Beyond Phenomenal Naivete

On a natural description of what a mundane visual experience is like for its subject—of its phenomenal character, of how it is phenomenally—such an experience is phenomenally a direct or immediate awareness of entities in the scene before the subject’s eyes. For example, according to Strawson (1979, 97), “mature sensible experience (in general) presents itself as [ . . . ] an immediate consciousness of the existence of things outside of us”; according to Sturgeon (2000, 9), “Visual phenomenology makes it for a subject as if a scene is simply presented. Veridical perception, illusion and hallucination seem to place objects and their features directly before the mind”. According to many, that experience is an immediate consciousness of things outside of us is part of a naive view of experience: I therefore call the doctrine that an experience is, phenomenally, an immediate awareness of entities external to the subject Phenomenal Naivete. Unfortunately, Phenomenal Naivete is incompatible with a natural suggestion as to the connection between the phenomenal character of a visual experience and the experience’s nature: while armchair philosophical reasoning or experimental psychology might play a crucial role in producing a theory of the nature of visual experience, this role would be limited to filling in the contours drawn by the phenomenal character of experience; while the phenomenal character of an experience might leave crucial gaps as to its nature, there is no way that phenomenal character could mislead; if an experience has a certain feature phenomenally—if that feature is among its phenomenal characters—it has that feature in fact.