Direct, Referential Realism

Extract

Only there occur certain lags in scholarship which need to be remedied. One of these is the lack of appreciation of the efforts of the American critical realists to attain a direct, referential realism which would avoid the difficulties confronting an intuitional type of naive realism and the well-recognized dilemma of Lockean representative perceptionism. In the latter case, the puzzle is, of course, that, if we perceive subjective ideas, how can we know that they give us cognitive access to external things.