The Structure of Consciousness
The motor impulses to reach out to, or to flee from, this something carry out this feeling and develop it. There can be no doubt that additional meanings, such as externality, independence of control, and persistence, all add themselves to this nucleus to constitute the belief in a co-real object.
Professor Strong calls this affirmation of an object instinctive. It is quite clearly expressive of the nature and situation of the organism. The structure of consciousness [http://societyandpeople.com/news-article/logic-and-epistemology.html] reflects the situation of the organism.
It can be suggested that the flaw in Berkeley's analysis of perception was due to his lack of attention to the psychological factors mediating the affirmation of an object and to his neglect of realistic meanings. In common with the traditional empiricists, he did not do justice to the category of thing hood. But the sensuous thing which is given in perception as the object has tended to suggest an impossible view of our knowledge of physical existents.
Since these sensuous things are open to inspection, we assume that physical things, with which they are confused through lack of reflective discrimination, are open to this intuitive type of inspection. Primary knowledge is thus taken to be an apprehension of physical reality, and physical reality is thought to be of this sensuous character. These correlative beliefs are equally significant, for they have made their influence felt everywhere in epistemology.
Thinkers who relinquish naive realism are yet apt to fall back upon the copy-theory, that is, the assumption that physical things are sensuous in nature and can be pictured more or less adequately by means of the sensible things apprehended in experience. This position is called representative perception. Knowledge is still taken to be an intuition; only now it is an intuition of a reproduction of the physical existent or of its qualities.
But it must seem quite obvious to us now that knowledge of physical existents cannot be either a direct or an indirect intuition of them. In fact representative perception sounds like a clumsy makeshift. Rather should we ask ourselves the searching question whether the whole idea of intuition is not an illusion due to the fusion, in common-sense perception, of the object of perception with the content of perception. What should we mean by knowledge?
Professor Strong calls this affirmation of an object instinctive. It is quite clearly expressive of the nature and situation of the organism. The structure of consciousness [http://societyandpeople.com/news-article/logic-and-epistemology.html] reflects the situation of the organism.
It can be suggested that the flaw in Berkeley's analysis of perception was due to his lack of attention to the psychological factors mediating the affirmation of an object and to his neglect of realistic meanings. In common with the traditional empiricists, he did not do justice to the category of thing hood. But the sensuous thing which is given in perception as the object has tended to suggest an impossible view of our knowledge of physical existents.
Since these sensuous things are open to inspection, we assume that physical things, with which they are confused through lack of reflective discrimination, are open to this intuitive type of inspection. Primary knowledge is thus taken to be an apprehension of physical reality, and physical reality is thought to be of this sensuous character. These correlative beliefs are equally significant, for they have made their influence felt everywhere in epistemology.
Thinkers who relinquish naive realism are yet apt to fall back upon the copy-theory, that is, the assumption that physical things are sensuous in nature and can be pictured more or less adequately by means of the sensible things apprehended in experience. This position is called representative perception. Knowledge is still taken to be an intuition; only now it is an intuition of a reproduction of the physical existent or of its qualities.
But it must seem quite obvious to us now that knowledge of physical existents cannot be either a direct or an indirect intuition of them. In fact representative perception sounds like a clumsy makeshift. Rather should we ask ourselves the searching question whether the whole idea of intuition is not an illusion due to the fusion, in common-sense perception, of the object of perception with the content of perception. What should we mean by knowledge?
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