Appearance vs. Reality (via Descartes and Sellars)
A second thread on Sellars' "Empiricism and Philosophy of the Mind", exploring some other, but related ideas...
The distinction between appearance and reality is probably among the oldest metaphysical tropes in philosophy - but how to understand it? Or first - why does it seem so important? Well, the first thing to draw attention to is an asymmetry between the terms: while reality can seem to be other than it is, this is not generally the case for appearances. For the most part (this qualification is important), while I can be mistaken about how things are, I cannot be mistaken about how things appear to be. While this seems straightforward enough, there is a question of how to interpret this asymmetry.
For Descartes, the fact that one could not be deceived by appearances was revelatory. It meant that appearances could stand as a secure ground for knowledge, such that the fact of something's appearing meant that one could know that thing, with certainty, if even only just as an appearance. (Descartes: "Because I may be dreaming, I can’t say for sure that I now see the flames, hear the wood crackling, and feel the heat of the fire; but I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. This cannot be false; what is called ‘sensing’ is strictly just this seeming" - Meditations, bolding mine).
For Descartes then, appearances are thus able to be independent objects of knowledge: appearances belong to the class of things which we can know. But this substantialization or reification of 'apperences' as quasi-entities is not the only way to interpret the asymmetery between appearance and reality. An alternative way - Sellars' way - is to understand the distinction in terms of our dispositions or confidence at making claims: to say "It is red" is to endorse a claim; to say "It seems red" or "it appears red" is to withhold endorsement of a claim.
This account, in terms of endorsement and it's withholding, has the advantage of rendering talk of appearances as derivative or parasitic upon 'is' claims (claims of reality). That is, if this account is right, then we must first be acquainted with reality (or 'things in reality') prior to being acquainted with appearances; for to be able to withhold endorsement about claims (by saying 'it seems...') presupposes that we can already speak of things as they are. Following Sellars, there is thus a logical priority of reality over appearence, and thus no need to engage with the hand-wringing over how to 'get from mere appearance to reality'.
Notably, this is nothing less than a complete reversal of the Cartesian approach, and one that readily recommends itself to anyone who finds the rerification of 'appearances' into quasi-entities (as if they could exist apart from, and independently of, reality) a metaphysically fishy move.
The distinction between appearance and reality is probably among the oldest metaphysical tropes in philosophy - but how to understand it? Or first - why does it seem so important? Well, the first thing to draw attention to is an asymmetry between the terms: while reality can seem to be other than it is, this is not generally the case for appearances. For the most part (this qualification is important), while I can be mistaken about how things are, I cannot be mistaken about how things appear to be. While this seems straightforward enough, there is a question of how to interpret this asymmetry.
For Descartes, the fact that one could not be deceived by appearances was revelatory. It meant that appearances could stand as a secure ground for knowledge, such that the fact of something's appearing meant that one could know that thing, with certainty, if even only just as an appearance. (Descartes: "Because I may be dreaming, I can’t say for sure that I now see the flames, hear the wood crackling, and feel the heat of the fire; but I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. This cannot be false; what is called ‘sensing’ is strictly just this seeming" - Meditations, bolding mine).
For Descartes then, appearances are thus able to be independent objects of knowledge: appearances belong to the class of things which we can know. But this substantialization or reification of 'apperences' as quasi-entities is not the only way to interpret the asymmetery between appearance and reality. An alternative way - Sellars' way - is to understand the distinction in terms of our dispositions or confidence at making claims: to say "It is red" is to endorse a claim; to say "It seems red" or "it appears red" is to withhold endorsement of a claim.
This account, in terms of endorsement and it's withholding, has the advantage of rendering talk of appearances as derivative or parasitic upon 'is' claims (claims of reality). That is, if this account is right, then we must first be acquainted with reality (or 'things in reality') prior to being acquainted with appearances; for to be able to withhold endorsement about claims (by saying 'it seems...') presupposes that we can already speak of things as they are. Following Sellars, there is thus a logical priority of reality over appearence, and thus no need to engage with the hand-wringing over how to 'get from mere appearance to reality'.
Notably, this is nothing less than a complete reversal of the Cartesian approach, and one that readily recommends itself to anyone who finds the rerification of 'appearances' into quasi-entities (as if they could exist apart from, and independently of, reality) a metaphysically fishy move.
Comments (106)
This doesn't resolve the result of Cartesian doubt. It ignores it. It is obvious that we all consider external reality obvious. Forrest Gump has no doubt he is holding a box of chocolates. It takes someone who is willing to examine the nature of reality some effort to convince himself that there might not really be a rock before him. And so Descartes' contribution was to examine this question and to doubt everything and then to locate which could not be doubted. He realized that he could not doubt appearances, could not doubt he was doubting, and therefore could not doubt he exists. That much is right.
The point here is that we are not first acquainted with things as they are; we are first acquainted with things how we think they are. We don't realize the distinction between things as we think they are and how they actually are until we engage in some amount of introspection, but that's how so much of what we know is. It's sort of like any Socratic discussion. We start with some unexamined claim and through questioning and probing we arrive at a more sophisticated and perhaps accurate response.
The problem with getting from mere appearance to reality is that of incoherence. It is not possible to describe an object without reference to appearance (or some other sensation), so to ask how can I know the rock without reference to how it looks, smells, or taste seems nonsensical. The problem then isn't that we can't know reality prior to appearance, but we can't even discuss a reality without appearances.
We can and we do with science.
Quoting Hanover
The properties that don't depend on how we perceive the rock are how science describes a rock. But really, it's the objective account of things, where we remove the perceiver dependent qualities. A rock's mass, size and shape, and molecular arrangement don't depend on how humans perceive a rock.
This is a return to Locke's primary and secondary qualities distinction, which I think is ultimately arbitrary. Your knowledge of mass, for example, would be the sensation of its weight or perhaps your observation of a numeric representation on a scale. The same could be said of size and molecular arrangement. All that you know is what you perceive. To assert that there exists something beyond appearances is just a declaration of realism, but you have nothing to base that on. And even if we were to agree that there was an external rock with all sorts of physical characteristics that exist independent of perception, we could not begin to know or explain what those raw characteristics were because all we could refer to are the impressions of our senses.
First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.
Quoting Hanover
More frequently: we realize the distinction after we experience things behaving differently than we would have anticipated them to behave given what we thought they were. Or: Someone, whose word we trust, tells us that a thing isn't what it appears.
Your reconstruction makes it sound as though Descartes began in a climate of certitude and, through thought, was able to shake that certitude (in order to rebuild on stabler ground.)
But the opposite is the case. Descartes was living at a time of radical uncertainty and doubt. Everyone was stoned, didn't know how to quit, and he was just the king-stoner who smoked himself sober.
But anyway the point is: the distinction between things as we think they are and how they really are is common, really common, everyday-language common. Even Forrest Gump will tell you, re: his box, that you never know what you're gonna get. Sellars is trying to examine the real conditions of possibility for such a distinction in order to understand it better.
The trouble comes when the distinction is too-quickly put to metaphysical work, without first understanding why and how it works.
So:
This, as you point out, is a mess. What is even meant by 'reality' 'object' 'knowledge' etc at this point? Something's gone really wrong. Sellars' analysis goes part of the way in figuring out where we lost the plot.
For example: a lot of the weirdness in that last quote revolves around the relation of knowledge and description, as though to know a rock, to 'get from' 'mere' appearance to 'reality' would involve describing a realer sensuous rock that lies behind the sensuous rock we describe. Compare to: I know the pythagorean theorem. I know that the Capital of France is Paris. I know that 'tsp' is an abbreviation for teaspoon.' I know that glass breaks when dropped on a hard surface. etc etc.
The attempt to solve the mystery doesn't draw a distinction between appearance and reality, but rather appearance vs what we expected to see prior to understanding atmospheric refraction.
If anything, Descartes helped to return confidence in appearances as long as the appropriate geometry is factored in.
Statements about seeming are again statements that have truth conditions: one can be wrong about the way things seem (even, depending on the situation, how things seem to oneself).
It's true that since seem is a propositional operator, propositions about seeming are in some sense more complex than the propositions to which they apply (this sense is only relative to our linguistic usage: we require a more complex statement, built out of a simpler one, in order to express such things). However, this says nothing about the epistemological order of things. If talk about seeming implied prior contact with something real, this would lead to the absurd conclusion that we have contact with whatever we can make seeming-claims about. This is just not true, and there looks to be no reason to believe it with respect to whole swaths of perception generally.
I'm not sure what 'conceptual priority' is, but whatever it is, it never gets us to any is-claim, which would seem to be the interesting thing to Descartes.
Of course it has epistemological consequences - it totally inverts the Cartesian approach to knowledge. Instead of employing methodical doubt, retreating to "seems" claims and then trying to define "is" claims based on criterial modifications therein, it does the opposite. In the process it also lessens the temptation to reify "appearances" into the direct objects of perception.
It seems to me like the noumenal "is" Hanover's discussing is an entirely different thing than "is" as we normally use it. Which is fine except that the discussion around the noumenal "is" often treats it as though we're talking garden-variety "is", if that makes sense.
I'm drawing on Hegel here, but it feels like what's happening is that a general structure of explanation ( 'seems y because is x, under circumstances z')is precipitated from the vast variety of local, specific explanations. Once this general structure crystallizes into view, and we become conscious of it, we mistakenly treat it as itself something to be explained, rather than as the immanent texture of knowledge,. So now we have "the realm of explanation" where all appearances are explained by something else, and we seek to explain that realm, taken in its entirety, by reference to... a mirror-world - where other, realer, *things* cause ( 'explain') the things we experience (I think this is what Hegel's getting st in the analysis of the 'topsy-turvy')
A step further is to admit that this supra-world is in essence unknowable while nevertheless retaining the void where it would remain, if it were knowable. But this confuses things. This is a matter of desire, not knowledge. It's wanting the (quasi-platonic) constants we use to know reality to have their own *substantial* reality; then: denying that they can, but still judging reality for failing to be the other kind of reality, when that other 'reality' is nothing but the asynchronous nature of knowledge reified.
It's desire in knowledge's clothing.
That from this one can conclude that one must 'start' with veridical perceptions in any way, in the sense that one has to have had any, is nonsense – this would imply that any phenomenon that people say seems to exist must have been met with actually existing, which is not the case. Existence proofs would then be very easy – it something seemed to exist, it would!
It wasn't that 'seem' statements are syntactically more complex. It's that 'seem' statements can't be understood unless one first understands 'is' statements.
Not at all. It only means that non-veridical perceptions can only be understood as non-veridical against the backdrop of a web of other, veridical perceptions. If one were to say that all perceptions were non-veridical, but couldn't explain what he meant by 'veridical', then he'd literally be talking nonsense.
Put another way
Let me take your perspective for a moment and subtract 'actually existing' from your sentence. What, then, are you saying?
again
If something 'seemed' to exist, as opposed to what?
Not so. Compare: it can seem like there is a witch, when there isn't. Must we have veridical witch-perceptions against which to 'compare' for this to be so? No, because it can seem like there are witches (perhaps it even has), yet there are none and have not been (let us assume).
Quoting csalisbury
There is no 'as opposed to.' Something that seems to exist can actually exist, or it can not.
Sure, but we need some sense of what it would mean were there such things as witches. In other words, we need some sense of what veridicality means. Where can we come by such an understanding?
To say that the non-veridical relies on the veridical is not to say that the seeming of any particular thing must rely on a prior veridical perception of some similar thing.
Quoting Snakes Alive
In explaining why there's nothing opposed, you immediately made recourse to existence and its negation i.e "is-talk". Could you answer another way without doing this?
As for Sellars, he basically overlays the phenomenal/noumenal distinction over his own manifest/scientific image distinction, a move that I find to be both unjustified and uncompelling. So while he doesn't fall into the trap of noumenalizing the void, he strips the manifest image of all ontological authority by granting scientific claims the ability to act as defeasors for any all manifest claims despite the complete and utter absence of any actual experience of error.
In any event, it seems like there's an ambiguity in the concept of the noumenal "is", it's meaning changing depending on whether or not someone is reifying the void. If they are reifying the void, the noumenal "is" becomes incoherent. If not, then it collapses back into the "is" of everyday experience (i.e. one half of the is/seems couplet that Sellars describes).
Hegel pointed out the thing-in-itself to be an abstraction. What gets abstracted away is every concrete form of existence leaving the mind with an existence-operator without any predicates following. It is nonsense that this empty form of existence would make up for reality. It is a consequence of contradictions between reality and assumptions that were made. From this the mind extrapolates that any assumption could come into conflict with reality and ends with: nothing. But this extrapolation - again - is not real, it is thought.
I do think the conceptual analysis holds, as a kind of historical-philosophical narrative, even if you strip out the desire stuff, but I'm not sure.
Either way, mostly saying what you said in your last paragraph. I think the noumenal, treated as a something that 'is', is a smokescreen over something like 'ontological openness' - its a things-can-always-surprise-us rather than a stable second world behind the scenes.
Sure, but who doubts this? Not Descartes. And it implies nothing about our epistemologically 'starting with' veridicality, or having had any veridical experiences.
Quoting csalisbury
So if I seem to see a witch, I must have seen something similar to a witch?
I get it, it sounds like a good formula, but if you actually try to apply it to the most banal examples, it doesn't seem to work.
Quoting csalisbury
How I could answer has nothing to do with epistemology, but again with syntax of language. It's perfectly possible that there are no veridical experiences whatsoever – that veridicality, however we are attuned to it, is a transcendental illusion of which we're doomed to make use.
Yes, exactly. But also an abstraction generated by the working of thought right? The impossibility of unifying the perceptual/sensual diversity of things into individual 'ones' forces us into the structure of explanation - explaining perceptual reality as the outcome of behind-the-scene forces. But then the same conceptual tendency that wanted - but failed - to unite the variety of perceptions into single 'things' leads to us to point to a united 'thing' in the invisible suprasensible realm.
I guess I'd respond by asking the same question again:
[quote=csalisbury]We need some sense of what veridicality means. Where can we come by such an understanding?[/quote]
---
Quoting Snakes Alive
I think you misread me here
[quote=csalisbury]To say that the non-veridical relies on the veridical is not to say that the seeming of any particular thing must rely on a prior veridical perception of some similar thing.[/quote] (bolding added)
Quoting Snakes Alive
I'm asking for conceptual unpacking without reference to 'is-talk', not that you don't use 'is' in your sentence. There's another way to say this: If it was 'seems' all the way down, even the 'evil demon' would make no sense as a cause. To talk of an evil demon causing whatever is to revert back to is-talk. If its 'seems' all the way down, 'seems' is lost. It 'seems' (ha!) like we're talking about something when we talk about the total absence of veridical experiences, but we're always smuggling them in, somewhere, as backdrop.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that distinctions between real and imaginary or hallucinated "seemings" are established intersubjectively. So, your 'witch' example is irrelevant to the context of this discussion. Intersubjective notions of 'is' are founded upon collectively corroborated "seemings". As Kant pointed out this intersubjectively established understanding of 'is', when rationally analyzed, leads to the "transcendental illusion" of naive realism.
On the other hand the ideality of transcendental conditions is based upon, as is Descartes' radical scepticism, the assumption of the perspective of disembodied-mind-as-subject, and the attendant unbridgeable gulf between that subject and any noumenal "object", especially when that object is thought to be "ultimately" a bare physical existence. How could a disembodied mind apprehend, much less comprehend, a bare physical existence?
The problem is that one cannot wait for something not to happen. The diversity is assumed to be infinite and anti-theses to be arbitrary while they are not. With such assumptions the realm of reality is already left behind and finally the conclusion made that nothing could be said about it.
It is not that Descartes had problems synthesizing concrete view-points. He failed because of counter-arguments that were never made. It is like with numbers: There can only be so and so many of them in reality due to lack of material but one can think of infinitely many of them by just adding one more ad infinitum. This is what Hegel calls "bad eternity".
So?
Doesn't matter, since the intersubjectivity can't establish anything and faces the same problem.
It's true that intersubjectivity cannot establish anything ":absolute". It is the incoherent demand for something "absolute" that is the problem. So, of course, that includes the demand for an "absolute" meaning of 'is'.
In other words what is established intersubjectively is the best we can do; and with rejection of such establishment, all discourse, including Descartes' global scepticism, would be meaningless gibberish.
It has much to do with the other part of my post.
again:
[quote=csalisbury]We need some sense of what veridicality means. Where can we come by such an understanding?[/quote]
Ah. That makes more sense.
Quoting csalisbury
So we've generalized an explanation of the form "seems y because is x, in circumstance z" that helps us understand/cope with particular cases of perceptual error. Even if we posit something akin to desire as a prime mover within the dynamics of experience, why take the next step and universalize the formula to all possible experiences? Is it desire pushing us to look for an explanation where none exists? Or is it just bad metaphysics?
Does the idea that there is a perceptual error arise because we say "Is green, but looks blue under certain conditions"? What if we said "looks green under most conditions, but can look blue under certain conditions". Would the notion of perceptual error then dissolve?
To answer well, I'd have go back and reread (or sufficiently read for the first time) Leibniz, Locke and Hume, among others.
All I can do is speculate, based on what I do remember. I'll probably get a lot wrong. That said:
Descartes guarantees the validity of our perceptions by reference to our ability to conceive of infinity (this is what 'god' for him boils down to.)
Locke et al disagreed with Descartes on this, yet retained the primacy of sense impressions for knowledge.
Let this marinate a while, and you get Hume. How can we connect impression x to impression y? Isn't this just habit?
And then Kant. Kant, as you probably know, doesn't substantialize the noumenon, despite rumors to the contrary - but the way in which he talks about the noumenon still gives some clues, maybe?
He talks a lot about how reason, necessarily, seeks the unconditioned. Seeks the unconditioned despite being dependent on the understanding and so being limited to the conditioned.
The infinity of Descartes, long-repressed, reappears here. But it's a little different. Kant's 'understanding' allows the interrelation of all phenomena in a legible conceptual web. Reason, on the other hand, seeks to ground the web itself. Kant is well-aware that it can't. But he's also aware that it can't help itself. So the Infinity of Descartes is pushed into the ethical (critique of moral reason) and the aesthetic (critique of judgment.)
I guess none of this answers your question though. Something about how reason needs to take everything as a whole, but needs that whole to be based on a ground. And how that is complemented by a different tendency to take everything as separate, but has no way of figuring out how those separate things hold together.
I'll try to take another stab tomorrow, a little soberer.
I always thought this guarantee was a matter of the omnibeneficence of God: that because he is a perfectly good being he would not deceive us.
In regards to leveraging a formula that says something like "X looks Y under most circumstances, but looks Z under others" won't eliminate perceptual error because we still can't help but make claims about how things really are, and we will still inevitably get things wrong from time to time. If I look into my parlor and say to you "John is sitting on my sofa in the parlor right now", but really it's just my daugher's life-sized Winnie the Pooh stuffed animal (for example) that is sitting on the couch, it won't help to try to formulate an explanation in terms of this Winnie the Pooh stuffed animal looking like Winnie the Pooh under most circumstances, but looking like John in other circumstances. First of all, my one-off mistake is probably not generalizable/repeatable in that way. But more fundamentally, the fact of the matter is that it's just Pooh-Bear sitting on my couch, not John, and that's that.
That makes sense; the fact that we can conceive infinity can only be on account of the existence of an infinite being, a fact which, if true, guarantees the existence of God, and then God's benevolence guarantees the veracity of our perceptions. So strangely, it does look like our ability to conceive infinity, according to Descartes, guarantees the veracity of our empiric (finite) perceptions. It's curious; I'd never though about it like that before! :cool:
Right? I do disagree with him, but it's still a pretty exquisite thought-thing. Just conceptually-aesthetically, :ok:
But how can you be sure of that? It might be John who just looks and behaves like Pooh-Bear under some special condition. As if you could be sure to be in error if you cannot be sure about the world!
I disagree with him too, but it is indeed "an exquisite thought thing". And I've been tending to think lately, in general, that metaphysical speculation is, understood most coherently, a search, not for truth, but for beauty in terms of different ways to understand or think about things. It's more like poetry than empirical science. So, the exquisiteness of Descartes' thought is not at all dependent upon its propositional truth, but, on the other hand, it is an aletheic truth, insofar as it presents something to us.
I need to think about this some more Aaron, but my immediate take is that the difference between seeing John instead of seeing Pooh, that is the perceptual error, is a difference within the context of perception between what I thought I saw and what I discover, on further investigation, that I had really seen.
When you say we're 'hardwired' - what do you mean by that? Why do you think that's the case?
Sure thing. I don't disagree with what you wrote above, so maybe there was just a misunderstanding prior?
When we see distances, we understand that the thing we're seeing is 'there', not 'here but small.'
When we see veridically (building on your analogy) we understand that the thing is real instead of not-real?
I mean, maybe. It seems like a strange analogy. I'm open to persuasion, but persuasion is needed.
Right, and there was an analogous kind of self-awareness when the empiricists noticed that you could come to 'see' things as just rearranged as different sizes in the visual field, instead of representing objective distances. We just naturally see these things as distances, but we only do this by means of the visual field being stimulated in this way, and when one turns to epistemology one 'sees' this again. Usually one sees 'through' it.
Quoting csalisbury
We take the experience to be 'of' something.
It doesn't seem like a good metaphor to me. In fact, in seems like the opposite. We adjust our perceptions in order to fit them to a world we know is the real one. We'll make our perceptions fit the world we live in, before we discard them.
And, moreover, we're right to do so.
It's true that that's how we're accustomed to think of it by default. I don't think there's any possible way to answer transcendent questions about whether that way of seeing it is the right way.
The point is that the Cartesian turn allows one to see it the other way – a way that one initially does not even understand that one can see it. In that sense, it's not like learning a new true proposition, but being able to see where once one was blind. You get a new ability. The Cartesian is also right that in some sense this is the way it was 'all along.' You can of course choose to ignore this new ability and have faith that it is just an aberration, and the old way of seeing things is the 'right way.' But it's just that – faith.
Quoting csalisbury
In general, we do not have the power to adjust our perceptions.
Wait, but none of this has anything to do with the Cartesian turn, at all. I don't mind rhetoric - i love rhetoric, - but only when its wedded to good argumentation. This is just a lot of rhetoric anchored on a phrase' cartesian turn' that , far as I can see, has no relation to any of the talk.
I don't even think you're playing foul, but this isn't....
shake hands and be done with it?
Maybe, maybe. But then you're between a rock and hard place. And I don't know where to direct you
I think your posts are pretty good, but the OP is bad. I was just puzzled by why you thought my comments were irrelevant, since they have to do with the topic discussed in the OP exactly. Maybe you wanted to talk about something else, not the OP, and were disappointed the conversation didn't steer the way you wanted?
Here's the post you're referencing:
I sincerely - I'm not saying this rhetorically - don't know what this post means. I can't connect it to the broader discussion.
Quoting csalisbury
That's how we are accustomed to think of it – but there's no reason to think that way is right.
Do you understand that?
I'd say that we're accustomed to thinking that the sun is large and out there. But I'm not trying to be difficult. I went to post something in agreement, but it's too significant a thing to smudge.
[edit] oh, unless your point was that there's no reason to think the sun is large and out there?
Before we go further, I just want to make sure I understand. Your ultimate response to the idea that 'seems' talk is based on 'is' talk is to challenge the idea that experiences are experiences 'of' something? Is that fair?
talk to you in the morning, if then
WTF is with all the questions about how basic dialogue works?
The OP seems okay to me, just a bit impenetrable without a certain background. It's taking about how we consider knowledge in relation to our experiences.
The major point is about how we consider the distinction between what exists/is true compared to what appears our experiences.
Descartes makes a split between reality and appearance. We find ourselves in a space in which appearances are consider seperate to reality. On the one hand, there is what appears, which can be anything and is true in its appearance. While on the other, there is reality, things which are true outside of appearance (e.g. the desert which is there when I see a mirage).
The OP is taking this distinction to task for seperating appearance from reality. While it's correct to make a distinction between our experiences and the world which doesn't appear, it has an unfortunate effect of implying appearances are outside reality.
To avoid the issue, the OP is suggesting we consider appearance differently. Instead of this making of them opposed to reality, we instead understand them to be part of reality, shifting the question from "appearance Vs reality" to "Our appearances are part of reality. What of reality do they show or do not show?"
In doing this, we deflate and remove the issue of how to get from appearances to reality. Appearance are of reality and show (or do not show) parts of reality we are interested in.
I want to claim this as thinking of us. Though, here I am posting on a forum, so I guess the past is sometimes the future.
I agree with this so far as it goes, but I wonder just how far it does. After all, are we not already operating in the sphere of 'is' claims here? That is, if something I took for reality turns out, in the final analysis, to be 'just an appearence', doesn't this passage from one to the other already presuppose reality? Isn't the 'result' the same? i.e. appearence-talk is tributary to is-talk? Or put yet otherwise: the problem of appearance is that it is not-reality. Reality here wears the pants - there is no reification of appearance into a quasi-standalone-entity.
Quoting Hanover
The above applies to this as well: while this may well be true, the (Cartesian) problem remains diffused: if we can't discuss a reality without appearances, then the problem of trying to make the move from appearance to reality is not one, insofar as they are something of a package deal. There might be another, separate problem, about how to understand the exact status of each in relation to the other (something like: "is there a reality without appearences?)" , but this would not be the same problem as the one being addressed. It's important, I think, to keep these two issues apart. Snakes seems to be making a similar conflation, although his confusion seems to be deeper.
Have you seen those amusing cups that (appear to) change colour when hot water is poured in?
Imagine a world where hot water has not been invented. In this world all colours appear exactly as they are...
It's a pretty sophisticated scientific understanding that distinguishes the tie that 'appears' to change colour from the cup that 'really' changes colour. So sophisticated as to appear arbitrary., and one can imagine the talk being, "Ah, sir, this is a marvellous colour changing tie that is blue indoors and turns green outside."
It is the set up of the thought experiment that is important - "colours appear exactly as they are". In such a world, one would not make a distinction between appearance and reality because they would be indistinguishable.
If mirages could quench one's thirst, they would be oases. In this case the distinction between appearance and reality imposes itself. One is obliged to face the reality of the unreality of a mirage, and likewise the reality of the reality of the oasis as one drinks or does not drink.
Reality imposes itself.
Reality imposes itself as distinct from appearance, and it is the reality of the unreality of appearances that obliges us to make the distinction or die of thirst. One does not question the reality of dying of thirst, except from the comfort of an armchair with a cup of whatever appearance close at hand.
Quoting StreetlightX
Exactly; perhaps I am dreaming - Dreaming of thinking, 'perhaps I am dreaming - Dreaming of thinking, 'perhaps I am dreaming - Dreaming of thinking, 'perhaps I am dreaming - ...'''''. It stops making sense, and so it must be a dream that I am dreaming, that I am dreaming, ... and that doesn't make sense either. Not just something of a package, but totally a package. Reality and unreality only have any sense at all as a distinction, so global doubt makes no sense, even to a lucid dreamer; to know/feel that all this is a dream is already to have a sense of reality.
This just means global doubt couldn't be a baby's first thought.
1) We don't know enough about consciousness to know if there is such a thing as a "first thought"
2) The adult is still free to wonder if she might have been mistaken in her former confidence about wakefulness
3) Sellars probably does undermine the argument from illusion, which means we're talking about sense data, not dreams.
Of course. If I think, "all this is a dream" as anyone can, it is to hypothesise a wakefulness that is absent.
But if all this is a dream, then a hypothesis, (that all this is a dream) within a dream is doubly dreamy, not dreamily realistic.
Quoting frank
I await with interest your spelling out the difference between sense data and dreams, without recourse to reality.
True, but global skepticism does not positively assert that this is a dream, and so is not hypothesizing anything.
Quoting unenlightened
That's an interesting challenge, but I'm not sure why you're setting it for me. I endorse Sellars' attack on the argument from illusion. What you're pointing out is exactly what undermines it.
Sellars does nothing for global skepticism, though. For the doubter "real" is simply honorific. Comprehension of the concept of error is grounded in the one thing no thinking entity can doubt: "Cogito"
To construct thought as the real (from doubt) is to make a prison of thought, from whence nothing else can be contacted, and even God is remote. Thus Cartesian certainty is exactly the dream from which one needs to awaken.
I disagree with your characterization of the Cogito as 'thought constructed as real from doubt.' But if we stipulate that we're going to call that a Cartesian view, then I agree with you.
But does that work as well with the other senses? Overly relying on vision can distort one's philosophical "picture".
Csalisbury brought up the sun as a counter example. One reason for thinking it's not just a small object in the visual field as opposed to far away is because the sun is a hot object that only manages not to burn (and irradiate us) because it's far away. An active volcano is not simply small in the visual field, it's at a distance or it would be burning us up.
The point here is that one's epistemology needs ot integrate information from all the senses across many different scenarios, and not just propose one possibility based on how vision works. Otherwise, you end up with a "distorted view" of how we experience and know about the world.
This is confused. Our perceptual experiences are about things or events, but the experiences themselves are a mental activity. There is an important distinction to make between the activity of perceiving and what is being perceived.
I'm interacting with some legos, seeing them, feeling them, putting them together. The interaction is not the legos. That's what I'm doing. The legs are something else as evidence by the fact that other people can interact with them.
Exactly. For example., It can't all just be a dream, because a dream implies a waking world. If I"m always in a dream, I can't fall asleep to dream or wake up to stop dreaming. So then dreaming collapses into what's real.
The only way around that is to propose that someone else (God I guess) is dreaming me, meaning that God must be able to wake up and realize she was dreaming. But that's just something we invent because we can distinguish between being awake and dreaming.
Similarly, it it were all just appearance, then appearance stops being an appearance. But we already have an appearance/reality distinction because there are appearances to contrast with what's real, just like we awake from the dream realizing it was a dream.
Reality is necessarily primary. All skepticism is parasitic upon it.
I think it's fair. The doubt is constructed via a conception of an evil demon; the indubitability of the self is concluded from the fact of the constructed doubt, and the reality of doubt as thought can only result in the reality of self as thought. I think, therefore I am... thought. There's nothing else to be(ing) at this point.
If only he had started with doing instead of thinking. I fuck about, therefore I am a dick. Which leads naturally to carnal knowledge as the fount of all wisdom.
Descartes never doubted his own existence. If you realize that you have never doubted your own existence, then you have put aside whatever ax you're grinding to really listen to the man.
I don't know. I had thought you were wanting to say there is a substantive point about perceptual error in the 'John and Pooh' example beyond what is merely an error of recognition that would seem to have no ontological bearing unless it is already presumed that what is seen is "what really is". To presume that would seem to beg the question in a context where an argument to support that presumption is being asked for.
Right. How near is "near". If the sun were really perceived to be "small and near" then presumably I would be able to touch it, and then perhaps I would perceive the vaporization of my hand.
The presumption of reality is primary, no skepticism in the Cartesian sense is possible without that presumption. Ancient skepticism consisted in the letting-go of investment in that presumption of reality and the fruitless questions that arise on account of it. This leaves me free to investigate without concern about what I might find.
Not sure if that helps, but it's the best I can do.
OK, I see what you mean now, I think. If I'm right you mean that the conditions under which you mistake pooh for John are not determinable, as they are in the case of seeing green as blue. That's true, but I would say that the former case is not a case of a correctable perceptual error; whereas the latter is, and without any need to say that it really is, independently of my perception, Pooh, not John. Of course we naturally do think there is a mind-independent reality that determines what is seen in both cases, but I think the main point I want to make is that that is true cannot be demonstrated by any argument.
I think Sellar's was, from what I have gathered from my modest reading of and about him, and from listening to his lectures, wanting to find some way to definitively justify what we do think about mind-independent reality, and I just don't believe that is possible. Of course that does not mean we should reject our most natural beliefs, because what is the viable alternative? I think the better question is not what positive justification we can find to secure them, but rather what possible reason we could have to doubt them.
You could well be right. I have no doubt you are a more competent interpreter of Sellars than I am.
As a aspiring stoic who really is just a cynic, I think by default I digress from continental or postmodern philosophy. Yeah, I'm missing out on a lot of fun but that doesn't really make me tick.
As I said in my previous post the title of the thead should read: Appearance vs Reality vs The World. Just seems like something you'd assume as a grounding aspect to the discussion.
An aspiring stoic who's a cynic is as good a candidate as any for studying 'pomo' philosophy. Helps you separate the wheat from the chaff. The sad thing is there's lots of good wheat you can't get elsewhere but there's soooo much chaff.