Naive realism, representationalism, and the rationalizing role of visual perception

Abstract

Suppose that I’m charged with helping a child learn his colours. The child has a number of uniformly coloured cubes, and we play the ‘which colour?’ game. This involves him presenting me with a cube and me saying which colour it is, and then me presenting him with a cube and him saying which colour it is, and so on. He holds up a green cube, and says ‘which colour?’ I say: ‘it’s green’. I judge correctly. But is my judgement rational? It depends on the scenario. Compare two. In the first, Inattentive, the game has been going on for what seems like hours, and I am losing the will to live. I go through the motions and just guess that the cube is green, without even looking. Though my judgement is correct, it is not rational. In the second scenario, Perception, I am playing the game properly and attentively. Based on what I can see, I judge that the cube is green. In Perception, my judgement is rational in the light of my visual perception. This illustrates the phenomenon I want to focus on: the rationalizing role of visual perception. My interest is in whether reflecting upon this enables us to settle a dispute in the metaphysics of perceptual experience: that between representationalism and naive realism. In §2 I clarify what it means to say that perceptions are rationalizing. In §3 I set out Ginsborg’s (2011) argument which aims to show that reflecting upon the rationalizing role of perception supports representationalism. In §4 I show how this argument can be extended so as to challenge naive realism. In §5 I explain why these arguments fail. I do not claim that reflecting upon the rationalizing role of visual perception supports naive realism over representationalism. Rather, I doubt that we can settle the dispute by reflecting on the rationalizing role of perception.