Naïve Realism as Psychosemantics

For those who think the notion of representation plays a critical role in visual perception, a pressing question—at least for those who are naturalistically inclined—should be that of how the mental representations acquire their contents. However, whilst this question was the source of a great deal of philosophy in the latter part of the twentieth century, this has not been the case more recently, despite the fact that the notion of representation continues to play a central role in philosophical theorising about perception. In this paper, I will argue (i) that this is a significant oversight for representationalist theories, and that absent a psychosemantics, these theories remain critically incomplete; (ii) that the problems identified with extant theories have not been resolved, so the representationalist cannot resolve this issue by simply plucking a theory off the shelf; (iii) that an appeal to a naïve realist notion of acquaintance nevertheless has the potential to ground the kind of psychosemantics the representationalist requires. This shows that the common assumption that naïve realism and representationalism are in competition is mistaken, and that theories of perception that make use of a notion of representation can only get off the ground if naïve realism, or something like it, is true.