Naïve Realism In Kantian Phrase

Abstract

Early twentieth-century philosophers of perception presented their naive realist views of perceptual experience in anti-Kantian terms. For they took naive realism about perceptual experience to be incompatible with Kant’s claims about the way the understanding is necessarily involved in perceptual consciousness. This essay seeks to situate a naive realist account of visual experience within a recognisably Kantian framework by arguing that a naive realist account of visual experience is compatible with the claim that the understanding is necessarily involved in the perceptual experience of those rational beings with discursive intellects. The effect is a middle-way between recent conceptualist and non-conceptualist interpretations of Kant: one which holds that the understanding is necessarily involved in the kind of perceptual consciousness that we, as rational beings, enjoy whilst allowing that the relations of apprehension which constitute perceptual consciousness are independent of acts of the understanding.