Constituent Parts

Empiricists, like David Hume, place human experience, such as sense data, at the center of reality. Often, they seek to reconcile the methodologies of reason and logic with experience and sense data by claiming that these methodologies are themselves simply an appeal to our experience, that the logical operations are merely a model of that experience, a picture of our sense data. Where then, and why, do we appeal to our experience in the first place? Hume claims it is according to [animal] custom, often restated as animal instinct. This is a convenient assertion as the polemic for questioning the source of animal instinct is well, animal instinct.

I find this unsatisfactory, as there is another option. Simply put, our appeal to experience itself has constituent parts. The problem this raises for empiricists concerns the precedent these constituent parts have towards our experience. For surely, if the appeal to experience has epistemic merit, and is made of these constituent parts, certainly these parts must themselves have such merit, else why accept the appeal in the first place?

I take, among others, the logical operations themselves to be one of these constituent parts. Withstanding the fact that we might come to an awareness of these operations by virtue of our state of experience, nonetheless, we must have an understanding of the operations in order to gain value from an appeal to our senses. By pointing to a cow and telling a pre-verbal child "This is a cow" at best you've acquainted it with an operand and the concurrent experience for that operand. In order for the child to take in such gestures, they must preform the assignment operation. The child must identify the assignment of 'cow' to 'this' by way of 'is' and all of that by way of gestures.

So even in a pre-verbal state the human mind is aware of operations that are preformed with regards to its experience. It is in this way that we appeal to our senses, by identifying the operations of inference and applying that to our sense data, a belief that sense data is at least probably a sufficient condition for justification of a mind independent world, the appeal to justification itself already in place as an identity of rational belief. All of these are present in the initial appeal to human sense data. If we place such value on this sense data as justification for further knowledge, how then, can we disregard its constituent parts as the same value in justification for further knowledge?