Whitehead's Epistemology, 1915-1917

Whitehead's Epistemology, 1915-1917 J. H. KULTGEN I WHITEHEADPUBLISHEDthree epistemological essays1 shortly before he wrote The Principles oJ Natural Knowledge. He claimed later that his subsequent writings should be construed as commentaries on these essays.2 This overstatement has enough truth to warrant a critical examination of them. The general remarks of this section report what I infer to be Whitehead's approach to the problem of knowledge in the three essays. Cognitive processes form a hierarchy in which the lower levels provide matter for the higher, and the higher constitute goals for the lower. We err at each level, and we discover possible relations among the levels in course of moving from one to another. Now, epistemology is a product of the higher levels, for it requires reflection on thinking which has already taken place. Hence, it is the product of an errant process with unknown resources; yet, its very business is to criticize the process. The thinker errs; the call to rectify error must come from without, from given reality. Whitehead referred to the primitive revelation of reality as "primal," "immediate," or "lived" experience. In 1929, after years of metaphysical speculation he still maintained that "The elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification of any thought; and the starting point for thought is the analytic observation of components of this experience." 8 One must determine the character of primal experience if he is to show how thought "elucidates" it. However, when the time arrives for reflection, one is confronted with perceptual objects (and such scientific objects as he takes for granted) constructed from contents extracted from experience. The commonsense world in terms of which we ordinarily think and act is "given." To recur to primal experience, one must put thinking out of the game. Since this runs counter to pressing practical needs, it takes effort and is possible only for short periods. The results are problematic. One is trying not to do what he ordinarily does unconsciously. The assumption that he ordinarily does it is a hypothesis, and hence so is his conclusion about the character of primary experience sans thought. Nonetheless, Whitehead claims, we can control that which we present ourselves in consciousness; "we can select and modify our sense-presentation" to a degree These were first collectedin The Organisation o] Thought (London: 1917). Numbers in parentheses in my text refer to this edition, specificallyto Space, Time, and Relativity (1915), pp. 191-228; The Organisationof Thought (1916),pp. 105-133; and The Anatomy of SomeScientificIdeas" (1917),pp. 134-190. Preface, The Aims o] Education (NewYork: 1929). SProcess and Reality (New York: 1929),p. 9. [43] 44 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY despite "the dominant necessity of sense" (pp. 138-139). This permits Whitehead to conduct a thought experiment: As much as possible, he suspends the presumed processes of thought to attend to parts of experience, then he combines these parts in various ways to observe which syntheses do in fact deliver back objects like those of commonsense and science. In this way he tries to confirm empirically his epistemological hypotheses. II As best Whitehead can infer, primal experience has these characteristics: It is lived and consequently ]ragmented. Experience is "for me." Each observer is a set of distinct experiences, and there are many observers. Each experience is an unsatis]actory revelation o] the whole o] reality. The unity of what is revealed explains how the revelations in one experience can be supplemented by those in another. The inadequacy of any revelation explains why we always need further experience and need to think about its content. Experience is a stream or flux yielded by (what we subsequently distinguish as) sight, sound, etc., more inchoate sensible feelings, and thought. Its content includes sensa, emotions, volitions, imaginations, conceptions, and judgments. It is a continuum, distinguishable into ]actors which dif]vr in character. Whitehead emphasizes equally two aspects of the stream, each of which imposes an obligation on empirical thinking: (a) A primitive level of thinking discriminates factors from the stream. Whatever freedom we assume in directing our thoughts, we must break the experienced world at its joints and it must have joints--if thinking is to be empirically relevant. A...