Online research in philosophy

How are we to understand philosophical claims about sense perception being direct versus indirect? There are multiple relevant notions of perceptual directness, so I argue. Perception of external objects may be direct on some notions, while indirect on others. My interest is with the sense in which ideas count as perceptual mediators in the philosophy of Descartes and Locke. This paper has two broader aims. The first is to clarify four main notions of perceptual directness. The second is to support my contention that in the texts characterizing ideas as immediate objects of perception, Descartes and Locke are invoking the notion of directness I call 'objectual'. This notion is modeled on the way a picture mediates perception of the pictured object. The upshot of my account is that – with respect to the objectual notion of directness – Descartes and Locke each hold an indirect theory of perception.

Direct Realists believe that perception involves direct awareness of an object not dependent for its existence on the perceiver. Howard Robinson rejects this doctrine in favour of a Sense-Datum theory of perception. His argument against Direct Realism invokes the principle ‘same proximate cause, same immediate effect’. Since there are cases in which direct awareness has the same proximate cerebral cause as awareness of a sense datum, the Direct Realist is, he thinks, obliged to deny this causal principle. I suggest that although Direct Realism is in more than one respect implausible, it does not succumb to Robinson’s argument. The causal principle is true only if ‘proximate cause’ means ‘proximate sufficient cause’, and the Direct Realist need not concede that there is a sufficient cerebral cause for direct awareness of independent objects.

The goal of this paper is to defend the claim that there is such a thing as direct perception, where by ‘direct perception’ I mean perception unmediated by theorizing or concepts. The basis for my defense is a general philosophic perspective which I call ‘empiricist philosophy’. In brief, empiricist philosophy (as I have defined it) is untenable without the occurrence of direct perception. It is untenable without direct perception because, otherwise, one can't escape the hermeneutic circle, as this phrase is used in van Fraassen (1980). The bulk of the paper is devoted to defending my belief in direct perception against various objections that can be posed against it. I discuss various anticipations of my view found in the literature, eventually focusing on Ian Hacking's related conception of `entity realism' (Hacking 1983). Hacking has been criticized by a number of philosophers and my plan is to respond to these criticisms on behalf of entity realism (or more precisely on behalf of the claim that direct perception is a reality) and to then respond to other possible criticisms that can be launched against direct perception.

This paper presents an argument against A D Smith’s Direct Realist theory of perception, which attempts to defend Direct Realism against the argument from illusion by appealing to conscious perceptual states that are structured by the perceptual constancies. Smith’s contention is that the immediate objects of perceptual awareness are characterised by these constancies, which removes any difficulty there may be in identifying them with the external, or normal, objects of awareness. It is here argued that Smith’s theory does not provide an adequate defence of Direct Realism because it does not adequately deal with the difficulties posed by the possibility of perceptual illusion. It is argued that there remain possible illusory experiences where the immediate objects of awareness, which in Smith’s account are those characterised by perceptual constancies, cannot be identified with the external objects of awareness, contrary to Direct Realism. A further argument is offered to extend this conclusion to all non-illusory cases, by adapting an argument of Smith’s own for the generalising step of the Argument from Illusion. The result is that Smith’s theory does not provide an adequate Direct Realist account of the possibility of perceptual illusion.

What sort of an episode is perception? What are the objects of such episodes? What is the grammatical and logical form of perceptual reports, direct and indirect? Each of these questions has been the subject of recent discussion. In what follows I set out one answer to each of them and explore some of the ways these answers support and complement each other. The answers adopted are: to perceive - and I shall normally only have in mind visual perception - is not to judge or to conceptualize but a sui generis mental mode or activity involving non-conceptual content; perception is of particulars only; the complements of perceptual verbs are, with one exception, non-propositional and indirect perceptual reports are made true by direct perceptual relations between subjects and particulars of various sorts.

Much contemporary discussion of perceptual experience can be traced to two observations. The first is that perception seems to put us in direct contact with the world around us: when perception is successful, we come to recognize— immediately—that certain objects have certain properties. The second is that perceptual experience may fail to provide such knowledge: when we fall prey to illusion or hallucination, the way things appear may differ radically from the way things actually are. For much of the twentieth century, many of the most important discussions of perceptual experience could be fruitfully understood as responses to this pair of observations.

This book develops and defends a version of direct realism: the thesis that perception gives us direct awareness, and non-inferential knowledge, of the external...

In at least some cases of justified perceptual belief, our perceptual experience itself, as opposed to beliefs about it, evidences and thereby justifies our belief. While the phenomenon is common, it is also mysterious. There are good reasons to think that perceptions cannot justify beliefs directly, and there is a significant challenge in explaining how they do. After explaining just how direct perceptual justification is mysterious, I considerMichael Huemers (Skepticism and the Veil of Perception, 2001) and Bill Brewers (Perception and Reason, 1999) recent, but radically different, attempts to eliminate it. I argue that both are unsuccessful, though a consideration of their mistakes deepens our appreciation of the mystery.

In this paper, I attempt to demonstrate the structure of Sellars' critical direct realism in the philosophy of perception. This position is original because it attempts to balance two claims that many have thought to be incompatible: (1) that perceptual knowledge is direct, i.e., not inferential, and (2) that perceptual knowledge is irreducibly conceptual. Even though perceptual episodes are not the result of inferences, they must still stand within the space of reasons if they are to be counted not only as knowledge, but also as thoughts directed at the world. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how Sellars elaborates and defends this position.

When philosophers speak of direct perceptual knowledge, they obviously mean to suggest that such knowledge is unmediated ? but unmediated by what? This is where we find evidence of violent disagreement. To clarify matters, I want to identify and briefly describe several important senses of "direct" that have helped shape our understanding of perceptual knowledge. They are (1) "Direct" as Non-Inferential Perception; (2) "Direct" as Unmediating by Objects of Perception; (3) "Direct" as Conceptually Unmediated Perception; (4) "Direct" as Independent Verification of Perceptual Beliefs; and (5) "Direct" as Perception of What is Epistemically Prior.