That lemons smell like lemons is a vacuous claim — Michael

Not so much. If the smell is only a thing constructed by the mind, then there is no reasons that lemons might not on occasion smell like mint. The reason lemons smell like lemons is, put simply, that that is how lemons smell.

Then you're welcome to present Austin's arguments. — Michael

Done, here: Austin: Sense and Sensibilia and in a post back on page one of this thread.

I don't see how saying irrelevant things like "lemons smell like lemons" is helpful at all. — Michael

Plainly, for you, it isn't. Not my problem.

It's not the immediate object of their rational consideration. — Michael

Sure, you can make up a story in which you talk like this.

But it is made up.

I'm amused that you presented a story that you supposed supported indirect realism, but ended up with an account that fits direct realism. The inversion drops out of consideration. One can imagine your creature's physiologist making the "discovery" that half the population sees things upside down, and their philosophers explaining carefully that no, they don't.

One of these must be true:

1. The science of perception is correct and suggests that perception distorts reality
2. The science of perception is correct and suggests that perception does not distort reality
3. The science of perception is incorrect and suggests that perception distorts reality
4. The science of perception is incorrect and suggests that perception does not distort reality — Michael

There is an unacknowledged premise in '1' and in any statement that claims that the science of perception shows us what is the case. The unacknowledged assumption is that perception, being that upon which the science of perception is necessarily based, gives us an accurate picture of what is the case.

Of course this assumption that perception generally gives us an accurate picture of what is the case does not rule out that sometimes in unusual circumstances it may not immediately give us an accurate picture. How else, though, other than via further perceptual evidence could we ever arrive at the realization that this has happened and correct our views?

So, '1' is invalid because the conclusion contradicts the hidden premise. '2' is valid because the conclusion does not contradict the hidden premise. '3' and '4' are not invalid, but if the science of perception is incorrect then what it tells us either way cannot be trusted.

The only contradiction is to argue that perception does not distort reality even though the science of perception suggests that it does. — Michael

The science of perception does not suggest that perception distorts reality generally speaking, but only in special circumstances. And further as I noted above it is only by means of perception that these mistakes can be corrected, and correction would only be possible if perception does not, by and large, distort reality.

The very notion that perception, globally speaking, distorts reality is incoherent anyway, since it is only via perception that we get any notion of reality. Any supposed reality beyond the possibility of our perceiving it is, since unknowable, completely useless as a point of comparison.

.

Makes sense. Though I'm wondering about notions of environment here. "Hydrophobic" and "hydrophillic" relate to general structures of molecules, however those structures change at different Pressure-Volumes: tap water dissolves more salt when it is boiling, for instance, than when it is ice-water.

Does the language of properties map at all to scientific discourse? Would a three-part predicate cover the variability of salt concentration with respect to pressure-temperature? (and what of the other things we may measure?)

EDIT: Tho this is more phil-o-sci than a comment on in/direct realism.

Hmm. It's an interesting case. I'd say

The science of perception is correct and does not suggest that perception distorts reality

Moving the negation. This has a different sense to @Michael's

The science of perception is correct and suggests that perception does not distort reality

bringing out your

The unacknowledged assumption is that perception, being that upon which the science of perception is necessarily based, gives us an accurate picture of what is the case. — Janus

Perception sometimes distorts reality. We know this to be so because sometimes, it doesn't. Importantly, and you might agree that folk seem to keep missing this, we can only know that perception distorts reality if we know what is real.

Some of the things we say about the world are true. Suggesting that we never perceive things as they are undermines this.

Perception sometimes distorts reality. We know this to be so because sometimes, it doesn't. Importantly, and you might agree that folk seem to keep missing this, we can only know that perception distorts reality if we know what is real. — Banno

I agree with this and would put it even more strongly as "perception sometimes distorts reality. We know this to be so because mostly, it doesn't".

Saying that we never perceive things as they are is self-refuting, incoherent, because we would need to perceive things as they are in order to know this. And on further investigation we do perceive things as they are in the special cases where perception does locally distort reality.

And hot oil dissolves naphthalene faster than cold - not sure about quantity.

But I wasn't able to relate this discussion to the thread's topic.

heh me either I just felt compelled to add my bit while admitting it's not the old debate.

Cool. "Quantity" is the part that seems hard for me to put into logic, though you can always substitute the empirical ranges known for various properties. It might end up being a 5 or more part predicate, thinking about MSD sheets I've seen and how identity is established in practice.

"Perception sometimes distorts reality. We know this to be so because mostly, it doesn't". — Janus

Yes!

The reply will be that we don't know things as they are, we only know our sense data or whatever, and have to infer the state of the world from that sense data, using pragmatics or probability or some such.

As if there were a reliable way of assessing the probability that your hand is before you in Moore's "Here is a hand!"

Oddly, indirect realism seems related to scientism.

:up:

I'm not sure what you're arguing for, that there is no real distinction between imaginings and sense perception? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm arguing that there is no fundamental difference in the phenomenal character of imaginings and sense perception. That the phenomenal sense of imagining "belonging to you" is just bookkeeping by the brain. Of course, imaginings and sense perception differ in their origination. And the bookkeeping does indeed represent this difference in origination, under normal conditions of the brain.

My larger point is that the ability to produce phenomenal experience is a property of brains, not of the environment, and not even the union of the two. The various mental disorders that produce self-generated phenomenal experience indistinguishable from sensed experience demonstrate this.

Of course, the world as we experience it is the co-creation of world and brain. But our brain's contribution is the "production" of phenomenal experience in response to the environment the body can detect.

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. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This didn't seem like your most compelling point to me. Of course we require a narrow band of environmental conditions to survive, and appropriate conditions to fully develop neurally. But we are talking humans who developed in normal conditions, not Mary's room, living on Earth, not the surface of the sun.

As to your larger point, I'm not sure. For instance,

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. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This seems as much a matter of perspective as anything, and dependent on the object and timescale. For instance, a rock is quite discrete in human timescales, and quite flowy in geological time. Just as there is no one right choice of timescale, there is no right choice of emphasis on discreteness or flowiness. If there is no fundamental ontological reason for our default focus on discreteness, then why should there be one for flowiness?

Then there is life, which spends much of it's energy maintaining it's discrete form, constantly resisting it's tendency to flow into goo. This inate effort common to all life can no more be ignored than the entropy it is at war with.

And then there is phenomenal experience, most central to this discussion, with which as you intimate something special is going on. How does a perspective which tries to dispense with discreteness accommodate what seems to be the absolute privacy of experience?

Another example, water is flowy at our scale, discrete at the molecular scale, and flowy at the quantum scale. Is any of these very different perspectives on the same thing "right"?

But it is true, I haven't fully grasped your process perspective.

My guess is that

So is salt water soluble in-itself or does water construct the solubility of salt? — Count Timothy von Icarus

relates to

...the whole 'things known "in-themselves"' issue. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm guessing that the issue is how, for example, the leaf being green-in-itself parallels salt being soluble-in-itself; and the answer is given by the analysis I presented previously. Salt is soluble-in-water, a single placed predicate; the leaf is (perhaps) green-to-most-people, a single placed predicate; but we can change this to a two-placed predication, soluble (salt, water) and green(leaf, most-people). The question of whether salt is soluble-in-itself dissolves in the two-placed analysis, as does the question of whether the leaf is green-in-itself.

This is one way to analyse primary and secondary qualities in first order logic. Primary qualities as single predications - the mass of the leaf; secondary properties as relations between the leaf and the observer.

Of course, as always, there are complications. Do we consider solubility a secondary quality of salt? Of naphthaline?

Both the Indirect and Direct Realist must agree that the thought of "trees lining the banks" must be in the mind, otherwise how would the mind know about trees lining the bank in the first place. — RussellA

Must we? I find trouble with your manner of putting things. :yikes: The aforementioned notion of mind is hard at work here. I suspect we work from several incompatible notions.



How we arrive at knowledge of trees lining the banks is irrelevant to the question asked. "The thought of 'trees lining the bank'" is also irrelevant.

Your target is whether or not "There are Cypress trees lining the bank" states the way things are if there are Cypress trees lining the banks. Thus, asking how we "know about trees lining the bank in the first place" focuses upon knowledge(and mind building). That's a great conversation. I'd love to have it one day, just not this one. I'm not asking how we know about cypress trees lining the banks of rivers. I'm asking if "There are Cypress trees lining the bank" states the way things are if and when there are Cypress trees lining the banks?

Both the Indirect and Direct Realist agree that there is something in the world causing us to perceive "trees lining the bank", as both believe in Realism.

I perceive quoted phrases like the one directly above via biological machinery. Our eyes are imperative to doing that successfully. I suppose I could learn braille and rid myself of such ocular dependency, but I digress...

We need not know the meaning of "trees lining the banks" in order to see trees lining the banks. We need not know how we come to know that there are trees lining the banks in order for there to be trees lining the banks. We cannot come to know that there are trees lining the banks if there are not. <----that speaks to your earlier question.

The question is whether or not - during the all times when we are looking at Cypress trees lining the banks - if we are directly perceiving the world as it is - if there are indeed Cypress trees lining the bank. I say we are and there are.

The Indirect and Direct Realist differ in what the something is in the world that is causing us to perceive "trees lining the bank".

For the Direct Realist, in the world are trees lining the bank regardless of there being anyone to observe them, in that, if you look at the world you will perceive exactly the same thing as me.

I wouldn't say it like that; not here at this juncture anyway. I know better. That context is far too broad. We need to get more specific if we want to arrive at a scenario where two people perceive exactly the same thing.

You and I are most certainly working from very different notions of "mind" and "perception". Acknowledging that seems necessary here. Helpful, hopefully, in some way. 

This means that if we are both looking at the same trees lining the bank, we will both be perceiving the same thing.

I agree with that exactly as it is stated, but deny the rest...

This means that I will know what's in your mind at that moment in time.

"Perceiving the same thing" might mean that to you, but not me. Cypress trees are not in the mind.

For the Indirect Realist, in the world is something regardless of there being anyone to observe it. As what I perceive is a subjective representation of the something in the world, we may not be perceiving the same thing.

You cannot believe that the Cypress trees along the banks of Mississippi delta backwaters only exist within your mind.

I would not say that I cannot know what is in your mind when we're looking at the same thing. Sometimes I can. Sometimes not. Rather, I'm stating that what we're looking at is not always exactly nor is it always only - what's in our mind - while we're looking at it.

I think your notion of "mind" is suspect.

As I have never believed it possible to know what someone else is thinking, I am an Indirect rather than Direct Realist.

You've always held false belief then. It is sometimes possible. AS best I can tell, that is not a litmus test for whether one ought be either a direct or indirect realist.

Because you have the concept of a bald cypress before looking at the river bank, you perceive a bald cypress.

As I don't have the concept of a bald cypress, all I perceive is a mass of green with some yellow bits.

I'm befuddled how that could make much sense of anything in the world.

You figure the tree stops being a directly perceptible entity that has existed long before you ever came across it simply because you've never seen one? You seem to be conflating your knowledge of what you're looking at with what you're looking at.

Did the bald cypress exist before anyone looked at it? You know that a mass of green with some yellow bits is a bald cypress, but I don't know that...

Nor need you in order for you to be looking at one.

So how can a bald cypress exist in the world independently of any mind to observe it, if the bald cypress only exists as a concept in the mind?

It couldn't if that were the case. Problem is - they do. Therefore, they do not only exist as a concept in the mind. The Mississippi river delta waterway does not reside within your mind. Those Cypress trees lining the backwater banks do not either. To drive the point home, I could break a small limb off and thwack you with it. I certainly need not extract anything from within your mind in order to successfully do so.

If that doesn't change your mind nothing will.

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

Do we know yet? All I know for sure is the op's arguments are long forgotten

Some are getting close, although I don't think everyone has the same distinction in mind between direct realism and indirect realism. I think the starting point needs to be a place where one can clearly define the position they hold as well as the position to which they object, and this has obviously been lacking.

Do we know yet? All I know for sure is the op's arguments are long forgotten — hypericin

The OP's arguments don't seem to be unrelated to the last series of posts. One of those arguments is that we only have access to perceptions, not the objects those perceptions are of. This seems to amount to saying we only see representations and not the objects represented. But if that were the case perception would give us a distorted picture of reality and I believe that claim has been adequately refuted by being shown to be self-contradictory or else simply baseless.

Another argument in the OP is that because perception is a process we should not think of it as direct. That, if accepted would leave us with no coherent notion of 'indirect', since the terms is meaningless without some criterion of directness that it can serve as the negation of. We have no such criterion except our ordinary notion of directly perceiving things, and this has been pointed out by several posters in several ways.

So, what do you see remaining of the OP's arguments that has not been addressed?

Another argument in the OP is that because perception is a process we should not think of it as direct. That, if accepted would leave us with no coherent notion of 'indirect', since the terms is meaningless without some criterion of directness that it can serve as the negation of. — Janus

See:

First, to echo Banno's question, what would the correlate to indirect, "direct," mean in the context of your claims? Apparently knowledge of the sandpaper without fingers, nerves, and brain processing would be direct? — Leontiskos

I think there is a general failure to consider a counterfactual understanding of either position. For example, if the indirect realist says that "direct" is as I have described it, this does provide a relevant foil, it's just that the foil is counterfactual and not actual. This directness is something like the way that Descartes' knows that he thinks. Such premises are not incoherent (although I think their conclusion is mistaken).

Apparently knowledge of the sandpaper without fingers, nerves, and brain processing would be direct? — Leontiskos

For example, if the indirect realist says that "direct" is as I have described it, this does provide a relevant foil, it's just that the foil is counterfactual and not actual. — Leontiskos

I have tried to provide a better account.

Experience can be organized into layers of varying degrees of directness.

Consider the experience of watching a YouTube video of a man telling a story. Your mind is transported to the world of the story, it is what occupies your attention. But your experience of the story is indirect. More direct is your experience of the man and his voice, as you experience the story via his voice and gestures. But this experience is still indirect, what is even more direct is your experience of your computer making sounds and images, as you experience the man's voice and gestures via your computers monitor and speakers.

Within this framework, the indirect realist says that this is still indirect, that there is a fundamental, bedrock, direct layer of experience. Of course, this is subjective sensory experience, because you experience every aspect of the world only via sensory experience. Whereas the direct realist does not acknowledge this layer, to them the computer in my example would be the most direct layer.

Since, according to scientific understanding, thinking, like perceiving, is a process, I don't see why it would not, on the indirect realist argument, equally qualify as indirect. I also don't see why my direct knowledge that I am thinking a particualr thought is any less certain than my direct knowledge that I am perceiving, for example, a tree.

Actually if we think of non of this is certain. Only thing we are certain about is our existential experience and it is purely subjective. Be it science or any other kind of knowledge we can never be certain.

Well, the first step is to explain what it means to experience something directly and what it means to experience something indirectly. — Michael

I take a direct perception of the world to involve two things: a perception and the world. A direct perception is a perception of the world without any intermediary between the perception and the world. I take an indirect perception of the world to involve three things: a perception, the world, and some third thing that lies between the perception and the world, such as a representation. An indirect perception of the world is a perception of something which exists between the perception and the world.

Indirect realists may take exception to this definition and they may prefer to define an indirect perception of the world as being a perception of the world via an intermediary. But, in that case, the intermediary would be part of the perception and wouldn't be a third thing that is perceived. The perception would be directly of the world and the representation would be subsumed under the meaning of "perception". In that case, the representation isn't part of the world (the perceived object) but is part of how we perceive things in the world.

So let's take olfactory experience. Do I smell a rose? Or do I smell the geraniol in the air, produced by the oils in a rose's petals? — Michael

What's relevant is whether we perceive the world or some intermediary between the perception and the world. The rose and the geraniol are both parts of the world. At a guess, I imagine science would tell us that smelling geraniol in the air is what it means to smell a rose.

After that, we should ask if there's such a thing as a correct smell. — Michael

I don't think so. Perceptions can differ between perceivers, but this needn't imply that they each perceive something other than the world.

I don't think certainty matters. What counts is what is most coherent and consistent with our experience.

Whereas the direct realist does not acknowledge this layer, to them the computer in my example would be the most direct layer. — hypericin

So you believe the direct realist would hold that the layer of sensory experience does not exist and therefore the computer layer is most "direct"? Why do you believe the direct realist would say this?

---

Since, according to scientific understanding, thinking, like perceiving, is a process, I don't see why it would not, on the indirect realist argument, equally qualify as indirect. — Janus

Well Descartes thought that we know some things indubitably, and that the fact that we think is one of these things. Descartes' claim acts as a counterfactual which explicates the content of "directness" whether or not the indirect realist thinks it actually exists. I don't see why the indirect realist (or the direct realist) is required to offer more than a counterfactual.

Similarly, someone might claim that reality is fundamentally intelligible to the human mind. Another might object, "Ah, but if you think that fundamental intelligibility is coherent, then you must explain what fundamental unintelligibility is, and you must do this in a more-than-counterfactual manner. Viz., you must point to fundamental unintelligibility in reality." Do you see why this isn't an appropriate objection? Some 20th century logicians thought these sorts of universal claims were vacuous, but whether or not they are vacuous, they are what we are dealing with in conversations such as this.

So you believe the direct realist would hold that the layer of sensory experience does not exist and therefore the computer layer is most "direct"? — Leontiskos

No, I think something more like sensory experience is not a distinct layer, but just a component part of perceiving the world.

I think we can know when we are thinking a particular thought just as we can know when we are looking at any particular object. Those are about as certain as any certainty can get.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say Descartes' cogito is a counterfactual, if that is what you are saying, and if it isn't, then I don't know what you are saying.

As to the "intelligibility of nature' example, I think I agree with you since it would be absurd to demand that intelligibility be pointed to as an object of the senses.

No, I think something more like sensory experience is not a distinct layer, but just a component part of perceiving. — hypericin

Right, and they might also question the rest of your analysis. They might say, for example, that the meaningful story is not posterior to the sounds. They may even say that because we often shape and infuse meaning into sounds the meaning itself is more primary than the sounds.

But your characterization is fairly close to what Aquinas says:

Some have asserted that our intellectual faculties know only the impression made on them; as, for example, that sense is cognizant only of the impression made on its own organ. According to this theory, the intellect understands only its own impression, namely, the intelligible species which it has received, so that this species is what is understood. This is, however, manifestly false for two reasons. . .

[...]

Therefore it must be said that the intelligible species is related to the intellect as that by which it understands: which is proved thus. . . — Thomas Aquinas, ST Ia.Q85.A2

Or to translate into your terms: <The sense data is related to the intellect as that by which it understands [, not as that which is understood]>. But this gets tricky because you want to talk primarily about sense data (which Aquinas calls phantasms) and Aquinas wants to talk primarily about knowledge.

It is interesting to me that when I studied epistemology the position I hold was called indirect realism, something vaguely akin to what you consider "naive realism" was considered direct realism, and your position would not have been called realism at all, because it terminates in perception and not in the real.

---

As to the "intelligibility of nature' example, I think I agree with you since it would be absurd to demand that intelligibility be pointed to as an object of the senses. — Janus

And is it not similarly absurd to ask the indirect realist to point to an instance of direct sensory knowledge? By definition, their position holds that such direct knowledge does not exist. So they might give a counterfactual analysis, "Well, if the world were such that Descartes' belief about direct or indubitable knowledge were correct, and this also held of our sense knowledge, then direct realism would obtain."

One can imagine your creature's physiologist making the "discovery" that half the population sees things upside down, and their philosophers explaining carefully that no, they don't. — Banno

The philosopher would be wrong. The scientist knows best. They're the ones actually studying how the world and perception works.

Not so much. If the smell is only a thing constructed by the mind, then there is no reasons that lemons might not on occasion smell like mint. — Banno

The reason is that physics is mostly deterministic. The same stimulus is going to elicit the same response in the same organism. When taste receptors in the tongue interact with sugar then the same kind of electrical signal is sent to the brain which then processes it in the same sort of way, with the same mental phenomenon occurring as a result.

And if something in the tongue or the brain changes then the mental phenomenon will change.

And if your tongue or your brain is different to mine in the relevant way, then the mental phenomenon you experience when eating lemons will always be different to the mental phenomenon I experience when eating lemons. A lemon's taste to you would always be different to a lemon's taste to me.

See, for example, this:

A 2011 study by Cornwall College found that sprouts contain a chemical, similar to phenylthiocarbamide, which only tastes bitter to people who have a variation of a certain gene. The research found that around 50 per cent of the world’s population have a mutation on this gene. The lucky half don’t taste the bitterness usually associated with sprouts, and therefore like them a whole lot more than everyone else.

Many millennia of being embedded in the world have granted sapiens in particular, and biological sight in general, the ability to receive information from their surroundings, including color. It is because organisms have been in the world and directly interacted with it this whole time that has allowed them to do so. I wager that had perception been at any time indirect, the evolution of perception would not have occurred at all and we’d still possess the perceptual abilities of some Cambrian worm. — NOS4A2

I agree that humans have evolved in synergy with the world over millions of years, and have evolved to survive within this world.

Successful evolution requires that there is a direct causal chain between an event in the world and the human's perception of it, and that this direct causal chain is consistent, in that every time an object in the world emits a wavelength of 500nm the human perceives the colour green. Evolution would fail if when an object emitted a wavelength of 500nm, one time the human perceived the colour green, the next time the colour purple and the next time nothing at all.

However, for the Indirect Realist, what is indirect is the relation between the object that exists in the world and the observer's perception of it.

As I see it, the Direct Realist is proposing that we know the world as it really is, in that if we perceive an object to be green then we know that the object is green.

I don't think that this is a case of semantics for the Direct Realist, in that if we perceive an object to be green then by definition the object is green. I think that the Direct Realist is saying that the object "is" ontologically in fact green.

The Indirect Realist is proposing that we don't know the world as it really is, but only know a representation of it, in that our perception of the colour green is only a representation of the object..

The question for the Direct Realist is, how can they know that the object is really green if their only knowledge of the object has come second-hand through the process of a chain of events, albeit a direct chain of events.

The very notion that perception, globally speaking, distorts reality is incoherent anyway, since it is only via perception that we get any notion of reality. Any supposed reality beyond the possibility of our perceiving it is, since unknowable, completely useless as a point of comparison. — Janus

As I said in my previous comment, you're reading too much into the phrase "distorts reality". That we naively assume that colours and smells and tastes are properties of things like lemons rather than just mental/bodily responses to stimulation isn't that the Standard Model and neuroscience cannot be trusted.

The science shows us that objects are constituted of atoms, that the surface atoms absorb and emit electromagnetic radiation of particular wavelengths, that this electromagnetic radiation stimulates the sense receptors in our eyes, that our eyes send signals to our brains, and that our brains then produce the conscious experience of colour. The science also shows us that in most humans in most lighting conditions, electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength of ~700nm is responsible for the experience of the colour red, but that differences in eye or brain structure can entail the experience of a different colour.

With respect to the epistemological problem of perception that gave rise to the distinction between direct and indirect realism, this is indirect realism.

Direct realism would entail something like A Naïve Realist Theory of Colour, which claims that "colours are mind-independent properties of things in the environment that are distinct from properties identified by the physical sciences" or like primitivism, which claims that "there are in nature colors, as ordinarily understood, i.e., colors are simple intrinsic, non-relational, non-reducible, qualitative properties. They are qualitative features of the sort that stand in the characteristic relations of similarity and difference that mark the colors; they are not micro-structural properties or reflectances, or anything of the sort."

These direct realists views have been refuted by the science of perception (and of the wider world).

They may even say that because we often shape and infuse meaning into sounds the meaning itself is more primary than the sounds. — Leontiskos

And what does "more primary" mean? We are talking about experiential indirection, not some nebulous valuation.

<The sense data is related to the intellect as that by which it understands [, not as that which is understood]> — Leontiskos

I guess this sounds about right.

and your position would not have been called realism at all, because it terminates in perception and not in the real. — Leontiskos

No, there is no termination in my view. We can know things though as many layers of indirection as we like (but never with certainty).

They're the ones actually studying how the world and perception works. — Michael

Direct and indirect realists agree as to the physics and physiology. Their disagreement is not about the science.

That's one of the main issues - that the indirect realist thinks they are giving a scientific account, against the direct realist, while the direct realist is agreeing as to the science but pointing out the grammar.

It's why we keep talking past each other.