There are two rival views of the nature of physical-item perception: the fundamentalist view, which takes the perceptual relationship between the subject and the perceived physical item to be psychologically fundamental, and the decompositional view, which takes this relationship to be constituted by the subject's being in some further (not in itself physically perceptive) psychological state, together with certain additional facts. These views of physical-item perception are exhaustive. But if we retain our allegiance to the common-sense assumption that the physical world has an existence which is logically independent of the human mind, it turns out that neither view can be satisfactorily developed. The only way of developing an intelligible account of how physical items form objects of perceptual awareness would be by abandoning the assumption of mind independence and adopting an idealist account of the physical world — one which represents the world as something whose existence is constituted by facts about human sensory experience, or by some richer complex in which such experiential facts centrally feature.
Keywords: perceptual relationship, fundamentalist view, psychologically fundamental, decompositional view, constituted, mind independence, idealist account