The Barn Looks Red

Here's an abbreviation of an attack against several things: the argument from illusion, the claim that we represent when we see or see perceptions when we see, and any of that host of claims associated with the representation theory of mind. (For the non-abbreviated version, see J.L. Austin's Sense and Sensabilia.) It's also meant as an illustration of a therapeutic method in philosophy, namely checking to see if the terms in which we set up our problems or tempting lines of philosophical thought require us to beg questions--checking, by comparing with other ways we have of making sense of things, looking then to examples of nonphilosophically-loaded conversations. Though of course we have philosophical concerns which lead us to look at these examples or to remind us of their existence, a fair number of people (five or six) have taken to calling these examples nonphilosophical examples or ordinary language examples. A better phrase perhaps would be therapeutic examples. --or just examples.

First, the philosophical temptation, in the form of an argument.

The ways things {seem to us/appear to us/are experienced by us/look to us/are perceived by us} could be the same whether they are based on reality or on {illusion/hallucination/afterimages/delusion/dreaming/mirages, etc.};

Therefore, we don't know anything.

This is one of the standard versions of the argument from illusion, maybe the only argument in philosophy. In trying to figure out whether it is a good argument, the procedure I'm recommending here would lead you to back up and worry about the terms, and whether they beg philosophical questions. In this case, clearly they do. The person who gives this argument is already a dualist, or the first line would not make sense. That is, she thinks that whenever we see something there is a difference between the thing we are looking at and the way that it seems-looks-appears etc. Is that true outside of philosophy? Consider a pair of contrasting examples (the two are the same up to a line where they branch off from each other):

You are having a garage sale at your house out on the Arcata Bottoms. I'm trying on Saturday morning to find the sale, but I'm being unsuccessful and get lost. I call you up on my cell phone: "I can't find your goddamned garage sale." You: "Well, where are you?" I: "I don't know. There was a sign for some Lanphere-Christensen Dunes, but that was several left turns ago." Y: "Can you see any landmarks?" I: "There's a big, hip-roofed barn across the road, by itself." Y: "What color is it?"

[That's where they branch. So, ]

Example A.

I: "It's red." Y: "Okay. The only painted barn out here is Mr. MacGregor's. You need to do a u-turn, go about a mile to an intersection with a big cluster of mailboxes and a little shelter for kids to wait for the school bus, turn right, . . . ." etc.

Example B.

I: "It looks red." Y: [long pause] "John, have you been dropping acid again? [or] Are you wearing those purple John Lennon sunglasses? [or] Oh, yeah, you're in that lowrider pickup with the dark green-tinted windows--roll down the window."

[and then, we hope, Example B rejoins Example A.]

Here come the morals: The way it looks to me does not arise or make sense in nonphilosophical examples unless there is some oddity about the case that makes it unlike a great many (maybe most of) the cases in which I see barns. In order to think that in Example A there has to be a way the barn looks to me, I have to already be a dualist. The support for the argument works only if the conclusion is true, not otherwise. That's the fallacy known as begging the question.

In other words, it is crucial to the argument from illusion that there be a gap (which means a possible difference) between how things look to us (or how they seem, or how they are perceived, or their appearance, and so on) and how they are. This argument is not for a claim that the gap does not exist, and it's not an argument that the claim there is such a gap is false. Instead, it is an argument for the claim that the gap does not make sense in cases in which it should make sense, unless we stipulate or take the gap for granted as we begin, rather than argue for it. Again, begging the question. In examples in which we should be able to see and comment on how things look (and we could do this for the other vocabulary--seems, appears or appearance, is perceived) we find that to make sense of that talk the example has to be a particular kind of example and not every example. One basic requirement of the argument from illusion thus evaporates under investigation.

Now, what's the contrast here with, say, philosophical examples? The answer is that there is a philosophical example here, which is example B but without all the ways to make sense of it that you offer over the phone, and without any other ways to make sense of it either. That is, the philosophical example is the one that does not make sense. This is, of course, an overly combative way for me to put it, but it is at least the possibility that makes philosophers add intelligibility to the list of crucial virtues. d:\wpwin\wpdocs\courses\argillus.s98

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