Chapter Three - A Defense of Representational Realism

Abstract

In this paper I defend the claim visual perception is indirect in the sense that what we ordinarily take as being the front surfaces of objects being “seen” in fact consists of phenomenal events in a private phenomenal mental space. The perception of distal physical objects is then held to be indirect due to the linkage of these phenomenal events with these distal objects by means of causal chains. I defend this claim against a series of objections including that the position results in various sorts of regresses that visual perception is manifestly not mediated by something else, that it results in the claim that we in some sense just perceive pictures of objects and not the objects themselves, and that the position inherently involves a violation of the ordinary language of perception.