I don't see him claiming we have *no* access to the world, just no direct access. Indirection still allows access to empirical facts, just not absolute certainly about those facts: everything could always be a simulation, or whatnot. But absolute certainty is overrated. — hypericin

He has said many times we have no access to the world. If all he meant was that we have no certainty about the world, or that we have no access to things as they are in themselves then I have already agreed with him regarding that, and he still disagreed.

We have direct access to things as they affect us and as they appear to us—there seems to be no puzzle in that. We have no access, direct or indirect, to those aspects of things which are not included in the possible ways we can be affected by them.

I do not forgo such knowledge but accept it provisionally to the degree it seems plausible.

My point to Amadeus was that if he denies we have access to the world, to empirical facts, then he has no justification based on the science of perception to claim that perception is either direct or direct.

I don't claim we have no access to empirical facts and I accept the science of perception (provisionally of course). I think the very framing of perception in terms of 'direct' and 'indirect' is wrongheaded from the get-go.

Well, to begin we would have to identify the objects.Wittgenstein does not do this. We do not even know what these objects are let alone knowing internal or external properties except that internal to them they must have the ability to combine with other objects. — Fooloso4

I get that the "objects" Wittgenstein refers to are not ordinary objects but logical simples or something like that. But they seem to be as inscrutable, and hence as propositionally useless, as Kant's 'things in themselves'

If I am to know an object, though I need not know its external properties, I must know all
its internal properties. (2.01231)

If all objects are given, then at the same time all possible states of affairs are also given. (20124)

It would seem that we know these objects in so far as they are the source of the possibilities of the world. From themselves they generate the world through the ways in which they combine.

There is a bottom up order to the universe. — Fooloso4

This seems to invoke things in themselves. Do you read it as suggesting that we can know any "internal properties" of objects, or is all we can know of objects "external properties"?

Declaring "I have two hands," may or may not fall under the category of conviction, i.e., there are contexts where it might be appropriate. — Sam26

It's not a conviction, it's simply something I see or feel. If I have two hands, and I can see or feel, I can see or feel that I have two hands. What could it mean to doubt it?

Isn't the whole concept of scientific or natural law built on the assumption of there being a natural order? — Wayfarer

No, the concept of natural law is based on observed invariances.

Desiring machines — Joshs

Spinoza's 'conatus' or Nietzsche's 'will to power' in different dress; the same old stew, reheated.

So, either you accept that our sight system is factually an indirect system (which, on what's considered the empirical facts, it is without debate) — AmadeusD

If what you mean to say is that I cannot rely on the "empirical facts" of our sight system to deduce that we do not directly experience an object (of sight) then you've proved my case far better than I ever could. — AmadeusD

You have it backwards: I'm saying you cannot rely on empirical facts to support any conclusion at all if you assume we have no access to empirical facts, so in assuming you have access to empirical facts you are assuming you have access to the world, which is contradictory to your stated position.

If you were consistent, you would say we have no access to empirical facts and therefore cannot draw any justifiable conclusions at all about perception, the world or anything else.

I don't accept the whole 'direct/ indirect' framing and to me all your comments are, to quote Dostoevsky, "pouring from the empty into the void", or to alter Chaucer a little "Thy drasty thinking is nat worth a toord".

That said, I'll leave you to the sophistry so appropriate to the lower quarters of your profession, as I have no illusions that your mind might be even a little open to correction.

Are the Skeptics skeptical of reason itself or rather of the common stock of premises upon which reason elaborates?

The story about Pyrrho could well be apocryphal, and since he wrote nothing himself, what we today consider to be Pyrrhonism comes from later sources, one of the most notable being Sextus Empiricus.
This is from Wikipedia:

A summary of Pyrrho's philosophy was preserved by Eusebius, quoting Aristocles, quoting Timon, in what is known as the "Aristocles passage."[5] There are conflicting interpretations of the ideas presented in this passage, each of which leads to a different conclusion as to what Pyrrho meant:

'The things themselves are equally indifferent, and unstable, and indeterminate, and therefore neither our senses nor our opinions are either true or false. For this reason then we must not trust them, but be without opinions, and without bias, and without wavering, saying of every single thing that it no more is than is not, or both is and is not, or neither is nor is not.[12](Underlining mine).

In any case you failed to address the salient question: what do you think reason consists in?

Misology is not best expressed in the radical skeptic, who questions the ability of reason to comprehend or explain anything. For in throwing up their arguments against reason they grant it an explicit sort of authority. Rather, misology is best exhibited in the demotion of reason to a lower sort of "tool," one that must be used with other, higher goals/metrics in mind. The radical skeptic leaves reason alone, abandons it. According to Schindler, the misolog "ruins reason." — Count Timothy von Icarus

This begs the question as to just what reason is or what it consists in. Do not those dogmatists and relativists give reasons for their stances? Surely the radical skeptics also have their reasons for being skeptical.

THe fiction is the particularly perniciious habit of ignoring the empirical facts when discussion perception. This has been ignored. — AmadeusD

The inconsistency in your view, which I have many times and am probably now again unsuccessfully pointing out to you, is that if we have no access to the world and see only arbitrarily constructed representations then there are no empirical facts.

Not sure if you are expecting an answer from me...

Sounds like we agree...

I agree with your responses to the point where my intended response would be redundant. I think @Ciceronianus is working with narrow conceptions of both art and philosophy.

To my way of thinking what counts as art is determined by the presence of creative imagination and technical skill and what counts as great art is determined by a superlative degree of both.

He does say at the beginning that it is an empirical proposition, so yeah, I'm disagreeing with that. I think it is a conceptual matter, you might even say it is tautologous, if something thinks, or does anything at all, then by definition it must exist. The very concept of 'something' seems to involve existence. The alternative seems completely unthinkable.

I don't see the judgement as an empirical one but as a confirmation that the concept of something that thinks involves the concept of existence, further that the concept of anything doing anything involves the concept of existence.

Perhaps a caveat could be added such as "exists in some sense, not necessarily physical", although the idea of a non-physical existent certainly seems inscrutable, and it is questionable as to whether it is even coherent.

Hence my existence also cannot be regarded as inferred from the proposition "I think," as Descartes held (for otherwise the major premise, "Everything that thinks, exists" would have to precede it), — CPR, Kant, B421

The alternative? "Not everything that thinks, exists"?

I would have thought that an Indirect Realist would also have said "I see what appears to be a bent stick". — RussellA

Which just goes to show that the debate is ill-conceived and pointless.

:up:

Can you see an analogy with the idea of the conservation of energy?

We can't falsify it; we can't demonstrate it. But we can assume it. — Banno

Exactly, speaking in terms of the external it seems to be consistent with our general experience and understanding, including science—but the question remains as to whether it contains any internal inconsistency. I can't see that it does.

Perhaps conservation laws are take to be true in the way axioms are - in order to get on with doing stuff. Noether's theorem shows how conservation laws are a result of assumptions of symmetry and continuity — Banno

Yes, the assumption of the conservation of energy seems to work in the sense of being consistent with most of our science. Does that mean it is true? How could we know?

It might be right regarding it being no more a fact than the length of the standard metre being a metre, but again, I don't know about that, it's an analogy I can't get my head around.

Not sure what Kripke would say, I imagine you would have a much better idea about that than I.

So is the conservation of energy a fact about the world, or a way of checking that our talk about energy is consistent? And if this latter, then it is not itself consistent, but the measure against which we determine consistency. — Banno

It might be a fact about the world, or it might not. Do we know what the "might not" could look like? Most of our experience points to it being the case, so it is (mostly?) consistent with our experience. In any case I was referring more to internal consistency. Is there an inherent inconsistency in the idea of the conservation of energy?

Yes, I think humans are generally fascinated with the unknown, even the unknowable—a space is left for the imagination to speculate, a creative activity. Pays not to take such speculation too seriously, though, I think, or else become a believer in some form of Gnosticism. The latter would be a departure from empirical/ rational criteria for belief, though. Empirical/ rational criteria are shared, intuition not so much.

And if it is not even true, nro false, how is it consistent? — Banno

It is consistent if it doesn't contradict itself.

I agree but speculative metaphysics is not necessarily inconsistent (Hegel for example) even if it might be thought implausible or empirically and /or logically underdetermined.

The statistician George Box said "All models are wrong but some are useful." — Gary Venter

What does it mean to say that models are wrong? Wrong in relation to what? If a model is useless it is useless, which means it doesn't accord with experience. Newtonian mechanics is useful, albeit not quite as useful as Einsteinian mechanics in some contexts.

We don't know whether either of them are right, in the sense of true, or even what it could mean for them to be right beyond observations showing that the predictions that are entailed by them obtain.

Right on, brother! Great philosophical works have their own aesthetic, just like mathematics does, but it doesn't follow that the great works will necessarily be to everyone's taste, just as it doesn't follow with great works of art.

I'd be interested to know what those may be. But I think it takes more than imagination to create a work of art. — Ciceronianus

Likewise it takes more than mere imagination to create great works of philosophy.

There might be shame in attempting to continue, rather than turn aside. Coherence has merit. — Banno

I think it's not a matter of shame, as if there could be a fact of the matter as to what is intellectually shameful, but rather a matter of personal predilection and/ or interest. I have no doubt you won't agree but that's alright.

The Indirect Realist says that in the sentence "I see a straight stick that appears bent", the word "see" is being used as a figure of speech and not literally, as in "I can clearly see your future".

The Direct Realist says that there is no difference between a word being used as a figure of speech or literally. — RussellA

I'm not too sure about that. The direct realist would say "I see what appears to be a bent stick, but I know it's really pretty straight, because I took it out of the water".

I dont know why you want to say that , but I can tell you that in Husserl’s phenomenology objects don’t just appear to a subject as what they are in themselves in all their assumed completeness, but are constituted by the subject through intentional acts. — Joshs

That's one way of putting it. Another would be that things present whatever it is possible to present of themselves to percipients, depending on their own constitutions, the environmental conditions and, of course the constitutions of the percipients, Framing this interactive process in terms of intentionality tends to yield a one-sided picture in my view.

It seems to me that phenomenology, like any other form of investigation, is as secondary and derivative of primal, non-dual experience as science. I think talk of one domain of inquiry having priority over another is wrongheaded from the get-go.

On the one hand "I see a bent stick" and on the other hand "I see a straight stick". — RussellA

For me a more accurate way of expressing that thought would be "I see a straight stick that appears bent". I see no cause for confusion in that—I've never seen the supposed problem for realism in the 'bent stick' argument.

Now when I said, above "I see no problem" that is obviously just a different sense of 'see'. We have been dealing with the visual sense of the word, and I don't think it is going to help to bring in other senses of 'see'.

Maybe you can help Janus? Why do you and I want to say, and why do some phenomenologists say, that the things we perceive present themselves to us? I feel I’m missing something obvious. — Jamal

It's a good question. I'm not convinced that speaking of things presenting themselves to us necessarily invokes agency on their part. Well at least not agency in the sense of intention to present themselves. In the context of chemistry agency is spoken about—we say there are chemical agents, defined as those compounds or admixtures which have toxic effects on humans.

While things don't have the intention to present themselves, they could be said to have the propensity to do so. Language is multivalent. We can speak of things presenting themselves or being presented or being or becoming present to us.

I don't know if I've answered the question adequately but that's all I've got right now.

Well, nature very well could BE the laws. — flannel jesus

:up: Yes, in one sense. Spinoza. Natura naturata and natura naturans, commonly translated as "nature natured and nature naturing. The passive and the active

All this seems hopelessly wrongheaded and confused to me, but I lack the will to try to untangle it, since I fear it will just continue going around in useless circles.

Direct Realism is aka Naïve Realism. Indirect Realism is aka Representational Realism,. — RussellA

I don't agree that they are equivalent. Naive realism is pre-scientific realism, the eyes were thought of as windows looking out onto a world which exists independently exactly as we see it. With scientific understanding of perception, we have come to realize the world looks different to different organisms.

As organism we are part of the world, each organism sees the world directly via its perceptual apparatus—there is no question of distortion, no need to invoke indirectness...I think those ideas just confuse the issue.

To add my two-cents worth, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, what he calls also the ontic-ontological difference, is not at all the same thing as the traditional philosophical meaning of ontology as the meaning of extant beingness. — Joshs

The distinction you mention is either a phenomenological or a metaphysical distinction, and as I said Heidegger, I believe, equates phenomenology with his conception of metaphysics, which is not the same as the classical conception of course.

it wasn’t posited as either so I’ll just leave that. — AmadeusD

see representations is equivalent to saying we see seeings
— Janus

Yet, this is exactly what is intimated by the claims of direct realists, — AmadeusD

Sounded like you were claiming it was entailed by direct realism, but what you wrote was somewhat ambiguous so perhaps I interpreted it differently than you intended.