In Search of Direct Realism1

Abstract

It is fairly standard in accounts of the epistemology of perceptual knowledge to distinguish three main alternative positions: representationalism (also called representative realism or indirect realism), phenomenalism, and a third view that is called either naive realism (usually by its opponents) or realism (usually by those who are more sympathetic to it). I have always found the last of these views puzzling and elusive. My aim in this paper is to try to figure out what realism amounts to, mainly with an eye to seeing whether it offers a genuine epistemological alternative to the other two views and to representationalism in particular. My main thesis will be that it does not that what is right in realist views turns out to have little bearing on the central epistemological issue concerning perceptual knowledge. Both for reasons of space and to allow a focus on the issues that I regard as the most important, my discussion will be restricted in the following ways: First, I will give no consideration at all to phenomenalism. The numerous and to my mind entirely decisive objections to the phenomenalist view are by now very well known. Second, I will also give no attention to the standard externalist views of justification, of which reliabilism is the most familiar. Though it is very easy within a reliabilist framework to defend something that might perhaps be characterized as direct realism, the point of such a characterization and of the alternatives that it implicitly suggests is largely lost in that context. Third, although I started by speaking of perceptual knowledge, I will pay no real attention to the concept of knowledge as such, focusing instead on the issue of whether and how perception yields a good reason or basis for thinking that a belief about the material world is true the issue of justification, as at least one version of internalism understands it.2 Fourth, I will follow the usual philosophical practice of concen-