It is neither practical nor necessary to address all of the theoretical problems just raised in connection with the various uses of the word ‘sensation’ as it applies to individuating and counting senses. Certainly, several important
abstract things from the more concrete things. It is a complete mistake to ask how concrete particular fact can be built up out of universals. The answer is, ‘In no way.’ [. . . ] In other words, philosophy is explanatory of abstraction, and not of concreteness”. Whitehead (1960, p. 30).
34“When a quality is thought about as a distinct object, it is said to be thoughtabstractly, and is called an abstraction; and nouns formed from adjectives and expressive of such ab- stractions are calledabstractnouns. It is a great blunder in logic to confound abstraction in this sense with the operation of precision, or separation in supposition. Many thinkers speak of “mere” abstractions, implying some degree of contempt. But thinking abstractly, in the sense of isolating characters and thinking them as distinct objects is the only way to think clearly and efficiently”; Ransdell (nd, p. 10), emphasis original.
questions arise: the problem of consciousness, the problem of intentionality and the ontological status of subjective experience to name just three. However, in seeking a source for the worries about sensations in accounts of subjective experience, the worries and qualms reflected in efforts to select out objective components in that experience, it is again useful to seek clarity by considering the traditional count.
The direct relevance of these efforts to separate the subjective from the ob- jective, or the private from the public, in the individuation and enumeration of the senses has already been shown, and the difficulties introduced by the realisation that in our apprehension the primary qualities are no less sensory and relational than secondary qualities have been covered in some detail. The traditional count of senses has been faulted in that it neglected bodily sensa- tions and feelings in favour of attending mainly to external objects. What is lost in this is the unity of experience, as if a simple division between the em- bodied perceiver and the external world could be made with the proviso that the body belongs to the individual, and experience of it is therefore private and subjective in the sense that the experience also belongs exclusively to that one subject, whereas experience of other objects, apart from the body, sub- sists in an objective space accessible to other perceivers. There is admittedly a wisdom in this separation because it reflects the special value of the body to the individual, but this valuation must be nuanced and moderated by the recognition that the body removed from its nourishing environment is of no value at all.
If the division of the perceiver from the surrounding world could remain unselfconscious, then one might envisage that separating the subjective and objective realms in experience could be as simple as making a division at the skin. But the first step beyond a naive captivation by the phenomena comes in the noticing which attends self-conscious knowing, the noticing by the perceiver that they play a role in what arises in experience, that it is just this individual ‘I’ who is perceiving the world, and where this subject is and what the subject does matters. This can quickly lead to the thought that all experience is private. As Lichtenberg so provocatively put it, “not only is the rainbow different which each of us sees, but each of us sees a different object and a different sentence”.36 The motivating example is beautifully chosen since
the apparent position of a rainbow does in fact depend on the location of the observer, and to ask where the rainbow is if there are many observers, or none, quickly generates conundrums.
The apparent privacy of all experience which follows from the recognition that we cannot quite step into each other’s shoes when we need to deal with objects is made more acute by the necessity to attend to and to judge the objects which we deal with. Attention and judgement come with failures to notice and misjudging. Sceptical concerns then closely follow. It is surely this, the unpleasantness of being mistaken, that underlies efforts to redraw a line around what is true, objective and real, and to separate it from the deceptive, illusory and idiosyncratic, and to devise methods whereby the boundary can be maintained. As soon as all subjective experience has been seen to be private, the need to recover some objectivity becomes urgent.
It is the characterisation of subjective experience and its sensations as private that is the source of doubts about the epistemic value and status of sensations. If our senses reach only as far as the boundary between the private and public, and if we cannot shift this boundary by insisting that we somehow have access to the regions which lie beyond it, or can burrow through it into a world of objective abstract relations and ideas by giving sensations not just a phenomenal feel but also a representational content, then the problem which Reid identified as central to the debate—that we perceive nothing but our own sensations—has no solution and we are faced with the sceptic’s triumph. We have already examined Reid’s solution based on primary and secondary qualities, a path apparently destined to lead to a multiplication of increasingly abstract yet conflicting constructions. But there is an alternative, which be- comes apparent as soon as we realise that the boundary between the perceiver and the world was badly drawn in the first place.