DCH Translation
Question
Asked 8 January 2010
Apprehensions of reality - the mind question (Locke vs. Kant in two rounds - my submission)
The Master of Königsberg famously differentiated between what is given in perception by the senses (the "phenomenon") and the thing-in-itself, the Ding an sich (the "noumenon") – cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noumenalism#Kant.27s_usage; on Kant's view, the noumenon is opaque to direct experience and can only be derived from the phenomenon by a process of induction or abduction. Noumenalism is commonly cited as an argument against "naïve realism" – the belief that the world is pretty much the way we perceive it (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_realism). The noumenalist argument against naïve realism goes something like this: "We can have no direct access to reality, therefore we can never be certain that our phenomenal experiences correspond to some noumenal reality. This being the case, to hold that the putative objects of our phenomenal experiences – material objects, physical events, concrete properties and relations etc. – correspond to the 'actual nature of phenomenal reality' is philosophically naïve."
We can indeed criticise the "pretheoretical categories" of entity with which we populate the "physical world", but this is a matter of investigating ontological commitment and the limits to our reduction of theories (or of our capacities to translate one theory into another). However, there is no reason to suppose that we are "hard-wired" to make any distinctions between phenomena save by the limits of our perceptual apparatus – thus, we cannot have optic perception of light at wavelengths greater or lower than the visible range. In some cases, our perceptual apparatus allows that one of our senses can experience phenomena that are beyond the range of another - we cannot have direct optic perception of light at wavelengths lower than the "visible range", though we can feel heat; we can have no direct auditory experience of very low-frequency sounds, though we can feel vibrations. But, other than these "perceptual capacities", we are "tabulae rasae" – there is not even the innate Cartesian capacity to make logical distinctions. This view is largely due to Locke (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke#The_self), though it has been largely modified by recent advances in pragmatic behaviouralist philosophies and by the evidence from the neurological and cognitive sciences.
As to Kant: Kantian noumenalism is a direct result of Cartesian dualism, and as such has had a widespread influence on the debate between monists and dualists. Generally speaking, an anti-dualist monism must show that the rejected domain (be it "the mental" or "the physical") is in some way an epiphenomenon.
1. REALITY
For my money, the problem is rather one of determining what it means for something to be "real". If our "criterion of reality" is causation (as with Davidson before 1985), then "what is physically real" will be "that which is the cause of a physical event"; if our criterion of reality is spatiotemporal localisation (as with Quine), then "what is physically real" is "that which occupies some region of spacetime". We can adopt the view that the contents of our phenomenal experience is "real" ("given directly in experience"), though we must also accept that such first-person experience is private and therefore illegitimate as the foundation of any public definition of reality. We can adopt a "heterophenomenological" approach in which we accept that a subject Susan is authoritative about what ***seems to be*** the case for her but by which we evaluate her statements of "what seems for her to be the case" by appeal to "what seems to us (and to others) to be the case" and to supporting evidence (Susan's more general behaviour, correlated regularities between the putative object of Susan's impressions and our more general beliefs concerning that "kind" of object etc. etc.).
We should bear in mind that the definition of "reality" is entirely informal and depends on metaphysical assumptions – and we should be most careful to distinguish between "reality" and "existence". Existence is a formal notion – "to be is to be the value of a variable", to quote Quine – and depends on quantifying existentially over the entities in some well-defined universe of discourse (our ontology depends on our choice of language). "Reality" is more a case of overt ontological commitment – thus, when we say something like "Othello's jealousy was the direct cause of Desdemona's death, but Iago's treachery was the indirect cause", we could claim that among the "furniture of the physical world", there really are "jealousies" and "treacheries"; our task here is to relate such entities to the more usual physical categories of "material object", "physical event", and "concrete process, disposition, or state of affairs".
2. LOCKE vs. KANT (round 1)
The idea that "we can have no direct access to noumenal reality" – in the following I'll call this notion "noumenalism"- is dependent on the notion that reality could be "other than we perceive it"; in the following, I'll argue against noumenalism as a product of the "Cartesian error" and suggest that saying that we can have no direct access to reality is not at all the same thing as saying that our apprehension of 'reality' is determined by our modes of access to a putative mind-independent world.
Noumenalism makes the Cartesian error of supposing that our sensory impressions could somehow "cheat" us in their reconstitution and representation of reality. Setting aside the "why" of the cheating, the error here is not in the notion of "reconstitution" – we do indeed seem to experience the world as 'unified', despite the different modes of access given by our sensory organs. The error is in the notion of "representation": the assumption that "reality" is *some thing* which can be represented ALSO presupposes that "reality" is represented TO *some thing*. We have a thing A that is represented to B and a thing B to which A is represented. If, against Descartes, we question the assumption of "B", the whole house of cards of noumenalism collapses. If there is no "B", there is no relation of representation; if there is no relation of representation, then "A" – the "noumenal reality to which we can have no direct access" – certainly can't be defined in terms of B having or not having access to A.
If I may use a metaphor : the stage of the Cartesian theatre might be brilliantly lit, but apart from the actors, the theatre is empty. Nothing and no-one is "watching" or "receiving" the contents of experience - indeed, the very idea of distinguishing "experience" and "the contents of experience" is already theory-laden.
We can, I think, argue that we have no need of a "spectator". When we distinguish between 'the contents of experience' and 'experience', we are postulating 'experience' as the province of a Cartesian subject and its 'contents' as "coming from without" – while it is true that I experience the taste and texture of the steak, what I am experiencing is NOT the taste and texture of the stake, but a 'false content' fed directly into my nerve system. This is not the way experience works, I think. My experience and the contents of my experience are not subject and object, but – if there is a distinction at all – at best subject and complement ("I am experiencing steakwise"). I'm not sure we can even make this distinction – there's no "fundamental experience" that can be separated from, for example "the experience of eating steak". If I might cite the classics, Cypher doesn't believe that the contents of his experience is false (otherwise he would have no reason for choosing the illusion). He simply accepts a metaphysical theory – that the causal web underlying his experiences is not the causal web of intuitive realism. For Cypher, the "myth of physical objects" no longer serves to explain the world of phenomenal experience – the myth of The Matrix is, within his narrative world, more compelling to reason. But his choice is still determined by a preference for the phenomenal reality of the experience of eating steak and drinking Château Margaux over the phenomenal reality of eating white goo and drinking raw alcohol.
My view is that, once we get rid of the Cartesian error, "the problem of noumenalism" in philosophical naturalism (PN) reduces to a simple contradiction implicit in PN's metaphysical assumptions. Now, PN postulates that there is a mind-independent reality. This postulates the weak assumption (WA) that things would happen whether or not they are 'known' to some mind (and hence the big problems posed by some interpretations of QM) – in other words, that the physical universe gets on with its business regardless of whatever we might say about it. Whatever it is about the apple that makes me see red is there even if it's midnight. Now, however tenable or not such views might be, they are NOT the strong assumption (SA) that "we cannot know reality".
"Mind-independence" is the tricky term. WA postulates that the world is there whether we think about it or not; it does NOT imply that we cannot have "knowledge about" the mind-independent world .
The error of SA is to understand "mind-independent" as "mind-inaccessible". The basic tenet of noumenalism is that Mind cannot have direct access to "noumenal reality". But if we remove the spectator from the Cartesian theatre of experience, there is no "misrepresentation" possible – "Mind" is not a spectator to whom Reality is being represented in a "narrative" which reunites the disparate modes of sensory impression. Mind is the narrative itself.
If Mind were the spectator of the narrative – the thing ***for which*** a unified image of reality had been reconstituted – then we would have four elements: "reality" (R), the "process or reconstitution" (P) by which sensory impressions of R are integrated; the "image of the world" (I) which is the result of 'P'; and the 'Cartesian spectator' (S) to whom 'I' represents 'R'.
We can, however, allow that 'R' is ***no more than*** 'mind-independent', and that 'P' is the process by sensory impressions of 'R' are integrated in experience. The "unified image of the world" 'I' is thus no more than a reification of 'P' – and this is the very banal observation that 'Mind' is a process, not an object. On THIS view, the "noumenalist objection" is just the very banal observation that we cannot have mind-independent experience of mind-independent reality.
All in all, noumenalism is based on the assumption that, although we can have no direct experience of it, there IS some reality which in some ways determines our phenomenal experiences (otherwise, we'd have nothing but phenomena, and this way Berkeley lies). Yet if we reduce "noumenal reality" to mind-independent reality, then it is evident that we cannot have mind-independent experience of that reality: experience is a 'mental process', and CANNOT be 'mind-independent'.
Of course, a lot of people would say "ah yes, but you can have an experience without thinking about it". Of course, but 'mental process' doesn't reduce to 'metacognitive process'. "Being aware" is not metacognition, but is rather a state of excitation fundamental to "having an experience" – if the 'experience' has no impact on your basic sensory and cognitive processes, then it's hard to say that you've "had the experience" (a high-level burst of gamma rays would be undetected by our immediate sensory apparatus – the 'experience' would be indirect, and given by the resultant destructive effects on bodily function).
That "reality" is mind-independent doesn't exclude that its is ALSO mind-dependent. Quite evidently, the notion of "reality" is itself mind-dependent: if there were no "minds", then the questions of whether "reality" is ordered, and "how" it is ordered, would never arise. Nor would the question of "order". All these questions are part of the "narrative" that we're acting out in the Cartesian theatre of Mind. But there are no spectators – just our fellow actors. While experience is 'private", Mind is not – it's an intersubjective domain which requires the interaction of human agents (our 'view of the world' is a matter of triangulation, not direct description. A term designates rigidly only when it can pick out one particular entity throughout all possible descriptions of time and space and for all possible speakers).
Most of all, Mind requires language if it is to serve as a means of triangulating from different perspectives of "the world"; however, this also requires that language is flexible enough to allow for a difference in perspective. While the categories into which we regiment phenomenal experience are linguistic and therefore general, certain linguistic resources (deictics, tense…) allow each speaker to interact with her linguistic community from a perspective that is perhaps local, but is nonetheless unique. "Mind" is itself a linguistic notion – indeed, we can ask whether the term 'linguistic notion' is not tautological – and, as such, cannot be reduced to the characteristics of an individual human being taken in isolation from any social or cultural context. Such a person would have no language, and therefore no equivalent to OUR concept 'Mind', which is irreversible tainted with the linguistic.
So, mind-dependence is not just a matter of "awareness", but also of language. We can push this as a partial redefinition of the hypothesis that "reality is mind-independent": "reality" would be *as it is* HOWEVER we might describe it; what matters is how well our descriptions of one part of reality integrate with our descriptions of other parts.
Now, this redefinition of "mind-independence" effectively brackets out 'awareness'. The problem is not whether our sensory impressions "reconstitute reality" faithfully or not, but whether the observation sentences we use to talk about those impressions are coherent with the observation sentences we use to talk about similar impressions at other times and in other places. Such similarities allow us to talk of 'phenomena', and to postulate relations between such 'phenomena' (to construct "special theories"); these "special theories" allow us to generalise from kinds of phenomena to "underlying regularities"; and the more "general theories" can be tested against experience as they *should* generate a certain class of observation sentences under certain controlled conditions (the view is restated in behavioural rather than mentalistic terms). Now, 'building up' from observation sentences to theories might serve a certain view of 'the abductive process', but we should ALSO bear in mind that the observation sentences are themselves the product of a given language and of the general assumptions that language makes about whatever 'part of the world' the observation sentences are supposed to be about (in this way, theories "face the tribunal of experience as a whole)".
We can go as far as to ask whether we should rather be postulating the language-independence of the world than its 'mind-independence' - or whether the two notions can even be distinguished.
***
I remarked above that, even if "reality" IS mind-independent, this doesn't exclude that its is ALSO mind-dependent. We could understand this as suggesting that
(1) mind-independent reality (MIR) and mind-dependent reality (MDR) are co-extensive;
(2) that MDR supervenes on MIR; or
(3) that MIR subvenes on MDR.
In its most banal form, (3) is no more than the recognition that the notion of MIR depends itself on language; if the subvenience relation were given ontological force, it would simply state that reality is mind-dependent.
(2) covers the familiar Humean supervenience of physical reductionism but could allow for less drastic or less top-down accounts (thus, if we want to keep a bottom-up ontology, we can employ such notions as 'emergence'; on the other hand, we can employ a top-down ontology and talk of theories "carving the world at the joints").
(1) is perhaps the notion that we should be discussing, rather than placing bets on a wrestling match between the straw man of "naïve scientific realism" and the self-defeating spectre of noumenalism.
3. LOCKE vs. KANT (round 2)
On reading the above, our good friend Nicole Pernat made the following remark :
"I agree that there is no self for which the world is re-presented. However, just as a thermometer gauges temperature while the mercury is not identical with the temperature, so our sensations & perceptions are not reality themselves"
I remarked to Nicole that when I was younger I was much taken by the "semiotic" account derived from CS Peirce: according to Peirce (and with apologies to the "real" experts!), a sign represents its object in three ways: either as an ICON - by some formal or topological resemblance (like a map, a graph or a photograph); as an INDEX – by some relation of "contiguity", and usually a causal relation (a footprint can indicate the presence of a person, a rash can indicate the presence of a virus…); or as a SYMBOL – by some convention or norm (language, of course, but also pictorial conventions, gestures – even silences!). Now, if we apply this simple model to the question in hand, we can see that ***the observable state of the mercury in the thermometer*** is in an indexical relation with the ***temperature of the mercury*** (its mean molecular momentum or whatever), and that THIS is in an indexical relation with ***the ambient temperature***. Each of the ***starred*** terms represents a "real" characteristic of the world, and each is linked to the other by a 'causelike' relation – the ***observable state*** is caused by the ***immediate temperature*** and the ***immediate temperature*** is determined by the ***ambient temperature***. In each case, we're talking about "real" states of the world (and remember that "the world" INCLUDES our perceptions) – what changes is the "epistemic system" by which reality is constructed (and I say "constructed" rather than "demonstrated" as *reality* is a linguistic notion, not some mind-independent characteristic of the world).
The observable state of the thermometer-system depends on our beliefs concerning the causal relation between the height of the mercury and the ambient temperature. We perceive the thermometer-system as being in a state which corresponds to, say, 8°C. There is a real state of the world which corresponds to our perception of the thermometer-system (let's call it "TH"). Unless we're hallucinating or misreading, the real state "TH" corresponds to a real state of the world which is the "temperature of the mercury as a system" ("TM"). The possibility of hallucination or misreading does indeed "come between" TH and TM (this is the entire premise of "The Matrix" series), but this more a question of interpreting the "real" content of a perceptual state.
How is this possible? Well, we've seen that there is a real INDEXICAL relation between our perception TH and the state of the (mind-independent) world TM and, given the physical and physiological characteristics of our perceptual systems, we take it that any ***perception*** has some cause – that is, that the perception is an index to "some" state - in Davidsonian terms, the phenomenal contents supposedly "supervenes" on some state of the perceptual system. The phenomenal contents is logically related to the "real perceptual state" (I'd say that the relation is one of identity), and the "real perceptual state" is the causal result of some "real stimulus". This is as much the case in hallucination as in "real" perception. In the Matrix, the phenomenal contents of the sleepers' experience corresponded logically to certain neurophysiological stimuli – the experience itself is "real" as it is a state which is the causal result of these stimuli, and the stimuli are "real" insofar as they are real physical events taking place in a definite region of spacetime. The sleepers are only mistaken in their naïve intuition that there is an ICONIC relation between the contents of their perceptual states and the stimuli – that when they see "a dog", the causal origin of that perception is indeed a mind-independent entity having certain physical, biological, and genetic characteristics. Whereas an index MUST have an object (it is caused by its object), an icon can be a pseudosign – just as one can create a "map" of an imaginary territory, or a "picture" of an entirely fictitious character. If you'll allow me the analogy, the "dog" seen by the Matrix sleeper is "no more than pigment on canvas" – there is "real pigment", but no "real dog". But whether the "dog" is "real dog" or "real pigment", it is still REAL.
The relation between the perceptual state "TH" and the state of the mercury-system "TM" is a relation between two real states, though WE must rely on circumstantial evidence to decide whether TM actually obtains (and this rejoins my comments on "states of affairs" and "possible worlds" on the philo group – we have to decide "which" world we're living in. I can develop further if you wish). If we take the "Matrix" example again, we have to decide whether we're living in a world where TH is caused by or correlates to the actual state of a real system TM, or whether we're living in a world where TH is caused by some Demon Machine stimulating our perceptual system. TH is not in doubt – though it is only accessible to "first-person experience". Now, while I can't appeal to MY first-person experience to found any "universal reality" of TH, our language does allow a certain "heterophenomenology" (to borrow Dennett's rather unlovely term http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterophenomenology): I can formulate an "observation sentence" of the kind "the thermometer gives a temperature of 8°C" to which any other observer can either assent or dissent – and should they assent to my description, I can hold-as-true that they are in an equivalent phenomenal state to my own. Of course (cf. the various "zombie" thought experiments), I have no *guarantee* that they are in such a state – my attribution is a matter of my having a Theory of Mind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind) or adopting some kind of "intentional stance". Each person who assents to the observation sentence reinforces my justification in believing that a perceptual state equivalent to TH should hold for any observer, though it is of course impossible to PROVE that TH actually holds for any observer.
My argument that TH is "real" is perhaps founded on my direct and private access to my own perceptual states; while Cartesian phenomenology would disallow this as a statement of how things ***are*** to me, I can - to use Dennett's terms - be "authoritative" about how things ***seem*** to me. The context of my observation sentence is evidently "IT SEEMS TO ME THAT the thermometer gives a temperature of 8°C" – and in fact, I am making a statement about my perception, not about the world. But, as we appear as a species to have evolved similar responses to similar stimuli, and as my "understanding" of my perceptual state is largely dependent on the linguistic conventions which determine the formulation of observation sentences, there is a pragmatic precedent for holding that the statement of my perception corresponds to some state of affairs accessible to "other minds" – that is, that in the context of a ToM, the "reality" of TM is at least not *solipsistically* mind-dependent.
***
The "Matrix" (and similar "brain in a vat" thought experiments - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat) are predicated on the idea that TH – the perceptual state – "represents" TM (the state-of-the-world). As you'll recall from my criticism of the Cartesian theatre, the error is perhaps in the notion of "representation", for which there is not only an "of", but also a "to". We can, I believe, make a distinction between "representation" in the sense of "modelisation" and in the more Cartesian sense of "the act of presenting something to someone" (Piece made some comment about a sign "representing" its object in the same way that a diplomat "represents" his government, which would imply that our perceptions are "synecdoches" of their putative objects). In the following, I'll use the term "presentation" to cover the Cartesian notion.
If we take TH to be "structured" (that is, as seeming to be disposed in a certain way in a perceptual "space" and as having certain "parts" which bear a topological relation to each other), then it would "appear to us" rather like a picture. Now, if we hold to the Cartesian notion of "presentation", this *picture* is being "shown to" something (the cogito). If we return to the notion of an "iconic sign", the Cartesian theatre is here a cinema – the perceptual state constitutes a "photograph" or "film" of reality which is replayed live to the thinking subject. Thus we have the idea that our perceptions somehow "represent to us" the topological and mereological structure of "external reality".
We can criticise this notion on two levels. First, we can criticise its semiotic accuracy: as the putative cause of the perceptual state, the "state-of-the-world" is in an indexical rather than an iconic relation with the perceptual state, and we cannot therefore hold that the "real structure" of the perceptual object is accurately reflected in the structure of the perceptual state. Imagine, for instance, that reductionism to fundamental particles were true. We could at best hold that the "real structure" of the perceptual object ***causes*** the apparent structure of the perceptual state, and seek regularities and covariances between one and the other (though this would rather be a scientific investigation into quantum-level interactions between highly complex emergent systems, and in no way a phenomenological investigation). This is similar to correlating, say, a rash, a fever, and a cough with the presence of a certain virus – the virus in no way "resembles" the rash, the fever, or the cough: they are merely indices to its presence.
The second criticism is more directly philosophical, and depends on our rejection of the Cartesian notion of "representation". If we refuse the notion of the perceptual state as a sign "presenting" a real state-of-the-world TO some other thing (the cogito or whatever), there is no longer any need to postulate an iconic relation between our perceptual state and the state-of-the-world, as there is no distinction between the topological and mereological structure of the perception and its informational content: the structure does not "transmit" information – it "is" information. Speaking more phenomenologically, we cannot separate the "reality" of experience from its "contents": there is no distinction between the contents of a perceptual state and its putative Cartesian subject (the experience of "seeing a thermometer" cannot be prescinded from its grammatical subject – there is no "I" to which "seeing a thermometer" is presented, there is just "an experience of seeing some thing which is recognised as a thermometer".
Our phenomenal experiences would seem to be structured in both space and time – the keyboard is "nearer" to me than the monitor screen, and the sound of footsteps upstairs is "more recent" than the sound of a passing ambulance. They seem to have certain parts which bear certain relations to other parts. In our everyday interaction with the world, we don't even need to question whether the structure of our experience corresponds to the structure of the putative objects of experience. If we take "the world" as a domain of entities in causal relations, our experience is part of the world – we interact with the world as it is because we are PART of that world; the puzzle lies in HOW phenomenal experience is "part of the world", not in how phenomenal experience REPRESENTS the world.
We have no reason to ask whether our everyday phenomenal experience of the world "differs" from the world – it is rather "part" of the world. However, we can still investigate the KIND of causal relations obtaining between the putative "object of experience" and the experience. I see the monitor screen as a source of light, and it makes no "sense" to me to formulate my experience otherwise. It is most probably the case that there is a "causal" relation obtaining between the physical state of the screen and the physical state of my perceptual apparatus, and that this causal relation could be described in terms of elementary-level interactions between complex systems. But it's meaningless to seek ***parts*** of "my experience of the screen" in particular fundamental interactions – the experience is an emergent phenomenon, and its "parts" are determined by relations obtaining at the emergent level.
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Two more juicy little questions:
Would Mary recognise whatever-her-sense-impression-was as "red"?
If she sees the cloudless daytime sky, and no other "coloured thing", has she learned anything about "red"?
Popular answers (1)
Central University of Venezuela
Dear David: I would like to know what do you think about the distinction made by John R. Searle concerning the existence of "brutes facts" that could have ontological objectivity and "institutional facts" that could have at most epistemological objectivity. I am sure, the problem is to distinguish in some cases what facts are "brutes" and what facts are "institutional". Of course, there are also two kind or ideas about reality involved in that distinction.
Thank you.
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All Answers (30)
Central University of Venezuela
Dear David: I would like to know what do you think about the distinction made by John R. Searle concerning the existence of "brutes facts" that could have ontological objectivity and "institutional facts" that could have at most epistemological objectivity. I am sure, the problem is to distinguish in some cases what facts are "brutes" and what facts are "institutional". Of course, there are also two kind or ideas about reality involved in that distinction.
Thank you.
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"Institutional facts" = Kuhn's conventionalism? i.e. recognized authority decides "reality."
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. . . until something or somebody upsets the paradigm with a new take on "brute facts." Quine's paradigm and foil?
West University of Timişoara
David-‘Just "an experience of seeing some thing which is recognized as a thermometer"’ or ‘a non-repeatable experience of seeing a particular thing (and not another particular one) which is recognised as a certain thermometer (and not another one)”? Hm, pretty close the nominalism heresy..Hi,hi!
Central University of Venezuela
"Institutional facts" depends of "language games" and they are important in order to communicate with other people and for the comprehension of the society.
DCH Translation
Gustavo: I think we should ask some very searching questions about what "facts" might be before attempting to make any distinction among 'em.
The problem with Searle is that he wan't really an ontologist: we might better understand his notion of "ontological objectivity" as "having extension in the physical world". The "epsitemological" distinction is a red herring, I think: our reasons for believing in a physical ontology are just as determined by epistemological considerations as are our reasons for accepting "conventionally-determined" facts. The real distinction concerns the way in which we justify and verify our beliefs - our belief in "the myth of material objects" seems "justified in our direct experience", while our belief in "the myth of moral obligations" or "the myth of fundamental particles" is based on information that is not (apparently) "given in direct experience"...
We can give an ontology for anything we can find a way to quantify over - "I've had three great loves in my life", "the present economic sitiuation is disastrous", "one thing frightens my children, and that's darkness".... Whether such ontologies would stand up to the principle of parsimony is another matter, likewise we can ask whether such ontologies might not reduce to more fundamental ontologies, or be eliminated by the application of a more fundamental ontology. But these are ALSO quuestions of epistemic justification - how do we justify our preference for one category rather than another as being "fundamental", and what pretheoretiical metaphysical assumptions are we making?
I think there's a big problem in philosophy over our use of terms like "the world". "The world" seems to bear to "the universe" the same kind of relation as "reality" bears to "existence" - but we should bear in mind the formal (logical) sense of both the term "existence" and the term "universe" when compared with the informal (metaphysical) sense of the terms "reality" and "the world". I rather think that the "universe of discourse" Searle was imagining for his "brute facts" would be something like "actual states of affairs", and the domain of objects would be "physical entities"...
DCH Translation
Virginia - and thus we're back to what we discussed with Haris. We can accept the myth of material objects from the commonsense evidence of our day-to-day experience, to accept the myth of fundamental particles one needs either a very extensive knowledge of higher mathematics - or a great deal of faith in the academic and scientific communities. Most of us are in the second position. Our "faith" is based on a "respect for authority", as both Haris and you have pointed out; however, I would argue that in the academic disciplines this "respect" is not entirely given, but must in part be "earned". There's a lot of elitism mixed in with the meritocracy system in the academic world, and a lot of politics - people are people. But there's still a fundamental requirement to have ***some*** capacity in the field, and this capacity can be demonstrated.
One could, for example, argue against Kant and Descartes solely by citing authors from Locke onwards (Hume would play a large role). Or one can work by example and argument, by "taking the question apart in public". At this point, one isn't trying to impose a view (or a belief, or a way of thinking about belief ) – one's doing the spadework in such a way that people can say "yes, that makes sense" or "that's interesting, but what about xyz?" or "what a load of unutterable crap – it deserves nothing more than the incredulous stare!".
Imagine that I was teaching the difference between the inclusive and the exclusive disjunction in classic bivalent propositional calculus. Here, I think I could speak authoritatively – after all, the distinction is merely a matter of truth tables. But in order to justify that authority, I'd have to explain what a truth table is, how it's derived – and why it matters. We're willing to take things on authority to the degree that we're willing to accept that the authority is "duly constituted" – and here the question is what criteria we pose for holding that an authority is "duly constituted". This obviously rejoins the "Searle" question…
DCH Translation
Bogdan - ‘a non-repeatable experience of seeing a particular thing (and not another particular one) which is recognised as a certain thermometer (and not another one)”
Can an experience be repeated? Do you mean having the same experience twice or experiencing two tokens of the same experience? Let's take it that I have 1. an experience 2. of seeing a particular thing and 3. recognising it a a certain thermometer
What follows is phenomenology, thus meaningless, metaphorical, and analogous. But all the same: I see some thing. In my experience, there is ***A*** thing, but its particularity is not inherent in what ***kind*** of thing it is (save in terms of the arrangement of its parts in space) - its particularity is that it occupies a certain, seemingly delimited part of my visual field (that is, I "model" it as occupying space). That I should delimit it as a "thing" and not as an amorphous mass of matter or as a part of some other thing depends largely on the beliefs I've established when confronted with similar experiences. That I recognise it as a thermometer is also dependent on prior experience and belief, and I might recognise it as "a thermometer" rather than "some particular thing" (as if I were to recognise a rigid designator rather than a bound variable).
I don't think terms such as "particular" make sense when applied to the putative contents of experience. "Seeing a particular thing and not another particular thing" should rather be "seeing a particular thing and NOT SEEING some other particular thing" - and it is usual that one sees what one sees and does not see what one does not see - though how something that is not there to be seen could be particular might cause a few headaches.
Anyway, nominalism is the Pure Dogma for me... can I "name" my experiences?

David,
Let us take our perception of any object. The object is seen by us by the information it generates. The information initiates an impulse in the eyes. Impulse is forwarded by the eyes to the brain. Brain projects this information. Now, take the case of a colorblind person who cannot see say red color. Person can never imagine what red color looks like. For him, the red color does not exist and no one can make him feel and experience what red color is like. For him perceivable universe is devoid of red color.
Take another case, a person is blind. For him, most of the universe does not exist as there is absolutely no way he can even imagine what a star looks like or what a galaxy is.
To assume that we can perceive everything that exists in the universe can only be an assumption that cannot be verified scientifically.
One can see that our perception of an object does not depend only on its own properties but also on our own properties.
The fact that we can perceive only the information rules out the possibility that we can know the reality of even a single entity.
The idea of reality emerges from the fact that we realize that we can only perceive the information generated by an entity.
How do we scientifically rule out the possibility that every object in the universe is only a dot or a string?
There is no way we can do this and hence science does not bother to explain reality but only attempts to explain observable universe. However, scientifically we can also conclude that what we perceive may not necessarily be the reality and hence the idea of 'objective reality'.
The observable universe is perceived reality. Perceived reality is always relative i.e. it is observer-dependent, space-dependent, and time-dependent.
West University of Timişoara
David-“…depends largely on the beliefs I've established when confronted with similar experiences”. A key word here is ‘similar’. How I recognize an experience as being ‘similar’ with a previous one? One possible answer is that there is a list of similarities and I could make a ‘check’ for these counting for a ‘large enough’ number of elements that ‘are the same’. But here is a problem: such list previous established largely depends of the ‘last time’ conditions of observations. Ideally, a ‘repeatable’ experience implies: 1) to observe the same object; 2) in exactly the same conditions of observation with 3) exactly the same capacity to observe, analyze, classify and interpret the information associated with this experience. Still, in practice the ‘same’ requirement is replaced by a ‘some’ one (with a supplementary condition that such replacement to not compromise the ‘critical descriptors’ of the experience): yesterday; a) I was happy and b) I was observing a rose. Today: a) I’m sad; b) I’m observing ‘a rose placed in the same place as yesterday’. The change in a) does not critically affect my capacity to recognize the today rose as the yesterday one (since ‘occupies a certain, seemingly delimited part of my visual field’ in ‘the same way’- I recognize the same ‘model’- list of characteristics). But could I still claim that ‘is the same experience of observing a rose’? Or in other words: could the changes in my mood be considered as ‘critical’ for defining such an experience? (And implicitly: Am I a part of my own experiences?).
As for ‘can I "name" my experiences?’…We can attach symbolic descriptors for any concrete or abstract thing (i.e. I can name it by attaching a label such as ‘Blue experience no.13’) but it is no clear for me what is the signification (and content) of such label…
DCH Translation
"The object is seen by us by the information it generates."
This is a reification of "information".
"a person is blind. For him, most of the universe does not exist as there is absolutely no way he can even imagine ... what a galaxy is."
Most of our descriptions of galaxies are mathematical
"One can see that our perception of an object does not depend only on its own properties but also on our own properties."
It depends PRIMARILY on our capacities - after all, we're talking about the PERCEPTION of an object, not the object itself.

David
Do you realize what you have stated? How do we know about the existence of a galaxy? through mathematics?
How do we perceive a galaxy? through mathematics?
No, it is a combination of both. Unless object reflect only red color light, we cannot perceive the red color on our own. Object must generate information in perceivable range and then our sense organs sense the information, forward it to brain and then brain projects the information.
Unless we believe that our perceptions create the world like in our dreams, we cannot reach the conclusions you have reached.
Central University of Venezuela
Galaxy is a name, like dog or father, belonging to our "language game".That´s why I can understand what galaxy means, even if I´m not (like it is my case) a mathematician or a physicist. In the same way, I can also understand if someone tell me "I´m in love", "I have a terrible headache" or "I´m depressed". Even, in my whole life I am be in love, suffering any pain or being depressed. Without those minimal rules, understanding or comprehension or translation it´s impossible.
Of course, Galaxy has an ontological base and that´s a kind of condition that enable us to talk about it. But, at the same time there are other thinks, like "angels" or "demons" that doesn´t have an ontological support. However we can talk about them and other people will understand us. Those "thinks" or "facts" have epistemological support, they are supposed to be "objectives" in some "language games".
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For us, the object is our perception of it. The reality of even single physical entity remains outside our observational capabilities.

Galaxy is a group of objects; we give the name. we cease to exist the name ceases to exist but galaxy exists.
There is a difference in perception of objects and feelings David though fundamentally both are only generated by an impulse. we cannot compare something imaginary like an angel with real objects.
You are confusing and combining unrelated phenomenon.

Try and imagine an angel or demon and the image you will see will be from a picture you might have seen in a book or in a movie....these are abstract phenomenon and have no scientific basis.
Central University of Venezuela
And also for most of the people Galaxy, or DNA, or magnetic forces are only abstracts phenomenon.It will be very hard for you to convince people that Galaxy and DNA are real and angel and demons are not. Empirical verification is not longer a scientific criterion. So, what we should use: mathematical model, parsimony models or.....
West University of Timişoara
‘Empirical verification is not longer a scientific criterion’- do we have ANY OTHER ‘scientific’ criterion to substitute for the evaluation of science relevance in solving the concrete problems? Is really from a ‘functional’ point of view the construction of the scientific theories only an exercise for the sake of the scientists? Since when did we loose the pragmatic purposes of the scientific approach? If we can not at least imagine an empirical test of a theory can we classify such theory as a ‘scientific’ one? The fact that we have difficulties to explain a scientific fact does not anything to have with its testable requirement. It is simply a ‘didactic’ problem…
West University of Timişoara
Did we give up to make a distinction between ‘theories’ (i.e. testable facts) and ‘believes’? Of course, we can ask for a theory to have an internal coherence, to respect the parsimony requirement, to be non-contradictory with other theories etc. BUT THIS DOES NOTHING TO DO with the necessity to formulate our theories in such manner that empirical tests of their relevance can be constructed and carry out (or in other words in order to label a statement as ‘theory’ we should formulate it in a falsifiable manner). Everything else is ‘believe’ and not ‘theory’...
West University of Timişoara
Gustavo, try to see the things like this: science is a social artifact designed to satisfy some specific social needs. In order to preserve its capacity to answer to concrete problems, there is a ‘hard constraint’ for the testable character of scientific theories. Science is not only about constructing a set of explanations in respect to ‘reality’ but also (and probably manly) to generate solutions for some very concrete problems. Thus, it can not be reduced to an intellectual exercise…
DCH Translation
Bogdan
Your comments deserve a serious reply. This is just a beginning… unfortunately, my time has been rather limited lately.
"How do I recognize an experience as being ‘similar’ to a previous one?"
This remark point up a serious problem for the Lockean view. If - as the Lockean analogy suggests - we are *tabulae rasae*, we have no innate notion of "one thing" and "more than one thing"; nor do we have any prior reasons to subdivide and organise our perceptual fields into distinct "entities". On the strong version of the Lockean view, each situation of experience would be unique, and experience would be undifferentiated save by (i.) its channel (vision, sound…), (ii.) its intensity, and (iii.) its duration.
However, my object in writing the initial piece was to argue against the idea that our sense impressions somehow "represent the world" to a Cartesian cogito; in this context, the Lockean tabula rasa is at best a metaphor for the self that is founded "in, through, and throughout" experience. In the initial piece I was presupposing that the "subject" of experience was a fully-competent member of some linguistic community and that they had undergone language learning (and this is a very important point for the neo-behaviourist account I'm defending).
For my part, and insofar as we are fully competent members of a given linguistic community, I don't think that particular instances of our recognition of a rose either as a rose or as a particular rose require that we recognise it first as a "thing" and as a particular "thing". As a good behaviourist, I'd say that recognition of objects as being tokens of some type (instances of natural kinds, whatever) is a learned habit: you hear the bell, and you think "lunch" – oops, wrong metaphor – when you see the particular form and colour, you think "rose". Learning a language conditions our responses to "linguistic stimuli"; once the "habit" is internalised, it becomes automatic.
But the problem you pose is more fundamental: We have to understand the recognition of the rose as a "thing", as a particular "thing", as "a rose", and as "that particular rose" not in the context of our being entirely competent language users, but as a process passing from "prelinguistic" or "alinguistic" experience to the use of observation sentences. Here, our problem is not "how do we recognise objects through change", but "how do we learn a language".
On the philosophical level, the account I'd most favour is given in Quine's "Things and their Place in Theories", which is unfortunately unavailable on the web, though the "Google books" result gives a taste of it –
I'll try and answer further asap - I'm well aware that I haven(t adressed your main points!

If we can demonstrate our experience to others and make them experience the same thing like we can see the moon and show it to everyone then it is a lot different than our experience of love, pain, angel, or demon. We may see a demon (I wonder if anyone has seen an angel or a demon but assuming it exists and hence someone might have seen) but we cannot make others experience how much painful something is for us, how much we love someone, how an angel or demon looks like....
Sunil
West University of Timişoara
David,
Thank you so much for your answer. It is very kindly. Just some short questions: 1) ‘that recognition of objects as being tokens of some type (instances of natural kinds, whatever) is a learned habit…’. My question is: can this process of learning be complete without the empirical observation? Am I fully able to recognize a rose even I did not was seeing one before (but I was learned about it)? More generally: is there any place in explanations for the importance of the repeated ‘similar’ (according to a list of some characteristics) experiences in order to fully assimilate the current ones? Why I’m thinking: this is a rose (and not for instance a tulip)? Is there a critical level of details that should be acquired in order to perform the recognition act? And can such details be completely transmitted by the mean of language? 2) There are various ‘forms and colours’ for roses. How can I distinguish the ‘rose of the little prince’ from any other one? (This problem was freak me out so many years ago… they call a book about the complex issues of identity and relationships a ‘children book’? grrrr, keep the children out!!! How am I supposed to find the damn rose and to not be foolish by another one with so many identical characteristics?). 3) Speaking about the ‘process passing from "prelinguistic" or "alinguistic" experience to the use of observation sentences’, should we seen the processes of ‘having an experience’ and respectively ‘communicating that experience’ as a compulsory sequence? Do we necessary have the ‘observation sentences’ as a component structure of the experience itself?
Many thanks for the link. I’m not familiarised with Quine's work and for the beginning I have to assimilate this ‘the triggering, first and last, is all we have to go on’ since I’m still amazed by the fact that we are using one ‘thing’ (the language) in order to explain all the other non-linguistic things…

I have no formal eduction in Philosophy but I feel that language is only a tool to express our perceptions. We can experience a thing without expressing it in any manner whatsoever. We name the objects after perceiving the objects.
DCH Translation
I feel that language is only a tool to express our perceptions. We can experience a thing without expressing it in any manner whatsoever. We name the objects after perceiving the objects.
Sunil: you're using the terms "thing" and "object" as interchangeable. That we experience "some thing" is one matter - that we should experience "some OBJECT" is another. A phenomenon is rather an event than an object...
DCH Translation
Bogdan
If you're unfamiliar with naturalised epistemology, I'd suggest Richard Feldman's Stanford entry - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-naturalized/. I'd certainly endorse the criticisms of Quine's appeal to psychology as a sufficient replacement for epistemology; but I'm not at all sure that we can arrive at any objective standard of "knowledge" – my ideas are still very vague on the subject, but I'd give an account based on what counts as "sufficient reason" to believe that a given possible world is the actual world (or, if you prefer a bit of mysticism, what "possibilities" are "actualised" in "the real world"). The importance of Quine's contribution is rather that he sees epistemic systems as "holistic" - our reasons for believing any one particular thing depend on the entire "web" of our beliefs about the world. Now, while confirmation holism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_holism) is theoretically feasible on the most general level as a theory of "scientific knowledge", I don't think we can generalise it further to the entire set of beliefs an individual has about the world (even if that person has a sophisticated "scientific culture"). This impacts the ontological question: while the ontologies of the special sciences can imaginably be co-ordinated with the ontology of physics, the "ontologies" of "pre-scientific", "non-scientific" or "extra-scientific" epistemic systems are less easily co-ordinated with and assimilated to the ontology of physics.
If we take this from the behaviourist point of view, whether I believe or not, for example, that there are fundamental particles and that these particles can have certain kinds of property has no discernible impact on my behaviour towards the "material objects" which furnish my everyday world – the artefacts, natural objects, animate beings and so forth about which I talk and with which I interact. My beliefs about, for example, "my desk" might include a vague consciousness of its putative microscopic structure – which, following the behaviourist criterion, would be "manifest" if someone were to ask me to describe my desk "as a material entity". This remark underlines the highly contextual nature of belief – the "web of belief" I have about my desk is large and diffuse, and concerns "my desk" under several aspects: as a desk (with all the cultural associations – the "connotations" - of the term "desk" from school to work and outwards to Edgar Allan Poe), as a piece of furniture, as a piece of property, as a tool, as an artefact, as a material object, as a composite object, as a certain quantity of wood, as wood, as organic matter, as the eventual subject of philosophical investigation… My "scientific beliefs" about my desk would only be brought into play if someone were to ask me about my desk "as a material object" – and in my particular case, I'd be more likely to access beliefs about "the mereology and topology of objects in spacetime" than beliefs about the interface between biology, chemistry and quantum mechanics. This is also an important point: the organisation and "nature" of the webs of belief we have about the world vary from one person to another. This IS a matter of "psychology", but of psychology in the most general sense – "what it is that makes one person's mental constitution different from the mental constitution of another person?". Depending on the "experience" of the person, that person will have a certain web of beliefs about a certain kind of object: someone with no "experience" of either philosophical or scientific accounts of "matter" and of "material objects" would have beliefs about its "materiality" that were entirely pragmatic ("it's solid, you can put things on it, it takes up a certain amount of space"). A carpenter, for example, would possess a set of beliefs concerning "the desk as an artefact" that would be far more complex or extensive than mine. But, all this taken into account, my non-linguistic behaviour towards "my desk" is no different whether I believe it to be a conventionally-designated region of spacetime delimited by the topological relations obtaining between its spatial and temporal parts or a very specific composite of earth, fire, air, and water impressed with some "ideal form".
So, while our beliefs about the world might well form "webs" in which each belief depends upon or is supported by some other belief or set of beliefs, it would be most unwise to assimilate this to the "confirmation holism" which supposedly underlies our scientific theories. The interest of Mr Spock on the old Star Trek shows was that his "Vulcan half" evaluated everything by a kind of "confirmation holism" – both actions and occurrences are judged with respect to a "rational, logical, and scientific" understanding of the world. Spock's human half asserted itself in behaviour that was "inexplicable" to his rational (cognitive) capacities – his love of and liking for McCoy, for example. As full humans we have less difficulty reconciling the imperatives of the physical world with the logic of the human world – we can deplore that McCoy should not be an "ideally rational agent" when faced with a question of interpretation, yet admire his capacity to make ethical decisions – and furthermore, we would hold that he has rational justification for believing that such ethical decisions are "appropriate".
The difference between the hypothetical Vulcan, whose "web of belief" coincides entirely with the domain of "confirmation holism", and we ordinary humans is that we ordinary humans have various webs of belief concerning the various situations in which we find ourselves. It's amusing that Vulcans should have as their "maximal set of consistent beliefs" the contents of ***human*** science – but then Vulcans are a fictional reification of "a certain aspect of human nature divorced from the other aspects". We *could* say that the beliefs of "we ordinary humans" obey some kind of "local holism" – that there is at least a coherence between our beliefs about the world ***under this or that specific aspect***, but that there is not necessarily full coherence between the set of beliefs underlying a given belief about one specific aspect and the set of beliefs underlying another given belief about another specific aspect.
I don't know whether you know Sidney Harris' "then a miracle occurs" (http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/pages/gallery.php). Here, the problem is that the physicist's explanation is incompatible with the process of confirmation required in physics (it is not in the domain of the mathematical) - in their "extra-scientific" lives, both the physicist and his locutor might be practising Roman Catholics, and accept *within the domain of their Catholicism* that "then a miracle occurs" is a perfectly good explanation of some occurrence (such as the Resurrection). Conversely, if within the context of their Catholicism, one of them were to claim that he accepted the Virgin Birth but that he believed Jesus was the physical son of Joseph, then there would be a similar incompatibility.
There is, I think, a real difference of "kind" between the "beliefs" that come into play in the scientific and in the religious contexts: the formation of belief in the scientific context depends on respecting a certain methodology and a certain form of expression, while religious belief is founded on a respect for authority and an acceptance of "revealed truth". Sciences and religions are obvious examples of epistemic systems insofar as explicit "explanation of the world and of our place in it" is common to both; but we have other "webs of belief" about the world based on social, ethical, and individual considerations. These "webs of belief" intersect and coincide in certain, but not all, areas – maximal coherence is rather a norm towards which "rational behaviour" tends than an actual characteristic of human cognition.
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DCH Translation
Bogdan – to address your points: this is point 1, part one (I'm sorry for the length of my replies but at least you're making me work!)
"1) ‘that recognition of objects as being tokens of some type (instances of natural kinds, whatever) is a learned habit…’. My question is: can this process of learning be complete without the empirical observation? Am I fully able to recognize a rose even I did not was seeing one before (but I was learned about it)?"
Hmmm – this is "Mary's Room", isn't it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary%27s_room
Mary has learned everything about a colour – say "red" – but has never experienced "red". She steps outside and sees the sky. Has she learned anything new about the colour "red"?
Sorry – just my joke. Seriously, I tend to take the "let's modify some absolutely fundamental parameter of human experience" kind of thought experiment to be very much what Dennett has called "intuition pumps"… alongside the objections mentioned in the Wikipedia article, we can perhaps identify two general classes of objection, both based on the insufficiency of Mary's "knowledge".
Firstly, Mary's knowledge is restricted to ***descriptive*** elements of the following kinds:
i. examples of "instances of the property red"
ii. the conditions of use of the term "red"
iii. the connotations of the term "red" (psychological, social, and cultural elements)
iv. the correlation of contextual uses of the term "red" with information derived from theories of perception and from physical theory
INDIRECT vs. DIRECT EXPERIENCE: Given that Mary can describe red, but has no direct acquaintance with it, we can ask whether for her red is a "theoretical entity" (a little like the theoretical entities of particle physics).
AN INHERENT PROBLEM WITH "RED"? We can ask whether we're making an assimilation with the kind of situation in which an unknown material object is described to Mary who thereafter picks out that object by sight. This works fine with, say, a table. Imagine Mary has never seen a table or an image of a table but has learned "everything" about tables (including detailed information about the kinds of parts tables have and the normative range of topological relations obtaining between these parts – that is, the geometrical structure of "tables"). When she sees her first table, she might well say "ah! So a table looks like *that*!" – but this is a problem of the reference and denotation of "that", not a matter of the putative denotation of "table" (see below). "Tables" are, with respect to colours, apparently unproblematic entities – the extension of the term is in the public domain. But is the extension of the term "red" in the public domain? We could argue that "red" is inherently qualitative – that it assumes "a sensation of red" – and that all Mary has learned is
(1a.) physical information concerning light in the wavelength range of roughly 630–740 nanometres and the "causal relations" such light can entertain and
(2a.) information about the use of the linguistic item "red".
This argument tells against physicalism to a certain degree – Mary has not learned "all there is to learn about red" BECAUSE she has not experienced a certain quale or whatever. Here, we can either
(1b) discount that "red" has any sense as a physical description, and is merely a matter of linguistic behaviour (though this is just sweeping the problem under the carpet of counterintuitive epiphenomenalism);
(2b) bite the bullet and allow an "exclusively non-physical source of knowledge"; or
(2c) claim that Mary's experience of red IS a "source of new physical knowledge"
I'd go for (2c) for the following reasons: Mary sees "red" for the first time at a time T. Before T, Mary has learned "all about" the physical processes underlying colour perception, and "all about" the various heterophenomenological evidence for "red". She knows, for instance, that an event which is "a seeing of red" is correlated with a certain series of events which include "reflection or emission of light with a certain wavelength", "stimulation of certain kinds of photoreceptor cell", "stimulation of certain areas of the brain" etc. etc. However, at T she becomes acquainted with a "new physical event", S, which is "the stimulation of certain of HER photoreceptor cells", "the stimulation of certain regions of HER brain". It might be that S is a token of a type of event – "a seeing of red" which can be entirely described by the nomological relations I outline – but Mary has nonetheless discovered a new "fact" about the physical world: she has become acquainted with a particular stimulation of HER "perceptual apparatus".
While it combines elements of both the "ability" and the "acquaintance" hypotheses, this is not an entirely satisfactory reply. Mary's new "ability" is to correlate a linguistic item with a certain kind of experience, and Mary's "acquaintance" with the physical event is still problematic as what she learns is given in the contents of experience. In both cases, we would seem to be presupposing precisely what is in question: the contents of experience. Conee's arguments are the most convincing: alongside "knowing that" - propositional knowledge (what Conee calls "factual knowledge") and "knowing how", which is a question of ability or competence, there is another kind of knowledge "by direct acquaintance".
We need to take a closer look at the grammatical form of "knowing that" and "knowing how" to clarify Conee's "knowing by direct acquaintance". "Knowing that" requires a propositional object (something like "the Earth orbits the Sun" or "red is light in the wavelength range of roughly 630–740 nanometres"); "knowing how" can have either propositional content, such as "I know how the Earth orbits the Sun" (in which case it claims familiarity with some nomological or normative account) or can describe an ability ("I know how to speak French"). We can ask whether, before T, Mary can truthfully say "I know how to perceive red", and this is at the root of the "ability" counterargument; if she says "I know how light in the wavelength range of roughly 630–740 nanometres stimulates the perceptual apparatus", then this is a form of propositional knowledge. [NB that she cannot say "I know how light in the wavelength range of roughly 630–740 nanometres stimulates MY perceptual apparatus"; before T, that light will stimulate her perceptual apparatus in that way is a hypothesis]. Conee's "knowing by direct acquaintance" is ambiguous in that it doesn't specify whether it is a "knowing that", a "knowing how" – or some other form of "knowing". "Knowing what" is usually propositional; "knowing about" is similar, though in a sentence such as "I know all about home improvement", there's an ambiguity between the "know that" and "know how" senses. It could be a "knowing by" or "knowing from", though this only specifies its source, not its object ("I know from experience that…"; "I know by experience how…"). "Knowing when" and "knowing where" are irrelevant, though their form is generally interesting in that they imply "knowing some thing" rather than "knowing some proposition". We can indeed ask whether Conee's "knowing by direct acquaintance" is not similar to "knowing some thing" rather than "to knowing some proposition": that is, if it's more like the "knowing" of "do you know John?". If I say that I know John, there's a sense of my "knowing" that goes beyond simply "knowing about" John. I can "know about" John without "actually knowing" John – and it's surely this "actually knowing" that corresponds to "knowledge by acquaintance" – indeed, "acquaintance" has both a social and an epistemic sense here. In social terms, I can only claim to be acquainted with John if I have had some direct contact with him (though such contact could be mediated – by telephone or computer for example, in the way that I am "acquainted" with you). In the epistemic sense, it would seem to imply some kind of "second-person" knowledge of John – John is not known to me in the third person, as the object of description, but is known to me in the second person, as an interlocutor. There is therefore a sense of "direct interaction" in the "knowing John" kind of "knowing" that is absent in "knowing that".
In this sense, "Mary knows red" would imply a kind of "knowing'" absent from any attribution of the kind "Mary knows that red is…" or "Mary knows how to differentiate red in such-and-such a situation". The difference is similar to the difference between reading an account of an experiment and successfully repeating the experiment oneself: the successful repetition of the experiment is of general epistemic value insofar as it supports the postulated nomological relation, but it doesn't introduce "new knowledge" – that is, knowledge that would not be generally available had one not conducted the experiment.
Even if Mary has learned a new fact about the physical world, this "fact" can best be expressed as "the reaction of Mary's perceptual apparatus generates a sensory impression that apparently correlates with certain aspects of Mary's prior knowledge of "red" and its various applications" ("certain aspects" because it's unlikely that her first experience would correspond to the entire range of "knowledge" given under (i…iv) above - if the first red thing she sees is, for example, a plate of strawberry jelly (jell-o for the colonials), then she's unlikely to access the connotations of "danger" or "interdiction"). The problematic notion has not been abolished – even though it can be understood as a particular physical event or concrete process, the "causal result" of the particular occurrence of perception is still an "impression". Such an "impression" might well be an emergent property with no proper causal powers which is in some way a "by-product" of the concrete process; and this seems a highly acceptable hypothesis However, the hypothesis should be adjusted to take into account a more sophisticated understanding of "causation" (is causation a form of becoming, or is it rather a matter of the structure of spacetime, or of regularities in the distribution of matter and energy in spacetime?); we should also re-examine the reductionist notion of "by-product" (is there any a priori reason why, for example, particle interactions should be "more real" than the complex interactions giving rise to an emergent property, such as a "sensation"?).
NOT REALLY A PROBLEM WITH "RED"
The relations obtaining between sensory stimulation and our recognition of a certain "physical quality", such as colour, are particularly puzzling. Above, I gave as a contrasting example a material object – a table. Now, we can describe tables without giving a visual image of a table; but we can also give a visual image of a table as a means of providing ""knowledge about tables". An image of a table is not a table. But we can't do this with "red", because an image of "red" ***is*** red - a monochrome image of a red object is not an image of "red". The term "red" has as its extension all actual instances of red, but no instances where red is absent.
With knowledge about tables, or the Pyramids of Egypt, where visual images can be employed, the reaction on first seeing "the real thing" is perhaps "so that's what a table (or the Pyramids) ***actually*** look like" rather than the unmodified "so that's what a table (or the Pyramids) look like". But we shouldn't overestimate the distinction è the principle is still the same. We've passed from the "knowing that" or "knowing how" kind of knowledge to "knowing some thing" by direct interaction with that thing. The important term in both "so that's what a table (or the Pyramids) ***actually*** look like" and "so that's what red looks like" is the demonstrative "that".
In my following message, I'd like to develop the idea that the problem with "the contents of experience", "qualia", "sense impressions" (or what have you) is a special case of the more general problem of indexicality.
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