I have presented the natural view as an expression of the core claim of naïve realism, at least insofar as the latter theory is motivated by phenomenological concerns. And I have proposed the simple metaphysical picture as a way of cashing out naïve realists’ rather metaphorical claims about the relational structure of perceptual experience and the role of objects as ‘constituents’ of our awareness. As noted earlier, some self-avowed naïve realists may not endorse the natural view, being concerned more with epistemological than phenomenological concerns. Nonetheless, if naïve realism does not entail the natural view, then we might at least think that the natural view entails a form of naïve realism.
However, we will have cause to question this posited entailment, and indeed to hold that naïve realism is false even while the natural view might yet be true.
Before getting to the reasons for this surprising claim, we can see that even a form of naïve realism that endorses the natural view goes a step beyond it. As its name suggests, what is distinctive about naïve realism is that it combines the natural view with a further claim that I will call the realism claim, namely the claim that the objects and qualities of which we are aware exist and have their nature independently of their being perceived.11 Let us then define the relevant form of naïve realism as the conjunction of these two claims:
The natural view: in perceptual experience we are directly aware of our environment such that it is the environment itself that is the bearer of phenomenal character.
and
The realism claim: worldly objects exist and have their perceptible qualities independently of their being perceived.
11 Different forms of realism are formulated for different kinds of subject matter, e.g. mathematical objects and moral properties, but all take a similar general form, namely that the existence and nature of the relevant entities are independent of their relations to subjects. See e.g. Miller 2010 for a synopsis and discussion. The realism relevant to the current thesis concerns perceptible objects and qualities.
Taken together, the natural view and the realism claim deliver what we might see as a key explanatory virtue of naïve realism, namely its ability to explain how things appear perceptually to the subject. The explanation proposed is simple: how things appear – their phenomenal character – is determined exhaustively by the experience-independent nature of the worldly objects and qualities perceived as they are arrayed in the scene before the subject.
Let us call this the explanatory virtue of naïve realism:
The explanatory virtue: naïve realism explains what it’s like to perceive solely by reference to objects and qualities in the subject’s environment as they are arranged to the subject’s perspective.
I take it that the realism claim is implicit in the explanatory virtue inasmuch as the direction of explanation is supposed to run from the existence and nature of the perceived objects/qualities to the phenomenology of experience. That is to say that any explanatory value is dependent on the explanans being independent of the explanandum.
The chief objections to naïve realism can be understood as attempts to show that for certain experiential phenomena – classically, perceptual illusion and hallucination - the explanatory virtue does not hold. In other words, these are supposed to be cases in which the phenomenology of experience cannot be explained solely by reference to the objects and qualities perceived by the subject. It is therefore widely claimed that the phenomenal character manifested in our awareness cannot simply be identified with the sensory character of the worldly scene itself in the way that the natural view requires. It is the alleged mismatch between how things are before the subject and how things seem perceptually that encourages some to treat phenomenal character not as a (relational) property of the perceived environment but as a (possibly intrinsic) property of an experiential mental state. The challenge to the naïve realist is thus to preserve the
explanatory virtue in the face of these seemingly problematic kinds of experience and so to keep phenomenal character ‘out there’, as it were.
I will show in chapter 3 that naïve realists have no difficulty squaring the explanatory virtue with at least some well-known kinds of illusory experience, since these are cases in
which the phenomenal character, misleading though it may be, is nonetheless
demonstrably explicable purely in terms of the scene before the subject and its constituent objects and qualities. Hallucination poses more of a challenge, since by definition it is a kind of experience in which some of the phenomenal qualities of which the subject seems to be aware need not be instantiated in the subject’s perceptible environment. As a result, the possibility of hallucination has driven some of the central arguments for and against naïve realism. I will argue in chapter 4 that available naïve realist accounts of
hallucination leave something to be desired, and show that the natural view points to an alternative account that, surprisingly, brings it within the scope of the explanatory virtue.
My reason for highlighting the explanatory virtue is thus to emphasise an essential feature of naïve realism, but also as a prelude to showing that it is difficult if not
impossible to reconcile with certain features of perceptual experience. I will cite some key features of colour experience which cause problems for the realism claim: first, intra- and intersubjective variation in hue perception; and, second, the structure of phenomenal colour space. Each of these cases presents a challenge to any attempt to account for the phenomenal qualities of experience – their nature and variability – by reference to the qualities that worldly objects possess independently of their being perceived. It seems from such cases that we cannot identify the phenomenal qualities with subject-independent qualities borne by the worldly objects perceived, and so the explanatory virtue cannot hold.
A corollary of this is that we cannot hold true both the natural view and the realism claim, such that we must reject naïve realism as I have defined it. Given the above-noted problematic features of colour experience, such naïve realism would entail the following inconsistent triad:
1. Perceived (phenomenal) colours inhere, in at least some cases, in the very worldly objects perceived (the natural view).
2. Colours have their nature, and qualify worldly objects, independently of their being perceived (the realism claim).
3. Perceived (phenomenal) colour qualities are subject-relative (call this ‘subject relativity’).
This effectively recapitulates a familiar form of argument against naïve realism, deployed in times where it was largely invoked as a foil for what were felt to be genuinely philosophical views of perception. As I will explain in chapters 3 and 4, the argument is more commonly constructed around the phenomena of illusion and hallucination, although there are plausible accounts of these that the naïve realist can offer without obviously endangering the realism claim. The same cannot be said for the subject relativity of colour experience.
Although I will conclude from this that naïve realism is an unstable and untenable position, I will persist in defending the natural view while rejecting the realism claim. At first blush, this might seem an absurd way to resolve the inconsistent triad, and the alternative route of abandoning the natural view might seem preferable. Certainly, it has been preferred by most philosophers when confronted by a similarly-structured problem based on the possibility of illusion or hallucination. Nonetheless, I think that the natural view remains worth defending precisely because it is such a statement of the obvious, by which I mean it is so well grounded in a compelling pre-philosophical grasp of what perception involves. One might object that the realism claim is likewise a statement of what seems obvious, so that there is an inconsistency in denying a corresponding defence of that claim. However, while the realism claim might seem to capture a common-sense view (albeit one not always endorsed by philosophers, notably including some idealists), it is arguably a more philosophical claim than the pre-philosophical insight I have tried to express in the natural view. No doubt there are common-sense insights in the vicinity of the realism claim, although these arguably have more to do with notions of causal independence, namely that we cannot change things merely by perceiving them. The notion of constitutive independence is less easily discerned in what we might imagine is a common-sense, pre-philosophical view of perception.
In any case, while the realism claim and subject relativity are clearly incompatible (the latter is the denial of the former, at least in respect of certain perceptible qualities), no such logical incompatibility comes between subject relativity and the natural view. Of course, to hold both of these claims would be to commit oneself to the claim that the inherent qualities of worldly objects (colours, etc.) are subject-relative. This, for one thing, requires a rather loose reading of ‘inherent’; specifically one that does not treat it as a synonym for
‘intrinsic’. More worryingly perhaps, it looks very like a kind of idealism, namely the claim that worldly objects are mind-dependent. However, I will argue in chapter 7 that the natural view opens the way to a metaphysical picture that can account for the falsity of the realism claim without succumbing to what have been seen as the more unacceptable implications of idealism. Most obviously, my denial of ‘mental states’ or ‘experiences’ construed as distinct entities, states or events occurring within the subject means that the relevant notion of subject-dependence is not to be read as mind-dependence or understood in terms of the ontological priority of the mental over the physical. Instead, I will argue in chapter 7 that it can be cashed out in terms of a certain kind of top-down metaphysical priority relation holding between wholes and their parts. The crucial example of this metaphysical priority for my purposes is the priority of the whole perceptual process (involving and linking object and subject) over the particular worldly objects and qualities that form parts of that process.
Notwithstanding the metaphysical contortions necessitated by subject relativity, I will show that the simple metaphysical picture allows us to explain many hallucinatory and other non-perceptual experiences in a way that preserves realism and hence naïve realism’s explanatory virtue. As such, I will argue that the natural view and simple metaphysical picture offer an advance on some existing naïve realist attempts to account for the
phenomenology of non-perceptual experience. Ultimately, however, we will be left with some aspects of sensory experience that are also explicable in terms of the simple
metaphysical picture, but only at the cost of abandoning realism. Quite what this abandonment amounts to will be discussed in chapter 7.