Blackwell Reference Online

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E pistemology A distinction between immediate and mediate or indirect perception that originated with Berkeley , and is also called the distinction between direct and indirect awareness. One may say that “I hear a train,” but what one actually hears is a sound. In this case the sound is what a person perceives immediately without any inference, while the train is perceived mediately, for the person may not perceive the train at all but only infer from hearing the sound that there is a train. We have mediate perception only when we have immediate perception, although the immediate perception need not be temporally prior. What, then, is the nature of this distinction between immediate and mediate perception? Different responses are the basis of a division in the philosophy of perception between naive or direct realism on the one hand, and representationalism and phenomenalism on the other. Both representationalism and phenomenalism take this distinction seriously, arguing that the objects of immediate perception are sense-data or sense-impressions, while the objects of mediate perception are physical existents that are represented by the sense-data (representationalism) or are constructed out of sense-data (phenomenalism). Naive or direct realism argues that what we immediately perceive are nothing but the physical objects themselves. According to this theory, both immediate ... log in or subscribe to read full text