naive realism essay

Naive Realism

What is naive realism.

Imagine everyone in the world wearing a pair of invisible glasses. These special glasses show them the world around them. Naive realism is the belief that the world you see through your own personal pair of glasses is the only true world. It is as if no one else’s glasses show any different picture. This view is straightforward: If something seems real to you, it must be real in the same way to everyone else.

Another way to explain it is that naive realism is like thinking everyone’s brains are set to the same radio station, playing the exact same song. When you look at a tree or hear a dog bark, you assume that everyone else sees the exact same tree and hears the same barking sound. This kind of thinking doesn’t leave room for other people’s experiences or feelings, which can be as varied as the tunes on different radio stations.

How Does Naive Realism Affect Us?

Naive realism affects us in a lot of ways, each one making it harder for us to get along with others. Here’s what it can do:

• We might argue with people a lot. Since we believe our view is the right one, it’s puzzling when others don’t agree. To us, our point of view seems so clear!
• Misunderstandings might happen a lot because we expect others to think like us and we can become upset when they don’t.
• We can end up judging others harshly. If we’re confident that our way of seeing things is the only correct way, then anyone with a different perspective might seem wrong or ill-informed.
• It can cause us to ignore other viewpoints or oversimplify complicated situations and issues because we think there’s only one simple answer.

Now let’s look at a situation where naive realism is the main player:

Example 1: Alex and Taylor having a disagreement in class could happen simply because their ‘glasses’ are showing them different pictures. Alex can’t understand why Taylor doesn’t see the obvious message about friendship, because through Alex’s ‘glasses’, that’s what stands out most in the book. On the flip side, Taylor’s ‘glasses’ are tuned to the theme of personal growth and challenges. Because of naive realism, they argue, completely sure that their own understanding is the correct one, and they fail to recognize the book might have multiple messages.

Dealing with Naive Realism

Fortunately, there are things you can do to help prevent naive realism from clouding your judgment. Here’s how:

• Acknowledge it: By simply being aware naive realism exists, you can spot it when it affects your thoughts.
• Be curious: Ask others about their perspectives and listen. It’s like a chance to look through their ‘glasses’ for a moment.
• Question yourself: Consider why you see things a certain way. Are you possibly overlooking something?
• Look for different angles: Most stories have more than one side. Aim to understand all the possible sides.
• Slow down: Avoid making quick judgments. Give yourself some time to think about different possibilities.

Doing these things can help you expand your vision to include more than just your own viewpoint.

Why Is Naive Realism Important?

Why should we care about naive realism? Well, it influences how we talk to and understand others in our day-to-day lives. If you believe that everyone sees things the same way as you, it’s easy to become frustrated or confused when they don’t. Think of it like this: if you’re playing a game where everyone is supposed to follow the same path, but you don’t realize that each person’s path looks different, there will be a lot of bumps along the way. By understanding that everyone has their own path—or point of view—we can have more patience and work together better.

For instance, in school or work, realizing that others might have different interpretations can lead to better team projects and discussions. Instead of arguing, people would respect each other’s views and learn from them. One person might point out something you missed, or you might change your mind about something after hearing a new argument . This makes for a more open and creative environment, where everyone’s perspective is valued, and we come up with better, more complete solutions.

Related Topics and Explanations

Understanding naive realism is also important because it’s connected to other ideas and biases that affect how we think:

• Confirmation Bias : Confirmation bias is like wanting to hear your favorite song on the radio over and over. It’s when you seek out information that agrees with what you already think and ignore anything that doesn’t fit.
• Fundamental Attribution Error : This happens when you blame someone for behaving a certain way because of who they are, rather than considering the situation they’re in. It’s like hearing someone play a sad song on the piano and thinking they’re just a sad person, instead of wondering if maybe they’re just practicing for a sad scene in a play.
• Fallacy of Fairness: When you expect life to be fair, like a game where everyone follows the same rules, and then feel upset or angry when you see unfairness, that’s the fallacy of fairness. But life is more like a game with lots of different rules for different players.

Recognizing these can help you understand the challenges we face in seeing things from someone else’s viewpoint.

In the end, naive realism is a tricky thing—it makes us think we’ve got the whole picture when we’re actually looking at the world through our own set of lenses. While it can mix up our thoughts and relationships, being aware of it is the first step to looking at life in high definition. We should also pay attention to other biases that can show up alongside naive realism. The key thing to remember is that everyone has a story, and the world is a complex place. Keeping our ‘glasses’ clean and our minds open will always reveal more of the amazing world and the people in it.

Naïve realism: a simple approach

• Published: 18 May 2018
• Volume 176 , pages 2167–2185, ( 2019 )

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• Justin Christy   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6605-0364 1  

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Naïve realism is often characterized, by its proponents and detractors alike, as the view that for a subject to undergo a perceptual experience is for her to stand in a simple two-place acquaintance relation toward an object. However, two of the leading defenders of naïve realism, John Campbell and Bill Brewer, have thought it necessary to complicate this picture, claiming that a third relatum is needed to account for various possible differences between distinct visual experiences of the same object (for example, differences that result from changes in the object’s spatial orientation relative to the subject, or from changes in the intensity with which the subject focuses her attention on the object). This, I argue, is a mistake. Once it is acknowledged that a subject’s visual experience acquaints her with more than just a single object, all of the relevant facts can be explained from within the simpler naïve realist framework.

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Naïve Realism and the Relationality of Phenomenal Character

Roberta Locatelli

What’s so naïve about naïve realism?

Carlo Raineri

Naïve Realism with Many Fundamental Kinds

See, e.g., Crane and French ( 2017 ).

The qualification in the first sentence may be meant merely to exclude hallucinatory sensory episodes from naïve realism’s scope, or it may be meant to leave room for the possibility that sensory experiences of certain types (e.g. gustatory), even when veridical, are not “presentations of an experience-independent reality.” On the first reading, Martin’s characterization is no weaker than Brewer’s or Campbell’s, since one will not have “experience of an object”, nor stand in a “perceptual relation with the physical world” if one is hallucinating. On the second reading, Martin’s characterization would appear weaker than Brewer’s and Campbell’s, which concern perceptual experience quite generally. I will ignore this potential point of difference here.

Cf. Fish ( 2009 , 14): “The distinctive feature of naïve realism [about visual experience] lies in the claim that, when we see the world, the subject is acquainted with […] mind-independent objects and their features—where ‘acquaintance’ names an irreducible mental relation that the subject can only stand into objects that exist and features that are instantiated in the part of the environment at which the subject is looking.”

Campbell occasionally characterizes the relation with which he identifies experience of an object as one of acquaintance—though never, as far as I am aware, in a canonical statement of naïve realism. In the work from which I have taken the above statement of naïve realism, Campbell says at one point that “experience of an object… constitute[s] the kind of simple acquaintance with the object that provides knowledge of the reference of a simple demonstrative” ( 2002 , 114). Acquaintance with objects is a major theme of Campbell ( 2009 ).

Apart from the various references to acquaintance in Campbell’s writings, another reason to understand his talk of a “simple” relation as picking out a relation that is both dyadic and unanalyzable is that such an interpretation preserves the distinction between Campbell’s naïve realism and competing accounts of what an experience is. For example, a proponent of representationalism can accept the claim that a veridical experience is a relation between a subject and an object—the relation of seeing , for example. However, she will insist that this relation admits of a further analysis, e.g. into a relation between a subject and a representational content plus a causal relation between the content and the object in question. Each of these relations may well be unanalyzable, but at this level of description, a veridical visual experience is no longer held to consist in a single dyadic relation.

To say that acquaintance presents reality to a subject is to say that when a subject is acquainted with something, she enjoys an unmediated awareness of it.

The apparent difference between Campbell and Brewer can be traced, in large part, to their respective staring points. Campbell is providing an account of “experience of an object ”, while Brewer is providing an account of “our perceptual relation with the physical world ” (emphasis added).

Campbell adopts the terminology of “scenes” in later work, e.g. ( 2011 , 2016 ).

This is not to say that our experience puts us in a position to make very detailed judgments about more than a handful of objects at a time: our peripheral experience seems to reveal only the coarsest features of our environment.

One source of resistance to this interpretation of naïve realism stems from the thought that it is good methodology to keep our account of perceptual experience as simple as possible, and that construing perception as acquaintance with an object abstracts away from much of the messiness inherent in the notion of a scene. One upshot of the discussion to follow, however, is that this sort of abstraction deprives the naïve realist of resources she can use to explain otherwise puzzling phenomena.

The requirement that y be numerically distinct from any part of x allows for x to range over scenes. Without it, the fact that the constituents of a scene are numerically distinct from the scene itself would be enough to secure sophisticated naïve realism. In addition, the requirement would be needed even if x were to take a single object as its value. An object’s parts are numerically distinct from the object itself, and it is easy to imagine cases where some will satisfy the remaining clauses of SC. It would be needlessly redundant, though, to say that perception consists in a three-place relation between a person, an object, and the object’s parts.

Considerations besides those at issue in the arguments from Brewer and Campbell have been thought to favor naïve realism. To exhaustively undercut the motivation for sophisticated naïve realism via the strategy I adopt here, we would need to extract conditions for inclusion in a scene from arguments based on each such consideration, and see whether any of Brewer and Campbell’s sophisticators can be correctly assigned as the value of y in SC when any of the resulting conceptions of a scene is assigned for x . I will not attempt this task in full detail here, but some brief remarks may be helpful. I am aware of two other sorts of consideration that have been thought to motivate naïve realism: epistemological considerations and phenomenological considerations. Epistemological considerations are prominent in John McDowell’s case for naïve realism, which rests on the thought that naïve realism is the only view that allows us to avoid skepticism about perceptually-based knowledge (see his 1982 , especially p. 474). This suggests something like the following:

Epistemological Condition (EC) : For any x , if a subject S has perceptually-based knowledge of one or more facts about x , then S is perceptually acquainted with x .

An argument for naïve realism from phenomenological considerations is given in Hellie’s ( 2007 ). Hellie appeals to expert judgments (i.e., judgments by philosophers of mind, seasoned in the art of introspection) that attribute to perceptual experience a phenomenological sense of the “direct presence” of the things perceived (a sense that is absent from episodes of imagining, for example—though see Martin ( 2002 ) for an argument for naïve realism based on analogues of this sense of “direct presence” in sensory imagination). On the basis of such judgments, Hellie thinks that it is reasonable to adopt a naïve realist account of perception. This gives us something like

Phenomenological Condition (PC) : For any x perceived by a subject S , if experts would judge that x phenomenally seems directly present when perceived, then S is perceptually acquainted with x .

(Kennedy ( 2009 ) supports naïve realism by appealing to the phenomenological judgments of ordinary subjects, as opposed to experts. The reference to experts in PC can easily be amended to capture this kind of approach.) I suspect that a discussion of the alleged sophisticators in connection with EC and PC would run more or less parallel to the discussion I go on to provide in the main text. I will leave it to the reader to consider how the details of such a discussion might go, however.

In addition, changes in an object’s orientation relative to a subject often entail changes as to which of its parts are obstructed by others. I argue below that the latter sort of change can be understood as a change in the scene with which the subject is acquainted.

A subject need not have in view the region of space coincident with her body in order to refer to it demonstratively. She might do so while looking straight up at the sky, for example. Analogously, she need not have in view the region of space behind her in order to refer to it demonstratively. A subject’s visual experience at a time secures a conception of a space that includes, but is not limited to, the space she can see at that time. She can then exploit this conception to refer to parts of the space that are not presently visible to her.

These changes in proximity relations can be offset, of course, by suitable changes in the location and orientation of everything else in the environment that is visible to the subject. Such changes will negate any differences that the change in the subject’s location would have made to her visual experience. This shows, perhaps, that subjects’ acquaintance with relations of proximity are of greater perceptual significance than their acquaintance with their own locations and the locations of the things they see.

This point will need to be qualified if a subject can be visually acquainted with time and its passage by seeing (e.g.) a clock as its second hand sweeps across its face. But even if we can be acquainted with the time in this way, this will not provide the simple naïve realist with the resources for a comprehensive treatment of the perceptual changes in question, since these may occur in cases where there is no clock (or anything analogous) in the relevant scene. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this issue.

This is consistent with the possibility that the subject might fail to notice a change in illumination. If the change makes a difference to the character of the subject’s visual experience, then it is “visually registered” in the relevant sense.

This should be qualified to account for the possibility that the occluded portion of the wall might contain small holes, flecks of non-red paint, patches of textural discontinuity, and so on. Were any of these possibilities to obtain, I do not think it would thereby be correct to say that your visual experience is nonveridical. More plausibly, your experience is non-neutral with respect to unlikely possibilities, like the examples given in the main text.

If the proponent of simple naïve realism adopts this strategy, it will be natural for her to say that the phenomenology of a subject’s veridical perceptual experience is determined by the properties with which she is perceptually acquainted in the scene in conjunction with the particular perceptual acquaintance relation she bears to the scene, rather than by the former properties exclusively.

Might this worry extend to the previous section’s proposals for handling various perceptual constancy phenomena? Suppose it were urged that what is crucial in cases of color constancy are differences in how colors themselves look, not differences in the perceptual registering of some distinct factor, such as environmental lighting conditions. In this case, though, the differences in how surface colors look is explained exhaustively by visually registered changes in lighting. I am skeptical that there is a similar explanatory connection between the way in which seeing a smooth surface differs qualitatively from touching one and the perceptual registering of (e.g.) the surface’s color versus its temperature—or, at any rate, I am unsure how to convince myself that there is such a connection.

Likewise for shifts of attention from one thing to another. Suppose a subject is faced with a white surface, marked with two black dots a few centimeters apart, and otherwise blank; and suppose that she visually attends first to one dot, then to the other. In shifting her attention, she need not move her eyes, so she will not become acquainted with any additional parts of the surface. And the overall scene with which she is acquainted throughout the example is too impoverished for the shift in her attention to yield an awareness of any additional, more determinate properties. (See Speaks 2010 for discussion of a similar case in a representationalist framework.)

On one way of spelling out this view, the subject’s acquaintance relation to the scene is “reflexive”, taking itself as an object. Another option would be to say that whenever a subject is perceptually aware of a scene, she also stands in a numerically distinct acquaintance relation to her relation of perceptual acquaintance. The former view is analogous to the “self-representationalism” defended by Kriegel ( 2009 ), who holds that conscious experiences represent their own occurrence as well as various aspects of their subject’s environment. The latter is analogous to the “inner sense theory” defended by Armstrong ( 1968 ) and Lycan ( 1996 ), according to which a subject’s conscious experiences are represented by higher-order perception-like states of the same subject.

See Dretske ( 1999 ) for one prominent example of such a view.

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Christy, J. Naïve realism: a simple approach. Philos Stud 176 , 2167–2185 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1120-9

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Published : 18 May 2018

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Objectivism In Depth

Exploring ayn rand's revolutionary philosophy..

Philosophy of Perception: Naïve Realism vs. Representationalism vs. Direct Transformative Process Realism

Thus, it is the job of philosophy to answer the most basic question: Does perception give us an awareness of reality, and if so, at the most basic level, how?

In this essay, I’ll explain three different theories of perception. To the question of whether perception gives us an awareness of reality, all three of them attempt to answer, “Yes.” Where they disagree is on the “how,” or the basic nature of perception. The three basic theories are naïve realism, representative realism, and Direct Transformative Process Realism (DTPR.) (“Representative realism” here is a synonym for representationalism. Note that these theories are all variants of “realism” in perception. Theories that answer “No” to the question of whether we can observe mind-independent reality would be variants of “idealism.”)

Philosophers sometimes use “naïve realism” as a synonym for “direct realism,” and there are many different theories that could be called “direct realist.” But here I will take “naïve realism” to be one specific sort of direct realist theory: the sort of approach to perception exemplified by the Ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle. Representationalism too has quite a few variants, but they all share a common thread. I will focus largely on the version of representationalism associated with the English philosopher, John Locke. Direct Transformative Process Realism (DTPR) is my term for the theory of perception put forward by Ayn Rand and Objectivist intellectuals after her. It’s a form of direct realism that is very different from Aristotle’s approach. I’ll explain this term in more detail when I explain this theory later in this essay.

Naïve Realism

Aristotle’s theory of perception is “direct realist,” which means that perception is taken to be the process by which material objects directly impact one’s consciousness through the sense organs. Aristotle says that a perceived object affects the sense organs in such a way that they become like the object in form. When you see a red apple, your eyes acquire a tinge of red. When you taste a strawberry, your tongue acquires a little of the strawberry flavor. And so on. This alteration of your sense organ constitutes your sense experience of the object, and is immediately transferred to your soul or consciousness as a sensory memory.

Thus, we could say that, for Aristotle, (and other naïve realists) perception is where one’s consciousness “mirrors” or “mimics” the outside world in some way. If you see a red apple, there will be something in your consciousness that mimics the shape and color of that apple, and this constitutes your sensory experience of the real apple. If you feel a smooth, cold surface, something in your consciousness somehow mirrors the smoothness and coldness, and this constitutes your experience of that surface.

All the qualities that we sense, such as shape, color, feel, odor, sound, etc., are “out there” in the object. These qualities then make their way into one’s consciousness through the sense organs.

This theory takes perception as basically a passive process of absorption of the external world into consciousness. And under this theory, it makes sense to compare the contents of a given perceptual experience to the external world. (That is, the experience and the outside world are commensurable .) If the form of the experience matches the form of the external object, then the experience is “accurate,” or “true” to the object. In the technical vocabulary of philosophers, the experience is “veridical.” (From the Latin for “true.”) If one’s experience did not match the object, the perception would be “non-veridical.”

Naïve Realism in visual perception. Aristotle’s theory of perception.

Aristotle himself thought that all sense perceptions automatically and infallibly matched the objects that generated them: He likened the sense experience to “the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold”–a literal “sense impression,” strictly determined by the form of the object that made it. ( De Anima ii 12)

But many of his contemporaries, as well as later philosophers, were not so sure. His account of perception leaves open the possibility that something could happen to cause the form in one’s consciousness to not match the form in reality. Couldn’t one use a signet-ring to make a “bad impression”? (I.e. a distorted one?) Or couldn’t the received form be distorted on its way to another portion of the body in which the experience actually takes place?

Even in Aristotle’s time, others like the Sophists had observed that sense experience of a given object varied with variations in the sense organs. So it didn’t seem to make sense to say that the senses could reliably reproduce the form of an external object. Also, illusions seem to be a case where the experience of an object clearly does not match its form in reality. Hallucinations seem to be an instance of perceptual experience where there’s not even any real object to impart its form to one’s consciousness.

These objections to naïve realism were part of the motivation behind the development of the next theory I’ll discuss: representationalism.

Representationalism

Representative realism is an “indirect realist” theory of perception. This means that real objects are only perceived indirectly, through intermediate “representations” in one’s consciousness. These representations may be called “ideas” (as with John Locke) or “sense data.” They are what is perceived directly , but they are held to be caused by real, physical objects.

In Locke’s version of representationalism, physical objects have two types of qualities directly relevant to perception: primary qualities and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are those qualities of objects that produce “ideas” (sensory experiences) in us that resemble them. They are in the real object, as we perceive them. These qualities include the object’s shape, structure, mass, texture, and motion. So when you see that an apple is round and that it is moving, your experiences of these things match the way the apple is “in itself,” apart from you.

According to Locke, secondary qualities are those qualities of an object that cause in us “ideas” (sensory experiences) that do not resemble the object as it is, “in itself.” They are the abilities of objects to generate in us experiences of color, odor, taste, warmth, cold, physical pain, etc. The secondary qualities in an object are actually a subset of the objects’s primary qualities that aren’t translated into experiences isomorphically–i.e. in a way that resembles them in the object.

An example of what Locke has in mind here would be the surface composition and texture of an apple, versus that of a peach. In the apple, the surface is smooth and composed in such a way as to reflect mostly “red” (low frequency) light. Thus, we see the apple as “red and shiny,” because it reflects “red” light at most angles, and all “colors” of light at certain specific angles (specular reflection.) The surface of a peach, on the other hand, is not smooth or “red-light-reflecting.” It has tiny hairs that disperse light, and a surface that reflects slightly higher frequencies of light, such that it appears “matte” and “pinkish-orange” to us.

For Locke, the “ideas” (sensory experiences) we have of an object’s overall size, shape and motion could be said to represent the real object “faithfully,” whereas the ideas we have of its color, temperature and odor represent the real object “unfaithfully.” The overall shape and motion of the representation that we experience is basically a copy of what is intrinsic in the real object, whereas the color, temperature and odor of the representation is a subjective invention of the individual’s mind.

Representationalism or indirect realism in visual perception, as theorized by John Locke.

This sort of representational theory of perception is meant to solve some of the problems with naïve realism. Unlike naïve realism, it can account for the problem of colorblind people, who see different (or fewer) colors in objects, or the fact that putting one’s hand in ice-water before touching a rock can make the rock feel warmer than normal. This is because, in representationalism, part of what makes our sensory experiences what they are is our own sensory processing. Elements of our sensory experiences “come from us.” Illusions would happen when the primary qualities as seen in our representation don’t match those in the object, because of what we add to the representation. Hallucinations would happen when we have a “representation” that doesn’t actually represent any physical object, because it is completely generated by us.

But representationalism also generates its own problems. If our ideas of secondary qualities don’t match those in the object, aren’t our senses lying to us? And if our senses lie to us about secondary qualities, how do we know our representations of primary qualities match those in objects? They don’t match when we have an illusion or hallucination, but how do we know we’re not in that state in a given experience, or indeed, all the time? We can never get “outside” our representations to compare them to the object “in itself,” so we seemingly have no way of knowing. This problem has traditionally been called the “veil of perception.”

Representative realist theories other than Locke’s will differ in their details, such as whether secondary qualities are what Locke said they were, or whether there’s even a distinction between primary and secondary qualities, or in the exact nature of the representations, or in what the representations are called, (e.g. “sense data.”) But in my understanding, the “veil of perception” problem is pervasive among these theories. For a pure representative realist, all we ever really deal with, or are directly aware of, are elements of our own consciousness. We never really perceive or deal with the physical world as such, only representations in our consciousness. So why not dispense with the physical world and focus on our representations as our reality?

Thus, in my estimation, pure representative realism leads naturally into de facto idealism. The only reality we can ever deal with is our representations, which are all elements of our consciousness. Reality “in itself” is inaccessible. So “our reality” is effectively composed of our own consciousness, which is the doctrine of subjective idealism.

The next theory I will discuss is one that, in my estimation, solves the conceptual problems of both naïve realism and representative realism, without lapsing into idealism.

Direct Transformative Process Realism

Direct Transformative Process Realism (DTPR) is a theory that contrasts with both naïve realism and representative realism. To understand how it’s different, let’s start with a simplified analogy:

Imagine a robot that uses a laser to sense what’s in front of it. It emits this laser, which then bounces off an object and back to a sensor on its front. When the laser light strikes this sensor, it triggers a series of steps that convert the light into an electrical signal that bounces back and forth along a wire in the robot’s head. The frequency of the signal varies with the distance between the robot and the object that reflects the laser. Let’s say that when the object is closer, the frequency is higher, when it’s further, the frequency is lower.

Now the robot also has wheels that it travels on and controls. It can sense when those wheels are turning and how many rotations they make, according to electrical impulses in other wires in its head. The robot can rotate its wheels until it gets to the object in front of it. By comparing the initial frequency of its laser sensor to the number of turns its wheels make before it’s stopped, the robot can determine the distance a given laser sensor frequency corresponds to, in terms of wheel rotations.

So, the first thing to notice about this situation, is that robot’s “awareness” of the object in front of it is not any sort of copy of the object in front of it. The robot’s laser-based awareness of the object is in the form of a resonating electrical impulse with a certain frequency. (And the robot’s wheel-based awareness is also in the form of an electrical impulse.) So it doesn’t make sense to ask if the electrical impulse matches the object’s distance from the robot or not. In other words, it doesn’t make sense to ask if the robot’s laser-sense is “veridical.” The resonating electrical impulse is not commensurable with the distance to the object: The two cannot be compared and judged as “matching” or “not matching.”

This is analogous to the way DTPR understands human sense perception. The signals that impact the senses undergo a process that transforms them into an awareness that is incommensurable with the physical object out in reality. This is why I refer to the theory as a “transformative process realism.” DTPR also regards the whole causal chain that leads from the physical object to a human’s awareness of it, as fundamentally part of the process of perception. All the steps of this chain directly participate in making the perceptual experience what it is. DTPR does not regard states or elements of consciousness as the objects of perception in the direct or fundamental sense. So this theory is a direct theory of perception, rather than an indirect one. Thus I call it Direct Transformative Process Realism.

Now, as against the simplified example of the robot, real human perception is very rich in information. The sense of vision provides, not just one distance, but a whole field of objects with depth, shape, angular size and color. The process of visual perception starts when light is emitted from a source. It then either enters the eyes directly, or is reflected off of one or more objects in one’s visual field. It is focused by the eyes onto the retina. This triggers neural signals and these travel to the brain for processing. This processing then generates an awareness of the solid, physical object that emitted or last reflected the light. This awareness of the object is not isolated, but includes the object’s immediate environment, insofar as it is visually perceivable.

This whole sequence of events constitutes the process of visual perception. The object of the perception is the physical object out in the world. The form of the perception is the way the object is perceived. The form of the perception includes things like the color, shape, texture, brightness, size and depth of the object as perceived. These are the ways in which one experiences the object. If I see an apple, then I am not seeing a “red blob in my mind.” I am seeing the apple , and I am seeing it as red. I am also seeing it as shiny, as rounded, as of a size similar to my hand, and as at a certain depth in my visual field.

Any alteration in the way the process of perception occurs can alter the way the object is perceived (i.e. the form of the perception.) If an object is turned to a different orientation relative to the observer, the form of the observer’s perception of it will likely change. If the color (visible frequency composition) of the light reflecting off of an object changes, then the form of the perception will change. The form of visual perception will be different between a colorblind person and a normally sighted person: Where the normally sighted person may see an apple as red, a totally colorblind person may see the apple as grey. Any alteration in neural processing of retinal signals may also affect the form of the perception.

In each of these cases, the perceived object remains the same, but the way it is seen changes. There is no “right” or “wrong” form in which to perceive the object, because perception is not a process of “copying” or “mirroring” the object. Perception is a transformative process that generates an awareness of the physical object that is incommensurable with it.

In the DTPR theory, the process of perception must also be sharply distinguished from conception . That is, perception must be distinguished from the practice of classifying objects under concepts like “apple” and “table.” Perception is a wordless experience of physical objects. Any words, classifications, or judgments are a separate step beyond sheer perception. Thus, in the terms of contemporary philosophy, DTPR is a non-conceptualist theory of perception.

Direct Transformative Process Realism in visual perception. Note that this diagram is simplified. Visual perception doesn’t generally present the observer with single objects in isolation, but a whole spread of multiple objects in relation to each other and to the observer.

So, as one might gather from what has been said, DTPR regards sheer perception of objects as infallible . It cannot be “wrong” in the sense of being “non-veridical,” nor can it be wrong about the conceptual classification of an object, since it provides no conceptual classification. (Nor can it be “right” in either of these senses.) Perception is an automatic process in response to physical objects that has no ability to “lie” or “distort.” Perception gives a presentation of an object in a given situation as it gives it, and that’s it. Misidentifications of things, like mistaking a wax apple for a real apple, are mistakes of conceptual judgment, not of perception. (Perception only tells one that there’s something there and that it looks a certain way to one’s eyes, not how to classify it.)

As you can see from the diagram on visual perception, light emission from a source is part of the process of perception. Variations in the color of light striking an object can alter the color of the object-as-perceived. In sheer perception, there is only ever the experience of the color of the object-as-perceived, never an experience of an “intrinsic color” in the object alone.

It’s a separate, conceptual task to define and judge the “intrinsic color” of the object. This can be done scientifically by measuring what proportion of what frequencies of visible light the object reflects. (I.e. the reflectance spectrum.)

So what does DTPR have to say about the arguments from illusion and hallucination that we discussed in regard to the other theories of perception? The cases of illusion and hallucination are very different. In the case of an illusion, a person is actually perceiving something in the world, just in an unusual form. The classic example of a pencil being submerged in water so that it “looks bent” is one such illusion.

A pencil partially submerged in water.

This is a case where the context the pencil is in alters the path of the light it reflects, and thus affects the form in which one perceives the pencil. It is not a case of a perception being “wrong.” Whether the pencil is “straight” or “bent” is a conceptual judgment. It is not given to an observer by sheer perception. There is no single way that a straight pencil is “supposed to look.” It can look many different ways depending on its situation in its environment and relative to the observer:

The same pencil in 4 different contexts, with different relations to the observer.

A judgment of the pencil as “straight” or “bent” is not directly implied by a single moment’s perception of it. To make this judgment, we would properly take many instances of perception of the pencil–or an extended interaction with it–then use that to apply our definition of what makes something straight or bent to it. We can make an error in doing this, but that is an error in judgment, not perception.

Another illusion is provided by the following pattern:

The way you see this pattern is not “wrong” or “an error.” The perceptual experience itself does not automatically generate the conclusion that the patterns are rotating. That would take a separate, conceptual judgement. The form in which you see this pattern is affected by the nature of the neural processing in your optic nerves and brain. The neural processing of this pattern generates a form of visual perception that is similar to the way other patterns might look when they are actually rotating. This is the way your visual processing inherently and automatically works, and so can’t be called an error. It’s the form in which you must perceive this particular pattern, given the nature of your means of perception. Nor can your perception fail because it “fails to match the object in reality,” since “successful” perception is not a copy of the real object, in the first place.

DTPR deals with hallucinations by recognizing that they are not perceptions at all. Perception occurs when an external, physical object impacts the senses and causes an awareness of it in a subject. Hallucination is not an instance of that, but an experience of content that one has already internalized. Thus, hallucination is a form of memory and imagination.

All that distinguishes a hallucination from a normal case of imagination is that it is experienced in a way that overrides genuine perception and thus is more difficult to distinguish from it. It is akin to a waking dream, and is no more a case of perception than a dream.

If someone has an occasional hallucination, then they can understand that it’s a hallucination by reference to their genuine perceptions and the conceptual knowledge they’ve built up from them. Hallucinations will tend to go against what the person understands about the world, and so won’t integrate (mesh) with their sense-based knowledge. This will typically allow them to pick out the hallucination as a case of imagination, rather than perception.

But if a person starts hallucinating all the time, then it is like the person is dreaming all the time. The person won’t really be able to make sense of anything. Such a person is no longer conscious, and is in no position to philosophize about the world. To anyone who is not in this state, it is self-evident that they are not, since they can integrate their perceptions and make sense of their experiences.

So we’ve looked at three theories of perception, all of them “realist.” They all contrast with idealism, in that they take the ultimate object of perception to be real–independent of anyone’s consciousness–while idealism takes the “object” to be “ideal”–dependent on someone’s consciousness.

The naïve realism of Aristotle takes perception to be a transfer of the form or qualities of an object to the sense organs and consciousness of the observer. The perceptual experience is like an impression or copy of the form of the external object. The form of this impression is held to infallibly match the form of the external object. (Perception itself is always “veridical.”)

The representationalism of John Locke takes perception to occur in two different stages: the causal chain that leads from the object to the observer, and the internal representation of the object by “ideas of sensation.” The initial causal chain triggers the representation, but is not actually present in the “direct perception,” which is all within the observer’s consciousness. The ideas of the primary qualities of an object “resemble” the primary qualities in the object, whereas the ideas of the secondary qualities do not “resemble” the secondary qualities in the object. This means that the perceptual experience of an object is a copy of the object’s primary qualities, mixed with subjective elements that are caused by the object’s properties, but not related to them in any other way.

The DTPR theory of Ayn Rand and other Objectivists takes perception to be an active process that generates a direct awareness of physical objects in reality. This awareness does not consist of a copy of any object’s form or qualities. It’s an experience of the object, from a certain perspective and in a certain form, that is not commensurable with the object itself. Any alteration in the causal chain that constitutes the perception process can alter the form in which the object is perceived. This theory has no place for Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities, since it rejects “resemblances” between physical objects and sensory experiences.

For more on Aristotle’s theory of perception, see this article: Aristotle’s Psychology (SEP) . For more on John Locke’s theory of perception, see Section 2.2. of this article: John Locke (SEP) and this page: A Guide to Locke’s Essay – Simple Ideas .

For more on Direct Transformative Process Realism, see the free online course, The Foundations of Knowledge , the audio course, Perception (ARI eStore) , the book, How We Know , and/or the book, The Evidence of the Senses .

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10 thoughts on “ philosophy of perception: naïve realism vs. representationalism vs. direct transformative process realism ”.

A use of the term “Naive Realism” in A. D. Smith’s Problem of Perception (2002): “the view that in perception we always perceive the world exactly as it is” (p. 22). Compare to your quote: “Perception gives a presentation of an object in a given situation as it gives it, and that’s it.” Smith also groups Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke and himself in the Direct Realist camp. I agree with Smith in that at least I think that primary qualities and the form of an object are equivalent, as the essence is the internal derivation from the form and secondary qualities are the internal processing of the object.

Re illusion: “The perceptual experience itself does not automatically generate the conclusion that the patterns are rotating.” The patterns are rotating regardless of concepts. It’s an illusion, which means a partial misperception. Hence anything that involves a misperception, like a misjudgment, is itself based on the way we perceive. I’ve written more on this here: http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?/topic/23364-the-dim-hypothesis-by-leonard-peikoff/&do=findComment&comment=351250

A comparison with the views of Thomas Reid (and followers) in the 18th and 19th centuries, and with the Oxford Realists of the early 20th century (such as Harold Prichard and Sir William David Ross) would be useful.

I agree this would be interesting and helpful, at least in regard to Reid. I may eventually write something comparing Rand to Reid.

They are similar, in that Reid was a direct realist and–at least superficially–recognized the incommensurability of awareness with physical objects. But Reid has significant problems that Rand doesn’t.

Basically, Reid kept a peculiar form of the primary/secondary quality distinction, whereas Rand does away with the distinction entirely. Reid still seems to think that the perception of primary qualities in objects presents those qualities “as they are in themselves,” as opposed to secondary qualities which present objects “as they are related to us.” I think that this distinction is a problem, because it won’t allow him to deal with certain illusions, such as simple magnification by a lens. (How can the “size” I’m seeing change when the object doesn’t?)

The fact is that all perception is a process that produces an experience mediated by the relationship between the object and the observer. Every element of perception involves the relationship between the observer and object. We can only get at intrinsic properties by integrating multiple instances of perception into concepts, as Ayn Rand describes in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology .

Reid also seems to make the connection between sensations and conceptual ideas “automatic,” in that they are simply features of our “constitution.” This effectively makes simple concepts an automatic extension of perception: Both must be regarded together as the most basic foundation of knowledge. So then if we have a false belief about the world occasioned by a sensation–say that the sun is the same size as the moon–then we would have to say that our senses + constitution have failed us, and we can’t trust them: Our foundation for knowledge is unreliable, and errors will be automatic and inevitable.

Unlike Reid, Rand does not treat basic concepts as automatic consequences of sensation/perception. Thus they don’t have to be treated as part of the ultimate foundation of knowledge. Perception alone is the infallible foundation, while concepts are developed from perception in a way that is potentially fallible. Conceptual errors are not automatic. Rather they are open to choices and to be rectified by reference to continued perception.

Yes there were some early 20th century American philosophers who were critical of Reid on these lines – not for being too much of a Realist, but for not being Realist enough.

Would it be safe to say that DTPR considers the behavioural nature of mind/consciousness , while other two consider mind/consciousness as a separate entity from the behavior

It is always risky to approach poets as if they were writing philosophy. However, in the case of William Blake I wonder what you think? He definitely had a ‘theory of knowledge’ – well more than a theory, more of a way of life! He famously wrote ‘if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear as it is, infinite’ which in my understanding is saying we approach life from too subjective a viewpoint; self-delusion comes into the picture and so on! He aslo blurrs the boundary between subject and object; so is very contemporary in this respect. His idea of Urizen, the over-rationalising self was a hindrance to seeing the world clearly as newly created phenomana in each moment. (Eternity in an hour!

” This effectively makes uncomplicated concepts an automatic propagation of sensing: Both must be regarded together as the most introductory origination of cognition. Basically, Reid kept a rum form of the main(a)/lower-ranking lineament eminence, whereas Rand does away with the eminence entirely.

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I would consider a person to be conscious in a dream but unaware. Unaware consciousness.

This is truly next-level thinking. You’re an inspiration!

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Perceiving Is Believing

How naive realism influences our perception of everything..

Posted January 23, 2021 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

The only true voyage of discovery...would be not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is. — Marcel Proust

Perception is everything—and it is flawed. Most of us navigate our daily lives believing we see the world as it is. Our brains are perceiving an objective reality, right? Well, not quite. Everything we bring in through our senses is interpreted through the filter of our past experiences.

Understanding Sensation and Perception

Sensation is physical energy detection by our sensory organs. Our eyes, mouth, tongue, nose, and skin relay raw data via a process of transduction, which is akin to the translation of physical energy—such as sound waves—into the electrochemical energy the brain understands. At this point, the information is the same from person to person—it is unbiased.

To understand human perception, you must first understand that all information in and of itself is meaningless. — Beau Lotto

While Dr. Lotto's statement is bold, from the perspective of neuroscience , it is true. Meaning is applied to everything, from the simplest to the most complex sensory input. Our brain's interpretation of the raw sensory information is known as perception. Everything from our senses is filtered through our unique system of past experiences in the world. Usually, the meaning we apply is functional and adequate—if not fully accurate, but sometimes our inaccurate perceptions create real-world difficulty.

Perceptual Illusions

There are numerous optical illusions that distinctly convey how easily our perception can lead us to incorrect conclusions. Psychologist Roger Shepard (1990) illustrated that our perceptions can be inaccurate with his famous table-top demonstration (see video below), which clearly establishes that our brains may fool us into perceiving an erroneous view of reality regarding even the simplest of visual perceptual questions.

Countless illusion examples may be found in psychology textbooks or via internet searches, but this captivating video unmistakably illustrates how our past experiences in the world interfere with our accurate perception regarding a simple line length comparison.

How does our brain get deceived ? We trust that our perceptual system constructs accurate representations of the surrounding world. However, our assumptions regarding perception are unsupported by evidence. The deficient understanding of how we perceive the world was originally termed naive realism by Lee Ross and his colleagues in the 1990s. Naive realism is thought to be the theoretical foundation for many cognitive biases , such as the fundamental attribution error , the false consensus effect, and the bias blind spot.

Perceptual illusions are endlessly fascinating and provide a microcosm of potentially faulty human perception. When we encounter these illusions, we initially believe we are seeing an accurate representation of reality only to be surprised by how easily our brains mislead us.

Inter-Group Conflict and Naive Realism

What happens when we extrapolate our perceptual shortcomings to large-scale human interaction? Too often, humans get stuck believing their view of the world is an objective reality. This, of course, leads to conflict with other humans who disagree, especially those we perceive to be part of an out-group . Naive realism leads us to reason that we see the world objectively—and that others do as well. When we encounter people who disagree with us on important matters, we tend to think they are uninformed, irrational, or biased.

Why does this happen? It is challenging and uncomfortable to confront our own understanding of the world, especially if we are unaware of our tendency for faulty interpretations of reality. Most people have likely not considered that their opinions about the world are filtered through their unique perceptual lens, which is fundamentally biased and based on past experiences.

How we perceive the world and important issues, from parenting to the political, is based on our perception. When we begin to understand that other people's experiences in the world vary greatly and influence how they interpret complex issues, we can begin to have a greater understanding of other points of view.

However, we tend to become more entrenched in our beliefs about our representations of reality when interacting with people in a different "tribe." Instead of seeking common ground—which can be an effective method to initiate belief change, we instead become more tribal and refute any information from our rival group.

What Can We Do?

The polarization in our modern world is widespread and appears to be increasing. Determining how to find commonalities between groups can feel impossible due to naive realism. Fascinatingly, researchers have uncovered a simple intervention that may promote greater understanding between members of rival groups.

Dr. Meytal Nasir (2014) and her colleagues set out to empirically investigate whether people could be more open to narratives of their adversaries (out-group) following an intervention that raises awareness regarding the concept of naive realism and the implications in the real world.

The researchers conducted their study within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an exemplar of a well-known intractable struggle. Their focus was to raise awareness of naive realism as a universal cognitive psychological bias that fuels adversaries to adhere to a collective narrative of the ingroup and reject the out-group narrative during conflict.

Results from the research indicated that the intervention—a short text describing naive realism and its implications—did produce an increased openness to adversary's narratives by raising the experimental group members' awareness of cognitive limitations. Fascinatingly, the intervention made no mention of the rival group or the specific conflict, yet still brought about positive change.

The Nasie research aligns with Dr. Lotto's commentary about how we can overcome our perceptual deficiencies.

By becoming aware of the principles by which your perceptual brain works, you can become an active participant in your own perceptions and in this way change them in the future. — Beau Lotto

Final Thoughts

A metacognitive strategy aimed at our perceptual system is a promising intervention for intractable disagreements between groups. While tribalism was certainly evolutionarily adaptive for humans thousands of years ago, current trends suggest it is detrimental and leading to deleterious consequences across the globe.

With knowledge regarding naive realism, we need to look beyond our own experiences and attempt to see the world with the eyes of others—especially those we perceive to be in out-groups. The insight uncovered with this new viewpoint may or may not move our positions on various issues, but as we navigate an ever-polarizing world of divisiveness—fueled by social media , it may be our only hope (sorry Obi-Wan).

Jessica Koehler, Ph.D., is an Associate Faculty Member in the University of Arizona Global Campus Psychology Department.

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Direct Realism

Basic definition.

• Direct realism , also known as naive realism , posits that perceptions provide direct knowledge of the world.
• Proponents maintain we experience external objects and their qualities precisely as they truly are .
• Perceptual experiences are not intermediated by sense-data , contrary to indirect realist or representational views.

Principal Features

• In the direct realist view , what is perceived is not a representation or an image of the external world, but the world itself.
• Among advocates, there is a general belief in the existence of a world independent of the human mind.
• It supports the notion of unmediated contact with the world, suggesting our experiences aren’t manipulated by any internal processes .

Arguments in Favour

• The argument from perceptual relativity proposes that the variation in perceptual experiences doesn’t necessitate acceptance of sense-data .
• Hallucinations and illusions , critics argue, can be contextualised as misinterpretations of sensory input rather than as proof of indirect realism.
• The theory of direct realism dismiss the need for an internal representation to explain perception, aiding Occam’s razor .

Criticisms and Counter-arguments

• Critics question the direct realist’s ability to account for hallucinations and illusions , where perceptions appear detached from any external object.
• Critics mention the phenomenon of perceptual variation ; the same object can appear differently to two observers, or to the same observer at different times.
• Critics further argue that if direct realism were true, we would be able to rely on our senses for accurate information about the world. However, various fields from psychology to physics show that our senses can be misleading .
• Counter-arguments often focus on theories of perceptual adaptation and advancements in neuroscience to help explain how our perception can be both direct and fallible.

Key Philosophers

• Significant proponents of direct realism include G.E. Moore and J.L. Austin , who presented detailed arguments against the idea of sense-data and the indirect realism associated with it.
• Both philosophers argue that our direct experiences are not complex interpretations or representations, but an immediate engagement with the world.
• While not without critics, direct realism forms a substantial part of epistemological theories, and it is important to understand both the arguments for and against this perspective.

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Naïve Realism: A Proposal for Documentary Film Theory and Criticism

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Research output : Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (Book) › Other

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• Brian Winston

T1 - Naïve Realism

T2 - A Proposal for Documentary Film Theory and Criticism

AU - Williams, Deane

PY - 2022/4

Y1 - 2022/4

KW - documentary

KW - film studies

KW - Brian Winston

M3 - Chapter (Book)

SN - 9781845497965

BT - It's the Media, Stupid!

A2 - Keeble, Richard

PB - Abramis Academic

CY - Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

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Article Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Naïve Realism
• 3. Sensibility and the understanding
• 4. Unification
• 5. Cognition
• Works by Kant:
• Others of Kant’s texts referred to:
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Naïve Realism In Kantian Phrase

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Anil Gomes, Naïve Realism In Kantian Phrase, Mind , Volume 126, Issue 502, April 2017, Pages 529–578, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzw009

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Early twentieth-century philosophers of perception presented their naïve realist views of perceptual experience in anti-Kantian terms. For they took naïve 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 naïve realist account of visual experience within a recognisably Kantian framework by arguing that a naïve 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 resultant view is middle way between recent conceptualist and non-conceptualist interpretations of Kant, holding 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.

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Naive Realism Essay (454 words)

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Naive realism is just a way of looking at the world. Also called common sense realism, things are perceived directly as they are. True naive realists would never sum up or analyze their views, because they do not consider them views but the way things obviously are. However, I will do my best to illuminate them:

“I, the naive realist, am a human being. There is the physical world, the space where everything exists and the time in which everything happens. There are many things in this physical world, each largely separate from the other and persisting over a span of time. Time is divided into “now,” which is real and experienced, “the past,” which once existed but now does not, and “the future,” which does not exist yet but will.

“My senses give me direct knowledge of reality. If I see a chair, it is because there is a chair physically where and when I see it. There are exceptions, such as when I am dreaming or watching a movie, but these are rare and obviously not real.

“I can know things through my senses, through thinking about things, and through communication with other people. Other people”s beliefs may be correct or not, but beliefs of people I respect, and beliefs held commonly by most people in my society, are usually true.”

Science used to support naïve realism to a certain point, that is to say, things being what they seem was the easiest, and the only answer in the not-so-distant past. However, eventually classical science broke away from naïve realism in a major way. Scientists drew a line in the sand between “objective reality” and “subjective perception.” All of a sudden, the grass wasn’t really green and the sky wasn’t blue, in fact, they had no color at all.

Color became the interaction between light, the object, and the human eye. For example, if I’m looking at a red rose, science says that the light from the sun hits the flower, which both absorbs and reflects the light. A small portion of that reflected light hits the human eye, which puts aside most of it and instead focuses on an even smaller portion that we call visible light. It then ignores most of the visible light and focuses again on a smaller, stronger portion, which my eye would translate as the color red.

Science, therefore, gave birth to a sort of sophisticated realism, where human beings do not perceive things as they truly are, but rather perceptions arise as a result of the interaction of the human and its environment. Perception does not show the object as it truly is, but in the way it interacts with human senses.

This essay was written by a fellow student. You may use it as a guide or sample for writing your own paper, but remember to cite it correctly . Don’t submit it as your own as it will be considered plagiarism.

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