Monday, January 4, 2010

Indeterminate Determinables in Reality, Belief, and Experience

Here are three theses concerning determinates, determinables, and beliefs and experiences thereof:

  1. There are instances of determinables that aren't instances of any of that determinable's determinates.
  2. There are beliefs that a determinable is instantiated that aren't beliefs about any of that determinable's determinates being instantiated.
  3. There are perceptual experiences of a determinable being instantiated that aren't experiences of any of that determinable's determinates being instantiated.
Remarks:

R1. If there were any examples of 1, one might be a shape that was polygonal without being any particular kind of polygon. I'm guessing 1 is widely held to be false. If anyone has advocated the truth of something like 1 in print, I'd love to hear about it.

R2. I'm guessing that 2 is widely held to be true. I believe that there's a car parked outside that's painted a color, but there's no particular color that I believe it to be painted.

R3. Of 1-3, is 3 the most controversial? I tend to go for 3, but I had a couple of conversations recently with some strongly anti-3 philosophers. If anyone knows of an argument, in print, that, for instance, something can't be seen to be green without being seen to be some determinate shade of green, I'd love to hear about it.

10 comments:

  1. Hi Pete,

    "If anyone knows of an argument, in print, that, for instance, something can't be seen to be green without being seen to be some determinate shade of green, I'd love to hear about it."

    How about "The Principles of Human Knowledge" by George Berkeley?

    Most uncheeckily,

    Martin

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  2. Seriously, an argument and not a bald assertion? Can you direct me to a specific passage so I can minimize how much Berkeley I need to reread?

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  3. Not bald assertion, though maybe a bit thin in argument. The argument appears to boil down to something like this: try to visualize a colored object that is not any determinate color. You can't. Try to visualize a red object that is not any determinate shade of red. You can't. The relevant passages are sections 7-20 of the Introduction. Not terribly long.

    MR

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  4. Thanks Martin, I appreciate it.

    For what it's worth, I question Berkely's premise about imagination. I bet people instructed to pick a color in imagination then afterward pick the precise paint chip that captures the determinate shade they are imagining would have a low degree of confidence that they were succeeding.

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  5. Hi Pete. Interesting subject. As I recall, Ayer, in his *Foundations of Emp. Knowledge*, uses 3 plus a sense datum theory to argue for 1: he says that a sense datum can have the determinable property *having some speckles* w/o having any determination thereof. But his linguistic gloss on the sense datum theory as a helpful 'terminology' makes interpreting Ayer difficult.

    All Meinongians accept 1. For instance, A. D. Smith accepts 1 as part of his account of perceptual consciousness.

    In his 'visual qualia' paper and (I think) in his new book, Chris Hill denies 3. He expresses the point by saying experience represents in analog form. My view is that peripheral vision provides the best case for something like 3 and against Hill here.

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  6. Hi Pete,

    Supposing that they did have a low degree of confidence, I wonder what that would show. Assume that light green and dark green are determinates of green, assume that light green and dark green are, in turn, determinables, and assume some paint chips are determinates of light green and some are determinates of dark green. Perhaps the low degree of confidence would reflect the belief that the properties picked out in experience, while always determinates of some determinable, may themselves be determinables whose determinates cannot be distinguished.

    Now, this seems to lend some support to your view that there can be experiences of determinables without experiences of determinates of those determinables.

    However, there may be alternative explanations that are not obviously ad hoc. For example, insofar as successful chip selection depends on memory, and insofar as the content (or aspects of the content) of the episode of imagining may get compressed or otherwise altered or lost when memorized, it would not be surprising if a person had a low degree of confidence in such cases, even if the content of the imagining was determinate in the intended sense.

    Part of what makes this particularly difficult to sort out (to me) is that I want to make room for a notion of unexploited content--content a cognitive system may harbor put currently unable to put to use. Consider the standard cases of training a neural network. A network gets better at categorizing, given a fixed learning set of input vectors. I want to say that there is content in the training set that the system cannot exploit (at the beginning of training). We cannot say that the input vectors get content during the training (or that the content changes), for otherwise we cannot make sense of weight adjustment as improvement (reducing error).

    I seem to remember that you were talking about some experimental evidence that bears on these issues (at one of the APA talks). Please let me know if I am inadvertently walking down a plank!

    MR

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  7. Thanks, Adam. That's enormously useful. What's the best thing for me to read regarding your arguments on peripheral vision and indeterminacy? Is it "How Visual Experience Reaches to the World"?

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  8. Martin, you raise a bunch of good and interesting points. The low confidence scenario undermines claims like that it's *obvious* that we have imaginative access to only determinate properties. But it doesn't by itself kill the determinist thesis.

    If we set conscious and imaginitive content to the side for a moment, I'm happy to allow that there's lots of determinate but unaccessed content. I think that your neural network example is a terrific one. But if we focus specifically on conscious states, determinate contents of consciousness that aren't even accessible from the first-person point of view aren't anything we have good reason to believe in.

    The stuff from the APA that you might be remembering was some stuff I was saying about whether the following sorts of cases defeat coarse-grained conceptualism: there are color pairs the members of which are too similar to be distinguished across a memory delay, but when presented simultaneously are reliably distinguishable. I just submitted a paper on this stuff to the Online Consciousness Conference. Hopefully, I'll be posting a whole lot more about this very soon on Brain Hammer.

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  9. Hi Pete,

    I talk about this issue a bit in the 'reaches' paper and also in a paper called 'intentionalism and perceptual presence'. But I think I say too little, and I plan to talk about the issue more in an intro book for Routledge. I am surprised the issue of indeterminacy and the periphery isn't more discussed.

    Btw, David Sanford has a cool paper touching on this called 'Illusions and sense data'.

    Also, one way of reading Foster, *The Nature of Perception*, at p. 160, is as using the implausibility of 1, together with a sense datum theory, to argue against 3. In short, he thinks perception can't really be indeterminate bc sense data can't be. He accounts for the 'apparent' indeterminacy of perception within sdt in terms of grain, but I don't follow what he says.

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  10. Excellent, Adam. I really appreciate all the pointers.

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