The Argument from Illusion
DOWNLOAD
FREE
|
J. L. Austen: Sense and Sensibilia
Equations are omitted for technical reasons - download the original pdf
Descartes’s argument is, in fact, not very good as it stands, and J.L. Austen has subjected it to what is probably a highly successful attack in his work Sense and Sensibilia. He declares his intention to expose the fallacies in this first form of the argument as follows: "What we have above all to do is, negatively, to rid ourselves of such illusions as ‘the argument from illusion’ – an ‘argument’ which those (e.g. Berkeley, Hume, Russell, Ayer) who have been most adept at working it, most fully masters of a certain special, happy style of blinkering philosophical English, have all themselves felt to be somehow spurious. There is no simple way of doing this – partly because, as we shall see, there is no simple ‘argument’. It is a matter of unpicking, one by one, a mass of seductive (mainly verbal) fallacies, of exposing a wide variety of concealed motives – an operation which leaves us, in a sense, just where we began. In a sense – but actually we may hope to learn something positive in the way of a technique for dissolving philosophical worries (some kinds of philosophical worry, not the whole of philosophy); and also something about the meanings of some English words (‘reality’, ‘seems’, ‘looks’ etc.) which, besides being philosophically very slippery, are in their own right interesting. Besides, there is nothing so plain boring as the constant repetition of assertions that are not true, and sometimes not even faintly sensible; if we can reduce this a bit, it will be all to the good." However, Austen wrongly attributes this argument to Berkeley, Hume, Russell and Ayer!! This argument is only presented by Descartes! In Sense and Sensibilia he points out that there is a formal contradiction in the argument. "Of course – this may seem perhaps hardly worth saying, but in philosophy it seems it does need to be said – we make a distinction between ‘a real x’ and ‘not a real x’ only if there is a way of telling the difference between what is a real x and what is not. A distinction which we are not in fact able to draw is – to put it politely – not worth making." The premise of the argument is that we have, in the past, been deceived by our senses. What this in effect states is that we have, in the past, been able to judge that there is a distinction between appearance and reality. But the conclusion is that we cannot judge that there is a distinction between appearance and reality! So this looks like a flat contradiction. Premise: I am able to distinguish appearance from reality. Conclusion: I cannot be sure that there is a distinction between appearance and reality. This is not very promising! Austen concludes that the whole argument is a bundle of fallacious inferences: "I conclude, then, that this part of the philosophical argument involves (though not in every case equally essentially) (a) acceptance of a quite bogus dichotomy of all ‘perceptions’ into two groups, the ‘delusive’ and the ‘veridical’ – to say nothing of the unexplained introduction of ‘perceptions’ themselves; (b) an implicit but grotesque exaggeration of the frequency of ‘delusive perceptions’; (c) a further grotesque exaggeration of the similarity between ‘delusive’ perceptions and ‘veridical’ ones; (d) the erroneous suggestion that there must be such similarity, or even qualitative identity; (e) the acceptance of the pretty gratuitous idea that things ‘generically different’ could not be qualitatively alike; and (f) – which is really a corollary of (c) and (a) – the gratuitous neglect of those more or less subsidiary features which often make possible the discrimination of situations which, in other broad respects, may be roughly alike. These seem to be rather serious deficiencies." Furthermore, in what sense can we say that the senses deceive us? The act of deception implies a willful act of telling a falsehood. It is appropriately used when one person lies to another. But our senses are not in themselves endowed with conscious will. What is a sense deception? For example, suppose I mistake a round tower for a square one? Then, my senses have not deceived me; what has happened is that I have made an erroneous judgement. In fact, if I attend carefully to my sense-experience I may be able to avoid these errors. In this case the whole use of the term "deception" is probably misguided as applied to what our senses tell us. The whole topic of the formation of perceptual judgements is more involved. Some people wish to distinguish the raw material of sense-experience, which they call sense-data, from the judgements made with that data, and they claim that if they do so it is at least theoretically possible to attain to infallibility with regard to sense-judgements. However, it is also possible to deny that sense-data exist, which is tantamount to claiming that all perception involves judgement. The former position has been proposed by Russell and Ayer in modern times, and the latter position is associated with Kant.
|
Contents of
The Argument from Illusion
1 The Problem of Other Consciousnesses
2 Subjective and Objective
3 Berkeley: The Principles of Human Knowledege
4 Esse est Percipi
5 The Argument from Illusion in Descartes and Hume
6 Descartes - Sceptical Arguments - Sense Deception
7 Descartes Dream Scepticism
8 J. L. Austen: Sense and Sensibilia
9 The Argument from Illusion in Berkeley and Hume
10 Entrapment within Subjectivity
|
