ISBN : 9780199692040
To be a 'commonsense realist' is to hold that perceptual experience is (in general) an immediate awareness of mind-independent objects, and a source of direct knowledge of what such objects are like. Over the past few centuries this view has faced formidable challenges from epistemology, metaphysics, and, more recently, cognitive science. However, in recent years there has been renewed interest in it, due to new work on perceptual consciousness, objectivity, and causal understanding. This volume collects nineteen original essays by leading philosophers and psychologists on these topics. Questions addressed include: What are the commitments of commonsense realism? Does it entail any particular view of the nature of perceptual experience, or any particular view of the epistemology of perceptual knowledge? Should we think of commonsense realism as a view held by some philosophers, or is there a sense in which we are pre-theoretically committed to commonsense realism in virtue of the experience we enjoy or the concepts we use or the explanations we give? Is commonsense realism defensible, and if so how, in the face of the formidable criticism it faces? Specific issues addressed in the philosophical essays include the status of causal requirements on perception, the causal role of perceptual experience, and the relation between objective perception and causal thinking. The scientific essays present a range of perspectives on the development, phylogenetic and ontogenetic, of the human adult conception of perception.
1. Introduction
2. Tackling Berkeley's Puzzle
3. Relational vs Kantian Responses to Berkeley's Puzzle
4. Experiential Objectivity
5. Realism and Explanation in Perception
6. Epistemic Humility and Causal Structuralism
7. Seeing What is So
8. Causation in Commonsense Realism
9. Perceptual Concepts as Non-causal Concepts
10. Perception and the Ontology of Causation
11. Vision and Causal Understanding
12. The Perception of Absence, Space, and Time
13. Perception, Causal Understanding, and Locality
14. Causal Perception and Causal Cognition
15. Children's understanding of perceptual appearances
16. Perspective-Taking and its Foundation in Joint Attention
17. A Two-Systems Theory of Social Cognition: Engagement and Theory of Mind
18. Development of understanding of the causal connection between perceptual access and knowledge state
19. Social and Physical Reasoning in Human-reared Chimpanzees: Preliminary Studies