Short essay on dualism, idealism, & materialism as concerns Q: What is a table?

[Mudhammam]

Longer response later but why did you pass over  an Aristotelian approach or Scholatic moderate realism?

We could only choose three and the options were between: 

• Platonism
  
  
• Aristotelian metaphysics
  
  
• Cartesian dualism
  
  
• Idealism
  
  
• Empiricism (materialism)
  
  
• Social Constructivism
  
  

I'm not entirely sure what constitutes Scholastic moderate realism, but do you interpret Aristotle as nestling his twelve categories of being into "Nature as primal substance," as opposed to Kant, who placed his ten categories of understanding firmly in the intellect?  I lean towards Aristotle's idealism... at least, I think it would be fair to call him idealistic on this point.  What says you?

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An empiricist would say the same.  That all knowledge is ultimately derived from sense experience.  Some of that certainly seems to occur in the mind, other bits don't (there is a chemistry to fragrance and we do have noses....).  To say that "it" is not in the object it self seems to miss out on some dependencies of sense apparatus.  Vanillan does contain the chemical compounds we call vanilla as a taste or a smell...we can even be fooled by synthetics.  A chemist can arrange for that experience by recipe.  There seems to be some "mind stuff" happening and some "other stuff" in each example of sensory perception.  The ready made answer to that is any number of representationalist theories.  

"It" is not in the object to the degree that "fragrance" refers to a sensation or quality of a particular smell -- and not simply a process that involves parts (different molecules) in motion, none of which contain in themselves a discernible odor.  Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities still sounds good, even if new data has required that we adjust our understanding since he wrote at the end of the 17th century, as is the case with temperature and kinetic energy, for example.  When you speak of "mind stuff" that interacts with "matter stuff" to allow for experience, are you expressing some form of (property) dualism?

 Don't see why we couldn't.  The properties of the thing-in-itself and our idea of the thing might overlap.  They certainly seem to in the case of vanilla, vanillan, and synthetics.  

With respect to primary qualities, one can more readily agree, despite the very strange claims that are sometimes made about more fundamental aspects of space and time and the like...  It's not clear to me how secondary properties -- take colors -- could exist as properties of objects-in-themselves... which makes it difficult to assess if a question like, "What does world look like from an "objective" POV?" is even meaningful, though in some sense I think it is.

Elaborate?   Why would memories being different, somehow, to sense experience, be a stumbling block for the position or for you?

For all of the reasons that people give to justify dualism.  Leibniz' famous "mill" analogy is one popular example.  He said,

It has to be acknowledged that perception can’t be explained by mechanical principles, that is by shapes and motions, and thus that nothing that depends on perception can be explained in that way either. Suppose this were wrong. Imagine there were a machine whose structure produced thought, feeling, and perception; we can conceive of its being enlarged while maintaining the same relative proportions among its parts, so that we could walk into it as we can walk into a mill. Suppose we do walk into it; all we would find there are cogs and levers and so on pushing one another, and never anything to account for a perception.  So perception must be sought in simple substances, not in composite things like machines. And that is all that can be found in a simple substance—perceptions and changes in perceptions; and those changes are all that the internal actions of simple substances can consist in.

I know the materialist/reductionist response is to argue that Leibniz' and similar POVs are making a category mistake, often comparing "mind" to something like "team spirit" or an entity like a "nation," but that doesn't instill much conviction for me.  Arguments like those that Rawls seemed to make don't really sufficiently account for or explain this so-called "unity of apperception" (i.e consciousness) and all that goes with it -- but maybe that is just MY experience.