Alan Weir

University of Glasgow

Mereological Naïve Realism

10 May 2019, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: One virtue of sense datum theories is their phenomenological accuracy: when I see, imagine, dream or hallucinate a dodecagon, there is a twelve-sided figure in my mind. At any rate, if that is plausible then intentionalist theories of mind are at a distinct disadvantage. However a vice of the sense datum theories, from a naturalistic perspective, is the great difficulty of squaring them with a physicalist ontology. In this talk I’ll sketch a metaphysical view which aims to avoid the affront to naturalism presented by sense data by validating a form of naïve realism which, I will argue, also meets the severe problem illusions and hallucinations pose for naïve or direct realism in a more satisfactory way than the alternatives. The metaphysical framework takes the form of a heterodox variant of mereology in which mereological concepts such as proper part are explicated in terms of a more complex, multigrade, constituency relation. The latter, I’ll suggest, can play the role of a fundamental explanatory tool which can encompass experience, naïvely construed, as well as other physical entities.