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This chapter argues that we can affirm the pattern of first-person thinking without the epistemic conception of hallucination. The chapter starts by explaining the link that Michael Martin draws between the first-person thinking and the epistemic conception of hallucination. It then goes on to explain how to achieve Martin's ambition without his theory. The chapter uses a naive-realist-friendly conception of first-person access to experience. The metaphysical theory used is a form of naive realism that endorses an intentionalist or representationalist “common-factor” approach to veridical and hallucinatory experience. The chapter finally develops this theory.

This chapter explains why the naive realist is constrained or limited in the positive characterization that can be given of hallucinatory experiences. It has argued that the resulting “epistemic” account is, pace the critics, explanatorily adequate. This argument has two parts. Firstly, it suggests an account of hallucinatory experience is not required to explain the sensory features of experiences in general. Secondly, the chapter argues, the right account of introspection shows how experiences can be introspectively indiscriminable without having a shared phenomenal character. If we take this argument to be correct, then the naive realist account of hallucinatory experiences is no less satisfactory than the accounts offered by other, non-naive realist, accounts of experience.

This chapter begins by presenting the following principle: (IND) “If two perceptual experiences are indistinguishable for the subject of them then the two experiences are of the same conscious character.” The goal here is to defend the rejection of this principle, which so many philosophers find so compelling, by gaining a better understanding of the kind of grounding that it can have. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first part explains why a naive realist needs to endorse a disjunctive theory of appearance, and what aspect of a common element approach one needs to reject. The second part presents a diagnosis of how one may argue for a common element view on the basis of subjective indistinguishability, and the final part suggests an underlying motivation for that argument, and hence a diagnosis that the naive realist can offer of the obstinate intuitions which support the argument.

Questions about the nature and existence of colour have an important bearing on wider questions about the nature of consciousness and, more generally, the relationship between the ‘manifest’ and ‘scientific images’ of the world: or between the world as it appears to perceiving subjects, and the way that the world is described by science. This chapter tentatively suggests how a naïve realist theory of colour combined with a naïve realist theory of perception might provide the materials for solving a cluster of problems relating to the nature of consciousness, and resolving the apparent tension between the ‘manifest’ and ‘scientific images’ more generally.

The editors of this volume have asked me to write something about reduction because I have been focusing on this issue in my research for some time. Rather than rehashing any previously published ideas, I want to consider a new aspect of this question—or at least one that is new to me. I will draw liberally on the work of my thesis grandfather, the chemist, Fritz Paneth. I use the term somewhat unusually, because Paneth was not the person who advised my own advisor Heinz Post but was, in fact, his natural father, from whom Heinz presumably developed an interest in the philosophical aspects of science. I will touch on such areas as realism, including naive realism, the nature of the periodic system, metaphysical aspects of chemistry, and, as suggested by the editors, the reduction of chemistry. Of course, nobody likes to be referred to as a naive anything, and not surprisingly, some chemists are quick to react if it is suggested that they tend to adopt a naively realistic attitude in their work. Nevertheless, I think it is true that chemists are often realists, naive or otherwise, and this may not be such a bad thing, as I will try to explain. The question hinges on the extent to which such realistic views are maintained and in what context they may or may not be appropriate. Broadly speaking, chemists are frequently accused of unwarranted realism by physicists for taking chemical models too literally. Whereas no chemist nowadays believes that tiny springs connect the atoms in a molecule, such denials of models are less prevalent when it conies to hybridization, electronic configurations, and atomic orbitals. Chemistry professors may well begin by declaring that these are approximate concepts, but they frequently fail to emphasize that, from the point of view of physics, they are strictly incorrect or, philosophically speaking, are nonreferring terms.