I'm not sure where the "active relation with the environment" fits in with direct realism's certainty versus indirect's reliance on inference. — Marchesk

Its advocates are in favour of direct more than indirect, but not in some "things are red in themselves" kind of way. That's a caricature of indirect realism's critics.

Sure, but I don't see how that goes against my point. Fire engines are red to most people, if you like. It doesn't matter. The point is not that red is some transcendent fact of the fire engine, but that a perceiver is in an active relation with its environment, in which perception depends on both.

There is probably a spectrum of terms that vary gradually in how much we can conventionally say, "this looks/sounds/tastes X to me" as opposed to "this is X"

No.

I dunno, maybe fdrake can explain things better.

Huh?

The relational approach answers all this. Red things are red, but only to certain perceivers. I don't think you understand my mockery of the question about whether or not the things really are red.

We want to know if the properties present in experience (a red colour, a sweet taste, a round shape) are (independent) properties of external world objects or if they're properties only of the experience (whatever it is that experience is). — Michael

What's wrong with the relational approach, that you and Marchesk might both be familiar with from other posts of mine, about colour realism and other things? Fire engines are red because they have properties that produce the experience of red in human beings, i.e., in perceivers that sense those properties in particular ways. Again, I think this shows how odd the question you're asking actually is.

Perceivers always have a perspective, in a general sense. That's what perceiving is.

Don't give in to the thought: in that case we can't say that fire engines really are red. Reject it. Banish it forever.

The reason for the "venerable folly" of indirect realism is because illusions and hallucinations raise the possibility that perception isn't what we naively take it to be. — Marchesk

But this is not true. Humans have known about these experiences since the earliest times, and we know about them individually from an early age.

Indirect realism is much more historically specific, and has its roots in specific ways of thinking about what it means to perceive, what it means to be a person at all.

It doesn't follow from illusions and hallucinations.

Great post. I guess my angle is to ask why exactly some people have the indirect realist intuitions. I mean, it's not just like ice cream. It's cultural.

This doesn't answer my objection, and merely repeats what I objected to.

Right, but what sort of realist was Kant? He thought there was an external reality of some kind, but we can't say anything positive about it, thus terming it the noumena. — Marchesk

No, that's not what he says. External reality is the stuff we see in everyday life, the empirically real. The noumenal is that which can only be thought, not known in experience. His philosophy is much more subtle than this direct-indirect realist-idealist stuff.

Maybe an alternative would be to propose that perception is a direct awareness of a relationship to an object. — Marchesk

No, it is a relationship to an object, one that constitutes perceptual awareness.

Well, the issue of directness, certainly as played out in the realist vs realist debate, is mostly bypassed by the way I've described perception. One can say perception is direct in that you perceive things directly rather than perceive mental objects or something similar--Gibson's theory is very much pitted against the idea that what we perceive is a model or whatever. One is coupled with one's environment, and what could be more direct than that?

On the other hand, if by direct you mean to perceive something as it is beyond possible experience, yeah, that's not a road that I go down. I want to say that's incoherent.

I find that this kind of talk misses the point. When I paint a person I'm painting a person, not painting paint, and when I write about a battle I'm writing about a battle, not writing about words. So when I see an apple I'm seeing an apple, not seeing an experience. But that doesn't address the epistemological problem of perception. What is the relationship between the paint and the person? What is the relationship between the words and the battle? What is the relationship between experience and the apple? What does it mean for the former in each case to be about the latter in each case, and to what extent is any information given in the former a product of that medium rather than a true, independent, property of its subject?

I brought up blindsight earlier. The body responds to external stimuli in a manner that lacks conscious awareness. What the direct/indirect realist wants to know is the extent to which visual percepts (that thing that's missing in cases of blindsight) "resembles" the external world object that is said to be the object of perception. Simply saying that the external world object is the object of perception or that experience just is the stimulus-response event (one or both of which you and unenlightened seem to be saying) doesn't address this question at all. — Michael

First, "we see room furniture, not head furniture" might not address the point you're interested in here, but it addresses Marchesk's point that what we know of the mechanisms of perception make it impossible that we see only room furniture and not head furniture.

Otherwise, maybe I'm not even interested in the question of how what we see "resembles" the external world. In fact I don't really know what that means. Or rather, I think it's a bad question.

214. What prevents me from supposing that this table either vanishes or alters its shape and colour when on one is observing it, and then when someone looks at it again changes back to its old condition? — “But who is going to suppose such a thing?” — one would feel like saying.

215. Here we see that the idea of 'agreement with reality’ does not have any clear application. — Wittgenstein, On Certainty

Asking how much our perception resembles reality, or gives us information about it, is akin in this context to asking, "what do tables look like, independently of how they look".

The question as to how much the appearance of things is a product of the perceptual medium presumes the possibility of appearance without perception. What you call a medium is what I call the stuff and processes and behaviours that constitute perception.

Answering the question as to how much information we get about things through perception more charitably, I might say things like... quite a lot, it depends, often as much as we need, etc. I don't think this has much to do with the big problem that you see. We don't get much information about the shape of a building without walking around to the back.

But to get to what you're interested in and state my positive position more explicitly: we always perceive under an aspect. We perceive affordances, what is relevant. Perception is a coupling with the environment in ways that depend on perceiver and environment. This might be a form of correlationism and so not as realist as you'd expect, but in the same way that Kant didn't think of himself as an idealist, neither do I.

:up: :mask: :strong:

I realize that this was not directed towards me — creativesoul

Actually it kinda was. :grin:

a state-of-mind reflected in our actions — Sam26

This makes it no different from beliefs in general (reflected in our action or sayings).

I can think of only two ways to interpret the idea that there are linguistic and prelinguistic beliefs:

1. To say that a belief is linguistic is to say that it is somehow made of words, that there are attitudes, comportments, or mental states that have an inherently propositional form, perhaps that they are identifiable thoughts. As if the holder of the belief is talking to himself: "I believe the world existed before I was born". This would be in contrast to prelinguistic, built-in expectations and habits.

2. Or, it means that some beliefs cannot be stated (hence Banno's question).

Both are anti-Wittgenstein. Unless there's another interpretation, the distinction cannot be one that is found in Wittgenstein's thinking.

A belief just is an attitude to the world (or a mental state if you like) when rendered as a statement. Or, as photographer might have said, a post hoc thematization (or maybe it's schematization, not sure). We can say that he believes--or he "has a belief"--that the world existed long before he was born, but in doing so we are not identifying any individuated object, an aspect or element of thought or behaviour that exists prior to its rendering as a statement. What we mean is that he acts in a way that shows he expects such and such to be the case, or just doesn't expect not-such-and-such to be the case.

This is really funny. I’m listening to the birds, the sounds of nature. Who does that? — Becky

I do, even here in the centre of a big city.

Interesting post Graeme.

But thanks for reading it @Marchesk :smile:

BTW, a lot of these criticisms are answered in the article or in the ensuing discussion that happened when it was first published years ago. I don't know if I'll join in here much this time around. It's not the article I would write today and although I'm still interested in perception, this direct/indirect stuff is pretty boring--and confusing for just about everyone involved.

Some direct realist might be tempted to deny the perception depicted in the head and say there's just the dude seeing the furniture. But that's an impossibility given how perception works. The senses are stimulated by various things in the environment which the brain makes sense of, resulting in the experience we have of interacting with the world. — Marchesk

Think about this some more, because it's the key to what I think is your misunderstanding.

Of course, I deny the furniture in the head: there's just the dude seeing the furniture.

Crucially, this is not in any way incompatible with this description: "The senses are stimulated by various things in the environment which the brain makes sense of, resulting in the experience we have of interacting with the world."

Taking "brain makes sense of" as a metaphor or shorthand, that's a reasonable, if impoverished, description of what goes on when we see furniture. But we still see room furniture, not head furniture.

That might work. You're welcome to send it in for us to see it.

That's very long.

You see as a result of a process leading to neural activity in your brain. Call it what you like, but that result is not the object. How could it be? — Marchesk

Are you sure you read the article? :lol:

Thank you.

Quit trolling. If you have nothing to say about the topic, shut it.

I can make a change to the template so that the copyright on articles shows the author instead of The Philosophy Forum as it does now. I'm not sure what else we can do regarding copyright.

1000wordphilosophy.com looks great, but personally I don't think we need to restrict articles to 1000 words.

Believe it or not many people want to work, not just out of necessity, but because it provides purpose, dignity, and fulfillment. — NOS4A2

Yes.

Capitalism would, I think, allow the freedom to choose which profession or trade they'd like to pursue — NOS4A2

No.

Currently a rather pricey $53 from Amazon

Her book on On Certainty is very good too.

Danièle Moyal-Sharrock — Sam26

The best interpreter of Wittgenstein I've found.

The German Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, 1933, was an immoral law, no?

That reminds me of what a wizened Tasmanian told my father, years ago ... — csalisbury

Love it.

I have a theory on this — csalisbury

Nice analysis.

I voted yes, but it's paradoxical. In saying "we hold these Truths to be self-evident", we're making a choice. Natural rights are stipulated or asserted under certain social conditions, and we thereby create them, according to how we want to live in those conditions. We say, in an effort to respect human beings universally, that these are the basic rights that every human being has, by nature. But if we create them, and only in certain conditions, then how can they be natural and universal?

Building on what @Pfhorrest says, it's as if we cannot conceive of universal rights unless we conceive of them as features of the natural world. The idea of moral objectivity without naturalism is a difficult one for us to handle. Incidentally, this is also clear in the effort to describe homosexuality as entirely biological, as if gay rights must depend on nature.

But I voted yes because I want to say that humans don't only find what is so, but make it so. That is, what is natural for us can change.

Just ordered War and Peace.

Also, I heard some strange things that there are still places in the world with 0 cases. Where are these places? Why are there 0 cases and what can we learn from them? — Julia

Yeah, one of the first things they did in Antarctica was close all the bars and restaurants.

As far as I can tell there's the untrustworthy authoritarian regimes of Turkmenistan and North Korea, and some isolated Pacific islands. I don't know if there's much to learn there. We should look at countries that have had a substantial number of cases but have managed to control it.

Too much aussie pride on the forums lately; I think its incumbent on the rest of us to stem this before it goes too far. — csalisbury

They're outnumbered by Americans here and that seems to frustrate them. It's like when you corner a Tasmanian devil: even if you don't mean any harm, it attacks anyway.

It does grab me, because I've had the same thoughts, and my post was almost a reproach to my own tendency towards essentialism.

This might be an unwelcome spanner in the works, but I feel like asking, why is this about listening? The complete appreciation or absorption in a piece of music is just as often represented by dancing. Thinking of it like that puts a different light on the question, I think. Unless we want to restrict the discussion to art music.

Then it might seem like the whole idea of the "entire piece" is a historical artifact of the development of music alongside visual art since the Renaissance: the work of art as a neatly delimited thing of special value. Maybe a great piece of music can be a living, changing thing, hardly just a thing at all.

EDIT: And of course, improvisation and jazz are significant here too. John Coltrane may give the writing credit to Rodgers and Hammerstein, but his "My Favourite Things" is his, or at least as much his as theirs.

EDIT: RIP McCoy Tyner

What if you drift off for half a second during the piece? What if you're at a classical concert and you're occasionally distracted by someone coughing such that you lose concentration for a few seconds. What if the performance you're listening to contains a non-obvious mistake by one of the musicians, like a wrong note? Would anyone then say it's not actually the piece it claims to be? — jamalrob

Taking this to its natural conclusion: we never listen to the entire piece. What then?

Well put.

Did you hear the entire piece? — Moliere

The obvious question is: why is this important? What if you didn't hear the entire piece, and yet you loved it, you were able to analyze it and understand it and be inspired by it and other good things? I'd say in that case that you did appreciate the piece aesthetically.

What if you drift off for half a second during the piece? What if you're at a classical concert and you're occasionally distracted by someone coughing such that you lose concentration for a few seconds. What if the performance you're listening to contains a non-obvious mistake by one of the musicians, like a wrong note? Would anyone then say it's not actually the piece it claims to be?

A listening experience broken by a pause might even heighten your appreciation, because it may give you time to bring to mind motifs and whatever from earlier in the piece, things that help you to make sense of what is to come. The composer may have an ideal listening experience in mind, but people are so different that I don't know if this ideal, from the listener's perspective, is always the main thing to strive for.

It's interesting though to compare it with the split painting. I think there's more to be said here about the essential temporality of music, and how that makes it different from the painting.

I have a feeling that many Europeans are wilfully blind to the internal fault lines within the EU. Europeans like to be led , it's in their nature, the British however are naturally suspicious and doubtful of politicians ...we tend to think they couldn't organise a fuck in a whorehouse , so why would we want more of them, but hey-ho. — Chester

This is rubbish. Not only that but it weakens the case against the EU, as if the EU is only bad for the English, or that they're the only ones who can see it. The fact is that there is a lot of opposition to the EU in Europe outwith England, in e.g., France, Italy, and obviously Greece.

(Cue a rant about lazy Greeks and French or something)