Molyneux's question : vision, touch, and the philosophy of perception / Michael J. Morgan.

  • Morgan, Michael J.
Date:
1977
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Molyneux's question : vision, touch, and the philosophy of perception / Michael J. Morgan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    BERKELEY AND CONDILLAC being able to rectify himself, incidentally, but one which Con- dillac evidently felt deeply, for he returns to the matter again in the Treatise on Sensations (1754). The problem is to explain how, if all our knowledge of the world comes from sensation, and if all our sensations are modifications of ourselves, we can justify the existence of the outside world. Or, rather, there were two questions, which were not very clearly distinguished, and which would not be differentiated until Kant attacked the prob¬ lem. First, there is an epistemological problem, which on the whole was the one Berkeley was concerned with: how can we justify our belief in the external world? To this Berkeley replied: not at all, so long as we believe that our only source of know¬ ledge consists in modification of our own body. But there is a second question, a much more psychological question, and that is: how does it come about that we believe in an external world? If all our sensations occur in the brain, how is it that they appear in many cases to happen outside us? As we shall see, it was the latter question, and not really Berkeley's at all, that Condillac attacked — with brilliant results. Concerning this distinction between the question affaci and the question of right, we may as well read Kant himself: Jurists, when speaking of rights and claims, distinguish in every law¬ suit the question of right (quid juris] from the question of fact (quid facti], and in demanding proof of both they call the former . . . the deduction. We, not being jurists, make use of a number of empirical concepts, without opposition from anyone, and consider ourselves justified, without any deduction, in attaching to them a sense or imagi¬ nary meaning, because we can always appeal to experience to prove their objective reality.® Thus Dr Johnson's famous refutation of Berkeley was defi¬ nitely quid facti. After we came out of church [says Boswell], we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that everjrthing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed that although we are satisfied that his doctrine is not ä E. Kant, Critique of Риге Reason, transi. F. M. Müller (В 117); see A. Zweig, The Essential Kant (New York: Mentor, 1970) 102. The original reads: 'Die Rechtslehre . .. unterscheiden in einem Rechtshandel die Frage über das, was Rechtens ist (Quid iuris) von der, die die Thatsache angeht (Quid facti}' (Critik der reinen Vernunfl, 5th ed. (Leipzig: Hartknoch, 1799) 166). 69