That depends on how broadly you want to define dualism, I suppose. It can sound like dualism anytime you talk about the difference between subject and object.Speaker to Animals wrote:Hanarchy Montanarchy wrote:Being charitable, GCFs argument isn't contradictory, it is just a sort of clumsy description of phenomenalism, but not necessarily dualism.
I'd argue most forms of naive phenomenalism that you will encounter today are really forms of dualism. When you unpack it and start to try to untangle what these people try to say, it always comes down to something like a man in a box who can only experience sense data, sort of like Plato's cave in which he is sitting in his cave watching sense data that is derived somehow from the external world. Aside from -- again -- representing a category mistake of confusing sensing with sense data, that really does amount to a form of dualism in which the mind is like a little man locked in a cage (the body) and is disconnected from the objective world, only able to perceive or interact with it through sense data, which they usually define as a totally constructed reality that has little if anything to do with the real world. This might not be expressed in religious language, but it's essentially the same thing as the kinds of dualism espoused by gnostics.
Even legitimate phenomenalism is a ridiculous set of propositions that turn an act into an object, and confuse the perceiving with an object of perception.
It's that same big mistake carried over from idealism.
I think the point is: why do we talk about the subjective as merely sense, and, therefore, less 'real' than objective reality? The idealist/phenomenalist answer is that we shouldn't. What is the essential (transcendental, if you're Kant) object-ness of an apple beyond what we sense about it? It can be very hard to answer that question, and if you insist there is a transcendental 'thingy-ness' of an apple that can't be accessed with sense data, it starts to sound an awful lot like dualism.
My inclination is to treat this as a language problem more than an epistemology or metaphysics problem.
