Naïve Realism and The Cognitive Penetrability of Perception

In naïve realism or direct realism, it is held that the world we perceive through our senses (sight, taste, touch, smell and hearing) is our 'exact' awareness of the physical world. Naïve realism goes further to claim that properties of an object, which can be perceived such as shape and color, are retained even if unperceived. If my essay paper is rectangular and white, and I were to stare away momentarily, its being rectangular and white will remain, whether I am perceiving it or not. This is a view contrary to the sense data thesis or representative realism, which states that our perceiving of something is actually a sense impression of that thing, represented in the mind, never directly. Moreover, the possibility hallucinating reality seems to be a direct threat to naive realism. I examine this threat while providing a disjunctivist argument, in its simplistic form, in defense of naive realism.

2015

Perception is typically distinguished from cognition. For example, seeing is importantly different from believing. And while what one sees clearly influences what one thinks, it is debateable whether what one believes and otherwise thinks can influence, in some direct and non-trivial way, what one sees. The latter possible relation is the cognitive penetration of perception. Cognitive penetration, if it occurs, has implications for philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. This paper offers an analysis of the phenomenon, its theoretical consequences, and a variety of experimental results and possible interpretations of them. The paper concludes by proposing some constraints for analyses and definitions of cognitive penetrability. The dominant tradition in philosophy and psychology is to distinguish human perceptual experience from human cognition. Like many distinctions, this one is not readily made in an uncontroversial way. One method of distinction is to enumerate paradigmatic examples of each category. Such examples of perceiving include seeing, hearing, and touching. Examples of cognitive states or processes include believing, intending, and reasoning. Of course, we still want to know the criterion or criteria by which these mental types are put on one list rather than the other. There are at least two non-exclusive means by which this might be done: function and phenomenology. Consider vision. It functions to provide an agent with information about the colour, shape, and location features of the objects of her immediate environment. Thus we say that when one suffers a visual hallucination, vision has malfunctioned. Beliefs, by contrast, do not perform a function that is obligated to one's immediate environment. Although one can and does form beliefs about one's current surroundings, one also forms and maintains beliefs about the past and the future, and about locations removed from what is perceptually

This paper is an attempt to defend naïve realism (NR) about perceptual experience by motivating it from within a more thoroughgoingly anti-representationalist approach to the problem of the mind-world relation. Representationalism about perceptual experience (PR) seems to hold the edge over NR in the current debate, but an epistemological argument due to John Campbell can seem to present a serious hurdle to accepting PR. However, it turns out that Campbell's strictures also make NR a non-starter. It seems we might make more progress by rejecting the metaphysical/epistemological framework of the whole debate, which I suggest involves accepting a) a view of experience as embodied coping b) a neo-pragmatist conception of the significance of the cognitive discourse. I argue NR can be vindicated as part of such a broader antirepresentationalist framework.

Perception purports to help you gain knowledge of the way the world is even if the world is not the way you expected it to be. Perception also purports to be an independent tribunal against which you can test your beliefs. It is natural to think that in order to serve these and other central functions, perceptual representations must not causally depend on your prior beliefs and expectations. In this paper, I clarify and then argue against the natural thought above. All perceptual systems must solve an under-determination problem: the sensory data they receive could be caused by indefinitely many arrangements of distal objects and properties. Using a Bayesian approach to perceptual processing, I argue that in order to solve the under-determination problem, perceptual capacities must rely on prior beliefs or expectations of some kind. I then argue that perceptual states or processes can help ground knowledge of the world whether the ‘beliefs’ necessary for perceptual processing are encoded as (or influenced by) sub-personal states within a perceptual system or cognitive states, such as person-level beliefs. My argument has two main parts. First, I argue by eliminating attempts to support the claim that it does matter whether perception is influenced by one’s cognitive states. Second, I argue that cognitively influenced perceptual states can be instances of seeing that p, which makes the relevant states well suited to help ground knowledge that p. I conclude that perception can serve its central functions whether or not it is cognitively penetrated. "

Forthcoming in American Philosophical Quarterly

Naïve realism, often overlooked among philosophical theories of perception, has in recent years attracted a surge of interest. Broadly speaking, the central commitment of naïve realism is that mind-independent objects are essential to the fundamental analysis of perceptual experience. Since the claims of naïve realism concern the essential metaphysical structure of conscious perception, its truth or falsity is of central importance to a wide range of topics, including the explanation of semantic reference and representational content, the nature of phenomenal consciousness, and the basis of perceptual justification and knowledge. One of the greatest difficulties surrounding discussions of naïve realism, however, has been lack of clarity concerning exactly what affirming or denying it entails. In particular, it is sometimes unclear how naïve realism is related to the claim that perceptual experience is in some sense direct or unmediated, and also to what extent the view is compatible with another widely discussed thesis in the philosophy of perception, the claim that perceptual experiences are states with representational content. In this essay, I discuss how recent work on these issues helps to clarify both the central commitments of naïve realism, as well as its relation to representationalist theories of perception. Along the way, I will attempt to shed light on the different ways in which each approach tries to address the various theoretical challenges facing a philosophical theory of perception, and also to assess the prospects for views that attempts to combine features of each approach.

This thesis offers a defence of naïve realism. As I understand it, naïve realism involves a claim about the structure of perception, and about the nature of perceptual experience, that is, the sensory experience that one enjoys when perceiving something. It claims that perception is psychologically direct, in that perceptual experience, in its very nature, suffices to put one in contact with normal, mind-independent objects. And it understands this nature in terms of it being presentational of these objects. After explaining the core commitments of naïve realism and presenting the salient alternative views of the nature of perceptual experience and perception, I go on to consider motivations for why it is a position that is worth defending. I discuss epistemological, metaphysical and phenomenological reasons for why naïve realism should be the place where we begin our theorising about perception, and why we should defend it as strongly as we can. I then present the two main challenges to the naïve realist view, the arguments from illusion and hallucination. The possibility of these two kinds of sensory experience is held to make the naïve realist view of the nature of perceptual experience untenable. I present a modified form of adverbialism as the best way for the naïve realist to understand the nature of perceptual experience if they want to successfully accommodate the possibility of illusory experience. On this approach, perceptual experience is the sensing of the object of perception by a subject. Next I consider the disjunctive response to the challenge that hallucination presents to the naïve realist, according to which we should conceive of perceptual and hallucinatory experience as having fundamentally different natures. I argue that such a disjunctivism needs to take an extreme form in which the only positive nature to hallucinatory experience is its being subjectively indiscriminable from perceptual experience. This position is rejected on the grounds that it maintains an implausible view about the nature of sensory experience. Finally, I consider an alternative way in which the naïve realist can deal with hallucination. This is to claim that perceptual and hallucinatory experience can share the same nature, while at the same time perceptual experience can be understood as presentational of the objects of perception. This strategy will require the naïve realist to adopt a stance about the metaphysical nature of the entities to which one can be related in experience.

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.

Synthese, 2019

Recently, it has been objected that naïve realism is inconsistent with an empirically well-supported claim that mental states of the same fundamental kind as ordinary conscious seeing can occur unconsciously (SFK). The main aim of this paper is to establish the following conditional claim: if SFK turns out to be true, the naïve realist can and should accommodate it into her theory. Regarding the antecedent of this conditional, I suggest that empirical evidence renders SFK plausible but not obvious. For it is possible that what is currently advocated as unconscious perception of the stimulus is in fact momentaneous perceptual awareness (or residual perceptual awareness) of the stimulus making the subject prone to judge in some way rather than another, or to act in some way rather than another. As to the apodosis, I show that neither the core of naïve realism nor any of its main motivations is undermined if SFK is assumed. On the contrary, certain incentives for endorsing naïve realism become more tempting on this assumption. Since the main motivations for naïve realism retain force under SFK, intentionalism is neither compulsory nor the best available explanation of unconscious perception.

1 We focus on the visual case, leaving it to the reader to consider how the discussion generalizes to other modalities. 2 concerned how the transition from introspective beliefs to external--world beliefs could be rational. 2 In this entry, we assume without argument these positions are mistaken. We begin from the assumption that experiences (such as the one you have when you see the mustard) can justify external world beliefs about the things you see, such as beliefs that the mustard jar is in the fridge, and that the justification experience provides does not have to rely on justification for introspective beliefs. From now on, we often let it remain implicit that we are talking about external world beliefs, when we talk about the kind of beliefs that experiences justify. 3 Our main question is this: what features of experiences explain how they justify external world beliefs? The grammar of the question might suggest that experiences suffice all by themselves to provide justification for external world beliefs. But don't read this into the grammar of the phrase "experiences justify beliefs". We can distinguish between the claim that an experience can justify a belief that P, and the claim that an experience can justify a belief that P without help from other features it only contingently has. We clarify our question further in Part I, where we explain why we have chosen this point of departure, and highlight a range of theses about the role of experience in providing different types of justification. In Parts II and III, we consider the role of features of experience falling into two broad categories: constitutive features of experience, including its phenomenal character, its contents, its status as attentive or inattentive (sections 3--7); and causal features of experience such as its reliability, and the impact of other mental states on its formation (sections 8--10). Along the way, we discuss the relationships between visual experience and seeing (sections 1 and 8), and we contrast perceptual justification and perceptual knowledge (section 9).

Several years ago, Jerry argued that the modularity of the perceptual systems was good news for epistemology. In particular, on the assumption that perceptual systems are modular in his (1983) sense of the term, they are informationally encapsulated, which means that their operation is not sensitive to the beliefs, desires, and such of the larger organism. This would allay any worries about the theory-ladenness of observation; if perception is modular, what we see is not affected by what we want to see or expect to see or have been trained to see. What one observes is determined by the outputs of the perceptual modules, and modules are cognitively impenetrable (i.e., informationally encapsulated), so if different theoretical camps disagree about what they've observed, the blame lies elsewhere than observation. Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the cognitive penetrability of perception (Raftopoulos 2001, Pylyshyn 2003, Macpherson forthcoming, Stokes in preparation). The epistemological implications of cognitive penetrability in particular have received special attention in a recent book by Athanassios Raftopoulos and paper by Susanna Siegel (Raftopoulos 2009, Siegel forthcoming). Raftopoulos (2009) starts with a set of concerns very similar to Fodor's, and the view he develops is a modified and nuanced version of Fodor's own. Raftopoulos argues that even though much of what Fodor calls observation is cognitively penetrated, nevertheless an early stage of perception is encapsulated and therefore immune to the skeptical and relativistic worries that exercise