Naïve Realism

Our perception is influenced by all sorts of things, from where we happen to be standing (and how tall we are, and how good our eyesight is) when something happens, to our biases about politics, assumptions about different groups of people, and our religious (or spiritual) beliefs.

These “lenses” distort all the information we take in (about the world around us and about our own internal processes), and we never perceive things through just a single lens: a multitude of them overlap to create an even more complex and unique distortion that then ultimately shapes our future assumptions, biases, and so on.

In the world of philosophy, the nature of our perceptual experience (and how that experience informs our beliefs and understandings) is core to many other important questions, and within that umbrella-concept, “Naïve Realism” (also sometimes called “Direct Realism”) refers to the idea that our sensory organs (and the other bodily components that interpret and organize the data they collect) provide us with an accurate map of reality.