@Hypericin

I see that you are not yet a member of the new site. I will hold off on posting a reply until you join, unless you would also like to bring the discussion to a close, in which case I will not post a reply your last post.

Understood. I'm fine with bringing it to a close as well. If you're ready to be done, then I can either try to delete the thread on the new site, or you can provide one final reply to which I will not respond.

@Hypericin @Michael

I have decided to move the discussion over to the new site in consideration of the fact that this site will be made read-only as of 2/26.

The new thread can be found here. Thanks.

I think there's a crucial equivocation running through your response that's worth surfacing, because it's doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

So even if our minds are "directed" towards a mind-independent world it does not follow that we have direct perception of it — Michael

You're right that in the monitor scenario, the person's mind is directed toward the world beyond the monitors without having direct perception of it. But the analogy breaks down at the decisive point. In the monitor case, we can independently specify both the monitors and the world beyond them — we can walk around the room, inspect the cameras, trace the causal chain, and verify that the monitors are intermediaries. The distinction between "what's on the screen" and "what's out there" is itself something we establish through further acts of perception and inquiry.

But in the perceptual case as you describe it, no such independent access is even in principle available. The "mental phenomena" you posit as the direct objects of perception are not something we discover between ourselves and the world the way we discover monitors between a person and an outside scene. They're postulated precisely because of a prior philosophical commitment — that the causal mediation of perception entails an intermediary object of awareness. The monitor analogy presupposes the very framework of direct perceptual access to a mind-independent world (we see the room, the monitors, the cameras) in order to motivate the claim that such access is never available. That's self-undermining.

It's not a case of either/or. We need to distinguish between direct awareness and indirect awareness. We can be indirectly aware of the world without being directly aware it. — Michael

You say we need to distinguish between direct and indirect awareness, and that modern science has "firmly established" that distal objects are not constituents of first-person phenomenal experience. But this is where I think you're moving too quickly from a scientific claim to a philosophical one. What science establishes is the causal story — photons, retinal transduction, neural processing. What science does not establish is a claim about the object of awareness. The claim that the direct object of awareness must be a "constituent" of experience in some quasi-mereological sense — that the apple must somehow be part of my experience in order for me to perceive it — is not a scientific finding. It's a philosophical assumption about what perception requires, and it's precisely the assumption I'm questioning.

On a different account of perception, awareness isn't a relation between a subject and an internal constituent but an act by which the subject is related to what is other than itself. The distal object doesn't need to be a "constituent" of experience; it needs to be what the experience is of, in a way that is specified by the intelligible content of the act. The demand that the object be a constituent is what generates the intermediary in the first place, and it's not obvious why we should accept that demand.

A common argument you seem to make is that a) the direct objects of perception have structure, that b) mental phenomena can't have structure, and so that c) the direct objects of perception can't be mental phenomena. I reject (b); they can and they do. — Michael

You say you reject my premise (b) — that mental phenomena can't have structure — and insist they can and do. I actually agree that mental phenomena have structure; that was never my claim. My claim is about the explanatory order. You're proposing that we start with structured mental phenomena that "erroneously seem to be distal objects," and that in favorable cases these mediate indirect perception of distal causes whose structure "mirrors" the structure of the mental phenomena. But this picture raises a serious question: what accounts for the structural mirroring?

On your view, the structural correspondence between mental phenomena and distal causes is something we discover after the fact — a happy coincidence or an evolved correlation that we posit to explain the reliability of our representations. But on the view I'm advancing, the structural correspondence isn't a coincidence requiring explanation; it's constitutive of what it means to understand. When an act of understanding grasps an intelligible pattern, the identity of the pattern grasped and the pattern in reality isn't a "mirroring" between two numerically distinct structures — it's one and the same intelligibility, accessed through different modes (being in reality, and being understood by a mind). The physicist's understanding of color charge and the actual behavior of quarks aren't two structurally similar items; the understanding is the intelligibility of the quark behavior as received in the mode of cognition.

This matters because your "mirroring" picture leaves you with an unbridgeable explanatory gap: how do you ever get from "my mental phenomena have this structure" to "the world has this structure" without already presupposing the cognitive access you're trying to explain? If all you ever directly perceive are structured mental phenomena, then the claim that distal causes have a mirroring structure is itself something you can only ever arrive at through those same mental phenomena — which means it's either circular or it requires some mode of cognitive access to reality that isn't reducible to perceiving mental intermediaries. And that mode of access is exactly what I've been pointing to all along.

Taking your points in order:

You and I seem quite capable of having a conversation and talking about world affairs, the colour of the dress, and headaches without ever having direct perception of the same things given that we've never met in person. The same would be true even if I was raised alone in a room by people on monitors, or if we all wore those visors. So rather than asking me to explain how this is possible, I think the burden is on you to explain why it wouldn't be — Michael

The burden-shifting move here doesn't quite work. The question isn't whether we can talk about the world — of course we can coordinate linguistically even under highly degraded conditions. The question is what grounds the normativity of that coordination. When I say the dress is blue and you say it's gold, we treat that as a genuine disagreement about how the dress is, not merely a discrepancy between two private mental states. But if all perceptual content is inherently private, then there's nothing we're both directed toward that could make one of us right and the other wrong. You'd need to reconstruct normativity from scratch out of private representations plus some coordination mechanism — and every attempt to do that either smuggles in a shared world or collapses into mere behavioral agreement with no genuine correctness conditions.

Your monitor-room scenario actually illustrates the problem. The person raised in that room could still make true or false claims about what's on the monitors. But could they make true or false claims about the world beyond the monitors? Only if you grant that their cognitive operations are in some way answerable to how things actually are — and that answerability is precisely what I mean by the mind being directed toward mind-independent reality. If you deny that, you lose the normative dimension entirely.

The "explanatory work" is that it's entailed by our understanding of physics, physiology, neuroscience, and psychology, hence indirect realism being the scientific view of perception. — Michael

This conflates two very different claims. Physics, physiology, and neuroscience tell us that perception is causally mediated — that there's a complex causal chain from object to experience. No one disputes that. But causal mediation doesn't entail that what we are aware of in perception is a mental intermediary rather than the world itself. That's a further philosophical inference, and it's precisely the one I'm questioning.

Consider: the fact that I see the tree by means of light waves, retinal stimulation, and neural processing doesn't by itself tell me whether I'm aware of the tree or aware of a mental representation of the tree. The causal story is equally compatible with a view on which the whole causal apparatus is the means by which the world itself becomes present to a knower. Treating "indirectness of causal mechanism" as equivalent to "indirectness of awareness" is a non sequitur, and one that the sciences themselves don't actually commit to — it's a philosophical gloss on the science, not a deliverable of the science.

The mind "grasping" the structure of mind-independent reality is a really vague claim. What exactly do you mean by it? Does my mind "grasp" the fact that quarks are fundamental particles with color charge and spin? To an extent perhaps, but I'm no physicist. Regardless, none of us has direct perception of quarks.

And I'm not saying that we cannot in principle do whatever it is. I'm saying that whatever it is only in practice achieved indirectly. These same "structural" contents occur even if subjective idealism true, even if we're Boltzmann brains, even if we're dreaming, even if we're hallucinating, and even if light is slow and the apple was disintegrated five seconds ago. So these mind-independent objects are not necessary (except to whatever extent they're causally necessary). — Michael

By the mind "grasping" the structure of mind-independent reality, I mean something fairly precise: that in acts of understanding, we identify intelligible patterns (relations, unities, regularities, dependencies) that hold in reality itself, not just in our representations. When a physicist understands color charge, they aren't just manipulating symbols — they've grasped something about how quarks actually behave, and that grasp is confirmed (or disconfirmed) by whether the predictions it generates pan out. The fact that none of us perceives quarks directly is beside the point; the structure of reality is grasped through inquiry which is mediated by direct perception the world. It's success conditions are set by how things are, not by how they appear.

Now, you say these "structural contents" would be present even under subjective idealism, Boltzmann brain scenarios, dreaming, and so on. This is just the classical skeptical move, and it proves far too much. By the same reasoning, you could say that no belief is justified, since any belief is compatible with a skeptical scenario. The force of skeptical possibilities depends entirely on whether we have positive reasons to take them seriously, and in the normal case we don't. More importantly, the fact that something could in principle be produced without the object doesn't show that in the actual case it is produced without the object. My visual experience of the apple could in principle be produced by a demon, but the relevant question is whether, in the normal case, the best explanation of the experience's specific content, its systematic revisability, and its integration with successful action is that it puts me in contact with an actual apple.

The slow-light scenario is instructive here. Yes, if light has a travel time, then the object might have changed by the time I see it. But this is a limitation on perceptual currency, not evidence that I'm perceiving a mental object rather than a physical one. When I look at a star and see it as it was eight years ago, I'm still seeing the star — I'm just seeing it as it was, not as it is. Temporal lag doesn't convert direct awareness of objects into awareness of mental intermediaries.

I see why @Michael was talking about the "multi-user VR goggles" case. It seems like your view precludes acknowledging the clear representationalism of the user-facing visualizations in this scenario. — hypericin

I actually fully acknowledge the representationalism of the user-facing visualizations in Michael’s VR goggle-scenario. Likewise, I fully acknowledge that the brain creates similar models/representations as part of its operations. My claim is that perception cannot be fully accounted for at this level of analysis.

For me, this is really a question of reductionism. There are many “levels” at which one might try analyze “perception”:

1. Quantum Physics
photon interactions, electron transitions, quantum electrodynamics

2. Statistical / Classical Physics
optics, wave propagation, thermodynamics, mechanics
(this is hugely important for perception — lenses, diffraction, sound waves, etc.)

3. Physical Chemistry
molecular bonding, electrochemical gradients, membrane potentials

4. Organic Chemistry
photopigments, neurotransmitters, receptor proteins

5. Biochemistry / Molecular Biology
signal transduction cascades (opsins, ion channels, second messengers)

6. Cellular Biology
neuron physiology, action potentials, synaptic transmission

7. Systems Neurobiology
retinal circuits, LGN, cortical pathways, dorsal/ventral streams

8. Computational Neuroscience
firing-rate models, spiking models, predictive coding, population coding

9. Machine Learning / Structured Neural Computation
structured connectionism, deep nets, feature hierarchies, representational learning

10. Cognitive Science / Psychology
attention, object recognition, gestalt grouping, perceptual constancies

11. Phenomenology / Conscious Experience
the “what-it’s-like,” figure/ground, presence/absence, salience
(this is a distinct layer from cognitive science, and leaving it out creates a gap)

12. Rational Agency (Space of Reasons)
perceptual judgment, justification, error, evidence-responsiveness

13. Practical Agency / Action (Space of Action)
decision, intention, responsibility, value-guided perception

@Michael seems to think that the question “what is the object of perception?” is settled by causal/functional analysis at levels 7 - 10.

I disagree. I think that at that level of analysis the question is left completely underdetermined. I think the question can only be settled at levels 11 - 13.

And while levels 11 - 13 are realized by the levels below them, they are not reducible to them. Yes, perception is mediated by levels 7 - 10, but this is causal mediation, not epistemic mediation.

It is only at levels 11 - 13 where epistemic normativity arises. This is where things like truth, reference, intentionaltiy and justification are found. The question “what is the object of perception?” is answered here, not at the levels below.

Michael will say that I’m just “changing the subject” by insisting that the question be answered at these levels. But historically, this is precisely where the debate took place.

If one actually takes the time to explore the work of the pre-modern realists - Aristotle, Aquinas, Scotus, Suarez, the Conimbricenses - none of them denied that perception was causally mediated, nor that the intellect works with “internal models” (e.g. “form”, “phantasm”, “formal sign”, “idea”, etc.). But for them, these aren’t what you see, they are what you see with (or, perhaps, how you see). This is in direct contrast with the indirect realism of Locke and Descartes (and their progeny) who maintained that we only ever see the idea itself. The external world must be inferred.

Even a naive-color realist like Aquinas would not have denied the modern scientific analysis at levels 7 - 10. He probably would have tempered his color realism a bit, but he would have had no problem with the idea that the brain generates models of its environment.

And that’s because, for someone like Aquinas, the directness of perception simply is not decided by whether distal objects are coloured, or whether perception is causally mediated. For Aquinas, perception is direct because the external thing itself is the intentional object of the sensory act, while the internal models are merely the causal means by which that object is made present to the perceiver.

So the idea that the debate between IR and DR is “just about colour realism” or is “settled by modern science” is not only historically inaccurate, but fundamentally misguided. Not only does it mislocate the debate, but it doesn’t even address how many of the most sophisticated pre-modern direct realists actually cashed out “directness”.

Looking at these two claims you don't accept again:

1 Qualia are logically prior to apprehension of the object
2 Qualia the sole constituent of experience, such that were it removed from experience, nothing would remain

If qualia are "how the distal object presents itself to the subject": Doesn't 1 have to be true? — hypericin

No. When we perceive an object such as an apple we are presented with an apple – not with “apple + qualia”. The presentation of the apple has a qualitative aspect to it, but the qualitative aspect is not itself explicitly thematized or objectified independently of the apple within ordinary perception.

If qualia are how the distal object presents itself, the distal object cannot present itself without qualia. Yet, qualia can be experienced without a distal object. The perception of qualia has no precondition, but the perception of distal objects require qualia. — hypericin

The fact that perception of distal objects probably requires qualia does not entail that qualia are what we perceive. Perception of distal objects requires all kinds of things: light, sense organs, neural circuitry, computation of edge maps, contour maps, motion vectors, depth maps, color gradients, etc., etc., but none of these is what is perceived.

As discussed above, this kind of mistake results from trying to decide the question “what is the object of perception?” at the wrong level of analysis.

And, doesn't 2 have to be true, following from 1? If qualia are necessary for object apprehension, the removal of qualia from experience removes any perception of the object as well. Leaving, nothing. — hypericin

This doesn’t follow. That qualia are required for object apprehension does not entail that object apprehension is exhausted by qualia. There is more to the presentation of an object than just the qualitative aspect.

There are also things like identity, persistence, relationality, modality, presence, absence, temporality, locatedness, etc, etc. that all contribute to what we apprehend as an “object”.

This was Kant’s insight (though he wasn’t the first to see it): objects are not presented to us as bundles of qualia, they have a robust intelligible structure that is not reducible to bare sensation.

In other words, aren't you already committed to qualia as an intermediary? Just not qualia as an intermediating "object"? — hypericin

Yes, but the fact that something mediates perception is not sufficient to establish it as the object of perception. Again, all kinds of things mediate perception that we wouldn’t try to identify as the object of perception (light, sense organs, neural circuitry, etc., etc.)

:up:

Cheers :up:

I have always found this whole debate somewhat ridiculous. It has always seemed to me to be nothing more than arguing about terminology.

...

So, we have two different ways of conceptualizing what is going on and no way of determining that one is true and the other false. — Janus

Yep, I mean this is how most people I know feel about philosophical debate in general. And to be honest, I often feel this way myself (especially after 43 pages). Personally, I still find it interesting and entertaining to engage in discussions like this because I like to explore and understand the nuances. But at the end of the day, I do think it's mostly an exercise in cost-benefit analysis in an attempt to build a philosophical outlook that one feels at home in. That's not to say that I don't stand by my opinions, but I don't really expect the debate to come to a tidy resolution either.

Then you're just splitting hairs over the meaning of the term "qualia". There's a reason I started the discussion by using the term "mental phenomena". It's a bit more inclusive. — Michael

I don't think it's hair splitting to contest your claim that qualia are the direct objects of perception, or to press the point that determinate objecthood is necessary for reference.

But it sounds like what you really mean is that all perceptual content — not just qualitative feel, but also structural features like unity, identity, persistence, relationality, and modality — is ultimately “mental stuff.” If so, a few questions arise:

(1) How can the normativity and public assessability of perception be explained if all perceptual content is inherently private?

(2) What explanatory work does the hypothesis that all perceptual content is “mental stuff” actually do that cannot be done otherwise?

(3) What reason is there to think that the “structural” contents of perception (identity, unity, relationality, modality, etc.) cannot in principle be explained as the mind grasping the structure of mind-independent reality?

Until those questions are answered, I don’t see why indirect realism should be regarded as obligatory rather than optional — or why it should be preferred over a direct realist account that treats perception as fallible but world-disclosing.

I agree that the “problem of perception” is partially a problem of identity (who the subject is supposed to be). If the indirect realist says the immediate object is always something internal (sense-data, qualia, BMO, etc.), then the distinction between the perceiver and the percieved starts to become problematic. If both are just “brain-stuff,” the view risks collapsing into a kind of self-perception model unless the subject is tacitly shrunk into an "inner witness".

And that’s exactly why brain-in-a-vat intuitions resonate: they presuppose that “I” could be detached from the embodied organism and reduced to a conscious subset receiving internal deliverances. Even if one avoids explicit Cartesian dualism, the functional structure starts to look dualistic: an inner arena of appearances vs. an outer arena of causes. The direct realist impulse, by contrast, is to resist that shrinkage and treat perception as an embodied act of disclosure of the world, rather than the inspection of inner items.

Are you suggesting that we know through introspection that subjective idealism is false; that if subjective idealism were true then we wouldn't have the first-person phenomenal experiences (or intellects) that we have? — Michael

Nope. I'm suggesting that insofar as someone posits a world in which nothing exhibits identity, persistence or modal stability, then perception as we know it is impossible.

I think it's possible that John lives in a world that is introspectively indistinguishable from ours but in which subjective idealism is true — Michael

Sure -- but this is still a world in which apples and boats satisfy the normative criteria of objectivity, and qualia don't.

I don't see why the existence of material brains or bodies or apples is necessary a priori. — Michael

It's not and I'm not arguing that it is. Even if we grant that there are no material brains, bodies or apples, it still doesn't follow that qualia are the direct objects of perception. That's just not how perceptual contents are structured. It's not: "I see red and infer an apple", it's: "I see a red apple".

If we assume subjective idealism then the apple is ultimately just "mind stuff", but this "mind stuff" isn't reducible to qualia. The phenomenology of perceiving an apple includes structured content -- unity, identity, difference, persistence, relationality, modality, temporality, blends of presence and absence, etc. -- that can't be cashed out in purely qualitative terms. The question of whether (or to what degree) this structured object is best understood as nothing more than the content of individual minds is yet a further question.

I don't see a problem with it. The schizophrenic hears voices, the synesthete sees colours when listening to music, and I feel a pain in my head after drinking too much. — Michael

Again, what does it mean to “hear voices,” “see colors,” or “feel pain” in a world where nothing exhibits identity, persistence, affordance, or counterfactual stability? Such a world would be an unstructured muddle incapable of supporting intentionality of any kind — because there would be nothing determinate enough to count as something heard, something seen, or something felt.

Berkeley saw this and appealed to God to guarantee the stability of experience. Hume appealed to habits of association. Kant appealed to transcendental synthesis. Different metaphysics, same structural insight: something must supply conditions of determinacy/objecthood if perception is to get off the ground at all. Without that, “perception” collapses into mere qualitative flicker with no possibility of intelligible aboutness.

So yes: I think godless subjective idealism can't sustain the normativity of perception.

...

Without God, premise (2) leaves perception without a proper object.
— Esse Quam Videri

Okay, but it doesn't follow that these people don't see, hear, feel, taste, and smell things, or that the things they see, hear, feel, taste, and smell aren't qualia/sense-data/ideas/etc. — Michael

I’m much less certain about this than you seem to be.

What does it even mean to say that we could perceive anything in a world where nothing meets the criteria of objecthood? Perception is not just “having qualitative episodes occur,” but encountering something as one and the same across time, as re-identifiable, as having boundaries, as affording possible interactions, as persisting through counterfactual variation (“it would still be there if I turned my head,” etc.).

If none of that structure is available — if there is no persistence, no re-identification, no affordances, no counterfactual stability — then we aren’t left with perception of “qualia-objects.” We’re left with William James’ “blooming, buzzing confusion”: a morass of bare qualitative occurrences with no intelligible structure whatsoever

And in that case, I don’t see how it makes sense to say that one sees, hears, tastes, touches, or smells something at all. The very grammar of perceiving “something” presupposes criteria of identity and difference that this view has dissolved.

At that point, “perception” becomes just a misleading label for sheer occurrence — and the distinction between veridical perception and hallucination collapses along with it.

On godless subjective idealism: I think perception becomes very difficult to sustain without some ground for normativity — whether that's mind-independent objects, divine coordination, or transcendental structure. If all that exists is minds and qualia, with no external standard, then the distinction between veridical perception and hallucination collapses — both are just qualia occurring in a mind. Error becomes unintelligible, because there's nothing to get right or wrong about. Incoherence among qualia only generates a norm if there's a reason to expect coherence, and without something beyond qualia to ground that expectation, there isn't one.

So yes: I think godless subjective idealism can't sustain the normativity of perception. But I don't think that's a problem for my starting point — I think it's a problem for that view.

On Berkeley's (2): yes, my account does reject "we perceive only ideas," but not by definitional fiat. It rejects it by argument — the argument that what functions as the object of perceptual cognition must satisfy conditions (re-identifiability, public accessibility, stability) that ideas-as-such don't satisfy. Berkeley himself recognized this, which is why he needed God to ensure that ideas meet the criteria of objecthood. Without God, premise (2) leaves perception without a proper object.

And I'd note that Berkeley's argument turns on an equivocation on "perceive." In (1), "perceive" means ordinary world-directed awareness. In (2), it means "have ideas." The conclusion only follows if both premises use the word in the same sense. My framework is, among other things, an insistence on not letting that equivocation pass.

I'm curious, doesn't this rule out subjective idealism a priori? Or is it only the case that if subjective idealism is false then "perception is an intrinsically normative and publicly assessable act"? — Michael

I don't think so. Take George Berkeley as an example. He's the paradigmatic subjective idealist, but he would not deny that perception is normative and publicly assessable. He might push back on the notion that perception is intrinsically normative since he ultimately grounds his system in God's coordinating actions. But I'm not ruling that out by fiat. If someone wants to argue that the normativity of perception is reducible, eliminable, grounded in God's will, etc. then I'm happy to have that discussion.

You still haven't explained why " object of perception" is necessary. Why doesn't, for instance "perceptual intermediary" suffice? — hypericin

This was something that was discussed at length earlier in the thread. The TLDR is that, on my view, perception is an intrinsically normative and publicly assessable act that is not fully reducible to causal analysis. In order for perception to be publicly assessable, whatever plays the role of "the object of perception" must satisfy criteria of re-identification and intersubjective reference that qualia, as such, cannot satisfy.

If it is established that qualia

* Is apprehensible
* Is logically prior to apprehension of the object
* Is the sole constituent of experience, such that were it removed from experience, nothing would remain — hypericin

I apologize if I have given the impression that I would accept the three of these claims. While I would accept the first with qualifications, I would not accept the other two. Those two claims are basically the whole indirect realist picture. If you assume them, then of course “qualia as intermediary” follows — but that’s exactly what’s at issue.

Do the images on the VS meet the criteria identity, persistence, affordance or counterfactuality? Keep in mind, it is not the housing, not the electronics, not the physical pixels that are the intermediary. These are the intermediary's implementation. It is the images themselves that intermediate.

If the images do not meet these criteria, yet they intermediate between the viewer and the subject, then these object criteria are irrelevant. — hypericin

The images absolutely do have criteria of identity and persistence. They can be re-identified across frames, inspected for artifacts, compared with other feeds, paused, replayed, etc. That’s precisely why they can function as intermediaries. They have a determinate structure independent of the distal apple.

If you deny that the VS image has any such identity conditions, then it’s hard to see what could even count as “the same image” across time, and the analogy stops doing the work you want it to do.

So yes: I insist on “object-like” criteria because without them “intermediary” becomes too thin to do the necessary philosophical work. “Apprehensible” is not enough; what matters is whether awareness terminates in something that can be specified and tracked as distinct from the distal object. That’s what happens in VS. It’s not what happens in ordinary perception.

I think some looping is inevitable. I actually don't think we have quite hit bedrock yet. But if you think it is getting repetitive, or you have just had enough, I certainly understand. It's been a hell of a discussion, either way. — hypericin

After 42 pages I think I'm getting a little burnt out on the topic, but I agree it's been a great discussion.

I don't disagree with you. But is there anything in those things that interpretation is answerable to that promises that only one interpretation of them is true? — Ludwig V

Good question — and no, nothing in what I said guarantees that there will always be only one uniquely correct interpretation, at least not in any straightforward epistemic sense.

Underdetermination is real: the same body of evidence can support multiple interpretations, and sometimes it’s not clear how to decide between them. But underdetermination doesn’t imply that “anything goes,” only that reality’s constraint doesn’t always uniquely fix a single articulation at a given stage of inquiry.

Also, sometimes apparent pluralism reflects different levels of description rather than competing claims about the same thing. Two accounts can both be true insofar as they are answering different questions or carving reality at different joints (e.g., thermodynamics vs statistical mechanics).

So the claim I am defending is weaker but (I think) more defensible: interpretation is constrained in a way that makes genuine success and failure possible. In my opinion, that is enough for realism.

Ok, so if Braver, Kierkegaard and Levinas dont work for you, maybe the left Sellarsians of the Pittsburgh school are more compatible. — Joshs

Yes, indeed. In fact, I think I mentioned the Pittsburgh School as a major influence in a previous response somewhere.

Of the three you mentioned, McDowell is closest, but I don't think he would fully endorse the claim that reality has an intelligible depth that exceeds any historically available conceptual scheme. For that you'd have to look to someone like C.S. Peirce:

Over against any cognition, there is an unknown but knowable reality; but over against all possible cognition, there is only the self-contradictory. In short, cognizability (in its widest possible sense) and being are not merely metaphysically the same, but are synonymous terms. — C.S. Peirce

This is perhaps an even stronger claim than I would endorse (without qualification), though I think it captures the spirit of what I've been arguing for.

Here I want to note I agree. — Moliere

Cheers!

It could be, in some larger sense, intelligible for all that. I just don't believe it to be so because of the diversity of thought is presently unable to be universalized in the manner of the philosophers without smudging out differences. And then it seems to me that differences in thought about the world (which are true) are what points to a reality greater than the mind: something beyond the intelligible. — Moliere

For me, the diversity (and fallibility) of thought is a reflection of our finite situatedness rather than a reflection of the unintelligibility of being. I find it very difficult to make sense of possibility of rational inquiry under the assumption that reality is fundamentally incomprehensible, whereas I feel that it's much easier to make sense of the diversity of thought in terms of the situatedness and limitations of the knower.

Braver is taking his cue from Kierkegaard and Levinas. For them, recalcitrance is not a brute, uninterpreted Given pushing back from outside all conceptuality; revolutionary experience isn’t contact with a naked world. Is this the direction you want to go in? — Joshs

Not entirely. I think Braver is hitting on something important with his insight that reality can disrupt established conceptual frameworks. I also agree that recalcitrance does not take the form of a brute, uninterpreted Given.

Where I would part ways is with the inference from the recalcitrance of reality to the irrational excess of Being. I believe that we can acknowledge that reality always outstrips our current framework without surrendering to the unintelligibility of that excess.

So, yes, I'm engaging in metaphysics by making the claim -- but I'm not committed to the intelligibility of Being in making that statement. — Moliere

I hope you don't mind if I press you on this point a bit. Consider the statements:

(1) Reality is chaotic
(2) Being is not inteliigible

How would you describe your intention in making such statements if not to affirm an insight into the nature of Being? In denying my claim that Being is intelligible are you not implicitly committed to the notion that I have gotten it wrong? And does this not imply a standard that both your claim and mine are answerable to, and can fall-short of? And what is this standard? Is it merely personal whimsy, or communal sanction? Mustn't it be something that outstrips and constrains both of those? Otherwise, we would be forced to say that truth is exhausted by the caprice of the individual or the community.

So there is a sense, I think, in which the claim that "Being is not intelligible" quietly self-undermines. This isn't intended as a cheap "gotcha"; it's a reflection on what is presupposed in the act of making an assertion, asking a question or seeking an acceptable answer.

The other argument I have in mind is noting what kind of thing "reality" is -- basically that it is no thing at all. — Moliere

I agree -- reality (or Being) is not a "thing", and I don't think metaphysical realism requires it to be thought of as a thing. Likewise, I don't think it makes sense to say "Being exists". To my mind, to affirm the intelligibility of Being is just to acknowledge that the world can be correctly understood, even if only partially, imperfectly and subject to the conditions of finite subjectivity.

What it means to succeed or fail, to be true or false, correct or incorrect, depends on qualitative systems of criteria. Such criteria define the basis of facts, evidence and intelligibility. If criteria are subject to interpretation along with the facts they orient and constrain, then making sense doesn’t begin only after the world is given, it constructs the conditions and modes of givenness which constrain fact-finding. — Joshs

True, but I'd argue that there is still an irreducible asymmetry at the bottom of inquiry. To re-quote Braver:

Lately, I've become interested in these moments of revolutionary experience, when our whole sense of what the world is like gets turned inside out and we are forced to form entirely new concepts to process what is happening...

So yes, the criteria are subject to interpretation, but even here reality will have its say regarding the adequacy of such interpretations, taking the form of recalcitrance in the face of denial.

The tricky part of this, I think, is that some understanding seems to be a matter of interpretation of given facts. This kind of understanding has elements of both alternatives. — Ludwig V

I agree that much of understanding is interpretive, but I think this actually sharpens the realist point rather than weakening it. Interpretation is an attempt to make sense of what is given in a way that can succeed or fail — i.e. in a way that is answerable to the facts, to counterexamples, to coherence with other lines of evidence, and to the possibility of correction. The very idea of interpretation makes sense only in light of such constraints.

I'm not saying there is a contradiction, I'm saying that no good reason has been given for treating "experience" itself as the object of perception, whereas there are good reasons for not treating it as such (e.g. it has no criteria of identity, persistence, affordance or counterfactuality).

It seems like the discussion is starting to loop now. Perhaps we've hit bedrock.

I think we’re actually very close here.

I’m completely on board with the idea that intelligibility isn’t “added from outside,” and that the world is always already given as structured and available to articulation — in fact that’s very close to what I mean by saying intelligibility belongs to being rather than being a contingent overlay.

I suppose the remaining question is just whether that “always already” should be understood primarily as a transcendental condition of appearance (Kant/Husserl), or whether it also licenses a modest metaphysical claim: that what exists is intelligibly structured in itself, even if our access is always mediated.

Either way, I think you’ve put your finger on the deepest point: the fit isn’t between two alien realms, but reflects an internal relation between being and intelligibility.

Good luck with the writing project — and thanks for the illuminating exchange.

I think there's a distinction being compressed here that's worth pulling apart.

You're right that "knowable" implies a relation to a knower — nothing is actually known without someone doing the knowing. I'm not disputing that. A universe without rational consciousness wouldn't contain acts of knowing.

But the question is whether the intelligible structure that knowing discovers is constituted by the knower or merely disclosed by the knower. Those are very different claims.

Consider: the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter would have been the same whether or not anyone conceptualized it. Not because π was floating around as a Platonic object, but because the physical relationships that we render intelligible as π were already there constraining how circular things behaved. Our conceptualization doesn't create that constraint — it grasps it. And if it merely created it, it would be hard to explain why we get things wrong and are forced to revise.

So when I say "being as knowable," I don't mean "being as already-known" or "being as constituted by a knower." I mean: being has the character of being able to be understood — it is the kind of thing that admits of intelligible structure. That's a claim about being, not a disguised claim about us. And the evidence for it is the very thing you're describing — that we can form gestalts, that cognition works, that the world cooperates with our inquiries rather than being opaque to them. The Pinter point about gestalt formation is interesting precisely because it raises the question: why does the world lend itself to being organized this way?

You might say: "That's just how cognition works — it's what minds do." But that's the question, not the answer. Why does what minds do yield genuine understanding of what isn't mind? Either the world is intrinsically the kind of thing that can be understood — in which case intelligibility is a feature of being — or the fit between mind and world is a brute fact with no deeper account. I find the former more plausible, but I recognize that's where the real disagreement lies.

I think you’re running together causal intermediacy with epistemic/intentional intermediacy.

1) Glass/fog/glasses don’t make perception “indirect” in the IR sense.

They are conditions that modulate how the same world-directed act succeeds or fails. They don’t introduce a distinct intentional terminus that I am aware of and only through which I access the world. Most of the time I don’t see “the glass” at all; I see the street through it. If the glass becomes salient (dirty, scratched), then it can become the object—but that’s a shift in what my attention takes as its target, not proof that the glass was always the immediate object.

That’s the difference from a TV or photograph: there the image is itself a public, inspectable object that can stably function as the terminus of awareness (pixels, screen, frame, resolution). That’s what makes “indirect” natural there.

2) I’m not claiming awareness of qualia requires a separate introspective act.

You’re right: there isn’t an extra act “between” hearing a chime and being aware of the chime’s sound. The phenomenal character is simply how the chime is heard. What I deny is that the phenomenal character is thereby a second object the hearing terminates on.

So: redness-as-seen, chiming-as-heard, pungency-as-smelled are not “introspected objects” in the first instance. They are features of the perceiving—the mode in which the distal thing is present. We can thematize them reflectively (“listen to the timbre,” “attend to the hue”), but that’s a change of stance, not the baseline structure.

3) “How can awareness of the object come first if sensation reveals it?”

Because “sensation” here is not a freestanding item that gets noticed first and then interpreted into an object. It is the vehicle of disclosure, not an inner object of disclosure. The system-level story is: neural/sensory processing enables an act whose intentional terminus is the world. That’s not mysterious unless we assume in advance that whatever enables awareness must itself be what awareness is of.

4) The TV junkie case actually helps distinguish the views.

A TV viewer is directly aware of an image/sound presentation and only through that indirectly aware of the event (which might be live, recorded, simulated, edited). Here “epistemic mediation” makes sense because there is a stable intermediary object (the audiovisual display) that can be inspected independently of the event.

In ordinary perception there is no analogous intermediary object “on display” for an inner observer. The neural processes are enabling conditions, not presented items. That’s exactly the step you keep asserting but haven’t shown: that because processing occurs, the subject is therefore aware of a processed intermediary.

So I’m not saying “everything is direct because it’s intentional,” and I’m not saying “everything is indirect because something is between.” I’m saying: indirect realism requires a distinct object of awareness interposed between subject and world—and your glass/fog cases don’t supply that, while TV/photos do.

On your view, what is the intermediary object of awareness in ordinary perception, analogous to the TV screen image—something we can in principle re-identify and inspect as the terminus of awareness? If your answer is “the experience itself,” then you owe an account of why experience isn’t just the act’s manner of disclosing the world.

I don't think my view has trouble accommodating indirect awareness. I am indirectly aware of a crime scene through eyewitness testimony; indirectly aware of what’s behind me through a mirror; indirectly aware of a distant galaxy through a telescope photograph.

In each case, there is a distinct intermediary that I am aware of, and through which I form beliefs about something further. The intermediary can be identified, inspected, and evaluated on its own terms. That is what makes the access indirect.

Perception is not like this. In ordinary perception there is no independently characterizable intermediary that I am aware of and through which I infer the world. The phenomenal character of the perceptual act is not something I first inspect and then use to reach the world — it is my awareness of the world. That’s the distinction, and it isn’t vacuous. It separates cases with a genuine epistemic intermediary from cases where the cognitive act just is the subject's engagement with its target.

And yes, I agree that contact with Homer through translation has the structure of indirectness on my account. You are aware of the English text as a distinct, inspectable intermediary, and you access Homer’s meaning through it. You can evaluate the translation on its own terms, compare translations, notice the translator’s choices, etc.

On your second point: you say “obviously we are aware of perceptual awareness, and obviously we can intentionally target it.” I agree — but that’s introspection, and it’s a distinct cognitive act. “I can attend to my seeing” is not the same as “in every act of seeing I am aware of an intermediary.” The possibility of introspection doesn’t entail that perception is always mediated by an object of introspective awareness.

Yes, we have now restated our divergence (once again): you see a vacuous terminological dispute, I see a substantive metaphysical disagreement. I think this is as far as we're going to get.

It's an epistemic intermediary because my intellect cannot reach out beyond my body to grasp the mind-independent nature of distal objects. — Michael

This is the core of our disagreement, and I think it's worth flagging that it's a metaphor, not an argument. It pictures the mind as an enclosed space and knowing as a kind of reaching. The entire "intentionality" tradition, from Brentano onward, challenges exactly this picture: to be conscious is already to be directed beyond oneself. The question "how does the mind get outside itself?" presupposes a separation that intentionality denies.

On reification: I don't think you're imagining a Cartesian theatre, per se. But when you say phenomenal character is "the only non-inferential information accessible to me," you're treating it as something to be accessed — an item the intellect has contact with. I'm saying it's not an item accessed but the accessing itself — the mode in which the world shows up. That's the distinction I mean by reification, and it doesn't require homunculi.

1) On "type coercion" and inference
Your framing is interesting, but it assumes what needs to be argued. You say perception produces a perception, but its goal is a world-fact, so there must be an additional operation that "coerces" perception into a fact.

But this already presupposes that perceptual experience arrives typed as non-worldly — as a free-floating inner item that must be interpreted into world-directed content. On the phenomenology I'm defending, perceptual experience is not merely an inner episode that later gets coerced into a world-fact. It already purports to disclose the world, albeit defeasibly and corrigibly. Judgment is not a type-conversion from perception into fact; it is the normative ratification of what perception already presents.

So yes, judgment introduces explicit commitment. But the world-directedness is not added by inference; it is intrinsic to the perceptual act.

2) On "matching" in interpretation and memory
You suggest that on my view the dyad in interpretation or memory could never "match," because we can't literally transpose the speaker's meaning or the past experience into the present.

But matching does not require numerical identity, or even identity of ontological type. Interpretation succeeds when it grasps the same meaning — repeatable content, not the same mental token. Memory succeeds when it recalls what occurred, not when it recreates the past episode as numerically the same experience.

You say interpretation can match its target because both are meanings. But a perception can also match its target in the relevant sense: it can accurately disclose a state of affairs. "Matching" in every case means getting it right — grasping what is the case. That doesn't require the cognitive act and its target to be of the same ontological type. A measurement can be correct without the act of measuring being the same kind of thing as the quantity measured. No one treats a measurement as an intermediary object between the scientist and the measured quantity — it's a successful cognitive achievement.

3) On translation and "directness"
You say it's obvious that in translation we have direct access to the translation-object and only indirect access to Homer. But that presupposes that "direct" means "physically at hand."

On my usage, "direct" is intentional: what is directly grasped is what the act is of. When I read Homer in English, I am indeed reading English words. But what I understand through those words is Homer's meaning. The words are the vehicle of understanding, not its terminus. Similarly, neural activity is the vehicle of perception, not its terminus. In both cases, there is a causal and semantic vehicle that I operate through rather than an intermediary that I am aware of.

This is exactly the distinction I'm drawing in perception: the enabling vehicle is not automatically an epistemic intermediary object.

4) On your clarification of what IR is and isn't
I want to highlight something important. You now say that IR does not say qualia are the intentional target of perception — the distal object is the target. IR does not say the subject only sees qualia — the subject sees the distal object through qualia. Qualia are the medium through which seeing occurs.

But notice: the intentional target is the distal object, the subject sees the distal object, and qualia are the medium through which this seeing occurs. That is precisely what I have been calling operational mediation — the system's activity constitutes the subject's awareness of the world, and phenomenal character is the mode of that awareness. You are describing my view and labeling it IR.

So I'll ask directly: what is the substantive difference between your position and mine? If it is that you prefer the word "indirect" for any cognition that proceeds through a vehicle or medium, then the disagreement is terminological rather than philosophical.

5) On your definition of epistemic mediation
You propose: epistemic mediation is a causal relationship whereby what is at hand grants epistemic access to what is not at hand.

I agree with this as a definition of operational mediation. But if you mean it as a definition of indirect realism, it applies to all cognition — memory, reasoning, interpretation, perception alike — and the distinctive IR thesis drops out. "Experience grants epistemic access to the world" is just another way of saying perception is intentional. It doesn't yet establish that experience is an intermediary object.

You've now offered several definitions of epistemic mediation over the course of our exchange — physical intermediary, multiple realizability, radical multiple realizability, and now "what is at hand granting access to what is not." In each case, the definition has turned out to be either too broad (applying to all cognition, making IR trivially true) or question-begging (presupposing that the vehicle of awareness is an object of awareness). I don't think that pattern is accidental.

The real question remains: does the vehicle of perceptual access become an object of awareness? That is the step that separates IR from DR, and it is the step that has not been established.

Wouldn't it be better to say "intelligibility is our response to being"? — Ludwig V

I would want to say something stronger than this: that intelligibility is there to be discovered — that being is the kind of thing that can be understood, and that our knowing is a response to that prior intelligibility, not its source. The evidence for this is precisely the experience of error and correction: when inquiry goes wrong and we're forced to revise, the revision isn't arbitrary. It's better — more adequate to what we were trying to understand. And that "more adequate" only makes sense if there's something there that our understanding is iteratively converging on.

I wonder what you might make of Lee Braver’s ‘middle way’ which he calls transgressive realism. — Joshs

Braver is interesting, and I think "transgressive realism" captures something phenomenologically real — the way experience can disappoint anticipation and force conceptual revision. That's a vivid articulation of the kind of constraint I was pointing to, without falling back into naive "reality batters theory" dualism.

But I don't think it lands quite where I want to land, because Braver treats the paradigmatic encounter with the real as precisely what breaks intelligibility — the moments of shock, rupture, conceptual short-circuit. The real is most real when it is most resistant to rational articulation.

That's evocative, but I think it risks turning realism into a kind of romanticism of the ineffable. What I'm after is something stronger: not just that reality can unsettle our frameworks, but that inquiry can be normatively answerable to being in a way that yields truth and correction — that intelligibility belongs to reality itself, not merely to our revisable schemes.

In other words, Braver gives a compelling phenomenology of how revision gets triggered, but not an account of why revision can converge on truth. The transgressive moment is the beginning of inquiry — the prompt — but it's not yet the answer. And without some account of normativity — of what makes one revision better than another, not just different — I think he's left with a realism of disruption rather than a realism of intelligibility.

So I'd say that Braver is a step in the right direction, but I don't think he provides the middle way on his own. The deeper question remains whether the asymmetry between truth and warrant can be grounded, or whether it dissolves into an endless series of conceptual reshufflings punctuated by shocks.

’m struggling to see a real distinction here, though. I don’t see Kant’s categories as being ‘subjective’ in the sense implied here, in that they don’t pertain to a particular subject, but are the necessary constituents of judgement for any subject. Likewise, I don't see the categories of understanding as 'imposed', as if 'the world' is one domain, and they another. They are, rather, the inevitable grounds of comprehension. — Wayfarer

That's fair — "subjective" and "imposed" were poorly chosen on my part. Kant's categories aren't psychological or arbitrary; they're the universal conditions of judgment for any finite discursive knower. I agree with that entirely.

The distinction I have in mind is subtler. For Kant, the categories govern objects as they can appear to us, and he explicitly denies that we can infer from this that things in themselves are structured accordingly. That's the whole point of the phenomena/noumena distinction. The categories are epistemically universal but ontologically noncommittal.

The realist alternative doesn't deny that intelligibility is accessed through judgment — it does deny that the structures of judgment are merely conditions of appearance. On this view, judgment is truth-apt precisely because reality is intelligible in itself and can therefore satisfy or frustrate the internal demands of inquiry. The possibility of genuine error isn't just a feature of experience's internal economy — it's answerability to what is the case.

So the issue isn't whether the categories are universal. It's whether their universality reflects the structure of any possible experience for us, or the structure of being as knowable. Kant says the former. I'm reaching for the latter.

That’s a very fair critique, and I agree my “reality pushes back” phrasing can sound Popperian — as if there were a clean dualism between framework on one side and an external tribunal called “the real” on the other.

But I don’t think that picture is essential to what I meant. I’m happy to grant the Hegelian and phenomenological point that “reality” is never encountered except as already articulated within experience and within a horizon of meaning. In that sense, breakdown is indeed internal: it shows up as contradiction, tension, or the collapse of a previously stable way of making sense.

Still, I’m not sure the post-Kantian dissolution of dualism can go so far as to make constraint purely intra-conceptual. Even if the “pushback” is experienced as breakdown within a lifeworld, the very intelligibility of error seems to require that our articulation is not sovereign — that the world can disclose our inadequacy in ways that are not reducible to mere shifts in communal norms or dialectical self-repair.

So I don’t mean “neutral reality battering theory.” I mean something closer to what phenomenology itself often emphasizes: the recalcitrance of experience, the failure of anticipations, the non-fulfillment of our intentions — a constraint that shows up immanently, but is not constituted by us. That’s the sense in which I still want to say intelligibility is discovered in response to being, even if “being” is never given outside the conditions of disclosure.

In short: yes, post-Kantian thought rejects the crude framework/reality split — but I don’t think it can dispense with the asymmetry between truth and warrant without losing the sense of genuine error and correction.

I agree that deductive implication is a matter of semantics: to grasp validity is to grasp what is being said. But I don’t think that dissolves the normativity — it just relocates it. “Good faith” understanding already presupposes that one is answerable to logical implication, and that this answerability is precisely the “oughtness” at issue.

And yes, I agree it can be both causal and semantic. But that’s exactly where the pressure point lies: if the semantic/normative side is genuinely real, then physical causality can’t be an exhaustive account of thought. The remaining question is what kind of ontology can accommodate both without collapsing the semantic into the causal or turning it into a merely epiphenomenal gloss.

I think that’s why this debate ends up being metaphysical rather than scientific.

The difference is that Kant’s transcendental idealism isn’t just the claim that inquiry has conditions; it’s the stronger claim that the fundamental intelligible framework (space, time, categories) is contributed by the subject and is therefore constitutive of objects only as they can appear to us.

The view I’m gesturing at is closer to a post-Kantian critical realism: yes, intelligibility is disclosed only in and through acts of knowing, and yes our access is conditioned — but the norms and structures that govern knowing are not merely subjective “forms of consciousness.” They function as constraints that inquiry discovers and revises in response to being.

Put differently: Kant makes the conditions of intelligibility primarily conditions of appearance; the realist alternative treats them as conditions of judgment and truth, and therefore as answerable to reality rather than merely imposed upon it. That’s why the possibility of error and correction becomes central: we can’t simply legislate the framework, because reality can force its revision.

I agree that validity is formal and conditional: logic doesn’t force assent unless one is already committed to the premises. But once one takes the premises to be true, acceptance of the conclusion is not optional—one is rationally "bound" to accept it. That “boundness” isn’t social; it’s just what it means see that the conclusion follows from the premises.

And I also agree that a causal description doesn’t mention normativity. The question is whether normativity is merely a parallel “semantic overlay,” or whether it has real explanatory authority in why we believe what we believe. If it’s only parallel—i.e. if the complete story of belief-formation is entirely causal—then it becomes hard to see how rational warrant is anything more than an after-the-fact gloss. But if warrant is real, then physical causality can’t be the whole story.

I agree: the brain does all the metabolic work. I agree: without brains, no qualia. I agree: qualia can occur endogenously — hallucination, dreaming, imagination. I agree: the distal object "just sits there." I agree: qualia exist in virtue of a relationship between observer and observed, and that this relationship is asymmetric.

Where I disagree is with the inference from all of the above to "qualia are features of brains." Qualia are features of conscious acts (modes of disclosure) that brains enable.

The question between us, then, is not whether the brain is necessary for qualia (obviously yes), or whether the brain is doing the causal work (obviously yes), but whether "enabled by the brain" entails "an inner item interposed between subject and world." I've been arguing throughout that it doesn't — that causal dependence on a system is not the same as epistemic mediation by an inner object of awareness.