20 January 2025 – Daniele Cassaghi (Turin University) – “Can a retentionalist be a direct realist?”
Aula “Martinetti”, Via Festa del Perdono 7, h. 14:00 and Teams
Abstract.
The intervallic perception view (James, 1890), according to which subjects are perceptually aware of intervals rather than instants, comes in two versions: retentionalism, according to which perceptual experiences are momentary, and extensionalism, according to which they are not.Philosophers have explored the connection between these two theories and the accounts of perceptual phenomenology (representationalism and direct realism) during the last years. And, the received view is clear: retentionalism cannot be combined with direct realism. The reason is well explained by Hoerl (2017), who argues that direct realism has some features that make it, prima facie, incompatible with intervallic perception (and he further argues that this problem can be overcome only by assuming an extensionalist perspective).I will argue that the received view is wrong and that retentionalism is fully compatible with direct realism. I will start by assessing the concerns by Hoerl, which are of two kinds: 1) he claims that past objects cannot be among the constituents of a direct realist phenomenology, 2) he claims that only objects that currently impinge upon our senses can be directly perceived.I will provide a way to reply to 1) by elaborating on the interaction between the metaphysics of time and perception. I will provide a rejoinder to 2) by relying on the interplay between the time of the perceived objects and the time of the neural realizers of the perceptual experience. The two rejoinders together will show how to articulate a coherent retentional direct realist theory.Finally, during the discussion some noteworthy upshots will be disclosed. Namely A) that the distinction between the temporal properties we perceive and the temporal properties of perception may be stronger than what is standardly assumed in the literature; B) that an assumption behind the usual interpretation of direct realism is unmotivated: the assumption according to which we are aware only of objects that are concurrent with our act of perception.