Her eyes are blue and I admire them. To admire them, I have to believe that they are there and blue. I cannot believe that the object of my admiration is merely an independently existing power which produces in me an experience as of her blue eyes. Her actual eyes don't have to be a content of my experience in order for me to admire them. It would be enough for them to be there and accurately represented by an internal object of my experience. But that her actual eyes are a content of my experience is perhaps the most likely and even the most agreeable way in which the conditions would be satisfied for me to admire them without illusion. Various doubtful philosophical arguments exist against the doctrine that perceptual experience has a content which is nothing other than a part of the independently existing world. But a new and ingenious causal argument against that doctrine has recently been advanced both by Howard Robinson and by J. J. Valberg.' Robinson wants a sense datum theory of perception, from which he can negotiate a further passage to the ultimate haven of Berkeleian idealism. Valberg aims rather to reveal a tension between our commonsensical commitment to a causal picture of the world and what he thinks is our inability not to believe in the immediate presence of external objects, given that we have any picture of the world. You may not share either of these concerns. You may also resist the currently popular picture of direct realism as our only saviour from the 'Cartesian sceptic', as uniquely capable of dispelling what is rightly or wrongly seen as the fatal illusion 'of a gulf, which it might be the task of philosophy to bridge, or declare unbridgeable, between the realm of subjectivity and the world of ordinary objects.'2 Why after all should the mere existence of direct realism ' Robinson, H., Perception (London: Routledge, 1994), ch. VI (an expanded version of some of his essay 'The General Form of the Argument for Berkeleyian Idealism' in Robinson, H. and Foster, J. (eds), Essays on Berkeley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 163-186. Valberg, J. J., The Puzzle of Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 106, 111. 2 McDowell, J., 'Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space' in Pettit, P. and McDowell, I. (eds), Subject, Thought and Content (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 146. Cf. McCulloch, G., Mind and World (London: Routledge, 1995), 15: 'it is because the mind, according to Descartes ..., is self-contained with respect to the surrounding material world, that sceptical questions immediately seem so urgent.