Realism and Appearances: An Essay in Ontology

A common story told about modern philosophy is that it introduced a representative theory of perception, a theory that places representative mental items between perceivers and ordinary physical objects. A form of indirect realism, such a theory involves two claims: 1) we perceive objects only by means of apprehending mental entities that represent them, and 2) these mental entities represent ordinary objects by resembling them. The moral of this story is that what begins with Descartes' revolutionary decision to base objective truth on subjective certainty ends with Hume's paroxysms of ambivalence and skepticism in the conclusion of the first book of his Treatise of Human Nature. One of Professor John Yolton's many contributions to the history of philosophy has been to argue that this familiar story is at best inaccurate and at worst a myth. In Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid (1984), and Perception and Reality: A History from Descartes to Kant (1996), Yolton established that few modern philosophers hold the resemblance thesis. He also convincingly argued that the claim that ideas are present in the mind may be better understood as an epistemological rather than an ontological thesis. Finally, he showed that the notion of ideas as signs of objects is an important strand in modern philosophical thought. This suggests, according to Yolton, that many moderns can be read as direct realists. Yolton's recent book Realism and Appearances: An Essay in Ontology, continues this important project by rehabilitating the notion of ideas or appearances as ways of being presented with objects instead of as things that stand in the way between perceivers and objects.

But there is another common and inaccurate story about philosophy that Yolton's work continues to perpetuate. Outside philosophy departments, it is frequently claimed that contemporary analytic philosophers are engaged in a positivist, reductionist pursuit of materialism that seeks to completely deny the existence of the subjective and the mental. This story too is at best inaccurate and at worst a myth. Positivism has not been a motivating theory in contemporary philosophy for some time now, and most materialists (physicalists) reject the notion that the mental can be straightforwardly reduced to the physical. Unfortunately, Yolton contributes to this myth in the first two chapters of his book, which criticize "the rejection, downgrading or ignoring" of appearances by contemporary philosophers such as Paul Churchland and Frank Jackson (5).

Physicalism has its roots in the common-sense position that the truths of philosophy ought to be consonant with the natural sciences; after all, both disciplines examine the same world and until fairly recently they were the same discipline. The natural sciences have made tremendous progress in explaining seemingly occult phenomena in terms of the processes and principles that govern the physical world. For example, the natural sciences tell us that digestion, which was once mysterious, is a complex interaction between the gastrointestinal and circulatory systems involving enzymes secreted from the pancreas and liver. There is no prima facie reason, so the intuition goes, that other mysterious phenomena such as consciousness and perceptual experience cannot go the way of digestion.

But while we can comfortably accept the claim that digestion is nothing more than a physical process, the claim that beliefs, experiences, and consciousness are nothing over and above physical brain states and processes is more difficult to believe. But contemporary physicalism, of which there are many stripes, is subtler than the digestion example may indicate. Those who grapple with the mind body problem are keenly aware that the mental is not just another phenomenon, but one that is central to how we understand ourselves and the world. There is a vast amount of current literature on the nature of subjectivity, on the explanatory gap between the physical and the mental, and on the very possibility of solving the mind body problem at all. Most physicalists hold that the mental is neither identical with nor reducible to the physical. There is a sense in which physicalists and non-physicalists alike are concerned with exactly what Yolton criticizes them for ignoring or downgrading, for their subject matter is subjectivity.

Yet Yolton is correct to criticize Churchland and others for not keeping separate cognitive and physical language. If one is concerned to show that thinking, seeing, or experiencing is grounded in physical processes, one cannot speak euphemistically about seeing brain-states, for the explanandum then appears in the explanans. The chapters on contemporary physicalism, however, are less concerned with particular objections than with a general criticism of contemporary physicalism, which Yolton argues is wont to move from explanatory physicalism (a la digestion) to status-reductive physicalism (the mental is not real). Without a more comprehensive survey of the literature, which I suspect would yield a variety of physicalist positions, this criticism is unwarranted.

Chapter three contrasts modern philosophy's commitment to the mental with contemporary philosophy's alleged rejection of it by examining Locke's distinction between persons as moral agents and humans as biological entities and Kant's distinction between the intelligible and empirical characters. Both distinctions highlight the degree to which the language of the mental cannot be translated into the language of the physical. Chapters four through seven provide textual evidence in support of Yolton's claim that modern uses of the terms 'idea' and 'appearance' are compatible with direct realism. First, Descartes, Locke, and others refer to ideas as signs that function in the way that words are signs of that which they signify, i.e. directly. When reading a word we attend to its meaning, not the word itself, its shape, color or orientation on the page. So too with ideas; we attend to the object presented by them, not to ideas themselves. Second, Yolton presents evidence that Locke, Berkeley, and Hume understood objects to be present in the mind in the sense that objects may be presented to us through cognition. This reading rules out the worrisome alternatives that physical objects are somehow spatially inside ones mind, or that ideas are present to the mind and that physical objects are somehow read off of them.

Yolton's methodological intention in these chapters is "to present the reader with the data, using a detailed inventory of key terms, rather than summarizing those data. I think it is important to present the relevant passages in this way and then draw my conclusions. In a way, the inventories speak for themselves" (7). The inventories consist of pages of quotations from the texts, grouped by interpretative categories, followed by conclusions for which there is little argument or analysis. The quotations, as he says, speak for themselves. I share many of Yolton's convictions about these passages, and so find them convincing, but because his claims are so important-completely undermining traditional understandings of Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant-they should not be left to speak for themselves. Those who have read these thinkers differently from Yolton have done so not from inattention to the text but from genuine incongruities in them, and one is eager for more analysis from a thinker who has clearly located crucial passages. In addition, Yolton's particular interpretation of these thinkers is highly relevant to contemporary philosophers of mind, who would likely welcome a detailed analysis of how modern philosophers understood perceptual direct realism.

Yolton's final chapter more carefully presents his reasons for thinking that a theorist who takes appearances to be the things themselves perceived can maintain a kind of realism. On such an interpretation, Berkeley counts as a realist, as does Kant, Descartes, Locke, and Hume. Typically, realism is understood as the thesis that there exists a domain of extra-mental, independent entities to which we have some epistemic access. On Yolton's reinterpretation of realism, the objects of experience, mental or extra-mental, need only bear internally consistent, repeatable relations to one another in order to count as real. This position has the unfortunate consequence of eliminating the appearance/reality distinction. By Yolton's criteria, if I consistently, repeatedly hallucinate, my hallucinations are real. Yolton's interpretation saves realism at the expense of absorbing idealism.

An alternative position (see Bill Brewer's Perception and Reason) treats appearances as modes of presentation of external objects. A perception is an act, and as with other acts, it is accomplished in a particular manner. Just as there is a way of throwing a baseball, so too is there a way of perceiving objects. And just as the way of throwing of a baseball does not intervene in or get in the way of throwing itself, so too does the way of being presented with an object not intervene in or get in the way of being presented with the object itself. This is a more promising path to direct realism, and one that also has its roots in scholastic and modern theories of mind. I suspect that Yolton does not find this alternative appealing because it downgrades the status of appearances from objects of cognition to mere ways of cognizing, and this downgrading may seem dubiously reductionist. Nonetheless, this theory does not eliminate appearances, ideas, or subjective experience but makes them necessary conditions of perception.

Although Professor Yolton's discussion of contemporary philosophy of mind is misleading, for those who have followed Professor Yolton's contributions to the history of modern philosophy of mind, this book is an indispensable installment in his important project. He has given us an interpretation of modern philosophy that will make it difficult for contemporary philosophers to regard this period as irrelevant to their most central concerns.