Problems of science and philosophy : the papers read at the joint session of the Aristotelian Society, the British Psychological Society, and the Mind Association, held at Bedford college, London, July 11th-14th, 1919.

Date:
1919
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Problems of science and philosophy : the papers read at the joint session of the Aristotelian Society, the British Psychological Society, and the Mind Association, held at Bedford college, London, July 11th-14th, 1919. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    my observation, that it has only such and such a degree of differentiation I run a risk of error. But no judgment of this kind is, I think, to be counted as a judgment of pure acquaint- ance, for the following reason. All such judgments contain an element of negation, based on observation. But no negative judgment can be based on observation in precisely the same sense as that in which some affirmative judgments are based upon observation. Compare, eg., the two judgments: (a) This patch which I see is red, and (0) This patch which I see is not green. oth are based on my observation of the patch. But they cannot be based on it in the same way, for it seems pretty certain that I cannot observe non-greenness in the same sense in which I can observe redness. I suspect that judgments of the second kind are founded indirectly on acquaintance by means of judgments of the first kind which are founded directly on it. Thus I judge that this patch is not green because (a) I observe that it is red, and (>) I know that redness and greenness are spatiotemporally incompatible. A genuinely negative element may be concealed under an affirmative form of words. Thus: This is uniformly red really means: There are no differences of shade in different parts of this, I think it is of the essence of judgments of pure acquaintance not to contain such negative elements, and the fact that such elements are often concealed by language causes some judgments to appear to be judgments of pure acquaintance when they are really not so. I do not, however, see any reason to suppose that even judgments of pure acquaintance are theoretically infallible. We must distinguish two notions which are often confused :— infallibility and incorrigibility. Judgments of pure acquaint- ance are perhaps incorrigible; but this does not prove that they are infallible. All judgments involve universals among their terms, whether they be about sense-data with which we are acquainted or about anything else. And it seems always possible to be mistaken in thinking that such and such a term
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