Realism and the Nature of Perceptual Experience

Abstract

Realism concerning a given domain of things is the view that the things in that domain exist, and are as they are, quite independently of anyone’s thought or experience of them. The realism which I am concerned with here is empirical realism, that is, realism concerning empirical things, which are the ordinary persisting things presented to us in our perception of the world around us. Empirical realism is thus the doctrine that the tables, tress, people and other animals, which we see, feel, hear, and so on, exist, and are as they are, quite independently of anyone’s thought or experience of them. My question is which account of the nature of perceptual experience is most conducive to this commonsense realist world-view. I start, in section I, by partitioning the possible accounts of the nature of perceptual experience into two groups, and clarifying in some detail precisely what this distinction between them consists in. In section II, I argue that accounts of one of these two fundamental kinds are either inconsistent with empirical realism, or entail that our knowledge of empirical things is irremediably severely limited, in a way which is sufficiently counterintuitive to constitute a reductio. In section III, I further divide the