Baloney.

Baloney — frank

...as bait? Maybe. Oily, so it'll attract something...

catfish

LOL fair enough.

I agree with Banno, except that straw man (IRists explicitly reject that we know the truth about the world, and instead respect that we know nothing of it besides its triggering tendency to our percepts), and concluding that what he says supports DR.

I also agree with Hanover, and have again, made it explicitly clear that it isn't metaphysics unless you want semantic commitment to override physics. That would be a metaphysical commitment, conceptually.

I agree with Michael about most of what he's said.

That is why it is not a definitional issue. It is one of wilfully ignoring the question in service of either comfort, or really shining Austin's shoes (its the latter - and i am Joking).

X is the mind-independent world. Contact with it is constant and immediate. One cannot disprove that with false analogies, formal hocus-pocus, and imagining off into strange worlds. You have no argument; there is no justification for your position; and it comes from a limited view which seeks to limit itself further by pretending something mediate his contact with the world immediately outside himself.

You have no argument; there is no justification for your position; and it comes from a limited view which seeks to limit itself further by pretending something mediate his contact with the world immediately outside himself. — NOS4A2

You don't even know what you're saying, let alone what the dispute is. You think your intuitions are arguments and deal with complex empirical issues that humans are not disposed to solve. Craziness.

I agree with Banno, except that straw man (IRists explicitly reject that we know the truth about the world, and instead respect that we know nothing of it besides its triggering tendency to our percepts), and concluding that what he says supports DR. — AmadeusD

Right. It's a strawman that indirect realists deny that we know truths about the world. That's what you mean, right?

The straw man to which I referred is the one proffered as the only alternative to indirect realism, is the contentious "direct realism" of their imaginings.

The straw man to which I referred is the one proffered as the only alternative to indirect realism, is the contentious "direct realism" of their imaginings. — Banno

I'm confused then. They're both realists.

Here:

“Direct realism” is not a position that emerged from philosophers asking how perception is best understood, so much as a reaction to dialectical pressure created by a certain picture of perception, roughly: the idea that what we are immediately aware of are internal intermediaries, be they sense-data, representations, appearances, mental images, from which the external world is inferred.

Once that picture is in place, a binary seems forced: either we perceive the world indirectly, via inner objects; or we perceive it directly, without intermediaries. “Direct realism” is then coined as the negation of the first horn. It is not so much a positive theory as a reactive label: not that. This already suggests the diagnosis: the term exists because something has gone wrong earlier in the framing.

What those who reject indirect realism are actually rejecting may not be indirectness as such, but the reification of something “given” — an object of awareness that is prior to, or independent of, our conceptual, practical, and normative engagement with the world. Once you posit sense-data, qualia as objects, appearances as inner items, you generate the “veil of perception” problem automatically. “Direct realism” then looks like the heroic attempt to tear down the veil. But if you never put the veil there in the first place, there is nothing to tear down.

You see the cat. Perhaps you see it in the mirror, or turn to see it directly. And here the word "directly" has a use. You see the ship indirectly through the screen of your camera, but directly when you look over the top; and here the word "directly" has a use. The philosophical use of ‘indirect’ is parasitic on ordinary contrasts that do not support the theory. “Directly” is contrastive and context-bound, it does not name a metaphysical relation of mind to object, it does not imply the absence of causal mediation.

What you do not see is a sense datum, a representation, an appearance, or a mental image. You might well see by constructing such a representation, and all the physics and physiology that involves. But to claim that what you see is that construct and not the cat is a mistake.

One can admit that neural representations exist and denying that such things are the objects of perception. These neural representations are our seeing, not what we see. — Banno