Illusion

Abstract

QUALITATIVE APPEARING does not demand perceptual events which are completely delusive. We are, however, not confronted solely by a particular which we acknowledge to exist but which exhibits different properties from those which we know it to have. We experience particulars which ostensibly do not belong to the physical world. These initial commonplaces initially threaten Direct Realism. If there are such objects, it is possible that we never directly perceive material objects at all. For it would then be possible that nothing we directly perceive is a material object or any proper part of such an object. This is the phenomenological root of what we have come to know as the Argument from Illusion. But, as we will see, that argument has suffered a chequered fate: Both its defenders and its traditional opponents are wrong. Both misunderstand the crucial turn in the argument which hinges on the exploitation of the phenomenological root of the conclusion that it is possible for us never to be able to perceive material objects directly. My strategy will be to show that what we have come to know as the Argument from Illusion depends on the claim that there is no intrinsic difference between objects which we perceive veridically and those which we hallucinate; that the claim that there is no intrinsic difference between the two perceptual situations is true of both mental and material objects alike; that because it applies to both kinds of object it cannot be invoked to show that we never directly perceive material objects; and, finally, that all of this implies that there are objects of perception which can be characterized independently of the mental-physical distinction.KeywordsReal ObjectMaterial ObjectPerceptual ObjectPhantom LimbDirect RealismThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.