Are we ever directly aware of objects in the external world? Let's look at two contrasting views on the nature of perceptual experience.
2.26 First, on a simple picture of how experience works, the answer is “yes.” Naïve realism says that when we see things around us like tables, chairs, and cups of coffee, we are immediately aware of these things.6 (That is to say, we're aware of them and it's not because we're aware of something else that we're aware of them.) The experience we have when we see a table, on this view, is a relation of awareness between you and the table. The ordinary object, which is, on this view, the immediate object of awareness (IOA), “shapes” the conscious character of your experience so that when you see it, its existence and its character are immediately available to you.
2.27 Second, on the rival indirect realist view, the answer is “no.” When we see a cup of coffee, say, we are aware of the cup but only indirectly. The IOA is something else. In experience, we are only ever directly aware of sense data, and no ordinary material object (OMO) is ever identical to sense data. The properties of the sense data determine the conscious character of your experience. It is by being directly aware of sense data that we're made indirectly aware of external objects (e.g. cups of coffee, tables, friends, etc.). Think of the way that, say, you're aware of a deer by being more immediately aware of its tracks, aware of incoming aircraft by being more immediately aware of blips on the radar screen, or aware of an intruder by being more immediately aware of the dog's barking. The indirect realist proposes that in every case of conscious experience (veridical – in other words, accurate – perceptual experience, illusion, hallucination) the IOA and its properties wholly determine what the conscious experience is like and then make us indirectly aware of external things if they are there and suitably related to us (e.g. by causing us to undergo certain experiences).
2.28 These views share some important features. First, they think of experience as a relation between a subject and some IOA. The IOA's properties determine what the experience is like. The experience you have when you see a tomato, say, involves a mental act (the experiencing, if you like) and an object (i.e. the IOA), and the reason that the visual experience of seeing a red tomato is similar to the experience of seeing a green tomato in some respects but not others is that there's a common mental act (i.e. visually experiencing), some common properties of the respective IOAs (e.g. shape), and some differences in the properties of the respective IOAs (e.g. color). Second, naïve and indirect realists are realists. The realist believes that there is a mind‐independent reality that includes things whose existence and character don't depend upon mental activity. Some people like to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the operative idea being that the existence of beauty is something that we bring into the world because of our experiences, sensibilities, preferences, etc. Few – a notorious exception is Berkeley7 – would say that tomatoes or shape are also in the eye of the beholder. Take all the minds out of the world and the tomato‐shaped tomatoes might well go on pretty much as they are. They continue to exist unperceived as they are, and perception reveals to us the existence and character of these independent entities.
2.29 The main point of difference between the naïve and indirect realists is over the truth of direct realism:
Direct realism: it is possible for a subject to be immediately aware of an ordinary external object and its properties.
The naïve realist thinks that the ordinary case of seeing a tomato shows us that direct realism is correct. The indirect realist thinks that the ordinary case of seeing a tomato shows us that it's false. This disagreement is a disagreement about the mind. It's not really an epistemological disagreement. (Notice that in stating the point of contention, we didn't use normative concepts [e.g. good/bad, right/wrong, reasonable/unreasonable] and didn't mention knowledge.) Why should it concern epistemologists?
2.30 It should concern epistemologists because debates about what we can and cannot be immediately aware of interact with debates about we can and cannot rationally believe or know. It also interacts with more fine‐grained debates about how we can rationally believe or know (e.g. whether we need evidence over and above our experiences to believe certain things).
2.31 Consider now an argument that might show that something of significance turns on whether the indirect realist is right to deny direct realism. The argument is designed to show that liberal foundationalism must be wrong if direct realism is mistaken:
An Argument against Liberal Foundationalism
P1. If direct realism is false, we are never immediately aware of anything external to the mind.
P2. If we are not immediately aware of something external to the mind, we cannot rely on experience alone to justifiably believe that such things exist or that such things have certain properties.
C1. So, if direct realism is false, we cannot rely on experience alone to justifiably believe that such things exist or that such things have certain properties.
P3. If liberal foundationalism is correct, we can rely on experience alone to justifiably believe that external things exist and have certain properties.
C2. So, if direct realism is false, liberal foundationalism is mistaken.
This kind of reasoning supports the idea that we cannot have justified beliefs from experience on its own to believe in things that we're only made aware of indirectly when we have an experience. Think about the blips on the radar screen. If you're aware of them but have no good independent reason to believe that these blips correlate with incoming aircraft, you cannot justifiably believe that aircraft are coming in just by seeing the blips. If you're aware of smoke but don't justifiably believe that smoke correlates with fire, you cannot justifiably believe that there's a fire.
2.32 We don't take this kind of argument to be decisive. However, if this argument is sound, it's quite troubling. Not every foundationalist is a liberal foundationalist. There is a traditional foundationalist view that tries to account for knowledge about the external world inferentially. On such views, you might come to know via inference that a tomato exists or that it's red by basing these beliefs on more basic beliefs about your own mental life. One difficulty that such views face is that the proponents of these views either need to identify some kind of evidence that connects these kinds of beliefs or explain why such evidence isn't needed. It's difficult to see, for example, how experience alone could give us the evidence we need to connect these two kinds of beliefs. If we don't have direct experience, say, of tomatoes and their color, we don't have direct experience of how these entities correlate with the experiences we have that lead us to believe that tomatoes are present. If the best option for the foundationalist is liberal foundationalism, it's important for the foundationalists to find some way of responding to this argument.
2.33 There are interesting ways of trying to block the argument just sketched, and we'll consider some responses below. Now that we have some idea of the potential epistemological stakes of the debates between the indirect realists and the naïve realists, let's have a closer look at those debates about the nature of experience.
2.5 Against Naïve Realism
2.34 Critics of naïve realism claim that certain familiar facts about experience show that we're never immediately aware of any external objects. If you conceive of the experience a subject has when, say, she sees the pages before her as nothing but a relation between a perceiver and the pages before her, you might be attracted to this kind of naïve explanation of the present character of your experience:
