Russell (1960: 750):
It is essential to this theory to deny the reality of 'sensation' as conceived by British empiricists. What happens, when it is most nearly what they mean by 'sensation', would be better called 'noticing', which implies activity. In fact — so Marx would contend — we only notice things as part of the process of acting with reference to them, and any theory which leaves out action is a misleading abstraction.
So far as I know, Marx was the first philosopher who criticised the notion of 'truth' from an activist point of view.
Blogger Comments:
This is consistent with the Systemic Functional Linguistic theory notion of (actively) construing experience as meaning.
It is also consistent with Edelman's Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, which holds that an unlabelled world is categorised by the actions of neuronal systems.
It is also consistent with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, which holds that we cannot say anything about what things are doing when we are not actively looking at them.
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