What really....I mean REALLY....is the problem here? — Mww
hen the ground of the possibility of both, each limited to its own specific domain, but functioning in unison towards a given end, becomes the better option. — Mww
according to indirect realism, agents aren't merely said to commit perceptual errors relative to the expectations of onlookers and their linguistic conventions, but are believed to really make those errors as a result of possessing cognitive states that have goals and beliefs as intrinsic properties. — sime
How would that look? — Marchesk
nobody can quite agree on the terms under dispute — Marchesk
Dennett is an indirect realist, and his view of goals and beliefs is that these features of a cognitive system can be reduced to the collective activity of a network of millions of dumb bits which can’t themselves be said to have goals or beliefs. It can be useful for certain purposes to treat such dumb assemblages as if they possessed such intrinsic properties. — Joshs
But i think those considerations are tangential, for direct realists take the object of perception to be the stimulus that directly elicits a behavioural response from an agent, however the boundary of the agent is defined. Would Dennett disagree with direct realists who define perception in this way? — sime
In typical philosophy forum fashion, nobody can quite agree on the terms under dispute, in part because we have our philosophical commitments to uphold. — Marchesk
the idea is that red is a property as we see it, not something that causes us to have a response, — Marchesk
it seems that indirect realism is ontologically committed to the folk-psychological notions of goal driven behaviour and mental states. — sime
I think the wrinkle is in red is a property as we see it. It's as if 'red' is supposed to do double-duty for some ineffable private experience which is somehow known to be the same ineffable private experience for all (an impossible public-yet-private experience). — Pie
Ryle attacks this kind of confusion in The Concept of Mind, just as Wittgenstein does with his beetles and boxes. — Pie
Assuming that we have the same kind of eyes and same kind of brain, and assuming that the relationship between body and mind (whatever that is) is deterministic, then we should have the same kinds of private experiences. — Michael
The word "beetle" and the phrase "the contents of our boxes" would mean different things to me. — Michael
Or again, consider Locke's inverted spectrum hypothesis. If such a thing happened I wouldn't then continue to say that grass is green and that rubies were red. I would say that grass is red (or "looks red") if you prefer and that rubies were green (or "looks green"). It's a perfectly coherent scenario (not withstanding it's physical possibility) and so clearly there's more to the meaning of colour words than just some public activity. — Michael
Roses are red and grass is green, even if their colors are reversed for one of us. But what can reversed or inverted mean here? — Pie
But clearly all that matters is the convention that roses are red (like calibrating a scale.) — Pie
I think it more accurate to say that red is the colour that roses are seen to be. This then accommodates both the "convention" that roses are red and Locke's inverted spectrum hypothesis. There is the common public use of the word "red" and the private understanding of redness. — Michael
Fair enough. It seems like such a weak position shown false by the simplest of counterarguments that I find it very hard to believe I haven't simply misunderstood their position. I mean, one of the proponents listed in the article you cited was PMS Hacker. I don't agree with a lot of his philosophy, but he doesn't strike me as the sort of low caliber philosopher likely to make such an elementary error. — Isaac
That we can see an object to be red only when light is reflected off its surface and on to our retina does not show that the object 'in and of itself' is not really red. It merely shows that a condition for its colour being visible is that it be illuminated. Similarly, that photons reflected off the illuminated object cause changes to protein molecules in the retina, which in turn transmits electrical impulses to the fibres of the optic nerve, does not show that what we see is not really coloured, any more than it shows that we do not see what we see directly. What we see is not the effect of an object on us. The effect of an object on our nervous system is the stimulation of the cells of the retina, the effect of this on the optic nerve, the consequent excitation of the cells in the hypercolumns of the 'visual' striate cortex - but none of this is perceived either by the brain (which can perceive nothing) or by the person whose brain it is. Rather, that we see is a consequence of the action of illuminated or luminous objects on our visual system, and what we see are those objects, colour and all. What we thus see, we see 'directly' (to see something 'indirectly' might be to see it through a periscope or in a mirror - not to look at the thing itself in full daylight with one's eyes).
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And it is no more necessary for my perceiving a red object that there be something red in me than it is necessary for me to perceive an explosion that something explode in me.
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Human beings, when they perceive their environment, do not perceive representations of the world, straightforward or otherwise, since to perceive 'the world' (or, more accurately, some part of it) is not to perceive a representation. (To perceive a photograph or painting is to perceive a representation.) And in whatever legitimate sense there is to the supposition that there is a representation of what is seen in the brain, that representation is not what the owner of the brain sees. The 'representation' is a weed in the neuroscientific garden, not a tool - and the sooner it is uprooted the better. — Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, 2nd Ed. - Bennett and Hacker, p143, p145, p154
How about the private recognition of redness? — Michael
Sorry for the delay. Just saw this. Do you mean something like saying to oneself that such and such is red? I can relate to the experience. I can see it figuring after the fact in an explanation. 'That's when I noticed the light was red, when it was too late to stop.'
I believe I have what I am tempted to call the usual intuitions , but I also see that such a thesis is unsupportable not only in practice but even in principle. The inverted spectrum possibility should make us question the whole framework, it seems to me. (As I see it, it makes a beetle-in-box-point itself.) — Pie
Hacker shouldn't be construed as defending either direct or indirect realism. — Andrew M
It's nothing to do with language. — Michael
A hermit with no language could look at two objects and see them to be the same colour (or different colours). — Michael
Without that wider association you couldn't say they discriminated (or equated) according to colour. Only that they discriminated. — bongo fury
It's everything to do with comparing and classifying, whether or not using word-pointing so to do. — bongo fury
Without that wider association you couldn't say they discriminated (or equated) according to colour. Only that they discriminated.
— bongo fury
You confuse me being able to know that that he recognises colours with him being able to recognise colours. He either can or he can't, irrespective of what I think. — Michael
It's everything to do with comparing and classifying, whether or not using word-pointing so to do.
— bongo fury
No it doesn't. I don't need to have words for pleasure and pain to recognise the difference between me feeling pleasure and me feeling pain. Qualitative experiences differ, and that they do has nothing to do with being able to make and make sense of my own and another person's vocalisations or ink impressions. — Michael
Hence my edit: it wouldn't make sense to say they discriminated according to colour, without their associating according to a background classification. — bongo fury
I clearly allowed for there being no language as such: no word- or symbol-pointing. But there will be comparing according to a wider classification, if it makes sense to speak of colour recognition, and not merely discrimination.
And that's how seeing colours is seeing objects. It's recognising classes of objects. (Or illumination events.) — bongo fury
I have no idea what you're talking about. A hermit with no language can recognise when he feels pain. A hermit with no language can recognise when he feels pleasure. A hermit with no language can recognise the difference between feeling pain and feeling pleasure. — Michael
Nothing about this depends on there being some observer who can make, and justify, these claims. — Michael
I'm trying my best to make sense of "recognise" without implying language use. — bongo fury
A dog can recognise his owner. — Michael
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