The Great Illusion

There is a debate that started in antiquity about how we perceive our surroundings.  The most intuitive idea is that we simply see what’s there and we assume, without any deep thought, that the world is as we see it (we assume we are capable of direct perception, DP).  But, when we examine the visual perceptual process, as neuroscientists do, we are forced to accept that this is not possible.  Light strikes the retina and triggers neural activity that creates the shapes and colours we become conscious of.  It is the neural activity that creates the shapes.  These shapes must therefore be within our brain, where the neurons are.

This leads to another much less intuitive idea that nevertheless has to be accepted: we become conscious of the shapes, colours etc. that our brain creates to represent what we are looking at.  This is not a philosophical argument, it simply follows from the neuroscience model of perception.

When perception works well, the shapes and colours are good representations of the external environment.  Let’s call this representational perception (RP).  Some people buy into this easily, others don’t.  I discuss this briefly in  “Getting acquainted with representational perception”. There is a long and detailed debate on this - search on representational or indirect perception and you will get many hits.

RP is incompatible with DP and so it is very important to carefully choose one of these and be aware of the consequences of this choice, especially for language.  This language issue is difficult - all the contributors to the DP/RP debate that I have come across use language as if they have accepted the DP position, even when arguing the case for RP  – a mistake that contributes to several problems.  I discuss this on the page “two ways to use language”.

RP also leads to a fundamentally different philosophical methodology, one that is more akin to what scientists do than what philosophers do.   If we assume DP, as is done in philosophy, we assume we perceive facts and reason our way to conclusions that are also facts.  This DP methodology, very roughly, is the preferred philosophical method and it clashes with the method used in science where models and theories are constructed to represent the environment.  

This scientific (RP) methodology does not yield facts about the world: it creates models that represent the world.  An example is Newtonian physics.  This creates mathematical models, based on idealised entities (e.g. masses with all the mass concentrated at the centre) that behave similarly to what they represent. See "The Clash of Methodologies".

Models that represent the environment are always less complicated than what is represented and often only present some aspect of what is being represented.  Models cannot exactly represent, there are always omissions and approximations.  If a model is assumed to be a fact it can easily be shown to be false. For example, the Newtonian model of planetary motion assumes that all masses are concentrated at the centre of the planet.  This is obviously false and so models like this cannot support philosophical argument that relies on starting with facts.  However such models can be used in the science based methodology I propose.    

Philosophers that criticise the empiricist models proposed by Descartes, Locke, Hume etc. often dismiss theory because they can find something about the theory that is not a fact.  It is easy to identify when analysts adopt this DP methodology as it is apparent from their writing that they think they are dealing with facts about the world. This is the "Great Illusion".  Unfortunately most, if not all, analytic philosophers adopt this stance.  From an RP perspective this is an impossible stance induced by the misleading  intuition that we can perceive directly. As is amply demonstrated by analytic philosophy, this methodology leads to stagnation as almost nothing can be proved to be a fact. This, in a nutshell. is why an alternative methodology is needed.