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.

This is really funny. I’m listening to the birds, the sounds of nature. Who does that? — Becky

I do, even here in the centre of a big city.

Interesting post Graeme.

But thanks for reading it @Marchesk :smile:

BTW, a lot of these criticisms are answered in the article or in the ensuing discussion that happened when it was first published years ago. I don't know if I'll join in here much this time around. It's not the article I would write today and although I'm still interested in perception, this direct/indirect stuff is pretty boring--and confusing for just about everyone involved.

Some direct realist might be tempted to deny the perception depicted in the head and say there's just the dude seeing the furniture. But that's an impossibility given how perception works. The senses are stimulated by various things in the environment which the brain makes sense of, resulting in the experience we have of interacting with the world. — Marchesk

Think about this some more, because it's the key to what I think is your misunderstanding.

Of course, I deny the furniture in the head: there's just the dude seeing the furniture.

Crucially, this is not in any way incompatible with this description: "The senses are stimulated by various things in the environment which the brain makes sense of, resulting in the experience we have of interacting with the world."

Taking "brain makes sense of" as a metaphor or shorthand, that's a reasonable, if impoverished, description of what goes on when we see furniture. But we still see room furniture, not head furniture.

That might work. You're welcome to send it in for us to see it.

That's very long.

You see as a result of a process leading to neural activity in your brain. Call it what you like, but that result is not the object. How could it be? — Marchesk

Are you sure you read the article? :lol:

Thank you.

Quit trolling. If you have nothing to say about the topic, shut it.

I can make a change to the template so that the copyright on articles shows the author instead of The Philosophy Forum as it does now. I'm not sure what else we can do regarding copyright.

1000wordphilosophy.com looks great, but personally I don't think we need to restrict articles to 1000 words.

Believe it or not many people want to work, not just out of necessity, but because it provides purpose, dignity, and fulfillment. — NOS4A2

Yes.

Capitalism would, I think, allow the freedom to choose which profession or trade they'd like to pursue — NOS4A2

No.

Currently a rather pricey $53 from Amazon

Her book on On Certainty is very good too.

Danièle Moyal-Sharrock — Sam26

The best interpreter of Wittgenstein I've found.