This is the only mention of her in Plato's dialogues. — Fooloso4

Hmm. I wonder if this is more about Plato than Socrates?

Interesting. Thanks for the discussion with .

...a stud person for national farming companies.

Is that some UKian agricultural usage which is very different from USian usage? — wonderer1

A special program to breed more blind farmers?

:wink:

Maybe you need to get out more.

A western example, but in that trashy book of lies, the guardian, so you won't have seen it.

OMG, he drives and uses a chain saw!!

You would benefit from watching this:

Oh, .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QWlTcF1JPk

The world is an amazing place.

It seems you are describing the totality of possible worlds. Modal logic sets out your answer.

And, at least in the case of the Phaedo, unwanted. — Fooloso4

Otherwise, by your account, Socrates actively sort out her company. Xanthippe may have been making the point that Socrates would have no further opportunity to educate his friends after the hemlock, perhaps in an attempt to have him make an effort to save himself.

Seventy isn't that bad...

Take care that it really is parsley...

One group just prefers to use the verb "to see" only when talking about seeing distal objects and the other group just prefers to use the verb "to see" only when talking about seeing mental phenomena. — Michael

Can you not see that these are both wrong? We use the word "see" in both ways.

Consider that we are all deaf, illiterate mutes. Naive realists claim that distal objects and their properties are constituents of our experience and indirect realists claim that they're not. — Michael

I'll offer you the same answer as given to Frank, above. Blind, illiterate mutes can herd cows. You account seems a bit ableist...

We do not simply passively "experience" cows. we feed them, move them into yards, slaughter them and eat them.

All this by way of pointing out that the "constituents of our experience" are not one way, from world to mind; we also change what is in the world, and this is part of our experience of the world. While you read this, you are already formulating your reply.

And you do not feed, herd, slaughter and eat sense impressions.

It is very difficult to see how you avoid antirealsim of some sort, or even solipsism, if all you have access to are sense-impressions and never cows. The notion that such things are "inferred" seems very lonely.

So you're looking at a cow. Do you recognize it as a cow? Or just think you recognize it? Knowing that it's called a "cow" doesn't make any difference. There is no fact about which rule you've been following all this time. Other people can't help you with that. — frank

recognising it as a cow consists in not running for the gate because it's a bull, keeping a eye out for pats on the surrounding ground, counting how many cows there are as opposed to kangaroos, and so on. That is it consist in interacting with the cow and with other things. You know it is a cow by those interactions - indeed, knowing it is a cow is those interactions.

There is a way of recognising that it is a cow that is shown by how one, not by setting out a rule. Pi §201. That's what is missed in Kripke's reading, powerful though it is.

Therefore perception has to start with innate confidence in a world circumscribed by space and time, where you, the real you, reside in an unchanging spot as it all swirls around you, or you fly through it as it rests on arbitrary x-y-z axes. — frank

It's not obvious that this follows from your previous paragraph. Yes, dealing with cows requires there to be cows, if that is what you are claiming. But you seem to want some Kantian transcendence here? I have a vantage point.

It's puzzling that I could have recognized the smell as something I'd experienced before. — frank

Well, here's the puzzle: did you recognise it, or just think you recognised it? Dejà vu?

You have no way to tell.

Hence, following a rule has to be public.

Kripke shows that it's not. — frank

Perhaps. That's another multifaceted issue. But all the more grist for the mill.

Which brings us again to the things lurking in the background here.

Oversimplified, Frege gets mentioned because of his separation of sense and denotation; what we might now call extension and intension, sense and reference. He introduced these in response to problems with substitution.

Anne believes that Venus is the morning star.
the morning star = the evening star.
Therefore, Anne believes that Venus is the evening star.

But Anne may believe no such thing.

This discussion runs in parallel with the discussion here, with indirect realism as the intensional description, direct realism as the extension.

"I see the cow in the field" if seen as direct, picks out the cow in the field. But if seen as only indirectly referring to the cow, is opaque. Hence Michael's insistence that one can see the cow without there being a cow.

Not unlike other issues involving other propositional attitudes... "I believe the cow is in the field"; "I hope the cow is in the field"; "I see the cow is in the field"?. And this of course goes to intentionality and hence to action.

Kripke and Donnellan put an end to some of this by showing us problems with the description theory of names. Their arguments can be rounded on Michael's idea that we infer the cow from our perceptions. Just as a description need not pick out the same individual in every possible world, our perceptions need not pick out the cow.

I'm sooting from the hip here, by way of showing some of the relations between this topic and various other philosophical problems.

And providing a pile of ammunition for folk who wish to shoot back.

But it might take the thread in new and interesting directions.

Do you mean that there is no doubt that Xanthippe existed? — Ludwig V

No.

It is true that no-one questions it. — Ludwig V

Just that.

Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"


A hundred pages. Not bad.

Thanks, Professor Dennett.

,

The dispute between naive realists and indirect realists concerns whether or not experience provides us with direct knowledge of the mind-independent nature of distal objects. That's not a grammatical dispute. — Michael

Here's a characterisation in grammatical terms: When one says one sees that there is a cow in the field over there, the direct realist says we can be referring to the cow, but the indirect realist says we can refer only to the sensation-of-cow, and must rely on some form of inference to talk about the cow-in-itself.

At issue is whether the word "cow" in "I see a cow" refers to the cow or the sensation-of-cow.

Anscombe, and I submit, Austin, say it can do either. Michael appears to claim that can only ever refer to the sensation-of-cow, and that further work is needed to ever talk about cows.

I haven't read Anscombe's paper. — Pierre-Normand

it's a worthy piece. There is a discussion of the change in the use of "intention", it's special philosophical uses and what Anscombe sees as the misspelling, "intension". The critique of Austin is so much the more cutting because Anscombe adopts both Austin's own style and method. She would have attended some of his sessions at Oxford.

So we have both Anscombe and Austin showing the poverty of this sort of thing:

The epistemological problem of perception concerns whether or not distal objects and their properties are given to us in experience; it doesn't concern the direction of our attention. You appear to be looking at things in reverse. — Michael

with

Frege's conclusion "The concept horse is not a concept" was based on the same sort of trouble about different uses of expressions. What "cheval" stands for is a concept, and what "cheval" stands for is a horse; these premisses do not, however, yield the result that if Bucephalus is a horse he is a concept. Similarly, what John is said to have sent Mary is a book, and what John is said to have sent Mary is a direct object; these premisses do not yield the result that if John gave Mary a book, he gave her a direct object. — Anscombe

Michael manages to only see the concept, and never the horse.

But Anscombe continues:

Now 'ordinary language' views and 'sense-datum' views make the same
mistake, that of failing to recognize the intentionality of sensation, though they take opposite positions in consequence. This failure comes out clearly on the part of an ordinary-language philosopher if he insists that what I say I see must really be there if I am not lying, mistaken, or using language in a "queer", extended (and therefore discountable) way.

Even using a list of variations in a way familiar to readers of Austin.

So we have the indirect realist, here, Michael, insisting that one only ever sees the "mental", and the direct realist, here, an advocate of "ordinary language", saying that we only ever see what is really there. And neither has it quite right.

Now Anscombe's "advocate of ordinary language" might appear to be Austin...

John Austin, who opposed the view that there are two senses of "see" ac- cording as the seeing has to be veridical or not, remarked casually that there were perhaps two senses of "object of sight". I think it was in this connection that he contrasted "Today I saw a man born in Jerusalem" and "Today I saw a man shaved in Oxford" -both said in Oxford. At any rate, one says, you didn't see him born today; perhaps you did see someone being shaved. So the one description, while true of what you saw, in a sense does not give what you saw. A description which is true of a material object of the verb "to see", but which states something that absolutely or in the circumstances "you can't have seen", necessarily gives only a material object of seeing. — Anscombe

But as I recall Austin is explicit, in Sense and Sensibilia, in avoiding commitment to direct realism per se, rather rejecting the framing of the dilemma altogether.

I don't see how your conversation with Claude helped.

By the way, I'm presently detecting an odor that I know I've smelled before, but I can't remember what it is or what it's called. I think it may be a flower, but I don't know. That shows that you don't have to know a name for something to recognize it and be keenly aware of it. Although I have Asperger's, so I may be wired differently. — frank

Indeed. And your attention is directed towards That.

Supose we call the smell "S". Discussion might go on around you as to what is causing S, if it is acrid or floral, if it is becoming stronger or if it is more noticeable near the window, and so on.

Or if you are by yourself, you might come back tomorrow and puzzle as to if the smell has changed.

And so the puzzle grows.

, , it remains that Xanthippes' presence was undoubted.

As is the assumption that this needs to be pointed out. — Fooloso4

Cast your eye down the list of discussions on the forum home page. While you and I might know better, Cartesian scepticism is unfortunately not uncommon.

There's a qualitative difference only in the sense that there's a qualitative difference between photorealism and cubism; it's still just paint on canvas. It's not as if in the veridical case distal objects and their properties are constituents of the experience. — Michael

Amusing, but it's a qualitative difference like there's a qualitative difference between cubism and method acting. While you might get to watch either, the context is quite different, as is the way one thinks about each.

It's not as if in the veridical case distal objects and their properties are constituents of the experience. — Michael

Isn't that the very point at issue?

The discussion moves on to talk of interpretation. I don't think that term quite strong enough. it doesn't capture the way in which we are embedded in what we see, touch, smell and feel, nor how that is set in place by our interactions with others, especially in terms of language.

Thanks for mentioning the SPR article on the problem of perception. Tim Crane, who authored it, was the perfect person for the job. What feature of intentionalism is it that you wish to retain that you think might be compatible with disjunctivism? — Pierre-Normand

Well, I've been using Austin's arguments here, despite being well aware of Anscombe's excellent critique. For the purposes of this thread the story is about why indirect realism is wrong; that's a different topic to which story is right. There's a whole lot more going on here than ever gets addressed in these threads.

But to be a bit more specific, we've all by now seen the man in the gorilla suit in the basketball game. Our perception is directed, intentional. While you are reading this you are ignoring the stuff going on around you, the itch of those haemorrhoids, the noise from the other room, the smell of the coffee. Other views of perception fail to give this aspect its proper place, they are excessively passive. This is the advantage of intentionalism: that perception is intentional, an action we perform.

I'm not convinced that intentionalism is obligated to accept the common kind claim, as is suggested in the SEP article.

Perhaps a thread specifically on The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature would attract some interest. But it's not an easy paper.

Thanks for the question.

So do you supose that there could be an algorithm, a method, that gives us truth in any given case?
— Banno

That's an interesting question. — Benj96

I'd kind of hoped that by asking the question, the absurdity of the idea would become apparent. Could the same algorithm answer questions as diverse as how black holes function and if she loves you?

“commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter” which leads us to where Descartes ends up, — Antony Nickles

See the thread on Rings and Books for more on this.

...we want to avoid our disappointment and surprise — Antony Nickles

Excellent answer.

Is this the kind of married life Mary advocated and you imagine marks an important distinction between philosophers? — Fooloso4

Well, I was taken. by this line:

...most people recoil towards experience, and attempt to bring their strengthened self to terms with the rich confusion from which it fled. Marriage, which is a willing acceptance of the genuinely and lastingly strange, is typical of this revulsion. — Rings and Books

A curiously accurate characterisation of marriage. It acknowledges the difference between a flatmate and a partner. There is a very different commitment, the willingness to work together while accepting those aspects of one's partner that are not within in one's control. More than a recognition of the other, marriage seeks the likes of Joy in the presence of the other.

Midgley points out that it is redundant to deduce the existence of one's wife or husband from first principles. Doubt here is absurd.

You have not understood what I said. — Fooloso4

I'm relieved.

Makes sense. — Janus

The cow joke?

She certainly succeeded in annoying Dawkins. — Ludwig V

To her credit. That line I quoted earlier so succinctly shows the flaw in his approach.

Philosophers did not want the human soul to be mixed up in the world of objects, as it must be to make knowledge possible. They were too sensitive about its dignity. — Rings and Books

I've italicised that last to emphasis it. Seems poignant.

It was the novelty and promise of 20th century analytic philosophy to which many at Oxford and elsewhere were enamored. A disregard for the history of philosophy at its root. A return to Aristotle was a response to this novelty. — Fooloso4

Mary read Honour Moderations and Literae Humaniore, along with Iris Murdoch, at Somerville. No, she does not disregard the history of philosophy. Indeed, one of the claims of Metaphysical Animals is that the (women) were to a large degree responsible for the rejection of Ayer's positivism and a returned emphasis on the classics. Certainly one would not sensibly claim Anscombe or Foot ignore Aristotle.

So I don't think you are on the right track here.

,

I do occasionally get a PM from someone appreciating something I said. — Fooloso4

Interesting - as do I, and more. The triviality that so often infests the open threads pushes many a discussion into the Inbox. The three more interesting discussions in which I am presently involved are found there, not in the forums. It avoids feeding the "trolls".

I still see something when I dream and hallucinate, — Michael

The "common kind claim", clarified in the SEP article on the problem of perception. When in an internationalist mood, following Anscombe and Davidson, I might consider it. When I'm in a more disjunctive mood I would deny it. Here's were there might be some actual new content to this discussion, were it to rise above the mediocrity of this thread. I speculate that there might be a way of achieving some compatibility between intentionalism and disjunctivism. I haven't worked through it. Another PhD for someone.

You're welcome to redefine "direct perception" if you like, but in doing so you're no longer addressing the indirect realist's claim. Your arguments against indirect realism are against a strawman. — Michael

This again assumes that the only alternative to indirect perception is direct perception. Have you stoped beating your wife yet?

Careful, if you think about this too much you might come to understand how words do things. — wonderer1

Yep.

Reminiscent of Kant's Noumena. The whole denial that I know that the heater grate to my right is what I'm seeing. I know what it's made of. I know where it's located. I know the size and shape. I know it's function. I know some dangers it poses to passersby. I know it's not located in my head/body. I know mental representations are. Thus, the grate I'm looking at is not a mental representation. — creativesoul

Again, indirect realism's framing of the discussion is oddly passive, as if all we ever do is look.

There is no difference between the constituents of an hallucination and a veridical experience. — Michael

I'm not convinced. An hallucinatory cow and a veridical cow are very different things.

We do, after all, have the word "hallucination", "dream", "delusion' and so on precisely because we are aware of that difference.

You want to say that the experience is the same, but having a dream is qualitatively different to being awake; having an hallucination is different to having a cow.

(I had to work a Bart joke in there somewhere).

I feel pain and see things when I dream and hallucinate. You're reading something into the sentence "I experience mental representations" that just isn't there. — Michael

...things...

When you have an hallucination of a cow, you do not see a cow, because there is no cow to see.

:smile:

There's semantic hijacking going on in here concerning what counts as direct realism/perception. — creativesoul

Yep, a continuing attack on "direct realism", a position that no one actually holds.

So we have two scenarios. In both there are things in the world. In both there are representations of those things. But in indirect realism one says that "what I see is the representation". Here the "I" doing the "seeing" is seperate to the representation, and the "I" never sees the thing.

Now this leads to various difficulties. It means, for instance, that when you say that you see the cup has a handle, what you mean is that the representation of the cup has a handle. You are not saying anything about the cup. It leads to a whole network of philosophical garden paths in which, absurdly, the self is forever "cut off" from the world in which it lives.

In the other account, one says something like that "I see things by representing them". Here, the "I" doing the seeing is doing the representing. When you say that the cup has a handle, you are saying that it is the cup that has the handle, not the representation.

The physics and physiology is the same in both cases. The wording in the first account cuts one off from the world. The wording in the second account embeds one in the world. The framing, the grammar one chooses, has consequences well beyond mere perception. — Banno

The trouble here is how indirect realism can produce reliable information about the number of handles on the cup.

Again, you are addressing what you expect to be said, not what has been said.

Attempting to use purportedly reliable scientific knowledge to support a claim that we have no reliable knowledge of distal objects is a performative contradiction. — Janus

. The philosophical dispute between direct (naive) and indirect (non-naive) realists concerns the physics and physiology of perception. Indirect realists are right and direct realists are wrong. — Michael

Balls. If that were so there would not be a philosophical issue. There is no difference in the physics or physiology between direct and indirect descriptions. The difference is that the direct realist sees a cow, the indirect realist sees... something mental. You keep setting out a scientific account as if it settles the issue, but there is no disagreement here.

There is a difference in language attribution.

But further, I am not here advocating direct realism as you see it, and it seems to me you have not addressed, indeed perhaps not followed, what I has writ.

So again, we talk past each other. And i don't think that's down to me.

That issue of language has nothing to do with the epistemological problem of perception. — Michael

:rofl: I think it is exactly the problem. We do not disagree on anything to do with the physiology or physics hereabouts. Where we disagree is as to the language of perception.

I say we see the cow. You say we see only the mental cow.

I don't see our approaches as meshing.

"The model emerges in the process of you interacting with the room. — wonderer1

Something like that. This is where @Isaac would chime in. :worry:

This discussion will again get nowhere. not with comments such as

When I say "I see colours and colours are mental phenomena" I am referring to the mental phenomena, not whatever else the term "colour" might be used to refer to. — Michael

Well, yes; if by "colour: you mean only mental phenomena, then colours are only mental phenomena, and you have thereby invented your own little language game that you can go play in the corner by yourself.

Enjoy.

This is equivocation. There is "colour" as an object's surface disposition to reflect a certain wavelength of light and there is "colour" as the mental phenomenon that differs between those with 3 channel colour vision and those with 12 channel colour vision (and that occurs when we dream and hallucinate). — Michael

There's also the colour red. Folk knew about it well before they knew about wavelengths and three channel colour vision.

If there is a equivocation here, it is being forced on us. But in any case, it seems we now agree that colours are not just mental phenomena.

Colours and pain are mental phenomena. — Michael

If colours are no more than mental phenomena, how is it that we agree that clear skys are blue? How is it that we agree that an ache is not a sting?

They are also linguistic, and physical.

No single thread runs through the whole rope - that sort of thing.

I've been a visual artist for a long time. I can put aside mental shorthand and tune into my visual field. I see color, light, dark, and lines. I can do that so thoroughly that I forget what it is my looking at, but this is something new artists struggle with. The mind strongly insists it knows what things look like and it will override attempts to draw what's actually in the visual field. I've known about this since childhood, so it's obvious to me that a person can voluntarily shift focus depending on what their concerns are. If it's an incoming car, I probably won't dwell long on how the car is foreshortened in space as it approaches me. — frank

Cool. So this is something you learned to do? You learned not to see the cow, but to see the colour, shade, shape and so on?

I'm not seeing what we are to do with this. Is the claim that the colour, shade, shape and so on are the mental model, and that you have learned to see it? I don't think that quite right. Interesting, though.

Our experiences are different though. — frank

Sure. But not so different that we always say we are seeing different cows... At least some times we are incline to say we see the same cow...

That might be enough.

So a further point, about language use, perhaps: Is it clearer, better, to say that you see the cow, or that you see the model or image or representation of the cow that your neural network constructs?

By way of argument in favour of the former, we sometimes might claim that you and I are to be said to be looking at the very same cow. It seems difficult to say this if what you see is the product of your neural net, and what I see is the product of my neural net. You see the product of your neural net, I see the product of my neural net, and hence we do not see the same cow.

That is, saying that what you see is the model or image or representation of the cow, and not the cow, makes other things we commonly do, oddly complicated.

So

...constructing the "image" is your experiencing the cow. — Banno

Does that make sense to you? You experience the cow by your neural nets building some sort of model or image or representation of the cow. Add to that the smell, the feel of the hide, and so on.

I would propose that instead of trying to explain sight, let's first do a quick analysis of what we do with the concept of self: — frank

Not sure that's a good plan. I don't see that self will be any simpler than sight - that seems very unlikely.

The self stays the same... — frank

Well, no, it doesn't. It is in a state of flux.

For the rest, the experience is of a cow, not of a "visual field" or of an "image" of a cow.

I would say you experience the image. — frank

That's not right. Rather, constructing the "image" is your experiencing the cow.

I don't understand why this seems so difficult to comprehend.

Not sure why you have posted this. Is it by way of agreeing wiht what I have said?

It makes sense to say that you interact with the room by way of a complex of representations, but how is the model equal to you interacting with the room? — frank

Well, where are those representations? If you are interacting with them, then presumably they can be distinguished from you... hence you see them, and we havn't an explanation of what seeing consist in at all.

As contrasted with interacting with the room by constructing those representations. I dunno. Seems a simple enough point.