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The Theory Of Mind And Free Indirect realism is broadly equivalent to the accepted view of perception in natural science that states that we do not and cannot perceive the external world as it really is but know only our ideas and interpretations of the way the world is. The representational realist would deny that "first-hand knowledge" is a coherent concept, since knowledge is always via some means, and argue instead that our ideas of the world are interpretations of sensory input derived from an external world that is real unlike the standpoint of idealismwhich holds that only ideas are real, but mind-independent things are not.

The main alternative to representationalism is anti-representationalismthe view according to which perception is not a process of constructing internal representations. Aristotle was the first to provide a description of direct realism.

In On the Soul he describes how a see-er is informed of the object itself by way of the hylomorphic form carried over the intervening material continuum with which the eye is impressed. In medieval philosophydirect realism was defended by Thomas Aquinas. Leibniz[7] and David Hume. Locke categorized qualities as follows: [9].

Thomas Reida notable member of the Scottish common sense realism was a proponent of direct realism. Late modern philosophersJ. Fichte and G. Hegel followed Kant in adopting empirical realism. In contemporary philosophyindirect realism has been defended by Edmund Husserl [16] and Bertrand Russell. However, epistemological dualism has come under sustained attack by other contemporary philosophers, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein the private language argument and Wilfrid Sellars in his seminal essay "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind".

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Indirect realism is argued to be problematical because of Ryle's regress and the homunculus argument. Recently, reliance on the private language argument and the "homunculus objection" has itself come under attack. It can be argued that those who argue for "inner presence", to use Antti Revonsuo 's term, [22] are not proposing a private "referent", with the application of language to it being "private" and thus unshareable, but a private use of public language. There is no doubt that each of us has a private understanding of public language, a notion that has been experimentally supported; [23] George Steiner refers to our personal use of language as an The Theory Of Mind And Free Indirect idiolect ", one particular to ourselves in its detail.

A problem with representationalism is that if simple data flow and information processing is assumed then something in the brain must be interpreting incoming data. This something is often described as a homunculusalthough the term homunculus is also used to imply an entity that creates a continual regressand this need not be implied. This suggests that some phenomenon other than simple data flow and information processing is involved in perception.

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This is more of an issue now than it was for rationalist philosophers prior to Newton, such as Descartes, for whom physical processes were poorly defined. Descartes held that there is a "homunculus" in the form of the soul, belonging to a form of natural substance known as res cogitans that obeyed different laws from those obeyed by solid matter res extensa. Although Descartes' duality of natural substances may have echoes in modern physics Bose and Fermi statistics no agreed account of 'interpretation' has been formulated.

Thus representationalism remains an incomplete description of perception.]