Clearly, the argument continues, it springs from the fact that they are made in just the circumstances in which they are made, as is indicated by the fact that they characteristically, though not necessarily or without exception, involve those so-called token-reflexive expressions which, in addition to the tenses of verbs, serve to connect the circumstances in which a statement is made with its sense …
It would appear, then, that there are two ways in which a sentence token can have credibility: (1) The authority may accrue to it, so to speak, from above, that is, as being a token [or instance] of a sentence type all the tokens of which, in a certain use, have credibility, e.g. ‘2 + 2 = 4.’ In this case, let us say that token credibility is inherited from type authority. (2) The credibility may accrue to it from the fact that it came to exist in a certain way in a certain set of circumstances, e.g. ‘This is red.’ Here token credibility is not derived from type credibility.
Now the credibility of some sentence types appears to be intrinsic – at least in the limited sense that it is not derived from other sentences, type or token. This is, or seems to be, the case with certain sentences used to make analytic statements. The credibility of some sentence types accrues to them by virtue of their logical relations to other sentence types, thus by virtue of the fact that they are logical consequences of more basic sentences. It would seem obvious, however, that the credibility of empirical sentence types cannot be traced without remainder to the credibility of other sentence types. And since no empirical sentence type appears to have intrinsic credibility, this means that credibility must accrue to some empirical sentence types by virtue of their logical relations to certain sentence tokens, and, indeed, to sentence tokens the authority of which is not derived, in its turn, from the authority of sentence types.
The picture we get is that of their being two ultimate modes of credibility: (1) The intrinsic credibility of analytic sentences, which accrues to tokens as being tokens of such a type; (2) the credibility of such tokens as ‘express observations’, a credibility which flows from tokens to types.
Let us explore this picture, which is common to all traditional empiricisms, a bit further. How is the authority of such sentence tokens as ‘express observational knowledge’ to be understood? It has been tempting to suppose that in spite of the obvious differences which exist between ‘observation reports’ and ‘analytic statements’, there is an essential similarity between the ways in which they come by their authority. Thus, it has been claimed, not without plausibility, that whereas ordinary empirical statements can be correctly made without being true, observation reports resemble analytic statements in that being correctly made is a sufficient as well as necessary condition of their truth. And it has been inferred from this – somewhat hastily, I believe – that ‘correctly making’ the report ‘This is green’ is a matter of ‘following the rules for the use of “this”, “is” and “green”’. Three comments are immediately necessary:
(1) First a brief remark about the term ‘report’. In ordinary usage a report is a report made by someone to someone. To make a report is to do something. In the literature of epistemology, however, the word ‘report’ or ‘Konstatierung’4 has acquired a technical use in which a sentence token can play a reporting role (a) without being an overt verbal performance, and (b) without having the character of being ‘by someone to someone’ – even oneself. There is, of course, such a thing as ‘talking to oneself’… but, as I shall be emphasizing in the closing stages of my argument, it is important not to suppose that all ‘covert’ verbal episodes are of this kind.
(2) My second comment is that while we shall not assume that because ‘reports’ in the ordinary sense are actions, ‘reports’ in the sense of Konstatierungen are also actions, the line of thought we are considering treats them as such. In other words, it interprets the correctness of Konstatierungen as analogous to the rightness of actions. Let me emphasize, however, that not all ought is ought to do, nor all correctness the correctness of actions.
(3) My third comment is that if the expression ‘following a rule’ is taken seriously, and is not weakened beyond all recognition into the bare notion of exhibiting a uniformity – in which case the lightning–thunder sequence would ‘follow a rule’ – then it is the knowledge or belief that the circumstances are of a certain kind, and not the mere fact that they are of this kind, which contributes to bringing about the action.
In the light of these remarks it is clear that if observation reports are construed as actions, if their correctness is interpreted as the correctness of an action, and if the authority of an observation report is construed as the fact that making it is ‘following a rule’ in the proper sense of this phrase, then we are face to face with givenness in its most straightforward form. For these stipulations commit one to the idea that the authority of Konstatierungen rests on nonverbal episodes of awareness – awareness that something is the case, e.g. that this is green – which nonverbal episodes have an intrinsic authority (they are, so to speak, ‘self-authenticating’) which the verbal performances (the Konstatierungen) properly performed ‘express’. One is committed to a stratum of authoritative nonverbal episodes (‘awareness’) the authority of which accrues to a superstructure of verbal actions, provided that the expressions occurring in these actions are properly used. These self-authenticating episodes would constitute the tortoise on which stands the elephant on which rests the edifice of empirical knowledge …
But what is the alternative? We might begin by trying something like the following: An overt or covert token of ‘This is green’ in the presence of a green item is a Konstatierung and expresses observational knowledge if and only if it is a manifestation of a tendency to produce overt or covert tokens of ‘This is green’ – given a certain set – if and only if a green object is being looked at in standard conditions. Clearly on this interpretation the occurrence of such tokens of ‘This is green’ would be ‘following a rule’ only in the sense that they are instances of a uniformity, a uniformity differing from the lightning–thunder case in that it is an acquired causal characteristic of the language user. Clearly the above suggestion … won’t do as it stands. Let us see, however, if it can’t be revised to fit the criteria I have been using for ‘expressing observational knowledge’…
[We] have seen that to be the expression of knowledge, a report must not only have authority, this authority must in some sense be recognized by the person whose report it is. And this is a steep hurdle indeed. For if the authority of the report ‘This is green’ lies in the fact that the existence of green items appropriately related to the perceiver can be inferred from the occurrence of such reports, it follows that only a person who is able to draw this inference, and therefore who has not only the concept green, but also the concept of uttering ‘This is green’ – indeed, the concept of certain conditions of perception, those which would correctly be called ‘standard conditions’ – could be in a position to token ‘This is green’ in recognition of its authority. In other words, for a Konstatierung ‘This is green’ to ‘express observational knowledge’, not only must it be a symptom or sign of the presence of a green object in standard conditions, but the perceiver must know that tokens of ‘This is green’ are symptoms of the presence of green objects in conditions which are standard for visual perception.
Now it might be thought that there is something obviously absurd in the idea that before a token uttered by, say, Jones could be the expression of observational knowledge, Jones would have to know that overt verbal episodes of this kind are reliable indicators of the