The Epistemic Primacy of Sense Perception

There is confusion within the history of philosophy over the correct epistemic ordering of the levels of awareness: chronologically it is true that the sensational is first, followed by the perceptual—but this is not the correct ordering with respect to the science of epistemology.

”[Direct] experience,” according to Objectivism, means the perceptual level of consciousness. As adults, as thinkers, and even as children beyond the infant stage, what we are given when we use our senses, leaving aside all conceptual knowledge, is the awareness of entities—nothing more, but nothing less.¹

In fact, it is the case that starting from the perceptually given it has taken a vast chain of scientific discoveries, an enormous amount of inductive and deductive reasoning, to even discover the sensational level and to deduce that we must have at one point experienced the world in such a way. We needed to first start with the external stimuli–the percepts–then we could move onto the stage of abstracting to form concepts, which then allowed us to uncover the existence of our own sensory apparatus, brain, and consciousness, and then we can begin to uncover the laws governing this whole setup, and only then we can finally conclude that the world must have at one point appeared as a chaotic mess. “That chaos, however, is not given to us as adults or philosophers. It is a sophisticated inference from what is given: the perceptual level.”²

For any given piece of knowledge that one has, the questions are: “what do I know?” and “how do I know?”—epistemology answers the latter question, the how? For you to have any information at all on anything, you must start with percepts–recall that your brain automatically integrates sensations into percepts–sensations are not themselves retained at all, and thus cannot form the basis of any chain of deduction—what you need is percepts, which are retained and are already bundled together, ready for further cognition.

There are philosophers (David Hume is the most famous) who deny the perceptual level. Such men give the sensation stage epistemological primacy, then seek to determine whether the fact of entities (and causality) can be established by inference from it. This is a dead end; from disintegrated sensations, nothing can be inferred. A consciousness that experienced only sensations would be like the mind of an infant; it could neither perceive objects nor form concepts (which is one reason Hume ended as a paralyzed skeptic). Hume’s dead end, however, is self-imposed. Entities do not require inferential validation. The given is the perceptual level.

This last statement does not necessarily mean that the entities we perceive are metaphysical primaries; as we have seen, that is a question for science. It means that the grasp of entities is an epistemological primary, which is presupposed by all other knowledge, including the knowledge of any ultimate ingredients of matter that scientists may one day discover.³

Any philosopher who wishes to place the sensational as having epistemic primacy must himself rely on percepts being the given in his attempt to validate his thesis—he steals the primacy of perception in his attempt to dispute it.