Perception: A Philosophical Symposium by F. N. Sibley (review)

168 BOOK REVIEWS Perception: A Philosophiccil Symposium. By F. N. SIBLEY. London: Methuen and Company, 1971. (Distributed in the United States by Barnes and Noble, Inc.). Pp. vii and 193. This book is the proceedings of a colloquium held at the University of Lancaster some five years ago. There are four major papers published substantially as presented at the colloquium and four responses, some more detailed than others. Some of the participants, like G. J. Warnock, William Kneale, Godfrey Vesey and Bernard Williams, are philosophers important in mid-century British analytic philosophy. This is a very technical work and in its present published form probably of interest only to those philosophers actually involved with the current discussions regarding perception theory. The papers and responses contained in the book are a logical development of the concerns about perception expressed by philosophers like Russell, Moore, and others central to the foundation of analytic philosophy in the beginning of the present century. Hovering behind three of the major papers is the ghost of the sense datum theories so common to epistemological accounts of perception by analytic philosophers a quarter century ago. That the concern with sense datum theories is now moribund is apparent from only a cursory reading of this book, which represents current work by analytic philosophers. Given the disdain with which the sense datum theory is viewed today, it is difficult for the contemporary student of epistemology to realize why it was so thoroughly and tenaciously held by so many not so long ago. Although there are no explicit refutations of the sense datum theories in these papers, nevertheless the theory's demise has prompted new problems, especially the claim that the " acquisition of beliefs " is a necessary condition for an adequate analysis of perception. This " epistemic " or " propositional " view of perception plays an explicit role in the papers by G. J. Warnock, J. W. Roxbee Cox, and F. N. Sibley. On an unrelated topic, Brian O'Shaughnessy's paper provides a new yet fairly difficult analysis entitled " The Temporal Ordering of Perception and Reaction." O'Shaughnessy's analysis appears a bit out of place, given the " epistemic " theme considered in some form or other in the other three papers. Since these three papers have a common theme, the major part of this review will be devoted to them. In his paper entitled " On What is Seen," Warnock discusses the nature of some of the insights regarding perception theory attributed to the late John Austin. That Austin was no friend of the sense datum theory is well known by anyone even vaguely familiar with his work. Using Austin's remarks from Sense and Sensibilia as a spring board, Warnock continues the demolition of the appearance/reality distinction made by representative realists, and a fortiori by advocates of the sense datum position. Warnock BOOK REVIEWS 169 spends much time in discussion of the validity of the following argument form: A sees X. XisP. # AseesP. Insofar as the conclusion attributes the property "P" to what is perceived as "X ", this implies that an epistemic dimension is part of the perception process. Throughout his discussion, I suspect that Warnock has blurred the important and useful distinction found in Aquinas between the object of perception known via the sensus communis (which I take to be a composite of proper and common sensibles), and the object known via the vis cogitativa (which I take to be an awareness of an individual object as a concretum-what both Aristotle and Aquinas refer to as the " incidental object of sense ") . I find this Thomistic distinction quite useful although it is commonly blurred in contemporary discussions of perception theory. Interestingly enough, in responding to Warnock, D. M. Taylor attributes the same structural blur to Warnock's analysis which I have suggested (cf. p. 18 ff.). The second and third papers and their corresponding responses explicitly deal with questions concerning the epistemic nature of perception. Insofar as Sibley's "Analysing Seeing" is in some sense a more general treatment of this problem, editorially it could well have been placed before Roxbee Cox's "An Analysis of Perceiving in Terms of the Causation of Beliefs." Given the logical priority of Sibley...