I get that you see the world through the eyes of a reductionist ontology. — apokrisis

Wrong.

Uh huh.

Just because I recognise that we are not bestowed by God with knowledge, and that all humans have learned is from what they can sense in the world says NOTHING what ever about reductionism.
Are you on drugs?? Uh huh!!

Did I say God? I said consider the evidence from psychological science.

Are you on drugs?? — charleton

Are you only a recent visitor to our planet?

So where else is the source of our knowledge?
And if I were a visitor, the god assumption would be a reasonable one. There are plenty of god botherers out there and several of them on this Forum.

I think that some people, the so-called holistic thinkers among them, have a difficult time accepting that what happens, what we observe, is not generated by some underlying, hidden, mechanism. I don't care how much they hate reductionism; if they think the universe unfolds according to some sort of hidden mechanism, as every metaphysician and ontologist does, they are still ontological reductionists. I don't care if this mechanism is deterministic, indeterministic or dichotomistic (involving the interplay of determinism and indeterminism.) The point is that you're still trying to reduce everything to a mechanism, i.e. a set of rules, regardless of whether the evidence that we have permits it or not. Reduction is possible only to the extent that observations permit it. If there is little to no regularity in the observed events, there is little to no reduction that can be performed. It is our EXPERIENCE that limits what kind of reduction we can perform.

It is our EXPERIENCE that limits what kind of reduction we can perform. — Magnus Anderson

As usual, you missed the fact you also had to mention the "you" that has "the experience".

So where else is the source of our knowledge? — charleton

Yep. The cognition does have to come from somewhere. The "you" has to be accounted for.

And clearly I account for it in evolutionary fashion. I don't invoke a soul.

I think that some people, the so-called holistic thinkers among them, have a difficult time accepting that what happens, what we observe, is not generated by some underlying, hidden, mechanism. — Magnus Anderson

I agree. Though I understand the practical and emotional reasons for seeking this mechanism. What is conceptual thinking is inherently 'mechanistic' ? It seems that we automatically model the world in the sense that we notice violations of our otherwise unconscious expectations. These expectations can become professional/scientific and hardened into 'laws.'

if they think the universe unfolds according to some sort of hidden mechanism, as every metaphysician and ontologist does, they are still ontological reductionists. — Magnus Anderson

In my view, they would be ontological reductionists only by denying the reality of what wasn't the mechanism itself. Or if they closed their minds to other structures in experience. I suspect that we are all reductionists whether we like or not, but I like philosophy that strives against our tendency to clamp down on a particular mechanism.

Yes you do all that using perception as a source. Even lying down with your eyes closed in a quiet room your many senses are telling you all about your existence. You can hear and feel your heart, sense the amount of sugar in your blood and the food in your gut. Proprioception tells you where your limbs are in relation to one another, and you feel the thing you are lying on. There is no escape from this constant information flow, until death.

As usual, you missed the fact you also had to mention the "you" that has "the experience". — apokrisis

As usual, you miss the fact that subject (that which we say perceives) and object (that which we say is perceived) are both part of the experience. Subject-object relation is nothing but a relation between two objects of experience. You are confusing direct knowledge (what has been experienced) with indirect knowledge (what hasn't been experienced but can be assumed, expected, guessed, predicted, retrodicted, inferred, etc based on what has been experienced.) Your position is that all knowledge is indirect knowledge. That's not true.

I agree. Though I understand the practical and emotional reasons for seeking this mechanism. — 0rff

In order to attain our goals, we must predict all of the relevant events. In order to be able to predict them, they must be predictable. That's why we love predictability. If there is a mechanism that generates every event that we observe then this means that, if we knew how this mechanism operates, we could predict these events with absolute precision i.e. without ever making a mistake.

The fact is that it is us who create such a mechanism. And we do so based on our direct knowledge i.e. based on what we have observed in the past. Such a mechanism can be formed to the extent that there is regularity, or more precisely homogeneity, within the observed events. If our data isn't regular or homogenous then no such mechanism can be formed. You can proceed to collect more data with the hope that there is a hidden order you are not aware of but this isn't a guarantee that further experience will make your data homogenous. Finally, no matter how homogenous your data is, further experience can always destroy its homogeneity.

The only way around this is dogmatism or absolutism: you just declare that the universe works according to some mechanism regardless of any evidence.

I suspect that we are all reductionists whether we like or not, but I like philosophy that strives against our tendency to clamp down on a particular mechanism. — 0rff

Reductionism isn't a bad thing per se. Reduction is a very useful tool. It allows us to create models of reality which in turn allow us to make predictions. We cannot make predictions without reduction.

As usual, you miss the fact that subject (that which we say perceives) and object (that which we say is perceived) are both part of the experience. — Magnus Anderson

But that is what I am saying. That is what makes knowledge indirect.

We don't see the world directly - which would be a simple dyadic relation of self and world. We see it indirectly via a system of sign. It is a triadic relation. In-between me and the world are the states of sensation which represent to me the world as I could best understand it in terms of my goals and needs.

So the red I experience stands on the side of the experience. The world isn't actually coloured. It just scatters patterns of radiant energy. At the first step of the retina, this energy is transduced into a neural signal, some change in firing rates of a network of cells. The result is that I see the red of the post-box. It serves to sum up the world in a way that is ecologically useful.

Red and green are barely any different as actual quantities of energy. Red light is about 700 nanometres in frequency. Green is about 540nm. So even if the world reflected an even balance of both, an eye that just registered the energetic content of light would struggle to tell different "colours" apart.

But the visual pathways are set up to turn that slight contrast into a binary signal. Retinal cells are designed so that a "green" receptor is switched off in the presence of "red" light. They signal the absence of green in the presence of red, as well as signalling green in its presence. So a slight difference in frequency is turned into an absolute on-off mental response.

So yes, there is a world of energy that drives the sensory processing. There are real patterns out there. But what I am drawing attention to is the transduction step which creates - for us - an internal realm of signs. And that triadic relationship - where we use constructed experience as our map to navigate the world - is a Kantian epistemology.

It is the reason for saying we can't know the world directly. Experience is grounded already in a pragmatic structure. Right down at the first step - neural transduction - energy has been turned into signal. A particular logical operation has been applied. Wavelength has been turned into yes-no contrast. Everything real or physical about the world has been discarded as information to leave just the signalled output of a mechanical operation. A retinal ganglion cell summed its inputs and changed its firing rate in some way.

Reductionism isn't a bad thing per se. Reduction is a very useful tool. It allows us to create models of reality which in turn allow us to make predictions. We cannot make predictions without reduction. — Magnus Anderson

Note that when I talk about reductionism in contrast to holism, it isn't about information reduction. I am of course a big believer in that. As I have just argued, that is what neurology is set up to do. The brain doesn't want to see "everything". It wants to reduce all the available energy of the world to a simple yes-no choice about what to do. And its starts doing that at the very first step of the neural processing hierarchy.

So the holism vs reductionism deal is about Aristotelean causality. Reductionism is taking the view that only bottom-up material and effective cause is "real". Holism is the larger view which accepts top-down formal and final cause as also "real". So it is about making models of reality which are just bottom-up, versus making models of reality which are about the triadic interaction between the bottom-up and the top-down (triadic, as the real is what emerges from these two complementary directions of cause).

Scientifically, both reductionist and holist models would be reductionist about the world. They are both models after all - maps of the territory. And the best maps are the simplest. They discard the most information.

Reductionist or bottom-up models are fine for most routine human purposes as we are only concerned with how to harness the material/effective causes of the world. We don't need to worry about the formal and final causes of things because that is going to be provided by us humans. We will supply any necessary design and reason when it comes to actually doing something with the modelled knowledge.

However when we come to describing nature itself, then we do have to include formal and final cause in the story we tell. We do have to speak to all four of Aristotle's causes.

We don't see the world directly — apokrisis

And before we can make such a claim, i.e. that we don't see the world directly, we must have a clear understanding of what it means to see the world directly as opposed to indirectly.

For example, what does it mean to say that an observation that an apple on a table is red is not a direct knowledge of the world? Most people will agree with this statement, i.e. that an observation that an apple on a table is red is not a direct knowledge of the world, but how many will be able to explain what that statement means? Very few, right?

I'm not following your point.

You need to define what it means to see the world indirectly as opposed to directly. Otherwise, I am afraid, no fruitful communication can take place.

I make a distinction between facts and interpretations. Facts refer to what has been experienced in the past e.g. an observation that an apple on a table is red is a fact because it is something that has been experienced in the past. Interpretations, on the other hand, refer to what hasn't been experienced in the past but has been assumed in the past e.g. an assumption that there is a tree in a garden when noone is looking at it. Facts are direct knowledge of the world, interpretations are indirect knowledge of the world.

It is clear to me that you operate with a different understanding of what it means for knowledge to be direct as opposed to indirect. What I am asking you is to make this explicit.

I defined indirect in saying that we see signs and not facts. I defined indirect as a triadic interpretive process rather than a dyadic observational one.

If you couldn’t get that from my post then I’ll leave it there.

That's not a good definition, my friend. It's too vague.

Experience on its own is neither subjective nor objective. Rather, it is objects of experience that can be either subjective or objective. To say that an object of experience is subjective or that it is objective is to say that it belongs to the category designated by the word "subject" or that it belongs to the category designated by the word "object". To determine whether any given object of experience belongs to the category designated by the word "subject" or to the category designated by the word "object" one must first understand the membership rules of these categories. The problem with saying that all experience is subjective (i.e. that every object of experience belongs to the category designated by the word "subject") or that all experience is objective (i.e. that every object of experience belongs to the category designated by the word "object") is that it does nothing but change the rules of these two categories so that one category becomes all-inclusive (which means there are no longer objects of experience that it excludes) and another all-exclusive (which means there are no longer objects of experience that it includes.) One must first understand the definition of these categories before one proceeds to determine which one of the two categories any given object of experience, or even every object of experience, belongs to. Given my understanding of the definition of these two categories, my position is that experience as a whole, i.e. the set of all objects of experience, does not belong to any of the two categories. Rather, some objects of experience belong to the category designated by the word "subject" and some objects belong to the category designated by the word "object".

There is no need for Charles Sanders Pierce kind of obscurity.

Everything thought, believed, uttered, and/or written is existentially contingent upon the attribution and/or recognition of causality.

Hume's 'problem' of induction is existentially contingent upon the idea of logical possibility. It is grounded upon logical possibility alone. If there is no empirical evidence to warrant belief that the sun will shine in the morrow, there is even less to believe that it will not. Logical possibility alone does not constitute sufficient reason to believe.

Objects are not subjects. Subjects are not objects. Sensibility requires drawing and maintaining a meaningful distinction between the two. Calling one - the other - renders that distinction absent, and renders the terminological use... incoherent and/or self contradictory. Aside from that...

I find that dichotomy unable to take proper account of that which is neither.

Objects and subjects.

Truth. Meaning. Thought. Belief.

All four consist in/of relationships whether they be recognized and/or attributed. Relationships are neither objects nor subjects. Some relationships are existentially contingent upon human awareness. Others aren't. None of the above are.

Objects are not subjects. Subjects are not objects. — creativesoul

Actually your objects might be my subjects and vice versa.

Actually your objects might be my subjects and vice versa. — charleton

If your objects are your subjects there's a problem. If my objects are my subjects there's a problem. If my objects are your subjects there's a difference in frameworks. So what?

So what, is that you misspoke.
This implies that you are applying a false objectivity by ignoring the ubiquity of varying frameworks.

I defined indirect in saying that we see signs and not facts. I defined indirect as a triadic interpretive process rather than a dyadic observational one. — apokrisis

Aren't you stating a fact that we see signs? How did you get at that fact if not through signs? How else can one get at facts?

You're lost.

If I’m stating a fact, I’m speaking in signs.

And yes, I can mean to speak of the facts of the world. That is the realism in the indirectness.

There is indeed such a thing as direct knowledge. For example, everything I have experienced in the past is a direct knowledge of the world. This is simply what "direct knowledge" means. That's how I define it. If you're going to deny what I am saying, you better understand what I am saying. Or, if you don't want to do that, you better make it explicit what you're denying, which means, you better define what you mean when you say "direct knowledge". You may find out that I agree with your statement that there is no such thing as direct knowledge and that you agree with my statement that there is such a thing as direct knowledge; it's just that we're using one and the same expression to mean two different things.

There is indeed such a thing as direct knowledge. For example, everything I have experienced in the past is a direct knowledge of the world. This is simply what "direct knowledge" means. That's how I define it. — Magnus Anderson

If direct knowledge is everything I have experienced in the past, then what would indirect knowledge be?

What's the term "a" doing in the second sentence?

If direct knowledge is everything I have experienced in the past, then what would indirect knowledge be? — creativesoul

That which you haven't experienced but assumed in the past. For example, I haven't experienced that dinosaurs lived on Earth but I have assumed, i.e. imagined based on the available evidence, that they lived on Earth.

So, assuming is not experience?

It is.