BonJour Direct Realism

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In Search of Direct RealismAuthor(s): Laurence BonjourSource: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 69, No. 2 (Sep., 2004), pp. 349-367Published by: International Phenomenological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40040724.

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In Searchof Direct Realism1LAURENCE BONJOURUniversity of Washington

Philosophy and Phenomenological ResearchVol. LXIX,No. 2, September2004

It is fairly standard in accounts of the epistemology of perceptual knowledgeto distinguish three main alternative positions: representationalism (alsocalled representative realism or indirect realism), phenomenalism, and a thirdview that is called either naive realism (usually by its opponents) or directrealism (usually by those who are more sympathetic to it). I have alwaysfound the last of these views puzzling and elusive. My aim in this paper is totry to figure out what direct realism amounts to, mainly with an eye to see-ing whether it offers a genuine epistemological alternative to the other twoviews and to representationalism in particular. My main thesis will be that itdoes not- that what is right in direct realist views turns out to have littlebearing on the central epistemological issue concerning perceptual knowl-edge.Both for reasons of space and to allow a focus on the issues that I regardas the most important, my discussion will be restricted in the followingways: First, I will give no consideration at all to phenomenalism. Thenumerous and to my mind entirely decisive objections to the phenomenalistview are by now very well known. Second, I will also give no attention tothe standard externalist views of justification, of which reliabilism is themost familiar. Though it is very easy within a reliabilist framework to defendsomething that might perhaps be characterized as directrealism, the pointof such a characterization and of the alternatives that it implicitly suggests islargely lost in that context. Third, although I started by speaking of percep-tual knowledge, I will pay no real attention to the concept of knowledge assuch, focusing instead on the issue of whether and how perception yields agood reason or basis for thinking that a belief about the material world istrue the issue of justification, as at least one version of internalism under-stands it.2 Fourth, I will follow the usual philosophical practice of concen-

1 This paperwas deliveredat the 2002 Rutgers EpistemologyConference. I am grateful tothe audienceand discussants therefor helpfulcomments and discussion.I am not assuminghere that a reason or basis for thinkingthat a belief is true must takethe form of anotherbelief; on the contrary, anythingto which one has cognitive access

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trating mostly on visual perception, adding, as is also usual, that I am rea-sonably confident that the resulting discussion could be generalized withoutany crucial modification to perception via the other senses. (Perhaps it isworth adding that I am interested in direct realism as a serious epistemologi-cal alternative that offers an account of how perceptual beliefs are justified,not merely as the denial that this issue need be taken seriously.)Thus the main issue to be considered is whether there is a genuine directrealist alternative to representationalism, one that is at least prima facieviable, with regard to the sort of reason or basis we have or might have forthinking that the beliefs about the physical world that result from perception,especially visual perception, are true. (Hereafterthe terms justification and

justified will be used exclusively in the indicated internalist sense that per-tains to the possession of a good reason or basis for thinking that a belief istrue.)

II begin with an elaboration and clarification of the contrast between directrealism and representationalism, starting with the latter. In first approxima-tion, the representationalist holds two main theses: first, that what is per-ceived directly or immediately in sensory experience is not external physi-cal or material objects, but rather entities that are mental or subjective incharacter sense-data or sensa, according to the most standard versions of theview; and, second, that the only available (reasonably cogent) reasons deriv-ing from perception for thinking that perceptual beliefs about the physicalworld are true depend on inference from facts about these directly perceivedmental or subjective entities, i.e., from facts about the character and contoursof subjective sensory experience, to conclusions about physical or materialobjects. (Notoriously, what direct and immediate mean in these formula-tions is far from obvious and will have to be considered further below.)3

thatconstitutes a rational basis for thinkingthat a belief is true will count as such areason.The representationalistdoes not, of course, deny that material objects are genuinelyperceived, but only attemptsto give an account of how such perception works and ofwhy it is notdirect or immediate n the way that t might seem commonsensicallyto be. Itis also worth noting that while the most standard formulationsof representationalismappealto sense-data(or to entities of arguably he same basic sort, such as the ideas ofthe Britishempiricists),neitherthe sense-datum heorynor the more general act-objectpicturethatunderlies t is in any way essential to the basic representationalistiew. If, forexample, one adopts insteadan adverbial ccount of perceptualexperience, the repre-sentationalistview can still be formulatedas the theses (a) that what one is most directlyaware of in perceptualexperience is the adverbialfeatures of experiential states (whichare,of course,quite distinct from materialobjects)and (b) thatany good reasons we mayhave for believing that materialobjects of various sorts exist depend on inference fromfacts about these adverbial features. (It will be convenient to continue to use the term

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What then does direct (or naive) realism amount to? The direct realistshould, I suggest, be viewed as rejecting both of the characteristic theses ofrepresentationalism, while still maintaining that perception is indeed a sourceof justification for beliefs about the material world. This commits the directrealist to holding both: (a) that in normal cases of perception, physical ormaterial objects are, in a sense admittedly still in need of clarification,directly or immediately perceived; and (b) that the justification for beliefsabout such objects that results from perception does not depend on the sort ofinference from the subjective character of perceptual experience to which therepresentationalist appeals, but can be accounted for in some other way. It isobviously the former of these theses that gives direct realism its label; butthe latter thesis is far more important from an epistemological standpoint andprovides the main dialectical motivation for the view. For the main allegedvirtue of direct realism has been precisely that it avoids the need for the alleg-edly difficult and perhaps even hopeless inference to which the representation-alist view appeals.

Here it is important to see clearly from the beginning that an adequate casefor the second direct realist thesis cannot be made merely by raising problemsfor the representationalist's opposing view. No matter how difficult or evenseemingly impossible the representationalist's attempted inference from sub-jective experience to the material world may turn out to be, this is notenough by itself to show that direct realism provides a better epistemologicalalternative or indeed that it provides one at all. Thus the only way to ade-quately defend the second direct realist thesis is to actually give and defend acompeting account of how perceptual beliefs about material objects are justi-fied, presumably by appealing in some way to the direct or immediate experi-ence of such objects that is alleged in the first direct realist thesis. And untiland unless such an account is given, a direct realist victory with regard to theissue defined by the opposing first theses would amount to very little, at leastfrom an epistemological standpoint, since it would still leave the representa-tionalist's account of reasons for perceptual beliefs as the only apparent con-tender in the field (phenomenalism aside), however allegedly problematic itmay be.

From this perspective, it is a striking fact that many of the most promi-nent recent proponents of direct realism offer little or nothing by way of apositive account of how perceptual beliefs are justified according to theirview, concentrating instead on defenses of their first thesis and on argumentsagainst the two representationalist theses. Thus, for example, George Pitcher,in his defense of direct realism in his book A Theory of Perception,expresses the assumption that direct realism is the most desirable sort of

object to refer to whatever it is of which one is directly aware in perception, irrespec-tive of which metaphysical category it may belong to.)




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perceptual theory from an epistemological point of view,' but never givesany real explanation of how and why this is supposed to be so, of just whatthe direct realist epistemological account amounts to. Similarly, in D. M.Armstrong's earlier book Perception and the Physical World,5 argumentsare mounted at great length against representationalism (and also against phe-nomenalism), focusing mostly on the issue defined by the opposing firsttheses. But the only hint of a positive account of how perceptual beliefs arejustified or rationally acceptable consists in an appeal to the regress argumentfor some form of foundationalism, leading to the conclusion that There mustbe at least some truths that we know without good reasons, together withthe further remark that...since immediateperception s, avowedly, the court of last appealwhen it comes to questionsaboutphysical reality,thereis no objection,it seems, to saying that in immediate perceptionatleast, we acquireknowledgeof certainfacts about the physical world withoutgood reasons.6This may point in the direction of Armstrong's later externalist view,7 but itoffers no help at all in our search for an internalist account of just how per-ceptual beliefs are justified according to direct realism, saying at most, per-haps, that such an account ought from an intuitive standpoint to be available.

Many other recent defenses of direct realism do no better in this regard.Jonathan Dancy, in his book An Introduction to Contemporary Epistemol-ogy* ostensibly opts for direct realism for reasons that are again basedmainly on supposed problems with the competing views, and then somewhatsurprisingly suggests a coherentist account of how perceptual beliefs are jus-tified.9 For reasons I have discussed elsewhere,10 1 am extremely doubtful thatany such view can succeed. But for now it is perhaps enough to point outthat it really amounts to a denial that perceptual experience as such offers anyjustification for the beliefs that result from it, rather than an account of howsuch justification works, so that Dancy's view is not really a version of direct

GeorgePitcher,A Theoryof Perception(Princeton:Princeton UniversityPress, 1971), p.217.5 D. M. Armstrong,Perceptionand the Physical World London:Routledge & Kegan Paul,1961).Ibid., p. 120. As I understand he idea of a reason,Armstrong'scharacterizationof foun-dationalism is inaccurate.What the regress argumentshows is that there must be beliefsthat are justified in some way that does not rely on further beliefs, not that there arebeliefs thatarejustified in the absence of any sort of good reason or basis for thinkingthatthey are true.Inhis bookBelief, Truthand Knowledge Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1973).JonathanDancy, An Introduction o ContemporaryEpistemology(London:Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1985). The main discussion of perception is in chapters 10 and 11.y Ibid., p. 176 ff.See my paper The Dialectic of Foundationalism and Coherentism, in the BlackwellGuide to Epistemology, ed. John Greco and Ernest Sosa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp.117-42.

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realism as I am understanding it here. John Searle, in his book Intentional-ity,11 argues for the intentionality of visual experiences, claiming that suchexperiences both are about material objects and constitute presentationsrather than mere representations of such objects, an idea about which I willhave more to say shortly. He also argues briefly against phenomenalism andrepresentationalism, though his arguments against the latter view are notparticularly compelling. But to the issue of what reason or basis we have onthe basis of perceptual experience for thinking that this intentional, presenta-tional content is true, Searle has virtually nothing to say. And while bothHilary Putnam and John McDowell offer views that seem to be intended asversions of direct realism,12it is again hard to find in either of their accountsany clear and developed response to the issue of how perceptual beliefs arejustified.

III turn to a consideration of the issue defined by the first of the direct realistand representationalist theses. Here it is very easy to make a case for the cor-rectness of the direct realist thesis on at least two fairly obvious understand-ings of the problematic terms direct or immediate.

Consider, first, the question of whether our perceptual awareness of mate-rial objects is arrived at via explicit inference from either beliefs about orawarenesses of subjective entities such as sense-data. Certainly some repre-sentationalists, especially earlier and less cautious ones, have said things thatsuggest such a view. But it is entirely too obvious to be denied that in ordi-nary cases there is no consciousness at all of such an inference and thatappeals to unconscious inference are mere evasions of the question. In mostordinary situations, it is material objects and situations that are the primaryor usually the exclusive objects of the perceiver's explicit awareness andthought, with no hint that this awareness has been arrived at via any sort ofexplicit transition from anything else. In fact this point is so obvious as tomake it hard to see how an explicit inference view could be plausibly ascribedto any serious philosopher, and for this reason, it seems to me preferable notto view even representationalists as committed to such a claim. This is not tosay that the perceiver is not also conscious in some way of, in the visualcase, the patterns of color and shape that philosophers have characterized interms of subjective sense-data or adverbial features. But this is normally verymuch in the background and not at all the object of explicit attention.

11 JohnSearle,IntentionalityCambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1983), ch. 2.See HilaryPutnam, Sense,Nonsense, and the Senses (his Dewey Lectures), JournalofPhilosophy,vol. 91 (1994), pp. 445-517; and John McDowell, Mind and World (Cam-bridge,MA: HarvardUniversityPress, 1994).

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Second, as Searle seems to have in mind in describing visual experiencesas presentations, there is in addition an obvious and intuitively compellingway in which my perceptual experience seems to directly present physicalobjects and situations to me: given suitable conditions of lighting and soforth, I have only to open my eyes, and there they are, in a way that seemscompletely open to my cognitive access. I find it somewhat difficult to sayclearly what this direct presentation of physical objects really amounts to, butit is undeniably a feature of the phenomenology of perceptual experience, onethat would not automatically follow from its non-inferential directness alone.(It seems reasonably clear that ordinary beliefs about material objects are lessthan fully direct, in that they are based on- though not in any clear wayinferred from these more basic presentational awarenesses.)

We thus have at least two reasonably clear senses in which the perceptualawareness of material objects can be said to be direct, thereby establishing acase for the first of the two direct realist theses. But what about the secondthesis, which I have argued to be epistemologically more fundamental? Doeither of these ways in which perceptual awareness of material objects isdirect yield any clear alternative to the representationalist's account of howclaims about such objects must ultimately be justified, of how our visualexperience constitutes or yields a cogent reason or basis of some sort forthinking that they are true?

It is easy to see that the non-inferential character of perceptual awarenesssays nothing positive about the issue of justification, but merely rules outone way in which the resulting claims might have been justified. A sheerhunch or random thought is after all also non-inferentially arrived at, but thatplainly constitutes no reason for thinking that it is correct and so no basis forjustification (though we will consider below a view that seems to disputethis).

What about the presentational directness of perceptual awareness? It iseasy to see how the way in which material objects seem to be simply pre-sented or, as one might even be tempted to say, given in perceptual experi-ence could lead to the view that is usually (and plausibly) ascribed to at leastthe most naive level of common sense, namely that there is no problem at allabout the justification or indeed about the truth of the resulting beliefs. Butas long as the presentational character of perceptual experience is not confusedwith the more Cartesian version of immediacy to be considered momentarily,it is far from clear why it should be accordedany genuine justificatory force.This presentational character has to do with the way in which physicalobjects are represented or depicted in experience, but has no obvious bearingon whether such representations or the beliefs that reflect them are true. Apresentational representation is no doubt more vivid, more striking, in some-thing like the way in which a picture is more compelling than a merely ver-




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bal description. But pictures are just as capable of being mistaken as anythingelse,13 and so the pictorial character of a representation seems to be simplyirrelevant to the issue of justification; my suggestion is that we have so farseen no clear reason not to say the same thing about the intuitively presenta-tional characterof perceptual experience.14

In thinking about the foregoing point, it is useful to explicitly contrastthe presentational directness or immediacy just described with the further,more controversial notion of directness or immediacy that has been advocatedby epistemologists in the broadly Cartesian tradition. According to this Car-tesian view of immediacy, sometimes referred to as acquaintance or given-ness, mental and sensory states and the objects that they are taken to involveare directly accessible to consciousness, directly before the eye of the mind.This view has often been accompanied by a claim that mistake about them isentirely impossible, but it is important to see that this is at best a conse-quence of the main view, not its central core. The central idea, I suggest, israther that such entities and features are simply part of the content of con-sciousness itself, so that the most fundamental consciousness of them, thatby virtue of which they exist at all, could not indeed be mistaken. Even ifthis were so, it would not preclude the formation of mistaken beliefs aboutthis content as a result of confusion or inattention or bias of some sort, butwould still provide a clear basis for justification, in that the content of such abelief could be directly compared in consciousness to the conscious feature orobject that it purports to describe.

Notoriously many recent epistemologists, including most of the propo-nents of direct realism, have been highly critical of this Cartesian picture,skeptical about whether anything is genuinely given to consciousness in theway that it claims. My own view, developed elsewhere, is that the Cartesianview is defensible and even obvious if properly understood.15But my pointfor the moment is that whether or not such a view is defensible in relation toour awareness of the features or aspects of sensory and mental states, it seems1 Puttingaside irrelevantcausal facts aboutphotographic mages in particular.For an opposing view, see James Pryor, The Skeptic and the Dogmatist, Nods, vol. 34(2000), pp. 517-49. Pryor's claim, defended on intuitive grounds, is that merely theoccurrenceof anexperience as of p's being the case, where p is one of a large classof propositionsabout materialobjects that are basicallyrepresentedby our experience,

yieldsprima acie justificationfor believingp. But while I agree that there is a common-sense intuitionof this sort, I do not thinkit is enough to obviate the need to explain justhow the justificationis supposed to work, how the occurrence of such an experienceyields a reason or basis for thinking hat the proposition n questionis true. And in the end,I think that the representationalist'saccount, based on the qualitativecharacter of theunderlying experience, is the only one that is available. (See the discussion, below, ofReynolds'sappealto recognitional kill.)See the paper cited in note 10; and also my paper Toward a Defense of EmpiricalFoundationalism, n ResurrectingOld-FashionedFoundationalism,ed. Michael DePaul(Lanham,Maryland:Rowman & Littlefield,2000).

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clearly not applicable to our perceptual awareness of material objects. Mate-rial objects, understood in a realist, non-phenomenalist way, are plainly out-side the mind, metaphysically distinct from any sort of experience or aware-ness of them, and related to conscious experience only via a highlycomplicated causal chain. They are thus inherently incapable of being directlygiven to consciousness in the way that things like sense-data are claimed bythe Cartesian to be- a point that should, of course, be readily accepted bythose who think that the Cartesian brand of directness or immediacy is sim-ply a myth and so does not genuinely apply to anything. This means thateven the most fundamental perceptual awarenesses of material things areentirely distinct from their objects in a way that allows room for the issues ofcorrectness and of justification to be significantly raised and precludes thesimple response that a Cartesian version of immediacy might seem to makeavailable.16

If the Cartesian version of directness or immediacy should turn out, as Ibelieve, to be more than a myth, then there would be a clear sense in whichperceptual awareness of material objects is not direct, in addition to the oth-ers, already noted, in which it is direct- so that the issue between the first ofthe direct realist and representationalist theses would end in a split decision.But the more important point is that even if the senses in which the percep-tual awareness of material objects is direct and immediate are the only viableones, we have so far found no way in which this result provides any clearsupport for the crucial second thesis of direct realism. Even if the perceptualawareness of material objects is arrived at without inference, and even if theobjects in question are from a phenomenological standpoint simply presentedin our perceptual experience, neither of these forms of directness or immedi-acy seems in any very obvious way to yield a good reason or basis for think-ing that the resulting claims about the physical world are true or likely to betrue. It thus remains so far quite possible that the account of such reasonsoffered by the second representationalist thesis is the only one available.17

It will not have escaped notice that I have arrived at this result with verylittle consideration along the way of specific direct realist views. I havealready noted that many such views say almost nothing about the crucialissue of justification, but there are others that do address that issue moreexplicitly, and I now want to have a look at some of these. A fullconsideration of any of them would require much more space than can be16 Discussion at the conference where this paperwas delivered (see note 1) has shown methatthe point madein this paragraphs morecontroversial than I originallybelieved it tobe. Inspite of this, it still seems to me obviously correct. See note 32 below for furtherdiscussion.

Though this mightbe a pyrrhic victory for the representationalist f the awareness ofsense-data (or adverbial features) cannot itself be justified by appeal to somethinglikethe Cartesiannotion of immediacy.

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allotted here, but fortunately their responses to the key issue of justificationcan be dealt with fairly briefly.

IllPerhaps the simplest and most straightforwardresponse to the issue of howperceptual beliefs about material objects are justified is offered by MichaelHuemer.18According to Huemer, perceptual experiences are assertive mentalrepresentations, where what is thus represented is some sort of specificphysical object or situation. When there is genuine perception, such experi-ences count as awarenesses in Huemer' s defined sense, in that (i) there existsan object or situation that satisfies the content of the experience, and (ii) it isnon-accidental (as a result of a non-deviant causal chain) that this is so [79-80]. And such awarenesses are direct, he claims, because they are not basedupon any other sort of apprehension [80], where one apprehension A is basedon another apprehension B just in case B causes A because B appears tologically support A [56]. Perceptual beliefs, involving conceptual claimsabout physical objects and situations, are based upon such perceptual experi-ences, but not inferentially, since inference is a relation between beliefs, andperceptual experiences are not beliefs: though they have propositional con-tent (that is, are true or false), that content is not conceptually represented[74]. I9Though there are a number of questions that might be raised aboutthis view, it seems to me reasonably plausible so far, for reasons that wehave already seen: perceptual experience does seem to involve presentations ofmaterial objects that are capable of being true or false; and these do not seem,at least in general, to be arrived at on the basis of other apprehensions.20But all this only raises, or at least appears to raise, the further issue ofwhether and how the perceptual experience, or perhaps rather the assertiverepresentation that it involves, is itself justified: that is, of what reason if anythere is to think that this representation is true or correct. To this pivotalquestion, Huemer offers, as I see it, two rather different responses, onedirectly and one by implication, neither of them in my judgment adequate.18 In his bookSkepticismand the Veil of Perception (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,2001). Bracketedreferences in this section are to the pages of this book.

Thoughthe relation between a belief and the correspondingexperienceis not inferential,accordingto Huemer, t is logical in a broader sense: the non-conceptuallyrepresentedcontentof the perceptualexperience is either the same as or, normally,a more determi-nate version of the conceptually represented content of the belief, so that the formerentails the latter.Many are likely to have doubts about the claim that perceptual experiences have pro-positionalcontent withoutbeing conceptual; indeed, I have often heard it claimed thatsuch a view is simply incoherent, hatonly representationshat involve conceptscan havepropositionalcontent. In the end, I am inclined to agree that this is so and hence thatHuemer' view on thispointis mistaken.ButI do not think thatthis is immediatelyobviousor thatthereis any very simple way to arguefor it.




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The first, more direct response is to deny outright that the issue of justifi-cation intelligibly arises for perceptual experiences. According to Huemer, Itdoes not make sense - it is a category error to say that an experience isjustified or unjustified [97]. People simply have experiences, but cannot beeither justified or unjustified in having them because they are simply auto-matic responses to external stimuli [97]. But this strikes me as almostentirely misdirected. While it is of course true that people cannot help havingperceptual experiences, so that it cannot be intelligibly said that they shouldnot have had them or are somehow blameworthy for having them, none ofthis has any real relation to the main epistemological issue with which weare concerned. On Huemer' s own account, such experiences have an assertiverepresentational and indeed propositional content: they represent variousspecific objects and situations as existing in the world. But then we cansurely ask quite intelligibly what reason or basis, if any, there is for thinkingthat the representational content in question is true or correct, that is, forthinking that the world actually contains the objects or situations thusrepresented and this just is the question of whether the perceptual experi-ence, or more specifically its representational content, is justified in the senseI have indicated.

Huemer, to his credit, recognizes that this first response to the question ofthe justification of perceptual experiences will not do by itself. He thusadvances a furtheraccount of why beliefs that are based on perceptual experi-ences are themselves justified, even though the experiences themselves areneither justified nor unjustified. This account appeals to a principle calledthe rule of Phenomenal ConservatismIf it seems to S as if P, then S therebyhas at least prima facie [that is, defeasible] justificationfor believing that P. [99]Here the relevant seeming is the perceptual experience itself.21But is this principle, which Huemer claims to be a self-evident necessarytruth, in fact correct? I do not have space here to consider everything thatHuemer says in support of it, but the main lines of his defense can, it seemsto me, be captured in the following two claims: First, the principle represents

One thingworthnoticinghere is that if this principlewere correct, and assumingthat thejustificationit speaks of is supposed to be epistemicjustification in the sense of therebeing a good reason or basis for thinkingthat the claim in questionis likely to be true,then it would follow fromthe principle hat a suitablyabstractversion of the representa-tional content of the perceptualexperience would, afterall, also be justified in the sensejust indicated which is why I regard his principleas a second, quite different responseto the questionof how perceptualexperiences are justified. ( Suitablyabstract becausethis pointpertainsonly to the partof the experience'scontent that is at the same level ofabstractionas the belief andwould not extend to the morespecific content of the experi-ence, the ways in which it is more determinatethan the belief. But it is hard to see howthe abstractcontent could bejustified if this morespecific content were not.)

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theepistemological default position, in that seemings or appearances arepresumed true, until proven false, which he compares to the legal situation

in which a criminal defendant is presumed innocent, until proven guilty[100]. Second, all thought and reasoning presupposes the principle in a cer-tain sense [105], in that there is ultimately no alternative but to rely onwhat seems to be true, no other place for reasoning and dialectical criticismto start. And the problem is that neither of these claims speaks nearly clearlyenough to the fundamental issue of whether there is any reason or basis forthinking that the seemings in question are likely to be true.

This is a bit easier to see with respect to the first claim, where it seemsobvious that neither the computer metaphor (for that is really all it is) nor thereally quite irrelevant legal analogy provides any real insight as to why theclaims in question should be presumed true if this is supposed to mean thatthere is a good albeit prima facie reason for thinking that they actually aretrue. Though others have also made similar suggestions, it just isn't clearwhy there should be an epistemological default position of this sort or whythere should be an allocation of the burden of proof that favors the truth asagainst the falsehood of such a claim. (And if the presumption is supposed tobe reasonable in some other, non-epistemic way, then it seems simply irrele-vant to the issue of epistemic justification.)

As regards the second claim, I am inclined to agree with Huemer that inthe end we have no alternative in our thought and reasoning but to rely on atleast some of the things that seem to us to be true. Any sort of reasoning ordiscursive justification must start somewhere, and it is far from obvious whatother general sort of starting point there could be. The important question,however, is whether all forms of seeming are on a par in this respect, at leastto the extent of constituting prima facie reasons for thinking that the claimsin question are true, as Huemer's principle claims, or whether it mightinstead be the case that some specific ways of seeming constitute reasons ofthis sort and others do not. It is easier to argue for the negative part of thislatter alternative, for it is surely clear, contrary to Huemer, that, for example,a mere spontaneous hunch provides no reason for thinking that its content istrue, no matter how psychologically compelling it may be. Making a case forthe positive part, viz., the claim that certain specific sorts of seemings doyield genuine reasons, is harder and cannot be attempted here; I have arguedelsewhere that this is true for at least two specific sorts of seemings, thosethat involve apprehensions of the contents of one's own conscious states ofmind and those that involve apprehensions of self-evident necessary truths.22But my main point for the moment is that until and unless such a casecan be made, either for some particular sorts of seemings or for all, the fact

See the paperscited in notes 10 and 15;and my book In Defense of Pure Reason (Cam-bridge: CambridgeUniversityPress, 1998), chapters4 and 5.




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that we ultimately have nothing else to rely on does not show that the claimsthat we accept on this basis are likely to be true or that we have any goodreason to think that they are. That we have nothing better to rely on, even ifthis is (as I doubt) genuinely the case, does not show that the best we have isgood enough. Thus if Huemer's defense of the reliance on perceptual experi-ence is the best that we can do, the result, I submit, is skepticism about theresulting claims rather than genuine justification.23 (It is also worth notingthe rather surprising fact that the distinctively perceptual character of theexperience really plays no role at all in Huemer's account of how the result-ing claims are justified: on his view, any sort of seeming would have just asmuch justificatory force.24)

IVA quite different account of the justification of claims about material objectswithin a direct realist view is offered by Bill Brewer.25Brewer claims to beoffering an account of how perceptual beliefs are justified in an internalistsense, while avoiding the traditional foundationalist (and representationalist)appeal to inference from introspective knowledge of the character of subjec-tive experience, an appeal that he regards as hopeless.26Brewer's view can be viewed as an attempt to base the justification ofsuch claims on the distinctively presentational character of perceptual experi-

To be fair to Huemer,I should note that he seems to be operatingwith what has becomeknownas a deontologicalconceptionof epistemicjustification,one according to which abelief is justified if the believer is epistemically blameless in holding it. If there were infact no way to discriminateamong seemings with respect to whether they yield genuinereasons for thinkingthat the correspondingclaims are true, then it would be plausibleenough that a personwho acceptedbeliefs on the basis of seemings generally would beepistemically blameless simplybecause that is the only epistemic alternative that wouldbe open. As I have arguedelsewhere, however, being epistemically blameless (or satis-fying othersimilardeontologicalrequirements)s not enough for genuine epistemic justi-fication: the aim of epistemicjustificationis truth,and the connection between blameless-ness and truth s far too tenuous as indeedthepointjust made illustrates.(See my paperThe Indispensabilityof Internalism, orthcomingfrom Philosophical Topics.) I havetaken Huemer to be primarilyconcerned with genuine epistemic justificationand haveinterpretedhis view accordingly; to take him to be concerned only with epistemicblamelessnesswould meanthat his view fails to be a versionof directrealism in the senseexplained above, i.e., is no longer a genuine epistemological alternative to representa-tionalism.Makingthe phenomenal artof the label for the principleratherseriously misleading.In his book Perception and Reason (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1999) and in hisearlier article Foundationsof Perceptual Knowledge, American Philosophical Quar-terly,vol. 34 (1997), pp. 41-55. Forreasons of space, I will mostly follow the simpler ver-sion of the view presented in the article (bracketed references in this section are to itspages), thus leaving aside manyfurtherinterestingdetails, arguments,and ramifications,which do not, however, in myjudgmentaffect the centralissue I am concerned with. Seealso a booksymposiumon Perception and Reason in Philosophyand PhenomenologicalResearch,vol. 63 (2001), pp. 405-64.See the discussionin Perceptionand Reason,pp. 112-29.

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ence. The initial idea is that perceptual experience is essentially perspectivaland egocentric in character: it presents physical objects and situations asstanding in a set of spatial relations that are centered on the perceiver [43].Moreover, Brewer argues, these presented spatial relations are in fact essentialto picking out specific physical objects in a way that makes determinatebeliefs about those particular objects even possible, since merely qualitativedescriptions of objects, however complicated they might be, could neverguarantee unique reference [44-45]. Instead such specific reference must befundamentally demonstrative in character, appealing to the egocentric spatialrelations presented in experience.So far, this seems to me plausible enough, but what does it have to dowith the issue of justification? Brewer's claim is that...egocentric spatial perception displays its objects as epistemically accessible to the per-ceiver. ... in veridicalperception,we are presentedwith things out there in such a way thatwe graspimmediatelyhow we arerightaboutthe way they are. [43]Instead of the classical foundationalist's reliance on inference,The internalistrequirement s met directlyinstead,by the presentationof objects of experienceas accessible to us, in virtue of the egocentric spatialrelations between them and us which aredisplayed in experience. [43-44]Here it should be noted that Brewer's somewhat idiosyncratic version ofinternalism in application to perception is that the perceiver must know howhe is right about the way things are in the world around him [4 1].27How are we to understand this? It is reasonable enough to say that percep-tual experience seems to present objects as accessible to us, even though thefull story of how they are thus accessible (if indeed they are) and of how weare right (if indeed we are) seems to demand further elements of a broadlycausal sort that are not in any clear way reflected in the presentational experi-ence itself. But the main problem, as the seems and the parenthetical quali-fications (which are mine, not Brewer's) suggests, is that nothing about thesefacts of phenomenology offers any apparent reason that counts in any wayagainst the possibility that the experiences in question are deceptive or illu-sory in a way that would mean that the objects that they seem to present donot genuinely exist. If this possibility were realized (and if the rest ofBrewer's view is correct), then the upshot would be that the beliefs whoseattempted reference to objects is based on those experiences in fact fail to referto specific objects at all. And if this were the case for all of our perceptual27 In Perception and Reason, Breweroffers a furtherargument in chapter3) for the thesisthat the same relations between perceptual experiences and perceptual beliefs thatdeterminethe specific content of those beliefs must also yield reasons for thinkingthatthose beliefs are true. This argumentseems to me objectionablyverificationist in char-acter,but I have no room to discuss it here.




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experiences, then the result would be that we fail to have any determinatebeliefs about particular objects in the world. This is no doubt an intuitivelyimplausible result, but it cannot be assumed to be false in the present con-text28without begging the essential question. Thus Brewer does not seem tohave given any account of why perceptual experience as such yields any justi-fication or reason of an internalist sort for thinking that the material objectsthat it seems to present are genuinely there.The key assumption underlying the foregoing objection is that veridicalperceptual experiences, those for which the objects that seem to be presentedare really there, and non-veridical experiences, those for which they are not,might be entirely indistinguishable from each other from a subjective stand-point, indiscernible to the people who have them, in which case the occur-rence of such an experience would in itself yield no internalist reason or basisfor thinking that the actual situation is one way rather than another.29Brewer,however, rejects this assumption. He grants that the two sorts of experiencecannot be distinguished in an infallible or indubitable way, but argues thatjustification does not demand infallibility or indubitability. And if such ademand is set aside, then, he argues, the person whose experience is veridicalcan be justified in the way already described and hence can know that theobjects in question are genuine and hence also know on that basis that hisexperience is veridical; whereas such justification and knowledge is not, ofcourse, available to the person whose experience is non-veridical (eventhough it will mistakenly seem to him that it is). As Brewer says in a replyto Richard Fumerton:Whenhavinga vivid hallucinatoryexperience, a person does not have the same reasons forempiricalbelief as she does when she is actually perceiving the way thingsare in the worldaroundher. For, in the veridicalcase, her epistemic openness to the way thingsare out there isevident to her, whereas,in the hallucinatorycase, she merely seems to be open to the way theworld is.30As he suggests at the end of this reply, his view involves a more radicaltype of externalism than epistemic externalism of the reliabilist sort(namely, I take it, an externalist view of content), one in which a person'ssubjective-experiential condition in perception is itself constituted by herrelations with the mind-independent things in the world around her. 31It is easy, however, to see that this move will not do, at least if it is agenuinely internalist reason for thinking that material objects exist that is in

As Brewersometimes seems to do. See, e.g., Perceptionand Reason, pp. 20-21.I do not mean to suggest here that there mightnot be further reasons of some sort forfavoringone of these alternativesover the other;but such further reasons would have toappealto more thanthe experiences themselves.Brewer, Reply to Fumerton, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 63(2001), p. 451.M Ibid.,p. 452. My italics.

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question. The problem, of course, is that even if it is granted that Brewer hasspecified a difference between a veridical perceptual state and a non- veridicalone, this difference is not discernible to the individuals in question in the waythat an internalist justification requires. Contrary to Brewer's suggestion,such a claim need not be based on a demand of infallibility or indubitability.The problem is rather that on Brewer's view, there need be no internallydetectable difference of any sort for the persons in question to appeal to, notjust one that is infallible. True, the person who has the veridical experiencecan claim correctly to be genuinely open to the world and so to have the sortof reason for and consequent knowledge of the veridicality of his or her expe-rience that Brewer specifies; while the person who has the non-veridical expe-rience will in fact be incorrect in making such claims. But it remains the casethat if the issue were explicitly raised, neither of the persons would be able totell in a subjectively accessible way on the basis of the presentational charac-ter of the experience alone which situation he or she is in. Thus each of themnot only fails to have what Brewer calls a skeptic-proof guarantee of truth[52], but in fact fails to have any genuinely internalist reason at all. Againwe seem to be left with a skeptical result that is not mitigated to any seriousextent by the fact that we may, for all we can tell, be able to make claims ofjustification and knowledge that are correct in senses that we cannot genu-inely recognize.32

32 As emerged in discussion at the conference where this paperwas delivered (see note 1),in which Brewerwas a participant,his view is even more radical than is capturedby theforegoing account. On his view, apparently,the materialobjects that are presented inveridical perceptualexperience are immediatelyaccessible parts of that experience,where this immediateaccessibility is to be understood n the Cartesiansense explainedabove. (Here I am quotinga positionpaperoffered at the conference by Scott Sturgeonand endorsed n discussion by Brewer.)Thus the claim is that in veridical experience wedirectly experience materialobjects in the very same sense in which on the more stan-dardCartesianview we directlyexperience our own states of mind,and that this is whythe resultingbeliefs are justified. An adequate consideration of this view is impossiblehere,butI would suggest three mainproblems,of which the last is the most crucial: First,the view in question strikes me as metaphysically unintelligible.Phenomenalism andsimilaridealistic views aside, I simply do not understand ow materialobjects, understoodin a realist way, can be literally parts of experiences. And to say, as is sometimes said,that themindspreads tself on the world only adds to the obscurity.Second, even if theview could be madeintelligible,the sorts of considerationscited by Brewer (and brieflysummarized n the text above) do not seem to me to in any clear way constitute reasonsfor thinking hat it is true. (Again, I am inclined to suspect an underlyingverificationistappeal.) Third,and most important,even if the view in question were intelligible andknown to be correct, t would still remain true thatthere would be no difference betweena veridical experience and a suitable hallucinatoryexperience that would be genuinelydiscernible to the perceiver in question and so no genuinely internalist reason forthinkingthat the belief in questionis true.




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VBoth Huemer and Brewer attempt to rest the justification of claims about thematerial world on what might be described as full-blown perceptual experi-ence: the perceptual experience that seems to present physical objects andsituations in physical space. Huemer regards such experience as propositionaleven though non-conceptual, whereas Brewer regards it as conceptual and pre-sumably also as propositional. A third, quite different view, but still a ver-sion of direct realism as understood here, is rather tentatively defended bySteven Reynolds.33 Reynolds attempts to base the justification of perceptualbeliefs on perceptual experience conceived in a thinner, more austere way:roughly, in the visual case, as the experience of patches of color of varioussizes, shapes, and hues, arranged in a person's visual field. He characterizessuch experiences as non-propositional and non-intentional, and I believe thathe would say that they are non-conceptual as well.This is essentially the same sort of experience that the most standardforms of representationalism attempt to characterize in terms of sense-data andthe like and appeal to as the basis for their envisaged inference to the exter-nal world. I have already said that I think that a consciousness of this sort ofexperience normally exists in ordinary perception, albeit very much in thebackground, and it is interesting to speculate as to how it relates to the richerlevel of experience to which Huemer and Brewer appeal. My tentative sugges-tion would be that the richer level of experience is in some way an amalgamof this thinner sort of experience with conceptual elements: what C. I. Lewis,among others, used to describe as the conceptual interpretation of the given.(Though how these elements are fused into a phenomenologically seamlessresult is not easy to say.) Reynolds attempts to explain how beliefs aboutmaterial objects can be justified by non-propositional experiences of this sort,but I think that the account, if successful, would apply just as well to thejustification of the richer variety or level of perceptual experience itself.

Reynolds suggests that the claims about material objects that we arrive aton the basis of non-propositional experience reflect learned recognitionalskills, skills that are at least somewhat analogous to those involved in suchthings as playing the piano or speaking a natural language [282]. Like otherskills, these recognitional skills could be captured in rules, though the personwho has the skills need not be thought of as having any very explicit concep-tion of these rules. I think that this picture is at least largely correct, that inarriving at claims about the material world in response to the non-proposi-tional level of experience we are guided by a tacitly understood correlation ofsome complicated sort between experiential content and material situations,

Steven L. Reynolds, KnowingHow to Believe with Justification, PhilosophicalStudies,vol. 64 (1991), pp. 273-92. Bracketed references in this section are to the pages of thisarticle.

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with the only real question being whether this correlation is, as Reynoldssuggests, learned, or whether it is not instead partly or even largely innate.

But what are the implications of this picture for the justification of theresulting beliefs (and propositional perceptual experiences)? Reynolds's sug-gestion is that the resulting claims are epistemically justified just in casethey in fact conform to the rules that describe the recognitional skill in ques-tion, that is, just in case they fit the correlation between non-propositionalexperience and material-object claims that (we confidently think) is sharedwithin our epistemic community. In his view, the epistemic goal of truthcomes in only as part of the causal explanation of why we adopt the practiceof belief acquisition that involve these rules: it is adopted because followingsuch rules in fact tends to produce true beliefs [288].

But this account is not enough to yield a genuinely internalist alternativeto representationalism (something, to be sure, that Reynolds makes no veryexplicit claim to be doing). I have no real quarrelwith saying that there is aspecies of justification, or something like justification, that results from con-formity to this tacitly accepted correlation or set of rules, something perhapsclose to what Tyler Burge and others have in mind by speaking of entitle-ment. MBut whether the justification (or entitlement) that results in this wayis epistemic in character must surely depend in the end on whether or not thecorrelation between experience and material objects or situations reflected inthe correlation in question is indeed accurate or reliable in the sense that theclaims about the material world arrived at on that basis are in fact likely to betrue. And for the resulting justification to be genuinely internalist in charac-ter, it seems that there must be good internalist reasons for thinking that thisis so. Thus, I suggest, we are led inexorably back to the classical representa-tionalist project of trying to show how an inference from the features of non-conceptual and non-propositional experience to claims about the materialworld can be justified. Perhaps ordinary people need not actually be able tojustifiably make this inference in order for them to be in some sense entitledto their beliefs, but that it be possible to justifiably make it is, I am suggest-ing, a necessary condition for this entitlement to count as genuinely epis-temic, from an internalist standpoint.

VII have now examined, in the previous three sections, three specific accountsof how perceptual claims about the material world might be justified within adirect realist view in ways that differ from that advocated by the representa-34 See Tyler Burge, ContentPreservation, PhilosophicalReview,vol. 102 (1993), pp. 457-88. Burgecites Reynolds's view as at least in the vicinityof his own (p. 478), but suggeststhat he would appeal to the perceptualcharacter of perceptual belief rather than tonon-intentionalsensations. This may lead back to something like Brewer's view, but

Burgedoes not say enoughto makeit possible to be very sure.




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tionalist and have argued that none of these accounts is successful. Theseresults obviously do not in themselves establish that there is not some otherpossible direct realist account that is more tenable, even though I have beenunable to find one. But I want to suggest briefly that there is some reason,though hardly a conclusive one, for thinking that any further such accountwill be in the vicinity of one of the ones just considered and likely open tothe same objections.The reason in question is based on the idea that versions of direct realismcan be usefully distinguished by what they say about the nature of perceptualexperience and its role in justification. If such experience is to play a justifi-catory role, then the direct realist must seemingly either (i) ascribe to experi-ence a propositional content of an internally accessible sort and appeal to thatcontent for the justification of perceptual beliefs, or (ii) ascribe to perceptualexperience a propositional content that is partly external in the content-exter-nalist sense and appeal in part to that external content for the justification ofperceptual beliefs, or (iii) attempt to justify perceptual claims by appeal toonly non-propositional experiential content. Huemer's account is of sort (i)and faces the problem, in my view insoluble, of how the subjectively acces-sible propositional content of the perceptual experience is itself to be justi-fied. Brewer's account is of sort (ii) and faces the problem, which I againregard as insoluble, that the sort of justification it offers will not beaccessible to the believer in the way that a genuinely internalist viewrequires. And a version of alternative (iii), such as that advanced by Reynolds,seems to lead directly back to representationalism in the way suggested. I cansee no further possibility that is compatible with the idea that perceptualexperience is itself somehow a source of justification. As already suggested,this is not intended to be anything like a demonstrative argument. But it maysuggest that in investigating the specific views I have considered, moreprogress has been made toward assessing the overall viability of direct realismthan might otherwise have been thought.

Is there any further direct realist alternative, one that avoids any claim thatperceptual experience has a content that plays a role in justification, whilestill claiming that perception is somehow a source of justification? Theobvious problem is that it is extremely unclear where such justification issupposed to come from.

Moreover, I would suggest, it is after all pretty obvious on reflection thatperceptual experience does contribute in an important way to the justificationthat perceptual beliefs seem intuitively to have. For example, as I look outon this room and form various perceptual beliefs concerning the presence ofpeople and chairs and walls and windows, my reasons or apparent reasons forthinking those various things are true surely depend in a fundamental way onthe presence in my visual field of what might be characterizedas distinctively




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shaped patches of color. These phenomenal elements seem to present to methe objects in question and even perhaps to be in some way identical withthem. I have argued that this seeming presentation cannot simply be acceptedat face value. But it still is, I suggest, abundantly obvious that the presencein my experience of elements of this kind plays an essential role in the onlysort of reason or basis for thinking that my perceptual claims are true that Ieven seem to myself to have. And once direct realist views of the sortsalready considered in the previous three sections are set aside, only the repre-sentationalist account of how such a reason could be genuinely cogent appar-ently remains. The difficulties that face such a view are extremely familiarand obvious, and I do not mean to take them lightly.35 But I would also sug-gest that far, far too much of the discussion of these issues, from the time ofDescartes and Locke to our own, has been concerned with ways of attemptingto evade the need for such an account and far too little with actually attempt-ing to give one- with the various views that fall under the rubric of directrealism being only the latest attempts at such evasion and likely, I think, tobe no more successful in the end than the idealist and phenomenalist viewsthatpreceded them.

35 For what I regard as a very preliminary attempt to grapple with these difficulties, see mypaper Foundationalism and the External World, in James Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophi-cal Perspectives,vol. 13 (2000).


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