Realism and its Discontents

General Philosophy
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I’ve created a new thread based on the discussion below as it outgrew the ‘Favourite Philosophical Ideas’ thread in which it originated.

The Bent Stick

The ‘bent stick’ objection is easily dealt with. The objection was raised against Berkeley’s esse est percipe, (‘to be is to be perceived’) and discussed in the third of his Three Dialogues betwee Hylas and Philonious (Jonathan Bennett translation from Early Modern Texts in which Hylas represents the sceptic.)

Hylas: Since, according to you, men judge the reality of things by their senses, how can a man be mistaken in thinking that the moon is a plain shining surface, about a foot in diameter; or that a square tower seen at a distance is round; or that an oar with one end in the water is crooked?

Philonous: He is mistaken not with regard to the ideas he actually perceives, but in what he infers from his present perceptions. Thus in the case of the oar, what he immediately perceives by sight is certainly crooked; and to that extent he is right. But if he infers from this that when he takes the oar out of the water he will see the same crookedness, or that it will affect his sense of touch as crooked things usually do, in that he is mistaken. Likewise, if from what he perceives in one place he infers that if he moves closer to the moon or tower he will still experience similar ideas, he is mistaken. But his mistake lies not in what he perceives immediately and at present (for it is a manifest contradiction to suppose he could err about that), but in the wrong judgment he makes concerning •the ideas he thinks to be connected with the ones he immediately perceives; or concerning •the ideas that—judging by what he perceives at present—he thinks would be perceived in other circumstances. The case is the same with regard to the Copernican system. We don’t perceive any motion of the earth while we are standing on it; but it would be wrong to infer from this that if we were placed at as great a distance from earth as we are now from the other planets we would not then perceive the earth’s motion.

Kant’s Criticism of Empiricism

Berkeley was one of the British empiricists, saying ‘all knowledge comes through sense-perception’. He didn’t doubt the reality of objects, but disputed that sensory impressions were caused by ‘material substance’. Hence his ‘esse est percipe’ meaning ‘to be is to be perceived’. Berkeley is generally interpreted as a subjective idealist.

Immanuel Kant took pains to differentiate himself from Berkeley, especially after critics tried to equate Kant’s approach with Berkeley’s after the First Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason was published.

Kant’s criticism of empiricism (which is the usual basis of realism) is that it overlooks the role the mind plays in the interpretation of experience. Realism presumes the world is just so, perceived or unperceived, and that its existence is unproblematic. It is up to scientific method to determine its ultimate nature which is gradually elaborated and refined through further progress.

But Kant showed that the mind is not tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which experience leaves impressions. It is an active agent, that construes and interprets what it sees in terms of the innate categories of experience (ref).

I claim that despite the centuries that have elapsed, Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution in Philosophy’ (‘things conform to thoughts, not thoughts to things’) remains a defensible position.

The problem here is to say that ‘ideas represent things.’ Because then you have to compare the idea with the thing! And how can we occupy a perspective where we have the thing on the one hand, and the idea, on the other?

Kant also anticipates this:

Truth, it is said, consists in the agreement of cognition with its object. In consequence of this mere nominal definition, my cognition, to count as true, is supposed to agree with its object. Now I can compare the object with my cognition, however, only by cognizing it. Hence my cognition is supposed to confirm itself, which is far short of being sufficient for truth. For since the object is outside me, the cognition in me, all I can ever pass judgement on is whether my cognition of the object agrees with my cognition of the object.— Kant, 1801. The Jasche Logic, in Lectures on Logic

This is the pitfall of the style of representative realism, a criticism which has often been levelled at empiricist philosophers, John Locke in particular.

So, in conclusion, I maintain that the shortcoming of realism, whether naïve or scientific, is that it fails to apprecate the foundational role of the mind in the interpretation of experience. We don’t natively ‘see things as they truly are’. That is what science aspires to do, and which it can do very well — but in specific contexts, in which the objects of analysis and the conditions of observation are carefully considered and specified. But our lived existence is not like that. The world we live in is also constituted in large part by the way in which we understand it and the meaning we impute to it. That is what realist philosophies tend to overlook.

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Favorite Philosophical Ideas, Questions, Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments
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So is a “mind” in Kant’s sense “real” (i.e. mind-independent)? :face_without_mouth:

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Pyrrhonism describes this as an effect of position. Close it looks a certain way, afar it looks a different way. Neither of the 2 are in any way true - they’re appearances. I’m referring to the particular example mentioned in the OP.

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It just cannot be shown that “the world we live in is also constituted in large part by the way in which we understand it and the meaning we impute to it.”

Interpreting experience is one thing but interpreting reality is quite another. One is concerned with oneself and the tiny volume of reality that occupies that space, the other is concerned with the rest of it, the world in which all of us operate. So of course one must try to leave out the personal stuff, not only because it has little to do with the rest of the world, but also because self-concern is often boring.

Sure, though some might find reward in the effort to insert oneself at the center of reality, it is self-referential and unable to reach beyond self-analysis and ego. There is more fruitful work occurring out there beyond the tiny jurisdiction of the mind.

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It seems to me that there are two meanings to this seeming debate over direct (or naive) realism vs indirect realism.
The first is direct vs indirect. I think here Hylas is questioning if the stick in itself is bent or if the nature of the stick is other than its appearance.

But I can also interpret much of the dialog (especially with Hylas referencing ‘reality of things’) to mean it being real or not, realism vs anti-realism. Yes, people tend to designate that which they sense to be real and that which they only imagine to not be real.

I don’t think this is what was intended, but so much of the dialog seems to imply both meanings. You quote Kant as not doubting the reality of objects, which seems to leverage the ontic meaning, not the nature-of meaning.

I’m pretty much on board with that, given either of the interpretations of the conversation. It makes both the existence and the nature of things very mind dependent, and when pressed, it is hard to find a true mind independent view of either, but especially the ontic stance.

So much of the nature-of X is interpretation dependent. All we perceive is those shadows. If you ask me if a line drawn from opposite ends of an oar ever strays from the interior of the oar, many (most?) would say no, but I would say yes. It’s metaphysical opinion, not fact. I don’t think it’s bent, I think it’s a long curve.

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This is interesting, because outside of a philosophy forum(wide use of forum, not referring to a pfp or whatever) I think this is basically how everyone acts; even anti-realists like myself. What I don’t think this does is say anything about whether or not we have direct access to objects in the world. That’s a very different discussion imo.

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Could you say more about why the verdict of “our lived existence” would be important here? I would have thought that, with such a fundamental and abstract question as “do we see things as they truly are?” we would immediately want to discount ordinary experience and look more deeply, as science tries to do. I guess I’m not sure why “the world we live in” has to exclude the world of scientific inquiry. How are those “specific contexts” disqualified?

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As far as I know, Kant doesn’t explicitly reject naive realism.

For a naïve realist, causality, for instance, is not a relation between things (Hume) nor a way we must understand the relation (Kant) but arises from real powers and dispositions in things.

Beliefs represent (or misrepresent) the things they are beliefs of. What distinguishes a belief from a perception is that we can believe e.g. that it rains regardless of whether it rains. But you can’t have a visual experience of rain unless it rains.

Your experience is the seeing, and the rain is the object that you’re seeing.

Perception is a world-involving process that, I think, doesn’t require internal representations or interpretations.

If we can’t detach the experience from its object, then how could we possibly see something other than the true object?

So how about ambiguous experiences? Let’s say I look through a semi-transparent curtain that makes the outside appear as if it’s raining. Must I interpret the experience or compare beliefs? No, I just move the curtain to see whether it rains.

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There’s an intriguing resonance between ancient scepticism and modern phenomenology. The term that Husserl used, epochē, meaning ‘suspension of judgement regarding what is not evident’, was also practiced by the ancient sceptics. It is also related to early Buddhism. And Pyrrho of Elis, founder of Pyrrhonism, is widely believed to have travelled to Ghandhara, the early Buddhist cultural centre, under the protection of Alexander the Great, from where he brought back the practices that were to become Pyrrhonism.

However, that is still a perspectival judgement. You might imagine the world as it would be without you being in it, but as long as you’re imagining it, you’re providing the perspective within which the judgement is meaningful. The Universe itself has no idea that it is vast!

It’s important to grasp that Kant was an empirical realist AND a transcendental idealist, and that he doesn’t see these as contradictory. The empirical sciences deal effectively with objects and their relations as they appear to us. But how or what they are independently of those appearances is unknown.

From lecture notes on Critique of Pure Reason

To assert the ‘complete objectivity’ of objects outside human cognition—meaning to claim that objects exist entirely independently of our ways of perceiving or knowing them—paradoxically leads to skepticism.

This is because, as Kant argues, if we insist that objects have an existence and constitution wholly apart from our faculties of cognition (i.e., from the forms of our sensibility and the categories of our understanding), then we have no way of knowing whether our representations correspond to these objects as they are “in themselves.” In other words, if things-in-themselves are posited as utterly independent, then our knowledge is forever cut off from them, and we cannot be certain that our experience gives us access to reality rather than just to subjective appearances.

Kant shows that this “transcendental realism” (the belief in the complete mind-independence of objects) is what ultimately leads to “empirical idealism” (the skeptical doubt about the existence or knowability of the external world). By contrast, Kant’s own “transcendental idealism” maintains that while things-in-themselves may exist, we can only know objects as they appear to us, structured by our forms of intuition and understanding. This position secures the reality of experience for us while acknowledging the limits of our knowledge.

I say that science considers things in specific contexts, in which the objects of analysis and the conditions of observation are carefully considered and specified. Of course, the context of e.g. cosmolology is the entire observable universe, so this discipline might be vast in extent. But the principle of objectivity still underwrites the basic stance. This is that we observe, measure, and correlate phenomena and the forces by objective means using insruments. Whereas we’re intimately involved in our existence, participants as much as observers. This is very much the concern of the book I often mention in this context, ‘the blind spot of science’.

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OK, I see the distinction you want to make, but I think it’s too sharp. A desire for objectivity, for “being reasonable,” is a hallmark of most people’s everyday experience, I would hope. I may not use instruments to determine whether the oar is really bent, but what I want is the same thing a scientist wants – to know what is really the case, and to respect evidence, not bias. I agree that there are many instances where my subjectivity and involvement with the world result in quite different “takes” on what I encounter. But just as often, I want what the scientist wants.

This still leave open the question of whether the objective stance – understood as “science” or more generally – results in a direct knowledge of how things are.

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Of course, objectivity is an important criterion in all walks of life. But objectivity is never absolute. And how can objective measurement provide the criteria for moral judgements? And how many questions revolve around that question?

Consider the Sanskrit term ‘yathābhūtaṃ’:

The Pali - Sanskrit word yathābhūta (or yathābhūtaṃ) translates to “as it really is,” “in truth,” or “in accordance with reality”. It combines yathā (meaning “just as” or “in accordance with”) and bhūta (meaning “that which has come to be” or “reality”). It describes seeing the true nature of existence without mental distortion.

A counterpart in early Greek philosophy is from Parmenides:

The Way of Truth (Alētheia): This is the direct apprehension of “What Is” (Eon). To enter the Way of Truth is to look past the changing, shifting illusions of the senses and grasp the fundamental, underlying reality of Being.

Whereas these will often be dismissed as metaphysics, I see them as being the precursors of science and the virtue of detachment. 'Historians of science understand that the pursuit of scientific objectivity did not arise out of the blue. In the early modern world, it was closely connected with religious concerns about the fallibility of human cognition as a consequence of the Fall.

Peter Harrison, in his book The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science shows that modern experimental science was originally devised to remediate this fallen state. Francis Bacon’s program, in particular, reads like a manual of ascetic discipline: experiment restrains imagination; measurement restrains bias; method restrains self-delusion. Science was conceived not as a neutral enterprise but almost as a form of cognitive therapy, designed to compensate for the brokenness of human understanding.

“The human understanding is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence.” ~ Francis Bacon, Novum Organum

The intellectual discipline required by early experimental science, therefore, had a resemblance to religious ideals of self-abnegation. Just as religion emphasized humility before divine truth, the emerging scientific ethos demanded that the investigator rise above personal feelings, imagination, and preconceived ideas in order to let nature speak for itself. In this way, the pursuit of objectivity was originally conceived as a kind of disciplined self-transcendence.

In religious traditions, however, this discipline was intended to transform the knower. In the emerging scientific context, the strategy of self-abnegation took a different tack. Instead of seeking the transformation of the subject, the method was to bracket the subject altogether. Perspectival knowing and qualitative experience were downplayed. Eventually, the spiritual dimension from which this discipline had originated came to be regarded as a subjective concern and a matter of indifference to science.

Thereafter, a distinction emerged that nowadays seems natural to us: the division of the world into subjective and objective, mutually exclusive and exhaustive. As a consequence reality comes to be conceived as something that can only be understood in objective terms: amenable to quantitative measurement and scientific description. The observing mind, meanwhile, is held to represent the inner or subjective domain, which itself increasingly comes to be regarded as the product of these same measurable and objective forces.

Here we see that what began as a methodological discipline hardens into a real blind spot.’ (Excerpt from The Blind Spots of Science.)

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As the left Sellarsians tell it, the problem Kant had to grapple with was how to overcome the Myth of the Given, the notion that experience imposes itself on the subject by fiat. Such an assumption alienates the world from the subject, since the givenness of the world is lawfully causal but the subject which must grasp this world is possessed of the capacity of free will and reason. Kant’s solution was to unite man and world via normativity. The world we experience doesn’t arrive as causes but as already organized normatively. This doesn’t prevent the world from being objective. We can be mistaken in our perception of the way things are, and this pertains to the moral as well as the epistemological.

Kant’s insight concerning the normative basis of perception was kept by the phenomenologists, but they made Kant’s normativity self-reflexive. We don’t just perceive that world through normative glasses, we continually modify these norms via our interaction with the world. This imparts a relativism to Kant’s empirical realism which transforms the world from a single normative ‘way things are’ to a world co-evolving alongside and in response to our interactions with it.

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There are 4 ways of knowing in Indian epistemology

  1. Reason (anumana)
  2. Senses (pratyaksa)
  3. Analogy (upamana)
  4. Testimony (shabda)

Various schools emphasized different modes. There were empiricists ane rationalists in Indian philosophy.

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Well said! I was recommended a book on the previous forum, Konstantin Pollok, Kant’s Theory of Normativity. I must say I’m not sufficiently equipped in Kant to fully understand it, but it is concerned with just these kinds of subjects.

@Scorpion - aside from the general point about epochē and phenomenology, I don’t think I want to digress too far into Indian philosophy.

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I thought Indian epistemology relevant to Indian philosophy’s inner world (spiritual?) emphasis and outer world de-emphasis. Maya and avidya seem to be the general direction any epistemology takes.

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And yet the latter exceeds the scope or limit of the former like every other ‘transcendental illusion’ (pace Kant).

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Well expressed ! This sounds like phenomenology. But I’d say it’s result of such inquiry that we never rise above preconceptions altogether. We can only do science because we mostly react to certain basic objects — including pragmatically central marks and noises — in the same-enough way. A re-embodied semantics sees that prejudice or visceral preconception enable social and relatively transpersonal inquiry. At the same time, a culture of individuality allows individuals to “look around” some of this enabling prejudice, with each them looking around different preconceptions.

So the pursuit of objectivity requires creative subjectivity, and requires the toleration of others who see things differently. Weirdly the monological dream of some is tacitly a death wish. “May pluralism’s poetry die into the one final method in a fixed regime.” Objectivity as complete absence of sociocultural bias is mute and helpless, like a computer without an OS.

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Right ! I think it’s crucial to get a grip on this ethical core of the concept of objectivity, and I can’t make senes of the ethical if nothing matters. We aim toward this rather than that, value this and dis-value that.

In practical life, “what is really the case” looks to be cashed out in terms enduring perceptual experience that matters to us. I want to include here also whatever you want to call “in-my-body” feelings of goodness and badness, basically the “felt value” or “felt disvalue” of this or that situation. I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis that we operate in the present toward increasing the “felt value” and decreasing the “felt disvalue” of long stretches of the future. I don’t rob the bank because prison sucks.

A terrible nightmare matters intensely but briefly. I wake up and like most people put it aside as bad luck, not an omen. It is not “real” in the sense of mattering for my long-term perceptual and “felt value” experience.

The oar in the water is “not really bent” because it gets the job done like always. Basically I’m suggesting that the “real” makes sense in terms of the future we expect to share with others.

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The “bent stick” or oar doesn’t even look bent. What we see is exactly what we should see when we see such an object in water.

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We’d be freaked out if it wasn’t bent at this point. The world appears in terms of our expectations and needs.