Critical Realism and N.T. Wright.

http://www.examiner.com/article/the-critical-realist-epistemology-of-n-t-wright-pt-1

The Problem of Perception.

Introduction 

In this note, I am going to articulate and defend the arguments presented by John Foster levied against common notions of perception as exhaustively encompassed in two summary, hypothetical, positions. By hypothetical, I mean, that the positions articulated are representative of all existing positions in their various forms as they relate to the area of perception.

These views are known as the Fundamentalist View and the Decompositionalist View.

 The Fundamentalist argues for a sort of direct realism, that our perceptual experience of an object is directly and completely caused by the object being perceived. Thus, the psychological state associated with perceiving is in itself perceptive. Thus the perceived phenomenal experience is exactly and directly informed by the external object.

The Decompositionalist approach on the other hand, argues that this phenomenal experience is rooted in a psychological state that is not itself perceptive. That is, what directly causes the phenomenal experience, is a state of mind that mediates the relationship of our phenomenal experience and external reality. Thus, the physical object is not the direct and constant cause of our perception, rather it is our own mind or brain that is the direct cause of our actual perceptual experience. 

These views are exhaustive for either the perceptual relationship is psychologically fundamental or it must psychologically decompose, of the views that predominate the western world and sit in opposition to any sort of immaterialism, these views are the only two. 

Now to Outline John Foster’s, and therefore my own, argument…

1. The Fundamentalist View And Its Problems.

A) Overview.

The fundamentalist argues that the object of our perceptual experience is the cause of that experience. The fundamentalist denies that the mind of man acts mediatorially in altering the phenomenal content of our experience. 

Or as the layman would say it;

“What we are seeing is a reality ‘out there,’ and what we are seeing is identical with how it actually is, because the reality of ‘out there,’ is the cause of what we are seeing.”

Therefore this state is fundamental (hence the term ‘fundamentalist’). Our phenomenal content (what we are perceiving) IS DIRECTLY derived from our perceptual contact with the reality being perceived.

Thus, this notion of perception DOES NOT believe that the phenomenological content is a representation of the reality perceptually contacted, but identical. The objects existing out there are causing, directly, my phenomenological experience under Fundamentalism.

B) The Problems; Phenomenological Content and Perceptual Contact.

The Primary problem with the Fundamentalist or direct realist view, is that its position about how our phenomenal experience is formed is based on the dogmatic epistemic assumption that this experience is directly dictated by genuine perceptual contact with outside objects of experience. There objects are static in relation to their effects on our experience. Therefore, as the objects are is how we are perceiving them, this alone guarantees genuine contact, what they are IS what is being seen.

B1-  If our phenomenological content is based on our perceptual contact, then what are hallucinations? This is something that the Fundamentalist view cannot even attempt to answer, if our phenomenological content is ONLY caused by our perceptual contact with ‘real’ objects, than it follows that my phenomenological content of a hallucination must be in correspondence to some REAL objects causing this experience. 

B2- The next problem is non-veridical perception, for if our phenomenological content directly corresponds to an existing external object, then it follows that when a stick is put in water, it is actually bent. Likewise if I were to look at my child through a wavy piece of glass, it would follow that my child is actually a disproportionate monstrosity at that time. Likewise when I look at white flowers under a green light, the greenness of their petals must be said to exist in the object. 

These examples demonstrate the main problem with this sort of direct realism as held under the fundamentalist view, and if we cannot distinguish hallucination and non-veridical perception from the rest of our experiences justifiably, than we are left with the worst sort of skepticism.

2. The Decompositionalist View and Its Problems.

A) Overview.

The basic position of Decompositionalism, is one that is common in modern philosophy since Kant, it is the position that it is the mind that forms our perceptual experience out of the raw uninterrupted sense data gathered from without. Therefore what causes our perceptions is an non-perceiving psychological state.

 This view, besides being made famous by Kant, was further developed in American Neo-Pragmatism and the very popular theory of Naturalized Epistemology (developed by W.V.O Quine).  

B)The Problems; Mediation and Correspondence.

The primary problem with the decompositional view is that it prevents perceptual correspondance to objective reality.

Because Decompositionalism argues that the mind is the center of human perception it does solve the problem of hallucination and non-veridical images, unlike Fundamentalism, but it fails in an opposite way in failing to account for the authenticity of our perceptual experience. How is it that we know that my phenomenological content is identical with the source of that content?  

No answer. 

There is no way to know if that which I am perceiving is in any way descriptive of reality. It could very easily, be all in my head, since what I know of reality is completely interpreted and mediated by a non-perceptive psychological state that forms my phenomenological content based on categories of thought existing in my mind or brain. 

The threat of solipsism should be apparent, so to curb this threat, most who held to this theory attempted to explain how these mediating categories came into existence. Kant was unable to do this, but the Naturalist epistemologists argued that these categories of human thought derived from the process of random mutation and natural selection (Darwinistic evolution). This of course, though giving an explanation (whether justified or not) of where these categories originated, offers no explanation as to why this in any way guarantees that our perceptual experience (phenomenological content) is in anyway descriptive of how things are in themselves. Kant’s problem of the noumenal v.s phenomenal haunts even modern philosophers on this account (see the problem of qualia). Not to mention, that a naturalized epistemology begs the question in claiming a scientific (and therefore metaphysical theory) to explain how Decompositionalism works, when in fact, decompositionalism makes the nature of reality, and there naturalism, an unknowable. This circularity is vicious and traps the proponent in instant and total skepticism, not to mention solipsism. 

These problems, in my opinion, make both of these views untenable.

There is one alternative that solves this problem. It is a view that denies the existence of these so-called ‘external objects’ altogether and makes existence completely and totally interconnected with perception when it comes to our phenomenological content (this escaping the issues of Fundamentalism), and likewise this content is not created by our minds, but as the determinate nature of our experience implies, we have no power over it, but are passive receivers of this perceptual world (thus escaping the issues of Decompositionalism). It is this view, as prescribed by John Foster, George Berkeley, and Jonathan Edwards, that I will present in a later notes.

Until then…

Thanks for reading. J Adam Johnson