NDPR Neil Mehta A Pluralist Theory of Perception

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2026.04.6 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews

Neil Mehta, A Pluralist Theory of Perception, MIT Press, 2024, 358pp., $50.00 (pbk) ISBN 9780262548281.

Reviewed by Kranti Saran, Ashoka University

Veridically perceiving an ovoid yellow mango in ordinary circumstances differs from hallucinating a matching scene. In hallucination, there is no mango. Yet these experiences look exactly alike. How should philosophers account for this pattern of sameness and difference? Representationalists argue that both cases involve representing the world to be the same way, but only veridical perception represents successfully. Naïve realists argue that only veridical perception involves a primitive nonrepresentational relation to its targets, a relation hallucination lacks. Naïve realist accounts of their sameness vary. These standard views do not exhaust the alternatives. Since at least Byrne and Logue (2008), the...