Basically indirect realism tends to make the brain its own product. The empirical brain ( the brains that we can see and investigate) is perceptual. So it would be, for the indirect realist, a mere image in the cave. But then the cave is inside an image inside the cave.
I think empiriocriticism ( Ernst Mach especially) manages to acknowledge the intense importance of the brain without the dualism of indirect realism.
My view is in the other direction. There is nothing in here. Reality is immediately “shared reality.” There are many ways to express this. I reject consciousness as inside stuff. But I grant that subjectivity goes all the way down. Perspective need not be understood to imply “internal stuff” versus “external stuff.”
The world can be shared without our postulating a “true reality.” This approach isn’t my invention. Crucial influences include Heidegger, J.S. Mill, Leibniz, W. Fasching, W. James, C. S. Peirce, and quite a few others. It might be called ontological perspectivism.
Basically we switch from a spatial metaphor ( inside/outside) to a temporal metaphor ( present expectation/ oncoming future). I can be “mistaken” because my approach to a situation doesn’t work out. So I revise my approach, not only verbally but with my arms and legs.
Belief is the specificity of an animal’s comportment. We don’t need “truth.” It suffices to consider the transformation of comportment in response to environmental feedback. This view does not present itself as “truth,” or as “the truth about truth.” It is itself a comportment toward traditional philosophical issues that tries to circumvent dualistic assumptions as limiting and tending to lead to cognitive dissonance.
Right. We might call it logocentrism. I’m a huge fan of logical positivism, but the “logical” is often tacitly theo-logical. A non-empirical metaphysical theory of meaning as “immaterial universal essence” is taken for granted. Basically they sometimes pretended to have access to God’s dictionary. The work of Bakhtin is great on this, so I call my attempt to update this movement dialogical positivism. Basically apes trade signs in their shared environment, and these signs ( spoken words and written symbols) are empirical objects that play conventional roles.
Different apes react to the same empirical object differently. So there is no “true meaning” of a noise or a mark. But there is an “average” response, and we do mostly understand one another in the practical realm. We’d be dead otherwise. So our sign system is subject to evolutionary pressure too, like a communal organism ( a meme system.)
If this interests you, perhaps you will contribute to this topic: Cry me an eagle
I’d put it this way. Animals always always always believe. To go north rather than south is to enact non-verbal belief. To hiss rather than purr. Any specified reaction of strategy is visceral belief.
Epistemic humility among humans can be understood as a readiness to modify comportment. We often understand this in verbal terms. Popper is great on this. “We let our theories do our dying for us.” We don’t identify with first-order verbal beliefs. We identify with a second-order belief about how first order beliefs should be managed. So the scientific mind is relatively detached from its first order beliefs.
“If you are wrong, then you were right.” Basically you can only be wrong if the mistaken belief was “rightly” empirical to begin with.
So we have phrases like “not even wrong.” Because a “not even wrong” belief is insufficiently empirical and definite to be subject to embarrassment by experience.
I love Popper, but I don’t like the term “falsification.” This is too metaphysical, too dualistic and theological. But it is easily fixed. A scientific personality adapts quickly. If the environment ( which is perspectival and perceptual) gives me an unpleasant surprise, then I change my approach.
We don’t need “truth” at all. My updated beliefs are just as tentative and fragile as those they replaced. The future can always surprise me. Indeed, I expect it to surprise me, but I don’t know exactly how it will surprise. I don’t know which beliefs I will need to modify, but I have learned that life involves endless learning. Even this is not a “truth” but a strong belief that is almost definitive of rationality. The person “who knows the absolute truth already” looks to the scientific person like a fool.
As far as religion goes, I’m an atheist. But I can respect some manifestations of religion. I tend to prefer deeds over words. The metaphysical version of religion comes off as a kind of confused pseudo-physics that has little to do with wisdom, love, a sense of “grace.” I prefer the “theism” in the music of J. S. Bach to the theism of metaphysicians, who are basically just building out another metaphysical system, another castle of words.
I’m a huge fan of pragmatism. And for me it is not a useless theory of truth. Instead it “grounds talk” in non-verbal conduct. I need to figure out what I, as an animal, am going to do next. Life is not fundamentally a game of “picturing with words.” The treasure map ( the model ) is a tool. The point is the treasure I hope it will help me grab. Words are tools, but some philosopher think that they are only good for “mirrors.”
So science is (mis)understand as the pursuit of “truth” instead of as a set of techniques for thriving in the environment. I’m saying that science is the search for better ways of doing things. “Pure seeing” is prioritized over a more general sense of success in the world. Basically the theorist is biased toward theory, and they approach human existence as if we were floating pairs of eyes with a mouth attached — as if the whole game is nothing but “math with words.” These words are “vessels” of “universal immaterial meaning stuff.” Basically the religion of this kind of theorist is mathematical platonism. A magical immaterial “truthy meaning stuff.” To me this is totally divorced from non-theoretical life. A fetish. A ghost story.