• Michael
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    I don't think 'mind-independent' is a very clear term.plaque flag

    Then forget that term. Is the redness a property of that bundle of matter which is the apple?
  • plaque flag
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    The world that exists outside language is certainly very different to the world existing within language.RussellA

    How are you talking about it then ? It's a product of language, an empty negation.
  • plaque flag
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    Then forget that term. Is the redness a property of that bundle of matter which is the apple?Michael

    Apples are red.
  • plaque flag
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    I don't think the scientific image is the Real beneath some paintjob of color and values.
  • Michael
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    I don't think the scientific image is the Real beneath some paintjob of color and values.plaque flag

    So you’re not a scientific realist? You believe in something like colour realist primitivism?
  • plaque flag
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    There must be a stronger argument against Indirect Realism that that.RussellA

    There's nothing strictly wrong about indirect realism talk. It's just clumsy. We aren't doing math here or playing chess. We are debating which approach is better.

    My direct realism is going to be hard to grasp without exposure to phenomenology and the idea of a lifeworld. My view is that linguistic sociality is absolutely fundamental. Philosophers presuppose it without even realizing it. It's the water they swim in. If you deny this, you are only engaging in a performative contradiction --- telling me I think the wrong way about our world in a language you expect me to understand.
  • plaque flag
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    So you’re not a scientific realist? You believe in something like colour realist primitivism?Michael

    I largely agree with Popper, so I'm probably a critical realist. But that doesn't mean that atoms are more real than marriages or the scientific norms that persuade us to take them seriously in the first place.
  • Michael
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    So this is either fictionalism or anti realism.
  • plaque flag
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    All of our concepts exists together interdependently in a system. That's a key point.
  • Michael
    15.4k
    If it is either fictionalism or antirealism then in no sense is it direct realism. In fact in no sense does it address the epistemological problem of perception at all.
  • plaque flag
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    I'm not sure what ism is best. I like old school commonsense philosophy, on this issue at least:
    https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Thomas_Reid
    *********
    As Reid understood it, many of his seventeenth and eighteenth-century predecessors (the clearest case may be Locke) had accepted a view along the following lines: in perception, external objects such as rocks and cats causally affect our sense organs. The sense organs in turn affect the (probably, non-material) mind, and their effect is to produce a certain type of entity in the mind, an 'idea.' These ideas, and not external objects, are what we immediately perceive when we look out at the world. The ideas may or may not resemble the objects that caused them in us, but their causal relation to the objects makes it the case that we can immediately perceive the objects by perceiving the ideas.

    Reid noted that, as soon as this picture is in place, the question naturally arises as to just how far our ideas might diverge from their causes. Indeed, it begins to seem that we are completely cut off from reality,stuck behind a veil of ideas. This is a counter-intuitive conclusion, and Reid thinks it indicates that the original positing of ideas, as things we perceive that are distinct from the objects was misguided (here, the view echoes that of Antoine Arnauld in his debate with Nicolas Malebranche). Common sense, he argues, dictates that what we perceive just are objects and their qualities. Ideas, then, are a philosopher's fabrication.
  • plaque flag
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    If it is either fictionalism or antirealism then in no sense is it direct realism. In fact in no sense does it address the epistemological problem of perception.Michael

    I really don't think you've grasped my approach to this issue yet.
  • plaque flag
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    Our articulation of the world is deeply historical and constantly being revised, but we live in that articulation (as well as in nonlinguistic aspects of the world that we can't say much about.)

    The scientific image describes relatively stable features of our world. But even its concepts evolve (Kuhn, etc.)

    But our claims describe the world. The world is that which is the case.
  • Michael
    15.4k
    I really don't think you've grasped my approach to this issue yet.plaque flag

    You're right, because I don't know what you're trying to say below:

    Our articulation of the world is deeply historical and constantly being revised, but we live in that articulation. The scientific image describes relatively stable features of our world. But even its concepts evolve (Kuhn, etc.)

    Regardless, I don't think your approach has anything to do with direct realism at all, even though you insist on using that label.
  • Michael
    15.4k
    Reid noted that, as soon as this picture is in place, the question naturally arises as to just how far our ideas might diverge from their causes. Indeed, it begins to seem that we are completely cut off from reality, stuck behind a veil of ideas. This is a counter-intuitive conclusion, and Reid thinks it indicates that the original positing of ideas, as things we perceive that are distinct from the objects was misguided (here, the view echoes that of Antoine Arnauld in his debate with Nicolas Malebranche). Common sense, he argues, dictates that what we perceive just are objects and their qualities.plaque flag

    His reasoning appears question-begging. The world is counterintuitive. Quantum mechanics has shown that. Common sense doesn't trump scientific evidence.
  • plaque flag
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    You're right, because I don't know what you're trying to say below:Michael

    Our ordinary life in which we shop for groceries, promise to walk to the dog, return books to the library....is real. Some entities exist now (men married to men, the internet) that didn't 100 years ago.
  • plaque flag
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    The world is counterintuitive. Quantum mechanics has shown that. His reasoning appears question-begging.Michael

    The scientific image is counterintuitive. No doubt. But you still seem to be assuming that that image alone is the truly real and not just a layer or aspect of the larger lifeworld, missing the fact that it's still just math, still just language. It all only makes sense as part of an inferential nexus that involves measuring devices and professors with PHDs and the hamburgers they order for lunch. It's all one world.
  • Michael
    15.4k
    Our ordinary life in which we shop for groceries, promise to walk to the dog, return books to the library....is real.plaque flag

    That's not relevant to the epistemological problem of perception. What matters to this topic is whether or not objects like apples and cats exist even when not being perceived, and whether or not the properties they are perceived to have are properties they have even when not being perceived. And this is to be understood in a literally true and realist sense, not in some fictionalist (e.g. pragmatic narrative) or antirealist sense.

    And you missed a paragraph from that description of Reid's philosophy:

    Reid's picture, however, is more complex than such general statements of it may suggest. For Reid continues to accept Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities of objects. Locke held that, among our ideas of objects, some (such as shape) do resemble qualities of the objects that produce them, while others (such as color) do not. Of course, Reid cannot accept the distinction in those terms, so he does so in terms of 'sensations.' When we perceive objects, Reid claims, we find in ourselves certain sensations. Sensations are the effects of the causal influence of objects on us, and these are what lead the mind to perceive the object. Yet sensations themselves, being feelings, cannot resemble their objects (in this, Reid echoes Berkeley's famous claim that nothing can be like an idea except another idea). When, for instance, we perceive though touch that some object is hot, we feel a certain sensation. We know that feature of the object caused us to have that sensation, but we may not know anything about the feature other than that (unlike the case of the extension of the object, which we perceive directly). The feature of the object which produces the sensation of heat is a secondary quality, and all other secondary qualities are individuated in the same manner: via some sensation we have.
  • plaque flag
    2.7k
    That's not relevant to the epistemological problem of perception.Michael

    I've already explained that we shouldn't bother with folk psychology. This is a matter of how best to talk about this stuff. We aren't doing math either. And it's not about winning an argument.

    And you missed a paragraph from that description of Reid's philosophy:Michael

    I didn't miss it. I just quoted the part I liked for convenience. I don't pretend to embrace all of Reid's stuff. But he was ahead of his time on the idea idea.
  • plaque flag
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    and whether or not the properties they are perceived to have are properties they have even when not being perceived.Michael

    This is a silly question !
  • plaque flag
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    At least without further specification, it's just way too vague.
  • plaque flag
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    And this is to be understood in a realist, literally true sense, not in some fictionalist (e.g. pragmatic narrative) or antirealist sense.Michael

    I'd say I'm a pretty hardcore realist in some sense, but not in a sense familiar to you.

    I like pragmatic neorationalist at the moment. Or normative monist. But these cute phrases can only do so much.
  • Michael
    15.4k
    This is a matter of how best to talk about this stuff.plaque flag

    "Best" as in "pragmatic" or "best" as in "true"? We're concerned with what's true.

    This is a silly question !

    It's a perfectly reasonable question. And direct realists do say that the properties we perceive objects to have are the properties they have even when not being perceived. That's what the "direct" in "direct realism" means. It's why they believed that there wasn't an epistemological problem of perception. This contrasted with indirect realists who said that the properties we perceive objects to have are properties of our mental phenomena (at least in the case of Locke's secondary qualities) and not properties of external objects. That's what the "indirect" in "indirect realism" means. It's why they believed that there was an epistemological problem of perception.
  • plaque flag
    2.7k
    This might help.

    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/#BeiWor
    According to Heidegger, Descartes presents the world to us “with its skin off” (Being and Time 20: 132), i.e., as a collection of present-at-hand entities to be encountered by subjects. The consequence of this prioritizing of the present-at-hand is that the subject needs to claw itself into a world of equipmental meaning by adding what Heidegger calls ‘value-predicates’ (context-dependent meanings) to the present-at-hand. In stark contrast, Heidegger's own view is that Dasein is in primary epistemic contact not with context-independent present-at-hand primitives (e.g., raw sense data, such as a ‘pure’ experience of a patch of red), to which context-dependent meaning would need to be added via value-predicates, but rather with equipment, the kind of entity whose mode of Being is readiness-to-hand and which therefore comes already laden with context-dependent significance. What is perhaps Heidegger's best statement of this opposition comes later in Being and Time.

    What we ‘first’ hear is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking waggon, the motor-cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling… It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to ‘hear’ a ‘pure noise’. The fact that motor-cycles and waggons are what we proximally hear is the phenomenal evidence that in every case Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, already dwells alongside what is ready-to-hand within-the-world; it certainly does not dwell proximally alongside ‘sensations’; nor would it first have to give shape to the swirl of sensations to provide a springboard from which the subject leaps off and finally arrives at a ‘world’. Dasein, as essentially understanding, is proximally alongside what is understood. (Being and Time 34: 207)

    For Heidegger, then, we start not with the present-at-hand, moving to the ready-to-hand by adding value-predicates, but with the ready-to-hand, moving to the present-at-hand by stripping away the holistic networks of everyday equipmental meaning.
  • plaque flag
    2.7k
    "Best" as in "pragmatic" or "best" as in "true". We're concerned with what's true.Michael

    Sure. But concepts are normative. Logic is liquid. The meanings of words change. Our notion of rationality itself changes.

    The world is not a chess board, not an array of bits that are simply on or off.

    We coarticulate our lifeworld (its linguistic aspect). Does gay marriage exist or not ? Sociality and language are fundamental to the discursive subjects they make possible, and these subjects direct claims toward others and about the world. We coperform and comodify semantic norms and more traditional norms (sexual, property, etc.)
  • Michael
    15.4k
    Does gay marriage exist or not ?plaque flag

    Not in a metaphysical realist sense, unlike (perhaps) the existence of electrons.

    So when you say that apples are red, are you saying that this is true in the metaphysical realist sense or the antirealist sense? Does the apple being red depend on us (on the way we perceive and talk about the world) or does it being red have nothing to do with us and everything to do with its innate nature?
  • plaque flag
    2.7k
    And direct realists do say that the properties we perceive objects to have are the properties they have even when not being perceived.Michael

    If I close my eyes, the apple is still red.
  • plaque flag
    2.7k
    Does the apple being red depend on us (on the way we perceive and talk about the world) or does it being red have nothing to do with us and everything to do with its innate nature?Michael

    I reject the idea of 'innate' nature. It's like asking me to talk about the apple as it is when no one is talking about it.
  • Michael
    15.4k
    If I close my eyes, the apple is still red.plaque flag

    So what does "is red" mean? What is the physical property red?
  • Michael
    15.4k
    I reject the idea of 'innate' nature.plaque flag

    Then you don't appear to be a realist of any sort, let alone a direct realist.
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