we do sometimes see (hear, touch, smell...) things as they are — Banno
How are we to know which parts of our experience provide us with “raw” information about the external world? — Michael
You seemed to be suggesting that if there is some third physical thing in the causal chain between the experience and the external world object then the experience is mediated. — Michael
So when I'm watching at the stadium I have a direct perception of the game? — Michael
Why in the world do you think direct realists think that? — flannel jesus
In an every day context yes, but not in the context of this debate. — hypericin
In the context of this debate, there is no such thing as a direct experience of an external world object, since all such experiences are mediated by phenomenal experience. — hypericin
I haven't said the scientific understanding of perception is incorrect. I've said that if the assumption is that perception as such distorts reality then the scientific understanding of perception, which is itself based on perception, cannot be trusted. To trust it and base arguments on it, would on that assumption, be a performative contradiction. — Janus
I've said that if the assumption is that perception as such distorts reality then the scientific understanding of perception, which is itself based on perception, cannot be trusted.
Direct realists recognize the difference between phenomenal experience and external world objects. So why do they still claim that perception of external world objects is direct? — Michael
How did you get to that?So things have a smell even if nothing has a nose? — Michael
How dod you get to that? — Banno
Direct Realist Presentation: perceptual experiences are direct perceptual presentations of ordinary objects.
But overwhelmingly, lemons smell like lemons.
Seems some folk are perplexed by this. — Banno
That'll be the article which ends: The question, now, is not so much whether to be a direct realist, but how to be one. — Banno
Whilst the debate between sense-datum theorists and adverbialists (and between these and other theories) is not as prominent as it once was, the debate between intentionalists and naive realist disjunctivists is a significant ongoing debate in the philosophy of perception: a legacy of the Problem of Perception that is arguably “the greatest chasm” in the philosophy of perception (Crane (2006)). The question, now, is not so much whether to be a direct realist, but how to be one.
Realism is what both sides agree upon… — hypericin
Once we hit page 20 we will surely be able to say what it is we are arguing about. — Leontiskos
What sits between the lemon and the creature's smelling? — creativesoul
But is this distinction somehow fundamental, or just bookkeeping by the brain? I think the latter
"But thought is capable of another and deeper movement. It can rise to a universality which is not foreign to, but the very inward nature of things in themselves, not the universal of an abstraction from the particular and different, but the unity which is immanent in them and finds in them its own necessary expression; not an arbitrary invention of the observing and classifying mind, . . . but an idea which expresses the inner dialectic, the movement or process towards unity, which exists in and constitutes the being of the objects themselves. This deeper and truer universality is that which may be designated ideal or organic universality. The idea of a living organism . . . is not a common element which can be got at by abstraction and generalization, by taking the various parts and members, stripping away their differences, and forming a notion of that which they have in common. That in which they differ is rather just that out of which their unity arises and in which is the very life and being of the organism; that which they have in common they have, not as members of a living organism, but as dead matter, and what you have to abstract in order to get it is the very life itself. Moreover, the universal, in this case, is not last but first. We do not reach it by first thinking the particulars, but conversely, we get at the true notions of the particulars only through the universal. What the parts or members of an organism are their form, place, structure, proportion, functions, relations, their whole nature and being, is determined by the idea of the organism which they are to compose. It is it which produces them, not they it. In it lies their reason and ground. They are its manifestations or specifications. It realizes itself in them, fulfills itself in their diversity and harmony. . . . You cannot determine the particular member or organ save by reference to that which is its limit or negation. It does not exist in and by itself, but in and through what is other than itself, through the other members and organs which are at once outside of and within it, beyond it, and yet part and portion of its being. . . . Here, then, we have a kind of universality which is altogether different from the barren and formal universality of generalization, and the indication of a movement of thought corresponding to an inner relation of things which the abstracting, generalizing understanding is altogether inadequate to grasp."
If earlier abstract thought was interested in the principle only as content, but in the course of philosophical development has been impelled to pay attention to the other side, to the behaviour of the cognitive process, this implies that the subjective act has also been grasped as an essential moment of objective truth, and this brings with it the need to unite the method with the content, the form with the principle.
The Science of Logic
A recurring theme is that one can never experience a thing as it is due to this distance and the things in between one and the other...To say we do not perceive light, for instance, which is of the world, cannot be maintained, especially given how intimate this relationship is — NOS4A2
How do you know that it is in fact orange if you never see the orange?suppose the thing in the world is in fact orange, yet I always perceive it to be blue. It is true that I can never experience the thing in the world as it is, but this is irrelevant to my relationship with the world, as I always perceive the thing in the world to be as I perceive it to be, in this case, blue. — RussellA
To be a substance (thing-unit) is to function as a thing-unit in various situations. And to have a property is to exhibit this property in various contexts. ('The only fully independent substances are those which-like people-self-consciously take themselves to be units.)
As far as process philosophy is concerned, things can be conceptualized as clusters of actual and potential processes. With Kant, the process philosopher wants to identify what a thing is with what it does (or, at any rate, can do). After all, even on the basis of an ontology of substance and property, processes are epistemologically fundamental. Without them, a thing is inert, undetectable, disconnected from the world's causal commerce, and inherently unknowable. Our only epistemic access to the absolute properties of things is through inferential triangulation from their modus operandi-from the processes through which these manifest themselves. In sum, processes without substantial entities are perfectly feasible in the conceptual order of things, but substances without processes are effectively inconceivable.
Things as traditionally conceived can no more dispense with dispositions than they can dispense with properties. Accordingly, a substance ontologist cannot get by without processes. If his things are totally inert - if they do nothing - they are pointless. Without processes there is no access to dispositions, and without dispositional properties, substance lie outside our cognitive reach. One can only observe what things do, via their discernible effects; what they are, over and above this, is something that always involves the element of conjectural imputation. And here process ontology takes a straight-forward line: In its sight, things simply are what they do rather, what they dispositionally can do and normally would do.
The fact is that all we can ever detect about "things" relates to how they act upon and interact with one another - a substance has no discernible, and thus no justifiably attributable, properties save those that represent responses elicited from it in interaction with others. And so a substance metaphysics of the traditional sort paints itself into the embarrassing comer of having to treat substances ·as bare (propertyless) particulars [substratum] because there is no nonspeculative way to say what concrete properties a substance ever has in and of itself. But a process metaphysics is spared this embarrassment because processes are, by their very nature, interrelated and interactive. A process-unlike a substance -can simply be what it does. And the idea of process enters into our experience directly and as such.
Nicholas Rescher - "Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy"
It is through action, and only through action, that real beings manifest or “unveil” their being, their presence, to each other and to me. All the beings that make up the world of my experience thus reveal themselves as not just present, standing out of nothingness, but actively presenting themselves to others and vice versa by interacting with each other. Meditating on this leads us to the metaphysical conclusion that it is the very nature of real being, existential being, to pour over into action that is self-revealing and self-communicative. In a word, existential being is intrinsically dynamic, not
static.
...by metaphysical reflection I come to realize that this is not just a brute fact but an intrinsic property belonging to the very nature of every real being as such, if it is to count at all in the community of existents. For let us suppose (a metaphysical thought experiment) that there were a real existing being that had no action at all. First of all, no other being could know it (unless it had created it), since it is only by some action that it could manifest or reveal its presence and nature; secondly, it would make no difference whatever to any other being, since it is totally unmanifested, locked in its own being and could not even react to anything done to it. And if it had no action within itself, it would not make a difference even to itself....To be real is to make a difference.
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One of the central flaws in Kant’s theory of knowledge is that he has blown up the bridge of action by which real beings manifest their natures to our cognitive receiving sets. He admits that things in themselves act on us, on our senses; but he insists that such action reveals nothing intelligible about these beings, nothing about their natures in themselves, only an unordered, unstructured sense manifold that we have to order and structure from within ourselves. But action that is completely indeterminate, that reveals nothing meaningful about the agent from which it comes, is incoherent, not really action at all.
The whole key to a realist epistemology like that of St. Thomas is that action is the “self revelation of being,” that it reveals a being as this kind of actor on me, which is equivalent to saying it really exists and has this kind of nature = an abiding center of acting and being acted on. This does not deliver a complete knowledge of the being acting, but it does deliver an authentic knowledge of the real world as a community of interacting agents—which is after all what we need to know most about the world so that we may learn how to cope with it and its effects on us as well as our effects upon it. This is a modest but effective relational realism, not the unrealistic ideal of the only thing Kant will accept as genuine knowledge of real beings, i.e., knowledge of them as they are in themselves independent of any action on us—which he admits can only be attained by a perfect creative knower. He will allow no medium between the two extremes: either perfect knowledge with no mediation of action, or no knowledge of the real at all.
W. Norris Clarke - "The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics"
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