ABSTRACT
John Austin ended his book Sense and Sensibilia with this sentence, “The right policy…is to dismantle the whole doctrine before it gets off the ground” (1964). Now, one might say that the doctrine in questionsense-datum theory of one sort or another-begins with the beginnings of modern philosophy, i.e. with Descartes. In one sense, that is surely correct-those who developed the doctrine were in the grip of a picture that they inherited from Descartes, the picture that our knowledge must have an indubitable foundation.1 But one might also say that the train of philosophical thought that Descartes had set in motion, that developed further in England on a Lockean foundation and culminated on the continent in the work of Kant, had, at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the writings of the great Absolute Idealists-Bradley in England and Royce in America-come to a conclusion. If so, then Moore’s “Refutation of Idealism” (1922a) marked a new beginning. Of course, Moore did not single-handedly produce analytic philosophy; Russell, in the preface to Our Knowledge of the External World (1926) gives credit to Frege for producing the first complete example of the use of the “logicalanalytic method” in philosophy, and that book itself played a seminal role in the development of analytic philosophy of perception. On one reading, a fairly straight path leads from that book to Ayer’s phenomenalism (Ayer 1940) and from that to Austin’s refutation of it. But by 1921, in Analysis of Mind Russell had become convinced by the “radical empiricism” of William James (1976) and rejected Moore’s account of perception. Of course, Russell retained the construction of Our Knowledge of the External World in its new edition of 1926, but I shall maintain that this construction, given these new elements, cannot be seen as a precursor of phenomenalism. My purpose, then, is twofold. It is to deal with certain major figures in the history of analytic philosophy of perception as historical figures, and it is to argue that while the aim of providing a foundation for empirical knowledge is a chimera, the
aim of explaining how it is that we live in a knowable world is in principle achievable.
