An analysand decides to take a pleasure trip to Europe. He experiences this as a victory over the analyst both because he will free himself from the analyst for two months and because he can afford this trip whereas the analyst cannot. He then begins to be anxious lest the analyst seeks revenge for the patient’s triumph. The patient anticipates this aggression by becoming unwill, developing fever and the first symptoms of influenza. The analyst feels slight anxiety because of this illness and fears, recalling certain experiences, a deterioration in the state of health of the patient, who still however continues to come to the sessions. Up to this point, the situation in the transference and countertransference is as follows. The patient is in a manic relation to the analyst, and his anxieties of preponderantly paranoid type. The analyst senses some irritation over the abandonment and some envy of the patient’s great wealth (feeling ascribed by the patient in his paranoid anxieties to the analyst), but while, the analyst feels satisfaction at the analysand’s real progress, which finds expression in the very fact that the trip is possible and that the patient has decided to make it. The analyst perceives a wish in part of his personality to bind the patient to himself and use the patient for his own needs. In having this wish he resembles the patient’s mother, and he is aware that he is in reality identified with the domineering and vindictive object with which the patient identifies him. Therefore, the patient’s illness seems, to the analyst’s unconscious, a result of the analyst’s own wish, and the analyst therefore experiences depressive (and paranoid) anxieties.
What object imago leads the patient to this manic situation? It is precisely this imago of a tyrannical and sadistic mother, to whom the patient’s frustrations constitute a manic feast. It is against these 'manic tendencies' in the object that the patient defends himself, first by identification (introjection of the persecutor in the ego, which manifests itself in the manic experience in his decision to take a trip) and then by using a masochistic defence to escape vengeance.
In brief, the analyst’s depressive (and paranoid) anxiety is his emotional response to the patient’s illness, and the patient’s illness is itself a masochistic defence against the object’s vindictive persecution. This masochistic defence also contains a manic mechanism in that it derides, controls, and dominates the analyst’s aggression. In the stratum underlying this, we find the patient in a paranoid situation in face of the vindictive persecution by the analyst - a fantasy that coincides with the analyst’s secret irritation. Beneath this paranoid situation, and causing it, is an inverse situation: The patient is enjoying a manic triumph (his liberation from the analyst by going on a trip), but the analyst is in a paranoid situation (he is in danger of being defeated and abandoned). Finally, beneath this we find a situation in which the patient is subjected to an object imago that wants to make of him the victim of its aggressive tendencies, but this time not to take revenge for intentions or attitudes in the patient, but merely to satisfy its own sadism of an imago that originates directly from the original suffering of the subject.
In this way, the analyst can deduce from each of his Countertransference sensations a certain transference situation, the analyst’s fear to deterioration in the patient’s health enabled him to perceive the patient’s need to satisfy the avenger and to control and restrain him, partially inverting (through the illness) the roles of victimizer and victim, thus alleviating his guilt feeling and causing the analyst to feel some of the guilt. The analyst’s irritation over the patient’s trip enabled him to see the patient’s need to free himself from a dominating and sadistic object, to see the patient’s guilt feelings caused by these tendencies, and to see his fear of the analyst’s revenge. By his feeling of triumph the analyst could detect the anxiety and depression caused in the patient by his dependence upon this frustrating, yet indispensable, object. Each of these transference situations suggested to the analyst the patient’s object imagoes - the fantasized or real Countertransference situation that determined the transference situations.
2. What is the meaning of countertransference aggression?
To what was previous, we have seen that the analyst may experience, besides countertransference anxiety, annoyances, recollection, desire for vengeance, hatred, and other emotions. What are the origin and meaning of these emotions?
Countertransference aggression usually arises in the face of frustration (or danger of frustration) of desires that may superficially be differentiated into 'direct' and 'indirect.' Both direct and indirect desires are principally wishes to get libido or affection. The patient is the chief object of direct desires in the analyst, who wishes to be accepted and loved by him. The object of the indirect desires of the analyst may be, for example, other analysts from whom he wishes to get recognition or admiration through his successful work with his patients, using the latter as means to this end. This aim to get love has, in general terms, two origins: An instinctual origin (the primitive needs of union with the object) and an origin of a defensive nature (the need of neutralizing, overcoming, or denying the rejections and other dangers originating from the internal objects, in particular from the superego). The frustrations may be differentiated, descriptively, into those of active type and those of passive type. Among the active frustrations is direct aggression by the patient, his mockery, deceit, and active rejection. To the analyst, active frustration means exposure to a predominantly 'bad' object, the patient may become, for example, the analyst’s superego, which says to him 'you are bad.' Examples of flustration of passive type are passive rejection, withdrawal, partial abandonment, and other defences against the bond with and dependence on the analyst. These signify flustrations of the analyst’s need of union with the object.
We may say then, that Countertransference aggression usually arises when there is frustration of the analyst’s desire that springs from Eros, both that arising from his 'original' instinctive and affective drives and that arising from his need of neutralizing or annulling his own Thanatos (or the action in his internal ‘bad objects’) directed against the ego or against the external world. Owing partly to the analyst’s own neurosis (and to certain characteristics of analysis itself) these desires of Eros sometimes change the unconscious aim of bringing the patient to a state of dependence. Therefore countertransference aggression may be provoked by the rejection of this dependence by the patient who rejects any bond with the analyst and refuses to surrender to him, showing this refusal by silence, denial, secretiveness, repression, blocking, or mockery.
Taken to place next, we must establish what it is that induces the patient to behave in this way, to frustrate the analyst, to withdraw from him, to attack him. If we know this we might as perhaps know what we have to interpret when countertransference aggression arises in us, being able to deduce from the countertransference the transition of the transference situation and its cause. This cause is a fantasized countertransference situation or, more precisely, some actual or feared bad conduct from the projected object. Experience shows that, in meaningly general terms, this bad or threatening conduct of the object is usually an equivalent of the conduct of the patient (to which the analyst has reacted internally with aggression). We also understand why this is so: The patient’s conduct springs from that most primitive of reactions, the talion reaction, or from the defect by means of identification with the persecutor or aggressor. Sometimes, it is quite simple: The analysand withdraws from us, rejects us, abandons us, or derides us when he fears or suffers the same or an equivalent treatment from us. In other cases, it is more complex, the immediate identification with the aggression being replaced by another identification that is less direct. To exemplify: Some woman patients, upon learning that the analyst is going on holiday, remain silent a long while, she withdraws, through her silence, as a talion response to the analyst’s withdrawal. Deeper analysis shows that the analyst’s holiday is, to the patient, equivalent to the primal scene, and this is equivalent to destruction of her as a woman, and her immediate response must be a similar attack against the analyst. This aggressive (castrating) impulse is rejected and the result, her silence, is a compromise between her hostility and its rejection, it is a transformed identification with the persecutor.
The composite distribution accounted by ours, is the vertical mosaic: (a) The countertransference reactions of aggression (or, of its equivalent) occur in response to transference situations in which the patient frustrates certain desires of the analyst’s. These frustrations are equivalent to abandonment or aggression, which the patient carries out or with which he threatens the analyst, and they place the analyst, at first, in a depressive or paranoid situation. The patient’s defence is in one aspect equivalent to a manic situation, for he is freeing himself from a persecutor. (b) This transference situation is the defence against certain object imagoes. Existent associative objects persecute the subject sadistically, vindictively, or morally, or an object that the patient defends from his destructiveness by an attack against his own ego: In these, the patient attacks - as Freud and Abraham have shown in the analysis of melancholia and suicide - just when, the internal object and the external object (the analyst). The analyst who is placed by the alloplastic or autoplastic attacks of the patient in a paranoid or a depressive situation sometimes defends himself against these attacks by using the same identification with the aggressor or persecutor as the patient used. Then the analyst virtually becomes the persecutor, and to this the patient (insofar as he presupposes such a reaction from his internal and projected object) responds with anxiety. This anxiety and its origin are nearest to consciousness, and are therefore the first thing to interpret.
3. Countertransference guilt feelings are an important source of countertransference anxiety: The analyst fears his 'moral conscience.' Thus, for instance, a serious deterioration in the condition of the patient may cause the analyst to suffer reproach by his own superego, and cause him to fear punishment. When such guilt feelings occur, but the superego of the analyst is usually projected upon the patient or upon a third person, the analyst being the guilty ego. The accuser is the one who is attacked, the victim of the analyst. The analyst is the accused, he is charged with being the victimizer. It is therefore the analyst who must suffer anxiety over his object, and dependence upon it.
As in other countertransference situations, the analyst’s guilt feeling may have either real causes or fantasized causes, or a mixture of the two. A real cause exists in the analyst who has neurotic negative feelings that exercise some influence over his behaviour, leading him, for example, to interpret with aggressiveness or to behave in a submissive, seductive, or unnecessarily frustrating way. Yet guilt feelings may also arise in the analyst over, for instance, intense submissiveness in the patient though the analyst had not driven the patient into such conduct by his procedure. Or he may feel guilty when the analysand becomes depressed or ill, although his therapeutic procedure was right and proper according to his own conscience. In such cases, the countertransference guilt feelings are evoked not by what procedure he actualizes by its use but by his awareness of what he might have done in view of his latent disposition. In other words, the analyst identifies himself in fantasy with a bad internal object of the patient’s and he feels guilty for what he has provoked in this role - illness, depression, masochism, suffering, failure. The imago of the patient then becomes fused with the analyst’s internal objects, which the analyst had, in the past, wanted (and perhaps managed) to frustrate, makes suffer, dominate, or destroy. Now he wishes to repair them. When this reparation fails, he reacts as if he had hurt them. The true cause of the guilt feelings is the neurotic, predominantly sado-masochistic tendencies that may reappear in countertransference: The analyst therefore quite rightly entertains certain doubts and uncertainties about his ability to control them completely and to keep them entirely removed from his procedure.
The transference situation to which the analyst is likely to react with guilt feelings is then, in the first place, a masochistic trend in the patient, which may be either of some 'defensives' (secondary) or of a 'basic' (primary) nature. If it is defensive, we know it to be a rejection of sadism by means of its 'turning against the ego', the principal object imago that imposes this masochistic defence is a retaliatory imago. If it is basic (‘primary masochism’) the object imago is ‘simply’ sadistic, a reflex of the pains (‘frustration’) originally suffered by the patient. The analyst’s guilt feelings refer to his own sadistic tendencies. He may feel as if he himself had provoked the patient’s masochism. The patient is subjugated by a ‘bad’ object so that it seems as if the analyst had satisfied his aggressiveness; now the analyst is exposed in his turn to the accusations of his superego. In short, the superficial situation is that the patient is now the superego, and the analyst the ego who must suffer the accusation, the analyst is in a depressive-paranoid situation, whereas the patient is, from one point of view, in a ‘manic’ situation (showing, for example, ‘mania for reproaching’). Nevertheless, on a deeper plane the situation is the reverse: The analyst is in a ‘manic’ situation (acting as vindictive, dominating, or ‘simply’ a sadistic imago), and the patient is in a depressive-paranoid situation.
4. Besides the anxiety, hatred, and quilt feelings in countertransference, most other countertransference situations may also be decisive points during analytic treatment, both because they may influence the analyst’s work and because the analysis of the transference situations that provoke such countertransference situations may represent the central problem of treatment, clarification of which may be indispensable if the analyst is to exert any therapeutic influence upon the patient.
Before closing, let us consider briefly two doubtful points. How much confidence should we place in countertransference as a guide to understanding the patient? As to the first question, I intuitively think by means of its existing certainty, by which is founded the mistake initiated of the countertransference reactions as an oracle, with blind faith to expect of them the pure truth about the psychological situations of the analysand. It is plain that our unconscious is a very personal ‘receiver’ and ‘transmitter’ and we must reckon with frequent distortions of objective reality. Still, it is also true that our unconscious is nevertheless 'the best we have of its kind.' His own analysis and some analytic experience enable the analyst, as a rule, to be conscious of this personal factor and know his ‘personal equation.’ According to experience, the danger of exaggerated faith in the message of one’s own unconscious is, even when they refer to very ‘personal’ reactions. Less than the danger of repressing them and denying them any objective value.
It seems necessary that one must critically examine the deductions one makes from perception of one’s own countertransference. For example, the fact that the analyst feels angry does not simply mean (as is sometimes said) that the patient wishes to make him angry. It may mean rather than the patient has a transference feeling of guilt. What has been said concerning Countertransference aggression is relevant here.
The second question - whether the analyst should or should not ‘communicate’ or ‘interpret’ aspects of his countertransference to the analysand - cannot be considered fully at present. Much depends, of course, upon what, when, how, to whom, for what purpose, and in what conditions the analyst speaks about his countertransference. Probably, the purposes sought by communicating the countertransference might often (but not always) be better attained by other means. The principal other means is analysis of the patient’s fantasies about the analyst’s countertransference (and of the related transference) sufficient to show the patient the truth (the reality of the countertransference of his inner and outer objects): and with this must also be analysed the doubts, negations, and other defences against the truth, intuitively perceived, until they have been overcome. Nevertheless, the situations in which communication of the countertransference is of value for the subsequent course of the treatment. Without doubt, this aspect of the use of countertransference is of great interest: We need an extensive and detailed study of the inherent problems of communication of countertransference. Much more experience and study of countertransference need to be recorded.
Some discussion of a working definition of the term countertransference is necessary, since it is by no means agreed upon by analysts that it can be correctly considered the converse of transference. D. W. Winnicott, for instance, has recently written about the importance of attitudes of hate from an analyst too patient, particularly in dealing with psychotic and antisocial patients. He speaks mainly of ‘objective countertransference’. Meaning ‘the analyst’s love and hate in reaction to the actual personality and behaviour of the patient based on objective observation. However, he also mentions countertransference feelings that are under repression in the analyst and need countertransference feelings that are under repression in the analyst and need more analysis. His concept of ‘objective Countertransference’ will not be included under the term Countertransference if the latter are used as the converse of transference. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann has separated the reconverse of the psychoanalyst to the patient into those of a private and those responses of the psychoanalyst to the patient into those of a private and those of a professional person and recognizes the possibility of countertransference distortions occurring in both aspects. Franz Alexander has used the term to mean all of the attitudes of the doctor toward the patient, while Sandor Ferenczi has used it to cover the positive, affectionate, loving, or sexual attitudes of the doctor toward the patient. Michael Balint, looking at a different aspect, calls attention ti the fact that every human relation is libidinous, not only the patient’s relation to his analyst, but also the analyst’s relation to the patient. He says that no human being can in the end tolerate any relation that brings only frustration and that it is as true for the one as for the other. 'The question is, therefore, . . . how much. What kind of satisfaction is needed by the patient on the one hand and by the analyst on the other, to keep the tension in the psycho-analytical situation as or near the optimal level.'
In developing his theory of interpersonal relations, Harry Stack Sullivan has defined the psychotherapeutic effort of the analyst as carried on by the method of participant observation. He says, 'The expertness of the psychiatrist refers to his skill in participant observation of the unfortunate patterns of his own and the patient’s living, in contrast too merely participating in such unfortunate patterns with the patient.' In the use of the term unfortunate patterns Sullivan includes the concept of countertransference, or in his words 'parataxic distortions'.
In several important recent papers, Leo Berman, Paula Heimann, Annie Reich, Margaret Little, and Maxwell Gitelson have made a beginning in the attempt to clarify the concept and to formulate some dynamic principles regarding the phenomena included in this category. Berman is mainly concerned with defining the optimal attitude of the analyst to the patient, an attitude that he characterizes as 'dedicated.' This description is based on the assumption that the analyst’s emotional responses to the patient will be quantitatively less than those of the average person and of shorter duration, as the result of being quickly worked through by self-analysis. This, then, would represent an ideal goal of minimizing and an easily handled countertransference response.
Heimann takes a step forward when she states that the analyst’s emotional response to his patient within the analytic situation represents one of the most important tools for his work, and that the analyst’s countertransference is an instrument of research into the patient’s unconscious. This important formulation is the basis upon which the study of the analyst’s part of the interaction with the patient should be built. Previously, the statement has frequently been made that the analyst’s unconscious understands the patient’s unconscious. However, it is presumed that much is already unconscious material as becoming available to awareness after a successful analysis, so that the understanding should theoretically not be only on an unconscious level but should be errorless in words.
Reich has classified most of countertransference attitudes of the analyst’s. She separates them into two main types: Those where the analyst acts out some unconscious need with the patient, and those where the analyst defends against some unconscious need. On the whole, countertransference responses are reflections of permanent neurotic difficulties of the analyst, in which the patient is often not a real object but is rather used as a tool by means of which some need of the analyst is gratified. In some instances, there may be sudden, acute countertransference responses that do not necessarily arises from neurotic character difficulties of the analyst. However, Reich points out that the interest in becoming an analyst is itself partially determined by unconscious motivation, such as curiosity about other people’s secrets, which is evidence that countertransference attitudes are some prerequisites for an analyst. The contrast between the healthy and neurotic analyst is that in the one the curiosity is desexualized and sublimated in character, while in the other it remains a method of acting out unconscious fantasies.
Margaret Little continues the search for an adequate definition of countertransference, concluding that it should be used primarily to refer to 'repressed elements', inasmuch as far as the unanalysed well-situated analyst, he attaches himself to the patient in the same way as the patient ‘transfers’ to the analyst effects, etc., belonging to his parents or to the object of his childhood: i.e., the analyst regards the patient (temporarily and varyingly) as he regarded his own parents. Even so, it is, Little who thinks that other aspects of the analyst’s attitudes toward the patient, such as some specific attitude or mechanism with which he meets the patient’s transference, or some of his conscious attitudes, should be considered Countertransference responses. She confirms Heimann’s statement that the use of countertransference may become an extremely valuable tool in psychoanalysis, comparing it in importance with the advances made when transference interpretations began to be used therapeutically. She sees transference and Countertransference as inseparable phenomena; both should become increasingly clear to both doctor and patient as the analysis progresses. To that end, she advocates judicious use of Countertransference interpretation by the analyst. 'Both are essential to Psychoanalysis, and countertransference is no more to be feared or avoided than is transference: In fact it cannot be avoided it can only be looked out for, controlled to some extent, and perhaps ill-used.
Gitelson, in a comprehensive paper, continues to clarify the phenomena, he goes back to the original definition of countertransference used by Freud - the analyst’s reaction to the patient’s transference - and separates this set of responses from another set that he calls the transference attitudes of the analyst. These transference attitudes, which are the result of ‘’surviving neurotic transference potential’ in the analyst. Involve ‘total’ reactions to the patient -that is, overall feelings about and toward the patient - while the countertransference attitudes are ‘partial’ reactions to the patient - that is, emergency defence reactions elicited when the analysis touches upon unresolved problems in the analyst.
This classification, while valid enough, does not seem to forward investigation to any great extent. For example, Gitelson feels in general that the existence of ‘total’ or transference attitudes toward a patient is a contradiction for the analyst to work with that patient, whereas the partial responses are more amendable to working through the continuity of inertial momentum whereby the processes of a self-analysis. Yet, it seems extremely sceptical whether avoiding is possible for one ‘total’ reaction to a patient - that is, general feelings of liking for, dislike of, and responsiveness toward the patient, and so on, is present from the time of the first interview. These do vary in intensity; when extreme, they may indicate that a non-therapeutic relationship would result should be the two persons attempt working together. On the other hand, their presence in awareness may permit the successful scrutiny and resolution of whatever problem is involved, whereas their presence outside awareness would render this impossibly. In other words, it is not so much a question whether ‘total’ responses are present or not, but rather a question as to their amenability to recognition and resolution. Therefore, another type of classification would, in any case, be more useful for investigative purposes.
Least of mention, this by no mean a harbouring dispute over the validity of Gitelson’s criticism of the rationalization of much Countertransference acting-out under the heading of ‘corrective emotional experience’. He emphasizes that motherly or fatherly attitudes in the analyst are often character defences unrecognized as such by him. Although the analyst, according to Gitelson, to facilitate . . . can deny neither his personality nor its operation in the analytic situation as a significant factor, this does, however, mean that his personality is the chief instrument of the therapy. He also reports the observation that when the analyst appears as himself in the patient’s dreams, it is often the herald of the development of an unmanageably intenser transference neurosis, the unmanageability being the difficulty of the analyst’s situation. Similarly, when the patient appears as himself in the analyst’s dream, but it is often a signal of unconscious countertransference processes going on.
So then, we have seen that in recent studies on countertransference have included in their concepts attitudes of the therapist that are both conscious and unconscious; attitudes that are responses both too real and to fantasied attitudes of the patient; attitudes stimulated by unconscious needs of the analyst and attitudes stimulated by sudden outbursts of effect for the patient; attitudes that arise from responding to the patient as though he were some previously important person in the analyst’s life; and attitudes that do not use the patient as a real object but as a tool for the gratification of some unconscious requisite. This group of responses covers a tremendously wide territory, yet it does not include, of course, all of the analyst’s responses to the patient. On what common ground is the above attitudes singled out to be called countertransference?
It seems, nonetheless, that the common factor in the above responses is the presence of anxiety in the therapist - whether recognized in awareness or defended against and kept of our awareness. The contrast between the dedicated attitude described as the ideal attitude of the analyst - or the analyst as an expert on problems of living, as Sullivan puts it-and the so-called countertransference responses, is the presence of anxiety, arising from the variety of sources in the whole field of patient-therapist interrelationships.
If countertransference attitudes and behaviour were to be thought of as determined by the presence of anxiety in the therapist, we might have an operational definition that would be more useful than the more descriptive one based on identifying patterns in the analyst derived from importantly past relationships. The definition would, of course, have to include situations both or felt discomfort and those where the anxiety was out of awareness and replaced by a defensive operation? Such a viewpoint of countertransference would be useful in that it would include all situations where the analyst was unable to be useful to the patient because of difficulties with his own responses.
The definition might be precisely stated as follows: When, in the patient-analyst relationship, anxiety is aroused in the analyst with the effect that communication between him and is interfered with by some alternation in the analyst’s behaviour (verbal or otherwise), then Countertransference is present.
The question might be asked, if countertransference were defined in this way, would the definition hold well for transference responses also? It seems that on a very generalized level this might be so, but on the level of practical therapeutic understanding such a statement would not be enlightening. While it could safely be said of every patient that he appearance of his anxiety or defensive behaviour in the treatment situation was due to an impairment of communication with the analysts that in turn was due to his attributing to the analyst some critical or otherwise disturbing attitude that in its turn was originally derived from his experience with his parents - still this would disregard the fact that the patient’s whole life pattern and his relation to all of the important authority figures in it would show a similar stereotyped defensive response. So that the early stages of treatment and to a lesser extent in later stages, the anxiety responses of the patient are for the most part generalized and stereotyped than explained with special reference to his relationship with the analyst.
This, however, is not true of the analyst. Having been analysed himself, most of such anxiety-laden responses as he has experienced with others have entered awareness and many of them have been worked through and abandoned in favour of more mature and integrated responses. What remains, then, not automatically represent sibling rivals? While it is possible that a particular, unusually competitive patient may still represent a younger sibling to an analyst who had some difficulties in his own life with being the elder child.
To speak of the same thing from another point of view, the analyst is not working on his problems in the analysis; he is working on the patient’s. Therefore, while the patient brings his anxiety responses to the analysis as his primary concern, the fact that the analyst’s problems are not under scrutiny permits him a greater degree of detachments and objectivity. This is, to be sure, only a relative truth, since the analyst at times and under certain circumstances is bringing his problems into the relationship, and at times, at least in some analyses, the attention of both the patient and the analyst are directed to the analysts' problems. However, it is on the whole valid to describe the analytic situation as one designed to focus attention on the anxieties of the patient and to leave in the background the anxieties of the therapist, so that when these do appear they are of particular significance as for the relationship itself.
The associative set classifications of countertransference responses are to classify the situation in analysis when anxiety-tinged processes are operating in the analyst. This is to the set classification as not as clear-cut separation of situational anxieties, nor are any of the responses to be thought of as entirely free of necrotic attitudes of the therapist. Even in the most extremer examples of situational stress (where ordinarily the analyst’s response is thought of as an objective response to th stress rather than a neurotic response), personal, characterological factors will colour his response, as will also the nature of his relationship with the patient. Take, for instances, the situation where the analyst comes to his office in a state of acute tension as the result of a quarrel with his wife. With one patient he may remain preoccupied with his personal troubles throughout the hour, while with another he may be able shortly to bring hid attention to the analytic situation. Something in each patient’s personality and method of production, and in the analyst’s response to each, has affected the analyst’s behaviour.
Anxiety-arousing situations in the patient-analyst interaction have been classified as follows: (1) situational factors - that is, reality factors such as intercurrent events in the analyst’s life, and, social factors such as need for success and recognition as a competent therapist (2) unresolved neurotic problems of the therapist, and (3) communication of the patient’s anxiety to the therapist.
The response to situational factors is, of course, very much influenced by the character make-up of the doctor. How much has the quality of being necessitated for conformity to convention he retains will influence his response to the patient who shouts loudly during an analytic session? Nevertheless, the response will always be affected by the degree of which his office is soundproof, whether there is another patient in the waiting room, whether a colleague in an adjoining office can overhear, and so on. So that, even leaving out the private characterological aspect of the situation for the therapist, there remains a sizable set of reality needs that, if threatened, will lead to unanalytic behaviour on his part.
The greatest number of these relates to the physician’s role in our culture. There is a high value attached to the role of a successful physician. This is not, of course, confined to the vague group of people known as the public, it is also actively present in the professional colleagues. There is a reality need for recognition of his competence by his colleagues, which has a dollars and cents value and an emotional one. While it is true that his reputation will not be made or broken by one success or failure, it does not follow that a suicide or psychotic breakdown in the patient does not represent a reality threat to him. Consequently, he cannot be expected to handle such threatening crises with complete equanimity. Besides, some realities need to be known as competent by his colleagues and the public, there is potent and valid need on the doctor’s part for creative accomplishment. This appears in the therapeutic situation as an expectation of and a need to see favourable change in the patient. It is entirely impossible for a therapist to participate in a treatment situation where the goal is improvement or cure without suffering frustration, disappointment, and at times anxiety when his efforts result in no apparent progress. Such situations are at times handled by therapists with the attitude: 'Let him stew in his own juices until he sees that he should change,' or by the belief that he, the doctor, must be making an error that he dies not understand and should redouble his efforts. Frequently, the resolution of such a difficulty can be achieved by the realization by the therapist that his reality fear of failure is keeping him from recognizing an important aspect of the patient’s neurosis having done with making the responsibility for his welfare on another’s shoulders. The reality fear of failure can . . . neither be ignored nor put up with, so to speak, since an attempt by the therapist to remove it by ‘making’ the patient gets well is bound to increase the chances of failure.
Further difficulties are introduced by the traditional cultural definition of the healer’s role - that is, according to the Hippocratic oath. The physician-healer is expected to play a fatherly or even god-like role with his patient, in which he both sees through him - knows mysteriously what is wrong with his insides - and takes responsibility for him. This magic-healer role has heavy reinforcement from many personal motivations of the analyst for becoming a physician and a psychotherapist. These range from need to know other people’s secrets, as mentioned by Reich, to needs to cure oneself vicariously by curing others, needs for magical power to cover up one’s own feedings of weakness and inadequacy, needs to do better than one’s own analyst. Unfortunately, some aspects of psychoanalytical educating have a tendency to reinforce the interpretation of the therapist as a magically powerful person. The admonition, for instance, to become a ‘mature character’, while excellent advice, still carries with it a connotation of perfect adjustment and perhaps bring pressure to bear on the trainee not to recognize his immaturites or deficiencies. Even such precepts as ti is a ‘mirror’ or a ‘surgeon’ or ‘dedicated’ emphasize the analyst’s moral power in relation to the patient and, still worse, makes it as good technique. Since the analyst’s power, it is regrettably easy for both persons to participate in a mutually gratifying relationship that satisfies the patient’s dependency and the doctor’s need for power.
The main situation in the patient-doctor relationship that undermines the therapeutic role and therefore may result in anxiety in the therapist can be listed as follows: (1) when the doctor is helpless to affect the patient’s neurosis, (2) when the doctor is treated consistently as an object of fear, hatred, criticism, or contempt, (3) when the patient calls on the doctor for advice or reassurance as evidence of his professional competence or interest in the patient, (4) when the patient attempts to establish a relationship of romantic love with the doctor, and (5) when the patient calls on the doctor for other intimacy.
Unresolved neurotic problems of the therapist are a subject on which it is very difficult to generalize since such problems will be different in every therapist. To be sure, there are large general categories into which most therapists can be classified, and so certain overall attitudes may be held in common, as for instance the categories of the obsessional therapists who retain remnants of a compulsive need to be in control, or the masochistically overcompensated therapist who compulsively makes reparation to the patient, as described by Little.
One may scrutinize all analysts, from the top of the ladder to the bottom, and, as is obvious, will find characteristic types of patients chosen and characteristic courses of analytic treatment in each case. Gitelson seems to undervalue this factor when he says that the analyst 'can no longer . . . grow to worsen of neither his personality nor its operation in the analytic situation as a significant factor . . . This is far from saying, however, that his personality is the chief instrument of the therapy that we call psychoanalysis. There is a great difference between the selection and playing of a role and the awareness of the fact that ones' own person has found himself cast for a part. Conducting himself is important for the analyst so that the analytic process proceeds by what the patient brings to it.'
It is not the selection. Playing of a role that creates the Countertransference problem of the average, and healthy analyst, but the fact that one habitually and incessantly plays a role determined by one’s character structure, so that one is at times hindered from seeing and dealing with the role in which one is cast by the patient.
It does, however, seem apparent that, to deal with the distortions introduced by the patient, the doctor needs to be aware of the following things: (1) that he has an unambiguous expression on his face when the patient arrives five minutes late for the first hour of therapy, and (2) that he annoyed (made anxious) by the patient’s imputation of malice to him. If he were aware of (1), he would. Perhaps, can interpret the fearful apologies of the patient with a question about why the patent thinks he is angry. If he were unaware of (1) or did not think it wise to interpret, still if he were aware of his anxiety reaction (2), he can probably recognize that his annoyance at being apologized to was leading to a sulky silence on his part. Once this was within awareness, the annoyance could be expected to lift and the therapeutic needs of the situation could be handled on their own merits.
Communication of the patient’s anxiety to the therapist proves most interesting and some mysterious phenomenons exhibited on occasion - and perhaps more frequently than we realize - by both analyst and patient. It seems to have some relationship to the process described as empathy. It is a well-known fact that certain types of persons are literally barometers for the tension level of other persons with whom they are in contact. Apparently cues are picked up from small shifts in muscular tension plus changes in voice tone. Tonal changes are more widely recognized to provide such cues, as evidenced by the common expression, 'It wasn’t what he said but the way he said it.' Yet there are numbers of instances where the posture of a patient while walking into the consulting room gave the cue to the analyst that anxiety was present, although there was no gross abnormality but merely a slight stiffness or jerkiness to be observed. A similar observation can be made in supervised analyses, where the supervised communicate to the supervisor that he is in an anxiety-arousing situation with the patient, not by the material he related, but by some appearance of increased tension in his manner of reporting.
It is a mood point whether anxiety responses of therapists in situations where the anxiety is ‘caught’ from the patient can be considered entirely free of personal conflict by the analyst. Probably, habitual alertness to the tension level of others, however desirable a trait in the analyst, must have had its origins in tension-laden atmospheres of the past, and therefore must have specific personal meaning to the analyst.
The contagious aspects of the patient’s anxiety have been most often mentioned concerning the treatment of psychotics. In dealing with a patient whose defences are those of violent counter-aggression, not of an analyst experience of both fear and/or anxiety. The fear is on a relatively rational basis - the danger of suffering physically hurt. The anxiety derives from (1) retaliatory impulses toward the attacker,
(2) wounded self-esteem that one’s helpful intent is so misinterpreted by the patient, and (3) a sort of primitive envy of or identification with the uncontrolled venting of violent feelings. It has been found by experience in attempting to treat such patients that the therapist can function at a more effective level if he is encouraged to be aware of and handle consciously his irrational responses to the patient’s violence.
A milder variant of this response can frequently be found in office practice. It can be marked and noted that when the affect of more than usual intensity enters a treatment situation the analyst tends to interpret the patient. This interpretation may take any one of a variety of forms, such as a relevant question, an interpretative remark, a reassuring remark, a change of subject. Whatever its content, it dilutes the intensity of feeling being expressed and/or shifting the trend of the associations. This, of course, is technically desirable in some instances, but when it occurs automatically, without awareness and therefore without consideration of whether it is desirable or not, its occurrence must be attributed to uneasiness in the analyst. Ruesch and Prestwood have studied the phenomenon of communication of patients’ anxiety to the therapist, in which they proved that the communication is much more positively correlated with the tonal and expressive qualities of speech than with the verbal content. Such factors as rate of speech, frequently of use of personal pronouns, frequently of expressions of feeling. So on, showed significant variations in the anxious parent as contrasted with either the relaxed or the angry patient. In this study, the subjective responses of most psychiatrists while listening to sections of recorded interviews varied significantly according to the emotional tone of the material. A relaxed interview elicited a relaxed response in the listening psychiatrist; the anxious interviews were responded to with a variety of subjective feelings, from being ill-at-ease to being disturbed or angry.
These uncomfortable responses, coupled with many types of avoidance behaviours by the analyst, such as those mentioned in another place, appear to occur much more frequently than has been previously realized. Detecting it is difficult then by an ‘ear witness’, since the therapist himself will usually be unable to report them following through its intermittence of time. They were noticed to occur frequently in a study of intensive psychotherapy by experienced analysts carried out by means of recorded interviews.
If one accepts the hypothesis that even successfully analysed therapists are still continually involved in countertransference attitudes toward their patients, the question arises: What can be done with such reactions in the therapeutic situation? Experience suggests that the less intense anxiety responses, where the discomfort is within awareness, can be quickly handled by an experienced but not to of a neurotic analyst. These are probably chiefly the situational or reality stimuli to anxiety. Nevertheless, where awareness is interfered with by the occurrence of a variety of defensive operations, is there anything to be done? Is the analyst capable of identifying such anxiety-laden attitudes in himself and proceeding to work them out? Certainly there are such extreme situations that the unaided analyst cannot handle them and must seek discussion with a colleague or further analytic help for himself. However, there is a wide intermediate ground where alertness to clues or signals that all is not well may be sufficient to start the analyst on a process of self-resolution of the difficulty.
The following is a tentative and necessarily incomplete list of situations that may provide a clue to the analyst that he is involved anxiously or defensively with the patient. It includes signals that have been found useful in a basic supervision that it probably could be added to by others according to their particular experience, as (1) The analyst has a reasoning dislike for the patient, (2) The analyst cannot identify with the patient, who seems unreal or mechanical. When the patient reports that he is upset, the analyst feels no emotional response. (3) The analyst becomes overemotional as for the patient’s troubles. (4) The analyst likes the patient excessively, feels that he is his best patient. (5) The analyst dreads the hours with a particular patient or is uncomfortable during them. (6) The analyst is preoccupied with the patient to an unusual degree in intervals between hours and may find himself fantasying questions or remarks to be made to the patient. (7) The analyst finds it difficult to pay attention to the patient. He goes to sleep during hours, becomes very drowsy, or is preoccupied with personal affairs. (8) The analyst is habitually late with a particular patient or shows other disturbance in the time arrangement, such as always running over the end of the hour. (9) The analyst gets into arguments with the patient. (10) The analyst becomes defensive with the patient or exhibits unusual vulnerability to the patient’s criticism. (11) The patient seems to misunderstand the analyst’s interpretations consistently or never agrees with them. This is, of course, quite correctly interpreted as resistance of the patient, but it may also be the result of a countertransference distortion by the analyst such that his interpretations are wrong. (12) The analyst tries to elicit effect from the patient - for instance, by provocative or dramatic statements. (14) The analyst is angrily sympathetic with the patient regarding his mistreatment by some authority figure. (15) The analyst feels impelled to do something active, and (16) The analyst appears in the patient’s dreams as himself, or the patient appears in the analyst’s dreams. No sooner that apparently to broaden the scope of psychoanalytic therapy, to expedite and make more efficiently the analytic process, and to increase our knowledge of the dynamics of interaction, methods of studying the transference-countertransference aspects of treatment need to be developed. In that this can best be accomplished by setting up the hypothesis that countertransference phenomena are present in every analysis. This agrees with the position of Heimann and Little. These phenomena are probably frequently either ignored or repressed, partly because of a lack of knowledge of what to do with them, partly because analysts are accustomed to dealing with them in various nonverbal ways, and partly because they are sufficiently provocative of anxiety in the therapist to produce one or another kind of defence reaction. However, since the successfully analysed psychotherapists have tools at his command for recognizing and resolving defensive behaviour via the development of greater insight. The necessity for suppressing or repressing countertransference responses is not urgent. Where the analyst deliberately searches for recognition and understanding of his own difficulties in the interrelationship, his first observation is likely to be that he has an attitude similar to one of those aforementioned. With this as a signal, he may then, by further noticing in the analytic situation what particular aspects of the patient’s behaviour stimulate such responses in him, eventually find a way of bringing such behaviour out into the open for scrutiny, communication, and eventual resolution. For instance, sleepiness in the analyst is very frequently an unconscious expression of resentment at the emotional bareness of the patient’s communication, perhaps springing from a feeling of helplessness by the analyst. When the analyst recognizes that he is sleepy as a retaliation for his patient’s uncommunicativeness, and that he is making this response because, up too now, he has been unable to find a more effective way of handling it, the precipitating factor - the uncommunicativeness - can be investigated as a problem.
Beyond this use of his responses as a clue to the meaning of the behaviour of the patient, the analyst is also constantly in need of using his observations of himself as a means to further resolution of his own difficulties. For instance, an analyst who had doubts of his intellectual ability habitually overvalued and competed with his more intelligent patients. This would become particularly accentuated when he was trying to treat patients whom they used intellectual achievement as protection against fears of being overpowered. Thus the analyst, as the result of these overestimations of such a patient’s capacity, would fail to make ordinary, garden-variety interpretations, believing that there must be obvious to such a bright person. Instead, he would exert himself to point out the subtle manifestations of the patient’s neurosis, so that there would be much interesting talk but little change in the patients.
This type of error can go unnoticed while the analyst learns eventually that he is unable to treat successfully certain types of patients. However, it can also be slowly and gradually rectified as the result of further experience. In such a case, the analyst is learning on a nonverbal level. Even so, some such signal as finding himself fantasying questions or remarks to put to the patient in the next session is noted by the analyst, he then has the means of expediting and bringing into full awareness the self-scrutiny that can lead to resolution.
It will be noted that the focus of attention of these remarks is on the analyst’s own self-scrutiny, both of his responses to the patient’s behaviour and of his defensive attitudes and actions. Much has been said by others (Heimann, Little, and Gitelson) regarding the pros and cons of introducing discussion of countertransference material into the analytic situation itself. That, however, is a question that is not possible to answer in the present state of our knowledge. Its intentional means are to improving the analyst’s awareness of his own participation in the patient-analyst interaction and of improving his ability to formulate this to himself (or to an observer) clearly. Devising techniques for using such material in the therapeutic situation seems more feasible after the area has been more precisely explored and studied - or, concurrently with further study and explanation.
One further point might be added regarding the contrast between the subjective experience of the analyst when anxiety is not present and when it is. When anxiety is not present, he may experience a feeling of being at ease, of accomplishing something, of grasping what the patient is trying to communicate. Certainly in periods when progress is being made, something of the same feeling is shared by the patient, although he may at the same time be working through troubled areas. Perhaps the loss of the feeling that communication is going in the most commonly used signal that starts the analyst on a search for what is going wrong.
In daily life and the early phases of the analysis, the transference is usually integrated with the actual total personality relationship. However, in the sense of something complex, thinking of it separately is better, unless specifically qualified, whether as a latent potentiality, or as an actual emergent ego-dystonic, or objectively inappropriate phenomena (Anna Freud, 1954). For, as far as the phenomenon is true transference, it retains unmistakeably its infantile character. However, much of the given early relationship may have contributed to the genuine adult pattern of relationship (via identification, imitation, acceptance of teaching for example), its transference derivative differs from the latter, approximately in the sense that Breuer and Freud (1895) assigned to the sequella of the pathogenic traumatic experience, which was abreacted neither as such nor associatively absorbed in the personality. Given an object who has a special transference valence, in a situation that provides a unique mixture of deprivation, intimacy and deprivation, with (obligatory!) unilateral communicative freedom, minimization of actual observation, and with certain elements of form and mechanics reminisce of the infantile state, the tendency to pristine re-emergence of talent transference drives, until now incorporated in everyday strivings, in symptoms, or in character structure, is enormously heightening. That the transference is treated in a unique way in the analytic process are assuredly true, and remains of prime significance. However, at one time, this ment of the analytic situation on the transference, as if its emergent integrated form in relation to any other physician would be essentially the same phenomenon. Considered as an actual functional phenomenon, as different from a latent potentiality (in a sense, Metapsychological concept), this is rarely the case. The unique emotional vicissitudes of the psychoanalytic situation plus the de-integrated effect of free association and the interpretative method restore an infantile quality and intensity to the psychoanalytic transference, which lead to the development of the transference neurosis. Thus, to turn Freud’s original reservations and admonitions in an affirmative direction: The question of what is the optimum transference neurosis, or whether and how nearly is much more as the optimal type of transference neurosis can be caused, has always been, and remains, an important and general problem of psychoanalytic technique. This is, to be sure, no simple matter. The modest hope implicit of our topic, in that it may offer a rationale and some suggestions toward the avoidance of spurious and unduly tenacious intensities. The transference neurosis, like other (simpler) elements in the psychoanalytic situation, has an intrinsically dialectical character and position (Free association, for example, facilitates both exposure and concealment, can occasion either gratification or suffering.) This dialectical quality can (in part) be explained by the concept of two separate, although potentially confluent streams of transference origin. In relation to the equivocal factor of intensity in the transference neurosis, in that there is a certain deductibility to reasonableness in the conception that the elements of abstinence augmenting transference intensity should derive preponderantly from the formal, i.e., explicitly technical factors (which include non-response to primitive transference wishes) rather than from excessively rigorous deficits in human response, which the patient may reasonably except or require, and where the technical valence of such deprivation may be minimal or altogether dubious as to demonstrability.
It is now all but axiomatic that the transference is the indispensable power of the analytic process, and the phenomenon on whose evolution the potentiality for ultimate therapeutic change rests in analysis. As distinguished from other psychotherapies, and resolution of the transference neurosis, and the dissolution or minimization of the transference(s) as such, is one of the distinctive final goals of the interpretative method, it's of the essence because it might be said that insights into dynamic and genetic elements in the unconscious, or the functional extension of the ego’s hegemony in relationship to the id and superego, or other germane concepts, are ultimately more important. Still, these are all, certainly in an operational sense, largely if not exclusively, contingent on the thorough analysis of the transference neurosis.
The term ‘minimization of the transference(s) is used here because of the amounting scepticism regarding the likelihood of complete dissolution or extinction of the transference. The specific personal misidentifications and the specific personally directed wishes and attitudes that usually occupy us in the analytic process (i.e., ‘the transference’) can, in a practical clinical sense, usually be brought to adequate resolution. However, at this point, it should be made to emphasize that pathogenic component of the transference complex that underlies and is anterior to these clinical phenomena. The ‘adequate resolution’ of the clinically significant aspect or fraction of the transference frees the basic practically universal element, if it is not itself severely distorted, for integration in socially acceptable enthusiasms held in common with most other human beings and thus, in a sense, a part of the individual’s environmental reality. The particularity of mind is the general latent craving for an omnipotent parent, renewed and specifically coloured with, indeed given form, by, the conflicts and vicissitudes of each phase of development and developmental separation, a craving of such primitive power that it can produce the profound physiologic alterations of hypnosis, or bring into abeyance an individual’s own perceptual capacities or capacities for rational inference, even based on fewer spectacular vehicles for suggestion. For clarity of a statement, as in the ‘primary transference’ presupposes the accomplished shift to an object, as opposed to Freud’s other [germane] use of the term, frequently elaborated by Loewald ([1960]). This phenomenon is already dramatically evident in the young (three to six-month) infants' reaction to any moving bearer of a face as mother
(‘ . . . the representative of that infant’s security’ [Spitz. 1956]). It permeates our whole social organization, is obvious in religious attitudes, in charismatic ideologists of any type. In its narrowest stronghold, in the intellectual avant-garde, it invests questions of scientific validity and rational or empirical demonstration, facilitating irrational and inappropriate attitudes of loyalty or antagonism toward scientific leaders. Human infallibility is attributed to others than the Popes, and the Anti-Christ have parallels in the world of science. Our own field has often been a conspicuous example of this tendency. In the end, scientific perceptual striving, whose autonomy is always relative at best, becomes secondarily burdened, and inevitably suffers, because of this type of ambivalent group euphoria.
If it is the entanglement with early objects that elicits the infantile neurosis and lays the ground for its later representation in the transference neurosis, it is the clinical neurosis, the usual motivation for treatment, that lies between them, and is related to both, in a sense a ‘resistance’ both to genetic reconstruction of the former, or to current involvement on the latter. This is, a variation of Freud’s statement regarding the transference neurosis as an accessible ‘artificial illness’. Perhaps suggesting that unconscious recognition of the unique transference potentiality of the psychoanalytic situation is intimately connected both with the violent irrational struggle against is not extravagant, and the sometimes fanatical acceptance of, analysis as therapy (i.e., the general and intrinsic fascination of a relationship to ‘the doctor who gives no medicine’) by the patient to whom it is recommended (and by many, before the fact). What is always fundamentally wanted, in the sense of a primal transferee, with rare (relative) exceptions, is the original physician, who most closely resembles the parent of earliest infancy. The ‘doctor who gives no medicine’ is in unconscious deductibility may be that the parent of the repetitive phases of separation. To what extent this unconscious constellation participated in the discovery or creation of psychoanalysis as such would be pure speculation. However, Freud’s capacity for transference in the attachments of daily life was abundantly evident (Freud 1887-1902, Jones 1953-1957), and the importance of the relationship with Fliess in his self-analysis was explicitly stated (Freud, 1887-1902) That it plays an important part in the emotional life of many contemporary working analysts is very likely, since all (at this time) have experienced the role of analysand (or analytic patient): The vast majority are physicians, all have been physicians’ patients in a traditional sense, and, certainly, all have been dependent and helpless children. Ferenczi (1919) described the evolution of the general psychoanalytic countertransference as for initial excessive sympathy, through reactive coldness (‘the phase of resistance against the counter-transference’), to mature balance. Lewin (1946) in referring to this formulation (to contrast it with the sequence of traditional medical training) attributes the first phase to the first of the analyst’s having only recently been a patient himself. While Lewin carefully separates the cadaver (the student’s first ‘patient’) as an ‘object’ (psychoanalytic sense) from its qualities, we may speculate that a species of retaliatory mastery of the parental object (perhaps in contrast with the role of a helpless child) is sometimes involved in this gratification, and that something of this quality was carried into the dialectic genesis of the psychoanalytic situation. When referring to the ‘dialectic genesis’ of the psychoanalytic situation, it is to infer to its genesis largely in the genius of a physician who experienced the training to which Lewin refers. The dialectic is epitomized exquisitely in the role of speech, the bridge for personal separation, rejected or distorted by children in their desperate clinging to more gratifying or more violent object drives, or, on the other hand, sought eagerly as the indispensable vehicle for alterative ego-syntonic development aspirations (Nunberg [1951], regarding the ‘Janus’ quality of transference.)
The transference neurosis, as distinguished from the initial transference, usually supervenes after the treatment has lasted for a varying length of time. Its emergence depends on the combined stress of the situational dynamics, and the pressure of the interpretative method. The latter tend to close off habitual repetitive avenues of expression, such as new symptom formation, acting out, flight from treatment, etc. the neurosis differs from the initial transference, in the sense that it tends to reproduce in the analytic and germane extra-analytic setting an infantile dramatis personae, a complex of transference, with the various conflicts and anxieties attendant on the restoration of attitudes and wishes parallelling their infantile prototypes. The initial transference (akin to the ‘floating’ transference of Glover [1955]?) is a relatively integrated phenomenon, allied to character traits, an amalgam or compromise of conflicting forces, that has become established as a habitual attitude, the best resultant of ‘multiple function’ of which the personality is capable, in the general type of relationship that now confronts it? It differs from its everyday counterpart only in its relative separation from its usual or substantiation, and - eventually - in the failure of elicitation of the gratifications or adaptive goals to which it is devoted. As time goes on, varying as to intervals before, and character of, emergence, with the nuances of the patient’s personality organization and the analyst’s technical and personal approach, the unconscious specific transference attitude will press free expression against the defences with which they have been previously integrated, in varying mixtures of associational derivatives, symptomatic acts, dreams, often ‘acting out’, and manifest feelings. At this point (or better, in this zone of a continuum), conflict involving the psychoanalytic situation becomes quasi-manifest, and the transference neurosis as this is incipient. If there be but a brief and over simply outline illustration it is only because there are various interpretations of these terms.
A male patient may adopt a characteristically obsequious although subtly sarcastic attitude toward his older male analyst, quite inappropriate to the situation, but thoroughly habitual in all relations with older men. As time goes on, his wife and business partner becomes connected in his dreams with the analytic situation, his wife in the role of mother, the analyst as father, his business partner as older brother, with corresponding and related anxieties and frustrations of functionally dynamic contributions, in his business and sexual life. Violently hostile or sexually submissive or guilty attitudes may appear in direct or indirect relation to the analyst, in the patient’s manifest activities, or in the analytic material, in dynamic and economic connection with changes in the patient’s other relationships. The entire development is not equally particular to be announced in diffuse resistance phenomena in the analytic situation and processes (Glover, 1955). The transference neurosis as such can, of course, is endlessly elaborated; when extended beyond the point of effectively demonstrable relevance to the central transference, its resistance function may be in the foreground. It must be remembered that the whole array of strongly cathected persons in the individual’s development, and the related variety of attitudes, is all distributed, so to speak, from a single original relationship, the relationship with a mother in earliest infancy. In all of them, there are elements of ‘transference’ from this relationship, most conspicuously and decisively, of course, the shifting of hostile or erotic drives from the mother to the father. In a sense, then, the entire complex of the transference neurosis is a direct, although paradoxically opposed derivative of the basic attachment and unrenounced craving, which arises in relation to the primal object, the more complicated drama having a relation to the original object attachment like that which Lewin (1946) assigns to the elements of the manifest drama in relation to the dream screen. (This is, of course, related to Lewin’s interpretation [1955] of the analytic situation in terms of dream psychology.) Because in the analytic situation, the patient is again confronted with a unique relationship, on which, via the instrumentality of communication by speech, all other relationships and experiences tend to converge, emotionally and intellectually. In this convergence, however, there is a conspicuous differential, due to the intellectual or cognitive lag. In the latter sphere, the analyst’s autonomous ego functions play a decisive operational role, via his interpretations. In the genesis of this lag, an important role must be assigned to the original (reverse) differentially. Which may establish itself between the centrifugal distribution of primal object libido and aggression and the relatively autonomous energies of perception (the ego’s ‘activity?’). The detachment of libido and aggression from the primal object will have the course be contingent not only on their original intensities but on the special vicissitudes of early gratifications. If we consider the limitless panpsychic scope and potentiality of free association, we must assume that some shaping tendency gives the associations a form or pattern reasonably accessible to our perceptive and interpretative skill. It seems likely that this is the latent inner preoccupation with the elements of the transference neurosis, the original transference of which it is self composed, and finally the derivative vicissitudes of the primal object relationship itself, the primal transference.
Insofar as an individual has achieved more than a physical-perceptual linguistic separation from the primal object, the latter elements (i.e., the actual manifestations of primal transference) may play little or no important role in the empirical realities of a given analysis. Except in certain ‘borderline’ (and allied) problems, they are of Metapsychological importance. The problems of the derivative phase and structural conflicts largely occupy us in the analysis of the neurosis. In an individual of unusually fortunate neurosis (!), the transference neurosis (thus the analysis) may not require deeper penetration than the relatively integrated conflict phenomena of the Oedipus complex. In speech, of course, there is at one time a powerful and versatile vehicle of direct object relationship, and at the same time the marvellously elaborated communicative-referential instrumentality that can convey from one individual to another the subjectively experienced parts or whole of an inner and outer world of endlessly multiplied things, persons, qualities, and relationships, in intelligible code. This code, furthermore, is one whose mastery was originally of profound importance (in conjunction with other crucial maturational phenomena, such as an independent locomotion) in enabling the physical separation from the first object (in continuing relationship), and the gradual physical and mental mastery of the rest of the environment.
With regard to the countertransference, is that it has the same important and narrowing distinction from the other aspects of the current relationship and should be made as in the case of the patient’s transference: For here, too, an individual is involved in a complicated relationship with another human being in which a triplet of separate but constantly interacting and sometimes integrated modalities can be discerned. In a sense, since the patient has at least a considerable freedom of verbal and emotional expression, the analyst’s emotional burden is a heavier one. This, however, is like saying that the patient’s responsibility is greater than the child’s, or (to turn back to an earlier page!) That the surgeon carries a greater burden than his comfortably anaesthetized patiently. The analyst is, or should be, better prepared for this burden than his patient. Still, if we remove this entire question from the realm of professional moralism, self-debasement, or self-pity, we can all the more genuinely appreciate the essential message of the frequently contributions on the countertransference in recent years, i.e., the reminder that no one is ‘completely; (or, as Freud [1937] preferred, ‘perfectly’) analysed, that even those who may have approximately this as closely as may reasonably be expected, have specific vulnerabilities to certain individuals or situations, that these may appear in milder form or ephemerally, but nonetheless importantly with others; that, in fact, a self-analysis for the specific ‘counter-transference neurosis’ (Tower, 1956) with each case is, to varying degrees, as silent counterpoint, an integral part of all good analytic work. This would be true whether the counter-transference played its traditional impeding role or its more subtle favourable (i.e., ‘catalytic’) role (Tower, 1956) in a given analysis. One never knows where the usefulness of an unanalyzed reaction may end, and difficulties begin. Another important contribution, not separate, except in terms of emphasis, is the growing appreciation of the countertransference as an affirmative instrument facilitating perception, whereby a sensitive awareness of one’s incipient reactions to the patient, fully controlled and appropriately analysed in an immediate sense, leads to a richer and more subtle understanding of the patient’s transference strivings (Racker 1957, Weigert 1954). This would be opposite yet cognate to the understanding by transitory empathic identification (Reich, 1960). There is also the important attention (Money-Kyrle, 1956) to the specific vicissitudes of the analyst’s peculiarly constricted and emotionally inhibited therapeutic effort, and the mutual projective and introjective identification that may occur between analyst and patient in crises of technical frustration, i.e., frustration of the analyst’s understanding. The operational primacy of the latter function must be stressed. That is, that this function and the germane emotional attitude constitute central and essential ‘gratification’ for the patient’s ‘mature transference’ strivings, enabling his toleration, even positive unitization of the principle of abstinence, in relation to primitive transference demands. Loewald’s views (1960) are importantly related to these, perhaps, in a sense, complementary to them. An important connotation of these countertransference studies is the diminution of the rigid status barrier between analyst and analysand. They point to the patient in the physician, the child in the parent (a sort of latent or potential ‘seesaw’, to modify Phyllis Greenacre’s [1854] ‘titled relationship’!). This intellectual tendency can be, and is often, overdone, just as the magical power of the countertransference to determine the course of treatment has become an almost euphoric overwrought mystical belief among certain younger therapists, and, as a concept, a formidable source of resistance in the technically informed patient. Such exaggerated views, when not of specific and immediate emotional geneses, or due to ignorance, may be connected with a general lack of conviction regarding the efficacy of the therapist’s own analysis, or os the effectiveness of the interpretative method. There may be of a general lack of awareness or acceptance of the power that the original ‘tilt’ lens to the patient’s transference. Finally it is this ‘tilt’ in the situation, and (very importantly) the actuality of its representation in the respective emotional and intellectual states of the participants, on which we must rely. If temperately considered, a view of the relationship that gives great weight to the countertransference, is productively important. It places the operational attitude and technique of the analysis in better perspective, as an integration of several important factors that always include the Countertransference, and it permits an examination of nuances of technical decision on a much more illuminating and genuinely dependable basis than pure precedent, or rule-of-thumb, or pseudo-mathematical certainty. Thus, too foreign a patient in pain some aspirin or not, to inspect his eye for a foreign body or not, to tell him promptly where one ids going on vacation or not, may be right or wrong in either alterative, depending on the analyst’s own specific motivation or anxiety, compared with the patient’s actual need, or their objective clinical indications of the moment, weighted against the continuing and rationally interpreted convenience of technique. It is less likely that any manoeuver, assuming the adherence to basic broad technical principles, will create significant analytic distortion, if executed with genuine and exclusively therapeutic intentions’ appropriate to the need, than a manoeuver or default of manoeuver, based entirely or largely on exhibitionistic or seductive or anxious or compulsive reasons, however respectable the latter may seem. These principles, of course, assume the general analytic framework, and the maintenance of the principle of abstinence, insofar as it does not conflict with overriding human requirements, or does not reach beyond the subtle limits that have been sought to earlier discussion (Scheunert’s, 1961). The issue of the increment of unanswered innocuous questions, of injudiciously withheld expressions of reasonable human interest, where the human relationship requires them. Still it is related to the emotional opposition of the analyst, for a ‘rule’ obviously has a different meaning to an anxious or sadistic or compulsive person than to an individual not thus burdened. The general problem is germane to the perennial interest in why (beyond the usual verities or clichés) an individual becomes a physician, and specifically why he then chooses this physically and emotionally inhibited specialty, which depends do largely on benignly purposive frustration of the patient, on occasional informed talking, and possibly even more on extended and perceptive listening. Assuming that is reasonable, with the myriad individual factors, some general or common countertransference element enters the over determination both of choice of the medical profession and of the specialty that holds a unique position in the minds of medical men and patients alike. The uniqueness of this position is perhaps best suggested by the remarkably frequent query of the naive patient: 'Are you really an MD.?' or 'Are you a medical doctor too?' This is in a different intellectual realm, but surely related to the more informed discussion as to whether analysis is a brach of medicine, or a special development in psychology, or an entirely independent discipline. It is to suggest that, apart from more usual considerations the fascination and strain of analytics works are related to the same phenomenon that evokes the deductibility of which the patient reaction to it. Having to a mindful purpose in that the state of separation and of infantile deprivations that are integral in the situation, and the effort to utilize these toward solutions more favourable than those originally evolved. Setting aside the specific phase problems and other quantitative aspects of individual Countertransference, there will still be quantitative individual variations, tending toward excessive deprivation or overindulgence (for example), revolving about the central and necessary principle of abstinence in the psychoanalytic situation, whose skilful administration is a part of the basic occupational commitment. Insofar as ‘weaning’ is the great focal prototype of abstinence or deprivation, bringing to our attention to the historical vicissitudes of the word wean (Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 12 [1933]) in which even a secondary (non-etymologic) developments of the alternative meaning ‘deprivingly of one's sanctity' has become obsolete. This is no doubt intertwined with cultural consideration far beyond out present scope of interest. However, it is also symbolically related to the (obsolescent?) Technical moods, which are felt to be restored to analytic work, with advantage.
In addition, on the interface of the analyst-patient interaction is not yet as to have become as focussing on the patient or the analyst. It is the nature of the integration, the quality of contact, what goes on between, including what is enacted. What is communicated effectively and/or unconsciously, that is addressed.
The apparent edge-horizon that is to form a resolution about that which ideally becomes the point of maximum and acknowledged contact at any given moment in a relationship without fusion, without violation of the separateness and integrity of each participant. Attempting to relate at this point requires ceaseless sensitivity to inner changes in oneself and in the other, as well as to changes at the interface of the interaction as these occur in the context of the spiral of reciprocal impact. This kind of effort has a reflexive impact on both participants, and this in turn influences what goes on between them in a dialectical way.
The interchanging edge thus is never static but becomes the trace of a constantly moving locus. Each time this is identified it is also changed, and as it is re-identified it changes again. The analytic expanse is enlarged significantly as aspects of the relationship that are generally not explicitly acknowledged or addressed, as well as their vicissitudes over time, are identified and explored in an analytic way. The emphasis is on process, on engaging live experience, and on generating a new kind of live experience by so doing, in an ever expanding way.
In some ways the focus is on what Winnicott (1971) refers to as the 'continuity-contiguity moment' in relatedness. What distinguishes the conceptualized necessity for acknowledgement and explicitness seems the process of acknowledgement for increases the moment’s dimensional change to natures experiential obtainability. What is? , However, achieved is not simply greater insight into what or was, but what should be, as but a new kind of evidential experience.
Working at the circumferential horizon soon creates a unique contest of safety and allows for maximum closeness precisely because it protects against the threat of intrusion or violation. Attending to the most elusive interactive subtleties and ‘opening the moment’ and thus actualizes upon a natural way to detoxify and subjectively field, every bit as dangers of mystification, seduction. Coercion, manipulation, or collusion is minimized (Levenson 1972, 1983; Ehrenberg 1974, 1982; Feiner 1979, 1983; Gill 1982, 1983; Hoffman 1983). In some instances this makes it possible for both participants to engage aspects of experience and pathology that otherwise might be threatening, even dangerous.
The protection of the kind of analytic rigour that attending to interactive subtleties provides allows for more intense levels of effective engagement without the kind of risk this might otherwise entail.
In its gross effect, the apparent circumferential horizon is not simply art the boundary between self and other, but the given directions developing interpersonal closeness in the relationship, it is also at the boundary of self-awareness. It is a particular point as occupying a positional state in space and time of self-discovery, at which one can become more ‘intimate’ with one’s own experience through the evolving relationship with the other, and then more intimates with the other as one becomes more attuned to self. Because of this kind of dialectical interplay, the apparent favourable boundary becomes the undergoing maturation of the relationship.
As moment-by-moment change over in quality, that the relatedness and experience between analyst and patient are studied, individual patterns of reaction and reason-sensitivities can be identified and explored. This allows for the sparking awareness of choice, as existential decisions to become increasingly involved, or to withdraw, as well as the persuasive influences may be responsively ado, in that they can be studied in process, and the feelings surrounding these can be closely scrutinized. The patient’s spontaneous associations to the immediate experience often not only become an avenue to effectively charged memories of past experiential encounters that might not have been previously accessible but also allow for the metaphoric articulation of unconscious hopes, fears, and expectations, least of mention, few than there are less, have to no expectation whatsoever, or as even not to expect from expectation itself.
Even when the circumferential edge horizon is missed and there is some kind of intrusion or some failure to meet due to overcautiousness, the process of aiming for it, the marginal but mutual focuses on the difficulties involved, can facilitate its obtainable achievement. The effort to study the qualities of mutually spatial experiences in a relationship, the interlocking of both participants, including an interchangeable focus on the failure to connect or inauthenticate, or perhaps into a collusion, can thus become the bridge to a more approximative encounter.
The circumferential edge horizon is, therefore. Not a given, but an interactive creation. It is always unique to the moment and for reason-sensitivities to posit of themselves the specific participants in relation to each other and reflects the participant’s subjective sense of what is most crucial or compelling about their interaction at that present of moments.
Focussing on the interactive nuances in this way often requires a shift in perspective as to what is a figure and what is ground. For example, where a patient drifts into a fantasy that figuratively takes him or her out of the room, perhaps the affirmation to what is in Latin projectio, yet the interactive meaning is as important as the actual content (if not more so). Exploring what triggered the fantasy, and what its immediate interactive function might be, may help the patient grasp some of the subtler patterns of his or her own experiential flame, inasmuch as to grasp to its thought. While the content of the fantasy can provide useful clues to its distributive contribution of its dynamical function, staying with content may be a way for both patient and analyst to collude in avoiding engaging the anxieties of the moment.
Where some form of collusion does occur, as at times it inevitably will, demystifying the collusion has internal repercussions as well. The clarification of patterns of self-mystification (Laing 1965) that this makes it a possibly that being often liberating. It can facilitate a shift on the part of the patient from feeling victimized or helpless, stuck without any options, too freshly experiencing his or her own power and responsibility in relation to multiple choices.
For example, one patient who had difficulty defining where she ended and the other began was invariable in a constant state of anger with others for what she perceived as their not allowing her feelings, as how this operated between us, she realized that no one could control her feelings and that it was her inordinate need for the approval of others that were controlling her. It was her need to control the other, to control the other’s reaction to her, that was defining her experience. The result was that she began to feel less threatened and paranoid. She also was able to begin to deal analytically with the unconscious dynamics of her needs for approval and for control, and to focus on her anxieties in a way not possibly earlier.
We must then, ask of ourselves, are the afforded efforts to control the given as the ‘chance’ to ‘change’, or the given ‘change’ to ‘chance’? As a neutral type of the therapist participation proves to be essential to the resolution of the schizophrenic patient’s basic ambivalence concerning individuation - his intense conflict, that is, between clinging and a hallucinatory, symbiotic mode of existence, in which he is his whole perceived world, or on the other hand relinquishing this mode of experience and committing himself to object-relatedness and individuality - too becoming, that is, a separate person in a world of other persons. Will (1961) points out that just as ‘In the moves toward closeness the person finds the needed relatedness and identification with another, in the withdrawal (often marked by negativism) he finds the separateness that favours his feelings of being distinct and self-identified, and Burton (1961) says that 'In the treatment, the patient’s desire for privacy is respected and no encroachment is made. The two conflicting needs war with each other and it is a serious mistake for the therapist to take sides too early.' The schizophrenic patient has not as to the experience that commitment too object-relatedness still allows for separateness and privacy, and where Séchehaye (1956) recommends that one 'make oneself a substitute for the autistic universe that helped to offer as of a given choice that must rest in the patient’s hands.' This regarded primeval area of applicability of a general comment by Burton (1961) that 'In the psychotherapy of every schizophrenic a point is reached where the patient must be confronted with his choice. . . .' Of Shlien’s (1961) comment that 'Freedom means the widest scope of choice and openness to experience . . . .'
Only in a therapeutic setting where he finds the freedom to experience both these modes of relatedness with one and the same person can the patient become able to choose between psychosis and emotional maturity. He can settle for this later only in proportion as he realizes that both object-relatedness and symbiosis are essential ingredients of healthy human relatedness - that the choice between these modes amounts not to a once-for-all commitment, but that, to enjoy the gratification of human relatedness he must commit himself to either object-relatedness or symbiotic relatedness, as the chancing needs and possibilities that the basic therapeutics requires and permit.
Such, as to say, the problem is to reconcile our everyday consciousness of us as agents, with the best view of what science tells us that we are. Determinism is one part of the problem. It may be defined as the doctrine that every event has a cause. More precisely, for any event as ‘e’, there will be some antecedent state of nature ‘N’, and a law of nature. ‘L’, such that given to ‘L’, ‘N’, will be followed by 'e'. Yet if this is true of every event, it is true of events such as my doing something or choosing to do something. So my choosing or doing something is fixed by some antecedent state ‘N’ and the laws. Since determinism is universal these in turn are fixed, and so backwards to events, for which I am clearly not responsible (events before my birth, for example). So no events can be voluntary or free, where that means that they come about purely because of free willing them, as when I could have done otherwise. If determinism is true, then there will be antecedent states and laws already determining such events? : How then can I truly be said to be their author, or be responsible for them? Reactions to this problem are commonly classified as: (1) hard determinism. This accepts the conflict and denies that you have real freedom or responsibility. (2) Soft determinism or compatibility. Reactions in this family assert that everything you should want from a notion of freedom is quite compatible with determinism. In particular, even if your action is caused, it can often be true of you that you could have done otherwise if you had chosen, and this may be enough to render you liable to be held responsible or to be blamed if what you did was unacceptable (the fact that previous events will have caused you to choose as doing so and deemed irrelevant on this option). (3) Libertarianism. This is the view that, while compatibilism is inly an evasion, there is a more substantive, real notion of freedom that can yet be preserved in the face of determinism (or of in determinism). While the empirical or phenomenal self is determined and not free, the noumenal or rational self is capable of rational, free action. Nevertheless, since the noumenal self exists outside the categories of space and time, this freedom seems to be of doubtful value. Other libertarian avenues include suggesting that the problem is badly framed, for instance because the definition of determinism breaks down, or postulating a special category of uncaused acts of volition, or suggesting that there are two independent but consistent ways of looking at an agent, the scientific and humanistic. It is only through confusing them that the problem seems urgent. None of these avenues accede to exist by a greater than is less to quantities that seem as not regainfully to employ to any inclusion nontechnical ties. It is an error to confuse determinism and fatalism. Such that, the crux is whether choice, is a process in which different desires, pressures, and attitudes fight it out and eventually result in one decision and action, or whether in attitudinal assertions that there is a ‘self’ controlling the conflict, in the name of higher desires, reasons, or mortality? The attempt to add such a extra to the more passive picture (often attributed to Hume), and is a particular target not only of Humean, but also of much feminist and postmodernist writing.
Thus and so, the doctrine that every event has a cause infers to determinism. The usual explanation of this is that for every event, there is some antecedent state, related in such a way that it would break a law of nature for this antecedent state to exist, and as yet the event not to happen. This is a purely metaphysical claim, and carries no implications for whether we can in a principal product the event. The main interest in determinism has been in asserting its implications for ‘free will’. However, quantum physics is essentially indeterministic, yet the view that our actions are subject to quantum indeterminacies hardly encourages a sense of our own responsibility for them.
As such, these reflections are simulated by what might be regarded as naive surprise at the impact of the renewed emphasis on the ‘here-and-now’ in our technical work during the last few years, including the early interpretations of the transference. This emphasis has been argued most vigorously by Gill and Muslin (1976) and Gill (1979). It has at times been reacting to, as if it were a technical innovation, and, of course, making it clear, all the same, from the persistence and reiteration that characterize Gill’s contributions, that he believes the 'resistance to the awareness of transference' to be a critically important and neglected area in psychoanalytic work, this may deserve further emphasis. In Gill’s latest contribution of which as before, he concedes that the recall or reconstruction of the past remains useful but that the working out of conflict in the current transference is the more important, i.e., should have priority of attention. In view of the centrality of issues and its interesting place in the development of psychoanalysis, the contributory works of Gill and Muslin (1976). Gill (1979) presents a subtle and searching review and analysis of Freud’s evolving views on the interrelationship between the conjoint problems of transference and resistance and the indications for interpretation. Repeating this painstaking work would therefore be superfluous. Our’s is for a final purpose to state for reason to posit of itself upon the transference and non-transference interpretation and beyond this, to sketch a tentative certainty to the implications and potentialities of the ‘here-and-now’.
In a sense, the current emphasis may be the historical ‘peaking’ of a long and gradual, if fluctuating, development in the history of psychoanalysis. We know that Freud’s first re-counted with the transference, the ‘false connection’, was its role as a resistance (Breuer and Freud 1893-1895). While Freud’s view of this complex phenomenon soon came to include its powerfully affirmative role in the psychoanalytic process, the basis importance of the ‘transference resistance’ remained. In the Dynamics of Transference (1912) stated in dramatic figurative terms the indispensable current functions of the transference: 'For when all is said and done, destroying anyone in absentia or in effigies is impossible.' In fact, to some of us, the two manifestly opposing forces are two sides of the same coin. As, perhaps, the relationship is eve n more intimate, in the sense that the resistance is mobilized in the first place b the existence of (manifest or - often - latent) transference. It is spontaneous protective reaction against loss of love, or punishment, or narcissistic suffering in the unconscious infantile context of the process.
Historically, the effective reinstatement of his personal past into the patient’s mental life was thought to be the essential therapeutic vehicle of analysis and thus its operational goal. This was, of course, modified with time, explicitly or in widespread general understanding. The recollection or reconstruction of an experience, however critical its importance, evidently did not (except in relatively few instances) immediately dissolve the imposing edifice of structuralized reaction patterns to which it may have importantly y contributed, this (dissolution) might indeed occur - dramatically - in the case of relatively isolated, encapsulated, and traumatic experiences, but only rarely y in the chronic psychoneuroses whose genesis was usually different and far more complex. Freud’s (1914) discovery of the process of ‘working through’, along with the emphasis on its importance, was one manifestation of a major process of recognition of the complexity, persuasiveness, and tenacity of the current dynamics of personality, in relation to both genetic and dynamic factors of early or origin. Perhaps Freud’s (1937) most vivid figurative recognition of the pseudoparadoxical role of early genetic factors, If not understood as part of a complex continuum, was in his 'lamp-fire' critique of the technical implications of Rank’s (1924) Trauma of Birth. The term pseudoparadoxical is used because the recovery of the past by recollection or reconstruction - if no longer the sole operational vehicle and goal of psychoanalysis - retains a unique intimate and individual explanatory value, essential to genuine insight into the fundamental issues of personality development and distortion.
When Ferenczi and Rank wrote The Development of Psychoanalysis in 1924, they proposed an enormous emphasis on emotional experience in the analytic process, as opposed to what was thought to be the effectively sterile intellectual investigation the n in vogue. Instead of the speedy reduction of disturbing transference experience by interpretation, these authors, in a sense, advised the elucidation and cultivation of emotional intensities. (As Alexander pointed out in 1925, however, the method was not clear.) These alone could lend a vivid sense of reality and meaningfulness to the basic dynamism of personality incorporated in the transference. Now it is to be masted and marked that in this work, too, there is no ‘repudiation’ of the past. Ultimately genetic interpretations were to be made. The intense transference experience, as mentioned, was intended to give body, reality, to the living past. Yet, the ultimate significance of construction was invoked, in the sense of ‘supplying’ those memories that might not be spontaneously available. It was felt that the crucial experiences of childhood had usually been promptly repressed and thus not experiences in consciousness in any significant degree. Therapeutic effectiveness of the process was attributed largely to the intensity of emotional experience, than to the depth and ramifications of detained cognitive insight. The fostering in of transference intensity, as, we can infer, was rather by withholding or scantiness of interpretations (as opposed to making facilitating interpretations) and, at times (as specifically stared), by mild confirming responses or attitudes in the affective sphere: These would tend to support the patient’s transference affects in interpersonal reality (Ferenczi and Rank 1024).
This is, of course, different from the recent emphasis on ‘early interpretation of the transference (Gill and Muslin 1976), which in a process in the cognitive sphere designed to overcome resistance to awareness of transference and thuds to mobilize the latter as an active participant in the analysis as soon as possible. What they have in common is an undeniable emphasis on current experience, explicitly in the transference. Also, in both tendencies there is an implicit minimization of the vast and rich territories of mind and feeling, which may become available and at times uniquely informative if fewer tendentious attitudes govern the analyst’s initial approach. Correspondingly, in both there is the hazard of stimulating resistance of a stubborn, well-rationalized maturity by the sheer tendentious of approachment, and similarly transference tendency pursued assiduously by the analyst.
The question of the moments entering a sense of conviction in the patient (a dynamically indispensable state) is, of course, a complex matter. However, if one is to think that few would doubt that immediate or closely proximal experience (‘today’ or ‘yesterday’) occasions grater vividness and sense of certainty than isolated recollection or reconstruction of the remote past. Thus the 'here-and-now' in analytic work, the immediate cognitive exchange and the important current emotional experiences, and, under favourable conditions, contributes to other elements in the process, i.e., recovery or reconstruction of the past, a quality of vividness deriving from their own immediacy, which can infuse the past with life. Obviously, it is the experience of transference affect that largely engages our attention in this reference. However, we must not ignore the contrapuntal role of the actual adult relationship between patient and analyst. Corresponding is indeed the actual biological constellation that bings the transference itself into being. At the very least, a minimal element of ‘resemblance’ to primary figures of the past is a sine quo non for its emergence (Stone 1954).
Nonetheless, this contribution up to and including Gill’s, Muslin’s (1976) and Gill’s (1979) are highly-developed. However, did not introduce alternations in the fundamental conceptions of psychopathology and its essential responses to analytic techniques and process. Yet, there are, of course, varying emphases - namely quantitative - and corresponding positions as to their respective effectiveness. As Strachey states, 'there is an approach to actual substantive modification in the keystone position assigned to introjective super-ego change as the essential phenomenons of analytic process - and possibly in the exclusive role assigned to transference interpretations as ‘mutative’.
A related or complementary tendency may be discerned in Gill’s (1979) proposal that 'analytic situation residues' from the patient’s ongoing personal life, insofar as they are judged transferentially significant in free association, is brought into relation with the transference as soon as possible, even if the patient feels no prior awareness of such a relationship. It is as if all significant emotional experience, including extra-analytic experiences, could be viewed as displacement or mechanisms of concealed expression of his transference. That this is very frequently true of even the most trivial-seeming actual allusions to the analytic would, in that, the thoroughly extra-analytic references constitute a more subtle and different problems, ranging from dubiously interpretably minor issues to massive forms of destructive acting out connected with extreme narcissistic resistances and utterly without discernible 'analytic situation residues'. The massive forms are, of course, analytic emergencies, requiring interpretation. Still, such interpretation would usually depend on the awareness of the larger ‘strategic situations (Stone 1973), rather than on a detail of the free association communication (granting the latter’s usefulness, if present - and recognizable). However, the fact of the past or the historical as never entirely abandoned or nullified, becoming more even, the role assigned to it may be pale or secondary. That the preponderant emphasis on concealed transference may ultimately, constitute an 'actually existing' change in technique and process, with its own intrinsic momentum.
The Ferenczi and Rank technique included, in effect, a deliberate exploitation of the transference resistance, especially in the sense of intense emotional display and discharged. While the polemical emphases of these authors are on (affective) experiences as the sine non of true analytic process - the living through of what was never fully experienced in consciousness in the past (with ultimate translation into ‘memories’, i.e., constructions) - the actual techniques (with a few exceptions) are not clearly specified in their book. For a detailed exposition of the techniques learned from Ferenczi, with wholehearted acceptance, as in the paper of De Forest (1942), which includes the deliberate building up of dramatic transference intensities by interpretative withholding and the active participation of the analyst as a reactive individual. Also included is the active directing of all extra-therapeutic experience into the immediate experiential stream if the analysis. The extreme emphasis on affective transference experience became at one time a sort of vogue, appearing almost as an end and measured by the vehemence of the patient’s emotional displays. In Gill’s own revival of and emphasis on a sound precept of classical techniques (preceded by the 1976 paper of Gill and Muslin), fundamentally different from that of Ferenczi and Rank in its emphasis, one discerns an increment of enthusiasm between the studied, temperate, and well-argued paper of (1979) and the later paper of the same year (1979), which includes similar ideas greatly broadened and extended ti a degree that is, in it's difficultly to accept.
Now, what is it that may actually be worked out in the present - (1) as a prelude to genetic clarification and reduction of the transference neurosis or (2) as a theoretical possibility in its own right without reliance on the explanatory power or specific reductive impact of insight into the past? First some general considerations of whether or not one is an enthusiastic proponent of ‘object relations theory’ in any of its elaborate forms, seems self-evident that all major developmental vicissitudes and conflicts have occurred in the context of important relations with important objects and that they or their effects continue to be reflected in current relationships with persons of similar or parallel importance. That we assume that the psychoanalytic situation (and its adjacent ‘ extended family’) provides a setting in which such problems may be reproduced in their essentials, both effectively and cognitively.
There is something deductively engaging in the idea that an individual must confront and solve his basic conflicts in their immediate setting in which they arise, regardless of their historical background. Certainly this is true in the patient’s (or anyone else’s) actual life situation. Some possible and sometimes state corollaries of this view would be that the preponderant resort to the past, whether by recollection or reconstruction, would be largely in the service of resistance, in the sense of a devaluation of the present and a diversion from its ineluctable requirements. It would be as if the United Kingdom and Ireland would undertake to solve the current problems in Ulster essentially by detailed discussion of Cromwell’s behaviour a few centuries ago. Granted that the latter might indeed illuminate the historical contribution of some aspects of the current sociopolitical dilemma, there are immediate problems of great complexity and intensity from which the Cromwell discussion might indeed by a diversion, if it were magnified beyond it's clear but very limited contribution, displacing in importance the problematical social-political-economic altercation of the present and the recent clearly accessible and still relevant past. As with so many other issues, Freud himself was the first to note that resort to the past may be involved by the patient to evade pressing and immediate current problems. In conservative technique, it has long been noted that some judicious alternations of focus between past and present, according to the confronting resistances trend, may be necessary (for example, Fenichel 1945). However, it was Horney (1939) who placed the greatest stress on the conflict and the greatest emphasis on the recollection trend as supporting resistance.
Now, from the classical point of view, the emphasis is quite different. The original conflict situation is intrapsychic, within the patient, though obviously engaging his environment and ultimately - most poignantly and productively - his analyst. This culminates in a transference neurosis that reproduces the essential problems of the object relationships and conflicts of his development. Thus, in principle, the vicissitudes of love or hate or fear, etc., do not require, or even admit of, ultimate solution in the immediate reality, perceived and construed as such. The problem is to make the patient aware of the distortions that he has carried into the present and of the defensive modes and mechanisms that have supported them. Obviously, the process (‘tactical’) resistances present themselves first for understanding; later there are the ‘strategic’ resistances (i.e., those not expressed in manifest disturbances of free association) (Stoner 1973). Insofar as the mobilization of the transference and the transference neurosis is accorded a uniquely central holistic role in all analyses, the ‘resistance to the awareness of transference’, becomes a crucial issue, the problem of interpretive timing on which a controversial matter from early. Ultimately the bedrock resistance, the true ‘transference resistance’, must be confronted and dissolved or reduced to the greatest possible degree. Such a reduction is construed as largely dependent on the effective reinstatement of the psychological prototype of current transference illusions, with an ensuing sense of the inappropriateness of emotional attitudes in the present and the resultant tendency toward their relinquishment. In a sense, the neurosis is viewed as an anachronistic but compelling investitures of the current scene within unresolved conflict of the past. When successfully reduced, this does appear to have been the accessibly demonstrable phenomenology.
What then may be carried into the analytic situation from the ‘hard-nosed’ paradigm of the struggle with every day, current reality, with advantage to the process? We have already made mention, in that the sense of conviction, or ‘sense of reality’ - affective and cognitive - which originates in th immediacy of process experience. It is our purpose and expectation that, with appropriate skill and timing, this quality of conviction may become linked too other, fewer immediate phenomena, at least in the sense of more securely felt perceptions, including first the fact of transference and ultimately its accessible genetic origins. What furthers? Insofar as the transference neurosis tends toward organic wholeness, a sort of conflict ‘summary’ by condensation, under observation in the immediate present, one may seek and find access in it, not only to the basic conflict mentioned, but to uniquely personal mode of defence and resistance, revealed in dreams, habits of free association, symptomatic acts, parapraxes, and the more direct modes of personal address and interaction that are evident in every analysis. Further, in this view, although not always as transparent as one would wish, this remarkable condensation of effect, impulse, defence, and temporary conflict solution adumbrates more dependably than any other analytic element (or grouping of elements) the essential outlines of the field of obligatory analytic work of a given period of the patient’s life. In it is the tightly knotted tangle deprived from the patient’s early or prehistoric life enmeshed in him actualities of the analytic situation and his germane and contiguous ongoing life situations.
Also, in the sphere of the 'here-and-now,' and of extensive importance, is the role of actualities in the analytic situation. Whether in the patent’s everyday life or in the analytic relationship, the even-handed, open-minded attention to the patient’s emotional experience (especially his suffering or resentment) as to what may be actual, as opposed too ‘neurotic’ (i.e., illusory or unwittingly provoked) or specifically transferential, is not only epistemologically deductive for reason that is also a contribution to the affective soundness of the basic analytic relationship and thus of inestimable importance. At the risk of slight - very slight - exaggeration, in that with excepting instances of pathological neurotic submissiveness, as a patient who wholeheartedly accepted the significance his neurotic or transference-motivated attitudes or behaviour if he felt that ‘his reality’ was not given just due. Furthermore, even the exploration and evaluation of complicated neurotic behaviour must be exhaustive to the point where a spontaneous urge to look for irrational motivations is practically on the threshold of the patient ‘s awareness. Once, again, one must stress the impact of such a tendency on the total analytic relationship. For, not only are the quality and mood of utilization of interpretations, but ultimately the subtleties of transition from a transference relationship to their realities of the actual relationship depend, on a greater degree than has been made explicit, on the cognitive and emotional aspects of the ongoing experience in the actual sphere. Greenson (1971, 1972. Wexler 1969) devoted several of his last papers to this important subject. The subject, of course, includes the vast spheres of the analyst’s character structure and his countertransference. However, more than may be at first apparency, can reside in the sphere of conscious consideration of technique e and attitude in relation to a basic rationale.
However, apart from the immediate function of painstaking discrimination of realities and the impact of this attitude on the total situation, there remains the important question of whether important elements of true analytic process may not be immanent in such trends of inquiry. The vigorous exploration and exposure of distortions in object relations, via the transference or in the affective and behavioural patterns of everyday life, including defence functions, can conceivably catalyse important spontaneous changes in their own right. To further this end, the traditional techniques of psychoanalysis will, of course, be utilized. As an interim phenomenon, however, the patient struggle to deal with distortions, as one might with other error subject to conscious control or pedagogical correction. It is to reasons of conviction that such a tendency may be productive (both as such, and in its intrinsic c capacity to highlight neurotic or conflictive fractions) and has been insufficiently exploited. Nonetheless, there is no reason that the specific dynamic impact of th past is lost or neglected in its ultimate importance, in giving attention to a territory that is, in itself, of a great technical potentiality.
Practitioners and theorists such as Horney (1939) or Sullivan (1953) did not reject the significance of the past, even though its role and proportionate position, both in process and theoretical psychodynamics, was viewed differently. The persisting common features in these views would be a large emphasis on sociological and cultural forces and the focussing of technical emphasis on immediate interpretation transactions.
Granted that various technical recommendations of both dissident and ‘classical’ origin, including those on the nature and reduction of the transference, sometimes appear to devaluate the operational importance of the genetic factor, this devaluation is not supported by the clinical experience of most of those that were indeed of closely scrutinizing it as part of the confessio fidei of major deviationists. Certainly, both in theoretical principle and in empirical observation, this essential direction of traditional analytic process remains of fundamental importance. Conceding the power and challenge of cumulative developmental and experiential personality change and the undeniable impact of current factors, it remains true that the uniquely personal, decisive elements in neurosis, apart from constitution, originate in early individual experience. How to mobilize elements into an effectively mutual function is largely a technical problem and - in seeming paradox - relies to a considerable degree on the skilful handling of the 'here-and-now.' The purposive technical pursuit of the past has not been clinically rewarding. That the ultimate effort to recover an integrated early material in dynamic understanding may not always be successful, especially in severe cases of early pathogenesis is, of course, evident (for example, Jacobson 1971). In such instances, while our preference would be otherwise, we may have to remain largely content with painstaking work in the 'here-and-now,' illuminated to whatever degree possible by reasonable and sound, if necessarily broad, constructions dealing largely with ego mechanisms than primitive anatomical fantasies. In other events, sometimes after years of painstaking work, even large and challenging characterological behavioural trends that have been viewed, clarified, and interpreted in a variety of current transference, situational (even cultural) references will show striking rottenness in earl y experience, conflict, and conflict solution whose explanatory value then achieves a mutative force that remains uniquely among interpretative manoeuvres or spontaneous insights. To this end, the broader aspects of ‘strategic’ resistance (Stone 1973) must be kept in mind, a much subtle element of countertransference and counterresistance.
It would seem proper that at this point of giving to a summation of the current ferment regarding the 'here-and-now' of which any number of valuable critique and theoretical and technical suggestions that may help us to improve the analytic effectiveness, it would seem that the emphasis on the 'here-and-now' interpreting not only consistently with but also ultimately indispensable for genuine access to the critical dynamism deriving from the individual’s early development. Nor is this reflexive, assuming the technical sophistication - inconsistent with the understanding and analysis of continuing developmental problems, character crystallization and the influence of current stresses as such. Adequate attention to the character as a complex interpretational group permits the clear and useful emergence in or the analytic field of significant early material, as defined by the transference neurosis between the technical approaches and that of Gill (1979, 1979), apart from certain larger issues. Whereas Gill would apparently recommend searching out ‘day residues’ of probable transference in the patient’s responses to the analysis or analyst and in his account of his daily life and offer possible alternative explanations to the patient’s direct and simple responses to them as self-evident realities, first relying on the acceptance and exploration of the patient’s ‘reality’, with the possibility that this will incidently favour the relatively spontaneous precipitation of more readily available transference materials, this general Principle does not, of course, obviate or exclude the other alternatives as something preferable?
Consideration of the interaction between the two adult personalties in the analytic situation requires a mixture of common sense and interest in self-evident (although often ignored) elements, on the one hand, and abstrusely psychological and Metapsychological considerations, on the other.
Thus, if we set aside from immediate consideration questions regarding the ‘real relationship’ and accept as a given self-evident fact that the entire psychoanalytic drama occurs (without our question or permission) between two adults in the 'here-and-now' the residual is due becomes the management of the transference, which has been a challenging problem since the phenomenon was first described. Let us assume, for purposes of brevity, that few would now adhere to the principle that the transference is to be interpreted only when it becomes a manifest resistance (Freud 1912). It is in fact always a resistance and at the same time a propulsive force (Stone 1962, 1967, 1073). It has long since been recognized that an undue delay of well-founded transference interpretations (regardless of the state of the patient’s free association) can seriously hinder progress in analysis, and further, it cas augment the dangers of acting out or neurotic flight from the analysis by the patient. The awareness of such danger has been clearly etched in psychoanalytic consciousness since e Freud’s (1905) insight into the end of the Dora case.
Apart from the hazzards inherent in technical default, nonetheless, there has developed over the years with increasing momentum, perhaps in some relations of the increasing stress on the transference neurosis as a nuclear phenomenon of process. The affirmative active address to the transference, i.e., to the analysis - or some by time is the active interpretative bypassing - of the ‘resistances to the awareness of transference
. . . operational emphasis on the countertransference, the tendency - in rational for a proportion - must be regarded as an important integral component of a progressively evolving psychoanalytic method. That individuals vary in their acceptance of technical devotion to this tendency is to be note (as indicated earlier), but its widespread practice by thoughtful analysts cannot be ignored, by the importance of its disregarded note of countransference among analysts, which would tend to restore n earlier emphasis digestedly approach to historical material and avoidance of early or excessive; transference historical material and the avoidance of earlier excessive’ transference interpretation.
A few words about our view on th relatively a circumscribed problem of transference interpretation. It is of the belief of longstanding conviction that the economic aspects of transference distribution are critically important, although largely ignored the seeking utilization of this consideration, a broad directional sense, by distinguishing between the potential transference of the analytic situation and those of the typical psychotherapeutic situation (as beyond that, the transference of everyday life. These varying their degree of emergence and their special investment of transference objects with the intensiveness of contact, with the structural emends of deprivation, and with the degree of regressive attention the operation of the rule of abstinence, which is, of course, most highly developed and consistently maintained in the traditional psychoanalytic situation (Stone 1961). Thus although subject to constant infirmed monitoring, the transference can be as medical, at least latently directed ultimately toward the analyst (compared with the cooperated persons in their environment).
Now, under what conditions and with what provisions should the awareness of such transference potentialities be actively mobilized? Obviously, the original precept regarding its emergence as resistance still trued in its implied affirmative aspect but is no longer exclusive. Further, there are, without question, early transference ‘emergences’ that must be dealt with by an active interpretive approach: For example, the early rapid and severe transference regression of borderline patients or the less common some timely seriously impeding erotic transference fulminations in neuronic patients. These are special instances in which the indications seem clear and obligatory.
The central situation, nonetheless, is the ‘average’ analysis (with apologies!), where the latent transferences tend to remain ego-dystopia, warded off, deploring slowly over periods, and manifesting themselves by a variety of derivative phenomena of variable intensity. Surely, dreams, parapraxes, and trends of free association will reveal basic transference directions very early. However, when should these be interrelated to the patient if he is effectively unaware of them? Again, ‘all things' being equal’, an old principle of Freud’s suggested for all interpretative interventions (as opposed, for example, to clarification), is applicable: That unconscious elements are interpreted only when the patient evidences a secure positive attachment the analyst. Yet, this would not obtain in the fact of the ‘emergencies’ of growing erotic or aggressive intensities, certainly of ‘acting out’ is incipient. The disturbing compilations (even in the ‘erotic’ sphere) occur most often when basic transferences are ambivalent (largely hostile) or coloured by intense narcissism. Therefore, in relation to Freud’s valuable precept, it may be understood that in certain cases, the interpretation of ambivalent hostile transferences may be obligatory prerequisite to the establishment o f the genuinely positive climate that required. In such instances of obligatory intervention, the manifestations that require them are usually quite explicit,
Again, then, what about the relatively uncomplicated case, the chronic neurotic, potentially capable of relatively mature relations to objects? Still, the coping with complications do not seem as in question. There are, a few essential conditions and one cardinal rule. First the patient’s sense of reality and his common sense must not be abruptly or excessively tax, lest, in untoward reaction, his constructive imaginative capacities become unavailable. Preliminary explanations and tentative preparatory ‘trail’ interventions should be freely employed to accustom him to a new view of the world. The traditional optimum for interpretation (when the patient is on the verge of perceiving its content himself [Freud 1940] is indeed best, although it must sometimes be neglected in favour of an active interpretative approach. Second, the patient’s sense that the vicissitudes and exigencies of his actual situation are understood and respected must be maintained
Beyond these considerations, the essential principle is quite simple. If it is assumed that - in the intensive, abstinent, traditional psychoanalytic situation (as differentiated from most psychotherapeutic situations) - the transference (ultimately the transference neurosis) is ‘pointing’ toward the unconscious trend is heavily weighted in this direction, there is still a manifest element of movement toward other currently significant objects. Thus, a latent economic problem assumes clinical form: Essentially, the growing magnitude of transference cathexes of the analyst’s person, as withdrawn to varying degree from important persons in the environment with whom most of the patient’s associations usually deal. There is a point, or a phase, in the evolution of transference in which analytic material (often priori to significant subjective awareness) indicates the rapidly evolving shift from extraanalytic objects to the analyst. In this interval (early in some, later in others) the analyst’s interventions, whether in direct substantive form or aimed at resistances to awareness of transference, often become obligatory and certainly most often successful in mobilizing affective emphasis into the 'here-and-now' of the analytic situation. The vigorous anticipatory interpretations suggested by some may be helpful in many instances (at least as preparatory manoeuvres) if (1) the analyst is certain of his views, in terms of not only the substance but the quantitative (i.e., economic) situation (2) the patient’s state soundly receptive (according to well-established criteria) (3) neither the patient’s realities nor his sense of their realities are put to unjustified questions or implicit neglect (4)a sense of proportion regarding the centrality of issues, largely as indicated by the outline of the transference neurosis (of their adumbration), are maintained in a real consideration. This will avoid the superfluous multiplication of transference references that like the massing of scatted genetic interpretations (familiar in the past), can lead to a ‘chaotic situation’ resembling that against which Wilhelm Reich (1933) inveighed. This will be more striking with a compliant patient who can as readily become bemused with his transference as with his ‘Oedipus’ or his ‘anality.’
Once the affective importance of the transference is established in the analysis, a further (hardly new) question arises, with which some of us have sought to deal in a therapist. Even if some agrees that transference interpretations have a uniquely mutative impact, how exclusively must we concentrate on them? Moreover, to what degree and when are extraanalytic occurrences and relationships of everyday life to be brought into the scope of transference interpretation? With regard to the concentration of transference interpretation alone: a large, complex, and richly informative worlds of psychological experience are obviously attention if the patient ‘s extra therapeutic life is ignored. Further, if the transference situation is unique in an affirmative sense, it is also unique by deficit. To revile at the analyst, for example, is a different experience from reviling at an employer who might ‘fire’ the patient or from being snide to a co-worker who might punch him (Stone 1067 and Rangell 1979). Such experiences are also components if the 'here-and-now' (granted that the 'here'aspect is significantly vitiated), and they do merit attention and understanding in their own right, specially in the sphere of characterology. Certain complex reaction pasterns cannot become accessible in the transference context alone.
At the time of speaking it is true that many spectacular extraanalytic behaviours can, and should be seen as displacements (or ‘acting out’) of the analytic transference or in juxtaposed ‘extended family’ relation to it, especially where they involve consistent members of an intimate dramatis personae? While such ‘extra-therapeutic’ transference interpretations (often clearly Germaine to the conflicts of the transference neurosis) can be indispensable, the confronting vigour and definiteness with which they are advanced (as opposed to tentativeness) must always depend on the security of knowledge of preceding and current unconscious elements that invest the persons involved.
Finally, there are incidents, attitudes, and relationships to persons in the patient’s life experience who are not demonstrably involved in the transference neurosis, yet evoke importantly and characteristic responses whose clarification and interpretation may contribute importantly to the patient’s self-knowledge of defences, character structure, and allied matters. Nonetheless, such data may occasionally show a vitalizing direct relationship to historical materials. It would not seem necessary or desirable that such material be forced into the analytic transference if the patient does not respond to a tactful tentative trail in this connection, for example, the ‘alternative’ suggestion proposed by Gill (1979). For the economic considerations that often obtain, and it may be that certain concurrent transference cluster, not readily related to the mainstream of transference neurosis, retain their own original extra-therapeutic transference investment. In some instances, a closer, more available e relationship to the transference mainstream may appear later and lend itself to such interpretative integration. In so doing, happening is likely if obstinate resistances have not been simulated by unnecessary assault on the patients' sense of immediate reality, or his sense of his actual problems. As for metapsychology, one may recall also that all relationships, following varying degrees of development and conflict vicissitudes, are derived greatly from the original relationship to the primal object (Stone 1967), even if their representations are relatively free of the unique ‘unneutralized’ cathexes that characterize active transference (‘transfer’ verus ‘transference’: Stern 1957).
Caring for a better understanding, to what the concerning change, as seen in the psychotherapy of schizophrenic patient, and particularly in reference to the sense of personal identity, may to this place be clearly vitiated in material that relates to extra-therapeutic experience, whether this is seen ‘in its own right’ or as displaced transference. The direct transference experience occurs in relations an individual who knows his own position, i.e., knows ‘both sides’ as in no other situation. (Even where there are interposing countertransference. There are at least susceptible to a self-analysis). This can never be true in the analysis of an extra-therapeutic situation, as there is no inevitable cognitive deficit. For this we must try to compensate by exercising maximal judgement, by exploiting what is revealed about the patient himself in sometimes unique situations, and by being sensitive to the growing accuracy of his reporting as the analyst progresses. Epistemologic deficits' are intrinsic in the very nature of analytic work. This is but one important example.
We need to be alert to the respects in which the concepts and technique of our particular science may lend themselves to the repression, in us and our patients, of anxiety concerning change.
Our necessary delineation of the repetitive patterns between the transference and countertransference tends to become so preoccupying as to obscure the circumstance that, as Janet M. Rioch phrases it, 'What is curative in the [analytic] process is that in tending to reconstruct in which the analyst that an atmospheric state that obtained in childhood, the patient effectively achieves something new' (Rioch 1943).
Our necessarily high degree of reliance upon verbal communication requires us to be aware of the extent to which grammatical patterns having a tendency to segment and otherwise render static our ever-flowing experience; this has been pointed out by Benjamin (1944); Bertrand Russell (1900), Whorf (1956) and others. The tendency among us to regard prolonged silence for being given to disruptiveness in the analytic process, or evidence per se of the patient’s resistance to it, may be due in part to our unconscious realization that profound personalty-change is often best simplified by silent interaction with the patient; therefore, we have an inclination to press forward toward the crystallization of change-inhibiting words.
What is more, our topographical views of the personality a being divisible into the area’s id, ego, and superego, are so inclined to shield us from the anxiety-fostering realization that, in a psychoanalytic cure, change is not merely quantitative and partial
as of 'Where id was, there shall Ego be,' in Freud’s dictum, but qualitative and all-pervasive. Apparently such data system in a passage is to provide accompaniment for Freud, as he gives a picture of personality-structure, and of maturation, which leaves the inaccurate but comforting impression that at least a part of us - namely, a part of the id - is free from change. In his paper entitled Thought for the Times on War and Death. In 1915, he said, 'the evolution of the mind shows a peculiarity that is present in no other process of development.' When a village grows into a town, a child into a man, the village, and the child become submerged in the town and the man. . . . It is in other considerable levels that the accompaniment with the development of the mind . . . the primitive stage [of mental development] can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable (Freud 1915).
In Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, he says that 'in psychoanalytic treatment. . . . By means of the work of interpretation, which transform what is unconscious into what is conscious, the ego is enlarged at the expense of this unconscious.' In the Ego and the Id, he said that, ' . . . the ego is that part of the id modified by the direct influence of the external world . . . the pleasure-principle . . . reigns unrestricted by the id. . . . The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions' (Freud 1923).
Glover, in his book on Technique published in 1955, states similarly that, . . .' A successful analysis may have uncovered a good deal of the repressed . . . [and] have mitigated the archaic censoring functions of the superego, but it can scarcely be expected to abolish the id' (Glover 1955).
Favorably to have done something to provide by some measure, conviction, feeling, mind, persuasion, sentiment used to form or be expressed of some modesty about the state of development of our science, and about our own individual therapeutic skills, should not cause us to undertake the all-embracing extent of human personality growth in normal maturation and in a successful psychoanalysis. Presumably we have all encountered a few fortunate instances that have made us wonder whether maturation really leaves any area of the untouched personality, leaves any steel-bound core within which the pleasure principle reigns immutably, or whether, instead, we have a genuine metamorphosis, from a former hateful and self-seeking orientation to a loving and giving orientation, quite as wonderful and thoroughgoing as the metamorphosis of the tadpole into the frog or that of the caterpillar into the butterfly.
Freud himself, in his emphasis upon the ‘negative therapeutic reaction’ (1923), the repetition compulsion, and the resistance to analytic insight that he discovered in his work with neurotic patients, has shown the importance, in the neurotic individual, of anxiety concerning change, and he agrees with Jung’s statement that ‘a peculiar psychic inertia, hostile to change and progress, is the fundamental condition of neurosis’ (Freud 1915). This is, even more true of the psychosis - so much so that only in very recent decades have psychotic patients achieved full recovery through modified psychoanalytic therapy. Also, it has instructively to explore and deal the psychodynamics of schizophrenia as for the anxiety concerning change which one encounters, in a particular intense degree, at work in these patients, and of ones own, inasmuch as for treating them. What the therapy of schizophrenia can teach us of the human being’s anxiety concerning change, can broaden and deepen our understanding of the non-psychotic individual also.
Further, we see that during his development years he lacks adequate models, in his parents or other parent-figures, with whom to identify about the acceptance of outer changes and the integration of inner change as personality-maturation throughout adulthood. Alternatively, these are relatively rigid persons who, over the years, either/or tenaciously resist change, if anything becomes progressively constricted, fostering him in the conviction that the change from a child into adult is more loss than gain - that, as one matures, fewer feelings and thoughts are acceptable, until finally one is to attain, or be confined to, the thoroughgoing sterility of adulthood. The sudden, unpredictable changes that puncture his parent’s rigidity, due to the eruption of masses of customarily-repressed material in themselves, make them appear to him, for the time being, like totally different persons from their usual selves, and this adds to his experience that personality-change is something that is not to be striving for, but avoided as frighteningly destructive and overwhelming.
We find evidence that he is reacting to, by his parents during his upbringing, predominantly concerning transference and projection, for being the reincarnation of some figure or figures from their own childhood, and the personification of repressed and projected personality-traits in themselves. Thus he is called upon by them, in an often unpredictably changing fashion, to fill various rigid roles in the family, leaving him little opportunity to experience change as something that can occur within himself, as a unique human individual, in a manner beneficial to himself.
When the parents are not relating to him in such a transference fashion they are, it appears, all too often narcissistically absorbed in them. In either instance, the child is left largely in a psychological vacuum, in that he has to cope essentially alone with his own maturing individuality, including the intensely negative emotions produced by the struggle for individuality in such a setting. Because his parents are afraid of the developing individual in him, he too fears this inner self, and his fear of what is heightening parenthetical parents within investing him with powers, based upon the mechanisms of transference and projection that by it's very nature does not understand, powers that he experiences as somehow flowing from himself and yet not an integral part of himself nor within his power to control. As the years bring tragedies to his family, he develops the conviction that he somehow possesses all ill-understood malevolence that is totally responsible for these destructive changes.
In as far as he does discover healthy maturational changes at work in his body and personality, changes that he realizes to be wonderful and priceless, he experiences the poignant accompanying realization that there is no one there to welcome these changes and to share his joy. The parents, if sufficiently free from anxiety to recognize such changes at all, have a tendency to accept them as evidence that their child is rejecting then by growing functionally. Also to be noted, in this connexion, is their lack of trust in him, their lack of assurance that he is elementally good and can be trusted to maturational bases of a good healthy adult. Instead they are alert to find, and warn him against, manifestations in him that can be construed as evidence that he is on a predestined, downward path into an adulthood of criminality, insanity, more at best ineptitude for living.
Moreover, he emergences change not as something within his own power to wield, for the benefit of himself and others but as something imposed from without. This is due not only to structures that the parents place upon his autonomy, but also to the process of increasing repression of his emotions and life as, such that when this latter manifest themselves, they do so in a projected expressive style, for being uncontrollable changed, inflicted upon him from the surrounding world? We see extreme examples of this mechanism later on. In the full-blown schizophrenic person who experiences sexual feelings not as such but as electric shocks sent into him from the outside world, and who experiences anger not as an emerging emotion directorially fittingly as in a way up from within, but a massive and sudden blow coming somehow from the outer world. In fewer extreme instances, in the life of the yet-to-become-schizophrenic youth, he finds repeatedly that when he reaches out to another person, the other suddenly undergoes a change in demeanour, from friendliness to antagonism, in reaction to an unwitting manifestation of the youths’ unconscious hostility. The youth himself, if unable to recognize his own hostility, can only be left feeling increased helplessness in face of an unpredictably changeable world of people.
The final incident that occurs before his admission to the hospital, giving him still further reason for anxiety as for change, is his experience of the psychotic symptoms as an overwhelming anxiety-laden and mysterious change. His own anxiety about this frightened away by the seismic disturbance and horror of the members of his family who finds hi ‘changed’ by what they see as an unmitigated catastrophe, a nervous or mental ‘breakdown’. Although the therapist can come to see, in retrospect, a potential positive element via this occurrence - namely, the emergence of onetime-repressed insights concerning the true state of affairs involving the patient and his family, none of those participants can integrate so radically changed a picture at that time. Over the preceding years the family members could not tolerate their child’s seeing himself and them with the eyes of a normally maturing offspring, and when repressed percepts emerge from repression in him, neither they nor he possesses the requisite ego-strength to accept them as badly needed changes in his picture of himself and of them. Instead, the tumult of depressed percepts foes into the formation of such psychotic phenomena as misidentifications, hallucinations, and delusions in which neither he nor the member of his family can discern the links to reality that we, upon investigation in individual psychotherapy with him, can find in these psychotic phenomena - links, that is, to the state of affairs that has really held sway in the family. Paretically, it should be marked and noted that the psychotic episode often occurs in such ac way as to leave the patient especially fearful of sudden change, for in many instances the de-repressed material emerges suddenly and leads him to damage, in the short space of a few hours or even moments, his life situation so grievously that repair can be affected only very slowly and painfully, over many subsequent months of treatment in the confines of a hospital.
It should be conveyed, in that the regression of the thought-processes, which occurs as one of the features of the developing schizophrenia, results in an experience of the world so kaleidoscopic as to make up still another reason for the individual’s anxiety concerning change. That is, as much as he has lost thee capacity to grasp the essentials of a given whole - to the extent that he has regressed to what Goldstein (1946) terms the ‘concrete attitude’ - he experiences any change, even if it is only in an insignificant (by mature standards) detail of that which he perceives, as a metamorphosis that leaves him with no sense of continuity between the present perception and that immediately preceding. This thought disorder, various aspects of which have been described also by Angyal (1946), Kasanin (1946), Zucker (1958), and others, is compared by Werner with the modes of thought that are found in members of so-called primitive cultures (and in healthy children of our own culture): . . . in the primitive mentality, particulars often as self-subsisting things that do not necessarily become synthized into larger entities. . . . The natives of the Kilimanjaro region do not have a word for the whole mountain range that they inhabit, only words for its peaks. . . . The same is reported of the aborigines of East Australia. From each twist and turn of a river has a name, but the language does not permit of a single all-embracing differentiation for the whole river. . . . [He] quotes Radin (1927) as saying that for the primitive man: 'A mountain is not thought of as a unified whole. It is a continually changing entity’ . . . [and, Radin continues, such a man lives in a world that is] ‘dynamic and ever-changing . . . Since he sees the same objects changing in their appearance from day to day, the primitive man regards this phenomenon as definitely depriving them of immutability and self-subsistence’ (Werner 1957).
Langer (1942) has called the symbolic-making function ‘one of man’s primary activities, like eating, looking, or moving about. It is the fundamental process of his mind’, she says, as she terms the need of symbolization ‘a primary need in man, which other creatures probably do not have’. Kubie (1953) terms the symbolizing capacity ‘the unique hallmark of man . . . capacities’, and he states that it is in impairment of this capacity to symbolize that all adult psychopathology essentially consists.
As for schizophrenia, we find that since 1911 this disease was described by Bleuler (1911) as involving an impairment of the thinking capacities, and in the thirty years many psychologists and psychiatrists, including Vigotsky (1934) Hanfmann and Kasanin (1942) Goldstein (1946) Norman Cameron (1946) Benjamin (1946) Beck (1946) von Domarus (1946) and Angtal (1946) - to mention but a few - has described various aspects of this thinking disorder. These writers, agreeing that one aspect of the disorder consists in over -concreteness or literalness of thought, have variously described the schizophrenic as unable to think in figurative (including metaphorical) terms, or in abstractions, or in consensually validated concepts and symbols, mor in categorical generalizations. Bateson (1956) described the schizophrenic as using metaphor, but unlabelled metaphor.
Werner (1940) has understood this most accurately matter of regression to a primitive level of thinking, comparable with the found in children and in members of so-called primitive cultures, a level of thinking in which there is a lack of differentiation between the concrete and the metaphorical. Thus we might say that just as the schizophrenic is unable to think in effective, consensually validated metaphor, as too as he is unable to think in terms that are genuinely concrete, free from an animistic forbear of a so-called metaphorical overlay.
The defensive function of the dedifferentiation that in so characterized of schizophrenic experience, and one find that this fragmentation o experience, justly lends itself to the repression of various motions that are too intense, and in particular too complex, for the weak ego to endure, which must be faced as one becomes aware of change as involving continuity rather than total discontinuity.
That is, the deeply schizophrenic patient who, when her beloved therapist makes a unkind or stupid remark, experiences him now for being a different person from the one who was there a moment ago - who experiences that a Bad Therapist has replaced the Good Therapist - is by that spared the complex feeling of disillusionment and hurt, the complex mixture of love and anger and contempt that a healthier patient would feel then. Similarly, if she experiences it in tomorrow’s session - or even later in the same session - that another good therapist has now come on the scene. The bad therapist is now totally gone, she will feel none of the guilt and self-reproach that a healthier patient would feel at finding that this therapist, whom she has just now been hated or despising, is after all a person capable of genuine kindness. Likewise, when she experiences a therapist’s departure on vacation for being a total deletion of him from her awareness, this bit of discontinuity, or fragmentation, in her subjective experience spars her from feeling the complex mixture of longing, grief, separation-anxiety, rejection, rage and so on, which a less ill patient feels toward a therapist who is absent but of whose existence he continues to be only too keenly aware.
Finally, such repressed emotions as hostility and lust may readily be seen, as these feelings not easy to hear expressed, as, for instance, the woman, who, at the beginning of her therapy, had been encased for years I flint lock paranoid defenses, become able to express her despair by saying that 'If I had something to get well for, it would make a difference,' her grief, by saying, 'The reason I am afraid to be close to people is because I feel so much like crying': Her loneliness, by expressing a wish that she would turn an insect into a person, so then she would have a friend. Her helplessness in face of her ambivalence by saying, to her efforts to communicate with other persons, 'I feel just like a little child, at the edge of the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, trying to build a castle - right next to the water. Something just starts to be gasped [by the other person], and then bang! It has gone - another wave. As joining the mainstream of fellow human beings.
In the compliant charge of bringing forward three hypotheses are to be shown, they're errelated or portray in words as their interconnectivity, are as (1) in the course of a successful psychoanalysis, the analyst goes through a phase of reacting to, and eventually relinquishing, the patient as his oedipal love-object, (2) in normal personality development, the parent reciprocates the child's oedipal love with greater intensity than we have recognized before, and (3) in such normal developments, the passing of the Oedipus complex is at least important a phase in ego-development as in superego-development.
While doing psycho-analysis, time and again patients who have progressed to, or very far toward, a thorough going analysis to cure, become aware of experiential romantic and erotic desires and fantasies. Such fantasizing and emotions have appeared in a usual but of late in the course of treatment, have been preset not briefly but usually for several months, and have subsided only after having experienced a variety of feelings - frustration, separation anxiety, grief and so forth - entirely akin to those that attended as the resolution of an Oedipus complex late in the personal analysis.
Psycho-analysis literature is, in the main. Such as to make one feel more, rather than less, troubled at finding in oneself such feelings toward one's patient. As Lucia Tower (1956) has recently noted, . . . Virtually every writer on the subject of countertransference . . . states unequivocally that no form of erotic reaction to a patient is to be tolerated . . .
Still, in recent years, many writers, such as P. Heimann (1950), M. B. Cohen (1952) and E. Weigert (1952, 1954), have emphasized how much the analyst can learn about the patient from noticing his own feelings, of whatever sort, in the analytic relationship. Weigert (1952), defining countertransference as emphatic identification with the analysand, has stated that . . . 'In terminal phases of analyses the resolution of countertransference goes hand in hand with the resolution of transference.'
Respectfully, these additional passages are shown in view of countertransference, in the special sense in which defines the analyst for being innate, inevitable ingredients in the psycho-analytic relationship, in particular, the feelings of loss that the analyst experiences with the termination of the analysis. However, case in point, that the particular variety of countertransference with which are under approach is concerned that of the analyst's reacting as a loving and protective parent to the analysand, reacted too as an infant: There are plausible reasons why in the last phase it is especially difficult to achieve and maintain analytic frankness. The end of analysis is an experience of loss that mobilizes all the resistances in the transference (and in the counter-transference too), for a final struggle. . . . Recently, Adelaide Johnson (1951) described the terminal conflict of analysis as fully reliving the Oedipus conflict in which the quest for the genitally gratifying parent is poignantly expressed and the intense grief, anxiety and wrath of its definitive loss are fully reactivated. . . . Unless the patient dares to be exposed to such an ultimate frustration he may cling to the tacit permission that his relation to the analyst will remain his refuge from the hardships of his libidinal cravings to an aim-inhibited, tender attachment to the analyst as an idealized parent, he can get past the conflicts of genital temptation and frustration.
. . . . The resolution of the counter-transference permits the analyst to be emotionally freer and spontaneous with the patient, and this is an additional indication of the approaching end of an analysis.
. . . . When the analyst observes that he can be unrestrained with the patient, when he no longer weighs his words to maintain as cautious objectivity, this empathic countertransference and the transference of the patient are in a process of resolution. The analyst can treat the analysand on terms of equality; he is no longer needed as an auxiliary superego, an unrealistic deity in the clouds of detached neutrality. These are signs that the patient's labour of mourning for infantile attachments nears completion.
In stressing the point, which before an analysis can properly bring to an end, the analyst must have experienced a resolution of his countertransference to the patient for being a deep beloved, and desired, figure not only on this infantile level that Weigert has emphasized valuably, but also on an oedipal-genital level. Weigeret's paper, which helped to formulate the views that are set down, that is, as expressing the total point that a successful psycho-analysis involves the analyst's deeply felt relinquishment of the patient both as a cherished infant, and for being a fellow adult who is responded to at the level of genital love?
The paper by L. E. Tower (1956) comes similarly close to the view that, unlike Weigert, limits the term counter-transference to those phenomena that are transferences of the analyst to the patient. It is much more striking, therefore, that she finds even this classification defined countertransference to be innate to the analytic process: . . . . That there is inevitably, naturally, and often desirable, many countertransference developments in every analysis (some evanescent - some sustained), which is a counterpart of the transference phenomena. Interactions (or transactions) between the transference of the patient and the countertransference of the analyst, going on at unconscious levels, may be - or perhaps are always - of vital significance for the outcome of the treatment. . . .
. . . . Virtually every writer on the subject of countertransference. States unequivocally that no form of erotic reaction to a patient is to be tolerated. This would suggest that temptations in this area are great, and perhaps ubiquitous. This is the one subject about which almost every author is very certain to state his position. Other 'counter-transference' manifestations are not routinely condemned. Therefore, it must be to assume that erotic responses to some extent trouble nearly every analyst. This is an interesting phenomenon and one that call for investigation; nearly all physicians, when they gain enough confidence in their analysts, report erotic feelings and imply toward their patients, but usually do so with a good deal of fear and conflict. . . .
Of our tending purposes, we are to pay close attention to the libidinal resources that are of our applicative theory, in that large amounts of resulting available libido are necessary to tolerate the heavy task of many intensive analyses. While, we deride almost every detectable libidinal investment made by an analyst in a patient . . . various forms of erotic fantasy and erotic countertransference phenomena of a fantasy and of an affective character are in some experiential ubiquitous and presumably normal. Which lead to suspect that in many - perhaps every - intensive analytic treatment there develops something like countertransference structures (perhaps even a 'neurosis') which are essential and inevitable counterparts of the transference neurosis. These countertransference structures may be large or small in their quantitative aspects, but in the total picture they may be of considerable significance for the outcome of the treatment. They function in the manner of a catalytic agent in the treatment process. Their understanding by the analyst may be as important to the final working through of the transference neurosis as is the analyst's intellectual understanding of the transference neurosis itself, perhaps because they are, so to speak, the vehicle for the analyst's emotional understanding of the transference neurosis. Both transference neurosis and countertransference structure seem intimately bound together in a living process and both must be considered continually in the work that is the psychoanalysis. . . .
. . . . Seemingly questionable, is any thorough working through a deep transference neurosis, in the strictest sense, which does not involve some form of emotional upheaval in which both patient and analysts are involved. In other words, there are both a transference neurosis and a corresponding Countertransference 'neurosis' (no matter how small and temporary) which are both analyzed in the treatment situation, with eventual feelings of a new orientation by both one another toward any other but themselves.
Freud, in his description of the Oedipus complex (1900, 1921, 1923), tended largely to give us a picture of the child as having an innate, self-determined tendency to experience, under the conditions of a normal home, feelings of passionate love toward the parent of the opposite sex; we get little hints, from his writings, that in this regard the child enters a mutual relatedness of passionate love with that parent, a relatedness in which the parent's feelings may be of much the same quality and intensity as those in the child (although this relatedness must be very important in the life of the developing child than it is in the life of the mature adult, with his much stronger, more highly differentiated ego and with his having behind him the experience of a successfully resolved oedipal experience during his own maturation).
Nevertheless, in the earliest of his publications concerning the Oedipus complex, namely The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud makes a fuller acknowledgements of the parent's participation in the oedipal phase of the child's life than does in any of his later writings on the subject'. . . a child's sexual wishes - if in their embryonic stage they deserve to be so described - awaken very early. . . . A girl's first affection is for her father and boy's first childish desires are for his mother. Accordingly, the father becomes a disturbing rival to the boy and the mother to the girl. The parents too give evidence as a rule of sexual partiality: A natural predilection usually sees to it that a man tends to spoil his little daughters, while his wife takes her sons' part; though both of them, where their judgement is not disturbed by the magic of sex, keep a strict eye upon their children's education. The child is very well aware of this patriality and turns against that one of his parents who is opposed to showing it. Being loved by an adult does not merely bring a child the satisfaction of a special need; it also means that he will get what he wants in every other respect as well. Thus, he will be following his own sexual instinct and while giving fresh strength to the inclination shown by his parents if his choice between them falls in with theirs (1900).
Theodor Reik, in his accounts of his coming to sense something of the depths of possessiveness, jealousy, fury at rivals, and anxiety in the face of impending loss, in himself regarding his two daughters, conveys a much more adequate picture of the emotions that genuinely grip the parent in the oedipal relationship than is conveyed by Freud's sketchy account, as Reik's deeply moving descriptions occupy a chapter in his Listening with the Third Ear (1949), written at the time when his daughters were twelve and six years of age; and a chapter in his The Secret Self (1952), when the oldest daughter was now seventeen.
Returning to a further consideration of the therapist's oedipal-love responses to the patient, it seems that these response flows from four different sources. In actual practice the responses from these four tributaries are probably so commingled in the therapists that it is difficult of impossible fully to distinguish one kind from another; the important thing is that he is maximally open to the recognition of these feelings in himself, no matter what their origin, for he can probably discern, in as far as is possible, from where they flow they signify, therefore, concerning the patient's analysis.
First among these four sources may be mentioned the analyst's feeling-responses to the patient's transference. This, when, as the analysis progresses and the patient enter an experiencing of oedipal love, ongoing, jealousy y, frustration and loss as for the analyst as a parent in the transference, the analyst will experience to at least some degree, response's reciprocally th those of the patient-responses, that is, such for being present within the parent in questions, during the patient's childhood and adolescence, which the parent presumably was not ably to recognize freely and accept within himself. Some writers apply the term 'counter-transference' to such analyst-responese to the patient's transference, unlike others some do not do so.
The second source consists in the countertransference in the classical sense in which this term is most often used: The analyst's responding to the patient about transference-feelings carried over from a figure out of the analyst 's own earlier years, without awareness that his response springs predominantly from this early-life, rather than being based mainly upon the reality of the patient analyst-patient relationship. It is this source, of course, which we wish to reduce to a minimum, by means of thoroughgoing personal analysis and ever-continuing subsequent alertness for indications that our work with a patient has come up against, in us, unanalyzed emotional residues from our past. This source is so very important, in fact, as to make the writing of such a paper as a somewhat precarious venture. Must expect that some readers will charge him with trying to portray, as natural and necessary to the annalistic process generally, certain analyst-responese that in actuality is purely the result of an unworked-through? Oedipus' complex in himself, which are dangerously out of place in his own work with patients that have no place in the well-analysed analyst's experience with his patient.
It can only be surmised that although this source may play an insignificant role in the responses of a well-analysed analyst who has conducted many analyses through to completion - to an intensified inclusion as a thoroughgoing resolution of the patient's Oedipus complex - it is probably to be found, in some measure, in every analyst. This is, it seems that the nature and conflictual feeling-experience in this regard - a fostering of his deepest love toward the fellow human being with whom she participates in such prolonged and deeply personal work, and a simultaneous, unceasing, and rigorous taboo against his behavioural expression of any of the romantic or erotic components of his love - as to require almost any analyst's tending to relegate the deepest intensities of these conflictual feelings to his own unconscious mind, much as were the deepest intensities of his oedipal strivings toward a similar beloved, and similarly unobtainable and rigorously tabooed, parent in particular, and in the hope of the remaining in the analyst's unconscious. That is hoping that this will help analysts - in particular, to a lesser extent-experienced analyst - whereas to some readers awareness, and by that diminution, of this countertransference feeling, as justly dealing with other kinds of countertransference feelings, by such as those wrote by P. Heumann (1950, M. B., Cohen (19520 and E. Weigert (1952?)
A third source is to be found in the appeal that the gratifyingly improving patient makes to the narcissistic residue in the analyst's personality, the Pygmalion in him. He tends to fall in love with this beautifully developing patient, regarded at this narcissistic level as his own creation, just as Pygmalion fell in love with the beautiful statu e of Galatea that he had sculptured. This source, like the second one that we can expect to holds little sways in the well-analysed practitioner of long experience, but it, too, is probably never absent of great experience and professional standing, than we may like to think. Particularly in articles and books that describe the author's new technique or theoretical concept as an outgrowth of the work with a particular patient, or a very few patients, do we see this source very prominently present in many instances.
The fourth source, based on the genuine reality of the analyst-patient situation, consists in the circumstance that nearly becomes, per se, a likeable, admirable and insightfully speaking lovable, human being from whom the analyst will soon become separated. If he is not himself a psychiatrist, the analyst may very likely never see him again. Even if he is a professional colleague, the relationship with him will become in many respects far more superficial, far less intimate, than it has been. This real and unavoidable circumstance of the closing analytic work tends powerfully to arouse within the analyst feelings of painfully frustrated love that deserve to be compared with the feelings of ungratifiable love that both child and parent experience in the oedipal phase of the child's development. Feelings from this source cannot properly be called countertransference. They may flow from the reality of the present circumstances but they may be difficult or impossible e to distinguish fully from countertransference.
There are, then four essentially powerful sources having to promote of the tendency toward the feelings of deep love with romantic and erotic overtones, and with accompanying feelings of jealousy, anxiety, frustration-rage, separation-anxiety, and grief, in the analyst about the patient. These feelings come to him, like all feelings, without tags showing from where they have come, and only if he is open and accepting to their emergence into his awareness does he have a chance to set about finding out their origin and thus their significance in his work with the patient.
Finally, with which the considerations have been presented so far, a few remarks concerning the passing of the Oedipus complex in normal development and in a successful psycho-analysis.
In the Ego and the Id (1923) we find italicized a passage in which Freud stresses that the oedipus phase results in the formation of the superego; we find that he stresses the patient's opposition to ther child's oedipal swosh, and lastly, we see this resultant suprerego to be predominantly a severe and forbidding one: The broad general outcome of the sexual phase dominated by the Oedipus complex may, therefore, be taken to be the forming of a precipitating in the ego . . . This modification of the ego
. . . comforts the other contents of the ego as an ego ideal or super-ego.
. . . . The child's parents, and especially his father, were perceived as the obstacle to verbalizations of his Oedipus wishes, so his infantile ego fortified itself for the carrying out of the repression by building this obstacle within itself. It borrowed the strength to do this, so to seek, from the father, and this loan was an extraordinarily nonentous act. The super-ego retains the character of the father, while the more powerful the Oedipus complex was and the more rapid succumbed to repression (under the influence of authority, religious teachings, schooling and reading), this strictly will be the domination of the super-ego over the ego later on - as conscience or perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt. . . .
The subject dealt within the subjective matter through which generative pre-oedipal origins are to be found of the superego, on which has been dealt by M. Klein (1955). E. Jacobson (1954) and others, also apart from that subject, a regard for Freud's above-quoted description as more applicable to the child who later becomes neurotic or psychotic, than to the 'normal'; child. Since we can assume that there is virtually a wholly complimentary neurotic difficulty, we may then have in assuming that Freud's formation holds true to some degree in every instance. Still, to the extent that a child's relationships with his parents are healthy, he finds the strength to accept the unrealizibilityy of his oedipal strivings, not mainly through the identification with the forbidding rival-parent, but mainly, as an alternative, the ego-strengthening experiences of finding the beloved parent reciprocate his love - responds to him, that is, for being a worthwhile and loveable individual, for being, a conceivably desirable love-partner - and renounces him only with an accompanying sense of loss on the parent's own part. The renunciation, again, something that is mutual experience for the chid and parent, and is made in deference to a recognizedly greater limiting realty, a reality that includes not only the taboo maintained by the rival-parent, but also the love of the oedipal desired parent toward his or her spouse - a love that undeterred the child's birth and a love to which, in a sense, he owes his very existence?
Out of such an oedipal situation the child emerges, with no matter how deep and painful sense of loss at the recognition that he can never displace the rival-parent and posses the beloved on e in a romantic-and-erotic relationship, in a state differently from the ego-diminished, superego-domination state that Freud described. This child that his love, however unrealized, is reciprocated. Strengthened, too, out of the realization, which his relationship with the beloved parent has helped him to achieve, that he lives in a wold in which any individual's strivings are encompassed by a reality much larger than he: Freud, when he stressed that the oedipal phase normally results mainly in the formations of a forbidding superego, and if it is resulting mainly in enchantments of the ego's ability to test both inner and outer reality.
All experiences with both neurotic and psychotic patients had shown that, in every individual instance, in as far as the oedipal phase was entered the course of their past elements, it led to ego impairment rather than ego functioning as primarily because the beloved parent had to repress his or her reciprocal desire for the child, chiefly through the mechanism of unconscious denial of the child's importance to the parent. More often than not, in these instancies, that suggested that the parent would unwittingly act out his or her repressed desires in the unduly seductive behaviour toward the child; yet whenever the parents come close to the recognition of such desires within him, he would unpredictably start reacting to the child as unlovable - undesirable.
With many of these parents, appears that, primarily because of the parent's own unresolved Oedipus complex, his marriage proved too unsatisfying, and his emotional relationship to his own culture too tenuous, for him to dare to recognize the strength of his reciprocal feelings toward his child during the latter's oedipal phase of development. The child is reacting too as a little mother or father transference-figure to the parent, a transference-figure toward whom the parent's repressed oedipal love feelings are directed. If the parent had achieved the inner reassurance of a deep and enduring love toward his wife, and a deeply felt relatedness with his culture including the incest taboos to which his culture adheres, he would have been able to participate in as deeply felt, but minimally acted out, relationship with the chid in a way that fostered the healthy resolutions of the child's Oedipus complex. Instead, what usually happens in such instances, in that the child's Oedipus complex remains unresolved because the child stubbornly - and naturally - refuses to accept defeat within these particular family circumstances, whereas the acceptance of oedipal defeat is tantamount to the acceptance of irrevocable personal worthlessness and unlovability.
It seems much clearer, then this former child, now neurotic or psychotic adult, requires from us for the successful resolution to his unresolved Oedipus complex: Not such a repression of desire, acted-out seductiveness, and denial of his own worth as he met in the relationship with his parent, but a maximal awareness on our part of the reciprocal feelings while we develop in response to his oedipal strivings. Our main job remains always, of course, to further the analysis of his transference, but what might be described seems to be the optimal feeling background in the analyst for such analytic work.
Formidably, when applied not to a moderate degree found in the background of the neurotic person but invested with all the weight of actual biological attributes, have much ado with the person's unconscious refusal to relinquish, in adolescence and young adulthood, his or her fantasied infantile omnipotence in exchange for a sexual identity of - in these-described terms - a 'man' or a 'woman'. It would be like having to accept only certain dispensations as well as salvageable sights, if ony to see the whole fabric ruined into the bargin. A person cannot deeply accept an adult sexual identity until he has been able to find that this identity can express all the feeling-potentialities of his comparatively boundless infancy. This implies that he has become able to blend, for example, his infantile - dependent needs into his more adult erotic strivings, than regard these as mutually exclusive in the way that the mother of the future patient or the persons infant frighteningly feels that her lust has been placed in her mothering. Another difficult facet of this situation resides in a patient's youngful conviction, based on his intrafamiliar experiences, which he can win parental love only if he can become or, perhaps, at an unconscious level remain - a girl; accepting her sexuality as a woman is equated with the abandonment of the hope of being loved.
Concerning the warped experiences their persons have and with the oedipal phase of development, calls to our attention of two features. First, the child whose parents are more narcissistic than truly object-related in faced with the basically hopeless challenge of trying to compete with the mother's own narcissistic love for herself, and with the father's similar love for himself, than being presented with a competitive challenge involving separate, flesh-and-blood human beings. Secondly, concerning warped oedipal experiences, in, as far as the parents succeeded in achieving object-relatedness, this has often become only weakly established as a genital level, so that it remains much more prominently at the mother-infant level of ego-development. Thus, the mother, for example, is much more able to love her infant son than her adult husband, and the oedipal competition between husband and son are in terms of who can better become, or remain, the infant whom the mother is capable of loving. When the infant becomes chronologically a young man, having learned that one wins a woman not through genial assertiveness but through regression, he is apt to shy away from entering into true adult genitality, and is tempted to settle for what amounts to 'regressive victory' in the oedipal struggle
We write much about the analyst’s or therapist’s being able to identify or empathize with the patient for helping in the resolution of the neurotic or psychotic difficulties. Such writings always portray a merely transitory identification, an empathic sensing of the patient’s conflicts, an identification that is of essentially communicative value only. However, it should be seen that we inevitably identify with the patient another fashion also, we identify with the healthy elements in him, in a way that entails enduing, constructive additions to our own personality. Patients - above all schizophrenic patients - need and welcome our acknowledgement, simply and undemonstratively, that they have contributed, and are contributing, in some such significant way, to our existence.
Increasing maturity involves increasing ability not merely to embrace change in the world around one, but to realize that one is oneself in a constant state of change. By contrast, the recovering, maturing patiently becomes less and less dependent upon any such sharply delineated, static self-image or even a constellation of such images, the answer to the question, 'Who are you?' is almost as small, solid, and well defined as a stone, but is a larger, fluid, richly-laden, and sniffingly outlined as an ocean? As the individual becomes well, he comes to realize that, as Henri Bergson (1944) outs it, 'reality is a perpetual growth, a creation pursued without end. . . . A perpetual becoming,' and to the extent that he can actively welcome change and let it become part of him, he comes to know that - again in Bergson’s phrase - 'to exist is to change, to change is too mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.'
Coherence is a major player in the theatre of knowledge. There are coherence theories of belief, truth and justification where these combine in various ways to yield theories of knowledge, coherence theories of belief are concerned with the content of beliefs. Consider a belief you now have, the belief that you are reading a page in a book. So what makes that belief the belief that it is? What makes it the belief that you are reading a page in a book than the belief that you have something other of a preoccupation? The same stimuli may produce various beliefs and various beliefs may produce the same action. The role that gives the belief the content it has is the role it plays within a network of relations to other beliefs, the role in inference and implication, for example, I infer different things from believing that I am reading a page in a book than from any other belief, just as I infer that belief from different things than I refer other beliefs from.
Nevertheless, an ‘idea,’ actually exists in the mind as a product of mental activity. Human history is in essence a history of ideas, as thoughts are distinctly intellectual and stresses contemplation and reasoning. Justly as language is the dress of thought. Ideas began with Plato, as eternal, mind-independent forms or archetypes of the things in the material world. Neoplatonism made them thoughts in the mind of God who created the world. The much criticized ‘new way of ideas’, so much a part of seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophy, began with Descartes’ (1596-1650) conscionable extension of ideas to cover whatever is in human minds too, an extension of which Locke (1632-1704) made much use. But are they like mental images, of things outside the mind, or non-representational, like sensations? If representational, are they mental objects, standing between the mind and what they represent, or are they mental acts and modifications of a mind perceiving the world directly? Finally, are they neither objects nor mental acts, but dispositions? Malebranche (1632-1715) and Arnauld (1612-94) and then Leibniz, famously disagreed about how ‘ideas’ should be understood, and recent scholars disagree about how Arnauld, Descartes, Locke and Malebranche in fact understood them.
Although ideas give rise to many problems of interpretation, but between them they define a space of philosophical problems. Ideas are that with which we think, or in Locke’s terms, whatever the mind may be employed about in thinking. Looked at that way, they seem to be inherently transient, fleeting, and unstable private presences. Ideas provide the way in which objective knowledge can be expressed. They are the essential components of understanding, and any intelligible proposition that is true must be capable of being understood. Plato’s theory of ‘forms’ is a launching celebration of the objective and timeless existence of ideas as concepts, and reified to the point where they make up the only real world, of separate and perfect models of which the empirical world is only a poor cousin. This doctrine, notably in the ‘Timaeus’, opened the way for the Neoplatonic notion of ideas as the thoughts of God. The concept gradually lost this other-worldly aspect, until after Descartes ideas become assimilated to whatever it is that lies in the mind of any thinking being.
Together with a general bias toward the sensory, so that what lies in the mind may be thought of as something like images, and a belief that thinking is well explained as the manipulation having no real existence but existing in a fancied imagination. It is not reason but ‘the imagination’ that is found to be responsible for our making the empirical inferences that we do. There are certain general ‘principles of the imagination’ according to which ideas naturally come and go in the mind under certain conditions. It is the task of the ‘science of human nature’ to discover such principles, but without itself going beyond experience. For example, an observed correlation between things of two kinds can be seen to produce in everyone a propensity to expect a thing to the second sort given an experience of a thing of the first sort. We get a feeling, or an ‘impression’, when the mind makes such a transition and that is what leads us to attribute necessarily to the reflation between things of the two kinds, there is no necessity in the relations between things that happen in the world, but, given our experience and the way our minds naturally work, we cannot help thinking that there is.
A similar appeal to certain ‘principles of the imagination’ is what explains our belief in a world of enduring objects. Experience alone cannot produce that belief, everything we directly perceive is ‘momentary and fleeting’. And whatever our experience is like, no reasoning could assure us of the existence of something independent of our impressions which continues to exist when they cease. The series of our constantly changing sense impressions presents us with observable features which Hume calls ‘constancy ‘ and ‘coherence’, and these naturally operate on the mind in such a way as eventually to produce ‘the opinion of a continued and distinct existence’. The explanation is complicated, but it is meant to appeal only to psychological mechanisms which can be discovered by ‘careful and exact experiments, and the observation of those particular effects, which result from [the mind’s] different circumstances and situations’.
We believe not only in bodies, but also in persons, or selves, which continue to exist through time, and this belief too can be explained only by the operation of certain ‘principles of the imagination’. We never directly perceive anything we can call ourselves: The most we can be aware of in ourselves are our constantly changing momentary perceptions, not the mind or self which has them. For Hume, there is nothing that really binds the different perceptions together, we are led into the ‘fiction’ that they form a unity only because of the way in which the thought of such series of perceptions works upon the mind. ‘The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance, . . . there is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different: Whatever natural propensity we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitutes the mind.
Leibniz’s held, in opposition to Descartes, that adult humans can have experiences of which they are unaware: Experiences of which effect what they do, but which are not brought to self-consciousness. Yet there are creatures, such as animals and babies, which completely lack the ability to reflect of their experiences, and to become aware of them as experiences of theirs. The unity of a subject’s experience, which stems from his capacity to recognize all his experience as his, was dubbed by Kant ‘the transcendental unity of apperception ~ Leibniz’s term for inner awareness or self-consciousness. In contrast with ‘perception’ or outer awareness ~. However, this apprehension of unity is transcendental, than empirical, because it is presupposed in experience and cannot be derived from it. Kant used the need for this unity as the basis of his attempted refutation of scepticism about the external world. He argued that my experiences could only be united in one self-consciousness if at least some of them were experiences of a law-governed world of objects in space. Outer experience is thus a necessary condition of inner awareness.
The awareness generated by an introspective act can have varying degrees of complexity. It might be a simple knowledge of (mental) things’ ~ such as a particular perception-episode, or it might be the more complex knowledge of truths about one’s own mind. In this latter full-blown judgement form, introspection is usually the self-ascription of psychological properties and, when linguistically expressed, results in statements like ‘I am watching the spider’ or ‘I am repulsed’.
Arguments against the idea of the given originate with Kant (1724-1804), who argues that percepts without concepts do not yet constitute any form of knowing. Being non-epistemic, they presumably cannot serve as epistemic foundations. Once we recognize that we must apply concepts of properties to appearances and formulate beliefs utilizing those concepts before the appearances can play any epistemic role, it becomes more plausible that such beliefs are fallible. The argument was developed by Wilfrid Sellars (1963), which according to him, the idea of the given involves a confusion between sensing particulars (having sense impressions), which is non-epistemic, and having non-inferential knowledge of propositions referring to appearances. The former may be necessary for acquiring perceptual knowledge, but it is not itself a primitive kind of knowing. Its being non-epistemic renders it immune from error, but also unsuitable for epistemological foundations. The latter, non-referential perceptual knowledge, are fallible, requiring concepts acquired through trained responses to public physical objects.
Contemporary foundationalist’s deny the coherentist’s claim whole eschewing the claim that foundations, in the form of reports about appearances, are infallible. They seek alternatives to the given as foundations. Although arguments against infallibility are sound, other objections to the idea of foundations are not. That concepts of objective properties are learned prior to concepts of appearances, for example, implied neither that claims about appearances are less certain than claims about objective properties, nor that the latter are prior in chains of justification. That there can be no knowledge prior to the acquisition and consistent application of concepts allows for propositions whose truth requires only consistent applications of concepts, and this may be so for some claims about appearances, least of mention, coherentists would add that such genuine belief’s stands in need of justification themselves and so cannot be foundations.
Coherentists will claim that a subject requires evidence that he applies concepts consistently that he is able, for example, consistently to distinguish red from other colours that appear. Beliefs about red appearances could not then be justified independently of other beliefs expressing that evidence. To say that part of the doctrine of the given that holds beliefs about appearances to be self-justified, we require an account of how such justification is possible, how some beliefs about appearances can be justified without appeal to evidence. Some foundationalists simply assert such warrant as derived from experience, but, unlike appeals to certainty by proponents of the given.
It is, nonetheless, an explanation of this capacity that enables its developments as an epistemological corollary to a metaphysical dualism. The world of ‘matter’ is known through external/outer sense-perception. So cognitive access to ‘mind’ must be based on a parallel process of introspection which ‘thought . . . not ‘sense’, as having nothing to do with external objects: Yet [put] is very like it, and might properly enough be called ‘internal sense’. However, having mind as object, is not sufficient to make a way of knowing ‘inner’ in the relevant sense be because mental facts can be grasped through sources other than introspection. To point, is rather that an ‘inner perception’ provides a kind of access to the mental not obtained otherwise ~ it is a ‘look within from within’. Stripped of metaphor this indicates the following epistemological features:
1. Only I can introspect my mind.
2. I can introspect only my mind.
3. Introspective awareness is superior to any other knowledge of contingent facts that I or others might have.
Tenets (1) and (2) are grounded in the Cartesian of ‘privacy’ of the mental. Normally, a single object can be perceptually or inferentially grasped by many subjects, just as the same subject can perceive and infer different things. The epistemic peculiarity of introspection is that, is, is exclusive ~ it gives knowledge only of the mental history of the subject introspecting.
The tenet (2) of the traditional theory is grounded in the Cartesian idea of ‘privileged access’. The epistemic superiority of introspection lies in its being and infallible source of knowledge. First-person psychological statements which are its typical results cannot be mistaken. This claim is sometimes supported by an ‘imaginability test’, e.g., the impossibility of imaging that I believe that I am in pain, while at the same time imaging evidence that I am not in pain. An apparent counter-example to this infallibility claim would be the introspective judgement ‘I am perceiving a dead friend’ when I am really hallucinating. This is taken to by reformulating such introspective reports as ‘I seem to be perceiving a dead friend’. The importance of such privileged access is that introspection becomes a way of knowing immune from the pitfalls of other sources of cognition. The basic asymmetry between first and third person psychological statements by introspective and non-introspective methods, but even dualists can account for introspective awareness in different ways:
(1) Non-perceptual models ~ Self-scrutiny need not be perceptual. My awareness of an object ‘O’ changes the status of ‘O’. It now acquires the property of ‘being an object of awareness’. On the basis of this or the fact that I am aware of ‘O’, such an ‘inferential model’ of awareness is suggested by the Bhatta Mimamsa school of Indian Epistemology. This view of introspection does not construe it as a direct awareness of mental operations but, interestingly, we will have occasion to refer to theories where the emphasis on directness itself leads to a non-perceptual, or at least, a non-observational account of introspection.
(2) Reflexive models ~ Epistemic access to our minds need not involve a separate attentive act. Part of the meaning of a conscious state is that I know in that state when I am in that state. Consciousness is here conceived as a ‘phosphorescence’ attached to some mental occurrence and in no need of a subsequent illustration to reveal itself. Of course, if introspection is defined as a distinct act then reflexive models are really accounts of the first-person access that makes no appeal to introspection.
(3) Public-mind theories and fallibility/infallibility models ~ the physicalists’ denial of metaphysically private mental facts naturally suggests that ‘looking within’ is not merely like perception but is perception. For Ryle (1900-76). Mental states are ‘iffy’ behavioural facts which, in principle, are equally accessible to everyone in the same was: One’s own self-awareness therefore is, in effect, no different in type from anyone else’s observations about one’s mind.
A more interesting move is for the physicalists to retain the truism that I grasp that I am sad in a very different way from that in which I know you to be sad. This directedness or non-inferential nature of self-knowledge can be preserved in some physicalists theories of introspection. For instance, Armstrong’s identification of mental states with causes of bodily behaviour and of the latter with brain states, makes introspection the process of acquiring information about such inner physical causes. But since introspection is itself a mental state, it is a process in the brain as well: And since its grasp of the relevant causal information is direct, it becomes a process in which the brain scans itself. Alternatively, a broadly ‘functionalist’ view of mental states suggests of the machine-analogue of the introspective situation: A machine-table with the instruction ‘Print: ‘I am in state A’ when in state ‘A’ results in the output ‘I am in state A’ when state ‘A’ occurs. Similarly, if we define mental states and events functionally, we can say that introspection occurs when an occurrence of a mental state ‘M’ directly results in awareness of ‘M’. Observe with care that this way of emphasizing directness yields a non-perceptual and non-observational model of introspection. The machine in printing ‘I am in state A’ does so (when it is not making a ‘verbal mistake’) just because it is in state ‘A’. There is no computation of information or process of ascertaining involved. The latter, at best, consist simply in passing through a sequence of states.
Furthering towards the legitimate question: How do I know that I am seeing a spider? Was interpreted as a demand for the faculty or information-processing-mechanism whereby I come to acquire this knowledge? Peculiarities of first-person psychological awareness and reports were carried over as peculiarities of this mechanism. However, the question need not demand the search for a method of knowing but rather for an explanation of the special epistemic features of first-person psychological statements. In that, the problem of introspection (as a way of knowing) dissolves but the problem of explaining ‘introspective’ or first-person authority remains.
Traditionally, belief has been of epistemological interest in its propositional guise: ‘S’ believes that ‘p’, where ‘p’ is a proposition towards which an agent, ‘S’, exhibits an attitude of acceptance. Not all belief is of this sort. If I trust what you say, I believe you. And someone may believe in Mrs. Collins, or in a free-market economy, or in God. It is sometimes supposed that all beliefs are ‘reducible’ to propositional belief, belief-that. Thus, my believing you might be thought as matter of my believing, perhaps, that what you say is true, and your belief in free markets or in God, a matter of your believing that free-market economies are desirable or that God exists.
It is doubtful, however, that non-propositional believing can, in every case, be reduced in this way. Debated on this point has tended to focus on an apparent distinction between ‘belief-that’ and ‘belief-in’, and the application of this distinction to belief in God: St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-64), accepted or advanced as true or real on the basis of less than convincing evidence in supposing that to believe in God is simply to believe that certain truths hold, such that God exists, that he is benevolent, etc. Others ague that belief-in is a distinctive attitude, one that includes essentially an element of trust. More commonly, belief-in has been taken to involve a combination of propositional belief together with some further attitude.
H.H. Price (1969) defends the claim that there is different sorts of belief-in, some, but not all, reducible to beliefs-that. If you believe in God, you believe that God exists, that God is good, etc. But, according to Price, your belief involves, in addition, a certain complex pro-attitude toward its object. One might attempt to analyse this further attitude in terms of additional beliefs-that: ‘S’ believes in ‘χ’ exists (and perhaps holds further factual beliefs about ‘χ’) (2) ‘S’ believes that ‘χ; is good or valuable in some respect? ; and (3) ‘S’ believes that χ’s being good or valuable in this respect is it is a good thing. An analysis of this sort, however, fails adequately to capture the further affective component of belief-in. Thus, according to Price, if you believe in God, your belief is merely that certain truths hold: You possess, in addition, an attitude of commitment and trust towards God.
Notoriously, belief-in outruns the evidence for the corresponding belief-that. Does this diminish its rationality? If belief-in presupposes belief-that, it might be thought that the evidential standards for the former must be, at least, as, high as standards for the latter. And any additional pro-attitude might be thought to require further layers of justification not required for cases of belief-that.
Some philosophers have argued that, at least for cases in which belief-in is synonymous with faith (or, faith-in), evidential thresholds for constituent propositional beliefs are diminished. You may reasonably have faith in God or Mrs. Collins, even though beliefs about their respective attributes, were you to harbour them would be evidentially standard.
Belief-in may be, in general, less susceptible to alteration in the face of unfavourable evidence than belief-that. A believer who encounters evidence against God’s existence may remain unshaken in his belief, in part because the evidence does not bear in his pro-attitude. So long as this is united with his belief that God exists, the belief may survive epistemic buffeting ~ and reasonably so ~ in a way that an ordinary propositional belief that would not.
What is at stake here is the appropriateness of distinct types of explanation. That ever since the times of Aristotle (384-322Bc) philosophers have emphasized the importance of explanatory knowledge. In simplest terms, we want to know not only what is the case but also why it is. This consideration suggests that we define explanation as an answer to a why-question. Such a definition would, however, be too broad, because some why-questions are request for consolation (Why did my son have to die?) Or moral justification (Why should woman not be paid the same as men for the same work?) It would also be too narrow because some explanations are responses to how-questions (How does radar work?) Or how-possibly-questions (How is it possible for cats always to land on four feet?)
In its most general sense , ‘to explain’ means to make clear, to make plain, or to provide understanding. Definitions of this sort used philosophically un-helped, for the terms used in the definitions are no less problematic than the term to be defined. Moreover, since a wide variety of things require explanation, and since many different types of explanation exist, a more complex explanation is required. The term ‘explanandum’ is used to refer to that which is to be explained: The term ‘explanans’ refer to that which does the explaining. The explanams and the explanandum taken together constitute the explanation.
One common type of explanation occurs when deliberate human actions are explained in terms of conscionable purposes. ‘Why did you go to the pharmacy yesterday? ‘Because I had a headache and needed to get some aspirin’. It is tacitly assumed that aspirin is an appropriate medication for headaches and that going to the pharmacy would be an efficient way of getting some. Such explanations are, of course, teleological, referring, as they do to goals. The explanans are not the realisation of a future goal ~ if the pharmacy happened to be closed for stocktaking the aspirin would not have been obtained there, but that would not invalidate the explanation. Some philosophers would say that the antecedent desire to achieve the end is what does the explaining: Others might say that the explaining is done by the nature of the goal and the fact that the action promoted the chances of realizing It. In any case, it should not be automatically assumed that such explanations are causal. Philosophers differ considerably on whether these explanations are to be framed in terms of cause or reason.
The distinction between reason and causes is motivated in good part by a desire to separate the rational from the natural order. Many who have insisted on distinguishing reasons from causes have failed to distinguish two kinds of reason. Consider my reason for sending a letter by express mail. Asked why I did so, I might say I wanted to get it there in a day, or simply: to get it there in a day. Strictly, the reason is expressed by ‘to get it there in a day’. But what this expresses are my reasons only because I am suitably motivated, in that I am in a reason state, wanting to get the letter there in a day. It is reason states ~ especially wants, beliefs and intentional ~ and not reasons strictly so called, that are candidates for causes. The latter are abstract contents of propositional altitudes, as the former are psychological elements that play motivational roles.
It has also seemed to those who deny that reasons are causes that the former justifies, as well as explain the actions for which they are reasons, whereas the role of causes is at most to explain. Another claim is that the relation between reasons (and here reason states are often cited explicitly) and the action they explain is non-contingent: Whereas, the relation of causes to their effects is contingent. The ‘logical connection argument’ proceeds from this claim to the conclusion that reasons are mot causes.
All the same, the explanation as framed in terms of reason and causes, and there are many differing analyses of such concepts as intention and agency. Expanding the domain beyond consciousness. Freud maintained, in addition, that much human behaviour can be explained in terms of unconscious wishes. These Freudian explanations should probably be construed as basically causal.
Problems arise when teleological explanations are offered in other context. The behaviour of non-human animals is often explained in terms of purpose, e.g., the mouse ran to escape from the cat. In such cases the existence of conscious purpose seems dubious. The situation is still more problematic when a super-empirical purpose is invoked ~, e.g., the explanation of living species in terms of God’s purpose, or the vitalistic explanation of biological phenomena in terms of an entelechy or vital principle. In recent years an ‘anthropic principle’ has received attention in cosmology. All such explanations have been condemned by many philosophers as anthropomorphic.
The preceding objection, for and all, that philosophers and scientists often maintain that functional explanations play an important and legitimate role in various sciences such as evolutionary biology, anthropology and sociology. For example, the case of the peppered moth in Liverpool, the change in colour and back again to the light phase provided adaption to a changing environment and fulfilled the function of reducing predation on the species. In the study of primitive societies anthropologists have maintained that various rituals, e.g., a rain dance, which may be inefficacious in brings about their manifest goals, e.g., producing rain. Actually fulfil the latent function of increasing social cohesion at a period of stress, e.g., theological and/or functional explanations in common sense and science often take pains to argue that such explanations can be analysed entirely in terms of efficient causes, thereby escaping the change of anthropomorphism, yet not all philosophers agree.
Mainly to avoid the incursion of unwanted theology, metaphysics, or anthropomorphism into science, many philosophers and scientist ~ especially during the first half of the twentieth century ~ held that science provides only descriptions and predictions of natural phenomena, but not explanations. Beginning in the 1930s, however, a series of influential philosophers of science ~ including Karl Pooper (1935) Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim (1948) and Hempel (1965) ~ maintained that empirical science can explain natural phenomena without appealing to metaphysics and theology. It appears that this view is now accepted by a vast majority of philosophers of science, though there is sharp disagreement on the nature of scientific explanation.
The previous approach, developed by Hempel Popper and others became virtually a ‘received view’ in the 1960s and 1970s. According to this view, to give scientific explanation of an natural phenomenon is to show how this phenomenon can be subsumed under a law of nature. A particular rupture in a water pipe can be explained by citing the universal law that water expands when it freezes and the fact that the temperature of the water in the pipe dropped below the freezing point. General laws, as well as particular facts, can be explained by subsumption. The law of conservation of linear momentum can be explained by derivation from Newton’s second and third laws of motion. Each of these explanations is a deductive argument: The premisses constitute the explanans and the conclusion is the explanandum. The explanans contain one or more statements of universal laws and, in many cases, statements describing initial conditions. This pattern of explanation is known as the ‘deductive-nomological model’ any such argument shows that the explanandum had to occur given the explanans.
Moreover, in contrast to the foregoing views ~ which stress such factors as logical relations, laws of nature and causality ~ a number of philosophers have argued that explanation, and not just scientific explanation, can be analysed entirely in pragmatic terms.
During the past half-century much philosophical attention has been focussed on explanation in science and in history. Considerable controversy has surrounded the question of whether historical explanation must be scientific, or whether history requires explanations of different types. Many diverse views have been articulated: the foregoing brief survey does not exhaust the variety.
In everyday life we encounter many types of explanation, which appear not to raise philosophical difficulties, in addition to those already of mention. Prior to take-off a flight attendant explains how to use the safety equipment on the aeroplane. In a museum the guide explains the significance of a famous painting. A mathematics teacher explains a geometrical proof to be a bewildered student. A newspaper story explains how a prisoner escaped. Additional examples come easily to mind. The main point is to remember the great variety of context in which explanations are sought and given.
Another item of importance to epistemology is the widely held notion that non-demonstrative inference can be characterized as the inference to the best explanation. Given the variety of views on the nature of explanation, this popular slogan can hardly provide a useful philosophical analysis.
The inference to the best explanation is claimed by many to be a legitimate form of non-deductive reasoning, which provides an important alternative to both deduction and enumerative induction. Some would claim it is only through reasoning to the best explanation that one can justify beliefs about the external world, the past, theoretical entities in science, and even the future. Consider belief about the external world and assume that we know what we do about our subjective and fleeting sensations. It seems obvious that we cannot deduce any truths about the existence of physical objects from truths describing the character of our sensations. But neither can we observe a correlation between sensations and something other than sensations since by hypothesis all we have to rely on ultimately is knowledge of our sensations. Nonetheless, we may be able to posit physical objects as the best explanation for the character and order of our sensations. In the same way, various hypotheses about the past might best explain present memory: Theatrical postulates in physics might best explain phenomena in the macro-world, and it is possible that our access to the future is through past observations. But what exactly is the form of an inference to the best explanation?
When one presents such an inference in ordinary discourse it often seems to have as of:
1. ‘O’ is the case
2. If ‘E’ had been the case ‘O’ is what we would expect,
Therefore there is a high probability that:
3. ‘E’ was the case.
This is the argument form that Peirce (1839-1914) called ‘hypophysis’ or ‘abduction’. To consider a very simple example, we might upon coming across some footsteps on the beach, reason to the conclusion that a person walking along the beach recently by noting that if a person had walked along the beach one would expect to find just such footsteps.
But is abduction a legitimate form of reasoning? Obviously, if the conditional in (2) above is read as a material conditional such arguments would be hopelessly based. Since the proposition that ‘E’ materially implies ‘O’ is entailed by ‘O’, there would always be an infinite number of competing inferences to the best explanation and none of them would seem to lend support to its conclusion. The conditionals we employ in ordinary discourse, however, are seldom, if ever, material conditionals. Such that the vast majority of ‘if . . . ,. Then . . . ‘ statements do not seem to be truth-functionally complex. Rather, they seem to assert a connection of some sort between the states of affairs referred to in the antecedent (after the ‘if’) and in the consequent (after the ‘then’). Perhaps the argument form has more plausibility if the conditional is read in this more natural way. But consider an alternative footsteps explanation:
1. There are footprints on the beach
2. If cows wearing boots had walked along the beach recently one would expect to find such footprints
Therefore. There is a high probability that:
3. Cows wearing boots walked along the beach recently.
This inference has precisely the same form as the earlier inference to the conclusion that people walked along the beach recently and its premisses are just as true, but we would no doubt regard both the conclusion and the inference as simply silly. If we are to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate reasoning to the best explanation it would seem that we need a more sophisticated model of the argument form. It would seem that in reasoning to an explanation we need criteria for choosing between alternative explanations. If reasoning to the best explanation is to constitute a genuine alternative to inductive reasoning. It is important that these criteria not be implicit premisses which will convert our argument into an inductive argument. Thus, for example, if the reason we conclude that people rather than cow walked along the beach is only that we are implicitly relying on the premiss that footprints of this sort are usually produced by people,. Then it is certainly tempting to suppose that our inference to the best explanation was really a disguised inductive inference of the form:
1. Most footprints are produced by people.
2. Here are footprints
Therefore in all probability,
3. These footprints were produced by people.
If we follow the suggestion made above, we might construe the form of reasoning to the best explanation, such that:
1. ‘O’ (a description of some phenomenon).
2. Of the set of available and competing explanations E1, E2 . . . , En capable of explaining ‘O’, E1 is the best according to the correct criteria for choosing among potential explanations.
Therefore in all probability:
3. E1.
Here too, is a crucial ambiguity in the concept of the best explanation. It might be true of an explanation E1 that it has the best chance of being correct without it being probable that E1 is correct. If I have two tickets in the lottery and one hundred other people each have one ticket, I am the person who has the best chance of winning, but it would be completely irrational to conclude on that basis that I am likely to win. It is much more likely that one of the other people will win than I will win. To conclude that a given explanation is actually likely to be correct on must hold that it is more likely that it is true than that the distinction of all other possible explanations is correct. And since on many models of explanation the number of potential explanations satisfying the formal requirements of adequate explanation is unlimited. This will be a normal feat.
Explanations are also sometimes taken to be more plausible the more explanatory ‘power’ they have. This power is usually defined in terms of the number of things or more likely, the number of kinds of things, the theory can explain. Thus, Newtonian mechanics were so attractive, the argument goes, partly because of the range of phenomena the theory could explain.
The familiarity of an explanation in terms of explanations is also sometimes cited as a reason for preferring that explanation to less familiar kinds of explanation. So if one provides a kind of evolutionary explanation for the disappearance of one organ in a creature, one should look more favourably on a similar sort of explanation for the disappearance of another organ.
Evaluating the claim that inference to the best explanation constitutes a legitimate and independent argument form. One must explore the question of whether it is a contingent fact that, at least, most phenomena have explanations and that explanations that satisfy a given criterions, simplicities, for example, are more likely to be correct. While it might be nice if the universe were structured in such a way that simple, powerful, familiar explanations were usually the correct explanation, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that if this is true it would be an empirical fact about our universe discovered only a posteriori. If the reasoning to the explanation relies on such criteria, it seems that one cannot without circularity use reasoning to the best explanation to discover that the reliance on such criteria is safe. But if one has some independent way of discovering that simple, powerful, familiar explanations are more often correct, then why should we think that reasoning to the best explanation is an independent source of information about the world? Again, why should we not conclude that it would be more perspicuous to represent the reasoning this way:
1. Most phenomena have the simplest, most powerful, familiar explanations available
2. Here is an observed phenomenon, and E1 is the simplest, most powerful, familiar explanation available.
Therefore, in all probability,
3. This is to be explained by E1.
But the above is simply an instance of familiar inductive reasoning.
There are various ways of classifying mental activities and states. One useful distinction is that between the propositional attitudes and everything else. A propositional attitude in one whose description takes a sentence as complement of the verb. Belief is a propositional attitude: One believes (truly or falsely as the case may be), that there are cookies in the jar. That there are cookies in the jar is the proposition expressed by the sentence following the verb. Knowing, judging, inferring, concluding and doubts are also propositional attitudes: One knows, judges, infers, concludes, or doubts that a certain proposition (the one expressed by the sentential complement) is true.
Though the propositions are not always explicit, hope, fear, expectation. Intention, and a great many others terms are also (usually) taken to describe propositional attitudes, one hopes that (is afraid that, etc.) there are cookies in the jar. Wanting a cookie is, or can be construed as, a propositional attitude: Wanting that one has (or eat or whatever) a cookie, intending to eat a cookie is intending that one will eat a cookie.
Propositional attitudes involve the possession and use of concepts and are, in this sense, representational. One must have some knowledge or understanding of what χ’s are in order to think, believe or hope that something is ‘χ’. In order to want a cookie, intend to eat one must, in some way, know or understand what a cookie is. One must have this concept. There is a sense in which one can want to eat a cookie without knowing what a cookie is ~ if, for example, one mistakenly thinks there are muffins in the jar and, as a result wants to eat what is in the jar (= cookies). But this sense is hardly relevant, for in this sense one can want to eat the cookies in the jar without wanting to eat any cookies. For this reason(and this sense) the propositional attitudes are cognitive: They require or presuppose a level of understanding and knowledge, this kind of understanding and knowledge required to possess the concepts involved in occupying the propositional state.
Thought there is sometimes disagreement about their proper analysis, non-propositional mental states, yet do not, at least on the surface, take propositions as their object. Being in pain, being thirsty, smelling the flowers and feeling sad are introspectively prominent mental states that do not, like the propositional attitudes, require the application or use of concepts. One doesn’t have to understand what pain or thirst is to experience pain or thirst. Assuming that pain and thirst are conscious phenomena, one must, of course, be conscious or aware of the pain or thirst to experience them, but awareness of must be carefully distinguished from awareness that. One can be aware of ‘χ’, ~ thirst or a toothache ~ without being aware that, that, e.g., thirst or a toothache, is that like beliefs that and knowledge that, are a propositional attitude, awareness of is not.
As the examples, pain, thirst, tickles, itches, hungers are meant to suggest, the non-propositional states have a felt or experienced [‘phenomenal’] quality to them that is absent in the case of the propositional attitudes. Aside from who it is we believe to be playing the tuba, believing that John is playing the tuba is much the same as believing that Joan is playing the tuba. These are different propositional states, different beliefs, yet, they are distinguished entirely in terms of their propositional content ~ in terms of what they are beliefs about. Contrast this with the difference between hearing John play the tuba and seeing him play the tuba. Hearing John play the tuba and seeing John play the tubas differ, not just (as do beliefs) in what they are of or about (for these experiences are, in fact, of the same thing: John playing the tuba), but in their qualitative character, the one involves a visual, the other an auditory, experience. The difference between seeing John play the tuba and hearing John play the tuba, then, is a sensory not a cognitive difference.
Some mental states are a combination of sensory and cognitive elements. Fear and terror, sadness and anger, joy and depression, are ordinarily thought of in this way sensations are: Not in terms of what propositions (if any) they represent, but (like visual and auditory experience) in their intrinsic character, in how they feel to the person experiencing them. But when we describe a person for being afraid that, sad that, upset that (as opposed too merely thinking or knowing that) so-and-so happened, we typically mean to be describing the kind of sensory (feeling or emotional) quality accompanying the cognitive state. Being afraid that the dog is going to bite me is both to think (that he might bite me) ~ a cognitive state ~ and feel fear or apprehension (sensory) at the prospect.
The perceptual verbs exhibit this kind of mixture, this duality between the sensory and the cognitive. Verbs like ‘to hear’, ‘to say’, and ‘to feel’ is [often] used to describe propositional (cognitive) states, but they describe these states in terms of the way (sensory) one comes to be in them. Seeing that there are two cookies left by seeing. Feeling that there are two cookies left is coming to know this in a different way, by having tactile experiences (sensations).
On this model of the sensory-cognitive distinction (at least it is realized in perceptual phenomena). Sensations are a pre-conceptual, a pre-cognitive, vehicle of sensory information. The terms ‘sensation’ and ‘sense-data’ (or simply ‘experience’) were (and, in some circles, still are) used to describe this early phase of perceptual processing. It is currently more fashionable to speak of this sensory component in perception as the percept, the sensory information store, is generally the same: An acknowledgement of a stage in perceptual processing in which the incoming information is embodied in ‘raw’ sensory (pre-categorical, pre-0recognitional) forms. This early phase of the process is comparatively modular ~ relatively immune to, and insulated from, cognitive influence. The emergence of a propositional [cognitive] states ~ seeing that an object is red ~ depends, then, on the earlier occurrence of a conscious, but nonetheless, non-propositional condition, seeing (under the right condition, of course) the red object. The sensory phase of this process constitutes the delivery of information (about the red object) in a particular form (visual): Cognitive mechanisms are then responsible for extracting and using this information ~ for generating the belief (knowledge) that the object is red. (The belief of blindness suggests that this information can be delivered, perhaps in degraded form, at a non-conscious level.)
To speak of sensations of red objects, tuba and so forth, is to say that these sensations carry information about an object’s colour, its shape, orientation, and position and (in the case of audition) information about acoustic qualities such as pitch, timbre, volume. It is not to say that the sensations share the properties of the objects they are sensations of or that they have the properties they carry information about. Auditory sensations are not loud and visual sensations are not coloured. Sensations are bearers of nonconceptualized information, and the bearer of the information that something is red need not itself be red. It need not even be the sort of thing that could be red: It might be a certain pattern of neuronal events in the brain. Nonetheless, the sensation, though not itself red, will (being the normal bearer of the information) typically produce in the subject who undergoes the experience a belief, or tendency to believe, that something red is being experienced. Hence the existence of hallucinations.
Just as there are theories of the mind, that would deny the existence of any state of mind whose essence was purely qualitative (i.e., did not consists of the state’s extrinsic, causal, properties) there are theories of perception and knowledge ~ cognitive theories ~ that denies a sensory component to ordinary sense perception. The sensor y dimension (the look, feel, smell, taste of things) is (if it is not altogether denied) identified with some cognitive condition (knowledge or belief) of the experienced. All seeing (not to mention hearing, smelling and feeling) becomes a form of believing or knowing. As a result, organisms that cannot know cannot have experiences. Often, to avoid these striking counterintuitive results, implicit or otherwise unobtrusive (and, typically, undetectable) forms of believing or, knowing.
Aside, though, from introspective evidence (closing and opening one’s eyes, if it changes beliefs at all, doesn’t just change beliefs, it eliminates and restores a distinctive kind of conscionable experience), there is a variety of empirical evidence for the existence of a stage in perceptual processing that is conscious without being cognitive (in any recognizable sense). For example, experiments with brief visual displays reveal that when subjects are exposed for very brief (50 msec.) Intervals to information-rich stimuli, there is persistence (at the conscious level) of what is called an image or visual icon that embodies more information about the stimulus than the subject can cognitively process or report on. Subjects cab exploit the information in this persisting icon by reporting on any part of the absent array of numbers (the y can, for instance, reports of the top three numbers, the middle three or the bottom three). They cannot, however, identify all nine numbers. The y report seeing all nine, and the y can identify any one of the nine, but they cannot identify all nine. Knowledge and brief, recognition and identification ~ these cognitive states, though present for any two or three numbers in the array, are absent for all nine numbers in the array. Yet, the image carries information about all nine numbers (how else accounts for subject’s ability to identify any number in the absent array?) Obviously, then, information is there, in the experience itself, whether or not it is, or even can be. As psychologists conclude, there is a limit on the information processing capacities of the latter (cognitive) mechanisms that is not shared by the sensory stages themselves.
Perceptual knowledge is knowledge acquired by or through the senses. This includes most of what we know. Some would say it includes everything we know. We cross intersections when we see the light turn green, head for the kitchen when we smell the roast burning, squeeze the fruit to determine its ripeness, and climb out of bed when we hear the alarm, ring. In each case we come to know something ~ that the light has turned green, that the roast is burning, that the melon is overripe, and that it is time to get up ~ that the light has turned green ~ by use of the eyes. Feeling that the melon is overripe in coming to know a fact ~ that the melon is overripe ~ by one’s sense of touch. In each case the resulting knowledge is somehow based on, derived from or grounded in the sort of experience that characterizes the sense modality in question.
Seeing a rotten kumquat is not at all like the experience of smelling, tasting or feeling a rotten kumquat. Yet all these experiences can result in the same knowledge ~ Knowledge that the kumquat is rotten. Although the experiences are much different, they must, if they are to yield knowledge, embody information about the kumquat: The information that it is rotten. Seeing that the fruit is rotten differs from smelling that it is rotten, not in what is known, but how it is known. In each case, the information has the same source ~ the rotten kumquat ~, but it is, so top speak, delivered via different channels and coded and re-coded in different experiential neuronal excitations as stimulated sense attractions.
It is important to avoid confusing perceptual knowledge of facts, e.g., that the kumquat is rotten, with the perception of objects, e.g., rotten kumquats. It is one thing ro see (taste, smell, feel) a rotten kumquat, and quite another to know (by seeing or tasting) that it is a rotten kumquat. Some people, after all, don not know what kumquats look like. They see a kumquat but do not realize (do mot see that) it is a kumquat. Again, some people do not know what a kumquat smell like. They smell a rotten kumquat and ~ thinking, perhaps, that this is a way this strange fruit is supposed to smell ~ do no t realize from the smell, i.e., do not smell that it is a rotted kumquat. In such cases people see and smell rotten kumquats ~ and in this sense perceive rotten kumquat ~ and never know that they are kumquats ~ let alone rotten kumquats. They cannot, not at least by seeing and smelling, and not until they have learned something about (rotten) kumquats. Since the topic as such is incorporated in the perceptual knowledge ~ knowing, by sensory means, that something if ‘F’ ~, we will be primary concerned with the question of what more, beyond the perception of F’s, is needed to see that (and thereby know that) they are ‘F’. The question is, however, not how we see kumquats (for even the ignorant can do this) but, how we know (if, that in itself, that we do) that, that is what we see.
Much of our perceptual knowledge is indirect, dependent or derived. By this is that it is meant that the facts we describe ourselves as learning, as coming to know, by perceptual means are pieces of knowledge that depend on our coming to know something else, some other fat, in a more direct way. We see, by the gauge, that we need gas, see, by the newspapers, that our team has lost again, or see, by her expression that is nervous. This derived or dependent sort of obtainable knowledge is particularly prevalent in the case of vision but it occurs, to a lesser degree, in every sense modality. We install bells and other noise-makers so that we can, for example, hear (by the bells) that someone is at the door and (by the alarm) that its time to get away. When we obtain knowledge in this way. It is clear that unless one sees ~ hence, comes to know. Something about the gauge (that it reads ‘empty’), the newspaper (which is says) and the person’s expression, one would not see (hence, know) what one is described as coming to know by perceptual means. If one cannot hear that the bell is ringing, one cannot ~ not at least in this way ~ hear that one’s visitors have arrived. In such cases one sees (hears, smells, etc.) that ‘a’ is ‘F’, coming to know thereby that ‘a’ is ‘F’, by seeing (hearing, etc.) that some other condition, b’s being ‘G’, obtains. When this occurs, the knowledge (that ‘a’ is ‘F’) is derived, or dependent on, the more basic perceptual knowledge that ‘b’ is ‘G’.
Though perceptual knowledge about objects is often, in this way, dependent on knowledge of fats about different objects, the derived knowledge is sometimes about the same object. That is, we see that ‘a’ is ‘F’ by seeing, not that some other object is ‘G’, but that ‘a’ itself is ‘G’. We see, by her expression, that she is nervous. She tells that the fabric is silk (not polyester) by the characteristic ‘greasy’ feel of the fabric itself (not, as I do, by what is printed on the label). We tell whether it is an oak tree, a Porsche, a geranium, an igneous rock or a misprint by its shape, colour, texture, size, behaviour and distinctive markings. Perceptual knowledge of this sort is also deprived ~ derived from the more basic facts (about ‘a’) we use to make the identification. In this case the perceptual knowledge is still indirect because, although the same object is involved, the facts we come to know about it are different than the facts that enable us to know it.
Derived knowledge is sometimes described as inferential, but this is misleading, at the conscious level there is no passage of the mind from premise to conclusion, no reasoning, no problem-solving. The observer, the one who sees that ‘a’ is ‘F’ by seeing that ‘b’ (or ‘a’ itself) is ‘G’, need not be (and typically is not) aware of any process of inference, any passage of the mind from one belief to another. The resulting knowledge, though logically derivative, is psychologically immediate. I could see that she was getting angry: so, I moved my hand. I did not ~ at least not at any conscious level ~ infer (from her expression and behaviour) that she was getting angry. I could (or, so it seemed to me) see that she was getting angry. It is this psychological immediacy that makes indirect perceptual knowledge a species of perceptual knowledge.
The psychological immediacy that characterises so much of our perceptual knowledge ~ even (sometimes) the most indirect and derived forms of it ~ does not mean that learning is not required to know in this way. One is not born with (may, in fact, never develop) the ability to recognize daffodils, muskrats and angry companions. It is only after a long experience that one is able visually to identify such things. Beginners may do something corresponding to inference: They recognize relevant features of trees, birds, and flowers, factures they already know how to perceptually identify, and then infer (conclude), on the basis of what they see, and under the guidance of more expert observers, that its an oak a finch or a geranium. But the experts (and we are all experts on many aspects of our familiar surroundings) do not typically go through such a process. The expert just sees that its an oak, a finch or a geranium. The perceptual knowledge of the expert is still dependent, of course, since even an expert cannot see what kind of flower it is if she cannot first see its colour and shape, but it is to say, that the expert has developed identificatory skills that no longer require the sort of conscious inferential processes that characterize a beginner’s efforts.
Coming to know that ‘a’ is ‘F’ by seeing that ‘b’ is ‘G’ obviously requires some background assumption on the part of the observer, an assumption to the effect that ‘a’ is ‘F’ (or perhaps only probable ‘F’) when ‘b’ is ‘G’. If one does not assume (as taken to be granted) that the gauge is properly connected, and does not, thereby assume that it would not register ‘empty’,unless the tank was nearly empty, then even if one could see that it registered ‘empty’, one would not learn ( hence, would not see) that one needed gas. At least, one would not see it by consulting the gauge. Likewise, in trying to identify birds, its no use being able to see their markings if one doesn’t know something about which birds have which marks ~ sometimes of the form: A bird with these markings is (probably) a finch.
It would seem, moreover, that these background assumptions, if they are to yield knowledge that ‘a’ is ‘F’, as they must if the observer is to see (by b’s being ‘G’) that ‘a’ is ‘F’, must themselves qualify as knowledge. For if this background fact is not known, if it is not known whether ‘a’ is ‘F’ when ‘b’ is ‘G’, then the knowledge of b’s being ‘G’, taken by itself, powerless to generate the knowledge that ‘a; is ‘F’. If the conclusion is to be known to be true, both the premises used to reach that conclusion must be known to be true. Or so it would seem.
Externalists, however, argue that the indirect knowledge that ‘a’ is ‘F’, though it may depend on the knowledge that ‘b’ is ‘G’, does not require knowledge of the connecting fact, the fact that ‘a’ is ‘F’ when ‘b’ is ‘G’. Simple belief (or, perhaps, justified belief, there are stronger and weaker versions of externalism) in the connecting fact is sufficient to confer a knowledge of the fact is sufficient to confer a knowledge e of the connected fact. Even if, strictly speaking, I don’t know she is nervous whenever she fidgets like that, I can nonetheless, see and hence know, that she is nervous by the way she fidgets, if I (correctly) assume that his behaviour r is a reliable expression of nervousness. One need not know the gauge is working well to make observations (acquire observational knowledge) with it. All that is required, besides the observer believing that the gauge is reliable, is that the gauge, in fact, be reliable, i.e., that the observer’s background beliefs be true. Critics of externalisms have been quick to point out that this theory has the unpalatable consequence that knowledge can be made possible by ~ and, in this sense, be made to rest on ~ lucky hunches (that turn out true) and unsupported (even irrational) beliefs. Surely, internalist argue, if one is going t o know that ‘a’ is ‘F’ on the basis of b’s being ‘G’, one should have (as a bare minimum) some justification for thinking that ‘a’ is ‘F’, or is probably ‘F’, when ‘b’ is ‘G’.
Whatever view one takes about these matters (with the possible exception of extreme externalism) indirect perception obviously requires some understanding (knowledge? Justification? Belief?) of the general relationship between the fact one comes to know (that ‘a’ is ‘F’) and the facts (that ‘b’ is ‘G’) that enable one to know it. And it is this requirement on background knowledge or understanding that leads to questions to questions about the possibility of indirect perceptual knowledge. Is it really knowledge? The first question is inspired by sceptical doubts about whether we can ever know the connecting facts in question. How is it possible to learn, to acquire knowledge of, the connecting facts knowledge of which is necessary to see,. By b’s being ‘G’, and that ‘a’ is ‘F’? These connecting facts do not appear to be perceptually knowable. Quite the contrary, they appear to b e general truths knowable (if knowable at all) by inductive inference e from past observations. And if one is sceptical about obtaining knowledge in this indirect, inductive way one is, perforce, sceptical about the existence of the kind of indirect knowledge, including indirect perceptual knowledge of the set described, in that depends on it.
Even if one puts aside such sceptical questions, how ever, there remains a legitimate concern about the perceptual character of this kind knowledge. If one sees that ‘a’ is ‘F’ by seeing that ‘b’ is ‘G’, is really seeing that ‘a’ is ‘F’? Isn’t perception merely a part ~ and, from an epistemological standpoint, the less significant part ~ of the process whereby one comes to know that ‘a’ is ‘F’. One must, it is true, sere that ‘b’ is ‘G’, but this is only one of the premises needed to reach the conclusion (knowledge) that ‘a’ is ‘F’. There is also the background knowledge that is essential to the process. If we think of a theory as any factual proposition, or set of factual propositions, that cannot itself be known in some direct observational way, we can express this worry by saying that indirect perception is always theory-loaded: Seeing (indirectly)that ‘a’ is ‘F’ is only possible if the observer already has knowledge of (justification for, belief in) some theory, the theory ‘connecting’ the fast one cannot come to know (that ‘a’ is ‘F’) with the fact (that ‘b’ is ‘G’) that enables one to know it.
This, of course, reverses the standard foundationalist picture of human knowledge. Instead of theoretical knowledge depending on, and being derived from, perception, perception (of the indirect sort) presupposes a prior knowledge.
Foundationalists are quick to point out that this apparent reversal in the structure of human knowledge is only apparent. Our indirect perception of facts depends on theory, yes, but this merely shows that indirect perceptual knowledge is not part of the foundation. To reach the kind of perceptual knowledge that lies at the foundation, we need to look at a form of perception that is purified of all theoretical elements. This then, will be perceptual knowledge pure and direct. No background knowledge or assumptions about connecting regularities are needed in direct perception because the known facts are presented directly and immediately and not (as, in indirect perception) on the basis of some other facts. In direct perception all the justification (needed for knowledge) is right there in the experience itself.
What, then, about the possibility of perceptual knowledge pure and direct, the possibility of coming to know, on the basis of sensory experience, that ‘a’ is ‘F’ where this does not require assumptions or knowledge that has a source outside the experience itself? Where is this epistemological ‘pure gold’ to be found?
There are, basically, two views about the nature of direct perceptual knowledge (coherentists would deny that any of our knowledge is basic in this sense). These views (following traditional nomenclature) can be called ‘direct realism’ and ‘representationalism’ or ‘representative realism’. A representationalist restricts direct perceptual knowledge to objects of a very special sort: Ideas, impressions, or sensations, sometimes called sense-data ~ entities in the mind of the observer. One directly perceives a fact, e.g., that ‘b’ is ‘G’ , only when ‘b’ is a mental entity of some sort ~ a subjective appearance or sense-data ~ and ‘G’ is a property of this datum. Knowledge of these sensory states is supposed to be certain and infallible. These sensory facts are, so o speak, right up against the mind’s eye. One cannot be mistaken about these facts for these facts are, in reality, facts about the way things appear to be, and one cannot be mistaken about the way things appear to be. Normal perception of external conditions, then, turns out to be (always) a type of indirect perception. One ‘sees’ that there is a tomato in front of one by seeing that the appearance (of the tomato) have a certain quality (reddish and bulgy) and inferring as this is topically said to be automatic and unconscious, on the basis of certain background assumptions, e.g., that there typically is a tomato in front of one when one has experiences of this sort, that there is a tomato in front of one. All knowledge of objective reality, then, even what commonsense regards as the most direct perceptual knowledge, is based on an even more direct knowledge of the appearances.
For the representationalist, then, perceptual knowledge of our physical surroundings is always theory-loaded and indirect. Such perception is ‘loaded’
with the theory that there is some regular, some uniform, correlation between the way things appear (known in the perceptually direct way) and the way things actually are (known, if known at all, in a perceptual indirect way).
The second view, direct realism, refuses to restrict perceptual knowledge, to an inner world of subjective experience. Though the direct realist is willing to concede that much of our knowledge of the physical world is indirect, however, direct and immediate it may sometimes feel, some perceptual knowledge of physical reality is direct. What makes it direct is that such knowledge is not based on, nor in any way dependent on, other knowledge and belief. The justification needed for the knowledge is right there in the experience itself.
To understand the way this is supposed to work, consider an ordinary example, ‘S’ identifies a banana (learns that it is a banana) by noting its shape and colour ~ perhaps, even tasting and smelling it (to make sure its not wax). In this case the perceptual knowledge that is a banana is (the direct realist admits) indirect, dependence on S’s perceptual knowledge of its shape, colour, smell, and taste. ‘S’ learns that it is a banana by seeing that it is yellow, banana-shaped, etc. Nonetheless, S’s perception of the banana’s colour and shape is not indirect. ‘S’ does not see that the object is yellow, for example, by seeing, knowing, believing anything more basic ~ either about the banana or anything else, e.g., his own sensations of the banana. ‘S’ has learned to identify such features, of course, but when ‘S’ learned to do is not an inference, even a unconscious inference, from other things be believes. What ‘S’ acquired was a cognitive skill, a disposition to believe of yellow objects he saw that the y were yellow. The exercise of this skill does not require, and in no way depends on, the having of any other beliefs. ‘S’s identificatorial successes will depend on his operating in certain special conditions, of course, ‘S’ will not, perhaps, be able to visually identify yellow objects in drastically reduced lighting, at funny viewing angles, or when afflicted with certain nervous disorders. But these facts about ‘S’ can see that something is yellow does not show that his perceptual knowledge (that ‘a’ is yellow) in any way deepens on a belief )let alone knowledge) that he is in such special conditions. It merely shows that direct perceptual knowledge is the result of exercising a skill, an indentificatoial skill, that like any skill requires certain conditions for its successful exercise. An expert basketball player cannot shoot accurately in a hurricane. He needs normal conditions to do what he has learned to do. So also, with individuals who have developed perceptual (cognitive) skills. They need normal conditions to do what they have learned to do. They need normal conditions to see, for example, that something is yellow. But they do not, any more than the basketball player, have to know they are in these conditions to do what being in these conditions enables them to do.
This means, of course, that for direct realist direct perceptual knowledge is fallible and corrigible. Whether ‘S’ sees that ‘a’ is ‘F’ depends on his being caused to believe that ’a’ is ‘F’ in conditions that are appropriate for an exercise of that cognitive skill. If conditions are right, then ‘S’ sees (hence, knows) that ‘a’ is ‘F’. If they aren’t he doesn’t. Whether or not ‘S’ knows depends, then , not on what else, if anything, ‘S’ believes, but on the circumferences in which ‘S’ comes to believe. This being so, this type of direct realism is a form of externalism, direct perception of objective facts, pure perceptual knowledge of external events, is made possible because what is needed, by way of justification for such knowledge has been reduced. Background knowledge ~ and, in particular, the knowledge that the experience does, and suffices for knowing ~ is not needed.
This mans that the foundations of knowledge are fallible. Nonetheless, though fallible, they are in no way derived. That is what makes them foundations. Even if they are brittle, as foundations sometimes are, everything else rests upon them
The theory of representative realism holds that (1) there is a world whose existence and nature is independent of us and of our perceptual experience of it, and (2) perceiving an object located in that external world necessarily involves causally interacting with that object, (3) the information acquired in perceiving an object is indirect: It is information most immediately about the perceptual experience caused in us by the object, and only derivatively about the object itself:
Clause 1. Makes representative realism a species of realism.
Clause 2. Makes it a species of causal theory of perception.
Clause 3. Makes it a species of representative as opposed
to direct realism.
Traditionally, representative realism has been allied with an act/object analysis of sensory experience. Its act/object analysis is traditionally a major plank in arguments for representative realism. According to the act/object analysis of experience with content involves an object of experience to which the subject is related by an act of awareness (the event of experiencing that object). This is meant to apply not only to perceptions, which have material objects (whatever is perceived), but also to experiences like hallucinations and dream experiences, which do not. Such experiences nonetheless, appear to represent something,. And their objects are supposed to be whatever it is that they represent. Act/object theorists may differ on the nature of objects of experience, which have been treated as properties, Meinongian objects (which may not exist or have any form of being), and, more commonly, private mental entities with sensory qualities. (The term ‘sense-data’ is now usually applied to the latter, but has also been used as a general term for objects of sense experiences, as in the work of G.E. Moore.) Act/object theorists may also differ on the relationship between objects of experience and objects of perception. In terms of representative realism, objects of perception (of which we are ‘indirectly aware’). Meinongians, however, may simply treat objects of perception as existing objects of experience.
Realism in any area of thought is the doctrine that certain entities allegedly associated with that area are indeed real. Common sense realism ~ sometimes called ‘realism’, without t qualification ~ says that ordinary things like chairs and trees and people are real. Scientific realism says that theoretical posits like electrons and fields of force and quarks are equally real. And psychological realism says mental states like pain and beliefs are real. Realism can be upheld ~ and opposed ~ in all such areas, as it can with differently or more finely drawn provinces of discourse: For example, with discourse about colours, about the past, about possibility and necessity, or about matters of moral right and wrong. The realist in any such area insists on the reality of the entities in question in the discourse.
If realism itself can be given a fairly quick characterization, it is more difficult to chart the various forms of opposition, for they are legion. Some opponents deny that there are any distinctive posits associated with the area of discourse under dispute: A good example is the emotivist doctrine that moral discourse does not posit values but serves only, like applause and exclamation, to express feelings. Other opponents deny that the entities posited by the relevant discourse exists, or, at least, exists independently of our thinking about them: Here the standard example is ‘idealism’. And others again, insist that the entities associated with the discourse in question are tailored to our human capacities and interests and, to that extent, are as much a product of invention as a matter of discovery.
Nevertheless, one us e of terms such as ‘looks’, ‘seems’, and ‘feels’ is to express opinion. ‘It looks as if the Labour Party will win the next election’ expresses an opinion about the party’s chances and does not describe a particular kind of perceptual experience. We can, however, use such terms to describe perceptual experience divorced from any opinion to which the experience may incline us. A straight stick half in water looks bent, and does so to people completely familiar with this illusion who have, therefore, no inclination to hold that the stick is in fact bent. Such users of ‘looks’, ‘seems’, ‘tastes’, etc. are commonly called ‘phenomenological’.
The act/object theory holds that the sensory experience recorded by sentence employing sense are a matter of being directly acquainted with something which actually bears the red to me. I am acquainted with a red expanse (in my visual field): when something tastes bitter to me I am directly acquainted with a sensation with the property of being bitter, and so on and so forth. (If you do not understand the term ‘directly acquainted’, stick a pin into your finger. The relation you will then bear to your pain, as opposed to the relation of concern you might bear to another’s pain when told about it, is an instance e of direct acquaintance e in the intended sense.)
The act/object account of sensory experience combines with various considerations traditionally grouped under the head of the argument for illusion to provide arguments for representative realism, or more precisely for the clause in it that contents that our senorily derived information about the world comes indirectly, that what we are most directly acquainted with is not an aspect of the world but an aspect for our mental sensory responses to it. Consider, for instance, the aforementioned refractive illusion, that of a straight stick in water looking bent. The act/object account holds that in this case we are directly acquainted with a bent shape. This shape, so the argument runs, cannot be the stick as it is straight, and thus, must be a mental item, commonly called a sense-datum. And, ion general sense-data-visual, tactual, etc. ~ are held to be the objects of direct acquaintance. Perhaps the most striking use of the act/object analysis to bolster representative realism turns on what modern science tells us about the fundamental nature of the physical world. Modern science tells us that the objects of the physical world around us are literally made up of enormously many, widely separated, tiny particles whose nature can be given in terms of a small number of properties like mass, charge, spin and so on. (These properties are commonly called the primary qualities, as primary and secondary qualities represent a metaphysical distinction with which really belong to objects in the world and qualities which only appear to belong to them, or which human beings only believe to belong to them, because of the effects those objects produce ion human beings, typically through the sense organs, that is to say, something that does not hold everywhere by nature, but is producing in or contributed by human beings in their interaction with a world which really contains only atoms of certain kinds in a void. To think that some objects in the world are coloured, or sweet ort bitter is to attribute to objects qualities which on this view they do not actually possess. Rather, it is only that some of the qualities which are imputed to objects, e.g., colour, sweetness, bitterness, which are not possessed by those objects. But, of course, that is not how the objects look to us, not how they present to our senses. They look continuous and coloured. What then can these coloured expanses with which we are directly acquainted be other than mental sense-data?
Two objections dominate the literature on representative realism: One goes back to Berkeley (1685-1753) and is that representative realism leads straight to scepticism about the external world, the other is that the act/object account of sensory awareness is to be rejected in favour of an adverbial account.
Traditional representative realism is a ‘veil of perception’ doctrine, in Bennett’s (1971) phrase. Lock e’s idea (1632-1704) was that the physical world was revealed by science to be in essence colourless, odourless, tasteless and silent and that we perceive it by, to put it metaphorically, throwing a veil over it by means of our senses. It is the veil we see, in the strictest sense of ‘see’. This does not mean that we do not really see the objects around us. It means that we see an object in virtue of seeing the veil, the sense-data, causally related in the right way to that object, an obvious question to ask, therefore, is what justifies us in believing that there is anything behind the veil, and if we are somehow justified in believing that there is something behind the veil,. How can we be confident of what it is like?
One intuition that lies at the heart of the realist’s account of objectivity is that, in the last analysis, the objectivity of a belief is to be explained by appeal to the independent existence of the entities it concerns: epistemological objectivity, this is, is to b e analysed in terms of ontological notions of objectivity. A judgement or belief is epistemological notions of objectivity, if and only if it stands in some specified reflation to an independently existing, determinate reality. Frége (1848-1925), for example, believed that arithmetic could comprise objective knowledge only if the numbers it refers to, the propositions it consists of, the functions it employs, and the truth-values it aims at, are all mind-independent entities. And conversely, within a realist framework, to show that the members of a given class of judgements are merely subjective, it is sufficient to show that there exists no independent reality that those judgements characterize or refer to.
Thus, it is favourably argued that if values are not part of the fabric of the world, then moral subjectivity is inescapable. For the realist, the, of epistemological notions of objectivity is to be elucidated by appeal to the existence of determinate facts, objects, properties, events and the like, which exit or obtain independent of any cognitive access we may have to them. And one of the strongest impulses towards platonic realism ~ the theoretical commitment to the existence of abstract objects like sets, numbers, and propositions ~ stems from the widespread belief that only if such things exist in their own right can we allow that logic, arithmetic and science are indeed objective. Though ‘Platonist’ realism in a sense accounts for mathematical knowledge, it postulates such a gulf between both the ontology and the epistemology of science and that of mathematics that realism is often said to make the applicability of mathematics in natural science into an inexplicable mystery
This picture is rejected by anti-realists. The possibility that our beliefs and theories are objectively true is not, according to them, capable of being rendered intelligible by invoking the nature and existence of reality as it is in and of itself. If our conception of epistemological objective notions is minimal, requiring only ‘presumptive universality’, then alternative, non-realist analysers of it can seem possible ~ and eve n attractive. Such analyses have construed the objectivity of an arbitrary judgement as a function of its coherence with other judgements, of its possession of grounds that warrant it. Of its conformity to the a prior rules that constitute understanding, of its verifiability (or falsifiability), or if its permanent presence in the mind of God. On e intuitive common to a variety of different anti-realist theories is such that for our assertions to be objective, for our beliefs to comprise genuine knowledge, those assertions and beliefs must be, among other things, rational, justifiable, coherent, communicable and intelligible. But it is hard, the anti-realist claims, to see how such properties as these can be explained by appeal to entities as they are on and of themselves. On the contrary, according to most forms of anti-realism, it is only the basis of ontological subjective notions like ‘the way reality seems to us’, ‘the evidence that is available to us’, ‘the criteria we apply’, ‘the experience we undergo’ or ‘the concepts we have acquired’ that epistemological notions of objectivity of our beliefs can possibly be explained.
The reason by which a belief is justified must be accessible in principle to the subject hold that belief, as Externalists deny this requirement, proposing that this makes knowing too difficult to achieve in most normal contexts. The internalist-Externalists debate is sometimes also viewed as a debate between those who think that knowledge can be naturalized (Externalists) and those who do not (internalist) naturalists hold that the evaluative notions used in epistemology can be explained in terms of non-evaluative concepts ~ for example, that justification can be explained in terms of something like reliability. They deny a special normative realm of language that is theoretically different from the kinds of concepts used in factual scientific discourse. Non-naturalists deny this and hold to the essential difference between normative and the factual: The former can never be derived from or constituted by the latter. So internalists tend to think of reason and rationality as non-explicable in natural, descriptive terms, whereas, Externalists think such an explanation is possible.
Although the reason, . . . to what we think to be the truth. The sceptic uses an argumentive strategy to show the alternatives strategies that we do not genuinely have knowledge and we should therefore suspend judgement. But, unlike the sceptics, many other philosophers maintain that more than one of the alternatives are acceptable and can constitute genuine knowledge. However, it seems dubitable to have invoked hypothetical sceptics in their work to explore the nature of knowledge. These philosophers did no doubt that we have knowledge, but thought that by testing knowledge as severely as one can, one gets clearer about what counts as knowledge and greater insight results. Hence there are underlying differences in what counts as knowledge for the sceptic and other philosophical appearances. As traditional epistemology has been occupied with dissassociative kinds of debate that led to a dogmatism. Various types of beliefs were proposed as candidates for sceptic-proof knowledge, for example, those beliefs that are immediately derive by many as immune to doubt. Nevertheless, that they all had in common was that empirical knowledge began with the data of the senses, that this was safe from scepticism and that a further superstructure of knowledge was to be built on this firm basis.
It might well be observed that this reply to scepticism fares better as a justification for believing in the existence of external objects, than as a justification of the views we have about their nature. It is incredible that nothing independent of us is responsible for the manifest patterns displayed by our sense-data, but granting this leaves open many possibilities about the nature of the hypnotized external reality. Direct realists often make much of the apparent advantage that their view has in the question of the nature of the external world. The fact of the matter is, though, that it is much harder to arrive at tenable views about the nature of external reality than it is to defend the view that there is an external reality of some kind or other. The history of human thought about the nature of the external world is littered with what are now seen (with the benefit of hindsight) to be egregious errors ~ the four element theory, phlogiston, the crystal spheres, vitalism, and so on. It can hardly be an objection to a theory that makes the question of the nature of external reality much harder than the question of its existence.
The way we talk about sensory experience certainly suggests an act/object view. When something looks thus and so in the phenomenological sense, we naturally describe the nature of our sensory experience by saying that we are acquainted with a thus ans so ‘given’. But suppose that this is a misleading grammatical appearance, engendered by the linguistic propriety of forming complete, putatively referring expressions like ‘the bent shape on my visual field’, and that there is no longer a bent shape in existence for the representative realist to contend to be a mental sense-data, than there is a bad limp in existence when someone has, as we say, a bad limp. When someone has a bad limo, they limp badly, similarly, according to adverbial theorist, when, as we naturally put it, I am aware of a bent shape, we would better express the way things are by saying that I sense bent shape-ly. When the act/object theorist analyses as a feature of the object which gives the nature of the sensory experience, the adverbial theorist analyses as a mode of sense which gives the nature of the sensory experience. (The decision between the act/object and adverbial theories is a hard one.)
In the best-known form the adverbial theory of experience proposes that the grammatical object of a statement attributing an experience to someone be analysed as an adverb. For example,
(1) Rod is experiencing a pink square
is rewritten as,
Rod is experiencing (pink square)-ly
this is presented as an alterative to the act/object analysis, according to which the truth of a statement like (1) requires the existence of an object of experience corresponding to its grammatical object. A commitment to the explicit adverbialization of statements of experience is not, however, essential to adverbialism. The core of the theory consists, rather, in the denial of objects of experience, as opposed to objects of perception, and coupled with the view that the role of the grammatical object is a statement of experience is to characterize more fully the sort of experience which is being attributed to the subject. The claim, then, is that the grammatical object is functioning as a modifier, and, in particular, as a modifier of a verb. If this is so, it is perhaps appropriate to regard it as a special kind of adverb at the semantic level.
Nonetheless, in the arranging accordance to the act/object analysis of experience, every experience with content involves an object of experience to which the subject is related by an act of awareness in the event of experiencing that object. Such as these experiences are, it is, nonetheless. The experiences are supposed to be whatever it is that they represent. Act, object theorist may differ on the nature of objects of experience, which h have been treated as properties. However, and, more commonly, private mental objects in which may not exist have any form of being, and, with sensory qualifies the experiencing imagination may walk upon the corpses of times’ generations, but this has also been used as a unique application to is mosaic structure in its terms for objects of sensory experience or the equivalence of the imaginations striving from the mental act as presented by the object and forwarded by and through the imaginistic thoughts that are released of a vexing imagination. Finally, in the terms of representative realism, objects of perception of which we are ‘directly aware’, as the plexuity in the abstract objects of perception exist if objects of experience.
As the aforementioned, traditionally representative realism is allied with the act/object theory. But we can approach the debate or by rhetorical discourse as meant within dialectic awareness, for which representative realism and direct realism are achieved by the mental act in abdication to some notion of regard or perhaps, happiness, all of which the prompted excitations of the notion expels or extractions of information processing. Mackie (1976( argues that Locke (1632-1704) can be read as approaching the debate ion television. My senses, in particular my eyes and ears, ‘tell’ me that Carlton is winning. What makes this possible is the existence of a long and complex causal chain of electro-magnetic radiation from the game through the television cameras, various cables between my eyes and the television screen. Each stage of this process carries information about preceding stages in the sense that the way things are at a given stage depends on the way things are at preceding stages. Otherwise the information would not be transferred from the game to my brain. There needs to be a systematic covariance between the state of my brain and the state unless it obtains between intermediate members of the long causal chain. For instance, if the state of my retina did not systematically remit or consign with the state of the television screen before me, my optic nerve would have, so to speak, nothing to go on to tell my brain about the screen, and so in turn would have nothing to go on to tell my brain about the game. There is no information at a distance’.
A few of the stages in this transmission of information between game and brain are perceptually aware of them. Much of what happens between brain and match I am quite ignorant about, some of what happens I know about from books, but some of what happens I am perceptually aware of the images on the scree. I am also perceptually aware of the game. Otherwise I could not be said to watch the game on television. Now my perceptual awareness of the match depends on my perceptual awareness of the screen. The former goes by means of the latter. In saying this I am not saying that I go through some sort of internal monologue like ‘Such and such images on the screen are moving thus and thus. Therefore, Carlton is attacking the goal’. Indeed, if you suddenly covered the screen with a cloth and asked me (1) to report on the images, and (2) to report in the game. I might well find it easier to report on the game than on the images. But that does not mean that my awareness of the game does not go by way of my awareness of the images on the screen. The shows that I am more interested in the game than in the screen, and so am storing beliefs about it in preference e to beliefs about the screen.
We can now see how elucidated representative realism independently of the debate between act/object and adverbial theorists about sensory experience. Our initial statement of representative realism talked of the information acquired in perceiving an object being most immediately about the perceptual experience caused in us by the object, and only derivatively about objects itself, in the act/object, sense-data approach, what is held to make that true is that the fact that what we are immediately aware of it’s mental sense-datum. But instead, representative realists can put their view this way: Just as awareness of the match game by means of awareness of the screen, so awareness of the screen foes by way of awareness of experience., and in general when subjects perceive objects, their perceptual awareness always does by means of the awareness of experience.
Why believe such a view? Because of the point we referred to earlier: The worldly provision by our senses is so very different from any picture provided by modern science. It is so different in fact that it is hard to grasp what might be meant by insisting that we are in epistemologically direct contact with the world.
An argument from illusion is usually intended to establish that certain familia r facts about illusion disprove the theory of perception and called naïve or direct realism. There are,. However, many different versions of the argument which must be distinguished carefully. Some of these premisses (the nature of the appeal to illusion):Others centre on the interpretation of the conclusion (the kind of direct realism under attack). In distinguishing important differences in the versions of direct realism. One might be taken to be vulnerable to familiar facts about the possibility of perceptual illusion.
A crude statement of direct realism would concede to the connection with perception, such that we sometimes directly perceive physical objects and their properties: We do not always perceive physical objects by perceiving something else, e.g., a sense-data. There are, however, difficulties with this formulation of the view. For one thing a great many philosophers who are not direct realists would admit that it is a mistake to describe people as actually perceiving something other than a physical object. In particular, such philosophers might admit, we should never say that we perceive sense-data. To talk that way would be to suppose that we should model our understanding of our relationship to sense-data on our understanding of the ordinary use of perceptual verbs as they describe our relation to the physical world, and that is the last thing paradigm sense-data theorists should want. At least, many of the philosophers who objected to direct realism would prefer to express what they were objecting to in terms of a technical and philosophical controversial concept such as acquaintance. Using such a notion we could define direct realism this way: In veridical experience we are directly acquainted with parts, e.g., surfaces, or constituents of physical objects. A less cautious version of the view might drop the reference to veridical experience and claim simply that in all parts or constituents of physical objects.
We know things by experiencing them, and knowledge of acquaintance. (Russell changed the preposition to ’by’) is epistemically prior to and has a relatively higher degree of epistemic justification than knowledge about things. Indeed, sensation has ‘the one great value of trueness or freedom from mistake’.
A thought (using that term broadly, to mean any mental state) constituting knowledge of acquaintance with thing is more or less causally proximate to sensations caused by that thing is more or less distant causal y, being separated from the thing and experience of it by processes of attention and inference. At the limit, if a thought is maximally of the acquaintance type, it is the first mental state occurring in a object to which the thought refers, i.e., it is a sensation. The things we have knowledge of acquaintance e include ordinary objects in the external world, such as the Sun.
Grote contrasted the imaginistic thoughts involved in knowledge of acquaintance with things, with the judgements involved in knowledge about things, suggesting that the latter but not the former are contentual mental states. Elsewhere, however, he suggested that every thought capable of constituting knowledge of or about a thing involves a form, idea, or what we might call conceptual propositional content, referring the thought to its object. Whether contentual or not, thoughts constituting knowledge of acquaintance with a thing as r relatively indistinct, although this indistinctness does not imply incommunicability. Yet, thoughts constituting knowledge about a thing are relatively distinct, as a result of ‘the application of notice or attention’ to the ‘confusion or chaos’ of sensation. Grote did not have an explicit theory of reference e, the relation by which a thought of or about a specific thing. Nor did he explain how thoughts can be more or less indistinct.
Helmholtz (1821-94) held unequivocally that all thoughts capable of constituting knowledge, whether ‘knowledge e which has to do with notions’ or ‘mere familiarity with phenomena’ are judgements or, we may say, have conceptual propositional contents. Where Grote saw a difference e between distinct and indistinct thoughts. Helmholtz found a difference between precise judgements which are expressible in words and equally precise judgement which, in principle, are not expressible in words, and so are not communicable.
James (1842-1910), however, made a genuine advance over Grote and Helmholtz by analysing the reference relations holding between a thought and the specific thing of or about which it is knowledge. In fact, he gave two different analyses. On both analyses, a thought constituting knowledge about a thing refers to and is knowledge about ‘a reality, whenever it actually or potentially terminates in’ a thought constituting knowledge of acquaintance with that thing. The two analyses differ in their treatments of knowledge of acquaintance. On James’s first analyses, reference in both sorts of knowledge is mediated by causal chains. A thought constituting pure knowledge of acquaintance with a thing refers to and is knowledge of ‘whatever reality it directly or indirectly operates on and resembles’. The concepts of a thought ‘operating in’ a thing or ‘terminating in’ another thought are causal, but where Grote found chains of efficient causation connecting thought and referent. James found teleology and final causes. On James’s later analysis, the reference involved in knowledge of acquainting e with a thing is direct. A thought constituting knowledge of acquaintance with a thing as a constituent and the thing and the experience of it are identical.
James further agreed with Grote that pure knowledge of acquaintance with things, eg., sensory experience, is epistemically prior to knowledge about things. While the epistemic justification involved in knowledge about all thoughts about things are fallible and their justification is augmented by their mutual coherence. James was unclear about the precise epistemic status of knowledge of acquaintance. At times, thoughts constituting pure knowledge of acquaintance are said to posses ‘absolute veritableness’ and ‘the maximal conceivable truth’, suggesting that such thoughts are genuinely cognitive and that they provide an infallible epistemic foundation. At other times, such thoughts are said not to bear truth-values, suggesting that ‘knowledge’ of acquaintance is not genuine knowledge at all, but only a non-cognitive necessary condition of genuine knowledge, that is to say, the knowledge about things.
What is more, that, Russell (1872-1970) agreed with James that knowledge of things by acquaintance ‘is essentially simpler than any knowledge of truths, and logically independent of knowledge of truth’. That the mental states involved when one is acquainted with things do not have propositional contents. Russell’s reasons were to seem as having been similar to James’s. Conceptually unmediated reference to particulars is necessary for understanding any proposition mentioning a particular and, if scepticism about the external world is to be avoided, some particulars must be directly perceived. Russell vacillated about whether or not the absence of propositional content renders knowledge by acquaintance incommunicable.
Russell agreed with James that different accounts should be given of reference as it occurs in knowledge by acquaintance and in knowledge about things, and that in the former case reference is direct. But, Russell objected on the number of grounds to James’s causal account of the indirect reference involved in knowledge about things. Russell gave a descriptional rather than a causal analysis of that sort of reference. A thought is about a thing when the content of the thought involves a definite description uniquely satisfied by the thing referred to. Yet, he preferred to speak of knowledge of things by description, than of knowledge about things.
Russell advanced beyond Grote and James by explaining how thoughts can be more or less articulate and explicit. If one is acquainted with a complex thing without being aware of or acquainted with its complexity, the knowledge one has by acquaintance e with that thing is vague and inexplicit. Reflection and analysis can lead to distinguish constituent parts of the object of acquaintance and to obtain progressively more distinct, explicit, and complete knowledge about it.
Because one can interpret the reflation of acquaintance or awareness as one that is not epistemic, i.e., not a kind of propositional knowledge, it is important to distinguish the views read as ontological theses from a view one might call epistemological direct realism: In perception we are, on, at least some occasions, non-inferentially justified in believing a proposition asserting the existence e of a physical object. A view about what the object of perceptions are. Direct realism is a type of realism, since it is assumed that these objects exist independently of any mind that might perceive them: And so it thereby rules out all forms of idealism and phenomenalism, which holds that there are no such independently existing objects. Its being a ‘direct realism rules out those views’ defended under the rubic of ‘critical realism’, of ‘representative realism’, in which there is some non-physical intermediary ~ usually called a ‘sense-data’ or a ‘sense impression’ ~ that must first be perceived or experienced in order to perceive the object that exists independently of this perception. According to critical realists, such an intermediary need not be perceived ‘first’ in a temporal sense, but it is a necessary ingredient which suggests to the perceiver an external reality, or which offers the occasion on which to infer the existence of such a reality. Direct realism, however, denies the need for any recourse to mental go-between in order to explain our perception of the physical world.
This reply on the part of the direct realist does not, of course, serve to refute the global sceptic, who claims that, since our perceptual experience could be just as it is without there being any real properties at all, we have no knowledge of any such properties. But no view of perception alone is sufficient to refute such global scepticism. For such a refutation we must go beyond a theory that claims how best to explain our perception of physical objects, and defend a theory that best explains how we obtain knowledge of the world.
All is the equivalent for an external world, as philosophers have used the term, is not some distant planet external to Earth. Nor is the external world, strictly speaking, a world. Rather, the external world consists of all those objects and events which exist external to perceiver. So the table across the room is part of the external world, and so is the room in part of the external world, and so is its brown colour and roughly rectangular shape. Similarly, if the table falls apart when a heavy object is placed on it, the event of its disintegration is a pat of the external world.
One object external to and distinct from any given perceiver is any other perceiver. So, relative to one perceiver, every other perceiver is a part of the external world. However, another way of understanding the external world results if we think of the objects and events external to and distinct from every perceiver. So conceived the set of all perceivers makes up a vast community, with all of the objects and events external to that community making up the external world. Thus, our primary considerations are in the concern from which we will suppose that perceiver are entities which occupy physical space, if only because they are partly composed of items which take up physical space.
What, then, is the problem of the external world. Certainly it is not whether there is an external world, this much is taken for granted. Instead, the problem is an epistemological one which, in rough approximation, can be formulated by asking whether and if so how a person gains of the external world. So understood, the problem seems to admit of an easy solution. Thee is knowledge of the external world which persons acquire primarily by perceiving objects and events which make up the external world.
However, many philosophers have found this easy solution problematic. Nonetheless, the very statement of ‘the problem of the external world itself’ will be altered once we consider the main thesis against the easy solution.
One way in which the easy solution has been further articulated is in terms of epistemological direct realism. This theory is realist in so far as it claims that objects and events in the external world, along with many of their various features, exist independently of and are generally unaffected by perceivers and acts of perception in which they engage. And this theory is epistemologically direct since it also claims that in perception people often, and typically acquire immediate non-inferential knowledge of objects and events in the external world. It is on this latter point that it is thought to face serious problems.
The main reason for this is that knowledge of objects in the external world seems to be dependent on some other knowledge, and so would not qualify as immediate and non-inferentially is claimed that I do not gain immediate non-inferential perceptual knowledge that thee is a brown and rectangular table before me, because I would know such a proposition unless I knew that something then appeared brown and rectangular. Hence, knowledge of the table is dependent upon knowledge of how it appears. Alternately expressed, if there is knowledge of the table at all, it is indirect knowledge, secured only if the proposition about the table may be inferred from propositions about appearances. If so, epistemological direct realism is false’
This argument suggests a new way of formulating the problem of the external world:
Problem of the external world: Can firstly, have knowledge of propositions about objects and events in the external world based on or upon propositions which describe how the external world appears, i.e., upon appearances?
Unlike our original formulation of the problem of the external world, this formulation does not admit of an easy solution. Instead, it has seemed to many philosophers that it admits of no solution at all, so that scepticism regarding the eternal world is only remaining alternative.
This theory is realist in just the way described earlier, but it adds, secondly, that objects and events in the external world are typically directly perceived, as are many of their features such as their colour, shapes, and textures.
Often perceptual direct realism is developed further by simply adding epistemological direct realism to it. Such an addition is supported by claiming that direct perception of objects in the external world provides us with immediate non-referential knowledge of such objects. Seen in this way, perceptual direct realism is supposed to support epistemological direct realism, strictly speaking they are independent doctrines. One might consistently, perhaps even plausibly, hold one without also accepting the other.
Direct perception is that perception which is not dependent on some other perception. The main opposition to the claim that we directly perceive external objects comes from direct or representative realism. That theory holds that whenever an object in the external world is perceived, some other object is also perceived, namely a sensum ~ a phenomenal entity of some sort. Further, one would not perceive the external object if one would not perceive the external object if one were to fail to receive the sensum. In this sense the sensum is a perceived intermediary, and the perception of the external object is dependent on the perception of the sensum. For such a theory, perception of the sensum is direct, since it is not dependent on some other perception, while perception on the external object is indirect. More generally, for the indirect t realism., all directly perceived entities are sensum. On the other hand, those who accept perceptual direct realism claim that perception of objects in the external world is typically direct, since that perception is not dependent on some perceived intermediaries such as sensum.
It has often been supposed, however, that the argument from illusion suffices to refute all forms of perceptual direct realism. The argument from illusion is actually a family of different arguments rather than one argument. Perhaps the most familiar argument in this family begins by noting that objects appear differently to different observers, and even to the same observers on different occasions or in different circumstances. For example, a round dish may appear round to a person viewing it from directly above and elliptical to another viewing it from one side. As one changes position the dish will appear to have still different shapes, more and more elliptical in some cases, closer and closer to round in others . In each such case, it is argued, the observer directly sees an entity with that apparent shape. Thus, when the dish appears elliptical, the observer is said to see directly something which is elliptical. Certainly this elliptical entity is not the top surface of the dish, since that is round. This elliptical entity, a sensum, is thought to be wholly distinct from the dish.
In seeing the dish from straight above it appears round and it might be thought that then directly sees the dish rather than a sensum. But here too, it relatively sett in: The dish will appear different in size as one is placed at different distances from the dish. So even if in all of these cases the dish appears round, it will; also appear to have many different diameters. Hence, in these cases as well, the observer is said to directly see some sensum, and not the dish.
This argument concerning the dish can be generalized in two ways. First, more or less the same argument can be mounted for all other cases of seeing and across the full range of sensible qualities ~ textures and colours in addition to shapes and sizes. Second, one can utilize related relativity arguments for other sense modalities. With the argument thus completed, one will have reached the conclusion that all cases of non-hallucinatory perception, the observer directly perceives a sensum, and not an external physical object. Presumably in cases of hallucination a related result holds, so that one reaches the fully general result that in all cases of perceptual experience, what is directly perceived is a sensum or group of sensa, and not an external physical object, perceptual direct realism, therefore, is deemed false.
Yet, even if perceptual direct realism is refuted, this by itself does not generate a problem of the external world. We need to add that if no person ever directly perceives an external physical object, then no person ever gains immediate non-inferential knowledge of such objects. Armed with this additional premise, we can conclude that if there is knowledge of external objects, it is indirect and based upon immediate knowledge of sensa. We can then formulate the problem of the external world in another way:
Problems of the external world: can, secondly, have knowledge of propositions about objects and events in the external world based upon propositions about directly perceived sensa?
It is worth nothing the differences between the problems of the external world as expounded upon its first premise and the secondly proposing comments as listed of the problems of the external world, we may, perhaps, that we have knowledge of the external world only if propositions about objects and events in the external world that are inferrable from propositions about appearances.
Some philosophers have thought that if analytical phenomenalism were true, the situational causalities would be different. Analytic phenomenalism is the doctrine that every proposition about objects and events in the external world is fully analysable into, and thus is equivalent in meaning to, a group of inferrable propositions . The numbers of inferrable propositions making up the analysis in any single propositioned object and or event in the external world would likely be enormous, perhaps, indefinitely many. Nevertheless, analytic phenomenalism might be of help in solving the perceptual direct realism of which the required deductions propositioned about objects and or events in the external world from those that are inferrable from prepositions about appearances. For, given analytical phenomenalism there are indefinite many in the inferrable propositions about appearances in the analysis of each proposition taken about objects and or events in the external world is apt to be inductive, even granting the truth of a analytical phenomenalism. Moreover, most of the inferrable propositions about appearances into which we might hope to analyse of the external world, then we have knowledge of the external world only if propositions about objects and events in the external world would be complex subjunctive conditionals such as that expressed by ‘If I were to seem to see something red, round and spherical, and if I were to seem to try to taste what I seem to see, then most likely I would seem to taste something sweet and slightly tart’. But propositionally inferrable appearances of this complex sort will not typically be immediately known. And thus knowledge of propositional objects and or event of the external world will not generally be based on or upon immediate knowledge of such propositionally making appearances.
Consider upon the appearances expressed by ‘I seem to see something red, round, and spherical’ and ‘I seem to taste something sweet and slightly tart’. To infer cogently from these propositions to that expressed by ‘There is an apple before me’ we need additional information, such as that expressed by ‘Apples generally cause visual appearance of redness, roundness, and spherical shape and gustatory appearance of sweetness and tartness’. With this additional information., the inference is a good on e, and it is likely to be true that there is an apple there relative to those premiered. The cogency of the inference, however, depends squarely on the additional premise, relative only to the stated inferrability placed upon appearances, it is not highly probable that thee is an apple there.
Moreover, there is good reason to think that analytic phenomenalism is false. For each proposed translation of an object and eventfully external world into the inferrable propositions about appearances. Mainly enumerative induction is of no help in this regard, for that is an inference from premisses about observed objects in a certain set-class having some properties ‘F’ and ‘G’ to unobserved objects in the same set-class having properties ‘F’ and ‘G’, to unobserved objects in the same set-class properties ‘F’ and ‘G’. If satisfactory, then we have knowledge of the external world if propositions are inferrable from propositions about appearances, however, concerned considerations drawn upon appearances while objects and or events of the external world concern for externalities of objects and interactive categories in events, are. So, the most likely inductive inference to consider is a causal one: We infer from certain effects, described by promotional appearances to their likely causes, described by external objects and or event that profited emanation in the concerning propositional state in that they occur. But, here, too, the inference is apt to prove problematic. But in evaluating the claim that inference constitutes a legitimate and independent argument from, one must explore the question of whether it is a contingent fact that, at least, most phenomena have explanations and that be so, that a given criterion, simplicity, were usually the correct explanation, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that if this is true it would be an empirical fact about our selves in discovery of an reference to the best explanation.
Defenders of direct realism have sometimes appealed to an inference to the best explanation to justify prepositions about objects and or events in the external world, we might say that the best explanation of the appearances is that they are caused by external objects. However, even if this is true, as no doubt it is, it is unclear how establishing this general hypophysis helps justify specific ordination upon the proposition about objects and or event in the external world, such as that these particular appearances of a proposition whose inferrable properties about appearances caused by the red apple.
The point here is a general one: Cogent inductive inference from the inferrable proposition about appearances to propositions about objects and or events in the external world are available only with some added premiss expressing the requisite causal relation, or perhaps some other premiss describing some other sort of correlation between appearances and external objects. So there is no reason to think that indirect knowledge secured if the prepositions about its outstanding objectivity from realistic appearances, if so, epistemological direct realism must be denied. And since deductive and inductive inferences from appearance to objects and or events in the external world are propositions which seem to exhaust the options, no solution to its argument that sustains us of having knowledge of propositions about objects and events in the external world based on or upon propositions which describe the external world as it appears at which point that is at hand. So unless there is some solution to this, it would appear that scepticism concerning knowledge of the external world would be the most reasonable position to take
If the argument leading to some additional premise as might conclude that if there is knowledge of external objects if is directly and based on or upon the immediate knowledge of sensa, such that having knowledge of propositions about objects and or events in the external world based on or upon propositions about directly perceived sensa? Broadly speaking, there are two alternatives to both the perceptual indirect realism, and, of course, perceptual phenomenalism. In contrast to indirect t realism, and perceptual phenomenalism is that perceptual phenomenalism rejects realism outright and holds instead that (1) physical objects are collections of sensa, (2) in all cases of perception, at least one sensa is directly perceived, and, (3) to perceive a physical object one directly perceives some of the sensa which are constituents of the collection making up that object.
Proponents of each of these position try to solve the conditions not engendered to the species of additional persons ever of directly perceiving an external physical object, then no person ever gains immediate non-referential knowledge of such objects in different ways, in fact, if any the better able to solve this additional premise, that we would conclude that if there is knowledge of external objects than related doctrines for which time are aforementioned. The answer has seemed to most philosophers to be ‘no’, for in general indirect realists and phenomenalists have strategies we have already considered and rejected.
In thinking about the possibilities of such that we need to bear in mind that the term for propositions which describe presently directly perceived sensa. Indirect realism typically claim that the inference from its presently directly perceived sensa to an inductive one, specifically a causal inference from effects of causes. Inference of such a sort will perfectly cogent provides we can use a premiss which specifies that physical objects of a certain type are causally correlated with sensa of the sort currently directly perceived. Such a premiss will itself be justified, if at all, solely on the basis of propositions described presently directly perceived sensa. Certainly for the indirect realist one never directly perceives the causes of sensa. So, if one knows that, say, apples topically cause such-and-such visual sensa, one knows this only indirectly on the basis of knowledge of sensa. But no group of propositionally perceived sensa by itself supports any inferences to causal correlations of this sort. Consequently, indirect realists are in no p position to solve such categorically added premises for which knowledge is armed with additional premise, as containing of external objects , it is indirect and based on or upon immediate knowledge of sensa. The consequent solution of these that are by showing that propositions would be inductive and causal inference from effects of causes and show inductively how derivable for propositions which describe presently perceived sensa.
Phenomenalists have often supported their position, in part, by noting the difficulties facing indirect t realism, but phenomenalism is no better off with respect to inferrable prepositions about objects and events responsible for unspecific appearances. Phenomenalism construe physical objects as collections of sensa. So, to infer an inference from effects to causes is to infer a proposition about a collection from propositions about constituent members of the collective one, although not a causal one. Nonetheless, namely the inference in question will require a premise that such-and-such directly perceived sensa are constituents of some collection ‘C’, where ‘C’ is some physical object such as an apple. The problem comes with trying to justify such a premise. To do this, one will need some plausible account of what is mean t by claiming that physical objects are collections of sensa. To explicate this idea, however, phenomenalists have typically turned to analytical phenomenalism: Physical objects are collections of sensa in the sense that propositions about physical objects are analysable into propositions about sensa. And analytical phenomenalism we have seen, has been discredited.
If neither propositions about appearances or propositions accorded of the external world can be easily solved, then scepticism about external world is a doctrine we would be forced to adopt. One might even say that it is here that we locate the real problem of the external world. ‘How can we avoid being forced into accepting scepticism’?
In avoiding scepticism, is to question the arguments which lead to both propositional inferences about the external world an appearances. The crucial question is whether any part of the argument from illusion really forces us to abandon the incorporate perceptual direct realism. To help see that the answer is ‘no’ we may note that a key premise in the relativity argument links how something appears with direct perception: The fact that the dish appears elliptical is supposed to entail that one directly perceives something which is elliptical. But is there an entailment present? Certainly we do not think that the proposition expressed by ‘The book appears worn and dusty and more than two hundred years old’ entails that the observer directly perceives something which is worn and dusty and more than two hundred years old. And there are countless other examples like this one, where we will resist the inference from a property ‘F’ appearing to someone to claim that ‘F’ is instantiated in some entity.
Proponents of the argument from illusion might complain that the inference they favour works only for certain adjectives, specifically for adjectives referring to non-relational sensible qualities such as colour, taste, shape, and the like. Such a move, however, requires an arrangement which shows why the inference works in these restricted cases and fails in all others. No such argument has ever been provided, and it is difficult to see what it might be.
If the argument from illusion is defused, the major threat facing a knowledge of objects and or events in the external world primarily by perceiving them. Also, its theory is realist in addition that objects and events in the external world are typically directly perceived as are many of their characteristic features. Hence, there will no longer be any real motivation for it would appear that scepticism concerning knowledge of the external world would be the most reasonable position to take. Of course, even if perceptual directly realism is reinstated, this does not solve, by any means, the main reason for which that knowledge of objects in the external world seem to be dependent on some other knowledge, and so would not qualify as immediate and non-reference, along with many of their various features, exist independently of and are generally unaffected by perceivers and acts of perception in which they engage. That problem might arise even for one who accepts perceptual direct realism. But, there is reason to be suspicious in keeping with the argument that one would not know that one is seeing something blue if one failed to know that something looked blue. In this sense, there is a dependance of the former on the latter, what is not clear is whether the dependence is epistemic or semantic. It is the latter if, in order to understand what it is to see something blue, one must also understand what it is fort something to look blue. This may be true, even when the belief that one is seeing something blue is not epistemically dependent on or based upon the belief that something looks blue. Merely claiming, that there is a dependent relation does not discriminate between epistemic and semantic dependence. Moreover, there is reason to think it is not an epistemic dependence. For in general, observers rarely have beliefs about how objects appar, but this fact doe not impugn their knowledge that they are seeing, e.g., blue objects.
Of what exists in the mind as a representation (as of something comprehended) or as a formulation (as of a plan) absorbs in the apprehensions toward belief. That is, ‘ideas’, as eternal, mind-independent forms or archetypes of the things in the material world, are something such as of a thought or conception that potentially or veritably is to exist. By the element or complex of elements in an individual velleity, which feels, perceives, thinks, wills and especially reasons as a product of mental activity. Though, having upon itself the intelligence, intellect, consciousness, mental mentality, faculty, function or power in an ‘idea’, the foreshadowing of inclination upon knowing its mindful human history. It is in essence a history of ideas, justly as thoughts are distinctly intellectual and stress contemplation and reasoning as language in the interpretative unclothing of thought.
Although ideas produce many problems of interpretation, but narrative descriptions between them, they define a space of philosophical problems. Ideas are that with which we think, or in Locke’s terms, whatever the mind may be employed about in thinking. Looked at that way, they may be inherently transient, fleeting, and unstable private presences. ‘Ideas’ tentatively forward a given provisional contributive distribution, for which things of component constituents are applicably pointful. Even to the sensibility that objective knowledge can be affirmatively approved for what exists in the mind or the appointed representations with which it is expressed. They are the essential components of understanding, and any intelligible proposition that is true can be understood.
Plato’s theory of ‘forms’ is a launching celebration of gratifying objectivity and a timeless existence of ideas as concepts, and reified the point where they make up the only real world. This doctrine, notably in the ‘Timaeus’, opened the way for the Neoplatonic notion of ideas as the thoughts of God. The concept gradually lost this other worldly aspect, until after Descartes ideas became assimilated to whatever it is that lies in the mind of any thinking being. With a general bias toward the sensory, so that what lies in the mind may be thought of as something like an image, and them the impression that thinking is well explained as the manipulation having no real existence but existing in a fanciful imagination. It is not reason but ‘the imagination’ that is found responsible for our making the empirical inferences that we do. There are certain general ‘principles of the imagination’ according to which ideas naturally come and go in the mind under certain conditions. It is the task of the ‘science of human nature’ to discover such principles, but without itself going beyond experience. For example, an observed correlation between things of two kinds can be seen to produce in everyone a propensity to expect a thing to the second sort given an experience of a thing of the first sort. We get a feeling, or an ‘impression’, when the mind makes such a transition and that is what directly leads us to attribute the necessary relation between things of the two kinds, there is no necessity in the relations between things that happen in the world, but, given our experience and the way our minds naturally work, we cannot help thinking that there is.
Until very recently it could have been that most approaches to the philosophy of science were ‘cognitive’. This includes ‘logical positivism’, as nearly all of those who wrote about the nature of science would have agreed that science ought to be ‘value-free’. This had been a particular emphasis by the first positivist, as it would be upon twentieth-century successors. Science, so it is said, deals with ‘facts’, and facts and values and irreducibly distinct. Facts are objective. They are what we seek in our knowledge of the world. Values are subjective: They bear the mark of human interest, they are the radically individual products of feeling and desire. Fact and value cannot, therefore, be inferred from fact, fact cannot be influenced by value. There were philosophers, notably some in the Kantian tradition, who viewed the relation of the human individual to the universalist aspiration of difference as an alternative differential. Nevertheless, the legacy of three centuries of largely empiricist reflection of the ‘new’ sciences ushered in by Galilee Galileo (1564-1642), the Italian scientist whose distinction belongs to the history of physics and astronomy, rather than natural philosophy.
The philosophical importance of Galileo’s science rests largely upon the following closely related achievements: (1) His stunning successful arguments against Aristotelean science, (2) his proofs that mathematics is applicable to the real world. (3) His conceptually powerful use of experiments, both actual and employed regulatively, (4) His treatment of causality, replacing appeal to hypothesized natural ends with a quest for efficient causes, and (5) his unwavering confidence in the new style of theorizing that would become known as ‘mechanical explanation’.
A century later, the maxim that scientific knowledge is ‘value-laded’ seems almost as entrenched as its opposite was earlier. It is supposed that between fact and value has been breached, and philosophers of science seem quite at home with the thought that science and value may be closely intertwined after all. What has happened to cause such an apparently radical change? What is its implications for the objectivity of science, the prized characteristic that, from Plato’s time onwards, has been assumed to set off real knowledge (epist~m~) from mere opinion (doxa)? To answer these questions adequately, one would first have to know something of the reasons behind the decline of logical positivism, as, well as of the diversity of the philosophies of science that have succeeded it.
More general, the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science is burgeoning on several fronts. Contemporary philosophical re-election about the mind ~ that has been quite intensive ~ has been influenced by this empirical inquiry, to the extent that the boundary lines between them are blurred in places.
Nonetheless, the philosophy of mind at its core remains a branch of metaphysics, traditionally conceived. Philosophers continue to debate foundational issues in terms not radically differently from those in vogue in previous eras. Many issues in the metaphysics of science hinge on the notion of ‘causation’. This notion is as important in science as it is in everyday thinking, and much scientific theorizing is concerned specifically to identify the ‘causes’ of various phenomena. However, there is little philosophical agreement on what it is to say that one event is the cause of another.
Modern discussion of causation starts with the Scottish philosopher, historian, and essayist David Hume (1711-76), who argued that causation is simply a matter for which he denies that we have innate ideas, that the causal relation is observably anything other than ‘constant conjunction’, that there are observable necessary connections anywhere, and that there is either an empirical or demonstrative proof for the assumptions that the future will resemble the past, and that every event has a cause. That is to say, that there is an irresolvable dispute between advocates of free-will and determinism, that extreme scepticism is coherent and that we can find the experiential source of our ideas of self-substance or God.
According to Hume (1978) on event causes another if only if events of the type to which the first event belongs regularly occur in conjunctive events of the type to which the second event belongs. The formulation, however, leaves many questions open. Firstly, there is a problem of distinguishing genuine ‘causal law’ from ‘accidental regularities’. Not all regularities are sufficiently law-like to underpin causal relationships. Being that there is a screw in my desk could well be constantly conjoined with being made of copper, without its being true that this screw is made of copper because they are in my desk. Secondly, the idea of constant conjunction does not give a ‘direction’ to causation. Causes need to be distinguished from effects. Still, knowing that A-type events are constantly conjoined with B-type events does not tell us that of ‘A’ and ‘B’ is the cause and the effect, since constant conjunction is itself a symmetric relation. Thirdly, there is a problem about ‘probabilistic causation’. When we say that causes and effects are constantly conjoined, do we mean that the effects are always found with the causes, or is it enough that the causes make the effect probable?
Many philosophers of science during the past century have preferred to talk about ‘explanation’ than causation. According to the covering-law model of explanation, something is explained if it can be deduced from premises that include one or more laws. As applied to the explanation of particular events this implies that a particular event can be explained if it is linked by a law to another particular event. However, while they are often treated as separate theories, the covering-law account of explanation is at bottom little more than a variant of Hume’s constant conjunction account of causation. This affinity shows up in the fact at the covering-law account faces essentially the same difficulties as Hume: (1) In appealing to deduction from ‘laws’, it needs to explain the difference between genuine laws and accidentally true regularities: (2) Its omission by effects, and effects by causes, after all, it is as easy to deduce the height of the flag-pole from the length of its shadow and the law of optics: (3) Are the laws invoked in explanation required to be exceptionalness and deterministic, or is it acceptable to say, that to appeal to the merely probabilistic fact that smoking makes cancer more likely, in explaining why some particular person develops cancer?
Nevertheless, one of the centrally obtainable achievements for which the philosophy of science is to provide explicit and systematic accounts of the theories and explanatory strategies exploitrated in the science. Another common goal is to construct philosophically illuminating analyses or explanations of central theoretical concepts invoked in one or another science. In the philosophy of biology, for example, there is a rich literature aimed at understanding teleological explanations, and there has been a great deal of work on the structure of evolutionary theory and on such crucial concepts as fitness and biological function. By introducing ‘teleological considerations’, this account views beliefs as states with biological purpose and analyses as their truth conditions specifically as those conditions that are biologically supposed to covary with.
A teleological theory of representation needs to be supplemental with a philosophical account of biological representation, generally a selectionism account of biological purpose, according to which item ‘F’ has purpose ‘G’ if and only if it is now present because of past selection by some process that favoured items with ‘G’. So, a given belief type will have the purpose of covarying with ‘P’, say, if and only if some mechanism has selected it because it has covaried with ‘P’ the past.
Similarly, teleological theory holds that ‘r’ represents ‘x’ if it is r’s function to indicate (i.e., covary with) ‘x’, teleological theories take issue depending on the theory of functions they import. Perhaps the most important distinction is that between historical theories of functions and a-historical theories. Historical theories individuate functional states (hence, contents) in a way that is sensitive to the historical development of the state, i.e., to factors such as the way the state was ‘learned’, or the way it evolved. An historical theory might hold that the function of ‘r’ is to indicate ‘x’ only if the capacity to token ‘r’ was developed (selected, learned) because it indicates ‘x’. Thus, a state physically indistinguishable from ‘r’ (physical states being a-historical) but lacking r’s historical origins would not represent ‘x’ according to historical theories.
The American philosopher of mind (1935- ) Jerry Alan Fodor, is known for resolute ‘realism’ about the nature of mental functioning, taking the analogy between thought and computation seriously. Fodor believes that mental representations should be conceived as individual states with their own identities and structures, like formulae transformed by processes of computation or thought. His views are frequently contrasted with those of ‘holist’ such as the American philosopher, Herbert Donald Davidson (1917-2003), or ‘instrumentalists’ about mental ascription, such as the British philosopher of logic and language, Eardley Anthony Michael Dummett, 1925-, in recent years he has become a vocal critic of some aspirations of cognitive science.
Nonetheless, a suggestion extrapolating the solution of teleology is continually queried by points as owing to ‘causation’ and ‘content’, and ultimately a fundamental appreciation is to be considered, is that: We suppose that there is a causal path from A’s to ‘B’s’ and a causal path from B’s to ‘A’s’, and our problem is to find some difference between B-caused ‘A’s’ and A-caused ‘A’s’ in virtue of which the former but not the latter misrepresented. Perhaps, the two paths differ in their counter-factual properties. In particular, although A’ and B’s botheration gives cause by A’s’ wherefore each, fragmentation is in pieces of its matter in the contestation of conveyance, and, as, perhaps, a conceivable assumption deducing that of only A’s would cause ‘A’s’ in ~ as one can say -, ‘optimal circumstances’. We could then hold that a symbol expresses its ‘optimal property’, the property that would causally control its tokening in optimal circumstances. Correspondingly, when the tokening of a symbol is causally controlled by properties other than its optimal property, the tokens that eventuate are ipso facto wild.
Suppose presently, that this story about ‘optimal circumstances’ is proposed as part of a naturalized semantics for mental representations. In which case it is, of course, essential that saying that the optimal circumstances for tokening a mental representation are in terms that are not in themselves a possibility for either semantical or intentionality. (It would not do, for example, to identify the optimal circumstances for tokening a symbol as those in which the tokens are true, that would be to assume precisely the semantical notion that the theory is supposed to naturalize.) Befittingly, the suggestion ~ to put it briefly ~ is that appeals to ‘optimality’ should be buttressed by appeals to ‘teleology’: Optimal circumstances are the ones in which the mechanisms that mediate symbol tokening are functioning ‘as they are supposed to’. With mental representations, these would be paradigmatical circumstances where the mechanisms of belief fixation are functioning as them are supposed to. To such a degree that it evinces in prove that the teleology of the cognitive mechanisms determines the optimal condition for belief fixation, and the optimal condition for belief fixation determines the content of beliefs. So the story goes.
The displaced objection can explicably be said as: The teleology story perhaps strikes one as plausible in that it understands one normative notion ~ truth ~ as for another normative notion ~ optimality. Nevertheless, this appearance if it is spurious there is no guarantee that the kind of optimality that teleology reconstructs, to the kind of optimality that the explication of ‘truth’ requires. When mechanisms of repression are working ‘optimally’ ~ when they are working ‘as they are supposed to’ ~ what they deliver are likely to be ‘falsehoods’.
Once, again, there is no obvious reason that conditions that are optimal for the tokening of one mental symbol need be optimal for the tokening of other sorts. Perhaps the optimal conditions for fixing beliefs about very large objects, are different from the optimal conditions for fixing beliefs about very small ones, are different from the optimal conditions for fixing beliefs sights. Nevertheless, this raises the possibility that if we are to say which conditions are optimal for the fixation of a belief, we must know what the content of the belief is ~ what it is a belief about. Our explication of content would then require a notion of optimality, whose explication in turn requires a notion of content, and the resulting pile would clearly be unstable.
Teleological theories hold that ‘r’ represents ‘x’ if it is r’s function to indicate (i.e., covary with) ‘x’. Teleological theories differ, depending on the theory of functions they import. Perhaps the most important distinction is that between historical theories of functions: Historically, theories individuate functional states (hence, contents) in a way that is sensitive to the historical development of the state, i.e., to factors such as the way the state was ‘learned’, or the way it evolved. Theory, might come to hold that the function of ‘r’ is to indicate ‘x’ only if the capacity to token ‘r’ was developed (selected, learned) because it indicates ‘x’. Thus, a state physically indistinguishable from ‘r’ (physical states being a-historical), but lacking r’s historical origins would not represent ‘x’ according to historical theories.
Just as functional role theories hold that r’s representing ‘x’ is grounded in the functional role ‘r’ has in the representing system, i.e., on the relations imposed by specified cognitive processes between ‘r’ and other representations in the system’s repertoire. Functional role theories take their cue from such common-sense ideas as that people cannot believe that cats are furry if they do not know that cats are animals or that fur is like hair.
That being said, that nowhere is the new period of collaboration between philosophy and other disciplines more evident than in the new subject of cognitive science. Cognitive science from its very beginning has been ‘interdisciplinary’ in character, and is in effect the joint property of psychology, linguistics, philosophy, computer science and anthropology. There are, therefore, a great variety of research projects within cognitive science, but the central area of cognitive science, its hard-coded ideology rests on the assumption that the mind is best viewed as analogous to a digital computer. The basic idea behind cognitive science is that recent developments in computer science and artificial intelligence have enormous importance for our conception of human beings. The basic inspiration for cognitive science went something like this: Human beings do information processing. Computers are designed precisely do information processing. Therefore, one way to study human cognition ~ perhaps the best way to study it ~ is to study it as a matter of computational information processing. Some cognitive scientists think that the computer is just a metaphor for the human mind: Others think that the mind is literally a computer program. Nevertheless, saying is fair that without the computational model there would not have been a cognitive science as we now understand it.
In the examined, in, Essay Concerning Human Understanding is the first modern systematic presentation of empiricist epistemology, and as such had important implications for the natural sciences and for philosophy of science generally. Like his predecessor, Descartes, the English philosopher (1632-1704) John Locke began his account of knowledge from the conscious mind aware of ideas. Unlike Descartes, however, he was concerned not to build a system based on certainty, but to identify the mind’s scope and limits. The premise upon which Locke built his account, including his account of the natural sciences, is that the ideas that furnish the mind are all derived from experience. He thus, totally rejected any kind of innate knowledge. Conversantly, opposing Descartes, who had deliberately argued that it is capably of being realized to come to knowledge of fundamental truths about the natural world through reason alone. Descartes (1596-1650) had argued, that we can come to know the essential nature of both the ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ by pure reason. John Locke accepted Descartes’s criterion of clear and distinct ideas as the basis for knowledge, but denied any source for them other than experience. It was information that came in a via the five senses (ideas of sensation) and ideas engendered from pure inner experiences (ideas of reflection) arose in the building blocks of the understanding.
Locke combined his commitment to ‘the new way of ideas’ with the native espousal of the ‘corpuscular philosophy’ of the Irish scientist (1627-92) Robert Boyle. This, in essence, was an acceptance of a revised, more sophisticated account of matter and its properties advocated by the ancient atomists and recently supported by Galileo (1564-1642) and Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655). Boyle argued from theory and experiment that there were powerful reasons to justify some kind of corpuscular account of matter and its properties. He called the latter qualities, which he distinguished as primary and secondary. The distinction between primary and secondary qualities may be reached by two alternatively different routes: Either from the nature or essence of matter or from the nature and essence of experience, though practising these have an inclination to run away together. The former considerations make the distinction seem like an a priori, or necessary, truth about the nature of matter, while the latter make it better off as an empirical hypothesis ~. Locke, too, accepted this account, arguing that the ideas we have of the primary qualities of bodies resemble those qualities as they are in the subject, whereas the ideas of the secondary qualities, such as colour, taste, and smell, do not resemble their causes in the object.
There is no strong connection between acceptance of the primary-secondary quality distinction and Locke’s empiricism and Descartes had also argued strongly for universal acceptance by natural philosophers, and Locke embraced it within his more comprehensive empirical philosophy. Nonetheless, Locke’ empiricism did have major implications for the natural sciences, as he well realized. His account begins with an analysis of experience. All ideas, he argues, are either simple or complex. Simple ideas are those like the red of a particular rose or the roundness of a snowball. Complicated and complex ideas, our ideas of the rose or the snowball, are combinations of simple ideas. We may create new complicated and complex ideas in our imagination ~ of a parallelogram, for example. Yet simple ideas can never be created by us: We just have them or not, and characteristically they are caused, for example, the impact on our senses of rays of light or vibrations of sound in the air coming from a particular physical object. Because we cannot create simple ideas, and they are determined by our experience, our knowledge is in a very strict uncompromising way limited. Besides, our experiences are always of the particular, never of the general. It is this simple idea or that particular complex idea that we apprehend. We never in that sense apprehend a universal truth about the natural world, but only particular instances. It follows from this that all claims to generality about that world ~ for example, all claims to identity what was then beginning to be called the laws of nature ~ must to that extent go beyond our experience and thus be less than certain.
The Scottish philosopher, historian, and essayist, (1711-76) David Hume, whose famous discussion appears in both his major philosophical works, the ‘Treatise’ (1739) and the ‘Enquiry’(1777). The distinction is couched about the concept of causality, so that where we are accustomed to talking of laws, Hume contends, involves three ideas:
1. That there should be a regular concomitance between
events of the type of cause and those of the type
Of the effect.
2. That the cause event should be contiguous with
Affecting events.
3. That the cause event should necessitate the effect event.
The tenets (1) and (2) occasion no differently for Hume, since he believes that there are patterns of sensory impressions of non-problematically relations to the idea of regularity concomitance and of contiguity. Yet the third requirement is deeply problematic, in that the idea of necessarily that figures in it seems to have no sensory impression correlated with it. However, carefully and attentively we scrutinize a causal process, we do not seem to observe anything that might be the observed correlate of the idea of necessity. We do not observe any kind of activity, power, or necessitation. All we ever observe is one event following another, which is logically independent of it. Nor is this logical necessity, since, as, Hume observes, one can jointly assert the existence of the cause and a denial of the existence of the effect, as specified in the causal statement or the law of nature, without contradiction. What, then, are we to make of the seemingly central notion of necessity that is deeply embedded in the very idea of causation, or lawfulness? To this query, Hume gives an ingenious and telling story. There is an impression corresponding to the idea of causal necessity, but it is a psychological phenomenon: Our exception that even similar to those we have already observed to be correlated with the cause-type of events will become an instant condition of case too. Where does that impression come from? It is created as a kind of mental habit by the repeated experience of regular concomitance between events of the type of effect and the occurring of events of the type of cause. Then, the impression that corresponds to the idea of regular concomitance ~ the law of nature then asserts nothing but the existence of the regular concomitance.
At this point in our narrative, the question at once arises whether this factor of life in nature, thus interpreted, corresponds to anything that we observe in nature. All philosophy is an endeavour to obtain a self-consistent understanding of things observed. Thus, its development is guided in two ways, one is demand for coherent self-consistency, and the other is the elucidation of things observed. With our direct observations how are we to conduct such comparisons? Should we turn to science? No. There is no way in which the scientific endeavour can detect the aliveness of things: Its methodology rules out the possibility of such a finding. On this point, the English mathematician and philosopher (1861-1947) Alfred Whitehead, comments: That science can find no individual enjoyment in nature, as science can find no creativity in nature, it finds mere rules of succession. These negations are true of natural science. They are inherent in its methodology. The reason for this blindness of physical science lies in the fact that such science only deals with half the evidence provided by human experience. It divides the seamless coat ~ or, to change the metaphor into a happier form, it examines the coat, which is superficial, and neglects the body that is fundamental.
Whitehead claims that the methodology of science makes it blind to a fundamental aspect of reality, namely, the primacy of experience, it neglected half the evidence. Working within Descartes’ dualistic’ framework reference, of matter and mind as separate and incommensurate, science limits itself to the study of objectivised phenomena, neglecting the subject and the mental events that are his or her experience.
Both the adoption of the Cartesian paradigm and the neglect of mental events are reason enough to suspect ‘blindness’, but there is no need to rely on suspicions. This blindness is clear. Scientific discoveries, impressive as they are, are fundamentally superficial. Science can express regularities observed in nature, but it cannot explain the reasons for their occurrence. Consider, for example, Newton’s law of gravity. It shows that such apparently disparate phenomena as the falling of an apple and the revolution of the earth around the sun are aspects of the same regularity ~ gravity. According to this law the gravitational attraction between two objects deceases in proportion to the square of the distance between them. Why is that so? Newton could not provide an answer. Simpler still, why does celestial or supernal space have three dimensions? Why is time one-dimensional? Whitehead notes, ‘None of these laws of nature gives the slightest evidence of necessity. They are [merely] the modes of procedure that within the scale of observation does in fact prevail’.
This analysis reveals that the capacity of science to fathom the depths of reality is limited. For example, if reality is, in fact, made up of discrete units, and these units have the fundamental character in being ‘ the pulsing throbs of experience’, then science may be unable to discover the discreteness: But it has no access to the subjective side of nature since, as the Austrian physicist (1887-1961) Erin Schrödinger points out, we ‘exclude the subject of cognizance from the domain of nature that we endeavour to understand’. It follows that to find ‘the elucidation of things observed’ in relation to the experiential or aliveness aspect, we cannot rely on science, we need to look elsewhere.
If, instead of relying on science, we rely on our immediate observation of nature and of ourselves, we find, first, that Descartes’ stark Cartesian division between mentality and nature with no grounds in our fundamental observation. We find ourselves living within nature. Secondly, in that we should conceive mental operations as among the factors which make up the constitution of nature, and thirdly, that we should reject the notion of idle wheels in the series of processes to nature. Every factor that makes a difference, and that difference can only be expressed as for the individual character of that factor.
Whitehead proceeds to analyse our experiences, in that overall, our observations of nature in particular, and rests ‘mutual immanence’ as a central theme. This mutual immanence is obvious in an experience that, I am a part of the universe, and, since I experience the universe, the experienced universe is part of me. Whitehead gives an example, ‘I am in the room, and the room is an item in my present experience. Nonetheless, my present experience is what I am now’. A generalization of this relationship to the case of any actual occasions yields the conclusion that ‘the world is included within the occasion in one sense, and the occasion is included in the world in another sense’. The idea that each actual occasion appropriates its universe follows naturally from such considerations.
The description of an actual entity for being a distinct unit is, therefore, only one part of the story. Seemingly, other, retributory character of the very nature of each actual entity is one of interdependence with all other actual entities in the universe. Every effective entity the determinant by which some outward appearance of something as distinguished from the substance for which it is made a process of prehending or appropriating all the other actual entities and creating one new entity out of them all, namely, itself.
There are two general strategies for distinguishing laws from accidentally true generalizations. The first stands by Hume’s idea that causal connections are mere constant conjunctions, and then seeks to explain why some constant conjunctions are better than others. That is, this first strategy accepts the principle that causation involves nothing more than certain events always happening with certain others, and then seeks to explain why some such patterns ~ the ‘laws’ ~ matter more than others ~ the ‘accidents’ -. The second strategy, by contrast, rejects the Humean presupposition that causation involves nothing more than is responsible for an effect to happen in reserve to the chance-stantial co-occurrence, and instead postulates the relationship ‘necessitation’, a kind of cement, which links events connected by law, but not those events (like having a screw in my desk and being made of copper) that are only accidentally conjoined.
There are many versions of the first Human strategy. The most successful, originally proposed by the Cambridge mathematician and philosopher F.P. Ramsey (1903-30), and later revived by the philosopher, David Lewis (1941-2002) who holds that laws that are true generalizations that can be fitted into an ideal system of knowledge. Stemming from the thought that the laws are those patterns that are explicably basic to science, either as fundamental principles themselves, or as consequences of those principles, while accidents, although true, have no such explanation. Thus, ‘All water at standard pressure boils at 1000 C’ is a consequence of the laws governing molecular bonding: But the fact that ‘All the fastening screws in my desk are copper’ is not part of the deductive structure of any satisfactory science. Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903-30), neatly encapsulated this idea by saying that laws are ‘consequences of those propositions that we should take as axioms if we knew everything and organized it as simply as possible in a deductive system’.
Advocates of the alternative non-Humean strategy object that the difference between laws and accidents is not a ‘linguistic’ matter of deductive systematization, but instead a ‘metaphysical’ contrast between the kind of links they report. They argue that there is a link in nature between being at 1000 C and boiling, but not between being ‘in my desk’ and being ‘made of copper’, and that this is nothing to do with how the description of this link may fit into theories. According to the forthright Australian D.M. Armstrong (1983), the most prominent defender of this view, the real difference between laws and accidentals, is simply that laws report relationships of natural ‘necessitation’, while accidents only report that two types of events happen to occur together.
Armstrong’s view may seem intuitively plausible, but it is arguable that the notion of necessitation simply restates the problem, than solving it. Armstrong says that necessitation involves something more than constant conjunction: If two events are closely connected by necessitation, then it follows that they are constantly conjoined, but two events can be constantly conjoined without being related by necessitation, as when the constant conjunction is just a matter of accidents. So necessitation is a stronger relationship than constant conjunction. However, Armstrong and other defenders of this view say very little about what this extra strength amounts to, except that it distinguishes laws from accidents. Armstrong’s critics argue that a satisfactory account of laws ought to cast more light than this on the nature of laws.
Hume said that the earlier of two causally related events is always the cause, and the later effect. However, there are several objections to using the earlier-later ‘arow of time’ to analyse the directional ‘arrow of causation’. For a start, it seems in principle, possible that some causes and effects could be simultaneous. That more, in the idea that time is directed from ‘earlier’ too ‘later’ itself stands in need of philosophical explanation ~ and one of the most popular explanations is that the idea of ‘movement’ from earlier to depend on the fact later that cause-effect pairs always have a time, and explain ‘earlier’ as the direction in which causes lie, and ‘later’ as the direction of effects, that we will clearly need to find some account of the direction of causation that does not itself assume the direction of time.
Moreover, such accounts have been proposed. David Lewis (1979) has argued that the asymmetry of causation derives from an ‘asymmetry of over-determination’. The over-determination of present events by past events ~ considers a person who dies after simultaneously being shot and struck by lightning ~ is a very rare occurrence, by contrast, the multiple ‘over-determination’ of present events by future events is absolutely normal. This is because the future, unlike the past, will always contain multiple traces of any present event. To use Lewis’s example, when the president presses the red button in the White House, the future effects do not only include the dispatch of nuclear missiles, but also the fingerprint on the button, his trembling, the further depletion of his gin bottle, the recording of the button’s click on tape, he emission of light waves bearing the image of his action through the window, the warnings of the wave from the passage often signal current, and so on, and so on, and on.
The American philosopher David Lewis (1941-2002), relates this asymmetry of over-determination to the asymmetry of causation as follows. If we suppose the cause of a given effect to have been absent, then this implies the effect would have been absent too, since (apart from freak -like occurrence in the lightning-shooting case) there will not be any other causes left to ‘fix’ the effect. By contrast, if we suppose a given effect of some cause to have been absent, this does not imply the cause would have been absent, for there are still all the other traces left to ‘fix’ the causes. Lewis argues that these counterfactual considerations suffice to show why causes are different from effects.
Other philosophers appeal to a probabilistic variant of Lewis’s asymmetry. Following, the philosopher of science and probability theorists, Hans Reichenbach (1891-1953), they note that the different causes of any given type of effect are normally probabilistically independent of each other, by contrast, the different effects of any given type of cause are normally probabilistically correlated. For example, both obesity and high excitement can cause heart attacks, but this does not imply that fat people are more likely to get excited than thin ones: Its facts, that both lung cancer and nicotine-stained fingers can result from smoking does imply that lung cancer is more likely among people with nicotine-stained fingers. So this account distinguishes effects from causes by the fact that the former, but not the latter are probabilistically dependent on each other.
However, there is another course of thought in philosophy of science, the tradition of ‘negative’ or ‘eliminative’ induction. From the English diplomat and philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and in modern time the philosopher of science Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994), we have the idea of using logic to bring falsifying evidence to bear on hypotheses about what must universally be the case that many thinkers accept in essence his solution to the problem of demarcating proper science from its imitators, namely that the former results in genuinely falsifiable theories whereas the latter do not. Although falsely, allowed many people’s objections to such ideologies as psychoanalysis and Marxism.
Hume was interested in the processes by which we acquire knowledge: The processes of perceiving and thinking, of feeling and reasoning. He recognized that much of what we claim to know derives from other people secondhand, thirdhand or worse: Moreover, our perceptions and judgements can be distorted by many factors ~ by what we are studying, and by the very act of study itself, the main reason, however, behind his emphasis on ‘probabilities and those other measures of evidence on which life and action entirely depend’ is this: It is apparent, for what is predominantly concerning the validity of ‘matter of fact’, is founded on the relation of cause and effect, and that we can never infer the existence of one object from another unless they are connected, nor marked or involved by complexity of detail something mediately or immediately.
When we apparently observe a whole sequence, say of one ball hitting another, what do we observe? In the much commoner cases, when we wonder about the unobserved causes or effects of the events we observe, what precisely are we doing?
Hume recognized that a notion of ‘must’ or necessity is a peculiar feature of causal relation, inference and principles, and challenges us to explain and justify the notion. He argued that there is no observable feature of events, nothing like a physical bond, which can be properly labelled the ‘necessary connection’ between a given cause and its effect: Events are simply, they merely occur, and there is in ‘must’ or ‘ought’ about them. However, repeated experience of pairs of events sets up the habit of expectation in us, such that when one of the pair occurs we inescapably expect the other. This expectation makes us infer the unobserved cause or unobserved effect of the observed event, and we mistakenly project this mental inference onto the events themselves. There is no necessity observable in causal relations, all that can be observed is regular sequence, where, as of this point, it is here that the necessities in causal inferences place in the mind, the self-realization that causation is a relation between pairs of events. We also realize that often we are not present for the whole sequence e that we want to divide into ‘cause’ and ‘effect’. Our understanding of the casual relation is thus intimately linked with the role of the causal inference cause only causal inferences entitle us to ‘go beyond what is immediately present to the senses’. Still, two very important assumptions emerge behind the causal inference: The assumptions that like causes, in ‘like circumstances, will always produce like effects’, and the assumption that ‘the course of nature will continue uniformly the same’ ~ or, briefly that the future will resemble the past. Unfortunately, this last assumption lacks either empirical or a priori proof, that is, it can be conclusively established neither by experience nor by thought alone.
Hume frequently endorsed a standard seventeenth-century view that all our ideas are ultimately traceable, by analysis, to sensory impressions of an internal or external kind. Accordingly, he claimed that all his theses are based on ‘experience’, understood as sensory awareness with memory, since only experience establishes matters of fact. Nevertheless, is our belief that the future will resemble the past properly construed as a belief concerning only a mater of fact? As the English philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) remarked, earlier this century, the real problems that Hume assumes the ascent in surfacing the addition to raise in whether future futures will resemble future pasts, in the way that past futures really did resemble past pasts. Hume declares that ‘if . . . the past may be no rule for the future, all experiences become useless and can lead to inference or conclusion. Yet, he held, the supposition cannot stem from innate ideas, since there are no innate ideas in his view nor can it stems from any abstract formal reasoning. For one thing, the future can surprise us, and no formal reasoning seems able to embrace such contingencies: For another, even animals and unthinkable people conduct their lives as if they assume the future resembles the past: Dogs return for buried bones, children avoid a painful fire, and so forth. Hume is not deploring the fact that we have to conduct our lives based on probabilities, and he is not saying that inductive reasoning could or should be avoided or rejected. Instead, he accepted inductive reasoning but tried to show that whereas formal reasoning of the kind associated with mathematics cannot establish or prove matters of fact, factual or inductive reasoning lacks the ‘necessity’ and ‘certainty’ associated with mathematics. His position, therefore clear; because ‘every effect is a distinct event from its cause’, only investigation can settle whether any two particular events are causally related: Causal inferences cannot be drawn with the force of logical necessity familiar to us from deductivity, but, although they lack such force, they should not be discarded. From use, causation manifests the inductive inferences is inescapably most-valuable. What, then, makes ‘experience’ the standard of our future judgement? The answer is ‘custom’, it is a brute psychological fact, without which even animal life of a simple kind would be essentially impossible. ‘We are determined by custom to suppose the future conformable to the past’ (Hume, 1978), nevertheless, whenever we need to calculate likely events we must supplement and correct such custom by self-conscious reasoning.
Nonetheless, the problem that the causal theory of reference will fail once it is recognized that all representations must occur under some aspect or that the extentionality of causal relations is inadequate to capture the aspectual character of reference. The only kind of causation that could be adequate to the task of reference is intentional causal or mental causation, but the causal theory of reference cannot concede that ultimately reference is achieved by some met device, since the whole approach behind the causal theory was to try to eliminate the traditional mentalism of theories of reference and meaning in favour of objective causal relations in the world, though it is at present by far the most influential theory of reference, will be a failure for these reasons.
If mental states are identical with physical states, presumably the relevant physical states are various sorts of neural states. Our concepts of mental states such as thinking, sensing, and feeling are of course, different from our concepts of neural states, of whatever sort. Nonetheless, that is no problem for the identity theory. As J.J.C. Smart (1962), who first argued for the identity theory, emphasized, the requisite identities do not depend on understanding concepts of mental states or the meanings of mental terms. For ‘a’ to be the identical with ‘b’, ‘a’, and ‘b’ must have the same properties, but the terms ‘a’ and ‘b’ need not mean the same. Its principal means by measure can be accorded within the indiscernibility of identicals, in that, if ‘A’ is identical with ‘B’, then every property that ‘A’ has ‘B’, and vice versa. This is, sometimes known as Leibniz’ s Law.
Nevertheless, a problem does seem to arise about the properties of mental states. Suppose pain is identical with a certain firing of c-fibres. Although a particular pain is the very same as a neural-firing, we identify that state in two different ways: As a pain and as neural-firing. That the state will therefore have certain properties in virtue of which we identify it as pain and others in virtue of which we identify it as an excitability of neural firings. The properties in virtue of which we identify it as a pain will be mental properties, whereas those in virtue of which ewe identify it as neural excitability firing, will be physical properties. This has seemed too lean toward the more in kind of dualism at the level of the properties of mental states, even if we reject dualism of substances and take people simply to be a physical organism, those organisms still have both mental and physical states. Similarly, even if we identify those mental states with certain physical states, those states will, nonetheless have both mental and physical properties. So disallowing dualism with respect to substances and their states is simply to its reappearance at the level of the properties of those states.
There are two broad categories of mental property. Mental states such as thoughts and desires, often called ‘propositional attitudes’, have ‘content’ that can be de scribed by ‘that’ clauses. For example, one can have a thought, or desire, that it will rain. These states are said to have intentional properties, or ‘intentionality sensations’, such as pains and sense impressions, lack intentional content, and have instead qualitative properties of various sorts.
The problem about mental properties is widely thought to be most pressing for sensations, since the painful qualities of pains and the red quality of visual sensations are irretrievably non-physical. If mental states do or place off fact the factorial legitimacy in having non-physical properties, the identities of mental states generate two physical states as they would not sustain an unconditional rigidity and rigorously sternful mind-body materialism.
The Cartesian doctrine that the mental are in some measure of direction to non-physical pervasiveness, which even advocates of the identity theory sometimes accepted it, for the ideas that the mental are non-physical underlies, for example, the insistence by some identity theorists that mental properties are really neural as between being mental and physical. To be neural is in this way. A property would have to be neutral about whether it is mental at all. Only if one thought that being meant being non-physical would one hold that defending materialism required showing the ostensible mental properties are neutral as regards whether or not they are mental.
Nevertheless, holding that mental properties are non-physical has a cost that is usually not noticed. A phenomenon is mental only if it has some distinctively mental property. So, strictly speaking, a materialist, who claims that mental properties are non-physical phenomena subsisting the state or fact of having independently been being actualized in the presence that present a reality that proves to exist. This is the ‘Eliminative-Materialist’, a position advanced by the American philosopher and critic Richard Rorty (1979).
According to Rorty (1931- ) ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ are incompatible terms. Nothing can be both mental and physical, so mental states cannot be identical with bodily states. Rorty traces this incompatibly to our views about incorrigibility: ‘Mental’ and ‘physical’ are incorrigible reports of one’s own mental states, but not reports of physical occurrences, but he also argues that we can imagine people who describe themselves and each other using terms just like our mental vocabulary, except that those people do not take the reports made with that vocabulary to be incorrigible. Since Rorty takes a state to be a mental state only if one’s reports about it are taken to be incorrigible, his imaginary people do not ascribe mental states to themselves or each other. Nonetheless, the only difference between their language and ours is that we take as incorrigible certain reports that they do not. So their language as no less the descriptive or explanatory power than ours. Rorty concludes that our mental vocabulary is idle, and that there are no distinctively mental phenomena.
This argument hinges on or upon the foundations building’s incorrigibility into the meaning of the term ‘mental’. If we do not, the way is open to interpret Rorty’s imaginary people as simply having a different theory of mind from ours, on which reports of one’s own mental states are corrigible. Their reports would this be about mental states, as construed by their theory. Rorty’s thought experiment would then provide to conclude not that our terminology is idle, but only that this alternative theory of mental phenomena is correct. His thought experiment would thus sustain the non-eliminativist view that mental states are bodily states. Whether Rorty’s argument supports his eliminativist conclusion or the standard identity theory, therefore, depends solely on whether or not one holds that the mental are in some considered point it stands to rest of non-substantial physicality.
Paul M. Churchlands (1981) advances a different argument for eliminative materialism. According to Churchlands, the common-sense concepts of mental states contained in our present folk psychology are, from a scientific point of view, radically defective. Even so, we can expect that eventually a more sophisticated theoretical account will relace those folk-psychological concepts, showing that mental phenomena, as described by current folk psychology, do not exist. Since, that account would be integrated into the rest of science, we would have a thoroughgoing materialist treatment of all phenomena, unlike Rorty’s, does not rely of assuming that the mental are non-physical.
However, even if current folk psychology is mistaken, that does not show that mental phenomenon does not exist, but only that they are of the way folk psychology described them as. We could conclude they do not exist only if the folk-psychological claims that turn out to be mistaken actualities defined by what it is for some phenomena to be mental. Otherwise, the new theory would be about mental phenomena, and would help show that they are identical with physical phenomena. Churchlands argument, like Rorty’s, depends on a special way of defining the mental, which we need not adopt, it is likely that any argument for Eliminative materialism will require some such definition, without which the argument would instead support the identity theory.
Despite initial appearances, the distinctive properties of sensations are neutral as between being mental and physical, in that borrowed from the English philosopher and classicist Gilbert Ryle (1900-76), they are topic neutral: Inclined to be being or that I am cognizant to the fact of having a sensation of red consists in my being in a state that is similar, in respect that we need not specify, even so, to something that occurs in me when I am in the presence of certain stimuli. Because the respect of similarity is not specified, the property is neither distinctively mental nor distinctively physical. But everything is similar to everything else in some respect or other. So leaving the respect of similarity unspecified makes this account too weak to capture the distinguishing properties of sensation.
A more sophisticated reply to the difficultly about mental properties is due independently to the Australian, David Malet Armstrong (1926- ) and American philosopher David Lewis (1941-2002), who argued that for a state to be a particular sort of intentional state or sensation is for that state to bear characteristic causal relations to other particular occurrences. The properties in virtue of which e identify states as thoughts or sensations will still be neural as between being mental and physical, since anything can bear a causal relation to anything else. But causal connections have a better chance than similarity in some unspecified respect to capturing the distinguishing properties of sensations and thought.
This casual theory is appealing, but is misguided to attempt to construe the distinctive properties of mental states for being neutral as between being mental, and physical. To be neutral as regards being mental or physical is to be neither distinctively mental nor distinctively physical. But since thoughts and sensations are distinctively mental states, for a state to be a thought or a sensation is perforce for it to have some characteristically mental property. We inevitably lose the distinctively mental if we construe these properties for being neither mental nor physical.
Not only is the topic-neutral construal misguided: The problem it was designed to solve is equally so, only to say, that problem stemmed from the idea that mental must have some non-physical aspects. If not at the level of people or their mental states, then at the level of the distinctively mental properties of those states. However, it should be of mention, that properties can be more complicated, for example, in the sentence, ‘John is married to Mary’, we are attributing ‘John’ the property of being married, and unlike the property of ‘John is bald’. Consider the sentence: ‘John is bearded’, to give a name as of the word deceptive of naming ‘John’ in this judgment of conviction ‘John’ is of a spoken language ~ a name of some individual human being ~ and more some would be tempted to confuse the word with what it names. Consider the expression ‘is bald’, this too is a bit of language ~ philosopher’s call it a ‘predicate’ ~ and it brings to our attention some property or feature that, if the sentence is true. Is possessed by John? Understood in this way, a property is not its self linguist though it is expressed, or conveyed by something that is, namely a predicate. What might be said that a property is a real feature of the word, and that it should be contrasted just as sharply with any predicates we use to express it as an intensifying name as ‘John’ is contrasted with the person himself. Controversially, just what sort of ontological status should be accorded to properties by describing ‘anomalous monism’, ~ while it is conceivably given to a better understanding the similarity with the American philosopher Herbert Donald Davidson (1917-2003), wherefore he adopts a position that explicitly repudiates reductive physicalism, yet purports to be a version of materialism, nonetheless, Davidson holds that although token mental evident states are identical to those of physical events and states ~ mental ‘types’ -, i.e., kinds, and properties ~ is neither to, nor nomically co-existensive with, physical types. In other words, his argument for this position relies largely on the contention that the correct assignment of mental actionable properties to a person is always a holistic matter, involving a global, temporally diachronic, ‘intentional interpretation’ of the person. But as many philosophers have in effect pointed out, accommodating claims of materialism evidently requires more than just repercussions of mental/physical identities. Mentalistic explanation presupposes not merely that metal events are causes but also that they have causal/explanatory relevance as mental ~, i.e., relevance insofar as they fall under mental kinds or types. Nonetheless, Davidson’s position, which denies there is strict psychological or psychological law, can accommodate the causal/explanation relevance of the mental quo mentally: If to ‘epiphenomenalism’ with respect to mental properties.
But the idea that the mental are in some deference of non-physical and cannot be assumed without argument. Plainly, the distinctively mental properties of the mental states are unlikely any other properties we know about. Only mental states have properties that are at all like the qualitative properties that anything like the intentional properties of thoughts and desires. However, this does not show that the mental properties are not physical properties. Not all physical properties like the standard states: So, mental properties might still be special kinds of physical properties. It is question beginning to assume otherwise. The doctrine that the mental properties are simply an expression of the Cartesian doctrine that the mental are automatically non-physical.
It is sometimes held that properties should count as physical properties only if they can be defined using the terms of physics. This too far too restrictive, that nobody would hold that to reduce biology to physics, for example, we must define all biological properties using only terms that occur in physics. And even putting ‘reduction’ aside, in certain biological properties could have been defined, that would not mean that those properties were in a major consideration of a non-physical connotation. The sense of ‘physical’ that is relevant that is of its situation it must be broad enough to include not only biological properties, but also most common-sense, macroscopic properties. Bodily states are uncontroversially physical in the relevant way. So, we can recast the identity theory as asserting that mental states are identical with bodily state.
The much criticized ‘new way of ideas’, so much a part of seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophy, began with Descartes’ (1596-1650) conscionable extension of ideas to cover whatever is in human minds too, an extension, of which Locke (1632-1704) made much use. But are they like mental images, of things outside the mind, or non-representational, like sensations? If representational, are they mental objects, standing between the mind and what they represent, or are they mental acts and modifications of a mind perceiving the world directly? Finally, are they neither objects nor mental acts, but dispositions? Malebranche (1632-1715) and Arnauld (1612-94), and then Leibniz, famously disagreed about how ‘ideas’ should be understood, and recent scholars disagree about how Arnauld, Descartes, Locke and Malebranche in fact understood them.
Although ideas give rise to many problems of interpretation, but between them they define the space of philosophical problems. Ideas are that with which we think, or in Locke’s terms, whatever the mind may be employed about in thinking. Looked at that way, they seem to be inherently transient, fleeting, and unstable private presences. Ideas provide the way in which objective knowledge can be expressed. They are the essential components of understanding, and any intelligible proposition that is true must be capable of being understood. Plato’s theory of ‘forms’ is a launching celebration of the objective and timeless existence of ideas as concepts, and reified to the point where they make up the only real world, of separate and perfect models of which the empirical world is only a poor cousin. This doctrine, notably in the ‘Timaeus’, opened the way for the Neoplatonic notion of ideas as the thoughts of God. The concept gradually lost this otherworldly aspect, until after Descartes ideas become assimilated to whatever it is that lies in the mind of any thinking being.
Together with a general bias toward the sensory, so that what lies in the mind may be thought of as something like images, and a belief that thinking is well explained as the manipulation having no real existence but existing in a fancied imagination. It is not reason but ‘the imagination’ that is found to be responsible for our making the empirical inferences that we do. There are certain general ‘principles of the imagination’ according to which ideas naturally come and go in the mind under certain conditions. It is the task of the ‘science of human nature’ to discover such principles, but without itself going beyond experience. For example, an observed correlation between things of two kinds can be seen to produce in everyone a propensity to expect a thing to the second sort given an experience of a thing of the first sort. We get a feeling, or an ‘impression’, when the mind makes such a transition and that is what leads us to attribute necessarily to the reflation between things of the two kinds, there is no necessity in the relations between things that happen in the world, but, given our experience and the way our minds naturally work, we cannot help thinking that there is.
A similar appeal to certain ‘principles of the imagination’ is what explains our belief in a world of enduring objects. Experience alone cannot produce that belief, everything we directly perceive is ‘momentary and fleeting’. And whatever our experience is like, no reasoning could assure us of the existence of something as autonomous of our impressions which continues to exist when they cease. The series of constantly changing sense impressions presents us with observable features which Hume calls ‘constancy ‘ and ‘coherence’, and these naturally operate on the mind in such a way as eventually to produce ‘the opinion of a continued and distinct existence’. The explanation is complicated, but it is meant to appeal only to psychological mechanisms which can be discovered by ‘careful and exact experiments, and the observation of those particular effects, which result from [the mind’s] different circumstances and situations’.
We believe not only in bodies, but also in persons, or selves, which continue to exist through time, and this belief too can be explained only by the operation of certain ‘principles of the imagination’. We never directly perceive anything we can call ourselves: The most we can be aware of in ourselves are our constantly changing momentary perceptions, not the mind or self which has them. For Hume, there is nothing that really binds the different perceptions together, we are led into the ‘fiction’ that they form a unity only because of the way in which the thought of such series of perceptions works upon the mind. ‘The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance, . . . there is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different: Whatever natural propensity we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitutes the mind.
Leibniz’s held, in opposition to Descartes, that adult humans can have experiences of which they are unaware: Experiences of which effect what they do, but which are not brought to self-consciousness. Yet there are creatures, such as animals and babies, which completely lack the ability to reflect of their experiences, and to become aware of them as experiences of theirs. The unity of a subject’s experience, which stems from his capacity to recognize all his experience as his, was dubbed by Kant ‘the transcendental unity of apperception ~ Leibniz’s term for inner awareness or self-consciousness. In contrast with ‘perception’ or outer awareness ~. However, this apprehension of unity is transcendental, than empirical, because it is presupposed in experience and cannot be derived from it. Kant used the need for this unity as the basis of his attempted refutation of scepticism about the external world. He argued that my experiences could only be united in one-self-consciousness, if, at least some of them were experiences of a law-governed world of objects in space. Outer experience is thus a necessary condition of inner awareness.
Here we seem to have a clear case of ‘introspection’, derived from the Latin ‘intro’ (within) + ‘specere’ (to look), introspection is the attention the mind gives to itself or to its own operations and occurrences. I can know there is a fat hairy spider in my bath by looking there and seeing it. But how do I know that I am seeing it rather than smelling it, or that my attitude to it is one of disgust than delight? One answer is, by a subsequent introspective act of ‘looking within’ and attending to the psychological state, ~ my seeing the spider. Introspection, therefore, is a mental occurrence, which has, as its object, some other psychological state like perceiving, desiring, willing, feeling, etc. In being a distinct awareness-episode it is different from more general ‘self-consciousness’ which characterizes all or some of our mental history.
The awareness generated by an introspective act can have varying degrees of complexity. It might be a simple knowledge of (mental) things’ ~ such as a particular perception-episode, or it might be the more complex knowledge of truths about one’s own mind. In this latter full-blown judgement form, introspection is usually the self-ascription of psychological properties and, when linguistically expressed, results in statements like ‘I am watching the spider’ or ‘I am repulsed’.
In psychology this deliberate inward look becomes a scientific method when it is ‘directed toward answering questions of theoretical importance for the advancement of our systematic knowledge of the laws and conditions of mental processes’. In philosophy, introspection (sometimes also called ‘reflection’) remains simply ‘that notice which mind takes of its own operations and has been used to serve the following important functions:
(1) Methodological: Thought experiments are a powerful tool in philosophical investigation. The Ontological Argument, for example, asks us to try to think of the most perfect being as lacking existence and Berkeley’s Master Argument challenges us to conceive of an unseen tree, conceptual results are then drawn from our failure or success. From such experiments to work, we must not only have (or fail to have) the relevant conceptions but also know that we have (or fail to have) them ~ presumably by introspection.
(2) Metaphysical: A metaphysical of mind needs to take cognizance of introspection. One can argue for ‘ghostly’ mental entities for ‘qualia’, for ‘sense-data’ by claiming introspective awareness of them. First-person psychological reports can have special consequences for the nature of persons and personal identity: Hume, for example, was content to reject the notion of a soul-substance because he failed to find such a thing by ‘looking within’. Moreover, some philosophers argue for the existence of additional perspectival facts ~ the fact of ‘what it is like’ to be the person I am or to have an experience of such-and-such-a-kind. Introspection as our access to such facts becomes important when we reconstruct a complete metaphysic of the world.
(3) Epistemological: Surprisingly, the most important use made of introspection has been in an accounting for our knowledge of the outside world. According to a foundationalist theory of justification an empirical belief is either basic and ‘self-justifying’ or justified in relation to basic beliefs. Basic beliefs therefore, constitute the rock-bottom of all justification and knowledge. Now introspective awareness is said to have a unique epistemological status in it, we are said to achieve the best possibly epistemological position and consequently, introspective beliefs and thereby constitute the foundation of all justification.
Coherence is a major player in the theatre of knowledge. There are coherence theories of belief, truth and justification where these combine in various ways to yield theories of knowledge, coherence theories of belief are concerned with the content of beliefs. Consider a belief you now have, the belief that you are reading a page in a book. So what makes that belief the belief that it is? What makes it the belief that you are reading a page in a book than the belief that you have something other of a preoccupation? The same stimuli may produce various beliefs and various beliefs may produce the same action. The role that gives the belief the content it has is the role it plays within a network of relations to other beliefs, the role in inference and implication, for example, I infer different things from believing that I am reading a page in a book than from any other belief, just as I infer that belief from different things than I refer other beliefs from.
The input of perception and the output of an action supplement the central role of the systematic relations the belief has to other beliefs, except that the systematic relations given to the belief specified of the content it has. They are the fundamental source of the content of beliefs. That is how coherence comes to be. A belief that the content that it does because of the away in which it coheres within the system of beliefs, however, weak coherence theories affirm that coherence is one determinant of the content of belief as strong coherence theories on the content of belief affirm that coherence is the sole determinant of the content of belief.
Nonetheless, the concept of the given-referential immediacy as apprehended of the contents of sense experience is expressed in the first person, and present tense reports of appearances. Apprehension of the given is seen as immediate both in a causal sense, since it lacks the usual causal chain involved in perceiving real qualities of physical objects, and in an epistemic sense, since judgements expressing it are justified independently of all other beliefs and evidence. Some proponents of the idea of the ‘given’ maintain that its apprehension is absolutely certain: Infallible, incorrigible and indubitable. It has been claimed also that a subject is omniscient with regard to the given ~ if a property appears, then the subject knows this.
Without some independent indication that some of the beliefs within a coherent system are true, coherence in itself is no indication of truth. Fairy stories can cohere, however, our criteria for justification must indicate to us the probable truth of our beliefs. Hence, within any system of beliefs there must be some privileged class with which others must cohere to be justified. In the case of empirical knowledge, such privileged beliefs must represent the point of contact between subject and world: They must spring up from within our descendable inherentability perceptions of the world, that when challenged, however, we justify our ordinary perceptual beliefs about physical properties by appeal to beliefs about appearances. The latter seem more suitable as foundational, since there is no class of more certain perceptual beliefs to which we appeal for their justification.
The argument that foundations must be certain was offered by Lewis (1946). He held that no proposition can be probable unless some are certain. If the probability of all propositions or beliefs were relative to evidence expressed in others, and if these relations were linear, then any regress would apparently have to terminate in propositions or beliefs that are certain. But Lewis shows neither that such relations must be linear nor that redresses cannot terminate in beliefs that are merely probable or justified in themselves without being certain or infallible.
Arguments against the idea of the given originate with Kant (1724-1804), who argues that percepts without concepts do not yet constitute any form of knowing. Being non-epistemic, they presumably cannot serve as epistemic foundations. Once we recognize that we must apply concepts of properties to appearances and formulate beliefs utilizing those concepts before the appearances can play any epistemic role, it becomes more plausible that such beliefs are fallible. The argument was developed by Wilfrid Sellars (1963), which according to him, the idea of the given involves a confusion between sensing particulars (having sense impressions), which is non-epistemic, and having non-inferential knowledge of propositions referring to appearances. The former may be necessary for acquiring perceptual knowledge, but it is not itself a primitive kind of knowing. Its being non-epistemic renders it immune from error, but also unsuitable for epistemological foundations. The latter, non-referential perceptual knowledge, are fallible, requiring concepts acquired through trained responses to public physical objects.
Contemporary foundationalist’s deny the coherentist’s claim whole eschewing the claim that foundations, in the form of reports about appearances, are infallible. They seek alternatives to the given as foundations. Although arguments against infallibility are sound, other objections to the idea of foundations are not. That concepts of objective properties are learned prior to concepts of appearances, for example, implied neither that claims about appearances are less certain than claims about objective properties, nor that the latter are prior in chains of justification. That there can be no knowledge prior to the acquisition and consistent application of concepts allows for propositions whose truth requires only consistent applications of concepts, and this may be so for some claims about appearances, least of mention, coherentists would add that such genuine belief’s stands in need of justification themselves and so cannot be foundations.
Coherentists will claim that a subject requires evidence that he applies concepts consistently that he is able, for example, consistently to distinguish red from other colours that appear. Beliefs about red appearances could not then be justified independently of other beliefs expressing that evidence. To say that part of the doctrine of the given that holds beliefs about appearances to be self-justified, we require an account of how such justification is possible, how some beliefs about appearances can be justified without appeal to evidence. Some foundationalists simply assert such warrant as derived from experience, but, unlike appeals to certainty by proponents of the given.
It is, nonetheless, an explanation of this capacity that enables its developments as an epistemological corollary to metaphysical dualism. The world of ‘matter’ is known through external/outer sense-perception. So cognitive access to ‘mind’ must be based on a parallel process of introspection which ‘thought . . . not ‘sense’, as having nothing to do with external objects: Yet [put] is very like it, and might properly enough be called ‘internal sense’. However, having mind as object, is not sufficient to make a way of knowing ‘inner’ in the relevant sense be because mental facts can be grasped through sources other than introspection. To point, is rather that ‘inner perception’, provides a kind of access to the mental not obtained otherwise ~ it is a ‘look within from within’. Stripped of metaphor this indicates the following epistemological features:
1. Only I can introspect my mind.
2. I can introspect only my mind.
3. Introspective awareness is superior to any other knowledge of contingent facts that I or others might have.
Tenets (1) and (2) are grounded in the Cartesian of ‘privacy’ of the mental. Normally, a single object can be perceptually or inferentially grasped by many subjects, just as the same subject can perceive and infer different things. The epistemic peculiarity of introspection is that, is, is exclusive ~ it gives knowledge only of the mental history of the subject introspecting.
The tenet (2) of the traditional theory is grounded in the Cartesian idea of ‘privileged access’. The epistemic superiority of introspection lies in its being and infallible source of knowledge. First-person psychological statements which are its typical results cannot be mistaken. This claim is sometimes supported by an ‘imaginability test’, e.g., the impossibility of imaging that I believe that I am in pain, while at the same time imaging evidence that I am not in pain. An apparent counter-example to this infallibility claim would be the introspective judgement ‘I am perceiving a dead friend’ when I am really hallucinating. This is taken to by reformulating such introspective reports as ‘I seem to be perceiving a dead friend’. The importance of such privileged access is that introspection becomes a way of knowing immune from the pitfalls of other sources of cognition. The basic asymmetry between first and third person psychological statements by introspective and non-introspective methods, but even dualists can account for introspective awareness in different ways:
(1) Non-perceptual models ~ Self-scrutiny need not be perceptual. My awareness of an object ‘O’ changes the status of ‘O’. It now acquires the property of ‘being an object of awareness’. On the basis of this or the fact that I am aware of ‘O’, such an ‘inferential model’ of awareness is suggested by the Bhatta Mimamsa school of Indian Epistemology. This view of introspection does not construe it as a direct awareness of mental operations but, interestingly, we will have occasion to refer to theories where the emphasis on directness itself leads to a Non-perceptual, or at least, a non-observational account of introspection.
(2) Reflexive models ~ Epistemic access to our minds need not involve a separate attentive act. Part of the meaning of a conscious state is that I know in that state when I am in that state. Consciousness is here conceived as ‘phosphorescence’ attached to some mental occurrence and in no need of a subsequent illustration to reveal itself. Of course, if introspection is defined as a distinct act then reflexive models are really accounts of the first-person access that makes no appeal to introspection.
(3) Public-mind theories and fallibility/infallibility models ~ the physicalists’ denial of metaphysically private mental facts naturally suggests that ‘looking within’ is not merely like perception but is perception. For Ryle (1900-76). Mental states are ‘iffy’ behavioural facts which, in principle, are equally accessible to everyone in the same was: One’s own self-awareness therefore is, in effect, no different in type from anyone else’s observations about one’s mind.
A more interesting move is for the physicalists to retain the truism that I grasp that I am sad in a very different way from that in which I know you to be sad. This directedness or non-inferential nature of self-knowledge can be preserved in some physicalists theories of introspection. For instance, Armstrong’s identification of mental states with causes of bodily behaviour and of the latter with brain states, makes introspection the process of acquiring information about such inner physical causes. But since introspection is itself a mental state, it is a process in the brain as well: And since its grasp of the relevant causal information is direct, it becomes a process in which the brain scans itself.
Alternatively, a broadly ‘functionalist’ inclination of what is consenting to mental states suggest of the machine-analogue of the introspective situation: A machine-table with the instruction ‘Print: ‘I am in state A’ when in state ‘A’ results in the output ‘I am in state A’ when state ‘A’ occurs. Similarly, if we define mental states and events functionally, we can say that introspection occurs when an occurrence of a mental state ‘M’ directly results in awareness of ‘M’. Observe with care that this way of emphasizing directness yields a Non-perceptual and non-observational model of introspection. The machine in printing ‘I am in state A’ does so (when it is not making a ‘verbal mistake’) just because it is in state ‘A’. There is no computation of information or process of ascertaining involved. The latter, at best, consist simply in passing through a sequence of states.
Furthering towards the legitimate question: How do I know that I am seeing a spider? Was interpreted as a demand for the faculty or information-processing-mechanism whereby I come to acquire this knowledge? Peculiarities of first-person psychological awareness and reports were carried over as peculiarities of this mechanism. However, the question need not demand the search for a method of knowing but rather for an explanation of the special epistemic features of first-person psychological statements. In that, the problem of introspection (as a way of knowing) dissolves but the problem of explaining ‘introspective’ or first-person authority remains.
Traditionally, belief has been of epistemological interest in its propositional guise: ‘S’ believes that ‘p’, where ‘p’ is a proposition towards which an agent, ‘S’, exhibits an attitude of acceptance. Not all belief is of this sort. If I trust what you say, I believe you. And someone may believe in Mrs. Collins, or in a free-market economy, or in God. It is sometimes supposed that all beliefs are ‘reducible’ to propositional belief, belief-that. Thus, my believing you might be thought as matter of my believing, perhaps, that what you say is true, and your belief in free markets or in God, a matter of your believing that free-market economy is desirable or that God exists.
It is doubtful, however, that non-propositional believing can, in every case, be reduced in this way. Debated on this point has tended to focus on an apparent distinction between ‘belief-that’ and ‘belief-in’, and the application of this distinction to belief in God: St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-64), accepted or advanced as true or real on the basis of less than convincing evidence in supposing that to believe in God is simply to believe that certain truths hold, such that God exists, that he is benevolent, etc. Others ague that belief-in is a distinctive attitude, one that includes essentially an element of trust. More commonly, belief-in has been taken to involve a combination of propositional belief together with some further attitude.
H.H. Price (1969) defends the claim that there is different sorts of belief-in, some, but not all, reducible to beliefs-that. If you believe in God, you believe that God exists, that God is good, etc. But, according to Price, your belief involves, in addition, a certain complex pro-attitude toward its object. One might attempt to analyse this further attitude in terms of additional beliefs-that: ‘S’ believes in ‘χ’ exists (and perhaps holds further factual beliefs about ‘χ’) (2) ‘S’ believes that ‘χ; is good or valuable in some respect?; and (3) ‘S’ believes that χ’s being good or valuable in this respect is it is a good thing. An analysis of this sort, however, fails adequately to capture the further affective component of belief-in. Thus, according to Price, if you believe in God, your belief is merely that certain truths hold: You possess, in addition, an attitude of commitment and trust towards God.
Notoriously, belief-in outruns the evidence for the corresponding belief-that. Does this diminish its rationality? If belief-in presupposes belief-that, it might be thought that the evidential standards for the former must be, at least, as, high as standards for the latter. And any additional pro-attitude might be thought to require further layers of justification not required for cases of belief-that.
Some philosophers have argued that, at least for cases in which belief-in is synonymous with faith (or, faith-in), evidential thresholds for constituent propositional beliefs are diminished. You may reasonably have faith in God or Mrs. Collins, even though beliefs about their respective attributes, were you to harbour them would be evidentially standard.
Belief-in may be, in general, less susceptible to alteration in the face of unfavourable evidence than belief-that. A believer who encounters evidence against God’s existence may remain unshaken in his belief, in part because the evidence does not bear in his pro-attitude. So long as this is united with his belief that God exists, the belief may survive epistemic buffeting ~ and reasonably so ~ in a way that an ordinary propositional belief that would not.
What is at stake here is the appropriateness of distinct types of explanation. That ever since the times of Aristotle (384-322 Bc) philosophers have emphasized the importance of explanatory knowledge. In simplest terms, we want to know not only what is the case but also why it is. This consideration suggests that we define explanation as an answer to a why-question. Such a definition would, however, be too broad, because some why-questions are request for consolation (Why did my son have to die?) Or moral justification (Why should women not be paid the same as men for the same work?) It would also be too narrow because some explanations are responses to how-questions (How does radar work?) Or how-possibly-questions (How is it possible for cats always to land on four feet?)
In its overall sense, ‘to explain’ means to make clear, to make plain, or to provide understanding. Definitions of this sort used philosophically un-helped, for the terms used in the definitions are no less problematic than the term to be defined. Moreover, since a wide variety of things require explanation, and since many different types of explanation exist, a more complex explanation is required. The term ‘explanandum’ is used to refer to that which is to be explained: The term ‘explanans’ aim to that which does the explaining. The explanams and the explanandum taken together constitute the explanation.
One common type of explanation occurs when deliberate human actions are explained in terms of conscionable purposes. ‘Why did you go to the pharmacy yesterday? ‘Because I had a headache and needed to get some aspirin’. It is tacitly assumed that aspirin is an appropriate medication for headaches and that going to the pharmacy would be an efficient way of getting some. Such explanations are, of course, teleological, referring, as they do to goals. The explanans are not the realisation of a future goal ~ if the pharmacy happened to be closed for stocktaking the aspirin would not have been obtained there, but that would not invalidate the explanation. Some philosophers would say that the antecedent desire to achieve the end is what does the explaining: Others might say that the explaining is done by the nature of the goal and the fact that the action promoted the chances of realizing it. In any case, it should not be automatically assumed that such explanations are causal. Philosophers differ considerably on whether these explanations are to be framed in terms of cause or reason.
The distinction between reason and causes is motivated in good part by a desire to separate the rational from the natural order. Many who have insisted on distinguishing reasons from causes have failed to distinguish two kinds of reason. Consider my reason for sending a letter by express mail. Asked why I did so, I might say I wanted to get it there in a day, or simply: to get it there in a day. Strictly, the reason is expressed by ‘to get it there in a day’. But what this expresses are my reasons only because I am suitably motivated, in that I am in a reason state, wanting to get the letter there in a day. ~ Especially wants reason states, beliefs and intentional ~ and not reasons strictly so called, that are candidates for causes. The latter are abstract contents of propositional altitudes, as the former are psychological elements that play motivational roles.
It has also seemed to those who deny that reasons are causes that the former justifies, as well as explain the actions for which they are reasons, whereas the role of causes is at most to explain. Another claim is that the relation between reasons (and here reason states are often cited explicitly) and the action they explain is non-contingent: Whereas, the relation of causes to their effects is contingent. The ‘logical connection argument’ proceeds from this claim to the conclusion that reasons are mot causes.
All the same, the explanation as framed in terms of reason and causes, and there are many differing analyses of such concepts as intention and agency. Expanding the domain beyond consciousness. Freud maintained, in addition, that much human behaviour can be explained in terms of unconscious wishes. These Freudian explanations should probably be construed as basically causal.
Problems arise when teleological explanations are offered in other context. The behaviour of non-human animals is often explained in terms of purpose, e.g., the mouse ran to escape from the cat. In such cases the existence of conscious purpose seems dubious. The situation is still more problematic when a super-empirical purpose is invoked ~, e.g., the explanation of living species in terms of God’s purpose, or the vitalistic explanation of biological phenomena in terms of an entelechy or vital principle. In recent years an ‘anthropic principle’ has received attention in cosmology. All such explanations have been condemned by many philosophers as anthropomorphic.
The preceding objection, for and all, that philosophers and scientists often maintain that functional explanations play an important and legitimate role in various sciences such as evolutionary biology, anthropology and sociology. For example, the case of the peppered moth in Liverpool, the change in colour and back again to the light phase provided adaption to a changing environment and fulfilled the function of reducing predation on the species. In the study of primitive societies anthropologists have maintained that various rituals, e.g., a rain dance, which may be inefficacious in brings about their manifest goals, e.g., producing rain. Actually fulfil the latent function of increasing social cohesion at a period of stress, e.g., theological and/or functional explanations in common sense and science often take pains to argue that such explanations can be analysed entirely in terms of efficient causes, thereby escaping the change of anthropomorphism, yet not all philosophers agree.
Mainly to avoid the incursion of unwanted theology, metaphysics, or anthropomorphism into science, many philosophers and scientist ~ especially during the first half of the twentieth century ~ held that science provides only descriptions and predictions of natural phenomena, but not explanations. Beginning in the 1930s, a series of influential philosophers of science ~ including Karl Pooper (1935) Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim (1948) and Hempel (1965) ~ maintained that empirical science can explain natural phenomena without appealing to metaphysics and theology. It appears that this view is now accepted by a vast majority of philosophers of science, though there is sharp disagreement on the nature of scientific explanation.
The previous approach, developed by Hempel Popper and others became virtually a ‘received view’ in the 1960s and 1970s. According to this view, to give scientific explanation of a natural phenomenon is to show how this phenomenon can be subsumed under a law of nature. A particular rupture in a water pipe can be explained by citing the universal law that water expands when it heated and the fact that the temperature of the water in the pipe dropped below the freezing point, so began the contraction of structural composites that sustain the particular metal. General laws, as well as particular facts, can be explained by subsumption. The law of conservation of linear momentum can be explained by derivation from Newton’s second and third laws of motion. Each of these explanations is a deductive argument: The premisses constitute the explanans and the conclusion is the explanandum. The explanans contain one or more statements of universal laws and, in many cases, statements describing initial conditions. This pattern of explanation is known as the ‘deductive-nomological model’ any such argument shows that the explanandum had to occur given the explanans.
Moreover, in contrast to the foregoing views ~ which stress such factors as logical relations, laws of nature and causality ~ a number of philosophers have argued that explanation, and not just scientific explanation, can be analysed entirely in pragmatic terms.
During the past half-century much philosophical attention has been focussed on explanation in science and in history. Considerable controversy has surrounded the question of whether historical explanation must be scientific, or whether history requires explanations of different types. Many diverse views have been articulated: the foregoing brief survey does not exhaust the variety.
In everyday life we encounter many types of explanation, which appear not to raise philosophical difficulties, in addition to those already of mention. Prior to take off a flight attendant explains how to use the safety equipment on the aeroplane. In a museum the guide explains the significance of a famous painting. A mathematics teacher explains a geometrical proof to be a bewildered student. A newspaper story explains how a prisoner escaped. Additional examples come easily to mind. The main point is to remember the great variety of context in which explanations are sought and given.
Another item of importance to epistemology is the widely held notion that non-demonstrative inference can be characterized as the inference to the best explanation. Given the variety of views on the nature of explanation, this popular slogan can hardly provide a useful philosophical analysis.
The inference to the best explanation is claimed by many to be a legitimate form of non-deductive reasoning, which provides an important alternative to both deduction and enumerative induction. Some would claim it is only through reasoning to the best explanation that one can justify beliefs about the external world, the past, theoretical entities in science, and even the future. Consider belief about the external world and assume that we know what we do about our subjective and fleeting sensations. It seems obvious that we cannot deduce any truths about the existence of physical objects from truths describing the character of our sensations. But neither can we observe a correlation between sensations and something other than sensations since by hypothesis all we have to rely on ultimately is knowledge of our sensations. Nonetheless, we may be able to posit physical objects as the best explanation for the character and order of our sensations. In the same way, various hypotheses about the past might best explain present memory: Theatrical postulates in physics might best explain phenomena in the macro-world, and it is possible that our access to the future is through past observations. But what exactly is the form of an inference to the best explanation?
When one presents such an inference in ordinary discourse it often seems to have as of:
1. ‘O’ is the case
2. If ‘E’ had been the case ‘O’ is what we would expect,
Therefore there is a high probability that:
3. ‘E’ was the case.
This is the argument form that Peirce (1839-1914) called ‘hypophysis’ or ‘abduction’. To consider a very simple example, we might upon coming across some footsteps on the beach, reason to the conclusion that a person walking along the beach recently by noting that if a person had walked along the beach one would expect to find just such footsteps.
But is abduction a legitimate form of reasoning? Obviously, if the conditional in (2) above is read as a material conditional such arguments would be hopelessly based. Since the proposition that ‘E’ materially implies ‘O’ is entailed by ‘O’, there would always be an infinite number of competing inferences to the best explanation and none of them would seem to lend support to its conclusion. The conditionals we employ in ordinary discourse, however, are seldom, if ever, material conditionals. Such that the vast majority of ‘if . . . Then . . . ‘ statements do not seem to be truth-functionally complex. Rather, they seem to assert a connection of some sort between the states of affairs referred to in the antecedent (after the ‘if’) and in the consequent (after the ‘then’). Perhaps the argument form has more plausibility if the conditional is read in this more natural way. But consider an alternative footsteps explanation:
1. There are footprints on the beach
2. If cows wearing boots had walked along the beach recently one would expect to find such footprints
Therefore: There is a high probability that,
3. Cows wearing boots walked along the beach recently.
This inference has precisely the same form as the earlier inference to the conclusion that people walked along the beach recently and its premisses are just as true, but we would be no doubt regard both the conclusion and the inference as simply silly. If we are to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate reasoning to the best explanation, it would seem that we need a more sophisticated model of the argument form. It would seem that in reasoning to an explanation we need criteria for choosing between alternative explanations. If reasoning to the best explanation is to constitute a genuine alternative to inductive reasoning. It is important that these criteria not be implicit premisses which will convert our argument into an inductive argument. Thus, for example, if the reason we conclude that people rather than cow walked along the beach is only that we are implicitly relying on the premiss that footprints of this sort are usually produced by people. Then it is certainly tempting to suppose that our inference to the best explanation was really a disguised inductive inference of the form:
1. Most footprints are produced by people.
2. Here are footprints
Therefore in all probability,
3. These footprints were produced by people.
If we follow the suggestion made above, we might construe the form of reasoning to the best explanation, such that:
1. ‘O’ (a description of some phenomenon).
2. Of the set of available and competing explanations E1, E2 . . . , En capable of explaining ‘O’, E1 is the best according to the correct criteria for choosing among potential explanations.
Therefore in all probability,
3. E1.
Here too, is a crucial ambiguity in the concept of the best explanation. It might be true of an explanation E1 that it has the best chance of being correct without it being probable that E1 is correct. If I have two tickets in the lottery and one hundred, other people each have one ticket, I am the person who has the best chance of winning, but it would be completely irrational to conclude on that basis that I am likely too win. It is much more likely that one of the other people will win than I will win. To conclude that a given explanation is actually likely to be correct on must hold that it is more likely that it is true than that the distinction of all other possible explanations is correct. And since on many models of explanation the number of potential explanations satisfying the formal requirements of adequate explanation is unlimited. This will be a normal feat.
Explanations are also sometimes taken to be more plausible the more explanatory ‘power’ they have. This power is usually defined in terms of the number of things or more likely, the number of kinds of things, the theory can explain. Thus, Newtonian mechanics were so attractive, the argument goes, partly because of the range of phenomena the theory could explain.
The familiarity of an explanation in terms of explanations is also sometimes cited as a reason for preferring that explanation to less familiar kinds of explanation. So if one provides a kind of evolutionary explanation for the disappearance of one organ in a creature, one should look more favourably on a similar sort of explanation for the disappearance of another organ.
Evaluating the claim that inference to the best explanation constitutes a legitimate and independent argument form. One must explore the question of whether it is a contingent fact that, at least, most phenomena have explanations and that explanations that satisfy a given criterions, simplicities, for example, are more likely to be correct. While it might be nice if the universe were structured in such a way that simple, powerful, familiar explanations were usually the correct explanation, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that if this is true it would be an empirical fact about our universe discovered only a posteriori. If the reasoning to the explanation relies on such criteria, it seems that one cannot without circularity use reasoning to the best explanation to discover that the reliance on such criteria is safe. But if one has some independent way of discovering that simple, powerful, familiar explanations are more often correct, then why should we think that reasoning to the best explanation is an independent source of information about the world? Again, why should we not conclude that it would be more perspicuous to represent the reasoning this way:
1. Most phenomena have the simplest, most powerful, familiar explanations available
2. Here is an observed phenomenon, and E1 is the simplest, most powerful, familiar explanation available.
Therefore, in all probability,
3. This is to be explained by E1.
But the above is simply an instance of familiar inductive reasoning.
There are various ways of classifying mental activities and states. One useful distinction is that between the propositional attitudes and everything else. A propositional attitude in one whose description takes a sentence as complement of the verb. Belief is a propositional attitude: One believes (truly or falsely as the case may be), that there are cookies in the jar. That there are cookies in the jar is the proposition expressed by the sentence following the verb. Knowing, judging, inferring, concluding and doubts are also propositional attitudes: One knows, judges, infers, concludes, or doubts that a certain proposition (the one expressed by the sentential complement) is true.
Though the propositions are not always explicit, hope, fear, expectation. Intention, and a great many others terms are also (usually) taken to describe propositional attitudes, one hopes that (is afraid that, etc.) there are cookies in the jar. Wanting a cookie is, or can be construed as, a propositional attitude: Wanting that one has (or eat or whatever) a cookie, intending to eat a cookie is intending that one will eat a cookie.
Propositional attitudes involve the possession and use of concepts and are, in this sense, representational. One must have some knowledge or understanding of what χ’s are in order to think, believe or hope that something is ‘χ’. In order to want a cookie, intend to eat one must, in some way, know or understand what a cookie is. One must have this concept. There is a sense in which one can want to eat a cookie without knowing what a cookie is ~ if, for example, one mistakenly thinks there are muffins in the jar and, as a result wants to eat what is in the jar (= cookies). But this sense is hardly relevant, for in this sense one can want to eat the cookies in the jar without wanting to eat any cookies. For this reason(and this sense) the propositional attitudes are cognitive: They require or presuppose a level of understanding and knowledge, this kind of understanding and knowledge required to possess the concepts involved in occupying the propositional state.
Thought there is sometimes disagreement about their proper analysis, non-propositional mental states, yet do not, at least on the surface, take propositions as their object. Being in pain, being thirsty, smelling the flowers and feeling sad are introspectively prominent mental states that do not, like the propositional attitudes, require the application or use of concepts. One doesn’t have to understand what pain or thirst is to experience pain or thirst. Assuming that pain and thirst are conscious phenomena, one must, of course, be conscious or aware of the pain or thirst to experience them, but awareness of must be carefully distinguished from awareness that. One can be aware of ‘χ’, ~ thirst or a toothache ~ without being aware that, that, e.g., thirst or a toothache, is that like beliefs that and knowledge that, are a propositional attitude, awareness of is not.
As the examples, pain, thirst, tickles, itches, hungers are meant to suggest, the non-propositional states have a felt or experienced [‘phenomenal’] quality to them that is absent in the case of the propositional attitudes. Aside from who it is we believe to be playing the tuba, believing that John is playing the tuba is much the same as believing that Joan is playing the tuba. These are different propositional states, different beliefs, yet, they are distinguished entirely in terms of their propositional content ~ in terms of what they are beliefs about. Contrast this with the difference between hearing John play the tuba and seeing him play the tuba. Hearing John play the tuba and seeing John play the tubas differ, not just (as do beliefs) in what they are of or about (for these experiences are, in fact, of the same thing: John playing the tuba), but in their qualitative character, the one involves a visual, the other and auditory, experience. The difference between seeing John play the tuba and hearing John play the tuba, is then, a sensory not a cognitive deviation.
Some mental states are a combination of sensory and cognitive elements, e.g., as fears and terror, sadness and anger, feeling joy and depression, are ordinarily thought of in this way sensations are: Not in terms of what propositions (if any) they represent, but (like visual and auditory experience) in their intrinsic character, as they are felt to the someone experiencing them. But when we describe a person for being afraid that, sad that, upset that (as opposed too merely thinking or knowing that) so-and-so happened, we typically mean to be describing the kind of sensory (feeling or emotional) quality accompanying the cognitive state. Being afraid that the dog is going to bite me is both to think (that he might bite me) ~ a cognitive state ~ and feel fear or apprehension (sensory) at the prospect.
The perceptual verbs exhibit this kind of mixture, this duality between the sensory and the cognitive. Verbs like ‘to hear’, ‘to say’, and ‘to feel’ is [often] used to describe propositional (cognitive) states, but they describe these states in terms of the way (sensory) one comes to be in them. Seeing that there are two cookies left by seeing. Feeling that there are two cookies left is coming to know this in a different way, by having tactile experiences (sensations).
On this model of the sensory-cognitive distinction (at least it is realized in perceptual phenomena). Sensations are a pre-conceptual, a pre-cognitive, vehicle of sensory information. The terms ‘sensation’ and ‘sense-data’ (or simply ‘experience’) were (and, in some circles, still are) used to describe this early phase of perceptual processing. It is currently more fashionable to speak of this sensory component in perception as the percept, the sensory information store, is generally the same: An acknowledgement of a stage in perceptual processing in which the incoming information is embodied in ‘raw’ sensory (pre-categorical, pre-recognitional) forms. This early phase of the process is comparatively modular ~ relatively immune to, and insulated from, cognitive influence. The emergence of a propositional [cognitive] states ~ seeing that an object is red ~ depends, then, on the earlier occurrence of a conscious, but nonetheless, non-propositional condition, seeing (under the right condition, of course) the red object. The sensory phase of this process constitutes the delivery of information (about the red object) in a particular form (visual): Cognitive mechanisms are then responsible for extracting and using this information ~ for generating the belief (knowledge) that the object is red. (The belief of blindness suggests that this information can be delivered, perhaps in degraded form, at a non-conscious level.)
To speak of sensations of red objects, tubas and so forth, are to say that these sensations carry information about an object’s colour, its shape, orientation, and position and (in the case of audition) information about acoustic qualities such as pitch, timbre, volume. It is not to say that the sensations share the properties of the objects they are sensations of or that they have the properties they carry information about. Auditory sensations are not loud and visual sensations are not coloured. Sensations are bearers of nonconceptualized information, and the bearer of the information that something is red need not itself be red. It need not even be the sort of thing that could be red: It might be a certain pattern of neuronal events in the brain. Nonetheless, the sensation, though not itself red, will (being the normal bearer of the information) typically produce in the subject who undergoes the experience a belief, or tendency to believe, that something red is being experienced. Hence the existence of hallucinations.
Just as there are theories of the mind, that would deny the existence of any state of mind whose essence was purely qualitative (i.e., did not consist of the state’s extrinsic, causal, properties) there are theories of perception and knowledge ~ cognitive theories ~ that denies a sensory component to ordinary sense perception. The sensor y dimension (the look, feel, smells, taste of things) is (if it is not altogether denied) identified with some cognitive condition (knowledge or belief) of the experienced. All seeing (not to mention hearing, smelling and feeling) becomes a form of believing or knowing. As a result, organisms that cannot know cannot have experiences. Often, to avoid these striking counterintuitive results, implicit or otherwise unobtrusive (and, typically, undetectable) forms of believing or, knowing.
Aside, though, from introspective evidence (closing and opening one’s eyes, if it changes beliefs at all, doesn’t just change beliefs, it eliminates and restores a distinctive kind of conscionable experience), there is a variety of empirical evidence for the existence of a stage in perceptual processing that is conscious without being cognitive (in any recognizable sense). For example, experiments with brief visual displays reveal that when subjects are exposed for very brief (50 msec.) Intervals to information-rich stimuli, there is persistence (at the conscious level) of what is called an image or visual icon that embodies more information about the stimulus than the subject can cognitively process or report on. Subjects cab exploit the information in this persisting icon by reporting on any part of the absent array of numbers (the y can, for instance, reports of the top three numbers, the middle three or the bottom three). They cannot, however, identify all nine numbers. The y report seeing all nine, and the y can identify any one of the nine, but they cannot identify all nine. Knowledge and brief, recognition and identification ~ these cognitive states, though present for any two or three numbers in the array, are absent for all nine numbers in the array. Yet, the image carries information about all nine numbers (how else accounts for subjects’ ability to identify any number in the absent array?) Obviously, then, information is there, in the experience itself, whether or not it is, or even can be. As psychologists conclude, there is a limit on the information processing capacities of the latter (cognitive) mechanisms that are not shared by the sensory stages themselves.
Perceptual knowledge is knowledge acquired by or through the senses. This includes most of what we know. Some would say it includes everything we know. We cross intersections when we see the light turn green, head for the kitchen when we smell the roast burning, squeeze the fruit to determine its ripeness, and climb out of bed when we hear the alarm, ring. In each case we come to know something ~ that the light has turned green, that the roast is burning, that the melon is overripe, and that it is time to get up ~ that the light has turned green ~ by use of the eyes. Feeling that the melon is overripe in coming to know a fact ~ that the melon is overripe ~ by one’s sense of touch. In each case the resulting knowledge is somehow based on, derived from or grounded in the sort of experience that characterizes the sense modality in question.
Seeing a rotten kumquat is not at all like the experience of smelling, tasting or feeling a rotten kumquat. Yet all these experiences can result in the same knowledge ~ Knowledge that the kumquat is rotten. Although the experiences are much different, they must, if they are to yield knowledge, embody information about the kumquat: The information that it is rotten. Seeing that the fruit is rotten differs from smelling that it is rotten, not in what is known, but how it is known. In each case, the information has the same source ~ the rotten kumquat ~, but it is, so top speak, delivered via different channels and coded and re-coded in different experiential neuronal excitations as stimulated sense attractions.
It is important to avoid confusing perceptual knowledge of facts, e.g., that the kumquat is rotten, with the perception of objects, e.g., rotten kumquats. It is one thing to see (taste, smell, feel) a rotten kumquat, and quite another to know (by seeing or tasting) that it is a rotten kumquat. Some people, after all, don not know what kumquats to look like. They see a kumquat but do not realize (do not see that) it is a kumquat. Again, some people do not know what a kumquat smell like. They smell a rotten kumquat and ~ thinking, perhaps, that this is a way this strange fruit is supposed to smell ~ does not realize from the smell, i.e., do not smell that it is a rotted kumquat. In such cases people see and smell rotten kumquats ~ and in this sense perceive rotten kumquat ~ and never know that they are kumquats ~ let alone rotten kumquats. They cannot, not at least by seeing and smelling, and not until they have learned something about (rotten) kumquats. Since the topic as such is incorporated in the perceptual knowledge ~ knowing, by sensory means, that something if ‘F’ ~, we will be primary concerned with the question of what more, beyond the perception of F’s, is needed to see that (and thereby know that) they are ‘F’. The question is, however, not how we see kumquats (for even the ignorant can do this) but, how we know (if, that in itself, that we do) that, that is what we see.
Much of our perceptual knowledge is indirect, dependent or derived. By this is that it is meant that the facts we describe ourselves as learning, as coming to know, by perceptual means are pieces of knowledge that depend on our coming to know something else, some other fat, in a more direct way. We see, by the gauge, that we need gas, see, by the newspapers, that our team has lost again, or see, by her expression that is nervous. This derived or dependent sort of obtainable knowledge is particularly prevalent in the case of vision but it occurs, to a lesser degree, in every sense modality. We install bells and other noise makers so that we can, for example, hear (by the bells) that someone is at the door and (by the alarm) that its time to get away. When we obtain knowledge in this way. It is clear that unless one sees ~ hence, comes to know. Something about the gauge (that it reads ‘empty’), the newspaper (which is says) and the person’s expression, one would not see (hence, know) what one is described as coming to know by perceptual means. If one cannot hear that the bell is ringing, one cannot ~ not at least in this way ~ hear that one’s visitors have arrived. In such cases one sees (hears, smells, etc.) that ‘a’ is ‘F’, coming to know thereby that ‘a’ is ‘F’, by seeing (hearing, etc.) that some other condition, b’s being ‘G’, obtains. When this occurs, the knowledge (that ‘a’ is ‘F’) is derived, or dependent on, the more basic perceptual knowledge that ‘b’ is ‘G’.
Though perceptual knowledge about objects is often, in this way, dependent on knowledge of fats about different objects, the derived knowledge is sometimes about the same object. That is, we see that ‘a’ is ‘F’ by seeing, not that some other object is ‘G’, but that ‘a’ itself is ‘G’. We see, by her expression, that she is nervous. She tells that the fabric is silk (not polyester) by the characteristic ‘greasy’ feel of the fabric itself (not, as I do, by what is printed on the label). We tell whether it is an oak tree, a Porsche, a geranium, an igneous rock or a misprint by its shape, colour, texture, size, behaviour and distinctive markings. Perceptual knowledge of this sort is also deprived ~ derived from the more basic facts (about ‘a’) we use to make the identification. In this case the perceptual knowledge is still indirect because, although the same object is involved, the facts we come to know about it are different than the facts that enable us to know it.
Derived knowledge is sometimes described as inferential, but this is misleading, at the conscious level there is no passage of the mind from premise to conclusion, no reasoning, no problem-solving. The observer, the one who sees that ‘a’ is ‘F’ by seeing that ‘b’ (or ‘a’ itself) is ‘G’, need not be (and typically is not) aware of any process of inference, any passage of the mind from one belief to another. The resulting knowledge, though logically derivative, is psychologically immediate. I could see that she was getting angry: so, I moved my hand. I did not, ~ at least not at any conscious level ~ infers (from her expression and behaviour) that she was getting angry. I could (or, so it seemed to me) see that she was getting angry. It is this psychological immediacy that makes indirect perceptual knowledge a species of perceptual knowledge.
The psychological immediacy that characterises so much of our perceptual knowledge ~ even (sometimes) the most indirect and derived forms of it ~ does not mean that learning is not required to know in this way. One is not born with (may, in fact, never develop) the ability to recognize daffodils, muskrats and angry companions. It is only after a long experience that one is able visually to identify such things. Beginners may do something corresponding to inference: They recognize relevant features of trees, birds, and flowers, factures they already know how to perceptually identify, and then infer (conclude), on the basis of what they see, and under the guidance of more expert observers, that it’s an oak a finch or a geranium. But the experts (and we are all experts on many aspects of our familiar surroundings) do not typically go through such a process. The expert just sees that it’s an oak, a finch or a geranium. The perceptual knowledge of the expert is still dependent, of course, since even an expert cannot see what kind of flower it is if she cannot first see its colour and shape, but it is to say, that the expert has developed identificatory skills that no longer require the sort of conscious inferential process that characterize a beginner’s efforts.
Coming to know that ‘a’ is ‘F’ by seeing that ‘b’ is ‘G’ obviously requires some background assumption on the part of the observer, an assumption to the effect that ‘a’ is ‘F’ (or perhaps only probable ‘F’) when ‘b’ is ‘G’. If one does not assume (as taken to be granted) that the gauge is properly connected, and does not, thereby assume that it would not register ‘empty’, unless the tank was nearly empty, then even if one could see that it registered ‘empty’, one would not learn ( hence, would not see) that one needed gas. At least, one would not see it by consulting the gauge. Likewise, in trying to identify birds, its no use being able to see their markings if one doesn’t know something about which birds have which marks ~ sometimes of the form: A bird with these markings is (probably) a finch.
It would seem, moreover, that these background assumptions, if they are to yield knowledge that ‘a’ is ‘F’, as they must if the observer is to see (by b’s being ‘G’) that ‘a’ is ‘F’, must themselves qualify as knowledge. For if this background fact is not known, if it is not known whether ‘a’ is ‘F’ when ‘b’ is ‘G’, then the knowledge of b’s being ‘G’, taken by itself, powerless to generate the knowledge that ‘a; is ‘F?’. If the conclusion is to be known to be true, both the premises used to reach that conclusion must be known to be true. Or so it would seem.
Externalism/Internalism are most generally accepted of this distinction if that a theory of justification is internalist, if and only if it requires that all of the factors needed for a belief to be epistemically justified for a given person be cognitively accessible to that person. Internal to his cognitive perspective, and external, if it allows that, at least, part of the justifying factor need not be thus accessible, so they can be external to the believers’ cognitive perspective, beyond his understanding. As complex issues well beyond our perception to the knowledge or an understanding, however, epistemologists often use the distinction between internalist and externalist theories of epistemic justification without offering any very explicit explication.
The externalism/internalism distinction has been mainly applied to theories of epistemic justification. It has also been applied in a closely related way to accounts of knowledge and in a rather different way to accounts of belief and thought content.
The internalist requirement of cognitive accessibility can be interpreted in at least two ways: A strong version of internalism required that the believer actually be aware of the justifying factor in order to be justified: While a weaker version would require only that he be capable of becoming aware of them by focussing his attention appropriately, but without the need for any change of position, new information etc. Though the phrase ‘cognitively accessible’ suggests the weak for internalism, wherefore, the idea that epistemic justification requires that the believer actually have in his cognitive possession a reason for thinking that the belief is true.
It should be carefully noticed that when internalism is construed by either that the justifying factors literally are internal mental states of the person or that the internalism. On whether actual awareness of the justifying elements or only the capacity to become aware of them is required, comparatively, the consistency and usually through a common conformity brings upon some coherentists views that could also be internalist, if both the belief and other states with which a justification belief is required to cohere and the coherence relations themselves are reflectively accessible. In spite of its apparency, it is necessary, because on at least some views, e.g., a direct realist view of perception, something other than a mental state of the believer can be cognitively accessible, not sufficient, because there are views according to which at least, some mental states need not be actual (strong versions) or even possible (weak versions) objects of cognitive awareness.
Obviously too, a view that was externalist in relation to a strong version of internalism (by not requiring that the believer actually be aware of all justifying factors) could still be internalist in relation to a weak version (by requiring that, at least, be capable of becoming aware of them).
The most prominent recent externalist views have been versions of ‘reliabilism’, whose main requirement for justification is roughly that the beliefs are produced in a way or to a considerable degree in which of subject matter conducting a process that makes of objectively likely that the belief is true. What makes such a view externalist is the absence of any requirement that the person for whom the belief is justified have any sort of cognitive access to the relation of reliability in question. Lacking such access, such a person will in general have no reason for thinking that the belief is true or likely to be true, but will, on such an account, nonetheless, be epistemically justified in accepting it. Thus, such a view arguably marks a major break from the modern epistemological tradition, stemming from Descartes, which identifies epistemic justification with having a reason, perhaps, even a conclusive reason, for thinking that the belief is true. An epistemologist working within this tradition is likely to feel that the externalist, than offering a competing account of the same concept of epistemic justification with which the traditional epistemologist is concerned, has simply changed the subject.
An alterative to giving an externalist account of epistemic justification, one which may be more defensible while still accommodating many of the same motivating concerns, is especially given to some externalists account of knowledge directly, without relying on an intermediate account of justification. Such a view will obviously have to reject the justified true belief account of knowledge, holding instead that knowledge is true belief which satisfies the chosen externalist condition, e.g., is a result of a reliable process, and, perhaps, further conditions as well. This makes it possible for such a view to retain an internalist account of epistemic justification, though the centralities are seriously diminished. Such an externalist account of knowledge can accommodate the common-sense conviction that animals, young children and unsophisticated adults possess knowledge though not the weaker conviction that such individuals are epistemically justified in their belief. It is also, at least. Vulnerable to internalist counter-examples, since the intuitions involved there pertains more clearly to justification than to knowledge, least of mention, as with justification and knowledge, the traditional view of content has been strongly internalist in character. An objection to externalist accounts of content is that they seem unable to do justice to our ability to know the content of our beliefs or thoughts ‘from the inside’, simply by reflection. So, then, the adoption of an externalist account of mental content would seem as if part of all of the content of a belief is inaccessible to the believer, then both the justifying status of other beliefs in relation to that content and the status of the content as justifying further beliefs will be similarly inaccessible, thus contravening the internalist requirements for justification.
Externalists, however, argue that the indirect knowledge that ‘a’ is ‘F’, though it may depend on the knowledge that ‘b’ is ‘G’, does not require knowledge of the connecting fact, the fact that ‘a’ is ‘F’ when ‘b’ is ‘G’. Simple belief (or, perhaps, justified belief, there is stronger and weaker versions of externalism) in the connecting fact is sufficient to confer a knowledge of the fact is sufficient to confer a knowledge e of the connected fact. Even if, strictly speaking, I don’t know she is nervous whenever she fidgets like that, I can nonetheless, see and hence know, that she is nervous by the way she fidgets, if I (correctly) assume that his behaviour r is a reliable expression of nervousness. One need not know the gauge is working well to make observations (acquire observational knowledge) with it. All that is required, besides the observer believing that the gauge is reliable, is that the gauge, in fact, be reliable, i.e., that the observer’s background beliefs be true. Critics of externalisms have been quick to point out that this theory has the unpalatable consequence that knowledge can be made possible by ~ and, in this sense, be made to rest on ~ lucky hunches (that turn out true) and unsupported (even irrational) beliefs. Surely, internalist argue, if one is going t o know that ‘a’ is ‘F’ on the basis of b’s being ‘G’, one should have (as a bare minimum) some justification for thinking that ‘a’ is ‘F’, or is probably ‘F’, when ‘b’ is ‘G’.
Whatever view one takes about these matters (with the possible exception of extreme externalism) indirect perception obviously requires some understanding (knowledge? Justification? Belief?) of the general relationship between the fact one comes to know (that ‘a’ is ‘F’) and the facts (that ‘b’ is ‘G’) that enable one to know it. And it is this requirement on background knowledge or understanding that leads to questions to questions about the possibility of indirect perceptual knowledge. Is it really knowledge? The first question is inspired by sceptical doubts about whether we can ever know the connecting facts in question. How is it possible to learn, to acquire knowledge of, the connecting fact’s knowledge of which is necessary to see? By b’s being ‘G’, and that ‘a’ is ‘F’? These connecting facts do not appear to be perceptually knowable. Quite the contrary, they appear to b e general truths knowable (if knowable at all) by inductive inference e from past observations. And if one is sceptical about obtaining knowledge in this indirect, inductive way one is, perforce, sceptical about the existence of the kind of indirect knowledge, including indirect perceptual knowledge of the set described, in that depends on it.
Even if one puts aside such sceptical questions, however, they’re remains a legitimate concern about the perceptual character of this kind knowledge. If one sees that ‘a’ is ‘F’ by seeing that ‘b’ is ‘G’, is really seeing that ‘a’ is ‘F’? Isn’t perception merely a part ~ and, from an epistemological standpoint, the less significant part ~ of the process whereby one comes to know that ‘a’ is ‘F?’. One must, it is true, sere that ‘b’ is ‘G’, but this is only one of the premises needed to reach the conclusion (knowledge) that ‘a’ is ‘F’. There is also the background knowledge that is essential to the process. If we think of a theory as any factual proposition, or set of factual propositions, that cannot itself be known in some direct observational way, we can express this worry by saying that indirect perception is always theory-loaded: Seeing (indirectly)that ‘a’ is ‘F’ is only possible if the observer already has knowledge of (justification for, belief in) some theory, the theory ‘connecting’ the fast one cannot come to know (that ‘a’ is ‘F’) with the fact (that ‘b’ is ‘G’) that enables one to know it.
This, of course, reverses the standard foundationalist picture of human knowledge. Instead of theoretical knowledge depending on, and being derived from, perception, perception (of the indirect sort) presupposes a prior knowledge.
Foundationalists are quick to point out that this apparent reversal in the structure of human knowledge is only apparent. Our indirect perception of facts depends on theory, yes, but this merely shows that indirect perceptual knowledge is not part of the foundation. To reach the kind of perceptual knowledge that lies at the foundation, we need to look at a form of perception that is purified of all theoretical elements. This then, will be perceptual knowledge pure and direct. No background knowledge or assumptions about connecting regularities are needed in direct perception because the known facts are presented directly and immediately and not (as, in indirect perception) on the basis of some other facts. In direct perception all the justification (needed for knowledge) is right there in the experience itself.
What, then, about the possibility of perceptual knowledge pure and direct, the possibility of coming to know, on the basis of sensory experience, that ‘a’ is ‘F’ where this does not require assumptions or knowledge that has a source outside the experience itself? Where is this epistemological ‘pure gold’ to be found?
There are, basically, two views about the nature of direct perceptual knowledge (coherentists would deny that any of our knowledge is basic in this sense). These views (following traditional nomenclature) can be called ‘direct realism’ and ‘representationalism’ or ‘representative realism’. A representationalist restricts direct perceptual knowledge to objects of a very special sort: Ideas, impressions, or sensations, sometimes called sense-data ~ entities in the mind of the observer. One directly perceives a fact, e.g., that ‘b’ is ‘G’, only when ‘b’ is a mental entity of some sort ~ a subjective appearance or sense-data ~ and ‘G’ is a property of this datum. Knowledge of these sensory states is supposed to be certain and infallible. These sensory facts are, so o speak, right up against the mind’s eye. One cannot be mistaken about these facts for these facts are, in reality, facts about the way things appear to be, and one cannot be mistaken about the way things appear to be. Normal perception of external conditions, then, turns out to be (always) a type of indirect perception. One ‘sees’ that there is a tomato in front of one by seeing that the appearance (of the tomato) have a certain quality (reddish and bulgy) and inferring as this is topically said to be automatic and unconscious, on the basis of certain background assumptions, e.g., that there typically is a tomato in front of one when one has experiences of this sort, that there is a tomato in front of one. All knowledge of objective reality, then, even what commonsense regards as the most direct perceptual knowledge, is based on an even more direct knowledge of the appearances.
For the representationalist, then, perceptual knowledge of our physical surroundings is always theory-loaded and indirect. Such perception is ‘loaded’ with the theory that there is some regular, some uniform, correlation between the way things appear (known in the perceptually direct way) and the way things actually are (known, if known at all, in a perceptual indirect way).
The second view, direct realism, refuses to restrict perceptual knowledge, to an inner world of subjective experience. Though the direct realist is willing to concede that much of our knowledge of the physical world is indirect, however, direct and immediate it may sometimes feel, some perceptual knowledge of physical reality is direct. What makes it direct is that such knowledge is not based on, nor in any way dependent on, other knowledge and belief. The justification needed for the knowledge is right there in the experience itself.
To understand the way this is supposed to work, consider an ordinary example, ‘S’ identifies a banana (learns that it is a banana) by noting its shape and colour ~ perhaps, even tasting and smelling it (to make sure it’s not wax). In this case the perceptual knowledge that is a banana is (the direct realist admits) indirect, dependence on S’s perceptual knowledge of its shape, colour, smell, and taste. ‘S’ learns that it is a banana by seeing that it is yellow, banana-shaped, etc. Nonetheless, S’s perception of the banana’s colour and shape is direct. ‘S’ does not see that the object is yellow, for example, by seeing, knowing, believing anything more basic ~ either about the banana or anything else, e.g., his own sensations of the banana. ‘S’ has learned to identify such features, of course, but when ‘S’ learned to do is not an inference, even a unconscious inference, from other things be believed. What ‘S’ acquired was a cognitive skill, a disposition to believe of yellow objects he saw that they were yellow. The exercise of this skill does not require, and in no way depends on having of any other beliefs. S’s identificatorial successes will depend on his operating in certain special conditions, of course, ‘S’ will not, perhaps, be able to visually identify yellow objects in drastically reduced lighting, at funny viewing angles, or when afflicted with certain nervous disorders. But these facts about ‘S’ can see that something is yellow does not show that his perceptual knowledge (that ‘a’ is yellow) in any way deepens on a belief )let alone knowledge) that he is in such special conditions. It merely shows that direct perceptual knowledge is the result of exercising a skill, an identificatorial skill, that like any skill. Requires certain conditions for its successful exercise. An expert basketball player cannot shoot accurately in a hurricane. He needs normal conditions to do what he has learned to do. So also, with individuals who have developed perceptual (cognitive) skills. They need normal conditions to do what they have learned to do. They need normal conditions to see, for example, that something is yellow. But they do not, any more than the basketball player, have to know they are in these conditions to do what being in these conditions enables them to do.
This means, of course, that for a direct realist direct perceptual knowledge is fallible and corrigible. Whether ‘S’ sees that ‘a’ is ‘F’ depends on his being caused to believe that ’a’ is ‘F’ in conditions that are appropriate for an exercise of that cognitive skill. If conditions are right, then ‘S’ sees (hence, knows) that ‘a’ is ‘F’. If they aren’t, he doesn’t. Whether or not ‘S’ knows depends, then, not on what else, if anything, ‘S’ believes, but on the circumferences in which ‘S’ comes to believe. This being so, this type of direct realism is a form of externalism, direct perception of objective facts, pure perceptual knowledge of external events, is made possible because what is needed, by way of justification for such knowledge has been reduced. Background knowledge ~ and, in particular, the knowledge that the experience does, and suffices for knowing ~ is not needed.
This mans that the foundations of knowledge are fallible. Nonetheless, though fallible, they are in no way derived. That is what makes them foundations. Even if they are brittle, as foundations sometimes are, everything else rests upon them
The theory of representative realism holds that (1) there is a world whose existence and nature is independent of us and of our perceptual experience of it, and (2) perceiving an object located in that external world necessarily involves causally interacting with that object, (3) the information acquired in perceiving an object is indirect: It is information most immediately about the perceptual experience caused in us by the object, and only derivatively about the object itself:
Clause 1. Makes representative realism a species of realism.
Clause 2. Makes it a species of causal theory of perception.
Clause 3. Makes it a species of representative as opposed
to direct realism.
Traditionally, representative realism has been allied with an act/object analysis of sensory experience. Its act/object analysis is traditionally a major plank in arguments for representative realism. According to the act/object analysis of experience with content involves an object of experience to which the subject is related by an act of awareness (the event of experiencing that object). This is meant to apply not only to perceptions, which have material objects (whatever is perceived), but also to experiences like hallucinations and dream experiences, which do not. Such experiences nonetheless, appear to represent something. And their objects are supposed to be whatever it is that they represent. Act/object theorists may differ on the nature of objects of experience, which have been treated as properties, Meinongian objects (which may not exist or have any form of being), and, more commonly, private mental entities with sensory qualities. (The term ‘sense-data’ is now usually applied to the latter, but has also been used as a general term for objects of sense experiences, as in the work of G.E. Moore.) Act/object theorists may also differ on the relationship between objects of experience and objects of perception. In terms of representative realism, objects of perception (of which we are ‘indirectly aware’). Meinongians, however, may simply treat objects of perception as existing objects of experience.
Realism in any area of thought is the doctrine that certain entities allegedly associated with that area are indeed real. Common sense realism ~ sometimes called ‘realism’, without t qualification ~ says that ordinary things like chairs and trees and people are real. Scientific realism says that theoretical posits like electrons and fields of force and quarks are equally real. And psychological realism says mental states like pain and beliefs are real. Realism can be upheld ~ and opposed ~ in all such areas, as it can with differently or more finely drawn provinces of discourse: For example, with discourse about colours, about the past, about possibility and necessity, or about matters of moral right and wrong. The realist in any such area insists on the reality of the entities in question in the discourse.
If realism itself can be given a fairly quick characterization, it is more difficult to chart the various forms of opposition, for they are legion. Some opponents deny that there are any distinctive posits associated with the area of discourse under dispute: A good example is the emotivist doctrine that moral discourse does not posit values but serves only, like applause and exclamation, to express feelings. Other opponents deny that entities posited by the relevant discourse exist, or, at least, exists independently of our thinking about them: Here the standard example is ‘idealism’. And others again, insist that the entities associated with the discourse in question are tailored to our human capacities and interests and, to that extent, are as much a product of invention as a matter of discovery.
Nevertheless, one us e of terms such as ‘looks’, ‘seems’, and ‘feels’ is to express opinion. ‘It looks as if the Labour Party will win the next election’ expresses an opinion about the party’s chances and does not describe a particular kind of perceptual experience. We can, however, use such terms to describe perceptual experience divorced from any opinion to which the experience may incline us. A straight-stick half in water looks bent, and does so to people completely familiar with this illusion who has, therefore, no inclination to hold that the stick is in fact bent. Such users of ‘looks’, ‘seems’, ‘taste’, etc. are commonly called ‘phenomenological’.
The act/object theory holds that the sensory experience recorded by sentence employing sense is a matter of being directly acquainted with something which actually bears the red to me. I am acquainted with a red expanse (in my visual field): When something tastes bitter to me I am directly acquainted with a sensation with the property of being bitter, and so on and so forth. (If you do not understand the term ‘directly acquainted’, stick a pin into your finger. The relation you will then bear to your pain, as opposed to the relation of concern you might bear to another’s pain when told about it, is an instance e of direct acquaintance e in the intended sense.)
The act/object account of sensory experience combines with various considerations traditionally grouped under the head of the argument for illusion to provide arguments for representative realism, or more precisely for the clause in it that contents that our senorily derived information about the world comes indirectly, that what we are most directly acquainted with is not an aspect of the world but an aspect for our mental sensory responses to it. Consider, for instance, the aforementioned refractive illusion, that of a straight stick in water looking bent. The act/object account holds that in this case we are directly acquainted with a bent shape. This shape, so the argument runs, cannot be the stick as it is straight, and thus, must be a mental item, commonly called a sense-datum. And, ion general sense-data-visual, tactual, etc. ~ is held to be the objects of direct acquaintance. Perhaps the most striking uses of the act/object analysis to bolster representative realism turns on what modern science tells us about the fundamental nature of the physical world. Modern science tells us that the objects of the physical world around us are literally made up of enormously many, widely separated, tiny particles whose nature can be given in terms of a small number of properties like mass, charge, spin and so on. (These properties are commonly called the primary qualities, as primary and secondary qualities represent a metaphysical distinction with which really belong to objects in the world and qualities which only appear to belong to them, or which human beings only believe to belong to them, because of the effects those objects produce ion human beings, typically through the sense organs, that is to say, something that does not hold everywhere by nature, but is producing in or contributed by human beings in their interaction with a world which really contains only atoms of certain kinds in a void. To think that some objects in the world are coloured, or sweet ort bitter is to attribute to objects qualities which on this view they do not actually possess. Rather, it is only that some of the qualities which are imputed to objects, e.g., colour, sweetness, bitterness, which are not possessed by those objects. But, of course, that is not how the objects look to us, not how they present to our senses. They look continuous and coloured. What then, can be these coloured expanses with which we are directly acquainted, be other than mental sense-data?
Two objections dominate the literature on representative realism: One goes back to Berkeley (1685-1753) and is that representative realism lead straight to scepticism about the external world, the other is that the act/object account of sensory awareness is to be rejected in favour of an adverbial account.
Traditional representative realism is a ‘veil of perception’ doctrine, in Bennett’s (1971) phrase. Lock e’s idea (1632-1704) was that the physical world was revealed by science to be in essence colourless, odourless, tasteless and silent and that we perceive it by, to put it metaphorically, throwing a veil over it by means of our senses. It is the veil we see, in the strictest sense of ‘see’. This does not mean that we do not really see the objects around us. It means that we see an object in virtue of seeing the veil, the sense-data, causally related in the right way to that object, an obvious question to ask, therefore, is what justifies us in believing that there is anything behind the veil, and if we are somehow justified in believing that there is something behind the veil. How can we be confident of what it is like?
One intuition that lies at the heart of the realist’s account of objectivity is that, in the last analysis, the objectivity of a belief is to be explained by appeal to the independent existence of the entities it concerns: Epistemological objectivity, this is, is to b e analysed in terms of ontological notions of objectivity. A judgement or beliefs is epistemological notions of objectivity, if and only if it stands in some specified reflation to an independently existing determinate reality. Frége (1848-1925), for example, believed that arithmetic could comprise objective knowledge only if the numbers it refers to, the propositions it consists of, the functions it employs, and the truth-values it aims at, are all mind-independent entities. And conversely, within a realist framework, to show that the members of a given class of judgements are merely subjective, it is sufficient to show that there exists no independent reality that those judgements characterize or refer to.
Thus, it is favourably argued that if values are not part of the fabric of the world, then moral subjectivity is inescapable. For the realist, the, of epistemological notions of objectivity is to be elucidated by appeal to the existence of determinate facts, objects, properties, events and the like, which exit or obtain independent of any cognitive access we may have to them. And one of the strongest impulses towards platonic realism ~ the theoretical commitment to the existence of abstract objects like sets, numbers, and propositions ~ stems from the widespread belief that only if such things exist in their own right can, we allow that logic, arithmetic and science are indeed objective. Though ‘Platonist’ realism in a sense accounts for mathematical knowledge, it postulates such a gulf between both the ontology and the epistemology of science and that of mathematics that realism is often said to make the applicability of mathematics in natural science into an inexplicable mystery
This picture is rejected by anti-realists. The possibility that our beliefs and theories are objectively true is not, according to them, capable of being rendered intelligible by invoking the nature and existence of reality as it is in and of itself. If our conception of epistemological objective notions is minimal, requiring only ‘presumptive universality’, then alternative, non-realist analysers of it can seem possible ~ and eve n attractive. Such analyses have construed the objectivity of an arbitrary judgement as a function of its coherence with other judgements, of its possession of grounds that warrant it. Of its conformity to the a prior rules that constitute understanding, of its verifiability (or falsifiability), or if its permanent presence in the mind of God. On e intuitive common to a variety of different anti-realist theories is such that for our assertions to be objective, for our beliefs to comprise genuine knowledge, those assertions and beliefs must be, among other things, rational, justifiable, coherent, communicable and intelligible. But it is hard, the anti-realist claims, to see how such properties as these can be explained by appeal to entities as they are on and of themselves. On the contrary, according to most forms of anti-realism, it is only the basis of ontological subjective notions like ‘the way reality seems to us’, ‘the evidence that is available to us’, ‘the criteria we apply’, ‘the experience we undergo’ or ‘the concepts we have acquired’ that epistemological notions of objectivity of our beliefs can possibly be explained.
The reason by which a belief is justified must be accessible in principle to the subject hold that belief, as Externalists deny this requirement, proposing that this makes knowing too difficult to achieve in most normal contexts. The internalist-Externalists debate is sometimes also viewed as a debate between those who think that knowledge can be naturalized (Externalists) and those who do not (internalist) naturalists hold that the evaluative notions used in epistemology can be explained in terms of non-evaluative concepts ~ for example, that justification can be explained in terms of something like reliability. They deny a special normative realm of language that is theoretically different from the kinds of concepts used in factual scientific discourse. Non-naturalists deny this and hold to the essential difference between normative and the factual: The former can never be derived from or constituted by the latter. So internalists tend to think of reason and rationality as non-explicable in natural, descriptive terms, whereas, Externalists think such an explanation is possible.
Although the reason, . . . to what we think to be the truth. The sceptic uses an argumentive strategy to show the alternatives strategies that we do not genuinely have knowledge and we should therefore suspend judgement. But, unlike the sceptics, many other philosophers maintain that more than one of the alternatives are acceptable and can constitute genuine knowledge. However, it seems dubitable to have invoked hypothetical sceptics in their work to explore the nature of knowledge. These philosophers did no doubt that we have knowledge, but thought that by testing knowledge as severely as one can, one gets clearer about what counts as knowledge and greater insight results. Hence there are underlying differences in what counts as knowledge for the sceptic and other philosophical appearances. As traditional epistemology has been occupied with dissassociative kinds of debate that led to a dogmatism. Various types of beliefs were proposed as candidates for sceptic-proof knowledge, for example, those beliefs that are immediately derive by many as immune to doubt. Nevertheless, that they all had in common was that empirical knowledge began with the data of the senses, that this was safe from scepticism and that a further superstructure of knowledge was to be built on this firm basis.
It might well be observed that this reply to scepticism fares better as a justification for believing in the existence of external objects, than as a justification of the views we have about their nature. It is incredible that nothing independent of us is responsible for the manifest patterns displayed by our sense-data, but granting this leaves open many possibilities about the nature of the hypnotized external reality. Direct realists often make much of the apparent advantage that their view has in the question of the nature of the external world. The fact of the matter is, though, that it is much harder to arrive at tenable views about the nature of external reality than it is to defend the view that there is an external reality of some kind or other. The history of human thought about the nature of the external world is littered with what are now seen (with the benefit of hindsight) to be egregious errors ~ the four element theory, phlogiston, the crystal spheres, vitalism, and so on. It can hardly be an objection to a theory that makes the question of the nature of external reality much harder than the question of its existence.
The way we talk about sensory experience certainly suggests an act/object view. When something looks thus and so in the phenomenological sense, we naturally describe the nature of our sensory experience by saying that we are acquainted with a thus and so, ‘given’. But suppose that this is a misleading grammatical appearance, engendered by the linguistic propriety of forming complete, putatively referring expressions like ‘the bent shape on my visual field’, and that there is no more a bent shape in existence for the representative realist to contend to be a mental sense-data, than there is a bad limp in existence when someone has, as we say, a bad limp. When someone has a bad limo, they limp badly, similarly, according to adverbial theorist, when, as we naturally put it, I am aware of a bent shape, we would better express the way things are by saying that I sense bent shape-ly. When the act/object theorist analyses as a feature of the object which gives the nature of the sensory experience, the adverbial theorist analyses as a mode of sense which gives the nature of the sensory experience. (The decision between the act/object and adverbial theories is a hard one.)
In the best-known form the adverbial theory of experience proposes that the grammatical object of a statement attributing an experience to someone be analysed as an adverb. For example,
(1) Rod is experiencing a pink square
Is rewritten as?
Rod is experiencing (pink square)-ly
This is presented as an alterative to the act/object analysis, according to which the truth of a statement like (1) requires the existence of an object of experience corresponding to its grammatical object. A commitment to the explicit adverbialization of statements of experience is not, however, essential to adverbialism. The core of the theory consisted, rather, in the denial of objects of experience, as opposed to objects of perception, and coupled with the view that the role of the grammatical object is a statement of experience is to characterize more fully the sort of experience which is being attributed to the subject. The claim, then, is that the grammatical object is functioning as a modifier, and, in particular, as a modifier of a verb. If this is so, it is perhaps appropriate to regard it as a special kind of adverb at the semantic level.
Nonetheless, in the arranging accordance to the act/object analysis of experience, every experience with content involves an object of experience to which the subject is related by an act of awareness in the event of experiencing that object. Such as these experiences are, it is, nonetheless. The experiences are supposed to be whatever it is that they represent. Act, object theorist may differ on the nature of objects of experience, which h have been treated as properties. However, and, more commonly, private mental objects in which may not exist have any form of being, and, with sensory qualifies the experiencing imagination may walk upon the corpses of times’ generations, but this has also been used as a unique application to is mosaic structure in its terms for objects of sensory experience or the equivalence of the imaginations striving from the mental act as presented by the object and forwarded by and through the imaginistic thoughts that are released of a vexing imagination. Finally, in the terms of representative realism, objects of perception of which we are ‘directly aware’, as the plexuity in the abstract objects of perception exist if objects of experience.
As the aforementioned, traditionally representative realism is allied with the act/object theory. But we can approach the debate or by rhetorical discourse as meant within dialectic awareness, for which representative realism and direct realism are achieved by the mental act in abdication to some notion of regard or perhaps, happiness, all of which the prompted excitations of the notion expels or extractions of information processing. Mackie (1976( argues that Locke (1632-1704) can be read as approaching the debate ion television. My senses, in particular my eyes and ears, ‘tell’ me that Carlton is winning. What makes this possible is the existence of a long and complex causal chain of electromagnetic radiation from the game through the television cameras, various cables between my eyes and the television screen. Each stage of this process carries information about preceding stages in the sense that the way things are at a given stage depends on the way things are at preceding stages. Otherwise, the information would not be transferred from the game to my brain. There needs to be a systematic covariance between the state of my brain and the state unless it obtains between intermediate members of the long causal chain. For instance, if the state of my retina did not systematically remit or consign with the state of the television screen before me, my optic nerve would have, so to speak, nothing to go on to tell my brain about the screen, and so in turn would have nothing to go on to tell my brain about the game. There is no information at a distance’.
A few of the stages in this transmission of information between game and brain are perceptually aware of them. Much of what happens between brain and match I am quite ignorant about, some of what happens I know about from books, but some of what happens I am perceptually aware of the images on the scree. I am also perceptually aware of the game. Otherwise, I could not be said to watch the game on television. Now my perceptual awareness of the match depends on my perceptual awareness of the screen. The former goes by means of the latter. In saying this I am not saying that I go through some sort of internal monologue like ‘Such and such images on the screen are moving thus and thus. Therefore, Carlton is attacking the goal’. Indeed, if you suddenly covered the screen with a cloth and asked me (1) to report on the images, and (2) to report in the game. I might well find it easier to report on the game than on the images. But that does not mean that my awareness of the game does not go by way of my awareness of the images on the screen. The shows that I am more interested in the game than in the screen, and so am storing beliefs about it in preference e to beliefs about the screen.
We can now see how elucidated representative realism independently of the debate between act/object and adverbial theorists about sensory experience. Our initial statement of representative realism talked of the information acquired in perceiving an object being most immediately about the perceptual experience caused in us by the object, and only derivatively about objects itself, in the act/object, sense-data approach, what is held to make that true is that the fact that what we are immediately aware of it’s mental sense-datum. But instead, representative realists can put their view this way: Just as awareness of the match game by means of awareness of the screen, so awareness of the screen foes by way of awareness of experience., and in general when subjects perceive objects, their perceptual awareness always does by means of the awareness of experience.
Why believe such a view? Because of the point that was inferred earlier: The worldly provision by our senses is so very different from any picture provided by modern science. It is so different in fact that it is hard to grasp what might be meant by insisting that we are in epistemologically direct contact with the world.
An argument from illusion is usually intended to establish that certain familia r facts about illusion disprove the theory of perception and called naïve or direct realism. There are, however, many different versions of the argument which must be distinguished carefully. Some of these premisses (the nature of the appeal to illusion): Others centre on the interpretation of the conclusion (the kind of direct realism under attack). In distinguishing important differences in the versions of direct realism. One might be taken to be vulnerable to familiar facts about the possibility of perceptual illusion.
A crude statement of direct realism would concede to the connection with perception, such that we sometimes directly perceive physical objects and their properties: We do not always perceive physical objects by perceiving something else, e.g., a sense-data. There are, however, difficulties with this formulation of the view. For one thing a great many philosophers who are not direct realists would admit that it is a mistake to describe people as actually perceiving something other than a physical object. In particular, such philosophers might admit, we should never say that we perceive sense-data. To talk that way would be to suppose that we should model our understanding of our relationship to sense-data on our understanding of the ordinary use of perceptual verbs as they describe our relation to the physical world, and that is the last thing paradigm sense-data theorists had better want. At least, many of the philosophers who objected to direct realism would prefer to express what they were objecting too in terms of a technical and philosophical controversial concept such as acquaintance. Using such a notion, we could define direct realism this way: In veridical experience we are directly acquainted with parts, e.g., surfaces, or constituents of physical objects. A less cautious version of the view might drop the reference to veridical experience and claim simply that in all parts or constituents of physical objects.
We know things by experiencing them, and knowledge of acquaintance. (Russell changed the preposition to ’by’) is epistemically prior to and has a relatively higher degree of epistemic justification than knowledge about things. Indeed, sensation has ‘the one great value of trueness or freedom from mistake’.
A thought (using that term broadly, to mean any mental state) constituting knowledge of acquaintance with thing is more or less causally proximate to sensations caused by that thing is more or less distant causal y, being separated from the thing and experience of it by processes of attention and inference. At the limit, if a thought is maximally of the acquaintance type, it is the first mental state occurring in a object to which the thought refers, i.e., it is a sensation. The things we have knowledge of acquaintance e include ordinary objects in the external world, such as the Sun.
Grote contrasted the imaginistic thoughts involved in knowledge of acquaintance with things, with the judgements involved in knowledge about things, suggesting that the latter but not the former are contentually presentive mental states. Elsewhere, however, he suggested that every thought capable of constituting knowledge of or about a thing involves a form, idea, or what we might call conceptual propositional content, referring the thought to its object. Whether contentual or not, thoughts constituting knowledge of acquaintance with a thing as r relatively indistinct, although this indistinctness does not imply incommunicability. Yet, thoughts constituting knowledge about a thing are relatively distinct, as a result of ‘the application of notice or attention’ to the ‘confusion or chaos’ of sensation. Grote did not have an explicit theory of reference e, the relation by which a thought of or about a specific thing. Nor did he explain how thoughts can be more or less indistinct.
Helmholtz (1821-94) held unequivocally that all thoughts capable of constituting knowledge, whether ‘knowledge e which has to do with notions’ or ‘mere familiarity with phenomena’ are judgements or, we may say, have conceptual propositional contents. Where Grote saw a difference e between distinct and indistinct thoughts. Helmholtz found a difference between precise judgements which are expressible in words and equally precise judgement which, in principle, are not expressible in words, and so are not communicable.
James (1842-1910), however, made a genuine advance over Grote and Helmholtz by analysing the reference relations holding between a thought and the specific thing of or about which it is knowledge. In fact, he gave two different analyses. On both analyses, a thought constituting knowledge about a thing refers to and is knowledge about ‘a reality, whenever it actually or potentially terminates in’ a thought constituting knowledge of acquaintance with that thing. The two analyses differ in their treatments of knowledge of acquaintance. On James’s first analyses, reference in both sorts of knowledge is mediated by causal chains. A thought constituting pure knowledge of acquaintance with a thing refers to and is knowledge of ‘whatever reality it directly or indirectly operates on and resembles’. The concepts of a thought ‘operating in’ a thing or ‘terminating in’ another thought are causal, but where Grote found chains of efficient causation connecting thought and referent. James found teleology and final causes. On James’s later analysis, the reference involved in knowledge of acquainting e with a thing is direct. A thought constituting knowledge of acquaintance with a thing as a constituent and the thing and the experience of it are identical.
James further agreed with Grote that pure knowledge of acquaintance with things, eg., sensory experience, is epistemically prior to knowledge about things. While the epistemic justification involved in knowledge about all thoughts about things are fallible and their justification is augmented by their mutual coherence. James was unclear about the precise epistemic status of knowledge of acquaintance. At times, thoughts constituting pure knowledge of acquaintance are said to posses ‘absolute veritableness’ and ‘the maximal conceivable truth’, suggesting that such thoughts are genuinely cognitive and that they provide an infallible epistemic foundation. At other times, such thoughts are said not to bear truth-values, suggesting that ‘knowledge’ of acquaintance is not genuine knowledge at all, but only a non-cognitive necessary condition of genuine knowledge, that is to say, the knowledge about things.
What is more, that, Russell (1872-1970) agreed with James that knowledge of things by acquaintance ‘is essentially simpler than any knowledge of truths, and logically independent of knowledge of truth’. That the mental states involved when one is acquainted with things do not have propositional contents. Russell’s reasons were to seem as having been similar to James’s. Conceptually unmediated reference to particulars is necessary for understanding any proposition mentioning a particular and, if scepticism about the external world is to be avoided, some particulars must be directly perceived. Russell vacillated about whether or not the absence of propositional content renders knowledge by acquaintance incommunicable.
Russell agreed with James that different accounts should be given of reference as it occurs in knowledge by acquaintance and in knowledge about things, and that in the former case reference is direct. But, Russell objected on the number of grounds to James’s causal account of the indirect reference involved in knowledge about things. Russell gave a descriptional rather than a causal analysis of that sort of reference. A thought is about a thing when the content of the thought involves a definite description uniquely satisfied by the thing referred to. Yet, he preferred to speak of knowledge of things by description, than of knowledge about things.
Russell advanced beyond Grote and James by explaining how thoughts can be more or less articulate and explicit. If one is acquainted with a complex thing without being aware of or acquainted with its complexity, the knowledge one has by acquaintance e with that thing is vague and inexplicit. Reflection and analysis can lead to distinguish constituent parts of the object of acquaintance and to obtain progressively more distinct, explicit, and complete knowledge about it.
Because one can interpret the reflation of acquaintance or awareness as one that is not epistemic, i.e., not a kind of propositional knowledge, it is important to distinguish the views read as ontological theses from a view one might call epistemological direct realism: In perception we are, on, at least some occasions, non-inferentially justified in believing a proposition asserting the existence e of a physical object. A view about what the object of perceptions are. Direct realism is a type of realism, since it is assumed that these objects exist independently of any mind that might perceive them: And so it thereby rules out all forms of idealism and phenomenalism, which holds that there are no such independently existing objects. Its being a ‘direct realism rules out those views’ defended under the rubic of ‘critical realism’, of ‘representative realism’, in which there is some non-physical intermediary ~ usually called a ‘sense-data’ or a ‘sense impression’ ~ that must first be perceived or experienced in order to perceive the object that exists independently of this perception. According to critical realists, such an intermediary need not be perceived ‘first’ in a temporal sense, but it is a necessary ingredient which suggests to the perceiver an external reality, or which offers the occasion on which to infer the existence of such a reality. Direct realism, however, denies the need for any recourse to mental go-between in order to explain our perception of the physical world.
This reply on the part of the direct realist does not, of course, serve to refute the global sceptic, who claims that, since our perceptual experience could be just as it is without there being any real properties at all, we have no knowledge of any such properties. But no view of perception alone is sufficient to refute such global scepticism. For such a refutation we must go beyond a theory that claims how best to explain our perception of physical objects, and defend a theory that best explains how we obtain knowledge of the world.
All is the equivalent for an external world, as philosophers have used the term, is not some distant planet external to Earth. Nor is the external world, strictly speaking, a world. Rather, the external world consists of all those objects and events which exist external to perceiver. So the table across the room is part of the external world, and so is the room in part of the external world, and so is its brown colour and roughly rectangular shape. Similarly, if the table falls apart when a heavy object is placed on it, the event of its disintegration is a pat of the external world.
One object external to and distinct from any given perceiver is any other perceiver. So, relative to one perceiver, every other perceiver is a part of the external world. However, another way of understanding the external world results if we think of the objects and events external to and distinct from every perceiver. So conceived the set of all perceivers makes up a vast community, with all of the objects and events external to that community making up the external world. Thus, our primary considerations are in the concern from which we will suppose that perceiver are entities which occupy physical space, if only because they are partly composed of items which take up physical space.
What, then, is the problem of the external world. Certainly it is not whether there is an external world, this much is taken for granted. Instead, the problem is an epistemological one which, in rough approximation, can be formulated by asking whether and if so how a person gains of the external world. So understood, the problem seems to admit of an easy solution. Thee is knowledge of the external world which persons acquire primarily by perceiving objects and events which make up the external world.
However, many philosophers have found this easy solution problematic. Nonetheless, the very statement of ‘the problem of the external world itself’ will be altered once we consider the main thesis against the easy solution.
One way in which the easy solution has been further articulated is in terms of epistemological direct realism. This theory is the realist insofar as it claims that objects and events in the external world, along with many of their various features, exist independently of and are generally unaffected by perceivers and acts of perception in which they engage. And this theory is epistemologically direct since it also claims that in perception people often, and typically acquire immediate non-inferential knowledge of objects and events in the external world. It is on this latter point that it is thought to face serious problems.
The main reason for this is that knowledge of objects in the external world seems to be dependent on some other knowledge, and so would not qualify as immediate and non-inferentially is claimed that I do not gain immediate non-inferential perceptual knowledge that thee is a brown and rectangular table before me, because I would know such a proposition unless I knew that something then appeared brown and rectangular. Hence, knowledge of the table is dependent upon knowledge of how it appears. Alternately expressed, if there is knowledge of the table at all, it is indirect knowledge, secured only if the proposition about the table may be inferred from propositions about appearances. If so, epistemological direct realism is false’
This argument suggests a new way of formulating the problem of the external world:
Problem of the external world: Can firstly, have knowledge of propositions about objects and events in the external world based on or upon propositions which describe how the external world appears, i.e., upon appearances?
Unlike our original formulation of the problem of the external world, this formulation does not admit of an easy solution. Instead, it has seemed to many philosophers that it admits of no solution at all, so that scepticism regarding the eternal world is only remaining alternative.
This theory is realist in just the way described earlier, but it adds, secondly, that objects and events in the external world are typically directly perceived, as are many of their features such as their colour, shapes, and textures.
Often perceptual direct realism is developed further by simply adding epistemological direct realism to it. Such an addition is supported by claiming that direct perception of objects in the external world provides us with immediate non-referential knowledge of such objects. Seen in this way, perceptual direct realism is supposed to support epistemological direct realism, strictly speaking they are independent doctrines. One might consistently, perhaps even plausibly, hold one without also accepting the other.
Direct perception is that perception which is not dependent on some other perception. The main opposition to the claim that we directly perceive external objects comes from direct or representative realism. That theory holds that whenever an object in the external world is perceived, some other object is also perceived, namely a sensum ~ a phenomenal entity of some sort. Further, one would not perceive the external object if one would not perceive the external object if one were to fail to receive the sensum. In this sense the sensum is a perceived intermediary, and the perception of the external object is dependent on the perception of the sensum. For such a theory, perception of the sensum is direct, since it is not dependent on some other perception, while perception on the external object is indirect. More generally, for the indirect t realism., all directly perceived entities are sensum. On the other hand, those who accept perceptual direct realism claim that perception of objects in the external world is typically direct, since that perception is not dependent on some perceived intermediaries such as sensum.
It has often been supposed, however, that the argument from illusion suffices to refute all forms of perceptual direct realism. The argument from illusion is actually a family of different arguments rather than one argument. Perhaps the most familiar argument in this family begins by noting that objects appear differently to different observers, and even to the same observers on different occasions or in different circumstances. For example, a round dish may appear round to a person viewing it from directly above and elliptical to another viewing it from one side. As one changes position the dish will appear to have still different shapes, more and more elliptical in some cases, closer and closer to round in others . In each such case, it is argued, the observer directly sees an entity with that apparent shape. Thus, when the dish appears elliptical, the observer is said to see directly something which is elliptical. Certainly this elliptical entity is not the top surface of the dish, since that is round. This elliptical entity, a sensum, is thought to be wholly distinct from the dish.
In seeing the dish from straight above it appears round and it might be thought that then directly sees the dish rather than a sensum. But here too, it relatively sett in: The dish will appear different in size as one is placed at different distances from the dish. So even if in all of these cases the dish appears round, it will; also appear to have many different diameters. Hence, in these cases as well, the observer is said to directly see some sensum, and not the dish.
This argument concerning the dish can be generalized in two ways. First, more or less the same argument can be mounted for all other cases of seeing and across the full range of sensible qualities ~ textures and colours in addition to shapes and sizes. Second, one can utilize related relativity arguments for other sense modalities. With the argument thus completed, one will have reached the conclusion that all cases of non-hallucinatory perception, the observer directly perceives a sensum, and not an external physical object. Presumably in cases of hallucination a related result holds, so that one reaches the fully general result that in all cases of perceptual experience, what is directly perceived is a sensum or group of sensa, and not an external physical object, perceptual direct realism, therefore, is deemed false.
Yet, even if perceptual direct realism is refuted, this by itself does not generate a problem of the external world. We need to add that if no person ever directly perceives an external physical object, then no person ever gains immediate non-inferential knowledge of such objects. Armed with this additional premise, we can conclude that if there is knowledge of external objects, it is indirect and based upon immediate knowledge of sensa. We can then formulate the problem of the external world in another way:
Problems of the external world: can, secondly, have knowledge of propositions about objects and events in the external world based upon propositions about directly perceived sensa?
It is worth nothing the differences between the problems of the external world as expounded upon its first premise and the secondly proposing comments as listed of the problems of the external world, we may, perhaps, that we have knowledge of the external world only if propositions about objects and events in the external world that are inferrable from propositions about appearances.
Some philosophers have thought that if analytical phenomenalism were true, the situational causalities would be different. Analytic phenomenalism is the doctrine that every proposition about objects and events in the external world is fully analysable into, and thus is equivalent in meaning to, a group of inferrable propositions . The numbers of inferrable propositions making up the analysis in any single propositioned object and event in the external world would likely be enormous, perhaps, indefinitely many. Nevertheless, analytic phenomenalism might be of help in solving the perceptual direct realism of which the required deductions propositioned about objects and events in the external world from those that are inferrable from prepositions about appearances. For, given analytical phenomenalism there are indefinite many in the inferrable propositions about appearances in the analysis of each proposition taken about objects and events in the external world is apt to be inductive, even granting the truth of a analytical phenomenalism. Moreover, most of the inferrable propositions about appearances into which we might hope to analyse of the external world, then we have knowledge of the external world only if propositions about objects and events in the external world would be complex subjunctive conditionals such as that expressed by ‘If I were to seem to see something red, round and spherical, and if I were to seem to try to taste what I seem to see, then most likely I would seem to taste something sweet and slightly tart’. But propositionally inferrable appearances of this complex sort will not typically be immediately known. And thus knowledge of propositional objects and event of the external world will not generally be based on or upon immediate knowledge of such propositionally making appearances.
Consider upon the appearances expressed by ‘I seem to see something red, round, and spherical’ and ‘I seem to taste something sweet and slightly tart’. To infer cogently from these propositions to that expressed by ‘There is an apple before me’ we need additional information, such as that expressed by ‘Apples generally cause visual appearance of redness, roundness, and spherical shape and gustatory appearance of sweetness and tartness’. With this additional information., the inference is a good on e, and it is likely to be true that there is an apple there relative to those premiered. The cogency of the inference, however, depends squarely on the additional premise, relative only to the stated inferrability placed upon appearances, it is not highly probable that thee is an apple there.
Moreover, there is good reason to think that analytic phenomenalism is false. For each proposed translation of an object and eventfully external world into the inferrable propositions about appearances. Mainly enumerative induction is of no help in this regard, for that is an inference from premisses about observed objects in a certain set-class having some properties ‘F’ and ‘G’ to unobserved objects in the same set-class having properties ‘F’ and ‘G’, to unobserved objects in the same set-class properties ‘F’ and ‘G’. If satisfactory, then we have knowledge of the external world if propositions are inferrable from propositions about appearances, however, concerned considerations drawn upon appearances while objects and events of the external world concern for externalities of objects and interactive categories in events, are. So, the most likely inductive inference to consider is a causal one: We infer from certain effects, described by promotional appearances to their likely causes, described by external objects and event that profited emanation in the concerning propositional state in that they occur. But, here, too, the inference is apt to prove problematic. But in evaluating the claim that inference constitutes a legitimate and independent argument from, one must explore the question of whether it is a contingent fact that, at least, most phenomena have explanations and that be so, that a given criterion, simplicity, were usually the correct explanation, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that if this is true it would be an empirical fact about our selves in discovery of an reference to the best explanation.
Defenders of direct realism have sometimes appealed to an inference to the best explanation to justify prepositions about objects and events in the external world, we might say that the best explanation of the appearances is that they are caused by external objects. However, even if this is true, as no doubt it is, it is unclear how establishing this general hypophysis helps justify specific ordination upon the proposition about objects and event in the external world, such as that these particular appearances of a proposition whose inferrable properties about appearances caused by the red apple.
The point here is a general one: Cogent inductive inference from the inferrable proposition about appearances to propositions about objects or events in the external world are available only with some added premiss expressing the requisite causal relation, or perhaps some other premiss describing some other sort of correlation between appearances and external objects. So there is no reason to think that indirect knowledge secured if the prepositions about its outstanding objectivity from realistic appearances, if so, epistemological direct realism must be denied. And since deductive and inductive inferences from appearance to objects and events in the external world are propositions which seem to exhaust the options, no solution to its argument that sustains us of having knowledge of propositions about objects and events in the external world based on or upon propositions which describe the external world as it appears at which point that is at hand. So unless there is some solution to this, it would appear that scepticism concerning knowledge of the external world would be the most reasonable position to take
If the argument leading to some additional premise as might conclude that if there is knowledge of external objects if is directly and based on or upon the immediate knowledge of sensa, such that having knowledge of propositions about objects and events in the external world based on or upon propositions about directly perceived sensa? Broadly speaking, there are two alternatives to both the perceptual indirect realism, and, of course, perceptual phenomenalism. In contrast to indirect t realism, and perceptual phenomenalism is that perceptual phenomenalism rejects realism outright and holds instead that (1) physical objects are collections of sensa, (2) in all cases of perception, at least one sensa is directly perceived, and, (3) to perceive a physical object one directly perceives some of the sensa which are constituents of the collection making up that object.
Proponents of each of these position try to solve the conditions not engendered to the species of additional persons ever of directly perceiving an external physical object, then no person ever gains immediate non-referential knowledge of such objects in different ways, in fact, if any the better able to solve this additional premise, that we would conclude that if there is knowledge of external objects than related doctrines for which time are aforementioned. The answer has seemed to most philosophers to be ‘no’, for in general indirect realists and phenomenalists have strategies we have already considered and rejected.
In thinking about the possibilities of such that we need to bear in mind that the term for propositions which describe presently directly perceived sensa. Indirect realism typically claim that the inference from its presently directly perceived sensa to an inductive one, specifically a causal inference from effects of causes. Inference of such a sort will perfectly cogent provides we can use a premiss which specifies that physical objects of a certain type are causally correlated with sensa of the sort currently directly perceived. Such a premiss will itself be justified, if at all, solely on the basis of propositions described presently directly perceived sensa. Certainly for the indirect realist one never directly perceives the causes of sensa. So, if one knows that, say, apples topically cause such-and-such visual sensa, one knows this only indirectly on the basis of knowledge of sensa. But no group of propositionally perceived sensa by itself supports any inferences to causal correlations of this sort. Consequently, indirect realists are in no p position to solve such categorically added premises for which knowledge is armed with additional premise, as containing of external objects, it is indirect and based on or upon immediate knowledge of sensa. The consequent solution of these that are by showing that propositions would be inductive and causal inference from effects of causes and show inductively how derivable for propositions which describe presently perceived sensa.
Phenomenalists have often supported their position, in part, by noting the difficulties facing indirect t realism, but phenomenalism is no better off with respect to inferrable prepositions about objects and events responsible for unspecific appearances. Phenomenalism construe physical objects as collections of sensa. So, to infer an inference from effects to causes is to infer a proposition about a collection from propositions about constituent members of the collective one, although not a causal one. Nonetheless, namely the inference in question will require a premise that such-and-such directly perceived sensa are constituents of some collection ‘C’, where ‘C’ is some physical object such as an apple. The problem comes with trying to justify such a premise. To do this, one will need some plausible account of what is mean t by claiming that physical objects are collections of sensa. To explicate this idea, however, phenomenalists have typically turned to analytical phenomenalism: Physical objects are collections of sensa in the sense that propositions about physical objects are analysable into propositions about sensa. And analytical phenomenalism we have seen, has been discredited.
If neither propositions about appearances nor propositions accorded of the external world can be easily solved, then scepticism about external world is a doctrine we would be forced to adopt. One might even say that it is here that we locate the real problem of the external world. ‘How can we avoid being forced into accepting scepticism’?
In avoiding scepticism, is to question the arguments which lead to both propositional inferences about the external world an appearances. The crucial question is whether any part of the argument from illusion really forces us to abandon the incorporate perceptual direct realism. To help see that the answer is ‘no’ we may note that a key premise in the relativity argument links how something appears with direct perception: The fact that the dish appears elliptical is supposed to entail that one directly perceives something which is elliptical. But is there an entailment present? Certainly we do not think that the proposition expressed by ‘The book appears worn and dusty and more than two hundred years old’ entails that the observer directly perceives something which is worn and dusty and more than two hundred years old. And there are countless other examples like this one, where we will resist the inference from a property ‘F’ appearing to someone to claim that ‘F’ is instantiated in some entity.
Proponents of the argument from illusion might complain that the inference they favour works only for certain adjectives, specifically for adjectives referring to non-relational sensible qualities such as colour, taste, shape, and the like. Such a move, however, requires an arrangement which shows why the inference works in these restricted cases and fails in all others. No such argument has ever been provided, and it is difficult to see what it might be.
If the argument from illusion is defused, the major threat facing a knowledge of objects or events in the external world primarily by perceiving them. Also, its theory is realist in addition that objects and events in the external world are typically directly perceived as are many of their characteristic features. Hence, there will no longer be any real motivation for it would appear that scepticism concerning knowledge of the external world would be the most reasonable position to take. Of course, even if perceptual directly realism is reinstated, this does not solve, by any means, the main reason for which that knowledge of objects in the external world seem to be dependent on some other knowledge, and so would not qualify as immediate and non-reference, along with many of their various features, exist independently of and are generally unaffected by perceivers and acts of perception in which they engage. That problem might arise even for one who accepts perceptual direct realism. But, there is reason to be suspicious in keeping with the argument that one would not know that one is seeing something blue if one failed to know that something looked blue. In this sense, there is a dependance of the former on the latter, what is not clear is whether the dependence is epistemic or semantic. It is the latter if, in order to understand what it is to see something blue, one must also understand what it is fort something to look blue. This may be true, even when the belief that one is seeing something blue is not epistemically dependent on or based upon the belief that something looks blue. Merely claiming, that there is a dependent relation does not discriminate between epistemic and semantic dependence. Moreover, there is reason to think it is not an epistemic dependence. For in general, observers rarely have beliefs about how objects appar, but this fact doe not impugn their knowledge that they are seeing, e.g., blue objects.
Along with ‘consciousness’, experience is the central focus of the philosophy of mind. Experience is easily thought of as a stream of private events, known only to their possessor, and baring at best problematic relationship to any other events, such as happening in an external world or similar stream of either possessors. The stream makes up the conscious life of the possessor. The stream makes up the conscious life of the possessor. With this picture there is a complete separation of mind and world, and in spite of great philosophical effort the gap, once opened, proves impossible to bridge both ‘idealism’ and ‘scepticism’ are common outcomes. The aim of much recent philosophy, therefore, is to articulate a less problematic conception of experience, making it objectively accessible, so that the facts about how a subject experiences the world are in principle as knowable as the facts about how the same subject digests food. A beginning on this task may be made by observing that experience have contents: ‘Content’ has become a technical term in philosophy for whatever it is a representation has that makes it semantically evaluable. Thus, a statement is something said to have a proposition or truth condition as its content: A term is sometimes said to have a concept as its content. Much less is known about how to characterize the contents of non-linguistic representations than is known about characterizing linguistic representations. ‘Content’ is a useful term precisely because it allows one to abstract away from questions about what semantic properties representations have, a representation’s content is just whatever it is that underwrites its semantic evaluation.
A great deal of philosophical effort has been lavished on the attempt to naturalize content, e.g., to explain in non-semantic, non-intentional terms what it is for something to be representation (have ‘content’), and what it is for something to gave some particular content than some other. There appear to be only our types of theory that have been proposed: Theories that ground representation in (1) similarity, (2) covariance (3) functional role, and (teleology.
Similarity theories hold that ‘r’ represents ‘χ’ in virtue of being similar to ‘χ’. This has seemed hopeless to most as a theory of mental representation because it appears to require that things in the brain must share properties with the thingos they represent: To represent a cat as furry appears to require something furry in the brain. Perhaps, a notion of similarity that is naturalized and does not involve property sharing can be worked out, but it is not obvious how.
Covariance theories hold that r’s representing ‘χ’ is grounded in the fact that r’s occurrence covaries with that of ‘χ’. This is most compelling when one thinks about detection systems: The firing of neural structure in the visual system is said to represent vertical orientations if its firing covaries with the occurrence of vertical lines in the visual field. Dretske (1981) and Fodor (1987) have, in different ways, attempted to promote this idea into a general theory of content.
Teleological theories hold that ‘r’ represents ’χ’ if it is r’s function to indicate (i.e., covary with) ‘χ’. Teleological theories differ depending on the theory of functions they import. Perhaps, the most important distinction is that between historical theories and functions, as historical theories individuate functional states, hence content, in a way that is sensitive to the historical development of the state, i.e., to factors such as the way the state was ‘learned’, or the way it evolved. An historical theory might hold that the function of ‘r’ is to indicate ‘χ’ only if the capacity to token ‘r’ was developed (selected, learned) because it indicates ‘χ’. Thus, a state physically indistinguishable from ‘r’ (physical stares being a-historical) but lacking r’s historical origins would not represent ‘χ’ according to historical theories.
Theories of representational content may be classified according to whether they are atomistic or holistic and according to whether they are externalistic or internalistic. Primarily, the alternative was for something expressed or implied by the intendment for integrating the different use of the terms ‘internalism’ and ‘externalisms’ has to do with the issue of how the content of beliefs and thoughts is determined: According to an internalist view of content, the content of such intentional states depend’s only on the non-relational, internal properties of the individual’s mind or brain, and not at all on his physical and social environment. While according to an externalist view, content is significantly affected by such external factors.
As with justification and knowledge, the traditional view of content has been strongly internalist in character. The main argument for externalisms derives from the philosophy of language, more specifically from the various phenomena pertaining to natural kind terms, indexical, etc., that motivate the views that have come to be known as ‘direct reference’ theories. Such phenomena seem, at least, to show that the belief of thought content that can be properly attributed to a person is dependent on facts about his environment ~, e.g., whether he is on Earth or Twin Earth, what in fact he is pointing at, the classificatorial criteria employed by the experts in his social group etc. ~ not just on what is going on internally in his mind or brain.
An objection to externalist accounts of content is that to know the contents of our beliefs or thoughts ‘from the inside’, simply by reflection. If content is dependent on external factors, then knowledge of content should depend on knowledge of these factors ~ which will not in general be available to the person whose belief or thought is in question.
The adoption of an externalist account of mental content would seem to support an externalist way: If part or all of the justification in which if only part of the content of a belief is inaccessible to the believer, then both the justifying status of other beliefs in relation to that content and the status of the content as justifying further beliefs will be similarly inaccessible, thus contravening the internalist requirement for justification. An internalist must insist that there are no justification relations of these sorts, that only internally accessible content can either be justified or justly anything else, but such a response appears lame unless it is coupled with an attempt to show that the externalist account of content is mistaken.
Atomistic theories take a representation’s content to be something that representation’s relation to other representations. What Fodor (1987) calls the crude causal theory, for example, takes a representation to be a
cow
~ a mental representation with the same content as the word ‘cow’ ~ if its tokens are caused by instantiations of the property of being-a-cow, and this is a condition that places no explicit constraints on how
cow
’s must or might relate to other representations. Holistic theories contrast with atomistic theories in taking the relations a representation bears to others to be essential to its content. According to functional role theories, a representation is a
cow
if it behaves like a
cow
behave in inference.
Internalist theories take the content of a representation to be a matter determined by factors internal to the system that uses it. Thus, what Block (1986) calls ‘short-armed’ functional role theories are internalist. Externalist theories take the content of a representation to be determined, in part at least, by factors external to the system that uses it. Covariance theories, as well as teleological theories that invoker an historical theory of functions, take content to be determined by ‘external’ factors. Externalist theories (sometimes called non-individualistic theories, following Burge, 1979) have the consequence that molecule for molecule identical cognitive systems might yet harbor representations with different contents. This has given rise to a controversy concerning ‘narrow’ content. If we assume some form of externalist theory is correct, then contents is, in the first instance ‘wide’ content, i.e., determined in part by factors external to the representing system. On the other hand, it seems clear that, on plausible assumptions about how to individuate psychological capacities, internally equivalent systems must have the same psychological capacities. Hence, it would appear that wide content cannot be relevant to characterizing psychological equivalence, philosophers attached to externalist theories of content have sometimes attempted to introduce ‘narrow’ content, i.e., an aspect or kind of content that is equivalent in internally equivalent systems. The simplest such theory is Fodor’s idea (1987) that narrow content is a function from contexts (i.e., from whatever the external factors are) to wide contents.
The actions made rational by content-involving states are actions individuated in part by reference to the agent’s relations to things and properties in his environment, wanting to see a particular movie and believing that building over there is a cinema showing it makes rational the action of walking in the direction of that building. Similarly, for the fundamental case of a subject who has knowledge about his environment, a crucial factor in masking rational the formation of particular attitudes is the way the world is around him. One may expect, then, that any theory that links the attributing of contents to states with rational intelligibility will be committed to the thesis that the content of a person’s states depends in part upon his relations to the world outside him we can call this thesis of externalism about content.
Externalism about content should steer a middle course. On the one hand, the relations of rational intelligibility involve not just things and properties in the world, but the way they are presented as being ~ an externalist should use some version of Frége’s notion of a mode of presentation. Moreover, many have argued that there exists its ‘sense’, or ‘mode of presentation’ (something ‘intention’ is used as well). After all, ‘is an equiangular triangle’ and, ‘is an equilateral triangle’ pick out the same things not only in the actual world, but in all possible worlds, and so refer ~ insofar as to the same extension, same intension and (arguably from a causal point of view) the same property, but they differ in the way these referents are presented to the mind. On the other hand, the externalist for whom considerations of rational intelligibility are pertinent to the individuation =of content is likely to insist that we cannot dispense with the notion of something in the world ~ an object, property or relation ~ being presented in a certain way, if we dispense with the notion of something external being presented in a certain way, we are in danger of regarding attributions of content as having no consequences for how an individual relates to his environment, in a way that is quite contrary to our intuitive understanding of rational intelligibility.
Externalism comes in more and less extreme versions: Consider a thinker who sees a particular pear, and thinks a thought ‘that pear is ripe’, where the demonstrative way of thinking of the pear expressed by ‘that pear’ is made available to him by his perceiving the pear. Some philosophers, including Evans (1982) and McDowell (1984), have held that the thinker would be employing a different perceptually based way of thinking were he perceiving a different pear. But externalism need not be committed to this, in the perceptual state that makes available the way of thinking, the pear is presented as being in a particular direction from the thinker, at a particular distance, and as having certain properties. A position will still be externalist if it holds that what is involved in the pear’s being so presented is the collective role of these components of content in making intelligible in various circumstances the subject’s relations to environmental directions, distances and properties of objects. This can be held without commitment to the object-dependence of the way of thinking expressed by ‘that pear’. This less strenuous form of externalism must, though, addressed the epistemological argument offered in favour of the more extreme versions, to the effect that only they are sufficiently world-involving.
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