I'm moving a comment of Pete Wolfendale from the previous thread to the front, because it raises so many things worth thinking about. And I'm putting my response as the first comment. Here's Wolfendale's comment:
This is not in accord with Kant's account, because Kant has a complicated transcendental machinery that establishes what objective representation is and how it can be prone to error. Inference plays an important role within this story, insofar as concepts are inferentially articulated for Kant. Precisely what I was accusing Graham of here was that he doesn't have anything resembling this transcendental machinery (and I suspect he can't), and something like it is necessary in order to give an adequate account of the structure of thought and the possibility of error it involves. There's a question as to whether Graham is capable of providing anything like this given the meagre (and ontologically loaded) resources he's given himself, and there's a further question about whether he'd even want to, given that this would make his panpsychism far stronger than he'd like it to be (at minimum he'd definitely not want to say that all objects are capable of making inferences).
There is also the additional question about whether Kant's story is actually sufficient to establish something like objective representation, given that it doesn't seem to give us the resources to talk about the reliability of our perceptual mechanisms, but that's another story, and we'll come back to it.
2. I most certainly not conflating scientific and metaphysical knowledge here. I've written at length about this distinction in my TR essay, and in relation to OOP specifically (http://deontologistics.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/scientific-vs-metaphysical-realism/).
The point is this: we are all aware that you and Graham think that there is a split between the withdrawn object and its sensual manifestation, but we're not necessarily sure why you think so. I haven't said that this metaphysical position is inconsistent, or that one can't have metaphysical knowledge, my question is simply what good reason is there to think that there is such a split? Now, the justification is supposed to be epistemological, insofar as there is supposed to be some argument to the effect that we can never know things as they are in themselves. What I've tried to show in my most recent post is that there doesn't seem to be a way of making this epistemological point that doesn't already depend upon some metaphysical interpretation of what knowledge consists in. The question then regresses to why we should adopt this metaphysical interpretation of knowledge in the first place? This problem is exacerbated by the next point.
3. I just about understand your claim that metaphysics (or ontology) comes before epistemology and ground it. However, I think that this claim is false, again, as I've argued in the post. In short, the argument is this:-
i) If we are to be able to have a proper argument about which metaphysical position is correct, then we must be able to make explicit what we're arguing about, i.e., we must be able to make explicit precisely what metaphysics is. Otherwise we are either talking past one another, or open to the objection that metaphysics is hopelessly confused and should therefore be abandoned.
ii) The questions regarding what metaphysics is are epistemological questions.
iii) We can't define metaphysics in metaphysical terms without begging the question.
iv) Therefore (i, ii & iii), there must be at least some part of epistemology, sufficient to define metaphysics, that is independent of metaphysics.
v) This means that we must at least be able to legitimately discuss knowledge in non-metaphysical terms, and and any position which denies this thereby denies the possibility of adequately circumscribing metaphysics, and thus the possibility of genuine explicit metaphysical debate.
There is the possibility of arguing that the vicious circle presented in 3 is a hermeneutic circle, rather than a vicious circle, but this requires a genuine argument. Moreover, this argument would have to be an epistemological argument that did not deploy metaphysical assumptions without thereby making it into a genuine vicious circle. I think this is an impassible bind, but if you have an argument, I'd love to hear it.
4. Of course, I wasn't arguing that OOO thinks that all kinds of intentional relation between objects are exactly the same. You do hold that there are differences, and differences of degree at that. The question is whether you can actually say anything illuminating about these differences, and more specifically whether this can involve a discussion of the actual perceptual mechanisms involved, precisely because of what you think is the same between them (i.e., that which is being varied by degrees). Simply stating that there are differences is not good enough if you can't give an account of what these differences consist in, in a way that shows *how* they are differences in degree.
So, let's talk about the difference between me perceiving a tree and the billiard ball perceiving another billiard ball. There is a complicated causal interaction between myself and the tree, which involves light hitting my retina, being converted into information signals, and these being processed in my brain in a certain way (it's even more dynamic than this, insofar as signals are sent back to my eyes to control the way they move, and I may move around the tree, taking in additional data and integrating it dynamically with my picture of the tree and then back to controlling my movements in relation to it, etc.). The causal interaction between the two billiard balls is considerably simpler, but not uncomplicated, insofar as there's some interesting stuff about their fine material structure and the way this deforms and transmits force.
According to Graham, both of these interactions should be interpreted metaphysically as having an intentional structure, which includes an 'as' content. I see the tree 'as' a tree, and the billiard ball encounters its partner 'as' billiard ball - we each encounter the other thing as an intentional object with a certain content. Now, I assume the difference in degree claim is that there's a lot more to the content of my experience than there is to the content of the billiard ball's bare intentional relation to its partner, that this is what it is to say that the interactions have the same intentional structure, but that the former has more to it. The important question is this: how do we map such differences in content onto differences in the detailed causal mechanisms that are involved in the interaction (as sketched out briefly above)? If you claim to be able to do it for me in relation to the tree, you've got to also be able to do it in relation to the billiard ball. The problem is that there aren't any important causal similarities between the two, indeed, the similarity on the basis of which they've both been counted as intentional (and thus as having contentful encounters) is simply that they are causal *at all*. There's no meaningful common causal structure to get a purchase on, and thus no meaningful causal differences either.
I think Graham is fairly happy to swallow this conclusion, insofar as he's been defending metaphysical accounts of consciousness against neuroscience for a while. However, I can see why you'd be uneasy with it. I certainly am. The additional thing to point out is that 'content' here can't be understood in informational terms. There's a perfectly good mathematical (and metaphysically elaboratable) concept of information which can be used to understand any causal interactions whatsoever. However, it's totally non-intentional. It's got nothing like directedness, or an 'as' structure. I'd recommend ditching intentionality all together and falling back on information, but this would also break the link between epistemology and metaphysics, insofar as representation is a normative notion (insofar as their can be mis-representation) that is distinct from information.
