Abstract
Naïve realism (also called ‘relationalism’ or ‘object view’) is becoming increasingly popular, but the specific outline of its commitments remains often underspecified by proponents and misunderstood by critics. Naïve realism is associated with two claims, both concerning genuine, veridical perceptual experience (where this excludes hallucinations). Constitutive Claim (CC): The phenomenal character of perception is (partly) constituted by the mind-independent objects in one’s surrounding and their properties. Relational Claim (RC): Perception is a relation to mind-independent objects in the environment and their properties. Some philosophers use the two claims interchangeably while talking about naïve realism, while others use only one or the other, although they do not explicitly discuss if the other claim is also a core commitment of naïve realism, or if naïve realism can be held without the other claim. This raises the question of how RC and CC relate to one another, together with the most pressing question of what each claim ultimately commits one to. After discussing the shortcomings of alternative interpretations, I argue that naïve realism should be understood as committed to, first and foremost, RC. This should be understood as a claim about the phenomenal character of perception, rather than about its nature, structure or essence (whatever that means). CC, on the other hand, should be understood as a corollary of RC. This doesn’t only offer a better characterisation of how naïve realists understand phenomenal character: it also helps us understand how we can simultaneously claim that the object of perception is a constitutive element of perception, while also allowing for it to play a causal role in determining perception.
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Notes
Notice that Kind and Soteriou characterise weak transparency in different ways. Here I follow Soteriou. For an overview of the debate on transparency and a discussion of further distinctions in the way the claim has been made, see Bordini (2023).
Strong intentionalism claims that the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences is fully determined by its representational content, while weak intentionalism claims that qualia account for the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences. Notice that sometimes these positions sometimes go by different names. Here I follow the terminology adopted by Crane (2001, Ch: 3, §25), to which I also refer for a detailed discussion of the debate.
Alternatively, one could read CC as a causal claim, saying that the phenomenal character of a perception causally depend on the object perceived and their features in such a way that it would not be what it is, were the object absent or different. However, this can’t be what naïve realists intend, since almost anybody (irrespective of their account of perception) would accept that the phenomenal character is causally sensitive to the objects perceived, to the point that the claim verges on the trivial.
This explains how naïve realism is most often understood as entailing disjunctivism: if the object is part of the essence or real definition of the phenomenal character of perception, then a hallucination, where the object is lacking, can’t have the same phenomenal character. The fact that some have argued that naïve realism can be upheld without committing to disjunctivism reflects the fact that not everyone agrees on what naïve realism entails, due to the ambiguity affecting the formulation of both CC and RC. Other strategies to defend a non-disjunctive versions of naïve realism rely on arguing that objects (although non-standard) are also constituents of the phenomenal character of hallucination (Raleigh 2014, Ali 2018).
Similarly, Boyd Millar (who, unlike Nudds, is not a sympathiser of naïve realism) claims: “Naïve realism is the view that when you perceive a particular object, the phenomenology of your perceptual experience is constituted by your standing in the acquaintance relation to that object and certain of its properties.” (Millar 2015: 607).
‘Consciousness’ and ‘phenomenal character’ are not always used as synonymous, but I take it that, in the debate I am considering, ‘phenomenal character’ is taken to refer to the conscious aspect of perception (sometimes called ‘conscious character’), to what it is like for the subject to undergo the experience. Thus, for the current purposes, what makes perception conscious is at least coextensive with its phenomenal character.
For a defence of the claim that relational facts can’t change their relation-constituents, see, for instance, Fine (2000: 5).
Interestingly, here Strawson uses this idea to object to Snowdon (1998). In this paper, Snowdon suggests that a naïve realist view, according to which “the visible facts are constituents of the experience” (Snowdon 1998: 302) can secure a non-accidental link between the object and perception better than the causal link posited by causal theories of perception. Against Snowdon, Strawson argues that the idea that “natural items themselves could be logically linked is nonsense, a category howler” (Strawson 1998: 314): only things capable of truth and falsity can be logically connected. Thus, only a description of perception can be said to entail the existence of the object, not perception itself. Here Strawson fails to see that the relation between perception (or its phenomenal character) is not merely logical, but metaphysical, in the sense I elucidated in §1.3 and 3.
Naïve realism is not incompatible with claiming that perception has a representational content. It is incompatible with claiming that the phenomenal character is determined by the representational content. Therefore, even a naïve realist might allow for perception to have a representational content (see Locatelli and Wilson 2017).
The idea that the intermediate cause (the brain state) should not be confused with a psychological event goes back to Hinton (1973; 75–87).
One might object that this leaves open a further question. If one accepts that the perception is directly caused by the brain state, and the brain state itself could occur in the absence of the object, it is tempting to think that the effect produced by the brain state should itself be independent of the object. But this would be a different strand of objection from the one I am concerned with here, and one that has been already largely dealt with by naïve realists and I don’t have space to rehearse here (see in particular Fish 2009 and Martin 2004; 2006). There is no good reason to think that the same brain state could not give rise to an event which is most appropriately characterised disjunctively, as either a perception (the obtaining of a relation with the object) or a hallucination (which only seems a perception). This is motivated idea through an appeal to either a local supervenience principle, or the ‘same proximate cause same effect’ principle. However, locally supervenience is highly disputable (see Fish 2009 for a discussion) and the same proximate cause same immediate effect principle, if at all acceptable, should allow for background conditions and non-causal constitutive elements affecting the nature of the outcome of the proximate cause (see Martin 2004, 2006 for a discussion).
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Locatelli, R. Naïve Realism and the Relationality of Phenomenal Character. Topoi 43, 221–231 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09953-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09953-y