The Strange Belief in an Unknowable "External World" (A Mere Lawyer's Take)
"Naivete" is lack of wisdom, judgment, sophistication, experience. "Naive realism" (a/k/a direct realism) is the view that those things we deal with every day, indeed every instant, taken for granted by all but philosophers and their students (so it may seem), are perceived by us immediately or directly. Naive realism is apparently referred to as "naive" disparagingly. It is, after all, the view typically taken by most of us, the untutored common folk, as a matter of common sense (I would maintain that it is for all practical purposes the view actually taken by those of us who consider themselves uncommon, as well). Being so very common, it perforce is invalid according to those sophisticated in theories of knowledge and perception.
We began to insert (as it were) something between us and the "external world" some centuries ago, for reasons I find difficult to understand. It may all have begun with Descartes' insistence on the use of faux doubt to establish knowledge. It may have begun with Hume. It may have begun earlier, but I think not that much earlier at least as far as the modern forms of insertion as we know it are concerned. Since ancient times there has been a tendency among the wise to doubt the quality, worth and even in some cases the reality of the universe--especially those parts of it that are not human--and it's possible the more modern reliance on sense-data or qualia to separate ourselves from the non-human, and perhaps our fellow humans as well, is an outgrowth of this tendency. But if that is the case those who more recently doubt what the common folk believe are more specific in their doubt.
For me, the old claims that we have reason to doubt the veracity of our senses because of hallucinations, sticks in water and such, are unimpressive. J.L. Austin pretty well laid waste to those claims, as far as I am concerned; but there is also the fact that our senses seem to serve us very well in most cases. But we disagree with each other! How could we disagree if we all can access the "external world"? Quite easily, I think, and for a number of reasons which don't require commitment to the absolutely unknowable nature of the world of which we're a part. Not being committed to a need for absolute certainty, I think our successful interaction with the rest of the world in most cases indicates our senses function quite well in perceiving the various "external objects" we cannot exist without. True, there are differences in perspective, the quality of our sense organs, etc., but disagreements resulting for such reasons are explained without recourse to our eternal ignorance.
But I suppose it is the fact that we cannot exist without that portion of the rest of the universe with which we interact which makes me wonder why we're inclined to separate ourselves from the rest of the universe in this fashion and in other respects. We're living organisms and like other living organisms we've been formed by our interaction with each other and the rest of the world over time. As we are part of the world, the idea that we are incapable of knowing what other parts of it really are doesn't make much sense. If we didn't have that knowledge, we wouldn't exist.
Perhaps those who disparage naive realism suffer from their own lack of knowledge and wisdom. They seem to believe that we are in some sense detached from the rest of the world, different from or superior to a living creature in the world. They fail to recognize our dependence on the world, being convinced that the world is dependent on us, an astonishingly unsophisticated, parochial view given the vastness of the universe.
It isn't necessary to posit the existence of sense data or some kind of "representation" of what's out there to explain or justify perception or knowledge. It is necessary, however, to recognize what we are as creatures of the universe. We have our limitations, but such is to be expected; to expect otherwise is to claim and seek for a godlike ideal of perception or knowledge. We perceive and know just as human beings, formed over time through evolution, are equipped to see and know. The fact we don't perceive and know as other creatures do merely means we're human and they are not. It doesn't mean that there is something between us and the rest of the universe on which we're fated to rely.
If there is such a thing as sense data (or whatever) which is what we experience directly, it would seem that is the case for other creatures as well. So presumably other creatures are similarly incapable of experiencing the world directly, perhaps even less capable than humans, being less sophisticated organisms. All living things incapable of immediate experience of the universe, yet living in it. It's a remarkable belief indeed, one that is premised on a belief that we can't "really" know anything. We somehow stumble through our lives ignorant of the inaccessible real, it seems.
Of course, the claim is sometimes made that we can know enough about the rest of the world, or can rely on our perception, just enough to survive and function, but even so we cannot know fully what "external objects" are or what characteristics they really have (or if they are?), being limited to that something or other, the insertion, which is all we can experience. If so, what of it? It seems a very insignificant insight, if insight it is.
We test the precision with which our senses function as we must test everything, by judging the results of our interaction with the rest of the world. There is no other justification for our knowledge and perception. But our interaction with the rest of the world establishes that our perception of it
is valid enough for there to be no concern, except perhaps for those who are naive enough to think otherwise.
We began to insert (as it were) something between us and the "external world" some centuries ago, for reasons I find difficult to understand. It may all have begun with Descartes' insistence on the use of faux doubt to establish knowledge. It may have begun with Hume. It may have begun earlier, but I think not that much earlier at least as far as the modern forms of insertion as we know it are concerned. Since ancient times there has been a tendency among the wise to doubt the quality, worth and even in some cases the reality of the universe--especially those parts of it that are not human--and it's possible the more modern reliance on sense-data or qualia to separate ourselves from the non-human, and perhaps our fellow humans as well, is an outgrowth of this tendency. But if that is the case those who more recently doubt what the common folk believe are more specific in their doubt.
For me, the old claims that we have reason to doubt the veracity of our senses because of hallucinations, sticks in water and such, are unimpressive. J.L. Austin pretty well laid waste to those claims, as far as I am concerned; but there is also the fact that our senses seem to serve us very well in most cases. But we disagree with each other! How could we disagree if we all can access the "external world"? Quite easily, I think, and for a number of reasons which don't require commitment to the absolutely unknowable nature of the world of which we're a part. Not being committed to a need for absolute certainty, I think our successful interaction with the rest of the world in most cases indicates our senses function quite well in perceiving the various "external objects" we cannot exist without. True, there are differences in perspective, the quality of our sense organs, etc., but disagreements resulting for such reasons are explained without recourse to our eternal ignorance.
But I suppose it is the fact that we cannot exist without that portion of the rest of the universe with which we interact which makes me wonder why we're inclined to separate ourselves from the rest of the universe in this fashion and in other respects. We're living organisms and like other living organisms we've been formed by our interaction with each other and the rest of the world over time. As we are part of the world, the idea that we are incapable of knowing what other parts of it really are doesn't make much sense. If we didn't have that knowledge, we wouldn't exist.
Perhaps those who disparage naive realism suffer from their own lack of knowledge and wisdom. They seem to believe that we are in some sense detached from the rest of the world, different from or superior to a living creature in the world. They fail to recognize our dependence on the world, being convinced that the world is dependent on us, an astonishingly unsophisticated, parochial view given the vastness of the universe.
It isn't necessary to posit the existence of sense data or some kind of "representation" of what's out there to explain or justify perception or knowledge. It is necessary, however, to recognize what we are as creatures of the universe. We have our limitations, but such is to be expected; to expect otherwise is to claim and seek for a godlike ideal of perception or knowledge. We perceive and know just as human beings, formed over time through evolution, are equipped to see and know. The fact we don't perceive and know as other creatures do merely means we're human and they are not. It doesn't mean that there is something between us and the rest of the universe on which we're fated to rely.
If there is such a thing as sense data (or whatever) which is what we experience directly, it would seem that is the case for other creatures as well. So presumably other creatures are similarly incapable of experiencing the world directly, perhaps even less capable than humans, being less sophisticated organisms. All living things incapable of immediate experience of the universe, yet living in it. It's a remarkable belief indeed, one that is premised on a belief that we can't "really" know anything. We somehow stumble through our lives ignorant of the inaccessible real, it seems.
Of course, the claim is sometimes made that we can know enough about the rest of the world, or can rely on our perception, just enough to survive and function, but even so we cannot know fully what "external objects" are or what characteristics they really have (or if they are?), being limited to that something or other, the insertion, which is all we can experience. If so, what of it? It seems a very insignificant insight, if insight it is.
We test the precision with which our senses function as we must test everything, by judging the results of our interaction with the rest of the world. There is no other justification for our knowledge and perception. But our interaction with the rest of the world establishes that our perception of it
is valid enough for there to be no concern, except perhaps for those who are naive enough to think otherwise.
Comments (525)
Would I be naive, in thinking there is no concern, at least generally speaking, because our perceptions are valid enough to establish our interactions with the rest of the world?
Naive in believing that our perception of the rest of the world is valid enough for their to be no concern, because our perceptions are valid enough to establish our interactions with the rest of the world? I don't think so, no. If our perceptions are valid enough, then I don't see how you could be naive in believing they'e valid enough for there to be no concern.
Cool. Just making sure it is perception that establishes, not the world. The world establishing being how I read what I commented on initially.
The problem with naive realism doesn't apply as long as we talk about tables and chairs (except for the rare cases of optical, auditory and other illusions).
The problem is thst a naive realist takes for granted that the same that goes for observing tables and chairs also goes for humans, for moral/ethical issues. To a naive realist, a sentence like
[I]This chair has four legs[/i]
is epistemically the same as
[I]Women are essentially inferior to men[/i]
or
[I]Henry is an evil person.[/i]
or
Witches should be burnt at the stakes.
A naive realist talks about moral issues with the same certainty as he talks about tables and chairs. Do you see any problem with that?
A great read. Thanks.
It is largely a problem of identity and self-hood, I think. I say this because the belief that one is not his body, but only a limited and mostly arbitrary part of it, begets all notions of perception, representation, idealism, and so on.
Whether it is a Cartesian or materialist dualism, or wherever one identifies with some amorphous locus within the body (consciousness, the brain, the mind), they are left with the implication that they are not in direct contact with the rest of the world, but are subject only to what the body allows them to see. If they were to extend the limits of their self to the boundaries of the body, the implication that there is a barrier or buffer or Cartesian theater between them and the rest of the world begins to dissolve.
I don't see how someone who maintains that a chair has four legs, or that it is reasonable to believe what we see when we see a chair is, in fact, a chair is obliged, thereby, to make any particular moral judgments.
It may be that what I call this "strange belief" is the result of mind-body dualism or some remnant of it, but I think it comes down to a kind of refusal to accept that we're active participants in the world (universe), like any other living organism.
Not obliged. Where did you get that?
Like I said,
Quoting baker
That's not the impression I've gleaned. Nor is there any obvious reason a realist would think along these lines.
But as a naive realist I would admit that our senses and our understanding and our recollection are all imperfect, and this leaves plenty of room for disagreement - though in practice arguments about how many legs a particular chair has are pretty rare. and tend to turn on semantic niceties such as whether a leg that has fallen off the chair still counts as a leg of the chair which is a conflict of ideas, not of realities.
What I wonder is how there can be evidence that the senses are false that does not rely on those very senses.
Well, maybe I misunderstand you. Are you saying all moral realists do that? If so, why is that the case?
You're quite welcome. It's just something that baffles me, and has for some time.
Feel free to question it. I know some history fairly well, but only some.
Quoting unenlightened
There has been and always will be disagreement. I don't maintain otherwise. But I don't think it exists because everyone sees something different when they look at something, or because we can't tell what we're really perceiving because we can't perceive the thing in itself, or because we can't know if there's really an external world. There are other, less odd and less absolute, explanations which can be provided, and which don't require us to believe we're hopelessly ignorant of the world in which we live.
So the chair I see (and sit on) isn't or may not be the chair I see (and sit on)?
You should ask @Isaac how the predictive processing model of perception treats naive realism.
Here’s Lisa Barret , one of the proponents of predictive processing, on naive realism.
“ Changes in air pressure and wavelengths of light exist in the world, but to us, they are sounds and colors. We perceive them by going beyond the in-formation given to us, making meaning from them using knowledge from past experience, that is, concepts. Every perception is constructed by a per-ceiver, usually with sensory inputs from the world as one ingredient. Only certain changes in air pressure are heard as trees falling. Only some of the wavelengths of light striking our retinas are transformed into the experi-ence of red or green. To believe otherwise is naive realism, as if perceptions were synonymous with reality.”
“ The history of science, however, has been a slow but steady march in the direction of construction. Physics, chemistry, and biology began with in-tuitive, essentialist theories, rooted in naive realism and certainty. We pro-gressed beyond these ideas because we noticed that the old observations held true only under certain conditions.”
That may appear to be the case, but appearances in this if not in every case are deceptive. :death:
Quoting PhilPapers Survey
So let's ask him - "Nothing about me without me" is not just a mantra for disability awareness but a common curtesy.
@Isaac?
If that's true, in what sense, and to what extent, should we be doubting ourselves and our ability to understand and interact with the world in which we live? How does it prevent us from doing what we do everyday, every moment? If it doesn't prevent us from eating, drinking, walking, sitting, driving, working, etc.--from doing what human beings do--why insist that we're in some sense necessarily ignorant in some sense of reality, of the world in which we live?
Relax. Giving up naive realism doesn’t mean simply doubting what you know and preventing you from doing what you previously thought you could do in the world. On the contrary, it puts you in more intimate contact with the world, and allows you to understand it in a more richly predictive manner , but in a different way than you’re used to.
OK. I can accept that there are factors arising from our being a part of the world which may affect the accuracy of our perception and judgment.
Yep.
:ok:
In this latter sense, as Bertrand Russell said:
"The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself... Naïve realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naïve realism is false. Therefore naïve realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.”
So we have a tension here.
So I think it boils down to how naivety is taken to be.
You're such a tease... :razz:
I felt bad for threatening to take away his security blanket.
That is an excellent brief, counselor.
Some of the problem involves how attempts to clarify relationships get taken for other things.
Hume and Kant swatted the same flies (or at least very similar flies) but disagreed about how little could be known about why they hung around. Kant wanted to say we could talk more about that than Hume did. It is an ironic development that an attempt to say we can know more about what happens is a step away from the subject (or object). Descartes presents some of the same odd disproportion between intent and consequences. Reading the Discourse upon Method beyond the money shot reveals a thinker deeply involved with experience, thankful that he had some.
Bah. I'M not the one who believes in the unknowable, lurking beyond us, forever a mystery. You throw a blanket between us and the world.
Those are the Kantians. We phenomenologists don’t buy that unknowable stuff. Our motto is ‘To the things themselves!’.
Neuroscientists throw the blanket. Oddly, if you start by assuming direct realism, you'll have to conclude indirect realism.
It's the darnedest thing.
(Emphasis is mine.)
"Naive realism" – clearly inadequate yet also indispensible – seems to me more perceptual bias for than reflective engagement with "things". Insofar as we perceive "things as they are", to degrees they are useful to us in various ways or not useful to us at all; the availabilty (i.e. appearance) of a "thing" to us also constitutes (yet doesn't exhaust) its "reality", no? And yet "naive realism" implies that a "thing" is nothing more than a "thing" as it appears to us, which cannot be the case (since almost every "thing" predates appearing to each or any of us). I don't agree either with Kantians or phenomenologists, however; what there is – the world (i.e. things, events, facts, objects, persons, etc) – we are always already entangled with and participating in (i.e. interpreting), which is how the world appears and enables-constrains our perceptions. No doubt, you know all this, Ciceronianus, that "naive realism" is necessarily, at most, but not sufficiently (i.e. pragmatically) realist.
"Entangled with and participating in"--yes. Well put. But I have problems with the use of "interpreting."
I think it implies a degree of intent or reflection that isn't normally present. I think it can also suggest that we misinterpret, i.e. that we're so encumbered by mental, cultural, social, physical, factors that we're incapable of making reasonable judgments regarding our interactions with the rest of the world.
Yeah, me too. I am quite certain I cannot think the unthinkable, and the unknowable suffices as that to which there is nothing to direct my thinking, for to do so is to immediately contradict myself. To believe in the unknowable is to form at least a minor judgement with respect to it, but without any possible object to which the judgement applies. Also self-contradictory.
But back down here on Mother Earth, where regular folk most often find themselves, here’s a little mind-game for ya: I will think something....any ol’ something....represent it in myself with a single concept, then transmit that to you, which you will receive as a single word, which you will apprehend and judge in accordance with your own standing abilities. At that time, with respect to that particular occasion, would you be one who believes in the unknowable?
The point being, of course, is that to believe in the unknowable is possible iff in relation to that which is already known. In this case, I know what you do not, and never will. Having established the validity of the unknowable, even though only as a condition of things in general under certain conditions, rather than a class of all things as themselves, it remains whether the unknowable is just as reasonable under other conditions.
Exactly. The naive realist is confusing properties of the mind with properties of some "external" object - in a sense projecting their mental states (good or bad) onto objects that have no inherent property of good or bad.
In the same way the naive realist projects colors onto objects, as if objects possess color independent of looking at it. The apple is not red, your view of an apple is red. Apples are ripe or rotten and their color is an indication of their ripeness and rotteness.
So the problem of naive realism is determining which properties are actual properties of the object in your view that exist independent of being viewed vs the properties of your mind in viewing the object, as well as the properties of the light when seeing and the properties of the air when hearing. Changing the amount of light and the amount of air can influence the way we see and hear things.
Quoting Ciceronianus
Because we often confuse what it is that we are talking about - properties of the world vs properties of ourselves when observing the world.
Quoting Ciceronianus
Well, using terms like "external" vs "internal" and "direct" vs "indirect" aren't helpful in reuniting humans with the world that they have a firm causal relationship with. Your mind is "external" to other minds and there is no view that is more fundamental than another so deeming one as "internal" vs "external" is just another projection of one's own view and not representative of the world independent of views. We all have "direct" access to our "internal" minds and "indirect" access to the rest of the world, yet we still know about the world. Which do we know more about? Can you really say that you know more about your mind than you do the rest of the world? Some would say that we know less about or own minds than we do the world (the problem of other minds, solipsism vs realism, etc.).
I think that we need to focus our efforts on explaining the mind and it's relationship with the world before we can really make sense of QM and it's implications.
I don’t think anyone would have a problem with that if they were convinced that “indirect realism” was not “indirect irrealism” or some such thing.
We’re used to the sciences explaining how things work, where ‘work’ takes in both how some mechanism or process is structured and, in the case of biology, how that structure or process gets results, how it is successful. When you explain how fish breathe underwater — which is really cool and seems impossible, but not until you know a little about how breathing works — you don’t end up claiming that as a matter of fact they don’t.
Somehow we’ve gone from “Isn’t it amazing how your brain figures out what the objects in your environment are!” to “Your brain is just making shit up and lying to you about it.”
It is entirely possible that the problem is the preconceptions of cognitive scientists about what they would find, and did not. Imagine trying to explain how a gambler is successful when your working assumption is not that he has a sound grasp of probability, but that he can sometimes see the future. When it turns out he can’t ever see the future, you claim that his ability to place bets intelligently is an illusion, and he’s just lucky. Something like that.
Prior to "intent or reflection", perception (i.e. interaction) is perspectival and thereby selective, or approximative (i.e. incomplete but accurate enough in situ). Thus, the notorious 'unreliability of eyewitness testimony', counselor; this is what I mean by interpreting: to be 'entangled with the world' is essentially a hermeneutical process as Gadamer (Merleau-Ponty, Dilthey, Peirce, Nietzsche et al) point out and which is consistent with the findings of embodied cognition researches. "Misinterpretation", I think, only happens via "intent and reflection" at the meta-level (re: meaning) of 'interpreting percepts' (or abstractly generalizing -- de/re-contextualing – the contents of perception) and not at the entangled-participatory level (re: sense) of perceiving: we cannot not interpret pain as discomfort (at minimum), but we can "misinterpret" pain as e.g. a sign (miracle / omen) of divine disfavor or we can (further) interpret pain as e.g. a symptom of distress or injury or illness.
There's not much of a difference, is there?, between naïve and foolish (ignorant and/or illogical).
Cartesian systematic doubt (Deus deceptor) & Harman's brain in a vat skeptical scenario (Evil genius) come to mind and given these rather disconcerting possibilities can't be ruled out with certainty, realism needs to be adjusted accordingly and what we leave behind is naïve realism and what get are fancier versions of realism.
I suppose it's only morons that take things at face value. @180 Proof claims that there's no hidden reality and WYSIWYG! It's like a dog/cat, upon seeing itself in the mirror, looking behind the mirror to check - there's nothing there. Is that good or bad?, you decide.
This doesn't in any way imply 'infallible' knowing or perceiving – that we cannot be mistaken. You're only a "moron", Fool, to the degree you "take things at face value" when, in fact, there are grounds to do otherwise. But yeah, as I understand things, existence is wholly immanent (Spinoza et al), and that any purported "non-immanent, hidden reality" (e.g. occult mysteries, higher realms, astral planes, etc) is escapist make-believe at best.
:up: for the qualification!
Quoting 180 Proof
[quote=Roger "Verbal" Kint aka Keyser Söze (The Usual Suspects)]The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.[/quote]
Doesn't do anything for you? :chin:
I’ve always wondered how one would observe the effects of Russell’s stone without observing the stone. It seems to me “observing the effects” says more about the way we observe the stone, and utilizing the means with which we observe do not preclude observing the actual stone.
:chin: What that?
I don’t know why I called it “Russell’s stone”. I mean the stone that Russell was speaking about in this quote.
Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth
Science is our brick wall. Arguing with the scientific community is what religious fanatics do, so let's all comport ourselves appropriately and stop trying to apriori our way to the correct conclusions.
Science says we use predictive models. There is a certain amount of making shit up. Accept it or make up your own religion.
When we ask the neuroscientist why she's agreeable to methodological realism that leads to indirect realism and all the loss of confidence in our knowledge of the external world which that entails, she says:
"Practicality."
There's an Ouroborus here. I would think a decent philosopher would stop to smell the weirdness.
Do anything? Reminds me that "Keyser Söze" had read Baudelaire. :smirk:
Quoting frank
:fire:
Yes, we need to observe the stone, otherwise we have no data to work with. When we investigate in close detail what this stone is made of, we discover it is made of colourless, odourless, insubstantial particles. So the stone is made of stuff that lacks the qualities we attribute to them in ordinary life.
So close investigation reveals the stone to be a projection, yet without this projection, we wouldn't be able to get to the stuff that makes up the stone.
Hence the paradox. As I understand it.
To tell you frankly, I don't see a problem with physics. What's the difference between a stone and the effects of a stone? They're, in my book, the same thing.
However, I concede that, given the possibility that there could be more senses than the traditional five we're endued with, our picture of what a stone is maybe incomplete. A stone could be so much more than coldness, hardness, heaviness, and so on. In this then what a stone is to us is subjective - we only perceive those properties of a stone we can. What is it like to be a bat?
:grin:
His complete epistemic self-confidence is that reason.
Once you see yourself as the arbiter of the truth about other entities, what's there to stop you, except perhaps a little common decency?
(Of course, with the proviso that to a naive realist, "seeing oneself as the arbiter of the truth about other entities" is not an intelligible sentence.)
- - -
Quoting Ciceronianus
You mean naive realists?
See above.
Then sketch out how it is appearances that deceive us.
Rather, the salient point is that perception is an active, deliberate process.
Indeed, we normally don't see ourselves that way. We tend to think that perception is something that "just happens" without us having anything to do with it.
Yet already popular phrases like "People see what they want to see" suggest there is a folk understanding that perception isn't the passive, reactive process we generally believe it to be.
[math]\uparrow[/math] is extremely important.
There's a lie-truth-belief asymmetry.
Suppose there are 3 people X, Y, and Z
1. If X tells the truth, I'd be a fool to assume Y and Z too will tell the truth.
However,
2. If X lies, I'd be a fool not to assume Y and Z too will lie.
Truth-telling is not treated as contagious but lying is. :chin:
This part sounds pretty a priori to me.
Here's an analogy, possibly inapposite. Say you're looking at some code that implements a natural merge sort. You can see clearly enough in the code where data is *represented*; that's usually in variables, and they have names they acquire at baptism and everything. But where is the sorting? Is it symbolically represented somewhere? It is not. But it is there, everywhere, in the structure of the code. You would be wrong to conclude it's not there because you can't point at where it is represented symbolically.
I'm only suggesting that expectations about *how* the "external world" is represented, and what we mean when we say that, might lead one to misinterpret what we learn about how the brain works.
You have an odd way of imputing far more into the posts, arguments and positions you find here than can be found in reality.
Probably. So?
So again, you're second guessing the scientific community, which you have a right to do. Just note that you aren't on strong ground when you do that.
Maybe, a little, but that's not really my intention. What I'm trying to quibble with is not the research, and not the usefulness of whatever framework that research is carried out within, but the interpretation of the results.
Let me put it this way: quantum theory has been taken as scientific proof of various sorts of idealism or spiritual whatnot. Now we have the likes of Hoffman peddling the same thing, but now in the name of evolutionary psychology. Cognitive science (which, I feel obligated to say, is an interdisciplinary pursuit philosophy had been involved in from the beginning) is taken too often these days as a license to replace the 'vat' in 'brain in a vat' with 'skull' and leap to whatever philosophical conclusion you like about the external world. That's what I'm pushing back against
I see what you're saying.
Thank goodness! (I was genuinely puzzled by the ever so slightly hostile tone of your response. I like science!)
Insofar as I was indeed quibbling with the science, it was with the concept of representation, which, as I understand it, is still a bit of a thorny issue in cognitive science circles. I think it mostly no longer means what, say, Locke might have meant when he used the word, but the specifically philosophical tradition of indirect realism probably owes much more to the early moderns than it does to contemporary brain science, and that presents some particular challenges when talking about brain science, challenges I'm certainly not up to.
I think that’s what Russell was getting at. But is it true? I don’t know if naive realism leads automatically to physics or some form of atomism. I would also say the stone does not lack the qualities we attribute to them in orderly life. So the paradox exists more in physics or atomism than naive realism.
It's a good question and again, I think that part of it has to do with what naïve realism imples for you. If it implies that stones and rivers would be as they are exactly as they appear, absent people, then I think naïve realism is problematic.
I wouldn't say a stone itself has colour absent or, or texture. For that to happen there needs to be a creature who appreciates or distinguished these things.
On the other hand, you make a good point. I think we switch from realism to something else once we enter physics, that is, we use mathematics to discover what physics is doing and mathematics seems to be of a different nature than perception.
But do we have good reasons to believe that the stuff mathematics is describing is accurate or true? I think that we do, given its results.
:nerd: I trying out being all: you gotta bow down to the God of Science you heathen!
The best theories around now really do amount to indirect realism. It's obviously assumed that the brain is coming up with something trustworthy enough, but once one part of the representation is declared wrong, the whole thing is now in question (for lack of any vantage point for verifying what's right and what isn't).
Quoting baker
Naive realism simply isnt backed up by recent research in perceptual psychology or the more sophisticated thinking in A.I.
Consider our perception of the colour red. The cause of our perception is not the colour red but a wavelength of 700nm. As it is commonly agreed that that humans when observing a wavelength of 700nm consistently perceive the colour red, it is therefore not unreasonable to say that our perception of the world is valid and presents no concern. However, it does not necessarily follow from this that what we perceive, the colour red, is being caused by the colour red. In fact, it is being caused by a wavelength of 700nm.
This question refers back to the debate about Kant's thing-in-itself. In the dual object view, the thing-in-itself is an entity distinct from the phenomena to which it gives rise. In the dual aspect view, the thing-in-itself and the thing-as-it-appears are two "sides" of the same thing. As the perception of the colour red is a distinct entity from what caused the perception, a wavelength of 700nm, it seems reasonable to say that the dual object view is the more reasonable.
Science shows us that our perception of red has been caused by a wavelength of 700nm, so it is science that has "inserted" something between our perception and the external world, a science with its roots in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia around 3000 to 1200 BCE.
One could conclude that, taking this example of our perception of the colour red, Direct Realism does not explain how we perceive the world.
However, the fact that Direct Realism is not the explanation does not mean that our senses don't function quite well, it does not mean that we are detached from the world and it does not mean that our interaction with the world is not immediate.
As regards the "veracity of our senses", our senses accurately translate a wavelength of 700nm into a perception of the colour red, and as regards "perceived by us .......directly", there is a direct correspondence between our perception of the colour red and the wavelength of 700nm.
IE, Direct Realism would mean that our perception of the colour red has been caused by a colour red, but science has shown us that this is not the case. A better term would be Indirect Realism, allowing for the fact that our perception of the colour red has been caused by the wavelength of 700nm.
I suggest that in spite of the a/k/a the two terms are not equivalent. Naive refers to what we see and experience without any philosophy at all. Direct realism is a specific philosophical technical term for formal philosophy that asserts the reality of what we see and experience among other things that are less naively obvious. The formal version is broader, as it also claims existence for things that are neither seen nor experienced, like numbers for instance.
Why would we as philosophers care what some scientists think?
It isn't caused by a wavelength. It isn't caused by the color red, either. It's the entirely natural result of our interaction with another object in the world. I don't think it's appropriate to speak of a "cause" for our seeing the color red, unless we wish to be hyper-technical for a reason. It's what takes place in certain circumstances. If it's appropriate to speak of "cause" the cause isn't the wavelength. The cause isn't in other words "out there" or in the "external world." It's the interaction.
Quoting RussellA
I'd say we're responsible for the insertion (for science as well, in fact). If we're part of the same world, there is no insertion of anything. There's nothing (no thing) between us and the rest of the world that is the "red" of which we speak. This purported "thing" is something we dreamt up, I think.
Quoting baker
I agree.
Quoting baker
I don't think it's passive. There are circumstances when "people see what they want to see" and those circumstances, as I understand them, may involve an interpretation. But there's no reason to infer from that fact that we always interpret in our interactions with the rest of the world, if what is meant by that is that we can never make a reasonable, or the same, judgment regarding out interactions with the rest of the world.
The understanding that what's involved in making judgments regarding the existence and nature of a chair differs from what's involved in making moral judgments? Do you really think there are people who don't have that understanding, and that people who believe they see a chair necessarily can't recognize the difference involved? I'm quite certain I'm sitting on a chair this moment, but I'm also quite certain there's a difference between making that judgement a making a moral judgment.
These "possibilities" are of no concern, to me. I'm with Peirce when it comes to the employment of faux doubt. I think we should have a reason to doubt before we doubt. But what is it you demand before possibilities are "ruled out with certainty"? Can anything be "ruled out with certainty"? If not, why impose such a standard when making judgments, decisions? We live in a world of probabilities. What the best evidence shows to be the case is acceptable to me. That means that new evidence may be discovered, of course, but for me that's not a disconcerting thing.
Quoting Ciceronianus
:chin:
What's that?
The Problem Of Possibility
The statement "the probability of rain is 95%" is either 100% true or 100%false i.e. even if rain is only probable, the forecast itself is certain.
There's a similar issue with multivalent/fuzzy logic. If I say "the apple is 70% red", the redness maybe 70% but the proposition itself is stated as 100% true. There seems to be no escape from binary (true/false) logic.
It's what Peirce refers to in Some Consequences of Four Incapacities:
[i]1. We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt; and no one who follows the Cartesian method will ever be satisfied until he has formally recovered all those beliefs which in form he has given up. It is, therefore, as useless a preliminary as going to the North Pole would be in order to get to Constantinople by coming down regularly upon a meridian. A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.
2. The same formalism appears in the Cartesian criterion, which amounts to this: "Whatever I am clearly convinced of, is true." If I were really convinced, I should have done with reasoning and should require no test of certainty. But thus to make single individuals absolute judges of truth is most pernicious. The result is that metaphysicians will all agree that metaphysics has reached a pitch of certainty far beyond that of the physical sciences; -- only they can agree upon nothing else. In sciences in which men come to agreement, when a theory has been broached it is considered to be on probation until this agreement is reached. After it is reached, the question of certainty becomes an idle one, because there is no one left who doubts it. We individually cannot reasonably hope to attain the ultimate philosophy which we pursue; we can only seek it, therefore, for the community of philosophers. Hence, if disciplined and candid minds carefully examine a theory and refuse to accept it, this ought to create doubts in the mind of the author of the theory himself.[/i]
And yet it remains the case that the rain is probable, not certain.
That said, what I gleaned from Peirce is that he's not saying we should stop doubting for the reason skepticism is nonsensical but because he believes there's value in certainty in that it enriches our lives. I prefer pepsi to water but not because I hate water; it's just that pepsi is more interesting to my taste buds.
What I think he's saying (and I don't pretend to be the last word on this), what I think he's criticizing, is similar in some sense to what Dewey would call the Philosophical Fallacy. That's the tendency to ignore the significance of context, which Dewey felt was prevalent in philosophy, and coming to conclusions in abstract. We can't just pretend to doubt everything and then apply as a maxim what we come up with in purporting to doubt what we clearly don't doubt. Dewey used to say we never really think until we encounter a problem. There's no problem until we have a real problem to solve or situation to resolve.
Although I suspect a Pragmatist--at least a classical Pragmatist--wouldn't speak of certainty, the value of the results of intelligent inquiry, the results of testing in practice and consideration of the results, the forming of a consensus based on the resulting evidence, would be of great, maybe the greatest, value.
I concur with Dewey. I'm only guessing but many questions philosophy begins with have practical significance - there's a problem and we're looking for a solution (off the top of my head, morality) - but oftentimes many levels of abstractions are executed that even if a solution is found, it doesn't work in the real world.
Quoting Ciceronianus
Yes, why look for the perfect in an imperfect world. That would be silly, not to mention dangerous.
Agreed.
Only if you define knowing what a thing is as that which you can successfully interact with do you avoid the problem that bees perceive objects differently from humans, and perhaps treat and react to them quite differently than humans, do you avoid the problem that they know the objects differently.
It's undisputed that bees perceive flowers differently than humans, and it's undisputed that both are fully able to navigate flowers successfully. That a flower is X to a bee but Y to a person begs the question of what is a flower. Is it X or Y? Is it whatever I believe it to be so long as it facilitates my survival?
A letter box emits a wavelength of 700nm. When looking at the letter box we perceive the colour red.
Direct Realism claims that when we do perceive something, the immediate and direct object of perception is the external world, not the mind.
I cannot understand how the immediate and direct object of perception (the colour red) is the external world (the wavelength of 700nm).
How does the Direct Realist justify that the colour red exists independently of any observer in the wavelength of 700nm ?
If I see a chair, then it is possible that there is a chair and that the presence of a chair is the main cause of my seeing a chair.
This is quite consistent with my sometimes hallucinating chairs and also with some chairs emanating wavelengths of light that I cannot perceive or causing changes in air pressure that are beyond my perception. Another couple of straw naive realisms to mention. Naive realism is not this:
If I see a chair, then there's a chair.
That is more properly termed 'psychotic realism', i.e. I cannot even in theory distinguish hallucination or delusion from reality.
Naive realism is not this:
If I see a chair, then there's a chair and if I see injustice then there's injustice.
That is a theory mentioned above and it combines psychotic realism with moral realism. It's probably the scariest straw realism you could get.
:100:
[quote=180 Proof's Prolegomena for the Fourfold Root of Insufficient Reason]If mind itself is nonmind-dependent (i.e. not ideal, more-than-just-ideal), then neither mind nor nonmind are mind-dependent (i.e. both facts are external-to-mind); therefore, nonmind is mind-invariant and not "mind-independent" (or ontologically separate from mind) insofar as mind is an aspect, or phase-state, of nonmind (i.e. more-than-ideality aka "reality" ~Spinoza, Anselm).[/quote]
For me, there's no "external world." There's a world of which we're a part. There isn't one world for us and another world for everything else. We see red because we're a particular kind of living organism existing in the world which, when interacting with certain other constituents of the world, see them as having what we call a "red color." That takes place in one and the same world. It's a function of what the world is and what it encompasses.
I think the person and the bee are interacting with the same thing (the flower). However, one is a person, and the other is a bee. It's unsurprising that our interaction with a flower (which results when we see it, smell it, grow it, etc.) differs from that of a bee and a flower. The difference is the result of the fact we're entirely different creatures, but living in the same world.
I agree.
What do you mean by "the same world"? This implies the flower is the same to me and the bee, but you've said otherwise. The question then is to describe those features of the flower that are the same regardless of the perceiver.
Both bees and we see the flowers at the same places, we know this because we see them pollinating flowers. What could justify saying that we both see flowers, but that the flowers are not the same in each case? Of course the bees seeings and our seeings are not the same; but it does not follow from that that we don't see the same flowers as the bees.
Direct Realism and Panpsychism
I agree that the human is part of the world, and has evolved as part of the world over hundreds of millions of years. However, the world can still be divided into humans and that which is external to humans.
Humans have what Chalmers calls "qualia" and others call subjective experiences, such as pain, love, colour, consciousness, etc.
If there is no "external world", then human experiences are just part of the world's experiences. IE, all the attributes of the mind - pain, love, colour, consciousness, etc - are also attributes of the world. As consciousness is a human experience, then consciousness must also be an experience of the world.
Panpsychism is the view that the mind is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. It seems that it necessarily follows that one of the consequences of Direct Realism is a belief in panpsychism.
What is the flower other than how we perceive it? If it's something else, what is it?
I don't take this to be direct realism/naive realism. It implicates the noumenal and doesn't correlate it to the phenomenal. If you allow that the actual flower is causative of the phenomenal, then the variations of perception among species can only be accounted for by how each mediates the external object, this leading to indirect realism.
Direct realism I take to be something like Thomas Reid's statement:
"The sceptic asks me, Why do you believe the existence of the external object which you perceive? This belief, sir, is none of my manufacture; it came from the mint of Nature; it bears her image and superscription; and, if it is not right, the fault is not mine: I even took it upon trust, and without suspicion. Reason, says the sceptic, is the only judge of truth, and you ought to throw off every opinion and every belief that is not grounded on reason. Why, sir, should I believe the faculty of reason more than that of perception?—they came both out of the same shop, and were made by the same artist; and if he puts one piece of false ware into my hands, what should hinder him from putting another? "(IHM 6.20, 168–169)
This eliminates any argument from reason that what you perceive lacks existence in the form in which you experience it because it refuses to allow reason to over-rule perceptions.
I'm not sure I find this persuasive, but this I take as a defense of the naive realist position.
I mean simply that you (and me and everyone else) and the bee, and the flower, are parts of the same world--we all are parts of the universe. That doesn't mean that we're all the same. That doesn't mean we all have the same characteristics, nor does it mean our characteristics fluctuate. It means that we all interact, differently, but the interaction takes place in the universe; it's part of the universe. The exact characteristics of what we interact with is a matter of study, investigation, testing, and use.
I'm not certain what you mean by this, but if you mean that there are parts of the world in addition to human beings, I agree. If you mean that we're not part of the world in which those other parts exist, I don't agree.
I think they're attributes of human beings, and so are part of the world in that sense, but don't know that it follows that they're attributes of the universe, if by that you mean that the universe is something which possesses). Birds are parts of the universe, but it doesn't follow the universe has wings and builds nests.
I mean the famous 'proof' of an external world.
"Much of the lecture is devoted to working out what counts as an ‘external object’, and Moore claims that these are things whose existence is not dependent upon our experience. So, he argues, if he can prove the existence of any such things, then he will have proved the existence of an ‘External World’. Moore then maintains that he can do this —
How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, ‘Here is one hand’, and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, ‘and here is another’ (‘Proof of an External World’ 166)" https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moore/
Moore was not claiming that he had a justified belief that he has hands. He was actually producing his hands. To deny the external world would be to deny that what he was producing were his hands. In the same way, if there is no external world, then I am not producing this post on PF. It's performance philosophy.
Quoting Ciceronianus
I was misled by your use of the phrase "external world"
There must be an "external world" if pain, love, colour, consciousness, etc are attributes of human beings, yet not attributes of the universe.
Though I agree with the idea that just because a human has the attribute of perceiving the colour red, it doesn't follow that the colour red is also an attribute of the "external world"
Interesting. But I've never thought of my hands as "external objects" or as parts of an "external world" and I'm uncertain what is meant when it's claimed that they (or any other parts of my body) exist "independently of my experience" if that's what he's saying.
I'm not sure we're speaking of the same thing. Are you saying there must be an "external world" unless the universe feels pain (for example)?
Something's missing.
No one has argued that.
What I'm arguing is that the approach of the OP is not naive (direct) realism. It sounds Kantian to me. Per the OP and subsequent clarifications there are said to be external objects and then there are perceptions. How the perception correlates to the external object is left to the unknown. It's being argued that bees have phenomenal states of flowers and people do as well, but they need not be at all similar.
I ask how this is not identical to saying the flower itself is noumenal and unknowablre, yet the experience is the phenomenal and all that is knowable?
The flower itself most certainly exists under this construct, but it's unknowable. That's what saves Kant from pure idealism as it does the OP.
I think something like the Thomas Reid quote better describes naive realism than what is argued here.
The flower is knowable in a multitude of ways, or in other words, via a multitude of different kinds and instances of encounter. It is not exhaustively knowable, but that does not entail that it is unknowable.
Here's what I'm proposing, regardless of whether it comports with anyone's idea of naive realism or direct realism. There are many constituents of the world. Some are human, some are bees, some are flowers. None of them exist in an "external world" apart from anything else. None of them is an "external object" in that sense. There is no "thing" called a perception which exists somewhere inside of us.
I'm open to understanding this, but I really don't follow what's being proposed. If a "constituent" is a part, it is distinct from other parts, which logically demands that bees, flowers, and people are apart from each other. By "apart" I mean not a part of, which means it's separate from me, thus being external.
It is my experience that my perceptions cease upon my unconsciousness, yet it seems the object of my perception is unaffected by unconsciousness. Do you believe otherwise? When I sleep, does my bed cease to exist now that I no longer perceive it?
This is slipping into pure idealism. Is that an accurate description of your position?
Very well, what is the flower in and of itself?
SO you have:
Odd. Not sure what the point is.
Must you be able to do something with the truth for it to be true?
He is addressing the question whether all his experience might be a mere figment of his imagination, including his own hands. Well, here's one hand. Is anybody putting their own hand up to say 'No, it isn't' or 'No, it might not be'? You mean no, what isn't? You mean this hand I'm producing? It's a while since I read it but from memory he does not claim to refute universal scepticism but to advance an argument that, if all 'this' is hallucination, then I'm not producing a hand here in this lecture theatre - the very hand whose existence we may proceed to discuss, apparently assuming that it's here because, well, here it is. I would love to have been there.
I'm speculating, but I think the use of a body part as an example is a nod to Descartes - we might not doubt our own existence but we can doubt the existence of bodies including our own. A wilder speculation is that he was thinking in 1939 of recent brutalities which young men were thankful to survive still in possession of their hands or other limbs.
Quoting Ciceronianus
Quoting Ciceronianus
Your question leads to a paradox. If the "external world" must exist, then it must exist whether or not it feels pain. But if it feels pain, then it cannot exist. But it must exist..............
Definitions
A common definition of "external world" is "the world consisting of all the objects and events which are experienceable or whose existence is accepted by the human mind, but which exist independently of the mind".
A common definition of "Direct Realism" is that the external world exists independently of the mind (hence, realism), and we perceive the external world directly (hence, direct).
The world and pain
I believe that humans, and sentient beings in general, feel pain. My belief is that pain does not exist in the world external to sentient beings.
I am not saying there must be an "external world", as my knowledge about the world is insufficient for me to know that, but I am saying that I believe that there is an "external world".
I am also not saying that the world external to sentient beings cannot feel pain, as again my my knowledge about the world is insufficient for me to know that, but I am saying that I believe that the world external to sentient beings doesn't feel pain.
IE, I am not saying that "there must be an "external world" unless the universe feels pain", I am saying that "I believe that there is a world external to sentient beings, and I believe that this world external to sentient beings doesn't feel pain"
Summary
One aspect of Direct Realism is that the external world exists independently of the mind. As you propose that there is no "external world", am I correct in thinking that your view is neither Naive Realism nor Direct Realism, but something else, such as Idealism, as @Hanover suggests ?
Quoting Ciceronianus
Quoting Ciceronianus
Quoting Ciceronianus
:fire: :100:
None of this makes much sense. That nothing can exist external to the world is tautological, considering "the world" is being referred to as all that is in this context. Even in Spinoza speak, objects have attributes, which makes them distinct within the universe. Bees, flowers, people, and even thoughts of bees, flowers, and people are things with different attributes and can discussed as separate entities, all within the world, even if we hold there is some mega underlying monism.
The universe is one, as the prefix "uni" demands, but that says nothing about what a flower is. If I conceive a flower as X and you as Y, what is the truth value of the proposition "the flower is Y"?
Can someone answer the bolded question?
Well, that is the Kantian position.
I tend to believe a causative link between the thing and the experience. So, if the flower is knowable, it can only be knowable from an analysis of all perspectives, recognizing that each of our perspectives is mediated by our peculiar filters. This is precisely how we all navigate the world by the way. Science requires we eliminate subjective bias.
Whatever objections persist related to indirect realism or subjectivism, they at least avoid the incoherent position of the OP. It argues for a holism, yet it describes seperate entities, but then insists because there is just one universe, all must be one. As if
1) For the Psychology Dictionary, the world of real and existing things external to and independent of our consciousness.
2) For Wiktionary, the world consisting of all the objects and events which are experienceable or whose existence is accepted by the human mind, but which exist independently of the mind.
3) For GE Moore Proof of an External World, the category of “external things” is the category of space-occupying things that may fail ever to be perceived.
4) For Putnam, “If we can consider whether [the hypothesis that we are brains in vats being electrochemically stimulated to have the very experiences that we’ve had] is true or false, then it is not true… Hence it is not true”
5) For Davidson and McDowell, agreement that experiences justify beliefs about the external world only if experiences have contents that can be assessed for truth.
It is definitely not about the concept expressed in the statement - "The world" cannot be "external" to – ontologically separate from – itself, which includes its constituents (Spinoza)
Given agreement as to the meaning of the phrase "external world", then the topic "there's no "external world" can be discussed.
I asked you to sketch out how "appearances deceive us". I've never felt "deceived" by an appearance, I don't know what that would be like.
Quoting Hanover
:mask:
This is Stoic doctrine, and we know you're a Stoic. Okay.
But this I don't understand.
Are you referring to Stoic epistemology, epistemology according to Stoicism?
An odd question. The flower is X, or not; or it is Y, or not.
You might have meant to ask: 'if I conceive a flower as X and you as ~X, what is the truth value of the proposition "the flower is X"'
Sometimes folk are wrong about flowers.
One of us might be wrong. My money is on it being you.
...but the claim was that flowers are is unknowable. So you can't know anything about such causal chains.
Always it comes back to this: you want to claim that we can talk about flowers but not flowers-in-themselves; and yet you insist in telling us about flowers-in-themselves.
There's a basic contradiction in claiming that there is something about which we cannot make claims.
The more I think about that question, the more incoherent it seems. To be something is to instantiate some attribute or set of attributes, no? Attributes are cognized; so if knowing attributes is dependent on judgements derived from perception, is asking about attributes that are imperceptible in principle not incoherent?
A much clearer approach to the same issue is to get rid of the subjective/objective dichotomy by talking about the stuff about which we agree or disagree.
So we tend to agree that the needle on the potentiometer points to the seven, but might disagree that vanilla is better than chocolate.
Incidentally, it's the confusion of agree/disagree with subjective /objective that leads to all that nonsense about intersubjectivity.
In any case, I won't need to consult you in order to determine that the poppies in the front yard are red and purple. So you are mistaken in thinking it can only be knowable from an analysis of all perspectives.
If you look back, you will see that I was commenting on another's comment making a claim that science had 'discovered' that our senses were unreliable. I pointed out that though this might appear to be the case, by its own claim, the claim cannot be relied on. Just to be clear, because it seems important to you for some reason, I am arguing throughout for direct realism, and thus not in disagreement with you about not being deceived in general. I thought this was made clear by my previous repetition of that claim first as the other's quote and then as my ironic comment on the claim. Obviously, that wasn't as clear as I thought it was, but hopefully, this will make it clear enough.
This isn't the survey result that applies to the questions within this thread. From the same survey:
See #21.
No, there's nothing particularly Stoic about that (as far as I know, in any case).
That comment is more along the lines of Austin, or ordinary language philosophy. I think we can deceive ourselves when we start referring to a perception as if it's a kind of "thing." In particular in this case, as if it's something separate from an "external object" like a flower, and, it seems, something that varies from person to person or creature to creature encountering the "external object." I suppose it's the result of the dualism that induces us to think of ourselves as separate from the "external world." It's like referring to sense data as if it's a kind of thing, although as I understand it that kind of thing is a thing which separates us from the rest of the world.
Not without a magnifying glass.
Quoting Hanover
The title of this thread: "The Strange Belief in an Unknowable "External World" (A Mere Lawyer's Take)"
The question I referred to: "External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?"
The question you referred to: "Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?"
So you think the thread about the external world is not about the external world.
I don't think so, no. When I say there's no "external world" I'm simply saying there's a single world, and that we're a part of it, not apart from it. I think referring to an "external world" is confusing as it implies there's some world outside of us in which we don't participate, and perhaps even in which we don't exist, but simply observe.
I think when we refer to an "external world" which "exists independently of the mind" we've already accepted a dualism I reject. We assume the existence of a mind separate from the world. I don't think our minds are separate from the world; I think they're parts of the world just as we are (necessarily so, of course). So, the question "Is there an external world which exists independently of the mind?" seems to me to be...well, weird.
You just like philosophers with the surname "Austin".
I think it's a question which shouldn't arise, frankly, and I assume it does only if one takes faux doubt of the kind which so famously was indulged in by Descartes seriously. Our every act, our very existence, establishes we don't seriously believe our hands are figments of our imagination.
There are humans and there are bees. I'm a human. I'm not a bee. So, if that is what you think makes a bee "external" to me, that's fine, but I think calling it "external" is inappropriate. I would simply say something like "There are bees in the world" much as I'd say "There are humans in the world" or "We're in (or are a part of) the world." If I'd even say such things. I don't think it would occur to me to do so.
And that may be the salient point. If we accept we're part of the universe along with everything else, how does the question whether there's an "external world" even arise? Obviously, we wouldn't think there was another world or universe. We wouldn't think our minds are independent from the rest of the universe. We wouldn't wonder whether the rest of the universe really exists, or if the rest of it would go away if we were asleep.
Nor, I think, would we wonder whether a flower is really a flower, or whether it's really something different from a flower--or think that what it truly is cannot be known.
I like the two I know of, anyhow.
"Uni" verse means one. It means everything that there is. That something is "external" could not mean external to the universe. If it did, the universe would only be part of what there is. This distinction you make is not one that needed to be made because no one argues otherwise.
That the blender is separate from the cupboard is separate from the coffee maker is entirely possible even if all the world is the kitchen.
When I say there are objects external to me, I don't mean external to the universe because that, well, wouldn't make a whole lotta sense.
Knowing this now, I say there is me, and then there are flowers and I have a perception of the flower. The question then is whether my perception represents the flower or is the flower. If the former, we're not direct realists. If the latter, we are. The latter makes no sense to me.
So to you direct realists think that the flower is the perception of the flower.
No wonder you are puzzled. perplexed.
It's easy to read that way if you're tacitly assuming a perception is an object that bears properties like a flower bears properties.
Words are multiplying unnecessarily here and causing you some confusion it seems. Your perception of the flower is neither a representation of the flower nor is it the flower. You perceive the flower, you don't perceive a representation of the flower. The flower is presented to your perception, is present in your perception, not represented by it. It is your thought or talk about the flower that represents the flower, if anything does.
In that view it is not that a perception is an object that bears properties like a flower bears properties, but that it is an object that bears properties instead of a flower that bears properties.
There seems to be some truth to this in the sense that some properties of the flower are only realized in being perceived. Nonetheless they are properties of the flower, not properties of the perception of the flower.
Doesn't it depend on the representation relationship? I guess I don't really want to get into it in too much depth. Spelled out my view about perceptual intermediaries here.
:up:
If my perception and the flower are the same thing, that's idealism. There is no external to speak of, so you can eliminate that word as well.
No, objects have properties.
Is idealism coherent? What about my perception of the flower, or the bees? Being different how can they all be the same flower?
There's a flower in your head and you're asking about the bee in your head. Idealism is strange, but not incoherent.
As the old saying goes, there are no flowers in my head, but you can see where they've been, :wink: (Well actually you can't; you'll need to open the skull).
Idealism doesn't seem to provide any explanation as to how the flower I see can be the same flower you see, hence it doesn't cohere with everyday experience, which seems to show that we can both look at, smell, and touch particular flowers (among many other wonderful things which I won't mention here for the sake of brevity and decorum)..
The ol' Bishop Berkeley's God might do the trick, I suppose, if He was Himself a coherent entity, or I guess you could posit a universal or collective mind, but in my experience philosophical idealists never seem to want to go there.
Philosophers often use “Naïve Realism” as a synonym for “Direct Realism”, though sometimes Naive Realism is taken as a strong form of Direct Realism, more along the lines of Aristotle's approach.
In the context of the philosophy of the mind, the phrase "External World" is the view that in the world there are things or events that exist independently of the mind.
Quoting Ciceronianus
If the mind is part of the world, then in the world there is the mind and there is that which is outside the mind, ie, an "external world" - ie leading to the possibility of Naive Realism, Direct Realism or Indirect Realism.
Quoting Ciceronianus
This would mean that there is no "external world" - ie, Idealism
These two viewpoints seem contradictory.
When I see a flower, I don't see a perception of a flower. I see a flower. Do you claim I see something else?
I believe we both acknowledge that we exist in the world, as do other living organisms and things. You clearly think that those other creatures and things are "external" to us. If by that you mean they exist in the world along with us, in addition to us, I agree. If you mean they exist in a world that is outside us, I don't agree.
Idealism wouldn't require anything external to the mind, so I'm not sure it's worried about other minds and what they see.
In any event, if your basis for realism is to provide an external causative object so that we'll have an explanation for consistency of perception from person to person, that object need not bear any resemblance to the perception. It need only be some noumenal whatever. The flower, for example, could be an algorithm that causes such perceptions in that scenario and nothing more.
My car has this feature that causes a light on the side mirror to light up when another vehicle passes into my blind spot. Unless you wish to speak if qualia, which I understand you don't, the car's perception of the passing car elicits the behavior of a light blinking on.
My question is whether the blinking light is the passing car.
To clarify my analogy: the flower is the passing car and my internal experience is the blinking light. That is, a flower elicits a physical response and it is my phenomenal experience. Is that experience the flower? I'd say no, unless you're willing to commit to the idea that the side blinking light is a passing car?
I agree that in this world that we live in, other living organisms and things are external to us.
I too don't believe in a multiverse, where other living organisms and things external to us live in a world outside the world we live in.
Words have meanings, and as regards the phrase "external world" in the context of a discussion about the philosophy of the mind, external means external to the mind and world means the world we live in, not another world outside our world in the multiverse.
It is of course OK for you to give words meanings that are not commonly accepted within the context that they are being used in, but it does cause confusion.
Why should a "noumenal whatever" with unknowable or no attributes reliably produce the experience of a particular flower? Who wrote the algorithm?
Thinking that way denies the whole ordinary world of shared human experience, so what use is it?
It very much is. Most ideologies/philosophies/religions propose that there are things which should not be, beings which should not exist, which must or will be destroyed, eliminated, or at least changed or punished.
Universal acceptance or the idea that the universe is perfect, flawless as it is are not the norm. Stoicism is one such exception. In some ways, Hinduism. Native American beliefs also come to mind (although I'm not sure how they integrate the arrival of colonizers, if at all).
Quoting Ciceronianus
Were you not taught this way? It seems to be a given in Western cultures to think there is oneself, and then there's the external world.
(For example, many religious people think of themselves as being "in this world, but not of this world".)
Quoting Ciceronianus
Of course. It's safe to say that most people think this way, including Hindus and Indians.
But why do you reject it? Based on what?
How do you explain mental illness?
And if there is disagreement about what those properties are?
I get @Banno's comment, suggesting that if all properties are subjectively imposed, then how can we speak of those properties of the thing in itself. The noumenal is by definition unknowable, so I'd agree that we can't know what those properties are, but realize that a property free entity is nothing at all.
My only non-Kantian response is to say that the object is whatever creates the experience, but I don't know what that is. To state otherwise must result in an idealism or anti-realism.
So, if we're realists here, we need to start allowing for this "external" talk, else we slip into a purely imaginative world. It would be ironic if the direct realist who prides himself as having the common sense approach ends up denying external reality.
The trick to dealing with the little man who wasn't there in Antigonish is to understand that he makes no difference to your ability to walk up the stair.
The trick in dealing with the noumenal is to understand that it makes no difference to anything you might choose to do.
On the condition one is an atheist/non-spiritual/non-religious.
Explain why.
To whom is the noumenal important? To those who believe in a kind of transcendence, ie. the religious, the spiritual, the theists. Those who have a stake is some unknowable thing out there being one way and not another.
Unlike you, who doesn't care whether that man upon the stair is there or not, even as you met him while he wasn't there.
Do you know that you don't know what it is? Or do you merely not know whether you know what it is or not, because you are seeking an impossible, incoherent kind of knowledge? You don't think you have better reason for saying it is a flower, some of whose attributes you know, than saying that it is completely unknowable, even if you cannot be absolutely certain this is true?
We can also simplify a bit while still being as accurate as we can be and we say there are "things themselves" which play a role is cementing my experience of the world.
What we know and are familiar with is what we take to be our ordinary image of the world: rivers, trees, clouds, birds, etc. But to attribute these very same things to the world, absent our ordering and classification is not coherent.
Of things themselves we are only acquainted with effects, which feed into an innate structure that attributes, not only "thatness" to items, but colours, smells, etc., not to mention the concepts which we use so (seemingly) effortlessly.
But we cannot go behind these, as much as we may want to.
The reason I disagree with this is that the idea of the thing in itself becomes irrelevant if we absolutely can't know what it is, which is exactly how it is defined. What we do know is that we inhabit a world we share with other non-human percipients, and their behavior towards things shows us that they see the same things (even if not in the exactly the same ways) in the same locations. The whole world is an incredibly complex coherent system comprising countless environments and kinds of entity, all of which hangs together coherently and consistently as a shared world.
So, it's not a matter of attributing anything to the purported "thing in itself" in principle we cannot do that; the thing in itself just is the idea of "something" to which nothing can be attributed. So, I say "fuck the thing in itself, what use is it"? Why do we cling to this incoherent idea of something to which nothing can be attributed?
What possible stake could anyone have in something completely unknowable? The "religious, the spiritual, the theists", contradicting themselves, think they do know something. or at least can, or could, know something "one day", about the purportedly unknowable.
I'm confused. I would've sworn in another conversation we had that you thought the idea was useful.
I currently re-reading Cudworth, a persecutor to Kant, who stated a similar doctrine almost 100 years before the Critique was published. It's very interesting.
He say that of these things themselves, we feel only motion - effects the objects induce in us, specifically to creatures like us, that we then attribute all this richness we take for granted. The idea being there was something here prior to us existing, but it cannot be defined using the concepts we apply to nature.
But there's also Schopenhauer, who says that the-thing-in-itself is will, energy, the same thing you feel when you move your arm is what it would be like to be anything else in the universe, if it were conscious.
So there's no need to say that things in themselves are completely, 100% unknowable. Perceiving effects, feeling as a subject and object or using the idea as a limiting notion, so as to not postulate a relational ontology ad infinitum, are useful and have content, to me anyway.
So it depends on how you take these ideas. I would agree, if we can know nothing at all about it, then the idea is not too useful.
I may have said that the distinction is a valid logical one, which I think it is. But I agree with Hegel's critique; that the idea of the thing in itself is just an idea derived by positing the opposite of the for us, an idea which nonetheless irrevocably remains just an idea for us; which makes taking it seriously a kind of a performative contradiction. Schopenhauer's totalizing notion of a blind will does not seem capable of explaining how it is that we experience a complex, consistently integrated world.
The most parsimonious explanation would seem to be that the structures and events we perceive, although obviously not known exhaustively, are real and somehow isomorphic with what is independent of us and our perceptions and judgements. But we are always pushing the limits of language, so if we don't attempt to speak from "beyond ourselves" we will save ourselves from uttering what is pretty much useless nonsense.
Then it is a mere difference on the use of our words. A structure or an event unperceived by a conscious being capable of making these discriminations is not too different from things-themselves.
Beyond this, structures or things or whatever you want to call it, our knowledge is indeed in very shaky grounds. But if something akin to this is not postulated, I don't see how we avoid saying that we make everything up and are left with pure idealism.
I think we could clarify these notions by speaking about what they can't be.
I suspect such notions are contrasted with a priori knowledge - a complicated subject, which I'm trying to clear up.
Funny how hard "naïve realism" turns out to be!
I agree,. Schopenhauer's critique of Kant's "things in themselves" was that they can't be plural because difference and change is nothing more than a category of judgement, just as space and time are nothing more than the "pure forms of intuition". So there cannot be things unless there is differentiation, which requires space and change, which requires time, both of which Kant claimed were relevant only to the phenomenal and which he denied of the noumenal. But the conundrum is as to how "something" supposedly completely changeless and undifferentiated could give rise to a perceived world of change and difference.
So, I tend to think we do know things, just not exhaustively; and that seems to dissolve the problem, for me at least. I'm not convinced the question "But what are they, really?" is not nonsensical, even though it may seem sensical enough. It relies on the idea of an omniscient mind which could exhaustively know what things truly are in a kind of absolutely total way. I tend to think this is a linguistically induced fantasy.
The problem I see with saying we make everything up and that idealism is the case, is that it doesn't work at all without a God or some such entity, something that guarantees that we all see the same things. Absent a deity it seems to be an idea incapable of explaining anything at all.
Indeed, idealism reduces to solipsism.
The gullible? Perhaps you do have a point.
Yes. And I think Schopenhauer was quite acute in making that observation. Somehow, at bottom, we are all one thing. Somehow the appearance of difference emerged with sufficient cognitive capacities.
Quoting Janus
'What are they really' presupposes a perseptive-less view or an omniscient view of all possible lived experience of all living creatures experiencing a "similar object". My thought is more, what grounds these appearances? Structures, negative noumena, will? One can say "well it's all atoms and fields at bottom". But from our representations of objects all the way down to atoms, there is a massive gap in our knowledge.
Imagine being in front of a tree with all senses. You lose sight, the tree is still there. You can touch it, hear it, etc. Now lose touch. You can still hear it, taste it if you like. But keep on going. You lose your traditional five senses. But we can't deny an object exists out there.
Quoting Janus
We have essentially the same genes, and one human being can be used in experiments, as a substitute for the whole species when it comes studying perception, or medication and so on. Why would we drastically experience a different world, people with severe cognitive problems aside?
We just project the world entirely. But don't have enough knowledge to see how we do this. I don't believe this at all, but it's what remains if we don't postulate a structure, etc.
Ok, but it keeps coming back. Descartes has been dead a long time and we still worry about brains in vats. The flies get out of the bottle and then a whole new generation of flies gets in.
:wink:
That would seem to me to make the mind the "internal world." Words have meanings, you see.
Quoting baker
Western culture has been fundamentally selfish for some time, it's true. The concern with individual rights, individual salvation, individual status, comfort, power, wealth, has been overwhelming. Self-love seems to me to be a narrow basis on which to assess the universe.
Quoting baker
Because I don't accept that our "minds" are separate from us, and think we're not separate from the rest of the world. I don't think it can be doubted on any reasonable basis that all we do is the result of our interaction as living organisms with the rest of the world.
Quoting baker
As a particular kind of illness, or disorder, we suffer from. I'm not sure I understand what you mean, though.
This seems to be to simply beg the question. Why should we assume the blinking light is all we see?
The fact so many are enamored by the thought of being brains in vats is disturbing, as it seems to amount to a rejection of the world in which we live.
This misunderstands the analogy. We don't see the blinking light. We see the flower. The car sees the passing car and a blinking light is activated.
Direct realism holds that the flower and the perception are indistinct. What you see is what there is.
Under direct realism, when I see a flower, the flower is whatever I see. We don't distinguish between "flowers" and "perceptions of flowers" as that would lead us down the path of having to explain which part of the flower is real and which is subjectively created. We also don't bother with things like qualia, as that would ask us to explain the difference between cognitive substance and external physical substance and it might suggest there are two flowers (the real and the perceived).
Now to my car:
The car sees a passing vehicle. Under direct realism, its response isn't to interpret the passing car, but to simply perceive it. Perceptual events aren't mysterious events, but they are simply behavioral responses offering direct impressions of objects. So, a car sees a passing car and it offers a behavioral response to it, namely to blink a light. The passing car, under direct realism, to my car, is a blinking light.
If passing cars are not blinking lights, but are something far more substantial, and include doors, windows, and seats and you know this because you've seen them, then my question is why your behavioral responses can be said to be accurate, but not the car's.
Back to bees and flowers:
Is the flower the way I see it or the way the bee sees it? If some creature sees it as a blinking light, is it a blinking light?
Yet Descartes didn't reject the world in which we live, so that must not have been the implication of the evil demon thought experiment.
The trick in dealing with the phenomenal is to understand that it makes a significant difference whether the phenomenal correlates to reality.
There is reality and then there is the perception of reality. How they correspond, I'm not sure, but I'm committed to the idea that they do, else we wouldn't continually try to get better and better perspectives of reality through the crude lenses we've been afforded.
And realism, once we strip it of its subjectivity, reduces to idealism. All slippery slopes lead to solipsism.
I can see that my projections are pretty smart and often clash with each other.
:cool:
It's a tough question. I might be off here, but I would think direct realism would permit that different creatures, with differing biologies, see the same thing and that the experience is always veridical. So in both instances the flower is observed directly, without any mediating factor standing between seer and seen. In all cases and with all creatures they see the flower. As soon as we insert "the way something sees" (the flower as a blinking light, for example) in between seer and seen we presuppose indirect realism. So I think the question is somewhat loaded.
Yeah, but you left out a key word here. Fill in the blank:
"I would think direct realism would permit that different creatures, with differing biologies, see the same thing _________ and that the experience is always veridical."
A. Similarly
B. Differently
If B, then what is veridical is not what is perceived but is something else, and you no longer have direct realism. What is "the thing" in this scenario?
If A, you're making a scientific claim about how varying species make observations, which means your theory of direct realism fails if the science contradicts you. If I can show that bee lenses could not possibly present flowers as human lenses do, does that defeat direct realism?
But there's no question that this happens in real life. I look at the eye chart to take my eye exam. There are the letters that are there and there are the letters I see. How can we speak of perceptual errors if there is no distinction between the object and the perception of the object?
I think an evil demon was having a bit of fun with him from the beginning.
I think the question in this thread is how we know what the external world is (which was the part of the survey I referred to) and to a lesser extent as to whether there is an external world to begin with (which is the part of the survey you referred to).
Overwhelmingly, there is agreement that there is an external world. The highest percentage of philosophers believe the external world is known through representations of reality, which I take to be indirect realism.
I'm not sure what percentage of philosophers agree with what the survey means. Maybe they need to vote on what their vote meant.
See how this assumes an external world?
You assume that the flower must be one thing for us, another thing for the bee.
There's a flower. We interact with it the way humans do. The bee interacts with it the way bees do. There's no reason to think it becomes something different depending on whether a human or bee is involved in the interaction. There's no reason to think it is something different than what we interact with and what a bee interacts with. There's not one flower for us, another for the bee.
Of course there's a reason to think it's a different for us and for the bee. The lens of the bee presents it in an entirely different way. There's also reason to believe a bee presents differently to me than a bat, considering I don't have echolocation.
I also don't know where pollen is instinctively, yet a bee seems to, so our behavioral differences make me believe the bee sees the flower differently from me.
Does your position require that I actually believe bees and humans perceive in the same way? If it does, I think your position just fails to scientific evidence.
"External world" simply references an object external to perception, which I assume you agree with, given your prior objection to solipsism.
If the perception of the bee of the flower is blue and the perception of the flower to me is red, what color is the flower?
How do you know that if we have, as you claim, no knowledge of the external world?
B is true: we see the same flower differently than the bee; our lenses and the rest of our biology is different than a bee’s; but the differences are with the creatures themselves and how they act upon the flower. Why must we assume some other thing?
In my understanding of direct realism there are no differing representations of the flower to present and there is no observer beyond the lens to present them to. I think at the very least indirect realists need to prove that there is some sort of barrier between observer and observed.
Red.
If the flower is 100 feet away, there's that barrier, especially if it's foggy outside or if a tree is in the way, and then there's the lens of the eye and then nerves and such along the way, any of which if you alter, so you'll alter the perception of the flower. Stick an electrode in the brain and that too will alter the perception, and actually could create the perception with no flower at all.
But everyone knows this, so I don't know why I'm having to recite it.
The perception is manipulated by all different parts of me, but not all. The flower looks the same with or without my gall bladder and I can sneeze out all sorts of internal mucus and the flower is the same.
The perception faculty, wherever it may be within me, is somewhere, but I'm not sure exactly where, but it seems like a bullet to the brain would stop the perceiving, so I'm thinking it's there somewhere.
If I wore rose colored glasses, you'd understand that my claim that the world is rose colored is mediated by my glasses. For some reason though if you sewed the glasses to my face so that it was part of me, you'd have to deny there was a homunculus waiting for the light to shine upon the optic nerve and insist the perception of the flower was unmediated.
Let me ask this: if there's a flower behind a 100 foot wall, would you agree that that barrier alters my perception of the flower? If yes, then we've established that what is between my perception faculty and the flower determines what I perceive. If not, then what's the difference between staring at a wall and looking at a flower?
If this were actually possible then the (same) flower would look red to me and blue to a bee. What's the problem?
To @Hanover: The problem I see with your position is that it is self-contradictory. You ask what if the same flower appears red to me and blue to a bee (obviously if they were different flowers then the argument would be totally vacuous) and yet you claim that this shows that the bee and I are not looking at the same flower. :roll:
It should not be so difficult to understand. The abolishment of naive realism ("naive", because that is how we start out in life, prior to philosophical sophistication) is one of the few definite results of philosophy. You should know it.
The naive realist believes perception reveals the world as it is. This is simply not so. Any perception is necessarily a co-creation of both the perceived and the perceiver. It cannot be any other way.
For something to be consciously perceived, it must be mapped onto a perceptual plane. This perceptual plane is contingent, and has everything to do with the perceiver, nothing to do with the perceived.
When you hear a pure 440hz tone, it sounds a certain way to you. But that sound in your head has nothing to do with the vibration in the air. Rather, it is a mapping from that vibration to your auditory perceptual plane. Which happens over many complex steps and signal transformations, from the vibration of your eardrum to the conscious event.
Others might perceive pure 440hz tones differently. Other species certainly do. None of these perceptions are privileged, none hear the tone as it really is. "Hearing it as it really is" is a contradiction in terms. "The world as it is" may be conceptualized, but it is perceptually inaccessible, due to the nature of perception itself.
We live immersed in a world of perceptual symbols, from which there is no escaping. It is like living your life in a library. You read words all day, every day. These words point to your understanding of the words, and as you read this understanding grows, as does your understanding of the world. But it's all book knowledge. You can't get out into the world itself, ever, the doors to the library are locked.
Similarly, have you seen human skin under an electron microscope? It looks like the surface of the moon and is full of living creatures (mites) roaming over it, like marauding aliens. Does this mean that I am not seeing the same human skin as the microscope sees? If you say no then for me this is entirely a poetic use of the word.
You don’t need to explain the physics or biology. And It’s true that if we alter the physics or biology we perceive differently. I just think it more precise, leads to less problems, and is just plain easier, to think of these things in terms of direct realism, at least as far as my limited and naive understanding goes. I think we perceive the flower; I don’t think we perceive perceptions.
If a wall stands between an observer and a flower, we no longer perceive the flower, we perceive the wall. The environment is altered. If an electrode is inserted in the brain, and we are unable to view the flower in the usual manner, we still perceive the flower. The biology is altered. As far as I can tell the fact that we perceive or regard a flower is not altered.
I don’t know if any of this factors into it, but for me the locus of perception is the entire organism. With this I don’t need to evoke Cartesian theaters and brains in vats to understand how we perceive.
That doesn't sound like naivety to me. I think the naive realist believes that, when she sees a chair, then, absent any good reason for thinking she's the victim of trick, it's a chair she's looking at. She thinks that if she has four guests and three chairs then she's one chair short, just because there are three chairs to be seen and three chairs that she sees. If you ask a naive realist whether she thinks her perception reveals the world as it is, she will likely look at you blankly as if it's a question without much clear meaning - and I'm with her on that one.
I think you overlook a serious problem here. If you admit that the presence of Y between object X and perceiver Z distorts, modifies, or alters the perception, then you admit to indirect realism as X is no longer what you perceive, but it's instead the conglomerate of everything between X and Z, including all biological processes prior to being perceived.
The wall example is just too obvious to deny, but it's no different in principle than any other impediment to direct perception. That is, it's not as if there is a vacuum of nothingness between the flower and your final perception. You simply don't see a flower. You see all sorts of walls, some in the environment and some in you.
That's just scientifically incorrect. My nose doesn't see things, nor does my pancreas.
You do in fact, regardless of how messy it makes philosophical analysis, have a part or parts of your brain that perceive. The perception occurs when that faculty receives sensory input, either through impulses from your sensory organs, artificial electrodes in the brain, drug abuse, psychological disturbance, damage to the brain, or even through purely internal processes like dreams.
That's just the way it works. If it's easier to think it another way, do that, but it'll be wrong and you'll need to stay a philosopher, as opposed to a doctor.
Quoting Hanover
In a way, he’s right. We construct body schemes that participate in interpretating all of our perceptions.
The following article give a sense of how
“sensory and motor information, body representations, and perceptions (of the body and the world) are interdependent”.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00819/full
That there are multiple points of entry for the sensory data and that they are at some point processed into a single experience doesn't seem to offer support for the direct realist position.
Why should I know anything, if what you say is correct?
Quoting hypericin
What's this "perception" you refer to, and where is it? Granted that our lives are our interaction with the rest of the world, why does that mean the rest of the world is unknowable?
Quoting hypericin
If that's what you maintain, then it seems strange you believe "any perception is necessarily a co-creation of both the perceived and the perceiver."
Quoting hypericin
There's a sound in my head? Are sights and smells in there as well?
Quoting hypericin
It's true we can't get out of the world. But you think the world is much smaller than I do.
Humans are humans and bees are bees and flowers are flowers. The interaction of a bee with a flower differs from our interaction with it because it's a bee, and we're not. The bee has characteristics we don't have, so of course its interaction with a flower is different from ours. How could it be (sorry) otherwise?
But it doesn't follow that the flower alters when approached by a bee, and then alters when subsequently approached by a human. Neither would a car, or a river, or a mountain, or anything else.
The world is inhabited by various kinds of living organisms. Each has evolved through interaction with the rest of the world over thousands if not millions or billions of years. Organisms differ as a result of that interaction. This is what is indicated by scientific evidence. Scientific evidence, in other words, supports the existence of a world which includes us and other creatures and that our interaction with the rest of the world is exactly what should be expected given our interrelationship with it. Scientific evidence doesn't support the claim that we can't know, or interact with, the rest of the world in which we live. If we could not, we wouldn't be alive.
By the locked-in-the-library theory we can never know whether what's in each others' heads are sights and smells and sounds or something else or nothing. And we can't know about anything outside our heads, either. I can't see how I would ever get to know what's even in my own head or what a head is.
Perhaps our heads are in our heads.
The only word I disagree with in this post is the word "know." Remove that word, and we're in complete agreement.
Knowledge = Justified True Belief. Truth is the problem here. I see the flower as X, you as Y, the bee as Z, yet we're all seeing the same thing. What is that thing? Is it X, Y, or Z or an amalgamation of all of them?
My take is that the flower is the cause of your perceptions, but it does not consist of your perceptions. Your perceptions come from you and are a part of your consciousness. The passing car is not the blinking light, but it caused the blinking light. We react to our environment for the reasons you said, so that we can survive in our environment. How we evolved to do that, whether to see the flower as red, to smell its scent, to find it a thing of great beauty, is all part of our design to enable our survival.
I just don't see why we must dump our baggage on the flower. The flower is whatever it is making us do what we do, but it's not the things we do.
No, it certainly doesn’t. Is that what he was arguing for?
I think so. i really don't want to misstate the positions here, but my understanding of a challenge with the direct realist position is that it cannot allow for any mediating influence between the object and the perceiver. The flower in the ground is replicated in the perception. If the direct realist allows for optic nerves, lenses, brain processes and other things to mediate the object, he must then allow for a final perceiver inside the brain to perceive the net result of the various processes. Not wanting to do that, he must insist the flower is just slammed into the holistic person as a perception unmediated and unchanged.
I don't get it. It seems like some concocted craziness designed not to cause interference with other deeply held philosophical positions, but that is just my commentary.
:chin: Do you want to give me a stroke or what? :joke:
That’s empirically incorrect. Every being that perceives is an organism. Brains or parts of brains or noses or pancreases do not perceive. That’s just the way it works.
But I don’t admit that the presence of Y between object X and perceiver Z distorts, modifies, or alters perception. As I stated earlier it alters the environment.
You can remove a pancreas and a nose and still perceive. It's not the entire entity that perceives, any more than it's the entire entity that bends. That task is left to the joints. I do understand that the perceiving faculties must be supported by blood and other life sustaining functions, but that doesn't mean the blood is what is doing the perceiving. The car's headlights shine the light, not the bumper, even if you wish to insist it's the car that is lit up and the bumper is part of the car.Quoting NOS4A2You're arguing perception is not alterable? Suppose you're knocked unconscious?
You’ll still be a living organism if you lose your pancreas or nose, at least with the aid of medication. The thing that perceives is, in every case, the living organism. The moment we eviscerate that organism, separate it into perceiving and non-perceiving faculties, there is no perceiving. A brain or faculty or any combination of disembodied organs in a vat cannot perceive.
I’m arguing that the only thing that is altered is the biology. I think this is what direct realism entails, at least, and that we ought to speak about such activity in this way.
You can still be a living organism and not have the ability to perceive even without eviscerating it. You can simply fall asleep.
I'm not sure what you're trying to do here, but it seems like you're trying to decipher the essence of a perceiver, listing out what the essential elements must exist to perceive. Obviously you can remove some parts of the body and it still be able to perceive, so arguing that the perceiver is the entire organism isn't correct.
At any rate, to the extent it has bearing on what we're discussing:
"In 2011, Dutch scientists hooked an EEG (electroencephalography) machine to the brains of mice fated to decapitation. The results showed continued electrical activity in the severed brains, remaining at frequencies indicating conscious activity for nearly four seconds. Studies in other small mammals suggest even longer periods."
https://www.livescience.com/39219-can-severed-head-live.html
The science doesn't support a direct realist position. The direct realist position is a position that attempts to simplify the metaphysical debate by eliminating unknowables, like the fundamental composition of things. At best, it admits to a pragmatism by stating there is nothing gained by itemizing objects as unknowable (I see this as @Banno's approach). At worst, it insists the world really is as they say it is. I think that's what you're trying to do here.
We receive representations of objects and what those objects are without the representative quality imposed on them by us is unknowable. Who we are as perceivers is also not the whole indivisible person, but it's just part of us. This means part of us interprets, part of us adds, part of us subtracts, and part of us perceives. What this conscious perceiving thing is and how we have these phenomenological states is a complete mystery. We just know it happens, somewhere in the brain.
What I am trying to do is speak about these things in terms of direct realism, without appealing to noun-phrases that signify nothing, which is admittedly difficult at times.
I said and meant that perceivers are organisms, which I can prove by pointing at entities that perceive. I don't believe an organism needs to be completely whole or without certain bodily functions in order to perceive, so I don't think the "entire" modifier need be added.
I struggle to see how 4 seconds of electrical activity in the brain of a decapitated mouse suffices to refute direct realism. Such electrical activity probably occurs in the bottom half, as it does with headless chickens. At best it indicates that electrical activity doesn't immediately disappear upon severing a spinal cord.
It's just difficult for me to accept that a "part of us adds" or a "part of us perceive", simply because such activities cannot be shown to be performed by parts. If I had to point to an entity that adds and subtracts, I can be satisfied by pointing to human beings. And if for some reason we'd like to narrow our focus, we should do so, but never once do we observe something other than the organism.
I don't see how you say this though. We can remove our arms, legs, many of our internal organs, and on and on and see that our ability to perceive is unaffected, yet when we alter our brain, something different happens. Our cognitive ability remains unaffected by damage to our sense organs, so it seems reasonable to conclude that my experience of the flower was not occurring in my eye. I also note that my sense organs do provide the stimulus to my brain because damage to the sense organ interferes with my ability to sense. If I put on red glasses, everything is red. I can then conclude that the lens within my eye offers its own alterations to the sense data being received.
This is just elementary stuff that I'm sure you fully accept, so I'm wondering why it need be explained and that there's this dropping back to some sort of holism that demands that every part of me is sentient and every part of me cognitive, from the hair on top of my head to the my toenails.
My hand picks things up, my nose smells, my mouth talks, my brain thinks. Organs each have functions, making up the complete organism, but each organ doesn't do everything.
I think it's important to clarify what you're saying. Regarding your objection to the use of the word "know."
Do you claim we can't know what a flower is, or do you claim we can't know what it's color, or smell, or stem is?
Do you claim we can't know what a flower is because bees don't see flowers as we do?
Do you think you and I disagree regarding the nature of flowers?
Do you think we know something about flowers, but not other things about flowers?
It seems to me that you believe flowers (and everything else, apparently) cannot be known because they're part of the world in which we and other creatures live. We living organisms in some sense taint
the rest of the world, it would seem; we prevent it from being perceived in the isolation needed to support true knowledge. Would God know what the world is, or some being unlimited by the restrictions imposed on us?
I'd say we know a great deal about flowers as they're part of the world in which we live. For example, we know how they grow, we know how their pigment is determined through DNA, we know they're attached to soil, we know they're pollinated by bees, we know how to plant them. In what sense is it that we don't know these things? Why do you maintain that we're not justified in concluding that we do?
It's a flower.
You keep missing the point. The flower is not the perception-of-flower.
It's the same error you have been making for years.
I'm aware there are flowers and perceptions of flowers. The flower is in the garden and the perception in my head, up until I blink, at which time it's just in the garden.
Do you agree with this?
Let's take it from there. You now start constructing direct realist men of straw.
:100:
"A sound" might be a perception (experience, qualia), or a physical event. The former is in your head.
Quoting Ciceronianus
You can know many things without direct access to them. You must agree, or you would never read, and presumably make a terrible lawyer.
Books bear a correspondence to the reality they describe, and you can learn much from them. And yet, books are not that reality, they are ink blots, perfectly arbitrary ones.
Perceptions are the same way. They correspond to reality, and yet they are composed of arbitrary symbols. Unlike the example of books, they are all we have. Because of this, naive realists confuse these symbols with reality itself.
Our heads are so crowded, then, it's remarkable we can know what's "in" them, let alone what's "out" of them. Is your perception of the ink blots you make in your head?
Quoting hypericin
You must refer to your perception of a lawyer, and what you believe a lawyer perceives when confronted with ink blots, or rather his perception of them, which are in his/her head, just as your perception of the lawyer and what you perceive he/she does when you perceive he/she is reading are in your head. I have a question, though. If you have a perception of a lawyer reading in your head, do you also have a perception of what he/she is reading in your head? If you don't, why do you maintain that what he reads, or if he reads (or rather what he has a perception of reading in his head, just as you have a perception of him reading in your head) makes any difference to whether the lawyer is a good lawyer or a bad lawyer? The lawyer may be pretending to read; may never have read anything.
They are indeed crowded. But perceptions are more mental events rather than objects filling the brain with clutter. The bandwidth of these events is quite limited.
Quoting Ciceronianus
No, I refer to lawyers in the abstract. But this reference is, necessarily, mediated by words, and comprehension of these words is mediated by perceptual events, our perceptions of the virtual ink blots I made on our screens.
Nothing is direct in the mental world, everything is abstract and mediated. Do lawyers reside in these ink blots? No more does reality reside in perceptions.
Imo, the best objection to the theory that mental states are identical to brain states is simply that I can imagine a blue car, but there's no blue car in my skull. Same with songs; we can play songs "in our heads", but there's no music in our skulls. This is pretty off-topic, though.
You realize that argument only works for realists. Skeptics and idealists will remain unconvinced by it. They will just reply that we can't make justified claims about a mind-independent real world.
Quoting Janus
I understand the indirect argument to mean there is something mental mediating perception of the real thing, as a result of all that neural activity. Thus why we have illusions, hallucinations and secondary qualities. Also why it's possible to have internal visual and auditory experiences, like with dreams and imagination.
Sure, but since the act of perception is not the thing perceived, that raises the question of whether the result of perception differs at all from thing perceived. If it does, can we be directly aware of the thing itself?
Direct perception works fine if naive realism is the case. It's a little more tricky if the world isn't quite as we perceive it. The indirect realists can then bring science to bear on the matter.
Perceiving the flower incorrectly is still about the flower.
Realism does not claim that our perceptions are always correct.
It just rejects the weirdness of "the thing itself" as opposed to "the thing".
SO for example we know about colourblindness, we know that some folk see the flower's colour differently. We understand that this is not a fact about the flower. But most pertinently, we know that there is a flower for all this to be true of. We do not make the invalid inference that all there is, is perceptions-of-flowers, nor make the equally absurd presumption that there is a flower-in-itself that we can never know. Both these views are philosophical junk.
It's not men of straw, it's naive realism I describe, but not the naive realism you accept. Very well. I see your post above, and I'm not sure what you're saying is any different from my claim that the flower is causative of the perception. To state otherwise would be idealism, a position no one here has so far held.
To say the pain from my stubbed toe is the road is an odd way of saying it, as I see that pain as evidence of the road, but speak as you may. The blip on the radar screen isn't quite a plane to me, but is a representation of it. What is the plane? The air traffic controller stuck with his head only on that screen might be inclined to think the blip is an airplane, but others might disagree. Those who would disagree would be those who have seen actual airplanes. Bristle as you will with the world "actual" here, but it does have meaning in this context when comparing the airplane you sit it in against that blip on the screen. Which is more accurate would be hard to say, as we don't speak of things in themselves anymore, so we don't know what a true airplane is other than that we can figure out how to interact with.
But to ask this directly, which is the better representation of the airplane? The blip or the plane you're in? Or, are neither representations, but only airplanes? Curious question, right? And what of the word "airplane," is that not also the airplane, as its creation was caused by the airplane? Why wouldn't the word be the thing under this position, or do you hold that as well?
But do you sit, looking at your perceptions? No. You have your perceptions. The alternative is the homunculus fallacy, the little man inside your head looking out.
You've mislead yourself with the analogy.
Nicely put and helpful.
How many worlds do you live in?
I'm not sure medication would do any good. There's nothing real in that mental world to begin with, apparently.
This again.
Alright, where is the metaphoric computer screen properly positioned for my analogy to be correct? Is it at the watery surface of my twinkling eye or is it on the front surface of my closed eyelid? It seems you wish to eliminate the homunculus by saying the person begins at some molecular point and instantly perceives when the light of the flower hits my body, even if it means denying the science, which says that hairs and eyelids don't perceive. It's odd to me that I perceive a flower when my eyes are closed, but I suppose I do because bodies perceive, not parts of bodies. That's what I'm told at least.
We have all seen the cartoon picture of a homunculus sitting inside the middle of the brain looking at what's delivered to him, with yet another man inside that man's head ad infinitum. That is not what I envision. What I envision is a faculty within the brain that processes the impulses received from the various sense organs. I envision that because that's exactly what happens. Sever the optic nerve, you'll stop the input of data. And that's not to say the only way to elicit the perception is through sensory input. You can stick electrodes in the brain, drug me up, let me sleep, do all sorts of things to make flowers appear to me.
But back to the other part of my analogy that has gotten lost in this discussion. I'm referring to the blip. If I should see a blip when you see an airplane as we know airplanes to look, then properly understood, as you've presented it, that blip is the airplane. It's not a representation, correct? To say otherwise leaves us asking the age old question of what is the airplane in and of itself, wings and jet engines, or blips? As long as our perception enables successful navigation in the world, then we have truth. Do I have this right?
If we don't see things as they are; if things in themselves are unknowable, then how do you know "that's exactly what happens". I posed this question earlier and you failed to respond—too difficult?
So I, and others here, explicitly reject the distinction between internal and external worlds.
But you are asking me where the line is to be drawn between these mooted internal and external worlds.
See the problem?
Quoting Hanover
It's both, or either. There's no essence-of-plane, just ways of talking about planes. Air traffic controllers do talk about the blip as the plane, and they are not wrong.
They aren't worlds. They are objects in the world. You deny objects?Quoting Banno
You think they mean it's the plane or they mean it's a representation of a plane?
Again, is a "plane" a plane? I'm just not seeing a difference between a symbol and a thing the way you're describing it.
I can only describe the phenomenal.
I do not understand why you are confused here.
The dot on the screen is the plane, much as the word "plane" in "the plane is airborne" is the plane - it's a way of using the dot, and a way of using the word.
Quoting Hanover
Rubbish. As if you could only talk about the dot, and not the plane.
From that position it seems to follow that we cannot make any justified claims at all.
Quoting Marchesk
Sure, but internal visual and auditory experiences, hallucinations, dreams and imaginings are not shareable except by report.
Quoting Ciceronianus
One world, with many different aspects which can be colloquially referred to as "worlds". You are being lawyerly, I guess.
Quoting Ciceronianus
Words are real, perceptions are real. Both are removed from the realities they refer to. We can look up from books, we cannot look up from our perceptions.
"The plane", the dot, and the thing you sit in are all the same plane, right?
How does location play into identity? Not at all?
If the dot disappears, I think I'd say "the dot disappeared" as opposed to the plane disappeared because typically planes don't do that. I'd then radio the pilot to confirm the plane still exists. I'd do that because the dot isn't the plane.
"The plane" is two words.
The plane is a plane.
The dot is ambiguous.
Quoting Hanover
Not at all. It might play into your deciding that two names refer to the same thing. But what has that to do with the topic?
Quoting Hanover
So what? If someone with more training in such things, looking at the screen, cries "the plane has disappeared!", are you going to quibble? "No, the dot has disappeared", says Hanover, "No need to call out search and rescue!"
If the dot moves north and the atc says the plane is moving north, this is because they have a justified belief in the correspondence between the dot's movement and the plane's. But if the dot started blinking and the atc said the plane has begun popping in and out of existence, they would either be joking or insane.
Do you deny a meaningful distinction between direct and indirect evidence? That is, the fingerprint is Banno as much as those two curious eyes that are your avatar are Banno as much as the old man in your mirror is Banno?
Indeed. But the relevant point here is that they have made a claim about the plane.
No.
You are missing the point. The fact that they can make any claim about the plane at all is because of the correlation between dot and plane. Were the dot to start blinking (unless the blinking signifies something else about the plane), that correlation would obviously have broken down. Therefore to make a claim about the plane's cycling existence and non-existence on the basis of the blinking is crazy.
Ah, so you have adopted a descriptive theory of reference - the dot is the plane in virtue of some correlation with a description?
Here's why that doesn't work.
I much prefer the intentionalist model, with a broad communal notion of intent, after Searle.
But all that is irrelevant.
True.
Very well, then let's work from here.
The blip on the radar screen is indirect evidence. If we were to challenge the accuracy of the statement "the plane has disappeared" based upon the radar screen feedback, we would look into the construction of the radar equipment and perhaps ask some experts in the field how could it be that there is an airplane in the sky, but not a blip on the radar. That is to say, the blip is not the airplane and we all know that, so before we start calling families and informing them that there will be one less plate to set at Christmas dinner, we check the accuracy of our indirect evidence. Before taking the radar apart, as I suggested, we radio the pilot. If the pilot responds, we now have indirect evidence of the airplane's continued existence, as generally pilots don't answer who are in disappeared airplanes.
If you claim to have seen the airplane in the sky, but it never lands and we can't find it, we might start to question what you saw, whether your interpretation of whatever you saw was actually the airplane. We might check your eyes, ask you how much you know about airplanes, whether you're schizophrenic, were drunk, or anything else that might have resulted in your misinterpreting the indirect evidence of the plane.
At some point, you might start denying the evidence is indirect, but that it is direct. For example, if you're sitting in the airplane and enjoying some of those really hard cookies, drinking from a small plastic cup. But, again, even then, calling that direct but the other examples indirect seems arbitrary. If it's not, then describe to me that bright line dividing the two, because your response to my question related to there being two different types of evidence was unequivocal. . You did previously claim the blip was direct evidence of the plane. That I don't follow.
I also don't understand the how the organism under your construct is a single holistic indivisible perceiver. Your objection to my claim that there are objects external to me is somehow an argument of multiverses or some such, isn't accurate. Admitting there are objects external to me is the only way to avoid solipsism . Humans possess parts that perceive and parts that don't, just as there are parts of us that digest food and other parts that don't. My point here is simply to say that should I perceive what I think to be a flower or airplane and there's some reason to dispute it, it makes perfect sense to check the health and accuracy of the perception equipment, whether that be running a diagnostic on the radar equipment or giving me an eye exam.
You seem to be fascinated by your perception of me as a lawyer, or perhaps of lawyers in general. I suggest this unhealthy, as you say you believe it isn't real.
Quoting hypericin
Then stop pretending to do so, for goodness sake.
But why? If you can't see what a flower really is in the first place, why bother checking to see if you have an eye problem?
That's not how it works. If you don't already know what that object really is then you can only see an unidentified object in its place. This is the case with UFO's. It isn't possible for any object to help you out by telling you what it is, whether that be the particular flower in your vase, some random rose on the bush, or all the rose bushes.
If you don't have the concept beforehand then you can't know. To have that concept you must have already learned the abstract dictionary idea of rose with its associated word rose correctly, then you can make an educated guess that your object is a rose flower.
The word is in one abstract world, roses are in another, only the rose in your vase is a material object in space. Which one exists? They all do and they are all external to you.
If my objective is to keep blips on the screen, then I'll do what is necessary to keep blips on the screen. That's a pragmatic pursuit.
If I want to know what the blips are and what the underlying structure of this whole enterprise is, I want to look behind the blip, find the airplane, look behind the airplane, find its structure. That's a metaphysical pursuit.
I'm saying all we have are representations. Blips are representations of airplanes and all you experience are blips. If we speak of representations, we must be admitting to a representation of something. That something is ultimately noumenal. That we cannot even speak of the composition of the noumenal is the definition of noumenal.
So you say why not just say that the phenomenal is all there is. I say because it's not. But I do agree, pragmatically, none of this matters, where "this" is 90% of what we talk about here. Of course, "this" is a referent; the antecedent is what actually is.
Yet I think you probably understand the difference between subjective and objective data. You're quibbling over wording
@Banno So I'll report a minor illusion I had yesterday after stepping outside a coffee shop, glancing at the clouds in the sky and then seeing the motorcycle parked in front of me. When I looked at the windshield, at first it seemed to be some kind of smoke or mist. I don't know why. I guess my brain wasn't expecting to see a windshield. Or maybe it was the way the light was reflected in the windshield. At any rate, I didn't perceive a windshield at first, but rather something that wasn't there.
Which brings up a point. If perception involves prediction, then are we seeing the object, or what our brains expect to be the object of perception?
Well, words are important. For example, speaking of "sense data" or "qualia" or feelings or thoughts as if they're things, somewhere, in the mind, distinct from the world we interact with at every moment. If that's what "subjective data" are, I don't accept that view.
The fact that "none of this matters" would seem, to me, to establish something regarding its acceptability as an assessment of the world and out place in it. That it's incredible.
So your view is a metaphysical one. Do you see why it's a form of rationalism? IOW, you're more like Descartes than Wittgenstein.
It is the only answer to the question “what perceives?”
And such an answer doesn’t demand that all parts of the organism are cognitive or sentient. That would be a fallacy of division. An eye removed from the organism does not see. A brain removed from an organism does not perceive. Parts do not perceive.
In short, we need not reduce the concept of “perception” to any other object in the world, whether faculty or organ. So why would we we?
Because when one has a perceptual problem only that portion of the body that perceives need be addressed, much like when you are having a digestive disorder, treatment is focused upon the digestive system and not upon eardrum.
That’s true. But when we address a portion of the body we are nonetheless addressing the body. So we need only reduce our focus and area of concern, not the object that perceives.
The point made is that the blip can be used to refer to the plane in much the same way that word "plane" can be used to refer to the plane.
Nothing more.
Because in both cases, there is a plane.
QED.
That has to be wrong. Children acquire new concepts.
So do some adults.
Some folk even invent new concepts.
We learn new stuff.
Dunno.
The point I am making is simply that there are objects.
QED, except that no one is arguing there is no plane.
The point is that blips, "plane"s, and planes are three distinct things. Therefore, when you see a blip and "plane", you are not seeing a plane.
Good.
There is the plane and then there is the word "plane," so I'm counting 2 things here.
There is the plane and then there is the perception I have of the plane, so, again, I'm counting 2 things here.
Why must I use the word "plane" to refer to the plane, but I must consider my perception of the plane to be the actual plane?
More consistent would be that the word "plane" is the plane, but it's just another way of dealing with planes. That seems the @Ciceronianus approach (I think, and I'm truly not trying to misstate or put words in anyone's mouth.). This approach eliminates duality on all levels. There are just planes and they are however we experience them.
I'll entertain the idea of non-representationalism, but I think we need to do it consistently. That is, we have objects of unknown quality such that it's incoherent to speak of the thing in itself, so we therefore limit our "knowledge" of the objects in our world to how we interact with them. So, when we say "the plane is in the sky," the word "plane" is a direct experience of the plane equal to seeing it, touching it, licking it, and sensing it in every humanely possible way, just so long as it offers an understanding of the plane. The understanding of the plane is the plane.
I'm not sure this is realism, but I've at least formulated something consistent from all I've taken in here.
Lawyers are real, perceptions of lawyers are also real. While causally connected, they are not the same thing.
Not least because, the perception is not a thing at all. It is an event.
Your perception of the plane is not the actual plane.
Your perception is of the plane.
But lack of credibility and lack of relevance are different objections.
The question we're addressing is the probative value of evidence, which presupposes representations of "truth" whatever that may be, and which is the subject matter of this thread. That is, when I see something, of what probative value is my having seen the thing in terms of proving the thing exits? That is, does the evidence I possess prove the thing I assert, namely that the thing is as I say it is? It seems we need to know what the thing is if we seek to establish whether my claims about it are true.
What is the distinction between the two? Just location?
Alright, we have 2 things: (1) the plane, and (2) (a) an interaction between me and (b) the plane.
What does #1 look like?
What does #2(a) look like?
My guess is that the only thing we know anything about is 2(a). I've said 100 times 2(b) is causative of 2(a), but I've also said the only thing we can know is 2(a).
#1 is a noumenal causative agent of #2, which is the phenomenal.
Hanover's view is in line with science. You have to go out on a limb to disagree with him, and like Ciceroninus, you're in danger of turning rationalist (relying on your own reason to say what is, rather than science).
Look, to avoid going over this yet again, here are the things that I am objecting to.
1. The notion of a thing-in-itself. This is a nonsense.
2. The notion that when we talk about the things in the world around us, we are not actually talking about them, but about our perceptions of them. I say we do talk about cups and planes and trees.
3. The notion that we cannot make true statements about the stuff that makes up our world. I say we can truthfully say things like "the cup has a handle".
Let me know which you are addressing, if any.
Which of these do you say is not in line with science? "cause I'm not seeing it. Quiet the reverse.
Well you hope you see one anyway.
I'm just kidding.
Of course we do. Science says we model the world. We talk about our models.
Tbh, I was mainly interested in what Hanover said. I like his turn of phrase.
I think you should help your buddy Ciceroninus avoid digging in with a metaphysical take on the issue. That's a very weak position.
You believe that science is in support of the view that we can't know the rest of the world?
He may be wrong, yet state of the art science supports his view. You're out on a limb.
What are you referring to by "the rest of the world"?
You're both on a leaky raft at sea.
For example:
"I see a concept of a red apple".
Well to illustrate the "red apple", you then need to generalize what the concept entails. An apple, being the colour red.
But then whats the concept of an apple? Well... the concept of an apple comes from the subset concept fruits and...etc.
This idea of infinite definitions doesn't make an iota of sense to me in terms of the organization of being. It feels much more closer to an intelligent over-complication. It as well describes that at the end of the tunnel, we wouldn't know exactly what a chair is, because the concepts would never end, but this is (probably) not true. We DO know exactly what a chair is.
Another aspect which I don't find clear is that perception somehow perceives this self contained complication, rather than just the simple object.
All you have done is state this.
Back it up.
I suspect you are confusing two uses of "model". One is the model that is the subject of our cognition, the other is the implementation of our cognition. The first is used by those who talk about scientific methods and such, the second is used by cognitive scientists in setting out how the brain works.
The regress is avoidable by recognising the error of thinking that what you see is a concept-of-apple. It isn't, it's an apple.
What are you referring to by "science"?
Cognitive scientists have not yet set out how the brain works. They have theories.
I suspect you're trying to step beyond science with philosophy.
If you made an argument, you'd be deep in a form of rationalism.
Oh dear.
Yep.
Well, I'm sure metaphysics has its place somewhere in philosophy. Maybe just not in the description of being.
What we do every day, every moment, in interacting with the rest of the world provides no relevant evidence regarding the nature of the rest of the world?
Why?
Just what I was going to write in response to your question "what do you mean by the rest of the world?"
How about this, then. What do you claim is the subject matter of science, or the sciences, or scientific inquiry? Or, say, of geology?
:wink:
Indeed, theorising about being will inevitably lead to circularity. In that sense all that can be said by ontology is that there is stuff to talk about.
Because of the broadness of the metaphysics you'd be engaging. If you want to back off of that and just do philosophy of language, you have to take a much less ambitious stance.
You couldn't, for instance, poo poo indirect realism, since it's so common to speak in those terms that they are presently the terminological framework of science.
Honestly, it seems like you're the one who's being hostile. You're misunderstanding me if you think I am.
I just don;t think you have been paying attention.
This is something I've thought a lot about since discovering thar neuroscience is seriously engaging representational theories.
The short answer is that they don't really deal with the philosophical side effects of adopting indirect realism.
You are adopting your usual passive-aggressive stance of objecting without providing any content. Yes, it pisses me off.
So I will go back to ignoring your posts.
I said "a form of rationalism" and even specified what I meant by that. The discussion between us can be dropped. Thanks :up:
Thanks.
So far as I can see, there was none.
Cool. Ciceroninus got to the interesting stuff without you. :blush:
This means: we have 2 things: (1) planes and (2) perceptions of planes.
(1) is the plane.
(2) is the plane + my interaction with it.
Am I right so far?
If the plane is the object and the perception is the object + my interaction with it, and I only know what I perceive, and I don't know which part of my perception is the added part and which is the plane part, then I don't know what the plane is. I only know what my perception is.
The logic follows right?
Quoting Banno
Then why did you talk about it above? You identified it as #1. If #1 is actually the plane + my interaction with it, it's #2.
This means when we speak of planes, assuming we don't speak nonsense, we speak only of what we perceive, and we make no claim about the airplane because we don't know how closely our perception matches the airplane.
But, should we deny there is an airplane absent our perception (i.e when the tree falls in the woods where no one is there to see it, there is no tree) we are no longer realists. The noumenal anchors us in realism. That the thing in itself is unknowable doesn't mean it's meaningless or nonsense. It serves the purpose of rooting reality in the world, not just in our head.
That's how I see it too. It would be rather strange indeed if the things we saw, for some reason, looked as they do to us, absent us. That is, river and stones would like as they seem, absent us, with all the colours, textures and the like. Surely not the everyday concepts "river" and "stone" would be around though.
If we postulate things in themselves, then we can say there is something that exists absent us, which does not depend on mind.
I think that risible. Shall we give your perception of the plane a proper name - "Fred" perhaps?
Better, surely, to think of the plane as an individual, and your seeing it as something you might do, rather than as an individual.
Quoting Hanover
No.
Perception is an activity, not a thing. But, this activity consists in the construction of phantom things in the mind. These phantoms look, smell, taste, feel, sound certain ways. Naive realism says that this is so because things really do look, smell, taste, feel, sound this way.
In truth, everything we actually know about things, we know indirectly, through inference. Everything we experience directly is in fact illusion, constructions of the mind. Illusion because the presentation of these experiences is as if they are of the world itself.
Sure. But here's an important thing... those "phantom things" are not what we see, taste and touch; they are what our seeing, tasting and touching, at least in part, consists in. They are not what we see, but part of our seeing; not what we touch, but part of our touching; not what we taste, but part of what you have called the activity of touching.
I don't see a problem with that. It appears to be consistent with indirect realism, so inside the bounds of science. :up:
Perceiving is the act, perception is the thing. I can't think of the phenomenal state I possess of the computer before me as a verb and something that is happening anymore than I can think of the actual computer screen as something that is being done. There is molecular movement in every event in the universe and nothing lies still, so I understand my perception is occurring in an ongoing sense, but so is the computer screen.
We will name my perception of the computer screen "phenomenal state" and we will name the computer screen itself "noumenal state." The former we call "Dell," but the latter has no name because we don't know enough about who it is.
Under this construct, there's a cup , and I impose upon it a certain shape and color, and then I have a phenomenal state. The cup is what we have imposed the shape and color upon. My phenomenal state is therefore a representation of the cup, with the shape and color added to it.
We then analyze precisely what the cup is. We determine it is the phenomenal state minus those attributes added by my acts of touching, tasting, and seeing. Since the cup is composed of only those things I can't sense, I cannot tell you anything about the cup because the only things I know about a thing are the things I sense.
How is this not indirect realism?
You fight a worthy battle.
That smooths over the discussion at the expense of putting off sober exploration of significant philosophical issues.
Most science is concerned with the mechanics and dynamics of what can be seen, for the purpose of description, prediction, and manipulation of the external world. There is no philosophy at present that covers that activity, and it is an activity. The closest we have are vague second-hand archaic Heraclitean aphorisms.
When scientists speak folk science they resort to a peculiar form of indirect realism, as you say. The peculiarity is that it is neither of the classical forms of realism, it is neither flat one-level Aristotelian nor two-level Platonist. Scientific realism is strictly pluralist with each science in its very own fly bottle.
Everything in our lives is an activity, because our lives consist of interactions with our environment. We're not spectators of the world, we're participants in it. Perhaps you don't think of us as mere spectators, but you deny us the status of participants, as you separate us from the rest of the world by imposing a wall of "representation" or "illusion" which you assume precludes us from intelligent interaction with what we, in fact, interact with every moment.
No, I am assuming nothing. Perception is an illusion, in that the sensory phenomena that appears to inhere to the world, the experiences of the 5 senses, are in fact phantasmal mental products. And yet, sensation is the projection of real environmental inputs onto the imaginary plane of qualia. This projection is information preserving, and so we can make intelligent decisions on the basis of these illusions. If we couldn't, we wouldn't have them.
Quoting Hanover
But that's not what you have done. When someone else asks what size Dell is, they are not asking about your perceptions, they are asking about Dell.
That is, we do talk about the things that you claim we cannot talk about.
Quoting Hanover
Can you impose just any shape and colour? What constrains your imposition?
You say the noumenal does, and proceed to incoherently talk about that about which you can know nothing.
I say the cup does. Here, you say the same:
Quoting Hanover
And hence there is a cup. Realism.
So then we have a dualism. What we see/taste/touch, and what those consist in, for us.
As physical objects, we bounce around the world as well as any other. But as conscious beings, all we have direct access to is what our seeing/tasting/touching consists in. Anything more must be acquired by reasoning. This is the barrier of the op, and what is on the other side may as well be called things-in-themselves.
That's just poorly worded. An illusion occurs when the senses goes awry.
Quoting hypericin
No. You are reifying the process of seeing, touching and tasting.
Quoting hypericin
Again, that's just poor wording. The word "direct" is not doing anything - except misleading you.
An illusion is that which is not what it appears to be. Perception itself is an exemplary illusion.
Quoting Banno
Not at all. Qualia are the elementals of our waking lives. Qualia, and nothing else, are immediately accessible to our awareness. Any knowledge we have outside of them is necessarily indirect.
1. A thing-in-itself about which we can say nothing is vacant. Since we can say nothing about it, it cannot enter into our conversations. It's no more than word play, along the lines of the little man who wasn't there.
2. Pretending that if we only ever see the things around us as represented to us by our minds, we never get to deal with those things, is Stove's Gem, The Worst Argument In The World. You are dealing with those things now, in the very act of reading this post.
3. We can and do make true statements about the things in the world. Here: This sentence is in English.
We are embedded in the world and deal with the bits and pieces that make that world up.
Indeed, that's quite right. But the things around us are as they appear to be, and hence not illusory. The cup has a handle, the laptop, a keyboard. These are not illusions.
Qualia. There goes the neighbourhood. A notion that only serves to further muddle the topic.
So our illusions, despite being illusions, contain (?) or perhaps transmit (?) "real environmental inputs" and so we can make intelligent decisions about our real environment.
It seems what you call our illusions aren't really illusions as commonly defined. If we were to call the perception of a chair an illusion, I think we'd mean that there is no chair. You, though, seem to assert that it would be an illusion but would nevertheless be an illusion which would reflect enough "real environmental inputs" for us to intelligently use what it represents as we would a chair.
Thus, we would intelligently use the chair as a chair for all intents and purposes, but nonetheless don't perceive the chair. When we think we see a chair we may (indeed should) treat it as chair but we don't really see a chair. Instead, we merely see something which is an illusion, but there are enough "real environmental inputs" for it not to be illusory.
I may sit in a chair but cannot perceive the chair in which I sit. I may drive a car but cannot perceive it. Is there nothing about these statements that seem problematic to you?
1. You presume that we can say nothing about that which we cannot access directly.
2. We are dealing with them, but indirectly, via an illusory interface. No different than what you are doing with your computer right now. Are you dealing with opcodes and interrupts directly?
3. Vacuous, nothing to disagree with there.
'Qualia' is merely a less ambiguous version of 'perception', 'sensory experience'. etc.
Quoting Banno
Quoting hypericin
If what we have access to is nothing but illusion, and we follow your definition of illusion as that which is not what it appears to be, then none of your statements about the world are true.
The analogy with perception is exact.
No, it isn't, since you can interact with, verify, the city outside the hologram. If all of your perceptions are an illusion, you cannot interact with the world at all, and there can be no independent verification.
The issue becomes what it is reasonable to doubt.
You can doubt that the liquid in the cup is water only if your working hypothesis is that there is a cup and liquid. This is not certainty, in the face of true certainty doubt is impossible.
Quoting Banno
Exactly so. This is the quandary of beings who lack certainty about the world, because they do not access it directly. The best they can do is make hypotheses, and question the ones worth questioning.
Wild Bill James was right-a difference which makes no difference is no difference at all. For me, that's what the best of the claims in support of an unknowable "external world" amount to, in the end.
If we are modeling the world then there must be a world that is being modeled, no? Or perhaps you are wanting to say the world is a model? Whose model would it be then?
If I am alone riding my bike out in the desert, is this all just a model? If I am driving my car through congested traffic in the city is this all just a model? If we each have our own models, then how come we can mostly coordinate such as to avoid collisions, if we are not all accurately modeling anything?
If we are accurately modeling something, then the issue comes down to just how we want to talk about whatever it is we are modeling; do we want to say there are cars, roads, trees, people, traffic lights, bikes, buses, trains etc, etc, or do we want to say that there are unknowable structures (or "somethings") that we (arbitrarily?) model as cars, roads, trees..."? What would be the advantage of the latter way of speaking?
Also the question I have posed twice now to Hanover has not been answered. How do we know the scientific picture of perception is right if we cannot know anything about what things are in themselves?
For me it seems more accurate and parsimonious to say that we don't talk about our models, we talk about the world via our models.
There are all sorts of resources for learning about the science of consciousness. For free, the SEP has some good articles. Nature magazine occasionally has some informative stuff. The average text on philosophy of mind will help, although make sure you're getting a recent view. It's a science that's rapidly changing.
Also, we have our good @Isaac who generously explains things if you ask nicely.
Check it out.
I don't quite agree. Overwhelmingly, we agree as to what is the case.
If that were not so, this conversation would not be possible.
However, we focus far more on the points of disagreement than on our agreements. We do not spend hours arguing about how many centimetres are in a metre or which city is the capital of Russia.
Great. So talk to us about how the brain processes vision.
We perceive the chair and the car. We just don't perceive them as they are. It is the nature of perception that it necessarily an illusion.
'Illusion' doesn't mean that what is illusory is not there. An illusion is simply that which is not as it appears. An illusion is always something, it is simply not as it presents itself. A hallucination, on the other hand, is nothing, at least nothing in the physical world.
The fallacy of naive realism is that it takes what is illusion to be what really is.
Yeah, there's no gotcha here. It's pragmatism. Think about all that literature you absorbed and you'll see why.
Pragmatism does not accept any notion of unknowable things in themselves. You apparently don't know what you're talking about.
Uh huh.
As if the car does not have wheels.
Again, if what you say were true, one would not be able to make true statements. But cars do have wheels. Hence, we see at least some things as they are.
Not surprisingly, as we presumably live in the same world, share the same human nature, and the same broader culture.
Quoting Banno
These are conventions, not facts of the world. Truths because they are defined to be so. About these certainty is possible.
Ok, we don't spend time arguing about whether the cup has a handle or the car has wheels.
But I just demonstrated that is not the case, with the hologram example.
Quoting Banno
These are hypotheses which are not worth arguing.
The point of such debates isn't to prove an ultimate winner. The question of scientific realism is one pretty much accepted as unanswerable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_philosophy#Metaphilosophy
I see the second year (and third year and on and on) as a chance to better hone one's logic and reason, and even perhaps to settle on theories that suit one's worldview. If these things were not debatable, they wouldn't be philosophy, but they'd be physics, biology, or something else.
Quoting Banno
The significance of unobservables: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobservable
Now why is that? Why shouldn't it be possible to see nature like it is? Why should nature hold secrets? The very idea of one and only reality goes way back to ancient Greece and Plato added that we can only have approximate knowledge (which can be seen from his metaworld of math and the shadows in the cave). Popper was like-minded, turning this vision into a methodological rule even. Always falsifying, always a bit closer, but never actual contact. A frustrating image.
They are talking about their perception. They aren't talking about the cup. That they think the cup and their perception are the exact thing and therefore speak that way is the consequence of the naiveté inherent among naive realists.
Because truth is a religious concept. You want to know how things really are? Believe in something.
Truth a religious concept? Tell me the truth. Do you really believe that?
Hmm. I have a suspicion that the difference between our positions is more one of language than of content. The same is probably true for Frank, if he ever got around to saying what his position is.
There's a sort of "folk-science", a cool trick pulled by popularises and first year lecturers in cognitive science, seeking to awe students by showing them that what they previously had taken as the case - that they see cups and planes and stuff - needs a re-think. It's good pedagogy, since it is certainly attention grabbing. But it is a lie-to-children.
It goes something along the lines of telling the novices that the brain is continually taking the information from the senses and making a model of it's surroundings, then using that model to predict what will happen next, and acting accordingly. So far so good - that's roughly what happens.
The lie-to-children is a claim something like this: "SO, you see, what you are actually dealing with is not the real world, but a model of the real worlds presented to you by your sensory apparatus; you never get to deal with the actual world".
It's a good lie. It hammers home the idea that all our sensing is a process, a point well worth making. But it isn't quite true.
To see why it is a lie, consider what is doing the seeing when you look at some object. In the account give above, you are sitting looking at your sensory input; in much the same way that you are sitting looking at the hologram of the city in the example given before. In the same way you are distinct from the hologram, the lie-to-children supposes that you are distinct from your sensory apparatus. You are sitting inside your head, and can only see what your sensorium constructs. You are a homunculus.
But that's not quite right. Your sensorium is not something seperate to you; it is a part of you. In this way the model is quite different to the hologram - a point I thought you might have grasped when you agreed with me when I said
Quoting Banno
The point here is about the choice of words in describing the situation. On the one hand we have the lie-to-children that says you are sitting in your head looking at the model presented to you by your sensorium, and can never "really" see stuff. Note the scare-word "really".
Drop the lie-to-children. Your sensorium is part of you making sense of what is in the world. The scare-word "really" drops out of the story along with the homunculus. Of course those things before you are understood through your sensorium, which just is your seeing stuff.
The question of whether you are seeing stuff "as it really is" becomes absurd - there is no "as it really is". But nevertheless what you are seeing is not your sensorium, but cups and tables and laptops.
Is that direct realism or indirect realism? Who really cares.
Edit: what is at stake? See my post below to Hanover. Hanover thinks we can never talk about cups and tables and stuff, but only about our perceptions of cups and tables and stuff. But a bit of reflection might show that even if what we see is processed through our sensorium, we still talk about cups and plates and trains and cats, and not about our perceptions of them.
The alternative is Stove's Gem: the idea that because we only ever see stuff with our eyes, we never see stuff.
No, they are not. They are talking about the Dell.
If they were talking about their perceptions, then since your perception-of-Dell is distinct from their perception-of-Dell, you would never be able to talk about the same thing.
Now we have been down this path before, and it leads to you realising that you are advocating solipsism. Remember? The argument simply moves from Dell to, say, @Cartuna; you are obliged for consistency to say that you can never talk to or about Cartuna, but only to your perception-of-Cartuna.
You are alone.
Not a knock-down argument, to be sure, but one that might make those considering your position uncomfortable.
Especially when that alternative is simply to suppose that there is a Cartuna for you to talk to and about.
Frankly, the approach you are adopting strikes me as singularly bad for your mental health.
As noted in a prior post to @Ciceronianus, he asked why the obsession with an evil demon, a world denying entity. But of course the Meditations was not a nihilist discourse. The evil demon was destroyed by God. It's a simple take on Descartes, but that's how the story ended.
The point here is that you've got to assert faith in something at the end of the day, and even if it's something as basic as realism, such is still faith.
Of course. But that doesn't mean truth can be found. Within different frames of believes different truths can be found. There is not one and only reality driving believe. But once the believe is accepted, you can say that it actually drives. Depending on your POV, this truth can be known exactly, or in an approximated way only. A flower is different for different creatures. But the very act of assigning an objective existence to the flower is an "act" of creating a believe, even if you make the flower dependent on what's around it, where there is no flower "as such".
How could what you say possibly be true, considering we are talking about the same thing, yet reading entirely different words. That is, the words on my screen are not the words on yours. They consist of different molecules and such. I trust my phenomenal state of your thoughts, as reduced to symbols, and transmitted in a way that accurately represents what you see in your head to what I see in my head allows this conversation.
How can you deny the layers of representationalism between you seeing a cup at your home thousands of miles from mine, your translating that into linguistic symbols, it being reduced to electronic impulses, it being transmitted through wires and airwaves, it being received and interpreted to my screen, and you still say we must see the same same cup to speak of the same?Quoting Banno
Interesting psychological twist here. I suppose strict adherence to secular philosophy might lead to feelings of isolation and that might form a personal basis to choose certain theories, but that fear isn't on my radar, largely because at heart I'm a theist.
But should one day I snap, and find myself amid helicopter search lights and yelping hounds, it will be for something far more glorious than an errant choice of indirect realism as an explanatory theory.
Well, I have a lot of faith that 1+1=3, but nobody except me seems to hold this true, no matter how much belief I pour into it.
I keep wondering how the idea of 'evidence' is being used here. Footprints in the flowerbed are evidence of a man, who was standing there, or of his having stood there, but can they be "evidence" of something we, in principle, can know nothing about? How? How would we establish the evidentiary relation between the footprints and the something or other? What could we mean by claiming that there is such a connection?
There's an idea of hinge propositions, which seems to solve problems about evidence, but then it makes other problems, like what would count as evidence that a proposition or action is a hinge?
The arguments presented here for direct realism could be used to support belief in anything: qualia, God, etc. We're just settling on men in flower beds.
Not sure my point really came through.
Footprints in the flowerbed are evidence of a man because there is a connection between a man and his footprints, which we'll tend to call 'causal', and because we're familiar with this connection, so we say things like, "We know that men leave footprints."
If we smell the scent of gardenias, we expect to be able to find gardenias somewhere nearby, because we know they're the sort of thing responsible for that scent. If we knew nothing about gardenias, we wouldn't take such a scent as evidence that they are nearby.
So I'm wondering how our senses can give evidence of something that we not only know nothing about, but can know nothing about.
The significance of hinges (whether actions or propositions) is that the whole narrative of senses telling us about the world revolves around them. That's a language game that works.
Indirect realism is a different sort of game with different hinges, and it also works.
Crashing the games into each other is something students learn in their 2nd year of philosophy school before they learn that it's a knife that cuts both ways and you can't question the existence of qualia if you insist on this sort of crashing.
Just kidding. The takeaway is that indirect realism gives us limited skepticism.
Maybe I can be even clearer:
When@Hanover talks about phenomenal experience, he uses the word "evidence", as if phenomena could be understood as evidence for noumena. I don't see how, do you? In what sense is the relation of the two evidentiary?
Part of the problem hinges on the word see. 'See' is used in at least two senses.
Process See: To 'see' is a process whereby light reflected from an object shines into an organism's eyes, whereby this signal may undergo many transformations as it is processed and potentially acted upon by the organism.
"I see 3 chairs in the room".
Experiential See: This usage is mostly confined to humans, refers to the last stage of internal transformation in Process See, which is subjective experience.
"Close your eyes and imagine the first chair. Describe what you see."
Lets get straight: no one here is denying the reality of Process See. Experiential See is at issue.
Naive realism claims that Experiential See is a faithful reflection of the world. This is the understanding we are born with, hence 'naive'.
I claim, Experiential See:
* Is usually causally connected to the world.
* Usually faithfully conveys information about the world.
* Is nonetheless something quite other than the world it depicts.
Here you will no doubt wave your finger in the air and shout "Depict to whom? A homunculus?!"
I feel homunculi are red herrings. If you insist on the strict identity of the subject and their perceptions, you would say "the subject undergoes the process of their own depictions", or something.
But I wonder how you make sense of the ordinary claim "I close my eyes and I see a red dragon". With sufficient powers of imagination, the red dragon appears as distinct from us as does the chair in the room.
Again, language is ambiguous. I would distinguish 'Bodily I' and 'Subjective I'. But this is enough for one post.
One reason this matters -- aside from whether you get mileage out of 'evidence' as a metaphor -- is that evidence is intelligible. Footprints are a natural sign; like other sorts of evidence they indicate something else in the world. Those sorts of connections make the world intelligible.
The issue here is a sort of sleight-of-hand: something defined as being unintelligible is introduced as if it were part of the intelligible world, like the airplane represented by a radar blip, or the flower represented by its scent. These are connections we are familiar with. Some of us even know something about how those connections work. Whatever we're attempting to say about the plane 'in itself' or the flower 'in itself', it's nothing like this.
Take a look at Level 1 and Level 2 as set out at Theories of Experience. Is that roughly what you have in mind?
What do you conclude from this?
That one day I'll have to study Kant, because I can't make any sense of the version of Kant presented here. I don't feel warranted to conclude anything more than that.
If you want a speculative answer, I could say this: the connection between the footprints and the man who left them, that the one indicates the other, that's "part of the world". By that I mean, this connection is not something we impose on the world, but something we encounter in it. That connection is what grounds our inference, from the footprints in the flowerbed, to the man who was there. The world we find ourselves in, is intelligible.
It’s modernized. Therefore it’s mistaken.
Hanover is the closest without mentioning Kant specifically.
The footprint and the flower are Hume, not Kant at all. See “constant conjunction”.
My apologies if I offended you by my straight talking. Do you want to say that philosophical pragmatists acknowledge unknowable things in themselves or not?
Most of the time, yes.
Not really. In my reading Level 1 and Level 2 both treat what I call Experiential Seeing. They ask, what is it? And how does it arise?
I am distinguishing between seeing as a process, and seeing as an experience. The word 'see' may refer to either.
Seeing as a process is just a way objects interact, via reflected light. We do it, microbes do it, robots do it. Experience may be a part of the process, or it may not. Even in humans it may not: "He saw the oncoming blow without being aware of it, and dodged purely by instinct" is a sensible sentence.
Seeing as an experience refers to the experiential component of the seeing process.
The point is, I maintain that you can consistently affirm that you see reality in the process sense, which requires the right kind of causal link between observer and observed. While denying that you see reality in the experiential sense, which requires that the experiential component of seeing coincides with the reality of what is seen.
I've acknowledged that my claim the noumenal causes the phenomenonal was a departure from Kant. Kant wouldn't allow any claims be made of the noumenal.
Not sure who here you're claiming is Humean, but I've not implicated him because Hume denies causation entirely, a view I reject. I accept the idea that causation is synthetic a priori, without which an understanding of the phenomenal would be impossible.
I'd agree, though, that Kant says nothing about causation within the noumenal realm, but that's because that realm is beyond analysis. However, to the extent we wish to depart Kant and speculate upon the noumenal, we'd be required to impose causation upon it because that's what synthetic a priori truths do - they force a particular view on the world.
I'll also defer to others on this because it's also a precondition for any comment about Kant that someone explain how you've misunderstood him.
This is entirely non-responsive to my post.
Your claim was that if we spoke only of the phenomenal, we could not meaningfully speak because we would be speaking of different things. I would be speaking of the X in my head and you of the X in your head, so why even refer to both as X would be your claim.
I pointed out that we can and do speak of different things as if they are the same, regardless of whether we're talking about cups or just experiences of cups.
For example, let's talk about this:
It's the famous red solo cup.
Are we taking about the cup on your computer or mine?
If the name "Janus" for me can only refer to Banno's-peception-of-Janus, but for you "Janus" refers only to Hanover's-perception-of-Janus, then when we each talk about Janus, we are talking abut different things.
That's about as strong a reductio as one might find. No mucking around with images of red cups will change that.
Tha answer is blindingly simple: Both Banno's-peception-of-Janus and Hanover's-perception-of-Janus are of Janus; Janus exists independently of those perceptions, and it is Janus to whom "Janus" refers.
Quoting hypericin
I've no idea what that might mean. I gather you want to do something a bit qualia-ish, but not what that might be. As if you can look at a sunset but not experience it...?
Depending on how closely you are attending to something else, you can see the sunset, and experience it fully, only somewhat, or not at all. The bandwidth of experiencing is more narrow than seeing.
Quoting Banno
Apologies. Communication is hard!
Is my distinction between the two uses of the word "see" clear? One refers to the process of seeing, the other to the experience of it, the qualia.
Then, if you ask, "do you really see the flower?", the answer depends on the usage of the word 'see'.
Process See: yes. The flower exists, light really did reflect off of it, your eyes receive it and function normally, as does your brain. The correct causal link is established, and the conditions of Process See are fulfilled. You really see the flower.
Experiential See: no. When speaking of the subjective experience of seeing the flower, this is not the flower. It is qualia, a mental construct. It is what seeing a flower is like, for you. But as you point out, there is no "what seeing the flower is really like". Therefore, what you see experientially is not what the flower is really like. You do not really see the flower.
Much of the confusion of this discussion comes from conflating these two usages of 'see'.
Yep, following the meaning here, but I'll leave you to it, since qualia have long struck me as pretty unhelpful.
See Nothing to do with Dennett's if you are interested in my take. Did you participate in that thread? I don't recall.
Exactly, which would enable us to similarly distinguish how our phenomenal states varied.
You're not following.
If we can discuss the differences between the two different cups we each see without the other seeing the other's respective cup, we are speaking only of our respective phenomenal state without access to the other's cup.
In humans, knowledge is not of things but of representations of things. I think obviously. And furthermore, predicated solely on incident physiology. It does not follow, and it is vacuous to suppose, that from the singular nature of the human intellect, the sole and necessarily preemptive methodology by which things are known to us, that things could not be otherwise. They could not be otherwise within us, but they could be otherwise without us. We cannot empirically know they are not, therefore it is logically possible they are. Anything not known or knowable by us, in accordance with the knowledge system intrinsic to us, be it whatever it may, if it is at all, is as it is all by itself.
In Kant, then, the ding an sich is given as an ontological condition, and yes, it remains an impossible epistemological one. On the other hand, if the human knowledge system is in fact not representational, this particular speculative metaphysics is immediately falsified, and the ding an sich disappears.
Shirley you of all people understand that we must use the knowledge system we have, to tell us about the knowledge system we have. Hence, the intrinsic circularity in human reason. As soon as we recognize it, at least one attempt to circumvent the inevitable contradictions incurred because of it, is to restrict exactly what we are allowed to claim as knowledge. So, given a certain methodology for knowing things, that which is necessarily external to that system cannot be included in its purely internal functions, instead serving merely as occasions for its empirical use. There are no physical objects in the system, therefore it is not of physical objects themselves the system knows. But there are physical objects that it is possible to know about, so there must be things as they are in themselves.
Q.E.gawddamnedD!!!!!
Or not.......
This is a hinge proposition?
Is this not a violation of the beetle in the box thought experiment:
"That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation', the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant."
That is, we can talk about the thing without concern for what the thing is, which I took to be the punchline of what W was saying in regards to the irrelevancy of metaphysical analysis, but here you argue that it's critical we know that we have the same beetle in the box if we wish to speak of beetles.
That depends on what you mean by "perception". Perceptions are about the things being perceived. If not then your perception of others perceptions is one of your own making and there is no "external" world that is perceived. There would actually be no perceptions, just solipsistic imaginations.
True enough, but causality is given, insofar as it resides in the categories as a concept, but speculation on the noumenal, in departing from Kant, requires a faculty of intuition not belonging to us as humans. So technically, we need to impose a faculty we don’t have, rather than a causality we do.
Actually, because noumena are conceived, they already are subsumed under causality anyway. Kant says the conception of noumena is merely understanding overstepping its proper domain by thinking an object as schema of a category to which a proper schema, as an intuition, cannot be synthesized.....because there isn’t one. Herein is the transcendental use of a category, when it is restricted to the empirical use, by the theory under which understanding operates. A spectacular and catastrophic no-no. Metaphysically speaking.
“....Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions, blind. Hence, it is as necessary for the mind to make its conceptions sensuous (that is, to join to them the object in intuition), as to make its intuitions intelligible (that is, to bring them under conceptions). Neither of these faculties can exchange its proper function. Understanding cannot intuite, and the sensuous faculty cannot think. In no other way than from the united operation of both, can knowledge arise....”
Unresponsive [math]\rightarrow[/math] Coma. :lol:
As in Wittgenstein? I’m not sure, and he may not have been either. But under the assumption that a hinge proposition is a proposition immune from skeptical doubt, hence necessarily true or false, Kant would just call it an analytic tautology. I mean.....if there is a thing we know about, a thing as it is in itself is logically given, hence free from our skeptical doubt of it, at least ontologically.
Is this an epistemological or a metaphysical/ideological/ethical consideration?
(Or do you believe that there cannot be one without the other?)
Quoting Ciceronianus
I think what happened is that there developed a belief that epistemology and metaphysics/ideology/ethics could be and should be separate fields of endeavor.
It seems that in the past, the what are now two (or more), used to be one and the same, indistinguishable.
A good example for this is the etymological meaning of the word "believe", which originally meant 'to hold dear' and only later began to refer to something abstractly cognitive.
But it isn't necessarily true that there are physical objects. It could all be per the holographic universe theory.
I think the OP is working on the premise that "facts of the world" are also such conventions (but the OP can't say that, because that would require a metalevel description that would be incoherent in his view).
Quoting Hanover
Because we are accultured to believing that there is an external world, the overwhelming agreement that there is an external world being an indication for that.
We don't discover that there is an external world. Other people present to us something that they present as an "external world", and we internalize this. And all this happens from early on in life, so that our cognitive abilities are shaped by it and we generally become unable to think in any other way.
Thus we live in a conflation of metaphysics and natural science, unable to tell them apart (other than by imposing new conflations suggesting what the difference between the two are).
(Yes, I am painfully aware of the reflexive nature of what I just said.)
Back to the Two Dogmas of Empiricism:
If you hold that everything and everyone is part of this world and belongs in it, then how do you explain what are considered aberrations and evil (such as mental illness)? And how do you justify morality, a sense of right and wrong?
If you accept aberrations and evil as somehow normal, as part of this world, then on the grounds of what can they be called "aberrations", "evil" to begin with?
For example, religious peple have been arguing about who has the right idea of God or The Truth. They even went to war with eachother for precisely this reason (such as the 30 year war). They have killed "heretics", maimed children, tortured women, burned towns and villages, and so on.
And all this on account of their belief as to what the right properties are of an entity that is ultimately unknowable. Clearly, these people have something at stake here.
Quoting Banno
Sure, but mostly those who want to rule, condemn. Also, those looking for salvation (one believes one will be saved by some entity that one doesn't really know and ultimately cannot know, but the belief is based on the belief that said entity has the property of being willing and able to save one).
Psycho-socially, it's very important to have the right beliefs about things that are simultaneously believed to be ultimately uknowable. Sure, we don't know God, but we believe that God is such that he is on our side and not on the side of our enemies.
Why would the OP, writing in defense of Naive Realism. believe this?
Given a certain set of initial conditions it is. Different conditions, different theory, different predictions/conclusions/possibilities, right?
No, I don't actually post here that often. The article is good, iconoclastic and well written, right up my alley.
Yes, but I think that's another way of saying that physical objects are possible, but not necessary.
Maybe, but I for one won’t be stepping off the curb in front of a sufficiently massive fast-mover to test a mere possibility.
Yes, and hence you are talking about two different things.
OF course it is open for us to take the daring path that you reject: to talk about these being two images of the very same cup.
But that would be to talk about what you choose to call the noumenal, which you insist we cannot talk about.
Is it so obvious, though? This is one way of thinking about the situation, to be sure, but is it the best way? To imagine is to represent, to make a picture is to represent. to think reflexively about or to re-member something is to represent. So perhaps it is difficult for us to imagine, think about, picture or re-member how we perceive things without it appearing to us to be a process of representation.
Quoting baker
The question was as to what stake people could have in something that is completely unknowable; which implies also something that is thought, acknowledged, to be unknowable. The stakes of the religious people you are referring to here are those of people who imagine they know the nature of the unknowable, or that someone has known and revealed the nature of the unknowable and so they at least have faith that it is thus and so; so their stakes are not in something that is acknowledged to be completely unknowable.
SO you really haven't understood the beetle , either.
The beetle would be to pretend that there was an unsharable mental object - perhaps, for example, an unsharable perception of something - that could somehow play a role in a language game.
No. That would require that we talk about our respective phenomenal states.
Not "perhaps" That's the exact point.
Pain is the beetle, yet we talk of pain, never sharing our pain with one another.
When I say "I am in pain" how do you know what I mean if there is no pain we both can look at, but are limited to our phenomenal states?
If we can do this with pain, we can with cups?
No. You so miss the point here. When we were talking of the image on our screen, not the cup. I was talking about the image on my screen, you of yours. How do we know they're the same image?
Substitute "screen" for phenomenal state, and you have the same answer.
Yes, you are right that your unshared phenomena drop out of the discussion, and what we can talk about is the shared world.
But that's my point; the beetle argument counts against our talking about the unshared mental phenomena you want to make central.
You are shooting yourself in the foot here.
The images on the screen are not the same. But they might be images of the same cup. Which is exactly what you cannot claim, since for you there is no cup.
They are all shared phenomenona. Pain, cups, flowers, the whole lot. If pain can be an shared without there being pains out there to measure against so can cups
Why must the image be of something real to be seen? We can't compare my randomly created image againstyour by discussing them online without submitting the images to one another?
They are shared phenomena? SO now you are saying that my perception-of-cup is shared with you? That you and I both feel the pain in my back?
This conversation teeters on insanity.
Why address this to me? It's not something I've claimed.
So you've read my comments as suggesting that the sensory input required to illicit pain is conversation about pain?
This conversation isn't insane, it's just nonsensical interpretation. Interesting, though, how representations of reality are often muddled by differing ways we process.
Quoting Hanover
I'm not convinced.
I've claimed the noumenal causative of the phenomenal. You're arguing against Kant, not me.
So there is a thing that causes us to have congruent sensations of plastic cups but is not a plastic cup. Failure to commit.
Tell someone who cares.The notion of the noumenal, and its various misunderstandings, are amongst the worst ideas ever had.
Best is irrelevant if it’s the only. I hear of other system methodologies, but I don’t understand them well enough to qualify their respective values. Enactivism, or some such? Dunno.
There shouldn’t be any problem with the fact that what the brain works with, is not the same as what perception works with, whatever that difference is called.
I agree that even beyond that range of possible ways of perceiving objects there is for us the merely logical idea of what the object could be in itself. But I'm not sure that is a coherent idea, because to be something is to manifest some attributes, and what kind of attribute could be beyond any possibility of being perceived or known?
Or what import could it have, beyond a desire to open the way for some imagined transcendent religious possibility? That would not be perceiving or knowing though, but merely faith. And I would argue that we don't need the idea of the noumenon to sustain religious faith in any case,because what we do perceive is already mystery enough, and we already know that profoundly altered states of consciousness are possible. Those altered states have nothing to do with "something" absolutely unknowable
That's my take anyhow..
The noumenal certainly doesn't seem very helpful but have you ever heard any of Kant's jokes?
"There was once a young merchant who was sailing on his ship from India to Europe. He had his entire fortune on board. Due to a terrible storm, he was forced to throw all of his merchandise overboard. He was so upset that, that very night, his wig turned gray." Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790)
Perhaps the wig was identical to its representation.
The properties experienced of the object are subjectively imposed. An object absent its properties is not describable. While that might not make you happy, it's the way the world works. Quoting Banno
The point that you don't care is irrelevant. My point was you weren't arguing against what I said, but what Kant said. Your declaration against Kant is relevant only to the extent someone was awaiting your final conclusory opinion about him relevant.
There's a very small audience for such jokes, right?
We do not impose those properties; they are imposed upon us, like it or not.
I've acknowledged it's causative, but there other ways to evoke phenomenal states other than perceptual input, like chemicals, electrodes in the brain, tumors, mental dysfunction.
I really hope so.
You "subjectively" render the cup red? ? The red of the cup is not in any way caused by the cup, but proceeds entirely from your mind? And it is some sort of coincidence that we also see the red?
No. The red of the cup is an interaction between each of our minds and the cup. The cup has a say in the issue.
But further, saying that we impose the properties of the experience seems to directly deny what you claimed earlier: that the noumenal is causative of the phenomenal. made the same point.
You want your cup and to eat it
Those are also imposed on us though, aren't they?
Unless the claim is that the self-in-itself is part of the noumenal. :wink: But....
if the noumenal cannot have parts, then the self-in-itself must be the whole of the noumenal which means....solipsism.
Perhaps Kant's tiny repertoire of jokes was the cause of the stereotypical notion of German humour.
The arguments against it here have been presented previously, several times.
Unless there's some new argument, the show is over.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Every event has a cause.
You said Quoting Hanover
I pointed out that experienced properties of the object are not imposed by us (that is, are not subjectively imposed), then you cited the genesis of non sensorially produced phenomenal states by drugs, brain stimulation, tumors and brain dysfunction, and I pointed out that those are not imposed by us either.
So I was just purporting to refute your claim is all.
This is correct, as far as framing perception. But perception is not representation, it is sensation, and that fully empirical. Some representations are of empirical perceptions, but representations themselves are rational.
Quoting Janus
It’s import, in accordance with the theory from which it arises, is to limit our empirical knowledge to only that which can be a phenomenon for us. Otherwise, nothing prevents us from claiming knowledge of everything there is, even without the possible experience of it.
I am in total agreement with that aim; not so much with the "making room for faith" part though (which I am not claiming you are advocating). This is the beginning of the "destruction" or deconstruction of metaphysics as it had been traditionally understood, and the accompanying idea of "rational intuition of reality".
When it comes to empirical knowledge, I would say the limits cannot be predetermined. The logical limits of what count as empirical knowledge; the logic behind " we can only know things as far as our experience of them allows" is really a tautology which could be phrased as "we can only know things as far as we can know them". I don't think anyone sensible could have any argument with that; but it really doesn't tell us much.
Oh absolutely. We can’t say what the limit of knowledge is, but we can still say what the limit of knowledgeable things is. This isn’t so much a limit on knowledge, but rather, a limit on experience.
But then, some say experience is knowledge, so there is that.....
I dunno. If that which we can know about is limited to phenomena, then parsimony suggests that serves as a limit on knowledge itself. On the other hand, the sheer quantity of possible phenomena far exceeds the time available for any one human to know of them.......
And new knowledge changes old knowledge.....
And we don’t even know what we don’t know.....
AAARRRGGGG!!!!
I mentioned the holographic universe. Matt O'Dowd devoted a bunch of Spacetime episodes to explaining it and I'm still confused by it. Apparently it's a serious thing, tho.
Suppose we wondered, is knowledge either the fundamental way human beings relate to the world or one of the fundamental ways human beings relate to the world? If either of these is the case, you should be able to abstract away the rest of the human being, and their other ways of relating to the world, and still produce a full account of human beings qua knowers. (Knowledge in this sense would have, at the very least, logical co-priority, so to speak.)
As a step halfway toward answering that question, you might abstract away the rest of the human being and see whether you can produce a full account of knowing. (You could, for the sake of the experiment, ‘pretend’ that knowing is fundamental.)
How would you know if you had failed?
That is, suppose, for the sake of argument, that knowing is not quite fundamental, and in abstracting away the rest of the human being you had cut away something essential to understanding the character of human knowing.
How would you know that the account you produced was not an account of human knowing, but only of how human beings would know if they were completely different — that is, if knowing really were fundamental?
So the blacks impose on other people that blacks are an inferior race?
LOTR imposes on you that it is a good book?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
HA!! Exactly right. Toss this....ok, still know stuff. Toss this....ok, still good. Toss this...still here. Toss.....
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Hmmmm. You’d end up tossing the tossable, and still know stuff. At last, you end up with THE fundamental way you started with.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Ahhh, after defeating the other two, what’s left? What if knowledge is merely an end in itself, having nothing whatsoever to do with the means? It becomes the case, then, that the means are the more fundamental, and if we start tossing them one at a time, we might find knowledge evaporates at the very first toss. And if that happens, we’ve arrived at the THE fundamental way of understanding the world, we’d find it isn’t knowledge itself, but that which makes knowledge possible.
Impasse. How do we know what it is that makes knowledge possible. Common rejoinder is.....education. Nobody wants to deny that they were taught everything they know. From day one they’ve been instructed in every-damn-thing, which leads to the abominable construct that culture/language is more powerful than reason.
Humans. Forever taking the easy way out.
I wasn’t invited, but I’m taking a seat on the affirmative side of the bandwagon anyway. You know.......”Copernican Revolution” and all.
Could be. Some have likened “The Allegory of the Cave” as a forerunner, and that was certainly a serious thing, at least philosophically, in that things are not always as they seem.
But I wonder.....how far-fetched does it have to get, just to argue established criteria?
The holographic universe is contemporary speculative physics. Why would it be far fetched?
What are the chances that you are both able to carry on this conversation so long without experiencing the words of this screen in similar ways? What are the chances that each post follows the arguement of the other without having a similar experience of the words on this screen? Are we always talking past each other when talking with anyone but ourselves?
When a professor gives you an exam, what are you being tested on if not whether your interpretation of the professor's lectures is accurate and that you interpret the professor's words the same way they do ?
If I were to ask you to copy and post everything that I said here, would you be able to do it? Why or why not? What are the chances you'd be able to do it if you weren't experiencing the same words on the screen? Even if you copy and paste the words you'd still need to interpret the scribbles, "copy and paste" the same way I do.
Sorry. I didn’t mean to come off as pejorative. I was just paying more attention to the keyword “speculative”, then the subject “holographic universe”.
Even established precepts or methods can seem far-fetched. It’s just that the speculative carries the implication of being more-so.
I see. But a fair amount of the non-speculative physics would also appear far fetched to the average person.
Thus the importance of honoring language games?
I honor reason, without which there wouldn’t even be a language game.
Which just shows reason isn’t perfect.
Maybe. But there are two other ways to ask that question: (i) what makes human knowledge possible? and, in a somewhat different vein, (ii) what makes human beings knowers?
So, yes, one version of the question would make room for an argument that language ‘comes first’, or some conceptual apparatus, or history and culture, or biology. Indeed, how do you make rabbit stew?
The other version might be brought out by the tired analogy of describing the progress of a game in terms of its rules: that everything happening on the field or on the board is in accordance with the rules leaves out almost everything about what people are doing when they play. And not just their motivations, but everything about the way they play.
Ever watch little kids playing soccer? It’s like watching a flock of birds chase a soccer ball around the field. They are playing in accordance with the rules (mostly — offside is confusing), but their understanding of the game of soccer is not the same as you would find among adult players. One reason for that might be readily described as cognitive: there are things about playing soccer they do not know. But there are also things they do not know how to do in the other sense: they cannot do them; they lack certain skills. And there are things about playing soccer you cannot understand if you lack those skills. The development of a skill new to you can change how you understand the game; the development of a skill new to those you’re playing with can change their understanding of the game. (Imagine only one player on the field figuring out how to chip — deliberately rather than by accident — and how that would change everything.)
My question was meant to land around here. You could produce an account of playing soccer that looks a bit like the rulebook, but you will miss almost everything, not only about why people do what they do when playing soccer (leaving aside why they play at all), but also how they play, how they understand the game, how they understand what they’re doing, and some of that is not a matter of cognition but of skill. If having some skill is a prerequisite for having some cognition, then by ignoring skill you would miss an entire class of cognition, and mischaracterize what’s left.
But what if reason evolved to provide fitness rather than truth?
Interesting.
(i) asks the same as the original, insofar as there is no good reason to ask about knowledge in other creatures when a human isn’t even certain of the conditions for his own.
(ii) is given immediately upon his knowledge of something. He who knows is a knower. Somewhat tautological in itself, but still leaves unanswered what makes knowledge possible, hence what makes knowers possible.
————
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Tired indeed. What a waste of time.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yeah, found as far back as at least Platonic “knowledge of” vs, “knowledge how”, and later in Russell’s “knowledge by acquaintance”, and a veritable myriad of similarities in between. I for one know nothing about soccer, but I could learn it well enough to play the game according to its rules. On the other hand, I simply do not have the musculature required to play soccer as a actual game, which implies competitive abilities.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yeah, I suppose, maybe. Like....how the HELL did he do that!!! But I think I would still maintain that I can understand how, e.g., a bicycle kick can be done without my personal ability to do one. This shows understanding antecedes experience, except for sheer accident or reflex.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
That, or I’m just putting the understanding I already have to more profitable use. I think a sense of accomplishment most often is merely conformance to an expectation, which must have been understood as possible in the first place.
But I get it.
—————
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I would agree, if such were the case. Having some cognition because of a skill doesn’t tell you how you got the skill, if it didn’t come naturally. So we end up with, practicepracticepractice, at the end of which we cognize how wonderful we’ve become at some particular thing.
But what if some cognition is prerequisite for a skill? Musical prodigies, natural athletes excepted, the rest of us have to think before we act.
Good stuff. Maybe elaborate some more, here and there?
We explain mental illness, to the extent we can, as we explain other illnesses to which living organisms are subject. To the extent they are aberrations, they are in the same sense as any other disease. Illness, disease, are present in the world with everything else. Being part of the world doesn't imply normality. Extraordinary and unusual things happen all the time. If we must, we can ascertain what is normal statistically. Morality is something we learn as we learn other things; by interaction with others and the environment in which we live. There are no illnesses or morality which are "outside" of the world.
What sense of fitness?
I'm not sure, really. I don't know that it's necessary or useful to categorize considerations in that fashion.
I agree with Dewey on many things, and one of them is regarding what he called "the philosophical fallacy"--the tendency of philosophers to neglect context by seeking to impose general rules upon the world. As in the case of those who maintain that mirages, illusions, errors and such establish that we can't truly know the rest of the world--that our senses deceive us. Based on such things some philosophers have concluded that we must not perceive the real world and instead perceive only qualia and sense data and representations .
This is to take circumstances in what are individual cases as applicable to all cases, when such things as mirages, errors, illusions may be explained by consideration of the context in which they occur (context would include us).
We can (or should) acknowledge that we live in a world we're a part of, and understand that we necessarily are dependent on it, but don't merely receive impressions caused by it because we're participants, not observers. We shape the world as we live (we alter it, build things, destroy things, etc.). That doesn't mean the world exists without us, and I think the whole "question" of the "external world" to the extent it addresses whether the world exists without us dissolves when we understand there is no world separate from us because we're parts of the world. But being part of the world doesn't mean there's no world.
I don't think either of us disagree with whether we are speaking to one another intelligibly. The disagreement is whether there has to be a common point of reference in order to do so. I don't see why there must be, considering we speak of pain to one another, yet there is no pain outside the phenomenal state to point to to be sure we're speaking of the same thing.
We both look at a cup and we may have no idea what part of the cup is descriptive of the cup and what are things we impose in order to better navigate our world. It's likely we see the cup the same way, but not necessarily so, and it's not required in order for us to speak of the cup.
My position is that you have an experience, and it might be caused by a variety of things, but the sensation itself ultimately was caused by your brain, or some such internal faculty that experiences. It's like asking what caused the blip on the radar screen. The wave bounced off the object, did this, did that, and then a blip. A malfunctioning screen might also create blips as might a blip appear if we stick a probe in the circuitry. What ultimately caused the blip is a causal chain question like any other. We can look to first initiating cause or last cause, much like what caused the billiard ball to fall in the hole. Was it my muscle contraction, the cue, the slope of the table, the resiliency of the various other balls, etc.?
This is only an argument against classical dogmatism as opposed to a scientific approach arising from experience. If I lost my car keys after dark Dewey would suggest that I should search in context under the streetlights because it is more efficacious. Unfortunately, the odds of success depend on the spacing of the streetlights. Science does not follow either Hercule Poirot's advice to retrace my steps from the pub nor the pragmatist's to look only where I can see. Science builds portable lights to scan at ground level which lengthen and put in motion the shadows of all lost objects along the path.
I don't know what you think constitutes "context" in this situation (nor do I know what you think pragmatism is), but I think it more likely Dewey would determine the context in which the keys were lost. If the keys weren't lost while you were under a streetlight, there would be no reason to search under all streetlights. If you don't know where you lost your keys, but think you did so while taking a path by which you passed under streetlights, no doubt it would make sense to check along the path you took which would include, but not be limited to, the area of the streetlights. And I think Dewey would, in determining the appropriate manner in which to search, take into consideration the context in which the search took place, i.e. if it took place in the dark, in which case it would make sense to use the portable lights you mention, or if it took place in daylight, in which case those lights wouldn't be helpful.
You're ignoring the fact that without an environment the body is sensitive to there is no sensation. Try a sensory deprivation chamber for a while. That said it's undeniable that the body can generate vivid experiences of its own (the content of which ultimately derive form experience of environments). That is exactly what happens in a sensory deprivation chamber. But you, the subject, have no control over what is experienced whether in or out of the environment. You don't impose it, you are subjected to it; that's just what it means to be a subject.
This confusion arises over how we are referring to the person. I have all along held that a person is composed of a variety of organs, each with their own function. That might seem obvious, but there is a trend within this thread to hold that it's the entire organism that experiences as a single holistic entity. So, it is accurate for me to say that my eye caused me to see the cup (as evidenced by my closed eye no longer seeing the cup). So, yes, I am subjected the image of the cup, but it might well be from another part of my body that I am so subjected to it, including a memory portion of my brain.
There is the belief that the homunculus objection overrides my claims of varying organs having different functions or, more specifically, that certain areas of the brain have particularized functions. The truth is that they do, which protects the homunculus concept from being a fallacy, unless you hold to the incorrect proposition of infinite regress.
An interesting wiki article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_homunculus
All of this is to say that there is an "out there," which I don't take to be another world, but the same world, just different objects within it. The "out there" affects me, a conglomerate of parts in many different ways. The cold affects different parts of me in different ways and there's no reason to speak only in the singular "me" as if cold makes me shiver. It does, but it also makes my nose run and my eyes burn.
My nose allows me to smell, which is me doing something to me, which is a thing, and which is not complicated or unusual.
And I know you've not said things to the contrary to much of what I've said to have elicited such a response. I'm just responding to everything right now, sort of as a summation of sorts.
Admittedly I am confused. Context can be a very big place. In my post I suggested three approaches, one dogmatic which applies to all situations regardless of context, and two which accepted or even manipulated a hypothetical but not necessarily relevant factor in the environment. You seem to say that Dewey would prefer the third, scientific solution, and not the initial formal mechanical attempt. Am I missing something here?
I think the issue reaches pretty deep: roughly, is the rational, the cognitive, derived from the non-rational, the non-cognitive? This is, it seems, the principal issue in philosophy of mind. It is the issue Sellars was dealing with in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, in which he argued, broadly, that there is no magic thread to stitch the two together — “magic” here meaning: has one side that counts as non-cognitive and connects cleanly to the non-cognitive (our senses) and has another side that counts as cognitive and connects to our conceptual judgments and so forth. (It’s “sense impressions” of some sort that are supposed to pull this off, and Sellars argues nothing can possibly be what they need to be for empiricism to work.)
It’s also the issue that Wittgenstein was dealing with in arguing that the foundation of, well, everything we do, is, well, what we do, i.e., our practices, and our practices are something we are trained in, and must just accept, not something we analyze and judge and understand rationally. (Sellars was here too, and has a much more complicated version of the same stuff in his article about language games, offering a solution to the problem that apparently it would be impossible to learn a language game.)
That there are these two realms seems inarguable. The choices seem to be basing one in the other, or treating each as sui generis. One source of the temptation to base the rational, the cognitive, and the linguistic ,i.e., everything we think of vaguely as ?????, in something not ?????, is that children seem to make the passage from not having such capacities to having them, and mankind, we assume, made such a transition at some point. Darwin has complicated that question somewhat, and Chomsky after him.
It is also possible to read Wittgenstein as denying that are two realms and denying there is such a transition to be made: maybe words like “know” and “true” and “meaning” are just words like any other words that we learn to use in certain ways and not others, and maybe they shouldn’t be thought of as ‘special’ or ‘central’ for philosophy. You could read the ‘language-game’ approach as suggesting that there are rather more than two realms, but they’re all just a matter of how we use language in different ways for diverse purposes in varying circumstances.
I don’t purport to be able to dismantle the model of “knowledge that” underlying everything we do, at least not right here and right now. I think it has a somewhat dubious provenance — what we might call an “intellectualist prejudice” — and I think a great deal of its attraction lies in making analysis tractable. It is also resistant to empirical critique because any calculation or inference that it is plainly implausible to suppose we do, whether in going about our daily lives or in performing some extraordinary feat of skill, can also be swept into the rational and plenty-fast-enough but unconscious processes whirring along in our brains, whether those processes are merely postulated or actually supported by some evidence.
But I do think there’s room for an alternative story, one which doesn’t begin by stipulating that the foundation of all our interactions with the world amount to predication — observing objects and events and classifying them, making inferences from our classifications, and so on. I think it is possible to take other ways of interacting with things as more fundamental.
One example I’ve had on my mind for a little while is reading. My daughter mentioned to me recently that now and then she kind of burns out on reading and begins to actually notice letters on the page rather than reading them. When you have mastered the skill of reading, and your brain isn’t messing with you, we would have to say both that you see the letters, obviously, else you’re not reading, and that you do not see the letters, that you see right through them and your mind is filled only with their meaning. You have to see them without noticing them. Heidegger talks somewhere about the tool nearly disappearing from the craftsman’s mind as he works, and that it only stands out as something to be contemplated when it’s broken, or missing, or the wrong tool for the job at hand. So it is generally when we use rather than mention words — you pass right through however the words are physical inscribed (in ink or air) to the meaning, and maybe right through the meaning to a response, an action, a reaction, a feeling, a reflection, an occasion of knowing something new. We begin learning to read by looking intently at each letter, assigning the proper sound to it, and all that, and perhaps to become skilled at that process of observing and classifying individual stimuli as a b or a d or a p means precisely for it to become faster and unconscious (to move from System 2 down to System 1), but it is still an open question what supports even those steps of learning that are later ‘automated’ to become ‘second nature’. Learning to read is a specific sort of activity, embedded in a terribly sophisticated environment, and only possible for an already very sophisticated person, who can already speak their native language fluently and understands quite a bit about learning new things.
I don’t have a knock-down argument that the cognitive (rational, linguistic) is grounded in the non-cognitive (non-rational, non-linguistic). I’m not sure there can be one. On the other hand, the arguments in the other direction come so easily that they are unconvincing, and involve a disconcerting amount of handwaving. There is, for instance, a story about a music student who was writing a paper about Coltrane and he agreed to talk to her about his music. She brought along a transcription she had made of one his solos that she wanted to ask about. He tried to play from her transcription, but, after a couple of tries, he gave up and told her it was “too hard”. How hard would it be to concoct some explanation about the sequence of decisions he ‘must’ have made when he improvised that solo and all of the factors he was taking into consideration every, say, tenth of a second, and explain the entire performance as if he were doing a peculiar bit of math, rather quickly, in his head, and unconsciously. It’s easy to describe such a ‘mechanism’ but pointless, because there is no chance at all that you could describe an algorithm that could predict what he was going to play. All you’ve really achieved is an alternative description of what he actually did and then claimed that it was perfectly understandable because we could so describe it. (It’s a sort of ‘argument from notation’.)
My instinct is that we see in the way a musician or an athlete or a craftsman acts, in the ‘decisions’ they seem to be making, an involvement with the things in the world, a responsiveness, that underlies everything we do, including knowing. It’s just a bit more spectacularly on display when it’s Coltrane playing saxophone than when it’s just me making a pot of coffee. I’d like to think of this ‘involvement’ as being prior even to the distinction between cognitive and not, but I think inevitably from the cognitive side it’s just going to look like ‘not’. Oh well.
As was made clearer further down the thread, the OP isn't actually defending naive realism.
Oh god. Showing your true colors.
But what are blacks doing to you, or a book?
Because this is where the matter of perceptions/affectings gains special relevance.
You say there are things the cold, for example, does to you, to different parts of you.
How about books or blacks?
Compare the above quote which implies that reality and our picture of reality may not correspond in order that we may live long enough, in evolutionary terms, to mate and rear offspring to the widely-held belief that if one loses touch with reality, one is doomed.
On the one hand, we have Brian Greene and those who think like him who are of the opinion that reality is being, in a sense, photoshopped - made more attractive and less ugly for instance - for our benefit in terms I already talked about and, on the other hand, we have some people - especially those who write books on critical thinking - who believe that our senses, if they'd ever lie to us about reality, would mean an early, possibly gruesome, death.
Aberrations and diseases are things we want to get rid of, eliminate them. We see them as things that shouldn't exist.
It's in this desire and effort to destroy or eliminate certain objects, events, or people that shows that we think they shouldn't be part of our world.
So it's not clear how a person who believes there is just this world can be consistent when they believe there are things that shouldn't exist.
Quoting Ciceronianus
I think this idea that we're observers and that there exists a world "out there" is a reflection of seeking satisfaction out there and feeling that the out there is sometimes the source of our suffering. It's your child or that piece of cake that makes you happy, it's that bad weather or obnoxious person who makes you miserable.
That's because pain is the phenomenal state. The injury that triggers the pain is outside the phenomenal state and is what you're talking about when talking about your pain. What use is talking about your pain if you're not really referring to your injury?
When a doctor asks you to describe your level of pain they are asking for a description of your injury.
Do either of you disagree on the concept of space-time and the fact that you both occupy different locations RELATIVE to the thing be talked about and then account for the distinction when talking the thing your taking about?
To say that there needs to be a common point of reference is to say that you have to be the same observer to be able to understand each other, but that is nonsensical in a world of time and space where we each occupy different points. Something that humans have been able to figure out is that the same object looks different from different points in space-time. You don't need another observer to figure that out for yourself. Just move around the object, change the lighting, etc. and you can see for yourself how the your perspective changes. You know that you are the one that changed,, and not the thing being perceived,, so you deduce that the change in the perspective is a result of you changing,, not ta change in the object being perceived. We understand that it's not the object that changes, rather it is the information of the object relative to our position in space-time that changes. We then assume others have these various views given the same sensory organs observing from different points in space-time. If not, then we can usually point to causes outside the phenomenal state as reasons for the discrepancy (the person's eye-brain system is abnormal).
Quoting Hanover
Seems like descriptions are the things we impose in order to better navigate the world. They are both the same thing. We have multiple senses. Maybe each sense provides a different description of the same property of the thing we're talking about and objects seem more complex than they are given we're using more than one different sense to describe/impose.
Think about how a cup feels in your hand vs how it sounds when it is dropped on the floor. Two very different experiences of the cup are descriptive of the just one property of the cup - the material it is made of.
Then why don't they clarify it like that?
Moreover, it is sometimes (often) not possible to describe the level of one's injury because one simply doesn't know it. For example, you may have sharp pains in your abdomen on the right side. You don't know what is causing those pains. You could have gallstones, intestinal spasms, a number of things. That's why you went to the doctor so that they can examine you and find out what it is.
Seems necessarily so. No brain, no conscious thought, right?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Maybe there isn’t a need to stitch together that which is inseparable.....
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
.....sorta just like that.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yeah, well......we already knew all that from the manifold of both possible and impossible experiences, your “varying circumstances”, that the construction of the language a priori represents. Doesn’t matter; however many more than two realms are posited, all reduce ultimately to just the original two.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Hume acknowledged as intellectually empty and philosophically lazy (paraphrased) in arguing that we think merely because we have a brain, in regard to the principle of cause and effect. How a singular cause affords an infinite plurality baffles us, and is by that, quite unsatisfying while at the same time being rather undeniable. So, no, I’m not sure there can be one either, other than how can it be otherwise, which is pretty much what Hume thought 300 years ago.
“...It is certain that the easy and obvious philosophy will always, with the generality of mankind, have preference above the accurate....”
(E.C.H.U. 1. 1. 3., 1748)
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yep. Hence the notion of spontaneity. Great as a mechanism, but just try demonstrating where our internal, pure, spontaneity comes from. Even choosing that conception prohibits anything to be said about it. The entirety of Kantian conceptual schemes depends on it, not because it is necessarily true, but only that it doesn’t contradict anything. And in a purely logical system, what more is needed?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
(Sigh) Same as it ever was........
They affect parts of me, not my knees, but probably my emotions, my intellect, my knowledge. Somewhere between my hat and my neck.
I may have misunderstood your post, then. Dewey would definitely prefer the scientific approach.
I don't see how there would be any inconsistency. We don't commit to the view that the world cannot or should not be altered if we acknowledge we exist in and participate in the world. Nor does the desire or the capacity to alter it commit us to a belief that there are more than one world.
Oh god, yes, may they shine a light like the darkest night!
Exactly. Your description of your pain indicates where the doctor should narrow his search and reasons for your pain. If it turns out you don't have an injury where you say you have pain then the problem might be more in your head.
We are almost always talking about the causes of our experiences rather than the experience itself. It is the world we share and not each others heads, so it is the shared world that our shared language is about, and not what is going on in our heads.
Why would it be that similar causes lead to similar effects in the world but that not be the case for the causal relationship of perceptions with what is perceived? Why wouldn't similar sensory organs and brains have similar perceptions and when they don't we can always point to some cause that is different (being located in a different point in space-time, different lighting, abnormal brain function, etc.)
Then you haven't determined if either one of you is speaking intelligibly if you haven't determined if a common point if reference is needed. What would a common point of reference even look like and how would you both agree that one exists?
What is a common point of reference if not a view from everywhere which both of your perceptions would be part of? So it seems that only upon agreeing on what it is that you both perceive has a common point of reference been achieved.
A common point of reference implies space-time and every point in space-time is relative to another. But by merging the information from different points do you end getting a better understanding of what it is that is perceived. But you'd have to assume that your perception of others with senses is accurate to be able to assert that there are other points of reference other than your own.
1. Bees and humans perceive the flower differently.
Therefore,
2. We cannot know what the flower itself is like, but only how we perceive it.
Therefore,
3. Jack and Jill know only their individual perceptions of the flower, not the flower.
In (1) we’re comparing the perceptions of species but in (3) of individuals. That makes the “we” in (2) ambiguous: it could refer to anyone qua human being, or to anyone qua individual human being.
Why don’t we feel the need to distinguish how each individual bee perceives from how every other bee perceives?
What in the comparison of the perceptive ‘styles’ of species underwrites distinguishing the perceptive ‘style’ of one human being from another? If (2) says “Members of a species can only know how members of that species perceive the flower,” how do you infer that Jack knows only how he perceives and Jill knows only how she perceives?
I don't think it does.
Ciceronianus....are you being serious? You are a pragmatist. Knowledge is pragmatic, not ontological. Knowing other parts, as you say, is a matter of knowing how to deal, solve problems, but issues about knowing the external world are ones that respond to the Cartesian claim that there is res extensa "out there" as opposed to res cogitans. Are you a res extensa proponent? If so, you are no disciple of Dewey, James, et al.
I'm not a disciple of any philosopher, though I favor some over others. I'm not even a disciple of my daemon, Marcus Tullius Cicero. And certainly not of Descartes, whose dualism was rejected by Dewey. I think Dewey also rejected the distinction you seem to make, separating the practical from the "ontological."
I'm not sure what you think I'm saying, but I think it's clear enough. Descartes made I distinction I don't. There's no "in there" or "out there." There's "here." There's no "external world" nor is there an "internal world." There's a world in which we live as participants in that world. I'm saying the philosophical conception of an "external world" and an "internal world" is misguided and confusing. I think this is what Dewey says, as well. We should speak of certain activities and things, what they are, what they do, as different parts of the of the same world, but should not speak of them as if they take place in isolated realms. I'm critical of the view there is an "external world" apart from us, which we merely observe and react to, somehow, though excluded from it.
I think it's a case of taking an unremarkable fact as the basis for a remarkable conclusion. That we are different from bees is said to require the inference that the flower we interact with isn't the flower the bee interacts with. What we call a flower is instead something neither we humans nor the bees can ever know, just as no other living organism can, being limited by its capacities and characteristics, which are different in each case. So, we must conclude that the "real flower" or "flower in itself" is unknowable, and therefore that what we perceive to be the case cannot be the case. From this the perception is born, as distinct from the flower.
So, each creature has a separate perception of the flower; human, dog, cat, bee, rabbit, etc., and these perceptions are never completely the same. To the extent we interact with a flower, it merely results in our having a perception which is no more reflective of the real flower than any other perception. Simply put, the flower can never be known, not really.
In which case we have no real knowledge of the rest of the world, and never will. It's an unknowable knowledge.
That is promising. Nothing worse than the dogmatic adherence to what someone said. Less interested in this, much more in how this serves my own evolving thoughts.
Quoting Ciceronianus
Then you are very much aligned with Heidegger and others. Of course, then you have to deal with the object as an analytical problematic. Here is my pen. At the level of the most basic inquiry, what IS it? Science has a lot to say, but this is not the most basic level. If it is stated that the pen has mass, e.g., we see that "having mass" is not as if the pen is some kind of eternal penness being intimated by the pen. Where did this designation come from? Of course, the sound 'pen' is what is being tossed around, but this sound is entirely arbitrary; it could have been anything. Then we have the concept (think structuralist Saussure), so how is it that concepts work? This is a thorny matter discussed for centuries, but out of this one thing is clear: Concepts are epistemic, objects are, traditionally, anyway, ontological. No way around it: Were are bound to include the epistemic IN the ontology.
Pragmatists do this, of course, regardless of the language that makes this into a complication. My pen is an event in time, for the epistemology, the apprehending of the pen, is an event. This requires an analysis of time, events, beginnings and terminations, and apparent fluidity (James' Stream of Consciousness, e.g.), meanings, aesthetics/ethics, and all that is IN primordial time. I think the pragmatists are right! Just incomplete.
Quoting Ciceronianus
But then, there I am, and there this cup is, and there is no denying that there is some "space" (space: more than one kind) between us; I mean, I am certainly NOT the kind of thing a cup is: A cup has presence, visible features like other things. I, on the other hand, don't have any of this. I am not an object to see; I have no presence, there, like a cup on a table. Nor am I a brain with a body. I can see brains, brain matter and its magnification, but to see my "I" is impossible, for the observational event to affirm this would presuppose the very "I" that I would be trying to affirm.
This is not to argue that there is no compelling reason to believe there is a brain/consciousness relation, obviously. It is merely to say that observation as such cannot achieve observational perspective on the generative source of an observation. This idea has a long history in philosophy. You can INFER that consciousness IS what consciousness observes in the world of objects, but this simply dismisses ad hoc that problematic mentioned here.
And speaking of Descartes, think of that wax of his: do you think a self, an "I" is reducible to what the was is reducible to in his famous analogy?
There's need to be insulting. I may be aligned to Dewey, however, who knew this and wrote of it before Heidegger.
Quoting Constance
The question I would ask, myself, is--When and in what circumstances do we, or anyone else, ask "What is a pen?" Or for that matter, "What is a cup?" I think the answer would be only in very isolated, contrived, artificial circumstances. The context in which such "questions" arise is significant, and when we ask them we're playing something like "Let's Pretend." Let's pretend, in other words, that we don't know what a pen or cup is, or whether they differ from us.
That should suggest to us that these aren't real questions; we have no doubt what they are, nor do we have any doubt that we're not pens, or cups. Why ask them, then? I'm inclined to think this is one of the non-problems which are fabricated when we accept dualisms and the concept of an "external world."
Quoting Constance
We clearly see ourselves daily, in mirrors and windows. We also see our hands when we use them, our feet when we use them, our hair as and after it's cut, etc. I have a presence, then, unless I believe that I'm not my hands, or my feet, or my legs, stomach, etc. Which would be to accept the mind-body dualism, and the belief in an "external world." I don't.
I only think it perplexing that he spent so much thought musing on the entirely unsurprising and obvious fact that wax will melt when place near a fire, and thought it to be instructive philosophically.
Not much of a philosophy fan, huh?
I like to think philosophy encompasses something more than that, or should do so.
Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be the device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes the method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.--John Dewey
Uh huh.
Heidegger is radically different. He is an embodiment of the entire history of philosophy as he critiques and rejects many of its central claims. The pragmatic event, for example, is not what defines understanding, and affect is not sidelined as incidental merely, but given full examination and fit into an inclusive phenomenological concept. Dewey, from my readings of Nature and Experience and Art and Experience, along with marlinal readings in education and elsewhere, is still fixated on general concepts familiar in nature and material accounts. This is not at the basic level.
Heidegger is more like the Greeks, Husserl, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hegel, Kant combined. The pragmatic end, his ready-to-hand is, in my thinking, well complimented by Dewey and the hypothetical deductive method; but Dewey is seriously deficient in describing the world at the basc level. For all I know, Heidegger read Dewey prior to Being and Time. He also read the Greeks. It doesn't matter.
Quoting Ciceronianus
Well, that's hardly fitting. I mean, asking what a pen is at the level of basic questions, is just an example of the openness of inquiry of all things at this level. It is not about fabricated dualisms, but about the world and what is THERE in authentic inquiry. That is all. It's a matter of observing the world at the level of basic questions. Just that. I see a cup,I know what it is, but I don't know what it means to know what something is. Now I am in the philosophical mode.
This is a second order of thinking, a reflection on meanings as they are given, not at all unlike what science does when it makes its way through the openness of established paradigms. We know how this works, but we, I mean the general thinking, do not know how this works philosophically: questions about the presuppositions of our knowing, about the presuppositions of science and everydayness.
So then, why bother with this? You can't say philosophical questions are not real questions and this is because they issue from the world, not our imaginations. Ancient cultures did not invent and hand down to us the incompleteness of all knowledge claims. Such a thing is a solid fact of our existence. All you have to do is follow through on inquiry. Consider that you can take Einstein's time and space, ask him how his observations of the world make it into perceptual schemes at all, and he will have nothing to say. He's a physicist, not a philosopher. But then Kant''s Space, Hegel's Time, Heidegger's Being: these are not definitive, but neither is science. They DO give extraordinary insight into the nature of the inquiry and give paradigmatic theories that are AS spot on as plate tectonics or chromosomal theory, given the nature of their field.
Which takes us to metaphysics, that which nearly ALL of 20th philosophy, on both sides of the Atlantic, have attempted to tear down. Philosophy does not make cell phones. It is interested in foundational truth, and even if this is impossible, it reveals, in the process of discovery, that the real, foundational questions are not at all what we thought when we were just reading scientific journals. It opens inquiry at the threshold of knowledge.
There is a wall between philosophical understanding and the general pov. A wall of unfamiliarity. One does have to read to know that it is interesting at all.
Of course that's not to say that contemplation of the fact a ball of wax melts when placed near a fire isn't, in itself, a worthy endeavor for a philosopher, and certainly as worthy as contemplating the fact that ice does so as well.
Thar joke isn't all that funny. Needs work.
Yes, and also the world's greatest unrepentant Nazi. We've been over this before.
Quoting Constance
What is, and what for that matter is "the basic level"?
Quoting Constance
Do you know what it means to not know what it means to know what something is? That would seem the pertinent question if that's the case. Presumably, that's something you know now. Please explain why you think you don't know what it means to know what something is, and what you think it would be you would know if you did know what it means to know what something is.
Like so much else, alas.
its a vacuous reply. A fallacy that is so obvious it has a name: ad hominem.
Quoting Ciceronianus
I gave you an example: I know what an apple is in a ready to hand way, but I don't know what it is to know something in this way. This knowledge relationship, what is it? What are concepts and how they relate to the world? Affect we call emotions, but emotions are certainly not concepts. And on and on. Philosophy is about basic questions. It is not how fast light travels, but what it means make a claim of any kind at all. You could say, as Dewey does, it is basically about experience (edging toward idealism, but, as with Heidegger, idealism is a thesis that comes AFTER the most basic inquiry. The most basic puts the relationships and meanings first, for these are first encountered, logically, that is, prior to any thematic undertaking (what is this or that as such, simpliciter?)). Phenomenology is a descriptive account that asks very simply: prior to our categorical knowledge (sciences, everydayness) there is already there, in place, a foundation for this. As you say, the wax example: this is not how we think about wax and there is nothing in the way wax turns up in our sciences, in our conversations, this question about the "existence behind the appearance" has no referent in the world at all, a complete fiction. Heidegger completely agrees, and his discussion of Descartes is a refutation. It is not this metaphysics of the object, it is what is there in the clearest way describable. Where this comes from is Husserl. You might want some day to look into his Ideas, Cartesian Meditations, and others. Husserl gets it from Brentano.
Empirical science is the greatest! That is, for what it does, and it does not do philosophy.
Quoting Ciceronianus
Because knowing my cat is on the couch is different from knowing what it is to know my cat is on the couch. Simple. My car stops when the pedal is pressed and I know this. But I don't know the analysis of this: talk about brakes, brake fluid, pressure, and so on, is very different. This is because braking is, if you will, a thing of parts, it is analyzable.
To make a very long story short, the entire matter turns finally to ethics/aesthetics. You ask "what you think it would be you would know if you did know what it means to know what something is and the key to this lies in value, or metavalue, and discussion in metavalue, metaethics, metaaesthetics (meta here means an thematizing of the analysis of the nature of value; ethics and aesthetics are inherently value affairs: e.g., no value, no ethics) are where the final inquiry must go. The analysis of knowledge is inherently an analysis of value (that's Dewey), and it is value that is the existential core of meaning in the world. Knowledge ABOUT something, my cat or stocks' daily yield, is reducible to an ontology of value and cognition, and cognition, assessed in itself, bears no actual. Or: epistemological analyses utterly fail because there is no foundational dimension; they always begin with the relation, and relations are justificatory and justifications are discursive such that the foundation is always at a distance from t he affirmation sought: P is always on the other side of S. This is why Husserl is so important: that Cartesian bit about res extensa is out the window, but the immediacy of the Cartesian center is not, for it is here where, and I disagree intensely with many on this, our existence and existence itself is disclosed. Existence IS value. That is Dewey, even if not in so many words.
THIS takes the matter full swing towards the egoic center, where the much sought after justification for P finds its home, and P is US all along.
Just to add, Dewey is a part of my thinking only. As is Witt, Heidegger and the rest. So don't take to the letter anything I say as I USE them, to be a representation of what one might encounter in some expository course. Husserl, for example, and intentionality, I present here as a problem.
There may be a typo or two up there
Well, he was an unrepentant Nazi, and you say he was great, so in what way is the statement untrue? But of course it's a silly reply to a silly statement, i.e. that he's an "embodiment of the entire history of philosophy"; philosophy incarnate, as it were, philosophy made flesh as Jesus was the Word made flesh.
Quoting Constance
So you want to know the mechanics of cognition, what happens when we think?
Quoting Constance
But you seem to be saying that we can't know what it is to know, in abstract, and without context, without relations, etc. If that's the case, we don't disagree.
Ok.
Ad hominem fallacies go to the person rather than the argument. Everyone knows this. And then the straw person argument that because Heidegger embodies the history of Western philosophy, he as untenable as Christian metaphysics. Curious. Why not simply look at the discussion and figure it out?
Quoting Ciceronianus
Me? I want to know what it is to be a existing person in the middle of reality, "thrown into" a world of suffering and joy. I mean, thrown in this qua thrown. Popular theories do not touch this. Evolution, for example, tells you nothing about this. It simply gives a justified account of how it got here, which no reasonable person disagrees with. No, the question is philosophico-theological. Justifications here are apriori, so we look at, say, pain, its presence. What IS this AS pain, not as a science would simply contextualize it. It is first a descriptive matter.
Quoting Ciceronianus
Well, there is nothing without context. Nothing abstract about this. Take my cat on the couch. Nothing abstract about my knowing she is on the couch at all. Now, ask what does it mean to know something at all? How is this any more abstract than inquiring about how brakes work, knowing full well how to use them? Asking how knowledge works is an inquiry that in no way steps beyond the boundaries natural inquiry.
So I am saying an inquiry into the nature of knowledge is not an abstract matter at all.
You take me far too literally. I'm saying that calling Heidegger philosophy incarnate is like claiming Jesus was the Word made flesh. It's a substantial, I would say greatly exaggerated, claim. To that claim (which I think preposterous) I made a response which I thought responded, sarcastically, to such a claim, noting that philosophy incarnate was also in that case an unrepentant Nazi.
Quoting Constance
Well, we all know that, do we not? If not, in what sense don't we know it? I think you're looking for some kind of a religious or mystical revelation.
Quoting Constance
If we knew how brakes work (I don't, not really) why would we ask how they work? If we ask how we know how they work, wouldn't the answer be based on our experience with brakes and making or fixing them? What else could the answer be, except perhaps a neurological or biological one addressing the functioning of the brain?
He should have denounced the Nazis. Beyond this, I don't see anything substantive.
Quoting Ciceronianus
Not for me to say what people see when they spend a lot of time second guessing the nature of the world. The world is, after all, structured by those very ideas that are assailed in deep scrutiny. In a letter Husserl wrote, he told that his students were turning toward religion to come to grips with the phenomenological reduction, which is a method of doing phenomenology that suspends most knowledge claims in order to get at the "thing itself". Husserl, then, was not himself very religious.
Taking this reduction to its ultimate expression, and this gives you meditation yoga, which is an complete suspension of all explicit knowing and experiencing (though underlying, there must be a construct of the self to constitute agency, I would hazard. What is NOT so constituted , a transcendental self, is entirely another matter). The Abidhamma speaks of profound intuitive revelations. Not a popular life's choice these days.
For me, sure, the more the familiar is made unfamiliar, whcih is what questioning things like this does, one is left with an openness that was closed in the tyranny of ordinary affairs, to borrow a phrase. The world is seen differently, perhaps radically so.
Philosophy, when at its best, can show us how to live, but I don't think it's a route by which we can satisfy ourselves regarding our purpose and place in the universe, or our salvation, by addressing "ultimate questions." I think there may be other ways to do that, but think they're evocative, and address emotion and the spiritual. Art, music, poetry, religion may be evocative in this sense, but not philosophy, or so I think.
I am rather on the other end of this.
Philosophy does not show us how to live. It's not a what to do? kind of thinking, but a what Is it all about? kind. But no doubt, philosophy as a method is absolutely essential to producing an enlightened mind, and this has the crucial role of delivering us from bad thinking, bad metaphysics, indefensible ideas. But it is mostly a critical enterprise, tearing down irrational institutions. It gives us the ability to think critically at the basic level of things, which is certainly useful, but this kind of thing turns to specific areas of involvement, and once a person sees how an argument works regarding, say, human rights and third world exploitation, then more sound moral thinking displaces messy, parochial thinking. An examination of how well an idea stands up under scrutiny is, of course, a very common thing, and philosophy, the method, steps in, bypassing extraneous incidentals. A "philosophy of" some particular area follows along these lines.
But philosophy proper is all about moving away from particular areas, and into the threshold thinking at the level of the most basic assumptions that are presupposed in all things. Having a philosophical outlook on many things is obviously a good thing, but this is not philosophy proper. It is just an extension of the particular. Talk about the philosophy I have of cooking for large parties is not the philosophy of the presocratics through postmodernism.
For me, philosophy at its best is concerned with how best to live. That's a view of philosophy which held in ancient times. I favor the Stoic position in that respect. I know philosophy over time became less and less concerned with our lives as we live them from day to day, to the point that now it seems, deliberately and even literally, otherworldly (there's that external world). To his credit (I think) Dewey felt philosophy should be a method cultivated to address the "problems of men" rather than the "problems of philosophy."