Aristotle's Empiricism by Marc Gasser-Wingate;

Author:Marc Gasser-Wingate;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

4.3 Perceptual Experience and Conceptual Resources

As I argued above, Aristotle doesn’t seek to explain our learning starting from some initial encounter with colors and shapes. He thinks we perceive Callias and other human beings (and in doing so perceive that they exhibit certain perceptible features), and seeks to explain our cognitive development from there. But even once we agree to this, it’s not entirely clear how we should conceive of perception’s contribution to the sort of inductive learning described in our previous chapter. On the reading defended above, perceiving Callias (or whatever else we perceive) doesn’t itself entail the recognition of Callias as such—that is, a recognition of Callias that would inform our interactions with him, and perhaps serve as a basis for the beliefs we form about him. How then do we come to recognize what it is we’re perceivingŒ And how do we move from there to knowing what would explain what we perceive, or to an understanding of essences we do not perceiveŒ

Aristotle doesn’t say much on these points, and what little he does say is telegraphic and confusing. He tells us, for instance, that perception leads to universal knowledge because perception itself is “of universals” despite the fact that we perceive particulars—so that when we perceive Callias our perception is “of human being” (APo II.19 100b1; cf. [24]). But this claim is problematic for at least two reasons. First, it seems to flatly contradict what Aristotle says everywhere else, which is that we perceive particulars and do not perceive universals. Second, it seems to undermine his critique of innatism. For this critique requires that perception be a basic capacity—a capacity we share with lower animals, and which yields only an unsophisticated form of knowledge. And it’s natural to think that one of the things that makes perception so basic is the particular character of its objects.34 But then it’s hard to see how this could be consistent with our having any perceptual grasp of universals: perception is supposed to be basic because we perceive particulars and particulars only, and this should rule out any perception of universals from the start.

Now, it has been suggested (e.g. by Scott (1995, 153–55)) that we should pay close attention to the phrasing of Aristotle’s remark: he tells us we perceive particulars and that perception is “of universals,” not that we perceive particulars and universals, or that our perception is of both (αἰσθάνεται μὲν τὸ καθ’ ἕκαστον, ἡ δ’ αἴσθησις τοῦ καθόλου, APo II.19 100a17). What this phrasing tells us, the suggestion goes, is that any particular perceptual act has a particular object, but the capacity to perceive is nonetheless defined in general terms.35 But I don’t think this can be right. First off, note that Aristotle says not only that we do not perceive universals, but also that perception is not of universals (APo I.31 88a2, cf. McKirahan (1992, 253)), and not only that we perceive particulars, but also that perception is of particulars (APo I.18 81b6). So we shouldn’t read too much into the phrasing of his remark.

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