Cheers.

That it has a use doesn't mean it can be had. — Hanover

Not at all sure what that means.

The choice here is between on the one hand an account that divides the world into mind and object, then finds itself unable to explain objects; and an account that makes no such presumption.

One account begins by dividing mind from world and then cannot recover the world. The other refuses that division and never loses it.

Perception is a activity within the world, not an impassible bridge between worlds.

And here's the thing: we do manage to talk about ships, cups, walls and each other.

"Troll" for you is an effective, articulate debater with an opposing viewpoint.

Please! Distract me! — Ecurb

Here you go:



The world is still a good place.

You are under no obligation to respond. or even to read, to my posts.

keep the discussion on topic and engaging with ideas instead of petty insults. — Philosophim

:lol:


Here's my contribution:
Page four
Page three
Page two
Page one

I've argued that the claim “trans women are women” can be true. We are not obligated to use only a single fixed biological definition of "woman". Words such as man and woman are polysemous—they have multiple legitimate meanings that vary with context (social, legal, everyday use) and are not rigidly fixed by biology. Hence in contexts of gender identity and social role, “trans women are women” is true; rejecting it by privileging one narrow biological sense is to misunderstand how language works. The idea that there is a single true or default meaning of these terms independent of context is faulty, and insisting on such a view is arbitrary and ignores existing usages. The aim is to show the opposition’s original claim (that the slogan is categorically false) collapses once we acknowledge legitimate linguistic contexts in which the slogan is true.

You just doubled down on your erroneous understanding of language use, and your fascination with genitalia.

Why not? — Hanover

Because at some stage the conversation has a use.

Explain it then. — Philosophim

26 pages of your obsession with the contents of other people's underwear and the supposition that those contents dictate which toilette they must use, shows that there is not much point.

You're seriously trying to redefine "direct perception" in such a way that even with these visors and their computer-generated images on a screen they still directly see their shared environment? — Michael

That's not a redefinition. What this shows is how you misdiagnose the the argument. In your visor world, the visors drop out of the discussion when folk talk about ships. They are not seeing the image on the screen, they are seeing ship.

Direct realism doesn't claim that direct perception is perception without mediation. That would rule out glasses, mirrors, telescopes, microscopes, hearing aids, telephones — and even eyes and nerves. Mediation is ubiquitous and trivial. What matters is not causal mediation but epistemic termination. This is why your visor world makes no difference. The visor drops out of consideration, much as the beetle in a box does in discussions of private language. The function of the visor is irrelevant, in that the moment you insist — as the indirect realist must — that what we really ever see is only the visor-image, the example collapses.

When you hear your mother on the phone, you do not hear sound waves and then infer your mother as a hypothesis about an inner item. You hear your mother speaking, by means of sound waves, transmission systems, speakers, etc. The fact that you do not experience the causal chain as such is irrelevant — because direct realism never required that.

Direct realism is not the thesis that perception includes awareness of causal links. It is the thesis that perceptual verbs take worldly objects as their logical objects. You hear your mother, not a sound-wave-token; you see the ship, not a retinal image. The mediation is causal, not epistemic.

We can talk about the image on the visor, but this is derivative, dependent on our being able to talk about an image of the ship, and hence being able to talk about the ship.

The argument here is not redefining “direct”; but refusing to accept a Cartesian picture in which perception must either be inner and certain or outer and inferential.

This is were a Markov Blanket helps. On the indirect realist construal, the Markov blanket is treated as epistemically opaque. On the direct realist construal, the blanket is only causally isolating. Information flows across it, but that does not lead to epistemic confinement. The organism’s perceptual capacities are attuned to environmental states across the blanket; perception is an interaction spanning the boundary, not an encounter with an inner surrogate. What is perceived is the ship, not a mental image that stands in for it.

The indirect realist uses the debunked picture of a theatre of consciousness; the homunculus, sitting inside only ever seeing the ship on the visor. The better picture is that we see the ship, using the visor. There is no phenomenal state that is what we see in the place of the ship; rather, the neural process that constructs vision constitutes your seeing the ship.

I think this thought process assumes a virtue that has not been earned. — Philosophim

You entirely misunderstood the argument. No surprise there.

↪Banno I was like... damn, I know over 100% of the trans population? — DifferentiatingEgg

Hey — good to hear we have so many mutual friends! :rofl:


Edit: But there is a serious point here. If the folk here objecting to trans folk do not know any, then that explains why they are treating real humans in abstract terms.

Perhaps nothing helped acceptance of the queer community as much as the "revelation" that gay, lesbian, and queer folk are all around you, and pretty much like you and I.

is why the physiology is irrelevant. Even when the physiology is added to somewhat radically, the direct realist point remains.

But we need to add, neither direct realism nor indirect realism is the whole story - we can talk about the beetle in the box, the mental image; in Michael's world, someone might complain that their visor is faulty - and thereby change from the game of talking about ships to the game of talking 'bout visors - but having a faulty visor is to admit that there are functioning visors, and so to give the visor a place int he game.

It can't be beetles all the way down.

I meant to say that I hold no stock in the argument that the PLA refutes indirect realism. You appear to be accepting that these people are talking about their shared environment even though none of them ever directly see it (even the direct realist must accept this given the visors). — Michael

It's hard to see how the visor example counts against the private language argument. That's how you set the account up. You now want to use it as an example of indirect perception.

So back to this:

A direct realist believes that when we, say, look at a veritable ship, what we see is the ship. They hold that light is reflected from the ship, focused by the eye and incites certain neural pathways associated with things of that sort, and that this process is what we call seeing a ship. — Banno

Your visor users talk about the ship, and not what they see on the visor.

An indirect realist, in contrast, holds that what we see is not the ship, but something else, sometimes called a "mental image" of the ship, that is presented to us by the process of light being reflected from the ship, focused by the eye and inciting certain neural pathways associated with things of that sort. — Banno

An indirect realist says that all they see is the stuff on the visor.

So if we wish to talk about images on screens, we can adopt the perspective of the indirect realist. If we wish to talk about ships, we must bypass the visor and admit that we see the ship.

Hence:

Indirect realism effectively treats the Markov blanket as opaque, the system having only access to internal states in the form of the mooted "mental image". External states are inferred, never directly encountered, and what is “perceived” is confined to what is inside the blanket (representations, images, models).

Direct realism treats the Markov blanket as causally, but not epistemically, isolated, the system having access to external states through the mediation of the blanket. Seeing the ship is an interaction, not an appearance, and perception is a skilled engagement with environmental states across the blanket;
there is no inner object that perception terminates on. — Banno

So we are back to were we were four pages and 3 days ago. But yours is a much imporved argument. Indeed, it supports direct realism by showing that we routinely and intelligibly “see through” intermediaries without reifying them as perceptual objects.

Usage remains constant regardless of what's going on out there, which is the point of the Wittgenstinian enterprise. — Hanover

Not quite. Rather, what we use is what remains constant... with regard to "out there"; but note that we ought also reject the phenomenological/cartesian picture of out there and in here. Wittgenstein emphasises what we do with words, in the world. His is not a form of idealism.

That is, what about unicorns? How do I deal with the words without references? — Hanover

"Unicorns" has a use, if not a referent, and if only as an example in philosophy fora. See if you can turn that into an argument.

In asking me to assume the external object is a constant so that we can be sure our perceptions are similar across one another is also problematic because it's false. — Hanover

Not sure what this was - a reference to the quote from PI? You are not there being asked to assume the external object is constant, but to notice that you have no way of telling if your private object has changed.

What is important is that we all engage in a word game, play it according to rules we all comprehend, and we interact in the form of life we know. — Hanover

I'll agree with that, and note the corollary that private objects cannot have a use in the game.

You[/u] claimed that it's impossible to talk about things unless we can see them directly, — Michael

Well, no. Certainly not. I do agree with the private language argument in so far as talk about boxed beetles and images in brains is useless.

I hold no stock in the private language argument. A society of people born with unremovable visors on their head with sensors on the outside and a screen on the inside displaying a computer-generated image of the environment could develop a language, talk about the environment, and lives their lives just as well as we can. — Michael

How is that in any way contrary to the private language argument? These folk are talking about their shared environment, not their unshared screen time...

Yes? That's how indirect perception works. You directly perceive some X and because of that indirectly perceive some Y. Even the direct realist must accept that this is how television and telephones work. — Michael

You are losing me here.

Sure, when we use a telephone we hear someone indirectly. Are you suggesting that undermines direct realism?

The point is that we don't need to directly[/i] see him to talk about him, and we don't need to directly see ships to talk about them. — Michael

Yep. But he is not only a mental image, or a firing of brain cells. He is public in a way that whatever indirect realists say they see, isn't.

It appears to me that you have moved on to equivocating about what it is that indirect realists suppose it is that is perceived.

There are about 15 transpeople in the world — Fire Ologist

Perhaps you should broaden your social circle.

I didn't say only ever. I explicitly said here that "in the non-hallucinatory case there is both hearing voices-as-mental-phenomena and hearing voices-as-distal-stimulus", with the former satisfying the philosophical notion of directness — as explained here — and the latter not. — Michael

Pretty ad hoc. Now we have both direct and indirect perception happening in the same individual for the same event.

I object to this use of the word "really". — Michael

So do I. Take it out, if you like. If what one sees is always private — cortex states, sense-data, whatever — then nothing in experience can fix reference to a public object.

The objection stands.

You and I can both talk about Napoleon. — Michael

That's exactly right. We can talk about Napoleon because there is more to him than the firing of neutrons. He is not an hallucination.

Wittgenstein can't deny reality, — Hanover

It would be odd to read what has been said here as denying reality. Far from it. Indeed, it seems to be indirect realism that cannot tell the real ship from the hallucination, since both are mere phenomena.

Yes, this relates to the mind-body problem - well diagnosed. The indirect realist accepts the dualism of mind and world, and then finds that they can't explain how a mind sees things in the world - the congenital problem of dualism. Their solution is to invent a "something" that is what we see, but which is in the mind, not in the world. Of course this does not help them, since they now have to explain how the "something" comes about, usually by handwaving at physiology.

A better approach might be to think of mind as a process embedded in the world, and seeing as something minds do.


Enjoy Austin.

The indirect realist might argue that "I see X" just describes the visual cortex being active in the right kind of way, regardless of what the eyes are doing or what distal objects exist, and so I see things when I have visual hallucinations and hear things when I have auditory hallucinations (and don't see or hear anything if I have brain damage but otherwise functional eyes and ears). This is a perfectly ordinary use of English vocabulary. — Michael

Always get rid of the idea of the private object in this way: assume that it constantly changes, but that you do not notice the change because your memory constantly deceives you. — PI (Anscombe) page 207

If the thing one sees is only ever "the visual cortex being active in the right kind of way" then we would have no basis for agreeing that there is a ship. If what one really sees is always private — cortex states, sense-data, whatever — then nothing in experience can fix reference to a public object. Memory deception, constant change, or cortical activity all make no difference: there is still no criterion for this rather than that object.

The PLA problem arises if you try to establish meaning of the term based upon that image without correlating it to use. — Hanover

Same. There is not path with which we might triangulate our beetles.

Not seeing much philosophical content.

Should be in the Lounge.

It seems there are a lot of people out there taking the absurd position that, "You cannot be what you are, because I do not know what you are." — Questioner

Excellent.

Were the USA deserves full credit is the Marshal Plan and the rebuilding of Europe. That was brilliant, the high point for US civilisation.

A bit different to now.

America's military-industrial complex is what beat the Nazis. — BenMcLean

Actually, it was China and the Soviet Union. The USA came in late and gave itself the credit.

But we are not supposed to point this out.

On mine, judgment is essentially answerable to how things are in a way that allows us to say that a practice-embedded, norm-governed belief nevertheless misrepresented reality. — Esse Quam Videri

We might sort all this by introducing triangulation, alla Davidson.

In that framing, I interpret your beliefs not just in relation to my own, but on the presumption that your beliefs are pretty much the same as my own - the Principle of Charity. So my interpretation is triangulated with your utterances, and my beliefs as to how things are in the world.

Are you familiar with it?

...but that has to do with grammar and the rules of language, not the ships out there versus the ships in my head. — Hanover

That's good, because I hope there are no ships in your head. What little metaphysics I am indulging claims that there are things such as ships, and that we can talk and think about them. I'd hope for agreement on at least this.

That is, I push back on your comment above to the extent you see the distinction between the hallucination and the ship is one of difference in referent. — Hanover

The hallucination of a ship has no referent, if our domain is ships and such. This is not a difference between the objects seen, since the hallucinator, by the very fact that they are hallucinating, does not see some thing; they have the hallucination of seeing something. That's kinda what hallucinations are.

My point is that there is no need to get into the weeds discussing how our brains work — Hanover

Yep. It's a point about how we talk consistently on these topics - that is, a conceptual, philosophical issue. The indirect realist invents something to be the thing the hallucinator sees, and that is their error. The direct realist points out that the hallucinator only thinks they see something.

I'm just trying to argue straight Wittgenstein, more out of my attempt to just understand Wittgenstein. — Hanover

The idea of a Mental image must surely be anathema to someone who has an understanding of the private language argument. What marks an hallucination is how it differs from the usual circumstances. Austin is better here, going into sense and sensibilia in some detail. And not incompatible with Wittgenstein.

Whether there is a ship at all consistent at sea with what we perceive is unknowable and meaningless. — Hanover

This, and the stuff around it, seems also incompatible with Wittgenstein. There's a ship if the ship has a place in our language games. There's a ship if there is a ship in the domain of discourse. What remains unclear is the nature of that ship. Our perceptions here have a place in our language games, but do not underpin it in the way that (naive?) phenomenology supposes. And it's not here being argued that the ship is exactly as we see it - that would still be sticking to the phenomenalist picture. Of course we might be in error - and poignantly, that would be to be an error about the ship, not about some phantasmic mental-image-of-ship.

I think there's merit to that, although it's entirely unsatisfactory, — Hanover

...ok...

And from there I go down a very theistic path — Hanover

Ok. I had suspected this. Thanks for being candid.

I responded to your the modal and relational points. Nice, but they don't get a guernsey.

Your quote says: "you can't have P and not have Q follow it", which is about as clear an account of material implication as one might have.

I'll leave you to your ruminations.

Yes, and hallucinated voices are mental phenomena. — Michael

Yesterday I wrote at length arguing that this was an error.

The most obvious is the move from "There is a phenomenal state" (a constipated way of saying "I see something") to "There is something that is seen". The argument is that naively, when we see a ship, there is a ship, so when we hallucinate a ship, there must be a thing that is hallucinated; and so philosophers invent the "mental image" as a reification of the hallucination. But of course what we have in an hallucination is not seeing any thing - the things hallucinated are of course not there. Talking as if there were a thing that is seen in an hallucination is a mistake.

It's worth noting that what marks an hallucination most clearly is that others do not see what the hallucinator sees. Hallucination is social. This is particularly important because in an hallucination there is nothing to fix truth; and that's were the "blur" example you give falls. You suggest — Banno

Can you explain that to me? — Fire Ologist

the history of our interactions in this forum would suggest not.

What does the following say?
"...you can't have P and not have Q follow it"

I interpret it as "If P, then Q".

Hoe do you interpret it, otherwise?

It's basic propositional logic.

Your quote does not rely on " how people mean 'entails' in natural language". It gives a clearly truth-functional definition of entailment: "...you can't have P and not have Q follow it".

I'll have to leave you to it at this rate. A shame, since there are good points to the conversation. But if we can't agree on these basics, there's not much point in continuing.

I thought these were two different questions. — Fire Ologist

There's your problem.

if you take my view, which is that for things to have a sufficient reason, they essentially must, like if P is a sufficient reason for Q, that's the same thing as saying that P entails Q, you know, that you can't have P and not have Q follow it.

The "you can't have P and not have Q follow it" is "if P is true, then Q is true", that is, P→Q.

Now P→Q is not in the list of paradoxes in the Wiki article. For good reason.

And further, if we understand, as the quote suggests, that if P→Q then P is the sufficient reason for Q, then any truth will be sufficient reason for any other truth.

Please, have a look at the argument I gave concerning causation and answering questions. It shows why we can't have purerly logical accounts of causation. A corollary would be that determinism also collapses.

Sure. Better approaches.

The entailment used in the podcast is not amongst the so-called paradoxes of material implication. IF the aim is to firm up the notion of cause, or of sufficient reason, by using material implication, as is set out in the quote form the podcast, then any truth will suffice. And that's not what we want.

There are modal theories of causation. These rely on limits to accessibility between possible worlds - so are somewhat arbitrary. For example, suppose we seek to explain that the rock broke the window when it hit it, we'd say something like that form every possible world in which the rock hits the window we can only access possible worlds in which the window broke. But what is missing is why only those worlds are accessible. Here we haven't explained the cause so much as repeated a description of the cause.

Relevance logic is quite interesting. In the example, the rock hit the window and the window broke, so there is the shared "variable" window. In one interpretation, it takes the accessibility relation to include a third world, so

A→B is true at a world a if and only if for all worlds b and c such that Rabc (R is the accessibility relation) either A is false at b or B is true at c. — SEP article

would be understood as that "The rock hit the window"→ "The window broke" is true at a world a if and only if for all worlds b and c such that Rabc either the rock did not hit the window at b or the window broke at c. As it stands, this also does not give a causal explanation. Something more is needed. And if we treat R as causation, then the account again becomes a description of a causal relation, not an explanation.

In none of these do we have, just form the logic, an explanation of why the antecedent brings about the consequent.

Now I suspect there is a deep reason for this, much the same one I mentioned earlier in this tread, to do with the nature of explanation. An explanation is useful when it is sufficient to stop us asking further questions. So if we ask "why did the widow break?", the answer "it was hot by a rock" might be sufficient to finish the discussion. But there is no reason form logic alone that we should stop here. SO for instance if we were interested in breaking more windows, we might continue the discussion with something like "but when I hit the window with this smaller rock it didn't break. Why?" And answer with an explanation of the rock needing to have sufficient momentum (mass times velocity) in order to break the window. And that might be enough, or we could continue with a discussion of different strengths for various panes of glass...

And the point here is that what counts as being a satisfactory causal explanation is not being a logically final answer, but being enough to stop further questions.

All this by way of pointing out that a sufficient cause is only sufficient for some particular circumstance, and never absolutely sufficient.

nope — flannel jesus

A brilliant response.

if you take my view, which is that for things to have a sufficient reason, they essentially must, like if P is a sufficient reason for Q, that's the same thing as saying that P entails Q, you know, that you can't have P and not have Q follow it.

You can't have P and not have Q follow it. If P is true, then Q is also true. Truth functional entailment.

Make up your mind.

That crows are black would be sufficient reason for seven to be three less than ten.

Then your use of "entails" is not truth functional.

This is a bizarre take — flannel jesus

Yep.

Without listening to the podcast, if P is a sufficient reason for Q, is the same thing as saying that P entails Q, then every truth is the sufficient reason for every other truth. A somewhat explosive result.

If P and if Q then P entails Q.

Somewhat explosive.

I'm very pleased that we've found some agreement.

Of course, "counts as" is not merely stipulative, either, in that not just any stipulation will do. So perhaps we agree there, too.

Interestingly, it seems we agree in rejecting the phenomenal as in any way foundational.

What you here call judgement corresponds closely to what I might call intent. Putting the case far too briefly, I'd draw on Anselm's distinction between directions of fit, pointing out that we stipulate what things are in order to allow for our talking about them. This counts as a ship, while that counts as a tree.

I quite agree with your last paragraph.