problem of the single case See PROBABILITY,. PROPENSIT. problem of the speckled hen, a problem propounded by Ryle as an objection to Ayer’s analysis of perception in terms of sense-data. It is implied by this analysis that, if I see a speckled hen (in a good light and so on), I do so by means of apprehending a speckled sense-datum. The analysis implies further that the sense-datum actually has just the number of speckles that I seem to see as I look at the hen, and that it is immediately evident to me just how many speckles this is. Thus, if I seem to see many speckles as I look at the hen, the sense-datum I apprehend must actually contain many speckles, and it must be immediately evident to me how many it does contain. Now suppose it seems to me that I see more than 100 speckles. Then the datum I am apprehending must contain more than 100 speckles. Perhaps it contains 132 of them. The analysis would then imply, absurdly, that it must be immediately evident to me that the number of speckles is exactly 132. One way to avoid this implication would be to deny that a sense-datum of mine could contain exactly 132 speckles – or any other large, determinate number of them – precisely on the ground that it could never seem to me that I was seeing exactly that many speckles. A possible drawback of this approach is that it involves committing oneself to the claim, which some philosophers have found self-contradictory, that a sense-datum may contain many speckles even if there is no large number n such that it contains n speckles. See also PERCEPTION , VAGUENES. R.Ke.