Pautz on the laws of appearance, internalism, and color realism

ABSTRACT

I focus on two of the challenges Pautz raises for representationalist theories of perception. The first is the challenge of explaining the necessity of certain principles which Pautz calls 'laws of appeaeance.' The second is based on the idea that the most promising versions of representationalism seem to lead to irrealism about the sensible qualities.

KEYWORDS:

• Perception
• internalism
• representationalism
• color
• naive realism
• sense data

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Pautz (2021), Section 3.8. Further references are also to this work.

2 One might think of exclusion laws as a special case of content restriction laws. As we'll see below, the issues raised by these two types of laws are quite different, so it will be useful to keep them separate for purposes of this discussion.

3 Note that a puzzle–albeit an easier one–would remain even if the laws held with something weaker than metaphysical necessity. After all, violations of each of these laws applied to the case of thought are actual rather than merely possible.

4 For some theorists, it will not be a necessary condition either, for reasons Pautz (26-7) discusses: one might hold that the character of experience is determined, not just by the nature of the relevant sense datum, but also by the perceiver's interpretation of that sense datum. I set this point aside for simplicity.

5 To be sure, there is wiggle room for the sense datum theorist to say that sense data can picture (in the above sense) properties which they do not instantiate. But this would threaten to undercut some of the central motivations for sense datum theory.

6 These issues have of course been much discussed in the context of evolutionary debunking arguments. For some of the difficulties in avoiding more general skeptical conclusions, see White (2010).