Excellent - thank you David. I'm familiar with Gibson but hadn't made the link with 2nd-order properties. I'll check out the other articles you suggest too.

I will look at some work on social affordances. I can imagine that social synchronisation generates some interesting feelings, but I'm not sure these are second-order properties (at least not in the sense that I mean). 

I am not at all sure that I understand your question. However, it is well known that  an object that may appear to have a very specific and bright shade of red in direct sunlight will look quite different under differing light conditions. But  this does not seem to affect the assessment of the object's colour by an observer. Although, it can be shown that the colour that observer experiences is continually changing with changes of context, this does not seem to alter the observers conviction that the object is (a particular shade of) red. 

This seems to me to beg the question as to whether we are observing first or second order properties. language does not seem to discriminate between a 'red' object that appears to be brown in heavy shade. Or the same object that appears bright scarlet in direct sunlight. In both cases an observer will assess (subconsciously) the colour of the object by taking into account the context in which it is being observed.

From this observation it might be argued that no objects have specific shades of any colour and that all shades of red are context dependent.

This might suggest the possibility that the experience of coloured objects is primarily the observation of a second order property. 

http://www.moillusions.com/colored-squares-illusion/

Thanks - I'll need to think more about how colour constancy fits in with this.

Sorry the question's unclear. Another way of putting it is this: are there cases where perception attributes a certain *kind* of property to an object but where it doesn't specify any particular property of that kind e.g. can we perceive an object as having colour without perceiving it as having any particular colour?  

Tricky,

It is probably a weak example, but, how about this:

Many people who have a sophisticated appreciation of music are aware of the fact that when they first hear a piece of complex music they may not 'get it'. However, if they persist then harmonic relations within the piece gradually become apparent and finally the piece becomes 'realized' and appreciated - even loved. Clearly this indicates a difference in how the music is perceived. at different times 

We can all recognize music but when the music is from a different culture it is often difficult ( if not impossible) to fully appreciate.

Might this be an example of what you are looking for?

I think it could be. What would be really good for me is if we could perceive a harmonic property *without* perceiving the notes the constitute the harmony. That might look unlikely, but there is data suggesting we can perceive the average size of a set of circles without perceiving the size of each individual circle in the set, which is quite similar to the music perception I'm proposing.

Yes, functional properties in general might be good examples for me. Thanks.

I'm not familiar with Foucault's concepts - I'll look into that. Thank you again!

What about the momentary perceptual bias that helps us when we must classify objects? Clear objects vs. dark objects, e. g.

If second-order properties have to do with this, then those properties could be grasped early in development, without need of metaphysical sophistication. 

It's definitely best if I can find examples of properties that can be perceived early in development - more sophisticated properties would complicate things. I haven't thought about how bias affects things. If this does need to be described in terms of perception of second-order properties, that would be a dramatic result since perceptual bias is ubiquitous.

Yes, Tom. The perceptual bias that I am focusing on would be a momentary affordance (David rightly cited Gibson). E. g., when are picking the best objects to throw against a particular type of animal.

"Ad hoc categories" (see L. Barsalou)

Perception is for action: Nowadays this classic issue is increasingly highlighted.

Tom,

I'm slightly confused by your question. Take an animal. One of its properties is aggressiveness. Then consider the animal's aggressiveness. One of its properties is diurnal variation. Then consider the diurnal variation. One of its properties is variability with maturity. And so it goes on and on.

Warren

Teresa - I see what you mean. That could work for me.

Warren, I think properties *do* go on and on in a hierarchy like this. It's easy to think about properties of properties. My question is whether we can perceive them.

Tom

 As far as our understanding of the universe and the dynamics and behaviors of matters in it, so far we are capable of observing and empirically verifying that almost all laws of nature (fundamental laws of physics ) are of second order. From the axioms of mathematics which have basis of reality,  these equations are not merely of perceptions but results of reality and truth of things.

There might be invisible behaviors of things which require higher order mathematical descriptions when our deep understanding of nature grows. For instance we can describe the motion of a moving vehicle completely by second order differential equation, but the invisible and very subliminal behavior of such a motion called jerk is described by a third order differential equation.

This is an example as to how and when we can still find new and more fined behaviors of already known phenomena but completely require higher order descriptions than second order. We only know a very small portion of the grand universe, matters and properties of them as well.  

Better to start with first order properties--take redness- color is neither just out there nor just in here (two common false alternative)--red is the form in which we perceive a certain wave length of light--it is out there as processed in here-what would second order properties be?

Edwin - yes, talking about the second-order property of 'being a colour' does raise problematic questions about the nature of colour. Perhaps that's a reason for me not to use colour as an example.

Dear Tom, I will probably say things of no properties ( of zero order) things of properties (of first order) and things of properties of properties (of second order), so that color is a second order property of a matter of a particular wavelength - a property.

When we say things are of properties of order at most two, we mean including properties of zero order, first order and second order. For instance in a rectilinear moving object distance is a zero order property, velocity is a first order property and acceleration, a second order property of time. 

I do not see any problem--what is the problem? I explained the solution--

Edwin - saying that red is the form in which we experience certain wavelengths of light doesn't necessarily give us the right account of the nature of colour. One might instead be a realist about colours (they're just out there in the world as they seem), regard colours as secondary properties (colours are the properties that cause this kind of sensation) or any number of other views. I guess that's a headache I want to avoid. Since there's no uncontroversial theory of colour, I might be better off sticking with properties we have a better grip on.

I have been wondering whether Kripke's discussion of (Frege's) second-level concepts, about existence and/or instantiation of predicates (Russell etc etc) in his 1973 lectures on Reference and Existence (published, as you know, only in 2013, OUP, roughly pp. 5-15) has any relevance for your problem?

That's a very promising idea - I'll look into that. Again, I think I'll run into the problem that perception isn't sophisticated enough to represent this kind of property, but it's certainly worth a look.

Dejenie, thanks for that. I'm unfamiliar with how these distinctions are used in physics so that's very helpful. I'll think about how to apply that to my research.

In my previous messages, I have focused on the implicit, preconceptual way towards second-order properties. How can these elements become explicit? I don't possess the answer, but I copy the following lines:

"Two opposed comparatives can be projected onto a single object. The centres of each of the comparatives only have to be on both sides of the object described. B is taller than A but shorter than C. What is happening here? At this point, the height has now lost completely its connection with the positive feature. Of course, in the simple comparative, there was no longer necessarily any positive evaluation (“taller than Juanita” could designate a reasonably short stature) but, in any case, ‘tall’ in this comparative is still understood positively. Now, in contrast, in the series of three terms, B is at one and the same time taller and shorter, and, consequently, ‘tall’ is now designating a mere dimension, height, made up of the continuum of all possible degrees of comparison, from least tall to most tall. Having thus reached the dimension, the need to quantify has now been sketched out. “Don’t tell me if he is tall or short; tell me what height he is.” Naturally, the true end of this story, that is, the stunning result which is quantitative science, had to wait for favourable social conditions, but it is clear that the key to such deployment is present here, in this cognitive-linguistic resource." (Bejarnao, 2011, p. 352)

Teresa - your example could be very useful. If we perceive B as taller than A but shorter than C, then I could describe it like this: we perceptually represent B as having the second-order property of having a first-order height property that is greater than the first-order height property of A but less than the first-order height property of C. This would allow us to perceive the relative height of objects without having to perceptually attribute them any absolute first-order height.

David - my aim is to come up with as many different examples as possible rather than focusing on just one area. That way I can build a cumulative case for the thesis that we can perceive second-order properties.

I see a colour.  I know that it is a colour.  But, I don't know what actually it is. 

Tom -- you seem to take it for granted that whereas the most specific colors are first-order properties, the determinable color must be a second-order property. In the paper "Determinables as Universals" (The Monist 1/2000: 101-21) I have argued that both the most specific colors and the determinable color are first-order properties. If so conceived, one has to claim, as I also do, that in perceptions color is always and necessarily only part of the background of a perception. I think all perceptions contain a foreground-background duality. 

Ingvar, thanks for this comment. I'll definitely look at your article (I'm interested in the determinable/determinate distinction for other reasons too). I want to say that being Crimson is a first-order property and that being red is a first-order property. I also want to say that the first-order property of being Crimson itself has the second-order property of being a kind of red property. I don't know if this is in tension with what you say about colour and determinables - I'll take a look.

It is in tension. My view is that properties always exist within a (first-order) determinable-determinate distinction, where 'determinate' means most specific determinate possible, and 'determinable' means determinable that has an "ontological gap" to other determinables. On this account, the word 'red' refers to a disjunction of determinates of the ontological (first-order) determinable color.  

That makes sense. Perceptual representation of disjunctive properties might also be interesting - in fact, most of the potential examples of second-order property perception are probably more easily described as examples of disjunctive property perception. Thanks!

My pleasure!

I thought I had answered this: red is the form in which one experiences light of a certain wavelength (or range)- so it is neither just out there nor just in here but the form in which a certain type of cs. perceives an attribute of objects in the external world--I do not see why it is a big puzzle???

Dear Edwin, to me you are not discussing the relationship between determinates and determinables that I focussed on. Such a relationship exists both in properties in conscious perceptions (e.g. crimson - color) and in properties in the mind-independent world (e.g. 1.539 kg - mass).

Ingvar: Sorry but I have no idea what you mean,

Read the entry "Determinates vs. Determinables" in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=Determinables

Tom,

What do you see?  My intention here is to demonstrate the importance of collateral experience in perceiving the possibility of second-order properties:

“..’Abduction’…is the mysterious logical process whereby representations are set in correspondence with contexts.  The mysterious part of the process is that the correspondences should be possible in the first place…

Or, as Peirce put it, a sign is the sort of thing “which in knowing, we know something more”.”

~John W. Oller, Jr., “Semiotic theory and language acquisition”

“We wish to reason or describe something in the target domain.  Rather than doing so directly, we map a basic concept in the target domain into a corresponding basic concept in the source domain”

~Hobbs, “Metaphor and Abduction”

For more, please see:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_the_best_example_of_Peircean_abduction

David, but we can also explore explicitly what the second-order property is, for this case. 

Do you agree with my placement of the purple lines or should I have marked the bright percept, instead?  The consequences of reasoning by the purple line (perceiving second-order properties) instead of the bright percept (M51 spiral) will be quite different for the immediate case but the final interpretant (at the end of inquiry) will be the same. 

David, I agree with a lot of what you say but the question was about perceiving second-order properties, not simply perceiving. I would also mention that it might be about perceiving second-order properties correctly and having to justify to others.

May I suggest reading Peirce, who dove deeper and formalized the ideas ("whole series of mental performances between the notice of the wonderful phenomenon and the acceptance of the hypothesis") you touched upon?

Here's a little taste from Paavola, "Peircean abduction: instinct, or inference?"

"For Peirce himself, these various aspects of abductive instinct are more or less meant as alternative ways for describing the same phenomenon, but it is useful to distinguish these characterizations. I want to discern three main varieties of naturalistic abductive instinct; a) ‘adaptive instinct’, b) ‘perceptual insight’, and c) ‘guessing with nonconscious clues’. These varieties overlap each other, but if differently emphasized, they lead to quite different interpretations of the proposed abductive instinct...

… b) In his famous, 1903 Pragmatism lectures Peirce likens the guessing instinct to insight and perception. So on this approach, the guessing instinct is a form of a ‘perceptual insight’ rather than instinct as such. Peirce himself describes the relationship between insight and instinct:

"It appears to me that the clearest statement we can make of the logical situation the freest from all questionable admixture is to say that man has a certain Insight, not strong enough to be oftener right than wrong, but strong enough not to be overwhelmingly more often wrong than right, into the Thirdnesses, the general elements, of Nature. An Insight, I call it, because it is to be referred to the same general class of operations to which Perceptive Judgments belong."

_______

What is so intriguing about the example I posted above is that the purple line represents the phi spiral, a shape that contains a mathematical constant, the phi ratio, and has been called by some as a symbol of perfect growth.  So, do we have a natural instinct to recognize this perfect of all natural living forms? 

There are clearly enough reasons to think so if one believes anything one reads on the internet but what about those with the appropriate scientific attitude?  Would they perceive the correct second-order properties?  What are the second order properties for this context?

Sorry I've been away from this thread for a while. A few replies:

David: I am interested specifically in conscious perception - that's the area I'm working on. Unconscious perception of affordances are important and interesting, but I'm asking about the kinds of property we can experience. I'm still not convinced that properties that emerge from interactions between the agent and the environment are second-order properties. To me they're first-order relational properties - that is properties of the agent and environment together - not properties-of-properties.

Jerry: thanks for your example. I think an appreciation of how context influences perception is crucial, but I'm not quite sure whether this should be described in terms of second-order properties. The image exemplifies many patterns, but we pick out one pattern at the expense of others. There are interesting questions to be asked about why we do this, and whether there's such as thing as the 'right' pattern to pick out, but when we pick out a pattern this is a property of the image not a property of a property of the image (which is what I'm looking for).

Tom, may I ask you to explain yourself regarding how picking out the "right" pattern is a property of the image and not a property of a property of the image?

For instance, would you say that seeing the correct pattern within Autostereograms are because it's the property of the image?  How could that be if it requires a viewer to know how to look?

What if there is no correct pattern to be seen in it?  That you only see a circle by crossing your eyes...but that circle only represents the top of a cylinder in all the autostereograms that I select to show you but you have no awareness of this information.  Would a person who recognizes this be said to be seeing a property of a property?

Jerry - in the autostereogram case the pattern we see might not be an actual property of the image. Rather, it's a property we represent the image to have that it does not. That doesn't make it a property of a property.

I find it obvious that "by nature" there exist BOTH conscious and non-conscious perception. They can be studied in isolation from each other, but they can also be studied together. The latter kind of research has led to remarkable inventions in the realm of medicine; think for instance of the implants that can make deaf people hear..

David - I'm with Ingvar. It's hard to deny that there is conscious perception. The processes the underwrite conscious perception are doubtless unconscious, but that's another matter. I appreciate you're approaching this from a different theoretical background though.

I totally agree with Tom. The existence of conscious perception is self evident and the processes that give rise to it (in the brain) are unconscious.

Hi again,

I think your question is a very good one but am still confused as to what you mean by second-order properties.  Would you mind using a more familiar example?  What’s required to go from one level to another?  

For instance, in Watson’s book, “The Double Helix”, he explains the moment he saw Photograph 51 and how it affected his view on the reality of the double helix:

“The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race. The pattern was unbelievably simpler than those obtained previously ("A" form). Moreover, the black cross of reflections which dominated the picture could arise only from a helical structure…With the B form, however, mere inspection of its Xray picture gave several of the vital helical parameters.”

Also, in the Nature paper, they state, “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” 

Is a second-order perception contained in either of the above two instances, i.e., double helix or copying mechanism?  Others have seen that photo but did not have the same response.  Although this doesn't get to your question about whether there are people doing research on second-order perception, how does one do research on it without knowing more clearly what it is?  Am I still confused?

Tom,

May I suggest some simple examples that come to mind

What about the silverness of a mirror? When I look at the mirror I perceive it as 'being silver' yet all I see are the colours of my own face.

What about the fragility of a meringue? I perceive that the meringue is fragile but there is no fragility that I perceive, at least until I crush it.

What about the strength of the wind? I perceive that the wind is strong as I see trees bow down but there is no strength that I can perceive if I am indoors.

Maybe these will not do the job you need, but I would be interested to hear.

I believe that that is are confusions in Dr. Edwards' post-- first, the mirror example:  certain objects reflect light and thereby other objects-reflectiveness  is an attribute--all entities have attributes that determine they they do (e.g., flame boils water;). Second, you do not perceive fragility; that is an attribute.  Third, wind itself is an existent that you perceive by kinesthesis. It's temperature and strength are attributes. Everyday objects are perceived directly. Attributes are discovered conceptually by abstracting attributes from objects; attributes have no independent existence.

Now there is a related issue about the metaphysical status of sensory qualities. Consider the color attribute "red." Redness as an experience is neither just out there nor just in the mind.  It is an interaction. Red is the form in which we experience light  waves of a certain wave length.  Red, of course, is always an attribute of some entity

In most of my dreams there are colors, sometimes red. Where is then your postulated interaction between my brain and the brain-external world? And where are the light waves? 

I guess that Edwin has highlighted the subtext of my post: that if you play philosophical word games with the physiology of perception without anchoring concepts in what is known about how perception works at the neural level you can go round and round for ever. I might have asked Tom what he meant by 'property', 'perceive' and, most particularly, 'we' but his question seemed quite neat in that questions posed like this sometimes bring to light some of the counterintuitive aspects of perception that we other wise think obey our intuitions.

What about size as a secondary property? There may be a ruffled patch on the surface of a pond where a puff of wind is passing. The ruffling is a property of the water and the size is a property of the ruffling - its extent. People may feel that is not the right usage of words but as Charles Martin has pointed out, all these words relate to convenient fictions. There is no such thing as an apple holus-bolus, Martin says, and correctly. An apple is a convenient fiction of a collection of dynamic dispositional (physical) units. The apple is not red, but some chemicals in the skin may be - except that ... The only way to say anything sensible is to  work out the detailed physiology.

Size is an attribute--you do not see size as a separate entity--you see objects--how do you grasp size?-- you perceive differences among units perceived as otherwise similar, e.g., oranges--by abstraction you can isolate size. and formulate a means of measuring it-- if an apple is just a fiction then, you could not eat it, buy it or feel it. You could also steal it without penalty--hey offiicer I did not steal anything--this apple is not real--what is the role of physiology? The brain processes sensory input unconsciously--awareness of the world is the result--not knowing how it all works at any given time in history does not invalidate the realit6y of perception--it was real in Aristotle's time and it is real  now--.

Jonathan, I apologize if I come across as being forward but would you mind clarifying for me;  the detailed physiology while doing what?  Being engaged in recognizing secondary perception? 

But the nature of this secondary perception is what I am confused about.  That is, if I were to design an experiment, what should the subject be doing, exactly, and what recordings would you expect to match in the next subject and by how much? 

What is a paradigm example of research like this?

Jerry,

Sorry for the confusion. Let me try to clear things up. Example's like Watson seeing the double helix structure in the pattern and (perhaps) seeing the copying mechanism in this would be described in the philosophical literature as 'high-level properties'. The idea is that we see low-level properties such as colours, shapes, sizes, locations and textures but we also (debatably) see more sophisticated properties on top of these. If we could see the property of 'being a copying mechanism' that would be a case of perceiving a high-level property. There's a continuing debate in philosophy about high-level property perception that I'm working on, but the question about second-order properties is a little different.

Second-order properties are properties of properties. First-order properties belong to objects. Second-order properties belong to the properties and not to the objects. So being red is a property of my phone. Being my favourite colour is a property of redness. Since redness is a property, that makes 'being my favourite colour' a second-order property. It's very hard to come up with examples in which we seem to perceive such second-order properties. Indeed, this thread suggests that the examples I thought of don't really work.

Jonathan, Thanks for your post. These are all interesting examples. There's a debate in philosophy about whether we can perceive dispositional properties of objects i.e. an object's property of behaving in a certain way under certain circumstances. The fragility of a meringue is a perfect example of this. I'm tempted to say that when I see the meringue as well as seeing it's colours, shape, texture etc. I experience it as being fragile. Many would disagree with me though.

The strength of the wind would probably be a case of indirect perception. That is I directly perceive something 'A' that reliably indicates 'B' and thereby indirectly perceive 'B'. The question is whether this is literally a case of seeing the strength of the wind, or more a case of seeing certain movements then post-perceptually inferring something about the wind. Again, this is exactly the kind of argument that's hotly contested in the philosophical literature.

I'm not so sure about the silvery mirror case. Perhaps this is a case in which we perceive the superficial properties of an object (in this case, the reflected colour properties) but also see what kind of thing it is beyond its appearance (in this case, being made of silver). As above, there's a question about whether such properties are perceived or whether they're inferred on the basis of perception.

These are all great examples but none of them are the kind of second-order property I'm after. The response to Jerry above explains why.

Btw, since the discussion seems to be getting into philosophy vs. psychology some of you might be interested in this short piece I wrote that went online recently.

http://icog.group.shef.ac.uk/what-can-you-see-some-questions-about-the-content-of-visual-experience/#comments 

Dear Jerry,

I am going to try to answer your question before reading what Tom says which may be a mistake but I do not want to ignore your query.

Perception of 'properties' turns out to be highly counterintuitive and I think Tom's examples may not work because until one has seen just how counterintuitive perception is there is a tendency to hold on to Aristotelian concepts like 'property' in a way that is going to fall to pieces anyway.

The relevant experiments are the sort of things Dale Purves and Beau Lotto describe in their book 'Why We See What We Do'. Using pictures that generate illusory interpretations (even 'optical illusion' is a term that needs unpacking here) you can show that just seeing a red tomato probably involves at least as complicated inferences about properties of properties that Tom has been thinking of. As an example, when I look now I see about fifty flowers of the same shade of yellow. I am not in fact perceiving the yellowness of each flower. I am perceiving that a shade of yellow is being instantiated about fifty times. If I took a photo every flower would come out a different shade - in fact with lots of internal variation. But what I see is 'they are all the same yellow'. And that is not a conscious inference, I have to consciously override it to see different shades.

So actually one can do all this sittin in one's armchair.

Dear TOm,

I am familiar with the debates in philosophy about this. After retiring from medical science I did an MA course with David Papineau at Kings. I am now more or less a full time philosopher - mosty working on Leibniz.

I go with Shoemaker and assume that all properties are dispositional. As a scientist a cannot see what categorical properties could be. The issue is whether a dispositional property has to be perceived through the manifestation that gives it its name. Martin said some sensible things about this and Heil has elaborated. The problem is that 'fragility' is really a property of breaking when struck lightly and not breaking when not struck lightly. So it is always found to be manifest in a way appropriate to the 'partner' situation. But what makes us successful is having unconscious machinery for sensing the manifestations with other partners as well.

Maybe my fifty yellow flowers are of interest? The yellow 'property' has the property of being visible in fifty places. You may want to be Procrustes and fit that back into an Aristotelian categorisation but what I am really trying to say is that perception simply does not work like this. I don't think there is an awful lot of point about arguing whether this or that satisfies some rules laid down by Aristotle when it probably has nothing to do with what actually goes on in perception. I believe that signals sent by nerves in the brain have propositional meanings but I am pretty darn sure that the propositions are not couched in Aristotle's terms in pre-conscious perception pathways.

And I am now looking out at a tree bending in the wind and unless I introspect I do not actually catch any image of what the tree is doing. I perceive 'blowing' directly - as directly as anything else that is. And the silverness of a mirror should not be confused with the adult concept of relectiveness. A child of three knows the colour silver. (Gold is an even better example, gold is not yellow, it is a colour of its own.) The keys in front of me ARE SILVER just as much as the tree is green. There is a hugely complicated sorting system in my posterior cortex that ends up with the output 'oh, for hecks sake just tell those cells in the front to experience the keys as SILVER, they know what that looks like'.

I wil have a look at your paper.

Dear Jonathan,

Sorry - for some reason I'd decided you were a psychologist. Your familiar with all this then. The fragility case is interesting because as you say, the disposition isn't as simple as being disposed to break when struck as such. Perhaps this is best couched in terms of affordances - we perceive the kind of thing the meringue would allow us to do (e.g. pick it up lightly) and the kind of thing it would not allow us to do (e.g. pick it up firmly like we might pick up a cricket ball).

The yellow flowers example is excellent and ties in with my case of statistical properties earlier in the thread - it's not obligatory to describe this in terms of second-order properties but it certainly looks like an option. We can say that we perceptually represent the flowers as each having properties with the property of being the same colour.

Re: Heil and Martin, I strongly agree that science only describes dispositional properties but disagree that this is all there are. Coincidently, I've done a lot of work round this in the past. I take the view that a world of just dispositional properties is incoherent so there must be categorical properties that ground those properties. If science can't describe those properties, then we ought to believe that some things are beyond science, not that those things don't exist. That's a whole other headache though.

With the blowing, I'm inclined to agree but find it hard to argue against those who say 'all I see is bending trees - I can't even imagine what perceiving blowing wind would be like!'. I'm comfortable with the visual system representing silver even if silver isn't a colour in the sense relevant to chromatic science.

I misunderstood your silver example - I thought you were talking about the material not the colour.  

I'll be away from the thread for a while. Let me take this chance to thank everyone for a stimulating discussion. I'm not sure if the idea of second-order property perception has got legs but I feel I understand the matter much better than I did when I started, so thank you!

All the best, Tom

My guess is that you may be right to ditch second order properties as objects of perception. Forget objects. To me all there is are properties of the universe - which are subsets of or constraints on dynamic possibilities. A property of a property is at best a further subset to intersect with the primary subset. So the intersection is again a property of the universe - another subset. And the brain works by picking up all sorts of subsets of dynamic possibility at the same time and letting whatever is salient come through to attention. You could get to a small subset by one step or two and may do both at once. The interesting thing would be the constraints on scope and ordering of subsetting in primary cortices and association areas. All subsets ('properties') will of course be arbitrary divisions useful to the brain rather than anything intrinsic or 'natural'.

I do think that at least it should be possible to identify ordered subset sequences and how they may be 'capsized' from illusion experiments - just as you do Tom with your cow picture. This is the interesting stuff.

Jonathan, thank you for your response.  But what about Watson's comments that "mere inspection of its Xray picture gave several of the vital helical parameters"?  Doesn't that statement suggest at some rational means of approaching the vastness that can be said about some context?  How do we mentally override this constraint in vital helical parameters?

Forget objects? This is philosophical rationalism gone amuck. The perception of objects is our first contact with reality and lies at the base of all our perceptual knowledge!

It is just empirical science, Edwin. Sticking to objects is rationalism - clinging to rational argument in the face of evidence for mistaken premises. The arguments may be valid but they are unsound.

If you want to understand how wires can conduct electricity or how the Italians invented a way to make sorbet using mountain snow and sea salt you need field theory. And field theory tells us that the basic units of the universe are not objects, atoms or particles but asymmetries of dynamic relation. That is a headache if you want to persist with ideas based on the culture we were brought up with and the way the brain has evolved to do its reality accounting but if one is not tied to 'rational' arguments tied to these and looks at the science long enough it all becomes beautifully satisfactory. Categorical, or at least non-dynamic/relational, properties become absurdities. 

Academic philosophy cannot afford to ignore progress in science. What I think we need is the sort of set up we have at the Institute of Philosophy in London with Barry Smith, Colin Blakemore and Ophelia Deroy - philosophy and science proceeding hand in hand with no boundary between. Tom suggests that science is a limited aspect of knowledge but I think that is a mistake. The deeper inferential levels are indistinguishable from any form of knowledge that might be called philosophy.

The fact that objects are composed of atoms etc. does not refute the reality of objects at all. Objects are the form in which we perceive those combinations of particles .Peikoff gives the example of a species of thinking atoms which can perceive  other atoms directly; for them atoms are self evident. But the existence of huge (to them) objects which they cannot perceive would have to be inferred based on scientific discovery.  Both species would reach the same conclusions but would reach them in a different way. Both would perceive reality..

Sounds like a classic case of the tail wagging the dog. There are second order perceptions iff we designate certain perceptions as representing second order properties.

I think Linda has it right.

I like what Linda has to say but it's hard for me to accept that we have complete control over second order perceptions.  If in a blind trial you expose 100 individuals to a percept, and 32 of them say they perceive the same something, yet, there are a billion different things available to perceive, that doesn't seem like a second order perception is something just because we say it is.  There is something that is so, something outside of ourselves, some coherence of relations in the object that is not available to everyone in the same manner.. 

"Such is the method of science. Its fundamental hypothesis, restated in more familiar language, is this: There are Real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those Reals affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as are our relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really and truly are; and any man, if he have sufficient experience and he reason enough about it, will be led to the one True conclusion."

~Peirce

"Peirce took issue with both Dewey and James’ interpretations of pragmatism. He disagreed with Dewey’s perspective concerning the nature of reality. Peirce was a strong idealist—believing that there were in nature ultimate ideal forms of actual and conceptual things (including truth and beauty) and that the properties of these forms were real, whether or not anyone ever came to recognize them as such. Peirce conceived the role of inquiry as a process of unfolding the properties of these forms and eventually reaching an ideal truth. "

~Chiasson

Further argument for the same:

"Where is the real, the thing independent of how we think it, to be found? There must be such a thing, for we find our opinions constrained; there is something, therefore, which influences our thoughts, and is not created by them. We have, it is true, nothing immediately present to us but thoughts. These thoughts, however, have been caused by sensations, and those sensations are constrained by something out of the mind. This thing out of the mind, which directly influences sensation, and through sensation thought, because it is out of the mind, is independent of how we think it, and is, in short, the real."  ~ Peirce

http://www.commens.org/dictionary/term/real