Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [47]
But inference is a funny thing—it can’t guarantee that the thing inferred is in fact true. Instead, an inference gains and loses strength depending upon those things from which it is inferred. It’s possible that that garbage-filled pools might be the ideal breeding ground for some fish species—a possibility that shrinks as the farmer encounters similar fishless, junk-filled small pools throughout the area. And it’s possible that Marco’s book is mistaken; a possibility that would decrease were he to find more references to underground brooks in other well-researched books. And the pool—like Marco imagines—might not be so small after all. Maybe.
As commonsensical as it is, the empiricist approach to epistemology is not without its drawbacks. At least some of these revolve around the difficulty of just how our perception generates and justifies our empirical beliefs. The empiricist holds that when we perceive a fish with a black-and-red “checkerboard belly” we are justified to believe that there in fact is a black-and-red checkerboard-bellied fish before us. This idea that our perceiving a thing to have some property justifies our belief that it does have that property is called “perceptual realism.” The problem for the empiricist is to explain just how the latter follows from the former.
“Direct realism” is the idea that the world is more or less just as we perceive it to be—any property perceived to be of a thing is a property of that thing: the fish does have a checkerboard-patterned stomach and that this square is red while the square next to it is black. Were direct realism the case, perceptual realism—and with it empiricism—would be hard to reject as a theory of knowledge. Unfortunately, there is at least one serious problem: how to explain our perceptual errors; say, “seeing” a mirage in the distance on a hot day. Similarly, we watch top-hatted magicians saw their lovely assistants in half and people sometimes hallucinate when extremely tired, starving, or following the ingestion of certain drugs. If the world really is how it appears to be as the direct realist claims, the world would simultaneously have and not have a pool at that distant spot on the road, magicians’ assistants would return from the dead, and pink elephants would need to be able to materialize in front of the drunk (then dematerialize before he wakes with a hangover the next day). The senses are not entirely trustworthy, so an account of knowledge based only upon sensory experience needs a way to discern between legitimate experience and hallucination and to connect veridical experiences to the things experienced.
Philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) proposed that objects have two kinds of properties: primary properties that are perceived and are actually in the object (à la direct realism) and secondary properties that also are perceived but are not in the object. These secondary properties instead have the “powers to produce various sensations in us.”6 This “two-properties” approach is known as “indirect realism.” Imagine again an open tin of sardines sitting on the table in front of you. It has a variety of grayish colors: here a pinkish blush, there almost a creamy white, and just a little over from that it seems a luminous gray. So what color are the fish in the tin? If Locke is correct, color is all in our perceiving; the delicacy before you has no color. Color, like scent and taste, are “secondary properties,” meaning that they are not inherent to the object but are brought to it by