Perception isn’t just visual. Do you agree or disagree? — NOS4A2

Yes, but I'm specifically talking about visual perception. But if you want me to be explicit, then according to your theory of perception, our perception of apples for the five main modalities are:

1. Sight: indirect
2. Hearing: indirect
3. Smell: indirect
4. Taste: direct
5. Touch: direct

So according to your theory, we only have direct perception of apples when it comes to taste and touch; but when it comes to sight, hearing, and smell, our perception of apples is only indirect.

Yes

So if you consider visual perception indirect because there is distance and other objects between apples and the eye, how do you describe perception where there is no distance nor other objects between the sense organ and the apple?

So if you consider visual perception indirect because there is distance and other objects between apples and the eye — NOS4A2

This isn't my claim. This is the consequence of your claim. I am simply pushing you to acknowledge this.

According to your theory of perception we do not have direct visual perception of apples.

So your so-called "direct realism" is very different to what is ordinarily understood by the term.

Again, perception isn’t limited to the visual, as you’ve conceded. Yet you keep limiting it to the visual. While I’ve long conceded that I cannot visually perceive apples (or anything) without light, you refuse to address whether I can still perceive apples without light. The answer to that question is “yes”.

Yet you keep limiting it to the visual. — NOS4A2

Yes, because it's important. This is the proposition under consideration:

1. We have direct visual perception of apples

According to most direct realists, (1) is true. According to you, (1) is false.

If (1) is false then one of these is true:

2. We do not have visual perception of apples
3. We only have indirect visual perception of apples

Therefore, according to you, either (2) or (3) is true.

I believe we have indirect visual perception of apples through the direct visual perception of light. This shouldn’t matter because the problem of perception is whether we can directly perceive the mind-independent world or directly perceive some mind-dependent intermediary. So why are we trying to keep discussion away from the problem?

I believe we have indirect visual perception of apples through the direct visual perception of light. This shouldn’t matter because the problem of perception is whether we can directly perceive the mind-independent world or directly perceive some mind-dependent intermediary. So why are we trying to keep discussion away from the problem? — NOS4A2

Of course it matters. If we don't have direct visual perception of apples then our ordinary understanding of perception is wrong, and there is an epistemological problem of perception. Having the direct object of visual perception be light rather than sense data is a problem for the sense datum theorist, but having it be light rather than apples is a problem for the traditional direct realist.

You're committing an association fallacy if you think that having the direct object of perception be just any mind-independent thing suffices as a solution to the problems of perception.

Then let’s try a different object of perception: the light that has bounced off an apple. How does one indirectly perceive the light bouncing off an apple?

How does one indirectly perceive the light bouncing off an apple? — NOS4A2

By light being causally responsible for but not a constituent of the first-person phenomenal experience that emerges from neural activity in the visual cortex.

I don’t know what a “constituent of the first-person phenomenal experience” is, and whether light it one or not. Can I have an example for the sake of comparison?

Can I have an example for the sake of comparison? — NOS4A2

An example of first-person phenomenal experience? It's what occurs when the visual cortex is active, whether dreaming, hallucinating, or having ordinary waking experiences, and what doesn't occur when the visual cortex isn't active, whether in deep sleep, having one's eyes closed, or suffering from cortical blindness.

An example of a constituent of that experience to be more precise. I’d like to avoid equivocating between “experience” as an occurrence or state of the human body, and “experience” as a space in which things occur.

A couple of quotes on the directness of visual perception.

I can believe just about anything I want, I can desire anything I want. My desires and my beliefs are not tied to my immediate environment in the way my visual experiences are. But when I open my eyes and look around in broad daylight, it is not up to me what I see; rather I am, by the very nature of the visual experience, forced to see the here and the now. This has an immensely important logical consequence: All experiences have the same formal intentional content. This is actually happening here and now or this object with these features exists here and now. ...

Notice that this point holds even when I know that the conditions of satisfaction are not satisfied here and now. I look at the star and know it ceased to exist millions of years ago, but all the same I am seeing it as if the shining of the star were happening right here and now. That phrase "seeing as if" marks intentional content because it fixes the conditions of satisfaction. Because of this presentational indexicality the visual experience always gives us an entire state of affairs, never just an object by itself, but always that this object exists here and now. — Seeing Things as They Are, Searle, 2015. P 65-66.

I'm not saying that the causal story is sufficient to cash out intentionality and epistemic normativity. — Michael

My understanding is that you think the causal/scientific story undercuts naïve realism, and that this is enough to settle the question of whether distal objects are the direct objects of perception.

But it seems to me you’re using “indirect realism” in a purely negative sense: i.e. as simply the rejection of naïve realism. If that’s the definition, then of course anyone who rejects naïve realism is an “indirect realist” by stipulation.

My point is that this doesn’t amount to a positive account of perception. Traditionally, the indirect realist framework is not merely the denial of naïve realism, but a substantive picture on which what is directly given are inner items (sense-data/representations/qualia) and distal objects are known only indirectly by inference. That is exactly what I reject.

So the disagreement isn’t over whether naïve realism is false; it’s whether rejecting naïve realism commits us to the kind of intermediary ontology required by a positive account of indirect realism.

I think your reply is clarifying, and I agree that we’re getting down to the core of the disagreement.

First, I’m not lumping refraction through the lens with what we are conscious of. Of course we are conscious of phenomenal character (color, sound, etc.) in a way we are not conscious of lens refraction. The question is whether being conscious of phenomenal character entails being conscious of a brain-modeled object as an object.

I don’t think it does. The phenomenal character is a feature of the act’s presentation of its object; it does not follow that it is itself an object of awareness with its own identity conditions.

Your photograph analogy is helpful, but I think it quietly shifts the issue. A photograph is itself a public object that can be inspected, re-identified, and treated as the intentional terminus of an act. But the “BMO” you’re positing is not something we can inspect in that way. If we were literally aware of BMOs as objects, then we should be able to distinguish (even in principle) “what the BMO is like” from “what the distal object is like.” But phenomenologically we don’t encounter two objects—an inner one and an outer one—we encounter one object as appearing.

On normativity: I don’t think “correspondence between BMO and DO” is yet an explanation. It presupposes the very normative notions at issue: accuracy, reference, aboutness, and correctness conditions. Saying “normativity is correspondence” is like saying “truth is correspondence”: it redescribes the target rather than explaining how such correspondence is possible or intelligible for a subject.

Moreover, IR doesn’t actually avoid the “error cases” problem—it relocates it. In IR the error is still an error about the DO, and the question remains: how does a subject ever get beyond the BMO to determine whether correspondence obtains? If you say “further BMOs,” you get regress; if you say “inference,” you’ve invoked normativity again.

So yes, I am arguing that DR gives a more satisfying account of normativity—not because it magically eliminates skepticism, but because it treats perceptual normativity as internal to world-directed experience itself, rather than as a relation between an inner object and an outer object that must somehow be bridged.

DR has to explain misperception. But IR has to explain something deeper: how any DO-directed normativity can arise at all if awareness terminates in a BMO. That’s the step I still don’t see made coherent.

There's the negative thesis that distal objects and their properties are not the constituents of first-person phenomenal experience and there's the positive thesis that the constituents of first-person phenomenal experience — those things that the naive realist wrongly believes to be distal objects and their properties — are in fact sense data/qualia/mental phenomena. Then there's the plausible epistemic worry that if distal objects and their properties are not the constituents of first-person phenomenal experience then the world might be radically different to how it appears to us.

Nothing about this prima facie entails that perceptions are not "world-directed" or "answerable to correctness/error".

Traditionally, the indirect realist framework is not merely the denial of naïve realism, but a substantive picture on which what is directly given are inner items (sense-data/representations/qualia) and distal objects are known only indirectly by inference. That is exactly what I reject. — Esse Quam Videri

Consider what you said before:

Strictly speaking, insofar as the apple has disintegrated, there is no direct object of perception during the second interval. — Esse Quam Videri

During this second interval I don't know that the apple has been disintegrated. I still believe that there is an intact red apple 10m in front of me because I am still having the first-person phenomenal experience described as "seeing a red apple 10m in front of me". I am inferring the existence of an intact red apple 10m in front of me from the fact that I am having the "appropriate" experience. The belief just happens to be wrong given that the apple was disintegrated. This same inference from the same kind of first-person phenomenal experience also happens during the first interval, before the apple was disintegrated, and just happens to be right given that the apple hasn't yet been disintegrated.

I agree that during the second interval I will judge that the apple is still there, and that this judgment will be false. But it doesn’t follow that the perceptual episode itself is an inference from an inner object.

What the apple case shows is simply that perceptual consciousness can retain the same sensory character even when its fulfillment condition fails. That is perfectly compatible with the apple having been the object of perception in the first interval and no longer being so in the second.

Your conclusion follows only if we assume from the outset that perception is always “experience + inference to a distal cause.” But that is precisely the indirect realist picture in dispute. On my view, the inference/judgment is a further act that can be correct or incorrect, whereas perception itself is world-directed and can succeed or fail in being fulfilled by what is there.

So the scenario establishes fallibility, not that the apple is always only inferred. Otherwise every case of perceptual error would prove that perception is never direct, which seems like an obvious non sequitur.

I agree that during the second interval I will judge that the apple is still there, and that this judgment will be false. — Esse Quam Videri

Oh, so the observer is unaware of the ten-second delay?

Then that's the problem. The causal and epistemic stories differ.

Yes, exactly! The causal latency introduces a temporal offset. If the subject is unaware of the offset, their judgment can be mistaken, but that doesn’t show the object perceived is an inner intermediary. In my book, it shows only that perceptual knowledge is fallible and requires correct interpretation of causal conditions.

Sounds accurate. If the observer is aware of the delay, then they are aware that they see the apple as is was ten seconds previously. They are under no compulsion to conclude that they only ever see a mental reconstruction of the apple, and never the apple.

Yep. And as you stated in a previous reply, the temptation to reify experience into an intermediary seems symptomatic of a deeply ingrained grammatical habit.