Get Acquainted with Naïve Idealism

This paper presents a new realist idealist account of veridical perception, hallucination, and illusion, on which representation plays no role in visual perception. When veridically perceiving a tree, a subject’s mind literally overlaps with reality—such that they stand in the very same relation to the tree as they do to their own pain. A hallucination of a tree involves the generation of distinct tree-like phenomenology, qualitatively akin to (but numerically distinct from) any actual trees. Illusions, on this view, are perceptual states akin to veridical perceptions (involving overlap of the subject with facets of reality). Insofar as they involve any sort of mistake, this comes with subsequent conceptualization; our basic perceptual states remain innocent of error. This paper concludes by arguing that the only way in which one can coherently hold distal objects to be immediately presented to us in perception is by embracing an idealist account of the nature of reality. Contrary to naïve realists such as Campbell (Reference and consciousness. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002) and Martin (Disjunctivism. MIT Press, 2009), materialists cannot hold perceptual experiences—or the phenomenal character thereof—to be constituted (even in part) by distal objects. Fundamentally material distal objects are essentially distant from us; fundamentally phenomenal objects, by contrast, need not be. Thus, many of the epistemic benefits that naïve realist hope to claim over representationalism are, in fact, only available if one embraces idealism.