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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
How far can we claim to know anything for what it actually is? Or, to put the question another way, how far is our so-called knowledge relative to the specifically human perspective? The problem was succinctly put by Fr Paul Verghese in an essay he contributed to the symposium on Technology and Social Justice:
Our present universe is constituted by our sense-equipment, and by the ancillary equipment which we have been able to make for ourselves by technology. Change our sense-equipment and brain-structure, and we will have a different universe. Look at the paranoid or the psychedelic. Is the universe of his experience the same as ours? And which is the true one? For our equipment ours is true, for his, his is true. And if all were paranoid or psychedelic, we would have a totally different universe. … The bee has its world, the spider and the bat have each its own, depending upon die particular perception system of each. Change our sense-equipment—this world disappears and another one takes its place.
page 12 note 1 Verghese, Paul, ‘This World and the Other’ in Technology and Social Justice, ed. Preston, R. H. (London, SCM, 1971), pp. 196f.Google Scholar
page 13 note 1 E.g. the attempt of Professor Antony Flew to draw a sharp distinction between sensation and perception, the former being private to the experiencing subject and the latter being our apprehension, through the senses of the external world for what it is. An Introduction to Western Philosophy (London, Thames and Hudson, 1971), pp. 355–364Google Scholar. This is plausible only so long as the word ‘perception’ is left completely vague. If it is held to be coterminous with the employment of the senses, then the problem remains for the naïve realist; for the senses are the source of all the difficulties. If ‘perception’ is held to include ratiocination of however primitive a kind, the case for uncritically accepting the deliverances of the senses falls to the ground.
page 14 note 1 Hume, , A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A. (Oxford, O.U.P., 1906), I.vi. 7.Google Scholar
page 15 note 1 Mascall, E. L., Words and Images (London, Longmans Green, 1957), p. 34.Google Scholar
page 15 note 2 Clifford, P. R., Interpreting Human Experience (London, Collins, 1971), pp. 115ff.Google Scholar
page 16 note 1 Flew, op. cit., p. 291.
page 17 note 1 Ratzinger, Joseph, Introduction to Christianity (London, Burns and Oates, 1968), pp. 31f.Google Scholar
page 19 note 1 Ian Ramsey, ‘A Paper prepared for the Synodical Commission on Christian Doctrine’, reproduced in the order for his memorial service at St. Margaret's, Westminster. From a very different point of view Colin Wilson has maintained that human beings have evolved into creatures with a ‘third dimension’: an experience of reality transcending the limits of the temporal-spatial world of sense experience. Cf. Voyage to a Beginning (London, Cecil and Amelia Woolf, 1969), p. 172.Google Scholar