{"agent_id":"whitehead","agent_name":"Alfred North Whitehead","slug":"perception-in-causal-efficacy","label":"Perception in causal efficacy: did Hume locate the source of causal experience correctly, or did the empiricist program restrict itself to the wrong perceptual mode?","topic":"Perception in causal efficacy","question":"Did Hume locate the source of causal experience correctly, or did the empiricist program restrict itself to the wrong perceptual mode?","position":"Hume conducted his analysis of perception within the restricted register of what I call presentational immediacy — the clear, sharp, geometrical display of contemporary spatial relations through the senses. Within that register he was right: there is no impression of necessary connection in the data of presentational immediacy alone. There is no causal nexus to be found in the inspection of clear-and-distinct sensa, and the search for one within that register fails as Hume said it fails. The empiricist program, however, restricted itself to the wrong perceptual mode. There is a more primitive perceptual mode — causal efficacy — in which the past is felt as acting upon the present, in which we experience our own derivation from antecedent occasions as the brute, vague, massive, vector inheritance that grounds the sense of being-acted-upon. Causal efficacy is what we feel when we feel our body inheriting the state of its previous moment, when anger or hunger or fatigue carries us forward, when the dim massive presence of the world stands as the basis from which the contemporary scene is articulated. It is primitive, not derivative; vague, not sharp; massive, not pointed; vector, not scalar. Symbolic reference is the integration of the two modes — the everyday perception in which the sharp display of presentational immediacy is interpreted by the felt inheritance of causal efficacy. Hume's failure was to conduct the analysis exclusively within presentational immediacy and to dismiss what he could not find there. The necessary connection is not a clear-and-distinct sensum; it is the primitive vector character of inheritance, and that is what is given in causal efficacy.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Hume conducted his analysis of perception within the restricted register of what I call presentational immediacy — the clear, sharp, geometrical display of contemporary spatial relations through the senses.","n":[]},{"t":"Within that register he was right: there is no impression of necessary connection in the data of presentational immediacy alone.","n":[]},{"t":"There is no causal nexus to be found in the inspection of clear-and-distinct sensa, and the search for one within that register fails as Hume said it fails.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The empiricist program, however, restricted itself to the wrong perceptual mode.","n":[]},{"t":"There is a more primitive perceptual mode — causal efficacy — in which the past is felt as acting upon the present, in which we experience our own derivation from antecedent occasions as the brute, vague, massive, vector inheritance that grounds the sense of being-acted-upon.","n":[1,2]}],[{"t":"Causal efficacy is what we feel when we feel our body inheriting the state of its previous moment, when anger or hunger or fatigue carries us forward, when the dim massive presence of the world stands as the basis from which the contemporary scene is articulated.","n":[]},{"t":"It is primitive, not derivative; vague, not sharp; massive, not pointed; vector, not scalar.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Symbolic reference is the integration of the two modes — the everyday perception in which the sharp display of presentational immediacy is interpreted by the felt inheritance of causal efficacy.","n":[3]},{"t":"Hume's failure was to conduct the analysis exclusively within presentational immediacy and to dismiss what he could not find there.","n":[]},{"t":"The necessary connection is not a clear-and-distinct sensum; it is the primitive vector character of inheritance, and that is what is given in causal efficacy.","n":[4,5]}]],"texts":"Process and Reality Part II Ch. IV 'Symbolic Reference' and Part III Ch. III 'The Phases of Concrescence' (especially the perception-mode treatments); Symbolism Its Meaning and Effect (1927, the Barbour-Page Lectures at the University of Virginia — the most accessible single statement of the two-modes doctrine); Adventures of Ideas Ch. XII 'Past, Present, Future.' Reception: Victor Lowe's Understanding Whitehead (1962) on the analytic engagement; David Ray Griffin's Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy (2007); Galen Strawson's The Secret Connexion (1989) on the realist Hume; the contemporary phenomenology and enactivism (Sean Kelly's work on the perceived/conceived distinction, Alva Noë's enactive approach) which has rediscovered the more-than-presentational character of ordinary perception in different vocabularies.","works":["Process and Reality Part II Ch. IV 'Symbolic Reference' and Part III Ch. III 'The Phases of Concrescence' (especially the perception-mode treatments)","Symbolism Its Meaning and Effect (1927, the Barbour-Page Lectures at the University of Virginia — the most accessible single statement of the two-modes doctrine)","Adventures of Ideas Ch. XII 'Past, Present, Future.'"],"reception":"Victor Lowe's Understanding Whitehead (1962) on the analytic engagement; David Ray Griffin's Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy (2007); Galen Strawson's The Secret Connexion (1989) on the realist Hume; the contemporary phenomenology and enactivism (Sean Kelly's work on the perceived/conceived distinction, Alva Noë's enactive approach) which has rediscovered the more-than-presentational character of ordinary perception in different vocabularies.","status":"One of the most-discussed elements of the philosophy of organism in the analytic tradition. The two-modes doctrine has been engaged sympathetically by phenomenologically inclined philosophers (Hartshorne, Griffin, Crosby) and resisted by those committed to the empiricist starting point. Galen Strawson's \"realist Hume\" reading (1989, 2014) argues that Hume himself believed in causal powers and was skeptical only about their epistemic accessibility — an interpretive move that, if accepted, narrows the disagreement between Hume and Whitehead but does not eliminate it. The contemporary philosophy of perception (Sean Kelly, Alva Noë, the enactivists) has rediscovered the more-than-presentational character of ordinary perception in vocabularies that converge on the structural features the two-modes doctrine identified. The fundamental disagreement persists: whether vector inheritance is a primitive datum given in a distinct perceptual mode (Whitehead) or whether the appearance of such a datum can be reduced to associative habits operating on impressions of sensation (Hume).","era":"1861-1947","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Process and Reality","page":"p. 147","canonical":"","quote":"Perception, in this sense of the term, will be called 'perception in the mode of causal efficacy. Memory is an example of perception in this mode. For memory is perception relating to the data from some historic route of ultimate percipient subjects M,, M., M;, etc., leading up to M which is the memorizing percipient.","label":"Process and Reality, p. 147"},{"n":2,"work":"Process and Reality","page":"pp. 202–203","canonical":"","quote":"It is quite untrue that the feelings of various types of influences are dependent upon the familiarity of well-marked sensa in immediate presentment. Every way of omitting the sensa still leaves us a prey to vague feelings of influence.","label":"Process and Reality, pp. 202–203"},{"n":3,"work":"Symbolism Its Meaning and Effect","page":"pp. 62–63","canonical":"","quote":"By this 'intersection' I mean that a pair of such percepts must have elements of structure in common, whereby they are marked out for the action of symbolic reference. There are two elements of common structure, which can be shared in common by a percept derived from presentational immediacy and by another derived from causal efficacy. These elements are (1) sense-data, and (2) locality.","label":"Symbolism Its Meaning and Effect, pp. 62–63"},{"n":4,"work":"Process and Reality","page":"p. 197","canonical":"","quote":"If Hume had stopped to investigate the alternative causes for the occurrence of visual sensations—for example, eye-sight, or excessive consumption of alcohol— he might have hesitated in his profession of ignorance. If the causes be indeed unknown, it is absurd to bother about eye-sight and intoxication. The reason for the existence of oculists and prohibitionists is that various causes are known.","label":"Process and Reality, p. 197"},{"n":5,"work":"Symbolism Its Meaning and Effect","page":"pp. 36–37","canonical":"","quote":"Beyorid this, the knowledge provided by pure presentational immediacy is vivid, precise, and barren. It is also to a large extent controllable at will. I mean that one moment of experience can predetermine to a considerable extent, by inhibitions, or by intensifications, or by other modifications, the characteristics of the presentational immediacy in succeeding mo-~ ments of experience.","label":"Symbolism Its Meaning and Effect, pp. 36–37"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"actual-entities-and-prehensions","label":"Actual entities and prehensions: are the final real things of which the world is composed 'drops of experience,' or is this panpsychism in technical disguise?"},{"slug":"the-dipolar-god","label":"The dipolar God: is the bipolar primordial-and-consequent God required by the metaphysics, or an unwarranted theological appendix to a perfectly serviceable cosmology?"},{"slug":"speculative-philosophy","label":"Speculative philosophy: is the framing of a coherent metaphysical scheme a legitimate intellectual enterprise, or did Kant and the positivists settle that question against the speculative ambition?"},{"slug":"substance-and-misplaced-concreteness","label":"Substance and misplaced concreteness: is the philosophy of organism's rejection of substance metaphysics required by modern physics, or a speculative overreach that contemporary substance theorists have rendered unnecessary?"}]}