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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
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    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Humans have no direct access to things in the external world and immediately perceive only mental likenesses (species) of those things.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Direct realists (Reid, Austin) argue that perception is a causal relation to external objects, not a relation to intermediate mental entities.
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    • 2.Positing species as intermediaries generates an infinite regress: we would need further species to perceive the original species.
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    • 3.If we only ever perceive species, we lose any epistemic ground for claiming species resemble external things at all.
      ?

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    Reason for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Intentionality, as Brentano and Husserl articulate it, allows mental acts to be directed at external objects without requiring numerically distinct intermediate entities.
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    • 2.The species theory conflates the content of a mental act with its object, a distinction Frege's sense/reference framework shows must be kept separate.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.The only way the mind can know external things is through species that resemble them.
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    • 2.Species are intermediate mental entities, not the external things themselves.
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