ABSTRACT
The ‘direct realism’ (I agree with Austin that the term is unfortunate, which is why I prefer ‘commonsense realism’) that I defended in my Dewey Lectures 8 is not a new scientific theory, nor is it a program for cognitive science; it is a conceptual reorientation. If it has consequences for cognitive science, it is only in suggesting that certain approaches have been neglected. 9 What I am attacking is a line of reasoning that ends up with the view as holding that whenever we perceive anything what is really ‘present to the mind’ is a little picture, and that whenever our perceptions are ‘the same’, the ‘numerically identical’ little picture, is present to the mind. In Jerry Fodor's form of the theory, for example, the little picture is the output of a localized assembly of neurons that he calls a ‘module’. I have heard him refer to this (hypothetical) neural event as an ‘appearance’ (i.e. a sense datum). If Fodor were right, it would be possible to have a sense datum in a test tube! In short, the disastrous view is that (1) there are sense data; and (2) they are identical with neural events. (Part of what I claim to have shown in my Royce Lectures, Part II of The Threefold Cord (Putnam 1999), is that NO neural events have the properties that are ascribed to ‘sense data’. In the Dewey Lectures, Part I of The Threefold Cord, I also claim to have shown that the supposed need to postulate such objects as ‘sense data’ is non-existent.)
