The doors of perception: Anti-sensationalism and direct realism in Reid and Kant (Immanuel Kant, Thomas Reid)

For Thomas Reid and Immanuel Kant, the problem of perceptual objectivity is not whether we're getting it right about the world, but whether we're getting at a world about which we can be right (or wrong). This dissertation is an examination of one aspect of Reid and Kant's philosophy of mind: their theories of perception. Reid and Kant were less concerned about the truth, accuracy or justification of any particular perceptual states than they were with examining the conditions required for forming intentional, representational mental states at all. I argue that their shared concern with the conditions of the ability to represent objects at all leads them to similar answers to the problems posed by the theory of ideas, answers that are best seen in the light of Reid and Kant's anti-sensationalism and direct realism; I argue that Reid and Kant are both non-naïve direct realists. Their non-naIve direct realism is based on their anti-sensationalism. Anti-sensationalism is the position that the qualitative character of sensations alone, by itself, cannot account for the representational content of perception. Reid and Kant's direct realism is not naïve because they do not deny that perception is mediated; they deny instead that perception is mediated by a representational relation internal to sensations and objects, a relation based on the intrinsic features of the relata.