Assess Representative Realism

Realism is a branch of the philosophical school of thought known as empiricism. In epistemology philosophers have frequently disputed whether it is possible to know anything at all. We may think that there is a blue chair in the corner of a room but this ‘knowledge’ requires a reliance on our senses. Sense experience is notoriously unreliable; the blue chair may be a hallucination or what we think is a blue chair may in fact be a different object that from the angle observed appears as a blue chair. Almost everything that we know about the world has been learned through experience of objects that inhabit it. All knowledge of scientific or physical truths is gained through sensory experience. The problem that empiricism is posed is that there is a gap between an object and our experience of said object. What we see, hear, taste and feel is all based on perception. The world as we experience it does not exist in the way that we experience it. The blue chair only appears blue because sensors in our eyes pick up the light waves emitted and turn this data into the perception of the colour blue.

Locke described the way we perceive objects in the world in terms of primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are qualities that are universal to any subject experiencing an object and are not reliant on human sense experience. Primary qualities include size, shape, location and number. Locke’s argument is that these qualities remain whether someone is perceiving the object or not. Secondary qualities include sounds, smells, tastes and colours. These qualities do not reside in the objects but are observed by perception. If an alien had no colour receptors he would not be able to tell a ten penny piece was silver but would still be able to describe size, density and other such primary qualities. Secondary qualities require both object and perceiver to exist.

Realism argues that something exists independently of the mind. Anti-realists argue that there can be nothing independent of the mind. Naive realism argues that there is a world of objects that exist whether there is a perceiver or not. If a tree falls in a wood then it will still make a sound even if there is no one around to experience it. Representative realism sits closer to Locke’s primary and secondary qualities argument. It argues that there is a world of independent material objects but we only experience representations of this material world. Representative realism claims that these representations may not correspond to how an object actually is. An example would be how a straight object such as a pencil appears bent in a glass of water due to refraction. The object itself is not bent but our representation of it leads us to believe that it is bent. This therefore must be an illusion or a trick of sensory data. What we experience through our sense is never the true object but rather a perception of it formed by our senses. Representative realism thus argues that the real object does exist it is just our perceptions that deceive us. Naive realism is a two part theory of perceiver and object whereas representative realism is a three part theory including the perception as part of this process.