What needs to be explained is the meaning of "direct". — Michael

'Direct' should be read as inindirect, a negation or cancelling of the original mistake. Cut out the middle man. Sweep away the metaphysical cobwebs.

I'm curious whether that description of naive realism was written by a naive realist. It's possible. But I prefer my approach in its simplicity. 'Experience' might be a misleading word here. It's fine for ordinary use.

I see snow through my window. I talk about the snow, say that it is white. This snow is in our world.

consciousness, whatever it is, doesn't extend beyond the brain, and so it's physically impossible for an apple and its properties to be "present" in my conscious experience. It might be causally responsible for conscious experience, but that's all it can physically be. — Michael

Consciousness (the semantically slippery eel) seems to extend to distant stars in some sense, or astronomy is bunk.

I say forget about internal theaters and secret screens. The apple is in the world. Yes, we know that light bounces off the apple and hits the retina. This is why it's so important to go back to conceptual norms. Which apples are we talking and therefore thinking about ? The one we may eat, the one that may be poisoned. We make claims about our shared world. Concepts play a social role. Worrying about images is a distraction. Anything totally private can play no role in science or philosophy.

Regardless, Direct Realism is the position that private experiences are direct presentations of objects existing in a mind-independent world, not about the nature of language. — RussellA

Respectfully, I claim that you don't yet understand the position. 'Mind-independent world' is potentially nonsensical, almost definitely misleading. 'Private experiences' too.


This resource offers what I am talking about (or close enough).

Direct realism, also known as naïve realism or common sense realism, is a theory of perception that claims that the senses provide us with direct awareness of the external world. In contrast to this direct awareness, indirect realism and representationalism claim that we are directly aware only of internal representations of the external world.
...
Direct realists might claim that indirect realists are confused about conventional idioms that may refer to perception. Perception exemplifies unmediated contact with the external world; examples of indirect perception might be seeing a photograph, or hearing a recorded voice. Against representationalists, direct realists often argue that the complex neurophysical processes by which we perceive objects do not entail indirect perception. These processes merely establish the complex route by which direct awareness of the world arrives. The inference from such a route to indirectness may be an instance of the genetic fallacy.

https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Direct_realism


There's just the world, friend. And we talk about things in the world. It's that simple. No need for folk psychology. Just look at how we do philosophy, how we make our cases.

It's a lifeworld, not a green vertically scrolling source code that we paint colors and smells and values on. Instead we shatter the 'original' unity of this symbolically articulated lifeworld for various practical purposes ---- and because some wacky philosophers talked us into it.

If I was the blind leading the blind, i would speak of the un-touched toucher, or the unfelt feeling, the still small voice, the inner warmth, the beating heart, or some other relation, that we might share in our solitary awarenesses. — unenlightened

:up:

the mind needs information from the other side of our senses — RussellA

Let me stop you there at the heart of our disagreement. The self is not 'behind' the senses or its data. The self is (I claim) a discursive performance of the body, a creative appropriation of community norms. The self is a way that a body acts in a society of other such selves. The self is a body that is trained to track itself for decency and the coherence of its claims and (in some cultures) for the amplification of its autonomy. This self is mostly inherited and reconstituted community 'software', including especially a language in which selves make sense, in both senses of the phrase. I mean we understand selves (make sense of them) as origins of claims (and other less symbolic deeds) for which they are then held responsible. Part of our training involves learning to apply concepts properly (within claims).

Are you saying the Universe didn't exist for the 13.8 billion years before humans appeared on Earth, 315,000 years ago ? — RussellA

I trust the latest models well enough. Now we can endlessly clarify what it might mean to say so --- and what 'the world as it in itself' is supposed to mean.

Are you saying you have no private experiences, you stub your toe and feel no pain ? — RussellA

No, it's not that. The point is that concepts are public norms. The concept pain doesn't get its meaning from private experience. Bots have already learned how to use the concept pain from reading examples. It's all there in the linear structure of the dead traces we humans left on the web for it. Deaf people can understand the concept of color. Blind people can understand the concept of sound.

Which world are you referring to, the world as we perceive it, or the world as it is independent of our perception of it. — RussellA

Neither ? Either answer will feed into exactly the presupposition I'm challenging. There's just the world, our world, the one we talk about. Inasmuch as we are philosophers, we impose on shared semantic norms. To deny our world as a philosopher is to engage in a performative contradiction.

That we have to use language to talk about perception isn't that when talking about perception we talk about language. — Michael

I'm saying that as philosophers we are negotiating conceptual norms (by appealing to them), arguing for the rational and proper way to apply concepts (for instance, the concept of perception).

I agree with you that, explicitly, the talk is about perception. I suggest that implicitly, it's just as much (or also, or equivalently ) about how to use the concept perception properly, such as deciding when its application is warranted.

The problem of perception concerns making sense of 1), not 2). — Michael

I see the difference between 1 and 2. We can talk about other things than talking, but we are still talking about those other things, making claims, asking questions.

Can you give me an example of sensemaking which isn't linguistic ? Doesn't involve claims ?

Good. Then can you finally stop talking about language and start talking about seeing? — Michael

To talk about seeing is just as much to talk about talk about seeing. Concepts are norms. To talk about seeing is to link the concept of seeing with other concepts inferentially.

..

I can see things without saying anything, and without performing any covert action that others can recognize. Even if it's not private in principle, it's private in practice. — Michael

Of course. But who ever denied it ? I already said that humans don't always have to apply concepts when they see. Babies can just grab the red block and not the blue. Differential responsiveness can even be attributed to thermostats and smoke detectors.

I don't "mutter" to myself when I think. I just think. The mute can think. — Michael

I'm not phonocentric. So we can just talk about sign language if you want. We can think of claims as equivalence classes (they can be spoken or signed or written, etc.)

But what's the point ? How is this related to my claim that concepts are norms ?

Let me also say that these norms are very much liquid and self-referential. Philosophy is something like the questioning of these norms within these norms (Neurath's boat.)

Exact synchronic snapshots look to be impossible. Writing dictionaries is hard uncertain work.

You can say that thinking of a number is reducible to brain activity if you want. — Michael

I'm not claiming that. The concept of thinking gets its meaning from norms governing inferences. That's my thesis.

The point is that it involves no overt action that ordinary humans going about their ordinary lives cannot recognize as happening. — Michael

Sure. As a practical matter, for now, you can mutter to yourself so quietly that nobody hears what you say.

Thinking is a minimal kind of talking, basically. [This was phonocentric, sorry. A person using signlanguage might minimally wiggle their hands, etc. ]

As a simple example, I can think of a number and not tell you (or anyone). I don't have to perform any kind of overt action to do this. I just think it.

Do you accept this? — Michael

I claim that 'just thinking' a number not truly but only relatively immaterial and private. Artificial intelligence is learning to read 'internal' monologues (tiny throat movements, etc.) and record dreams.

What's a concept? All you appear to have done is replaced the notion of phenomenal character with that of cognition. I'm not sure how that helps you avoid the "private" aspect that you take so much issue with. — Michael

Deep question ! My (cobbled together) oversimplified tentative view is that concepts are norms.

Concepts are norms we perform, norms we embody. They are not semantic atoms. Instead it's claims that claim this role, for a claim is the minimum 'piece of meaning' that I can be held responsible for. Claims are inferentially related, and concepts get their meaning from the role they play in this inferential structure. Forget anything immaterial or private. Instead watch discursive primates trade symbols and gestures and deeds (all 'material') with a maddening complexity that allows for dazzling self-reference --what we as philosophers are doing now, talking about talking about talking.

To be a discursive primate (have a self) is to be held to a coherence norm. The totality of claims which I am held responsible for ought not contain contradictions. I can disagree with you. I cannot (or rather ought not) disagree with myself.

Then I think it's disingenuous of you to characterise your position as being direct realism. — Michael

I don't know. I said I was a postHegelian direct realist. I claim that we talk about the tree and not an image of the tree.

Sellars or Brandom would distinguish between (for instance) smoke detectors and parrots and human beings. All can react differentially to smoke. The detector beeps. The parrot 'says' smoke. The human applies the concept smoke. The crucial move from parrot to human is the inferential relationship of the concept smoke with other concepts. 'There's smoke, so we should make sure the house is not on fire.' Or 'I had this crazy fear on my walk that our house was burning down, but I got to our block and didn't see smoke. What a relief!'

I have no objection to uses of the word 'see' that don't involve the application of concepts. I don't see why humans can't operate (for various reasons) at the level of a parrot. A baby might be trained to reach for a blue and not a red block.

In these cases I wonder if they're making a solid point that I'm just not getting, or if they simply don't understand what we mean. — Jamal

:up:

"perception can't be linguistic because I can see things without saying anything," — Jamal's example objection 1

This objection I understand more, given the ambiguity of 'perception.'

But it seems to assume also the possibility of a folk psychology where only one scientist gets to look at the data (yikes!) , except there's a background assumption going back at least to Aristotle that saves the day.

Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all... — Ari

Cooperation-enabling signtrading is here explained 'by' elusive immaterial private Experiences. (In other words, by magic!) Aristotle doesn't even see the issue. Note also the naked phonocentrism. So much of spoken language appeals to the eye (think of spoken metaphors as liquified hieroglyphs poured in the ear).

"language cannot be social because if I were stranded on a desert island I'd still be able to talk and read." — Jamal's example objection 2

This objection does seem to miss the point. The sociality of meaning is already in with our castaway. Our castaway (mostly) 'is' this social meaning, like downloaded software on a computer contingently offline (the self is not the legs but the dance). As the DNA of the castaway stores or 'is' the 'experience' of ancestors, so the training of the castaway's embodied mind 'is' primarily tribal software, inherited habitus, though not without a uniqueness within the limits of sanity.

But then tell me I am missing the point? — Fooloso4

The background can be sketched, as simply and clearly as possible. — Fooloso4

If you mean the background can be sketched as well as it can be sketched, well sure.

If you mean the background can be made simple and clear, you are missing the point. One is the background, and one is terribly complex and not so good at seeing what one is.

"Thought is proper to man alone – not, however, to man only as an isolated individual subject; we have to look at thought as essentially objective." This Hegel quote can be framed in terms of 'material' meaning, patterns in our 'physical' embodied signtrading. Sentences are screwdrivers. Paragraphs are pelicans.

We don't learn to ride a bike from an instruction manual. We climb on and try to stay that way. Conversation requires the mastery of a mountain of tacit norms and receding yet enabling appropriate comportment.

philosophy strikes me as an ongoing discussion over the nature of reality. — Arne

:up:

We might want to add a normative dimension to this, such as what separates philosophy from less organized and serious discussions of what is.

.

I’ve almost never been impressed by attempts to explain Heidegger’s notions of conscience or authenticity, and this is no exception. — Mikie

:up:

That's maybe the murkiest stuff in B&T.

Seems to me that morals are easier to exemplify (post hoc) than to generalize into concise laws. It's about concern. — jorndoe

:up:

Phronesis ? More skill than spiel ?

Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation of the matter. Idle talk, which everyone can snatch up, not only divests us of the task of genuine understanding, but develops an indifferent intelligibility for which nothing is closed off any longer. — plaque flag

This is the reduction of (the masking or covering up of ) the iffy and uncanny to / with comfortable banalities. Idle talk is gossip that levels, that smooths over, offering an excuse for one to believe that one already knows, for one [das Man] does already know, always. For one is curious and educated and has an industry that makes things easy for one. One is a tourist who has seen it all, eager to rattle off a catalogue of classifications, like a student in anatomy class. One knows that anything worth hearing is easily heard, anything worth saying easily said. One knows that one is a serious and practical and decent das-Man-of-the-world. Was ist das--die Philosophie?

Is Heidegger original here ? No. Not exactly here. But it's part of the quilt, and embodying norms as founded in aconceptual competence / comportment is newish. (?) [ To me sniffing out the origin of the origin of the organ is of finite allure.] One has a thick 'positive' kind of existence as our dummy unquestioning default mode, our foundational anti-Socrates, the part of us that fucking hates philosophy. Turns out that a young Socrates was on the jury that convicted the old Socrates, but he didn't recognize himself with the beard. Time travel stuff.

If I were a Nazi, I would want to be the best Nazi possible. Otherwise, why bother? — Joshs

<grin>
I do appreciate a dark sense of humor.

One reason I like the above line of thought is that I find it so much more satisfying, intellectually and philosophically, than, to be blank, religion’s fairy tales. And I think it may even be a true and accurate picture of reality. — Art48

As I see it, there's a continuum that runs from what are nakedly fairy tails to an anemic or white mythology with a minimum of images. We never transcend the trading of hieroglyphs. For instance:

. . . I entered even into my inward self . . . and beheld with the eye of my soul . . . above my mind, the Light Unchangeable. — Art48

We have the eye, light, and the 'dry' notion of the unchanging, basically a negation of time. I'm not complaining. This is about as good and subtle as it gets. In my view, the most aggressively critical philosophy can't escape a residue or secret foundation of metaphor.

It’s our core because it’s central to all the thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations we experience. Consciousness is like the backbone of the human body, or the trunk of a tree. It’s core. — Art48

I think this idea is also explored in Husserl as something like the eternal shape of a luminously present plenitude. The picture varies, the screen itself is always there. God is the screen (or the projector) ? I think you've whizzed like an arrow here to the bullseye, to the beating heart of metaphysics.

Some critics though would say that 'Consciousness' takes too much for granted. It's already an interpretation of being there.

Something always is. Is this 'is' 'deeper' than 'consciousness' ?

In case it furthers the conversation, I'll work with this:

It implies that the world is always already primarily given as the common world. It is not the case on the one hand there are first individual subjects which at any given time have their own world; and that the task would then arise of putting together, by virtue of some sort of arrangement, the various particular worlds of individuals and of agreeing how one would have a common world. This is how philosophers imagine these things when they ask about the constitution of the inter-subjective world. We say instead that the first thing that is given is the common world -- the one.

I'd like to project Brandom backwards onto Heidegger (his goes taut to understand this better than any run slept Hegel maybe.) One [ das Man ] is a trumpduck of tribal norms, how bodies ought to do, including how they mouths flap, which is to say semantic norms, which is to say ( swift blazing flag of the regiment) inferential norms, what your contemporaries will let you get away whiff. Note that language is the rattle of teeth and gum, at least minimally if admittedly efficiently embodied incarnate immanent worldly glue. The you of every say dasein is a self-deferential dance of tongues and fingers. Find ye deep in this goo the convention of that famous pineal gremlin held responsible for workplace gropings and trailing a coherent sorry about the lifewhirled, that well gnome wherein of giving a creasy fuck. You can miss agree with me, we say (one says), but don't miss agree with your self, for one is one around here, or we'll refer you chew the soporific ministry of awakening.

This tradition of mouths being tracked for the claims that pour out of them like they was chimneys for half wonder stood spoke leads to weird theologies of penisolate phantoms who may just be lonely gods looking at the inside of a dreambag they can't crawl out of, for there is nothing else. Only the inside of the bag is given, somehow as an inside. Along with this we have thoughts as thin as angels' kin, diaphanous as the dandruff on a virgin's tear.

Do folks hear this chugging along in language ? This letting one think for one ? Song of old lung scents of the onebot ? Yesterday's risky metaphor is tomorrow's obvious truth that must not even can not be questioned, for it is no longer seen as something that was chosen, now mistaken for bottommost foundation, most obviously obvious obviousness.

They are something to play with, juggle, kick down the street. — T Clark

:up:

Definitions are [ serious ] poems.

The poem is a showing, not a saying. — Banno

Somewhere I picked up the theory that paintings exist to teach us how to see the world in a new way. Maybe poems are like that, telling us where to look, how to look, at no-longer-so-ordinary things.

Clichés are to be avoided because they do our thinking for us (and imagining, feeling, etc), or they shut out thinking; — Jamal

:up:

They are default bot as generic soul of a tribe.

I am far more interested in the nature of being — Arne

:up:

...which is to say in the matter itself and not the gossip around it and an excuse to do something easier, something routine, like attack or defend (as I have) obscurity.

I just noticed you have a transformer symbol as your avatar. Electronic engineer? — frank

Cool that you noticed ! It's actually a nod to artificial intelligence (transformers are the key piece at the moment.). For me it's a nice metaphor for us as transformers of our inheritance. We are thrown like bots into a stream of symbols and have to make sense of them and create ourselves from the stuff, hopefully a little bit new so we are noticed and loved, etc.

We do tend to attach cool sounding labels to that which we cannot explain and then proceed as if the label explains all. — Arne

:up:

Yes. We bury complexity under words that we pretend to understand.

His lectures were published at his leisure while Being and Time was rushed. Both the History of the Concept of Time and Basic Problems of Phenomenology were first published in the 1970s. Being and Time was a classic by then. — Arne

:up:

Yes, that sounds correct. We were lucky to have had the lectures available.

The background can be sketched, as simply and clearly as possible. — Fooloso4

This is iffy. It's either a tautology or missing the point. Preverbal competence ! Toolbeing. In the beginning was animal skill. In the beginning was the deed, the handshake, the welltimed fart.

While engaged in hitch-free skilled activity, Dasein has no conscious experience of the items of equipment in use as independent objects (i.e., as the bearers of determinate properties that exist independently of the Dasein-centred context of action in which the equipmental entity is involved). Thus, while engaged in trouble-free hammering, the skilled carpenter has no conscious recognition of the hammer, the nails, or the work-bench, in the way that one would if one simply stood back and thought about them. Tools-in-use become phenomenologically transparent.

Yet language itself is also the hammer. We are mostly anything but clear on the staggering complexity of our tacit semantic norms.

I agree. The same is true of some of the lectures immediately following Being and Time as contained in Basic Problems of Phenomenology. — Arne

I haven't yet read Basic Problems. It's been on my list forever. Always thought it looked good. But it seems we've both seen how readable the lectures are. They are detailed and thorough and careful. But Being and Time is the famous book, so everyone grabs that. A little Heidegger reader might be better --- maybe 2 volumes, 'early' and 'late'.

The most insidious part is that one's lack of understanding never reaches the surface. — Fooloso4

:up:

Now you are talking some Heidegger !

That's why we must dig, my friend. That's why we can't just stare, assuring ourselves that we are neutral and unbiased, for it's not a matter of a feeling in the tummy. It's a matter of us being language, being an enacted system of semantic norms. I am my history (my training, my contingent tribal software) as I come upon and try to make sense of the past in my pursuit of a future. Even that future which I pursue as a possibility has been articulated by me as my living past which leaps ahead, in terms I got from daddy and mommy and peers and PBS. But I can pop my head out in an uncanny moment, recessive violet, and think otherwise, twisting my gnarled inheritance, just a little...

I am thrown projection become aware of myself as such. I consider this theme to also be present in Hegel. (See Braver's A Thing of this World for more on this.)

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water. — The Gay Science, 173

This is a beautiful quote, and I will grant you that Being and Time contains many needlessly tangled passages. Yet there are long stretches that I find very direct and clear. I don't know why he did that. I wish he hadn't.

I can't comment on the later Heidegger. I will reiterate that his style is direct and clear in the lectures that led up to the writing of Being and Time.