Losing grip on the world: from illusion to sense-data

2012 ◽  
pp. 68-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek H. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Sense Data ◽  
The World

Perception

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.G.F. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Direct Realism ◽  
Philosophical Debate ◽  
Sense Data ◽  
Intermediary Objects ◽  
External Objects ◽  
The World ◽  
Five Senses ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Proper Account

Sense perception is the use of our senses to acquire information about the world around us and to become acquainted with objects, events, and their features. Traditionally, there are taken to be five senses: sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste. Philosophical debate about perception is ancient. Much debate focuses on the contrast between appearance and reality. We can misperceive objects and be misled about their nature, as well as perceive them to be the way that they are: you could misperceive the shape of the page before you, for example. Also, on occasion, it may seem to us as if we are perceiving, when we do not perceive at all, but only suffer hallucinations. Illusions and hallucinations present problems for a theory of knowledge: if our senses can mislead us, how are we to know that things are as they appear, unless we already know that our senses are presenting things as they are? But the concern in the study of perception is primarily to explain how we can both perceive and misperceive how things are in the world around us. Some philosophers have answered this by supposing that our perception of material objects is mediated by an awareness of mind-dependent entities or qualities: typically called sense-data, ideas or impressions. These intermediaries allegedly act as surrogates or representatives for external objects: when they represent aright, we perceive; when they mislead, we misperceive. An alternative is to suppose that perceiving is analogous to belief or judgment: just as judgment or belief can be true or false, so states of being appeared to may be correct or incorrect. This approach seeks to avoid intermediary objects between the perceiver and the external objects of perception, while still taking proper account of the possibility of illusion and hallucination. Both responses contrast with that of philosophers who deny that illusions and hallucinations have anything to tell us about the nature of perceiving proper, and hold to a form of naïve, or direct, realism. The account of perception one favours has a bearing on one’s views of other aspects of the mind and world: the nature and existence of secondary qualities, such as colours and tastes; the possibility of giving an account of the mind as part of a purely physical, natural world; how one should answer scepticism concerning our knowledge of the external world.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Philosophy ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wayne Froman ◽  
Meirav Almog
Keyword(s):  
Editorial Board Member ◽  
Lived Body ◽  
Sense Data ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Phenomenology Of Perception ◽  
The World ◽  
Gestural Analysis ◽  
The Invisible

Merleau-Ponty (b. 1908–d. 1961) was a major 20th-century French philosopher and contributor to phenomenology. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure from 1926 to 1930, received the aggrégation in philosophy in 1930 and the Docteur ès lettres in 1945. After early teaching largely in psychology, culminating with a Sorbonne appointment as professor of child psychology and pedagogy, he was elected in 1952 to the Chair in Philosophy at the Collège de France, as the youngest philosopher ever in this position, which he held until his death. His inaugural lecture was published as Éloge de la philosophie (In Praise of Philosophy). In 1945, Merleau-Ponty became, along with Raymond Aron, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre, a founding editorial board member as well as political editor of Les temps modernes, a journal devoted to “la philosophie engagée.” In 1953 he resigned from the journal. After the Korean conflict, Merleau-Ponty’s political difference with Sartre was acute, and in Les aventures de la dialectique (Adventures of the Dialectic) Merleau-Ponty characterizes Sartre’s position as “ultra-bolshevism.” Eventually, Merleau-Ponty would relinquish Marxist tenets. Merleau-Ponty’s first book, La structure du comportement (The Structure of Behavior), from 1942, is largely a critique of behavioral psychology as lacking a-propos, his stated goal, understanding the relation between nature and consciousness. His second and major completed book is La phénoménologie de la perception (Phenomenology of Perception). In this work Merleau-Ponty undermines classical theories of perception, which rely on “sense data”; introduces his understanding of the “lived body”; accentuates Husserl’s remark that consciousness is initially a matter of an “I can,” not an “I think”; and introduces a gestural analysis of language. While affirming Eugen Fink’s observation that there is no total “reduction” phenomenologically, Merleau-Ponty proceeds under the “epochē,” nonetheless. When he died, Merleau-Ponty was writing what would have been a book of major proportions. The material that he completed was posthumously published as Le visible et l’invisible (The Visible and the Invisible), a title from working notes that were published with it. Critical discussions of reflective philosophy, dialectic, and intuition precede a decidedly ontological project involving: “la chair” (the “flesh”), successor to Phenomenology of Perception’s “lived body,” through which “I live the world”; “reversibility,” the perceptual dynamic operative in our habitation of the world; and “the chiasm” or “intertwining” of different contexts, such as vision and motility. L’oeil et l’esprit (Eye and Mind), intended for inclusion in The Visible and the Invisible but published separately, addresses exploration of these factors in painting.

A Phenomenological Reply to Berkeley’s ‘Water Experiment’

1998 ◽  
pp. 262-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eldon C. Wait
Keyword(s):  
Sense Data ◽  
The World ◽  
Left And Right

Berkeley introduces his water experiment in order to demonstrate that in perception the perceiver does not reach the world itself but is confined to a realm of representations or sense data. We will attempt to demonstrate that Berkeley's description of our experience at the end of the water experiment is inauthentic, that it is not so much a description of an experience as a reconstruction of what we would experience if the receptor organs (the left and right hands) were objects existing in a space partes extra partes. Our argument is that there is nothing in our experience of the illusion to suggest that under normal conditions perception does not reach the world itself.

A Defence of Direct Surface Realism

Philosophy ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 57 (221) ◽  
pp. 339-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roderick Millar
Keyword(s):  
Dimensional Space ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Sense Data ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The World ◽  
Physical Objects ◽  
Representative Realism ◽  
Three Dimensional Space

It is commonly believed that there are, in the world, large numbers of objects which occupy three-dimensional space. It is also commonly believed that at least a large part of people's experience is of the surfaces of these material objects. Nevertheless, arguments have been adduced in favour of the view that we are never aware of such surfaces but only of distinct items called ‘sense-data’. It has also been suggested that if we couple the view that experience is limited to sense-data with an empiricist thesis to the effect that knowledge is limited by experience then we are forced to the conclusion that we cannot have any knowledge of material objects. There have been many attempts to reconcile the sense-data thesis with common beliefs about material objects. Among them have been representative realism and phenomenalism. However, a view which may have found favour recently is the Quinean one that ‘the myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience’.1

scholarly journals Intellection and Intuition: On the Epistemology of S.R. Ranganathan

NASKO ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 149
Author(s):  
Thomas M. Dousa
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Method ◽  
Knowledge Organization ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Classification Theory ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Sense Data ◽  
The World ◽  
Facet Analysis ◽  
Fundamental Categories ◽  
In Virtue Of

The Indian librarian and library theorist S.R. Ranganathan (1892-1970) is generally recognized as a seminal figure in the development of facet analysis and its application to classification theory. In recent years, commentators on the epistemology of knowledge organization have claimed that the methods of facet analysis reflect a fundamentally rationalist approach to classification. Yet, for all the interest in the epistemological bases of Ranganathan’s classification theory, little attention has been paid to his theory of how human beings acquire knowledge of the world – i.e., his epistemology proper – or to the question whether this theory reflects a rationalist outlook. This paper examines Ranganathan’s statements on the origins of knowledge to assess if they are congruent with rationalist epistemology. Ranganathan recognized two different modes of knowledge – intellection (i.e., intellectual operations on sense data) and intuition (i.e., direct cognition of things-in-themselves) -- and it is in virtue of the latter that his epistemology can be considered to fall within the ambit of rationalism. Intuition as a source of knowledge plays a role in Ranganathan’s classification theory, most notably in his model of scientific method underlying classification development, his vision of the organization of classification design, and his conceptualization of seminal mnemonics and a reduced number of fundamental categories as important elements in the design of classification notation. Not only does intuition subtend the rationalism of Ranganathan’s epistemology but it also serves as a bridge to another often-neglected aspect of his thought, namely his valorization of mysticism. Indeed, Ranganathan’s theory of knowledge is best characterized as mystical rationalism

Qualia

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Levin
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Phenomenal Properties ◽  
Intentional States ◽  
Sense Data ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The Moment

In contemporary discussions in the philosophy of mind, the terms quale and qualia (plural) are most commonly used to denote features of our conscious mental states such as the throbbing pain of my headache, the warmth I feel when I hold my hands over the fire, or the greenish character of my visual experience when I look at the tree outside my window (or stare hard at something red and then close my eyes). To use the now-standard locution introduced by Thomas Nagel, a subject’s mental state has qualia (or, equivalently, phenomenal properties) just in case there is something it is like for the subject to be in that state, and there are phenomenal similarities and differences among a subject’s mental states (that is, similarities and differences in their qualia) just in case there are similarities and differences in what it is like for that subject to be in those states. Qualia, in this sense, can be more or less specific: the state I am in at the moment can be an example of a migraine, a headache, a pain and, even more generally, a bodily sensation. And a mental state can have a distinctive phenomenal property, or quale, even if its subject cannot pick it out in terms any more descriptive than ‘I’m now feeling something funny’, or ‘I’ve never had an experience quite like this’. Sometimes the terms ‘quale’ and ‘qualia’ have been used more restrictively, to denote properties of mental states that are irreducibly nonphysical. ‘Qualia’ has also been used to denote ‘sense-data’, that is, image-like elements of perceptual experiences whose properties are directly and infallibly accessible to the subject of those experiences (and thus provide ‘data’ for our theories of the world). Indeed, C. I. Lewis, who is generally thought to have introduced the term, used ‘qualia’ in this way, and many others (e.g. Dennett 1988: 229) have understood ‘qualia’ to denote properties that are ‘ineffable, intrinsic, private, and directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness’. Thus philosophical disputes about qualia have often taken the form of disputes about whether qualia exist, rather than about what sorts of properties qualia could be. But most philosophers now use these terms more neutrally, as characterized above - and attempt to argue that qualia must have (or can lack) these further metaphysical and epistemological characteristics. Perhaps the most contentious dispute about qualia is whether they can have a place in the physical world; whether, that is, they could be identical with physical, functional or otherwise natural properties, or must rather be regarded as irreducibly nonphysical features of our mental states. There are also significant epistemological questions about qualia - in particular, how we come to have knowledge of the phenomenal properties of our own mental states, whether our beliefs about these properties can be taken to be infallible, or at least to have some kind of special authority not possessed by our beliefs about the world outside our minds, and whether, and if so, how, we could have such knowledge of the mental states of others. In addition, it has traditionally been routine to distinguish ‘qualitative’ states such as sensations and perceptual experiences from purely representational (or intentional) states such as beliefs, thoughts and preferences, but this distinction is now under challenge. Thus another important question about qualia is how extensive they are in our mental lives: whether they are possessed by all our conscious mental states, including thoughts, beliefs, intentions and preferences, or merely some, such as sensations and perceptions.

Kant on the Ideality of Space

1988 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Rogerson
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Idealism ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Sense Data ◽  
The World ◽  
Independent Reality

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant argues for a position he calls transcendental idealism. And although it comes as no surprise to claim that Kant was an idealist, it is far from clear how this idealism should be understood. Traditionally, Kant’s idealism has been understood as a version of phenomenalism. ‘Objects of experience’ (appearances) are constructions of mental data caused by mind independent reality (the realm of things in themselves). This reading has been labeled the ‘ontological’ interpretation since on this view ‘objects of experience’ are ontologically dependent on our minds and ontologically distinct from the world outside of our minds. And, corresponding to the supposed ‘two worlds’ of objects, it is thought that Kant allows for two perspectives from which objects can be described. Human descriptions are limited to the mere collections of sense data while God can describe the set of objects outside our mind as they really are ‘in themselves.’

Reason and Religion in Modern History

2019 ◽  
pp. 199-241
Author(s):  
Joshua Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Psychology Of Religion ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Sense Data ◽  
Rational Theology ◽  
Intellectual Origins ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Alternative Reading

This chapter focuses on Victorian debates over the intellectual origins of modernity. These hinged on competing interpretations of the place of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the history of ‘mind’. Secularly inclined sociological critics such as Henry Thomas Buckle, who held to an epistemological phenomenalism influenced by John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte, hailed these periods for having refined the inductive sciences which drove true progress. An alternative reading of post-Reformation intellectual history, developed by John Tulloch and others, and attacked by agnostics, instead credited it with having made rational theology possible. Underlying these debates was the question of whether experience was confined to the world of sense data, or else also encompassed the intuitive powers of mind. William Inge, in dialogue with Idealist philosophy, developed the latter possibility, in ways that hinted at the development of the apologetic authority of history into a new concern with the psychology of religion.

scholarly journals Conventionalism and the world as bare sense-data

2007 ◽  
Vol 85 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crawford L. Elder
Keyword(s):  
Sense Data ◽  
The World

scholarly journals Being Somewhere

2021 ◽  
pp. 13-50
Author(s):  
Ingvar Tjostheim ◽  
John A. Waterworth
Keyword(s):  
Direct Perception ◽  
Digital Environment ◽  
Sense Data ◽  
Perceptual Illusions ◽  
The World ◽  
Data View

AbstractTo understand the experience of being present somewhere else, via a digital environment, we start by considering how we can experience being anywhere. We present several different philosophical and psychological perspectives on this, stressing the importance of perception. Each has something to offer and add to our understanding of digital travel. We compare four philosophical views: representationalism, relationism, enactivism and the sense-data view. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, but relationism is best placed to accommodate perceptual illusions, which is a prevalent view of the psychological nature of telepresence experiences. As suggested by enactivism and the direct perception approach, the possibilities for action in the world are important to the nature of our experience of places. This, in turn, is influenced by the characteristics of the world in which we act, through affordances.

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