Experience and Naïve Realism

Is there anything in sense experience that indicates the falsity of naive realism? For example, is there anything in sense experience that informs us that objects are not objectively colored? Or is it a matter of science and conceptual reflection? Do we know that naïve realism is false just by being subjects of experience, or is experience itself coy on the question? This is not an easy question, so let’s start with something simple and self-evident. Pain: is there anything about the experience of pain that tips us off that pain resides in us not in objects—that it is subjective not objective? Surely, there is: we feel pain in the body; we don’t perceive it in objects. My hand hurts not the rock that lands on it. Pain seems to me to be in me not in the external world independently of me. I am under no illusion about its location. I don’t need science or philosophy to convince me that naïve realism about pain is incorrect; it feels incorrect. You would have to be very naïve indeed to believe that pins have pain in them; pins merely have the power to produce pain in me. If our experience of color were like our experience of pain, we would never be naïve realists about color—and similarly for sounds, tastes, smells, and feels. Suppose colors were like pain: you experience them as in your body—you see your body change color depending on what’s in the environment. Your eyes are stimulated in such a way by a wavelength of light emitted by certain roses that your foot (say) turns red: those roses have the power to produce a certain color effect in or on your body. You don’t see the roses as red; they merely cause a part of your body to be seen as red. The redness is perceived in your body not in the roses, though you may describe roses with the word “red”, meaning that they have a red-producing power in relation to your body. No way would you be a naïve realist about red (sic) roses—you would have no inclination to ascribe redness to roses. Redness would be like pain—manifestly over here not out there. Am I right? You’re damn right I’m right. But this is not the situation with our experience of color: we do experience color as in the objects. Why we do is an interesting question, but it is indubitably so. We really are under the illusion that objects are objectively colored (assuming that naïve realism is false of color). Grass is not green though it sure as hell looks green. Doesn’t that settle the question? Phenomenology endorses naïve realism; it doesn’t contradict it. It is therefore eminently understandable that we are prone to accept naïve realism, even if we ultimately reject it on theoretical grounds. Naïve realism is the common sense of sense perception; it is what experience directly tells us, rightly or wrongly.

So, is there nothing in naïve experience that invites rejection of naïve realism? Is it impossible to scrutinize sense experience and see that naïve realism is false? I have tried the experiment: diligently I have attended to my experience and strained to discover a clue to the falsity of naïve realism. But I have come up with nothing (try it yourself). Experience seems stubbornly wedded to a false theory of perception. Strange, but true—why not make color perception like pain perception? Are all animals under the same illusion? Do we all hallucinate colors from dawn to dusk? Do we never see colors correctly? Our senses really ought to tip us off about the truth-value of naïve realism, but they refuse to—they insist on asserting a false theory. We can’t even surgically fix our eyes and brain to rectify the error; no one has ever perceived the color of roses in their body (or in their mind). No one perceives color as they perceive pain. However, this doesn’t mean that experience contains no other type of clue; there might be other facts about ordinary sense experience that tip us off about the truth of the matter. And I think there are—there are things that even a wee child will notice about its experience that give the game away. I will call the thing in question “variability-without-penalty” (VWP for short). Your senses can vary in the qualities they present without you running into trouble. Here we encounter the inverted spectrum, warm and cool water, taste variations, and the like: all these allow for subjective variations that are consistent with equality of bodily well-being. The same volume of water can be felt as varying in temperature without there being any difference in the condition of the body (your skin is not physically affected). It is not so with objective qualities: variations of shape do affect the well-being of the body, because shape is an objective feature of the environment that can cause damage to the body. We are all familiar with the subjective variations of water temperature that have no bearing on potential harm to the body. The reason for this is that the corresponding subjective qualities reside in us not the objective world; it doesn’t vary when we vary. Food tastes appetizing or unappetizing depending on our degree of satiation, so no one thinks that the appetizing quality of food is inherent in food; we don’t think the food must have changed when we lose interest in eating more of it. We don’t need sophisticated science or philosophy to inform us that food is not appetizing in itself but only relative to our needs and desires. Maybe we experience food as intrinsically tasty, but we know from elementary experience that this quality comes and goes according to us not the food in itself. But the same is not true of the chemical composition of food or its mass and volume. Ordinary daily experience gives us the information we need to accept that total naïve realism is mistaken. We are not fooled by the phenomenology of eating—or seeing, hearing, and touching. Experience tempts us into the naïve realist error, but it also provides the wherewithal to withstand the temptation. This is why people are so ready to accept that sensory qualities are in us not the world—they came to this conclusion long ago just by being sensing creatures. Experience itself is in error, but the experiencer is not; he knows better than to trust the immediate deliverances of sense perception uncritically. We are all natural-born critics of our own experience. We know quite well that it would be pretty stupid to sign on to naïve realism in its most naïve form. Just consider your experience of stepping into a swimming pool and gradually getting used to the water temperature; it didn’t change, you did–obviously. Similarly for your eyes adjusting to brightness when you wake up in the morning. Experience can be quite candid about advertising its subjective origins, despite its surface dishonesty—it’s like a liar who gives you the wink. Experience admits its own error.

There is another source of error correction: intersensory confirmation. You can check that your eyes are giving you the right shape of an object by touching it, but you can’t do the same with color. This, too, is completely familiar to even the most untutored of perceivers. It tells us that perceived shape is inherent in objects but perceived color is not. Likewise, we don’t put food under the microscope in order to determine whether it is appetizing or not, or stroke it. Sense-specificity is the mark of subjectivity. How could color be intrinsic to objects if it was only perceptible by one sense? Thus, we cut down the number and range of objective properties of things; we reject the multiplicity of properties recommended by our sense experience. Again, this is intellectually primitive stuff not university-level learning. It is quite wrong to think that science alone has taught us the falsity of naïve realism, or even that reflective common sense has; the lesson is present in the simplest of perceptual facts, available to any two-year old or chimpanzee (or shellfish). I like to think that the octopus has never been a benighted naïve realist: it knows that felt temperature depends (partly) on it not the surrounding water and that its tentacles can correct visual misattributions of shape and size. The wonder is that the senses insist on attributing subjective qualities to objective things, as if we will be fooled. The fact is that we live with what we know to be an illusion—the entire way we sense external objects. We know we are erroneous beings, error-prone in our most primitive means of knowledge acquisition. We know we live in a kind of deceptive sensory prison that we can’t escape—the prison of sensation. Pain doesn’t deceive us about its location, but our senses are constantly telling us lies about where the qualities it presents to us exist. We are essentially brains in a vat, victims of an evil demon, living in a dream world—prisoners of our own misleading sensorium (our lying eyes). We can’t find a way to sidestep it and confront reality as it actually is. But we know we are in a sensory prison; we are not deceived about that. Our jailors at least have the decency to inform us of our imprisoned state.[1]

[1] I think this position explains the peculiar ambivalence we feel about naïve realism, and our natural oscillation on the question. For we are, on the one hand, smitten with it by our senses (our windows on the world) and yet, on the other, wise to its blandishments. At every moment our senses relentlessly drum it in, but at the same time elementary experience contradicts it. We know it to be false, but our everyday consciousness is firmly committed to it. Our knowledge that it is false, attested by the simplest of experiences, can make no dent in our sensory constitution; it keeps on insisting that the world is replete with qualities we know it doesn’t possess. This is the uncomfortable and irremediable truth.

Nabokovian Mysterianism

I came across the following passage in Brian Boyd’s weighty biography of Nabokov: “Space, time, the two prime mysteries. The transformation of nothing into something cannot be conceived by the human mind.”[1]Two points stand out here. First, he regards space and time as the two prime mysteries—not consciousness and free will, say. That is, the non-mental universe presents the greatest of mysteries. And not just time but space too. Second, he regards the mystery as a function of the human mind; he doesn’t think that the transformation of nothing into something is intrinsically miraculous or contrary to nature. He believes the mystery is subjective not objective. He follows this brief statement with this: “The torrent of time—a mere poetical tradition: time does not flow. Time is perfectly still. We feel it as moving only because it is the medium where growth and change take place or where things stop, like stations”. Time is not growing or changing; it exists all at once, changelessly. This is hard to understand: our conception of time is closely tied to our experience of it. Yet Nabokov seems convinced that time is objectively static and fixed. In these remarks I perceive the authentic mysterian spirit. The author of Lolita was a member of the school of mysterians.

[1] Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, p.379. It comes from a note written in 1959. When I was nine and not far along in my philosophical studies Nabokov was formulating the position I would later come to adopt.

Most influential Philosopher

I will restrict this question to recent philosophers. It not an easy question, because influence is hard to measure or estimate; and it varies over time, sometimes quite dramatically. It is certainly not me, not by a long chalk. There are the usual suspects, whom I do not need to mention. After giving it some thought, I am going to nominate Jerry Fodor. I think he overturned Wittgensteinian orthodoxy, or what remained of it. He destroyed behaviorism (preceded by Chomsky). For my money, Saul Kripke comes second: his influence was no doubt massive, but he didn’t destroy a whole school of thought—and Fodor kept at it, relentlessly. He also changed the way philosophers write (not always for the best). David Lewis had some influence, but it wasn’t so widespread. So did John Rawls, but it was limited to political philosophy. Thomas Nagel re-introduced depth to philosophy, and a concern with traditional problems. All these people had have had undeniable influence, but I think Fodor stands out, if not by a wide margin. I wonder what other people think.

Not So Naïve Realism

We are usually faced with a binary choice between naive realism and sense-data theories, as if naive realism had only one strength or type. But really there is a spectrum of positions aptly so described, according to their degree of naivety. The strongest type—the most naïve—says that the objects of perception are objectively precisely as they seem subjectively: if the object seems to have a certain property, then it objectively has that property, whether it is perceived or not. If it seems elliptical, then it is objectively elliptical; if it seems red, then it is objectively red; if it seems hot, then it is objectively hot, etc. Such a view comes under pressure from visual illusion, quirks of perspective, lighting conditions, and species-specific perceptual biases and projections. It is too naïve (“naïve naïve realism”). We do well to dial it back a notch. Thus, we reach a more sophisticated form of naive realism: exclude anything idiosyncratic to the perceiver and peculiar to a particular viewing situation. This will give us the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the latter assigned to the perceiving mind not to the mind-independent object. Perceptions of shape and size are objectively veridical, but not perceptions of color and smell. We can be naïve about some perceived properties, but not all. But this position too can come under pressure, on two fronts. First, physics might indicate that even these supposedly objective properties do not really belong to the objects, being rather projections from our innate perceptual geometry. Nothing is really straight or intrinsically heavy, not when you get right down to it. Second, nothing about the object is precisely as it seems—there is always some degree of inaccuracy. We don’t see objective shape exactly as it is, if we see it at all (i.e., the objective spatial properties of the object). Following this line of thought, we conclude that ordinary perception is never completely veridical with respect to the actual object—never perfectly true to it. Some properties may be better perceived than others, but none are perceived exactly as they objectively are. The subject always gets in the way, as it were. This may be called wised-up naïve realism, as opposed to the dumb kind.

But doesn’t that mean that naïve realism is actually false and that we only perceive sense-data (subjective states)? I think not, because there is room for very sophisticated naïve realism, as sophisticated as you like. We never see objects as they are in themselves, in any respect, but we still see them—or we still see them.For we don’t see anything else, certainly not our states of mind. We see real physical things, just not as they really (objectively, intrinsically) are. Their properties line up with perceived properties (they covary) and in virtue of this they are seen objects. The mug on my table lacks all the properties it seems to me to possess—a certain color, shape, weight, warmth, etc.—but I still see it, that physical thing. What else would I be seeing? So, we can still be naïve realists about perception, but highly sophisticated, scientifically well-informed, super-smart naïve realists—just not naive naïve realists. I rather suspect this position is correct: our perceptual experience never accurately represents the actual objective nature of things—it doesn’t need to from a biological point of view—but that doesn’t prevent us from seeing them. I see my mug all right (not my mind or brain), just not as it is in itself, independently of my visual system. Isn’t the same thing true of all seeing, human and animal? It tracks and mirrors, but it doesn’t transparently portray—it isn’t like a high-resolution photo. Even insects can be granted naïve realism, though they never get the object precisely right—as it is sub specie aeternitatus. I therefore advocate what may be called hyper-sophisticated naïve realism. We really do see physical objects but never as they are from their point of view. Our perceptions are all completely false of the things perceived, but we still perceive those things.

I hear a piercing bellow from the back row: “But don’t we really know the properties of the objects of perception?!” Answer: no, we don’t, not as a result of our perceptual experience anyway; but it is okay to talk as if we do. I can say that I know my mug is blue just by looking at it, but it is not really blue, not in the way it seems to me (it can be said to be relationally blue). Error does not preclude efficacy. Pragmatically, we can talk this way, but strictly speaking things are not as they seem, ever. We can even have true beliefs about the true objects of perception, recognizing their divergence from our perceptions of them; the rampant falsity of our perceptions does not prevent that. Perceptual error does not imply cognitive (intellectual) error. I can know the truth concerning what my senses deceive me about, e.g., the location of color. My senses can be riddled with illusion and falsehood, but my mind may be omniscient, or at least undeceived. The senses do their job, but objective accuracy is above their pay grade. They may not even be anywhere close to the truth, but still serve their biological purpose. The point I have been making here is that naïve realism is not committed to uncritical acceptance of the contents of perception, only the most simple-minded version of it is. Naïve realism can be as sophisticated and revisionary as you like; it can even describe physical objects as totally unlike the way they seem. They might be ideas in the mind of God, not material things in physical space with shape and size; but still, we are seeing them. We don’t know we are looking into the mind of God—we think we are looking into an ungodly physical space—but we are. Objects are what they are, however they seem to us, and they may be very different from the way they seem. We could be seeing noumenal objects all the time (ripples in a ten-dimensional continuum) despite the fact that they seem to us like solid bounded things in three-dimensional space. Perception can pierce its own veil. It has the power to transcend its content. It is like a telescope trained on an occluded star.[1]

[1] It is an interesting point that we are ready to accept that our perceptions of distant stars fail to reveal their intrinsic nature, even to be radically misleading, but we naively assume that nearby objects are seen pretty much as they really are. Why is this? Why aren’t nearby objects as underperceived, or misperceived, as distant stars? Yet we can still see them. Seeing is one thing, correctly characterizing is another. After all, you can see a person in disguise as someone he is not—yet you still see him.