A post that summarised my writing on Austin, from here, apparently ran afoul of the rules. The absence leaves somewhat of a hole, so in its place, here is the origional, somewhat edited, copied as it was writ by me. The images did not carry over. The text was a step-by-step run through of Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia. First three lectures.
The relevance to telescopes is I hope clear.
I find myself re-reading Austin’s lecture notes as reconstructed by G. J Warnock. The result of a slow wet day and recent threads hereabouts.
The book is an extended and detailed remonstration against the view, so common as to be almost ubiquitous in these fora, that
p.2:…we never see or otherwise perceive (or ‘sense*’), or anyhow we never directly perceive or sense, material objects (or material things), but only sense-data (or our own ideas, impressions, sensa, sense-perceptions, percepts, &c.).
Several ongoing threads advocate this view, in various denominations.
Austin, of course, has been the butt of many jokes, the quintessential irrelevant Oxford Don, putting the anal back into analytic, and so on. He’s also a decorated war hero, and given the period in which he worked, a probable misogynist. A quick look at his book ngram shows continuous, perhaps even exponential, growth. Anecdotally there has been recent interest in sorting out Austin’s own views from those of his student, John Searle.
Anyway, it promises to be a wet week, and this thread might ease the tedium.
I wasn’t able to find a free PDF. If you have access to one, you might link it here.
I.
The first lecture is introductory, of course. Austin notes the tendency to back down on stronger versions of the doctrine - “Theres the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back”.
Austin calls the doctrine “Scholastic”, ironic language coming from a man who obsessed over detail and dictionaries. But here we have the first of the critical tools of which he makes use; part of my plan for this thread is to draw explicit attention to these. Austin points out that philosophers are inclined to consider only a limited number of cases in their musings, to “oversimplification, schematization, and constant obsessive repetition of jejune ‘examples’. …our ordinary words are much subtler in their uses, and mark many more distinctions, than philosophers have realized”.
Yes, I am aware that I am guilty of this. The tool being advocated is the broad consideration of the full range of uses for the terms at hand. Ruminating on limited cases will lead to limited rumination…
Austin makes clear that his intent is not a defence of realism. In the terminology he uses, he is not advocating a preference for material things over sense-data; in the terminology used more recently, he is not defending realism against antirealism, but rejecting the very distinction between these two.
The reason is simple: “There is no one kind of thing that we perceive, but many different kinds” (p. 4, emphasis in original).
So there’s the argument of the text in outline.
II.
There’s a copy of Ayer’s Foundations at Foundations Of Empirical Knowledge : Ayer Alfred J. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive . In the section quoted Ayer is introducing the Argument from Illusion,
Some mirth has been found in Austin’s use of “the ordinary man” - as if such as he would have any idea… But notice that the contrast between philosophers and ordinary folk is borrowed from Ayer. Austin uses it to draw out the idea of ordinary language which is central to his approach. I’ll adopt “folk” by way of avoiding issues of gender.
The points against Ayer here are:
- It’s not the case that ordinary folk see themselves as always perceiving material objects; they see shadows and rainbows and such, and understand that these are different to pens and cigarettes; further, it is far from clear what a “material thing” might be, outside of a discussion of the sort being had here.
- it is not true that not seeing a material thing is equivalent to being deceived by one’s senses.
- There’s more than a hint that common folk are naïve in not being critical of the objects of their everyday perception.
- That there is not a place for doubt here, or at the very least, that if there is to be a place for doubt, it is not obvious.
- We don’t attribute truth and falsity to what we see, but to what we make of what we see. Further, and importantly, talk of deception only makes sense against a background in which we understand what it is like not to be deceived.
All these come together to show that seeing things is a far more complicated and indeed complex process than is supposed in Ayer’s text, and indeed in fairly simple accounts given elsewhere. Seeing a cup is not the same as seeing a rainbow or as seeing a shadow or a headless magician’s assistant on stage.
The use of “directly” in “seeing directly” takes its meaning in contrast to the meaning of “indirectly” in each case. Do you see the ship directly or through a periscope? Do you see the door directly or via a mirror? This is a standard critical tool for Austin, used elsewhere and later to show philosophical abuse of “real”.
In the spirit of taking on as wide a field of examples as possible, Austin draws attention to the examples being dominated by sight. What might it mean to hear something indirect? What sort of thing is an indirect smell? “For this reason alone there seems to be something badly wrong with the question, ‘do we perceive things indirectly or not?’”(p. 17)
Other examples follow. In the other direction, are we to say that we saw the guns indirectly if we see the flash of their firing? The cloud chamber example is perhaps dated, a more recent equivalent might be to ask if we saw the Higgs boson, or did we see signs of its passing? The cloud chamber is more direct… 
Whatever our philosopher is doing in talking of “direct perception” is very different to what the rest of us might be doing. So much the worse when the philosopher is going to claim that something could never be perceived directly.
III
p.20:The primary purpose of the argument from illusion is to induce people to accept ‘sense-data’ as the proper and correct answer to the question of what they perceive on certain abnormal, exceptional occasions; but in fact it is usually followed up with another bit of argument intended to establish that they always perceive sense-data. Well, what is the argument?
Here he outlines the argument from illusion, hinting at the shenanigans he sees in its structure. Austin will show how Ayer has oversimplified, even misdiagnosed, the case for these abnormal instances, why we should reject ‘sense-data’ as a solution, and then that generalising to all perceptions is absurd.
Austin’s dissection is minute and thorough.
The three examples on the next page are central: A stick that appears bent in water because of refraction; A mirage; and a reflection in a mirror. I’ll give a bit of background on each.
The physics of the stick is straightforward.
Quoting Discourse
A stick or a pencil half immersed in water at an angle appears bent due to refraction of light at the air-water surface. Figure shows a straight stick AO whose lower portion BO is immersed in water. It appears to be bent at point B in the direction BI. A ray of light OC coming from the lower end O passes from water into air at C and gets refracted away from the normal in the direction CX.Another ray OD gets refracted in the direction DY. The two refracted ray CX and DY, when produced backward, appear to meet at point I, nearer to the water surface than O. Similarly each part of the immersed portion of the stick raised. As a result immersed portion of the stick appears to be bent when viewed at an angle from outside.
The mirage example is a bit unclear.
Ayer, p. 4:Thus, when a man sees a mirage in the desert, he is not thereby perceiving any material thing , for the oasis which he thinks he IS perceiving does not exist
Presumably the “thing” that is supposed not to exist is the body of water in which the tree appears to be reflected, not the tree, which does exist. This image shows a possible result:
The ship, of course, exists. Ayer’s example is not the best.
Mirror images are familiar, and well-understood.
Of course, the stuff in the mirror is “the wrong way around” - usually.
There’s no mystery here, all accepted physics, with a plain and clear explanation.
Ayer’s supposition is that in each case what we see is not a “real” material thing; there is no bent stick, no body of water, no person standing in the mirror, and hence we “must” conclude that in each case what we see is something else - what philosophers call a “sense datum”.
Some might now replace “sense datum” with “qualia”. Not quite the same, but Austin’s counterarguments may hold.
Austin points out that although we are supposedly looking at the Argument from Illusion; that there is a distinction between an illusion and a delusion, terms interchanged by Ayer; and that the examples given are not examples of illusions. “The argument trades on confusions at just this point” (p.22)
Here’s the familiar Müller-Lyer Illusion:
The two lines appear different lengths, but are the same.
Amusingly, the page from which I borrowed the image has this to say:
Quoting Zach Olsen
Here’s the thing: Even after we have measured the lines and found them to be equal and have had the neurological basis of the illusion explained to us, our conscious awareness still perceives one line to be shorter than the other. One can know that the two lines are the same length whilst at the same time experience them as different lengths.This has a serious effect on our conception of the nature of experience. The world around you is not the way you think it is.
Olsen’s conclusion is not quite right, but not quite wrong, either. We are, after all, aware of the Müller-Lyer Illusion, and after a point no longer surprised by it - one might say it becomes a part of the way we think. The Müller-Lyer Illusion is part of the world around you and part of what you think. Olsen’s conclusion, “the world around you is not the way you think it is”, is imprecise, as are similar views expressed already in this thread.
Delusions differ from illusions mainly in their being something amiss with the person who is deluded - they have delusions of grandeur, of persecution. We suffer from delusions, not so much from illusions… (p.23) In an illusion, nothing need be “conjured up”; we see the lines before us quite clearly. In a delusion, the grandeur or paranoia are the product of the sufferer. Something is wrong with the person who has delusions. But there is nothing wrong with you when you look at the Müller-Lyer Illusion; indeed, now you are aware of the illusion, you can take steps to prevent yourself being deceived, and even use your understanding to create novel illusions.
It is true that sometimes there is reason to doubt what you’re experiencing. I suppose that what is salient here is that sometimes folk doubt what they are experiencing without good reason. Austin is slowly and carefully showing why this is problematic.
What’s not true is that “we sometimes see things incorrectly; therefore, we never see them correctly”. The invalidity of this is apparently not obvious to many. Stove’s gem, the worst argument in the world, and so on.
Not everything you perceive is real… Austin is certainly not making any such claim. Sometimes we see things that are real. It does not follow that everything we see is real. Sometimes we see things that are not real. It does not follow that everything we see is not real.
I suppose “hallucination” is closer to “delusion” than to “illusion”, in that something is conjured up in both an hallucination and a delusion, but not so much in an illusion. Should Ayer have called his the “Argument from Hallucination”? That doesn’t carry the same rhetorical strength.
So is a mirage an illusion or a delusion? Ayer would have us suppose that we have conjured into existence a thing, a “sense data”, and hence that we are deluded, seeing the sense data where there is nothing. But it is clear from the explanations given above that what we see is a part of the sky, or a ship, appearing in an unexpected place. The problem, if there is one, is not within us, but in the way light is bent by layers of air at different temperatures. We don’t need the delusion of sense data to explain mirages.
When you look at yourself in the mirror, are you looking at an illusion? That is an odd use of words. Those are your eyes, that zit is on your nose; they are not illusory, and certainly not delusions. The coin, seen edge on, looks elliptical - that’s not an illusion, but just how a coin seen edge-on is supposed to look. The straight stick in water looks just how a straight stick in water should look - slightly bent. Just as in the Müller-Lyer Illusion we understand what is going on, our expectations are met.
Importantly, there are common cases where we miss-perceive, yet which are neither illusions nor delusions. Austin gives the example of a proofreader who sees “casual” as “causal”; not a delusion or illusion, but a simple misreading.
Austin uses Price to show a common feature of Arguments from Illusion; that they suppose there is something extra that is what is seen in each of these cases, in addition to the mirage, reflection, stick and so on; the argument is taken as proving that this additional aspect of perception is needed. I hope it is plain from the explanations given hereabouts that this need not be so. The explanations of each do not require sense data. In such situations we are not deluded.
The sting, when it comes, is pithy and simple.
So the argument goes that the stick is straight, but appears bent.
p.29: What is wrong, what is even faintly surprising, in the idea of a stick’s being straight but looking bent sometimes? Does anyone suppose that if something is straight, then it jolly well has to look straight at all times and in all circumstances?
And the answer here is simply that there is no problem with a straight stick that looks bent when partially immersed in water, not illusion, no delusion, nothing that needs explaining beyond the physics of optics mentioned earlier. And there certainly is no need to infer the existence of a novel entity to take on the part of being what we see when we look at a straight stick that appears bent when partially submerged, apart from and distinct from the stick.
And when you see yourself in a mirror, there is no need to invent a simulacrum to stand in for you. There is no illusion, no hallucination and no error. What you see is yourself, reflected in the mirror. Again, this is what mirrors do, and no further explanation is needed that replaces your reflection with anything immaterial.
And when you see a mirage, you need not infer the presence of a new thing, but understand instead that the light from things already there has been bent in odd ways. Of all the examples, this is the one Ayer deals with most poorly.
p.32:for though, as Ayer says above, 'it is convenient to give a name, to what he is experiencing, the fact is that it already has a name-a mirage. So there is no reason, let alone a necessity, to conclude that in these cases we need invoke sense data to explain what is going on.
Even less, then, to take the next step, and conclude with Ayer that in normal cases, what we see is sense data.