Janus

How do you know ancient people talked coherently about their mental states? Did they think in terms of mental states at all? Do you have any textual e...

I agree much of the Bible is great literature and great literature may do as you suggest. It may help people to understand the human condition and liv...

Yes, the insidious notion of the "elect", held fast by those who believe themselves favored in God's eyes. It is mind-boggling how long such childish ...

I'm not sure I understand the question. We all live with the illusion of free will. Society demands moral responsibility, and this leads to the assign...

I see concern about the "fate of the immortal soul" as a sad state of delusion. I don't deny that for those who cannot see their way clear of such del...

I agree that perception is a complex process. I don't agree that "inferential" is a term that aptly characterizes it. Anyway, I have little use for th...

As I understand there are deductive inferences, which if valid are necessary and inductive and abductive inferences, which are not logically necessary...

I agree and that wasn't at all what I had in mind.

As I understand it Spinoza was a thorough determinist. He denied freedom of will even to God (or nature). The freedom that may be enabled by reason is...

That's a pointless point that deserves to be missed. Belief in anything, however absurd, (Nazism, scientism, Zionism, scientology, you name it) has re...

Nicely set out!

It seems odd to speak of simple organisms making inferences, conscious or otherwise, since the term usually applies to the deliverances of rational th...

It depends on what is meant by "are read". Obviously they cannot appear red in the dark. In any case even if, for the sake of argument, you assume the...

:up: likewise

:up:

Cheers, I have also resonated with your recent explanations. I hope we are not in danger of finding ourselves with nothing to argue about! :smile:

I agree, but before a scientific understanding of what is going in it may have been puzzling, All I think these cases amount to are circumstances in w...

It is an unusual use. I seem to remember coming across it before somewhere in a context where perceptions were being treated as inferences, but I can'...

I don't think we "infer the existence and nature of objects at a distance from the body" I think we see (if we are close enough to identify them) what...

Thanks for your articulate explanation. I have no argument with anything you've said there. I would use different language, though. I don't think I ha...

Secondary qualities are the result of interactions between the body and the objects that display them. For example, of course colour considered as a v...

I agree with you, the phrasing is clumsy. It should have been put better. I was referring to things that proponents of IR usually cite such as sticks ...

The argument has nothing to do with the status of so-called 'secondary qualities' or particle physics and you seem to be conflating naive realism with...

I think we can know when we are thinking a particular thought just as we can know when we are looking at any particular object. Those are about as cer...

I don't think certainty matters. What counts is what is most coherent and consistent with our experience.

Since, according to scientific understanding, thinking, like perceiving, is a process, I don't see why it would not, on the indirect realist argument,...

The OP's arguments don't seem to be unrelated to the last series of posts. One of those arguments is that we only have access to perceptions, not the ...

:up:

I agree with this and would put it even more strongly as "perception sometimes distorts reality. We know this to be so because mostly, it doesn't". Sa...

There is an unacknowledged premise in '1' and in any statement that claims that the science of perception shows us what is the case. The unacknowledge...

It is a good one and it is yours by default.

"Experience is the last in the chain leading to experience"?. I'm afraid I can make no sense of that other than to understand it as being a mere tauto...

As a conclusion based on the assumption that perception enables an undistorted picture, namely the scientific understanding of perception, it is a con...

:cool: There are both good and bad horse trainers, just as there are good and bad educators of humans.

I'm not sure what you are referring to when you say "the indirection I described". I don't deny that perception is a process, what I deny is that the ...

The science of perception doesn't claim that perception is illusory: that would be self-refuting. :up:

Yes, I think so, which means that primally we experience ourselves as extended, even though in that primordial state, we are not consciously aware of ...

Thanks but it was

I think this is a very idealistic view of education. It doesn't accord at all with my experience of the education system, at least at the primary and ...

I haven't said the scientific understanding of perception is incorrect. I've said that if the assumption is that perception as such distorts reality t...

We before anything else proprioceptively experience our bodies as extended—mouth here, ears, nose, eyes, hands, belly, legs and feet etc, all in diffe...

Missed this before. It doesn't seem apt to speak of all maps, simply inasmuch as they are not the territory, as "wrong" and as you say some maps are b...

:up: I think we agree that philosophy can be thought as an art, but that it has its own unique concerns, its content being generally more intellective...

Again, this seems conceptually similar to the ding an sich since the term does not refer in the ordinary sense as with naming table and chairs but is ...

There is a coherent conception of directness though. Our ordinary perceptions, and against these the seeing things indirectly through tinted glasses, ...

If we have direct access to the world then there is no distortion, if our access is indirect then it is distorted. Think about looking at the world th...

What's giving you trouble?

The training of people, the 'civilizing' of them. although obviously more complex, is essentially no different than training horses. some people, like...

For me the purpose of the arts is the creation of novel ways of seeing, hearing, feeling and thinking. The 'novel' part is where the creative imaginat...

If indirect realists are OK with assuming they're perceiving the world through their senses and their brain is creating their experience of the world ...