The Nature of Perception by John Foster

Author:John Foster [Foster, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 0198237693

end p.143

(the fact that they ascribe the qualities to external objects) prevents its explicit recognition. The link is, if you like, the closest that our ordinary beliefs can come to reflecting the real nature of the qualities, given the strategic externalist error to which they are committed. It might still be wondered how the real nature of the qualities manages to exert this influence on our thinking. After all, the abstract fact that the qualities are of this sort can hardly be in itself what exerts the influence. But the point must be that, although this fact is rejected by our ordinary beliefs, its acceptance is at least implicit in our basic understanding of the qualities, and it is as thus implicitly registered, and hence psychologically immanent, that the real nature of the qualities exerts its influence. It is as if, beneath the surface of our ordinary system of beliefs, there is an underlying manifestation of the true situation which gets distorted, but not obliterated, by what overlays it. And this, of course, would explain not just the relevant aspect of our ordinary thinking, but also why we find it impossible to free ourselves from it on subsequent reflection.

So ERT allows us to explain the phenomenon at issue in our second question. And, as well as yielding this explanation, it puts the phenomenon itself in a quite different perspective. Initially, it had seemed that the inclusion of the mode-of-appearance element in our ordinary thinking was responsible for rendering that thinking incoherent. For there seemed to be no way of understanding how an object's possession of an ES-quality could be essentially linked to an objective mode of appearance which would not involve either construing the mode of appearance as the mere possession of the quality (thus eliminating the link in any significant form), or construing the possession of the quality as a mere disposition to appear a certain way (thus eliminating the physical realization of the quality in any significant form). But if the envisaged explanation is right, we can now see that the incoherence in our ordinary view stems from its acceptance of the external realization of the qualities, rather than from the link with appearance which it attaches to this. The attachment of this link is simply the extent to which a truth whose recognition is implicit in our basic understanding of the nature of the qualities is able to preserve its influence in a framework of belief which denies it. So when we find ourselves, on reflection, unable to free ourselves from this way of thinking, this is, in effect, the influence of an underlying insight, rather than an irrational compulsion—even though it is an insight which can only express itself, in those circumstances, in a compromised form.

ERT, then, allows us to answer the two questions we raised: it enables us to account for the constraint on transparent conception (to explain why a

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