Status Updates From رؤية الأشياء كما هي: نظرية ...

I think more people should be talking about how funny John Searle is. He’s such a smartass, he’s like a wholesome egghead Don Rickles. I love the little snipes at Descartes and dualists, self deprecating bits about the complicatedness of the subject matter, he’s so entertaining without being distracting from the dense subject matter. Actually helps the reader stay the course

“...on Locke’s account, Primary Qualities are observer independent and Secondary Qualities are observer relative....the impact of the combination of Primary Qualities on our sense organs gives us the ideas of the Secondary Qualities.”

“...the real object is not some technical difficulty. The real objection is that the theory just seems to be inadequate to our own experiences. It is just a fact about our experiences that they reach right out to independently existing objects and state of affairs in the world.”

“If the meaning of a statement as its method of verification and the methods of verification reduces all of my empirical statements to my experiences, then the meaning of those statements is solipsistic. Solipsism is a reduction ad absurdism of any theory.”

“...because sense data are ontologically subjective...always in the mind of individual human subjects... I have no access to your sense data and you have no access to mine.”

“When you say any empirical statement can be analyzed into a set of statements about sense data, that must have the consequence that any empirical fact amounts to a lot of ontologically subjective facts about personal experiences and these always have to be in the minds of some individual human being....The objective ontology of the real world is eliminated in favor of subjective ontology of sense data.”

“What is wrong with saying that all that exists are really private experiences in your mind and in other people’s minds? The answer is that this results in Solipsism.”

Phenomenalism “...the basic problem is that it reduces the public ontologically objective world to a set of private ontologically subjective phenomena.”

“...the particular details of the form of Hegelian Idealism seem to be extremely obscure, but the rejection of physical particles as the rock bottom of ontology is very clear in German Idealism.”

“...the account bottoms out in what I think of as the real world that exists in a way that is totally observer independent and ontologically objective. One of the tasks of philosophy is to explain the constitution of these higher-level systems and how they bottom out into the entities of atomic physics.”

“What, if anything, is that in terms of which everything else has to be explained, but which does not itself have to be explained in terms of something else?”

“Of course I might be mistaken , but the dimension of the mistake is different from having an absence of evidence or insufficient evidence.”

“...the language game of attributing pain is such that this is a case where it is legitimate to call it pain because the criteria are satisfied; and even in cases where we are mistaken, the mistaken attribution is founded in the very nature of pain. (Example)”

“...there is no distinction between the evidence and the conclusion. The sense data that you see just are the objects that you see. This is a standard argument for Idealism in any form. The distinction between the evidence and reality is removed if the only reality is in fact the evidence.

“The skeptical argument says all you can ever perceive are your own experiences, so how do you know there is a reality in the other side of those experiences?

“The big mistake is to think that seeing provides ‘evidence’ (or ground or warrant or basis) it does not, and all of these are wrong. Seeing is a way of knowing.”

“Each of the terms I have used can be misleading because each commits us to a certain way of looking at the matter.”