Metaphysical Realism As a Pre-Condition of Visual Perception

viXra, 2017

Philosophical Explorations, vol. 7, 2004

Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 1998

Dialectica, 2021

Susanna Schellenberg has presented several arguments for the "situation-dependency thesis" (SDT), i.e. the claim that (visual) perceptual experiences are necessarily situationdependent, insofar as they represent objects' situation-dependent properties. In my critical response to her paper, I focus on her argument from the "epistemic dependence thesis" (EDT), according to which "perceptual knowledge of intrinsic properties is epistemically dependent on representations of the relevant situation-dependent properties" (Schellenberg 2008, 75). I consider what support she musters for EDT, so as to make an objection to her argument from EDT. To address this objection (or, rather, to bypass it), I will re-formulate the EDT, as a different but closely related thesis that I will call EDT*, informed by the admittedly radical Husserlian view that perception is epistemically rational.

Mohan Matthen (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Perception, 2015

Perception is the ultimate source of our knowledge about contingent facts. It is an extremely important philosophical development that starting in the last quarter of the twentieth century, philosophers have begun to change how they think of perception. The traditional view of perception focussed on sensory receptors; it has become clear, however, that perceptual systems radically transform the output of these receptors, yielding content concerning objects and events in the external world. Adequate understanding of this process requires that we think of perception in new ways—how it operates, the differences among the modalities, and integration of content provided by the individual senses. Philosophers have developed new analytic tools, and opened themselves up to new ways of thinking about the relationship of perception to knowledge. The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception is a collection of entries by leading researchers that reviews these new directions in philosophical thought. The Introduction to the Handbook reviews the history of the subject from its beginnings in ancient Greece to the nineteenth century, and the way that science and philosophy have together produced new conceptions during the last hundred years. It shows how the new thinking about perception has led to a complex web of theories.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017

This paper investigates the nature of reality. It will do so by looking at the philosophical debate between realism and idealism and at scientific investigations in quantum physics. The concept of perceptual relativity will be examined and this will involve looking at sense perception in other animals, and at neurology and cognitive psychology, and at various examples of perceptual relativity in science. It will be concluded that the universe is observer dependent and that there is no reality independent of the observer, which is knowable to the observer. The paper concludes by an investigation of what an observer dependent universe would be like and that recognition of an observer dependent world would lead to a much more open minded and tolerant world.

My aim in this paper is to outline a specific philosophical strategy for the defense of common-sense realism and for the rejection of relativism. The strategy is specific in that it is based on the assumption that the human mind is a visual one – indeed, as I stress, fundamentally a kinesthetic or motor one. The primary contact we make with reality is not verbally mediated; rather, it is direct, kinesthetic, perceptual, visual. The paper presents philosophy as a perennial enterprise the task of which is to mediate between common sense as formed on the one hand by our natural dispositions and by tradition, and on the other hand by the results of science as evolving in time. Philosophy, if fulfilling its task, is common-sense philosophy; common-sense philosophy meaningfully pursued will result in philosophical realism, and, conversely, any realism worthy of the name must be a common-sense one; while relativism & constructivism, if they go beyond saying the obvious, cannot be regarded but as mere delusions.

2018

In this paper I will try to outline a Metaphysics of Perception that takes for granted one of the central thesis of the metaphysical doctrine called Indirect Realism. Firstly, I will introduce the central thesis of Indirect Realism and then a special version of the Causal Theory of Perception that modifies in some fundamental respect one of the most influential version of Causal Theory of Perception designed by William Child.

This paper spells out the implications of a two-component analysis of perceptual experience, developing ideas about the productive imagination that are sketched out in Sellars's late paper 'The Role of Imagination in Kant's Theory of Experience' (1978). It is argued that the phenomenal and intentional aspects of experience are unified through the role of the imagination. There are two dimensions in the exercise of concepts in experience. In order to be perceptually conscious, the perceiving subject must exercise at least some low-level classificatory concepts about the objects taken to be perceived. At the same time the subject becomes implicitly prepared for changes to the inner phenomenal aspects of their perceptual consciousness. The activity of the imagination in experience, through the construction of "sense-image-models", enables the subject to anticipate future possible experiences, corresponding to different perspectival views of the outer objects perceived. A range of problematic kinds of perceptual experiences are examined in detail, including hallucinations of various kinds, displaced perception, and double vision. The application of the two-component analysis of experience to such cases leads to a proper understanding of what takes place in normal perception. and provides a consistent explanation of a whole range of perceptual phenomena. When subjects exercise concepts focusing on the objective properties of the external environment, the inner phenomenal character of their experience is projected onto outer objects. It is shown how a critical realist version of the causal theory of perception makes much better sense of perceptual phenomena than any other theory of experience, and is compatible with a common-sense understanding of the directness of perception.

Perception, Causation, and Objectivity, 2011

Suppose that we identify physical objects, in the first instance, by extension, as things like stones, tables, trees, people and other animals: the persisting macroscopic constituents of the world in which we live. Of course, there is a substantive question of what it is to be like such things in the way relevant to categorization as a physical object. So this can hardly be the final word on the matter. Still, it is equally clear that this gives us all a perfectly respectable initial conception of what we are talking about; and it is an entirely adequate starting point for what follows. Reflection on the history of epistemological and metaphysical discussions of perception, especially through the early modern period, shows philosophers struggling in practice to combine two intuitively compelling ideas about physical objects and our relation with them in perception.