Philosophy as Literature: the Case of Borges I. Borges the Artist and Borges the Thinker

For you took it, taking a look, that he was there, supposing quite correctly that things would not have looked that way unless he was. (This is not Dretske's example, but I hope it does not botch his point.) The third point, implicit of course in those others, is -that, while in a sense what we can see is simply what is there to be seen, there is no such ineluctable limit to what we can 'get to know by visual means'. We can indeed get to know things by seeing that they are the case; but there are also things that we can see to be the case just because of, or on the basis of, other things that we know, and that perhaps we got to know in quite different ways. The capacity to see, as one might put it, is a capacity of acquiring ' visual increments ' to a stock of knowledge that is itself, by that means and many others, indefinitely extensible; so that there is no fixed point beyond which no further visual increment is possible, or beyond which any further increment would have to be non-visual. Dretske goes into this, with care and exactness and (I would say) truth, in a long discussion of observation in scientific practice. It will be observed that this critical notice has not been very critical, at least in that secondary sense of the term which connotes disagreement. But I do not apologize for that. This seems to me to be a book in which many, many things are got right, and which accordingly, admirably, offers little occasion for the philosophical sport of perpetual dissension. I should mention that it also contains, though I have not discussed, valuable passages about 'perceptual relativity' and about measurement; and also, of course, about many instances of seeing other than those which, as central cases, I have mentioned here. G. J. WARNOCK