Disjunctivism and Skepticism

I see a particular book on the shelf. How should I characterize the nature of this visual perception? According to naïve realism, what explains what it is like for me to see this book is the book itself and its manifest properties—the properties that I can see, like its color, shape, size, texture, and so on. In particular, naïve realism maintains that the objects in the world around us—objects like trees, books, tablecloths, and so on—enter into our experiences of them as constituents. On this view, it is the external objects and their manifest properties which explain the “phenomenal character” of our perceptual experiences—what Thomas Nagel (1974) called those features of experience such that there is something that it is like to undergo them.

Most philosophers reject naïve realism in favor of some form of intentionalism about the nature of experience. According to intentionalism, sense experience is an intentional state, like belief or thought. Consider a now famous expression of the view from Christopher Peacocke: ...