(MA) The Mind's Eye, and Realism

Some things to read and think about;

The mind's eye;
The phrase "mind's eye" refers to the human ability for visualization, i.e., for the experiencing of visual mental imagery; in other words, one's ability to "see" things with the mind.


And Representative Realism;

Representational realism, related to indirect realism, is a philosophical concept, broadly equivalent to the accepted view of perception in natural science. Unfortunately, the meaning of the theory is dependent on the user's interpretation of words like 'perceive', 'reality' etc. such that in the longstanding debate between representational (indirect) and naive (direct) realists each side will always claim that the other has not understood their position. Thus, readers of this account must ask what the writer(s) believe(s) their words to mean.

Representational realism states that we do not (and cannot) perceive the external world as it really is; instead we know only our ideas and interpretations of the way the world is. This might be said to indicate that a barrier or 'veil of perception' prevents first-hand knowledge of the world, but the representational realist would deny that 'first hand knowledge' in this sense is a coherent concept, since knowledge is always via some means.

An indirect realist believes our ideas of the world are interpretations of sense data derived from a real external world (unlike idealists). The debate then occurs about how ideas or interpretations arise. At least since Newton, natural scientists have made it clear that the current scope of science cannot address this. Nevertheless, the alternative, that we have knowledge of the outside world unconstrained by our means of access through sense organs that does not require interpretation would appear to be inconsistent with every day observation.

Aristotle was the first to provide an in-depth description of indirect realism. In On the Soul he describes how the eye must be affected by changes in an intervening medium rather than by objects themselves. He then speculates on how these sense impressions can form our experience of seeing and reasons that an endless regress would occur unless the sense itself were self aware. He concludes by proposing that the mind is the things it thinks. He calls the images in the mind "ideas".

Indirect realism has been popular in the history of philosophy and has been developed by many philosophers including Bertrand Russell, Baruch Spinoza, René Descartes, and John Locke.

Representationalism is one of the key assumptions of cognitivism in psychology.