Can you steelman the DR position a little? From this writeup (and from some lightweight previous explanation), I don’t understand why anyone sane and reasonably technical would think it possible or even sensible that “our senses give us direct experience of objects as they really are”. Our senses are very clearly intermediated by neural clusters that do a fair bit of interpretation/prediction, and then interpolated into mental models and beliefs.
I don’t see how anyone faced with any common optical illusion could think otherwise.
Seconding this… my thought on reading the post was “this seems akin to arguing with vitalism or disproving the existence of the luminiferous aether”.
OP writes:
One of the leading idea in phenomenology is something called direct realism, it is the idea that our senses give us direct experience of objects as they really are.
Is this… really true? Like, today, in 2025, there’s a sizeable contingent of philosophers who believe this? For real?
To be honest I haven’t seen any statistics or anything like that, I state that based on my personal experience. I used to be active on a neurology server and basically everyone was some form of DRs (most were doctors and higher education).
DR is also considered a pretty orthodox view among philosophers.
see e.g. Chapter 1 of Searle’s Seeing Things as They Are for an exposition of the view usually called direct realism (i’m pretty sure you guys (including the op) have something pretty different in mind than that view and i think it’s plausible you all would actually just agree with that view)
“Direct realism, also known as naïve realism, argues we perceive the world directly.” That…does not advance things.
″...the metaphysical question of whether the world we see around us is the real world itself or merely an internal perceptual copy of that world generated by our conscious experience.” A deepity, a fake question resting on an equivocation over “the world we see around us”. Someone might reasonably use this phrase to refer either to the world outside ourselves, existing independently of our experience of it, or to refer to our (visual) experience of it. In the first case, “the world we see around us is the real world itself” is trivially true and “an internal perceptual copy of that world” trivially false. In the second case, it is the reverse. The confusion arises only because our everyday way of speaking rarely needs to distinguish the two things. Philosophers then confuse themselves by questing for the “true meaning” of the loose words.
The rest of the article sinks into the morass of philosophy.
I agree it’s a pretty unfortunate/silly question. Searle’s analysis of it in Chapter 1 of Seeing Things as They Are is imo not too dissimilar to your analysis of it here, except he wouldn’t think that one can reasonably say “the world we see around us is an internal perceptual copy” (and I myself have trouble compiling this into anything true also), though he’d surely agree that various internal things are involved in seeing the world. I think a significant fraction of what’s going on with this “disagreement” is a bunch of “technical wordcels” being annoyed at what they consider to be careless speaking that they take to be somewhat associated with careless thinking.
Its important to.understand that there is a difference between, “we perceive external objects, not mental proxies” and “our senses give us direct experience of objects as they really are”. The latter is naive realism...naive realism is direct realism, but direct realism does not have to be naive realism. The argument against DR given in the OP is mostly an argument against NR.
The argument for DR is simply that it follows from the meanings of words like “see” and “perceive”...they indicate a relationship between a perceiver and an external object, not a process internal to an observer.
From the blurb to Searle’s book:-
The central question concerns the relation between the subjective conscious perceptual field and the objective perceptual field. Everything in the objective field is either perceived or can be perceived. Nothing in the subjective field is perceived nor can be perceived precisely because the events in the subjective field consist of the perceivings, whether veridical or not, of the events in the objective field.
ETA:
The problem about using “perception” to label a purely internal process is not just semantic: if you model the internal process as fully fledged perception, you are offering a recursive explanation of perception,not a reductive one. Reductive explanations need to appeal to simpler components. If the indirect realist fixes that problem, they can agree with the indirect realis lt that ,properly speaking, only external objects are perceived.
The non-naive direct realist needs to account for sensory errors and distortions, and can do so in a variety of ways...even admitting that there are qualia, but denying that they are seen by an inner observer—the audience in the “Cartesian Theatre”—or instead of external objects.
(One of the concerns with indirect realism is that if it is only the internal representation or proxy that is perceived, the posit of the external object is not needed—“we are blind because we see”—and solipsism follows)
ETA: the direct realist doesn’t have to regard perception as simple or atomic...they only have to deny that perception involves sub perceptions, sub objects and sub perceivers. This allows them to meet the more refined indirect realists in the middle.
The shifts to which “direct realists” resort are like those of “evidential decision theorists”: there are knockdown arguments against, so they change the theory to get round them, while keeping the same name.
You can call it shifting, I can call it improving. It’s not impossible for two opposite, but equally unworkable theories to amount to the same thing , once their problems have been fixed.
The problem about using “perception” to label a purely internal process is not just semantic: if you model the internal process as fully fledged perception, you are offering a recursive explanation of perception,not a reductive one. Reductive explanations need to appeal to simpler components. If the indirect realist fixes that problem, they can after with the indirect realist, that ,properly speaking, only external objects are perceived.
The non-naive direct realist needs to account for sensory errors and distortions, and can do so in a variety of ways...even admitting that there are qualia, but denying that they are seen by an inner observer—the audience in the “Cartesian Theatre”—or instead of external objects.
(One of the concerns with indirect realism is that if it is only the internal representation or proxy that is perceived, the posit of the external object is not needed—“we are blind because we see”—and solipsism follows)
The direct realist doesn’t have to regard perception as simple or atomic...they only have to deny that perception involves sub perceptions and sub perceivers. This allows them to meet the more refined indirect realists in the middle.
if you model the internal process as fully fledged perception
I don’t know what that means.
We have perceptions. We can also notice the perceptions that we have as perceptions, and take those as objects of examination, as is done here and in some of the other posts tagged “phenomenology”. There is no circularity there, just multiple but finitely many levels.
I’m not doubting the phenomenon where you have some kind of higher level awareness of your sensorium...but I am doubting that strictly speaking , it should be called perception.
It’s OK, according to reductionism, to explain an X in terms of Y , where Y is similar...it’s just that Y needs to be simpler as well.
ETA:
The reason we feel an urge to put sneer quotes around “see” when we describe hallucinatory “seeing” is that, in the sense of intentionality, in such cases we do not see anything. If I am having a visual hallucination of the book on the table, then literally I do not see anything. Since I am “aware of” something, the temptation is to put in a noun phrase to form the direct object of “see.” We compound the ambiguity of “aware of” by introducing an ambiguity of “see.”
It matters for clear communication. It is not relevant to the things the communication is about.
So there is the world in itself out there, the causal effects it has on our sense organs, the processing in the nervous system of the signals from those organs, various aspects of the subjective experiences that (somehow) result; there are also imagined experiences and witting or unwitting hallucinations. These are all different things. But in everyday life these distinctions generally make little practical difference, and words such as “perception” and “see” can be used indifferently to sprawl over different parts of that whole domain. There is no such thing as the “strict meaning” of such words, the ways they “should” be used.
One can say, here [lengthy description] is one phenomenon, and here [another lengthy description] is another: I will for this conversation use [some word] to refer to the first and [some other word] to refer to the second. It is nonsense to say “strictly, [some word] means only the first of these” when in everyday talk it straddles both.
If people with realist intuitions argue against direct realism, they usually start by taking the existence of mental objects (such as images) at face value. Their argument usually goes something like “well clearly those mental objects can’t be the external objects because xyz”, where xyz can be about the brain’s processing pipeline or about visual illusions. This xyz stuff is in fact pretty hard to argue with, which makes the entire thing look a little silly/trivial.
However the actual controversial step here is completely unacknowledged, which is to assume that mental objects exist at all. A Dennettian-aligned skeptic can simply argue that our talk of seeing visual images is just a clunky/confused way to describe the limited access we have to our visual processing pipeline—which is in fact something like a highly sparse representation, or maybe even a list of features—and nothing like a 2d pixel image (or even vector image) is ever actually created.
Under this view, insofar as “what we see” refers to any object at all, well it kind of does refer to the external physical object. Not in the sense that we have some magical ability to read off real properties of the physical object, but just in the sense that there is nothing else causally upstream of our reports about seeing visual images.
So what about visual illusions? Well, visual illusions are cases where our reports aren’t accurate. But so what? This just means we’re making a mistake in describing the external thing, not that we’re describing anything else. I don’t think that the frequency of illusions or the magnitude of the mistake is actually all that relevant.
My hot take is that realists generally don’t understand this and that’s why virtually every post arguing against direct realism fails to address the actual crux.
So what about visual illusions? Well, visual illusions are cases where our reports aren’t accurate. But so what? This just means we’re making a mistake in describing the external thing, not that we’re describing anything else. I don’t think that the frequency of illusions or the magnitude of the mistake is actually all that relevant.
No and no. Perceptions and misperceptions aren’t just reports, for one thing.
For another, perceptual illusions don’t have to result in false reports , because you can cognitively compensate for them...adults don’t believe pencils bend in water.
To explain dream and hallucination as misperception, as crude DR does, is to stretch a theory to breaking point...if you are dreaming with your eyes closed, there is no external object to be confused about.
I really can’t steelman DR, it took me a while just to understand it. Optical illusions aren’t very problematic to DRs since they can simply blame our own misunderstanding of the world, a pencil half submerged in water appears bent due to diffraction but since this is natural then there’s no problem, it is your own misunderstanding of optics that leads you to the mistaken opinion of the pencil being crooked.
I don’t see how that works. You can use cognition to correct some misleading perceptions, but you only need to because they are misleading! So, it isn’t shown that there are no misleading perceptions,and it isn’t shown how they work without intermediaries.
Can you steelman the DR position a little? From this writeup (and from some lightweight previous explanation), I don’t understand why anyone sane and reasonably technical would think it possible or even sensible that “our senses give us direct experience of objects as they really are”. Our senses are very clearly intermediated by neural clusters that do a fair bit of interpretation/prediction, and then interpolated into mental models and beliefs.
I don’t see how anyone faced with any common optical illusion could think otherwise.
Seconding this… my thought on reading the post was “this seems akin to arguing with vitalism or disproving the existence of the luminiferous aether”.
OP writes:
Is this… really true? Like, today, in 2025, there’s a sizeable contingent of philosophers who believe this? For real?
To be honest I haven’t seen any statistics or anything like that, I state that based on my personal experience. I used to be active on a neurology server and basically everyone was some form of DRs (most were doctors and higher education).
DR is also considered a pretty orthodox view among philosophers.
see e.g. Chapter 1 of Searle’s Seeing Things as They Are for an exposition of the view usually called direct realism (i’m pretty sure you guys (including the op) have something pretty different in mind than that view and i think it’s plausible you all would actually just agree with that view)
I haven’t read that book, but all I can gather from the publisher’s blurb and two reviews of it, one hostile and one favorable, is that it’s philosophy in the worst sense. What, if anything, Searle means by “direct realism” remains obscure to me.
So let’s try Wikipedia.
“Direct realism, also known as naïve realism, argues we perceive the world directly.” That…does not advance things.
″...the metaphysical question of whether the world we see around us is the real world itself or merely an internal perceptual copy of that world generated by our conscious experience.” A deepity, a fake question resting on an equivocation over “the world we see around us”. Someone might reasonably use this phrase to refer either to the world outside ourselves, existing independently of our experience of it, or to refer to our (visual) experience of it. In the first case, “the world we see around us is the real world itself” is trivially true and “an internal perceptual copy of that world” trivially false. In the second case, it is the reverse. The confusion arises only because our everyday way of speaking rarely needs to distinguish the two things. Philosophers then confuse themselves by questing for the “true meaning” of the loose words.
The rest of the article sinks into the morass of philosophy.
I agree it’s a pretty unfortunate/silly question. Searle’s analysis of it in Chapter 1 of Seeing Things as They Are is imo not too dissimilar to your analysis of it here, except he wouldn’t think that one can reasonably say “the world we see around us is an internal perceptual copy” (and I myself have trouble compiling this into anything true also), though he’d surely agree that various internal things are involved in seeing the world. I think a significant fraction of what’s going on with this “disagreement” is a bunch of “technical wordcels” being annoyed at what they consider to be careless speaking that they take to be somewhat associated with careless thinking.
Its important to.understand that there is a difference between, “we perceive external objects, not mental proxies” and “our senses give us direct experience of objects as they really are”. The latter is naive realism...naive realism is direct realism, but direct realism does not have to be naive realism. The argument against DR given in the OP is mostly an argument against NR.
The argument for DR is simply that it follows from the meanings of words like “see” and “perceive”...they indicate a relationship between a perceiver and an external object, not a process internal to an observer.
From the blurb to Searle’s book:-
ETA: The problem about using “perception” to label a purely internal process is not just semantic: if you model the internal process as fully fledged perception, you are offering a recursive explanation of perception,not a reductive one. Reductive explanations need to appeal to simpler components. If the indirect realist fixes that problem, they can agree with the indirect realis lt that ,properly speaking, only external objects are perceived.
The non-naive direct realist needs to account for sensory errors and distortions, and can do so in a variety of ways...even admitting that there are qualia, but denying that they are seen by an inner observer—the audience in the “Cartesian Theatre”—or instead of external objects.
(One of the concerns with indirect realism is that if it is only the internal representation or proxy that is perceived, the posit of the external object is not needed—“we are blind because we see”—and solipsism follows)
ETA: the direct realist doesn’t have to regard perception as simple or atomic...they only have to deny that perception involves sub perceptions, sub objects and sub perceivers. This allows them to meet the more refined indirect realists in the middle.
.
The shifts to which “direct realists” resort are like those of “evidential decision theorists”: there are knockdown arguments against, so they change the theory to get round them, while keeping the same name.
You can call it shifting, I can call it improving. It’s not impossible for two opposite, but equally unworkable theories to amount to the same thing , once their problems have been fixed.
The problem about using “perception” to label a purely internal process is not just semantic: if you model the internal process as fully fledged perception, you are offering a recursive explanation of perception,not a reductive one. Reductive explanations need to appeal to simpler components. If the indirect realist fixes that problem, they can after with the indirect realist, that ,properly speaking, only external objects are perceived.
The non-naive direct realist needs to account for sensory errors and distortions, and can do so in a variety of ways...even admitting that there are qualia, but denying that they are seen by an inner observer—the audience in the “Cartesian Theatre”—or instead of external objects.
(One of the concerns with indirect realism is that if it is only the internal representation or proxy that is perceived, the posit of the external object is not needed—“we are blind because we see”—and solipsism follows)
The direct realist doesn’t have to regard perception as simple or atomic...they only have to deny that perception involves sub perceptions and sub perceivers. This allows them to meet the more refined indirect realists in the middle.
I don’t know what that means.
We have perceptions. We can also notice the perceptions that we have as perceptions, and take those as objects of examination, as is done here and in some of the other posts tagged “phenomenology”. There is no circularity there, just multiple but finitely many levels.
Compare noticing our beliefs as beliefs, being aware of being aware, and the ladder of abstraction.
I’m not doubting the phenomenon where you have some kind of higher level awareness of your sensorium...but I am doubting that strictly speaking , it should be called perception.
It’s OK, according to reductionism, to explain an X in terms of Y , where Y is similar...it’s just that Y needs to be simpler as well.
ETA:
--Searle
It does not matter what it is called, and it does not matter how Searle or anyone else thinks the word “see” should properly be used.
As soon as you say something to someone else, the usage of words matters.
It matters for clear communication. It is not relevant to the things the communication is about.
So there is the world in itself out there, the causal effects it has on our sense organs, the processing in the nervous system of the signals from those organs, various aspects of the subjective experiences that (somehow) result; there are also imagined experiences and witting or unwitting hallucinations. These are all different things. But in everyday life these distinctions generally make little practical difference, and words such as “perception” and “see” can be used indifferently to sprawl over different parts of that whole domain. There is no such thing as the “strict meaning” of such words, the ways they “should” be used.
One can say, here [lengthy description] is one phenomenon, and here [another lengthy description] is another: I will for this conversation use [some word] to refer to the first and [some other word] to refer to the second. It is nonsense to say “strictly, [some word] means only the first of these” when in everyday talk it straddles both.
Not the OP, but here is an attempt.
If people with realist intuitions argue against direct realism, they usually start by taking the existence of mental objects (such as images) at face value. Their argument usually goes something like “well clearly those mental objects can’t be the external objects because xyz”, where xyz can be about the brain’s processing pipeline or about visual illusions. This xyz stuff is in fact pretty hard to argue with, which makes the entire thing look a little silly/trivial.
However the actual controversial step here is completely unacknowledged, which is to assume that mental objects exist at all. A Dennettian-aligned skeptic can simply argue that our talk of seeing visual images is just a clunky/confused way to describe the limited access we have to our visual processing pipeline—which is in fact something like a highly sparse representation, or maybe even a list of features—and nothing like a 2d pixel image (or even vector image) is ever actually created.
Under this view, insofar as “what we see” refers to any object at all, well it kind of does refer to the external physical object. Not in the sense that we have some magical ability to read off real properties of the physical object, but just in the sense that there is nothing else causally upstream of our reports about seeing visual images.
So what about visual illusions? Well, visual illusions are cases where our reports aren’t accurate. But so what? This just means we’re making a mistake in describing the external thing, not that we’re describing anything else. I don’t think that the frequency of illusions or the magnitude of the mistake is actually all that relevant.
My hot take is that realists generally don’t understand this and that’s why virtually every post arguing against direct realism fails to address the actual crux.
No and no. Perceptions and misperceptions aren’t just reports, for one thing.
For another, perceptual illusions don’t have to result in false reports , because you can cognitively compensate for them...adults don’t believe pencils bend in water.
To explain dream and hallucination as misperception, as crude DR does, is to stretch a theory to breaking point...if you are dreaming with your eyes closed, there is no external object to be confused about.
I really can’t steelman DR, it took me a while just to understand it. Optical illusions aren’t very problematic to DRs since they can simply blame our own misunderstanding of the world, a pencil half submerged in water appears bent due to diffraction but since this is natural then there’s no problem, it is your own misunderstanding of optics that leads you to the mistaken opinion of the pencil being crooked.
I don’t see how that works. You can use cognition to correct some misleading perceptions, but you only need to because they are misleading! So, it isn’t shown that there are no misleading perceptions,and it isn’t shown how they work without intermediaries.