immediacy presence to the mind without intermediaries. The term ‘immediate’ and its cognates have been used extensively throughout the history of philosophy, generally without much explanation. Descartes, e.g., explains his notion of thought thus: ‘I use this term to include everything that is within us in a way that we are immediately aware of it’ (Second Replies). He offers no explanation of immediate awareness. However, when used as a primitive in this way, the term may simply mean that thoughts are the immediate objects of perception because thoughts are the only things perceived in the strict and proper sense that no perception of an intermediary is required for the person’s awareness of them. Sometimes ‘immediate’ means ‘not mediated’. (1) An inference from a premise to a conclusion can exhibit logical immediacy because it does not depend on other premises. This is a technical usage of proof theory to describe the form of a certain class of inference rules. (2) A concept can exhibit conceptual immediacy because it is definitionally primitive, as in the Berkeleian doctrine that perception of qualities is immediate, and perception of objects is defined by the perception of their qualities, which is directly understood. (3) Our perception of something can exhibit causal immediacy because it is not caused by intervening acts of perception or cognition, as with seeing someone immediately in the flesh rather than through images on a movie screen. (4) A belief-formation process can possess psychological immediacy because it contains no subprocess of reasoning and in that sense has no psychological mediator. (5) Our knowledge of something can exhibit epistemic immediacy because it is justified without inference from another proposition, as in intuitive knowledge of the existence of the self, which has no epistemic mediator. A noteworthy special application of immediacy is to be found in Russell’s notion of knowledge by acquaintance. This notion is a development of the venerable doctrine originating with Plato, and also found in Augustine, that understanding the nature of some object requires that we can gain immediate cognitive access to that object. Thus, for Plato, to understand the nature of beauty requires acquaintance with beauty itself. This view contrasts with one in which understanding the nature of beauty requires linguistic competence in the use of the word ‘beauty’ or, alternatively, with one that requires having a mental representation of beauty. Russell offers sense-data and universals as examples of things known by acquaintance.
To these senses of immediacy we may add another category whose members have acquired special meanings within certain philosophical traditions. For example, in Hegel’s philosophy if (per impossibile) an object were encountered ‘as existing in simple immediacy’ it would be encountered as it is in itself, unchanged by conceptualization. In phenomenology ‘immediate’ experience is, roughly, bracketed experience.
See also BERKELEY , EPISTEMOLOGY , IDEA, INFERENTIAL KNOWLEDGE , PERCEPTION , PHI – LOSOPHY OF MIN. T.V.