ABSTRACT
In his treatment of the problem in Perception Price makes quite clearly and more than once the point that I stress here, namely that percipients do not distinguish the alleged given from the object of perceptual consciousness (though he would hardly admit the ‘alleged’). Thus ‘What happens is not that we identify them [the sense-datum and the entire thing], but that we fail to distinguish between them’ (p. 168). Or again, ‘The two states of mind, the acquaintance with the sense-datum and the perceptual conscious ness of the tree, just arise together. The sense-datum is presented to us, and the tree dawns on us, all in one moment. The two modes of “presence to the mind”, utterly different though they are, can only be distinguished by subsequent analysis’ (p. 141). This being the case, it seems to me not only that the sense-datum or given could not be used as a cue or ground for inference, but also that it is misleading to speak of taking for granted that the datum specifies the material thing or to say that we ‘jump straight from the awareness of the one to the thought of the other’.2 All these suggest discursive thought, a passage of the mind from A to B, when there is admitted to be no such passage at all.
