Indirect Realism Vs Indirect Perception

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In this essay I will be arguing that indirect realism is the most logical and the most plausible viewpoint to hold when looking into perception over direct realism, which I will argue, has no good reason to be used as a way to perceive things. I will look into the arguments for viewpoints of perception and which one is the most convincing. These viewpoints consist of; firstly direct realism (or naïve realism) most people who have not looked into philosophy hold this view, the view that you perceive things exactly as they are with properties that they seem to have, like occupying space, being a certain size or having a certain colour. This viewpoint has a lot of problems with it and I will be outlining some of them as well as counter arguments by direct realists. Another viewpoint is indirect realism (or representational realism), which is the view that you should perceive things what they seem like, but representing things using sense data which is data that you get from your senses. Sense data is the information that comes in through the senses like touch and sight etc. there are a few definitions that show us what sense data is. Firstly, sense data is private and can only be experienced by you, even though you can talk about it or make others perceive it as well others can never know what your sense data is. Secondly, if there is usually a thing in the external world then there is probably a thing out there. Thirdly, sense data only exists when you perceive something because if you experienced a thing before then you are no longer experiencing something therefore no longer getting any sense data. Fourthly, sense data is always correct, so if you are looking at a table then you are getting sense data of a table, even if you are... ... middle of paper ... ...k with direct realism because it is an illusion. They would say that a stick looks bent but it clearly isn’t, therefore it must be sense data. A counter argument for this is if a direct realist saw the stick that looks bent in water then they would look at the stick as if it were a stick with the properties the properties of the water that makes things distorted and the properties of air that you can see things in clearly. There are also the properties of the stick, the properties of the stick itself and the properties of the appearance of the stick being bent. Now this last point was not a great argument because an indirect realist could just say that if a direct realist was put in front of a stick that is already bent in water then they wo A direct realist http://www.theoryofknowledge.info/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sense-data/

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