Seeing life steadily: Dorothy Emmet’s philosophy of perception and the crisis in metaphysics

ABSTRACTThe aim of this paper is to outline Dorothy Emmet's (1904–2000) account of perception in The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking (published in 1945). Emmet's account of perception is part of a wider attempt to rehabilitate metaphysics in the face of logical positivism and verificationism (of the kind espoused most famously by A. J. Ayer). It is thus part of an attempt to stem the tide of anti-metaphysical thought that had become widespread in British philosophy by the middle of the twentieth century. Emmet does not fit neatly into the traditional story of twentieth-century British philosophy. She draws on figures like A. N. Whitehead and Henri Bergson much more extensively than figures like Russell or Moore – and thus straddles the so-called ‘analytic-continental divide.’ My aim in this paper is to put Emmet on the map of twentieth-century British thought by outlining her philosophy of perception, highlighting her proposals for a way forward for metaphysics in a time of crisis, and identifying the ways she preempts movements in contemporary philosophy of perception.KEYWORDS: Dorothy EmmetperceptionWhiteheadBergsonmetaphysics AcknowledgementsMany thanks to Matyáš Moravec and Emily Thomas for constructive feedback on earlier versions of this paper. Thanks also to participants at the Wartime Quartet: Significance, Legacy, Spirit conference, organized by the (women) in parenthesis project (Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman), for feedback on a version of this paper.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Henceforth, I abbreviate The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking to ‘NMT’.2 Parts of Chapters VII and IX of NMT were previously published as Emmet, “Analogies in Metaphysics”.3 Exceptions include Leemon McHenry’s entry in a chapter on “Whitehead’s Contemporaries” in Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought (McHenry, “Whitehead’s Contemporaries”). See also Turner, “Deflated Functionalism” for a paper on Emmet and the sociologist Robert Merton. Emmet also appears briefly in the conclusion of Wiseman, “Metaphysical Thinking”, 91. In this paper, I go further than these papers, which focus on Emmet’s connection to more established figures, and emphasise the degree to which Emmet was an original thinker. Aside from these papers, I am aware of a handful of scholars working on (or who plan to work on) Emmet’s philosophy in the future, including Lawrence Blum. In particular, my reading of The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking was informed by a talk given by Fraser McBride in Durham in 2022 (https://www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk/british-twentieth-century-women-philosophers-on-science/). When it comes to the biographical details of Emmet’s life, alongside McHenry’s paper, I am indebted to obituaries in The Guardian and The Times from 2000.4 Emmet would continue to discuss the topic of perception in her writings on Whitehead and process philosophy (see, e.g. Emmet, “Whitehead and Alexander”), but NMT contains her most sustained discussion of the topic – and is the most revealing when it comes to her own views.5 The notion of ‘bad questions’ in philosophy has also been explored in contemporary scholarship such as, e.g. Taylor and Vickers, “Conceptual Fragmentation”.6 The ‘Epiphany Philosophers’ were primarily interested in the intersection of philosophy with religion and theology. Emmet was clearly interested in such matters prior to her involvement with the group, as evidenced by the fact that she dedicates three chapters of NMT to religious and theological analogies (Chapters V, VI, and VII).7 For a monograph-length treatment of British philosophy during World War Two and its impact on the careers of several women philosophers (most notably, the ‘Wartime Quartet’ of Foot, Anscombe, Murdoch, and Midgley) – and featuring some fleeting glimpses of Emmet (including the time she collected Ghandi from the airport in her Austin 7) – see Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals.8 For example (these are not Emmet’s examples but my own), a mechanistic materialist metaphysics might inform us that the universe is a complex mechanism, similar to that of a clock, while a panpsychist metaphysics might inform us that there is something it is like to be the universe, similarly to how there is something it is like to be you or me. More formally, though, Emmet claims that metaphysicians employ one of five distinct kinds of analogy: (1) deductive analogies, which start with “the basic pattern of the macrocosm” and deduce more specific truths from there (NMT, 8–9); (2) phenomenological analogies, where one infers from the structure of one’s experiences to the structure of reality (NMT, 9–10; this is closely related to the ‘isomorphic’ theory of perception she later criticises); (3) “probable hypotheses” (NMT, 11), where one conjectures that since some aspect of reality has such and such a nature, reality itself most likely does too (e.g. William Paley’s watchmaker analogy); (4) coordinating analogies, where one borrows a “key idea” from one domain of experience and employs it in another (NTM, 12–13); and finally (5) “existential analogies” or “analogies of being”, which are employed in order to understand “an object in part experienced and in part not experienced” (NMT, 13). Emmet suggests that a statement like ‘God is Light’ is understood via an existential analogy, since we have a good grasp (via experience) of light but do not have a good grasp of God, so must infer that, to some degree, God’s light is like the light we ordinarily experience (NMT, 14).9 Perhaps she had Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, which found popular success, in mind here.10 This is also connected to Emmet’s critique of verificationism (and indeed logical positivism more widely). The verificationist’s mistake, she thinks, is to assume that we can appeal to some neutral, or ‘raw’, kind of experience to verify (or falsify) the kinds of statements that, within the verificationist framework, count as meaningful. Many thanks to an anonymous referee for making this reading of the passage clear to me.11 In that sense, Emmet’s view looks somewhat similar to Kant’s view that space and time are forms of intuition. One might also argue that, in line with contemporary philosophy of perception, for Emmet, all perceptual experience includes the perception of ‘K properties’ (Siegel, “Which Properties”). ‘K properties’ are properties that objects have in virtue of being certain kinds of things (e.g. being a tree, or a pine tree, is a K property). But kinds, on this view, are understood in a nominalist sense; they are categories of thought or interpretation, rather than natural kinds.12 Emmet acknowledges a debt here to Henri Bergson. She approvingly cites the following passage from Bergson’s Matter and Memory: “Here is a system of images which I term my perception of the universe, and which may be entirely altered by a very slight change in a certain privileged image – my body” (NMT, 32). I will say more on the role of the body in Emmet’s approach to metaphysics (and Bergson’s influence) in Section Three.13 Again, for Emmet, the verificationist’s mistake is to think there is a way of verifying propositions that is objective, i.e. from something like a ‘God’s-eye’ perspective.14 This move is what Crane and French call “the spreading step” (this terminology originates in Snowdon, “Direct Perception”): the claim that “the same account of experience must apply to veridical experiences as applies to illusory/hallucinatory experiences” (Crane and French, “The Problem of Perception”, §2). Descartes make a similar move in the Meditations when he argues that if the senses deceive us even once (which they do in cases of dreaming, for instance) then we should regard them as unreliable (Descartes, Meditations, 12).15 It is unclear which idealists Emmet has in mind here. There is a reference to ‘the Hegelians’ (although this is part of a quotation from Russell) (NMT, 28) and to Berkeley (NMT, 22–23). In a later chapter, Emmet mentions Hegel, Bradley, and McTaggart (NMT, 199), suggesting that these are the idealists she is familiar with. As Matyáš Moravec pointed out to me, it is noteworthy that Emmet is attacking idealism in 1944, well after its hey-day (at least in Britain). One explanation for this could be that Emmet saw idealism as a live issue and had contemporary idealists in mind when she put forward these criticisms. In turn, that raises the question: Who? However, a more likely explanation is that, in dealing with naïve realism, idealism, and phenomenalism, Emmet is outlining how debates about perception have proceeded historically or offering a genealogy of those debates. This suggestion is supported by the fact that, as I have noted, Emmet does not tend to pick out any specific idealists, but does identify Wittgenstein, Whitehead, and the ‘gestalt psychologists’ as proponents of isomorphism (indicating, in turn, that she sees isomorphism as a live issue rather than a historical one).16 Emmet’s talk of experimental attitudes might be thought of as pre-empting contemporary claims about ‘cognitive attitudes’ in perception. For example, O’Shaughnessy claims that hearing silence, specifically, requires adopting a certain cognitive attitude (O’Shaughnessy, Consciousness and the World, 329) and, in language reminiscent of that employed by Emmet, characterises the act of listening as one in which we “open the door” or “actively make the attention open to influence at the hands of timbre” (O’Shaughnessy, Consciousness and the World, 397).17 Emmet approvingly cites a passage from Whitehead in which he writes: “sense-perception has a factor which is not thought. I call this factor “sense-awareness”” (Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, 3; cited at NMT, 37, fn. 1). The point that Emmet and Whitehead are making here seems similar to G. E. Moore’s claim that, in sensation, alongside the thing sensed (e.g. a blue sensation) we seem to be aware of our ‘consciousness’ of that thing (Moore, “The Refutation of Idealism”, 450). As Ian Phillips puts it, for Moore, there is a “distinct element in all conscious experience, namely, the relation of conscious awareness itself” (Phillips, “Hearing and Hallucinating Silence”, 345). Phillips thinks Moore is right about this and, on this basis (namely that “listing the objects of experience” does not suffice “to characterize experience” (Phillips, “Hearing and Hallucinating Silence”, 345)), argues that since we can become aware of ourselves as hearing silence (even though such perceptual experiences lack an object) this means that silence is something that can truly be said to be heard. Thanks to an anonymous referee for noting these similarities.18 She has something like Kant’s distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal in mind here.19 Note that while Emmet acknowledges a debt to Whitehead (and was clearly influenced by his ‘process philosophy’) it is not right to think of her as simply a ‘disciple’. She explicitly seeks to move away from his account of perception (as she reads it) in NMT.20 One might push back against Emmet’s claim here. It might be argued that the structure of a written word, for example, does reflect the structure of its spoken counterpart. The written word ‘Yes’ has one syllable, reflecting the monosyllabic sound of ‘Yes’ as spoken. The written word ‘glockenspiel’, meanwhile, is longer and reflects the three syllables of the spoken word. But it seems likely that Emmet has in mind the relation between words (written or spoken) and their meanings, where (contrary to, e.g. Platonic naturalism about words) the relation does seem to be purely arbitrary.21 Emmet notes that “Russell at one time advocated that a logical language should be so constructed that the word order of a sentence should always exhibit the spatio-temporal order of the things being talked about” (NMT, 58). However, she also notes that even Russell denied that this was the case in natural languages. And yet that does not undermine their validity as languages, and thus as systems of sign-usage (and, in turn, symbols).22 At least, it cannot be solved without resource to phenomenalism or idealism – two positions that Emmet has already shown to be flawed.23 As well as Whitehead, it seems likely that Emmet’s view is influenced by Samuel Alexander – particularly his notion of ‘compresence’ which looks similar to Whitehead’s notion of ‘prehension’ (see Thomas, “Samuel Alexander”, 3.1 for discussion – and thanks to Emily Thomas for pointing out the possible connection here). Alexander maintains that “There is nothing peculiar in the relation itself between mind and its objects; what is peculiar in the situation is the character of one of the terms, its being mind or consciousness. The relation is one of compresence. But there is [also] compresence between two physical things” (Alexander, “The Basis of Realism”, 288). In that sense, Alexander claims, “The relation of mind and object is comparable to that between table and floor”. Alexander’s influence on Emmet is evidenced by (e.g.) her Samuel Hall Oration lecture from 1950, titled “Time is the Mind of Space”, which is dedicated to him (Emmet, “Mind of Space”, 225). Alexander is also referenced several times in The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking (e.g. NMT, 21, 192, 218). Looking ahead towards the end of this section, where I make the case for Bergson’s influence on Emmet, it is worth noting that Alexander (like Whitehead) draws on Bergson in his Space, Time, and Deity (e.g. Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity, 36, 44, 140, 148). Alexander also reviewed Bergson’s Matter and Memory (Alexander, Matière et Mémoire).24 Like Whitehead, Emmet maintains that philosophers of perception have been misled by the fact that we talk as though cases of perceptual experience involved a Subject-Object dichotomy (e.g. we say things like ‘I saw the moon’). Whitehead claims that those who make such an inference – from how we speak to what must be the case – commit ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’, i.e., they mistakenly take themselves to be picking out some concrete features of reality (Whitehead, Modern World, 66 & 74) (many thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing this out). This is the same (erroneous) inferential move that Susan Stebbing calls the ‘fallacy of the substantive’ (Stebbing, “Some Ambiguities”, 117).25 It is radical, but only if viewed from a particular standpoint (namely, traditional approaches to the mind-world relation and the problem of perception), for it has precedents. As we have seen, Emmet draws on the work of Whitehead and Alexander. Bergson, who is cited by Emmet in various places (e.g. NMT, 51, 56, 62, 237) and who influenced Whitehead and Alexander, similarly argues against the Subject-Object distinction (e.g. Bergson, Matter and Memory, vii).26 In this way, Emmet’s project resembles that of G. E. Anscombe in “The Intentionality of Sensation” (Anscombe, “Intentionality of Sensation”; for discussion, see Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals). Both Anscombe and Emmet agree that there is a reason that the debate between direct (naïve) realists and indirect realists has not been settled – which is that both are trying to answer a ‘bad question’: namely, how the human mind cognizes the external world and what the tripartite relation of mind-mental object-external thing looks like. Emmet and Anscombe’s views differ, however, when it comes to what we should be doing. Anscombe defends a ‘grammatical’ approach to sensation, arguing that the focus ought to be on understanding our (verbal) reports of perceptual experiences, as well as those other forms of life that are shaped by the concept of sensation. Doing so, Anscombe maintains, can in turn reveal the structure of sensation itself. Emmet is less interested in moving away from metaphysical or ontological questions about perception than Anscombe, but nonetheless agrees that we ought to move on from traditional approaches to understanding perception in terms of a subject-object dichotomy. See also Margaret Macdonald’s “Linguistic Philosophy and Perception” where she also sets out to diagnose why debates in the philosophy of perception do not seem to “progress”. Like Anscombe, Macdonald (who also studied with Wittgenstein) suggests that “linguistic philosophy” may offer a way forward.27 There is also a case to be made for including Heidegger as one of the influences on Emmet’s view. Emmet identifies similarities between Heidegger and Whitehead’s approaches to perception. For example, she writes that “[a]lthough the final outcome and emphasis of his philosophy is very different from Whitehead’s, both Heidegger and Whitehead are starting from an analysis … of a subject of experience as arising out of a way of feeling its world” (NMT, 65).28 It is also worth noting that Emmet’s tutor in Oxford, A. D. Lindsay, wrote a book on Bergson (Lindsay, The Philosophy of Bergson) which Emmet may have read. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing this out.29 Samuel Alexander, in his review of Matter and Memory, compares Bergson’s ‘images’ to Lockean ‘ideas’, but the comparison with Emmet’s ‘interpretations’ seems closer since Bergson’s images are involved in actively shaping our perception of reality (Alexander, Matière et Mémoire, 572).30 There is more that could be said about the similarities between Bergson and Emmet, and I think a stronger case could be made for a causal connection. The question of why Emmet does not cite Bergson anywhere near as extensively as Whitehead is also worth addressing. The answer may lie in the fate of Bergson’s philosophy in Anglophone philosophy, especially after the publication of Russell’s “The Philosophy of Bergson”. For example, Matyáš Moravec argues that from the 1930s and 1940s onwards, Bergson’s philosophy began to be “treated with suspicion” (Moravec, “Taking Time Seriously”, 2; see also Vrahamis, “Russell’s Critique”). It may well be that, in line with trend, Emmet simply wished to avoid paying too much deference to Bergson’s philosophy.31 Not only is this important for understanding Emmet’s position from a historical perspective but this is also an aspect of Emmet’s view that might be taken up by contemporary philosophers of perception. Debates in (analytic) philosophy of perception still typically resemblance the debates that Emmet is critical of (see, e.g. Crane and French, “The Problem of Perception”). Those readers who are sympathetic to Emmet’s criticisms of such debates might look to her own approach as a way forward – and the ‘accusative’ versus ‘accusative’ perception distinction is an important part of that approach.