On Sameness and Identity: A Psychological Study: Being a Contribution to the Foundations of a Theory of KnowledgeFullerton, George Stuart
Philosophy
On Sameness and Identity: A Psychological Study: Being a Contribution to the Foundations of a Theory of Knowledge
Fullerton, George Stuart
Knowledge, Theory of
But in which ever of the ways mentioned a man thinks of "real" things,
he does what I have described. And when he implies that the immediately
known and the "real" are in some sense the same, as he does when he
talks as if there were but the one object, or asserts that we do not
know things as they are in themselves but only as they appear to us;
he really uses the word same in the fifth sense that I have given. The
fact that he is using it to indicate the relation between percepts and
a certain class of ideas which he has come to regard as duplicates of
his percepts does not make the use of the word a new one. Whatever may
be the state of affairs outside of his consciousness, this is all that
takes place within it; and the word same, used in this connection, can
mean no more to him than I have said.
SEC. 9. To avoid needless prolixity I will class together and very
briefly treat of the kinds of sameness which one may attribute
to "external" things. It is not necessary to go at length into
the discussion of these, for since the "external" world, as it is
assumed by those who have faith in it, is, to the man thinking it,
simply a more or less modified duplicate of the world of things
immediately perceived; and since all ground for attributing to it
any determinations at all must be found in that which is immediately
perceived; we may naturally look to find in it nothing that we have
not already found in this immediate world. How, indeed, could anything
else get into it? We cannot have _in_ mind what is by hypothesis _out_
of mind. The "real" world is then, in the mind of the man who thinks
it, a world of imagined objects, and the world of imagination depends
for its material upon the world of sense. A little reflection will show
that the kinds of sameness of these "realities" are only the kinds of
sameness already discussed duplicated, and assumed to belong to a new
world.
1. An "external" quality or group of qualities may be said to be the
_same_ with itself at any one instant. Here we have Sense I carried
over into the field of imagined duplicates.
2. An "external" quality existing at one time may be said to be the
_same_ with an "external" quality existing at another time, to indicate
that the two are similar. The same thing may be true of any group of
qualities. Here we have Sense II.
3. The "external" bundle of qualities, which formed for Locke the
knowable element in a thing or "body," may be regarded as being the
_same_ at two different times--as having, so to speak, a life-history.
Here one is simply calling up in thought the experience described under
Sense III.
4. Two "external" things (bundles of "real" qualities), or two
"external" qualities, existing at one time, may be called the _same_ to
mark similarity. Here we have Sense IV.
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