• New article published: The Argument for Indirect Realism
    ↪Michael
    I wasn't trying to change your mind. I was showing that it was incumbent on you not to present a controversial thesis as if it were obvious. And if you were in a philosophical discussion that involved a dispute about whether Yahweh existed, you would likewise have to do more than appeal to your prejudices (personally I don't get involved in those debates because like you I think it's bloody obvious).
  • Reading Group for Kant's Prolegomena: What did he get right and/or wrong?
    ↪Moliere
    I thought that his use of analytic/synthetic to describe the different methods of the Prolegomena and the CPR respectively was mostly unrelated to his use of it to describe judgements. Isn't it more about analytic as in breaking down a complex whole, and synthetic meaning building up from basic elements? But I'm not really sure how that applies to the books, unless he's simply saying that in the CPR he had to start from scratch and build the edifice brick by brick, and that in the Prolegomena he is taking this already built thing and breaking it down to reveal its core truths.
  • New article published: The Argument for Indirect Realism
    So, my apologies to jamalrob for my part in de-railing his thread. — John

    It's not a problem, John. The more discussion the better. :)

    1) I can tell the difference between veridical and non-veridical experience.

    2) I cannot tell the difference between veridical and non-veridical experience.

    You cannot claim both of these. The skeptic has nothing to do with it; you can't blame him.     — The Great Whatever

    But that's just an uncharitable reformulation of what I said. It is this interpretation that I'm blaming the sceptic for.

    Can one experimentally show that there are objective colours? — Michael

    I'm not sure why you are asking this in response to my posting of a link to an authoritative article that shows colour realism/objectivism to be a popular philosophical position. I posted it because you seem to think you can say that colour is obviously mind-dependent.
  • Missing features, bugs, questions about how to do stuff
    ↪Monitor
    Only subscribers get to upload files as things stand.
  • Reading Group for Kant's Prolegomena: What did he get right and/or wrong?
    Right, I wrote this too so I'll post it. Then I'll hold off for a while. And if anyone thinks these walls of text aren't suitable for the thread, let me know. I've written so much because I've been enjoying it.

    Preamble

    The Preamble covers the central distinction covered in the introduction to the CPR, between analytic and synthetic judgements. He begins in section 1 by looking at the sources of metaphysical knowledge, and states that they are a priori by definition.

    A few words about a priori and a posteriori. These are about justification, i.e., how we come to know things, so they are epistemological concepts. In the CPR Kant says that “There can be no doubt that all knowledge begins with experience”, but that “although our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.” What this means is that it is experience that calls forth knowledge, not that it is the source. For example, it is in experience that we come to know about cause and effect in the first place, but only because events must be experienced in terms of a prior, independent (pure) concept of the understanding.

    The crucial thing to know about the a priori is that it is characterized by necessity and universality. In contrast to empirical knowledge, which is always contingent--it only happens to be the case that the sun rose this morning--and applies only as far as we know to the cases we can observe, a priori knowledge is what is always applied to everything that is relevant to it, everywhere and for all time. Thus we generalize from observation into laws, e.g., every event has a cause, the total mass-energy of a closed system remains constant, and E=mc^2.

    All necessary truths must be known a priori, because experience and induction can only give us contingency as Hume showed. E=mc^2, for example, might at first sight look like it's a posteriori, because it's confirmed by experiment. But all that's really discovered in such an experiment is that E=mc^2 happened to be true on that occasion; the necessity and universality of the equation, it's law-like character, cannot be confirmed by experience.

    But is all a priori knowledge necessary? Historically most philosophers have thought so--it’s hard to think of anything a priori that doesn’t apply across the board necessarily. But Kripke argued that there is such a thing as contingent a priori knowledge. However I’ll leave that aside, because it’s is not the kind of a priori that Kant is interested in.

    It’s often said that Kant found a way between rationalism and empiricism, or a way to reconcile them, and it can be seen here. The rationalists had their innate ideas, like the ideas that God is omnipotent or that time has no beginning and no end, which are thought to be necessary and universal. But Kant's a priori knowledge is different: it consists of concepts or principles that are used to form judgements about the objects of experience, whereas the innate ideas are whole judgements already present in the mind and complete without any experience at all. Thus Kant accepts that experience is essential for knowledge (empiricism), but also accepts that necessary and universal truths can be known by the understanding (rationalism).

    Briefly on this point, I think it's wrong to think of rationalism and empiricism here as equal, competing philosophies. Kant was in the rationalist tradition and, in a way, wanted to save it from scepticism by reforming it. Adorno puts it nicely in his lectures on the CPR:

    ...the synthetic a priori, in short, the incontrovertibly true and valid modes of knowledge that far surpass mere logic, may be described as the roast, the Leibnizian or Cartesian roast, while Hume and English scepticism provide the dialectical salt. — Theodor Adorno

    Section 2 is about the types of knowledge that can be called metaphysical. Whereas the a priori-a posteriori distinction concerns how we know things, this is about what we know. In other words, a priori-a posteriori is about the justification of propositions and analytic-synthetic is about the character of the propositions themselves, or about the sort of truths they are, or more precisely what makes them true or false. Whereas a priori-a posteriori is epistemological, analytic-synthetic is semantic.

    So Kant makes a distinction between judgements (we can think of judgements as propositions held to be true in human understanding), and this distinction applies to all judgements, whether they contribute a priori or a posteriori knowledge:

    • Analytic: explicative judgements, ones that don’t tell us anything new but just bring out what’s already there.
    • Synthetic: ampliative judgements, ones that are informative, i.e., they add something new.

    Analytic judgments. Kant uses something like the containment metaphor he used in the CPR to define these. This is the idea that the subject of a proposition contains the predicate already, e.g., in “All bachelors are unmarried”, being unmarried is contained in the concept of a bachelor. In contrast, “Some bachelors are Mexican” is not analytic because the concept of bachelors has nothing to do with being Mexican.

    Incidentally, the example he actually uses, of bodies being extended (analytic) and heavy (synthetic), is much less useful to us now. At the time, extension was a part of the concept of a material body (meaning a physical thing), both in physics and metaphysics, whereas weight was not. He was just using a familiar and uncontroversial concept.

    He goes on to elaborate on his containment definition: an analytic judgement is one whose negation is a contradiction. Thus it is contradictory to deny that all bachelors are unmarried.

    It’s easy to get a sense of what “analytic” means from this, but it’s a bit vague, and later philosophers--who had better logical tools than Kant, who was working with Aristotle’s logic--pointed out that his definitions are not general enough. For example, he has only really covered subject-predicate propositions, but he means analyticity to apply to more complex judgements, like those involving conditionals.

    There are other logical problems, but it turns out that analyticity can be satisfactorily generalized:

    A judgement and its negation are both analytic if and only if one of the pair is self-contradictory, or false by virtue of the definitions of words or its logical form. — Jill Vance Buroker

    In any case, I find true by definition or true by virtue of the meanings of the constituent terms to be close enough approximations much of the time.

    As Kant points out at the end of 2(b), all such judgements must also be a priori, because it is logical form and the definitions of the terms involved that determine whether they’re true or false--not experience.

    Synthetic judgments. These can be defined as simply the contrary of analytic judgements, i.e., they are judgements that are not true by virtue of the meanings of the constituent terms. So it’s clear enough that a posteriori judgements, i.e., judgements of experience, are all synthetic. But Kant says there are synthetic a priori judgements too.

    He classifies synthetic judgements like this:

    1. Judgements of experience
    2. Mathematical judgements
    3. Properly metaphysical judgements

    I’ve said enough about 1. And like @Sapientia I don’t feel like covering the mathematics, whether 7 + 5 = 12 is synthetic or not, etc. My feeling has always been that mathematics is entirely analytic and that Kant was wrong on this. I don’t know how badly that damages Kant’s project--I suspect it doesn’t.

    So that leaves metaphysics. Here he argues that although there are analytic judgements in metaphysics--I think of these like steps in solving a mathematical equation--the important ones are synthetic. Just like physics, with its propositions such as “air is an elastic fluid”, the whole point of metaphysics is to tell us something about reality, something that is not true only by definition. He gives the example that “all that is substance persists”, which is a conservation principle that serves as a foundation for physics (the quantity of matter remains constant in physical interactions). Other more controversial synthetic judgements of metaphysics are that reality is fundamentally made up of monads, that reality is fundamentally made up of matter, and that reality is divided between two substances, mind and matter. These aim at positive knowledge, not mere explication.

    And of course they are also a priori, so we can see that the synthetic a priori will be Kant’s main concern.

    So we can make a table of knowledge like this:

                      analytic            synthetic
a priori              ✓                   ✓
a posteriori          —                   ✓

    There is no such thing as analytic a posteriori, because what can be known based on experience cannot be true merely by definition or logically.

    That’s enough for now. The next bit, the “General Question”, is where Kant introduces the central question: How are synthetic a priori propositions possible?
  • Reading Group for Kant's Prolegomena: What did he get right and/or wrong?
    Nice post @Moliere. One thing I avoided when writing my own summary was this:

    Something that piqued my interest later is when Kant distinguishes between methods to draw the distinction between the Prolegomena and the Critique -- namely, the Prolegomena follows the analytic method, and the Critique follows the synthetic method. Kant insists that the synthetic method is necessary to present all the articulations, whereas the analytic method is good enough -- after accepting the deduction (which, back then, was more akin to legal justification than dedeuctive logical inference) -- for giving the plan in broad strokes. — Moliere

    Can you say more about what he means by this? I was never quite sure.
  • New article published: The Argument for Indirect Realism
    To think that when we see red or taste sweetness that this redness and sweetness are inherent properties of these mind-independent causes is evidently false. — Michael

    Note that colour realism and objectivism are popular views among philosophers.

    One of the most prominent views of color is Color Objectivism, i.e., the view that color is an objective, i.e., mind-independent, intrinsic property, one possessed by many material objects (of different kinds) and light sources. — SEP
    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/color/
  • New article published: The Argument for Indirect Realism
    ↪The Great Whatever
    You're right, I'm not very interested, but I'm smarting from the charge of internal incoherence, so let me try again.

    Between making use of the distinction and saying that I can't tell the difference at any particular time there is a tension from a sceptical standpoint, but not an inconsistency, for making use of the distinction does not depend on my being able to tell the difference during any particular instance of experience.
  • Reading Group for Kant's Prolegomena: What did he get right and/or wrong?
    Here’s my bit about the preface.

    Preface or Introduction

    First, I like that it's well-written, which is not something Kant is famous for. But he could do it if he tried, and he thought it especially important to boost the rhetoric and drama for this particular book. The Prolegomena was written a couple of years after the publication of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, and was intended as a forceful summary of that work. Kant is on a mission to reform metaphysics, and this book is meant to serve as the starting point for all future attempts at doing it. What this really means is that he is attacking traditional rationalist metaphysics.

    Metaphysics was, or was felt to be, in crisis. In contrast to physics, which had been making great strides of discovery for a couple of hundred years and which had recently been revolutionized by Newton, metaphysics “cannot, as other sciences, attain universal and lasting acclaim”, and “perpetually turns round on the same spot without coming a step further”. Back then, in the midst of the Enlightenment, any endeavour aiming at knowledge of the world was expected to make progress. But there was no such progress in metaphysics, nor even any substantial agreement. Kant is saying, “if you think you can do metaphysics, read this first before embarrassing us all.”

    The particularly philosophical source of the crisis of metaphysics was David Hume’s scepticism, and Kant makes it explicit here that the construction of the CPR was based on the need to respond to him. Kant nicely summarizes Hume’s position on the connection of cause and effect:

    He indisputably proved that it is wholly impossible for reason to think such a connection a priori and from concepts, because this connection contains necessity; and it is simply not to be seen how it could be, that because something is, something else necessarily must also be, and therefore how the concept of such a connection could be introduced a priori. From this he concluded that reason completely and fully deceives herself with this concept, falsely taking it for her own child, when it is really nothing but a bastard of the imagination, which, impregnated by experience, and having brought certain representations under the law of association, passes off the resulting subjective necessity (i.e., habit) for an objective necessity (from insight). From which he concluded that reason has no power at all to think such connections, not even merely in general, because its concepts would then be bare fictions, and all of its cognitions allegedly established a priori would be nothing but falsely marked ordinary experiences; which is so much as to say that there is no metaphysics at all, and cannot be any.

    This is a threat in two specific ways. It questions the possibility of metaphysics as an independent science (a rigorous, rational and progressive discipline), and it also threatens the status of physics insofar as physics is based on principles and laws that are meant to apply without fail, necessarily and throughout the universe, e.g., Newton's Laws or Einstein's equation of general relativity; or based on more basic metaphysical principles such as that every event is caused. Reason (the a priori) is independent of the empirical, but it often concerns itself with the empirical. So in a nutshell, Hume had threatened humanity’s claim to rational objective knowledge.

    Kant, unlike Hume, is going to defend reason’s ability to apply a priori concepts of necessity and universality; he will say that this is much more than just a habit to get us through life. But to do this he will drastically restrict the domain over which this can be done. Basically [SPOILER ALERT!] the answer will be that informative objective a priori knowledge is possible, but only when it concerns the objects of experience, i.e., speculative metaphysics is impossible. These are the positive and negative aspects of Kant’s project, respectively: in support of our ability to know the world objectively through physics and natural science more generally, but against the attempt to get beyond experience.

    A word about metaphysics to clarify what I’ve just been saying, and this might also help to solve @Sapientia's worry about the separation of metaphysics and the empirical. For Kant there are basically two kinds: immanent metaphysics or the metaphysics of experience and transcendent or speculative metaphysics. (Note it’s transcendent and not transcendental). Immanent metaphysics is a priori reasoning concerning the objects of experience and thus the objects of physics; it’s basically about the “principles and laws” I mentioned, on which natural science is based. Speculative metaphysics, on the other hand, is a priori reasoning about what is beyond experience. It’s about what the world is really made of beyond any evidence we could possibly adduce. Examples are Leibniz’s monads and Plato's theory of forms. Speculative metaphysics is pretty much what we mean by metaphysics today.

    However, although it's not quite clear at this stage there is really another kind of metaphysics: that which Kant himself is going to be doing, which is transcendental metaphysics, which explores the relationship of human reason and experience with the world. On the other hand it's debatable if this is metaphysics or in fact just epistemology. Anyway, I expect there will be more about that in later posts.

    Metaphysics is often summed up, as it has been on this site, as asking "big questions", regarding things like truth and reality, and including questions such as "What exists?" and "Are objects constituted by the way we see and describe the world?".

    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

    I think we can now see that Kant is not excluding the empirical. Metaphysics can be about empirical objects--it is just that they cannot be the source of metaphysical knowledge, just as Hume showed.

    I don't have any comments on what he got right and wrong, because I think it's too early for that.

    Next I’ll cover the Preamble, which is mainly about the analytic-synthetic distinction. A priori-a posteriori should probably be sketched out too.
  • New article published: The Argument for Indirect Realism
    ↪The Great Whatever
    My position doesn't demand that I address such a possibility, because I have been fairly explicitly presuming all along that it is not the case. That is, although I accept for the sake of argument that "every instance of an experience is one that is in principle indistinguishable between the two types you've mentioned", I take it for granted (as I've said) that such instances as are hallucinations are rare interruptions in perception.

    This would be a problem only if I were trying to establish the distinction, to prove against the sceptic that it was real.
  • New article published: The Argument for Indirect Realism
    ↪The Great Whatever
    No, like I said, "what I accepted was that there are times when I can't tell whether or not what seems to be there is there", but in the wider context of my life hallucination is meaningful as an anomalous, disruptive event. This is just a tedious disagreement about what "cannot tell" means. Perhaps I was unclear.
  • New article published: The Argument for Indirect Realism
    But the problem for TGW's argument is the direct realist has never argued there is no difference between the real and virtual world. They have NEVER take the position we can't tell the difference. We can, in fact, tell the difference all the time. We have experiences of "real" and "virtual" events. We know about them. Though it may be true there is no difference, in immediate sensation, between a "real" world event and a "virtual" world event, it is NOT true when is comes to our wider experience (and so our knowledge). — TheWillowOfDarkness
    TGW is ignorant of this because he isn't considering experiences other than the immediate sensation of an object.

    Indeed, I tried to make that point in various ways, but it doesn't satisfy TG.
  • New article published: The Argument for Indirect Realism
    And if you believe the dreaming argument is absurd, then it reflects poorly on your position, since your position is exactly what makes it cogent. — The Great Whatever

    The dream argument works against anyone who takes what is evident in experience to warrant belief in anything at all. It is cogent insofar as one thinks experience is intrinsically precarious and uncertain. But I don't want to argue against the dream argument or any of that stuff, and I don't know what position of mine you keep referring to that you think demands that I do.
  • New article published: The Argument for Indirect Realism
    Now surely you agree that if every instance of an experience is one that is in principle indistinguishable between the two types you've mentioned, there is a problem? — The Great Whatever

    No, I don't agree. I was hallucinating then, and now I'm not. But wait, I can't know that I'm not now hallucinating either: what if it's all hallucination? I really don't think the problem you've uncovered amounts to anything more than this.
  • New article published: The Argument for Indirect Realism
    ↪The Great Whatever
    But I never said that I can't make that distinction. What I accepted was that there are times when I can't tell whether or not what seems to be there is there. Which is of the nature of hallucination, of course (and illusion).
  • New article published: The Argument for Indirect Realism
    When you say "your theory", do you mean the following claims taken together?

    Subjectively, I can't tell the difference between a hallucination and a genuine perception.
    Hallucination and perception are distinct.

    I'm not playing games. I actually don't see the problem. So how can I possibly respond?
  • New article published: The Argument for Indirect Realism
    Like I say, subjective indistinguishability does not entail that I cannot successfully make the distinction based on what I know hallucination to be, what I know about it from experience, learning, and so on. There seems to be something very wrong about the question "how did you figure out that such a distinction exists?" I'm not prepared to start telling stories about how I once recovered from a hallucination and thereby "figured out" that hallucinations really are different from perception.

    What if there really is no such metaphysical distinction? That is a worry for a certain kind of sceptic or his victims, but not for me. Again, I don't mean to be too blasé, because you're a serious interlocutor, but I just don't see the problem.
  • New article published: The Argument for Indirect Realism
    ↪The Great Whatever
    I don't know why my answers haven't been enough. Maybe I just don't know what you're getting at.

    And I've already said I had no interest in defending realism as such.
  • Welcome PF members!
    ↪Sapientia
    Is that because he's a well-known masochist. ;)
  • New article published: The Argument for Indirect Realism
    ↪The Great Whatever
    If we agree there's a difference, then I don't know what the problem is. Knowing there's a difference between hallucination and perception doesn't depend on my being able to tell the difference when I'm hallucinating. I can be fooled. But such episodes occur in the context of my life, in which most of the time I have no reason to suspect that what I see is merely the result of neurological disruption. Because that is what hallucination is, and I take it for granted. I've enjoyed our exchange so far, but this doesn't seem like a fruitful way to go. Am I missing something?

    you, the realist — The Great Whatever

    I don't want to be "the realist".
  • What is the point of philosophy?
    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.
  • Reading Group for Kant's Prolegomena: What did he get right and/or wrong?
    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
  • New article published: The Argument for Indirect Realism
    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.
  • Reading Group for Kant's Prolegomena: What did he get right and/or wrong?
    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 PF members!
    ↪xzJoel
    Welcome :)
  • Reading Group for Kant's Prolegomena: What did he get right and/or wrong?
    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?
  • New article published: The Argument for Indirect Realism
    @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
  • Reading Group for Kant's Prolegomena: What did he get right and/or wrong?
    ↪Sapientia
    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)
  • Reading Group for Kant's Prolegomena: What did he get right and/or wrong?
    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
  • Monthly Readings: Suggestions
    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.
  • Welcome PF members!
    ↪Thorongil
    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?
  • Welcome PF members!
    ↪Thorongil
    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)?
  • Reading for November: Poll
    All right, it looks like it's Davidson for this month. Anyone got a nice version and I'll start a new thread?
  • New article published: The Argument for Indirect Realism
    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
  • New article published: The Argument for Indirect Realism
    ↪John
    Thanks John, I'd love to see your comments if you do get around to reading it.
  • How should one think about Abstract Expressionism?
    ↪John
    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.
  • How should one think about Abstract Expressionism?
    ↪Thorongil
    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.
  • Welcome PF members!
    ↪Thorongil
    He joined already, as you can see here. Hasn't posted anything though.
  • How should one think about Abstract Expressionism?
    ↪Thorongil
    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".
  • New article published: The Argument for Indirect Realism
    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.
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