New article published: The Argument for Indirect Realism
To get things going on our articles web site I've published something I wrote some time ago about indirect realism.
https://blog.alistairrobinson.me/philosophy-archive/the-argument-for-indirect-realism
https://blog.alistairrobinson.me/philosophy-archive/the-argument-for-indirect-realism
Comments (224)
If we take Austin at his word here, he is wrong, both in the implication that we do not see a barn in any sense, and in the implication that any insistence that we do implies insistence that we therefore must see something immaterial.
It takes a brief detour into linguistics to show that this is so. We know from semantics that there are intensional verbs that create scopally ambiguous sentences. One such famous example, discussed by Quine, is ‘seek.’ Suppose I say, ‘I am seeking a unicorn.’
There are in fact two readings of this sentence, whose truth conditions can be rigorously separated and given different, precise, logical forms. One reading can be paraphrased:
(1) There is an x such that x is a unicorn and I am seeking x.
On this reading, of course, it is not possible to actually search for a unicorn, because there aren’t any, and so the sentence must be false. But there is another reading:
(2) I am seeking the following: an x such that x is a unicorn.
This is perfectly intelligible and perfectly possible. I can search for a unicorn even though unicorns don’t exist (in fact, we often search for things that don’t exist precisely in order to find out whether they exist).
‘See’ is an intensional verb in this same way, which has a scopal ambiguity similar to the de dicto versus de re distinction ((1) is de re; (2) is de dicto). So, if I say, ‘I see a barn,’ this can mean either (3) or (4).
(3) There is an x such that x is a barn and I see x.
Now this reading is clearly false, since there is no barn: only a church that looks like one. But Austin, and philosophers of perception generally, are insensitive to the second reading.
(4) I see (my visual experience is consistent with) the following: there is an x such that x is a barn.
That this reading is possible can be seen from the fact that without, it, the game in which people look at the clouds and ask, ‘what do you see?’ and say, ‘I see a man,’ ‘I see a shoe,’ and so on, would make no sense. In such situations the de re reading is always false: there is never an x such that x is a man and one sees x in the clouds, because there are no men where the players are looking in the sky, only clouds. Yet we can make perfectly true statements such as ‘I see a man,’ pointing at a cloud, on the latter reading. This is not a deviant way of speaking at all. Note that these are structural ambiguities that arise systematically, and are in no way ad hoc, for which semanticists offer accounts.
So, in correcting myself, after I find out that the purported barn is actually a church, there are actually two things I can say, depending which of the two readings is intended. On the one hand, I can say, ‘I was wrong. I didn’t see a barn at all; I actually saw a church.’ But on the other hand, I can say, ‘I saw a barn, but there turned out to be no such thing — just a church.’ Both these responses are perfectly intelligible, and we actually know the structural reasons why they are. Now Austin, and most philosophers, not only do not give the second reading its fair due, but also seem to exclude its very existence. This is unfortunate, and I think it has to do with metaphysical presuppositions, and an insensitivity to linguistic analysis (unfortunately, quite common in ‘ordinary language philosophers’).
This is crucial for the sense datum dispute. To say that one saw a shrinking object is not to commit oneself to saying ‘there is an object such that it was shrinking and I saw it.’ In eagerly trying to reject the latter interpretation, one wrongly rejects the more crucial point made by the indirect realist, which is that ‘I see a shrinking table’ is perfectly intelligible whether or not there actually is a table that is actually shrinking. So on the de dicto reading, one can in fact say, on one reading, ‘I saw something shrinking.’ You just have to make clear which meaning is intended — one way it is true, the other way false. The direct realist is wrong that there is no sense in which it is true.
What this means is that although the indirect realist may have a tendency to hypostatize the shrinking table, i.e. to treat it on a de re reading as if there really were a thing that was shrinking, this misstep nevertheless leaves the importance of their philosophical point untouched, which is that even linguistically, we are sensitive to the notion of a visual medium through which things are seen, and we can characterize that medium as distinct from the objects that medium purportedly reveals to us. Direct realists are wrong to the extent that they deny or downplay this (the ‘one step removed’ that you talk about). The visual medium, the experiential field, is something to be spoken abut in its own right, and it has properties that vary independent of the object. We cannot just skip over it and pretend the objects are ‘just there’ for us with no more to do. That is not a viable philosophical position, and if a direct realist is forced to claim it is, so much the worse for his position.
This, then, is the kernel of truth in indirect realism that the direct realist is insensitive to and wrong about. You phrase the debate in terms of direct versus indirect realism, and in so doing imply that other alternatives, in particular idealism and skepticism, are not worth considering; but leaning toward the skeptical view myself, I’m in a somewhat privileged position to speak about the faults of both types of realism without the bias that attends trying to defend one’s own favored position. Indirect realists correctly claim that perception is mediated in a far less trivial way than the direct realist is willing to grant; direct realists correctly claim that there is no sense in which there is a two-step perceptual process that takes one from one immediate object to another mediate one.
Next I’ll take the Heidegger quote.
If we take Heidegger at his word, what he says is false. ‘We never…?’ We certainly do. We are met with visual impressions all the time that we aren’t sure what to make of, and so we do not first see them as determinate objects with specific significances, but a mess that we’re not quite sure what to do with (‘What the hell am I looking at?’). One problem here is that philosophers (and this goes for your paper as well, though interestingly not Heidegger’s quote which unusually focuses on sound) are overly accustomed to speaking primarily of visual perception, which is unfair to the full range of our experiences: visual perceptions are unique in that they, far more than those in other sensory modalities, seem (in my opinion, give the illusion) that they simply grasp objects the way they are without any further ado. Of course, even in vision, this is not only not always true, but is in fact never true (see below on this).
But the case is far easier to see with sensory modalities classically considered more ‘subjective,’ such as smell. We so much more rarely smell things and immediately know what sort of specific thing that we are smelling that, if philosophers focused on cases of smell rather than vision, I think none of them would be tempted to say the sorts of wrong things that Heidegger does on this subject. Of course I may encounter an aroma as the smell of jasmine or the sell of chocolate chip cookies; but there are so many manifold smells that confront me just as weird, unidentifiable sensations, ones that I’m not sure how to interpret and will likely never smell again. These confront me not as the smell of particular objects, but rather as olfactory impressions upon me: ones that are painful or pleasant, imbue me with certain sensory affections, and so on, but that I cannot pin down. And when I do, this process can take, not milliseconds as in the case of veridical vision, but often whole seconds, even minutes or hours. These sorts of cases destroy the illusion that I simply ‘smell things as they are;’ there is a laborious process of piecing together, or projecting, what I smell. Here the direct realist is wrong, and the indirect realist correct.
In the case of vision, as I’ve implied above, the situation is actually the same: we never simply see things right away as ‘what they are’ without further ado. There is again a laborious process of interpretation, but one that we are so well attuned to that in many cases it takes only milliseconds, and we are not consciously aware of it happening. We can actually measure how long this takes with modern physiological techniques, and in the lab we can purposely mess up the interpretive process that projects some object out of sensory impressions. If Heidegger were right, there would be no such process to mess up in the first place, since we first see the object, and only then do we abstract to sensation. And yet even outside the lab, our attempts at inferring from some sensation to some projected object go wrong, not only with outright hallucinations, but also e.g. when looking at surfaces when we can’t tell whether they’re flat or cornered (or for that matter, in seeing rainbows — there is a sense in which a rainbow is an object that we see, and a sense in which it is not, and it arises due to a curiosity in our visual mechanisms). It should also be noted that our modern laboratory equipment was not the advent of this realization: Schopenhauer said as much before modern psychology was a real discipline, and he had many examples of such ‘messing up’ of the visual interpretive process that you could perform for yourself purposely on a child’s allowance. The ‘remove’ that the indirect realist speaks of is very real, and you can see it for yourself in the process of its happening and its breaking down. Not only that, but ontogenetically we must learn how to see, and so the direct realist needlessly privileges adult humans with fully functioning visual capacities that have had years of practice at what they do, they who have forgotten how hard it was to unscramble the ‘blooming, buzzing confusion.’ It is almost as if someone literate thought that in seeing words, we just ‘see their meaning for what it is’ as a perceptual matter, and denied that there was really any process involved in constructing their meaning (note that for the literate person, seeing the meaning of a word, too, requires no conscious effort). Visual perception is much like reading. There is in this sense very much an ‘inference,’ though of course it is not always, not even usually, a conscious one or one of ratiocination.
In other words, when you say this:
You are speaking falsely. And your comment about only awareness being relevant does not salvage you, since this can be brought easily to awareness by messing up the inferential process, or even in the case of smells that take minutes or hours to recognize.
Now, as to your comments on the duck-rabbit:
This passage is to me bewildering, because I think that the duck-rabbit shows exactly the opposite of what you want it to show. In the case of the duck-rabbit, we’re faced with a situation in which it makes no sense to say that you just see the picture immediately as it is, because there is no such way that it is (if by this we mean among the alternatives between a duck and a rabbit). In fact, in switching from one to the other, you can see the inferential process in action. All that’s relevant to the switch is that process — the picture hasn’t changed relevantly. Yet if, as the direct realist claims, what we see are simply things, this would be impossible. Second, I think you are wrong to say that we exclude other ways of seeing it: it is possible in working visually around the duck-rabbit image to hold it in limbo between its duck and rabbit gestalts, and the visual sensation in that case becomes very odd, and not at all in keeping with how the direct realist claims visual experience should look or function generally. The comment about the indirect realist making perception too passive is also odd: it is usually in my experience the indirect realist who emphasizes the activity of perception, and the direct realist who wants to minimize one’s role in perceiving in order to maximize the role of the object: we simply see things as they are, and thus there is little role for perception other than to just open us up to that way. For the indirect realist, the task of perception is far more laborious: given a stew of impressions upon the senses, one has to cobble together the object, not just receive it as is. And in doing so, one of course can cobble together either a rabbit or a duck, and then switch at will between the two processes, changing the perception without changing any ‘object.’ How is that possible, if perception ‘immediately’ just sees what is there?
Now the kicker is, everything is a duckrabbit. So I also think this is in error:
They are the paradigm. The duck-rabbit in one sense exists at the periphery; but in another sense it does so precisely because it shows you in a visceral way what is always going on. That we have perceptual mechanisms that tend to immediately prefer one interpretation does not in any way mean that there is no interpretation, via precisely the medium that the indirect realist speaks of.
Finally, I want to talk about hallucination. This is important because while I believe that many of the direct realist claims above are empirically wrong, coming from false claims about linguistics or how perception works, this is where I think that the position generally shows itself to be internally incoherent, that is, not tenable even according to its own claims.
This move to the distinction between genuine and ostensible visual experience is one that eventually the direct realist always seems forced to make in response to the uncomfortable fact that hallucinations happen. Now, this puts the direct realist in a really foul position. The reason is that, the direct realist must simultaneously claim that (1) hallucination can, at least at some points, be phenomenologically indistinguishable from veridical perception (as you happily concede, and though some deny this, I like you don’t take that denial seriously in lieu of serious argument); (2) that therefore there can be phenomenologically indistinguishable states that still differ as to whether or not they are states of perception. What this means is that, if we add a few plausible assumptions, the direct realist cannot, in principle, and according to his own claims, tell the difference between ostensible and genuine perception, ever. The reason is of course that there is no way to tell such a difference if the only distinguishing evidence one can have between the two is phenomenological, and ex hypothesi the direct realist is forced to admit that no such evidence can possibly exist. It follows that the direct realist not only never knows when he is perceiving anything, but cannot know; it is impossible. That is to say, no evidence that one could possibly have for perception is such that it distinguishes between veridical perception and a long, coherent, constructed dream. This spells a problem for the direct realist in two ways: (1) how does he know so much about perception, that he can give us a whole theory about it, when he has never experienced one case of it that he can in principle tell it apart from cases that are not perception? (2) What on Earth is even the relevance of his metaphysical thesis about the objectivity and perceiver-independence of objects, if all perceptual experience is equally coherent and behaves experientially the same way whether that status obtains or not?
Now, there are many answers to these worries, but I have never heard one that comes close to being adequate.
Thank you for writing this article and taking the time to read my criticisms.
But thanks for reading, TGW. These are penetrating criticisms that deserve to be addressed, so I'll try and respond in the coming days. Generally, I agree with much of what you say and think the article is consistent with it; our fundamental disagreement I think is less about direct/indirect and more about realism/anti-realism, if you see what I mean.
Indeed. Realism is a metaphysical point: any object defined itself. This doesn't have any empirical manifestation and so is not visible in perception (and so dreams are, in the moment, indistinguishable from "the real world." ).
The telling of dreams from the "real world" does not happen by "realism," but rather by our experiences of what is a dream and what is not; the (experienced) relation of our experiences to other experiences.
The direct realist actually maximises the object in experience. When the direct realist argues perception is "immediate," they are not suggesting experience plays no role in the experience of the object, but rather that there are no extra state of representation to the object in experience. Anytime someone experiences an object, what they experience is that nature of the object. What someone experiences when they perceive an object isn't merely a representation creation of there bodies. They see the object as it is.
So everything is, indeed, a duckrabbit. And a duck on its own. And a rabbit it on its own. And some unclear shape which isn't yet known. Any of which are immediately present in the experience someone who perceives the object in the given manner.
The point is, by the direct realist's own logic, he cannot tell dreams apart from waking by experience. Hence why the dreaming argument is so annoying to the direct realist: it's not that his enemies invent wild scenarios for him; he brings them upon himself.
The direct realist has nothing to be concerned about though, for whether or not they are dreaming is of no consequence. Direct realism is not an argument over whether or not any particular experience is a dream or not.
It is a logical point about existence, that states are defined in themselves, and a logical point about the perception of objects, that any perceived object is how it is present in experience. Pick out any experience. It is inconsequential to the direct realist. Dream or not, something manifests in experience.
If its a dream, well, no object of the "real world" is perceived and so it holds no consequence for arguments about when an object of the "real world" is perceived. On the other hand, if an object is perceived, then its nature (as far as the person perceives it) present in their experience. Nothing conflicts with the direct realist's position. Direct realism was never a means of judging "what is real." There is no method for that, as we are always stuck within whatever experience we have.
A direct realist has nothing to fear because knowing what is and is not a dream is irrelevant to their point. It is a question without significance because, no matter what happens, a person only has their experience to distinguish dreams and the world. Trying to find some an object, something independent of experience, which shows what is a dream and what is not is absurd: unperceived objects don't show anyone anything. Any knowledge or showing involves someone experiencing.
Trying to get outside experience, with respect to perceived objects, is exactly what direct realism avoids- perceived objects are experienced as they are. If one perceives an object, it is by experience.
Nonetheless, I'm coming to realize just how preliminary arguments like the ones in the article are. They do good work in 'demolition' as you put it, and only begin to point out 'where to go next' as it were. And there are indeed, issues with that demolition itself. TGW, as much as I disagree with his general outlook, for example, make some excellent points which do need to be addressed. I think you're entirely right, for example, to take 'inferential' accounts of perception to ask, but rather than discard with inference altogether, what I suspect is needed is a reintegration of inference as something like an 'additional layer' of perceptual experience which can work in tandem with the more 'primordial perception' which your own arguments seem to want to tend towards. I think one of the challenges of future accounts of perception will precisely to show how inference can function in a 'top-down' manner upon the more 'bottom-up' conceptions of perception which are very in vogue at the moment.
There will need to be a dialectical integration of concept formation with perceptual exploration that will complicate any straight forward move to ground perception in the body, etc. This is where I think the trend toward 'embodiment' and so on is ripe for another revolution: one which will show how idealities can structure our perceptual capacities even as they have their genesis from out of that perceptual ground. In other words, articles like yours will need to be seen to constitute the first part of a two-step account of perception: the first consisting in the rejection of the naive 'sense data' accounts of perception wherein perception is a matter of inferential extrapolation from brute sense data, and the second consisting of a recuperation of inference as that which operates as an 'expanded' or extra modality of perception which can enhance and augment the 'primary processes' of perception as given in embodied accounts.
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Second, I think TGW is entirely right to highlight the autonomous role of sensation with respect to perception. The challenge is to accommodate this autonomy without falling back into the old paradigm of sense data/inferentialism. There's been some really good stuff written on this matter by philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas, Alphonso Lingis, and more recently, Tom Sparrow. To draw on Lingis however, as he points out - with respect to the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty in particular, "what is lacking in the phenomenology of perception is sensation... [P]henomenology, making perception primary, veers toward a certain idealism. Is not something lost, in the measure that sensation becomes the perception of a sense - that by which sensation is sensuous? The exposure to the field of the sensuous is not only a capture of messages, things tapped out on our receptors; it is contact with them in their resistance and materiality, being sensitive to them, susceptible to being sustained and wounded by them. Sensation also means feeling pleased, exhilarated, or being pained by the sensible. A sentient subject does not innocently poise objects about itself as its decor, it is not only oriented by their sense; it is subject to them, to their brutality and their sustentation."
Thus, against Merleau-Ponty's argument that to perceive is to see a figure against a background, Lingis argues that "the sensible field does not consist only of configurations against a background of potential things, or instrumental connections, or paths and planes. There is also an unformed prime matter.... Sensibility occurs in a medium which is pure depth, but not empty space; filled with qualitative opacity. It has no contours, does not present itself through profiles, does not have sides, is depth without surfaces. It is neither delimited, nor positively without limit: it is indefinite, apeiron ... Colors concretize in a chromatic medium, solids and vapors form in the density, sounds emerge in the sonorous element.... The things do not crystallize along the axes of a space-time framework, or at the intersections of instrumental pathways; they solidify in a depth-in the day, in the atmosphere, in the density and din of the world." (Lingis, Sensation)
A phenomenology of sensation, rather than perception, would have us pay attention to these un-phenomenal 'vapours' that cannot themselves be captured by the intentional structure perception (one wonders if this would be a 'phenomenology' any more...). There is, in other words, a double challenge that the phenomenology of perception needs to meet. The first is with respect to the role of conceptuality and inference, which cannot be so easily discarded as one would like. The second is the challenge that sensation poses, which also cannot be captured by the strictures imposed by the perception of 'things'. I like to think of it in terms of a continuum which runs both forward and backward, looking something like this: sensation <-> perception <-> inference. Anyway, the point of this is to say that while I agree entirely with the spirit of your article, one must be careful of the sorts of conclusions that we can draw from it: is inference the 'enemy', or must we instead rethink the role of inference in perception? Equally with sensation - is sensation the equivalent of sense-data, or is sensation more complex, more interesting that that?
*Attached is a link to Lingis's article on Sensation, which is a great read in itself, and speaks to some of TGW's concerns here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_WcK7Wdttxqc19fWm1SXzFDcVU/view?usp=sharing (Google Drive, pdf, 12 pages)
Thank you for the detour into linguistics. It's very usfeful. I attempted to bring out the same point in my brief discussion of the word "see". It is, as you say, perfectly intelligible to say you see a face in the clouds (maybe that would have been a better example than a scintillating scotoma). It is this distinction that I am claiming is missed by the indirect realist, who thereby finds that all we ever see is faces in the clouds, where some correspond to real objects and others do not. Because the de re sense is privileged (certainly by realists), faces in clouds, hallucinations, and shrinking tables are thoughtlessly taken to be objects of perception rather than in various ways constituting perceptual experiences (in the same way that the pain constitutes a pain experience rather than being an object of awareness in a perceptual sense).
So I agree with most of this:
But I don't think direct realists make that claim. Their point is that the sense in which one sees something shrinking, or sees a face in the clouds, does not permit the indirect realist to say that one always only sees a perceptual intermediary, precisely because, as you say, it does not entail that ‘there is an object such that it was shrinking and I saw it.’
I agree that we can speak about the visual experiential field in its own right, and that we can pay attention to it phenomenologically. The point is that this medium, as you call it, is not a barrier between ontologically independent subjects and objects, a screen on to which outer objects are projected, or a channel between mind and world or a priori and a posteriori. It is not a veil, but a reciprocal relation, which is essential to perception even if one sees things that are not there.
Instead of saying that "we are sensitive to the notion of a visual medium through which things are seen", I think it is better to say that we are sensitive to perception as a process of interaction that can go wrong or that we can attend to in its own right. This is a better way of putting it because the notion that we see through a medium is borderline incoherent: it implies an intervening something of which seeing is independent, something like an old window with warped glass. But what could it be to see without such a medium? Of course, there would be no seeing at all, because what you are calling a medium actually constitutes vision.
This means that the indirect realist cannot, after all, justifiably say that we are one step removed. We may be one step removed in those moments when we attend to the geometry of vision, as when you see the person on the other side of the street as a centimetre tall. In the article I call this a snapping out of normal, smooth, successful perception. And there are also times when we haven't been able to snap in to successful perception ("what the hell am I seeing?") But it cannot be drawn from this that we are generally one step removed from the things we perceive, except by assuming a dualism and a head-bound epistemology.
But what does "mediated" mean here? It all hinges on how one characterizes the fact that we see faces in clouds or hallucinations or mirages: if perception's being mediated means that it has its own properties that can be studied independently of the properties of whatever is perceived, and is perspectival, partial, subject to error, and relative to the perceiver's specific evolved physiology, his cultural milieu, his motivations and affect, and so on--if this is what "mediated" means then the direct realist can happily agree that perception is mediated. But the "direct" in "direct realism" is not the opposite of this sense of "mediated". The sense of "direct" is: having no object of perception intervening between subject and object.
You partially defend indirect realism but I notice you do not defend the main arguments that I criticize in the article. Maybe you think it is a trivial point, that we do not see intervening objects. I don't think so, and I made some attempt to explain why. Such comments as this, from a neuroscientist, are still very common:
But after reading what you say about unconscious inference, I suspect that you have more sympathy with this view than I at first thought:
First, I don't think it's true that we are often met with indeterminate impressions. Most often when I say "what the hell am I looking at", I am seeing something meaningful yet unstable or anomalous. An example: back in the summer I was at the top of a hill in the early evening of a sunny day, looking down on a pine forest, and I was amazed to see a patch of luminous glowing yellow birch trees surrounded by the dark pines. It didn't make sense--there are no birch trees around here it wasn't autumn--and it didn't look quite real. But then I suddenly saw the spectacle for what it was. These were not different trees at all; it was just a small area of the fairly uniform pine forest directly illuminated by the sunlight shining through a gap between the hills, the rest of the forest being in shadow.
Are there really times when what we see is inchoate and meaningless? I think this happens rarely. I suspect this goes for smell, touch, and hearing as well (though I take your point that I've fallen into the habit of privileging vision). Smell is not intentional to the extent that vision is, in fact is probably quite rarely so. But it is meaningful all the same. Familiar smells go unnoticed, while new smells stand out against this background; this is a useful evolved adaptation. For a smell to be meaningful there need not be an awareness of what the object is that is giving off the odour. I can be reminded of a time in my past just by a smell that I haven't identified. The olfactory impressions you mention are meaningful precisely in that they are imbued with qualities of newness or familiarity, pleasantness or unpleasantness, etc., in the way you describe.
Your account of the "laborious process of interpretation" and of unconscious inference is supremely Cartesian. I don't believe perception works this way. If we are meant to take "inference" seriously, it is hard to see how it could be unconscious, despite the popularity of the concept among psychologists. And if you are merely gesturing towards what is happening in the brain and the perceptual system as a whole when we perceive things, I think there are good reasons to think that this is not of the nature of internal construction with the building blocks of raw sensation.
From the way you describe perceptual learning, it looks like you really do mean that objects are inferred, that perception is a process of inference, a la Russell:
It is very clear that Russell's primary conception is one of full-blown conscious mental interpretation, only one that eventually becomes "habit", thereby slipping beneath explicit consciousness. I can't make much sense of this. I can see neither how an inference can become habitual and yet remain an inference, nor how one can seriously maintain that perceptual learning, prior to habitual perception, involves conscious inference from sensory premises to perceptual conclusion, when everything we know about perception tells us otherwise.
So I'll return to the possibility that you mean "inference" metaphorically, to describe what the brain is doing in perception. Does this mean that unconscious brain processes can, like inferences, be mistaken? Does the use of "inference" mean you think there is something analogous to inference carried out by cognitive modules in the language of thought, as in computationalist theories?
But without delving too deeply into unconscious inference, I could take you to mean simply whatever the brain or perceptual system has to do to construct a meaningful perceptual field from the impoverished input of the senses. I take issue with this as well. I am much more sympathetic to Gibson's ecological approach to perception, in which all the information required for perception is in the environment rather than being built up in the head, and where the function of vision is not to supply the brain with material for synthesis, but to allow the perceiver to act in its environment. Of course, this environment is an environment for us--what we perceive is its affordances--so this might be thought to weaken the element of realism, but the crucial point is that perception requires no mediation: we are attuned to an environment that contains invariant patterns and structures that constitute all the information we need to perceive.
You suggest that the direct realist ignores the temporality of perception, but a theory of direct perception such as Gibson's is acutely sensitive to this. Perception develops over time as the perceiver explores her environment and seeks to maintain an optimal sensorimotor engagement as conditions change (and as they are changed by her). It is not that everything is just there, straight away, exactly as it really is. The point is a quite different one: that perception is a relation of reciprocity between agent and environment and between sensory detection and action. What makes this direct is that there is nothing intervening, nothing separating the two relata into independent domains.
I'm not familiar with the studies of infant perceptual learning, but I'll note that some psychologists do take the ecological approach. Intuitively, I see no reason to accept that the need to learn how to see entails that perception is essentially inferential. After all, when we become expert at some activity--driving or playing an instrument--what has happened is not that the laborious step-by-step process we had to go through as novices has now got a bit faster and more habituated; rather, we are in an entirely different mode of activity.
You say that the "remove"--the separation of mind and world or subject and object of perception--becomes apparent when perception breaks down. I would say rather that there is only such a remove when perception breaks down (or in "snapping out", etc.).
However I don't want to say that inference has no place in perception. Sometimes I actively and consciously try to work out what I'm seeing, actually inferring by induction from the characteristics of my visual field, thereby also guiding my perception. But this is not what you and the indirect realist mean by inference.
As might now be clear, I didn't mean passive in the Cartesian or Kantian sense, as opposed to the active synthesizing of the manifold by the understanding. I meant it in Gibson's or Merleau-Ponty's sense, as opposed to the constant probing movements of a perceiver in an environment, relative to its affordances for action. Indirect realists imagine a passive sensory receptivity borne by a single static eye, the stimuli from which are only then worked up into perception by an active cognition--because for the indirect realist, the perceiver as bodily subject or situated organism is passive, its only relevant positive activity taking place behind the veil and in the head.
As part of this active, probing bodily subject, our perceptual systems do not just receive, but obtain stimulation.
Now, about the duck-rabbit.
Aside from my objections to the notion of interpretation, I think this might be right, and I may have to abandon the position I took on this particular issue. I agree, we always or most often see under an aspect, i.e., see as.
I may say more, and I still have to tackle your bit about hallucination.
I think, in the case of the scintillating scotoma, or an after-image or color patch, that a de re reading is also intelligible. That is, since you only refer to the object seen qua visual impression, I think it can be true to say 'there is an x such that x is an after-image and I see x.' I don't think objects in the wide sense have to be 'located' anywhere in particular, and it's perfectly fine to treat things in the visual field as objects and talk about them that way. That is not the same as seeing a face in the clouds: when someone says this, they're not committed to there being any face at all, except metaphorically; but I think you are in some sense committed to saying there is an after-image (look, it's right there). The after-image and scintillating scotoma are not supposed to be extra-visual objects in the first place, like a face is.
I see no reason, other than philosophical prejudice, not to say the same about splotches of color and so on in every case. Here, of course, you often do have to take a sort of abstract and artificial view of your own perception to say something like 'I see a red patch of color' and mean it, but that's fine, there's no reason to rule it out on that account. Day to day though, I would say people don't do this sort of thing very often -- it usually happens when something's wrong with your eyes or you for some reason are relaxed and curious, and want to take an objective distance toward your own experience.
Quoting jamalrob
I need to clarify a few more things here. De dicto and de re readings of these verbs can be distinguished, but that doesn't mean they're mutually exclusive. Suppose again I say 'John is seeking a unicorn.' That can be true de dicto: he has his 'sights' set on finding some unicorn or other; it can be true de re: there is some unicorn (say, Charlie), and John is seeking him; it can be true both: John is seeking Charlie, and since he knows Charlie is a unicorn, he has his sights set on finding a unicorn, too; it can be true de re but not de dicto: John is seeking Charlie, but doesn't know Charlie is a unicorn, and so he is seeking an x such that x is a unicorn, but does not have his sights set on finding a unicorn; and it can be true de dicto but not de re: John has his sights set on finding a unicorn, but not on any individual in particular (rather he just wants to find some unicorn or other, he doesn't care which).
The reason this is important is because it is possible to see something de dicto without seeing anything de re. If I shut my eyes and imagine a house, I can with propriety say on the de dicto interpretation, 'I see a house.' This can be true, even if de re there is no x at all such that I see x: I don't see anything in this sense, since my eyes are closed. But the reverse is not true: you cannot see something de re without seeing something de dicto. It is true that I might see a church de re, and not see a church de dicto: I only see a barn de dicto. But nevertheless, it is impossible, given that I see something, that I do not see something de dicto. So in this respect, the indirect realist is perfectly correct. And they are perfectly correct in claiming that it is possible to see 'the same thing' in one sense regardless of whether you are hallucinating or not, and regardless of what the object 'actually' is.
Quoting jamalrob
It depends on what you mean by 'objects,' but okay. And certainly phenomenalists like Ayer are far more sophisticated and subtle than this crude criticism would suggest. I also think, as I said, that it is possible in analyzing your own experiences to objectify them and make of them de re objects. And of course, it's perfectly intelligible to speak of the experiences themselves as such objects.
Quoting jamalrob
Okay, yes, I agree with this. But I'm not sure the hypostatization of the sensory intermediary in these cases is really what's crucial about indirect realism insofar as it's a criticism of direct realism. In other words, the fact that the indirect realist's positive thesis is incorrect doesn't really help the direct realist in any way, who will be beset by the same problems.
Quoting jamalrob
I'm not so sure he can. You may think he can, or want very badly that he can because it would make you more comfortable with the position, but these are not all the same thing. Usually trying to account for mediation leads direct realists into incoherencies that invite dreaming arguments, and so on.
Quoting jamalrob
It doesn't matter how often it happens. That it can happen, period, is a problem for the direct realist. And of course you can make it happen once you figure out how.
Quoting jamalrob
Yes.
Quoting jamalrob
'Inference' is misleading, in the sense that I think there's no transference from one sort of thing to another. In brief, I do not really think there is such a thing as perception as philosophers talk about it. If you like, direct realism could be an attempt to logically deduce what qualities perception must have if it is to exist, and it rightly criticizes indirect realism for not sticking to those qualities. But then, since direct realism is internally incoherent, this shows that perception is internally incoherent.
If I had to pick a word, I would say that objects are projected, not inferred or perceived or anything like that. If I could speak with more liberty, I would simply say, there are no objects. Period. There are experiential movements, some of which settle into more or less regular patterns. There is nothing they are 'about' or 'aim at.' They contain their telicity internally, in pleasure and pain.
Quoting jamalrob
It doesn't even matter. Even if we move the goalposts, the fact remains that sometimes you do literally infer what you are perceiving consciously, as when trying to figure out what a certain smell is. That in most cases the process isn't a conscious one seems to me metaphysically irrelevant. You have a lot of work to do in order to see anything. Sometimes it's conscious work, sometimes not -- so what?
Quoting jamalrob
Honestly, I don't see how an indirect realist in any way, shape or form is less able than a direct realist to talk about, account for, or ascribe importance to active understanding and affordance in this way. I suspect this is more of a vague feeling of the 'character' of the positions that doesn't amount to much.
Quoting jamalrob
There are two theses held by the direct realist, both of which I think are wrong. These are that experience is:
1) teleological, aims naturally at something outside of it, and sometimes fails to hit its target;
2) normative, has a 'job to do,' and so sometimes can 'fail at it.' Furthermore, there are 'right' and 'wrong' ways to perceive (there must be, since there is a way the world is, and a way it's presented, and since these are separate, the latter is good only insofar as it somehow hooks up with the former)
We can talk about why I think these are both wrong, and why so much of the mistaken realist metaphysics depends on them; but I just wanted to say that this is where your 'snapping out of it' language comes from, and the only background against which it makes sense. I suspect what is at work is taking certain phenomenological or practical qualities of experience and mistaking those qualities for metaphysical ones -- that because, for example, some perception is felicitous or useful, it therefore is not just that, but further 'real' (insert some story about how there are evolutionary pressure to make perception 'good,' and so on).
That, of course, is more deeply Cartesian than anything you criticize.
P1. The table looks as if its top has two acute angles and two obtuse angles
P2. The tabletop's real shape is rectangular; it does not really have two acute angles and two obtuse angles
P3. If there sensibly appears to a subject to be something which possesses a particular sensible quality then there is something of which the subject is aware which does possess that sensible quality
C1. Therefore the real table is not what we see
C2. Therefore what we see is a mental image, copy or representation of the real table
Your linguistic considerations still don't take us from P2 to the negative conclusion C1. This is because you have not shown P3, the Phenomenal Principle, to be true. What you have done, I think, is supported a weaker formulation:
If there sensibly appears to a subject to be something which possesses a particular sensible quality then there is sometimes something of which the subject is aware which does possess that sensible quality.
This is clear from what you say here:
But on another reading--accepting that the shape with two acute angles and two obtuse angles remains an object of perception even when we're not paying attention to it--you have successfully defended the Phenomenal Principle, and in that case maybe my formulation of The Argument is actually invalid: if seeing a shape with two acute angles and two obtuse angles does not in fact exclude seeing a rectangular tabletop--so that one can see both, as objects in the wider sense, at the same time--then C1 does not follow from the premises.
Either way, the conclusion that "the real table is not (ever) what we see" is unsupported. Do you agree with this? Or have you in fact been arguing for the negative conclusion? I suppose your answer might be "it depends what you mean by 'the real table'".
Just to be clear, it is not merely the hypostatization of the sensory intermediary that I object to, but the claim that we cannot be perceiving what we think we are perceiving, or that we don't really see what is out there, or that we do not see objects that exist outside of our heads.
Quoting jamalrob
Quoting The Great Whatever
Can you explain how the direct realist's position is in conflict with this kind of mediation? Positions that fail to acknowledge it are not those I am defending, and emotional attachment has nothing to do with it. And I think I have already shown how we can hold perception to be direct while remaining consistent with--perhaps even dependent on--a description of the particular way that perceivers get geared in to their surroundings. I do think this can be called a direct realism, but I don't care if the label is not entirely appropriate. I'm not here to defend "common sense realism".
Quoting jamalrob
But it does matter how often it happens. It does matter that meaningless sensation is atypical. The reason it matters is that the existence of a perceptual field with its own characteristics, one that does not always resolve in a phenomenally meaningful way, does not in any way suggest that in typical perception we do not get a direct grip on the things around us--does not, for example, suggest that we do not see tables directly. You think this does follow only because you assume this perceptual field to be a medium or barrier rather than part and parcel of perception, and the meaningless sensations to be the raw data for a mental synthesis.
Well, I made a point of describing conscious inferences in perception in my last post, so I am not claiming that inference has no place at all. What I object to is the idea, again expressed here, that this conscious inference is a special instance of a process that goes on all the time, for the most part unconsciously. Didn't you just backtrack on this point anyway?
Indirect realism is utterly at odds with ecological psychology, whose theory of perception is significantly called "direct perception" and whose pioneers and adherents explicitly pitch their theories against indirect realism, representationalism, cognitivism and the rest of that family of theories.
Dewey was a precursor of the approach, and likewise he explicitly opposed it to representationalism and the spectator theory of knowledge, both of which I take to be tied up with indirect realism.
It is not a vague feeling. It is simply the case that indirect realism is associated with, sits most easily alongside, and is most sympathetic to a cognitivist, mechanistic, passive, dualistic conception of what it is to perceive.
I can go in to more detail, but a couple of your responses here have been a bit impatient about this, so I'd like to see where you intend you go next. It's not enough to say you don't see how, "in any way, shape or form", indirect realism is incompatible with a view of perception that is famously in opposition to it. It might help if you say what you think indirect realism actually is.
Is this the indirect realist's conclusion? It certainly isn't if we're talking about people like Russell and Ayer. And certainly someone like Descartes never claimed that we do not see tables -- rather, he claimed that we saw them mediately, that is, via something else seen immediately, which are ideas presented to the mind. Note that even in your opening Hume quote, he says 'nothing can ever be present to the mind...' This does not mean that we do not perceive tables (Hume was ultimately a skeptic on this question, it seems to me). It means that they are not 'present to the mind' in the way that a direct realist thinks: rather, they are seen mediately, if at all. Insofar as the rest of your post is predicated on this historically dubious claim, you need to answer this before continuing.
Quoting jamalrob
You really need to have your feet held to the fire abut hallucination in order to see this. You cannot make your position live on promises.
Quoting jamalrob
What exactly does it matter whether it's conscious or not? We know it's happening, in either case.
Quoting jamalrob
Why, exactly? The fact that perception occurs via a perceptual medium doesn't seem to me to implicate anything about perception not being active, embodied, or whatever hip word you want to use. This is obvious from the fact that playing video games, which the realist does not want to describe the same sort of directly perceptual metaphysical import to as non-video-game seeing, operate pretty much the same way, as embodied, sensitive to the environment, relying on affordances, and so on. It seems to me that all these things are precisely what don't need any sort of direct, or realist, account to make sense. Just the opposite, they shift the focus to the process of experiencing itself, rather than putting all the weight on the object that the direct realist believes perception is there just to give us information about. Getting objective information about some external thing, indifferent to the medium by which this happens, is not at all what perception is like or about. Hell, we spend a good portion of our lives nowadays looking at electronic screens with purposely projected interfaces; even for the direct realist, much of what we live in is a projected sensory simulation. The indirect realist rightly points out that this is not metaphysically different from ordinary situations. That is, we in no sense began to lose touch with any reality when we began to look at computer screens more often.
This just seems patently untrue to me. Our sensory dealings with real entities are most often far more inter-sensory and somatic than can be the case with virtual entities. I can not only see the apple, I can touch it, feel its texture, hardness, taste it, experience its crispness, slice it, smash it, throw it and so on.
Even if a virtual environment were to be set up to simulate such a rich inter-sensory and somatic experience, I would still know that it was a simulation because I could, given the appropriate knowledge, describe exactly how it was achieved.
And video games still abide by the phenomenological if-then relations that characterize body movement, relations which remain somatic: if I move my hand/mouse in this way, my point of view will change accordingly. If I type out this string of instructions, that event will take place. Further, as Vicki Kirby warns, trying to institute a hard and fast divide between so-called 'real life' and VR simply redoubles the Cartesianism which embodiment tropes are meant precisely to avoid: "Thus far, the literature on VR/cyberspace, despite its attention to the vagaries of identity, remains committed to a recipe of self-present ingredients... The mind/body division [in this literature] presumes supplementation, articulation, interfacing, and progress, such that the body is figured as a tool or as an instrument of the mind. ... [Yet], there never was an unmediated integrity before difference. Instead of mind and body, the conjunction that assumes that difference happens at one interface, between entities, we might think the body as myriad interfacings, infinite partitionings—as a field of transformational, regenerative splittings, and differings that are never not pensive." (Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal, p. 148).
I would say that knowing something is a simulation would necessarily entail that you interacted with it differently than you would with something you presumed to be real.
I don't agree that we are justified in thinking that the everyday world is a simulation, because a simulation is normally understood to be both a simulation of something else and deliberately simulated by some agent.
In any case, I cannot agree that the fact, even if it were accepted, that Quoting The Great Whatever entails that such an explanation could be analogous to an explanation of how a merely simulated sensory environment works because the latter would be given in relation to the separate understanding of the physical and chemical dynamics of the real world, and could be exhaustively understandable in relation to those already achieved separate understandings; whereas any explanation of the former could only be given in terms of the aforementioned deliverances of the very sensory perception that it would be purporting to be explaining, and will always be limited by that fact, and hence could never be definitive or exhaustive.
This is interesting Streetlight, but I still think that the virtual space of video games is categorically different than natural perceptual space, even if not phenomenologically so. I think it is categorically different by virtue of its being able to be exhaustively explained in terms of the mechanisms by which natural space is simulated. It seems to me that it would cease to be able to be exhaustively explained only at a point where explanation is demanded for natural perceptual abilities.
I think there's certainly something to what you say here TGW, but I still cannot see any reason to think that natural space is simulated (although we might think of it as 'simulated') whereas virtual space is most definitely simulated, and so I remain unconvinced that they should not be thought to be categorically different.
Yes, the two cases are certainly analogous in that regard. Actually, this leads me to think of another dis-analogy, namely that we know that virtual space is contained by natural space, at least in the sense that experiences of it always occur in some localized region of natural space. Thus we know there is natural space outside, in the sense of surrounding, virtual space; and this is not the kind of thing that could be known about, or even makes sense in relation to, natural space.
Or envisage a 'virtual space parlour' where participants go to get 'hooked up'. We can say that everything that is going on in the virtual perceptual spaces of the participants is contained within the natural space bounded by the building that houses the parlour, even though the virtual 'events' are not 'happening' in the natural space.
The problem with this is such video game functions no differently to "real space." We may miss something occurring in virtual space just as readily as in "real space." It isn't necessary exhaustively explained(or rather, that should be, described) at all. Moreover, there is actually no such difference when considering our capacity to describe our the functioning of the world. That, for example, a biologist knows how some part if the body reacts with the world is no more or less exhaustive than the model that runs under the hood of a virtual world. And both are ruling of nothing more than what we happen to perceive about a world. Whether "virtual" or "real," our experience shows it insofar as we perceive it.
We may have more "exhaustive" descriptions of how a virtual world works, even to the point of being able to tell the precisely what happens at any point, but that's merely a function of happing to know more about a virtual world. Take away the expert's knowledge and it is just "uncertain" as the normal world. Players often have to learn how a virtual world functions through experience, much like our interaction with our "real" surrounding environment. We must not confuse the amount of knowledge we have for some "fundamental difference" of "existence."
Virtual space is actually categorically different than "real space." There are things is virtual space which aren't in "real" space. I am not a super man with a gun in real space. My hands on the controller aren't in the virtual world. I can't see my hands in the virtual world. In the real world, my body is unaffected by the recoil of my gun in the virtual world. Such difference, however, is always a function of the objects themselves and how they can interact with each other. The difference between the "real" an "virtual" world is not found in some abstracted quality of "real" or "virtual," but rather in the specific sensations themselves and how they relate to each other. When we say something is "real" or "virtual," we are actually talking about what it can to outside that moment of sensation; the ways something relates to the rest of our life. The difference between the real monster, who can snap your body in two and end your life, and the virtual monster, which can't touch you (no matter how many times it might kill the character you are controlling on the screen).
You say that "virtual space is actually categorically different than "real space." so I think you are agreeing with me, even though it might seem as though you are not.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
The question as to whether the two are ontologically different is an entirely different beast that I have not ventured to touch.
1. That I misrepresent indirect realism or ignore its strongest versions
2. That I falsely oppose indirect realism to active, embodied theories of perception
3. That I or the direct realist cannot answer the argument from hallucination
Oh don't get me wrong John - my point is that it's precisely because VR or video games are never 'purely' video games, because the 'space' involved when we interact with them is not at all reducible to the 'flat projection' which they seem to employ, that citing video games as an argument against the OP doesn't work. In some sense what I'm saying is that there is no such thing as a 'virtual space of video games', as if such a space could exist 'in itself'. Such a space always has roots in a corporeality without which 'experience' of it begins to come apart at the seams, as in the case of the nauseous simulator subjects.
One shouldn't have to 'side' with reality over virtual reality (as you are doing), or vice versa (in TGW's case), when the very line that demarcates the two is porous to begin with.
Don't we treat them as "metaphysically" different precisely on the basis of what we know about how the two experiences were causally mediated? We call the one object "real" and the other "virtual" because of the different stories we can tell about the causal circumstances in which they were perceived. Phenomenal indistinguishability seems irrelevant.
No more or less than someone who lived in the other world. When someone is "unplugged," there experience is changes to the point where they know their body is not in the virtual roller coaster, where they know the virtual roller coster is not wood and steel rising many metre in the air. They know their body in the 'real' world can't fall out and die when the a riding the virtual roller coaster.
Here there are no question of "exceptions." Both experiences are "real" (they exist) and, when someone is thinking about it, they have experience of the relationships of those experiences. They know what they see on the screen can't run their body through. The question "real" or "virtual" is a non-starter because we never encounter a situation where there is doubt about that. If we have the experience of a "real" or "virtual" world, we don't have any doubt on the matter; the idea is the particular experience of that instance.
So the dilemma you propose is a joke. Who cares if the computer in front of you is "real" or "virtual?" If all you are experiencing in the moment is the sensation of the computer, you are not making any sort of comment of whether the computer is "real" or "virtual." It has no relevance. If, on the other hand, you are making comment on whether the computer is real of virtual, which is to say how it relates casually to other sensation you have had or might have, then you either have your answer or can wait it out until the relevant experience emerges (of fails to emerge). There is no significant to the dilemma of is it "real" or "virtual." Just what are you expecting to find in trying to answer that question?
The "problem of hallucination" is of no problem to the direct realist. They have no care for whether any sensation is "real" or "virtual." To merely have a sensation doesn't say anything about a real or virtual world at any time. They aren't looking out at an object and using something about it to tell whether it is real or virtual. "Real" and "virtual" are measures of the relationships of different things people have encountered. They are always given in themselves in the first instance. We don't understand there to be a real or virtual world by looking at an object (e.g. roller coster), we do it by having experience which identifies them (e.g. that my body remains unharmed and untouched by the twisting metal of the crashing virtual roller coster).
Realists.
No, they don't. Whether or not something is of a virtual world or a real one makes no difference to them. What they care about is the presence of things regardless of experience.
The "real" world is merely, for less the thorough realists, the representation of a world which is there even when experience is not. Since hallucinations are drawn into the opposition to the world we are experiencing (e.g. that dragon Willow hallucinates isn't actually going to breath fire on us), they express the presence of a world (the one NOT experienced in the hallucination) which is present despite it being outside the experience of the person who is hallucination. Realist like talking about the "real" world so much because it is a (somewhat poor) example of how things are still there even when not in experience.
When a realist says: "but there is a real world," they are imploring how existing of things isn't dependent on experience. They aren't obsessing about some quality of real or virtual which makes a profound difference to our experience irrespective of our experience (that's an oxymoron).
Do you think so? If one believes that roller coasters are made out of thousands of tons of wood and metal, then to become unplugged is to be confronted with the realization that the roller coasters one had hitherto encountered were not real.
But regardless, the point remains that there'd be non-phenomenological reasons for distinguishing between real and unreal roller coasters.
If I gave the impression that I was "siding" "with reality over virtual reality' then it was probably due to poor expression on my part. I certainly agree that it may be possible in the future that the two will become phenomenologically indistinguishable, (but, does this indistinguishability apply only within the momentary experiences themselves?). So,to say the two might become phenomenologically indistinguishable is not, necessarily at least, to say that a participant would not know that she was a participant in a simulated reality. She might even be looking for immanent (that is immanent to the virtual experience itself, as opposed to the memory of having put on the equipment or whatever) distinguishing features that 'give away the game'.
Whatever we might think about the ontological or metaphysical statuses of the two experiences; I think that they can justifiably be said to be categorically different simply on the basis that we might think that people would know when they were leaving one and entering the other. It would always be the transitions from one to the other, if nothing else, that provides a phenomenological difference.
Although, is it plausible that it could reach a point where people might not (be able to) know they were leaving one and entering the other? Maybe....It certainly seems to have the potential to become a much more complex question than it might seem at first glance!
That's precisely what is under discussion, ins't it? I've proposed that the distinction between 'real' and 'fake' ought to be grounded in whatever causal story we are able tell about the circumstances of perception. So whether or not the unplugged world is considered to be 'real' is not a simple matter of whether it happens to be the world that we spend the majority of our time in, nor is it (necessarily) a matter of the discernment of some phenomenological distinction between the two. If the unplugged world is deemed to be fake, it will ultimately be deemed so on the basis of some story about how our sensory apparatuses are not causally related to anything like the objects we take ourselves to be perceiving.
But we weren't initially considering the possibility of being in "opposite-land", were we? We were initially just discussing the distinction between the objects we encounter in every day life vs. those we might encounter while hooked up to some virtual reality machine. That's where the causal stories will differ and ground the distinction between real and virtual objects.
As for the possibility that we are all living in the matrix, the possibility of global error is intelligible only against the conceptual backdrop of the appearance/reality (unreal/real) distinction. So I don't think you can leverage that possibility in order to invalidate that distinction without undermining your own argument.
1. That I misrepresent indirect realism or ignore its strongest versions
2. That I falsely oppose indirect realism to active, embodied theories of perception
3. That I or the direct realist cannot answer the argument from hallucination
1. That I misrepresent indirect realism or ignore its strongest versions
This is quite a good criticism, for which I am grateful. I have indeed failed to distinguish between two indirect realist positions:
A. We don't see everyday physical objects but merely internal representations
B. We do see everyday physical objects, but only indirectly
I think you're right to suggest that position B is at least as characteristic of indirect realism as A. This means that I've been attacking something different, a subset or merely a vulgarization of indirect realism.
First of all, I don't really mind the accusation that I've been attacking a vulgar form of indirect realism. As an entry into the direct-indirect realist debate, such an attack would be uncharitable--but that's not quite what I'm doing. Rather, I am critiquing a set of common prejudices that are operative in science and culture, by exposing their philosophical underpinnings.
And obviously position A is not merely a popular vulgarism, because real philosophers have argued for it. Looking again at Russell's version it's remarkable how easy it is for him to slip from one to the other, to be not quite clear on whether we are seeing physical objects by virtue of seeing representations, or seeing only the latter.
However, I do have my sights set on the stronger sorts of indirect realism too.
Claim B can be further divided between: (i) We see everyday physical objects through a medium, and (ii) We see everyday physical objects via intermediary objects such as mental representations. And I think that among the adherents of B, position (ii) is by far the most prevalent and characteristic, possibly because (i) is trivial or vague.
So I probably ought to concentrate on attacking B(ii). But I want to look at B(i), because that seems closest to your own view, or at least to the minimal version of indirect realism that you’re inclined to defend.
When touching a table-top, we can attend to it phenomenologically, discovering, for example, that without any movement of the fingers the wood has no textural feel at all, supplying only pressure. This is what you described as the medium that has its own properties: the way that we make contact with things in perception, which the direct realist apparently skips over. But who would conclude that we do not touch tables directly? Is the answer that this case is different because the surface of the table is contiguous with my skin, with nothing in between? But if this is all that is meant by direct, then of course all perception is indirect, so this cannot be what the direct-indirect dichotomy is about.
But maybe you will say that your perception of the table, qua table, is indirect, just as every other perception is; that the reason we do not say that touch per se is indirect is that "touch" and "see" are not quite parallel.
Be that as it may, the notion of a medium, and also that of directness, need some clarification. Surely one can speak of a perceptual medium that does not entail representations, inference, or sense-data, or sensations as raw input for the construction of models, and so on? Such a medium seems not to imply a relevant indirectness. Intuitively, a medium connects things as much as it separates them, and it encompasses both poles rather than standing between them like a more or less distorting window.
2. That I falsely oppose indirect realism to active, embodied theories of perception
I must admit I find this accusation puzzling. Indirect realism is almost synonymous with representational realism, which is also known as epistemological dualism. There is something out there, and a distinct something independently in here in my head that represents it.
Representational realism has it that the mind is essentially disembodied--hence the still-popular functionalism--and that its job is to manipulate representations. Perception is a function of mind, and a mental processes. Consciousness is an interior state standing in a linear causal relation with sensory input, mental inference and representation construction. The mind works with the sense-data that result from sensory impingements from the external world, but is logically disengaged from this world.
The argument from hallucination makes particularly clear the way that indirect realism introduces a chasm between mind and world, one that active embodied perceptual theories are designed to collapse. Hallucination is meant to show that perception is already complete without the external world. On this view, if there is an external world at all it is accidental. The only thing that can be certain, the only thing we can be confident in, is within us.
For indirect realism, to be a perceiver is to be a spectator. What is perceived is objects, and what we do in perception is observe them (notice how often the perceiver in the literature is called “the observer”). Merleau-Ponty, a great influence in active, embodied theories, argued repeatedly against this way of thinking about perception, the mind and consciousness:
It is not a coincidence that this looks so radically different from the language of indirect realism, all the way from Descartes and Locke to Russell, Ayer, and now Robinson. It is different because they have entirely different views of what it is to perceive. The indirect realist will admit that yes, we move about and do things, but to him this is irrelevant to perception, which through all of our activity remains an internal matter of building representations from sense-data caused by the stimulus of the purely receptive senses. Here, activity and embodiment, far from being essential to perception as Merleau-Ponty, the enactivists and the ecological psychologists believe, is incidental.
Gibson’s theory of ecological perception is particularly opposed to representationalism. For indirect realists, the environment supplies no information to perception, but merely neutral atomic stimuli specifiable by intrinsic physical metrics such as wavelength, out of which the mind ultimately constructs something meaningful. For Gibson, perception is the detection of meaningful information which is not in the mind, but in the environment itself, such that there is no need for anything like internal inference, an ongoing dynamic attunement and sensitivity to the environment being enough.
3. That I or the direct realist cannot answer the argument from hallucination
First, the argument from hallucination doesn't work. It simply does not follow from subjective indistinguishability and the fact that in hallucination the object of awareness is mental, that the objects of awareness in perception are always mental, or that objects of awareness in perception are perceived only through such intermediaries. In other words, phenomenal indistinguishability does not entail ontological indistinguishability.
Even in the “causal argument from hallucination” there is a hidden premise, which is that in hallucination the subject is directly presented with a sense-datum or mental image, a conception clearly deriving from the model of perception itself. Thus the argument assumes that in all cases in which one seems to be perceiving something, there is an object of which one is aware.
Now, we’ve discussed this issue already, and I accepted that one can intelligibly say that “I see an X” even if X is an illusion or an hallucination. But this is a consequence of indistinguishability. If I am not aware of an object--because the hallucination constitutes the awareness rather than presenting sense-data for inference or synthesis--then the argument fails.
That an apparent hallucinatory object of awareness in fact constitutes one’s awareness means that the subjective report, “I see an X”, can be taken in two ways: if the subject knows there is no X, the use of the word “see” is de dicto; and if not, then the report may simply be wrong, i.e., in Austin's sense you do not see an X, if that is the sense you meant. Neither in the case where there is an X, nor in the case where there is not, is there a mental object of awareness.
Anyway, all this is to say that I do rely on the distinction between genuine and ostensible visual experience. And this is what you see as the nail in the coffin for direct realism. In other words, it is not the argument from hallucination that you seem to think is the big problem for direct realists, but just the phenomenal indistinguishability of hallucinations. Your target here then is just realism, and your method of attack is just hyperbolic doubt.
Well, okay, you got me. The thing is, I do not seek certainty in an epistemological foundation and I am not trying to prove that a mind-independent world exists. The article is pretty much saying, assuming realism, here's why I think perception is not indirect in any relevant sense. I take it for granted that hallucination is a disruption of veridical perception, and can often be explained in terms of neurological anomalies; and that I and other people share a world, one that is irreducible to me.
But no doubt there is a correlationist flavour to my view, and that's why I tend to downplay the realism. Although they're eager to emphasize their realism, ecological psychologists claim that it is affordances that we perceive, rather than objects per se. The relation between agent and environment is reciprocal, and what could be more correlational than that? Of course, in so far as they are taking a stand on metaphysics they will often say (e.g., Carello & Michaels, Direct Perception) that this correlation supervenes on the brute physical world, but all the same this is very far from a common sense "see it like it is" realism.
A more philosophically sensitive thinker who takes an active and embodied approach is Evan Thomson, who makes the transcendental in all of this explicit (to use a quotation I used elsewhere on the forum a couple of hours ago):
I'd have thought that quantum mechanics has already shown that our sensory apparatuses are not causally related to anything like the objects we take ourselves to be perceiving (instead they're causally related to things very unlike the objects we take ourselves to be perceiving). But it doesn't then follow that the apple we see is fake.
The problem with this hypothesis is that it's described as "being in the Matrix", and so it follows from the premise that the person living in the 1990s metropolis is living a lie, and I think that's where @Aaron R is coming from. However, @The Great Whatever's point is perhaps better explained with a different hypothesis; we have one person who has taken some pills and found himself waking up in an apocalyptic future where his previous life was a computer simulation and we have another person who hasn't taken any pills and has found his life continue as he's accustomed. Which is the real world?
I don't think this matters. The statement of yours that I initially responded to argued that we ought to drop the distinction between the real and the virtual because they are phenomenologically indistinguishable. You said there was "no reason" to treat them as "metaphyiscally" different, and that we interact with virtual and real objects in the same way. I am arguing that this is false, and that phenomenological indistinguishability is irrelevant. We actually don't interact with virtual and real objects in the same way precisely because we think of them as "metaphysically" different. For example, I would almost certainly be willing to take liberties with a virtual body that I would not be willing to take with my real body, and the reason I am willing to do so is because of the causal story that I base that distinction upon. Now, being able to tell such a story doesn't guarantee that I've made the distinction correctly. Something might happen that calls the truth of my causal story into question, prompting me to re-evaluate the way I have made the distinction. That's fine, but it's beside the point. The point is that we do have good reasons for making the distinction, and those reasons are not phenomenological ones.
body, not the virtual one. (And so functionally, the 'virtual' one would begin to take its place as 'real').
What matters is not whether there are painful consequences for the body. I get frustrated by the outcomes of virtual worlds all the time. My body is affected by what happens in a virtual world. When my character dies, when I missing is failed, it impacts on my body. The contents of a virtual world affects how I think and feel. Sometimes it does have terrible and painful consequences.
Rather the distinction between the "real" and "virtual" is about how someone is affected. It is about the ways in which a body interacts with objects. If my "real" body was invincible, it wouldn't necessarily mean a pain causing world was not virtual. If someone programmed a game to inflict pain on the body as my character got injured in-game, its world would still be "virtual," as it was still impossible for the dragon to take my real body in its mouth and ingest it. All an invincible "real" world body means is that someone couldn't be harmed by the things of "real" world. And yes, people would take liberties with their real bodies rather than actives in virtual worlds which caused them pain. This doesn't affect the difference between the "real" and "virtual." The pain causing dragon of the game still can't ingest my "real" body.
Functionally, any virtual world has already taken place of a real one. That happens the moment of experiencing the virtual world. When I step into a virtual world, I have no choice in whether i am affected by it. The moment I join it, it starts indicating with my body and impacting on my experience.
Yes.
The "real" and "virtual difference is about the relation of specific objects to each other. What world is "original" doesn't matter. If I began life hallucinating it will have always been "virtual" because it things cannot impact on my body the same way "real" things can. Not to mention "virtual worlds"are frequently not "modelled" on the real one at all. Dreams, imagination, etc.,etc. frequently break with the nature of the "real world" and have not been deliberately set to mimic one any part of the real world.
(similarly, the virtual world is just as real, as an existing state. It only differs form the "real" in the sense of how it has different impact. It is not somehow a "fake" moment which really means nothing- contrary to what some imply when the talk about the virtual world compared to a real one).
Virtual worlds are modelled on the everyday world, and I would say that since this is incontrovertibly always the case, this fact alone provides a sufficient criterion to distinguish the two. I would say that the same goes for distinguishing dream worlds from the real one.
As for the first, okay, it's fine. If your target really is the lumpen neuroscientist or whatever, that still leaves the problem that your examples: Hume, Russell, and Ayer, don't hold this view on any plausible reading of them. Roughly, I think Hume is a sort of skeptic in the Greek sense, and that Russell and Ayer are ultimately Millian phenomenalists more concerned with logically analyzing perception, breaking down perceptual objects into 'logical fictions' constructed out of complexes of sense data and their dispositions. None of them to my mind are indirect realists in quite the way you suggest. And as I've said, even Descartes, who is supposed to be the representative realist par excellence, never said that we don't perceive tables and so on. He entertained the notion as part of hyperbolical doubt, but then abandoned it.
B(i), by the way, is not my view: my view is that, in the sense the philosopher is interested in perception, we do not perceive anything.
The third point is the really interesting one. I really don't want to post walls of text about this because it just obscures everything. I just want to say to begin, that your take on it seems to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the criticism being made, from a dialectical point of view. You seem to think the problem is that hallucination, and the admission of the phenomenological indistinguishability between it and veridical perception (between which the direct realist is, as you recognized, forced to draw a metaphysical distinction), yields some sort of lingering doubt on the part of the direct realist that any given thing, or everything, might be unreal in the sense the realist is interested in. But that is not the problem. This is not about certainty. It is about the realist's most basic claims being fundamentally incoherent by their own lights. It is not as if the realist leaves himself open to lingering doubts, but that's okay because we don't require certainty. No. It is that the realist's positions literally do not make sense when juxtaposed. The criticism is taken to be a devastating one in that if it obtains, direct realism cannot.
With that said, I think it's best to go back and forth about it rather than try to unpack the criticism itself all in one go. So I'll start by asking this. You claim that there is a difference between two sorts of experiences: one is ostensible perception, the other actual. However, you also claim that in principle these two are, or can be, phenomenologically indistinguishable. Let's make the reasonable assumption that if you ever were to tell the difference between them at some point, this would require some phenomenological difference, somewhere, in order to do so.
So now the question is: how can you tell the difference, if you can't tell the difference?
I don't see the difference. Can you explain it? As far as I can see you're saying that the realist is not warranted in drawing a distinction between hallucination and perception, between ostensible and genuine. I don't see how this amounts to incoherence.
Quoting The Great Whatever
I don't want to be "the realist".
The problem is not that you can't tell the difference between the two when you're hallucinating. The problem is that according to your own account, you cannot tell the difference ever, even in principle. Do you see? It might help if you walk through how it is you figured out in the first place that there were two such types of experiences. I know what led you to that conclusion, but now think back a bit on how, given what you've sid, someone possibly could have discovered such a thing.
Quoting jamalrob
Then don't defend a realist position.
And I've already said I had no interest in defending realism as such.
Put it this way. You have claimed there are two metaphysically distinct, but phenomenologically identical, types of experiences. The question then arises: how did you figure out that such a distinction exists?
In other words, you are putting stock in a theory that requires you to make a distinction that, according to that very theory, you are incapable of making.
What if there really is no such metaphysical distinction? That is a worry for a certain kind of sceptic or his victims, but not for me. Again, I don't mean to be too blasé, because you're a serious interlocutor, but I just don't see the problem.
You don't have to tell a story. Your theory entails that there exists a distinction that you have to make in order for the theory to make sense, while at the same time the theory itself claims that you cannot make this distinction. So no 'stories' are required: you cannot make in intelligible how in principle you can make the very distinction you are required to make. In other words, it does not matter what story you try to give, because you have locked yourself out of making one.
Quoting jamalrob
This bewilders me. You can't just make claims and then deny that you're responsible for the consequences of them. I'm again only using what you have said. It is not as if some outside source, the 'skeptic,' is criticizing you. If your theory does not make any sense on its own terms, that is indeed a problem for your theory, and it can't simply be dismissed by saying 'I don't see the problem.'
In other words, it's not, again, like there's some lingering doubt, 'what if I'm wrong about the distinction?' It's that precisely the way you've made it rules out the possibility of determining there is one to begin with, yet you yourself are committed to claiming there is one.
Subjectively, I can't tell the difference between a hallucination and a genuine perception.
Hallucination and perception are distinct.
I'm not playing games. I actually don't see the problem. So how can I possibly respond?
No, I don't agree. I was hallucinating then, and now I'm not. But wait, I can't know that I'm not now hallucinating either: what if it's all hallucination? I really don't think the problem you've uncovered amounts to anything more than this.
I don't think that follows from quantum mechanics so much as it follows from reductionistic metaphysics/ontology: that is, from thinking that the objects that we encounter on a daily basis "are nothing more than" the parts out of which they are constituted at the smallest levels of scale, and that the only true descriptions of those objects are the ones given by a particular, "fundamental" physical theory.
Quoting Michael
Well, if we are defining "real" as "not computer-simulated" then clearly the apocalyptic future is real and the other world is not. This is how the distinction between real and virtual objects is typically made and, in fact, it's kinda become the definition of the word "virtual". The distinction is an ontological one that is grounded in what we know about the causal structure and material composition of the respective objects. Real apples are things that grow on specific types of trees, virtual apples are things that you program into computer systems. When you eat a real apple your real body will be nourished, when you eat a virtual apple your real body will not be nourished. Etc., etc.
Now this doesn't mean that someone couldn't come to regard virtual apples as "real" and real apples as "unreal". The point is that there is a distinction to made here, and that it is not a phenomenological distinction but a causal/physical one.
Right, but the distinction is not grounded in the fact that the one body is invincible and the other is not. It's grounded in my understanding of what kind of thing each body is.
I think we need to distinguish between the two senses of the word "real" that are in play here. On the one hand we have an ontological distinction between "real" and "virtual" which is grounded in differences of kind. On the other hand we have a transcendental distinction between "appearance" and "reality" which is grounded in the way we justify our claims. Both distinctions seem perfectly legitimate to me. Could people disagree over what things to call real and what to call virtual? Sure. Is it possible that our claims could be wrong no matter how we justify them? Sure. I guess I don't see how either of these considerations undermine either distinction. In fact, it seems like neither of these considerations even make sense unless we are already making these distinctions. So like, @Jamalrob, I guess I just don't understand how you are connecting the dots.
I know this was directed at Jamalrob, so I apologize for butting in and ruining the flow of the discussion, but I can't resist...
We can't have any idea of what it would mean to say that every experience could be a hallucination unless we can understand what it means to say that an experience is an hallucination. That's where the argument falls down, in my opinion, since it has to leverage the distinction between veridical/non-veridical perception in order to present the possibility that all perception could be non-veridical. So the argument from the possibility of global hallucination can't conclude that the distinction is meaningless/incoherent without undermining the meaningfulness/coherence of its own premises.
The dream argument works against anyone who takes what is evident in experience to warrant belief in anything at all. It is cogent insofar as one thinks experience is intrinsically precarious and uncertain. But I don't want to argue against the dream argument or any of that stuff, and I don't know what position of mine you keep referring to that you think demands that I do.
The problem is the significance TGW is reading into the question of whether or not we are experiencing an hallucination. Asking that question, having doubt about whether we know an event is virtual or not, doesn't actually say anything about if we are aware of a real or virtual world. TGW's argument is really trying to ask this: if a distinction between the real and virtual world cannot be identified, how then is there a real and virtual world at all? If the real an virtual cannot be said to be different, how then can there be any difference at all? If real and virtual don't somehow talk about a difference about between states of existence, which we may know, experience and identify, then it is nonsensical to talks of such worlds. There would be no distinction of real and virtual. It would be outside what could be known and talked about. Direct realists are seeming arguing a contradiction in the very definition of their position- "States of existence are as we experience, even when they are outside our awareness. The distinction of real and virtual is something we cannot experience."
But the problem for TGW's argument is the direct realist has never argued there is no difference between the real and virtual world. They have NEVER take the position we can't tell the difference. We can, in fact, tell the difference all the time. We have experiences of "real" and "virtual" events. We know about them. Though it may be true there is no difference, in immediate sensation, between a "real" world event and a "virtual" world event, it is NOT true when is comes to our wider experience (and so our knowledge).
We notice the dragon the in the computer game doesn't touch our body, not matter how real it might look. It "virtual" nature is shown in our present experience. We know it can't roast us or eat us. The entire premise that there is no knowable difference between experience of the "real" world and hallucination is wrong. There is one. We just don't know it in the immediate experience of a sensation. It comes with a later experiences, where a sensation has been related to others we have had. TGW is ignorant of this because he isn't considering experiences other than the immediate sensation of an object.
I don't know what you are referring to here. Could you elaborate. I understand you are more focused on your exchange with jamalrob, so when you have the time...
Perhaps this is what you are referring to as "epistemological commitments": that everything could be an hallucination?
If everything were, or even could be, an hallucination then there could be no meaningful distinction between 'real' and 'hallucinated'. I think this possibility can be ruled out just on the grounds that we (apparently very successfully) make the distinction all the time and that the very coherence of the argument depends on the distinction.
PS. I just notice that Aaron has made substantially the same point above, so my apologies for not reading the thread thoroughly and inadvertently repeating it.
I didn't say that the other world is a computer simulation. I moved away from the Matrix example for the reason I explained.
It's exactly because a true description of the objects we encounter are not the ones that (always) describe the thing(s) that causally influence our sensory organs (and so experiences) that direct realism fails and indirect realism is a more reasonable account. Direct realism entails reductionism.
I don't mean to be nit-picky, but I think you did:
Quoting Michael
Perhaps you did not mean to say that?
Quoting Michael
Hmm...I'm not convinced that's right, but I need to think it over a bit.
By "found himself" I meant to suggest that this is what he experienced. One person experiences himself waking up in a post apocalyptic world and another doesn't. Who is having the real experiences and who is having the false ones?
The reason it forces you to confront the dreaming argument is that the result of these two propositions combined is that the dreaming scenario is not only a cogent one, but there is literally no way on your account ever to tell the difference, in principle, between that scenario and a waking one. In other words, there is no 'uncertainty' on your position, in the following sense: you are certain based on your characterization that you can never distinguish one from the other. You cannot adopt the position that makes the dreaming scenario possible, and then simply dismiss it! This is not a viable position. You have to deal with the consequences of your own position, and if your own position drives you into incoherencies you do not want to confront and/or cannot accept, it is not an option open to you to simply ignore them.
Indeed, I tried to make that point in various ways, but it doesn't satisfy TG.
Isn't the distinction just a logical one based on our understanding of different categories of experience?
There is a difference between the possibility that the experience I am having right now might be a dream or hallucination and the possibility that my entire experience might be. The possibility that my entire experience might be dream or hallucination is senseless without the accompanying possibility that I might wake up from the dream or come to realise that I had been hallucinating.
The idea that it is possible that there is nothing but dream or hallucination is senseless because there could then be no reality to distinguish it from.
Everything being dream collapses into the "dream" being real because reality is defined as 'all that is'.
Hi Michael. I must apologize in advance for the length of this post. I usually try to keep my posts to a more modest length, but this issue is complicated enough that, in order to do it some kind of justice, I felt I had to be somewhat explicit in explaining my take on it. So here goes...
In my opinion, the question of which world is real cannot be answered in a justificatory vacuum. We have to have reasons for thinking that our perceptions might be in error. So the man who wakes up in the post-apocalyptic world might initially question the veridicality of his perceptions just in virtue of the sheer incongruity between what he currently thinks he knows to be true about the world and what he is now perceiving. Each new perception confronts him with a new reason for either revising or persisting in what he already takes himself to know.
After a while the contents of what he takes himself to know will inevitably be altered by what he has subsequently perceived and inferred. At some point he will presumably learn about the "matrix". He'll learn that the matrix is a computer-simulated reality that is used by an artificial intelligence for the purposes of harvesting humans to generate electro-magnetic energy, and he'll learn that his previous perceptual experiences had all occurred while plugged-in to the system. He'll may or may not come to accept this story, but if he does, he'll likely come to regard the objects that he perceived while plugged-in to have been "virtual" as opposed to "real" and, again, this assessment will be based on what he takes himself to know about the kinds of things those objects are.
So for instance, he takes himself to know what kind of thing an apple is, and nothing he has perceived so far has prompted him to revise his criteria for what does and does not count as an apple. He now knows that the "apples" he had perviously encountered while plugged-in were, in fact, patterns of electro-magnetic fluctuations coursing through the channels of some ultra-sophisticated computer system, and as such, were not really apples at all (again, according to his understanding of what kind of a thing an apple is). And in general, he will upon this basis likely come to regard the beliefs of those still plugged-in to the matrix to be in error insofar as they take themselves to be perceiving and interacting with real, rather than simulated apples, etc.
So in order to answer the question of which world is real, we each need to ask ourselves who's reasons we'd be willing to endorse and defend. To me this seems like a perfectly legitimate question, and this is where I can't really make heads or tails of @The Great Whatever's position on this matter. He apparently wants to deny the coherence of the distinction on the grounds that the man who took the pills could have just as easily persisted in his initial skepticism regarding the veridicality of his perceptions, and could have alternatively interpreted each new perception as just another reason for thinking that the post-apocalyptic world he now finds himself in is, in fact, not real. So we're faced with a kind of equipollence regarding the hypothesis that this world is real and that these perceptions are veridical, etc., and it supposedly follows from this that there is no grounds for making the distinction in the first place.
But I don't see how that follows. For one thing, the argument seems to be premised on the very possibility that it seeks to deny, namely the possibility of questioning the veridicality of one's perceptions. But, perhaps more fundamentally, equipollence is something that can be achieved by asserting the negation of any claim whatsoever, so if we're prepared to reject the legitimacy of one distinction on that basis, then we ought to be prepared to reject the legitimacy of all distinctions on that basis, which, as far as I can tell, amounts to a reductio of that position.
I am definitely open to the possibility that I am fundamentally misunderstanding what's being said. So, if you have any insight into the matter please feel free to share it. I'd be interested to get your take on it.
This would be a problem only if I were trying to establish the distinction, to prove against the sceptic that it was real.
But I can see you're not interested in this, so I will stop.
Between making use of the distinction and saying that I can't tell the difference at any particular time there is a tension from a sceptical standpoint, but not an inconsistency, for making use of the distinction does not depend on my being able to tell the difference during any particular instance of experience.
The idea that experience is all just a dream, an hallucination or virtual is senseless without the distinction between real and illusory, so I haven't said the distinction is senseless at all, which appears to be what you think I said.
What does your idealist say that experience is? Does the idealist deny the reality of the causal relationship between things and our visual perceptions of them, as it is understood by science? It is on the basis of 'common sense' but nowadays even more so in light of our observations and analyses of the things we visually perceive, of the means (light) of our visual perception and the whole complex and very coherent and consistent story that science tells us about the world that we observe, that we now make the distinction between 'real' and 'virtual' objects.
Virtual objects do not have any causal physical relationship to us. Why is that not sufficient to underpin the distinction? If you think it is insufficient or wrong somehow, then explain what reasons we have to disbelieve what science tells us about visual perception, about the causal relationships between us and the things we see.
Insofar as immediate sensations go, yes. Since there is no yet any experience which shows them to be real or a hallucination, no relation of the sensations to other experiences which amounts to knowing the difference of "real" and virtual," it is possible that any such immediate sensation could be an hallucination.
But that tells us nothing. Possibility is not actuality. Nor does it get removed when one possible outcome is actual as opposed to another. It is possible, for example, that I will make submit this post. It is also possible I will not submit this post. Both possibilities are present, whether I submit the post or not. Both are so whether I know I'm going to submit this post in the future or not. Possibility has no consequence for either what exists or what we know (that's really just member of the former set; our instances of knowledge are states of existence).
So the possibility of hallucination is irrelevant to the direct realist. They are interested in the actual (whether "real" or "virtual"): what exists, how the things we experience relate to others, and what is true any time we are aware of these existing states.
Neither. Both experiences are of "real" worlds. Within the Matrix, the person is living out a life where interactions between their body (in the Matrix) have consequences for their life (in the Matrix). Even bodies in the outside world can be affected by events in the Matrix (people getting injured).
The Matrix may be the single worst example of a "virtual" world there has ever been. There is nothing illusionary about it. Neo did not find out the world he was in wasn't real. He merely found out there was another (or maybe "wider" ) real world.
Apples aren't a topic in Quantum Mechanics. You're assuming that the microphysical is all that counts, and everyday objects can be dismissed because physicists in a lab can achieve counter intuitive results with subatomic particles.
By this you mean a BIV type scenario I take it, because it doesn't make sense that our entire life experience could be the ordinary kind of hallucination. As to how the direct realist is able to make a metaphysical distinction between hallucinations or dreams and veridical experiences, wouldn't that be a matter of inference to the best explanation amongst a life worth of experiences? Maybe when I saw a ghost I thought it was a real experience, until later when I realized that my mind was playing tricks on me.
Embodied cognition emphasizes the role that the kind of bodies we as humans have play in thought, perception, etc. This is in opposition to computationalism and functionalism where the functional or computational organization is what matters, not the biological substrate. Thus you can have someone like Dennett claiming that if we met a six legged intelligent, arthropod alien which utilized X-Ray version, we wouldn't have any fundamental difficulties in communicating with them.
As to the argument at hand, functionalism and computational theories of mind are at home with talk of representations and constructing perception, while embodiment would focus on how perception is part of an organism's ability to maneuver in their environment.
Furthermore, I'm rejecting @Aaron R's claim that if the things we take ourselves to be perceiving are unlike the things that explain the perception then the things we see are fake. The apple I take myself to see is very unlike the electromagnetic radiation and subatomic particles that explain the act of seeing but it is still the case that the apple I see is real.
I'm still not sure what it could even mean to say that a perception is veridical while at the same denying that anything like the ostensible object of perception actually exists. That seems incorrect almost by definition.
That's why your claim that "If [something] is deemed to be fake, it will ultimately be deemed so on the basis of some story about how our sensory apparatuses are not causally related to anything like the objects we take ourselves to be perceiving" is wrong. The apple is real but the apple I take myself to be perceiving is not like those things to which our sensory apparatuses are causally related (i.e. electromagnetic radiation and subatomic particles).
I'm not saying that the object doesn't actually exist. I'm saying that a description of the apple as we perceive it is not a description of whatever mind-independent things explain the occurrence of such a perception. Therefore direct realism fails. The fact that the descriptions are different is why indirect realism is a more accurate account of perception.
I am saying that there's no good reason to believe this insofar as there's no good reason for accepting the reductionism on which it is based.
Of course there are good reasons to believe this. We describe an apple as round and hardish and red and sweet. But this isn't how we describe the mind-independent things that explain the occurrence of our perception. To think that when we see red or taste sweetness that this redness and sweetness are inherent properties of these mind-independent causes is evidently false. Redness and sweetness are experiences produced by brain activity in response to certain stimulation. It's not that we encounter the redness and sweetness that was already present prior to the seeing and the tasting. That's why direct realism fails.
Note that colour realism and objectivism are popular views among philosophers.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/color/
1) I can tell the difference between veridical and non-veridical experience.
2) I cannot tell the difference between veridical and non-veridical experience.
You cannot claim both of these. The skeptic has nothing to do with it; you can't blame him.
I can't resist jumping in here because it seems to me you are misrepresenting jamalrob's argument so egregiously.
It should be (and jamalrob may correct me on this):
1) I can tell the difference, for the most part. between veridical and non-veridical experience.
2) I cannot always tell the difference between veridical and non-veridical experiences.
No contradiction.
More like:
1) I can tell the difference between vertical and non-verdical experience. It is given in experience which is distinct from the immediate sensation of an object-e.g. Seeing the presence of a tree (makes no comment on whether it is really or virtual) and then a different experience about he nature of the tree (e.g. "that tree is real" or "that tree is virtual" as the case may be).
2) I cannot tell whether an object is real or virtual from its immediate sensation. When I only have this, when I do not have experience of whether am object is real or virtual, I do not know whether or not the sensation I have is of a real or virtual thing.
Direct Realism is correct logically and phenomenological speaking. When I see a tree, I see a tree not a mental representation of a tree.
Indirect Realism is based on a scientific understanding and description of the physical and physiological processes of perception, which are quite complex. In this context it makes sense to say that perception is a mediated process. The claim about the indirectness of perception, which is inflated to the position of Indirect Realism, is read into, and extrapolated out of, the "mediate" (i.e. not immediate or direct) in 'mediated process'.
The argument is based on fallacious understandings of conflict between to two that come about due to inappropriate attempts to merge the two interpretative contexts.
Yes. In any instance where a person sees a colour in response to an object, an objective colour is shown: it is true that the object in question has the relevant colour. This effect is then repeated when the person again sees the object. In this respect to is no different to something like object's shape (or any other part of the object), which is similarly shown through body produced experience.
I don't agree. Our ability to tell is not merely phenomenological it is also based on the whole accumulated logic of intersubjective experience, including a coherent and consistent body of scientific understanding..
Also we can tell, phenomenologically speaking, not necessarily from within the experiences, but by the transitions from one kind of experience to the other. So, for example, when I wake up, I realize "Oh, that seemed so real, but it was just a dream". This is a pretty universal kind of experience.
The phenomenon of lucid dreaming also shows that we are in fact sometimes capable, phenomenologically, of telling the difference from within the experience itself. Lucid dreamers commonly report that once they realize they are dreaming they are then able to 'direct the dream' however they want to.
Indirect realism merely strawmans direct realism. It falsely thinks direct realism is arguing perception just appears without any causal system, without any system of interaction within the body,without any sort of meditation between the existing object and experience.
This is, of course, not true. And something the direct rats has not argued. Each instance of perception is created out of system which shows only shows specific aspects of an object in question. What is perceived of an object (and which objects are perceived) is meditated by the body and what is present in the environment.
Indirect realism misreads the focus of the direct realist argument, how the meaning of things is what is experienced when they are perceived, for an argument about how experiences are caused.
Yes, I agree, and that is just what I was alluding to.
I agree with you, that is another way of saying it.
How does the perception of a tree differ from a mental representation of a tree?
How does a blind person experimentally show that there are objective colours?
Furthermore, "X has property Y when not seen" does not follow from "X sees Y when stimulated by X", so the above doesn't account for objective colour. I might see a chair in response to being poked in the brain by a neuroscientist but it doesn't then follow that the chair continues to exist when I stop seeing it (or even when I am seeing it).
That's not true. The fact it is impossible to tell whether sensation is real or virtual, as phenomenologically speaking, they are identical doesn't prevent us from having other experience which detail whether something is real or virtual. After seeing dragon on the screen, moving towards us, we may then have another experience that the dragon can't get out and shred our body with their death. We have experienced the dragon is "virtual," despite not being able to tell, form the sight of the daring anole, whether it was real or virtual.
I can't see why you think there is such a problematic tension between these two ways of talking about perception; the one from within (phenomenology) and the other from without (science). Why should we be surprised or perplexed that things look different from different angles?
I think his point is that if colours X and Y are phenomenologically indistinguishable then how can one say that they are two colours and not one?
It doesn't. Given that the perception if the tree (a tree experienced) is a mental representation of the tree. They are the same thing: the showing of (part of ) the object of a tree in experience.
The object of the tree, on the other hand, is a bit different. It is what is experienced in this instances perception. But it is also more than is present in the given experience (e.g. different colours, different shapes which aren perceived by the given experience, parts which aren't picked up by the present perceptual system). Crucially, any object (and any part of any object) has it existence defined by itself rather than by whether it is perceived. Perceiving objects doesn't create them or form the existence of an object triggering perception.
From a philosophical perspective I am not a fan of representational theories of perception generally. Hegel, and various philosophers since, have present several viable alternatives, but that is a whole other very complex (and very interesting) story.
Representational models, as diagrammatic heuristics, in science are fine, but are perilous when reified philosophically.
As far as it goes it is OK to say that seeing the tree just is mentally representing it. But, for me, it would be tendentious and philosophically pointless gobbledygook to say that 'we see mental representations'.
How things are defined is irrelevant. What matters is whether or not the object's features when seen are also its features when not seen. Can you show that the apple is red and tasty even when I'm not looking at or tasting it? Does it even make sense to say that the apple is tasty when not being tasted?
We are not talking about phenomenal immediacies like colors but about different categories of experience that are well understood and distinguished by all. Not a good analogy, in other words.
I agree, but that's a point of grammar rather than metaphysics. The metaphysical issue is on whether or not the features present in the experience (the shape, the colour, the smell, the taste, the feel, etc.) are present even when the experience ends. The direct realist argues that they are and the indirect realist argues that they're not. The indirect realist argues that shapes and colours and smells and tastes are mental representations of mind-independent causes (in the same way that a footprint is a representation of a foot).
But that's what realism argues: "The realist view is that we perceive objects as they really are. They are composed of matter, occupy space and have properties, such as size, shape, texture, smell, taste and colour, that are usually perceived correctly. Objects obey the laws of physics and retain all their properties whether or not there is anyone to observe them."
Actually it does make perfect sense. Fruiterers often have signs like "Tasty Apples" above their stacks of apples, which are obviously not 'being tasted'.
And even if they were making a metaphysical claim, that doesn't mean they're right. Are you suggesting that a sweet taste is an objective feature of the apple when not being eaten? Because that's what the direct realist argues. Is that consistent with our scientific understanding of the objective world and perception? I'd argue that it isn't, and that's why indirect realism offers a more plausible account,
Because it isn't question of showing them. Indeed, the point is about objects when they are no shown: that it doesn't take the showing of a red, tasty and large apple for such a thing to exist. It does make sense to say there is a tasty apple when not being tasted. Objects aren't always perceived. Any if them, an any aspect of them, may or may not be when they are not experienced.
The entire point is that apple-shape, tastiness, red, mass, etc.,etc. are not limited to when an apple is perceived. Any if those qualities, experienced when an apple is perceived, may exist when an object is not perceived. This is how there are unperceived objects.
If we follow your argument, take away all the aspects of a perceived apple (e..g it's shape, mass, redness, tastiness, etc.,etc.), no apple is left. An unperceived apple would be impossible.
So yes, it does make sense to say there is redness, tastiness, a large shape, a mass, etc.,etc. when no-one is experiencing them. That's what an unperceived object IS.
It makes no more sense than saying that there is a painful knife when not being used to stab someone. It's only painful once it's experienced a certain way, just as an apple is only tasty or red when experienced a certain way.
You don't think that if you told people that you perceived apples as square, black and white, roughly textured, smelling like rotting fish carcasses, tasting like warthog faeces, as large as houses, that people would think you are insane? Wouldn't they think you are insane because they know that apples are none of these?
Wouldn't such a perception simply be an incorrect perception of an apple?
Apples are tasty, even when not being tasted, in the same sense that the world is visible, even when not being seen.
Both those objections are incoherent.
Obviously, as the blind person doesn't see them, they do not perceive any of the objective colours of an object and referring to their experience doesn't show any of those colours. Perceiving something about an object requires experience that shows it. The blind person doesn't have this.
There is no X (chair) triggering your experience in the second example. You never perceived an object of a chair which caused your experience of a chair. You are confusing the given experience with the presence of the object.
Such a perception would only show that your body reacts differently to most people to the same sensory stimulus. In everyday language we might say that you're seeing or smelling or tasting it wrong. But that's hardly indicative of a metaphysical fact.
Is the smell or taste of animal feed pleasant to you? Probably not. Is it pleasant to the animal? Probably. Is one of us wrong (or insane) and the other right? Is it pleasant or not pleasant when not smelled or eaten by either animal or man?
By "visible" do you mean "capable of being seen"? If so, I'd agree. So for the analogy to work "tasty" must mean "capable of being considered tasty when tasted". But then what does "tasty" mean in this second sentence? It can't be "capable of being considered tasty when tasted" else you run into a meaningless repetition of "capable of being considered capable of being considered capable of being considered...". So clearly "tasty" in the second sentence means something different. And it's that sense of being tasty that is the matter of discussion, and as it's different in kind to being visible, the analogy fails.
Given that, you know, does make sense, it doesn't bode well for your argument.
It makes just as much sense as saying an unseen book has pages or that the ball in my bag is spherical. All are nothing more than qualities of an object we experience.
We just tend not describe objects in terms of pain because we usually encounter pain events after perceiving an object some other way. An apple is only rounded to certain experiences too. It only has a certain mass to specific experiences. So it is for any aspect of an object.
No, it doesn't. The knife doesn't contain the property of painfulness when not being used to stab someone. The pain is only ever in the experience. It's painfully obvious.
No more or less then the properties of mass, shape, colour, smell tastiness, etc.,etc. All aspects of an object are only encountered during specific interactions between the body and the object. Pain is no different. We only see something when an object it within our field of vision. We only hear something interacts between objects generate a sound our ear picks-up, allowing our body to generate the experience. Pain only occurs when object hit out body in specific ways. Aspects of objects are all alike in this way.
We can experimentally show that certain things exist even though we can't see those things. That's how science works. So if colours are objective then they are the sort of things that a blind person can scientifically determine. I want to know how he can do this. If he can't then the claim that there are objective colours seems to have been falsified.
And the direct realist's claim is that the properties of colour and smell and taste are present even when they're not being experienced. So the above disagrees with direct realism. As usual, your stated position conflicts with your actual claims.
Yes, but such a series of perceptions of an apple (if it were indeed possible) would not be correct, in the sense that it would not be within a range that could be considered normal for a human body.
But really, even to say that is too modest; apples are not square, they are not black and white, do not smell like rotting fish carcasses and so on. I think it is arguable that it would not be possible for any sentient being to perceive apples in these ways.
I think you are conflating the taste of the apple with the tasting of it.
I don't think many realists would argue that the tasting of an apple is present when it is not being tasted.
Nope.
We can only show something in an experiment provided we have the experience to do so. The blind person doesn't have the experience to show colours. Lacking this experience, the presence of colours is not something the blind person has evidence for. This doesn't mean the colours aren't there.
It is no different to any other instance where someone lacks experience to gather evidence of something. Just because I don't have the system to see bacteria doesn't mean they aren't there. People are always seeing different parts of the world such that they ahem evidence for somethings but not others. The fact someone person lacks evidence for something doesn't mean it is not there.
Sure, but it doesn't then follow that the "normal" taste (for a human) is an inherent feature of the apple when not being tasted.
Why? Why must an organism react to stimulation by electromagnetic radiation at a wavelength of ?~620–740 nm by stimulating the visual experience which we name "red"? Why must an organism react to stimulation by air-borne chemicals by stimulating the olfactory experience which we name "sweet"? Furthermore, even if they must, it doesn't then follow that the features of these visual or olfactory experiences are features of the apple when not seen or smelled. What would such a thing even mean? So it's not enough to say that we must experience things in this way but also that the things that cause the sweet experience are identical to the sweetness of the experience or that the cause of the red experience is identical to the redness of the experience.
But is redness identical to electromagnetic radiation at a wavelength of ?~620–740 nm? It's not. The former is a representation of the latter. That's why indirect realism fares better than direct realism.
Taste and smell, like pain and sight, are merely parts of objects which are only experiences at certain points. The direct realist is pointing out they are all part of an object. Else we give-up unperceived objects, as take away the significance of an object when pervade and there is nothing of the object left, and so fall into the incoherence of idealism.
What is the taste of the apple? Is the taste of the apple identical to the chemicals which stimulate the taste receptors? It must if direct realism is to work. But sweetness is very different to molecules. Hence indirect realism.
No, the direct realist argues that the taste and smell and feel of an apple are present even when not being tasted, smelled, and felt.
There's nothing incoherent in saying that there's nothing left once experience is taken away. It might be false, but not incoherent. It's no different to the realist saying that if you take away the atoms then there's nothing left.
Direct realism has never argued this. Red is, for direct realism, red. It isn't identical to ~620–740 at all.
Electromagnetic radiation at a wavelength of ?~620–740 may result in many possible experiences of colour. Some people might see red when encountering it. Other people might not (e.g. colourblind people). Other people might not even see a colour at all (blind). The colour red is not representation of 620–740nm electromagnetic radiation. It is representation of the colour red in the world, in instances where it is a showing of an object.
Yes, it has.
This is indirect realism.
No, the taste of an apple is what it tastes like; some taste sour, some sweet, all taste subtly different.
And it can't taste like something when it's not being tasted.
Indeed. that's what being "part of the object" means. Same with sight or any other sense.
Parts of the object are, for the direct realist, what experienced when the object is perceived.
No, it isn't. Under that argument, colours aren't added to the world by experience. They are parts of the world perceived. And they may be when no-one experiencing them.
No, they may not. There is no colour red without any experience. Redness is an experience. It's not a mind-independent feature of the world.
I have the experience the dragon can't eat me. There is no doubt present. I understand the dragon to be locked away in the virtual world.
The receptors (cones) that have the right physical characteristics to be affected by light in the wavelength range you cited (so-called 'red light' ) are the ones that enable seeing red. If the organism, let's say mammal, has these cones (most don't) they will see red; if not, then not
Yes, it can. A sour apple will taste more like another sour apple than it does like a sweet apple; even if they are never tasted. Just as one mountain range will look more like another mountain range than it will look like a valley, even if they are never seen.
I'm not exactly sure where your problem is; but I think you are somehow confusing yourself by reifying words.
And different animals (or even different persons) might have different receptors that are affected by such light in a different way and so see a different colour. They're no more wrong than we are wrong in not seeing the same colours as a mantis shrimp.
Furthermore, it's not enough to say that seeing red is a necessary consequence of being stimulated by such light; you must say that redness is a mind-independent feature of such light if you are to be a direct realist.
That it will taste like X (when tasted) is not that it does taste like X (when not tasted). To maintain direct realism you must say that the apple tastes sour even when not tasted. It's a nonsense position.
The direct realist is the one reifying, treating taste and colour and smell as concrete features that exist independently of the experience.
The taste of an apple is just the taste of an apple. Apples have certain flavours, no two apples the same flavour, and no apple will taste exactly the same to two people (at least it seems reasonable to think not, even though the very notion of something tasting the same to two people is kind of incoherent to start with).
Sweetness may be a characteristic of molecules, just as heat is the agitation of molecules, but is also from another perspective "very different to" the agitation of molecules.
But that's not a problem because the direct realist isn't concerned with what is true in any specific instance. The direct realist doesn't have any particular care for an argument that any specific state if real or virtual.
Here you are back to attacking on the grounds that a direct realist doesn't know what is real or virtual, rather than arguing their position is internally inconsistent because there is no difference between the real and virtual.
Indeed, your objection presupposes discintion made by the direct realist here. If the direct realist can be mistake the real world for a virtual one, or a virtual one for a real one, then the distinction of real and virtual means something.
Again, that they will not taste the same (when tasted) is not that they do not taste the same (when not tasted).
This is conflation, as shown by your use of "from another perspective". The word "heat" can refer either to the type of experience or to the energy. They're not the same thing. The former is a mental representation of the latter and not an objective feature of the fire that is retained even when not being felt.
That's not true. The experience of heat (the hot toast I am juggling) is not a representation of the energy at all. It is heat (what appears in my experience) experienced. The idea of energy doesn't even come-up in the experience of burning oneself on something hot. In that moment, I experience nothing about energy. I have no mental representation of it at all.
Sure, but an animal that has a certain kind of receptor will see the 'red wavelength' roughly the same as another animal that has the same kind of receptor. It seems reasonable to think that although there may be different kinds of receptors, no two receptors will be exactly the same. Any animal will see any portion of the spectrum according to the kinds of receptors it possesses. Most mammals do not see colour because their eyes are not equipped with cones (colour receptors) , but only with rods (tonal receptors); they will see only black and white and shades of grey.
Redness is a mind independent feature, but seeing red is not. That seems to make perfect sense to me. What's the problem?
Nothing you have said convinces me that you are not conflating two different things.
No it is to say, not that 'it tastes sour' (which is possible only when it is being tasted) but that it has 'a sour taste' independently of its being tasted. The two statements are not the same, and common usage bears this out.
As I already said I don't think many realists would believe anything as absurd as that flavours are 'out there' being tasted, colours being seen or odors being smelled, independent of any experiences of tasting, seeing and smelling. I still believe you are conflating different senses of the words.
Common usage says they are concrete features which are independent of being experienced, so if meaning is use, then...
>:O I am not conflating the two senses of heat, as evidenced by my use of the phrase "from another perspective". You are, ironically, accusing me of doing in relation to heat, the very thing, that is running two senses together, which you are doing in relation to colours. smells and tastes.
The problem is that redness isn't a mind-independent feature. Electromagnetic radiation is a mind-independent feature. Redness is the type of experience elicited by the detection of electromagnetic radiation of a certain wavelength.
What "two senses" are there to colours, smells, and tastes? There's just the one sense; the types of experience (which are mental representations of their electromagnetic or chemical stimulants).
OK, fine, if you don't want to engage with the argument, then have it your own way.
Then all of common usage that refers to 'smells', tastes', 'colours' in a different sense than 'smelling', 'tasting' and 'seeing colour' and so on, must be wrong then?
Electromagnetic radiation is no less known through experience than the colour red. And everything thing it does is, how it interacts, what it interacts with, is also only significant in terms of things which may be experienced.
Are you invoking a resurrection?
So, my apologies to jamalrob for my part in de-railing his thread.
The very fact that you say that there are two different sense of "red" -- presumably one which refers to the experience and one which refers to some mind-independent thing -- suggests indirect realism rather than direct realism.
I don't know if this implied criticism is (also, or only) meant to be directed at me, but I will just point out that I responded directly to what you wrote with this:
"I can't resist jumping in here because it seems to me you are misrepresenting jamalrob's argument so egregiously.
It should be (and jamalrob may correct me on this):
1) I can tell the difference, for the most part. between veridical and non-veridical experience.
2) I cannot always tell the difference between veridical and non-veridical experiences.
No contradiction. "
and you made no attempt whatsoever to engage with the objection to what you had written that it contains.
That seems to be the point at which the flurry of pedantic polemic began.
How it's known is irrelevant to the discussion. The question is whether or not redness is present when nobody observes it in the same way that electromagnetic radiation is present when nobody observes it. The direct realist says that it is and the indirect realist says that it isn't -- the indirect realist says that redness is a purely experiential phenomena that represents (in the sense of having a mostly-unique causal relationship with) electromagnetic radiation.
@jamalrob said here that "every instance of an experience is one that is in principle indistinguishable between the two types you've mentioned [veridical and non-veridical]".
No, I already covered this objection with this:
Quoting John
"Red" is used to refer to the colour that we see and also to the part of the spectrum of light that produces that seeing. This is simply a fact about two senses of usage. Also people in everyday parlance refer to apples and other red things as 'being red', they do not refer to mental representations as 'being red', but as being 'of red things'. All this is indisputable fact about usage.
It seems to me that you are trying to controvert this fact somehow, to conflate the different common senses of some words, for the purpose of some kind of obscure metaphysical argument against realism which I cannot follow. So, I think we'd best just agree to disagree and leave it at that.
Again there is a distinction between 'kinds' and 'instances' which I think both you and TGW are missing.
Please just cite the post where you think you responded cogently and we can look at it again. If I missed something I will be happy to admit it. I'm not here to play games...
It's not a problem, John. The more discussion the better. :)
Quoting The Great Whatever
But that's just an uncharitable reformulation of what I said. It is this interpretation that I'm blaming the sceptic for.
Quoting Michael
I'm not sure why you are asking this in response to my posting of a link to an authoritative article that shows colour realism/objectivism to be a popular philosophical position. I posted it because you seem to think you can say that colour is obviously mind-dependent.
So then it's the light that's red, not the apple?
Furthermore, this is consistent with indirect realism. The indirect realist says that the red colour we see is a mental representation of the external light. To be a direct realist is to say that the red colour we see is itself external.
I'm not denying this common usage. I'm saying that this second sense of "red" is irrelevant to the discussion. Do you really think that the indirect realist is saying that we can't use the word "red" to refer to something other than the colour we see (e.g. the particular spectrum of light that produces the seeing) or that electromagnetic radiation is not external to the experience? I'm sure almost every indirect realist will accept this. The question is whether or not the red colour we see (the thing referred to in the first sense of the word) itself a feature of the external world and so present even when we don't see it. The direct realist says that it is and the indirect realist says that it isn't.
Well, I also think that the non-existence of Yahweh is obvious, and the prevalence of Christianity doesn't change my mind about that.
This really will not do. You are asking us to take your verificationist argument to be unassailable. I was inviting you to engage with the actual philosophy about it.
And that was my original point; that science has shown that the causal explanations for experiential phenomena are unlike the experiential phenomena themselves. But, despite @Aaron R's claim, it doesn't then follow that what we see is fake.
The claim that there is colour, or pain, or smells present in the external world when not observed seems to me to be controversial. As if I encounter the sensations that were already there. It's a bizarre view.
Don't force me to get into this debate. ;)
Although as an aside, I didn't mean to suggest verificationism (in the sense that a thing is true if it is verified); I meant to suggest that if the view is contrary to the empirical evidence then there are more reasons to reject it than endorse it.
That is, after all, why people tend to use science to prove realism over idealism, is it not? So it then seems to be a bit hypocritical for the direct realist to ignore this when arguing with the indirect realist.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/color/
What empirical evidence?
My point wasn't about how anything was known. It was about what was known. This point is critical because "electromagnetic radiation," such as "~620–740 nm" is never observed. It is nothing more than our understanding of something which relates to things (colours, objects, energy measuring detector screens, etc., etc. ) which have have experienced. No-one perceives the object of "electromagnetic radiation" in this sense. A human who sees red when in the presence of ~620–740 nm electromagnetic radiation sees the colour red in the world , not"~620–740 nm electromagnetic radiation." In their experience of red, they actually know nothing about electromagnetic radiation at all.
Awareness of that is a different experience and it doesn't take any particular experience of sensation (a blind person, for example, may know about electromagnetic radiation perfectly well, even though they don't see coloured objects or light as a result of it). Critically though, like any other things we know about, electromagnetic radiation is known through experience. If I know about electromagnetic radiation, then it is not colours that I know, but rather the presence of electromagnetic radiation itself. My awareness is of things in the world as it exists.
The point is that on this level, electromagnetic radiation and the colour red are no different in this respect. One cannot say that "electromagnetic radiation" is "uniquely casual" because we aware of it though the same sort of means as the colour red: an experience generated by our body. Our knowledge of "electromagnetic radiation" is no less caused by our body than our knowledge of red. We know "electromagnetic radiation" as it is. We know the colour red as it is.
Both are things of the world we are aware of only through experience. In any instance where experience is aware of something in the world, it presents it as it is.
Science doesn't actually perform that task. Realism is a metaphysical position (i.e. about logic) and is shown through the demonstrations of other positions being logically incoherent, not through the presence of any observed empirical state.
Using observed empirical states doesn't work because at no point does it grant us access to unobserved states of the world. We can't use it to demonstrate the existence of unobserved states. The idealist or anti-realist can always pull the "in a moment of experience" argument to support the coherence of their position with science.
So maybe the direct realists do, at least on this issue, believe that philosophy has to 'correct' science? Neuroscientists that study perception are fundamentally wrong about the way we perceive, while people who have more or less convinced themselves from the armchair that perception works another way are right? An interesting problem. Though of course, there will be citations of scientists who believe in 'embodied theories' (again, whatever that means [not much I wager]) and direct realism and so on. But that would be a risky gambit, since then the defense would buy into the logic of the argument, and the minute the consensus is revealed to be genuinely in favor of indirect realism among scientists, the direct realist is left with egg on his face. Though who knows, maybe he would just entrench again.
I often get the impression that for the direct realist, there is no potential argument or piece of evidence that could possibly get him to reconsider. That is, direct realism is something he knows pre-philosophically, is certain of, and anything that denies it must be wrong (ala 'common sense' schools of philosophy). The 'philosophical' arguments always stop as soon as the ideological point is met and never bother to deal with their own inconsistencies, because that's not the point of why I was arguing: ensuring that a view actually makes sense is boring and irrelevant. It reminds me a lot of the usual charge leveled against Plantinga and Protestant Christianity (arguments in service of a pre-made ideal rather than a conclusion reached by evidence and argumentation), but I doubt a direct realist would like that comparison or believe it fair. Nonetheless, that looks to me like what is going on. And it's repeated at the professional level too, of course -- John Searle, who is a superlatively bad philosopher in my opinion, just published a book on this subject, which might as well be titled How Not to Philosophize. He calls it 'the bad argument,' by the way, not 'the argument.' And I also get the impression he hasn't read the people he's criticizing, but what's new, huh.
[The vitriol at what I take to be intellectual dishonesty and bad scholarship is over.]
It's right here, friend:
Quoting The Great Whatever
And what do you know, it's a post that quotes you right below the very post you made.
'Thank you for doing my job for me, TGW!'
So, in the passage quoted in your post above you have merely asserted again the impossibility of telling the difference tout suite if the difference is not immediately apparent, without giving any justification at all for this claim. It seems you are guilty of a kind of reductively atomistic thinking about perception; that what we know must build upon pure a-temporal instances of self-evident knowledge, or not be justifiable at all.
The other point is that the 'indirect realist' understanding that is embodied in the science of perception actually supports direct realism, because it is basically saying that it is the fact that light reflects at different wavelengths and angles from the surfaces of objects, and is focused by the lens onto the retina and so on that allows us to see those objects. The fact that the process is complex does not support a conclusion that we don't really see the objects, and direct realism just is the claim that we see the objects; it is not a claim about 'what the objects really are'.
The issue is that the (indirect realist) neuroscientists are asking the wrong question. It is not that they are wrong about how experiences are caused (they are right about that), but rather they do not address what an instance of perception IS.
Direct realism is talking about what it means to perceive an object: that in instances of perception, someone is aware of an object in the world (what is interacting with their body, to produce their present experience) as it exists. The point is to draw the distinction which actually defines the perception of an object (as opposed to merely having an experience).
If objects are not what appears in experience, then nothing is perceived. Anything experienced is merely a creation of an unknown something. No outside object has been perceived. I just have my generated experience and it has no ties to anything I have perceived. An experience, for example, cannot be caused by a ball hitting someone arm, for both those objects are merely a created experience. The effect of objects on the body lost, for any we experiences become a secondary effect of an unknown system (it can't be our body and environment, as both of those are things we are aware of in experience) which generates our experience. Indirect realism is incoherent with embodied causes to experiences and perception of any causal object.
I think the problem with this passage is that it attempts to treat the mind, and the images in it, as objects, in the same way that it treats the table. There, the table; here, the mind with its images. But where do you have to stand to attain that perspective? Why, outside the mind! And we can't do that. Mental representations, ideas and images, are the very substance of perception and the basis or judgement; if it is true that everything we see is in some sense composed of them, then it is a mistake to believe that they are also objects, because they can't be 'objectified' in the same way that tables and chairs can be. It is to put the processes of mentation on the same footing as what the process sees, which is an elementary mistake, in my opinion.
I think it is accurate, provided that we understand that perception of objects has an irreducible subjective element; a mind is always implicated, and that mind is never amongst the objects of perception (which is the exact meaning of 'transcendental idealism').
And that is the 'holistic approach'. The conceit of scientism is the mythical 'view from nowhere', but the reality is that all perception, even scientific measurement, takes place in a mind, and a mind is therefore essential to it. But asking 'what mind is', is the source of much error, because, again, it attempts to 'objectify' the mind, to make mind an object with attributes and so on. All such attempts are at best analogical, because the mind is only known (if 'known' is the word) in the first person; it is the subject which knows, not the object of knowledge. And who or what is the subject? Well, we don't know, and we ought to adjust our thinking accordingly, because otherwise we're labouring under the mistake of thinking we know something that we really don't.
For me, to speak of "subjective elements" is to commit the very mistake you have identified in your first paragraph: that is, the mistake of imputing a kind of objective status (a quasi-objective status) to subjectivity. To say that "mental representations, ideas and images, are the very substance of perception" is another example of this mistake.
It is true that the mind is not among the objects of perception, but it is also true that there is no mind separate from them either. Perception is an activity of the body and never occurs without it. The mind is an activity of the body and we have no reason to believe the former ever occurs without the latter.
I acknowledge that mind occurring without body is not logically impossible, but since we have no idea what that could mean, and could never have any adequate evidence for its actuality; I cannot see what point or advantage there could possibly be in entertaining the idea.
Not as an object of perception, that's for sure.
But I think a salient question is, are there objects without perception? The perspective I am referring to here is the co-arising of objects and mind (much discussed in Buddhist philosophy.)
You can separate 'object', 'mind' and 'cognition' but in so doing you're still making each an object of analysis (of physics, psychology and cognitive science, respectively.) But the reality of experience always comprises subject-object-act of knowing; the reality is the totality. I think we have become very disconnected from that reality, through over-reliance on abstraction and symbolic thought, which tacitly presumes that division of subject and object without necessarily being aware that it is doing it.
So when I say 'subjective elements' it is not an attempt to 'objectify the subject'; there is not literally 'an element' which is subjective. What I am getting at is the more Kantian type of point, that we don't see objects as they are, absent the cognitive act by which we know them. So every act of knowledge implies a subject of experience, but that subject is never itself something that is known. But there is also no 'transcendent object', that is, an object that is over and above or separate from knowledge of it; objective knowledge pertains to the phenomenal domain, the realm of appearance.
The question as to whether there are objects without perception is not an unequivocal one. It depends on what you count as an object, in other words.
If you take the idealist line and count objects as being themselves perceptions, then, obviously you could not coherently claim that there are objects absent perception.
If you take the realist line and think that objects are revealed to us in perception, and are not themselves perceptions, then logically it follows that the objects must exist absent perception of them.
I agree with you that experience (perception) can be analyzed as 'subject-object-act of knowing' and that it is really all one unitary process. But from this it does not follow that objects are 'subject-object-act of knowing'.
When we say anything we are reliant on 'abstraction and symbolic thought' if that is the way you want to characterize it, so of course under such a characterization our discourse about perception will be about subjects, objects and acts of knowing. I would say that perceived objects are real (as are our bodies), as configurations of energy that act on light and sound, which in turn act on our bodies enabling us to see and hear them. I see no good reason to doubt this.
In a different (logical) sense objects are merely formal identities, but I still think it is reasonable to grant them an ontological status as the fore-mentioned real configurations of energy that those formal identities identify. Subjects are also formal identities, logically speaking, and the subject is the formal identity of the perceiving body, so their ontological status is also, just like the object, as a configuration of energy.
"OK," you say, "we just can't do ontology. But how can we trust the public arena, if reality itself cannot be pinned down?" We trust the arena in a Wittgensteinian sense -- we play by shared rules and make progress thereby. But every game contains an element of risk, because every meaning we can identify is anchored in a yet to be satisfied arc of completion. We are tilted toward the future, and as such we are tilted, unavoidably, toward uncertainty.
Attempts to make this uncertainty certain are the work of tyrants. It takes a twisted agenda to deny the rickety and half-baked nature of the human condition. Follow the tyrant, and you lose touch with humanity; seek solace in certainty, and you will have to bury your failures in denial.
There is no "reality", the sharing of which comes without strings. Nor can we avoid the sharing. Let's just not pretend otherwise.
1. They fail to properly deal with TGW's hallucination/dream argument that direct realism has no way of determining whether perception is ever veridical if hallucinations and dreams can be phenomenologically indistinguishable. The counter argument was that the distinction would lose it's meaning if everything was a hallucination or dream.
But consider BIVs, the Matrix, Inception, Boltzman Brains and a version of the Simulation argument (just the brain and inputs). What matters here is that there is never any actual perception, only the experience of perception. The direct realist needs to argue these scenarios are impossible, because otherwise they have no means of saying whether they are directly perceiving the world or are in one of these scenarios. And I don't think we know enough to conclusively discount them.
2. The direct realists attempt to defend the realism of colors, smells, sounds, tastes and feels as objective properties of objects to defend against Michael's argument for indirect realism. And I'm pretty sure problems discovered in ancient philosophy disposed with such naive realism, let alone modern science. And thus TGW's ultimate frustration with where the argument ended.
May I ask a few questions? (Sorry in advance if these have already been discussed at length.)
1. How do we know that even our impressions of reality are in fact 'real impressions', rather than, say, 'simulated', or 'forgotten' ones, and not just a sort of habituated blend of neuro-electric (or <insert your favorite thought model>) stimuli?
2. Does partitioning ourselves from the rest of the universe draw us closer to where we wish to be, or could it also be psychologically damaging? Which argument or counterargument best serves the needs of our philosophical mission?
3. How do we know that anyone ever really escapes the Matrix, or that the Matrix is the sort of thing that can even be escaped? (Can robots really levitate that way without making a ton of noise? Is a super-intelligent AI necessarily more compassionate than any human being?)
I found this interesting, especially as a window to see how some contemporary philosophers approach Hume's work. (Note that the link is now down and perhaps the domain needs to be renewed.)
Quoting Jamal
I am reminded of David Oderberg's quip:
Quoting David Oderberg, Hume, the Occult, and the Substance of the School
In a footnote he notes that David Stove gave this as an example of ‘the worst argument in the world’.
This reflects the somewhat common argument that if a reality is mediated then it must also be inaccessible or at least distorted. If our eyes mediate reality, then apparently we cannot see. But what, then, is the alternative to mediated realities?
The problem of erroneous perceptions was obvious to all philosophers, but very few took the route that Hume took, and none with such confidence and even hubris.
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes, I let the articles site lapse since nobody ever sent in a suitable article; there was only that one by me. Maybe I'll just re-publish it within this site somehow, although I no longer stand by it entirely: I think I may have made a couple of stupid mistakes of argumentation, and it's probably a bit shallow.
(Note that I've edited your post to remove the broken link)
We haven't had that argument in 3 years now. Could be time to have it again.
That's okay. I don't agree with it any more either.
Sounds good Jamal, that all makes sense. Given that the article is available via Wayback Machine (and perhaps other internet archives) it might be nice to have the old link visible somewhere. Here is the link to the most recent archive on Wayback Machine: The Argument for Indirect Realism.
Note: I wrote it some time around 2010, not 2020 as it says there.
Indeed! That's an odd mix up on Wayback Machine.