Absolutely not. In some trivial sense, everyone does philosophy in that they, perhaps sometimes on a lonely night, 'wonder what it's all about', or have disagreements with other people about certain things. But I think that to do philosophy as a craft requires the taking up of certain commitments regarding the long-term refinement of one's own thinking, a willingness to open up all belief and values to revision, as well as a worldly-engagement of praxis in dialectical relation with one's philosophy. All of this is by no means guaranteed, and in fact rare because it's hard work.

Actually I'd even argue that one has to engage with the actual discourse and philosophical texts before one can 'do it', or otherwise a community where you can engage dialectically so that specific discursive features and a shared language are developed that can be recognized as 'philosophical'. I'm not sure if it makes any sense for philosophy to be done by a solitary individual with no context of a community: concepts and language are socialized. It isn't something totally innate and guaranteed...what would we need to refer to to make such an argument? — Shevek

I pretty much agree with this, but I think there's another way of looking at it. Kant regarded metaphysics as a natural disposition, and if this is the perennial originary seed of philosophy as a "science" (in Kant's terms, meaning a rigorous and productive discipline) it is far from trivial. To say that the ability or inclination to do philosophy--by which you mean to do it right--is something rare, and not characteristic of human beings, is not to deny darth's comment that "philosophy is something that is inherently part of a human being". It almost looks like a professional philosopher's apologia, the demand that he is taken seriously as a professional alongside scientists, doctors and lawyers ("not just anyone can do this job!"). This idea of philosophy as a job or craft, more than the thought that philosophy is innate, might itself be seen as a trivialization of philosophy. To philosophize is not a success verb, and it can be done well or badly, rigorously or lazily.

Anyway, this is nitpicking by way of looking at things differently. Your criticism of the picture of the solitary philosopher, perhaps sitting in a chair pondering, is well put.

When I was reading the CPR I found this glossary of Kant's technical terms extremely useful:

http://staffweb.hkbu.edu.hk/ppp/ksp1/KSPglos.html

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 Great Whatever

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.

Done.

I suggest first reading the Preface ("Introduction" in Bennett's version) and Preamble and then comparing notes. Looks like you're already there @Sapientia; it might take others a while to catch up. I will try to take part.

Welcome :)

It strikes me this discussion would work well as a more formal reading group, especially if @Moliere is on board. So, you'd agree to read a section at a time and post your thoughts, that kind of thing. What do you think, @Sapientia?

@The Great Whatever, you make three important accusations:

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:

For the player in action the football field is not an “object,” that is, the ideal term which can give rise to an indefinite multiplicity of perspectival views and remain equivalent under its apparent transformations. It is pervaded with lines of force (the “yard lines”; those which demarcate the “penalty area”) and articulated in sectors (for example, the “openings” between the adversaries) which call for a certain mode of action and which initiate and guide the action as if the player were unaware of it. The field itself is not given to him, but present as the immanent term of his practical intentions; the player becomes one with it and feels the direction of the “goal,” for example, just as immediately as the vertical and the horizontal planes of his own body. It would not be sufficient to say that consciousness inhabits this milieu. At this moment consciousness is nothing other than the dialectic of milieu and action. Each manoeuvre undertaken by the player modifies the character of the field and establishes in it new lines of force in which the action in turn unfolds and is accomplished, again altering the phenomenal field. — Merleau-Ponty, Structure of Behaviour

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

(1) how does he [the indirect realist] 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? — The Great Whatever

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):

When we ask the constitutional question of how objects are disclosed to us, then any object, including any scientific object, must be regarded in its correlation to the mental activity that intends it. This transcendental orientation in no way denies the existence of a real physical world, but rather rejects an objectivist conception of our relation to it. The world is never given to us as a brute fact detachable from our conceptual framework. Rather, it shows up in all the describable ways it does thanks to the structure of our subjectivity and our intentional activities. — Evan Thomson, Mind in Life

Are you saying this from the point of view of someone thinking about how best to do metaphysics? In saying that metaphysics is non-empirical, Kant is not saying that it ought to be so; he's just defining it. It's more accurate to describe Kant as excluding metaphysics from natural science. Part of his whole project in the CPR is to save a sliver of legitimate metaphysics by ditching the rest, at the same time as proving the objective validity of physics. (Sorry, don't have much time for this right now)

If such questions are appropriate in metaphysics, then it seems completely wrong to exclude empiricism, that which is known through the senses, that which is taken from experience, and that which is physical. We can still question whether anything exists beyond the aforementioned, and if so, how much we can know about it - without making such an exclusion. — Sapientia

But wouldn't we then say that we're doing natural science when we go by empirical evidence, but when we ask, e.g., about what is beyond them--for which there can be no evidence, for if there were we would just be doing science again--then we are doing metaphysics?

I don't know if this helps, because it's very general, but what I think Kant got right in the CPR and Prolegomena--or anyway what I like--is the transcendental insight. This is the idea that we are reciprocally coupled with the world. As far as the world is knowable, it is knowable only subject to the conditions under which it is possible for us to know anything, and as we are finite beings who experience things in our own special way, what we can come to know, and thus objects themselves, are conditioned by our way of knowing. This has been read as idealism, but it can also be seen as a way between realism and idealism:

When we ask the constitutional question of how objects are disclosed to us, then any object, including any scientific object, must be regarded in its correlation to the mental activity that intends it. This transcendental orientation in no way denies the existence of a real physical world, but rather rejects an objectivist conception of our relation to it. The world is never given to us as a brute fact detachable from our conceptual framework. Rather, it shows up in all the describable ways it does thanks to the structure of our subjectivity and our intentional activities. — Evan Thomson, Mind in Life

The Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiotics, H. H. Pattee. I always struggled to understand what the hell Apo was going on about, but he sounded like he knew what he was talking about and recommended this paper for us fools to read. I thought we could give it a go, if only so we could tell him what a condescending shit he is from a position of knowledge. — bert1

This is a great idea; I similarly struggled to understand his posts but liked a lot of what he had to say. I'll add it to the list for December. The other one looks good too. For this month, the people have spoken and it looks like it's Davidson.

In the old PF you also have to scroll to find the post you want to quote, and then you would click "Quote" and it would take you to the reply page. Here, you find the post and quote it by selecting text, the difference being that this doesn't load a seperate page.

I guess I'm asking is if there is a way to swiftly ping pong back and forth between the post you want to quote from and the one you're writing at the bottom of the page. — Thorongil

To ping pong up and down--I've just been trying it--you can hit "Preview" and click on the name in the quote link or reply link and that will take you up to the post. To go back down to the post you're composing, click on the menu bar blue background--ah, now I see what you mean, it's the blue strip at the top where the navigation is. Or quoting something else will also take you back down.

When you're at the bottom, clicking on the menu bar takes you straight to the top, but when you're further up doing the same thing takes you to the bottom.

So...click "preview" --> click on name link of who you've quoted or are replying to --> quote or reply or click on the menu bar to take you back down.

Make sense?

Not sure what you mean about the menu bar. And as for having to scroll up, are you talking about in discussion threads? Isn't it inevitable that you have to scroll to read certain messages? There are two features that help with this: you get a notification if anyone quotes, replies or mentions you, and that links directly to the post; and the names in replies and quotes link back to the posts too.

Do you mean the fact that when you enter a discussion you've been in before, it takes you to the last post you read (which is sometimes the end)?

All right, it looks like it's Davidson for this month. Anyone got a nice version and I'll start a new thread?

By the way, @The Great Whatever, work is getting in the way. I'll reply to you as soon as I can. I'm going to address these accusations:

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

Thanks John, I'd love to see your comments if you do get around to reading it.

Yes indeed. There is much more than mere line, colour, texture and so on in most abstract paintings, and I haven't done justice to that in my comments so far. But the representation is general, as it is in (absolute) music: while not about anything in particular, music can represent tension and release, climax and decay, chaos and order, solidity and ethereality, surprise, etc.

Personally I find abstract art far less confusing than figurative art. Confronted with a scene by Caravaggio, for instance, I struggle to work out what's going on, interpret the facial expressions, and know what I am supposed to be thinking about it. In appreciating the painting, what it is about is of secondary importance to me than its purely formal aspects; it is the latter that makes Caravaggio's paintings so gorgeous and so important.

He joined already, as you can see here. Hasn't posted anything though.

On the face of it, abstract art seems even more naturally suited to channel a perception or contemplation of the Ideas than representational art is. The Ideas are abstract objects, after all. The peace and purity of a Mondrian painting, for example, is far removed from the strivings, pleasures and sufferings in, say, Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights".

Your linguistic analysis looks good to me, but I still don't see how it goes against my criticism of The Argument. To see this, here is Russell's version again (it's handier than Hume's because it's easier to think of a perspectival shape as an object of perception than a perspectival diminution):

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:

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.

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'".

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.

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.

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. — 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. — 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".

First, I don't think it's true that we are often met with indeterminate impressions. — 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. — TGW

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

THE PHILOSOPHY FORUM appeared on page 10 of a Google search results. — Bitter Crank

For what? I.e., for what search term? That's what matters. After all, we're at the very top of the search results for "thephilosophyforum.com" (with the quotes).

But yes, it's good to see us in the results: 17 Google results pages of thephilosophyforum.com URLs indexed as of today by my reckoning.

Shot of a lifetime, that one!

See the thread for feature requests: thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/30/feature-requests . The OP has a continually updated list.

I've asked support for MathJax, and they want to know if I'll sponsor the required development.

Thanks Street, I'll read that Lingis article.

First I'd like to say--and I don't say this to absolve myself of the responsibility for defending the article--that I wrote this article a couple of years ago and would take a different approach today. But I will defend it, because I still basically agree with most of it, as far as it goes.

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:

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.

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.’

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 about 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.

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.

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.

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:

All we’re actually doing is seeing an internal model of the world; we’re not seeing what’s out there, we’re seeing just our internal model of it. And that’s why, when you move your eyes around, all you’re doing is updating that model. — David Eagleman

But after reading what you say about unconscious inference, I suspect that you have more sympathy with this view than I at first thought:

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.

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:

Induction allows us to infer that this pattern of light, which, we will suppose, looks like a cat, probably proceeds from a region in which the other properties of cats are also present. Up to a point, we can test this hypothesis by experiment: we can touch the cat, and pick it up by the tail to see if it mews. Usually the experiment succeeds; when it does not, its failure is easily accounted for without modifying the laws of physics. (It is in this respect that physics is superior to ignorant common sense.) But all this elaborate work of induction, in so far as it belongs to common sense rather than science, is performed spontaneously by habit, which transforms the mere sensation into a perceptive experience. — Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth

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.

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.

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.

Looking around and getting around do not fit into the standard idea of what visual perception is. But note that if an animal has eyes at all it swivels its head around and it goes from place to place. The single, frozen field of view provides only impoverished information about the world. The visual system did not evolve for this. — J. J. Gibson

Now, about the duck-rabbit.

Now the kicker is, everything is a duckrabbit. ...

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. — The Great Whatever

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.

Thanks :)

I really like square and abstract too. Those are great.

Me, I started taking photos of people this summer, which I've never done before.

I'm not sure I know of a solution — invizzy

The solution is to overcome your prejudices.

Unusually, I agree with you.

This is the proper thread for feature requests so I deleted your second comment.

Thanks for the feedback. I've added it to the list in the OP.

Hi @Agustino

We'll be setting up a thread here on the forum for artistic work, and we don't intend to publish poems or stories on the Articles site, at least to begin with. Our vision is of a philosophical journal tackling issues in academic philosophy, but one that is accessible to educated lay-people and sometimes relevant to topical concerns. If we do decide to publish poetry or stories in the future it will be in the context of a site that has built up a solid archive of substantial philosophical articles.

As for length, between around 2000 and 5000 words is good, but that won't be strict: the first article, published two days ago, is over 6000 words, and I can imagine shorter pieces being sometimes suitable too.

Two others have mentioned this as well so I've added it to the feature requests here: http://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/30/feature-requests/p1

Currently I can change other colours but not the main body background or side menu background.

8-)

I'm not surprised someone pounced on the weakest sentence in the article, "If I think about my own perceptual experiences, it is obvious that...", which is unclear and inept.

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.

It seems to me that any philosophical position that must claim that eating a cookie is torture has gone wrong somewhere. — The Great Whatever

Who could argue?

If you want really short there's always Is Justified True Belief Knowledge by Gettier.

Or for something a little longer, What is it like to be a bat? by Nagel. — Michael

By the way, I didn't include these because I thought something longer and meatier would be more suitable. And my guess is most people have read the Nagel and could discuss it in any old thread.

Ooh, another one I think I'd like to read, and possibly discuss, at some point. — Sapientia

Personally that's the one that appeals to me least among those mentioned. But once we have a couple more suggestions, including one on ethics, I'll create a poll and if the people want Davidson, I'll read Davidson.

Oh right, I see. Fair enough.

I'd like to give some anecdotal evidence that for me lends weight to the thesis that the mind is not bound by the skin and skull. As some of you know, I broke my left arm two weeks ago. I'm right-handed so I haven't been as disabled as I could have been, but it's still been difficult, and in interesting ways.

The worst thing has been typing, because not only am I a web developer, but I've also been setting up and trying to participate in this new forum. It's difficult not merely in the physical sense, but in the way it seems to block my entire being-as-developer or being-as-writer. I open up a forum discussion with the intention of contributing, but I find I cannot think about it without my hands at the ready in the normal way. Similarly with my work, I can keep on top of the small everyday tasks that come up, but I cannot bring my self to bear on the meatier problems. I've got bugs to fix and new features to implement, but I can't get in the zone. When I'm in the zone I'm constantly switching between various windows and using special key strokes to manipulate code. My cognition, normally, seamlessly involves my brain, hands, keyboard, and the objects on my computer screen.

I can achieve these things, given time, but the extra effort degrades the quality of the work, I feel like I only have a superficial hold on the problem, and I feel like I'm not in control. More importantly, I most often struggle to get going in the first place.

It is not that I know what to do--have it all planned out "in my head"--and feel frustrated that my body is not in a fit state to cooperate. This is not how it is at all. I actually cannot plan or think well without my familiar powers of movement. When I'm in the zone, I pounce on the computer and throw myself into a problem, and these words are not merely metaphorical--there is a real sense in which I move physically, however slightly, in postures of attack or careful exploration (it's not just my hands).

All of which is not to say that I couldn't retrain myself were I to lose the use of my arm permanently.

I like the look of the first two and the Brassier, and Quine's a good idea too.