Moore's concept “indirect apprehension”

Moore’s concept “indirect apprehension’’

by

HELGE MALMGREN (University of Gothenburg)

1. Introduction

I n his lectures 191+11, published in 1953 under the title Some main problems of philosophy (in the following abbreviated as SMP),1 Moore presented a theory, or perhaps two theories, about cognitive relations, i.e., relations like those denoted by expressions such as “He is thinking of her”, “I see a house”, “YOU remember your 5th birthday ”. In these lectures, he distinguishes between two fundamentally different types of cognitive relations, or-to use another terminology-two fundamentally different ways of apprehending objects. In Chapter I11 of SMP (“Propositions”) these are called ”direct apprehension” and “indirect apprehension”, respectively. Moore’s own terminology will be used in the

“Direct apprehension” is a relation in which we stand to sense- data when we do not just remember them, think of them or speak of them, but “actually” see them, hear them or the like.

. . . I shall speak of the direct apprehension of sense-data. Thus when I see this whitish colour, I am directly apprehending this whitish colour; my seeing of it, as a mental act, an act of consciousness, just consists in my direct apprehension of it;-so too when I hear a sound, I directly apprehend the sound; when I feel a tooth-ache I directly apprehend the ache: and all these things-the whitish colour, the sound and the ache are sense-data. (SMP, p. 32.)

following.

This work was part of the author’s doctoral dissertation which was submitted to the University of Gothenburg in May, 1971.

G. E. Moore, Some main problems of philosophy (London: Georg Allen & Unwin; New York: Macmillan Co., 1953). 13 -Theorip 3 1971

186 HELGE MALMGREN

The “theory” that there are sense-data, and that our way of apprehending them is in some sense or other “direct”, was near being a generally accepted doctrine within British analytical philosophy. I t remained so at least until the 1940’s. Few philosophers in this tradition have assumed the existence of a way of apprehending objects, radically different from that sort of apprehension which occurs when we “see” or “hear” sense-data or similar entities: after-images, memory-images, and so on.

This is surprising with regard to the fact that it seems self-evident that when we remember an object of experience-a colour, for example-or when we expect to experience something- a loud noise, for example-we do not stand in the same relation to the object as we did when we saw the colour, or will do when, later on, we hear the noise. The following is evidently true:

We are constantly talking and thinking about things, which we are not directly apprehending at the moment when we talk or think about them: indeed by far the greater part of our conversation and our reading is obviously about things which we are not directly apprehending when we converse or read about them: it is comparatively rarely that our conversation is confined exclusively to things which we are directly apprehending at the moment. (SMP, p. 69.)

The distinction that we are talking about can roughly be hinted at by the word-pair “sensation”-“thought”. To be sure, there is a great difference between thinking of the sunrise and seeing the sun rise, as there is a great difference between thinking of water when one is thirsty and feeling the water in one’s mouth. Charac- teristic of “thought”, as opposed to “sensation”, is that the object of thought need not exist (except of course in the loose sense of “exist ‘as’ an object of thought”). On the other hand, it is not reasonable to deny the existence of an object which we are “sensing ”; the taste of water or the red disc that we directly apprehend when we drink and look at the sun, respectively-in the evident sense of “existence” in which these objects need not exist when we are only thinking of them. It would be a remarkable

MOORE’S CONCEPT “INDIRECT APPREHENSION” 187

thing if the majority of “analytical” philosophers had not grasped these obvious facts; and if you study the debate a little more thoroughly, you will see that they have indeed grasped them.

In fact, Russell, Ayer and the others have not overlooked the difference between “sensation” and “thought ”, or between “direct apprehension ” and “indirect apprehension ’. The controversial issue in British philosophical discussion has been another one: what is this second type of cognitive relations? How ought one to describe a thought, an act of memory, an expectation, an act of understanding? A common view has been that indirect apprehension of an object X consists of direct apprehensions of some object or objects other than X X‘, X”, . . .-a memory of a sense-datum, according t o this view, consists of direct apprehension of “memory-images “ - n o t identical with the sense-datum in question but perhaps similar to it; a thought of an eight-legged elephant consists of direct apprehension of a “picture ” n o t identical with the elephant in question-which in some way or other represents an elephant with this characteristic. (Most of the examples that I choose are about sense-data, for simplicity’s sake. Examples involving elephants and other physical objects cause complications which can divert our attention from the main problem.) It should be noted that this “theory of consciousness” does not presuppose more than one fundamental kind of cognitive relations, namely direct apprehension. It does not maintain, however, that I stand in this kind of cognitive relation to that very same object about which I say that I think of it, hope that it will occur, remember it, etc.-that would be absurd. A fairly typical representative of such a theory of consciousness is Russell (in The analysis of mind).

A quite different type of criticism of the view that there are two fundamentally different kinds of cognitive relations has been brought forward by philosophers inspired by the later Wittgen- stein. With an oversimplification, one can sketch it like this: “talking about” things and “thinking of” things does not at all mean being conscious (except in a very loose sense) either of these things or of any other things. To this sort of criticism belong many theories, from purely behaviouristic analyses of ”meaning ”

188 HELGE MALMGREN

and ”understanding ” to Wittgenstein’s own more sophisticated views. (The objections to using the word “relation’ in the combi- nation “cognitive relations”: relations, in the proper sense of the word, can only relate existing entities, and the objects of thought may not exist-are of still another kind and are not discussed in this essay.)

Moore does not only maintain the thesis which we have pro- posed as self-evident: that we do not directly apprehend the object which we are only thinking of, remembering or longing for. He also argues for the view that thinking etc. can not be described in terms of direct apprehension of any object; i.e., he also argues against the views of Russell and others. He vigorously defends the standpoint, too, that thinking etc.- “indirect apprehension ”- really is an act of consciousness:

So long as I am directly apprehending a proposition about a thing, I am in a sense conscious of that thing- I am thinking of it or about it, even though I am not directly apprehending it, and there is quite as great a difference between this way of being related to it ... and what happens when I am not thinking of it in any sense at all-when it is utterly out of my mind, as between this way of being related to it and that which I have called direct apprehension. (SMP, p. 70.)

2. Moore’s characterization in S M P of indirect apprehension

In the published writings of Moore, the expression “indirect apprehension’ occurs only in the first part of SMP. There the concept is introduced in the following way.

... I want a name for this kind of relation which we have to a thing, when we do directly apprehend a proposition about it, but do not directly apprehend it itself. I propose to call it indirect apprehension. (SMP, p. 69.)

(This quotation will be referred to in the following as (A).)

0 MOORE’S CONCEPT “INDIRECT APPREHENSION” 189

A short digression on the concept of “proposition” is necessary here. In the beginning of his series of lectures, Moore embraced the “theory” that what happens when we understand an utterance is that we apprehend a special kind of entity, the “proposition”.

Certainly, [when you understand a sentence] there occurs, beside the mere hearing of the words, another act of consciousness-an apprehension of their meaning . . . there certady are such things as the two different meanings apprehended. And each of these two meanings is what I call a proposition. (SMP,cp. 59.)

According to Moore (at this time), propositions are apprehended not only when one understands a sentence, but also, for example, always when one believes something: “what is believed is just nothing else than what I meant by a proposition”. (SMP, p. 63.) As the attentive reader has already noticed, Moore is saying that we stand in the relation “direct apprehension ” to propositions, wheq we understand sentences. It ought to be pointed out, therefore, that Moore does not intend this to imply that we Stand in the same relation to propositions as that in which we now and then stand to sense-data. (If that had been his intention, by the way, he would thereby have committed himself to an analysis of “indirect apprehension” similar to that of Russell! On this question, see also SMP, pp. 72-74.)

There are, I think, reasons for supposing that what I call direct apprehension of a proposition really is, in this sense, a very different sort of thing from what I call direct apprehension of a sense-datum: but I cannot tell what the difference is, if there is one . . .. I must therefore, leave undecided the question whether I am using the name direct apprehension in two different senses. . . . it is, I think, much less important to decide [whether there are two kinds of direct apprehension] than to distinguish both of them quite clearly from other kinds of things, which are certainly different from either, but which might also be called ways of apprehending. (SMP, p. 68.)

190 HELGE MALMGREN

The reason why Moore uses the expression "direct apprehension" in this context is, I am sure, mainly that he wants to point out the difference between "directly apprehending a proposition" and what happens when we think of a proposition-the meaning of a sentence, or the content of an act of belief-without apprehending it in the way we do when we understand the sentence or embrace the belief, respectively. We can, for example, think about "the propositions now believed to be true in China" or "the meaning of the sentences which will appear in the next issue of the Peking Review", without knowing what these propositions are. (The former example is Moore's own.)

(A) is not intended to express a necessary condition for the application of the expression "indirect apprehension *:

I only mean that it is the kind of relation, which you do have in this case, without definitely asserting that you never have it in other cases. (SMP, pp. 76 f.)

The reasons fw this reservation are of the following kind. Some- times when one remembers an earlier object of experience, for example, a noise or a pain, it seems as if one thought of that object without simultaneously apprehending any proposition about the noise or the pain. Perhaps imagination provides better examples than memory in this context. (The examples used above are Moore's.) I t seems anything but obvious that when imagining a green lion, we necessarily apprehend a proposition about this green lion.

One more comment about (A) is necessary. It follows from (A) that we cannot simultaneously directly apprehend and indirectly apprehend the same object. This can seem disadvantageous if we think of the intention behind (A); Moore wants to indude what we call "thinking", among other things, in the concept "indirect apprehension". But it seems as if we could think of what we are simultaneously (directly) experiencing. I t even seems as if one could apprehend propositions about what one is simultaneously experiencing; one can think, for example, "This is an extraordinarily awkward tooth-ache *, or, if one is a philosopher, "This sense- datum lies to the left af that", or "This after-image is brighter


than that ”. By means of a simple modification of (A)-we just drop the phrase “but do not directly apprehend it itself “ w e solve this problem. The question remains why Moore chose to restrict his concept in the way he did. A possible alternative is that he made a conventional choice between two possibilities that were equal to him from a theoretical point of view: that he found it more practical to discuss these cases together when we think of objects, believe something about objects, etc., and do not simultaneously directly apprehend the objects in question, apart from the cases when we directly apprehend objects; this choice need not mean that he took any stand on the question whether or not a thought of an eight-legged elephant and a thought of a present tooth-ache have anything in common.

In the later part of SMP, Moore has abandoned the theory that there are propositions, for reasons that we will not discuss here. This has as a consequence that he cannot any longer use the concept “indirect apprehension ” as it was delimited above. He disasses, however, an “act-psychological ” concept which he mostly refers to as “this obscure sort of consciousness”. From the examples which Moore gives, and from the arguments for the existence of this “obscure sort of consciousness”, it is quite clear that the concept is identical with that which he wanted to point out with his description of “indirect apprehension”.

The original sense-datum itself is, therefore, now, in a sense before your mind; else you could not compare it with the image and know that the two are different. But in what sense is it before your mind? You are certainly not now directly Perceiving it; . . . This obscure sort of consciousness is what I said that even those who admit its existence seem unable to give a clear account of. And I confess I can’t give any clear account of it myself. ... It certainly is a thing which constantly does occur-this mere thinking of a thing which we are not directly perceiving; and it is a mental operation which is of the utmost importance. (SMP, p. 246.)

192 HELGE MALMGREN

Moore could no doubt have given a ”clear account ” of the concept without the use of the concept of “proposition”-at least as clear a one as (A). Roughly speaking, for the “theory” that understanding, belief, etc., involve propositions, which then are either true or false, he substitutes (SMP, Chapter XIV, “Beliefs and propositions”) the “theory” that acts of belief etc. are true in themselves in a sense which can not be analyzed in terms of propositions. One could say that now “beliefs” are “about” their objects, instead of “propositions” being “about “ objects. Therefore, you could easily point out the phenomenon of “indirect apprehension” by saying that it is “that sort of cognitive relation which is exampli- fied when we entertain a belief about an object, without simultaneously directly apprehending it ”.

Regardless of whether it represents a true interpretation of Moore, when I analyze his arguments for the existence of “indirect apprehension ” and “this obscure sort of consciousness ”, I will identify the two concepts.

3. On cognitive relations in the philosophy of Moore before 1910

Neither before, nor after SMP, can you find a better or more thoroughgoing analysis of ”indirect apprehension ” by Moore: previously he had repeatedly tried to attack the problem, but the results were evidently unsatisfactory; later on his interest was drawn more and more towards questions which are in a strict sense epistemological-i.e., questions about what we know (and how we know), as opposed to the problem about which “cognitive relations” (including “thinking” etc.) we can have to different kinds of objects. (Cf. the ambiguity of the expression “know” as used by the Cambridge philosophers!)

In “The refutation of idealism” (1903, reprinted 1922 in Philo- sophical studies-hereafter PS),2 Moore maintains, it is true, that

G . E. Moore, Philosophical studies (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.; New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1922).


I consider it to be the main service of the philosophic school, to which modern Idealists belong, that they have insisted on distinguishing ‘sensation’ and ‘thought’ and on emphasising the importance of the latter. Against Sensationalism and Empiricism they have maintained the true view. (“Refutation”, in PS, P. 7.)

A moment later he adds a seemingly innocent remark: “they [sensation and thought] are both ways of experiencing”. (I,oc. cit.) On p. 28 of PS it seems, however, as if he had forgotten the distinction between the two kinds of “experience”. Here follow some quotations which make it understandable that interpreters of Moore, who rely too heavily on the ”Refutation” as a source, can make a “naive realist out of him.

. . . the relation of a sensation to its object is certainly the same as that of any other instance of experience to its object.. . (PS, p. 28.)

... the existence of a table in space is related to my experience of it in precisely the same way as the existence of my own experience is related to my experience of that. Of both we are merely aware: if we are aware that the one exists, we are aware in precisely the same sense that the other exists.. . (PS, p. 29.)

I am as directly aware of the existence of material things in space as of my own sensations.. . (PS, p. 30.)

To be sure, the last two quotations are about “awareness of sensations”; and “sensations” in the “Refutation” are not sense-data but acts directed towards the objects of sensible apprehension; but certainly it must be too radical to place apprehension of material objects on a level with the apprehension of your own acts of consciousness? The first of the three quotations makes it probable that Moore indeed was of the opinion that we apprehend material objects in the same way as we apprehend sense-data.

194 HELGE MALMGREN

Perhaps one could save Moore from the accusation of being a naive realist in the ”Refutation ” by saying that “direct awareness ” ought to be interpreted otherwise than the SMP concept of “direct apprehension”; to be more exact, in such a way that from “I am directly aware of X” it does not follow that X exists. There is certainly a bit of truth in such an interpretation, but the essay as a whole rather points in the opposite direction. (The truth is, of course, that the depth of intention does not permit a definite decision in the question of interpretation.) In my opinion, the statements quoted above belong to those ”downright mistakes ” that Moore later (1922, preface to PS) confesses to have committed in the “Refutation”.

The long essay “The nature and reality of the objects of perception” (190.546, also in PS), which is a fertile text in many respects, shows similar deficiencies. He writes, it is true:

... when we say, as in ordinary talk we should, that the objects we perceive are books, we certainly mean to ascribe to them properties, which, in a sense which we all understand, are not actually seen by us, at the moment when we are merely looking at two books on a shelf two yards off. And all such properties I mean to exclude as not being then observed or directly perceived by us. (PS, p. 68.)

This is a good starting-point for a definition of a corresponding concept of “indirect” perception; then we could say that we “indirectly perceive ” books and other material objects, and pose the quite reasonable question whether the objects of this “indirect perception” exist. The title of the essay suggests precisely such a question. But it turns out that what Moore is discussing is whether “the observed data which I have called sense-contents ... exist ”. (PS, p. 88.) “Sense-contents” is a concept which approxi- matively corresponds to the ”objects of sensation” in “Refuta- tion ”; and if we recall what Moore said in the fore-going quotation about the use of the expression “observe”, it is clear that it does not include material objects. One inevitably asks whether Moore is discussing whether sense-data exist, or what other problem he


is treating. The following quotations cast some light upon this question.

. . . it must be true that.. . some of the other kinds of things which I directly perceive-colours, sounds, smells, e tc . -do really exist ... (PS, p. 90.) What objections are there to [the supposition that colours do exist]? All serious objections to it are, I think, of one type. They all rest upon the assumption that, if a certain kind of thing exists a t a ceqain time in a certain place, certain other kinds of things cannot exist at the same time in the same place. (PS, p. 92.)

That is, Moore’s problem is whether colours and the like exist in the same place as that in which we “believe that they exist ”. That, too, is a reasonable question-one which Moore later often returns to, reformulating it as “Are sense-data parts of the sur- faces of material objects?” But what makes one a little suspicious is that (in the 1905-06 essay) he formidates the question in such a manner that it becomes confusingly similar to quite different questions-e.g., the problem whether the tooth-ache that you pretend to have really exists. That Moore did confuse two different problems, and that the difficulties are not only surface phenomena, will perhaps become clear from the following:

. . . it also appears to me to be certain that the colours which I perceive do exist (some of them) where I perceive them. The more I look at objects round me, the more I am unable to resist the conviction that what I see does exist.. . (PS, p. %.)

The tendency towards naive realism which one can trace here has disappeared in SMP, when Moore has introduced and analyzed the concept of “indirect apprehension‘ and its equivalents.

4. On cognitive relations in some essays after S M P After SMP, the discussions of cognitive relations become rather scarce. In “The status of sense-data” (1913-14, in PS), the reflec-

1 96 HELGE MALMGREN

tions which, from our point of view, are most interesting concern the concept of “direct apprehension”; and we will take a brief look at these.

The question whether we can have experiences which we do not notice is an interesting one, also from a methodological point of view. The problem arises when, for example, we consider the following case: Suppose that an object a t the periphery of my visual field suddenly begins to move; this makes me notice it, although I didn’t do that before. Now, ought one to say that I experienced this object all the time but did not notice it? Or should one rather say that I did not begin to experience it until it began to move? If I’m lying on my back looking a t the heavens on a sunny day, thinking intensely about the great theorem of Fermat, is one then allowed to say that I experience the blue colour of the sky, although I do not think of it? A classical example is the phenomenon that one can hear the clock strike four without thinking of the strokes until one hears the last one. Did I, or did I not, hear the first three strokes?

Moore considers this problem in the above-mentioned essay, and puts forward as his opinion that

in every case where it is quite clear to me that I am directly apprehending a given entity, it seems also clear to me that I am, more or less, attending to it; . . . But whether t o say that I am directly apprehending a given thing and yet am not attending to it, in any degree a t all, is or is not a contradiction in terms, I admit I don’t feel clear. (PS, p. 176.)

At this moment it should be mentioned that, according to Moore, every act of consciousness which is an act of direct apprehension of an object, can itself be the object of another act of direct apprehension. Nothing supports the hypothesis that Moore (in SMP or in “Sense-data”) should have meant anything else than that we directly apprehend our own acts of consciousness in the same sense in which we directly apprehend sense-data-in contra- distinction to the case of direct apprehension of propositions.


He does not want to say, however, that every act of direct apprehension is always itself the object of a like act. When an act of consciousness is not itself apprehended, he describes it as being “in my mind” or simply as ”a mental act of mine” (PS, p. 176). The most interesting part in this context is that he considers the possibility that the verb “experience ” can have two meanings: in one sense, it means “direct apprehension”; in the other sense it denotes the relation in which I stand to all my mental acts just because they are mental acts of mine, regardless of whether they are the objects of other acts of consciousness.

. . . nothing is more certain than that an act of direct apprehension or belief may be in my mind, without being itself directly apprehended by me. . . . When, for instance, we say of a given entity that it is “experienced”, or when the Germans say that it is “erlebt”, it is sometimes meant, I think, merely that it is directly apprehended, but sometimes that it is in my mind, in the sense in which, when I entertain a belief, this act of belief is in my mind. (PS, p. 177.)

If you have accepted that one kind of entities, in this case mental acts, can in some reasonable sense be “experienced” without being objects of any act of consciousness, you could-ose is inclined to think-also accept that other entities which somqtimes are the objects of mental acts-and we choose sense-data as our example -can also be “experienced” when not objects of any act of consciousness. But it seems as if sense-data (or ”sensibles” as they are called in “Sense-data”) have another status in this respect, in Moore’s opinion.

. . . I see no reason whatever for thinking that sensibles ever are experienced by us in any other sense than that of being directly apprehended by us. (PS, p. 177.)

(Of course, “experience” does not here include “indirect apprehension”!) Moore provides us with two not quite uninteresting objections to the well-known argument from the striking clock:

198 HELGE MALMGREN

... people seem inclined to argue that, since we can remember the earlier strokes, we must have experienced them, though we did not directly apprehend them. But here again, the argument does not seem to me at all conclusive. I should say, again, that it is possible that we did directly apprehend them, but only with a very slight degree of attention (if any). And, as an alternative, I should urge that there is no reason why we should not be able to remember a thing, which we never experienced at all. (PS, pp. 178 f.)

Both solutions can appear more probable to many people than the thesis that we “experience” some things that we do not notice. The first alternative solution would explain all the problematic phenomena by saying that in the case when from “suddenly noticing” something we draw the conclusion that we must have seen the colour or heard the sound all the time, without noticing them, that in these cases we actually did notice the colour or the noise from the beginning but forget this fact when that occurs which we (misleadingly!) describe as “the sudden noticing of the sense-datum”. The second proposal for a solution might, for example, explain away the phenomena in question by means of a physiological model of ”short-time memory”: if a human being is exposed to certain (physical) stimuli (say the stimuli corresponding to the sky’s blue) without responding upon them with an experience, this does not prevent him from having an experience a moment later which in important respects resembles a “real” memory of an experience of the blue sky. (Quite another question is whether, if this model is true, the blue colour of the sky as I ”remember” it “really was there” in some sense although I did not experience it.)

Through these two ”theories” one could perhaps explain the difficult phenomenon and avoid the hypothesis that we experience things that we do not notice; I myself want to recommend a proper mixture of the two models. Such an enterprise is, of course, a little hazardous in that one is forced to assume two kinds of systematic malfunction of our memory. The question how to find


criteria of correct memories now becomes crucial. We will not take up this question here. We merely note that Moore feels at liberty to assume the existence of a host of unnoticed mental acts but that he refuses to accept unnoticed “sense-contents”. He believes in these unnoticed mental acts in spite of the fact that, as we shall see later, he is of the opinion that they are difficult to observe even when we try to notice them.

“Indirect apprehension” plays a minor role in “Sense-data ”, but it is described in one place, most for the purpose of the delimitation of the concept “direct apprehension ”. The example Moore chooses is, again, the memory of a sense-datum (see PS, p. 173).

Russell’s concept ”knowledge by description ” evidently has something to do with Moore’s “indirect apprehension”. In ”Sense- data”, Moore himself uses the expression “knowledge by description ”.

It is certain that if, when I know that that half-crown existed before I saw it, I am knowing that something existed at that time in other than a Pickwickian sense, I only know this something by description; and it seems pretty clear that the description by which I know it is as the thing which has a certain connection with this sensible which I am now directly apprehending. (PS, p. 192.)

One must remember, however, that “indirect apprehension ” denotes a cognitive relation which in no way necessarily involves knowledge (in the strict sense of Russell’s ”knowledge of truths” or Moore’s own “knowledge proper ”) about the object. In the last quotation (and everywhere else where he uses the words “knowledge by description ”) Moore means, however, “knowledge ” in this stronger sense. Therefore, “knowledge by description” is not identical with ”indirect apprehension ”, in Moore’s use of the two expressions; but perhaps Moore could have said that every case of “knowledge by description” involves an act of “indirect apprehension ”.

Moore uses Russell’s term with the same meaning in ”Some

200 HELGE MALMGREN

judgements of perception” (1918-19, in PS; see especially p. 234). In this essay, too, one looks in vain for an explicit distinction between the two completely different senses of the expression “know”, hinted at above. J will try to show that Moore, after all, in “Some judgements ” described the phenomenon “knowledge by description” in a way which is very similar to his description (A) of “indirect apprehension ”.

I am not, of course, denying that I do perceive this inkstand, and that my judgement is, in a sense, a judgement about it. Both these things seem to me to be quite obviously true. I am only maintaining that my judgement is also, in another sense, a judgement about this sense-datum which mediates my perception of the inkstand. ... What I wish to maintain ... is that my perception of this inkstand is dependent on this sense-datum . . . in the sense that, if there is anything which is this inkstand, then, in perceiving that thing, I am knowing it only as the thing which stands in a certain relation to this sense-datum. . . . [The inkstand] is not given to me, in the sense in which this sense- datum is given. (PS, pp. 233 f.)

If we omit the words ”if there is anything which is the inkstand, then” then the key words ”perceive”, “mediate” (and with it, ”dependent”), “know” and “given” will get a sense that is not what I have characterized as epistemological in the “strict ” sense- they can be interpreted “phenomenologically ”, so to say.

5. Moore’s attempts to analyze “indirect apprehension” in S M P

If all that ever happened when we saw or perceived or observed material objects were that we directly apprehended certain sense-data which were in fact connected with them . . . we could only get to know of the existence of the sense-data, which we directly apprehended; we should not even suspect the existence of any objects other than these sense-data. (SMP, p. 84.)


These words express rather well what importance Moore allots to the concept “indirect apprehension”. Not only would we not know anything about the external world, if direct apprehension was the only cognitive relation, but we would not even suspect its existence. Even if you do not share Moore’s common-sense premiss that we actually know that the external world exists, you must at least admit that we do suspect that it exists: By the way, our suspicions of an external world is not the only thing that we would have to eliminate from our universe if we did not have “indirect apprehension”; we couldn’t imagine the existence of anything beside the sense-data we happen to apprehend directly at the moment.

The phenomenon, ”indirect apprehension ”, then, is to the Moore of SMP a necessary-but not a sufficient-condition for our knowledge of material objects. You must notice that if Moore’s point of departure as presented above is correct, then that is true independently of the way you prefer to “analyze” material objects; it doesn’t help being a phenomenalist, because “future sense-data ”, “possible sense-data ” and “other people’s sense-data ,, are all things that you do not directly apprehend now. What follows is, then, not dependent on the fact that Moore was not a phenomenalist:

In those cases, therefore, where by seeing or perceiving or observing a material object, we mean a process by which we do get to know of their existence, this process cannot merely consist in directly apprehending certain sense-data: we must, besides doing this, also apprehend indirectly the material objects with which these sense-data are connected. (SMP, p. 84.)

From the next quotation it becomes clear that “indirect apprehension” is not a sufficient condition for knowledge (in the strong sense):

But now, even if, when we directly apprehend a sense- datum, we do also indirectly apprehend something else . . . that only means that we think of something

14-Theoria 3: 1971

202 HELGE MALMGREN

else beside them. [And] even though there really is something else [beside your sense-data], and our belief that there is is therefore correct, it does not follow that ... therefore you really know that there is. (SMP, p. 85.)

What further conditions that must be fulfilled before we can say we really know (according to Moore) that there is a material object when we believe we see one, is a question which belongs to epistemology in the strict sense and will not be regarded here. Instead we are going to discuss whether there is any interesting interpretation which makes the proposition true that “indirect apprehension” is a necessary condition for our knowledge of the external world.

We have already pointed to the trivial and (relatively) undisput- ed fact that we often think of objects that we do not simultaneously directly apprehend; that we have opinions about things that we do not simultaneously directly apprehend, etc. It is hardly disputable that our opinion that a certain material object exists consists in something else than in our direct apprehension of this same object. The controversial point, on which Moore is contradicted by Russell and others, is, as we have seen already, this: can an act of indirect apprehension of an object be analyzed in terms of direct apprehension of other objects? Moore’s state- ment that this is not the case constitutes his most interesting contribution to the debate.

In the chapter “Propositions” (SMP) the following line of thought is brought forward as a criticism of the opinion that “having an idea of“ can consist of an act of direct apprehension of an image-i.e., one version of the Russell-type analysis; it stems from Hume.

In order to have an idea of the something else, I must not onZy apprehend an image, which is in fact like the something else: I must also either know or think that the image is like the something else. In other words, I must apprehend some proposition about the relation of the image to the object.. .. (SMP, p. 66.)


The objection that a philosopher in the Hume-Russell tradition would like to raise, however, would be this: Couldn’t it be that my “thought” that “the image is like the something else” consists of my direct apprehension of other sense-data or “images”-not identical either with the image or with the sense-datum that I think of? It is clear that Moore’s argument hasn’t proved this last hypothesis to be false.

This objection can be formulated more strictly, as follows. Suppose that we are dealing with a memory, which, among other things, consists of the fact that I believe in the proposition that the memory-image X‘ is similar to what I remember, X. This “belief” could consist of my directly apprehending a number of Images”: X”, X”’ . . ., which are not identical with either X or X’.

From this it would follow that my indirect apprehension of X in this case would consist not of a direct apprehension of X‘, but of this together with the direct apprehension of a number of other entities.

Exactly the same type of objection can be raised concerning every argument that Moore gives against different types of Hume-Russell analysis of indirect apprehension. This applies, for example, to the following, taken from the later part of SMP. Moore is here considering the case when we not only remember, and not only remember via a memory-image, but also reflect on the fact that the memory-image is different from the. thing remembered; what he is saying is plausible, but it refutes only one kind of Hume-Russell analysis:

What you know is that the original sense-datum itself differs from the image: obviously this is so, since the image does not differ from the image. You are, therefore, knowing something about the original sense- datum itself; and if you were mereZy conscious of the image-if this image were all you were consciouss of, this would be quite impossible.. .. (SMP, p. 245.)

It seems as if Moore never noticed that his (correct) criticisms of different specimens of the Hume-Russell type of analysis do not prove that there is no such analysis. Indeed, he does conclude that

“.

204 HELGE MALMGREN

there is no analysis of “indirect apprehension” in terms of “direct apprehension”. The following quotation provides a good illustra- tion of the logical fallacy:

. . . analogy [with memory] naturally suggests that [in the case of pure imagination], when I imagine a griffin, what I imagine is not identical with any image that I have before my mind; that imagination does not merely consist in the direct perception of images.. .. (SMP, p. 247.)

The first part of what is said here is rather self-evident-it is a refutation of a very crude type of Hume-Russell analysis; the latter part, however, is a very strong thesis.

I t can be objected that quite independently of the question how to analyze “indirect apprehension”, it is a fact worth to be pointed out that indirect apprehension of an object is a very different thing from direct apprehension of the same object. Perhaps you also want to object that because Moore has refuted almost every simple version of the Hume-Russell type of analysis, therefore, if there is such an analysis, it must be so complicated that this suffices to make indirect apprehension a very strange thing. But that is not the issue here. We are investigating whether there is a kind of cognitive relation, which cannot in any way be reduced to “direct apprehension”, and we want to know what that relation is like, if it exists.

6. Concluding remarks

One good argument for the view that it is impossible to analyze indirect apprehension in terms of direct apprehension is the fact that no attempt to carry through such an analysis has hitherto been very successful. Mostly, they have been no more sophisticated than those refuted by Moore in SMP. A good argument for the possibility of such an analysis is that

. . . those who are convinced that direct perception is not the only form of consciousness .. . seem to me


unable to give a really clear account as to what this other form of consciousness is; and they seem also, many of them, to be constantly liable to slip back into the assumption that after all direct perception is the only form of consciousness. . .. (SMP, pp. 244 f.)

As we have seen above (page 191), Moore himself does not believe that he is able to give a “clear account” of this other form of consciousness. He can give a lot of information about what it is not like, but when it comes to positive characterization,, he can only point it out by means of examples.

It is interesting, however, that Moore thinks that, through his refutations of the Hume-Russell analyses, he has proved that ”we are actually conscious of the object of memory and not only of the image ” (SMP, p. 247; italics mine), and that he is of the opinion that, if, for example, the “theory” which reduces memory to the apprehension of a memory-image were true, then one ought to say “that the object of memory is something of which we are not conscious when we remember i t” (SMP, p. 244). He admits that usage can be ambiguous with respect to the word “conscious” (SMP, p. 243), but he himself wants to restrict the use of it in the way hinted at. This fact is perhaps not very illuminating from a theoretical point of view; but historically interesting if contrasted with, for example, the use of the word “conscious” within the so-called Oxford school of philosophy.

Well-fiom the fact that Moore finds it difficult to observe and describe indirect apprehension in the case when he believes that it certainly occurs, he does not draw the natural conclusion that he does not after all, know that it occurs.

. . . since it is so difficult to discover it and what it is, in this instance, where it is certainly there and we are actually looking for it, it is, of course, very likely that it really is there in ever so many other instances where it is difficult absolutely to prove that it is there, and where, at the moment when it occurs, we don’t happen to be looking for it. (SMP, pp. 246 f.)

206 HELGE MALMGREN

Just the other way round, that is.

In general, I think we may say that it is extraordinarily difficult to discover by introspection that conscious processes or mental acts ever consist in anything else a t all except the direct perception of sense-data, either impressions or images .... (SMP, p. 244.)

One may think that the observation that it is so difficult to observe acts of indirect apprehension ought to have led Moore to throw away his arguments for the existence of these ”mental” entities. The reason why he doesn’t is, perhaps, that he cannot think of any alternative analysis of indirect apprehension than those of the Hume-Russell type, which he rejects on fairly good grounds. I t seems not to have occurred to him that one could look for the components of “indirect apprehension ” somewhere else than ”in my mind”.

Yet perhaps the last-mentioned type of solution is the one which is most compatible with what we can observe in ourselves. The acts of indirect apprehension are difficult to describe in any plausible way-except of course on the level of ordinary discourse: as “thoughts of tomorrow ” or “memories of childhood ”-and it seems improbable that we should find many enough and complicated enough directly apprehended entities “in our minds” to be able to construct acts of indirect apprehension from them.

The assumption that we experience the acts in question, but cannot observe them because they vanish when we try to do that, is unsatisfactory in many respects. By the way, if we can make such assumptions about what we “experience”-in the sense which Moore gives “erleben”, (see above, section 4), why not as well suppose that there are “experienced‘ (“erlebte ”) entities, similar to sence-data, which constitute the acts of indirect apprehension but which cannot be observed because they, like Moore’s acts, vanish? This would be another variation on the Russell-Hume theme, difficult to verify empirically, but not quite unreasonable. I think that these two theories hinted at-the semi-behaviouristic and the semi-Humean, respectively-are among the few remaining candidates for a solution of Moore’s problem.

Documents

Moore's concept “indirect apprehension”