Direct Realism Without Illusions
Direct Realism Without Illusions

Summary/Abstract: A good theory of perception should be able to account for the epistemology as well as the phenomenology of perception. My paper has two main goals: a) to offer such theory by proposing an argument in favor of a modified version of Reid`s direct realism and b) to argue that there are no illusions and we should drop the distinction between seemings and seeings. The novelty of my approach is that, unlike existing arguments against illusions, I am going to treat illusions as a single category and will not adopt any form of anti-realism or phenomenalism. Instead, I am going to target the distinction between an object looking in a certain way and an object seeming to a perceiver to be such and such and show that it is unjustified to suppose that there are objective perceptual or looking properties of objects or phenomenal properties of experience. Perception is a relation and most of the properties that we are aware of while perceiving are relational properties.

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