Abstract

In the dissertation I answer an argument which I label the argument from conflicting appearances. Briefly put, this argument contends that the existence of conflicting appearances, for example water feeling hot to a cold hand but warm to a hand at room temperature, shows that we do not directly perceive external objects. I argue that the argument, though valid, is not obviously sound; the reason so many philosophers have thought it obviously sound, however, is that there is an assumption about perception at work in the background. This implicit assumption I label the revelatory standard of direct perception, which says that for direct perception to be valid, the subject cannot affect the nature of his perceptual awareness. The revelatory standard generates the argument because the existence of conflicting appearances shows that we do affect the nature of our perceptual awareness of external objects---which means, according to the standard, that we cannot be directly perceiving them. I argue that the revelatory standard should be discarded because it treats direct perception as causeless. ;In the rest of the dissertation I present a view of perceptual awareness that is free of the revelatory standard yet capable of explaining the existence of conflicting appearances in direct realist terms. I argue that the subject does affect the nature of his perceptual awareness of the object, but that this does not mean, as is usually assumed, that he affects the nature of the object of his perceptual awareness---in some sense constituting or creating the object of his awareness. Rather, the subject affects the nature of his awareness of the external object. An implication of this approach is that sensory qualities are not intrinsic qualities of an object but relational qualities. They are the intrinsic properties of the external object as perceived by a specific subject in specific conditions of perception. I then show how this view of perceptual awareness can explain the existence of conflicting appearances in direct realist terms. Conflicting appearances are cases where we directly perceive the same external object and intrinsic property but the nature of the awareness differs