Problems of science and philosophy : the papers read at the joint session of the Aristotelian Society, the British Psychological Society, and the Mind Association, held at Bedford college, London, July 11th-14th, 1919.

Date:
1919
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Problems of science and philosophy : the papers read at the joint session of the Aristotelian Society, the British Psychological Society, and the Mind Association, held at Bedford college, London, July 11th-14th, 1919. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    exist at the very begining of such experiences as you have quoted; but the moment discrimination and judgment begin (and you admit that they begin almost at once) acquaintance ceases. Now, if this simply means that mere acquaintance ceases, 1t is a dull analytic proposition. If it means that, as I pick out and recognise details in a total field of view, a relation (viz., acquaintance), which was present before I began to dis- criminate ceases to be present in any form, it is synthetic but highly doubtful. Suppose we shift our attention about our field of view and distinguish one part from another, and the parts from the whole. There are three points to notice: (a) a change takes place in our experience, (0) we regard ourselves as discovering and not creating distinctions, and (c) we regard these distinctions as being present in that of which we were already aware. If we turn our head and thus alter our total field of view, the first two conditions are fulfilled and the third is not. There are various, more or less plausible interpreta- tions which we may put on these admitted changes; but none of them, I think, implies that acts of acquaintance cease to be a part at least of our total state of mind. We may, eg., hold that we continue to be acquainted with precisely the same total sense-datum, but that we also become acquainted with various parts of it. Or we may hold that the sense-datum really changes, and that, after discrimination we are acquainted with a somewhat different object from that with which we were acquainted before we began to discriminate. We can then explain in various ways our belief that we discover and do not create the distinctions. y., to say that the distinctions were all along contained in the original sense-datum may be a loose way of saying that the old and the new sense-datum are both appearances of the same physical object, and that the new sense-datum gives us fuller and clearer information about those features in the physical object concerning which the old sense-datum gave scantier and vague information. Or again, we might drop all reference to a supposed physical object, and