Skepdick wrote: ↑Fri Mar 27, 2020 1:12 pm
tapaticmadness wrote: ↑Fri Mar 27, 2020 11:33 am
I am an ontologist. I love labels.
That's a non-starter for me. To be an ontologist one requires direct access to ontology (reality) - the Kantian noumena. I don't think humans enjoy that privilege. Even our senses and intellect are in conflict with each other as Democritus once wrote:
Intellect: By convention there is sweetness, by convention bitterness, by convention color, in reality only atoms and the void.
Senses: Foolish intellect! Do you seek to overthrow us, while it is from us that you take your evidence?
tapaticmadness wrote: ↑Fri Mar 27, 2020 11:33 am
I am not a perspectivist because there is nothing there that one can have a perspective on.
In so far as all ontologies are categorisation schemes on sense-data, there are greatly many ontologies possible - each ontology is a different perspective. A conceptual scheme if you will. A model. Even - a Philosophy.
At the very least one can have a different perspective on the different philosophies when interpreting one's sense-data.
tapaticmadness wrote: ↑Fri Mar 27, 2020 11:33 am
I see what I see and that is real.
Does reality come pre-categorized to you? Not to me.
Because different people could be committed to different ontologies, they will then experience different realities. In as much as this has a name it's
Model-dependent realism
tapaticmadness wrote: ↑Fri Mar 27, 2020 11:33 am
I do not believe in freewill.
Then how did you choose your philosophy?
Yes, you are right. An ontologist must have direct access to ontological reality, but that is not the Kantian Noumena. The Kantian Noumena doesn’t exist. And neither do sense data. I belong to that band of New Realists that reared their head at Cambridge a little over a hundred years ago. German Idealism was the enemy they were in revolt against. Even against the later Hegelianism which is the forerunner of today’s holistic pragmatism.
I look across the way and I see a boy in a maroon-colored shirt. The color and the form of being a shirt are both real things there in the world. Color and that shirtness are external to my mind. Color is not a sense datum, something in my mind. Shirtness is not a matter of language that convention has taught me to say. I am a realist, not an idealist.
And I see that maroon-colored shirt on that boy directly, without going through mind constructs to get at it. that is my anti-representationalism. We are not looking at representatives, deputies, vicars, stand-ins, images of the world in the mind when we perceive what is really there. Thus no sense data. My mind is up against the thing-itself.
So, yes, what is out there comes pre-categorized. And even my philosophy, in its being different from other philosophies, was there before I was forced to think it. My philosophy came to me, I didn’t choose it. I am possessed by these thoughts.
I want to say a word about Reality. There is no such thing as the one Reality beyond all our images of it. There are all the different appearances without there being any one substance that they are of. Thus my anti-substantialism. Only the appearances exist and those appearances may very well contradict each other.
Here's something you might enjoy (or roll your eyes at) -
A reference in John Passmore’s A Hundred Years of Philosophy to this article in The Monist: T. P. Nunn, "Are Secondary Qualities Independent of Perception?," MS, Vol 10 (1909- J910), 191-218. It’s old. Here’s the passage:
The first, in England, to formulate the characteristic doctrines of the New Realism was T.P. Nunn. Best known as an educationalist, Nunn wrote little on philosophy, but that little had an influence out of all proportion to its modest dimensions. In particular, his contribution to a symposium on ‘Are Secondary Qualities Independent of Perception?” (Printed in The Monist: T. P. Nunn, "Are Secondary Qualities Independent of Perception?," MS, Vol 10 (1909- J910), 191-218. ) was widely studied both in England where, as we have already noted, it struck Bertrand Russell’s roving fancy, and in the United States. Nunn there sustained two theses: (1) that both primary and the secondary qualities of bodies are really in them, whether they are perceived or not: (2) that qualities exist as they are perceived.
Much of his argument is polemical in form, with Stout’s earlier articles as its chief target. Stout had thought he could begin by presuming that there are at least some elements in our experience which exist only in being perceived – he instanced pain. But Nunn objects that pain, precisely in the manner of a material object, presents difficulties to us, raises obstacles in our path, is, in short, something we must reckon with. ‘Pain,’ he therefore concludes, ‘is something outside my mind, with which my mind may come into various relations.’ A refusal to admit that anything we experience depends for its existence upon the fact that it is experienced was to be the most characteristic feature of the New Realism.
The secondary qualities, Stout had also said, exist only as objects of experience. If we look at a buttercup in a variety of lights we see different shades of colour, without having any reason to believe that the buttercup itself has altered; if a number of observers plunge their hands into a bowl of water, they will report very different degrees of warmth, even although nothing has happened which could affect the water’s temperature. Such facts demonstrate, Stout thought, that secondary qualities exist only as ‘sensa’ – objects of our perception; they are not actual properties of physical objects.
Nunn’s reply is uncompromising. The contrast between ‘sensa’ and ‘actual properties’ is, he argues, an untenable one. All the shades of colour which the buttercup presents to an observer are actual properties of the buttercup; and all the hotnesses of the water are properties of the water. The plain man and the scientist ascribe a standard temperature and a standard colour to a thing and limit it to a certain region of space, because its complexity would otherwise defeat them. The fact remains, Nunn argues, that a thing has not one hotness, for example, but many, and that these hotnesses are not in a limited region of space but in various places around about the standard object. A thing is hotter an inch away than a foot away and hotter on a cold hand than on a warm one, just as it is a paler yellow in one light than it is in another light. To imagine otherwise is to confuse between the arbitrary ‘thing’ of everyday life and the ‘thing’ as experience shows it of be.
In Nunn’s theory of perception, then, the ordinary conception of a material thing is revolutionized; that is the price he has to pay for his Realism. A ‘thing’, now, is a collection of appearances, even if every appearance is independent of the mind before which it appears.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities ... ew-realism