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difficulty that such views face is that the proponents of these views either need to identify some kind of evidence that connects these kinds of beliefs or explain why such evidence isn't needed. It's difficult to see, for example, how experience alone could give us the evidence we need to connect these two kinds of beliefs. If we don't have direct experience, say, of tomatoes and their color, we don't have direct experience of how these entities correlate with the experiences we have that lead us to believe that tomatoes are present. If the best option for the foundationalist is liberal foundationalism, it's important for the foundationalists to find some way of responding to this argument.

      2.34 Critics of naïve realism claim that certain familiar facts about experience show that we're never immediately aware of any external objects. If you conceive of the experience a subject has when, say, she sees the pages before her as nothing but a relation between a perceiver and the pages before her, you might be attracted to this kind of naïve explanation of the present character of your experience:

       Naïve Account of the Conscious Character of Experience

      It looks as if there is something white and rectangular in your hands. This is because you're directly aware of something in having this experience. This direct object of awareness just is the page that you're reading. Your experience is the way that it is because the direct object of awareness is white and rectangular. Had the pages been circular or been blue, your experience would have been different because the character of your experience is just directly determined by the qualities of the immediate object of awareness.

      If this kind of explanation holds in every case of conscious experience, then this kind of explanation assumes this principle:

      The Phenomenal Principle is so called because it posits a principled connection between the phenomenology of experience (i.e. what your experience is like) and the character of the IOA that your experience relates you to.

      2.36 Why are these cases problematic for the naïve realist? Consider these very simple arguments against the naïve realist's hypothesis that the IOA is an OMO:

       Argument from Illusion

      P1. In the case of illusion, it appears that something is F but the OMO is not F.

      P2. The IOA is F. [P1 and the Phenomenal Principle]

      P3. Nothing can be F and not F. [Leibniz's Law]

      C. In the case of illusion, the IOA is not an OMO.

       Argument from Hallucination

      P1. In the case of hallucination, it appears that something is F but the subject is not aware of any OMO.

      P2. The IOA is F. [P1 and the Phenomenal Principle]

      P3. There is no suitable OMO that the subject is aware of that is F.

      P4. Nothing can be F and not F. [Leibniz's Law]

      C. In the case of hallucination, the IOA is not an OMO.

      2.37 Now, there is a subtle point that we need to take account of. As we noted just now in passing, not every conscious experience is an illusion or hallucination. These arguments tell us nothing about the identity of the IOA in your garden‐variety cases of perception, cases where there is no illusion and no hallucination. Since the naïve realist only says that we are sometimes immediately aware of OMOs, can't the naïve realists say that we are sometimes immediately aware of OMOs? They can, but the indirect realists were wise to this move, so they have argued that we can generalize from the case of illusion to all cases. H.H. Price asks us to consider cases involving “continuity” in which a perceiver sees, say, a cricket ball at a distance and then moves closer and closer to it. From a distance, the IOA is flat. Up close, the IOA is, as he puts it, “bulgy.” Now, the OMO in this case, a cricket ball, is bulgy (and not flat) throughout the episode. If we were to say that the OMO is the IOA only in the case where experience is not illusory, we have to say that the identity of the IOA changes as we move from just the spot where the ball appears as it actually is to the nearest spot where the IOA appears ever so slightly different from the OMO. Price remarks:

      Now it seems most extraordinary that there should be a total difference of nature where there is only an infinitesimal difference of quality. It also seems most extraordinary that so radical a replacement should be brought about by an infinitesimal backward movement of the observer's body.

      (1950, p. 32)

      Translation: it seems that the IOA is the same throughout so long as you're attending to the cricket ball. If, as the Argument from Illusion seems to show, the IOA is distinct from the OMO in the case where the IOA looks flat, the IOA remains distinct from the OMO in the case of veridical experience.

      2.39

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