Zhiwei Yang

This paper develops a veridical-first screening-off problem for naïve realism using simple cases from touch. Unlike traditional, hallucination-based arguments, the problem arises entirely within ordinary tactile perception and realistic haptic simulation, and it turns on the multiple realisability of a single tactile experiential kind by distinct worldly conditions. A wooden ball, a metal ball, and a haptic device can all produce the same “smooth sphere” experience. I argue that once we fix the shared pattern of local tactile interaction and the subject’s neural responses that realise this experiential kind, the particular external object that happens to produce it becomes explanatorily redundant with respect to phenomenal character. This challenges naïve realism’s claim that worldly objects play a non-derivative constitutive role in good-case experience. I close by considering four naïve realist responses and explaining why they do not resolve the tactile screening-off problem.

The “phenomenal overlap argument” claims that, from the subject’s own point of view, successful cross-modal perception (e.g., vision and touch) of the same object can phenomenally lack any shared element that presents that object, thereby challenging naïve realism’s prediction that the same object should give rise to non-trivial phenomenal overlap. Morgan replies by appealing to spatiality, arguing that vision and touch are at least alike in how they locate objects in space. This paper does two things. First, it distinguishes an object’s intrinsic spatial properties from its relational spatial properties, and argues that the similarity Morgan invokes concerns, at best, the latter. It is too thin and too abstract to meet naïve realism’s demand for “relevant phenomenal overlap.” Second, it argues more broadly that despite the range of proposals considered, cross-modal experience is systematically heterogeneous, and current forms of naïve realism lack a clear account of how the same object could ground such pervasive intermodal differences.

Some philosophers argue that the content of iconic memory is conscious, called the Rich View. However, critics maintain that only fragments of the content of iconic memory are conscious, called the Fragment View. Both sides cite different psychological experimental data to support their positions. Proponents of the Fragment View tend to assert that their view uniquely explains the data they rely on. The uniqueness of the Fragment View is challenged here. Newly introduced evidence suggests that the data supporting the Fragment View may also be compatible with the Rich View. Given the theoretical advantages of the Rich View in other respects, there are reasons to consider it the superior one.