Of Perception

[Seanjos]

What is the distinction between "form" and "object"?

[Tenure]

I'm not even sure how to begin, so let me ask:

What do you think a form is, and what do you think an object is?

[ctrl y]

What is the distinction between "form" and "object"?

Are we talking about Aristotle? He saw the form of an object as its source of change. If we take an object's "structure" to be the organization of its parts at some point in time, the form is the structure toward which an object strives. For example, the form of a child is an adult, so it will change until it reaches the structure of an adult. (If it seems odd for me to use the word "strives" above, let it be noted that Aristotle saw the form as a goal that an object really in truly has, something that has an actual existence in reality, not as something it reaches merely by the pushes and pulls of material laws.)

Edited April 8, 2008 by ctrl y

[JMeganSnow]

Both of those words have numerous meanings based on context, so you're going to have to supply more context if you want a useful answer.

If you're speaking specifically of OPAR and perception, I think you may be referring to the distinction between the form of our perceptions and the object of our perceptions. One way to illustrate this is to talk about what happens when a person with normal color vision and someone who is color-blind both look at the same object. The object is simply the thing they're looking at, but due to their different forms of perception (the fact that one can see color and the other cannot), one may say that it is gray while the other says that it is blue.

The problem comes that some epistemologies take the fact that people can have qualitative differences in the forms of their perception to mean that the object causing those perceptions is actually two different things and thus that reality is not an absolute. That is why it is important to distinguish between perceptual form and perceptual object. When you say "I see this and it's blue", you're saying that due to the form of your perceptions, you perceive it to be blue. You are not saying that your perceptions are creating reality.

Not sure how helpful that is.

[RicardoSmith23]

What is the distinction between "form" and "object"?

The object, which is the entity, has a form. Every entity that exists, exists in some form. The form is the basic physical structure of the object, the physical attributes. It's the appearence of these "forms" (not platonic reference) that allows us to distinguish between the objects.

There is a slight difference between this definition of form and Aristotle's, because it's in a difference context. We aren't talking about different "causes" as Aristotle was, we're subsuming all four of them in "nature"--which is the "form". So, for the Aristotileans, the material, eformal and final causes are all part of the entity's nature, and the efficient cause is something outside of it, pertaining to motion, that reveals the basic nature of the entity (i.e., pouring lemon juice on a papercut is the efficient cause of the pain, and it tells you something about citric acid, and something about human skin, the natures of the two).