Do we perceive the intermediaries or the distal stimulus? The intermediaries are part of the "mechanics of perception"; they are not the perceived object. — Luke
Nobody has ever thought that fire engines are red in the dark — Jamal
Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. I meant phenomenal intermediaries. — Jamal
I'd say there is ample evidence of perception and thinking being entangled. — wonderer1
Phenomenal experience is the intermediary — Michael
I think the very idea of an intermediary is a red herring. — frank
Yes, perhaps. I meant it as an intermediary between the "thinking" aspect of consciousness (that interprets and makes use of phenomenal experience) and the external world.
So perhaps it is more accurate to say that we are directly cognisant of phenomenal experience and through that indirect cognizant of distal objects. — Michael
Sometimes I see a rabbit, sometimes I see a duck. A duck is not a rabbit. Therefore, is it the case that sometimes I see one distal object and sometimes I see another? No; the distal object is the same. — Michael
In this context "seeing a rabbit" and "seeing a duck" has less to do with the distal object and more to do with my brain's interpretation of the sensory input. — Michael
Otherwise, it just boils down to an ambiguity in the meaning of "perceive", with one camp taking it to refer to perceiving real objects and the other camp taking it to refer to the way those objects are perceived and the contents of our phenomenal experience. — Luke
In what sense are they not? — Luke
Phenomenal experience doesn't extend beyond the body. Distal objects exist beyond the body. Therefore, distal objects are not present in phenomenal experience. Distal objects are a cause of phenomenal experience, but that's it. — Michael
In phenomenal experience, it’s crystal clear to me that when I hear spoken language, I directly hear words, questions, commands, and so on—generally, people speaking—and only indirectly if at all hear the sounds of speech as such (where “indirect” could mean something like, through the intellect or by an effort of will). Our perceptual faculties produce this phenomenal directness in response to the environment and our action in it.
Maybe an example from vision is less controversial. When you walk around a table, you don’t see it metamorphose as the shape and area of the projected light subtending your retina changes. On the contrary, you see it as constant in size and shape.
1. Their notion of directness, seldom stated and even seldomer relevant or coherent.
2. Their notions of “as it is” and “what it's really like.”
4. Their motivation: where they’re coming from is really unclear.
Your criterion for a direct perception seems to be that the perception must be identical with the physical object. By that standard, no perception can be direct.
If I take a photograph of a flower, then the flower is in the photograph. — Luke
Distal objects are present in phenomenal experience in the same sense.
By that standard, no perception can be direct. — Luke
But of course the noumenal isn't actually said to to only act/exist in-itself, it's said to act on us, to cause. So we know it through its acts, but then this is said to not be true knowledge. How so? — Count Timothy von Icarus
There has to be a way to distinguish between fantasy and fiction, between Narnia and Canada. So, to simply say that dragons and gorillas both come from mind is to miss something that differentiates them. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Is the claim that something only has "ontological existence" if it is "mind independent?" Wouldn't everything that exists have ontological existence? — Count Timothy von Icarus
So the concept cat only has to do with humans and nothing outside them? I just don't find this plausible. This would seem to lead to an all encompassing anti-realism. — Count Timothy von Icarus
In anti-realism, the truth of a statement rests on its demonstrability through internal logic mechanisms, such as the context principle or intuitionistic logic, in direct opposition to the realist notion that the truth of a statement rests on its correspondence to an external, independent reality. In anti-realism, this external reality is hypothetical and is not assumed.
It is true that, in the case of translation too, we have the problem of underdetermination since the translation of the native’s sentences is underdetermined by all possible observations of the native’s verbal behaviour so that there will always remain rival translations which are compatible with such a set of evidence.
Wittgenstein pointed out that if language is defined as something used to communicate between two or more people, then, by that definition, you can't have a language that is, in principle, impossible to communicate to other people. — Count Timothy von Icarus
In §243 of his book Philosophical Investigations explained it thus: “The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know — to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.” ............Wittgenstein goes on to argue that there cannot be such a language.
No it's not. The flower is on the ground. The photograph is in my pocket. The photograph is just a photosensitive material that has chemically reacted to light. — Michael
Distal objects are present in phenomenal experience in the same sense.
Which is not a direct sense. It's an indirect sense. — Michael
You really are just describing indirect realism but refusing to call it that. — Michael
Direct Realist Presentation: perceptual experiences are direct perceptual presentations of ordinary objects.
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Direct Realist Character: the phenomenal character of experience is determined, at least partly, by the direct presentation of ordinary objects.
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On [the naive realist] conception of experience, when one is veridically perceiving the objects of perception are constituents of the experiential episode. The given event could not have occurred without these entities existing and being constituents of it; in turn, one could not have had such a kind of event without there being relevant candidate objects of perception to be apprehended. So, even if those objects are implicated in the causes of the experience, they also figure non-causally as essential constituents of it... Mere presence of a candidate object will not be sufficient for the perceiving of it, that is true, but its absence is sufficient for the non-occurrence of such an event. The connection here is [one] of a constitutive or essential condition of a kind of event.
I have basically less than zero sympathy for the positions of Michael, @hypericin and their ilk. I’m aware there are still some philosophers around who tend to kind of agree with them, and I know that there do exist non-stupid ways of arguing for indirect realism. Even so, the position seems really weird to me. What I have the most trouble with are four things:
1. Their notion of directness, seldom stated and even seldomer relevant or coherent.
2. Their notions of “as it is” and “what it's really like.”
3. Their constant appeals to science, which are bewildering.
4. Their motivation: where they’re coming from is really unclear. — Jamal
At the very least we can apply modus tollens and simply say that if phenomenal experience is not reliable then these direct realists are wrong, even without having to ask what they actually mean by "direct presentation". — Michael
The idea is that there is some alternative vantage point which is more fundamental than phenomenal experience, and which makes inferences based on the phenomenal experience. — Leontiskos
There is. There's rational interpretation. — Michael
So, even if [1] those objects are implicated in the causes of the experience, [2] they also figure non-causally as essential constituents of it — SEP
Under any ordinary reading, the flower is not "directly presented in" or "a constituent of" the photo. The photo is just a photosensitive surface that has chemically reacted to light.
A curious kind of identity occurs in pictures. A picture does not simply present something that looks like the thing depicted. The thing pictured is not just similar to the thing itself. It is identically and individually the same, not just similar. Suppose I have a picture of Dwight D. Eisenhower on my desk. The figure in the picture is Dwight Eisenhower himself (as pictured). It is not merely similar to Eisenhower, as his brother or son, or someone else from Kansas who happens to look like him might be. Dwight Eisenhower’s brother is similar to him, but he is not a picture of him. Similarity alone does not make something a picture. Picturing involves individual identity, not just similarity
But, you may say, the picture really is not Dwight Eisenhower; he has been dead for many a year. The picture is really only a piece of paper. Of course, the two are different entities, different substances;but when we take them that way, we are not taking them as picture and pictured. We are taking them just as things. Once we get into the logic of pictures and appearances, something else happens, and we have to report the phenomenon as it is, not as we would wish it to be. In the metaphysics of picturing, in the metaphysics of this kind of appearance, the thing pictured and Dwight Eisenhower are identically the same. The picture presents or represents that man; it does not present something just similar to him.
We should also note that the picturing relationship is one-sided. The photograph pictures Eisenhower, but Eisenhower does not picture the photograph. This is another way in which picturing differs from mere similarity, which is a reciprocal relationship. If Dwight Eisenhower’s brother is similar to him, he also is similar to his brother, but Eisenhower is not a picture of his image. Why not? I cannot give you a reason, but I know that it could not be otherwise. Neither can I give you a reason why things have predicates, but I know that they do have them when they are spoken about. Such necessities are involved in the metaphysics of appearance.
We should also note that picturing is an exhibition of intelligence or reason. To depict something is not just to copy it but to identify it and to think about it. It does not just make the thing present; it also brings out what that thing is.
Robert Sokolowski - Phenomenology of the Human Person
[The] particular expression of intentional existence—intentional species existing in a material medium between cogniser and cognised thing— will be our focus...
In order to retrieve this aspect of Aquinas’ thought today we must reformulate his medieval understanding of species transmission and reception in the terms of modern physics and physiology.11 On the modern picture organisms receive information from the environment in the form of what we can describe roughly as energy and chemical patterns. 12 These patterns are detected by particular senses: electromagnetic radiation = vision, mechanical energy = touch, sound waves = hearing, olfactory and gustatory chemicals = smell and taste.13 When they impinge on an appropriate sensory organ, these patterns are transformed (‘transduced’ is the technical term) into signals (neuronal ‘action potentials’) in the nervous system, and then delivered to the brain and processed. To illustrate, suppose you walk into a clearing in the bush and see a eucalyptus tree on the far side. Your perception of the eucalypt is effected by means of ambient light—that is, ambient electromagnetic energy—in the environment bouncing off the tree and taking on a new pattern of organisation. The different chemical structure of the leaves, the bark, and the sap reflect certain wavelengths of light and not others; this selective reflection modifies the structure of the energy as it bounces off the tree, and this patterned structure is perceived by your eye and brain as colour....
These energy and chemical patterns revealed by modern empirical science are the place that we should locate Aquinas’ sensory species today.14 The patterns are physical structures in physical media, but they are also the locus of intentional species, because their structure is determined by the structure of the real things that cause them. The patterns thus have a representational character in the sense that they disperse a representative form of the thing into the surrounding media. In Thomistic perception, therefore, the form of the tree does not ‘teleport’ into your mind; it is communicated through normal physical mechanisms as a pattern of physical matter and energy.
The interpretation of intentions in the medium I am suggesting here is in keeping with a number of recent readers of Aquinas who construe his notion of extra-mental species as information communicated by physical means.18 Eleonore Stump notes that ‘what Aquinas refers to as the spiritual reception of an immaterial form . . . is what we are more likely to call encoded information’, as when a street map represents a city or DNA represents a protein. 19... Gyula Klima argues that ‘for Aquinas, intentionality or aboutness is the property of any form of information carried by anything about anything’, so that ‘ordinary causal processes, besides producing their ordinary physical effects according to the ordinary laws of nature, at the same time serve to transfer information about the causes of these processes in a natural system of encoding’.22
The upshot of this reading of Aquinas is that intentional being is in play even in situations where there is not a thinking, perceiving, or even sensing subject present. The phenomenon of representation which is characteristic of knowledge can thus occur in any physical media and between any existing thing, including inanimate things, because for Aquinas the domain of the intentional is not limited to mind or even to life, but includes to some degree even inanimate corporeality.
This interpretation of intentions in the medium in terms of information can be reformulated in terms of the semiotics we have retrieved from Aquinas, Cusa, and Poinsot to produce an account of signs in the medium. On this analysis, Aquinas’ intentions in the medium, which are embeded chemical patterns diffused through environments, are signs. More precisely, these patterns are sign-vehicles that refer to signifieds, namely the real things (like eucalyptus trees) that have patterned the sign-vehicles in ways that reflect their physical form.24 It is through these semiotic patterns that the form of real things is communicated intentionally through inanimate media. This is the way that we can understand, for example, Cusa’s observation that if sensation is to occur ‘between the perceptible object and the senses there must be a medium through which the object can replicate a form [speciem] of itself, or a sign [signum] of itself ’ (Comp. 4.8). This process of sensory semiosis proceeds on my analysis through the intentional replication of real things in energy and chemical sign-patterns, which are dispersed around the inanimate media of physical environments
Sokolowski's real focus in thought and language though, not perception. He goes on to elucidate how names, words, and syntax, are used intersubjectively to present the intelligibility of objects. Roughly speaking, the intelligibility of an object is exactly what we can truthfully say about it, what can be unfolded through the entire history of "the human conversation." — Count Timothy von Icarus
The patterns thus have a representational character in the sense that they disperse a representative form of the thing into the surrounding media. — Count Timothy von Icarus
The idea is that there is some alternative vantage point which is more fundamental than phenomenal experience, and which makes inferences based on the phenomenal experience. — Leontiskos
In what sense is inferred knowledge direct knowledge?
I think there is a more general concern that the "indirect" term is smuggling dualism in. — Count Timothy von Icarus
And I think this is where demands to define "indirect" in terms of physical interactions becomes relevant. Perhaps there is some way to demarcate direct and indirect physical processes, although I am skeptical of this. — Count Timothy von Icarus
This is the important part. — Michael
...if [2] is false then the epistemological problem of perception remains. — Michael
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