The Nature of Perceptual Experience

"Naive realism" is the common-sense view that the world we see, hear, feel, taste, and smell about us is one and the same as the so-called physical world, existing apart from ourselves. It is called naive realism for it is a view of reality which every one of us naively assumes as we are growing up. It is not so much a matter of "indoctrination" by our educational systems that we are naive realists, but rather a consequence of the high degree to which sensory perception has evolved. The evolutionary function of the senses, of course, is to provide reliable information about the external environment so as to insure biological survival. The perceptual world created by our five senses is something so highly consistent and veridical that we are able to routinely make life-depending decisions (as in driving) without ever suspecting that the perceptual information upon which we are relying is once removed from the external world. In fact, it is precisely because the perceptual process is so highly functional that we fail to recognize its existence. We might say that to the extent that perception is veridical, it is self-concealing. It is for this reason that the layperson thinks of perception as little more than attending to aspects of the environment. One purpose of this course is to show that perception involves much more than the act of attending and that the world we experience about us is really quite a bit different than we had always assumed.