EPISTEMOLOGY whether it is a man or something else, but not about whether it is white or not (3 430b29) This makes it look as if he is saying simply that if when you use your eyes, and conWne yourself to making statements about how things look to you here and now, then you cannot go wrong But this cannot be what he means, for he clearly envisages there being genuine conXicts between two deliverances of a single sense, and he oVers rules for sorting them out: in the case of sight, for instance, prefer a closer glimpse to a more distant one So the infallibility of the senses about their proper objects, for Aristotle, does not mean that whatever appears to a particular sense within its own competence is true Not all statements made about colour on the basis of using our eyes are true: what appears to be red may not be red Statements such as ‘That is red’ made on the basis of visual experience are not incorrigible What is special about them is that they can be corrected only by a further use of the same sense If we are not sure whether a thing really is the colour it looks from here to me now, we check by having a better look, by looking closer, by looking in a better light Against the verdict of any particular look an appeal lies; but where what is in question is colour, the appeal can never go to a court higher than that of sight With qualities proper to other senses, or senses perceptible by more than one sense (the ‘common sensibles’), sight does not have the Wnal verdict (Metaph C 1010b15–18) So, generalizing: each sense is the Wnal judge in the case of its proper object, though it has to get into the right condition and position to judge Where S1 and S2 tells us diVerent things about sensory properties, S1 is to be preferred over S2 if S1 is the proper sense, and S2 is the alien sense, for the property in question Between two verdicts of the proper sense, we are to choose the one delivered in optimum conditions: near, not far; healthy, not ill; awake not asleep; and so on It is thus that Aristotle seeks to avoid both Protagoras’ phenomenalism and Plato’s intellectualism He insists that our knowledge depends on the senses both for the concepts we employ and for the unproved premisses from which we start We form concepts thus: Wrst there is sensation and then there is memory; memories build up into experience and out of individual experience we form a universal concept, which is the basis of both practical skill (techne) and theoretical knowledge (episteme) (APo 19 100a3) It is for experience, Aristotle says in the Prior Analytics (1 30 46a17–22), to provide the principles of any subject Astronomers begin with their 163