It means the perception is not a faithful mirror of the object, and therefore can't be direct. If we're not aware of objects as they are, then we don't have direct awareness. That's the point. — Marchesk

I get the point, but I think it's not a good one. There is no mirroring going on. Why would you expect direct perception to produce faithful reflections? That's so far from my position I'm not sure how to address it.

But to have a perception of an object which is modified in some way (and even fabricated to some extent) from the real-world source of the sensations which precipitated the perception, is most definitely 'indirect'. — Isaac

I think you go wrong here. What exactly is modified? Taking you at your word, you mean the perception is modified. I don't know what this means. The perception is the result of, or is constituted by, modifications of light, electrical impulses, and so on, but that doesn't say anything about a modification of perception or experience as such. Is there a raw, unmodified perception?

I address this in the "Sensation" section of the article:

https://blog.alistairrobinson.me/philosophy-archive/the-argument-for-indirect-realism

By the way, I think my argument here works even if what you meant was that the source is modified in the process of perception, and that the perception is somehow a modification of the object.

Maybe.

No! A belief is not a metal state. — Banno

Yes, I see that now. Maybe I was pandering to the masses.

That's a sad story.

I wanted to take the AI course at university when I first started learning programming but they abandoned it at the last minute and I ended up doing tic-tac-toe in C++.

Yeah, I see linguitics, AI, and cognitive science as areas in which philosophy really makes a difference today.

so I deflect — JoeyB

So we're just deflecting at each other now.

One way you could go is to argue that because it's possible, as far as I know, that I am just a brain in a vat hooked up to some cables, or just an encoded consciousness in your computer, as you described, then there's always some doubt about the reality of reality. There is nothing I can point to that proves definitively that this is not the case.

But in my view, that unfalsifiability is not a strength.

I feel honoured to be have been here at the moment you posted this, possibly the longest post in your forum career. I also agree with it--as far as it goes.

I've just realised this is your forum :lol: I'll see myself out — JoeyB

I'm a benevolent caretaker. Carry on.

EDIT: Welcome to the forum :-)

Disagreement is all right. Don't take it personally.

I think I did answer it. If nothing speaks for your hypothesis, and everything against it, then why am I the one who's gotta do all the proving?

There's a difference between computer science and programming. It's like the difference between pure mathematics and engineering. I'm not educated in computer science but I learned how to code through experience. There's nothing about programming that feels relevant to philosophy, to me. I'm an engineer, or craftsman. For others, doing more comp sci kinds of things, I imagine it's different.

It might be the case that the way I think even in everyday software engineering is somehow useful as a way of training me how to think in a disciplined way that might be helpful for philosophy, but it doesn't really seem that way. When I'm programming, it doesn't feel like I'm thinking as such, as much as it feels like working on an engine with a toolbox. If it feels like thinking at all, it's like thinking with my fingers.

The point was that you cannot be sure you are "a body, which very importantly includes a brain." — JoeyB

I think I can, and I am. And I answered this already.

Now you have something that speaks against it. — JoeyB

No, I think what you've given me is a popular idea from science fiction, which some "pioneers" think might be actually possible, but which we have no reason to think actually is.

That's a surprise. I seem to remember having pretty much the same debate with him since I joined the old forum.

I guess that means I've been making the same arguments for years as well.

How can you be so sure you are a body "which very importantly includes a brain"? — JoeyB

Everything speaks for it, and nothing against it.

Agreed.

It seems you are rather stuck — Marchesk

Coming from the guy who's been making the same arguments for at least 5 years. :wink:

No, I think that's wrong. The widely known fact that dogs don't see colours as we do does not put a dent into anyone's conception of perception.

The difference between computer programming and philosophy is like the difference between making a table and making a sculpture: if you've gone wrong your code will produce an error and your table won't stand up right, but in philosophy and sculpture you never get that: it's harder to tell. In philosophy, there's no agreement as to what the proper objects, settings, and parameters should be in the first place. Philosophy is the practice of trying to work that out.

I suppose I would have thought, in my naivety, that the very fact that the aspect of perception we actually experience is filtered, summarised and condensed, would make it de facto indirect. If not, then I'm lost as to what indirect might be referring to. — Isaac

Allow me to jump in here. Let me use the word perspective to encompass all of this, meaning just the way perception works, given that perception is of things and is not the things themselves. We perceive from a point of view, and in a certain way, as you describe. We cannot perceive otherwise, so what is the asserted or possible non-perspectival perception to oppose your "indirect" to? It looks like Russell's argument that because the light reflected from a rectangular table-top projects a non-rectangular patch on to the retina, perception must be indirect. But would anyone demand that to be direct, the table-top would have to project a rectangular shape on to the retina? Is there actually a naive position that is somehow corrected by the idea that perception happens from a perspective and in a certain way?

A Naïve Realist Theory of Colour by Keith Allen is an example — Michael

Point taken. I'd be interested to read his argument.

What would life be like without a body i.e. you are just a brain/mind/consciousness.

You might find this easier to visualise as;

You are born in a body without any senses. You are kept alive by artificial means, but you don't know it. — JoeyB

When you say "you", you're referring to me, and I am a body, which very importantly includes a brain. Are you presuming, without argument, that I and you are brains or minds first, and only bodies by a lucky accident of evolution?

This post is mostly an attempt to get us closer to disagreeing about the same thing. — fdrake

Beautifully put.

I'm not sure any more. I may come back to it.

Yes, good point, and a good example: was the article even committed to or advocating some positive doctrine called direct or naive realism? I gathered not. — bongo fury

You gathered pretty much right. The article is mostly demolition, not construction. On the other hand, if perception is not generally indirect in any significant sense, or is at least not indirect in the sense that Hume and Russell and others have used, then I guess it's direct. In some sense.

Can't we be questioning mental representations altogether? — bongo fury

Yes please. I only gestured towards that in the article when I mentioned the significance of the debate for cognitive science: computationalism vs embodied/enactivism/connectionism/dynamical systems and all that.

Give me an example.

EDIT: Ah, you edited to give an example. In that case, can you find a relevant quotation?

I'm not sure where the "active relation with the environment" fits in with direct realism's certainty versus indirect's reliance on inference. — Marchesk

Its advocates are in favour of direct more than indirect, but not in some "things are red in themselves" kind of way. That's a caricature of indirect realism's critics.

Sure, but I don't see how that goes against my point. Fire engines are red to most people, if you like. It doesn't matter. The point is not that red is some transcendent fact of the fire engine, but that a perceiver is in an active relation with its environment, in which perception depends on both.

There is probably a spectrum of terms that vary gradually in how much we can conventionally say, "this looks/sounds/tastes X to me" as opposed to "this is X"

No.

I dunno, maybe fdrake can explain things better.

Huh?

The relational approach answers all this. Red things are red, but only to certain perceivers. I don't think you understand my mockery of the question about whether or not the things really are red.

We want to know if the properties present in experience (a red colour, a sweet taste, a round shape) are (independent) properties of external world objects or if they're properties only of the experience (whatever it is that experience is). — Michael

What's wrong with the relational approach, that you and Marchesk might both be familiar with from other posts of mine, about colour realism and other things? Fire engines are red because they have properties that produce the experience of red in human beings, i.e., in perceivers that sense those properties in particular ways. Again, I think this shows how odd the question you're asking actually is.

Perceivers always have a perspective, in a general sense. That's what perceiving is.

Don't give in to the thought: in that case we can't say that fire engines really are red. Reject it. Banish it forever.

The reason for the "venerable folly" of indirect realism is because illusions and hallucinations raise the possibility that perception isn't what we naively take it to be. — Marchesk

But this is not true. Humans have known about these experiences since the earliest times, and we know about them individually from an early age.

Indirect realism is much more historically specific, and has its roots in specific ways of thinking about what it means to perceive, what it means to be a person at all.

It doesn't follow from illusions and hallucinations.

Great post. I guess my angle is to ask why exactly some people have the indirect realist intuitions. I mean, it's not just like ice cream. It's cultural.

This doesn't answer my objection, and merely repeats what I objected to.

Right, but what sort of realist was Kant? He thought there was an external reality of some kind, but we can't say anything positive about it, thus terming it the noumena. — Marchesk

No, that's not what he says. External reality is the stuff we see in everyday life, the empirically real. The noumenal is that which can only be thought, not known in experience. His philosophy is much more subtle than this direct-indirect realist-idealist stuff.

Maybe an alternative would be to propose that perception is a direct awareness of a relationship to an object. — Marchesk

No, it is a relationship to an object, one that constitutes perceptual awareness.

Well, the issue of directness, certainly as played out in the realist vs realist debate, is mostly bypassed by the way I've described perception. One can say perception is direct in that you perceive things directly rather than perceive mental objects or something similar--Gibson's theory is very much pitted against the idea that what we perceive is a model or whatever. One is coupled with one's environment, and what could be more direct than that?

On the other hand, if by direct you mean to perceive something as it is beyond possible experience, yeah, that's not a road that I go down. I want to say that's incoherent.

I find that this kind of talk misses the point. When I paint a person I'm painting a person, not painting paint, and when I write about a battle I'm writing about a battle, not writing about words. So when I see an apple I'm seeing an apple, not seeing an experience. But that doesn't address the epistemological problem of perception. What is the relationship between the paint and the person? What is the relationship between the words and the battle? What is the relationship between experience and the apple? What does it mean for the former in each case to be about the latter in each case, and to what extent is any information given in the former a product of that medium rather than a true, independent, property of its subject?

I brought up blindsight earlier. The body responds to external stimuli in a manner that lacks conscious awareness. What the direct/indirect realist wants to know is the extent to which visual percepts (that thing that's missing in cases of blindsight) "resembles" the external world object that is said to be the object of perception. Simply saying that the external world object is the object of perception or that experience just is the stimulus-response event (one or both of which you and unenlightened seem to be saying) doesn't address this question at all. — Michael

First, "we see room furniture, not head furniture" might not address the point you're interested in here, but it addresses Marchesk's point that what we know of the mechanisms of perception make it impossible that we see only room furniture and not head furniture.

Otherwise, maybe I'm not even interested in the question of how what we see "resembles" the external world. In fact I don't really know what that means. Or rather, I think it's a bad question.

214. What prevents me from supposing that this table either vanishes or alters its shape and colour when on one is observing it, and then when someone looks at it again changes back to its old condition? — “But who is going to suppose such a thing?” — one would feel like saying.

215. Here we see that the idea of 'agreement with reality’ does not have any clear application. — Wittgenstein, On Certainty

Asking how much our perception resembles reality, or gives us information about it, is akin in this context to asking, "what do tables look like, independently of how they look".

The question as to how much the appearance of things is a product of the perceptual medium presumes the possibility of appearance without perception. What you call a medium is what I call the stuff and processes and behaviours that constitute perception.

Answering the question as to how much information we get about things through perception more charitably, I might say things like... quite a lot, it depends, often as much as we need, etc. I don't think this has much to do with the big problem that you see. We don't get much information about the shape of a building without walking around to the back.

But to get to what you're interested in and state my positive position more explicitly: we always perceive under an aspect. We perceive affordances, what is relevant. Perception is a coupling with the environment in ways that depend on perceiver and environment. This might be a form of correlationism and so not as realist as you'd expect, but in the same way that Kant didn't think of himself as an idealist, neither do I.

:up: :mask: :strong:

I realize that this was not directed towards me — creativesoul

Actually it kinda was. :grin:

a state-of-mind reflected in our actions — Sam26

This makes it no different from beliefs in general (reflected in our action or sayings).

I can think of only two ways to interpret the idea that there are linguistic and prelinguistic beliefs:

1. To say that a belief is linguistic is to say that it is somehow made of words, that there are attitudes, comportments, or mental states that have an inherently propositional form, perhaps that they are identifiable thoughts. As if the holder of the belief is talking to himself: "I believe the world existed before I was born". This would be in contrast to prelinguistic, built-in expectations and habits.

2. Or, it means that some beliefs cannot be stated (hence Banno's question).

Both are anti-Wittgenstein. Unless there's another interpretation, the distinction cannot be one that is found in Wittgenstein's thinking.

A belief just is an attitude to the world (or a mental state if you like) when rendered as a statement. Or, as photographer might have said, a post hoc thematization (or maybe it's schematization, not sure). We can say that he believes--or he "has a belief"--that the world existed long before he was born, but in doing so we are not identifying any individuated object, an aspect or element of thought or behaviour that exists prior to its rendering as a statement. What we mean is that he acts in a way that shows he expects such and such to be the case, or just doesn't expect not-such-and-such to be the case.