p In a process as complicated as cognitive activity there is a host of premisses, preconditions, transitions, conditions, and other moments that play a role of sorts in achieving the results of knowledge. Some of them are obligatory (in the sense that their absence makes the very process of knowledge impossible); others have a more or less chance character. To avoid differences in the interpretation of terms signifying one moment of the process of knowledge or another, we shall touch on some definitions related to our theme so as to reduce the risk of a different understanding of the text as far as possible.
p The obligatory premises include the existence of a subject of knowledge, i.e. of someone who performs cognitive activity, and the existence of an object of knowledge, i.e. of something to which the subject’s activity is directed. Sometimes the subject-matter of knowledge is singled out from the object of knowledge, i.e. the aspect (property, relation) of the object that is included in the given cognitive process from a definite standpoint, according to the aims and interests of the knowing subject. Man as an integrated object of knowledge, for example, figures in various qualities as the subject-matter of knowledge in sociology, physiology, psychology, ethics, etc. The subject-matter of knowledge can be either objects of the environment counterposed to the subject in the form of the world around him, or the subject of knowledge himself, as happens in self-knowledge. It is necessary to remember, too, that the term ‘subject-matter’ (cobject’ is used not only in the sense of ’subject-matter of 12 knowledge’ but also to mean a part of the objective world with a relatively independent existence, i.e. with a meaning identical or close to the concept thing. The sense of the term can be established from the context in which it occurs.
p By cognitive activity we understand primarily the process through which the peculiarities of the object of knowledge are reflected in the consciousness of the subject with some degree of reliability. The result is the aggregate or totality of the knowledge or information, in short the data the subject has about the object of knowledge. The subject’s experience of his relations with the external world and himself in the form either of satisfaction or of dissatisfaction constitutes the sphere of emotions (positive or negative).
p Apart from the subject-object relation, the necessary conditions of the cognitive process include the existence of channels in the subject by which he receives information about the object of knowledge, and also the existence of a capacity in the subject to retain and process this information according to certain rules.
p The moments listed above do not exhaust all the premises and conditions that make cognitive activity possible but we can limit ourselves to them at the beginning of our exposition since their existence is sufficient for a review of the initial premises that have led since antiquity, it would seem, to unresolvable contradictions in explanation of the nature of knowledge. Several of these contradictions were linked with the difference between, and opposition of, the two aspects (degrees) of knowledge, viz., sensory and rational. In order to designate these two aspects, moreover, various writers use different terms. The sensory aspect, for instance, is sometimes called sense experience (or simply experience), sensibility, sensibilia, etc. The rational aspect is called abstract, logical, rational, or conceptual thinking, intellect, etc.^^1^^
p In spite of the host of terms (which in itself is indirect evidence of the complexity and many-sidedness of these two aspects of cognitive activity and their relations) a quite definite line can be drawn between them, for all that, which indicates their qualitative difference.
p Sensory knowledge most often includes sensations, perceptions, and representations (notions).
p By sensations we understand the elementary psychic phepomena that arise through the direct effect Q| objects on 13 the subject’s sense organs and are experienced by the latter as qualities inherent in the objects themselves (yellow, round, sour, etc.).
p Sensations underlie perceptions, i.e. the direct sensory reflection of reality in the form of integral (whole) sensory images. The object of knowledge figures in the perception of objects as a unity of its various aspects and properties, as something independent (e.g. a lemon as a unity of sensations of yellow, roundness, etc.).
p Finally, a representation (notion) is a sensory-visual image that is preserved and reproduced by the subject without direct action of the object on his sense organs (we can represent or imagine a lemon from past perceptions without having to observe the fruit here and now).
p By the main forms of rational knowledge are traditionally meant concepts, judgments, and inferences or deductions. Hence, while not claiming to give an exhaustive definition of these forms, we refer only to some of their features that can be certain initial moments in an attempt to disclose the content of rational knowledge more fully during our exposition.
p From the many definitions of concept we single out the one in which a concept is considered a thought reflecting the material properties, connections, and relations of objects in generalised form. It is a form of ideal reflection of reality that is linked with the use of language. When an ancient sage, walking in a shady grove with his disciples, turned to them with the words ’Does a tree exist? If so, show it to me’, he certainly already knew that they could point to a lemon tree, an oak, a chestnut, or a cypress, but not to a tree in general. ‘Tree’ exists as a concept in our consciousness; it is designated in language by a word—of that there is really no doubt—but what does it correspond to in actual reality? As the age-long discussions between, in particular, holders of the conceptions of nominalism and realism have shown, it is not really a simple matter to answer this simple question.
p As for judgments as forms of rational knowledge, ideas are usually meant by them that are expressed in the form of propositions in which something about the properties, connections, or relations of objects are affirmed (or denied), the thought being either true or false.
p And finally, by deductions or inferences we have in mind a mental operation (reasoning) during which a new judgment 14 (called a consequence or conclusion) is drawn from one or more judgments (premises).
p From what we have said it can be concluded that both sense, or immediate, and rational knowledge are considered to possess a multi-level structure. As for the difference between them, the commonest view among the many philosophical schools and trends is the claim that it consists, basically, in the following.
p Sense knowledge operates with visual images that arise as the result of direct or immediate observation. It is ultimately some sort of aggregate of sense data, or sensations ( sensibilia). Sensibilia have a unique, concrete character depending on both the peculiarities of the concretely observed object and those of the structure of the observing subject’s sensory apparatus.
p Rational knowledge, on the contrary, operates with concepts (universals) that have a general character. Operation with concepts follows definite rules that do not depend on the will of any single individual (individmmi). It is mediated by a system of signs (language).
p Many philosophers (especially those taking a materialist stand) add to this that sense knowledge reflects the external aspect of things, is concerned wilh the world of phenomena, while rational knowledge penetrates the essence of things and grasps the inner necessary connections of objects.
p According to which proposition about the qualitative difference between the sensory and the rational is recognised in philosophy, the attitude to the place and role of these aspects in the process of knowledge has led to a division of gnosiological conceptions about this point into two main currents. One (the empiricists and sensationalists) considers sense experience the main form of knowledge, the other ( rationalists), abstract thinking, reason. Features of both these trends are illuminated in the works of many authors in the Soviet Union and other countries. In treating certain problems of the historical confrontation between spokesmen of sensationalism and rationalism in this chapter we have not set ourselves the task of giving an exhaustive description of the many philosophical conceptions that incline toward one or other of them or that try to overcome the one- sidedness of each of them. For our purposes it is important to consider the historical, philosophical opposition of sensationalism and rationalism through the prism of a deliberate exposure of the essence of the disagreement between them, 15 and of stressed counterposing of their main initial propositions, so as to demonstrate with the maximum clarity that the problems of overcoming the incompatibility of the postulates of sensationalism and rationalism, in the form in which they have been and are posed by spokesmen of non-Marxian philosophical theories, could not and cannot find a satisfactory solution in them.
p In order to avoid unjustified simplifications we need to note quite clearly that it is difficult to name an empiricist or a sensationalist among the classical spokesmen of both sensationalism and rationalism who fully excludes the role of reason from the process of knowledge, and equally a rationalist who has not adduced some significance to sense knowledge. Nevertheless the main initial propositions of sensationalism and rationalism differ so from one another that attempts at a consistent development of one of them, it would seem, have led to results diametrically opposite to the conclusions that followed from another premise. But the eclectic mixing of the premisses of sensationalism and rationalism within one theory has led to the creation of conceptions suffering from inner inconsistency and incapable of overcoming the difficulties that stem from the real difference between the sensory and rational aspects of knowledge.
p The many attempts to reduce the phenomenon of the consciousness knowing and possessing knowledge to an aggregate of sense data are linked with the classical sensationalist formula: ’There is nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses’. The legitimacy of these attempts has a fundamental basis, it would seem, in the fact that we have no other source of initial information about the world other than the data of sense experience, a fact that is also recognised by the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge. ’The first premise of the theory of knowledge,’ Lenin wrote, ’undoubtedly is that the sole source of our knowledge is sensation.’^^2^^ ’Save through sensations,’ he said further, ’we can know nothing either of the forms of matter or of the forms of motion.’^^3^^
p Many attempts have been made in accordance with the initial formula of sensationalism to explain the transition from the isolated data of sense experience to general concepts by their mechanical uniting and transformation. They failed, though they had a positive significance in their day. The thesis of the formation of concepts from an aggregate of sense-perceived data, taken into the arsenal of metaphysical 16 materialism, in particular, played a positive role in the fight against idealist speculations about the supernatural origin of rational knowledge. The origin of conceptual thinking was not due to the intervention of a supernatural force but came from the development of sense knowledge itself.
p Spokesmen of sensationalism who took a materialist position started from notions that the sensory image was an ideal ‘copy’ of objects existing outside consciousness. But the limitation inherent in the metaphysical method did not allow of a satisfactory solution of the problem of the relationship of sensation and reason.^^4^^ In particular, a satisfactory answer was not obtained to the question of the character of the transition of the quantitative accumulation of the isolated data of sense experience into a new quality of commonness proper to conceptual thinking. The assumption that the elementary sensation already contained the general within itself, but only in an embryonal, undeveloped state, led to conceptions of a sort of gnosiological prefigurism that wiped out the qualitative boundary between sensation and reason. The striving to shake off prefiguristic extremes led to new, unresolvable dilemmas.
p The mechanism of the rise of general concepts from an aggregate of sense data appears as a process of the discovery of constant, invariant characteristics manifested during the manifold superimposing of various projections of the sense image on one another. After many repetitions of the projecting of objects in the memory, everything chance and secondary is discarded and the most frequently repeated and permanent is ultimately traced out and identified with the universal. A general concept is thus formed, derived as it were from the background of individual sense perceptions rather like, for example, the technique by which periodically repeated weak signals are sorted out distinctly from background noise in a radio receiver. The idea of the birth of general concepts through discovery of repeated moments in the connections (associations) of various psychic phenomena, which follows from the main postulate of sensationalism, was developed further by associative psychologists.
p The weakness of the argumentation of the supporters of this method of extracting the general from the particular was not so much that the general was identified with the most frequently repeated as that there was repetition in fact where there was a general pattern and necessity. But repetition of the results of observations still cannot serve, 17 in itself, as evidence of the truth of concepts, judgments, or deductions based on it, if we are thinking of the frequency of the pattern of events perceived directly by the sense organs. It does riot follow, for example, because Europeans have seen only white swans millions of times, that the statement ’all swans are white’ is true, excluding the possibility of even just one non-white swan being discovered in objective reality.
p If the repetition of results deduced from immediate sense data were in fact sufficient grounds for forming concepts more or less adequately reflecting the objective sources of the phenomenon’s repetition, we would have to acknowledge the existence in many species of a capacity for conceptual thought. Their analysers also fix the similarity of perceived situations in which they find themselves many times by virtue of a mode of life linked with the specific environment of their habitat. The deduction of a general concept from a consecutive series of direct observations could at best be considered attainable only if the series were admitted to be fully completed. But it is impossible, indeed to consider a consecutive series of observations to be completed once and for all. For it already follows from the very premiss of the possibility of a repetition of the observations that they may be repeated any number of times, and that there will be a new number ln + 1’, etc., to infinity, for any finite number of observations. What is said above relates to observations not only of the properties of objects but also to the relations between various phenomena following on one another in space and time, and to the establishment of links between them.
p If a visible flash of lightning, for example, is accompanied 1000 times by audible thunder, it is still impossible to conclude that, with the same state of our vision and hearing, we shall necessarily hear peals of thunder the thousandth and one time after a visible flash of lightning. It could be that, unlike the preceding thousand-times repetition of this event, the last of the observed rumbles of thunder was so weak or so far away from the observer that, in spite of his seeing the gleam of lightning, he could not hear the accompanying sound because of the weakness of the signal, which was below the ‘resolving’ power of his aural analysers.
p It may be objected that sound waves that are not perceived directly by people become accessible to perception through the use of ‘mediators’, e.g. instruments that transform weak 18 signals into stronger ones. But this, surely, is a matter precisely of the trend of sensationalism that tried to deduce general concepts from an aggregate of immediate sense data, passing over any third, mediating link. The introduction of instruments as a mediating link between subject and object gives rise to a number of new problems also requiring solution. But as a rule they remain apart from sensationalist conceptions that claim to deduce general concepts from an aggregate of immediate, direct data of sense experience.
p The repetition of a sensually perceived succession of events cannot serve as a reliable basis either for the formation of judgments about an inner, causally conditioned connection between them along the lines of ’every appearance of event A necessarily entails the appearance of event B\ If we could not go beyond the bounds of direct sense fixation of events, repeated following of events on one another would, at best, serve as grounds for a post hoc statement, but not a propter hoc one.
p In that case we would have to express doubt, following David Hume, in the objective existence of causality, assuming that perception of a regular following of event B on event A leads to a mistaken conviction that grows into a stable association of expectation, to habit, and finally to a faith that every appearance of event A in the future will entail the appearance of event B.
p The interpretation of the main postulate of sensationalism, namely that there is nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses, proved so hopeless that it was proposed, as a way out of the impasse in general, to ‘remove’ the question of the objective content of general concepts, and to eliminate it from scientific currency as wrongly formulated. Absolutising of the sensory aspect was one of the gnosiological roots of subjective idealism, including its neopositivist trends. All actual reality was reduced somehow to an aggregate of direct sense data, to a ’set of sensations’ without any underlying objective basis. General concepts or categories were declared fictions without cognitive significance since they could not be verified by direct experimental data. The problems of whether they reflected any essential aspects of objective reality were classed, like statements about the essence of objective reality itself, as ’ pseudoquestions’ that are allegedly outside the data of experience, are metaphysical, and should not interest positive science. Some of the latest holders of such a point of view were the 19 logical positivists, who sought a way out of the dramatic situation by developing a probability logic. Rudolf Carnap, characterising the difference between scientific knowledge and the data of direct observation, remarked that the former was formulated in terms of logical thought, while the latter represented an incomplete series and could only provide informalion of a probable character which was displayed in the relative frequency of the observed events. According to him, probability logic is an inductive logic based on the degree of confirmation of statements. To some extent this logic resembles deductive logic, which is the limiting case of inductive logic. Both are a system of purely a priori relations, according to Carnap, independent of the facts and of the truth or falsity of the premises leading to them. Deductive logic, moreover, in spite of its limited nature, gives definitive, complete results, while probability logic gives only different degrees of confirmation. Probability inductive logic is an extension of deductive logic through the addition of a certain new function of confirmation.^^5^^
p The idea that the age-old dispute between rationalism and sensationalism was to be resolved by probability logic in favour of the latter received clear expression in the work of Hans Reichenbach, an influential member of the Berlin group of logical positivists. He subjected Kant to sharp criticism for having, in his view, only succeeded, while claiming to unite sensationalism and rationalism into a single whole, in ’cluttering up’ the concept of experience with rational moments; the sensationalists, to their misfortune, accepted the rationalists’ postulate of the possibility of complete proof, by virtue of which consistent sensationalism led in the person of Hume to inevitable scepticism. As Reichenbach considers, the new achievements of the natural sciences (non-Euclidean geometry, the theory of organic evolution, the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics) are freeing thought from the bonds of rationalism and leading to a conclusion about the unacceptability of the rigid determinism that rationalism had long been trying to drag into science.
p The development of logistic logic, Reichenbach claims, has shown that the whole apparatus of logic and mathematics that rationalism tried to impose on reality consists of tautologies and lacks factual content. It is necessary to see the way out in the fact that ’the problem of probability ... contains the nucleus of every theory of knowledge’.^^6^^ As one of 20 the critics of this conception has noted, growth of our knowledge means that we are passing to theories with decreasing probability rather than increasing (in the sense of a calculus of probability), so that high probability does not coincide with the goal of progress of knowledge.^^7^^
p In fact, the less probable the events predicted by a theory are, the more pithy it is. It is enough to compare two theories, one of which predicted that the average air temperature in Moscow in two years’ time would be—2°C, and the other that the temperature in Moscow would be—35°C on 12 January in two years’ time.
p In the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge, it should be noted, probability relations are given great importance, for they are treated as manifestations of the inner natural connections of phenomena (e.g. in the form of statistical regularities). When scholars who hold to dialectical materialism are working on problems of probability logic, they employ the valuable results that have been obtained by individual logical positivists in concrete fields of logical studies proper. But as for the philosophical interpretation of these results, logical positivism cannot overcome the narrow limits of empirical subjectivism. Since problems of probability are admitted to be the ‘nucleus’ of the theory of knowledge, and the relative frequency of observed events and degree of confirmation of statements are made the basis for establishing probability connections, the results of knowledge can only be reduced to the discovery of the outward succession of the events in time and space. The human mind proves doomed to skate about on the surface of events. But questions of whether it can reflect the general pattern of the development of the objects of knowledge, penetrate to the inner essence of things, and ’grasp^^1^^ the causal connections of phenomena, are declared to be ‘pseudo-problems’ of no scientific value. That point of view has led to a tendency to reject determinism, deny objective truth, and pass from relativism to agnosticism.
p The weakness of the positions of orthodox sensationalism had already been guessed by eighteenth century rationalists. Unlike the sensationalists they defended the proposition that the general character of concepts could not be deduced from an adding together of sense data. The intellect disposed of an additional faculty, apart from the concatenation of ‘sensa’, that enabled the mind to extract reliable knowledge of a universal and necessary character from 21 observed reality. But where did this ‘addition’ come from that gave reason a new quality in principle compared with feeling, if this quality did not exist in the sense data themselves? The rationalists counterposed their inherent faith in the omnipotence of reason not only to a narrow sensationalism but also to religious dogmas that declared the intervention of a supernatural creative force not amenable to rational explanation to be the source of man’s capacity for logical thought. The rationalists made no small contribution in the history of philosophy to the fight against various forms of irrationalism and religious mysticism.
p Having called in question the postulate of the direct intervention of the will of a divine creator in the cognitive process (which it was far from safe to do when a religious outlook predominated) and not being able to discover the basis in actual reality itself that would make it possible to unite the sensory and rational degrees of knowledge logically and equivalently, the rationalists could not, apparently come to any other conclusion than to explain the capacity for logical thought by an inherent capacity of the human mind itself that found expression in intellectual intuition. Just as the eyes see form, colour, etc., the mind, by-passing the data of sense organs, directly ‘grasps’ universal and necessary connections expressed in the logic of concepts. If sense experience also has a place in the mind’s direct judging of universal truths, it is simply as a kind of catalyst promoting manifestation of the logical schemes that are being examined by ’the eyes of reason’. This rupture between sensibility and rationality led to an antinomy of conceptions, and the origin of consciousness remained an open question. If a capacity for logical thought is given to man by nature, then why has nature endowed only man with this quality, and refused it to other members of the animate world?
p Absolutisation of the rational aspect of knowledge was reflected as well in various forms of objective idealism, which ‘found’ a way out of the difficulties by declaring that general concepts or universals underlay the universe. The problem of the origin of consciousness did not essentially arise here, because it was posited as an axiom that there was initially a consciousness in general, an Absolute Idea, a Cosmic Reason, etc.
p It is not out of place here to recall Hegel’s approach to this matter. From the general proposition he put forward, 22 expressed in the triad ’the Absolute Idea—Nature—Spirit or Absolute Reality’,^^8^^ it followed that consciousness in general, Consciousness with a capital C (Absolute Idea), was ‘materialised’ in Nature and by-passing through Nature was again ‘dematerialised’ in human consciousness. In The Phenomenology of Mind Hegel treated the genesis of human consciousness as the process of its becoming and development from elementary forms of sensation to the highest levels of theoretical thought. The problem of the antinomy of sensory knowledge and the logically highest level of knowledge was removed, as is generally characteristic of the conceptions of objective idealism, but in Hegel it was removed dialectically. The sensual was treated as the cause of the awakening of the mental or spiritual as a level of development of consciousness in general that contained not only isolated, concrete data in itself, but also something general that was already manifested at the level of perceptive consciousness in the form of as yet very ‘meagre’ abstractions. Because of his dialectical approach Hegel succeeded in ‘grasping’, though in an idealist form, certain essential aspects of man’s objectified activity, and in coming close to an explanation of his history as the result of his own labour. In starting from the mediated character of human activity, Hegel made a number of profound remarks about the qualitative difference between man’s thinking and the psychic activity of animals. He put forward, in particular, an important thesis about the ‘cunning’ of reason to pit the forces of nature against one another to realise set aims. Reason is as cunning as it is powerful.
p Cunning may be said to lie in the intermediative action which while it permits the objects to follow their own bent and act upon one another, till they waste away, and does not itself directly interfere in the process, is nevertheless only working out the execution of its own aims.^^9^^
p But the premises of objective idealism could not lead to solution of the problem of the relation of the sensory and the rational. Since Nature was declared the ‘other’ of the Absolute Idea, the principle of the identity of thought and being underlying Hegelian philosophy was essentially reduced to that of the identity of thought with itself, while the historical process of the origin and development of various levels of knowledge was interpreted as one of self-knowledge of the Absolute Idea by itself. Thus, in contrast to materialists, who considered sense images to be ‘copies’ of real 23 objects, the adherents of objective idealism declared objective reality itself to be the creation of some universal reason which was also contained from the very outset in sensation.
p That point of view was held by one of the last eminent advocates of rationalist idealism, Brand Blanshard, who tried (in the spirit of Hegel, but without Hegel’s dialectic) to substantiate the thesis that the object is nothing other than the fully realised idea. According to him, sensation already contained some repeated or universal element in itself, in its sources. If universals had not been present in experience from the outset they could not have appeared at more developed stages of the cognitive process; therefore there were already general concepts in the perceptions of animals. Without universals there could be no identification.
Being far from a dialectical materialist understanding of the origin of consciousness, Blanshard did not see the profound qualitative differences between the mechanisms of identification in the psyche of animals and the consciousness of men. The thesis about intellectual intuition advanced by early rationalists was developed in philosophical conceptions that found their logical completion in conclusions directly opposed to their intentions of confirming the power of reason. The founder of the phenomenological school, Edmund Husserl, and his disciples, for instance, starting from recognition of the impossibility of synthesising rational thought with sensory experience, tried to build a ‘pure’ logic of scientific knowledge by banishing sense data completely from the sphere of consciousness. Excessive concentration on’ the mind’s capacity for direct judgment of truth, typical of the early rationalists, led to conceptions of intuitionism and the associated attempts to bring subconscious factors to the fore in the cognitive process. One of the most famous representatives of the intuitionist interpretation of knowledge, Henri Bergson, considered man to be capable, thanks to intuition, of learning the secrets of being without any mediating link, even forms of the logical level of knowledge (reasoning, abstraction, generalisation). In his view mind directly contemplated mind in intuition without any intermediaries. In intuition there was an indivisible, and therefore 24 substantially continuous, flow of inner life. This contemplation, which can hardly be distinguished from the contemplated object of knowledge, is contiguous and almost coincident.For if we are really confined to transient particulars, then every judgement of recognition, every identification of anything, and in the last resort every perception, is a snare and a delusion.^^10^^
p One of the epistemological roots of idealism is the singling out and excessive inflation of some one aspect of the universal connection of phenomena. Materialists sharply criticise the adherents of intuitivism, but not because they, for their part, deny the existence of moments of intuition in the process of knowledge. The idealism of the intuitivists does not stem from the fact that they recognise the role of intuition, but from their absolutising of it, their effort to represent it in itself as the sole means of understanding truth. The essence of intuition is reduced, moreover, to a mystic capacity of the subject that is not rationally explicable, while the objective bases of its origin remain outside their ken.
p The existence of intuitive moments in thought was noted long ago in the past. The very fact of the protracted dispute between sensationalists and rationalists, and the difficulties associated with its resolution, witnessed to the qualitative difference between feeling and reason, surmised to some extent intuitively, and not capable of easy exposition in scientific terms. As Gustav Bergmann remarked (he was a member of the Vienna Circle at the beginning of his career), all sensible statements must be either analytical or empirical and synthetic. Truths that are related to facts cannot be outside experience (unexperienced) but analytical statements belong to the unexperienced. And though they are tautological, i.e. empty (in the sense of the existence of substance or content), there really is a difference between them and empirical statements. According to Bergmann, this difference, is grasped intuitively, and is not created or dreamed up by philosophers.^^11^^
p The failure of attempts at deducing rational thought directly from the aggregate of sense data led to the idea of a third link of some sort that would play the role of an intermediary in the transition from the sensory to the rational through a three-member formula ‘sensation—x—reason’. It was also remarked that discovery of this unknown middle link would be an important milestone in the history of philosophical rthought, capable of ending the incompatibility of the postulates of sensationalism and rationalism.
p The ideaTwas "first developed most clearly by Kant. He thought he’had succeeded in making a radical change in philosophy thanks to discovery of the unknown third term 25 of understanding. While giving their due to the Lockean sensationalists who tried to trace the process of the ascent from separate perceptions to general concepts, Kant affirmed that it was impossible to pass from the sensory to the rational in that way, and that
He expressed himself even more categorically against the possibility of deducing cognitive understanding from the principles of logic. Any attempt to employ the data of logica deduction of the pure a priori conceptions of course cannot be made in this way.... It is therefore manifest that there can only be a transcendental deduction of these conceptions, and by no means an empirical one; also that all attempts at an empirical deduction, in regard to pure a priori conceptions, are vain, and can only be made by one who does not understand the altogether peculiar nature of those conceptions.^^12^^
p as an instrument (organon) in order to extend and enlarge the range of our knowledge must end in mere prating; any one being able to maintain or oppose, with some appearance of truth, any single assertion whatever.^^13^^
p He also subjected the thesis of the existence of an intellectual intuition that comprehended truth directly, by-passing the sense organs, to well-founded criticism.
p Kant considered productive imagination, which generated a cognitive a priori synthesis, to be a third form of understanding, free of the one-sidedness of both empirical and rational knowledge, that made it possible at the same time to synthesise sense data. He made it the basis of the structure of his transcendental schema.
p Because every phenomenon contains a manifold content, diverse perceptions consequently are broken up in the mind properly considered and met as single details, so a connection is needed between them which cannot be in the faculty (sense) itself. We therefore have an active faculty (capacity) to synthesise these manifolds which we call imagination, and whose activity aimed directly at perception I eall apprehension.^^14^^
p When disclosing the process of ‘apprehension’ Kant found a place in it for the reproductive faculty of imagination and the associative connection of notions. But the content of his ‘apprehension’ differed radically from sensationalists’ conceptions of the formation of general concepts from an aggregate of sense data. General concepts, according to him, are formed through’the ordering’of’sense data in the human mind, which possesses a productiveffaculty of imagination, rather than through the direct building-up of sense data. 26 Because of the activity inherent in the mind, the final result of the formation of single and multiple perceptions in it differs qualitatively from the initial material because the sense perceptions are ordered according to certain rules given by a rational schema produced by the productive imagination, rather than as we wish them to be ordered. The multitude of scattered and isolated perceptions is thus reduced to a system and acquires unity in a determination of sensibility.
p Productive imagination supplies perception with images, but these images differ from direct sensual ones.
p The Schema is, in itself, always a mere product of the imagination. But as the synthesis of imagination has for its aim no single intuition, but merely unity in the determination of sensibility, the schema is clearly distinguishable from the image. Thus, if I place five points one after another ... this is an image of the number five. On the other hand, if I only think a number in general, which may be either five or a hundred, this thought is rather the representation of a method of representing in an image a sum (e.g. a thousand) in conformity with a conception, than the image itself, an image which I should find some little difficulty in reviewing and comparing with the conception.^^16^^
p The activity of the productive imagination is the source of the ‘additional’ property that general concepts—- categories—possess, in contrast to the unique and differing data of sense experience.
p On the other hand Kant’s ‘apprehension’ also differs in principle from rationalists’ notions of intellectual intuition. Productive imagination ‘grasps’ the general in phenomena, not through the mind’s direct consideration of general patterns, by-passing the sense organs; on the contrary the activity of the imagination works, as it were, on sense data, putting them into order.
p The thesis of the role of imagination in the process of understanding, when interpreted materialistically, is given deep content. Soviet philosophers and psychologists working in the field of analysis of the forms of understanding have often turned in recent times to clarification of the place and role of imagination in the cognitive process. The results obtained thereby have become so generally accepted that a description of imagination as a relatively independent form of understanding has begun to appear in textbooks on dialectical materialism on an equal footing with description of the traditionally known forms of sensory knowledge (judgments, perceptions, representations).
27p The weakness of the premisses of Kant’s philosophical system did not allow him to disclose the real reason for the transition from sensory knowledge to logical understanding. He himself understood that substantiation of the role of productive imagination as the third link connecting the sensory and the rational required an answer to several questions. We shall touch on two of them. How is a synthesis of the sensory, ‘apprehended’ by the imagination, and the transition thereby from the sensory to the rational, possible if there are no general concepts in the sense data, i.e. categories, and categories are not reducible to an aggregate of sense data? Where is the source of the formation of this faculty of the mind that is called productive imagination?
p Kant thought a satisfactory answer to the first question was possible if there were a mediating representation that was homogeneous with categories on the one hand and sense data (phenomena) on the other.
p It is quite clear that there must be some third thing, which on the one side is homogeneous with the category, and with the phenomenon on the other.... This mediating representation must be pure (without any empirical content), and yet must on the one side be intellectual, on the other sensuous.™
p Underlying his transcendental schema (which, Kant thought, was this intermediate link) there was the representation of time and space. Kant understood time ’as pure inner contemplation’.^^17^^ As for space, it ’is merely a pure form of the phenomena of external sense’,^^18^^ ’for the external sense the pure image of all quantities (quantorum) is space’.19 According to him, inner feeling and external sensation were not equivalent. Preference was given to inner feeling, by means of which the subject in fact comprehended itself insofar as it operated internally on itself. His thesis about the inner activity or self-activity of the subject, as the source of productive imagination, was associated with the leading role of representations of time as ’the pure image of all objects of sense in general’.^^20^^
p The thesis that representations of time and space have a most important place in the shaping of thought, in its materialist interpretation, is very profound. A time link between conditioned stimuli and unconditioned reflexes, accompanied with reinforcement, already inherent in animals at the level of sensory reflection of reality, in fact underlies the development of animals’ complex conditioned-reflex behaviour. But Kant himself interpreted representations of time and space 28 from subjective idealist positions remote from their recognition as forms of existence of objective reality.
p Since the mediating form of understanding that bridges lit sensory and rational levels was a purely subjective property of mind itself (in Kant’s view), it was a faculty of productive imagination, and the latter had to do with unmediated sense data that in turn became facts of consciousness, understanding (knowledge) did not and could not go beyond the limits of the world of phenomena. The universality and necessity proper to categories therefore did not reflect an objectively existing inner connection of phenomena. In Kant’s view active, creative role of understanding was not that men understood objective laws that did not depend on their consciousness, and employed them to transform the objective world in their practical activity, but that consciousness itself created laws (patterns) at its own discretion and prescribed them to nature.
p Consequently we ourselves import the order and regularity into phenomena that we call Nature, and they also cannot be found in phenomena unless we or the nature of our mind has originally put them there.^^21^^
p Kant considered consciousness and the objective world to be separated by an impenetrable barrier, beyond which consciousness could not, in principle, go. If it could be admitted that this barrier were in any way surmountable, the capacity to do so belonged to faith rather than consciousness. The supersensitive ‘dawning’ by which faith ‘apprehended’ the essence of the ‘thing-in-itself’ that lay on the other side of the wall that consciousness could not penetrate was logically inexplicable, and therefore could not be classed as the subject-matter of science. As Kant himself remarked, he had to limit knowledge so as to free room for faith. As for the source of the productive faculty of imagination, he found no other answer than the assumption that it preceded any empirical understanding and was given a priori.
p Despite his conviction that he had succeeded in solving the connection between sensation and reason through discovery of the productive faculty of imagination (a problem that his predecessors had struggled with unsuccessfully), Kant did not even try to explain the origin of this faculty, considering it an innate property of the human mind. Furthermore, he expressed himself extremely pessimistically (in accordance with his conclusions about the unknowability of the ‘thing-in-itself’) about the possibility of the 29 mechanism of the faculty of forming general concepts, and working with them, being discovered at any time in the future.
p This schematism of our understanding in regard to phenomena and their mere form, is an art, hidden in the depths of the human soul, whose true modes of action we shall only with difficulty discover and unveil.^^22^^
p We have dwelt on the Kantian solution of the relation between the sensory and the rational in such detail because several of Kant’s theses, which have still not lost their topicality, can be employed when we investigate the really complex mechanism of the transition from the sensory level of knowledge to conceptual thought, and so prove useful for further analysis of the problem we are discussing. We must allow, moreover, that the Kantian conception is often employed by today’s philosophical schools in the main to construct subjective idealist schemes in epistemology and psychology (that is an essential feature of most neokantians’ turn ’to the right’ from Kant). A critical rethinking of the Kantian heritage has therefore not lost its significance for disclosing the gnosiological roots of the latest trends of idealism now reflected in the form of ‘realism’.
p Kant’s idea of the need to introduce a third link determining the transition from sensory to rational knowledge was quite justified in its most general form. It is not fortuitous that many philosophers who do not go to the extremes of nominalism, solipsism, and idealist ‘realism’ of a Platonic hue, have turned to this idea. The famous English philosopher Bertrand Russell, for example, made several attempts to eliminate the contradiction between propositions affirming, on the one hand, that sense data are the sole source of our knowledge of the world, and on the other hand that our knowledge contains information about unperceived objects outside sensory experience. In his search for a satisfactory solution of this problem, moreover, he changed his point of view several times, passing from positions close to Berkeleianism to Humism, and then to a natural materialism. The range of his wavering between these extremes was indirect evidence, in fact, of the difficulties of coping with the problems posed. When summing up his unsuccessful attempts to deduce the process of understanding simply from sense data, Bertrand Russell remarked that he had previously limited himself too much to the verifiable and that the attempt to construct knowledge in terms of perception was ultimately simply an attempt to develop a certain technical hypothesis.^^23^^
30p Russell hoped to find the way out of the situation (when he moved away from Berkeleianism and Machism) by introducing some reliable principle of induction that would help ‘unite’ sense data and knowledge of objects that lay beyond direct observation. Back in the initial period of his work he had assumed that intuition and instinct must have a certain role in substantiating induction. Not seeing any possibility of disclosing the nature of his reliable principle of induction, he limited himself in the end to listing several postulates that (in his opinion) underlay the process of knowledge, but which were neither empirical nor logical ( quasipermanence, separable causal lines, space-temporal continuity in causal lines, common causal origin of similar structures, analogy). The real grounds for accepting them were deeply rooted, according to him, in the fact that they seemed inescapable, and that people had a propensity to rely on them.^^24^^
p Rudolf Garnap also attempted to find third links mediating between the sensory and rational level of understanding. In his original phenomenalistic analysis he suggested that the middle link that made it possible to ‘join’ sense experience and logical thought was a relation of similarity in memory. In Der logische Aufbau der Welt he wrote that, since sense experience could not in itself be included in the logical system, there must be a relation expressible in terms of experience and at the same time suitable for the purposes of logic. This relation was that of resemblance in memory, which consisted in a close resemblance of remembered elements of experience. The whole system of knowledge and analysis that substantiated it was based on this relation.25 The singling out of a relation of resemblance in memory enabled each more complex judgment to be analysed in terms of more elementary ones, until it was reduced to the basic relation of resemblance in memory.
p The scheme of the origin of categories from sense data proposed by Carnap thus lay in the common stream of associationist attempts to identify categories with the invariant that is fixed in memory as a result of repeated observations. These attempts, as we noted before, ended in an impasse of ‘bad’ infinity, so that Carnap decided it would be better to abandon them. At the same time, however, he also had to abandon the universals themselves as general concepts that could reflect the necessary link between objective processes. True, he revised many of his earlier views not long before 31 his death, and began to share views of the existence of material objects (including unobservable ones) as the basis for constructs of logical systems that were close to a materialist understanding of the world.
p Adherents of the hypothetical-deductive method deduce the role of a link that enables them to overcome the incompatibility of the postulates in sensationalism and rationalism from a special faculty of the knowing subject that can be called the faculty of advancing hypotheses. This faculty has a certain resemblance to the Kantian productive imagination, being a faculty of creating assumptions about the forms of connection in some ordered whole of various observed phenomena. These forms of connection themselves, moreover, go beyond direct sense experience; they are not observed, but are ’dreamed up’ by the subject of knowledge. But after they have taken shape in the subject’s head they can be confirmed (or refuted) by subsequent observations and experiments.
p One of the fathers of pragmatism, Charles Peirce, pointed out the importance in the development of knowledge of ’qualitative induction’, which consists in a process of bringing forward hypotheses and selecting them according to certain criteria (abduction), and a process of experimental testing, and rejection of those that do not stand up to the test (retroduction). The suggestion that hypotheses have a certain meaning (significance) in the growth of knowledge was later developed by many spokesmen of Western thought. The eminent American pragmatist’John Dewey, for example, considered that hypothetical judgments presented a possibility of getting out of the situations of discrepancy or difficulty apprehended during experiment. According to him, a hypothesis
The birth of a hypothesis defies control and involvesinvolves a leap, a jump, the propriety of which cannot be absolutely warranted in advance, no matter what precautions be taken.^^26^^
p the formation of habits of mind which are at once enterprising and cautious ..., the selection and arrangement of the particular facts.^^27^^
p Dewey’s thesis about the ‘jump-like’ transition from the sensory level of knowledge to the rational through hypotheses is not evidence of a dialectical approach on his part 32 to the solution of this problem. The solution does not consist, in principle, in explaining the passage from sensation to reason as the result of an inexplicable leap (a spasmodic transition to a new quality actually must take place), but in disclosing the objective criteria of this qualitative transition, showing its necessity, and explaining the nature of the mechanism of its operation that leads, by virtue of objective causes, precisely to that result and not some other. But Dewey did not manage to do that.
p Dewey tried to dissociate himself from the extreme subjective idealist conceptions that reduce knowledge to purely psychological processes. He pointed out that biological factors in man’s adaptation to his environment played a certain role in the process of understanding, and that certain logical operations included physical activity and called for the use of material instruments (e.g. microscopes and balances in a scientific experiment). The general premises and conclusions from his instrumentalism were nevertheless evidence that his conception did not go beyond the form of idealism represented by ‘neutral’ monism. Dewey considered the various forms of knowledge as instruments by which certain vague, unsatisfactory situations were transformed into definite, satisfactory ones. When that idea is given a materialist interpretation it is valuable, but it had a subjectively idealist sense to Dewey, since he considered the object of knowledge to be generated by the act of knowing itself. According to him the object of knowledge was ’ subjectmatter so far as it has been produced and ordered in settled form by means of inquiry’. The objects themselves were never simply given, but were manifested in experience only as ’the objectives of inquiry’.^^28^^
p The faculty of the subject of understanding to generate and order the objects of inquiry (productive imagination, ability to put forward original hypotheses, etc.) began to attract more and more attention insofar as epistemologists’ interest was shifted from problems of the logical substantiation of already available, ready-made knowledge to the discovery of patterns (laws) of creative thought that generate knowledge. There was thus, perhaps, a tendency to exaggerate this faculty (just as the sensationalists and rationalists exhibited an inclination in their day, each in his own way, to absolutise the role either of sense observations or of intelligent judgements). We must note that although Kant allotted an important place to productive imagination in 33 the process of understanding, he limited its place (as we have already shown) to the role of the middle link that made it possible to bridge the gap between the sensory and rational aspects of understanding. He repeatedly warned against those fruits of the unrestrained play of imagination that can grow in complete isolation from the soil of experiment and the requirements of reason. He remarked in a letter that only those statements are meaningful for a scientist that lie can always repeat in experiments, while the ignoramus
He expressed himself even more categorically in another letter, remarking that imagination destroyed itself by its arbitrary action, degenerating into downright insanity;collects results that may well have been wholly generated from the imagination whether of the observer or of the observed person, and therefore cannot be subjected to a real experiment.^^29^^
In his day it could hardly be supposed that a time would come when some eminent natural scientists would not only be favourably disposed to putting forward ‘crazy’ ideas, but would also complain that lack of such ideas was holding back the growth of scientific knowledge.when the imagination is no longer controlled by reason and even conversely tries to enslave the latter, man falls from the state (sphere) of humanity to that of dreams and fantasies.^^30^^
p A striving to regard understanding as a process of the growth of knowledge (which has its own history) is typical in particular of spokesmen of scientific realism, which arose in the 1950s (Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, and others). Without going into the particulars of this doctrine, let us dwell only on the aspect of it that relates to the problems of the ’middle link’ in the passage from sensory to rational knowledge. In contrast to traditional episternology these problems are considered now through the prism of the interconnection of the empirical and theoretical levels of understanding. It can, however, be rioted that this point of view could not eliminate the ‘blanks’ left from the unresolved problems of the past. The non- inferability of theoretical knowledge from empirical knowledge and the irreducibility of the former to the latter, have become no less a stumbling-block to explanation of the mechanism of the rise of new knowledge than the incompatibility of the initial postulates of sensationalism and rationalism that tormented thinkers of the past.
34p An attempt has been made, moreover, to get around the ’tragic dualism’ of the sensory and the rational, the empirical and the theoretical, by turning neopositive precepts ’inside out’. If the truth of general concepts and universals cannot be veriiied in fact by the data of observations, however far their finite series is extended (stretching to ‘bad’ infinity), a single observation is often sufficient to doubt their truth. For however often we have observed white swans, it is sufficient to see just one black one in order to find the falseness of the statement that ’all swans are white’. The question arises whether, having rejected the inductivist principle of verification, it is possible to affirm the principle of falsification in its place as the criterion for confirming the scientific importance of a theory, i.e. its refutation by just one empirically established or hypothetically possible fact. In that case the centre of gravity in explaining the pattern of growth of scientific knowledge is shifted to elimination of the old theory so as to make room for the new. But every new theory can only claim to be scientific when it in turn presents possibilities for its refutation. Every new theory must thus share the fate of the old one.
p With that approach the growth of scientific knowledge looks like a chain of successive theories each of which is ultimately proved false. Properly speaking, they cannot even be called theories, if by such we understand some logically strict system of reliable knowledge. So we are concerned with systems of hypothetical knowledge, i.e. hypotheses.
p Karl Popper took such a turn toward absolutising the hypothetical character of scientific knowledge. From his standpoint the development of scientific knowledge, being a process of the constant succession of hypothetical constructs, leads to the posing of ever more complex and refined problems. These constructs (for Popper, theories) are, as it were, a network (comparable in some respects with Kant’s rational schema), that is cast onto the world so as ’to rationalise, to explain, and to master it’. And for that ’we endeavour to make the mesh ever finer and finer’.^^31^^
p The opposition of the data of sensory experience and logical thought, of empirical fact and theoretical construct, seems thus to be overcome insofar as all empirical facts are ’theoretically loaded’ (in the same way as Kant’s mediating representation was on the one hand intellectual and on the other sensory).
35p As Popper himself wrote:
p My point (if view is, briefly, that our ordinary language is full of theories; that observation is always observation in the light of theories; and that it is only the inductivist prejudice which leads people to think that there could be a phenomenal language, free of theories, and distinguishable from a ’ theoretical language’.^^32^^
p Many examples can be taken from the history of science, of course, when a fact became observable only after its existence had been forecast by a theory (genes in biology, the neutrino in physics, etc.). But that is scarcely grounds for saying that these facts, or the events manifested in them, only exist in imagination and the language of theorists.
p Exaggeration of the role of productive imagination, and of the faculty to construct bold hypotheses, led in the final analysis to the conception of methodological anarchism. This faculty began to be treated no longer as the link that made it possible to connect the sensory and the rational, the empirical and the theoretical, but as something in which this opposition was dissolved rather than absorbed. Not only the difference between theory and fact but also that between science and myths disappears, as is typical of the conception of the American philosopher Paul Feyerabend. The scientist operates outside any rules of the rational whatsoever, but himself ’by his actions constitutes rationality’.
p A scientist is an inventor not only of theories but also of facts, standards, forms of rationality, in a word, an inventor of entire forms of life.^^33^^
p According to Feyerabend, the process of understanding is directed by a passion that
p gives rise to specific behaviour which in turn creates the circumstances and the ideas necessary for analysing and explaining the process, for making it ‘rational’.^^34^^
p We are far from denying the significance of emotion in the creative endeavour of the scientist or from not seeing a common element in mythological and logical thinking, but we shall try to show later that the key to the complex problems of the interconnection of the various aspects of cognitive activity lies in the monistic methodology of dialectical materialism rather than in subjective conceptions in general and methodological anarchism in particular.
p Thus the idea, profound in its posing, that if conceptual thought cannot be directly deduced from sense experience, some third link must be sought that would lead to the 36 transition from the sensory to the rational, could not find satisfactory solution in the conceptions considered above. We may also note that, inspito of the modifications in the treatment of the nature of this sought-after link, the conceptions that recognise the expediency of introducing it as an intermediary between sensibilia and universals have something in common.
p (1) The attitude of the knowing subject to the object of knowledge is treated as their direct link in the classical dyadic subject-object scheme. The separate attempts to introduce such objects as the instruments used in understanding as the middle link between subject and object were not developed in these conceptions.
p (2) The transition from sense perceptions to logical thought is treated exclusively as the product of the individual’s subjective cognitive faculty, whatever name is given to it (productive faculty of imagination, faculty of making hypotheses, similarity in memory, etc.).
p (3) It is recognised that the knowing subject is linked with the object of knowledge through his sense organs. This link is a direct one since the sense organs are an integral part of the knowing subject. Even if it is assumed that sense data play the role of intermediary between logical thought and the object of knowledge, the general formula of a direct link between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge is not altered thereby, because the difference between feeling and reason is traced only within the knowing subject.
p Each of the theses considered above contains a pointer to some aspect of the cognitive process that may really be present in certain cognitive acts. Nevertheless, they lead, when taken in isolation from the general patterns of the development of knowledge, into a labyrinth from which there is no way out.
p In fact, when the basis for differentiating the sensory and rational levels of knowledge is found only within the subject of knowledge we may conclude that we are capable of knowing only our own sensations. The subject’s capacity to create general concepts from single and isolated sense data is thus treated as a mystic, incomprehensible faculty whose source is not amenable to rational explanation.
p On the other hand, the thesis that, although the knowing subject deals only with his own sensations, but is at the same time linked through them with the object of 37 understanding, seems to make it possible to get out of the blind alley of solipsism. But since the subject’s link with the object is thereby reduced simply to a direct connection, another difficulty arises that also seems insuperable. The organism’s direct, unmediated link with the environment, taken by itself, excludes any possibility of ‘grasping’ the inner patterns, hidden from the sense organs of the course of objective processes. If we even grant that our sense organs are capable of directly ‘grasping’ the inner links of the objects of observation, we could not perceive them as anything distinct from the directly observed phenomena themselves.
p Such an assumption leads to obvious paradoxes. Some hypothetical subject, while possessing a faculty of perceiving inner patterns directly (whether, it is called intellectual intuition, productive imagination, or what have you), might have perceived the law of universal gravitation from observing the starry heavens. But in that case Sir Isaac Newton’s famous formulation of this law would have been indistinguishable from the visible movement of the ’planets. As Hegel remarked, the laws of celestial mechanics are not traced in the heavens. To discover the law of universal gravitation it took an immense expenditure of theoretical thought over the lifetime of many generations, before it was finally formulated as a mathematical equation that had no apparent similarity to the sense-perceived distribution of the planets.
p The paradoxicalness of the assumption of a capacity to ‘grasp’ objective laws of nature independent of consciousness, by direct sensory perception, was already quite clear to Kant. But as it was also clear to him that we have no other channels of connection with the world around us than the data of the sense organs, he found no other way out (as we have already said) than to admit the inknowability in principle of ’the thing-in-itself.
p Attempts to introduce a three-term relation ’ sensations—reason’ were thus limited by this relation’s being irremovable from the inner world of the subject of perception. As for the subject’s relation to his environment, it boils down to his direct connection with the perceived object according to the classical ‘subject-object’ scheme.
p The holders of metaphysical and idealist conceptions^who tried to link sensibilia with universals by introducing an intermediate link started from an unhistorical approach 38 to the connection between the sensory and the rational. The question of the transition from sensory reflection of reality to a rational one as a process of the rise of consciousness during the evolution of life remained outside their field of view. They considered consciousness as formed, and already containing a difference between the sensory and rational aspects. Accordingly, the mediating representation (Kant’s productive imagination, for example) was treated in the form of a ‘link’ between the sensory and rational inherent in man from birth, and given to him a priori.
p Soviet philosophers and psychologists have paid much attention to the epistemological analysis of sense perception and its relation to rational knowledge. ^^36^^ Some have substantiated the thesis that the gnosiological relations expressed in the classical dyad ‘subject-object’ suffers from several essential shortcomings. This scheme has been subjected to well-founded criticism, in particular, in the work of A. N. Leontiev and K. R. Megrelidze.^^36^^
p We are going to discuss in greater detail the point that the ‘subject-object’ relation reveals its limitation in the light of the fundamental propositions of dialectical materialism, which makes it doubtful that it can be used to analyse the transition from the sensory reflection to the rational. But insofar as we are concerned with precisely that aspect of the problem, it is convenient to cite some of the conclusions here of authors who are critical of this dyad. In Leontiev’s work it has been substantiated that a three-member relation, i.e. ‘subject-activity-object’, is typical of man’s connection with his environment, rather than a two-member one, the subject’s activity thus being interpreted as a ’ system with its own structure, inner transition and transformation, and development’, rather than as a reaction or aggregate of reactions.^^37^^
p According to Leontiev human activity does not exist in any other form than as an act or series of acts, although both these concepts reflect realities that are not coincident. The difference he draws between the concept of acts (or actions) pertaining to ends or goals, and the concept of operations that relate to conditions, is a real one. It is the fate of the latter that they sooner or later become the functions of machines and automata, dropping out of man’s activity.
The needs of the members of the labour collective are met by a share of the product of their joint labour, which is distributed in accordance with the social relations arising. In that connection Leontiev made the very important (in our view) suggestion thatThe simplest technical division of labour must lead to the introduction of, as it were, intermediate, partial results, which 39 are achieved by the separate participants in collective labour, but which are incapable in themselves of satisfying their needs.^^38^^
p this ‘intermediate’ result, to which man’s labour processes are subordinated must also be singled out for him subjectively, in the form of a representation. That is also the singling out of the goal which, in Marx’s expression, ’gives the law to his modus operand!’.^^39^^
p We would quote another passage from Leontiev’s writings:
p ‘Subject-activity-object’ transitions form a circular movement as it were.... But it is not at all movement in a closed circle. The circle is open, and it is opened preeisely by sensory- practical activity itself.^^40^^
p Megrelidze has suggested that labour and society, while mutually conditioning each other, represent a circular, closed formation, and that
p a certain ‘centre’ (focus) is distinguishable in the content of consciousness, from which and around which the whole field of consciousness is built as a mutually related, closed whole.^^41^^
p Starting from the idea that the decisive factor in the transition frorn the direct sensory reflection inherent in animals to man’s cognitive thought is labour, he singled out the role of the product of labour in particular as the material intermediary in relations between ’the subject and nature, and between the subject and other subjects’.^^42^^
p Citing Karl Marx, Megrelidze put forward the idea that
p the instrument of labour (tool) as an external object rationally organised by man, who makes it the means of his activity, increases man’s strength and extends his individuality far beyond his physiological limits.^^43^^
p Tools are a special product of labour. Their specific feature is that, while the product of labour, a result of the labour process, they are at the same time involved in the labour process itself, entering it not simply as the product but in certain respects as the producer element. In the scheme ’man—tool—object of labour’ the middle link is that element of the labour process without which material production is inconceivable in human society.
p The sensory reflection of reality inherent in man’s animal ancestors preceded the origin of rational reflection in time. 40 The latter, while a higher stage of reflection, could not help being genetically linked with the first stage. But since a direct link between these two stages cannot be substantiated, and the thesis of the existence of a mediating representation is put forward, it must be assumed that the middle link, in order to perform its connecting role, has to be linked with both the sensory (sensibilia) and the rational ( universals). In that case the mediating representation must consequently have an internally contradictory, dual character. If it is taken as a subjective picture or reflection of objective events, then a determinant condition for its rise must have been the development of an objective determinant perceived on the one hand at the sensory level, while sense perception, on the other hand, must already have been inadequate for a psychic reflection of its features, which went beyond the possibilities of direct sense perception. In other words, the objective determinant must also have a dual, contradictory character. The problem of the mediating representation is thus based on the broader one of the origin of consciousness.
p Before we can answer what is the mechanism of the transition from sense perception to abstract thought inherent in man as a formed rational being, we must discover the patterns of the natural, historical transition from direct sense reflection of reality by man’s animal ancestors to its mediated rational reflection in the head of Homo sapiens. That faces us, it the first place, with the necessity to consider certain features of the reflection of reality at the level genetically preceding the origin of consciousness, i.e. at the level of the sensory world of animals (to which our next chapter will be devoted).
p Notes to Chapter 1
p ^^1^^ In order to avoid terminological confusion we would specify, that, for stylistic considerations, we shall make equivalent use of the various terms that mean respectively ‘sensory’ or ‘rational’, so long as no need arises in the course of the exposition to differentiate them. The expedience of this assumption is suggested as well by the fact that the authors of several of the philosophical conceptions examined here employed various pairs of terms (sensory-rational, sensation-reason, sensibilia-universalia, 41 etc.) to signify the two aspects (degrees) of knowledge mentioned.
p As for the terms ‘degree’ and ‘aspect’, they also have a different sense content. Without dwelling on this specially, we would simply note that the term ‘degree’ indicates varying levels of knowledge, the existence of a transition from the sensory to the rational, while the term ‘aspect’ is used more often when examining ‘formed’, i.e. developed knowledge that already contains qualitatively different moments of the sensory and the rational.
p ^^2^^ V. I. Lenin. Materialism and Empiric-Criticism, (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977), p. 111.
p ^^3^^ Ibid., p. 282.
p ^^4^^ By ‘metaphysics’ and ’metaphysical method’ is meant in Marxist-Leninist philosophy a way of thinking incapable of grasping the dialectical contradiction of development of the objective world and of the process of knowledge itself. Most Western philosophers adopting ‘realist’ positions in their positivist interpretation also oppose metaphysics, understanding by it any system of knowledge that declines to reduce the objective world to a complex of the subject’s observations. From the standpoint of materialist dialectics the holders of these conceptions of subjectiveidealist ‘realism’ can be justifiably classed as metaphysicists; they cannot cope with the task of constructing uncontradictory epistemological conceptions because a denial of the dialectical contradictoriness" of the object world, which exists independently of the set of subjective sensations, underlies them.
p ^^5^^ See Rudolf Carnap. Logical Foundations of Probability (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1950), p. 199.
p ^^6^^ Hans Reichenbach. The Theory of Probability (University of California Press. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1949), p. V.
p ^^7^^ See Karl R. Popper. Conjectures and Refutations. The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (Harper and Row, New York, 1965).
p ^^8^^ See Hegel’s Science of Logic, translated by W. H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers (Allen & Unwin, London, 1929), Table of Categories, facing p. 24.
p ^^9^^ Hegel’s Logic, being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Translated by William Wallace (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982), pp. 272-273.
42p ^^10^^ Brand Blanshard. The Nature of Thought, Vol. 1 (The Macmillan Co., New York, 1940), p. 62.
p ^^11^^ Gustav Bergmarm. The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism (Longman, Green & Co., London, 1954), p. 45.
p ^^12^^ Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by J.M.D. Meiklejohn (J.M. Dent & Sons, London, 1934), p. 87.
p ^^13^^ Ibid., p. 69.
p ^^14^^ Immanuel Kant. Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Verlag von Felix Meiner, Hamburg, 1956), p. 176A.
p ^^15^^ Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 118-119.
p ^^16^^ Ibid., p. 117.
p ^^17^^ Immanuel Kant. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 181A.
p ^^18^^ Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 106.
p ^^19^^ Ibid., p. 120.
p ^^20^^ Ibid.
p ^^21^^ Immanuel Kant. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 184A.
p ^^22^^ Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 119.
p ^^23^^ P.A. Schilpp. The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell ( Northwestern U.P., Evanston, 111., 1944), p. 718.
p ^^24^^ See Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge. Its Scope and Limits (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1948), p. 488.
p ^^25^^ See Rudolf Carnap. Der logische Aufbau der Welt ( Weltkreis-Verlag, Berlin, 1928), p. 72.
p ^^26^^ John Dewey. How We Think (Heath & Co., Boston, Mass., 1910), p. 75.
p ^^27^^ Ibid.
p ^^28^^ John Dewey. Logic. The Theory of Inquiry (Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1938), p. 119.
p ^^29^^ Kant’s Briefwechsel, Vol. 2 (1789-1794). (Verlag von Georg Reimer, Berlin, 1900), p. 140.
p ^^30^^ Immanuel Kant an Alexander Fiirst von Beloselsky ( Sommer 1792). Traktaty i pis’ma (Nauka, Moscow, 1980), p. 633.
p ^^31^^ Karl R. Popper. The Logic of Scientific Discovery ( Hutchinson, London, 1959), p. 59.
p ^^32^^ Ibid.
p ^^33^^ Paul K. Feyerabend. From Incompetent Professionalism to Professionalized Incompetence—the Rise of a New Breed of Intellectuals. In Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 1978, 8, 1: 43-44.
p ^^34^^ Paul K. Feyerabend. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (New Left Books, London, 1975), p. 26.
43p ^^35^^ A survey of the state of development of this problem in the Soviet literature will be found in particular in the article ’Lenin’s Theory of Reflection’ by A. M. Korshunov, Yu. A. Dorodnykh, V.S. Evdokimov, and V.V. Mantatov in Filosofskie nauki, 1973, 6.
p ^^36^^ See A.N. Leontiev. Problems of the Development of the Mind (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1981); idem. The Problem of Activity in Psychology, Voprosy filosofii, 1972, 9: 95- 108; idem. Activity and Consciousness, Voprosy filosofii, 1972, 12: 129-140; K.R. Megrelidze, Osnovnye problemy sotsiologii myshleniya (Basic Problems of the Sociology of Thought), Tbilisi, 1973.
p ^^37^^ A.N. Leontiev. The Problem of Activity in Psychology, Voprosy filosofii, 1972, 9: 98.
p ^^38^^ Ibid., p. 104.
p ^^39^^ Ibid.; Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1. Translated by S. Moore and E. Aveling (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1974), p. 174.
p ^^40^^ A N. Leontiev. Activity and Consciousness, Voprosy filosofii, 1972, 12: 130.
p ^^41^^ K.R. Megrelidze. Op. cit., pp. 49-51, 115.
p ^^42^^ Ibid., p. 101.
Notes
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