Yes, to me, internally representing the world begets a representation of the world, something that represents, models, or stands for, the environment. We have a space in which representing occurs (internally), and presumably this representation or act of representation (sight) is the intentional object.
I could be completely wrong; that’s just how I always understood representationalism. — NOS4A2
Instead, I say that our perception of real objects is direct (in a non-naive sense) because perceptions are mental representations. — Luke
The indirect realist opposes the naive realist position, saying that we do not directly perceive a real object but that we directly perceive only a mental representation of the real object. — Luke
We have a space in which representing occurs (internally)….. — NOS4A2
I think that's one of the central axes this debate is happening on. Direct realists in thread seem to see experience/perception as a relationship between the brain and the world that takes place in the world. Michael seems to see experience/perception as a relationship between the brain and the world that takes place in the brain. — fdrake
And then, of course, there are direct realists who view experience/perception as the actualization of a capacity that persons (or animals) have to grasp the affordances of their world. Brains merely are organs that enable such capacities. — Pierre-Normand
The dispute between naive and indirect realists concerns the phenomenal character of experience. You can use the word "experience" to refer to something else if you like but in doing so you're no longer addressing indirect realism. — Michael
That's right. The phenomenal character of experience is something that is constructed and not merely received. The perceiving agent must for instance shift their attention to different aspect of it in order to assess the phenomenal character of their experience. But this is not a matter of closing your eyes and inspecting the content of your visual experience since when you close your eyes, this content vanishes. You must keep your eyes open and while you attend to different aspects of your visual experience, eye saccades, accommodation by the lens, and head movements may be a requirement for those aspects to come into focus. This is an activity that takes place in the world. — Pierre-Normand
I suppose it's also why people have invited you to reconsider the kind of things that can count as direct realism! — fdrake
Edit: removing some laziness in the question. There's the adage that externalism means "meaning ain't just in the head", ecological perception like Gibson sees signs and capacities for acting in nature. Environmental objects themselves are seen as sites of perceptual interaction. — fdrake
claimed (1) that everyday material objects, such as caterpillars and cadillacs, have mind-independent existence (the “realism” part); (2) that our visual perception of these material objects is not mediated by the perception of some other entities, such as sense-data (the “direct” part); and (3) these objects possess all the features that we perceive them to have (the “naïve” part) — https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780195396577/obo-9780195396577-0340.xml
The phenomenal character doesn't take place in the distal world. — Michael
And then, of course, there are direct realists who view experience/perception as the actualization of a capacity that persons (or animals) have to grasp the affordances of their world. Brains merely are organs that enable such capacities. — Pierre-Normand
Not in the distal world; in the world. — Pierre-Normand
The second formulation is the constitutive claim, which says that it introspectively seems to one that the perceived mind-independent objects (and their features) are constituents of the experiential state. Nudds, for instance, argues that ‘visual experiences seem to have the NR [Naïve Realist] property’ (2009, p. 335), which he defines as ‘the property of having some mind-independent object or feature as a constituent’ (2009, p. 334), and, more explicitly, that ‘our experience […] seems to have mind-independent objects and features as constituents’ (2013, p. 271). Martin claims that ‘when one introspects one’s veridical perception one recognises that this is a situation in which some mind-independent object is present and is a constituent of the experiential episode’ (2004, p. 65).
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... Intentionalism typically characterizes the connection between perception (taken as a representative state) and the perceived mind-independent objects as a merely causal one. But if the connection is merely causal, then it seems natural to take the suitable mind-independent objects to be distinct from the experience itself and, therefore, not literally constituents of it.
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