*Published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 27 (2020): 121-132. Please cite published version * How not to think of perception Søren Overgaard Abstract Perception seems like it puts us directly in touch with real things in our environment. But according to a popular view, perception actually does no such thing. Perceptual experiences are internally generated imagery, and we don’t see what is really out there. I call this view “the Hard-Nosed View”, and I argue that it is deeply problematic. In fact, the view is self-defeating: it undermines the very evidence supposed to establish or support the view. Indeed, if perceptual experiences are just internally generated images that generally don’t reflect what is really out there, the very notion of a scientific finding is put in jeopardy. So, the Hard-Nosed View had better be false. 1. Introduction On the 11th of November 1572, Danish nobleman and astronomer Tycho Brahe made a discovery that would make him famous and change the science of astronomy forever. In the constellation Cassiopeia, he noticed a bright celestial object that had never before been there. Tycho (we’re on a first-name basis) observed it carefully over the weeks and months that followed, using whatever simple instruments he had available. (The telescope had not yet been invented). In May of the following year, Tycho published a small book detailing his observations, entitled De nova stella. As the title – “On the New Star” – made clear, Tycho believed he had discovered a new star. This was not a trivial claim to make at the time, since the prevailing Aristotelian view was that the heavens – unlike the sublunary world – were unchangeable, eternally the same. There could, then, be no such thing as a new star. Tycho disagreed. For he had done his homework. If the bright, new body was closer to Earth than the moon, there should be observable parallax – that is, the new object should seem to move *Published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 27 (2020): 121-132. Please cite published version * relative to the supposedly more distant stars. (Think of the way nearby things seem to rush by if you look out the window of a moving car, whereas a distant hillside remains more or less fixed. This familiar phenomenon is known as motion parallax.) Since Tycho could observe no such thing, he concluded that the new body had to be a new heavenly body – a star.1 Thus, the orthodox view that the heavens were unchanging had to be abandoned. This is usually described as a scientific triumph – one important step towards the correct view of the universe. Tycho himself never came close to that, of course. He never accepted the Copernican, heliocentric view. What made Tycho great was above all his observations – unparalleled in terms of their accuracy – which would help later astronomers set things right. Perhaps Tycho’s legacy is also a certain attitude: put received views to the test by careful observation and meticulous measurement. If a currently widespread view of perception is to be believed, however, Tycho’s reliance on observation was hopelessly naïve. Tycho believed he had perceptual access to how things actually were out there in the starry sky above his head. He believed that his observations could reveal this to him, and could thus be used to test, and possibly overturn, time-honoured theories. But, as the view of perception I’m interested in here has it, we now know that perceptions are just hypotheses constructed by the brain. Our experiences give us no direct knowledge of how things are out there in the world beyond our skulls. Tycho can be forgiven, of course, since so little was known about perception is his day. He could hardly have avoided this sort of naïveté. However, any present-day Tychos, placing similar confidence in the deliverances of their perceptual apparatuses, cannot be forgiven in the same way. They ought to know better. Or so it seems anyway. I am not entirely confident that the view of perception in question is one anyone seriously – really seriously – wants to promote. The view is so deeply problematic that apparent defences must be tongue-in-cheek, or so I sometimes think. At *Published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 27 (2020): 121-132. Please cite published version * other times, however, I find myself leaning towards the view that they really mean it. After all, the texts in which such views are apparently promulgated, are so serious about other matters. Can they all really be joking when it comes to perception? If they are not joking, however, they pull the rug out from under empirical science itself. If the view is correct, whatever reason we might think we have for taking it to be correct, is undercut. Scientific practice itself – along with pretty much every other human practice – is invalidated. This is a result no one – least of all empirical scientists – should feel comfortable accepting. Or so I will suggest in this paper. Here is a road map: In the next section, I introduce the view of perception I want to discuss here, which I shall henceforth call “The Hard-Nosed View”.2 Then, in section 3, I show why the view has disastrous consequences. In section 4, I consider a way of toning down some of the more extreme formulations of The Hard-Nosed View while retaining the overall spirit of the view. I tentatively suggest that it is too little, too late. Section 5 considers some objections, and in section 6, I summarize my conclusions. 2. The Hard-Nosed View As I am writing this, winter has descended upon Denmark, and I am reminded of a pie chart that went viral last winter on social media (at least among parents with small kids). The chart was a representation of parenting in winter and, unsurprisingly, by far the biggest piece of the pie (75 per cent or thereabouts) was “taking care of sick child”. “Hoping child won’t get sick again” accounted for another 15 per cent or so, and the remaining wedge represented the activity of searching for lost gloves. The chart is amusing because it exaggerates wildly, yet on the basis of a recognizable kernel of truth. In my experience, there is quite a lot of glovesearching going on during the dark winter months. (Don’t get me started on the topic of sick children). Most of the time, though not always, it ends well. What happens in those cases is *Published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 27 (2020): 121-132. Please cite published version * always the same: Suddenly I see the glove there in the bottom of the pile, behind the radiator, in my backpack (how did it end up there?), or wherever it might be. The glove’s whereabouts are revealed to me in my perceptual experience. At any rate, that is a very natural way to think about what is happening. But according to a number of neuroscientists, psychiatrists, philosophers, and others, that is a fundamentally misguided way of looking (ahem) at the matter. Francis Crick insists, for example, that “[w]hat you see is not what is really there; it is what your brain believes is there” (1995, 31).3 Crick goes on to observe, quite correctly I think, that “[i]t is difficult for many people to accept that what they see is a symbolic interpretation of the world – it all seems so like ‘the real thing’”. But the uncompromising scientist will not be swayed by such appearances. Difficult as it may be, we must face up to the fact that “we have no direct knowledge of objects in the world” (33). Perception seems like “the real thing” – or like it puts us directly in touch with real things – but really isn’t (doesn’t). We don’t see what is really there. This is the Hard-Nosed View. Crick is far from the only neuroscientist who advocates a view of this sort. Antonio Damasio expresses very similar sentiments. He writes: When you and I look at an object outside ourselves, we form comparable images in our respective brains. We know this well because you and I can describe the object in very similar ways, down to fine details. But that does not mean that the image we see is the copy of whatever the object outside is like. Whatever it is like, in absolute terms, we do not know. (Damasio 2000, p. 320)4 Damasio seems to be gesturing at a thesis that is even more radical than anything Crick explicitly says. For the former, it seems, all we ever see are images formed in our brains. On *Published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 27 (2020): 121-132. Please cite published version * this view, perceptual experiences are not even of objects in the world, at least not directly. Rather, they are of brain-generated “images” that may not even accurately reflect (or “copy”, as Damasio says) the objects beyond our skin. It is not clear that Crick is committed to this view. He can be read simply as suggesting that perceptual experiences are representations of objects in the world – brain-generated hypotheses about what might be out there. On this view, there is a clear sense in which perceptual experiences are of the world: they are “of” it in essentially the same way that thoughts are. When I think there is beer in the fridge, I am representing a bit of the world to be a particular way – I am representing the fridge as containing beer, not a fridge-image as containing beer-images. But sadly, my fridge may nonetheless be beer-less.5 Crick can be read as suggesting that something similar goes for perception: it represents the world as being some way. Since the world is (generally?) not that way, perception does not give us direct access to, or knowledge of, the world. At any rate, others follow Damasio in making the even more radical claim. Psychiatrist Ralf-Peter Behrendt, for example, maintains that “the environment that we see and that we suppose to be real, is part of our consciousness” (1998, 239). Behrendt is not making some fine point about perception being more thought-like that we might have thought, or even that it tends to misrepresent what’s really out there. His view is that perception leaves us radically out of touch with reality: In fact, what we see in and as the world is our mind itself. We never see the external world as it really is. There are no colors, no forms, no smells, no sounds in the real world. Outside, there is just matter. (239) … [H]allucination should not be regarded as perception without an object, because no real perception arises from an external object. We are living in a private world of *Published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 27 (2020): 121-132. Please cite published version * imagination that proved to be useful for our interaction with the real world. (ibid., 247) Our perceptual experience is never of the real, external world, but always of our own mind’s own creations. These are fictions – “entirely internal production[s] that [are] projected outside” (236), but at least they’re useful ones, conducive to our survival. Philosophers have said similar things, though they have tended to choose somewhat more cautious formulations. For Thomas Metzinger, for example, perception is what he calls a “world-simulation”, yet one that is “so perfect that we do not recognize it as an image in our minds” (2009, 7). We “are not in direct contact with outside reality” (ibid.). Indeed, the very idea of such direct contact is “a sort of romantic folklore”, according to Metzinger (2009, 9). Our perceptual experience is entirely “an internal affair” (2009, 21). 6 But the brain’s simulation is good enough to pass itself off as the real deal – experiential contact with the external world. I think I have said enough to indicate at least the rough outline of the view of perception that I call “The Hard-Nosed View”. The view posits that perception does not – as it seems – put us in direct touch with reality. Our perceptions are just brain-generated hypotheses or images – or worse, our perceptions are of such images – that we have good reason to suppose are not faithful depictions of the world around us. 3. ‘Romantic Folklore’ Strikes Back I confess to being something of a romantic. I cannot let go of the idea that perceptual experience does, when all goes well, reveal to us how things are. Perception puts us in touch with external objects, just as Tycho assumed. In fact, The Hard-Nosed View is so disastrous, *Published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 27 (2020): 121-132. Please cite published version * as we are about to see, that I cannot help suspecting that the apparent advocates of the view don’t really mean what they say. How, one wonders, have Crick, Damasio, and the others, come to adopt The HardNosed View? Presumably on the basis of some pertinent scientific findings. But how have they obtained knowledge of these? Perhaps they have conducted some experiments themselves, and read the reports of other experiments. But how do they know what the results of those experiments – their own or those of others – were? At some point, perception will have been crucially involved: images will have been seen, recordings listened to, print-outs read, and so on and so forth. It is easy to see that this creates a fundamental difficulty. Let us just stick with the example of reading a scientific report. Unless one’s perception of the printed pages gives one access to those pages as they actually are – to the ink marks that really adorn those sheets of paper – one cannot know what the report says. But that seems to require precisely the very romantic folklore that The Hard-Nosed View (henceforth “HNV”) staunchly rejects. The absurdity of HNV is clearest, perhaps, in the case of Behrendt. There is no colour, sound, etc. in the real world, he says. Well, how does he know? He can appeal to none of the scientific papers he has read, or any observations he has made. For doing so would presuppose what he explicitly denies: that perception can and does inform us of the world as it really is. That the deliverances of perception are not confined to some private, imaginary world. Damasio runs into the same problem. We cannot know what the world is like “in absolute terms”, he says. All we have access to are the images constructed in our brains – and these cannot be assumed to be faithful copies of what is out there. But, says Damasio, we can at least know that we form similar images in our respective brains, because we can describe them to each other. Here’s the obvious rub, though: I really can’t know what anyone else’s *Published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 27 (2020): 121-132. Please cite published version * images are like, if Damasio is right. For everything I “hear”, on Damasio’s view, is internally generated imagery that doesn’t faithfully reflect what is out there. What, “in absolute terms”, is out there, if anything, I cannot know. Damasio’s proposed confirmation of similar imagery across individual subjects only works on the assumption that perception can deliver knowledge of external matters. Obviously, present-day neuroscientists use all manner of technological instruments – EEG, brain scanners, electrodes that can be inserted into monkeys’ brains, and so on. They don’t just rely on (mostly) unaided perception, the way Tycho did. But no matter how you look at it, this does not fundamentally change anything. Perception will still be crucial to the whole endeavour. For fMRI scanners don’t write scientific reports. Human scientists do. And before they know what to put in those reports, they will need to look at some images, for example. Or listen to recordings of neurons firing. Or in some other way perceive objects in their surroundings. And even if (a big ‘if’) all that could somehow be circumvented – say, robots would immediately receive the data from the various measuring equipment used, and then proceed to write up and publish reports of the findings – then how could anyone find out what was in those reports if human perception never amounted to anything like a presentation of what was actually out there? My point here, I should emphasize, is not that human beings must interpret whatever data the scanner (say) produces, though I suppose that is likely also true. My point is that there is no production and consumption (e.g. reading) of scientific findings that does not at crucial points rely on human perception. There could not be, unless data could be inserted directly into people’s brains, totally bypassing our perceptual apparatus. Perhaps that sort of thing is a (distant) possibility. But it is not the way things currently go. Science, as currently practiced, relies on perception to deliver the sort of experiential contact with our surroundings that HNV defenders deny it could ever deliver. HNV defenders, then, seem to be engaged in *Published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 27 (2020): 121-132. Please cite published version * what the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has dubbed “performative contradiction” (performative Widerspruch) (Habermas 1985, 219 and passim). Speaking of European philosophers, I must confess that little, if anything, of what I have said so far – and very little I will go on to say – is original. My main message here was forcefully conveyed almost 75 years ago by the French phenomenologist Maurice MerleauPonty. Merleau-Ponty famously writes in the preface to his Phenomenology of Perception: Everything I know about the world, even through science, I know from a perspective that is my own or from an experience of the world without which scientific symbols would be meaningless. The entire universe of science is constructed upon the lived world [i.e., the world as given in perception]…. (Merleau-Ponty 2012 [1945], lxxii) According to Merleau-Ponty, scientific perspectives that uphold something like the HardNosed View “are always naïve and hypocritical because they always imply, without mentioning it, that other perspective” (ibid.) – the perspective according to which our perception is, as Merleau-Ponty puts it a few pages later, “our access to the truth” (2012 [1945], lxxx). In fact, Edmund Husserl made essentially the same point four decades earlier, in a 1907 lecture course on perception. Husserl writes: All the reality judgments grounded by the natural scientist lead back to straightforward perception and memories ….All mediate grounding, as carried out by science, rests precisely on immediate givenness, and the lived experiences in which reality comes to be given immediately are perception [and] memory … (Husserl 1997, 4) *Published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 27 (2020): 121-132. Please cite published version * He continues: Indeed, it is clear at once that it would be an obvious nonsense to explain everything given immediately from these sources as illusory. In any case, what would be abandoned thereby is not merely reality as the common man [des gemeinen Menschen] grasps it but also reality as it is for science and thereby science itself. (1997, 4)7 It is precisely such “obvious nonsense”, or so it seems, that HNV defenders are explicitly espousing. They do not merely leave open the possibility that, as Mark Johnston puts it, “our sensibility and understanding have always been, in effect, virtual reality machines, presenting us with no more than the idiosyncratic subjective effects that external items induce in us” (Johnston 2006, 285). To leave this possibility open would be bad enough: in Johnston’s words, it would be “deeply embarrassing to the whole enterprise of knowledge” (ibid.). But HNV aficionados go further in positively affirming that our perceptual experiences just are the creations of such internal “virtual reality machines”. 4. Softening the Blow: HNV Lite I suspect many defenders of HNV will not feel entirely comfortable with some of the more extreme claims discussed in the previous section (perhaps those of Behrendt, in particular). They might try to soften the blow by distancing themselves from such claims as that we only ever perceive our own private imaginary world, while seeking to retain the overall spirit of HNV. The following general strategy suggests itself. Hold on to the idea that our perceptual experiences are internally produced hypotheses – brain-created images of what our surrounding may be like – rather than “clear windows” onto the world. But accept that those *Published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 27 (2020): 121-132. Please cite published version * hypotheses are generally, or at least very often, correct about how things are out there. 8 (One might suggest that it makes good evolutionary sense to suppose that this would be so: perceptual capacities that mostly or very often delivered false information about the surroundings would presumably not be conducive to survival). We can now make sense of, and indeed justify, the practice of relying on perception, while retaining at least the core of HNV. Call this general strategy “HNV Lite”. HNV Lite is clearly not as absurd as regular HNV. But I want to suggest that, at least as it stands, HNV Lite still does not capture the role perception actually plays in pretty much all human practices – including scientific ones. HNV Lite still defends this double thesis: 1. Perceptual experiences are (brain-generated) hypotheses about external objects. 2. Perceptual experiences do not reveal or present such objects (their properties, relations between them, etc.) to us. It is natural to think 2 follows from 1. If perceptual experiences are merely hypotheses, then they are not cases in which things are simply presented or manifested to us. Cases of presentation or manifestation would constitute opportunities to test hypotheses – verify or falsify them. In this way, for example, Tycho took his observation that SN1572 had no (observable) parallax to falsify the hypothesis that it was a sublunary body, with the noted wider ramifications for Aristotelian cosmology. But Tycho’s way of proceeding is scarcely different from the way scientists proceed nowadays. Perceptions are not treated as hypotheses of what may be out there, as Gregory put it, but as manifestations or presentations of what is out there. Consider what a conversation in the lab should be like, if scientists had really, seriously, taken HNV Lite to heart. “Well,” says one scientist, “it seems to me that there is an image of the brain displayed on a screen *Published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 27 (2020): 121-132. Please cite published version * before me; and according to my brain’s best guess, the image shows activation in the amygdala”. Another scientist responds: “Just now images were formed in my brain, suggesting the presence of a human voice uttering words in English to the effect that…. Going by the general reliability of these perceptual mechanisms, it is plausible to assume that in fact there was such a voice. And given that my brain forms visual images compatible with the hypothesized message of the hypothesized voice, it seems quite plausible indeed that there is in fact an image showing amygdala activation.”9 The point of this parody is of course that this is a far cry from the way perceptions are treated in the lab. In the right conditions, perceptions are treated as “windows” onto the world, and not as hypotheses. That is of course not to say that perception is always trusted – nor that we should always trust it. Of course it is not, and we should not. But when there is no reason to think things aren’t going well, perception is not treated as merely a plausible hypothesis, but as a presentation of things out there. But if defenders of HNV Lite mean it, if they are serious about perceptions being hypotheses, then they should treat perception accordingly. As long as they fail to do so, the performative contradiction remains. And it is very hard to imagine that they would start to treat perceptions as hypotheses – witness the parodied dialogue in the previous paragraph. This is not the final word on HNV Lite – which is not a specific theory as much as a loose framework within which theoretical views can be developed. Some of those views may avoid the problems I have sketched. For example, perhaps defenders of HNV Lite could explain our practices (in the lab and elsewhere) in terms of our senses generating hypotheses that are generally reliable. That’s why (they might say) we trust the deliverances of our perceptual experiences most of the time, and indeed are justified in doing so. Fair enough. But it seems to me that the more defenders of HNV Lite stress the reliability of our senses, the further away they move from the original HNV standpoint, and in the direction of the sort *Published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 27 (2020): 121-132. Please cite published version * of view I am pushing for. At any rate, I shall leave HNV Lite behind at this stage, and return to regular HNV. 5. Objections In this section, I would like to consider three objections to my argument against regular HNV. First, it may be suggested that the performative contradiction I’ve attributed to the Hard-Nosed View is not really very damaging to the view. Perhaps, as things stand, it is practically impossible for us to treat perception as HNV-defenders believe we ought to treat it. Perhaps it’s practically impossible even for HNV-defenders themselves! But that’s hardly proof that they’re wrong. After all, we’re talking about changing ‘practices’ that have been around for millennia – indeed, ‘practices’ that pre-date homo sapiens. Animals, too, rely on their perceptions to inform them of their environment. It’s no wonder that such “practices” die hard! Compare the situation with respect to so-called “eliminative materialism”. According to that view, there really are no such things as beliefs, desires, pains and joys (see, e.g., Churchland 1988, 44). Yet defenders of the view seem, in practice, to think of themselves as having beliefs and emotions. Churchland, for instance, says in the preface to the revised edition of Matter and Consciousness that he has been “much gratified” by the way the first edition was perceived. He also describes himself as having an “opinion [that] is only one of many alternatives” (1988, ix). Talk about the paradox of the preface!10 If the view [sic!] Churchland defends [sic!] in this book and elsewhere is true, what he says in the preface is false. Of course, he hasn’t felt gratified, and of course he holds no opinions about anything – for no one ever has. The performative contradiction, then, seems undeniable. But this doesn’t *Published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 27 (2020): 121-132. Please cite published version * show that Churchland’s eliminativism is false – perhaps it merely shows that old habits die hard. I agree that the performative contradiction point isn’t anything like a knockdown argument against HNV. But note that I’ve also suggested that HNV casts doubt upon the very scientific data upon which defences of HNV tend to be based. The question one should ask an HNV-defender is: How do you know that perceptions are simply brain-generated hypotheses? If, at some point, they appeal to perceptual evidence – which they must eventually – then one must stop them and object that now they’re merely appealing to a hypothesis. They cannot simply shrug and point to recalcitrant deep-rooted habits, for it is the very evidence for HNV that is called into question. (It would be rather as if Paul Churchland’s arguments for eliminativism relied crucially on the assumption that people sometimes do have beliefs.) A second objection takes its point of departure from the observation that HNV is supported by scientific findings – say, about the complicated way in which the brain constructs our conscious experience based on two tiny, upside-down, two-dimensional images in our eyes. So, by arguing against HNV it seems I must be contradicting those scientific findings – from the proverbial armchair, no less! Not a comfortable position to be in, to say the least. In reply, I want to suggest that we consider carefully whether the scientific findings – whatever exactly they are – may not be compatible with the rejection of HNV, after all. Sometimes it turns out that what seemed like an obvious incompatibility is not so obvious when we have given careful thought to the matter. Consider, for instance, determinism and free will. It seems, intuitively, that if determinism is true – if everything that happens is determined by the laws of nature together with how the world was in the distant past – free will must be an illusion. But many philosophers nowadays defend compatibilism: they argue that free will is actually compatible with determinism.11 Similarly, I am suggesting, it may be *Published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 27 (2020): 121-132. Please cite published version * that the findings of vision science (and the other sciences of perception) do not ultimately require one to accept HNV. At any rate, it had better be possible to reconcile the rejection of HNV with the relevant scientific findings. For HNV takes away our right to speak of findings in the first place. If HNV is true, all we can ever have are internally generated hypotheses (mostly false ones, in fact, according to regular HNV). According to the third objection, I am just championing common sense here – “romantic folklore”, as Metzinger has it. But such things are notoriously unreliable. As Bertrand Russell observed, in former centuries common sense made what we now think mistakes. It used to be thought that there could not be people at the antipodes, because they would fall off, or, if they avoided that, they would grow dizzy from standing on their heads. It used to be thought absurd to say that the earth rotates, because everybody can see it doesn’t. When it was first suggested that the sun may be as large as Peloponnesus, common sense was outraged. … I do not know at what date common sense became all-wise. (Russell 1956, 156) Russell is being sarcastic, of course. Common sense, as he understands it, is definitely not “all-wise”. I agree that it’s not. But at the same time, I wish to plead guilty to the charge of championing common sense – just not as Russell understands it. Let me explain. Following Russell’s Cambridge colleague G. E. Moore, we can distinguish between a loose and a strict notion of common sense. Russell’s examples of false common-sense beliefs are examples of common-sense beliefs in the former, loose sense. They are “folk beliefs”. However, Moore’s stricter notion of common sense refers to things “we all cannot help believing, even though we may hold philosophical views to the contrary” *Published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 27 (2020): 121-132. Please cite published version * (1953, 115). That is why, in A Defence of Common Sense, Moore can say that he does not defend any views his opponents do not also hold. The difference between him and his opponents, he says, is only “that I don’t hold, as part of my philosophical creed, things which they do hold as part of theirs – that is to say, propositions inconsistent with some which they and I both hold in common” (1959, 41).12 Back to the objection: Russell’s reference to mistaken folk ideas about the size of the Sun or whatever is neither here nor there. For Russell’s examples of common-sense beliefs do not meet Moore’s requirement for being common-sense in the strict sense. But in rejecting HNV, I have relied on common sense in Moore’s strict sense (not in the loose sense). I have been at pains to show that those who espouse HNV also, at least implicitly, in their practices, rely on a contrary view to the effect that perception does (when all goes well) present or reveal our surroundings to us. And they do so, not merely when going about their business outside the lab, but in the lab as well. The difference between them and me, as Moore would put it, is merely that they hold an additional, theoretically or scientifically motivated view, which I do not hold: the Hard-Nosed View. 6. Conclusion It’s time to take stock. Despite its apparent popularity, the Hard-Nosed View should be rejected. The view is self-defeating: it undermines the very evidence supposed to establish or support the view. Indeed, if perceptual experiences are just internally generated images that generally don’t reflect what is really out there, the very notion of a scientific finding is put in jeopardy. There are no empirical findings, no data, unless perception at least sometimes is the presentation or manifestation of what is really out there – in other words, unless the HardNosed View is false. In light of that, it is hardly surprising that defenders of the view *Published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 27 (2020): 121-132. Please cite published version * contradict it by acting as though they have lots of – ultimately perception-based – knowledge of what the world is really like. I feel a certain uneasiness in writing this conclusion. Not because I think what I’ve said is wrong. But rather because I fear I may have made a fool of myself by kicking at a wide-open door. Surely, the people whom I’ve taken to defend the Hard-Nosed View didn’t really mean it – not like that. Perhaps they put things too bluntly, exaggerated a bit – for dramatic effect, say – and really only wanted to defend some version of HNV Lite. Or perhaps they said it tongue-in-cheek, and I just didn’t get the irony. Well, I suppose it’s better, all things considered, if the joke is on me. Rather that, than having to conclude that influential current neuroscientists are busily pulling the rug out from under – to quote Mark Johnston again – “the whole enterprise of knowledge”. 13 References Behrendt, R.-P. 1998. Underconstrained Perception: A Theoretical Approach to the Nature and Function of Verbal Hallucinations. Comprehensive Psychiatry 39: 236-248. Churchland, P. 1988. Matter and Consciousness, Revised edn. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Crick, F. 1995. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York: Simon & Schuster. Damasio, A. 2000. The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion, and the Making of Consciousness. London: Vintage. DeLillo, D. 1985. White Noise. London: Picador. Eagleman, D. 2015. The Brain: The Story of You. Edinburgh: Canongate Books. Gingerich, O. 2005. Tycho Brahe and the Nova of 1572. In M. Turatto, S. Benetti, L. Zampieri, and W. Shea (eds.), 1604-2004: Supernovae as Cosmological Lighthouses (ASP Conference Series, Vol. 342), pp. 312. San Francisco: Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Gregory, R. L. 1998. Eye and Brain, 5th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Habermas, J. 1985. Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Husserl, E. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Husserl, E. 1997. Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, trans. R. Rojcewicz. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Johnston, M. Better than Mere Knowledge? The Function of Sensory Awareness. In T. S. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds.), Perceptual Experience, pp. 260-290. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Makinson, D. C. 1965. The Paradox of the Preface. Analysis 25: 205-207. *Published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 27 (2020): 121-132. Please cite published version * Merleau-Ponty, M. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. D. Landes. London: Routledge. Metzinger, T. 2009. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books. Moore, G.E. 1953. Some Main Problems of Philosophy. London: George Allen & Unwin. Moore, G.E. 1959. A Defence of Common Sense. In his Philosophical Papers, pp. 32–59. London: George Allen & Unwin. Russell, B. 1956. The Cult of ‘‘Common Usage’’. In his Portraits from Memory and Other Essays, pp. 154– 159. London: George Allen & Unwin. Somerville, J. 1986. Moore’s Conception of Common Sense. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47: 233–253. Zahavi, D. 2018. Brain, Mind, World: Predictive Coding, Neo-Kantianism, and Transcendental Idealism. Husserl Studies 34: 47-61. Notes 1 This result was “dynamite”, and constituted the “beginning of the end” of Aristotelian cosmology (Gingerich 2005, 5). Tycho’s “new star” was in fact a supernova, a dying star, which now goes under the name of SN1572. 2 In his own way, Tycho Brahe was hard-nosed too. Having lost part of his nose in a duel(!), he wore a prosthetic nose apparently made of brass. 3 As Richard Gregory puts it, perceptions are “hypotheses of what may be out there” (Gregory 1998, 5). 4 David Eagleman’s popular book The Brain – on which a BBC television series is based – contains many similar pronouncements (Eagleman 2015, especially chapter 2). 5 To say my thoughts are not about real fridges and beers, but only about images of such, is absurd. What I want is not an internally constructed image of a beer in my fridge – which is achieved easily enough, but won’t quench my thirst. I want there to be actual beer. 6 See Zahavi (2018) for a discussion of Metzinger and other philosophers who may be espousing versions of what I call the Hard-Nosed View. 7 These points recur in Husserl’s work. In his very last book, the Crisis, Husserl describes how scientists who treat perceptual experience with “disdain” nevertheless must rely on such experience in conducting their research (1970, 125). The deliverances of straightforward perception are not “something irrelevant that must be passed through” but “the source of self-evidence, the source of verification. The visible measuring scales, scalemarkings, etc., are used as actually existing things, not as illusions” (1970, 126). 8 Note that this is already substantively weaker than the explicit statements of Crick, Damasio, and Behrendt we have considered. For them, what we see is generally not what is really out there. *Published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 27 (2020): 121-132. Please cite published version * 9 For a funnier example, written in the author’s characteristically brilliant prose, see the opening pages of DeLillo (1985), chapter 6. The protagonist, Jack Gladney (professor of Hitler studies!) is sitting in his car with his son Heinrich (!) trying to get him to acknowledge that it is raining (“Look at the windshield”, Jack says). But the boy simply refuses to place any trust in his visual perception, claiming that science has shown that perception is mere guesswork. The scene is hilarious and runs for several pages. 10 Of course, the paradox I am talking about here is not identical to what is commonly known as the paradox of the preface. The latter occurs when an author declares in a preface that although she believes everything asserted in the book is true, the book probably also contains mistakes, for which the author alone is responsible. See Makinson (1965). 11 I am not suggesting that compatibilism is the right view to take. I am merely noting that many philosophers who have thought carefully about the matter have found that the contradiction between determinism and free will is more apparent than real. 12 For more on Moore’s conception of common sense, see Sommerville (1986). 13 Many thanks to an audience at the Centre for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen for comments on an earlier version of this paper. I am particularly grateful to Ody Stone and Gregor Bös for challenging my criticism of HNV Lite. Finally, I wish to thank Henry Cerbone for inviting me to contribute to the Harvard Review of Philosophy, and for his helpful comments on the penultimate version of the paper.