John Searle has recently written a book on perception “Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception“ and what’s right about it. The condensed version: what you see is what you get. In it he gets after the Bad Argument about perception and it’s quite fascinating when you consider how engrained the bad argument is in the poppy fields of philosophy.
The Bad Argument turns on the truism that perception, like all other mental faculties, does not provide us with infallible access to the world. We sometimes get things wrong, from a perceptual point of view.
As Ben Cohen says:
There’s a difference in the way the Associated Press portrays political candidates and no theory of
disjunctivism can explain it. I wouldn’t call it seeing things as they are. I wouldn’t even call it seeing things as they ought to be (unless you an numbskull leftist tool). I’d call it seeing things as the machine wants you to see it.
Keeper of the Clown Bell 
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