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The recommended reaction to the Inconsistent Triad, (OV), is to reject (III), the claim that the direct objects of perception are mind-dependent, whilst retaining the early modern empiricist insight that perceptual experience is most fundamentally to be construed as a relation of acquaintance with certain direct objects, whose identity and nature provide the most basic elucidation of what it is to be in the relevant conscious experiential condition. Detailed explanation is given of how the dependence of a person's perceptual experience of a given object upon the her point of view and other circumstances of perception, and also the possibility of various kinds of illusion and hallucination, are all consistent with the identification of such direct objects with mind-independent physical objects. A rich and nuanced account is given of the many and varied ways that such mind-independent physical objects look in perception on the basis of their visually relevant similarities from the point of view and in the circumstances in question with various paradigm exemplars of physical kinds. This exploits a powerful distinction between thin and thick such looks.

The author provides a protracted defense of the art-ontological nominalism reached in the previous chapter. By replacing the notion of the repeatability of abstracta with that of the relevant similarity between concreta, the author is able to preserve the motivating intuitions behind standard repeatable-work ontology in a manner commensurate with most of the relevant surrounding art-world practices and conventions. On this view, to be a repeatable artwork is not to be an abstract artwork of which there may be multiple concrete (non-art) instances, but instead to be an individual and concrete artwork to which multiple other individual and distinct concrete artworks may be relevant similar. Most importantly, only by adopting the relevant similarity model for putatively repeatable art can one hope to endorse coherently realism about artworks in a manner consistent with the substantive necessity of art’s intention-dependence.

This paper examines the rationale for the standard practice in ethics of arguing from imaginary cases to real ones. Challengeable aspects of this practice are exposed. One question is whether an imaginary case is being taken to establish a Rossian prima facie duty or a duty proper. Another is whether, once we have established the correct account of an imaginary case, we can be sure that another case similar to the first in all respects relevant to our account of the first must be given the same account, irrespective of other differences. A generalist will try to extract principles from the imaginary case and apply them to the real case. This paper argues that this is hopeless. Is particularism in a better situation? A possible line is that what the imaginary case reveals is the importance that certain features can have and may have in the real case before us. No more can be expected.