We cannot speak of the world as it is in itself. Then how can it have any significance? — Banno

True, but it does nonetheless. The significance being, the setting of limits of human knowledge, the limits being, not the world, but ourselves.

So far I've taken "see" to be roughly understood as "perceive". But it might mean something like "discern". — Banno

It doesn’t. To discern is to understand, to comprehend. Perception doesn’t think, and comprehension doesn’t perceive.

What I've writ so far is along the analytic tradition, breaking the question down into pieces and seeing if, by finding answers for each, we can answer the original question. — Banno

Well, there ya go: your analytical way finds answers to questions, the other, and dare I say all the more fundamentally significant, way seeks the conditions which must have been involved, in order for questions to even be asked in the first place.
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The idea is that there is a world that stands outside our perceptions of it, and hence is outside of our capacity to discern. — Banno

Yes and no. The idea is, and yes it stems from transcendental idealism if not other doctrines as well, there is no world for a human other than the world of his perceptions, but rather, the idea is, whatever that world is, is not necessarily represented by his knowledge. It’s just shorthand for the notion that the world doesn’t tell us about itself, but we tell ourselves about the world. The world is as it is, for it couldn’t logically be otherwise, but nevertheless, we just can’t claim knowledge of it as it is, but only as we understand it.

The direct realists say the world and our understanding of it are on a one-to-one correspondence, but that is of course, provably not the case.

So change your evil ways, dump those analytic bovine droppings, and join the real philosophers!!!!

In philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, naïve realism is the idea that the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are. [Wikipedia]

In social psychology, naïve realism is the human tendency to believe that we see the world around us objectively, and that people who disagree with us must be uninformed, irrational, or biased.[Wikipedia]

When it comes to social interactions, our sensory testimony can be especially unreliable, and we probably do not see social aspects of the world with clarity, validity, and reliability a good share of the time. There are numerous aspects of social interactions which are not readily observable; things like motivation, 300 different kinds of bias, conscious and not-conscious hopes and fears, and so forth. And that's true of ourselves observing ourselves. Sometimes it is not clear what our own motivation was (in say, quitting a good job) until quite some time later.

The hotness of water or the shape of a tree is more easily nailed down than what, exactly, is going on socially between people, or among a group of people. (Not always, of course; sometimes social interactions are as clear as boiling water.)

". The idea is that there is a world that stands outside our perceptions of it, and hence is outside of our capacity to discern. Further, this world, beyond our keen, is the actual thing. Since we cannot discern the goings on in this world as it is in itself, we cannot make statements about it, let alone true statements. On this view, there is precious little that we can say that is true. — Banno

I agree with the begining of this quote, of course. The hypothesis of a world independent of what we think or perceive of it is fundamental to explain disagreements between people. However, your last sentence in unwarranted: there is an awful lot of truth we can say about the world, in its relation to ourselves and in our relation to it. What escapes us is its ontology: what is matter, for instance, apart from something we hurt our toes on?

If you have no sense of mystery, then don't bother with philosophy.

Well, there ya go: your analytical way finds answers to questions, the other, and dare I say all the more fundamentally significant, way seeks the conditions which must have been involved, in order for questions to even be asked in the first place. — Mww

Analytic philosophers do address that question. And in my view, with great clarity. Perhaps the difference is that they do not pretend to have the answer.

But then, that's what I would say.

In philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, naïve realism is the idea that the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are. [Wikipedia] — Bitter Crank

We might profit form the approach taken in the SEP article on the problem of perception, which sets up the issue by contrasting naive realism with internationalist theories of perception. The final sentence sets up the issue clearly:

Is it that some such experiences are themselves in their nature non-representational relations to ordinary objects? Or is it that they are in their nature non-relational representations of ordinary objects?

For my part I oscillate between these two views, but find myself tending at present towards the notion of representations; however this seems to be at odds with views on belief I have expressed elsewhere, and hence is an area for further consideration.

The role you give to social interactions is perhaps not to dissimilar to that which I would give to language, that being the root of social interaction.

However, your last sentence in unwarranted: — Olivier5

I had hoped it was clear that this: "there is precious little that we can say that is true", was given as a view with which I disagree.

Hence, Olivier, I agree with your comment, there is an awful lot of truth we can say about the world.

If you have no sense of mystery, then don't bother with philosophy. — Wayfarer

I quite agree.

But let's not pretend we have the answer where there can be none.

Well, there ya go: your analytical way finds answers to questions, the other, and dare I say all the more fundamentally significant, way seeks the conditions which must have been involved, in order for questions to even be asked in the first place. — Mww

The problem with this is that, if we cannot see the world as it is, which includes mot being able to see ourselves as we really are, then we can never know what "the conditions which must have been involved in order for the questions to be even asked in the first place" are.

Not perceiving the world as it is is different from it being impossible to know the world as it is, which seems to be the charge leveled. First, the way we see the world is related in some manner to how the world is, and second, we have different senses and various tools we've made to augment them to investigate. Science investigates the reality behind appearance, and comes up with theories to explain how things appear.

Granted, as Wayfarer would point out, that does mean we have to take into account how our intellect understands the world in theory formation and what not. We investigate the world given the kinds of minds, bodies, tools (and language) we have. The world though is just whatever it is, including how it appears to us. We do our best to make sense of that, which is somewhere between the naive appearance and a deeper understanding.

So, we don't have to be skeptics in the ancient sense, but we should acknowledge the difficulties and how humans often get things wrong.

This is true. But in a context (this thread) where the issue seems to be generally presented in binary terms (we know or don't know the world as it is), we certainly know a tremendous amount of social reality. You can see this when you move into a cross-cultural situation and you, the stranger, to this social reality are constantly confused and commit faux pas with regularity and natives do not (thought obviously they are not infallible). They can read cues and know when people are angry or what their motivations are much better than you can. A similar argument could be made regarding certain kinds of autism. That there are degrees/gradations of knowing. I doubt anyone thinks we are remotely infallible (even the most skilled detectives and poker players (or Dr. Ekman who made as close to a science of reading people as he could). Babies lock onto their mothers' faces as the first part of a long (in some case lifelong) learning how to read people.

(this may all have little to do with your point. I selfishly used it to return to my earlier point that it's not (necessarily anyway) a binary issue. I would disagree with someone saying 'we see the world as it is' and I disagree here with people who say 'we don't see the world as it is'. These, to me are both blanket and wrong and do not recognize that there is a spectrum. Some people seem to say sure, we can see or conceive the world as it is, but only when science is used. But man, we were feeding ourselves and successfully climbing trees and running down deer long before science - iow engaging in fast, complicated assessments of the reality we needed to navigate successfully.)

Hence, Olivier, I agree with your comment, there is an awful lot of truth we can say about the world. — Banno

In its relation to ourselves and in our relation to it, yes. But we can’t say much about the world as it is in itself. If you assume that you know the world as it is, then you are totally oblivious to the possibility that you may have biases. Any disagreement is simply because the other person is wrong. I suspect that is precisely why David Stove was such an misogynist and racist: he believed he saw the world as it was, and if in that world the tenured professors in Sydney U were all white and males, it was because white males display more intellectual merit than other people, not because there was a bias in the system...

We can do better than that.

While not to discount the possibility that we don't see the world as it really is, I'm somewhat certain that you're making a mistake if your thesis depends on color vision and other examples, if you choose to employ them, of a similar nature and the mistake is you're concluding, to use an analogy, that a black-and-white photograph isn't real because it lacks color. Black-and-white photographs are real, it's just not complete, color-wise. If I listen to a song incompletely, it doesn't mean the parts that I listen to aren't the real deal.

I think there’s some confusion here, things aren’t relating to each other. I was talking about my gripe with analytic philosophy, in that it answers questions logically by breaking them down, as Banno says, but I hold that questions should have been constructed logically in the first place, if it be granted the human cognitive system is itself a logical enterprise. It follows that breaking the question down doesn’t have near the explanatory power as would breaking down the logic under which the question was constructed. And because logical constructions are metaphysical without regard for language, which has only to do with expressions representing such constructions, the disassembly of that logic should be metaphysical as well. Nothing can be re-stated that hasn’t been re-thought.

As to not seeing the world as it is prohibits seeing my own body as it is......with respect to empirical knowledge, this is quite correct. My foot, e.g., is the same kind of perceptual sensation and I cognize my foot as an experience just as I perceive, represent, cognize and experience the oak tree down back. But the quality of the foot as MY foot among feet in general, is very far from the quality of the one tree among trees in general, from which follows the certainty of knowing very much more about MY foot than feet in general. Still, no matter how much more I know about my foot, I am not authorized to say I know my own foot as it is in itself, without contradicting the entire system by which I base the possibility of my empirical knowledge. For then I must admit my foot is not represented to me as a phenomenon as is every other object of my perception, and I then successfully defeat my own experiential methodology.

Now......the importance of “quality”......

If you assume that you know the world as it is, then you are totally oblivious to the possibility that you may have biases. — Olivier5

If you say you can see the world as it is, period, then you are confused about your fallibility and biases right from the start. Or course, regardless of where one weighs in on this issue one can still be susceptible to biases. But we do see the world as it is to some degree. You seem to see this professor and his biases, for example.

But let's not pretend we have the answer where there can be none. — Banno

Agreed, that this can be both dangerous and foolish. Is this a general cautionary statement, or have you witnessed an occasion where such pretension is evident, and refer me to it?

But we do see the world as it is to some degree. You seem to see this professor and his biases, for example. — Coben

Seeming and being, caution on the traverse; they do not actually connect.

As it is, to any degree, is fictive. Imo more accurate to say that some of what I think the world is works well-enough for me that for my convenience I'll just assume that's the way the world is. Of course I shall soon enough forget the qualification, thereby becoming confused and misled about the world. But in many cases being just one of a very large herd of the confused. And that's the wherefore of Mww, to point us in the right direction, if we'll just pay attention.

But we do see the world as it is to some degree. You seem to see this professor and his biases, for example. — deletedusercb

People are easier to see than atoms and neutrinos, evidently. It depends. But as a general rule, the map is always at a variance with the territory, and to maintain this distinction is important to understand biases.

-ah, misdirection.

It seems odd that we agree that there are things about which nothing can be said, yet seem to disagree as to what these things are.

In correspondence you spoke of the world as a "euphemism for whatever there is on the input side of our senses"; but for the analytic tradition, at least since the Tractatus, the world is that of which we make true statements - the world is all that is the case.

IS this difference at the root of our disagreement?

In its relation to ourselves and in our relation to it, yes. But we can’t say much about the world as it is in itself. — Olivier5

Then does "the world as it is in itself" make any sense?

We can make true statements about the world. But add "as it is in itself" and that capacity is removed from us.

So don't add "as it is in itself"

I know.

I might just skip past the misleading verbiage and say that seeing is interacting. And, as parts of the world, we interact as (parts of) the world is. Does that work?

This should have been an end to the thread.

Thanks for all the thoughtful posts, I've had a minor medical emergency, I will respond soon (I'm getting treatment).

Not perceiving the world as it is is different from it being impossible to know the world as it is, which seems to be the charge leveled. — Marchesk

As far as I can parse the notion: 'being able to see the world as it is', if not taken in a naive realist sense, could only be taken to mean that there are real structures or energetic configurations that the world we experience are caused by/ contingent upon. So we perceive the world in accordance with how it is; but to say that we perceive it exactly as it is would be to suggest that the perception of something is identical with the thing tout court which is obviously not correct.

Granted, as Wayfarer would point out, that does mean we have to take into account how our intellect understands the world in theory formation and what not. We investigate the world given the kinds of minds, bodies, tools (and language) we have. — Marchesk

But we cannot, as I pointed out to @Mww, on the view that we cannot see things as they are in themselves, "take into account how our intellect understands the world in theory formation and what not" because we cannot see those processes in themselves either; whether those processes are purely neurophysical or not, the pre-conceptual (not to mention the proto-conceptual) processes by which we come to see a world of things is hidden from us. We can investigate those processes as they appear to us, just as we can investigate the rest of the world as it appears to us.

In light of that it seems that talk of "things in themselves" has no referent; and thus would seem to be, if not incoherent, at least useless.

It follows that breaking the question down doesn’t have near the explanatory power as would breaking down the logic under which the question was constructed. And because logical constructions are metaphysical without regard for language, which has only to do with expressions representing such constructions, the disassembly of that logic should be metaphysical as well. Nothing can be re-stated that hasn’t been re-thought. — Mww

I think that is precisely what analytic philosophy attempts to do: analyze and bring to light the logic of thought. I don't see how logical constructions can be independent of language. so I'm not following your thinking there.

In light of that it seems that talk of "things in themselves" has no referent; and thus would seem to be, if not incoherent, at least useless. — Janus

Yep.

We can make true statements about the world. But add "as it is in itself" and that capacity is removed from us. — Banno

you spoke (....) of the world as a "euphemism for whatever there is on the input side of our senses"; but for the analytic tradition (...) the world is that of which we make true statements - the world is all that is the case.

IS this difference at the root of our disagreement? — Banno

Truth be told, the root is in language use itself, and the supremacy I think falsely allotted to it. Case in point.....it may be that the world is that about which true statements can be made, but it does not follow from that, that the world is all that is the case merely because true statements are possible because of it. It is also possible, after all, to make true statements having nothing whatsoever to do with the world, re: change is successions in time.
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things about which nothing can be said — Banno

As well, I think this needs qualifiers, insofar as there is nothing about which it is impossible to say anything, from your admitted analytic prospective. There are things that if anything is said about them, such saying will be irrational, nonsensical, absurd, meaningless, and so on, but theses are still somethings that can be said.

Things about which nothing can be said, on the other hand, this from the non-Anglophone continental tradition, is that to which no thought has been given. And THAT is what gives ordinary language use its secondary status.

It is also possible, after all, to make true statements having nothing whatsoever to do with the world, re: change is successions in time. — Mww

I'd like to see this filled out: an example, perhaps.

There are things that if anything is said about them, such saying will be irrational, nonsensical, absurd, meaningless, and so on, but theses are still somethings that can be said. — Mww

enunciating things that are irrational, nonsensical, absurd, or meaningless is not saying anything, It's just making noise.

I'd like to see this filled out: an example, perhaps. — Banno

What need does an example serve, when the truth of a proposition lays in the fact the negation of it is impossible. If a proposition must be either true or false, and the falsity of the proposition is impossible, the truth of the proposition is given necessarily.

The only way to falsify the proposition, is to change the definitions of the conceptions contained in it. But that’s cheatin’ dammit!!
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It's just making noise. — Banno

Again with language. By definition, one cannot enunciate incomprehensibly. Incomprehensible speech is still speech, even if it is impossible to understand, re: Swahili to a 10yo Finlander. Feynman could have spoken to me in our common language but with his kind of terminology and I wouldn’t have understood half of what he said, but I wouldn’t dare claim he was merely making noise.