No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
The notion of experience plays a deeply ambiguous role in philosophical thinking. In ordinary discourse we say that applicants for employment as joiner, farmhand or nanny should have some previous experience with carpentry, livestock or children. Such uses of the word clearly presuppose the existence of the relevant objects of experience. In other usages the focus is more on the mental effect on the subject (without doubting the existence of the relevant objects), as when someone says that they have had several unpleasant experiences that day–a wetting in a thunderstorm, an altercation with a traffic warden, and a long wait at the station.
1 L., Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), *621.Google Scholar
2 See Armstrong, D. M., Bodily Sensations (London: Routledge, 1962), Ch. IV-V,Google Scholar andA Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge, 1968), Ch. IX. Cf.Google Scholar also A., Michotte, The Perception of Causality (London: Methuen, 1963), Ch. XIII.Google Scholar
3 A point which Kant alluded to in his Second Analogy, Critique of Pure Reason, B233ff.Google Scholar
4 Cf., Wittgenstein, op. cit., and Anscombe, G. E. M., Intention (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), section 8.Google Scholar
5 Gibson, J. J., The Senses considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 32–3.Google Scholar
6 F., Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 146.Google Scholar
7 M., Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated by C., Smith (London: Routledge, 1962). Part One of this book is devoted to ‘The Body’.Google Scholar
8 S., Hampshire, Thought and Action, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959), 47–8, and 69.Google Scholar
9 Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, II. xi. 17.Google Scholar
10 Newton made the closet image even more explicit, contrasting the supposed directness of God's knowledge of things with the inevitable indirectness of our perception of them: ‘of which things the images only carried through the organs of sense into our little sensoriums, are there seen and beheld by that which in us perceives and thinks’ (Opticks, end of Query 28). But where do touch and bodily action fit in to this scheme? What is it ‘in us’ (one wonders, in these feminist days) that does the cooking, the lovemaking and the childcare?
11 That ‘most despotic of the senses’ as Wordsworth called it (The Prelude, 1805 version, Bk XL, line 174).Google Scholar
12 H., Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge University Press, 1981), 6.Google Scholar
13 The question about the necessary conditions for having any particular experience thus becomes Kant's question about the possibility of experience in general, see Critique of Pure Reason B195–7
14 Kant, B275–9.Google Scholar
15 Moore, G. E., ‘Proof of an External World’, Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. XXV, 1939.Google Scholar
16 Dennett, D. C., Consciousness Explained (London: Allen Lane, 1991)–see Ch. 1.1Google Scholar
17 Malcolm, N., Dreaming (London: Routledge, 1959).Google Scholar
18 In this, we could do worse than think about what Kant says in and around his Refutation of Idealism–e.g ‘whether this or that supposed experience be not purely imaginary, must be ascertained from its special determinations, and through its congruence with the criteria of all real experience’ (B279, and cf. B273).
We might also ask ourselves what if anything lies behind Wittgenstein's suggestion that the temptation to solipsist claims like ‘Only this is is really seen’ seems much stronger when we stare at unchanging surroundings, than when we actively walk about–see The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 66.Google Scholar