----------
Derek wrote:

> I agree with her up to this
> point. Where I get lost is when she claims that it is possible to know
> the qualities of an object’s identity. I would grant that we obviously know
> our perception of that object, but how do we ever come to know the object
> itself? In other words, on what grounds can we say that our perception of
> an object tells us anything about the object’s actual identity?

This sounds like it’s headed down the wrong road. If you think of perceptions as some thing that we know, as the object of awareness – you’re lost. You’ll end up asking what the connection is between your perceptions and the real world out there, and there will be no intelligible answer. You won’t be able to justify a claim that they correspond to or resemble or give us information about the real world because you won’t (according to this theory) have any direct contact with the real world to compare your perceptions to. The view that “perceptions” are what we are typically aware of, where perceptions are mental entities of some sort, is sometimes called representative realism: the perceptions we have are thought to represent the real world to us. It was one of the great achievements of Hume (with an assist from Berkeley) to show that this couldn’t work. If our entire cognitive contact with the world is mediated by these so-called perceptions, then we have no cognitive contact with the world. Or, if you start “inside” – in the mind, in the subjective realm – and don’t cheat, you can never get out.

A better way, I think, is to say that perception isn’t what we know or are aware of, but how we know or are aware. What we are aware of is (typically) things or events or states of affairs in the world. We are aware of these by perceiving them. It’s not that we live in a world of color-patches, sound-snatches, odor-whiffs, tactile sensations and the rest. Rather, we see colored objects, hear noise-making events, smell things that give off odors, touch things that are hard or hot or fuzzy and so on.

This kind of view, that we are directly aware of things, events, etc., outside the mind is, for obvious reasons, called direct realism. However, it can be held in too simple a form to do justice to the facts. For the present, I’ll just say that directness does not mean or imply infallibility and is consistent with saying that the quality of our experiences depends on us, on the states of our sensory organs and brains as well as on that of which we are aware.

If you accept direct realism, there isn’t a general problem (lots of problems in the details) about how we know the natures of the things we perceive. We know their natures – by perceiving them – and the experiences that we have depend in part on the natures of the things perceived.



Rob