I’m not saying that there are no red lollipops. I’m saying that the science is clear that the colour red is a visual sensation. You’re giving too much importance to English grammar.
Why not? Are you saying there are?
To much importance for what?
Yes; red lollipops are those that cause us to have red visual experiences, which are usually those that reflect ~700nm light.
To much importance for what?
You seem to think that the adjective “red” is properly predicated of lollipops if and only if colours are not visual sensations but mind-independent properties of lollipops. That just doesn’t follow.
It’s like thinking that the adjective “painful” is properly predicated of injections if and only if pain is not a sensation but a mind-independent property of injections.
The fact that we say “red lollipop” rather than something like “redful lollipop” is an arbitrary fact about English grammar, no doubt stemming from a historically naive and erroneous understanding of colours. Our science has corrected this for us, but there’s no good reason for us to rewrite the English language to accommodate.
Okay, so “red visual experience" here doesn’t mean a visual experience that reflects ~700nm light, but an experience of ~700nm “impinging” on your visual receptors—unless you’re just imagining something red, and then there’s no light of any wavelength involved. So how are you defining “red visual experience”?
What makes you say that?
I guess I’m not really sure what “constituent of experience” is supposed to mean here. Sometimes I’ve seen it used as “whatever it is that experience is made of, or directly involves, when you perceive,” which seems fair enough. In this case, I don’t see why the actuality of the thing perceived cannot be a constituent and the question of whether this is “direct” seems to me more one of definition. The actuality of an apple can be a constituent of experience in the sense that it is constitutive of the experience. The actuality of the apple determines why the experience is one way, not any other. That’s the causality proper to sign relations.
But the object doesn’t need to exist when an individual has the experience (stars in the night sky might very well have burnt out), rather it has to have existed at the proper time to have caused the experience.
Because in response to me quoting the scientific view that colours are visual sensations, not physical properties of material objects, you asked me if I should tell the child asking for a red lollipop that there are no such things.
Otherwise what was the purpose of this bizarre red herring?
700nm light stimulates the cone cells in our eyes, causing them to release a certain amount of glutamate up the optic nerve, which triggers neural activity in the visual cortex.
450nm light stimulates the cone cells in our eyes, causing them to release a different amount of glutamate up the optic nerve, which triggers different neural activity in the visual cortex.
These two different groups of neural activity give rise to two different types of visual experiences, with two different qualitative characters. We name these different qualitative characters “red” and “blue” respectively.
This is what our science has shown to be the case. Are you saying that this scientific view is wrong?
Yes the word can be used for different levels of interpretation or analysis. Only, I don’t accept that concept of the “raw” uninterpreted perception. That’s a philosophical construct posited as a limit of the interpretive process. If such a thing could be phenomenally experience, ti would not be the perception of anything. What we experience and describe is always already interpreted at some level.
Though actually, the process of interpretation that we talk about is not always present in our experience. Most of the time, we simply look and see. The interpretive process that we attribute to the brain is, strictly speaking, just a hypothesis.
On reflection, I over-simplified. Look at it this way. There are different judgements we can make about a perception when it is presented to us. We can accept it, reject it, or be uncertain how to take it. What is our starting point, then? After all, a perception is not just a neutral phenomenon, but demands a reaction - acceptance as true or rejection as false or possibly doubt or in ability to commit. But any of those decisions could be the starting-point - or, if you prefer, the default position. So the process of assessing perceptions as they come in certainly exists, but does not always need to be present.
I’ll grant you that the status of a perception as true, false, or doubtful is different from the interpretation we are presented with. That is the object of the assessment process, when it occurs.
It’s not spelled out, but what is spelled out is:
- We have direct perception of something if and only if it is a constituent of the experience
- If something is a constituent of the experience then it exists
- Something can be causally responsible for the experience but not be a constituent of the experience
That’s all the foothold my argument needs to reach its conclusion; if (1), (2), and (3) are true then we do not have direct visual perception of apples.
The non-naive direct realist might disagree with (1) and/or (2), but I think that’s because they mean something different by “direct perception” and/or “constituent of experience”. For the naive (and indirect) realist, I think (1) and (2) are true by definition.
Why would we accept a premise with an unclear term? It’s not even clear what we are accepting.
Plus, the argument doesn’t make sense when we look at analogs. Someone doesn’t cease to be a direct murderer if they fire a shell at a school, and before it lands they are killed. Nor does a photograph cease to be of President Truman once President Truman has ceased to exist. This wouldn’t prove that it is an “indirect” photograph of President Truman, right?
And surely we can experience absences, which don’t exist, but are the absence of existence. Intentionality ranges over non-existents all the time. For instance, with sight, surely people experience blindness. This is because blindness is a privation in man (whereas rocks do not experience an absence of sight).
So your position on lollipops is that the scientific explanation of color perception does not change the truth-value of sentences like “This is a red lollipop”; you just have to gloss the predicate “… is red” as something about wavelengths and cones and glutamate.
So it’s different from “The sun goes around the earth" which is just false.
You don’t have to accept it?
Maybe you misunderstood the post. Those first three premises are the premises of naive realism. I then used its own premises to show that we do not have direct visual perception of apples, and so that naive realism is false.
If you already disagree with naive realism then the post is not relevant to you.
Thanks for chiming in. I agree with you that the debate on this topic is often fraught, but I would disagree with your conclusion.
Nobody in this debate (as far as I know) denies that perception involves complex causal subprocesses — retinal stimulation, neural processing, predictive modeling, etc. Thats just the science and its not what’s being disputed. From my perspective, the key question is about what the act of knowing terminates in. When the observer judges “that’s an apple,” is the object of that judgment the apple itself, or some intermediary representation produced by a subsystem?
Your description treats this as a harmless ambiguity — just pick your level of description and move on. But I don’t think it’s that simple. If the output of a perceptual subsystem is what observer actually knows, then the observer never cognitively reaches the apple. He’s stuck behind a veil of representations, and now you’ve got all the classic skeptical problems. If the apple itself is what the observer knows — achieved through the full cognitional process of experiencing, understanding, and judging — then the causal intermediaries are just that: causal, not epistemic. They’re part of how knowing happens, not what gets known.
The distinction between the causal story and the epistemic story is doing real work here, in my opinion. Collapsing them is precisely what generates the appearance that the debate is “just semantics” (much as I sometimes wish it were).
I actually agree that there’s no such thing as a fully “raw” uninterpreted perception. My point was that the fact that experience is always-already interpreted means that interpretation is a real operation, even when its so habitual that we don’t catch ourselves doing it. “We simply look and see” describes how it feels, but it doesn’t settle whats actually going on.
And I think that’s where we actually disagree. You seem to be saying: since interpretation isn’t thematized in the experience — since we don’t feel ourselves interpreting — then attributing interpretation to ordinary perception is just a hypothesis. But why should we think that a cognitional act has to be phenomenally conspicuous in order to be real? When you look at a cup and just see a cup, the fact that you see a cup and not an undifferentiated blob of color and shape is already evidence that understanding is operative. The intelligibility is right there in the content of what you see. You don’t need to catch the act of insight in the act to recognize its footprint.
So I’d say the interpretation isn’t a hypothesis projected onto experience — its what makes the experience have the determinate content it has. The alternative is that experience just arrives fully structured “for free”, and I’m not sure what that would even mean.
I think that last paragraph actually concedes the key point, and I want to make sure it doesn’t slip past. If the status of a perception as true, false, or doubtful is different from the interpreted content we’re presented with — then the conviction isn’t carried by the perception itself. It’s a further determination, even when it happens so smoothly that we don’t notice it.
As for the default position question — I’d say acceptance is the default, practically speaking. We don’t walk around scrutinizing every perception. But a default is still a stance. The fact that it’s automatic and habitual doesn’t mean its not a judgment — it means it’s a judgment we’ve become so practiced at that it drops below the threshold of attention. Compare it to reading: a fluent reader doesn’t feel herself decoding letters into words, but the decoding is still operative. Fluency doesn’t eliminate the act, it makes the act invisible.
It seems to me that if apprehensions are of something particular then they can be “false” in at least an analogous sense. When we are aware of a “snake” that turns out to be a shadow, we were not aware of “nothing in particular.” So even simple apprehension, whose opposite is ignorance, not falsity, would not seem to be a contentless binary (aware/not aware), but more “aware of x.”
But rather than frame this as true/false in the sense of propositional beliefs, this might be more akin to how terms can be clear or unclear.
So in: “all snakes are reptiles.”
“Snakes”
And:
“Reptiles”
Cannot themselves be true or false. Rather, the judgement that includes them can be. However, they can be clear or unclear.
It’s sort of like the psychology of traditional logic, where the “first act of the mind,” involves terms, the second judgements (propositions), and the third arguments/discourse, which correspond to clear/unclear, true/false, valid/invalid.
This is a thoughtful reframing and I think the three-acts-of-the-mind schema is genuinely useful here. But I want to push on one point, because I think it actually reinforces the distinction I’m drawing rather than softening it.
You’re right that apprehension has content — when we see a “snake” that turns out to be a shadow, we weren’t aware of nothing. But notice what’s doing the work in generating that content. The datum isn’t “snake”; the datum is some visual pattern — a shape, a colouring, maybe a suggestion of movement. “Snake” is already an interpretation of that data, an act of understanding that organizes sensory presentations under a concept. So even at the level of terms, what we’re dealing with isn’t a purely receptive apprehension but an intelligent structuring of experience.
And this matters for the clarity/unclarity distinction. On the schema you’ve outlined, a term’s being clear or unclear looks like a property it either has or lacks at the level of first-act apprehension. But clarity, I’d argue, is itself an achievement — it’s the result of getting the right insight into the data, of arriving at a concept that actually fits what’s presented. The move from “unclear” to “clear” isn’t a matter of squinting harder at the term; its a matter of understanding better. Which means that clarity already implicates the second act, not just the first.
So I’d agree with the basic structure: terms aren’t true or false, judgements are. But I’d want to add that terms aren’t just given clearly or unclearly either. Their clarity is a function of how well our understanding has organized the experiential data — and the assessment of whether that organization is adequate just is a judgement. The three acts are real and distinct, but they’re not three independent deliverances; they’re cumulative, where each subsequent act is what retroactively determines the adequacy of the prior one.
Yes, it’s the central issue in a great many discussions here, and rightfully so.
I believe there is a pre-philosophical, and certainly pre-scientific, understanding of rationality, and philosophy is largely concerned with understanding, perhaps accounting for, perhaps refining or systematizing, our ideas about rationality.
Science intends to be a rational endeavor. It is surprising, then, that a scientific understanding of ourselves and our world should appear to undermine our ideas of rationality.
I think, by and large, scientists do not have this experience, and it’s worth considering why they do not. (I do not think the answer is just that they are philosophically unsophisticated.)
Philosophers, and even people like me, do very often experience considerable tension, at the very least, between naturalistic scientific accounts, on the one hand, and such accounts as we might construct, carefully and reflectively, using ideas about rationality that underlie and underwrite both scientific and non-scientific thought.
How could this have happened?
(I think I know roughly how and when, but that’s not what I mean.)
Are there competing understandings of rationality at play? Maybe. Is there some genuine tension pre-existing within rationality that allowed it to branch like this? If so, did we not notice before?
For instance, if, as you say, no naturalistic account of human mental life can, in principle, account for knowledge or reason or any of a host of concepts that belong to rationality, why is that? Are we to think that science aimed at such a thing and just missed? I do not believe we could defensibly claim that cognitive psychology has no interest in human reason. Are psychologists to claim that philosophy’s understanding is just old-fashioned and has been superseded? That doesn’t sound right either, since some version of that understanding of rationality underlies all of their practices of research and inference. Are they blind to that fact? I don’t believe that either.
I think there’s something very strange about the conflict between naturalist and non-naturalist accounts. Why is there a divide at all, and why does it appear (to one side at least) to be an unbridgeable gap, if scientific accounts spring from the same original understanding of rational inquiry?
Well, the status of “hidden” cognitional acts is not at all clear. “They must be there, because they can be there” is not a valid inference.
I agree that the intelligibility is right there in what you see. That’s why I’m not at all clear that we need to posit an act of insight as well. Actually, “insight” is well suited to my argument, because it isn’t at all clear what an act of insight might consist of.
We don’t use language by using dictiontaries and grammar books to construct sentences. We can do it that way. But we don’t have to. If you think that each move must consist in the application of a rule, you end up with an infinite regress. At some point, there is a moment when we just do come up with the appropriate words in the appropriate order. This is Wittgenstein’s bedrock - the point at which he say “This is what I do.”
I see what you’re saying, but science presupposes rational norms — evidence, coherence, warranted judgment — in order to function at all. So if the scientific picture of cognition ends up dissolving those very norms into “just” causal processes, it saws off the branch it’s sitting on. The account undermines the authority of the account.
The resolution, I think, is recognizing that the causal story and the normative story operate at different levels. Neural processing, predictive modeling, etc. — thats the machinery. But the question of whether a judgment is warranted, whether the evidence is sufficient, whether an insight actually grasps the relevant intelligibility — those are normative questions that can’t be cashed out in purely causal terms without remainder. You can explain why someone made a judgment causally, but you can’t explain whether they were right to make it that way.
So the appearance of science undermining rationality is really just the consequence of conflating those two levels of description. The science of perception is fine; the philosophical mistake is thinking that the causal account is the epistemic account. More on this below.
These are fair questions. I wouldn’t say science “aimed at” accounting for rationality and missed. It’s more that the methods of empirical science are designed to track correlations, regularities, causal mechanisms — and they do that brilliantly. Cognitive psychology absolutely studies reasoning in the sense of studying what people do when they reason: the heuristics, the biases, the neural substrates, the developmental trajectories. Thats genuinely illuminating and nobody should dismiss it.
But there’s a difference between studying the process of reasoning empirically and adjudicating whether a particular bit of reasoning is valid. The psychologist can tell you that subjects reliably commit the conjunction fallacy under certain conditions. What she can’t tell you as a psychologist is that the conjunction fallacy is a fallacy — that requires a normative standard (probability theory, logic) that isn’t itself an empirical finding. She relies on it, of course. But it enters her work as a presupposition, not as a result.
So it’s not that anyone is blind to anything, and its not that there’s a hidden fracture in rationality itself. It’s that empirical method, by design, abstracts from the normative dimension even while depending on it. The tension only shows up when someone tries to claim that the empirical account is the whole account — that there’s nothing left over once you’ve described the causal machinery. That’s where the overreach happens, and honestly I think most working scientists don’t make that claim. It’s more of a philosophical temptation.
I think the divide is diagnosable. It comes from a particular move that gets made — often implicitly — where someone goes from “empirical method is extremely successful” to “empirical method exhausts what counts as knowing.” Once that move is made, anything that can’t be captured in terms of efficient causation and quantifiable regularity starts to look like spooky metaphysics. Normativity, meaning, truth as something more than predictive success — all of it gets treated as either reducible or eliminable.
But the thing is, that move isn’t itself a scientific finding. Its a philosophical commitment about the scope of knowledge, and it’s one that arguably can’t be stated without performatively relying on the very normative concepts it tries to reduce. The scientist who says “we should proportion our beliefs to the evidence” is already operating with a normative “ought” that no brain scan or regression model delivers.
So the gap isn’t really between science and philosophy. It’s between two philosophical positions about what knowledge is — one of which happens to dress itself up in a lab coat. And the reason it looks unbridgeable from the naturalist side is that, if you’ve already decided that causal-empirical explanation is the only game in town, then anyone pointing to a normative remainder is going to seem like they’re gesturing at ghosts. But thats a consequence of the starting assumption, not evidence for it.
I think there’s a misunderstanding about what I’m claiming. I’m not positing insight as a hidden theoretical entity — something we infer must be lurking behind experience because it could be there. Insight is something you can catch yourself in the act of having. Think of the moment a joke clicks, or you suddenly see the solution to a problem you’ve been chewing on. That “click” is not a perception and not a judgment — its the moment where intelligibility comes together for you. It’s as phenomenally available as anything else in your mental life, even if it doesn’t always announce itself loudly.
I agree with the Wittgenstein point about rule-following — insight is precisely not the application of a rule. It’s the act of grasping an intelligible pattern, which is something quite different. So we’re not in regress territory here.
But here’s what I’d push back on. You say the intelligibility is “right there” in what you see, and that you’re not sure we need to posit insight on top of that. But intelligibility doesn’t just float free — if it’s there for you, then something is doing the understanding. Otherwise you’re saying: the experience arrives already structured, already meaningful, and no cognitional act is responsible for that. And I’m genuinely not sure what that could mean. It sounds like the intelligibility is just… given. And I think that’s a problematic place to land.
Much of your reply is the same objection, that brain modeling must imply infinite regress. Yes, we are directly aware of the model: we are directly aware of the subset of our internal machinery we are conscious of. Anything outside this subset must be modeled using that subset to be grasped. That is the indirection.
This is not some concession, we must be directly aware of something for the IR “indirect” to have any meaning. By contrast with this direct awareness, awareness of the world is indirect.
And so, there is no regress. We can, of course, “model the model”. This is metacognition, not the cognitive base case. Of course this never leads to an infinite regress. Only one level is interesting or even feasible, meta-metacognition is not a thing afaik.
This is a whopper of an assumption. I identify personhood with the brain, and not with the larynx. I would happily get a larynx transplant if necessary, yet I would balk at a brain transplant, as I would not survive the operation, successful or not.
How is this a third option? Surely “the act of experiencing the chime” is “something other than the chime”.
I agree that chiming is the way we perceive the chime, on the side of the subject. But phenomenologically, chiming is just how the chime sounds, on the side of the object. Chiming is a part of us, of our own mental modeling, presenting with the illusion that it is a feature of the chime itself.
This is true of each and every perceptual feature of each and every object. They all present as features of the object when they are, as you put it, “the act of experiencing the object”, something most definitely other than the object.
If phenomenologically what presents to the subject as the object in fact belongs to the subject, then from the phenomenological perspective this presentation stands between subject and object.
Judgement alone won’t be of any help in distinguishing between two indistinguishables. What makes money money, and what makes perception veridical, lies outside the money and perception. Judgement doesn’t just ponder, it must deploy evidence which is fully exterior to the money and to the perception. And so if confirmation of the mere existence of the distal object lies outside the perception, in what sense can the claim that we “directly” perceive the distal object survive?
You will have to do better than this. In no way does skepticism undercut its own rational norms. At its core the skeptical argument is about multiple realizability. What we experience might be realized by mind independent objects, or the dreams of a god, or scientists working on brains in vats, and so on. These possibilities are models, and of course cognition is not just model building, otherwise we would have no basis to choose one model over another. Judgement, which can accept or discard models, is required as well. The problem is, lacking direct contact with reality, we have no way to judge any of these as logically impossible. Instead, we have to conclude using various reasons that these “alternative” hypotheses are extremely unlikely.