ABSTRACT
Professor Hampshire recognizes a contrast between ‘a noncommittal description of something perceived on a particular occasion’ and ‘an identification of it as a thing of a certain kind’.2 He calls it a necessary contrast. The non-committal descriptions are not thought of as merely whimsically non-committal. They are non-committal because the speaker cannot, for the moment, commit himself further with confidence. He wonders, but neither knows nor thinks he knows, just what it is that he is perceiving. The ‘identifications’, on the other hand, represent answers to his wonderings, or askings, about what it is that he is perceiving, what the phenomenon is of which he can for the time being give only a noncommittal description. Hampshire mentions various features of non-committal descriptions in respect of which they are generally contrasted with identifications. Such descriptions ‘must not imply that the thing referred to is a thing of a specific kind’; they carry no implications about the origin, causal properties, history, possible uses or criteria of identity of the thing referred to; they do not represent it as ‘standing in specifiable relations to things of other
specific kinds in the external world’; they are descriptions available to one for whom the object is ‘so far wholly unidentified’; they are ‘purely aesthetic’ descriptions.
