Abstract
Recently, it has been objected that naïve realism is inconsistent with an empirically well-supported claim that mental states of the same fundamental kind as ordinary conscious seeing can occur unconsciously (SFK). The main aim of this paper is to establish the following conditional claim: if SFK turns out to be true, the naïve realist can and should accommodate it into her theory. Regarding the antecedent of this conditional, I suggest that empirical evidence renders SFK plausible but not obvious. For it is possible that what is currently advocated as unconscious perception of the stimulus is in fact momentaneous perceptual awareness (or residual perceptual awareness) of the stimulus making the subject prone to judge in some way rather than another, or to act in some way rather than another. As to the apodosis, I show that neither the core of naïve realism nor any of its main motivations is undermined if SFK is assumed. On the contrary, certain incentives for endorsing naïve realism become more tempting on this assumption. Since the main motivations for naïve realism retain force under SFK, intentionalism is neither compulsory nor the best available explanation of unconscious perception.
Highlights
A number of philosophers have pressed that naïve realism (a.k.a. relationalism) cannot deliver a plausible account of unconscious perception
I take it that the core of naïve realism comprises the following claims: (i) perception, understood here as a successful sensory encounter with the mind-independent world, is a direct relation between the subject and the mind-independent physical object; (ii) the relata of this relation, the perceiver and the perceived object, stand to each other as components of a unified state called ‘perception’; (iii) perceptual relation provides some cognitive import for the subject, which normally consists in creating an opportunity to gain knowledge about mind-independent reality
If we focus on unconscious perception exclusively, intentionalism does not seem to have any advantage over naïve realism
Summary
Because I want to stay neutral with respect to internal debates within the naïve realist camp, it will be useful to extract the core of naïve realism, which is arguably common to all of particular formulations of this claim. This variable is filled with one or more of the following: (A) the possibility of demonstrative thought (Campbell 2002); (B) the transparency of sense experience (Martin 2002b); (C) the fine-grainedness of experience (Brewer 2011); (D) the particularity of experience (Martin 2004, 2006); (E) the primacy of veridical perception in the theory of perception (Martin 2006); (F) the possibility of thought about the external world (Travis 2013b); (G) epistemic humility regarding the judgments about the kind of experience one is having (Martin 2004); (H) relationality of experience without the commitment to sense data (Brewer 2011).2 This list is not exhaustive, it tenably encompasses the main motivations of naïve realism.
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