Causation and Direct Realism

Extract

Direct Realism as a theory of perception has traditionally been thought to collapse on the existence of hallucinations. The cause of that collapse is what is familiar to philosophers as the Argument from Illusion. And what sustains that argument is the equally familiar No-Intrinsic-Difference Claim. The argument and the claim conspire to undermine Direct Realism as follows. We are first given cases in which we are acquainted with perceptual states of affairs that can be neither material bodies nor parts of such bodies. We are told that what we see in such cases is phenomenally indistinguishable from what we see in cases of veridical perception: There is, so the argument goes, no characteristic of either kind of state of affairs available to inspection which enables us to distinguish one from the other. And since there is no phenomenal difference between them, there is also no intrinsic difference; hence, we are never directly aware of material bodies or their parts in perception—from which it is generally inferred that Direct Realism is false.