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established legacy of belief that the distinction between primary and secondary qualities is hopeless. But Berkeley refuted the distinction only in terms of assump- tions made by Locke, and indeed in terms of an assumption which Berkeley shared with him, namely that we are in direct contact only with a set of ideas. Moreover, consistent at least in this in his empiricism, Berkeley was an idealist, something that there is rea- son not to be. When we reject idealism, the questions of what elements, if any, of a representational theory of perception should 226 physical objects be preserved, and of how the indispensable causal aspect of the concept of perception should be accommodated, are questions which, as before,14 I shall not try to answer. The important point here is that a distinction of primary and secondary qualities can be detached from the representational theory of perception, and when it is formulated independently of that, it emerges as of very great significance. It combines the notions of the material world as it is understood by natural science, and of that world as it really is. The idea of the world as it really is involves at least a contrast with that of the world as it seems to us: where that contrast implies, not that our conception of the world is totally unrelated to reality, but that it has features which are peculiar to us. By the same token, the world as it really is is contrasted with the world as it peculiarly seems to any observer that is to say, as it seems to any observer in virtue of that observer s peculiarities. In using these notions, we are imply- ing that there can be a conception of reality corrected for the special situation or other peculiarity of various observers, and that line of thought leads eventually to a conception of the world as it is independently of the peculiarities of any observers. That, surely, must be identical with a conception which, if we are not idealists, we need: a conception of the world as it is independently of all observers. There is every reason to think that such a conception should leave out secondary qualities. The traditional arguments bring out the ways in which the secondary qualities depend on psychological factors, are a function not just of consciousness, but of the peculiar- ities of individuals or species. The point comes out well in this, that when we understand, or merely have some vague idea of, the kinds of processes that underlie the phenomena of colour (to take what everyone has always regarded as the best entrenched secondary quality, the one that we are most disposed to regard as in things), we can easily understand why a thing should seem one colour to one person, another to another; or, again, why it should seem coloured to members of one species, monochrome to mem- bers of another. In understanding, even sketchily, at a general and reflective level, why things appear variously coloured to various physical objects 227 observers, we shall find that we have left behind any idea that, in some way which transcends those facts, they really have one col- our rather than another. In thinking of these explanations, we are in fact using a conception in which colour does not figure at all as a quality of the things. Our ordinary language does not display these considerations about secondary qualities: in fact, it encourages us to deny them. We can draw distinctions between things seeming green and their really being green; and asked to describe, in an everyday context, a scene without observers (for instance, events occurring before there were any observers), we would unreflectingly use colour- words and other sensory terms. If there was grass in the world before there was consciousness, there was green grass. But these usages do not go very deep; or rather, we should say, we cannot assume that they go very deep. (If scientific enquiry turned out not to yield what the present line of thought requires it to yield, then perhaps our everyday distinctions will turn out to go as deep as anything goes. But we cannot assume that that will be so. Moreover, paradoxically, it would be an affront to other parts of our everyday thought if it did turn out to be so.) Our distinctions between what seems green and what is green are essentially based on agreement within the range of human experience, and human thought is not, in that limited sense at least, tied only to human experience: scien- tific and philosophical reflection can stand back from at least these peculiarities of our constitution. That thought was marvellously expressed already in the fifth century bc by Democritus, one of the first to introduce the distinction between primary and secondary qualities: colours, sweetness, bitterness, these exist by convention; in truth there are atoms and the void. 15 So it is with our descriptions of the unobserved. We can say, and indeed say truly, that grass before there was consciousness was green: certainly . . . was green does not mean . . . looked green to someone . But equally . . . was amusing does not mean amused someone ; the term amusing , like green , is not (at least in that very simple way) relational. But it is, nevertheless, relative, relating to human tastes and interests. Descriptions which embody it, though they may not explicitly mention or include a distinctively 228 physical objects human perspective, recognizably and diagnosibly come from that perspective. One can in describing an unobserved scene properly describe it as amusing, but if one s attention were specially directed to describing it as it was without observers, one would have good reason to leave that concept aside. It is much the same with green or any other secondary quality term: they may not mention their human relativity, but they only too obviously display it to reflection.16 How exactly the truth-conditions of statements containing such terms are to be regarded is a hard and, I suspect, unsolved question. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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