"perception"タグの名言
Perhaps also there are some necessary truths about mind, language, and perception after all, a compendium of superscientific truths awaiting discovery and dissemination by philosophers. If so, however, one would expect the same to be true of other subjects. For example, one would expect there to be a set of necessary truths about all possible living things; and another set about all possible stars and galaxies; and another set about all possible forms of matter; and so on. One would expect, that is, a significant compendium of a priori knowledge on almost every significant subject: space, time, motion, light, matter, planets, fire, cosmology, life, weather, medicine, and so forth. Given the thousands of years philosophers have had to penetrate these subjects, we might well ask in which books the apodictic fruits of so much a priori labour have been written down. Put thus bluntly, the question is embarrassing. There is no such accumulated compendium of important a priori truths on any of these topics. And this despite the fact that philosophers have been talking and theorizing with enthusiasm about all of them for over twenty-five centuries. Claims of necessary truth have regularly been made, but empirical refutation has been their most common fate. What has accumulated instead is a rich compendium of a posteriori knowledge, a compendium born of the continuing labours of various subdivisions of earlier philosophy, subdivisions now quite properly identified as sciences. It now seems silly to expect philosophical techniques to reveal important necessary truths about all possible planets, or all possible forms of matter, or all possible living things. But if it is just plain silly to expect this for planets, matter, and life, why should it be sound philosophy to expect it for language, mind, and perception?
Yet if women are so flighty, fickle, changeable, susceptible, and inconstant (as some clerks would have us believe), why is it that their suitors have to resort to such trickery to have their way with them? And why don't women quickly succumb to them, without the need for all this skill and ingenuity in conquering them? For there is no need to go to war for a castle that is already captured. (...) Therefore, since it is necessary to call on such skill, ingenuity, and effort in order to seduce a woman, whether of high or humble birth, the logical conclusion to draw is that women are by no means as fickle as some men claim, or as easily influenced in their behaviour. And if anyone tells me that books are full of women like these, it is this very reply, frequently given, which causes me to complain. My response is that women did not write these books nor include the material which attacks them and their morals. Those who plead their cause in the absence of an opponent can invent to their heart's content, can pontificate without taking into account the opposite point of view and keep the best arguments for themselves, for aggressors are always quick to attack those who have no means of defence. But if women had written these books, I know full well the subject would have been handled differently. They know that they stand wrongfully accused, and that the cake has not been divided up equally, for the strongest take the lion's share, and the one who does the sharing out keeps the biggest portion for himself.
[Women] complain about many clerks who attribute all sorts of faults to them and who compose works about them in rhyme, prose, and verse, criticizing their conduct in a variety of different ways. They then give these works as elementary textbooks to their young pupils at the beginning of their schooling, to provide them with exempla and received wisdom, so that they will remember this teaching when they come of age ... They accuse [women] of many ... serious vice[s] and are very critical of them, finding no excuse for them whatsoever. This is the way clerks behave day and night, composing their verse now in French, now in Latin. And they base their opinions on goodness only knows which books, which are more mendacious than a drunk. Ovid, in a book he wrote called Cures for Love, says many evil things about women, and I think he was wrong to do this. He accuses them of gross immorality, of filthy, vile, and wicked behaviour. (I disagree with him that they have such vices and promise to champion them in the fight against anyone who would like to throw down the gauntlet ...) Thus, clerks have studied this book since their early childhood as their grammar primer and then teach it to others so that no man will undertake to love a woman.