Introductory
summary by Ted Honderich of Peter Strawson’s Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual
Lecture PERCEPTION
AND ITS OBJECTS Professor Sir Peter Strawson, born
of teachers in north London, read Philosophy, Politics and Economics in Oxford,
and, after returning from the war, became a Fellow at University College Oxford
and subsequently Oxford's Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics. At 31 he became
known for his contending against Bertrand Russell's Theory of Descriptions, and
subsequently he was distinguished by his metaphysics in the English descriptive
or analytic way, not speculative in the German way, and by his books Individuals and Introduction to Logical Theory and many articles. A car accident resulted in his being
unable to give an arranged and anticipated Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual
Lecture. The editor and the publisher of the present volume have decided to
include the present paper. It like most of the lectures is not in much need of
an introduction for clarification but more to lead readers into a confident
anticipation that even if the thinking is not easy, concentration on it will be
rewarded. The paper is an adjudication of two
views of our ordinary sense perception of things and a defence of a third view.
The first is that of the Logical Positivist A. J. Ayer in the tradition of what
is called phenomenalism, having to do with internal and somehow subjective
entities in perception, what historically were called ideas and subsequently
have been spoken of as sense data, qualia, representations and the like. The
second view by John Mackie is in a tradition of what is called scientific
realism, having to do with the science of perception and the nature of what is
perceived. As against these two views, the third view or attitude, to which
Strawson is at least inclined, is what he speaks of as a kind of common-sense
realism about the world. Ayer, we are reminded, takes it in a
late book that our ordinary perceptual experience of a thing, seeing it, is
such that what we judge or think about what we see goes beyond what we actually experience. What we have in mind,
maybe a room, is more than what, strictly speaking, we do experience in the
subjective episode. That is accepted in a certain careful way by Strawson. But
it is also maintained that we do not need to embrace sense data, which need is
a myth. We have to remember instead that our perceptual experience in a way
immediately includes or involves a concept of the object itself. It is only the
theory of phenomenalist philosophers that in a way leads us away from this
fact. We can and must stick to common-sense realism. It is possible to question and to disagree with common-sense realism, as I myself do. Are the dappled deer yet more and more literally the story of your seeing them than Strawson supposes? Is it possible to go still further in Strawson's realist direction and and to suppose that our actual consciousness in perception can be very explicitly analysed? But one cannot but be affected by his line of thought in its informal astuteness. What is conveyed and evoked has the excellence of making you think. It is easy, too, to be enlightened by much along the way, say the incidental observation near the end that science is not the only offspring of common sense, and remains its dependant. |