Thinking you know what’s what.

Especially if you think you really know how your senses and your cognition don’t really render things as things really are, and that by knowing that you can correct for their confounding factors.

I find that a surprising number of people are naive realists. Naive realists talk about objective facts.

Naive (or more properly called “direct”) realism believes in isomorphic concept of perception of reality. What we see is out there in the same very form, so to speak. What we see is the objective reality (colours, shapes etc).

Naive realism is not particularly widely held amongst philosophers in academia. It is very intuitive and convenient as a view but just as any other strictly common sense view it quickly runs into many problems, and that is due to chiefly scientific revelations of the 20th century. For example, it is true that colours only exist in our brain or that objects don’t exist the way we see them; physics theory of objects tells us that there is only space and aggregates of matter that we perceive as objects are mere creations of the brain for us to navigate in the world. To see objects is more of an evolutionary trait, an adaptation. Quantum research also called into question the concept of perceiving anything “objectively” and concluded that the notion is impossible, no two observers can perceive reality in the same way. People might perceive things like colours, shades and concepts drastically different, and this is what neuroscience says. What we do is translate and thus communicate, but translation depends on public interaction, it requires intersubjectivity. All of this is only the tip of the iceberg, there are objects out there like rainbows that do not exist at all, oases, or simply hallucinations. Direct (naive) realist runs into many problems that other theories of perception like indirect realism simply don’t have. Indirect realist theories account for error and incompleteness of sense impressions and a correct theory will have margins of error rather than isomorphism which is implausible.

Naive realism is the natural attitude toward the world: the belief that the world as we perceive it is pretty nearly the world as is, except for a rare hallucination or optical illusion or the like. It is also taken to include the idea that the world as we perceive it would pretty much go on as it appears to be going on, even if we weren’t around to perceive it.

This raises the obvious question: is it really naive? Should philosophers not, after all, in the end “come home” to this natural pre-philosophic attitude. That has been the contention of several not-especially naive philosophers, including G.E. Moore and (I would contend) George Santayana. You might call that sort of thing deliberately naive realism.

Thanks for the question, Wayne Hardy. I was unfamiliar with the social psychology concept naive realism prior to receiving your answer request. But it accords quite well with Buddhist philosophy, science, and practice. Naive realism [1] is an empirically verified phenomenon demonstrating that humans tend to strongly believe that their “reality belief system”[2], i.e. their notions regarding ontology and social ontology in particular, are objectively true and that anyone who disagrees does so due to errors of perception, errors in inference (logic), lack of knowledge (ignorance), etc.. In Buddhist practice, naive realism is considered a mental health issue, and for every mental health issue Buddhism has an antidote, generally taking the form of visualization exercises - meditations.

Naive realism, in that it rests on a strong reification of the self-concept [3], could be considered THE central mental health issue from the perspective of Buddhist practice. And if you think about it, it indicates a severe lack of self-reflection - introspection, in our society. If one reflects inward even occasionally, then it doesn’t take a great deal of discernment to realize that neither your self-concept nor your reality-concept are static but are, rather, dynamic processes which evolve in accordance with experience. In other words, your self and your reality are projections generated by your mind under the influence of embodied experience. Your views on ontology are surely not the same as they were even 5 or 10 years ago. From here it’s a rudimentary extrapolation from empirical observation aided perhaps by a bit of counter-factual reasoning to the realization that those whose embodied experiences differ substantially from one’s own most probably project selves and realities which also differ substantially from one’s own. Being able to realize this and act on it is the basis of empathy. Our society - certainly its Congress, is clearly lacking in empathy.

The Buddhist antidote for naive realism is the deconstruction of the self-concept through penetrating insight into the true nature of reality - Wisdom, combined with the intentional cultivation of spontaneously arising compassion, loving kindness, empathetic joy, and equanimity - the Four Immeasurables. Cultivating wisdom is the antidote for substantialism - it renders “objectivity” a mute concept, viewing the self as a process of individuation [4]. Cultivating the four immeasurables is the antidote for nihilism - compassion, kindness, and empathy, all applied equally, become the ground of existence. Buddhists view naive realism as a prison bound up with suffering. This prison is sustained by substantialist thought, erroneously engaging with self and reality as though objectively real rather than simply emergent projections of mind. It is bound up with suffering because the reified reality induces the reified self to yearn for what was and/or anticipate what shall be and/or cling to what is. It supports a reified distinction between self and other - thick boundariedness, which weakens the ground of existence and generates the three poisons - ignorance, attachment, and aversion.

According to Buddhist science there are obtainable two modes of freedom from this situation, called Relative Bodhicitta and Ultimate Bodhicitta [5]. Relative bodhicitta (enlightened mind) obtains when one attains the direct realization that one’s self-concept and reality-concept are simply emergent projections of mind constrained by karmic resonances - evolutionary habits you might say, and intentionally transforms these karmic resonances to support wisdom and the four immeasurables. Ultimate Bodhicitta obtains when one attains the direct realization that what we naively refer to as reality - rocks, trees, galaxies, is itself just a projection of deep mind. Those who attain Ultimate Bodhicitta can actually alter “reality” in ways beneficial to others, i.e. Dzogchen masters manifest the Rainbow Body in order to reinforce faith in the Buddhist science [6].

So to me naive realism is a sad, unnecessary fact of human existence, a mental illness to be overcome. It’s really why I promote what I promote here on Quora, the anti-substantialist philosophy of Gilbert Simondon [4], Radical Constructivism [7], Social Constuctivism [8], Enactivism [9]; it is why I’m an ardent anti-Platonist [10]. So many problems in society seem to have their root cause in this curable alienation from compassion and empathy. At its worst it becomes naive metaphysics, manifesting when leaders publicly declare “God told them” to pre-emptively invade other countries or start caliphates or genocide entire peoples and cultures. It’s rather arrogant to believe that your reality is also God’s reality! And even worse yet is when peoples and governments try to force those different from them to “think” like them, thinking here of how the Chinese Communists are treating the Tibetans and Uighurs and how Western Europeans have treated Africans and the First Peoples of Turtle Island.

1. Naïve Realism: Our Misinterpretation of How We Interpret the World;
2. Chaotic Logic: Chapter Nine; this and the following are chapters from Ben Goertzel’s book, Chaotic Logic,
3. MIND AND REALITY;
4. The Genesis of the Individual;
5. The Bodhisattva Ideal;
6. Investigating the Rainbow Body;
7. An Introduction to Radical Constructivism;
8. Social Constructivism;’
9. Amazon.com: The Embodied Mind, revised edition: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (The MIT Press) (9780262529365): Varela, Francisco J., Thompson, Evan, Rosch, Eleanor, Kabat-Zinn, Jon: Books;
10. Social Constructivism as a Philosophy of Mathematics.

You can find all of Ben Goertzel’s books here and here.

In the philosophy of perception and the philosophy of mind, naïve realism (also known as “direct realism”, “perceptual realism”, or, most commonly, as “common sense realism”) is the idea that the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are. When referred to as direct realism, naïve realism is often contrasted with indirect realism.

According to the naïve realist, the objects of perception are not merely representations of external objects, but are in fact those external objects themselves. The naïve realist is typically also a metaphysical realist, holding that these objects continue to obey the laws of physics and retain all of their properties regardless of whether or not there is anyone to observe them. They are composed of matter, occupy space, and have properties, such as size, shape, texture, smell, taste and color, that are usually perceived correctly. The indirect realist, by contrast, holds that the objects of perception are simply representations of reality based on sensory inputs, and thus adheres to the primary/secondary quality distinction in ascribing properties to external objects.

In addition to indirect realism, naïve realism can also be contrasted with some forms of “philosophical idealism”, which claim that no world exists apart from mind-dependent ideas, and some forms of “philosophical skepticism”, which say that we cannot trust our senses or prove that we are not radically deceived in our beliefs; that our conscious experience is not of the real world but of an internal representation of the world. I consider myself to be a believer of the form of “German Idealism” as proposed by the 18th century philosophers Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. Although, to tell the truth I am very much, in the minority with that notion. Most modern philosophers believe in a form of indirect realism. None that I know of consider naïve realism to be a valid metaphysical system.

In fact, most philosophers (including me) claim that it is incompatible to accept naïve realism in the philosophy of perception and scientific realism in the philosophy of science. Scientific realism states that the universe contains just those properties that feature in a scientific description of it, which would mean that secondary qualities like color are not real per se, and that all that exists are certain wavelengths which are reflected by physical objects because of their microscopic surface texture.

As a reference, Aquinas is thought to hold a moderate Realism position in Philosophy.

FROM WIKIPEDIA WE LEARN: “Moderate realism (also called immanent realism) is a position in the debate on the metaphysics of universals which holds that there is no realm in which universals exist (in opposition to Platonic realism who asserts the existence of abstract objects), nor do they really exist within particulars as universals, but rather universals really exist within particulars as particularized, and multiplied.

Overview

Moderate realism is opposed to both extreme realism (such as the theory of Platonic forms) and nominalism. Nominalists deny the existence of universals altogether, even as particularized and multiplied within particulars.

Aristotle espoused a form of moderate realism as did Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus (cf. Scotist realism). Moderate realism is anti-realist about abstract objects, just like conceptualism is (their difference being that conceptualism denies the mind-independence of universals, while moderate realism does not).

A more recent and influential version of immanent realism has been advanced by Willard Van Orman Quine, in works such as "Posits and Reality" (1955)] and D. M. Armstrong, in works such as his Universals: An Opinionated Introduction (1989, p. 8.

A Naive Realism approach to Philosophical understanding would be:

“In philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, naïve realism (also known as direct realism, perceptual realism, or common sense realism) is the idea that the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are. When referred to as direct realism, naïve realism is often contrasted with indirect realism.

According to the naïve realist, the objects of perception are not merely representations of external objects, but are in fact those external objects themselves. The naïve realist is typically also a metaphysical realist, holding that these objects continue to obey the laws of physics and retain all of their properties regardless of whether or not there is anyone to observe them. They are composed of matter, occupy space, and have properties, such as size, shape, texture, smell, taste and color, that are usually perceived correctly. The indirect realist, by contrast, holds that the objects of perception are simply representations of reality based on sensory inputs, and thus adheres to the primary/secondary quality distinction in ascribing properties to external objects.

In addition to indirect realism, naïve realism can also be contrasted with some forms of idealism, which claim that no world exists apart from mind-dependent ideas, and some forms of philosophical skepticism, which say that we cannot trust our senses or prove that we are not radically deceived in our beliefs that our conscious experience is not of the real world but of an internal representation of the world.”

I don’t think Niave Realism had even appeared on the horizon in the time of Aristotle, or even in Aquinas’s time!

Let me write a few words from The Happiness Hypothesis:

“Each of us thinks we see the world directly, as it really is.

We further believe that the facts as we see them are there for all to see, therefore others should agree with us.

If they don’t agree, it follows either that they have not yet been exposed to the relevant facts or else that they are blinded by their interests and ideologies.

People acknowledge that their own backgrounds have shaped their views, but such experiences are invariably seen as deepening one’s insights; for example, being a doctor gives a person special insight into the problems of the health-care industry. But the background of other people is used to explain their biases and covert motivations; for example, doctors think that lawyers disagree with them about tort reform not because they work with the victims of malpractice (and therefore have their own special insights) but because their self-interest biases their thinking.

It just seems plain as day, to the naive realist, that everyone is influenced by ideology and self-interest. Except for me. I see things as they are.”

Basically, what this is trying to convey is that - We are good at pointing out others fault, but when it comes to us, we are unmoved.

Another example what I can think of is when you saw someone driving a car, and you told them that you are not good at parking and the other guy told you, you are not great on U turns. You immediate response would be 'how dare you' or 'who the hell are you to tell me about U turns'. And if the other person asks you to change your words, you would not do it. If someone ask you to change your biases, would you do it. I guess no.

This is what Naive Realism is. We are capable enogh to what others are good or bad at while igroning our own And if you talk about tablets, it can be your anger or rudeness.

How to overcome? Be humble, take a breath when someone is finding out faults in you and then introspect. And when you find out other's fault, speak in a polite manner, if they get it, they are the ones who will be beneficial, if they get angry or they don't understand why you told them, just move on. You felt responsible and you said what you had to. Plus,if you happen to know anyone's biases or faults, don't promote it to the world.

Hope this helps.

The reason one may call empirical realism ‘naive’ is that it’s wishful about the claims it makes about the mechanisms of the world. Specifically, it employs a set of research methods — usually, a variant of the scientific method combined with quantitative rigor — to present the world as governed by ‘natural’ laws. Consequently, the world and its processes are, ultimately, not unpredictable or uncertain; they can be predicted based on one or another principle of causality. And if your research suggests the world is unpredictable, then you haven’t been rigorous enough.

But even worse, this kind of realism can become dangerous if it makes the move from claims about the world to dicta about the world. That is, when it moves from telling us how the world is to telling us about how the world ought to be. I hate to invoke Godwin’s Law, but a clear example of naive ‘realism’ gone too far in this regard is the racial theory behind the Nazi regime, which was propped up by quite a few ‘scientists’ and ‘anthropologists’.

But both these points — the claims and methods of naive realism, and the risks of it being used to inform a certain ethical stance — are simply descriptions, and both cite very extreme examples. I mean, the whole of science has done so much to dispel ‘superstitions’, improve our material health and wellbeing, and inform countless ethical stances that are, ultimately, going to save the world: the fight against climate change is a good example.

What makes empirical/naive realism problematic, is that it uses one of at least two domains — the natural domain and the social domain — to make philosophical and ethical claims about both. Specifically, it may use ideas from natural science — causality is a good example — to justify claims about absolute determinism in the social sphere. Hence, for example, because we can use scientific methodologies to prove that CO2 emissions cause climate change or that tobacco causes cancer, it is assumed that we can use the same methods — some combination of statistical research, regressions and so on — to prove that being a woman causes you to be more caring and nurturing, or that pure self-interest is what governs your choices as a consumer or as a human being in general. A lot of research in social theory has shown that neither is gender something essential to who you are as a person, nor does it ‘cause’ you to be more aggressive or more nurturing — both are outcomes of how people talk about gender in your society and culture. Similarly, consumer behavior — let alone human behavior as a whole — is not governed by the simple economic principles of self-interest or rationality.

The value of the social sciences is that they can help us understand what ‘rational’ means in a given social setting in the first place. In the UK, it might be ‘rational’ to not finish your food because you’re full, but the same action might be ‘irrational’ elsewhere, for fear of appearing rude or disrespectful. By drawing insights from a realm that’s not directly compliant with, say, the laws of physics, the social sciences can offer a complete picture of social phenomena.

The problem is that this is kind of argument is a very difficult one to sell in our modern world, which is in many ways founded on realist principles. So think of it the other way round: how absurd would it be for a social theorist to make claims about why planets revolve? Believe it or not, some social theorists — such as Gabriel Tarde — did go this far, but the silliness of their argument is self-evident.

So what do we do? Give up realism? Or do we simply accept the fact that the natural and social realms have nothing to offer to each other, and pick a side? Personally, I think we can do better than that.

If you look at the state of modern philosophy, you notice something striking: it’s almost exactly divided along the same lines as the natural and social sciences are. On the one hand, we have the Analytical school, with an insistence on the possibility of the absoluteness of reality (and here I’m slightly exaggerating, of course) with such figures as David Hume, John Locke and A.J. Ayer. On the other, we have the Continental school, with an equally enthusiastic rejection on the value, if not the possibility, of ‘absolute’ truth. In this latter school, one may group figures such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and so on.

Scientists (and most economists), insofar as they do resort to Philosophy to reflect on their worldviews, tend to appeal to the Analytical school. And social scientists, in their insistence on, let’s call it, a more ‘relativistic’ perspective, almost always appeal to someone from the Continental school (Husserl and Heidegger evergreen favorites).

And when there’s a fight between the two sides, the underlying difference of philosophy is quite evident. So Hegel has been called more a ‘mystic’ than a ‘philosopher’ — the jab being that his work doesn’t concern the ‘real’ world but some other phantasms — just as social theorists trying to be ‘empirical’ are frowned upon — the case of cultural ecology and functionalism in anthropology are good examples.

But this isn’t to say that you can’t be a scientist and a non-naive realist at the same time, or that you can’t be a realist and a social scientist at the same time. Chaos theory, for example, is a good example of a natural science sub-field that’s built on the idea of uncertainty, as is quantum physics. And as a social science, economics is anything but uncertain: it’s built upon the idea that there exists a universal (and hence, ‘natural’) entity called the ‘market’, that this entity is based on a few ‘natural laws’ (self-interest, self-control, rationality) and that these laws can be used to predict booms and busts in its natural cycle.

In fact, reading about such ‘philosophical differences’ makes you wonder if both sides actually disagree about anything. It just seems that the fight between scientific realism and social scientific idealism is simply being dragged on.

And this is also my personal stance. I feel that even though both ‘sides’ are aware that the world isn’t absolutely predictable, just as it isn’t hopelessly uncertain, there’s a lack of a common philosophical language for them to actually recognize this simple truth. In other words, even though both sides are aware that their ‘stances’ are ultimately not that simple or absolute, they can move on because they keep talking past each other.

The political and social consequences for all of us are painfully visible. Take the US, for example: the alt-right uses ‘naive realism’ to advocate a strict gender binary, but then conveniently drops this realism when it comes to climate change. And politicians, being smart enough to realize such sloppiness, haven’t missed the opportunity to make their lives easier, by transforming the political theater into exactly that: a drama contest were populism wins more votes than sensible discussion.

So, as much as intellectuals such as Neil deGrasse Tyson may disagree about the value of philosophy, I feel that it’s philosophy that ultimately holds the key to coming up with a common language, that reconciles the foundational differences between scientific and social-scientific worldviews.

In fact, there is such a philosophical school, and has been for some decades now: Critical Realism. The aim of its proponents is to question the underlying philosophical assumptions behind both science and social science, so as to bring about some reconciliation. So that instead of debating long-resolved philosophical issues simply because neither side can speak the other’s language, both sides can work together to actually consider, study and influence some critical, in fact existential, issues facing us as a species and a planet: whether it’s climate change, economic downturns, social inequality or political eruptions.

So I’ll leave you with an introductory article about Critical Realism, put together by the very people who, in a way, came up with this branch of philosophy.

And since the school’s ambassador, Roy Bhaskar, unfortunately passed away recently, here’s a short video of him introducing the school of thought, some of its key tenets, and its potentially emancipatory consequences.

Hope this has been as much fun for you to read as it was for me to write!

Rainbows.

We each perceive our own unique rainbow.

Though it appears vividly to us, the rainbow is not an object that we can actually locate ‘out there’. We can’t walk over to it.

Simultaneously, it is not an illusion. It is an understood physical process.

When a group of people experience a rainbow, though they simultaneously experience what appears to be the same rainbow, each individual is actually experiencing their own unique rainbow from their own perspective.

There isn’t one rainbow object out there as it seems to appear. Rather, a set of conditions allows each individual to have their own experience.

We each perceive our own rainbow, and I think that can serve as a nice analogy for our experience of the world as a whole.

We each experience our own world.

Simultaneously, our world-experiences cohere with each other, because they share a set of fundamental ground conditions.

It is this fundamental ground that informs our experience, but the experiences that we each have are highly edited representations.

The actual sensory data that we receive would make us crazy if we experienced it sequentially as it hit our brain in real time, because different sensory modalities travel in different ways at different speeds, so things have to be put on hold to wait for all the relevant bits to arrive, and then lots of stuff gets scrapped because considered irrelevant, and then also lots of stuff gets added to fill in the gaps, based on intelligent guesswork, and this all happens behind the scenes, so what is finally presented to our conscious awareness is a highly edited representation that works, not necessarily what is actually there.

Evolution is pragmatic. It is satisfied with what ‘works’. It doesn’t care about ‘truth’ so much until it turns into things like humans.

And that is why we are prone to certain kinds of optical illusions. We evolved that way.

We can’t help but experience various optical and cognitive illusions, because that’s how our brains evolved.

We naively believe what we see or experience in these situations, but reflection and reasoning show that it can’t be so.

I assume the question is asking about realism in regard to the external world that we ostensibly perceive through the senses. “Naive realism” doesn’t actually refer to any theory. It’s just an insult.

Realism is the view that there does exist a physical world independent of human consciousness which we perceive through our senses. But there are two forms, direct realism and indirect realism. I’m assuming here that you’re using “representative realism” to refer to indirect realism.

Indirect realism was advocated by people like Locke and Lenin and Russell. This is the view that in our sensory experience what we are immediately aware of — what we have a direct shot at through focusing our attention — are images or sense-data that are not existing in the independent physical world and are not identical with the objects we are ostensibly perceiving. This is also called the “veil of appearances” view. It’s been discredited in psychology since the function of the visual sensory system is to extract factual information about physical things in the distal environment. This implies we have a direct shot at the physical objects and their features. This is known as “direct realism” or “direct perception”. Since sensory experience is non-inferential — is psychologically immediate — perception of the physical world doesn’t consist in judgments based on images in our heads.

Naive realism would shape the view of the world as completely objective, and that subjective contents of the mind are also directly percieved, and the two shouldn’t be mixed up. The thoughts of the mind have to be trained to be objective or else one will make incorrect conclusions based on one’s thoughts, but those incorrect thoughts and those of the world are seperate perceptions. The world is exactly as it is perceived and there are no incorrect perceptions, just badly composed thoughts. The indirect realist assumptions that the world is completely recomposed as a simulation made by the brain suggests that the world may not be as it appears. It opens up the possibility of doubt about an actual material world, or the nature of the material world is unknowable due to fundamental detachment. Naive realist would argue that one is making errors in only one’s own thinking, and that there is no fundamental detachment from the object nature of the world. So an direct realist will be certain about the world, and an indirect realist will be doubtful or skeptical.

Naive Realism: When a person assumes they see the world objectively and without bias. They feel everyone will draw the same conclusions from the same data; if there is a difference in opinion the naive realist remark would exclaim something like “well you're just not being rational.” When really the naive realist is really responsible for a fallacy of reasoning I'm not sure if this is a fallacy that's been examined in depth by logicians and has a bonafide name, but one could say it informally as a “fallacy from objectivity.” You get this a lot with those who follow dogmatic beliefs like religions.

Representative realism: States that we can't directly perceive the outside world, we are limited by the veil of perception… well, a fundamental condition of life is perspective. How much life do we kill, indiscriminately, every day? You wash and cleanse yourself, walk across the grass, maybe run in the hills. Every last entity killed by us has its very own perspective, even the plants --regardless if they can scream or not. Some take this view too far and suggest reality as a holographic work of our senses that is derived from our organs, but this is also found to be a reduction to absurdity fallacy as it's impractical to say that the external world is generated by the work of the sense-organs because the sense-organs are part of that external world and cannot be self-generating.

Idealism is a curse for perfectionists.

‘A direct sense of objects as they are’

Let’s start with color. On a sunny day on the skii slopes if you wear rose-tinted ski goggles, eventually instead of seeing a ‘red’ tinted world, your vision will mentally shift back to ‘familiar colors of things’. This is color constancy, we understand that color relates to frequencies, and there are many en topic aspects of vision.

Sense is relative. To a human a work of art is marvelous, but a cat might just find it an interesting texture to claw. In this sense, the human mind forms meaning. It divides the whole of the frequency universe into bits of intelligibly separate things.

I think the relativity of time if nothing else suggests that nothing ever remains in a fixed state.

Naive realism is neither correct nor incorrect.

Realism, non-realism, anti-realism: these all reflect philosophical stances, upon which are built philosophical worldview.

People with different worldviews then engage with each other in argument. Naive philosophers assume that their worldview is “right” and others are “wrong”, but this pretty childlike. There are lots of intelligent, well-educated philosophers in the world, and if they hold different views—and these different views persist over centuries and even millenia—it’s unlikely that Joe Today has come along and invented it the Killer Argument that decides Once And For All what is “the” right worldview.

That’s why when you take philosophy, they still make you study Plato, and Leibnitz. You are being inducted into a millennia-long conversation, and major differences in the arguments are rarely, if ever, “settled.”

Within that view, the way phrase your question is: “What are some of the major critiques of naive realism?”

Here are some pages that address that question. From the first, in particular, you might get the sense of an infinite debate.

• Hegel's Internal Critique of Naive Realism
• The Problems with Naive Realism
• Theory of Knowledge
• The Problem of Perception
• jmp2PercepNaiveRealism

Personally, I like the idea of naive realism, for the following argument.

1. We are natural beings in a natural world; we are our bodies.
2. Our bodies bring forth what the phenomenologists call the lifeworld, the world as we perceive it. It is not private (i.e. “in our mind”) because it joins with the lifeworlds of others to create a shared, but very complex intersubjective lifeworld. I say shared because I can point at a cushion and say that’s a cushion, and you can say “yep”. I say complex because (as happened to me yesterday) I can insist that the cushion is gray, and you can insist that it is green, and we can come to no agreement. You may have seen the debate about the white-and-gold dress on the Internet recently, and this is a good example.

Normally, we’re all saying “yep” to each others statements about the world, but occasionally things like this come up. These are called in philosophy “aporia”—places at which the flow of mutual understanding stop, and people are left in puzzlement.

Aporia - Wikipedia

Sometimes I think of them as gaps in the usually seamless intersubjective lifeworld.

Now “real” is just a label that we apply, by social agreement, to certain descriptions of the lifeworld. But these are actually quite contextual and fluid. For instance, you might hear a physicist say something that this piece of wood is really not solid, but mostly space, and is really composed of atoms. At other times, people will say that the wood is solid, and agree.

Then there are bigger agreements (again, contextual, and in fact quite contextual.) We might at some time, for instance, in our scientifico-techno-industrial civilization insist that the description of the world in terms of waves and atoms and quanta and quarks is “real”, and the the apparent solidity and colour of a piece of wood is an illusion created by that hidden reality. The very idea of hidden reality which produces everyday appearances goes back to Plato, and his allegory of the cave, and these days is sometimes referred to as the “hermeneutics of suspicion”. People—especially intellectuals—look at ordinary life or things and assume that there is some hidden reality causing them. This might be atoms, or political power, or the patriarchy, or sociological relations, etc.

But that’s just now.

So I think that the naive lifeworld is more primary than the secondary, theory-induced lifeworlds. In other words, before physics, there were still naive lifeworlds, and physicists used their ability to operate in the world to create those things we call physical theories, which are secondary, or at least later.

Again: lifeworlds are complex. When the lifeworld of a hunter-gatherer and the lifeworld of a nuclear physicists will meet almost seamlessly in a meal of fire-roasted yams. They will not meet in a set of wave equations, or the hunter-gatherer’s dream dialogues with her ancestors.

The term "Naive Realism" has two definitions. The first is a neurocognitive framework. Humans are hardwired to structure sense data through very basic metaphors like time, forwards/backwards, gross, attractive, up, etc. This kind of naive realism is inescapable. Understanding (for the verbal rational aspect of our minds) is literally extending naive realism through metaphor. For this definition learning math means gaining a concept of addition from piling rocks, and taking steps, subtraction from retracing steps, etc. We can then extend extended metaphors and the unending expanse of math opens before us, enabling scientific understanding. In that sense science, as a human endeavor is inextricably rooted in naive realism.

The other definition of naive realism is a philosophical stance. It's the belief that because you see Things, Things exist. This unquestioning acceptance of the untested is inherently unscientific

Naïve realism, simply put, takes the things we experience as existing objectively, independent of observation, just as they appear to be given to us by our perceptions. It is closely related to the myth of the given. Naive realism, however, easily falls apart upon critical examination because how we experience things is influenced by personal biases, unquestioned assumptions, and patterns of unconscious conditioning. Taking our experience of things uncritically at face value ignores all of these factors, resulting in a false belief that the way we experience things is in fact the way that they objectively are, in themselves. This is problematic because holding such a mistaken view of the world leads to false expectations, misguided actions, interpersonal conflicts, and suffering.

Naïve realism, is a simplistic way of looking at the world.

For example, it's a known fact, that light itself has no color. Color is a visual sensation created by our brain when our eyes detect a certain frequency/a combination of different frequencies, of light. Most physicist are aware of this, but for simplicity sake, they refer to red light or blue light.

You see, perceptions are what we call, qualia. Qualia are impossible to measure, which is why physics adopts a reductionist approach. Unfortunately, many people interpret this approach as contrary to mainstream science, when it's just an approach for convenience.

As we go about our daily lives we are all naive realists (myself included). However, as I believe Hume once put it, when we retreat to our study for reflection we are no longer obligated to “think with the vulgar” (he is using “vulgar” in the Latin neutral sense, we would say today “think like the common person thinks”).

Realists (naive or sophisticated) simply claim that the existence of some of the things we encounter, perceive, or think and talk about have a mind-independent existence (these objects would exist even if no human being ever was aware of their existence). With the notable exception of Bishop Berkeley (1685–1753) pretty much all the Great Dead Philosophers held this view. Unfortunately, the Western tradition in philosophy originates with the writings of Plato who, while indeed a realist, added the caveat that our transitory world, the one we experience everyday, is less real than a transcendent realm containing super-things called Forms (which some people—philosophers—can have access to). This claim had several very long and doleful effects on subsequent philosophers. From my point of view, perhaps the worst of these was the idea that the phrase “there are objects that exist independently of our knowledge or perception or talk of them” is somehow an important belief.

I think that this is a true belief. But as a pragmatist (influenced by the writings of people like William James, John Dewey & Richard Rorty) I consider this a rather trivial true belief. Since for such people, when it comes to formulating plans for action or trying to cope with the world (which is all we pragmatists think “having a belief” means) it doesn’t really matter if you are a committed Idealist (who claims that our mental apparatus automatically structures our perception of the external world a la Kant) or sophisticated Empiricist (who acts on the assumption that the human mind is a “mirror of nature” a la Locke) because when dealing with practical problems requiring concrete action (seeking shelter when caught outside in a sudden downpour or when hot and thirsty acquiring and consuming a refreshing beverage) both these thinkers will respond to and act in pretty much the same ways. As William James used to say about many philosophical debates, the disagreement between people who follow Locke versus people who follow Kant is a “difference that doesn’t make a difference”.

Summary: As a pragmatist I think that claiming there exists mind-independent entities is both a true and a trivial belief. I am not a Realist because they think that acknowledging the existence of mind-independent entities is a true and important claim.

for me, it’s not that i get a realistic picture of a realistic understanding, but that i get a realistic description of a process which leads convincingly into an understanding and, therefore, into a knowledge of some thing.

so, i define a realistic concept as something that is thinkable back to some physical touch on the surface of some thing. so, ‘apple’, the fruit’, is bid as a picture and physical object to sell ‘apples’. anyone who says the vendor is stupid not to also say that atoms are this and quanta is that, would be missing the point of selling apples. “if the apple isn’t there, mr. grocer, then what does it matter what my penny is worth, since it’s also an apple and maybe even a better one?”

conceptualizing is linear, like when you put brackets around something understood to be the resolvable case: “apple [ the fruit ] is the mother of applesauce.” Realistically, what is this phrase talking about — ‘apples’ or ‘applesauce’?

Einstein considered scientific realism as a refinement of naive realism:

Naive realism...[states that] things “are” as they are perceived by us through the senses. This illusion dominates the daily life of men and of animals; it is also the point of departure in all of the sciences, especially of the natural sciences.
—Einstein, Albert. Ideas and Opinions. (New York: Crown Publishers, 1954). p. 20.

Like any process of refinement, one could draw the line in various places. Naive realism begins by considering as real ordinary objects of experience such as rocks. Scientific realism could be considered to begin when the objects that are considered to be real are abstract theoretical entities of scientific theories that have no counterpart in everyday experience. A few examples of such entities include atoms, elementary particles, electromagnetic fields, black holes, and quasars.

As already mentioned in others answers, there is no fundamental difference between naive and scientific realism. They are all internal representations of an assumed external reality in our minds (or the minds of any other living being from bacterium to dinosaur), with various degrees of sophistication and predictive power. They are so far acceptable, as long as the model behaves more or less like the ‘observed reality’. Plants know and rely on the alternance of day and night, and of seasons, but they do not care about astronomy.

Science only extends our individual mind, by an abstract ‘collective mind’ shared by a population thru accurate communication capabilities. Its relative quality is only due to the fact, that it relies on a much broader set of observations.

I would only add, that reality by itself, is just what happens now and here, and it cannot be observed ‘directly’ by any event outside itself. It can only be ‘observed’ by external entities thru the (imperfect) ‘mirror’ of a subset of its effects, long after it happened (even if only a few picoseconds later).

Naive realism is to think that reality is the world. The world is a representation of reality as we percieve by mean of our sense organs, our emotions and our thoughts. So in naive realism reality is shaped, represented or formalized as a world by our sense organs, our emotions and our thoughts. Reality is as the undefined clay, the world is as the defined jars, pots and figurins. Naive realism is thinking that reality is limited to be the jars, pots and figurins which are accessible, which are defined, which are represantations. They are clay, they are reality, but clay itself, reality itself is the inaccessible, undefined, undetermined, unrepresented.

Naive realism is the theory (or really lack of theory) about how the physical things in the world are known by animals ( with emphasis on human animals). There is an assumption , at least in the West, that it is the viewpoint that we all start out with as babies and children.

Scientific realism is an attempt by neuroscience as well as other branches of science to have a cogent, materialistic account of how we have representations of physical objects (for instance cars, coffee cups, trees, whatever). It involves theories of how it is possible to know the “outer” world of things by representing them in the “inner” world of mind.

Scientific realism is also sometimes employed to mean that the metaphysics of what exists really only consists of scientifically discovered “things”. Such elemental particles as quarks (or if not particles at least real entities) are the stuff out of which everything is composed; including conscious awareness and phenomenal reality.