The Mind Does Not Make Jumps

Abstract

Bertrand Russell's notion of acquaintance—still influential in contemporary philosophy of mind and epistemology—promises an immediate and epistemically secure awareness of things, independent of conceptualization, predication, and other forms of cognitive activity. This paper reconstructs and assesses the largely neglected critique of that model developed by George Dawes Hicks (1862–1941). Hicks articulates a distinctive and underexplored source of a line of criticism that later became central to attacks on the Given. He argues that wholly passive and receptive awareness cannot serve as the basis of cognition. If discrimination, comparison, and the apprehension of relations are assigned to a subsequent, heterogeneous faculty, their emergence becomes psychologically unintelligible: such a view would supply no bridge from mere presentation to cognition. I show that this objection rests on a distinctive “reverse engineering” methodology, according to which basic mental phenomena are theoretical posits whose legitimacy depends, at least in part, on their capacity to explain mature cognition. I reconstruct Hicks's master argument and test it against an alternative framework developed from James Ward's theory of attention.