You need to read up on the use-mention distinction. — Michael
The meaning of the word "tree" has nothing to do with perception — Michael
For the Indirect Realist, the world in which the tree exists is in their mind. For the Direct Realist, the world in which the tree exists is in a mind-independent world. — RussellA
If that were true, you would know the meaning of the word "mlima" even if you had never perceived one. — RussellA
Sooner or later, meaning depends on perception. — RussellA
An illiterate deaf mute with no language can see a tree "in their mind". They just won't call it "tree"...I've seen many animals that I don't have a name for...But perception doesn't depend on meaning — Michael
That seeing the colour red isn't just "reaching" for the word "red", and that colour is "in the head", not a property of external world objects.
That "there is literally [something] in the brain ... that corresponds to 'seeing red'". — Michael
In what way do you think the experiment supports that conclusion? — Isaac
There is no color in light. Color is in the perceiver, not the physical stimulus.
Color is a perceptual construct that arises from neural processing in hierarchically organized cortical visual areas.
This task aimed to exclude the involvement of higher cognitive processes, such as color naming, as it did not require any explicit judgment of the chromaticity of the stimulus.
This task aimed to exclude the involvement of higher cognitive processes, such as color naming, as it did not require any explicit judgment of the chromaticity of the stimulus.
Color is a perceptual construct that arises from neural processing in hierarchically organized cortical visual areas.
"Ngoe" means at least a third of the picture is green? Or the picture is an odd number from the left? — Banno
This task aimed to exclude the involvement of higher cognitive processes, such as color naming, as it did not require any explicit judgment of the chromaticity of the stimulus.
Seeing red isn't "reaching" for the word "red". — Michael
It doesn't even mention seeing 'red'. — Isaac
It mentions "colour percepts" and "colour perception" and "colour experience" and "colour we see". — Michael
It doesn't prove we 'experience red', or that 'red' is correlated with some neural state. — Isaac
The experimenters seem to think so, given that they explicitly say "color is in the perceiver, not the physical stimulus" and "color is a perceptual construct that arises from neural processing" and "the present study ... examine[d] how subjective color experience is represented at each stage of the human ventral visual pathway". — Michael
'Red' is a specific category — Isaac
The private language argument is that such a thing cannot be understood in a coherent fashion. That there can be no private languages. That such a thing could not count as a language. — Banno
When the indirect realist says "I see the Earth", they are referring to the brown thing. When the direct realist says "I see the Earth", they are referring to the Earth. — Banno
Summarising, what the private language argument shows is that one cannot construct a private language that is about one's private sensations. If indirect realism holds that what we see is not the world but a private model of the world, then one could not construct a language about that private model. — Banno
Treating this as a reductio, we do have language about the world, and therefore we talk about the world, and not about our private world-models. At least that form of indirect realism is wrong. — Banno
Indirect Realism accepts they have private sensations, but as argued by Wittgenstein in his beetle in the box analogy, such private sensations drop out of consideration within a public social language as irrelevant. — RussellA
Wittgenstein's beetle in the box analogy justifies Indirect Realism. — RussellA
I like the picture, although to be consistent with indirect realism and to prevent any real-word bias, it would be best not to colour the circle in the middle, and to invent a new word to replace the use of "blue". — Michael
It may be that when looking at the public colour blue, Bill has the private experience of yellow and Bob has the private experience of red, but both Bill and Bob have linked their private experience with the public word "blue", thereby allowing them to talk about objects in their shared world. — RussellA
to be consistent with indirect realism and to prevent any real-world bias, it would be best not to colour the circle in the middle — Michael
the same kind of light will trigger the same kind of experience — Michael
I agree that not colouring the circle would be more consistent with Direct Realism. — RussellA
Yes, in practice this must be the case, as Bill and Bob are the product of the same 3.5 billion years of evolution, they share 99.9 % of their genetic makeup and they share the same common ancestor, Mitochondrial Eve.
Knowing these facts, Bill and Bob will agree they most likely have had the same private experience and therefore can sensibly name it "grue". — RussellA
Better yet, to be consistent with Wittgenstein's view of “private language” one should remove the colors inside the heads of the figures. — Richard B
It has nothing to do with grammar. Experience isn't language. I can be an illiterate, deafblind mute, and yet still feel pain. — Michael
Animals get around the world without language, and they certainly are experiencing the world.
But humans use language to understand and communicate what is going on in their experience. So, sometimes what we say makes senses and sometimes it does not. — Richard B
https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts%20Mark%201%20p.htmlThe concepts for which inferential notions of content are least obviously appropriate are those associated with observable properties, such as colors. For the characteristic use of such concepts is precisely in making noninferential reports, such as "This ball is red." One of the most important lessons we can learn from Sellars' masterwork, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (as from the Sense Certainty section of Hegel’s Phenomenology) is the inferentialist one that even such noninferential reports must be inferentially articulated. Without that requirement, we can't tell the difference between noninferential reporters and automatic machinery such as thermostats and photocells, which also have reliable dispositions to respond differentially to stimuli. What is the important difference between a thermostat that turns the furnace on when the temperature drops to 60 degrees, or a parrot trained to say "That's red," in the presence of red things, on the one hand, and a genuine noninferential reporter of those circumstances, on the other? Each classifies particular stimuli as being of a general kind, the kind, namely, that elicits a repeatable response of a certain sort. In the same sense, of course, a chunk of iron classifies its environment as being of one of two kinds, depending on whether it responds by rusting or not. It is easy, but uninformative, to say that what distinguishes reporters from reliable responders is awareness. In this use, the term is tied to the notion of understanding--the thermostat and the parrot don't understand their responses, those responses mean nothing to them, though they can mean something to us. We can add that the distinction wanted is that between merely responsive classification and specifically conceptual classification. The reporter must, as the parrot and thermostat do not, have the concept of temperature or cold. It is classifying under such a concept, something the reporter understands or grasps the meaning of, that makes the relevant difference.
It is at this point that Sellars introduces his central thought: that for a response to have conceptual content is just for it to play a role in the inferential game of making claims and giving and asking for reasons. To grasp or understand such a concept is to have practical mastery over the inferences it is involved in--to know, in the practical sense of being able to distinguish (a kind of know-how), what follows from the applicability of a concept, and what it follows from. The parrot doesn't treat "That's red" as incompatible with "That's green", nor as following from "That's scarlet" and entailing "That's colored." Insofar as the repeatable response is not, for the parrot, caught up in practical proprieties of inference and justification, and so of the making of further judgements, it is not a conceptual or a cognitive matter at all. — link
It follows immediately from such an inferential demarcation of the conceptual that in order to master any concepts, one must master many concepts. For grasp of one concept consists in mastery of at least some of its inferential relations to other concepts. Cognitively, grasp of just one concept is the sound of one hand clapping. Another consequence is that to be able to apply one concept noninferentially, one must be able to use others inferentially. For unless applying it can serve at least as a premise from which to draw inferential consequenceds, it is not functioning as a concept at all. So the idea that there could be an autonomous language game, one that could be played though one played no other, consisting entirely of noninferential reports (in the case Sellars is most concerned with in EPM, even of the current contents of one’s own mind) is a radical mistake.
Don't you mean to say that Wittgenstein's beetle in the box analogy justifies talk of indirect realism in relation to the third-personal public concept of perception, but that this doesn't justify talk of indirect-realism in the case of one's own perception? — sime
consider the irrealist understanding of the beetle on the box — sime
Given that each individual only has access to his or her private colour, and uses his or her mother-tongue in a bespoke private fashion when referring to the "shared" circle, then what is the purpose of colouring in the shared circle? — sime
Following this line of thought further, one could even deny the very existence of a shared circle, as part of a strategy for defending direct-realism for all perceivers — sime
Another approach to color and the like is to think how color terms play a role in the larger context of conversation. — green flag
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