Some Problems of Philosophy

Does our conceptual translation of the perceptual flux enable us also to understand the latter better? What do we mean Scone by making us ‘understand’? Applying our pragmatic rule to the interpretation of the word, we see that the better we understand anything the more we are able to tell about it. Judged by this test, concepts do make us understand our percepts better: knowing what these are, we can tell all sorts of farther truths about them, based on the relation of those whats to other whats. The whole system of relations, spatial, temporal, and logical, of our fact, gets plotted out. An ancient philosophical opinion, inherited from Aristotle, is that we do not understand a thing until we know it by its causes. When the maidservant says that ‘the cat’ broke the tea-cup, she would have us conceive the fracture in a causally explanatory way. No otherwise when Clerk-Maxwell asks us to conceive of gas-electricity as due to molecular bombardment. An imaginary agent out of sight becomes in each case a part of the cosmic context in which we now place the percept to be explained; and the explanation is valid in so far as the new causal that is itself conceived in a context that makes its existence probable, and with a nature agreeable to the effects it is imagined to produce. All our scientific explanations would seem to conform to this simple type of the ‘necessary cat.’ The conceived order of nature built round the perceived order and explaining it theoretically, as we say, is only a system of hypothetically imagined thats, the whats of which harmoniously connect themselves with the what of any that which we immediately perceive.