Ok. The problems for your position remain: mental phenomena as entities; phenomenology as representational; non-identity as epistemically problematic. You've reiterated them and then insulated them by an appeal to sociology. The challenges raised remain unanswered.

You've retreated back to the sociology, to "most indirect realists believe...", and there is little empirical data one way or the other. What we do have is evidence that philosophers overwhelmingly accept realism.. The same is unsurprisingly the case for physicist.

Philosophers appear to have moved past the direct/indirect realism dichotomy, and indeed past the realism/anti-realism debate. The deflationary arguments have brought a rejection of grand dichotomies, and a focus on local questions about representation, perception, normativity, explanation, and practice - to small, close conceptual work.

Mental phenomena are either reducible to neurological phenomena or are emergent. — Michael

Why should we think this covers all the possibilities?

Again, with phenomena, and the presumption that somehow I observe "what occur when we dream, and what don’t occur when we are unconscious".

I don't observe my dreams; I have them. What doesn't occur when I am unconscious is consciousness, which is again not something I observe, so much as something I do.

You are taking these "mental phenomena" as granted. I would question them.

And along with them, the characterisation of direct realism.

I am interested in your opinion on the following and how you would think Kripke would reply. — Richard B

But

Kripke pointed out that if water is H₂O, if they are indeed identical, then necessarily, they are identical. If they are the very same, then they are the very same in every possible world. — Banno

I'll try explaining this again.

See the "if"? that makes it a conditional. If as you seem to think, science did not find that water is H₂O, then ◇water ≠ H₂O.

Kripke is not asserting that water is H₂O; although he, like most folk, took this as granted. He is not telling physicist what water is made of. He is making a point about the interpretation of modal theorems, such that such equivalences, if true, are necessarily true.

So the question concerning air is misbegotten.

Do mental phenomena exist, and if so are its properties the mind-independent properties of things like apples (or do they in some sense resemble them)? If mental phenomena do exist and if its properties do not resemble the mind-independent properties of things like apples then indirect realists are correct and there is an epistemological problem of perception. — Michael

This is better - we are getting closer to the presumptions underpinning this picture of the world.

DO mental phenomena exist? Well, what sort of thing is a mental phenomenon? What is to count as mental phenomena? Once we decide that, we are on the way to being able to quantify over them and include them in out discourse. Whatever they might be, they are not apples. But can the notion be set out clearly?

Now I know what an apple is - at least well enough to cook apple crumble. Is there something I can do with, say, a mental phenomenon of an apple that I can't do with an apple? Well, I can post about them on a philosophy forum, I suppose.

Are we going to say I can use my mental-phemonenon-of-apple to make mental-phenomenon-of-apple-crumble?

And if I did so, what have I done that is not equally well set out by saying I used apples to make an apple crumble?

See how the mental phenomena loses its puff? That's the deflation mentioned above.

It's all in the crumb.

SO, this is all going to work out well...

There are legitimate phenomenological and epistemological differences between direct and indirect realism that can only be addressed by a scientific study of the world and perception, and that cannot be deflated by some semantic argument that "X is red" means "X causes such-and-such an experience". — Michael

So you claim. Yet the deflation is set out before you. Hmm.

Ok. That still looks to be a misunderstanding of Kripke, and of implication. He's not attacking physics.

we know from observation that metals expland more than wood, for example does with heat, and wood more than metals with moisture. — Janus

You're just layering theory on top of theory here. And thinking that the indigenous understanding of the land is separable from what they say about the land is absurd.

Why are you so wed to this idea - that observations are somehow inviolably non- theoretical? Intuitive realism? Anti-relativism or fear of epistemic circularity? Habit?

My guess is that he has them lined up already, since he has stated an agreement publicly. — Questioner

:grin: I doubt there was such forethought... and the recent news indicates otherwise. Hitting someone generally results in their getting their back up, rather than their becoming more cooperative.



Edit: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-05/nicolas-maduro-allies-take-power-in-venezuela/106198570

A lot of the foofaraw here seems to hinge on "in contact." — J

Yep. It helps to talk of the other senses - a suggestion from Austin. We already used the taste of sugar being sweet - the contact is pretty direct there. Touch provides an alternate example, rough against smooth.

Perhaps the problem is the expectation of certainty.

The analogue thermometer is based on the observation that things expand when heated, an observation which does not rely upon a theory of the nature of heat. — Janus

Yeah, it does. In order to determine that something has expanded on heating, we have to compare it to something else, and assuming that the something else has remained unchanged. Nor was it wrong for Martin Horký and Francesco Sizzi to ask if telescopes distorted the images of Saturn and Jupiter. The acceptance of these observations came along with the development of the theory of optics. Aboriginal people embed their understanding of the world in stories in order to make sense of them, in much the same way as Aristotle and Newton. Calling one set of stories "theory" and the other "myth" is pretty arbitrary.

The Duhem–Quine thesis stands. Observations are embedded in our overall understanding of how things work.

No oil company will invest in infrastructure in the circumstances Trump has created.

Again, his response to a problem is achieving the exact opposite of the desired outcome.

What a fool.

Yep.

You have a penchant for telling naive realists what they think. I'm not sure that they would agree with you. But then, it's not all that clear who "they" are.

Extensionally, being sweet is the very same as having a chemical structure that activates T1R2/T1R3 GPCR on taste cells.

It's not clear what the intensional difference is. We talk in very different ways in cooking and in biochemistry. Yet the two meet. Intensionality might be no more than a different language game.

Here I am purposefully deflating the phenomenology.

There doesn't seem to be any plan for exactly how they are going to "run" Venezuela. — Questioner

There seems to be an odd mindset - the belief that somehow the way to change Venezuelan policy is by kidnapping the guy at the top - as if he acted alone.

That's the illusion of every autocrat: "I alone make things happen". It ain't so.

The Venezuela government has said it will not comply.

So what now - kidnap the next leader? And the next?

Stupidity on a grand level.

I’ve already addressed this point several times. — Esse Quam Videri

Yes, you did. I marked "what judgment itself presupposes" specifically because of the central place you give it.

I'm concerned to make sure I am using your somewhat difficult language, so as to be sure we are not talking past each other. So let me adopt your language yet again, and go over what seems to me to be a central difficulty with your account:

...judgment presupposes answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error. — Esse Quam Videri

and your concern with:

an infinite regress of conditions— — Esse Quam Videri

So let's set the trilemma up again, using the changed language you are here adopting: we suppose that if someone judges something to be true then they presupposes answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error, in order to so judge; but then they must either again explain that presupposes answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error; or they must take them as fundamental; or they must rely on circularity, where judgements form the conditions for themselves.

And your answer is that there must be something that exists necessarily in order to ground judgement.

Now my rejection of this framing is based on an example of a judgement that does not fit that framing. First, I assume that you will judge with me that you are reading this post, here, now, and that this can act as a point of agreement. The question, then, by your account, is what that judgement presupposes, by way of answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error, and how it avoids an infinite regression.

Now I don't see how we can make sense of being wrong about your reading this post, here and now. There is no possibility of error here, apart from our being mistaken as to the use of words like "EQV, reading, here, now".

So were you say

Practice determines what would count as being right, but it does not (and cannot) itself make a judgment right. — Esse Quam Videri

I would instead point out that the example shows that the practice counts as making the judgement. Your reading this thread counts as "EQV is reading this tread" being true.

If you like, the extensional equivalence overrides any difference in intensionality. But that's not a very clear specification.

You take yourself as

...reflectively identifying what inquiry itself presupposes in order to function as inquiry. — Esse Quam Videri

Perhaps we agree that there are things that are taken as granted in order to enact an inquiry. But were you say these things exist of necessity, I point out that they are instead aspects of our practice.

Gödel, of course, is used metaphoricaly. But

Notably, this presupposes a notion of truth that is not exhausted by system-relative coherence — Esse Quam Videri

is not quite right, since the underivable truths are true within the system. Truth is a part of the things we do with language.

I think we have reached the point in the discussion where further clarification is unlikely to be productive. Thank you for the interesting discussion. — Esse Quam Videri

Cheers. You are of course under no obligation to respond to my posts.

Seems you are doing what is appropriate, working with what your clients want and providing for them as needed.

Carer training and interaction is usually, mostly medical, as it should be; but this leaves them with only the language of the medical model with which to explain the complex human interactions that they have to deal with directly - doctors and other medical professionals are usually able to abstract themselves from the nitty gritty, nurses and carers have to deal with bed pans and tears.

The social model, and especially the capabilities approach, provide language that can be used to deal with the humanity of those one cares for, in a more "holistic" way. That is, it emphasises the ethical dimension.

It's a different way to think and talk about what you already do.

I think the science clearly shows that colour, taste, smell, etc. are the product of our biology, causally determined by but very different to the objective nature (e.g. the chemical composition) of apples and ice creams. — Michael

We had this chat previously. Let;s look again at some philosophical weasel-words.

So the idea is that sugar is not really sweet, it just tastes that way to us.

See the word "really" there? what's it doing?

If we take it away we have "sugar is not sweet, it just tastes that way to us"...

Something has gone wrong here. sugar is not sweet, it just tastes sweet? Well, yes... that's what being sweet is - a taste.

"No, no, the sugar isn't sweet in itself!"

See the words "in itself" there? what'r they doing?

If we take them away we have "sugar is not sweet", which is false. Sugar is sweet.

Sugar has hydroxyl (–OH) groups which activate the T1R2/T1R3 GPCR on taste cells, triggering a calcium-mediated signalling cascade form which the nervous system learns certain activities, including seeking out sweet tastes and calling them "sweet" in contrast to "bitter" and "umami".

It's the chemical composition of sugar that makes it sweet, in interaction with a human. Being sweet is having a chemical structure that activates T1R2/T1R3 GPCR on taste cells.

Now nothing in this last, bolded paragraph implies that being sweet is not a property of sugar in itself or is not real.

Being sweet is not an illusion or hallucination. Sugar really is sweet.


So, Michael, is there anything in this with which you disagree? I hope not.

Your diagram... why the potato? :wink:

Yes, yours did that, which is what my argument about the age of consent demonstrates. — BenMcLean

Ok. No, it didn't. my post was pretty clear. Your argument, somewhat less so.

Ha! Folk think there's a plan...

What's in dispute is what's perceived - the world itself or mental states — Clarendon

When you see a boat, it' a boat that you see. If what you see is not a boat - if it is an illusion of an hallucination - then by that very fact what you see is not a boat.

But when philosophers say "perceive" instead of "see" they quickly loose track of what is going on. "Perceive" tries to treat veridical vision, hallucinations and illusions as if they were the same; it often presumes that there is a "something" that is being perceived, even when this may not be so; and it tries its best to be a private inner process.

Picking up on these observations: By starting with the idea of "looking at a ship", we can be misled into believing that to perceive a ship is always to do so under that description.. A child has to learn, quite literally, to look at a ship -- to learn what to look for, how to recognize one, what the fuzzy cases are. Direct perception would instead be something like "bare colors and textures" -- a very unnatural thing for the human species to experience, past infancy. I think that to defend direct realism, you have to argue that those unmediated (?) experiences are what we perceive, full stop. — J

Why not just say that the babe has not yet learned to see the ship, and doesn't do so until they do so under a description? That "seeing a ship" just amounts to applying that set of games and rules. Before learning, the baby sees shapes, colours, textures — not “ships”. After learning, the baby sees ships, and not by constructing an internal model or representation, but by participating in a set of practices: naming, recognising, sorting, using ships.

Seeing the ship is unmediated... Seeing it through a telescope might be called unmediated. What we call a "ship" just is the sort of thing that we see. We don't see it "indirectly" in any ordinary sense.

So the claim is: when I see a ship, I am directly in contact with the ship itself, not with a representation, sense datum, or mental model of it. And what "the ship itself" is, is an aspect of the games we play with words and the world.

Summarising, when a babe learns to “see ships” it is learning to participate in the practice of identifying them. And seeing a ship is direct: you are in contact with the ship, not a mental model. What counts as a ship is socially and linguistically mediated, but that mediation does not make perception indirect. Direct realism = contact with objects; practice/learning = the conditions under which contact with conceptually-defined objects is possible.

I'm puzzled.

What you argued was that observational knowledge was true, but that theoretical knowledge might be dubious.

What you pointed out , in agreement with my post, is that our observations are justified by theory.

...a thermometer works reliably as attested by experience — Janus

Does it? Try setting that out. Sometimes it's 22ºC by the thermometer and feels cold; sometimes, too hot. The water freezes at about 0ºC, but only more or less - and boils at a bit under 100ºC....

And all these have theoretical explanations...

Are we to say the thermometer works because experience certifies it, or are we only interpreting our experience so as to show that the thermometer works?

:wink:

To perceive something is to be in unmediated contact with it. — Clarendon

There's a lot going on in that. Why should we accept it?

Isn't such statement ruling out representationalism, sense-data theories, intentionalist and inferential accounts by fiat?

And "unmediated" is doing a lot of work. I hope no one will deny that vision is mediated by light, hearing by sound.

And we know that perceptual content is structured, that we see a chair, not bare colours and textures.

And what is that relation, being in contact? spatial? causal? intentional? normative?

I think most contemporary philosophers will want to describe themselves as direct realists of one sort or another. — Clarendon

Maybe not in those terms: Survey Results: Metaontology: heavyweight realism, anti-realism, or deflationary realism?

The observational knowledge of science is of course true. The hypotheses and theories as to how the processes observed work are defeasible models. They cannot be definitively demonstrated to be true. — Janus

Ok. Good reply.

Of course it assumes that the observational knowledge is separable from the hypotheses and theories. But using a thermometer involves applying a theory of heat, and using a telescope involves applying a theory of light.

Hence the Duhem–Quine thesis, that "the physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to
experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses".

And the ensuing demise of naive scientific methodology to the myth of the given.

The pattern here should be familiar. There's the intuition that there must be something firm - absolute, necessary, unconditional - upon which we build whatever it is we are building. And then there's the inability to coherently set out what that foundation might be.

And what we have instead is small steps, ad hoc hypotheses, little critiques of piecemeal ideas.

Two ways to philosophise.



For @Esse Quam Videri there must be something that exists necessarily. But trouble is, it's very hard for such a view to survive critique. Every time the absolute is found, it turns out to be just another posit in the ongoing discussion. Every necessity on examination becomes contingent on it's context.

Perhaps this should not surprise us, since we know that at least for the case of a simple formal system that is capable of doing counting, it might be consistent but it can never be complete - that is, whatever foundation we build will never give us every truth. The best we can hope for is to add a little bit more truth to that consistent system.

And if that's the case for simple formal systems, why should we then expect our natural languages to be any less complicated?

So folk here would be happy to claim they know stuff that is not true...?

The move to the unconditioned is not made by upgrading epistemic necessity into modal necessity, It is made by reflecting on what judgment itself presupposes in order to be truth-apt at all. — Esse Quam Videri

So what I'm looking for in your response is "what judgment itself presupposes" so that a judgement can be true or false.

If our operating notion of reality were such that reality is conditioned all the way down, then for any claim, further conditions could always be demanded such that no fact, state of affairs or claim could ever be counted as truly settled. — Esse Quam Videri

Is this concerning the branch of Agrippa’s trilemma that results in an infinite regress? Ok.

This is not the same as saying merely that we are finite and fallible, or that inquiry is ongoing. It implies something much stronger - namely, that there is no fact of the matter that could ever settle a judgment as finally correct, because any purported settlement is always relative to a context, stage or set of conditions that could always, in principle, be revised. — Esse Quam Videri

So your trilemma is set up like this, using the language you are adopting: we suppose that if someone judges something to be true then they are able to state the conditions under which they so judge; but then they must either again explain their judgement as to the truth of those conditions; or they must take them as fundamental; or they must rely on circularity, where judgements form the conditions for themselves.

And the conclusion is that "...no fact of the matter... could ever settle a judgment as finally correct".

You then spend a few paragraphs explaining much the same thing for negation. If someone were to deny that water is H₂O, we would never be in a position to say in some absolute sense that they are wrong, because there would always remain some conditions that are not judged to be true... or something along those lines. We could never say their denial is wrong...

One might respond “Okay, maybe ‘final truth’ disappears, but why does ordinary truth go with it?”. The robust notion of truth implicit in every act of judgment is not just “what we currently accept”, “what fits in a framework” or “what is best so far”. Implicit within the robust notion of truth is the idea that “this is how things really are, and denying it misrepresents reality”. But if reality itself is understood to be such that it can never settle anything without remainder, then the very notion of “misrepresenting reality” has no determinate content, and the robust notion of truth itself becomes indistinguishable from provisional endorsement. — Esse Quam Videri

So now you have two notions of truth, ordinary and robust. Ordinary truth is "what's best so far" and robust truth is "how things really are". You worry is about losing the ability to tell which we have.

But this is not an apt characterization of what we are doing when we engage in authentic inquiry. The way we talk about such things betrays the fact that the very act of judging each other's claims to be true or false carries within it an implicit commitment to robust notions of truth and reality and, thus, to reality itself being unconditioned (and intelligible) without remainder. — Esse Quam Videri

So now you have along side the two notion of truth, two notions of explanation, one of which is "authentic" in that it commits one to saying how things are "unconditionally".



Now I think your have drawn yourself a nice picture here of how you think epistemology works, but that there are fundamental problems in the way that this picture has been set up that lead you to a sort of absolute conclusion that is erroneous.



Let's start with an example. I think that if I ask you if you are reading this post, here, and now, you would quite rightly judge that you are. Now on your account, since you so judge, there must be "conditions" for that judgement. And the condition for it being true that you are reading this post, here, and now is just that you are reading this post, here, and now. So here, the condition and the judgement are the very same.

I'm not suggesting that your judgement is based on some observation of yourself reading, but that what you are now doing counts as reading. It is what we mean when we say something like "EQV is reading". To deny that you are reading this, here, now, would be to deny the whole practice that underpins the use of sentences like "EQV is reading here, now".

If we go back to the Trilemma, the leg we are on now is in effect that of circularity: we judge that you are reading because we judge that you are reading.

It might help at this stage to review the fact that a circular argument is perfectly valid, just potentially unsatisfactory. So it is not an objection to point out that the justification is circular.

And this is part of the appeal of practice. The justification here is that this is just how we use the words "EQV is reading" and their correlates. To deny that you are reading is just to step away from that practice. So someone who denies that you are reading isn't mistaken as to the facts, but as to the words we use to set them out.



And here we have avoided the picture of "conditions all the way down". Our justification is this is just what we do.

Notice also that it's not some "fact of the matter" that settles the discussion. We've sidestepped that, too, by since we do not here point to a fact about the world, but to our practice within that world. In these sort of circumstances, we say things like "it is true that EQV is reading this post".

And we've dropped any need for splitting truth into absolute and relative truths. Our sentences are just true when the practice is coherent.


I'll stop there. That's enough for now.

:victory:

World-first as Australian donates organs after self-administering assisted dying medication

Out of interest.

So, by way of checking my understanding

• Modal semantics can only function as semantics if it is embedded in practices of judgment that distinguish getting things right from merely playing a consistent formal game.
• To say of some sentence, that it is true, is to make a commitment, to take responsibility.
• This commitment is to something's being the case, and not otherwise. That given what I take to be the relevant conditions, denying p would be an error?

But "Given the conditions, it cannot be otherwise" here is not modal, so much as epistemic. That is, the judgement that such-and-such is true commits one to denying that it is false; but it doens;t commit one to saying that it is true in all possible circumstances. Yet this is what would be required in order to move from "such and such is true" to "such and such is necessarily true".

That is , this "unconditional" truth is a step further than is justified by the commitment to such-and-such being true.

That is “If everything were conditioned, final truth is undermined” - perhaps; I'm not sure what final truth might be. but not truth per se.

If you have a theory of language which appears to break down as soon as you swap out a few simple nouns, then I'd say that's a pretty strong argument against your theory of how we should be approaching language. — BenMcLean

Ok.

Has someone done that?

Yeah, ok. I'll leave you to it.

I wondered how it happened - but was baffled.

I must have had two windows opened, unawares.

Once more unto the breach dear friends...

“Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?” isn’t something we can answer by grabbing a biology textbook and pointing at chromosomes. Words like woman and man aren’t fixed labels; their meanings come from how we use them in our lives, in law, in society, in everyday practice. Language isn’t a static system of definitions—it’s a web of practices, habits, and shared understandings.

So when someone says “transwomen are women,” that statement can be perfectly true in ordinary English, in legal contexts, and in social reality, because those uses of the word woman include gender identity and lived experience. To insist it’s false because of some narrow biological criterion is to pretend there’s only one correct meaning, which there isn’t. We can’t just ignore the ways language functions in the real world.

I’m not saying “woman” means whatever anyone wants it to mean. Context matters. Meaning is negotiated, shared, and socially embedded. You can’t pull an abstract definition out of thin air and pretend it’s universally authoritative. The truth of these statements depends on which meaning of woman and man is operative in the conversation you’re having. In some contexts, they’re true; in others, they might not be—but that’s a property of language, not a reflection of some underlying “essence.”

In short: the slogans are true in the contexts where language and social practice treat them as true, and the only reason people think they must be false is because they’re secretly privileging a single, rigid, biological definition without admitting it. Words don’t work that way.

• Language is polysemous: multiple legitimate uses exist for “man” and “woman”.
• Meaning is contextual: truth isn’t fixed by biology alone nor reducible to private claims.
• Statements like “transwomen are women” can be true in some contexts (social, legal, identity based), and false in others (strict biological categorisation) depending on which use of the term is salient.
• Attempts to privilege one use as “the only correct one” ignore the plurality of language functions and tacit prejudices about what counts as “rational” uses of terms.
  
  

More on this; Gabrielle Bychowski has done some interesting research. See Were there Transgender People in the Middle Ages?

Crossed two versions of that post... I'm baffled as to how.

...wonderment... — Wayfarer

...which I much prefer to bafflement... :confused:

wonderment — Wayfarer

Will bafflement suffice?