Nelson Goodman (1973) A Puzzle about Perception

Nelson Goodman gives a 1973 lecture called "A Puzzle about Perception". This talk is the second in his series of Kant Lectures on the Ways of Worldmaking. This is part of the Immanuel Kant Lectures given at Stanford University. You can find more Nelson Goodman here: • Playlist
Audio Source: purl.stanford.edu/vh816yh7318
#Philosophy #Epistemology #Perception

[@mcurtisallen]

Always good to see Goodman.

[@josebolivar4364]

Yeah, he is such a good man.

[@Gabriel-pt3ci]

Impressive! I enjoy a lot his careful description of the experiments and his insightful comments. Thanks again, @Philosophy Overdose

[@JingleJangleJam]

''The whole world lies, so to speak, in the nets of understanding or of reason, but the question is *how* exactly it got into those nets, since there is obviously something other and something *more* than mere reason in the world, indeed there is something which strives beyond these barriers'' - Schelling. The Idealistic problem of the beginnings of the period of modern philosophy in Schelling's time, remain that of the problem of if there is an external world and few philosophers have proceeded past it like Nelson Goodman had tried.

[@Jy3pr6]

Thank you for these, Brad. Will you be posting the first and third lectures? If not, where can we find them, if it’s possible?

[@Philosophy_Overdose]

I haven't found them.

[@Jy3pr6]

@@Philosophy_Overdose What a shame!

[@josebolivar4364]

Has anyone got the name of the book mentioned in the lecture?

[@frederickanderson1860]

Its obvious that if we had visions like a lizard or a fly then its obvious we dont see same as the fly or lizard. A horse can see further than s human,so its obvious a horse cant see same as us humans. Imagine having x ray eyes like superman would that make our world more habitual and better.

[@KRYPTOS_K5]

The Google AI robot is very smart and they are listening my phone calls.

[@JingleJangleJam]

Can it be said to ''listen'' if the word ''listening'' refers to an activity living beings do with their ears, but doesn't apply to itself as a Google AI picks up patterns without the use of ears? Is the Echolocation of a bat detecting its sorroundings with a biological sonar radar, a form of ''listening'' or ''seeing'' or neither, can it be considered ''both''? To be more precise, human beings who work at Google are listening to your phone calls. However, a human being can hear the words that someone speaks, but not know what they mean - they can hear and not listen. How do you mean ''listen''? To assume someone will listen to you, is to assume there is a message or meaning behind what you say, how you mean to say it, that is rationally understood by another. What if the men who work at Google are listening, but don't understand your thoughts or feelings in the right way that you mean them as? Are they still listening, or failing to listen, in that case? Would they comprehend and understand your point of view? Are they hanging on your every word? Do they put together the words you say in a way that reverberates or treats seriously or as important and meaningful the meanings or evaluations of subjects in your fields of interest? Well in one way an algorithm detects fields of interest, but in another way, I'm not sure that it is capable of understanding why it's an interest on a more fundamental level, without the same level of gross human error that any other human is capable of, hence why Algorithms lead societies to greater political and democratic irrationality sometimes by referring them to faulty information that does not properly reflect the ''right'' answers to increasing their fields interests, but rather narrows, closes off and makes more limited people's interests to narrow their understanding of what they believe right. Google does both I think - depending how you understand the notion of ''listen'' - it both can listen and can't listen properly. In the second sense, it is detached from understanding quite strongly and does not listen, leaving us more existentially alone than before something ''listens''. Who you are, and what your reflection of yourself is, might not be graspable by the technician who works on the other ends of the machine systems that generate data on capricious and contingent instincts of interest in the moment for each individual, aligning it up to its presuppositions it forms for making patterns of each thing. The technician is just as confused over who he is and may not even be able to make sense of her own fellow friends and family, may listen but hear and misapprehend what you intended to think. I can say a speech to try to motivate someone to wear blue jeans, using implicit contextual argumentation - from my understanding - and that person may take as the conclusion of my speech erroneously that he ought to wear green jeans and not blue. So when I say, when I next saw him in green jeans ''Have you not been listening at all to what I said?'', I do not mean that he didn't pick up the explicit words I used, because he did, but those explicit words may have formed a different meaning in his mind to what it did in my own, and so by listening he may have been hearing a different meaning to what I had been saying, so he ''heard'' a contradictory message in what I say. In my experience, it happens almost every time I use the Google algorithmic search engines, that the queries I have in mind when writing the words to generate results, when written down generate very much out of line and irrelevant results to the interest that animated my query. Sometimes it produces blatant misunderstandings, like if I were to search what children ought to do about having bad parents, it misplaces the words ''child'' and ''bad'' and ''parent'' to turn up a result about what parents ought to do about having bad children.

[@rhetoric5173]

retrocausality!