Is the world that we experience around us, the real world itself, experienced out there where it lies? Or is our experience of the world a "picture" generated by our brain inside our head?

I posed this question in Lehar( 2003 ) and Lehar( 2003 }, and I have posted an informal cartoon outlining the issue here:

A Cartoon Epistemology
http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/cartoonepist/cartoonepist.html


What is the current state of consensus in the community on this subject? Are there more naive realists out there, or is representationalism the dominant paradigm yet?


And why is this most central and foundational issue not discussed more widely? Surely just about everything else in philosophy and psychology depends critically on getting this profound epistemological issue right. The issue is by no means irrelevant or insignificant. What is your view on this?

  Steve Lehar