Summary of John R. Searle's Seeing Things as They Are

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The mistake of Dualism, Materialism, Monism, and Functionalism is the belief that there is a special problem about the relation of the mind to the body, consciousness to the brain, and in their fixation on the illusion that there is a problem, philosophers have fixated on different solutions to the problem.
#2 When you look around you, you will see objects and states of affairs that have an independent existence completely separate from your perception of them. The objects and states of affairs exist independent of being experienced by us.
#3 When you begin to theorize, you will notice a third feature in addition to the objective reality and the subjective experience: a causal relation by which the objective reality causes the subjective experience. The two descriptions are exactly the same because a main biological function of perceptual experience is to give you knowledge about the real world.
#4 The intentionality of a state is its directedness at or about or of objects and states of affairs in the world. States of undirected anxiety or nervousness are not intentional, at least when the subject is just anxious or nervous without being anxious or nervous about anything in particular.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy
• Epistemology

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 12 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822506473
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on John R. Searle's Seeing Things as They Are
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The mistake of Dualism, Materialism, Monism, and Functionalism is the belief that there is a special problem about the relation of the mind to the body, consciousness to the brain, and in their fixation on the illusion that there is a problem, philosophers have fixated on different solutions to the problem.

#2

When you look around you, you will see objects and states of affairs that have an independent existence completely separate from your perception of them. The objects and states of affairs exist independent of being experienced by us.

#3

When you begin to theorize, you will notice a third feature in addition to the objective reality and the subjective experience: a causal relation by which the objective reality causes the subjective experience. The two descriptions are exactly the same because a main biological function of perceptual experience is to give you knowledge about the real world.

#4

The intentionality of a state is its directedness at or about or of objects and states of affairs in the world. States of undirected anxiety or nervousness are not intentional, at least when the subject is just anxious or nervous without being anxious or nervous about anything in particular.

#5

Direct Realism is the view of perception that we directly perceive objects and states of affairs. It is often called Naïve Realism because it says we do have perceptual access to the real world, and it is contrasted with Representative Realism, which says we perceive representations of the real world rather than the real objects themselves.

#6

The distinction between ontological subjectivity and ontological objectivity is important. Some entities, such as mountains, molecules, and tectonic plates, have an existence independent of any experience. They are ontologically objective. But others, such as pains, tickles, and itches, exist only insofar as they are experienced by a human or animal subject.

#7

The visual experience is ontologically subjective, and its intentional content determines its condition of satisfaction. The object and events in visual perception are all part of the real world, and any theory of perception should be able to explain their relations.

#8

The account I just gave you is denied by just about every famous philosopher who writes on this subject. The subjective visual experience cannot be seen because it is itself the seeing of anything.

#9

If you accept the conclusion of the argument, then the question for epistemology is: What is the relation between the sense data that you do see and the material objects that apparently you do not see. Different answers to this question define modern epistemology.

#10

The Argument from Science is similar to the Argument from Illusion, but it is presented in a different format. It goes like this: A scientific account of perception shows that our perceptions are entirely caused by a sequence of neurobiological processes that begin with the stimulation of the photoreceptor cells in the retina by photons reflected off objects in the world. We never see the real world, but only a series of events that are the result of the impact of the real world on our nervous system.

#11

Modern epistemology, which is based on the argument that we can only ever access our own subjective experiences, is unable to solve the skeptical problem. It is impossible to know facts about the real world on this basis.

#12

The argument that we are not aware of anything when we have a hallucination is based on a pun, a simple fallacy of ambiguity, over the use of the English expressions aware of and conscious of. In the intentionality sense, A is not identical with O. But in the constitution or identity sense, A is identical with O.

#13

The Argument from Illusion is based on a fallacy of ambiguity. It is not a case of lexical ambiguity, as there are two different dictionary meanings for aware of and conscious of. The temptation is to treat the visual experience itself as the object of visual experience in the case of hallucination, but in fact there is no such object.

#14

The Bad Argument is an instance of a more general fallacy about intentionality, and it arises from the confusion between the content of an intentional state and the object of the intentional state. The assumption that all intentional states have objects is false. Some philosophers even postulate a special kind of object for unsatisfied intentional states.

#15

The Argument from Science is a bad argument because it attempts to treat the visual experience as a real or possible object of experience. And by the expression Bad Argument, I mean any argument that attempts to treat the perceptual experience as a real or possible object of experience.

#16

The denial of Direct Realism is disastrous, and it has led to the entire epistemic tradition being based on the false premise that we can never perceive the real world directly.

#17

Berkeley believed that the only things that exist are minds and ideas. He thought that all ontological objectivity reduced to subjectivity. We can have objective knowledge that there is a tree in the quad even when we are not looking at it because God is always perceiving the tree in the quad.

#18

There is a schoolboy limerick that summarises Berkeley’s philosophy for beginning philosophy students. It goes like this: There was a young man who said, God must think it exceedingly odd that this tree continues to be when no one is about in the quad. And then comes the reply: Dear Sir, your astonishment is odd.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

Intentionality is the feature of the mind that directs it at, or about, or of objects and states of affairs in the world.