A REJOINDER TO MR. LEVIT B Y HARRY S. BROUDY

I SHALL COMMENT ONLY ON THAT ASPECT OF MR. LEVJT’S PAPER WHICH SINGLES

I would like to assure the readers of that book that my devotion to science does not fall short of piety, although admittedly it falls far short of idolatry.

As John W. Yolton in a recent article* pointed out, problems and theories of perception take their shape from the ontological and methodological tools to which one is committed.

One such major difference in approach is between the epistemological and the psychological. The former begins with the kind of knowledge which we have via perception and tries to crystallize out propositions that would justify that knowl- edge. He quotes Price’s remarks (Perception, pp. 10-11) to the effect that the data of psychology must be excluded from such an analysis because they do not concern the logical question of justification but that of cause, and the data of these sciences themselves rest upon perception and hence cannot be appealed to in an analysis of the validity of perceptual knowledge.

If, however, one holds to an ontology that posits a precognitive stage of reality out of which subject, object, and all distinctions emerge or become specified by inquiry, then psychological descriptions of this precognitive reality become relevant to a theory of perceptual cognition, albeit Price’s stricture still holds. The theory tells us how we come to make the distinctions we do make in our developed knowledge but not whether we are justified logically in the making of them.

It should be clear that the statements quoted from my book as horrible examples are epistemological in the sense above described. They are not psycho- logical, hence much of the quotation from the color psychologists is irrelevant to it.

To put it differently: The epistemological question is: What must I infer about the elements and relations among mind, body, and object in order that “The fire hydrant is red” is a case of perceptual knowledge. The psychological question is: What series of events result in the sort of experience described by me as: “The fire hydrant is red?”

There is no law compelling Mr. Levit to be interested in epistemological questions, but neither is there any law forbidding such an interest on the part of anyone writing on the philosophy of education. Actually, whatever psychology the book propounds is in Chapter 8 where something very close to Gestalt theory is used to characterize the learning process.

The admonition in the latter part of the paper to modernize my science to conform to my avowed respect for it lacks point for the reasons given and needs no further comment.

OUT MY BOOK AS A HORRIBLE EXAMPLE OF INSUFFICIENT PIETY FOR T H E SCIENCES.

HARRY S. BROUDY is a Professor of Education at the University of Illinois.

*Philosophical Realism and Psychological Data.” J. Phi(. and Pden. Res., 19: 4 (June 1959), pp. 486-501.

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