Abstract

Are scientific enquiries directly relevant to epistemological issues? That is the question which links together the four studies comprising this work. Professor Mandelbaum answers the question in the affirmative. On the basis of this answer he rejects all phenomenalist or subjectivist notions: that we know only our states of mind or ideas. He rejects likewise any epistemology of a naïvely realist kind, which asserts that things are just as they appear to be. In their room he defends the epistemological doctrine which he calls ‘critical realism’. A critical realist acknowledges that physical objects exist independently of our perception of them but insists, on the strength of scientific testimony, that not all the qualities which physical objects appear to possess are really possessed by them. On this count, Locke was a pioneer critical realist when he denied, on what he supposed to be scientific evidence, that secondary qualities inhere in objects. Mandelbaum is not committed precisely to Locke’s form of critical realism, but he believes that Locke was following the right general lines.