Quote:
Originally Posted by grant hutchison
But in my little trinity of epistemological views of perception, it seems to me to be easier to see the usefulness of the "middle way" as contrasted with the pure "in your head" and "in the world" stances.
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In most situations, I would agree, but then there's that schizophrenic person who we know is hallucinating, who we might want to think phenomenalistically about, and the engineer trying to get the best mixture, who might think entirely realistically. In neither case do we need any bridges between what is real and what is being pictured, so we can just do without the representationalist overhead. Someone using representationalism as an epistemology, rather than a meta-epistemology, would be somewhat at a loss in either situation. My meta-epistemology is "tailor your epistemology to what answers the questions you need answered", and don't worry about blanket justifications. It works great for things like quantum mechanics interpretations, for example, and I should think perhaps also understanding perception and consciousness.