But you offer some kind of Kantian indirect realism — plaque flag

But Kant doesn't call himself, and is not referred to, as an indirect realist. Kant's position is known as transcendental idealism.

But maybe saying mind is 'foundational' to existence is a little misleading ? — plaque flag

What I'm arguing against is the commonly-held view that mind is a product of physical causes. That is the general view of evolutionary naturalism, is it not? I hold to a view that the mind transcends physical causes. But I'm also not wishing to appeal to theism.

Kant took pains to distinguish himself from Berkeley, because critics accused him of being like Berkeley, whom Kant described as a 'problematic idealist' on account of Berkeley saying that a world outside himself is dubious or impossible to know. — Wayfarer

I've read Kant's outraged responses to his early critics. He was truly pissed. I've quoted them here even, years ago. But I don't think Berkeley's point is that we can't know things outside of our individual selves. I think his point is that a-perspectival, a-sensual, a-experiential reality does not compute. Like talk of triangles with 17 sides.

But Kant described himself as transcendental idealist, and differentiated that from what he described as 'problematical idealism'. — Wayfarer

You can of course link me to secondary sources, but I was quoting primary sources to begin with. From the book he wrote after receiving that criticism, when he tried to force himself to be clearer.

Long before Locke's time, but assuredly since him, it has been generally assumed and granted without detriment to the actual existence of external things, that many of their predicates may be said to belong not to the things in themselves, but to their appearances, and to have no proper existence outside our representation. Heat, color, and taste, for instance, are of this kind. Now, if I go farther, and for weighty reasons rank as mere appearances the remaining qualities of bodies also, which are called primary, such as extension, place, and in general space, with all that which belongs to it (impenetrability or materiality, space, etc.)—no one in the least can adduce the reason of its being inadmissible. As little as the man who admits colors not to be properties of the object in itself, but only as modifications of the sense of sight, should on that account be called an idealist, so little can my system be named idealistic, merely because I find that more, nay,

All the properties which constitute the intuition of a body belong merely to its appearance.

The existence of the thing that appears is thereby not destroyed, as in genuine idealism, but it is only shown, that we cannot possibly know it by the senses as it is in itself.
...
I leave to things as we obtain them by the senses their actuality, and only limit our sensuous intuition of these things to this, that they represent in no respect, not even in the pure intuitions of space and of time, anything more than mere appearance of those things, but never their constitution in themselves



https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52821/52821-h/52821-h.htm

Which 'primary source' describes Kant as an 'indirect realist'? Is it something Kant says about himself? The primary source I'm referring to is this:

I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not things in themselves, and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves. To this idealism is opposed transcendental realism, which regards space and time as something given in themselves (independent of our sensiblity). The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding. — CPR, A369

Having distinguished between transcendental idealism and transcendental realism, Kant then goes on to introduce the concept of empirical realism:

The transcendental idealist, on the contrary, can be an empirical realist, hence, as he is called, a dualist, i.e., he can concede the existence of matter without going beyond mere self-consciousness and assuming something more than the certainty of representations in me, hence the cogito ergo sum. For because he allows this matter and even its inner possibility to be valid only for appearance– which, separated from our sensibility, is nothing –matter for him is only a species of representations (intuition), which are call external, not as if they related to objects that are external in themselves but because they relate perceptions to space, where all things are external to one another, but that space itself is in us. — A370

"The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility" - you will observe that this is the view almost universally defended by others in this debate.

To the extent I have a problem with indirect realism, it's the fact that it tends to lead to this sort of soft dualism and hidden humonculi who are there to view the "representations" of the world. — Count Timothy von Icarus

To the extent I have a problem with indirect realism, is reconciled by distinguishing the operation of the cognitive system, in and of itself, on its own accord, from talking about the constituent parts that enable its function. The talking about it is that which creates the very Cartesian theater alledged to subsist in it. It is absurd to suppose reason has a partner, or intuition has a twin.

Consider time. At one point the subject thinks, feels, knows….whatever. It is at another time he reconsiders the content of former time, and whether sufficiently identical to it or not, it is still the same system belonging to the same subject in operation for both times. For any times, in fact.

From here, it follows the soft dualism in question doesn’t reside within the system, but dualism proper is the condition resident between the system in which representations are the effects, and that which is given to it, by which representations are caused. There is no “view”; there is merely relation.

I suspect….I’d like to think…..the extent to which you have a problem with indirect realism, isn’t so great.

Which 'primary source' describes Kant as an 'indirect realist'? Is it something Kant says about himself? — Wayfarer

I don't think the phrase 'indirect realism' was invented yet. But let's just look.

The indirect realist agrees that the coffee cup exists independently of me. However, through perception I do not directly engage with this cup; there is a perceptual intermediary that comes between it and me. Ordinarily I see myself via an image in a mirror, or a football match via an image on the TV screen. The indirect realist claim is that all perception is mediated in something like this way. When looking at an everyday object it is not that object that we directly see, but rather, a perceptual intermediary. This intermediary has been given various names, depending on the particular version of indirect realism in question, including “sense datum, ” “sensum,” “idea,” “sensibilium,” “percept” and “appearance.

https://iep.utm.edu/perc-obj/#H2

Here's Kant:

All the properties which constitute the intuition of a body belong merely to its appearance.

The existence of the thing that appears is thereby not destroyed, as in genuine idealism, but it is only shown, that we cannot possibly know it by the senses as it is in itself.
...
I leave to things as we obtain them by the senses their actuality, and only limit our sensuous intuition of these things to this, that they represent in no respect, not even in the pure intuitions of space and of time, anything more than mere appearance of those things, but never their constitution in themselves.

Kant is truly more radical than Hobbes or Locke. For even matter in motion is mere appearance. The deep Stuff of the world is (in the quotes I've presented so far) completely hidden and mysterious.

For Kant, we only have $f(X)$, never $X$, where $f$ is our cognitive 'filter.' But $X$ serves no purpose here. I think Kant is misled by an analogy, thinking he can talk sensibly not only beyond individual human perspectives but beyond the human perspective altogether.

I see no advantage in introducing the term, 'indirect realism'.

It's not my term. It's just standard philosophical terminology. You can of course stick to Kant's terminology. But that's beside the point, is it not ?

But we can't ever compare 'the real world' with 'the representation of it'. — Wayfarer

Sure we can. We just can't achieve a perfect match between our representation of the world and the full detail of the way the world is. Every day, billions of people are comparing their representations of the world with reality. Some manage to increase the accuracy of their representations.

The existence of the thing that appears is thereby not destroyed, as in genuine idealism, but it is only shown, that we cannot possibly know it by the senses as it is in itself ~ Kant — plaque flag

that's more or less what I'm arguing in the OP.

I don't agree with 'indirect realism' because it posits two separate things - the reality and its representation. As if we could compare them.

Of course you can compare a photograph or a painting with the actual subject that it's supposed to represent, but that is not at issue.

Sure we can. We just can't achieve a perfect match between our representation of the world and the full detail of the way the world is. Every day, billions of people are comparing their representations of the world with reality. Some manage to increase the accuracy of their representations. — wonderer1

I think Husserl also handles this nicely. We can always get a better and more complete look at something. We have the 'transcendent' (inexhaustible) object which we are never done learning about. We never see even a desk lamp from every possible angle in every possible lighting.

That 'truth' of the object is how it is for an ideal looking-at-it, roughly speaking. But this include accumulating concepts, relating objects to one another, the whole of science even.

I don't agree with 'indirect realism' because it posits two separate things - the reality and its representation. As if we could compare them — Wayfarer

But aren't you explicitly positing two things ? The representing and the represented ?

But you seem (to me) to be flitting from position to position. — plaque flag

When you made that remark, I had copied in a section of Pinter's text, which, incidentally, was introduced by him referring to Wittgenstein's dictum that 'the world is the totality of facts', to wit:

In a universe without an observer having a purpose, you cannot have facts. As you may judge from this, a fact is something far more complex than it appears to be at first sight. In order for a fact to exist, it must be preceded by a segmentation of the world into separate things, and requires a brain that is able to extract it from the background in which it is immersed*. Moreover, this brain must have the power to conceive in Gestalts, because in order to perceive its outlines and extract it, a fact must be seen whole, together with some of its context.

A fact does not exist if it has not been articulated, that is, if it does not exist explicitly as a verbal entity sufficiently detailed that it can be made to correspond (approximately) to something in the external world. Facts don’t exist in the absence of their statement (because a statement cuts the fact out of the background), and the statement cannot exist apart from an agent with a purpose. When an intentional agent sets out to carve a specific object from the background world, he has a Gestalt concept of the object—and from the latter, he acts to carve the object out. Thus, a fact cannot exist in a universe without living observers.

A fact does not hold in the universe if it has not been explicitly formulated. That should be obvious, because a fact is specific. In other words, statements-of-fact are produced by living observers, and thereby come into existence as a result of being constructed. It is only after they have been constructed (in words or symbols) that facts come to exist. Commonsense wisdom holds the opposite view: It holds that facts exist in the universe regardless of whether anyone notices them, and irrespective of whether they have been articulated in words. You may now judge for yourself if that is true. — Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 93). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition

What do you make of this?

What do you make of this? — Wayfarer

I'm a correlationist (or something like that), so I think you aren't being radical enough.

But do you get the drift of the argument?

But aren't you explicitly positing two things ? The representing and the represented ? — plaque flag

No. If the world as it is in itself is unknown to us, then it's not a thing. It neither exists nor does not exist.

Commonsense wisdom holds the opposite view: It holds that facts exist in the universe regardless of whether anyone notices them, and irrespective of whether they have been articulated in words. You may now judge for yourself if that is true. — Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 93). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition

Yes, commonsense tends to forget or not notice the transparent subject, which I equate with the very being of the world. So people tend to think that the world exists in an aperspectival way somehow. But I don't think we can really make sense of that. We understand 'matter' or its surrogate in terms of possible perception, possible experience. Experience is always a fusion of subject and object, to put it roughly, though it's more like a nondual stream that divides only upon reflection. I agree with Husserl that a certain kind of scientific realism is absurd, despite its popularity.

Yes, commonsense tends to forget or not notice the transparent subject, which I equate with the very being of the world. — plaque flag

Well, that's what I meant from the outset.

No. If the world as it is in itself is unknown to us, then it's not a thing. It neither exists nor does not exist. — Wayfarer

Perhaps your view is changing as the discussion proceeds. But here you said :

By ‘creating reality’, I’m referring to the way the brainreceives, organises and integrates cognitive data, along with memory and expectation, so as to generate the unified world–picture within which we situate and orient ourselves. — Wayfarer

So you have a brain which presumably 'really' exists (a brain-in-itself, made of ur-stuff) taking more of this ur-stuff and creating ordinary experience. If the brain is itself mere appearance, then of course the brain-created world no longer makes sense.

Kant wrote that the hidden reality is nothing like appearance, not even spatially or temporally. But by abandoning primary qualities in this way, he abandons the brain and the sense organs. So he pushes Hobbes and Locke to a point of mystic and glorious absurdity.

It's only because of our ordinary experience with sense organs that we came up with the idea of appearance and perspective.

If I believe that the Jones is guilty, while you believe he is innocent, aren't we both believing about the same Jones ? — plaque flag

There's no way of being sure that we are both believing about the same Jones.

There's no way of being sure that we are both believing about the same Jones. — Angelo Cannata

My own take is that language is fundamentally social, more social than individual. 'Language speaks the subject.'

Basically like this :

The form of experience is temporality, which is to say that whatever is directly experienced occurs “now”, or at the moment in time to which we refer as “the present”. Experience, in other words, is essentially transitory, and its contents are incommunicable. What we experience are the perceivable features of individual objects. It is through the act of thinking that we are able to identify those features through the possession of which different individuals belong to the same species, with the other members of which they share these essential features in common.

Unlike sense experience, thought is essentially communicable. Thinking is not an activity performed by the individual person qua individual. It is the activity of spirit, to which Hegel famously referred in the Phenomenology as “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’” (Hegel [1807] 1977: 110). Pure spirit is nothing but this thinking activity, in which the individual thinker participates without himself (or herself) being the principal thinking agent.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/

There's no way of being sure that we are both believing about the same Jones. — Angelo Cannata

Moreover, critical rational discussion presupposes a shared language and a shared world. Rational norms are implicitly self-transcending.

So one can be mad, of course, truly fretting that one is trapped in a bubble, but one cannot argue seriously for the impossibility of the conditions of an argument being meaningful.

If the brain is itself mere appearance, then of course the brain-created world no longer makes sense. — plaque flag

The brain doesn't appear at all. Not unless you're someone who is studying brains.

perspective can't really be avoided — Wayfarer

I agree, but we should be careful not to turn perspectives into objective realities. This mistake can be avoided by considering that, by talking about perspectives, we, as a consequence, need to apply the relativity of everything to the idea of perspectives as well, so that, at the end, we need to admit that, ultimately, we don't know what we are talking about.

The brain doesn't appear at all. Not unless you're someone who is studying brains. — Wayfarer

?

This doesn't seem relevant. Of course our brains are protected by our skulls and our flesh.

Define ‘sure’. There is no absolute certainty anymore than there is ‘absolute’ other than in the same sense that noumenon is ‘negatively’ ‘known’.

Words are words. The issue is deciding when we are just using words or the words are using us.

I agree, but we should be careful not to turn perspectives into objective realities. This mistake can be avoided by considering that, by talking about perspectives, we, as a consequence, need to apply the relativity of everything to the idea of perspectives as well, so that, at the end, we need to admit that, ultimately, we don't know what we are talking about. — Angelo Cannata

I think you are making a good point about the fragility of relativism.

But one can say (with me) that we only ever have belief without also saying that all beliefs are equally worthy. We can accept our fallibility without being helplessly lost in doubt. In fact, we always do take all sorts of 'truths' for granted. Peirce is great on the 'settling' of belief. Inquiry is activated by the wobble of this or that piece of our 'belief machinery' --- which mostly runs quietly in the darkness. It's because we don't question the meaning of most of our words than we can question (in those words) the meaning of this or that one. And so on.

Thinking is not an activity performed by the individual person qua individual. It is the activity of spirit, to which Hegel famously referred in the Phenomenology as “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’” (Hegel [1807] 1977: 110). Pure spirit is nothing but this thinking activity, in which the individual thinker participates without himself (or herself) being the principal thinking agent. — plaque flag

I think I should stress that I don't deny the necessity of an individual working brain for though. The point is that we are cultural beings, and that the hardware of the brain is necessary but not sufficient for us to be fully human. The hardware (wetware) is a thin client, a sine qua non.

To think rationally is to think according to norms. Following Brandom's inferentialism, I'd say that meaning is essentially normative/social. I do not at all deny the importance and possibility of acts of individual creativity. Such innovations sometimes spread throughout the culture, and there is no culture at all without actual living bodies. Spirit (culture) is a modification of 'nature.' It's all built on/from living flesh and its environment.

Of course you can compare a photograph or a painting with the actual subject that it's supposed to represent, but that is not at issue. — Wayfarer

This is why I insist that the lifeworld is always already 'significant' or linguistically-structured. Sort of what Wittgenstein was about in the TLP. How do propositions mean ? The world is all that is case. What does it mean to call P true ? I say that belief is simply the structure of the world given perspectively. But we can have 'signitive intentions,' guesses that a box contains X rather than Y. So our counterfactuals picture the meaningful lifeworld, not some hidden ur-stuff. And 'seeing is believing' means that a 'fulfilled intention' is an extremely strong pressure on our belief (on the articulable meaningform of 'our-world-for-me.') Though we can always retrospectively decide that we hallucinated, or must have been dreaming.

The brain doesn't appear at all. Not unless you're someone who is studying brains. — Wayfarer

No brain has ever been a phenomenon to the subject to which it belongs. The only brain that will ever appear to me, is someone else’s, and even if I intuit it as such, I will still never apprehend its internal machinations.

What Berkeley actually denied was the existence of material substance that exists independently of being perceived. — Wayfarer

To be more precise, Berkeley described how the existence of matter is an unnecessary assumption. He provided very good arguments, and demonstrated how "matter" is just a concept employed by us to account for the inferred temporal continuity of bodies, objects. This supposed temporal continuity (which is inferred from observations) makes an object identifiable at different times as the same object, supporting Aristotle's law of identity. The inferred continuous existence of the same object which is derived from observations of sameness (similarity) at different times, is commonly justified as caused by, or the result of the "matter" which inheres within the object.

Notice that I used "inheres within the object", because this is what I explained is a place holder for the unknown. So "matter" is just a place holder for the unknown. The real cause of the temporal continuity of sameness, which people attribute to "the matter" of the object is unknown.

So Berkeley demonstrates that "matter" as a concept of something which exists independently of human minds is no more justified, nor even better than the concept of "the Mind of God". Each of these two concepts serves to account for the temporal continuity of sameness of objects, in its own way, with its own history, but in reality each is just a different place holder for the unknown; each having its own connotations and extensions. Analysis of the connotations, extensions and history of usage is how we find out that each involves a different perspective toward the unknown.

But it is basically the same argument, with the difference that instead of appealing to the stone's hardness, you're appealing to its shape. — Wayfarer

That the boulder truly does not have a shape is supported by Einsteinian relativity, as shape is dependent on the frame of reference. This is understood under the concept of length contraction which is related to time dilation.