The question of
direct or "naïve" realism, as opposed to
indirect or "representational" realism, arises in the
philosophy of perception and
of mind out of the debate over the nature of
conscious experience; the
epistemological question of whether the world we see around us is the real world itself or merely an internal perceptual copy of that world generated by
neural processes in our
brain.
Naïve realism is known as
direct realism when developed to counter
indirect or representative realism, also known as epistemological
dualism, the
philosophical position that our conscious experience is not of the real world itself but of an internal representation, a miniature
virtual-reality replica of the world.