Recent work in perception: Naïve realism and its opponents

Analysis 69 (2):334-346 (2009)
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Abstract

Suppose that you are looking at a vase of flowers on the table in front of you. You can visually attend to the vase and to the flowers, noticing their different features: their colour, their shape and the way they are arranged. In attending to the vase, the flowers and their features, you are attending to mind-independent objects and features. Suppose, now, that you introspectively reflect on the visual experience you have when looking at the vase of flowers. In doing so, you might notice various features of your experience, for example that individual petals on the flowers are difficult to distinguish. Although in introspection your interest is in the character of your experience, your attention is still to the objects of your experience – to the mind-independent vase and the flowers. Since attending to your experience involves attending to the mind-independent objects and features of your experience, your experience seems introspectively to involve those mind-independent objects and features. 2In general, then, when we introspect a visual experiential episode, it seems that we are related to some mind-independent object or feature that is present and is a part, or a constituent, of the experience. We can call this property – the property of having some mind-independent object or feature as a constituent – the naïve realist property of experiences. It is widely accepted that visual experiences seem to have the NR property; 3 naïve realism is the view that some experiences – the veridical ones – actually do have it: " veridical experiential episodes have mind-independent objects and features as constituents."On a plausible conception of phenomenal character, the phenomenal character of a perceptual experience just is those properties of the experience that explain the way it introspectively seems. Naïve realism is then the view that veridical …

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Matthew Nudds
University of Warwick

Citations of this work

Recent Work on Naive Realism.James Genone - 2016 - American Philosophical Quarterly 53 (1).
Naïve Realism in Kantian Phrase.Anil Gomes - 2017 - Mind 126 (502):529-578.
Hallucination And Imagination.Keith Allen - 2015 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (2):287-302.
Naturalism and the metaphysics of perception.Zoe Drayson - 2021 - In Heather Logue & Louise Richardson (eds.), Purpose and procedure in philosophy of perception. Oxford University Press. pp. 215-233.

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Mind and World.John Henry McDowell - 1994 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
The intrinsic quality of experience.Gilbert Harman - 1990 - Philosophical Perspectives 4:31-52.
Mind and World.Huw Price & John McDowell - 1994 - Philosophical Books 38 (3):169-181.
Mind and World.John Mcdowell - 1996 - Philosophical Quarterly 46 (182):99-109.
Mental causation.Stephen Yablo - 1992 - Philosophical Review 101 (2):245-280.

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