I'm a nominalist, so you're going wrong somewhere. — Terrapin Station
What do you think that properties are? — Terrapin Station
I don't think there is such a thing as a 'table' outside of our experience of it, — Isaac
So you're an idealist? — Terrapin Station
"Property" doesn't imply "universal" or "type," by the way. — Terrapin Station
I don't think there's any one 'kind of thing' we see. I mean, I'm mostly on board the embodied cognition train that says we see for the most part "affordances", opportunities for action, sites of relief and rest, goals to arrive at, hazards and safety, speed and rest, and so on. Perception understood in a bodily sense, according to categories that matter to living, moving, metabolizing beings. We perceive significance far more than we perceive things and stuff (phenomenology teaches us this: perception is normative). We're animals before we're anything else. — StreetlightX
No, although I could easily be. I think there is external matter. It's the division of some of it into 'table' I think is arbitrary. — Isaac
But I am honestly amused - like it makes me smile irl - to think people look out at the world around them and honestly believe in their heart of hearts that what they see are 'properties'. — StreetlightX
I mean, I'm mostly on board the embodied cognition train that says we see for the most part "affordances", opportunities for action, sites of relief and rest, goals to arrive at, hazards and safety, speed and rest, and so on. — StreetlightX
So in other words, you're conflating how we think about things, how we evaluate and value them, etc., with what we're perceiving. — Terrapin Station
All properties that are not quantities (that are not simply numerical). — Terrapin Station
It takes a particular kind of abstraction to think that we perceive things in their neutrality first, — StreetlightX
What about higher/lower... more/less... — bongo fury
In order to refer to the external matter, we have to use a type term, since that's how language works. So you're again getting confused here because you're conflating concepts and what they're in response to/about/of. — Terrapin Station
I see food on the table, — StreetlightX
You can't _perceive_ how we think about something, how we value it, etc.
"Perception" has a connotation of "sensing information from outside of us." How we think about things, value them, etc. isn't something that exists outside of us for us to perceive. — Terrapin Station
Yes but a linguistic affectation can't possess properties can it? — Isaac
Valuation is built-in to perception. It's why we are susceptible to visual illusions, it's why people have visual disorders where they can't recognize faces even though they can 'see' them perfectly well and so on. There's a bodily thinking that is irreducible to a rational process of abstraction. Go read about the science of perception, it's interesting. — StreetlightX
"Same/different" is qualitative. — Terrapin Station
We bring a great deal of ourselves to what we perceive. — StreetlightX
And we construct quantities from qualities, — bongo fury
Cool. Goodman was agnostic as to what we construct from what, though. Are you siding with what he would have called a phenomenalist basis, as against e.g. a physicalist one? — bongo fury
No. And I'm a physicalist, by the way. — Terrapin Station
Oh yes, I knew that. So you assume a physicalist basis, but properties are part of it, not something you would (like Goodman) expect to construct? — bongo fury
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