When Does Philosophy Become Affectation?
"Affectation" according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online, is:
"a. Speech or conduct not natural to oneself: an unnatural form of behavior meant especially to impress others; b. the act of taking on or displaying an attitude not natural to oneself or not genuinely felt."
Ask yourself when you last acted as if there were no other people, no things, no animals, i.e. nothing other than yourself. When did you last refrain from eating because you doubted the existence of food? When did you last believe, and treat, people you see across the street from you as if they were only, e.g., 6 inches tall because that's how they appeared to be when you saw them, and thought that they became 6 feet tall when they crossed the street to speak to you?
When did you last ponder whether the car you're driving was in fact a car having the characteristics of a car as you understand them to be, or instead something else you can never know (if, indeed, it was anything at all)? When did you last question whether the office building in which you work remained the same building, because it looked one way when you entered it in the morning, when the sun was out, but did not look the same as it did then when you left it at night?
Chances are you never did anything of the sort. In the course of reading or discussing or considering or studying philosophy of a particular type, you may have entertained such thoughts, but by doing so you were acting unnaturally, not genuinely. You didn't really think a person you see across the street was small but grew larger as they approached you, and more importantly you didn't act as if they did so, or as if the place where you worked changed after you entered it into something else you perceived when you left it.
If that's the case, though, why purport to think, or believe, otherwise, i.e. contrary to the way in which you actually live your life? Those who say we should act in one way, and then act in another way, are called hypocrites. I don't say certain philosophers are hypocrites, or even that they're disingenuous when they contend that what we see and interact with every day without question isn't real, or can't be known, but when what we do is so contrary to what we contend, or what we contend is so unrelated to what we do as to make no difference in our lives, I think we have reason to think that we're engaged in affectation.
"a. Speech or conduct not natural to oneself: an unnatural form of behavior meant especially to impress others; b. the act of taking on or displaying an attitude not natural to oneself or not genuinely felt."
Ask yourself when you last acted as if there were no other people, no things, no animals, i.e. nothing other than yourself. When did you last refrain from eating because you doubted the existence of food? When did you last believe, and treat, people you see across the street from you as if they were only, e.g., 6 inches tall because that's how they appeared to be when you saw them, and thought that they became 6 feet tall when they crossed the street to speak to you?
When did you last ponder whether the car you're driving was in fact a car having the characteristics of a car as you understand them to be, or instead something else you can never know (if, indeed, it was anything at all)? When did you last question whether the office building in which you work remained the same building, because it looked one way when you entered it in the morning, when the sun was out, but did not look the same as it did then when you left it at night?
Chances are you never did anything of the sort. In the course of reading or discussing or considering or studying philosophy of a particular type, you may have entertained such thoughts, but by doing so you were acting unnaturally, not genuinely. You didn't really think a person you see across the street was small but grew larger as they approached you, and more importantly you didn't act as if they did so, or as if the place where you worked changed after you entered it into something else you perceived when you left it.
If that's the case, though, why purport to think, or believe, otherwise, i.e. contrary to the way in which you actually live your life? Those who say we should act in one way, and then act in another way, are called hypocrites. I don't say certain philosophers are hypocrites, or even that they're disingenuous when they contend that what we see and interact with every day without question isn't real, or can't be known, but when what we do is so contrary to what we contend, or what we contend is so unrelated to what we do as to make no difference in our lives, I think we have reason to think that we're engaged in affectation.
Comments (264)
Quoting Ciceronianus
I recognize shades of your critique of Descartes radical doubt here. Apart from your disagreement with Descartes, how pervasive a problem do you see this kind of thinking as being within the contemporary philosophical community as a whole , or the history of philosophy? Its fine and dandy for all of us here to agree how silly and pointless it would be to reason in the manner you depicted above, especially given you made no effort to justify it or widen the context of its use. But without reference to concrete examples in philosophy ( preferably from someone other than Descartes), the O.P. seems to be tilting at windmills.
"the experimental reasoning, which we posses in common with the beasts, and on which the whole conduct of life depends, is nothing but a species of instinct or mechanical power that acts in us unknown to ourselves (my italics) (Hume 1975: 108)
And he thought the same applied to any method of belief formation. For Hume, belief produced by reason is an empty category; for him, our beliefs are governed by the very principles of instinct and imagination which rule the mental lives of the beats. [/quote]
https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/1211/1/owensdj3.htm
Hume elsewhere confesses that he does indeed expect the future to be like the past, and the ground not to collapse beneath him. My understanding that he is not in fact attacking the common-sense understanding of the world at all, Rather he is attacking the over-reach of "reasoning". It is reason that is limited by not being able to get an 'ought' from an 'is' or a 'will be' from a 'has been'.
But humans are not constrained by reason, only philosophy students are, and then only in their academic productions.
I don't think it a problem in the wider community, nor with professional philosophers, who tend to be more critical of their own thinking. But it's not uncommon amongst the denizens of these fora. It is often dressed as radical scepticism or relativism. My suspicion is that it is found in those with a little philosophy, but not enough.
I have a thing where I lose confidence that the road in front of me will be there when I get to it. I think it's along the lines of OCD. I get through it by humming. For some reason, the worst drive is through West Virginia when the big open valleys appear between the peaks. In other words, philosophy probably isn't for you. :razz:
Or are you perhaps talking about people post(ur)ing at philosophy forums when it's already past their bedtime?
Some people go to pubs and drink and talk. Some people go to philosophy forums and talk ... and drink.
And besides, one has to try on different philosophies for size, so to speak, given them a trial run. That's not hypocrisy.
Descartes isn't called the "Father of Modern Philosophy" for nothing. Descartes had, and in some respects still has, his followers. It seems to me that Kant, with his things-in-themselves, and any of those who accept dualism, the view that there is an external world, apart from us, the mind-body distinction; those that believe we can't be directly aware of the world, all participate in what seems to me to be an affectation.
The closest real example to the sort of thing you're talking about that comes to mind is Parmenides' denial of the reality of change. However, it seems like his whole point was to show the flaws in the "common sense," view, rather than to put forth an equally common sense/naive view of changelessness.
As you say, such things are normally put forth as thought experiments. What they generally try to show is that the common sense explanation of things cannot be the case, not that the "silly" view is the case. This isn't always true, but it often is. I think that when people embrace extremely counter intuitive ideas of the world, it is because the problems with the "naive view" start to seem worse. That, and some people enjoy being iconoclasts and going against the grain.
I don't think this is (always) affectation meaningless naval gazing though. People have been writing about philosophy for about as long as they have had written language. It's natural to us. Thinking through these sorts of things is natural. A lot of our world is quite counter intuitive, which gives us grounds for testing bedrock assumptions.
Think about a question as simple as "what does it mean for two things to touch?" This actually has a very complex and counter intuitive answer in physics. We don't need to know this answer to know what is meant by "touch" in everyday speech, but knowing more about the more complex answer has helped us do things like build cars, cell phones, GPS satalites, etc. In that way, questioning our starting point is worthwhile.
Likewise, animism is sort of the human default. Both human children and early societies tend towards animism. "Why does the river flood?" Because it wants to. "Why does it rain?" Because the sky is mad.
We have no problem figuring out what someone means by "an angry sky," or what people are saying when they say "free hydrogen atoms [I]want[/I] to pair up with oxygen atoms." But at the same time, questioning our initial animist, common sense proclivities, turns out to be time well spent.
My guess is that, if we ever get a really satisfying answer for the relationship between particulars and universals, or a satisfying explanation of how parts relate to wholes, these will actually come with some pretty significant advances in technology and scientific understanding. They seem so basic as to be irrelevant, but the same is true vis-á-vis what it means for two objects to "touch."
Which I think some (like me, maybe) would maintain constitutes a confession he himself
disregards the claims he makes in philosophy all the time. One would think that should make a difference to him, and to others, in assessing the validity and value of his claims.
Quoting unenlightened
In that case, he's attacking a view neither he nor anyone else genuinely accepts, if our conduct is any guide.
I hope your suspicion is correct.
Yes. But I'm wondering what it means when they're not a realist otherwise.
Why call it a dream, then?
Interesting that I loved driving through the mountains in West Virginia. Beautiful.
But I think some of philosophy may be genuine.
But one's prejudices will show: I'm authentic, you are ostentatious, he's a wanker.
I don't mean to claim all philosophy is affectation. Consider this a preliminary inquiry into when it becomes affectation.
According to Wallace Stevens, "Imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to the real." I think the same goes for philosophy.
Because I think it is one. I don't think non-conscious non-mental stuff can produce minds and consciousness.
I don't think what I refer to is hypocrisy. But I think there's more involved than a "trial run" by the curious. I do think it's peculiar, and aberrant in a way, requiring an explanation. I'm wondering if it's a kind of contrivance on the part of those who engage in it.
What happens when you wake up?
You become one with the godmind? I don't know for sure.
I think those like Austin show that in most cases, if not in all of them, the "naive view" starts to "become insurmountable" only due to confusion and error. But I'm curious how we come to think that a stick in a glass of water and other such things establishes that we cannot trust our senses. Do we really believe the stick bends on contact with water? No. Why, then, do we claim we think it does? It's a kind of special pleading.
There is an important bit of nuance here; Hume absolutely did think that we couldn't justify induction without reference to induction. He does appear to take this claim seriously.
If Hume is right, then we can't justify induction via any straightforward, foundationalist, rationalist argument.
This isn't inconsistent with Hume saying that "of course we still end up using inductive reasoning, because we sort of have to."
Likewise, his reduction of cause to constant conjunction has a similar bit of nuance. Does he really think cause doesn't exist? IDK. Does he take the epistemic issues his argument highlights seriously? Absolutely.
Plato uses the "stick in water" example because it's an obvious example of sight not matching reality.
A and B being identical shades of gray would be a less obvious example. I've had students refuse to believe they are the same before I copy and paste them into the same paint file before, so it definitely isn't intuitive.
IDK, wouldn't the Earth being round, the Earth rotating around the Sun, etc. all be examples here? Same with Galileo's finding re the period of pendulums and the rate at which things fall in a vacuum. Aristotle"s physics remained so popular for so long precisely because it was intuitive and seemed to match sense data.
Someone should start a thread about that...
That's a great idea.
Or 'a more scientifically updated Hume' saying, "of course we still end up using the deep learning in our neural networks because we [s]sort of[/s] have to."
If we "have to" there's something about it, or us, which requires or provides for its use. How/why is it appropriate to insist it's use must be justified if that's the case? What induces someone to claim that what we have to do by virtue of the fact we live is unwarranted?
I don't think Austin was addressing such circumstances. If someone told me the Earth is flat, or the Sun rotated around the Earth, I wouldn't say his senses are deceiving him, and therefore they can't be trusted.
What I conceive is certainly my own conception, but I haven't said anything about what I consider practicing philosophy. I've addressed philosophical positions taken in metaphysics and epistemology by some people. I think I've made it clear that philosophy encompasses more than those positions.
A favorite quote of one of my favorite philosophers, specifically addressed to Descartes' faux doubt if I recall correctly.
What (or whose or what topics in) philosophy is not affectation, in your view?
Quoting Ciceronianus
I wonder what adhering to the real could possibly mean? Perhaps to the ever changing definitions of the real that have made their way into use over the past few millennia? I say we should all adhere to the mugwump, since that is about as clarifying.
So who is this mysterious someone? Specific examples from the last 200 years please. Perhaps a nice quote or two to buttress your argument.
Guilt by association is no argument. You dont believe theres an external world apart from us? Isnt that the common sense view? If you dont believe that the mind is divine and the body material, what about the distinction between emotion and rationality? Most still adhere to that kind of dualism. Most also believe in a dualism between neutral physical stuff and subjective valuation. This is the basis of the hard problem. Then there is the belief that the objectively real is to be determined by correctly representing what is out there by internally generated models. Are these views that most share not affectations?
What are you thinking of here?
After reading the OP and its supporters posts, it reminded me of a severe case of Projection Defense Mechanism symptom in Psychology.
One of the extreme cases of Scepticism was by Hume. He even doubted his own "self". But we don't call him someone who indulged in affectation.
"I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are remov'd for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist." (Hume, Treatise)
Quoting Tom Storm
The hard problem of subjective consciousness
I'm only a servant of the devil, not the devil himself. The demon that Descartes pretended was tricking him into believing what he clearly believed in the first place is a good friend of mine. We share a laugh about this, he and I, as he tricked Descartes into believing Descartes existed.
But there are mugwumps among us, and the number of them is said to be growing. Didn't you know?
If we want to know what Stevens thought the real to be, we'd all have to read his book The Necessary Angel. Absent that, I think his poem The Snow Man may give us a hint.
[i]One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.[/i]
It's just my interpretation, but I note that the poem states that we must have "a mind of winter" to behold the frost and crusted boughs, junipers shagged with ice, the cold winds of that season, rather than thinking of aspects of the season as expressing "misery" in the sound of the wind and the few leaves. The listener, who actually listens in the snow, beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is there, the listener being nothing. "Nothing" I take to mean "nothing in addition to the world" as the listener is a part of the world, not apart from it. The world is without the accoutrements we try to dress it in when we consider ourselves separate from it. That, I guess, is what he refers to when he uses "real" in this context.
That's not to say that the accoutrements don't themselves exist. Stevens was pupil of Santayana. I think he distinguished between what philosophers and poets do, but thought that imagination expressed in poetry and art is a means by which we may affect the real, transform it, understand it. But the more it detaches itself from"the real" the more it loses its impact.
As you might guess, I have some sympathy for this point of view. I think it's similar to the view that we're participants in the rest of the world and thereby part of the real and our lives are our interaction with it.
I'd never heard of this mechanism. Those psychologists are so clever, with names.
How odd, and revealing, it is that Hume thought he didn't exist while he slept. How was it, you think, that he tried to "catch himself" without a perception? Did he try to "sneak up" on himself so to speak, only to find that he was aware he was doing so and continued to see, hear, smell, etc.? What would have been the case if he succeeded?
Quoting Ciceronianus
Thats an approach to the real I can get onboard with.
I would just add to that that the real is what is constantly changing with respect to itself.
Any philosophical discussion which doesn't require us to disregard or consider of no real value how we live in determining the nature of what we interact with in the course of living will, in all likelihood, be relatively free of affectation.
As Marcus Aurelius wrote: "The universe is change."
It was just a passing impression. Not a judgement. No worries.
Quoting Ciceronianus
I had to answer the similar question on the other thread. I understand Hume's scepticism as his endeavour trying to find the ground for certainty and warrant for belief in the existence of the world and self, not the actual existence itself.
Not apart from us, no, because we're a part of it. What is called "the external world" isn't external from us; it includes us.
I intended to refer to Hume, who had been mentioned as doing so, or those who took his position.
That may well be. And it may be that a desire for absolute certainty is behind the effort. But I still think the fact such skepticism is so contrary to how we live our lives that it should count against it, so to speak. If inductive reasoning (for example) is something we "have to do" by virtue of living, what induces us to think that there's no basis for it? Why question it in the first place?
Wouldn't it be due to the nature of our reason? When reason reflects on itself, it cannot fail to notice the problems in the existence and the knowledge of existence.
But that was exactly the response to people first positing that the Earth is spinning: "it doesn't seem like it's spinning."
It doesn't appear that way to your senses, but it is, right? Sure, we can explain why this is the case. The same is true for the bent stick and the optical illusion I posted.
Plato's point isn't that we are tricked by the stick in the water. It's that we can be tricked, and so our naive judgements aren't always going to lead us to the correct conclusions.
Maybe so. Hume was responding to the thinking of his day though, so it wasn't really a contrived or affected consideration.
Thanks. I hadn't heard it put quite like that.
Yeah. But so many folk take this as showing that it is never going to lead us to the correct conclusions. That's muddled.
I'm wondering whether there is any such philosophical discussion. Can you give an example of the topic of such a discussion?
Pragmatism is a broad topic, so I doubt that all philosophical discussions involving Pragmatism meet Ciceronianus' criteria for avoiding affectation.
I take it that "how we live" includes the differing values, worldviews and/or philosophical positions of each of us, rather than assuming some universal common sense view. Further, that we each have the opportunity to consider and reflect on positions that may differ from our own or that we had never previously considered, as well as to question the views we hold at any particular time.
Does the present discussion meet its own criteria? Is it only those philosophical discussions that are anti-philosophical which are relatively free of affectation?
Clearly. How do we find out that we are mislead? By other empirical observations. You have to trust some observations to conclude that you've been led astray in the first place.
Right, we could adopt the pragmatist view, which is that we can accept positions based on the benefit they grant to us. In this way, beliefs don't have to be justified by their truth status, but rather by the benefits that accrue from holding them. Hume didn't have access to this line of reasoning though.
The problem with the purely pragmatic view IMO, is that, while it certainly works for justifying the use of induction, it also seems like it could be used to justify sticking your head in the sand on all sorts of issues because "it feels better." But how can we know if sticking our head in the proverbial sand will actually maximize our benefit? For that we need to know the "truth of the matter," and so we come back to where we started.
Plus, I don't think it's the case that "people only care about the truth to the extent that such knowledge can benefit them." At least not in any direct sense. It seems to me that understanding truth is an essential element of freedom and self-determination, insofar as we aren't being led around by illusions and lies if we know the truth, and this leads to truth being sought for its own sake (Plato). Aristotle would say that, as the "rational animal," our telos/purpose is to discover truth, and it is in fulfilling this authentic purpose that we "flourish." In either take, which seem to get at something important, benefit comes from truth, not the other way around.
I tend to think of philosophy as a protracted means of finding ways for handling disagreement. Because all the things that philosophy talks about have their relevance in reference to handling disagreement. People keep disagreeing on what exists and what doesn't exist, what is true and what isn't true, how we can be sure that we know something, what is good and what is bad -- all these themes are covered by the standard disciplines of philosophy.
Disagreement isn't something trivial, it often has disastrous consequences, so it has to be taken seriously. But a philosophically inclined person just isn't able to handle disagreement in the "confident" way that the average person can. So a philosophically inclined person will think about the disagreement and try to find ways to make sense of it, or to even overcome it.
Of course, these attempts can then get momentum, get a life of their own, and people lose sight of the big picture why they're doing philosophy to begin with. That's when philosophy becomes the ivory tower, so alien to life as it is usually lived.
When it's done for ideological purposes.
Quoting Ciceronianus
The historical reception of Descartes would be comical, if it wouldn't be so sad and had such enormous consequences.
Even though Descartes made it clear that he wrote his philosophy specifically for the purpose of providing ready-made arguments that Roman Catholics can use for the purpose of converting non-Catholics (which is also the reason why the RCC allowed the publishing of his texts at all), he was somehow received into the history of philosophy as some kind of poor guy who was just trying to find his way while the mean mean RCC was breathing down his neck (and is thus eminently suitable to be considered the "Father of Modern Philosophy").
Instead of writing him off as yet another religious preacher, he was embraced as some kind of beacon of wisdom even by atheists. Well, apparently he and the RCC succeeded in their intents ...
I would say that pragmatism isnt about turning our attention away from whether actual events validate our predictions, in order to satisfy subjective needs. On the contrary, pragmatism recognizes that the actual events which validate or invalidate our predictions are themselves the products of our value-oriented social and material practices. Thus we are continually having to pragmatically recalibrate our criteria of truth and falsity.
Our conversation is now spread across two threads, this and my thread on Austin. Might have to choose one.
It is not obvious what counts as an empirical observation, and what counts as theoretical. All observations are interpretations. And we are very selective as to what we choose to see.
As for pragmatism, sure, you might as well believe what is useful, but it's a good idea not to think that because it is useful it is true. You seem not to disagree with this. doesn't:Quoting Joshs
Yes, great point. This is why I prefer philosophers like Aristotle to philosophers like Kant. As others have noted, it is perhaps more common on philosophy forums than among "professional" philosophers. With that said, I think it is also present among professionals, except there it occurs in more subtle ways. For example, Aristotle is quick to remind us that not all matters are susceptible of the same level of certitude, and I think the violation of this maxim is one clear way that philosophers tend to fall into 'affectation'. For instance: the idea that all legitimate knowledge must possess an apodictic kind of certitude, or must be known via the same means as the physical sciences, etc.
One may notice problems, but why extrapolate from them the notion that such problems are ubiquitous, regardless of considerations of context?
Most discussions related to ethics or questions of value would qualify, I think.
Yes.
Quoting Luke
It would seem to me that proposing that certain views are affectations isn't itself an affectation, as it would be to validate what we do all the time.
We know by sticking our head in the sand and seeing what happens. Before we do that, though, we'd consider what it is we wish to achieve by doing so. In fact, there are quite a few things we do without looking to determine what's "true."
William "Wild Bill"James may have said things suggesting what is true is what "works" but I think you'd find that Peirce and Dewey, and others, don't. Dewey thought the word "true" carried too much baggage. He thought that it's inappropriate to think only of propositions as true or false, but consider judgments as the subject matter. He felt that we are justified in making judgments when we act on the best evidence available. What that evidence indicates is what we are warranted in asserting.
Sometimes that evidence will be what "works." Sometimes it won't be. It happens that induction has been used successfully in the resolution of questions and problems for a very long time. Justification lies in the results of it use time and time again--the best evidence available on which to make a judgment of it.
Well, to give him his due he seems to have been a great mathematician. Perhaps the perceived need for absolute certainty worked to his benefit. Everyone seemed to desire that. I think of Berkeley, and his use of God to serve as a reassuring remedy for the results of his musings.
But isn't Philosophy about finding out the nature of the world, our knowledge of the world, and the limitation / boundary of our knowledge? What would your points of Philosophy be?
I don't understand the part after the comma. Are you saying: Proposing that certain views are affectations...validates what we do all the time?
It's a play off of the definition of "affectation" appearing at the beginning of the thread. If I criticize the view that we cannot know what the "external world" is, or whether it is, as an affectation I'm claiming that view is unnatural because we act as if it is and know what it is all the time. So, the claim it is an affectation isn't unnatural or aberrant, because it reaffirms that we act as if the external world exists and that we know what it is.
Do you really think Levinas actually approached other people in daily life as if he was "infinitely responsible" for them? That he actually felt indebted to just everyone he met simply because that other person was "an other"?
Nietzsche. Hardly an exemplar of the Übermensch himself.
Pretty much every religious philosopher.
We find out about the nature of the rest of world and the extent of our knowledge by our interaction with it, rather than by maintaining, without adequate evidence, that our interaction with it is inherently deficient.
I can think of two groups of reasons for this:
1. An authoritarian sense of entitlement; extreme self-confidence; the belief that when one opens one's mouth, the Absolute and Objective Truth comes out.
2. Existential dread; anxiety; the craving to make oneself feel less afraid, less vulnerable, and so taking for granted that everyone is experiencing that same anxiety as well, that this anxiety is part of "human nature".
Esp. older generations seem to have been taught that they are inherently deficient, by default. The belief that we are born bad and defective and yet need to be corrected.
Ah, that's interesting, as it suggests there is a religious reason behind the affectation. That would be consistent with the view that philosophy is the handmaiden of theology. The belief is similar to the concept of Original Sin. We're condemned to insufficiency; doomed not to know the world merely because we're human, the spawn of Adam and Eve. Inherently deficient by our nature. We seek to know the world (eat of the Tree of Knowledge) but because we dared to do so God has arranged that we never will, absent his help.
But then I recalled Wile's proof of Fermat's last theorem.
It sounds like youre seeing philosophers as advocating a way of life and then falling short of this ideal in their own life. But I would argue the central task of a philosophy is like that of a scientific theory, to present a model of the way things are. To then say Nietzsche or Levinas falls short of this model is like saying Einstein didnt take seriously Relativity in his private life. If a philosopher seems to fall short of what their philosophy argues for, I suggest it is not because they are hypocrites or have somehow forgotten what they have written, but reflects the limitations of their philosophy.
It depends. If "sticking your head in the sand" works well enough, then you never have an incentive to go out and try to learn more. People tend to be, in economic parlance, utility satisfiers, not maximizers. They look for "good enough" in a lot of things. At a social level, this might be how peoples end up in "low level equilibrium traps" of sorts. E.g., in Why Nations Fail there is an anecdotal story of some Roman emperor, I forget which, being presented with a scheme for mass producing glass. He was impressed, but thought it might disrupt the labor force, and so ordered that the process be banned rather than leaning into the innovation.
Against this tendency to stick with what works, there is that drive to "know what is really true," that Plato talks about. However, this tendency seems to manifest in individuals, and then reverse when it comes to people, plural.
:up:
Right, and I agree there are more supportable versions of pragmatism. I was thinking of the rather primitive versions, Pascal's Wager in particular.
Interesting. I've never quite understood this one. Pascal's Wager does seem like an affectation to me. Firstly, I don't know how one can believe something just for its potential utility. You either believe in god/s or not. Something either provides utility (in real time) or not. I don't accept that an atheist can adopt a genuine belief position simply on the basis of, 'what if I'm wrong?' Thoughts?
Secondly how do you pick the religion you are going to believe in pragmatically? If you pick Catholicism, then you go to hell if the Calvinists are right. What if Allah is god and Yahweh is heresy? What if the Zoroastrian deities are real? It seems a pretty limited wager.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This is an engaging question. What reason's do people have for pursuing philosophy? I would suggest that philosophy often comes from dissatisfaction and/or curiosity. Not everyone seems to need philosophy. It's not an appetite everyone shares. No doubt many of us can afford to examine our presuppositions and reflect on life with more 'critical thought' and compassion. But philosophy? Philosophy seems to me to be an umbrella term for many kinds of enquiry and speculative thought. Much of it superfluous (and dull) to the average person (I include myself in the average category).
Good point. Can one will ones' self into a belief? Possibly in politics.
Quoting Tom Storm
Its a matter of personality style. Think of the arc of a persons life in terms of a sequence of creativity cycles. Each cycle begins with the most incipient hint of a way of being in the world, of understanding, valuing and being affected by it. At this delicate and uncanny point in the cycle, what we have is no more than a subliminal bodily feeling or impression. One might call this aesthetic intuition. From this wisp of a feeling, we may progress to a more sharpened and crisp articulation of our understanding that we can verbalize in a poetic or prose form, perhaps via a story. With more sharpening and clarifying, we may end up with a form hat has the concreteness of empirical fact. If we push our thinking even farther in the direction of completeness and comprehensiveness, we arrive at a philosophical worldview, which itself may have an aesthetic, literary, empirical, ethical or spiritual focus, depending on how fully we develop the philosophical thought. Eventually, the whole cycle begins again when we replace a failing interpretation of the world with a new one.
Some observations concerning the creativity cycle: First, we can correlate these phases to cultural modalities such as art, literature, science, philosophy and spirituality.
Everyone experiences all phases of this cycle in some rudimentary form, so each of us is an incipient artist, scientist and philosopher. Second, given the fact that all phases of the cycle will have to be repeated when we replace one worldview with another, no particular phase has any superiority over the other. So why do some end up as plumbers, some as bankers, others as musicians and still others as scientists or philosophers? This is where personality style comes into play. While all of us repeatedly go through all the phases of the creativity cycle over the course of our lives, each of us is particularly suited to emphasize and articulate one phase over the others. This is why a musician will claim that music provides the most primordial access to truth, a poet will insist that poetry is the most sublime art, a scientist will extoll their seemingly privileged access to what is truly there, and a philosopher will try to usurp all of these domains within their own.
Quoting Joshs
Yes, I've seen that. I've never developed enough of a passion for any subject to master it or become so focused or monomaniacal. Although perhaps my common man's 'can't be fucked' is a lens of its own.
Thanks, I see what you're saying now.
However, although I agree that we naturally act without any doubt about what the "external world" is or whether it is, and although I might agree that it is unnatural to question such things, I would also question how natural it is to criticise those who question such things. It is one thing to act without question regarding things such as the existence of the "external world", but another thing to engage those who do question its existence. I think there is a clear distinction between acting without doubt about such things and engaging those who do doubt such things, and I question whether engaging the doubters is as much an affectation as is the doubting itself.
And, if not all of philosophy (or all philosophising) is an affectation, then by what criteria do you determine which parts of philosophy are affectation and which parts are not?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Perhaps this is why people nowadays can get away with affectation -- because there is no you-shall-burn-at-the-stake-for-heresy attached.
This is what it looks like, yes. But I make no claim about their intentions in this discrepancy; in fact, their intentions in this discrepancy is what I want to understand to begin with.
A model of the way things are -- for whom?
It would hardly be a first that someone presents a model of the way things are -- but which _other_ people, or _only some categories of people_ are supposed to believe.
I find this too hard to believe. I don't think it is possible to write a philosophical text, publish it (leaving aside for the moment the shenanigans surrounding the publication of some texts), without the author being aware that there are some, perhaps serious problems with what he has just presented.
C: Look, there's Sulla across the street
X: I had no idea he's only 5 inches tall.
C: What the hell are you talking about?
X: Well, look at him. Look at my finger. He's only slightly bigger than it.
C: Are you serious?
X: Oh my God, he's growing!
C: He's just crossing the street towards us.
X: How do you know he's not growing? He looked small, now he looks bigger. If you're right, then we can't trust our own sense of sight.
C: Do you actually think he's growing?
X: Well, he might be. He might not. Why do you think differently? What's wrong with you? You're the crazy one.
I don't see how this addresses my previous post.
Your OP question presupposes that some philosophy (or philosophising) is affectation while other philosophy (or philosophising) isn't. I am questioning this presupposition. As I alluded to in my last post, I don't see what criteria you use to judge that some philosophy (or questions or assumptions) is or is not affectation.
Your exchange above appears to suppose that X's comments are affectation without explaining why they are affectation. Is it because they are counterintuitive or controvert common sense? Is the critieria for affectation any philosophising (or any questions or assumptions) which is abnormal or contrary to common sense or to accepted wisdom? If so, then should philosophy (and science, too, I suppose) be restricted only to questions or assumptions that remain within the bounds of currently accepted wisdom and common sense; only to what is currently accepted or understood to be true? That wouldn't seem to leave much ground for any new ideas.
I got an eye exam the other day, and it was relevant how I saw things, with an objective standard being assumed that I varied from, so I was prescribed glasses to bring my vision into alignnment with what was thought to be the standard.
My vision wasn't so skewed that I saw objects in ways that would suggest a neurological problem (like not adjusting objects properly for distance), but I assume that could also be the case.
That's a pragmatic example of when it matters.
Philosophically it matters because it suggests an interpretative function of the eye apparatus and the brain and how that interplays on the object itself to the extent we may question whether our perception is a match with reality. I would presume that with my glasses off, I do not see objects as they are, but more as they are blurred.
Well, does the fact that they appear blurred to you with your glasses off persuade you they are or may be blurred?
Again, I'm referring to "affectation" as defined by Merriam-Webster online as I said in the OP:
Affectation" according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online, is:
"a. Speech or conduct not natural to oneself: an unnatural form of behavior meant especially to impress others; b. the act of taking on or displaying an attitude not natural to oneself or not genuinely felt."
I wouldn't consider it "natural to myself" to believe that someone across the street from me is 5 inches tall, but would consider it "natural to myself" to by surprised by, and to dispute, someone who did believe that.
My perception of the apple is blurred without the glasses. If I never had glasses, I would assume the apple and the blurriness were one in the same. My assumption is that there are other distortions between the apple and my perception that are not correctible or that they are correctible by means I don't yet know about.
People who have significant eyesight problems generally know this is the case. Someone nearsighted will come to understand that what appears blurry to them at a distance won't appear blurry when closer to them, and as they live in an environment with others with no such problems, will come to know that they have a problem others don't have. Someone blind will come to know others are not. I think it's unlikely that the nearsighted and the blind will conclude that all are nearsighted and all are blind.
I think it's unlikely that we are not blind in some regard we don't know about.
It seems unlikely that many people believe this.
We are in fact "blind in some regard" whether you believe. You can't see ultraviolet, hear high frequencies, taste certain flavors, feel minute variations, or smell certain smells.
Of course, people will generally make concessions of weakness, fault, or deficit when it comes to small or trivial things.
But they are unlikely to believe (much less openly admit) they might be blind in some way that matters.
I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people admit they can't smell an intruder like a dog.
What isn't natural for you to believe might be natural for someone else to believe (and vice versa). Again, by what criteria do you judge whether some belief or assumption or philosophy is an affectation? Is it simply when others are lying about their beliefs?
In this case, by conduct; by how those who maintain that we cannot know the nature of what we deal with everyday, or experience it, or some variant of that position, act every moment. Conduct indicates we have no doubt at all regarding the nature and use of the cup from which we drink coffee (or regarding coffee, for that matter).
One might say "well, that's just how I act in everyday life, not when I'm doing philosophy" or "well, I really do doubt, I just don't act like I doubt" but such responses aren't persuasive, really. They're aspects of the affectation. What can be more natural to us than how we live, how we actually interact with the rest of the world?
Which is merely to say that we're human beings. One might say the same of any living creature. Are they "blind" as well? We must be omnipotent, be God then, in order not to be "blind"? It seems a rather unusual way to use the word.
If there is something we do not know, then by definition, we are not omniscient. Your question, as I took it, was why we should ever doubt the accuracy of what we see before us, and that should we so doubt, we do it disingenuously.
You attempted to deal with a very simple case in the OP where you acknowledged that our vision did report to us information that could mislead us into thinking that a person grows in height as we move closer to them, but you correctly pointed out that our vision isn't the only thing that informs us of the world, but that our intelligence does as well. That is, I know you don't get physically larger when I get closer to you or that the straw in the glass of water doesn't actually bend even though it looks that way because I am able to noodle all that in my head and realize such perceptions need to be interpreted by me and with that I can figure out the world in which I live.
I then took a more complex case dealing with a person who might be truly blind to portions of reality incapable of sorting out what the world truly were like as in the case of the approaching subject or the bending straw. That then resulting in efforts to interpret "blind" very narrowly, as in surely someone who needs glasses knows when he's not wearing them that the world isn't actually blurred. I then explained that blindness is any sort of inability to sense things as they are, which is obviously the case because we all know that what we smell isn't what a dog smells. We can also imagine that there are sensations that no organism can detect.
The point of all of this is responsive to what I think is the larger inquiry, and that is whether folks like Descartes are foolish to question that which no one has a basis to question. I think the above discussion does provide such a basis.
It might be the case this answer was already given here maybe a few times. We act differently from what we believe because it is productive. But though I have no perfect reason to believe there is a truck coming on the other lane, and that my brain is not in a vat, I will still keep driving on my own lane and avoid the incoming truck.
A better example is, even though causation might be just regularity and that there is no guarantee that boiling eggs will make them edible, it is still a good bet to boil my eggs if I want to eat them.
Even if I don't personally believe in the permanence of the self, this belief will lead me nowhere, as I might be wrong and the self does actually stay through time. So I will try not to screw myself by eating junk all day. If I don't act as if I am the same person tomorrow, I won't reap any great benefits now.
To quote someone else, everyone is a realist once they walk out of the door.
There may be instances where doubt is appropriate. I'm trying to address the view that we should doubt in all cases, or cannot know in any case. That view may be based on unwarranted extrapolation from unusual cases to all cases, confusion, or misuse of language, as some philosophers have noted.
I wonder if there are other factors involved which incline some of us to question whether we can really know anything about the world. The reason I wonder that arises from the fact, which I don't think can reasonably be disputed, that we clearly act like we know something about, as we interact with it all the time, change it in various respects, create new constituents of it from existing constituents (furniture, cars, etc.), consume portions of it, and do many things with it all the time, simply by virtue of the fact that we live in it. We do that in most cases without any concern whatsoever that what we interact with may not really be what we think it is, or may be actually be something else. We have no concern, I think, because we have no reason to think that in most cases, and generally can arrive at any explanation in those instances when we do have reason. Why doubt when there's no persuasive reason to doubt?
Quoting Hanover
That's a fairly good summary of what I think--that's it's (generally) foolish to question that which no one has a basis to question. I disagree with you, though, as nothing I've seen in this thread provides such a basis.
There likely are things about the universe we can't know. We're not omniscient. We're human. These aren't particularly profound observations. It doesn't follow from this that we can't know anything, or can't know what is real.
Things we see are actually made up of things we can't see (though they have been determined). Very well. Again, we're human. We see in most cases exactly what we should see, being human. If that's the case, why is it that what we see isn't really what's there?
When we say we can't know what the world really or actually, I think we make certain assumptions, the primary of which is the assumption that there is something that is real behind what we experience which can't be determined. Something hidden from us because of our nature. It's a kind of religious view, perhaps.
Its a metaphysical view which formed the basis of thinking for the sciences until recently. It also lends support to particular religious perspectives. The metaphysics dependson the concept of substantiality. Mind and matter are composed of substance. To be a substance is to have intrinsic content, qualities, attributes that persist as self-identical, independently of their interactions with other aspects of the world. Since the mind, with its intrinsic , substantial qualities, differs from the substantial stuff of the external world, its representations of the world will always leave doubt concerning what remains intrinsic to external objects, and thus hidden from the minds eye. The question will always be left open as to what extent the mind makes contact with external substance. We only escape this doubt when we cease to assume the idea of intrinsic substance, and opt instead for a radical interconnectedness of subject and object ( Hegelian dialectics, phenomenology, pragmatism, hermeneutics).
Of course it's a religious/spiritual view. Religions/spiritualities start from the premise that _ordinary_ people don't see things "as they reallly are". (To which the religions/spiritualities then offer their solution: "Follow our religion/spirituality and then you will see things as they really are, and then you will be happy/content/self-actualized/self-realized.")
Not having senses as acute as those of some animals or technological devices is common to all humans, so nothing special. There's no threat to one's ego to admit to such deficits.
But who would even consider that they might not know the truth about God, or about some moral issue? Even people who style themselves as "seekers" are actually still completely sure about everything.
The image on the right was taken using film sensitive to reflected (not fluorescent) UV. The other is visible light.
With a bit of help, we can see UV.
Speaking of vision problems: There are vision problems that are impossible to correct or compensate for with various devices. Such as color blindness, or certain depth vision problems (because of which the person cannot "see" some optical illusions). Unlike a person with dioptric problems, such a person never has the chance to experience what it would be like to see "normally". Instead, they have to take on trust that there is something wrong with their vision, and they need to compensate deliberately, both cognitively and behaviorally, in order to function in a world designed by people who mostly don't have such vision problems.
The salient point here is that sometimes we have to take it on trust that there is or might be something wrong with us, or that we have a blindness of some kind, even though we can at best recognize this blindness only indirectly. This having to take things on trust is a significant vulnerability.
With a lot of interpretation.
Cunning.
Man is cunning.
And I refer here to the double meaning of the word "cunning", which in the beginning didn't have the negative connotation it tends to have nowadays.
I'm not sure if "on trust" is entirely accurate. I think it would be more a case of making a judgment based on the weight of the evidence, which may be indirect. What's the probability that everyone without the problem would lie to us, or be mistaken?
It seems to me that the view that we can never know the extent to which we (I don't think our minds are separate from us) make contact with the rest of the world is far more radical than the view that we do. The latter is based on what actually takes place to our knowledge when we interact with the rest of the world; the former is based on the belief that what takes place when we do so doesn't matter. What actually happens when we interact with the "external world" is apparently of no value.
It's not about others lying or being mistaken.
My personal example here is that I have a non-dioptric vision problem because of which I can't see some optical illusions, among other things. I remember back in school when other students and the physics textbook were talking about those optical illusions, and I just didn't see them. It's a peculiar situation: other people visibly express emotion over something, are excited, and I don't even see what they're talking about. It was an alienating experience, that's why I remembered it. How does one make sense of this feeling of alienation?
Ah. I see what you mean.
Quoting Ciceronianus
I think that what actually happens when we interact with the world is taken into account by all of the philosophies which
you accuse of affectation in their doubting. This is why they all come up with explanations for why the world makes sense to us. For Descartes God ensures that we have rational facilities which allow us to tell truth from error in our dealings with things. For Kant, it was our innate categories which steered us in the right direction. You undoubtedly have your own explanation as to why we can reliably make sense of our relations with the world. Im assuming you jettison (doubt) divinely-based a prioris of rationality in favor of empirically-based, biological foundations.
Youll notice that in order to assert whatever new and improved ground for reason a philosopher is embracing, they have to show why the previous eras assumptions should be placed in doubt. For instance, although Descartes may have done an awkward job of it , he needed to place in doubt the basis of medieval assumptions concerning knowledge in order to advance his alternative. Similarly, once you put Descartes divine source of cogitation into doubt, you take away his justification for rationality. And once you place into doubt Kants transcendental categories, you need a new basis for the relation between our conceptual schemes and the world. Your own pragmatically-based grounding of everyday knowledge may be susceptible to doubt on the part of certain contemporary philosophies and psychologies.
We know how things appear to us. There is no guarantee that these appearances give us exhaustive knowledge of how things are or that the nature of things is not (at least partially) hidden from us. It seems to me that to admit this is merely to exercise a modicum of intellectual humility which would make it, if anything, far from being an affectation. Closer to being an affectation would be to claim that what we can experience and understand of the world as it appears to is, or even must be, exhaustive of its nature.
Doesn't this example show the opposite of what the OP hopes to prove, namely that we have no reasonable basis to challenge the veracity of our senses?
If for millions of years we saw the flower as X, but now we learn the flower more truly appears as Y, can't we conclude for all things what we learned from the flower, namely that things as we sense them are not as they truly are?
If X is a perception inconsistent with reality, then the thesis of the OP (i.e. we have no reasonable basis to challenge the veracity of our senses) is disproved.
Once we establish a basis for our skepticism regarding the veracity of our perceptions in one instance (as we just did from your flower example), we'd then logically need to do the same for all perceptions, which leads us to Descartes, the person I feel the OP most wants to avoid.
What an I missing?
No guarantee if one is one the Quest for Certainty, I suppose. But in this unhappy, imperfect universe we must make judgments without the benefit of absolute knowledge, on the best evidence available at the time we make them. And we do, in real life, if we're wise.
And don't forget George Berkeley, the Irish priest who thought material things were just malarkey. God saved us all in his thinking as well.
I'm with Peirce in thinking that we shouldn't doubt in philosophy what we don't doubt in our hearts (which I take to refer to how we act and what we do, regardless of what we may say). So although the philosophers in question may figure something out to remedy their "doubt" the question remains why they "doubt" in the first place, which it seems comes down to a belief that we just are incapable of knowing by nature.
Quoting Ciceronianus
I dont think its coincidence that Peirce buttressed his epistemic realism with a belief in God. I should also mention that Dewey, James and Mead doubted the grounding of Peirces pragmaticism.
Quoting Ciceronianus
And you are arguing that we are capable of knowing. And what is knowing? It would seem that for you it is dependent on a process of weighing evidence, of having a belief, theory, expectation validated by reference to the world around us. I mentioned earlier that your own grounding of everyday knowledge in assured belief may be susceptible to doubt on the part of certain contemporary philosophies. The doubt I have in mind is not a denial that we can know things through evidence-based methods, but a doubt that belief-validation is the fundamental basis of everyday understanding. There is remarkable agreement between the later Wittgenstein and your pal Heidegger on this, as Lee Braver explains:
It seems to me youre trying to arrive at the conclusion these two reach without taking the extra step they take in bypassing epistemic belief entirely. But then, the price you pay for taking this step may not be worth it to you. By giving up epistemic belief as the ultimate basis of knowing in favor of language games, you eliminate skepticism concerning the existence of the world, but you turn that world into a place of relativism. After all, if evidence is no longer the adjudicator of the real, then my cultures world doesnt have to jibe with your cultures world. One doesnt doubt ones own world , but doubts that this world is the same one as anothers, and doubts that the world as it is for me now is the same one that I will
comprehend at a later date. One might wonder why anyone would find such a philosophy appealing. From an ethical point of view, while it destroys the idea of a same world of universal truths, it opens up a path toward tolerance and empathy toward those with alien values that is not available to common sense realist thinking about ethics.
Good question. There is good reason to doubt that Descartes doubted all he claimed to have doubted. After all, he took his motto from Ovid:
So why does he doubt? Quite simply to avoid the fate of Galileo at the hands of the Church. Doubt is for Descartes a rhetorical device. In the terms of this thread it was an affectation.
He hides behind but argues contrary to his pious pretenses. The building he intends to undermine is that of the Church. But he could not hope to live and have his work published if he openly spoke in opposition to the Church. And so, he calls everything into question without overtly calling the authority of the Church and its teaching into question.
In the first Meditation he says:
He begins the discourse on optics by affirming this but to other ends:
The science of optics is a study and theory of the nature of light. Its explanations are in terms of a physics of motion and physiology. Further, what is at issue is not the fact that the senses can deceive us but that they can be augmented and improved upon.
In a letter to Mersenne, Descartes reveals:
Quoted here
Still cautious, but Aristotle was for the Church the authority on secular things. Often, when citing his authority, it was not even necessary to call him by name, only "the philosopher"
Sure, we make judgements, inferences to what we think are the best explanations. But in philosophy, where consensus seems impossible, as opposed to science where it is operative, who decides what is the best evidence or the best basis for judgment, or what wisdom consists in?
Peirce famously doubted James' Pragmatism as well, and so began calling his philosophy "Pragmaticism" to distinguish it from that of Wild Bill. I think Peirce came to accept Dewey's views as similar to his in some respects, though, and that Dewey would agree with his criticism of Descartes' faux doubt among other things. I know nothing of Mead's views of Peirce, or Peirce's view of Mead if he had any.
Quoting Joshs
I'm not sure what you mean by "assured belief." I like Dewey's somewhat clumsy phrase "warranted assertability." All judgments are subject to revision, though.
Quoting Joshs
Well, in this thread I've been interested in exploring a different route, i.e. why it is that some even take the position that we can't know what's "in the external world" given the fact that our conduct, and indeed how we live, belies that claim.
Quoting Joshs
I don't understand why you think I take the position that "evidence is no longer the adjudicator of the real." Our interaction with the rest of the world and its results are the best evidence we have of the real.
Unless we're content with philosophy being a kind of intellectual scrum or free for all, we should make the best judgments we can using the same general method we use to make intelligent judgments in life and in science.
That's an interesting view. An affectation of necessity, as it were. That demon would be very handy in that case. Thank you for that insight.
I'm not sure of the extent to which philosophy "goes beyond the criteria exercised in the empirical domain." There's practical wisdom after all, in which I think would be included the philosophies of ancient schools like Stoicism and Epicureanism, but I'm not sure what you refer to.
The image on the right is colour-coded UV data. We are not seeing UV. Just like colour-coded gravitational fields in a computer graph is not the same as seeing gravity. We as humans completely lack the experience of UV, as it does not interact with our senses except sun burns.
Quoting Ciceronianus
I didnt explain myself very well. I meant that this is a position I assumed you would not take. But its worth examining the consequences of rejecting such a path. Going back to Descartes, the belief at that time that the world offers itself up to us in its unvarnished truth only when we use our faculties of reason correctly was accompanied by the anxiety that evil liars and manipulators could plunge unsuspecting innocents into a 17th century version of the Matrix. All an evil genius would have to do is take advantage of the fact that the world that appears to us doesnt have the power by itself to reveal its true nature, it needs our help via our proper use of rational faculties. Perhaps all Descartes succeeded in demonstrating to his peers is that those faculties are adept enough to make his doubt- based thought experiments seem ludicrous. And yet it did highlight a common assumption of the era, which is that the difference between truth and falsity hangs entirely on the functioning of a rather arbitrary mechanism of logical cogitation.
By the time we get to Peirce, the thinking has shifted in favor of a more equal participation of the material world in the production of truth, thanks to his absorption of Hegelian dialectic. Rationality is not dependent entirely on the skills of a solipsistic cogito, but is intersubjectively produced through interactions with the world. The Matrix scenario no longer makes sense given the dependence of truth on pragmatic interaction, so evil liars become less of a threat.
But still with Peirce we have to worry about situations in which we fail to gain purchase on truth:
The independence of that truth produces anxiety that we might fall victim to hallucination, madness, illusion. We doubt the reality of our world, which is different than saying we doubt that there is such a thing as a real world. That would be self-contradictory, given that doubting one thing is only possible against a wider backdrop of certainty.
But for Peirce as well as Descartes that certainty rests ultimately on faith, faith that whether we have gained proper access to it or not, there are intrinsic objective truths that apply to the world. For the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenologists, faith is no longer needed in order to ground certainty in the existence of the world. They have freed themselves of the anxiety that has accompanied all belief and evidence based foundations of the really true. For them it can never be the case that a disconnect exists between what is actual and what we think is actual, a source of fear that illusion and error could cloud our apprehension of what is true.
We always already find ourselves ensconced within one language game or another, one or another form of life providing the frame of intersubjectively shared certainty within which we can agree or disagree on what is true or false. The frame itself is not a belief but an unquestioned prerequisite and precondition for belief or doubt.
I hope that is not what is suggesting. I certainly don't read what he has said in that way. There's all sorts of situations in which it is entirely reasonable to doubt your senses.
What would be absurd is doubting them in every instance.
What the image shows is that with suitable equipment we can see IR. There's no suggestion that this is how the flower "truly" appears - a weird thought.
Quoting Hanover
So once seeing the Müller-Lyer Illusion would lead you to doubt every observation thereafter? I don't see why.
That doesn't follow. Take the example of forged money (notes or coins). Some money is forged. Some money is genuine. Both those statements must be true, or the distinction between them collapses. So one cannot ask of all notes and coins whether they are all forged. One can ask of each note or coin, whether it is forged. But when it has been established that a given note or coin is genuine, the question is empty.
:up:
I'm not sure how this is done in a practical sense. Is your following para the explanation?
Quoting Joshs
So we inhabit a series of contingent 'domains' which we can explore through our shared presuppositions or rules? Which means that we do not access Truth/Reality but shared truths/realities - frames which are without foundation, are relational and context dependent. A meta-narrative version of reality is not something even recognisable from this position. We inhabit forever preconditions for belief and doubt, but never reality itself. Can you expand on this or correct my take?
I think I see what you are getting at. I would worry that this way of putting it seems to claim (or could be misinterpreted to claim) that we are infallible or that certain beliefs are infallible. Don't we have to acknowledge that error (I assume that's what "a disconnect between what is actual and what we think is actual" means) is always possible? The point is, we can recognize it and rectify it (in principle).
Quoting Tom Storm
That seems unnecessarily pessimistic. We don't inhabit "preconditions for belief and doubt", we adopt them. When and if they fail, we can correct them. I'm not quite sure what inhabiting reality means, but if I understand what you are getting at, I would say we do inhabit reality - and the possibility of error, and the correction of error - is part of that.
Quoting Banno
It's an old one, but still a good one. Credit to Ryle.
Quoting Tom Storm
I think your summary captures the idea. The meaningful sense of what is true and what is false is only coherent relative to a background intelligibility that orients us in terms of what is at stake and what is at issue for us, and this background grounding shifts over time as our purposes change. Lee Braver puts it this way:
Wittgenstein likens this relationship between the fast dynamics of ascertaining proportional truth that play out within larger frames of grounding, and the slower movement of the grounding frames, to the waters of a river and the underlying river bed.
The forgery example makes clear the significance of subjectivity. That is, the distinction between a true dollar bill and a forged one does not come down to a discernable physical difference between the two because it's possible to create an exact replica. A perfect forgery would still be a forgery. Distinctions in the physical appearance might count as proof of the forgery, but the true distinction is what the authority declares to be real. If I forge a dollar bill and the king is so impressed he declares it real, then it is real.
But the more telling question is this: In @Banno's example, he presented two pictures of the same flower. Which one is the accurate depiction? If we say that Flower B is the correct depiction, do we then say that Flower A is an incorrect version? I don't think we do. My assumption is that you would say that both A and B are correct depictions, just under different conditions.
Consider another example with Flower C, which is a photoshopped version of Flower A, that makes it looks larger and more colorful. Would we not all say that Flower C is not an accurate depiction of the "the flower"? What then makes A and B correct depictions but not C? That is, why is "the flower" under conditions C not a valid flower but the conditions that prevail upon A and B allow the flower to retain its validity.
And "the flower" is the complicated entity that somehow prevails throughout the conditions regardless of what they are.
I'd suggest that what makes us want to say that C is a fake is that we've added something to "the flower" which neither A nor B contains. This distinction collapses, I'd argue, because there's no meaningful difference between the arbitrary changes we impose by photoshopping as there is with regard to the arbitrary changes we might make to the external environment or to our own ability to perceive.
That is, what it means for A and B to be the same but only under "different conditions" but not for C only makes sense if we abitrarily decide which conditions are invasive enough for us to allow "the flower" to still persist.
Perceptions can be manipulated in a number of ways: (1) by manipulating the external environment by changing the lighting, the temperature, the air pollution level, whether it's suspended in air or in a glass of milk, and all sorts of ways; (2) by intentionally changing it by photoshopping it, drawing on it, cutting its leaves, etc; or (3) by changing the perceiver, by altering someone's consciousness, optic nerves, or putting rose colored glasses on the perceiver.
The question then becomes: once I have the phenomenal state of the flower in my consciousness, which one of those still represents the flower? Keep in mind, the question is loaded because it uses the word "represents" which indicates "the flower" is noumenal and has been subjected to all sorts of conditions from within and without that makes us question whether this representation is an accurate one or whether we have been so deceived to see it not as it is.
That is, this is indirect realism, with the italics to indicate we are not questioning whether our perceptions are of something external and real (i.e. not figments of our imagination), but we are questioning whether we have a blurred, photoshopped, or deteriorated version. That I might see a flower as a gorilla under certain conditions only means I am denying direct realism, claiming that the flower does have anything within it that makes it inherently gorilla-like. I see whatever I do as an interplay of the object, the environment, and my subjective way of seeing things, which is why Descartes was correct in asking whether his perceptions were reliable measures of reality.
In order to define what is "fake", by definition one must define what is "real". As your counterfeiting example demonstrates, many, if not most common philosophical examples are of an inter-subjective, not objective nature. Thus in those circumstances perspective is critical because we are addressing opinions, not objective facts.
Right. As for logic, unwarranted extrapolation is a logical fallacy, I think.
What kind of conduct and thought makes us miserable and how to avoid them seems demonstrable enough in most cases.
How often does that happen? When was the last time you genuinely doubted the reality of the world, in general and not in a particular context? What happened when you did? I think our conduct is the best measure of the reality of our claimed doubt of reality.
I know next to nothing of phenomenology, but something of pragmatism (that of Dewey, at least) and OLP and related criticisms of traditional metaphysics and epistemology, and find them persuasive. I'm just trying to take a different approach; unsuccessfully, perhaps, but I think it's interesting.
On the assumption that you have not forged a dollar bill and do not have the abiity to do so, you meant to say "If I were to forge a dollar bill and the USA (I assume this scenario is set in the USA?) has become a monarchy, then it would be real". Maybe. It depends how real dollar bills are defined in the USA. I rather doubt that your scenario is even likely, so I don't feel any need to decide that question.
There's an example in Sense and Sensibilia (pp.65,66) "Suppose that there is a species of fish which looks vividly multi-coloured, slightly glowing perhaps, at a depth of a thousand feet. I ask you what its real colour is. So you catch a specimen and lay it out on deck, making sure the condition of the light is just about normal, and you find that it looks a muddy sort of greyish white. Well, is that its real colour? It's clear enough at any rate that we don't have to say so. In fact, is there any right answer in such a case?"
I conclude that our ordinary understanding of colour will settle what to say about normal variations under various conditions, but doesn't settle what to say about all possible variations under all possible conditions, now matter how remote and fantastic they are.
Quoting Hanover
Well, I don't see why you say that the difference is not meaningful. The fact that the changes are, in a way, arbitrary is irrelevant.
Quoting Hanover
You posit a number of different circumstances of different kinds. Why would there be the same answer for all of them? See above.
I find the next paragraphs very confusing, because you shift between talking of the flower and the picture without being clear which you mean, so I'll skip to the chase.
Quoting Hanover
I would say the object, the environment and me. However, whatever we say about these cases does not justify asserting that the same difficulties apply to everything we see.
Sure. I guess I was suggesting that the world we inhabit is one where these precognitions are given. But I get your point. I was looking for a stronger word than adopt because in some cases we don't choose or adopt them, they may more be like presuppositions for a world we think of as true. That kind of thing.
The concerns you express here address our epistemic and empirical goals within the confines of our paradigmatic schemes, but those paradigmatic grounds for our beliefs are not themselves beliefs, so at this level the issue is not one of fallibility or error. Our paradigms are not epistemic hooks looking to grasp the actual, they are already actual. This does not mean that there no progress of paradigms, but this cannot be u destroy as a progress from error to truth.
Yes. The point was not well put. It comes back to the question of paradigm breakdown.
Perhaps Kuhn's concept of an anomaly is useful here, but that presupposes some sort of intrusion from "outside" - "actuality"?. It's important to remember (or point out - what I've read seems mostly to forget this) that paradigms/conceptual schemata are not static constructions but dynamic systems of thinking and practicing. So I don't think that anomalies are necessarily the only form of breakdown. Internal difficulties (contradictions?) seem to me just as plausible.
"Subjectivity"? Whenever you see that word, ask what it is doing. No, it's about intentionality; the genuine note is made with the intent of building a system of exchange, which the counterfeit can then undermine. Subjectivity is unhelpful.
Quoting Hanover
Accurate for what purpose?
Quoting Hanover
Valid in what argument?
Context. Your claim was that we can't see UV light. I showed a picture of a flower in UV light. We can see the picture. It's an accurate depiction of the reflection of UV on the flower, and a valid observation of the structure of a flower as shown in UV... and so on.
Quoting Hanover The image is not arbitrary, but is determined by the reflection of UV and the subsequent filters and film used.
You are way off. Quoting Hanover
It is a loaded question, but because it supposes the nonsense of "phenomenal state of the flower in my consciousness". Poor philosophical theories produce poor results.
Quoting Hanover
No, it's a flower, seen in UV. I know you can't drop all that nonsense about things in themselves and phenomenal states of consciousness, and although it provides a basis for some wonderful pretence, in the end it confuses you.
The point wasn't to determine the liklihood of how a forgery might or might not occur, but it was to point out that a forgery is a purely subjective determination. It's a judgment, having nothing to do with the physical composition of the object, unless the perceiver dictates it does. Two entirely similar US dollars, exactly the same in terms of ink, paper, and design can be different only in terms that one is forged and one not and that will affect the value of each. A forgery is a forgery due to the intent and authority of the maker, not due to the quality of the item. Quoting Ludwig VGive me a concrete case then of an object that is unimpacted by the perceiver so that you can say object A is described as having the qualities of a, b, and c in all instances.
We determined Banno's flower is not one such object and it seems your fish is not either. What then is that object you refer to?
Accurate for reflecting what is really there, with the term "really" being used in the sense you use the term "real" in the terms direct realism and indirect realism. If we concede a pragmatism, then idealism works as well.Quoting Banno
I wasn't speaking in terms of maintaining the validity of a syllogism. I was speaking in terms of the photograph being an accurate representation of the flower.Quoting Banno
You do not see the UV light. You see the photographic representation of the flower of how it might look to someone who can see UV rays. What you see is a representation of a flower, which is then represented to you in your consciousness.
Anyway, which one is the flower, A or B? Both? C? I just want to know what color it is. If I'm colorblind, is it black?Quoting Banno
I do have a phenomenal state in my consciousness and it goes away when I close my eyes, but the flower remains. It seems like two different things. Is it not?
Great idea for lyric too!
I should weave that in to the upcoming short story contest.
But what is real depends on what is not real. On context.
Quoting Hanover
The photo is an accurate representation of the flower as seen with UV light. your asking if it validly represents the flower is confused. We can ask, quite validly, if the filter cut out sufficient red light, or if the emulsion might have emphasised some frequency a bit too much. Such considerations do not stop the photo being of the flower in UV light.
Quoting Hanover Nor do you see red light. You see red.
Quoting Hanover
The homunculus. No.
Quoting Hanover
Neither. They are photos. And both. The flower has structural features that cannot be seen in visible light, but can in UV. We now understand bee behaviour better, because they seek out these structures due to their sensitivity to UV. Context.
Quoting Hanover
That's an affectatious way of saying that you don't see the flower when your eyes are closed.
I don't disagree with that, but my point was that these ancient schools had metaphysical ideas which underpinned their ethical practices. It is arguable that different ideas, different metaphysical assumptions, work for different people. It is also arguable that none of them are truth-apt. Thus, their truth or falsity is not the significant issue, but rather their efficacy in producing misery or happiness is.
Yes, one might well want to tease out some details about them. They certainly are not ordinary, true-or-false beliefs. But whether they are beliefs or precognitions, they seem to involve propositions. Quite how to express it is another question. You seem to be verging on Kantian apriori. I'm thinking something more like grammatical or hinge propositions, after Wittgenstein.
I accept that the issue is not one of fallibility or error. But if they are beliefs, they involve propositions. So, not ordinary contingent propositions, but propositions of a different kind. Surely?
Well, any true-or-false statement is determined by someone, if that's what you mean. But that doesn't mean it is subjective. Since the definition is specified by law, I would say the question is objective.
Being a forgery is not a matter of its physical constitution. I never suggested otherwise.
Quoting Hanover
How about Banno's flower? It has four petals, a definite height and flowers at a particular time of year.
You may have determined something about Banno's flower, but I didn't determine anything about it. I couldn't make head or tail of what you were going on about.
I agree. But I baulk whenever someone says "It's subjective". It's a distinction I don't think is of as much use as some folk supose.
Well, I agree. Perhaps I should not have characterized that question as objective. On the other hand, I did specify my reason for applying that term.
Quoting Janus Good question. One way of answering is to consider it's use in . The truism that perception always involves a perceiver, is associated with "beauty in the eye of the beholder", "nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so" and the conclusion that all perception is subjective looks plausible. How can I say that forgery or not is not in the eye of the beholder, or that thinking does not make forgery so (or not) without appearing to deny the truism?
I have to admit that my way of putting the issue might be taken to suggest that Hanover's motivation is suspect. So I have to clarify that I don't doubt that Hanover believes what he is saying.
Any inconsistency between the flower and the perception is defined as distortion. If the radio transmits a song filled with static, we don't say the static was part of the song. We say the song was distorted by the static. If you ask if I'm hearing the song, my answer is I'm hearing parts of the song and parts of other things as well, but, to the extent the song is X, I'm not hearing X. I'm hearing all sorts of other things.
What holds true of hearing the song holds true of all perceptions of things. We have to determine which part of Object X I am sensing against those perceptions I am having of things imparted upon Object X if we want to distill what Object X is. What is the undistorted X?
My position is that it is unknowable because the perception necessarily is filled with all sorts of distortions from within me and from the environment. Pragmatically, I live my life dealing with distortions of varying degrees, but the thing is not the distortion.Quoting Banno
What the bee can sense is that which assists in its survival, regardless of whether it bears any resemblence to the flower.
Either the flower is red or the flower is white. Either the flower has certain structural features or it does not. What is different about color in that it can vary from perceiver to perceiver but not change the fact that it's the same flower but if the structural feature of the flower is different from one flower to the next it's a different flower?
Quoting Banno
If I have an image of the flower in my mind after I close my eyes, I experience the phenomenal state of the flower with my eyes closed. If I open my eyes and that elicits a flower experience, then I then have that experience. Phenomenal states are brain created, often elicited by our senses, but not always.
That's just a restatement of naive realism.Quoting Ludwig V
Then re-read it and see if you can better understand what I said.
I'm uncertain what metaphysical ideas you think underpin feelings of pain or unhappiness and judgments regarding how to avoid it. If they amount to "ideas" such as that there is an "external world" which has things in it which cause us pain or unhappiness, then I think we're speaking of what I've been calling affectation. I don't think this sort of metaphysics was indulged in by the Stoics, at least.
Do you really think there is an image of the flower in your mind? Is that image the phenomenal state you refer to, or is the image distinct from the phenomenal state?
Or we could say that these are two types of phenomenological experience, experience given to us in distinctly different modalities. If I see an actual flower, the object I actual see is already shaped by my expectations, which I draw from memory. It is a concatenation or amalgam of expectations and the meager data that is given to me from the world. When I close my eyes I eliminate the data from the world ( which as I said is already concept-laden) and draw strictly from memory. In either case, the flower with its petals is not something there i. the world but a subjective construction. More precisely, the concept of flower is an intersubjectively constructed object. Its objectivity is thus a socially constituted ideal. We judge error and illusion in perception in relation not to a world as it is in itself but in relation to our constructed idealities, which, being relative, can always be other than how we now constitute them as objectively existing.
I have a phenomenological state that seems to me to be elicited by an external stimuli, but I know that it can be elicited without it because people dream and some people have hallucinations elicited by brain injury, direct brain stimulation, drug use, or perhaps some sort of mental illness.
I say all this because I do think it to be an image that is distinct from the flower.
The phenomenological state is the full brain state, which would include the image, the smells around me, my hunger, my thoughts of getting home in time for dinner, my slight headache, and whatever other fleeting thoughts that might be within me.
Despite there being all sorts of more elementary components you might be able find within a phenomenological state, the conscious state presents as a holistic event. I typically refer to this idea as the transcendental unity of apperception when I'm hanging out with my friends.
This just seems doubtful. I would expect that an infant sees what I see when it looks at a flower, despite it not having any sense of what is socially agreed upon. This concept would apply cross-culturally as well, lending support to the idea that we reach out to the flower to pick it not due to some inter-subjective, socially agreed upon basis, but because we think the flower it out past our hand ripe for picking.
Maybe. But it is what you asked for. Where have I gone wrong?
This may not be a strictly philosophical observation, but does it not occur to you that calling that doctrine "naive" realism may be an instance of the rhetorical tactic of giving a dog a bad name? I think you'll find that "direct" realism is less tendentious. Names for doctrines are harder to get right than you might think.
If I were to see a small blip on a radar screen showing me an airplane, would that be an airplane or a representation of one?
Why do you think that when you see an actual flower, you actually see something else?
Quoting Joshs
Quite so. Thought it is a bit odd to refer to a concept as an object. Still, it would be picky to object. It is, I submit, a concept of a living think that grows, flowers, sets seeds and so forth - planted, say, in my front garden. Some flowers manage all of that without any help from me at all. Others need a hand and some TLC.
Quoting Joshs
I think that you misunderstand what objectivity is. It is something that happens irrespective of any socially constructed ideal
Quoting Hanover
William James thought that what an infant sees in the beginning is "a buzzing, blooming, confusion", just because it doesn't have any sense of what has been socially agreed upon. Sadly, they can't tell us, and we can't see it.
Quoting Leontiskos
Are you looking for the "raw" experience? I'm not sure you'll find it there. Since it will be before any concepts are applied (since they are not yet acquired), it will be indistinguishable from seeing nothing.
Well, it depends what you mean by a representation. There's the kind of representation that is a picture and the kind that is a symbol. The blip is a representation in the symbolic sense.
I think we all see flowers fairly consistently cross-culturally, indicating the way in which we perceive relates to biology as opposed to culture. That is, tribe members from the rain forest see flowers as I see flowers, despite our not sharing social norms. They may worship flowers and hold them as sacred objects, but they don't see them in the chaotic state you're describing how James suggests infants see things.
I didnt mean to suggest they a baby has to wait till it is informed of a social construct till it can recognize an object as a flower. What I meant was that the baby constructs the idea of a unitary object like a flower out of constantly changing perspectives, which it coordinates with its own movements. This personally synthesized construction
is not the same thing as the intersubjectively constructed empirical concept of flower, the identical flower for everyone. This identical flower for all is something that no one actually sees, since it is an abstraction derived from multiple vantages.
It's all symbolic. You can't just remove the instances that show indirect realism and call them the indirect sort without having some basis for that.
What's all symbolic?
Everything that you sense. Such is the nature of indirect realism. That's why it's called representationalism. Your phenomenlogical state of the flower is the symbol you have for that flower.
You are arbitrarily claiming that some perceptions are symbolic and others not. When you see the flower, what you see is a representation of it, just like when you see a blip on a computer screen, you see a representation of an airplane.
What I meant was that the idea of a spatial object as a persistingly self-identical thing enduring throughout changes in perspective is something we surmise, something we contribute to the phenomenon in front of us rather than something the world contributes. So what we see is a melding of conceptual expectation and what the world contributes, and the two sides are inextricably interwoven with each other.
Quoting Ludwig V
Again, Im thinking of objectivity as empirical objectivity. Following Husserl, this way of seeing objects is an idealization, The empirical object is something that no one actually sees, because it is a social construction derived from myriad subjective perspectives.
It seems plausible to me to think that perception is conceptually mediated. At the very least things seen, which are obviously not isolated from the rest of the visual field, as noticed, stand out as gestalts, as figure stands out from ground.
If 'see' is taken to mean something like 'the changing pattern of tones and colours formed on the retina' then we can say we always see the whole visual field. But this would be Jame's "buzzing blooming confusion' until something stands out as significant, with the rest of the visual field remaining 'invisible' or 'transparent'. We might say the rest is seen, but it is not consciously seen.
So, I don't think reality is socially or culturally constructed, but rather is merely socially or culturally mediated. There is always something real there which constrains what can be seen, but how what is there is seen may vary from culture to culture and individual to individual.
I'm saying that the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Neoplatonists, as three examples. had very definite and different metaphysical postulates which formed integral parts of their respective systems and were (at least understood to be) conducive to the kinds of strategies each employed to deal with pain and suffering and/ or spiritual advancement. In other words, the various metaphysical presuppositions were integral to the various practices involved in the teachings.
Quoting Banno
I'd say there are only objective facts or actualities. If you prefer vanilla to chocolate that would be an objective fact about you, so I'm not seeing much scope for confusion there.
Why engage in this kind of categorization? We're referring to processes, not isolated events or things. When a person is walking, the image of a person walking doesn't take form in their minds, which then induce their legs to move appropriately. They simply walk. People who dream are dreaming. They're having a dream (not encountering images coming into being in their minds). People who have hallucinations are hallucinating, for whatever reason. They have hallucinations (there are no images or sounds or things that they encounter). People who see a flower see a flower (not a sense datum or combination of them). People who look at a radar screen are looking at a radar screen (not an airplane, not a "blip").
What is it that you think this shows? So:
Quoting Hanover
The flower is one object; the fish, one object.
There's a view that we only see things indirectly, and that view presents itself as opposed to the view that we only ever see things directly, building for itself the straw man of "direct realism". But if one gives a bit of thought to the issue, instead of just reacting, it is clear that the alternate to our seeing things only indirectly is that we sometimes see them directly, sometimes indirectly.
"Sir. there is a submarine off the port bow!"
"How do you know, Sonar Operator?" commands Captain Hanover
"I can see it on the screen!"
"Oh, that's not a Submarine! It's just a blip on the screen! And anyway, sonar uses sound, so you can't see with Sonar! Let me know when you see the submarine directly!"
Lost with all hands...
Quoting Hanover
It's also true. Indeed, by the end of this thread, you are agreeing that it is true.
Quoting Hanover
So we come across Hanover singing along to "Let it be" on his little transistor radio, the song barely discernible through the hiss and the hum. If we ask him what song he is listening to, his reply, despite the singing, is "I'm not listening to a song, but only to parts of a song, so I'm not hearing "let it be" I'm hearing all sorts of other things". (notice that this is a paraphrasing of his own words).
Quoting Hanover
Thanks for this. It makes your mistake much clearer. The "undistorted X" is the song, in the second example, and the submarine, in the first. You have the thing and the perception of the thing confused. You think that you never see a flower because you only ever see it with your eyes, and never hear a song because you only ever hear it with your ears. Stove's Jew box, rather than his gem. Hence your conclusion: "What is the undistorted X? My position is that it is unknowable because the perception necessarily is filled with all sorts of distortions from within me and from the environment." You hold that you never see the sub or hear "let it be". That's enough of a reductio to reject your view.
But you add "Either the flower is red or the flower is white. Either the flower has certain structural features or it does not. What is different about colour in that it can vary from perceiver to perceiver but not change the fact that it's the same flower". My bolding. You agree that the flower has four petals, and that this is the case for you, for me, and for the bee. You are agreeing that there are things about the flower that are true regardless of one's perceptions. Where previously you had insisted that "My position is that it is unknowable" you now agree the flower has four petals. You don't believe your own theory.
So because our calling it a "flower" is a social construct, we never see the flower?
So I ask my question once again so I can understand what you're talking about. You say there are certain objects we see directly. We will call them D. There are certain objects we see indirectly. We will call them I. Give me a list of object Ds and then a list of object Is. I can then go back and forth between the two and figure out what the rule is that you are using to place each in its respective catagory.
Quoting Banno
What I hear is an interpretation of sound waves. It's for that reason that when you sing behind a wall, I don't hear the song. What do you suppose I hear when I hear the song?
Quoting Banno
A realist, which I think we both are, holds only that things exist outside the mind. The simple act of existing is not a property. What I can say of the flower is that it exists. What I can say of my perception of the flower is that it has four petals. I don't think I'm inconsistent in my position.
No.
And that repeated mischaracterisation of those who reject indirect realism is at the heart of why these threads are interminable. Sometimes you see stuff directly, sometimes you see the same stuff indirectly.
Quoting Hanover
I'm not at all sure what you are claiming here. So you think that you only ever hear "interpreted sound waves", and hence you never hear songs? I propose that when you hear a song, it is the song that you hear.
Quoting Hanover
A realist will say that it is true that the flower has four petals, and that this is true regardless of what you percieve. As opposed to @Joshs, who apparently thinks that since the language we use for the flower is communal, the number of petals is, too.
Very well, once you overcome your exasperation, in column 1 tell me those instances where we see directly and in column 2 tell me those instances where we see indirectly, offering whatever context you need.
Quoting Banno
Is the song not the sound waves? Is it just the experience of hearing sounds? Quoting Banno
A realist makes no epistemological claim. He doesn't suggest an accuracy of the senses. He will say that the flower exists however it does independently of the observer. He has no opinion on how many petals it has.
Quoting Hanover
Well, yes, its not. It's a Beetles song, heard many times before, that I can play bits of and that many will be able to sing along with and which quite a few folk have made their own.
Quoting Hanover
That's not right, as you agree when you say "He will say that the flower exists however it does independently of the observer". The realist commits to the view that "the flower has four petals" is either true, or it is false, and that this is so regardless of who is looking at it or how. Those are epistemological claims. That is as opposed to antirealism, which claims that the number of petals is indeterminate, usually until observed; and thereby commits to a non-bivalent logic.
Quoting Banno
The quoted text continues...
Quoting Ludwig V
The point Austin makes quite early seems to me to cover this:
You didn't see it directly, you saw it through a telescope, or a mirror, or only its shadow; how we are to understand "direct" perception depends entirely on what it is contrasted with; so of course it is difficult to imagine what "direct perception" is, per se. It's a nonsense, an invention of the defenders of the sort of argument Ayer is presenting. You can find examples in every thread on perception*. Quoting Antony Nickles
Yes!
You say there are two sorts of perceptions: direct and indirect. I ask you to give me examples of each. You say it's too complicated?Quoting Banno
I want to bring this song thing into my house. What do I bring in my house to have that song? As we've determined, realism demands the song thing be able to exist independent of the perceiver.
Quoting Banno
A realist knows nothing about the flower except that it exists or not. This has nothing to do with how we know things or what counts for knowledge.
Quoting Banno
This is indirect realism, just with you claiming varying degrees of indirectness. There is no pure direct perception as you've described it, but just your arbitrary gradations of directness versus indirectness. Perhaps me looking at the flower is more direct than me seeing its shadow. Is that all you're saying: everything is blurred to some degree, just some more than others, and the more unblurred is called "direct" when contrasted with the more blurred?
Then we have to determine somehow which perceptions are most closely correlated to the noumenal flower in order to rank the perceptions from most direct to least direct?
This goes back to my request for a list. You can't avoid making this concrete with actual examples of direct and indirect perceptions or at least providing which are more and which are less direct and then providing reasons why you place them on your sliding scale.
Hence the quote in the next post.
Quoting Hanover
Not I. I'm supporting Austin's rejection of that distinction. But we do sometimes see things directly, sometimes indirectly - I woudln't call these "sorts of perceptions". I've already given several examples - seeing the sub directly as opposed to via sonar; seeing the flower directly as opposed to seeing a picture of it; seeing something directly as opposed to seeing it through a telescope, or in a mirror, or seeing it's shadow.
Quoting Hanover
You have an odd notion of what a song is. Download it on Tidal. Better quality.
Quoting Hanover
I don't have to do anything of the sort. You made that mess for yourself.
This Austin quote isn't controversial to any degree. He's not discussing metaphysics at all, but instead is just trying to hammer out how we use the term "direct" and "indirect." The fact that we have reasons to distinguish between those things we perceive without obvious interference between ourselves and the object offers a reason why we have words for that, but that's as far as it goes. It says nothing about reality. It just talks about how we talk.
I'm doing no such thing.
Odd, that you repeatedly misattribute stuff to me.
Quoting Hanover
Risible.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
Following Husserl, there are different components that contribute to what we see. We perceive the actual flower in front of us but apperceive the empirical same flower for all. In both cases we fill in from memory what isnt actually in front of us. Parts of the flower may be visually occluded, the outline and coloration may have breaks, and inconsistencies, but we still perceive the whole flower based on what we fill in from many previous experiences of it. In empirical seeing, we also include the socially agreed upon idealizations we have learned, such as pure geometric shapes. Ask a child to draw a desk in front of them and they will try and draw a pure rectangle or square rather than the perspectivally given object presented to them.
A history of art book offers a chronology of changes of socially shaped ways of perceiving. In many respects, this has involved leaning to unsee previous socially formed notions of how things present themselves to us. Greek sculptors unsaw the rigid, depersonalized statues of the Egyptians, Assyrians and Mesopotamians when they discovered the inner dynamism of human beings. Renaissance artists had to unsee the inherited idea of a perspective-free landscape, no unifying light source and children depicted as tiny adults. Impressionist painters learned to unsee objects reflecting only a narrow band of colors onto the eye in favor of trees, skies and seas composed of every color in the rainbow. Expressionists taught themselves to unsee scenes in which subjective mood played no part in how things appear., giving us Van Goghs Starry Night and Munchs Scream.
Are you claiming that the ancient Egyptians and others perceived each other as rigid and depersonalized, expressionless? That the Greeks discovered the inner dynamism of human beings (whatever that may mean)--those before them were unaware that humans could do more than stand and sit (referring to statutes) or could laugh or cry? People before the Renaissance thought children looked like tiny adults--that's why they drew them that way? That before the Impressionists, people didn't perceive all the colors of the rainbow?
If so, why not say so? I suspect you don't. You refer instead to how particular artists depicted people, something which may vary for many reasons, some technological, some cultural. On what basis do you conflate what we see with what we paint or sculpt? If you do that, I suppose it's easy enough to conflate what we see with what we dream or hallucinate.
What we see is a function not simply of what random pixels of shape and color happen to impinge on our retinas. It is a function of what patterns we are able to synthesize out of this chaos of sensation. We have to discern correlations among initially disparate elements of the world, and coordinate these with our own movements.
In addition, we have to correlate different sense modalities associated with what we see into a unity.
Perception strives to achieve relative regularities and stabilities in navigating our surroundings, not veridical truths. It is about goal-oriented interaction, not mirroring. Thats why puppies deprived of movement in their early years fail to see objects properly, despite a healthy visual system. And why when wearing glasses that invert our visual field, eventually we come to see the world right side up again despite no change in how the visual information is reaching us. When we hallucinate from Lsd, which fragments the constructed stabilities and regularities, we can learn to re-stabilize the chaotic scene somewhat by adjusting our interactions with it. At the very least, we can eventually learn to separate out the influence of the drug from the changes in the visual scene, just as we figure out the distorting effect of bad glasses.
Sense modalities coordinate with each other, with concepts we have learned about the world and with our movements. And our movements coordinate with the seen world in ever more complex ways so as to produce new patterns where before we saw nothing. Perception sees through interacting. Artists see nuanced gradations of color the rest of us dont see. Musicians perceive sound patterns others cannot.
Because perception is conceptually mediated, whether we see a random pattern of dots or recognizable letters forming words or a face is a function of what we expect to see. Optical illusions and the ability to understand spoken and written language depends on our expectations filing in shapes that are incomplete. We see a completely formed letter A even though what is there is a degraded and broken set of points. We hear a complete sentence even though some of the words have been drowned out by background noise.
We see facial expression, bodily comportment, posture and attitude based on what we expect in the others behavior. The pre-Greek cultures produced art that expressed their ways of interpreting human behavior based on cultural schemes of understanding The Greek enlightenment produced a psychological, philosophical, artistic , literary and spiritual revolution in thinking that was expressed in new expectations in seeing the human form through sculpure. Many art historians have written about the originality of the Greeks in seeing persons as animated by an inner volition or movement absent from ancient ways of thinking.
What the Renaissance brought to seeing was the recognition that the elements of a scene are related to each more radically than simply by the fact that they all fit within the room or landscape. They are tied together in relation to each other and to the viewer by a unified perspective, and by a unified light source. These relational patterns were invisible to previous seers, who only had simpler notions like shrinking size correlates with distance from the viewer. It is not that only the Impressionists saw the rainbow , it is that they were the first Western painters to see that the rainbow resides in all objects that light illuminates. Again , this is a matter of construing more complex forms of relational pattern tying one element of a visual scene with all the other elements than had previously been seen .
Yes, the trouble with 's posts is that he hasn't said what his point is. It is set as a reply to my 'So because our calling it a "flower" is a social construct, we never see the flower?', but how?
Joshs adopts the atomistic view that we "build" the objects around us from sense impressions or some such, form the "random (sic.) pixels of shape and color happen to impinge on our retinas... construing more complex forms of relational pattern tying one element of a visual scene with all the other elements." More recent work shows that the process is one of prediction rather than construction.
And the "pixels" are not "random". We see the flower with four petals because there is a flower with four petals.
When Husserl talks about sense data, he is not taking the naive realist position that there are concept or intention-independent features of the world that we incorporate into our perceptual schemes. The sense data are not raw but only appear to us on the basis of association. Rather than the Humean notion, for Husserl association is a synthetic activity based on likeness, concordance and similarity. One could say it constitutes on the basis of expectation.
Quoting Banno
What if one has been blind since birth and only recently acquired sight? Would a flower appear at first as anything other than a random collection of colors, shadings and lines? Would we not have to construct the meaningfully recognizable object called a flower out of a series of sensory-motor interactions we have with it? There is no flower with four petals , or any other visually identifiable object, until we first establish these relational interactions between ourselves and the world. Developmentally speaking, we have to use the flower to see it, and that is intrinsic to its meaning for us.
Yeah, all that guff and misrepresentation. How many petals does the flower have? I say four. Your answer?
Quoting Joshs
I don't agree. The flower has four petals regardless of what you suppose. That we see, feel, count or believe that it has four petals is incidental, post hoc.
Ah, if only we were in a court of law. I would object to your "response" as being unresponsive, and I think any Judge in the external world would sustain the objection.
In the rarefied realm of philosophy, so removed from the world of the sensible (a little pun on my part), there's no need for you to respond to direct questions, of course.
Have you ever thought that those children in pre-Renaissance painting actually were little adults? Or just that the artists who painted them thought they were?
I find this fairly persuasive. We seem to apprehend and understand our world subject to frames of reference and emersion (for want of a better word) in the human experience - which brings sense making points of view, shaped and limited by our cognitive apparatus.
Quoting Banno
I think this is correct given our intersubjective agreements about reality, which almost all share. But I think Joshs point refers to the sense making building blocks of human experince which assist us to make order out of apparent chaos. Until we have arrived at things like petals and numbers, the notion of flowers and counting, we can't really answer this meaningfully.
Now, unfortunately as a non-philosopher, I don't have access to the language I would need to defend this phenomenological perspective. I can only go by limited intuitions.
As someone who is not overly concerned with philosophy and is content to inhabit the quotidian world, I can see how many might consider it pointless to talk about the kind of constructivist process that seems to go into us making sense of our experince and constructing reality. To agree upon 4 petals is probably all we need to be happy and functioning.
In short, I probably want it both ways. Sorry.
[quote="Banno;d5600]I've been struck by the lack of clarity in several recent discussions revolving around subjectivity, objectivity, truth and belief. [/quote]
You don't say what the purported confusion is. If all you are saying is that it seems to you that there is a lack of clarity, then that may say something about you but nothing about anything else.
I don't see, and you haven't explained, how you think these obvious truisms refute anything or support your judgement that some beliefs or claims amount to affectation in philosophy.
I've already dealt with your 'ice cream' example, showing that saying it is an example of a subjective or an objective statement are just different ways of talking about it. I received no response.
Do you think anyone would challenge that? What is the word "objective" doing there? Is it meant to suggest that the truth of the statement is independent of any context?
An end to what? 'Subjective' and 'objective' is just a distinction we are able to make; they are valid in some contexts, and questionable in others.
It seems to me it is just a matter of different ways of thinking/ speaking. For example, I can say that without percipients (subjects) there are no facts, and in that sense all facts are subjective (or more accurately, intersubjective). Depends on what sense of 'fact' is being employed. Shifting sands...talk about bewitchment by means of language!
The answer is in the difference between belief and truth. What you believe, in your terms, is down to "apprehend and understand our world subject to frames of reference and emersion... in the human experience". Notice this is about what we apprehend and understand, not about what is true.
What we apprehend and understand can be in error. One might apprehend the flower as having three petals, despite it having four. In which case, the flower has four petals regardless of what is supposed.
I think what's at work here might be called a "hypertechnical" approach to questions, and meaning. What do we mean when we say "I see X"? To answer (if indeed we can answer) requires detailed and specific knowledge of how we see X, which requires consideration of anatomical, neurological, physiological processes within our bodies, the quality of and nature of the object X, its ecology and that of the person who sees it, the experiences of that person and the culture in which the person lives...indeed, the consideration of all aspects of the world itself. Many of these factors will vary from person to person, of course. The result is we don't see X. We see whatever it is that's the result of their interaction.
A better answer is the obvious point that there are different ways of using an expression such as "I see the flower". I supose we might feel sympathy for those who cannot see flowers.
Quoting Leontiskos
The point is that objects have existence in themselves and exercise causal powers independently of anything we do or know. We have to do certain things in order to learn that there is a flower and that it has four petals, but the flower with four petals exists whether or not we learn about it.
My response was to refer to the argumentum ad lapidem, the 'appeal to the stone', by which Samuel Johnson famously attempted to refute Berkeley's argument of the mental nature of reality. In the context in which your argument was made, you failed to address the salient point in question, but proceeded on the mere assumption that 'of course there are mind-independent objects'.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm personally unsure of this, although this would seem to be a common sense view. Does the world have any kind of coherence at all without us providing a point of view and the language to 'demonstrate' the relationships we see?
Quoting Banno
Could not everything be in error, with some accounts just more useful in certain situations than others?
Quoting Banno
But is not truth finally something we have to arrive at via apprehending and understanding? I feel like this is a bit of a loop. Are not the constituent ingredients of truth themselves subject to questioning? Note, I am not saying there is no truth just that I think truth is contingent and in that contingence lies an endless series of potential debates and nosebleeds.
Quite. This is the point of the book I keep referring to, Mind and the Cosmic Order, by Charles Pinter. He shows how this process is working even with studies of insect perception. Minds 'create' the objects of perception, not in the sense that they're otherwise or previously non-existent, but insofar as they're object of cognition (and reason, for us.)
I think that the phenomenology and enactivism that Joshs refers to is aware of this in a way that analytical philosophy is not.
Hmm, i tend to feel this is the case, but isn't there a good argument that since there is literally no other source of data (i.e, no matter how many people apprehend something, that potential for error remains), that this can't reallly be concluded?
I would put it this way: there are truths that we do not arrive at. Not everything that is true is known to be true. Part of the difficulty here is that 'truth' is a complex and multivalent term, as it should be.
I think we talked about this before. Error depends on things mostly being right.
Quoting Tom Storm
Arriving at the truth is adopting a belief. Belief and truth are different things. I think we looked at this before. Propositions are true, or not: P is true. Propositions are believed, or not, by people. Tom believes that P is true. Most statements are true or false regardless of their being apprehended or understood.
Folk hereabouts fumble that difference.
And some truths are contingent - that I just and a flat white - others not so much - that a flat white is a flat white.
Could be, I forget.
And one of those is an affected way.
Which is to say they don't create them, eh? Thus the quotation marks. It's a metaphor only. The problem arises when we (or others) don't recognize that's the case, or disregard it. Perhaps analytic philosophy is aware of this in a way phenomenology and enactivism is not.
Well, if it's instinctive, it must be wrong.
I think it's more a case of "philosophy as talking past one another" than "philosophy as affectation", when each side assumes that either the proposition that phenomenal objects enjoy mind-independent existence or the negation of that proposition represents some absolute matter of fact.
As I see it both of those propositions are "not even wrong", just because we have no idea what they could even mean outside of very well-defined contexts. If there is an affectation it is the pretense that we know what we are talking about when we make such claims and counterclaims.
It really is such a pointless, boring and interminable debate that lacks any significance for human life.
Well, I always thought is was basically just a posh word for "appearances" but perhaps in some contexts it is better to think of them as data. In many common uses, you are quite right that they are related to a subject, but I think they are more like data than appearances. Two points about appearances (in many common uses:- 1) t they are essentially like a relation, "appearance" of something to someone: 2) they are used, not just for the way something looks - the way it appears (seems) to be, - but also for something hidden coming into view - the ship appeared over the horizon or the game of peek-a-boo.
Quoting Janus
That is very true. The problem arises when some argument seems to require that some object exists, but (in Locke's phrase) "we know not what it is". People don't draw the more likely conclusion that the argument is wrong.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is one definition. On the other hand, it seems most plausible that there is a whole universe of phenomena, only the tiniest fraction of which ever appears to any "subject".
You are losing the distinction between what we know of the existence of things and their actual existence: the two are not the same.
As to 'the whole universe of phenomena' they are not actually phenomena until they're an observed phenomena (c.f. Bohr 'no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon'). Which is not to say that such phenomena don't exist prior to or outside of being observed, but that nothing can be said in respect of them in the absence of any observation of them - either the claim they do exist or don't.
As always, your statement is made from a putative perspective 'outside' that of any subject - imagining the vast universe as it must be without any subject being in it. But my claim is that even such an imaginative act still relies on an implicit perspective. (That is the subject of The Mind Created World OP.)
Quoting Janus
Cross posted whilst I composed the above, but the same response. The 'actual existence' you're proposing is that outside any perspective or point of view. But you can't legitimately occupy such a perspective. I know this is un-intuitive but that feeling is based on a kind of 'reflexive realism' - what Husserl calls 'the natural attitude' which simply assumes the reality of the sensory domain.
*Which I take to be a reference to 'the transcendental ego' or subject of experience.
"What appears" could be construed as either the appearance itself or what gives rise to the appearance.
Even assuming your tale is correct, meanings change, and new usages may be more or less in accordance with the origins of terms (assuming that we are able to accurately interpret just what was meant by archaic usages). It is nowhere near as cut and dried as you would like to paint it.
Quoting Wayfarer
I understand your way of thinking, I used to think that way or at least tried it on for a while, but I think it is misguided, based on conflating what we can clearly think existence is (based on our experience) with being able to clearly think that actual (as opposed to experienced) existence is not, or at least might not, be the same. As I read Kant this is the very point of the noumenal/ phenomenal distinction.
On the other hand, we could just refer to things as phenomena, whether experienced or not and allow that our perceptions of those phenomena give us limited knowledge and understanding of them. It's just different ways of thinking, but both sides of this interminable and pointless debate seem to want to have it that there is a fact of the matter, and that the reality is just one way and not the other. " There really are cups even when no one is looking at them" or "there really are no cups when we are not looking at them". I mean, what the fuck does it matter?
What is 'interminable and pointless' is trying to explain it to others, but hey, it's a philosophy forum. :-)
There are also a few definitions or conceptions of what doing philosophy consists in.
It seems to me you fail to understand that others do understand your point of view and simply disagree with it.
How could we possibly know?
The psychological equivalents of solipsism are narcissism and egoism. Which are fairly common, and appear to be on the trajectory to becoming virtues.
Actually, children do such things, according to Piaget's theory of cognitive development. :)
It covers also issues of perspective, object size, object permanence.
Western philosophy has affectation built in as a feature, in the assumption that an argument can somehow "stand on its own", regardless of who is making it; "a fallacious ad hominem" is considered a pleonasm, as if every argument against the person is automatically fallacious.
And so we have a whole philosophical culture of people saying things they don't mean and that aren't meant to be taken seriously, at least not by everyone.
Exactly. You're thinking like a lawyer, not a philosopher. Except that we're at a philosophy forum.
Quoting Ciceronianus
But must these judgments amount to a certainty that justifies burning people at the stakes? For a lawyer, perhaps, certainly.
People who are not lawyers and otherwise not in the business of professionally judging others, can get by just fine without pronouncing definitive judgments upon others, and can instead live with tentative.
That was actually the prevailing belief back then: that children are just like adults, only smaller. The belief was that children were only quantitatively different from adults, but not qualitatively. (I read somewhere Kant believed children cried because they were angry because they couldn't use their bodies properly yet.)
In the 20th century psychological theories of cognitive and moral development put forward the idea that the differences between children and adults are in fact qualitative.
Much of what people call "petals" are actually bracts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bract
Since it's the season, what you see in a poinsettia, those Christmasy bright red things are bracts, not petals.
Just so as to be botanically clear.
This difference between bracts and petals is another good example of how our perception of things is socio-culturally shaped.
But @Hanover is a lawyer, right? He has to make sense of things in a way that is consistent with his profession.
This is doubtful, already physiologically.
A human infant's vision is qualitatively different from that of human adults; also, infants have not yet mastered object permanence.
The standard counterargument to this is the complexity of color words across different languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term
What does the word "true" add to this sentence?
Even philosophers manage to live as part of the world, whether they want or not. Some even hire lawyers when they encounter problems of a certain kind in that world. Never philosophers, I think. Why not?
Quoting baker
Judgments made with the understanding that they cannot be made with absolute certainty aren't made with certainty. Your thinking of religion, not the law.
Quoting baker
Lawyers don't judge, unless they're judges as well and their function is to judge, except in matters within the authority of a jury. Good judges know the law, like everything else, is uncertain. Even legal precedent isn't binding, as our Supreme Court Justices like to say when it suits them.
Quoting baker
Ah, well. They were painting them quantitatively then.
I didn't know we were speaking of children, sorry
Quoting baker
I don't know what you mean by this.
Quoting Janus
Im not getting the impression youre grasping what Wayfarer is aiming at here. For phenomenology, its not just that the world appears to us as phenomena, its that things appear in particular ways, and these particular ways contribute the sense of what appears. This sense is neither purely a contribution of the subject nor the object but of a correlation between the two. Anothern way of putting it is that when a thing appears in a certain way as what and how we take it to be, this is a function not of some raw data inherent in the world independent of us, but of the web of relations between it and other things in world from our vantage, and the relation between all of that and our own activities and expectations. We tend to distinguish between things we construct , and things that
naturally appear to us, but it is better to understand all appearances as constructions. For instance, take a computer system. If i show you one and ask you what it is, you will recognize it as a unified thing with that name. If I were to travel back in time with the computer and ask someone what it is, they would see a disconnected series of objects that they would name according to what is familiar to them.
In other words, what a thing is depends on how we put its pieces together, and this is based on how we use it. This might seem obvious, but go back to your assertion that there are myriad things in the universe outside of what appears to us. Now imagine that we systematically remove (or bracket off) everything about that data that we contribute to the things, all of the relations of relevance and pragmatic utility that turn random bits of effluvia into computers and cars and chairs. You might say what we have left are the stuff of the universe that physicists and chemists have identified and described. But even such seemingly humanity-independent features of objects such as geometric shape, size, mass and movement make no sense outside of our conceptually mediated relation with them out of which we construct idealizations of shape and form. There would be no sentence we could formulate to describe what exists in itself out there beyond our interaction with things except that it is devoid of everything that our scientific language is constructed of. This is why @Wayfarer says that nothing can be said in respect of them in the absence of any observation of them.
The way I think about what is out there independent of what appears to is in terms of a potentiality, not a specific set of contents or furniture of the world. The world is a constant changing flux, but it is not just this or we would have to say that our sciences are fabrications based on nothing. No, our sciences are useful because as the world interacts with us, patterns are produced in this interaction. And over time, we produce from our continued interaction with the world more and more integrally constructed patterns, leading to a progress in predictability.
[Quoting baker
We dont need to delve into physiology to demonstrate how what we see is importantly determined by how we put together the pieces, and more fundamentally, what constitutes the pieces for us. If we are familiar with an object that is a machine or other human-created thing (chair, computer, car), we scan it with our eyes differently than we would if we didnt know the object was created by humans for some purpose. When we recognize the car as a car, we organize its features ( front and back, tires, steering wheel) in relation to what we know a car does. Without this knowledge we have a disconnected series of things. And what that disconnected series of things amounts to for is itself a function of cultural background. Show a car to a 1st century Roman and they will recognize its parts differently from a Neanderthal.
An infant who has never seen a flower will see what they are already prepared to recognize in terms of shape, color, line, etc, but it will likely be a disconnected series of small objects, not the unified concept of flower, which is a concoction based on what we know a flower is for. You might say here that they do in a general way see the shapes and colors and lines that we do, but even color, line and shape are a function of what we recognize the total configuration to be for. In the duck-rabbit kind of optical illusion what constitutes a line or point or angle is a function of what we see the picture as representing. It is not enough to point out that even if we dont see the image as being both a duck and a rabbit we are capable of such due to the fact that ducks and rabbits are available in the same world for all of us to learn about.
Because the duck and the rabbit. like the car and the computer and the flower, are constructions, ways we compose lines and points and curves based on how we interact with that aspect of the world i. relation to our goals and purposes, recognizing objects isnt simply a matter of giving everyone a chance to see a particular object. Perceptual objects are features of language, even for infants who havent learned to speak yet. They are language in the sense that they are constructions we put together from the resources available to us in our dealings go with others. Those dealings evolve over time to produce new cultures with new technologies, which changes how we recognize objects. In this way we reinvent how we see over time.
When we throw the frisbee to the dog to catch, do t they see the object we do? Yes and no. For the purposes of playing catch, the dog must see the frisbee as the same object thoughout changes in its movement. They have to be capable of this to track it. But if we cover the frisbee with a blanket will the dog know the same object is still there but occluded? If we cut up the frisbee into two pieces will the dog associate the pieces with the former object? What the dog can and cant see i. the frisbee will be a function of what it is capable of doing with it. The dog constructs its concept of frisbee in relation to its behavioral niche, which is more or less fixed. The behavioral niche of humans , on the other hand, continually evolves.
I understand what Wayfarer is aiming at, and I understand the project of phenomenology. My point is that it is just one way of looking at things. Phenomenology is concerned with describing and analyzing how things appear to us, but how things appear to us is not exhaustive of reality, even if it is exhaustive of what we can know of reality.
Science deals with things as they appear to us (obviously, since what else could it deal with?} but it is not phenomenology, because it is concerned with studying the things and not with studying how we experience the things.
Quoting Joshs
Yes, the world as we experience it is a function of the interaction between the extra-human conditions and the human conditions.
Quoting Joshs
I don't think it is better to understand all appearances as constructions, or at least not as purely human constructions. We do not create ourselves any more than we create the rest of nature; we are created by nature, we are always already pre-cognitively created by nature.
We create human stories, about how we came to be in the world as we experience it, and of course those stories are cultural, historically mediated constructions, but to say they are exclusively constructed by us implies a creative freedom, a pure creative arbitrariness, which is misleading and brings about an anthropocentric illusion that reality is created by us tout court.
Our human stories are constrained by the signs of the past that are discovered in nature, so our stories are constrained by those signs, most of which predate humanity altogether. Our stories are merely the map, and the map can never become the territory. All we can hope for is verisimilitude, not absolute veracity.
Don't fall into the mistake of thinking that those who disagree with you, who have a different perspective, do not understand your way of understanding things. The important thing to understand, in my view, is that there are many ways of understanding things, and that those ways of understanding can only be more or less right, and that whether they are more or less right is not up to us but is determined, as our very beings are, by natural actuality. The challenge is to be able to accept that we must learn to live with uncertainty, since, as the limited beings that we are, we can only know things as they appear to us.
Quoting Joshs
If the dog sees you cover the frisbee with a blanket she will likely stick her nose under the blanket to retrieve the frisbee. If she doesn't see you cover the Frisbee, she may sniff it out nonetheless. Of course, this depends on the dog. When I throw the ball for my dog and the throw is weak resulting in the ball falling into the metre high grasses where it is no longer visible, my dog does not assume it has simply disappeared but hunts relentlessly until he finds it. I presume he does this by scent, since I would be unable to find the ball in that grass.
If you cannot come up with a clever experiment to test that, then we have no way of knowing. When the dog chews the frisbee to pieces does she know that the pieces are what is left of the frisbee? To my way of thinking your view suffers from excessive anthropocentrism. In a way of course our views are necessarily anthropocentric since we only know things as they appear to us, but that shouldn't stop us from trying to imagine beyond our human-centric understandings, or from realizing that those very understandings should in any case lead us to acknowledging that we are just one tiny part of a vast universe, the actuality of which is not dependent on us.
So it is. Perhaps this is perversion rather than affectation--turning away from or aside from what's generally done or accepted.
I wonder though if much of this can be attributed to the selective application and subsequent disregard of metaphors. The claim is made that we "create" or "construct" objects or phenomena in the factory or workshop of our minds as if we carry tiny craftsmen or masons in us, building what we experience.
:up: Nice image! I think you are right that metaphors often get taken literally, then reified.
Quoting Janus
The question is, what sort of notion of a thing do you have in mind, and how was it formed? The original notion of scientific thing or object that can be traced back to Galileo, who recycled the geometric idealizations developed in the near East and Greece that were pure mathematical
constructions. He applied these constructions to the messy realm of empirical phenomena and from this synthesis emigres the modern notion of scientific exactitude and the idea of a natural world composed entirely of causally related bodies in a fixed mathematical grid of geometric space and linear time. In other words, the scientific thing was seen through the lens of an imposed construction. Putting it in your terms, how science chose to experience the things became the basis of what the things were in themselves.
Quoting Janus
Its not an interaction between already formed , pre-existing condtions, but the production of something absolutely original, which is why it doesnt make sense to talk about an independently existing world. What our sciences discover never existed before in the history of the world, which doesnt mean that they arent reliable means of navigating that world or making predictions that pan out. But what we are navigating and predicting is not something pre-existing. It is the patterned , anticipatable way in which the world that we interact with changes in response to our interacting with it.
Quoting Janus
Building an apparatus that channels the behavior of particles is not just a story, it is a material configuration that interacts with and changes phenomena in predictable ways. Our narratives and theories, as products of brains as physiological systems, are also material apparatuses that are not exclusively constructed by us. They are co-constructions that require both our own material constitution and that of our environment. Our theories are not simply in the head, they are engagements between head and world that are composed of turnout of both aspects. New realities are created through this reciprocal relation, not from inside the head.
Quoting Janus
Youre right. Recent research shows dogs have better object permanence than infants. But my point isnt who has object permanence and who doesnt, but how we and animals like us acquire it, and what it says about how the way we see the world reflects how we move around in it in relation to our purposes. We see based on what and how it is useful for us to see. this is not a fabrication of the mind, but neither does it allow us to assume lawfully fixed contents of a world independent of our dealings with it.
This says to me that you don't have enough experience in engaging in scientific processes to know what you are talking about. It sounds like you have simply accepted a story about science. What basis do you have, for thinking people should believe that you know what you are talking about on this subject?
Quoting Ciceronianus
Tiny craftsmen and masons have to allow the material they shape and mold to guide their efforts based on how that material lends itself to , affords and constrains their aims.
Construction, constitution or construing, whichever term you prefer, refers not to a conjuring oblivious to an outside, but a back and forth , reciprocal conversation with a niche which feeds back into our efforts in very precise and specific ways to guide and adjust our direction. A craftsman cant just use any methods they choose. Only some will get the job done, and this is how the real world shows its face. We build the models, apparatus of measure and observation, and the world responds just so to how we prod and alter it. It only gives up its secrets in the language of the questions we ask of it, and for the purposes we use it for.
Quoting wonderer1
The Wizard of Oz gave me a PhD.
What your comment says to me is that the company I keep in philosophy of science and cognitive science is far removed from your neck of the woods.
https://independent.academia.edu/JoshSoffer
Science as it is has evolved to be practiced today is based on observing and describing things as they appear to us including augmented appearances via, for example, microscope and telescope, and as they are measured, quantified and modeled mathematically. It also involves educated conjectures regarding how things came to be as they appear to be chemically speaking. Modern chemistry is coherent with physics, and the whole system of understanding as it extends into cosmology, geology, biology is vastly more complex, consistent and coherent than any other body of knowledge.
Quoting Joshs
Those are not my terms; I think a distinction between things as they appear to us and things as they are in themselves is a valid distinction, even though we cannot (by mere definition) know what things are in themselves. Science deals, and can only deal, with things as they appear to us. But I don't see that appearing as artificial or culturally constructed, it too is a part of nature, and it is as real as anything else could be.
So, I don't see much or even any "choosing ways to experience things", although of course there is choosing ways to test and experiment with the things as they naturally appear to us.
Quoting Joshs
I don't disagree with anything you say here, although I would say the "new realties" you mention are realities of human experience. I don't think our experimenting changes the nature of the cosmos, but merely the nature of our conceptions and experience of the cosmos.
Quoting Joshs
I'm not talking about anything "fixed" in the sense of 'static'. We don't know what the contents of a world independent of our dealings with it are, but that does not preclude thinking that such a world, of which our world of experience and understanding is a small part, a manifestation, exists.
Quoting Joshs
I am the Wizard of Oz, and I have issued no such qualification.
True, I haven't spent nearly so much time in an ivory tower playing make believe.
Sorry to break it to you, but you really don't know what you are talking about, in describing science. You might as well be telling a fairy tale.
Quoting Joshs
:up: And numbers are exceedingly effective habits.
There's an anecdote I sometimes tell. Three blokes are looking at a green field. One is a cattle farmer - he's looking for type of feed, if there is water, what trees are on it. One is a real estate developer looking at geographical situation, nearby infrastructure, zoning laws. Another is a geologist, he's looking at the rock formations on the surface to determine whether there is anything useable in the ground.
Which is the real field?
The answer I would give is that in terms of specialist human experience and understanding they are all real aspects, relations or possibilities of the one field.
We do those things when we actually do them, not when we see something. It's a mere truism to say that we build buildings, roads, etc., and alter the world of which we're a part when we do so. We do nothing of the sort when we see a tree. We don't build it or images of it in our minds when we see it. We merely see it.
Quoting Ciceronianus
Do you also want to make this hard and fast distinction between technological and scientific know-how? We build computers but we dont build concepts like neuron and quark? Or do you want to argue that neuron and quark are constructions, but perceptual achievements like object permanence, depth perception and recognition of chords are not? Let me ask you, how is it that we are able to recognize any aspect of the visual environment as familiar when no aspect of the seen world duplicates its features from moment to moment? Is there not, as Piaget would say, an accommodation of our memory- driven expectation to the novel aspects of what we encounter? Do we not do in perceiving what we do in understanding language, adapt and adjust our rule -based criteria to accommodate the new context of interaction?
Perhaps. But you cant know that for sure without familiarizing yourself with some of the scholarship behind my claims. Maybe Im just doing a bad job of describing these points of view concerning the nature and foundation of science. If you were to give me a short list of the philosophers of science you follow, I would likely be quite familiar with them , and would be able to provide a summary of their thinking that agrees with your understanding.
If , on the other hand, I were to give you my short list (Heidegger, Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, Piaget, Husserl, Feyerabend, Hilary Putnam, Joseph Rouse, Karen Barad), would you be able to summarize their assertions about science? I would be more impressed with your claim that Im concocting a fairy tale once youve provided an adequate summary of the view of one of these writers on science.
If you don't think there is a difference between constructing a building or a road and seeing a tree, we aren't going to get much farther than we have in this discussion. That's all that I've been addressing, in any case. I don't understand how this relates to a distinction between scientific and technological know-how, nor does it seem to me that seeing is equivalent to what was done in arriving at concepts like neuron and quark, or what we do in understanding language. Clearly, we disagree on what it is to see something. When I say "I see a tree" I think most would understand what I mean by that, but it seems you don't, or that you would contend I don't see a tree.