#IT CANNOT SEE THE FUTURE THE IMAGES IT SHOWS ARE REAL TRUE AND CURRENT REPRESENTATIONS OF WHERE YOU'RE LOOKING

[anarinya]

“Two paces back, face to the stone but with a foot forward and one behind,” Anarion stood as he thus explained, focused, gesturing along invisible lines of sight in his mind’s eye as he slowly dancer-stepped around the circumference of the Palantir situated before him. At first it was dormant, a mildly iridescent sphere of stone that sat upon a haphazardly constructed pedestal of boxes and a small cushion. 

However, Anarion paused in his walk, standing up straighter from his usual sloping posture, and he seemed to catch the sight he had been looking for. “You must simply bend your mind’s eye to the stone and it will recognise your intent.” In a moment, the stone transformed. The layers of translucent but coloured mineral seemed to illuminate until the whole thing appeared like glass, the sky clear and visible through it like a window. Anarion did not appear to do anything, and yet the vision through the stone changed, travelling forward along Anarion’s line of sight, at times tilting side to side or up and down. Distant images of trees, water, plains and buildings flew by for a moment until Anarion spoke again. 

“Whatever might be in the path of your gaze, the Palantiri can show you. It’s sight will pass through any barrier, even stone, but darkness will blind it as surely as it does a man.” He shifted on his feet minutely to the left and the vision swung with him, coming to rest suddenly upon the small image of a sprawling yet triangular city set upon the shores of a river so wide one bank could not be seen when standing upon the other. 

“One might travel along their path of sight until they reach the edge of the world, the Palantir can show you this much with ease, it is it’s natural use. True skill comes into play when trying to narrow your view and close in upon something small.” The concentration it took was visible, but with a gradual magnifying, the belltower in Pelargir’s drydock slowly sharpened in detail and grew closer and closer until eventually the runes carved into the detailed patterns in it’s brass became readable ‘Erukyermë, Erulaitalë, Eruhantalë’.

Anarion released a soft breath of exertion through his nose, but nodded to himself as if to accept the outcome. 

Open-starter

[dae-zea]

Fashioning the Future

Video 1: Introduction to Fashioning the Future by Ashlee Murphy

The fashion journalist, once the gatekeepers to the fashion capitals of the world and their runways, are now fleeting to rule the World Wide Web.This expansion comes from not just the breadth of opportunities and advancements known to social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and yes, even Tumblr, but also to keep up with the relentless battle against the fashion blogger and the decline of print media. Starting the conversation for this structural shift to modern journalism is important to divulging the true impact of technology and social media - is it a friend or foe to the future of journalism?

THE FASHION BLOGGER

Call it amateur, but the rise of the fashion blogger is real. Once marginalised by their lack of degree or profession, the blogger was a rare sight on any forum of journalism. Many believed it was pure PR, disguised by the pretence of journalism. However, if new media has started anything, it’s the democratisation of the journalism sphere. 

Fashion bloggers are now seen as the voices of potential - the people that can freely, analytically and without the constraints of appeasing media standards and organisations, comment with fresh perspectives in an industry that relies on the ideal of the ‘new’. However, is this ‘freedom’ damaging to the integrity of journalism? 

The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance developed the Journalist’s Code of Ethics in 1944 which has since served as a core for Australian press self-regulation. Bloggers, by their separation to traditional media professionals, and the absence of ‘quality-control’ associated with media representation, are not applicable to this code. This, along with a lack of experience and education in the areas, presses the argument on blogging as being an unprofessional practice and an unreliable source for fashion news - especially in a society where the detriments of fake news are so very real.

Author Geoffrey Millerson (1964, p. 14) argues that professional practice can be defined by 23 characteristics. Six of these are transferable across industries:

1. A skill based on theoretical knowledge.

2. Intellectual training and education.

3. The testing of competence .

4. Closure of the profession by restrictive organisation.

5. A code of conduct.

6. An altruistic service in the affairs of others.

Evaluating fashion bloggers against this criteria proved that a blogger cannot currently be defined as a profession as the nature of blogging only appeals to the sixth characteristic. Equally so, the capabilities and lack of boundaries characteristic to blog posting continues to lower the bar on what constitutes ‘journalism,' and therefore implementing the ‘professionalism’ of the job. However, their voice, as one that is accessible anywhere in the world on any device and any online platform, is on none of us can really avoid as a forum of fashion news.

The role of the fashion blogger in new media is one that is disruptive - one that will break down the barriers of ‘professional practice’ and continue to democratise the journalistic sphere until we all could just be bloggers or civil journalists across multiple news platforms. Either way, the current journalists playing field sees the bloggers with reigns over the internet, and in today’s digital world, perhaps it’s them that are the highest stakeholders.

Figure 1: Growth of readership for Australian fashion magazines in the span of 12 months. Data retrieved from Roy Morgan. 

THE TANGIBLE FASHION MAGAZINE

As seen from the data visualisation above, readership values for Australian fashion magazines in the past twelve months are staying pretty stagnant, or if not, slipping (see Frankie). This shows us the growing concern for the future of print media, and more specifically, the fashion magazine.

Industry professionals still remain adamant that print is irreplaceable. Former fashion editor for Queensland media corporations Quest Newspapers, Courier Mail and (now inactive) BMagazine, Laura Churchill, says that although she may be a ‘dinosaur’ in her thinking, she still ‘loves to be able to pick up a newspaper or a magazine and be able to read something tangible - something you can keep’. 

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL MINI INTERVIEW WITH LAURA CHURCHILL

Dinosaur? Maybe. Just maybe.

The battle between online media, such as blogs, and print media is undoubtedly a paradigm shift as the world continues to digitalise. This shift, and opening of new platforms, would give off the idea of more job opportunities, however in most publications, print journalism teams also contribute to their digital platforms, which perhaps is a core lesson for the future of fashion journalism (not to foreshadow or anything, wink).

The shift was given life by the rapid rise of technology and the Internet. These complimenting areas have distributed the idea of the world as an interconnected web of politics, economics and culture due to the technologies speeding up the delivery of information (Arnould et al., 2005, p. 214-215). Journalism and fashion, as two industries that rely on time, politics, economics and culture at their cores, are pretty cozy in this domain. Repeatedly, we’re seeing this shift leave print media in the dust.

A key example of this is the UK edition of the internationally renowned InStyle Magazine, which in 2016 stopped its print publication to instead focus on online-only distribution. 

“What we have achieved with InStyle over the last few years has been hugely rewarding and the team has, rightly, won numerous awards and nominations for their work across print and digital,” said editor Charlotte Moore.

“But the fashion world is changing dramatically - the way our audience interacts with it is changing and we have to change to meet that challenge. With a focus on delivering the InStyle experience across all digital platforms, we can really give our audience 24-hour access to all the fashion and beauty looks, trends and brands they clearly have such a huge appetite for.”

However, this bold decision from InStyle UK was met with criticism as leading fashion and journalism professionals believe that the future for print remains strong.

“I think that magazines, Vogue and Condé Nast, all they do is talk about online content and online projects. And I think they slightly forget their own DNA,” says Godfrey Deeny, former fashion editor-at-large of Le Figaro. 

“The DNA of magazines is the same as the DNA of luxury products: to make beautiful objects and reflect a certain amount of intelligence.”

If there were any greater example of adapting to both print and online, let it be Deeny’s ventures between them both. Deeny, other than being the former fashion editor at Le Figaro, has an extensive journalistic history as the editor-in-chief of Vogue Hommes International, and buerau chief of Women’s Wear Daily in Paris, under John Fairchild (Business of Fashion, 2018). He is currently positioned as the editor-in-chief of German magazine Achtung while still contributing fashion critiques for Le Figaro. Although boasting the impressive resume of print-focused titles, Deeny was also highly involved in the launch of online fashion website, the Fashion Wire Daily, as the European editor-at-large, AND just last year succeeded as the inaugural international editor-in-chief of Fashion Network.com. 

By embracing positions across both mediums, Deeny has been able to secure a sensational career in fashion journalism that spans over 25 years. 

IMAGE 1: Print and Online examples of fashion journalism. Image credit to Megan Dennis.

Perhaps then, a collaboration (rather than a battle!) between the print and digital sides, is at the core of a thriving future for fashion journalism. By marrying the online idea of immediacy and the reputable traditions of print, all aspiring journalists would be ‘multi-lingual’ in their approaches to media platforms. The notion of being a cross-disciplinary journalist is also referred to as multi-skilling, or up-skilling - a trend that sees the journalism industry depart from specialisation in platforms (such as broadcast journalists, print journalists etc.) to adapt to all areas of journalism for maximised flexibility (Nygren, 2014, p. 76). In a survey conducted in 2012 of 1,500 journalists, 73% could see future journalists being multi-skilled (Nygren, 2014, p. 81). Six years later, we are the future journalists. As myself, and other’s in my position begin our journalism careers with an eye for fashion journalism, the area of multi-skilling needs to be at the fore-front of our minds.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ashlee Murphy is a third year fashion and journalism student at the Queensland University of Technology. While her ultimate goal is to overthrow the great Anna Wintour in her position as Vogue Editor-in-Chief (see Ashlee’s own interesting interpretation of this above), Ashlee knows that Rome wasn’t built in a day and is happy to embrace the freelancer life until her reign of the fashion journalism industry comes. If she’s not busy reading up on critical areas of fashion studies and brushing up on her online shopping skills, she’s raising a beautiful labrador x golden retriever puppy. 

REFERENCES

Abnett, K. (2016). “How Newspaper Supplements Took On Fashion Magazines.” Business of Fashion, February 17, 2016. Retrieved from https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/intelligence/how-newspaper-supplements-are-beating-fashion-magazines-at-their-own-game

Arnould, E., Price, L., & Zinkhan, G. (2004). Consumers (2nd ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.

Arthur, C. (2012). “A blogger or a journalist? Debate over the power and influence of tech writers”. The Guardian, February 27, 2012. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/feb/26/blogger-journalist-silicon-valley-dan-lyons

Business of Fashion (2018). Godfrey Deeny. Retrieved from https://www.businessoffashion.com/community/people/godfrey-deeny

Hermida, A. (2010). TWITTERING THE NEWS. Journalism Practice 4 (3), 297–308. DOI: 10.1080/17512781003640703

Jackson, J. (2016). InStyle UK magazine to shut print edition. The Guardian, October 19, 2016. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/oct/19/instyle-uk-magazine-digital-only-time-inc

Maisey, S. (2017). “In conversation with fashion critic Godfrey Deeny - who has spent 25 years critiquing the industry.” Lifestyle, November 11, 2017. Retrieved from https://www.thenational.ae/lifestyle/in-conversation-with-fashion-critic-godfrey-deeny-who-has-spent-25-years-critiquing-the-industry-1.674746

MEAA. (2018). MEAA Journalist Code of Ethics. Retrieved from https://www.meaa.org/meaa-media/code-of-ethics/

Millerson, G. (1964). The Qualifying Associations: A Study of Professionalization. London: Routledge and Paul.

Nygren, G. (2014).Multiskilling in the Newsroom: De-skilling or Re-skilling of Journalistic Work? The Journal of Media Innovations 1 (2): 75-96. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5617/jmi.v1i2.876

Roy Morgan. (2018). Australian Magazine Readership, 12 months to June 2018. Retrieved from http://www.roymorgan.com/industries/media/readership/magazine-readership

Wang, C. & Stivers, V. (2018). Inside The Fake News Campaign To Smear Russia's Biggest Fashion Influencers. The Refinery, May 7, 2018. Retrieved from https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/05/198267/fake-news-russian-it-girls-miroslava-duma

[mhboroson]

“World Without Ghosts”

(An essay by Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong, written around 1943 or 44)

Accepting an invitation from the University of Chicago, I went there to work on my book “Earthbound China.” After I arrived, a secretary showed me to room 502 on the fifth floor of the Social Sciences Building and asked politely if it would do for an office. When I noticed the name “Robert Park” in the brass card-holder on the door, the alert secretary hurried to say, “I was waiting until you decided before putting your name up.”

“Don’t change the name. I like that one,” I told her. But she could hardly have understood why.

Robert Park had been my teacher. He came to Yenching University [in Peking in 1932] when I was an undergraduate there. Though I was just an ignorant student, I absolutely worshipped him—except for the old man’s perverse insistence on teach­ing at 7 a.m. and never missing a class or even coming late, which meant I had to skip breakfast to get there on time. For better or worse, his course determined the direc­tion my life has taken in the ten-odd years since, and to him should go the credit or the blame. The founding father of the Chicago school of sociology, he maintained that sociology should take as its subject understanding human nature. Perhaps I liked him because he wanted me to read novels and not sociology textbooks. More than reading novels, he urged going and personally experiencing different kinds of life. Ten years later I still follow this teaching. On this trip to the United States, I had hoped to go hear his classes again. But I was busy with other things, and it was half a year before I got to Chicago, and the old professor had already gone south to escape the Chicago cold. And so it happened that I was put in his office.

This arrangement, whether accidental or not, was full of meaning for me. I had been an unremarkable student in Professor Park’s class, a matter for some regret, and ten years later, though still without achievements, I remained eager for a word of praise from the teacher. I was secretly happy that, sitting in the chair he had used, I would surely absorb something of his spirit, and hoped to write a book that would compensate for my earlier failure to be worthy of the pains he had taken in rising so early all those mornings to teach us. There is here a sort of historical causal connection: because of a past memory the present takes on a significance greater than anything in the current situation. My strong desire to have the name left on the door arose out of a need for concrete, living, moving history. I felt that if the nameplate, the old books lining the walls, even the air in the room were not disturbed, then, surrounded by this lingering past, perhaps in a few months I would see a draft of “Earthbound China” on the table. But if these were disturbed, all might be lost.

This, in fact, is the “tradition” of which I have written in an earlier article. Tradi­tion need not be an obstacle to innovation. True, it has its bad side. When old peo­ple, with the various privileges and respect that have been accorded them in the past, prevent any change in the status quo, that is a bad aspect of tradition. But it is also undeniable that everything new is born out of that which is old. These ties of kinship should not be obliterated, and recognizing them gives to the connection between old and new the significance of succession and continuity. If we can develop this kind of feeling for history, I believe the world and mankind will be richer. When we go on a trip into the country, we can enjoy the scenery merely as a present phe­nomenon; if we have left there earlier memories worth recalling, this can bring on a pleasant nostalgia; and if this is a historical site, our feelings arc further enriched because of what others did there. People do not live only in the here and now; life is not just a string of moments. We need history, for it is a wellspring of inspiration. When we take tradition in this way, that is another aspect of it.

Sometimes I think the world is very strange. We in the Orient accept tradition, but what we seize on is its bad side. The West seems to want to disregard it, with the result that the good side is lost too.

Of course, it is not entirely true that Westerners purposely disregard tradition. For the most part, they all know much more about the history of their own coun­try than I do. Every child who goes to New York has to go gaze at the huge Statue of Liberty and then on the way back visit the church that George Washington fre­quented. In Washington, D.C., there are the hundred-foot-tall Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and now the Jefferson Memorial. Buildings just a few hundred years old are preserved as historical monuments. On a personal level, Americans keep diaries and write autobiographies. I have elsewhere described how on Thanksgiving the year before last my host brought out a big pile of his fathers diaries. At Professor Redficlds house, Mrs. Park especially wanted me to see the pictures of Redfield ancestors in a corner of the living room. On Professor Ogburns staircase wall were neatly lined up generation after generation of ances­tor portraits. Perhaps because at a dinner party I had once expressed the view that Americans lack any feeling for history, all the friends I came into contact with were particularly anxious to correct my misapprehension by showing me their concern for their ancestors. All this is true, but still I feel their regard for tradition is to a greater or lesser extent conscious, intellectual, and artificial. It is not the same as ours. The reason I feel this way is that I have found Americans do not have ghosts.

When tradition is concrete, when it is a part of life, sacred, something to be feared and loved, then it takes the form of ghosts. This is equivalent to the state­ment by Durkheim that God is the representation of social cohesion. As I write this, I feel in my heart that Chinese culture in its essence is rather beautiful. To be able to live in a world that has ghosts is fortunate. Here let me relate some personal experiences.

When I was a boy, because the family was in decline ... we lived in a big old building of which at least half was closed off awaiting uncles who seldom came home, and in another part of which were dark rooms that had never seen sun­light. ... In these dark and desolate rooms, there were more places for ghosts than for people This environment was already sufficiently frightening, but in addi­tion not a day passed when people did not talk of ghosts to scare or amuse us children I am not exaggerating when I say that to a child like me brought up in a small town, people and ghosts were equally concrete and real....

Because I grew up half in a world of ghosts, I was particularly interested in them. Gradually my fear changed to curiosity and then to attraction, to the point that I even feel a little sorry for people raised in a world without ghosts. The thing that felt most strange to me during almost a year of living in America was that no one told me any stories of ghosts. I do not want to overpraise such a world, but I will admit that children who grow up in it are more comfortable than we and do not have to live with fear in their hearts all day long. But perhaps there is a heavy price for this, a price I would be unwilling to pay.

The beginning of my gradual change in attitude toward ghosts occurred the year my grandmother died. One day not long after her death, I was sitting in the front room looking toward her bedroom. It was almost noon. Normally at that time Grandmother would go to the kitchen to see how the lunch preparations were coming along, soon after which lunch would be served. This had been a familiar sight for me, and after her death the everyday pattern was not changed. Not a table or chair or bed or mat was moved. Every day close to noon I would feel hungry. To my subconscious mind the scene was not complete without Grand­mothers regular daily routine, and so that day I seemed to see her image come out of her bedroom once more and go into the kitchen.

If it was a ghost I saw, it was the first one in my life. At the time I felt nothing unusual, for the scene was so familiar and right. Only a little later when I remem­bered that Grandmother was dead did I feel upset—not frightened, but sad the way one feels at a loss that should not have occurred. I also seemed to realize that a beautiful scene, once it had existed, would always be. The present loss was just a matter of separation in time, and this separation I felt could be overcome. An inex­tinguishable revelation had struck; the universe showed a different structure. In this structure our lives do not just pass through time in such a way that a moment in time or a station in life once past is lost. Life in its creativity changes the absolute nature of time: it makes past into present—no, it melds past, present, and future into one inextinguishable, multilayered scene, a three-dimensional body. This is what ghosts are, and not only did I not fear them, I even began to yearn for them.

I cannot get used to people today who know only the present moment. To take this moment as [the sum of] existence is a delusion. Our every act contains within it all the accumulated history from the beginning of the universe right down to the present, and this every act will determine the destiny of endless future generations. If the present moment, fragmentary, abstract, false, is taken for life, this life will necessarily be shallow and base and even empty—since the moment cannot last, one might as well indulge oneself and revel, for when the instant is gone what is left?

American children hear no stories about ghosts. They spend a dime at the “drugstore” to buy a “Superman” comic book. This “Superman” is an all-knowing, resourceful, omnipotent hero who can overcome any difficulty. Let us leave aside the question of what kind of children this teaching produces; the point worth not­ing here is that Superman is not a ghost. Superman represents actual capabilities or future potential, while ghosts symbolize belief in and reverence for the accumu­lated past. As much as old Mrs. Park, trying to lessen the distance between East and West, might lead me over to the corner of the living room to look at faded photographs, it was the Redfields little boy who showed me the heart of American culture, and it lay in Superman, not ghosts.

How could ghosts gain a foothold in American cities? People move about like the tide, unable to form permanent ties with places, to say nothing of other people. I have written elsewhere of the gap between generations. It is an objective social fact that when children grow up they no longer need parental protection, and the reflection of this in the family is childrens demand for independence. Once when I was chatting at a friends house, his daughter sat with us chain-smoking. The father happened to remark that it was senseless to smoke like that, but she paid no heed and afterwards told me that she was eighteen, it was none of the old mans business, smoking was her own affair. Eighteen is an important age for a girl; after that her parents need not support her, but neither can they tell her what to do.

I also know an old professor whose son teaches in the same university as he but lives apart from him—which might be all right, but he seldom even visits. During the war they could not get a maid and it made my heart sick to see the professors wife, old and doddering, serving a guest coffee with shaking hands.

When I was staying at the Harvard Faculty Club, I noticed sitting at the same table every morning a white-haired old gentleman who lived upstairs and who from his looks was not long for this world. Whenever I saw him I felt outraged. He must have been a famous professor who had educated countless people and worked hard for society. Now old and failing, cast out of the world into this building, with­out relatives even to care for him much less give him pleasure, he might as well have been dead. One day he said softly to the waitress, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it down the stairs tomorrow.” Afterwards I asked her where his home was, but she did not know the answer and only shook her head. In America, when children grow up they have their own homes, where their parents are mere guests.

Outside the family there is certainly much social intercourse, but dealings with people are always in terms of appointments. On my office desk is an appointment calendar marked in fifteen-minute intervals with a space for a persons name beside each. Apart from business there are various kinds of gatherings, but if you go to one you will find it is no more than social pleasantries: a few words with this person, a few words with that one—it is hard even to remember their names. I cannot say all Americans pass their lives like this. But I once asked a fairly close acquaintance how many friends he had whom he could drop in on at any time without a previous engagement. Counting on his fingers, he did not fill one hand. In fact, unless they have business or an engagement they spend most of their time at home, where they don’t much like to be disturbed by guests. At any rate, friends warned me not to go barging in on people all the time.

With interpersonal ties like these, naturally they seldom see ghosts after death. Moreover their movements are so easy and they have contacts with so many peo­ple, that there seldom comes about the kind of relationship I had with my grand­mother, living interdependently for a long time, repeating the same scenes, so that these scenes came to seem an inalterable natural order. Always being on the move dilutes the ties between people and dissolves the ghosts.

As to attachments to places, that is another thing that made me uncomfortable in America. Not the beds and mattresses, for I believe there are none more com­fortable than those of the Americans, but the constant moving around that year was the cause of my discomfort. I visited many places, but when I think of them now it seems I went nowhere, for I felt no particular attachment to any place as all were alike, differing only a little in the height of the buildings. The cities are all more or less the same, at least for a traveler: you get off the train and your bags are taken by a black man who everywhere wears the same type of cap (you may not encounter this kind of man, but you will not encounter any other); you take a similar taxi to a similar hotel—no matter what hotel, if you have stayed anywhere once, you will not feel it unfamiliar. The hotel rooms are all comparable, some big­ger and some smaller, but none lacking a bathroom, a cold-water tap, a Simmons mattress, and nice stationery and envelopes. Since it is the same everywhere, you can never take away a particular impression from any hotel.

Hotels are not exceptions; it is basically the same with homes in American cit­ies. Moving house is no more difficult than changing hotels; a phone call is all it takes. Move here, move there—the houses are about the same. In New York I thought of renting a house and visited ten possibilities in succession. In the end I said to the friend who was accompanying me, “Why bother to see each one? Why not draw straws?” Moving here and there dilutes peoples ties with houses.

Whenever I return to my native place, I go to see the house I lived in as a child. I have lots of questions about the tung tree and the loquat tree; the tung tree still has my name carved on it. In London, where people do not move so frequently, I still remember where I lived on Lower Station Road and Ridge Avenue [?]; while I was in the United States I heard that the old buildings there had been bombed, and it made me feel bad for several days. In America, at least for me, no house has yet produced such a feeling.

I cannot get used to the way lights illuminate all the parts of a room either. Liv­ing in such rooms gives you a false sense of confidence that this is all of the world, that there is no more to reality than what appears clearly and brightly before your eyes. I feel the attitude of Westerners toward the unknown is very different from that of Orientals. They think of the unknown as static, waiting for people to mine it like an ore—not only not frightening, but a resource for improving life in the future. They are very self-assured. We Orientals feel some measure of reverence for the unknown; our reverence for fate makes us content with our lot, makes us aware of human limitations, and keeps our eyes fixed on the humanly attainable. I cannot assert that this attitude is ultimately due to the form of the houses we live in as children, but I believe that my own early feelings of uncertainty toward the big kitchen and the back garden and my fright toward the closed-off rooms have still not dissipated, but only expanded into my view of the universe. If many people in traditional China had similar experiences, then these experiences may have deter­mined the basic structure of our traditional attitudes toward people and things.

In a world without ghosts, life is free and easy. American eyes can gaze straight ahead. But still I think they lack something and I do not envy their lives.

 M. H. Boroson here. I don’t agree with everything in this piece, but I find it fascinating. I used a passage from it at the opening of The Girl with Ghost Eyes, and I wanted to share the rest of Dr. Fei’s brilliant essay.

[elliottelderfmp]

Indirect realism: Why I’m starting to doubt everything

RESEARCH :  Locke J and Yolton J, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1st edn, Dent 1974)

Okay so we ditch direct realism, perceptual variation and illusions obviously show that our minds eye view the world differently to the way it exists. Johnathon Locke then presented a new realist view (a standpoint that the external world is real) that in theory should overcome the issues with direct realism: Indirect or representational realism.

Indirect realism states that our eyes are less like windows to the minds eye but more like cameras, indirectly sending a feed of information (sense data) to our minds eye (imagine a mini person in our heads watching from a screen of the camera feed).

This overcomes issues with the disconnect between perception and existence in the external world as all that is happening is that our cameras are showing a disturbed or distorted feed. This means that the sense data itself is although an incorrect representation of the world, we cannot deny that the representation exists, its infallible because we are all experiencing sense data, its just that sometimes some properties that are being represented are inaccurate, such as Descartes example of the oar bent in water.

Locke splits this sense data into primary and secondary qualities - primary being those that exist in the object in the external world such as size, shape and solidity, indubitable perceived by everyone in the same way (debatable), Secondary on the contrary also exist in the object yet hold powers to cause certain sense data to occur, so the smell of an orange say is a secondary quality. These secondary qualities have room for error and explain away the problems of direct realism.

But it doesn’t really matter.

Taking the indirect realist approach then takes us down a rather depressing path and this is a chain of arguments strung together to pretty much conclude we as people/minds/brains can’t know anything for certain:

The past

“Yesterday I had toast”

Nope. According to Descartes waves of doubt we can’t be certain our minds are giving us correct information as we have no proof that an evil demon is not existing in our heads tampering with thoughts memories etc

Logic

“Two plus two = four”

Same as above how do we know this isn't being tampered.

COUNTER TO WAVES OF DOUBT: COGITO

the fact I am able to question a demon in my head shows that I have a mind able to think and use logic surely?

No: Hume - Using the process of doubting only shows that “something is being thought” not necessarily that we as mind exist as a thinking thing able to perform logic and the past, we never can KNOW identity only thoughts (which may not even be true).

The future

“Tomorrow I shall have toast”

No:

Hume on causation and induction (paraphrased)

We cannot predict or use induction (make a logical leap) to guess anything due to our lack of perception of causation. 

e.g: Someone hits a billiard ball (ball 1) into another and the other ball (ball two) moves.

We do not perceive ball 1 to CAUSE ball two to move but instead we only perceive ball one moving into ball two and the separate event of ball two moving. Now ofcourse one could repeat it, hit ten thousand ball ones into ball twos and this would cause us to make the connection that one event (ball 1 moving) leads to another event (ball 2 moving) however we never perceive the cause and effect, we simply create that link in our minds. Thus we cannot KNOW the cause and effect as a necessary certain truth : therefore we cannot know or predict anything in the future as certain knowledge.

Other people have minds

Unless one takes a religious standpoint (god would not lie to us) then we have no proof that other human beings have minds.

The external world

“Toast exists infront of me in the external world”

No proof the external world exists, Descartes waves of doubt, how do we know an evil demon isn't tricking us and our perceptions, even if we perceive the world indirectly, so what if we have a camera feed to our minds, that doesn't show that the camera isn't simply showing us trick images that hold no representation of the external world

So what do we know exactly?

So all this leaves is current sense impressions or sense data that our minds eye views, whether this correlates to an external world we have NO clue. And note, this isn't all sense impression we have ever viewed, as we have shown memory isn’t something we know or trust, eg we may have just come into existence this exact second and every memory you have ever had up to this point is an illusion.

So the only thing we know for absolute certain is everything we are currently perceiving to the exact millisecond is happening, nothing before, nothing by the time I have finished typing this very word, nothing I do after, all we can know for certain is “my mind is seeing this thing right now”.