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[Thomyum2]

Greetings Thomyum2, Nice to hear from you. I've been keeping busy, mostly reading things that refuse to make thought easy. Continental philosophy is to inquiry what rip tides are to daring swimmers--you find yourself curious, so you move into the reading more closely, and before you know it, you find yourself pulled off into alien territory, and the shore gets less and less distinct, and the ocean more abyssal. White whales all around.

That’s nicely put – I do agree that Continental philosophy is like that. I was talking to someone not long ago and telling him that unlike Analytic philosophy, which is linear and goes step-by-step, Continental is the kind that you gradually absorb, a little at a time, unless a picture emerges – I thinks it’s similar to how we absorb music, poetry, art as well. I think I may have share this quote from GK Chesterton with you at some point too – he also uses the sea metaphor:

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. ... The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

I am about to head out of town for a couple of weeks and unfortunately will have to put some thoughts down here relatively quickly and then likely will have to hit ‘pause’ and resume this later. But I didn’t want to leave without at least sharing a few thoughts on your basic idea here while they’re still fresh in my mind.

the problem of knowledge is such a whale for reasons pointed out in the OP. Everything known about the world is perceived first, so how does perception make for knowledge claims, that is, how does an object received by perception make its way "through" the perceptual process such that a knowledge claim can be about the object?
This is only a problem for a naturalist pov, but making a move out of this model of the world is very difficult for people because one has to give up the idea Thomist realism, or the scientist's realism, or any thinking that thinks perception as such has no influence on conceiving what the world and its objects is. To think of the world as a perceptual act is the only way that makes any sense. It does not conclude that there are no objects independent of perception, but it does say what we see and are is an event. Seeing this is essential.

I do see this. I think you sum up the essence of it when you say:

To think of the world as a perceptual act is the only way that makes any sense.

I think I understand and agree with most of what you’re saying, but only up to a certain point, when you come to this:

Again this certainly is NOT to say there is no world "out there" for clearly there is.

What does it mean for there to be a world “out there”? Actually, I don’t think it’s that clear at all - there's a certain set of presuppositions that underly that conclusion. As per my Griffiths quote that I cited above, “The world is of course outside my body; but it is not outside my mind. ” I think we have to remember that the ‘perceptual act’ is an act of the mind, not of the body. The body senses, but the mind perceives. From the perspective of the body’s physical senses, sure, there is a world ‘out there’. - that part of the world that is sensibly distinct from one's body. But the mind is not distinct from the world the in the same way that the body is.

Here I think we have to begin to distinguish between the individual mind, and greater ‘Mind’, if you will. Of course we are not blank slates - we are born already having conceptual categories, as Kant pointed out, these are in our genes, but to these we add more categories as we grow, first from our parents, then from our community and our world. The mind that is acting to make the perception is not an isolated mind acting of its own volition – it’s a mind that’s part of a greater Mind. This also goes back to Aristotle – the term ‘common sense’ traces back to him, as I understand, the notion of a 'higher-order perceptual capacity which goes beyond the individual senses' - from his koine aesthesis or sensus communis. An individual perceives not only with their own senses, but with the ‘sense of the community’. And as you rightly point out, this ties into language as well – that medium in which we share the world with our community. Language is not ‘private’ – it only makes any sense at all when the meanings are shared. So when we perceive and conceptualize and think, we do so not as independent disconnected entities, but as a part of a greater communal Mind.

So when we see that tree (or fence-post, or whatever it might be) we don’t just separately and individually perceive the tree as if we were a photo plate taking up the light, but rather we’re bringing into consciousness all the archetypal knowledge of the tree that we’ve accumulated from our community. – we receive the tree as a member and representative of our community of sentient beings. We receive from the tree what we bring to the tree, so to speak. From the individual’s perspective, sure, it does appear that the tree is ‘out there’ or there is a ‘world’ that we are ‘in’, that has existence independent from us. But it is only independent from us as individuals. It is not independent from the universe of sentient experience.

Here’s where I think the mistake is – so-called ‘knowledge claims’ and not claims about the object at all – they are claims about the perception, and claims made for the purpose of communicating knowledge among our community of thinking beings. The 'object' is not something 'out there' at all - it's merely a way our minds classify a particular class of idea, the way we mentally 'clothe' an idea to make it understandable.

For me, this all ties back to Berkeley - esse ist percipi - that something exists and that something is perceived are the same thing. But note that he’s not saying that we cause something to exist by perceiving it – not at all. That's a criticism based on superficial reading of his work. Rather, all claims of existence are claims of a perception – this is a very different idea, and it only makes sense when we begin to recognize that the individual act of perception is not an individual act, but an accumulation of the work of that greater Mind - the Mind we think from when we use our individual minds. Here's a passage of Berkeley's that I think sums this up really nicely:

So long as we attribute a real Existence to unthinking Things, distinct from their being perceived, it is not only impossible for us to know with evidence the Nature of any real unthinking Being, but even that it exists. Hence it is, that we see Philosophers distrust their Senses, and doubt of the Existence of Heaven and Earth, of every thing they see or feel, even of their own Bodies. And after all their labour and struggle of Thought, they are forced to own, we cannot attain to any self-evident or demonstrative Knowledge of the Existence of sensible Things. But all this Doubtfulness, which so bewilders and confounds the Mind, and makes Philosophy ridiculous in the Eyes of the World, vanishes, if we annex a meaning to our Words, and do not amuse our selves with the Terms Absolute, External, Exist, and such like, signifying we know not what. I can as well doubt of my own Being, as of the Being of those Things which I actually perceive by Sense: It being a manifest Contradiction, that any sensible Object should be immediately perceived by Sight or Touch, and at the same time have no Existence in Nature, since the very Existence of an unthinking Being consists in being perceived.

This is, of course, idealism. I’m not sure if this is the tradition that you refer to in your last response to Gertie just above, but it seems to me to align with much of what were you’re saying here:

Of course, as you probably suspected, there is an entire philosophical tradition that talks like this which I haven't been naming.

As mentioned, this is a bit rushed, so apologies for any errors or incoherent content. But I’ll leave it there for now and hope to pick up again later!