Knowledge, Theory of; Metaphysics; Philosophy -- Introductions
In addition to general principles, the other kind of self-evident truths
are those immediately derived from sensation. We will call such truths
'truths of perception', and the judgements expressing them we will
call 'judgements of perception'. But here a certain amount of care
is required in getting at the precise nature of the truths that are
self-evident. The actual sense-data are neither true nor false. A
particular patch of colour which I see, for example, simply exists: it
is not the sort of thing that is true or false. It is true that there is
such a patch, true that it has a certain shape and degree of brightness,
true that it is surrounded by certain other colours. But the patch
itself, like everything else in the world of sense, is of a radically
different kind from the things that are true or false, and therefore
cannot properly be said to be _true_. Thus whatever self-evident truths
may be obtained from our senses must be different from the sense-data
from which they are obtained.
It would seem that there are two kinds of self-evident truths of
perception, though perhaps in the last analysis the two kinds may
coalesce. First, there is the kind which simply asserts the _existence_
of the sense-datum, without in any way analysing it. We see a patch
of red, and we judge 'there is such-and-such a patch of red', or more
strictly 'there is that'; this is one kind of intuitive judgement of
perception. The other kind arises when the object of sense is complex,
and we subject it to some degree of analysis. If, for instance, we see a
_round_ patch of red, we may judge 'that patch of red is round'. This is
again a judgement of perception, but it differs from our previous kind.
In our present kind we have a single sense-datum which has both colour
and shape: the colour is red and the shape is round. Our judgement
analyses the datum into colour and shape, and then recombines them by
stating that the red colour is round in shape. Another example of this
kind of judgement is 'this is to the right of that', where 'this'
and 'that' are seen simultaneously. In this kind of judgement the
sense-datum contains constituents which have some relation to each
other, and the judgement asserts that these constituents have this
relation.
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