Direct Realism Flashcards
Outline the claim of direct realism
-Physical objects exist independently of our minds and of our perceptions of them; and the immediate objects of perception are mind-independent objects and their properties.
Outline and explain the problem of perceptual variation: sight.
- Russel gives the example of a shiny brown table.
- We say it’s brown but it doesn’t actually look an even brown colour all over; depending on how the light falls, some parts are lighter than others, and some are even white from shininess.
- So Russel objects that saying the table is brown means no more than that it looks brown to ‘a normal spectator from an ordinary point of view under usual conditions of light’. But why think that this colour is more real, more of a property of the table, than any of the other colours that you experience.
- Just what colour any part of the table looks to you depends on where you stand.
Outline and explain the challenge of Perceptual variation: Touch.
- Russel then runs the same argument but this time appealing to variations in our perceptual experience, from the properties of texture and shape.
- The table might be smooth to touch but if you looked at it at a microscopic level there are all kinds of bumps and dips- so should we say we feel the smoothness of it when we touch it?
- And the shape something appears to have also changes depending on where you stand.
Outline what Russel means by sense data.
- What we are immediately aware of when we perceive something. When I look at the table, I have a (visual) sensation I.e. I am immediately aware of something.
- The ‘content’ of my sensation- what I am immediately aware of- is sense data.
- We can summarise the challenges by saying that perceptual variation shows that what we directly perceive are not physical objects, but sense-data.
How can we respond to the problems or variation? And what is the development of this response using the example of the table.
-Russel claims that what we say when we say the colour of an object is the colour that it appears to have when seen by normal observers under normal conditions.
- That we don’t always see this colour- that our perception of its colour varies- doesn’t show that direct realism is false: we can still say that we see that table; and it’s colour, under normal conditions.
- After all, we do all see it as some shade of brown (shading to white). So, in seeing it’s colour, we see the table and it’s properties.
- Developed Response:
- Take the shape of an object; we have an even better reason to support the claim that the table is rectangular, rather than obtuse- we can use its shape to perform various actions, like getting it through a narrow doorway, which will only succeed if it is rectangular and not obtuse.
Outline and explain what a relational property is. And 2 examples of this.
-A relational property is a property that something has only in relation to something else.
- For example ‘being to the north of’ is a relational property; Manchester is to the north of London.
- Another example is ‘being in love with’; Jack is in love with Joan.
-Notice that in these examples we can only say what properties these are by mentioning other things (London and Joan).
How can we apply relational properties to perception?
- In perception, we can be aware of a range of properties, some of which the object has independent of our minds, and some of which it has in relation to being perceived.
- For example, a rectangular table has the property of ‘looking obtuse’. This is a distinct property from ‘being obtuse’- so a table can be rectangular and look obtuse.
-The property of ‘looking obtuse’ is a relational property, in this case, a property the table has in relation to be seen.
Do relational properties resolve the problem of perceptual variation?
- It would appear so. In claiming that perceptual variations are a relational property the properties of the physical object are preserved.
- That the object is still mind-independent is clear.
- It is only the relational properties that are dependent on us.
Outline and explain the problem of illusion. And the direct realists response to it.
- If you look at a pencil half-submerged in water, it looks crooked, but it isn’t. If we are looking at an illusion and we have no background knowledge of illusions, we don’t know it is one.
- If direct realism is true, the external world would be exactly as we perceive it. However in the case of illusion, there is an obvious difference between our perception and reality.
- The direct realism could reply that the pencil has the property of looking crooked. It is a relational property it has to being half-submerged in water.
What is the challenge of hallucination?
- We can experience perceptual hallucinations- not just visual ones, but auditory hallucinations aswell.
- Hallucinations can be subjectively indistinguishable from verifications perception.
- But here we can’t say that what is seen is how some physical object looks, because there is no physical object seen at all!
- Therefore what we perceive must be mental (sense data).
What is the response to hallucinations?
- The disjunctive theory of perception: If something looks a certain way, then one of two quite different things is going on:
- Either I directly perceive a mind-independent physical object that is F.
- Or (as in the case of hallucination) it appears to me just as if there is something that is F, but there is nothing that is F. - According to the disjunctive theory of perception, hallucinations and veridical perception are two completely different kinds of mental state, because in hallucinations, the person isn’t connected to the world.
- In hallucination, we don’t perceive anything, we imagine it.
- To imagine something is not to perceive something mental, such as sense- data but not to perceive anything at all.
- Perception is a relation of the subject to the world, a form of ‘cognitive contact.’ Hallucination is not.
- As a result, the argument from hallucination falls apart!
Outline and explain the Time-Lag argument.
- For example it takes 8mins 20 seconds for light from the sun to reach the earth. If you look at the sun you are seeing it as it was 8mins 20secs ago. Therefore, we could argue, you aren’t seeing it directly. (We can generalise).
- We can generalise. What we perceive is the physical medium by which we detect physical objects (light waves, sound waves, chemicals for smell and taste). So we don’t perceive physical objects directly.
What is the response to the time-lag argument?
- Direct realists can reply that this is a confusion between how we perceive and what we perceive. Light waves are part of the story of how we see physical objects.
- ‘Can you see the paper?’ and ‘can you see the light reflecting from the paper?’ There is no difference between the 2. To ‘see’ the light that the paper reflects is just to see the paper. In fact; you cannot see the light itself; only the paper!
