Yeah, there's no gotcha here. It's pragmatism. Think about all that literature you absorbed and you'll see why. — frank

Pragmatism does not accept any notion of unknowable things in themselves. You apparently don't know what you're talking about.

You apparently don't know what you're talking about. — Janus

Uh huh.

We just don't perceive them as they are. — hypericin

As if the car does not have wheels.

Again, if what you say were true, one would not be able to make true statements. But cars do have wheels. Hence, we see at least some things as they are.

Overwhelmingly, we agree as to what is the case — Banno

Not surprisingly, as we presumably live in the same world, share the same human nature, and the same broader culture.

We do not spend hours arguing about how many centimetres are in a metre or which city is the capital of Russia — Banno

These are conventions, not facts of the world. Truths because they are defined to be so. About these certainty is possible.

These are conventions, not facts of the world. — hypericin

Ok, we don't spend time arguing about whether the cup has a handle or the car has wheels.

Again, if what you say were true, one would not be able to make true statements. — Banno

But I just demonstrated that is not the case, with the hologram example.

Ok, we don't spend time arguing about whether the cup has a handle or the car has wheels. — Banno

These are hypotheses which are not worth arguing.

It's an odd disconnect from reality, taught in first year philosophy. It's a test to see who amongst the students can see beyond such poor arguments to move to second year Philosophy. — Banno

The point of such debates isn't to prove an ultimate winner. The question of scientific realism is one pretty much accepted as unanswerable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_philosophy#Metaphilosophy

I see the second year (and third year and on and on) as a chance to better hone one's logic and reason, and even perhaps to settle on theories that suit one's worldview. If these things were not debatable, they wouldn't be philosophy, but they'd be physics, biology, or something else.

. A thing-in-itself about which we can say nothing is vacant. Since we can say nothing about it, it cannot enter into our conversations. It's no more than word play, along the lines of the little man who wasn't there. — Banno

The significance of unobservables: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobservable

The question of scientific realism is one pretty much accepted as unanswerable. — Hanover

Now why is that? Why shouldn't it be possible to see nature like it is? Why should nature hold secrets? The very idea of one and only reality goes way back to ancient Greece and Plato added that we can only have approximate knowledge (which can be seen from his metaworld of math and the shadows in the cave). Popper was like-minded, turning this vision into a methodological rule even. Always falsifying, always a bit closer, but never actual contact. A frustrating image.

When someone else asks what size Dell is, they are not asking about your perceptions, they are asking about Dell. — Banno

They are talking about their perception. They aren't talking about the cup. That they think the cup and their perception are the exact thing and therefore speak that way is the consequence of the naiveté inherent among naive realists.

Now why is that? Why shouldn't it be possible to see nature like it is? Why should nature hold secrets? — Cartuna

Because truth is a religious concept. You want to know how things really are? Believe in something.

Because truth is a religious concept. You want to know how things really are? Believe in something. — Hanover

Truth a religious concept? Tell me the truth. Do you really believe that?

Again, if what you say were true, one would not be able to make true statements.
— Banno

But I just demonstrated that is not the case, with the hologram example. — hypericin

Hmm. I have a suspicion that the difference between our positions is more one of language than of content. The same is probably true for Frank, if he ever got around to saying what his position is.

There's a sort of "folk-science", a cool trick pulled by popularises and first year lecturers in cognitive science, seeking to awe students by showing them that what they previously had taken as the case - that they see cups and planes and stuff - needs a re-think. It's good pedagogy, since it is certainly attention grabbing. But it is a lie-to-children.

It goes something along the lines of telling the novices that the brain is continually taking the information from the senses and making a model of it's surroundings, then using that model to predict what will happen next, and acting accordingly. So far so good - that's roughly what happens.

The lie-to-children is a claim something like this: "SO, you see, what you are actually dealing with is not the real world, but a model of the real worlds presented to you by your sensory apparatus; you never get to deal with the actual world".

It's a good lie. It hammers home the idea that all our sensing is a process, a point well worth making. But it isn't quite true.

To see why it is a lie, consider what is doing the seeing when you look at some object. In the account give above, you are sitting looking at your sensory input; in much the same way that you are sitting looking at the hologram of the city in the example given before. In the same way you are distinct from the hologram, the lie-to-children supposes that you are distinct from your sensory apparatus. You are sitting inside your head, and can only see what your sensorium constructs. You are a homunculus.

But that's not quite right. Your sensorium is not something seperate to you; it is a part of you. In this way the model is quite different to the hologram - a point I thought you might have grasped when you agreed with me when I said

...you can interact with, verify, the city outside the hologram. If all of your perceptions are an illusion, you cannot interact with the world at all, and there can be no independent verification. — Banno

The point here is about the choice of words in describing the situation. On the one hand we have the lie-to-children that says you are sitting in your head looking at the model presented to you by your sensorium, and can never "really" see stuff. Note the scare-word "really".

Drop the lie-to-children. Your sensorium is part of you making sense of what is in the world. The scare-word "really" drops out of the story along with the homunculus. Of course those things before you are understood through your sensorium, which just is your seeing stuff.

The question of whether you are seeing stuff "as it really is" becomes absurd - there is no "as it really is". But nevertheless what you are seeing is not your sensorium, but cups and tables and laptops.

Is that direct realism or indirect realism? Who really cares.

Edit: what is at stake? See my post below to Hanover. Hanover thinks we can never talk about cups and tables and stuff, but only about our perceptions of cups and tables and stuff. But a bit of reflection might show that even if what we see is processed through our sensorium, we still talk about cups and plates and trains and cats, and not about our perceptions of them.

The alternative is Stove's Gem: the idea that because we only ever see stuff with our eyes, we never see stuff.

They are talking about their perception. — Hanover

No, they are not. They are talking about the Dell.

If they were talking about their perceptions, then since your perception-of-Dell is distinct from their perception-of-Dell, you would never be able to talk about the same thing.

Now we have been down this path before, and it leads to you realising that you are advocating solipsism. Remember? The argument simply moves from Dell to, say, @Cartuna; you are obliged for consistency to say that you can never talk to or about Cartuna, but only to your perception-of-Cartuna.

You are alone.

Not a knock-down argument, to be sure, but one that might make those considering your position uncomfortable.

Especially when that alternative is simply to suppose that there is a Cartuna for you to talk to and about.

Frankly, the approach you are adopting strikes me as singularly bad for your mental health.

Truth a religious concept? Tell me the truth. Do you really believe that? — Cartuna

As noted in a prior post to @Ciceronianus, he asked why the obsession with an evil demon, a world denying entity. But of course the Meditations was not a nihilist discourse. The evil demon was destroyed by God. It's a simple take on Descartes, but that's how the story ended.

The point here is that you've got to assert faith in something at the end of the day, and even if it's something as basic as realism, such is still faith.

The point here is that you've got to assert faith in something at the end of the day, and even if it's something as basic as realism, such is still faith. — Hanover

Of course. But that doesn't mean truth can be found. Within different frames of believes different truths can be found. There is not one and only reality driving believe. But once the believe is accepted, you can say that it actually drives. Depending on your POV, this truth can be known exactly, or in an approximated way only. A flower is different for different creatures. But the very act of assigning an objective existence to the flower is an "act" of creating a believe, even if you make the flower dependent on what's around it, where there is no flower "as such".

If they were talking about their perceptions, then since your perception-of-Dell is distinct from their perception-of-Dell, you would never be able to talk about the same thing. — Banno

How could what you say possibly be true, considering we are talking about the same thing, yet reading entirely different words. That is, the words on my screen are not the words on yours. They consist of different molecules and such. I trust my phenomenal state of your thoughts, as reduced to symbols, and transmitted in a way that accurately represents what you see in your head to what I see in my head allows this conversation.

How can you deny the layers of representationalism between you seeing a cup at your home thousands of miles from mine, your translating that into linguistic symbols, it being reduced to electronic impulses, it being transmitted through wires and airwaves, it being received and interpreted to my screen, and you still say we must see the same same cup to speak of the same?

Frankly, the approach you are adopting strikes me as singularly bad for your mental health. — Banno

Interesting psychological twist here. I suppose strict adherence to secular philosophy might lead to feelings of isolation and that might form a personal basis to choose certain theories, but that fear isn't on my radar, largely because at heart I'm a theist.

But should one day I snap, and find myself amid helicopter search lights and yelping hounds, it will be for something far more glorious than an errant choice of indirect realism as an explanatory theory.

Well, I have a lot of faith that 1+1=3, but nobody except me seems to hold this true, no matter how much belief I pour into it.

I keep wondering how the idea of 'evidence' is being used here. Footprints in the flowerbed are evidence of a man, who was standing there, or of his having stood there, but can they be "evidence" of something we, in principle, can know nothing about? How? How would we establish the evidentiary relation between the footprints and the something or other? What could we mean by claiming that there is such a connection?

There's an idea of hinge propositions, which seems to solve problems about evidence, but then it makes other problems, like what would count as evidence that a proposition or action is a hinge?

The arguments presented here for direct realism could be used to support belief in anything: qualia, God, etc. We're just settling on men in flower beds.

Not sure my point really came through.

Footprints in the flowerbed are evidence of a man because there is a connection between a man and his footprints, which we'll tend to call 'causal', and because we're familiar with this connection, so we say things like, "We know that men leave footprints."

If we smell the scent of gardenias, we expect to be able to find gardenias somewhere nearby, because we know they're the sort of thing responsible for that scent. If we knew nothing about gardenias, we wouldn't take such a scent as evidence that they are nearby.

So I'm wondering how our senses can give evidence of something that we not only know nothing about, but can know nothing about.

So I'm wondering how our senses can give evidence of something that we not only know nothing about, but can know nothing about. — Srap Tasmaner

The significance of hinges (whether actions or propositions) is that the whole narrative of senses telling us about the world revolves around them. That's a language game that works.

Indirect realism is a different sort of game with different hinges, and it also works.

Crashing the games into each other is something students learn in their 2nd year of philosophy school before they learn that it's a knife that cuts both ways and you can't question the existence of qualia if you insist on this sort of crashing.

Just kidding. The takeaway is that indirect realism gives us limited skepticism.

Maybe I can be even clearer:

When@Hanover talks about phenomenal experience, he uses the word "evidence", as if phenomena could be understood as evidence for noumena. I don't see how, do you? In what sense is the relation of the two evidentiary?

Oh sorry, I thought you were asking something else. :grimace:

See https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/627569

I have a suspicion that the difference between our positions is more one of language than of content. — Banno

Part of the problem hinges on the word see. 'See' is used in at least two senses.

Process See: To 'see' is a process whereby light reflected from an object shines into an organism's eyes, whereby this signal may undergo many transformations as it is processed and potentially acted upon by the organism.
"I see 3 chairs in the room".

Experiential See: This usage is mostly confined to humans, refers to the last stage of internal transformation in Process See, which is subjective experience.
"Close your eyes and imagine the first chair. Describe what you see."

Lets get straight: no one here is denying the reality of Process See. Experiential See is at issue.

Naive realism claims that Experiential See is a faithful reflection of the world. This is the understanding we are born with, hence 'naive'.

I claim, Experiential See:
* Is usually causally connected to the world.
* Usually faithfully conveys information about the world.
* Is nonetheless something quite other than the world it depicts.

Here you will no doubt wave your finger in the air and shout "Depict to whom? A homunculus?!"

I feel homunculi are red herrings. If you insist on the strict identity of the subject and their perceptions, you would say "the subject undergoes the process of their own depictions", or something.
But I wonder how you make sense of the ordinary claim "I close my eyes and I see a red dragon". With sufficient powers of imagination, the red dragon appears as distinct from us as does the chair in the room.

Again, language is ambiguous. I would distinguish 'Bodily I' and 'Subjective I'. But this is enough for one post.

One reason this matters -- aside from whether you get mileage out of 'evidence' as a metaphor -- is that evidence is intelligible. Footprints are a natural sign; like other sorts of evidence they indicate something else in the world. Those sorts of connections make the world intelligible.

The issue here is a sort of sleight-of-hand: something defined as being unintelligible is introduced as if it were part of the intelligible world, like the airplane represented by a radar blip, or the flower represented by its scent. These are connections we are familiar with. Some of us even know something about how those connections work. Whatever we're attempting to say about the plane 'in itself' or the flower 'in itself', it's nothing like this.

Interesting.

Take a look at Level 1 and Level 2 as set out at Theories of Experience. Is that roughly what you have in mind?

One reason this matters -- aside from whether you get mileage out of 'evidence' as a metaphor -- is that evidence is intelligible. Footprints are a natural sign; like other sorts of evidence they indicate something else in the world. Those sorts of connections make the world intelligible.

The issue here is a sort of sleight-of-hand: something defined as being unintelligible is introduced as if it were part of the intelligible world, like the airplane represented by a radar blip, or the flower represented by its scent. These are connections we are familiar with. Some of us even know something about how those connections work. Whatever we're attempting to say about the plane 'in itself' or the flower 'in itself', it's nothing like this. — Srap Tasmaner

What do you conclude from this?

What do you conclude from this? — frank

That one day I'll have to study Kant, because I can't make any sense of the version of Kant presented here. I don't feel warranted to conclude anything more than that.

If you want a speculative answer, I could say this: the connection between the footprints and the man who left them, that the one indicates the other, that's "part of the world". By that I mean, this connection is not something we impose on the world, but something we encounter in it. That connection is what grounds our inference, from the footprints in the flowerbed, to the man who was there. The world we find ourselves in, is intelligible.

I can't make any sense of the version of Kant presented here. — Srap Tasmaner

It’s modernized. Therefore it’s mistaken.

Hanover is the closest without mentioning Kant specifically.

The footprint and the flower are Hume, not Kant at all. See “constant conjunction”.