The Concept of Nature: The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919Whitehead, Alfred North
Philosophy
The Concept of Nature: The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919
Whitehead, Alfred North
Knowledge, Theory of; Nature; Science -- Philosophy
Our knowledge of the peculiar characters of different events depends
upon our power of comparison. I call the exercise of this factor in our
knowledge 'recognition,' and the requisite sense-awareness of the
comparable characters I call 'sense-recognition.' Recognition and
abstraction essentially involve each other. Each of them exhibits an
entity for knowledge which is less than the concrete fact, but is a real
factor in that fact. The most concrete fact capable of separate
discrimination is the event. We cannot abstract without recognition, and
we cannot recognise without abstraction. Perception involves
apprehension of the event and recognition of the factors of its
character.
The things recognised are what I call 'objects.' In this general sense
of the term the relation of extension is itself an object. In practice
however I restrict the term to those objects which can in some sense or
other be said to have a situation in an event; namely, in the phrase
'There it is again' I restrict the 'there' to be the indication of a
special event which is the situation of the object. Even so, there are
different types of objects, and statements which are true of objects of
one type are not in general true of objects of other types. The objects
with which we are here concerned in the formulation of physical laws are
material objects, such as bits of matter, molecules and electrons. An
object of one of these types has relations to events other than those
belonging to the stream of its situations. The fact of its situations
within this stream has impressed on all other events certain
modifications of their characters. In truth the object in its
completeness may be conceived as a specific set of correlated
modifications of the characters of all events, with the property that
these modifications attain to a certain focal property for those events
which belong to the stream of its situations. The total assemblage of
the modifications of the characters of events due to the existence of an
object in a stream of situations is what I call the 'physical field' due
to the object. But the object cannot really be separated from its field.
The object is in fact nothing else than the systematically adjusted set
of modifications of the field. The conventional limitation of the object
to the focal stream of events in which it is said to be 'situated' is
convenient for some purposes, but it obscures the ultimate fact of
nature. From this point of view the antithesis between action at a
distance and action by transmission is meaningless. The doctrine of this
paragraph is nothing else than another way of expressing the
unresolvable multiple relation of an object to events.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account