Its important to.understand that there is a difference between, “we perceive external objects, not mental proxies” and “our senses give us direct experience of objects as they really are”. The latter is naive realism...naive realism is direct realism, but direct realism does not have to be naive realism. The argument against DR given in the OP is mostly an argument against NR.
The argument for DR is simply that it follows from the meanings of words like “see” and “perceive”...they indicate a relationship between a perceiver and an external object, not a process internal to an observer.
From the blurb to Searle’s book:-
The central question concerns the relation between the subjective conscious perceptual field and the objective perceptual field. Everything in the objective field is either perceived or can be perceived. Nothing in the subjective field is perceived nor can be perceived precisely because the events in the subjective field consist of the perceivings, whether veridical or not, of the events in the objective field.
ETA:
The problem about using “perception” to label a purely internal process is not just semantic: if you model the internal process as fully fledged perception, you are offering a recursive explanation of perception,not a reductive one. Reductive explanations need to appeal to simpler components. If the indirect realist fixes that problem, they can agree with the indirect realis lt that ,properly speaking, only external objects are perceived.
The non-naive direct realist needs to account for sensory errors and distortions, and can do so in a variety of ways...even admitting that there are qualia, but denying that they are seen by an inner observer—the audience in the “Cartesian Theatre”—or instead of external objects.
(One of the concerns with indirect realism is that if it is only the internal representation or proxy that is perceived, the posit of the external object is not needed—“we are blind because we see”—and solipsism follows)
ETA: the direct realist doesn’t have to regard perception as simple or atomic...they only have to deny that perception involves sub perceptions, sub objects and sub perceivers. This allows them to meet the more refined indirect realists in the middle.
The shifts to which “direct realists” resort are like those of “evidential decision theorists”: there are knockdown arguments against, so they change the theory to get round them, while keeping the same name.
You can call it shifting, I can call it improving. It’s not impossible for two opposite, but equally unworkable theories to amount to the same thing , once their problems have been fixed.
The problem about using “perception” to label a purely internal process is not just semantic: if you model the internal process as fully fledged perception, you are offering a recursive explanation of perception,not a reductive one. Reductive explanations need to appeal to simpler components. If the indirect realist fixes that problem, they can after with the indirect realist, that ,properly speaking, only external objects are perceived.
The non-naive direct realist needs to account for sensory errors and distortions, and can do so in a variety of ways...even admitting that there are qualia, but denying that they are seen by an inner observer—the audience in the “Cartesian Theatre”—or instead of external objects.
(One of the concerns with indirect realism is that if it is only the internal representation or proxy that is perceived, the posit of the external object is not needed—“we are blind because we see”—and solipsism follows)
The direct realist doesn’t have to regard perception as simple or atomic...they only have to deny that perception involves sub perceptions and sub perceivers. This allows them to meet the more refined indirect realists in the middle.
if you model the internal process as fully fledged perception
I don’t know what that means.
We have perceptions. We can also notice the perceptions that we have as perceptions, and take those as objects of examination, as is done here and in some of the other posts tagged “phenomenology”. There is no circularity there, just multiple but finitely many levels.
I’m not doubting the phenomenon where you have some kind of higher level awareness of your sensorium...but I am doubting that strictly speaking , it should be called perception.
It’s OK, according to reductionism, to explain an X in terms of Y , where Y is similar...it’s just that Y needs to be simpler as well.
ETA:
The reason we feel an urge to put sneer quotes around “see” when we describe hallucinatory “seeing” is that, in the sense of intentionality, in such cases we do not see anything. If I am having a visual hallucination of the book on the table, then literally I do not see anything. Since I am “aware of” something, the temptation is to put in a noun phrase to form the direct object of “see.” We compound the ambiguity of “aware of” by introducing an ambiguity of “see.”
It matters for clear communication. It is not relevant to the things the communication is about.
So there is the world in itself out there, the causal effects it has on our sense organs, the processing in the nervous system of the signals from those organs, various aspects of the subjective experiences that (somehow) result; there are also imagined experiences and witting or unwitting hallucinations. These are all different things. But in everyday life these distinctions generally make little practical difference, and words such as “perception” and “see” can be used indifferently to sprawl over different parts of that whole domain. There is no such thing as the “strict meaning” of such words, the ways they “should” be used.
One can say, here [lengthy description] is one phenomenon, and here [another lengthy description] is another: I will for this conversation use [some word] to refer to the first and [some other word] to refer to the second. It is nonsense to say “strictly, [some word] means only the first of these” when in everyday talk it straddles both.
Its important to.understand that there is a difference between, “we perceive external objects, not mental proxies” and “our senses give us direct experience of objects as they really are”. The latter is naive realism...naive realism is direct realism, but direct realism does not have to be naive realism. The argument against DR given in the OP is mostly an argument against NR.
The argument for DR is simply that it follows from the meanings of words like “see” and “perceive”...they indicate a relationship between a perceiver and an external object, not a process internal to an observer.
From the blurb to Searle’s book:-
ETA: The problem about using “perception” to label a purely internal process is not just semantic: if you model the internal process as fully fledged perception, you are offering a recursive explanation of perception,not a reductive one. Reductive explanations need to appeal to simpler components. If the indirect realist fixes that problem, they can agree with the indirect realis lt that ,properly speaking, only external objects are perceived.
The non-naive direct realist needs to account for sensory errors and distortions, and can do so in a variety of ways...even admitting that there are qualia, but denying that they are seen by an inner observer—the audience in the “Cartesian Theatre”—or instead of external objects.
(One of the concerns with indirect realism is that if it is only the internal representation or proxy that is perceived, the posit of the external object is not needed—“we are blind because we see”—and solipsism follows)
ETA: the direct realist doesn’t have to regard perception as simple or atomic...they only have to deny that perception involves sub perceptions, sub objects and sub perceivers. This allows them to meet the more refined indirect realists in the middle.
.
The shifts to which “direct realists” resort are like those of “evidential decision theorists”: there are knockdown arguments against, so they change the theory to get round them, while keeping the same name.
You can call it shifting, I can call it improving. It’s not impossible for two opposite, but equally unworkable theories to amount to the same thing , once their problems have been fixed.
The problem about using “perception” to label a purely internal process is not just semantic: if you model the internal process as fully fledged perception, you are offering a recursive explanation of perception,not a reductive one. Reductive explanations need to appeal to simpler components. If the indirect realist fixes that problem, they can after with the indirect realist, that ,properly speaking, only external objects are perceived.
The non-naive direct realist needs to account for sensory errors and distortions, and can do so in a variety of ways...even admitting that there are qualia, but denying that they are seen by an inner observer—the audience in the “Cartesian Theatre”—or instead of external objects.
(One of the concerns with indirect realism is that if it is only the internal representation or proxy that is perceived, the posit of the external object is not needed—“we are blind because we see”—and solipsism follows)
The direct realist doesn’t have to regard perception as simple or atomic...they only have to deny that perception involves sub perceptions and sub perceivers. This allows them to meet the more refined indirect realists in the middle.
I don’t know what that means.
We have perceptions. We can also notice the perceptions that we have as perceptions, and take those as objects of examination, as is done here and in some of the other posts tagged “phenomenology”. There is no circularity there, just multiple but finitely many levels.
Compare noticing our beliefs as beliefs, being aware of being aware, and the ladder of abstraction.
I’m not doubting the phenomenon where you have some kind of higher level awareness of your sensorium...but I am doubting that strictly speaking , it should be called perception.
It’s OK, according to reductionism, to explain an X in terms of Y , where Y is similar...it’s just that Y needs to be simpler as well.
ETA:
--Searle
It does not matter what it is called, and it does not matter how Searle or anyone else thinks the word “see” should properly be used.
As soon as you say something to someone else, the usage of words matters.
It matters for clear communication. It is not relevant to the things the communication is about.
So there is the world in itself out there, the causal effects it has on our sense organs, the processing in the nervous system of the signals from those organs, various aspects of the subjective experiences that (somehow) result; there are also imagined experiences and witting or unwitting hallucinations. These are all different things. But in everyday life these distinctions generally make little practical difference, and words such as “perception” and “see” can be used indifferently to sprawl over different parts of that whole domain. There is no such thing as the “strict meaning” of such words, the ways they “should” be used.
One can say, here [lengthy description] is one phenomenon, and here [another lengthy description] is another: I will for this conversation use [some word] to refer to the first and [some other word] to refer to the second. It is nonsense to say “strictly, [some word] means only the first of these” when in everyday talk it straddles both.