That is also why sensory experience, while indispensable, cannot itself function as an inferential premise. Sensation is not the kind of thing that can be right or wrong. Judgment is. And that difference is where epistemic authority resides. — Esse Quam Videri

It is possible to infer from a single sensory experience, such as “I see an orange screen”, what exists in a mind-external world, but the probability of being correct is remote.

It is also possible to commit oneself to the judgement that “if I see an orange screen then there is an orange screen in the world”, but again the probability of being correct is remote.

I agree that a sensory experience is not truth-apt whilst a judgement is.

As it is unlikely that any inference from a single sensory experience will be correct, it is also unlikely that any single judgement will be correct either.

There is the normative claim “you ought not to be smoking”

There is also the normative claim “I ought to commit myself to making a judgement". I agree that it is not the content of the judgement that is normative but rather the act of committing oneself to making a judgement that is normative.

However, a judgement being normative does not make it any more likely to be correct than a descriptive judgement. There is no reason why a normative judgement that one is committed will be more correct that a descriptive judgement one is not committed to.

Epistemic authority resides neither in a single sensory experience such as “I see an orange screen” nor in a single normative judgement, such as “I ought to commit myself to making a judgement".

We must look elsewhere for epistemic authority.

I think there’s a subtle but important shift in your reply that ends up missing the point I was making.

My claim was not that single judgments are reliable, infallible, or likely to be correct. Epistemic authority is not a matter of probability, reliability over isolated cases, or confidence in one-off judgments. It concerns what kind of act is even eligible to be assessed as correct or incorrect at all.

Sensation, as you agree, is not truth-apt. Judgments are. That difference is not about likelihood of error; it is about logical role. Only truth-apt acts can be wrong, and only what can be wrong can be corrected, justified, or criticized. That is the sense in which epistemic authority “resides” in judgment rather than sensation.

So when you say that neither a single sensory experience nor a single judgment has epistemic authority, I agree — if “authority” is taken to mean certainty or high probability. But that is not the sense at issue. The point is that only judgment participates in the space of reasons at all, even when judgments are tentative, revisable, or likely to be false.

Likewise, the normativity I’m invoking is not the moral norm “you ought to judge,” nor the psychological commitment to judging. It is the epistemic normativity built into judgment itself: judgments answer to how things are, can succeed or fail, and can be revised in light of further reasons. Sensory experience constrains this process, but it does not enter it as a premise.

So I don’t think we need to “look elsewhere” for epistemic authority. We just need to distinguish authority from certainty, and normativity from reliability. Epistemic authority lies in judgment because judgment alone is answerable to truth — even when, and especially when, it turns out to be wrong.

And causally speaking, there's where we can rest. The difference is not in the causal chain, but where one spreads one's Markov blanket.

So, and here we can reject much of the account Michael has promulgated, since causal mediation does not entail indirect perception. — Banno

Causal chains are not the real claim. As you, @Hanover and others point out, there are innumerable causal steps between an observer and any act of perception. If the claim was just "there are causal steps in between" it would be quite weak. Indirect realism, as @Michael points out, is aimed at naive realism, and so the target it attacks is the illusion of direct perception. The direct/indirect distinction this claim relies on is quite tricky, and the fact that people don't clearly grasp it is why this discussion is interminable. (I'm still working it out myself, which is why the topic is still interesting to me even after that huge thread a few years ago).

The physical world offers ample examples of this illusion. First, what it is not: consider looking at yourself in the mirror. It appears to you that you are directly seeing yourself. That is because you are. The mirror is an extra step in the causal chain the light undergoes, one designed to allow you to see yourself. That extra step doesn't mean you really aren't seeing yourself directly. You see yourself directly, with aid of a mirror.

Now, consider looking at a photograph of yourself. If you were naive to photography, it might be shocking to look directly at yourself, captured in a small flat square. You are not. When you look at the photograph, you are in fact looking at a square of cellulose or plastic, not yourself. But you are still looking at yourself indirectly, because there is still a causal connection between the surface of the photograph and your features.

Hopefully this example brings some clarity to the indirect realist claim. We experience the world through something it is not, phenomenal representation, just as you can experience your appearance through something you are not, a photograph. It only appears to us that all the sights, sounds, smells, shades that comprise the world, are the world. They are not, they don't belong to the larger world, but instead the world of the mind. The primitives of perception: colors, sounds, scents, are constructs of brains, and may manifest differently to different brains, almost certainly so across species. But crucially, these constructs are causally connected to the world. How they appear at any moment is causally connected to the world they are about, just as the photograph is causally connected to your appearance.

The world is real, and we are causally connected to it, through an indirect relationship like the relationship between a photograph and the subject it captured.

It only appears to us that all the sights, sounds, smells, shades that comprise the world, are the world. They are not, they don't belong to the world at all. — hypericin

But those who advocate for indirect realism like to point out how all of this goes on in the brain. And last I heard the brain is part of this world.

Thanks for contributing to the discussion with a thoughtful reply. I thought I would chime in since this overlaps with so many of the same issues I've been discussing with @Michael and @RussellA.

The photograph case you raised is an interesting test case because I think that it subtly presupposes exactly what is at issue. The photograph itself is what is perceptually present, and the person is not. That’s why it’s natural to say the person is only perceived indirectly. But in ordinary perception there isn’t an analogous surrogate object that stands in for the ship in that way; at least, that is the point at issue. The ship itself is what our judgments are about, and it's what also constrains our beliefs over time.

That’s why I’m hesitant to say that the “primitives of perception are hallucinations of the brain.” That description already assumes that phenomenal character functions like a photograph—i.e. as the thing perceived instead of the object—whereas both @Banno’s point (if I'm understanding him correctly) and my own have been that phenomenal character causally constrains perception without being its direct object.

I agree that rejecting naïve realism is mandatory, and that causal mediation alone doesn’t settle the issue. But I don’t think the photograph case shows that perception must be indirect in the sense of being mediated by inner surrogates rather than being answerable to the world itself.

That’s why I’m hesitant to say that the “primitives of perception are hallucinations of the brain.” That description already assumes that phenomenal character functions like a photograph—i.e. as the thing perceived instead of the object—whereas both Banno’s point and my own have been that phenomenal character causally constrains perception without being its direct object. — Esse Quam Videri

When you look at a photograph, you really are looking at its subject. And you are looking at the photograph. You are looking at the subject, by way of the photograph. This is indirection. We experience the ship too, by way of its phenomenal character.

Do you dispute that we experience its phenomenal character? We certainly talk about the way the ship looks, the way it sounds, the way it smells, the way it feels, all the time. Not just how it operates.

Do you dispute that looks, sounds, smells, feels belong to the brain? That they are not found on the ship itself, but are properties of the brain, which are causally constrained by properties of the ship?

If you agree with these two, its hard for me to see how this does not map to a photograph. We experience the photograph, and we indirectly experience the subject, which causally constrains its manifestation on the photograph. We experience phenomenal character, and we indirectly experience the world object, which causally constrains how phenomenal character manifests to us.

We experience the world through something it is not, phenomenal representation, just as you can experience your appearance through something you are not, a photograph. — hypericin

While addressed to hypericin, this post is for all.

This might be a side-issue, or perhaps the following point is worth making.

There's a line of argument, a form of scientism, that runs something along these lines: the chairs, tables and cups that make up our world are not as we see them but consisting of atoms or quarks or quantum fluctuations or some such; therefore the chairs tables and cups are not the things that make up our world.

Now I hope it's very clear that this line of argument is not only invalid, it is mistaken. That a chair consists of atoms or quarks or quantum fluctuations simply does not mean that it is not a chair.



At least a part of the problem here is that direct realism, as criticised by the indirect realists, is wholly accepted by hardly anybody. The reasons for this are partly historical. When it was noticed that we construct our understanding of the world around us using our brains, folks supposed that this meant we didn't see our world directly. They therefore inferred the existence of philosophers who thought we did see the world directly, and called them "direct realists".

There's also much vagueness concerning what it is to see something indirectly. You didn't see it directly, you saw it through a telescope, or a mirror, or only its shadow. It appears that how we are to understand "direct" perception depends entirely on what it is contrasted with; so of course it is difficult to imagine what "direct perception" is, per se. It's a nonsense, an invention of the defenders of the sort of argument from Ayer that was critiqued by Austin. You can find examples in every thread on perception.



What I would reject here is the idea, incipient in the physiological description of perception, that we do not see the flower, but an image of the flower. The argument being rejected is along the lines of the one given above that there are not really any chairs and tables and cups. It runs along the lines that what we see is not, and here the language gets a bit weird, the "flower-as-it-really-is" or the "flower-in-itself"; what we see is instead a construct built by light and atoms and neural nets.

Now I think this account is wrong, and on two counts. The first is count is the supposition that there is a useful way in which there is a "flower-as-it-really-is" or the "flower-in-itself". This idea relies on it making sense to talk of a flower seperate from our interpretation and construction of the world around us, a flower apart from our comprehension of the world. But our understanding is always, and already, an interpretation, so the "flower-as-it-really-is" or the "flower-in-itself" is already a nonsense.

The second count is the misdirection in thinking that we see the result of the causal chain, and not the flower. We do not see the result of the causal chain, as if we were homunculi; rather, that causal chain just is our seeing the things in our world.

We do not "experience the world through something it is not, phenomenal representation".

Firstly, the word "phenomenal" is doing damage here, by reifying the process of perception, mistaking the process for the result. It presumes, rather than argues, that what we see is the phenomena and not the flower.

And secondly, we do not "experience the world" passively, in the way supposed. We interact with it, we pick up the cup, board the ship, and coordinate all of these activities with others. We do not passively experience the world, we are actively embedded in it.

And none of this is to deny the casual chain that is part of this interaction.

I don’t dispute either of the points you raise. Yes, we experience phenomenal character, and yes, the looks, sounds, smells, and feels involved in perception are properties of the nervous system. I also wouldn’t deny that perceptual judgment is causally mediated by phenomenal character.

But the issue isn’t causal mediation; it’s epistemic mediation. Consider the following commitments:

(1) Phenomenal qualities represent aspects of the world.

(2) Ordinary perceptual judgments are judgments about phenomenal qualities.

(3) Our knowledge of the world is inferred from such perceptual judgments.

One influential way of understanding epistemic mediation in the indirect realist tradition involves accepting commitments like these. I reject all three. For that reason, I reject the claim that perceptual judgment is epistemically mediated in the traditional sense. That’s also why I think the photograph analogy misleads: it tacitly presupposes at least one of these commitments, whereas my view denies them.

Out of curiosity, which of three propositions above would accept, if any? Does the distinction between causal and epistemic mediation as laid out above make sense to you, or would you qualify it in some way? I’d be interested to get your thoughts.

Out of curiosity, which of three propositions above would accept, if any? Does the distinction between casual and epistemic mediation as laid out above make sense to you, or would you qualify it in some way? I’d be interested to get your thoughts. — Esse Quam Videri

I think I understand this distinction between causal and epistemic mediation, and I like it. At first blush, I accept all three propositions. Quickly, using the smell of ammonia as a grounding example:

(1) Phenomenal qualities represent aspects of the world. — Esse Quam Videri

The smell of ammonia represents that there is ammonia in the world. The relation smell of ammonia -> ammonia is symbolic, represented with the one way arrow characteristic of symbols. The smell of ammonia points to ammonia, without the smell being a part of the ammonia itself. In the same way, "dog" points to a doggy, without the glyphs "dog" being in any way a part of the doggy itself.

(2) Ordinary perceptual judgments are judgments about phenomenal qualities. — Esse Quam Videri

True.

When I smell ammonia, I am judging that this particular phenomenal quality smells like ammonia to me. NH3 doesn't in itself smell like ammonia, it has no intrinsic smell. It is the way that smell manifests to me phenomenally, that sharp, unpleasant, pungent reek, that I associate with ammonia.

When I say ammonia is stinky, I am complaining specifically about the phenomenal quality of that smell. Not the NH3 itself. It is the phenomenal quality that makes me recoil. If the phenomenal quality were pleasant to me, I would not complain, despite NH3 being identical in either case.

(3) Our knowledge of the world is inferred from such judgments. — Esse Quam Videri

True. The smell of ammonia in itself tells me nothing about the world. I have to had experienced the smell, paired with knowledge of the substance producing it. Only after this learning event has occurred, can I infer, from the smell, the proposition "There is ammonia nearby".

To me this is all fairly straightforward. Where do you object?

Two thoughts: (1) your description of direct realism is definitional, not metaphysical. You're just saying your interest is in your perception and discussion of the thing without perception is meaningless. This means you can both be an indirect realist as the posters here who hold themselves to be and a direct realist as you hold yourself to be at the same time without logical inconsistency. (2) You correctly reject the humonculous as offering no explanatory power because it just moves the magic of perception to a theater chair in the back of the brain where the humonculous views the screen. But to just say the perception then is just part of the process is empty, telling me nothing about how it is we have these conscious experiences, what it means to taste, smell, and see. The phenomenonal state remains a mystery, beyond philosophical description.

The difference I see in our positions is perhaps in my insistence that the boundaries of philosophical inquiry do not imply anything about ontology.

(1) your description of direct realism is definitional, not metaphysical. — Hanover

Well, metaphysics is just conceptual plumbing, after all. So metaphysics is "definitional". Btu yes, I'm really not advocating direct realism so much as rejecting indirect realism, together with its reliance on private phenomenon.

(2) ...But to just say the perception then is just part of the process is empty — Hanover

So you would rather a wrong answer here to no answer?

The phenomenonal state remains a mystery, beyond philosophical description. — Hanover

The supposed "phenomenal state" is a large part of the problem. Why take such positing private phenomena as a metaphysical given?

The difference I see in our positions is perhaps in my insistence that the boundaries of philosophical inquiry do not imply anything about ontology. — Hanover

So far as philosophy consists in conceptual clarification, it doesn't presume an ontology. However there are things that we do talk about, so there are ontological ramifications here.

Well, metaphysics is just conceptual plumbing, after all. So metaphysics is "definitional". Btu yes, I'm really not advocating direct realism so much as rejecting indirect realism, together with its reliance on private phenomenon. — Banno

I read you as just rejecting reliance on private phenomena period. Whether our perceptions directly or indirectly reflect reality or not is irrelevant.

So you would rather a wrong answer here to no answer? — Banno

I was arguing for quietism, meaning you can't say anything about what our perception is. When you say the perception of the ship is just part of the process, that doesn't mean much to me and it tells me nothing about how this seeing happens. It suggests an answer has been provided when it hasn't. The better answer to the question of "what is it to see a ship?" is "I have no idea, but I do. "

The supposed "phenomenal state" is a large part of the problem. Why take such positing private phenomena as a metaphysical given? — Banno

Because they indubitably exist.. There's a significant difference between denying the phenomenonal and claiming it's identification is unnecessary for philosophical purposes.

So far as philosophy consists in conceptual clarification, it doesn't presume an ontology. However there are things that we do talk about, so there are ontological ramifications here — Banno

Wasn't the Wittgensteinian objective to isolate out metaphysical confusion from philosophical inquiry?

The better answer to the question of "what is it to see a ship?" is "I have no idea, but I do. " — Hanover

I think it'd be more informative to answer "Look over there... see that? it's a ship". Show, don't tell. (Edit: Notice that this is public and communal, it presumes that others are involved, as opposed to the solipsism seen in phenomenalism?)

And that's not quiteism. You and I understand what it is to see a ship, because that's what we do. Meaning as use.

Because they indubitably exist — Hanover

Well... we see things, and talk about them and so on - we interact with them and with each other. What place there is for private mental phenomenon in all this is at the very least questionable. You've seen my arguments rejecting qualia for similar reasons.

That word, exist... so often leads to reification.

Wasn't the Wittgensteinian objective to isolate out metaphysical confusion from philosophical inquiry? — Hanover

I'm not privy to Wittgenstein's intentions. I read him as primarily showing that what are thought of as philosophical problems are often, and perhaps always, confusions that can be sorted by rearranging the way we understood them.

Well... we see things, and talk about them and so on - we interact with them and with each other. What place there is for private mental phenomenon in all this is at the very least questionable. — Banno

To some extent your response here also seems pragmatic.

To some extent your response here also seems pragmatic. — Tom Storm

Well... not quite, although there are simialriteis.

What's absent, amongst other things, is the usual, somewhat naive view that truth is about practicality, that the utility of a sentence is what renders it true, or that there are no true sentences, only more useful ones.

I certainly would not call myself a pragmatist.

What's absent, amongst other things, is the usual, somewhat naive view that truth is about practicality, that the utility of a sentence is what renders it true, or that there are no true sentences, only more useful ones. — Banno

That’s more my speed.

The first is count is the supposition that there is a useful way in which there is a "flower-as-it-really-is" or the "flower-in-itself". This idea relies on it making sense to talk of a flower seperate from our interpretation and construction of the world around us, a flower apart from our comprehension of the world. But our understanding is always, and already, an interpretation, so the "flower-as-it-really-is" or the "flower-in-itself" is already a nonsense. — Banno

Of course every understanding is an interpretation. But this does not obviate the distinction between the world as we perceive it, and (our understanding of) the world as it is. We perceive the flower as looking like this, and smelling like that. We understand the flower to typically take this physical form, to have this life cycle, to grow in this climate , to treat that disease, to attract these insects. The fact that these understandings are interpretations adds nothing. These are our interpretations of how the flower is. But to also understand the phenomenal presentation of the flower as how the flower is, is the misunderstanding at issue.

The second count is the misdirection in thinking that we see the result of the causal chain, and not the flower. We do not see the result of the causal chain, as if we were homunculi; rather, that causal chain just is our seeing the things in our world. — Banno

Yet we discuss both, which is your gold standard. How the flower appears to us, and what the flower is.

No homunculi. An object can phenomenologically appear to us in a certain way, without there being a literal gnome in our heads watching an internal monitor.

And secondly, we do not "experience the world" passively, in the way supposed. We interact with it, we pick up the cup, board the ship, and coordinate all of these activities with others. We do not passively experience the world, we are actively embedded in it. — Banno

Experience is active in that it is an active mental construction, which is indirect realism. But it feels like a passive window to the world, which is the naive realist illusion. All these actions you describe are irrelevant, we are not talking about them, we are talking about perceptions.

Thanks for clarifying!

Here is how I would approach each of the three propositions. I’ll try to reuse your examples so that we can better observe how our approaches differ.

(1) Phenomenal qualities represent aspects of the world.

False. The sharp, pungent, acrid scent of ammonia as-smelled does not, in itself, represent anything in the world. Neither does redness as-seen, loudness as-heard, or sour as-tasted. A representation is something that can be assessed for correctness, truth or fidelity. Raw sensory qualities are not the kinds of things that can be correct or incorrect; they simply are what they are.

(2) Ordinary perceptual judgments are judgments about phenomenal qualities.

False. Ordinary perceptual judgments are about things in the world (“that rag smells of ammonia”), not phenomenal qualities (“there’s a sharp, pungent, acrid scent in my olfactory map”). The former are typically referred to as “perception”, the latter as “introspection”. Introspection is second-order, reflective and derivative with respect to ordinary perception.

(3) Our knowledge of the world is inferred from such (introspective) judgments.

False. We do not ordinarily infer perceptual judgments from introspective judgments. Rather, perceptual judgments are epistemically primary, and introspective judgments are appealed to only in reflective, corrective, or explanatory contexts. And even then, introspective judgments are typically not used to justify perceptual judgments, but only to help reason about (or explain) anomalous cases (e.g. uncertainty, disagreement, illusion).

As you can see, we approach and answer these questions in significantly different ways. What do you think of this?

I largely agree with the position you've been defending on this thread. The only significant divergence we have is the one we've discussed on another thread. Whereas you would say:

But our understanding is always, and already, an interpretation, so the "flower-as-it-really-is" or the "flower-in-itself" is already a nonsense. — Banno

I would say: "our understanding is always, and already an interpretation, and the notion of the 'flower-as-it-really-is' or the 'flower-in-itself' is a non-eliminable regulative ideal around which the act of inquiry itself is organized".

Another divergence is that I am perhaps more apt to treat talk of phenomenal experience as legitimate (though not epistemically foundational).

Outside of those two things, I don't find much to disagree with in what you say.

Yep - not small differences. I hope. to get back to our other conversation soon. First cool day in a week so gardening to catch up with.

Cheers. Enjoy the weather.

As you can see, we approach and answer these questions in significantly different ways. What do you think of this? — Esse Quam Videri

Let me push back a little.

A representation is something that can be assessed for correctness, truth or fidelity. Raw sensory qualities are not the kinds of things that can be correct or incorrect; they simply are what they are. — Esse Quam Videri

Compare this with words. "Dog" represents dogs. Yet, the word "dog" in itself, is not correct or incorrect. It simply is what it is. But, when placed in a larger context, for instance, pointing to an animal, and uttering "dog", then the word can correctly indicate the animal pointed to, or not.

Similarly, the smell of ammonia, in and of itself, is neither true or false. Yet, when it is experienced in an environment, the smell can correctly indicate ammonia, or not. Ammonia might be the wrong phenomenal smell, as happens sometimes with long covid. Or it might be hallucinatory.

Ordinary perceptual judgments are about things in the world (“that rag smells of ammonia”), not phenomenal qualities (“there’s a sharp, pungent, acrid scent in my olfactory map”). The former are typically referred to as “perception”, the latter as “introspection”. Introspection is second-order, reflective and derivative with respect to ordinary perception. — Esse Quam Videri

Hmm, this is not how I experience odor. The smell itself is what hits me first, viscerally and immediately. No introspection is needed. If the smell is a familiar one, I might identify it quickly, so quickly that it might even seem immediate. But if I haven't smelled that smell in a long time, it can take significant mental effort to identify it. Occasionally, I won't be able to at all, and I am left frustrated, wondering what that smell reminds me of.

Do you not relate to this?

(The third disagreement seems to follow from the second).

My claim was not that single judgments are reliable, infallible, or likely to be correct. Epistemic authority is not a matter of probability, reliability over isolated cases, or confidence in one-off judgments. It concerns what kind of act is even eligible to be assessed as correct or incorrect at all. — Esse Quam Videri

Based on the Merriam Webster Dictionary, normative means conforming to norms, and norms means a principle that ought to be followed.

I agree that humans ought to be continually making judgements, such as “if I see an orange screen in my mind then there is an orange screen in the world”.

You use the word “authority”. A judgement cannot give itself authority. Any authority must come from outside the judgement. By what authority ought I to be continually making judgments? Where does this authority come from? What gives me the authority to make judgments?
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Sensation, as you agree, is not truth-apt. Judgments are. — Esse Quam Videri

As you say, a sensation cannot be wrong, is not truth-apt, but a judgement can be wrong, is truth-apt.

Surely, If we are looking to an authority, we would prefer an authority that cannot be wrong, such as the senses, rather than an authority that is more often than not wrong, such as a judgement.

That I see an orange screen in my senses is authoritatively foundational to my subsequent reasoning, yet my judgement that “if I see an orange screen in my mind then there is a green unicorn in the world” has no authority in my reasoning about the world.
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Likewise, the normativity I’m invoking is not the moral norm “you ought to judge,” — Esse Quam Videri

Is not the normal use of the word “normative” a moral norm, such as “you ought not smoke”
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Epistemic authority lies in judgment because judgment alone is answerable to truth — even when, and especially when, it turns out to be wrong. — Esse Quam Videri

The problem is we give no authority to a judgement just because it is a judgement. We give authority to the content of a judgement.

For example, we give no authority to the judgement that “if I see an orange screen in my mind then there is a green unicorn in the world” just because it is a judgement. We give authority to the content of the judgement.

Compare this with words. "Dog" represents dogs. Yet, the word "dog" in itself, is not correct or incorrect. It simply is what it is. But, when placed in a larger context, for instance, pointing to an animal, and uttering "dog", then the word can correctly indicate the animal pointed to, or not. — hypericin

I would say that words are essentially representational: to be a word is to be a bearer of meaning or reference. And while I agree that context is required in order to fix a word’s conditions of use and meaning, context does not transform a word from a non-representational kind of thing to a representational one.

Smells are not like that. They can causally indicate ammonia, just as smoke can indicate fire, but the correctness conditions do not attach to the smell itself. They attach to the judgment made on the basis of it. When smell is misleading (hallucination, long covid, etc.), we don’t assess the smell as incorrect; we assess the judgment as mistaken or the sensory capacity as unreliable.

So even in context, phenomenal qualities are not what represents the world. They are a causal-enabling condition under which world-directed judgments acquire correctness conditions. That is the sense in which I deny epistemic mediation while fully granting causal mediation.

Hmm, this is not how I experience odor. The smell itself is what hits me first, viscerally and immediately. No introspection is needed. If the smell is a familiar one, I might identify it quickly, so quickly that it might even seem immediate. But if I haven't smelled that smell in a long time, it can take significant mental effort to identify it. Occasionally, I won't be able to at all, and I am left frustrated, wondering what that smell reminds me of.

Do you not relate to this? — hypericin

I relate to that description completely. But I think this brings out a distinction rather than a disagreement.

What you’re describing is immediate phenomenal awareness — the smell hitting you viscerally, prior to identification. I don’t deny that at all. What I’m denying is that this involves an introspective judgment in the epistemic sense.

An introspective judgment would be something like “I am having a sharp, acrid olfactory experience.” That’s a reflective, truth-apt claim about one’s experience. In ordinary cases, we don’t make that judgment first. We either make a world-directed judgment (“that’s ammonia,” “something smells off”), or we hesitate from making a judgment at all because we can’t yet place it.

I would say that the delay or effort you describe doesn’t show that we infer from an inner premise; it shows that perceptual judgment can be difficult, uncertain, or fail altogether. Phenomenal awareness can be immediate without functioning as an epistemic intermediary.

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To sum up: it seems like the divergence between us can be captured by a single question: are phenomenal qualities representational vehicles whose correctness conditions are fixed in context, or are they non-representational causal conditions under which world-directed judgments acquire correctness conditions.

What do you think?

For the direct realist, the chain is the mechanism by which the world shows itself... — Banno

The problem with this is that it makes the word "direct" in the phrase "direct perception" meaningless. This is highlighted by your assertion that these people with their visors still directly perceive their shared environment. You appear to be arguing that the visor and its screen is "the mechanism by which the world shows itself".

Whereas I think this visor and its screen functions exactly like a Cartesian theatre, and a Cartesian theatre is exactly the sort of thing that would qualify as indirect perception (but isn't required for indirect perception, as I've argued before). So you've defined "direct realism" in such a way that even the strawman misrepresentation of indirect realism would count as direct realism.

And while they are seeing the image on the screen and they are seeing the ship and they are talking about the ship, each of these has a slightly differing sense, each is involved in a different activity. — Banno

According to the indirect realist, the same is true ("each of these has a slightly differing sense") even without the visor.

1. There is perceiving mental phenomena (e.g. colours in the sui generis qualitative sense of the term) — which is not to be understood in the sense of a Cartesian theatre but in the sense of the seeing and hearing that (also) happens when we dream and hallucinate.

2. There is perceiving distal objects (e.g. a dress).

3. There is talking about the mental phenomena (e.g. "I see white and gold").

4. There is talking about the distal object (e.g. "there is a dress").

The substantive philosophical claims are that a) (2) only happens in virtue of (1) and that b) (2) does not satisfy the philosophical notion of directness, e.g. as explained here — with the example of the visor showing that (2) doesn't need to be direct for (4) to happen.

The visor case is instructive precisely because it introduces an epistemic intermediary whose outputs are the immediate objects of assessment. — Esse Quam Videri

So let's amend the scenario slightly. Instead of there being a screen on the inside that outputs light towards the eyes it has wires connected directly to the optical nerves and stimulates them in the "appropriate" way, i.e. the visor is a "bionic eye".

Would you still accept that these people only have indirect perception of the world beyond the visor, or does it now qualify as direct perception? What are the immediate objects of assessment? If the Common Kind Claim is to be believed then whatever are the immediate objects of assessment when the bionic eye is malfunctioning (e.g. causing their wearers to see things that aren't there) are also the immediate objects of assessment when it's working as intended.

I agree that humans ought to be continually making judgements …
Is not the normal use of the word “normative” a moral norm, such as “you ought not smoke”? — RussellA

Yes — in ordinary language, “normative” is often used for moral norms. But that is not the sense in play here.

By epistemic normativity I do not mean “humans ought to be continually making judgments.” I mean something closer to this: when we make judgments, we are implicitly adopting standards of correctness (e.g. truth, evidence, coherence, reasonableness).

In other words, judgment is normative because it is answerable to how things are. To judge at all is to commit oneself to being right or wrong, and to being accountable to reasons. That commitment is built into the act of judging; it is not a further moral obligation one may or may not take on. To reject those norms is not to judge differently, but to stop judging altogether.

And while these norms are indeed socially mediated, I would argue they are ultimately grounded in the subjectivity of the individual.

Surely, if we are looking to an authority, we would prefer an authority that cannot be wrong, such as the senses, rather than an authority that is more often than not wrong, such as a judgement. — RussellA

Here the contrast is misleading. Sensation is not “an authority that cannot be wrong”; it is not an authority at all, because it is not the kind of thing that can be right or wrong. To say that sensation is not truth-apt is to say it can be neither correct nor incorrect.

Judgments, by contrast, can be wrong — but that is precisely because they are the only things that can also be right. Error is not a defect relative to sensation; it is the price of intelligibility. Only what can be mistaken can be corrected, justified, or improved. That is why judgments — not sensations — belong in the space of reasons.

The problem is we give no authority to a judgement just because it is a judgement. We give authority to the content of a judgement. — RussellA

I think this shows that the word “authority” is doing more harm than good here, and that may be my fault for introducing it.

All I mean by saying that judgments have epistemic authority is that they are the locus of truth and falsity. Sensory qualities — redness-as-seen, pain-as-felt — are not the kinds of things to which truth or falsity apply at all. Judgments are. That is the only contrast I am trying to mark.

So the point is not that judgments are authoritative regardless of content, nor that every judgment deserves equal credibility. It is that only judgments, whatever their content, are even candidates for being assessed as correct or incorrect. Sensation constrains judgment, but it does not itself enter into justification or inference.

When looking at either a ship or a photograph of a ship, both the Semantic Direct Realist (SDR) and Indirect Realist agree that perception is indirect through a causal chain and cognition direct.

Where the SDR and Indirect Realist disagree is where this directly cognized ship exists.

The Indirect Realist believes that the ship they perceive exists in the mind as a particular instantiation of their concept of ship, caused by something that exists in a mind-external world that is unknown.

The SDR believes that the ship they perceive exists in the mind as a particular instantiation of their concept of ship, caused by something that exists in a mind-external world that is the same as what they perceive in their mind.

So in the mind of the SDR is something that weighs 10,000 tonnes, is 200m long, 25 m wide and 30m tall. But this is obviously not the case.

The SDR says that they are directly cognizing the ship in the mind-external world, but if in the mind of the SDR there is no direct cognition of a weight of 10,000 tonnes, length of 200m, width of 25m and height of 30m, then what exactly is the SDR directly cognizing? The idea of a ship?

I would say that the change doesn’t affect the point I was making.

Moving the interface from a screen to direct stimulation of the optic nerve changes the location of the causal mediation, not its epistemic role. In both cases, what the subject’s judgments are immediately answerable to is a generated input whose correctness depends on how it was produced, rather than to the objects themselves. That is the sense in which the perception is indirect.

In both cases, what the subject’s judgments are immediately answerable to is a generated input whose correctness depends on how it was produced, rather than to the objects themselves. That is the sense in which the perception is indirect. — Esse Quam Videri

Then what is the relevant difference between these:

1. An artificial bionic eye
2. An artificial organic eye (identical to a natural eye, but grown in a lab)
3. A transplanted natural eye
4. The natural eye one was born with

All work by taking electromagnetic radiation as input and then stimulating the optical nerve according to some deterministic process.