[lit-ideas] Re: Popper and Grice on the philosophy of perception
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2014 11:04:54 +0000 (GMT)
JLS, is there an on-line version of Grice's "The Causal Theory of Perception"?
I should like to re-read it.
I
recall reading this when a student at Oxford and thinking it fairly
awful - tenuous and based on a kind of appeal to a crude intuition [viz. that
if I am only seeing a 'seeming' lamp then I am not seeing a lamp]
to ground a claim that the causal affect of an object is a necessary
condition to it being perceived.
It is not that I thought the
crude intuition is necessarily wrong [though I thought it not
necessarily wrong to think 'What difference does it make given my seeing
the 'seeming' lamp is perceptually the same as seeing the lamp?', or to
think that the distinction between a 'seeming' lamp and a lamp is
somewhat question-begging or beside the point]. And it is not that I thought
objects have no causal role in their being perceived.
It
is more that I thought this kind of analytical philosophy does not go
very far or anywhere that interesting - for example, 'causation', at
least as deployed by Grice, is way too elastic and stretchable a notion
to ground anything interesting about the character of perception. What
we really want here is not some philosopher insisting that objects must
[analytically?] have some causal role in their perception [because
otherwise we are not perceiving that object, but at best a 'seeming' object
that seems exactly the same] but a model of how we perceive objects that
explains
the role of the object and the role of our perceptual apparatus in
arriving at 'perception of an object'.
Grice's paper [or
'seeming'-paper] seems at best the claim that whatever the model of
perception it must give the object some causal role. But so what?
Moreover,
it seems to me conceivable that the model of perception may take the
'object' as permanently screened off from its perception [as per Kant's
Idealism] so that we may doubt that the specific character of the object causes
anything specific about the character of our perception (even should we admit
the object somehow is causally necessary to our perception).
In
the same post JLS uses the term "naive" re Popper's philosophy [the
answer is there nothing naive about Popper's account but there are naive
accounts of Popper]; but it seemed to me "naive" is quite the word to describe
the philosophising in Grice's paper.
So I would be grateful [or not] for another look at Grice's paper to reconsider
my callow, youthful response.
Donal
On Friday, 17 January 2014, 11:01, "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx>
wrote:
In a message dated 1/16/2014 2:42:52 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
When “knowledge” is understood in such terms then ‘JTB-theory’ becomes a
remnant of a mistaken approach to “knowledge” which tries to identify “
knowledge” with a special “justified” kind of human subjective belief, and
which sees the status of “knowledge” as inextricably linked with its human “
genesis-cum-justification”.
The reason may be one of emphasis.
I don't know about Popper, but Grice was working in what he called
'Philosophy of Perception', a field which was pretty popular in the Oxford of
his
days.
It starts with an examination of 'sense-data', notably with Paul's
question, "Is there a problem about sense-data?", which seems to challenge
McEvoy's neo-Foucaultian idea (as I dare call it) of a 'problematique' behind
things.
The idea is perhaps Cartesian, but also Lockean, that sense deceive us.
Therefore, philosophers need to analyse what it means to 'perceive', to
'sense', if you wish, to 'believe'. It is a short step then towards an
analysis
of what makes our beliefs 'certain' about their contents.
Grice would say that sense-data do not nourish us; objects (as he called
them -- I prefer 'things') do. We are nourished by apples, not by the sense
data of apples.
So, it is easy to see how a view of 'knowledge' as 'justified true belief'
developed within the subjectivist philosophical tradition that was popular
in Europe since Descartes and Locke, not to mention the Old Hellenistic
Philosophy.
-- (I mention Hellenism, because all the post-socratic schools were also
concerned with the elimination of error in 'philosophia theorica', i.e. how
some of our 'doxai' or beliefs never attained the level of 'episteme' or
scientia, or knowleddge -- and the philosopher was supposed to moralise about
how bad error can be).
Popper is into the _outcomes_ of 'science', and he is then telling another
story.
----- Grice would then agree with Popper that there is a degree of
evolution and a matter of degree between the interaction of simpler organisms
with
their environment (the example by McEvoy of the uni-cell organism that
swims towards the surface of the ocean to get the energy from the rays
emanating from the sun) and a wise person who knows what she is doing.
Grice's method may even be called Kantian: there is something
'transcendental', as Grice would say, about our (or most of our) beliefs HAVING
to be
_true_, rather than false. We need that our sense perceptions CORRESPOND to
the objects that have CAUSED those sense perceptions.
Grice goes on to elaborate this into a theory of communication:
psi-transmission, as I think he calls it, is what is operative. A creature
perceives
the world, and the world is more or less as the creature perceives it,a and
its co-creature relies on this first creature to get further information
about the world, via psi-transmission which is meant to be reliable and a
good guide to survival.
Grice would indeed distinguish between 'knowledge' and 'information'; but
while he did have in his agenda "read Dawkins", I don't think he would go
the whole hog, as the expression goes? and buy a mechanical idea of
'information'. I once discussed this with L. Floridi: Grice's motto, in Way of
Words: "False information is NO information" (Grice would be into analysing
what
it means to say that a creature INFORMS another, for example).
So, there is a lot of rationale for the idea that some distinguished type
of belief attains, via higher degrees of probability regarding its
verosimilitude (to use a concept that Popper abused), the status of
'knowledge'. Or
not, of course.
Popper seems to disregard what may be called a Kuhnian type of philosophy
of science, where the picture that emerges is one of scientists working
within paradigms or research programme communities, where what counts as
'evidence' (that would validate our beliefs) is protected by a 'belt' that
assigns genuineness to this or that type of information (astronomy versus
astrology, for example). In a Kuhnian approach to science, the idea that
science
proceeds, as Popper hopes, by trial-and-error and in a cooperative search
for more and more reliable 'information', ends up as being naive. Popper was
possibly aware of this movement, which is credited to Lakatos with whom he
interacted. And I'm would not be surprised if there are neo-Popperian
brands or post-Popperian brands in the philosophy of science that take up this
'relativistic' conception of 'truth', and scientific method (cfr.
Feyerabend, "Anything goes") into something different.
To sum up, then, the keywords: "PHILOSOPHY OF PERCEPTION" (as practiced by
Oxford philosophers like Prichard, Price, Grice, G. A. Paul, G. J. Warnock,
and others) should be distinguished from "PHILOSOPHY OF that instititution
we call 'science'" (cfr. Chalmers, echoing Porter, "What is this thing
called Science?").
Grice started his career in Oxford, pretty much like I. Berlin, as a critic
of 'phenomenalism', i.e. that the idea that material-objects were 'logical
constructions' out of sense-data. His "Causal theory of perception" may be
cited as a critique to the worst type of phenomenalism that fails to
recognise the minimal implicature in sense misperceptions ("That pillar box
does
not just seem RED to me; it happens to BE red. In fact, it seeming red to
me is not, as Witters would say, a signal that it is NOT red, but the
casual effect of its being red" -- The fact that we INFER, on occasion, "The
pillar box is NOT red" from my saying "The pillar box SEEMS red" is a strange
conversational implicature" -- that he had to go on and invent for the
purpose of refuting Witters).
Or not.
Cheers,
Speranza
Refs.:
Grice, "The causal theory of perception", repr. in Swartz's volume,
"Sensing, perceiving, knowing".
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