Ep. 353: Reid on Visual Knowledge (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to Partially Examined Life, episode 353, part 2. We've been discussing Thomas, Thomas Reid's inquiry into the human mind. Still talking about seeing, I think a point that I was maybe I'll remake. But just one of his critiques of Berkeley was that Berkeley was so properly fixated on the fact that the qualities of a body out in the world can't resemble the qualities of an idea in the mind that he missed out on where they actually can resemble each other. And he thought that when somebody experiences shape through touch and experiences shape through sight, that those were just totally different.

That unless we'd had the experience of getting in there and having both of these things working together, we see that the correlations. Whereas he wants to argue that Berkeley was wrong about that, the seen figure does resemble the touched figure in exactly the way we're talking about. It's not that they have the same exact geometry, but especially even if we're talking about the seen geometry is like projections on the inside of the sphere, and then the touch geometry is straight up Euclidean. Well, especially when you're just talking about one little thing, one specific object that you're focusing on on the sphere.

Well, a square as seen very much resembles a square as felt. And so again, he brings up this blind guy and says the person who couldn't see, let's imagine we gave him back sight, but we didn't let him touch anything for a while. Could he figure out on his own? Berkeley says he could never figure out that that touched image was the same as the seen image. And Reid has been saying that yes, he could, because even as a blind person, he could figure out a lot about what seen images would be like, even though he hadn't experienced them. So is this important?

I guess is the question that there is some resemblance. The seen image does resemble the thing in the world in systematic ways. I guess that's the thing. It's not just. Well, it's just a fact that when we have this image of some sort, a smell image, then it brings to mind a thing in the world of this type that we've interacted with and there's just nothing more to explain about it. Reid clearly thinks that there might be a lot more to explain about, a lot more that science can explore about. Of exactly how we get that information onto the retina, into the brain, blah, blah, blah.

I don't think he's against that kind of explanation. It's just. He thinks there's going to be limits to what we can know and we shouldn't require that there be a resemblance, but it's okay to recognize one when there is one there. Or to talk about encoding as we were in part one.

2:43 Wes: Well, the resemblance. Right. So there's. Let's take the. For comparison smell. Right. We're never going to find a resemblance between what he calls the effluvia of something that are. Get into our nostril and produce the smell. And then the qualia of the smell itself, the feeling of the sensation of the smell. Those two things just are categorically, can never resemble one another. The unique thing about spatial information is that we have it through two different senses.

3:14 Seth: So I have a question about that. I read him as saying that we don't just have it through two senses, but we actually require both in order to get spatial. Because there's a part where he talks about what it would be like if somebody had vision but was fixed and never moved or something like that. Never had the opportunity to feel their way around in space. And that they would.

3:40 Wes: When we require touch, we don't require vision. Yeah. Imagine we had no sense of touch and no sense of our own being in space. Right.

3:48 Mark: Is that the Idomenians again, that they

3:50 Seth: would just see a two dimension? No, this was. I don't think so. It was a different. Yeah, I got the impression that he was. That it's not just the fact that the vision. He suggests that we wouldn't develop the same sense of vision, the same capacities that our vision, if we were not also mobile and had touch, where we could physically move around in the world.

4:12 Wes: Yeah. And I think he's absolutely right about that.

4:15 Mark: Right. Because it's acquired that we have some built in like that. When I see an object, nature causes me to believe that object is there, but its particular distance and motion and things like that we might need to learn from. Is that one of the things we definitely need to learn what kind of object it is. There's a lot of things that we need to learn, but there's like a baseline that nature provides that gets us going.

4:39 Dylan: But the point there is our ability to see is directly related to the mobility of us as beings. Or any being that has sight is directly related to that. And so I was stumbling for a second on Wes's comment that smell has nothing to do with resemblance, whereas sight does. And maybe that becomes more clear when you associate. Smell is basically the same thing as touch in that it's the physical pieces of the world interacting with your corporeal body and those signals are being transmitted, which is distinct from sight. Sight doesn't work that way. So you know, when you smell, you smell by having pieces of the things in the world interact with your biochemical existence.

5:41 Wes: Yeah, I think resemblance is always the wrong way to think of our. The relationship between a sensory modality and things in themselves. And it's much easier to see obviously with something like smell, where we smell a rose. And it's not the feeling of what it feels like to smell that rose, to have that fragrant smell is not related in any way to resemblance between the smell and the effluvia. The things, the particles that are coming off the rose. The particles are just spatiotemporal and however you might want to describe them, the resemblance comes about in the case of sight because just because we have two different sensory modalities that are both giving us spatial information so one can resemble the other. If we had another sensory modality that were related to smell, we could talk about resemblance in that case too.

6:33 Dylan: But I'm really sorry to ask this question, but I am completely now deeply confused about what, what resemblance means. What does it mean to have something that doesn't resemble and something that does resemble?

6:46 Wes: You know, if I were to draw a picture of you, it would be two dimensional. The viewer would interpret it as three dimensional. They said there'd be many differences obviously between the picture and you. But we could legitimately talk about resemblance between the picture and.

7:02 Dylan: Well, but their resemblance we're saying is that that resemblance is completely defined spatio temporally. That is, I have some outline of me that I can imagine. I can draw, you know, a shadow of me or something like that. So it's a. Yeah, but I can

7:18 Wes: say the same thing about my visual field, right? So he wants to say the visual field and objects as they appear in that field because they are spatial. So they do resemble objects as we feel them by touch. So if you think about the way we conceive of objects spatially through touch, which he thinks in a way gets at what they are in themselves, right? The figures in themselves, their spatial properties in themselves, then we can say, yes, this non Euclidean geometry of the visual field is very different than three dimensional Euclidean space, but they still resemble one another.

And so this is important, right, because some signs and signifiers have no resemblance. If I'm Using the word dog to signify a dog. There's no resemblance between the word and the signified. If I'm having a smell, and that signifies to me some unknown property of the body that's causing that there's no resemblance. But in the case of the visual field, vision is quite special. Even though he's working against this resemblance theory, the fact that there's two sensory modalities providing spatial information creates this possibility of a resemblance between the visual field and then space as we construct it, which is much closer to space as we feel it.

8:31 Dylan: Is there a way to talk about resemblance that doesn't equate completely with spatiotemporal in this respect?

8:41 Mark: I was thinking even more narrowly as visual of like, could you have. This cube that I'm touching, I'm not seeing, resembles this bigger cube? Because I think. Yes, but as you were just saying, that's still spatiotemporal. But then couldn't you have. This is gooey and this is also gooey.

8:58 Dylan: Exactly.

8:58 Mark: Is that a spatial, temporal. You know.

9:01 Dylan: Yeah. Or this wine smells like feet. It resembles feet, right? Or this.

9:06 Mark: Yeah, yeah. You have to have. You have to be able to. He says, with tastes.

9:10 Wes: Specifically, you guys are talking about comparing actual physical sensory objects. What we're talking about here is the comparison of mental representations to reality. So put aside any comparison between objects in the world. We want to talk specifically about this theory that he's opposing, this early modern theory that there's got to be some way in which, if I have an idea in my mind, if it's to represent reality, reality has to resemble it in some way. So Locke's idea. Right. Is that okay? Yes. I grant you, smell can't possibly resemble anything, but. Whoa, primary qualities. That's different because my representations of primary. Right. Spatiotemporal data can certainly resemble the real world. We have access to things in themselves via primary qualities. For Locke.

10:00 Mark: And I know we've been talking as if touch gets the shape of the thing in itself, but that can't be his theory of touch, because you have to move your hand around the thing. So there's like a temporal aspect, whereas the. The just the shape of the spear, the sphere that you're feeling around does not itself have a temporal aspect. Right. It's every little instant that your hand is in a different part of it is getting a different. So you're constructing the shape in the same way that you are visually. Or even says, like, you might think colors. Like, we don't have to construct colors. You just the color as seen is the real color. But no, no, there's all sorts of variations and changes of light and exact angle that we just. And distance that we ignore.

10:42 Wes: Right. But just the difference with touch is we do get three dimensions. So that's nice. Yeah, we can hold the sphere in our head so we get the whole idea of figuring out we are three dimensional ourselves, which helps. So yeah, there are some big advantages to touch. We're not moving from non euclidean two dimensions to. We're not making that jump, that particular kind of jump. But yeah, Mark, I think you're right. Yeah, it's constructed nevertheless.

11:07 Mark: I think a line between resembling and encoding is kind of thin right at one far end. Dog is just means that animal. And it's not like you took part of the dog and put it in that word. It's nothing but like a smell. Well, you are kind of taking, you know, part of the thing is making an impression not on your mind, but on your organs of smell. So you're catching part of it. Just like the flat picture of a person is not capturing all their dimensions and things. And it's not capturing, but it's capturing a part. It's a low res version. Well, you know, your sense of smell is capturing a very low res version of that particle.

And that's quite different than. He gives this analogy to pain. You might feel pain from something, but pain just definitely doesn't resemble, and we don't even think it resembles the object that is causing you pain because those are just starkly different. There's so many different things that could cause you pretty much exactly the same kind of pain, that it must be more about your organism than about the thing that's, that's causing it. So it's not even that our imagination goes from the pain. We're actually able to focus on the pain in a way that we aren't able to focus on other phenomenal smell or the phenomenal image.

It doesn't go right to the painful object. Anyway. That seems quite different than smell because smell is at least capturing some. It's encoding something about an actual rose. Hmm.

12:32 Dylan: I feel weird that I'm stuck on this because I feel like the reading and the discussion have confused me in a way that I didn't expect. But this question of resemblance is at the core of the whole. And what resemblance is, is at the core of the whole a disagreement. The people like Berkeley are saying, making the observations of the distinction between the resemblance of what we see and what the world is then making this turn that takes us to that everything is in the mind. There's no access to the world at all. Reid wants to call him out on that by articulating what we mean by resemblance and not resemblance.

13:14 Wes: I think what's confusing is that it seems to be the case, right. In other sensory modalities, we can see clearly that the signifiers signify not by way of resemblance, like with smell. And that's his big insight and his big argument. And he wants to fight against resemblance theories of perception in general. And I think he's on that track with vision as well. But it's complicated by the fact that the signifiers and signifieds do have something in common. If we are thinking of the visual, non Euclidean visual field as containing signifiers that help us construct three dimensional space, then of course we get this resemblance or overlap between signifier and signified, which is confusing.

14:06 Mark: I think he's trying to. His strategy in the long run is to say that vision is the exception that proves the rule, right? The rule is that the idea, the sensation does not resemble the thing in the world. And here he's going to say, well, actually with vision there is a correlation. There's a structural isomorphism between the visual image and the tactile image, the real shape, the visual shape versus the real shape, the tactile shape. But I think then he goes into all this stuff of maybe we're not seeing all the dimensions, maybe it's just a brute fact that the various ways we have of getting at shape give us slightly different information.

And so I think, Dylan, you were saying. Oh, and he has to clarify what resemblance means. I think the fact that we're having this discussion means he doesn't clarify what resemblance means because he doesn't think it matters that even in this visual case where there's some kind of resemblance, like that's. No, it's still just a brute fact. Like it's not the fact, you know, that why we were saying that, oh, well, it matters, says Locke or some other philosopher, that there is an image actually on your retina. But it's still. It's not that the image that we have in our head that might resemble the thing out in the world somehow gets there in a way that would retain the resemblance, right?

If it goes through the pipe of our optic nerve, there's no little pictures sailing through the pipe, according to his analysis. So therefore it doesn't even matter if there's a resemblance involved. It's still the same basic principle of just a brute cause out in the world. And an effect in our heads.

15:39 Wes: Yeah, I think I'm more on the side of Dylan's confusion now because when you think about this, you start to get attracted to the Lockean point of view, because it does kind of sound like what he says in the Touch chapter, which I reviewed again last night, is that touch does give us this immediate access to spatial reality. And there's the further confusion. And this is something that. Right. People like Schopenhauer lean on, which is that we ourselves are bodies. Like all of this is mediated through our own three dimensional body. Our sensory organs are themselves three dimensional material objects.

That's a further confusing aspect of this. They are in the phenomenal. They're supposed to account for the phenomenal field, but they're also in that field, so to speak. So I think it's natural to have the sense. Well, between touch and sight, I have access to these primary qualities that are out there in the world in a way that smell is not. The smell of the rose is just in my head, but the three dimensionality of material things is out there. That's the pull. Now, has he fully rejected that or is he. Where does he stand on that?

16:50 Seth: No, I think he definitely hasn't rejected it because at the end he says we're so constituted by nature to. There are such things as what he calls like natural and artificial. Right. There's the natural language or whatever and artificial language, and there's primary and secondary. He does believe in these primary and secondary qualities, and he does think that vision and touch are so constituted and plugged in to get us to the primary qualities associated with extension and space.

17:27 Mark: So on the secondary qualities, though, he makes the point that Locke was right in distinguishing them because maybe of this resemblance part that we've been talking about, that it does hold to some degree between sensations and objects in primary qualities, but not in secondary qualities.

17:41 Dylan: But.

17:41 Mark: But secondary qualities. That term makes it sound like it is something of the object, whereas Locke explicitly said a secondary quality like color is just something in your head. And Reid just wants to say you're using the words wrong. Use them like normal people use them. The color is in the object, the smell is in the object. It's just that you then have a color sensation that does not actually resemble the color because the color is some unknown quantity. Probably something about its microtexture that causes. Right, so in some ways he's agreeing with Locke that there is a difference between these two things, but he's disagreeing in how Locke used the words.

18:22 Wes: Yeah, he doesn't like the fact that Locke is going to use the word color to refer to the qualia as opposed to use it to refer to the cause, what Locke calls the power. Right. The cause in the object of the color, qualia in us. And because I think he said the vulgar, according to Reid. Right. Just the common person. I think he thinks they've been slandered by these early modern philosophers as having this idea that the smell, the qualia part, the smell of the rose, really is in the rose. And Reid's like, no, people aren't that dumb. They know how this works.

They know the smell is just in their head. So when they say the rose smells like that, when they say the smell is in the rose, they just mean the cause and habits of language are such that we kind of run these two things together. Smell means both the qualia and the cause of the qualia, but it doesn't mean that the vulgar are confused about this issue. And then so that philosophers create these paradoxes by this misuse of language. I think it's kind of a minor point in the scheme of things. And that he kind of fundamentally agrees with Locke in many ways on primary

19:36 Mark: and secondary qualities that Reid always venting. If we gonna say, well, actually he agrees with his.

19:43 Dylan: Well, I mean, as Wes pointed out, he agrees an awful lot with all the people he's criticizing. He just has a very particular point about his criticism, which is that their conclusions regarding idealism and skepticism are way, way off base.

20:03 Seth: Yeah, Right.

20:04 Mark: So he agrees more with Locke than he does with each successive person in a certain way. In that locked at least is paying lip service to the common man and

20:16 Wes: their vulgar and access to external reality by primary qualities. Yeah. And Reid has a more, I think, satisfying explanation of how we can have access to that external reality that doesn't rely on resemblance. Right. More of the signifier, signified relation. So that when we do construct three dimensional space and material objects in it as signified as the things that we, quote, unquote, perceive, even if we don't have them in sensation, it's possible to say, yeah, we're in touch with reality, we're in touch with the signifieds. It's not a problem that the signifier, signified relationship is not one of resemblance.

So I think he can kind of leave behind, if necessary, even if he's attracted to the idea of resemblance in some way for spatial data. I don't know. I think the most attractive thing about Reid is this idea of forgetting about resemblance altogether and just thinking about signifying identification and then Living with that saying, hey, I'm still a realist. It doesn't mean I'm just cut off from things in themselves because I can't have this copy access to them, this image resemblance access.

21:32 Seth: I think Reid's approach, where he's really respecting the fact that we're embodied, this is very much anticipatory of phenomenology or a phenomenological approach in that, you know, if you get to the point where you're saying there's a sense in which the empiricists and the peripatetics talked about sensation as if it was kind of spun out of dreams and spider webs and then just kind of somehow filtered into our, you know, a kind of disembodied ego or disembodied self. And if you take seriously the fact that human beings are embodied and that literally the way that we experience the world is through physical and chemical mechanisms in our body, it's gotta be really hard to be any kind of a skeptic other than a solipsist.

Because if you're gonna be skeptical about the reality or the presentation of the external world, then you've got to be skeptical about your body and your own embodiment. And Reid's kind of pointing that out in the way that he says, you know, the vulgar. Right. But he's just like, nobody thinks that. And you know, at the end he talks about how we're kind of disposed towards credulity and nature doesn't lie and the regularities of nature exist for a reason and there's a reason why we can rely upon them. And so I think he has a very strong case.

Like you said, there's no knockdown, drag out argument against skepticism because skepticism itself is a specious argument from questionable premises. And he's just saying these premises that you have are invalid.

23:19 Wes: Well, I think it, you know, his strongest argument is the self undermining nature of skepticism. Because if you're a skeptic because you have done enough science to know that the rose smell you have in your head is not out there in the world and it's an effluvia, you've already made tons of materialistic assumptions about the world. I have a body, I have a nose. This is the way it works. There's the rose giving off the effluvia. So all those assumptions, they can't lead you to a skeptical conclusion that simply contradicts those assumptions, contradict your very reason for being a skeptic in the first place. He suggests this sort of idea at a number of places in this text, and it's right in line with G.E. Moore and Wittgenstein.

24:00 Dylan: It's like a scientific underpinning of creationism.

24:03 Wes: Right.

24:04 Mark: We've definitely gotten into these last two sections that we read, 20 and 24 here, so let's maybe more systematically hit those 20. I think this discussion of skepticism, we sort of had a lot of this last time, so I don't know that we have to dwell on it. But you did add the one thing right at the beginning of it, on the distinction between I feel a pain and I see a tree. So this is about. Seth was just referring to the distinction, I think, between sensation and perception. That sensation is just having a feeling. So I feel a pain. Sounds like it is an intentional conscious act in that it is I'm having a feeling, and it is directed toward this pain that is the object of my feeling. But really, it just means I feel painly or something like that. Like, there's no actual separate object from the feeling. This is at least what he claims.

24:56 Wes: Right.

24:56 Mark: I think we could say, oh, you could have an unconscious pain.

24:59 Seth: Right.

24:59 Mark: Isn't this. I feel like somebody we read recently said, oh, yeah, actually, there is that distinction. It's not just that pain's going anyway as opposed to a perception.

25:08 Seth: Yeah. I'm a little worried about the pain thing because I'm concerned that pain is a special case, because pain is not a signifier of, like, if you stick your hand on a hot stove and you feel pain, it's not a stove signifier. It's not a stove signifier.

25:28 Dylan: Yeah. Or if you feel pain in your amputated leg, it's not a leg signifier.

25:34 Seth: Right.

25:35 Wes: It's a Don't do this again signifier.

25:37 Seth: Yes, exactly. And warmth might be a signifier of heat, but it's not a signifier of fire. And, you know, I think that's why this notion of signification, in some sense requires the use of the primary and secondary qualities. Precisely because you don't want to say that not everything that you experience, not everything that is a sensation associated with an object, is a signifier of that object. So Reid is going to have to be able to talk about qualities of the object that are signified through sensation. But in the case of pain, I just. That one just worries me a little bit.

26:17 Mark: This seems to point about an issue between signifier and cause, because there is no fundamental difference between them. Is when you see the smoke, that signifies fire, because the fire caused the smoke and There was a saying those two things, that there's a causal relationship and there's a signifying relationship is one and the same thing.

26:35 Seth: The stove didn't cause the pain.

26:37 Mark: I mean, it did ultimately.

26:39 Seth: No, no, no. The heat, the heated element or heat is what caused the pain. If the stove was turned off and you touched it, it would not have caused pain.

26:48 Mark: Well, he gives an example of a child who's given a shot by the doctor, might think the doctor is the cause of pain. Actually, the child is wrong. It's being poked with a needle that's the cause of pain. But so for that child, the experience is, I see the doctor. I'm now scared because that doctor means pain to me.

27:11 Seth: Right.

27:11 Mark: I've established so as establishing, even though that's a faulty one. Well, the needle actually does legitimately mean pain. It's just clearly it doesn't mean it in the way that a word typically refers to an object. It's just one of the many things associated with it.

27:25 Seth: Well, the needle means pain. But in that example that he brings up, he's talking about how we learn from experience. And he's saying the child goes to the doctor once, gets a vaccine or shot or whatever, and then is afraid of the doctor, like, associates pain with the doctor. That child goes to the doctor three more times and there's no shot. Then the child says, aha. It's not the doctor that's the pain, it's the needle.

27:50 Wes: Right.

27:50 Seth: And he's just talking about that. We have the capacity to learn from experience and to disambiguate repeated experiences from each other based on different sensations that we have. And that's how we come to identify specific objects in the world and associate. In other words, there is a way that we learn how to signify just in the same way that we learn how to signify in language use.

28:17 Wes: Sensations other than pain give us information about the world and about the objects. Ultimately, they're signifiers in the sense that they tell something about external reality. Almost anything can cause us pain. That it's painful doesn't tell me whether it's an iPhone I dropped on my foot or a knife. Right. I know. I guess I would know the difference, but, you know, I can drop any number of things on my foot. The pain, let's just say it's very, very low resolution.

28:42 Seth: Right.

28:43 Mark: You're just not discriminating enough in your

28:45 Wes: pain information about objects. But it is giving me information about behavioral routines and what not to do in the future. I meant that very seriously. Yeah.

28:54 Seth: No, I mean, pain could be a signifier for the body or for health, or the health of the body, something like that.

29:00 Dylan: It gives you direction. Right. It's an indicator for changing your actions.

29:04 Wes: It's about the future, not the present, which I think is part of the conceptual problem here. Yeah.

29:10 Dylan: In this way, pleasure is as well. Or things that make us feel good, that we're attracted to, we're drawn to. I mean, that might be the biggest way in which to talk about the sensation of that. Pain and pleasure are really characteristics along the line of those sensations. One that draws us towards it and one that pushes us away from it. Yeah.

29:31 Mark: All right, well, he only has one sentence about pain in this whole thing, so maybe.

29:35 Wes: Yeah, let's get a larger. What a point. He wants to make this distinction between perception and sensation. Right. So the things perceived are the signifieds. So we get a nice. Right. Robust theory of theory laden perception here already with Reid. So a lot of processing has to go on before we say we're perceiving an object. The object is not simply an object of sensation, it's an object of perception that we construct by way of sensory data. And the object itself, though, we take to be distinct from sensation. And it's there whether we're perceiving it or not.

So, you know, the Berkeley argument to idealism puts us in the position of thinking about, well, suppose a tree is falling in the forest and there's no one around to hear it. Can you say there's really a sound? That sort of paradox. And I think if we are thinking in terms of signification rather than resemblance, that paradox sort of disappears. Just disappears. Think of something. Yeah, as a signifier, as being there without us. In a weird way, it's still a little puzzling to me, but that's my overall sense of that.

30:46 Dylan: But it does make it go away by saying that the signifier, just like the world, doesn't have to have us to be there. I mean, that's sort of Reid's point. The absurd conclusion you get with the skeptical argument is that the world doesn't exist without us, independently of us.

31:10 Wes: I mean, for Berkeley, you know, he does want a world that exists independently, but it has to be in God's mind. So our relationship to things in themselves is between us and our maker? In a way, yes.

31:21 Dylan: Yes.

31:22 Wes: And what's satisfying about that is that God, because external reality is a mind, it can do the looking when we're not there to do it. So the object can still be looked at when there isn't any particular human perceiver, thank God. God is there to look at it and keep it in existence. Because how can we conceive of things existing qualitatively and having these properties unless there's a perceiver to experience the property? If we wanted to be more clever about it, we might just say, well, there's something about formality and form that is self perceiving. The object could do that. One might. And another ontologist might want to say, you don't need God. Objects can kind of do that for themselves. And that's what structure is, that's what form is. Form has got enough mind likeness to it. It's enough like the mind that we don't need an actual God mind or human mind to sustain the object.

32:18 Mark: But I thought you'd want to talk about testimony because.

32:21 Seth: Yes.

32:22 Mark: Even though testimony is only broad.

32:23 Wes: I saw that and I like my head almost exploded.

32:26 Mark: Even though it's only brought here as just an analogy.

32:29 Seth: Right.

32:29 Mark: It's the analogy between perception and the credit we give to human testimony. It sort of builds on what he'd said before about natural language versus artificial language and compares that to these natural associations that come in sensation versus learned ones. There's a lot of things even just learning where an object is by hearing in our field of, you know, that's something that we have to have some experiences before we can can do that steadily and. And we learn so many more things just that we hear or we see a shape but knowing that that's actually a carriage that we're hearing or seeing.

Like oh, we have to experience a carriage and know what a carriage is and all that kind of stuff. So that's all makes a lot of sense and just illustrates what we've been saying before about how that you need this raw God given just associations that you know or just facts that are just given to us as basic postulates in perception. But he supports that by first talking about testimony. And his discussion of testimony is much better than we got from the Nyayas. Right. And it is a similar. Yeah. Do you want to go into that?

33:33 Wes: Well, he starts out 24 talking again about the way in which acquired perceptions, which are. He distinguishes from natural perceptions. Right. So acquired perceptions like hearing a coach and knowing that it's a coach, that's similar to artificial language and original perception is similar to natural language. So original perception is something like the way in which we could take sensations and construct three dimensional spatial reality out of them and then natural language. Right. The way in which we can see A certain facial expression and know that someone is angry.

So in the original and natural versions, this stuff is just sort of written into our nature, into our constitution. And the way we would think of it today, it's, you know, we're designed that way by evolution. So the signs of the sensations, nature, hard wires, lots and lots of connections to signifieds. Before we ever get to human culture, human language use and all the rest

34:34 Seth: of it, I'm going to read a little bit. In the testimony of nature given by the senses as well as in human testimony given by language, things are signified to us by sign. And in one as well as the other, the mind, either by original principles or by custom, passes from the sign to the conception and belief of the thing signified. So essentially our experience and sensation of nature functions in the same way as language acquisition and use. So he says a little bit later on, no man of common sense ever thought of taking a man's own word for his honesty.

And it is evident that we take his veracity for granted when we lay any stress upon his word or promise. I might add that this reliance upon the declarations and testimony of men is found in children long before they know what a promise is. It is therefore in the human mind, an early anticipation, neither derived from experience nor from reason, nor from any compact or promise that our fellow creatures will use the same signs and language when they have the same sentiments, AKA or also, then it's the same with our experience of nature. So in the same way that he wants to say that sensation somehow.

Wes, as you point out, it's a little complicated. Where sensation does not act via resemblance, but rather through signification, then it carries belief. So sensation somehow carries or engenders belief just in its very nature without. And that comes through prior to reason, prior to. It's part of how we grow and exist and develop as human beings. And he says that by analogy, we have that same experience with human beings, and we couldn't do otherwise. Even though there are liars, even though there are people, we assume, and we have to assume that people are using language appropriately and veridically.

They're signifying what they are signifying we can take as true testimony. In the same way that we can trust that nature is giving us the sun, the same sun every day, rising in the east and setting in the west.

36:46 Dylan: And in fact we use those assumptions in order to detect a liar.

36:49 Seth: Yes.

36:51 Wes: So we trust that nature is going to continue to be consistent, that nature is law like. And we also trust this hardwired Connection that we have that makes us go from certain sensory data to these constructed perceptions, these signifieds. Because the skeptic can come along and say, okay, yeah, I understand your brain is hardwired to do that, but that's not good enough for me. Just because your brain is hardwired to do that doesn't mean your brain has access to reality. And Reid is saying, well, that's all we've got, and it works very well for us.

And if you were to extend that skeptical principle to human social relations, you would essentially become a conspiracy theorist. You'd say, oh, you can't trust anyone. It's all got to be firsthand experience, blah, blah, blah. And jet fuel can't melt the steel. Which is. Right. Which has. We understand the drastic consequences of that. People become idiots in that mode. So if we want to avoid being idiots, we're just going to have to say, yeah, I think it's good enough that my brain is hardwired this way. It makes me think that maybe it's relating me to reality, that God has set it up that way, or evolution, however you want to think about it.

38:08 Seth: I think there's actually even a stronger conclusion to make from Reid, which is to say, given that nature provides us with this true testimony, and given that we're hardwired to sense it, and given that that sensation, in combination with memory and time, builds experience, which allows us to become functional in the world as well as develop language, I think what Reid is saying is there's a basis for not just a assuming the existence of a real world, but also a way in which we experience it as it is or sense it. We have sensations which allow us to experience as is.

And it's really not until we develop reason that the skeptical argument is even possible. And it's almost like the skeptical argument is ignoring the facts of the case to some extent. And to even put forth a skeptical argument based on idealism or based on the fact that it's essentially a play of ideas, which makes me question the existence of the real world that I grew up in and that everybody else operates in is, you know, to go back to the last. The last episode is just lunacy. Mad men and philosophers, right?

39:31 Mark: Yeah. So for both testimony and for perception, the idea of skepticism is entirely parasitic on the idea of normally everybody is telling the truth, Nature is telling the truth, and giving us, you know, this is really what you're seeing. What you see is what you get. And that we are normally credulous properly. So in both circumstances, if we normally believe people, and we normally believe our eyes, and those are on very similar principles. And it's only when we get then fancy that we're like, you know, some people actually are lying. It's only until children have actually been lied to.

And it brought to mind a specific event as a child where I had a friend who I think his parents worked for some kind of toy company or whatever. I'm going over to his house. You'd have a lot of these, like, little people or whatever, just, like, everywhere. And so he started. We were talking about, then at school later, about, like, what sort of representations of Muppets you have, what puppets do you own? And he would just start saying, yes.

40:36 Dylan: Oh, yeah.

40:37 Mark: Do you have a Kermit?

40:37 Wes: Yes.

40:37 Mark: Do you have a Miss Piggy? Yes. Do you have a Fozzie? I kept asking, and he just. And this went over days because I didn't realize that he could just be lying. And then eventually he was like, oh, no, of course I was lying about all that. Like, well, I do have a Kermit. Then. I was just discussing. This was sort of, you know, at age 6, was. For some reason, like, I discovered that people could lie. So I thought that was funny. Yeah. And likewise for skepticism about the external world or whatever. Like, it's only. Okay. Well, yeah, maybe as scientists, we have to be skeptical about certain things, especially when we're talking about how the sky looks to us or whatever. But this is just. If we didn't have a basic credulity and the information we weren't receiving from our senses was reliable, or if it wasn't reliable, we'd just be dead. Dead a million times over. Yeah.

41:29 Dylan: And all that isn't to say that we might not have to clarify what we're seeing and the path to which it gives us the information about the thing underlying it. That's the bent stick problem. Bent stick in the water problem. And in fact, as Reid points out, we're doing that all the time.

41:48 Seth: And that's actually the gift that vision gives us as a special sense. Is that. That's why it's so interesting to do the anatomy of how vision actually works, because we are creating something out of something that doesn't look. And in that case, you draw your attention to the fact that what you're looking at is not what's actually being sensed. That's.

42:12 Wes: Did you guys know your iris is just. Or your pupil is just a hole?

42:16 Dylan: Yep.

42:17 Wes: It's just a hole.

42:18 Dylan: It's just a hole.

42:20 Wes: How did I miss it?

42:21 Mark: Well, you can poke your needles in it.

42:23 Wes: Anatomy class. It's just a hole.

42:26 Seth: I thought it was. He's got some really interesting stuff to say about like just the whole idea of the focusing of the light and light coming into your eye from different angles and your eye is a sphere in itself. You were talking about projecting a two dimensional something onto a sphere.

42:40 Wes: Yes. A hollow sphere inside.

42:41 Seth: That's exactly what's happening in your eye.

42:44 Wes: Yeah.

42:44 Seth: And it's upside down and inverted. So you're getting a completely. Well, I don't know.

42:49 Dylan: Mine's an egg. Which is why I have so many problems with my eyesight. But we'll put that on.

42:55 Wes: Right.

42:55 Mark: One thing that didn't come out, that always comes up in philosophy classes or neurology class about when you're talking about the inverted picture is if you then make somebody put on glasses. That inverts their whole visual field. Like within a week or. I forget how long it takes.

43:09 Wes: Yeah.

43:09 Mark: But they'll start seeing things right again.

43:11 Wes: Yeah.

43:11 Dylan: Well so I would look into this a little bit. I'm not sure that they start seeing things right again. It's that they go through the world perfectly normally.

43:20 Seth: So you learn how you don't know

43:21 Mark: how they see things. This is a Dennett response. We don't. We don't know if they're seeing things right or whether they're.

43:28 Dylan: I mean it just seems like a question worth asking somebody in such a situation. I think it's that they just get used to it very quickly and can judge distances and have proprioception and all that.

43:38 Mark: Stu.

43:40 Dylan: But not that the world is somehow dead. Yeah.

43:44 Seth: The brain adjusts.

43:45 Dylan: The brain adjusts. That's true.

43:47 Seth: I would be interested to see somebody who goes through that, who starts functioning normally, describe what their visual experience is. That would be cool. Yeah.

43:55 Mark: But not next time. Because next time we're talking to Timothy Williamson about his new book. The first two chapters of his new book Overfitting and Heuristics in Philosophy. So we'll talk to the man himself.

44:09 Seth: Woohoo. Excitement.

44:11 Mark: You should let us know what you want us to cover. Email us@pl partiallyexaminedlife.com comment on the blog post associated with this episode. Get in touch with us through x.com or xxx.com or any of the porn sites that most of the philosophy discussion where we talk with the black Nazis and such happens on the porn site comments. So if you want to go there and post what we should cover next, maybe word will get back to us. Thanks everybody. Good night.

44:38 Seth: Good night.

44:39 Wes: Good night.