Thanks for that excellent summary.

A foot-note. There is an additional aspect to this desire for certainty. It is the tendency to universalize. Admittedly not everything is certain (sometimes our sense deceive us), but equally not everything is uncertain (sometimes our senses do not deceive us).

Why should we expect there to be one universal account of consciousness, dreaming, cogitation and such? — Banno

I'm not all that surprised that there is a variety of first person accounts of various mental phenomena. I'm sure that we all tend to fall victim to the assumption that everyone else is just like me. It's more dangerous when that assumption becomes the idea that everyone else ought to be like me or that there is something wrong when other people turn out to be different from me. (There's an overtone in the very terms "aphantasia" and "hyperphantasia" that I think is very dangerous. They are not necessarily pathologies.)

These are first person accounts, not objective reports. The fact that people give such accounts is important, but should not be taken to suggest that they are true, or at least it needs to be taken into account that they are unverifiable (not therefore meaningless). Compare the ways that the medical profession treats "I am in pain". Compare also the trouble that we have (should have) with dreams.

Language is for expressing, describing and communicating thoughts and the contents of perception. — Corvus

I'm afraid this triggers one of my hobby-horses. Language is also for expressing emotions, giving orders, consoling people, deceiving people, inspiring the troops, shaming wrong-doers and many other things. Focusing on one, admittedly important, use of language narrows the vision of philosophy and distorts the understanding of people living in the world.
There is, I believe, even an argument that the origins of language, assuming they lie in animal communication systems are severely practical things like expressing peaceful or aggressive intentions, making demands, expressing anger, fear, pleasure and pain and such.
The theoretical uses of language are not the core, but a derivative, and arguably still marginal, use of language.

The infinite regress is only avoided by stopping, which renders the capacity as still not understood, because we do not get to the bottom of it — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, this way of looking at an infinite regress has occurred to me. One issue is that once you have taken the first step, you need a reason for not taking the second step.... Or, you need a reason for stopping. The standard view of this, as I'm sure you are aware, is that the infinity of the regress is real, so that, for example, Achilles can never catch the tortoise or we can never acquire a disposition. Wittgenstein takes issue with this, but it is still regarded as a problem.

But we can probably agree that there is a feeling that simply to analyse a disposition (potential, capacity, ability, skill, tendency, liability, habit, custom) as a counter-factual that x would happen if... is not enough. But I notice that you never specify what would count as the bottom of it. But we do look for, and often find, a basis for the disposition. Petrol is flammable because its' molecular structure is such that it easily reacts with the oxygen in the air and so forth. Most ice floats because its molecular structure makes it less dense and therefore lighter, than water. But these are empirical discoveries. So the most that we can say is that a disposition includes the idea that there is a causal basis for the counter-factual, but no more than that. In the end, it's just an application of the principle of sufficient reason.

I know that's not very well argued, but I hope it is enough to suggest at least that there is an alternative view to yours.

My problem with your view is that, so far as I can see, your view of capacity and potential are wide open to the objection that Berkeley rightly levels against the scholastic idea of matter as pure potential and Locke's view that substance is something unknown - that it is empty.

So the math does not provide us with any higher degree of certainty about the world than other language forms, because it is applied according to principles stated in other forms of language anyway. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, mathematics applied to the world is subject to the same caveats and limitations as any other empirical knowledge. The idea of mathematics as something different is about pure mathematics and purely mathematical objects, like numbers.

Plato may have presented math as if it was supposed to be the standard, but then exposed problems with that presupposition, and in the Parmenides, he demonstrates problems with math's basic foundational concept, "one", or "unity". — Metaphysician Undercover

Thanks for this. But isn't it also true that the Theory of Forms presents an idea that seems to be a generalization of mathematics and provide a basis for his view that the things of this world are but shadows of reality? I would have thought that Plato was quite able to hold a view and recognize difficulties with it at the same time.

While Malcolm gives a little here, there is not much left over to compare whether a conscious experience of a dream is "qualitatively" similar or different to a conscious experience of being awake. — Richard B

Well, I would not say that there is never a give-away within the experience, so to speak. On the contrary, the fact that I seem to be flying might be regarded as a clue. But somehow, such clues seldom, if ever, get picked up. So it is not really the experience that doesn't give away the truth, but the experiencer who doesn't pick up the clues - until they wake up the following morning. But this doesn't amount to a dream-like quality that tells the dreamer what is going on.

I’m not sure where Austin put forward “this idea” of what we do in dreams. — Antony Nickles

The quotation from Austin is:- "I may have the experience (dubbed 'delusive' presumably) of dreaming that I am being presented to the Pope. Could it be seriously suggested that having this dream is 'qualitatively indistinguishable' from actually being presented to the Pope? Quite obviously not. After all, we have the phrase 'a dream-like quality'; some waking experiences are said to have this dream-like quality, and some artists and writers occasionally try to impart it, usually with scant success, to their works." pp. 48, 49.

It's the last sentence I take issue with.

Thanks for these links. I'll have a look at them.

I think you could say the same thing about Austin. His arguments have been largely ignored because the philosophical community continues to talk about qualia, what-it's-like-ness experiences, or the ontological subjective. — Richard B

The life of philosophy is debate, which requires a puzzle or a question. Solutions and answers end debate. Paradoxically, being right leaves nothing to say. So it becomes necessary to renew the puzzle.
Wittgenstein did not appreciate this, which is why he had to give up philosophy when he had written the Tractatus.

My main point in this post is to show how two linguistic philosophers supposedly analyzing the same ordinary language we all use, seemingly coming up with some fundamentally different conclusions. — Richard B

As usual, what was supposed to be a final authority becomes a subject of debate. No-one really likes a final authority. In some people, the prospect of a final authority triggers a desire to overthrow it.

I don't think this is cynicism. I think it represents some understanding of philosophy as a way of life.

Oh you said you don't get mental images. — Corvus

I'm afraid I have a mild form of aphantasia. You can speak for yourself, but not for me. — Ludwig V

What I said was that I don't always get mental images. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I call them up (especially when remembering) and sometimes I don't. I sometimes seem to recall images when I wake up in the morning; I have no way of knowing whether my report is accurate. BTW, there's no problem about dreaming "in language"; it's just telling a story (improvised); for me that usually happens when I'm awake, so it is called day-dreaming.

What I'm protesting against is the idea that necessarily one "sees" an image when imagining things, remembering things, etc and that "seeing" an image is always the same thing. The images I "see" when I remember something are not like the images I see on a screen or in a mirror and even less like the images I see in pictures, and when someone remarked, on seeing me and my brother together for the first time "Oh, there are two of you. You are the image of each other." (We are not twins and neither of us was impressed by this remark.) All these examples are different from the image of the monarch that appears on stamps, coins and notes in the UK.

I don't deny that we think, remember, judge, imagine, etc. etc. How could I? I'm not sure that I know what mental objects are supposed to be.

Perception will not bear the epistemological weight philosophers put on its shoulders. it needs help. — Banno

Yes. The search for certainty. Nothing can bear the weight of that.

It's in line with Wittgenstein, of course:
To repeat: don’t think, but look!
— PI, §66 — Banno

Just occasionally, I find I have to take issue with something that W says. The idea that it is just a matter of just looking, or collecting data, is far too simple. Wittgenstein gets us to look at things differently, to break out of the tyranny of philosophical knots. Austin gets us to see distinctions and differences that we overlook unless we are very careful. Both provide cases (examples) that are effective. They are not random. They are selected and constructed.

What is also true, though, is that their work is only to persuade us to do our work.

I was saying that if delusions, illusions are regarded as a type of perception, then why shouldn't seeing mental images in memories, imaginations, thinking and intuitions be thought of as a type of perception too. It was a suggestion, not a claim. — Corvus

Fair enough, and I can see why it might make sense. My reason for not accepting it is that perception (seeing, hearing, etc.) is always perception of something - hence the tendency to think about subject and object. That's how we get led astray. In the case of imagining something, there is no object - I mean that unicorns don't exist and that it is misleading to suppose that when we imagine unicorns we necessarily see something unicorn-like. (When we imagine or remember visiting the Parthenon, we are not visiting the Parthenon).

The issue is that the capacity to see, which is temporally posterior to learning how to see, is necessarily prior in time, to the physical act of seeing. Therefore the capacity to see cannot be reduced to the capacity to learn how to see, nor can it be reduced to the physical activity of seeing. — Metaphysician Undercover

But it seems to me that, just as one swallow doesn't make a summer, one action doesn't make a disposition, habit, tendency or addiction, and that I acquire the capacity or skill required to do many things by doing them or trying to do them. Your infinite regress suggests that I cannot acquire any capacity, and I don't believe that.

I understand folk like to say Malcolm is denying that we have experiences such as dreams, but I think we one needs to understand he is studying how we understand the concept of "dreaming" and what we can and cannot say about such a concept. — Richard B

Thank you for your posts about this. But I had the impression that he does deploy an argument about this, that experiencing something is incompatible with being unconscious and that being asleep is being unconscious.

I think you could say the same thing about Austin. His arguments have been largely ignored because the philosophical community continues to talk about qualia, what-it's-like-ness experiences, or the ontological subjective. — Richard B

Yes. I put it down partly to the conventional approach to philosophical education as initiation into traditional ways of thinking with the intention of inoculating students against infection. It doesn't seem to work very well, partly because breaking through, or out, of them is not a once-for-all job. But that pushes us back to Cavell's idea that the roots of philosophy lie deeper than was recognized at the time.

Austin seems to be saying that we somehow know the dream experience is "qualitatively" different than the waking experience, because as he says "How otherwise should we know how to use and contrast the words. — Richard B

Yes, and I think he is wrong about that. At least, he is wrong if he thinks that by inspecting the dream experience, we can reliably sort out whether we are awake or not. There's no reliable clue inherent in the experience that allows us to identify it as a dream - if there were, we would be dreaming it, so it wouldn't be reliable. That's why we insist, in the morning that these things did actually (seem to) happen. We tell the difference because the dream story doesn't fit with our waking life in the ways that our memories of yesterday fit with what happens in the morning.

Austin doesn't pay attention to the fact that children have to be taught to recognize that the wolves they dreamt of are dreams - that there are no wolves around one's house and one cannot really jump over tall buildings. Nor does he take into account that many societies do not believe that dreams are just false; they develop ideas that posit them as realities (gods, other worlds, altered states of consciousness) or develop interpretations that posit a kind of truth to them.

In "Dreaming" Malcolm does not ignore scientific considerations regarding dreams. He says the following: — Richard B

Yes. That's why I didn't attribute the resistance to him. It was an informal conversation, no more. But the question what we are to make of them stands, and the issue that the scientists, for the most part, as far as I have seen, seem to accept that we have experiences while we are asleep. But the issue remains that we are dependent on the dreamer's reports about what they are; dream stories are not independently verifiable. The scientific data here ought to be the reports, not the experiences reported.

Austin goes on to criticise the notion that there are preferred conditions for observations in which we can see the "real" qualities of some object. Again, by way of a series of examples he shows that it is not possible to make this approach coherent. — Banno

His demolition of that classic idea is an excellent piece of philosophical work.

But why don't they include mental images we see during our remembering, imagining, thinking, and intuiting? That was my question. — Corvus

Well, you may see them. But I don't think you can assume that everybody sees them.

I was saying that if delusions, illusions are regarded as a type of perception, then why shouldn't seeing mental images in memories, imaginations, thinking and intuitions be thought of as a type of perception too. It was a suggestion, not a claim. — Corvus

My best answer is that imagining something is not like my cases 1 (the real dagger) or 2 (the reflected dagger), both of which clearly count as perceiving something. It most resembles 3, (the hallucination, except that, of course, you are not fooled, deluded) in that there is no dagger nor image of a dagger involved. Isn't that good enough reason to say they are not perceptions?

Taking your question at face value: speaking for myself, I view it as an ability that can be used or not used. As one additional tool in the toolbox of cognition. It in no way interferes with any day-to-day cognitive process. — javra

So you don't see the route to the shops when you remember it? That's good. It could be confusing to see the route as you remember it and as it actually is at the same time. It is simpler and clearer to say that when driving the route, remembering it does not require any images, only correct actions as you go along. (It could also show as correctly telling someone else what to do.)

I'm less sure of what to say given the research about aphantasia. If I take it at face value, some people see something they call an image under circumstances I don't - or so they say. Other people don't - or so they say. Rather than rushing in, it seems best to pause for thought.

You visualise the cup in your mind, and are seeing mental images of the cup. — Corvus

I'm afraid I have a mild form of aphantasia. You can speak for yourself, but not for me.

See Wikipedia - aphantasia

I'm quite capable of thinking, remembering, imagining without seeing images. I'm glad of that. It enables me to drive to the shops, which involves remembering them, without seeing images that might interfere with driving safely. How do you manage?

The outline of how I think about this is here

Let me try to come at it this way. — Ludwig V

. There, I do consider the case of an actual image. My discussion of hallucinations deals with one form of mental images. I didn't consider this case. I'm reluctant to deny that people see something when they see mental images, because it seems that some people find them useful in, for example, problem-solving. However, in line with the empirical evidence, I do deny that people always see an actual image when they think about, remember, or imagine a cup.

I don't have a good understanding of the phenomenon. On the other hand, I have no problem saying that what one might call verbal thinking is just suppressed speech, as is reading silently to oneself.

The ability to perform that special activity is what defines "the perceiver" — Metaphysician Undercover

Wittgenstein, who would define having the ability to 'follow a rule' as someone who has been observed to have followed a specified rule, rather than as someone who has the capacity to follow that rule. — Metaphysician Undercover

Forgive me, but if I understand you rightly, you are using "following a rule" as an example, but intend what you say to apply to all actions. I don't want to get involved in what W might have meant or not meant in his argument about this. So, if I may, I shall talk in terms of another example.

I choose "walking across the room" as my example. I think that you intend what you say to apply to that as well. I asked myself whether you intend what you say to non-actions, to what are called dispositions. These are somewhat different in that the disposition of a stone to resist impact from other bodies is not acquired by the stone but is built in, so to speak, when the rock is formed. So there can be no disposition before the disposition, so your argument doesn't apply. So I'll assume that a capacity is a disposition that is acquired, as tempering changes the properties of iron (and so we call it steel).

Wittgenstein is faced with the question of what type of capacity exists prior to this. — Metaphysician Undercover

From this perspective, the capacity to perceive, what we are calling "the perceiver", must necessarily preexist the act which is implied here by the name, as the act of perception. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is a fake puzzle, based on the fact that we tend to use "capacity" in an ambiguous way. We say of an infant that cannot yet walk, or of someone that has not yet learnt to drive that they cannot walk or drive, but that they have to capacity to learn to walk, or drive and in that sense, can walk or drive. The capacity to learn or otherwise acquire, as skill is distinct from the exercise of that skill. Your infinite regress, I'm afraid, is little more than a pun.

Except that we acquire many skills by practice. The infant learns to walk by trying and failing and gradually getting better at it. We learn to drive by sitting in the driving seat and trying to drive and gradually getting better at it. This learning process is built on what we already can do, but which we have not learnt to do. Infants can do various things from birth and even before birth. These are the result of the physical development of the body, and can be compared to the tendency of the stone to resist pressure - that is, they are dispositions, not capacities.

Instead, we must accept the obvious, much more highly, and truly intuitive principle, that the capacity to perceive, which defines "the perceiver" must be prior in time to any act of perception. — Metaphysician Undercover

As I explained above, the capacity to learn to see is indeed "prior to" the capacity to see, but is not the same capacity as the capacity to see.

He could just have said that perceptions can lack certainty in certain cases. — Corvus

But that is exactly what he does say. He makes a big fuss about it because Ayer argues for a conception of perception that eliminates the possibility of uncertainty at the cost of depriving us of the ability to see anything except what is in our own heads. That's the issue.

I feel that perception doesn't end there, but it activates the other mental activities — Corvus

That's perfectly true. But those activities are not perception, so I'm not quite sure what your point is.

For Ayers, the hallmark of indirect realism is divergence between the world as experienced by a human, and the world as it is. — frank

For Austin, if human experience lines up correctly with what one would expect from a certain POV, — frank

This would be one way of understanding the debate between them. But you are giving too much to Ayer and so missing the point of Austin's argument.

To put it this way, the phenomena here are more complicated that the straightforward distinction between experience and reality can deal with.

Let me try to come at it this way.

1. When Macbeth sees a dagger (i.e. there is a actual, real dagger that he sees), Austin would say that he sees the dagger directly.

2. But that only makes sense if we think of indirect ways in which he might see that dagger, such as via a mirror. In those cases, it makes sense to explain that what he sees (directly) is an image of the dagger and so, in a sense, is inferring that the dagger is there or is interpreting the image as an image of a dagger. Note that the relationship between an image of a dagger is quite hard to describe, but is not at all like the relationship between one dagger and another or the relationship between a dagger and its scabbard.

3. But in the play, there is no dagger, and no image of a dagger. We need to say that he does not see a dagger at all. And yet, he is behaving as if he sees a dagger, and he clearly believes he is seeing a dagger. What are we to say? Well, there is a word that covers this situation - "hallucination". But a hallucination of a dagger is not a real dagger and not a (real) image of a dagger. What, exactly, is a hallucination?

Ayer wants to say that Macbeth sees a dagger-like sense-datum and then wants to argue that what Macbeth actually sees (directly sees) in all three cases is a dagger-like sense-datum. He wants to sweep away the differences between these three cases into the same formula. I think he could justify saying the sense-datum is always what we see "directly". But then, he is extending "direct" and "indirect" and using them in a new context, so he has changed their meanings.

So you could say that they are talking past each other.

Ayer suggests is that to talk of sense-data is just an alternative way of representing the facts. Austin wants to argue is that this amounts to "anything goes" and compares Ayer to Humpty-Dumpty. He also suggests that Ayer doesn't really believe that the choice between the two ways of talking is indifferent.

I would say that the problem is that Ayer's way of talking buries the real differences between the cases.

For the record, to say that someone is hallucinating a dagger is to say that they are behaving as if there is a dagger and believes that there is a dagger when there is no dagger. No more than that. You can call that seeing a dagger or an image of a dagger, if you like, but I think that's just confusing. When people draw the conclusion that we never really see or know reality or that reality is nothing like what we think it is, it becomes absurd.

I was alluding to something along the lines of the extended mind idea. — Apustimelogist

I didn't know about this. I'll have to look at it carefully. It addresses some important considerations. However, I'm a bit suspicious of any attempt to locate "the mind" at all. It would be absurd not to acknowledge that I am located in space and time. But It is not obvious that the mind, as such, can be located in the same way, any more than numbers can.

Thanks very much for these posts. They were very helpful to me.

Secondly, words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can re-look at the world without blinkers. — (Austin, J. L. “A Plea for Excuses: The Presidential Address”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1957: 181–182

A good text, or a good writer, always has more than you think. It's curious how at one level, we understand what the metaphor is getting at (roughly). But on a second look, doubts creep in - and then doubts about the doubts. Perhaps we have to understand what he means by seeing what his practice is. Is this faute de mieux or what really counts?

What is offered by Austin is not a definition, but a method to test proposed uses. What we have is an antidote to the philosopher's tendency to push words beyond their applicability. — Banno

Yes, I think Hume identifies the same problem in relation to the argument from design. Only he calls it "augmentation". I think it's a very important point. I must try to find the reference.

So in outline, Ayer was looking for certainty, and in the process misused and muddled the terms and concepts he was working with. Austin's approach, along with others involved in the "linguistic turn", is to look for clarity over certainty. — Banno

Yes. That is clear enough in this context. I agree also that the detail of the pursuit of clarity becomes more complicated when we push beyond the outline. Ayer surely has views about clarity and certainty.

(I don't want to be obstructive here. I think Austin achieves his goal. I just want to be wary of "augmentation".)

There could be cases of illusion, hallucination, delusion, and confronting with the bogus objects which look like certain objects, but found out to be bogus, lookalikes, mistaken identities etc. Hence the contents of perception require further judgements of its "authenticity" to have assurance as legitimate knowledge. — Corvus

I suggest that Austin does not allow himself to be seduced by the cartesian sceptical argument into pursuing some perfectly assured certainty, which in the end destroys so much, but to notice that when things go wrong, there are ways of coping. Somewhat as, when you drive down a road, you have no assurance that the unexpected will not happen. But you are confident that you can deal with such incidents as and when they occur. That's particularly clear in his fourth point, that real is an adjuster word.

I don't think we are very far apart, though I need to enter a caveat that "perceive" covers a range of activities. After this discussion, we have to be a little cautious using that term.

I was using "interdependent" as a flexible term to cover the different relationships between those elements. So, yes, a perceiver is not just a perceiver but has an independent existence as, say, a creature with the capacity to perceive, not just a particular perception, but a whole range of different perceptions. But surely, the perceiver is only a perceiver as capable of exercising that capacity, just as parents are only parents in relation to their children, even though they are many other things that do not require any such relationship. If they don't have children, they are not parents.

And, yes, to understand that capacity we have to understand that creature, not only when perceiving this perception, but many different perceptions but also as capable of, and performing, many other actions as well. But surely, understanding the capacity requires also understanding the exercise of it?

Cheers. I hope I made a good effort after all. — javi2541997

You certainly did, and a very welcome one, too. Thank you.

But could I add that his little disquisition about ordinary language philosophy deserves some attention too. However, I would like to put this issue into the context of Aristotle's method. Since he had a strong background in Ancient Greek (and, no doubt, Latin), Austin must have been familiar with Aristotle. Aristotle was a great respecter (especially in the context of ethics) of his tradition, often under the label of "what people say". He uses that as a reference point, not a referee, so he is happy to amend and adjust that as appropriate in what he is discovering by his attention to how the world actually is - a sort of empiricism, in marked contrast to Plato.

Since I'm lazy, here a quotation from pp. 62 - 64:-

" 'Real' is an absolutely normal word, with nothing new-fangled or technical or highly specialized about it. It is, that is to say, already firmly established in, and very frequently used in, the ordinary language we all use every day. Thus in this sense it is a word which has a fixed meaning, and so can't, any more than can any other word which is firmly established, be fooled around with ad lib. Philosophers often seem to think that they can just 'assign' any meaning whatever to any word; and so no doubt, in an absolutely trivial sense, they can (like Humpty-Dumpty).

Certainly, when we have discovered how a word is in fact used, that may not be the end of the matter; there is certainly no reason why, in general, things should be left exactly as we find them; we may wish to tidy the situation up a bit, revise the map here and there, draw the boundaries and distinctions rather differently. But still, it is advisable always to bear in mind

(a) that the distinctions embodied in our vast and, for the most part, relatively ancient stock of ordinary words are neither few nor always very obvious, and almost never just arbitrary;
(b) that in any case, before indulging in any tampering on our own account, we need to find out what it is that we have to deal with; and
(c) that tampering with words in what we take to be one little corner of the field is always liable to have unforeseen repercussions in the adjoining territory. Tampering, in fact, is not so easy as is often supposed, is not justified or needed so often as is often supposed, and is often thought to be necessary just because what we've got already has been misrepresented."

The reference to Humpty-Dumpty is presumably a swipe at Ayer & co.

I wouldn't be surprised if he (or they) got the idea from Aristotle. At least, far from being a revolution, it seems that it has a reasonably respectable ancestry. But, of course, a revolution is so much more dramatic than a tradition..

Keeping on the track, Austin says that 'real' 'nor does it have a large number of different meanings-it is not ambiguous. ' I just don't understand why he says this. — javi2541997

You could say that it has a different meaning for each substantive it gets attached to. But what Austin is emphasizing is that it does the same job, i.e. has the same use, when attached to the substantives it gets attached to. One could quarrel with that, but there's no clear principle of individuation attached to either meanings or uses, so we can allow different applications of those terms.

Austin claims that 'real' is more understandable among the people than 'proper' 'genuine', 'true' 'authentic', etc. — javi2541997

If that's what he means to say, it is indeed hard to understand. I think he is not saying that but saying that "real" is an umbrella or basket for all those other terms. Perhaps more like the head of the family.

I don’t think it can be established that a perceiver is both perceiver and perceived. — NOS4A2

So you don't think that people can perceive themselves - be self-aware?

But if the medium, perceiver, is made to be the subject of our inquiry, then the thing perceived and the perception are incidental to the inquiry, and the silliness of this thread is avoided. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't see how one can separate three things, perceiver, perceived and perception. They are clearly interdependent, by definition.

The nervous system is not a medium, though, because it is a part of that which senses—the perceiver—not that which the perceiver senses. I guess my next question is: where does the perceiver begin and end? I doubt appealing to biology can furnish an answer in favor of the indirectness of perception. — NOS4A2

Yes, I think this is the way that your analysis has to go. But I don't think that it encourages us to believe that this approach is useful.

The problem I see is that there is no clear way of determining which philosophical theory is more right. — Janus

That doesn't mean that there is no way of determining which theory is more right, or less wrong.

Anything that has no intellectual appeal to virtually anyone will not "go" to be sure. — Janus

You have put your finger on the way to determine which theory is more right or less wrong. Now, how does one establish whether a theory has any intellectual appeal? By argument, perhaps?

There is, as you point out, also REM and other evidence that shows a great deal of activity during sleep. It looks as if something is happening. That seems to be why Malcolm's ideas are discounted. — Banno

In conversations, I found a reluctance to take scientific research on board. The problem here is partly that being a scientist does not make one immune from philosophical mistakes. What makes it even more difficult is that the distinction between ordinary language and science is distinctly permeable. REM is in some ways a technical, theoretical concept, but in others is a common sense observation.

But I don't see that the research can prove that the subject is experiencing something (in the required sense of experience) without also proving that the subject is also conscious. So we need to stop thinking of consciousness as binary. This is not contrary to common sense - half-asleep, half awake.

Research evidence does show a great deal of activity during sleep, and, by the same token, shows that sleepers are not in a normal state of consciousness.

Dreams do not fall foul of the Private Language Argument, since they are reported in ordinary language. But they make no sense unless sleep is not the same as unconsciousness.

There's room for an interesting speculation about why so many philosophers have been so resistant to even considering the philosophical implications of dreaming that they ignore these arguments.

Why not say they are dreaming? — Banno

I have no problem with that and I think that Malcolm (and the very few sympathizers) are wrong to assume/suggest that nothing is going on. But that just emphasizes the question what is going on in dreaming?

The central critique aimed at Malcolm's account is, as I understand it, that he insists that dreams occur (at least in their quintessential form) when one is soundly asleep, a definition not accepted by others, especially dream researchers. — Banno

What you say confuses me, because it doesn't seem to fit at all with what I understood Malcolm to be arguing. Malcolm's thesis is regarded as outrageous because he denies that people have experiences while they are asleep. The core of the argument is that to be asleep is to be unconscious, but to experience something is to be conscious, so the common sense of dreaming is self-contradictory.

The only facts of the matter are 1) that young children sometimes wake up convinced of impossibilities and have to be taught that they were dreams and 2) that people often wake up telling stories that seem to them (at the time they are telling the stories) to have happened to them while they were asleep. That impression - that things happened to them while they were asleep - is not evidence that anything did happen to them while they were asleep. On the contrary, the evidence is that nothing happened to them while they were asleep.

I wouldn't want to opine on the opinions of dream researchers. But I am under the impression that much of their data is gathered by observing people while they are asleep (and not talking) and, from time to time, waking them up to see whether they have anything to tell. Which is not evidence that they are experiencing anything while asleep - even though they may think it is.

I think this argument is good. It's weakness is the identification of sleep with unconsciousness. I don't think it is obvious even to common sense that sleep is the same thing as unconsciousness. There is a good deal of common sense observation which suggests that a sleeper can be, to some extent, conscious while asleep - and sleep research has a good deal to say about this. That opens up the possibility of reconciling, to some extent at least, common sense with this argument.

Cavell's idea is very interesting and it would be nice to see how it could be developed into a real part of philosophy - digging deeper into the reasons why scepticism or sense-data seem to be able to recover from refutation and sprout afresh. Rejoining philosophy after being out of touch for so long, it does seem plausible to suppose that some ideas arise from enduring tendencies in human thought, which are not based on the arguments. I didn't find his gestures towards Phenomenology convincing - and it seems that phenomenologists didn't either.

The reason you propose in this case makes sense to me. But I don't think it applies to, for example, Berkeley.

Our fears and desires are isolating us as the only way to maintain something certain (by pulling back from the world); but we don’t need everything to meet the criteria of certainty. — Antony Nickles

This looks very plausible. It also looks to me that you might have been reading Cavell?

Is anyone going to do a reading of VII? Or are we not done with VI. — Antony Nickles

As a final flourish, I would like to point out that this have been the point where Austin makes good on his comment that we are told to take it easy "really it's just what we've all believed all along. (There's the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back.)" (Lecture 1 page 2) This makes it much harder to understand what the doctrine amounts to.

VII looks most interesting. I'm looking forward to what people make of it.

He is not talking about perception, he is discussing indirect and direct (here as they relate to seeing, reflecting, etc.); he accepts none of that. I must be a terrible writer. — Antony Nickles

I'm afraid it is me that is the terrible writer. I should not have allowed myself to use that term, though I meant by it no more than seeing/hearing/....

The point is that there is not one kind of evidence (direct or not; real or not). — Antony Nickles

Certainly. I should have put the point in a different way to make that plain.

I haven’t seen anything that would make me think Austin would concede that it was not false. — Antony Nickles

There's another tricky word. I'm only gesturing at the point that what's in question is not "ordinary", contingent falsity, but something more radical, in that Ayer uses "direct" and "indirect" in an incoherent way.

Ludwig V says that Austin might not have had any idea on Perception. I — Corvus

I'm glad you found a way of understanding what I was trying to say.

"sometimes direct, sometimes indirect, and that neither is always the case"-ism — Corvus

is indeed a mouthful. I would still resist calling that a theory and I would have included the proviso "if you accept his use (I don't say definition) of "direct" and "indirect"." Part of the issue is whether Ayer's use of those terms is coherent.

Your statement is based on a fallacy of false dichotomy. Surely there are more perceptual theories than just the two. — Corvus

Well, at the time, sense-datum theory was a staple of philosophy and was taught to and discussed by almost all analytic philosophers. In a sense, since Austin is rejecting the terms of the question, the third alternative would involve neither rejecting not accepting them

But still, if you know of another philosophical theory of perception, perhaps you could identify it?

After a little contemplation, I remember where I got this sense that something is just not right with this passage. From another linguistic philosopher, Norman Malcolm, in is book Dreaming, Chapter 18 "Do I know I am Awake", he says the following: — Richard B

I had the same feeling about this. Malcolm's take on dreaming has not been popular. Indeed, it has largely met the ultimate rejection - being ignored.

I would be delighted to indulge in a conversation about this, but I'm not inclined to think that he's not quite right about these cases shows that his overall argument is wrong. So I think it is off-topic.

Does this show that Austin drifted from the pure faith of linguistic philosophy? Or, that he may have other philosophical presuppositions hidden in his closet? — Richard B

Coming back to it now, I'm not sure how pure the faith of linguistic philosophy ever was.

Ayer resigns himself to only be able to be sure of facts about sense-data (to thus be certain by one, fixed standard because only one type of object, without the need of any talk of context). — Antony Nickles

I don't disagree with this. But then he seems to me someone who thinks he has found firm ground to stand on, but actually has positioned himself on a marsh. That is, the idea of direct, immediate experience doesn't do what he thinks it does.

Just want to clear this up (if I can). — Antony Nickles

I wouldn't disagree with this either. But I'm finding that his project is more complicated than I realized. However, if we pursue those issues here, we may well find that we never get back to the main point.

To attempt to clear up the direct/indirect issue, — Antony Nickles

I'm thinking that there is an argument in the background that is confusing people. It relates to Corvus' question

You still have not answered whether Austin was a direct realist or not. — Corvus

The question has a presupposition, which is in question. So it can't be answered. It's comparable to the traditional "Have you stopped beating your wife?" In this case, whether I answer yes or no, I commit to accepting that direct realism is a coherent possibility. But that's what's in question. If you accept Austin's ordinary language definition of direct and indirect perception, then he does accept that some perceptions are direct and others are not. But the meaning of "direct realism" in Ayer's text is different from that.

Ayer's official position is that all perception is indirect and dubiously realistic. The understanding of Ayer's position that I've come to in this discussion is that there is such a thing as direct perception - perception of sense-data - and the objects of this kind of perception are always real, in the sense that they are what they seem to be, but always unreal in that they are not what we would like to think they are - perceptions of "external" "objective" reality. Austin rejects that idea, not on the ground that it is false, but on the ground that it is incoherent.

Of course, there needs to be evidence under the scrutiny of judgment. I mean, it’s not like we can just make up anything. — Antony Nickles

"Evidence" needs to be interpreted here. It is not a matter of evidence of the kind that's appropriate to deciding whether unicorns exist or the prisoner is guilty. It is a question of the kind of evidence that is appropriate to deciding whether unicorns are possible or whether what the prisoner has done amounts to a crime.

I think it's more a matter of philosophers finding new and novel ways to imagine things; the "problem" only arises when the demand that there be just one "correct" way of viewing things is made. — Janus

You make us sound like SF writers. You can't mean that. But perhaps you mean new and novel ways to think (conceptualize) things. Well, some philosophers certainly do that and it can often be a good idea to break away from orthodox, traditional ways of thought. That's what Austin is trying to do here. Curiously enough, Ayer wrote (Language, Truth and Logic as exactly that. But that doesn't mean anything goes, does it?

My point was that, in thinking about perception in different ways, using different criteria for what would count as 'direct' and 'indirect', perception can be considered to be either direct or indirect. So my question is, given there is no fact of the matter regarding which is the case. what is the problem? — Janus

Well, it's not a question of the (empirical) fact of the matter. That's what makes this a philosophical discussion. I have time for

Phenomenologically speaking our perceptions certainly seem immediate. On the other hand. scientific analysis show perceptions to be highly mediated processes. Which is right? Well, they both are in their own ways. — Janus

This does pose the question what we are to make of, how we are to understand, what we are beginning to learn from physiology and psychology about perception. I think that is a real question. But it still treats perceptions as if they were objects and as if those processes produced a final result, thus allowing Dennett to claim that consciousness is an illusion. What if perception is an activity? What if perceptions are no more objects than a magnetic field or a rainbow or an orbit or heat? BTW, none of those things are events, either.

Direct and indirect are just words i.e. adjectives and adverbs describing how perception worked. One can say, I can see it directly, indirectly, clearly, dimly, sharply, indubitably, lucidly, positively, distinctly, manifestly, conspicuously, translucently, unmistakably, evidently, or precisely, .... etc etc. — Corvus

"Direct" and "indirect" are antonyms. The Cambridge dictionary defines "antonym" as "a word that means the opposite of another word" and provides, by way of example "two antonyms of "light" are "dark" and "heavy". The opposite of "antonym" is "synonym".

Folk might quite successfully agree to "meet at the barn". — Banno

Well, yes. But then, they could equally well agree to meet at the church. Always subject to the proviso there is a the context of a mutual understanding of where to meet. But in the context of a church-barn or barn-church, that understanding is harder to presuppose.

Doubtless Gettier had read Austin. — Banno

I would like to think so. Though the Stanford Encyclopedia cites Alvin Goldman as the source, in 1976. But he might easily have read Austin as well.

Phenomenologically speaking our perceptions certainly seem immediate. On the other hand. scientific analysis show perceptions to be highly mediated processes. Which is right? Well, they both are in their own ways. — Janus

I think that's right. It could be argued that we cannot expect "ordinary language" to be adapted to cater for this (relatively) new kind of knowledge - yet. This does seemm to open up the possibility of a technical account. However, talk of "perceptions" could easily encourage us to think of our perceptions as the end stage of a process. But they aren't pictures - or at least anything like an internal picture or model leads immediately to the question how we perceive that, and an infinite regress.

Here it is the fear of a skeptical moral world transferred to our best case scenario, a physical object. — Antony Nickles

I'm inclined to attribute Ayer's approach to Cartesian scepticism, rather than to any ethical question. However that may be, it is interesting that Ayer seems to back off the radical implications of his theory by denying them; Berkeley does exactly the same thing, in his rather different way. Surely that must show some sort of unease about the theory. (I didn't find the same thing in Hume.)

I would suggest that the reason Austin goes ballistic at this point is because any possibility of successfully refuting the theory is closed if each of us can say whatever we like and deny that we were asserting the consequences. I can sympathize with that. More soberly, it at least trivializes the theory.

I think it's more a matter of philosophers finding new and novel ways to imagine things; the "problem" only arises when the demand that there be just one "correct" way of viewing things is made. — Janus

It is possible that more than one way of thinking about things is valid, in one way or another. But surely some sort of selection will be needed sooner or later.

So there's no single view of him that represents a consensus. — frank

Yes, that's to be expected. Paradoxically, that's also why it pays to read the original text. There's room for a large discussion there. I'm not sure that the range of different reactions is greater in his case than in others.

Does that mean there's something wrong with my finding a flaw in what he says, even though I'm very much in sympathy with the project? Aren't we supposed to think these things through for ourselves - with the help of the commentators?

There are phenomenal experiences – let’s call them perceptions – and these same experiences can refer to, or be of, objects in the world which have names and, often, are constituted in interesting ways by smaller, more fundamental components. — J

That sounds interesting. But I don't want to adjourn to another thread to pursue it right now. I wouldn't want to dismiss James out of hand, but for now I would like to stick to Austin. Your summary bristles with ideas that need further explanation and articulation.

All perception is indirect via sense data and sense-organ which carries the sensed information into the brain via sense organs. — Corvus

Doesn't this imply that perception of sense data or perhaps "the sensed information" is direct perception?

Direct and indirect are not some essential properties of existence or entities as some folks seem to think. — Corvus

That's intuitively correct. But doesn't that just mean that direct and indirect are not properties, but relations (or perhaps properties of relations)?

We could easily have used "mediated" or "medium-less" instead of direct or indirect. — Corvus

I think that, together with the idea of "raw" or "unabstracted" and "certain", that is exactly what proponents of sense-data mean by direct. Whether those ideas make sense is another question.

Plane from London to Sydney is a direct flight, if it flies without stopping anywhere during flight, takes off from London and lands in Sydney then it is a direct flight.  If it stops in some other airports such as Dubai or Singapore, then it would be an indirect flight. — Corvus

Yes. The meaning of "direct" and "indirect" is determined by the context. The sense-datum theorist is like someone who insists that what we call the direct flight is actually indirect because it follows a route on the journey. That's a problem.

I think Corvus was just pointing out that science shows that perception involves representation and interpretation. It's just weird to insist that that's direct (as someone in the thread was doing). — frank

I realize that is the usual way of describing certain phenomena of perception. But both "representation" and "interpretation" are usually applied in very different circumstances - when the original is also available to us. But in perception, the original is not available to us. So we end up bewailing the veil of perception which cuts us off from the world. But the point of the senses is to give us information about the world, and they do this quite successfully, on the whole. So these models are a trap.

While I agree with Austin's complaint that the delusive/veridical argument is a gross over-simplification of perception, I think that he is does not quite identify the source of the "problem". Indeed, it could be argued that he shares an important mistake with his opponents. Consider this:-

"Again, it is simply not true to say that seeing a bright green after-image against a white wall is exactly like seeing a bright green patch actually on the wall; or that seeing a white wall through blue spectacles is exactly like seeing a blue wall; or that seeing pink rats in D.T.s is exactly like really seeing pink rats; or (once again) that seeing a stick refracted in water is exactly like seeing a bent stick. In all these cases we may say the same things ('It looks blue', 'It looks bent', &c.), but this is no reason at all for denying the obvious fact that the 'experiences' are different. (p. 49)

He is here making a move that he makes earlier, in the context of the argument from illusion:-

"The straight part of the stick, the bit not under water, is presumably part of a material thing; don't we see
that? And what about the bit under water ? - we can see that too. We can see, come to that, the water itself. In fact what we see is a stick partly immersed in water." (p.30)

The problem is simply this, "experience" is not a count noun, but more like a mass term. There's no criterion for individual experiences, barring such informal criteria as we apply in context when we discuss them. (I suspect that all the empricists assume an atomic account of experience, which is simply a misunderstanding.) Austin's move is simply to widen the scope of "experience" to include the various ways we distinguish veridical from delusive. The argument gets its force from the narrow focus that is silently adopted, and a wider context allows Austin to rebut the claims.

Austin's argument is not best framed as an objection to wrongly describing a given experience. The problem is that Ayer and Price are selectively ignoring inconvenient circumstances by focusing on a narrow version of certain experiences. As Austin says:- "Inevitably, if you rule out the respects in which A and B differ, you may expect to be left with respects in which they are alike" (p.54). So Austin is right to insist that attention to a wider context will (often) correct such mistakes. But framing this as a disagreement about what the experience is is not helpful.

That's right. Austin was a classicist. He was drawn into philosophy by puzzlement at the things philosophers said. He brought his method over from Classics. — Banno

In his time, it was not at all uncommon, so I assumed he was. Perhaps that's why I feel so at home with him. It's curious, though, to see how much more complicated his reliance on ordinary language is than it seemed to be at the time.

We should try to avoid the interminable discussions that so often proceed from such differences. I take it that we agree there is a church, and that it looks like a barn, and that "I see a church" is OK, and so is "I see a barn", but that their conjunction needs some additional information - the fact of the camouflage - to avoid contradiction. — Banno

The camouflaged church is more complicated that Austin presents it, and the discussion above was an excellent dissection of it, particularly since it avoided the trap of thinking that the look of the church was something distinct from the building which could be peeled off it in the way that the camouflage could be peeled off it.

However, I think that does not take account of what is sometimes called the success logic of "see" (and "perceive"). So, for me, it is perfectly clear that no-one sees a barn, even though some people think they see a barn. Everybody sees a church, but some people do not realize that it is a church. However, in the context of this discussion, I don't have a conclusive argument for objecting to the idea that we see whatever we think we see, even though, for my money, that gives far too much to sense-data.

But what is neglected here is the context in which people may wish to communicate with each other about it - say, for the purpose of organizing a service, or even for the purpose of storing stuff. Call the people who see a church group A and the people who see a barn group B. One might say "Turn left into Hoe Lane and you will see the church half a mile down on the right". This would not work for those in group A who do not know about the camouflage and it would hopelessly mislead group B.

So I need to add "It looks like a barn." for the church-goers. But even if the aim is to find a barn to store stuff, I still need to explain to avoid large quantities of inappropriate stuff turning up at the church. In other words, "I see a church" and "I see a barn" are both inadequate (but not false) because of what they omit. (It's a sort of suppressio veri) So I would say that neither is OK. Only "I see a church camouflaged as a barn" is true.

Side-note. I'm fascinated to find this example in this context. I'm sure other people are aware that it has
a prominent place in discussions of the Gettier problem. I was aware that philosophical examples circulate in the literature, but not usually as widely as this.

I get that. But we are perceiving light, not electrical signals. We are our eyes, the signals, the brain, etc. We cannot be both perceivers and mediums. — NOS4A2

:up:

So I wonder to what extent we should take into account this topic from a Philosophy of Language perspective, and not just metaphysics. — javi2541997

The issues at this point are complicated, and I don't fully understand them. As a preliminary, it seems quite clear to me that Austin does disagree with Ayer. But he also wants to be as fair to Ayer as he possibly can. It would be easier to interpret Ayer uncharitably and produce an argument that, in the end, just attacks a straw man. But it is more convincing to refute what I have seen referred to as a steel man, i.e. an interpretation of the argument that is as strong as it can possibly be.

I'm not sure that Austin is entirely right about Berkeley. (I don't know Locke or Kant well enough to have an opinion about them.)

Berkeley is not entirely clear about whether the arguments he presents are just about language or not. If he is presented with possible counter-examples, such as the watch-maker, he shows that whatever the watchmaker believes, what he is doing can be represented in terms of "ideas" (which correspond, at least roughly to Hume's impressions and Ayer's sense-data). But his project is to refute any inference to anything beyond what can be perceived (ideas) - except minds, but set that aside for now. So it is clear that he does not think that it is just a question of language - how could the existence of God be just a question of language - except to an unbeliever?

But he gives permission several times for ordinary language to continue to be used in certain contexts and by certain people. True, there is always the proviso that users should accept his arguments. I read him as anxious to avoid the appearance of contradicting "vulgar opinion" - to the point where he allows that ordinary objects (or at least the ideas of them) continue to exist even when not perceived by anyone, since God continues to perceive them. (This is only clearly stated in the Dialogues). In short, I read Berkeley as suggesting exactly what Austin says he doesn't suggest. But I'm not at all sure that Berkeley's position on this is coherent. (If you want references to Berkeley's text, I can provide them.)

I think his melancholy is disappointment that Ayer has not really progressed from the classical doctrines, in spite of the claims that Logical Positivism is a revolution that overthrows the entire tradition of philosophy.

I also think that he is saying that he would side with the less liberal Kant and Berkeley.

The most interesting feature of this discussion is that it shows that Austin's view of language is more complicated than the dismissive interpretations of the linguistic turn suppose.

But this is all in Lecture VI, so perhaps we should park it for now and return to it later?

I wanted to point out that part of the confusion here is that we (and most everyone in philosophy in general) do not take what Austin is doing as revolutionary and radical as it is. He is not offering another theory to explain “perceiving” or something to replace it. He is claiming that the problem that everyone is arguing about how to solve is made up; — Antony Nickles

Part of the difficulty is understanding the significance of what he says. It is too easy to trivialize "ordinary language". But I think that's is a reaction to the difficulty of seeing what one might do next in philosophy. So much is being dismantled that the landscape can seem to be a desert. Bringing the nonsense in philosophy to an end is one thing. But bringing philosophy to an end is something else. Whatever motivates philosophy has certainly not gone away.

One reflection on re-visiting this text after so long. I see it differently. What Austin does in dismantling Ayer's argument is just a careful, thorough, detailed analysis of the argument. It's classic. The core of the business is not the messing about with dictionaries, but the careful critical reading of the text. Completely conventional, completely orthodox. Or so it seems to me now.

Ayer wants us to take "something looks bent" and conclude that, therefore, something is bent; it's only by our being duped in this way that we will again be convinced of the existence of sense data. — Banno

Yes, it's an example of what I think of as the tyranny of the noun.

Having gotten through Lecture IV: this is an example of where Austin takes a deep-dive into the differences between ordinary "uses" of words that philosophy takes as terms for a special purpose, but I think Austin somethings buries the point of all this. — Antony Nickles

I also found Lecture IV less than exciting, because his target wasn't obvious and it wasn't easy to see how his exploration could be applied. Your summary was helpful, in particular

the way things look is, in general, just as much a fact about the world, just as open to public confirmation or challenge, as the way things are. p 43 — Antony Nickles

However, I came out thinking, not that his approach was wrong, but that a slightly different approach would have been more illuminating. He says that he offers his examples so that we can get the feel of it, but I'm afraid I didn't. I was much more comfortable with Lecture V, because the idea that "real" is grammatically comparable to "good" gave me something to hold on to.

After scratching my head for a while, I came to the conclusion that, in spite of his saying that it is the differences are important, it is the similarities - overlaps - that are most prominent. Hence my confusion. Here are some examples of what I would have found more helpful. But I'm not sure the application to his targets is as clear as it is in what he wrote.

1) He doesn't mention that "appearance" (which is not best thought of as a noun, but as a verb) has one important use that is quite distinct from either "looks" or "seems", as in "When we reached the crest of the hill, the sea appeared, twinkling in the sunshine", or "the train appeared down the track" or "the magician appeared on the stage". There are no peculiar objects involved in these events.

2) "looks" have their home, not as peculiar properties of objects, but as something that I do. I look at things. "looks" in the senses explored in Austin's discussion, are, so to speak what I see when I look at things. As Austin points out, "looks" is part of a family of verbs, each of which is specific to one sense; there are nouns that go with each verb, as in "sounds" and "smells", etc.

3) "Seems" doesn't seem to have a noun attached - as he points out, there are no such things as "seemings". It is also the only one of the three that, to put it this way, has deception or at least the idea that what seems to be so is not the whole, or proper, story, built in to it.

It's not that Austin doesn't make the point he needs and I'm not sure that I'm not being presumptuous or just changing the subject in saying all this.

Thanks for the quotation from Austin. It does help.

Here we must consider first that it is not so much neither internal nor external but both that we are stuck with. — javi2541997

Austin's point is that we are not stuck with them. He doesn't analyse this particular duo, but if he did, he would seek to clarify exactly what they mean, and, IMO, conclude that they don't mean anything coherent.

all perceptions are somehow indirect from the minimal perspective that for any human  perception, — Corvus

Austin's point here is that "direct" and "indirect" are a pair, linked by their opposition. Each derives it's meaning from the other, like "north" and "south", "up" and "down", "hot" and "cold". If you say that all perceptions are indirect, and imply that no perception is, or could be, direct, you deprive "direct" of any "meaning" and hence render "indirect" meaningless as well.

I don't accept that my eye is an intermediary, getting in the way of my perception. It would be simplistic to say that indirect perception is perception aided by something that is not (part of) me, but it is a start, and at least rules out the idea that my eye, which enables me to perceive at all, is somehow an intermediary in a process which could not happen without it.

I am still trying to understand the direct realist's account on perception.  In what aspect perception is to be understood as direct and real? — Corvus

I am also trying to understand that, because unless I do understand that, I don't understand what "indirect" means.

Linguistic Idealism — RussellA

This is a new concept to me. As far as I know, neither Austin nor Wittgenstein recognize this classsification. Since they are both what one might call no-theory theorists, I'm inclined to think that this is a pigeon-hole attributed to them so that they can be more easily refuted. I haven't run across Anscombe's article before, so I need to look at that before forming an opinion.

however people will rebut that it is the whole body and not just the brain so it’s direct in that this is how the human brain body processes the world, — schopenhauer1

I think that this is right, at least in the sense that I perceive things, not my eyes nor my brain. I'm dubious whether it really makes sense to say that my body perceives things either, since most physical objects are not sentient. But insofar as I am embodied, it may be helpful.

Linguistic Idealism may be described as the position that puts the mind at the centre of reality and language at the centre of the mind, and language does not represent the physical world as is often claimed but is the world itself. — RussellA

Those metaphors "at the centre" are presumably shorthand for something and need a bit of explaining. It seems plainly absurd, however, to claim that language is the world, if you mean that cats and dogs are linguistic objects of some kind. (But I agree that language does not represent the world, though it certainly can be used to describe it.)

like an entire lecture on the word “real”. — NOS4A2

You miss the point. If you are going to assert that the objects of perception are unreal or that tables and chairs are real, it is a good idea to know what the word means, including what it means to other people. Unless you offer your own definition of real, other people will assume that you mean by it what it means in ordinary language. But in ordinary language, the assertion that tables and chairs are real is extraordinarily pointless, and the assertion that rainbows and sunsets are unreal is completely puzzling.

But we are not asking who or what is responsible for perception, but how perception works. — Corvus

It is true that Austin does not ask this question. But then neither does Ayer. You are right to put the question that asks in that way.

But if you ask how a rainbow is made, the rainbow will not be part of the explanation. The sunlight, and the raindrops involved are not the rainbow, but the rainbow is not an entity distinct from them either. This should not be surprising. If the analysandum is part of the analysis, you have a circularity. So looking to find a process or event that is the perception inside one's head is a mistake.

How the human brain/body works is a good question but a question for physiology and psychology, from their different points of view. The only contribution that philosophy seems to make is to define the problem in such a way that it is insoluble and call it the "hard problem", which seems less than helpful. Perhaps they should tell philosophy to butt out and leave them to it. But then, traditional comfortable dualism would be threatened. From my point of view, that's not a problem.

For my part my intent is to continue in the way I have been, reading a lecture or two ahead and then going back to re-read in more detail to make notes mostly for myself. Lecture IV will probably be very brief, then a bit more detail, or less, as we move into the later lectures, if I loose interest. If you want to move at a faster pace, go ahead, but I've found in the past that this leads to folk getting lost and needing to go over arguments again. — Banno

Thanks very much for this. I don't want to move at a faster pace (except that I have skimmed through the book because I find it helpful to have something of an overview. But it'll be a lot easier to follow and contribute if I know where the focus is in the discussion. By now, I guess you'll be reading Lecture IV - and by the time I'm actually posting this, you have read it. I found Lecture IV quite difficult and am not confident that I've understood it.

Austin is specifically tearing down philosophy's framing of the issue as both direct or indirect. — Antony Nickles

Yes. I should have explained that I was asking the question because I didn't and don't think that "direct" perception makes any sense, except in the context of Austin's account of indirect perception. But various comments have clarified sense-data are (very like) qualia, and I'm content believe that I'm right to be puzzled.

I agree that these entities are developed in pursuit of

the unabstracted perception, the unconceptualized sensation specific to one setting and one time. — J

. The idea that we can, so to speak "peel off" the layers of interpretation to arrive at a purified, simple sensation seems to me a wild goose chase. That peeling off process is itself a process and the result will be another concept of the sensation which will be, paradoxically, itself a concept. There is no "before". (I wish I could construct the Austinian argument for this.)

It’s just a question of what it is we are perceiving. — NOS4A2

Yes - in the context of our mistakes. The argument from illusion, rightly seen, is not as persuasive as the more difficult cases. The more difficult problem is that, for example, Macbeth is behaving as if he sees a dagger, and not acting (pretending), so he believes that he sees a dagger. There's no (philosophical) problem until we remember that perceiving is always perceiving something. So we invent something to plug the apparent logical gap and create something that gives us philosophical certainty, and a morass of problems to go with it. That's my diagnosis of the conjuring trick, anyway.

If the law of identity holds, I cannot consider “the final place where the perceptual judgement took place” as perceived, because the brain is a component of the perceiver. Does X perceive Y, or does X perceive X? At any rate, neither precludes any intermediary. — NOS4A2

I think perspective - subject and object - is based on two main categories: — javi2541997

I don't really understand either of these models, but it is striking that Austin (so far, at least) doesn't directly consider them. I'm very suspicious of them. For a start, they are dominated by the sense of sight. But do they apply to all the senses? Perhaps to hearing, and even to smell, but touch and taste are different, and proprioception and balance different again. It's not obvious to me how helpful they are in those contexts.

We do not have to buy in to the argument that the tree falling in the forest when there is no-one to hear it does not make a sound. It depends what you choose to call a sound.

what we imagine direct perception would be the perfect case of. So if we set aside the problem of direct or indirect, — Antony Nickles

My problem is that I can't imagine what direct perception would be. Isn't this part of what we need to recognize here? If nothing could count as direct perception, then the idea that perception is actually indirect doesn't make sense. The problem is the move from "some perception is indirect" to "all perception is indirect".

But I agree that setting this issue aside enables us to understand what is going on here better, even though I'm not entirely sure that the last word has been said here. (I have in mind Cavell's idea that the idea of a last word on scepticism is a mistake.)

The danger here is the presumption that what we perceive is all of one sort, in such a way that we can apply the label "sense data" in all cases. Austin is showing that this is not a good idea. — Banno

I certainly agree with that. If there is anything more to be said about or with sense-data, it would be off-topic here, so I shall leave it alone.

Instead it starts pretty well where we are, here and now. And it proceeds by looking with great care at the philosopher's main tools, their words. — Banno

I agree with this, whole-heartedly. But you referred earlier to some of the "critiques" of ordinary language philosophy here

Some mirth has been found in Austin's use of "the ordinary man" - as if such as he would have any idea.. — Banno

and there's a mention of Gellner's book here:-

Ernest Gellner. In his book, Word and Things, — Richard B

So I'm tempted to articulate more of a defence. But, again, that would perhaps be more appropriate elsewhere.

I'm afraid I'm a bit confused about whether we are working through the sections systematically or just reading the book at our own pace?

I only discovered this thread to-day. Best thing that's happened to me in a long time. But I have read everything from the beginning. I lost my copy of Sense and Sensibilia in the distant past, but I've downloaded the pdf.

First, a general question. Everybody seems to be confident that they understand direct vs. indirect perception. I can sort of understand what is meant by indirect perception and why it is thought to be the appropriate way of looking at perception, as here:-

In perception, there is far more going on than just identifying an object as an object i.e. reasoning, intuition, judgement and intentionality can get all involved, and for that they have to be sense data, — Corvus

It would be reasonable to introduce a term like sense-data as a place-holder for whatever it is we decide we perceive directly. It's when you try to identify what the sense-data are that the trouble begins, for me, at least. The obvious candidates are either the signals sent to our brain by our nervous system or the events that trigger our nervous system to send a signal (light waves, sound waves, etc.) But those are nothing like what Russell or Ayer had in mind.

But my biggest puzzle is what would count as direct perception. Austin seems to me to begin to give an answer to that question by explaining what we mean by indirect perception. My only doubt about his argument is that perhaps it is unhelpful when we come to experimental psychology or neurology.

Kripke allows that mathematicians can adequately specify the rules of addition. That's not being called into question. — frank

If you mean the mathematical justifications of the rule, that's true - within the rules (practices, language games) of mathematics. But what justifies those? "This is how we do it. You need to learn that. Then we can discuss justification." It's not quite foundationalism and not quite some form of coherentism. As usual, he manages to not quite fit in.

The rule is in effect, and in some sense then it produces facts — Moliere

There are rules for which the process that brings them into effect is quite clear. They are what we call laws, but there are other varieties. They are imperatives, not really different from the order given by the general. Other rules, like mathematical rules about how to calculate are different. There are proofs of such rules. What makes them effective? Which is to say, what justifies them? That's where the sceptical pressure (which W also applied) and his appeal to practices comes in. But that involves saying that the rule doesn't really of itself produce facts; human beings have to carry out the calculations (or psersuad machines to do it for them. Those results are facts, i.e. have the authority of facts? Only the calculation, which can't produce a wrong result. That means that if a result does not fit in to our wider lives in the way it is expected to, we look for the fault in the calculation and the calculator, not the rule.

At the bottom of this is the fact that "+1" can be applied to infinity. How can we know that? Certainly not by applying the rule to infinity. By definition, we can never exhaustively check that the infinite application of the rule will work out.

The skeptic has to be pointing out that we're inclined to believe there's a fact where there is none in order for the skeptic to have a point at all. — Moliere

If you mean a fact that justifies the rule and/or justifies how the rule is applied. I sometimes think that the quickest way to state the problem is to point out that the rule cannot be a fact, because the rule has imperative force and no fact can do that - a version of the fact/value distinction. For the same reason, no fact can, of itself, justify the rule.

logical nihilism or pluralism. — Apustimelogist

I prefer pluralism coupled with pragmatism. Horses for courses. Logical analysis can give a kind of clarity.

The side effect of neat clean concepts is they lose all the fuzzy non-linearity which makes them exceptionally good at being used in real life. — Apustimelogist

Yes, that's true. I'm a bit inclined to say the W sees that "fuzzy non-linearity" as inherent in all concepts. So what do we say about logic? What makes it special? (I'm not asking because I know, or think I know, the answer.)

because here we have truths that we arrive at because of the conditions of assertability — Moliere

Maybe we should distinguish between what brings the rule into effect (I chose that word carefully because after it becomes effective it is correct to say that there is a rule that ...) Can we see conditions of assertability as comparable to the licence conditions for someone to perform a wedding? If so, laying down a rule is or at least is comparable to, a speech act. We then have to explain that in some cases, the rule is not formally laid down, but informally put into effect (as when language changes, and "wicked" comes to mean the opposite of what it meant before). Once the rule is in effect, there is a fact of the matter, as when your king is in check or 68+57=125.

neurons that are physical enslaved — Apustimelogist

impelling the perceptions forced upon us — Apustimelogist

I hope so. It's the only way that we get reliable information - and, in great part, we do.

making it look like we are acting in these kinds of mysterious ways that seem somewhat messy and underdetermined by our concepts and so can only be described as "games, practises, forms of life". — Apustimelogist

I'm sure there's a lot of quick and dirty solutions and heuristic dodges involved. Anything remotely like formal logic would be too slow to be useful.

I dunno; I think looking at this way, as I seem to understand what you have said, plays down everything else that Wittgenstein seems to be getting at in philosophical investigations. — Apustimelogist

I was only talking about relying on a memorized table, instead of doing the basic calculations. It's an example of a quick and dirty solution.

One result is that I now know how to defuse Goodman's "grue". — Ludwig V

This "paradox" is structurally the same as Kripke's. Here's the link to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction, which mentions, but does not discuss, Kripke and his solution. I think that Wittgenstein's discussion of rule-following applies to both of these puzzles. Does that help? To take it much further would probably require another thread, don't you think?

Another is that it seems that Kripke has made the private language argument superfluous. I need to think about that. — Ludwig V

This point is made elsewhere. The complication is that the private language argument does rely on some of the things he says about rule-following, particularly the importance of understanding what does and does not conform to the rules about ostensive definition. But numbers are not sensations, so the cases are not exactly the same.

A third - minimal - result is that Kripke has added to the stock of examples that pose Wittgenstein's problem. — Ludwig V

W likes lots of examples. In one way, Kripke's case is just another one, although W does mention the point at PI 201 "This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be brought into accord with the rule. The answer was: if every course of action can be brought into accord with the rule, then it can also be brought into conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here." I had forgotten this quotation. In time, I could no doubt find what he was referring back to. It gives a short answer to both Goodman and Kripke.

The fourth is that I notice that we have all appealed to the wider context, both of mathematics and of practical life to resolve it. Kripke's case is effective only if we adopt his very narrow view, — Ludwig V

Isn't that an accurate reflection of what we've been saying about practices?

I hope that's helpful.