For the past several decades, the dominant fashion among academic philosophers was empiricism—a militant kind of empiricism. Its exponents dismissed philosophical problems by declaring that fundamental concepts—such as existence, entity, identity, reality—are meaningless; they declared that concepts are arbitrary social conventions and that only sense data, “unpro-cessed” by conceptualization, represent a valid or “scientific” form of knowledge; and they debated such issues as whether man may claim with certainty that he perceives a tomato or only a patch of red.

Sooner or later, it had to become apparent that cooks, let alone scientists, do something with that patch of red by some means which is not direct and immediate sensory perception. And—as in any field of activity ruled by fashion, not facts—the philosophical pendulum began to swing to the other side of the same coin.

Accepting the empiricists’ basic premise that concepts have no necessary relation to sense data, a new breed of rationalists is floating up to the surface of the academic mainstream, declaring that scientific knowledge does not require any sense data at all (which means: that man does not need his sense organs).

If the empiricist trend—with its glib, glossy, up-to-the-minute modernism of quasi-technological jargon and pseudo-mathematical equations—may be regarded as the miniskirt period of philosophical fashion, then the rationalist revival brings in the maxiskirt period, an old, bedraggled, pavement-sweeping, unsanitary maxiskirt, as unsuited for climbing into a modern car or airplane (or for any kind of climbing) as its equivalent in the field of ladies’ garments.

How low this new fashion can fall and what its hem-line can pick up may be observed in the November 20, 1969 issue of The Journal of Philosophy—a magazine regarded as the most “prestigious” of the American journals of the philosophic profession, published at Columbia University.

The lead article is entitled “Science Without Experience” by Paul K. Feyerabend of the University of California and London University. (Remember that what is meant here by “experience” is the evidence of man’s senses.) The article declares: “It must be possible to imagine a natural science without sensory elements, and it should perhaps also be possible to indicate how such a science is going to work.

“Now experience is said to enter science at three points: testing; assimilation of the results of test; understanding of theories.”

Whoever is said to have said this, did not include observation among his three points, implying that science begins with “testing.” If so, what does one “test”? No answer is given.

“It is easily seen that experience is needed at none of the three points just mentioned.

“To start with, it does not need to enter the process of test: we can put a theory into a computer, provide the computer with suitable instruments directed by him (her, it) so that relevant measurements are made which return to the computer, leading there to an evaluation of the theory. The computer can give a simple yes-no response from which a scientist may learn whether or not a theory has been confirmed without having in any way participated in the test (i.e., without having been subjected to some relevant experience).” (All italics in original.)

One might feel, at this point, that one’s brain is being paralyzed by too many questions. Just to name a few of them: Who built the computer, and was he able to do it without sensory experience? Who programs the computer and by what means? Who provides the computer with “suitable instruments” and how does he know what is suitable? How does the scientist know that the object he is dealing with is a computer?

But such questions become unnecessary if one remembers two fallacies identified in Objectivist epistemology, which can help, not to elucidate, but to account for that paragraph: the fallacies of context-dropping and of “concept-stealing”—which the article seems to flaunt as valid epistemological methods, proceeding, as it does, from the basic premise that the computers are here.

This still leaves the question: by what means does the scientist learn the computer’s verdict? To this one, the article’s author provides an answer—which is point 2 of his theory of knowledge.

“Usually such information travels via the senses, giving rise to distinct sensations. But this is not always the case. Subliminal perception [of what?] leads to reactions directly, and without sensory data. Latent learning leads to memory traces [of what?] directly, and without sensory data. Posthypnotic suggestion [by whom and by what means?] leads to (belated) reactions directly, and without sensory data. In addition there is the whole unexplored field of telepathic phenomena.”

Apparently in order not to let this sink in fully, the article’s next sentence continues the paragraph uninterrupted. But I have interrupted it precisely to let this sink in fully.

The paragraph’s next sentence is: “I am not asserting that the natural sciences as we know them today could be built on these phenomena alone and could be freed from sensations entirely. Considering the peripheral nature of the phenomena and considering also how little attention is given to them in our education (we are not trained to use effectively our ability for latent learning) this would be both unwise and impractical. But the point is made that sensations are not necessary for the business of science and that they occur for practical reasons only.”

What would be the meaning or value of an impractical process of consciousness? Since the practice of the faculty of consciousness is to give us information about reality, an impractical process would be one that fails in this function. Yet it is some such process that the author advocates as superior or, at least, as equal to the processes of sensory experience—and urges our educators to develop in us.

Turning now to point 3 of his theory of knowledge—the relationship of experience to the understanding of theories—the author announces that “experience arises together with theoretical assumptions, not before them . . .” He proves it as follows: “eliminate part of the theoretical knowledge of a sensing subject and you have a person who is completely disoriented, incapable of carrying out the simplest action.”

A disoriented person is an adult who, losing part of his acquired conceptual knowledge, is unable to function on a purely sensory-perceptual level, i.e., unable to revert to the stage of infancy. Normally developing infants and children are not disoriented. It is the abnormal state of an adult that the article offers as a demonstration of the cognitive impotence of sense data.

Then the article’s author plunges rapidly into his theory of a child’s cognitive development, as follows: the development “gets started only because the child reacts correctly toward signals, interprets them correctly, because he possesses means of interpretation even before he has experienced his first clear sensation.”

The possession of means and their use are not the same thing: e.g., a child possesses the means of digesting food, but would you accept the notion that he performs the process of digestion before he has taken in any food? In the same way, a child possesses the means of “interpreting” sense data, i.e., a conceptual faculty, but this faculty cannot interpret anything, let alone interpret it “correctly,” before he has experienced his first clear sensation. What would it be interpreting?

“Again we can imagine that this interpretative apparatus acts without being accompanied by sensations (as do all reflexes and all well-learned movements such as typing). The theoretical knowledge it contains certainly can be applied correctly, though it is perhaps not understood. But what do sensations contribute to our understanding? Taken by themselves, i.e., taken as they would appear to a completely disoriented person, they are of no use, either for understanding, or for action.”

After a few more sentences of the same kind, the paragraph concludes: “Understanding in the sense demanded here thus turns out to be ineffective and superfluous. Result: sensations can be eliminated from the process of understanding also (though they may of course continue to accompany it, just as a headache accompanies deep thought).”

Let me now summarize the preceding, i.e., that article’s theory of man and of knowledge: a zombie whose mental apparatus produces theoretical knowledge which he does not understand, but which “interprets” signals “correctly” and enables him to “apply” it correctly, i.e., to act without any understanding—directed by his ultimate cognitive authority, the scientist, a blind-deaf-mute who engages in mental telepathy with a computer.

Now for the article’s payoff or cashing-in: “Why is it preferable to interpret theories on the basis of an observational language rather than on the basis of a language of intuitively evident statements (as was done only a few centuries ago and as must be done anyway, for observation does not help a disoriented person), or on the basis of a language containing short sentences (as is done in every elementary physics course)? . . . Knowledge can enter our brain without touching our senses. And some knowledge resides in the individual brain without ever having entered it. Nor is observational knowledge the most reliable knowledge we possess. Science took a big step forward when the Aristotelian idea of the reliability of our everyday experience was given up and was replaced by an empiricism of a more subtle kind. . . . Empiricism . . . is therefore an unreasonable doctrine, not in agreement with scientific practice.”

Summing up his procedure, the article’s author concludes with: “Proceeding in this way of course means leaving the confines of empiricism and moving on to a more comprehensive and more satisfactory kind of philosophy.” The “confines of empiricism,” in this context, means: the confines of reality.

Before we return to the morgue for the task of dissection, let us pause for a breath of fresh air—for a moment’s tribute to the lonely giant whom, two thousand three hundred years after his death, the enemies of man’s mind still have to try to attack before they can destroy the rest of us.

A graphic description of what a non-observational, non-Aristotelian language would be like is given in an academically less prestigious journal—Look magazine, January 13, 1970. An article entitled “Growl to Me Softly and I’ll Understand” declares: “On a personal level, there’ll be no need to cling to formal grammar to convey meaning. Speech doesn’t have to be linear; it can come out as a compressed overlay of facts and sensations and moods and ideas and images. Words can serve as signals, and others will understand. The way a man feels can be unashamedly expressed in sheer sound, such as a low, glottal hum, like the purring of a cat, to indicate contentment. . . . Feelings have meaning. Sounds have meaning. Open language can be a joy—a language we can grow with, growl with. Words can cramp your style.”

Suppose that you are on trial for a crime you did not commit; you need the clearest focus, the fullest concentration on facts, the strictest justice in the minds of those you face, in order to prove your innocence; but what “comes out” of the judge and jury is “a compressed overlay of facts and sensations and moods and ideas and images.”

Suppose that the government issues a decree which expropriates everything you own, sends your children to a concentration camp, your wife to a firing squad, yourself to forced labor, and your country into a nuclear war; you struggle frantically to understand why; but what “comes out” of your country’s leaders is “a compressed overlay of facts and sensations and moods and ideas and images.”

These examples are not exaggerations; they are precisely what the two articles quoted mean, and the only things they can mean—in that factual, existential reality where your sole tool of protection and survival is concepts, i.e., language.

The Look article wears a thin fig leaf, in the form of restricting the growls to the “personal level” (which cannot be done, since the human mind is unable to carry for long that kind of double psycho-epistemology). But The Journal of Philosophy article advocates the method of the “compressed overlay”—a non-observational language—for the mental activities of scientists.

“Science Without Experience” heralds the retrogression of philosophy to the primordial, pre-philosophical rationalism of the jungle (“as was done only a few centuries ago,” states the author, in support of a non-observational language). But what is innocent and explicable in an infant or a savage becomes senile corruption when the snake oil, totem poles and magic potions are replaced by a computer. This is the sort of rationalism that Plato, Descartes and all the others of that school would be ashamed of; but not Kant. This is his baby and his ultimate triumph, since he is the most fertile father of the doctrine equating the means of consciousness with its content—I refer you to his notion that the machinery of consciousness produces its own (categorial) content.

“Science Without Experience” is an article without significance and would not be worth considering or discussing if it were not for the shocking fact that it was published in the leading American journal of the philosophic profession. If this is the view of man, of reason, of knowledge, of science, of existence sanctioned and propagated by the philosophic authorities of our time, can you blame the hippies and yippies who are their products? Can you blame an average youth who is thrown out into the world with this kind of mental equipment? Do you need any committees, commissions or multi-million-dollar studies to tell you the causes of campus violence and drug addiction?

A brilliant young professor of philosophy gave me the following explanation of the appearance of that article: “They [the academic philosophers] would enjoy it because it attacks philosophy, in a hooligan manner, including some of their own most cherished beliefs, such as empiricism. They get a kick out of it. They will read and publish anything, so long as it does not imply or advocate a broad, consistent, integrated system of ideas.”

For a long time, the academic philosophers have been able to do nothing but attack and refute one another (which is not difficult) without being able to offer any theory of a constructive or positive nature. Every new attack confirms their notion that nothing else is possible to their profession and nothing else can be demanded of them. If the style of the attack is hooligan, it reassures them: they don’t have to take it (or philosophy) seriously. They will tolerate anything, so long as it does not require that they check the validity of their own premises—i.e., so long as it does not threaten the belief that one set of (arbitrary) assumptions is as good as another.

In For the New Intellectual, I mentioned the central cause of the post-Renaissance philosophy’s disaster, the issue that brought its eventual collapse. “They [the philosophers] were unable to offer a solution to the ‘problem of universals,’ that is: to define the nature and source of abstractions, to determine the relationship of concepts to perceptual data—and to prove the validity of scientific induction. . . . [They] were unable to refute the Witch Doctor’s claim that their concepts were as arbitrary as his whims and that their scientific knowledge had no greater metaphysical validity than his revelations.”

(Observe that the demands for this sort of epistemological equality is still the irrationalists’ policy, strategy and goal. “Why is it preferable to interpret theories on the basis of an observational language rather than on the basis of a language of intuitively evident statements . . . ?” asks the author of “Science Without Experience.” This is the perverse form in which mystics are compelled to acknowledge the supremacy of reason and to confess their motive, their envy and their fear; an advocate of reason does not ask that his knowledge be granted equality with the intuitions and revelations of mystics.)

Concepts are the products of a mental process that integrates and organizes the evidence provided by man’s senses. (See my Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. ) Man’s senses are his only direct cognitive contact with reality and, therefore, his only source of information. Without sensory evidence, there can be no concepts; without concepts, there can be no language; without language, there can be no knowledge and no science.

The answer to the question of the relationship of concepts to perceptual data determines man’s evaluation of the cognitive efficacy of his mind; it determines the course of every individual life and the fate of nations, of empires, of science, of art, of civilization. There are not many men who would die for the sake of protecting the right answer to that question, yet countless millions have died because of the wrong answers.

Through all the ages, a major attack on man’s conceptual faculty was directed at its foundation, i.e., at his senses—in the form of the allegation that man’s senses are “unreliable.” It remained for the brazen-ness of the twentieth century to declare that man’s senses are superfluous.

If you want to grasp fully the abysmal nature of that claim and, simultaneously, to grasp the origin of concepts and their dependence on sensory evidence, I will refer you to a famous play. One might think that such a subject cannot be dramatized, but it has been—simply, eloquently, heartbreakingly—and it is not a work of fiction, but a dramatization of historical facts. It is The Miracle Worker by William Gibson and it tells the story of how Annie Sullivan brought Helen Keller to grasp the nature of language.

If you have seen the superlative performance of Patty Duke in the role of Helen Keller, in the stage or screen version of the play, you have seen the image of man projected by “Science Without Experience”—or as near to it as a living human being can come. Helen Keller was not that article’s ideal—a creature devoid of all sensory contact with reality—but she came close to it: blind and deaf since infancy, i.e., deprived of sight and hearing, she was left with nothing but the sense of touch to guide her (she retained also the senses of smell and taste, which are not of great cognitive value to a human being).

Try to remember the incommunicable horror of that child’s state, communicated by Patty Duke: a creature who is neither human nor animal, with all the power of a human potential, but reduced to a sub-animal helplessness; a savage, violent, hostile creature fighting desperately for self-preservation in an unknowable world, fighting to live somehow with a chronic state of terror and hopeless bewilderment; a human mind (proved later to be an unusually intelligent mind) struggling frantically, in total darkness and silence, to perceive, to grasp, to understand, but unable to understand its own need, goal or struggle.

“Without being accompanied by sensations,” her “interpretative apparatus” did not act; it did not act “as do all reflexes”; it did not produce any knowledge at all, let alone any “theoretical knowledge.” “Knowledge,” that article declares, “can enter our brain without touching our senses.” None entered hers. Would she have been able to operate a computer? She was not able to learn to use a fork or to fold her napkin.

Annie Sullivan, her young teacher (superlatively portrayed by Anne Bancroft), is fiercely determined to transform this creature into a human being, and she knows the only means that can do it: language, i.e., the development of the conceptual faculty. But how does one communicate the nature and function of language to a blind-deaf-mute? The entire action of the play is concerned with this single central issue: Annie’s struggle to make Helen’s mind grasp a word—not a signal, but a word.

The form of the language is a code of tactile symbols, a touch alphabet by means of which Annie keeps spelling words into Helen’s palm, always making her other hand touch the objects involved. Helen catches on, in part, very rapidly: she learns to repeat the signals into Annie’s palm, but with no relation to the objects, she learns to spell many words, but she does not grasp the connection of the signals to their referents, she thinks it is a game, she is merely mimicking motions at random, without any understanding. (At this stage, she is learning “language” as most of today’s college students are taught to use it—as a totally non-observational set of motions denoting nothing.)

When Helen’s father compliments Annie on the fact that she has taught Helen the rudiments of discipline, Annie, discouraged, answers: “. . . to do nothing but obey is—no gift, obedience without understanding is a—blindness, too.”

Annie’s determination leads her through as heroic a struggle as has ever been portrayed on the stage. She has to fight the doubts, the weary resignation, of Helen’s parents; she has to fight their love and pity for the child, their accusations that she is treating Helen too severely; she has to fight Helen’s stubborn resistance and uncomprehending fear, which grows into obvious hatred for the teacher; she has to fight her own doubts, the moments of discouragement when she wonders whether the achievement of the goal she has set herself is possible: she does not know what to do, in the face of one disappointment after another, she does not know whether an arrested human mind can be reached and awakened—it has never been done before. Her only weapon is to go on, hour after hour, day after day, endlessly pulling Helen’s hand to touch the objects they encounter (to gain sensory evidence) and spelling into her palm “C-A-K-E . . . M-I-L-K . . . W-A-T-E-R . . .” over and over again, without any results.

Helen’s older half-brother, James, skeptical of Annie’s efforts, remarks that Helen might not want to learn, that maybe “there’s such a thing as—dullness of heart. Acceptance. And letting go. Sooner or later we all give up, don’t we?

“Annie. Maybe you all do. It’s my idea of the original sin.

“James. What is?”

“Annie. Giving up.

“James. You won’t open her. Why can’t you let her be? Have some—pity on her, for being what she is—

“Annie. If I’d ever once thought like that, I’d be dead!”

In today’s world, many physically healthy but intellectually crippled people (particularly college students) need Annie Sullivan’s help, which they can use if they have retained the capacity to grasp (not merely look at and repeat, but grasp) the full meaning of two statements of Annie Sullivan:

Addressed to Helen’s father: “. . . words can be her eyes, to everything in the world outside her, and inside too, what is she without words? With them she can think, have ideas, be reached, there’s not a thought or fact in the world that can’t be hers. . . . And she has them already . . . eighteen nouns and three verbs, they’re in her fingers now, I need only time to push one of them into her mind! One, and everything under the sun will follow.”

Addressed to Helen, who cannot hear her: “I wanted to teach you—oh, everything the earth is full of, Helen, everything on it that’s ours for a wink and it’s gone, and what we are on it, the—light we bring to it and leave behind in—words, why, you can see five thousand years back in a light of words everything we feel, think, know—and share, in words, so not a soul is in darkness, or done with, even in the grave. And I know, I know, one word and I can—put the world in your hand—and whatever it is to me, I won’t take less!”

(“Words can cramp your style,” answers Look magazine.)

To my knowledge, The Miracle Worker is the only epistemological play ever written. It holds the viewer in tensely mounting suspense, not over a chase or a bank robbery, but over the question of whether a human mind will come to life. Its climax is magnificent: after Annie’s crushing disappointment at Helen’s seeming retrogression, water from a pump spills over Helen’s hand, while Annie is automatically spelling “W-A-T-E-R” into her palm, and suddenly Helen understands. The two great moments of that climax are incommunicable except through the art of acting: one is the look on Patty Duke’s face when she grasps that the signals mean the liquid—the other is the sound of Anne Bancroft’s voice when she calls Helen’s mother and cries: “She knows!”

The quietly sublime intensity of that word—with everything it involves, connotes and makes possible—is what modern philosophy is out to destroy.

I suggest that you read The Miracle Worker and study its implications. I am not acquainted with William Gibson’s other works; I believe that I would disagree with many aspects of his philosophy (as I disagree with much of Helen Keller’s adult philosophy), but this particular play is an invaluable lesson in the fundamentals of a rational epistemology.

I suggest that you consider Annie Sullivan’s titanic struggle to arouse a child’s conceptual faculty by means of a single sense, the sense of touch, then evaluate the meaning, motive and moral status of the notion that man’s conceptual faculty does not require any sensory experience.

I suggest that you consider what an enormous intellectual feat Helen Keller had to perform in order to develop a full conceptual range (including a college education, which required more in her day than it does now), then judge those normal people who learn their first, perceptual-level abstractions without any difficulty and freeze on that level, and keep the higher ranges of their conceptual development in a chaotic fog of swimming, indeterminate approximations, playing a game of signals without referents, as Helen Keller did at first, but without her excuse. Then check on whether you respect and how carefully you employ your priceless possession: language.

And, lastly, I suggest that you try to project what would have happened if, instead of Annie Sullivan, a sadist had taken charge of Helen Keller’s education. A sadist would spell “water” into Helen’s palm, while making her touch water, stones, flowers and dogs interchangeably; he would teach her that water is called “water” today, but “milk” tomorrow; he would endeavor to convey to her that there is no necessary connection between names and things, that the signals in her palm are a game of arbitrary conventions and that she’d better obey him without trying to understand.

If this projection is too monstrous to hold in one’s mind for long, remember that this is what today’s academic philosophers are doing to the young—to minds as confused, as plastic and almost as helpless (on the higher conceptual levels) as Helen Keller’s mind was at her start.