Tim Crane Perception

Tim Crane claims that the usual, instinctual way of regarding perception is as an “openness to the world.” However, the fact that illusions and hallucinations can occur seems to indicate some sort of fault with the typical view, as these bizarre experiences give rise to questions about the nature and coherence of perception. He asserts that in order to escape this problem, philosophers must provide a theory of perception which both maintains integrity to our intuitions and explains how perceptual mistakes are possible. (Crane 1.1) Peter Strawson in his paper “Perception and Its Objects” describes common-sense realism, which he takes to be an explication of our ordinary view of perception, and attempts to resolve the apparent conflict between
(Crane 2.1) Concerning the first sort of claim, our “ordinary conception of perception [is] that its objects are mind-independent, public objects.” (2.1.1) Clearly in this respect, Strawson's exposition of common-sense realism relates it to Crane's “open to the world” view. In the “strict account” of perceptual experience free from any truth-claims about the external world, he demonstrates that even when not declaring the existence of the objects we take ourselves to perceive, we still cannot help but refer to these objects as if they do exist. Strawson asserts that the “strict account” of perceptual experience should be the same even in the case of illusion. (Strawson 93) Though we consider ourselves to be immediately experiencing objects around us, Strawson maintains that this does not require “that we take ourselves to be immune from illusion, hallucination or mistake.” (100) This point ties into the second of the “open to the world” view's claims, the conviction that the nature of a perceptual experience is a result of its relation to the nature of its object. (Crane 2.1.2) If we directly perceive external objects, it seems problematic for the common-sense view that the “strict account” of our experience would be the same if the experience was illusory, since we ordinarily understand our perceptual experiences to be related to their objects in the right way, or causally. However, Strawson argues that what our perceptual experiences indicate to us about the world around us does not entail that our resulting picture of its character is reliable, only that we take it to be. (Strawson