Carol,

The answer to your query is in my latest book, 'Narrative, Perception,
Language, and Faith' (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), Chapters 3 and 4.  It has
just come out in paperback.

The key point is one I made in my ATEG contribution of February 22nd, the
penultimate paragraph.  There is no doubt that what we call dogs and parrots
are part of the real, of existence, of basic being, but what is not given is
the way human beings together sort out portions of the real.  In particular,
no one makes precisely the same sorting as anyone else for two reasons: (1)
no one senses in the same way as anybody else, and (2) no one has learned
about what they select from the real in the same way as anybody else  (both
of these facts are undeniable;  psychological experiments have proved them)
-- for a start, is everyone's hearing the same?).  So what WE TOGETHER call
a SINGULAR object is actually no such thing, but rather a cluster of
differing takes on the real that for convenience sake we all have to call
ONE object, but is really a set of overlapping selections, one for each
observer.  A fair analogy is of people in different places watching the same
TV programme:  no one sees quite the same colours (and their 'Contrast'
settings may be different too), and everyone is interpreting what they see
differently.  

So objectivity and existence come apart.  We can be sure of the existence of
all we sense, but not the identifications that we choose from what we sense.
The differences are always showing up, and that is the actual reason that we
talk to each other -- to try hopefully to update each other.  I say
'hopefully' because we cannot be sure we have got a pure co-ordination that
will work for every new circumstance and every human purpose.  This is why,
after some apparently safe verbal agreement with someone else, we are often
faced with cross-purposes, with comic and tragic outcomes -- and why faith
in the other comes to be ethically more important than what we call 'truth'
and 'objectivity'.  We sense the real all right, but perceive only our fuzzy
MUTUAL projections,  always open to correction by someone or other telling
us about it -- our huge HUMAN advantage.

Further philosophical support will appear in a new collection I have just
edited in which 18 philosophers and psychologists argue for what are called
in the current jargon 'qualia', namely, the sensory  experiences that go on
in our brains ('The Case for Qualia', MIT Press, June 2008).


Edmond


Dr. Edmond Wright
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