The Value of Perception

Summary

This paper argues that naive realism—the view that veridical perceptions are fundamentally relational—should not be treated as a hypothesis to be evaluated by cost-benefit analysis. Instead, it claims a special status as part of a transcendental project explaining how perceptual experience is possible. Drawing on Strawson's work on reactive attitudes, the author develops a modest version of transcendental naive realism that is, in a sense, immune to falsification.

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Abstract

This paper develops a form of transcendental naive realism. According to naive realism, veridical perceptual experiences are essentially relational. According to transcendental naive realism, the naive realist theory of perception is not just one theory of perception amongst others, to be established as an inference to the best explanation and assessed on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis that weighs performance along a number of different dimensions: for instance, fidelity to appearances, simplicity, systematicity, fit with scientific theories, and so on. Rather, naive realism enjoys a special status in debates in the philosophy of perception because it represents part of the transcendental project of explaining how it is possible that perceptual experience has the distinctive characteristics it does. One of the potentially most interesting prospects of adopting a transcendental attitude towards naive realism is that it promises to make the naive realist theory of perception, in some sense, immune to falsification. This paper develops a modest form of transcendental naive realism modelled loosely on the account of the reactive attitudes provided by Strawson in ‘Freedom and Resentment’, and suggests one way of understanding the claim that naive realism is immune to falsification.

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