Abstract
Robert Schwartz explores what he calls ‘A Puzzle about Mediate Perception’. It arises in Berkeley’s view, espoused in NTV, that we do not immediately perceive distance. Berkeley claims that we mediately perceive distance. That is, he argues that the ability to perceive that something is at a distance from us is something we learn early on in life by coming to associate certain visual and tangible perceptions. When something is far away from us, for example, two kinds of perception are available to us: the tangible perception of taking several steps to reach that object and the visual perception of the object appearing small. The puzzle, for Schwartz, is to characterise how the experiences from the two senses ‘mesh’ together. Solving the puzzle involves understanding what it is like for perceivers to mediately perceive that something is at a distance from them.
