The Problem of Resemblences
There's this curious phenomenon which is brought up by several philosophers, though I like Thomas Reid's formulation of the problem . What's the problem?
The issue is that of resemblances. Reid points out that if you are walking down a street and hear the sound of a horse pulling a wagon and then you turn around and look at it, the sound produced does not resemble the objects producing it.
Likewise, the pain in my finger looks not at all like the tip of a sword which caused it.
We can further imagine many other instances: the smell of wet grass does not resemble grass, the sensation of a surface of a wall does not resemble the wall which produces the sensation.
We can do this for almost all of our senses, with the apparent exception of sight. It makes no sense to say (for example) that the red sensation I get from this apple does not resemble red. And so on.
I think such thought experiments show what the rationalists have argued for, namely, that objects induce in us the capacity to be affected in a certain manner. If we are deaf, no problem of resemblance can arise for hearing: such persons just lack the innate capacity to hear.
There are many ways to tackle this problem: from philosophy of language, to eliminitavism, to metaphysics and simple common sense.
But that's for you to decide. How do you think about this topic?
The issue is that of resemblances. Reid points out that if you are walking down a street and hear the sound of a horse pulling a wagon and then you turn around and look at it, the sound produced does not resemble the objects producing it.
Likewise, the pain in my finger looks not at all like the tip of a sword which caused it.
We can further imagine many other instances: the smell of wet grass does not resemble grass, the sensation of a surface of a wall does not resemble the wall which produces the sensation.
We can do this for almost all of our senses, with the apparent exception of sight. It makes no sense to say (for example) that the red sensation I get from this apple does not resemble red. And so on.
I think such thought experiments show what the rationalists have argued for, namely, that objects induce in us the capacity to be affected in a certain manner. If we are deaf, no problem of resemblance can arise for hearing: such persons just lack the innate capacity to hear.
There are many ways to tackle this problem: from philosophy of language, to eliminitavism, to metaphysics and simple common sense.
But that's for you to decide. How do you think about this topic?
Comments (64)
I think Isaac would tell us that the sound of a fan becomes bound up with a model that causes anticipation of a fan.
Does that just push the problem down stream?
One would have to explain how the fan induces the model to work in the first place. If that can be established somehow, then progress could be made.
At the outset, it looks as if someone is taking one set of terms "sound" from a "fan", to another set of terms, "models" in the "brain". The problem has been re-phrased, in this case. With more detail, maybe I could understand what they're getting at.
I'm not suggesting this problem has a solution. I'm looking to see how people think about this, is all.
I don't think neuroscience is too far past speculation about how perception works, but that's how I would think about it: 'ask a scientist.'
The strong scent of some flowers, lily of the valley and lilac in particular, have a semblance (to my nose) of solvent. The semblance fades with dilution.
The scent of limburger cheese (a soft smelly variety) has a strong semblance (to my nose) of the pleasant (to my nose) fragrance of a dairy barn. Silage (which is quite smelly), ground grain (very pleasant) and the earthy smell of the cows. On reflection, the scent of the cheese still resembles the smell of a dairy barn.
Semblances add to the interesting features of experience.
They made a good starting point, but reified the issue in terms of objective causation. The phenomenologists made much ore headway here , which is why their analyses have been taken up in cognitive science.
Let’s take Reid’s example below.
Quoting Manuel
Phenomenology begins far back from
constituted objects like wagons , to the conditions of possibility of objects in general. Something as simple as spatial object is the product of a complex process of constitution beginning with constantly changing visual phenomena with no unity and then proceeds by our perceiving correlated patterns that we eventually idealize as ‘this object’. Along the way , we not only have to correlate input form sense modalities other than the visual, but more crucially, we have to link the movement of our body, eyes , head with changes in the perspective of the object. How will the object change when we move our head to the left, for instance. The final achievement of object recognition consists of a seamlessly fused concatenation of memory, anticipation and actual expereince. Most of what we see is not there in front of us but filled in by us. Resemblance plays a crucial
role all along the way here. What is closely similar becomes unified for us.
I would argue that semblances account for ALL of what we take as objective nature. Without the work of semblance there would be no natural world of recognizable objects, only a chaotic flux.
What would it mean for the sound of a horse pulling a wagon to resemble a horse pulling a wagon?
Quoting Manuel
You've run a bait and switch. It's not a question of the red sensation resembling red. It's a question of the sight of an apple resembling an apple. In what sense does the sight of an apple resemble an apple that is different from the sound of a horse pulling a wagon resembling a horse pulling a wagon.
Answer - none.
These types of phenomena are rather eerie. But on hindsight, really highlight how wonderful our minds can be. How could it be possible for a plastic bag to resemble a dog or pavement on hot day resemble water? It's pretty cool.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Absolutely.
Quoting Joshs
Sure. I mean, starting off is often the hardest thing to do. We just take it as a given that fans produce such a sound or rocks feel such a way. Until you reflect that, it's me that is creating the effects off of relatively poor stimulus. In this respect, the classical figures of the 17th and 18th centuries were geniuses.
Quoting Joshs
I agree. Also that the phenomenologists do plenty. And there's a lot more to analyze.
That it would be the kind of object of which one would expect that specific sound it produces. If we have not heard something sufficiently well, we won't know what object caused that sound. We take it for granted that horses pulling a wagon sound like they do, or fans, etc.
Quoting T Clark
Good. This is the part which confuses me, so I'm trying to work this out, no bait and switch is intended.
I am trying to point out sensations, the way ice feels to our fingers, the way thunder sound to our ears, etc. A horse pulling a carriage produces a sound which I would not initially associate with such objects, that these objects could sound this way. They could sound completely different from what they appear to me.
But when I experience a colour of any kind, I personally don't expect an object to produce any other colour effects than the one it currently has. Of course, apples can be yellow or green.
But it could be my personal quirk.
You recognize the way ice feels on your fingers because you've felt ice with your fingers before. You recognize thunder because you've heard thunder before. I've mistaken thunder in the distance for a truck going over a bump. I live on a busy street. I've heard a horse pulling a wagon before, so I'd probably recognize the sound for what it was.
I still don't know what you mean when you say "sound completely different from what they appear." What does a sound appear like?
I saw a dog beside a child outside a store and asked if his dog would bite. He said he wouldn't.
I pet the dog and he bit me.
"You said your dog wouldn't bite!"
"He's not my dog. "
Sometimes you hear things and they're not what you thought you heard.
Suppose you hear a particular sound, perhaps one reminding you of a glass jar breaking. You've heard glass break before, so you associate a particular sound to this phenomena. One of two things can happen here:
You check the source of the sound and find out that indeed, it was a glass jar that broke because the window was open and the breeze toppled it over.
You check the source, but find out that the sound was produced by a metal wind chime. Apparently wind chimes can sound like glass breaking in certain circumstances.
Or the very example you used, you associated a sound with thunder. Only that it wasn't thunder, it was a truck. The sound appeared to you as belonging to thunder. Sounds appear or are represented (if you prefer this word) by us as belonging to certain objects automatically, but they need not produce these specific effects in us.
So, since I have heard the sound of a horse pulling a wagon before, the sound of a horse pulling a wagon would resemble a horse pulling a wagon to me. If that's what you mean, I'm ok with it.
Yep. Pretty much.
That's why we say "it sounds like X, Y or Z".
I'm still confused. Is it the association of a given sound with the object we think of as making the sound that is puzzling?
I tend to favor a type of rationalism in the philosophy of mind, which includes sensation as a important factor. I believe I can "think away" all properties of objects, except solidity. I may lack all senses, but objects will still be solid.
But when Reid (and others) point out that the pain in my finger does not resemble, does not look like, the tip of the sword that caused it. Then extension is also a quality the mind is induced to create given certain stimulus. What object would resemble the pain in my finger, assuming a cut? Something that itself is painful, maybe red, etc. But that's not how it works.
The example of the horse cart rings true. If we are walking in a street and hear a very specific configuration of sound, we are alerted that something is causing this.
If we had not seen a horse carrying a cart before, I don't think we would associate the sound the object produces in us with the object. It's only once we become habituated to hearing this specific sound, that we say it was caused by a horse carrying a cart.
The point for me is that such things we take so utterly for granted, are created by us. We take poor stimulus and create rich meanings associated with sounds, etc.
Yes. But what about chemical composition is it that should lead it to produce the experiences that we do? When I look at a chemical, say a sleeping pill or a hallucinogenic, it isn't obvious to me that these things would cause me to feel the way I end up feeling.
We find these things natural because we are habituated to them by now.
It's the difference between the felt quality and configurations of particles which lack any apparent qualities associated with our everyday life.
You mean to say, for instance, that the sound of footsteps in a hall should possess some footness and floorness? Why would you think that? By the way it does and that's how burglars and cops do what they do.
Not quite, but it's an approximation. Assume that for some reason, you recover all your senses. Before you lacked all of them.
Before you become habituated to the world, things like the distance of objects, what sound is related to which object, how surfaces feel, would likely be completely foreign. One would have to spend some time to associate the sound of footsteps with people stepping on the floor, as opposed to someone knocking on the door, which sounds kind of similar, depending on certain conditions.
But you may be right, I may be puzzling over nothing. I just found it interesting, but am not quite able to express it well enough, maybe because I'm wrong.
It is interesting! It's a deep question.
Movie SFX
That's an excellent illustration of the general idea. Thanks for sharing.
Could you kindly elaborate on the point you wish to make?
Much of our knowledge, what we know, is visual e.g. a horse is horse because it looks a certain way but is there a horseness to the way a horse looks? :chin:
I'm not too confident on this topic. It hit a nerve when I read it. I could be relying too much on visuals, because as I mentioned, if I look at a fire hydrant the issue doesn't arise, it produces a "red" sensation in me, which doesn't make me question how this object induces this sensation in me.
The natural objection is, what sound do you expect a horse cart to make or what smell would you suppose grass (not marijuana, which actually is an interesting illustration) smells like? Fair point.
When we speak of resemblances, we already have sophisticated association in mind. If I ask you, what resembles water? You can point to all kinds of liquids, including fruit juices, milkshakes and even blood, though this latter case is further removed.
But if you ask the question, what resembles the sound of a horse carrying a cart? I'd have to think quite a bit, because, not many things produce that sound. Maybe a rusty wheel or a donkey sound like a cart and a horse respectively.
My puzzle is that, based on my experience with horses carrying carts, it isn't obvious to me what sound they'd make. It's only when I become more familiarized with these things, that I can say " that is probably the sound of a horse carrying a cart". Why? Because that's what I've heard before most of the times I hear this noise.
But it isn't evident prior to being habituated. Same with smells. It's strange to me that wet grass smells like it does, it doesn't seem like grass could smell like that.
Well what would it smell like? Obviously the smell we end having. It involves some chemistry I'm not familiar with.
tl,dr: It isn't obvious to me, visual sensations aside, that any object would produce the effects in us that we end up feeling.
Sure, the point of this specific thread is just for that, whatever one wants to make of it.
I think its innate, it's something they are born with, they have the disposition to recognize grass as a type of food. Similarly, baby turtles race to the ocean as soon as they hatch. There's no other explanation that an innate mechanism that makes them go to the ocean.
It probably took several deaths for creatures to sharpen whatever they do as habit.
Say you lack the sense of smell and look at grass. They could say it smells fresh or earthy and you may form a mental image these words. But obviously no smell.
Some modern technology comes along and fixes your sense of smell. Now you smell wet grass. It's quite a peculiar smell. Would you've imagined grass would possibly smell that way?
Blind people have said that they are aware that "being in the red", means losing money. Or "feeling blue" means feeling down or depressed. If they could see, would the sensation of seeing an apple or seeing the ocean resemble anything associated with the word?
I suspect not, or maybe in some cases they would not be totally shocked by the association. But don't know, obviously.
An open-ended question. :ok:
Quoting Manuel
The key word here is "recognition" which implies that there's a grassiness to the odor of grass - that's how herbivores identify/recognize grass (as food, edible and nutritious).
The intriguing bit is why should grass smell the way it does? It seems arbitrary, lacking a rationale and this I suppose is what bothers you. Is it that the matter is more about rationality (expecting reasons, good ones I guess, for why things are the way they are) than about reality?
Quoting Manuel
You seem to flip-flop between discussing things and how their properties aren't necessary to those things and properties themselves. What's up with that?
Okay, I thought that might be it. A little like Hume and the billiard balls.
Let's say something like this: we can take an object, look at it, touch it, smell it, get it to produce a certain sound by the way we manipulate it or bring it into contact with another object; we know all of these sensory impressions are produced by the one object (or, for many sounds, by a pair of objects), so even though we recognize that our senses respond to particular aspects of the object -- I would like to say "separately" but this is known to be false, for instance, when it comes to taste and smell -- we think there ought to be some analogy, or even homology, between the different impressions. That is, the look of cut grass should be to vision as the scent of cut grass is to smell as the texture of cut grass is to feel, something like that.
We may come to associate the scent of a lawn that's just been cut with the look of such a lawn, but I don't think anyone would really claim that how the lawn looks to us is what its scent would be if it were a visual impression rather than olfactory. Nor the other way around. We know the connection can be explained, grass being what it is means it looks a certain way and smells a certain way when it's just been cut, and we can associate those impressions, but that association can't help but seem somewhat arbitrary.
The question really is why it should seem arbitrary, why would we expect our sense impressions to be nearly homologous like this? It's almost as if we aren't supposed to notice that we have these largely independent subsystems -- vision, hearing, and so on. Over here on our side, there's supposed to be a unified person, a self, that experiences objects in its environment; and over there, those objects are also individual entities. The look and feel and taste of that object to this person are supposed to be abstractions, in a sense, aspects of an interaction between that single object and this single subject. But it doesn't feel like that; it feels like a particular look arbitrarily associated with a particular texture and a particular scent, and so on.
Quoting Manuel
Should we infer that everything about the interaction of that object and this subject is assembled somehow, maybe that the object is just a sort of bundle of impressions, a bundle we assemble? Maybe we also conclude that we are such a bundle. That's Hume's word, I guess, but I'm not trying to insist that there is no structure here, only that there is some assembly required to get a subject and an object.
But maybe we don't have to do that. Maybe there's just something odd here in how we think about what our senses are and how we think about having more than one of them. Most people, I'd guess, will think there's something terribly foolish about expecting any kind of similarity between the "reports" of our various senses, but I'd much rather ask this very strange question and get an actual answer for why we shouldn't expect it.
Yes, I think you raised an important point, the arbitrary aspect. What would be rational to expect of something to smell like? We begin (almost) already in it, we grow up to an age in which we just assume meat smells this way and no some other way, and that flowers smell like this.
But as to what they should smell like, based on how they appear, is a good question which I don't have an answer for.
Quoting TheMadFool
Working my way through my confusion. I mean, sure, objects don't need too many properties by necessity. If you are blind and deaf and lack a sense of tactile sensations, there aren't many properties to uncover.
Properties being, properties for us: induced by objects so that we feel that way we do when we encounter them.
But to expect a property-less object is perhaps going too far.
YES. Reid was reacting to Locke - I think - and replying to Locke that primary qualities do not resemble anything in the object. We feel the effects of the object, but not in a resemblance manner.
It feels as if there should be a consistency between our separate impressions, but there isn't.
Reid actually wrote much of his works as an attack on Hume, he was Hume's fiercest critic at the time. But they got along well, no bad blood between them.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Again yes. Great. It doesn't seem arbitrary, but in some sense they are.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
You explain this better than me. We imbue object with permanence that they don't need to have. One minute we see a lawn, we close our eyes for a second, and we say it's the same lawn. But it isn't actually, things are changing all the time. So this uniformity is quite interesting.
But perhaps our notion of "single object" is extremely misleading, which seems to be the case.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It's a good question. I think that an object just is an instantiation of properties, but I also believe that something in nature holds these properties together. We do that to objects too. But it would be really weird if nothing but us binded objects together. I mean, what's to stop us from thinking a river dry?
As for us, it's much harder to say. In a sense yes, we are instantiations of properties, but without an innate structure we could not be able to discern anything. So I suspect there is a rigid inner nature that orders ourselves and parts of the world.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Sure. This is quite speculative stuff.
The only reason I can offer off the top of my head, is that we tend to like patterns and ordering stuff, we do this all the time, practically involuntarily. But once we begin to isolate what seems to be a coherent picture, obvious things become problematic. Our common sense picture of the world turns out to be an extremely elaborate construction, which we take for granted.
You understand the problem rather well and it's puzzling for some.
I'll add one more point before calling it a night: if objects are assembled out of our sense impressions by our internal model-making machinery, we might expect this fact to be disguised better. That is, we shouldn't have to learn to associate the scent of just cut grass with the look of just cut grass --- our model should have already taken steps to convince us that this scent and this look go together perfectly naturally. We shouldn't be surprised that they go together, and have to learn that this is normal. The model should be a better liar than that.
I think it's an excellent question, the best question I've seen on here in a very long time. I think it might be a really fruitful way of looking at how we think about our senses, so heading in a very different direction from yours I think.
Yeah, I'm calling it a night too.
I certainly agree with what you say. It seems our model should be a better liar, and we shouldn't be confused or surprised by sounds or smells.
I'm glad you like the question. It's nice to find someone who thinks of this too.
Talk to you soon.
Innate knowledge? The horseness of a neigh - a neigh is part of the (Platonic) form of horses. Someone who hears a neigh a for the first time might immediately recognize it as horse's vocalization. :chin:
As I tried to point out, the chemical and physical structure of objects determine their properties. Does this answer your question or does it not? if it does then there are reasons why objects appear to us as they do - the way they look, smell, taste, sound and feel are functions of their, how shall I put it?, essence. In a sense then an object's qualities, all of them, are fundamental to them and that messes up Hume's (?) [@Srap Tasmaner] primary vs secondary qualities distinction.
Quoting Manuel
A property-less object? How does one distinguish that from nothing? Is this too off-topic?
In other words, what you call 'resemblance' already takes sight as its privileged sense. But why? Why is 'the wall which produces the sensation' understood on the modality of sight - a conflation of a sensory modality with the sheer existence of the wall as such.
The very language of resemblance is odd too: the idea is that you have two terms, X and Y, where one can or cannot resemble the other. But in the case of sight, the issue of resemblance apparently does not apply, insofar as there is simply one term: 'that which is seen'. But for some reason - and the confusion here seems linguistic rather than substantial - two terms are admitted (arbitrarily?) for the other senses, except, having conflated sight with existence, every other sensory modality is judged to fail to 'live up to' the 'resemblance' understood as 'what it looks like'. But what kind of problem is this? Seems to me like asking why a fish can't climb a tree, despite the fact that for some inexplicable reason the fish seems to do very well in water. But the problem here is not with the fish, but the question itself. But perhaps I'm missing something. If so, what?
Yet another consideration: from a phenomenological standpoint, this separation of sensory modalities is artificial from the get-go. The idea that things don't smell like they look, or feel like they sound is simply not true to experience, outside of some very narrow and artificial boundaries. To quote Alphonso Lingis:
Or in yet other words: all sensing is synesthetic from the get-go, and the parcelling out of senses into discrete modalities is an artificial, analytic operation undertaken after the fact, on the basis of a rationalist confusion.
Knowledge can be a problematic word when applied to animals. Innate dispositions might be better. The have a nature such that when an object induces in the animals the relevant sensory organ, they recognize the object as food or predator or mate, etc.
Quoting TheMadFool
Yeah. So far as we know it's the chemical properties that cause us to smell objects the way we do. At least we have to include chemicals as an important part of the explanation.
I think @Srap Tasmaner was on to an important point, which is the similarity of our reports based on different senses. We often see that sight and touch seem to agree with each other, as when we crumple up a piece of paper and aim for the garbage bin.
But sometimes the reports don't match, a piece of Tupperware may look normal to us and we would expect we could lift up with no problem. Until we touch it and feel an intense burn.
Quoting TheMadFool
Depends on how you think of objects. Something lacking all sensible properties could be called nothing.
Yeah, you are right. I'm aware of privileging sight. You could ask the reverse question you are positing. And the answer might be that depending on what you've smelled before, maybe a certain perfume or rolling in mud or whatever, is similar to grass, so when you turn around and see it you are surprised that the smell produced by grass is due to that object, as opposed to mud.
Quoting StreetlightX
I think the problem is that of arbitrariness. We could imagine we describe to a blind person how a tree looks like: it's taller than me, hard like a table is bright green at the top, etc. I would assume such a person would form some kind of association with "tall", "bright" and so on. So when the time comes that they recover sight, they could say I expected it to be this tall, but not this colour.
Clearly they couldn't compare colour to anything else prior to sight, but they had idea of resemblance of height. So the shock is partial.
Quoting StreetlightX
Sure I agree that objects are synthetic from the get go, in this sense "the given" is already created by us.
But the distinction between primary and secondary qualities was made by Locke and the idea of "bundles" was Hume's, so it was also an empiricist account. Again, I could be asking a confused question, as you point out, it could be that it's like asking why "fish can't climb a tree".
Or it may be a very particular puzzle of mine that may dissolve in a bit of time.
Animals know i.e. they possess knowledge (of edible food for example) but probably in ways different from humans. Now that you mention it, the definition of knowledge might need revision to accommodate this fact.
Quoting Manuel
In what sense do you mean "...reports don't match"? It implies you had an expectation, a preconception if you will of how a certain object/phenomenon should look/smell/taste/sound/feel like. Are you Alice (in wonderland)?
Quoting Manuel
Definitional issue, eh?
I think so in the case of animals. For knowledge to be knowledge proper and not just a very broad word implying ordered information or something, it should be explicit knowledge, as in I know that so and so. Raymond Tallis speaks of this quite well.
Quoting TheMadFool
It's a problem. Again, suppose your senses come back and you see and hear a tree in your garden or park. You might expect that the object is closer that it is, given that much of our information is visual, perhaps more important than tactile sensation.
But when you reach out to try to touch the tree, it doesn't match what you perceive, as sight and sound suggest the object is, say 5 feet away, when it is actually 8 feet.
Something like that.
The thing is, our senses often don't match this way. You can't match music to many things, maybe math. The sensation of warmth isn't really matched by sight.
So it's curious that they sometimes they do happen to match, as when we accustom ourselves to distances coordinating our vision and tactile sensations.
No, he’s a perceiving organism. Most of what perceive doesn’t come directly fro the world but from our expectations. See Noe and O’Reagan’s work on visual
perception.
Here's my first stab at it --- don't know if it's any good.
What we want, think we want, is for the scent of just cut grass to be to smell what the look of just cut grass is to our vision.
Suppose we maintain a sort of catalog of scents we have smelled. What matters here is not quite the individual and possibly unique quality of each one, but how we can arrange them. You could imagine a sort of graph or map that would keep similar scents near each other shading off around the periphery into other groups that are more similar to each other than to these, and so on. The point here would be that we would have the opportunity to catalog new unfamiliar scents by their relations to ones we already know, and we could describe scents we have smelled to others who haven't relying on systematic similarities and differences.
I'm not concerned with whether the underlying psychology here is accurate; what I want is a sort of model of how we think about familiar and unfamiliar sense impressions, how we talk about them with other people, how we might link such behaviors to our actual sensory experiences. Something like what I've described seems good enough for a start.
And now we can flesh out what it would mean for the scent of just cut grass to be to smell what the look of just cut grass is to vision: the idea is that they would occupy similar positions in our respective sensory catalogs, near the same sorts of things and distant from the same sorts of things, showing the same pattern of similarities and differences, and describable using the same comparisons.
But there are at least two reasons this doesn't work at all.
First, the various sensible qualities of objects just fail to match up for us this way. Things that appear to have similar texture -- baby powder and cocoa powder -- have almost nothing else in common in their other qualities. The scent of cocoa leaves might be close to a combination of the scent of powdered cocoa and other sorts of leaves, but it looks like one and unlike the other. Failure everywhere. The way things group together, the whole pattern of relations, the map, is different for each sense.
The second reason is that the maps don't even have the same population: there are an enormous number of things we have only partial experience of. I can walk through the grocery store and see everywhere foods that I have not tasted but that I now know the look of. The population of the visual catalog explodes here with no additions to the taste catalog at all, not just at the moment anyway. Of course there's no reason to imagine we catalog absolutely everything we see in this way, but the point remains that we have to expect there are objects we took enough interest in to note their look or feel or scent, whatever, but for a large number of these we won't have a complete set of sensory impressions and thus cannot conceivably rely on the same set of similarities and differences to catalog them.
Is this at all close, you think?
I'll try to take another swing at why we might think things should match up better. I'm not sure I really get that yet, and it's the most interesting part.
That's a good direction to go in. We'd want objects to be coherent, as we take them to be in manifest reality.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Then when we bump into a new-ish smell, we would not be surprised by it, because we have a catalogue of similarly smelling things. We might except to predict such smell from sight or touch.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes. This is a thought experiment which can provide a heuristic of sorts to get people into sharpening the ideas they may have of particular sensations. If this can inform a science in any way, good. If not, well we've attempted to highlight sense impressions more clearly.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Correct. That would be our "folk psychological" picture.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I like your intuition and the way you caught on to the gist of my problem.
What you point out is true, it would be impossible to catalogue every sensation. Yet these very different senses appear to give us a coherent whole. It's very strange, but taken as a given.
And there's the whole problem of your "red" being my "green", but with smells and sounds. I don't know if when you smell cut grass or when you hear a drum you get the same sensations I do.
I suspect that we do share similar sensory qualities, but each person accentuates one property over another one.
It's also interesting to see what senses are relevant for our scientific theories. I think Russell was correct when he points out that vision is our most acute sensation. Then we go to tactile sensations. Then probably sounds. Our sense of smell is quite poor compared to many other mammals.
Yet while sight gives us good evidence for scientific phenomenon, we paradoxically don't have a science for qualitative colours. Which is strange considering how acquainted we are with colours in our day to day life.
This is meant to be open ended, and your approach looks useful to me. So quite good in my eyes.
We can talk about the scent that a flower "gives off" as a sort of separate thing; we do, of course, say that we smell flowers, but we can think of the scent as something the flower, as it were, causes, as something it sort of does, but we don't think this way about how the flower looks. When we see the flower, we see it, not something it causes (its "appearance") or something it does.
Same for the sound of a horse's hoof striking cobblestones. When you hear that, you hear something the horse, or the horse's hooves, cause. But when you see the horse, you don't think of that as something the horse is just the cause of, but as just the horse itself.
Thinking about how we might catch onto any of sight or smell or sound first, and then have to match up other aspects to that, I was thinking that whatever privileging of sight was in your very first post here was accidental, in a sense. But now I think there's something to it. We do seem to think of seeing things as more directly grasping them as what they are than hearing them or smelling them, which feel like they're one step away from the actual thing.
But the same could maybe be said for touch and taste -- that those are more the actual thing. That would be very odd for taste since it's so closely bound up with smell. And it could be that the feel of a surface or the resistance we feel when hefting an object, maybe these are a bit too narrow an experience of the object and so, in a way, generic, realizable in many different objects.
I just don't have clear ideas about all of the senses, and might want to take back a lot of this, but I think it does turn out that we don't naturally distinguish how a thing looks from the thing, as we are inclined to do with at least some of the other senses.
Which brings us right back to your original version of the puzzle, that there's a potential for being surprised by perhaps any sensible aspect of an object except its appearance.
If true, that's very curious indeed.
That's exactly what I caught my attention. What other possible way could a flower look like except the way it looks like? There are different flowers of course, which look differently from each other, but I don't question that this flower could look other than how it does. But I can perfectly image a flower smelling completely different, like ocean water or wood.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
That's what Reid seems to point out. He was saying all these curious things about all other senses, but when it came to colour he was saying something like the colour just is what it looks like in the object. Which is strange, but true, at least in ordinary experience, putting science aside.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes. This are a bit more problematic than smelling or hearing. I suppose I can say that if I look at an apple, I could not know before hand that it could taste as it does. For all I know it could taste like meat. I think touch is probably the hardest one, outside of sight. Perhaps wooden tables might not be so surprising. But then I think of water as in the beach or a river. Could it be thicker than what it looks like, as in swimming in glue? I'm not sure.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I'm glad one other person caught my surprise. Permit me to link you to what Reid book I was looking at, you might find it further fuels your imagination:
https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/reid1764.pdf
I stopped at page 66, when he gets to math, as I prefer to look into more modern views on this subject, like Russell. But the rest is quite good, look at the table of contents and you'll be directed to whatever sense you want to look at in more detail.
Just by searching the word "resemble", there's plenty of good stuff you might like.
Methinks Reid's observation delves into what things really are. Reid seems to have made an assumption - sight reveals the true nature of things, reality. Thus his question about some perceptions, sound in this case, not matching the visual input and not any other thing.
Is this justified?
Why can't sound be the standard of measure here? We could then ask why what a horse straining on a heavily-loaded wagon looks like fails to resemble the sound they make? A bat (which can think), whose primary sensory system is hearing, might ask just such a question.
So, which sensory modality is primary - vision, auditory, gustatory, tactile, olfactory? There must be a reason why we have all these senses together for none alone gives you a complete picture of (earthly) reality. This then makes Reid's question meaningless: it's like asking why the tail of a horse doesn't resemble a horse? The tail, which may differ from the head, neck, hooves, etc. of a horse is part of what a horse is.
I guess what I'm getting at is there doesn't seem to be any good reason why the sound of a horse wagon should resemble a horse wagon.
I'll have to read him again, since it's been a while since I read what I linked. He believes that many of these aspects sounds, tastes and the like, are something the mind produces which are inexplicable.
Locke said that colours are secondary qualities, not essential to the object itself but instead an effect we feel when confronted with the object. Reid seems to saying that Locke is wrong in this respect, that colours are in the objects. As are other sensations too, but that we have no idea how objects cause these effects in us.
Well, think of it this way. We've advanced so much in physics because of the way light works. It's been vision - sight - that's allowed us to progress in physics. If we were blind creatures, we would not have modern physics. Math, yes. So sight does give us a unique avenue into the nature of the world, somehow. The other senses much less so.
Quoting TheMadFool
I agree with this. But again, I may be either misleading myself or misreading Reid's point.
But what it got me into thinking (for some reason) is that sight is rather special for insight. Which is strange.
It would seem to me that the resemblance feature of sight being discussed here is a unique feature about how sight allocates things into space. Sight feels almost magical in this sense... with sight, our sensory experiences extend far beyond our bodies. Sight is not quite unique in this regard... we can hear things and allocate that into space, so hearing "reaches out" far beyond our bodies just as sight does. But for humans in particular, sight is unique in its precision of allocation of sensed objects into space... we can ascertain an object's shapes, motions and behaviors real time as we sense them. I gather this is the particular sense in which a particular flower should "look like" what it is... we can feel the flower's shape, using our proprioception and tactile senses to allocate the flower into space, and when we look at the flower its shape should be allocated into space the same way we pieced together that it should be using these other senses.
So is it just sight's ability to affix objects remotely and precisely in space that is what's being discussed here? Analogous to how a flower should look like what it is, shouldn't it also "echo-locate" like what it is to entities that use high precision echo-location?
Yep.
As to your question, no idea. Somehow we are creatures for which sight not only saved us from predators, it also allowed us to see certain aspects of physics.
:ok:
Very good post. :up:
Yeah, there's something about sight in combination with our sense of direction and other factors, that permits us to create a model, some of which may map to the external world.
Quoting InPitzotl
That's one very important aspect. If we had different sensory modalities, such as echo-location, sophisticated enough to a certain point, it may well be the sense that gives us most depth of understanding.
It seems that the concept of "resemblance" follows sight most closely. Which is why the other senses can be more puzzling, whereas, at least in my case, I don't ask why does the flower look the way it does.
Do you happen to know where Reid offers his formulation?
Quoting Manuel
I'm inclined to take issue with Reid's assessment as you relate it here, in part because the account of perception seems biased by disproportionate respect for visual perception.
The "look" of an object is not identical to that object. Why should we speak as if the look of an object resembles the object any more than the sound of an object resembles the object?
We must be careful in identifying the "perceptual object" in each case. Surely the thing I hear is not best characterized primarily in terms of color and extension. It's not a static visual picture of a horse and wagon; nor is it merely a horse and wagon. It's a whole physical system with many moving parts that we may characterize only roughly and generically as, say: a shod horse pulling at a given velocity through a given period of time a wooden wagon of given dimensions and weight carrying a given load on granite cobblestones surrounded by air….
The visual system is not capable of perceiving all the gross and subtle motions of that object which transmit vibration through the surrounding air, nor capable of perceiving those transmitted vibrations as they move through air. In this regard the auditory system is much finer, and grasps the object in its own way when the ear receives the vibrations produced by the motion of that whole state of affairs.
It may seem clear enough what it means to call one sound similar or dissimilar to another sound; and to call one look similar or dissimilar to another look. It seems prima facie less clear what it might mean to call a sound and a look similar or dissimilar to each other; or to call a sound (or a look) similar or dissimilar to the object that sounds (or looks) thus. In each case we must specify a principle of comparison: similar or dissimilar in what respect?
It seems fair enough to say that a sound and a look may resemble each other in virtue of their correspondence to the same perceptual object and in virtue of their correspondence to the same sort of perceptual object.
Ordinarily, a horse looks and sounds horse-like. In this regard, the look and the sound of the horse are alike. Moreover, the look and the sound of a horse may be called "horse-like" in that they appear to us when we happen to be in the appropriate physical and perceptual relation to horses: This sound is like other sounds I have heard in a similar connection to horses. This look is like other looks I have seen in a similar connection to horses.
It's easy enough to specify respects in which the sound of an auditory object resembles the object itself. For instance, the force and temporal intervals at which hooves strike cobblestones are reflected in the auditory presentation, though the same features of the object may seem a blur to vision. I presume the science of acoustics can specify in fine grain many more features according to which the objective character of the sound resembles the various parts-in-motion of the physical system that produces the sound.
This is perhaps even clearer in cases of olfaction and tactition.
Quoting ManuelWhat could be more "grass-like" than the gas we call the grass's odor -- which presumably contains molecules just like some of the molecules of which the grass itself consists, only lately transmitted from that grass to the air around it?
Quoting ManuelThe wall feels smooth and hard and yay high; the wall is smooth and hard and yay high. Here too, empirical science may unpack the correlations of such objective features of tactile perception with physical characteristics of the object perceived, with a finer grain than is available to us in our ordinary perceptual reports.
To say a resemblance is not immediately apparent is not to suggest that there is no such resemblance. To say a resemblance is roughly grasped is not to suggest it is not grasped.
Quoting ManuelI'm not sure what exception you have in mind. To pursue the analogy you've set up, the relevant perceptual object here is not the color red, but the apple itself. To rehearse the formula I introduced above, I see no reason to suppose the redness of the apple we see is any more "like" the apple itself, than the sweetness of the apple we taste is "like" the apple itself.
Quoting ManuelSurely the "look" of the finger and the "look" of the sword are not the most relevant principles of comparison here.
That aside, I suggest that feelings of pain are more like feelings of hunger than they are like exteroceptive modes of perception, and arguably deserve distinct treatment in the present inquiry. I might briefly expand on this point if you like.
Quoting ManuelWhat rationalist argument do you have in mind?
It seems to me the capacities you point to here are not induced in us by the things we perceive, but are natural to animals like us.
Here's the link for the entire book, for free:
https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/reid1764.pdf
One passage:
"Anatomy tells us that the wisdom of nature has assigned the mucus membrane, and the olfactory nerves that are run to the hairy parts of this membrane, to the sense of smell; so that a body can’t be smelled when it doesn’t emit any effluvia, or it does but they don’t enter the nose, or they do enter but the mucus membrane or olfactory nerves have become unfit to do their work. Despite all this ·knowledge that we have·, it is obvious that neither the organ of smell, nor the medium, nor any motions we can conceive to be caused in the mucus membrane or in the nerve or animal spirits, have the faintest resemblance to the sensation of smelling."
"Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Reid on Colour:
"So we have all the reason that the nature of the thing admits, to think that the vulgar apply the name ‘colour’ to the quality of bodies that causes in us what the philosophers call the ‘idea of colour’. That there is such a quality in bodies is agreed to by all philosophers who think there is any such thing as body. Philosophers have thought fit to leave nameless the quality of bodies that the vulgar call ‘colour’, and to •give the name ‘colour’ to an idea or appearance that the vulgar leave nameless because they never think about it or reflect on it. So it seems that when philosophers say that colour is not in bodies, but in the mind, and the vulgar say that colour is not in the mind, but is a quality of bodies, there is no difference between them about things but only about the meaning of a word."
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Perhaps a spray of some kind, which smells like grass, but lacks other smells that may interfere with it in real life, air pollution, dog manure, surrounding plants, etc.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
When you look at a horse, I don't ask myself, how else could this creature look like? When the horse starts racing, it would not be evident to me that his hooves would sound the way they do. In this respect, you can recreate the sound of hooves with your tongue.
But, point taken in so far as I'm privileging vision. It seems to bother me somehow.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
You are correct. We construct the resemblance and then we say that sounded like a horse or that looks solid like a wall.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Go ahead, sounds interesting.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Let me quote Leibniz:
"What is innate is what might be called the implicit knowledge of them, as the veins of the marble outline a shape which is in the marble before they are uncovered by the sculptor"
And a few from Cudworth:
" The essence of nothing is reached unto by the senses looking outward, but by the mind's looking inward upon itself. That which wholly looks abroad outward upon its object is not one with that which it percieves, but it is at a distance from it, and therefore cannot know or comprehend it. But knowledge and intellection doth not merely look out upon a thing at a distance, but make an inward reflection upon the thing it knows... the intellect doth read inward characters written within itself."
"For knowledge is not a knock or thrust from without, but it consisteth in the awakening and exiting of the inward active powers of the mind."
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
You are right. I should have made it much more clear. It's not so much that Reid argued what I am saying, it's that I took what he was saying in this direction. His ideas caused me to take his arguments in this direction.
The objects incite in us an innate capacity to react to them the way do, because we are the creatures we are. We never see triangles in the world, we construct them out of imperfect figures. We don't see entire environments, but parts of it, we fill out the rest. We listen to sounds in a pattern which we call music, but which nonetheless are "just" sounds. And so on.
Apologies for the length of the reply, but I felt I had to respond in kind.
Great post by the way.
@InPitzotl pointed out the intimate connection between space and vision. Something else worth considering is the relation between other sensible qualities and time. No sound without time, without movement. Gazing at an object we can imagine we are seeing the object as it simply is, not in its doing something. Persisting doesn't seem like something an object *does*.
I thought I replied, but will look again.
What you say about say about time is true. Which is why it's often helpful to think of things as "events" as Whitehead and Russell do. That way we get around the persistence problem.
But nothing is coming to mind at the moment to add to what you are pointing out, other than agreeing.
This is true. We discovered the most surprising aspects of the physical world through sight, there is something about matter of which we can perceive best through sight.
As for space being responsible for this surprise, yes it could be. Space and time (as Kant and Schopenhauer pointed out) are quite special for everything really, we bring it to the world and think with them. But we can't as it were, go behind space and time to analyze them, we see only appearances.
But it's hard to articulate how space ties to vision the way it does. For me anyway.
Spacial extension is built into the concept of a physical thing. No other sense can detect that from a distance.
Sight is the favored sense of materialism?
I'd modify that to matter, not materialism per se.
There is something about the nature of matter to which sight informs us best in relation to its effects, instead of some other sensory modality.
Quoting Manuel
Thanks, that's kind of you to say. And thanks for this delightful exchange.
No reason to apologize. I thought your reply was admirably concise, especially given the length of my first reply to your provocative prompt.
In a hopeless effort to emulate your admirable concision, I'll reserve discussion of nociception and of Reid's remarks on color for another occasion. Even so, I thought it might aid digestion to break today's reply into three posts.
In this section, I address some preliminary matters. In the second, your citation of Reid's passage on olfaction. In the third, your remarks and citations about "innate" ideas or "innate" knowledge.
If that's too much prose for one turn, I'll find some way to narrow focus going forward, should we have the good fortune to continue.
Quoting Manuel
Thanks for the reference. At a glance it strikes me as an exemplary work of modern philosophy. I look forward to reading more of it.
So far Reid's discourse doesn't seem to entail the sort of visual bias we've discussed above.
Quoting Manuel
What is it that bothers you along these lines?
To me it seems clear that each perceptual modality puts us in touch with objective states of affairs in its own way, without thereby providing us with complete information or a basis for infallible judgment about those states of affairs. In each case, it's up to us to learn from the experience, and to extend and coordinate our investigations, while aiming to avoid and to correct conceptual confusions that may contaminate the judgments we make on the basis of perception.
It may go a long way in adjusting for the visual bias to develop the habit of trying analogous conceptual treatment across perceptual modalities: The sound of a horse running or whinnying does not suggest the look of a horse any more or less than the look of a horse suggests those sounds -- until we learn what to expect from such looks and from such sounds.
Likewise, the look of a horse's hoof does not suggest the look of a horse's head until we learn what to expect. Perhaps, in some cases, the sound of a horse's gallop does not suggest the velocity of a horse's gallop until we learn what to expect.
Such expectations are informed on the basis of experience.
Great citation. In its careful appropriation of available empirical research, the passage reminds me of Gassendi's discussion of the perception of the taste of salt.
Reid indicates several important factors of a general analysis of exteroception in a single modality. I'll paraphrase quite awkwardly in calling them out:
--proper object (the perceived "body")
--intermediate object (the emitted "effluvia")
--sense receptor (nose, membranes, hairs)
--physiological (e.g. cognitive) processing of received signal (nerves, "animal spirits")
--subjective character (of "the sensation")
(Another key factor: the complex context or "medium", e.g. air, through which the intermediary is transmitted. In special cases we may say the distinction between proper and intermediate object collapses, e.g. when we're interested in an odor instead of its origin.)
What does Reid mean by the phrase "the sensation of smelling"? I presume he thereby indicates what I would prefer to call "the subjective character" of that sensation. As Reid's description suggests, the whole process of sensation seems to include much more than its subjective character. I'd give a similarly "holistic" treatment to similar uses of terms like sensation, perception, experience, appearance, and phenomenon. The whole perceptual process -- which in paradigm cases of exteroception may be extended to a distant object -- is the "thing" I ordinarily have in mind when I use such terms. The "subjective character" is only one feature of such things.
Perhaps we've already agreed for present purposes that, when they are distinct objects, the thing I've called the "intermediate object" is rightly said to "resemble" in some respects the thing I've called the "proper object" of perception, not only in cases of olfaction, but also in other exteroceptive modalities. I'll move on to consider the problem of resemblance with respect to the subjective character of perception.
It's hard for me to understand what it could mean to claim that "there's absolutely no resemblance" between the subjective character of an exteroceptive experience, and the objective features of that experience. That there is some such resemblance seems perhaps most evident when considering changes, variations, and other differences that appear in the course of experience.
There is "something it's like" for the smell of grass to get stronger as I move closer to the grass, or as more grass is brought near me; and "something it's like" for the odor I'm smelling to change as grass is mixed with rain, or as oat grass is mixed with wheatgrass or with manure. Likewise, there's "something it's like" for the look of an apple to change as ambient light gets bright or dim; and "something it's like" to behold variations in color along the surface of an apple, or to note changes in the look of the apple as I rotate it in my hand.
What could it mean to claim that such changes and variations are not manifest in the "subjective character" of perception? What could it mean to claim that the "subjective character" of these differences does not regularly track similar differences in the "intermediate" or "proper" objects of the very same experience? And if those differences are similar -- for instance, if they are proportionate -- how could it be said that there is no resemblance? To the contrary, it seems the coherence, significance, and reliability of perceptual experience depends on robust likeness in the subjective character and objective features of perception along such lines.
If something like my objection stands, we should unpack Reid's negative claim to more accurately express the insight he's tucked into it. I suppose we should say Reid's claim disguises a more accurate claim about what have been called the "sensory qualities" that appear to us in perceptual experiences, and through which, it seems, objective features of the same experiences appear to us. However, it's no easy matter to articulate the claim in question, as it's notoriously difficult to say anything informative about such "sensory qualities" without thereby implicating objective features of the experience in which these sensory qualities appear.
When I speak about the "redness" that appears to me in an instance of visual perception, I implicate the light that strikes my eyes. When I speak about the "grassiness" that appears to me in an instance of olfactory perception, I implicate the gas that fills my nose. And I implicate much more than that in each case, as may be discerned by following the tracks laid by appearances.
Nonetheless, it strikes me as unreasonable to deny that the subjective character of exteroceptive experience involves what may be clumsily called sensory qualities, like the sensory qualities of redness and grassiness; and unreasonable to deny that these qualities in some important respects do not "resemble" objective features of the experiences in which they appear.
Then again, I suppose any two things in the world may be called similar in some respects and different in other respects. What should we make of the claim that there are some respects in which the "sensory qualities" of an experience do not "resemble" the objective features of the same experience? What's at stake in this claim for us, or for philosophers in the bygone days of Reid?
It seems to me that we learn far more about phenomena, including those "sensory qualities", by investigating all the ways in which they appear to be "connected", than we do by merely noting their "resemblances".
Quoting Manuel
I'd prefer to say: The objects affect us the way they do in virtue of our disposition to be affected by such objects thus. It seems an empirical question, which of our perceptual dispositions are innate and which are acquired -- or perhaps it's better to ask, in what respect is a perceptual disposition innate and in what respect is it acquired.
Quoting Manuel
It would seem strange to say we don't "see triangles" or "see triangular things", just because none of the triangular things we see conform exactly in their shape to the ideal triangles precisely described in the mathematical science of geometry. I suspect that humans learned to recognize, construct, and speak about triangular things before they arrived at that mathematical idealization; and it seems the precise geometrical concepts were designed to help us measure, describe, and construct the real things, not to replace them. I'm inclined to say it's the original, rough and practical, concept of triangle, not the mathematically precise concept of triangle, that's ordinarily applied in perceptual judgment. I see no reason to declare that the shape of a real thing must be perfectly similar to an ideal shape in order to count as triangular -- for instance, a triangular plot of land, a triangular altar, a triangular plow.
Perhaps a similar prejudice about the role of conceptual idealizations is implicated when a disillusioned idealist concludes there's no such thing as love or justice in the world -- on the grounds that no putative instance of love or justice conforms to their ideal conception.
Quoting ManuelSurely our conceptualized grasp of an environment on the basis of perception, and our grasp of any "object" or "region" within that environment on the basis of perception, is always partial at best, and often mistaken.
I'm no more inclined to say that music is "mere sound" than to say that speech is "mere sound", writing is "mere ink", or animals are "mere molecules".
Quoting Manuel
What exactly does Leibniz characterize in that suggestive passage as "innate"? On the surface, his claim is that we have innate "implicit knowledge" even of "the deepest and most difficult sciences"; but that we do not have innate "actual knowledge" of such things. He treats "arithmetic and geometry" as exemplary cases of sciences of which we have "innate implicit knowledge".
I've learned to employ a rather firm distinction between formal and empirical sciences. I wonder if Leibniz offers any examples of "innate implicit knowledge" in the empirical sciences.
I'll agree that some quantitative concepts and judgments seem somehow "innate and implicit" in the general form of the experience of minds like ours; and that the formal science of arithmetic depends on some such concepts and judgments. Likewise I'll agree that some spatial and temporal concepts and judgments seem somehow "innate and implicit" in the general form of the experience of minds like ours; and that the formal science of geometry depends on some such concepts and judgments.
I see no reason to suppose that "empirical concepts" like "horse" and "star" are likewise "innate and implicit". To the contrary, it seems clear that we acquire such concepts only through acquaintance with instances of the corresponding objects in experience; and empirical sciences like biology and astronomy depend on the investigation of those particulars.
Of course our acquaintance with and investigation of such "empirical objects" depends on our capacity to perceive them. And it seems we must acknowledge what we might call "parameters" or "sensory qualities" in each mode of exteroception that are "innate and implicit" in the general form of the experience of minds like ours. I mean, for instance, brightness and color, loudness and pitch, sweet and salty, pressure and heat. In each case, however, it's clear that the "sensory qualities" that appear to us in perception correspond to and vary along with specific features of objective states of affairs outside our heads; and these correspondences, and those objective states of affairs, are objects for empirical investigation.
Quoting Manuel
How should we interpret these passages from Cudworth?
I'm wary of such uses of the term "essence". I'm not sure what Cudworth might mean in saying that the "essence" of any thing is "reached unto… by the mind's looking inward upon itself". I'm not sure what he means by "intellection".
He seems to suggest that a "mind" must be "one with that which it perceives" in order to "know or comprehend it". That mysterious criterion is fleshed out by the accompanying claim that a mind cannot "know or comprehend" anything "at a distance". This sounds way off the rails to me. Perhaps the passage puts egregiously unwarranted spin on the term "comprehension". I'm tempted to conclude that these extraordinary formulas are signs of Cudworth's ignorance of the integrity of the physical connections, revealed by empirical investigation since Cudworth's time, which link perceivers to distant objects in exteroception.
On the other hand, Cudworth is quite right to emphasize that our knowledge of the world on the basis of exteroception does not consist merely in "looking outward". And he's right to suggest that exteroceptive knowledge is not produced in us merely by dint of each "knock or thrust from without". Careful introspection makes us more reliable and astute perceivers. Empirical investigation of the objective factors of perception, in coordination with our introspective reports, informs us about ourselves, about our perceptual processes, and about the world as it appears to us on the basis of perception. And our culturally mediated conceptual capacities play an extremely important role in determining the character of the perceptual judgments we're disposed to make on the basis of perception.
It seems to me that I say all this on purely phenomenological grounds, without extraneous "metaphysical" commitments or implications.
Wow. That's some reply. I currently don't have the puzzlement that caused me to create this over a week ago, nevertheless I have to answer some of the things you bring up. :cool:
Reply 1/2
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Though Reid was generally critiquing Hume, in this area I think he has in mind Locke, but I'm not certain. Locke's primary qualities suggested that these properties belonged to the object, that is, they were essential to the objects existence. Secondary qualities are inessential to the object existence.
Odor would be an inessential property of an object, not existing if we did not exist to smell them. The only reply I can come up is what I've said before, beforehand, it would not be evident that grass would smell the way it does when one looks at grass. When we look at grass, I can't imagine another way it could look, other than what appears to me. It could smell like bacon for all I know, but it couldn't look like a pig.
On the other hand, if I only smelled grass, having my eyes closed, and not having seen it before, I might be surprised it looks as it does, though perhaps I would associate that smell with some kind of plant.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Yes, absolutely. Our sight of the colour will depend on lighting conditions, seasons, etc.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Most of the times, yes. How about hallucinations or dreams though? In these cases there's literally nothing external in the world to point to and say "this tree is the cause of my seeing it as brown and green."
Nevertheless, it will be pointed out, that dreams take stuff from the world, so we are reproducing it without extraneous help in these instances.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
What's at stake? Not much by the way of practical affairs. For me it's more about being quite puzzled as to why we interpret the objects the way we do. We take our "world-building" as a given. It's only when we are puzzled that we got into modern science. Once you notice that what seems evident is problematic, then everything can be quite surprising. Which is an appropriate philosophical attitude to have, at times.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Absolutely.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
We take the sense data from the world and represent it as a wall. We don't experience how we do this, we automatically do so. It's after this process that we can speak about noticing similarities and differences.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
That's a good formulation.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
This is the difference between what science says about "sounds" and "molecules" vs our experience of them as intelligent, sentient creatures. If we describe the phenomenon of music such as Beethoven's 9th, then we speak about sound waves and amplitudes. The property "sublime", "creative", "moving" and so forth, should not figure in a scientific description of facts, I think.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
We may say the word "triangle" before we have a clear conception of what it is. But if we did not have an innate concept of triangle, we would see three lines connecting and often not very well. We could call it that a "triangle", but I think that wouldn't tell us anything about them any more than calling a group of people a "nation" tells us about people.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
This is an extremely difficult topic to talk sensibly about, in my opinion, one that could very well lead to an entire different thread. The best way I can talk about this topic briefly would be to ask you to consider at an early age, when you found out what a "horse" and a "star" was, how many times did you have to see it and for how long did you have to be experiencing such objects such that you could see another one of its kind and call that other thing a "horse" and a "star"?
I think that if we attach "learning" or acquaintance with experience, it would take us forever to walk through a hallway, much less a beach or a forest.
The things science studies are postulated as being mind-independent. Our ordinary notion of "star" and "horse" do not apply to the science. I think this video explain the outline rather well, you may want to see all of it on 2x speed, but the relevant idea begins at minute 4:38:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ozZdrFQfTU&t=127s
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
He's very wordy and can often be obscure. What I think he says is that by just sensing the object, we don't get any ideas from them. It's only when we think about the phenomenon carefully, that we're surprised to discover things about them. We see apples falling down, we use to believe that this meant "apples going to there natural place". But when Newton became puzzled by this and started thinking "why do apples fall instead of going up" he discovered important things about the world, through his experiments and calculations.
We can only experiment on what we have available to us as inquiring creatures, for instance, we could not do physics if we had no mathematical capacity, which is innate. That's the rough idea.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
They certainly do to an extent, especially in folk psychological explanations of the world. It's quite interesting.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Yes. We can do most things in philosophy without metaphysical commitments. We can put that aside for these discussions.