Representative realism Totally Explained

Everything about Indirect Realism totally explained

Representative Theory of Perception, also known as Indirect realism, epistemological dualism, and The veil of perception, is a philosophical concept. It states that we don't (and cannot) perceive the external world directly; instead we know only our ideas or interpretations of objects in the world. Thus, a barrier or a veil of perception prevents first-hand knowledge of anything beyond it. The "veil" exists between the mind and the existing world.
   The debate then occurs about where our ideas come from, and what this place is like. An indirect realist believes our ideas come from sense data of a real, material, external world (unlike idealists). The doctrine states that in any act of perception, the immediate (direct) object of perception is only a sense-datum that represents an external object. Aristotle was the first to provide an in-depth description of indirect realism. In On the Soul he describes how the eye must be affected by changes in an intervening medium rather than by objects themselves. He then speculates on how these sense impressions can form our experience of seeing and reasons that an endless regress would occur unless the sense itself were self aware. He concludes by proposing that the mind is the things it thinks. He calls the images in the mind "ideas".
   The way that indirect realism involves intermediate stages between objects and perceptions immediately raises a question: How well do sense-data represent external objects, properties, and events? Indirect realism creates deep epistemological problems, such as solipsism and the problem of the external world. Nonetheless, Indirect realism has been popular in the history of philosophy and has been developed by many philosophers including Bertrand Russell, Baruch Spinoza, René Descartes, and John Locke.
   Representationalism is one of the key assumptions of cognitivism in psychology.

Potential results of representative realism

Dualism

A problem with representationalism is that if simple data flow and information processing is assumed then something in the brain, described as a homunculus, must be viewing the perception. This suggests that some physical effect or phenomenon other than simple data flow and information processing might be involved in perception. This wasn't an issue for the rationalist philosophers such as Descartes, since Cartesian dualism held that there's a supernatural "homunculus" in the form of the soul. For those who doubt dualism, explaining precisely what it's that sees the representation is problematic. But if the transfer of information into a "mind" is thought to be the only explanation of how we indeed see, then it falls afoul of the homunculus fallacy which would suggest that either representationalism is an incomplete or invalid description of perception or some supernatural intervention or non-materialist, physicalist explanation is needed. Aristotle realised this and simply proposed that ideas themselves (representations) must be aware - in other words that there's no further transfer of sense impressions beyond ideas.

Scepticism

A further difficulty is that, since we only have knowledge of the representations of our perceptions, how is it possible to show that they resemble in any significant way the objects to which they're supposed to correspond? Any creature with a representation in its brain would need to interact with the objects that are represented to identify them with the representation. According to this theory, the external world is only to be inferred, the person needing to learn about the relations between their electrochemical perceptions and the world.

Further Information

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