Is it any more complicated that for every effect there is a cause. — RussellA
And that's why I've said before that there's an element of equivocation in the direct realist's argument. That we might use the same word to refer to both cause and effect isn't that they are the same thing. Colour experience is one thing, and apples reflecting light is a different thing entirely. — Michael
That 'red' is a label given to a property in the external world and when we correctly see red, it is that we are detecting that property. — Isaac
It is that we are detecting a property of the external object, not that we actually possess a copy of that same property in our own brain. — Isaac
In TPF discussions I'll stick with anti-realist Direct Realist -- it seems to fit, given what's been said. — Moliere
One thing that cause and effect naturally invokes is time.............Then you have to have a theory of cause and effect which is usually to say they are events, and effects are those which come after causes. But what is an event? — Moliere
That's like saying you are an Atheist Christian, or a vegan carnivore. — RussellA
Well -- maybe we need new terms then. — Moliere
without worrying too much about ultimate reality or mind-independence — Jamal
I don't think that we can talk about a "faulty" representation. To do that we must know what the "correct" representation --in fact, absolute reality-- is, which we can't. Moreover, that would consist a self-contradition, since if we could see the world "as it is" then we wouldn't talk about a "faulty" representation. :smile:If you note in the image above, the indirect scenario has a guy seeing a faulty representation of the object. If this is his only access to the world, can he be an indirect realist without contradiction? In other words, if his view of the world is faulty (or at least possibly unreliable), why should he believe the impressions that led him to consider indirectness in the first place? — frank
and the latter because it seems to posit some kind of ultimate reality that we are approximating towards which is similar to the problem of mind-independence in that since it cannot be known we cannot know we are approximating towards that reality, and therefore we have no reason to claim our knowledge has any relation at all to that notion. — Moliere
Mind-independence and indirectness, as concepts, have so far been my target as bothersome notions -- the former because we don't know enough about minds to know either way, and the latter because it seems to posit some kind of ultimate reality that we are approximating towards which is similar to the problem of mind-independence in that since it cannot be known we cannot know we are approximating towards that reality, and therefore we have no reason to claim our knowledge has any relation at all to that notion. It functions like a thing-in-itself. — Moliere
What does it mean to correctly see that property? — Michael
it’s not incorrect that things look different to something with a different physiology, e.g. the colour blind or the human tetrachromat or animals. — Michael
What does “detect” mean? If it just means “responds to” then it isn’t inconsistent with indirect realism. — Michael
they don’t just say that a copy of the property is in the experience, but that the exact token instance of the property is in the experience. That’s what they mean by experience being direct. If it were a copy then it would be representative realism, i.e. indirect realism. — Michael
So, "faulty" or not, an indirect perception of the world is all the reality we can have. A subjective one. But this does not mean the external world is mind-dependent. Only idealists believe that. — Alkis Piskas
To eat the red berry and not get sick because it's ripe. — Isaac
Yes it is, because indirect realism posits this 'representation' of the object (which we have no cause to consider even exists) to which we respond. — Isaac
You'll have to quote a direct realist saying such a ludicrous thing for me to believe this isn't just a straw man. — Isaac
Consider the veridical experiences involved in cases where you genuinely perceive objects as they actually are. At Level 1, naive realists hold that such experiences are, at least in part, direct presentations of ordinary objects. At Level 2, the naive realist holds that things appear a certain way to you because you are directly presented with aspects of the world, and – in the case we are focusing on – things appear white to you, because you are directly presented with some white snow. The character of your experience is explained by an actual instance of whiteness manifesting itself in experience.
Why would there be properties? Aren't these just predicates? — Moliere
in relation to causation no direct realist would say "we can see causal chains all the way back" because we are situated in time — Moliere
Rather than saying a direct realist would hold that we see reality as it is, that the substrate is real and we directly perceive it, I'd say that the direct realist states that there's nothing indirect. — Moliere
So someone who doesn't eat the red berry can't see the red berry (correctly)? — Michael
I don't need to eat something to see it. I'm asking you to explain what it means to see something's colour correctly. That has nothing to do with any subsequent activity. — Michael
You appeared to accept this in the case of pain. Putting my hand in the fire causes pain. That pain is not a property of the fire, but an inner, physiological state. — Michael
This is the position that indirect realists argue against. — Michael
Our modern scientific understanding of the world, along with the arguments from hallucination and illusion, have shown that the naive realist conception of colour (and other) experience as described above is untenable. — Michael
whether or not we should describe perception as "seeing representations" or "seeing the external world stimulus" is an irrelevant issue of semantics. It's like arguing over whether we feel pain or feel the fire. — Michael
So it's a crucial issue of semantics. Should the psychology admit internal representations, as well as external representations and internal brain shivers? — bongo fury
Simply declaring it doesn't have anything to do with subsequent activity is begging the question. I'm claiming it does. I'm saying that, since we don't have any locus for a 'representation' of red (and yet 'red is meaningful, as in the ripe berry), our best theory is that it is our response that constitutes 'red' (our reaching for the word, our eating the ripe berry, our categorising according to our culture's rules...), and that absent of any of these responses, there's no 'seeing red' going on at all.
You counter that you think you see red without any response at all, and that because you think it, it must be true. — Isaac
I counter that we don't have an apparent mechanism, nor locus for such a thing and looking at the way the brain works doesn't seem to allow that (it seems to go straight from modelling aspects (likes shade and edge) to responses (like speech and endocrine system reactions).
I can see without any overt response recognisable by other people who might be around. — Michael
Then what’s this and this? — Michael
Observation is important to science, but it's a social process which produces knowledge rather than a methodology. The methods get developed along with the knowledge — Moliere
I didn't limit the description to overt responses. — Isaac
No where is there a state of affairs which some other part of the brain can detect as being 'an experience of red'. — Isaac
The Direct Realist agrees that pain doesn't exist external to the senses of any perceiver, but argues that the colour red does. — RussellA
Here is perhaps Kant’s deepest and most original idea, the axis around which I see all of his thought as revolving. What distinguishes judging and intentional doing from the activities of non-sapient creatures is not that they involve some special sort of mental processes, but that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for. Judging and acting involve commitments. They are endorsements, exercises of authority. Responsibility, commitment, endorsement, authority—these are all normative notions. Judgments and actions make knowers and agents liable to characteristic kinds of normative assessment. Kant’s most basic idea is that minded creatures are to be distinguished from un-minded ones not by a matter-of-fact ontological distinction (the presence of mind-stuff), but by a normative deontological one. This is his normative characterization of the mental.
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This master idea has some of Kant’s most characteristic innovations as relatively immediate consequences. The logical tradition that understood judging as predicating did so as part of an order of semantic explanation that starts with concepts or terms, particular and general, advances on that basis to an understanding of judgements (judgeables) as applications of general to particular terms, and builds on that basis an account of inferences or consequences, construed syllogistically in terms of the sort of predication or classification exhibited by the judgments that appear as premises and conclusions. In a radical break with this tradition, Kant takes the whole judgment to be the conceptually and explanatorily basic unit at once of meaning, cognition, awareness, and experience. Concepts and their contents are to be understood only in terms of the contribution they make to judgments: concepts are functions of judgment. Kant adopts this semantic order of explanation because judgments are the minimal units of responsibility—the smallest semantic items that can express commitments. The semantic primacy of the propositional is a consequence of the central role he accords to the normative significance of our conceptually articulated doings. In Frege this thought shows up as the claim that judgeable contents are the smallest units to which pragmatic force can attach: paradigmatically, assertional force. In the later Wittgenstein, it shows up as the claim that sentences are the smallest linguistic units with which one can make a move in the language game. — Brandom
So, "faulty" or not, an indirect perception of the world is all the reality we can have. A subjective one. — Alkis Piskas
Then what covert response counts as seeing red? — Michael
I’m suggesting that seeing red just is the firing of certain neurons as a response to external stimulation, comparable to feeling pain just being the firing of certain neurons as a response to external stimulation. — Michael
They are all trying to estimate the state of some external node. To exactly the same extent that we can say that external node is 'square' we can say it is 'green'. Both are just ways of describing our estimating its state in ways which dictate appropriate responses. — Isaac
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