Peter Auriol and Adam Wodeham on Perception and Judgment

Peter Auriol’s claim that the direct objects of perception enjoy a mind-dependent kind of being elicited strong reactions from his contemporaries. According to Adam Wodeham, no special ontology of apparent being is needed in order to account for the cases of perceptual illusion cited by Auriol. Wodeham goes on, in order for a dog to have anything like the human appearance of a bent stick, it must be able to form a sentence saying that the stick is bent. According to Wodeham, when a dog looks at a stick that is half merged into water, it receives what he calls a simple vision of the stick. According to Wodeham, for an intuition to give us certainty about the contingent present is for that intuition to yield a judgment about the contingent present that is certain. A judgment counts as knowledge, Wodeham explains, when it is evident.