This what-is-the-case then becomes something like a thing-in-itself. — Moliere

I agree that technological “affordances” matter, and I don’t mean to deny the Kuhnian point that theory change involves sociology, pedagogy, and generational uptake as much as brute confrontation with data. And certainly Ptolemy’s system was impressively successful at saving the appearances within the observational constraints of the time.

But I’m not sure that supports the stronger claim that there’s “no measure” of tracking what is the case better. Even if our access is historically conditioned, we still distinguish theories by explanatory scope, unification, counterfactual robustness, and coherence with independent lines of evidence. Ptolemy and Copernicus aren’t merely alternative descriptions on a par; they make incompatible claims about the Earth’s motion, and later developments (Kepler/Newton, and eventually spaceflight) strongly vindicate one over the other.

So I’m happy to grant that what counts as warranted is interest- and instrument-relative, but the very intelligibility of calling geocentrism “oblivious” seems to presuppose that reality itself was not as the Ptolemaic picture described it—even if no one at the time had the epistemic means to establish that. That doesn’t posit a Kantian "thing-in-itself"; it’s just the minimal realist point that what-is-the-case is not exhausted by what we can currently demonstrate.

Yes—this is the key pressure point. A naturalist can of course say “we trust our models because they keep working,” but that’s a pragmatic entitlement, not yet a rational vindication. The deeper question is why predictive success should be taken as evidence of truth or real structure rather than merely a contingent fit between our cognitive habits and the environment.

If intelligibility is not intrinsic to reality, then “success” can be explained causally, but it becomes unclear what licenses the further inference to correctness or truth. And that’s exactly where normativity enters.

I think your reply is clarifying, and I agree that we’re getting down to the core of the disagreement.

First, I’m not lumping refraction through the lens with what we are conscious of. Of course we are conscious of phenomenal character (color, sound, etc.) in a way we are not conscious of lens refraction. The question is whether being conscious of phenomenal character entails being conscious of a brain-modeled object as an object.

I don’t think it does. The phenomenal character is a feature of the act’s presentation of its object; it does not follow that it is itself an object of awareness with its own identity conditions.

Your photograph analogy is helpful, but I think it quietly shifts the issue. A photograph is itself a public object that can be inspected, re-identified, and treated as the intentional terminus of an act. But the “BMO” you’re positing is not something we can inspect in that way. If we were literally aware of BMOs as objects, then we should be able to distinguish (even in principle) “what the BMO is like” from “what the distal object is like.” But phenomenologically we don’t encounter two objects—an inner one and an outer one—we encounter one object as appearing.

On normativity: I don’t think “correspondence between BMO and DO” is yet an explanation. It presupposes the very normative notions at issue: accuracy, reference, aboutness, and correctness conditions. Saying “normativity is correspondence” is like saying “truth is correspondence”: it redescribes the target rather than explaining how such correspondence is possible or intelligible for a subject.

Moreover, IR doesn’t actually avoid the “error cases” problem—it relocates it. In IR the error is still an error about the DO, and the question remains: how does a subject ever get beyond the BMO to determine whether correspondence obtains? If you say “further BMOs,” you get regress; if you say “inference,” you’ve invoked normativity again.

So yes, I am arguing that DR gives a more satisfying account of normativity—not because it magically eliminates skepticism, but because it treats perceptual normativity as internal to world-directed experience itself, rather than as a relation between an inner object and an outer object that must somehow be bridged.

DR has to explain misperception. But IR has to explain something deeper: how any DO-directed normativity can arise at all if awareness terminates in a BMO. That’s the step I still don’t see made coherent.

I'm not saying that the causal story is sufficient to cash out intentionality and epistemic normativity. — Michael

My understanding is that you think the causal/scientific story undercuts naïve realism, and that this is enough to settle the question of whether distal objects are the direct objects of perception.

But it seems to me you’re using “indirect realism” in a purely negative sense: i.e. as simply the rejection of naïve realism. If that’s the definition, then of course anyone who rejects naïve realism is an “indirect realist” by stipulation.

My point is that this doesn’t amount to a positive account of perception. Traditionally, the indirect realist framework is not merely the denial of naïve realism, but a substantive picture on which what is directly given are inner items (sense-data/representations/qualia) and distal objects are known only indirectly by inference. That is exactly what I reject.

So the disagreement isn’t over whether naïve realism is false; it’s whether rejecting naïve realism commits us to the kind of intermediary ontology required by a positive account of indirect realism.

That helps, yes — and I agree that in metaphysics/epistemology we’re often clarifying the conceptual norms governing our discourse rather than straightforwardly “describing objects”.

For me, the Ptolemaic case nicely illustrates the asymmetry I’m trying to get at. They were warranted given their evidence and conceptual resources, and they certainly made many true claims and successful predictions. But the reason we call the geocentric framing “oblivious” rather than merely “a different discourse” is precisely that it failed to track what was actually the case. The discourse ultimately shifted because reality didn’t cooperate with it.

So I’m happy to grant the “both/and” descriptively — different discourse and genuine error — but the notion of genuine error seems to require that “what-is-the-case” is not itself fixed by our discursive norms, even if our access to it is always mediated by them.

In other words, we are forced to revise discourse to accommodate what-is-the-case, whereas what-is-the-case refuses to be forced into inadequate conceptual schemes.

I see three responses: there is no such thing as BMOs. BMOs are the same as DOs. BMOs are also insufficiently object like to serve as intermediary. None of these seem appealing. Do you agree with one or more, and/or is there a fourth response I'm missing? — hypericin

The fourth option is that BMOs belong to the causal implementation of intentionality rather than being the objects of intentionality. They enable us to see, but they are not what is seen.

For me, it comes down to whether normativity is reducible to causation. I don’t think it is. The causal/functional story that explains how perception is possible underdetermines the normative question of what perception is of. Otherwise we’d be forced to say that we see neural models (or retinal stimulations), rather than the world those processes disclose. To me, that seems like a clear category mistake.

I think your last paragraph is exactly right: warrant concerns justification, whereas truth concerns what is the case. I’m completely on board with that distinction.

I'm less sure about the suggestion that we’re only ever “talking about how we talk about” rather than referring to the thing itself. I agree that our interests determine which aspect of reality we’re talking about (we always carve out a facet, an affordance, a temporal slice, etc.). But that selectivity doesn’t seem to imply (on its own) that truth is merely an intra-discursive status rather than a genuine answerability to what is.

In fact, the possibility you mention — that a community can satisfy its own norms while being oblivious to something outside those norms — seems to presuppose precisely the asymmetry I’m pointing to: that what is warranted-for-us can fail to coincide with what is actually the case. If “truth” isn’t ultimately a constraint beyond our practices, in what sense is the community oblivious rather than simply operating within a different discourse?

I grant the sociological point that we often revise both directions — what gets treated as “warranted” shifts, and what gets treated as “the case” shifts as inquiry unfolds. And of course authority and consensus play a major role in how communities stabilize belief.

That said, the asymmetry I have in mind isn’t about which side has more rhetorical or institutional weight in a given historical moment. It’s about the normative status of truth itself: even if “important people” determine what counts as warranted, they don’t thereby determine what is actually the case — which is precisely what it means to say that communities (and authorities) can be mistaken.

If we collapse the normative distinction between warrant and truth, mustn't we relinquish the possibility of an entire community being wrong, even while fully satisfying its own norms of justification?

to use an idea from fdrake "warranted-for-us" and "actually-the-case" are mutually determinative of one another -- you don't get one without the other, they mutually constitute one another as a contrast, that sort of thing.

So the norms of correction are either neither internal/external or both/and external/internal. Which in turn would mean that we can't sneak in an "well, ultimately it's being" or "well, ultimately it's us" — Moliere

I see what you mean, but to my mind the function of “actually-the-case” is intrinsically asymmetric in the sense that it can overturn what is warranted-for-us, whereas the opposite does not hold. This asymmetry is precisely what underwrites the possibility of error. We revise what is warranted in light of what is the case, not vice versa.

Thoughts?

There might be a place here for a discussion of pedagogic method. — Banno

Perhaps—but I suspect that in this context it would come off as condescension rather than sincerity. These “picture change” issues are hard to address in a debate format without sounding like one is talking down.

I'm curious: how would you cash out the distinction between "warranted-for-us" and "actually-the-case" if the norms of correction are understood as entirely internal to practice?

“Phenomenal character” isn’t a thing over and above our perceptual and behavioural capacities, but a mode of description. We abstract from how someone sees, reacts, discriminates, reports, and then pretend the abstraction names an inner object. That’s exactly the move Wittgenstein warns against: turning an adjective or an adverbial construction into a noun and then asking what sort of thing the noun refers to. — Banno

Yes—this is exactly my worry. Once we treat “phenomenal character” as a constituent or item in an inner realm, we’ve already built the indirect realist ontology into the starting point. The grammar invites reification.

Couldn't it be the case that norms are always historically bound -- situated, not trans-communal, etc. -- and yet successfully refers, describes, and so forth? I.e. one could make true statements? — Moliere

Yes, I agree that norms can be historically situated and yet we can still make true statements.

My point is about what makes that success intelligible. If norms are wholly internal to a community, then “true” collapses into “licensed by current communal standards,” and any notion of correction becomes hard to distinguish from mere change in consensus. We could still shift norms, but we wouldn’t have a basis for saying we were previously mistaken rather than merely operating under different standards.

Put differently: the very idea of “successful reference” seems to presuppose a distinction between what is warranted-for-us and what is actually-the-case, because success and failure aren’t defined by communal uptake alone. That’s the sense in which inquiry appears answerable to something beyond consensus, even if it is always socially mediated in practice.

So other than me calling this "indirect" perception and you calling this "direct" perception, what exactly are we disagreeing about? — Michael

It seems we disagree over whether the causal story is sufficient to cash out intentionality and epistemic normativity sufficient for an adequate theory of perception—i.e. perception as world-directed and answerable to correctness/error.

I hope you haven't conceded this - that we never see apples, or taste oysters, or hear birdsong. — Banno

No worries—I’m not conceding that we don’t see apples. Personally, I reject the whole “constituents of experience” framing. From my perspective this framing results in an illicit reification of "experience". Apples are what we see; phenomenal character is how they are given. Treating phenomenal character as an intermediary object is exactly the indirect realist move I’m resisting.

Yes—exactly. If intelligibility is reduced to pragmatic usefulness, then “understanding” collapses into successful prediction and control. But then the naturalist has given up the stronger claim that our beliefs are answerable to how reality is in itself, rather than merely to what works for organisms like us.

In that case, it’s not that science becomes false, but that its truth-claims are quietly reinterpreted as instruments. And once that slide happens, it becomes unclear what grounds the normativity of truth and correctness rather than just adaptive success.

I'd say statements are normatively answerable to truth because our communities are set up in a manner such that we can demonstrate "true" or "false". Norms come from social groups acting together rather than from being.

Though here "the act of knowing" isn't as much a psychic as a social act -- a statement made to a body of fellow thinkers, and not a proposition believed by a given subject of the external world. — Moliere

I agree that norms of assertion and justification are socially articulated, and that standards of evidence and demonstration are embedded in communal practices. But while social practices can explain how we enforce norms (what counts as warranted, what gets sanctioned, what gets treated as knowledge), they don’t yet explain why those norms are (in principle) answerable to something beyond communal consensus. I’m happy to grant that epistemic norms are socially mediated — but that mediation itself seems to presuppose an independent constraint: the difference between what is justified-for-us and what is actually the case. Otherwise it becomes hard to make sense of inquiry as genuinely corrigible rather than merely internally self-stabilizing.

By them causally affecting our bodies, or causally affecting energies that causally affect our bodies, and then our bodies causally affecting our minds.

Isn't this exactly what you think to? You just call this "direct perception" and I call this "indirect perception". — Michael

I think this is the crux of our disagreement.

I agree with the causal story. But that story is not yet an account of knowledge. It tells us how experiences are produced, not how they are about distal objects or how they can be correct or incorrect.

If your “positive account” is just causal mediation, then I would argue you will be forced to distinguish veridical perception from systematic illusion by appealing to further causal facts. But epistemic correctness cannot be reduced to causal etiology.

So no, this is not merely a terminological dispute. The question is whether causal relations alone are sufficient to ground intentionality and normativity. I don’t think they are.

You (from my perspective) strip the mental object of its object like characteristics, retaining only bare phenomenality, and inappropriately assign those objective characteristics to the distal object itself. — hypericin

I just want to clarify that I am not assuming that phenomenal qualities belong to the distal object. For instance, I wouldn't say that the redness belongs to the distal apple. My claim is that, in the case of perception, they are the manner in which the distal object is presented to us. They are presented as-of the distal object, but whether they inhere in the distal object is a further metaphysical question, distinct from the phenomenological point at issue here.

I (from your perspective) inappropriately reify phenomenal qualities, which are relations to distal objects, not objects in themselves, into a pseudo object. — hypericin

Yes, more-or-less.

Indirect realism:
Subject -----> mental object (with phenomenal qualities) ------> distal object

Direct realism:
Subject ---- (phenomenal qualities) ----> distal object

Do you agree with this picture? — hypericin

If I were to draw it, I'd put it like this:

IR:
Subject → object of awareness (mental item) → distal object

DR:
Subject → distal object (given-as / appearing-as)

The contested step, for me, is precisely the move from “appearing-as” to a distinct “object of awareness” with object-like characteristics.

And of course this is meant to characterize perception specifically. I agree that other intentional acts (memory, imagination, etc.) do not require a distal object in the same way.

The same thing that enables the people with bionic eyes to do this? Unless you can point out exactly what the problem is I don't know how I can answer the question? — Michael

I am referring to the problem of perception. I'm simply asking for your positive account of how people come into possession of knowledge of distal objects.

You're reading something into indirect realism that I just don't understand. The people wearing the visors all have indirect perception of the wider world but can still do science just as well as we can. — Michael

On your view, how is this possible? What enables these people to get any epistemic purchase on distal objects such that their claims about such objects can be correct or incorrect?

No worries.

Perception and evidence do not come in a single harmonious system. Different perceptions can conflict, bits of evidence can point to different conclusions. We have to sort through them and make decisions. Sometimes we choose one perception or piece of evidence over another. Sometimes we reject our theories and develop new ways to interpret perceptions. That's what "world-directed" and normatively answerable to reality mean. — Ludwig V

I don't deny any of this.

Science doesn't require that we have direct perception of atoms for us to have knowledge of atoms. — Michael

No, but it's hard to understand how knowledge of atoms can get off the ground unless perception can underwrite the correctness of the practices through which that knowledge is obtained.

Admittedly I still don't quite understand what (5) is supposed to mean — Michael

Basically (5) is just another way of saying that if perception were not capable of providing knowledge of distal objects and their properties then the whole notion of being correct or incorrect about such objects (whether through science or any other practice) becomes unintelligible. So the acceptance of (5) would seem to be at odds with any interpretation of (1) - (4) that would rule out the ability of perception to provide us with knowledge of distal objects and their properties.

So the question is: in your framework, what would the acceptance of (5) really amount to given that your interpretation of (1) - (4) apparently rules it out from the start?

We've been around the block a few times now in this discussion, so I'd like to switch gears for a moment. You've repeatedly appealed to science as providing evidence that the world is very different from how it appears to us. My question is: if all empirical evidence ultimately comes through perception (including scientific observation and instrument readings), in what sense can science correct perception without presupposing that perception is already world-directed and normatively answerable to reality?

I don't think it's necessarily quietism or eliminativism; rather it's only trying to answer a simpler question, and that is: what are the constituents of first-person phenomenal experience? — Michael

Fair enough—if the only question you’re trying to answer is “what are the constituents of first-person phenomenal experience?”, then I agree that you can bracket normativity, objecthood, and error as further issues.

But then we should be clear that this is no longer (or not yet) a theory of perception in the philosophically relevant sense. It’s a theory of phenomenal constituency.

The traditional dispute about realism in perception is not exhausted by what constitutes experience, but by how perceptual experience is of mind-independent objects at all, how it can succeed or fail, and what grounds the distinction between veridical perception and illusion/hallucination.

My point is that phenomenal constituency underdetermines all of that. So even if you settle the “constituents” question, you haven’t yet settled whether perception is world-directed or mediated by inner objects. You’ve only described what experience contains (if anything), not what it is answerable to.

I think this is a fair pushback, and I agree that my quick framing risks sounding like a Cartesian “mind vs world” split. I’m sympathetic to the Merleau-Ponty point that we don’t stand outside reality as spectators, and that meaning is disclosed in lived engagement rather than deposited on one side or the other.

That said, I am hesitant to adopt that framing in its entirety. Even if intelligibility “comes to light” only in the act of knowing, we still need an account of why that disclosure is normatively answerable to truth—i.e. why it can be correct or incorrect rather than merely an internally coherent projection. If the possibility of error is to be taken seriously, then disclosure must be constrained by what is the case. This seems to require that reality itself be intelligible in more than a merely relational sense.

So I’m happy to grant the subject–world entanglement, but I don’t think it removes the metaphysical question of whether intelligibility is intrinsic to being or merely an artifact of our mode of access.

I suspect that what’s at stake here is, at least in relation to Wittgenstein, is to what extent we treat understanding and reason in terms of adequation and conformity vs creation, enaction and becoming. — Joshs

Yes, I agree it’s probably the underlying axis. For my part I would tend to side more with . I wouldn't want to deny creation, enaction, or becoming, but my worry is that if we say “normativity is creatively re-established in each use,” we risk collapsing into “norms are whatever we now make them,” which would seem to undercut the possibility of error and the authority of correction.

So no, the chess analogy isn’t claiming rational discourse is literally a game. It’s forcing a distinction you keep trying to blur, viz. that clarifying the conditions of intelligibility isn't the same thing as arguing for a claim within those conditions or parameters. You can have meta-level norms without turning bedrock conditions into ordinary premises. And pretending otherwise is exactly how the issue of global doubt and endless “improvement” talk becomes performative rather than really answerable. — Sam26

While I can't speak for @J, I can say that it hasn't been my intention to collapse everything into one level. I take it that the distinction between levels has been explicitly granted, and that we're now disputing whether the meta-level is inside or outside of rational normativity as such. For me, it's not about arguing for system-closure, or for some Archimedean stand-point outside of inquiry. It's about acknowledging that reason can come to understand the conditions of its own operation, and that to do so is itself a rational achievement.

Nicely put. I agree there’s an additional pressure point here: intelligibility isn’t a free-floating property—it’s conceptually bound up with the possibility of intellect. If reality is intelligible in itself (not merely interpretable by us), then it must at least be the kind of reality that is proportionate to understanding.

That said, I’d want to phrase the naturalist option a bit more carefully: naturalists don’t usually deny intelligibility outright, but they tend to treat it as instrumental or model-relative rather than intrinsic to being. The real question is whether intelligibility is ontological (a feature of reality) or merely epistemic/pragmatic (a feature of our coping strategies). If it’s only the latter, it becomes hard to see how explanation retains genuine truth-normativity rather than collapsing into sophisticated prediction.

What you are directed at is phenomenal experience unfolding in time. The rhythm, pitch, and structure are features of the phenomena, not a distal object. There are numerous candidates for distal object: speakers, player, band/creator, cd/lp/mp3 file. All of these are components of our causal understanding of the phenomena, but none of them somehow supersede the phenomena. — hypericin

I completely agree that when we turn our attention to the phenomenal quality of the experience, the distal-object-qua-causal-source is bracketed to the background. But I don’t think this eliminates the object-directedness of experience as such, of which more below.

Not necessarily. I can imagine the sound of chiming, without imagining any specific distal object (wind chime, door bell, phone, mp3 clip) realizing it. I can imagine the phenomenal experience of redness, and I "see" red in my minds eye, not attached to any object at all. — hypericin

I likewise agree that when we imagine a chiming sound or a patch of redness, these can be imagined as “unattached” to any distal object in the environment.

What does this mean, "arise from experience itself". When I hear a chime, I might wonder, what is making the noise. But by no means is this wonderment somehow embedded within the phenomenal experience of chiming itself. It is something extra: given this experience, this chiming, I am led to wonder, "what made it"? — hypericin

Agreed. The explicit question “what is it?” is not embedded in phenomenal character itself, but is a further moment in the overall structure of perception.

But what positive arguments do you have that the phenomenal is derivative? — hypericin

First, I want to make it clear that I’m not claiming that phenomenal experience is derivative in the sense of being unreal, reflectively constructed, or temporally distinct from the act of perception. I fully acknowledge that phenomenal qualities are features of first-order perceptual episodes. What I deny is only that they are first-order with regard to their epistemic or intentional role.

In my view, perception is an intrinsically normative and intentional act. It is characterized by a “directedness” or “aboutness” that purports to present its object as thus-and-so, in a way that is answerable to correction. Perception is something that can be mistaken, revised, and confirmed or disconfirmed, so any theory that purports to explain perception must not render these characteristics unintelligible.

By contrast, phenomenal qualities as such (redness-as-seen, chiming-as-heard, pungency-as-smelled) are not themselves propositional or truth-apt. They do not purport, on their own, to settle what is the case. Whereas perceptual objects exhibit conditions of identity, persistence, and modality that are necessary to underwrite error and correction, phenomenal qualities, taken in abstraction, do not. So to treat phenomenal character as the intermediary object of direct perception is, I would argue, a category mistake.

This doesn’t mean that phenomenal qualities cannot be explicitly thematized within consciousness. We can turn our attention to them specifically, and even make claims about them. When we say “the redness of that apple is very intense,” we are making a claim about the redness itself, but doing this doesn’t alter the adjectival role that redness played in the original perceptual episode.

Similarly, when we imagine a red-patch in abstraction from any particular distal object, the redness-as-such is not the object of imagination. Rather, the redness is presented as-of something—in this case, a bounded phenomenal field (a “patch”) with minimal criteria of identity and persistence. It is the patch-of-red that is the intentional object, not the pure phenomenal quality of redness in isolation.

So phenomenal qualities cannot function as objects standing between subject and world because they do not exhibit the characteristics required to play that epistemic role. Phenomenal qualities are the manner in which an object—actual, imagined, abstract, or indeterminate—is given. Shifts in attention, aesthetic focus, or meditative bracketing only modify the intentional object; but they do not abolish the "object-directedness" of intentionality or invert the priority of the object within intentionality itself.

Yes, I think this gets exactly to the heart of the matter, and it helps show why the game analogy is doing double duty in a way that may ultimately mislead.

As you say, the question *“Could chess be improved?”* is not incoherent, even though it is not a question that can be answered by making better moves under the existing rules. It invokes criteria—playability, depth, elegance, enjoyment—that are not internal to the rules of chess as such. Those criteria are not arbitrary, but neither are they codified by the game itself. They arise from a broader rational perspective on what a game is for and what makes it successful as a game.

That’s the sense in which I think the analogy breaks down when it is applied to inquiry. Empirical inquiry clearly functions like a game in some respects: it has rules, stopping points, standards of correction, and conditions under which “this counts as a mistake” or “that counts as evidence.” But rational inquiry *as such* seems to include the capacity to step back and ask whether those rules and stopping points are doing the job they are supposed to do—namely, making judgment, error, and correction intelligible in the first place.

So the issue isn’t whether justification must stop somewhere—we all agree that it must. The issue is whether asking *why* it stops where it does, or whether it could stop differently under changed conditions, is still part of rational inquiry or already a category mistake. The chess analogy suggests the latter; the phenomenon of evaluating and even revising games suggests the former.

That’s why I’m inclined to say that empirical justificatory practice is a *subset* of rational inquiry, not identical with it. Rational inquiry includes both playing the game well and understanding what makes the game playable, meaningful, or worth playing at all. If that’s right, then asking whether the “rules” of inquiry could be improved or reconfigured isn’t asking for reasons for being reasonable; it’s exercising reason at a higher level of reflection.

At that point, I think we’ve identified a genuine philosophical fork rather than a confusion: whether rational practice just *is* the empirical game with its hinges, or whether the empirical game is one expression of a broader rational capacity that can also reflect on its own conditions. The chess analogy, by itself, can’t decide that question—and that’s exactly why your example is so helpful.

Premise 1: Naturalism explains everything in terms of physical causes and effects.
Premise 2: Physical causes and effects, by themselves, have no meaning or “aboutness.”
Premise 3: Human thoughts, beliefs, and concepts are intentional—they are about things and can be true or false.
Premise 4: Intentionality (aboutness, meaning, truth) cannot be reduced to or derived from purely physical processes.
Conclusion: Therefore, naturalism cannot fully explain intentionality; the intelligibility of thought points beyond purely naturalistic causes. — Tom Storm

Some further thoughts for your consideration:

I think this is a helpful way of isolating the issue, and you’re right that premise (4) is doing all the real work. One small critique I have, though, is that the way the argument is framed makes Hart sound like he’s offering a genetic or causal claim about whether intentionality can “arise” from physical processes. I don’t think that’s quite his target.

Hart’s point, as I read him, isn’t that natural processes couldn’t in principle produce intentional states, but that any attempt to explain reason, truth, or meaning already presupposes intelligibility and normativity. Scientific explanation itself depends on distinctions between true and false, valid and invalid, better and worse reasons. Those norms aren’t themselves causal properties, and so can’t coherently be treated as merely derivative features of otherwise non-intelligible processes.

So, on my reading of Hart, the pressure point isn’t really consciousness or even intentionality as a psychological phenomenon, but the status of normativity as such. The claim is that intelligibility has to belong to being itself, not merely to our ways of coping with it, otherwise explanation undermines the very standards it relies on.

—That’s a nice way of putting pressure on the issue, and I think it helps clarify what’s at stake.

From within a game, “better” is defined by the rules already in place (better play, fewer mistakes, more elegant strategies). But there is also a broader sense in which a game can be evaluated as a game: whether it is coherent, playable, learnable, or capable of sustaining meaningful distinctions like success and failure. That second kind of evaluation does not proceed by making another move under the existing rules; it reflects on the conditions that make any such rule-governed activity possible or worthwhile.

Translating this back to inquiry: empirical inquiry evaluates claims within an established framework of evidence and correction, while rational (or transcendental) inquiry evaluates the framework itself in terms of whether it can support judgment, error, and correction at all. The point of contention isn’t whether these evaluations use the same criteria—they clearly don’t—but whether the latter counts as part of rational inquiry as such or must be classified as merely explanatory and outside epistemic normativity altogether. That’s where the rational vs. empirical distinction really bites, and where reasonable disagreement can persist without anyone talking past anyone else.

So, it does not seem that phenomenal experience is intrinsically object directed. It is only so when it is specifically an environmental cue. But there are phenomenal experiences such as music and imaginations that are not environment cues. These latter seem phenomenal on their own, without pointing to an object. And so, if phenomenal experience is able to float free of an object, it cannot be a secondary derivative of an object directed perceptual event, as you want to say. — hypericin

I think this rests on an overly narrow notion of object-directedness. Bracketing interest in a distal cause does not amount to the absence of an object altogether. When I listen to music, I am still directed at something: sounds unfolding in time, with rhythm, pitch, and structure. Suspending concern with instruments or sources does not turn the experience into a free-floating phenomenal item.

Likewise, appealing to “brain tagging” doesn’t explain intentionality; it redescribes it at a subpersonal level. The question is not why organisms care about environmental cues, but why experiences are given as of something at all—why questions like “what is it?” arise from within experience itself.

Finally, imagination doesn’t show phenomenology without intentionality. Imagining is paradigmatically an experience as of something—just not something presently existing. In that case the object is "irreal", not absent altogether.

So I don’t see any case here of phenomenology genuinely floating free of object-directedness. What these examples show is that object-directedness can be attenuated, abstracted, or bracketed—not that it is optional or derivative. That is why I continue to think these cases presuppose, rather than undermine, an object-involving perceptual structure.

Why not? There is no relevant difference between the information carried by the light in the first ten seconds and the second ten seconds. The presence or absence of the apple when the light arrives is irrelevant. IMO. — Ludwig V

I don't deny that the information carried by the light remains continuous between the two intervals. I’m claiming that perceptual fulfillment is not exhausted by information carriage. In the first interval, the perceptual act is fulfilled because the apple exists at the time of perception; in the second, it is not, because the object no longer exists then. That difference is normative, not optical. Light can carry accurate information about what was the case, but veridical perception concerns what is the case when the act occurs. Conflating those is exactly what makes the object seem dispensable in the perceptual story.

Yes, as I have tried to explain several times, e.g. with the distinction between phenomenological direct realism and semantic direct realism. It is possible that perception is direct1 but not direct2, where "direct1" and "direct2" mean different things. — Michael

Yes, and I have likewise admitted several times that there are different senses of "direct" in play. My concern is not to deny that there are multiple senses in play, but to argue that any adequate theory of perception ought to explain normativity, error, and objecthood, and that refusal to address those issues looks less like a theory of perception and more like quietism or eliminativism.

Clearly something is happening during the second interval; I am having a visual experience with phenomenal character, described as "seeing a red apple 10m in front of me". If you don't want to say that qualia or sense data or mental phenomena are the "constituents" of this visual experience then I don't really understand what you think this visual experience is (are you an eliminative materialist?). — Michael

As I have explained previously, qualia do not meet the criteria required to play the role of the object of perception. This doesn’t mean they don’t exist; it means they are features of perceptual acts rather than entities that can ground correctness, error, or public objecthood. Treating them as objects simply relocates the problem rather than solving it.

You’re right to push on the consciousness point—I didn’t mean to suggest that evolutionary accounts of cognition or consciousness are settled. What I take to be the deeper issue (and I think this is where Hart is really operating) isn’t whether evolution can produce reliable or even intentional states, but whether it can account for normativity as such.

To my knowledge, Hart does not present his argument as a single, formal “anti-naturalism proof.” His case is cumulative, transcendental, and often embedded in polemics. Probably the clearest presentation of his reasoning can be found in the early chapters of "The Experience of God".

That said, Hart’s argument isn’t a knock-down proof that intentionality cannot arise via natural processes. I understand it to be a transcendental claim: any explanation that treats truth, validity, and correctness as derivative byproducts of non-normative processes already presupposes those norms in the act of explanation itself. Scientific explanation depends on truth-apt judgments, valid inference, and reasons that count as better or worse.

The conclusion Hart draws is not that science fails, but that intelligibility cannot be ontologically secondary or merely instrumental. It has to belong to reality itself in some fundamental way. That’s where the metaphysical move comes in.

Did you have Schelling in mind here, or is there another group of philosophers you can point us to who expound this post-critical position? — Joshs

I wasn't thinking primarily of Schelling. The position I'm gesturing at is a bit of an eclectic synthesis across a number of thinkers and traditions, focally centered on American (neo-)pragmatism (Peirce, Sellars, McDowell, Brandom), but drawing heavily on transcendental Thomism, phenomenology, contemporary Aristotelianism, and certain strands of post-Kantian realism.

The unifying thought, for me, is that intelligibility belongs to reality insofar as inquiry is normatively answerable to being, rather than being either metaphysically guaranteed in advance or constructed by historically contingent sense-making practices.

Hart is a theological Platonist retrieving classical participation, Schelling is a speculative post-Kantian rethinking intelligibility as dynamic and self-grounding. — Joshs

Agreed. And while I have sympathies with many of Hart's arguments against naturalism, I ultimately approach things from a different angle.