Experience: An Inquiry into Some Ambiguities

CLARENDON LIBRARY OF LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY General Editor: L. Jonathan Cohen EXPERIENCES EXPERIENCES ~ AN INOUIRY IN...

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CLARENDON LIBRARY OF LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY

General Editor: L. Jonathan Cohen

EXPERIENCES

EXPERIENCES ~

AN INOUIRY INTO SOME AMBIGUITIES

]. M. HINTON OX:FORD

FELLOW OF WORCESTER COLLEGE

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1973

GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON

Oxford University Press, ElYHouse, London W. I

c::Qu:;. . . . "l? .,...-, v'

vi CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACBI LAHORE DACCA

CAPE TOWN JBADAN NAIROBI DAR ES SALAAM LUSAKA AODIS ABABA

KUALA L1,JMPUF. SINGAPORE HONG KONG TO:o:YO

DELm BOMBAY

© Oxford University Press I973

Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Oxford by Vivian Ridler Printer to the University

PREFACE

I HAVE been influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the authors listed in the Bibliography, to which the bracketed names and numbers in the text refer. However, I have been guided by so many people, teachers and students and others, that a list would be very difficult to draw up. I apologize to anyone I may unwittingly have quoted; to me this is a lively fear. If it has happened, then the process of recollection mistaken for discovery was, in all but a very few passages, laborious. I have drawn upon three of my own articles, which will be found in The Philosophical Quarterly, January 1967, Mind, April 1967, and Inquiry, October 1967. I drew on these same sources for my contribution to Wisdom: Twelve Essays, ed. Renford Bambrough. During the writing of those articles I was stimulated by reading L. B. Grant's doctoral thesis on Visual Experiences. During the writing of this book I had helpful discussions with 1. C. Hinckfuss, O. R. Jones, R. Sorabji, W. E. Cooper, J. A. Schumacher, and L. Kojen among others: I may have helped myself to some ideas from them. The Appendix contains some clarifications, relating mainly to Sections 10 and 13-

CONTENTS

An event of which one is the subject: general Things that you can experience, but that can also happen to you without your experiencing them

PART I. A VERY GENERAL NOTION AND SOME SPECIAL ONES

INTRODUCTION

I.

2.

3. Transitional: senses and forms of the verb, 'to experience' 4. Things that could not happen without being experiences 5. A contrast

PART II. A VERY SPECIAL NOTION

II a, PERCEPTION-ILLUSION DISJUNCTIONS (1)

6. Perception-illusion disjunctions: general 7. Some descriptions that apply to certain perception-illusion disjunctions 8. Some descriptions that do not apply to perception-illusion disjunctions

lIb. THE COMMON ELEMENT IN PERCEPTION AND ILLUSION g_ The common element: general 10.

Experience-reports Something about which nothing can be said 12. Comments

II.

lIe. PERCEPTION-ILLUSION DISJUNCTIONS (2) 13. Perception and other matters 14. Dlusion and other matters

APPENDIX BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

1

5

8 13 21 34

37

37

38

46

60

60 63 100 100

103

103 114

145

147

149

S

I

INTRODUCTION

The Sovereignty of Good, Routledge, 1971.

OMEONE who has more sympathy with traditional empiricism than with much of present-day philosophy may ask himself, 'How do my experiences give rise to my beliefs about an external world, and to what extent do they justify them?' He wants to refer, among other things, to unremarkable experiences, of a sort which he cannot help believing to be so extremely COmmon that it would be ridiculous to call them common experiences. Drawing a breath of fresh air is still a very common experience in many parts of the globe, but he does not mean that kind of an experience. Like the COmmon experience of doing a monotonous job of work amid exhausting noise, it would be too much an event in what he calls the external world. He mainly has in mind sense-experiences, and he thinks of them in a particular way. His way of thinking of them, roughly speaking as something 'inner', is one on which recent logico-Iinguistic philosophy has thrown a good deal of light, or so I for one believe. I still hope to throw a little more, mainly or wholly reflected, light on it in Part II of this book, where the visual case .is concerned. There might be more originality if I could offer to defend that way of thinking of visual experiences. Not that one need be opposed to anything and everything that might be meant by calling visual experiences 'inner'. Iris MurdochI is right when she says that an experienced painter might tell someone who lacked his experience, 'You do not know what red means.' However, in the relevant controversial conception-which Miss Murdoch neither ignores nor defends-sense-experiences have an 'inner' quality quite independently of any quality that is conferred on them by experience. This general idea is not devoid of truth; something may remain to be said about what truth and what falsehood there is in it. One way of getting clear about a notion is to contrast it with another, particularly another that is expressed by the same word or phrase. This can, and will, be done here. The relevant

2

INTRODUCTION

special notion of an experience contrasts, among other things, with a certain more general biographical notion of an experience, which some dictionaries indicate by the definition, 'an event of which one is the subject'. An experience, in some special sense of the word, would of course not necessarily be debarred from being an experience in that very general biographical sense as well. Indeed, if 'an experience', in the given special sense, is an experiencing and is of no very great duration, then we should rather expect it to be an event of which one was the subject, whatever else it was. The very general sense is what I shall talk about first, however. Part I is almost, though not quite, a self-contained Prologue.

PART I

A VERY GENERAL NOTION AND SOME SPECIAL ONES

(5)

I

A VERY GENERAL NOTION, AND SOME SPECIAL ONES

1. An event of which one is the subject: general

extent.

X

N event of which one is the subject': I can see three components, three requirements, in the idea of 'the subject of an event' here. In the first place, whoever is reported as having or having had the experience is the grammatical subject of the event-report, or he can easily be made the grammatical subject. Then he is also still to some extent the test-subject; it seems that the event must not depart too widely from the old, submerged meaning of an experience as an experiment, test, or trial to which something is subjected. The third requirement is one which I will now state in an ambiguous and potentially misleading, though not unnatural, form as a preliminary to analysing what it involves: the grammatical subject and test-subject of the event must also be the conscious subject, or there must be the right sort of consciousness or awareness on his part. Most of Part I is an attempt to say how this third requirement is to be taken in various types of case. The other two requirements do not present so many problems. One of them, the requirement that you be the grammatical subject of the event, just puts a ring round things you 'do' or 'are' that happen. The other adds'... and that test you in some way'. Given that you are human, this is likely to involve you in some sort of consciousness; the requirement of being tested has faded, though that of consciousness has not, or not to the same

Instead of just saying that the grammatical subject did or 'did' or 'was' or underwent whatever it was, swam the Bospharos or was ferried across it or whatever, the event-report sometimes says what almost comes to the same thing, that he 'had the experience of' swimming the Bosphorus or being

A VERY GENERAL NOTION

7

1

I

6

and knowing this or that. More restrictively again, we could impose the further requirement that the so-called 'act' must be a happening. And then we could further impose, in all its unclearness, the proviso that there must be the right sort of consciousness on the part of the subject of the verb, if the happening is to be an 'act'. I do not see any difference between an act, in this last possible sense, and an experience in the ordinary biographical sense of the word, unless you count the restriction that survives from the old meaning of a test. Where an experience is just an act in this sense, to experience it is just to 'do' it. In other words, to experience X-ing, in this sense, is just to X -provided that X-ing is a happening, provided that there is the right sort of consciousness on your part, whatever that may mean, and subject to the further restriction just mentioned that survives from the old meaning. I do not want to stress this last restriction too strongly, that the experience must be something like a test or trial through which the subject passes-to which he, she, or it is subjected. In some cases this reqnirement is imposed in a very attenuated form if at all, and we can lift it completely if we are so inclined. Still, a loose and altered connection with that old meaning of a test may help to explain why we do not colloquially call just anything and everything that we literally live through as conscious subjects an experience. The connection is altered; not only because the 'experiencing' used to be the testing and not the being tested, but because from being an occurrence whose 'event' in the old sense, outcome, establishes whether Or not the thing tested has certain qualities, an experience may now by extension have become alternatively something whose mere occurrence, or whose tautologous outcome, establishes that he, she, or it has them--{)r even merely something that has a characteristic result, such as the giving of a report. The experience of passing through the streets of a foreign city may fail to establish more than that one has some part of the wealth and leisure of a globe-trotter, and may result only in one's boring others. Yet perhaps it also tests whether one can make something of what one sees, and perhaps this fact is thrown into the background only because the outcome of the test is so often thought by others to be negative. The connection is loose; it can always be tightened. Sean O'Faolain writes, looking


ferried across it. It almost comes to the same thing because when our talk in English about someone's, or the, 'experience of' doing this or that has the present sense, as distinct from another sense that I shall come to, the word 'of'is like a mere comma. (In some languages, German for instance, it is translated by one.) The experience of swimming the Bosphorus is just the experience, swimming the Bosphorus, What the origin of this queer 'of' is, linguists would know. Probably they can tell us why we talk about the island of Mull and the township of Craignure and the virtue of honesty and the sum of one pound and the act of raising your arm, but not the postmistress of Mary Donaldson. What I have to point out is that, just as the island of Mull is not something like the map of Mull; not something other than Mull which is related to Mull in a way indicated by the word 'of'; so the experience of being ferried across the Channel, in this sense of the phrase, is not something other than being ferried across the Channel. The experience, (of) X-ing, in this sense, is no other event or thing than X-ing, the event of which one is the grammatical subject.-The reason why talk about someone's, or the, 'experience, (of) X-ing' only almost, and not qnite, comes to the same thing as talk about X-ing is that the characterization of X-ing as an experience may be essential to the sense of the passage; for instance if the question is whether things that come nnder that characterization always or sometimes come under some other specified characterization or classification. There is quite a marked resemblance between the common noun, an 'experience', and the common noun, an 'act'. The last of these common nouns is, or could be, used in an indefinite number of different ways on a scale of generality. Most generally of all, as a word for anything at all that you 'do' in the sense that you are the grammatical subject of it-you did get born, did grow. Ifwe used 'act' in this utterly general way, then even getting cremated or mummified, or posthumously rehabilitated or otherwise revalued, let alone dying, would be an act. A little more restrictively, we might impose the proviso that the subject of the verb be at least alive. Being operated on, even under a general anaesthetic, and even if you died on the table, would be an act then, in contrast to undergoing a literal or figurative post-mortem-but so would weighing eleven stone

8


I

back,' that the revolutionary period in Ireland which he had come out of when he wrote his first successful short story was too filled with dreams and ideals and a sense of dedication to be what he would now call an experience 'in the meaning of things perceived, remembered and understood'. The basic idea, here, is that-of things and times lived through; a more general idea. than that of an event of which one is the subject, and one with which I shall not be directly concerned. In other words the verb, here, is 'to live through' in a broad sense, broader than that of 'doing', while alive, something which is a happening. Within that broader general idea, the reference to 'things perceived' shows a shift towards a meaning of 'to experience' that I shall come to in Section 3; a meaning more like 'witness', 'behold', or 'perceive' than 'do' or 'undergo'. Yet these last two ideas are very much alive in the context, and to the extent that they are, the stress is on a test or trial of the mind's power to remember and understand the things done or undergone. No doubt it has something to do with the older meaning of a test that suggestions of passivity, belied by that example and many others, and of something out of the ordinary, even of something rather unpleasant, cling at times to the noun an 'experience'. However, these are associations merely, and not requirements; we speak of the gratifying experience of clearing six foot two in the high jump, and of humdrum, everyday experiences too. There remains to be investigated the requirement that there must be the right sort of consciousness on the part of the grammatical subject of the event, or in other words that he must be the conscious subject ofthe event. What does this mean?

2. Things that you can experience, but that can also happen to you without your experiencing them

Stories of Sean O'Faolam, Penguin Books, 1970.

We characteristically require the grammatical subject of an event to be in some sense its co.tiscious subject, before we are happy to call the event one of his experiences in the ordinary biographical sense of the word. But what, more exactly, does this requirement involve when the event is of the sort men~ tioned in this section's title? The answer suggested is that, in this type of r

2


9

case, we nonnally require the subject to have a certain specialkind of awareness of the event itself. This awareness, which need not be simultaneous with the event, can take many forms within certain limits. It need not amount to knowledge that the event in question is occurring or has occurred, nor is such knowledge sufficient.

8244037

B

Let us take cases in which the grammatical subject of the event might not have been the conscious subject of it, because there might not have been the right sort of consciousness or awareness on his part. And then the event would not have counted as one of his 'experiences'. Only that is putting it too strongly; the requirement of the right sort of consciousness is only more or less built into the ordinary biographical notion of an experience in this type of case-and in a more or less stringent form. For instance, suppose a young man tells you that when he and his friend Peter were conscripts, sent to suppress revolution in a distant former colony, and were taken prisoner, Peter had the experience of being operated on, in a field hospital of the revolutionaries, for the removal of six bullets. Your informant's using the word 'experience' may lead you to assume that they were not able to give Peter a general anaesthetic, but only a local or regional one, or only rice wine, or nothing at all. However, you may be inclined to let the word 'experience' pass even if you are told that Peter did have a general anaesthetic and was completely nnconscious throughout the operation-no simultaneous relevant awareness, presumably. But what if your informant goes on to add that Peter now remembers nothing at all about the entire period of his captivity? You may still be willing to call the operation one of Peter's experiences. This is partly because you will naturally assume that when Peter came to, after the operation, he realized or was told what had happened-though of course he has now forgotten this. But what if you are told that, for some peculiar reason, when Peter came to, he did not know he had been operated on, and was led to believe that his wounds had been caused by falling on stakes of sharpened bamboo in a man-trap? Even now, you may still be prepared to call the operation one of Peter's experiences, perhaps because his now-forgotten former awareness of his wounds before and after the operation counts, for you, as the right sort of consciousness on his part. His awareness of his

IO

A VERY GENERAL NOTION I

wounds was, after all, relevant to the operation although Peter did not know that it was. Let us now exchange the case for one in which we can more easily suppose the subject to have no consciousness, whether before, during, or after the event, that is at all relevant to what he undergoes. The convalescent Peter is sound asleep on the ground in a clearing when he is gently turned over by some tame animal that can smell the pahn leaves or hay he is lying on. The friend who now tells you of the incident is sure that Peter knew nothing about it at the time and knows nothing about it now. There was no sign of its disturbing his sleep, nor did he later tell of a dream that could be connected with what happened. Yet your narrator, who believes Peter to have had no kind of awareness at any time that was at all relevant to the animal's turning him over, still says that Peter had the 'experience' of being turned over by the animal. His is, in virtue of his belief, an unconventional use of the word. Nevertheless, someone might so use the word, not just as a momentary aberration but regularly; making it cover any event you literally lived through as the grammatical subject, and altogether suspending the requirement of consciousness, whatever this requirement is exactly. We could countenance such a use; partly, perhaps, because we lack some such noun as an 'undergoing' for what the happening was if it was not an experience. In point offact we sometimes countenance a use in which not even the requirement that the grammatical subject and testsubject be a living thing, let alone any requirement of consciousness, is involved; when we are told that a bullet, or the fuselage of an aircraft, or the hull of a ship, experiences such and such testing stresses under such and such conditions. Since this is just a matter of refraining from imposing a proviso or restriction, it is not strictly speaking an analogy; or at any rate not quite in the way in which it is an analogy to talk about a malicious deck-chair. But returning to cases in which we do require 'the right sort of consciousness', and keeping to cases in which there might fail to be this, what is the right sort of consciousness? To be less vague by a perceptible degree, it is, in these cases, some sort of awareness of the event in question, the very event of which one

2


is the grammatical subject, and about which the question is whether it is to be numbered among one's experiences or not. Some sort of awareness of it; you need not know, need not in that sense be at all aware, that it is X-ing that is happening or that happened. Twinges of pain, accompanied by quite confused ideas as to what was going on, are enough-sufficient, not necessary-for Peter to be said to have had, in being operated on, the experience of being operated on. In the ordinary biographical sense which is our sale concern at present, it is possible to have a certain experience without knowing that you are having that experience, and even 'without knowing a thing about it' at the time. But do we include all cases where you know? Is knowledge that you are X-ing sufficient for experiencing X-ing? I do not think so, or at least I do not think it is sufficient to make the case a clear one. I am being attracted to the earth by its gravitational pull, and I know this, but I am not exactly having the experience of being so attracted-as I might, if I were ending a period ofweightlessness. It is not just that I am always being so attracted; I might know that I was again being so attracted, without having the experience of again being so attracted-if some arrangement to eliminate the effects on me of having attained escape velocity had been operating, a rotating space station perhaps. A blind man with the wind in his face and a voluble sighted companion at his side may have the experience of coming into New York harbour, but does the stoker have that experience, given merely that he hears the chief say 'We are entering New York harbour'? Only at a pinch. If knowing that you are X-ing is neither sufficient nor necessary for you to experience your X-ing, then it seems that some special sort of awareness of your X-ing is necessary: not just any and every sort of awareness of your X-ing will do. The sort of awareness we require is, I believe, a queer and complex thing, which varies as X-ing varies. Not surprisingly, or it would hardly be awareness of X-ing. Because the awareness must be appropriate to the X-ing, someone who is always discontented though lovingly cared for hardly experiences being cared for or being loved-the aim or object of such love and care is the happiness of the loved one. Someone who is

I2


contentedly exploited scarcely experiences exploitation, and the first task of the agitator may be to get him to experience it-resistance is an appropriate reaction to injustice, though hardly its aim or object. To narrow the question down, what does the so-called right sort of awareness, the kind that makes the common noun 'an

experience' conventionally applicable, involve in this type of case, when moreover the awareness is simultaneous with its object, the event lived through? There is the hypnotized or locally anaesthetized patient who perceives the operation in a more or less normal way. There is the case where the patient does not perceive the operation but feels a certain amount of pain. Illusion is another thing that sometimes counts as the right sort of awareness. When you have the experience of being left standing in the station by another train, it is sometimes because you have the illusion ofleaving the other train standing. Sometimes it is perception, but perception of something other than your X-ing. I assume it will be sufficient if your perceiving the other thing is pretty directly due to your X-ing, as when a motorist in a car with good suspension has the experience of being in a major earthquake, perceiving only the sudden swaying of some trees and then the effects in the first township he comes to. I think one can give something like the following general account. The awareness, when it is simultaneous with the X-ing, where the X-ing could have happened without being an experience, may consist in the subject's perceiving by means of his senses that he is X-ing. It may consist in his perceiving something else, where his perceiving that other thing is pretty directly due to his X-ing. It may consist in his perceiving something that is a part of what we mean by his X-ing, or that is closely connected with the fact of his X-ing. When he does not know that he is X~ing, his awareness will consist in his 'doing' something that can be thought of, analogically perhaps, as a confused, indirect, or incomplete way of perceiving that he is X-ing; his relevant awareness is then a 'bad picture' or confused impression of his X-ing. This awareness, whatever it may consist in, e.g. feeling pain, must be a pretty direct result of his X-ing and must have a sort of relevance or appropriateness to X-ing, whatever X-ing may be in the given case.

3


'3

3. Transitional: senses and forms of the verb, 'to experience'

To experience is, roughfy, 'to undergo, witness': two different verbs here, and each verb has various forms. Confusion threatens as a result of this situation.

'To experience' is really two or more quite different verbs: two concern us here. (aJ There is the transparent, colourless, or empty verb, akin to 'undergo' or 'do', with which we have so far been concerned: to experience X-ing, to X plus provisos. I will mark this verb off as 'to a-experience'. (b) There is a verb of which a very rough paraphrase would be 'to witness'. I will mark this one offas 'to b-experience' and will describe it further. We can distinguish, independently, between different kinds of grammatical object which those two verbs might take; different sorts of thing that you might be said to a-experience and/or b-experience. A thing you a-experience is of course always something you 'do', but a thing you b-experience is only sometimes something you 'do'. When a thing you a-experience or b-experience is something you 'do', it will belong to one of two kinds: (1) the kind of thing with which Section 2 was concerned, things that could happen to you without exactly being among your experiences, because you can fail to have the right sort of awareness of them, and (2) the kind of thing with which Section 4 will be concerned-things of which we find it natural to say that they could not happen without being experiences, intending some sort of rather ambiguous contrast with the first kind of thing. I will say that you I-esperience the first kind of thing and 2-experience the second. So, as far as what has been said up to this point goes, there might be: a-I-experiencing, b-I-experiencing, a-2-experiencing, and b-2-experiencing. However, it will turn out to be less than certain that there is such a thing as b-2-experiencing. I said in Section 2 that we do not invariably impose the stipulation that the grammatical snbject of the event must have the right sort ofawareness or consciousness if it, if you are to call it one of his a-experiences. But when this pointed stipulation is being imposed-and it must not be confused with a mere vague stipulation that there must be the right sort of consciousness 'in the case' or 'on the part ofthe subject'-then I shall say that the

'4


I

verb 'to ca-experience', is being used; a special form of 'to a-experience'. 'To ca-experience' is the verb you are using when you say that a man who is engrossed in the hovering of a hummingbird while he is being approached by an alligator does not have the a-experience of being approached by an alligator. Or that a man whose attention is wholly devoted to a pretty girl while he is being cold-shouldered by another man or while he is missing his train does not have the a-experience of being coldshouldered or missing his train. It is also the verb you are using if you say that, on the narrator's assumptions, Peter did not really a-experience the animal's turning him over. But this example must not lead one to forget what those other examples bring out; namely, that you can fail to ca-experience your xing, without being 'unconscious' in the flat, modern sense; provided that you do not have the right kind of awareness if your X-ing. When the requirement that you must have the right kind of awareness of your X-ing is not being imposed; when you are not requiring the grammatical subject of the event to have any sort of awareness if it, before you will consent to call it one of his 'experiences', then I shall say that you are using the verb, 'to ua-experience'. The letter u merely indicates that the colourless, empty, auxiliary-like verb, the a verb, is now unencumbered by that particular, pointed consciousnessstipulation. It is not meant to suggest that the verb is now exactly the same as the verb 'to undergo', or that the subject is unconscious, or even that he is unconscious of X-ing. These associations mayall, even including the last one, be seriously misleading in some contexts. If you were to stretch a point and say that the man whose attention was elsewhere did have the experience of being cold-shouldered, this would not mean that he was having it while unconscious. True, he would be unconscious of being cold-shouldered. But it is now widely helci.through the influence of Wittgenstein, Ryle, Hampshire, and others-that there may be things of which it is neither appropriate to say that you can do or undergo them unconsciously, nor yet true to say that whenever you do or undergo them you have some kind of consciousness of doing or undergoing them. If there are such things, and Section 4 is about this, then you might be said to ua-experience them. Then perhaps some things

3


'5

you can be said to ua-experience are by no means passive, in which case 'undergo' would not at all be a happy word to use. 'To ua-experience', then, is just the a verb unrestricted by the pointed consciousness-stipulation which is imposed in the use of 'to ca~experience'; so that whichever of those verbs you are using, you are using the verb 'to a-experience'. So now, as far as what has been said goes, there may be: ua-l-experiencing, ca-I-experiencing, ua-2-experiencing, and ca-2-experiencing. However, it will turn out to be less than certain that there is such a thing as ca-2-experiencing. Although ca-l-experiencing involves awareness, it would be misleading to call the verb a verb of awareness. This would make it sound a lot more like 'witness' and 'perceive' and 'b-experience' than it is. Since 'to b-experience' is a verb of awareness, there is a difference here between the act and the object, the b-experiencing and the thing that is b-experienced. The thing that is b-experienced is, say, an operation which is being performed on someone with a local anaesthetic or under hypnosis, while the b-experiencing is not the operation, but the having of a certain sort of possibly distinct, possibly indistinct awareness of the operation. Contrastingly, in the case of aexperiencing, there is no difference between the act and the object. The 'doing' is what is 'done', the experiencing is what is experienced in the a sense-though of course you can make the linguistic distinction, otherwise you could not say that there was no difference. A 'b-experience' then, if you mean the experiencing, is a very special kind of a-experience, since not all our a-experiences are cognitive acts: it is also not the kind of a-experience mentioned in the title of Section 2. And if by 'a b-experience' you mean the object, the thing that is b-experienced by the b-experiencer, an odd thing to mean but hardly an impossible one in philosophy at least, where 'a perception' has been used to mean a thing perceived, then this is not necessarily an a-experience at all. Although I have said that the awareness involved in ca-lexperiencing X-ing need not be simultaneous with the X-ing, and although I will now say that b-experiencing need not always be simultaneous with the thing that is b-experienced; still it does seem that when the awareness involved in ca-l-experiencing X-ing takes the form of experiencing, in the b sense of

16


course, then it has to be virtnally simultaneous with the X-ing. In other words, b-I-experiencing is virtually simultaneous with the thing you a-I-experience and b-I-experience. The letters and numbers give this remark the look of an arbitrary stipulation, but it is not meant to be one. The prefixes mark off expressions in ordinary use, actual received uses of the verb 'to experience'. In one sense or use of the verb we cannot experience something we ourselves undergo or 'do' without being aware of it at the time; prefix b-l. In another sense we can; prefix ca-I, or of course ua-l. In one sense we can experience something that is not happening at anything like the same time-experiencing a supernova; prefix b. In another sense we cannot; pre-

fix a, alternatively b-l. And so on. I The general b sense sometimes shows itself by ceasing to take as its object something one does or undergoes. It then may take as its object some environmental event or object, and stands for a kind of perception. This, therefore, is 'b-' without being either 'b-I' or 'b-Z'. I will sometimes call it 'db-experiencing', because it has got detached from objects that are events ofwhich one is the grammatical subject, and because, with a qualification we shall come to, the b-experiencer in db-experiencing is pretty much of a detached observer. This is when you experience the great firework display, the carnival of flowers, the enthronement of the Patriarch without being the Patriarch, the Northern Lights, a supernova, the Taj Mahal. As a second kind of b-experiencing whose object is not an event of which one is the subject, we should perhaps list the b-experiencing of a state of which one is the subject, but which is not a happening. As when, in and by the pangs of thirst, one experiences dehydration conceived in a static sense; OT, in and by an unbearable itching, experiences the lack of some vitamin or other chemical. We are strongly inclined to introduce, and ifwe are careful we can introduce, a 'seeming' or 'ostensible' sense of b-l-experiencing X-ing, call it sb-I-experiencing X-ing, which does not entail X-ing. The only thing is that we are then prone to fall into a certain mistake. We may get the mistaken idea that 'b-Iexperiencing X-ing' can be defined as 'sb-I-experiencing X-ing because of, or accompanied by, X-ing'. This is a mistake' I Ifin some of these cases the reader would use the noun but not the verb, then this counts in my sub-language as 'using the verb or function'.

3 A VERY GENERAL NOTION 17 because b-I-experiencing X-ing does not necessarily involve sb-I-experiencing X-ing. This is so because, in the case of b-Iexperiencing X-ing, which is linked to X-ing by being pretty directly due to X-ing, the links of relevance or appropriateness between the awareness and the X-ing can afford to be quite loose; it will still count as awareness of X-ing in virtne of the causal link; whereas in the case of sb-I-experiencing X-ing the links of relevance or appropriateness have got to be that much tighter or closer, since these must unaidedly make the awareness count as (ostensible) awareness ofX-ing, there being no causal link to help them out since there need be no actnal X-ing. For instance, one would hardly report a sudden pain in the back, as one lay awake in bed, in terms of one's having 'seemingly had the experience of being turned over by some animal', and yet such a pain could, with the event, have constitnted Peter's actually b-I-experiencing this indignity ifit was caused by this. Thus if we say that 'sb-I' is weaker than 'b-I', we must remember that in defiance of the literal meaning of weakness it is equally true the other way round; neither logically entails the other. A thing which may at first sight seem rather odd is this, that the feature or peculiarity, of b not entailing sb, fails to be displayed by the parallel notion of sdb-experiencing, which we can introduce ifwe like. {No numbers here, of course, any more than in db, since the object of the verb here is not something I 'do' or that happens to me at all, and consequently neither a Type One nor a Type Two thing of that kind.) The tourist, and this is just a fact of usage, is only at a pinch said to db'experience the enthronement ofthe Patriarch' ifhe has broken his glasses and, as a result, it might just as well have been one of those festivals where they wear masks and throw tomatoes at one another. He might keep the English language growing by saying, drily and wryly, that he really mis-experienced the enthronement of the Patriarch. So, it is hardly, only at a pinch, possible to db-experience something without sdb-experiencing it; not that this fact gives us a deep understanding of what sdbexperiencing is. The fact ought not on reflection to seem too odd: b-I-experiencing is 'experiencing' a thing anyway, since it involves a-I-experiencing it, whereas db-experiencing has got to work harder to be 'experiencing' a thing. A further reason

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for the fact may be this, that the notion of db-experiencing may still vestigially involve the notion of something not so merely observational, a notion of experimenting or testing as distinct from being tested. There is not much left ofthis idea; the man who tests metal springs is not 'experiencing' them, or if he is this would now be called trade jargon. And it is mainly the streets of Calcutta that put the tourist to a test, rather than the other way round; still there is a trace of the suggestion that he is seeing whether they are what they are supposed to be. A warning: what we say about any form of the verb 'to experience' is about that verb, not about the verbs which report particular forms of, say, b-experiencing or db-experiencing. Thus what we say of sb-I-experiencing and of sdb-experiencing does not go over, automatically, to such particular forms of sdb-experiencing as, say, seeming to see. To represent oneself as talking about 'kinds of thing' is a source of confusion here. Whatever is true of men, is true of Englishmen; not everything that is true of 'perceiving' or of 'b-experiencing' is true of 'seeing' or 'hearing'. Similarly, you could say all there was to say about all these special verbs or functions without having even begun to talk about the general ones. In distinguishing so many uses of 'to experience', have I seen matters as more complex than they really are? Can it be argued in particnlar that it is a mistake to posit both the a and the b senses? Partly recapitulating and partly expanding: if someone maintains that there is the a sense but not the b sense, then one may retort that the verb is nsed in the db sense nowadays. People do say that you should experience the Northern Lights, the Taj Mahal. Perhaps the 'a only' theorist will say they are using language bad!y; I should prefer not to say so. True, he may alternatively say that such uses are elided a uses-you should experience seeing the Northern Lights. But there are other arguments against him. The argument from adverbs and adverbial phrases for instance: the operation is experienced hazily but not undergone hazily. To attach an adverb is, as a rule and excepting queer adverbs, to make a predicate or function more specific: to see shortsightedly or love hopelessly entails, without being entailed by, seeing or loving. Hence in

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general, though not universally, the adverbial test for a difference of sense is as fair as the test by a difference in respect of species, such as 'Some men are castles, no male humans are castles, therefore "man" has another sense as well as "male human".' Then there is the argument from the fact that the interrogative 'What ... ?' in 'What did he experience?' does not always seem to mea.." what was it that got a-experienced or b-experienced; we ask the question when we know this already. If, for instance, we idly wonder what the rook which is being swung about in its nest by the wind is experiencing, this is not a question which answers itself: we are idly wondering in what W'!J' the bird is (ca-l, b-l) experiencing being swung about in its nest by the wind. It reminds us of the similar use of 'What ... ?' with 'see'; what do they see, the Dungarvan townsfolk wonder, as the tourists from overseas gaze at the perfectly ordinary market square, with its shops of no vast size and their, unsurprisingly Irish, proprietors' names on the boards. Then there is the argument that the 'of' in 'the experience of' is surely not always a mere comma, but sometimes more like a weakened form of the 'that' in 'awareness that one is X-ing'. In other words it would surely be wrong to say that in no sense of the verb, 'to experience', was there a difference bet-ween act and object. If someone maintains that there is the b sense but not the a sense, then against him there is the retort that one can caexperience things without b-experiencing them. Moreover the previous or subsequent awareness, in such a case, need not always be an event or process, which is what experiencing is; so that there would still be ca-experiencing without b-experiencing, even if b-I-experiencing did not have to be simultaneous with the thing b-I-experienced. There is the argument that people do not look forward to a chronicle of mental events merely, when they look forward to hearing about a sailor's experiences. There is the argument that the verb sometimes has the ua sense. There is the argument from adverbs and adverbial phrases again: it is not the patient's awareness which we mean to describe as having had no ill effects when we say that he experienced the operation without ill effects. There is the argument that witnessing is not the same thing as undergoing, but that many dictionaries define 'erleben' as 'live through,

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For the 'also' see the Oxford Latin Dictionary, Fasc. III; cf. Lewis and Short.

undergo, witness' and 'erfahren' as 'discover, witness, undergo'. The shorter English dictionaries are probably going to go on saying that there is just the one sense of 'to experience', namely 'to undergo, witness'. But from some points of view it seerns useful to stress that there is an important difference between undergoing and witnessing, even when we allow that someone can witness what he undergoes. And of course these are only very rough synonyms: there is no reason to think that any other expression means exactly the same as 'He a-experienced Xing', or that any other expression means exactly the same as 'He b-experienced Y'. It is not hard to see how the b sense might have come into being. The sense of 'being human and being put to a test' would emerge with or soon after the obsolete English sense, 'to put to a test', since the first English users of the verb had their eye on Latin and experiri meant to try, either by testing or attempting, also to resort to or to undergo.' To be human and be put to a test is often the same as to ca-experience something, X-ing. Attention might focus on, and the verb might come to stand for, the simultaneous awareness of X-ing which ca-experiencing X-ing often involves, b-I-experiencing X-ing. The b sense might then be broadened as to its objects. Another way of explaining why we do not find it strange that the same verb is used in the two senses, but this makes it seem more like purming on our part, is to say that both verbs can be paraphrased-'to be the subject of'. In the a sense this means inter alia the grammatical subject, and the grammatical object must be an event, while in the b sense 'subject' means something like witnesser and the object can be anything witnessable. True, the first of those working models has imperfect application to those languages in which the word for an experience is not derived from experiri. But if a poet has to attend to his own language in order to exploit its peculiar strengths and avoid its peculiar pitfalls, then the same is true to some extent of a philosopher. Most obviously in the case of a critical philosopher, an anti-sophist, who wants to find out how much of its plausibility some conception owes to the tricks oflanguage. These, at least as far as my knowledge reaches, are always the tricks of some particular language; they may or may not be easy to

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parallel in others. One would have failed to avoid such a pitfall if one were in effect to reason: 'I am at present the subject of a state of consciousness. Such a state is a categorial thingexperienced, something that could not happen at all without being experienced. Therefore, I am in a state whose esse is to be b-2-experienced or otherwise ca-2-experienced, one whose esse is to be the object of consciousness. And the occurrence and nature of this state are things I have established by the most rigorous empirical method.'

4. Things that could not happen without being experiences

In what sense do we require the experiencer to be 'the conscious subject' of the event, when the event is the sort of thing that is mentioned in this section's title? The answer which is accepted here is that we do not in this type of case require consciousness of the event itself. It is enough if the event consists in or involves consciousness of something else. This widefy heldview is tested in three types of case, and the discussion narrows to a preliminary exploration if the sense or senses in which we may besaid to experience seeing.

Still under the general heading of events of which one is the subject, we come to a different kind from the kind with which Section 2 was concerned: we come properly to things you 2-experience, or Type.Two cases as I will call them. They are non-probingly defined or demarcated as things which it is natural to describe in the really rather ambiguous way that appears as this section's title, intending some sort of indistinct contrast with Type One cases, things you I-experience. Type Two cases include seeing, being tortured, and going for a walk. Our essentialist tendencies may sometimes lead us to use the expression 'an experience' to mean 'a Type Two thing'; thus producing a special sense of the expression, a special notion of an experience, to set beside the special notions already mentioned: e.g. 'a b-experiencing' and 'a b-experienced'. None of these special notions is the same thing as the very special notion of Part II. As I have implied, we sometimes call Type Two cases 'categorical' or 'categorial' experiences, in contrast to the 'experiences per accidens' with which Section 2 was concerned.

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from someone whom I cannot identify.

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I Although what I shall say here has been arrived at by discarding numerous ideas and formulations, I have the fear that the outcome is almost a quotation

4 (i). Let us begin cheerfully with the kind exemplified by being tortured.' Being tortured by having your finger-nails pulled out is not just the same thing as having your finger-nails pulled out, since if you have lost consciousness you are hardly being tortured, not being tormented, certainly not being 'put to the question', though you are still being physically abused. Being tortured is, roughly speaking, ca-I-experiencing and b-lexperiencing having your finger-nails pulled out-or some such physical abuse which would normally cause great pain. More accurately speaking, to be paradigmatically tortured is to be a central case of ca-I-experiencing physical abuse: it is to ca-lexperience and b-I-experience such abuse by undergoing itwi~h, simultaneously, the most appropriate kind of awareness of It; the kind that it would normally cause and that it is intended to cause. However, this leads to a linguistic puzzle. We say quite naturally of someone that he had the experience, (of) being tortured, or that he experienced torture. And being tortured is the same thing as (ca-l-, b-l-) experiencing physical abuse. So why do we not quite naturally say that he had the experience, (of) experiencing physical abuse, or that he experienced experiencing physical abuse? One answer would be that, in 'He experienced torture', the verb has an unweakened 'ca-l, b-l' sense but the noun has a weakened sense-some form of torture, some form that being tortured can take such as having your finger-nails pulled out; i.e. some kind ofphysical abuse, i.e. physical abuse. So since the noun does not occur in the unweakened sense there, you cannot substitute for it the paraphrase '(ca-l-, b-l-) experiencing physical abuse'. You cannot in that way obtain the thing we do not say; but the idea of its being obtainable by substitution is what made it seem puzzling that we do not say it. True, you could substitute 'ua-experiencing physical abuse' for the noun

being experiences. Or if you prefer, we are inclined to say'Experiences; that is what they are, whether they occur or not.' This in-between sort of a-2-experiences itself splits into at least two different kinds.

Just using these terms does not throw much light: my id~a in this section is to test, and in the event to confirm, a certain widely held view of what it is for something to be a Type Two experience: namely, that it is a trivial linguistic matter ~nd. has nothing to do with any awareness of awareness. 0,:, this Vl~w, the only sense in which 'you are invariably the COnsCIOUS subject in these cases' is that these are cases of consciousness. It is not that in these cases, you invariably have some kind of awareness of the event of which you are the grammatical subject. So ifyou express the consciousness-stipulation in a vague way, by saying that there must be the right sort of consciousness in the case, or on the part of the subject, for the case to count as an experience; then although this requirement is always satisfied in TYpe. Two cases, and only sometimes satisfied in Type One cases, It 18 ll?t always satisfied in Type Two cases in the one and only way in which it is sometimes satisfied in Type One cases. The only way in which it is always satisfied in Type Two cases is, not by the event's being attended by the right sort of awa~enes~ of it ~or it to be called an 'experience', but by the event s being or involving the right sort of awareness of something for it, the event to be called an 'experience'. In the terminology I have introduced, the view can be expressed succinctly: 2-experiences are not invariably ca-experienced and a fortiori not invariably b-experienced. (Not invariably ca-experienced, for 'to caexperience' was explained, not as the auxiliary ~th the :-ague proviso that there must be the right sort of consc~~usness. m the case or on the part of the subject, but as the auxiliary WIth the distinct, pointed proviso that there must be the right sort of consciousness of the X-ing, the event of which one is the grammatical subject.) The examples of Type Two experiences which spring most readily to mind are states of consciousness, such as pain or the varieties of sense-experience. Things, in fact, that are or can be involved in b-experiencing things-so that they are inevitably experiences in the sense of being instances of b-experiencing, even if they are not inevitably experiences in any ot~er ser:se. However, I will first consider an in-between class. ThIS consists of things that are not exactly states of consciousness, anyway not naturallv so classified, but about which we are none the less strongly inciined to say that they could not happen without

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abuse. If it is, then we can say that (a-2-) experiencing torture is ca-2-experiencing torture; i.e. ca-2-experiencing ca-I-experiencing and b-I-experiencing physical abuse. Otherwise, it will be sensible to opt for the view that by (a-2-) experiencing torture we just mean, ua-2-experiencing it. For it would not be sensible to conclude both that there is in fact no such invariable secondorder awareness, and that we are all for ever mistakenly saying that there is such awareness-when we utter the gnomic saying, 'Being tortured is the same thing as experiencing torture'. Instead, we ought in that case to take it that 'experiencing' has a weakened, ua sense in the gnomic saying, which therefore reduces experiencing torture to being tortured rather than asserting some sort oflaw by which the latter involves the former. Another thing that would not be sensible is, simply to assume for no reason at all that 'experiencing' does not have a weakened sense here, and to conclude from this that, since we cannot very well be mistaken in that gnomic saying of ours, there must be the invariable second-order awareness. That would be glossogenic pseudo-psychology of the worst sort; not because of any general principle that one cannot infer from language to reality, but because one cannot infer from a baseless assumption. We would be assuming that language is, at a certain point, more regular than in general we know it to be. So the question we have to ask ourselves is this. Is it or is it not true as a matter of psychological fact that when someone is tortured by having his finger-nails pulled out, he invariably has a second-order awareness, an awareness of his awareness of having his finger-nails pulled out, or in other words an awareness of his pain? To the best of my knowledge and belief the only reason for the affirmative is the following bad reason; that we cannot make ordinary, non-theoretical sense ofthe remark'In his agony he had the awareness of his finger-nails being pulled out, awareness that makes it linguistically correct to call his having his finger-nails pulled out one of his "experiences"; however, he was in no wqy aware of hauing that awareness.' We can, in a way, make non-ordinary, theoretical or anti-theoretical sense of this remark; we can take it to mean that the distinct and resolute posit, of such a second-order awareness as a psychological fact, is unwarranted. We cannot, however, make ordinary, non-theoretical and non-philosophical sense, datum82«037

'torture' in the weakened sense of 'physical abuse'. This would give you 'He (ca-l-, b-l-) experienced ua-experiencing physical abuse', which would be like 'He (ca-l-, b-l-) experienced undergoing physical abuse'. But it is not surprising that, although you can legitimately say this, we do not say it; the use of iundergo', or 'experience' in its place and in the same sense, is pointless here. Another answer, to much the same effect, would be that 'torture' and 'being tortured' have an unweakened sense in 'He experienced torture' and 'He had the experience of being tortured', but that the verb 'to experience' has the weakened, 'ua' sense here. So by substitution you can get 'He ua-experienced ca-I-experiencing physical abuse' and 'He ua-experienced b-I-experiencing physical abuse'. But it is not surprising that we say neither of these things, i.e. that we do not say 'He experienced experiencing physical abuse' in either ofthese senses. For neither of those things is worth saying. The first would be like saying 'He underwent undergoing physical abuse not without the relevant sort of awareness', and the second would be like saying 'He underwent or "did" having the relevant sort of simultaneous awareness of physical abuse that he was undergoing'. On neither of these views is there any regular implication, when we speak of someone's experiencing torture or having the experience of being tortured, that he has an awareness if his awareness of being physically abused. The real alternative is to say that this implication is indeed present, i.e. that whenever we speak of someone as experiencing torture or having the experience of being tortured, we mean that he ca-2-experienced ca-l- and b-I-experiencing physical abuse. Ifwe do not naturally say 'He experienced experiencing physical abuse', this must simply be because you cannot in fact ca-l- and b-I-experience physical abuse without also ca-2-experiencing your ca-l- and b-I-experiencing physical abuse. How are we to choose between these alternatives? Surely the only way is by an independent attempt to ascertain the relevant non-linguistic facts. We must ask ourselves whether, in point of fact, the ca-I-experiencing and b-I-experiencing of physical abuse is always accompanied by a second-order awareness, an awareness of ca-I-experiencing and b-I-experiencing physical


.,

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happened; while the statement, that someone had a certain capacity, as distinct from the statement that he acquired or lost it, is not. Not being an event in the modern sense of a change nor, for that matter, necessarily an event in the older sense of an outcome, a capacity is not a process if a process is a series of changes, or a change in which different phases can be discerned; b-experiencing is often and hence characteristically, though not always, a process in this sense. There is thus no warrant for positing a b-Z-experiencing of one's b-l-experiencing having one's finger-nails pulled out, nor is there warrant for positing any other kind of invariable awareness of the b-l-experiencing. The conclusion to be drawn is that 'experiencing torture' just means undergoing torture, i.c, being tortured, i.e. experiencing physical abuse. We are presented with an explanation of why you cannot be tortured without experiencing it; of why, and in what sense, torture is 'categorically' an.experience. Someone who does not want to say that there is an invariable, and who consequently does not want to say that there is a necessary, b-experiencing ofone's b-experiencing physical abuse may still insist on saying that, if you b-l-experience extreme physical abuse, then you not only a-experience but also bexperience torture. (Note that if you b-experience torture, then since being tortured is a Type Z X-ing or being X-ed, you b-Zexperience torture.) In this case, however, what he is pleased to call b-experiencing torture, or cognitively experiencing torture, will for him be nothing over and above b-experiencing extreme physical abuse; it will consist solely in this. You will be said to b-experience torture simply in that, inasmuch as, in the sense that, you b-experience physical abuse. Awareness of that which, since you are in the given way aware of it, can be called torture, is to be called awareness of torture for short. This is an intelligible proposal and rule. In contrast, if someone wants to say that you b-experience your b-experiencing ofphysical abuse simply in that, or inasmuch as, or in the sense that, you bexperience physical abuse, we can hardly understand him. Your b-experiencing physical abuse is to be called your bexperiencing your b-experiencing physical abuse-for what? For long? He must either make a substantive claim that you b-experience your b-experiencing, or else not say that you do; on pain of merely being silly.


sense, of the remark. A certain kind of philosophy seeks to infer that we can make sense of, and indeed must accept as true, the remark that 'he was in some way aware of having that awareness'. This kind of philosophy is, once again, what linguistic or glossocentric philosophy exists to destroy: namely glossogenic philosophy in the bad sense, and pseudo-psychology. From the mere fact of our not having any use for the remark, 'He X-ed, but he did not 1" that he X-ed', in ordinary language, we cannot infer that the remark, 'He who X-es, 1"-s that he X-ed', is true. That inference wonld again involve a simplistic view of ordinary language, whose departures from logicomathematical simplicity and regularity are notorious. It is obvious, when you come to think of it, that-taking 'He 1"-ed that he X-ed' as a case of 'He 1"-ed'-we may in ordinary language have no use for either 'He X-ed but did not T or 'He X-ed and 1"-ed'. This will necessarily be the case if we have no use for either 'He 1"-ed' or 'He did not T. Or we may have an idiomatic use for one or both of these expressions, without their being expressions that 'mean what they say'. So the inference from 'He X-ed' together with the rejection of 'He X-ed but did not T to 'He X-ed and 1"-ed' does not go through. The thesis, that one who X-es 1"-s, has got to be supported in some other way than that if it is to be well supported. Certainly a tortured man who has not been brought up by wolves will, unless he suffers from congenital mental defect, know or be aware that he is in agony and in danger ofdisclosing information, in the sense that he will be able to apply these general terms or these concepts to himself. The capacity to apply general terms, however, so as to have the thought that 'this is agony', is not invariably attendant upon agony under any kind oflaw. One who lacks that capacity Can be tormented; even if you may wish to say that he can hardly be put to the question. The fact, that awareness of this sort is not invariably associated by any kind of law with b-l-experiencing physical abuse, should not be allowed completely to overshadow the fact that, if the opposite were true, then still the capacity could not be called one's 'experiencing' the b-l-experiencing. Experiencing, whether a or b, is an event of which one is the subject; the statement that someone experienced something is a grammatically appropriate answer to the question as to what


4 (ii). Other cases, which will now be instanced, in which we are tempted to say that the thing 'could not happen without being experienced although it is not exactly a state of consciousness', are different. They do not consist, as things like being tortured do, in having some Type One, per accidens experience together with the right kind of might-be-absent awareness of it for it to be called one of your 'experiences'. It is not in their case, as it is in those cases, a matter, of our simply generating Type Two things by introducing a set of terms that are to apply to specified Type One things, but only when you (ca) experience them. This new lot of Type Two cases can be distinguished into two groups. There are those like 'eyeing your food with relish', which I assume are Type Two because they involve states of consciousness like seeing and anticipation that are not, as far as common knowledge tells, the awareness of any per accidens experience. Then there are cases that are Type Two because they are actions, things to which the question 'What did he do that for?' applies. The first group are presumably to be dealt with by talking about the states of consciousness they involve. To speak briefly of actions, some cases are ambiguous as between these and Type One cases. Chairing a meeting falls back into Type One if it just means literally being alive in the chair, as you may be asleep. On the other hand, if it is meant to entail doing something about the meeting, however ineffectually, then the appropriate sub-heading is that of action under Type Two. Enjoying, from the chair, the disorder of a meeting would be a Type Two non-action case rather like eyeing your food with relish, though chairing catastrophically with enjoyment would be a case of action. Which again makes the point that we are not really distinguishing between things, since there is no difference between chairing catastrophically with enjoyment and enjoying, from the chair, the disorder of a meeting. There is a difference between the verbs or terms. I do not propose here to review, still less to try to rival, the contributions which have been made in recent years to the philosophy of action. The question, when you come at it from the present angle, is this. Is an action an a-2-experience in a full, unweakened ca sense, or only in the ua sense of being done? (The u, with its associations with 'undergo', is admittedly

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distracting here; however, as I said, it should be thought of as standing for 'unencumbered by any stipulation that one must have awareness if what is done'.) In other words, when the a-2experience of Y-ing is an action, is Y-ing always accompanied by some sort of awareness of Y-ing? Partially paralleling what was said in the torture type of case, we need some better reason than a glossogenic one for giving the answer yes. We cannot simply assume that, if we have no use in ordinary language for the remark, 'He clambered up the halyards in a gale to relight the masthead light without in any way being aware of doing so', then this in itself proves that he must have been to some extent aware of doing so. And if we think that an agent is always to some extent a spectator of himself and his environment, otherwise he would not be an agent; if we think that he always b-l-experiences his own motion and rest, and/or db-experiences his environment; then we must distinguish between two forms of the idea that he b-2-experiences his action, rather as we did in the torture case of non-action. The idea may simply mean that he shall be said to b-2-experience his action inasmuch as, in that, he b-experiences those other things-that his doing this, given the occurrence of the action, is to be logically sufficient for what one is pleased to call b-2-experiencing the action. Or the idea might mean what is more dubious, that over and above those b-l-experiencings he b-2-experiences the action, either by b-2-experiencing those b-l-experiencings or in some other way.

4 (iii). Coming now to states of consciousness, or to speak less confusingly, coming to verbs, functions, or general terrns for things that can be involved in b-l-experiencing and dbexperiencing things; and in particular coming to seeing, since seeing is what we shall be concerned with in the next Part: is there good reason to hold-that seeing, visual perception in an unweakened objective or external sense, is a-experienced in an unweakened, ca sense? Does one who sees, invariably have some sort of awareness of his seeing-an awareness which is what justifies us in saying that his seeing is experienced? Does he have an extra-sensory perception ofhis seeing or else get a 'bad picture' of his seeing or have some other kind of awareness of it? Or is seeing invariably experienced only in the sense that it is 'done'?

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To anticipate: if we avoid bad reasons by applying again the ~egative pr~ciples: I see no reason to hold that seeing is mvanably expenenced m any other sense than that. Seeing is of course also an experience in the sense that it is an instance of b-experiencing. Usually, of db-experiencing. If it cannot occur without being an experience, this is merely to say that it cannot o~cur ~thout occurring and being an instance of b-experiencmg. Ius not hard to see how this truistic fact might give rise in error to the idea that seeing is an experience in the third sense of a b-experienced. . What I have just said contrasts with the view that seeing is m no sense an experience; a view to which Ryle appeared to ?ommit himself in Dilemmas. But I take Ryle to have been sayr~g that seeing is not an 'experience' in a redefined philosophical-psychological usage, for whose existence he, Ryle, is not responsible. In this special usage there is a contrast between an 'experience' and an achievement, whereas if we avoid special dictions there is no contrast between an experience and an achievement. Winning a game of chess against a much better player n;ay be one of my more memorable experiences, and so may seemg a flash of light if my doing so saved my life. In the ordinary and literary use of the common noun 'an ~xperience',.an event of which one is the subject, there is no mescapable Implica~on that an experience is a process, a series of changes; or an ,:pI.sode, something ofwhich one is a spectator; ~r a s:retch of, as distmct from a momentary happening in, one's lif~ history; or something that one was 'engaged in'; or somethi~g that has 'a beginning, a middle, and an end'; or a passive busmess; or anything at all like that. But in order to get to closer grips with the matter ofawareness of seeing, let me make what I believe to be a familiar, though not self-explanatory, distinction between two meanings of 'see X'; (1) the meaning exemplified by 'see a cobra, in the general sense of seeing something which is, in point offact, a cobra' and (2). a narrower meaning exemplified by 'not only see what is in p.omt of fact a cobra, but also see a cobra as distinct from only (Just, merely) seeing what is in point offact a cobra'. There is a natural paral~el with, for instance, 'try to pick up a cobra, I mea? try to pick up something which is in fact a cobra' and 'try to pick up a cobra; I mean try to do that, as distinct from only

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or just trying to pick up what is in fact a cobra'. In this case the difference lies in whether one knows that it is a cobra; the case of seeing is similar to this extent, that seeing what is in point of fact a cobra, while knowing it to be a cobra, is sufficient even if nat necessary for 'seeing a cobra' in the narrower sense. I must make it clear, by the way, that I shall be concerned with 'seeing what is in fact X' only to the extent that such a phrase clarifies some established non-theoretical usage of 'see X' (same X as in the first expression). Not when 'see what is in fact X' is used where no such usage of 'see X' (same X as in the first expression) exists. For instance, I shall not be concerned with the sense in which a man who sees a table sees what is in fact a set of nltramicroscopic, i.e. invisible, particles, since this is not, neither is anything else, a case in which we wonld ordinarily speak of someone as seeing a set of invisible particles. The distinction I am making between 'see X, see what is X' and 'see X, as distinct from only seeing what is X', is a distinction between and within ordinary uses of 'see X' (same Xl-it does not go beyond these. I was saying that it is clear that seeing a cobra, in the sense ofseeing what is in fact a cobra, does notlogically entail seeming to see a cobra in any sense. But what about seeing a cobra in the second and narrower of those two senses, call it 'properly' seeing one? Does this entail seeming to see a cobra? If we were to say so, we should be using the notion of 'seeming to see', or ostensible visual perception, more broadly even than the broad and vague notion of the relevant visual appearance's being present or being presented. For someone who sees what is a cobra, looking to him then and there exactly like a root, but who happens to know for certain that it is a cobra, may if you like be said to see a cobra, as distinct from just or merely seeing what is in fact one. Now we are not here interested in any sense of 'seem to see' or 'ostensibly visually perceive' which is broader than the vague notion of a visual appearance of the relevant sort's being presented. We therefore shall not say that 'properly' seeing an X entails seeming to do so. What ifwe simply leave out ofconsideration all those cases (of seeing X in the 'proper' sense) in which what is seen does not look like X to the one who sees it, as well as all cases in which. while it does look like X to him, it also looks to him to a non:

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necessarily the same thing. This could be interpreted as the view that if you see what is X, then for some r, you seem to see r. If this is true, then the question arises whether your seeming to see r, where r is not X, can be regarded as your having a more or less 'bad picture' of your seeing X; a more or less indistinct awareness of your doing so. The question arises, but I shall not try to answer it now; the next footnote applies here. The principles already mentioned, those anti-glossogenic ones, seem sufficient to show that it is quite unwarranted to posit any other sort of invariable awareness of one's seeing what is in fact X. The same principles will show that there is no warrant for positing an invariable awareness of plainly seeing X, or rather they will unless the case proves to be, that one's consequential 'seeming to see X' (same X) can be said to constitute such an awareness; another question I leave open at present. I The case of visual apperception, since this does not entail 'seeming to see' what is apperceived, is like that of 'seeing what is'. Finally, there is- no justification for positing an invariable awareness of 'seeming to see', itself; a fortiori no justification for the idea that the act of 'seeming to see' is itself b-experienced, consequently no justification for the idea that it is an act whose esse is to be b-experienced, a possible philosophical meaning of 'an experience'. In contrast we can say safely enough that the esse of any a-experience is to be a-experienced, provided we do not equivocate with the c and the u: the esse of a ca-experience is to be ca-experienced, that of a ua-experience to be ua-experienced. "What goes for seeing and seeming to see, which are forms that b-experiencing can take, seems likely to go for b-experiencing in general. Certainly we have so far found no warrant for the idea that b-experiencing is ca-experienced or b-experienced. So; what sort of 'of' is the 'of'in 'the experience of seeing'? It depends what sort of 'seeing' the 'seeing' is. Where it is either 'seeing what is in fact' or 'visually apperceiving', the 'of' can only be the mere comma, and the mere comma that follows ua at that, unless one's seeming to see something or other can play the role of a b-experiencing of those things. Similarly where 'seeing' is 'plainly seeing'; the 'of' will be the comma that

I The answer 'Will surely be 'No' unless there are what I shall call E-reports (0£ Ifb).

negligible extent like something different?' Do the remaining cases, those in which, as we say, the unambiguous testimony of his visual sense is of X, yield a sense of 'see X' which entails seeming to see X (same Xl? It is plausible to say yes, plainiJ seeing X, in this sense, entails seeming to see X (same Xl. I defer (until 7 (ii-iii)) the question as to what truth exactly there is in this reply. I think there is truth in it. It is worth stressing a couple of things about what has just been marked out as 'plainly seeing': first, that plainly seeing X is a special case of seeing what is in fact X; second, that plainly seeing X does not entail taking what you see to be X. This last point is true because I may see what is in fact a cobra, not looking to any extent worth mentioning like anything but a cobra, in my sitting-room and yet, on the assumption that English sitting-rooms do not have cobras in them, take it to be a toy or a spoof Here I plainly see, but to revive an old word I do not 'apperceive', a cobra because I do not realize what it is, do not correctly identify what I see as a cobra. "When a man both apperceives X and plainly sees X, unlike the man who apperceives a cobra looking exactly like a root, then it might be said that he 'strongly' visually apperceives X. We can now ask the question about whether there is an invariable awareness of one's seeing what one sees, in each of those cases: (1) seeing what is in fact X; (2) 'properly' seeing X in the sense of seeing X as distinct from just, only, seeing what is in fact X; (3) plainly seeing X, which is to say, 'properly' and where the unambiguous testimony of the visual sense is of X; (4) visually apperceiving X; (5) strongly visually apperceiving X; (6) seeming to see X. But it will do if we consider the first, third, fourth, and sixth of those cases. In the case of seeing what is in fact X, there is certainly no invariable knowledge that one is doing so; this is part of the main point about seeing what is in fact X. And this does not entail seeming to see X, in any sense, so there is no question of this latter act's constituting an invariable awareness of seeing what is in fact X. However, it has been argued (Ayer, chap. 3) that seeing something entails seeming to see something, though not 1 Here the relevant use of 'look' is one in which you (just) say how some optical object looks to you, without intending any guess or estimate as to the object's nature or properties.

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follows ua, unless it proves that your seeming to see what you plainly see can count as b-experiencing your plainly seeing it. And where 'seeing' is 'seeming to see', whatever that is exactly, the 'of'in 'the experience ofseeing' can only be the comma that follows ua. 5. A contrast Apart from any interest which such a philosophico-lexical study may have in itself, the main point of Part I has been to make a contrast between the ordinary biographical notion of an experience and the special philosophical notion of one, to which we shall come. The contrast emerges in its most marked form if we compare the notion of an experience in certain philosophical discussions with that of an a-experience. When someone avers that if you dream that you are being cut into small pieces then you 'have the experience of' being cut into small pieces, he does not mean that you have the a-I-experience. Nor, when someone says that if you dream you are being tortured then you have the experience of being tortured, does he mean that you have the a-2-experience. He means that you sb-I-experience being cut into small pieces, or some other form of physical abuse. This means that we are or may be getting into philosophy. For many questions arise as to how that special kind of event is being conceived, and the answers when elicited will often reveal some decidedly philosophical conception. The same thing is true when someone says that in a hallucination you sometimes have the experience of seeing flashes of lightningcertainly not meaning that you have the a-2-experience, (of) seeing such flashes, but possibly meaning that you sdb-experience them by seemingly seeing them. The eliciting and appraisal of the philosophical ideas that may lie behind such a statement is a task often left to the critical philosopher, and some part of it will be attempted in what follows.

PART II

A VERY SPECIAL NOTION

IIa

PERCEPTION-ILLUSION DISJUNCTIONS (1)

6. Perception-illusion disjunctions: general

By way of what is seen as an essential, and so to speak contiguous, preliminary to the investigation in lIb of the relevant, very special, philosophical notion qf an experience, IIa concerns itself with a type rif proposition to which lIe returns, called perception-illusion disjunctions. These are first roughly defined in Section 6. In Section 7 certain propositions ofthis kind are assumed to be true in a hypothetical case, and some qf their properties are setforth. Section 8, in contrast, considers a number ofdescriptions that hardly apply to those, or any other, perception-illusion disjunctions.

E

V E N if few things are certain, it is certain that there are what I will call perception-illusion disjunctions: sentences or statements like 'Macbeth perceives a dagger or is having that illusion', which you can compose by adding words like '... or x is having that illusion' to a sentence which says that a particular person, x, perceives a thing of some particular kind. Words like c••• or x is having some different illusion' are to be counted as unlike '. . . or x is having that illusion': a perception-illusion disjunction mentions the illusion of the very perception it mentions. This does not mean that no perceptionillusion disjunction is or would be troe when, for instance, it is troe that 'Macbeth perceives a dagger or is having the illusion of perceiving Banquo'. But this sentence or statement is not what I am calling a perception-illusion disjunction. It is perhaps surprising that perception-illusion disjunctions are not more often deliberately placed in the centre of the picture, in the philosophy of perception. Philosophers do quite often introduce the notion of an experience-report as that of a statement, or even the statement, which is troe both when you perceive a given thing and when you have the illusion of doing

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so. This makes it sound as if they had in mind a perceptionillusion disjunction. In a high proportion of cases, however, one has only to ask them whether they do, to find that they do not. They did not express their whole thought. They had in mind a suppositious kind of statement which has the property they mentioned, but which also has other properties. I believe that they often have in mind something that 'answers the question as to what is happening to the subject', in a sense which I will pick out. (Sense A in Section 8 (i).) But this in itself, apart from not being invariably required, would never be enough. In lIb (Section 10) I am going to set forth some requirements which the sort of statement they have in mind might have to satisfy in a particular hypothetical case, defined as one in which certain perception-illusion disjunctions are true: I will describe the hypothetical case in Section 7. In what I say in lIa and lIb about the case, and about perception-illusion disjunctions, I shall be sketching with fairly broad strokes. Much detail and corroboration, as well as some further questions, will be left until lIc. Among the matters deferred is the question as to what exactly is meant by perception and illusion here: it is hardly too much to say that a good deal of lIa and. lIb would be close to mere foolishness, given traditional assumptions about the need to 'analyse' these notions. When I return to them in lIc the relevant concepts of perception and of illusion will not be obtained by analysis in any traditional sense, though I shall do my best to identify them. 7. Some descriptions that apply to certain perception-illusion disjunctions I will use 'D*' as a name for the following statement, which we will assume someone to make truly-perhaps by pressing a button which he has been told to press if and when the statement is true. D*. 'I see a flash oflight of a certain sort or I am having the perfect illusion of seeing one of that sort.' Solely in virtue of its containing the words'•. , of a certain sort . . . of that sort' in the way it does, D* is what I shall call .a 'pointed' perception-illusion disjunction; 'pointedness' is in-

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dicated by the asterisk. Contrast the 'blunt' perception-illusion disjunction, D. 'I see a flash oflight or I am having the perfect illusion of doing so.' A more specific, yet 'blunt', perception-illusion is Db. 'I see a flash of bluish-white light or I am having the perfect illusion of seeing one.' This, as well as D*, is to be true ex hypothesi of the person who states D*, but we do not assume him to state Db. Similarly we assume the truth of Db*. 'I see a flash of bluish-white light of a certain' sort or I am having the perfect illusion of seeing one of that sort.'

The addition of the sign, " will indicate the omission of the word, 'perfect'. So D*' and Db' and Db*' are also true ex hypothesi of the same person. I In blunt perception-illusion disjunctions, the 'or' has just the sense of the logical constant 'v'; to suppose such a disjunction to be true is to suppose no more and no less than that its limbs or disjuncts are not both false. The 'or' in a pointed perceptionillusion disjunction gets as close to that as it can. It can be clarified by the speaker's saying things like 'Just not neither is all I mean, get rid of any further suggestions or associations.' For instance any suggestion, which may arise from the fact of the speaker's or button-presser's having stated D*, that he does not know whether his case is one ofperception or one ofillusion, may be a suggestio falsi; or may not be. There is to be no difference at all between D* and 'I am having the perfect illusion of seeing a flash of light of a certain sort or I perceive a flash of light of that sort'.

So, if you like, D* is really D*. 'Of at least one sort of flash of light it is true either that I see, or that I am having the perfect illusion of seeing, a flash of light of that sort.'

Perhaps this is true or false under just the same conditions as D; perhaps not. In any case, it goes against the grain to say

t You could call these 'imperfect' perception-illusion disjunctions, and call D*, Db, Db*, and D 'perfect' ones.

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that it means just the same as D. Obviously D* does not mean the same as Db. The fact that Db is true may be what has given our speaker his incentive to state D*, but this does not mean that in stating this he states something which means the same as Db. Rather similarly, if he were to state Db, let us say again, by pressing a button which he is to press if and when the statement is true, and if Db* was what he would really have liked to convey, then he would not have said or stated something that meant the same as Db*. What you 'say' or 'state', at least as I am here and now using these verbs, is a matter of the meaning of the conventional sign you use, not of what you have in mind. It is a little, though in the first person not very, like the fact that if I say 'At least one Australian is of Chinese origin', having in mind a certain colleague who, however, in point of fact is of Korean origin, then what I say or state is true all the same if at least one Australian is indeed of Chinese origin. The illusion, and it might be the perfect illusion, of (seeing) a flash of light is-1 say-what you get for instance when an electric current is passed through your head in a certain way by experimental psychologists. They call it giving you a 'phosphene', etymologically a light-appearance. No light is involved. I will now note some things that are true of some or all of those perception-illusion disjunctions, as I shall continue to call them in virtue of their ordinary-language form, though there is a distinct possibility, to be discussed in lIc, Section 14, that the 'pointed' ones are not strictly disjunctions from a logical point of view. So in the rest of this section I shall, explicitly or in effect, be listing some descriptions that fit some or all of those perception-illusion disjunctions. The point is that the descriptions are all ones which have been thought to apply to a suppositious class of statements,' experience-reports in a narrow sense. The conclusion, then, is that some of the descriptions which have been thought to apply to this suppositious class of statements do in fact apply to some perception-illusion disjunctions. In the next section, 8, we shall see by way of contrast that" others of the descriptions which have been thought to apply to the suppositious class of 'experience-reports' do not apply to any perception-illusion disjunctions. This will raise the question whether there is anything to which these Section 8 descriptions do apply. That there is nothing to which they apply

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in our hypothetical case is roughly the conclusion reached at the end of lIb.

are at least so tempted when, as we say, the unambiguous

7 (i). D* and Db, in this respect unlike D*' and Db', logically entail that the subject is at least tempted to believe that he visually perceives a flash oflight. For if D* or Db is true, and if it is not a case of perfect illusion, which entails the temptation for reasons that will be very briefly discussed in lIc, then it is a case of seeing a flash of light. But I rule that 'seeing', 'visually perceiving', and 'perceiving', in all these statements, have the sense we called 'plainly seeing'. And if you plainly see X then you are at least tempted to believe that you do. For you

testimony of your senses is to the effect that there is X in your environment. Your plainly seeing X is one of the things this saying can relate to; your being perfectly illuded that you plainly see X is another.

8244037

D

7 (ii). D* and D*' are propositions that can be worded, without doing much violence to language, in one of such ways as 'In a neutral sense, it is/seems/appears to me a little/rather/very much/exactly as if I saw a flash of light'. Or simply as 'I see a flash of light', used in the relatively incorrigible sense of neutral appearance; any perception-sentence can be used exceptionally in this weakened sense by making it, for the moment, equivalent to a pointed perception-illusion disjunction. D* can obviously be worded in those ways without doing any violence to language at all: e.g. as 'In a neutral sense, it appears to me exactly as if I saw a flash of light of a certain sort'. Here 'neutral' just means that no per:ception-proposition or illusion-proposition follows deductively. In this sense D* is of course neutral, though I am going to say shortly that the word neutral is misleading in another way. As for 'relatively incorrigible', the comparison is of course with perception-claims, illusion-reports, and anything else that stands to be corrected in ways in which the disjunction does not stand to be corrected. What about 'blunt' perception-illusion disjunctions? Can they, too, be called neutral seem- or appear-statements and expressed in terms of, for instance, 'seeming to see'? There is some room for doubt on the point, when we distinguish a blunt perception-illusion disjunction, one that has said all it means,

IIa A VERY SPECIAL NOTION 42 from an incomplete verbal expression of a 'pointed' one. I retnrn to tbe matter in Section 14. At any rate you could hardly apply the tag 'neutral seem- or appear-statement' to a perception-illusion disjunction in which 'visually perceive' or 'see' did not have tbe sense 'plainly see'. If, for instance, tbe disjunction disjoined seeing what is in point offact a cobra witb having the illusion of doing so, tben this would be made true by visually apperceiving a cobra which did not look in tbe least like a cobra but looked exactly like a root; it could tberefore hardly be worded in terms of 'seeming to see a cobra'.

7 (iii). Each oftbose perception-illusion disjunctions is of course a proposition which follows from at least one perception-claim and from at least one illusion-report. Taking tbe blunt ones first, each follows from its own disjunct of perception and from its own disjunct of illusion. It is true that tbe logical principle involved, that (A v B) follows from A and from B, has been held to flout a certain intuitive notion oflogical consequence; which must tberefore begin, rather unhappily, to distinguish itself from logical deducibility. However, the usual motive to tbis distinction is tbat A and B may be totally irrelevant to one another or may have no subject-matter in common. That is not tbe case here; nobody is going to say that 'I am having the illusion of seeing a flash oflight', aliter 'I am being illuded tbat I see a flash of light', has no subject-matter in common with 'I see a flash 01 light'. In tbe case of 'pointed' perception-illusion disjunctions we are in a difficulty about picking out something as the disjunct of perception and something else as the disjunct of illusion; tbis lends plausibility to the suggestion tbat 'pointed perception-illusion disjunctions' are not strictly speaking disjunctions at all. Nevertheless, every pointed perception-illusion disjunction follows from some perception-proposition and from some illusion-proposition; for instance, D* follows from 'I perceive a flash of light of a certain sort' and from 'I am having the illusion of perceiving a flash of light of a certain sort'. Putting what Was said about pointed perception-illusion disjunctions in the previous subsection together witb what has just been said about them, we find to tbe vindication of much in the literature that tbe very paradigm of a 'neutral appearance-

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statement' always follows from some perception-proposition and from some illusion-report.

7 (iv). U* fits tbe description of being a neutral appearancestatement which lies behind, witbout following from, D*. It lies behind it in tbe sense of being sometbing from which D* follows and which tbe subject could have asserted witb equal trutb had he chosen to be more specific. Iftbe subject advances to tbe bare claim that he perceives a flash of light, tben in a ratber different, but still intelligible, sense Db* lies behind, witbout following from, his perception-claim. It lies behind it in tbe sense of being something which he could have asserted witb trutb and witb relative incorrigibility.

7 (v). The great ambiguous notion of 'possibility' is such, tbat D* clarifies one meaning which tbe tbought 'Possibly I see a flash of light of a certain kind and possibly I am having tbe perfect illusion of doing so' can have. It is a sure sign tbat 'possibly A and possibly B' has this meaning, if tbe word 'and' can be replaced by the word 'or' without change of sense. This use of 'possibly ...' amounts to saying tbat tbere are two possibilities, there are alternatives. An interesting feature of tbis use of 'Possibly A or possibly B', or 'Possibly A and possibly B', as a logically redundant form of 'A vel B', is that under certain conditions it gets verbally contracted to 'Possibly A' or to 'Possibly B'. This happens when, in the context, it pretty well goes witbout saying what the alternative is: for instance, when tbe alternatives are A and not-A, but also when, as in our case, tbey are A and 'false'-A in tbe otber sense, A and illusion-A. There is tben, by tbe way, a danger tbat 'Possibly illusion-A', derived in this manner as a mere contraction of a redundant form of 'A vel illusion-A', will be mistaken by tbe speaker or thinker himself for some other use of 'Possibly illusion-A'; say, one in which this militates against a claim on his part to know that A. This could take him from 'I know that A' to 'I do not know that A' in five easy steps: I know that A, so A, so A vel illusion-A, so possibly A and possibly illusion-A, so possibly illusion-A, so I do not know that A. Of course 'A vel illusion-A' is not characteristically or usually derived in tbat way. But if one's whole initial thought is 'A vel

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illusion-A, I don't know which', then one cannot use this to prove that one does not know which. This form of the confusion between just saying that you do not know which and showing tJ;at you. do. n~t know :which is, I feel, a factor in the queer kind ofhistnomc credulity that we keep miscalling 'scepticism', as well as other forms of the same confusion. Not in all minds at all times a major factor, but surely more of a factor than the b:,~iness of it~ being what is unhappily called 'a logical possibIli~, mea;ung a non-contradictory supposition, that I am having the Illusion that I am reading a page at the moment. For it is not one whit less of a 'logical possibility', in that sense, tha: I am having the illusion ofsighting tropical fish as they and I glide among reefs of coral. Yet one is hardly expected to count this as a possibility when entertaining so-called 'scepticism' as to whether one is reading a page. The fact that D* can be given curtailed expression as 'Possibly I see a flash oflight (of a certain sort)' vindicates an idea which might otherwise appear to be very dubious. I mean the idea that there is a use of 'Possibly p', and a synonymous use of 'Appar~nt1y p', in which you can build up to 'p' by adding somethmg that is not equivalent to 'p', For you can build up from 'Of a certain sort of flash of light it is true that I either perc.eive a fl~sh of,light of that sort or am having the perfect illusion of domg so, by the addition of '(and) I am not having the perfect illusion of doing so', which is not equivalent to 'I perceive a flash oflight of that sort', to this.

:?

(vi). A !~rther point, ,:",d one that is relevant to 'scepticism', IS that D IS a truth which makes it reasonable, in the absence of proof or counter-evidence, for the speaker or thinker to accept that he sees, visually perceives, a flash oflight. For there is a sense of 'appear' in which it is the abuse of terms a self. . ' answenng question, to ask why someone to whom it appears that p has pro tanto reason to believe that p. And what could be a better example of its appearing to you, in this sense, that you se~ a flash of li~ht, than your either plainly seeing one of a cert:"m sort or having the perfect illusion that you do so? This means that although statements like D* are neutral in the sense mentioned earlier, they are not absolutely neutral as between perception and illusion; there is a weighting of the

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alternative of perception. So the 'I don't know which', in the sense of 'I have no belief as to which', that can attach itself here though it need not, is evanescent in the absence of counterevidence to the perception-claim. ~y s~ying this I do not mean to suggest that a perceptionclaun IS at all commonly based on a perception-illusion disjunction; to start a new 'theory of knowledge', according to which everything is based on perception-illusion disjunctions, is far from being my wish.

~ (vii). D*,D*', and to a lesser extentDb* r andDb*', fit a description whose short form might be, 'things that seem oddly prefixed by "I am inclined to believe that ..."", However, the oddness in question is of a special kind. It is a matter of seeming like an abuse oflanguage, or of making us wonder whether the speaker has perhaps misunderstood the prefix or else what it is prefixed to. An apparent incongruity between these two things, exemplifying, with reference to the prefix, the dictnm that 'You can't always say it'. Rather as in 'I am inclined to believe that/I exist' and 'I am inclined to believe that/I am conscious'. If someone had been instructed to say 'Fipp!' as an abbreviation for D* and to use the suffix, -0, as equivalent to the prefix, 'I am inclined to believe that ...', and to use 'Fapp!' as anabbreviation for 'I visually perceive a flash of light'; we should be rather surprised to hear him say 'Fippo!'. We should be quite likely to ask him, 'Don't you mean "Fappo"?' It is not the same kind of oddness as there is in 'Now as I survey the varied scene, I am inclined to believe that something is going on in my head, such that unless that thing or an adequate substitnte for it were going on there, I would not see anything'. Here our natnral retort begins with 'You are inclined ... ! In God's name, do you think the liver may be the seat of consciousness ?-etc.'. Nor is it the same kind of oddness that there would be if someone said that certainly all men were vertebrates and that certainly Socrates was a man and that he was inclined to believe that Socrates was a vertebrate. Here there is no incongruity, or not of the right sort, between the prefix and what it is prefixed to, though we might well wonder whether the speaker had misunderstood something else.

A VERYSPEOIAL NOTION

8. Some descriptions that do not apply to perception-illusion disjunctions

IIa

8 (i). Do perception-illusion disjunctions 'answer the question as to what is happening to the subject'? Do they fit this description? In one very unambitious sense of the description, they do. N othing 'prevents us from introducing some such general term as 'flash-experiencing', stipulatively defined as 'perceiving or being illuded that you perceive a flash of light', and nothing then stops us from saying that the statement, 'Bob flashexperienced', or 'Bob had the experience ofa flash', or whatever form of words we choose to define in that way, 'answers the question as to what happened to Bob'. It does so in the sense that it reports an event of which Bob was the subject. True, this may mean only (a) that it is about Bob and (b) that it does, in a purely syntactical sense, answer the question 'What happened?' as distinct from, say, only aoswering the more general question, 'What was so?' (i.e. puttingtogether 'What happened ?-He had the experience of a flash' is all right). So at any rate something that was deliberatelyintroduced as a paraphrase ofa perceptionillusion disjunction could, in a sense, 'answer the question as to what happened to the subject'. It would be over-scrupulous to say that an explicit perception-illusion disjunction could not do so. There is a pedantic sense in which, though over-scrupulous, this would nevertheless be true. What I have in mind here is merely the fact that you might say that no explicit 'either-or', even if both alternatives are aoswers to that question, answers that question. However, this would be rather trivial. Qnite apart from this, however, there is a sense in which neither an explicit perception-illusion disjunction, nor a sentence introduced as a paraphrase for such a disjunction, answers that question, though an explicit disjunction is not as such debarred from so doing. As a matter of fact, irritatingly enough, there are several such senses. Let me get two irrelevant ones out ofthe way first. They do not require truth in an answer. They are senses of 'giving a right or wrong answer to the question as to what happened to the subject' in which a perception-illusion disjunction no more does this than the statement that it is a fine day does. Each of these tiresome, irrelevaot senses is a context-dependent sense; in the first, answering the

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question means correctly or incorrectly answering the question \ which alternative it is that is the case, in the context of a given perception-illusion disjunction's having been asserted: only the disjuncts of that very disjunction score here, it is trivially true to say. The second tiresome sense means, answering the question 1\ in the sense just mentioned, but without logically implying anything about the subject's environment: only the relevaot disjunct ofillusion scores. This second sense, though profoundly unimportant, is not quite as much of a non-sense as it may appear: answering the question in this sense is something a statement cao do, though it would be rather Henry Ford-like-s'They can have any colour they like as long as it's black'-to ask someone to do it. Now for two context-dependent senses that matter. I will call them Sense A and Sense B. Sense A is the sense to which I want to point, in which neither an explicit perception-illusion disjunction, nor a sentence introduced as a paraphrase for such a disjunction, can 'answer the question as to what happened to the subject', though ao explicit disjunction, as such, is in no way prevented from doing so. Sense B, mentioned for the sake of contrast, is one in which both those things can, if you like, be said to 'answer the question, etc.' Sense A could be a little more clearly, though a lot more cumbrously, expressed as follows. To answer the question, in Sense A, is to be a more precise statement of-or, failing that, the beginning of a more exact statement of-what happened to the subject; mrywtry; at or after the first moment at which he began to be affected. ('Account' of, or statement 'as to', if you prefer.) Here 'more precise' means: more precise thao the given disjunction; more precise than either of its disjuncts; more precise thao anything true that entails one of the disjuncts. (Similarly with '..• more exact .. .'.) A more precise statement, the beginning of a more exact statement; I take it that these phrases, which are always correlative with the other pole of some particular implicit or explicit contrast, are not exactly equivalent. 'X' could be a more precise statement (than 'r) of what happened when Y, aod yet not be merely the beginning ofa more exact account of what happened when Y-if'X' was the beginning and end of such a more exact account, because it omitted nothing of any consequence. Equally, 'X' could be the


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ized report might, as was implied above, not be entailed by x's Y-ing but only by something more specific that was true and that entailed x's Y-ing-his Y-ing Z-wise. But also something can be entailed by my having Y-ed, not entail this, and nevertheless be no mere vague or generalized report of my having Y-ed., I think the point is that for this to be so there has to be a positive reason. If something is overentailed by my having Y-ed, then it is a mere vague or generalized report of my Y-ing unless there is some positive reason why it is not. For instance, 'A bicycle-frame has just gone by' is overentailed by my having just gone by on a bicycle, but the statement about the frame nevertheless has some claim to be a more precise account-or at least the beginning of a more exact account-ofwhat happened when I went by, as a bicycle-frame is a part of a bicycle so that the frame's going by is a part of what happened. Similarly if something is overentailed by an a fortiori report of my Y-ing, without being entailed by my Y-ing. For instance, suppose in fact I went by on a black bicycle. Then 'A black bicycle-frame has just gone by' is saved from being a mere generalized report of my going by on a bicycle, by the fact that a black bicycle-frame is a part of a black bicycle. To take another type of example: the statement, that object o fell to earth from the stratosphere, is overentailed by the statement that object 0 re-entered-in the sense in which we speak of the re-entry of a space capsule, which does not mean a second entry. Yet though '0 re-entered' overentails '0 fell to earth from the stratosphere', still this last statement has a claim to be called a more precise (though less informative and so, you might say, less exact) statement of what happened at or after the moment at which 0 left the stratosphere. I take this to be because O's fall to earth was a part of its trajectory, the part in which it moved after leaving the stratosphere. Again, 'He said that he would not go' has some claim to be called a more precise statement of what happened when he replied that he would not go; this is because 'replying that you will not go' can be spelt out with some exactitude as 'saying that you will not go, in reply' . It is noteworthy that there is no differerue between the particular re-entry and the particular fall to earth, or between the


beginning ofa more exact account (than 'r) of what happened when Y, without being a more precise account of this-s-if the rest of the exact account is too important for its omission to be compatible with precision. The other pole of the implicit or explicit contrast, in Sense A (and in Sense B which we shall come to) is-I have impliedthe perception-illusion disjunction which is given ex hypothesi as true; whatever this disjunction may be, e.g. that the subject perceives a flash of light or has the illusion of so doing. The notions ofprecision and exactitude pull their weight, and imply truth. The emphasis on 'to the subject' means at least that the statement must entail nothing about the subject's environment. The 'anyway' means that the statement must not, alone or in conjunction with any kind oflaw, provide certainty as to which of the disjuncts is true. These last two requirements, those expressed by 'to the subject' and 'anyway', could of course be met by a perceptionillusion disjunction. But a perception-illusion disjunction, even one that was true, could not meet the requirement of being a more precise statement, or the beginning of a more exact statement, than any of those above-mentioned things, of what happened to the subject. Nor could a deliberate paraphrase for such a disjunction meet that requirement. On the other hand, a physiological statement about what was going on in the subject's head would not appear to be excluded by any of its features, necessarily. And this shows that 'answering the question in Sense A' has got nothing to do with being or not being an explicit disjunction, since as far as we know everything can be re-expressed as an explicit disjunction. Answering the question in this sense excludes being something that a perception-illusion disjunction is bound in the context to be: what we would, with wisdom after the event, knowing what it was that had in fact happened, call a 'mere vague or generalized' report of this. Which is what we would, literally after the event but without that much wisdom, call a 'mere vague or generalized report of whatever it was that happened', e.g. of x's visually perceiving a flash oflight. A mere generalized report of x's Y-ing is not, be it noted, exactly the same thing as a statement that is 'overentailed by'~i.e. entailed by, without entailing~x's Y-ing. For one thing the mere vague or general-

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particular reply and the particular act of saying; the less informative, more general description of the event nevertheless has a claim to be called the more precise one. Greater generality does not, even in the case of contingently true reports of what happened, and even in the case where there is no difference between the particular event to which the more and the less general statements relate, preclude greater precision; it does create a defeasible presumption against greater precision. In the case of perception-illusion disjunctions and their deliberate paraphrases one sees nothing to rebut the presumption that they are mere vague or generalized reports ofwhatever it was that happened. This is in spite of the fact that such a disjunction is by no means the most vague and general report that can be conceived, of the event reported by whichever of its disjuncts is true. It does not sink or dissolve the specificity of the happening completely in its broader characterization. It neither does this, nor yet 'answers the question' in Sense A. Such a disjunction is a mere vague or generalized report of whatever in point of fact happened; let me stress that this has nothing at all to do with the way in which the disjunction is reached or arrived at by the one to whom it relates. It does not mean that he infers it from one of its disjuncts, or anything like that. The relevant sense of 'a mere vague or generalized report of what in fact happened' is, as was implied, one in which this description of a statement is an expression of a commentator's knowledge that, after the event, when you were given what in point offact happened, you could call the statement that. And of course, by being given what in point of fact happened, I mean in the context what it is natural to mean: being given that perception of a specified sort occurred; or, being given that illusion of a specified sort occurred. Coming now to Sense B. 'Answering the question as to what happened to the subject', in this sense, just means being a true statement which expressly reports something about the subject that happened at or after the time at which he began to be affected. The main point, or a main point, about this is that a report of the subject's having perceived something 'answers the question' in Sense B. My perceiving something is itself something that happens at or after the time at which I begin to be affected-after, to be more accurate. I

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Here we are tempted to a queer redefinition of 'the perceiving', or to a much less queer though potentially misleading definition of something like 'the perceptual process', so as to include in the former, or more defensibly in the latter, some part of what relevantly happened before the first moment at which it was true that the subject perceived the thing. This makes us feel as if we had to restore the balance by introducing some qualification, something like 'the perceiving qua mental act', if we want to get back to the original, unredefined notion of the subject's perceiving the thing; a condition first satisfied at the first moment when-he perceived the thing. Such qualifications are pointless and absurd. If you speak of the 'perceptual process', or less defensibly the 'process of perceiving', in that broader way, then the subject's perceiving the thing-which is what I, for one, always mean by the perception or the perceiving-is itself ouly a part ofthe 'perceptual process' or 'process of perceiving' ; you do not need any qualification to distinguish it as a part. In the case of the Brontosaurus as we like to think of him, with poppies still dangling from his mouth while something is chewing the end of his tail, it is futile to say that 'the perceiving' has already begun, so that we must at all costs carefully distingnish between 'the perceiving as a whole' and the perceiving qua something or other, which is yet to come. Unfortunately for the Brontosaurus, no perceiving has yet occurred. Still more" absurd would it be to suggest that perceiving or an instance of perceiving began when the supernova exploded which I now perceive. The point is that with a whole family of verbs or functions, 'to perceive', 'to after-image', 'to react', 'to respond', 'to reply', 'to re-enter', etc., the function or proposition entails something's having happened before the first moment at which the function is true of the thing; so that its being true of the thing is, if a happening, then a part and not the whole of what happens during the time which begins when the first thing happens that is of a kind whose happening is logically entailed by the function or proposition. Given that a perception-proposition, if true-and alternatively of course, an illusion-report, if true-'answers the question' in Sense B, it is hardly worth quarrelling about whether a perception-illusion disjunction does so. Why not say that it does? If an objection is raised, this will perhaps be

A VERY SPECIAL NOTION II.

because the objector does not like saying that such a disjunction expressly reports something which, etc. There is not much in this. Either he is just focusing on the fact that the thing is an explicit disjunction, in which case his objection does not apply to something introduced as a definiendum for such a disjunction; or he is moving from 'expressly' to 'explicitly' and from this to 'exactly, with exactitude'. Certainly a perception-illusion disjunction does not score high for exactitude; its account of the what-it-is of what happened, though non-null, stops short of that degree of informativeness which a normal human interest in the matter exacts. Since all those things 'answer the question' in Sense B, the fact of something's doing so cannot be used to show that it answers the question in Sense A, which involves being a more precise statement of what happened than any of those things. 8 (ii). Can you ever call a perception-illusion disjunction 'an express report, or explicit description, of an experience that you have both when you perceive a given thing and when you have the illusiou of doing so'? I suppose the answer is that every perception-illusion disjunction, or at the very least every nondisjunctive paraphrase of a perception-illusion disjunction, can at a pinch be called that; in such a trivial, vacuous sense that it is not worth while to apply the tag. It is even rather well worth while not to apply the tag, so strongly would the tag suggest that the perception-illusion disjunction or its paraphrase was not this but-something else. Can a perception-illusion disjunction like D* or Db be called 'an express report, or explicit description, of an experience which is (would be) the same whether the case is (was) one of perception or one of illusion'? Surely the same reply is intuitivelyappropriate, though the inwardness of the matter remains to be explored (in IIb and IIc). 8 (iii). To put a general question in particular terms; does my true statement, 'I see a flash oflight or I am having the illusion of doing so', describe a feature of an event of which I am the subject, a feature in virtue of which I might decide that my case is one of either perceiving a flash of light or having the illusion? That it does not, is surely the answer one would expect from an uncorrupted mind not stunned by the question. This

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is at least partly because what the perception-illusion disjunction does; when stated, is precisely to express t~e decision th~t my case is one of either ... or . And there is an absolute If trivial distinction in common parlance between p, on the one hand, and something in virtue ofwhich you might decide that p, on the other. Though trivially true, this is not quite unimportant in the present context. It reminds us, even if this is all it does, that people who speak of 'something in virtue of which' one decides that a given perception-illusion disjunction is true do not mean by that 'something' the truth of the perceptionillusion disjunction.

8 (iv). The next description to be considered is that of what is called an 'intentional' statement, or statement involving an 'intentional object'. To say that this description does not apply to perception-illusion disjunctions, is too flat. One ought to say rather that the description seems hardly worth applying to such disjunctions; qualifications do not go easily into section headings, though. The philosophical conception of 'intentionality' does not always t-akethe same form. I will assume that no statement will be called 'intentional' if it neither is of the form 'X that P' and can be true though p is false, nor has, as it is sometimes put, a grammatical object which, consistently with the truth of the statement, may not exist. I will also assume that, at least in t~e present context, this last condition would, for those who use It, be sufficient. A paradigmatic example of an 'intentional' statement then is, 'Ponce de Leon went in search of the fountain if youth'. 'Diogenes went looking for an honest man' is another, however; even if such a man exists, the statement does not entail this. The reason why it would not be quite right to say that the description, 'intentional statement', does not apply to a perception-illusion disjunction is that it does,for instance, apply to: 'Bob visually perceived or was illuded of visually perceiving a flash if light'. I think it would also be the custom to say that 'a flash of light' was the grammatical object in 'Either Bob perceived a flash of light, or he was illuded of perceiving one', so that this statement would count as 'intentional' too, by that test. And of course if you use 'see' in the neutral sense of

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perception or illusion, then 'Bob saw a flash if light' gives you a much less cumbrous example; certainly something which is ex hypothesi clarified as a perception-illusion disjunction can be 'intentional', by that grammatical test. True, there is the complication that 'the illusion of perceiving a flash of light' is the grammatical object of some sentences, just as 'the perception of this or that' is sometimes the grammatical object of a sentence. In such formulations, and in those in which the grammatical object is a sentence, or a clause like 'that he saw a flash of light', we may feel that we do not quite know how to take the question whether the statement could be true 'without that object's existing'. It is certainly not easy to see what is achieved here by applying the term 'intentional' when this is governed by school-book grammatical criteria. Logical criteria seem only marginally, if at all, more promising for the applicability of the term. Like any 'vel'-statement, a 'blunt' perception-illusion disjunction is one whose truthvalue depends solely on that of its constituents; this is regularly called a form of 'extensionality' in contrast with 'intensionality' or 'intentionality'. (True, there may be something a bit more intensional or intentional about pointed perception-illusion disjunctions; here there is a question of what has been called intentional identity, which will be touched on in Section 14, though not under that imperspicuous name.) One motive, though only one motive, for interest in 'intentionality' is the wish to test Brentano's thesis that 'intentionality is the mark of psychological phenomena'. Since '» perceives that p' is itself of course not 'intentional' when perception has the objective sense in which we are using it here, a defender of that thesis must either say that perception, in this sense, is in no way a psychological phenomenon, or else must explain how 'intentionality' is in some way in the ofEng here. One way, though only one way, in which this task may be attempted is by trying to show t-hat 'x perceives that p', in the objective sense, must be unidirectionally defined as the conjunction of an 'intentional' condition with some other condition, the former : condition being the strictly psychological part of perceiving. In virtue of its unidirectionalism rather than its emphasis on 'intentionality', this is a form of the relevant controversial conception of an experience which will be in question.

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PEROEPTION-ILLUSION DISJUNOTIONS (1)

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The fact, that an 'intentional' sense or use of 'x saw a flash of light' can so readily be clarified in terms of a perception-illusion disjunction, might by the way lead to a mistaken inference. It might lead to the idea that one could clarify, in terms of a disjunction of realization and illusion, the familiar weakened sense or use of such locutions as 'mowing the lawn', 'entertaining an audience', 'helping the gardener', etc., in which what is meant is merely that the intention of the person, who is described as doing the thing, is to achieve or produce the relevant result or effect. No such clarification is possible, since someone may for instance be entertaining an audience, in the weakened sense that this is what he means to be doing, and yet may be neither producing the relevant effect nor getting in any sense, however weak, the illusion of doing so. The fact, that a so-called 'intentional' sense of perception can readily be clarified as the disjunction of perception and illusion, seems indeed to be connected with the fact that what we have here, usually at least, is precisely not the ordinary notion of intention. Ifwe were to introduce, as we could, a sense of 'perceiving a cuckoo at the edge of the wood' in which by saying that someone was doing this we meant neither more nor less than that his intention or hope was to be achieving the identification of something at the edge of the wood as a cuckoo; then this 'perceiving in the sense of intention' would be sufficient, but not necessary, for what is intended as a general rule by the philosophical notion of an 'intentional' or purely psychological sense of perception. When I am given a phosphene and know that this is what is happening, it is not true that I mean to be detecting a flash oflight. Only a philosopher whose eccentric conception of the 'intentional' or purely psychological sense of perception did not regularly include illusion conld clarify his conception in terms of the ordinary sense of intention (cf. Anscombe, Cohen).

8 (v). We next come to two descriptions which definitely do not apply to perception-illusion disjunctions, if these are identified by the mode of sentence-composition which I gave as a recipe. Here we must bear in mind the question whether these descriptions might nevertheless apply 'to the same thing in other words', in such a way that, so to speak, it was not worth not applying them to perception-illusion disjunctions proper.

II.

PERCEPTION -ILLUSION DISJUNCTIONS (1)

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any other perception-illusion disjunction, if ouly because the idea ofsuch a definition would be to analyse perception as such. This applies as much to causal as to non-causal definitions; it does not matter whether 'x perceives that p' is sought to be defined simply as 'X and r, or as 'X and as a result r. As for things that mean much the same as perception-illusion disjunctions, what we have said in the other cases applies; if something that means much the same as a perception-illusion disjunction is suitable in this role, it is suitable not because it means much the same as a perception-illusion disjunction, but in spite of the fact. That something which means much the. same as a perception-illusion disjunction can be a conjunct in a clarifying paraphrase of 'x perceives that r. provided that this clarification is not conceived unidirectionally, is something I shall in IIc admit, or even claim (c£ Grice).

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Experience: An Inquiry into Some Ambiguities

Experience: An Inquiry into Some Ambiguities (Clarendon Library of Logic & Philosophy)

Lila: an inquiry into morals

Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

An Inquiry into Bukharan Qadimism

An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution

Inquiry into Life

Biology - Inquiry into Life

Inquiry into Physics

Value and Capital: An Inquiry into some Fundamental Principles of Economic Theory, Second Edition

Ants and some other Insects - An Inquiry into the Psychic Powers of these Animals

Economics and Power: An Inquiry into Human Relations and Markets

Critical Pragmatics: An Inquiry into Reference and Communication

The Passion To Learn: An Inquiry into Autodidactism

Truth and Falsehood: An Inquiry into Generalized Logical Values

Economics and Power: An Inquiry into Human Relations and Markets

Unknowability: An Inquiry Into the Limits of Knowledge

Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice

The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis

Insights into Game Theory: An Alternative Mathematical Experience

Clinical Experience With Some Rare Nosodes

Some Remarks on Kant's Theory of Experience

Insights into Game Theory: An Alternative Mathematical Experience

Insights into Game Theory: An Alternative Mathematical Experience

Cambridge Insights Into Game Theory An Alternative Mathematical Experience

On Royalty A Very Polite Inquiry Into Some Strangely Related Families

Pierre: or, The ambiguities

Mistress of Ambiguities

Experience: An Inquiry into Some Ambiguities