## 1. Life



Price was born on 17 May 1899 and died on 26 November 1984. He was
born in Neath, a small, then industrial town in South Wales, and
educated at the famous public school Winchester College, whose
students are called Wykehamists. He studied Literae Humaniores
("Greats", covering Ancient History, Ancient Literature,
and Philosophy) at New College, Oxford, where the cleverest
Wykehamists go, both colleges being founded by William of Wykeham in
the fourteenth century. He had the perfect Wykehamist career: being
Wykeham Professor of Logic from the remarkably young age of 35 in 1935
until his retirement in 1959 (Harrison 1993: 479). He had a very
distinguished academic career (Quinton 1995a: 676; 1995b: 252),
receiving many honours and prestigious invitations and was known as an
excellent philosophy lecturer (Mitchell 2009: 45-46). He was a
constructive philosopher, attempting constantly to develop approaches
and not satisfied with the demolition of extant views. Famously, Price
is credited with punching a hole in the isolation of Oxford philosophy
in the inter-war period by discussing philosophy with Moore and Broad
in Cambridge, especially on perception, and importing the new approach
to philosophy developed there with, in Quinton's (1995a: 675)
words, "style, rigour, and authority" (see also 1995c:
708; Mabbott 1986: 78). He was extremely polite, usually trying to
formulate the views of other philosophers and students, especially if
he disagreed with them, in the best way possible (Price [1945: 2]
discusses this in his balanced response to critics of clarificatory
philosophy). For example, he finds *some* merit in the
traditional imagistic model of thought (1951-1952; 1969). His
impact on students was significant. Anscombe recalls, "of all
the people I heard at Oxford, he was the one who excited my respect;
the one I found worth listening to" (1981: viii; Mac Cumhaill
& Wiseman 2022: 76f). He supervised several philosophers who went
on to have distinguished careers themselves, including Wilfrid Sellars
(for some reflections, see Sellars 1975: 285) and D.M. Armstrong.


## 2. Four General Features



There are at least four general features of Price's approach to
philosophy.


### 2.1 Following the Evidence of Experience



First, with any issue he simply aims to follow the evidence, wherever
it leads. Thus, if the clear evidence is that there are sense-data
with a certain character, then that must be accepted and incorporated
into one's theory of the world. And if the character of your
experiences means that you cannot be a body then that must also be
accepted. He arrives with few metaphysical prejudices.



However, Price's understanding of evidence is revealing. For
instance, his novel arguments against both materialism and Cartesian
forms of dualism come down to their conflict with evidence
"discovered by straightforward empirical methods" (1953b:
45), for such phenomena as unconscious processes, those he calls
"supernormal cognition" (such as telepathy), and the
divided self (especially 1953b: 43-47) (for discussion: Dilley
1995: xviif; Martin 2000: 222).



Also, the evidence relevant to philosophical questions goes beyond
what the sciences tell us: Price famously claims (1953a: 2ff),
employing a pattern of argument that he repeatedly uses (more examples
below, e.g.,
 SS2.3),
 that, since our scientific beliefs depend on the beliefs that our
experiences give us, the scientific picture of the world cannot
undermine those basic beliefs, because unless we can rely on those
basic beliefs we cannot rely on the science constructed on their basis
(see also 1930a: 34-35). An important theme is to examine the
experiences upon which our beliefs are based and to inquire into the
ways they justify our beliefs. Evidence from experience is more
important and basic for Price than scientific evidence.



Quinton (1973: 195) attributes Price's argument's
influence as the source of the discredit of
"scientifically-based reasoning" about perception, at
least until Smart, Armstrong, and Pitcher reanimated such arguments in
the 1960s (for discussion: Bradie 1976: 42ff). Price declares, from
our perspective somewhat oddly, that the investigation into perception
is not a question for science: science does not tell us what seeing
and touching are, but merely what their causes are (1932: 2). Price
contrasts physiological investigations, that is to say science, and
"immanent or phenomenological" ones, which is to say
philosophy (1932: 10; for discussion: Hamlyn 1961: 173, 178). Thus,
philosophy uniquely contributes to knowledge and evidence via his type
of phenomenological investigations; it is no mere handmaiden to
science. He also articulates another role for philosophy independent
of "the progress of empirical research", where
"great problems", "puzzles", are 



> 
> 
> dissolved, rather than solved, by dragging to light ambiguities,
> confusions, and unconscious preconceptions [...and] by inventing
> a more flexible and less equivocal terminology. (1940b: 36; see also
> 1945: 4)
> 
> 
> 


### 2.2 Empiricism



He does, however, reiterate a commitment to empiricism, arguing that
it is "beneficial to mankind" and a "social
phenomenon of great importance" (1940b: 8-9). By
"empiricism", he seems to mean two things:



First, if we understand a notion (or concept) then we should be able
to recognise when it applies should the right experiences present
themselves. Price (1953a: especially 78, 117, 136, 231, 260, 270,
355-358) extensively defends his view that understanding,
concepts, and ideas themselves are recognitional capacities of
"conscious creature[s], human or animal" (1959c: 483; for
discussion: Burgener 1957: 157; Warnock [1995: 756] emphasises its
centrality for Price). Price links this to the much-discussed slogan,
which he accepts, that to understand a claim is to know what would be
the case if it is true (1953a: 208-209; 1938: 442). A key
contribution of his is that he thinks that this kind of knowledge
incorporates a recognitional capacity. 



But second, the test for a theory or conviction lies ultimately in how
it engages with experience. Regarding religious belief, he recommends
that you should try it out and see how the experience of doing so
strikes you (1964c: 25-25; 1969: 455-488; see
 SS6.8).
 He sums up the empiricist programme which he endorses thus: 



> 
> 
> to show that all ideas are ultimately cashable by impressions, that is
> by data which we are acquainted with in sense or introspection, or in
> any other sort of acquaintance there may be [such as, controversially,
> "mystical experience"]. (1940b: 11-12) 
> 
> 
> 



He also writes: 



> 
> 
> An empiricist is a man who says "it all comes down to
> *ostensive* definition in the end." (1959c: 483)
> 
> 
> 



Also, Hume and Locke are his two main philosophical heroes; see Kneale
1996: xix. In 1959 (1959c: 481), Price writes "I am really just
an old-fashioned British empiricist" (agreeing with Burgener
1957), and "[*Thinking and Experience*, 1953a] protests
against the transformation of the empiricist epistemology into a
*linguistic* epistemology".


### 2.3 Commonsense



Third, Price defends the authority of commonsense as "the
starting-point of all philosophy" (1930b: 202), extending
Moore's (1925) defence (see 1930b: 198f), generally using it as
a methodological touchstone. He frequently objects to criticism of
common thinking from science: because science *relies on*
ordinary thinking and experience, such criticisms undermine themselves
(e.g., 1930b: 198; 1932: chapter 2). He also identifies this
"fallacy" in anti-commonsense, genetic debunking arguments
and Bergsonian arguments that commonsense is practically biased
(1930a: 34-35). Furthermore, Price tends to say that our
cognitive practices and nature simply have to be accepted for what
they are. Of paramount importance is the existence of what he calls
the "inner life", involving toothaches, dreams, and mental
images (1959c: 481-482; 1964c: 7; 1969: 295; he cites this as
one of Wittgenstein's 1953 main themes, too; see also Kneale
1994: xvii). According to him, the contemporary attack on the
"inner life" has "gone a long way towards a kind of
"dehumanisation" of man" (1959c: 482).



Finally, commonsense guides which topics he focuses on. For instance,
his famous discussion of the metaphysics of properties focuses on
Aristotelian universals in things (*in rebus*) rather than
Platonic universals anterior to things (*ante rem*) not because
he thinks the latter is unimportant but because "it is more
remote from common sense and our ordinary everyday habits of
thought" (1953a: 10; this responds to Findlay's 1954: 71
criticism).


### 2.4 Metaphysical Neutrality



Fourth, despite his major contributions to metaphysics, Price often
maintains metaphysical neutrality. For instance, he provides the most
worked-out and discussed account of resemblance nominalism in the
literature (1953a: chapter 1), but ultimately stays neutral about
whether realism about (Aristotelian) universals (1953a: 10-14)
is true.
 SS5.1
 discusses this extensively. He is also metaphysically neutral about
the nature of sense-data. Generally, his metaphysical neutralism takes
this form: First, he finds that the empirical evidence points us to
the existence of such things as sense-data, mental phenomena
(including psychical phenomena), concepts, dispositions to recognise
concepts, etc. However, second, the empirical evidence does not
adjudicate between whether sense-data are physical, mental, or
neither, or whether our recognitional dispositions track resemblances
or universals, etc. So, he neither affirms nor denies any of these
metaphysical accounts.



Also, Price (1940a) articulates two forms of Neo-Humeanism about
external objects which are essentially neutralist; see
 SSSS4.3-4.4
 below.



To be clear: he is no across-the-board metaphysical neutralist. For
instance, unlike his positivist colleagues (e.g., Ayer), he
doesn't think that metaphysics is nonsense. He is very critical
of declarations of nonsense (1939 [1995: 26]; 1945: 30-31). He
defends positive ontological and metaphysical positions, e.g., the
*ontological* reality of sense-data and of dispositions, when
his evidence allows him to. But when his evidence is inconclusive, he
stays neutral.



When defending sense-data, Price (1932: 19-20) stresses what he
calls the *neutrality* of the admissions of sense-data in his
sense. There is no immediate commitment to their persistence
conditions, their privacy or publicity, the kind of entity they are,
nor to their origins: the nature of sense-data is not given to us.
Understanding them for instance as "sensible species"
(some Scholastics), "impressions" (Hume), or
"sensa" (Broad) begs the question, for they bring in the
assumption that their nature is physical, mental, or neither,
respectively (see also Murray 1933: 507f). Thus, he characteristically
neither accepts nor denies any of these further metaphysical
assumptions: they go beyond what he takes to be the evidence. Price
(1927: 110) also compares not being immediately aware of the
*nature* of sense-data with not being immediately aware of
physical objects. This neutrality-until-further-examination regarding
"sense-data" in effect places Price close to Moore's
(1903; 1957[1965]) way of introducing sense-data (see also Lean 1953:
2-3; Bauer 1967: 8-9; Crane 2000: 175-177). In
summary, Price puts it thus: 



> 
> 
> So far as the main theme of this book goes, it really does not matter
> how we answer them [... i.e. the questions about] the
> *nature* of sense-data. (1932: 104)
> 
> 
> 



Despite this metaphysical neutrality about the *nature* of
sense-data, he is not ontologically neutral. He argues that sense-data
are what are given to us and what are sensed in perceptual
experiences, which we obviously have: we simply have to accept their
*existence*. And, they have whatever nature they must have to
play the role in experience that they do, a role that allows them (a)
to be related to the material things which we suppose are in the
world, and (b) to enable our consciousness of those material
things.



However, even his metaphysical neutrality is not complete: it does not
extend to denying metaphysical features that are phenomenogically
given (recall
 SS2.1);
 for instance, it is to misunderstand visual sense-data to take them
to be two-dimensional: "It is a plain phenomenological fact that
visual fields have the property of depth" (1954a:
vii-viii; for discussion: Jackson 1977: 102; Crane 1992a: 15;
Baldwin 1992: 183-184; Martin 1992: 198). Price's
metaphysical neutralism, however, doesn't underplay metaphysical
speculation's importance for philosophy and science: he
writes,



> 
> 
> If people accuse us of being speculative and even
> "metaphysical" we must refuse to be frightened. We must
> postulate unverifiable entities and processes if we cannot get on
> without them. The task of philosophical *deflation*, of
> removing unnecessary metaphysical entities, comes at the end of a
> science's progress, not at the beginning; if such writers as
> Hume and Mach and the modern Logical Positivists had lived in the
> early seventeenth century, Physics would never have got itself
> started. (1939 [1995: 26])
> 
> 
> 


## 3. Perception



Price's fame rests most on his views on perception, expressed in
his first book *Perception* (1932) and many articles (1924;
1926a; 1926b; 1927; 1928; 1941; 1943-1944; 1951; 1952a; 1952b;
1956; 1959a; 1959b; 1960; 1964a). In his most cited passage, he
writes, "when I see a tomato there is much that I can doubt.
... but that something is red and round then and there I cannot
doubt" (1932: 3; Robinson 1994: 32 calls this an expression of
the "Phenomenal Principle"; see also Martin's (2000:
218ff) "Actualism"; for discussion: Crane 2000:
176-177; Raleigh 2009: 64-65; Fish 2010: 5; O'Shea
2007: 109-110; Johnston 2018: 175f; Locatelli 2014: 147f). I
cannot, according to Price, doubt that there is present to my
consciousness at that time a genuinely red thing with a certain shape;
it is just obvious and "quite plain that I am acquainted with an
actual instance of [here: redness]" (1932: 63; for discussion:
Snowdon 1992: 73). This thing is (directly) sensed by me,
*given* to me, and he calls it a sense-*datum* (this is
called the "sense-datum inference" by Chisholm 1963: 102;
O'Shea 2007: 141 argues that Price along with Russell relies on
an "act/object" model of sensory cognition here; however,
see Price 1969: 363-365 on the act-object distinction).



Price claims immediately that our core beliefs about the world depend
on our visual and tactual experiences which have the
just-characterised structure. However, he is at pains to say both (i)
what he does *not* take to be indubitable (1932: 3-4;
1924: 20-24) and (ii) that "our data, the undeniable facts
with which he must begin, are never mere sense-data" (1924: 24),
for they also involve non-sensuous data. He has sometimes been
credited with the view that our knowledge of sense-data and their
features is indubitable--for instance, Grossmann (1990:
113-114) criticises Price here by arguing that we can indeed be
mistaken about the properties of our impressions, something revealed
by closer inspection. However, Price insists (e.g., 1924: 21) that one
may make "mistakes of detail", e.g., whether a sense-datum
is uniformly one shade of red, but one cannot mistake a colour for a
sound or a smell.



The famous tomato-passage's crucial move is that *at least
some* of the genuine properties the given item has are obvious to
us. This allows us to fix further properties of the sense-data in
light of what we can determine about the external world. 



Price (1932: ch. 2) identifies two theoretical goals for sense-data
theories. It is clear that for a subject to have the complex beliefs
about the material world that we have, the subject must do more than
simply sense or be acquainted with sense-data. Further mental
processes which he calls "perceptual consciousness" (1932:
25) are required. One task is to describe fully what the components of
perceptual consciousness are; another is to say what it is for a
sense-datum to "belong to" a material object,
"belonging to" being what Price, following Moore (Price
1932: vi), calls the relation between a material object and a
sense-datum when sensing that sense-datum counts as perceiving that
material object.


### 3.1 Criticisms of Theories of Sense-Data: Naive Realism



Price defines and criticises a theory he calls "Naive
Realism", so-called because it is a "natural" place
to start, not because this is what naive or ordinary people think
(1932: 26). This Naive Realism has two sides: First, perceptual
consciousness, in Price's sense, is equivalent to knowledge that
there is a material object to which the current sense-datum belongs.
Second, for a sense-datum (which is visual or tactual) to belong to an
object is for it to be part of the surface of the object. (The
centrality in this debate of the notion of a surface comes from
Moore's discussion, e.g., 1942: 649-659.)



Price proposes two versions of what he calls the Argument from
Illusion (1932: 27): one Phenomenological and the other, Causal. The
first is Price's version of the traditional argument, based on
its familiar examples of illusion. The second is an argument aiming to
show that visual and tactual sense-data exist only if there are
processes occurring in the subject (say, neural processes), which
means that, since the surfaces themselves (and the objects to which
they belong) exist, whatever is going on in the subject, they cannot
be the same thing as the sense-datum. He proposes that the causal
argument is unpersuasive, but the phenomenological one works. (For
further discussion: 1956; also Hamlyn 1970: 147ff; Crane 2005:
SS1.2.)


### 3.2 Austin on Price: seeing versus what one can doubt & the Theory of Appearing



In his famous book *Sense and Sensibilia* (1962), Austin
focuses on Price's argument for sense-data almost exclusively as
presented in (1932: chs. 1-2), though this discussion plays only
a minor role next to Ayer, the book's real anti-hero (Snowdon
2014: 167 queries Austin's motivations here; Rowe 2023: ch. 25).
Although the current consensus seems to be that Austin's
criticisms of Price were successful (e.g., Hamlyn 1970: 148; though,
e.g., Harris 1987: 70 remarks that Austin misrepresents Price and
Ayer), this is not true when Austin shifts his focus to perceptual
knowledge.



Austin says:



> 
> 
> Price is more seriously interested than is Ayer in the actual facts
> about perception, and pays more attention to them--but still, it
> is worth noticing that, after raising the initial question,
> "What is it to *see* something?", his very next
> sentence runs, "When I see a tomato there is much that I *can
> doubt*". This suggests that he too is really interested, not
> so much in what seeing is, as in what one *can't* doubt.
> (1962: 104-5)
> 
> 
> 



Austin overlooks Price's most important point here, which is
that he is certain that what is given to him is something red, that
is, something with that property. Price's interest here is what
the real character of the component of experience is, and his remark
does not reveal his more general interest in doubt and certainty.
Price needs some genuine feature so that in the light of what he can
also know about the surrounding objects he can argue that the given
items are not surfaces of external things. The main problem with
Price's claim is that he has no good response to the
counter-proposal that all he can really be certain of is that the
presented thing *looks* red. Despite talking about what he can
doubt, Price's main concern is what seeing involves.



He does elsewhere respond to what he calls the Theory of Appearing
(1932: 61-65; for discussion: Langsam 1997: 36; Murray 1933:
508-513), which he takes to be a modification of naive
realism, and which in effect says that when we see the tomato it is
not certain that there is a red thing, but it is merely certain that
there *appears to be* a red thing. Clearly, this suggestion
undermines the central argument from illusion, since the external
object can also count as appearing to be red; so no non-identity claim
can be generated (1932: 62).



Price's main response is that either "*X* looks
red" means "*X* presents a red sense-datum" in
which case there is a red sense-datum (1932: 63; 1964a: 15ff), or,
"derivatively" (1964a: 15), it means something like
"I am inclined to think that *X* is red" or
"there is some probability (though not certainty) that *X*
is red" or is used to avoid being accused of being mistaken if
*X* isn't red, in which cases it does not capture an
experiential fact (1932: 62-65; 1964a: 12-15). The obvious
problem with this objection is why those are the only alternative ways
to understand looks judgements. However, see 1952a: *passim*,
where he discusses *appearing* further, Quinton's (1952:
238-246) detailed criticisms, and Grossmann's (1965:
35-38) sympathetic use of Price's response.


### 3.3 Criticisms of the Causal Theory



Price (1932: ch. 4) scrutinises the so-called Causal theory which he
thinks of as more or less equivalent to traditional
representationalism. Price's initial statement of the theory is:




(1)
a sense-datum belongs to an object *O* if *O*
causes that sense-datum, and 
(2)
perceptual consciousness is, fundamentally, an inference
from effect to cause. 


To make
 (2)
 consistent with our sense that in ordinary circumstances we do not
arrive at our convictions about the environment by inference, Price
reads it as claiming that originally we form our convictions by such
causal inferences, but after that, dispositions are generated which
make the process automatic (1932: 68f). Price (1932: 70f) also
proposes that
 (1)
 be replaced by the more complex analysis of "belonging"
by being a "varying or differential" causal condition,
meaning that a perceiver's visual sense-data would be different
if these causal conditions were different, in contrast to their
standing causal conditions (e.g., there being a source of light and an
eye in a certain state) which are perhaps "necessary to all the
visual sense-data alike, [but] do not wholly determine any of
them" (1932: 70f; for discussion: Jackson 1977: 168). Famously,
Grice (1961: 142ff) criticises the more complex analysis, requiring
instead that the perceived object contributes to the occurrence of the
sense-datum (1961: 143; see also Kim 1977: 612; Sosa 2015:
11-13).



Price himself moves quickly from
 (1)
 and concentrates on the revised version of
 (2).
 He allows that it is reasonable to infer that there are unsensed
causes of our sense-data (1932: 70-74), but what is the
character of those causes? Can a backward causal argument reveal that?
In answer, Price formulates five methods of argument that can be
developed. In outline, the methods isolate types of independence in
features of the given to ground inferences about the degrees of
independence in their postulated causes. Price's critical
response is to suggest that the most such backward arguments can
establish is the existence of "Non-sensible" (1932: 74)
somethings-or-other with a plurality of aspects.


### 3.4 Perceptual Consciousness: Perceptual Acceptance



Price (1932: ch. 6) discusses what he calls "perceptual
consciousness", that is, what the perceiver takes to be there.
His example is when a perceiver takes in that there is a tree in front
of them. Price's method is to describe as accurately as he can
the component in perception that he calls *perceptual
acceptance*. His project is a phenomenological analysis (Passmore
[1957: 255] ties Price's work with Husserl's). Acceptance
does not count as knowledge, since it can be present when the
percipient is mistaken, as when a drunk hallucinates a large pink
rabbit that frightens him. It isn't belief either but perhaps
the "absence of disbelief" (1932: 142), since, according
to him (following Cook Wilson; for discussion: Passmore 1957:
254-255), beliefs are a state of mind which must be arrived at
by inference from evidence that the subject recognises is less than
conclusive. Price says that there is no inference or weighing of
evidence in basic perceptual consciousness. Both these claims, that it
cannot be knowledge or belief, rest on questionable assumptions.



O'Shea (2007: 210) takes Price to be relating
"(non-propositional) sensing and (propositional)
perceiving" here. Martin (2000: 210) claims that Price's
perceptual acceptance is what he calls "the intentionality of
perceptual experience" and takes Price explicitly to consider it
a "belief-like state of mind". Butchvarov (1979: 93) calls
Price's perceptual consciousness, "singling out in
perception of a material thing, which may but need not
exist".



Price's analysis attempts to capture the nature of very basic
perceptual acceptance: as subjects' experiences grow this sets
up in the subjects dispositions for the sensing of a certain type of
sense-datum to produce acceptance of much more complex claims as to
what is there. These dispositions represent part of the subject
learning about the world. Price is claiming that these are simply
acceptances with richer content.



Price argues that acceptance is not the generation of *a bodily
disposition* relating to the environment, for it is also related
to an ability to report what is there, not simply to adopt a
behavioural response--nor is it reducible to an emotional
response (1932: 156ff). Rather, acceptance is a basic attitude,
involving concepts, which our psychological nature endows us with
(1932: 168f). His work on perception doesn't explain what it is
for these states to involve concepts, nor what this explains: we are
simply set up to form attitudes when undergoing sensings of
sense-data, though he holds that the most basic concepts involved in
acceptance are innate and not derived from experience. However, later
(1953a), he develops a theory of concepts as recognitional capacities,
which suggests that perceptual acceptance involves a recognitional
capacity developed by perceiving and derived from experience.


### 3.5 Less Basic Forms of Perceptual Consciousness & the Principle of Confirmability



Price (1932: ch. 7) discusses less basic forms of perceptual
consciousness, roughly, ones which occur after more worldly
experiences. Consider a subject who has looked around a tree sensing a
sequence of sense-data. In these circumstances the subject has what
Price calls a settled conviction about the existence and character of
the tree. This is not mere acceptance but a new attitude which has
survived challenges and counts as rational belief, passing Cook
Wilson's conditions that Price relied on when arguing that the
initial cases are not cases of belief. Then he asks: How can simple
sensings of sense-data validate this new attitude? His response:
gathering the relevant experiences simply does count as a rational
confirmation of the claims in question. This yields Price's
Principle of Confirmability:



> 
> 
> Clearly we shall have to say that the existence of a particular visual
> or tactual sense-datum is prima facie evidence (1) for the existence
> of a material thing such that this sense-datum belongs to it, (2) for
> the possession by this thing of a front surface of a certain general
> sort. (1932: 185)
> 
> 
> 



To Price, this principle is evident, not derivable from anything more
basic, but equally not refutable by any considerations (for
discussion: Lemos 2004: 136-137). Crucially, although our
experiences confirm the claims about the material objects around us,
they don't yield knowledge that there are material objects: the
confirmation doesn't amount to absolute certainty. However, we
do have knowledge that these experiences are confirmatory ones. We
cannot ask for more than that.


### 3.6 Price's Theory of Sense-Data & their Relations



Price (1932: ch. 8) analyses "belonging to", the phrase he
uses for the relation between a sense-datum *s* which is sensed
and an object *M* where sensing *s* amounts to perceiving
*M*. Here and now you are seeing a screen and you are sensing a
sense-datum which therefore "belongs to" the screen. He
seems initially to want an analysis of what is involved in a
sense-datum (the sensed one) being a member of a group of sense-data
which has a relation to *M*. We are to envisage, say, walking
towards a table and what the evolving sequence of sense-data would be.
Very roughly, there would be what Price calls a gradual transformation
in the successive sense-data "in respect of colour, shape, size,
and position in the field of view" (1932: 208). His central
insight is that, as we might put it, moving towards and around the
object *M*, certain groups of sense-data constitute a
three-dimensional solid shape (1932: 217-229).



But how are material things that occupy the spatial world related to
this system of families of sense-data (1932: ch. 9)? First, Price
rejects phenomenalism, which identifies material things with these
families (1932: 275-282). His basic objection is that material
things occupy space and are present, often doing things, such as
reflecting light or deflecting air, etc. But according to
phenomenalism, all the presence of the family comes down to is that
sense-data would be sensed if things were different. Clearly this sort
of fact cannot itself deflect light rays. Price, therefore, has to
recognise "two distinct" entities (1932: 293). There is
the "family" of actual and obtainable sense-data
*and* the physical object. Price claims that we are ignorant of
the intrinsic nature of the physical objects themselves and have to
conceptualise them as bearers of causal powers (1932: 294-300;
also 1927: 110). A table, for instance, is a "family [viz. of
sensibilia] together with the physical object which is coincident with
it" (1932: 301). His analysis of when a sense-datum *s*
belongs to an external object *M* is this:



(1)
*s* is a member of a family of sense-data *F*,
(2)
there is a physical occupant *O* with which *F* is
coincident,
(3)
*M* consists of *F* and *O* in conjunction.


It is unclear exactly what "coincidence" strictly means.
For instance, *O* and *F*, according to Price (1932: 252),
cannot have the same position in space for the sense in which *F*
has a position in space is radically different from the sense in which
*O* does. 



Finally, when considering the causal origins of sense-data, Price
contrasts (i) "vertical" causation, the causal process of
sense-data genesis, with (ii) "horizontal" causation,
other causal interactions between things in the world. Price claims
that our basic knowledge of objects does not depend on or presuppose
our belief in vertical causation. Rather, we attain knowledge of
vertical causation from already established knowledge of objects
(1932: 311-313 sketches this knowledge-acquisition). He
considers this an objection to the causal theory of perception. But it
is so only if that theory is defined as requiring that our basic,
worldly knowledge is based on causal reasoning, which need not be
coupled with a causal model of perception.



Price also argues that phenomenalism cannot accommodate real vertical
causation by physical objects as they understand them. Idealists and
phenomenalists, however, would generally agree and look for other
explanations of experience (e.g., God). The real causal generators in
the external world are, Price argues, not the complex two-component
things, which he previously (1932: ch. 8) claimed corresponded to our
conception of material things, but, rather, are the real physical
occupants with their causal powers. He writes: "sense-data are
causally dependent on the states and the changes of physical
occupants" (1932: 319). Price avoids confronting the natural
question as to where this leaves the idea that material things cannot
be identified with the physical occupants, since, it now seems,
everything that an external thing does will be done by the physical
occupant. 



Price ends up with a form of dualism, with physical occupants and
things of another sort which house sense-data occurrences, whose
nature is radically under-described. For he claims that the events
which are the occurrences of sense-data cannot themselves be events in
the physical occupants. So, strikingly, he defends a conception of
objects as two-sided compounds of a physical occupant of space with
causal properties and a family of sensibilia.


### 3.7 Possible Criticisms: Sellars against the Given



Many under the influence of Sellars might object to Price's
notion of the given. Price belongs with the group of British
philosophers whom Sellars (1956 [1997]) discusses, along with Ayer,
Ryle, and earlier Empiricists. But Sellars, who was a pupil of Price
(see, e.g., Crane 2013: 246; deVries 2005: 4-5; Triplett 2023:
1), doesn't single out Price for criticism, instead positively
appealing to Price in other contexts (e.g., Price's [1953a: 73]
understanding of abstract thinking, "thinking in absence"
[1956 [1997: 65]], and Price [1953a: 185-187] on the
"thermometer view" [1956 [1997: 66]]). Overall, Sellars
doesn't clearly oppose Price's notion of the given. Most
recently, Triplett (2023: 6) argues that (a) Sellars' argument
doesn't touch Price's sense-datum theory, as Sellars
relies on understanding sensing as *entailing* propositional
knowledge; (b), nor does Hicks's (2020: 12) reconstruction of
Sellars' argument, according to which sensing requires
conceptualisation, since Price explicitly understands sensing as a
direct acquaintance with sense-data. See also Triplett 2014; Crane
2013: 229, 246; O'Shea (2007: 109-111, 112-113)
argues that Price (1932: 7) anticipates Sellars's objections
against the given.



His (1969: 50-71) later developments of
knowledge-by-acquaintance take it to be knowledge of items, say a
place, a person, or something abstract like a poem, which we ascribe
in the form "*S* knows *X*" (1969: 47-63).
Such knowledge requires two things (1969: 55): 


1. the subject has encountered the item *X*
("first-handedness"), and
2. the subject has familiarised themselves through their encounters
with *X* (familiarity).



Price then argues that we are not acquainted with sense-data or
experiences (1969: 57-60), because, being so fleeting, subjects
cannot familiarise themselves with them (1969: 58f). Whether this
undermines the support for Price's being a target of
Sellars' (1956 [1997]) criticism is debatable. What are basic
and given (though after 1960 he no longer uses these words) are
ordinary persisting objects and their properties, known through
acquaintance, that is, in a first-hand, familiarised way. (In 1932:
63, however, he follows other sense-data theorists in rejecting this:
"I am not acquainted with an actual instance of
tableness", thus not with actual tables; see also 1927: 110).
This acquaintance is more fundamental than knowledge from sense-data
and grounds knowledge-by-description, on pain of the latter "not
deserv[ing] the name of knowledge, not even of reasonable belief
... [and] hav[ing] no relation to reality" (1969: 68; Price
[1936: *passim*] similarly attacks the coherence theory of
truth; for discussion: Kneale 1996: vi; Robinson 1972: *passim*
criticises Price's notion of corrigibility).



Price's (1932) assumptions about *the given* and the
analysis of sense-data he derives from them are now controversial.
Much of Price's discussion of sense-data amounts to speculation
about how we develop our understanding of the world and its contents,
where the real check on that speculation, *pace* his attitude
towards appeals to science (1932: 2;
 SS2.1
 above), comes from developmental psychology and its empirical study
of the emergence of our world-directed thoughts.



Price (1964a) is often ignored and indirectly addresses some of
Austin's (1962) criticisms. Price (1952a) extensively discusses
seeming; for discussion: Quinton (1952). Other discussions of Price on
perception include Murray 1933 and Bauer 1967.


## 4. Building on Hume



Another major contribution is Price's close, sympathetic
engagement with David Hume's theoretical philosophy, especially
on our belief in the external world (1940a) as presented in (Hume
1739-1740: I, iv, 2 "Of Scepticism with regard to the
Senses"), which Price calls "the most brilliant thing
[Hume] ever wrote" (1940b: 16), necessary connections and
induction (1940b: 16ff), Hume's empiricism and its significance
(1940b), his analysis of belief (1969: ch. 7), and comparisons between
Hume's and Buddhist no-substance views of the self (1953b: 30;
1959c: 485). Price states (1940a: 2-3) that he'll treat
Hume as he would a contemporary, though he discusses him more than he
does anyone else.


### 4.1 Two Similarities and a Difference with Hume



Price shares Hume's conception of two things. First, both hold
that (a) experience presents us, or acquaints us, with perceptions,
impressions, or sensibilia (ignoring Hume's scepticism about the
self); and (b) our belief in an external world amounts to regarding
those presented sensibilia as the real external objects or as
constituents of external objects. In effect, both reject an
understanding of our belief in an external world as a belief in
objects as causes of our perceptions, as lying behind them and not
part of the world of experience. That is, they both reject the
two-world model with a world of presented experience and another world
of spatial external objects. However, recall, Price accepts that there
are physical occupants distinct from sense-data or families of them
which vertically cause our sense-data. Price gives no hint at how (i)
his own earlier positive, sense-data theory of perception relates to
(ii) his engagement with Hume's theory (though Church [1943:
317-318] and Laing [1941: 317] make comparisons).



Their biggest difference concerns the "vulgar" belief that
presented sense-data are persisting, external spatial objects.
Hume's whole theory can be described as an error theory. Price
rejects Hume's arguments for this (e.g.,
 SS4.3
 below). The two resemblances, this difference, and his real
admiration for Hume guide Price's discussion.


### 4.2 Hume on Belief about the External World



Officially, Hume's (1739-1740: I, iv, 2) question is
"What causes induce us to believe in the existence of
bodies?". Price suggests that Hume should have asked another
question: 



> 
> 
> The question which he actually tries to answer ... would come to
> something like this: *given what characteristics of
> sense-impressions do we assert material-object propositions?* 
> 
> 
> 



About this question Price says:



> 
> 
> Now this is not a psychological question at all, nor is it a causal
> question. It belongs to the inquiry which is now called
> "philosophical analysis". It is a question about the
> *meaning* of material-object words and material-object
> sentences, and about the rules of their use. (1940a: 15)
> 
> 
> 



In understanding Hume's question thus, Price situates
Hume's philosophical discussion in debates about the possibility
of reducing talk about material objects to talk about
sense-impressions (or sense-data). As we saw, Price himself notably
contributed to this debate. However, reading Hume this way more or
less guarantees that there can be no error of the sort Hume seems to
allege, since the experiences in response to which we make our
judgements are being built into the analysis of their meaning. 



Price credits Hume for asking: Why doesn't 



> 
> 
> the *interrupted* and *fragmentary* character of human
> sense-experience ... every drowsy nod ... shake the opinion
> of us all that matter has a continued existence? (1940a: 20) 
> 
> 
> 



Price agrees with Hume that our perceptions are
"interrupted", but clarifies this as a discontinuity in
their character, and not that they are strictly interrupted, except by
periods of sleep or unconsciousness. Price further agrees, with
reservations (1940a: 22-31), that this is not the result of our
impressions, given their silence about what is there in unsensed
periods, nor of reasons. Hume's explanation is that the belief
results from our imagination in conjunction with the character of our
sense-impressions. Hume characterises the important aspects of our
impressions as constancy and coherence, which Price discusses in
detail (1940a: chapter 3; see Penelhum 1975: 67ff). Price argues,
initially, that Hume's conception of the notion of identity,
which is central to his discussion, is fundamentally confused. The
construction that Hume is meant to describe is the postulation of a
sequence of unsensed sensibile forming a series with the sensed ones.
In developing this, Price initially goes along with the contrast
between coherence and constancy. The cases that Hume envisages when
talking about constancy are based on what Price calls
"gap-indifference" (1940a: 60-62). A schematic
representation of this is the sequence in a subject's experience
of the following sort: *A*1, *A*2,
... (gap) ... *A*5, *A*6,
where *A* stands for the same type of experience. For example,
the subject looks at a clock for two seconds, looks away, and then
looks again at the same clock. Price agrees that this sort of sequence
prompts the subject to postulate the occurrence of
*A*3 and *A*4 (although unsensed). But
he points out that we can also talk of gap-indifference if the gappy
sequence is not monotonous, but is a gappy reproduction of variegated
familiar series, such as
*A*1*B*1*C*1*D*1,
consisting, say, of *A*2, ...,
*D*2, in which case the subject postulates
*B*2 and *C*2. In this way Price
brings both constancy and coherence under the term
"gap-indifference".



Do the postulated un-sensed sensibilia in the reconstruction of our
conception of the world exist (1940a: ch. 4)? Hume's official
view is "no". "Experiments" such as giving
oneself double-vision by pressing an eyeball supposedly show this.
But, Price argues, these "experiments" don't show
that there is causal dependence of the existence of the current
sensibile, or therefore any others, on the nervous system of the
subject. But, further, since according to Hume there are no such
things as eyeballs, fingers, or nervous systems, he cannot even accept
the data his arguments appeal to.



Price concedes that Hume's argument can be interpreted
differently.



One route Price (1940a: 125-133) discusses is to agree that
there are the sequences of un-sensed sensibilia imaginatively
postulated by the ordinary person, but sometimes there are also sensed
sensibilia sufficiently close in character to some members of the
un-sensed series to count as the sensing of some of them.


### 4.3 Neo-Humeanism: The As-if Theory



Price offers two general approaches to neo-Humeans. The first he calls
the "As-If" Theory (1940a: ch. 5; also 1930b:
192-195). The central idea is that a judgement of the form
"it is as if *p*" can be true even if
"*p*" is not true. One could say of a man who looked
very tired, "he is as if he had trained for two hours",
even if he had not. For material object discourse, the proposal
becomes: if someone says, "There is a table", they are to
be treated as saying "My current sensibilia is as if there is a
table".



In Price's view, Hume tried but failed to show that "there
is a table" is false. Hume, being an empiricist, should have
held that there is no way to determine whether (or not) there is a
table, which Price says is equivalent to claiming that the words
"There is a table" are "meaningless" (1940a:
143). So the theory should be that although "there is a
table" is strictly meaningless, the claim "it is as if
there is a table" is not meaningless, and is, according to the
as-if theory, what our statement "there is a table" in
effect means. One might wonder how a meaningless sentence can be
embedded in a meaningful complex sentence, but Price clarifies this:
"meaningless" simply means "not confirmable or
disconfirmable" (1940a: 148-150).



According to this account, our ordinary thought about the surrounding
world amounts to the following: We sense various sensibilia, which
given our imaginative propensities makes us envisage continuous and
varied streams of unsensed sensibilia which would amount to the
presence of objects. And we describe things in terms of it being as if
these streams occurred although we are not committing to their
actually having occurred. This practice allows us to anticipate future
experiences.



He interestingly argues that the as-if approach has advantages over
phenomenalism (1940a: 177-192). First, phenomenalism treats the
presence of an object as the truth of a counterfactual conditional,
whereas in ordinary thought the presence of an object amounts to a
thing's real existence (1940a: 177ff). On the as-if approach,
when someone understands a material object claim they envisage the
sequences of sensibilia their experiences lead them to think of. Price
thinks this fits ordinary thought better. It builds into ordinary
understanding an envisaging of more than counterfactual conditionals.
However, the whole point of calling it "as-if"-envisaging
is to treat ordinary talk non-seriously. Where that leaves the
supposed advantage is unclear.


### 4.4 Neo-Humeanism: The Expressive Theory



Price develops another Neo-Humean theory he calls the Expressive
Theory (1940a: 193ff), according to him similar to F.P. Ramsey's
(1929: 241ff) suggestion that causal laws are not statements but rules
for framing predictions. It proposes that statements apparently about
the external world (e.g., "there is a table over there")
are not actually truth-apt, but "expression[s] of certain sorts
of mental processes. So far, they are more like exclamations than they
are like statements" (1940a: 194). If I say "this
sense-datum is red" I am making a statement characterising the
sense-datum. But if I say "this ball is red", employing
the external object category *ball*, I am merely giving
expression to my imaginative construction or postulation of an
indefinite number of sensibilia. These are not sensed, but would
amount to the presence of a ball if they did exist. My experiences
also prompt me to put them into a model constructed by me to
"coordinate" my experiences.



Price (1940a: 228) extensively discusses Hume mainly to develop a
theory somewhat along these austere, Neo-Humean lines hoping to leave
the general problems of philosophy "in a more nearly soluble
state than we received them" (ibid.). Hofstadter (1941: 612f)
criticises Hume and Price's Neo-Humeanisms as embracing an error
theory about unsensed sensibilia and for being unable to analyse
dispositions. However, Price (1943: 331-334) later defends a way
of interpreting Hume (against A. H. Smith 1943: ch. 1) on which
"it is perfectly conceivable that there may be unsensed
sensibilia" (1943: 334), though "conclusive empirical
arguments" show, also according to Hume (1739-1740: 211),
that "all our perceptions are dependent on our
organs".


### 4.5 Hume on Induction



Price (1940b) takes Hume's discovery of the problem of induction
to be "Hume's greatest service to Philosophy
[...and...] one of the most important advances in the whole
history of thought" (1940b: 30). On Price's (1940b:
17-31) helpful, detailed analysis, the problem is, for instance,
not that induction seems to be "an *irrational*
process" (like committing logical fallacies is) but a
"*non*-rational" one (like sleeping) (1940b: 31).
Price interprets Hume's "more constructive solution of the
problem" (1940b: 31) as the articulation of a sense of
reasonableness, a criterion of "just reasoning", an
inductive sense "over and above the principles of deductive
inference enunciated by Formal Logic" (1940b: 35). Asking why it
is sensible or reasonable to generalise and predict in an inductive
way is to ask an important though "meaningless question"
or "not a question at all" (1940b: 34). This reading of
Hume is echoed later in Strawson's (1952: 256ff) famous
"analytic solution" (Snowdon 2009: SS8.4). According
to Price, this dissolution fits well with ordinary thinking about
reasonableness (1940b: 36; and
 SS2.3
 above). However, Price (1969: ch. 7, 176ff; also 1940b: 29) argues
that Hume's conception of induction is too narrow, since it
holds only for "the causal sort of constant conjunction"
(1969: 176); induction is relevant also in other contexts.


### 4.6 Hume's Theory of Belief



Price (1969: ch. 7) extensively discusses Hume's theory of
belief, the solution to Hume's new problem about belief (1969:
160), which asks: "What is belief?", and "How do we
distinguish belief from disbelief and merely entertaining a
proposition without belief or disbelief?" Price does not relate
Hume's problem to its natural background, Locke and
Berkeley's ideational models of understanding. For Price,
Hume's central point is that when entertaining a belief, which
amounts to having a structure of ideas, we entertain the very same
ideas as when we simply consider the claim without believing it; so
belief cannot consist in the addition of an extra idea (1969:
160-161).



Hume's proposal is, famously, that talk of "belief"
stands for the presence of the ideas being more lively or vivacious.
Further, Hume's view is that the terms "solidity"
and "steadiness" enable us to focus on the special
"feel" of believed thoughts, produced by an impression
with its own high degree of vivacity. On his picture, the
impression's high "vivacity" creates the
ideas' vivacity by being based on the experience of constant
conjunction establishing evidence of a causal link between the present
impression's content and the idea in the belief.



Price criticises Hume for supposing that the link must be causal. If I
see a tree I shall believe that it has roots, but not because the tree
causes the roots, but because trees have roots as their parts (see
also
 SS4.5).
 Price sees another severe limitation: Hume's account does not
fit belief in generalisations themselves. If seeing some water makes
me think of the law that water freezes at 0degC, that is not because
the sight of water is linked to seeing it freeze at that temperature.
And, his model of belief-formation does not apply to beliefs formed by
inference.


### 4.7 Freedom and Assent: Hume versus Descartes



Finally, Price (1969: 22, 26, 41, 221-240) defends his own
well-known views about our degree of freedom in relation to assent by
studying Hume (1739-1740: Appendix) and Descartes'
disagreement (1641: Meditation 4). Hume's official view is that
belief is independent of the will and something over which we have no
mastery. In contrast, Descartes maintains that judgements are acts of
the will. Price thinks it is obvious that we cannot simply decide to
believe something (1969: 225ff, 238), but we can decide to investigate
a question and decide what type of evidence to scrutinise, meaning
that we might deliberately *incline* ourselves to think a
certain way.



Hume and Descartes, however, don't dispute this possibility.
Descartes affirms the freedom *not to believe*, given the
chance of erroneous belief. Since we are free to remain agnostic, we
are responsible for our errors, and not God, who is not a deceiver. On
Price's view, even if we cannot simply abandon a belief, such as
one's belief now that one is reading, we can "train
ourselves" (1969: 225) over time to refrain from forming such
beliefs. There are also abnormal subjects who form beliefs, e.g., that
they are made of paper, or are surrounded by impostors. We are, thus,
not impelled to form commonsensical beliefs (also 1930a: 26; 1930b:
193f). Finally, Price (1969: 239f) criticises Hume, the philosopher he
most admired, for inconsistency. Hume stresses that beliefs are
involuntary but also thinks that we can appreciate and respond to his
sceptical arguments, if only for a short time.


## 5. Recognition



Price's third main contribution is his ambitious analysis of
thinking, specifically of how what Price calls "full concept
application" emerges from its roots in experience (especially
1953a). Price's answer, in brief, is that it emerges because the
recipients of experience are intelligent. Price stresses an
*environmental condition* for concept-formation: the presence
of "recurrence" in our environment. Thus, there are lots
of red things, worms, leaves, and so on. Price claims that without
recurrence for us to encounter there could be no thought. Incessant
novelty would block conceptual acquisition.



Price's interesting claim is not obviously true. To be entitled
to hold that single examples are not enough, Price must provide a
theory of concept-formation.


### 5.1 Price's Metaphysical Neutrality regarding Recurrence and Properties



How should recurrence be analysed (1953a: ch. 1)? One proposal is that
recurrence consists in a *universal* (or characteristic) being
present in different things. An alternative analysis invokes the
notion of *resemblance*. Rather than saying red things have a
universal in common it is proposed that red things resemble each
other. In a rich discussion which is, besides his work on perception,
probably his most influential, Price finds difficulties and strengths
in both ways of speaking.

 

Most notably, on what Armstrong (1978: 15) calls Price's
"fully worked-out" analysis of resemblance nominalism,
something is in the class of things with recurring feature *F* if
it resembles a group of standard *F*-objects, exemplars, as
closely as the exemplars resemble each other (1953a: 20-22). See
also, e.g., Armstrong (1978: 46ff, 54f; 1989: 15, 17, 47f);
Rodriguez-Pereyra (2002: ch. 7) describes Price's
"Aristocratic Resemblance Nominalism" (2002: 10) as the
version which "current writers on the topic usually have in
mind"; and Paseau (2015: 95) criticises resemblance theories for
"the misleading connotation of subjectivity or
anthropocentricism". However, Price works out what he calls
"The Philosophy of Resemblances". He distinguishes this
"*ontological doctrine*" as the "starting
point for" "epistemological theories" such as
nominalism, conceptualism, and imagism (1953a: 22-23). The
ontological view he works out is thus not necessarily nominalist.



In his view, both analyses of recurrence are ultimately satisfactory
but have inelegant aspects in certain contexts. We can employ either
depending on which helps. Price distinguishes the views as two
alternative ways of *describing* matters: sameness versus
resemblance. This illustrates Price's special sort of
metaphysical neutralism (see also
 SS2.4
 above). The universals and resemblance languages are "two
different (systematically different) terminologies, two systematically
different ways of saying the same thing" (1953a: 30); Armstrong
calls Price's the "alternative languages view"
(1978: 47; 1989: 139). For criticism, see Raphael (1954-55:
SS2) and Brandt (1954: 633). Notably, Price's (1946) earlier
Hertz lecture defends realism about universals against resemblance
theories (Brandt 1954: 633; Rodriguez-Pereyra 2002: 125). It is an
interesting, though unexplored, question how Price's version of
neutralism compares with apparently similar meta-ontological positions
such as Carnap's (1950). 



Most importantly for him, Price frequently argues that his many
distinctions and general approach to recognition and mental life
overall are compatible with whichever view one takes on key
metaphysical issues such as the natures of properties and of
perception (Butchvarov 1998: 94-96 discusses this and highlights
similarities with Strawson 1966: 47-48; 1985: ch. 4). For
instance, when drawing the primary and secondary recognition
distinction (see
 SS5.3),
 he argues for this in detail (see 1953a: 55-74 [on properties],
50 [perception]; see also
 SS2.4).


### 5.2 Conceptual Thinking and Recognition: Thinking in Absence and in Presence



Price (1953a: 33) credits Ryle's (1949: ch. 2) famous discussion
of know-how with making clear that intelligence, which grounds our
conceptual capacities, also receives expression in action, even if not
preceded by thought. To Price, though, the mode of intelligence that
grounds thinking, the "fundamental intellectual process seems to
be the experience of recognition" (1953a: 34-35).
Conceptual thinking is a capacity which enables us to think of
*things in their absence*, a phrase he was known for (see also
 SS5.4;
 Sellars 1956 [1997: 65]). A requirement for reaching that level of
thinking is the ability to think about them *in their
presence*. He calls *this* recognition. He further claims,
very implausibly from contemporary perspectives, that full
concept-possession requires the capacity to recognise instances when
encountered (1953a: 34-35). A genuine concept must be, in
Price's words, "cashable" (1953a: 35) in this way.
Further, recognition does not require language; it doesn't
necessarily involve linguistic expression either privately or
publicly. When one recognises one's son one need not utter
"Here's my son" (see also Salmon 1986: 168). Also,
learning a language requires learning to recognise that
language's words. This cannot rest on possessing language.
Finally, recognition can be of characteristics or of individuals; the
former is basic.


### 5.3 Secondary versus Primary Recognition



A key distinction in his theory is between (a) primary recognition,
i.e. of a characteristic presented in experience, and (b) secondary
recognition, i.e. of something beyond what is presented in experience
(1953a: 44ff). His favourite examples are recognising an instance of
red (primary), and recognising a lump of lead (secondary). Price
claims that in recognising it as lead the subject goes beyond the
characteristics she notices. Rather, she treats the presented features
as signs (see
 SS5.4
 below; 1953a: ch. 4).



Obviously, secondary recognition can be mistaken. Price calls such
mistakes, "errors of recognition" (1953a: ch. 3). Someone
could take a grey lump to be lead even if it was not. But Price argues
that it is different with primary recognition. A *statement* in
response to a primary recognition might be erroneous, e.g., when using
the wrong word. But if one notices a feature presented in experience
and has an apparent memory of encountering it earlier, then one is
recognising the feature, whether or not one had encountered it before.
This argument's two crucial assumptions are 



(i)
that the presented feature fixes what it is recognised as, and
since it is there, what it is recognised as cannot differ from it, and

(ii)
the occurrence of recognition simply involves the
*apparent* sense of familiarity, which is there whether or not
it has been previously encountered. 


(ii) is hard to accept.


### 5.4 Sign-Cognition



What Price calls "sign-cognition", "cognition of the
absent" (1953a: 95), is "the type of cognition in which
something not immediately experienced is brought before the mind by
means of a sign" (1953a: 88). Price thinks that it is crucial to
explain what "being before the mind" amounts to here. For
instance, a subject recognises that someone is at the door by hearing
a knock--that someone is absent from the subject's
experience but brought before the mind by means of a sign, the knock.




Sign-cognition need not involve a linguistic response, nor the
entertainment of an image of what is signified. But, the recognition
often involves a generation of preparedness to act. If I recognise an
unstable cyclist I recognise a possible accident and get ready to
avoid it. So sometimes the recognition leads to actions that block
what is recognised as likely. Price adds that there is something
abstract about what is recognised. For example, if I recognise that
rain is imminent the specific character of the actual rain is not
signified. On the other hand what is recognised can be fairly
specific--the action-readiness that is stimulated might also be
specific and delicate. These differences are matters of degree. He
adds too that there are differences in degree in how strong the sign
is or is taken to be. If one hears thunder then that is a strong sign
of earlier lightning, but hearing a police siren is a fairly weak sign
of a local crime. It may just be a traffic accident call-out. Further,
the temporal direction of what is signified can be the past, as with
the lightning, the present, or the future. Price often discusses
sign-recognition in animals (especially cats, leading Iris Murdoch
[1940] to call him a "felinist", see also Mac Cumhaill
& Wiseman 2022: 78), calling it "the typical achievement of
the animal mind" (1953a: 98) and reveals a genuine awareness of
the behaviour of animals (e.g., animal vigilance, 1953a:
108)--this interest echoes Hume (1739-1740: III, xvi; 1748:
sect. 9).



But what does it mean to talk of the signified feature as thought of?
The adult case of recognition is based on the capacity to tell of
presented cases whether (or not) they fall under a possessed concept.
Price points out that this capacity can be possessed without being
actualised and can be actualised to different degrees. He proposes
that we should say of sign-recognition that the concept of the
signified is partially actualised in the subject.



Roughly, this half-actualisation can be specified operationally,
although Price expresses it differently. If I see smoke and take it as
a sign of fire in the environment that means that *my dispositions
to behave* are modified in a way that is conducive to encountering
fire. Crucially this can happen in us (even though we do have the
concept of "fire") but it can happen in creatures without
the concept. Price captures this change by talking of an increased
vigilance for fire (1953a: 120f). This is what "having in
mind" in such cases amounts to.



Price extensively relates sign-cognition also to logical notions, such
as disjunction, conditionals, and negation (1953a: ch. 5; 1929
discusses negation further); of this discussion, Beck (1953: 560)
says, "Psychologically this is the most subtle part of his
[1953a] book". Also, understanding thinking in this way, he
argues, avoids presupposing other minds, blocking a common objection
to communication's being our best evidence for other minds
(1938: 440ff).


### 5.5 Sign-cognition, Meaning, and Symbolisation



Price (especially 1953a: 144ff, 160ff) also made significant
contributions to theorising about meaning.



First, he (1953a: 144ff) draws a distinction between two senses of
"meaning": (i) the "sign" sense and (ii) the
"symbol" sense. The first is the sense in which we say
that those clouds mean rain, and the second the sense in which the
word "rain" means rain (see also 1938: 444). See also
Grice 1957 and
 SS7
 below.



Second, he criticises (1953a: 160ff) the view that symbols are a
special sort of sign (Ogden & Richards 1923: 23; Stebbing 1930:
11), the "Sign-Theory of Symbolization". The natural link
between sign and signified is established inductively. However, one
might indicate that one wants a drink by mimicking drinking with
one's hand. According to Price, this works by resemblance, not
by establishing an inductive correlation to wanting a drink, and thus
is unlike the natural, inductively established way that black clouds
signify rain--not all symbols are signs.



Third, Price's general objection to the sign-theory of meaning
is that it has latched onto something that corresponds to what a
spectator of a linguistic act, or an interpreter, must engage with,
but it completely ignores the point of view of the speaker (or
writer). It focuses, as he says, on the consumer and not the producer
of language (1953a: 198ff). As Price formulates the criticism he says
that the sign-theory fails to give any account of the role of symbols
(language) in what he calls "free thinking" (1953a:
200ff), that is thinking about things "in their
absence".



Fourth, Price points out that regarding someone's saying that
*p* as a sign that it is the case that *p*, something that
sustains the effectiveness of communication and testimony, is quite
different from regarding smoke as a sign of fire, in that it requires
and depends on a rational speaker emitting the assertion. To talk
simply of communication as a sign is to under-describe the nature of
communication.



Finally, Price points out that someone can hear and understand an
utterance without believing it, without treating it as a sign about
the world. He suggests, in effect problematically for sign-theories,
that understanding is more basic than expectation-generation.


### 5.6 The Imagist Theory of Occurrent Thinking



Another major focus is Price's analysis and criticism of the
Imagist Theory of (Occurrent) Thinking (e.g., Berkeley 1710; see
1953a: 234ff). Price deserves credit for opposing the tendency amongst
philosophers of his time to underestimate the importance of images
(Hamlyn [1984: 95] also remarks on Price's seriousness regarding
imagism). Price claims that images, especially visual images (1953a:
235-237), are employed in thinking, for instance by enabling us
to calculate things, or remember things.



Price contrasts imagism as a theory of thinking with
"verbalism", the theory that we think in words. Price
allows that we do think in words. Imagists claim, however, that this
verbal thinking is secondary, and if it is to be contentful, it has to
be cashable in images, whereas thinking in images does not require
anything else to confer content on it. Price notes that strictly when
someone thinks privately in words, they are employing images of words.
But on his understanding, an imagist about thinking means by
"images" non-verbal images and takes the basic components
of thought to be "representative images" (1953a: 245;
1951-1952: 143).



He argues that we ordinarily think in absence, with non-instantiative
particulars, that is, items which do not instantiate that which they
enable us to think about (1953a: 253ff). He then affirms that images,
in his sense, come closer to being instances of the concepts under
which the topical objects fall than do words. They are, he says,
"quasi-instantiative" (1953a: 255). Although Price is
himself prepared to say this, it is hard to understand talk of
*closeness* with regard to instantiation. Price helpfully
suggests that such things as models and diagrams also more closely
instantiate concepts than words do: they're also
"quasi-instantiative". Price's final criticism is
this: imagists have no good reason to insist that thinking has to
employ "quasi-instantiative" things. He says that thinking
in words has content in virtue of links between the words and
ostensive definitions of those words. These definitions ground
recognitional capacities which get activated when experience presents
the right sorts of particular. Price puts it this way: 



> 
> 
> my memory of what a crocodile is like is already operating in another
> way, because my word-producing and word-recognising capacity is firmly
> linked to it. (1953a: 263) 
> 
> 
> 



Thus, (A) occurrent thinking need not be carried by images, and (B)
thinking in words is perfectly possible.



Price's understanding of how thinking, when it is carried by
images, works, is sketched in his answers to the traditional problems
of resemblance. 



(1)
There are no hard rules about how closely images (say of a
crocodile) must resemble the thing thought about (the crocodile).

(2)
How do images fix content by resemblance when crocodile-images
resemble not only crocodiles but also other reptiles, and green images
of crocodiles resemble green? 


Price replies that images can be used to focus on one thing rather
than another by the presence of a word or a stimulating perception and
being situated in a mental set (1953a: 268ff). To flesh this out, he
(1953a: 273ff, 283-284, 296) mentions Hume's proposal that
some images are "present in power" though not
"present in fact" (1739-1740: I, i, 7; also
discussed here: 1959c: 483), that is, that the subject has a
"multiform image-producing capacity" (1953a: 273), is
disposed to produce a sequence of multiple images, say, of a
crocodile, and not just one crocodile-image. These images fix what is
focused upon with a word or thought, though sometimes a word, say
"crocodile", itself fixes the setting, the interpretation,
and "which of these resemblances will be the psychologically
effective one" (1953a: 269).



Price also addresses the traditional problem of generality, how
image-based thinking can have general content. Price argues that it is
an illusion that it is somehow easy in an image-based model of
thinking to account for thoughts about individuals. One has an image
of a face but which individual face is it an image of? Couldn't
another person have a face that resembles that image? Price thinks
Hume makes some progress by postulating the availability of many other
images. Price also allows that in some cases it may be possible to
have generic images akin to composite images formed by superimposing
lots of photographs. But in some cases of generality (e.g., the class
of triangles) no such composite can be imagined. Price also allows
indeterminate images, like Locke's (1689) suggested abstract
ideas, to sustain generality (1953a: 287-294). Real spatial
entities cannot be indeterminate, but images may be in a realm where
indeterminacy is possible. Such speculative proposals about
image-realms are also central to his famous account of the afterlife
on which the "Next world, if there is one, might be a world of
mental images" (1953c: 3; 1968b: 3; 1972: ch. 6; for discussion:
Badham 1976: 68, 133-146; Hick 1968: 110; Aldwinckle 1972:
97-99; Lewis 1973: 142; Ducasse 1961: 128; Ayers [1971: 397]
defends Price against Penelhum's [1970: 47-53] charge of
solipsism).



For Price (1953a: 297), imagism's "very serious
defect" is its inability to account for logical thinking (e.g.,
with negation, disjunction, possibility/actuality, and
quantification).


### 5.7 Price's Dispositional Conceptualism



According to Price, symbolic thinking doesn't exhaust the
content of thought; he writes, "part of what we think is always
symbolised, but not the whole of it ... and often only a small
part" (1953a: 308). For instance, when one searches for the
right word, one is guided by content that is not yet symbolised. Also,
thinking in time using a succession of symbols "overflows [the]
symbols" (1953a: 309) and never involves the whole
symbol-conveyed thought present at any time--the succession must
be guided by something already there in full (1953a:
309-311).



The extra features of thought missing from symbol-presented content,
Price argues (1953a: 302), are not captured by the so-called classical
theory of many ancients and earlier moderns such as Locke and Kant, on
which thinking is "the awareness or inspection of intelligible
objects--universals, or concepts, or abstract ideas, or ....
Subsistent propositions" (1953a: 302). In short, there is no
phenomenological evidence for this when one is thinking.



The key is the right view of concepts. In brief, Price's
approach is "a dispositional version of Conceptualism"
(1953a: 353), on which we talk of concept-manifestation in situations
where certain dispositions are present or actualised or partly
actualised. According to Price, then, concepts are neither the images
one encounters in thinking nor the objects of thinking which we
introspectively grasp in thinking. Rather, they are the dispositions
(i) to recognise instances of the universals which on other accounts
are equated with the concept itself or (ii) to recognise recurring
resemblances.



A very thorough and fair critical discussion of Price's theory
of recognition and related issues is given in Broad 1954. Other
critical but largely sympathetic discussions include L.W. Beck 1953;
Findlay 1954; Malcolm 1954; L. 1954; Brandt 1954; Mundle 1954;
Butchvarov 1979: 42, 79, 147, 258.


## 6. Belief



We now present some of Price's significant contributions to the
philosophical study of belief, including belief ascriptions
 (SS6.1),
 the variety of beliefs
 (SS6.6-6.8),
 their relations to other states such as knowledge
 (SS6.1;
 1969: chs. 1-3), the analysis of "one's evidence
for belief"
 (SS6.2;
 1969: ch. 4), especially from his 1960 Gifford Lectures, published as
his magnum opus *Belief* (1969). Their backbone is his defence
of the *dispositional* analysis of belief
 (SS6.4),
 in his eyes the standard modern analysis, specifically against
occurrentist analyses (e.g., Hume and Cook Wilson)
 (SS6.3).


### 6.1 Knowledge & How it Illuminates Belief



We start with some general commitments about belief's
relationship to knowledge.



First, Price (1969: 30ff) takes belief-ascriptions to be performatory:
when one says "I believe that *p*", one is certifying
to some extent the truth of *p*. The level of guarantee, however,
is below that of knowledge claims, which he takes Austin to have shown
to be performatory and convey a guarantee of truth. Price leaves it
unclear whether publicly self-ascribed beliefs can count both as
guarantees and as self-descriptions of one's state of mind
(e.g., as being that of belief).



Second, Price (1969: 42f) suggests that knowledge-ascriptions are
normally dispositional, ascribing to subjects a condition explicable
in counterfactual terms. He notes that we have ways of ascribing what
is actually factual knowledge in indirect forms--for example,
"*S* knows where *A* is"--but if such an
ascription is to be true it requires that *S* knows that *p*
where *p* is of the form "*A* is at place so and
so" (1969: 49-50). A different kind of
knowledge-ascription is "knowledge-by-acquaintance" (see
 SS3.7),
 which he understands as knowledge of items, say a place or a person,
which he takes to ground knowledge-by-description, meaning what we
have been told in general terms. Knowledge-by-description is only
genuine if we can relate the descriptions to what we can sense, the
realm of acquaintance. Both Russell earlier and Strawson later
developed in their own ways this link, though Price credits Jane
Austen (1811: ch. 21) with drawing the distinction 100 years before
Russell (1969: 63). Third, Price (1969: 50) follows Ryle:
"know-how" ascriptions are in some sense practical and not
reducible to factual claims.



Finally, Price (1969: ch. 3) defends a variant of the standard account
of propositional knowledge: *in many cases* the condition for
knowing that *p* is that the subject *S* believes with full
certainty that *p*, and has conclusive reasons for thinking that
*p*, and *p* is true. However, this analysis only applies
where the conviction is generated by inference. Where *S* simply
observes that *p*, e.g., that something is red or that
she's having a pain, no reasons or inference is involved. The
analysis of knowledge in such cases, according to Price, cannot centre
on belief. Thus, knowledge isn't analysed in just one way.
Earlier, Price (1930b: 200) claims that knowledge is a
"direct" cognitive relation to its objects and is a
"state where the distinction between sure and unsure does not
arise at all".


### 6.2 The Analysis of Belief: Some Preliminaries



Now, some preliminary stances regarding belief. First, Price endorses
talk of degrees of belief (1969: 39-41). Second, in assessing
the reasonableness of someone's belief, the focus must be on the
evidence that one possesses, not on the evidence available. According
to Price, the notion of evidence suggests facts that are known,
whereas people's belief-formation can be guided by other beliefs
they already have, whether accurate or not. Third, because standards
for knowledge are high, when knowledge is unavailable,
"mere" beliefs need to guide thought and action. Fourth,
complex series of beliefs which support each other might be grounded
outside themselves in at least four ways: (1) perception, (2)
self-consciousness, (3) memory, and (4) testimony.



Price's attitude to perception as a source of belief can be
described as Moorean: the regress of the justification of belief is
terminated by perceptual experiences and self-observation. Perception
is simply a way to settle questions, whatever sceptical arguments
might be offered.



Price argues that self-consciousness gives us evidence about
ourselves: he writes, for example: 



> 
> 
> My evidence for believing that I am a timid person is [...] the
> frequent experiences of fear which I have noticed in myself on many
> different sorts of occasions. (1969: 105)
> 
> 
> 



He blocks scepticism about memory in ways familiar from
 SS2:
 sceptical problems about memory can only be generated by relying on
memory. A ground for scepticism will rely eventually on something
delivered by memory. Say you seem to remember doing something.
You're told that you didn't do it. Acknowledging this
relies on your trusting someone else's memory of what happened
(1969: 106-111). Also, to draw a conclusion from premises, one
generally relies on one's memory of the premises. Thus,
arguments against memory rely on memory, so are self-undermining
(1930b: 195-196). (Bernecker 2008: 98-99 discusses and
uses Price's argument; for more on memory: Price 1936:
16-33; 1952c).



Price stresses how much of what each human being believes is grounded
in testimony. However, Price argues that the following, widely
accepted generalisation isn't well-supported: "What there
is said to be (or to have been) there is (or was) more often than
not" (1969: 114). For it involves a clash in the ethics of
belief (1969: ch. 11; 1954b: *passim*): (a) that it is wrong to
believe things that are not supported, and (b) that we should trust
others. Another approach he calls an "economic"
justification takes the claim about others as corresponding to a
*rule* (not a generalisation) to believe others unless one has
a reason not to do so (1969: 124-126). Its justification is that
unless one endorses the rule one forgoes the chance of learning about
most parts--spatial and temporal--of the world.



Famously, Price (1954b: 23) opposes the ethics of belief, arguing that
any blame directed on people's thoughts will have dire
consequences, such as that "charity will almost disappear from
the world" (for discussion: Wolterstorff 2005: 326).
 SS4.7
 above discusses his view that we cannot simply decide to believe
something (1969: 225ff, 238). However, he defends, against Newman
(1870: ch. 6), John Locke's (1689: IV, chs. 14-16, 19)
Ethics of Belief (1969: 130), which in short is that we should assent
to a degree which corresponds to the strength of our evidence for the
truth of the claim.


### 6.3 The Occurrence Analysis of Belief



Price's central topic is his critique of the occurrence analysis
of belief and his defence of the dispositional analysis.



Price proposes that the traditional occurrence analysis should be
understood as focusing on what he calls "assent" (1969:
204ff), which can stand for an occurrence. But in order to assent to a
proposition one must *entertain* it. So Price attempts to say
something informative about entertaining.



Price belongs in the truth-conditional tradition which links
understanding a proposition to knowing its truth-conditions, what it
would be like for the proposition to be true, though, of course,
without linking that to the Davidsonian idea of defining truth for
propositions. Price distinguishes between knowing the truth-conditions
and knowing how to verify or falsify the claim in question: we
understand claims of which we cannot determine the truth (1969: 194).
Price's problem is this: knowing what the truth of a proposition
involves is simply a dispositional condition and cannot consist in
occurrently analysing those conditions--so what is involved
occurrently in entertaining it? Price insightfully claims that it does
not consist in mentally encountering either a pure contentful entity
or an abstract possibility. His best answer is that the occurrence
involves an experienced state of readiness to engage in analysing the
truth-commitments of the proposition (1969: 200ff).



Further, entertaining a proposition *p* is necessary to be able
to doubt, reject, or assert that *p*, as well as to have a
conscious desire or aversion regarding *p* (1972: 38-39).
Bernecker (2010: 236) claims that "entertaining" plays the
same role for Price that "thought" plays in Descartes
(1641 [1984: 17]), as an "ur-attitude that underlies all
others".


### 6.4 Price's Dispositional Analysis of Belief



Most generally, Price's (1969: 243-266, Series II, Lecture
1) dispositional analysis equates having a belief with the presence of
a disposition. He thinks that it is obvious that many
belief-ascriptions have a dispositional meaning. When we say of a
sleeping person that she believes Rome was founded in 753 BC that does
not ascribe any sort of occurrence or act. Occurrence theorists do not
deny this, but claim that some belief-ascriptions ascribe occurrences,
and that with dispositional ascriptions the outputs of the disposition
are such occurrences; so the occurrence sense is more basic than the
dispositional sense. Price's sort of dispositional analysis has
the following features.



First, disposition-ascriptions are equivalent to conditionals, and
also can apply to a thing for a time, possibly very short, but
possibly throughout the object's existence.



Second, to pin down belief in terms of its characteristic outputs one
should not focus simply on action-outcomes. Characteristically,
beliefs can give rise to inaction, as when your belief that the radio
is properly tuned means you leave doing anything about it. More
interestingly, beliefs give rise to emotions or feelings (1969:
267ff). Your belief that there is a snake present generates fear, and
a belief that suddenly seems to be false generates surprise (1969:
275ff).



Third, Price (1969: 280-285) defends the idea (against Kneale)
that certain states of belief are ones in which something is felt.




Fourth, beliefs give rise to other beliefs. As he puts it: "We
need beliefs because we need guidance not only in our actions but in
our thoughts also" (1969: 291). Sometimes this generation of
belief amounts to an experienced inference, in which case the subject
making the inference must assent to the premises and also to the
conclusion, occurrences which Price calls "inward and
private" mental acts (1969: 295), but sometimes the inference is
automatic and not "lived through" (1969: 293).



Price, thus, recommends that belief is recognised as a multiform
disposition (1969: 294-296), in which inner acts of assent
figure amongst the outputs of the disposition. This view inclusively
incorporates what he sees as the insights of the traditional
occurrence analysis and the dispositional approach. Price aims, as is
typical of him, to bring out the best, as he sees it, in both sides.
What he brings out most is that much needs to be done to fill out the
dispositional analysis. (Salmon 1986: 168 compares Price's
dispositional view of belief with his own.)


### 6.5 Applications of the Dispositional Model



Price applies his dispositional model to various issues related to
belief, such as the phenomenon of half-belief (1964b: 152ff; 1969:
305ff), Newman's (1870) distinction between notional and real
assent (1969: 315-348), and the puzzle of self-verifying beliefs
(1969: 349-375), presented as a puzzle for the objectivity of
truth.



Price accounts for half-beliefs with his dispositional model as cases
where there are *some* elements in the normal, complex
disposition which constitutes belief but *others* are absent.
For example, maybe the tendency of the disposition to remain is weaker
than it characteristically is, or the disposition to emotion might be
prompted by certain sensory inputs, as in aesthetic contexts when
watching a film or reading a book (1969: 307-308), without
dispositions to act in certain ways.



The problem of self-verifying beliefs is that they seem to undermine
the conviction that our beliefs are made true by states-of-affairs
independent of our beliefs. Consider a competition in which one
team's members are convinced that they can win and this belief
motivates them to persevere through difficulties and win. Their belief
that they can win is made true by this very belief. Price's
solution is to claim that the belief's role is to be part of a
causal condition which produces the outcome; the truth of the belief
is in this way an objective matter.


### 6.6 Moral Beliefs



Price argues that there are no moral beliefs properly speaking: 



(i)
beliefs are things which are truth-apt, that is can be true or
false, and 
(ii)
"moral judgements" are essentially expressions of the
sentiment of approval or disapproval, something which cannot be true
or false (1969: 398). 


Ultimately, he prefers the "Attitudinarian Analysis"
(1969: 379): "it seems to accord with [my] own moral
experience" (1969: 380). When we express doubt about our moral
judgements, for instance, that simply amounts to expressing
uncertainty about the attitude, and not an uncertainty about a fact
(1969: 383ff). However, on various points, he argues that 



> 
> 
> the difference between an "attitudinarian" analysis of
> moral judgements and an "objectivist" analysis, in which
> they are held to be true or false, is not quite so clear-cut as it
> looks. (1969: 399)
> 
> 
> 



Further, he favours Hume and Hutcheson's way of developing this
analysis over R.M. Hare's, which treats moral judgements as
injunctions or imperatives (1969: 396, 418-420). He suggests
that to make a moral remark to another is not like telling them what
to do but is rather a matter of laying your attitude before them, as
an invitation to feel the same. He also claims that simply adopting a
universal rule unaccompanied by feelings of approval is not sufficient
for having a moral attitude--it is more akin to merely
internalising a rule. In fact, creatures without feeling cannot be
creatures with moral attitudes (1969: 420-425). 



Price aims to shrink the difference between ethical realism and
ethical non-realism. Later, more sophisticated twentieth century
efforts largely ignored Price's interesting explorations.


### 6.7 Belief-In



Price was well-known especially amongst philosophers of religion for
his discussion about whether "believe-in" reports are
reducible to "believe-that" ascriptions (1964c; 1965;
1969: 426-454). Price argues that many are clearly equivalent
(1969: 431-435). For example believing in the Loch Ness monster
is believing that there is such a monster. But in other
cases--such as believing in a friend, or in God--an
important element is trust (and love) which involves a feeling; so the
reduction cannot always work (1964c: 10-11; 1969: 449ff).
Litzenburg (1967) directly responds to Price's view, and
Sleeper's (1966) metaphysics of belief builds on Price's
account; for discussion: Mitchell 1971: 7ff, Malcolm 1964: 107ff.


### 6.8 Religious Belief



Finally, Price wrote influentially on (i) the nature of religious
belief, and (ii) its conflict with science and empiricism (see
 SS2.2
 above; also 1953b; 1964c; 1969: Series 2, Lecture 10; 1972; among
others). In 1953b and in "Religious Belief and Empiricist
Philosophy" (1969), he engages especially with two recent
developments: that religious claims such as "God exists"
(i) are neither true nor false, being devoid of descriptive meaning;
and (ii) should be interpreted as recommendations of
lifestyles--say, to love thy neighbour--rather than as
claims about transcendent entities (1953b: 3).



Price suggests the following. Religious "recommendations"
advise us to adopt a certain worldview, putting it briefly, to live a
loving life. Some sort of empirical test is available for the
recommendation to live a loving life. We can try it or observe such
attempts and see if it produces approval and what the recommenders
think it will. Importantly, though, the recommended worldview and ways
of life are committed to the assertion of certain propositions,
without which they cannot even be understood (1953b: 7). For instance,
the lifestyle recommendations of theistic religions (e.g.,
Christianity) require propositions about the real existence of a
transcendent deity, human immortality, and generally a theistic theory
of the universe (1953b: 4-6), and for non-theistic religions
such as Buddhism, propositions about reincarnation and the
non-existence of a substantial Ego (1953b: 6-7). Further, Price
argues strongly that engaging in many of the religious practices
(e.g., petitionary prayer) without these beliefs is intellectually
dishonest. The wishful beliefs, say in God, are an essential part of
the psychological techniques and practices of the religion (1972:
38-40). However, earlier (1964c: 18-19) he makes room for
devotional practices which require merely an "as-if"
attitude towards God (see
 SS4.3).



Price is, thus, a realist about the interpretation of religious
claims, in contrast to his contemporary, Braithwaite (1955). Price
(1969: 476-488) aims to locate experiential evidence that bears
on such claims and empirical tests of the realist religious hypotheses
for earthbound creatures like us. If successful, empiricists should at
least have no qualms about the meaningfulness of claims, say, about a
transcendental god. The religious view is that we are capable of
encountering God in devotional experience, such as prayer which
involves a "real" rather than "notional"
apprehension of God (see 1969: 318-319; Newman 1870)--in
short, prayer allows us to be acquainted with God rather than to know
about God by description--and via "super-sensory cognitive
powers, an awareness of the Divine" (1953b: 31, also 11ff),
though he claims in (1964c: 22-23) that it would be
"presumptuous" of the ordinary religious person to think
that they've achieved this. So to test it empirically we must,
without prior belief in religion, *try out* devotional practice
and see what experiences occur. He does not say what the experiential
outcome will in general be, and he does not explore problems that
might be raised about the interpretation of the resulting experiences.
(Price's acquaintance with an apparent religious experience is
recounted by Hick 2002: 74-75.) He (1964c: 20-24) does
describe, however, that it involves a personal relationship of faith,
belief, and loving confidence in God, which isn't propositional
and involves a removal of the illusion that God is absent (1964d: 35).
For discussion: Hartshorne 1964: 31. Price seems content to have
linked religious claims to such empirical testing: he writes,
"'Try it and see for yourself' is one way of
formulating the empiricist principle" (1935: 331; 1964c: 24;
1969: 488;
 SS2.2
 above). Also, he argues (1953b: 37-54) that psychical research
has "discovered" (1953b: 54) other forms of
"supernormal cognition". Although these discoveries do
"nothing at all to establish [the sense of the Divine]"
(1953b: 49), they "diminish or perhaps even ... remove the
chief obstacle[:] ... the Materialistic conception of human
nature" (1953b: 53; for favourable discussion see Russell 1954
[1999: 147-150]; see also
 SS7
 below).


## 7. Remarkable Anticipations



We end by illustrating a very impressive feature of Price's
discussions: the degree to which he anticipates ideas that became a
focus of considerable attention later.



In Quine and Davidson's terminology, Price (1953a: ch. 7) is
concerned with the possibility of translation and interpretation,
although he does not speak that way. Here, Price has latched onto the
idea that accurate language-acquisition depends on and requires that
certain utterances dealing with observable matters must be true. He
does not propose highly general principles, such as truth-maximisation
for belief as a constraint on interpretation--indeed he is
probably against such a general claim--but he appreciates the
crucial role of truth in relation to observation sentences. He also
stresses the idea that language-acquisition centrally depends on
induction, an insight which any response to Wittgenstein's
rule-following discussion should acknowledge. What is surprising,
looking back, is that these ideas in Price were not taken up, and his
ideas played no role in later discussion. The explanation for this, we
believe, is that his book was unfortunately often ignored. 



Elsewhere, Price (1929: 98) says that it is unfortunate to call
statements about oneself or one's mental states
"subjective" as they are, in his words, "as
'objective' as anything else, for they are realities
existing in the world whether anyone thinks about them or not"
(1929: 98). This anticipates reactions against Nagel (1974) and
Jackson's (1982: 130) attempts to capture our mental lives with
what-it's-like-ness talk and the subjective/objective
distinction. He remarkably analyses "knowing what it is like for
something to be red" (1969: 55) as a case of
knowledge-by-acquaintance (see
 SS3.7
 above), with (1) first-handedness, and (2) familiarity, together
yielding the capacity to recognise the colour when one encounters it
elsewhere. He doesn't seem to think that such knowledge brings
in anything non-objective.



Interestingly, when applying his theory of recognition to recognising
individuals, Price reveals that he thinks of persisting individuals as
a succession of short-lived particulars, in effect what came to be
called time-slices (1953a: 39).



Price's (1953a: 144ff) distinction between the sign and symbol
senses of meaning anticipates the same distinction in Grice (1957),
famously labelled natural versus non-natural meaning, by four years
looking at publication dates. However, Grice's paper was written
earlier than when it appeared. Neither Price nor Grice mentions the
other in their accounts and there is no way to decide who influenced
whom or whether they were independent.



According to Langsam (1997: 57), Price (1932: 31) anticipates but
quickly rejects the disjunctivist conception of experience later
defended by Hinton (1973), Snowdon (1981; 1990), and McDowell (1982).
He rejects it because "there is no qualitative difference
between normal [veridical] sense-data as such and abnormal [e.g.,
illusory] sense-data as such" (1932: 31; for discussion: Crane
2005: SS1.2).


## 8. Legacy



Price was clearly a major figure during his life-time. Although his
influence seems to have waned quickly after his death, it lived on via
his major influence on and continued engagement from his students,
some of whom themselves became major figures in philosophy, despite
his being, in Warnock's (1995: 717) words, "a shy,
reclusive figure, belonging to no school or group and seeking no
disciples".