Searle - Direct Realism - what's the justification?

Question

Here's a video of an interview with Searle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiAAVDv2w7A

Watch 3:27 where he says we have direct perceptual access to the real world.

I have difficulty understanding this... Take someone who's blind... or an organism with a different sensory apparatus... or maybe it can see other wavelengths of light. Isn't it obvious that it will have a different perception of the same object? Doesn't that automatically make direct realism impossible? I mean there are countless examples... take someone who wears glasses and his vision becomes clear from blurry.

Plus this intermediate nature of our connection to the world doesn't seem like anything mysterious to me... Suppose you walk away from a tree... you don't think the tree somehow shrank. We believe the tree remained the same size and our distance from it makes it appear smaller. This is the common sense view. Isn't this indirect realism?

Searle seems to be bypassing this natural view of indirect realism, but I don't understand his justification.

Answer 1

He simply says that most of the time senses--for what information they do provide--provide useful/accurate information.

In his 2015 book he calls the Argument from Illusion and variations thereof the Bad Argument. He simply says that because someone who experiences a hallucination really sees nothing real, it doesn't at all imply that most people's vision works like that in usual circumstances. So concluding that there's no connection between vision reality in general is a bad argument.

He says/concludes e.g.

I have to say that what bothers me about Phenomenalism and the Representative Theory is not some technical problem that they have, but their sheer preposterousness.

Although Searle doesn't do this as far as I can tell, one can obviously invoke e.g. evolutionary mechanisms: if senses were completely misleading and useless they may not have arisen or survived this long etc. There are such works elsewhere.

(In general I find philosophy works about vision seriously underwhelming. Even when they come to a biologically plausible conclusion, they seldom bring the right arguments.)

Your [counter]argument is that blind people exist. Sure, but most people are not blind. So you can't say itself blindness evolved for some use/purpose in people, as opposed to being an accident/mutation. (That vision is not that useful for moles as opposed to people is another matter--different environmental pressures.) That blind people can still deal with the world with the remaining senses isn't any sort of refutation that blindness is not the norm for people, nor that vision is not plausibly useful as a tool for perceiving reality.

Likewise, the fact that the senses we normally have don't provide complete information like say x-ray vision isn't an argument that those sense we have are always misleading.

Sure, you (and other philosophers) may disagree with this, but that's basically what Searle is saying, although I've improved on his account quite a bit here...

If you want to argue that whole world is a simulation, then sure, the above account only argues that vision is a good adaptive mechanism within that (simulated) domain. But most realists would also deny that the world is a simulation.

Answer 2

Searle referenced here:

Searle has argued that critics like Daniel Dennett, who (he claims) insist that discussing subjectivity is unscientific because science presupposes objectivity, are making a category error. Perhaps the goal of science is to establish and validate statements which are epistemically objective, (i.e., whose truth can be discovered and evaluated by any interested party), but are not necessarily ontologically objective.

Searle thinks there are certain phenomena (including all conscious experiences) that are ontologically subjective, i.e. can only exist as subjective experience. For example, although it might be subjective or objective in the epistemic sense, a doctor's note that a patient suffers from back pain is an ontologically objective claim: it counts as a medical diagnosis only because the existence of back pain is "an objective fact of medical science".[39] The pain itself, however, is ontologically subjective: it is only experienced by the person having it.

So apparently since Searle believes only ontological subjectivity exists for conscious experiences (perception included such as pain referenced above), there's no mystery why he says we have direct perceptual access to the real world. There're mainly 3 schools of thought regarding the philosophy of perception, namely Naïve realism (direct realism), Enactivism, and Representationalism (indirect realism). So Searle's direct realism is the idea that the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are like a naïve child without reflective doubt for ontological reality, as opposed to commonly hold representation theory employed by many sophisticated philosophers, such as Edmund Husserl and Bertrand Russell. Here's a further comparison of direct and indirect realism.

For me to believe direct realism is very similar to believe some a priori axioms. For example, we never sense or perceive infinitesimal dx directly as an ordinary person, actually it doesn't make any common sense at all. But after learning calculus and practice to apply it over and over again to solve many math problems successfully in a deductive manner, you'll start to firmly believe its existence at least in some ideal ontological form realm, same as the axiomatic belief of numbers, points, lines, etc. At this stage, you can claim you have some direct "perception" every time you see infinitesimal dx compared to when you didn't know any calculus stuffs (assuming you're a realist regarding these concepts like Plato). But personally, I don't subscribe to Searle's theory which sounds uninspiring...