| Direct Realism |
Direct realism is the view that our senses give us a direct experience of the world around us. The theory is extremely simple, and essentially states that ‘what you see is what there is’, and a direct realist will believe that the world is the way we perceive it is, and we perceive it as this because this is the way the world is. The theory has had much criticism by philosophers over the years as they see it as very much a ‘man in the street’ theory, in that it fails to take philosophical considerations seriously. Much more considered options that philosophers seems to prefer are either the adoption of idealism or representative realism, in some form or another, depending on whether or not we can infer the existence of an external world from our senses, or whether the only access to "reality" is through our mind.For the direct realist, the qualities of an object such as its colour, shape, size, and texture are properties that exist within the object itself – to take an example of a ripe banana, we can discover through our senses that it has certain qualities of taste, texture, smell and colour. To a direct realist these qualities exist within the banana itself, continue to exist regardless of any human perception, or lack of, and there is no mediation between the qualities and my experience of them. However, this is one of the major issues with direct realism as its reliance on our senses makes it open to attack due to the unreliability of our senses. As a form of evidence, our senses are not that reliable, and as such the evidence they provide cannot be given too great a weight. Therefore it is very difficult to maintain the claim that the objects we perceive are the objects in reality – the ripe banana that we think we experience might not actually be the ripe banana that sits on the table in front on me. The arguments from illusion and hallucination demonstrate how our senses are fallible and cannot be entirely relied upon. In our sense experience of the world, we often have cases of perceptual illusion where our experiences do not properly represent reality. To take a simple example, a straight stick that is placed underwater appears to be bent, when in fact we know it is still straight. There are many other examples that can be observed in everyday life, and these all present a challenge for the direct realist. According to the theory, we must accept that the stick is actually bent, or just accept that the theory is false, in this instance. Because of this, we know that distortion occurs at a perceptual level rather than an objective one, and we can partition our experience of reality, and reality itself – the two are no longer unmediated, as a direct realist would have us believe. However, there is a counter argument to such illusions in that we generally are aware of the fact that these are illusions – I know that the stick is not actually bent. We know that we are seeing an illusion, which is in itself a distorted view of reality, and although our senses have been proved to not be totally reliable they are self correcting, in that further sense experiences by ourselves reveals where we have been misled. The argument works against itself in a way, because if we claim that we can know nothing through our senses as they are completely untrustworthy, then we cannot say that they deceive us as the only evidence we have for this is sense itself, which cannot be used! There are other examples, all of which cause to create a gap between appearance and reality, something that a direct realist would have us deny. For example, the time lag argument uses the example of the sun and our perception of it from earth to make clear how we indeed never see anything as it atually is. Because of the distance of the earth from the sun, when we "see" the sun from earth we actually see the sun as it was 9 minutes ago, because of the speed of light. Therefore, if in the past 9 minutes the sun had ceased to exist we would continue to perceive it for a further 9 minutes - a direct realist viewpoint would lead us to believe that the sun still exists, when of course it does not. The other alternative though, is that we are looking into the past. We can then bring this example down to a much smaller scale, and claim that because light takes time to travel, we never actually experience anything as it is right now, in this moment in time, we see a fraction of a second into the past. Therefore, what we see is not reality, the speed of light mediates between the two. any will argue that the examples given by critics are fairly uncommon, and do not cause major problems, we still should not trust entirely something that can, and frequently does deceive us. As Descartes said: “Although the senses sometimes deceive us… there are perhaps many other things which one cannot reasonably doubt”. He maintained that whilst perceptual error discredits the senses to a degree, it is not common enough for scepticism of the senses as evidence. Whether or not we follow Descartes’ trusting approach, or follow a more negative path, we must consider that if we refute by counter example, a perfectly sensible thing to do, we cannot logically trust our senses at all. We cannot logically believe that our senses are trustworthy when we have examples of when they are not. Indeed, any scepticism about perception is self defeating as one must adopt a realist position to reasonably be able to invoke doubt on a subject, therefore we seem to have little alternative but to use our senses, regardless of any scepticism we may or may not have. Descartes unwittingly criticised direct realism with his dreaming argument, where he argued that we could be dreaming at any given moment in time, and there is nothing that proves we are not. If we are never certain that we are not dreaming then we cannot know anything for certain about the external world as we are never sure we are experiencing it. However, there are several counter arguments to this. One comes from Norman Malcolm, who believes that because we ask ourselves we are dreaming, we cannot be doing so. Only a conscious person could ask such a question, and as we lose consciousness when we enter a dreaming sleep, this cannot be so. Also, we know from experimental evidence that people can experience 'false awakenings' and also 'lucid dreams', both of which prove it is possible to have know you are in a dream, or believing you are awake when you are not. Another argument of Descartes' was his suggestion that all of what we perceived could conceivably be a virtual reality, which was ultimately controlled by some evil being, and what we experienced had no relation to the external world. It suggests that our brain exists independently and nerve endings leading into it are stimulated to create an illusion of reality. This theory, whilst absurd, is very difficult to disprove. Therefore, in assessing direct realism it has been shown that whilst it is a theory objectionable to the philosopical mind, it is by far the least problematic of the theories of knowledge, and is a pragmatic, practical position to take, that holds truth for some 6 billion people in the world, that only causes issues within the narrow confines of philosophy. |