Scientific or naïve? Perceptions of Direct and Indirect Realism, and why they matter

Philosophical debates about the nature of perception are standardly informed by an empirical assumption about folk beliefs: They assume there is such a thing as ‘the’ common-sense conception of vision, and that this conception is captured by Direct Realism. This naïve theory is thought to compete with scientifically informed Indirect Realism. This paper discusses how to render these claims empirically tractable and reports a scientific accuracy rating study whose findings suggest instead that both Direct Realism and Indirect Realism capture pre-scientific conceptions. We discuss two philosophical consequences: ‘Common sense’ is too conflicted about vision to deserve epistemic default status in philosophical debates about perception, and the ‘problem of perception’ needs to be reconceptualised as arising not from a challenge to our ordinary understanding of vision, but from a patent conflict within this understanding. Together, these two upshots facilitate a fresh approach to the problem which can usefully be transferred to further ‘aporetic’ problems that arise from conflicts between beliefs to which we are pre-theoretically attracted.