Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences

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Objects of Perception, Objects of Science, and Identity Statements — Pavla Toráčová
enterprise, the so-called “contingent” properties provide
the only available knowledge of the object.
Another question that comes to one’s mind is
whether the scientific term really expresses the essential
properties of the phenomenon—it can still be replaced by
a better, and completely different, description as science
proceeds forward in the analogical way the phenomenal
term was replaced by the scientific one. Isn’t, here, the role
of the essential properties the same as the role of the
phenomenal properties—i.e., to be regarded as the
contingent property? To accept that doesn’t necessarily
bring any unsound relativity about the scientific truth—we
can maintain that real natural phenomena posses certain
essential properties, which after all makes one of our
descriptions to be more adequate or true then the other,
and at the same time to admit that none of our descriptions
of the phenomena is perfectly adequate and absolutely
true.
Strawson: objects of perception and
objects of science
Now I would like to turn attention to ideas of P. F. Strawson,
who provides an explanation of the identification of
objects as scientists describe them with the objects as we
know them by sense perception in his article “Perception
and Its Objects” (Strawson 2002). Sense perception is, in
Strawson’s view, the way we initially or pretheoretically
identify objects in the world—as having phenomenal qualities
presented to us by our senses. Later on, when we
achieve scientific descriptions of the objects in the world,
we replace the phenomenal properties with the scientific
ones. The traditional account of this changeover (i.e., the
representative theory of perception) considers the phenomenal
properties to be merely subjective sensations
caused in us by the real objects that science truly describes.
According to this traditional account, science
teaches us that the objects in fact don’t have the phenomenal
qualities, that they, in fact, are not of the pale
green color as we see them and of the rough surface as
we touch them and of the sweet scent as we smell them
and of the warm quality as we feel them. It’s true that in
our sense perception we perceive the objects as being
green and fragrant and soft and tasty, but we are, as it
were, the victims of a persistent illusion—these qualities
don’t belong to the objects themselves but to our experiences;
they are nothing but our sensations (or sense data)
which are caused by the real objects. They can be said to
represent the outer objects, but the outer objects don’t
posses them as such, they just cause them in us.
In his article, Strawson argues against this
representative approach and proposes an alternative
picture of what’s going on when we perceive objects and
when we come to know the very same objects in a
scientific investigation. First, he points out that the
representative account is unconvincing. We live in a world
of objects that are phenomenally propertied, where the
properties belong to the objects, and not to my
experiences. The book remains green even when I put it in
my bag, the heat stays in the room even when I leave it.
This phenomenal world is the public world, accessible to
observation by others. Strawson writes:
“Consider the character of those ordinary concepts
of objects on the employment of which our lives, our
transactions with each other and the world, depend:
our concepts of cabbages, roads, tweed coats,
horses, the lips and heir of the beloved. In using
these terms we certainly intend to be talking of in-
dependent existences and we certainly intend to be
talking of immediately perceptible things, bearers of
phenomenal (visuo-tactile) properties. /.../ Surely we
mean by a cabbage a kind of thing of which most of
the specimens we have encountered have a characteristic
range of colours and visual shapes and felt
textures; and not something unobservable, mentally
represented by a complex of sensible experiences
which it causes.” (Strawson 2002, 103–104)
Strawson thereby presents a common-sense realistic view
with which we all pretheoretically live. In this view, phenomenal
qualities belong to the objects and are considered
to be the real properties existing independently of our
experience of them. Its only later, when we are to explain
the identity of the phenomenally propertied object and the
scientific object, that we are willing to accept the illusory
character of the phenomenal world: only then we can have
a reason to say that the scientific description matches the
real object whereas the phenomenal properties are mere
subjective appearances of it, mere contingent effects of
the real object. For if we don’t accept the illusory character
of phenomenal properties, how could we explain the question
of identity?
Strawson doesn’t accept this “illusionary” step and
suggests his own explanation of the identity question: he
uses the relativity of points of view that is present in our
perception and in our ordinary ascription of the
phenomenal properties to things:
“The mountains are red-looking at this distance in
this light; blue-looking at that distance at that light;
and, when we are clambering up them, perhaps neither.
Such-and-such a surface looks pink and
smooth from a distance; mottled and grainy when
closely examined; different again, perhaps, under
the microscope.” (Strawson 2002, 107)
We are used to shifting our point of view and so the different
quality ascriptions are not seen as conflicting. Strawson
suggests seeing the scientific descriptions as one of
those shifts of point of view, though a more radical one.
Scientists then can be seen as carrying out the original
pursuit but by different means.
The pragmatic approach to identity
statements
We can understand Strawson’s view as the view that, in
using phenomenal terms, we ordinarily mean objects as
essentially phenomenally propertied, because we mean
them as existing independently of us and our perception.
In perceiving the object, we make the distinction between
the object existing independently of us and our perceiving
of it, for example between the seen object and our seeing
it; this distinction is, according to Strawson, essentially
embedded in our sense perception.
According to Kripke, however, terms that express
phenomenal qualities designate objects that posses the
phenomenal properties only contingently, as the effects in
sensitive beings like us. The essential properties of the
objects are, in Kripke’s view, expressed only by the
scientific descriptions.
The views of both philosophers are quite convincing,
but, at the same time, both could also be challenged.
Strawson’s view can be challenged from the scientific point
of view: We have scientifically discovered that the
phenomenal properties are not the properties of the real
objects, but they are the properties that the real objects