ABSTRACT
Philosophers of the past generally rejected naive realism. This chapter describes a basic form of contemporary naive realism. It looks at two arguments for naive realism over representationalism: one based on how experience seems and another based on the explanatory role of experience. The chapter discusses traditional considerations against naive realism and in favor of representationalism concerning hallucination and scientific evidence for the role of internal factors in normal perception. There is an essential explanatory link between having an experience as of a color or shape and having knowledge of “what properties colors and shapes are”. Visual experience seems to play an explanatory role in providing us with other, less controversial epistemic and cognitive capacities. Representationalists may be able to provide a better account of hallucination and illusion than naïve realists. Their account of hallucination and illusion avoids the two problems we just raised for the indiscriminability theory.
