1 Naturalized Sense Data

This paper examines and defends the view that the immediate objects of visual perception, or what are often called sense data, are parts of the facing surfaces of physical objects. I will call this the naturalized sense data (NSD) theory. Occasionally defended in the literature on the philosophy of perception, most famously by G. E. Moore (1918-1919), it has not proved popular and indeed was abandoned by Moore himself. The contemporary situation in the philosophy of perception seems ripe for a revaluation of the NSD theory, however. Much recent discussion is polarized between uncritical direct realism and various forms of representationalism. Both positions have serious drawbacks and the plausibility of each seems to rest largely upon the perceived inadequacies of the other. But the NSD theory allows us to accommodate the very real shortcomings in uncritical direct realism without postulating the existence of non-physical sense data in a way that has seemed to many incompatible with any robust form of philosophical naturalism.1