Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Push a straight stick halfway into a pond and look at it. The submerged half appears to bend at the waterline. Everyone has seen this. Children find it delightful, physicists find it boring, and philosophers — for roughly three hundred years — have found in it a reason to doubt that you ever see the world at all.

That last reaction deserves explanation, because it sounds unhinged. How does a stick that looks bent become an argument that you never perceive sticks, ponds, or anything else outside your own head? The chain of reasoning carries a name: the argument from illusion. It runs through Berkeley, Hume, Russell, and Ayer, and it has done more than any other single argument to convince thoughtful people that perception delivers not the world but a private showing of it — a screen of “sense-data,” appearances, mental pictures, with the real stick forever on the far side. I want to teach you the argument at full strength, because it has real force, and then show you exactly where it cheats.

Here is the argument, laid out the way its defenders would lay it out. When you look at the half-submerged stick, you are aware of something bent. The physical stick is not bent — pull it out, it is straight. So the bent thing you are aware of cannot be the physical stick. But you are undeniably aware of something bent; awareness has to have an object. That something, since it is not the physical stick, must be a different item — a mental one, an appearance that genuinely possesses the bentness the stick lacks. Call it a sense-datum. So far this concerns only illusions. But now comes the move that does the damage. A good illusion is, from the inside, indistinguishable from accurate perception. You cannot tell, by inspecting your own experience, whether you are seeing a really-bent stick or a straight stick that merely looks bent. And if the two cases feel identical, the most economical conclusion is that the same kind of thing happens in both: in the accurate case too, what you are directly aware of is a sense-datum, an inner appearance, and the external object — if there is one — gets known only at second hand, inferred from the appearance the way a detective infers a burglar from a broken window.¹

That is the bad picture, and it is worth saying how natural it feels. Once you accept it, perception becomes a kind of theater. You sit in the dark watching the show your nervous system puts on, and the world is the rumored cause behind the curtain. Most people who have taken a science class half-believe some version of this already — the brain constructs a model, so what you really see is the model — and the argument from illusion seems to give the homely thought a rigorous spine. The stakes are not small. If the picture holds, then knowledge of the external world rests on an inference you can never check from the outside, and the skeptic who doubts the whole external world is not a lunatic but a logician.

The argument cheats in the second sentence. Watch it again: “you are aware of something bent.” This sentence has two readings, and the argument needs you not to notice the difference. On the first reading, it just restates the harmless fact we began with — the stick looks bent, the way a friend looks tired or the sky looks threatening. To say the stick looks bent is to say something about how the stick presents itself to you; it does not commit you to a bent object sitting anywhere. On the second reading, “you are aware of something bent” asserts that there exists a bent thing, a genuine bearer of bentness, standing as the object of your awareness. The first reading is obviously true and philosophically inert. The second reading is exactly what the argument is supposed to prove. Slide from the first to the second without comment, and you have manufactured a sense-datum out of grammar.²

J.L. Austin caught this in the 1950s, in a series of Oxford lectures published after his death as Sense and Sensibilia — a title he chose, characteristically, as a pun on Jane Austen, since he thought the whole sense-datum literature had the texture of a domestic comedy of errors.³ Austin’s complaint was that the argument trades on a sloppy handling of the ordinary word “looks.”⁴ From the fact that the stick looks bent, nothing whatever follows about your being acquainted with a bent entity. A straight stick in water looks exactly the way a straight stick in water should look, given how light behaves at the surface; the appearance is not a deceiving inner object but the lawful look of a real stick under real refraction. There is no extra bent thing to be the object of anything. The “illusion,” properly described, is just a true fact about how a straight stick presents itself in those conditions — which is why you stop being fooled the moment you learn a little optics, though the stick goes on looking exactly the same. An inner bent object would not behave like that.

The contemporary defenders of the argument know Austin’s objection and have a reply, and honesty requires meeting their strongest version rather than the cartoon. Their reply rests on what Howard Robinson calls the Phenomenal Principle: if it sensorily appears to a subject that something has a sensible quality, then there exists something that does have that quality, and the subject is aware of it.⁵ Grant the Phenomenal Principle and Austin loses; the bent look guarantees a bent bearer, full stop. The principle is not stupid. It is trying to honor a real datum — that experience presents us with something, that perception is not a contentless buzz but an encounter with qualities laid out before us. The older sense-datum theorists, Russell and Price and Broad, leaned on it constantly, and for a long time the principle traveled in the company of a foundationalist epistemology: sense-data were supposed to be the incorrigible bedrock on which all other knowledge was built, the one thing you could not be wrong about.⁶

But that is precisely where the modern defense exposes its own weakness. As Tim Crane has shown, the Phenomenal Principle does not actually depend on the old infallibilist project, and its defenders today are right to disown that baggage — yet once the baggage is gone, so is the principle’s only visible means of support.⁷ Why should we believe that appearing-F requires a thing that is really F? Stated baldly, the principle is just the conclusion of the argument from illusion wearing a premise’s clothing. A photograph can present a unicorn without there being any unicorn, real or mental, that the photograph is “aware of”; a sentence can be about a golden mountain without conjuring one into a special realm. Presentation does not require a present object of the kind the principle demands. The defender of sense-data, asked why he believes the Phenomenal Principle, can in the end only point back at the bent stick — which is to say, he asks you to grant the very thing in dispute. Austin’s diagnosis turns out to be exactly right: the real motive was never the optics of ponds but the craving for an incorrigible inner object, and when you give up the craving, the object dissolves with it.⁸

Strip the Phenomenal Principle away and the whole edifice falls in the right direction. Illusions stop being evidence for an inner theater and become what they always were: cases where a real, mind-independent object presents itself, accurately or not, to a perceiver embedded in a world of light and water and angles. The stick looks bent because the stick is really there and refraction is really happening. Perception represents the world as being a certain way, and like any representing it can misrepresent — the bent look is a representation that does not match its object. But a misrepresentation of the stick is still about the stick; it is not the substitution of a mental stick for a physical one. You see the world directly, the way you read a sentence directly even when the sentence asserts a falsehood. The falsehood does not insert an intermediary between you and the page.⁹

The strongest objection left standing is not the original argument but a refinement of it, and it deserves a clean answer. Grant, the objector says, that illusion involves a real object misrepresented. Hallucination does not. The person who hallucinates a dagger confronts no dagger, refracted or otherwise — and yet a vivid hallucination can be subjectively identical to seeing the genuine article. If the two experiences share a common inner character, then that shared character, present in both, is what you are really aware of in each — and we are back to the inner object, smuggled in through the side door of hallucination rather than the front door of illusion. This is the common-factor argument, and it is the live debate today.¹⁰ One serious answer, developed by M.G.F. Martin, refuses the shared inner object outright: veridical perception and hallucination need not be the same kind of mental state merely because you cannot tell them apart from the inside.¹¹ That you cannot introspectively distinguish two conditions shows a limit on your self-knowledge, not the presence of a common ingredient — just as two coins you cannot tell apart by weight in your palm need share no hidden third coin between them. The indistinguishability is a fact about the knower, not a discovered part inside the experience. Whether you take Martin’s hard line or the representationalist’s gentler one — that the hallucination is a representation that happens to represent nothing real, a check drawn on an empty account — the point holds: subjective sameness does not entail a shared inner item, and the leap from “I can’t tell the difference” to “therefore the same thing is before my mind in both” is the original equivocation in a new costume.

So look at the stick again. It bends at the waterline, exactly as a straight stick should. Three centuries of philosophers stood at that pond and concluded that they could not see the stick. They were misled not by their eyes — their eyes were working perfectly — but by a small grammatical slide and an unargued principle they wanted to be true. The eyes never lied. The stick was always right there, straight under the bent-looking surface, waiting for someone to stop inferring it and simply look.

References

Austin, J. L. (1962). Sense and Sensibilia. Reconstructed from manuscript notes by G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Crane, T. (2001). Elements of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Crane, T. (2005). “What is the Problem of Perception?” Synthesis Philosophica 20: 237–264.

Crane, T. (2006). “Is There a Perceptual Relation?” In T. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds.), Perceptual Experience, 126–146. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Martin, M. G. F. (2004). “The Limits of Self-Awareness.” Philosophical Studies 120: 37–89.

Robinson, H. (1994). Perception. London: Routledge.

Smith, A. D. (2002). The Problem of Perception. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Snowdon, P. (1992). “How to Interpret ‘Direct Perception’.” In T. Crane (ed.), The Contents of Experience, 48–78. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Notes

1. The progression from illusion to the universal claim has two stages that the literature does not always keep distinct: a sense-datum stage, which concludes that one is aware of a bearer of the apparent quality, and a generalizing stage, which extends the conclusion from illusory to veridical cases via the indistinguishability of the two. The separation, and the observation that the generalizing stage is logically the weaker of the two — resting as it does on a “same-effect-same-cause” inference the direct realist has no reason to grant — follows the standard treatment in A. D. Smith, The Problem of Perception (2002, ch. 1). ↩
2. The equivocation is between a phenomenal or adverbial reading of “aware of something bent” (one is appeared-to bently) and an act-object reading (there exists a bent particular standing in the awareness relation). The sense-datum theorist needs the act-object reading, but only the phenomenal reading is licensed by the datum. Crane (2005) frames the underlying issue as the tension between the Phenomenal Principle and the openness of experience to mind-independent objects; the equivocation is the hinge on which that tension turns. ↩
3. Austin delivered the material as lectures across the 1950s; Sense and Sensibilia (1962) was reconstructed from his notes by G. J. Warnock after Austin’s death in 1960. Austin’s central charge against Ayer was not that sense-data are metaphysically impossible but that the argument for them rests on an “abuse” of ordinary perceptual vocabulary — “looks,” “appears,” “seems” — each of which carries its own logic that the sense-datum theorist flattens into a single misleading notion of appearance. ↩
4. Austin (1962, chs. 4–5) presses that “looks,” “appears,” and “seems” do not share a single logic that licenses a common appearance. “It looks blue” (a cautious report on color), “it appears to be a thrush” (a tentative identification), and “it seems to be slowing” (a guarded judgment) carry different commitments and different defeasibility conditions; the sense-datum theorist flattens all three into one notion of a presented inner quality. Austin’s charge against Ayer is therefore not that sense-data are impossible but that the inference to them rests on an “abuse” of this vocabulary — a charge about the semantics of perceptual verbs, not the metaphysics of mind. The point dovetails with the equivocation diagnosed in note 2: once “looks F” is read as a defeasible report on how a real object presents itself rather than as the ascription of F to an inner bearer, the argument’s first inferential step simply fails to go through. ↩
5. The formulation follows Robinson (1994, ch. 2), who treats the Phenomenal Principle as the load-bearing premise of the argument and defends it explicitly rather than smuggling it in. Crane (2005) reconstructs Robinson’s version precisely because it is the most candid: it isolates the one premise a direct realist must reject, rather than burying it in talk of what we “must” be aware of. ↩
6. On the historical entanglement of the Phenomenal Principle with foundationalist epistemology, see Crane (2005), who traces the principle through H. H. Price’s Perception (1932) and C. D. Broad, and notes Austin’s diagnosis that the sense-datum theorists’ “real motive” was the desire for a class of incorrigible statements (Austin 1962, 103). ↩
7. Crane (2005) argues that the natural reading of Price does not in fact require the infallibilist motive, and that Robinson follows “the same lines of thought” without it. This is the decisive move: it concedes that the principle can be stated cleanly, while showing that once detached from the epistemology that originally recommended it, the principle has no independent argument in its favor and merely restates the conclusion at issue. Crane (2006, §V) frames the burden precisely as a question the sense-datum theorist cannot answer without circularity: “why should it be that whenever anyone is aware of something as having a property, there really is something which has this property?” The parallel with judgment is fatal to the principle — when someone consciously judges that something has a property, no one infers that there must exist a thing bearing it; the Phenomenal Principle asserts, without argument, that perception is the lone exception. Crane (2006) puts the charge most sharply: since perception is “a form of representation,” and representations in general do not require their objects to exist, “to claim that it must be otherwise in the case of perceptual experience is to beg the question in favour of sense-data.” Cf. Crane (2001, ch. 5) on the broader point that intentional states need not represent their objects “in some particular way” answering to an internal item. ↩
8. This converges with the book’s standing anti-reification commitment. The sense-datum is the reified residue of a verb: appearing-bent, a way the stick presents itself, gets frozen into a bent appearance, a thing one inspects. The cure is the same one applied throughout to consciousness, information, and meaning — cash the noun back out into the relation or process it abbreviates. There is appearing; there is no further appeared-thing. ↩
9. This is the representationalist’s direct realism: perceptual experience has representational content, and that content is a way of being directed at the world, not an intermediary thing perceived in the world’s place. The sentence analogy is imperfect — perception is not language-like in its format — but it captures the essential point that aboutness does not require an internal object answering to the content. Cf. Crane (2006) on whether perception involves a genuine relation to its object, and the difficulty of stating direct realism without collapsing either into a bare relation that hallucination cannot share or into a content that allegedly screens off the world. ↩
10. A second route to the inner object runs through causation rather than indistinguishability — the causal argument (Russell, Ayer; reconstructed in Smith 2002, ch. 2, and Robinson 1994, ch. 3). Because the proximate cause of experience is a brain state, and because the same brain state could in principle be produced without the external object (the time-lag from distant stars, the surgeon’s electrode), the immediate object of awareness must be something internal that the external object merely causes — a sense-datum standing proxy for the world. The direct realist need not deny the neural facts; the argument equivocates on “immediate.” A cause’s being proximate in the causal chain does not make its effect the proximate object of awareness. As Martin (2004) observes, the causal argument “can be blocked by claiming that the object of perception acts as a direct cause in addition to any role it has in producing intermediary causal” states: the distal object is genuinely what one perceives, even though intervening states mediate the seeing. The inference from “mediated by inner states” to “directed at inner states” is the same vehicle/object confusion the screening-off worry trades on; that experience has causal antecedents no more interposes them between perceiver and world than the firing of rods and cones interposes itself between you and this page. ↩
11. Martin (2004) defends a “naïve realist” disjunctivism on which the veridical and hallucinatory cases share no positive mental nature; the hallucination is characterized only negatively, as a state introspectively indistinguishable from a veridical perception. Disjunctivism, in Crane’s (2006) reconstruction, “makes the possibility of hallucination compatible with the relationality of perception by denying that the hallucination and the subjectively indistinguishable perception are states of” the same fundamental kind — precisely the inference the common-factor argument needs and cannot earn. Snowdon (1992), an early architect of the position, treats the demonstrative judgments available in genuine perception as non-inferential and object-involving in a way no hallucination can match, blocking the slide from indistinguishability to identity of mental kind. The representationalist resists Martin’s negative characterization, holding instead that hallucination has positive (but unsatisfied) content. The essay’s argument is neutral between the two replies because both deny the inference the common-factor argument requires — that introspective indistinguishability entails a shared inner object. The dispute between them concerns the positive nature of hallucination, not the refutation of sense-data. ↩