BMOs are not objects in the everyday sense, so I don't think objecthood is the appropriate condition. Rather, I think the question is whether the BMO satisfies the requirements of an epistemic intermediary between the subject and object. — hypericin

Fair enough—but if the BMO is not an object of awareness in any ordinary sense, then I don’t see in what sense it is an epistemic intermediary rather than merely a causal implementation. “Epistemic intermediary” suggests something like: that which provides the subject’s evidence as such. But that is exactly what is at issue.

We still see the subject, because the photograph discloses the subject, and there is an appropriate causal connection between subject and photograph. — hypericin

I agree that mediation does not imply “we only see the intermediary.” But the photograph analogy is still misleading because a photograph is itself an inspectable object that can become the intentional terminus (we can notice glare, cropping, pixelation, etc.). In perception we do not encounter an “image” in that way. We encounter one world-directed presentation. So positing a BMO as an epistemic intermediary is not phenomenologically innocent—it adds a second object that is not given as such.

Exactly, phenomenologically we encounter one object. This is the illusion IR aims to dispel. — hypericin

But notice what you’ve done here: you’re now committed to the claim that phenomenology is systematically misleading about its own intentional structure. That’s not impossible, but it’s a much stronger thesis than “we sometimes misperceive,” and it’s not a neutral starting point either.

More importantly: you treat the “one object appears” datum as forcing a choice between DO and BMO. But there is a third option you keep overlooking: the bearer of phenomenal character is not an object at all, but the perceptual act/episode.

“Redness-as-seen” can be a property of seeing, not a property of an inner object. That dissolves the alleged contradiction without requiring a BMO.

P3: Distal objects do not support qualitative features like redness — hypericin

P3 is doing all the work, but it’s not a phenomenological datum. It’s a metaphysical thesis. If you grant P3, IR follows. But that just means the argument is question-begging: it builds the conclusion into the premises by stripping DOs of sensible qualities in advance.

A direct realist can deny P3 in several ways without saying “redness is microphysical”: e.g., redness is dispositional/relational, or a way the apple manifests itself under normal conditions. None of that forces the postulation of an epistemic intermediary object.

Phenomenologically, they are properties of the object as seen. The object as seen, the BMO, is object-like... — hypericin

But this again assumes what needs to be argued. “Object as seen” is not automatically “an inner object.” It can just mean: the distal object under a mode of presentation. You are sliding from “the object as experienced” to “there exists an additional object, distinct from the distal one, that is experienced.” That inference is precisely what I’m resisting.

Broadly, correspondence grounds truth, and failure of correspondence error... The subject does not live in a walled garden of BMOs. — hypericin

I’m not demanding that IR “solve normativity” in full generality. But I do think IR inherits a structural difficulty: if the BMO is the immediate object of awareness, then the DO becomes something like a theoretical cause posited behind experience. In that case, “correspondence” risks becoming something asserted from the outside rather than something intelligible from within the first-person epistemic situation.

You say we can establish correspondence because DO and BMO are causally connected—but causal connection is not yet epistemic access. The normative question is not “how do I get from an inner item to an outer item?” but “how does my experience come with conditions of correctness at all?” On my view, the perceptual act is already world-directed in its intentionality, so normativity is a question about the success-conditions of an act that is constitutively oriented toward the world. On your view, normativity looks more like a bridge between two ontologically distinct items (BMO and DO), and it’s that bridge that remains obscure.

But this just sounds like the standard IR picture... — hypericin

It only sounds like IR if one assumes that “experience” is itself an object (a BMO) rather than a conscious act with a certain phenomenal character. My whole point is that the mediation here is in the operations (experiencing, understanding, judging), not in an intermediary object.

So then does DR entail a commitment to eternalism? — hypericin

No. “Seeing a past state of affairs” doesn’t require eternalism any more than memory or astronomy requires eternalism. All it requires is that the past was real and causally efficacious. Saying “the intentional object is the apple-at-t0” is not time travel; it’s just temporal indexing.

And note: IR has the exact same temporal situation. The BMO is also causally generated by the apple-at-t0, not by the apple-at-t1. So temporal lag cannot be a differential argument for IR over DR—it affects both views equally.

hallucination and veridical perception are fundamentally different process... — hypericin

Here I think you’re assuming a controversial principle: that if two experiences are introspectively indistinguishable, they must share the same intentional object or structure. But that doesn’t follow. Two acts can be phenomenally identical while differing in their fulfillment conditions—just as a forged key can feel identical to a real key while failing to open the door. Phenomenology alone does not settle whether the act is fulfilled by the world or empty.

So yes: hallucination and veridical perception can be phenomenally indistinguishable while still differing in whether they are world-fulfilled. That isn’t “bending over backwards”; it’s simply recognizing that phenomenology underdetermines ontology.

=========

Finally, I don’t deny that “the brain models the world” in the subpersonal, cognitive-scientific sense. But that’s a mechanistic explanatory posit. The philosophical question is whether such modeling constitutes the intentional object of awareness at the personal level. The inference from “there are subpersonal models” to “what I am directly aware of is a modeled object” is not forced, and I don’t think your argument establishes it without smuggling IR into P3 at the outset.

I don't understand what this means, or how it relates to what I am saying or to indirect realism — Michael

As far as I can tell, you are saying that during the second interval you take the shapes/colours/etc. to be properties of qualia, and then you infer the the existence of the apple from them. That's exactly the step I’m rejecting.

If the object perceived is not the distal object, and it is not an inner intermediary, then what is it? — hypericin

Let’s quickly disambiguate the word “perception.” At minimum we need to distinguish (i) the sensory episode (experience), (ii) the act of grasping/identifying what is going on (understanding), and (iii) the commitment that something is the case (judgment).

In the apple scenario, the content of experience and understanding can remain continuous even after the apple disintegrates, because the light still carries information from the earlier state of the world. In that sense, the intentional object is the distal apple as it existed at the time the light was emitted (the apple-at-t0, not the apple-at-t1).

If the observer is unaware of the time lag and judges “there is an apple over there right now,” then that judgment is false, because there is no longer any distal object that satisfies it.

On this analysis, nothing requires treating the intentional object as an internal intermediary.

But I wonder if it justifies the criticisms against naturalism on the basis of intelligibility. — Moliere

I think this is exactly the right question. And I agree: the point we’ve converged on (truth not collapsing into warrant) doesn’t automatically refute “naturalism” if by naturalism we mean something like methodological commitment to the sciences.

Where it arguably becomes a problem is for a stronger naturalism—one that treats reality as exhaustively describable in the idiom of efficient causation, and treats normativity/intentionality as reducible to that idiom. If what-is-the-case is not constituted by our justificatory norms, then truth is a genuine constraint that isn’t identical with any social practice. But it’s also not obviously the sort of thing that can be captured in purely causal vocabulary.

The reason that normativity purportedly can't be grounded in efficient causality is that causal explanation and normative status come apart. An efficient-causal story can tell us why a belief arose (neural mechanisms, evolutionary pressures, reinforcement histories, etc.), but none of that by itself tells us whether the belief is true, false, valid, invalid, justified, or unjustified. Two people could arrive at beliefs through the same kinds of causal pathways and yet one be right and the other wrong depending on how things actually are. So the causal story underdetermines the normative story. That’s why the worry isn’t that naturalism can’t describe cognition, but that it struggles to account for the binding “ought” of truth and correctness using only the “is” of causal sequence.

So the worry isn’t “science can’t work,” but that the intelligibility presupposed by science (truth, validity, correctness) can’t be ontologically grounded in a picture of the world as fundamentally non-normative. That’s where Hart thinks naturalism quietly leans on what it can’t fully account for.

In other words: the critique isn’t of naturalism as method, but of naturalism as a total metaphysics. The issue isn’t whether naturalism can describe how we reason, but whether it can make sense of why reason is answerable to truth at all.

Yep. And as you stated in a previous reply, the temptation to reify experience into an intermediary seems symptomatic of a deeply ingrained grammatical habit.

Yes, exactly! The causal latency introduces a temporal offset. If the subject is unaware of the offset, their judgment can be mistaken, but that doesn’t show the object perceived is an inner intermediary. In my book, it shows only that perceptual knowledge is fallible and requires correct interpretation of causal conditions.

I agree that during the second interval I will judge that the apple is still there, and that this judgment will be false. But it doesn’t follow that the perceptual episode itself is an inference from an inner object.

What the apple case shows is simply that perceptual consciousness can retain the same sensory character even when its fulfillment condition fails. That is perfectly compatible with the apple having been the object of perception in the first interval and no longer being so in the second.

Your conclusion follows only if we assume from the outset that perception is always “experience + inference to a distal cause.” But that is precisely the indirect realist picture in dispute. On my view, the inference/judgment is a further act that can be correct or incorrect, whereas perception itself is world-directed and can succeed or fail in being fulfilled by what is there.

So the scenario establishes fallibility, not that the apple is always only inferred. Otherwise every case of perceptual error would prove that perception is never direct, which seems like an obvious non sequitur.

I think we’re actually quite close on several points. I agree there’s no “view from nowhere” where we can measure our theories against reality as such, and I also agree that many scientific concepts (voltage is a good example) are genuine inventions that open up new lines of inquiry rather than simply “reading off” ready-made categories from nature.

But I’m not convinced that this makes explanatory scope, unification, etc. merely “aesthetic.” They look more like epistemic virtues that have proven themselves precisely because reality pushes back: ad hoc theories tend to break under novel testing, while unifying theories tend to be more counterfactually robust. So while we can’t directly compare a theory to “Being,” we can still distinguish better and worse ways of being answerable to constraint.

On voltage: I agree we invented the concept and the measurement practices, but it seems hard to deny that electrical potential differences existed long before we conceptualized them. That is, the conceptual scheme is constructed, but what it latches onto is not.

And on your last point: I’m sympathetic to the modesty of “some statements are true,” but I’m not sure we can cash out even that minimal claim without implicitly presupposing that what makes a statement true is not constituted by our norms of justification. Otherwise “true” collapses into “warranted by our best lights,” which reintroduces the very distinction we’ve been debating.

This what-is-the-case then becomes something like a thing-in-itself. — Moliere

I agree that technological “affordances” matter, and I don’t mean to deny the Kuhnian point that theory change involves sociology, pedagogy, and generational uptake as much as brute confrontation with data. And certainly Ptolemy’s system was impressively successful at saving the appearances within the observational constraints of the time.

But I’m not sure that supports the stronger claim that there’s “no measure” of tracking what is the case better. Even if our access is historically conditioned, we still distinguish theories by explanatory scope, unification, counterfactual robustness, and coherence with independent lines of evidence. Ptolemy and Copernicus aren’t merely alternative descriptions on a par; they make incompatible claims about the Earth’s motion, and later developments (Kepler/Newton, and eventually spaceflight) strongly vindicate one over the other.

So I’m happy to grant that what counts as warranted is interest- and instrument-relative, but the very intelligibility of calling geocentrism “oblivious” seems to presuppose that reality itself was not as the Ptolemaic picture described it—even if no one at the time had the epistemic means to establish that. That doesn’t posit a Kantian "thing-in-itself"; it’s just the minimal realist point that what-is-the-case is not exhausted by what we can currently demonstrate.

Yes—this is the key pressure point. A naturalist can of course say “we trust our models because they keep working,” but that’s a pragmatic entitlement, not yet a rational vindication. The deeper question is why predictive success should be taken as evidence of truth or real structure rather than merely a contingent fit between our cognitive habits and the environment.

If intelligibility is not intrinsic to reality, then “success” can be explained causally, but it becomes unclear what licenses the further inference to correctness or truth. And that’s exactly where normativity enters.

I think your reply is clarifying, and I agree that we’re getting down to the core of the disagreement.

First, I’m not lumping refraction through the lens with what we are conscious of. Of course we are conscious of phenomenal character (color, sound, etc.) in a way we are not conscious of lens refraction. The question is whether being conscious of phenomenal character entails being conscious of a brain-modeled object as an object.

I don’t think it does. The phenomenal character is a feature of the act’s presentation of its object; it does not follow that it is itself an object of awareness with its own identity conditions.

Your photograph analogy is helpful, but I think it quietly shifts the issue. A photograph is itself a public object that can be inspected, re-identified, and treated as the intentional terminus of an act. But the “BMO” you’re positing is not something we can inspect in that way. If we were literally aware of BMOs as objects, then we should be able to distinguish (even in principle) “what the BMO is like” from “what the distal object is like.” But phenomenologically we don’t encounter two objects—an inner one and an outer one—we encounter one object as appearing.

On normativity: I don’t think “correspondence between BMO and DO” is yet an explanation. It presupposes the very normative notions at issue: accuracy, reference, aboutness, and correctness conditions. Saying “normativity is correspondence” is like saying “truth is correspondence”: it redescribes the target rather than explaining how such correspondence is possible or intelligible for a subject.

Moreover, IR doesn’t actually avoid the “error cases” problem—it relocates it. In IR the error is still an error about the DO, and the question remains: how does a subject ever get beyond the BMO to determine whether correspondence obtains? If you say “further BMOs,” you get regress; if you say “inference,” you’ve invoked normativity again.

So yes, I am arguing that DR gives a more satisfying account of normativity—not because it magically eliminates skepticism, but because it treats perceptual normativity as internal to world-directed experience itself, rather than as a relation between an inner object and an outer object that must somehow be bridged.

DR has to explain misperception. But IR has to explain something deeper: how any DO-directed normativity can arise at all if awareness terminates in a BMO. That’s the step I still don’t see made coherent.

I'm not saying that the causal story is sufficient to cash out intentionality and epistemic normativity. — Michael

My understanding is that you think the causal/scientific story undercuts naïve realism, and that this is enough to settle the question of whether distal objects are the direct objects of perception.

But it seems to me you’re using “indirect realism” in a purely negative sense: i.e. as simply the rejection of naïve realism. If that’s the definition, then of course anyone who rejects naïve realism is an “indirect realist” by stipulation.

My point is that this doesn’t amount to a positive account of perception. Traditionally, the indirect realist framework is not merely the denial of naïve realism, but a substantive picture on which what is directly given are inner items (sense-data/representations/qualia) and distal objects are known only indirectly by inference. That is exactly what I reject.

So the disagreement isn’t over whether naïve realism is false; it’s whether rejecting naïve realism commits us to the kind of intermediary ontology required by a positive account of indirect realism.

That helps, yes — and I agree that in metaphysics/epistemology we’re often clarifying the conceptual norms governing our discourse rather than straightforwardly “describing objects”.

For me, the Ptolemaic case nicely illustrates the asymmetry I’m trying to get at. They were warranted given their evidence and conceptual resources, and they certainly made many true claims and successful predictions. But the reason we call the geocentric framing “oblivious” rather than merely “a different discourse” is precisely that it failed to track what was actually the case. The discourse ultimately shifted because reality didn’t cooperate with it.

So I’m happy to grant the “both/and” descriptively — different discourse and genuine error — but the notion of genuine error seems to require that “what-is-the-case” is not itself fixed by our discursive norms, even if our access to it is always mediated by them.

In other words, we are forced to revise discourse to accommodate what-is-the-case, whereas what-is-the-case refuses to be forced into inadequate conceptual schemes.

I see three responses: there is no such thing as BMOs. BMOs are the same as DOs. BMOs are also insufficiently object like to serve as intermediary. None of these seem appealing. Do you agree with one or more, and/or is there a fourth response I'm missing? — hypericin

The fourth option is that BMOs belong to the causal implementation of intentionality rather than being the objects of intentionality. They enable us to see, but they are not what is seen.

For me, it comes down to whether normativity is reducible to causation. I don’t think it is. The causal/functional story that explains how perception is possible underdetermines the normative question of what perception is of. Otherwise we’d be forced to say that we see neural models (or retinal stimulations), rather than the world those processes disclose. To me, that seems like a clear category mistake.

I think your last paragraph is exactly right: warrant concerns justification, whereas truth concerns what is the case. I’m completely on board with that distinction.

I'm less sure about the suggestion that we’re only ever “talking about how we talk about” rather than referring to the thing itself. I agree that our interests determine which aspect of reality we’re talking about (we always carve out a facet, an affordance, a temporal slice, etc.). But that selectivity doesn’t seem to imply (on its own) that truth is merely an intra-discursive status rather than a genuine answerability to what is.

In fact, the possibility you mention — that a community can satisfy its own norms while being oblivious to something outside those norms — seems to presuppose precisely the asymmetry I’m pointing to: that what is warranted-for-us can fail to coincide with what is actually the case. If “truth” isn’t ultimately a constraint beyond our practices, in what sense is the community oblivious rather than simply operating within a different discourse?

I grant the sociological point that we often revise both directions — what gets treated as “warranted” shifts, and what gets treated as “the case” shifts as inquiry unfolds. And of course authority and consensus play a major role in how communities stabilize belief.

That said, the asymmetry I have in mind isn’t about which side has more rhetorical or institutional weight in a given historical moment. It’s about the normative status of truth itself: even if “important people” determine what counts as warranted, they don’t thereby determine what is actually the case — which is precisely what it means to say that communities (and authorities) can be mistaken.

If we collapse the normative distinction between warrant and truth, mustn't we relinquish the possibility of an entire community being wrong, even while fully satisfying its own norms of justification?

to use an idea from fdrake "warranted-for-us" and "actually-the-case" are mutually determinative of one another -- you don't get one without the other, they mutually constitute one another as a contrast, that sort of thing.

So the norms of correction are either neither internal/external or both/and external/internal. Which in turn would mean that we can't sneak in an "well, ultimately it's being" or "well, ultimately it's us" — Moliere

I see what you mean, but to my mind the function of “actually-the-case” is intrinsically asymmetric in the sense that it can overturn what is warranted-for-us, whereas the opposite does not hold. This asymmetry is precisely what underwrites the possibility of error. We revise what is warranted in light of what is the case, not vice versa.

Thoughts?

There might be a place here for a discussion of pedagogic method. — Banno

Perhaps—but I suspect that in this context it would come off as condescension rather than sincerity. These “picture change” issues are hard to address in a debate format without sounding like one is talking down.

I'm curious: how would you cash out the distinction between "warranted-for-us" and "actually-the-case" if the norms of correction are understood as entirely internal to practice?

“Phenomenal character” isn’t a thing over and above our perceptual and behavioural capacities, but a mode of description. We abstract from how someone sees, reacts, discriminates, reports, and then pretend the abstraction names an inner object. That’s exactly the move Wittgenstein warns against: turning an adjective or an adverbial construction into a noun and then asking what sort of thing the noun refers to. — Banno

Yes—this is exactly my worry. Once we treat “phenomenal character” as a constituent or item in an inner realm, we’ve already built the indirect realist ontology into the starting point. The grammar invites reification.

Couldn't it be the case that norms are always historically bound -- situated, not trans-communal, etc. -- and yet successfully refers, describes, and so forth? I.e. one could make true statements? — Moliere

Yes, I agree that norms can be historically situated and yet we can still make true statements.

My point is about what makes that success intelligible. If norms are wholly internal to a community, then “true” collapses into “licensed by current communal standards,” and any notion of correction becomes hard to distinguish from mere change in consensus. We could still shift norms, but we wouldn’t have a basis for saying we were previously mistaken rather than merely operating under different standards.

Put differently: the very idea of “successful reference” seems to presuppose a distinction between what is warranted-for-us and what is actually-the-case, because success and failure aren’t defined by communal uptake alone. That’s the sense in which inquiry appears answerable to something beyond consensus, even if it is always socially mediated in practice.

So other than me calling this "indirect" perception and you calling this "direct" perception, what exactly are we disagreeing about? — Michael

It seems we disagree over whether the causal story is sufficient to cash out intentionality and epistemic normativity sufficient for an adequate theory of perception—i.e. perception as world-directed and answerable to correctness/error.

I hope you haven't conceded this - that we never see apples, or taste oysters, or hear birdsong. — Banno

No worries—I’m not conceding that we don’t see apples. Personally, I reject the whole “constituents of experience” framing. From my perspective this framing results in an illicit reification of "experience". Apples are what we see; phenomenal character is how they are given. Treating phenomenal character as an intermediary object is exactly the indirect realist move I’m resisting.

Yes—exactly. If intelligibility is reduced to pragmatic usefulness, then “understanding” collapses into successful prediction and control. But then the naturalist has given up the stronger claim that our beliefs are answerable to how reality is in itself, rather than merely to what works for organisms like us.

In that case, it’s not that science becomes false, but that its truth-claims are quietly reinterpreted as instruments. And once that slide happens, it becomes unclear what grounds the normativity of truth and correctness rather than just adaptive success.

I'd say statements are normatively answerable to truth because our communities are set up in a manner such that we can demonstrate "true" or "false". Norms come from social groups acting together rather than from being.

Though here "the act of knowing" isn't as much a psychic as a social act -- a statement made to a body of fellow thinkers, and not a proposition believed by a given subject of the external world. — Moliere

I agree that norms of assertion and justification are socially articulated, and that standards of evidence and demonstration are embedded in communal practices. But while social practices can explain how we enforce norms (what counts as warranted, what gets sanctioned, what gets treated as knowledge), they don’t yet explain why those norms are (in principle) answerable to something beyond communal consensus. I’m happy to grant that epistemic norms are socially mediated — but that mediation itself seems to presuppose an independent constraint: the difference between what is justified-for-us and what is actually the case. Otherwise it becomes hard to make sense of inquiry as genuinely corrigible rather than merely internally self-stabilizing.

By them causally affecting our bodies, or causally affecting energies that causally affect our bodies, and then our bodies causally affecting our minds.

Isn't this exactly what you think to? You just call this "direct perception" and I call this "indirect perception". — Michael

I think this is the crux of our disagreement.

I agree with the causal story. But that story is not yet an account of knowledge. It tells us how experiences are produced, not how they are about distal objects or how they can be correct or incorrect.

If your “positive account” is just causal mediation, then I would argue you will be forced to distinguish veridical perception from systematic illusion by appealing to further causal facts. But epistemic correctness cannot be reduced to causal etiology.

So no, this is not merely a terminological dispute. The question is whether causal relations alone are sufficient to ground intentionality and normativity. I don’t think they are.

You (from my perspective) strip the mental object of its object like characteristics, retaining only bare phenomenality, and inappropriately assign those objective characteristics to the distal object itself. — hypericin

I just want to clarify that I am not assuming that phenomenal qualities belong to the distal object. For instance, I wouldn't say that the redness belongs to the distal apple. My claim is that, in the case of perception, they are the manner in which the distal object is presented to us. They are presented as-of the distal object, but whether they inhere in the distal object is a further metaphysical question, distinct from the phenomenological point at issue here.

I (from your perspective) inappropriately reify phenomenal qualities, which are relations to distal objects, not objects in themselves, into a pseudo object. — hypericin

Yes, more-or-less.

Indirect realism:
Subject -----> mental object (with phenomenal qualities) ------> distal object

Direct realism:
Subject ---- (phenomenal qualities) ----> distal object

Do you agree with this picture? — hypericin

If I were to draw it, I'd put it like this:

IR:
Subject → object of awareness (mental item) → distal object

DR:
Subject → distal object (given-as / appearing-as)

The contested step, for me, is precisely the move from “appearing-as” to a distinct “object of awareness” with object-like characteristics.

And of course this is meant to characterize perception specifically. I agree that other intentional acts (memory, imagination, etc.) do not require a distal object in the same way.

The same thing that enables the people with bionic eyes to do this? Unless you can point out exactly what the problem is I don't know how I can answer the question? — Michael

I am referring to the problem of perception. I'm simply asking for your positive account of how people come into possession of knowledge of distal objects.

You're reading something into indirect realism that I just don't understand. The people wearing the visors all have indirect perception of the wider world but can still do science just as well as we can. — Michael

On your view, how is this possible? What enables these people to get any epistemic purchase on distal objects such that their claims about such objects can be correct or incorrect?

No worries.

Perception and evidence do not come in a single harmonious system. Different perceptions can conflict, bits of evidence can point to different conclusions. We have to sort through them and make decisions. Sometimes we choose one perception or piece of evidence over another. Sometimes we reject our theories and develop new ways to interpret perceptions. That's what "world-directed" and normatively answerable to reality mean. — Ludwig V

I don't deny any of this.

Science doesn't require that we have direct perception of atoms for us to have knowledge of atoms. — Michael

No, but it's hard to understand how knowledge of atoms can get off the ground unless perception can underwrite the correctness of the practices through which that knowledge is obtained.

Admittedly I still don't quite understand what (5) is supposed to mean — Michael

Basically (5) is just another way of saying that if perception were not capable of providing knowledge of distal objects and their properties then the whole notion of being correct or incorrect about such objects (whether through science or any other practice) becomes unintelligible. So the acceptance of (5) would seem to be at odds with any interpretation of (1) - (4) that would rule out the ability of perception to provide us with knowledge of distal objects and their properties.

So the question is: in your framework, what would the acceptance of (5) really amount to given that your interpretation of (1) - (4) apparently rules it out from the start?

We've been around the block a few times now in this discussion, so I'd like to switch gears for a moment. You've repeatedly appealed to science as providing evidence that the world is very different from how it appears to us. My question is: if all empirical evidence ultimately comes through perception (including scientific observation and instrument readings), in what sense can science correct perception without presupposing that perception is already world-directed and normatively answerable to reality?

I don't think it's necessarily quietism or eliminativism; rather it's only trying to answer a simpler question, and that is: what are the constituents of first-person phenomenal experience? — Michael

Fair enough—if the only question you’re trying to answer is “what are the constituents of first-person phenomenal experience?”, then I agree that you can bracket normativity, objecthood, and error as further issues.

But then we should be clear that this is no longer (or not yet) a theory of perception in the philosophically relevant sense. It’s a theory of phenomenal constituency.

The traditional dispute about realism in perception is not exhausted by what constitutes experience, but by how perceptual experience is of mind-independent objects at all, how it can succeed or fail, and what grounds the distinction between veridical perception and illusion/hallucination.

My point is that phenomenal constituency underdetermines all of that. So even if you settle the “constituents” question, you haven’t yet settled whether perception is world-directed or mediated by inner objects. You’ve only described what experience contains (if anything), not what it is answerable to.

I think this is a fair pushback, and I agree that my quick framing risks sounding like a Cartesian “mind vs world” split. I’m sympathetic to the Merleau-Ponty point that we don’t stand outside reality as spectators, and that meaning is disclosed in lived engagement rather than deposited on one side or the other.

That said, I am hesitant to adopt that framing in its entirety. Even if intelligibility “comes to light” only in the act of knowing, we still need an account of why that disclosure is normatively answerable to truth—i.e. why it can be correct or incorrect rather than merely an internally coherent projection. If the possibility of error is to be taken seriously, then disclosure must be constrained by what is the case. This seems to require that reality itself be intelligible in more than a merely relational sense.

So I’m happy to grant the subject–world entanglement, but I don’t think it removes the metaphysical question of whether intelligibility is intrinsic to being or merely an artifact of our mode of access.

I suspect that what’s at stake here is, at least in relation to Wittgenstein, is to what extent we treat understanding and reason in terms of adequation and conformity vs creation, enaction and becoming. — Joshs

Yes, I agree it’s probably the underlying axis. For my part I would tend to side more with . I wouldn't want to deny creation, enaction, or becoming, but my worry is that if we say “normativity is creatively re-established in each use,” we risk collapsing into “norms are whatever we now make them,” which would seem to undercut the possibility of error and the authority of correction.

So no, the chess analogy isn’t claiming rational discourse is literally a game. It’s forcing a distinction you keep trying to blur, viz. that clarifying the conditions of intelligibility isn't the same thing as arguing for a claim within those conditions or parameters. You can have meta-level norms without turning bedrock conditions into ordinary premises. And pretending otherwise is exactly how the issue of global doubt and endless “improvement” talk becomes performative rather than really answerable. — Sam26

While I can't speak for @J, I can say that it hasn't been my intention to collapse everything into one level. I take it that the distinction between levels has been explicitly granted, and that we're now disputing whether the meta-level is inside or outside of rational normativity as such. For me, it's not about arguing for system-closure, or for some Archimedean stand-point outside of inquiry. It's about acknowledging that reason can come to understand the conditions of its own operation, and that to do so is itself a rational achievement.

Nicely put. I agree there’s an additional pressure point here: intelligibility isn’t a free-floating property—it’s conceptually bound up with the possibility of intellect. If reality is intelligible in itself (not merely interpretable by us), then it must at least be the kind of reality that is proportionate to understanding.

That said, I’d want to phrase the naturalist option a bit more carefully: naturalists don’t usually deny intelligibility outright, but they tend to treat it as instrumental or model-relative rather than intrinsic to being. The real question is whether intelligibility is ontological (a feature of reality) or merely epistemic/pragmatic (a feature of our coping strategies). If it’s only the latter, it becomes hard to see how explanation retains genuine truth-normativity rather than collapsing into sophisticated prediction.

What you are directed at is phenomenal experience unfolding in time. The rhythm, pitch, and structure are features of the phenomena, not a distal object. There are numerous candidates for distal object: speakers, player, band/creator, cd/lp/mp3 file. All of these are components of our causal understanding of the phenomena, but none of them somehow supersede the phenomena. — hypericin

I completely agree that when we turn our attention to the phenomenal quality of the experience, the distal-object-qua-causal-source is bracketed to the background. But I don’t think this eliminates the object-directedness of experience as such, of which more below.

Not necessarily. I can imagine the sound of chiming, without imagining any specific distal object (wind chime, door bell, phone, mp3 clip) realizing it. I can imagine the phenomenal experience of redness, and I "see" red in my minds eye, not attached to any object at all. — hypericin

I likewise agree that when we imagine a chiming sound or a patch of redness, these can be imagined as “unattached” to any distal object in the environment.

What does this mean, "arise from experience itself". When I hear a chime, I might wonder, what is making the noise. But by no means is this wonderment somehow embedded within the phenomenal experience of chiming itself. It is something extra: given this experience, this chiming, I am led to wonder, "what made it"? — hypericin

Agreed. The explicit question “what is it?” is not embedded in phenomenal character itself, but is a further moment in the overall structure of perception.

But what positive arguments do you have that the phenomenal is derivative? — hypericin

First, I want to make it clear that I’m not claiming that phenomenal experience is derivative in the sense of being unreal, reflectively constructed, or temporally distinct from the act of perception. I fully acknowledge that phenomenal qualities are features of first-order perceptual episodes. What I deny is only that they are first-order with regard to their epistemic or intentional role.

In my view, perception is an intrinsically normative and intentional act. It is characterized by a “directedness” or “aboutness” that purports to present its object as thus-and-so, in a way that is answerable to correction. Perception is something that can be mistaken, revised, and confirmed or disconfirmed, so any theory that purports to explain perception must not render these characteristics unintelligible.

By contrast, phenomenal qualities as such (redness-as-seen, chiming-as-heard, pungency-as-smelled) are not themselves propositional or truth-apt. They do not purport, on their own, to settle what is the case. Whereas perceptual objects exhibit conditions of identity, persistence, and modality that are necessary to underwrite error and correction, phenomenal qualities, taken in abstraction, do not. So to treat phenomenal character as the intermediary object of direct perception is, I would argue, a category mistake.

This doesn’t mean that phenomenal qualities cannot be explicitly thematized within consciousness. We can turn our attention to them specifically, and even make claims about them. When we say “the redness of that apple is very intense,” we are making a claim about the redness itself, but doing this doesn’t alter the adjectival role that redness played in the original perceptual episode.

Similarly, when we imagine a red-patch in abstraction from any particular distal object, the redness-as-such is not the object of imagination. Rather, the redness is presented as-of something—in this case, a bounded phenomenal field (a “patch”) with minimal criteria of identity and persistence. It is the patch-of-red that is the intentional object, not the pure phenomenal quality of redness in isolation.

So phenomenal qualities cannot function as objects standing between subject and world because they do not exhibit the characteristics required to play that epistemic role. Phenomenal qualities are the manner in which an object—actual, imagined, abstract, or indeterminate—is given. Shifts in attention, aesthetic focus, or meditative bracketing only modify the intentional object; but they do not abolish the "object-directedness" of intentionality or invert the priority of the object within intentionality itself.