So today I'm going to talk about, my talk is going to carry on some themes from Martin's talk. Because I'm going to start off by talking about Bergson. And what Bergson means by experience and the experience of duration specifically. And what I want to do now, so first of all, the paper has this... When I started this paper I thought it was going to be more straightforward than it actually turned out to be because it seemed that if any philosopher was guilty of kind of buying into the myth of the given given wholesale hook-line is thinker it's Berkson Berkson seems to kind of valorize intuition over
intellection the immediate sensation of experience and he attributes in fact he says that kind of intuition itself provides the key to to metaphysics okay and I'm gonna criticize I'm gonna suggest that Bergson is enthralled to the myth of the given, but actually, because Bergson is an extremely sophisticated thinker, and because he reinvents terms like intuition, conception, and experience, and the domain of empirical experience in particular, one has to be careful to kind of, one can't simply tag a straightforward kind of dismiss him or kind of castigate him for this kind of enthusiasm for giving us in the way in which other kind of less ingenious
thinkers might be. So one of the things I'm going to say, the first quote actually, this is a quote from Burton's Creative Evolution, it's actually on the first page of the opening of the text, it says, the existence of which we are most assured and which we know best is unquestionably our own. For every other object we have notions which may be considered external and superficial, whereas of ourselves our perception is internal and profound. Now, what I'm going to suggest here is that I'm going to challenge this basic kind of Bergsonian contention, which I think lies at the heart of this kind of vitalism metaphysics, insofar as vitalism is a metaphysics of experience I'm going to suggest by
introducing Wilfred Salazar's critique of what he calls a mentally given that our relation to ourselves is not fundamentally different in kind from a relation to other objects it's a mistake to assume that there's a categorical difference in the way in which we know about ourselves in the way which we know about external objects and phenomena. So, what I'm going to outline is two contrasting concepts of experience. One, the Bergsonian pits experience against representation and insists that a new form of conceptualization is necessary to map the terrain of experience. So, this is something that's often... The reason Bergson is ingenious is because the distinction between intellection and intuition in Bergson...
Berkson does not simply say, Berkson has a concept of intuition which entails a new theory of concept formation. So in other words, his critique of intellection and his denunciation of what he calls the intellectualist occlusion of the real features of lived experience or duration, entails not simply kind of pitting intuition against conceptualization straightforwardly, but rather revising the definition of concept formation. And the philosopher, this is a promissory note in Bergson, but obviously the philosopher who has tried to kind of cash out this promissory note in most detail is Gilles Deleuze.
And if you read Bergson, I mean, I've read Deleuze before Bergson, but it's apparent now, I think it's undeniable that Bergson's entire philosophical project is an attempt to systematise Bergson's key claims. And the whole problematic of concept creation and of philosophy as conceptual creation in the US comes from Bergson. Now, so Bergson's conception of experience entails that we have a kind of, There's something peculiar and specific to the character of what he calls lived experience or the experience of duration that requires new conceptual resources in order to be properly articulated. Against this I'm going to pit a Szilagian account, a Szilagian account which is indebted to Kant and Hegel but offers a kind of a naturalistic revision of Kant and Hegel.
and according to the Sainarjian accounts experience is explicitly conceptual and explore over experiences and conceptual achievements through and through even though not all experiences conceptual so in other words the accusation that Bergson levels against intellectuals or conceptualists you simply believe that you can go from concepts to things or that you can simply that you can you can always subsume and encompass experiential data in terms of conceptual representation is berkson claims that you'll never get unless you kind of install yourself in experience immediately
and unless you recognize the the the ways in which the qualities of experience defy conceptualization you're never going to be you're going to be a kind of idealist who fails to recognize the fundamental properties of the real insofar as experience itself is the key to understanding the fundamental characteristics of reality the alternative account the alternative critical account I want to kind of delineate is one in which the claim that experience is a conceptual achievement does not mean that all experience is conceptual so in other words this is a kind of fallacy if you claim that some
some minimum degree of conceptualization is required in order to have an experience that doesn't mean that the character the intrinsic character of experience is conceptual. So, basically, Bergson proclaims, as is well known by now, a provocative reversal of Platonism. It's not being that is degraded into appearing, but appearing that is being. It's not the sensible. The sensible is not the occlusion of the intelligible. The intelligible is the occultation of the sensible. Being is not substance, but duration, only duration subsists. This is another quote from Creative Evolution. A self-sufficient reality is precisely the characteristic classical Aristotelian definition of substance,
that which exists in and of itself, not through another. A self-sufficient reality is not necessarily a reality for interuration. We must accustom ourselves to think being directly without making a detour. then the absolute will be revealed as very near to us and in a certain and in a certain measure within us it is of psychological and not of mathematical or logical essence but do we ever think true duration here again a direct taking possession is necessary it is no use trying to approach duration, we must install ourselves within it straight away. This is what the intellect generally refuses to do, accustomed as it is to think the moving by
means of the unmovable. So, the entire credibility of Bergson's enterprise depends on establishing the claim that the absolute is concretely given an experience and not attained via intellectual abstraction and that rather that attraction cannot provide our means of access to being understood being understood as what truly is what is in itself and not through another so so Berkson kind of an early he accepts a classical kind of canonical definition of the metaphysical tasks but simply kind of proposes this radical redefinition of the nature of being which is in a way which is like, you know, as many 19th century, you know, post-Canton philosophers sought to do, which is to, you know, carry out a thorough desubstantialization of being, terminate the equation of being and substance.
so the question is the question is does person then on his own an offer per team to succeed another for birds and the time to be credible he must be his description of the character of duration cannot be smuggling in any kind of unavoid conceptual prejudices and the title French title of Berkson's book is the immediate data of consciousness it's translated as time and free will but I mean except the immediate data of consciousness are precisely what provide the starting point for Berkson's entire project and his basic claim is that these qualities these immediate data of
conscious experience have been systematically misconstrued and travesty by intellectual so what are these qualities and they're the qualities of experience or the qualities of sensation and these qualities are intensive differences this is those of you who are familiar with works will be familiar with the kind of the accounts intensive differences cannot be measured so he begins person begins the book with an attack on the notion of intensive magnitude he says intensities have been illegitimately characterized or correlated with extensive magnitude and what he's really attacking is actually
a kind of psychological naturalism that was trying to explain the phenomenon of consciousness and then I'm trying to reintegrate consciousness within the biological domain and this is so that the target of the opening chapter of Bertrand's book are these psychophysicists including Fetner and various other French and German empirical psychologists so it begins his critique is basically that intensive differences cannot be measured because it is important one cannot identify an integer of measure through which one could quantify differences in sensation. The illusion of intensive magnitude falls from
transposing the determinate magnitude of a physical cause into the felt quality. And this is a mistake. This is a paralogism according to Burton. Intensities of sensation admits of no units of measure, only qualitative differences. In other words, there are differences, every difference in sensation is a difference in time not a difference of degree so he proceeds to this critique of the psychophysical correlation between difference and extensively and difference in extensively because obviously like if you can establish a low light correlation between a kind of a new physiological stimulus and a conscious state or the intrinsic characteristics of a conscious state then a science of consciousness is
possible you can establish a law-like correlation between the mental and the physical and this is what Bergson challenges from the outset in order to defend a dualism even more radical than Descartes it's not substance dualism but it's like radical kind of property dualism and here I'm going to the second The second quote is from Time and Free Will. And this is a quote from this opening chapter from Bergson. Either you keep to what consciousness presents to you, or you have recourse to a conventional mode of representation. So once again, Bergson claims that he is simply describing the phenomena,
the data of consciousness, the data of lived experience, without any kind of conceptual transposition or importation. In the first case, you will find a difference between S and S'. S and S' are two sensations. In the first case, you will find a difference between S and S' like that between the shades of the rainbow and not at all an interval of magnitude. In the second case, you may introduce the symbol delta S. This is Fechner's symbol in order to attempt to quantify a difference in sensation, a degree of difference in sensation. But it is only in a conventional sense that you will speak here of an arithmetical difference, and in a conventional sense also that you will assimilate a sensation to a sum.
The mistake which Fechner made, as we have just seen, was that he believed in an interval between two successive sensations, S and S dash, when in fact there is simply a passing from one to the other, and not a difference in the arithmetical sense of the word. but if the two terms between which the passing takes place could be given simultaneously there would then be a contrast besides the transition and although the contrast is not yet an arithmetical difference it resembles it in a certain respect for the two terms which are compared stand here side by side as in a case of the subtraction of two numbers so Verkson's claim is very simple his argument is very straightforward it's simply the what is consciousness consciousness is sensation what is
sensation sensation is intensive difference intensive differentiation there are no degrees of intensity or of intensive difference because every difference between two sensations s and s dash is a difference in kind and what Berkson's claim is that the passage from S to S-dash has been illegitimately conceived in spatial terms. Psychophysicists have spatialized, they've represented this as a difference between two coinciding or spatially distributed events or states. and what what resists quantifiable measure according to to Berkson is the
passing in other words what is the experience of consciousness or what is consciousness constituted by its experience of passing of duration and duration itself or the passing from s to s dash is precisely what cannot be quantified or measured and it can never therefore be correlated with any kind of degree of excitation in the organism that is allegedly having this sensation so So, now, so Bergson's claim then is very simple.
So, he claims then that, so the question is, how is it that we are aware, how do we register these differences of sensation? Now, what's interesting about Bergson's task is that in a way he very ingeniously, or what I'm going to suggest he's actually doing, Strangely, the person isn't really kind of engaged in a phenomenology. He's not engaged in a phenomenology because he doesn't believe that conscious phenomena can be inscribed within a logos. In other words, he doesn't believe that they are, he doesn't hold to the thesis of intentionality. and Burton kind of you know the most famous formulation for birds and consciousness is not all something it is that something itself so the question is you are your experience so
when you have so the question is what is it that's how is are these and these causes of differences in sensation registered no what's what works actually does is that instead he never actually explains how the registration of a cause of difference in duration could proceed and he can't because there's no mechanism there's no possible explanation you just experience this is Bruce datum as far he's concerned the passage from s to s dash and the quality of difference between that separates s from s dash cannot be is not a measurable interval in other words it's not a category
difference it's not even a difference in kind in the familiar conceptual sense this is why berkson's vocabulary of differences in kind is itself because what berkson does he says Intellection systematically occludes the qualities, the intensities of experience. How does it do so? It carves up the movement, the passage of duration into discrete states with determinate qualities this is what it it's a segregate segments and individuates passages or transitions which actually cannot be carved up or
segregated this is why I thought so in other words so this is why that the quality of a conscious state is not a determinate quality in the way which a physical object or a physical state of affairs can be characterized in terms of a determinate quality what Berkson does is having simply coming pointed out how these psychophysicists are making this fundamental mistake by systematically by dividing and segregating what is in fact a pure continuity of kind of a heterogeneous continuity he doesn't do anything else he never actually gives a positive account of what of the nature of these causes of differences and or
he ever tells what kind of differences these are no so what I want to suggest is that he says that the attempt to represent he says all our our misunderstanding of the intrinsic character of duration comes from intellectual intellectual illegitimately kind of superimposes the distinction between states and qualities onto the the flow duration and makes it seem as as if the succession of constant conscious states could be understood in spatial terms as a kind of you know the linear unfolding of physical movements that this is what personal famously denounced as the kinema kinema
kinematographical the wall so specialization should the attempt to to give a positive characterization of qualities involves spatialization. And spatialization is ruled out of court as an illegitimate, as a misunderstanding of the phenomenon. But what's really striking is that Bergson provides no criteria of adequacy for what a proper interpretation of the phenomenon in question would be. See, he's not like a phenomenologist who can say, he's not going to be like Heidegger who's going to evoke this pre-ontological understanding of the ways in which phenomena disclose themselves to Dacei, precisely because this is a pre-conceptual, pre-discussive, radically kind of pre-semantic
experience. So the difference, the phenomenon of duration can't be interpreted. It can't be interpreted and it is not meaningful in the way in which an intentional phenomenon is for a phenomenologist. The consequence of that is that Bergson provides no criteria by which you could distinguish between a proper characterization of an intensive quality and an improper characterization. And what he actually does is that he superimposes this concept of duration as pure qualitative heterogeneity onto our experience and says this is how we ought to describe our experience.
So it's a kind of, he's actually introducing, it's a completely conceptual operation. He's transposed a conceptual characterization of the radical kind of non-categorial purity of lived experience for any kind of empirical account or empirical description of what the properties and features of conscious experience would be. So in other words, it's precisely the mixture of space and time, of extensity and intensity that Bergson analyzes and decomposes into extensity without quality and intensity without quantity. The fundamental dualism that governs all of Bergson's work, intensity and extensity, space and time, is completely conceptual.
It's a pure conceptual distinction. He claims to have derived it from this account, from an empirical account, but it's not an empirical account at all. It's not describing anything at all. So the Berkson operation is in fact one of abstraction. It's one of conceptual abstractions through and through. He abstracts from the composite nature of experience in order to isolate its constitutive elements, intensity and extensity, and then claims that we experience this difference. not only that indeed that experience itself duration itself is this difference and this sort of the claim would have us claim that human beings are badly analyzed compasses that the Bergsonian task is of separating and segregating
things that are actually kind of mixed together or illegitimately fused in the gregarious and gregarious intellectual degenerate manifestations of social understand it okay so so no words the distinction between intensive time and extensive space is not a consequence of Burton's analysis the immediate data consciousness but it's enabling condition so how then does he so the
problem is this okay the problem is that he seems to provide no viable or kind of persuasive accounts of actually how this region you know that the registration mechanism that would manifest these intensive qualities these differences in kind and here I think it's quite this is something else that I think that the verse does this is a promise we know in Berkson the loses account of the larval subjectivity and the kind of the contractions of habit is an attempt to explain how duration is inscribed within the very kind of fabric of physical reality so in other words an explicit kind of endorsement of panpsychism and
it's the psychic contraction of two differences of two minimal kinds of spatial differences that already allows that allows for the synthesis the original kind of temporal synthesis from which spatial extensitiy is constructed. This is a complete, once again, so now we're engaged in metaphysics. So in other words, so what's really striking about Bergson's accounts, and this is the third quote here, is that he wants to kind of, he lays claim to a kind of a radical empiricism,
a kind of a radical empiricism, a kind of an account of the nature and character of experience that would be free of intellectual prejudices, etc., etc. But in fact substitutes a metaphysical apparatus and a system of metaphysical distinctions on to this characterization of experience from the get-go. So this is a quote from Bergson's Introduction to Metaphysics. He says, a true empiricism is the one which purposes to keep as close to the original itself as possible, to probe more deeply into its life and by kind of spiritual auscultation, to feel its soul palpates. It's a very amusing image, spiritual auscultation.
He wants you to feel yourselves. It really is ultimate touchy-feely kind of philosophy. and this is the true empiricism is the real metaphysics the work is one of extreme difficulty because not one of the ready-made conceptions of thought useless for its daily operations can be of any use here of any use here but an impress is a more than the other name and precedent which works only according to measure sees itself obliged to make an absolutely new effort for which for breach new object it studies it cuts for the object a concept appropriate to the object alone, a concept one can barely say is still a concept, since it applies only to that one being. So in other words, metaphysics would be a science of singularities. In other
words, instead of resigning itself to deal with the level of generality, and in other words, what must be, and again, Deleuze is wonderfully kind of clarificatory here in terms of Berkson's intentions instead of confining metaphysics within the framework of representation where the logic of conceptual differentiation differentiation is is consigned at the highest level by generic differences that can be deduced generic differences in being that cannot be independently derived or that used and specific differences that lead down to the
individual but beneath the level of a small specific difference or the smallest individuating differences it is not possible to understand what will separate two individuals of the same species so there was there can be no science of the singular in this famous are still in formula and what Berkson says that the proper task of metaphysics is metaphysics is a truly radicalised empiricism, is to generate a science of the singular, which is to say, concepts are tailored to singularities, to singular occurrences. Now, so the question is, well, so Bergson, what we have to ask ourselves is, like, Bergson arrives at these extraordinary conclusions, which entail radically overhauling
the resources, I mean, the very logic of concept formation, the very resources of intelligibility so the question is what kind of justification or what has he given us a kind of a convincing account to motivate this kind of radical reinterpretation of the metaphysical task and I don't think he has I don't think he has because he was engaged in metaphysics from the beginning he gives a metaphysical characterization of experience and then simply renders explicit a system of met of conceptual distinctions which inform his his descriptive procedures no no okay so no what I'm going to kind of move is to a discussion of the
so one interesting claim here is that when in that sense person is not he's not guilty of embracing the myth of the given in its classical even it's kind of it's not even persisted for which is immediately targeted by sellers but nor even in its phenomenological form in which intentionality itself the condition of all givenness is given and it's something that's also kind of misunderstood about cells is that he's not just content also feel that they can afford to disregard cells as critical because they think they've already done it because he think he's just attacking a kind of naive
and the naive empiricism, specifically the logical empiricism exemplified by the Vienna Circle. And he's not, actually. He's targeting a much kind of more varied assortment of philosophical projects, including, I think, phenomenology. The claim that even givenness itself is given, that is, in other words, if intentionality is given, intentionality itself is a manifestation of this mythological commitment so the claim that is what's for in what way is Bergson kind of guilty of endorsing a form of forgiveness not in the it's not in the phonological sense because he
doesn't believe just discuss intentionality at all there's no kind of constituting role of intentional consciousness or the logic of objectivation and it's simply in terms of the way in which he thinks that well one could characterize it as a kind of a radical auto affection or she thinks that kind of sensation itself of experience of duration involves a kind of a registration of differences and if if there's a differentiation there must be a kind of minimal relationality but Bergson gives no positive account of the nature of this relationality because he just thinks it's time and you can't
conceptualize time you can't conceptualize the passage of time why not because every attempt at conceptualization involves spatialization an illegitimate intellection but what must be challenged is this claim that he's actually describing time at all okay in other words the experience of duration why is it in what sense is the experience of duration um indexed to the phenomenon of time or of temporality and bergson insinuates this without ever kind of you know kind of justifying this claim and i think the radical conclusions that he reaches when he thinks that kind of ultimately kind of subjectivity and life and psychic experience is constitutive of the fabric of reality is a direct consequence
an illegitimate metaphysical consequence of a claim that he never kind of properly substantiates so sounds critique that is going to kind of fall so sounds as alternative critical kind of characterization of experience is simply going to say that there is no no there is no kind of originally dimension of the mean of immediacy that's should be kind of identified as this originally strata for all subsequent cognition but what's interesting is that this is not to say that you can't have so the claim is this the claims attacking
is traditional force first thought that it was possible or traditional empiricists thought that you could explain in order to have to explain how conceptualization of representation was is makes contact with reality with some kind of ultimate data and there has to be a point at which a point of contact between mind and world between consciousness and reality so the claim is that all our concepts all our beliefs are justified in terms of other beliefs in other words we justify any determinate belief we have about the world in terms of systems of inferences that's you know articulated in terms of
being of logical syllogisms but they're ultimately unless there are beliefs that are kind of self authenticating unless there's a layer of self authenticating mental episodes or experiences we are going to fall back into a conceptual idealism in which reality is conceptually saturated all the way down and sellers interestingly is going to challenge both those claims because what he wants to claim is that what two things have been illegitimately confused observation observation observation of the ability to make
talking about non-inferential relationship to an experience and immediacy in other words he says that your capacity to directly record thoughts and experiences and sensations is non inferential but just because it's non inferential me that doesn't mean it's immediate in other words so that things that you don't need to justify in terms of any other kind of system of concepts are not necessarily immediate they're just justified on another level but this is what I'm going to try to explain so but I'm going to quote for
this so so that's what he calls an inconsistent triad at the heart of every kind of version of the myth of the given he says the three components are a X senses red sense contents entails that X non inferentially knows that s is red In other words, when we have a sensation of red, we know non-inferentially that we're sensing red. You don't need to make an inference. It's like if you're in the woods, you see a bear track, you see the bear track, you infer that a bear has been present. There's an inference that will take you from the bear track to the bear that left the track. You don't need an inference to see the bear track.
That is directly kind of given. B, the ability to send sense contents is unacquired. And C, the ability to know facts of the form X is phi is acquired. what sellers will argue is that sellers will basically kind of endorse A and C and refuse B I mean the triad is like if A and B together entail not C B and C entail not A, A and C entail not B. They can't be reconciled but what's interesting
about Seraph is that he won't deny that you can have a non-inferential relationship to experiences. He will just claim that your ability to have this non-inferential relation, this non-inferential knowledge is itself acquired. It has to be acquired through a process of training and indoctrination so so the question is how do we acquire this capacity okay so but so basically someone says himself that following child he says given that we have to acquire the ability to either to justify to be able to learn how to justify a
belief to make an inference about what kind of belief justifies what other beliefs but also even to be able to understand when we don't need to justify a belief in terms of another belief we need to introduce a series of distinction to see the distinction is fundamental fundamentally between sapience and sentience sapience is normative it involves conceptual knowledge involves conceptualization salience is intellectual and bergson sense sentience is merely kind of is a ubiquitous feature of all organic life it's simply the capacity to register a somatic stimulus plants can do organisms
can do it human beings can do it so the question is how do we explain the articulation between sapiens and sentience to explain how human beings acquire the capacity to have experiences and to have experiences that are both conceptual in character but also non conceptual now what in order to do this what Serra's must challenge first of all is two things he's going to challenge the claim that he's going to challenge classic accounts of the nature of thinking and of the nature of sensing he's going to challenge the claim that for instance that intentionality or
directedness is the mark of the mental now you can understand the relationship between mind and world in terms of like intentionality and that's it's our ability to kind of that we have an intentional relationship to phenomena before we have a kind of a intentional objectivation or phenomenal objectivation is the ignition of possibility for interacting with physical objects and physical phenomena there's a classic account that says that whatever our ability to have thoughts about something else intentionality also
means being able to kind of have beliefs with the term and content that are about things or states of affairs in the world the classic account tries to see that linguistic intentionality is derived from psychological intentionality so in other words intentionality is an originally phenomenological or psychological phenomenon and that's words and utterances derived an intentionality which is to say they're aboutness from the mind and Sellerton this he says no it's actually the other way around the capacity of bonus is primarily a semantic phenomenon and it's the you in order to understand about us it involves understanding the relationships between words and other sets of words between utterances or inscriptions and other sets of utterances
inscriptions so that for instance when we say the example itself gives us rot means red, the mention of the German expression rot is correlated with the use of a red expression red. But all we're doing there is correlating the conceptual role played by this linguistic token in the German language with the conceptual role played by red in our language. there is no point at which concepts come into contact with some allegedly extra conceptual reality. You cannot correlate words and things, concepts and objects.
Because to do that you have to assume some miraculous pre-established harmony between the mental and the physical between mind and world. And Sellers as a good Darwinian naturalist says that that's not possible. even intentionality if you have to transcendentalize intentionality that's simply kind of that becomes a sky group an unexplained explainer and he says that given that we are descended from mindless animals we have to explain the emergence of the capacities for intentional correlation without simply postulating it as this transcendental sine qua non so in other words so he reverses the order explanation and says that it's our capacity to engage two things, our
capacity to learn how to apply concepts appropriately and then to develop resources so that we can use language to talk about language. In other words, a language that develops a semantic dimension requires the ability, semantic asset, the ability to talk about talk, or to engage in this meta level of description where you can describe correlations between systems of words, the functional role of one set of uptances and those of another set of uptances. So the intentionality in that sense becomes neutralized, becomes a linguistic phenomenon, and that the about miss them of our capacity to deploy concepts and to think about red
appropriately to see that's red in the appropriate circumstances is depends on two things when it depends on our being having what what service calls or actually what Brandon calls a reliable responsive differential disposition it means what you simply need is you need to be able to register differences to track and record salient differences this is something that thermostats and parrots can do a thermostats the state of a thermostats track the temperature in a room because there's a mechanism that simply kind of correlates the kind of degree you know the molecular excitation in the in the room and the mercury gauge or whatever similarly a parrot will eventually learn to say red simply by
being conditioned by being trained to respond in this way systematically it says this is how it is originally with human beings human beings are conditioned first of all they have to be conditioned to respond appropriately and to issue the appropriate the appropriate linguistic tokens in the relevant circumstances. But then the next step is being able to deploy a concept. And the difference here is the difference between, once again, between sentience and sapience. One is a purely causical, mechanical order of explanation, and the other is normative and conceptual. You cannot, although the ability or abilities to deploy concepts require certain neurophysiological mechanisms and conditions of acculturation they can't be
straightforwardly they can never be identified or reduced to them so the first thing essential say is that the contents of a thought or ability to understand ourselves as thinking being moves from our ability to understand to recognize one another's systems of utterances and appropriate circumstances so in other words you learn how to understand if someone is in front of a red triangle they'll say that's a red triangle and you attribute and what sounds infamous myth of Jones and the myth by which he challenges the myth of the given is simply this the myth of Jones is the personification of a process of a structural process through which we internalize
a new system of concepts in order to identify hitherto unrecognized phenomena which is to say psychological phenomena what happens is Jones is this mythical genius who says that what's happening who proposes to explain the behavior of human beings not just in terms of their dispositions to kind of make sounds in certain circumstances in other words the classic behaviors that kind of would say all there is to you having when you see red things you're just conditioned to kind of see red okay so that would be a classic kind of behaviorist occurrence Jones
wants to say that the next step rather Selges Jones wants to say that a crucial kind of crucial progress is made when you realize that you can explain human beings kind of human behavior and the complicated kind of patterns that human beings engage in by postulating unobservable internal states and you use them to explain the physical behavior it's another word you say he says that's red because he believes that that's for it choosing one is that this this is a
cognitive achievement because it involves taking a familiar and a familiar empirical regularity and using it as the model for an unobserved phenomenon you postulate an unobserved cause for a series of empirical regularities and the analogy that no service uses he says that there's no difference in kind of in this explanatory resources or explanatory achievement and the molecular theory of gases because the key claim is that the difference between the observable and the unobservable is methodological not ontological there is no difference in kind between things that we learn to perceive and things that we cannot as yet
perceive there's really a difference of degree and what happens when we postulate unobservable to explain a series of observable phenomena is that what first of all two things happen is that one is that there's a there's not straightforward analogical transposition from the observed the observed original to the unobserved model because we introduce an amendment we introduce a significant amendment in the case of thought it's the case that when someone is thinking there is no inner voice there is no voice going on in your head we understand thinking as latent kind of verbal episodes but we don't actually believe that there's someone
there's a little voice going on in someone's head. The same kind of, the same machinery is the point to explain sensations. And okay now I need number five. Okay so the key claim in Sellers of the Count is, Sellers of the Count is two tiered. One is that he explains our capacity to have thoughts in terms of these linguistic kind of internal episodes that have to determine a propositional context. In other words, when someone is thinking there's something going on inside them that is linguistically structured and it's analogous to what happens when they speak,
but it doesn't involve any kind of speech, vocalization. so what is going on then when someone has a sensation because the claim is that so so it's a following question so what is common to a seeing that X over there is red it's looking to one that X over there is red and it's looking to one that there's a red object over there these what's interesting about these three claims is that it's actually difficult to identify what they all have in common the common conceptual content is that X over there is right the common experiential content is that seeing that X over there is right but there's a
radical difference between those two levels of contents one is propositional conceptual the other one isn't one is generic because propositions are you know kind of universalizable representations whereas experiences must be particulars seeing that X over there is red can't be explained in terms of any kind of generic determinable it can be cashed out in terms of propositional content but it can't be cashed out in terms of any universal generic category because those categories are properly applied to types of physical object so what is interesting character of the common experiential content given that
it be the object need not be read and see there may be no object at all and read is not determined in particular but a generic determinable attributed to physical objects in other words sensing must be of particulars and what sounds like simply that what we we do to explain the content of experience is that once again we engage in a kind of theoretical transposition is that we take spatial temporal particulars physical objects that we've learned to recognize and individuates conceptually and then we abstract their or rather kind of transpose their perceptible properties into non spatial arrays of
properties so no words okay I'm running out of time okay so consequence what is it says contrary to a kind of a common misunderstanding sellers is not a conceptual idealist he's a scientific realist and his scientific realism is also um consonant with a realism both about thoughts and sensations in other words sellers account is that jones is not an inventor he's a discoverer in other words we had thoughts and experiences but we had no way of thinking or
recognizing our thoughts and our experiences so the basic kind of the crucial kind of Szilagyan claim is that instead of having it but instead of coming to have a concept of something because we've noticed that sort of thing this is the classic claim that you you have this ability to notice things and then you develop a concept based on this ability such as this is completely it's the wrong way round. In fact, it's our ability to notice things depends on our having the relevant concepts. But that doesn't mean that the things themselves are simply concepts. That their existence is entirely conceptual. What makes us conscious is not thinking or feeling, but have a concept of thinking.
Our ability to recognise ourselves as conceptualising or as feeling or sensing. And finally, I'll just... Now, what's... There's a final kind of... The final quote, which is Atlantic Quote, I'm not going to read it out. But it's a quote... Now, what's interesting is that Sellers, strangely enough and unpredictably, rejoins Berkson. In other words, there's a way of understanding Berkson's achievement. is that what Berkson has done is actually he's identified he mistakes a legitimate account of the logic of sensation within the manifest image the manifest image is the image of the kind of the
basic dimension of self-understanding in which we recognize ourselves as thinking and feeling beings Berkson mistakes a legitimate account of the logic of sensation within the manifest image and it's entirely proper. The idea that the homogeneity and the continuity of sensation or the non-particular character of sensation is unequivocal for a metaphysical account of its absolute nature. In other words, Bergson mistakes a conceptual account for a metaphysical and ontological effect. He ontologises what is in fact a category of the manifest image. And what's one of the things and Seles is, basically I'm just going to read the kind of the final passage here is that Seraj says that the reason we can't simply identify
thoughts and sensations with neurophysiological processes is one is because it's a mistake to ontologize the propositional concepts are not things and the propositional content, the normative content that is articulated at the level of thinking can't be identified with any kind of array of physical processes but neither can sensations be identified with micro physical occurrences in the nervous system and the reason for this is because once again actually what's strange
kind of seller says that the the qualities that he says that the the experience a red sensation the experience of a red sensation is non-particulate in other words it can't be decomposed into micro features which would know themselves be red okay and in that regard it's impossible to carry an identification of a sensation with a micro physical kind of process but however what he said what he what he suggests is that we can come to understand we can develop a new account of physical processes that would integrate continue what he calls sensor which is the same manifold of intensive
manifolds of sensation within the scientific image. So in other words, the final quote, he says, we must penetrate to the non-particulate foundation of the particulate image and recognize that in this non-particulate image, the qualities of sense are a dimension of natural process, which occurs only in connection with those complex physical processes, which, when cut up into particles in terms of those features, which are the least common denominator of physical process present in organic as well as organic processes become the complex system of particles which in the current scientific image is the central nervous system so what's striking both sellers is that he says that instead of like
consigning science to so Berkson has kind of given a kind of a viable or at least a kind of plausible account of what's entailed and our understanding of the structure of sensation but instead of like claiming that scientific conceptualization is congenitally incapable of integrating this within the resources of physical theory, we can recognize that a revision in physical theory would allow, a categorical revision in physical theory would allow us to introduce new types of processes, new types of processes of pure processes, which would allow us to understand sensations