Object Recognition
It seems that we are aware of objects. My understanding of the neuroscientific and psychological view is, roughly, that visual (or whatever sensory input) enters the brain, is parsed and organized, and then recognition of an object results from this process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_recognition_(cognitive_science).
However, it is unclear where exactly, in the aforementioned process, recognition of an object qua object enters conscious awareness. In other words, starting with a manifold of input such as shapes, colors, etc., it is unclear how the brain ultimately recognizes something as a distinct object.
And yet we do seem to perceive distinct objects.
Note: The issue is not "how do we perceive what an object is?" Rather the issue is: "how do we perceive objects as such in the first place?" How is it that the world we perceive is understood in an objective way? Why is our world more like a world of objects, and less like an abstract painting?
I do not have an answer to the question I stated. What are your thoughts on the issue stated?
However, it is unclear where exactly, in the aforementioned process, recognition of an object qua object enters conscious awareness. In other words, starting with a manifold of input such as shapes, colors, etc., it is unclear how the brain ultimately recognizes something as a distinct object.
And yet we do seem to perceive distinct objects.
Note: The issue is not "how do we perceive what an object is?" Rather the issue is: "how do we perceive objects as such in the first place?" How is it that the world we perceive is understood in an objective way? Why is our world more like a world of objects, and less like an abstract painting?
I do not have an answer to the question I stated. What are your thoughts on the issue stated?
Comments (53)
I'd grant that we can comprehend non-objective matters like the good or justice, but our perception seems to be conditioned always by objects.
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/waymaker-psychology/chapter/gestalt-principles-of-perception/
I would say it is not possible for humans to perceive visually, except in an object-oriented way. A couple of points.
1. Our visual perception is neural network based, and our brain does what amounts to fast data compression so that what reaches consciousness is a gestalt of an object, with knowledge of fine details requiring conscious attention.
2. Our ancestors needed very fast recognition of lions as being lions, without spending excessive time consciously assessing what it is they were looking at.
In other words, it seems like it would be difficult to explain to someone who is not familiar with an object, what an object is. If I said to someone "That is a lion." And they said back "what is a lion?" And I said, "the big creature with a mane over there." They might be like "I understand that you are trying to point something out to me, but all I see is a mane-like appearance connected to a creature-like appearance surrounded by a context of Savannah, I am unable to pick out what you are referring to as a lion." And then what can I say to them, to indicate that there is something there, namely a lion, and that the lion is distinct from the surrounding Savannah.
And you might say to me: "NotAristotle, the lion is the thing that will try to eat you." This might cause me some alarm, but if I am unfamiliar, fundamentally, with what an object is, then there is no way for me to differentiate the lion from everything else in the environment perceived. In other words, I would have to pick out the lion first, before I have good reason to avoid it.
But I can pick out lions, and other things. How do I do this?
Beyond the cognitive and psychological construal of identity, are you looking for some kind of argument for a logically fundamental category? Our minds are wired to identify things in certain ways.
If we were not able to identify objects it is unlikely we would have evolved to our current form.
Because you have trained neural networks. (Although it seems likely that we have some innate programming to recognize animals as being animals in general.)
See this video to get a sense of how it works.
Note that the brain has a matching visual path for movement and spatial orientation. So the brain dichotomises by not just seeing a recognised object, but also seeing it in terms of its context, its relative position and motion in surrounding space.
Then also think how hard it is to see the trees for the forest or remember all the furrows and gullies that mark the sides of a familiar mountain.
Aspects of our world pop as objects because they strongly contrast with their surroundings as being separate entities rather than just a slight variation within a large ragged patch of variation.
So the eye is trained to recognise that which is an object in terms of having crisp boundaries and high probability of moving in a coherent fashion. Like an animal or other living creature. Or in the modern world, a chair or bicycle,
But when faced with landscapes, branching shrubbery, cloudy skies, it is looking a fractal objects with random markings and indistinct boundaries.
This again is a dichotomy the brain can latch on to as organisms maintain clear boundaries and move as one, so that pops out against a background of objects that instead do the opposite as they have random patterning as their visual characteristic.
Colour itself mainly evolved to make shapes pop out in the same Gestalt abrupt way. Objects that are indeed objects in being coherent and organised will tend to have a surface that is also coherent in its reflectance because it is all made out of the same material.
Colour vision makes that a big clue. A red plum in a green tree is easy to spot - once you are a primate who has evolved a third retinal pigment tuned to make that slight wavelength difference appear blindingly obvious from the brains point of view.
So the object recognition path is already being delivered a sharp contrast in terms of a landscape carved up in a variety of useful ways.
The eye is caught by the cat in the corner - a familiar coiled black presence of unpredictable movement against the contrast of the very bland and predictable furnishings - until we take a second look and see it is really something else, like a tossed aside blue sweater in a heap. The brain does a rough sorting of the visual field to find not only putative objects, but objects worth proper attending and making some further effort in recognising.
Mostly the world pops out in ways we dont even have to pause and think about. We experience it as a flow of the ignorable. And that then grounds our sense of their being objects we need to properly recognise and take note of.
So the brain is set up with recognition capacities even more complex than you realise. This is the Gestalt figure-ground principle.
The brain is recognising what to recognise by also recognising what is to be ignored. Being an object puts something high on the list to being properly seen. As does being in independent motion. The two going together really grabs our attention.
And the answer to your question is, you would not have grown into adulthood, or into childhood without object-perception. Unless you are blind, no nerve endings to feel objects, and no other sensory features, and no perception of time (memory) -- in which case you would not have survived infancy -- then you really do not have a choice but be conditioned to know these things. This is your realism at its best.
No, the world does not appear to us as a painting simply because we perceive boundaries and points and edges. You can't escape your perception, so you have no choice but to view the world through these lenses.
See that object over there.
The grass?
No, I said, the object, dummy.
You mean the cat?
Oh, thats a cat?
Or
You mean the cat?
No, I see the cat. The weird object with the lights above it.
Oh, yeah. Huh.
We have criteria for what counts as an object, and can judge between cases. We have expectations in pointing something out and for seeing it, even for seeing it distinctly (from say, from the objects around it). It is a bit of a mystery because we (unreflectively) dont usually parse out our lives that much (seems like an inherent ability), but it is not a how does our brain do that mystery. You grew up with objects: asking for them, pointing to them, naming them, etc. We arent confused about objects, were unsure about our future with them, because sometimes the magic doesnt happen.
I have two questions to ponder:
(1) where do we get the criteria for what counts as an object?
(2) I think the issue is a "how does our brain do that" mystery. Light enters the brain through the retina, it is parsed as images (lines, shapes, colors, and so on). At what point does that assemblage of lines shapes, colors, etc. become an object? If it's the brain that does that, how does it do so?
Pattern recognition. Thats a huge part of what the brain does and its so dedicated to finding patterns that it will even see patterns that arent there, optical illusions etc
This feature of the brain is how we differentiate objects from the rest of it, or any perceived thing really.
:up:
Quoting NotAristotle
Its a function of how objects have mattered to us over the course of human life; the different ways we are interested in them compared to, say, theories, or colors, or apologies. When we deal with objects, what do we count as a correct or appropriate judgment or approach or point in their identity, use, differentiation, mistakes, clarity, etc., such as: recognizing it as distinct, being made aware of a part (that you see and I didnt), presuming a complete picture although we only see a part, etc.
And we come by these criteria in getting raised in our culture through training, watching, mistakes, etc., (unconsciously as it were, not using them overtly), and as philosophers (explicating them) because we can all propose criteria and agree with others claims. Wittgenstein and ordinary language theory get these criteria, or grammar as he terms it, by looking at what we normally say when, in this example, when we are dealing with objects. What happens is philosophy wants to abandon these ordinary criteria and impose a requirement for certainty first, which creates a fantasy picture of something mental from a desire to have something we can find out for sure.
Quoting NotAristotle
Sure, the brain is doing stuff (vision, attention, focus, etc.) but it does not determine why we are interested in objects, the ways in which they matter to us; our turning our attention to one, our pointing one out from another, identifying one, etc. One way to put this is that physical science cant do the work of philosophy, cant solve our concerns and confusions with our human condition. We want it to take us (our failings) out of the picture, but the process of working with objects is a human activity.
"Human"?
Dogs don't bury bones? Beavers don't build dams? Owls don't catch field mice?
So you pick out the lion without having a good reason and then you pass your lucky genes to your offspring. Or you don't pick out the lion and your genes go to waste. Fast-forward millions of years and virtually everyone in the gene pool automatically picks out lions.
Of course. I only meant to say activities, as: different and more than brain processes; ones we are responsible for, judge the adequacy of. We could say other animals share or can share some with us, even regarding objects, but, of course, we have our own relations to objects; say, our (human alone) relation to our understanding of our relation to objects.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Agreed.
But to @NotAristotle's question, it does appear that objects are by and large constructed within the brain, without our awareness, and that this is true even of infants only some months old as well of many other animals. Not just by the brain as some sort of passive observer of course, but also through interaction with the environment.
That still leaves a lot of room for human ways of relating to objects that are distinct from dog ways or hummingbird ways and so on.
Quoting NotAristotle
Quoting wiki article on Developmental Psychology
Quoting NotAristotle
You'd have to read up on developmental psychology more than I have, but that's the place to look. The little bit of research I've read about has to do with infants, so for sure we're not talking about reasoning our way to objects -- there's almost certainly a specialized module for handling this stuff wired in, and connecting directly to a module handling some basic physics, which infants considerably less than a year old already understand.
What we want with this picture is to understand seeing and identification of objects without our participation in the process. The chance of error previously led philosophy to create the idea of appearances (compared to something more real or certain). The current fascination with brain processes comes from the same desire. The fact of the brains development of object permanence, etc. does nothing to help us understand seeing recognizing differentiating mistaking changing aspects etc., all of which are activities, not hidden brain processes. Our usual unawareness of these acts are because we are so trained in them we handle everything effortlessly, until everything falls apart or we turn to reflect on them in doing philosophy. For example: I point out an object you had no awareness of and you construct it into your world in learning to identify and differentiate it, learn where to find it, etc. In an actual sense, your unawareness of it as a separate distinct object means it does not exist (for you), as you have no reasons for it to matter, no criteria of our reasons to be interested in it. Basically, the brains activity during all this is not critical to, nor does it illuminate, the philosophical issues involved.
I think you're on the wrong track here.
(1) Science is not the land of certainty. People talk this way sometimes, sure, even scientists, but when it comes down to it, science is a dogma-free zone. So if you're looking for certainty, it's religion you want, not science.
(2) No description of what the brain does concludes, "And this is how your brain allows you to know for certain that ..." It's similar to (1). Those perceptual processes we're unaware of, they do not provide some faithful reproduction of our environment, but useful working predictions. There are well-known ways -- various optical illusions, in particular -- in which if you think that's what you're getting, what you actually get will be awfully confusing.
(3) There have been persistent puzzles in Western philosophy that I believe largely stem from not having the concept of unconscious mental processes. Hume seemed to intuit some of this, in seeing that reason alone cannot account for our understanding of objects, causality, and so on, and yet finding that he experiences a world of objects and causal events. Objects, for instance, are given for us, because we do not in fact have conscious access to the "raw data" our senses take in -- by the time there's something we can be aware of, it's already been constructed as an object.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Depends a little on what you mean by "trained", but no this is just not what the research in developmental psychology looks like. The physics of objects begins showing up at less than six months old, practically as early as we can devise tests for it. If by training you had in mind some kind of social convention, that's just not it.
And it looks like we are not aware of how some of the basic building blocks of the world are put together for us because we cannot be. The connections aren't there. It may present a bit like a habitual activity that you can perform "on automatic", without thinking, but there are things that you were never thinking, not consciously.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I don't see what philosophy has to gain by walling itself off from science.
What you give here is a description, and there are always alternative descriptions of phenomena possible, relying on differing frameworks, some more illuminating than others. Philosophy can sometimes do this really well, and there's value in that.
Science is something else altogether, not just description but explanation. They're not in competition.
When I say certainty I only mean predictable, repeatable, knowable, etc., which are the criteria for the conclusions of the scientific method. EDIT: most importantly here is that it does not matter which (competent) person does the experiment to reach the same conclusion.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
That the brain can make errors does not account for all the errors that can be made (and its errors can be understood in advance). And the exact point is that if we are talking about brain processes, were not talking about mistakes and excuses and responsibility because of the desire to make our interplay with objects pure instead of muddled with those considerations and our relation to others.
And what is given is our lives over the span of human history, all the practices and expectations and implications and shared judgments and interests and failings. Reason and knowledge are not our only relation to the world but that doesnt mean the relation is hidden from us, only that at times it is a matter of living through it; a matter of, say, me identifying to you which object or part of an object is of interest to me, which is making you aware of it (or failing to).
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Not sure youve specified what it isnt, but focusing on our biological relationship to objects is fine (its not wrong), but only, its trying to answer a question that philosophy has misconstrued out of fear and desire (how do we know the back side of the object exists?, etc.)
Hume wanted causality and real objects, but his desire overlooked the unexamined ordinary ways we handle our world, and the mistakes we make in it, which created his fantasy of things that could be known, only somehow were just out of our reach (see Plato and virtue).
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yet science can find these magical processes, though the cart is before the horse, as somehow we know what we should be explaining, but have only just not yet explained it.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Science can never be a dogma-free zone. It can be a practice that is self-aware with regard to its reliance on guiding presuppositions concerning not only the contents of its theoretical paradigms but the nature of its methods, the relation between observation and transformation, fact and value, and other assumed grounding structures of science. But most scientists havent arrived at that point yet. The fact that science tends to embrace falsificationism these days would seem to indicate the abandonment of the quest for certainty, but to the extent that scientists embrace the language of mathematics as the quintessence of precision, and separate observation from production, a different and more profound notion of certainty is still at work.
I think Antony is on the right track. I would just supplement his discursive interactionism with a phenomenological analysis of perceptual construction. Husserls account of the constitution of a spatial object gets to the OPs question of how we arrive at the recognition of objects, and I think it does a better job of this than empirical accounts positing subpersonal, strictly unconscious mechanisms. For instance, there is no experience of an object without kineshthetic sensation of our voluntary movement in relation to the thing seen. Intrinsic to what the object means as object is our knowing how its appearance will change when we move our head in a certain way, or our eyes , or when we touch it. The object is what it is for us in relation to the way we know we can change its appearance relative to our interactions with it. Am I consciously aware of this relation between my potential movements and my recognition of an object? No, but this doesnt mean that such knowledge is simply unconscious. Rather, it is implicit in my perceiving an object qua object.
But those are all good things, and the best way to fight off dogmatic certainty. Over here in the science-friendly world we say "Better a question that can't be answered than an answer that can't be questioned." (Feynman, though maybe not originally, I dunno.)
Quoting Joshs
I think that's abusing the word "dogma". Of course there are working assumptions, all of those things you mentioned, but in the long run any of them can change. In the right circumstances, even what constitutes an experiment can be up for grabs. Science is how we fight entrenched certainties and dogmas.
Quoting Antony Nickles
There is plenty of room for all that, while still understanding where we're starting from, where we are all starting from insofar as all of our brains handle distinguishing objects, some basic physics, color constancy of objects and loads of other things in roughly the same way so long there's no damage or inhibited development. Rather than denying our responsibility for what we do with these capabilities, it provides the ground we stand on when we have those discussions.
Quoting Antony Nickles
There may be something to that, but our very unconscious construction of objects is also and unavoidably driven by fear and desire, fear of what might harm us, desire for what sustains us. Just the nature of being an organism. My version, instead of telling people they need (philosophical) therapy, just shows them why they were so puzzled, shows the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. Hume would have been deeply gratified, as he would have had he lived to read On the Origin of Species, some of which he also intuited. (Darwin had the benefit of reading Hume, and did.)
Abandoning our regular criteria for distinguishing an object in favor of a scientific explanation is the desire to have something we can know and which removes ourselves from the issue, rather than it being an ordinary act (distinguishing) that we do for ourselves or others, or fail to do, or make mistakes in doing. And when I distinguish an object to someone, and they ask how I am distinguishing that object (in what way am I distinguishing it, by what features or attributes), no one ever explains a process of the brain. It is not the ground of any discussion, a scientific explanation is the end of (reasonable) discussion (other than scientific correction).
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
And this is the hope for science (for some)that it will solve philosophybut philosophy is puzzled because it doesnt recognize the part that our fantasies play in requiring certainty as an answer. Simply believing that, yes, we can have an answer! is not the way out of the bottle, it is fuel to the fire.
This happen to you a lot, someone asks you, "By what features or attributes are you distinguishing that object?"?
For one thing, "feature" in everyday life is (a) a salesman's word, (b) refers to a guest vocal by a hip-hop artist, or (c), rarely nowadays with the disappearance of shorts and doubles, a movie. But that's not how you're using it; you're using it as a bit of philosophical shop-talk. "Attribute"? "Object"? Hardly used by ordinary people at all. I've been asked whether I think a pair of pants is green or grey, but I wasn't asked what color I would attribute to them, or by what features I distinguished the pants as an object. If you have these sorts of conversations on the regular, your life is very different from mine.
The question that @NotAristotle asked was clearly a question looking for a scientific explanation that would involve processes of the brain. He could not have been clearer. The answers he received referred to gestalt principles (@Pantagruel), neural networks (@wonderer1), the predictive and inferential nature of perception (@apokrisis), the involuntariness of object perception (@L'éléphant), pattern recognition (@DingoJones), survival value so that natural selection can kick in (@litewave), and how object perception arrives very early in our lives (me). Those are all important pieces of a very complicated answer.
Only you told him, don't do that, this is a philosophical issue, and therefore a question about our ordinary criteria for objects; turning to science is just your desire for certainty, your fear of uncertainty, and an evasion of responsibility. And then @Joshs showed up to throw Husserl at me, god love him (and oddly choosing not to mention that Merleau-Ponty references early gestalt psychology).
I would've given odds that you would say that, but no one who's read any of your posts would have bet against. The odds were also pretty high that @wonderer1 was going to say something about neural networks, that I was going to say something about learning and "go read some more", that @Joshs was going to question the foundations of science, and that @apokrisis was going to say something a lot like what he did, which most of us can recognize but not reproduce (although I did know that if he answered this one, the word "crisp" would be there), showing that there is a hierarchy of issues involved and how those fit together.
We're all pretty predictable. It might all seem very interesting to @NotAristotle, but it'll seem less interesting the fourth time he asks a question and gets exactly these answers for the fourth time.
Most of the sciency posts here were more or less explicitly partial answers, with the exception of apo's, because apo doesn't do partial.
Only you and then @Joshs argued that science is more or less irrelevant here, @Joshs because science itself has foundations that are, I guess, metaphysical, you, I think, because nothing could be a 'higher court of appeal' than our practices. @Joshs accepts some sort of continuity between philosophy and psychology, but on the grounds (I guess) that psychology is more philosophical than it lets on. You do not. I'm not clear whether you have a critique of science in mind, or only of the reliance on science when doing philosophy or perhaps also in everyday conversation.
I would defend the use of science in philosophy this way: we begin in the middle, with conceptions we only know through our everyday reliance on them, scientists being just like other people; we investigate ourselves and our environment relying on those conceptions but without assuming they are the last word, that we already know everything that can be knowed. It will frequently turn out to be the case that our everyday conceptions are inadequate for understanding what we find, even misleading, but we can also come to understand why we have come to conceive of things as we ordinarily do. Why, for instance, we perceive a world of objects, to use a philosopher's word. What science helps you resist is the elevation of your everyday understanding into a theory, which is the philosopher's game. Scientists, not philosophers, "leave everything as it is": of course you perceive tables as solid, here's why, and here's why "solid" can't mean what you might reflectively think it means, but your sense that there's a difference between room-temperature wood and room-temperature water is right, and here's more why.
Philosophers used to talk about stuff like this but they don't anymore for the simple reason that science does it better. They know it. Ordinary people know it. @NotAristotle knows enough to know it's science that will answer his question, not philosophy.
Having been painted into an increasingly small corner by science, some philosophers have gotten their own paint to mark the line that science Shall Not Cross. Only Philosophers Allowed. You can keep all the territory you've conquered (an amusing gesture, considering there's no way philosophy is getting any of that back), but no more! What's left in this corner? Metaphysics? Probably not for long. Transcendental arguments? They fit the bill, apparently, but the need for the transcendental move is premised on a deeply flawed psychology, folk psychology elevated to theory. Language? The same transcendental issue. No, it's become pretty clear that philosophy is (at best) a methodology in search of a domain. (@plaque flag) Unless you're apo, and your domain is everything.
I've been on the other side of this argument as @Isaac could attest. I've tried defending the specialness of philosophy. I think there's still some room for stuff that science isn't quite suited to or that it doesn't bother with, but I'm through chasing science off my lawn. I think it's a betrayal of the spirit of philosophy and resentment of the success of science.
What's your take? I'm asking.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
As I tried to point out in my previous comment, I dont think the issue that Antony is touching on has to do with a limitation of science with respect to philosophy, but the limitation of a certain set of philosophical assumptions that inform specific approaches in the sciences. Antony may or may not be aware of them, but all one has to do is search for those theorists contributing to research in cognitive neuroscience and other domains of psychology who cite the later Wittgenstein as a key inspiration. Such a search will reveal philosophically reformulated notions of brain, body , language and culture that are much more compatible with Wittgenstein than the ones that Antony has in mind.
I'm right now reading a book of psychology that I would argue is in some clear ways compatible with the later Wittgenstein.
On the other hand, who cares? Wittgenstein is interesting, but aligning your theory with Wittgenstein or with any philosopher really should not be a goal of any scientific research program.
Inspiration taken from Wittgenstein? Absolutely. But inspiration can come from absolutely anywhere and ought not guide you toward a particular result.
mQuoting Srap Tasmaner
Inspiration ought not guide you toward a particular result? Would you prefer lack of inspiration as your guide?
Inspiration can in theory come from anywhere. In practice, it often comes from a handful of prophetic thinkers who had to wait decades before the larger culture was ready to embrace their ideas. One example is the eventual embrace of the ideas of American Pragmatists and Phenomenology within psychology. It s not a question of artificially aligning your scientific work with a philosopher, but of enriching your ideas by interlacing them with giants who preceded you.
Most empirical research is drudge work that aligns itself with myriad references from the field. Breaking with an accepted theoretical orientation means turning your back on those conventional references and finding new sources of inspiration. Heisenberg and Bohr understood this, delving deep into the philosophical literature for guidance.
For my money , any empirical psychology which hasnt absorbed Wittgensteins insights(or those of the pragmatists and phenomenologists) is not a very interesting psychology.
We know what picking the results of research ahead of time looks like, and it's not the same thing as working within an existing paradigm.
Quoting Joshs
I wouldn't even describe Darwin this way, so we're just not talking about the same world. Lots of people have interesting ideas, it's the research that matters. It's the research supporting and extending Darwin's insights that makes his ideas matter. Picking ideas you like -- well, we all do that, but that's not science.
But wasnt the pragmatism a reflection of early psychological research - the work of Helmholtz, Wundt, Donders, Fechner and the rest? Psychology started off enactive and embodied with its emphasis on habits, psychophysics, anticipation, etc - the practical how of modelling a world - and then got lost in the wilderness of Freudianism, Behaviourism, Cognitivism, Personality testing, etc, for a long time.
In my reading of the history, you have Cartesian representationalism and British empiricism creating the familiar disembodied notion of mind as a clutter of sense impressions and ideas. The justification of phenomenology as the method of inquiry.
You then have pragmatism arising out of the new scientific spirit of inquiry where the mind is all about modelling, habits and judgements - constrained by the fact of being in the world rather than being remarkable for standing apart from that world.
After that, psychology swings back to a confusion of approaches that speak to the old Dualistic concerns with representation and sense data. The problem for psychology becomes again the contents of the private individual head rather than the more general one of how organisms relate to worlds in meaning constructing fashion.
See this quick intro to Peirces theory of object recognition as a shift from the representationalism of sense data to the enaction of perceptual judgements.
https://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10289/9037/NZAP%28Dec2014%29.pdf?sequence=6&isAllowed=y
So enactivism was alive and well in 19th C experimental psychology. And Pragmatism arose in that context. Both were informed by the holism of German naturphilosophie.
But then the reductionist Anglo world came crashing in and claimed psychology as its science of the mind. The story of a container with its private content. The whole field got metaphysically screwed for another century.
It sounds like science to you is tied to a notion of correspondence between scientific observer and observed reality wherein the evident world that appears to the scientists instruments of measure can be partitioned off from entanglement with cultural influences. So science as research means a certain.l purity with respect to such outside influences, including the influence of philosophy. After all, philosophical research doesnt have its eye on the mathematically measurable and testable facts, does it? Sciences method thereby gives it a privileged access to, or at least privileged ability to measure and verify, the real, so the traditional thinking about science goes. Wittgensteins insights appear irrelevant to what science is about, according to this thinking.
Quoting apokrisis
My understanding is that Helmholtz et al were under the sway of neo-Kantianism. Dan Zahavi writes:
James, Dewey and Mead were heirs of Hegel rather than Kant.
Quoting apokrisis
The above justified Husserls phenomenological method as an alternative to the above, an attempt to navigate between empiricism and idealism, relativism and skepticism.
As Derrida writes:
Nope. You got all of that just out of me using the word "research"? Geez.
Quoting apokrisis
Exactly. I can't speak to Peirce, but it takes no more than a page of Dewey or James to see this. I mean, James literally wrote the book on psychology. His career is physiology > psychology > philosophy. I don't how much more obvious this can be.
And a quick reminder that the full title of Hume's book is A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects.
The pragmatists I'm reading may differ from Hume in where they land on particular issues, but it's the same spirit, and I see no reason for work undertaken in the spirit of science to be discontinuous from other work undertaken in that spirit.
Quoting Joshs
I dont speak gibberish. Perhaps you could translate into plain language?
Oh, theres correspondence there all right. It may be in the form of indirect modeling, but there is something in your notion of scientific observation and measurement that keeps science apart from the humanities and other areas of cultural creativity, and I think it has to do with how science gets a grip on the real.
Quoting apokrisis
You mean you arent familiar with the philosophical history of structuralism, the class of approaches which unify elements on the basis of a shared logic. Structuralists like Levi-Strauss posited a structuralist semiotics for describing anthropological systems, but didnt give an adequate account of the origin of such wholes. Piagets little book Structuralism deals with the attempt by various kinds of structuralist accounts to integrate genesis and structure.His own genetic epistemology was one such attempt , and he saw Husserl as a kindred spirit. Derrida recognized that Husserls melding of genesis and structure avoided both the temptations of Historicism, which would posit an a priori dialectical organizing principle to unify historical development , and empiricism, which would produce a skepticism of facts of the matter.
I meant that I don't do gibberish. And I certainly don't regard the PoMo version of "structuralism" as a solid foundation for a proper structuralist metaphysics.
I'm a systems scientist/holist/Aristotelean when it comes to a structuralist causality. Kant and Hegel, along with Schelling and whoever, were the heirs to that tradition.
And where I depart is in recognising that organisms have their root in the physics of dissipative structure, but their intentionality in the mechanics of semiosis.
So nature wants to self-organise entropically. And life and mind can arise as further informational structure that lives off that dynamics.
The philosophical history of structuralism continues to be written. By science now.
I mean, I get that "correspondence" is like a swear word for you, but you're just making stuff up.
Quoting Joshs
What notions? Where did I talk about observation and measurement? You're just projecting, which -- it's just weird. Do you need me for this conversation?
Here's the thing. I could explain what my actual conception of science is (communal, pragmatic, predictive, sensitive to feedback, self updating, blah blah blah), thus defending myself against your charge of philosophical sin. But I don't have to.
What does your "correspondence" charge amount to? Suppose it's true and "correspondence" is inscribed in the Great Book of How to Do Science and What It Really Means. Then you could object that correspondence to the real is -- what? Is refuted? Is bad? Is a discredited metaphysics? Is problematic? Should science care? If it works, it works. You can stand outside all day shouting, "This whole enterprise is a farce! They believe in correspondence to the real, those scientists!" No scientist will care. No one else will either. You will maintain your philosophical purity, as you understand it, but so what? Science will go on doing what it does.
Which is of course the point. Science is successful. Art is also successful. Literature is successful. History is successful. All of them in different ways, and it's no knock on art or literature or history that they are not science. Science is also only what it is. Is philosophy successful? I think most people feel it's a little harder to say whether it is -- but it's easy if you count spawning the natural sciences as part of the history of philosophy, because philosophy ought to be proud of that.
I still don't see any good reason for philosophy to be ashamed to be seen in the company of science.
And this is the story philosophy has told itself, that ordinary criteria for judgment are inadequate and/or misleading, thus the advent of appearances and that philosophys job was to understand objects directly or actually or completely. And now science has taken the bait to really tell us how things are, as if the answer was the missing part and not the first step of turning our human condition into an intellectual problem. Science here is trying to answer a rigged question that is not about knowledge. Philosophy does not have the success of science, with its sturdy, repeatable, dependable conclusions; its meant to transform people. A moral discussion can always end without agreement, but that is not a reason to retreat to only what we can know (say, about the brain).
Quoting Antony Nickles
Yes, and I dont seem to be getting much help from you.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Ill tell ya, a bit more explanation from you would help a lot. Or you could just continue expressing bemused exasperation at my projecting and not getting you.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Is this a version of If pomo claims there is no objective truth, isnt that claim itself an attempt to locate truth?
What my charge would amount to is an invitation to see how the intrinsic CONTENT of scientific theory changes, including how the RESEARCH is conducted and interpreted, as a direct result of a shift in metaphysics or philosophy of science. For instance, phenomenologically informed enactivist and autopoietic approaches in cognitive psychology are based on such a conceptual shift, and new materialism ( which is different than pomo) interprets the results of quantum field theory through a different metaphysics than older materialisms.
Quoting Antony Nickles
All accepted science works, but changes in the metaphysics of science leads to changes in our understanding of HOW it works, and as a consequence de leads to fresh concepts. It matters much to physicists that Quantum field theory works differently than Newtonian mechanics, even if they dont realize this is due to a shift in their own metaphysics. The same goes with the shift from behaviorism and positivism in psychology to Cognitivism to embodied, enactive approaches.
Quoting Antony Nickles
It shouldnt be ashamed since they are intertwined aspects of the same company. My point is the ways philosophy and science are different is much less significant than you think they are, such that it is silly to even try to distinguish the domain of philosophy proper from science proper, other than as a matter of the conventionality and generality of the vocabulary.
To the extent that we can talk about a progress in science it is due not to successful theory per se, but to its ability (which it shares with philosophy, the arts and other cultural domains) to undergo revolutionary shifts in the way it understands the criteria of success, and those shifts are metaphysical revolutions.
Agreed! Though if I said this I would probably have only said "theoretical framework" instead of metaphysics.
Quoting Joshs
Also agreed, though again I wouldn't have reached for metaphysics.
So let's talk about that. I think we are both committed to a view of science evolving and changing, and I that's roughly why I think of pragmatism as most clearly expressing the spirit of science. There's some confusion possible because there's presumably a hierarchy here, with the predictions of research down near the bottom, very changeable, theoretical frameworks above that, somewhat less changeable, and maybe way up at the top something like metaphysics.
Some of the constraints from above on what happens below are clear enough, as in the way theory guides experiment design. But those aren't absolute, because theory doesn't get to determine the experimental result, that's what the lab and the field are for.
But to some degree what's above theory does determine the result, in the sense that it guides interpretation, and that in the two ways I think you were referring to: something like metaphysics which guides the interpretation of any theory-and-research program, what it all amounts to, what sort of thing you learn when you learn something by doing science; and something like philosophy of science, which guides decisions about whether and how experimental results count as evidence for theories.
It's clear enough how the latter can constrain practice, or not, but I'm not as clear on how the 'metaphysical' arm does. If it doesn't cash out as a change in methodology, or in how theories are judged, then it seems like it might be possible to swap out the metaphysics without too much change in practice. BUT, as you point out, how research already done is understood, and how research to be done is undertaken might change considerably.
The important thing to me is that change at the various levels here is always a live option, and I think this is the pattern that pragmatism spots, so there's no reason to be wedded even to your top-level constraints of the moment.
What threw me about the way you were putting this earlier was that it sounded to me like the important thing to you was picking the right metaphysics, the one that jibes with your philosophical views, which is why I referenced Lysenkoism. I don't see it that way, obviously.
I doubt my little sketch here is perfectly satisfactory to you, but I still think there's broad agreement.
Quoting Joshs
Ah, okay, that's a funny thing, because I have been exactly questioning that sort of boundary policing. I think they should be taken as continuous. So here again you and I are on the same page, or same enough we can talk.
I've been trying to undermine @Antony Nickles's claim that science should get off philosophy's lawn. My talking up the virtue of science was not to cordon off philosophy as its unworthy cousin, but to convince philosophy to accept science as kin.
It really doesn't take philosophy, just an Ames Window or an Abelson square, a 'gorilla' walking past some kids bouncing a ball, an estimate of how many countries are in Africa. We have an everyday theory about how we perceive and think, and that theory is, you know, wrong. That's hyperbole, of course.
Quoting Antony Nickles
"Taken the bait" -- I love that. I'll say instead that modern science has stepped up to continue doing what philosophy used to do but barely does at all anymore, for reasons that are less and less relevant. I think most philosophers from throughout the Western tradition would be thrilled by what science has achieved. Can you even imagine Aristotle's reaction!
But you think almost all Western philosophy is a train-wreck anyway, and you're among the special few who understand how most philosophy and almost all science is based on a colossal mistake.
Interesting. Do you have a handy link to this?
Quoting apokrisis
Sure. Heres a good place to start.
https://smartnightreadingroom.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/meeting-the-universe-halfway.pdf
I didnt say theory, because philosophy is not explaining vision or whatever the mechanism is for self-reflection or internal dialogue. And Im not saying science doesnt correct the lay-understanding of the world with definitive knowledge. But our ordinary criteria for judging that something is seen, or what is a thought, are, however, sufficient and precise enough to allow us to resolve our failings and misunderstandings, without abandoning them for the certainty and generality historically desired by philosophy and hoped for by a scientific explanation of the fantasy that this is all handled by cognitive processes (although not without cognitive processes, but only to say they dont come into it here, with our ordinary criteria).
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
We used to call philosophy what science does nowthe pursuit of knowledgehowever, our relation to the world is not entirely by way of knowledge. Im not speaking of belief or opinion, but of activities, practices, and even self-determination at times. How we perceive (lets say see) or are aware, as @NotAristotle says, of objects as objects is based on our criteria for what an object is (rather than an illusion, or a gas, or something like peace or anger) and what counts as those activities in relation to them (what counts as seeing an object rather than anothers point of view, becoming aware of a distinct object rather than of a sneaking suspicion). Usually we dont reflect on these issues until we are having a problem, in a specific context; we dont use them rationally to do a thing (usually, unless Machiavellian) nor as reasons for doing something (though depending on the activity, having a motive or interest would be a integral part or requirementsay, applying for a job, but not, throwing a stick).
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Ive never said science is a mistake (though I do claim science is confused about this issue, as philosophy has been). And I take your comment that I am special in understanding this issue as sarcasm, which would be disrespectful and inappropriate here, so, unless I am mistaken, Ill leave you to it.
It looks to me, reading this thread, that your disagreement with @Srap Tasmaner is curiously founded on a mutual reification of 'science' an ironic mis-recognition of an object. Is it a method, is it an ethic, is it a philosophy, is it a practice, is it an ethnicity, a social institution, a tradition, a cult? No it's Superscience! Faster than a speeding bullet.
What is being defended and attacked is nothing more than a hand, waving in the general direction of vague habits of thought and attitudes of 'suck it and see', that have proven fruitful in the past in producing material conveniences. We tried the power of prayer, but found horsepower more reliable.
If it had happened to be the other way, scientists would be busy researching which prayers to which gods were the most efficacious, and we would be calling them priests.