"Hearing voices" is something that happens in the head, when the primary auditory cortex is activated. We then judge this to either be a response to external world sounds or to be an hallucination. — Michael

That's plausible enough, but (as Derrida might point out against Sarl) you are putting hearing voices in quotes for a reason ---because the voices aren't real. So you can create new entities (fake voices) or speak of mistaken claims. 'He needs to see a psychiatrist. He says he's talking to his grandfather, but his grandfather is dead.'

It's not like we can't introduce fake apples, fake voices. They would be as real as promises and whiskey, if we treated them as such in making inferences. Liquid logic. We decide how concepts are properly applied and how to articulate the lifeworld.

So I don't even say you are wrong. I only suggest that direct realism has certain advantages.

Perceptual realism is the common sense view that tables, chairs and cups of coffee exist independently of perceivers. Direct realists also claim that it is with such objects that we directly engage. The objects of perception include such familiar items as paper clips, suns and olive oil tins. It is these things themselves that we see, smell, touch, taste and listen to. There are, however, two versions of direct realism: naïve direct realism and scientific direct realism. They differ in the properties they claim the objects of perception possess when they are not being perceived. Naïve realism claims that such objects continue to have all the properties that we usually perceive them to have, properties such as yellowness, warmth, and mass. Scientific realism, however, claims that some of the properties an object is perceived as having are dependent on the perceiver, and that unperceived objects should not be conceived as retaining them.

I like naive realism in the above. Scientific realism is already too indirect, in my view.

I like naive realism in the above. Scientific realism is already too indirect, in my view. — plaque flag

Well, I would say that the scientific evidence proves scientific realism and disproves naive realism. You might think that question begging, but I think I have more reason to believe in the truth of science than to believe in your theory about language.

Well, I would say that the scientific evidence proves scientific realism and disproves naive realism. You might think that question begging, but I think I have more reason to believe in the truth of science that in your theory about language. — Michael

I don't mind if I haven't convinced you, but I don't think science answers metaphysical questions, and I don't think my views interfere with science.

I still don't think you understand my view, but that's OK.

I don't think science answers metaphysical questions — plaque flag

I don't think perception has anything to do with metaphysics. Perception has to do with biology and psychology and physics. and so science is the appropriate tool to use.

The world from the person's perspective ,"see the world through different pairs of eyes" and the external world, "the same world". — RussellA

It's the same world viewed by different people with eyes in different places.

I don't think perception has anything to do with metaphysics. Perception has to do with biology and psychology, and so science is the appropriate tool to use. — Michael

That's fine, but

Also, a philosopher’s account of perception is intimately related to his or her conception of the mind, so this article focuses on issues in both epistemology and the philosophy of mind. The fundamental question we shall consider concerns the objects of perception: what is it we attend to when we perceive the world?
https://iep.utm.edu/perc-obj/

I've tried to shift the focus to us talking about the apple and not the image of the apple, from early on, in any case.

I've tried to shift the focus to us talking about the apple and not the image of the apple — plaque flag

So you’re shifting focus away from perception.

That's precisely why the indirect realist says that there is an epistemological problem of perception. You seem to be arguing that because we don't like the conclusion we should reject the premise, which is question-begging. — Michael

Well, if I ask you what is causing your headache, and you tell me “Everything”. This answer does not have much value or any value at all other than maybe expressing frustration.

I would argue that our modern scientific understanding of the world, such as that of quantum mechanics, the Standard Model, string theory etc. support that conclusion above. There's just a mass of fundamental wave-particles, bouncing around, interacting with each another, and when the right stuff interacts in the right way, there's the conscious experience of seeing a red apple. — Michael

Whether you describe a rock “ordinarily” or “scientifically”, neither is more fundamental than the other. Each serves it own purpose to adequately and accurately described our experiences.

So you’re shifting focus away from perception. — Michael

No. I thought you were. We see the red apple and not its image, and it's still there if we close our eyes ---and still red.

If we really wanted to (as a community), we could put fake voices, fake apples, fake cellphones....or, to get it all done at once, a fake private world... in each head.

Just as we invented marriages which we can include in our reasoning, we can make indirect realism true by fiat, just by living in that articulation of the world.

But I think there are other, cleaner ways to solve the problem it wants to solve.

We see the red apple and not its image — plaque flag

It’s both.

it's still there if we close our eyes ---and still red. — plaque flag

What does it mean for it to be red when not being seen?

Whether you describe a rock “ordinarily” or “scientifically”, neither is more fundamental than the other. Each serves it own purpose to adequately and accurately described our experiences. — Richard B

Only one accurately describes the independent nature of the external stimulus. The other describes an appearance, which is (at best) only representative of that external stimulus. Hence indirect realism.

The Indirect Realist would say that "something caused the idea of a rock". — RussellA

One could reword as "something in the external world caused an idea of a rock in the mind" — RussellA

To be consistent, the indirect realist cannot say “rock”. The only meaning this term could mean by this theory is “some object” or “something”.

Which reduces to say “something caused an idea of something. Again this is trivial and does not say much of anything”. I don't see adding “external” and “mind” as adding much to the significance to the statement.

But please solicit the help of scientific theories to help give the metaphysical theory some creditability as I expect. Sometimes if you intermingle the two theories enough you can fool folk into believing they are saying the same thing.

Only one accurately describes the independent nature of the external stimulus. — Michael

Sounds like you are begging the question now.

Sounds like you are begging the question now. — Richard B

Is being a scientific realist question begging?

What evidence do you have that external stimuli, when not being seen, are accurately described by our description of how they appear to us when seen?

What evidence do you have that external stimuli, when not being seen, are accurately described by our description of how they appear to us when seen? — Michael

We will have “begging the question” again if you define “evidence” as only counting as how they appear to us when seen.

I think I am. I believe I've already explained and argued for this above. It's true however that I'm not a metaphysical realist as described in the quote you provided.

The key point is that one sees the apple and not an image of the apple. Hence 'direct.' — plaque flag

Yup.

I don't think perception has anything to do with metaphysics. Perception has to do with biology and psychology and physics. and so science is the appropriate tool to use. — Michael

Couldn't there be a metaphysics of perception? Isn't that the distinction between direct and indirect? Such as @RussellA's worlds, where there is an external world and an internal world?

I think that if science is an appropriate tool to understand reality, then we must have access to reality to be able to assert such a thing reasonably. And the indirect access adds a metaphysical entity in between ourselves and reality, which is directly perceived but not real.

So I'm not seeing how you connect yourself back to reality to be able to assert that science is an appropriate tool to use to understand it -- it seems that your perception will always directly be of something that is not real, and so your perceptions, at least, aren't reliable in judging whether science is a good tool for understanding reality.

Which I think kind of goes to show that there's something of a choice going on between positions, and our choices are largely based upon faults we see in the other position (hence accepting our own)

It has the smell of an antinomy.

Couldn't there be a metaphysics of perception? — Moliere

I suppose that depends on whether or not you're a dualist. If there is such a thing as a non-physical mind then it is literally meta physics.

Isn't that the distinction between direct and indirect? — Moliere

I think the distinction is that the direct realist believes that apples and their properties are manifest in conscious experience such that how an object appears is how it is (even when it doesn't appear), whereas the indirect realist believes that the properties which are manifest in conscious experience (e.g. shapes and colours and tastes and smells) are properties only of conscious experience, albeit causally covariant with (and perhaps in a sense representative of) apples and their properties.

Such as RussellA's worlds, where there is an external world and an internal world? — Moliere

I wouldn't read too much into such terminology. After all, there's no metaphysics involved when we talk about the "world of show business".

And the indirect access adds a metaphysical entity in between ourselves and reality, which is directly perceived but not real. — Moliere

There's nothing metaphysical about it (unless the mind is non-physical). Just look at perception from a purely biological perspective. Electromagnetic radiation stimulates the rods and cones in the eyes. This sends signals to the occipital lobe which processes visual information, which is then sent to the temporal lobe where the visual information is processed into memory and to the frontal lobe where the visual information is processed into intellectual reasoning and decision-making.

Now what happens if we ignore the eyes entirely and find some other means to activate the occipital lobe, such as with cortical implants or the ordinary case of dreaming? I would say that the subject undergoes a conscious experience. And I would say that their conscious experience is one of visual imagery, such as shapes and colours. Seeing shapes and colours does not require electromagnetic radiation stimulating the rods and cones in the eyes (or an apple to reflect said light). Seeing shapes and colours only requires the activation of the appropriate parts of the cerebral cortex.

Given that seeing shapes and colours only requires the activation of the appropriate parts of the cerebral cortex, regardless of what triggers it, it's understandable why one would argue that the shapes and colours we see are "in the head" and not properties of apples. Seeing shapes and colours is no different in principle to feeling pain or hot or cold.

The brain activates, a sensation occurs, and we are cognitively aware of this sensation. We then (often) infer from this sensation the existence of some responsible external stimulus. The mistaken naive view is to think that the quality of this sensation (e.g. shape or colour or smell or taste) is a property of the external stimulus.

Again, more than one world. The world from the person's perspective ,"see the world through different pairs of eyes" and the external world, "the same world". — RussellA

Are you familiar with Markus Gabriel's ideas? What you say above reminds me of his philosophy. I am somewhat partial to his notion of "fields of sense". He says the world (taken to be an overarching realm that "contains" all the different discursive fields of sense) does not exist; it's a kind of collective hallucination.

And the indirect access adds a metaphysical entity in between ourselves and reality, which is directly perceived but not real. — Moliere

:up:

This is why a phenomenological approach is nice. We don't act or talk as if we are seeing images rather than objects. Certain figures of speech seem to be tempting us to pretend we are wrapped in a cloak of illusion through which we must somehow peep.

Which I think kind of goes to show that there's something of a choice going on between positions, and our choices are largely based upon faults we see in the other position (hence accepting our own) — Moliere

:up:

This is why I view it in terms of discussing which way of talking is better. It's hard to make sense of one side as right or wrong. We make the rules. We perform meaning, perform what counts or not as logical.

We are always already within a sufficient but liquid system of such norms that make discussion possible in the first place. As thinkers we push for the adoption of our preferences as more binding than they currently are. We also try to weaken the bindingness of norms we find fault with.

What does it mean for it to be red when not being seen? — Michael

Basically one would infer (along with so many other things) that a person walking into that room would find that apple still sitting there, still red. We'd have to look at context to see how such a phrase is actually being used. Maybe we are explaining object permanence to a bot. Maybe we are explaining to a child that apples don't change their color when they look away for a moment.

It'll be hard to understand me without checking out inferentialism.
https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/Inferentialism_Normative_Pragmatism_and.pdf



Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning and conceptual content. The modern Western philosophical tradition has taken representation to be the key concept of semantics. To understand the sort of contentfulness characteristic of sapience, that tradition counsels us to focus on the relation between pictures and what they picture, between signs and what they are signs for.

The master-idea of semantic inferentialism is to look instead to inference, rather than representation, as the basic concept of semantics. What makes something meaningful or contentful in the sense that matters for sapience (rather than the mere sentience we share with many nonlinguistic animals) is the role that it plays in reasoning. The primary vehicle of meaning in this sense is declarative sentences. Those are symbols that can be used to assert, state, or claim that things are thus-and-so. The kind of content they express, “propositional” content, in the philosopher’s jargon, is what can both serve as and stand in need of reasons—that is what can play the role both of premise and of conclusion in inferences.
...
Pragmatism in general is the claim that pragmatics is methodologically, conceptually, and explanatorily prior to semantics—thatone should understand the meaning or content expressed by linguistic locutions in terms of their use. The later Wittgenstein, who counseled “Don’t look to the meaning, look to the use,” is a pragmatist in this sense (though he didn’t use that term). Normative pragmatism is the idea that discursive practice is implicitly, but essentially, and not just accidentally, a kind of normative practice. Discursive creatures live, and move, and have their being in a normative space. What one is doing in making a claim, performing the most fundamental kind of speech act, is committing oneself, exercising one’s authority to make oneself responsible.

Understanding someone’s utterance is knowing what they have committed themselves to by producing that performance, by saying what they said—as well as knowing what would entitle them to that commitment, and what is incompatible with it. Those commitments, entitlements, and incompatibilities are inferentially connected to one another. The space discursive creatures move about in by talking is a space of reasons, articulating what would be a reason for or against what. That is what connects normative pragmatism to semantic inferentialism.

Helpful Brandom quote:

***************************************************
For Kant, our normative status as autonomous, our possession of the authority to make ourselves responsible, to bind ourselves by conceptual norms (either cognitively in judgment or practically in exercises of intentional agency) is simply an ontological fact about us, definitive of creatures like us. Hegel takes a large step to naturalizing this fundamental discursive normativity by treating the possession of this normative status as a social achievement. Indeed, for him, all normative statuses are understood as social statuses. (Slogan: “All transcendental constitution is social institution.”) More specifically, he understands normative statuses, including those corresponding to Kantian autonomy, as socially instituted by practical normative attitudes of reciprocal recognition. Norms are understood as implicit in social practices. This is his understanding of the Enlightenment insight that there were no normative statuses of authority or responsibility, no commitments or obligations, before or apart from our practices of taking or treating each other as authoritative, responsible, committed, and obliged.

These are lessons the classical American pragmatists take over from Kant and Hegel. They, too, see intentionality in all its guises as fundamentally a normative phenomenon. One of their master-ideas is to further naturalize the normativity of intentionality (both discursive andpractical) by construing it as arising from the role intentional states play in the generically selectional processes whose paradigms are Darwinian evolution and individual learning (both supervised and unsupervised). These have in common the feedback-loop, Test-Operate-Test-Exit (TOTE) structure. The pragmatists’ model and emblem for the faculty of reason is neither the Enlightenment’s reflectively representational mirror nor Romanticism’s creatively illuminating lamp, but the flywheel governor that is the flexible instrument of control for the engines of the Industrial Revolution.

Placed in the context of Kant’s normative insight, it is the methodological strategy of giving explanatory priority to norms implicit in practices or practical abilities to norms explicit in the form of principles. The converse explanatory strategy, which looks for something explicit in the form of a rule or principle behind every practical capacity deployed in cognition and agency, is what Dewey called “intellectualism,” (or “Platonism”).

The stage-setting for pragmatism of this sort is the notion of practical intentionality. This is the sort of skillful practical coping nonlinguistic organisms exhibit—epitomized at the high end by the efficient foraging strategies of orangutans and the stalking exploits of apex predators, but discernible at the low end even in the TOTE-based behavior of radar-guided missiles. Nonlinguistic animals are already in a distinctive way oriented to or directed at (“onto”) the environing objects in their world that play significant roles in their lives. In its most basic form, fundamental pragmatism seeks to situate discursive intentionality within the larger field of this sort of practical intentionality. This project can take the form of exhibiting discursive intentionality as a kind of practical intentionality: a species of that genus. Or it can take the form of trying to show how discursively intentional abilities can arise out of more primitive sorts of skillful doing.

https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/Inferentialism_Normative_Pragmatism_and.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor

There's what Heidegger called 'understanding' at the bottom.

It's the same world viewed by different people with eyes in different places. — plaque flag

Relatively speaking.

There is the ontology of the nature of reality, in that, is the Neutral Monist correct when they argue that reality is elementary particles and elementary forces in space-time. There is the epistemological problem of how we know the nature of reality, given the problem that between our mind and the external world are our senses, and the senses alter any information arriving at our minds from the external world. But we can only discuss these things using language.

But language is a symbolic system, where words symbolise what they represent. Therefore, any understanding we get using language must be founded on a symbolic understanding, where, for example, the word "world" symbolises something else, in this case, the world.

This leads into the philosophical problem of where does language get its meaning. What does the word "world" actually mean. Is there an absolute meaning to "world", or is its meaning relative to its users.

If there is an absolute meaning to "world", then it cannot depend on the users of the language, as each user may use the word differently. Therefore it can only be found outside users of the language. But language wouldn't exist if there was no one to use it, leading to the inevitable conclusion that there can be no absolute meaning to the world "world".

Therefore, the meaning of "world" must be relative to the users of the language. But if meaning is relative to its users, the meaning of the word "world" depends on who is using it. Therefore, no one use is correct. My "world" may be different to your "world", meaning that there is no one meaning of "world" but many. In fact as many meanings as there are people using that language.

It is correct to say "she lives in her own world", where the world exists in the mind. It is correct to say "you are my world", where the world exist in a social community. It is correct to say "there is an unknown world out there", where the world exists external to any mind. It is also correct to say "there is only one world", where the world is the sum of all the above.

We may be worlds apart in our world view, but then again, the world is a strange and mysterious place.

To be consistent, the indirect realist cannot say “rock”. The only meaning this term could mean by this theory is “some object” or “something”. — Richard B

As an Indirect Realist, I can say "I see a rock", because the rock I see exists as a concept in my mind. External to my mind is something, but it is not a rock.

In my mind, the rock exists in part as a direct perception and in part as part of language, neither of which are independent of any mind.

Are you familiar with Markus Gabriel's ideas? — Janus

No, but I will have a look.

From a quick scan on Wikipedia Markus Gabriel, I definately agree with:

"In an April 2020 interview he called European measures against COVID-19 unjustified and a step towards cyber dictatorship, saying the use of health apps was a Chinese or North Korean strategy."

"In a 2018 interview, Gabriel complained that "most contemporary metaphysicians are [sloppy] when it comes to characterizing their subject matter," using words like "the world" and "reality" "often...interchangeably and without further clarifications. In my view, those totality of words do not refer to anything which is capable of having the property of existence"

But language is a symbolic system, where words symbolise what they represent. — RussellA

I don't think so. Not essentially. I've provided links to alternatives.

Therefore, the meaning of "world" must be relative to the users of the language. — RussellA

The language, its users, and the world are primordially unified. [ Heidegger writes about this. ]

I claim that trying to shatter this unity leads to confusion.

Our situation is being-in-the-world-in-language-with-others as one phenomenon with different aspects (we can focus on this or that.)

In fact as many meanings as there are people using that language. — RussellA

Claims are semantic atoms, not concepts. That I claim is a better way.

There is the epistemological problem of how we know the nature of reality, given the problem that between our mind and the external world are our senses, and the senses alter any information arriving at our minds from the external world. But we can only discuss these things using language. — RussellA

That's just a fake problem made up by long dead philosophers who didn't notice the structure of their own game (philosophy.)

The world is all that is the case. There is genius in that simple statement.

We may be worlds apart in our world views, but then again, the world is a strange and mysterious place. — RussellA

:up:

The language, its users, and the world are primordially unified — plaque flag

Not primordial, as language only began about 50,000 to 150,000 years ago.

Users of the same language agree to a basic meaning of a word, even though they can have very different concepts as to its particular meaning. For example, an Australian living in Alice Springs will have a very different concept of the word "grass" to an American living in Spokane.

The world is all that is the case. There is genius in that simple statement. — plaque flag

My approach to "the world is all that is the case" is similar to that of Markus Gabriel:

"In a 2018 interview, Gabriel complained that "most contemporary metaphysicians are [sloppy] when it comes to characterizing their subject matter," using words like "the world" and "reality" "often...interchangeably and without further clarifications. In my view, those totality of words do not refer to anything which is capable of having the property of existence"