Disagreeing with Davidson about Conceptual Schemes
An advocate of conceptual schemes would tell you that when you look out at a landscape and pick out mountains, trees, clouds, sky, dirt, etc., you have fallen under the spell of a particular conceptual scheme that shapes the reality you experience. This idea popped spontaneously into my mind when I was a teenager thinking about the world that a spider must experience. I was thinking that the spider wouldn't even recognize that we were in a room with a ceiling and floor. It wouldn't think of the room as filled with air which was different from the air on the other side of the window. None of this would translate. At the same time, I wouldn't be able to understand the spider's point of view since I lacked the kind of sensory organs it has. This realization had a far reaching impact on the way I thought about myself from that point on. I always thought of my perception, cognition, consciousness in general, as limited by my physical state. Immersed in science fiction, I could easily imagine that aliens would know all sorts of things I couldn't know.
What would Davidson's criticism of this be? Basically, he would say that I've overstepped in claiming that a spider has a conceptual scheme. In order to know for sure, I'd need to go beyond the human format and somehow come to know what spiders experience. But this is the very thing I've said I can't do, so I'd have to contradict myself. Davidson would say that by the time I've verified that spiders actually have experiences different from my own, I will have destroyed scheme-content duality.
This is a very persuasive point. Still, I think spiders do experience things, and I think it's probably so different from my own experience that if we could upload the spider's thoughts and download them into my brain, my mind would just detect inexplicable noise. I may be wrong about this, but it seems plausible enough that I can still do something with the idea of conceptual schemes. For instance, I agree with anthropologists that agriculture brought about changes in human life that would represent a shift in conceptual schemes related to the passage of time and the idea of home.
In other words, I don't think I have to prove that spiders have experiences before I can tentatively believe that they're incommensurable to mine. Do I?
What would Davidson's criticism of this be? Basically, he would say that I've overstepped in claiming that a spider has a conceptual scheme. In order to know for sure, I'd need to go beyond the human format and somehow come to know what spiders experience. But this is the very thing I've said I can't do, so I'd have to contradict myself. Davidson would say that by the time I've verified that spiders actually have experiences different from my own, I will have destroyed scheme-content duality.
This is a very persuasive point. Still, I think spiders do experience things, and I think it's probably so different from my own experience that if we could upload the spider's thoughts and download them into my brain, my mind would just detect inexplicable noise. I may be wrong about this, but it seems plausible enough that I can still do something with the idea of conceptual schemes. For instance, I agree with anthropologists that agriculture brought about changes in human life that would represent a shift in conceptual schemes related to the passage of time and the idea of home.
In other words, I don't think I have to prove that spiders have experiences before I can tentatively believe that they're incommensurable to mine. Do I?
Comments (149)
I hope we can use it to bring out some of the subtly of On the very idea of a conceptual scheme.
Someone who agrees with Davidson can agree that spiders have very different experiences to you and I. The sort of conceptual schemes that Davidson is addressing do not consist in experiences, so much as in beliefs about those experiences. They are for Davidson much the same as Quine's web of belief. Similar ideas are found throughout the literature. It is the foundation for conceptual relativism of all sorts.
The basic idea in Davidson's paper is fairly straight forward. That folk have different points of view can make sense only if there is some common framework from which we might notice the difference. But if we have such a common framework, then by that very fact, aren't we working in the same conceptual scheme? Doesn't the difference now become that of a disagreement within a conceptual scheme, and not between conceptual schemes?
And if that is the case, then any plurality of conceptual schemes reduces to at most one.
And there is a further step for Davidson. If there is at most one conceptual scheme, then how does it make sense to talk of conceptual schemes?
The conclusion Davidson reaches is that the notion of our beliefs being embedded in a conceptual scheme drops out of consideration. Our beliefs are tested against the world, not against competing conceptual schemes.
This is a good explanation. There is more to be said here.
The spider's conceptual scheme is not just it's experiences, but the beliefs it forms as a result. For Davidson, becasue those beliefs and our beliefs are about the same world, they will be congruent. And this may well be so regardless of the experiences of the spider.
As she crawls along the ceiling of the room, she believes that she can move forward, and does so again and again. Until she encounters the wall. Here she stops believing that she can move forward - stretching her pedipalps forward reveals an obstacle - instead believing that she must change direction.
Despite the experiences had by the spider and ourselves being quite different, the belief had by both is congruent.
Might leave this here. I'm sure it will be enough to receive a reaction.
Quoting Banno
The schemes dont have to be identical , they can be similar. And they can be alike when it comes to superficial aspects of behavior that dont matter deeply to us, but differ profoundly concerning matters of great personal significance. One person can subsume anothers conceptual scheme as a variant of their own, thereby recognizing both the points of similarity and of difference. One person can understand another persons conceptual scheme better than the other person can understand the first person. I dont have to understand you to know that your way of thinking about a certain matter is different from my own.
Quoting frank
Ever seen The Fly?
But this doesn't rule out varying conceptual schemes between say, humans and aliens. It just says that if there are such differences, we wouldn't be able to detect them. But consider this scenario, taken from the plot of the movie Arrival:
Aliens arrive and begin teach humans their language. But eventually, one woman discovers that the aliens have a completely different view of time. She realizes this because through association with them and their language, she has developed the same perspective on time they have. Yes, their language is now translatable to her, but what she's discovered is that in the past there was a conceptual rift.
I think in the same way, we could speculate that people in the past were missing some of the concepts needed to understand the world as we see it. In other words, Davidson doesn't really rule out scheme-content duality, he's just criticizing cases where people assert the existence of a rift, and immediately show that there is no rift by offering the translation. It remains possible that there could be aliens who have untranslatable languages.
Quoting Banno
The information @Pierre-Normand provided calls this into question. Davidson has been criticized for rejecting any rational influence of the world on our beliefs. I'll flesh that out after I've understood it better.
Well the standards for a proper, valid, and lasting OP on TPF have to be fairly excellent as a bare minimum per the rules so let's not get carried away. Superfluous praise truly helps no one, certainly not the praisee.
Quoting Banno
This, while hard to refute as anything less than relevant, has a few points of contention I feel you'd agree are wholly reasonable to address. "The world", as many would perceive, is not truly "the world." It's how people have made society and thus an illusion of comparison to some sort of absolute everlasting state that both has been and would be without social engineering or otherwise, any other person living on it. One cannot truly "test their beliefs" against the "world" unless in an enclosed, isolated environment where either the individual (or group of like-minded individuals) are free to do so in an environment truly their own without any sort of influence or control by external factors. This cannot be done unless in some sort of socially and technologically barren or isolated landscape, which is virtually non-existent to the vast majority of persons.
We are social beings, meaning, to an extent, we're socially-engineered to be noticeably different or "set apart" from "the world" around us. Wherever people manage to thrive, that is solely because of artificial (or non-organic) creation of society and civilization. In short, society or groups of people and nations especially are in fact unique from "the world", per se. Each are furthermore in fact in competition, otherwise, armies and borders would not exist. So, there's basically nowhere on Earth you could go that is not socially engineered or given an artificial set of "what works vs. what doesn't" by those who live and place their identity under what eventually is little more than a competing social (ie. conceptual) scheme.
Basically, our beliefs "can", in theory, be tested against the "world", truly. It's not impossible. But realistically in 99% of cases never truly are, and simply are in fact tested against by what, by all irrefutable logical definition is in fact, a competing conceptual (specifically, social) scheme.
Let's say it's 1,000 years ago and you go to a never-visited island with a population of a few dozen people. That's you testing your beliefs against the world. But not really. Because they have made the region or reality you, in that moment, are confined to, as their own. No different than preaching the general belief in "equality" to a town of slave-owners. The "world", per se, has nothing to do with it. You're in a constructed society or region where the law, no matter how just or injust, is the only thing you're reasonably competing against ie. that provides resistance or response, at least, overshadows anything else by pure social will or force.
Ultimately, the only thing you're testing your beliefs against is that of others who have made a certain world, geography, region, or society, according to their conceptual belief, which by nature is in fact a competing one.
So, I disagree with the quoted statement above as some sort of 100% "happens all the time" absolute where a claim of the opposite would be, seemingly according to your wording, invalid.
--
But in general, while I've never (to my recollection) read a word of the individual in question, giving the OP the benefit of the doubt and respect that he understands what the individual (Davidson) claims, and has the ability to recite it for us, I feel it appropriate to respond to that as one and the same.
Quoting frank
This is interesting. What is the compelling or jarring factor that makes a spider different from one's own? Is it the size? The (so-called) scientific awareness of its ability (or lack thereof) to perceive the world (at least, in comparison to one's own)? Or something beyond? Surely one can imagine being kidnapped and placed in a hypothetical mansion where everything is say, equivalent to the difference in scale to the size of a spider vs. a human, perhaps 1000x the size of what a person is accustomed to? And then what? If we believe the spider has a conscious, a mind, a medium to process its surroundings to the point of a larger, more-intelligent picture, though perhaps not to the same degree, naturally, we have a reasonable avenue to contend the claim in one way or another. Otherwise, surely. It's just a spider, it doesn't know anything, it just "does". So which do we attest as more likely, and why?
Well, 's AI starts off by talking about "raw sensory data" in. a way which is not found in the article. Looks to be a confabulation, again. As a foundation, sense data is explicitly rejected in the argument, at page 12 of the Jstore version. The AI partly saves itself later, but I remain dubious as to the benefits of such conversations. They are unreliable.
But if you want to put something together, that might be of interest.
A simpler example of the sort of argument you propose might be dolphins rather than aliens. Here we have a creature that has the brain capacity and social structure we'd expect to see in a creature with a language, but we have been unable so far to build a simple translation. Perhaps their beliefs are so different that there are no common grounds on which to build a mutual understanding - "If a dolphin could speak, we could not understand him". But notice that what is at stake is whether dolphins have a language, and we can't understand it, or whether they have no language at all. This lends itself to Davidson's idea that in order to recognise that dolphins have a language, we would need to understand at least some of what that language is doing.
The apocryphal that the Greeks had no "concept" of the colour blue is not a bad point, either. Tentatively accepting the apocryphal, we would say that we learned to distinguish blue from red, because that was a distinction on which we could agree and which became relevant. That distinction is not just in the mooted conceptual scheme, but is found in our shared beliefs. It became part of the language when our attention was drawn towards it.
Quoting frank
Again, that looks to be more than Davidson is saying. While some of our beliefs are caused, it does not follow that they all are. The belief in that pain in your back is not a rational deduction. But go ahead.
If you want to argue that LLMs are faulty, prone to hallucination and confabulation, and can't generally be relied upon as authoritative sources, you will find no argument from me. In fact, in all of those respects, I've found them to be nearly as bad as your average human being!
Although Davidson didn't use the word "raw", Gemini's initial characterisation of the dialectical situation and its unpacking of the basic concepts, seemed very good to me. The second sentence Davidson wrote in On the Vey Idea of a Conceptual Scheme is "Conceptual schemes, we are told, are ways of
organizing experience; they are systems of categories that give form to the data of sensation". So, when setting out to criticize the scheme/content dichotomy, Davidson takes as one of his main targets the idea of data of sensation that have not yet been informed by conceptual categories. He later refers to those, I dare say "raw" materials, as "uninterpreted contents," a concept that, he proposes, can be relinquished without giving up on the idea of (informed) empirical content. So, when Gemini paraphrases "the data of sensation" or "uninterpreted content" as "raw data of experience" in its explanation, I give it a pass.
Let me stress also, as I had already hinted, that I didn't use Gemini merely to report to me on the content of a paper that I hadn't read. I had read it at least twice in the early 2000s after having already read reactions to it by Brandom and McDowell. I just wanted to have my memory jogged. I must say, though, that the structured way in which Gemini responded greatly helped my get a better handle on Davidson's these by situating it within the main components of his thought, which I was familiar with but hadn't yet been able to integrate coherently within the broader dialectical situation (where he targets Quine, Whorf & Sapir, Kuhn, etc. and is being responded to by Strawson, Brandom, McDowell, etc.)
I've also read the paper, so no one is using an AI comment in lieu of reading and considering. I didn't know about the "spinning in the void" criticism and looking into that is giving me a deeper understanding.
If this is to be yet another thread about AI, I'm out.
Any ideas?
I would rather you stayed, so no using AI as an authority.
There is significant overlap between Davidson's and McDowell's philosophies. The idea that experience is always already interpreted is common ground between them. But that's because Davidson conceives of the content of experience as the contents of (conceptually informed) belief states that are somehow caused to occur in an individual by the world. The whole thrust of McDowell's Mind and World (which is the reprinting of his 1991 John Locke Lectures) is to thread a middle path between a conception (like Quine's) where the empirical source of our beliefs (the "irritations of our nerve endings") resides outside of the sphere of the conceptual, but causes events within that sphere (in the form of intentional attitudes that are "Given", as Sellars would put it) and a conception like Davidson's where empirical contents reside within that sphere, and aren't "Given" in the Sellarsian sense, but still are caused by the world to occur in a non-normative fashion that makes them unsuitable for grounding empirical beliefs, according to McDowell. I think Gemini had done a good job (when I prompted it to do so) in expounding on McDowell's Kant-inspired idea that the passive actualization of conceptual abilities are drawn in acts of receptivity as a result of our active engagements with the world (thereby integrating Kantian receptivity and spontaneity in the same act), and also on my purported elucidation or demystification of this process in terms of Gibson's ecological approach to animal perception.
The problem I see is that if our experience of the world is always already interpreted, and we acknowledge that we are being affected pre-cognitively by the world (although it would seem inapt to refer to those affections as "empirical contents" since those are part of cognition), and we also refer to what we cognize as 'the world', then it seems that when we speak of the world we are not speaking unequivocally.
Add to that the fact that we are arguably 'brain blind' and if we also accept that we are part of the world both in the pre-cognitive and cognitive senses, then i wonder where that leaves us in our attempt to make sense of much less answer such questions. To me it looks like a Gordian knot; which edge of the sword will we use to cut it? Perhaps we cannot cut it because we have access to only one edge of the sword.
Would these meet the criteria for conceptual scheme under Davidson though? I believe Davidson's main target is some kind of claim that there are different conceptual schemes, ways (forms) of living (life) that are inherently unintelligible from some other perspectives. So the question is whether changes of norms about home life or concepts of time are unintelligible? I believe if anthropologists can talk about them, then probably not, at least to some degree. I'm sure a spider could never understand the majority of human existence though.
Where is the problem, though? If our epistemology is Cartesian and representationalist, then "The World" is what it is regardless of the manner in which we conceive it to be and it is also forever hidden behind a veil of perceptions. The former idea"metaphysical realism"has been Hilary Putnam's target over much of the second half of his long career. He has proposed to replace it with a form of pragmatic Realism with a Human Face (and has claimed indebtedness to McDowell). If we acknowledge, however, that our experience of the world always is already interpreted, then we lose the idea of a view from nowhere, but our references to the world (our world) aren't thereby rendered equivocal. Davidson's views on radical interpretation, and the principle of charity, also yield some common ground with McDowell in dispelling the idea of incommensurate conceptual schemes. Our disagreements about the world don't stem from an inability to agree on what it is "in itself" but rather are manifestations of our willingness to negotiate how it is that we can most perspicuously define it in relation to us and us in relation with it. This sort of organism-environment mutuality that was already at play before we became rational animals remains at play after we have.
Well, if we are always and only working with and within the always interpreted world that would seem to dispel any significant difference between Davidson's and McDowell's positions. Within that interpreted world we inhabit and understand there would seem to be no problem regarding the rationality of our judgements, at least when it comes to empirical matters.
On the other hand, if we acknowledge that we are pre-cognitively causally affected by the pre-interpreted world and that those affections feed into our thinking in ways we cannot hope to understand (which seems most plausible) it would seem the problem of just what is primordially given to us remains untouched.
Am I missing something here?
If nothing else it ignores triangulation and holism, and that interpretation itself is a rational process.
Hmm, thought provoking statement, very interesting.
How are basic empirical judgments primarily justified? You might judge that the cat is on the mat because you looked and saw that it is. What happened when you looked? On McDowell's view, the conceptual elements that make up this perceptual contentalong with your self-conception as a being with sense perception, the Kantian 'I think'are passively drawn upon in experience. This allows you to judge that the cat is on the mat based on it visually appearing to you that it is. This is a joint actualization of conceptually informed rational abilities, enabling you to withdraw the judgment if you detect misleading circumstances or misapplied concepts, and of a receptive ability that makes you perceptually sensitive to cats, mats, etc.
On Davidson's view, the presence of the cat on the mat causes you to acquire the belief that the cat is on the mat. New perceptual beliefs might trigger revisions of prior beliefs, in line with his coherentism. However, Davidson would describe illusory or misleading perceptions as cases where the world causes us to form a false belief. The experience is still the causation of a belief, regardless of its truth.
For McDowell, this is insufficient. It doesn't explain how experience can provide reasons for our beliefs, especially when we know our experience might be misleading. Davidson focuses solely on the causal role of experience, omitting the rational constraint McDowell sees as necessary for genuine knowledge. The problem isn't that Davidson denies fallibility, but that his account gives experience itself no role beyond that of a causal intermediary, making it hard to see how experience could justify our beliefs..
We were talking specifically about empirical judgements and their justification. Who suggested Davidson would issue such a denial? Davidson's claim that experiences cause agents to acquire beliefs is an expression of his conception of empirical experience, not belief.
This is very much common ground, isn't it? I don't view Davidson as denying that experiences (empirical beliefs) can rationally ground other beliefs. He denies that uninterpreted experiences could fulfill that role. And McDowell questions that Davidson's empirical beliefs (as conceived by him to be caused to occur by a subjects transactions with the world) could fulfill this normative role.
You might be. I think the discussion should be somewhat broader.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Of course it is an expression of his conception of belief. How could it be one and not the other? That would be to reintroduce the scheme - content dualism he rejects. He denies that there is a place for experience in our knowledge apart from our beliefs. There can be no "pure experience" separate from our ratiocinations; any empirical judgements already have the whole web of belief "built in". If McDowell seeks to seperate out again the experience from the judgement, he is a long way from Davidson.
And I think mistaken.
But this is a thread about Davidson, not McDowell. That McDowell misapplies Davidson is neither here nor there.
What I meant simply was that, according to Davidson, experiences are beliefs. They are beliefs of a specific sort: empirical beliefs (that are caused by the world to occur) but not all beliefs are, according to him, empirical beliefs. Beliefs indeed could the product of ratiocination according to Davidson (which is a claim that you seemingly thought I might deny.)
It is true that McDowell seeks to distinguish the experience (things seeming, or visually appearing, to be thus and so) from the belief or judgement that things are thus and so. The need for such a distinction is apparent when one is subjected to a visual illusion, one is aware of the illusory nature of the experience, and one thereby isn't inclined to judge (or believe) that things are the way experience represents them to be. Marking this distinction doesn't result in expelling perceptual contents from the sphere of the conceptual. It was likely the need not to expel them thus that motivated Davidson to equate experiences with beliefs (and to claim that only a belief can be such as to justify another belief) but it may have been overkill. A perceptual state can be conceptually informed and still fall short from being endorsed as the content of a judgement or belief.
Your suggestion that a thread being about philosopher X should exclude discussions of philosopher Y who has been critical of X, because you personally don't agree with the criticism, in a philosophy forum, is wrong headed.
That is, I don't see much value in McDowell's comments. While you are welcome to try to convince us otherwise, so far, I'm not seeing it.
I wanted to come back to this, to make a point this time about what conceptual schema are not. They are not a neural network.
Frank's description here is part of the reason I thought his OP excellent, since it makes explicit a misunderstanding of the relation between brain and mind. Frank may well be quite right that if the spider neural net were somehow grafted to his own, the result would be noise. But that need not count against Davidson's account. The beliefs of the spider sit apart from the mere firing of the neural networks that cause it's movement, and cannot be reduced to them. Indeed, it is problematic to attribute beliefs to the spider at all, since beliefs sit within the broader framework of of triangulation, interpretation, and hence occur at a level that it utterly foreign to the spider.
Which is just to say, we can explain the behaviour of the spider in terms of belief, but the spider cannot.
For Davidson, mental eventslike beliefs, desires, intentionsare not reducible to physical events. There is no deterministic, law-like relationship between the two; instead, mental descriptions are interpreted within the broader context of social practices and linguistic frameworks.
Hence the anomalism of the mental. There need be no correspondence between physical stats and the intentional descriptions of them.
It might help if you would sketch the argument that you take McDowell to be misapprehending. In cases when a experiencing subject doesn't believe things to be as they appear to them to be, it is hard to equate the content of the experience E (e.g. that the cat is on the mat) with a belief since the subject doesn't believe this content. It is true that they, in that case, believe a different content LE, namely that it looks to them like the cat is on the mat. But that it looks to them like there is a cat on the mat, although it indeed is part of their conceptually articulated web of knowledge, isn't the content of the experience that is, according to Davidson, caused by the world to happen.
You're nevertheless right that the illusory nature of certain experiences isn't the central issue. The issue is how experience can provide reasons for our beliefs. McDowell isn't denying that we evaluate experiences against our web of belief. He's asking how experience can have any justificatory force if its role is merely causal.
In cases where I don't believe things are as they appear, it's true that I don't form the belief E (that the cat is on the mat). I might form the belief LE (that it looks to me like the cat is on the mat). But for Davidson, experience just is the causation of a belief. So, in this case, he'd likely say that the experience caused me to form the belief LE.
But this creates a problem. LE is a belief about my experience, not a basic empirical belief directly caused by the world like 'the cat is on the mat' would be. It's a higher-order belief. Even if Davidson says LE is the belief caused in cases of illusion, it doesn't explain how the experience Ethe experience as of a cat on the matplays any role in justifying my beliefs.
McDowell, on the other hand, argues that the experience E itself, with its conceptual content, provides a reason for my belief E. It's because it appears to me as if there's a cat on the mat that I'm justified in believing that there's a cat on the mat. The experience E doesn't just cause the belief E; it rationalizes it. This rational connection is what's missing in Davidson's account.
A related issue arises from cases where the belief LE (that it looks like E) is consistent with both a veridical experience E and an illusory experience that is subjectively indistinguishable from E. This raises the question of how we can distinguish between veridical and illusory experiences. While this isn't a problem unique to McDowell, his approach differs from Davidson's.
Davidson relies on overall coherence within the web of beliefs to make this distinction. For instance, if I believe it looks like there's a cat on the mat (LE), but I also believe that I'm currently looking at a hologram (based on other beliefs), coherence favors the belief that my experience is illusory. However, this approach still faces the challenge of explaining how experience itself contributes to justification, beyond merely triggering beliefs that are then assessed for coherence.
McDowell, in contrast, addresses this through a form of disjunctivism, understood through the lens of perceptual capacities. This view holds that veridical and illusory experiences, while they may be subjectively indistinguishable, fundamentally differ in terms of the capacities they involve. In veridical perception, our capacity for rational, perceptual engagement with the world is successfully exercised. We are in genuine, perceptually-mediated, rational contact with the fact that P, and this contact provides a reason for believing that P. In an illusion, this capacity, while engaged, fails to be properly actualized due to misleading circumstances. The experience may seem the same, but it does not involve the same successful exercise of our capacity for rational engagement, and therefore does not provide the same kind of reason for belief. This capacity-based understanding of disjunctivism (that I also owe to Sebastian Rödl and Andrea Kern) aligns with direct realist conceptions of perception, where we directly perceive the world, not internal representations. It also allows McDowell to reject "highest common factor" views, where both veridical and illusory experiences are thought to share a common element (like a mental representation). If both types of experiences involved the same actualized capacity, it would be difficult to explain how experience can justify beliefs. By focusing on the success or failure of our capacity for perceptual knowledge, McDowell provides a more intuitive understanding of how experience can rationally constrain our beliefs, even though our perceptual capacities are fallible.
So, while both Davidson and McDowell reject the scheme/content dualism, McDowell's disjunctivist approach, by giving experience a genuine rational role, arguably does a better job of securing this rejection. It avoids the pitfalls of reducing experience to a mere causal intermediary, thereby providing a more robust account of how our beliefs are answerable to the (always already conceptually structured) world.
Why? I'm not making McDowell's argument. If you think he has a case, then you can make it.
Thanks for the response.
We ought be careful not to think of seeing the cat on the mat as happening in isolation, especially since this is what Davidson says does not happen. That what we see is interpreted as cat and mat is not seperate to the belief - in a sense it is the belief, caused by the physics and physiology of the situation. The physics and physiology cause the belief that the cat is on the mat; the "experience" doesn't "contribute to the justification" that you see the cat, since there is no justification. You see the cat. The experience is not isolated from the beliefs.
So thinking of LE as a belief about your experience would not fit Davidson's account. Part of what is going on here is an ambiguity in introducing the term "experience". A better way to say this would be that the physics and physiology cause the belief; dropping the word "experience".
[reply="Banno;964071"
I think I will have to look at that paper again, On the idea of conceptual schemes, but I believe I more-or-less agree on things in there iirc.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
Yes, I think these are some good points.
Because you said:
Quoting Banno
So you want to critique and call out McDowell while simultaneously avoiding giving any substantive account of what you think McDowell is saying. If Pierre-Normand doesn't even have a clear account of what you are accusing McDowell of, how is he supposed to engage with the content of your accusation? :chin:
https://www.marcellodibello.com/commonground/readings/DavidsonConceptualSc.pdf
and
https://eltalondeaquiles.pucp.edu.pe/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/On-the-Very-Idea-of-a-Conceptual-Scheme.pdf
for anyone looking.
Thanks for dropping by.
It is also common ground that acts of perceptual experience, and acts of perceptually grounded judgements, don't occur in isolation. McDowell draws not only on Davidson, but also on Kant, Frege and Sellars, in maintaining that contents of propositional attitudes are essentially conceptually articulated with many more such attitudes (e.g. many other experiences, beliefs and intentions, according to McDowell, mainly beliefs, according to Davidson).
To illustrate this difference, let's return to our example. Suppose our subject doesn't know where the cat is. So, she looks for the mat and sees the cat laying on it. On Davidson's account, she acquires the belief that the cat is on the mat, a belief that, we are to suppose, she takes to have been caused by the presence of the cat via the normal workings of physics and physiology. She ensures that this newly acquired belief doesn't undermine the overall coherence of her web of belief (e.g. doesn't clash with the belief that she had brought her cat to the vet for being euthanatized the week before). We then have, indirectly, a source of empirical justification mediated by the newly acquired belief that the cat is on the mat which, she speculate, she has been caused to acquire by the worldly presence of the cat on the mat (where the causal mediation is a matter of physics and physiology).
You might object that there's no justification involved when we see the cat on the mat, only the causal impact of physics and physiology on our belief-forming mechanisms. While it's true that physics and physiology play a causal role in perception, McDowell's point is that our experience, as a conceptually structured, conscious state, provides us with reasons for our beliefs, not just causal antecedents.
When our subject sees the cat on the mat (in the factive sense of 'sees'), she's not merely undergoing a causal process; she's having an experience as of a cat on the mat, an experience that, on McDowell's view, has rational significance. This experience, on McDowell's view, provides her with a reason to believe that the cat is on the mat because in having this experience, the fact of the cat being on the mat is made manifest to her. In such a case, her reason is grounded in her direct perceptual contact with the fact itself, a contact that is made possible by her being part of the conceptually structured, perceptible world. Of course, she might be mistaken about whether she is actually seeing a cat on the mat; she might unknowingly be in the illusory 'bad case' where it merely seems to her as if she is seeing a cat on the mat. But when she is in the normal 'good case', her experience provides a conclusive reason.
Davidson, by contrast, can only say that the presence of the cat, via physics and physiology, caused her to form the belief. He can appeal to the overall coherence of her web of beliefs to explain why she retains this belief, and he can appeal to the process of radical interpretation to argue that most of her beliefs must be true. But this doesn't fully address the question of how her experience, in the moment, provides her with a reason to believe that the cat is on the mat. It only explains how the belief came about and how it fits with her other beliefs.
Ultimately, the disagreement boils down to whether experience plays a purely causal role in the formation of our beliefs (Davidson) or whether it also plays a rational role in their justification (McDowell). McDowell's view, by giving experience a rational role, provides a more satisfying account of how our beliefs are answerable to the world, not just causally connected to it.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
If on McDowell's view my acquisition of language including the categories of *cat* and ^mat* along with my self-conception as a being with sense perception enables me to judge or believe there is a cat on the mat when I see one, what would allow a dog to believe it sees a cat on the mat?
I don't find any convincing reason for bringing belief into it as a primary aspect of the experience. I see the cat, just as the dog does. The fact that I am symbolic language-competent enables me to formulate the judgement or belief that I see a cat. I see that as the only difference between myself and the dog. How it is that the pre-cognitive effects the environment/ world have on dogs and humans enable the dog and me to see particular things in our respective umwelts, to "see things as whatever" cannot be anything to do with language and culture.
It seems to me that language and culture just enable a voice to be given to what is seenI see no reason to think they determine what is seen beyond perhaps what variously stands out for the dog and for me. Even there we might say that in the dog's case what stands out is determined very little or not at all by culture, but by physiology and biology, and even in my case physiology and biology would seem to be prior to culture in the order of such determinations.
Looked at this way I don't see that McDowell improves on Davidson's view. Do you think we can say that the world is always already interpreted for the dog?
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Now this is at odds with Davidson, but also I think it is not accurate. The "experience" here is already the belief that the cat is on the mat, already interpreted. So if it were to "give you a reason" to think the cat is on the mat, that would amount to "the cat is on the mat becasue the cat is on the mat".
It's not too far from Moore's "Here is a hand"...
Seeing that the cat is on the mat is not a reason to think the cat is on the mat so much as believing that the cat is on the mat...
So we have two differing accounts, and I think Davidson's the better.
I like that. What a bugger of a question!
Quoting Janus
But we do increasingly understand how the stuff around us works on our neural system... so I'm not convinced of this.
I'm only quoting part of your post but I read it all and here are two notes that I wrote for myself and that I intended to flesh out. Gemini did flesh them out brilliantly, but since AI generated content understandably isn't suitable for posting here, I posted it in my second AI thread to showcase Gemini's abilities. (It is, of course, merely optional reading for you. You can feel free to read only my notes below and state your objections or ask for clarifications.
Note 1
What comes to mind is the neglect of the distinction between 'seeing X' where X is the object being seen but "X" isn't necessarily part of the intentional content of the subjects intentional state, which depends on their conception of an "X" and "seeing that X", where "that X" not only has propositional content but also richly conceptually articulated intentional content. When a dog sees a cat, they grasp affordances (e.g. something to cuddle with, to bark at, to keep a safe distance from, etc.). When a human being sees a cat, they also grasp direct behavioral affordances, arguable different in character than those of the dog, but they also grasp a whole new class of affordances for navigating the space of reasons for purposes both of theoretical and practical reasoning. Their linguistically mediated conceptual structuring of the world enables them to grasp affordances such as planning to buy food for the dog later in the afternoon, inquiring if its the same dog that they saw on the front lawn the day before, etc. etc. etc.
Note 2
The whole conceptual apparatus that Davidson and McDowell bring to bear on dismantling a duality of mind and world that relinquishes the latter outside of the space of reason (and the former behind a veil of appearances) is meant to specifically address the epistemic predicament of rational animals. So, my response will not satisfy Janus's worry that Davidson and McDowell's rejection of the duality of empirical content and conceptual scheme since it will appear to him that the world of the dog and the human world and incommensurable just in the way that Davidson purports to deny. But my rejoinder to this would be simply to assert that the dog, owing to it not being rational, is blind to the aspects of the world that our rational abilities disclose (including affordances for reasoning practically and theoretically) while, on the other hand, our different animal nature makes it simply hard to grasp affordances of the specifically canine form of life. But Davidson's considerations about charity and interpretation still suggest that our making sense of the behavior of dogs (which we do to a large extent) signifies that we at least are able to achieve good approximate understandings of their "empirical" world, which is the same as ours albeit viewed with different emphases.
I'd say seeing it presents it, unlike the belief which one can maintain or change regardless of the whereabouts of the cat. You won't keep on seeing the cat on the mat when it hops up on the chair. The visual experience is then the cat on the chair. This suggests that seeing is different from believing, and that seeing can be used as a reason for believing that the cat is on the mat (or on the chair).
Your point about seeing being different from believing is well-taken. Seeing the cat on the mat indeed presents the cat being on the mat in a way that merely believing doesn't. This connects to Sellars's important insight that empirical knowledge can be non-inferential without being non-conceptual.
Sellars rejected the "Myth of the Given," the idea that our knowledge rests on a foundation of non-conceptual experiences. He argued that all awareness involves the application of concepts. But he also recognized that we can have non-inferential knowledgeknowledge that isn't inferred from other beliefs.
When we see the cat on the mat, we don't infer that it's there from other beliefs. Our knowledge is direct and immediate. But it's still conceptual, involving the concepts 'cat,' 'mat,' etc. This is what Sellars meant by 'looks' talk. I can report 'It looks to me as if there's a cat on the mat' without making an inference. This report is a "language entry transition," a move within the space of reasons that's occasioned by my transactions with the world.
McDowell builds on this Sellarsian account. He argues that in veridical perception, our conceptual capacities are passively actualized in experience, allowing the world to be directly present to us. This is why seeing the cat on the mat can provide a reason for believing that it's there. The experience is not an inference, but it's also not a non-conceptual 'given.' It's a conceptually structured 'entry' into the space of reasons, providing a rational basis for belief.
This also highlights why Davidson's purely causal account is insufficient. While Davidson acknowledges that beliefs are caused by the world, he doesn't give experience itself a rational role in justification. For McDowell, following Sellars, experience is not just a causal intermediary; it's a non-inferential but conceptually structured encounter with the world that provides reasons for our beliefs.
To say that knowledge is direct and immediate yet conceptual seems incoherent. Do we experience the cat or the concept?
Quoting Pierre-Normand
The belief that the cat is on the mat is caused by (experiencing) the cat on the mat.
One might add, that the way the cat is on the mat, or one's angle of view etc. fixes the experience to be a certain way. I think these are examples of what's "given" and available for us to discover in the experience.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Joseph Rouse entered into the debate involving Davidson, Brandom and McDowell, concluding that while McDowell was right to accuse Davidsons approach of treating conceptual thought as a frictionless spinning in a void, McDowells attempt to ground conceptually-mediated perception in the nature of objects of the world ends up in the same quagmire.
I rarely agree with Bakker on philosophy, but he is normally thought provoking
A good question.
If sensation were not any different from imagination, and if belief, memory, etc. were dominant, it would be hard to explain why people often listen to songs they know by heart, watch their favorite movies very many times, or how cooks, prostitutes, theme parks, etc. all stay in business (since presumably visiting them multiple times doesn't do much to affect our beliefs about them, or perhaps even our memories). Likewise, there are all sorts of neurological disorders whose affects seem largely contained to concept recollection or word recall. Yet such disorders are not the same thing as being deaf or blind. As far as can be ascertained, it seems possible for the visual field to be largely unaffected (e.g. people can draw what they see, and navigate the world) even as a person losses the ability to attach concepts (e.g. "what a thing is and is used for") to what they experience.
Sometimes it is argued that such disorders show that the all external objects must be "constructed," or must be "representations" of some sort. I don't find this conclusive at all. To the contrary, I think the most obvious reason to suppose that man has the capacity for picking out plants from rocks, a branch above from the sky, or a tiger from the jungle background, is that these things exist, and that it is very important for us to recognize them directly in sensation. So, while "what is experienced" might be, in some sense, the interaction of the sense organ and ambient environment (that latter of which mediates through its interactions with the objects sensed), this does not preclude a strong "sense realism," since this sort of mediation is hardly unique in physical interactions. Indeed, all physical interactions might be said to involve some sort of mediation, yet "everything is received in the manner of the receiver," does not presuppose "everything is received as representation."
On a related note, I've come to have the opinion that a great many "escapes from representationalism" are just replacing one form of representationalism (normally a caricature of early modern versions) with some alternative form.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The fact that neurological damage can manifest itself at different levels of perceptual processing doesnt mean that the lower levels of processing of the visual field arent as conceptually saturated as the higher levels. The effects of lsd and optical illusions both reveal how at the lowest level conceptual expectations organize the appearance of the seen world.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Most contributors to the Philosophy Forum share, to one extent or other, your belief that the meaning of the truth of the world is ultimately bound up with the way things are outside of , and pre-existing, our interactions with them or our schematic constructions of them, even if we never have direct acces to such a reality. The philosophical positions I endorse, however, insist that our contact with the world is neither that of indirect representation nor direct seeing of an independent reality. Instead, to perceive a world is to enact it or produce it. Let me make it clear that enaction is not the imaginative act of a mind. In interacting with our environment, we dont internally model an outside world, we produce an actual world. More precisely , an absolutely new, never before existing aspect of world is produced through our practical engagement with our physical and social surrounds. It is neither from inside a mind nor from the world that this production of the new proceeds, but in-between the two.
The reason is that world is not a flat space of pre-existing objects for us to encounter, is that it is continually changing itself nature, and human -world interaction is just one manifestation of this. Since for the realist meaning and truth require an anchoring in a nature composed of pre-existing objects, the idea of what sounds like a chaos of Heraclitus flux would seem to destroy the very possibility of meaningful truth and replace it with nihilism. But meaning isnt the product of fixed, pre-existing facts, it is a function of the experience of patterns of familiarity, relevance and consistency within the always changing flow of events that we enact in our inter-affecting with world. Nihilism and meaninglessness is only a possibility to the extent that we try to freeze the flow of events into fixed , pre-existing objective facts. And even when we think this way, we are still enacting a new world implicitly while we explicitly hold to our belief in the objective independence of the facts of reality for our engagement with the world.
That the enacted world of continual becoming is not a chaotic, senseless flux is demonstrated by the fact that it allows us to theorize it in realist terms as directly perceived or indirectly represented. To abandon realism for enactivism doesnt at all mean that we have to abandon the security and stability provided by belief in independently existing facts of nature. It instead allows us to replace the arbitrariness and duality of such models with a way of thinking which sees our relation to the world as more intimate, connected and relevantly meaningful.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
The underlined part seems to contradict what you say below it. Also I don't agree that dogs are not rationalI think they are capable of reasoning, although obviously not linguistically mediated reasoning.
When you say that Davidson and McDowell reject "the duality of empirical content and conceptual scheme" are you suggesting that they believe there is no difference between experience and what we judge to be the case on account of experience?
When Davidson understands experience to be always already interpreted I take him to mean that it is always to some degree conceptually mediated. Is the conceptual only possible in the context of symbolic language? Surely, we allow that gestalts are for animals as well as humans. Gestalts involve recognition, which arguably involves pattern recognition. Should we understand pattern recognition as well as the understanding of the significance for the animal of what is recognized as a kind of (proto in the case of non-linguistically mediated) process of conceptualization?
I never agreed with Wittgenstein's assertion that if a lion could speak we would not understand him. Why would we not be able to understand the lion if he spoke our language? The lion is not all that different from us. For me the idea that we could not understand the lion stinks of human exceptionalism. So contrary to what you say I do not see animal's experience as being radically incommensurable with human experience. They eat, drink, run, walk, swim or fly, smell, taste, hear, see, feel, mate and so on just as we do.
Quoting Banno
I didn't mean to say that we could never develop a scientific understanding of what goes on with the pre-cognitive effects of the environment on the organism, but that they are not a part of our conscious experience in vivo and hence cannot play a part in or be used to justify our directly reasoned perceptually based judgements.
So, I don't see that McDowell has solved a puzzle that Davidson failed to solve. It's Sellar's problem of integrating the space of causes with the space of reasons, and I see little reason to think that it can be achieved. I think it's just a fact about our limitations, and about our inability to transcend dualism in thought.
We can recognize that the world is not really dualistic, but it seems that language is nonetheless inherently dualistic because to understand propositionally is to separate what is experienced from the experiencer. Just look at the title of McDowell's book: Mind and World for example.
(This was your reply to Banno but I'd like to address it also. I'll then address your comments to me in another post.)
One problem that many modern philosophers have faced with integrating the space of laws (our conception of which makes intelligible the phenomena of some of the natural sciences) with the space of reasons (our conception of which makes intelligible the thoughts, claims and actions of human beings) is, on my view, the wrongheaded identification of the space of causes with the space of laws. By 'space of laws,' I mean the realm of nomological regularities, the kind of law-governed processes that are typically studied by the natural sciences. I hadn't seen that clearly until I read Eric Marcus's wonderful bookRational Causation(that has helped me understand how human actions fit in the causal order). Marcus states in his first sentence of the acknowledgement: 'I was profoundly influenced by John McDowells classes at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1990s. The space of causes, he taught, straddles the non-overlapping space of reasons and space of laws, a metaphor that fits the central thesis of this book.'
Marcus's central thesis is that reasons are causes, but they are not reducible to the kind of law-governed causes that operate in the physical world. They belong to a distinct category of 'rational causation' where causes are not related to effects in a nomological manner. Elizabeth Anscombe, Jennifer Hornsby and Michael Thompson also have helped me see how human actions and intentions are both causal and rational (and conceptual) but not thereby nomological.
In his writings on action and the philosophy of mind, unlike his writings on language and interpretation (although his treatments of language and meaning create an overlap), Davison attempts to make causation bridge the space of laws with the space of reasons with his appeal to the nomological character of causation, which seeks to salvage the normative non-nomological character of the source of human actions while making them fit within the natural order. This doesn't work, on my view, and likely is motivated by his identification of intentional human actions with the physical motions that occurs (within their bodies and brains) when they form intentions and/or act.
Davidson's insistence that all causation is nomological makes it difficult to see how reasons (and episodes of practical deliberation), which are not governed by strict laws in the same way, can be genuinely causal. He notoriously subsumes both of those under the neutral category of 'events'; this is his thesis of anomalous monism. However, as David Wiggins has brilliantly argued in Sameness and Substance, two things can be at the same place at the same time and not be the same things or the same event. We need to attend to their different criteria of persistence and individuation to trace their distinctly protracted trajectories. As Wiggins argues, a physical event, like the movement of my hand, might momentarily coincide with an intentional action, like my raising my hand to vote, but they are not the same event. The action has a rational and temporal structure that the physical event lacks. Human actions take place in the natural world and may, in a sense, supervene on physical events, but aren't on that account physical events.
McDowell's project, in part, is to show how we can understand reasons as causes without reducing them to law-governed processes. He does this by rejecting the narrow conception of causation that Davidson inherits from a broadly Humean tradition, and by emphasizing the role of conceptual capacities in shaping our experience and guiding our actions. I don't wish here to expand anymore on how McDowell, or others, like Joseph Rouse and Jennifer Hornsby, purport to achieve the requisite integration. Banno would rightfully complain about this being off topic. But I just wanted to point out how the resistance to such an integration (or failure to achieve it) might present itself in Davidson's philosophy. If however, we take our departure from his seminal work on radical interpretations, and jettison some of the claims that he makes on the metaphysics of "mental events" (and "bodily actions,") we can then view him as an ally on the path towards this reintegration and towards the rejections of a dualism of conceptual scheme and empirical content.
In any case, if we reject the idea that all causes, and in particular rational arguments, are nomological or strictly law governed then we might still maintain that integrating the space of reasons and the space of laws is impossible because we are incapable of understanding our actions in vivo in terms of causation. The example you give of the difference between raising the hand to vote as opposed to just raising it for no reason might be explained by saying that different brain regions or processes are involved in each case, but that both actions are strictly caused by the brain.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
This also seems pertinent: the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines 'nomological' thus:
"relating to or expressing basic physical laws or rules of reasoning".
The fact that the argument, even if its a conclusively good argument, may fail to convince highlights a key distinction between norms and laws, and their respective "direction of fit". When a phenomenon is found to fail to obey a putative law, then the putative law is (at leas prima facie) falsified. There is something wrong with our understanding of the laws of nature if some phenomena genuinely fail to abide by them. When an human being fails to abide by a rational norm (or an animal's behavior or physiology fails to exemplify a ethological or biological norm) then there is something wrong with their thought process or motivation (or perceptual circumstances, health, or metabolism). What this also means is that norms of human behavior (and norms of biological functioning) point to the, indeed, "normal," form of behavior, but a person's (or animal's) abiding by them reflects the actualisation of fallible capacities. It's because our rational abilities are fallible that our occasional failures to abide by them don't "falsify" those norms as genuine explanatory principles of human behavior, and neither do they indicate that we don't have those capacities. Just as is the case in epistemological disjunctivism (which concerns itself with our rational capacities for justified knowledge) we can occasionally fail to abide by norms of practical rationality without this indicating that, in the case where we do abide by them, the rational norms that we rely on to govern ourselves aren't causally effective (in the sense that they constitute genuinely non-redundant explanatory factors of our behavior).
I would not say that, when we like ice cream, we are free not to like it, anymore than, when we are sensitive to good reasons, we are free to disregard them. But in those cases, I follow Susan Wolf who, in Freedom Within Reason, argues that free will (or rational autonomy) doesn't consist in the ability to freely choose between a reasonable and an unreasonable option but rather in having acquired rational abilities through becoming (mainly by means of upbringing and acculturation) asymmetrically sensitive to good reasons. We always remain fallible, and the ineliminable asymmetry consists in the fact that rational or irrational behavior have distinct modes of explanationour rational behaviors being explained by our sensitivity to reasons, and our failures to behave rationally being explained by interfering factors, which we may sometimes (e.g. drugs, stokes or misleading information) or may not (e.g. callousness or intellectual laziness) be exculpated or excused for.
I would not say that Rouse charges McDowell in ending up in the exact same quagmire. Rather, although Rouse endorses McDowell's criticism of Davidson, he wishes to fulfill more effectively than McDowell does the project of accounting for the intelligibility of our rational nature within a naturalistic framework and understanding of natural sciences. He does seem to charge McDowell with too often or too closely assimilating the intelligibility of the order of first nature (i.e. our pre-conceptual animal nature as opposed to our linguistically informed and acculturated second-nature) with the realm of laws (physics, chemistry, etc.) And I am sympathetic to this criticism.
I've had Rouse's book 'How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism' sitting on my shelves for many years and haven't read it yet just because there only are twenty-four hours in a day. But I greatly enjoyed the book Yo! and Lo!: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons that he co-authored with Rebecca Kukla. I just now found an excellent review of How Scientific Matter written by Kukla. I greatly recommend it.
Let me quote from Willem deVries who in his SEP entry about Sellars wrote:
"Sellars studies has been dominated by a clash between the right-wing Sellarsians (e.g., Patricia and Paul Churchland, Ruth Millikan, Jay Rosenberg), who emphasize Sellarss scientific realism and nominalism, and the left-wing Sellarsians (e.g., Rorty, McDowell, and Brandom), who emphasize instead Sellarss insistence on the irreducibility and sociality of rules and norms."
In his contribution to the volume Rorty and His Critics, Bjørn Ramberg wrote a very illuminating paperPost-ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson, indeed my favorite contribution in the whole volume, and one that Rorty was very receptive to, that I now forgot much of the substance of except that it illuminatingly shows how moving a bit from right-wing towards left-wing Sellarisianism can help Rorty illuminate the notion of rational causation while enabling Rorty to avoid some of his scientistic/reductionistic tendencies, within the bounds of naturalism. A few years ago, I had gone to Oslo University to attend (uninvited!) a philosophical workshop organised by Jennifer Hornsby (about Helen Steward's newly published A Metaphysics for Freedom) and I ran into Ramberg in a corridor, not even knowing he was teaching there. But when he told me his name, I was immediately able to praise him for this specific paper that had impressed me so much.
If I can find the time, I'll reread Ramberg's paper and attend closely to what he had to say about Davidson and mental causation.
It's relevant but also misleading. This is how the term is being used broadly but, just like 'libertarianism' qua thesis about free will and determinism, and as opposed to the ethical/political philosophy championed by Ayn Rand, in specific philosophical contexts 'nomological' also has a narrower connotation. As used by Davidson, 'nomological' refers to a causally closed order of exeptionless laws of nature, precisely in opposition with the 'rules' (i.e. norms) of reasoning that may be expressed as ceteris paribus rules and that rational animals like us aren't always abiding by even when we should. It's indeed the 'anomalous' character of the 'rules of rationality' (and his token-identification of mental events with physical events) that motivate his 'anomalous monism'.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I would add that a central point of Rouses is that our animal nature is not pre-conceptual at all. Also, the Yo and Lo book was by Kukla and Mark Lance.
Tying this back to the OP, Rouse replaces the concept of conceptual scheme with that of normative discursive practices. Would Rouse respond differently than McDowell and Davidson to the question of whether it makes sense to talk of individuals or communities as living in different worlds? I think he would. I think Rouses treatment of material circumstances as already intertwined with normative practices makes the data of perceptual experience internal to social practices in a way that it is not for either Davidson or McDowell.
Thank you! I hadn't heard of House of Leaves. I got a copy to read.
Since we don't create ourselves by fiat so to speak and given that we have no choice given who and what we are as to whether we are convinced by arguments or not. I'm not seeing much difference between the ideas of being convinced and being caused to be convinced.
I also want to reiterate that once we look at the world as always already interpreted, then I think the interpreted evidence of the senses, although obviously sometimes mistaken, does provide good evidence and hence rational justification for both animals and humans for at least the basic beliefs about what is observed. I think we've explicated our respective positions pretty thoroughly so I'm not sure there's much more to say at this point. Thanks for your efforts and polite participation, Pierre.
It was indeed Mark Lance (who I also used to confuse with Marc Lange)! I should rely on AI more. Human beings like me are so unreliable and prone to hallucinating...
Thank for pointing this out about Rouse. I ought to look deeper into it. I wonder, though, whether he believes our animal nature to be conceptual owing to it being shaped by our acculturation and language acquisition (and he is stressing the continuity of the process and substrate) or if he believes other animals and human infants to also have conceptual abilities (and he is stressing the similarities between linguistically informed and non-linguistically shaped conceptuality). If it's the former, then he would seem to be closely aligned with McDowell in that regard.
For McDowell, the data of perceptual experience is most definitely internal to social practices. The data is always already informed by those practices. It seems clear also that Rouse endorses much of McDowell's criticism of Davidson, but I'll probably need to read Chapter-2 The Dualism of Nature and Normativity, in 'How Scientific Practices Matter,' to get a better handle on Rouse's positioning between Davidson and McDowell. Meanwhile, I'll happily defer to you.
Regarding the intelligibility of placing individuals in different worlds, this may also be a matter of stressing the overlaps, following Davidson's ideas about the principle of charity, or stressing the differences owing to the (conceptually informed) empirical content being impotent to serve as a neutral arbiter for resolving the disputes (or islands of mutual unintelligibility) at the boundary. But both stances seem to be consistent with the thesis apparently shared by Rouse and McDowell, that empirical content doesn't reside outside of the sphere of the conceptual.
This leaves me wondering just what you mean by "empirical content"?
There are two issues here. One concerns autonomous self-origination of one's actions (and mental acts) and the issue of ultimate responsibility. Galen Strawson argued (look up his 'Basic Argument') that if human beings can't be credited with, per impossibile, shaping their own preferences (including the preference for behaving rationally versus irrationally) prior to them having first acquired rational dispositions, then they aren't ultimately responsible for any of their choices and actions. But the rejoinder to this is that responsibility doesn't require ultimate responsibility in the crude sense that one would need to get a hold on the first link in the historical causal chain of events that led to one being bootstrapped in a rational form of live. I'm not ultimately responsible for having been born human and having been provided with a decent enough upbringing. But this lack of ultimate responsibility doesn't entail that I have not become (at some point) rationally autonomous in a way that makes me, now, responsible for my actions.
Secondly, regarding the difference between the idea of being convinced and being caused to be convinced, there need not be one according to McDowell. That's the whole point of the idea (also endorsed my Eric Marcus) that 'the "space of causes" straddles the non-overlapping "space of reasons" and "space of laws." If the causality at issue is rational causationfinding oneself in circumstances such that one has a good reason for doing X and one does X because one is suitably sensitive to the force of such a good reason, then one is indeed being caused by the obtaining of those circumstances to do X. But the fact that one is sensitive to the goodness of the reason (because one is rational) also is explanatorily relevant to one's action. It is a formal cause of the action, as it were.
There was a British version of the Candid Camera TV show that ran in the 1960s or 70s, I think. In one episode they decided to trick dogs who were being walked by their owners and who were, in normal dog fashion, watering the tree trunks and fire hydrants that they were passing by. The crew had set up a tall tree stump that was hanging from a crane and resting on the ground. When a dog would walk by and raise a hind leg to do its job, the tree would suddenly rise up in the air. The viewership, and likely also the planners of the prank, might have been expecting the dogs to display some puzzlement at seeing a tree take flight. But all the dogs being pranked would just immediately discontinue their watering project and walk straight to the next tree without once looking back.
One might say that the perception of a suitable object, such as a tree, for marking one's territory provides a reason for a dog peeing on it. And then, when this object reveals itself to be unsuitable, the reason lapses. But what the behavior of the dogs highlights, in my view, it the comparative lack of conceptual articulation of the objects and qualities that figure in their world of affordances (or Umwelt). A tree may be an object that the dog tacitly expects to stay put when it pees on it. But if it doesn't, who cares? That doesn't trigger a conceptual revision in the dog's world conception. If this sort of occurrence happens very often, the dog's behavioral proclivity to pee on trees may get progressively extenuated. But that isn't exactly an intellectual achievement.
Above, I mentioned a comparative lack of conceptual articulation between the elements in a dog's world of affordances. But I must acknowledge the existence of a proto-conceptual means-to-ends articulation of animal affordances. The thirsty dog knows that its water bowl affords drinking from. The dog also knows that walking down the corridor will lead it to the water bowl. The dog's motivation to drink therefore translates into a motivation to walk towards its known location. This is a form of proto-practical reasoning, but it falls short of practical reason in that the means-to-end links that connect basic affordances can't be questioned or revised by the dog other than as a result of conditioning.
For instance, that the apple looks red when I look at it. The content of the intentional state "the apple looks red" is empirical since it is passively actualized, as an act of Kantian receptivity, as a result of my visual sensory encounter with it. But it is also conceptual since I am not just perceiving an apple and perceiving redness. I am subsuming it under the concept of a substance, namely the 'apple' sortal concept, and also seeing it as having this or that shape, being in this or that location, and as being red, where the grasping of the location, shape and secondary qualities consist in the passive actualisation of conceptual abilities that I have acquired (and learned to reason with) prior to seeing this particular apple, seeing it as an apple, and seeing it as having its particular primary and secondary qualities.
Maybe the thesis that empirical content isn't external to the sphere of the conceptual could be stated pitily as: there is no seeing that isn't also seeing as.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Rouse believes both animals and infants have conceptuality. The distinction he makes between humans and animals is between what he calls one-dimensional and two-dimensional intentionality. Only humans possess the latter, which not only allows our practical perceptual activities to be guided by conceptual normativity as is the case with other animals, but we can put into question those norms, in terms of what is at stake and at issue for us.
Rouse treats
Quoting Pierre-Normand
What is key here is that Rouse understands conceptuality in a fundamentally different way than does McDowell. From Rouses vantage, Mcdowell treats conceptuality, and language, in a detached and over-intellectualized manner , while Rouse sees both linguistic and pre-linguistic conceptuality as contextually-dependent and purpose-driven.
I'm pressed for time right nowI'll try to respond to your other posts when I have more time.
Something's being blue or yellow doesn't represent affordances in the dog's Umwelt, so I don't think those ever are salient features of their perceptual experience. But they might differentiate the blue from the yellow ball if it is only the blue one that their owner makes them play with. In that case, their experience having empirical content is manifested by their expectation, when their owner displays the blue ball to them, that they may soon have an opportunity to play with it. But the blueness of the ball isn't abstracted from the holistic content of this perceived affordance. Dogs discriminate colored objects but don't have abstract concepts of color. They don't see the ball as blue, since this abstract feature of the ball never is salient to them. Lastly, that the blue ball that they see affords being played with is part of their perceptual experience (and is an empirical content in that sense) but it is merely proto-conceptual since it isn't articulated in a two-dimensional space of reasons like our own concepts are, as Joseph Rouse might say. (See @Joshs's latest reply to me). Dogs can't play the game of giving and asking for reasons, and their lack of an ability to do so also limits the scope of their discriminative and practical reasoning abilities
I think dogs probably are smart enough to learn tasks which require them to abstract out something like color to perform it.
We possess a general concept of substance, or object, which allows us to conceive of an object as remaining numerically identical even as its qualities change. In the case of secondary qualities like color, we also distinguish between something looking red (as it might under unusual lighting) and its actually being red. A dog can be trained to respond differently to blue objects than to yellow ones, but this does not amount to abstracting the concept of color in the intended sense. There remains a categorical distinction between a dogs proto-conceptual perceptual discriminative ability and our ability to form abstract concepts, which we use to articulate propositions and integrate empirical content inferentially within a broader web of beliefs that shapes our understanding of the world and our self-conscious place within it, or so I would argue.
Depends what you mean I think. There are animal experiments that require them to learn rules where they have to attend to some perceptual dimensions (e.g. colors) and ignore others (e.g. shape) for sets of stimuli (where they will be shown all possible object/color combinations). Specific colors or shapes will lead to rewards when performing the task. If, say, red gives the reward you have say possible colors and two possible shapes for the animal to choose from, you can change the reward structure by just swapping which color gives the reward and the animal has to change their behavior. You could also swap all old stimuli out for new stimuli; say, changing red & blue for green & yellow, and circles & squares for triangles & vertical lines, so the animal has to learn a new reward structure. It always takes longer for animals to learn the new reward structure when it has been changed from a color to a shape than if the reward structure had stayed with colors. This kind of thing suggests that the animals are attending specifically to colors (or shapes) as an abstract dimension when looking for the reward, and can change so that they are attending to some dimensions while ignoring others. If they were just responding to the stimulus as an object in and of itself there should be no differences when changing reward. I'm pretty sure all mammals are able to do this kind of task, probably others too, I wouldn't be surprised.
I agree they probably don't see the ball as blue if that means they consciously conceive of it as such. Nonetheless I see no reason to think they don't see the blue ball, that it doesn't appear blue to them. Much of our own perceptual experience is like thatwe don't see the red or green light as red or green we simply respond appropriately.
This is the general nature of affordances, for non-rational (or proto-rational) animals or humans. They structure our perceptual worlds but aren't always salient. But unlike animals, we don't just respond to them when our immediate drives make them salient. We actively pick them up for purpose of practical or theoretical reasoning, which is possible thanks to our conceptual skills being rationally articulated. Although blue objects that we see aren't generally seen as blue, when we don't attend to this property of them, and as cases of change blindness illustrate, we can focus on them (and navigate their implications) at will.
Furthermore, I would argue that the dog never sees the blueness of the ball as an affordance. What would it afford? Picking another object of the same color? Rather, as I argued previously, they might see the blue ball as affording playing with, since this is the ball (and not the yellow one) that their owner always make them play with. But then, the color of the ball merely enables a discriminative ability, and the salient ground of the discrimination, in the dog's perceptual experience, isn't blue/not-blue, but rather affords-playing/does-not-afford-playing. The dog doesn't know that the blue ball has anything in common with their blue collar or with the blue cabinet in the living room, for instance, unless it's being trained and rewarded with food when it point to blue objects, in which case the salient affordance isn't the blueness, but the promise of food.
I recall you mentioned Eric Marcus, 'Rational Causation', who writes extensively on this theme. Could you perhaps say a little about him in this context?
I don't recall Marcus discussing the special case of non-rational animal cognition and how (non-rational or proto-rational) mental causation might contrast with, or relate to, the case of rational causation. I think Joseph Rouse, whom @Joshs mentioned earlier, but whom I haven't read much, might be relevant to the issue of the continuities and discontinuities between us and other animals.
On edit: I think you might like what DeepSeek R1 had to say regarding the differences between AIs and us that stem from AIs, unlike us, lacking an embodied animal nature.
But whatever cognitive or perceptual abilities an animal has is regardless of whether it has been trained to do something or not. The use of rewsrd is just motivation to get an animal to overtly display capabilities that it always had. It just comes to the simple notion that an animal nor a human is going to arbitrarily do things or display certain kinds of behavior unless it has a motivation to do so. If you observe people just going about their business in a public place, you probably won't be able to tell if someone is color blind; you need to engineer the scenario to make their lack of capability visible, which must involve some motivation or requirement to act in a certain way.
And this is the task I was talking about just if anyone's interested:
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_vis=1&q=intradimensional+extradimensional+shift+task+rat+mice&btnG=
You can try a human version here:
https://www.labvanced.com/content/research/en/blog/2023-07-wisconsin-card-sorting-test/
Of course all of that may well be true. But I see no reason to think the blueness of the ball is not perceptually present even if the dog has no conscious awareness of its presence, just as we most often aren't consciously aware of what we are perceiving. The ability to detect blue is simply a matter of physiology.
Anyway, the original point at issue was whether the world is always already interpreted for dogs (and other animals), and the idea of affordances seems to suggest that it is.
This is indeed something I wholeheartedly agree with. There is no "raw" empirically given data figuring in the phenomenological experience of humans, dogs or slugs. But I also tend to use "interpreted" in a wider sense than "conceptualized".
Where are you now? Any thoughts?
I was thinking along these lines (imagine Quine and Davidson discussing reference):
Quine: Because differing conceptual schemes could be in play, reference is inscrutable.
Davidson: But if there were really differing conceptual schemes, they would have to be incommensurate, because otherwise they would be translatable. And if they were truly incommensurate, you wouldn't be able to detect that.
Quine. I don't disagree with that. I didn't say anything about detecting differing conceptual schemes, I was saying that they could exist. It's the mere possibility of it that makes reference inscrutable.
Davidson: Oh. But you have to assume that reference is fixable in order to communicate at all.
Quine. That may be, but it doesn't change the fact that you don't really know. The appearance of knowing is coming from familiarity with behavioral cues.
Davidson: And this convinces you of behaviorism?
Quine. Sort of, not exactly?
Quoting frank
I'd suggest rather that Davidson would say reference has a function only within broader theories of truth (or meaning), and there can be no coherent theory of reference per se. Reference is not free-standing.
I'll have to think about that.
To my eye this thread went awry in considering the intentionality of animals.
Having said that, there was some interesting stuff in New Scientist last week about statistical analysis of whale song, showing that the sounds matched human language in intriguing ways.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2467170-humpback-whale-songs-have-patterns-that-resemble-human-language/
One of Davidson's core conclusions is that if we are to say that some phenomena is a language, we have to be able to translate that language into our own - that we cannot recognise it as a language unless we understand what is being said. These empirical results challenge that.
So far the researchers baulk at calling whale song a language...
So the topic is... topical.
That's so cool. I'm sick as crap at the moment and that cheered me up. I agree that by the time we understand whale, there is no multiplicity of conceptual schemes. But still, wondering if there's a conversation going on down there that we're being left out of is amazing.
Incidentally, did the link to the NS article work, or was it fire-walled?
Yes. There are those who cannot conceive of a non-human animal that truly shares any concepts with human beings and those who are quite sure that all animals in this world share that world, to a greater or lesser extent. Never the twain shall meet. Looks like two incommensurable conceptual schemes to me.
I have questions. I hope someone can enlighten me. (I have read Davidson's article, but it was a while ago...)
Does Davidson think of us as having just one conceptual scheme? Shared by all humanity, past, present and future?
Does Davidson recognize in any way how complex translation can be?
To further entangle the thread with animal intelligence...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/02/250203163756.htm
It appears bonobos are capable of sharing our ability to conceive of others as knowledgeable or ignorant of some fact.
It popped right up when I clicked on it.
Davidson rejects the view, held by both metaphysical realists and anti-realists that persons represent the world (scheme vs content) to themselves. Hilary Putnam argues that we all share a single scheme, but, as As Evan Thompson explains
I find Thompsonss pragmatist pluralism an appealing alternative to Davidsons non-representationalist direct realism, so Ill quote his argument here:
Thanks very much for this. Very helpful.
Quoting wonderer1
The more we look for abilities that both animals and humans have, the more we find.
So no.
The holism in Davidson consists in our sharing the same world, and hence that whatever beliefs you have about that world are a variation on the beliefs I have. He was not a realist, in the traditional sense, since he does not hold that we are interpreting a word by constructing a conceptual scheme that is about that world. Nor is he an antirealist, since truth is not a function only of our conceptual schemes.
I don't know Thompsonss work, but there is something odd in what quoted, since it wrongly claims Davidson was a realist, then sets out an approach that rejects realism and antirealism in much the way Davidson actually does, but then re-introduces conceptual schemes.
It looks very much to be yet another misreading of Davidson.
Quoting Banno
Thompson is simply reiterating Davidson's claim that with a correct epistemology we can be realists in all departments.
As to Thompson re-introducing conceptual schemes, he cant be doing that since that would imply a representationalist view of the world, which Thompson is rejecting. His approach, like Davidsons , assumes that language is directly in touch with the world. The key difference between his pragmatism and Davidsons unconventional realism is expressed in Thompsons assertion that the world is both found and made: it is made in the finding and found in the making.
An old paper - 1980's? . His views had changed somewhat by the time of Truth and Predication (2005).
.
Quoting Joshs
But
Those incommensurate domains philosophers are to navigate look very much like conceptual schemes.
All of that is very helpful - and confusing!
I realize that it would be helpful to identify specific remarks to back up what I say, but I have found it difficult to choose exactly the right quotations. Nonetheless, I think there is a basis in what you both have said for the following comments:-
It seems to me that Thompson and Davidson have much in common. But there seems to be a difference (though Thompson seems to say that Davidson points us towards it) in that, for Thompson there are sometimes (but, I notice, not too often) local differences of opinion that involve incommensurability. Davidson certainly rules out the "superholist" view and rejects the conventional realism/anti-realism dilemma. Yet he does seem to adopt an unconventional version of realism. But I don't think that he rules out local disagreements that involve incommensurablity. But nor does he rule them in.
One of the features of Kuhn's version of all this is that he broadens the scope of his paradigms beyond the purely linguistic, to include, for example, technology. I would have expected something similar from Thompson (embodiment, enactivism).
Davidson's view that the only issues are about our beliefs and whether they are true or not "in the world" is surprising, especially when he insists that there are no "raw" (i.e. uninterpreted) experiences, yet it seems to be the case that such facts about the world are the causes of our beliefs. (McDowell's objjection that causality is indifferent to justification seems correct to me.). On both grounds, the articulation of our beliefs is critically important, but the means to articulate them would, surely, be some form of conceptual structure or structures. In any case, it seems just obvious that there are many ways to insulate specific beliefs against empirical refutation. For example, "God always answers prayers. Sometimes the answer is no", "All's for the best in the best of all possible worlds", the concept of repression in psychoanalysis &c,
I hope, but am not sure, that at least some of this makes some sense.
Yes. The metaphor of a lens is much better. And, of course, the selection of what is to be noticed by reference to what is of interest or use makes perfect sense. We don't start with a clean sheet of paper, but as human beings thrown into the on-going social and material world. We start with where we are.
So we need to think of pragmatism, in some form, at the level of the conceptual scheme or paradigm or language (and this needs to be flexible, capable of adapting to changes and surprises. Then truth and falsity apply where the scheme applies. (The idea of truth that is independent of what enables us to articulate it and discover it seems like a desirable goal, but doesn't make any sense.)
We can attend to the world in different ways, paying more attention to certain aspects, configurations, things that seem relevant to us for various reasons and are maximally informative in regard to affording the behavior required to live or do what we want to do. I think all our perception trivially is picking out structures in the world even if it requires some processing to do so (e.g. our ability to sense and engage with 3-dimensional depth in visual space can only be inferred indirectly from 2D visual cues and also information from our bodies). Different brains may inclined to attend to some structures more than other, some brains may not even be able to pick out some structures (e.g. color blindness), and brains can often be wrong in some sense (e.g. illusions).
As @Ludwig V suggests, we may have local disagreements in the sense that we make (or think we make) meaningfully different predictions about how the world works. The fact that different cultures or even different people may attend to the world in different ways or use words in different ways then doesn't necesarily preclude some in principle mutual intelligibility in how these people use words, and people generally have access to the same information from the perceived world due to our shared biology and intelligence. This point can be somewhat separated from the idea that people can have different beliefs with different predictions or counterfactuals about how the way the world works - the belief in the existence or absence of God in different cultures is about disagreements of beliefs. Obviously these beliefs may involve novel concepts, but then Davidson's point is that the idea of conceptual schemes becomes vacuous once mutual intelligibility is allowed - it is not so troublesome to incorporate a concept you have never heard of before into your own conceptual repertoire. I think Kuhn's notion of paradigms was never about some notion of global unintelligibility but about general underdetermination of the kinds of hypothetical metaphysics that can account for empirical evidence, and local misunderstandings that cause scientists to sometimes talk past each other.
On the idea of interpreted experiences, I like a kind of middle ground in the sense that I think we just see what we see in terms of direct experiences. However maybe those experiences just change given the context for various reasons in your brain; for instance, color inversion / afterimage illusions is just a very extreme example of the fact that we can plausible have different experiences to the same stimuli given some different context. You might then think of having different experiences to the same stimuli in the sense of the kind of structure that is, so to speak, being inferred by the brain from its sensory inputs - the brain can react to the same sensory inputs in different ways to extract the most information in some context.
There is though, I think, also an interpretation aspect in the sense that we can plausibly act or re-act in response to the same experiences in different ways - that is a sense of interpretation purely in the sense of acts, behavior, changes of attention, vocalization, prompted thought or even mental imagery, prediction, memory, etc ...
Aside:
(Imo, its not necessarily very easy to disentangle experiences and interpretations introspectively because the nature of our experiencrs tends to be in flux - in a William James sense of the metaphor of continual flights and perchings and flights again of a bird. From my introspections, meaningfully making sense of a perch involves a flight which obviously takes you away from that perch - my own experienced cannot be made sense of in an intelligible, noticeable way outside of the fact that those experiences are a continual stream. There is no sense in which I recognize a dog without the reactive changes in attention and behavior that it entails, or the later ability to report and re-affirm that experience. In those attention-blindness tasks with the dancing gorilla, my cortical system may have registeted information on the retina which is related to the gorilla, but without attention and the ability for this information to affect other parts of the brain that react to the gorilla; then for all intents and purposes, nothing was registered, nothing was noticed, nothing was seen, because registering something is an act).
Continued:
... This all in the same sense that different people may attend or have tendencies to make different predictions or construct relationships about what they see in the world. We could then be "wrong" in some sense - the kind of structure inferred may have a different relationship to the world that contradicts counterfactuals related to the particular relevant scenario - a brain can be wrong in some sense when its predictions about its own experiences do not cohere. We use words like 'dog' in relation to a coherent structure of experiences that map to an outside world insofar as our biological machinery is coupled to an outside world. And biological structures can couple to the world in different ways (whether at the level of different species, cultures, individuals, etc), coupling to different facets, in a way that carries some kind of veridicality insofar that they organisms are predictive machines that react appropriately or at least consistently to the environment as a "good regulator": e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_regulator.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I dont like the metaphor of lens as a depiction of the relation between mind and world. It implies a detached, subjectivist view of how we make sense of the world, as though the information contained in reality is already sitting out there and all we have to do is notice and process it internally. We dont pick out factual aspects of the world based on relevance for our purposes, we actively do things with the inanimate and social world, and the patterns of our doings forms normative structures of intelligibility and purpose which determine HOW the world appears meaningfully to us, how it ought to be relative to the predictive norms of correctness of fit that are generated from our discursive interactions with it, as well as the pathways by which its intelligibility changes for us over time.
Quoting Apustimelogist
The idea of mental scheme vs factual content is vacuous. But if we recognize the performative, enactive nature of sense-making, then we can see why it is the case that when it comes to vitally important aspects of our dealings with each other , on matters such as science, politics and ethics, it is indeed enormously troublesome to incorporate a concept you have never heard of before IF that concept gets its sense from a discursive system of practices that is only peripherally shared by you. No need to blame this on a split between scheme and world, since the world is already directly present in our practices.
I've read that thrice and still have little idea of what your thesis is.
In particular, it is not clear that conceptual schemes correspond in any helpful way with "models" in cybernetics, whatever they are.
How about the "Mirror of Nature"? Sound better?
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
It sounds wonderful when used as the foil it represented in Rortys book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
What did you think of the book?
I think thats why he added NEO-pragmatist.
Maybe. What I was thinking about was the idea of attention - selecting parts of the outside world as more relevant than other parts. For me, this idea of attention conveys a lack of one privileged structure from the perspective of an organism - instead, organisms can interact with the world in different ways, to different parts, for different reasons.
Quoting Joshs
Not sure I see a fundamental difference.
Quoting Joshs
But there is nothing inherently stopping anyone from becoming becoming more familiar with that.
Quoting Banno
If concepts are just the coupling of word-use to the states of the world then that is fundamentally what they are. Words are proxies which convey the sense in which we - and how we - perceive, predict, attend or engage with our environments. If different people seemingly have different concepts then it is because they are interacting with the world in different ways or interacting with different parts of the world.
If we are good regulators then thats trivially what they are.
The point being conveyed was that a good model can be entailed by any fashion in which an organism can couple to its environment.
How?
Because thats what all our sensory-motor states are and words (or word-use) are just a special case.
Yes. But that's a misunderstanding of what intelligibility is. Intellgibility is not black and white, but a spectrum. He seems to think that "conceptual schemes" are a tight logical structure which is either completely intelligible of completely unintelligible - which leads to his reductio. That fits with what appears to me a very naive view of translation as just a set of equivalences. That's seldom or never available.
Quoting Apustimelogist
That's very close to what I would call a concept.
You seem Quoting Apustimelogist
Now it seems that you are substituting words for concepts.
I don't think we can do without some sort of idea like that of a concept or idea.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Not quite right. We have 3D stereoscopic vision because of our two eyes; it fails at larger distances, but it works well at smaller distances - as the 3D films show. Our ears manage to give us 3D hearing as well.
Yes I agree, there are gradations of intelligibility. I think the point is that nothing humans do is in principle unintelligible (in regular contexts). When different, say, cultures collide in the same environment, the individuals in that environment are generally engaging with the same structures of the world (or maybe the weaker claim of some common accessible structure is available) - but the difference is their knowledge, ability or simply the norms or conventions of navigating these structures. But they are in principle navigable.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, agreed. I think concepts can be seen as tied to something like meta-awareness or meta-distinctions... awareness of one's own awareness or ability to distinguish one's own distinctions one makes about the world. We model this in word-use - like how we use 'dog' in relation to some coherent structure of experiences.
Quoting Ludwig V
All visual cues trivially occur to us on a 2D field - the retina is a 2D structure. The use of two retinas does not change this fact. You are just using 2D cues in an interesting way to make inferences that guide action and predictions about the world.
Here's the thing, people. It's much simpler than what all of you are saying. A good regulator = a good unofficial moderator.
As such, that person is not technically a moderator.
Is that person doing backseat moderation?
Of course not.
That's what makes him a good regulator!
If any of you ever played D&D, you'd understand all of this in a heartbeat.
I agree that we have to think of the senses as part of a sensori-motor system, which cuts out the distraction of "presentations" and "perceptions".
One can argue that vision is 2D in the eye, I suppose, and that there is an inference being made. But my ears don't have a 2D image. Nor do my touch or pain receptors. Yet we experience them in 3D. Our knowledge of body position is similar. We don't make the inference - the results of an inference made "unconsciously" are available (are reported) "directly". This, I suppose, is why Kant had to posit a priori understanding of space; similar points apply to time.
Quoting Apustimelogist
That fits with Wittgenstein's idea that human life and practices are the essential context for everything. It would seem that he did not see any similarities with non-human life. This is somewhat puzzling to me, though I would not automatically extend that understanding to all life. There is disagreement among human beings about that.
There is more to be said about how we deal with extreme - non-regular - contexts.
Quoting Ludwig V
Depends what is meant by "experience them in 3D" I guess. For me, 3D "experience" is nothing more than our ability to navigate and predict the 2D visual information. In terms of the body, it is about the integration of joint positions and predictions regarding those degrees if freedom -. Imo, the results of the unconscious inference about 3D space - that becomes available to us - is almosr entirely enactive in terms of my familiarity with the consequences of movements in terms of visual and joint information. And we must include eye movement and lens focusing (i.e. ciliary muscle) in this too - your eye palpates the scene in its motion and focusing which is part of your distinct familiarity with 3D space.
Quoting Ludwig V
I would say maybe there is something like intelligibility in common with non-human life. Maybe we can say humans an animals might share some vague sense of mutual intelligibility with regard to something like space or even emotions on some minimal level depending on the animal, but then animals may be incapable of many of the kinds of abstract predictions a human can. Maybe an animal has a kind of intelligibility in terms of the spatial engagement with a ceiling, but an animal may not have access to the kind of abstract semantic relations and predictions a human could associate with a ceiling. Or maybe a writing is a better example - many animals can see and distinguish letters but will never be capable of attaining more abstract, higher-order predictive content about semantic meaning.
Not the foggiest what you just said, I'm afraid!
Yes. In terms of focusing, there is also the "squinting" that aligns the eyes so that they can focus on the same objects. (Hold up a finger at arm's length in front of you. Move it gradually towards you. You will find that you have to adjust your eyes to follow it. If you don't, you'll find you see two images of the finger. Then there's the peculiarity of how one sees one's own nose.) But none of that is 2D information. The ears work differently. They apparently note the difference when a given sound arrives at each ear and compute the direction from that. How knowledge of my own body's position works - or our balance sense - I have no idea.
But it's also true that at greater distances, we rely on 2D information.
(I like the idea that my eye "palpates" the scene. My hands and feet also palpate my surroundings. In the second case, it is clearly not 2D information.)
Quoting Apustimelogist
It would seem you are a minimalist on this question. Let's not forget the differences between dogs and bacteria. There's not one answer for all non-human life. There's a spectrum. What complicates the issue even more is that, IMO, the relationship we can form with (the "higher" forms of life") actually affects, not only our judgement, but also how those creatures behave and consequently the practices that they and we can share. That shouldn't be a surprise. We learn to be human - what being human is - through our interactions with those around us.
But then, there also people with whom we do not share everything. As in the holocaust and other examples of inhuman or bestial treatment meted out by human beings - not to mention occasions when we find the behaviour of others unintelligible - there are examples all around us.
Epicurus was not like that, for example. He considered slaves as equals, not only to each other, but to himself as well.
Epicurus was therefore a better role model than Quine, as far as Ethics goes.
Well, yes it is 3D information in the sense that the objective world seems to be spatially 3D. I'm just saying that we can only navigate this visually, on a 2D space of the retina.
Maybe proprioception and body motion you can argue actually is much more directly 3D...
[Edit: and I am not sure 3D body information is entirely trivial since no single joint in your body has access to all possible degrees of freedom of motion in a 3D space. It is conceivable to me that information of movement in a single joint is not sufficient for a brain to infer 3D space - rather I imagine, many joints are needed and possibly even other information like vestibular and visual, at least for 3D space as we know it.]
... But then the inference about 3D space as you see it in vision is then a consequence of how body motion changes a 2D image. The non-trivial way in which this happens allows the inference of 3D space, but I would say that this can equally seen as just transitions in 2D patterns on the retina interacting with proprioceptive and other kinds of sensory information. All the visual information about space is inherently 2D. For me, 3D visual perception is not some direct perception of 3D information - you only ever have 2D visual information. Rather, its your ability to enact predictions about 3D space through motion, and your inherent familiarity with that.
Quoting Ludwig V
What would non-minimalism be?
It is certainly true that all the visual information about space can be represented in 2D. It's called a picture, and you can walk around the world thinking of yourself as watching a movie. That's why I draw your attention to the other senses, since there is no equivalent in those contexts. You mention proprioception and body motion as possible 3D. But how could we have 3D bodies in a 2D world? BTW, you are forgetting that we have 3D hearing as well.
Quoting Apustimelogist
If we only had a 2D picture and no other information, I don't think we could even conceive of a 3D space, never mind navigate it. Our intepretation of that 2D image is conditioned by what we know from all our senses. Without that, I don't think we could even make sense of the possibility of a 3D space.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Well, as I said above, any 3D scene can be represented in 2D. We have learned to interpret 2D pictures as 3D scenes. If all we experienced were 2D, how could we even get the idea of 3D?
There is a real difference between a 2D and 3D visual image, but it is not simply based on 2D information, but on the fact that the two images our visual system works with are slightly different. In combination, they give a diferent experience. Call that an inference if you like, but the experience really is different.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I was just picking up on what you said:-
Quoting Apustimelogist
A non-minimalist would have said "to a greater or lesser extent" and cut out all the "maybe" qualifications. I would have said that there is often mutual comprehension between animals and humans based on whatever interactions occur in each case. However, even though that looks like an empirical question, it depends how the facts are interpreted, so I'm pessimistic about the possibility of productive argument about that. That one of the reasons why I don't think that all disagreements can be settled on empirical grounds.
They are different senses about different things, one from directly inside the body, the other from outside.
I'm talking about what you see. Its a 2D image.
Quoting Ludwig V
But this is not very different from the visual case in the sense that your learning about 3D space vicariously through cues.
Quoting Ludwig V
For me, the question here is: what does it mean to say that you interpret 2D pictures as 3D? Does the 2D image magically turn into a 3D one? I don't think so. Thats why I believe that 3D perception, and what we might think of as our experiences of 3D space, are rather about your ability to enact predictions about 3D space through body motion, and your inherent familiarity with that. From my perspective, it is then not an experience per se in the same way that directly seeing blue is, or feeling touch on the skin.
Quoting Ludwig V
I wouldn't necessarily say I am a minimalist then, I just don't know what level of mutual comprehension occurs between humans and other animals - and presumably it dependa on the animal - and I was framing it in a way I would if I didn't know what the other person's perspective on that would be either. I think even people who think very little of animal cognition would agree there is a minimal level of intelligibility between humans and certain animals, even in an emotional sense.
Thank you!
Quoting Apustimelogist
The problem here is about the meaning of "direct" and "indirect". You seem to the saying that internal senses are direct and external senses are not? But we have pain and touch receptors connected to the brain and processed in the brain before we experience anything. If what we see is the image on our retina, how is that any different?
In any case, if the internal senses are direct, they give us 3D information directly.
Quoting Apustimelogist
"What you see" is ambiguous. When I look at a normal 2D picture, I can say that I can see the picture and say that I see my car in the the picture. Presumably, the same applies to this 2D image. The iimage is more like a lens, by means of which I see my car.
You pointed out that the image on our retina is 2D. Fair enough. But I don't see that we ever see that image, because it is extensively processed, including the amalgamation of two images. Don't forget. that retinal image is broken up into what, presumably is an encoding that is quite different from any image.
I'm not sure whether to count the result of comparing two images or the extent to which our lens needs adjusting to produce a clear image a visual cue. It could go either way, I suppose.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I partly agree with that. But what is learning is not me, it is, let us say, my brain. I don't ever hear two sounds, one for each ear and then realize that I can deduce where the sound is from that. I hear one sound, located in space. The learning and the processing takes place way "below" consciousness and involves an encoding process that is nothing like a sound even though it is caused by sound.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I'm not sure whether you are aware of the phenomenon of trompe l'oeil painting. There are many examples in Wikipedia - Trompe l'oeil painting . I think that "Escaping Criticism" by Pere Borrell del Caso, 1874 is a particularly clear example - the pictured person is climbing out of the frame. (I would upload it if I could!)
The 3D spectacles that are used in 3D cinemas are a different technique for achieving similar effects. I would say that, in the case of trompe l'oeil it is the case that a 2D image is experienced as 3D. There's no magic involved. I realize that you may know about this already, but it is possible that you don't and I want to make sure that we are talking about the same phenomena.
I can be a bit relentless when I get stuck into a philosophical debate like this. Sometimes I annoy people. Please let me know if I am annoying you.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Some people (Descartes' is the classic philosophical example) deny that any animals experienced anything and saw them as purely mechanical. This resulted in some of his followers concluding that dogs don't feel pain and cruelly mistreating them in order to prove the point. But the disagreement is not a question of evidence, but of interpretation of the evidence. So Davidson's thesis that we can abandon talk of conceptual schemes and return to beliefs and experiences seems to me to be false.
Most people are on the spectrum, but the issue is where a mechanical explanation is sufficient, (as with creatures like bacteria and fungi) and where it is appropriate to apply the kinds of explanation we use to explain (most of) the actions of human beings. Reason and purposes vs causes and evolution.
Which is not to claim that we do not learn the conceptual schemes that we apply to the world.
I wasn't intentionally implying anything at all here by the word "direct" tbh other than the fact that the sense comes from inside our bodies.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, you're right, I think - it isn't. But as I say earlier, I think you could argue that joint positions don't actually directly convey 3D physical space without further integration of information (e.g. A finger joint typically cannot move through all degrees of freedom of 3D space).
Quoting Ludwig V
But what do you then mean when you say that you see your car? There is nothing more, imo, to seeing a car than this 2D information, your reactions to it, and your ability to make predictions about it and engage with it. Thats the only way knowledge makes sense to me. For me, just saying "I see a car" isn't good enough. I need to make sense of what it actually means that I see that car, and this is the conclusion I have come to introspectively. There is nothing but the images - I can just react to them in sophisticated ways.
Quoting Ludwig V
But I don't think whatever is inferred is anything that isn't latent in 2D patterns on the retina, and hence limited by the 2D nature. Hence, why you can manipulate pictures to create illusions of depth; because it is nothing above picking out those 2D patterns. Yes, you can say that is seeing in 3D, but .... similar to the question of "what do you then mean when you say that you see your car?":
What do you then mean when you say that you see depth?
We have 2D information from the retina, and our ability to engage with how that 2D information may change over time and in different contexts.
We can say "that is far away?". But does saying something is far away have any meaning without your ability to move in 3D space. When you say "that is far away?", are you literally seeing "far away" or are you just reacting to a salient cue in a way that represents or pre-empts your ability to recognize and predict what would happen in some context. Is this cue you identify or distinguish anything above a 2D pattern latent on the retina? I guess it isn't technically 2D because color and brightness add extra dimensions, but these aren't inherently spatial. For me, we just use these distinctions to infer something about what would happen with regard to movement. And this is a continual thing too in real-time, not just because we are bodies always sitting in 3D space, but our eyes are continually sampling the environment, and their sampling will be intuned with depth; most of the time, we aren't even aware of what our eyes are doing.
I guess my perspective also leads to the question - are you literally seeing anything?
Not in any essentialitic way. We see complicated patterns and we react to them in real-time.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, I think you are correct. But the 2D nature of the image on the retina is not ambiguous - so that is my anchor.
Quoting Ludwig V
Its going to be the same for vision and hearing.
But are you actually hearing the location of a sound, or just hearing a certain quality to the sound across your two ears that changes are you re-orient your body? If you have no body to re-orientate, what you hear when you "hear the location" could not possibly give you any spatial information - it would simply be a difference in the quality of sound in your ears.
Quoting Ludwig V
But I would say this is what we have been talking about all along.
I would say I am not necessarily saying that we don't see in 3D, but that this is nothing above information on a 2D retina and an enactive component regarding movement and prediction. Space itself I think is the same - spatial perception is more like spatial enaction - familiarity with how movement changes visual information. For me the idea of perceiving any space, let alone 3D space doesn't make any sense above what is essentially a behavioral familiarity - spatial perception is nothing above our real-time manipulation of information through movement.
Quoting Ludwig V
Not at all!
Quoting Ludwig V
I would say that this question of evidence interpretation is a question of beliefs and so in that regard, Davdison would not consider it as something about conceptual schemes.
Perhaps not. But a knuckle joint or a thumb or an arm or a spine can. On the other hand, I would agree that our understanding of 3D space does depend on "holistic integration of the information of the senses". The result of that integration happens to be true. So what's wrong with it?
Quoting Apustimelogist
I mean that I see a 3D object, which I can walk round, get inside, drive around and take to pieces. None of those is true of images of the car, no matter how many you accumulate.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I wouldn't object to that. But what validates the inference? There must be some way that you can compare the image of a 3D object with the 3D object. But you seem to deny that we can. So the image of my car is no different from an image of starship Enterprise or a dragon - and even in those cases, we know what it would mean to see the real thing, even if it never happens.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Perhaps. But I do have a body to re-orient.
Quoting Apustimelogist
It depends what you mean by "literally". For me, when I walk through my front door, I literally see my car. If I only see the image on my retina, then I don't see "literally" my car, but an image of it.
Quoting Apustimelogist
An image is always an image of something else, never the real thing. So my anchor is the real thing. That's what makes the image of a car an image as opposed to a complex array of coloured shapes.
Quoting Apustimelogist
But the image on our retinas (we have two, remember) and our enactive lives are what enable us to see the 3D world. They do not prevent us from seeing it.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Suppose that someone died, and we are considering a suspect. There is good evidence that S caused the death, but also evidence that they did not intend to. I think that means that S is not guilty of murder. You think that means they are guilty of murder. Our disagreement is not about the facts, but about what counts as murder - that is, our concept of murder. Murder is part of a group of concepts under the heading of "crimes". So our disagreement is not about what happened, the facts of the case, but how we should clssify them. You can label that a disagreement about beliefs, if you like. But it is not the same as a disagreement about the facts and cannot be settled in the same way.
Well, I think its at least debatable. I don't think those joints are anywhere near mobile enough, imo.
Quoting Ludwig V
Well then the 2D image is how [I]I[/I] am seeing a 3D car. I can't shake the awareness that my visual field is two-dimensional (except for the color dimension) even though I can distinguish distance.
Quoting Ludwig V
The brain doesn't have any direct access to the outside world. It can never intelligibly compare things with some criterion that has come from the way things somehow are on the outside world. All the brain can do is construct models which make predictions about what happens next, and that can fail and get re-adjusted.
Quoting Ludwig V
Not sure what you mean here.
Quoting Ludwig V
I'm just saying I dispute the idea that there is some kind of phenomenal essence to things that we recognize and perceive - rather I see it in terms of just the direct patterns I see, and my reactions to those patterns in real time. Without those reactions, the idea that I am recognizing an object like a car is empty. I see the 2D patterns of the car and react to them in a way consistent with my recognition of it.
Quoting Ludwig V
Sure, but I don't think the "real thing" can be transcend the 2D information accessible from the retina.
I think the difference in our perspective is that you just say you see the 3D car and stop there; while to me, my percepts can be deconstructed so I do see that my visual space is 2D (apart from the color). But you seem to just embrace the idea that you are directly acquainted with a 3D object. When I then ask what it means that I am acquainted with these 3D objects, it comes back to what I have said about 2D information and enactive processes.
Quoting Ludwig V
But I think the animal case is conceivably a disagreement about facts as opposed to classification.
Quoting Ludwig V
Quoting Apustimelogist
The main point is that we do have the information and it is integrated knowledge. So we agree. What matters here is that we don't have it via an image of any kind.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Well, I agree that the 2D image is how you are seeing the 3D car. But it doesn't follow that you are seeing the image, except perhaps indirectly. When I look through a telescope or similar, what I see is the ship or star. I may be aware of the telescope indirectly because of my limited field of vision, but I do not see two images, the one in my eye and the one in the telescope.
When you refer to the 2D image, you are not seeing the image in your retina. That would mean seeing two images. What we see is one image at most.
It is very easy to fall in to thinking of the eye as some sort of camera or telescope, and in some ways it is. But the difference is that the camera focuses its image on an image-recording device, which an observer can access later, and a telescope has an observer at the eye-piece. But the eye does not have an observer (perhaps the brain) or an image-recording device.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Well, somehow we can work out when our eyes deceive us, so there must be some criterion that lets us know when those 2D images are wrong. Acting and moving with a 3D body in a 3D world is a rich source of correction. But that does depend on linking perception with action rather than experience.
Quoting Apustimelogist
If you suppose anything like an image or model in the brain, the question arises how the brain can access it in order to apply it to the incoming information. The answer is always an observer of some kind. But then, that observer will need to construct its own model or image and there will have to be a second observer inside the first one.... I'm sure you see the infinite regress that has begun. The brain is not an internal observer - unless you call it an observer of the outside world.
Quoting Apustimelogist
People sometimes talk about "affordances" in this context. (I seem to remember they were mentioned earlier in this thread). Of course they are important, because they are the significance of the objects that I see.
Some images are images of something, some are just patterns. If you treat them all as of the second kind, you have lost the significance of the image.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I don't understand what you mean here.
Quoting Apustimelogist
If "directly" just means inside the body, then obviously I cannot be directly acquainted with objects outside my body. Not very interesting. The interesting an important question is whether I can be acquainted with objects outside my body. The answer has to be, yes. I would not use directly and indirectly in the the context of objects outside my body.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Oh, it certainly could be a question of facts. But some people have insisted on describing the sounds emitted by an animal in pain from an experiment as "vocalizations" in the misguided belief that is more objective than "screaming". Such differences of classification prevent rational argument about the facts. So, classification needs to be agreed before the facts can be agreed, and if people are in the grip of the idea that animals are just machines, that agreement is not possible.
Another example:-
Quoting Apustimelogist
We do agree pretty much on how the eye works, yet we describe the facts differently. Our disagreement is not about the facts, but about agreeing a coherent way of describing them, i.e. how to think about them, i.e. a coherent conceptual structure for understanding them. It's not a straightforward task.
Which is just a pattern that I see; thats all I mean by image, without further distinctions or assumptions.
Quoting Ludwig V
They aren't mutually exclusive. You only know something about your actions insofar that you have experiences about your actions.
Quoting Ludwig V
The brain is the model, no infinite regress of observers required.
Quoting Ludwig V
I believe that all the images are just patterns and the significance is retained by way of what I said in the bit you quoted.
Quoting Ludwig V
What you see must be constrained by your physical perceptual systems.
Quoting Ludwig V
I wasn't using directly in the same sense as earlier!
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, agreed.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, I would probably agree here too.
It's as if I were to say that I see an animal, "without further distinctions or assumptions". Do you not even recognize a distinction between the images that enable me to infer that some images are images of 3D objects? It's as if you were to say that all writing is just marks on paper etc., or that the body of my dead friend is just meat.
Quoting Apustimelogist
.. and you only have experiences of your actions because you act.
Quoting Apustimelogist
That's an interesting reply. But on reflection, since we remember things and there's evidence the memories are stored in the brain, I've decided not to pursue this line. "Model", these days, is flexible enough to cover almost any form of information storage.
Quoting Apustimelogist
So an image plus affordances is not an image?
Quoting Apustimelogist
OK. Can you explain the new sense? I'm particularly interested in whether you think there is such a thing as indirect perception and what that might amount to.
On "conceptual schemes", I should add that there is quite a lot that Davidson says that I agree with. I think he is right to argue that there is not one single conceptual scheme that all human beings share. I do maintain, however, that our world includes many partially incommensurable schemes - partly shared and partly not. Further, the difference between scheme and content is not anything like as clear-cut as his argument requires. On the other hand, I accept that the differences in thinking can be expressed as beliefs. I think, for example, that belief in God is not a straightforwardly empirical scheme, but the anchor of a way of thinkng about the world that is conceptually different from the way an atheist or sceptic thinks about the world. But then, Davidson doesn't seem to recognize that there are different kinds of belief.
Quoting Ludwig V
What else is it? Anything else about it does not come from the writing itself but context and relationships those markings have to other things, including our engagement with them. Without those things, yes writing is just marks on paper; writing is nothing more than marks on paper and how those marks relate to other parts of the world.
Quoting Ludwig V
Which are not intelligible without experience of them!
Quoting Ludwig V
I'm quite agnostic on direct vs. indirect perception. I think both can be argued in different ways. I think the idea that we are directly aquainted with structure in the outside world is a coherent notion. But I am not someone inclined to say that there is some single, strong, absolute way of describing structure in the world, so I think this direct perception is quite weak. There are plausible inumerable kinds of structure that an organism could tap into when engaging with the world. You could also argue indirectness though in the sense that we are still in some sense insulated from the outside world by our sensory states, the structure of the brain and its possible foibles, and in principle issues of chronic indeterminacy. So I am open to both types.
Quoting Ludwig V
I more or less agree with Davidson's reasoning in his argument about conceptual schemes but I have never really been familiar woth the context of why he is making these arguments. He is attacking a very strong notion of conceptual schemes; when I think often peoplr talking about this kind of thing just might be referring to what I think is trivial - we use words in different ways depending on the environments and cultures and customs we have been exposed to, and sometimes it is difficult communicating between these things. I don't think this notion needs to be as strong as the one Davidson is attacking. I think maybe the core of what Davidson is attacking is possiby relativism, which would require that not only do people have different ways of talking and refer to different things, but their validity relative to someone's conceptual niche cannot be overturned, maybe entailing that there can be no communication between different conceptual niches in which such a challenge to validity can arise. So maybe thats why his notion of conceptual schemes is very strong, whereas I think most would agree we can uphold the trivial idea that people have different ways of talking or referring without mecessarily having to uphold some kind of relativism.
Neither of you have read much Davidson, have you.
Whats the issue?
No, I haven't. I would welcome enightenment from someone who has.
I have a question for you. Am I right to understand Davidson's thesis as being that conceptual differences come down to different beliefs, and that, at some point, the differences can be settled empirically?
Quoting Apustimelogist
I'm going to assume that "it" in the first sentence is the marks on paper. But then your second sentence should have read "Anything else about them does not come from the marks themelves, but from constext and relationships those markings have to other things." That's true, and in that context, one can refer to those marks as writing. So writing is more than marks on paper. It is marks on paper and how those marks relate to other parts of the world. The difference in vocabulary depends on and signals a difference in how we are to think about the phenomenon.
Quoting Apustimelogist
So either we are in a hopelss circle or the two are inter-dependent.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Well, yes. "Direct" and "indirect" are applied in different ways, depending on the context. (So are "inside" and "outside".) So there is a bit of a morass there. You are also right that there is no single, strong, absolute way of describing structure in the world. It all depends on what we are trying to describe.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I've no objection to saying that our senses and cognitive capacities have their limitations. But, at the same time, they do work for many purposes, and we've been quite clever about working out ways of pushing the boundaries.
Yes, but if you look at writing, you just see marks. You don't somehow see marks and the totality of its relations to other parts of the world. Those relations are only experienced in real time in specific behaviors or thoughts or reactions.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, I think if you assume that there is some objective way the world is, then they have to work in some effective way, mapping to things out in the world. But, I would say that if one were able to make a coherent separation between some thing and some other thing "representing" it, then their relationship is not an intrinsic one but subject to the whims of how the world allows them to coherently map and the "representation" be used. That it is a representation is then, imo, in a weak sense - hence the use of "". I have no objection to the notion of representation as long as it comes with caveats regarding how they work, how their use can be deconstructed. If everyone were to agree on representation in this sense, then I guess the "" would be redundant though.
Quoting Ludwig V
Naturally!
Not quite, I think. Rather, apparent differences in belief, and therefore apparent conceptual differences, are in the main differences in expression. Suitable re-expressions, reinterpretations, may be able to make this apparent.
That's much better. It seems to allow a much more flexible idea of what translation involves than I thought. But then, it seems to leave open the possibility of failure. I'm not sure that's really compatible with what he wants to demonstrate - unless he envisages the possibility of a pragmatic accomodation or even the possibility of the relevant beliefs changing as a result of the encounter - even if both sides stick to their own languages. Is that a possibility?
I looked again at the actual arguments and found it much harder going than I thought when I first read it. One reason is the dearth of actual examples, or, better, cases. His discussion of the yacht (p.18) is fine, though limited. Then he seems to want to extend the scope of this case very widely - even suggesting (though not stating) that this is how philosophy proceeds. Perhaps. Somtimes. And then one wants to say that if that method could resolve philosophical disagreements, philosophical debate would be much more fruitful than it actually is.
I'm still not happy about the slide from conceptual differences to beliefs. It would be tedious to complain that not all differences in beliefs are differences in concepts, so I won't bother with that. However, concepts (or, given the link he establishes between concepts and language) and conceptual schemes (language-games to me) aren't true or false. They are what enables us to establish truth and falsity. Some of the issues he deals with later on seem to me to be very much over-simplified. Yet, I find it hard not to agree with his last paragraph, except for the idea in the last sentence that "we .... reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false." Following his example, I ask what "mediated touch" would be; if that makes no sense, it would seem that "unmediated touch" also makes no sense.
That's not quite right. If you look at marks, you may be looking at 1) meaningless (to you) marks, or you may be looking at 2) marks that you know are meaningful, but don't know the meaning of (scripts that you can't read), or you may be looking at 3) meaningful marks that you can read. In each case, your experience will be different. There are three different visual experiences involved.
Our interpretation of what we see affects our experience, or, better, the significance (or lack of significance) of what we see affects our experience of it. We literally see the difference.
You have probably encountered puzzle pictures, but here are two examples that illustrate what I mean.
The Duck-Rabbit Illusion
Rubin's vase
There's an illusion here, that there is a "neutral" - uninterpreted - description of the pictures in terms of the patterns presented. But there's nothing special about this way of seeing the picture - it's just another interpretation.
The trompe l'oeil pictures are another example of this phenomenon.
This is another part of our discussion about the ambiguity of "see". There is a very influential discussion of this in Wittgenstein Philosophy of Psychology - A Fragment, [previously known as Part II of the Philosophical Investigations] Section xi, para. 118
Yes, but what is different isn't the markings but your reactions to the markings.
The duck-rabbit illusion that you give is an excellent example. My inclination is that what is happening is still about changes in the way we are reacting to the image: attending, sampling, making predictions regarding the image and confidence of reporting. The experience then is inextricably entwined with our ongoing engagement with the image, imo.
In a way, that's true. But it is also true that there are three different kinds of markings, though it is true that they are distinguished by how I can engage with them.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Quite so. There's an interactive process going on. The ambiguity of "see" strikes again, of course. I would want to say that I see the markings differently. You would not be wrong to say that we both see the same markings in a different way. I'm not sure that anything important hangs on the difference. I certainly hope not.
The case of writing is somewhat special, in that writing is 2D, and the writing in the image on my retina is exactly the same as the writing in the 3D book. So we shouldn't have a problem in agreeing that what I see is the writing (or the marks). What's going on with 3D is still unclear.
There are various considerations that might make you pause about saying that we see the image on our retina. I've mentioned already that, in a sense, we not see two images, but a single combination. There are other bits of editing that have gone on that differentiate what we are aware of and what is actually there. 1) There's a blind spot where the optic nerve joins the retina. Our brain fills that in by guess-work, which can go wrong and so we can become aware of that even though it is invisible to us. 2) There's a patch in the centre of the retian that is more densely populated with retinal cells than the margins. The sharp focus that we think we see at the edges of our visual field is the result of our constantly looking around us, so the fuzzy image at the edges of the field of vision is filled in with memories from the last time we looked. 3) I've mentioned the squinting that goes on to enable us to "range-find" objects out in the world.
You mentioned attention. When I look through a telescope or microscope, I do not attend to the image as such (unless I need to focus the lens, or clean it). So I think it is more accurate to say that I look at the ship in the distance through the telescope, that is, through the telescope's image. I would say the same for the retinal image. Most of the time, we are not aware of the retinal image unless there is a problem with it - dust floating on the surface of the lense causes spots to appear in what we see, failures in the lens make the image fuzzy or distorted.
What I would say is seeing the same marks differently is more to do with a different engagement with the information extractable from those markings; but I agree that "see" is ambiguous, partly leading to my previous consideration of whether we see anything at all.
Quoting Ludwig V
You're always attending to things whether you realize it or not, constantly scanning parts of what you see.
Quoting Ludwig V
I don't think this is relevant because I don't believe the distinction between the outside 3D world and what we see is relevant given the fact that our brain cannot access anything independently of 2D information. From my perspective, the patterns we see are 2D. Its our somato-motor engagement with the world that brings an additional dimension to what we "see", both in terms of our body and eyes.
I don't disagree.
Quoting Apustimelogist
OK. The idea that we don't "see" anything at all is interesting. I must have missed it. (I'm assuming it's in this thread somewhere?)
Quoting Apustimelogist
I agree that the images on our retinas are 2D. But I would say that our brain has access to information about the 3D world through somato-motor engagement (with some reservation about hearing) and I think that affects how the brain interprets the 2D information and consequently how we see it. I think the distinction between our brain doing something and us doing something matters. But I admit that what conscious experience amounts to is not at all clear.
Aha, I think it was something I wrote but must have not posted because it was both too vague and complicated a thought, and distracting from some point of a post. Just forgot I didn't post it.
Quoting Ludwig V
I think thats fair.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I do that quite often. Sometimes a thought just doesn't survive being written down.
Quoting Apustimelogist
It's good to reach a consensus. Thanks for the discusssion.