Naïve Realism

Naïve realism is the name for a philosophical theory of visual perception and the nature of visual experiences (though the theory may be generalized to the other senses). According to naïve realism, veridical visual experiences are relations to material objects that exist whether or not they are perceived and so are mind-independent (naïve realism is therefore sometimes referred to as the relational theory of perception); such experiences have material objects as constituents—the objects of visual awareness are literally part of the experience. Because hallucinatory experiences are not experiences of material objects, it follows that you could not be having the visual experience that you are now having if you were having a hallucination. Therefore, naïve realists hold a disjunctive theory of visual experiences: A visual experience in which it seems to you that there is a book on the desk in front of you is either a psychological episode that actually has the book as a constituent or a fundamentally different kind of psychological episode that merely seems to have a book as a constituent.

Why should we accept naïve realism? One reason is that it captures how our visual experience seems to be to us in introspection. When you look at a book lying on the desk in front of you, the book visually appears to you as being a certain way: as having a certain size and shape, for example, and as being a certain color. Attending to the book and its features is a way of finding out how the book—the object of your experience—appears. Suppose now that you introspectively reflect on your visual experience of the book: You shift your attention from the book to your experience of the book. Shifting your attention from the book to your experience of the book is not shifting your attention from one object to another—in introspectively reflecting on your experience of the book there is no other object for you to attend to than the book itself (this is sometimes referred to as the transparency of visual experience: Visual experience seems transparent to the world). Your experience introspectively seems a certain way to you. In characterizing how your experience—a psychological episode—seems, you can do no better than describe how the objects of your experience—material objects—appear. Your experience seems to present the book and its features, and the features that determine the character of your experience are features that seem to be instantiated by the book. Therefore, your visual experience seems to involve the presentation of a material object—the book—and its features, and any account of visual experience that rejects this is committed to claiming that visual experience is other than it seems to be introspectively. A second reason for accepting naïve realism is epistemological. If the visual experience you enjoy when seeing a book is of a kind that could occur in the absence of the book (as it would do, for example, when you have a hallucination of the book), then it does not provide you with the kind of cognitive contact with the world required to ground knowledge. Therefore, the experience you have when you see the book [Page 610]must be of a kind that could not occur in the absence of the book.

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