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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    MOLYNEUX'S QUESTION true, it is impossible to refute it. I shall never forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with almighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, 'I refute it thus!' Dr Johnson's answer was all the more objective, in the Kantian sense, for referring to an objectus, the Latin for an obstacle. He pointed out, or rather kicked, certain facts which were not in dispute, leaving to the bishop the task of sorting out quid juris. Similarly, it seems that Wordsworth found it necessary, at a certain time of his life, 'to push against something that resisted to be sure there was anything outside'. The spirit of Condillac's enquiry is closer to Dr Johnson than to Berkeley. He accepts that there is a psychological difficulty in explaining how we come to refer things to the outside, and he tries to solve it. Naturally, as an empiricist, what he tries to do is to show how experience could lead us to the idea of an external world. Obviously this is no answer to Berkeley's quid juris problem, for Berkeley is asking for a 'deduction' of experience. The empiricist philosophy could be summarized in the few words: a deduction of experience is impossible. No wonder, then, that Berkeley's problem poses difficulties to empiricism, and why the latter has always avoided the difficulty by an irrelevant appeal to fact.^^ Condillac's answer is very modern. Its true originality could not be perceived until recently, because it is only in the last few years that psychology has caught up with his ideas. Briefly, Condillac stressed the fundamentally active nature of percep¬ tion. He realized that there was no reason why organisms should have an idea of an external world, or even why they should have any perceptions at all, if their sole commerce with the world consisted in passively receiving information. If we were indeed but a sensorium into which sensations crowded, why should we be conscious either of our selves, or of the fact that the sensations came from outside? Reason can give no reply, and that Berkeley had thoroughly shown. To put the problem in a modern way, if a perception is the firing of a nerve cell, as the materialists tell us, H. H. Price, Perception (London: Methuen, 1950] 279. As Erich Heller says, 'It is the truly pathetic fallacy of empiricism that it offers as safe harbour what is the ocean itself, the storms, the waves, cind the shipwrecks, namely man's experience of himself and the objective world.' The Disinherited Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961) 232. 70