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The Bridge between the Subject and Object

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The Bridge between the Subject and Object

brussel4
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Posted 06/25/09 - 06:09 AM: Subject: The Bridge between the Subject and Object	#1
It seems to me that talk of a need for a cognitional bridge that somehow connects our minds to the external world is a sort of imaginative fiction. Is it not the case that to talk of any distinction between a subject and object, mind and body, internal and external reality, appearance and reality, is to already presuppose data that one has inquired into, grasped some pattern in, and made a judgment about? I guess one could argue that external reality or the object is constituted by us, but the material of reality, the basic data "into which" one formulates distinctions is always presupposed. Thus, there does not seem to be need of a "bridge". Yes?

nousPLOTINU
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Posted 06/25/09 - 06:25 AM:	#2
What about autism? What about colorblindness? What about misunderstandings? What about learning? What about a mountain climing answer?
It is not that I think I know, it is that I know when I think.

treysuttle
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1 of 1 people found this post helpful Posted 06/25/09 - 06:58 AM:	#3
I distinguish between our epistemic relation to the world and our metaphysical relation to the world. We don't need a 'bridge' to gap a subject and an object (qua subject, and qua object). We are 'in-the-world' as proper part of the world. I am personally not a dualist...so 'connecting' a mind to the physical is not a problem for me. If you are a dualist (or even a phenomenalist) then I think you do have a serious problem that calls for some 'bridge' type account. It terms of our epistemic access, we are finite knowers and we (with some controversial qualifications that are unimportant for this post) can only know from a human point of view. To be 'in-the-world' so tightly that a bridge is unnecessary does not imply that we would know everything about this world. We learn as we go along. Autism, colorblindness, and so forth...all have perfectly good explanations without positing the kind of fundamental distinction between a subject and an object that would require a 'bridge'.

MarchHare
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Posted 06/25/09 - 07:05 AM:	#4
nousPLOTINU wrote: What about autism? What about colorblindness? What about misunderstandings? What about learning? What about a mountain climing answer? Why would the absence of metaphysical representationalism require infallibility? Some forms of direct realism are committed to infallibility (Epicureanism, naive realism, some Marxist theories of perception I've heard of etc.) but it's not a necessary consequence of non-representationalism. For example, we might misunderstand the shape of a mountain because we view it through an old piece of glass in a window, but in this case it is the fact that we are observing the intervening medium of the glass rather than the mountain itself that leads us to error. A direct realist can also appeal to facts about the subject (though I would prefer the word "agent" to emphasise the active nature of the subject in perception) to explain the unique character of particular perceptions. Your questions would be troublesome if brussel4 was proposing some sort of naive realism, but that didn't seem to be the case, since brussel4 wasn't referring to the exact replication of the character of the object in the mind.
Doubt requires a reason to doubt. Nothing is immune from potential doubt. The correct response to a question isn't always to try to give the question's answer.

MarchHare
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Posted 06/25/09 - 07:14 AM:	#5
treysuttle wrote: I distinguish between our epistemic relation to the world and our metaphysical relation to the world. We don't need a 'bridge' to gap a subject and an object (qua subject, and qua object). We are 'in-the-world' as proper part of the world. I am personally not a dualist...so 'connecting' a mind to the physical is not a problem for me. If you are a dualist (or even a phenomenalist) then I think you do have a serious problem that calls for some 'bridge' type account. It terms of our epistemic access, we are finite knowers and we (with some controversial qualifications that are unimportant for this post) can only know from a human point of view. To be 'in-the-world' so tightly that a bridge is unnecessary does not imply that we would know everything about this world. We learn as we go along. Autism, colorblindness, and so forth...all have perfectly good explanations without positing the kind of fundamental distinction between a subject and an object that would require a 'bridge'. Exactly; there are two very good points in this post: (1) perceptive anomalies don't require metaphysical explanations, because (2) agents are active participants in the world.
Doubt requires a reason to doubt. Nothing is immune from potential doubt. The correct response to a question isn't always to try to give the question's answer.

brussel4
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Posted 06/25/09 - 08:45 AM:	#6
nousPLOTINU wrote: What about autism? What about colorblindness? What about misunderstandings? What about learning? What about a mountain climing answer? It seems to me that the mentioned types of phenomena presuppose the isomorphic relation of the subject and object. For example "colorblindness" presupposes experience of some sensory data, and "misunderstandings" presuppose at least an proposed understanding of an experience which happens to be mistaken. Although an interesting topic, learning would be outside the scope of the thread, I believe. MarchHare: I agree on a basic level to what you have written. Could you explain a bit further what you mean by "A direct realist can also appeal to facts about the subject (though I would prefer the word "agent" to emphasise the active nature of the subject in perception) to explain the unique character of particular perceptions." Thank you. treysuttle: Do you hold that there are structures of knowing that are isomorphic with the metaphysical object? In other words, does the subjects' activity constitute specifiable correlates in the world? And can the phenomena mentioned by nousPLOTINU be classified into these structures without "positing the kind of fundamental distinction between a subject and an object that would require a 'bridge'"?

MarchHare
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Posted 06/25/09 - 09:08 AM:	#7
brussel4 wrote: MarchHare: I agree on a basic level to what you have written. Could you explain a bit further what you mean by "A direct realist can also appeal to facts about the subject (though I would prefer the word "agent" to emphasise the active nature of the subject in perception) to explain the unique character of particular perceptions." Thank you. There are two points in that sentence- 1. A direct realist can account for hallucination, misunderstanding, relativism and so on, by referring to causes of these events within the agent. So, for example, I could explain colourblindeness by appealing to particular facts about the eyes or neural networks that cause this; no appeal to a difference between representation-in-the-mind and the-thing-in-itself is necessary. Equally, I could explain our normal perception of colour without appeal to identical properties of "greeness" in both objects and agents. So it isn't that there is a property "green" in grass, but that there are properties of grass that, when observed by humans with typical sensory appartuses, results in an experience of green. Only if you're a naive realist, Epicurean etc. and thing that the property of colour we experience in our mind has an identical property IN THE OBJECT is there a problem. The representationalist response to the problem of naive realism is to hypothesise some sort of intermediary representation and that it's errors in the representation that cause our perceptions to differ from reality, but a direct realist can instead appeal to either external factors (the pane of distorted glass) or internal factors (a problem either with a sensory organ or the neural apparatus) instead. By doing so, the direct realist falls into the problems of representationalism that took up so much of Enlightenment philosophy from the optimism of Locke to the despairing scepticism of Kant. 2. The reason I prefer "agent" to "subject" is that "subject" suggests that sensations are imposed by the external world on a passive entity. Some Stoics even used a metaphor of a seal pressing on hot wax to describe perception. A better metaphor, in my opinion, also comes from the Stoics: the thing perceived is like an object in the hand, whereas the perceiver is like the hand. We can either affirm or deny most perceptions: we can see someone in the mirror who looks exactly like us, but not thing that there is a clone of ourselves in front of us; we might smell vanilla from a perfume but not think that there is vanilla present in the room; we might hear a violin playing from a sound-system and not think that there is a violin playing in the room etc. Perception is an active experience rather than a passive experience. If we have always associated a church organ with serious events, we will associate a church organ with a serious event, but there is not an intrinsic property of "serious eventness" in the sound of an organ. Much of the nature of experience is caused by our decisions, assumptions and memories. So I prefer "agent" to "subject": one has a subject of a medical experiment, but an agent who performs a function in a corporation. I like to use the same word in epistemology, ethics and generally in philosophy when talking about people, especially since "agent" escapes speciesism in things like discussions of genetic engineering.
Doubt requires a reason to doubt. Nothing is immune from potential doubt. The correct response to a question isn't always to try to give the question's answer.

Legion
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Posted 06/25/09 - 09:19 AM:	#8
Maybe the example of modeling in science has something to say about this. It seems to me that models are constructed in order to make the objective world comprehensible to our subjective selves. And models have two different bridges connecting a formal system and a natural system. The first is measurement which encodes phenomena into propositions. And the second is prediction which decodes propositions into phenomena.
We sense. We reason. We predict. We don't always get those right.

treysuttle
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Posted 06/25/09 - 09:22 AM:	#9
Good question Brussel4. The short answer is maybe, but there need not be. I am surely not committed to naive realism. My view is that there is no mediation by anything like a 'sense-datum', 'idea' 'qualia' 'sensation' or the like, between the object and my experience of the object. There is surely mediation by many non-cognitive conditions (environmental factors, physiological factors, and the like). With that being said, when we perceive an object, there is a direct causal chain between the object and our experience thereof. Circumstances in this causal chain very well may contribute to our not seeing the object in the way that we would see it given other circumstances (in some circumstances we perceive the train as small, in other circumstances we perceive the train as large). To get specifically to your question, I'm not really sure how to answer it. I guess for knowledge to be isomorphic would be for it to accurately 'map' or 'represent' the object. I don't have a problem with that -- if I say 'This apple is red'..and there is an apple and it is red, then I guess my knowledge claim is isomorphic, in your sense here? I would say, as a kind of caveat...that structures of knowledge may be isomorphic (in some instances) with the metaphysical object, without it being specifiable as such.

cosscos
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Posted 06/25/09 - 04:22 PM:	#10
There is a pretty girl in a kitchen. Now. she is thinking of beauty. Her mind is connected to the object, namely, beauty. What she see now is an image of the beauty, not the beauty itself. Therefore, it is the image that bridges between she and the beauty, or the subject and the object. She will be always alienated on the beauty unless she herself will be in accordance with the beauty itself. So, How would she make an identity with the beauty? According to inter-subjectivity theory, the object transforms itself into the subject, in other words, the beauty will see an image on her or herself as well. Therefore, inter-subjectivity would get rid of her alienation about beauty, completing the identity.

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