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Naïve Realism

Although the label “naïve realism” has been used for different theories in different contexts, the theories it names tend to be those that play a certain role in a discipline. More specifically, naïve realism tends to be used as a name for a theory that would, within a discipline or subdiscipline, be a starting point—a theory that is motivated by an initial appeal to how things seem to us, pretheoretically speaking. This entry briefly considers naïve realism as it is discussed in cognitive psychology, the philosophy of perception, and metaphysics, and how these different theories are related to one another.

Naïve Realism in Cognitive Psychology

The eminent cognitive psychologist, Ulric Neisser, uses the label naïve realism to name a simplistic view that claims, among other things, that a subject's visual experience “directly mirrors the stimulus pattern; … [is] a passive … copy of the stimulus,” and “begins when the pattern is first exposed and terminates when it is turned off” (p. 16). This naïve view is then taken to be refuted by, for example, evidence that expectancy can alter a subject's visual experience and evidence that the visual experience can persist beyond the extinction of the stimulus.

It is important to note that, although naïve realism is supposed to be a pretheoretic starting point, as Neisser's characterization shows, this does not stop the views so labeled from being theoretically loaded. On the characterization just given, naïve realism goes along with a piece of cognitive psychological doctrine—that visual experiences represent the world. What distinguishes naïve realism from more sophisticated theories within cognitive psychology is the further claim that the representation is both perfectly faithful and passively created.

Naïve Realism in the Philosophy of Perception

This feature of Neisser's characterization of naïve realism actually serves to render it inconsistent with philosophical naïve realist theories of experience. Within the philosophy of perception, naïve realism has been used to name two closely related theses. The first is the view that the things that we perceive are actually constituents of the perceptual experiences we have. So, for example, if I see a tugboat, then the tugboat itself—part of the external world—is literally a constituent of my experience. If I merely seem to see a tugboat—say, I have a tugboat dream or tugboat hallucination that is completely indistinguishable from my experience of actually seeing one—because there is no suitably situated tugboat in the world, the experience I have when I merely seem to see a tugboat could not be the same kind of experience I have when I actually see one. The experience of actually seeing something and merely seeming to see something are experiences of fundamentally different kinds. The second claim differs in virtue of being specifically about consciousness: It says that, according to naïve realism, the things that we perceive actually shape the conscious character of our experiences. Thus, according to such a view, the pink color that we are consciously presented with when we see a flamingo just is the flamingo's pinkness. Again, this has the consequence that we could not have such a conscious experience of pinkness without there being some pink thing that we are aware of. Both of these claims are inconsistent with naïve realism as Neisser conceives of it because they deny that visual experiences are representations of the world, claiming instead that they are states or events that actually involve the world in some way.

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