perception is reality essay

How Your Perception Is Your Reality, According to Psychologists

"Perception molds, shapes, and influences our experience of our personal reality,” says  Linda Humphreys , PhD, a psychologist and life, relationship, and spirituality coach. “Perception is merely a lens or mindset from which we view people, events, and things.”

In other words, we believe what we perceive to be accurate, and we create our own realities based on those perceptions. And although our perceptions feel  very  real, that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily factual.

• Kevin Gilliland, PsyD , licensed clinical psychologist and executive director of Innovation360
• Linda Humphreys, PhD , psychologist and relationship coach

Dr. Humphreys says that our past experiences greatly influence how we decode things. Certain people, things, and situations  can trigger you to interpret things  through a positive or negative lens based on those past experiences.

If you’re the type that leans more toward the glass-half-empty perspective, don’t worry. Although it does require some work, your perception is something you can change because we  choose  how we see things. That power is in your hands (er, mind).

Keep reading to learn more about the pros and cons of this way of thinking, how it impacts different areas of life, and what actionable steps you can take to change the way you view yourself, other people, and life in general.

{{post.sponsorText}}

The pros and cons of negative perception

Your perceptions influence all areas of life. "The totality of your perceptions— regarding yourself, your life, life in general, others, and so on—creates and impacts your personal reality and ultimately your experience of life," Dr. Humphreys. "Specifically, your perceptions affect the quality of your experience of life." So, if you perceive things in a positive light, you’ll experience a happier existence.

Perception informs your relationships, too. “If you constantly perceive people (your boss, teacher, parent, sibling) as always being against you, you will most likely react in a defensive, combative, negatively reactive, and victim-like way,” Dr. Humphreys says. “This way of perceiving people can lead to experiencing intense levels of unhappiness, and both inner-personal and outer disturbances.” On the flip side, perceiving people through a positive lens leads to experiencing higher levels of joy and inner peace.

Furthermore,  Kevin Gilliland , PsyD, licensed clinical psychologist, mental health expert, and executive director of  Innovation 360  says, misperceiving certain situations, likely because of previous negative experiences you’ve endured, can also cause you to miss out on some fantastic things life has to offer, such as promotions at work or romantic relationships.

Fear also influences the way we view things, but that’s not always a bad thing. “If our perception is based on fear, then we may end up avoiding things that we misperceive as dangerous when in fact, they aren’t,” Dr. Gilliland says. “At the same time, our perception of a situation may keep us safe from harm.” To distinguish between the two, question how accurate your perceptions are or are not.

How to switch to a more positive perception of life

1. take personal responsibility.

Changing your perceptions requires that you, first and foremost, take responsibility for your past unconscious reactions, Dr. Humphreys says. It’s only then that you can begin to see people, events, things, and even yourself from a more neutral or positive perspective.

2. Have compassion for yourself and others

Shifting the way you view the world is no easy feat, so it’s essential to be patient and gentle with yourself. “Have compassion for yourself as you work [on] taking proactive steps towards perceiving your reality in a more conscious and empowered way,” Dr. Humphreys says.

She also notes that the changes you make in your perception may even ruffle other people’s feathers, so express compassion for them, too. Your growth may be a catalyst for their growth as well.

3. Have a willingness to see things differently

Change of any kind, Dr. Humphreys says, requires willingness. Often people say they want to change, but they aren’t actually prepared to make said changes. So having a desire to see things differently is a vital component. This readiness, Dr. Gilliland adds, creates room for us to learn and create new perceptions.

4. Activate your pause button when triggered

Whenever you feel triggered by someone, something, or some situation, Dr. Humphreys suggests "hitting pause" and taking a moment to breathe and ground yourself into the present moment so you can choose how you will respond from a more empowered place.

And if a few deep breaths aren’t enough to help you shift, don’t be afraid to give yourself a grown-up time out. Dr. Humphreys recommends letting other people know that you need some time to process things, and you will address the issue at a later time.

5. Enlist support

We’re so accustomed to perceiving things a certain way that sometimes it’s difficult to see our blindspots and where perhaps we’re not looking at things in the most favorable light.

That’s why Dr. Gilliland suggests running your perceptions past someone else. Whether it’s a trusted friend or family member or a professional such as a psychologist, talk to someone who can help you see things from a different perspective that you might not have thought of before. “It’s the only way we improve our perceptions and reduce the number of mistakes we make,” he says.

6. Look for patterns

“We all have patterns,” says Dr. Gilliland of the way we perceive things. To spot those patterns, he recommends asking yourself if other independent, objective people would look at the same situation and come to the same assessment as you have.

This practice will cause you to think more critically and less emotionally, and open you up to notice things that you may have initially missed because you were caught up in your pattern.

Loading More Posts...

The Beach Is My Happy Place—and Here Are 3 Science-Backed Reasons It Should Be Yours, Too

Your official excuse to add "OOD" (ahem, out of doors) to your cal.

4 Mistakes That Are Causing You to Waste Money on Skin-Care Serums, According to an Esthetician

These Are the Best Anti-Chafing Denim Shorts—According to Some Very Happy Reviewers

{{ successMessage }}

Please wait a moment...

What Does Perception is Reality Mean: A Clear Explanation

By: Author Paul Jenkins

Posted on July 25, 2023

Categories Creativity , Art , Self Improvement

The concept of “perception is reality” revolves around the idea that our personal interpretation of the world around us shapes our understanding and ultimately determines our experienced reality.

Our perceptions, which are largely based on individual experiences and beliefs, play a critical role in how we interpret events, people, and situations. As a result, we each construct a unique version of reality that is influenced by our own individualized lens.

It is essential to recognize that our perception may not always align with objective reality, and can be flawed or biased. Various factors, such as past experiences, expectations, and personal desires, can influence how we perceive events and situations.

This can lead to varying interpretations of the same event, which is why understanding the relationship between perception and reality is crucial to effectively navigating our experiences and relationships with others.

Key Takeaways

• Our unique perceptions shape our individual understanding of reality
• Factors like past experiences and personal desires can influence our interpretation of events
• Recognizing the potential biases in our perception is important for navigating experiences and relationships effectively

Perception and Reality: Understanding the Concept

Perception is the way an individual interprets and understands the world around them. It is a mental process that involves the selection, organization, and interpretation of sensory information. In simpler terms, perception is how we see things, situations, and people, and this can vary greatly from person to person.

Each individual’s perception is shaped by factors such as their experiences, beliefs, values, and attitudes.

Reality, on the other hand, refers to the actual state of things as they exist, independent of individual interpretations or perceptions. In a sense, reality is the complete, objective truth about the world and the events within it.

The phrase “perception is reality” refers to the idea that our perceptions, or how we interpret and understand the world, can influence and shape our experience of reality. Our perceptions can act as a lens through which we view the world, affecting how we process, remember, interpret, understand, make decisions about, and act on reality.

This means that even though there may be a concrete reality that exists independently of our minds, the way we perceive things can have a significant impact on how we experience the world and react to it.

To better understand this concept, consider an example. Two people can witness the same event, but their individual perceptions of that event can differ greatly due to their unique experiences, biases, and backgrounds. In this sense, each person’s perception becomes their personal reality, shaping their emotions and actions in response to the event.

In conclusion, “perception is reality” is a concept that highlights the importance of recognizing the impact our individual perceptions can have on shaping our experiences and understanding of the world around us.

By recognizing this phenomenon, we can strive to broaden our perspectives, challenge our biases, and develop a more nuanced understanding of the world and the events within it.

Factors Influencing Perception

Perception is the process of interpreting and organizing sensory inputs to make sense of the world around us. It is a continuous process that helps shape our reality and is influenced by numerous factors.

In this section, we will discuss four key components that contribute to how we perceive the world: past experiences, emotions, beliefs, and mental impressions.

Past Experiences

Our past experiences play a crucial role in shaping our perception. The way we interpret new information depends on our past encounters and the knowledge we have accumulated. If we have had positive experiences, we are more likely to perceive situations optimistically, while negative experiences can lead to a more pessimistic point of view.

In essence, our prior experiences have a significant influence on how we view the world, allowing us to make connections and draw conclusions based on them.

Our emotions also have a strong impact on our perception. When we are in a particular emotional state, our perception of reality can be colored by that emotion. For example, when we are anxious or scared, we are more likely to interpret ambiguous information negatively.

Conversely, when we are happy or content, our perception tends to be more positive. Emotions can sometimes even override our rational thought processes and greatly impact our decision-making.

Belief systems act like a filter in our perception, guiding and shaping the way we interpret and understand the world around us. Our cultural, religious, and personal beliefs can significantly influence the information we choose to accept or dismiss.

In many cases, people will unknowingly seek information that reinforces their existing beliefs and disregard any evidence that contradicts them, a phenomenon known as confirmation bias .

Mental Impression

Lastly, our mental impression of a situation or event is heavily influenced by the specific details we notice, including its context, our attention at that moment, as well as the associations we have with those details. Sometimes, our minds may create visual illusions that trick us into perceiving things that are not in line with reality.

These mental impressions can also be influenced by external factors, such as societal norms or stereotypes, further affecting our perception of reality.

In conclusion, perception is a complex and dynamic process that is influenced by a multitude of factors, including our past experiences, emotions, beliefs, and mental impressions. These factors create a unique and individualized view of the world, highlighting the truth behind the phrase that “perception is reality.”

Positive and Negative Perception

Influencing happiness, joy, and compassion.

The concept of perception as reality signifies that our understanding and interpretation of the world around us play a significant role in how we experience life. A positive perception can greatly influence our sense of happiness, joy, and compassion.

By focusing on the positive aspects of a situation, we can cultivate a sense of gratitude, which in turn can lead to a greater sense of overall well-being.

For instance, when we choose to view difficulties as opportunities for growth, we are more likely to approach challenging situations with a positive mindset, ultimately promoting feelings of happiness and joy.

Furthermore, a positive perception can also increase our capacity for empathy and compassion toward others. When we acknowledge the good in ourselves and others, we learn to foster deeper connections and understanding with those around us.

Causing Anxiety, Worry, and Fear

However, it is also important to note that just as positive perception can influence happiness and compassion, negative perception can be detrimental to our mental well-being. Pessimistic thinking and focusing on negativity can lead to feelings of anxiety, worry, and fear.

Negative perceptions cause us to feel stressed or overwhelmed, as we may begin to believe that our problems are insurmountable or that the world is an inherently terrible place. This distorted view of reality has the power to impede our progress, as we may become stuck in a cycle of rumination and worry.

In conclusion, the power of perception in shaping our emotional experiences cannot be understated. By being mindful of our thought patterns and consciously working to cultivate a more optimistic outlook, we can ultimately influence our overall well-being and mental health.

Perception in Relationships

Alignment and empathy in relationships.

In relationships, it’s essential to achieve a certain level of alignment and empathy . Alignment refers to having a mutual understanding of each other’s perspectives and views. This allows you and your partner to connect more effectively and anticipate each other’s needs.

Empathy in relationships entails understanding and feeling your partner’s emotions, helping to create deeper bonds and nurture trust.

To foster alignment and empathy, communication is crucial. Maintaining open lines of communication enables couples to share their views, identify potential issues, and work together to address them. Active listening can be a powerful means of empathizing with your partner’s emotions and experiences.

Cognitive Distortions and Delusions

On the other hand, relationships may also be affected by cognitive distortions and delusions . Cognitive distortions are biased ways of thinking that affect our perception of reality. These can manifest in our relationships, leading to problems such as misinterpreting situations, reacting negatively based on assumptions, or generalizing behaviors to broader contexts.

Cognitive distortions can exacerbate conflict and misunderstandings in a relationship if not addressed.

Delusions, meanwhile, are false beliefs that someone may hold, even in the face of valid counter evidence. These can significantly impact relationships as they might prevent individuals from seeing reality clearly, leading to communication breakdowns and mistrust.

To overcome these obstacles, it’s important for individuals to develop self-awareness, identify their cognitive distortions, and work towards challenging and reshaping those biased thoughts. This process includes learning to embrace uncertainty, trusting your partner, and actively seeking accurate information rather than relying on assumptions.

In conclusion, understanding the role of perception within relationships can be vital to maintaining healthy connections with our partners.

Cultivating empathy and alignment can help foster a stronger bond, while addressing cognitive distortions and delusions can contribute to clearer and more effective communication.

Perception in Time

Perception of past and present.

Our perception of time plays a significant role in how we understand and experience reality. Often, our perception of past and present events influences our understanding of the world around us. We derive meaning from these events by comparing and contrasting different moments in time, using our experiences to predict future outcomes and plan our actions ( Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ).

Our brains process time-related information by reviewing events in our memory. These memories enable us to make sense of the present and provide a context for the inevitable changes that occur over time. Using these past experiences, we can not only learn from our mistakes but also build upon our successes.

It is crucial to remember that our perceptions of the past may not always be entirely accurate, as the brain sometimes reconstructs memories to fit our beliefs or expectations. As a result, our interpretation of past events can be subject to biases and other distortions.

Perception of Future

The perception of future plays an essential role in how we navigate through life. A person’s ability to envision, plan, and prepare for the future depends on their capacity to anticipate possible outcomes from their past experiences and present circumstances ( Nature ).

In the realm of time, our understanding of the future is primarily shaped by our perception of the passage of time. There is no direct sensory experience of the future, but rather a mental construct that relies on our understanding of the past and present.

Our perception of the future can be influenced by our mindset, expectations, and emotions. For example, habitual pessimists may have a more negative outlook on the future, while optimists may have a more positive outlook.

Furthermore, our perception of time can affect how we perceive our future selves, and this can, in turn, impact our decision-making and goal-setting processes.

In conclusion, the perception of time is a complex and multifaceted aspect of human experience. By understanding how we perceive the past, present, and future, we can have a greater appreciation for the flexible and dynamic nature of reality.

Perception and Decision-Making

Perception plays a crucial role in the decision-making process, as it involves the interpretation and understanding of the world around us. Our brains are constantly creating a mental model of reality based on the sensory information we receive, and this model influences how we process, remember, and make decisions about events, people, and situations.

In fact, our perception acts as a lens through which we view reality, shaping the way we think and act.

However, it is important to keep in mind that perception is not always synonymous with reality. Our brains can sometimes distort our view of the world, leading us to make decisions based on inaccurate or biased information.

One factor that can influence our perception is our past experiences, which can create cognitive biases that affect our decision-making. For example, someone who has experienced a specific type of situation before might have an inherent bias towards it, leading them to make decisions based on a distorted perception of reality.

Another factor is our personal expectations, as mentioned in this Stanford article , our brains unconsciously bend our perception of reality to meet our desires or expectations. This can lead us to make decisions that could be influenced by wishful thinking or overly optimistic beliefs.

It is crucial to be aware of these potential perceptual distortions and developments when making decisions, particularly in complex or high-stakes situations.

By being mindful of our own biases and paying attention to the available evidence, we can improve our decision-making processes and ultimately make more informed and effective choices based on a more accurate understanding of reality.

In summary, the relationship between perception and decision-making is complex and multifaceted. By recognizing our own perceptual biases and striving for a more objective view of the world, we can make better decisions that are rooted in a clear and knowledgeable understanding of reality.

Deconstructing the Illusion of Perception

Philosophers’ views on perception as reality.

Many philosophers have explored the concept of perception as a fundamental aspect of understanding reality. The idea lies in the belief that what we perceive directly corresponds to the “real world.” However, some philosophers argue that our perceptions are not always a reliable representation of the world around us.

Instead, they are constructed by our brain , influenced by our personal experiences and beliefs.

For example, the philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that our perceptions are shaped by our cognitive faculties. He argued that what we perceive is not the world “as it is,” but rather, the world “as we experience it.”

Similarly, George Berkeley proposed that our perceptual experiences are entirely mental constructions, which exist only in our minds.

Mental Illness and Perception

Mental illness can significantly impact an individual’s perception of reality, further demonstrating the disconnect between perception and objective truth. In cases such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, altered perceptions can lead to delusions or hallucinations.

These distorted experiences can become a person’s reality, even though they do not accurately represent the external world.

Furthermore, anxiety and depression can also affect an individual’s perception of reality. For instance, a person suffering from depression might perceive the world as bleak and hopeless, despite objective evidence to the contrary. In contrast, someone with anxiety may feel threatened or overwhelmed by situations that are objectively safe or manageable.

This relationship between mental illness and perception highlights the fundamental role that our individual experiences play in shaping our understanding of reality. By deconstructing the illusion of perception, we can better recognize and appreciate the complex interplay between our minds and the world around us.

Acceptance and Personal Responsibility

Acknowledging distortions and misconceptions.

In order to grasp the concept that perception is reality , it’s essential to first acknowledge the distortions and misconceptions that may shape our understanding of the world. Our personal reality can be greatly influenced by our cognitive biases, which may create distortions in how we interpret events, situations, and the actions of others. Recognizing and addressing these distortions can lead to a more accurate perception of reality.

One key element in this process is acceptance . By accepting our cognitive distortions and personal biases, we acknowledge that our perception may not always be accurate, which in turn allows us to take personal responsibility for our actions and thoughts. Taking responsibility for our past unconscious reactions enables us to gain control over our perceptions and, ultimately, our reality.

Developing Inner Peace through Willingness

Once we’ve acknowledged and taken responsibility for our distortions and misconceptions, we can work towards developing inner peace through a willingness to change our perceptions. This process involves being open to exploring alternative perspectives and re-evaluating our beliefs and assumptions.

A key aspect of developing inner peace is the understanding that acceptance starts with perceiving reality as it is in the present moment. By acknowledging what is present and recognizing aspects of life that we cannot control, we can develop a greater sense of inner peace and contentment.

Some steps towards cultivating such willingness include:

• Seeking professional help, such as therapy or coaching, to gain insight and guidance into changing perceptions
• Practicing mindfulness and meditation to increase self-awareness and acceptance of the present moment
• Engaging in personal growth activities, such as reading, journaling, or attending workshops, to further expand one’s understanding of oneself and the world

In conclusion, by acknowledging distortions and misconceptions and taking responsibility for our perceptions, we can develop inner peace through a willingness to change our perspective on reality. This process requires dedication, self-awareness, and a genuine desire for personal growth to ultimately reshape our personal reality into a more accurate reflection of the world around us.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does perception shape our reality.

Perception acts as a lens through which we view reality . Our perceptions influence how we focus on, process, remember, interpret, understand, synthesize, decide about, and act on reality. Each individual’s perception is shaped by their personal experiences, beliefs, and emotions, which can result in different people recognizing and interpreting the same situation differently.

What’s the difference between perception and reality?

Perception refers to our mental impression and interpretation of the world around us. Reality, on the other hand, refers to the world or state of things as they exist independent of our perceptions. While perception is subjective and influenced by individual experiences, reality is objective and independent of our views and interpretations.

How does inaccurate perception affect our lives?

When our perception is inaccurate or biased, it can lead to misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and poor decision-making. Inaccurate perceptions can cause individuals to see obstacles where none exist, misjudge situations, or miss out on opportunities because they are not able to accurately assess their environment.

Can perception and reality coexist?

Yes, perception and reality can coexist. Although our perceptions are subjective and influenced by personal experiences, they are still based on the world around us. The key is to be aware of the difference between our perception and the objective reality and strive to refine our perceptions to make them more closely reflect the true state of things.

What role does communication play in shaping perceptions?

Communication plays a crucial role in shaping perceptions. Effective communication can help bridge the gap between perception and reality by sharing information, experiences, and insights with others. Through communication, individuals can exchange ideas, clarify misunderstandings, or gain a broader understanding of situations, ultimately leading to a more accurate perception of reality.

How do personal experiences influence our perception of reality?

Personal experiences play a significant role in shaping our perception of reality. Each individual’s unique set of experiences, beliefs, and emotions contribute to how they perceive and interpret the world around them. These experiences can lead to biases and assumptions, which may result in an inaccurate perception of reality. It is essential to be aware of these influences and strive for self-reflection and growth to maintain an accurate understanding of the world around us.

Perceiving Is Believing

How naive realism influences our perception of everything..

Posted January 23, 2021 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

The only true voyage of discovery...would be not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is. — Marcel Proust

Perception is everything—and it is flawed. Most of us navigate our daily lives believing we see the world as it is. Our brains are perceiving an objective reality, right? Well, not quite. Everything we bring in through our senses is interpreted through the filter of our past experiences.

Understanding Sensation and Perception

Sensation is physical energy detection by our sensory organs. Our eyes, mouth, tongue, nose, and skin relay raw data via a process of transduction, which is akin to the translation of physical energy—such as sound waves—into the electrochemical energy the brain understands. At this point, the information is the same from person to person—it is unbiased.

To understand human perception, you must first understand that all information in and of itself is meaningless. — Beau Lotto

While Dr. Lotto's statement is bold, from the perspective of neuroscience , it is true. Meaning is applied to everything, from the simplest to the most complex sensory input. Our brain's interpretation of the raw sensory information is known as perception. Everything from our senses is filtered through our unique system of past experiences in the world. Usually, the meaning we apply is functional and adequate—if not fully accurate, but sometimes our inaccurate perceptions create real-world difficulty.

Perceptual Illusions

There are numerous optical illusions that distinctly convey how easily our perception can lead us to incorrect conclusions. Psychologist Roger Shepard (1990) illustrated that our perceptions can be inaccurate with his famous table-top demonstration (see video below), which clearly establishes that our brains may fool us into perceiving an erroneous view of reality regarding even the simplest of visual perceptual questions.

Countless illusion examples may be found in psychology textbooks or via internet searches, but this captivating video unmistakably illustrates how our past experiences in the world interfere with our accurate perception regarding a simple line length comparison.

How does our brain get deceived ? We trust that our perceptual system constructs accurate representations of the surrounding world. However, our assumptions regarding perception are unsupported by evidence. The deficient understanding of how we perceive the world was originally termed naive realism by Lee Ross and his colleagues in the 1990s. Naive realism is thought to be the theoretical foundation for many cognitive biases , such as the fundamental attribution error , the false consensus effect, and the bias blind spot.

Perceptual illusions are endlessly fascinating and provide a microcosm of potentially faulty human perception. When we encounter these illusions, we initially believe we are seeing an accurate representation of reality only to be surprised by how easily our brains mislead us.

Inter-Group Conflict and Naive Realism

What happens when we extrapolate our perceptual shortcomings to large-scale human interaction? Too often, humans get stuck believing their view of the world is an objective reality. This, of course, leads to conflict with other humans who disagree, especially those we perceive to be part of an out-group . Naive realism leads us to reason that we see the world objectively—and that others do as well. When we encounter people who disagree with us on important matters, we tend to think they are uninformed, irrational, or biased.

Why does this happen? It is challenging and uncomfortable to confront our own understanding of the world, especially if we are unaware of our tendency for faulty interpretations of reality. Most people have likely not considered that their opinions about the world are filtered through their unique perceptual lens, which is fundamentally biased and based on past experiences.

How we perceive the world and important issues, from parenting to the political, is based on our perception. When we begin to understand that other people's experiences in the world vary greatly and influence how they interpret complex issues, we can begin to have a greater understanding of other points of view.

However, we tend to become more entrenched in our beliefs about our representations of reality when interacting with people in a different "tribe." Instead of seeking common ground—which can be an effective method to initiate belief change, we instead become more tribal and refute any information from our rival group.

What Can We Do?

The polarization in our modern world is widespread and appears to be increasing. Determining how to find commonalities between groups can feel impossible due to naive realism. Fascinatingly, researchers have uncovered a simple intervention that may promote greater understanding between members of rival groups.

Dr. Meytal Nasir (2014) and her colleagues set out to empirically investigate whether people could be more open to narratives of their adversaries (out-group) following an intervention that raises awareness regarding the concept of naive realism and the implications in the real world.

The researchers conducted their study within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an exemplar of a well-known intractable struggle. Their focus was to raise awareness of naive realism as a universal cognitive psychological bias that fuels adversaries to adhere to a collective narrative of the ingroup and reject the out-group narrative during conflict.

Results from the research indicated that the intervention—a short text describing naive realism and its implications—did produce an increased openness to adversary's narratives by raising the experimental group members' awareness of cognitive limitations. Fascinatingly, the intervention made no mention of the rival group or the specific conflict, yet still brought about positive change.

The Nasie research aligns with Dr. Lotto's commentary about how we can overcome our perceptual deficiencies.

By becoming aware of the principles by which your perceptual brain works, you can become an active participant in your own perceptions and in this way change them in the future. — Beau Lotto

Final Thoughts

A metacognitive strategy aimed at our perceptual system is a promising intervention for intractable disagreements between groups. While tribalism was certainly evolutionarily adaptive for humans thousands of years ago, current trends suggest it is detrimental and leading to deleterious consequences across the globe.

With knowledge regarding naive realism, we need to look beyond our own experiences and attempt to see the world with the eyes of others—especially those we perceive to be in out-groups. The insight uncovered with this new viewpoint may or may not move our positions on various issues, but as we navigate an ever-polarizing world of divisiveness—fueled by social media , it may be our only hope (sorry Obi-Wan).

Jessica Koehler, Ph.D., is an Associate Faculty Member in the University of Arizona Global Campus Psychology Department.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Online Therapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Self Tests NEW
• Therapy Center
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

Sticking up for yourself is no easy task. But there are concrete skills you can use to hone your assertiveness and advocate for yourself.

• Emotional Intelligence
• Gaslighting
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

Is Perception Reality?

• First Online: 23 June 2023

Cite this chapter

• Meghan Carmody-Bubb 2  

523 Accesses

This chapter examines the role of perception on human information processing and decision-making. The role of expectations is discussed in terms of how past learned experiences can impact our interpretations of the world.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save.

• Get 10 units per month
• Download Article/Chapter or eBook
• 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
• Cancel anytime
• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Balcetis, E., & Dale, R. (2007). Conceptual set as a top—down constraint on visual object identification. Perception, 36 (4), 581–595. https://doi.org/10.1068/p5678

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Carmody, M. A. (1993). Task-dependent effects of automation: the role of internal models in performance, workload, and situational awareness in a semi-automated cockpit . Texas Tech University.

Google Scholar  

Chase, W. G., & Simon, H. A. (1973). The mind’s eye in chess. In W. G. Chase (Ed.), Visual Information Processing (pp. 215–281). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-170150-5.50011-1

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Doidge, N. (2007). The Brain That Changes Itself . Viking Penguin.

Esterman, M., & Yantis, S. (2010). Perceptual expectation evokes category-selective cortical activity. Cerebral Cortex, 20 (5), 1245–1253. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhp188

Gladwell, M. (2013). The unheard story of David and Goliath . TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_the_unheard_story_of_david_and_goliath

Gobet, F., & Simon, H. A. (1996). Recall of random and distorted chess positions: Implications for the theory of expertise. Memory & Cognition, 24 (4), 493–503. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03200937

Article   Google Scholar  

Goolkasian, P., & Woodberry, C. (2010). Priming effects with ambiguous figures. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 72 (1), 168–178. https://doi.org/10.3758/APP.72.1.168

Hastie, R., & Dawes, R. M. (2001). Rational choice in an uncertain world: The psychology of judgment and decision making . Sage Publications.

Hayashi, A. M. (2001, February). When to trust your gut . Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2001/02/when-to-trust-your-gut

Heidegger, M. (2010/1953). Being and time (J. Stambaugh, Trans.). State University of New York. (Original work published in 1953 by Max Neimeyer Verlag).

Hill, W. E. (1915). My wife and mother-in-law, by the cartoonist W. E. Hill, 1915 (adapted from a picture going back at least to an 1888 German postcard. Retrieved November 21, 2022, from https:/commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Youngoldwoman.jpg . This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office) before January 1, 1927.

Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology: An introduction to phenomenological philosophy . Northwestern University Press.

Lidsky, I. (2017). Eyes wide open: Overcoming obstacles and recognizing opportunities in a world that can’t see clearly . Penguin Random House LLC.

Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63 , 81–97. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0043158

Muehlmann, R. (1978). Berkeley’s Ontology and the Epistemology of Idealism. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 8 (1), 89–111. https://doi.org/10.1080/00455091.1978.10716210

National Transportation Safety Board. (2000). National Transportation Safety Board Aviation Accident Final Report . (Accident Number NYC99MA178). https://app.ntsb.gov/pdfgenerator/reportgeneratorfile.ashx?eventid=20001212x19354&akey=1&rtype=final&itype=ma

Neubauer, B. E., Witkop, C. T., & Varpio, L. (2019). How phenomenology can help us learn from the experiences of others. Perspectives on Medical Education, 8 , 90–97. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40037-019-0509-2

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Phillips, D. (2000, July 7). NTSB says disorientation likely caused JFK Jr. crash. The Washington Post . https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/07/07/ntsb-says-disorientation-likely-caused-jfk-jr-crash/08cd60a8-74ae-46e1-a2e8-960ab2e71116/

Posner, M. I. (1973). Cognition: An introduction . Scott, Foresman.

Reinhart, R. O. (1996). Basic Flight Physiology (2nd ed.). McGraw-Hill.

Shyamalan, M. K. (Director & Screenplay Writer), Marshall, F., Kennedy, K. & Mendel, B. (Producers). (1999). The Sixth Sense [Film]. Hollywood Pictures.

Wilde, O. (2006). The picture of Dorian Gray . Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1890).

Zimbardo, P. G. (1985). Psychology and life (12th ed.). Scott, Foresman and Company.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Leadership Studies, Our Lady of the Lake University, San Antonio, TX, USA

Meghan Carmody-Bubb

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Carmody-Bubb, M. (2023). Is Perception Reality?. In: Cognition and Decision Making in Complex Adaptive Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31929-7_10

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31929-7_10

Published : 23 June 2023

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-031-31928-0

Online ISBN : 978-3-031-31929-7

eBook Packages : Behavioral Science and Psychology Behavioral Science and Psychology (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

* Scanned from Chapter 7 in R.J. Rummel, The Dynamic Psychological Field , 1975. For full reference to the book and the list of its contents in hypertext, click book . Typographical errors have been corrected, clarifications added, and style updated. 1 . The profound relationship between perception and conflict has been appreciated by the best writers on the subject, such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Clausewitz. Thucydides, for example, clearly was aware of the dependence of peace on the perception of interests, capability, and will (credibility). 2 . J. B. Watson, Behaviorism (New York: Norton, '1924). 3 . See Chapter 5 . 4 . Do not trouble over the precise meaning of this and other terms introduced at this point. Subsequent chapters will gradually clarify them. 5 . These are not the Kantian a priori forms for understanding experience, nor am I using the term "category" in quite the Aristotelian or Kantian sense. By category I mean the culturally given scheme for relating stimuli one to another or to the self. 6 . Just to make sure that I am clear in using these terms: A is sufficient for B if when A, then B (if a rose, then thorns); A is necessary for B if when B, then A--that is, A must be present for B to be present (when no A, then no B), but having A does not necessarily mean having B (gravity is necessary for a ladder to fall). I am not using necessary and sufficient with any causal meaning, as the rose example indicates. Nor, do I define cause here as a necessary and sufficient condition.

The Power of Perception: Understanding How Our Minds Shape Reality

I ntroduction: Perception is the lens through which we view and interpret the world around us. It is the fundamental process by which our minds make sense of the sensory information we receive. But what if I told you that perception is not just a passive observer but an active creator of our reality? In this blog, we will delve into the fascinating concept of perception and explore how our minds shape the very reality we experience.

1. The Nature of Perception: Perception is our brain interprets the information it receives from our senses. It goes beyond mere observation and involves complex cognitive processes. We construct our reality based on how we perceive the world, and this process is influenced by various factors.

2. Filters of Perception: Our perceptions are filtered through the lens of our past experiences, beliefs, values, and cultural background. These filters shape our interpretations, biases, and judgments, ultimately influencing our perception of reality. They act as both guides and limitations in our understanding of the world.

3. Subjectivity and Reality: Reality is not an objective entity but a subjective construct. Each individual has their own unique reality based on their perceptions. What one person sees as true and real may differ from another’s perspective. Understanding this subjectivity is crucial in appreciating the diversity of human experiences and perspectives.

4. Perceptual Distortions: Our perceptions are not always accurate representations of reality. Cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias and the halo effect, can distort our interpretations, leading to flawed judgments. Recognizing and understanding these distortions is essential for gaining a more accurate understanding of reality.

5. The Power of Perspective: Perspective plays a significant role in shaping our perception of reality. Different perspectives can lead to contrasting interpretations of the same event or situation. Empathy and the ability to see things from others’ viewpoints can broaden our understanding and foster better relationships.

6. Perception and Decision-Making: Our perceptions strongly influence the decisions we make. Biases and heuristics can sway our judgment, leading to suboptimal choices. Being aware of these influences and engaging in critical thinking can help us make more informed decisions.

7. Perception in Relationships: Perception heavily influences our interactions and relationships with others. Misunderstandings and conflicts often arise from differences in perception. Developing effective communication skills and cultivating empathy can bridge perceptual gaps and foster stronger connections.

8. The Potential for Perception Change: Although our perceptions may seem fixed, they are malleable. We have the power to challenge and change our perceptions through conscious effort. Mindfulness, exposure to diverse perspectives, and embracing uncertainty can open new pathways for personal growth and a more nuanced understanding of reality.

C onclusion: Perception is a powerful force that shapes our reality in profound ways. By recognizing the filters, biases, and distortions that influence our perceptions, we can better understand ourselves, others, and the world we inhabit. Embracing the potential for perception change empowers us to expand our horizons and create a more inclusive and compassionate reality for ourselves and those around us.

Written by Sky Head

Text to speech

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Epistemological Problems of Perception

The central problem in the epistemology of perception is that of explaining how perception could give us knowledge or justified belief about an external world, about things outside of ourselves. This problem has traditionally been viewed in terms of a skeptical argument that purports to show that such knowledge and justification are impossible. Skepticism about the external world highlights a number of epistemological difficulties regarding the nature and epistemic role of experience and the question of how perception might bring us into contact with a mind-independent reality. The issues that arise are of central importance for understanding knowledge and justification more generally, even aside from their connection to skepticism.

Two main types of response to the skeptical argument have traditionally been given: a metaphysical response that focuses on the nature of the world, perceptual experience, and/or the relation between them, in an effort to show that perceptual knowledge is indeed possible; and a more directly epistemological response that focuses on principles specifying what is required for knowledge and/or justification, in an effort to show that skepticism misstates the requirements for knowledge.

Much of the philosophical tradition has viewed the central epistemological problems concerning perception largely and sometimes exclusively in terms of the metaphysical responses to skepticism. For that reason, these will be addressed before moving on to the more explicitly epistemological concerns.

1. The Problem of the External World

2.1.1 phenomenal directness, 2.1.2 referential directness, 2.1.3 perceptual directness, 2.1.4 direct world-involvement, 2.1.5 epistemological directness, 2.2 idealism and phenomenalism, 2.3.1 sense-data, 2.3.2 intentionalism and adverbialism, 2.3.3 direct realism, 2.4 comments on metaphysical solutions, 3.1.1 classical foundationalism, 3.1.2 fundamental epistemic principles, 3.1.3 coherentism, 3.1.4 seemings internalism, 3.1.5 the sellarsian dilemma and other challenges, 3.1.6 seemings externalism, 3.2 etiological approaches, 3.3 world-involving approaches, 4. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries.

The question of how our perceptual beliefs are justified or known can be approached by first considering the question of whether they are justified or known. A prominent skeptical argument is designed to show that our perceptual beliefs are not justified. Versions of this argument (or cluster of arguments) appear in René Descartes’s Meditations , Augustine’s Against the Academicians , and several of the ancient and modern skeptics (e.g., Sextus Empiricus, Michel de Montaigne). The argument introduces some type of skeptical scenario, in which things perceptually appear to us just as things normally do, but in which the beliefs that we would naturally form are radically false. To take some standard examples: differences in the sense organs and/or situation of the perceiver might make them experience as cold things that we would experience as hot, or experience as bitter things that we would experience as sweet; a person might mistake a vivid dream for waking life; or a brain in a vat might have its sensory cortices stimulated in such a way that it has the very same perceptual experiences that I am currently having, etc.

All this suggests a “veil of perception” between us and external objects: we do not have direct unvarnished access to the world, but instead have an access that is mediated by sensory appearances, the character of which might well depend on all kinds of factors (e.g., condition of sense organs, direct brain stimulation, etc.) besides those features of the external world that our perceptual judgments aim to capture. Paraphrasing David Hume (1739: I.2.vi, I.4.ii; 1748: sec 12.1; see also Locke 1690, Berkeley 1710, Russell 1912): nothing is ever directly present to the mind in perception except perceptual appearances.

But if our only access to the external world is mediated by potentially misleading perceptual appearances, we ought to have some assurance that the appearances we are relying on are not of the misleading variety. And here is where all the trouble arises, for it seems that there is no way we could have any evidence for the reliability of perception (i.e., perceptual appearances) without relying on other perceptions. We have empirical reason, for example, to think that science is not yet capable of stimulating brains in a very precise way, but appealing to this to rebut the possibility of brain-in-a-vat scenarios seems blatantly question begging. At the heart of the problem of the external world is a skeptical argument referred to here as “PEW,” one possible reconstruction of which follows. The premises are named, as we will want to discuss them individually.

• Nothing is ever directly present to the mind in perception except perceptual appearances. ( Indirectness Principle ) Thus:
• Without a good reason for thinking perceptual appearances are veridical, we are not justified in our perceptual beliefs. ( Metaevidential Principle )
• We have no good reason for thinking perceptual appearances are veridical. ( No-Good-Reason Claim )
• Therefore, we are not justified in our perceptual beliefs.

A few comments on the logic of the argument are in order. (2) and (3) make up the meat of the argument; together they entail (4) . This means that (1) , which is motivated by the skeptical scenarios mentioned above and the associated veil of perception view, would be unnecessary for deriving the skeptical conclusion, as are those skeptical scenarios, were it not for the fact that (1) is commonly taken to render perception inferential in such a way as to lend support to (2) . If (1) is true, then, plausibly, (2) is: if our access is mediated by potentially nonveridical appearances, then we should only trust the appearances we have reason to think veridical. And no other reason to endorse (2) is immediately apparent (although an additional motivation for (2) will be discussed below, in section 3.1.1 ). (1) is therefore an important component of the traditional problem. The plausibility of (3) derives from the idea that our only means of verifying the veridicality of appearances would itself depend on perception, in the question-begging manner sketched above.

Notice that PEW addresses justification rather than knowledge. On the reasonable assumption that knowledge requires justification, (4) implies that our perceptual beliefs do not count as knowledge. One who denies this assumption could easily rewrite PEW in terms of knowledge rather than justification with little or no reduction in plausibility. PEW has been reconstructed here in a way that is supposed to be intuitively compelling. Were we to get specific about the implicit quantification involved (we have no good reason for thinking that any perceptual appearances are veridical? that perceptual appearances are in general veridical? that this perceptual appearance is veridical?), the argument would get a lot more complicated. The simpler version presented above is sufficient for our current purposes.

The problem of the external world should be distinguished from what is typically called the problem of perception (see the entry on the problem of perception ), even though they are motivated by similar considerations, in particular, by the Indirectness Principle. The problem of perception is the problem of how perception is possible—how it is possible, for example, to see mind-independent objects, rather than inferring them from awareness of sense-experiences, in light of the claim that only appearances are ever directly present to the mind. The problem of the external world is a distinctively epistemological problem, and it focuses on the normative status of perceptual judgments about external objects; it matters little for these purposes whether and how such judgments might amount to seeing . What matters is whether such judgments are or could be justified.

PEW illustrates the central problem of the epistemology of perception: if many or any of our perceptual beliefs are justified, PEW must have gone wrong somewhere. But where? Several subsidiary problems in the epistemology of perception arise in the efforts to solve this central problem.

2. Metaphysical Solutions to the Central Problem

The Indirectness Principle is a metaphysical principle: it says something about the nature of perception. The Metaevidential Principle and the No-Good-Reason Claim are epistemic principles: one lays down specifically normative requirements for justified belief and the other denies that these requirements are satisfied. Because PEW can be challenged by denying any of the premises, there are two main classes of solution to the central problem: metaphysical solutions, which challenge the Indirectness Principle; and epistemological solutions, which challenge the Metaevidential Principle and/or the No-Good-Reason Claim. This section addresses the first class of solutions to the central problem. Section 3 addresses the second class.

PEW starts with the Indirectness Principle, and it has often been thought that the central skeptical worry is due to a metaphysics of perception that holds that, although worldly objects do exist outside of the mind, they are never directly present to the mind, but only indirectly so, through mental intermediaries. Thomas Reid, for example, held that “Des Cartes’ system, which I shall beg leave to call the ideal system , … hath some original defect; that this skepticism is inlaid in it, and reared along with it” (1785: 1.vii). Consequently, a great deal of philosophy since Descartes has involved various attempts to block PEW by doing away with the intermediaries between the mind and the objects of perception, by offering a metaphysics of perception that puts these objects directly before the mind. If perception is direct in the relevant sense, then the skeptical problem never even gets off the ground.

There are two main branches to this tradition. The more obvious and commonsensical one originates with Reid (1764, 1785) who insists that physical objects and their properties can be directly present to the mind as well as mental objects can. This is the direct realist option. Earlier on the scene, however, is a tradition tracing back to George Berkeley (1710, 1713), which agrees with Descartes that only mental items are directly present to the mind but which holds that the objects of perception—tables, rocks, cats, etc.—are really mental items after all. This is the idealist/phenomenalist option. Despite the manifest differences between realist and idealist metaphysics, both branches of the “direct presence” tradition are united in rejecting the Indirectness Principle, insisting that tables and such are indeed directly present to the mind in perception. If perception is thus direct, the Indirectness Principle is false, and support for the Metaevidential Principle is undercut, and PEW ceases to pose a threat to knowledge.

2.1 Varieties of Direct Presence

Whether in the realist or idealist tradition, the direct presence theorist rejects the Indirectness Principle, insisting that when one perceives a cat, for example, the cat is directly in view, directly present to, simply there before the mind. But what is meant by these spatial metaphors? The metaphors can be unpacked in several importantly different ways, having different implications for the rest of PEW. The spatial/metaphorical terminology has been so vastly prevalent in the literature that it is very often hard to tell which author intends which conception(s) of directness. Consequently, it is difficult to pin particular conceptions of directness on particular authors, and the presentation here won’t try except where it’s quite obvious. Instead, the next five subsections aim to map out the more salient possibilities. Later, in sections 2.2 and 2.3 , these distinctions will be used to examine how the traditional metaphysical theories of perception bear on the epistemology of perception.

Notice that what is metaphorical about “direct presence” is the notion of presence, not of directness. To be directly present is to be present, but not in virtue of the presence of another thing (that would be in direct presence). Directness is merely unmediatedness, but what kind of mediation is at issue will depend on what kind of presence is intended.

One dimension of directness, emphasized by Reid (1785), notes that perceptual judgments are phenomenally noninferential, in the sense that they do not result from any discursive or ratiocinative process; they are not introspectibly based on premises. This noninferentiality is usually understood loosely enough to allow for perceptual beliefs’ being based on things other than beliefs (in particular, on experiential states, as we will see below) and also to allow for the possibility of unconscious or subpersonal inferential involvement in the formation of perceptual beliefs, so long as the agent is not deliberately basing these perceptual beliefs on other beliefs . Without these two allowances, claims of noninferentiality would quickly run afoul of standard views in epistemology and psychology, respectively. To claim that perception is phenomenally direct is to claim that it is noninferential in this sense.

Another way that perception might be direct is if perception represents external objects, as such, without that representation being mediated by representation of other things. Contrast this with the classical empiricists’ opposing view, that the only way to represent external objects is as the cause of our sensations (Locke 1690, Berkeley 1710). One might worry, however, that unless perception puts objects directly before us, we are in danger of not genuinely being able to think about the objective, external world at all, but only about ourselves. To say that perception is referentially direct is to say that the ability of perceptual states to represent does not depend on the ability of other states to represent.

One version of in directness claims that we perceive outer things by perceiving (or standing in a quasi-perceptual relation to) inner things—usually sense-data (see below and the entry on sense-data ). This makes it sound as if what we thought was ordinary direct perceiving of tables and rocks and such is really more like “perceiving” that someone has broken into your house—indirectly, on the basis of actually perceiving the broken window, empty area where the TV used to be, and so on. It is easy to see how such perceptual indirectness may invite the semantic and epistemological worries we have been seeing. To claim that perception of external objects is perceptually direct is to claim that it is not mediated by the perception (or quasi-perceptual apprehension or awareness) of something else.

One could endorse phenomenal directness and perceptual directness while still holding that perceptual contact is mediated by experience, where experience is conceived as something in virtue of which we have perceptual contact, though it is not the perceptual contact itself. An alternative is a relational metaphysics of perception according to which elements of the perceived world are literally parts of the perceptual experience. On idealist versions of this view, the mental states whose immediate apprehension constitutes perceptual experience just are the objects of perception (or parts of these objects). On (direct) realist versions of the view, perceptual experiences are not internal mental states of the agent but are relations between the agent and some external objects or states of affairs. Thus the agent is in a different type of mental state in the case of veridical perception (the “good case”) than in the case of hallucination (the “bad case”). Veridical perception is a certain kind of relation to a distal array, while hallucination or dreaming is an introspectively indistinguishable but metaphysically distinct relation to something else entirely.

Finally, one might hold that perception is direct in the sense that one’s perceptual beliefs about external objects, like rocks and cats and such, enjoy a kind of justification or knowledge that does not depend on—is not mediated by—any other justification or knowledge. Such beliefs are said to be “epistemically noninferential”, or “epistemologically basic” and the normative status is sometimes referred to as “immediate justification/knowledge” or “basic justification/knowledge”. This possibility will be explored in more detail below, in section 3 . Epistemological directness will be treated separately from the previous senses of direct presence, which can all be viewed as metaphysical senses of direct presence. The relation between metaphysical and epistemological directness will be addressed below, in section 2.4 .

With these distinctions in hand, we can better situate the traditional theories of perception that are often thought to bear on the skeptical problem.

Idealism and phenomenalism are views that hold that ordinary objects (tables, clouds, rocks, etc.) are really collections of or constructs out of actual and/or possible mental states, especially perceptual experiences. (I won’t try to distinguish phenomenalism from idealism but will use “idealism” to include both.) There are several varieties of idealism and several motivations for holding the view. But one motivation is that it promises to solve the skeptical problem of the external world. Berkeley (1710) held that idealism was a cure for skepticism. Transcendental idealism (Kant 1781) aims to split the difference with the skeptic by distinguishing the phenomenal objects of perception—which are collections of appearances and about which we can know something—from the noumenal objects—which are things in themselves and not mere appearances, and about which skepticism is true.

Idealism promises to solve the skeptical problem by attacking the Indirectness Principle. If the problem of the external world starts with the gap between the proximal and the distal objects of perceptual experience, then idealism would avoid skepticism by simply closing that gap. The idealist can embrace direct world-involvement while retaining the claim that nothing is ever directly present to the mind but its own mental states, by holding that the world is fundamentally mental, that, e.g., tables are just collections of ideas. Although metaphysical solutions are usually aimed at the Indirectness Principle, idealism might, additionally, undermine the No-Good-Reason Claim. Hume (1739) argued that we couldn’t reasonably posit external objects as plausible causes of our experiences without first observing a constant conjunction between external objects and experiences; but we can’t “observe” external objects unless we justifiedly believe in their existence, which we could only do if we could reasonably posit them as plausible causes of our experiences. Thus, a vicious circularity. On the other hand, if the objects of perception are not external after all, we are in a better position to infer causal relations between them and individual experiences.

The main difference between idealism and an indirect realism concerns not so much the metaphysics of perception as a larger metaphysical view about what else exists outside of the mind. Berkeley and Descartes agree about the direct objects of perception, but Descartes posits an additional stratum of mind-independent external objects in addition. The idealist denies that there is a veil of perception not because Descartes was wrong about the nature of perception, but because he was wrong about the natures of cats and rocks.

Idealism has a few contemporary defenders (e.g., Foster 2008, Hoffman 2009, Robinson 2022), though it is nowhere near the dominant view that it had been for almost two centuries after Berkeley. Most responses to PEW in the last century have endorsed some kind of realism instead, insisting that ordinary objects are indeed mind-independent.

2.3 Realisms, Direct and Indirect

The problem of the external world, especially the Indirectness Principle, sees its modern renaissance in Descartes’s representative realism, which was offered as an alternative to both the commonsense view of naive (aka direct) realism, and the hylomorphic theory standard among Scholastics. This latter doctrine holds that objects are combinations of primordial matter and forms impressed upon them, which determine the objects’ properties; these objects then cast off forms that can enter the mind through the sense organs. A red thing is simply something that has the form of RED, which it can transmit, making the receptive, perceiving mind also—though presumably in a different sense—red.

Both theories have difficulty handling error. Science frequently teaches us that things are not in reality the way they appear to the senses. The sun, for example, perceptually appears as a small disk rather than the large sphere that it is (Descartes 1641). This perceptual experience cannot involve either the transmission of forms (since the sun doesn’t have those forms), or the “direct pick-up” of objective properties (again, those properties aren’t there to pick up). Nor could we simply be picking up relational properties, like looking small from here , Descartes argues, because I could have the very same perceptual experience in a vivid dream (where even the relational properties are not instantiated) as I do in waking life. Therefore, perceptual appearances must be entirely mental and internal, rather than relational. Insofar as external objects are at all present to the mind, it is only because of these appearances, which thus serve as inner stand-ins, or proxies, for them. As John Locke puts it,

the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without. (1690: 163)

It is this notion of standing in that the term “representative realism” is supposed to capture. The representative realist may, but need not, hold that these proxies are also representations in the sense of having semantic contents, i.e., truth- or accuracy-conditions. In fact, the most recognizable form of representative realism denies that experiences are in this sense representational.

This best known, though now widely rejected, form of representative realism incorporates a sense-datum theory (see the entry on sense-data ), which holds that every perceptual experience as of something’s being F involves the subject’s awareness of something that really is F . My having a perceptual (veridical or hallucinatory) experience as of something’s being blue requires there to be a nonphysical, inner, mental object—a sense-datum—that is blue. Sense-data are not normally taken to be true or false, any more than rocks or tables are; nonetheless, sense-data constitute the inner rocks and tables in virtue of which we perceive external rocks and tables and are in that sense the latter’s representatives. Two important features of this theory are worth highlighting: (i) that sense-data really do have the properties that external objects appear to have, and (ii) that the relation one stands in to one’s sense-data is a perceptual, or quasi-perceptual, relation: one is perceptually aware of objects due to a more fundamental awareness of one’s sense-data.

Any version of representative realism is indirect in the sense of denying direct world-involvement. The sense-datum theory further denies perceptual directness, as it has us perceive objects by way of perceiving our sense-data; and it is typically fleshed out in such a way as to be incompatible with referential directness as well, holding that we can think about mind-independent objects only as the external causes of these sense-data. It is, however, compatible with phenomenal and epistemological directness. For example, one could deny that the “inference” from sense-data to external objects is conscious and deliberate and insist that only such deliberate inferences would render a belief epistemically inferential (i.e., nonbasic) in the sense of 2.1.5 above.

Intentionalism holds that to perceive (or hallucinate) something as being blue is to be in a state with a distinctively semantic property of meaning blue, of referring to or predicating the property of blueness (see the entry on consciousness and intentionality ). On this view, the inner states are not just representatives but represen tations ; they have semantic values. Such representations typically lack the properties they depict external objects as having. Furthermore, the relation one stands in to one’s perceptual representations is not necessarily a quasi-perceptual one: it is normally held that one simply has , or tokens , the representations; they are not in any sense objects of perception or awareness in the ordinary course of events, but the vehicles of perception (Huemer 2001). They might, of course, become objects of awareness if we reflectively attend to them; and certain theories of consciousness hold that a perception only becomes conscious when it is the object of a higher order quasi-perceptual state, but in general, being in the perceptual state does not require perceiving one’s perceptual representations.

Sense-datum and intentionalist views both see perceptual experience as a two-place relation between perceiver and inner representative. Adverbialism , on the other hand, holds that perceptual experience itself is monadic; it doesn’t involve the perceiver standing in a relation to something (see the entry on the problem of perception ). [ 1 ] Different kinds of perceptual experiences are simply different ways of sensing: one “senses greenly” or “is appeared to horsely”, and such locutions do not commit us to the existence of either sense-data or representations. Adverbialism is sometimes offered as an ontologically neutral way of talking about experiences (Chisholm 1957), sometimes as the more contentious claim that perceptual experience is primitive and unanalyzable.

Intentionalism and adverbialism deny direct world-involvement but are compatible with the other varieties of directness. They are also compatible with any of the corresponding varieties of indirectness.

Proponents of intentionalist and adverbialist theories have often thought of themselves as defending a kind of direct realism; Reid (1785), for example, clearly thinks his proto-adverbialist view is a direct realist view. And perceptual experience is surely less indirect on an intentionalist or adverbialist theory than on the typical sense-datum theory, at least in the sense of perceptual directness. Nevertheless, intentionalist and adverbialist theories render the perception of worldly objects indirect in at least two important ways: (a) it is mediated by an inner state, in the sense that one is in perceptual contact with an outer object of perception only (though not entirely) in virtue of being in that inner state; and (b) that inner state is one that we could be in even in cases of radical perceptual error (e.g., dreams, demonic deception, etc.). These theories might thus be viewed as only “quasi-direct” realist theories; experiences still screen off the external world in the sense that the experience might still be the same, whether the agent is in the good case or the bad case. Quasi-direct theories thus reject the Indirectness Principle only under some readings of “directness”. A fully direct realism would offer an unequivocal rejection of the Indirectness Principle by denying that we are in the same mental states in the good and the bad cases. In recent years, direct realists have wanted the perceptual relation to be entirely unmediated: we don’t achieve perceptual contact with objects in virtue of having perceptual experiences; the experience just is the perceptual contact with the object (Brewer 2011).This is the view that perceptual experience is constituted by the subject’s standing in certain relations to external objects, where this relation is not mediated by or analyzable in terms of further, inner states of the agent. Thus, the brain in the vat could not have the same experiences as a normal veridical perceiver, because experience is itself already world-involving.

The type of direct realism that has received the most attention recently is disjunctivism (e.g., Snowdon 1980, McDowell 1982, Martin 2002, Haddock & Macpherson 2008; see the entry on the disjunctive theory of perception ). There are many different versions of disjunctivism, but a common thread is the claim that the experiences involved in the veridical case are ipso facto of a different type than those involved in the hallucinatory cases. The theory of appearing (Alston 1999) is a type of disjunctivism but one that emphasizes the direct world-involvement in the veridical case rather than the radical difference between the cases.

Some forms of behaviorism, functionalism, and embodied mind are also direct realist views. If, for example, having a certain perceptual experience constitutively involves being disposed to act on worldly objects and properties in certain ways—that is, if behavioral dispositions are themselves individuated as world-involving—then this would render the experience relational in the way required by direct realism; disembodied brains in vats could not have the same experiences as we have in normal, veridical cases. Similar consequences follow if perceptual experience is understood in terms of “skilled coping” (Dreyfus 2002) or “sensorimotor know-how” (Noë 2004), again, provided that these terms are read as requiring certain interactions with real, external objects. Any such theory implies that brains in vats couldn’t have the same experiences we do, because they’re causally disconnected from the physical world. Such a view need not be a form of disjunctivism, however; depending on the details of the theory, a hallucinating subject who is nevertheless embedded in and disposed to act on the world in the right ways might have the same experience as a veridically perceiving subject.

Direct realism is compatible with all the metaphysical species of direct presence listed above. As such, it allows for an unequivocal denial of premise (1) of PEW, while quasi-realist views only reject that premise under certain understandings of direct presence.

If representative realism is the cause of the central epistemological problem for perception, then perhaps direct realism or idealism will be the solution. Some philosophers have thought that these metaphysical views resolved the epistemological problem by closing the gap between appearance and reality, by making ordinary objects (e.g., tables and rocks) directly present to the mind.

On further reflection, however, it is clear that the metaphysical account will be, at best, a part of the solution.

Consider again PEW:

Most metaphysical solutions attack the Indirectness Principle as a way of undercutting the Metaevidential Principle. But they only attack metaphysical readings of the Indirectness Principle, and while the various metaphysical theories of perception from sections 2.2 and 2.3 may have certain intuitive affinities with the Metaevidential Principle or its denial, it follows from Hume’s “no ought from is ” dictum that none of them immediately implies either premise (2) or its negation. Epistemological directness does straightforwardly entail the rejection of (2) , but epistemological directness is compatible with any of the metaphysical theories of perception glossed above and is entailed by none of them. At best, a metaphysical theory of perception will block one avenue of intuitive support for (2) , but it will not imply that (2) is false.

An idealist, for example, will allow that we sometimes dream and that there is a real difference between hallucination and veridical perception, even though in both cases the direct object of awareness is a collection of ideas. The standard view (Berkeley 1710) is that a hallucinatory table is a different sort of collection of ideas than a real table; certain counterfactuals are true of the latter that are not true of the former (e.g., that if I were to will certain movements, my visual perceptions would change in certain ways, etc.). But this reopens the gap between perceptual experiences and ordinary objects. Tables are not just experiences; they are larger entities of which experiences are parts, and those parts can be shared by hallucinations. So what is directly present to the mind is something common to hallucination and veridical perception. So my perceptual experience would seem to be neutral with respect to whether I am seeing or hallucinating a table. So to be justified in believing there is a table in front of me, I will need some reason to think this particular experience is veridical, and PEW is back in business (Alston 1993, Greco 2000).

Direct realism precludes this particular relapse into skepticism by denying that the experience is the same in the good and the bad cases. If our perceptual evidence includes the experience, then our evidence in the good case is different from our evidence in the bad case—they are different mental states. It does not follow, however, that these two bits of evidence have differing evidential import; both may—for all we’ve been told so far—be evidentially neutral with respect to, e.g., whether there is actually a chair in front of me or whether it merely appears so. Even if they are very different mental states, it doesn’t follow that they license different inferences; nothing prevents the direct realist from holding that both only license beliefs of the form ‘I’m either seeing or hallucinating a table’. Additionally, the direct realist is free to impose a metaevidential demand on justified perceptual belief, a demand that we know which kind of experience we are having before that experience can serve as evidence. Unsurprisingly, direct realists often endorse some kind or other of epistemological directness ( section 3.3 below), though some endorse the Metaevidential Principle, and in any case, the metaphysical view is by itself silent on this epistemological issue.

Even with the metaphysical premise (1) removed, a purely epistemological version of PEW, consisting of (2) through (4) , still challenges the justification of our perceptual beliefs. A satisfying solution to the problem of the external world requires the articulation of some plausible epistemic principles, one that explains which of the two crucial premises (2) and (3) of PEW are being rejected, and provides an epistemological context which renders that rejection plausible. An entirely metaphysical solution to the problem of the external world will not suffice. An epistemological solution to this epistemological problem will be needed in addition or instead.

3. Epistemological Solutions

Any satisfactory, non-skeptical epistemology of perception is going to deny one or more of the epistemological premises of PEW. But that denial will have to be situated within the context of a larger epistemological theory of perceptual belief—or better yet, of belief more generally. There are three broad, not necessarily exclusive, approaches to this question:

• an evidentialist approach, which holds that perceptual beliefs are justified when held on the basis of (or when the agent is in possession of) something that counts as a good reason for holding that belief;
• an etiological approach, which holds that perceptual beliefs are justified when formed in an appropriate way (i.e., when the psychological processes by which the beliefs are produced are the kind that generally conduce to justification); and
• a world-involving approach, which holds that perceptual beliefs are justified when the agent is appropriately related to the worldly truthmaker for that belief (e.g., the perceptual belief that p is justified when the agent sees that p ).

The first two are normally defended as parts of and continuous with a more general epistemological view, encompassing not just perception but also testimony, introspection, memory, inductive and deductive inference, and so on. The world-involving view, on the other hand, is formulated specifically to handle perception, though one could imagine it being extended to some of these other sources.

An important difference among these approaches is the way they handle perceptual experiences. On nearly any evidentialist view, experiences—construed as internal, nonfactive (i.e., non-factively-individuated) mental states of the agent—play a central role in the epistemological story, although not necessarily an evidential role; indeed what that role is will differ considerably for the different evidentialist views. For an etiological view, experiences matter if and insofar as they are links in the causal chain by which perceptual beliefs are formed, but they are no more or less important than the other, nonexperiential, links. The world-involving views bring experiences back to a position of centrality, but only with a very different understanding of experiences: not as inner states of an agent but as factive, relational phenomena holding between a perceiving agent and a worldly state of affairs.

These three are quite general approaches, and there is much room for disagreement within each. Thus there are internalist as well as externalist varieties of each as well as disagreement within each as to which of the epistemological premises of PEW is to be rejected.

3.1 Evidentialist Approaches

For most of the history of philosophy, epistemologists have assumed a framework that is both internalist and at least weakly evidentialist. Since the mid-1960s, both the internalism and the evidentialism have become controversial views, rather than common ground that can simply be assumed without argument, though they are still very much live options.

The traditional framework is internalist in both of the two main senses of mentalism , holding that all the factors relevant to justification supervene on the nonfactive mental states of the agent; and accessibilism , requiring that the presence of these factors is knowable by the agent on the basis of mere reflection (see entry on internalist and externalist conceptions of epistemic justification ). The framework is weakly evidentialist in requiring—at least for any proposition that is not directly (i.e., immediately) justified—that its justification derives from and is a function of an actual or potential basing relation to some ground, or reason, in relation to which that proposition is a reasonable one to believe. Contemporary evidentialists tend to espouse a stronger kind of evidentialism, according to which all justification, and not just indirect justification, is a function of the agent’s evidence. But this is a later development. There’s no hint in Descartes or Locke, for example, that experiences serve as reasons for appearance beliefs; rather, their occurrence is partly constitutive of the reflectively transparent infallibility of those introspective judgments, which gives these judgments the highest degree of epistemic certainty.

Foundationalism is the view that some beliefs are epistemologically direct, or “basic”—i.e., their justification does not depend on evidential support from other beliefs—and all other justified beliefs ultimately derive their justification from these. (Basically justified beliefs are sometimes referred to as “immediately justified” as well.) Classical foundationalism is the view that (i) it is appearance beliefs —i.e., beliefs about perceptual appearances—that are basic, and perceptual beliefs about ordinary objects, events, and properties are based at least partly on these, and (ii) perceptual justification requires us to have good reason to think that the relevant current appearances are veridical. Basing is a relation of epistemic dependence and does not imply explicit inference, although particular theories might hold that the relation is satisfied only when inference occurs.

(i) is defended in one of several ways. Here are brief versions of some of the more common, often implicit, arguments:

• The empirical foundation must consist of the most highly justified contingent beliefs, and these are appearance beliefs.
• In order for perception to give us genuine knowledge of the external world, perceptual knowledge must be grounded in direct acquaintance with something; we are not directly acquainted with physical objects, but only with our experiences, so beliefs about these experiences must serve as the foundations of perceptual knowledge.
• We can and do articulate beliefs about our experiences in defense of our perceptual beliefs when challenged; so these appearance beliefs must be at least part of our evidence for the perceptual beliefs.
• Perceptual beliefs about external objects are not self-evident (if they were, they would be justified whenever held), so they must be based on some other belief; the only candidates are appearance beliefs, which plausibly are self-evident.

(ii) includes an endorsement of the Metaevidential Principle. We have looked at representative realism as one motivation for that principle, but there are others. Classical foundationalists have traditionally endorsed it because it follows from two other claims they find plausible. The first is (i) above, that our perceptual beliefs are based on appearance beliefs. The second is the claim that in order to be justified in believing hypothesis h on the basis of evidence e , one must be justified in believing that e makes h probable (or that e entails h , or e is good evidence for h , etc.) This second claim is a version of Richard Fumerton’s “Principle of Inferential Justification” and is often defended by citing examples (Fumerton 1995; see the entry on foundationalist theories of justification ). My belief that you’re going to die soon cannot be justified on the basis of your tarot card reading unless I’m justified in believing that tarot cards really do tell the future. Whether such examples generalize to all inferences is an open question. Some forms of internalism (see the entry on internalist vs. externalist conceptions of epistemic justification ) would imply the Principle of Inferential Justification as well.

The classical foundationalist avoids skepticism by rejecting the No-Good-Reason Claim, insisting that we do often have good, non-viciously-circular, reasons for thinking that our experiences are veridical. Two questions thus arise for classical foundationalism, one about the nature and justification of appearance beliefs and one about the allegedly non-circular inference from appearance beliefs to perceptual beliefs.

Appearance beliefs are not based on other beliefs, so how are they justified?

Appearance beliefs are a species of introspective belief, and introspection is sometimes thought to involve a “direct contact”, or “confrontation”, or “acquaintance with”, or “access to”, or “self-presentation” of certain truths. As we saw in section 2.1 , regarding “direct presence”, such metaphors could be unpacked in a variety of ways. If claims about “acquaintance” and the like (for simplicity, all of them will be referred to indiscriminately as “acquaintance”) are given an epistemological reading, then they seem to restate or reiterate the classical foundationalist’s claim that we can have foundational justification for appearance beliefs, rather than to explain or argue for that claim. If they are making some metaphysical claim, then the consequences for epistemology are indirect and unclear. Epistemologists are sometimes less than fully explicit about how they are understanding acquaintance. And however acquaintance is understood, the classical foundationalist must make acquaintance broad enough that we are plausibly acquainted with appearances (on pain of skepticism) but narrow enough that we are not acquainted with physical objects as well (or else endorse a very different kind of foundationalism).

Roderick Chisholm’s (1977) conception of acquaintance (he calls it “self-presentation”) is explicitly and fundamentally epistemic—a self-presenting state is simply one such that a person is justified in believing they are in it whenever they actually are in it. This doesn’t explain or argue for the special epistemic status of appearance beliefs, but Chisholm denies that argument or explanation is needed: it is self-presenting that appearance beliefs are self-presenting.

Attempts to explicate acquaintance in non-epistemic terms fall into one of two categories. The traditional way to understand acquaintance is in terms of a containment relation between appearance beliefs and appearances, with the result that appearance beliefs entail their own truth. This is the indirect realist’s analogue of the world-involvement invoked by direct realists (above, sections 2.1.4 , 2.3.3 ). Descartes (1641) held that appearance beliefs, like any belief about one’s own mental states, are infallible for this reason, and transparently so, and thereby justified. Though some still endorse this view (McGrew 2003), most epistemologists deny that our self-attributions are infallible. A more modest claim is that only some appearance beliefs are infallible. A certain kind of token-reflexive concept (“direct phenomenal concepts”) might include phenomenal qualities as literal elements or constituents (Chalmers 2003), and so introspective judgments that involve the application of such concepts cannot be mistaken.

This does not yet fully account for the distinctive epistemic status of appearance beliefs, as the epistemic implications of infallibility remain unclear, especially in the context of an internalist epistemology. One might believe some necessary truth as the result of a lucky guess; the belief is infallible, but not justified. This seems at least in part to result from the fact that the infallibility occurs, in some sense, outside of the agent’s perspective. (The infallibility involved in self-attribution, however, seems intuitively to fall within the agent’s perspective.)

The second type of approach views appearance beliefs as justified by something extrinsic to them, so that an appearance belief is justified when it is accompanied by acquaintance with the experiential fact that the appearance belief describes. Laurence BonJour (2003), for example, understands acquaintance in terms of constitutivity, though in a very different way from the one just seen. BonJour claims that awareness of the sensory content of an experience is partly constitutive of what it is to have a conscious experience. That awareness is thus infallible, but appearance beliefs —which purport to describe the experience and constituent awareness—are fallible. Though, he hastens to point out, we are very likely to get them right in such conditions. Similarly, Fumerton (1995, 2001) claims that acquaintance is a nonepistemic relation, but that whenever we’re acquainted with a fact, everything possibly relevant to the truth of that fact is unproblematically there before the mind.

These two views see acquaintance as a metaphysical (i.e., non-epistemic) relation. They lay down as a separate, further thesis one that is not directly entailed by but is rendered highly plausible, proponents think, by the nature of the acquaintance relation: that when one is thus acquainted with an experience, one has a strong prima facie justification to believe that one has that experience, and furthermore, that justification does not depend on any other beliefs. On either non-epistemic understanding of acquaintance, it puts us in a very good position to make correct judgments about our current experiences. Most classical foundationalists allow that all appearance beliefs are defeasible (i.e., having a kind of justification that is capable of being overridden or undermined by further reasons); hence the claim made is merely for prima facie , rather than ultima facie , justification. (To say that a belief is prima facie [aka pro tanto ] justified is to say that it is has some positive epistemic status, in the sense that it is justified if it is not defeated by overriding or undermining considerations.) Chisholm (1977) and Timothy McGrew (2003) endorse the stronger claim that acquaintance provides indefeasible, ultima facie justification.

So far we haven’t seen any talk of evidence; that will come later for these views, in the movement from appearance beliefs to beliefs about the external world. But a stronger kind of evidentialism could hold that the experience (or acquaintance with it) serves not only as a truth-maker and justifier for the appearance belief, but as evidence for that belief as well. By “evidence” is meant here not just any factor that serves to confer justification on a belief, but something that serves as a ground , or reason , or rational basis , for that belief. [ 2 ] Not all justification-conferring or justification-relevant factors count as evidence in this sense (if they did, evidentialism [see Conee and Feldman (2004) and entry on epistemology ] would not be the controversial thesis that it is). Evidence, in the current context, is something that an agent can possess and on which they can base a belief; someone who possesses evidence that fits , or supports, some belief has ( prima facie ) propositional justification for that belief, and doxastic justification if that belief is based on that evidence. Not all justification-making factors fit this bill. For example, Descartes held that all clear and distinct judgments were justified, though certain judgments—e.g., “I think”—are justified without evidential appeal to clarity and distinctness. It is the fact that it is clear and distinct that makes it justified, not the agent’s awareness of that fact or appreciation of that fact’s epistemic significance, so clarity and distinctness are not functioning here as evidence. Similarly, reliabilism holds, roughly, that being reliably formed renders a belief justified; although reliability need not—and typically does not—figure in as the agent’s evidence or grounds for believing something.

The stronger evidentialist view holds that even directly (i.e., basically/immediately) justified beliefs are justified by evidential connections, but since these beliefs are basic, their evidence must consist of something other than (justified) belief. Hence the popular claim that perceptual experiences are nondoxastic (i.e., non-belief) states that nevertheless serve as evidence for appearance beliefs, in much the way that beliefs serve as evidence for other beliefs, though with one crucial difference: for one belief to serve as evidence for another, the former must be justified; experiences on most views are not susceptible to justification, thus can be neither justified nor unjustified, but—on the standard strongly evidentialist view—can nevertheless serve as evidence and confer justification on beliefs. The justification of appearance beliefs on this view depends on evidential connections to other mental states but not to other beliefs, and because experiences need not be justified in order to serve as evidence, the threatened regress is halted in a way that is consistent with foundationalism. The idea of such nondoxastic evidence raises several problems, as we will see shortly.

Classical foundationalism is sometimes objected to on the grounds that we typically do not have beliefs about our experiences (e.g., Pollock 1986, Greco 2000), at least not consciously. This raises interesting and difficult issues about the natures of evidence and the basing relation. For the belief that p to serve as justifying evidence for the belief that q , must I consciously form the belief that p , or is it enough that, e.g., I have good reason to believe that p and be disposed to do so if the question arises? Surely the classical foundationalist never denied phenomenal directness or thought our perceptual beliefs were reasoned out explicitly. If one could show that only consciously formed beliefs could ground other beliefs, this would be bad news indeed for classical foundationalism, but this is a controversial claim. Alternatively, the objection might be that we are typically not even yet in a position to form justified appearance beliefs, in some situations where we are nevertheless well justified in our perceptual beliefs. Being in a position to form justified appearance beliefs would require further investigation, in an “inward” direction. This investigation is not always easy (Pollock 1986), and it is possible that such investigation would alter the nature of the experience. In addition, some perceivers may lack the conceptual resources to distinguish appearances from external objects, although they seem to be justified in their perceptual beliefs nonetheless.

The second big question for the classical foundationalist is how appearance beliefs provide justification for beliefs about external objects.

Cartesian foundationalism was the strictest form of classical foundationalism, requiring a deductive metaevidential argument for the reliability of perception. Descartes believed that he could give a non-circular argument for thinking that some perceptual experiences were veridical, by constructing an a priori argument for the reliability of perception. He also aimed for certainty, so his argument was a deductive one, starting with the existence and perfection of God and concluding that any clear and distinct awareness (including some elements of perceptual awarenesses) must be true; so some perceptual experiences—namely, the clear and distinct ones—are veridical. This would have licensed a rejection of the No-Good-Reason Claim, by showing how we could have a good reason for thinking our experiences to be veridical. However, Descartes’s a priori arguments for the existence of God were at best controversial, and the theology needed to deduce the reliability of perception from the perfection of the deity was unconvincing, so deductive metaevidential arguments along these lines were not pursued further.

NonCartesian forms of classical foundationalism have tried to combine the a priority required by non-circularity with a probabilistic form of inference, the most promising candidate being abduction, or inference to the best explanation (Russell 1912, BonJour 2003). According to this view, the best explanation of our experiences is the commonsense hypothesis that there is a mind-independent external world that conforms in some measure to these experiences and is the cause of them. The superiority of this explanation to the alternatives (idealism, a Cartesian demon, etc.) is held to be an a priori matter, thus not dependent on assuming the veridicality of the very experiences the argument is supposed to legitimate. There is a good deal of intuitive plausibility to the claim that an external world serves as the best explanation for our sense experience, but making that case in any detail, especially enough to satisfy the idealist, would require taking on some large and complex issues, like what makes one explanation better than another (see the entry on abduction ), and—since the commonsense view is sometimes (e.g., Russell 1912, BonJour 2010) held to be simpler than competitors—what counts as simplicity, a vexed question in the philosophy of science (see the entry on simplicity ). William Alston (1993) offers an influential critique of abductive arguments for the reliability of sense-experience.

Furthermore, if we are trying to explain how the ordinary person’s perceptual beliefs are justified, then it is not enough that there be some good deductive or abductive argument for the reliability of perception; this argument must be in some important sense available to or possessed by the agent. Premise (2) of PEW, after all, is the claim that the agent must have some good reason for thinking their experiences are veridical. Some (e.g., Pollock & Cruz 1999) think this imposes a significantly more onerous burden on the proponent of classical foundationalism, although others (e.g., BonJour 2010) claim that the superiority of the commonsense view is quite accessible to ordinary epistemic agents.

Other traditional foundationalists have responded to PEW by denying the Metaevidential Principle, rather than the No-Good-Reason Claim. Most such views have rejected both parts of the standard argument for the Metaevidential Principle ( 3.1.1 above), but one important exception is worth noting. Chisholm (1966, 1977) agrees with the classical foundationalist that perceptual beliefs are based on appearance beliefs but denies that any argument for the legitimacy of the appearance-reality inference is needed. Chisholm posits as a fundamental epistemic principle that if one is justified in believing herself to be perceptually appeared to as if p , then one is prima facie justified in believing that p . The significance of insisting that this principle is fundamental is to insist on the legitimacy of the move from p -appearance to p -reality while denying that that legitimacy is derived from deduction or abduction. This move is similar to one taken by the antireductionist in the epistemology of testimony (see the entry on epistemological problems of testimony ).

To the classical foundationalist, this move seems illicitly ad hoc . Admittedly, it gives the answer we desire—that perceptual beliefs are justified—but it doesn’t explain how this can be so or give us any reason to think it is true (Fumerton 1995). The objection holds that the postulation of fundamental epistemic principles licensing the inferences we like, despite our inability to provide an argument for the legitimacy of such inferences, has, to borrow Bertrand Russell’s apt phrase, all the advantages of theft over honest toil.

The coherentist, like the classical foundationalist, endorses the Metaevidential Principle but holds that we can indeed have good arguments for the reliability of perception. Coherentism is the view that at least some justification comes from mutual support among otherwise unsupported beliefs instead of tracing back to basic beliefs. As such, coherentists are sometimes said to endorse certain kinds of circular (they prefer to call them holistic) argument, but a coherentist will reject the No-Good-Reason Claim by insisting that there is nothing viciously circular about our arguments for the reliability of perception (BonJour 1985, Lehrer 1990). Because it allows mutual support, coherentism can tolerate empirical arguments for the reliability of perception, in principle, allowing appeals to track records, evolution, and other scientific evidence.

Coherentism has traditionally been propounded as a doxastic theory: one that holds that only beliefs can serve as evidence. This is in part because one of the major motivations for coherentism derives from an argument due to Wilfrid Sellars (1956), Donald Davidson (1986) and Laurence BonJour (1980) that purports to show that nondoxastic states (e.g., experiences) cannot play an evidential role (about which, more below, in section 3.1.5 ). Indeed, on this sort of view, experiences play no epistemic role at all (though maybe a causal, psychological role), either evidential or otherwise. This doxasticism is the source of one of the most notorious problems for coherentism, however, for the internal coherence of a belief system could result from the ingenuity of the believer, rather than from its fit with reality. A detailed enough and cleverly constructed fairy tale could be highly internally coherent, but surely I am not justified in believing the fairy tale, in my current situation and environment. This is the famous isolation objection to coherentism: a belief system could be isolated from the world and yet be fully coherent. Since those beliefs would not be justified, coherence is not sufficient for justification.

The brunt of the isolation objection is that (doxastic) coherentism is unable to do justice to perception, for it does not require any genuinely perceptual contact with the world. But without perception, the whole of one’s beliefs is just another plausible story, not the one true description of things. (Even with perception, there is unlikely to be a single best belief set, but the number of equally good contenders will be vastly reduced.) For some time, BonJour (1985) thought that the problem could be solved with more beliefs; he required a candidate belief system to include a number of beliefs attributing reliability to beliefs that seem to be involuntary, noninferential, and directly caused by the outside world. But this solution seemed ad hoc , and it still didn’t require the belief set to be very highly constrained by perception; at best it constrained the belief set by what the agent believes to be perception, and even then, only those putatively perceptual beliefs about which the agent has favorable metabeliefs would need to constrain the rest of the system in any way. This seems to render perception epistemically “optional”, in an objectionable way.

Although BonJour (1997) has consequently abandoned this approach in favor of a form of foundationalism, others have sought to incorporate experiences into a nondoxastic coherentism (Conee 1988, Haack 1993, Kvanvig 2012, Kvanvig & Riggs 1992). If experiences are among the relata over which the coherence relation is defined, then a fully isolated agent won’t be able to satisfy the coherence requirement, and the isolation objection may be averted.

It is unclear whether such a move genuinely rescues coherentism or simply replaces it with a version of foundationalism. If consonance with experience can increase the credibility of a belief, then it begins to look as if that belief satisfies at least some (“weak”) foundationalist definitions of an epistemologically basic belief. Instead, the nondoxastic coherentist might insist that experiences justify perceptual beliefs, but only in the presence of the right background beliefs about which experiences reliably indicate which distal states of affairs, where these background beliefs are themselves justified in a coherentist manner (Gupta 2006). This view seems to be securely coherentist, though it threatens to render coherence with experience optional in just the way BonJour’s older view did. The crucial question here is whether experiences—alone, and in and of themselves—affect the coherence of a belief system, or whether they do so only in the presence of the relevant metabeliefs. If the former, then “nondoxastic coherentism” may not be significantly different from some form of foundationalism. If the latter, then an agent lacking the requisite metabeliefs might satisfy the coherence requirements quite well but have a belief system that clashes with their experience, and the nondoxastic coherentist would have to hold that the agent is none the worse, epistemically, for that fact.

The very spirit of coherentism seems to dictate that perception yields justification only because and insofar as the perceiver has metabeliefs that favor perception, while it is central to the foundationalist theory of perception that perceptual experience imposes epistemic constraints on us, whether we believe it or not.

The epistemological views considered so far can all be considered egoistic theories , for they hold that justification for beliefs about external objects depends in part on justification for beliefs about oneself—about one’s current mental states, about the connections between one’s experiences or putatively perceptual beliefs and certain distal states of affairs, rendering perceptual beliefs nonbasic. Modest foundationalism is a nonegoistic version of foundationalism, one that allows some beliefs about external objects and their properties—particularly, perceptual beliefs—to be epistemologically basic. (Both types of foundationalism also countenance other basic beliefs, e.g., beliefs about simple arithmetical truths.) Modest foundationalism thus denies the Metaevidential Principle; perceptual beliefs are not based on other beliefs and thus not based on appearance beliefs, and if they are based on something other than beliefs (namely, experiences) the agent need not have a justified belief about the reliability of this connection.

Some proponents of modest foundationalism go a step further and offer a derivative denial of the No-Good-Reason Claim: since we already have justified beliefs about our surroundings, and introspective knowledge of the deliverances of perception, we can construct non-circular arguments for the reliability of perception. Indeed, if I can have first-order knowledge about the world around me without first having metaevidence about the reliability of perception, I should be able to accumulate empirical evidence for thinking that I am not a brain in a vat, that I am not dreaming, etc., without begging the question. Whether this should count as a virtue or a vice of the theory is a matter of debate. Proponents of a “Moorean” response to skepticism (see the entries on skepticism and epistemic closure ) will see this as a selling point for modest foundationalism (Pryor 2000). Others (Vogel 2000, 2008; Cohen 2002) have interpreted this result as revealing a fundamental flaw of the theory: it makes justification and knowledge “too easy”. It is as if I used an untested speedometer to form beliefs both about my speed and what the meter indicated my speed to be, then used a number of such belief pairs to inductively argue for the reliability of the speedometer.

Modest foundationalism endorses epistemological directness ( section 2.1.5 above) and could be considered a kind of epistemological direct realism , for it makes the world and its elements “directly present” to the mind in a fairly clear, epistemological sense: perceptual justification is not dependent on any other justification; no other beliefs are interposed between us and the world (in fact, John Pollock’s term for his [1971, 1986] modest foundationalism is “direct realism”; cf. Pollock & Cruz 1999). Modest foundationalism is compatible with any metaphysical view about the nature of perception. Even a sense-datum theorist could embrace this epistemological direct realism, provided they held that the inference from sense-data to external objects was a kind of (perhaps unconscious or subpersonal) inference that does not impose evidential requirements on the conclusion belief.

Modest foundationalism is usually associated with the internalist, strongly evidentialist versions of the theory, of the sort initially developed by Pollock (1971) and Anthony Quinton (1973), though given renewed visibility in recent decades by James Pryor (2000), Michael Huemer (2001) and others. These views hold that perceptual beliefs about external objects, events, and properties are directly justified by the corresponding perceptual experiences; it is the experiences themselves, rather than beliefs about the experiences, that do the justificatory work. Thus, Huemer’s (2007) “phenomenal conservatism”, Pryor’s (2000) “dogmatism”, and Pollock’s (1971, 1974, 1986) “direct realism” all endorse something like the following principle:

If S has a perceptual experience as of p , then S is prima facie justified in believing that p .

Alternatively:

If it perceptually seems to S that p , then S is prima facie justified in believing that p .

That is, S is prima facie justified whether or not perception is reliable for S and whether or not S has any evidence in favor of the claim that perception is reliable. Perceptual beliefs are justified by the experience alone, in virtue of some intrinsic feature of that experience (its content, or phenomenal character, or assertive force, some combination of these, etc.). Of course, because the justification here is only prima facie justification, this justification could be defeated if, say, S has good enough reason to think that perception is unreliable, or has independent evidence that p is false.

To have a neutral term, this view will be called “ seemings internalism ”, for it holds that perceptual beliefs are based on “seemings”, i.e., appearance states, i.e., experiences. (There is no fixed, established terminology here.) Seemings internalism is attractive on the grounds that it offers intuitively correct, nonskeptical verdicts about ordinary perceptual belief and does so, according to some proponents, in a way that is less intellectually demanding than other internalist views, thus more likely to get the result that animals and small children have perceptual knowledge, even though they’re not sophisticated enough to have beliefs about appearances.

Susanna Schellenberg’s (2013, 2018) view is best classified as a form of seemings internalism, but only about one aspect or dimension of justification. On her view, any time it perceptually seems to you that p , you have “phenomenal evidence” for p . Full justification of the sort required for knowledge requires another kind of justification in addition to phenomenal evidence (as we’ll see in section 3.3). She has a complex externalist theory about what constitutes it seeming to you that p, but there is no conflict between a seemings internalist epistemology and the various kinds of semantic externalism (see entry on externalism about the mind ).

Most seemings internalists are fairly liberal about the contents of the seemings and thus about which perception-based beliefs are directly justified. Others, notably Elijah Chudnof (2018) and Matthew McGrath (2013, 2018), are more conservative. Is my belief that there’s a dog in front of me basic, or does its justification depend on the justification of more elemental beliefs: that there’s a medium sized, 3-dimensional object of such-and-such a shape and a furry texture, etc.? Is my belief that that’s Django on the floor in front of me basic, or does it depend on the belief that there’s a black and tan dog of a certain description, that Django is a black and tan dog who fits that description, etc.? Liberals will take the former options, while conservatives will go with something like the latter. Seemings internalism requires experiential states whose contents match the contents of the basic beliefs, so a liberal view about direct justification requires a liberal view about the contents of perceptual experience (see the entry on the contents of perception ). Chudnoff (2018) combines a liberal theory about the contents of perception with a conservative view about basic beliefs by endorsing a restricted kind of seemings internalism: not all perceptual experiences provide prima facie justification, only the ones with “presentational phenomenology”, which not all perceptual experiences do have.

Perhaps the most important problem for internalist, evidentialist views concerns the relevant understanding of seemings, or perceptual experience. It is clear that seemings must be non-belief states of some sort, as their epistemological role is to confer justification on basic beliefs, and the latter wouldn’t be basic if seemings were themselves beliefs. The “Sellarsian dilemma” is a famous argument, in some ways due as much to BonJour (1978, 1985) as to Sellars (1956), which claims that “experience” and “seemings” and the like are ambiguous in a way that undermines the epistemological role that a strongly evidentialist foundationalism requires of experiences. That role, of course, is to provide justification for beliefs without being themselves in need of it. Sellars (1956) starts with the justification of appearance beliefs. He argues that there is a kind of noncognitive awareness of sensations that does not involve learning or the application of concepts; this kind of awareness accompanies all conscious sensations, but this kind of awareness does not account for the justification of our appearance beliefs, for one might well have this kind of awareness without having any idea what kind of experiences one is having (or any idea that there are such things as experiences). There is another kind of awareness of our sensations that does involve the application of concepts and does entail knowledge and justification. But this awareness just is one’s knowledge of one’s experiences (i.e., one’s justified, true, unGettiered appearance belief). But that kind of awareness cannot then serve as a nondoxastic foundation that confers justification on beliefs without being itself in need of justification (see Lyons 2016).

This argument--Sellars’s original argument--is aimed at a kind of classical foundationalism, but a modified version has more general ambitions. Sellars himself (1956) thought that there are two elements to perception: a bare sensation, which is an inner event with qualitative character but no representational content; and a perceptual belief (or belief-like state, in cases where the agent does not accept appearances at face value; see Reid 1764, 1785 for a similar view). Recent formulations of the Sellarsian dilemma have focused on this mismatch in content between experience and perceptual belief, and have modified the argument to include an attack on modest foundationalism. There are several variants of the argument; what follows is an amalgamated version.

• Let us say that a state is “cognitive” just in case it has conceptual and propositional content, and assertive force; it is “noncognitive” otherwise. [ 3 ]
• If an experience is noncognitive, then it cannot justify a perceptual belief.
• If an experience is cognitive, then it cannot justify any beliefs unless it is itself justified.
• Therefore, in neither case can an experience confer justification without being itself justified.

In defense of (2) , experiences have frequently been construed as lacking representational contents altogether (Sellars 1956, Martin 2002, Brewer 2011), or as having nonconceptual contents (Heck 2000, Peacocke 2001). [ 4 ] An influential argument (e.g., McDowell 1994, Brewer 1999) holds that without conceptual content, an experience would have to stand outside the “logical space of reasons” and thus cannot justify a belief. This line is perhaps most plausible if the relevant mode of justification is assumed to be a specifically evidential one (see section 3.1.1 above). To serve as evidence, the experience would need to stand in logical or probabilistic relations to beliefs, and without (conceptual) contents, it is unclear how it could stand in evidential relations to beliefs, or which beliefs it would serve as evidence for (McDowell 1994). A common response is that as long as experiences have contents of any sort, they can have truth conditions and thus stand in entailment and probabilistic relations to beliefs (Heck 2000, Byrne 2005). One way to follow through on the original argument for (2) is to emphasize the kind of content necessary for evidence appreciable as such by the perceiver. If experiences are nonconceptual, then it seems that I could have a nonconceptual experience of a cat without being in any position to appreciate the fact that the experience is of a cat . In such a case, I could fail to have any justification for believing that there is cat in front of me. So nonconceptual experiences cannot, by themselves, justify perceptual beliefs (Lyons 2016). Such an argument requires the controversial assumption that an agent must “appreciate” e ’s evidential significance vis-à-vis h , in order for e to supply that agent with evidence for h . Some (e.g., Alston 1988) have explicitly rejected this assumption, although some forms of access internalism require it.

As for the other horn of the dilemma, premise (3) , one can argue that so-called “experiences” that have assertive force and the same contents as beliefs are, if not themselves beliefs, at least sufficiently belief- like that they are susceptible to epistemic evaluation in much the way that beliefs are; if so and if only the “justified” ones can confer justification on beliefs, then these experiences will not have filled the role foundationalism had carved out for them (Sellars 1956, BonJour 1978, Sosa 2007).

In recent years, several authors (Lyons 2005, 2009; Bengson, Grube, & Korman 2011; Brogaard 2013) have argued that what we think of as perceptual experiences is actually a composite of two (or more) distinct elements, what Chris Tucker (2010) calls the “sensation” (an imagistic state, rich in perceptual phenomenology) and a “seeming” (here construed as a purely representational state, applying conceptual categories to things in the world). Seemings understood in this way are still non-belief states: in cases of known perceptual illusion, it might seem to me that p , even though I don’t believe that p . Something like the above Sellarsian dilemma can be run with this distinction in hand: sensations without seemings are insufficient to justify beliefs; and seemings without sensations would be subjectively too similar to mere hunches to justify beliefs (Lyons 2009). The seemings internalist can reply by arguing that seemings alone, even construed as just one component of perceptual experience, can indeed justify beliefs (Tucker 2010), or by rejecting this composite view, insisting that a seeming is a single, unified state, whose perceptual phenomenology and conceptual content are inextricably linked (Chudnoff & Didomenico 2015).

Seemings internalism as formulated above claims that the content of the experience is the same as the content of the belief, thus rejecting premise (3) of the Sellarsian argument. There may be variations close enough to still count as seemings internalism that deny (2) instead, allowing experiences with nonconceptual contents to justify beliefs. The standard schema would have to be modified:

If S has a perceptual experience as of p* , then S is prima facie justified in believing that p .

One would, of course, want to say more about the relation between p and p* . Although his concern is not with nonconceptual content, Nico Silins (2011) defends a view much like seemings internalism, where the experiences are not required to have the same contents as the beliefs.

A second problem is that of alien sense modalities (Bergmann 2006). There are possible creatures with sense modalities and experiences that are foreign to us: echolocation, electroreception, etc., and presumably these creatures can be justified in their alien perceptual beliefs. If metaevidential beliefs are not necessary for perceptual justification, then these same experiences ought to justify us in those same beliefs. Intuitively, however, a sudden electroreceptive experience would not justify me in believing there was a medium sized animal about three feet behind me. In fact, a famous objection to a different (reliabilist) theory seems to apply equally well to seemings internalism. Norman (BonJour 1980) has no reason for thinking that he has reliable clairvoyant powers, but one day he has a clairvoyant experience as of the president being in New York; intuitively, he is not prima facie justified in believing that the president is in New York, yet seemings internalism seems to imply that he is. The clairvoyance objection is normally pressed against reliabilist theories, not on the basis of the reliability component, but rather on the basis of their rejection of the Metaevidential Principle, a rejection that is shared by seemings internalism. One might reply that Norman’s experience is not exactly perceptual; perhaps this might offer a way out, especially if one could explain why it isn’t perceptual and why that should make a difference. Some versions of seemings internalism restrict their claims to perception (Pryor 2000), although some (Huemer 2007) apply to seemings much more generally.

Another potential problem is that seemings internalism is insensitive to the etiology of the experience, although it intuitively seems that this should matter. If the only reason Jack looks angry to Jill is that she has an irrational fear that he would be angry, then her perceptual experience as of angry-Jack should not carry its usual evidential weight (Siegel 2011). This problem is sometimes framed in terms of the “cognitive penetration of perception”, a controversial empirical issue in the philosophy of perception. In general, experiences that result from wishful thinking, fear, and various irrational processes should not have the same evidential import as do experiences with a more respectable etiology (Markie 2005, Siegel 2013). But seemings internalism makes the experience itself sufficient for ( prima facie ) justification and thus leaves no role for etiology to play. One response to these sorts of cases is that if it genuinely looks to Jill as if Jack is angry, then the only appropriate thing for Jill to do is believe that he is angry (Huemer 2013). This is compatible with there still being something else epistemically lacking in Jill; e.g., she presumably doesn’t know that Jack is angry (even if he is). Chris Tucker (2014) argues that cognitive penetration problems are a worry for everyone, not just for seemings internalists.

This last concern in particular calls into question a phenomenal determination principle, assumed by all the epistemological views canvassed so far, which holds that the phenomenal character of an experience completely determines which beliefs that experience directly justifies: two agents cannot be alike with respect to their phenomenology and yet differ in which beliefs are directly ( prima facie ) justified for them. The phenomenal determination principle has some intuitive plausibility, but so does its denial. Cognitive penetration cases (Markie 2005, Siegel 2011) purport to offer cases where two agents have the same phenomenal states but different direct justification, and certain responses to the new evil demon objection to reliabilism (Lyons 2012) try to undermine intuitive support for the phenomenal determination principle.

A different worry concerns the basing relation. Doxastic evidential justification is generally thought to require that the belief be based on the justifying evidence, where basing is some kind of psychological relation (which psychological relation is a matter of some controversy--see the entry on the epistemic basing relation ). This makes it a partly empirical question whether we typically or ever actually do base perceptual beliefs on experiences. Although it seems intuitively plausible that we do, Jack Lyons (2020) argues that the empirical facts about the contents of perceptual experiences and about the time course of conscious experience and perceptual categorization render this claim unlikely.

A final worry for seemings internalism is one that we encountered above in section 3.1.2 in connection with a different view: the proposal seems to be an ad hoc attempt to get the desired nonskeptical answer without further justification for the principle. What is it about seemings, after all, that makes them able to generate justification? The desire that p has propositional content but doesn’t justify the belief that p ; the unjustified belief that q has assertoric force but doesn’t justify the belief that q (Lyons 2008, Ghijsen 2014); imaginings can have phenomenal force but don’t justify beliefs (Teng 2018), and so on. Chudnoff 2018, 2021 holds that some seemings have a particular phenomenal character (“presentational phenomenology”), namely that of seeming to put us in direct contact with an extramental reality. But he holds that only some seemings have this phenomenology, and it’s only these that confer direct justification, so this view won’t give most seemings internalists all they want. Pollock’s (1986) epistemological theory of concepts addresses this worry by claiming that it is part of the concept of, e.g., red that a certain perceptual experience (or seeming) is a prima facie reason for the belief that x is red. Most recent proponents of seemings internalism have not embraced this part of Pollock’s view.

Some of the problems facing internalist evidentialist theories are at least ostensibly solved by going externalist. A view we might call “seemings externalism” holds along with seemings internalism that perceptual beliefs are justified when based on a fitting experience but is externalist about the fittingness relation, allowing that what makes for fittingness need not be accessible by reflection nor need supervene on the nonfactive mental states of the believer. This sort of view is premised on the rejection of the phenomenal determination principle articulated above. Assuming that experiences are necessarily conscious and that conscious states are necessarily accessible, seemings externalism nevertheless imposes an internalist constraint on perceptual justification: one component of justification must be an accessible mental state of the agent. But the rest of the justificatory story is thoroughgoingly externalist. To date, this sort of view has been developed in two ways, one reliabilist and one functionalist.

An example of the first approach is Alston’s (1988) internalist externalism. He requires that every justified belief have some ground, or evidence, and that this ground be accessible; that is the internalist element. He claims, however, that what makes a ground (good) evidence for some belief is that the ground reliably indicates the truth of that belief, and this fact is one that need not be accessible to the agent; this is the externalist element. (See Comesaña 2010 for a similar view.) Although Alvin Goldman is best known for the reliabilist (etiological) theory to be addressed in section 3.2, he also (2011) has developed a reliabilist/evidentialist “synthesis”, where experiential evidence plays a central role in perception. (He does not, however, require that all justified perceptual beliefs be based on some experience.) He offers a two-factor reliabilist proposal for understanding evidence, which combines process and indicator reliabilism (see entry on reliabilist epistemology ); for e to be evidence for h (i) e must be among the inputs to a reliable process that outputs h , and (ii) there must be an objective fittingness relation between e and h , that is, e must reliably indicate the truth of h , in the sense of making h objectively likely to be true. Both components, (i) and (ii), are externalist in both the mentalist and accessibilist senses.

The second approach says that an experience fits the belief that p if it’s the function—in a biological or teleological sense—of the state to indicate p (Plantinga 1993, Bergmann 2006, 2013). On this view, there need not be any necessary or intrinsic connection between a certain kind of experience and the belief it justifies, and the belief need not even tend to be true whenever the experience is undergone; all that’s required is that this belief be the proper response to the experience, in the sense that a properly functioning agent (or an agent whose perceptual/doxastic system is functioning properly) will form that belief in response to that experience.

Objections to these views are typically just specific applications of objections to the relevant externalism: reliabilist and teleological theories more generally. For instance, clairvoyance objections (BonJour 1980) aim to show that reliability is not sufficient for prima facie justification, and new evil demon arguments (Lehrer & Cohen 1983, Cohen 1984) insist that reliability is not necessary (see the entry on reliabilist epistemology ). One way to run the new evil demon argument is to image an experiential state that seamlessly transitions from reliably indicating p to not reliably indicating p; intuitively the agent remains justified throughout and should not change their mind or suspend belief halfway through (Smithies 2019, Pautz 2020). Functionalists might have resources here that reliabilists do not, unless these arguments are sufficient to establish a general internalism. However, they face the additional problem of the Swampman (Davidson 1987, Sosa 1993), who is a randomly occurring (therefore, lacking in any biological functions) molecular duplicate of a normal person; intuitively he seems to have justified perceptual beliefs, although this cannot be accounted for in terms of function, at least on some views about functions. Perhaps, however, Swampman can fairly quickly acquire some functions as the result of interactions with his environment (Graham 2019) and thereby have justification fairly soon after his appearance, even if not immediately.

If experiences have justificatory power only when reliability or proper function are added into the mix, one might wonder if it’s better to just omit any reference to experience and instead simply analyze perceptual justification directly in terms of reliability or proper function. Indeed, these make up two prominent etiological approaches to perceptual justification and knowledge. A third etiological approach is an inferentialist one. All three reject the Metaevidential Principle and access internalism.

Goldman (1979, 1986) argues that justification results from the operation or exercise of a cognitive process whose operation is objectively likely to yield true beliefs; the process must really be reliable in this sense, but the agent need not be aware of that fact. [ 5 ] (To be ultima facie justified the agent must not have reasons to think the process unreliable.)

A reliabilist theory of perceptual justification falls out from a reliabilist theory of justification in general, the simplest version of which is one that holds

(SR): a belief is prima facie justified iff it is the result of a reliable cognitive process.

By claiming that reliability is sufficient for perceptual justification, the theory allows for justification in the absence of experiences or anything else that the agent might use as evidence for the belief. It allows that blindsighters and zombies could have perceptual justification. (Blindsight is a real phenomenon where patients with damage to early visual cortex are capable of forming reliable perceptual judgments in the absence of perceptual experiences; philosophical depictions of blindsight tend to be somewhat fictionalized. Zombies in philosophical parlance are creatures otherwise just like us but lacking conscious experiences altogether.) It is nonevidentialist in the further sense that even where some link in the causal chain happens to count as an evidential state for the cognizer (i.e., one on which they might base a belief), that state’s status as evidence is irrelevant to its epistemic role, so long as it still makes the same contribution to the reliability of the overall process.

A different kind of broadly reliabilist theory emphasizes skills or competences, rather than cognitive processes (Sosa 1991, 2007, 2021). Skills will likely be individuated in different ways than cognitive processes, and reliability might be assessed differently for different skills (as one does with performances more generally: a skillful driver must almost never wreck the car, while a skillful batter might strike out more than half the time). Nevertheless, the view is still reliabilist in that skill is a matter of having a high enough propensity to believe truly. Ernest Sosa’s influential development of this view distinguishes “animal knowledge”—a belief is true because competently formed—from “reflective knowledge”—where the subject has true-because-competently-formed belief that a lower order belief is true because competently formed. Concepts of animal and reflective justification are easily derived from these. Although Sosa denies the Metaevidential Principle for animal knowledge/justification, he embraces it for reflective knowledge/justification.

One reliabilist theory that aims at perceptual justification in particular holds that it is not merely reliability that gives perception its epistemic force but also the fact that perceptual beliefs have a distinctive psychological provenance. In particular, they are the outputs of (weakly) “modular” perceptual processes (where what counts as a perceptual module is spelled out in architectural terms, rather than in terms of phenomenology or the agent’s background beliefs; Lyons 2009). This “inferentialist reliabilist” theory (so-called not because of its treatment of perception but because of its treatment of some nonperceptual belief) claims that reliability is only sufficient for the ( prima facie ) justification of the outputs of modular processes, but that the reliabilist can and should impose inferential requirements (understood in reliabilist ways) on other beliefs. Though the view is designed as a version of reliabilism, a mentalist internalist could accept the modularity part and drop the reliability part, claiming that the outputs of perceptual modules are thereby prima facie justified whenever held, irrespective of either experience or reliability.

In addition to or instead of reliability, one could endorse a functionalist view about the justification of perceptual beliefs. Tyler Burge (2003, 2020) and Peter Graham (2012, 2019) are the most prominent proponents of this sort of view in its non-evidentialist mode. Both hold that the belief-forming process need not be reliable, but it must have the (teleological) function of producing reliably true beliefs. This requires that the process be (/have been) reliable in normal conditions—i.e., the conditions where producing a particular result led to the establishment of that result as the function. For Burge, however, the functions derive from the fact that percepts and beliefs are representational states, and it’s an a priori condition on any representational state that it has the function of representing correctly; thus the view is that perceptual justification (he calls it “entitlement”) requires that the perceptual process and its elements be reliable in those conditions in which the contents of those elements was fixed. For Graham, the functions result from the empirical fact that the processes have done the organism (or its ancestors) some practical, biological good.

These views are fully externalist, but there is a kind of etiological view that is compatible with mentalism. An “inferentialist” theory holds that perception involves an inferential or quasi-inferential process and that perceptual beliefs are justified or not, according as the inferential moves pass muster vis-a-vis whatever the ordinary standards are for inference more generally. The inference to be evaluated can be unconscious and of the Helmholtzian sort that perceptual psychologists talk about (Siegel 2013, 2017), or it can be a move from conscious, person-level contents, like low-level sensory contents, to high level perceptual categorization beliefs (e.g., ‘there’s a cat’) (Markie 2006, 2013; McGrath 2013, 2018). The latter option ends up being a version of the evidentialist theories discussed above (usually a conservative kind of modest foundationalism) and won’t get repeated treatment here; but the former is a distinctive theory of perceptual justification. Susanna Siegel takes her inferentialism so far as to claim that nondoxastic perceptual experiences are themselves epistemically evaluable and can be effectively unjustified, if their etiology is an inferentially bad one. Although the inferentialist can make explicit appeal to experiences, one can also develop an inferentialism that assigns no significant role to experience as such (Ghijsen 2021), and in any case, the experience is merely one link in the inferential chain on the basis of which the perceptual belief is evaluated. (As stated above, the evidential, etiological, and world-involving approaches were not held to be mutually exclusive.) One putative counterexample to Siegel’s inferentialism involves an agent who believes for no good reason that the woods around them are full of snakes, and this irrational belief affects their perceptual experiences in such a way that they are now better at spotting snakes that are actually there (Lyons 2011). Intuitively, the agent is justified in their perceptual beliefs, despite an irrational inferential etiology.

As with the seeming externalist views, the standard clairvoyance, new evil demon, and Swampman objections to reliabilist and functionalist theories are leveled against these theories of perceptual justification. Proponents of the phenomenal determination principle (section 3.1.5 above) will reject all of these views as incompatible with that principle (Smithies 2019, Pautz 2020). A closely related issue concerns agents who don’t have any experiences. Because these theories allow perceptual justification in the absence of any experience, they will allow zombies and blindsighters to have perceptual justification, so long as their perceptual processes are reliable, or functioning normally, or drawing rational unconscious inferences, and so on. Intuitions on this matter seem to be divided; some authors think this consequence is a virtue of such views (Plantinga 1993, Lyons 2009, Tucker 2010), though others think it is clearly a vice (e.g., Smithies 2019, Johnston 2011).

The theories considered so far all consider the justification of a particular belief to be independent of whether the agent is veridically perceiving on that occasion, or is hallucinating or being deceived by a Cartesian demon, etc. (although some of these views would allow that widespread and persistent deception reduces reliability, and certain kinds of hallucination might involve a different relevant etiology from normal veridical perception). On a world-involving view, the mere fact that the agent is veridically perceiving means that the agent has a kind of justification that no hallucinating subject could have. Such a view is sometimes also referred to as “epistemological disjunctivism” (Pritchard 2012), though some proponents reject this label (Schellenberg 2018). On this sort of view, the agent in the “good” case (veridical perception) has the best sort of empirical evidence one could hope for: the world itself is made manifest through perception; the agent in the “bad” case (hallucination) has either no justification at all (Byrne 2014, 2016) or a different and presumably inferior kind of justification (Williamson 2000, Millar 2011, 2019, Schellenberg 2013, 2018).

Common to the various forms of epistemological disjunctivism is the idea that, normally, when you see a barn, you thereby know that there’s a barn in front of you. This can be understood in two very different ways. On the “evidential” construal, the relevant seeing is a non-doxastic, non-epistemic factive experiential state, on which your belief that there’s a barn is based. This state can be understood along the lines of metaphysical disjunctivism ( section 2.1.4 , 2.3.3 above), as a world-involving relation of a subject to a perceptual object; or it can be understood as an internal (e.g., representational) state that has a different epistemic potency when it’s veridical. On the “constitutive” construal, your seeing that there’s a barn just is your knowing that there’s a barn, since seeing that p is a determinate of the determinable, knowing that p. The first kind of seeing is consistent with the agent being in fake barn country (see entry on epistemology ), or having good reasons to believe they’re being deceived, or suspending belief about whether there’s a barn; the second kind of seeing—assuming that defeaters and environmental luck block knowledge, and that knowledge requires belief—is not.

The pioneer of this general approach is John McDowell (1982), although it is difficult to know just what view he endorses. There are hints of metaphysical disjunctivism and an evidential construal of seeing, especially in earlier writings, although he has long insisted that one does not see that there’s a barn in fake barn country. One possibility is that McDowell’s talk about seeing is simply a particular kind of “conclusive reason” (in the sense of Dretske 1971) (Graham and Pederson 2020).

One key motivation for a world-involving approach is the idea that if the warrant (/evidence/justification) that we have in the good case is no different from the warrant we have in the bad case, then it must be in itself neutral between these possibilities and thus can’t justify, say, the belief that there’s a real table there, rather than a hallucinated table—at least, not without a hefty contribution from background knowledge (McDowell 1982, 2011, 2018). A second motivation is the claim that some or all evidence is factive. Some epistemologists hold that all evidence is factive, in the sense that only true things can serve as evidence (Williamson 2000, Littlejohn 2012, Byrne 2014); this would preclude hallucinations from conferring evidence on perceptual beliefs. Schellenberg (2013, 2018) argues that successful exercises of perceptual capacities yield a special, superior, kind of evidence—“factive evidence”—which is absent in cases of hallucination, though she thinks hallucinations do provide another kind of evidence ( section 3.1.4 above).

Direct world-involvement theories tend to be instances of modest foundationalism ( section 3.1.4 above), holding that perceptual knowledge and justification are direct, and therefore denying the Metaevidential Principle, at least in a form that holds that the metaevidential knowledge/justification is prior to the perceptual knowledge/justification. Some proponents also reject the No-Good-Reason Claim, holding that in veridical perception, not only is the world manifest to us, but so is that fact (Pritchard 2012, McDowell 2011), even though the good case and the bad case are in some sense indistinguishable. This would support a form of access internalism, though an unusual one and one that some other internalists will find unsatisfactory (Smithies 2013). Although mentalist internalism is defined in terms of nonfactive mental states, McDowell’s defense of epistemological disjunctivism has always been motivated by a kind of internalism, and he thinks that states of seeing, though factive, satisfy whatever needs our internalist intuitions demand. Other versions of the view are staunchly externalist (Williamson 2000, Schellenberg 2013).

The biggest objection to this general approach is that it doesn’t allow or doesn’t illuminate perceptual justification in cases of error, at least not in cases of hallucination. Those with more conventional internalist intuitions will think that some or all hallucination victims will be just as justified as veridical perceivers (even though the former won’t be in a position thereby to know). In fact, the New Evil Demon objection to reliabilism ( section 3.1.6 above, entry on reliabilist epistemology ) takes this as an obvious starting point, and many externalists have crafted or modified their theories to accommodate this intuition (Goldman 1986, 1988, Graham 2012). Some disjunctivists have tried to blunt the impact of this objection by suggesting that there’s another kind of justification or another route to justification available in the bad case. Schellenberg (2013, 2018) allows that there’s a degree or dimension of justification available even in the bad case; and Williamson (2000) suggests that sufficiently sophisticated hallucinators have introspective knowledge that things look F, and this affords them inferential justification for thinking that something is F.

The epistemological problems of perception have traditionally centered on the threat of skepticism, in particular, on the “veil of perception” implicated by a well-known metaphysics of perception, which threatens to lead to skepticism. Although much of the history of philosophy has involved attempts to find metaphysical solutions to this problem, recent decades have seen a proliferation of dedicatedly epistemological theories, offering more direct responses to these concerns. Even if we have a metaphysics in place, we will still need to make difficult decisions about the epistemology. Various evidential, etiological, and direct world-involvement theories have been proposed, including combinations of these. Each of these three admits of internalist as well as externalist variants. The result is an active and ongoing area of research in epistemology.

• Alston, William P., 1988, “An Internalist Externalism”, Synthese , 74(3): 265–283. doi:10.1007/BF00869630
• –––, 1993, The Reliability of Sense Perception , Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• –––, 1999, “Back to the Theory of Appearing”, Philosophical Perspectives , 13: 181–203.
• Augustine, Against the Academicians and The Teacher , P. King (trans.), Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing, 1995.
• Bengson, John, Enrico Grube, & Daniel Z. Korman, 2011, “A New Framework for Conceptualism”, Noûs , 45(1): 167–189. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0068.2010.00764.x
• Bergmann, Michael, 2004, “Externalist Justification without Reliability”, Philosophical Issues , 14(1): 35–60. doi:10.1111/j.1533-6077.2004.00019.x
• –––, 2006, Justification Without Awareness: A Defense of Epistemic Externalism , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2013, “Externalist Justification and the Role of Seemings”, Philosophical Studies, 166 (1): 163–184.
• Berkeley, George, 1710, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge , reprinted in Berkeley 1975, 61–127.
• –––, 1713, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous , reprinted in Berkeley 1975, 129–207.
• –––, 1975, George Berkeley: Philosophical Works, Including the Works on Vision , M. R. Ayers (ed.), London: Dent.
• BonJour, Laurence, 1978, “Can Empirical Knowledge Have a Foundation?” American Philosophical Quarterly , 15(1): 1–13.
• –––, 1980, “Externalist Theories of Empirical Knowledge”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy , 5(1): 53–73. doi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.1980.tb00396.x
• –––, 1985, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 1997, “Haack on Justification and Experience”, Synthese , 112(1): 13–23. doi:10.1023/A:1004972413209
• –––, 2003, “A Version of Internalist Foundationalism”, in Laurence BonJour & Ernest Sosa, Epistemic Justification: Internalism vs. Externalism, Foundations vs. Virtues , Malden, MA: Blackwell, 3–96.
• –––, 2010, Epistemology: Classic Problems and Contemporary Responses , 2 nd edition, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Brewer, Bill, 1999, Perception and Reason , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0199250456.001.0001
• –––, 2011, Perception and its Objects , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199260256.001.0001
• Brogaard, Berit, 2013, “Phenomenal Seemings and Sensible Dogmatism”, in Chris Tucker (ed.), Seemings and Justification: New Essays on Dogmatism and Phenomenal Conservatism , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 270–289. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199899494.003.0012
• Byrne, Alex, 2005, “Perception and Conceptual Content”, in Ernest Sosa & Matthias Steup (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology , Boston: Blackwell, 231–250.
• –––, 2014, “Perception and Evidence”, Philosophical Studies , 170: 101–13.
• –––, 2016, “The Epistemic Significance of Experience”, Philosophical Studies , 173(4): 947–67. doi:10.1007/s11098-015-0537-7
• Burge, Tyler, 2003, “Perceptual Entitlement”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 67(3): 503–548.
• –––, 2020, “Entitlement: The Basis For Empirical Warrant”, in Peter Graham & Nikolaj Pedersen (eds.), Epistemic Entitlement , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Chalmers, David J., 2003, “The Content and Epistemology of Phenomenal Belief”, in Quentin Smith & Aleksandar Jokic (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 220–271.
• Chisholm, Roderick M., 1957, Perceiving: A Philosophical Study , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• –––, 1966, Theory of Knowledge , Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall
• –––, 1977, Theory of Knowledge , 2 nd edition, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
• Chudnoff, Elijah, 2018, “Epistemic Elitism and Other Minds”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 96(2): 276–298.
• –––, 2021, Forming Impressions , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Chudnoff Elijah, & David Didomenico, 2015, “The Epistemic Unity of Perception”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly , 96(4): 535–549. doi:10.1111/papq.12114
• Cohen, Stewart, 1984, “Justification and Truth”, Philosophical Studies , 46: 279–295.
• –––, 2002, “Basic Knowledge and the Problem of Easy Knowledge”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 65(2): 309–329. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2002.tb00204.x
• Comesaña, Juan, 2010, “Evidentialist Reliabilism”, Noûs , 44(4): 571–600. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0068.2010.00748.x
• Conee, Earl, 1988, “The Basic Nature of Epistemic Justification”, The Monist , 71(3): 389–404. Reprinted in Conne & Feldman 2004. doi:10.1093/0199253722.003.0003
• Conee, Earl & Richard Feldman, 2004, Evidentialism: Essays in Epistemology , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0199253722.001.0001
• Davidson, Donald, 1986, “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge”, in Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson , Ernest Lepore, (ed.), New York: Blackwell, 307–319.
• –––, 1987, “Knowing One’s Own Mind”, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association , 61(3): 441–58. doi:10.2307/3131782
• Descartes, René, 1641, Meditations on First Philosophy , in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes , John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (trans.), vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 1–62.
• Dretske, Fred, 1971, “Conclusive Reasons”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 49: 1–22
• Dreyfus, Hubert L., 2002, “Intelligence Without Representation—Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Mental Representation: The Relevance of Phenomenology to Scientific Explanation”, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences , 1(4): 367–383. doi:10.1023/A:1021351606209
• Feldman, Richard, 2003, Epistemology , Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
• Foster, John, 2008, A World for Us: The Case for Phenomenalistic Idealism , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199297139.001.0001
• Fumerton, Richard A., 1995, Metaepistemology and Skepticism , Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• –––, 2001, “Classical Foundationalism”, in M. DePaul (ed.), Resurrecting Old-fashioned Foundationalism. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 3–20.
• Ghijsen, Harmen, 2014, “Phenomenalist Dogmatist Experientialism and the Distinctiveness Problem”, Synthese , 191(7): 1549–66.
• –––, 2021, “Predictive Processing and Foundationalism About Perception”, Synthese , 198(7): 1751–69.
• Goldman, Alvin I., 1979, “What Is Justified Belief?” in G. Pappas (ed.), Justification and Knowledge , Dordrecht: Reidel, 1–25.
• –––, 1986, Epistemology and Cognition , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 1988, “Strong and Weak Justification”, Philosophical Perspectives , 2: 51–69.
• –––, 2011, “Commentary on Jack Lyons’s Perception and Basic Beliefs ”, Philosophical Studies , 153(3): 457–66. doi:10.1007/s11098-010-9602-4
• Graham, Peter J., 2012, “Epistemic Entitlement”, Noûs , 46(3): 449–482. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0068.2010.00815.x
• –––, 2019, “Why is Warrant Normative?”, Philosophical Issues , 29(1): 110–128.
• Graham, Peter J., & Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen, 2020, “Dretske & McDowell on Perceptual Knowledge, Conclusive Reasons, and Epistemological Disjunctivism”, Philosophical Issues , 30(1): 148–166.
• Greco, John, 2000, Putting Skeptics in Their Place , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gupta, Anil, 2006, Empiricism and Experience , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Haack, Susan, 1993, Evidence and Inquiry: Toward Reconstruction in Epistemology , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Haddock, Adrian & Fiona Macpherson (eds.), 2008, Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199231546.001.0001
• Heck, Richard G. Jr., 2000, “Nonconceptual Content and the ‘Space of Reasons’”, Philosophical Review , 109(4): 483–523. doi:10.2307/2693622
• Hoffman, Donald D., 2009, “The Interface Theory of Perception”, in Sven J. Dickinson, Michael J. Tarr, Aleš Leonardis, & Bernt Schiele (eds.) Object Categorization: Computer and Human Vision Perspectives , Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 148–165.
• Huemer, Michael, 2001, Skepticism and the Veil of Perception , Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• –––, 2007, “Compassionate Phenomenal Conservatism”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 74(1): 30–55. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2007.00002.x
• –––, 2013, “Epistemological Asymmetries Between Belief and Experience”, Philosophical Studies , 162(3): 741–748. doi:10.1007/s11098-012-0056-8
• Hume, David, 1739, A Treatise of Human Nature , Peter H. Nidditch (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
• –––, 1748, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , reprinted in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principle of Morals , Peter H. Nidditch (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
• Johnston, Mark, 2011, “On a Neglected Epistemic Virtue”, Philosophical Issues , 21: 165–218.
• Kant, Immanuel, 1781, Critique of Pure Reason , Norman Kemp Smith, (trans.), London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929.
• Kvanvig, Jonathan L., 2012, “Coherentism”, in Andrew Cullison (ed.), The Continuum Companion to Epistemology , New York: Continuum Press, 57–72.
• Kvanvig, Jonathan L. & Wayne D. Riggs, 1992, “Can a Coherence Theory Appeal to Appearance States?” Philosophical Studies , 67(3): 197–217. doi:10.1007/BF00354536
• Lehrer, Keith, 1990, Theory of Knowledge , Boulder, CO: Westview.
• Lehrer, Keith & Stewart Cohen, 1983, “Justification, Truth, and Coherence”, Synthese , 55(2): 191–207. doi:10.1007/BF00485068
• Littlejohn, Clayton, 2012, Justification and the Truth-Connection , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Locke, John, 1690, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , reprinted Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke, Peter H. Nidditch (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
• Lyons, Jack C., 2005, “Perceptual Belief and Nonexperiential Looks”, Philosophical Perspectives , 19(1): 237–256. doi:10.1111/j.1520-8583.2005.00061.x
• –––, 2008, “Evidence, Experience, and Externalism”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 86: 461–79.
• –––, 2009, Perception and Basic Beliefs: Zombies, Modules, and the Problem of the External World , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2011, “Circularity, Reliability, and the Cognitive Penetrability of Perception”, Philosophical Issues , 21: 289–311.
• –––, 2012, “Should Reliabilists be Worried About Demon Worlds?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 86(1): 1–40. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2012.00614.x
• –––, 2016, “Experiential Evidence?” Philosophical Studies , 173(4): 1053–79. doi:10.1007/s11098-015-0540-z
• –––, 2020, “Two Dogmas of Empirical Justification”, Philosophical Issues , 30(1), 221–237.
• Markie, Peter J., 2006, “Epistemically Appropriate Perceptual Belief”, Noûs , 40(1): 118–142. doi:10.1111/j.0029-4624.2006.00603.x
• –––, 2013, “Searching for True Dogmatism”, in Seemings and Justification: New Essays on Dgmatism and Phenomenal Conservatism , pp. 248–69.
• Martin, M.G.F., 2002, “The Transparency of Experience”, Mind and Language , 17(4): 376–425. doi:10.1111/1468-0017.00205
• McDowell, John, 1982, “Criteria, Defeasibility and Knowledge”, Proceedings of the British Academy , 68: 455–79. [ McDowell 1982 available online ]
• –––, 1994, Mind and World , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2011, Perception As a Capacity for Knowledge, Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press.
• –––, 2018, “Perceptual Experience and Empirical Rationality”, A nalytic Philosophy , 59: 89–98.
• McGrath, Matthew, 2013, “Phenomenal Conservatism and Cognitive Penetration: The ‘Bad Basis’ Counterexamples”, in Seemings and Justification: New Essays on Dgmatism and Phenomenal Conservatism , pp. 225–247.
• –––, 2018, “Looks and Perceptual Justification”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 96(1): 110–33.
• McGrew, Tim J., 2003. “A Defense of Strong Foundationalism”, in The Theory of Knowledge , 3 rd edition, Louis Pojman (ed.), Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 194–206.
• Millar, Alan, 2011, “How Visual Perception Yields Reasons for Belief”, Philosophical Issues , 21(1): 332–351. doi:10.1111/j.1533-6077.2011.00207.x
• –––, 2019, Knowing By Perceiving , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Noë, Alva, 2004, Action in Perception , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Pautz, Adam, 2020, “The Arationality of Perception: Comments on Susanna Siegel”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101(3): 755–63.
• Peacocke, Christopher, 2001, “Does Perception Have a Nonconceptual Content?” The Journal of Philosophy , 98(5): 239–264. doi:10.2307/2678383
• Plantinga, Alvin, 1993, Warrant and Proper Function , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Pollock, John L., 1971, “Perceptual Knowledge”, Philosophical Review , 80(3): 287–319.
• –––, 1974, Knowledge and Justification , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 1986, Contemporary Theories of Knowledge , Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Pollock, John L. & Joseph Cruz, 1999, Contemporary Theories of Knowledge , 2 nd edition, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Pritchard, Duncan, 2012, Epistemological Disjunctivism , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199557912.001.0001
• Pryor, James, 2000, “The Skeptic and the Dogmatist”, Noûs , 34(4): 517–549. doi:10.1111/0029-4624.00277
• Quinton, Anthony, 1973, The Nature of Things , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Reid, Thomas, 1764, An Inquiry Into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense , reprinted Derek R. Brookes (ed.), vol. 2, Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid, Knud Haakonssen (series ed.), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997.
• –––, 1785, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man , reprinted Critical Edition, Derek R. Brookes (ed.), vol. 3, Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid, Knud Haakonssen (series ed.), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002.
• Robinson, Howard, 2022. Perception and Idealism: An Essay on How the World Manifests Itself to Us, and How It (Probably) Is in Itself , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Russell, Bertrand, 1912, The Problems of Philosophy , London: Williams and Norgate; New York: Henry Holt and Company.
• Schellenberg, Susanna, 2013, “Experience and Evidence”, Mind , 122(487): 699–747.
• –––, 2016, “Phenomenal Evidence and Factive Evidence”, Philosophical Studies , 173(4): 875–896. doi:10.1007/s11098-015-0528-8
• –––, 2018, The Unity of Perception , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Sellars, Wilfrid, 1956, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science , 1: 253–329.
• Siegel, Susanna, 2011, “Cognitive Penetrability and Perceptual Justification”, Noûs , 46(2): 201–22. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0068.2010.00786.x
• –––, 2013, “The Epistemic Impact of the Etiology of Experience”, Philosophical Studies , 162(3): 697–722. doi:10.1007/s11098-012-0059-5
• –––, 2017, The Rationality of Perception, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Silins, Nicholas, 2011, “Seeing Through the ‘Veil of Perception’”, Mind , 120(478): 329–67. doi:10.1093/mind/fzr030
• Smithies, Declan, 2013, “Review of Duncan Pritchard, Epistemological Disjunctivism ”, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews , 2013.01.02. URL = < http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/36590-epistemological-disjunctivism/ >.
• –––, 2019, The Epistemic Role of Consciousness , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Snowdon, Paul., 1980, “Perception, Vision and Causation”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , New Series, 81: 175–92.
• Sosa, Ernest, 1991, Knowledge in Perspective , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1993, “Proper Functionalism and Virtue Epistemology”, Noûs , 27(1): 51–65.
• –––, 2007, A Virtue Epistemology , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199297023.001.0001
• –––, 2021, Epistemic Explanations , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Teng, Lu, “Is Phenomenal Force Sufficient for Immediate Perceptual Justification?”, Synthese , 195, 637–56. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1233-7
• Tucker, Chris, 2010, “Why Open-Minded People Should Endorse Dogmatism”, Philosophical Perspectives , 24(1): 529–545. doi:10.1111/j.1520-8583.2010.00202.x
• –––, 2014, “If Dogmatists Have a Problem With Cognitive Penetration, You Do Too”, Dialectica , 68(1): 35–62.
• Vogel, Jonathan, 2000, “Reliabilism Leveled”, Journal of Philosophy , 97(11): 602–623. doi:10.2307/2678454
• –––, 2008, “Epistemic Bootstrapping”, Journal of Philosophy , 105(9): 518–39. doi:10.5840/jphil2008105931
• Williamson, Timothy, 2000, Knowledge and its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/019925656X.001.0001

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• BonJour, Lawrence, “Epistemological Problems of Perception,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/perception-episprob/ >. [This was the previous entry on epistemological problems of perception in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — see the version history .]

abduction | consciousness: and intentionality | epistemic closure | justification, epistemic: foundationalist theories of | mental content: nonconceptual | perception: the contents of | perception: the disjunctive theory of | perception: the problem of | reliabilist epistemology | sense data | simplicity | skepticism

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Bill Fish and Susanna Siegel for comments on earlier drafts, and to Joe Cruz, Alvin Goldman, Peter Graham, Chris Hill, Anna-Sara Malmgren, and Tom Senor for helpful discussion.

Copyright © 2023 by Jack Lyons < jack . lyons @ glasgow . ac . uk >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2023 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

July 1, 2010

Looks Can Deceive: Why Perception and Reality Don't Always Match Up

When you are facing a tricky task, your view of the world may not be as accurate as you think

By Christof Koch

ALL OF US, even postmodern philosophers, are naive realists at heart. We assume that the external world maps perfectly onto our internal view of it—an expectation that is reinforced by daily experience. I see a coffee mug on the table, reach for a sip and, lo and behold, the vessel’s handle is soon in my grasp as I gingerly imbibe the hot liquid. Or I see a chartreuse-yellow tennis ball on the lawn, pick it up and throw it. Reassuringly, my dog appears to share my veridical view of reality: she chases the ball and triumphantly catches it between her jaws.

That there should be a match between perception and reality is not surprising, because evolution ruthlessly eliminates the unfit. If you routinely misperceive or even hallucinate and act on those misapprehensions, you won’t survive long in a world filled with dangers whose avoidance requires accurate distance and speed assessments and rapid reactions. Whether you are diving into rocky waters or driving on a narrow, two-lane road with cars whizzing by in the opposite direction, small mistakes can be lethal.

You probably believe that your eyes register high-fidelity information about the absolute size, speed and distance of visible objects and that you respond based on these impartial data. But although we build robots in this manner—equipping them with sensors and computers to plumb the metric properties of their environments—evolution has taken a more complex route.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

As psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered over the past several decades, our consciousness provides a stable interface to a dizzyingly rich sensory world. Underneath this interface lurk two vision systems that work in parallel. Both are fed by the same two sensors, the eyeballs, yet they serve different functions. One system is responsible for visual perception and is necessary for identifying objects—such as approaching cars and potential mates—independent of their apparent size or location in our visual field. The other is responsible for action: it transforms visual input into the movements of our eyes, hands and legs. We consciously experience only the former, but we depend for our survival on both.

When driving in the mountains, have you ever noticed a discrepancy between the slope described on the yellow road sign and your sense that the incline is actually much steeper? Psychologist Dennis R. Proffitt of the University of Virginia and his then graduate student Jessica Witt did. Being scientists and not philosophers, they designed an experiment to find out why. Proffitt and Witt stood at the base of hills on campus and asked passing students to estimate their steepness in two ways. Subjects had to align the diameter line on a flat disk to the slant of the hill. They also were asked to place the palm of one hand on a movable board that was mounted on a tripod and then, without looking at that hand, to adjust the board’s slant until they felt it matched that of the hill.

In the first part of the test, which relied on visual cues alone, subjects badly overestimated, interpreting a 31-degree slant as a much steeper, 50-degree one. But when people’s eyes were guiding their hands, subjects judged accurately, tilting the board an appropriate amount. Perhaps even more striking was the finding that people’s tendency to overestimate on the strictly visual part of the test increased by more than a third when they had just run an exhausting race—but the hand estimates were unaffected. The same discrepancy occurred when subjects wore a heavy backpack, were elderly, or were in poor physical condition or declining health.

In another variant of the experiment, Proffitt had subjects stand on top of a hill on either a skateboard or a wooden box the same height as the skateboard. Participants were instructed to look down the hill and judge, both visually and manually, its grade. They were also asked how afraid they felt to descend the hill. Fearful participants standing on the skateboard judged the hill to be steeper than did the braver souls standing on the box. Yet the visually guided action measurement was unaffected by fear.

Proffitt argues that perception is not fixed: it is flexible, reflecting a person’s physiological state. Your conscious perception of slant depends on your current ability to walk up or down hills—hard work that should not be undertaken lightly. If you are tired, frail, scared or carrying a load, your assessment of the hill—the one that guides your actions—will differ from what you see. Not by choice, but by design. It is the way you are wired.

The Witt-Proffitt team published another report on the observation, well known in sports lore, that baseball players perceive the ball to be larger when they are hitting well and smaller when they are on a losing streak. Since then, Witt, now a professor at Purdue University, along with her student Travis Dorsch, has pursued this intriguing link between how success (or lack of it) in a task affects one’s perception of the world.

In their experiment, 23 volunteers had to kick an American football through the field goal from the 10-yard line. After a warm-up, participants were asked to judge the height and width of the goal by adjusting a handheld, scaled-down model of the goal made out of PVC pipes. They then each performed 10 kicks. Immediately after the final kick, participants repeated the perceptual measurement.

The result was striking. Before kicking, both groups had the same perception of the size of the goal (incidentally, an inaccurate one: everybody underestimated its actual width-to-height ratio). But after 10 kicks, the poor performers (those who scored two or fewer successful kicks) saw the goal as about 10 percent narrower than they had before, whereas the good kickers (those who scored three or more) perceived the goal to be about 10 percent wider. How well you have performed over the past few minutes influences the way you see the world! Not just metaphorically, but on a physiological level—it changes your actual perceptions.

After more data mining, the two psychologists discovered that the people who missed the goal because they tended to kick the ball too short perceived the crossbar as being higher than did their more successful peers, whereas those who missed because they kicked wide judged the upright field posts to be narrower.

So by now you may be thinking: How convenient! The perceptual system offers us self-serving justifications for bad performance. But there is likely some value here, evolutionarily speaking: if people perceive the goal as higher or smaller than it actually is, they will aim more precisely the next time. What happens in football also holds for softball and golf, Witt and her colleagues have found—and, most likely, for life in general.

Our conscious perception of the world, though relatively stable, is not static. We are incapable of being fully objective, even in our most mundane observations and impressions. Our awareness of the objects around us is informed and fine-tuned by any number of transient factors—our strength and energy levels, our sense of confidence, our fears and desires. Being human means seeing the world through your own, constantly shifting, lens.

Christof Koch is a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute and at the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, the former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and a former professor at the California Institute of Technology. His latest book is Then I am myself the world. Koch writes regularly for a range of media, including Scientific American . He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

“Reality” is constructed by your brain. Here’s what that means, and why it matters.

Fix your gaze on the black dot on the left side of this image. But wait! Finish reading this paragraph first. As you gaze at the left dot, try to answer this question: In what direction is the object on the right moving? Is it drifting diagonally, or is it moving up and down?

Remember, focus on the dot on the left.

It appears as though the object on the right is moving diagonally, up to the right and then back down to the left. Right?  Right?!  Actually, it’s not. It’s moving up and down in a straight, vertical line.

See for yourself. Trace it with your finger.

This is a visual illusion. That alternating black-white patch inside the object suggests diagonal motion and confuses our senses. Like all misperceptions, it teaches us that our experience of reality is not perfect. But this particular illusion has recently reinforced scientists’ understanding of deeper, almost philosophical truths about the nature of our consciousness. “It’s really important to understand we’re not seeing reality,” says neuroscientist Patrick Cavanagh, a research professor at Dartmouth College and a senior fellow at Glendon College in Canada. “We’re seeing a story that’s being created for us.”

Most of the time, the story our brains generate matches the real, physical world — but not always. Our brains also unconsciously bend our perception of reality to meet our desires or expectations. And they fill in gaps using our past experiences.

All of this can bias us. Visual illusions present clear and interesting challenges for how we live: How do we know what’s real? And once we know the extent of our brain’s limits, how do we live with more humility — and think with greater care about our perceptions?

Rather than showing us how our brains are broken, illusions give us the chance to reveal how they work. And how do they work? Well, as the owner of a human brain, I have to say it’s making me a little uneasy.

Where the conflict between perception and reality lies in the brain

My colleague Sigal Samuel recently explored the  neuroscience of meditation . During her reporting, she found good evidence that a regular meditation practice is associated with increased compassion. That evidence, she writes, “feel[s] like a challenge, even a dare. If it takes such a small amount of time and effort to get better at regulating my emotions ... am I not morally obligated to do it?”

Perception science, for me, provokes a similar question. If the science tells us our brains are making up a “story” about reality, shouldn’t we be curious about, and even seek out the answers to, how that reality might be wrong?

It’s not about doubting everything that comes through our senses. It’s about looking for our blind spots, with the goal of becoming better thinkers. It can also help with empathy. When other people misperceive reality, we may not agree with their interpretation, but we can understand where it comes from.

To approach this challenge, I think it helps to know that the brain is telling us stories about the smallest things we perceive, like the motion of objects. But it also tells us stories about some of the most complex things we think about, creating assumptions about people based on race, among other social prejudices.

Let’s start with the small.

In 2019, Cavanagh and his colleagues Sirui Liu, Qing Yu, and Peter Tse used the above “double drift” illusion of the two dots to probe how our brains generate the illusory diagonal motion. To figure this out, Cavanagh and his colleagues ran a neuroimaging study that compared how a brain processes the illusory animation with how it processes a similar, non-illusory animation. In this second animation, the object on the right really is moving diagonally. Trace it with your finger again.

With  fMRI neuroimaging , which allows researchers to map brain activity, Cavanagh and his team could ask the question: If we perceive each animation similarly, what in our brains makes that happen? What’s the source of the illusion in the first animation? “We want to find where the conscious perception diverges from the physical sensation,” Cavanagh says.

One possibility is that the illusion is generated in the visual cortex. Located at the back of your head, this is the part of your brain that directly processes the information coming from your eyes. Maybe the visual system “sees” it wrong. The alternative is that the visual system “sees” it just fine, but some other part of the brain overrides it, creating a new reality.

The experiment included only nine participants but collected a lot of data on each of them. Each participant completed the experiment (and was run through the brain scan) 10 times.

Here’s what the analysis found. That visual system in the back of the brain? It doesn’t seem fooled by the illusion. Each animation produces a different pattern of activation in the visual cortex. In other words, “the visual system thinks they are different,” Cavanagh says.

Okay, the visual system correctly “sees” these two animations differently. Then why do we perceive them as being the same?

The patterns of activation in the frontal lobes of the participants’ brains — the higher-level thinking area dedicated to anticipation and decision-making — were similar. That is: The front of the brain thinks both animations are traveling in a diagonal direction.

“There’s a whole world of visual analysis and computation and prediction that is happening outside of the visual system, happening in the frontal lobes,” Cavanagh says. That’s where the “story” of reality is constructed — at least in this one example, as evidenced by this one small study. (To be sure: Vision is a vastly complex system involving  around  30 areas of the brain. There are other illusions that  do seem to “fool” the visual cortex , because no story about the brain can be simple.)

But you don’t need an fMRI to conclude that some part of your brain is overriding the plain truth about the path of the object. You can see it for yourself. “The remarkable thing is that — even when you are told what is happening — you still see it in the illusory form,” Justin Gardner, a Stanford University neuroscientist who wasn’t involved in this study, said in an email. “You can’t seem to consciously override the ‘wrong’ interpretation.”

The lesson: The stories our brains tell us about reality are extremely compelling, even when they are wrong.

We’re not seeing reality. Our vision runs 100 milliseconds behind the real world.

Why are we seeing a story about the world —  a story  — and not the real deal? It’s not because evolution made our minds flawed. It’s actually an adaptation.

“We don’t have the necessary machinery, and we wouldn’t even want it, to process carefully all of the amount of information that we’re constantly bombarded with,” says Susana Martinez-Conde, a neuroscientist and illusion researcher at SUNY Downstate Medical Center.

Think about what it takes to perceive something move, like the objects in the above animations. Once light hits the retinas at the back of our eyeballs, it’s converted into an electrical signal that then has to travel to the visual processing system at the back of our brains. From there, the signal travels forward through our brains, constructing what we see and creating our perception of it. This process just takes time.

“The dirty little secret about sensory systems is that they’re slow, they’re lagged, they’re not about what’s happening right now but what’s happening 50 milliseconds ago, or, in the case for vision, hundreds of milliseconds ago,” says Adam Hantman, a neuroscientist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus.

If we relied solely on this outdated information, though, we wouldn’t be able to hit baseballs with bats, or swat annoying flies away from our faces. We’d be less coordinated, and possibly get hurt more often.

So the brain predicts the path of motion before it happens. It tells us a story about where the object is heading, and this story becomes our reality. That’s what’s likely happening with Cavanagh’s illusion. It happens all the time.

Don’t believe it? See for yourself. Here’s a simple illusion that reveals our visual system is a bit lagged.

It’s called  the flash-lag illusion . The red dot is moving across the screen, and the green dot flashes  exactly  when the red dot and green dot are in perfect vertical alignment. Yet it’s incredibly hard to see the red dot and the green dot as being vertically aligned. The red dot always seems a little bit farther ahead.

This is our brain predicting the path of its motion, telling us a story about where it ought to be and not where it is. “For moving things — we see them ahead on their path of motion,” Cavanagh explains, “by just enough.” The illusion, he says, “is actually functional. It helps us overcome these delays and see things ... where they will be when we get there.”

In Hantman’s view, what we experience as consciousness is primarily the prediction, not the real-time feed. The actual sensory information, he explains, just serves as error correction. “If you were always using sensory information, errors would accumulate in ways that would lead to quite catastrophic effects on your motor control,” Hantman says. Our brains like to predict as much as possible, then use our senses to course-correct when the predictions go wrong.

This is true not only for our perception of motion but also for so much of our conscious experience.

The stories our brain tells are influenced by life experience

The brain tells us a story about the motion of objects. But that’s not the only story it tells. It also tells us stories about more complicated aspects of our visual world, like color.

For some meta-insight, look at the illusion below from Japanese psychologist and artist Akiyoshi Kitaoka. You can observe your own brain, in real time, change its guess about the color of the moving square. Keep in mind that the physical color of the square is not changing. You might look at this illusion and feel like your brain is broken (I did when I first saw it). It is not. It just reveals that our perception of color isn’t absolute.

Akiyoshi Kitaoka@AkiyoshiKitaoka     A moving square appears to change in color, though the color is constant.  

Color is an inference we make, and it serves a purpose to make meaningful decisions about objects in the world. But if our eyes acted as scientific instruments describing precise wavelengths of light, they’d constantly be fooled. Red may not appear red when bathed in blue light.

Our brains try to account for this. “We’re not trying to measure wavelengths, we’re trying to tell something about the color,” Sam Schwarzkopf, a vision scientist at the University of Auckland, says. “And the color is an illusion created by our brain.”

When we think an object is being bathed in blue light, we can filter out that blue light intuitively. That’s how many of these color illusions work. We use surrounding color cues and assumptions about lighting to guess an object’s true color. Sometimes those guesses are wrong, and sometimes we make different assumptions from others. Neuroscientists have some intriguing new insights into why our perceptions can diverge from one another.

You remember  The Dress , yes?

In 2015, a bad cellphone photo of a dress in a UK store divided people across the internet. Some see this dress as blue and black; others see it as white and gold. Pascal Wallisch, a neuroscientist at New York University,  believes he’s figured out  the difference between those two groups of people.

Wallisch’s hypothesis is that people make different assumptions about the quality of light that’s being cast on the dress. Is it in bright daylight? Or under an indoor light bulb? By unconsciously filtering out the color of light we think is falling on an object, we come to a judgment about its color.

Wallisch believes people who see this image differently are using different filtering schemes. Most interestingly, he suggests that life experience leads you to see the dress one way or the other.His  study of 13,000 people  in an online survey found a correlation that at first seems odd. The time you naturally like to go to sleep and wake up — called a chronotype — was correlated with dress perception. Night owls, or people who like to go to bed really late and wake up later in the morning, are more likely to see the dress as black and blue. Larks, a.k.a. early risers, are more likely to see it as white and gold. What’s going on?

Wallisch believes the correlation is rooted in the life experience of being either a lark or a night owl. Larks, he hypothesizes, spend more time in daylight than night owls. They’re more familiar with it. So when confronted with an ill-lit image like the dress, they are more likely to assume it is being bathed in bright sunlight, which has a lot of blue in it, Wallisch points out. As a result, their brains filter it out. “If you assume it’s daylight, you will see it as white and gold. Because if you subtract blue, yellow is left,” he says.

Night owls, he thinks, are more likely to assume the dress is under artificial lighting, and filtering that out makes the dress appear black and blue. (The chronotype measure, he admits, is a little crude: Ideally, he’d want to estimate a person’s lifetime exposure to daylight.)

Has Wallisch solved the mystery of The Dress?

“The owls versus lark data seems quite compelling for explaining a large part of the individual differences,” Schwarzkopf says. But not all of it. “There are still lots of other factors that must have a strong influence here. It could be prior experience with the subject matter, or related to other aspects of people’s personality,” he says. “Yes, the dress continues to mystify.”

The mystery isn’t totally solved, but the lesson remains: When confronted with ambiguity — like the odd lighting in the photo of The Dress — our brains fill in the ambiguity using whatever we’re most familiar with. “People assume what they see more of,” Wallisch says. If we’re more familiar with bright, sunny light, we assume that’s the default lighting.

But we have no way of knowing how our experiences guide our perception. “Your brain makes a lot of unconscious inferences, and it doesn’t tell you that it’s an inference,” he explains. “You see whatever you see. Your brain doesn’t tell you, ‘I took into account how much daylight I’ve seen in my life.’”

Wallisch says the disagreements around The Dress, as well as other viral illusions like  Yanny and Laurel , arise because our brains are filling in the uncertainties of these stimuli with different prior experiences. We bring our life histories to these small perceptions.

It’s believed another textbook illusion, the Kanizsa triangle, works a bit like this, too. In this illusion, the Pac-Man-like shapes give the impression of a triangle in our minds. It seems like a triangle is there because we’re used to seeing triangles. We only need the suggestion of one — implied via the corners — to fill in the rest of the picture with our minds.

In 2003, the journal  Nature Neuroscience  published  an article on the case of a man (called “Patient MM”) who lost his vision at age 3 and had it restored by surgical intervention in his 40s. In a study, he didn’t fall for an illusion like this one. He couldn’t see the illusory triangle (in the case of that experiment, it was a square). It may be that a lifetime of looking at triangles is what makes the rest of us see one so plainly in this image. Patient MM didn’t build up a lifetime’s worth of visual experiences to make predictions about what he saw. He had to build them from scratch.

More than two years after his operation, Patient MM  told  researchers, “The difference between today and over two years ago is that I can better guess at what I am seeing. What is the same is that I am still guessing.”

Gavin Buckingham@DrGBuckingham     The horizontal lines are actually parallel, and not at all slanted. Look at the distance between them at the start and end of each row if you don't believe it. Wonderful version of the cafe wall illusion, by Victoria Skye.  

Some of these examples may seem frivolous. Why does it matter that one person sees a dress as black and blue and another sees it as white and gold?

It matters because scientists believe the same basic processes underlie many of our more complicated perceptions and thoughts. Neuroscience, then, can help explain stubborn polarization in our culture and politics, and why we’re so prone to motivated reasoning.

Sometimes, especially when the information we’re receiving is unclear, we see what we want to see. In the past, researchers have found that even slight rewards can change the way people perceive objects. Take this classic image used in psychological studies. What do you see?

It’s either a horse or a seal, and in  2006 , psychologists Emily Balcetis and David Dunning showed they could motivate study participants to see one or the other. In one experiment, the participants played a game wherein they had to keep track of animals they saw on screen. If they saw farm animals, they’d get points. If they saw sea creatures, they’d lose points. In the end, a high score meant getting a candy treat (desirable!), and a low score meant they’d eat canned beans (kind of weird).

The very last thing the participants saw was the above image. If seeing the horse meant they’d win and get the candy, they’d see the horse.

In  a more complex example , Balcetis has found that when she tells study participants to pay attention to either an officer or a civilian in a video of a police altercation, it can change their perception of what happened (depending on their prior experience with law enforcement and the person in the video with whom they more closely identified). “That instruction changes what their eyes do,” Balcetis told me last summer. “And it leads them to a different understanding of the nature of the altercation.”

You can’t completely remove bias from the brain. “You can’t change the fact that we’ve all grown up in different worlds,” Balcetis said. But you can encourage people to listen to other perspectives and be curious about the veracity of their own.

The neuroscientists I spoke to said the big principles that underlie how our brains process what we see also underlie most of our thinking. Illusions are “the basis of superstition, the basis of magical thinking,” Martinez-Conde says. “It’s the basis for a lot of erroneous beliefs. We’re very uncomfortable with uncertainty. The ambiguity is going to be resolved one way or another, and sometimes in a way that does not match reality.”

Just as we can look at an image and see things that aren’t really there, we can look out into the world with skewed perceptions of reality. Political scientists and psychologists have long documented how political partisans  perceive the facts of current events  differently depending on their political beliefs. The illusions and political thinking don’t involve the same brain processes, but they follow the similar overarching way the brain works.

In a way, you can think of  bias  as a social illusion. Studies find that  many people  perceive black men to be bigger (and, therefore, potentially more threatening)  than they actually are , or generally  associate  darker skin tones and  certain facial features  with criminality. Cops can  confuse people removing wallets  from their pockets with people reaching for guns, often with tragic consequences. This isn’t to say that all instances of prejudice are mindless — many are  enacted with clear malignant intention , but they can also be built from years of experience in an unjust society or as the result of systemic racism.

Our brains work hard to bend reality to meet our prior experiences, our emotions, and our discomfort with uncertainty. This happens with vision. But it also happens with more complicated processes, like thinking about politics, the  pandemic , or the reality of climate change.

Wallisch has come up with a name for phenomena like The Dress that generate divergent perceptions based on our personal characteristics. He calls it “SURFPAD.” Spelled out, it’s an absolute mouthful: Substantial Uncertainty combined with Ramified or Forked Priors and Assumptions yields Disagreement. (Let’s stick with SURFPAD.) Simply, SURFPAD is a consequence of bias, or motivated perception. When an image, event, or some other stimulus isn’t perfectly clear, we fill in the gaps with our priors, or presumptions. And because we have different priors, that leads to disagreement about the image or event in question. Wallisch sees it everywhere in society.

I recently tweeted some frustration over how mass protests against police brutality might be perceived if it seems as though they led to increased Covid-19 cases.

Brian Resnick   ✔@B_resnick     Prediction: In a few weeks, there will be endless argument among know-it-all types on Twitter and TV about what led to rising Covid cases. No one will have the right data. It will bring out the worst in everyone. And it will... just... completely... suck.   29 11:13 AM - Jun 7, 2020 Twitter Ads info and privacy

“If there is a spike, it will be hard to discern whether it was reopening or protests, so people will go with their prior,” Wallisch replied. “As the priors are different, there will be massive disagreement. ... What’s truly terrifying is that given this framework, no matter what happens, [people] will feel vindicated, reinforcing the strength of the prior and increasing polarization.”

Later, I emailed him and asked whether his inclination to see SURFPAD in these current events was just an instance of his own priors (that SURFPAD is a real and influential phenomenon) coloring his perception.

“Of course,” he says. “It’s SURFPAD all the way down.”

Neuroscience is deeply humbling

I don’t want people to read this and think we can’t believe our eyes, or we can’t incorporate evidence into our thinking. We can seek out verified sources of information. We can turn to expertise and also earnestly question it. (Don’t let people gaslight you, either — another phenomenon that preys on the brain’s tendency  to generate illusory thoughts .)

Instead, the illusions and the science behind them raise a question: How do we go about our lives knowing our experiences might be a bit wrong?

There’s no one answer. And it’s a problem we’re unlikely to solve individually. I’d suggest that it should nudge us to be  more intellectually humble  and to cultivate a habit of seeking out perspectives that are not our own. We should be curious about our imperfections, as that curiosity may lead us closer to the truth. We can build cultures and institutions that celebrate humility and reduce the social cost for saying, “ I was wrong .”

This isn’t easy. Our psychology makes it hard. “We have this naive realism that the way we see the world is the way that it really is,” Balcetis  told me last year . Naive realism is the feeling that our perception of the world reflects the truth.

But illusions remind us it does not. This is why illusions aren’t just science — they’re provocative art. They force us to reinterpret our senses, and our sense of being in the world. They tell us about the true nature of how our brains work: The same neurological machinery that leads us to discover the truth can lead us to perceive illusions, and our brains don’t always tell us the difference.

Navigating this is the challenge of being a living, thinking person. But simply acknowledging it and trying to put it into practice is a good place to start.

I know I will try to keep remembering that reality always seems real. Even when I mess it up.

• Admissions & Aid
• Life at Lesley

Search form (GSE) 1

Perception is reality: the looking-glass self.

Behavior and self esteem are dictated by a person's predictions of how they’ll be perceived by others.

When it comes to understanding ourselves, social interaction plays a more important role than many of us realize. According to sociologist Charles Horton Cooley, individuals develop their concept of self by observing how they are perceived by others, a concept Cooley coined as the “looking-glass self.” This process, particularly when applied to the digital age, raises questions about the nature of identity, socialization, and the changing landscape of self.

The Looking-Glass Self

The looking-glass self describes the process wherein individuals base their sense of self on how they believe others view them. Using social interaction as a type of “mirror,” people use the judgments they receive from others to measure their own worth, values, and behavior. According to Self, Symbols, & Society , Cooley’s theory is notable because it suggests that self-concept is built not in solitude, but rather within social settings. In this way, society and individuals are not separate, but rather two complementary aspects of the same phenomenon.

Core Assumptions

According to Society in Focus , the process of discovering the looking-glass self occurs in three steps:

• An individual in a social situation imagines how they appear to others.
• That individual imagines others’ judgment of that appearance.
• The individual develops feelings about and responds to those perceived judgments.

In practice, the process might look like this:

Someone meets a group of new work colleagues for the first time. This individual believes she can easily demonstrate professionalism and competence to others. During this interaction with her new co-workers, the individual pays attention to her colleagues’ body language, word choices, and reactions to the conversation. If these coworkers provide positive feedback, such as maintaining eye contact or offering a firm handshake, the individual’s belief in her own professionalism will be upheld. However, if the colleagues provide negative feedback, such as looking away or leaving the conversation quickly, the individual might question how professional they truly are.

The process of the looking-glass self is further complicated by the context of each interaction and the nature of the people involved. Not all feedback carries the same weight, for instance. People may take the responses from those whom they trust more seriously than those of strangers. Signals may be misinterpreted. People also usually take their own value systems into consideration when thinking through any changes to their behavior or views of self.

Ultimately, the process of the looking-glass self is one of alignment. People constantly seek to create consistency between their internal and external worlds and, therefore, continue to perceive, adjust, and strive for equilibrium throughout their lives.

The Role of Social Media

The rise of social media makes the process of the looking-glass self infinitely more complex. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and the like make it possible to connect with others in ways never before imagined. However, this exposure has led to an ever-increasing number of “mirrors,” thus proposing new questions about the development of self.

Social media has brought with it the concept of the “cyber” self, Mary Aiken explains . The cyber self is the version of him or herself a person chooses to present on a digital platform. As in real life, the cyber self may interact with other individuals, receive social feedback, and align to social conformities. However, the differences between the cyber self and actual self are profound.

A person may possess many versions of the cyber self, for example. He or she may present a professional self on LinkedIn, a casual self on Twitter, or an artistic self on Pinterest. The cyber self also continues to exist in social spaces even when people are not interacting with those environments in real time. In this way, social media users are never fully removed from exposure to judgment and criticism. And unlike the actual self, the cyber self is far more malleable when it comes to being shaped, updated, and perfected.

These unique qualities of the cyber self raise a host of psychological issues and concerns, Aiken explains. Individuals may experience a greater sense of urgency to return to or remain in digital spaces. They may be increasingly involved in the curation of their online identities, possibly at the cost of developing their real-world selves. The host of digital platforms involved also brings into question whether one’s identity may become splintered, or whether developmental problems will result. All these consequences are more severe when digital users are young or in their teens.

However, changes to the social self via digital platforms are not always steeped in such negative implications. A study published in the Journal of Social Media and Society , for example, describes a host of positive outcomes that arise from the digital looking-glass self. When YouTube video producers were interviewed about their content-creation practices and its influence on their sense of self, they offered a range of positive responses. Results included:

• A sense of gained confidence
• Enhanced creativity
• Overcoming of major social hurdles
• Increased sense of self-worth
• A strengthened professional image
• Feelings of altruism and “helping others” through their content
• Interacting in a positive social space

Whether digital platforms are ultimately a help or a hindrance to self-identity remains to be seen. The human mind is still very much a frontier of modern science. For individuals who wish to ask the psychological questions essential for modern times, however, the right career begins with the right degree.

Additional sources:  Human Nature and the Social Order

A Modern Career in Psychology

At Lesley University, the online Bachelor of Science in Psychology degree program prepares students to succeed in this ever-evolving field. Lesley’s well-rounded curriculum trains students in a variety of subject areas, including cognition, abnormal behavior, development, and more. Required laboratory and internship work means students gain valuable hands-on experience that provides a competitive edge after graduation. Because Lesley’s program is offered fully online, students have ultimate flexibility when earning their degrees.

Related Articles & Stories

Read more about our faculty, students and alumni.

The Science of Personality Development

Janet Echelman ’97

What Can You Do With a Psychology Degree?

Stages of Memory Formation

Perception vs Reality: Gaining Clarity Within

Home Basics Perception vs Reality: Gaining Clarity Within

Updated on May 27, 2022

Each one of us has our own perception. This perception becomes our reality. But, the real reality is different and it’s above any perception. In this battle between perception vs reality , reality often has an upper hand. 

We hardly see the world as it is. Mostly, we see the world through a set of layers. These layers are made up of our emotions, past experiences, and beliefs. But, this biased view of ours is actually detrimental to us in the long run. It doesn’t help us in any way.

Perception is how we see the world.

Reality is how the world is.

Perception vs Reality Infographic

What is Perception?

In the simplest terms, perception is how an individual perceives reality. It is how he/she perceives the world.

Perception differs from person to person. It is an individual phenomenon and as such, no two perceptions are the same. Life perception is as unique as an individual and is as unique as the experiences an individual has.

It is the processing of reality by an individual. Perception is not reality. It rarely is.

That’s the case as perception is the final state of reality after it gets influenced by many factors. These factors are:

• Emotions 
• Past experiences
• And cognitive distortions of an individual

Even if our perception is not the reality it has great importance. So much so that it can determine if a person will lead an unhappy or happy life.

What is Reality?

There are many philosophers around the world who will tell you there is no reality. There is only perception. You see, they describe reality as a collection of everyone’s perceptions. Again, whichever perception is held by most, is popularly deemed as the reality.

We are not going to go by philosophy here. For us, ‘reality’ is what the name suggests. It is REALITY!

Reality is the truth. Reality is the actual state of things.

Reality is the opposite of all things imaginary.

Reality is the opposite of all things non-existent.

Reality is how things actually are before our emotions and preconceived notions have a chance to corrupt them.

The absolute nature of truth gets destroyed in the battle between perception vs reality . These concepts of perception vs reality give birth to three types of truth. 

1) The truth which is actually the truth

2) The truth that you think is the truth

3) And the truth that is considered to be the truth by another person

In the above-mentioned points, only the 1st option is the truth and hence is the reality. While the 2nd and 3rd options are two perceptions of the same truth (reality).

Perception vs Reality Examples

Let’s try to understand the difference between perception and reality . Plus, why it is important for us to know the difference between them with the following example. 

John is an 8th grader who has 1 month left to prepare for his final exams. He has been studying for 2 hours every day and feels confident that he will pass all his papers. 

Being confident in his preparations he starts to study only 1 hour each day in the final month. After the exam was over and the results came out John was shocked. His report card stated that he had failed in two subjects. 

John couldn’t understand how this could have happened as he had studied regularly. 

You see when John studied for 2 hours every day he perceived he was well prepared. Also, he thought 2 hours/day was enough to prepare each subject.

He took his perception as the truth (the reality). But, it was obviously not the reality as it became clear after his results were out. 

This situation could have been easily avoided if he had just taken a mock test on each subject. A mock test would have shown him what reality really was. 

Here, John’s perception was that he was well-prepared. But, he was underprepared in reality. 

From the above example, we can conclude that it is important for us to know the difference between perception and reality. This is because a wrong perception creates a false picture and can lead us to the wrong path. 

Continuing on the wrong path for a long will deter us from achieving our goals. Also, in certain cases, our wrong perceptions may cost us. This may make it impossible for us to return to the desired track.

Perception vs Reality – Deviation of Perception from Reality

Yes, perception differs from reality as it gets a tint of human emotions and experiences. Minor deviations are also expected but extreme deviations will lead to catastrophic results.

It is desirable if our perception remains as close to reality as possible. Perception’s extreme deviation from reality will result in a highly skewed outlook of the world.

This, in no circumstances, leads to favorable outcomes. Deviation of perception from reality can lead to two different scenarios:

1st scenario : A deviated perception yields a positive impact on the person.

One positive effect of a deviated perception is an inflated view of self. In other words, it can give an overestimation of one’s capabilities.

At most, this wrong perception can give a person hope and improved endurance for the time being.

But, this positive effect will soon come to an end in the moment of truth. Since the positive effect of the wrong perception is highly transient.

2nd scenario : Where this deviation can cause a negative impact.

Mostly, a deviated perception inclines more towards the negative side of things. For example, we may always worry that something bad is going to happen in the future.

This may stem from our perception that the present circumstances are bad. This may lead to low self-esteem and give birth to anxiety and depression.

A deviation of our perception from reality is never good. It becomes a greater liability if our illusion converts into delusion. A complete U-turn of our perception from reality is actually termed as mental illness.

Perception vs Reality: How to Differentiate

It is not easy to differentiate between perception and reality. If it were easy people would always be on the right side of things. They would have always taken the right decisions.

But as we can all admit, we have been wrong, multiple times in our lives. It was not until later, that we realized that we were wrong.

Most of the time, we are not even aware that we are wrong. This is the main limitation of perceiving the world through our senses.

Our perception has this inherent quality of misguiding us. Moreover, since perception stems within us it is not easy to tell that we are wrong. This continues until some external source forces us to see the reality.

So what’s the solution? How do we come to know that this is my perception and this is the reality?

Recall the example that we gave of John. John was only able to understand that his perception didn’t match the reality when his results were out. In this case, it was his report card that showed him the truth.

Here report card can be said to be that external source that showed him what the reality was. John’s result was an instrument of measuring reality.

It’s the instrument of reality that can differentiate between our perception and reality. Only this instrument can help us tell what the truth is.

Quiz or revision tests could have served as an instrument of measuring reality as well. This would have been a better way of finding out for John that he was wrong.

In our lives, the opinion of a friend, colleague, family, or others can help us distinguish between perception and reality.

The Importance of Positive Perception

Yes, we all perceive situations and events differently. But broadly speaking, our perceptions can be classified into two main categories.

1)   Negative Perception

2)   Positive Perception

While perception is not the reality it still has great significance in our lives. The way we see the world and the way we see the situation affect us. For one, it affects our outlook on the world. It affects what we feel about others.

Perception also greatly impacts our level of happiness in life. A negative perception leads to low satisfaction and low enthusiasm towards life; whereas a positive perception can even convert a tragic situation into a cause for inspiration.

Scientists have found that perception is a choice. This means we can choose to have a positive or negative perception.

Let’s see the benefits of having a positive perception

• Positive perception promotes happiness
• It reduces stress in life
• Gives people hope
• Makes people more patient in difficult situations
• Instills confidence
• Improves our relationships

Final Thoughts

Understanding perception vs reality is essential for us as human beings. Our daily life decisions are based on the understanding of the two.

When we are able to separate our own perception from reality we can take the necessary measures to be happy. Plus, we can be on the right path to achieve our goals.

Article Sources

1. https://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-perception-and-vs-reality/ 2. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-prime/201908/perception-is-not-reality 3. https://www.imsts.com/perception-vs-reality

Sometimes, we happen to fall prey to false beliefs, distorted thoughts, and incorrect perceptions that we are great, or extraordinary in some way. Want to know why? Do read our article on Delusions of Grandeur !

Surabhi has a deep passion for words. She puts her heart and mind into whatever she pursues and craves for creative ventures. She has always been keen on creating original content that can make a difference. In her experience as a content writer, she has had the opportunity to work on several fields with Psychology being her favorite. Surabhi says, words have the power to transform the world, better than a sword. So she hopes to contribute her bit to this revolution. At ThePleasantConversation, she feels lucky to have the opportunity to share content capable of bringing about a change in the lives of the readers.

Perception And Reality Essays

Perception and reality, “david hume and john locke’s views on perception and reality”, popular essay topics.

• American Dream
• Artificial Intelligence
• Black Lives Matter
• Bullying Essay
• Career Goals Essay
• Causes of the Civil War
• Child Abusing
• Civil Rights Movement
• Community Service
• Cultural Identity
• Cyber Bullying
• Death Penalty
• Depression Essay
• Domestic Violence
• Freedom of Speech
• Global Warming
• Gun Control
• Human Trafficking
• I Believe Essay
• Immigration
• Importance of Education
• Israel and Palestine Conflict
• Leadership Essay
• Legalizing Marijuanas
• Mental Health
• National Honor Society
• Police Brutality
• Pollution Essay
• Racism Essay
• Romeo and Juliet
• Same Sex Marriages
• Social Media
• The Great Gatsby
• The Yellow Wallpaper
• Time Management
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Violent Video Games
• What Makes You Unique
• Why I Want to Be a Nurse
• Send us an e-mail

• Social Sciences

Reality Versus Perception: Why Your Perception is Not Always Reality

20 Oct 2022

Format: APA

Academic level: College

Paper type: Essay (Any Type)

Words: 1450

Downloads: 0

Psychological and philosophical studies gave indicate that reality is a fact or the truth. Perception, on the other hand, is the process of organizing and interpreting stimuli to understand surroundings. Reality exists entirely outside the mind and cannot be easily be manipulated because it represents “what is” or the truth. Perception exists entirely inside the brain because it represents mental gymnastics about the world. In other words, the former is a constant factor, while the latter is a variable (Betancourt, 2018). However, reality is complex and cannot always be accessed by human beings, and it is the main reason why perception exists. Perception has an overwhelming ability to influence how people look at reality, and it is the reason why cognitive processes have the power to turn beliefs into reality (Draaisma, 2017). Primarily, since perception can affect reality, it prevents people from making objective judgments about their surroundings. Because of perceptions, people can have distinctive meanings of the same truth. Therefore, this paper will be a discussion of reality and perception in light of organizational decision making.

Objective Perceived and Realities 

Objective realities represent accounts of how things are. In other words, objective realities represent a collection of facts. A fact is considered a reality because it is neutral, or it is not influenced by interests, prejudices, or feelings. Objective realities are independent of the mind of the person, making them because they correspond with facts. Every person can verify an objective reality (Betancourt, 2018). The perceived reality, on the other hand, represents the process where people tend to view their perceptions of a particular as the objective truth. In this case, people see observations of others about the same event as incorrect. For example, the beauty of a flower is a perceived reality. People will choose whether the flower is beautiful or not based on their perceptions (Betancourt, 2018).

Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.

Factors that Influence the Perception of Reality 

Reality is complex and cannot be accessed entirely by human beings. Therefore, perceptions, according to psychologists, occur to help people understand the realities of their world. However, the limitations of perceptions limit how people look at reality, and it is the reason it has the power to turn beliefs into reality (Draaisma, 2017). Factors that influence perceptions are attribution, bias, selective perceptions, primacy and recency effects, bounded rationality, cognitive biases, conjunction fallacy, contrast effects, and stereotyping.

Attribution 

Attribution is explained by the attribution theory designed in 1977 by Harold Kelley. Attribution describes how people establish the realities of others based on their innate characteristics or external factors. In this case, people believe that behavior is caused by personal characteristics or external factors that are out of a person’s control (Youssef-Morgan, 2017). For attribution to occur, people must observe the behavior, and then they must decide whether it was intentional or it was forced by external factors. As a result, the behavior will be attributed to a person or a situation (Draaisma, 2017). Attribution affects the perception of reality because people tend to think one attribute is more desirable or appropriate than the other. For example, people attribute the success of marathoners to their talent and not situational factors such as training methods and running shoes.

Bias is the inclination or prejudice against or towards someone, event, or something. Biases are mainly bases on stereotypes rather than the actual state of events. The stereotypes act as cognitive shortcuts that allow people to embrace a particular inclination or school of thought. There are positive biases, such as choosing to eat organic foods or only (Draaisma, 2017). However, there are cognitive shortcuts that lead to poor decisions. For instance, racial and religious stereotypes often lead to prejudgments that cause a rash or discriminatory outcome.

Selective Perceptions 

Selective perceptions represent the use of objects, events, or people that stand out to make quick judgments. The process involves responding to attractive, colorful, or loud stimuli. People selectively respond to events or objects that stand and ignore the subdued ones (Youssef-Morgan, 2017). For example, a pregnant woman is likely to notice pregnant women at a party compared to other women. As a result, people are likely to make decisions based on signals rather than underlying factors. Selective perceptions call for immediate action instead of objective analysis of stimuli.

Primacy and Recency Effects 

The primacy effect is the inclination to rely on information gained from early experiences, while recency effects involve the tendency to depend on recent experiences to make decisions. Primarily, while making decisions, people tend to make sense of the events by relying on information gain from early or recent experiences (Draaisma, 2017). These factors affect the perception of reality through serial positioning. Serial positioning is the act of remembering the first and last items in a series of things. For example, the first and last items in a shopping list are likely to be remembered in high amounts. The inclination to primacy and recency effects affect the motivation to remember all the facts of an event (Youssef-Morgan, 2017).

Bounded Rationality 

Bounded rationality dictates that human beings are prevented from making rational decisions because of external factors and limited mental abilities. These factors prevent decision-makers from seeing the bigger picture and exploring all alternatives to a problem. According to bounded rationality theory, people cannot make rational decisions because of limited mental capacities, information available, and time (Draaisma, 2017).

Cognitive Biases 

Cognitive biases revolve around heuristics or mental shortcuts that people apply to reduce the complexities of the decision-making process. Cognitive biases are systematic and predictable rules that decision-makers apply to process complex information (Youssef-Morgan, 2017). For example, people ignore the flaws of their loved ones because of the strong love they have. Although cognitive biases can lead to accurate decisions, they can also lead to wrong decisions because they depend on people’s motivations and social pressures (Draaisma, 2017).

Conjunction Fallacy 

Conjunction fallacy revolves around the idea that specific conditions are more probable compared to the general ones. When people are presented with choices, they are likely to choose the ones that are based on specific information. For example, if A is a subset of B, then A is more probable than B. The fallacy occurs because people are primed to choose the subset as the most probable choice (Draaisma, 2017).

Contrast Effect 

Contrast effect occurs when an outcome or reaction is influenced by previous information. Primarily, when two stimulants are similar, or close people tend to evaluate them against each other instead of against a fixed benchmark or standard. The comparison leads to contrast error when events are compared to others of greater value. For example, in performance evaluation, a new employee’s performance can be lower if it is compared to that of a retired employee (Youssef-Morgan, 2017).

Stereotyping 

Stereotyping happens when information regarding people or objects is categorized in the same group. Stereotyping is used to group people and objects into categories that prevent individuals from relearning their characteristics. Stereotypes are essential when learning new skills, such as operating new software. However, when dealing with people, they influence reality mainly when individuals who share fewer characteristics are grouped together. Furthermore, stereotyping cannot work in modern diverse social and workplaces (Youssef-Morgan, 2017).

Bias Awareness in Organizations 

Reality is complex, and it is the reason why people make biased decisions. Awareness of unconscious bias is one of the factors that lead to rational decisions. One of the reasons why managers should be aware of their unconscious bias is that it makes them form teams based on facts rather than their motivations (Draaisma, 2017). When managers are not aware of bias, their likely to form teams based on their feelings, desire, and what they are familiar with. However, when managers are aware of bias, they create systematic processes that help them to form teams based on reality. The processes are also used in performance and talent management processes whereby employees are not affected by the unconscious bias of their managers (Youssef-Morgan, 2017).

Also, awareness of bias helps to create an innovative workplace. Ideally, unconscious bias prevents managers from exploring all the possible solutions to a problem (Youssef-Morgan, 2017). However, when they are aware of the likelihood of bias, they drive towards seeking many answers to a problem. As a result, managers create an environment that encourages new and innovative ideas (Betancourt, 2018).

There are different strategies that managers can use to increase awareness of bias in the workplace. One of the strategies is through progressive education that allows all stakeholders to know how to conceptualize things without attaching feelings and motivations (Draaisma, 2017). Education can also be enhanced by providing feedback on previous decisions. This step helps individuals to identify factors that led to the right decisions in the past and overcome the ones that led to negative decisions (Youssef-Morgan, 2017).

The second step is encouraging diversity in the workplace. Diversity brings different ideas that expand the realities of managers and employees (Betancourt, 2018). To gain experience in rational decision making people must expand the horizons of their knowledge to gain insights on new unknowns. Further, studies have shown that diversity gives managers and employees the opportunities to make decisions in a broadened array of contexts (Youssef-Morgan, 2017). As a result, managers and employees cannot focus on surface factors while making novel decisions.

Conclusion 

This essay has shown that reality is fact or the truth, while perception is the process of organizing and interpreting stimuli to understand surroundings. The former is a constant factor, while the latter is a variable. However, the limitations of perceptions limit how people look at reality because of attribution, bias, selective perceptions, primacy and recency effects, bounded rationality, cognitive biases, conjunction fallacy, contrast effects, and stereotyping. For example, bounded rationality represents the inability of people to make rational decisions because of restricted mental capacities. Creating awareness of bias in the workplace is crucial because it encourages innovation and objective performance appraisals a. Managers can create awareness in the workplace through education, giving feedback on previous decisions and encouraging diversity.

Betancourt, J. R. (2018). Perception is Reality, and Reality Drives Perception: No Time to Celebrate Yet.  Journal of General Internal Medicine, 33,  3, 241-242.

Draaisma, D. (2017). PERCEPTION Our useful inability to see reality.  Nature, 544,  7650.)

Youssef-Morgan, C., & Noon, A. (2017). Industrial/Organizational Psychology (2nd ed.). Bridgepoint Education.

• Video Discussion- Living with Schizophrenia
• Grief Therapy: How to Cope With Grief and Loss

Select style:

StudyBounty. (2023, September 15). Reality Versus Perception: Why Your Perception is Not Always Reality . https://studybounty.com/reality-versus-perception-why-your-perception-is-not-always-reality-essay

Hire an expert to write you a 100% unique paper aligned to your needs.

Related essays

We post free essay examples for college on a regular basis. Stay in the know!

How to Do a SWOT Analysis for Your Business

Letter of consent for research study, mental representations and the mind-brain relationship.

Words: 1796

Building a Healthy Marriage

Words: 1266

Devastating Impacts of Domestic Violence

Words: 2437

How Emotions Affect Marketing and Sales

Words: 1113

Running out of time ?

Entrust your assignment to proficient writers and receive TOP-quality paper before the deadline is over.

IEEE Account

• Change Username/Password
• Update Address

Purchase Details

• Payment Options
• Order History
• View Purchased Documents

Profile Information

• Communications Preferences
• Profession and Education
• Technical Interests
• US & Canada: +1 800 678 4333
• Worldwide: +1 732 981 0060
• Contact & Support
• About IEEE Xplore
• Accessibility
• Terms of Use
• Nondiscrimination Policy
• Privacy & Opting Out of Cookies

A not-for-profit organization, IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. © Copyright 2024 IEEE - All rights reserved. Use of this web site signifies your agreement to the terms and conditions.

• Subscriptions

By clicking Sign In, you agree to our Terms and Conditions and that you have read our Privacy Policy .

Sign In Up with your social account

We won't post to any of your accounts

Your password must include:

• Min 8 characters
• Min 1 lowercase character
• Min 1 uppercase character
• Min 1 number

Jax Taylor Was Served Divorce Papers From Brittany Cartwright While Filming ‘The Valley’ Season 2

There’s a new plot twist in Jax Taylor ’s split from Brittany Cartwright .

Taylor, 45, was served divorce papers on camera while filming season 2 of Bravo’s The Valley , a reality spinoff of Vanderpump Rules , Us Weekly has learned. 

The news, which was first reported by TMZ on Wednesday, August 28, came one day after Cartwright, 35, filed to divorce from Taylor after five years of marriage. Per court documents obtained by Us on Tuesday, August 27, she listed their official date of separation as January 24. Cartwright cited “irreconcilable differences” as the reason for the split and is seeking primary legal and physical custody of their 3-year-old son, Cruz, with visitation for Taylor.  

According to TMZ, Cartwright, who stars on The Valley alongside her ex, filmed footage for the show on the day that she filed. She and Taylor did not film together. 

Us Weekly has reached out to Taylor’s rep for comment.

Related: Jax Taylor and Brittany Cartwright's Ups and Downs Through the Years

Hours after filing, Cartwright was photographed going to dinner with The Valley costar Zack Wickham at Taisho, a Japanese restaurant in Sherman Oaks, California.

The estranged pair have yet to directly acknowledge the divorce, though Cartwright has taken to Instagram to share several glam photos with empowering captions. On Tuesday, she captioned a photo of herself sporting a bright pink dress, “Getting my sparkle back.”

“Shine on,” former Bachelorette Rachel Lindsay , who is in the middle of her own divorce from Bryan Abasolo , remarked in the comments section. Nia Sanchez , who stars alongside Cartwright and Taylor on The Valley , gushed, “Yes!! Love you queen Britt.”

Earlier in August, Taylor completed his month-long in-patient treatment for his “mental health struggles.” His rep told Us in a statement , “Jax has spent the last 30 days in treatment and will be heading back home later this week. It’s been an emotional month for him and he’s most looking forward to spending time with his son.”

Related: Celebrity Couples Who Stayed Together After Cheating Scandals

Cartwright and Taylor’s relationship has endured many highs and lows over the years. They first met during a trip to Las Vegas in 2015, and Cartwright joined Taylor on season 4 of Vanderpump Rules the following year. The duo went on to have their own spinoff series, Vanderpump Rules: Jax and Brittany Take Kentucky , which aired in 2017.

You have successfully subscribed.

Subscribe to newsletters

By signing up, I agree to the Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive emails from Us Weekly

Deal of the Day

Check our latest news in Google News

Check our latest news in Apple News

Despite a past cheating scandal with VPR costar Faith Stowers , the twosome worked through the rough patch and got engaged in June 2018. They tied the knot in June 2019 and eventually left Vanderpump Rules in 2020.

“He needs to go to therapy,” Cartwright exclusively told Us in April . “He doesn’t need to be staying out at the bar all the time. He needs to respect me more and stop taking me for granted. I was the closest person to him and was kind of like his punching bag. He was always giving me jabs. I can’t deal with that for the rest of my life.”

She added,  “But I won’t waste my time and get back into a toxic situation. Now the veil has been lifted and I see how much I was always cleaning up Jax’s messes. I’m thrown in the middle of all these fights and constantly forced to apologize for him in the media and to friends. It’s hard.”

In this article

Brittany Cartwright

More Stories