Art and Experience, Utrecht, © 1996. All rights reserved

Representationalism understands perception as of an intermediary representation in the mind. There is a slippery slope argument in favour of representationalism based on puzzles like long gone stars and mirror images. However, stars formed no problem for the old Ptolomeic worldview which did not include the very idea of a visible non-existant. We can only conceive of this idea because we believe that light travels at a certain speed. I argue that perception's embodied nature entails discounting a distance such as the one existing between the star and us, and, thus, the time lapse between the existence of the object and our--direct--perception of it. Spatially there is no inconsistency in my direct realism either: evidently 'our body' knows that at a certain distance moving our bodies will not change the view of far away bodies. We and the Ptolomeics see stars directly--only the descriptions under which we see them are at variance: ours are more sophisticated. (VIII:2)