The Intersubjective Perceptual Field as the Privileged Field of Sense

The thesis of the article is that the public spatiotemporal field of perception, which is centred egocentrically around each of us, is our fundamental field of sense in both senses of “sense”. It is (1) accessible to our senses and (2) readable for speakers and thus endowed with linguistic and conceptual sense relative to a language. As a result, a non-neutral, hermeneutic realism can be argued for, which recognises as real hermeneutic fields of sense whose common basis is the intersubjective perceptual field, and then welcomes Markus Gabriel’s multiplicity of imagination-based fields of sense as a useful extension. What remains as an incompatibility between Gabriel’s ontology of fields of sense and hermeneutic realism is the inclusive realism of the former in relation to hermeneutic and imaginative fields of sense alike, and the tendentially fundamentalist epistemology according to which the fields of sense in Plato’s heaven are ready to be “grasped” by us.