The point is they don't need language. — Michael
And that's how seeing colours is seeing an external material world. It's recognising classes of objects. (Or classes of illumination events.) — bongo fury
See red things. — Michael
I don't need to have words for pleasure and pain to recognise that I am in pain or to recognise the difference between me feeling pleasure and me feeling pain. Qualitative experiences occur and differ from one another, and that they do has nothing to do with being able to make and make sense of my own and another person's vocalisations or ink impressions — Michael
No, dreams and hallucinations are exercising our imagery circuits without succeeding in seeing anything. — bongo fury
There is no perception without conceptualization in humans ( and higher animals). Conceptualization doesn’t mean using formal. language. To perceive pain or emotion or colors is to construe them by paring expectations with appearance in a complex process of sense making. We dont instantly feel, we undergo a matching and fitting process to determine and identify what it is we are feeling. This is why pain changes it’s felt character in response to many internal and external contextual factors.
This constructive process happens quickly enough that it seems immediate to us. We dont need others to help us judge what we are feeling when we are along , but we need our own cognitive processes to make that judgment, that is , to validate our expectations. — Joshs
I was arguing against Pie's claim that seeing red has something to do with the public use of the English word "red". — Michael
The most common form of direct realism is Phenomenological Direct Realism (PDR). PDR is the theory that direct realism consists in unmediated awareness of the external object in the form of unmediated awareness of its relevant properties. I contrast this with Semantic Direct Realism (SDR), the theory that perceptual experience puts you in direct cognitive contact with external objects but does so without the unmediated awareness of the objects’ intrinsic properties invoked by PDR. PDR is what most understand by direct realism. My argument is that, under pressure from the arguments from illusion and hallucination, defenders of intentionalist theories, and even of relational theories, in fact retreat to SDR. I also argue briefly that the sense-datum theory is compatible with SDR and so nothing is gained by adopting either of the more fashionable theories.
Proponents of intentionalist and adverbialist theories have often thought of themselves as defending a kind of direct realism; Reid (1785), for example, clearly thinks his proto-adverbialist view is a direct realist view. And perceptual experience is surely less indirect on an intentionalist or adverbialist theory than on the typical sense-datum theory, at least in the sense of perceptual directness. Nevertheless, intentionalist and adverbialist theories render the perception of worldly objects indirect in at least two important ways: (a) it is mediated by an inner state, in that one is in perceptual contact with an outer object of perception only (though not entirely) in virtue of being in that inner state; and (b) that inner state is one that we could be in even in cases of radical perceptual error (e.g., dreams, demonic deception, etc.). These theories might thus be viewed as only “quasi-direct” realist theories; experiences still screen off the external world in the sense that whether the agent is in the good case or the bad case, the experience might still be the same. Quasi-direct theories thus reject the Indirectness Principle only under some readings of “directness”.
Whereas the direct realist proper is saying something comparable to "we read history", as if reading a textbook is direct access to its subject, which is of course false. — Michael
think the wrinkle is in red is a property as we see it. It's as if 'red' is supposed to do double-duty for some ineffable private experience which is somehow known to be the same ineffable private experience for all (an impossible public-yet-private experience). Ryle attacks this kind of confusion in The Concept of Mind, just as Wittgenstein does with his beetles and boxes. — Pie
Experiments show how subjects’ auditory or visual perception is influenced by what they are told. — Joshs
Does that work for colors? Do you think if someone said you would be seeing a gold dress that it would necessarily mean you saw it as gold and not blue? I'm not aware that color illusions work that way. — Marchesk
I don't know how it's possible to escape the conclusion that we do have private experiences — Marchesk
Take an experiment with that blue/gold dress before anyone knew about it. How would you know that someone was seeing a different color (blue or gold) than you were (gold or blue) until they told you? You couldn't know just by showing them if they're instructed to keep quiet about what the dress looks like. — Marchesk
We do dream after-all, and nobody can share our dream experience. Many of us have inner dialogs and day dreams. People lie and there's no foolproof way to always tell. Nor can we always know what someone is feeling or thinking. — Marchesk
Think of the duck-rabbit or vase-face set-up. If someone tells me the image is a rabbit that will prime me perceptually to look for ways to construct it as a rabbit. — Joshs
:up:If a vervet monkey produces an alarm call , do you think nearby monkeys are more inclined to recognize objects as predators? — Joshs
As I mentioned before, the indirect realist says something comparable to "we read words" and the quasi-direct realist says something comparable to "we read about history", both of which can be correct. — Michael
Well then I'm left with no idea who these 'direct realists' even are, let alone what they claim. I asked Michael for some examples of the direct realist claim and he pointed me to the SEP article on colour primitivism which listed Hacker as a proponent.
So...
1. Is Hacker not a colour primitivist, ... — Isaac
Rather, that we see is a consequence of the action of illuminated or luminous objects on our visual system, and what we see are those objects, colour and all. What we thus see, we see 'directly' (to see something 'indirectly' might be to see it through a periscope or in a mirror - not to look at the thing itself in full daylight with one's eyes). — Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, 2nd Ed. - Bennett and Hacker, p143
One of the most prominent views of color is that color is an objective, i.e., mind-independent, intrinsic property, one possessed by many material objects (of different kinds) and light sources. ... colors are simple intrinsic, non-relational, non-reducible, qualitative properties. — 2.1 Primitivism: The Simple Objectivist View of Colors
2. Who the hell is a direct realist? Seems everybody quoted turns out not to be one. — Isaac
It's nothing to do with language. A hermit with no language could look at two objects and see them to be the same colour (or different colours). That's colour recognition. — Michael
The fact that cognitions acquired receptively through sensation are noninferential in the sense that they are not the result of exercising inferential capacities does not mean that they are nonconceptual in the sense that they are intelligible as determinately contentful apart from the situation of those contents in a “space of implications” of the sort exploited by inferential capacities. — Robert Brandom
We can radicalize the inverted spectrum idea. Maybe you see a different palette of colors entirely. Maybe I've never seen any of the colors you've seen. — Pie
A foil for the indirect realists. — Andrew M
So I'm discovering. — Isaac
This book develops and defends the view that colours are mind-independent properties of things in the environment that are distinct from properties identified by the physical sciences. This view stands in contrast to the long-standing and wide spread view amongst philosophers and scientists that colours do not really exist—or at any rate, that if they do exist, then they are radically different from the way that they appear.
According to naïve realism, the actual objects of perception, the external things such as trees, tables and rainbows, which one can perceive, and the properties which they can manifest to one when perceived, partly constitute one’s conscious experience, and hence determine the phenomenal character of one’s experience. This talk of constitution and determination should be taken literally; and a consequence of it is that one could not be having the very experience one has, were the objects perceived not to exist, or were they to lack the features they are perceived to have. Furthermore, it is of the essence of such states of mind that they are partly constituted by such objects, and their phenomenal characters are determined by those objects and their qualities. So one could not have such a type of state of mind were one not perceiving some object and correctly perceiving it to have the features it manifests itself as having.
...
Focusing on the tower, I can note its distinctive shape and colouring; turning my attention inward, and reflecting on the character of my looking at the tower, I can note that the tower does not disappear from the centre of my attention. The tower is not replaced by some surrogate, whose existence is merely internal to my mind, nor are its various apparent properties, its shape and colours, replaced by some merely subjective qualities. So my perceiving is not only a way of providing me with information about an external world, when my attention and interest is directed towards action and the world; in its very conscious and so subjective character, the experience seems literally to include the world.
For whatever it's worth, I'm not at all against claiming that some complex thoughts need words whereas some do not.
— creativesoul
So do you see then, that we can make the general claim "complex thought does not need words"? And in your examples, the words are "needed" not for the complex thought, as you seem to think, but for something else. We could for instance name a special type of complex thought, propositional thought, or something like that, and say that words are needed for this. — Metaphysician Undercover
I might agree some complex thought does not presuppose words, but rather, ensue from them... — Mww
The division of us and the world...
— creativesoul
But division is not independence. — Isaac
In the complete absence of light and leaves there cannot be any experience of seeing them. In the complete absence of the biological machinery, there cannot be any experience of seeing them... — creativesoul
So, to repeat myself, "these are just different ways of speaking, different ways of conceptually dividing and/ or sorting things". — Janus
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