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.

yep, that's basically it.

I think we've actually located the precise point of disagreement, which is progress even if neither of us has convinced the other.

I take it that you hold that if phenomenal character is a mental phenomenon (not a property of apples, light, or eyes), then it must be something the subject is aware of as an object—an intermediary. I hold that it can be a feature of the subject's awareness of the world without being itself an object of that awareness. The warmth of an embrace is a real feature of the embracing — it's not a property of the other person's body, and it's not a third entity between the two people. It characterizes the act, not an intermediary.

Whether that distinction is genuine or merely verbal is, I think, the question that separates us. I appreciate the exchange in any case — I think it's sharpened my understanding of where the real fault line lies between us.

The money analogy actually makes my point. What distinguishes genuine currency from counterfeits isn't some hidden "moneyness" substance inside genuine bills — it's that genuine bills stand in the right institutional and normative relations. We don't posit an inner "money-quale" that counterfeits lack. Likewise, what distinguishes veridical perception from hallucination isn't an additional inner entity (a quale) that somehow connects to the world — it's that the perceptual act stands in the right fulfillment relation to its object. Your version of the analogy smuggles in exactly the reification I'm challenging: you treat the difference between genuine and counterfeit as evidence for a hidden inner ingredient, when in fact it's evidence for a relational, normative distinction — which is what I've been arguing all along.

Phenomenology misleads about form, not content. It presents form, qualitative features, as features of the content. When in reality, they are descriptors. Map, not territory. — hypericin

This is a helpful distinction, but I want to press on it. You say qualitative features are "descriptors" — but descriptors of what? If they describe the apple (accurately or inaccurately), then they are ways the apple is presented to the subject, i.e., modes of presentation of the distal object. That's my view. If they describe nothing external — if they are purely system-internal features with no presentational function — then the intentional directedness you've already conceded becomes mysterious. You can't have descriptors that are "of the apple" in their intentional direction but belong entirely to the system in their qualitative character without explaining how those two aspects are unified in a single conscious experience. I think they're unified because qualitative character just is the way the act presents its object. You think they're unified by... correspondence? Causal connection? That's the gap I keep pointing to.

But the apple has no more requirements in fulfilling this perceptual relationship than it does in fulfilling "to the left of". It just has to sit there. The viewer is doing all the work: they have to fulfill extraordinary biological requirements for the relationship to manifest. — hypericin

I actually agree with much of this. Perception is indeed asymmetric — the subject's biological system is doing the heavy lifting. But "the subject's system is doing all the work" doesn't entail "therefore the product of that work is an intermediary entity." It could equally mean: the subject's system is doing all the work of disclosing the apple. The activity is the system's; what the activity achieves is a presentation of the world. These are not competing claims.

Consider: in understanding a sentence, the listener does all the cognitive work — parsing syntax, activating semantic associations, resolving ambiguities. The sentence just sits there (or the sound waves just arrive). Understanding is a "unipolar process" in your sense. But we don't conclude that the listener is therefore aware of an intermediary "meaning-object" that stands between them and what the speaker said. The listener's active processing constitutes their grasp of the speaker's meaning. The processing is the medium, not an intermediary object.

the image of the apple is the way VS presents the apple...the apple does not support the image on the screen. — hypericin

The TV analogy is vivid and I think it's doing a lot of your argumentative work, so I want to engage with it carefully.

You're right that the viewing system actively constructs a presentation, and that the apple is passive in this process. You're right that the system could present the apple in infinitely many ways — distorted, inverted, unintelligible. I grant all of this.

But the analogy has a crucial structural feature that perception lacks: the TV has a screen. There is a spatially distinct surface where the image is literally inscribed, and this surface can itself become an object of inspection — you can notice the pixels, the refresh rate, the bezel. This is what makes it natural to say "there is an image, and it is an intermediary between you and the apple."

The brain has no screen. There is no inner surface where a presentation is displayed for an inner viewer. And if you posit one, you face the homunculus regress: who watches the brain's display? The TV analogy works precisely because there is a viewer external to the system (the person sitting on the couch). In perception, there is no such external viewer — the system's activity is the awareness. There's no gap between "the system presents" and "the subject sees."

This is why I keep insisting that the constructive activity of the perceptual system produces an act of awareness, not an object of awareness. The system's active presentation of the apple is the subject's seeing of the apple. These are not two things — a presentation and then a seeing of the presentation — they are one event described at two levels (subpersonal mechanism, personal-level experience).

VS could present the apple any which way: distorted, with inverted colors, or with infinite possible other transformations, which could leave the apple unintelligible to a human viewer. None of these transformations belong to the apple, they belong to VS. VS is doing them. — hypericin

Agreed — the transformations belong to the system. But "belonging to the system" is ambiguous between two readings:

(a) They are features of an intermediary object that the system constructs and the subject inspects.
(b) They are features of the system's activity of presenting the apple to the subject.

On reading (a), you get IR: the subject is immediately aware of the constructed object. On reading (b), you get my view: the subject is immediately aware of the apple, but the way it is aware — the qualitative character of the awareness — is shaped by the system's processing. The apple is what is seen; the "transformations" characterize the seeing.

Your own concessions push toward (b). You've agreed that the intentional target is the apple, not the image. You've agreed the image is an event, not an object. You've agreed the system is doing all the work. What remains of IR, once all these concessions are made? It seems like the only thing left is the TV screen — the idea that there must be some surface or entity on which the presentation is inscribed. But that's the very thing that perception, unlike television, doesn't have.

The light which emerges from VS is not the same as light reflecting off the apple. While the light is still of the apple, it is also mediated by VS. — hypericin

Of course — and I've never denied causal mediation. The question was never "is perception causally mediated?" (obviously yes) but "does causal mediation entail an epistemic intermediary object?" I've been arguing it doesn't, and I think your own developing picture — active system, passive apple, constructive processing, intentional directedness at the apple — is actually more naturally at home in a direct realist framework than in IR. What you've described is a system whose activity constitutes awareness of the world, not a system that constructs inner objects for a subject to inspect.

I'm confused. This is what you said early in the discussion: — Michael

You're right to flag this, and I want to address it directly rather than paper over it. Over the course of this discussion I've been drawing on two different philosophical frameworks — one that locates directness at the level of judgment and intentional reference, and another that gives a richer account of the phenomenology of perception. I don't think these are contradictory, but I have shifted emphasis between them, and I owe you a clearer statement of how they fit together.

Here's the unified picture: perception has both a phenomenological dimension and an epistemic dimension. Phenomenologically, perceptual experience presents the object itself under profiles — not an inner item that merely represents the object. Epistemically, the justification of perceptual judgments doesn't rest on the phenomenology alone but on the whole cognitional structure of experience, understanding, and judgment. So when I said earlier that directness isn't a matter of phenomenal presence, I was rejecting the idea that epistemic directness is secured by phenomenology alone. When I said more recently that the phenomenology is of the apple, I was making a phenomenological claim about what experience presents, not an epistemic claim about what justifies our judgments. These are distinct questions, and I should have been clearer about which one I was addressing at each point.

Occam's razor and no positive evidence for b) is reason enough to assert a). — Michael

You say that after disintegration, either the appearance is (a) the mental phenomenon emerging from neural activity or (b) some mysterious third thing, and Occam's razor favors (a). But this is a false dichotomy. My view is not (b). The appearance is the phenomenal character of the intentional act — its mode of presentation — which at t1 is unfulfilled by any distal object. That's not a third entity; it's a feature of the act itself. You don't need to posit an extra object; you need to recognize that perceptual acts are individuated by their norms of fulfillment, not by introspective character alone. An unfulfilled perceptual act and a fulfilled one differ in kind — not because of some external add-on, but because fulfillment is constitutive of the act-type, just as a kept promise and a broken promise aren't the same act that merely differs in external outcome. We individuate normative acts by their success conditions, not merely by how they feel from the inside. Occam's razor, if anything, favors this over the postulation of qualia as a distinct ontological category of mental particulars.

We can see colours even without apples or light, e.g. if we're dreaming, hallucinating, or synesthetes listening to music with our eyes closed. What are these colours if not qualia? — Michael

This is a real challenge and I don't want to dismiss it. But notice that you can only classify the dream experience as apple-like or red-like by borrowing those descriptions from veridical perception. The hallucinatory case is not self-standing — it inherits its intentional description from the successful case. So treating hallucination as revealing the true nature of all perception reverses the correct explanatory order. It's like analyzing genuine currency by starting from counterfeits: the counterfeit is only intelligible as a counterfeit of something. Dreams and hallucinations are cases where the neural mechanisms that normally subserve world-directed perception are activated endogenously. The intentional structure — the presenting-as — is preserved, but it is unfulfilled by any distal object. This doesn't show that in veridical perception the colours are also qualia; it shows that the neural substrate can generate experiential acts that have the form of object-presentation without an object. The question is whether we redescribe all perception in terms of the non-veridical case or understand the non-veridical case as a deficient mode of the normal one. I think the latter is more principled.

Do (1) and (2) mean the same thing, or is it logically possible for (2) to be true but (1) to be false? — Michael

You ask whether "colour is how the apple presents itself given the kind of perceivers we are" and "neural activity in the visual cortex from which colour qualia emerge" mean the same thing. No, they don't, and yes, it is logically possible for (2) to be true and (1) false. But it's also logically possible for (2)'s causal story to be true while its ontological gloss — the claim that what emerges are "qualia" as inner mental particulars — is false. I accept the neuroscience. I reject the philosophical interpretation you're attaching to it. The causal chain from apple to retina to cortex can be fully described without concluding that what I'm aware of at the end of the chain is a quale rather than the apple-as-presented. That's the inference I keep challenging.

But let me put the question back to you: suppose I grant you qualia as a label for the sensory character of experience. What do they explain that intentional content, causal enabling conditions, and norms of fulfillment don't already explain? If "qualia" is just your name for what I'm calling the mode of presentation, then we agree on the phenomenon and disagree only about its ontological description — and you need to show why "inner mental particular" is a better description. If qualia are supposed to be genuine intermediaries doing explanatory work, tell me what that work is.

Finally, you've said before that the causal story isn't sufficient for intentionality and normativity. I agree. But if perceptual experience is wholly inner, then your judgments about the world are operating on inner items. What anchors their content to distal objects rather than to the qualia themselves? If the answer is "the causal relation," then causation alone doesn't determine content — causal relations underdetermine intentional content unless some normative constraint is already in play. If the answer is "inference," then what makes the inference truth-tracking rather than merely adaptive? This is the question I keep pressing, and I don't think the indirect realist framework has a very good answer to it.

1. Regarding Semantic Direct Realism

You keep pointing me toward Semantic Direct Realism as though my position reduces to it, but it doesn't. Semantic Direct Realism says perception is intentionally directed at distal objects but that what is phenomenally present are still inner items — it concedes the phenomenological ground to indirect realism and salvages "directness" only at the level of content or reference. That's not my view. I'm saying the phenomenology itself is of the apple — that the qualitative character of perceptual experience is not a property of an inner item but the way the object shows up. So the disagreement between us is phenomenological, not merely semantic. Please stop trying to shunt me into a position I've explicitly rejected.

2. Regarding "what does this even mean?"

You ask whether I'm saying that redness inheres in distal objects "only when you exist and look at them from a certain vantage point," and you call this absurd. But I think the absurdity is in your paraphrase, not in my claim. I'm not saying the apple gains a new intrinsic property when I look at it. I'm saying that redness characterizes the perceptual situation — the apple-as-perceived — which is neither a mind-independent property of the apple (naïve realism) nor a property of an inner mental object (indirect realism). It is a relational phenomenon: it involves the apple, the perceiver, and the conditions of perception. This is no more mysterious than saying that "being to the left of" is a real relation without being an intrinsic property of either relatum. Colour is how the apple presents itself given the kind of perceivers we are, the lighting conditions, and so on. That's a substantive ontological claim, not a grammatical trick.

3. Regarding "the apple as it shows up for me just is a mental phenomenon"

This is precisely the move I keep challenging and you keep reasserting. You say the apple-as-it-shows-up-for-me "just is a mental phenomenon caused by looking at the apple." But that identification is not self-evident — it's the indirect realist thesis stated as though it were an uncontroversial gloss. I'm saying that the apple-as-it-shows-up-for-me is the apple under a perceptual profile, not a numerically distinct mental entity that resembles or represents the apple. When I see the apple from the left side, what I see is the apple — its left-side profile. When I walk around and see it from the right, I see the same apple under a different profile. At no point do I need to posit an inner object that mediates between me and the apple.

You'll respond: "But after the apple is disintegrated, the 'profile' persists — so it can't be of the apple." And I've already addressed this. The perceptual act retains its intentional character — its directedness toward the apple — but it is no longer fulfilled. The profile is now empty in the sense that what it presents is no longer there. That's perceptual failure, not evidence that the profile was always a self-standing mental entity.

============

So the question back to you is: what is your positive reason for identifying the appearance with a mental particular, other than the assumption that if perception can fail, appearances must be inner objects? Because the destroyed-apple case doesn't establish that identification — it only establishes fallibility, which my view already accommodates.

Is there a difference between these two claims? — Michael

Yes, there is a difference, and it's important.

(1) is a claim about the intentional structure of the perceptual act: what the act is directed toward, what it presents-as. At t1, my perceptual consciousness still has the character of presenting an apple at a certain location. The act intends the apple (as it was at t0). This is a phenomenological description of the act's directedness.

(2) is a claim about perceptual success — that I am in genuine epistemic contact with something that exists. And I agree with you: (2) is false during the second interval. I do not have successful perception of the apple at t1, because the apple no longer exists.

But here's the crucial point: I don't need (2) to be true in order to be a direct realist. Direct realism is the thesis that when perception succeeds, it is the distal object itself — not a mental intermediary — that is the object of awareness. It is not the thesis that perception always succeeds, or that it cannot present-as-there something that isn't there.

The distinction between (1) and (2) maps onto a familiar intentionality point: I can think about Sherlock Holmes without Sherlock Holmes existing. That doesn't mean my thought is "really" about an inner mental item from which I infer Holmes. It means the intentional act is directed toward Holmes and is unfulfilled — there's nothing in the world that satisfies it. Likewise, at t1 my perceptual act intends the apple and is unfulfilled. What it doesn't do is redirect onto a quale that serves as a proxy for the apple.

So your argument works against naïve realism, which holds that perception is always successfully world-involving. It doesn't work against the view I'm defending, which distinguishes the directedness of the act from the existence of its fulfilling object.

Which part do you reject? Colours and shapes as qualia or that I continue to believe that there is an intact red apple 10m in front of me because I continue to see an intact red apple 10m in front of me? — Michael

What I reject is the move from "the sensory character persists" to "therefore what I was aware of all along were qualia, and the apple was only ever inferred."

Let me take your two options in turn.

(1) Colours and shapes as qualia. I reject this characterization as the baseline description of what's going on. You're treating it as obvious that when I see a red apple, what I'm really aware of are inner qualitative items that happen to be red and round. But that redescription is precisely what's at issue. On my view, in the first interval, the redness and roundness I'm aware of are properties of the apple as it shows up for me from this vantage point. They are appearances of the apple, not freestanding inner objects that I then project outward. This is what I mean by distinguishing the object-as-intended from the object tout court: the apple-as-seen-from-here is not a second entity (a quale) but the apple itself given under a particular profile.

(2) That you continue to believe there's an apple because you continue to see one. I don't reject that description — I just reject your analysis of it. Yes, during the second interval, my experience retains the character of "seeing a red apple 10m away," and yes, I form the (false) judgment that the apple is still there. But what this shows is that perceptual consciousness has an intentional structure that can be empty in the sense of lacking fulfillment by a presently existing object — it intends an object that is no longer there to fulfill it. It does not show that what I'm aware of in both intervals is a quale from which I infer the apple.

The difference matters because your picture requires a general ontological claim: that in every case of perception, the immediate objects are inner items. My picture requires only that perception is an intentional act that is normally fulfilled by its object and sometimes isn't. The disintegrated-apple case is a case of unfulfilled intention — analogous to a thought about a nonexistent object — not evidence that the object was never part of the perceptual situation in the first place.

So to answer your fork directly: I reject the inference step, and I reject the redescription of appearances as qualia. What I accept is that experience can persist when its object doesn't, and that this makes perception fallible. Fallibility is not indirect realism.

BMOs are not objects in the everyday sense, so I don't think objecthood is the appropriate condition. Rather, I think the question is whether the BMO satisfies the requirements of an epistemic intermediary between the subject and object. — hypericin

Fair enough—but if the BMO is not an object of awareness in any ordinary sense, then I don’t see in what sense it is an epistemic intermediary rather than merely a causal implementation. “Epistemic intermediary” suggests something like: that which provides the subject’s evidence as such. But that is exactly what is at issue.

We still see the subject, because the photograph discloses the subject, and there is an appropriate causal connection between subject and photograph. — hypericin

I agree that mediation does not imply “we only see the intermediary.” But the photograph analogy is still misleading because a photograph is itself an inspectable object that can become the intentional terminus (we can notice glare, cropping, pixelation, etc.). In perception we do not encounter an “image” in that way. We encounter one world-directed presentation. So positing a BMO as an epistemic intermediary is not phenomenologically innocent—it adds a second object that is not given as such.

Exactly, phenomenologically we encounter one object. This is the illusion IR aims to dispel. — hypericin

But notice what you’ve done here: you’re now committed to the claim that phenomenology is systematically misleading about its own intentional structure. That’s not impossible, but it’s a much stronger thesis than “we sometimes misperceive,” and it’s not a neutral starting point either.

More importantly: you treat the “one object appears” datum as forcing a choice between DO and BMO. But there is a third option you keep overlooking: the bearer of phenomenal character is not an object at all, but the perceptual act/episode.

“Redness-as-seen” can be a property of seeing, not a property of an inner object. That dissolves the alleged contradiction without requiring a BMO.

P3: Distal objects do not support qualitative features like redness — hypericin

P3 is doing all the work, but it’s not a phenomenological datum. It’s a metaphysical thesis. If you grant P3, IR follows. But that just means the argument is question-begging: it builds the conclusion into the premises by stripping DOs of sensible qualities in advance.

A direct realist can deny P3 in several ways without saying “redness is microphysical”: e.g., redness is dispositional/relational, or a way the apple manifests itself under normal conditions. None of that forces the postulation of an epistemic intermediary object.

Phenomenologically, they are properties of the object as seen. The object as seen, the BMO, is object-like... — hypericin

But this again assumes what needs to be argued. “Object as seen” is not automatically “an inner object.” It can just mean: the distal object under a mode of presentation. You are sliding from “the object as experienced” to “there exists an additional object, distinct from the distal one, that is experienced.” That inference is precisely what I’m resisting.

Broadly, correspondence grounds truth, and failure of correspondence error... The subject does not live in a walled garden of BMOs. — hypericin

I’m not demanding that IR “solve normativity” in full generality. But I do think IR inherits a structural difficulty: if the BMO is the immediate object of awareness, then the DO becomes something like a theoretical cause posited behind experience. In that case, “correspondence” risks becoming something asserted from the outside rather than something intelligible from within the first-person epistemic situation.

You say we can establish correspondence because DO and BMO are causally connected—but causal connection is not yet epistemic access. The normative question is not “how do I get from an inner item to an outer item?” but “how does my experience come with conditions of correctness at all?” On my view, the perceptual act is already world-directed in its intentionality, so normativity is a question about the success-conditions of an act that is constitutively oriented toward the world. On your view, normativity looks more like a bridge between two ontologically distinct items (BMO and DO), and it’s that bridge that remains obscure.

But this just sounds like the standard IR picture... — hypericin

It only sounds like IR if one assumes that “experience” is itself an object (a BMO) rather than a conscious act with a certain phenomenal character. My whole point is that the mediation here is in the operations (experiencing, understanding, judging), not in an intermediary object.

So then does DR entail a commitment to eternalism? — hypericin

No. “Seeing a past state of affairs” doesn’t require eternalism any more than memory or astronomy requires eternalism. All it requires is that the past was real and causally efficacious. Saying “the intentional object is the apple-at-t0” is not time travel; it’s just temporal indexing.

And note: IR has the exact same temporal situation. The BMO is also causally generated by the apple-at-t0, not by the apple-at-t1. So temporal lag cannot be a differential argument for IR over DR—it affects both views equally.

hallucination and veridical perception are fundamentally different process... — hypericin

Here I think you’re assuming a controversial principle: that if two experiences are introspectively indistinguishable, they must share the same intentional object or structure. But that doesn’t follow. Two acts can be phenomenally identical while differing in their fulfillment conditions—just as a forged key can feel identical to a real key while failing to open the door. Phenomenology alone does not settle whether the act is fulfilled by the world or empty.

So yes: hallucination and veridical perception can be phenomenally indistinguishable while still differing in whether they are world-fulfilled. That isn’t “bending over backwards”; it’s simply recognizing that phenomenology underdetermines ontology.

=========

Finally, I don’t deny that “the brain models the world” in the subpersonal, cognitive-scientific sense. But that’s a mechanistic explanatory posit. The philosophical question is whether such modeling constitutes the intentional object of awareness at the personal level. The inference from “there are subpersonal models” to “what I am directly aware of is a modeled object” is not forced, and I don’t think your argument establishes it without smuggling IR into P3 at the outset.

I don't understand what this means, or how it relates to what I am saying or to indirect realism — Michael

As far as I can tell, you are saying that during the second interval you take the shapes/colours/etc. to be properties of qualia, and then you infer the the existence of the apple from them. That's exactly the step I’m rejecting.

If the object perceived is not the distal object, and it is not an inner intermediary, then what is it? — hypericin

Let’s quickly disambiguate the word “perception.” At minimum we need to distinguish (i) the sensory episode (experience), (ii) the act of grasping/identifying what is going on (understanding), and (iii) the commitment that something is the case (judgment).

In the apple scenario, the content of experience and understanding can remain continuous even after the apple disintegrates, because the light still carries information from the earlier state of the world. In that sense, the intentional object is the distal apple as it existed at the time the light was emitted (the apple-at-t0, not the apple-at-t1).

If the observer is unaware of the time lag and judges “there is an apple over there right now,” then that judgment is false, because there is no longer any distal object that satisfies it.

On this analysis, nothing requires treating the intentional object as an internal intermediary.

But I wonder if it justifies the criticisms against naturalism on the basis of intelligibility. — Moliere

I think this is exactly the right question. And I agree: the point we’ve converged on (truth not collapsing into warrant) doesn’t automatically refute “naturalism” if by naturalism we mean something like methodological commitment to the sciences.

Where it arguably becomes a problem is for a stronger naturalism—one that treats reality as exhaustively describable in the idiom of efficient causation, and treats normativity/intentionality as reducible to that idiom. If what-is-the-case is not constituted by our justificatory norms, then truth is a genuine constraint that isn’t identical with any social practice. But it’s also not obviously the sort of thing that can be captured in purely causal vocabulary.

The reason that normativity purportedly can't be grounded in efficient causality is that causal explanation and normative status come apart. An efficient-causal story can tell us why a belief arose (neural mechanisms, evolutionary pressures, reinforcement histories, etc.), but none of that by itself tells us whether the belief is true, false, valid, invalid, justified, or unjustified. Two people could arrive at beliefs through the same kinds of causal pathways and yet one be right and the other wrong depending on how things actually are. So the causal story underdetermines the normative story. That’s why the worry isn’t that naturalism can’t describe cognition, but that it struggles to account for the binding “ought” of truth and correctness using only the “is” of causal sequence.

So the worry isn’t “science can’t work,” but that the intelligibility presupposed by science (truth, validity, correctness) can’t be ontologically grounded in a picture of the world as fundamentally non-normative. That’s where Hart thinks naturalism quietly leans on what it can’t fully account for.

In other words: the critique isn’t of naturalism as method, but of naturalism as a total metaphysics. The issue isn’t whether naturalism can describe how we reason, but whether it can make sense of why reason is answerable to truth at all.

Yep. And as you stated in a previous reply, the temptation to reify experience into an intermediary seems symptomatic of a deeply ingrained grammatical habit.

Yes, exactly! The causal latency introduces a temporal offset. If the subject is unaware of the offset, their judgment can be mistaken, but that doesn’t show the object perceived is an inner intermediary. In my book, it shows only that perceptual knowledge is fallible and requires correct interpretation of causal conditions.

I agree that during the second interval I will judge that the apple is still there, and that this judgment will be false. But it doesn’t follow that the perceptual episode itself is an inference from an inner object.

What the apple case shows is simply that perceptual consciousness can retain the same sensory character even when its fulfillment condition fails. That is perfectly compatible with the apple having been the object of perception in the first interval and no longer being so in the second.

Your conclusion follows only if we assume from the outset that perception is always “experience + inference to a distal cause.” But that is precisely the indirect realist picture in dispute. On my view, the inference/judgment is a further act that can be correct or incorrect, whereas perception itself is world-directed and can succeed or fail in being fulfilled by what is there.

So the scenario establishes fallibility, not that the apple is always only inferred. Otherwise every case of perceptual error would prove that perception is never direct, which seems like an obvious non sequitur.

I think we’re actually quite close on several points. I agree there’s no “view from nowhere” where we can measure our theories against reality as such, and I also agree that many scientific concepts (voltage is a good example) are genuine inventions that open up new lines of inquiry rather than simply “reading off” ready-made categories from nature.

But I’m not convinced that this makes explanatory scope, unification, etc. merely “aesthetic.” They look more like epistemic virtues that have proven themselves precisely because reality pushes back: ad hoc theories tend to break under novel testing, while unifying theories tend to be more counterfactually robust. So while we can’t directly compare a theory to “Being,” we can still distinguish better and worse ways of being answerable to constraint.

On voltage: I agree we invented the concept and the measurement practices, but it seems hard to deny that electrical potential differences existed long before we conceptualized them. That is, the conceptual scheme is constructed, but what it latches onto is not.

And on your last point: I’m sympathetic to the modesty of “some statements are true,” but I’m not sure we can cash out even that minimal claim without implicitly presupposing that what makes a statement true is not constituted by our norms of justification. Otherwise “true” collapses into “warranted by our best lights,” which reintroduces the very distinction we’ve been debating.