Philosophy

say “I see a black dot”. In the other case, when you say “there is a triangle” because you saw it a moment ago, though not now, you have three stages: First, memory assures you of the proposition “I saw a triangle”, and then you pass on to “there was a triangle”, and then, further, to “there is a triangle, because nothing can have happened to destroy it so quickly.” Here we have obviously passed far beyond the region of immediate certainty. It seems clear, therefore, that, of our two statements, the one which comes nearest to expressing the fact of which we are immediately certain is “I see a triangle”, because the other makes inferences to something public, and thus goes beyond the bare datum. This is on the assumption that we should not say “there is a black dot” when we see a black dot which we attribute to eye-trouble and therefore suppose that no one else can see. Let us therefore concentrate upon “I see a triangle”, and ask ourselves whether the whole of this, or only part, can be accepted as a primitive certainty. A moment’s reflection shows that both “I” and “see” are words which take us beyond what the momentary event reveals. Take “I” to begin with. This is a word whose meaning evidently depends upon memory and expectation. “I” means the person who had certain remembered experiences and is expected to have certain future experiences. We might say “I see a triangle now and I saw a square a moment ago.” The word “I” has exactly the same meaning in its two occurrences in this sentence, and therefore evidently has a meaning dependent upon memory. Now it is our object to arrive at the contribution to your knowledge which is made by seeing the triangle at the moment. Therefore, since the word “I” takes you beyond this contribution, we must cut it out if we want to find a correct verbal expression for what is added to our knowledge by seeing the triangle. We will say “a triangle is being seen”. This is at any rate one step nearer to what we are seeking. But now we must deal with the word “seen”. As ordinarily used, this is a causal word, suggesting something dependent upon the eyes. In this sense, it obviously involves a mass of previous experience; a new-born baby does not know that what it sees depends upon its eyes. However, we could eliminate this. Obviously all objects of sight have a common quality, which no objects of touch or hearing have; a visual object is different from an auditory object, and so on. Therefore instead of saying “a triangle is being seen”, we should say “there is a visual triangle”. Of course the meanings of the words “visual” and “triangle” can only be learnt by experience, but they are not logically dependent upon experience. A being could be imagined which would know the words at birth; such a being could express its datum in the words “there is a visual triangle”. In any case, the problems remaining belong to the study of concepts; we will therefore ignore them at present. Now in English the words “there is” are ambiguous. When I used them before, saying, “there is a triangle”, I meant them in the sense of “voila” or “da ist”. Now I mean them in the sense of “il y a” or “es giebt”. One might express what is meant by saying “a visual triangle exists”, but the word “exist” has all sorts of metaphysical connotations that I wish to avoid. Perhaps it is best to say “occurs”. We have now arrived at something which is just as true when your perception is illusory as when it is correct. If you say “a visual black dot is occurring”, you are speaking the truth, if there is one in your field of vision. We have eliminated the suggestion that others could see it, or that it could be touched, or that it is composed of matter in the sense of physics. All these suggestions are present when one says, in ordinary conversation, “there is a black dot”; they are intended to be eliminated by the addition of the word “visual” and the substitution of “is occurring” for “there is”. By these means we have arrived at what is indubitable and intrinsic in the addition to your knowledge derived from a visual datum. We must now ask ourselves once more: Is there still a distinction, within what is immediate and intrinsic, between the occurrence of a visual datum and the cognition of it? Can we say, on the basis of immediate experience, not only “a visual black dot occurs”, but also “a visual black dot is cognised”? My feeling is that we cannot. When we say that it is cognised, we seem to me to mean that it is part of an experience, that is to say, that it can be remembered, or can modify our habits, or, generally, can have what are called “mnemic” effects. All this takes us beyond the immediate experience into the realm of its causal relations. I see no reason to think that there is any duality of subject and object in the occurrence itself, or that it can properly be described as a case of “knowledge”. It gives rise to knowledge, through memory, and through conscious or unconscious inferences to the common correlates of such data. But in itself it is not knowledge, and has no duality. The datum is a datum equally for physics and for psychology; it is a meeting point of the two. It is neither mental nor physical, just as a single name is neither in alphabetical order nor in order of precedence; but it is part of the raw material of both the mental and the physical worlds. This is the theory which is called “neutral monism”, and is the one that I believe to be true.