Naïve Realism Face to Face with the Time Lag Argument

This thesis offers a defence of naïve realism. As I understand it, naïve realism involves a claim about the structure of perception, and about the nature of perceptual experience, that is, the sensory experience that one enjoys when perceiving something. It claims that perception is psychologically direct, in that perceptual experience, in its very nature, suffices to put one in contact with normal, mind-independent objects. And it understands this nature in terms of it being presentational of these objects. After explaining the core commitments of naïve realism and presenting the salient alternative views of the nature of perceptual experience and perception, I go on to consider motivations for why it is a position that is worth defending. I discuss epistemological, metaphysical and phenomenological reasons for why naïve realism should be the place where we begin our theorising about perception, and why we should defend it as strongly as we can. I then present the two main challenges to the naïve realist view, the arguments from illusion and hallucination. The possibility of these two kinds of sensory experience is held to make the naïve realist view of the nature of perceptual experience untenable. I present a modified form of adverbialism as the best way for the naïve realist to understand the nature of perceptual experience if they want to successfully accommodate the possibility of illusory experience. On this approach, perceptual experience is the sensing of the object of perception by a subject. Next I consider the disjunctive response to the challenge that hallucination presents to the naïve realist, according to which we should conceive of perceptual and hallucinatory experience as having fundamentally different natures. I argue that such a disjunctivism needs to take an extreme form in which the only positive nature to hallucinatory experience is its being subjectively indiscriminable from perceptual experience. This position is rejected on the grounds that it maintains an implausible view about the nature of sensory experience. Finally, I consider an alternative way in which the naïve realist can deal with hallucination. This is to claim that perceptual and hallucinatory experience can share the same nature, while at the same time perceptual experience can be understood as presentational of the objects of perception. This strategy will require the naïve realist to adopt a stance about the metaphysical nature of the entities to which one can be related in experience.

Philosophical Explorations, 2016

Naïve realism, the view that perceptual experiences are irreducible relations between subjects and external objects, has intuitive appeal, but this intuitive appeal is sometimes thought to be undermined by the possibility of certain kinds of hallucinations. In this paper, I present the intuitive case for naïve realism, and explain why this intuitive case is not undermined by the possibility of such hallucinations. Specifically, I present the intuitive case for naïve realism as arguing that the only way to make sense of the phenomenal character associated with perceptual experiences is by means of a naïve realist ontology. I then explain why this intuitive argument is not undermined by the possibility of hallucinatory experiences that possess the phenomenal character associated with perceptual experiences but, being hallucinations, do not have the ontological nature specified by naïve realism.

Note: This is no longer under review, since I have recently become dissatisfied with the argument of the paper. In particular, I think that, in order to capture the basic intuition behind the 'missing object objection', that, in principle, whether an experience is a pure hallucination or a successful perception need make no difference to it's phenomenal properties, a naïve realist needs to be able to capture not merely the claim that for every successful perception, there is a possible pure hallucination with the same phenomenal properties, but also that the claim holds in the opposite direction: that for each pure hallucination, there's a possible successful perception with the same phenomenal properties. And I don't see how the naïve realist can use the 'Quasi-Descriptivist' view developed below to capture the latter claim. But I have left the paper up, in case anyone still finds some of the discussion useful or interesting. Abstract: In the last twenty years there's been much interest in so-called 'naïve realist' accounts of perceptual conscious, on which conscious perceptual states are states of being related to ordinary physical objects in the right way to count as conscious experiences of those objects. A common objection to such views is that they fail to account for the fact that it's possible in principle for hallucinatory experiences which are not perceptions of any objects to fall under the same experience-types as successful perceptions. Here, I develop a new response to this 'missing object objection', based on what I call the " Quasi-descriptivist " view of hallucinations. On this view, whenever some objects perfectly 'fit' the representational content of a (pure) hallucination, that hallucination is a conscious experience of those objects. I show that, given this the missing object objection fails, because for each successful perception, there will be a possible hallucination which is an experience of identical objects. I go on to discuss some modified versions of the missing object objection, and argue that they possibly have some bite, but that at worst, they either show only that naïve realist views suffer from problems which also afflict some of their main competitors, or rely on controversial empirical assumptions. Conscious experiences come in different types: the sort of conscious experience you have on seeing a red square, differs from the kind you have on seeing a blue circle. In current jargon, properties of being a conscious experience of a particular type, are called 'phenomenal properties'. Now, in the case of conscious perceptual experiences, the phenomenal properties of our experiences vary with what properties object(s) in the world are perceived to have. According to certain philosophers-the so called " naïve realists "-the reason for this (why, for example, we have a different conscious experience when we see a red square, than when we see a blue circle) is the following. Phenomenal properties, such as the phenomenal property Q distinctive of seeing a blue circle, are relational properties, which

In the present paper, I shall argue that disjunctively construed naïve realism about the nature of perceptual experiences succumbs to the empirically inspired causal argument. The causal argument highlights as a first step that local action necessitates the presence of a type-identical common kind of mental state shared by all perceptual experiences. In a second step, it sets out that the property of being a veridical perception cannot be a mental property. It results that the mental nature of perceptions must be exhausted by the occurrence of inner sensory experiences that narrowly supervene on the perceiver. That is, empirical objects fail directly to determine the perceptual consciousness of the perceiver. The upshot is that not only naïve realism, but also certain further forms of direct realism have to be abandoned.

Parallax: The Dialectics of Mind and World, ed. by Dominik Finkelde, Slavoj Žižek, and Christoph Menke (Bloomsbury, 2021), pp. 81-92., 2021

One aim of this chapter is to suggest that central logical and positional features of subjectivity can plausibly be seen as resulting from the structure of time as given, rather than conversely. By "time as given, " I shall mean whatever underlies such facts as that what is now present will later be past, that objects may enjoy contradictory determinations at different times, and that temporally indexical facts (such as the fact that it is 9:58 AM now) are irreducibly tensed. It is plausible that these facts, and the formal structures they exemplify, obtain prior to and independently of any activity or process of human thinking, perception, consciousness, or representation. Accordingly, it should be possible, as I argue here, to understand the temporally positional and perspectival structure of these activities or processes on the basis of the prior structure of given time. Such an understanding produces a position according to which tense, change, and becoming are real but are not dependent on the processes or activities of a subject. As I shall argue, this provides a realist alternative to both of two seemingly opposed traditions of thinking about time: first, the long tradition, characteristic of Kant's idealism and culminating in Husserl's phenomenology, of thinking about time as constitutively dependent on subjectivity; and second, the objectivist naturalism, typical of the analytic tradition, according to which tense, change, and becoming play no part in reality as it is in itself.

In naïve realism or direct realism, it is held that the world we perceive through our senses (sight, taste, touch, smell and hearing) is our 'exact' awareness of the physical world. Naïve realism goes further to claim that properties of an object, which can be perceived such as shape and color, are retained even if unperceived. If my essay paper is rectangular and white, and I were to stare away momentarily, its being rectangular and white will remain, whether I am perceiving it or not. This is a view contrary to the sense data thesis or representative realism, which states that our perceiving of something is actually a sense impression of that thing, represented in the mind, never directly. Moreover, the possibility hallucinating reality seems to be a direct threat to naive realism. I examine this threat while providing a disjunctivist argument, in its simplistic form, in defense of naive realism.

Philosophical Books, 2010

Philosophical Studies, 1997

Analytic Philosophy, 2018

Perceptual experience has representational content. My argument for this claim is an inference to the best explanation. The explanandum is cognitive penetration. In cognitive penetration, perceptual experiences are either causally influenced, or else are partially constituted, by mental states that are representational, including: mental imagery, beliefs, concepts and memories. If perceptual experiences have representational content, then there is a background condition for cognitive penetration that renders the phenomenon prima facie intelligible. Naïve realist or purely relational accounts of perception leave cognitive penetration less well-explained, even when formulated with so-called 'standpoints' or 'third relata.'