The relational account holds that the leaves themselves are green (under certain conditions etc). This entails that it is not something mental that is perceived, which is your definition of indirect perception.

Thus direct perception on this account depends on both perceiver and perceived. As seems kind of obvious when you think about it.

And if the fact that different perceivers perceive in different ways were enough to kill off direct perception as a philosophical position, then the fact that dogs can't see green would have resolved this issue a while ago.

I can't think of a way of saying it more clearly.

I think you're missing the point.

Because color and taste are in the brain, not out there in the world. — Marchesk

Why do you reject the relational account, under which colour is a property of perceived things, as perceived in a certain way in a certain environment?

Yes, but our experience isn't of the chemical makeup, but rather of color. And if that color occurs in the brain, then it's hard to see how we could be directly perceiving a red apple. — Marchesk

I don't see why. Evan Thompson's description is consistent with an account of perception that has been described as "direct". But then, different people mean different things by "direct perception". The substance of my post was the bit about colour being essentially relational.

Perhaps not, but it does still leave all of Chalmers' arguments for the hard problem in play. How do we account for brain events having color experiences? — Marchesk

I'm not sure. With some kind of combination of evolutionary biology, ecology and phenomenology, I'd guess. That's handwaving, I know.

2. Does this entail that direct perception is false, being that secondary qualities (color, taste, etc.) are not properties of things themselves, but rather coding schemes that relate to the chemical makeup of sugar or reflective surfaces of leaves (using the two examples above)? — Marchesk

But the chemical makeup of sugar or reflective surfaces of leaves are properties of those coloured things.

Being coloured a particular determinate colour or shade … is equivalent to having a particular spectral reflectance, illuminance, or emittance that looks that colour to a particular perceiver in specific viewing conditions. — Evan Thompson

It's the leaves--not an "idea" or representation--that are green, but they only look green to certain perceiving beings in certain environments. Thus, colour is entirely relational. According to taste one could see this as a deficiency in the language--because of the way we use "colour", we can't say whether colour belongs solely to us or to the things we're looking at--or else one could see it as expressing the essentially relational nature of perception.

3. We know that color experience is produced after the visual cortex is stimulated. This can the result of perception, memory, imagination, dream, magnetic cranial stimulation, etc. If a person's visual cortex is damaged enough, they lose all ability to have color experiences, including being able to remember colors. It's hard to avoid concluding that color experiences are generated by the brain. But that sounds like the makings of a cartesian theater, which Dennett has spent his career tearing down. — Marchesk

I don't think saying that the brain produces the experience of colour entails that there is an interior spectator. I imagine Dennett might say, not that the brain produces colours for us to look at internally, but that the relevant events in the brain just are those colour experiences. That's not how I would put it myself, but I don't think the Cartesian theatre is entailed either way.

I'm not sure if being thoughtful is the same as being philosophical, I only know that I do make my brain work a little bit extra, and I have the urge to exchange thoughts with others.

I'm here hoping to be enlightened; and although I'd rather stay anonymous, I'd gladly make exceptions for minds I admire, and add them to my circle of friends. That would be the best rewards I could hope for! — jaofao

Seems like you'll be a good addition to the forum jaofao :smile:

Welcome

We already have a category for psychology: "Humanities and Social Sciences". It's not dedicated to psychology alone, but that seems proper on a philosophy forum. But one tricky area that might require some rejigging of categories is cognitive science, which seems to be a mix of psychology and philosophy, among other things.

EDIT: Actually though, the Philosophy of Mind category seems to cover that.

As long as jamalrob doesn't mind, it can stay there — Baden

:up:

I see.

I could be wrong but I don't think Tiff was talking about discussions that have been moved to the Lounge. Discussions are moved to the Lounge if that's where they fit. What's the problem?

Well, we've removed all Lounge discussions now, and that's now my favourite option.

It's odd. Some people just prefer the traditional forum design (I don't mean just PF, but in general on the web), though they never seem to be able to properly explain what they like about it, at least in my experience.

The thing I don't like about using the categories is that the individual active discussions are not listed. I think this is pretty bad for a forum home page.

Oh, it looks like we've already implemented the third option, All discussions excluding the Lounge category. Very well.

Here everything is packed into one page — Posty McPostface

The old forum had that page as well, and it's really the only one I used ("New Posts" I think it was called). The difference here is that I made that page the home page, that's all. Anyway, see the breakaway discussion for my opinion about the home page.

Note that "All discussions" is effectively active discussions or new posts. That's what I like about it, but I have noticed that it means the front page often doesn't have much quality philosophy on it, and is taken up with politics and lounge stuff.

So from that point of view I quite like the idea of using the categories as the home page. I'll wait for a while and then I'll probably try it out.

Realize, not realise. Who's been teaching you antiquated (look it up) English? — Hanover

In fact, -ize is older than -ise.

I'm almost at a native level of speaking English [...] Ugh... I meant "less words" — Benkei

Fewer words.

We currently have $196, and we have a number of monthly and quarterly subscriptions.

Thanks all.

Firstly, sites like this are tyrannies, not democracies, and the site owner rules absolutely. Secondly, there is no justice system, but an editorial one.

So the final recourse of us peasants is only to find or create somewhere more congenial to cast our pearls, or put up with the foibles of the local executive.

But in the meantime, we assume that our dictator is benevolent and seeks to appoint benevolent servants. I'm pretty confident that such is the case here, and by and large, the regime succeeds in fostering a lively debating community with a minimum of unpleasantness and folly. I think it should be encouraging that a couple of mods have been found unsuitable for the task and reduced to the ranks.

From the pov of the administration, as the site expands, they can no longer be on top of everything, and have to rely more and more on their undercover agents, which you can join by flagging stuff that needs attention. Since, by hypothesis, the administration is benevolent, they are concerned to know from us what we think needs attention. If nobody ever complains, they will think they and the site are perfect.

So flagging, pms, and feedback are important ways to influence them and guide the conduct of the site, as petitions to the tyrant and his minions. At the same time, one should be a little cautious not to get a reputation as a constant moaner and unreliable witness, who will likely be ignored.

In the case of a thread being moved, merged, or some such decision, I would think a reasoned appeal by pm is the best course, though I will just come out and say that I do not believe that there is such a thing as 'the philosophy of Trump'. (I think that is your current concern?) But hopefully, such matters can be discussed and minds can change or not without any acrimony. Its not a personal matter on either side, is it?

So say what you want and don't want, complain about decisions you disagree with, argue politely, and then don't bang on forever about it, but decide to live with it or not.

Here endeth the old fart ramble. — unenlightened

:up: :up: :up:

But to save time in the future I'd really like to get clear what not to write. And is it a moderator or an overzealous algorithm at work? — Kym

The site guidelines are pinned at the very top of the main page. Here's a link:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/480/site-guidelines

It was a sensible but short question on physics, dutifully posted in the Science folder. The title was a bit silly "Do Black Holes S*ck?" (replete with vowels). Maybe this was interpreted as obscene?

Or could it have scanned as too short? The question only included two premisies leading to an apparently paradoxical conclusion - one I'd really like resolved. — Kym

The moderator who deleted your posts might respond in this thread to inform you why they did it.

@CuddlyHedgehog @Sir2u

Stop it. You want to behave like kids, go somewhere else.

In case you missed it, Dennett responded: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/04/03/magic-illusions-and-zombies-an-exchange/

Those who sat on the right in the National Assembly and in the assemblies that followed it were the nobility, and the monarchists. It seems to me that neither rightism nor conservatism are essentially (and transhistorically) pro-free-market.

And there is the obvious fact that fascism is uncontroversially right-wing and yet is not especially pro-free-market, and has in fact often been explicitly against free markets.

I love conspiracy theories. They always get people to think more deeply about a problem rather than just listen to the official reports. — René Descartes

Somewhat off-topic, but...

In my experience the opposite is true. Conspiracy theories appeal rather to those who want neat, logical answers, in which motivations are clear and intentions are cleanly carried through. They want a world that isn't messy like real life. Their thinking is anything but deep. Conspiracy theories are cartoon facts.

From the Communist Manifesto. They are not the "rules of Communism" and they are not a description of how communism might work. They are suggestions for the first steps towards communism.

Just the functionality I would expect.

EDIT: Well, the way it handles replies to conversations that have been deleted could be improved I guess.

I don't like Wittgenstein's use of the term hinge-propositions, because a proposition is a linguistic phenomena. I would say that some beliefs, especially those that are pre-linguistic have a causal explanation, which I explained in other threads — Sam26

But for W, to identify a belief is not to identify a thing in the head. To call it a proposition, and to say, "she believes she has legs", is not to suggest that she has a matching thought, an internal statement, "I believe I have legs" or "I have legs". A belief may be pre-linguistic in your sense, or in W's appeal to forms of life, but also linguistic in the sense that it can be stated (later). It becomes linguistic when we talk about it, and it is as a propositional attitude that we must talk about it--she believes that...

This makes belief an odd kind of post hoc thematisation.

I just read an interesting article on Aeon that might make it clearer what I meant when I said this:

new social restrictions surrounding sex, an impoverishment of sexual interaction and a degradation of individual autonomy — jamalrob

How do we understand sexual pleasure in this age of ‘consent’?

Some quotes from the article:

Sometimes what we want is not fully known to us in advance. The details of desire and satisfaction are often discovered, and produced, in the sexual moment. Rather than a question of individual will, sexual autonomy can be expressed through the interaction of two (or more) partners. Sex can be a uniquely utopian experience, in that the act of sexually relating creates novel ways of being together socially.

Women’s sexual pleasure is often viewed as more complicated and less predictable than men’s. Historically, this assumption has contributed to the over-regulation of female sexual and reproductive capacities. Rather than the exception, ambiguity about exactly what is desired, and how that desire should be expressed, is the sexual norm. Women’s emancipatory projects should therefore focus on ways of incorporating this fact, rather than shunning it.

This is not to say that there are no limits in sex, but rather to propose that we devise limits that align with the erotic potential of the sexual encounter. Liminal trust is a space in which partners can explore the value of sexual experiences precisely because they directly engage the line between permissibility and impermissiblity. Both affirmative and enthusiastic consent cast this kind of sexuality as deviant and criminal. That is a mistake.

#MeToo explicitly relies on patriarchy as both cultural context and target. It sees women as objects of sexualised male domination. Men, we are told, have an interest in furthering, or at least maintaining, misogynistic forms of social control over women. They are assumed to want to go ‘as far’ as they can before being confronted with a woman’s expression of non-consent to sex. This picture provides, at best, an idiosyncratic and regressive picture of human sexuality. At worst, it encourages us to police sexuality in conservative ways.

And if you have no idea what she's talking about, well, you're doing it wrong. :wink:

No doubt she'll be cast as a rape apologist by the mob.

[Vector addition] if it works, buys facticity, but it is of little benefit to (law) realists who believe that the phenomena of nature flow from a small number of abstract, fundamental laws. — Cartwright

I guess I was thinking that facticity--which the laws give us, or can give us--does amount to descriptiveness, even if they don't amount to the metaphysical grounding that the law realists claim for them.

Just on the subject of descriptiveness (and sorry if I'm inappropriately fisking here)...

It can account for why the force is as it is when just gravity is at work; but it is of no help for cases in which both gravity and electricity matter — Cartwright

Didn't she already supply the solution here:

For bodies which are both massive and charged, the law of universal gravitation and Coulomb's law (the law that gives the force between two charges) interact to determine the final force — Cartwright

That is, the laws of physics together describe how things behave. Which means that this is wrong:

Once the ceteris paribus modifier has been attached, the law of gravity is irrelevant to the more complex and interesting situations — StreetlightX

Surely we can, and do, apply multiple laws?

We can't impose a delay, but there are two things we can do. There is a setting to require staff approval of all new users, and we can enable two anti-spam plugins. I've just enabled the plugins to see how they work for us, so I'm not going to implement the signup approval just yet.

EDIT: Actually, three things: I've also turned on reCAPTCHA to prevent automated signups.

Well spotted. Not such a big problem, I wouldn't think (how did you uncover it?). We don't have direct access to the code to implement a fix, and there are several things that would take priority, but I guess I could mention it next time I send the devs a list of feature requests.

:cool:

Actually it was just my excuse for not practising today :grin:

I do remember Wayfarer as a keyboardist of some sort; I know a few others who tinkle the keys, but I can only remember TS as someone who is/was apparently a semi/full professional musician, other than myself. — Noble Dust

Ah yes, I see. Me, I sacrificed my glorious musical talents to Mammon and my creative spirit was crushed by the relentless imperatives of capital. :wink:

More interesting than that, what's the correlation between civil engineering and web development — Agustino

I actually know several guys I studied with who went into programming of one kind or another.

Seems like a dialect issue; amateur has a negative con' over here in Ammuurica. — Noble Dust

Yes, also in the UK, but I like to emphasize the word's etymology, according to which it means someone who does something for the love of it, not for the money.

Oh right, how many other aspiring career musicians do you find around here, other than old Terrapin Station, who seems to have disappeared? — Noble Dust

Wayfarer is a musician I believe, and I noodle on a cute little curved soprano sax from time to time.

Please, I'm an amateur, not a hobbyist.

T Clark and Agustino are the only philosophical civil engineers I know, so I'm guessing it's just a delightful coincidence.

I actually am a civil engineer by degree — Agustino

Me too.

But if you keep working after that in the same conditions, then almost certainly you've stopped growing. Either you must change position, or you must start on your own, a consulting company, a general contractor, etc. — Agustino

But changing position, taking on more responsibility and so on, can also be done in an established company. In any case, you were dead wrong to respond to T Clark's comment, "working for a company run by others doing what you are good at is a better option ...", by saying "no, that's just a way to stay in your comfort zone". It isn't always.