Frances to William and others... Under pragmatism all the mental things in the brain and its mind are held to be derived externally from the prior sense of phenomena held in memory. The psyche cannot generate its own mental things internally by epiphenomenal means, whether those things are visions or notions or associations or nominations or ideations. The brain after all is in the body of the human being, all of which is a material physical construct. This of course entails that evolving matter like an atom is itself effete or weak mind that is engaged in quasi thought.
In feeling to sense external phenomena, the psyche experiences the seeming phenomenal haze of likely phenomenal stuff that mind guesses to be a really true fact. The haze is an indirect mirrored representation of the stuff, which stuff cannot be directly accessed due to the glassy limits of sense and mind. If some mere property of a fact can be felt sensed, and even by some kind of moderating representation in the mind, then that fact is an object and is real to sense in mind. If an actual concrete fact cannot yet be sensed at all, then it may very well remain existent in the world, but it will not be real. The hazy reality of stuff is only as real as sense. The mind however is brought into a relation with the external object of sense, and not with its own subjective sense of the object, because it is after all the object that is held to be sensed. It is the relativity of the situation that yields reality. If the collective community of normal individuals who are similarly engaged will agree by a consensus of opinion that the seeming haze conforms to the likely stuff, then the guessed factuality can reasonably be held as a true reality. The formal science of general philosophy that prepares for all this sentient metaphysical activity is ontology and especially its phenomenology. It entails the "observation" by the self of its own inner feelings of what phenomenal haze is felt sensed, and then the "expression" of that represented finding in reports to others similarly engaged, so that a final conclusion can be tentatively reached. This phenomenology is the basis under epistemology of empirical methodology. It is interesting to note however that for pragmatists the represented haze given uncontrolled to phenomenology cannot be tested unlike most other sciences, so that it must rely on the reports of experts engaged in feeling phenomena. >From your previous remarks below it seems that our positions are perhaps not very far apart. It was always my feeling that inside the integrationist there must be a reactionary realist trying to wiggle out. (Thanks for mentioning the book "Vision and The Biology of Seeing" by Margaret Livingstone in this post, and for mentioning other similar books on perception and cognition in past posts; all of which will be sought later.) William wrote... The object experienced is the mental construction of the object, projected. That does not mean that there is no object out there. It simply means that we can't know it in its objectivity. Imagine looking at fish at the aquarium. You see them through the glass. The glass distorts vision and thus you don't see the fish as they are without the glass. So too with all sight, the image you project was constructed in your brain and certain neurons fool you into thinking it's out there. Meanwhile the object of your sight is what it is. Never purely and objectively known. The construction of vision is quite well understood in science. Nothing weird or conjectural. See Vision and The Biology of Seeing by Margaret Livingstone. Frances wrote... The subject must be brought into a relation with the object of its own sense. It is therefore relativity that cannot be avoided. It is hence objectivity or subjectivity alone that fails to account for reality. In other words, the percipient is related in a relative ground with the object that they experience, and not with their own experience, because it is after all the object that is experienced.
