HAPSAT Graduate Workshops - Third Winter Session - 2026

In this talk, I will defend a philosophical theory of perceptual realism called perspectival perceptual realism. It is based on the observation that living organisms have special properties that set them apart in the natural world. They are agents with an observable capacity to flexibly pursue their own goals. Theories of perceptual realism seek to explain the relationship between the colours, sounds, tastes and smells we experience as part of our phenomenal ontology and the objective physical world. There are two traditional varieties; direct and indirect realism. Direct realism is the intuitive notion that perception reveals the world as it is. Using research on colour vision, I argue while our colour ontology is an invaluable practical aid in revealing and differentiating the world’s surfaces and structure, it doesn’t parse the world according to its objective physical ontology. Our own properties as perceivers make an important contribution to the content of our colour ontology. This is not compatible with direct realism. Indirect realism supposes that we experience the world indirectly by way of a subjective inner construct. It finds a place for perceptual mechanisms as mediators between the perceiver and the world, but at the price of making it difficult to see how the perceiver can be part of the natural world.

Perspectival perceptual realism supposes that, because the perceiving living organism is an agent with its own goals, and its own capacities for perception and action with which to attain them, it has its own perspective. For an organism, things in the world have ecological meanings; they are opportunities to fulfill goals, or threats to those goals. An organism encounters the world in terms of a set of properties that are neither objective nor subjective.  They are real relational properties constituted from stable properties of the organism and of entities in the world. Though not part of the world’s objective physical ontology, the threat posed by a predator to an organism is very much real. Such threats and opportunities are affordances.  Phenomenal properties like colours belong to entities in the world for the perceiver. Although they are not themselves affordances, phenomenal properties, as properties of entities in the world, form patterns that reveal affordances, much as letters spell words.