Elements of metaphysicsTaylor, A. E. (Alfred Edward)
Philosophy
Elements of metaphysics
Taylor, A. E. (Alfred Edward)
Metaphysics
(3) The origin of the subjectivist fallacy, as has been brilliantly
shown by Avenarius,[52] is to be found in the “intrasubjective
intercourse” of a plurality of percipients capable of communicating
their experience to each other. So long as I am dealing solely with
myself as an experiencing being and my relation to my own environment,
there is no possibility of a subjectivist interpretation. In my own
direct experience I have to do neither with “mental states” nor with
mere “objects of cognition,” but with _things_ which in various ways by
their interference assist or hinder the accomplishment of my various
purposes, and of which I have therefore to take note, so as to adapt my
ways of reaching my ends to their ways of behaviour. Hence the “natural”
view of the world, for a single experiencing being, would be that of
“naïve realism,” to which the things forming my environment are real in
precisely the same sense in which I am real myself. But as soon as I
have to take account of the experiences of other percipients, there
arises an inevitable fallacy which leads to philosophical consequences
of the gravest kind. Starting with the assumption that the things I
perceive are the real things, I feel a difficulty as to how the same
things can be perceived by the other percipients around me. _E.g._, if
the sun I see is the real sun, what about the sun seen by some one else?
Instead of finding the true explanation, that all the percipients are in
relation to a common environment which is independent of its presence to
any one percipient’s experience, I very naturally fall into the mistake
of thinking the things perceived by other men to be “ideas” or
“percepts” of the real things perceived by me. These perceptual copies
of the real things I, for obvious reasons, locate somewhere “in” the
organisms of my fellow-percipients. Then I go on to interpret my own
experience in terms of the theory I originally devised to meet the case
of my fellow-men, and infer that what I myself perceive is a set of
“percepts” or “ideas” produced “in” my organism by a reality “outside”
all experience. And it is then an easy step to the final conclusion
that, inasmuch as all known and knowable things are mere “ideas in some
one’s head,” nothing else exists. Subjectivism is thus the last step in
the development of the fallacy which begins with what Avenarius calls
“introjection.” Just as we learned that the existence of our fellow-men
is the cardinal fact of experience which affords the most immediate
refutation of the subjectivist theory, so the original source of the
subjectivist fallacy is failure to recognise their experience as being
on the same level of reality as our own.
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