There are many intermediaries between phenomenal experience and, say, a painting on the wall. There's light, the eyes, and the unconscious processing of neural signals. — Michael

Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. I meant phenomenal intermediaries.

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.

I’m on holiday without a computer so posting to TPF is a struggle, and yet this debate always has the power to draw me in. I’ll say something about (1) and might come back to the others some other time, when I can read and quote papers etc.

1. Directness

Here’s an argument…

Directness at its most abstract is the lack of an intermediary between two connected things. Directness in perception can mean two things: the lack of an intermediary in the physical process of perception, or the lack of an intermediary in phenomenal experience. The relevant context is phenomenal experience, and perception phenomenally lacks intermediaries between experiencer and object of experience, therefore perception is direct.

For example, if someone is watching a film it is not at all clear that the sounds are more direct than the story — Leontiskos

To me it is crystal clear. Only by way of the sounds and sights coming from the viewing device do you experience the on screen action of the film. And only by experiencing and interpreting the on screen action do you construe the story. This seems indisputable. — hypericin

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.

The empirical evidence suggests that perception distorts reality. — Michael

The very idea of a perceptual distortion of reality, or even of a distortion of reality per se, is suspect. As far as perception goes, surely only the perception of reality can be distorted—by earplugs or hallucinogenic drugs, for example—rather than reality itself. In other words, the signal can be distorted, but not what is sending the signal (I use this metaphor because it fits my point and because the concepts of distortion and signal go together so nicely–not because I think it's a very good description of perception).

If you mean, e.g., fire engines look red even though they are not red except as perceived by certain creatures like us, this does not amount to any kind of distortion, since the concept of distortion is meaningless without a conceivable neutral and undistorted perception to oppose it to. In this case a neutral and undistorted perception could only be seeing the red fire engine as red, not some super-perception without perspective and particular characteristics.

So I understand perceptual distortion, but I do not understand perceptual “distortion of reality”. So I have to ask: which evidence?

the science shows that this isn't the case — Michael

You haven't shown how. It doesn't.

Do you know O.rang ? — Noble Dust

No, I didn’t know about them :cool:

:up: I like the solo record best but love Laughing Stock too. I don’t listen to the other stuff much any more.

I just watched Color Out of Space from 2019. I loved it. My kind of film. Some people say it’s best to be stoned while watching it, but I say there’s no need, since the film itself is in a sense totally wasted.

(I was told that I was 'bordering on insanity' by one of the mods for bringing it up, speaking of insults.) — Wayfarer

I think @Mikie took you to be repeating your claim that the word “being” refers only to conscious referents. Perhaps he wasn’t right about that—and calling you borderline insane was mildly bad—but it was understandable, because in fact you have conflated the issues.

It is this distinction which I say has been occluded by the fact that physicalist ontology only allows for one kind of fundamental substance, namely, the physical, so it can't allow for an in-principle difference between beings and things, of the kind that Aristotlelian philosophy refers to here. (I was told that I was 'bordering on insanity' by one of the mods for bringing it up, speaking of insults.) — Wayfarer

Okay, so according to Aristotle, for living beings, living constitutes their being. I can go along with that. I don’t know my Aristotle well enough to know if Perl’s interpretation is correct, to the effect that living beings are more beingy than non-living beings, but I can go along with that too if pushed. (It does not, of course, follow that rocks are not beings.)

You’re right that a distinction has been lost in the physicalist paradigm. This is because physicalism has no need for the general concept of being. But it’s crucial, I reckon, not to respond to physicalists by using being in a way that is equally as restrictive as their concept of existence. It’s good to have a general notion that is uncommitted, and that’s what being is. To stick to the grammatically basic meaning is to preserve the non-physicalist notion, even though it doesn’t assert—indeed, partly because it doesn’t assert—anything about consciousness.

There is another example that came up in my reading the other day. In the paralogisms of pure reason in the CPR, Kant argues that the “I think” cannot be said to be a substance, though there is a logical or transcendental subject. I wondered if this was an example of being (transcendental subject) vs. thing (substantial immortal soul).

Good question!

I don’t know, but the fact is that in certain contexts they mean different things. Although being and substance are related and sometimes coincide, the former can refer to a referent more fundamental than the latter. Substance tends to have a more specific meaning:

This conception of substance derives from the intuitive notion of individual thing or object, which contrast mainly with properties and events. — SEP

So in a process metaphysics, you have dynamic beings, as opposed to things—or maybe things are seen as dynamic beings. In any case, I don’t know about the ontological difference, but the words/concepts certainly can be different.

Yep, it’s annoying. The devs won’t change it.

That's basically the only point that was ever at issue in this argument — Wayfarer

No, the point at issue was whether beings are all sentient or conscious. They are not. Only sentient or conscious beings are sentient or conscious. The reason you keep on confusing the issues is that you have not suspended judgement about whether inanimate objects are beings; the difference between beings and things, insofar as there is one (and I think there is) is not about sentience or consciousness.

Didn't mean to be insulting — Wayfarer

Whether you mean to be or not makes no difference. I carefully and politely showed you that you were wrong, and you stuck your fingers in your ears, because of what you want to be true.

but I really don't think it makes sense to declare that anything that exists is 'a being' — Wayfarer

That is how it is used in philosophy, as I showed you, and as anyone with a familiarity with Western metaphysics ought to know.

The only passage about Heidegger that I quoted in this thread was a snippet I found in a Philosophy Now article, to wit: — Wayfarer

I’ve tracked it down. You quoted me in this post and attributed the quotation to Heidegger, which I had clearly not attributed to Heidegger.

Hold on. Who started saying that that quotation was from Heidegger? Whoever it was, now you’ve got me doing it. It’s a quotation about Heidegger.

rocks... are...beings — Mikie

Am I take to it you're pan-psychist? — Wayfarer

On the assumption—no matter how unbelievable and insulting—that you are not joking…

You didn’t complain of Heidegger’s panpsychism when you quoted him saying the same thing (“beings in general—from particles to planets, ants to apes”). As you do know, Mikie is using the term in the way that’s conventional in metaphysics, going back thousands of years and still in use: that which is. It says nothing about consciousness, when used in the standard Western philosophical sense.

Whether there is a difference between beings and things is another matter. I think there is.

If you want to use the popular sense—or the one used in some Eastern philosophy—in the context of Western philosophy, say so openly, and make it clear when you’re doing so.

I don't agree with this, because the a priori intuitions are necessarily "inner" as the conditions for the experience of the outer. The concept of a priori pure intuitions gives primacy to the inner, as the conditions required for the possibility of an experience of an outer. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think I’ve mentioned the tension several times. It’s important to distinguish between (a) a priori concepts and forms of intuition, and (b) inner/outer experience. Although Kant is obviously stuck in a cognitivist and Cartesian paradigm, he is pushing against it in exactly the way I described. Flipping the priority of inner and outer experience is an important aspect of the CPR, expressed first (in A) in the fourth paralogism, and then (in B) in the “Refutation of idealism”. The latter especially is a paradigmatic case of Kant’s transcendental arguments.

(Note that in the following passage, by “idealism” he means Cartesian doubt as to the existence of the external world)

Idealism assumed that the only direct experience is inner expe­rience and that from it we only infer external things; but we infer them only unreliably, as happens whenever we infer determinate causes from given effects, because the cause of the presentations that we ascribe—per­haps falsely—to external things may also reside in ourselves. Yet here we have proved that outer experience is in fact direct, and that only by means of it can there be inner experience . . .

Thus, consequently, inner experience is itself only indirect and is possible only through outer experience. — B 277

I don’t really want to address your other comments except to say that I’ve pointed out many times here that a fundamental difference between the two philosophers is that Kant is all about what’s in your head whereas late Wittgenstein is all about what people do together. (Also, using transcendent to refer to the transcendental without pointing out the potential confusion is dangerous, and may indicate that you’re not clear on Kant’s different uses.)

Your position on this looks a lot like those odd people who turn up here sometimes, loudly calling for the end of belief. They seem to think belief only pertains to belief in God.

faith (n.)
mid-13c., faith, feith, fei, fai "faithfulness to a trust or promise; loyalty to a person; honesty, truthfulness," from Anglo-French and Old French feid, foi "faith, belief, trust, confidence; pledge" (11c.), from Latin fides "trust, faith, confidence, reliance, credence, belief," from root of fidere "to trust,"from PIE root *bheidh- "to trust, confide, persuade." — etymonline.com

Interesting.

Wittgenstein is observing the same limits of 5.557 in both works. The use of "form of life" is not a replacement of a previous schema. — Paine

Are you suggesting that the idea of a form of life is an elaboration of the earlier position?

I don't see your point. He is exactly saying "that cannot be said: it makes itself manifest", right after he has explicitly said it; "there are laws of nature". If you somehow think that he is not saying what he claims cannot be said (hypocrisy), then please explain yourself — Metaphysician Undercover

But he does not explicitly state that “there are laws of nature”. He says we could say “there are laws of nature” if there were a law of causality. He does not say P; P cannot be said. He says If X then we could say P; but we cannot say P.

The quoted passage here is completely nonsensical. — Metaphysician Undercover

blatant hypocrisy — Metaphysician Undercover

utterly ridiculous — Metaphysician Undercover

Because you are deceived by this hypocrisy — Metaphysician Undercover

For fuck’s sake. Check what Wittgenstein actually wrote before you go off on one of your rants:

If there were a law of causality, it might be put in the following way: There are laws of nature.
But of course that cannot be said: it makes itself manifest.

Good story :cool:

while there are plenty of issues here we might discuss, I see Kant as being of little help. — Banno

I think it's a matter of taste. But Kant is indispensable for a discussion about Kant, which is what this is (as well as being a discussion about Wittgenstein).

And the point is not simply that Kant and Wittgenstein used transcendental arguments, but that they used them to the same ends. Or put another way, transcendental arguments are not just arguments of a particular logical form but tend to be motivated in a particular kind of direction: the critique of the legitimacy of metaphysics; more specifically, the critique of transcendence, i.e., wondering if the cup disappears, wondering about noumena; and to flip inner and outer and make what’s outside the head primary.

Together these amount to a transcendental approach that wrestles with global scepticism (neither of them just dismissed it) and challenges the Cartesian and Humean tradition of inner/outer and appearance/reality. I think that’s significant. You on the other hand, with your Wittgensteinian disregard for history, do not. No problem.

Soon I hope to present my thesis that Wittgenstein was a Hegelian. :wink:

Yes, I often say if you want to know about a place, don’t ask a local. Or at least, be very careful who you ask. A few times I’ve seen tourists in Edinburgh being given the most awful advice and information, laden with prejudices, cynicism, and basic ignorance.

British Columbia, Canada is my first choice — 180 Proof

:up:

I’ve been to Vancouver Island a couple of times, would love to live there. I knew someone there who lived off the grid in the forest in a small geodesic dome.

I consider BC to have far too many trees but I could get used to it.

I was being tongue in cheek — fdrake

Ah, I get it now. A @Banno impersonation. Still, good question.

If you do make your way to Norfolk you would be very welcome to visit. — Punshhh

Thanks!

The consensus seems to be that they missed what made the book great.

Good points. It’s a minefield.



Maybe they’re like beliefs, only determined post-hoc. Does it make sense to say that in the moment I was enacting the concepts, such that they were not at that stage concepts at all? But I’d still want to maintain that I was thinking, for no more reason than it really felt like cognitive work.

Sounds promising. I was put off reading it by the crappy film.

I suspect that happiness is mostly about the motivation and energy you bring with you. — Pantagruel

In my experience, largely yes.

We are also considering the Wye Valley — Pantagruel

A very beautiful area.

Alan Partridge, from Norfolk, suggested amalgamating Norfolk and Suffolk to form a new county. Its name would combine the Nor- from Norfolk with the -folk from Suffolk: Norfolk.

This is encouraging. East Anglia here I come.

I’m from the UK. Many years ago I lived in four places there that had the community feel you’re looking for: Fairlie in Ayrshire, Wigan, Stockbridge in Edinburgh (“the village in the city”), and Leith. Only one of those is in England and it’s the wetter part of England. Down where the weather is nice I’ve spent a lot of time around Hastings and Bexhill and like those places very much.

Now I want to move back to the UK too, after an absence of twelve years, but these days I’m less hopeful about finding the community feel and a nice place to live that I can afford. And all you hear from Britain now is how bad everything is—I’m hoping this is because of the way the news is now.

But having been back to visit a few times I do get the impression that Stockbridge, for example, has lost the community feel it once had. Its locally owned shops and cafes are now Tesco, Sainsbury, Starbucks, etc. But that’s in the city and probably to be expected. I’ve also been back to Fairlie, and even though it’s still just a village, it might have lost the community feel as well. There is now nobody in the streets, the houses and gardens are now divided by high hedges—when I lived there they were all open—and there are no shops left. On the other hand, I have associations of community from childhood that just don't apply any more (local shops), and communities may be thriving today but just look different.

In my experience, in the middle and south of England there is a tweely conservative monarchy-loving ultra-parochial cake-baking mindset which might be compatible with community feel but which I find quite horrible (but I guess that’s because I’m a rootless cosmopolitan, mostly Scottish and a bit prejudiced against the English). They're certainly not socialist, but I guess they do like the NHS (which I imagine counts as socialist to a North American).

Oddly enough, although I’m in a country that’s as cold as Canada (Russia), I find the weather here much better than British weather, since winter is proper winter and summers are consistently warm and dry.

Since you’ve chosen England for the weather, of all things, I’m assuming it’s because of the language and culture. In which case, why not Australia or New Zealand?

BTW I’d be very sceptical of what @Sir2u has to say.

On a less related note,
I, for one, don't think in language but in images. I can't imagine what it is like to think in language, if someone tells me to imagine a golden mountain, I picture a mountain coloured over in bright yellow. — Lionino

I always assumed everyone did both. To imagine is, after all, to form a mental image. I suppose people who can’t do this just somehow think of the concept, by putting a word to it.

So, sometimes images, sometimes words—and sometimes concepts. There are pure concepts in mind when a jazz musician is improvising (I know; I’ve done it), such as tension and release, growth and decay, entropy, yearning, etc. They may be in some sense linguistic, but they’re not mentally articulated in (mental) words (which was what I meant by “pure”). I think in these cases one only properly identifies them later, using mental words.

But as you say, this is somewhat off the topic.

Well, I don't see the need even for an "object" at this point. We have the subject, and the subject's relations to what is outside, or external, to it. The supposition of "objects" or "an object" appears to be a tool of the learning process, we individuate the outside, distinguishing objects which can be named and spoken about. The individuation is based in the temporal extension, continuity of sameness, which validates an object with an identity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Davidson distinguishes three kinds of knowledge: subjective, intersubjective, and objective, and he doesn’t reduce any of these to any of the others. Intersubjective knowledge is not just a subset of objective knowledge or subjectivity multiplied but is something else: knowledge of other minds. Objective knowledge is knowledge of the world that the subject shares with others (or rather, that the subjects share), which has a bunch of objects in it.

I’ll avoid your other thorny issues.

I like this image. I believe it is important to understand that the learning process, therefore knowledge in general, begins in our relationships with others, mother, father, and other authority figures. This knowledge is developed through the use of words, therefore the "outer experience" gains primacy in our knowledge. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. Wittgenstein and Davidson are much closer to your way of putting it than Kant is, since they emphasize other people, whereas Kant is thinking about the lonely subject perceiving objects. Davidson adds another element to make it a three-way relation, a "triangulation" ...

. . . that requires two creatures. Each interacts with an object, but what gives each the concept of the way things are objectively is the base line formed between the creatures by language. — Davidson, Rational Animals

So instead of subject and object you have an object plus at least two persons who share a language.

So I see Kant as pioneering this approach while being unable to escape his philosophical milieu entirely.

I'm afraid that far more scholarship would be required to carry the point in either direction. — Banno

Yep. Nevertheless, I can say a few things in support of the OP, even if they're far more vague and suggestive than is required to carry the point.

First, I'm not saying that Wittgenstein is a Kantian philosopher or that he is in a unique position in taking a transcendental approach. What I’m thinking is that there is a resemblance between Kant and (late) Wittgenstein, at least along a certain dimension. I think it’s something like a historical point. I'm saying that Kant prefigured Wittgenstein or laid the groundwork, in ways that might be under-appreciated. He was ahead of his time, and more than he knew; without the rationalist baggage, Kant is more contemporary than is often thought, not least because he was one of the first to push back against the Cartesian tradition (which is an important aspect of the transcendental in the hands of Kant).

This matters to me personally because I keep noticing that Kant and Wittgenstein, in similar ways, help me in thinking about things like appearance and reality, sceptical doubt, direct and indirect realism, perception, and related issues. I'm trying to identify why this is so.

I take the important and controversial question to be how Wittgenstein’s late philosophy can be transcendental given that it’s significantly anthropological and seemingly empirical, and given that he specifically cautions against the identification of, and the search for, necessity and universality (and by implication, the a priori).

I call transcendental all cognition that deals not so much with objects as rather with our way of cognizing objects in general insofar as that way of cognizing is to be possible a priori. — Kant, CPR, B 25

For Kant this is about synthetic a priori knowledge via concepts, but I think it can be about other things while remaining transcendental.

There are other ways to put it. A transcendental investigation investigates ...

• The a priori conditions of experience
• The most general conditions of experience
• The conditions of the possibility of experience (or of knowledge, practices, etc.)
• What it is that "stands fast" for us
• The limits of reason.

Crucially too, the transcendental is anti-sceptical, and not just as a pleasant side-effect. This is seen at various points in the CPR (the Transcendental Deduction of the categories, the Refutation of Idealism, and the fourth Paralogism in the first edition). Generally what we get is the idea that it doesn't make sense to say that objects as we perceive and know them are such apart from those conditions (there is a sense in which Kant's transcendental idealism is almost a tautology: you cannot experience something except in the way you must experience it). Since I'm more familiar with OC than PI, I wouldn't mind pursuing this angle ("Here we see that the idea of 'agreement with reality' does not have any clear application.").

There is debate over whether late Wittgenstein identifies a priori conditions. Here's one way of looking at it:

Rather than being denied, the concept of the a priori is placed firmly on its feet in the later works. This concrete a priori no longer centers about a Kantian transcendental subjectivity. Here it defines a concrete form of life in a particular world rather than a transcendental consciousness. One must envision the a priori as arising in experience rather than being imposed upon experience. — G. D. Conway, Wittgenstein on Foundations

Whether or not that works (how is it a priori if it arises in experience?) Wittgenstein has this in common with other twentieth century thinkers, e.g., Foucault with his historical a priori. Foucault himself is doing transcendental philosophy in that he is investigating intersubjective conditions of the possibility of our societal practices, even though these conditions are not to be seen as universal and fixed. But interestingly, he also argued that Kant had already done something similar. In his essay introducing Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Foucault argues (I think) that after the CPR Kant began to locate the transcendental in the empirical subject, thus bringing the two poles, empirical and transcendental, together. And the move to anthropology notably parallels the direction of Wittgenstein's thinking from the 1930s on.

So what is the transcendental argument Wittgenstein uses, Jamal? "Thus, from the fact that we are able to make such statements meaningfully, the existence of a community of others that ‘fix’ this rule can be inferred, as a necessary pre-condition for the former..."? — Banno

Sure. Or how about the following, which is Davidson's summary of the private language argument:

. . . unless a language is shared, there is no way to distinguish between using the language correctly and using it incorrectly; only communication with another can supply an objective check. — Davidson, Three Varieties of Knowledge

Which I take to be equivalent to: distinguishing between using the language correctly and using it incorrectly is possible if and only if language is shared.

And thus we reach our social practices and the form of life that language is embedded within. What are you asking for when you ask how form(s) of life "cashes out"?

Similar to Wittgenstein (and Davidson's "triangulation"), Kant transcendentally flipped inner and outer experience to give primacy to the latter, i.e., to the experience of the "external world" as opposed to self-knowledge and self-consciousness. Descartes and his followers, both rationalist and empiricist, assumed that...

. . . our self-awareness is a given, that our sensory states are exactly what they appear to us to be, and that the philosophical task is to see what else, if anything, we can know on this basis by logical deduction from this presumed evidence base. — K. R. Westphal, Kant, Wittgenstein, and Transcendental Chaos

Notice that this is the basic rationale for epistemology as first philosophy. But with self-awareness demoted, that's called into question.

I think Kant and Wittgenstein demonstrate an anthropological tendency while retaining a transcendental motivation. Whether it carries the point, I hope all this does something to support the view that late Wittgenstein is significantly transcendental, and that ...

the locus of his new kind of transcendental philosophy is ultimately taken out of the head and placed in social practices. — Jamal

(The unmentioned intermediary point being the Tractatus: the locus in language and/or logic.)

Of course, there's a lot of detail missing here.

:cool:

Let us know what it's like.

José Saramago — javi2541997

Yesterday I got a copy of Saramago's The Cave. I don't know when I'll get around to reading it.

All the Names — javi2541997

I'm intrigued by the premise.