Perception and extraordinary objects

Abstract I provide a new, perception-based defense of ordinary ontology , the thesis that there exist ordinary objects but not extraordinary objects. To that end, I first outline a story about perception and perceptual justification – one informed by recent advances in cognitive science and philosophy of perception – according to which perception gives us reason to countenance ordinary things (Sect. 2). I then argue that extraordinary objects are just the sorts of entities our perceptual apparatus is well-poised to detect; thus, the fact that we fail to see extraordinary things gives us perceptual reason to repudiate them. I conclude that ordinary ontology is true (Sects. 3–5). In closing, I show that my way of defending ordinary ontology reveals that one of the most prominent objections to ordinary ontology rests on a mistake (Sect. 6).