Pan Psych Ism or Evolutionary Materialism

Panpsychism or Evolutionary MaterialismAuthor(s): Roy Wood SellarsReviewed work(s):Source: Philosophy of Science, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Oct., 1960), pp. 329-350Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Science AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/185235 .Accessed: 17/12/2011 04:18

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PJhilosophy of Science VOL. 27 October, i960 NO.4

PANPSYCHISM OR EVOLUTIONARY MATERIALISM*

ROY WOOD SELLARS

I shall be concerned in this paper with the consideration of panpsychism and of materialism in new forms as alternatives. Extended reference will be made to C. S. Peirce's view of perception as realistic in intention and yet not quite clear as to its mechanism and how it attains objective import. I shall say little about Whiteheadl as a representative of panpsychism as I have just finished a detailed criticism of his epistemological framework. I shall, however, make comments on William James's radical empiricism as tied in with his view of perception as direct and immediate- roughly speaking, the alternative to Locke's representation of "unperceived things" -and bring in mny own theory of sensations as guiding perceiving. Russell's neutral monism, connected historically with James's radical empiricism, will be touched on here in connection with his rejection of materialism. Phenomenalism and materialism exclude each other. Materialism, as an ontology, requires a realistic epistemology. I shall also make some comments on Dewey's biological experientialism. One can often best explain a perspective by means of contrasts.

Panpsychism had quite a vogue toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. It had deep historical roots in the teachings of Leibniz, Kant and Schopenhauer and in the Naturphilosophie of Schelling. All these thinkers rejected the physical world, as ordinarily and realistically conceived, as phenomenal. Cartesian and Lockian dualism involved basic ontological difficulties and was weak epistemologically. How could a genuinely material world be known? An adequate theory of perceiving in a biological setting had still to be worked out. New notions of mind, the brain, the locus of sensations, the importance of directed response for perceiving, the role of concepts and language, had to be worked out. A dead-level mechanical view of the material world had also to be replaced by more evolutionary notions. All this would take time. As a pioneer, C. S. Peirce did wonders. But it should not surprise us that his thought was weighted in terms of "mind." Mind was only beginning to be naturalized. As I remember it, Darwin appealed to Chauncey Wright2 to do something about it; and he made a brave effort. I

* Received November, 1959. ' The critical paper will come out in the Revue Internationale de Philosophie in a Whitehead

centenary number. My argument against Whitehead is that sensa are not terminal in perceiving but of the nature of guides and evidence for a referential act. This undercuts his whole notion of "vacuous entities" which derives from Bradley's stress on sentiency as ultimate.

2 P. WIENER, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism, p. 31.

329

330 ROY WOOD SELLARS

gather that Peirce thought of Wright as too much a follower of Mill and not basic enough in his logic. The question here may be called that of the ontological reach of logic. My own position is that thought and logic have ontological reach. In veridical knowledge-claims we penetrate to the factual texture of the world.

In my graduate years-1903-5, I studied James Ward, C. A. Strong (Why the Mind has a Body), Clifford, Paulsen and A. E. Taylor, all essentially panpsychists, just as I had puzzled over the dialectic of F. H. Bradley earlier. By reaction, perhaps, I made a determined effort to work to a physical realism. I continued this project in a course at the University of Michigan on the Main Concepts of Science, one of the early courses in the philosophy of science. What I was working towards was an epistemology with different principles than those current, such as to be is to be perceived, or to be is to perceive, or there is no object without a subject, or the physical world is a construction. It took me time but I gradually worked out a referential realism combined with a naturalization of mind tied in with the directive functioning of the brain. I knew practically nothing of Peirce's work at the time. The systematic editing of his writings came much later. The result is that I am in a fair position to note where we agree and where we diverge. Fortunately, some outstanding Peirce scholars have assisted me in the task of sizing up Peirce's view of perception. I shall do my best but will end in some queries. What is the foundation of referential language? And what is the status and locus of serLsations ?

As I see it, we are involved in the working of the brain-mind economy and in the notion of evolutionary levels in nature. All these things hang together. And what could be more inviting than an exploration of them? The premise is that epistemology and ontology interplay. To the naturalist, metaphysics is not something transcendent but a question of how things are. There has, of course, been much bad metaphysics but that is a question of genre and perspective. I am persuaded that much depends on an adequate view of perceiving as our entrance to the world. Plato was quite aware of this point in his attack on the Giants, as was Berkeley in his attempt to undercut Newtonianism.

I belong to a generation of American philosophers who took the problem of perceiving very seriously, feeling that it was neglected by both idealists and pragmatists. The idea seems to have arisen that there was a stalemate here. I shall try to show that that was not the case. At least, I worked on to further clarification. The norm of perceiving is verdidicality so that one has to have a theory of truth to complete one's theory of perceiving. I shall report on this point later in the paper.

Now I agree with C. S. Peirce in his opposition to general, or unmotivated, skepticism. Here was a thinker who was both a trained scientist and a professional philosopher, a promising combination. His emphasis was upon method and enquiry. In contrast to James, his thought was weighted in the direction of logic and mathematics. And yet both were theists and both were

PANPSYCHISM OR EVOLUTIONARY MATERIALISM 331

concerned with the import for man of mechanical necessitarianism. Peirce explored tychism on a large, ontological canvas while James concentrated on free-will in an interactionist setting. Both were opposed to materialism as identified with the postulates of classical physics - where every event was supposed to have its deductively appointed time. One can note this assumption even to-day in C. D. Broad's famous essay rejecting free-will. What happens could not but happen. I shall have some remarks to make on this point also. As I see it, all these questions are interwoven. In this sense, I belong to the Peirce-James tradition.

But let us come back to our title. Both panpsychism and materialism are forms of ontology or, if you will, metaphysics. The semantic tradition here is twofold, naturalistic and theological. The Ionian tended to make nature self-sufficient. Plato attacked this perspective, making mind and the world- soul prior. Aristotle resorted to a prime mover in terms of a cosmic teleology. But we should remember that both the Epicureans and the Stoics were, in their divergent ways, materialists. It is a very old tradition. I have always felt that the antipathy to "metaphysics" displayed by the logical positivists reflected their cultural situation and their neglect of epistemology with its tie-in with ontology. A correct analysis of perceiving is, again, the key. If perceiving does not attain the physical world, then the teeth of scientism are drawn. It is not surprising that this moral was quickly grasped and exploited by Thomists. I am not for a moment denying the technical contributions made by logical positivists and logical empiricists. All I am standing for is a larger framework; and I do think the James-Peirce assemblage of problems is a good point of departure. Analysis is the better for a setting.

I am, of course, suggesting a revised form of materialism as such a setting. There have been both cultural and technical reasons for the neglect of this framework. Perceiving had to be cleared up and connected up both with objective reference and the economy of the brain-mind complex. The notion of emergence, or evolutionary levels, had also to be developed technically and applied so that justice could be done to the stature and status of man. In other words, materialism had to be taken from academic cold storage. Now, by its very nature, materialism cannot avoid facing up to basic and perennial questions. As we shall see, it was sometimes rather cavalierly dis- missed on epistemological grounds. But here I shall argue that the philosophers were at fault. At other times, it was regarded as impossible to bring the mind and the brain together. In my opinion, recent electrical study of the working of the brain together with advances in the theory of communication is helping here. A better idea of the nature and role of language is, likewise, of assistance. But, of course, the domain of appraisals and values must be given point and human leverage. All this is of the nature of a direction and a challenge.

I am concerned here chieX1y with foundatioGi-S. But I cannot resist a Parthian shot. Why did the bold, free spirits of Vienna and Oxford not rise to this great challenge as the great mountain climber, Mallory, did to Mount Everest? Did it not involve a whole gamiut of intriguing questions, epistemological,


ontological and axiological ? Were they not there beckoning as Mount Everest was? What more could a vigorous, philosophical mind desire?

Perhaps, there were too many road-blocks. Some break-through was needed. I have always argued that an adequate analysis of perceiving would be such a break-through. That is why I am stressing it in this paper. I must leave it to the historian of the future to look back and analyze the directions academic philosophy took. On the whole, I am inclined to believe that technical difficulties played as great a role as social ones. Philosophy, like science, was prepared to go against the inertia of popular opinion as much as it was permitted to do. Modern philosophy had, however, begun with a subjectivistic bias in both Cartesian rationalism and British empiricism. It was going to be hard to give human knowing objective import and to work out the mechanisms of such an achievement. Objective idealism was a sort of romantic tour-de- force built on Kant's constructive phenomenalism. I am going to argue that James, Peirce, Russell and Dewey never quite got the correct framework, though approaching it. Of that later.

In this introductory section I shall allow myself some general remarks on Dewey's instrumentalism as I saw it develop. I shall be more specific later.

It is quite evident that Dewey did not like "epistemology" to which he came rather late in his career as a result of the rise of the realistic movement in its two expressions, the "new" and the critical. He saw weaknesses in the new realism with its presentationalism and the alleged ubiquity of the knowledge relation. I could agree with him here. Not unsurprisingly, Santayana's doctrine of essences with its Platonistic touch did not appeal to him either. The direction he took was to stress ideas as instruments concerned with the future. Cognitive claims about the things around us were replaced by the emphasis on warranted assertibility in the logic of enquiry. This shift signifies a turning away from the more traditional, epistemological setting of the term, "true". I have long argued that "true" means the acceptance of a knowledge-claim after testing and that it contextually implies correspondence. Though correspondence is not a test, its achievement is connected with the mechanism of sense-perception and the growth and corrigible application of concepts. It is these mechanisms with a long, bio-psychological history which make possible the achievement of human knowing. In recent parlance, t'true," as a term, signifies endorsement or a favorable verdict. It expresses the acceptance of a knowledge-claim.3

Now, as I saw it, the pragmatists turned their back too hastily on this direction of analysis. What Dewey did, as I see it, was to embrace behavioral experientialism, eschewing what he called traditional dualities. Now I regard this as a short cut which broke the linkage of epistemology with ontology. It gave what Santayana called a foreshortened naturalism. The status of electrons and other "scientific objects" was always unclear in Dewey. I have

3See my article, "'True' as Contextually Implying Correspondence," The Yournal of Philosophy, August 27, 1959.


long had the feeling that many American pragmatists have had their philosophical powers blunted by Dewey's strategy. The only antidote is, of course, an adequate account of the mechanism and objective import of human perceiving and of the working of the brain-mind complex.

Now it has been my thesis that the virtue of materialism as an ontology is that it brings in its wake, unavoidably, all the crucial questions. It cannot escape them. A clear theory of sense-perception must be worked out as well as some notion of the brain-mind complex. Of course, the setting to-day is evolutionary; and we speak of emergence and of levels.

It is well in these matters for Americans to note European trends. Thomism is a movement which is sensitive to basic currents. I do not think it takes romantic existentialism too seriously though it recognizes that it overstressed essence as against existence. What it has its eyes on, quite naturally, is dialectical materialism. Its argument is to the effect that the dialectical materialist confuses realism with materialism. The Thomist is a realist but his ontology is that of "form" and "matter",, as correlatives, "formal materialism." I cannot go into the question here in detail but I am persuaded that when Marx turned Hegelianism upside down and got a kind of dialectical scientism this was not much more than a change in base. Technical problems as to human perceiving and the economy of the brain-mind complex were left in arrears. I suspect that as Western academic philosophy gets over its jag of phenomenalism-and it seems to be moving in that direction-a constructive debate with dialectical materialism may occur. There should be both give and take. As a naturalistic humanist I am not too proud of the West's emphasis upon traditional religion. But this is a climatical, cultural issue tied in with man's status and stature. I am at present concerned with epistemological and ontological bases.

Coming back, then, to my title, there were, as I see it, two prongs of attack by panpsychism against materialism: (1) epistemological and (2) ontological. The epistemological prong rested on such positions as Kantianism, idealism and phenomenalism, which had become endemic in modern philosophy as a result of the inability to solve the problem of perceiving and thus get directly to the material world. The ontological prong stressed the dominance of mechanicalism and deductive necessitarianism and the difficulty of finding a place in nature for consciousness and reason. Philosophers often turned to panpsychism as a way of making objective idealism more concrete and more in touch with science. I shall argue that this was the motivation of C. S. Peirce. He was a quasi realist, a remarkable logician and an opponent of necessitarianism, in an idealistic era. I shall try to show how his quasi-realism left mind too dominant in his ontology. Here we come up against the difference between panpsychism and emergent evolution.

Leibniz may be said to have begun the gambit of panpsychism. He swung from atomic materialism to monadism on at least three grounds: (1) Because if one identified matter with extension-as did Descartes-it was infinitely divisible in a mathematical way. The distinction between pure and applied


mathematics had not yet been clearly worked out. (2) Because matter was supposedly inert and one needed centers of force and feeling; and (3) Because of the mill-analogy. That is, one could never get beyond the wheels and cogs in the inspection of a machine.

These points are, of course, dated. Newton had already swung away from Cartesian cosmology; pure mathematics was to be ever more sharply distinguished from applied mathematics and the conception of infinitesimals was to alter; and matter was to be thought of as dynamic. Besides, cerebral activity is no longer thought of in mechanical terms but as action-patterns. Thus these road-blocks have vanished. I wonder what a Leibniz would do to-day!

Coming back to the epistemological prong of the argument against materialism, one can note that it was always appealed to as a final veto. It concerned the philosopher's technical competence. Hobbes and the Thomists -an interesting combination-were in abeyance. After a fair historical study, F. A. Lange falls back on Neo-Kantianism. The physical world is phenomenal. Paulsen establishes psychical monism (panpsychism) in a similar fashion. The material world is phenomenal. Even Russell uses much the same device, though now as the grounds for a neutral monism, a position stemming from Hume as modified by William James in his radical empiricism. It follows that any overt materialism must offer, in rebuttal, an analysis of perceiving giving it objective import and undercutting this traditional philosophical veto. The ontological status of consciousness and mind in the material world can then be grappled with. The emergence gambit may then come into play.

I

I am going to pass now to a study of Peirce with special emphasis on his theory of perceiving. I wrote of him as a quasi-realist. I want to bring out what I meant by this phrase. He was not a Berkeleian and he was opposed to Cartesian dualism. That does not say too much, for Kant and the objective idealists would have said the same.

But, before I take up perceiving, I want to bring out the point that panpsychism was taken to be the alternative to materialism, conceived in terms of mechanism, predetermination, necessity and alienness to the facts of consciousness and mind. Here we have, in part, a semantic question. I call myself an evolutionary materialist and reject these stipulations. Surely, our view of the physical world has been altering tremendously, as classical physics has given ground and as evolutionary notions have come to the front. Much that Peirce fought against has been discarded. But this has usually resulted in a revision of our notions of the texture of material systems. When Whitehead points out that the traditional billiard-ball conception of the atom is no longer valid because a temporal dimension is always present, he is not discarding matter but revising our conception of it. It is on epistemplogical grounds of a Berkeleian sort that he makes his ultimate rejection in favor of panpsychism.


That is, he falls back on the epistemological prong. As I see it, Peirce rejects the materialism of his day and regards panpsychism as the logical alternative. We must not forget that Kantianism and objective idealism still dominated the era. It is not surprising that Schelling's Naturphilosophie still had influence. We can note the same perspective in Bergson. Matter is degenerate mind. As I have suggested, the theory of emergent evolution takes another base. Mind is an activity evolved in organic life. In a conversation with Bergson in 1909 I advanced this idea but he did not take it up.

In handling these matters a whole complex is involved, both epistemological and ontological. One must work back and forth. Let it be recalled that Bergson worked out a theory of pure perception akin to that of Perry's new realism. Perry agreed with Bergson that consciousness is not intrinsic to the brain. This led to pan-objectivism and the dislike of the subjective. Dewey, likewise, shied from the brain-mind complex and "traditional dualities". He took his stand on a behaviorial experientialism.

Now I am going to query Peirce's view of perceiving, just because I think it is somewhat ambiguous. Let me put it this way: Do we perceive our percepts? Or do we perceive material things? We must be quite clear as to the difference. The first answer falls in line with Kantianism, phenomenalism, objective idealism. The second is that of physical realism. I am going to argue for the second and connect it with changed ideas of the texture of the material world and with notions of emergence and levels. That is, I shall move from below upward. I do not think that Peirce would find this so alien to his own thought but that his base of operations was affected by his objective idealism, even though this had a pragmatistic directive. It will be recalled that I sketched a theory of true which made it contextually imply correspondence. What I always find in Peirce is a feeling for logical and ontological depth, for a basis for possibility and potentiality which Mill missed. I try to link up epistenmology with ontology in such a way that this can be satisfied. A more explicitly realistic theory of perceiving, in my opinion, fits in with the recognition of ontological categories, such as substance, causality, dispositional properties. I suppose that the avowed Peircean would feel that I am only expanding the master. But it seems to me to be more than that, to be an affair of reorientation. As indicated, I shall now concentrate on Peirce's theory of perception for strategic reasons. In the next section I shall pay my respects to James, Dewey and Russell.

I have read considerably, of late, on Peirce's view of perception and have had the advice of such experts as Wiener, Goudge, Chisholmn and Burks. There seems to be general agreement that he is not altogether clear on the subbject. To me, that is not surprising since it is a difficult topic. I shall, naturally, use my own analysis as a paradigm. I look upon sensations as connected with sensori-motor patterns and so guiding perceiving as a response-activity concerned with the things around us. At the hluman level, this involves the growth and application of concepts tied in with language. The point of this approach is that perceiving is directed at things and not, as in traditional


empiricism, at ideas. I call it direct, referential perceiving. Now we should expect language to reflect this situation. And Professor Burks points out that in Vol. 7, paragraph 635, of his Papers Peirce analyzes the sentence, "That chair is yellow", and says that the phrase "that chair" functions as an index pointing to the chair. Now I would agree with this linguistic analysis but would argue that it has a foundation in sense-perception that needs exploration.

The influence of Kant is very evident. As nearly as I can make out, the framework is Kantian with things-in-themselves left out in the idealistic tradition. The influence of Hegel is also evident. All this leads to a phenomenology of description critical of British empiricism. And yet one can note the effect of James's combination of introspective psychology and physiology.

How did Peirce integrate all this ? I shall make my suggestions. As I see it, both James andPeirce took the line of what they called "immediate perception" of the world. That is, they would have nothing to do with the Lockian copy theory. In his phenomenology, Peirce is the logician religiously abstaining from any speculation as to the relation between categories of firstness, secondness- and thirdness and physiological facts, cerebral or otherwise. He is also not concerned with correspondence to any real thing. We are left with question marks as to the status of sensations and the way to handle cognitive claims. Let us look at these separately.

Firstness is the quality, monadic aspect of experience and the world. "Anything whatever, however complex and heterogeneous, has its quality sui generis, its possibility of sensation, would our senses only respond to it." Again, "But whether we ought to say that it is the senses that make the sense-qualities or the sense-qualities to which the senses are adapted, need not be determined in haste." I find that my experts are somewhat puzzled about the status of firsts, pointing out similarities with Santayana's essences and Whitehead's feelings.

Let us turn now to sense-perception. According to Peirce, we have in perception (a) direct sensory material or the "percept" and (b) the characterization of that material in a perceptual judgment. And the sole justification of a perceptual judgment is that it turns out to be useful, that is, guides our future actions. It seems to me that Peirce was influenced by Kant to put stress upon experiential facts, the results of judgment rather than upon genesis in the fashion of traditional empiricism. (One recalls that the logical positivists later made a similar point.) But there are certain ambiguities which I, as a physical realist, note. These fit in with objective idealism and indicate why I call him a quasi realist. Peirce asserts that a "percept" is not a mental occurrent but a portion of the external world which impinges directly on us. It exerts a brute compulsion from which we cannot escape and is, therefore, properly described as physical rather than psychical. On the other hand, in being real and external it does not in the least cease to be a purely psychical product like anything else of which I can take any sort of cognizance. (A marked idealist touch.) Again, he states that our percepts are undoubtedly purely psychical, altogether of the nature of thought. And he notes in them


the firstness of feeling, the reactions of secondness and indications of thirdness or symbolism.

Now I want to be entirely fair to Peirce. Professor Burks points out that Peirce stresses both the utility of a judgment of perception and its empirical origin. "We find ourselves impotent to refuse our assent to it in the presence of the percept." (C.P. 7.628) Again, "A perceptual judgment is a judgment absolutely forced upon my acceptance, and that by a process which I am utterly unable to control and consequently am unable to criticize." (C.P. 5.157.) And both the empirical and the utility aspects of perception come out in this quotation: "The elements of every concept enter into logical thought at the gate of perception and make their exit at the gate of purposive action; and whatever cannot show its passports at both these gates is to be arrested as unauthorized by reason." (C.P. 5.212.)

What queries do I still have? Note, first, that I speak of perceiving rather than of percepts. According to my theory, sensations operate in the brain as guides to perceiving tied in with objective response. Things are located, responded to, and characterized so that the pattern becomes increasingly S-C-R. Stimulus feeds into an interplay of sensations and concepts directed at terminal response and cognitive characterization. This is what I call the referential view of sense-perception. As I see it, Peirce limits cognizance, as above, to the psychical. I hold, on the other hand, that perceiving is concerned with material things and that we denote and characterize chairs and trees as material things. Unless we make this point clear, the term, external things, remains ambiguous. Here is one watershed between objective idealism and panpsychism and evolutionary materialism. The phrase "immediate perception" requires analysis. It led James to his radical empiricism. Is the object given or referred to ? A theory of truth is involved. On the one hand, we have pragmatic prediction and ambulation. On the other hand, tested claims where the verdict is true and which implies a mechanism working in the direction of correspondence. Of course, true ideas work.

Professor Goudge made the following points in answer to my queries. As regards Peirce's rejection of materialism, he agreed that it stemmed, in part, from his identification of it with one-level mechanism and necessitarianism. (Professor Lowe, it would seem, assigns much the same motivation for Whitehead's ignoring materialism as an ontology.) Now I have recently argued for levels of efficient causality, at the highest of which guidance and direction enter in causality as a going affair. This involves the denial of Newtonian predetermination. The minded organism has to solve its causal problems and choice follows a period of indeterminacy.4 And so we come to Peirce's second and repeated objection to materialism, namely, that material particles and forces could never give rise to such psychic phenomena as sensations and feelings. He even contends that a consistent materialist ought

4See my article, "Levels of Causality: The Emergence of Guidance and Reason in Nature." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, September, 1959.


flatly to deny that there is such a thing as consciousness. Since this would be absurd and since he rejects both Cartesian dualism and Berkeleian idealism, the only ontology left is panpsychism a la Schelling, that is, the view that matter is "degraded" or "undeveloped" mind. One recalls that Bergson took a similar path with beautiful metaphors added.

As to the postulated exclusion of consciousness from the functioning brain, I have argued that it reflects the dominance, hitherto, in science, of the kind of knowledge built around perceiving. This kind of knowledge abstracts from cognizing and its conditions. Hence consciousness is ignored and is not deducible from it. But, surely, we have a double knowledge of the brain- mind, an external and a participative one. I have recently been heartened by the fact that Sir Russell Brain finds this double-knowledge approach illuminating as well as the connection of perceiving with sensori-motor patterns.5

But let us probe Peirce's view of perception and its mechanism a little deeper. Professor Goudge indicates to me that Peirce wanted a direct, or immediate, perception of things and events. James agreed with him here. This, as we saw, led to radical empiricism. Now the primordial element in immediate perception is feeling (firstness). When one looks at a rose, the direct sense-quality which appears is a quality of feeling. But immediacy requires continuity. Hence the most acceptable account is to say that there is a "psychic feeling of red without us which arouses a sympathetic feeling of red in our senses." (Peirce, 1.311.) This is like Whitehead's feeling of feeling. There is also a resemblance to Santayana's essences, which are both subjective and objective. Whitehead's gambit involves a transfer of data, a denial that they are generated in the brain, and a reduction of material things to sensory data as transfers through a selective kind of objective immortality.

Great thinkers are very logical. One must see their problems and their assumptions. Now my thinking has led me to challenge this kind of immediate perception. In place of it, I put guided, referential perceiving. The object is not given but designated and characterized. The underlying mechanism is sensori-motor. This expands into what Peirce calls Seconds. Sensations arise in the brain under control and function as guides and, at a higher level, as evidence. Perceiving is not an affair of having "percepts." I would stress not so much continuity as communication of pattern.

But, of course, we are living in a time of greater knowledge of how the brain works. Adrian, Brain, Herrick and otherS6 of the same competence

Sir RuSSELL BRAIN in a letter to me recognizing the importance of the sensori-motor approach. 6 E. D. ADRAIN, The Ph?ysical Background of Perception, Oxford University Press, 1947;

Sir RUSSELL BRAIN, MiIind, Perception and Science, Blackwell, 1951; C. JUDSON HERRICe, The

Evolution of Human Nature, University of Texas Press, 1956. Herrick and I talked over these matters frequently. He was a critical realist. Philosophers will find the little book, The Physical Basis of Mind, Blackwell, 1950, interesting not only as containing good summaries by distinguished neurologists but as having statesments by Ayer and Ryle. Both are opposed to Cartesian dualismr=. Ayer points out that we have two sets of observations correlated. Conceptually, he falls back on the positivistic framework of classifying and interpreting our experienecs. He admits that it may be difficult to translate statements about people's so-called mental processes


assure us that sound and color sensations emerge in the cortex and are connected with paths and differentiated cells. And they are not terminal here but are linked with motor responses. At the human level perceiving becomes an affair of locations and descriptions. All this becomes explicit in language, as Peirce saw. But I have a suspicion that his pragmaticism tended to point to the future just because of the status and role of firsts. This was, certainly, the case with James. And yet Peirce's interest in dispositional properties increased, as Burks has pointed out. For me, all this leads to an ontology of continuants and a reformulation of the correspondence theory of truth. In continuants the stress is on functionally sustained patterns; and there are evolutionary levels.

It is unfortunate that I have not the space to quote in full Professor Wiener's excellent summary. He largely confirms Goudge, Chisholm and Burks.

It is interesting to note that Peirce did not feel the tug in the direction of subjectivism as much as Santayana and James did. I judge this was because of the influence of Kant, logic and science. It will be recalled that he rejected wholesale doubt in the Cartesian manner. Russell and Santayana diverged here. This is where his critical common sense entered. I agree with him here.

While James moved from "immediate perception" to "radical empiricism') by way of Renouvier and M'ach, Santayana sought to escape from subjectivism by way of animal faith. This was his "mortal leap." I, on the other hand, reanalyzed perceiving to give it objective import. Peirce, it would seem, thought to make contact with the objective world through the continuity of First with the psychical reality of the world. This fitted in with the climate of objective idealism. And we must remember that materialism in those days had a poor philosophic press. It was tied in with hard atoms and deductive necessity.

So much for Peirce, a thinker of great stature in the setting of his age. I may mention, in conclusion, that he seemns to have thought of matter as connected with viewing things from the outside and mind as viewing, them from the inside. This is in line with the double-aspect approach hinted at in Stoic materialism and in the Spinozistic tradition. I, myself, developed a double-knowledge outlook connected with emergence and levels.

II

I want now to turn, first to Dewey and then to Russell. I shall say nothing more about Santayana except to remark that I disagreed with his "essence"

into statements about their observable behavior. Now this is just what the neurologists are refusing-and I think rightly-to do. Ryle takes his point of departure from the person as a whole. Quite right. Language so expresses perceiving, thinking, hoping, etc. But this kind of monism, which rejects two substances and two theatres, has still to do justice to such factors as sensations, images and concepts. I suspect that Ryle is beginning to have second thoughts. Just to eliminate them was too easy; it was what I call "sweeping them under the carpet." One must sharpen one's epistemology and enlarge one's ontology; or what is philosophy of science for ?


apparatus and that I thought his "materialism" was largely of the vintage of Democritus. Nevertheless, he was a great artist and a challenger of popular dogmas. One of his undeniable achievements was his conversion of Russell from a Platonic theory of values. But value theory is now in a process of clarification with the stress on criteria, grading and objective appraisal. I mention this because evolutionary materialism must do justice to man as a moral agent and to the use of the practical reason in morals. The context here is that of the social sciences.

The differences between Dewey and Russell are very illuminating. While both were naturalistic in their outlook, neither could quite accept any form of ontological materialism. Professor Savery's challenge to Dewey in the "Living Philosophers" series is excellent on this point. I shall try to show that Dewey was never clear in his epistemology and his ontology. As I have indicated, I think that this had a blurring effect on the perspective of his followers. Yet it was counterbalanced by his liberalism and his endorsement of scientific method. The impact of Russell was of a different order. On the whole, he sought to integrate mathematical logic with Humeanism. I shall use his Introduction to Lange's History of Materialism as a point of departure. He falls back on his neutral monism and his "under-the-hat" account of perception. As I see it, his neutral monism is tied up with James's radical empiricism and "immediate perception." For me, perceiving, though involving brain-mechanisms, has objective import because developed on a sensori- motor foundation.

In the absence of a definitive analysis of Dewey's philosophy, I shall offer my aperfu. This goes back to my acquaintance with the "Chicago School."7 The point of departure here was the substitution of experimental logic with its stress on problems, data and ideata for Lotzian and Hegelian logic. It was a question of how we think with as little intrusion as possible of introspective psychology and epistemology. One must remember that the problem of the "external world", so pressing for Lockian and British empiricist, hardly existed for the objective idealist. Dewey refers with approval to the attitude of his teacher, G. S. Morris, on this point. It was all a matter of experience.

Dewey came into contact with the new epistemological ferment when he

7 I began my acquaintance with the "Chicago School" with the famous Decennial Publication in 1903. The formula for a logic of inquiry was there worked out. There was no clear epistemology. Dewey met this problem later after he went to Columbia. I, myself, went to the summer school at Chicago in 1906. I had talks with graduate students and read some of Dewey's lecture notes that were still passing around. I had a class in functional psychology with Angell. Later I met A.W. Moore whom I still regard as one of the keenest minds of the school. His famous remark to the effect that the "situation" is the pragmatist's absolute reflects the shift from Bradley and Royce. I had only formal acquaintance with Mead and Tufts. The former I associated with social psychology somewhat like Cooley's at Michigan under whom I took a minor for my Ph. D. in 1909. Tufts I thought of as primarily an ethicist. The spirit of the whole movement was naturalistic and in line with science. I have no doubt that this perspective affected me. My dissatisfaction concerned itself with epistemology, the mind-body problem, and the ontology of evolution.


went to Columbia and came into close association with Woodbridge and Montague. Now the "new realism" with its searchlight view of cognition and its ubiquitous, external cognitive relation did not appeal to him-nor to me either, as a matter of fact-nor did the essence wing of critical realism. I could understand all that. I was, myself, working in the direction of a referential view of perceiving which located sensations in the brain as guiding factors in response. The idea was to give perceiving objective import as developed around response in the way of location and conceptual characterization. This is the human level of perceiving and feeds into testing and judgment. Veridical perceiving is this kind of achievement and involves mechanisms supporting correspondence or reproduction of pattern. The sense-organs and their cerebral termini have the function of furthering this requirement, essential to adjustment and to cognition. The Lockian approach was pre-biological.

Now, so far as I know, Dewey did not explore this referential view of perceiving. I could never see that he had a clear, realistic view of perceiving. He took it as a natural event in the context of experiential behaviorism and concerned himself with the job of ideas as plans of action looking to the future. Here he worked out schematisms which had pragmatic point. My primary objection was that it turned its back on cognitive claims and their endorsement. To me, at least, the status of the physical world remained ambiguous in his outlook, something which was very apparent when it came to the question of the status of atoms, electrons and so-called "scientific objects."

It has long been my thesis that science and philosophy, working together, must clarify perceiving and, with it, the mind-brain problem, while facing up to all the factors. Dewey, on the other hand, wanted to do away with "gratuitous dualisms" such as the objective and the subjective, the real and the apparent, the mental and the physical, scientific physical objects and objects of perception, things of experience and things-in-themselves.

This was an admirable project but merely frowning on "gratuitous dualisms" would not be enough. He saw that Russell's thought was enmeshed in them. And Russell seems to have been a bit envious of Dewey's mode of escape from the subjectivism which haunted British empiricism. Dewey firmly proclaimed that the proper gambit was to take "experiential situations" with the biological-anthropological method of approach to "experience." This provides the way out of "mentalistic" into behaviorial interpretations of experiencing.

What a blessed relief "behaviorism" has been to puzzled philosophers as well as to puzzled psychologists! One just sweeps consciousness, sensations and images under the carpet. Recently, Ryle at Oxford developed a form of linguistic behaviorism with much the same intent as Dewey's. But it has turned out that the neurologists are tougher-minded. They see no reason to deny sensations and images. The problem is to locate them, categorize them and see how they function. I am persuaded that an adequate analysis of perceiving and of imaging-that is, the cognitive use of images-might well introduce


order and bring introspective psychology into harmony with objective psychology.

I think we can now understand why Dewey turned his back on epistemology and put cognition in the framework of solving problems and developing instrumental ideas. It was a shift of framework. We ordinarily think of cognitive claims as directed at things with determinate natures. True is a verdict in favor of such a claim. But, because it had not handled the problem of perceiving in a direct, referential way, philosophy had gotten itself into a turmoil of perceiving unperceived things (Locke), construction (Kant), coherence (Hegel and objective idealists) and pragmatism (Peirce, James and Dewey). I have been suggesting a way out of this chaos.

After he got his "experiential situations" in a behavioral setting, what did Dewey do next? He made much of the contrast between pre-cognitional and cognitional modes. I think we must recognize with Peirce that perceiving is ordinarily veridical and rather automatic. For Dewey, the cognition mode is intermediate between "an earlier, less organized, more confused and fragmentary sort of experienced sublect-matter and one more ordered, clearer, freer, richer and under better control as to its occurrence."8 Cognition is thus tied in with the mode of inquiry and its logic and we are in the climate of ideas as instruments for the reorganization of experience. Now I do not think that the final phase of his thought with its emphasis upon transactions broke with this perspective. Dewey was, in intention, a naturalist and a realist of sorts. But ideas seem to me more than instruments. They operate in knowledge-claims about our world. I have nothing against reflective thinking. I try to do some myself. But I am convinced that to remove it from the framework of common sense and science does harm. Categories are deflected. It is this chair which I bought several years ago which I now regard myself as perceiving. It is the same material thing which chemists regard as composed of cellulose and physicists of atoms and molecules. All this is side-stepped by Dewey because he was unable to solve the mechanism of perceiving and give it objective import. The alternatives he saw were the new realism, Santayana's essences, Russell's Humianism, Locke's perception of unperceived things. Was logical positivism with its disregard of epistemology and ontology much of an improvement ? Stipulations are made and threshed out. There are technical advances but basic reorientation comes slowly. I have been arguing for direct, referential realism and for an evolutionary ontology.

Dewey, I take it, was nearer to Peirce than to James. Yet I do not think he had as incisive a mind. Both were opposed to the James-Bergson resort to vitalism and irrationalism. I have referred to Dewey's dislike of dualities. This found expression in terms like "passive spectator" and the "mirror view" of knowing. As I see it, these were almost rationalizations of his inability to achieve a view of knowing as an achievement concerned with things. I may remark parenthetically that Continental existentialism, with its

8All of these quotations are from his "Reply...." in the Schlipp volume.


linkage with Kierkegaard's subjective notion of truth and its tendency to retain the old slogan of no object without a subject, exemplifies, in my opinion, another philosophical wasteland. I have more sympathy with Neo-Thomism and dialectical materialism than with this kind of jargon. There is too much self-pity and romantic vagueness about it. I am all for analysis if it has a comprehensive structure.

Let us now turn to Russell. I have found him more interesting than G. E. Moore because of his close contact with science. As Dewey saw it, Russell was operating within a logic of inquiry without realizing it. Consequently, he took sensations as terminal in the old empirical way and wanted a correspondence theory of truth. Now I have argued that the pragmatic perspective arose from lack of exploration of perceiving as a directed operation concerned with the things around us. In this way we undercut Locke's gambit of perceiving ideas. Not having a biological context, Locke got himself into the dilemma of trying to perceive the unperceived. The empiricist and the idealist shifts to "immediate perception" was the consequence. They did not see that reference could be direct while the object is not "given" in the way sensations are. Even sense-perception is an affair of guided designation and of characterizing in terms of concepts founded on sensory factors. Not grasping this alternative, James developed his radical empiricism, Dewey his futuristic emphasis on ideas as instruments, and the logical positivists their attempt to translate statements about things into statements about actual and possible sensations. There is no lack of persistent effort on the part of philosophers to follow out leads to the bitter end. What is usually needed is a drastically new lead.

Now I do not believe that Russell caught sight of this new lead which I call referential and connect up with the sensori-motor action-pattern as a foundation. His great contributions were logical rather than epistemological. I think we all have great admiration for technical developments in logic from Peirce to the present. Perhaps Russell and the logical positivists hoped too much from this powerful instrument and paid too little attention to epistemology. I can understand the temptation it exerted on mathematicians.

While, then, Dewey dropped the term truth with its implications of correspondence and stressed warranted assertibility and the future, Russell kept the old term and stuck to the notion that correspondence was somehow involved. I recall in this connection the dispute Pratt and I had with C. I. Lewis. One always came up against the stone wall of the assumption that the only alternative to "If-then" prediction was an untestable copying. Lewis was firm with Pratt and myself for he was persuaded that we were of the Lockian family. Instead, we were trying to open up a new way. The point is so important for both epistemology and ontology that I shall go into it again.

In my book, The Philosophy of Physical Realism (1932), I put it this way: Correspondence is an implication and not a test. A referential knowledge-claim directed at things and events is primary; and the adjective, true, signifies an endorseement, or verdict, in favor of the claim. It means that the statement

2


involved is a cognitive achievement. We are then led, as philosophers, to reflect on its conditions and mechanisms, sensory and conceptual or logical. How is the implied correspondence achieved.? Our attention is, thereupon, directed to the role of the sense-organs as taking up and communicating patterns to guide the organism. From their role as guiding we pass to their use as evidence for checking the conceptual patterns developed in the activity of perceiving and carried to higher levels with techniques like those of measurement. I think that we can thus understand how the correspondence implied by cognition is achieved. The very mechanism of guided perceiving inaugurates it and logical thought takes up the process and makes of it an interplay of applicable concepts and sensory evidence. Human knowing is an achievement with this foundation.

It is clear that this is not Lockian. And, as I see it, it undercuts traditional disputes resting on a bad epistemology. It can do justice to what is significant in pragmatism and in the coherence view. And it connects up with biology and neurology and, as we shall see, with a monistic solution of the mind-body problem. Perceiving, knowing and correspondence are achievements resting on guided response. This way of looking at things is both post-Lockian and post-Kantian.

But, to come back to Russell, he got "percepts" into the brain by the causal approach he still emphasizes, but he saw no way to get out except by the use of postulates and a firm faith in physics. Making sensations terminal in the Humean fashion, he sought either to infer or to construct material things. I cannot see that the logical positivists had any new clue in this field. To connect perceiving with the working of the sensori-motor unit did not occur to them, any more than it did to Dewey and Lewis. Of course, Dewey emphasized behavioral response but he did not connect it up with perceiving, partly, I take it, because he had turned his back on the subjective and traditional dualities.

III

I am about finished with the traditional epistemological prong used against materialism. It has been an effective one, often used in a Blitzkrieg fashion. The claim was that material things simply do not exist apart from relation to mind and knowing. The object is tied with the subject. German existentialism retreats into human existence and the realm of the subjective. Even a critical writer, like F. H. Heinemann, speaks of American materialistic humanism.

Even after we have overcome the epistemological defense we must still meet the ontological. Is nature the dead-level, mechanical, deductively predetermined affair classical physics assumed? Do we not participate in the working of our bodies at the brain-mind level? Do we not solve problems and adjust ourselves to situations ? Are we not creatively working going-concerns, making choices and engaging ourselves? I think that we are; and I shall try,


in the next section, to explain the emergence of reason and the status of man as a moral agent, able to set up rules and to direct his life in accordance with them. Kant left this to the noumenal world. All this is, of course, a large order; but it accents the evolutionary, non-reductive character of the new materialism. One must give oneself a good semantic shake.

And it is well to remember that this question represents one of the oldest struggles in basic philosophy, called by Plato the war between the Giants and the Gods. Plato used all the weapons in his armory against naturalism and materialism, epistemological, ontological, moral and political. Aristotle tried to mitigate the struggle and turned, as a biologist, in the direction of Ionian naturalism, but he never embraced evolution and rejected atomic materialism in his physics. Epicureanism and Stoicism turned in the direction of materialism, Stoicism rather ambiguously. But empirical knowledge was not adequate. The rise of modern science weakened Aristotelian cosmology; but science, itself, had to push from one set of assumptions to others. We saw Peirce attacking those of his day. It is evident that the issues are coming to a head in our own day with improved equipment, experimental and linguistic.

Russell remarks that behaviorism in psychology has materialistic implications so that the science counted, hitherto, as the chief barrier to materialism has shifted its base. A better understanding of introspection as involving linguistic techniques is developing. And the recent, rapid advance of neurology has had its effect. Is it so certain that "mental states" are not also brain states ? Do we not have here double knowledge, participative and referential ?

Russell's chief line of defense against ontological materialism pivots on his "'neutral monism." But I have already argued that this position goes back to the tradition of the Hume-James notion of ""immediate perception", in some measure found also in Peirce. The sensory field, however modified by relations and judgment, is terminal. One does not perceive through the visual field. One perceives the visual field. With this gambit the move was to make this terminal and neutral. Any Kantian Bewustsein or consciousness-in-general could simply be dropped. ""Neutral" was the magic term, suggested by Sheffer. As I see it, ""immediate perception", the presentationalism of the new realists with their searchlight notion of cognition, Russell's neutral monism, are all of the same vintage. It was a dead-end for traditional British empiricism. Logical positivism started with phenomenalism and tried to lift itself by the bootstraps of logic. But it seems to be shifting to a sort of realistic empiricism. As I see it, this signifies that empirical statements may be about material things as well as about sensations. This would ease us into ontology -or, if you will, metaphysics-in an empirical way. Was not physics-and the other sciences-always concerned with the material world. When one escapes from phenomenalism one gets rid of emotive terrors. But when I read existentialist literature I can appreciate the phobias of the positivists. Heidegger seems bent, with his "rewording of all words", on caricaturing English linguistic philosophy. We pass into unnatural language.


IV

What I shall seek to do in this section is to sketch how mentation is being naturalized in terms of a double knowledge of the action-patterns of the brain. We pass from Gestalt isomorphism to an enriched insight into patterned activities. One type of knowledge about this is built around referential perceiving; and is behavioristic and neurological. The other is participative and introspective with language developed in this context.

As I see it, mentation and cerebration are inseparable and involve the same action-patterns. It is largely a question of tidying up our way of thinking about them. On the one hand, there was the soul-body dualism; on the other, the mind-consciousness-matter contrast. Since these oppositions were mixed up with strong, religious motivation, it is not surprising that the human mind was puzzled. Moreover, modern science had started with the inorganic world and developed a schematism of fixed laws and initial conditions. It was only gradually that it advanced into a study of living things and their economy. We saw how Peirce challenged deductive necessity. The new physics is recognizing time and a measure of indeterminacy. I have argued for levels of causality culminating in problem-solving and choice at the human level. This in no way savors of vitalism but of an enlargement of the texture of efficient causality. Neural mechanisms are involved in which the brain acts as a whole in a self-directive way. And, as conscious creatures, we are on the inside and participants. This is the level of agential causality with its adoption of rules and consideration of consequences. It would be foolish to under- estimate the human brain as a going concern.

One methodological weakness of both science and philosophy has been that of building up a conception of the brain in terms of external knowledge alone and, after recognizing that this conception does not imply consciousness, sensations and images, holding that these are alien to the brain. But the epistemological weakness of such a rejection should now be evident. It can be countered by our participative knowledge, as when we are aware that our feelings and sensations guide perceiving. The need is to clarify our double knowledge and to work out categories in terms of it. I take it that, in the present debate between behaviorism and introspective psychology, such an enlargement of categories, based on a more adequate epistemology, is in the making.

The ancient worldresorted to fire-atoms, lively and mobile. This was the best it could do to counter psyches and souls. There was a touch of emergence in Lucretius.

In the nineteenth century, a would-be materialist, such as Buichner, thought of the brain as a concourse of atoms of the billiard-ball type. The schematisms of our day were not available, such as action-patterns, dispositions, recordings, scannings. Thinking was largely a term for having sensations and images. These were the "mental" par excellence. And it was not realized that the alienness of these factors to the brain was largely a consequence of the fact


that the brain was thought in terms of the kind of knowledge built up around the referential emphasis in perceiving. That is, we are concerned with external things in perceiving. And this kind of knowledge about them does not imply consciousness. Why should it? Here we have Leibniz's "mill" and the common notion that if consciousness were "in" the functioning brain the neurologist ought to be able to see it. If my epistemological analysis is correct, all this is a mistake which still bothers behaviorist and introspectionist. While sensations and images guide perceiving, they are not the terminus of it-as in the old tradition of British empiricism-for we are concerned to characterize the things we are responding to. But if, in perceiving, we are participating in the brain's activity, all we need to do is to recognize this second kind of knowledge and categorize accordingly. Here we are on the inside of a high level of physical activity. In this enlarged sense, consciousness is physical. There is no need for dualism. Place of Oxford and J. J. C. Smart of Adelaide, and Feigl and Wilfrid Sellars have drawn this monistic conclusion.9 It, of course, needs careful thinking through in terms of epistemology and ontology. We are moving between traditional materialism and panpsychism. Even Biichner fell back on Spinozism or the double-aspect view. It should be noted that I call mine the double-knowledge approach.

Paulsen, the philosopher, made merry with Biichner and had his neat and simple solution, that of psychical monism or panpsychism.10 All one needed to do was to declare that the material world is phenomenal, that there is no object without a subject, etc.

Now that is the epistemological prong which I have attacked. I have defended a direct referential realism which maintains that, in perceiving, we are concerned with the things we are adjusting to. And I long ago maintained that mental activity, which is, likewise, cerebral activity, is spatial. Thus I challenged Cartesian subjectivism and dualism.11 As I see it now, I think that Peirce was doing the same, but with more sympathy with objective idealism than the men of my generation had. I have given the reasons why I believe that Dewey did not quite face up to these problems. It would be unjust if I did not mention C. A. Strong and Durant Drake. Both were markedly influenced by the essence doctrine of Santayana. Drake was an ontologist who was convinced that we had to begin with a primal sentience

9 U. T. Place, "Is Consciousness a Brain Process?", British Yournal of Psychology, 1956. Smart, "Sensations and Brain Processes," Philosophical Review, April, 1959. Feigl, "The 'Mental' and the 'Physical'," in Vol. 2 of Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Smart refers to this with approval. W. Sellars, "The Concept of Emergence," (with P. E. Meehl); "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" in Vol. I of Minnesota Studies. See also "Aristotelian Philosophies of Mind" in Philosophy for the Future, ed. R. W. Sellars, McGill and Farber.

Just for the record, I call attention to the paper of mine, "Is Consciousness Physical?", Journal of Philosophy, 1922. I was told at the time that I was going too far. It is interesting to have Place and Smart revive the idea.

10 PAULSEN, Introduction to Philosophy, Bk. I, Ch. I, Sec. 4, "Critique of Materialism." "1 Cf Critical Realism, 1916, Ch. IX, "Is Consciousness Alien to the Physical ?" Also, Wood-

bridge Rily, American Philosophy, p. 377 f.


and that emergence was not to be taken too seriously. Toward the end of his life, Strong gave up the doctrine of essences and moved in the direction of concepts. But he was still dominated by the predeterminism of classical physics. I could say a lot about this period but no department of philosophy in any American University seems to be interested in such matters. So it must be left to the mandarins who come after. I have myself been astonished by the lack of knowledge of the present generation of American philosophers of this realistic debate. I suppose it was due, in part, to what was felt to be a stalemate and, in part, to the impact of logical positivism with its stipulations. While the technical equipment of philosophy has improved, there are signs of a return of interest in epistemology and ontology. It is my guess that something of the nature of a three-cornered debate between Neo-Aristotelianism, dialectical materialism and evolutionary materialism is on the cards. In existentialism, German philosophy divorced itself too much from science and flirted with subjectivism and irrationalism.12 This seems to me a cultural occurrence of a transitional sort.

CONCLUSIONS

I have tried to show that the two prongs of the attack of panpsychism on materialism can be met. To meet the epistemological prong a better epistemology is needed. I have argued that the era of to be is to be perceived or to perceive; of no object without a subject and the physical world is a construction, of to infer or to construct is past. I hold that perceiving is direct and referential and, from the first, concerned with the things around us. Not ideas but things are terminal in perceiving. This view undercuts Locke, Hume and Kant. It corresponds to the implications of natural language and its logic. This is not to deny the advantages of technical language.

I have sought to show that Peirce, James, Dewey and Russell were all, in various ways, committed to the doctrine of "immediate perception." That is, to the doctrine that what is perceived is in some sense given. So far as I can see, this doctrine operates in the role of Firstness in Peirce, in the way of continuity for the secondary qualities. Now I take colors and sounds to be generated in the brain as aids to discriminative response. Relevance does not seem to me to involve identity or continuity. It is in this fashion that referential realism breaks with immediate perception.

I have tried to show how Dewey kicked against the pricks on many points, turned his back on epistemology and stressed problem-solving and instrumentalism. There was much that was sane in his thinking and in his allegiance. But it lacked the additional soundness that a referential analysis of perceiving and a more penetrating analysis of the brain-mind problem would have given it. On these basic matters it tended to be vague. Neither

12 See Marvin Farber's new book, Naturalism and Subjectivism, Thomas.


science nor philosophy could remain in this state. And, of course, science is marching ahead in these matters. One has only to read Symposia on "Speech and the Brain"13 to know what is in the wind.

A summarizing word about truth is in order. As I see it, ""true," as an adjective applied to a statement, is an endorsement of it as a case of knowledge. It nmust then fit in with other statements and may be expected to add to our insight into our world and combine with others to give us that growing comprehension of the world we live in. Quite rightly, it is used to direct our actions and technical know-how. I can see no good reason for the supposed antagonism between knowledge as referential comprehension and ideas as instruments. Since our world is both a temporal and a nomic one, knowledge is directed at prediction and control. Conceptual comprehension, prediction and control-so far as possible-seem to me naturally tied together.

One further word about correspondence. I have argued that it is not a test for perceiving "unperceived things" in a Lockian way. But it does point to the mechanism making possible the achievement of truth. Our sense- organs function under external control and communicate energy-patterns to the cortex which uses them in a discriminative way to guide motor responses and adjustments. It is for this reason that, at the human level, sensory data are used as evidence for the application of concepts to things and events. Perceiving is an achievement but a responsibly conditioned one. I do not think Peirce would have dissented from this dictum. What he was interested in bringing out was that it might take a long time to achieve it. Both Peirce and Dewey were fighting intuitionism. I look upon truth, or knowledge, as an achievement best gained by the use of scientific method. Nevertheless, it is something achieved and not merely an instrument. In Aristotelian terms, it represents adequacy to what is. This adds to the semantic theory of truth which has so much logical vogue without being lost in the regress of the meta...meta, emphasized by Mehlberg.

But ontological materialism still faces the ontological prong. It has to do justice to mind, consciousness, history, levels, and moral agency. That is why adjectives like evolutionary, emergent and non-reductive are added these days. We saw that Peirce identified it with classical physics and deductive necessitarianism. Much water has gone under the bridge since them.

I shall leave it to physicists to discuss what they mean by indeterminacy. Clearly, time is being taken more seriously. Measurement, as an operation, involves both a fore and an after. What happens between ? How is it to be thought? What has happened to the non-temporal, initial state on which deduction was based?

The brain is an adjustmental, problem-solving mechanism. I do not say machine. Here we have a problem in semantics. Mechanism is here a term for

13 Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior, The Hixon Symposium, passim Whatmnough's Language is to the point. Sir Russell Brain makes many interesting observations in his contribution to The Physical Basis of Mind, showing the growth of electrical patterns for words.


operation-performing. Now the cortex forms conceptual patterns in responsible relation to sensory patterns. That is what cognitive intelligence consists in. Much the same holds for valuative intelligence, though it is more personal in import, Here, also, I am an empirical rationalist.

Man is a creature who, as a result of cortical development, can stand back and analyze his mistakes and, often, make improvements if he has a second chance. Language and the differentiated concepts that go with words are intrinsic to this operation-performing mechanism leading up to decision- making. It is interesting to note how science is paralleling such categories. I see no reason not to take pretty literally such terms of our natural languages as trying, purpose, choice. Clearly, they fit in with the task confronting human organisms. As I see it, intelligence evolved because it helped man to survive. The moral I drew was that nature here reached the level of at least semi- rational causality, that is, causality guided and directed by reason. Decisions are not pre-determined in the old cosmic, necessitarian way, as C. D. Broad seems to think. Already, Peirce had challenged this outlook. "Free-will" is a rather ambiguous expression for decision-making. The expression, "I could have chosen otherwise" is a model analytic of the causal economy of choice as a temporal affair opposed to cosmic predetermination. It expresses causal pluralism; for the organism is a going concern of a high causal order. Here we are in the context of agential causality and moral agency.

Thus we end in a non-reductive materialism which accords with the texture and demands of human living. I would contend that the emotional and categorial objections to materialism are, in principle, met. But into the further reaches of the "metaphysics of ethics" I cannot here enter.

MODERATION

"Moderation" ... is Russell's Paradox, Reduced to a single word. For being moderate in moderation, Means one is immoderate in some respect; And if one is completely moderate, One is immoderate in moderation.

RABBI AMOS EDELHEIT Willimantic, Conn.

Pan Psych Ism or Evolutionary Materialism

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