How is causality self-evident?

Metaphysics and Epistemology
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Per page 15 of OPAR (italics added for emphasis):

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Given the facts that action is action of entities, and that every entity has a nature—both of which facts are known simply by observation—it is self-evident that an entity must act in accordance with its nature.

Isn’t self-evidence perceptual-level, i.e., automatic? The reasoning above seems to involve inference so is conceptual-level, i.e., volitional and thereby fallible.

I also understand that we perceive entities acting—that much is self-evident—but how does perception establish the relationship “that an entity must act in accordance with its nature” as opposed to merely acting whether in accordance with its nature?

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Research Center on Development of Causal Inference 

It would seem that saying what something is entails having come to know that things have natures. When we state a definition of a thing, we state its nature. We know some of the natures of things by experience before acquiring language. Prior to linguistic skill required for stating definitions, we embed our notion of what a thing is into action-schemas, i.e., what we can do with it and what it can do. Just playing with a bouncing ball on the floor has got the notion of having a nature going already, balls as capable of bouncing, floors as places on which balls can be bounced. 

Children of grade-school age make a shift—at different ages for various domains of knowledge—from verbal thinking of things in terms of characteristic features to verbal thinking of things in terms of definitions (“Capturing Concepts”, pp. 35–38).

I wouldn’t sell physical “musts” short. It’s a necessity very worth having and the base of any notional “musts” whatever. Fallible knowledge is good. And knowledge thought infallible, but really fallible, is also good.

The notion of the self-evident is a conceptual one, I notice. Also, if one of the interlocutors finds something not self-evident, proofs might be offered to them nonetheless for the truth of a proposition. The fact that something is self-evident to one does not preclude it also being provable from other propositions self-evident to all the interlocutors. Even the old self-evident proposition that nothing comes from nothing can be derived from other truths, hopefully evident as true to all.

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13 hours ago, RupeeRoundhouse said:

Per page 15 of OPAR (italics added for emphasis):

Isn’t self-evidence perceptual-level, i.e., automatic?

The evidence is presented by the things-in-themselves, but the conclusion is not reached explicitly unless thought through.  Evidence is not conclusion.

 

13 hours ago, RupeeRoundhouse said:

but how does perception establish the relationship “that an entity must act in accordance with its nature” as opposed to merely acting whether in accordance with its nature?

The contribution of perception is to gather the evidence.  It does not “establish” the conclusion, which is a separate act by a different faculty.

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2 hours ago, Grames said:

The contribution of perception is to gather the evidence.  It does not “establish” the conclusion, which is a separate act by a different faculty.

Fair enough. But if the perceptual evidence is self-evident, then the faculty of reason identifies the existence of the percept as true, yes?

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On 2/14/2023 at 4:56 PM, RupeeRoundhouse said:

Fair enough. But if the perceptual evidence is self-evident, then the faculty of reason identifies the existence of the percept as true, yes?

No.  Percepts are not true or false.  Percepts are the result of the deterministic operations of the body’s sensing and perceiving physiology.  What makes an idea true or false is its correspondence with reality, but percepts automatically correspond with reality.  It is always the conceptual judgement identifying what a percept is presenting where an error may lie.

Dr. Kelley goes into this subject in some depth in his book “The Evidence of the Senses”.  Some relevant excerpts from my outline notes (the notes are linked in my signature below):

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First Principle of Justified Perceptual Judgment:

For a judgment to be justified by perception, the person judging must perceptually discriminate the object he takes to be an instance of the concept predicated.

 

…

Only in relation to our concepts can we identify any form of perception as illusory. Abnormal conditions are those in which we perceive objects in illusory forms.

 

Definition of Normal Condition- any condition of perception within a range that allows discrimination of the similarity to other objects subsumed by the same concept.

 

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Second Principle of Justified Perceptual Judgment

One must perceive the object in a form which is normal for the perception of F objects (F a concept of a sensory quality).

 

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Third Principle of Justified Perceptual Judgment

One must take into account any evidence one has that the conditions of perception are abnormal.

 

 

The conceptual override - Using background knowledge of what F looks like in abnormal conditions to make a judgment makes that judgment an inference.

Justified error - An object which is Not-F may be perceived in the form and normal conditions for the perception of F. One can be perceptually justified in judging a Not-F is F.

 

Two concepts of justification:

• “Being in a position to know” is what justifies - meaning in contact with reality. Knowledge is the  correct  identification of things as they are independently of our beliefs. By this theory an hallucinator is not in a position to know what he asserts, and neither is the subject of an illusion.

• “Reasonableness” What justifies is what makes it reasonable to think so. Justification is normative, a standard of what ought to be cognitive conduct. But “ought implies can”, a person cannot be held accountable to a standard impossible to apply in a given case. By this theory the subject of an illusion is reasonable in forming the judgment to which his experience prompts him, and so is the hallucinator.

 

Holding to either theory of justification in disregard of the other is another manifestation of issues discussed in Chapter 1. The first theory disregards the process of knowing {intrinsicism}, the second theory discards reality as the standard {subjectivism}. Objectively, a percept, even an illusory percept, arises from the interaction of object, senses and conditions. A subject takes an object to be F on the basis of similarities that are the real product of perceptual contact with reality. Hallucinations can be reasonably interpreted in certain ways, but there can be no perceptual justification without perceptual contact with reality. The subject of an illusion can be justified, an hallucinator cannot.

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Grames,

The idea of Kant and of the Objectivists writers that percepts do not err and should should not be ascribed truth or falsity is mistaken. 

Instruments we design for detections and measurements have a dedicated object (which I shall designate by all-caps TARGET), and we can manipulate and adjust the instrument to capture just that object for presentation to our senses. We could design a camera with the purpose of imaging a straight stick partially in water such that the camera system compensates for difference in the indices of refraction of air and water. A sensor in the air and a sensor in the water feeding information ultimately to the camera would likely be required, and this information processed in an automatic way in the camera recorder. The camera would show a straight stick because we had made the instrument system an indicator of our information purpose, our TARGET: straightness in objects it detects. Design of the instrumentation systems that are our natural sensory systems are the result of natural processes of evolution and individual development employing living processes in an environment having whatever material resource are locally available at the time. Mere typical success in detecting or measuring the TARGET (fortuitous, not designed by an intelligence) of the sensory system gives enough probability for preservation and reproduction of the animal.

We are able to learn that the enlargement of the moon or the sun when near the horizon is, in some unknown way, a contribution of our visual system. If we take a photo of the moon in that position, the enlargement-effect is not registered and reported by the camera. With thought and empirical investigation, we can tease out elements in our perceptions that are contributions of our perceptual systems. By modern scientific investigation, the Mach-band effect—which is a visual illusion in the degree of darkness of the grayness of surfaces and which may have had the adaptive advantage of accentuating edges—has been explained by the pattern of neural connections (lateral inhibition) in the circuitry of the retina.

In our era, science has also traced the processing of outputs from the retina by LNG and cortex for various receptions of light at the retina . Science has shown what elements of a scene are assembled by the visual system within the first 150 msec. after reception of the light from the scene. And how it all goes from those in the brain processing on up to formation of the percept of a scene. (Along the neural-activation course are topographical maps of arrangements in the distal stimulus.)

I mentioned the TARGET of an instrument we design. There is another sort of target of an artificial instrument, which is also at work in our natural, perceptual instruments. Advantage in animal species evolution or in survival of the individual animal is not the TARGET of a natural perceptual instrument. Nature is not a designer, and there are no TARGETS for natural perceptual systems. There is a  target (lower-case) of an instrument which is in the detailed constitution and operation of the instrument. Our modern motion-detecting devices have as their target: alterations in level of light being received by their sensors, which has some fair correlation with objects moving in the field. Our purpose, our TARGET—detection of moving objects—is not the target we put into the design of the instrument. I maintain that this is the way to view natural sensory systems, from thermal contact systems to visual systems having a distal stimulus.

Veridical perception, I say, is neuronal system indicating in consciousness things as they are. Illusions are neuronal system indicating in consciousness things in some ways as they are not.

I say percepts are leaders to reality, due to our constitution. Percepts do not only present. They indicate due to our constitution. Their character of automatically indicating in consciousness is what makes percepts components in empirical cognition.  The proverbial straight stick partially in air and partially in water indicates a bent stick. Understanding how it comes to look bent does nothing to change the circumstance that the perceptual presentation is misleading (contra Branden c. 1968, 47–48; Kelley [. . .]; Peikoff [. . .]). The stick’s looking bent is not on account of some inference we have made, not even an inference unconsciously made.

Kelley and other Objectivist philosophers ignore the leading I attribute to perceptual presentations. That is a mistake. The quality in perceptual presentations that I have called “leadingness,” and importance of that quality, should be recognized and put to work in a realist philosophy of perception.

Notwithstanding that error of Dr. Kelley et al., Kelley made an important distinction to keep in mind for philosophy of perception: “As a form of awareness, perception may naturally be approached from various different perspectives. From the outside it is a physical response to the environment, and one may examine the way sense organs are stimulated by physical energy, and the way this stimulation is transmitted and transformed by the nervous system as it ascends the sensory pathways to the brain. Or one may view it from the inside, as we experience it, describing the features of objects we discriminate, the structures and relationships of which we are directly aware.” (1986, 8 )

That distinction is important to keep in mind when thinking about the alternatives Realism v. any Representationalism that is not realist in perception.

Consider our sense of warmth or coolness of objects or media that one’s skin contacts. Coolness or warmth are in the inside-stream that is awareness. From the external perspective, we know there are specific sensors in the skin whose target is the rate of heat flow into or out of our bodies in contact with objects or media. The content of this external perspective was won by intellect joined to making instruments to use in our experiments on the phenomenon, instruments whose use of course requires the internal perspective. 

The two perspectives, internal and external, can and must be interwoven for understanding of perceptual experience. The warmth of a hot shower is from receptors registering rate of heat flowing into the body. The coolness when stepping barefoot out the shower and onto tile of the bathroom floor is from receptors registering rate of heat flow out of the body and into the tile. Until recent times, people would have identified the object of the perception that is warmth or coolness as traits of the shower water and of the tile floor. This was an error in perceptual psychology and provided a setting of perceptual phenomena as anomalous, which provided a gadget to bolster skeptical schools of philosophy.

Step now onto the tile floor from having taken not a hot shower, but a cold shower. The tile will not feel so cool as it would when stepping from a hot shower. We, who know that what our sensors are detecting is rate of heat flow into or out of the body and who know that rate of heat flow between two bodies in contact depends in part on the temperature difference between the two bodies find nothing paradoxical about the tile feeling more cool in the one step than in the other.

The puzzle for people thinking that warmth and coolness in our internal flow of conscious experience has as purpose and target a trait of external objects and media is: a tile floor is two different levels of coolness at the same time. 

The possession of sensors conveying thermal contact conditions of the animal body are a heritable trait, and perhaps that is a trait selected by advantage in evolution. Current scientific accounting of sensory experience of warmth and coolness dispels traditional skepticism buoyed by sensory phenomena.

The misleading in percepts is not always deleterious. It has some disadvantage for hand grasping of objects in the bent-stick sort of situation. It can be advantageous, as the case of the Mach Bands shows. The illusion of space behind the surface of a mirror can be advantageous once one adapts to seeing it as a reflected space really in front of the mirror. Unlike the mirror case, many illusions are not remediable. The sun will continue to be sensed as moving across the sky, even though we know better.

The veridical percept is only advantageous. What is advantageous is whatever affordance for successful action is occasioned in the percept’s indication. 

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Stephen,

Please respond to the following:

The stick looks bent, but concluding that it is bent is a matter of interpretation or inference.

If we move the stick so that a different amount of it is in the water, the look of a bend changes its position on the stick.  If we feel the stick with our fingers, it does not feel bent.  Thus collecting a more thorough set of perceptions gives a more nuanced set of perceptual data.

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On 2/17/2023 at 7:11 PM, Grames said:

No.  Percepts are not true or false.

I agree. But what about the following propositions?

(A) I detect a percept.

(B) This percept exists.

(C) This percept is A.

I take it that you’d agree that C can be identified as true or false; what about A and B? I would say that they, too, can be identified as true or false.

I’ll agree that perception qua perceptual data cannot be since truth or falsity are conceptual qua propositional, i.e., corresponds with reality.

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4 hours ago, Doug Morris said:

Stephen,

Please respond to the following:

The stick looks bent, but concluding that it is bent is a matter of interpretation or inference.

If we move the stick so that a different amount of it is in the water, the look of a bend changes its position on the stick.  If we feel the stick with our fingers, it does not feel bent.  Thus collecting a more thorough set of perceptions gives a more nuanced set of perceptual data.

Notion of looks and correctives is conceptual. All in the quote here is conceptual thinking. That is not the starting place. At the starting place, mere perception, mere deliverance by automatic brain processing, there is a display presenting and leading.

Might a lion perceive a prey without thought? Surely without conceptual thought. A lion’s percepts too could be sometimes entirely veridical, sometimes only partly so (and leading the lion to a danger instead of a meal).

Quite possibly a chimp perceives the enlargement of sun or moon near the horizon as we do. The illusion is there without thought, without judgment, without interpretation or inference upon it. 

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3 hours ago, RupeeRoundhouse said:

I agree. But what about the following propositions?

(A) I detect a percept.

(B) This percept exists.

(C) This percept is A.

I take it that you’d agree that C can be identified as true or false; what about A and B? I would say that they, too, can be identified as true or false.

I’ll agree that perception qua perceptual data cannot be since truth or falsity are conceptual qua propositional, i.e., corresponds with reality.

I agree.  A and B as propositions about what has already happened are either true or false. 

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On 2/18/2023 at 8:59 AM, Boydstun said:

The idea of Kant and of the Objectivists writers that percepts do not err and should should not be ascribed truth or falsity is mistaken.

I disagree: can a rock err while it rolls down a hill?

Our senses, whatever their limitations, are deterministic. The possibility of error does not arise until you get the information from your senses, and then the error, if any, is yours.

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necrovore,

Nothing I’ve said implies or insinuates that a rock rolling down a hill could have errors in its action. Neither could an uprooted gravitropic root of a plant have errors in its response to uprooting: beginning new root growth oriented in the direction of gravity.

Like the gravitroplic system possessed by some plants, our perceptual systems are living systems, teleological in the ways they are due to natural selection, and deterministic in the operation of the individual member of the species. Beyond those characters of a perceptual system, it is as well composed of living excitable communicative cells, neurons, conveying patterned activity to the brain of animals that have a brain where those patterned activations are processed in an automatic way set by evolution and by individual development having inputs from the right environment, and that brain, by neurons, has connection to muscle.

One’s perceptual systems are part of what one is. They are parts of our awareness, parts of the awareness that we are. We do not stand outside them (contra the meditative states Descartes pretends he and we can engage in). We make errors by judgments to be sure. But we and other high animals are also given percepts that are illusory without participation of judgment. I’m inviting you to break with old habits of thinking about error that have been running since at least Descartes. 

That we feel pain from certain sensations is in no part due to our having made a judgment about what the senses have delivered. That we experience visual luminance is in no part due to our having made a judgment about what the senses have delivered. That we experience relative largeness of the moon or sun near the horizon is in no part due to our having made any judgments in that awareness (and contra Descartes, in no part due to inattention). By conceptual reasoning, we can see through the relative largeness illusion (though not avoid experiencing it, thank goodness!) about the presented objects. That is later. Perceptions do not require talk-thinking.

 

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Of illusions, we should not say they have error. We should say they mislead. Percepts are leaders even before our thinking about them begins. Percepts themselves are some amount of identification.

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Causality is a law of identity applied to the action. And law of identity is an axiom, on which all proofs are based. Therefore law of causality is also and axiom, self-evident self confirmed claim 

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2 hours ago, Boydstun said:

Nothing I’ve said implies or insinuates that a rock rolling down a hill could have errors in its action.

True. I’m just saying that the operation of the senses is deterministic, just like a rock rolling down a hill, so the operation of the senses cannot “err” any more than the rock can.

What matters is how we interpret what the senses are telling us. In many cases the naïve interpretation is actually fine, which is why our species is still around, but there are some cases (such as illusions) where the actual situation is not what it looks like.

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50 minutes ago, necrovore said:

True. I’m just saying that the operation of the senses is deterministic, just like a rock rolling down a hill, so the operation of the senses cannot “err” any more than the rock can.

What matters is how we interpret what the senses are telling us. In many cases the naïve interpretation is actually fine, which is why our species is still around, but there are some cases (such as illusions) where the actual situation is not what it looks like.

Thanks.

Yes, the senses cannot err. They can malfunction if damaged or are in a special condition (which happen pretty frequently in olfaction). But the senses, functioning properly, lead the animal alongside presenting to the animal, even before higher identifications are made. Both veridical and illusory percepts are delivered when the sensory system is functioning properly. The “what” in “what it looks like” is at hand in awareness before any conceptual identifications. 

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5 hours ago, Leonid said:

Causality is a law of identity applied to the action. And law of identity is an axiom, on which all proofs are based. Therefore law of causality is also and axiom, self-evident self confirmed claim 

The Law of Causality is actually a corollary (of identity), not an axiom. Per page 15 of OPAR, “[a] corollary of an axiom is not itself an axiom; it is not self-evident apart from the principle(s) at its root (an axiom, by contrast, does not depend on an antecedent context).”

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19 hours ago, RupeeRoundhouse said:

The Law of Causality is actually a corollary (of identity), not an axiom. Per page 15 of OPAR, “[a] corollary of an axiom is not itself an axiom; it is not self-evident apart from the principle(s) at its root (an axiom, by contrast, does not depend on an antecedent context).”

Rand called such corollaries in her metaphysics “corollary axioms” (AS 1015). That suggests that they inherit, as Leonid suggested, the certification of truth had by the truth of self-evidence (manifestation in sense) and by contradiction upon denial of the axioms to which they are corollaries. For Rand the Law of Causality is that things act in definite, distinctive ways and not in any other ways, due to things having definite, distinctive identity. Indeed, that causal character of things is part of their definite, distinctive identity. Moreover, that causal character is an instance of the identity of things having causal character. So it would seem that to say “the law of causality is the law of identity applied to action” really is a little understated. Not only is causality an application of identity; it is an instance of it in just the way that Socrates, being an animal, is mortal is an instance of the universal fact that all animals are mortal. Although, the axioms and corollary axioms in Rand’s general metaphysics, unlike the connection of mortality and animality, have truth of their widest-of-wide range certified additionally by their epistemic character of contradiction upon denial.

Let me attempt to show that causality as a corollary axiom is indeed an axiom by having the character of ensnaring one in a contradiction upon denial of the law of causality. To show the law is not a truth having completely general scope is to adduce a counterexample to the law. To defend the completely general scope of the law’s truth is to show that no such counter-example can be adduced. To wit: “An occasion of adducing is a caused production or not. If not, then utterance of the assertion that is the putative counter-example is uncaused. If uncaused (specifically by an interlocutor), then it is incapable of having any controlled, intended referent. Then no counter-example as counter-example has been adduced. On the other fork, if the occasion of adducing is a caused production (which in truth it is), then the adducing of a counter-example to the law of causality requires one to implicitly affirm causality. No entirely self-consistent counter-example to the law of causality can be adduced.” So, corollary axioms can have the axiomatic character of the axiom they depend from.

In his book How We Know, Harry Binswanger did not put corollary axioms into any role for his epistemology. He mentions the idea from Rand, but he does not himself put it to work, unlike Rand or Peikoff. I think that leaves a gap in Dr. Binswanger’s picture. I don’t mean a gap in full adherence to Rand’s views, for strictly speaking, he was not out to set forth such an epistemology. I mean a gap in representation of the organization in our knowledge of metaphysics.

I think Dr. Peikoff is correct when he characterizes what Rand called “corollary axioms” as elucidations of the axioms. Rand’s elucidation upon her famous axiom comes straightaway, in Galt’s Speech: “Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists” (1015).

These corollary axioms are useful not for having additional fundamental propositions from which to deduce further metaphysics, as in the manner of Spinoza, but for countering some derailments in thinking. Such as Locke when he writes: “It is the first act of the mind, when it has any sentiment or ideas at all to perceive it’s ideas.” And such as Augustine’s Platonic and Pauline conception of humans knowing by thinking immutable ideas within themselves, dimly reflecting divine mind. I take corollary axioms as elucidations and as performance-truths attending axioms and their grasp, immediately recognizable truths very like our recognition of the need of figure construction, labeled, and of discursive thought in composing a geometric proof in Euclid and very like the need for ability to count in order to comprehend that 7 + 5 = 12.

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4 hours ago, Boydstun said:

So, corollary axioms can have the axiomatic character of the axiom they depend from.

My understanding is that a consequence of being axiomatic is that it’s implied in all thought, including those that deny the axiom. This is clear with the principles of existence, identity, and consciousness; it’s not so with causality.

Take for example, the thought that “Jane is blue”: It implies the existence principle (Jane and blueness exist), identity principle (Jane has blueness), consciousness principle (I’m aware that Jane has blueness), but nothing of the causality principle. Not all thoughts—only some, as exemplified in your reply—invoke the causality principle.

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Blue Jane’s existence causes you to apprehend Jane as blue, Blue Jane is not not Blue Jane at the same time.

But I think your sense of the argument is not in that vein, though I think still a mistaken argument against Stephen’s comments , in that the blueness of Jane is not an essential characteristic , except in the context of your apprehension of Jane.