we do sometimes see (hear, touch, smell...) things as they are — Banno

So things have a smell even if nothing has a nose? I disagree. There's no such thing as smelling something as it is. It is just the case that some objects produce chemicals that stimulate some sense receptor of some biological organism, causing that organism to have an olfactory experience.

The naive realist view of projecting the properties of that olfactory experience onto that external world object is mistaken.

And the same principle with vision, e.g with colours.

How are we to know which parts of our experience provide us with “raw” information about the external world? — Michael

As the Indirect Realist would say, "exactly".

Everyone seems to agree that there is a chain of events. For example, light from the sun hits an object, part of the light is absorbed by the object and part reflected, a wavelength of 480nm then travels though space to the eye of an observer, this causes an electrical signal to travel along the optic nerve from the eye to the brain where it is somehow processed, thereby enabling the mind to perceive the colour blue.

Both the Indirect Realist and Direct Realist would agree that there has been a "direct" causal chain from the prior cause to the subsequent effect.

It then comes down to a semantic problem. What is it the correct use of language.

It cannot be that the observer has "direct" knowledge of the cause of their perception, as the cause is of a very different kind to the effect, and there is no information within the subsequent effect as to its exact prior cause. Whilst one prior cause determines one subsequent effect, one subsequent effect could have had numerous possible prior causes. There is a temporal direction of information flow. Consider the impossibility of looking at a billiard ball at rest on a billiard table and being able to determine its prior position just from knowledge of its rest position. The same with perceiving the colour blue.

It must be more grammatical to say that the subsequent effect, perceiving the colour blue, only gives us "indirect" knowledge of any prior cause.

You seemed to be suggesting that if there is some third physical thing in the causal chain between the experience and the external world object then the experience is mediated. — Michael

I'm not talking about physical things in the casual chain. I'm talking about experiential mediation, not physical mediation.

So for example, if I see your reflection in a mirror, that would be physical mediation of your image; the mirror is a third party in the casual chain between us; but not experiential mediation in the sense I am taking about.

Some more examples of experiential mediation: by directly experiencing a speaker in my phone, I indirectly experience someone's voice. By directly experiencing blips on a radar screen, I indirectly experience the position of airplanes. By directly experiencing words on a page, I indirectly experience an author's thoughts.

And the indirect realist says, by directly experiencing phenomenal experience, I indirectly experience the world.

So when I'm watching at the stadium I have a direct perception of the game? — Michael

In an every day context yes, but not in the context of this debate. But the concept of direct/indirect is the same.

Why in the world do you think direct realists think that? — flannel jesus

They are using their own particular language game, sui generis, where "direct" in the language game of the Direct Realist means "indirect" in the language game of the Indirect Realist.

In an every day context yes, but not in the context of this debate. — hypericin

In the context of this debate, what is required for an experience to be direct? In the context of this debate, is direct experience of an external world object only possible if that external world object is in physical contact with my brain/experience?

In the context of this debate, there is no such thing as a direct experience of an external world object, since all such experiences are mediated by phenomenal experience.

In the context of this debate, there is no such thing as a direct experience of an external world object, since all such experiences are mediated by phenomenal experience. — hypericin

Direct realists recognize the difference between phenomenal experience and external world objects. So why do they still claim that perception of external world objects is direct?

I haven't said the scientific understanding of perception is incorrect. I've said that if the assumption is that perception as such distorts reality then the scientific understanding of perception, which is itself based on perception, cannot be trusted. To trust it and base arguments on it, would on that assumption, be a performative contradiction. — Janus

If perception does not distort reality then the empirical evidence would show us that perception does not distort reality. The empirical evidence does not show us that perception does not distort reality. Therefore, perception distorts reality.

There's no performative contradiction in applying modus tollens.

I've said that if the assumption is that perception as such distorts reality then the scientific understanding of perception, which is itself based on perception, cannot be trusted.

That perception distorts reality isn't the assumption but the conclusion. We don’t start as indirect realists but as scientists and then accept what the empirical evidence tells us about how perception actually works. And that is that colours and tastes and smells are not properties of lemons but are a response to a lemon’s properties. The naive view that projects colours and tastes and smells onto lemons is mistaken.

Direct realists recognize the difference between phenomenal experience and external world objects. So why do they still claim that perception of external world objects is direct? — Michael

I believe they variously misunderstand phenomenal experience and/or direct/indirect. But I admit I am not sure.

So things have a smell even if nothing has a nose? — Michael

How did you get to that?

Sometimes - mostly - things smell as they should (or even as they do) - ozone like ozone, lemon like lemon; If ozone smelt like lemon, that would be notable.

Thats why we have different words for the smells of ozone and of lemon.

How dod you get to that? — Banno

You said that we smell things as they are, which under any reasonable reading is to say that smells are properties of those objects that we are then able to detect.

The existence of organisms with noses has nothing to do with the properties of a lemon, and so if lemons have some property of smell then they have that property of smell even if no organisms have noses.

But lemons don't have smell properties of this kind. It is simply the case that lemons produce chemicals that cause humans (with functioning noses) to have a certain kind of olfactory experience (and likely cause non-human organisms to have a different kind of olfactory experience).

What sits between the lemon and the creature's smelling?

...under any reasonable reading... — Michael

Sure. You interpret it the way you want. :wink: It'll save you thinking.

According to the SEP article The Problem of Perception

Direct Realist Presentation: perceptual experiences are direct perceptual presentations of ordinary objects.

If person A directly saw an object as it really is, and person B looking at the same object also saw the object as it really is, then person A would know what was in person's B mind. This would be a consequence of Direct Realism and could be described as a form of telepathy.

That'll be the article which ends:

The question, now, is not so much whether to be a direct realist, but how to be one.

I had a lemon the other day that smelled of mould. :grimace:

But overwhelmingly, lemons smell like lemons.

Seems some folk are perplexed by this.

But overwhelmingly, lemons smell like lemons.

Seems some folk are perplexed by this. — Banno

Nobody is perplexed by this. It’s the vacuous claim that lemons cause me to experience what lemons cause me to experience.

It has no bearing on anything said by either direct or indirect realists.

That'll be the article which ends: The question, now, is not so much whether to be a direct realist, but how to be one. — Banno

The quote above from the SEP article The Problem of Perception refers to the debate within Direct Realism, not to the debate between Direct and Indirect Realism.

The paragraph in full is:

Whilst the debate between sense-datum theorists and adverbialists (and between these and other theories) is not as prominent as it once was, the debate between intentionalists and naive realist disjunctivists is a significant ongoing debate in the philosophy of perception: a legacy of the Problem of Perception that is arguably “the greatest chasm” in the philosophy of perception (Crane (2006)). The question, now, is not so much whether to be a direct realist, but how to be one.

Realism is what both sides agree upon… — hypericin

Doesn’t seem that way to me.

If all agreed on realism being the doctrine that describes a condition of a thing, what sense does it make for some to disagree on the criteria by which the thing meets that condition?

If a thing can be directly real under these conditions, but indirectly real under those conditions, realism is no longer the descriptive doctrine all agree upon, but is reduced to being itself conditioned by criteria having nothing whatsoever to do with a thing being real in accordance with the original agreement.

Or, on the other hand, the description is of something supposed as real but still something other than the real thing met with under the criteria of the original doctrine, hence not contained in the realism all agreed upon.

I mean….you said it yourself: realism is assumed under these conditions, but is known under those conditions, which puts realism itself right smack-dap in the doctrinal crosshairs.

Nahhhh…..if we are to append “real” to this only because of this, we are not legitimately allowed to then append “real” to this because of not-this.
—————

Once we hit page 20 we will surely be able to say what it is we are arguing about. — Leontiskos

Forever the optimist, are we? Ehhhh….even if you’re right, there’ll always be something else to take sides over. Like…..those gawd-awful qualia. (Sigh)

What sits between the lemon and the creature's smelling? — creativesoul

A necessary relation, and some means by which it occurs. (??)

But is this distinction somehow fundamental, or just bookkeeping by the brain? I think the latter

I'm not sure what you're arguing for, that there is no real distinction between imaginings and sense perception? No real difference between dementia and psychosis and proper functioning?

If such "bookkeeping" doesn't correspond to any real difference between the proximate causes of sensations this would seem to lead to a sort of radical skepticism and solipsism, as there would be no grounds for distinguishing between imaginings and sensory experience, dementia and healthy cognitive function. I'd maintain that these are clearly not the same thing.

But you've seemed to ignore my main point, which is that brains don't appear to "bookkeep" or produce any sort of experience in the vast majority of environments that exist in the universe. Nor do they develop the capability to experience things in isolation. A back and forth between the "enviornment"/"individual" barrier is essential for embryo development and essential for survival. E.g., a radical constriction of sensory inputs after birth leads to profound deficits in mammals, whereas a total constriction of sensory inputs would obviously require an enviornment that is going to kill any animal.

Nor do true dividing lines between different "things" seem to show up in the world upon closer inspection. If the mind "constructs" things, it surely appears to construct these boundaries.

The resulting picture is a single universal process with multiple phenomenological horizons, which appear to be relatively discrete (arguments for group minds and super organisms not withstanding). But once you've dropped the conceit of discrete things behaving according to intrinsic properties, the direct/indirect distinction seems to dissolve, because it requires these boundaries to be framed in the first place.

The question of whether true/false, beautiful/ugly, good/bad, makes any sense outside of the context of subjectivity then comes up. If these lack content outside the subjective frame, truth having no meaning without the possibility of falsity, etc. then we might want to ask if "truth" "beauty," "color," "shape," etc. exist, "out there" without reference to the phenomenological sphere. This, IMO, is a mistake. It is simply to reinstate the discrete distinctions we've discovered to lack merit. The very fact that we are considering something already places it inside the phenomenological horizon, the realm of Mind/Geist.

Is the red thing red if no one looks at it? Again, the truth/falsity distinction only makes sense in terms of Mind. Universals are what they are because of Mind, but Mind is what it is because of the universal process. Color isn't unique here. In reality, all properties are defined in terms of interaction. A thing is only said to have mass because of how it interacts with other things; if it didn't display these characteristic interactions we wouldn't say it had mass at all. The "properties of substances" only ever show up in process and interaction. Relations considered essential to minds are no different. We might as well ask if electrons have charge "of themselves" or only when interacting in some way? We seem to be able to dispense with things and deal only in relations (process) e.g. Rovelli's Relational Quantum Mechanics.

The question of universals then, seems to require two tiers. There is first, the abstractions of mind, the identification of what is common to sets of things, what Aristotle describes. It's easy to see how nominalist intuitions can cash out if we end here.

But then there is the universal of the entire process by which something comes to be, and be known as, a universal, a sort of causal unfolding, which Hegel illuminates:

"But thought is capable of another and deeper movement. It can rise to a universality which is not foreign to, but the very inward nature of things in themselves, not the universal of an abstraction from the particular and different, but the unity which is immanent in them and finds in them its own necessary expression; not an arbitrary invention of the observing and classifying mind, . . . but an idea which expresses the inner dialectic, the movement or process towards unity, which exists in and constitutes the being of the objects themselves. This deeper and truer universality is that which may be designated ideal or organic universality. The idea of a living organism . . . is not a common element which can be got at by abstraction and generalization, by taking the various parts and members, stripping away their differences, and forming a notion of that which they have in common. That in which they differ is rather just that out of which their unity arises and in which is the very life and being of the organism; that which they have in common they have, not as members of a living organism, but as dead matter, and what you have to abstract in order to get it is the very life itself. Moreover, the universal, in this case, is not last but first. We do not reach it by first thinking the particulars, but conversely, we get at the true notions of the particulars only through the universal. What the parts or members of an organism are their form, place, structure, proportion, functions, relations, their whole nature and being, is determined by the idea of the organism which they are to compose. It is it which produces them, not they it. In it lies their reason and ground. They are its manifestations or specifications. It realizes itself in them, fulfills itself in their diversity and harmony. . . . You cannot determine the particular member or organ save by reference to that which is its limit or negation. It does not exist in and by itself, but in and through what is other than itself, through the other members and organs which are at once outside of and within it, beyond it, and yet part and portion of its being. . . . Here, then, we have a kind of universality which is altogether different from the barren and formal universality of generalization, and the indication of a movement of thought corresponding to an inner relation of things which the abstracting, generalizing understanding is altogether inadequate to grasp."

Some examples given take the distance between the perceiver and perceived to be evidence of indirect realism. With this they can extend the causal chain and place a veil between the perceiver and perceived. A recurring theme is that one can never experience a thing as it is due to this distance and the things in between one and the other.

But the corollary that we can only experience something as it isn't is replete with its own problems. These accounts often leave out the rest of the sensual periphery, for instance everything else in the field of vision, as in the stick-in-the-water case: the water, the bucket, the atmosphere, the light, the ground, and the myriad other aspects of the environment through which we can experience anything at all.

If these were considered, as I think they ought to be, the relationship between perceiver and perceived would have to be direct, so much so that contact between one and the other is measurable, with much of the perceived entering into the perceiver—the air enters into the nose, the light into the eyes, the sound-waves into the ears, and so on. To say we do not perceive light, for instance, which is of the world, cannot be maintained, especially given how intimate this relationship is. These mediums are invariably of the environment, which would need to be experienced as they are rather than as they are not in order for us to experience anything at all.

To try to sum my rambling attempts above I would point to:

A. The substantial empirical support for the "process metaphysics view," which is well summed up in this extensive excerpt from Bickhard's "Systems and Process Metaphysics" https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/826619 . Better, more philosophical arguments in favor of the process view can be found in the opening chapters of Rescher's introductory text on the topic, which ably disambiguates what is essential to process metaphysics and what is particular to popular, but not necessarily representative versions of it in Whitehead or Bergson. The first few chapters are even free: https://books.google.com/books/about/Process_Metaphysics.html?id=9V2FoMPTl5MC

B. This view would seem to dissolve the brain/environment dichotomy, whereas we are still left with a world where there appear to be multiple minds, but just one universal process.

C. Given this shift in starting presuppositions, something like Hegel's conception of the relationship of Mind/Giest to Nature, and his theory of universals seems much more plausible. More importantly, it seems like it should be possible to describe it in much more "down to Earth," less obscure terms (maybe).

If earlier abstract thought was interested in the principle only as content, but in the course of philosophical development has been impelled to pay attention to the other side, to the behaviour of the cognitive process, this implies that the subjective act has also been grasped as an essential moment of objective truth, and this brings with it the need to unite the method with the content, the form with the principle.

The Science of Logic

I once saw process philosophy likened to a knuckleball. No one denies you can strike people out with it. No one denies it would be a great pitch for all pitchers to learn, because it is low velocity and lets you pitch lots of innings. But knuckleballers, like process philosophers, are quite rare. Why? Because the pitch is awkward and because, since no one throws it, no one teaches it. And because only a few throw it, it gets identified with the particularities of greats like Tim Wakefield (Whitehead) or R.A. Dickey (Bergson). But we are left with the suspicion that it isn't just the best breaking ball, but properly used, a full on alternative to the fastball (Niekro had 300+ wins, 3,300 Ks after all, philosophical case closed).

A recurring theme is that one can never experience a thing as it is due to this distance and the things in between one and the other...To say we do not perceive light, for instance, which is of the world, cannot be maintained, especially given how intimate this relationship is — NOS4A2

On the one hand, the Indirect Realist proposes that we can never experience a thing in the world as it is, meaning that the relationship between perceiver and thing in the world as it is is indirect. But on the other hand, the Indirect Realist also proposes that we do experience a thing in the world as we perceive it to be, meaning that the relationship between perceiver and thing in the world as the perceiver perceives it to be is direct.

The intimate relation between the perceiver and perceived is maintained.

IE, suppose the thing in the world is in fact orange, yet I always perceive it to be blue. It is true that I can never experience the thing in the world as it is, but this is irrelevant to my relationship with the world, as I always perceive the thing in the world to be as I perceive it to be, in this case, blue.

Wittgenstein makes the same point in Philosophical Investigations 293 with the beetle in the box analogy.

suppose the thing in the world is in fact orange, yet I always perceive it to be blue. It is true that I can never experience the thing in the world as it is, but this is irrelevant to my relationship with the world, as I always perceive the thing in the world to be as I perceive it to be, in this case, blue. — RussellA

How do you know that it is in fact orange if you never see the orange?

An orange building may appear blue in the early morning when the sky is blue before sunrise. So in a sense something that is in fact orange may appear blue. But that's different.

Two quotes from recent readings that I think get to the core of the whole 'things known "in-themselves"' issue.

To be a substance (thing-unit) is to function as a thing-unit in various situations. And to have a property is to exhibit this property in various contexts. ('The only fully independent substances are those which-like people-self-consciously take themselves to be units.)

As far as process philosophy is concerned, things can be conceptualized as clusters of actual and potential processes. With Kant, the process philosopher wants to identify what a thing is with what it does (or, at any rate, can do). After all, even on the basis of an ontology of substance and property, processes are epistemologically fundamental. Without them, a thing is inert, undetectable, disconnected from the world's causal commerce, and inherently unknowable. Our only epistemic access to the absolute properties of things is through inferential triangulation from their modus operandi-from the processes through which these manifest themselves. In sum, processes without substantial entities are perfectly feasible in the conceptual order of things, but substances without processes are effectively inconceivable.

Things as traditionally conceived can no more dispense with dispositions than they can dispense with properties. Accordingly, a substance ontologist cannot get by without processes. If his things are totally inert - if they do nothing - they are pointless. Without processes there is no access to dispositions, and without dispositional properties, substance lie outside our cognitive reach. One can only observe what things do, via their discernible effects; what they are, over and above this, is something that always involves the element of conjectural imputation. And here process ontology takes a straight-forward line: In its sight, things simply are what they do rather, what they dispositionally can do and normally would do.

The fact is that all we can ever detect about "things" relates to how they act upon and interact with one another - a substance has no discernible, and thus no justifiably attributable, properties save those that represent responses elicited from it in interaction with others. And so a substance metaphysics of the traditional sort paints itself into the embarrassing comer of having to treat substances ·as bare (propertyless) particulars [substratum] because there is no nonspeculative way to say what concrete properties a substance ever has in and of itself. But a process metaphysics is spared this embarrassment because processes are, by their very nature, interrelated and interactive. A process-unlike a substance -can simply be what it does. And the idea of process enters into our experience directly and as such.

Nicholas Rescher - "Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy"

It is through action, and only through action, that real beings manifest or “unveil” their being, their presence, to each other and to me. All the beings that make up the world of my experience thus reveal themselves as not just present, standing out of nothingness, but actively presenting themselves to others and vice versa by interacting with each other. Meditating on this leads us to the metaphysical conclusion that it is the very nature of real being, existential being, to pour over into action that is self-revealing and self-communicative. In a word, existential being is intrinsically dynamic, not
static.

...by metaphysical reflection I come to realize that this is not just a brute fact but an intrinsic property belonging to the very nature of every real being as such, if it is to count at all in the community of existents. For let us suppose (a metaphysical thought experiment) that there were a real existing being that had no action at all. First of all, no other being could know it (unless it had created it), since it is only by some action that it could manifest or reveal its presence and nature; secondly, it would make no difference whatever to any other being, since it is totally unmanifested, locked in its own being and could not even react to anything done to it. And if it had no action within itself, it would not make a difference even to itself....To be real is to make a difference.

---

One of the central flaws in Kant’s theory of knowledge is that he has blown up the bridge of action by which real beings manifest their natures to our cognitive receiving sets. He admits that things in themselves act on us, on our senses; but he insists that such action reveals nothing intelligible about these beings, nothing about their natures in themselves, only an unordered, unstructured sense manifold that we have to order and structure from within ourselves. But action that is completely indeterminate, that reveals nothing meaningful about the agent from which it comes, is incoherent, not really action at all.

The whole key to a realist epistemology like that of St. Thomas is that action is the “self revelation of being,” that it reveals a being as this kind of actor on me, which is equivalent to saying it really exists and has this kind of nature = an abiding center of acting and being acted on. This does not deliver a complete knowledge of the being acting, but it does deliver an authentic knowledge of the real world as a community of interacting agents—which is after all what we need to know most about the world so that we may learn how to cope with it and its effects on us as well as our effects upon it. This is a modest but effective relational realism, not the unrealistic ideal of the only thing Kant will accept as genuine knowledge of real beings, i.e., knowledge of them as they are in themselves independent of any action on us—which he admits can only be attained by a perfect creative knower. He will allow no medium between the two extremes: either perfect knowledge with no mediation of action, or no knowledge of the real at all.

W. Norris Clarke - "The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics"

Well, you might excuse me since it remains unclear to me what it is you are claiming. It seems to be something like that, since lemons sometimes smell lemony, therefore that is how they smell when nothing has a nose...

I don't know what to make of that.

Directly or indirectly, even you, Michael, on occasion, see, hear, smell or touch the world, and thereby make true statements about things in the world.

The quote above from the SEP article The Problem of Perception refers to the debate within Direct Realism, not to the debate between Direct and Indirect Realism. — RussellA

:roll:

Salt is water-soluble. This is a commonly-held property of salt.

But salt only dissolves in water if it is placed in water. When salt isn't in water, salt doesn't dissolve in water. So is salt water soluble in-itself or does water construct the solubility of salt?

Is water-solublity a property of salt or is salt-dissolving a property of water? Or are these properties of neither because they only show up when the two interact? Salt doesn't dissolve in water if the water is cold enough, so it would appear that the enviornment might be constructing the solubility as well.

Would these interactions be direct then?