Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology

Keeping Up Appearances: Reflections on the Debate over Perceptual Infallibilism

247 S everal contributors to this volume (Onkar Ghate, Pierre Le Morvan, Gregory Salmieri, and Bill Brewer) share an interest in defending direct realism (sometimes also called presentationalism) about the senses. They agree that perceptual awareness is the awareness of objects or even facts in the world, not of mental intermediaries such as sense-data or some other kind of “representational” content. But they differ over the commitments of accepting the existence of this direct form of awareness. A central point of contention is over whether treating perception as direct commits the realist to infallibilism about the senses, the view that there is an important sense in which the senses cannot be wrong. In this volume, Ghate and Salmieri each affirm a version of this view which they attribute to Rand, seeing it as essential to the case for anti-skeptical realism. Le Morvan and Brewer, by contrast, critique the case for infallibilism, seeing it as lending comfort to skepticism or idealism. Central to the dispute is the felt need to reconcile with direct realism various truisms about illusions and other cases of the relativity of perception that suggest the possibility of a gap between sensory appearances and facts. I am in general agreement with Salmieri and Ghate on the merits Keeping Up Appearances Reflections on the Debate over Perceptual Infallibilism Benjamin Bayer 248 ■ Benjamin Bayer of Rand’s theory, and so I want to help showcase the resources available in their essays to address the objections from Le Morvan and Brewer. I will begin by arguing that direct realists can acknowledge fairly mundane truisms about “appearances” without maintaining that there is any important sense in which the senses are fallible. I will also address the concern that infallibilist direct realism collapses into some version of representationalism or worse. Le Morvan Le Morvan’s case for perceptual fallibilism rests on the premise that “just because an object appears (e.g., looks, tastes, sounds, feels, or smells) F (e.g., blurry, circular, green, sour, etc.) to someone S, it does not automatically follow that the object really is F.” Because an object can look F without being F, he concludes that perception can fail to “match” its objects . Even if the perceptual awareness per se does not come in a propositional form that is either true or false, that it might fail to “match” in this way is sufficient to establish fallibilism. I want to maintain that we can accept ordinary claims about objects that look F but are not F without accepting fallibilism. It does not follow from these truisms that the senses are sometimes mistaken. Indeed, Ghate’s chapter describes a sense of “appears F” or “looks F,” which makes unambiguously clear why there is no such consequence. Ghate’s proposed description of the bent stick illusion suggests the following analysis of the language of “looks F” or “appears F”:1 (1) An object appears F in a context a if and only if a subject’s perceptual awareness of an object in context a is similar to his perceptual awareness of an F object in context b. We can formulate the claim whose possible truth is supposed to imply fallibilism according to Le Morvan as follows: (2) An object appears F in context a, and that object is not F in context a. If we apply Ghate’s analysis of “appears F” and substitute it into (2), making necessary adjustments for grammar, we get: 1. At one point Le Morvan expresses curiosity about why Ghate’s initial description of the bent stick illusion does not use the language of “appearance.” But Ghate does use the language of “looks.” Keeping Up Appearances ■ 249 (3) A subject’s perceptual awareness of an object in context a is similar to the subject’s perceptual awareness of an F object in context b, and the object is not F in context a. Once we analyze “appears F” this way, the perceptual state is not being compared to the fact in a way that generates any “mismatch.” The analysis does not describe the perceiver’s awareness as expressing any content that is logically inconsistent with facts about the object of awareness . It does not express any content that the object in context a is F, which is the content it would need to express to contradict the fact that the object in context a is not F. There would be a...