Thanks for poking at the formicary of philosophy—the concepts of reality, existence, justification, truth, and belief.
My primary tool for dissolving questions is to ask “From what perspective?”. From what perspective do the claims hold? From what perspective are the claims made?
The descriptions of both direct and indirect realism identify the concepts of an external reality and its interpretation by human senses and mind. Manfred in his comment provides some models from this perspective.
When I ask the question “From what perspective?”, I see that these descriptions are from a third person perspective, a human perspective, and so these descriptions are from substantially the same context that that our first person experience of reality comes from. My answer to this question also came from a human perspective, and so is also from substantially the same context… and so forth in a seemingly pointless regression of justification.
From this it seems reasonable to claim that we have an anthropocentric perspective of reality, and every evaluation of our perspective on reality is also substantially anthropocentric.
(But you might say “We can build tools of math and science that provide perspectives that are independent of the human mind.” To which I would respond that these tools were designed by humans, relate to reality as described from a human perspective, and produce results that are translated into the terms of human experience and understanding so that we can comprehend them.)
From this perspective neither direct nor indirect realism describe a universally objective situation, they are actually subjective anthropocentric descriptions. As such we should be able to identify contexts where these descriptions of realism are valid, are invalid, or are even meaningless.
What remains is a question of pragmatics, not of truth; is one of these perspectives on realism more useful than competing perspectives, for the context of current concern?
Thanks for poking at the formicary of philosophy—the concepts of reality, existence, justification, truth, and belief.
My primary tool for dissolving questions is to ask “From what perspective?”. From what perspective do the claims hold? From what perspective are the claims made?
The descriptions of both direct and indirect realism identify the concepts of an external reality and its interpretation by human senses and mind. Manfred in his comment provides some models from this perspective.
When I ask the question “From what perspective?”, I see that these descriptions are from a third person perspective, a human perspective, and so these descriptions are from substantially the same context that that our first person experience of reality comes from. My answer to this question also came from a human perspective, and so is also from substantially the same context… and so forth in a seemingly pointless regression of justification.
From this it seems reasonable to claim that we have an anthropocentric perspective of reality, and every evaluation of our perspective on reality is also substantially anthropocentric.
(But you might say “We can build tools of math and science that provide perspectives that are independent of the human mind.” To which I would respond that these tools were designed by humans, relate to reality as described from a human perspective, and produce results that are translated into the terms of human experience and understanding so that we can comprehend them.)
From this perspective neither direct nor indirect realism describe a universally objective situation, they are actually subjective anthropocentric descriptions. As such we should be able to identify contexts where these descriptions of realism are valid, are invalid, or are even meaningless.
What remains is a question of pragmatics, not of truth; is one of these perspectives on realism more useful than competing perspectives, for the context of current concern?