Steven Gouveia

Perception is an important feature of our mental life. Since ancient times, perception as being the main core of many theories about the reality and the access to the external world. In this paper, I will focus on one of the most important answers to the problem of perception: namely, Direct Realism. I will characterize the main idea of this approach and the several sub-positions (and which model – naive, representationalist, or other – of perception they are attached too), underlying the main intuition of direct realism. I will then demonstrate why this approach is more plausible than the indirect theories of perception. Finally, I will show some of the problems of direct realism (namely, the adoption of an implausible model of perception) and offer a neurophilosophical alternative that is more plausible and compatible with the current empirical data.