I wouldn’t call it a quibble: I agree. There is a lovely tension between the idea that all perception, not just seeing, is “inference from incomplete information”; and the peripatetic axiom, “nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses”.
The only way to have complete information is to be Laplace’s demon. No one else has truly “adequate data”, and all knowledge is in that sense incertain; nevertheless, inference does work pretty well. (So well that it sure feels as if logic need not have been “first in the senses”, even though it is a form of knowledge and should therefore be to some extent incertain… the epistemology, it burns us !).
I wouldn’t call it a quibble: I agree. There is a lovely tension between the idea that all perception, not just seeing, is “inference from incomplete information”; and the peripatetic axiom, “nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses”.
The only way to have complete information is to be Laplace’s demon. No one else has truly “adequate data”, and all knowledge is in that sense incertain; nevertheless, inference does work pretty well. (So well that it sure feels as if logic need not have been “first in the senses”, even though it is a form of knowledge and should therefore be to some extent incertain… the epistemology, it burns us !).