Spacetime and perception: a special relativistic defense of naïve realism

In this paper, I advance a special-relativistic formulation of naïve realism and use it to respond to the time-lag objection, the claim that naïve realism cannot account for the perception of distant objects that ceased to exist. On the view proposed, an object constitutes a perceptual episode when the world-line that carries its manifest properties intersects the observer’s past light cone, an invariant condition across all inertial frames. Because simultaneity is frame-dependent while this light cone relation is not, the case of distant objects that ceased to exist never yields a single frame in which both premises of the objection are true: in the subject’s frame, constitution holds but simultaneity fails; in the star’s frame, simultaneity fails; in a suitable third frame, simultaneity can be forced only at the cost of causal disconnection. Therefore, the time-lag objection poses no threat to naïve realism.