Direct Realism

Umberto Eco (1975; 1985) has invariantly maintained that specular images have no semiosic status, basically because they stand in front rather than instead of an object. In his Kant and the Platypus (1997), Eco returns offering reasons to exclude specular images from signs, and definitely classifies mirrors as visual prosthetic devices. In this paper I argue that Eco is partly right and partly wrong. He is right inasmuch as he claims that seeing an object in a mirror must count as a case of seeing that object rather than as a case of seeing a sign of that object (or, a sign standing for a propositional content about that object). The only reason why we should agree with Eco on this point, however, is that otherwise we would be forced to admit that also when we see the object in normal visual perception, with no mirror involved, what we really see is a sign. But then Eco is wrong because he does not acknowledge that, although mirror phenomena do have no semiosic status per se, they may acquire it by taking advantage of independent sign-functions – thus coming to be part of what I call parasiticly semiosic phenomena. Specifically, since an object that is visually perceived in a mirror may appear to have some spatial or topological properties that the real object does not possess, it is sufficient for the mirror phenomenon to exploit an independent sign-function whose expressions admit spatial or topological properties among their distinctive traits in order for it to become fully (though parasiticly) semiosic.

The question whether God knows particular individuals has traditionally attracted the attention of Islamic scholars: Does the perishability of worldly individuals entail problems about the perishability of God's corresponding knowledge? Can one eternally know that Zayd will arrive tomorrow to the city? In this paper, I systemically and historically analyze (1) how post-Avicennian philosophers distinguished between two pre-Avicennian kalām views on whether such knowledge is eternal or perishable; (2) how they regarded Avicenna's famous theory that God knows particulars qua universals as connected to the pre-Avicennian kalām debate; (3) and how the authors such as Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210) and Šihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191) attempted to synthesize Avicenna and kalām epis-temology in their account of God's knowledge as relation or as presence.

An attempt to take back  ‘direct realism’ as a name for a plausible view from those who have recently tried to co-opt it to name a suite of implausible views.  (1) Direct realism is true, when properly understood. Descartes and Arnauld are good guides, although their writings are open to different interpretations. (2) The issue of the truth or falsity of direct realism must be kept strictly separate from the issue of scepticism regarding an external world; any version of direct realism that permits the refutation of scepticism about the external world—about its existence, or our knowledge of its nature—is ipso facto refuted. (3) No defensible version of direct realism denies the existence of existents that can be correctly called ‘mental representations’. (4) Direct realism neither requires nor entails ‘disjunctivism’; ‘disjunctivism’ neither requires nor entails direct realism. (5) Direct realism doesn’t require the truth of ‘transparentism’, and is incompatible with it on one natural understanding of the word ‘transparent’. (6) There is some truth in the doctrine of transparentism, but we need to distinguish the Moore version from the Reid-James version. (7) A defensible version of transparentism must acknowledge (i) the sense in which we are fully aware of our sensations in conscious perceptual experience, and necessarily so, (ii) the fact that we are in everyday life often aware of our experiences considered specifically as such, even as we are in direct perceptual contact with objects.

In this paper, I explore and examine different ways in which affectivity is related to perception within ecological psychology. I assess whether some of those ways compromise the realist and direct aspects of traditional ecological perception. I sustain that they don't. Affectivity, at least in some cases, turns the perception of fine-grained affordances possible. For an engaged perceiver, affectivity is not optional.

Naïve realism, often overlooked among philosophical theories of perception, has in recent years attracted a surge of interest. Broadly speaking, the central commitment of naïve realism is that mind-independent objects are essential to the fundamental analysis of perceptual experience. Since the claims of naïve realism concern the essential metaphysical structure of conscious perception, its truth or falsity is of central importance to a wide range of topics, including the explanation of semantic reference and representational content, the nature of phenomenal consciousness, and the basis of perceptual justification and knowledge. One of the greatest difficulties surrounding discussions of naïve realism, however, has been lack of clarity concerning exactly what affirming or denying it entails. In particular, it is sometimes unclear how naïve realism is related to the claim that perceptual experience is in some sense direct or unmediated, and also to what extent the view is compatible with another widely discussed thesis in the philosophy of perception, the claim that perceptual experiences are states with representational content. In this essay, I discuss how recent work on these issues helps to clarify both the central commitments of naïve realism, as well as its relation to representationalist theories of perception. Along the way, I will attempt to shed light on the different ways in which each approach tries to address the various theoretical challenges facing a philosophical theory of perception, and also to assess the prospects for views that attempts to combine features of each approach.

This thesis aims at laying the groundwork for a research program in philosophy of mind by arguing for two theoretical positions, internalism and representationalism (intentionalism), which are rarely defended jointly, but which together can form the basis for a plausible theory of the mind.

The first chapter argues for internalism against the dominant externalist view. Firstly, it is discussed what the best way is to elucidate the debate between internalism and externalism rooted in the Twin Earth thought experiment. (Putnam 1975) It is argued that the issue between internalists and externalists is whether concrete items that stand in a referential relation to mental states are among the constitutive bases of mental states. The Dry Earth thought experiment (Boghossian 1998) is introduced to make a case for internalism, relying on concepts that do not refer. Externalist counter-arguments are introduced and rejected.

The second chapter argues for representationalism/intentionalism against qualia theory. It is argued that there are no mental qualities (qualia) that account for the qualitative aspects of phenomenology. What do account for the qualitative aspects of phenomenology are apparent qualities of the intentional objects of conscious experiences, the qualities the world is represented as having by the experiences. Three sets of arguments for qualia are introduced and rejected. The first set of arguments are the type of arguments that are variants of the argument from error, which are rejected by an intentionalist analysis of mentality, and an epistemology of experience is developed where experience provides an acquaintance relation between a subject and something abstract such as a possibility. This makes it unnecessary to postulate epistemic relations both to concretely instantiated items in the environment and to mental items such as qualia or sense-data. Arguments based on allegedly non-representational states such as double vision and afterimages are shown to fail by demonstrating that such states are non-endorsed representations. Arguments that rely on spectrum inversion cases where representational content allegedly differs while qualitative phenomenology stays the same are rejected by arguing against the account of representation that underlies such arguments. (The order of the two chapters is largely arbitrary, though a rejection of externalism is useful in arguing against the argument from spectrum inversion.)

The account is completed by briefly discussing and rejecting the disjunctivist theory of perception, and some other motivations for externalism such as externalism’s advantage in providing a naturalistic account of mentality is discussed. The thesis concludes by pointing at the naturalistic prospects for an account of mentality that analyses mental states as representational states while the representational content is based neither on mental qualities like qualia, nor on causal-informational relations to environmental items. I further speculate about the role of powers and dispositions of organisms that might underpin a future naturalistic analysis of mentality, and also consider the plausibility of a mysterian account of mind where the special mystery regarding the explanatory gap about consciousness is downgraded by suggesting that explanatory gaps might be widespread in nature, such as in our failure to logically link qualities like color and sound as we experience them to the lower-level physical phenomena they supervene on.

My aim in this paper is to consider various forms of perceptual realism, including, for purposes of comparison, the largely abandoned indirect or representative realism. After surveying the variety of perceptual realisms and considering their various commitments, I introduce some considerations concerning the phenomenology of visual space that cause trouble for most forms of direct realism. These considerations pertain to the perception of objects in the distance and, secondarily, to the perception of shapes at a slant. I argue that one of the lesser known varieties of perceptual realism, critical direct realism, can meet the challenges offered by the facts of spatial perception.

Phenomenal objectivism explains perceptual phenomenal character by reducing it to an awareness of mind-independent objects, properties, and relations. A challenge for this view is that there is a sense in which a distant tree looks smaller than a closer tree even when they are the same objective size (perceptual size variation). The dual content view is a popular objectivist account in which such experiences are explained by my objective spatial relation to the tree, in particular visual angle (perspectival size). I describe a series of first-person experiments for investigating size experience. I use a ruler as a first-person method for operationalising perspectival size (Experiment 1). I use the corridor illusion (Experiment 2), outlining one’s head in the mirror (Experiment 3), and outlining the size of objects on glass (Experiment 4) to show a phenomenal difference in size for items in different depth contexts, despite being identical in visual angle. These finding demonstrate that visual angle cannot account for these spatial experiences. Psychological evidence provides further support for the thesis that subjects do not experience visual angle when depth information is present. Together this evidence supports the hypothesis that perceptual size variation cannot be accounted for by visual angle, hence undermining a plausible version of the dual content theory. This outcome, combined with problems raised by alternative objectivist accounts of size variation, provides support for a subjectivist account of size experience.

This paper investigates the debate about mental images in early-modern scholasticism, by means of a close reading of two Spanish authors, the Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza (1578-1641, a Jesuit reputed for his leaning towards nominalism) and Tomás Hurtado (d. 1659, a Cleric Regular Minor defender of orthodox Thomism). It argues that early-modern scholasticism presented a wide array of different theories of cognition based on different reading of the same foundational texts, in particular those of Thomas Aquinas: Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza defending a kind of "direct realism", and Tomás Hurtado on the contrary vindicating the necessity of representationalism. The difference of these readings can be related to their different appraisals of the value of Aristotelian hylemorphism.

This paper aims to defend the thesis that we can only perceive what we understand. Such a theory would seem to be unable to account for our learning to perceive what we do not yet understand. To address this objection, the paper presents a non- representationalist, direct realist theory of perception. In this, the sensorimotor theory of Noë and O’Regan plays a crucial role (although one important modification to the interpretation of that theory is proposed). The result is an account of how we are in contact with the world itself during perceptual experience; and this leads to an account of how the world itself guides our understanding, as we move from non-sense to sense.

Unlike “Virtual Reality” in “Augmented Reality” (AR) the stress is put on the word “reality”. However, it seems that we still lack a concept of reality which can fit the world of both humans and computers. In connection with this philosophical issue, this paper aims to provide the background for a better insight into the meaning of Augmented Reality and its impact on human behavior. My thesis is that an ecological version of direct perception’s realism constitutes the most natural framework to start from. The ecological approach to perception - namely, the Gibsonian theory of affordances - together with a non-dualistic, pragmatist and evolutionist notion of reality, perfectly fits this purpose. Thus, after a brief survey of the present state of AR technologies, it should become natural to interpret AR digital contents as implementations of affordances.

In recent years, it has become popular again to endorse relationalism about perception. According to this view, perceptions are essentially relational experiences and thus differ in nature from non-relational hallucinations. In this article, I assume that relationalism is true. The issue that I am generally interested in is rather which version of relationalism we should endorse, given that perceptions are relational. The standard answer to this question is Acquaintance Relationalism, the view that perceptions are relational in so far as they acquaint us with objects in our environment. But my contention is that this view cannot account for two important aspects of perfect hallucinations, namely their property of being introspectively indistinguishable from perceptions and their property of having the same motivational force as veridical perceptions. Which alternative form of relationism should be endorsed instead (if any) is then an issue to be discussed at another ocassion.

C. S. Peirce introduced the term “icon” for sign-vehicles that signify their objects in virtue of some shared quality. This qualitative kinship, however, threatens to collapse the relata of the sign into one and the same thing. Accordingly, the late-medieval philosopher of signs John Poinsot held that, “no matter how perfect, a concept [...] always retains a distinction, therefore, between the thing signified and itself signifying.” Poinsot is touted by his present-day advocates as a realist, but I believe that, judged by realist standards, his requirement of minimal dissimilarity backfires. Poinsot thinks that, in analyzing the sign, we should stop before a full merger between sign-vehicle and object is reached. Peirce, by contrast, saw good reason to push the analysis all the way down to one isolated quality. Because such a qualitative merger can lend support to realism, I favour Peirce’s stance.

Naïve realists traditionally reject the time lag argument by replying that we can be in a direct visual perceptual relation to temporally distant facts or objects.
I first show that this answer entails that some visual perceptions – i.e. those that are direct relation between us and an external material object that has visually changed, or ceased to exist, during the time lag – should also count as illusions and hallucinations, respectively.
I then examine the possible attempts by the naïve realist to tell such perceptions apart from illusions and hallucinations, and after showing the inadequacy of the answers relying on a mere counterfactual or causal criterion, I explain why the problem is solved by introducing a view of visual perception as temporally extended into the past of objects and, in particular, as consisting in the whole causal chain of events or states of affairs going from external material object x to subject S.
But this solution is not immune from defects for the naïve realist. I show that this view of perception raises a number of significant concerns, hence leaving the issue of the time lag problem still open for naïve realism.

Kant posits the schema as a hybrid bridging the generality of pure concepts and the particularity of sensible intuitions. However, I argue that countenancing such schemata leads to a third-man regress. Siding with those who think that the midway posit of the Critique of Pure Reason's schematism section is untenable, my diagnosis is that Kant's transcendental inquiry goes awry because it attempts to analyze a form/matter union that is primitive. I therefore sketch a nonrepresentational stance aimed at respecting this primitivity.

Thomas Reid describes visible figure as both a ‘real and external object to the eye’ and as the ‘immediate object’ of sight. This generates an apparent challenge to Reid’s direct realism since if the ‘immediate’ object of sight is also its direct object, then visual perception must be perceptually indirect due to the role of visible figure as a perceptual intermediary. I argue that this apparent conflict within Reid’s account may be reconciled by understanding visible figure as a relational entity comprised of a set of objective relations that hold between an object’s visible surfaces and a point of view. On this view, once an ambiguity concerning his use of the term ‘object’ is resolved, Reid’s treatment of visual perception can be seen to be both epistemically and perceptually direct, as well as consistent both with his account of other sense modalities and the doctrine of signs.

In this paper I show that, in Husserl’s phenomenology of perception, the consciousness of any perceiving subject can take up space. What Husserl calls “noema” just is some intentional object. Thus any noema of perception just is the object of some perceptual experience. According to Husserl, since the noema of perception is immanent to the consciousness of the perceiving subject, the object of perception must also be in some sense immanent. In order to avoid confrontation with Husserl’s anti-Brentanian claim that no intentional object can be immanent to any intentional act, I show that there are two different senses of immanence in Husserl: the “genuine”-sense and what Steven Crowell calls the “phenomenological”-sense. On this disambiguation, any perceptual object can be genuinely transcendent while remaining phenomenologically immanent. What is required for the second sense of immanence is a holistic conception of consciousness. However, Husserl is also a realist about the objects ...

What are the proper objects of perception? Two famous responses to this question hold that they are either the images of extramental objects, that is, the way in which they appear to us (representationalism), or they are the objects themselves (direct realism). In this paper, I present an analysis of this issue by Abū l-Barakāt al-Baġdādī (d. 1164/65), a post-Avicennian scholar whose impact on the history of Islamic philosophy has been largely neglected. Abū l-Barakāt argued against the traditional Aristotelian-Avicennian episte-mological dualism, which distinguishes between the sense-perception of material particulars and the conception of immaterial universals in terms of the perceiver and/or the structure of perception. In Abū l-Barakāt's own theory, all epistemic acts have the unified structure of direct relation between one and the same perceiver (immaterial soul) and the objects themselves-both material and immaterial. His main thesis is that having corporeal organs is not necessary for sense-perception. In the final section of the paper, I show that Abū l-Barakāt's critique of the Aristotelian-Avicennian tradition was received as a breakthrough in epistemology. It may have also determined the epistemologi-cal theories of two of the most important post-Avicennian Islamic philosophers: Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210) and Šihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191). Résumé. Quels sont les objets de la perception ? Deux réponses célèbres à cette question soutiennent que ce sont soit les images des objets extramen-taux, c'est-à-dire la façon dont ils nous apparaissent (représentationalisme), soit les objets eux-mêmes (réalisme direct). Dans cet article, je présente une analyse de cette question par Abū l-Barakāt al-Baġdādī (m. 1164/65), un sa-vant post-avicennien dont l'impact sur l'histoire de la philosophie islamique a été largement négligé. Abū l-Barakāt s'est opposé au dualisme épistémologique traditionnel aristotélicien-avicennien, qui établit une distinction entre la perception sensorielle des particuliers matériels et la conception des universaux immatériels, notamment en ce qui concerne le percevant et/ou la structure de la perception. Selon la théorie d'Abū l-Barakāt, tous les actes épistémiques ont la structure unifiée d'une relation directe entre un même percevant (l'âme im-matérielle) et les objets eux-mêmes-matériels et immatériels. Sa thèse princi-pale consiste à dire qu'avoir des organes corporels n'est pas nécessaire pour la perception sensorielle. Dans la dernière section de cet article, je montre que la critique d'Abū l-Barakāt de la tradition aristotélicienne-avicennienne fut consi-dérée comme une innovation révolutionnaire en épistémologie. Cela peut avoir https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.

The purpose of this paper is to contextualize Bergson's panpsychist thought into the panpsychism debate that is being revived in contemporary analytic metaphysics, thus giving it an accurate characterization and clarifying Bergson's place in the debate.
Although Bergson's name is rarely mentioned as a source of modern panpsychism – whereas his contemporaries William James, Ernst Mach, and Bertrand Russell are often referred to - there is a common understanding among Bergsonian scholars that his philosophy has a clearly panpsychist picture. For example, Milič Čapek, author of Bergson and Modern Physics: Reinterpretation and Reevaluation, published in 1971, characterizes the theoretical foundation of his panpsychism as follows.

Epistemic Indirect Realism (EIR) is the position that justification for contingent propositions about the extra-mental world requires an inference based on a subjective, experiential mental state. One objection against EIR is that it runs contrary to common sense and practice; in essence, ordinary people do not form beliefs about things in the external world on the basis of experiential mental states. This objection implies EIR is contrary to ordinary experience, impractical, and leads to scepticism. In this paper, I will defend EIR against this objection by distinguishing EIR based on conceptual awareness and non-conceptual awareness. In particular, I will argue that direct acquaintance provides sufficient (non-conceptual) awareness that can explain how ordinary folks are capable of forming justified beliefs about the external world in a way consistent with EIR. Overall, I present a framework for showing that EIR can satisfy ordinary epistemic practices without betraying human nature or over-intellectualizing the required epistemic standards for possessing a justified belief.

Michael Bergmann (2006) has argued that an internalistic view of justification faces a dilemma. Assuming as internalism does that to have a justified belief, subjects must be aware of the justifiers of the belief and of their relevance to the truth of the belief, Bergmann notes that one is either aware of this relevance conceptually or not. But, says Bergmann, if the required awareness is conceptual, internalism is encumbered with an infinite regress. If it is not—if it is only “weak awareness”—then internalism lacks any dialectical advantage over externalism. In this paper, I explore DePoe’s (2012) defense of the dialectical advantage of weak awareness, and show how the case for its ability to account for awareness of the relevance of the justifiers can be improved by supplementation from a direct realist theory of perception and a theory of concept-formation and application informed by that theory of perception.

The debate in the philosophy of perception between direct realists and representationalists should influence the debate in epistemology between internalists and externalists about justification. If direct realists are correct, there are more consciously accessible justifiers for internalists to exploit than externalists think. Internalists can retain their distinctive internalist identity while accepting this widened conception of internalistic justification: even if they welcome the possibility of cognitive access to external facts, their position is still quite distinct from the typical externalist position. To demonstrate this, Alvin Goldman's critique of internalism is shown to ignore important lessons from the case for direct realism about perception, in particular by unjustifiably assuming that internalism entails that only facts simultaneous with the justification of a belief can justify the belief. Goldman's definition of a "justifier" is also inconsistent with the overall guidance conception of epistemology he takes for granted in his critique of internalism.

Direct realists about episodic memory claim that a rememberer has direct contact with a past event. But how is it possible to be acquainted with an event that ceased to exist? That's the so-called ​ cotemporality problem.​ The standard solution, proposed by Sven Bernecker, is to distinguish between the occurrence of an event and the existence of an event: an event ceases to occur without ceasing to exist. That's the eternalist solution for the cotemporality problem. Nevertheless, some philosophers of memory claim that the adoption of an eternalist metaphysics of time would be too high a metaphysical price to be paid to hold direct realist intuitions about memory. Although I agree with these critics, I will try to show two things. First, that this kind of "common sense argument" is far from decisive. Second, that Bernecker's proposal remains the best solution to the cotemporality problem.

This paper aims to challenge the idea claimed by Putnam in his Dewey Lectures that internal realism presupposed sense data theory so that it would have been unable to account for the fundamental intuition of common sense realism that perception gives us cognitive access to reality. Rather, I argue that Putnam’s writings from the period of internal realism indicate that it (internal realism) already presupposed a form of direct realism of the kind he puts forth in the Dewey lectures. I support my thesis with a demonstration of the implication of direct realism in the refutation of the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis that occurs in the first chapter of Reason, Truth and History, as well as with various passages from the philosopher’s writings of the time when he defended internal realism. I also argue, contrary to what the philosopher seems to assert in his Dewey Lectures, that his model-theoretic argument against metaphysical realism does not involve sense data theory. After noting the very strong resemblance between the theses of his common sense realism of the 1990s and those of his internal realism of the 1980s, I hypothesize that Putnam pretended to renounce internal realism in order to allow himself to rephrase his original position so as to avoid being misinterpreted as a form of idealism or fact constructivism, as was the case with his initial statement.

This paper argues that there is a conflict between two theses held by John McDowell, namely i) the claim that we are under a standing obligation to revise our beliefs if reflection demands it; and ii) the view that veridical experience is a mode of direct access to the world. Since (i) puts no bounds on what would constitute reasonable doubt, it invites skeptical concerns which overthrow (ii). Conversely, since (ii) says that there are some experiences which we are entitled to trust, it undermines the prescriptive scope of (i). Drawing on C. S. Peirce’s distinction between genuine and contrived doubt, I maintain that critical revisions of beliefs should be triggered only by unwanted disruptions of habits, thereby restoring unity between McDowell’s two theses.

The enactivist tradition, out of which neurophenomenology arose, rejects various internalisms – including the representationalist and information-processing metaphors – but remains wedded to one further internalism:the claim that the structure of perceptual experience is directly, constitutively linked only to internal, brain-based dynamics.
I aim to reject this internalism and defend an alternative analysis.
The paper presents a direct-realist, externalist, sensorimotor account of perceptual experience. It uses the concept of counterfactual meaningful action to defend this view against various objections.
This account of experience matches certain first-person features of experience better than an internalist account could. It is fully tractable as “normal science.”
The neuroscientific conception of brain function should change from that of internal representation or modelling to that of enabling meaningful, embodied action in ways that constitutively involve the world. Neurophenomenology should aim to match the structure of first-person experience with the structure of meaningful agent-world interactions, not with that of brain dynamics.
The sensorimotor approachshows us what external objects are, such that we may enact them, and what experience is, such that it may present us with those enacted objects.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) causes behavioral and emotional problems. The emotions associated with the disorder, research has shown, literally change and individual’s perception. Those who study the effects of emotion on perception generally accept an indirect theory of perception like representationalism. Yet, an indirect theory does not seem to be adequate to account for the immediacy and phenomenology of PTSD. Therefore, a theory that can better account for these is needed. I suggest a form of direct realism – the combined scientific-philosophical theory that combines John Campbell’s 3-place relation and James J. Gibson’s direct perception of information through ambient light – is such a theory. In addition, looking at the variability of normalcy may account for why there is not 100% attrition of PTSD across individuals exposed to the same or similar traumatic events.

Most inferentialists hope to bypass givenness by tracking the conditionals claimants are implicitly committed to. I argue that this approach is underdetermined because one can always construct parallel trees of conditionals. I illustrate this using the Müller-Lyer illusion and touching a table. In the former case, the lines are either even or uneven; in the latter case, a moving hand will either sweep through or be halted. For each possibility, we can rationally foresee consequents. However, I argue that, until and unless we benefit from what is given in experience, we cannot know whether to affirm the antecedents of those conditionals.

In this paper I show that, on Husserl's phenomenology of perception, the consciousness of any perceiving subject can take up space. What Husserl calls "noema" just is some intentional object. Thus any noema of perception just is the object of some perceptual experience. According to Husserl, since the noema of perception is immanent to the consciousness of the perceiving subject, the object of perception must also be in some sense immanent. In order to avoid confrontation by Husserl's anti-Brentanian claim that no intentional object can be immanent to any intentional act, I show that there are two different senses of immanence in Husserl: the "genuine"-sense and what Steven Crowell (2008) calls the "phenomenological"-sense. On this disambiguation, any perceptual object can be genuinely transcendent while remaining phenomenologically immanent. What is required for the second sense of immanence is a holistic conception of consciousness. However, Husserl is also a realist about the objects of perception: the object of perception is the actual object itself rather than some mental representation of anything like the Kantian thing in-itself. The objects of perception are spatial. Therefore, if any perceptual object is immanent to some consciousness then that consciousness must

This paper postulates and explores an epistemic state which is inherent to all phenomenal experiences: Direct acquaintance with possibilities. Relying on a representationalist framework and a common-factor theory of perception and hallucination, I argue that having a perceptual experience involves an acquaintance with abstract entities. These abstract entities are possibilities, for instance the possibility of a yellow sphere existing in space and time, and this epistemic state is made possible by, indeed necessarily follows from, the experiential non-conceptually representation of a yellow sphere. Experiences, therefore, bestow knowledge upon subjects about sensible qualities, such as the colour yellow, even in hallucinatory or illusory cases, and this epistemic state is separate from, and not in conflict with, the direct awareness of objects and their properties in veridical experience. With the help of several thought experiments, I demonstrate that pure cognition lacks this element. I argue that puzzles of perceptual experience are better solved by postulating this epistemic relation, and erroneous arguments like the Argument from Hallucination result from a misunderstanding of this epistemic feature of sensory experience, leading to the postulation of sense-data and qualia. I further apply this theory of acquaintance to the philosophical puzzle regarding Mary the Colour Scientist, providing an explanation, without postulating qualia, of why she lacks some knowledge in her pre-experiential, purely cognitive state.

In his well-known Mind and World and in line with Wilfrid Sellars’ (1991) or “that great foe of ‘immediacy’” (ibid., 127) Hegel, McDowell claims that “when Evans argues that judgments of experience are based on non-conceptual content, he is falling into a version of the Myth of the Given” (1996, 114). In this paper, on the basis of a) a mainly Kantian ‘realist idealist’ world view and b) an explication of Kant’s concept of the “given manifold” (CPR, e.g. B138), I will argue that Kant and Evans (1982, chs. 5.1–5.2) were indeed mistaken in their versions of the given, but that Sellars and his student McDowell were even more mistaken and that, in the end, there would appear to be a non-conceptual and (thus) non-propositional given in perceptual experience from which we unconsciously and automatically infer to our first perceptual beliefs.

In this paper, I respond to Millar’s recent criticism of naïve realism. Millar provides several arguments for the thesis that there are powerful phenomenological grounds for preferring the content view (the view that to perceive is to represent the world to be a certain way) to naïve realism (the view that to perceive is to stand in a primitive relation of acquaintance to the world). I intend to show that Millar’s arguments are not convincing.

Both traditional and naturalistic epistemologists have long assumed that the examination of human psychology has no relevance to the goal of traditional epistemology, that of providing first-person guidance in determining the truth. Without slipping into naturalism, I apply insight about the psychology of human perception and concept-formation to a very traditional epistemological project: the foundationalist approach to the epistemic regress problem. I argue that direct realism about perception can help solve the regress problem and support a foundationalist account of justification, but only if it is supplemented by an abstractionist theory of concept-formation, the view that it is possible to abstract concepts directly from the empirically given. Critics of direct realist solutions like Laurence BonJour are correct that an account of direct perception by itself does not provide an adequate account of justification. However a direct realist account of perception can inform the needed theory of concept-formation, and leading critics of abstractionism like McDowell and Sellars, direct realists about perception themselves, fail to appreciate the ways in which their own views about perception help fill gaps in earlier accounts of abstractionism. Recognizing this undercuts both their objections to abstractionism and (therefore) their objections to foundationalism, as well.