On Jan 1, 2009, at 3:57 PM, Geoff wrote:
Michael: I agree that our perceptions are constructed. I don't agree that fictitious is understood by most persons to equate to truthful.
I didn't say that. The way we hold thoughts in our mind (the "fiction" that William talks about) is different from its truthfulness. Indeed, the notion of truth is involved in how we evaluate the thought and act on it, not on the original thought itself. (This reminds me of the Catholic teaching about not entertaining a temptation or sinful thought: to think of the sin is to entertain the sinful thought behind the words. Man, all those dirty thoughts when I was a young 'un and I tried not to think of them! Sinning by not being able to cast out the thought of the sin I was resisting. PS: if you weren't raised Catholic, this will surely be unfamiliar!)
We may equally construe fictional/imagined persons or verifiably existent persons. Let us not confuse the process (construction/ construal) with the object (fictional/made-believed) with the valid.
Every conscious thought is a construction or representation from some source, either immediate sensory perceptions or memories of some kind. Thus, all of these are fictitious, that is, they are formed or contrived to represent some exterior experience. It is at the next step that the notion of verifiability--noumenal, phenomenal, or epiphenomenal--enters. Do I "believe" the interior representation? Truth is the aspect of a thing's representation that supports the reliability of the representation.
If it's a question of believing what I'm seeing, it comes down to tacitly accepting the premise that my perception coincides with the object or event causing the perception. (Something's out there and I'm perceiving it without any distortion or deficiency.)
If it's a question of something I am thinking about, it comes down to evaluating how reliable is my awareness to hold thoughts in my mind and perform cognitive transformations on those thoughts. (Do I have the information I need? Have I compiled it and analyzed it properly? Etc.)
If it's a question of perceiving an external representation, say, a book or television program, it come down to evaluating the composition of the representation, as well as my perceptions of the source and my thinking about it. (Did Snow White really exist? Did Paul Newman? How does their independent existence affect what and how I think about what I know of them?)
One of the definitive characteristics of how schizophrenia affects a person is that the person cannot distinguish between hallucinations and delusional thoughts, on one hand, and external reality. The mental mechanisms that you and I use to distinguish between a fantasy (for example, my being able to fly like I remember from a very vivid dream) and reality itself (nope, can't do that) is impaired or absent in a person who experiences schizophrenic delusions. The person just cannot distinguish between the delusion and reality. Thus, entirely and wholly invented memories or experiences are received with the same sense of believability as ordinary, day to day experiences. A person with schizophrenia does in fact confuse the process of constructing the thought with the verifiable validity of it.
Delusions and hallucinations show us that the "truthfulness" of an internal representation itself is independent of the person's experiencing the delusion. The person thinks the delusion is real and acts accordingly.
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