The Causal Theory of Perception: is sense data a defensible technical term, and does perception of a material object require a causal connection through a sense-impression?

H. P. Grice, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

A causal theory of perception is to be advanced — not with the certainty of obvious truth but with the more modest claim of being "if not true, at least not obviously false." On this account, to perceive a material object is, at least in part, to stand in a certain kind of causal relation to it through a sense-impression or sense-datum: the sense-impression figures in the causal history of the perception, and the material object figures in the causal history of the sense-impression.12

The apparent oddness of perception-reports of the so-and-so looks Φ to me form, when applied in contexts where Φ obviously holds — "that looks red to me" said of a British pillar box in normal daylight — is to be analysed as a feature of language use governed by the principle that one does not make a weaker statement when a stronger is available, rather than as a feature of the meaning of perception-reports. Sense data are a technical term worth retaining for the purposes of the analysis.34

Sources

  1. The Causal Theory of Perception 1 The Causal Theory of Perception (CTP) has for some time received comparatively little attention, mainly, I suspect, because it has been generally assumed that the theory either asserts or involves as a consequenc~ the proposition that material objects are unobservable, and that the unacceptability of this proposition is sufficient to dispose of the theory.
    Studies in the Way of Words, pp. 224–225
  2. A view of this kind may perhaps deserve to be called a causal theory of perception; but I shall not be concerned with theories on these lines.
    Studies in the Way of Words, pp. 225–226
  3. ' them would ' have ' to be investigated; and furthermore, even if one has decided on a preferred candidate, not all of its uses would be suitable; if, for example, we decide to employ the expressions "looks," etc., are we to accept the legitimacy of the sentence "It looks indigestible to me" as providing us with the sense-datum sentence "I am having an indigestible visual sense-datum"?
    Studies in the Way of Words, pp. 227–228
  4. But the sense-datum theorist wants his sense-datum statements to be such that some one or more of them is true whenever a perceptual statement is true; for he wants to go on to give a general analysis of perceptual statements in terms of the notion of - 228 Semantics and Metaphysics sense-data.
    Studies in the Way of Words, p. 228

Where the argument is made

  • The Causal Theory of Perception (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supp. Vol. xxxv, 1961), reprinted as a chapter in Studies in the Way of Words (Harvard 1989)

How the argument was received

A late entry in the British empiricist tradition of causal theories of perception (Locke, Berkeley, Russell, Broad, Price, Ayer). Austin's Sense and Sensibilia (1962, from 1947-49 lectures) had attacked the sense- datum apparatus as confused and the philosophical theory of perception as resting on bogus distinctions; Grice's paper is a tentative defence against that attack. Warnock and Strawson praised the paper as a contribution to the philosophy of perception; the pragmatic principle introduced — that one does not make a weaker statement when one could truthfully make a stronger — became the second maxim of Quantity in Logic and Conversation. The contemporary literature on perception has largely moved past sense-data ontology to disjunctivist and direct-realist positions; causal-theoretic structure survives in mainstream analytic philosophy of perception but the sense-datum apparatus is no longer the live framework.