Official Position of sensedatumtheory.com

This position statement is restricted, for the present, to visual perception. What follows below is intended to pick out a family of sense datum theories, under the description of "Naive Sense Datum Theory" (NSDT).

1. What is given to us in our visual experiences is an array in the brain, whether we take it to be the outside or the inside world. It is the Phenomenal Array.

2. The phenomenal array is, in all probability, a physical artefact. Its explanation may or may not require appeal to unfamiliar physics; it may, in part, appeal to "neo-physical" variables. (The confirmation of the existence of electrical central forces by Cavendish, Coulomb, and others at the end of the 18th century introduced "neo-physical" variables, in that context. Introducing electrical forces did not make physics dualistic.)

3. Our access to the phenomenal array is constituted by a condition of awareness.

4. Seeing is a form of informative detection, rather like what some early 17th century authors (Bacon, Descartes) sometimes referred to as ‘deprehension’. (The use of the term "seeing" is partly stipulative. An alternative option would have been to reserve "seeing" for conscious visual experience of sense data, but I have chosen to use it for the relation of perceivers to external, distal stimuli -- of which, per hypothesis, we have no conscious awareness. This allows the continuing use of familiar terminology even though its significance is importantly altered.)     

5. Awareness is not a kind of seeing. Awareness is a component of seeing. Seeing external things depends in part on awareness of the phenomenal array.

6. The condition of awareness is, in all probability, a physical condition.

7. We do not see the phenomenal array.

8. We are not aware of external objects (distal stimuli). There are no external objects in the phenomenal array.

9. We do not see external things by or in virtue of seeing sense data.

10. It is unlikely that the condition of awareness of the phenomenal array constitutes, in itself, any executive action, discursive thought, or high-order cognitive operation, such as knowledge-formation

11. Our false belief that the phenomenal array is the external world is not essential to the biological well-functioning of our visual system. Even highly developed animals, other than us, likely have no particular view about the ontology of their phenomenal array.

12. The phenomenal array does not have to be a simulacrum of the external world in order to serve its function.

13. Our false belief that the phenomenal array is the external world is a form of Stimulus Error: The Grand Stimulus Error. (The expression "stimulus error" was introduced by Titchener to denote the biasing of introspective reporting by beliefs about the external world of  distal stimuli.)

14. It is likely that the phenomenal array is two-dimensional, rather than three-dimensional.

15. Awareness is ‘transparent’ or ‘diaphanous’ in the sense of G.E. Moore. Any given condition of awareness does not per se reveal its own properties to itself. Conscious awareness is an unobservable.