[lit-ideas] Re: Realism/Geary on Unreal Temperature
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2010 09:59:33 +0000 (GMT)
For the moment just a brief comment on Robert's interesting post on this
important topic of "realism".
--- On Wed, 28/7/10, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>Kant’s misgivings have the form A: ‘One can never compare p with R, for there
>is no way of perceiving R.’ (Of course one can’t perceive R, and if this
>assumed at the outset, Kant’s search for a point outside both p and R >would
>be futile (as he knows) by definition.
Assuming p = perception, R = Reality or the world-as-it-is:-
Reiterating first a point made in my previous post:- if p exists then p is, in
a sense, an aspect of R. But here what interests us more is how p can compare,
or be compared, to a non-p R i.e. a non-p Reality or
world-as-it-is-outside-of-how-it-appears-to-a-perceiving-subject - a Reality
that exists beyond, or outside of, our perception of it.
Given the question of comparing p to non-p R, we can see Kant's POV as
expressed above: "one can't perceive R", where R is non-p R, because what we
perceive is never R but merely our perception of R - when I see a table, the
content of what I see is not an actual table but my perception of a table. [Try
setting down supper on the content of what I see and you'll see Kant's point].
But surely even if we accept this, it leaves open the question of whether that
content accurately corresponds to some non-p R that lies beyond it?
If so, we may accept "one can’t perceive R" without having to accept the view
that 'One can never compare p with R, for there is no way of perceiving R.’
That is, it is logically possible to accept both
1. Subject X's p with content y [say y = a table] is always at best pRy [i.e. a
perception with content y that is part of R] and never can be the same,
_ontologically_, as non-pRY [the table-as-it-is-in-itself outside of how it is
perceived]. This is so even if we were to assume that the content of pRy
exactly corresponds to or is the same as, _epistemically_, the content non-pRY.
2. We can ask and seek to compare, perhaps through critical discussion, the
extent to which the content of pRy corresponds to or is the same as content
non-pRY.
Robert continues:-
>So, there must be a Reality ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ our perceptions that can be
>‘experienced’ other than by perception, and here one might ask: How
is this known? Yet, this can’t be answered unless the experiencing of R and the
perceiving of trees and clouds can occur together: we know this can’t happen,
for it could there would be no question of how perceptions >match or don’t
match Reality.
Not sure I understand this, particularly the last sentence. But my comment is
this:-
from pRy we need not conclude there is a non-pRY beyond "our perceptions" [we
can guess there is or guess there isn't, but that is a v different story];
second, even if we guess there is a non-pRY we need not conclude that there
must be a way of experiencing non-pRY that goes beyond "our perceptions".
Donal
Off for a stiff coffee
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