epistemological disquietudes referred to above. Though they may seem to the
ordinary person to be simple problems, not worth serious notice, for those
who ponder them they pose difficult questions. For instance, human beings
claim to know that the stick is not really bent and the tracks not really
convergent. But how do they know that these things are so?
Suppose one says that this is known because, when the stick is removed
from the water, one can see that it is not bent. But does seeing a straight
stick out of water provide a good reason for thinking that it is not bent
when seen in water? How does one know that, when the stick is put into the
water, it does not bend? Suppose one says that the tracks do not really
converge because the train passes over them at that point. How does one
know that the wheels on the train do not happen to converge at that point?
What justifies opposing some beliefs to others, especially when all of them
are based upon what is seen? One sees that the stick in water is bent and
also that the stick out of the water is not bent. Why is the stick declared
really to be straight; why in effect is priority given to one perception
over another?
One possible response to these queries is that vision is not sufficient
to give knowledge of how things are. One needs to correct vision in some
other way in order to arrive at the judgement that the stick is really
straight and not bent. Suppose a person asserts that his reason for
believing the stick in water is not bent is that he can feel it with his
hands to be straight when it is in the water. Feeling or touching is a mode
of sense perception, although different from vision. What, however,
justifies accepting one mode of perception as more accurate than another?
After all, there are good reasons for believing that the tactile sense
gives rise to misperception in just the way that vision does. If a person
chills one hand and warms the other, for example, and inserts both into a
tub of water having a uniform medium temperature, the same water will feel
warm to the cold hand and cold to the warm hand. Thus, the tactile sense
cannot be trusted either and surely cannot by itself be counted on to
resolve these difficulties.
Another possible response is that no mode of perception is sufficient to
guarantee that one can discover how things are. Thus, it might be affirmed
that one needs to correct all modes of perception by some other form of
awareness in order to arrive at the judgement, say, that the stick is
really straight. Perhaps that other way is the use of reason. But why
should reason be accepted as infallible? It also suffers from various
liabilities, such as forgetting, misestimating, or jumping to conclusions.
And why should one trust reason if its conclusions run counter to those
gained through perception, since it is obvious that much of what is known
about the world derives from perception?
Clearly there is a network of difficulties here, and one will have to
think hard in order to arrive at a clear and defensible explanation of the
apparently simple claim that the stick is really straight. A person who
accepts the challenge will, in effect, be developing a theory for grappling
with the famous problem called "our knowledge of the external world." That
problem turns on two issues, namely, whether there is a reality that exists
independently of the individual's perception of it--in other words, if the
evidence one has for the existence of anything is what one perceives, how
can one know that anything exists unperceived?--and, second, how one can
know what anything is really like, if the perceptual evidence one has is
conflicting.
The "other minds" problem."
The second problem also involves seeing but in a somewhat unusual way. It
deals with that which one cannot see, namely the mind of another. Suppose a
woman is scheduled to have an operation on her right knee and her surgeon
tells her that when she wakes up she will feel a sharp pain in her knee.
When she wakes up, she does feel the pain the surgeon alluded to. He can
hear her groaning and see certain contortions on her face. But he cannot
feel what she is feeling. There is thus a sense in which he cannot know
what she knows. What he claims to know, he knows because of what others who
have undergone operations tell him they have experienced. But, unless he
has had a similar operation, he cannot know what it is that she feels.
Indeed, the situation is still more complicated; for, even if the doctor
has had such a surgical intervention, he cannot know that what he is
feeling after his operation is exactly the same sensation that the woman is
feeling. Because each person's sensation is private, the surgeon cannot
really know that what the woman is describing as a pain and what he is
describing as a pain are really the same thing. For all he knows, she could
be referring to a sensation that is wholly different from the one to which
he is alluding.
In short, though another person can perceive the physical manifestations
the woman exhibits, such as facial grimaces and various sorts of behaviour,
it seems that only she can have knowledge of the contents of her mind. If
this assessment of the situation is correct, it follows that it is
impossible for one person to know what is going on in another person's
mind. One can conjecture that a person is experiencing a certain sensation,
but one cannot, in a strict sense of the term, know it to be the case.
If this analysis is correct, one can conclude that each human being is
inevitably and even in principle cut off from having knowledge of the mind
of another. Most people, conditioned by the great advances of modern
technology, believe that in principle there is nothing in the world of fact
about which science cannot obtain knowledge. But the "other-minds problem"
suggests the contrary--namely, that there is a whole domain of private
human experience that is resistant to any sort of external inquiry. Thus,
one is faced with a profound puzzle, one of whose implications is that
there can never be a science of the human mind.
Implications.
These two problems resemble each other in certain ways and differ in
others, but both have important implications for epistemology.
First, as the divergent perceptions about the stick indicate, things cannot
just be, as they appear to be. People believe that the stick, which looks
bent when it is in the water, is really straight, and they also believe
that the stick, which looks straight when it is out of the water, is really
straight. But, if the belief that the stick in water is really straight is
correct, then it follows that the perception human beings have when they
see the stick in water cannot be correct. That particular perception is
misleading with respect to the real shape of the stick. Hence, one has to
conclude that things are not always, as they appear to be.
It is possible to derive a similar conclusion with respect to the mind
of another. A person can exhibit all the signs of being in pain, but he may
not be. He may be pretending. On the basis of what can be observed, it
cannot be known with certitude that he is or that he is not in pain. The
way he appears to be may be misleading with respect to the way he actually
is. Once again vision can be misleading.
Both problems thus force one to distinguish between the way things
appear and the way they really are. This is the famous philosophical
distinction between appearance and reality. But, once that distinction is
drawn, profound difficulties arise about how to distinguish reality from
mere appearance. As will be shown, innumerable theories have been presented
by philosophers attempting to answer this question since time immemorial.
Second, there is the question of what is meant by "knowledge." People claim
to know that the stick is really straight even when it is half-submerged in
water. But, as indicated earlier, if this claim is correct, then knowledge
cannot simply be identical with perception. For whatever theory about the
nature of knowledge one develops, the theory cannot have as a consequence
that knowing something to be the case can sometimes be mistaken or
misleading.
Third, even if knowledge is not simply to be identified with perception,
there nevertheless must be some important relationship between knowledge
and perception. After all, how could one know that the stick is really
straight unless under some conditions it looked straight? And sometimes a
person who is in pain exhibits that pain by his behaviour; thus there are
conditions that genuinely involve the behaviour of pain. But what are those
conditions? It seems evident that the knowledge that a stick is straight or
that one is in great pain must come from what is seen in certain
circumstances: perception must somehow be a fundamental element in the
knowledge human beings have. It is evident that one needs a theory to
explain what the relationship is--and a theory of this sort, as the history
of the subject all too well indicates, is extraordinarily difficult to
develop.
The two problems also differ in certain respects. The problem of man's
knowledge of the external world raises a unique difficulty that some of the
best philosophical minds of the 20th century (among them, Bertrand Russell,
H.H. Price, C.D. Broad, and G.E. Moore) spent their careers trying to
solve. The perplexity arises with respect to the status of the entity one
sees when one sees a bent stick in water. In such a case, there exists an
