Outline and assess the main objections to representative realism

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Outline and assess the main objections to representative realism 

Representative realism, also known as indirect realism, is the view that sensations are a representation of the world. The representative realist agrees with the direct realist that the world consists of material objects which occupy space and that these material objects possess particular independently existing properties. However the disagreement falls on the matter of whether we perceive the properties of matter directly and as they are, and hence there are some objections that are made to representative realism. One of the main objections to representative realism is that it can lead to skepticism. It cannot disprove Descartes evil demon argument and opens up a veil or perception. Furthermore, we cannot even talk about the real world.

One problem for representative realism is that it leads to skepticism. If representative realism is true, then the only things we ever see directly are sense-data. However, the problem here is that we don’t seem to have any way whatsoever of checking whether these sense data are actually accurately represent the ‘external world’. A question that arises is; ‘how can we really know what the real world is like?’ A major difficulty concerns how we can possibly tell when our senses are or are not deceiving us. Unlike direct realism, representative realism is able to accept that on some occasions, our senses may be deceiving us, because the theory does not claim that the world is exactly as we perceive it. This means it can tolerate the idea that sometimes our mind might play tricks on us, or that optical illusions like the narrowing or railway lines, for example, do not match reality. As the theory takes into account two elements; the world and sense data, it can provide an illustration of what hallucinations are. They take place when sense impressions fail to represent the world accurately. Although individual hallucinations can be pointed out by the indication of others, there is a much more problematic issue of general or widespread misrepresentations.

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However, one reply to this objection is that the existence of the external world is a plausible hypothesis. Representative realists can counter this objection by saying that, although we can’t know for certain that the external that the external world exists, its existence is a plausible hypothesis. An example is given by philosopher Bertrand Russell to support this point: If a cat appears at one moment in one part of the room, and at another in another part, it is natural to suppose that it has moved from the one to the other, passing over a series of intermediate positions. ...

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