Dear Michael,

Sorry, I missed your last post too. I doubt your problem is 'competence'! Modern philosophy has created elaborate language to try to be precise in argument but we can see from the trouble Mohan and Ali (as masters of the art) are having in pigeonholing McDowell, that this elaboration is founded on such shifting sands that it has to be rebuilt after every incoming tide. I suspect it is quite possible to do good philosophy without any of this language anyway.

As I see it the main problem we have in talking sensibly about DR is a confusion between labeling and explaining. To unpick your 'gist' just as an exercise: 'DR says that when I perceive an object O I have the experience O'. And if O wasn't in front of me (in public space) I could not have had the experience O'. All this is doing is using the label 'experience' in the form that means something like 'encounter with'. So: 'an [encounter with] is not something in the mind of a subject but something involving a relationship between a subject and an object (or two objects, if you like).' Nobody will argue with that so why does anyone think there is anything interesting to discuss here? The interesting question is what is the relation between events in the brain and experience -in the more complete sense that we do not expect to apply to a stone encountering O because it does not have a brain. Neither philosophers nor scientists need worry about the difference between O and fake O being there. We know that. We want to know the interesting difference between us and stones.

It seems the DRist wants to imply something about the way the world really is rather than just move language deckchairs around. But if we want an explanatory account of how things really are we need to connect this to the natural science account. That does not mean we want new reductive relations; we need non-reductive relations that bolt on to our reductive relations (science at least since before Newton acknowledges this). Unfortunately, the subject is full of postulated relations like Fodor's relation between an organism and a proposition (defining an attitude) that cannot be bolted on to anything and float free like the relations between a supplicant and the God he is praying to. These accounts seem to explain but are impotent. We need to get serious about the biophysics and when we see an eye to fit a bolt in, home in.

One thing intrigues me specifically about the gist wording. It seems that the direct realist does not have a 'public space' distinct from 'private space'. DR private perceptual space is not 'an appearance' of how space really is. It is how space really is. So it might seem we cannot appeal to whether O is or is not in public space. Ironically, I believe the DRist is correct in that there is no public space in the sense of how things really are (this is being discussed under another thread on the time-lag argument). In natural science there is only the dynamic mathematical space of what is really going on in terms of the playing out of the causal processes that give rise to private spaces. Public space is just a useful heuristic handle that at the limits becomes highly misleading. So the whole idea of percepts of O, or knowings by acquaintance of O, indirect or direct, representational or otherwise, is ontologically empty. Which is maybe why everyone gets so muddled.

Best wishes,  Jo