ABSTRACT
I do not propose to state any views about philosophy in general, or even about the theory of knowledge in general. I shall confine myself to the particular department of the theory of knowledge which happens to interest me most, the epistemology of perception. A student of this subject cannot fail to be impressed by one feature of contemporary British philosophy. There is a widespread tendency to return to common sense. Nearly two hundred years ago, the common-sense philosopher Thomas Reid protested against the ‘way of ideas’. In our own time, the terminology of sense-data has fallen into disrepute, and so have the more or less phenomenalistic theories, or analytical procedures, which were often associated with it. Some of this disrepute, I think, is due to misunderstandings of what the sensedatum philosophers were trying to say, as Reid perhaps also misunderstood what his predecessors were trying to say. The sense-datum philosophers might seem less paradoxical if more attention were paid to their remarks about visual depth, for example. Nevertheless, we should all like to hold a commonsense theory of perception if we could; and when distinguished thinkers assure us that we can hold such a theory, and even that we must, it is time to think again about the foundations of our subject.
