Still, even by meeting these methodological criteria, we cannot give something in evidence about physical reality. By doing so we can regularly find out that our perception is indeed mostly very reliable and also objective (Gregory and Gombrich, 1973)-but only if we employ standard definitions of “objective” as being consensual among different beholders. We can analyze the quality of our perceptual experiences by standard methodological criteria.
Feeling something by touch seems to be the ultimate perceptual experience in order for humans to speak of physical proof (Carbon and Jakesch, 2013). When people need even more proof of reality than via the naked eye, they intuitively try to touch the to-be-analyzed entity (if at all possible) in order to investigate it haptically. The assumed link between perception and physical reality is particularly strong for the visual sense-in fact, we scrutinize it only when sight conditions have been unfortunate, when people have bad vision or when we know that the eyewitness was under stress or was lacking in cognitive faculties. Indeed, it seems that there is no better, no more “proof” of something being factual knowledge than having perceived it. Most obviously, you can experience this with eyewitness testimonies: If an eyewitness has “seen it with the naked eye”, judges, jury members and attendees take the reports of these percepts not only as strong evidence, but usually as fact-despite the active and biasing processes on basis of perception and memory. Sensory perception is often the most striking proof of something factual-when we perceive something, we interpret it and take it as “objective”, “real”. The relationship between reality and object
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