contributes to bringing about the action.
In the light of these remarks it is clear that if observation reports are construed as actions, if their correctness is interpreted as the correctness of an action, and if the authority of an observation report is construed as the fact that making it is ‘following a rule’ in the proper sense of this phrase, then we are face to face with givenness in its most straightforward form. For these stipulations commit one to the idea that the authority of Konstatierungen rests on nonverbal episodes of awareness – awareness that something is the case, e.g. that this is green – which nonverbal episodes have an intrinsic authority (they are, so to speak, ‘self-authenticating’) which the verbal performances (the Konstatierungen) properly performed ‘express’. One is committed to a stratum of authoritative nonverbal episodes (‘awareness’) the authority of which accrues to a superstructure of verbal actions, provided that the expressions occurring in these actions are properly used. These self-authenticating episodes would constitute the tortoise on which stands the elephant on which rests the edifice of empirical knowledge …
But what is the alternative? We might begin by trying something like the following: An overt or covert token of ‘This is green’ in the presence of a green item is a Konstatierung and expresses observational knowledge if and only if it is a manifestation of a tendency to produce overt or covert tokens of ‘This is green’ – given a certain set – if and only if a green object is being looked at in standard conditions. Clearly on this interpretation the occurrence of such tokens of ‘This is green’ would be ‘following a rule’ only in the sense that they are instances of a uniformity, a uniformity differing from the lightning–thunder case in that it is an acquired causal characteristic of the language user. Clearly the above suggestion … won’t do as it stands. Let us see, however, if it can’t be revised to fit the criteria I have been using for ‘expressing observational knowledge’…
[We] have seen that to be the expression of knowledge, a report must not only have authority, this authority must in some sense be recognized by the person whose report it is. And this is a steep hurdle indeed. For if the authority of the report ‘This is green’ lies in the fact that the existence of green items appropriately related to the perceiver can be inferred from the occurrence of such reports, it follows that only a person who is able to draw this inference, and therefore who has not only the concept green, but also the concept of uttering ‘This is green’ – indeed, the concept of certain conditions of perception, those which would correctly be called ‘standard conditions’ – could be in a position to token ‘This is green’ in recognition of its authority. In other words, for a Konstatierung ‘This is green’ to ‘express observational knowledge’, not only must it be a symptom or sign of the presence of a green object in standard conditions, but the perceiver must know that tokens of ‘This is green’ are symptoms of the presence of green objects in conditions which are standard for visual perception.
Now it might be thought that there is something obviously absurd in the idea that before a token uttered by, say, Jones could be the expression of observational knowledge, Jones would have to know that overt verbal episodes of this kind are reliable indicators of the existence, suitably related to the speaker, of green objects. I do not think that it is. Indeed, I think that something very like it is true. The point I wish to make now, however, is that if it is true, then it follows, as a matter of simple logic, that one couldn’t have observational knowledge of any fact unless one knew many other things as well. And let me emphasize that the point is not taken care of by distinguishing between knowing how and knowing that, and admitting that observational knowledge requires a lot of ‘know how’. For the point is specifically that observational knowledge of any particular fact, e.g. that this is green, presupposes that one knows general facts of the form X is a reliable symptom of Y. And to admit this requires an abandonment of the traditional empiricist idea that observational knowledge ‘stands on its own feet’. Indeed, the suggestion would be anathema to traditional empiricists for the obvious reason that by making observational knowledge presuppose knowledge of general facts of the form X is a reliable symptom of Y, it runs counter to the idea that we come to know general facts of this form only after we have come to know by observation a number of particular facts which support the hypothesis that X is a symptom of Y.
And it might be thought that there is an obvious regress in the view we are examining. Does it not tell us that observational knowledge at time t presupposes knowledge of the form X is a reliable symptom of Y, which presupposes prior observational knowledge, which presupposes other knowledge of the form X is a reliable symptom of Y, which presupposes still other, and prior, observational knowledge, and so on? This charge, however, rests on too simple, indeed a radically mistaken, conception of what one is saying of Jones when one says that he knows that p. It is not just that the objection supposes that knowing is an episode; for clearly there are episodes which we can correctly characterize as knowings, in particular, observings. The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says.
Thus all that the view I am defending requires is that no tokening by S now of ‘This is green’ is to count as ‘expressing observational knowledge’ unless it is also correct to say of S that he now knows the appropriate fact of the form X is a reliable symptom of Y, namely that (and again I oversimplify) utterances of ‘This is green’ are reliable indicators of the presence of green objects in standard conditions of perception. And while the correctness of this statement about Jones requires that Jones could now cite prior particular facts as evidence for the idea that these utterances are reliable indicators, it requires only that it is correct to say that Jones now knows, thus remembers, that these particular facts did obtain. It does not require that it be correct to say that at the time these facts did obtain he then knew them to obtain. And the regress disappears …
The idea that observation ‘strictly and properly so-called’ is constituted by certain self-authenticating nonverbal episodes, the authority of which is transmitted to verbal and quasi-verbal performances when these performances are made ‘in conformity with the semantical rules of the language’, is, of course, the heart of the Myth of the Given. For the given, in epistemological tradition, is what is taken by these self- authenticating episodes. These ‘takings’ are, so to speak, the unmoved movers of empirical knowledge, the ‘knowings in presence’ which are presupposed by all other knowledge, both the knowledge of general truths and the knowledge ‘in absence’ of other particular matters of fact. Such is the framework in which traditional empiricism makes its characteristic claim that the perceptually given is the foundation of empirical knowledge.
If I reject the framework of traditional empiricism, it is not because I want to say that empirical knowledge has no foundation. For to put it this way is to suggest that it is really ‘empirical knowledge so-called’, and to put it in a box with rumours and hoaxes. There is clearly some point to the picture of human knowledge as resting on a level of propositions – observation reports – which do not rest on other propositions in the same way as other propositions rest on them. On the other hand, I do wish to insist that the metaphor of ‘foundation’ is misleading in that it keeps us from seeing that if there is a logical dimension in which other empirical propositions rest on observation reports, there is another logical dimension in which the latter rest on the former.
Above all, the picture is misleading because of its static character. One seems forced to choose between the picture of an elephant which rests on a tortoise (What supports the tortoise?) and the picture of a great Hegelian serpent of knowledge with its tail in its mouth (Where does it begin?). Neither will do. For empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all
