Terrapin Station wrote:
What I was asking you to do was explicitly confirm that you understand that no one is saying anything about the "entirety" or anything, and that no one is saying "nothing but" anything. I wouldn't normally do that, but I had already explained this to you, yet you brought it up again. So I want to make sure that you understand that no one is saying that.
Re your question, what you actually wrote was just this:
"OK, so is anyone, i.e. you, saying 'something'?"
At first I thought you were being facetious.
If you mean to ask, "Is anyone saying that we perceive some aspects of the objects etc. that we perceive?" then of course the answer is "Yes," and the answer is "Yes" for everyone on any side of a philosophy of perception discussion, because otherwise, we'd not be talking about perception.
I'm sorry if this comes as a shock, but no they don't.
To say we 'perceive' something is to say we think our idea has an external cause, (as distinct from 'imagine' something, say). But the content of our idea and the nature of the cause need not be the same, not in any respect.
You say '
otherwise, we'd not be talking about perception'. I went to a lot of trouble trying to tease out what you meant by 'perception' - difficult because you shift your ground or change the subject as soon as your meaning starts to harden. So you cannot simply prove your point via imposing a definition of 'perception', especially since you won't clearly define it.
What's at issue isn't whether we perceive some aspects of the objects etc. that we perceive. It's what the relations are between the objects that we're perceiving and our perception.
Which may be none at all. That is what I wrote, and yet you judged that to be avoiding the question.
It is you that avoids the question. You do it by always avoiding clarity over what you mean by 'relations'. Yes, a claim of perception is a claim of a relationship, in the sense of being a cause of an idea. But no, it is not (necessarily) a claim of a relationship in the sense that our idea resembles that cause.
If you'd disagree, as you claim, and thus say that we don't even perceive some aspects of the objects etc. that we perceive, then you'd simply be arguing that we don't in fact have any perception. Because otherwise, what would "perception" even be referring to? You wouldn't have to agree that perception involves any direct relation between the object we're perceiving and our perception of course, but if you don't think that we at least perceive some aspect of the objects we perceive indirectly (and the answer there is usually representationally), then I'd have no idea what you might be talking about if you'd still choose the word "perception" to name something.
You write above:
we at least perceive some aspect of the objects we perceive indirectly (and the answer there is usually representationally)
We can leave aside the mystery of whatever
you might mean by 'indirectly' or 'representationally', because the key words there are '
at least' and '
some'.
Either you have a test or you don't. If you are uncertain about
which aspects are 'perceived indirectly', then you cannot know that
any are 'perceived indirectly'. Likewise 'usually representational'; you can either distinguish the representational from the not-representational or you can't. If you can't, then you don't know if any, or none, are 'representational'.
You are like an eye-witness in court who says;
'I know some of the things I see are hallucinations, and I don't know which, but I am certain that I am a reliable witness of something'.