Word of the Week: Realism (Philosophy)

Philosophical realism is the theory that there is a material world of 'ordinary objects' for us to perceive. In other words, realists think that there is some objective, physical reality out there - as opposed to just ideas in our minds. Realists, therefore, do not think that we are in the matrix, or mere brains in vats. However, realism has come under attack from various philosophers: some deny the existence of the material world completely (e.g., George Berkeley) or at least deny the possibility of a proof of the material world’s existence (e.g., Immanuel Kant). Perhaps more significantly, realism has come under attack from politicians: Donald Trump and his minions are intent on denying the validity of our senses. For instance, Kellyanne Conway (Counsellor to the President) recently made up a terrorist attack - the 'Bowling Green Massacre' (hint: it's fantasy) - despite the fact that such a terrorist attack was never seen or heard to take place. This situation, of resorting to mere ‘idealism’ where the world is just what we wish it to be, is what ‘realism’ tries so hard to avoid. Realists do this by affirming the possibility of veridical (truthful) experience of the material world. The likes of Plato and Trump would have us believe that both veridical and non-veridical are insignificant, since abstract 'ideas' are far more interesting, reliable and entertaining (well, at least for Trump...). But realists have set out at solving this Trumpist dilemma.

Nevertheless, realism is not without challenges, and has descended into a conflict between representative realists who assert that our perceptions indirectly represent reality and naïve realists who assert that we can be directly aware of reality. I argue that a realist theory of perception can only be properly upheld in a representative way. However, even from that standpoint, representative realists must produce a justification of why our perceptions represent reality at all. If such an argument is not proposed, then representative realism decays into mere idealism. In that vein, I will start with evaluating the aptly named theory of naïve realism before progressing onto representative realism in the second part of my critical analysis. This should facilitate a judgement as to whether it is indeed impossible to uphold a realist theory of perception.

Naïve realism is built upon the foundations that common sense provides, as Bertrand Russell (1912) and Crane and French (2017) note. This common-sense view itself is a realist theory of perception. Therefore, we can begin our analysis of naïve realism with an analysis of its foundations in common sense. The common-sense view of perception tends to assert two axioms, one of which concerns Openness and the other of which concerns Awareness. As John McDowell notes, the first axiom means that we have ‘Openness to the world’, which comes in three ways: firstly, mind-independence, or the idea that, when we perceive objects, we are perceiving objects that are independent of our minds; secondly, presence, or responsiveness to the way things are now, such that a perception of a table means that we are responding to a real, present, material table; thirdly, transparency, or perception only of mind-independent objects and absolutely nothing else. The doctrine of Awareness is defined in roughly the same way as Openness, with the caveat that humans are in actual perceptual contact with objects. For instance, according to Awareness, if we say that we perceive a table, then a common sense realist would say that we are directly aware of the object, with no need for any intermediary sense-data or representations to provide ‘stepping stones’ for us.

Martin Heidegger (1977 [1950]) noted the merits of this approach by acknowledging that we never ‘originally and really perceive a throng of sensations, e.g. tones and noises, in the appearance of things’; ‘rather, we hear the storm whistling in the chimney, we hear the three-engine aeroplane’. Therefore, when we hear ‘the door slam in the house’, we are hearing the actual door slamming and ‘never hear acoustic sensations or mere sounds’. This has the advantage that we are not acquainted with mere sensations of mental sense-data, but instead are acquainted with, to use a Kantian phrase, ‘things-in-themselves’. Thus common-sense realism allows us to find truths about reality itself, and not just our subjective perceptions. (Hence the materialist maxim of phenomenologists such as Heidegger: ‘To the things themselves!’)

However, whilst Openness and Awareness are both ‘common sense’, there are a number of philosophical problems with both axioms. In particular, the third element of Openness—namely, that we perceive objects with total and utter ‘transparency’—runs contrary to the evidence. To say that we perceive with transparency implies that any variation in our sense-experience can be explained with reference to some variation in the actual objects themselves. For instance, if a white light were shone on a green object from a certain angle, then a common-sense realist would have no choice but to say that the green object has actually turned white. This is obviously not the case – the object is still green from whatever perspective of the observer and whatever lighting is applied to the object.

Nevertheless, academic naïve realists, rather than common-sense naïve realists, solve this problem by admitting three ways in which Openness does not always equate to total ‘transparency’. Firstly, as Heather Logue (2012) argued, variations in the perceiver, such as whether the perceiver is wearing pink-tinted glasses, can lead to variations in one’s perceptions which are not present in things-in-themselves. Secondly, as John Campbell (2009) and Bill Brewer (2011) noted, there are certain conditions of perception, such as angle of the object relative to the perceiver, that can generate illusions, such as the anamorphic skull in Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Thirdly, as M.G.F. Martin (1998) and Matthew Soteriou (2000) noted, the way in which we view an object can generate illusions in our perceptions, such as looking at a cup of tea from an ‘upside-down’ perspective, generating the illusion that the liquid in the tea is suspended in the air. Although these responses are, in my view, essentially the same (as they argue that changes in the relationship between objects and perceiver can impact on the perception of the objects) they succeed in saving academic naïve realism from some of the more obviously naïve claims of its common-sense counterpart.

Yet academic naïve realism is dealt a fatal blow by appliers of the arguments ‘from illusion’ and ‘from hallucination’, such as Howard Robinson, C.D. Broad, J.J. Valberg and P.F. Snowdon. Moreover, representative realists such as Howard Robinson have melded the two arguments against naïve realism to also argue for representative realism. The argument progresses as follows:

(A) Base Case: (a) illusions and hallucinations are not really cases of awareness of ordinary objects; but rather (b) are cases of awareness of non-ordinary (i.e. non-material) sense-data.

(B) Spreading Step: veridical experiences, illusions and hallucinations are all to be given the same account.

(C) Conclusions: (c) no perceptual experience is the case of awareness of an ordinary object; bur rather (d) all perceptual experiences are the cases of awareness of non-ordinary sense-data.

From the apparently obvious premise (A), representative realists have demonstrated that we never have direct awareness of ordinary objects and instead always have direct awareness of non-ordinary sense-data. Sense-data, for our purposes, are (1) objects of direct awareness, (2) bearers of sensible qualities (i.e. that we can ‘sense’ or ‘perceive’), and (3) objects of a radically different ontological kind from ordinary objects (i.e. rather, they are non-ordinary objects). Sense-data, therefore, are the immaterial, mental representations of the material, non-mental reality beyond.

However, a naïve realist, who would prefer us to directly perceive reality rather than indirectly perceive it via sense-data, could attack the Base Case of the argument. Firstly, a naïve realist would argue against the notion in (A)(a) that ‘illusions are not really cases of awareness of ordinary objects’. (Note that the naïve realist is ignoring the argument ‘from hallucination’ for now and is concentrating on the argument from illusion’). Naïve realist Bill Brewer (2011) argues that an object, under certain material conditions, will appear to us in an illusory way. For instance, the placement of a pencil at an angle into a glass of water may make the pencil appear bent. For Brewer, we are still aware of the pencil, but the pencil is placed in such a way that it appears as if it is bent. It is not sense-data that tell us this, but the physics of refraction that tell us this. Therefore, Brewer contends, we are still directly aware of the ordinary object, albeit in an illusory way. On this basis, a naïve realist contends, the Base Case collapses and the argument against naïve realism and for representative realism falls apart. Nevertheless, even if illusions are still cases of direct awareness of ordinary objects, the argument contra naïve realism might still work on the basis of hallucinations: all that is needed is one base case of non-awareness of ordinary objects, whether that involves illusions or hallucinations, for the argument to suggest that we never have awareness of ordinary objects. Therefore, for naïve realist to uphold their case, they have to also take down the part of the argument that deals with hallucinations, or totally non-veridical experiences, such as dreams.

J.M. Hinton (1973) and John McDowell (1982, 1987) try to take down the Spreading Step’s notion that ‘veridical experiences […] and hallucinations are all to be given the same account’. To do this, they propose the disjunctive theory, which suggests that there is something intrinsically different about veridical experiences from hallucinations. Veridical experiences are cases of direct awareness of ordinary objects whereas illusory experiences are not cases of direct awareness of ordinary objects. (Of course, therefore, naïve realists have to accept the Base Case on this one, so they are just attacking the Spreading Step.) Therefore, for naïve realists, we cannot accept the Spreading Step’s principle of giving ‘the same account’ to both illusory and veridical experiences, since they are intrinsically different, or ‘disjunctive’. However, veridical and illusory experiences are often subjectively indistinguishable. For instance, if one is hallucinating that one is looking at a polar bear in the Arctic, then this hallucination may be as vivid as a genuine perception of a polar bear in the Arctic. Or, at the very least, it is very difficult to tell when one is dreaming and when one is not. Consequently, it seems that the argument from disjunctivism falls on its basic assertion that there is something that obviously distinguishes hallucinatory from veridical experiences for the perceiver. As Delia Graff argues, hallucinations feel, for the perceiver, almost identical to veridical experience, such that the Spreading Step is correct in assuming ‘that veridical experiences, illusions and hallucinations are all to be given the same account.’

Therefore, it seems that representative realists have the theory with the greatest explanatory power: when we are having hallucinatory experiences, representative realism teaches that the reason why the experience is so vivid is that we are really and directly acquainted with objects. These objects, however, are just sense-data, which may or may not correspond with the real world. A.J. Ayer, for instance, contended that all experiences can be explained in terms of sense-data. However, sense-datum theorists such as Ayer have admitted that sometimes this would involve (using Robert Nozick’s terminology) ‘subjective conditionals’. For instance, a subjective conditional might involve the claim that ‘if I were standing high on the right side of Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, then I would see an accurate painting of the human skull’ but ‘if I were looking front-on at Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, then I would see a strange, grey, distorted shape’. In the case of this painting, subjective conditionals must be employed to explain why the skull is anamorphic, i.e. it appears in different shapes from different perspectives. However, this suggests that the conditionals must always hold, which is implausible if sense-data are just mental cognitions. If sense-data are mental, then our perceptions should be chaotic and dream-like, without a tangible pattern. This requires a representative realist to posit the existence of the material world to be perceived, such that veridical experiences are still veridical and illusory experiences are still illusory. However, as A.J. Ayer notes, there is no a priori proof for the existence of material ordinary objects. Nevertheless, we can assume that such objects exist, as they make uniform perception possible. In other words, we can pragmatically but not logically demonstrate the existence of material objects. Without such an assumption, science would have to assume that objects, when unperceived, might not really exist; with such an assumption, we can happily leave our homes without worrying that the homes will vanish when we are not perceiving them. In a way, the existence of matter is, to use Kantian terminology, ‘empirically real’ for all scientific purposes, but, for want of a logical proof, ‘transcendentally ideal’.

On balance, representative realism deals naïve realism a fatal blow with the arguments from illusion and hallucination. Even though illusions can be explained by naïve realists as examples of direct awareness of ordinary objects under certain material conditions, hallucinations are clearly non-veridical and, at the same time, subjectively indistinguishable from veridical experiences. Representative realism solves this dilemma by explaining all experience in terms of sense-data and not just ordinary objects. Representative realism, however, similarly lacks any a priori demonstration of its veracity. Nevertheless, there certainly are a multitude of a posteriori indications of the plausibility of representative realism, as its axioms are presupposed in much scientific activity. Pragmatically, realism is absolutely necessary lest we admit that objects may magically vanish if they are not being perceived. Realism may not be a perfect theory, both in its naïve and not-so-naïve forms, but it certainly is not impossible to uphold a realist theory of perception. So the Trumpists may have lost - the real world does exist, perception can give us veridical experiences, and truth matters.