Sensory Character and Participatory Disclosure: Beyond Representation and Naive Realism

A persistent challenge for direct realism concerns the status of sensory character. If sensory states have a determinate phenomenal character, they appear to require representational content, collapsing direct realism into intentionalism. If non-representational, sensory character risks becoming explanatorily idle. This dilemma, pressed forcefully by naive realists following M.G.F. Martin, appears to leave direct realism without stable ground. This paper argues that both horns share an unexamined assumption: that sensory character can contribute to perception only representationally or as a brute causal intermediary. Such an assumption reflects a restricted ontology of perception in which explanatory resources are limited to inner mental states and outer physical objects. Drawing on a participatory realist framework, I propose that sensory character is the determinate phenomenological form of participatory disclosure itself, the lived mode through which a mind-independent being becomes genuinely present to a finite perceiver without being exhausted by that presence. This dissolves the dilemma without retreating to either representational mediation or naive immediacy, while grounding a richer ontological vocabulary for perception theory.