Nave realism

For the psychological theory called nave realism, see nave realism (psychology)

4. These objects are also able to retain properties of

the types we perceive them as having, even when
they are not being perceived. Their properties are
perception-independent.
5. By means of our senses, we perceive the world directly, and pretty much as it is. In the main, our
claims to have knowledge of it are justied.[3]
In the area of visual perception in psychology, the leading
direct realist theorist was J. J. Gibson. Other psychologists were heavily inuenced by this approach, including William Mace, Claire Michaels,[4] Edward Reed,[5]
Robert Shaw, and Michael Turvey. More recently, Carol
Fowler has promoted a direct realist approach to speech
perception.

Nave realism argues we perceive the world directly

Nave realism, also known as direct realism or common sense realism, is a philosophy of mind rooted in
a theory of perception that claims that the senses provide us with direct awareness of the external world. In 2 Nave and scientic realism
contrast, some forms of idealism assert that no world exists apart from mind-dependent ideas and some forms of Nave realism is distinct from scientic realism, which
skepticism say we cannot trust our senses.
states that the universe contains just those properties that
The realist view is that we perceive objects as they really feature in a scientic description of it, not properties like
are. They are composed of matter, occupy space and have colour per se but merely objects that reect certain waveproperties, such as size, shape, texture, smell, taste and lengths owing to their microscopic surface texture. Nave
colour, that are usually perceived correctly. Objects obey and direct realism propose no physical theory of experithe laws of physics and retain all their properties whether ence and do not identify experience with the experience
of quantum phenomena or the twin retinal images. This
or not there is anyone to observe them.[1]
lack of supervenience of experience on the physical world
Nave realism is known as direct as against indirect or rep- means that nave realism is not a physical theory.[6]
resentative realism when its arguments are developed to
counter the latter position, also known as epistemological An example of a scientic realist is John Locke, who held
dualism;[2] that our conscious experience is not of the real the world only contains the primary qualities that feature
in a corpuscularian scientic account of the world (see
world but of an internal representation of the world.
corpuscular theory), and that other properties were entirely subjective, depending for their existence upon some
perceiver who can observe the objects.[1]

Theory

The nave realist theory may be characterized as the ac- 2.1 Realism and quantum physics
ceptance of the following ve beliefs:
Main article: Principle of locality
1. There exists a world of material objects.
Realism in physics refers to the fact that any physi2. Some statements about these objects can be known cal system must have denite properties whether meato be true through sense-experience.
sured/observed or not. Physics up to the 19th century
3. These objects exist not only when they are being was always implicitly and sometimes explicitly taken to
perceived but also when they are not perceived. be based on philosophical realism.
The objects of perception are largely perception- Scientic realism in classical physics has remained comindependent.
patible with the nave realism of everyday thinking on
1

2
the whole but there is no known, consistent way to visualize the world underlying quantum theory in terms of
ideas of the everyday world. The general conclusion
is that in quantum theory nave realism, although necessary at the level of observations, fails at the microscopic
level.[7] Experiments such as the SternGerlach experiment and quantum phenomena such as complementarity
lead quantum physicists to conclude that "[w]e have no
satisfactory reason for ascribing objective existence to
physical quantities as distinguished from the numbers obtained when we make the measurements which we correlate with them. There is no real reason for supposing that
a particle has at every moment a denite, but unknown,
position which may be revealed by a measurement of the
right kind... On the contrary, we get into a maze of contradiction as soon as we inject into quantum mechanics
such concepts as carried over from the language and philosophy of our ancestors... It would be more exact if we
spoke of 'making measurements of this, that, or the other
type instead of saying that we measure this, that, or the
other 'physical quantity'.[8] It is no longer possible to
adhere to both the principle of locality (that distant objects cannot aect local objects), and counterfactual definiteness, a form of ontological realism implicit in classical physics. Some interpretations of quantum mechanics hold that a system lacks an actualized property until
it is measured, which implies that quantum systems exhibit a non-local behaviour. Bells theorem proved that
every quantum theory must either violate local realism
or counterfactual deniteness. This has given rise to a
contentious debate of the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Although locality and 'realism' in the sense of
counterfactual deniteness, are jointly false, it is possible
to retain one of them. The majority of working physicists discard counterfactual deniteness in favor of locality, since non-locality is held to be contrary to relativity. The implications of this stance are rarely discussed
outside of the microscopic domain but the thought experiment of Schrdingers cat illustrates the diculties
presented. As quantum mechanics is applied to larger
and larger objects even a one-ton bar, proposed to detect gravity waves, must be analysed quantum mechanically, while in cosmology a wavefunction for the whole
universe is written to study the Big Bang. It is dicult
to accept the quantum world as somehow not physically
real, so Quantum mechanics forces us to abandon nave
realism,[9] though it can also be argued that the counterfactual deniteness 'realism' of physics is a much more
specic notion than general philosophical realism.[10]

REFERENCES

depend on how we look.[11]

3 Virtual reality and realism

Virtual realism[12] is closely related to the above theories.
In the research paper The reality of virtual reality it is
proposed that, virtuality is itself a bonade mode of reality, and that 'virtual reality' must be understood as 'things,
agents and events that exist in cyberspace'. These proposals resolve the incoherences found in the ordinary uses
of these terms... 'virtual reality', though based on recent
information technology, does not refer to mere technological equipment or purely mental entities, or to some
fake environment as opposed to the real world, but that
it is an ontological mode of existence which leads to an
expansion of our ordinary world.[13]
The emergence of teleoperation and virtual environments has greatly increased interest in synthetic experience, a mode of experience made possible by both these
newer technologies and earlier ones, such as telecommunication and sensory prosthetics... understanding synthetic experience must begin by recognizing the fallacy
of nave realism and with the recognition that the phenomenology of synthetic experience is continuous with
that of ordinary experience.[14]

4 References
[1] Nave Realism, Theory of Knowledge.com.
[2] Lehar, Steve. Representationalism
[3] Nave Realism, University of Reading.
[4] http://ione.psy.uconn.edu:16080/~{}corr/Pages/
MichaelsProfile.htm
[5] http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/
Psychology/Cognitive/?view=usa&ci=9780195073010
[6] Michaels, Claire & Carello, Claudia. (1981). Direct Perception. Prentice-Hall.
[7] Gomatam, Ravi. (2004). Physics and Commonsense Reassessing the connection in the light of the quantum
theory, arXiv.org.
[8] Kemble E. C. in Peres Asher, (1993). Quantum Theory:
Concepts and Methods, Springer 1993 p. 17 ISBN 9780-7923-2549-9.

" '[W]e have to give up the idea of realism to a far

greater extent than most physicists believe today.' (Anton [9] Rosenblum, Bruce & Kuttner, Fred. (2006). Quantum
Zeilinger)... By realism, he means the idea that objects
Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness, Oxford Unihave specic features and properties that a ball is red,
versity Press US. p. 112. ISBN 978-0-19-517559-2.
that a book contains the works of Shakespeare, or that an
[10] We examine the prevalent use of the phrase local realelectron has a particular spin... for objects governed by
ism in the context of Bells Theorem and associated exthe laws of quantum mechanics, like photons and elecperiments, with a focus on the question: what exactly is the
trons, it may make no sense to think of them as having
realism in local realism supposed to mean?". Norsen,
well dened characteristics. Instead, what we see may
T.Against 'Realism'

[11] Ball, Philip. (2007). Physicists bid farewell to reality?

Quantum mechanics just got even stranger, Nature, April
18, 2007.
[12] Heim, Michael. (2000). Virtual Realism, Oxford University Press US. ISBN 978-0-19-513874-0.
[13] (Requires login) Yoh, Myeung-Sook. (2001). The reality
of virtual reality, Virtual Systems and Multimedia. pp.
666-674.
[14] Loomis, Jack. (1993). Understanding Synthetic Experience Must Begin with the Analysis of Ordinary Perceptual
Experience, IEEE 1993 Symposium on Research Frontiers
in Virtual Reality, 54-57.

Sources and further reading

Ahlstrom, Sydney E. The Scottish Philosophy and
American Theology, Church History, Vol. 24, No.
3 (Sep., 1955), pp. 257-272 in JSTOR
Cuneo, Terence, and Ren van Woudenberg, eds.
The Cambridge companion to Thomas Reid (2004)
Gibson, J.J. (1972). A Theory of Direct Visual Perception. In J. Royce, W. Rozenboom (Eds.). The
Psychology of Knowing. New York: Gordon &
Breach.
Graham, Gordon. Scottish Philosophy in the
19th Century Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2009) online
Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture (2006) excerpt and text search
S. A. Grave, Common Sense, in The Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (Collier Macmillan, 1967).
Peter J. King, One Hundred Philosophers (2004:
New York, Barrons Educational Books), ISBN 07641-2791-8.
Selections from the Scottish Philosophy of Common
Sense, ed. by G.A. Johnston (1915) online, essays
by Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, James Beattie,
and Dugald Stewart
David Edwards and Steven Wilcox (1982). Some
Gibsonian perspectives on the ways that psychologists use physics (PDF). Act. Psychologia 52: 147
163. doi:10.1016/0001-6918(82)90032-4.
Fowler, C. A. (1986). An event approach to the
study of speech perception from a direct-realist perspective. Journal of Phonetics 14: 328.
James J. Gibson. The Ecological Approach to Visual
Perception. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1987.
ISBN 0-89859-959-8

Claire F. Michaels and Claudia Carello. Direct Perception. Prentice-Hall. ISBN 978-0-13214-791-0.
1981. Download this book at http://ione.psy.uconn.
edu/~{}psy254/MC.pdf
Edward S. Reed. Encountering the World. Oxford
University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-19-507301-0
Sophia Rosenfeld. Common Sense: A Political History (Harvard University Press; 2011) 346 pages;
traces the paradoxical history of common sense as a
political ideal since 1688
Shaw, R. E./Turvey, M. T./Mace, W. M. (1982):
Ecological psychology. The consequence of a commitment to realism. In: W. Weimer & D. Palermo
(Eds.), Cognition and the symbolic processes. Vol.
2, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
Inc., pp. 159226.
Turvey, M. T., & Carello, C. (1986). The
ecological approach to perceiving-acting a pictorial essay. Acta Psychologica 63 (1-3): 133
155. doi:10.1016/0001-6918(86)90060-0. PMID
3591430.
Nicholas Wolterstor. Thomas Reid and the Story
of Epistemology. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
ISBN 0-521-53930-7
Nelson, Quee. (2007). The Slightest Philosophy
Dogs Ear Publishing. ISBN 978-1-59858-378-6

6 See also
Philosophy of mind
Philosophy of perception
Qualia
Representative realism
Eliminative materialism
Scientic realism
Conrmation holism
Critical realism
Disjunctivism
Instrumentalism
Objectivism
Misconception
Consciousness
Worldview
tienne Gilson

7
Jacques Maritain
Joseph Owens (Redemptorist)
John F. X. Knasas
Thomas Reid
Everett W. Hall
P. F. Strawson
James J. Gibson
James McCosh
History of philosophy in Poland
Model-dependent realism

External links
James Feiser, A Bibliography of Scottish Common
Sense Philosophy
Theory of knowledge: Nave Realism
Nave Realism and the Argument from Illusion
The Function of Conscious Experience
Representationalism
Nave Realism in Contemporary Philosophy
The Science and Philosophy of Consciousness
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Epistemological Problems of Perception
Physics and Commonsense: Reassessing the connection in the light of quantum theory
Quantum Theory: Concepts and Methods
Nature Journal: Physicists bid farewell to reality?
Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness
Virtual Realism
The reality of virtual reality
IEEE Symposium on Research Frontiers in Virtual
Reality: Understanding Synthetic Experience Must
Begin with the Analysis of Ordinary Perceptual Experience
Realism, article form the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy.
Sense Data, article from the Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Skepticism and the Veil of Perception, book defending direct realism.

Pierre Le Morvan, Arguments against direct realism and how to counter them, American Philosophical Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2004): 221-234. (pdf)
Steven Lehar, Gestalt Isomorphism (2003), paper
criticizing direct realism.
A Direct Realist Account of Perceptual Awareness,
dissertation on direct realism.
Epistemological debate on PSYCHE-D mailing list
A Cartoon Epistemology

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