In the
philosophy of perception and
philosophy of mind, the question of direct or naïve realism, as opposed to indirect or representational realism, is the debate over the nature of
conscious experience;
[Lehar, Steve. (2000)]
The Function of Conscious Experience: An Analogical Paradigm of Perception and Behavior
, ''Consciousness and Cognition''.[Lehar, Steve. (2000)]
, ''The Function of Conscious Experience''. out of the
metaphysical question of whether the world we see around us is the real world itself or merely an internal perceptual copy of that world generated by our
conscious experience.
Naïve realism is known as ''direct'' realism when developed to counter ''indirect'' or representative realism, also known as epistemological dualism, the
philosophical position that our conscious experience is not of the real world itself but of an
internal representation, a miniature
virtual-reality replica of the world.
Indirect realism is broadly equivalent to the
materialist
Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds matter to be the fundamental substance in nature, and all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions. According to philosophical materialis ...
view of
perception that postulates we do not perceive the external world as it really is, but know only our ideas and interpretations of the way the world is. Representationalism is one of the key assumptions of
cognitivism in
psychology. The representational realist would deny that "first-hand knowledge" is a coherent concept, since knowledge is always via some means, and argue instead that our ideas of the world are interpretations of sensory input derived from an external world that is real (unlike the standpoint of
idealism, which holds that only ideas are real, but there are no mind-independent objects).
The main alternative to representationalism is anti-representationalism, the view according to which perception is not a process of constructing internal representations.