ABSTRACT
In favour of the latter there is the strong intuitive plausibility of a distinction between what we actually do or can perceive with the senses and what we may say that we perceive, but do not literally perceive. We can readily accept Descartes' point that we may say that we see people from a window, when all we really see are their hats and coats. The antique-dealer who claims to see and feel that a chair is genuine Chippendale really sees or feels no more than its shape, the crispness of its carving, its patina, the structure of its joints and so forth. It seems beyond dispute that the attribute of having been made in a certain workshop more than two hundred years ago could not possibly be, in literal truth, an object of sight or touch. Yet in other cases such simple appeals to common sense may falter. A ball or a coin is an object made or employed for a specific purpose, a goat, as a member of a natural species, has a familial relationship to other goats, a child is a human being below a certain age; and yet it is plausible that we can literally see that an object before us is a ball, a coin, a goat or a child.
