another person perceives is seen by us to lie outside him, we infer that there exists in him the perception of it. “Thus in consequence of introjection [we] find on the one side the parts of the environment as ‘things,’ and on the other side individuals who ‘apprehend’ the ‘things’; that is to say, ‘things’ on the one hand and ‘perceptions of things,’ or, more shortly, ‘perceptions’ on the other.”[1] As the voice of each individual comes from within him, and as each individual locates certain feelings in organs which are as a rule inside the body, the perceptions are regarded as forming an inner world. This conclusion seems all the more inevitable as these perceptions are not discoverable on the outside (am Äussern) of the body.[2] The inference may therefore be stated as follows: All other persons have an outer world which they perceive or experience and each has an inner world which consists of these perceptions or experiences. The introjectionist argument is then completed through application to the self. I have an outer world which I perceive or experience and an inner world which consists of these perceptions and experiences.
Many objections to this argument at once suggest themselves. In the first place, the distinction between objects and perceptions of objects must be present in our own experience before we can infer its presence in the experience of others. Dr. Ward has stated that “the essence of introjection consists in applying to the immediate experience of my fellow-creatures conceptions which have no counterpart in my own”.[3] But if the self has no conception of inner experience or of perception as something distinguishable from the objects apprehended, it could not invent the distinction by any amount of reflexion upon the spatial externality of objects to the bodies of others. Also, it is not clear why the spatial externality of objects to our own body should not in itself, without this roundabout argument through other selves, suffice to direct our attention to so fundamental a distinction as that between objects and the perception of them. But since Avenarius admits as original and primitive the distinction between characters and contents, that is to say, between experience or perception and the contents experienced or perceived, he can only mean that the introjectionist fallacy consists in transforming distinguishable aspects into separate worlds, the inseparable aspects of experience into two kinds of experience.
- ↑ Menschlicher Weltbegriff, § 43.
- ↑ Ibid., § 45.
- ↑ Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. ii., 172.
