Do humans perceive reality indirectly?
Idealism, representationalism, and realism Before responding to this question, it is necessary to define what exactly is meant by indirect perception. First of all, it is important to know that there are three main camps of opinion into which people tend to fall in regards to the connection between reality and human perception (Broude 2003). One camp, called idealism, is of the belief that perceptions are completely fabricated by the individual; there is no external reality on which they are based. The second camp, called representationalism (a.k.a. representative realism), believes that perceptions are based on representations of the real world rather than information obtained directly from the world, and people therefore have a distorted understanding of what exists in reality. The third camp, called realism, claims that perceptions are based on a world independent of the person perceiving it. Therefore, direct perception refers to the idea of realism — that perceptions correspond d
