358 THE REAL WORLD 



bill are identical "in point of chemical footing" (i.e., same paper, 

 same ink ) . Yet in each case I have an uneasy feeling that one is dwell- 

 ing overlong on a similarity which— though no doubt abundantly 

 interesting in itself— is yet trifling in comparison with the enormous 

 functional diflFerence that is left out of all account. Precisely that 

 neglect is responsible for what Quine himself recognizes to be the 

 thrust of his argument: "... a blurring of the supposed boundary 

 between speculative metaphysics and natural science." In my opinion 

 any such "blurring" represents an inordinately high price to pay for 

 epistemological enlightenment. For certainly, if Homeric gods and 

 physical objects "di£Fer only in degree and not in kind," must not re- 

 ligion and science then diflFer only in degree and not in kind? And if 

 fossil sea shells are then found on high ground, why not believe the 

 Devil put them there to mislead men? 



NAIVE REALISM 



Naive realism is Samuel Johnson's view that the stone that stubbed 

 his toe thereby established a claim to be considered "real." It is the 

 view of the man of common sense. We saw earlier that, necessarily, 

 it is also in part the view of the microphysicist. Naive realism con- 

 ceives an external world wholly independent of our knowing of 

 it, progressively revealed to us by science, and certainly and objec- 

 tively depicted by scientific knowledge. For reasons indicated earlier, 

 and now only briefly recapitulated, this appealingly straightforward 

 position is utterly untenable. 



Provisionally adopting the realist position, we must accept the 

 results of a century of physiological and psychological research that 

 demonstrates the great complexity of the "simple" process of percep- 

 tion. In Chapter I we found that "naked perception," free from all 

 conceptual component, is a fiction: the most primitive reports of the 

 "real world" furnished by our senses are already colored by our 

 humanity. A phijsical object is not a given reality, as the naive realist 

 supposes, but irreducibly involves human inference. Nor is a scien- 

 tific law, as he supposes, the pure expression of a natural order dis- 

 covered as such. In Chapters II and V we saw the major elements of 

 conceptual invention that enter into the making of laws quite clearly, 

 then, not perfect general truths dictated by nature to an attentive but 

 passive human auditor. 



The naive realist supposes scientific theories shaped only by the 



