Mr. Russell gives a specific illustration of what he takes to be the
correct way of stating the question in an account of what, in the
common-sense universe of discourse, would be termed walking around a
table. If we exclude considerations to which we have (apart from
assuming just the things which are doubtful) no right, the datum turns
out to be something to be stated as follows: "What is really known[66]
is a correlation of muscular and other bodily sensations with changes
in visual sensations" (p. 77). By "sensations" must be meant sensible
objects, not mental events. This statement repeats the point already
dealt with: "muscular," "visual," and "other bodily" are all terms
which are indispensable and which also assume the very thing
professedly brought into question: the external world as that was
defined. "Really known" assumes both noting and belief, with whatever
complex implications they may involve--implications which, for all
that appears to the contrary, may be indefinitely complex, and which,
by Mr. Russell's own statement, involve relationship to at least two
other terms besides the datum. But in addition there appears the new
term "correlation." I cannot avoid the conclusion that this term
involves an _explicit_ acknowledgment of the external world.
Note, in the first place, that the correlation in question is not
simple: it is threefold, being a correlation of correlations. The
"changes in visual sensations" (objects) must be correlated in a
temporal continuum; the "muscular and other bodily sensations"
(objects) must also constitute a connected series. One set of changes
belongs to the serial class "visual"; the other set to the serial
class "muscular." And these two classes sustain a point-to-point
correspondence to each other--they are correlated.
I am not raising the old question of how such complex correlations can
be said to be either "given" or "known" in sense, though it is worth a
passing notice that it was on account of this sort of phenomenon that
Kant postulated his threefold intellectual synthesis of apprehension,
reproduction, and recognition in conception; and that it is upon the
basis of necessity for such correlations that the rationalists have
always criticized sensationalist empiricism. Personally I agree that
temporal and spatial qualities are quite as much given in experience
as are particulars--in fact, as I have been trying to show,
particulars can be identified _as_ particulars only in a relational
complex. My point is rather (i) that any such given is already
precisely what is meant by the "world"; and (ii) that such a highly
specified correlation as Mr. Russell here sets forth is in no case a
psychological, or historical, primitive, but is a _logical_ primitive
arrived at by an analysis of an empirical complex.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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