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.

Whereas I see two mutually incompatible accounts of perception that both happen to reject naive realism — one reifying phenomenal character into an inner intermediary, and one treating it as a mode of disclosure.

I think your statement and mine sum up the disagreement between us quite well. I don't think we're going to get any further clarity on this.

:rofl: :up:

Group B is not a single position. It contains at least two very different interpretations:

B1 (your view): phenomenal qualities are inner mental items (qualia/sense-data) and perception of distal objects is mediated by direct awareness of these inner items.

B2 (my view): phenomenal qualities are modes of disclosure of the distal object. They are neither mind-independent intrinsic properties nor intermediary objects, but relational properties that obtain in virtue of the interaction between perceiver, object, and environment.

I think we directly perceive the distal object as colored and shaped. You seem to think we directly perceive colors and shapes (as mental phenomena) and then infer the distal object as their cause. That’s the substantive disagreement.

On like and unlike types:
Your reversibility argument is interesting, so let me engage with it directly.

You say that in memory, the act and target are of like type: a recalled experience targets a past experience. And in interpretation, an interpretation targets a meaning. But in perception, the act and target are of unlike type: a perceptual act targets a world-state.

I think you're applying an asymmetric standard. When you say "a recalled experience is an experience targeting an experience," you're characterizing both terms at a high level of abstraction — they're both "experiential." But a present act of remembering is not the same kind of thing as a past lived experience. One is occurring now, the other no longer exists. One is reconstructive, the other was original. If I recall the pink wall, my present memory-act is not the past seeing — it's a present mental event that aims at something beyond itself, namely a determinate past episode that may or may not have occurred as recalled. That's structurally identical to what you say about perception: a present act aiming at something beyond itself.

You make memory and interpretation look "like-typed" by abstracting both terms to "mental." But by the same logic, I can make perception look "like-typed" by abstracting both terms to "disclosure" — the perceptual act is a disclosure, and the world-state is what the act purports to disclose. The abstraction level determines the result, not the underlying structure. So your "like-type" claim is not a structural insight into cognition; it's an artifact of shifting the grain of description mid-argument.
Even if I grant that the intentional target of memory is a past experience rather than a past event, the present act of remembering is still not identical to that past experience — so the dyad remains unlike-typed in exactly the way you say perception is.

Your sensory deprivation point — that memory and interpretation can proceed without concurrent world-contact — is true but cuts in my favor. Perception's constitutive involvement with the world is exactly what makes it a case of direct openness to reality. It's not a defect that introduces a special epistemic gap; it's the feature that grounds the epistemic contact the other cognitive acts lack.

On radical multiple realizability:
You've conceded that two realizers can't literally share zero properties, and that phenomenal character, inferential role, and behavioral upshot belong to the realized, not the realizer. So "radical" multiple realizability amounts to: the realizers differ in their physical-causal origins. But this is true of memory as well. A memory can be produced by faithful encoding, reconstructive inference, external suggestion, confabulation, or neurological malfunction. These causal pathways share no properties other than terminating in the same neural system — which is exactly the minimal shared property you identified for perception (realizing in the same way). You say "there is only one realizer of memories: the mind." But the mind is not one causal pathway — it's a system capable of generating the same output through radically different processes. "The mind" is doing the same work here as "the brain" does in the perception case. The distinction you're drawing is between where the causal chain starts (world vs. mind), not between the structures of realization.

On objection 1 revisited:
Your argument is:

(1) The subject is aware of the realized, not the realizer (per hallucination)
(2) Multiple realization involves a transformation
(3) Therefore the subject is aware of a transformation

This doesn't follow. From (1) and (2), you can conclude that the subject is aware of the product of a transformative process. But being aware of a product is not the same as being aware of it as mediated or as a transformation. A transformation can be a necessary causal condition for awareness without being an intentional term within awareness.

Consider translation: when I read Homer in English, my access to Homer is certainly "transformed" by the translator's activity. But it doesn't follow that I'm directly aware of an intermediary "translation-object" and only indirectly aware of Homer. The transformation is operational, not objectual. The translator's work is a necessary condition for my reading, but Homer — not the translation as such — is what I engage with.

You then say: "the world is the object, the transformation mediates its apprehension." But this is a restatement of IR, not an argument for it. I agree the perceptual system transforms its input. I agree the subject is aware of the result. I deny that the result is an intermediary entity standing between the subject and the world. It can equally be the subject's achieved awareness of the world — awareness that is world-directed in its intentionality even though it was produced by a transformative process.

And note something interesting about your own premises. You say "the subject is aware of the realized, not the realizer, per hallucination." In hallucination, the realizer is just the neural system. But in veridical perception, the realizer includes the world — the apple's reflectance properties, the ambient light, the entire causal chain from object to retina. If the subject is aware of what is realized by this process, and this process constitutively involves the world, then the subject is aware of something whose realization is worldly. That is direct realism.

The hallucination case is the one where the world drops out of the realization — it's the failure case. You're treating the failure case as the paradigm and then asking how the world gets back in. I'm treating the success case as the paradigm and noting that the failure case is precisely a failure — a perceptual act that lacks the world-involvement that would make it veridical.

I'm not saying that the colour red is an object, just as I wouldn't say that my headache is an object. I'm saying that I see the colour red, that the colour red is a mental phenomenon, and that seeing the colour red (usually) mediates seeing 700nm light and/or a surface that reflects 700nm light. — Michael

is right. You’re treating “whatever my awareness consists in” as an intermediary by definition, but that is exactly the point under dispute.

But I think many scientists are nowadays aware of the dangers of metaphysical realism, the antidote to which is simply circumspection. 'We don't say this is how the world really is, but that is surely how it appears to be.' — Wayfarer

I agree with the call for circumspection — but I don’t see circumspection as being at odds with metaphysical realism. Metaphysical realism, at least in its minimal form, is simply the claim that there is a mind-independent reality that constrains our judgments. Circumspection is the epistemic recognition that our access to that reality is fallible, mediated, and historically conditioned. I think the strongest versions of metaphysical realism are the ones that acknowledge the conditioned nature of inquiry while maintaining the real intelligibility of being.

naturalism isn't a theory that explains how we come to know the world, and neither is NeoPlatonism, from my perspective, but these are the myths which help us to make collective sense at all. — Moliere

I think that’s a very clear statement of your stance, and I get the appeal: naturalism (or Neoplatonism) functions more like an orienting picture than a theory we could straightforwardly verify or falsify. And I agree that metaphysics doesn’t behave like empirical inquiry with crisp criteria of confirmation.

But I wonder whether this quietist framing can really be maintained without smuggling in metaphysical claims. For example, “reality is still there” and “our stories do not capture it” already look like substantive theses about the relation between mind/language and world. If those aren’t truth-apt claims, what are they? And if they are truth-apt, then it seems metaphysics hasn’t been bypassed so much as relocated.

Also, I’m not sure Hart’s challenge is that metaphysics can “mimic the forms” or capture reality in itself. The claim is much weaker: that inquiry is norm-governed and truth-aimed, and that this only makes sense if reality is intelligible enough to constrain us. That’s compatible with fallibilism and with the idea that our frameworks are always historically mediated.

So I’m happy to grant the mythopoetic dimension, but I’m not sure it dissolves the underlying question: are we genuinely answerable to what is the case, or are we only ever elaborating internally coherent pictures?

P1: Saying that reasoning is normative suggests that it is socially or culturally constructed. — Janus

Hart is using the word "normative" in a different way. To say reasoning is "normative" is to acknowledge the possibility of error. The distinction between successful and unsuccessful performance comes "baked in".

P2: The only ought I see in logic is that if you want your thoughts to be more than arbitrarily related to one another, orderly instead of chaotic, and pragmatically insightful, then you ought to attempt to think consistently, validly and justifiably. — Janus

Yes, but also there is an "oughtness" to logical implication itself (e.g. one ought to accept the conclusion of a deductive argument that is both valid and sound).

P3: It is simply not true that human (or animal) thought is fully and exhaustively explicable in terms of physical causal relations. To think this would be to posit strict determinism and the impossibility of novel insight. — Janus

Hart's argument is targeted toward eliminative materialists such as Rosenberg, Chruchland, etc. who do argue that human (or animal) thought is fully and exhaustively explicable in terms of physical causal relations.

P4: What if believing the conclusion because it follows just is neurons firing in a certain appropriate sequence or pattern of relations? — Janus

It's hard to see how the former is reducible to the latter. The "oughtness" or "normativity" described above seems to drop out of any purely causal analysis.

P5: The physicalist worldview does not necessarily, even if certain versions of it may, render rational warrant impossible. This is a strawman. — Janus

Again, Hart's argument is targeted toward eliminative and strongly reductionistic versions of physicalism.

You make it sound as though there could be an alternative. — Janus

This was a response to Srap Tasmaner who was less convinced.

Good post. I think your argument is a bit overstated, but I agree with the spirit of what you've said. Philosophers overstep when they try to legislate rationality, pontificate from the armchair, or tell scientists how to do their jobs.

That said, I don't think Hart is aiming to do any of those things. His arguments are designed to put pressure on a certain metaphysical picture while pointing the way to an alternative that he thinks is more compelling than contemporary intellectual culture gives it credit for. That's it.

Should he be ignored? I don't see that he's doing anything particularly egregious or underhanded. Unlike Zeno, the topics he is addressing are considered "live" within contemporary philosophy and science. Sure, his metaphysical views are idiosyncratic, and he blusters a bit too much, but that doesn't make him unworthy of engagement per se.

That said, I can totally see why certain people would ignore him, whether out of distaste or disinterest. That's fine. I don't think his arguments "demand" an answer, though I think anyone who is interested in the topics should probably grapple with the underlying conceptual issues at some point.

That's a fair sociological observation — no working scientist is going to pack it up because Hart thinks physicalism can't ground intentionality, and you're right that the dispute lives in philosophy departments, not labs.

But I think the "who is this for?" framing quietly assumes that ignoring a philosophical question is a neutral option. It isn't. Every working scientist presupposes that nature is intelligible, that valid inference tracks truth, and that explanation is possible when they do their work. Those are philosophical commitments, whether or not anyone stops to examine them. Hart's point isn't "stop doing science" — it's "maybe your philosophical assumptions are in conflict with what must be presupposed when you actually do science."

Billiard-Ball causation, I thought, has long been left behind -- insofar that this is the only target of his criticism then, yes, I'm a fellow traveller. But I suspect that I'm not at the same time. — Moliere

I think that’s a fair self-diagnosis. Hart isn’t really targeting “science” so much as the idea that nature is exhaustively describable in terms of efficient causation. If one has already moved beyond billiard-ball mechanism, then Hart's argument will seem overwrought.

The remaining question (and I think it’s the one you’re gesturing at) is whether a non-mechanistic naturalism is stable as a metaphysics, or whether it either collapses into deflationary quietism or else starts to look like a cousin of the older metaphysical traditions—just with different vocabulary. That’s where the boundary question becomes genuinely interesting.

On the dyad:
You've reformulated my position as "perceptual act → correct perceptual act" and then objected that the intentional target of perception isn't a perceptual act. But that wasn't my claim. My dyad is: the act as performed, measured against a normative standard fixed by the world — the wall's stable reflectance properties, normal illumination conditions, etc. The second term isn't "another perceptual act"; it's the worldly conditions that determine what a successful perceptual act would disclose. So the dyad is act vs. world-anchored norm, not act vs. act.

You then propose your own dyad: perceptual act → world-state. And you say this is IR, because "the perceptual act discloses world-state without being world-state, and therefore intermediates between subject and world-state."

But look at what you've done. You've defined "intermediation" as: any cognitive act that discloses its target without being identical to its target. On that definition, every cognitive act is an intermediary — understanding intermediates between subject and meaning, memory intermediates between subject and past event, reasoning intermediates between subject and logical truth. You've made "indirect" trivially true of all cognition, which is exactly my objection.

The question was never whether the perceptual act is identical to the world-state. Obviously it isn't — an act of seeing a white wall is not the same thing as the wall's being white. The question is whether the act interposes an object between subject and world, or whether it constitutes the subject's openness to the world. You keep sliding from "the act is not identical to its target" to "therefore the act produces an intermediary entity." That inference is what I deny.

On "unlike types":
You claim perception is special because the two terms of the dyad are of unlike type — perceptual acts are not facts about world-states — whereas in other cases the terms are of like type. But I don't think this holds.

An interpretation is a mental act. The speaker's intended meaning is not a mental act of the listener — it's what the speaker meant, which is normatively fixed by their communicative intentions and the conventions of language. A recalled event is a present mental episode. The actual past event is a concrete historical occurrence that no longer exists. In both cases, the cognitive act and its target are of fundamentally unlike type — one is a present mental episode, the other is something in the world (a meaning, a past event, a logical relation) that the act aims to disclose.

You make these look "like" each other by using loose language: interpretation "is" meaning, memory "resembles" its target. But by that same loose standard, a perceptual act "is" a disclosure of world-state — just possibly an inaccurate one. If you tighten the standard, all the dyads involve unlike types. If you loosen it, none of them do — including perception.

On strong epistemic mediation:
You propose that perception involves “radical” multiple realizability—two possible realizers that share no properties whatsoever. A hallucinated apple and a real apple, you say, share no properties. But that’s overstated: hallucination and veridical perception share plenty of relevant properties (phenomenal character, inferential role, behavioral upshot). The difference is in fulfillment by the world, not in a total lack of shared properties. And in any case, the same kind of “radical” gap shows up wherever cognition can go wrong: a confabulated memory vs an actual past event, a delusional interpretation vs a speaker’s intended meaning, a fallacious inference vs a valid entailment. If your criterion tracks the mere possibility of empty vs fulfilled acts, it will generalize across cognition, not isolate perception as uniquely indirect.

On your response to my first objection:
You say: multiple realization requires an intermediary, the transformation must be "housed somehow," the subject must be aware of a "signal," and therefore the subject is aware of an intermediary.
But this just reasserts the conclusion. That the system transforms its input doesn't entail that the subject is aware of the transformation as an entity. I am causally mediated by my optic nerve, my visual cortex, and countless neural processes — these transformations are "housed" in my nervous system But I am not aware of my optic nerve. The processing occurs; I am not aware of the processing. I am aware of the world through the processing. You need an argument that the subject's awareness takes the transformation as its object, and you haven't provided one — you've simply inferred it from the existence of the transformation.

This is, at bottom, the same inference I've been resisting throughout: from "the system processes" to "the subject is aware of something processed." The first is a claim about subpersonal mechanism. The second is a claim about personal-level awareness. They are not the same claim, and the second does not follow from the first.

certainly in the counterfactual sense that I cannot be aware of apples and sugar without being aware of these phenomenal characters. — Michael

Right — phenomenal character is necessary for awareness of the apple. But necessity (or counterfactual dependence) is not mediation. I can’t see the apple without my eyes, but my eyes aren’t what I see. Phenomenal character is what my awareness of the apple consists in — the mode of perceiving — not a second object I perceive on my way to the apple.

We can leave it anywhere anytime. I think we’re pretty much disassociated on the finer points, and the common points aren’t interesting anyway. — Mww

Agreed. Seems like we're running up against divergent starting points and background assumptions.

I really appreciate your responses here. — Tom Storm

Cheers! :up:

Yes, good. What's your reaction to this point? — Tom Storm

My reaction is: I actually think Hart has a real point here.

If you grant that intentionality is real — that thoughts are genuinely about things, and that actions are genuinely directed toward ends — then you've already moved beyond the picture of nature that came out of early modern mechanism (matter in motion, efficient causation, nothing else).

A generous naturalist can certainly allow intentionality, but Hart's challenge is: what is it, ontologically? Is it just a convenient way of talking? An illusion? Or a real feature of reality? If it's real, then it starts looking a lot like what older traditions called formal and final causality — forms, purposes, directedness. And Hart's suspicion is that once you let those back in, you've already conceded that the mechanistic story is incomplete in principle.

That said, I'm less convinced that Neoplatonism is the only viable landing place. While I am sympathetic to irreducible intentionality and teleology, I'm more inclined toward a neo-Aristotelian metaphysical picture where nature is simply richer than pure mechanism allows — without taking on a Neoplatonic metaphysical hierarchy. At a certain point the labels start mattering less than the substance. The real question isn't "are you a naturalist?" but "what do you think reality actually contains?" And if your answer includes irreducible aboutness, directedness, intelligible structure — you've already left behind the worldview Hart is primarily attacking, regardless of what you call yourself.

So I'd put it like this: Hart is right about the inadequacy of mechanism, but the positive metaphysical conclusion is underdetermined by his argument.

I would be interested to learn more about what a post-modern response would would be or what someone like Richard Rorty might say. — Tom Storm

Rorty is interesting here because I don't think he would try to answer Hart on Hart's terms at all. He wouldn't say "intentionality is reducible to physics." He'd say something closer to: "Hart assumes that if aboutness can't be reduced, it must correspond to some deep metaphysical structure. But why? Maybe aboutness is just part of how we talk — a feature of our vocabulary and practices, not a window into the architecture of being. It doesn't need metaphysical grounding any more than humor needs a metaphysical theory of funniness."

Hart's counter would be sharp: even to describe vocabularies and practices, you're relying on meanings, norms, and directedness — you're relying on intentionality while refusing to account for it. The "it's just how we talk" move is parasitic on the very thing it waves away. I don't think Hart decisively refutes Rorty, but he does expose the cost of the Rortyan move. Rorty will avoid Hart's metaphysics, by treating "what is intentionality?" as a pseudo-problem — and Hart will insist it isn't.

To summarize: I think Hart's challenge is serious. I'm sympathetic to the claim that intentionality and normativity are irreducible, but I'm less convinced that irreducibility forces you all the way to Plotinus or even to classical theism, rather than to a richer-than-mechanistic view of nature. Hart's argument doesn't force you to become a theist — but it does force you to decide whether you really believe that nature is exhausted by efficient causation.

That’s a totally fair reaction — Hart tends to get very “high altitude” very quickly, which can make his prose rather opaque (being charitable) for the "uninitiated".

If we strip away the technical metaphysics, Hart's basically saying that when we act intentionally, we aren’t just pushed around by physical causes like billiard balls. We are guided by meanings — by “what we are trying to do” (e.g. desires, goals, plans, etc.). When I hammer a nail, what explains my movements isn’t only the physics of muscles and neurons, but the goal I am aiming toward: driving the nail in. That goal isn’t physically present yet, but it’s already shaping what I do right now.

So Hart thinks the world contains something that physics has banished: purpose (or “end-directedness”). That’s the intuitive starting point.

Regarding your comments on P3 — you're right to press this. The claim is basically: when you reach for your coffee cup, your action is organized by something that doesn't physically exist yet (the coffee being drunk). The whole movement only makes sense in light of where it's going. Hart says no purely mechanical account — billiard balls hitting billiard balls, so to speak — can capture that forward-directedness, because mechanism only allows the past to push the present, never the future to pull it.

Can this be demonstrated beyond all doubt? I doubt it. But Hart would say: every attempt to explain intentionality mechanically ends up either smuggling intentionality back in through the back door (your "neural representation of a future state" is itself about something — so you haven't eliminated aboutness, you've just relocated it), or else giving up on intentionality altogether and saying it's an illusion — which is the Rosenberg move, and which most people find absurd.

So as with all philosophical arguments, it's less a proof and more a challenge. Hart is saying: show me how mechanism gets you aboutness without presupposing it. He thinks no one has ever met that challenge. Whether that constitutes a demonstration or just a very confident bet is a fair question.

Regarding P6 — your reading is essentially right. A specific intelligible unity — say, "the act of hammering this nail" as a purposive whole — it is one thing rather than another. But it doesn't contain within itself the reason why it's a unity at all. Its being-one is something it has, not something it is. So it participates in unity without being the source of unity. And that means there must be something more fundamental that grounds the possibility of things being unified wholes in the first place.

This is the most Neoplatonic step in the argument and frankly the one that asks the most of the reader. If you find it natural to ask "but why is anything a unity rather than merely an aggregate?" then the argument has some purchase. If that question strikes you as confused or unanswerable, you'll get off the train here. Hart thinks it's the most important question in philosophy. Many people think it's not really a question at all.

On the "low-hanging fruit" point — yes and no. Hart is targeting eliminativists, and that's the "easy" win. But his deeper claim is that any naturalism that accepts real intentionality has already conceded something that sits very uncomfortably within a naturalist framework, even a generous one. Real aboutness, real directedness toward ends — these look a lot like the formal and final causality that the scientific revolution was supposed to have banished. So the generous naturalist may have a harder position to maintain than it first appears: you've let the camel's nose into the tent, so-to-speak.

On Hart's confidence — your last line made me laugh, and you're probably right that he'd say exactly that. It's both his greatest strength and his most exasperating quality. He writes as though the Neoplatonic hierarchy is just obvious once you've cleared away modern confusions, and for some readers that's electrifying and for others it's maddening.

I’m more interested in what you think the transition entails then where it may be located. — Mww

Fair enough. I'll address this briefly and then we can leave it at that if you wish.

In my view, the transition from sensation to knowledge is not a passage from one realm (sensibility) to another (understanding), but an enrichment of the subject's relation to what is given. The same conscious subject who senses also inquires, understands, and judges — and these are not operations performed on different objects, but successive operations on the same presentation leading to a progressive refinement of the given.

When I sense, I am presented with a patterned manifold — colors, shapes, resistances — that is not yet understood. I don't know what it is. But the manifold is not understood to be a representation of the real; it is the real as disclosed by the senses. The transition to understanding occurs when I ask "what is it?" and insight grasps an intelligible unity in the data — that's an apple. The transition to judgment occurs when I ask "is it really so?" and marshal the evidence: the data sufficiently support the identification.

What's crucial is that understanding and judgment don't take a different object than sensation. They take the same given and determine it further. The intelligibility that understanding grasps is the intelligibility of the sensed data. The judgment affirms that this intelligibility belongs to what is given, not to some downstream substitute for it. Knowing the real doesn't require containing it — it requires correctly understanding and affirming what is given

Where I diverge most fully with Kant is metaphysically: I take the world to be intrinsically intelligible in its own right, thereby enabling the mind to grasp this intelligibility in the act of insight/understanding, though always perspectivally, fallibly and subject to the embodied conditions of the particular knower.

1. Regarding the dyadic structure of error:

I agree that error requires a dyad — something that is wrong and a standard of correctness. You assert that the dyad must consist of two entities (BMO and DO), but you haven't argued for that; you've assumed it. That's precisely what I'm challenging.

I would argue that the dyad can be: act-as-performed vs. act-as-correct.

When I make an error in reasoning — say, I commit a fallacy — the two terms are: my inference as I actually drew it, and the valid inference I should have drawn given the premises. I don't need an intermediary "logic-object" to ground this dyad. The standard of correctness is provided by the logical relations themselves, and my act falls short of that standard.

The same structure applies to perception. The two terms are: (1) the perceptual act as it was performed, and (2) the perceptual act as it would have been performed under proper conditions given the actual state of the world. When I see a white wall as pink under red lighting, the error is not that I have an accurate BMO ("pink-wall object") that fails to match the DO (white wall). The error is that my act of perceiving was performed under conditions — red lighting — that prevented it from disclosing the wall as it is.

The standard of correctness here is not a purely internal ideal; it is fixed by the stable properties of the wall and the lawful conditions under which those properties are disclosed (e.g., normal illumination). So the dyad is act and norm, not inner object and outer object.

More generally: error arises when we judge beyond what our evidential conditions warrant — when we affirm "it is so" without the relevant conditions being fulfilled. The dyad is normative, not ontological.

2. Regarding the definition of epistemic mediation:

Your multiple realizability criterion is creative, and I agree it's an improvement over your earlier formulations. But I see three difficulties:

First, multiple realizability is a feature of the system's causal powers, not of the subject's awareness. The mere fact that a system could have produced the same output from a different source doesn't entail that the subject is therefore aware of an intermediary. Possible deception is not the same thing as an intermediary object of awareness.

Second, this criterion applies to perception itself, since hallucination shows that the visual system can produce similar outputs without a distal object. But that just repackages the argument from hallucination as a definition. And my response remains: phenomenal indistinguishability doesn't entail sameness of intentional structure, any more than a real key and a perfect forgery being indistinguishable entails the same relation to the lock.

Third, this definition proves too much. Memory is multiply realizable (I could be confabulating). Linguistic understanding is multiply realizable (I could be misinterpreting). Reasoning is multiply realizable (I could commit a fallacy). If the bare possibility that the same cognitive output could have been produced by a different source is sufficient for "epistemic mediation," then all cognition is indirect, and the direct/indirect distinction loses its contrast and does no philosophical work.

I suspect this difficulty in finding a stable definition of "epistemic mediation" is not accidental. It may reflect the fact that the direct/indirect distinction, as traditionally drawn, doesn't track a real structural difference in cognition — only a difference in how much processing is involved, which is a matter of degree, not kind.

So I'll put the question directly: on your definition, what would count as direct cognition?

I think there's more agreement between us than the terminological differences might suggest, so let me try to locate the genuine point of divergence.

I'm happy to grant that at the level of raw sensation, there is no "apple" — there is, as you say, no more than a "something", not yet identified or named. The apple as a particular object of knowledge arises only through further operations: understanding what kind of thing it is, and judging that it is indeed so. That much is central to my account as well. I would say that experience (sensation) provides the data, understanding grasps intelligibility in that data, and judgment affirms whether that grasp is correct. No one of these levels alone constitutes knowledge of an apple.

Where I'd gently push back is on the separation of sensibility from cognition as distinct faculties or systems. On my account, sensation is not housed in a separate faculty that mediates between the real and cognition. It is the first level of the cognitional process itself. This doesn't deny functional distinctions between sensing and understanding; it denies that sensation constitutes a self-contained representational realm that cognition must then "bridge."

In my view, experience, understanding, and judgment are dynamically related operations within a single conscious subject — not separate systems handing data from one to the next. The same subject who senses is the one who understands and judges, and the object is progressively disclosed through those operations. The name "apple" is a conceptual determination of what is already given as a unified "something" in experience.

This matters for the direct/indirect question, because if sensation belongs to a separate mediating faculty — sensibility — then there is structural room for an intermediary: the phenomenon as something distinct from the thing itself. But if sensation is already the first moment of a unified cognitional act directed at the world, then the structural room for such an intermediary narrows considerably — the burden shifts to showing why one is still needed. Instead of a relay between systems, my view visages a single process of coming to know the real at progressively higher levels of determination.

So when you say sensation is "a moment within sensibility, which relates the directly real in perception to the indirectly representational in phenomena" — I'd want to ask whether that relay step is doing necessary work, or whether it's an artifact of the faculty model. In my view, there is no point at which the directly real gets converted into a representation that acts as the direct object of awareness. There is only a subject whose conscious operations progressively determine what is given in experience. I would say it like this: the real is not first given and then re-represented; it is given, then understood and then affirmed.

Your point about distinguishing direct/indirect under different systemic conditions is well-taken. I think the distinction you're drawing between "the real as directly given in perception" and "the indirectly representational in phenomena" is genuinely important — it's just that I'd locate the transition differently than Kant does.

You're raising something I think is genuinely important — the question of what "naturalism" actually commits you to. Hart is at his strongest when he's targeting the Rosenberg/Churchland end of things, where intentionality really is denied or explained away. But you're right that there are much more capacious naturalisms that would happily accept real intentionality and even something like teleology.

The interesting question is whether those generous naturalisms are still naturalism in any meaningful sense, or whether they've quietly conceded the ground Hart is fighting over. If one's naturalism includes irreducible intentionality, real directedness toward ends, and the genuine ontological priority of meaning over mechanism — at what point has one just become a fellow traveler with Hart who prefers different vocabulary? That's not intended as a "gotcha" — just an interesting question about where the boundaries of the dispute actually lie.

And your point about Hart sometimes asserting impossibility where he should be arguing for it is well taken. He has a tendency to treat certain metaphysical intuitions as self-evident that aren't self-evident to everyone. The "impossibly fantastic" line about emergence is a case in point — it expresses a conviction rather than demonstrating a conclusion.

Then what of sensation? — Mww

Good question. I don’t deny that sensation is real, or that the external “becomes internal” through the activity of the sensory system. The question is what role sensation plays in the structure of cognition.

On my view, sensation belongs to the level of experience—the conscious flow that provides data for further operations of understanding and judgment. But sensation is not ordinarily given as an object we inspect in its own right; it is the medium through which the world is given. I don’t first attend to sensations and then infer an apple; rather, the apple is presented in and through the sensory manifold (even if that presentation can later be analyzed or thematized).

This is roughly analogous to Kant’s point that intuitions without concepts are blind: sensory content doesn’t yet constitute cognition of an object until it is synthesized. Where I would part ways with Kant is on whether that synthesis delivers only “appearance” or a perspectival disclosure of the thing itself. But the structural point stands: sensation is a moment within cognition, not an intermediary entity that cognition takes as its terminus.

I think this is a genuinely distinct argument from the other two, though it shares deep roots with both of them.

The first two arguments were essentially negative — they aimed to show that physicalism cannot account for normativity and intelligibility. This passage is doing something more constructive: it’s trying to show that the very structure of intentionality, properly analyzed, naturally points toward something like a participatory metaphysics — a hierarchy of being in roughly the Neoplatonic sense.

The key move, as I read it, runs like this:

Every intentional act — even something as mundane as using a hammer — is directed toward an end that is not yet realized but is already operative as the organizing principle of the act. When I swing a hammer, the completed action (the nail driven in) is not yet actual, but it is already functioning as the rational cause of my present movements. The future end is operative in the present as a final cause.

Hart then argues that this temporal structure — where the end is “always already” governing the act even as it is being worked out in time — requires more than a merely mechanical succession of efficient causes. Time (chronos) is the unfolding, in sequence, of what is graspable only as a unified whole (aeon). This is the Platonic dictum from the Timaeus: chronos is the moving image of aeon.

And then the crucial further step: this order of intelligible purposive wholes cannot itself be understood as a mere aggregate of interacting parts. It must involve genuine intrinsic unity. But any determinate unity, Hart suggests, is intelligible only as a participation in unity as such — which points beyond itself to a higher principle of unity. This yields the Plotinian hierarchy: temporal becoming, noetic wholeness, and ultimately the One beyond all distinction.

So the argument’s skeleton might be formalized roughly as follows:

The Argument from Intentionality to Participation
P1. Intentional action is real — our acts are genuinely directed toward ends, and this directedness is not epiphenomenal.
P2. Every intentional act is structured by a meaning — an end or purpose — that is not reducible to any present physical configuration. The act of hammering is organized by the completed goal (nail driven in), which does not yet exist physically but is already operative as the rational principle governing the agent’s present movements.
P3. This directedness toward what is not-yet (and even toward what may never be) cannot be captured in purely immanent mechanical terms. No arrangement of present matter, however complex, constitutes aboutness — orientation toward an absent end — without presupposing an irreducible intentional structure that already exceeds efficient causality.
P4. Therefore, in every intentional act, the temporal sequence of physical events is governed by an intelligible wholeness that is prior to and not derivable from the sequence itself. The parts of the act only make sense in light of the whole, but the whole is not yet physically actual. Temporal sequence presupposes intelligible wholeness.
P5. This intelligible wholeness — the order in which intentional acts exist as complete purposive unities rather than as mere successions of physical states — constitutes what the tradition calls a "noetic order". This is not a “separate place” or a Platonic warehouse, but a claim about ontological priority: intelligible form is more fundamental than material sequence.
P6. The noetic order, as a realm of determinate intelligible unities, cannot be self-grounding. Any determinate unity — any "this" rather than "that" — is a limited participation in unity as such, and so points beyond itself to a principle of unity that is not itself one determinate thing among others.
P7. If intentionality is not unique to human minds but can be discerned at systemic levels of nature — if biological organization, persistence, and function exhibit genuine directedness toward ends — then this structure (temporal unfolding governed by intelligible wholeness, grounded in a principle of unity) characterizes reality as such, not merely human psychology.
C. Therefore, if intentionality is real, reality cannot be fundamentally mechanical. The present is always already governed by a meaning that transcends the present, and this pushes metaphysics toward a participatory ontology — a hierarchy from temporal becoming, through noetic wholeness, to an absolute principle of unity ("the One").

Basically Hart is arguing that if you take intentionality seriously and follow out its internal structure, you are led — almost by phenomenological necessity — toward a participatory ontology. It’s not primarily attacking physicalism (though it does that in passing, with the point about the “mechanical narrative of emergence”). It’s constructing a positive metaphysical picture “from the inside,” showing that it arises naturally from reflection on what intentional action actually involves.

Hart is also doing something methodologically distinctive here. He’s suggesting that ancient Neoplatonic metaphysics — which modern philosophy often treats as naïve pre-critical speculation — was in fact operating with something like a proto-phenomenological method: deriving ontological structure from the analysis of agency and experience. So the argument is simultaneously philosophical and historiographical: Plotinus is not separated from Husserl/Heidegger by a Kantian abyss, but is engaged in a continuous project of making explicit what is implicit in experience.

Where is it most vulnerable? Probably around P3 and P6. A naturalist will say: the “end” that organizes present action is just a neural representation — a predictive model of a future state that causally shapes present behavior. No need for a "noetic order".

Hart’s reply will be that this simply relocates the problem: a “representation” is itself already an intentional phenomenon. The question is not whether the brain can generate models, but how matter can be about something absent, future, or merely possible at all. Invoking neural representations is not an explanation of intentionality; it is intentionality redescribed in mechanistic vocabulary.

So the real issue, for Hart, is whether intentionality is eliminable or irreducible — and if it's irreducible, whether it forces us beyond the mechanical narrative toward a metaphysics in which finality, form, and unity are basic features of reality rather than emergent accidents.

Your move on the interpretation analogy is well-taken, and I want to engage with it honestly. You're right that interpretation mediates our access to meaning. But notice: when I misinterpret a sentence, the error is a failure of my act of understanding, not a mismatch between two objects (my meaning-representation and the speaker's meaning-representation). I don't first accurately apprehend an inner "meaning-object" and then compare it to the speaker's intended meaning. I simply understand wrongly. The mediation is operational — it passes through the activity of understanding — not objectual. That's exactly my claim about perception: error is a failure of the perceptual act, not a mismatch between an accurately apprehended BMO and an inferred DO.

On the TV: you say that even without a viewer, the TV image is epistemically mediated. But I think the reason we call it mediated is precisely that the image on the screen is a self-standing entity — it has pixel values, luminance, contrast ratios that can be characterized completely independently of any viewer. It exists as a physical particular whether or not anyone is watching. That's what makes it an intermediary: it's a thing with its own properties, interposed between apple and viewer.

You've acknowledged that perception lacks this feature: "to appear is to be apprehended." But I don't think you've registered how much this concession costs. If the perceptual presentation doesn't exist independently of the subject's awareness — if there is no presentation without apprehension — then the presentation is not a self-standing entity interposed between subject and world. It's not a thing that mediates; it's the character of the subject's awareness of the world. And that is the act/object distinction I keep drawing.

So when you ask me to explain why (b) doesn't apply to the VS: it does apply to the VS. But the VS is mediated because of an additional feature — the screen image is an independently existing particular. Remove that feature (as perception does), and (b) describes direct presentation: the system's activity constitutes the subject's awareness of the apple, rather than producing an intermediary entity that the subject then apprehends.

Your reformulated question — "do the structures of perception entail epistemic mediation between subject and object?" — is the right question. My answer is: the structures of perception entail operational mediation (the system actively processes), but not objective mediation (the system does not produce an intermediary entity that the subject is aware of). These come apart, and the TV analogy obscures this because TVs happen to involve both.

Here's a shot at reconstructing Hart's arguments from normativity and intelligibility respectively. It's worth noting that Hart doesn't explicitly spell out his argument in a concise manner, so this definitely involves some interpretation. The first argument is a reductio style deductive argument, while the second is more of an inference to the best explanation type of argument. I've tried to be as charitable as I can:

Argument 1: The Argument from Rational Normativity
P1. Reasoning involves being guided by normative logical relations — recognizing that conclusions ought to follow from premises, that inferences are valid or invalid, that beliefs are warranted or unwarranted.
P2. Logical relations are intrinsically normative (they involve "ought"), and no purely descriptive-causal account of physical events entails or generates normativity. (The is/ought gap applies at the level of logic itself.)
P3. If physicalism is true, then every feature of human thought is fully and exhaustively explicable in terms of physical causal relations.
P4. Genuine reasoning requires that our beliefs are (at least partly) explained by the normative logical relations themselves — that we believe the conclusion because it follows, not merely because neurons fired in a certain sequence.
P5. If a worldview renders genuine rational warrant impossible, it undermines its own claim to be rationally believed.
C1. If physicalism is true, no belief — including the belief in physicalism — is held because it is rationally warranted; it is held because it is causally produced.
C2. Therefore, physicalism is self-undermining.

Argument 2: The Argument from Intelligibility
P1. Reality is not merely ordered but intrinsically intelligible: it is the kind of thing that admits of rational explanation and can be known as such by minds.
P2. If reality is fundamentally mindless and non-rational (as physicalism holds), then intelligibility is not intrinsic to being but at best a contingent appearance generated within certain organisms — a useful fiction rather than a feature of the real.
P3. But all explanation — including physicalist explanation — presupposes that reality is inherently ordered toward intelligibility. The physicist's equations work because nature is rationally structured, not because we impose structure on chaos.
P4. A worldview that must presuppose the intrinsic intelligibility of being while denying it any ontological ground is parasitic on what it refuses to explain.
P5. Classical theism accounts for intelligibility: the rational order of nature and the mind's capacity to grasp it are both grounded in a transcendent rational source (Nous, Logos) — what the classical tradition calls God.
C. Therefore, classical theism provides a more coherent and less parasitic metaphysical framework than physicalism.