The indispensability of the manifest image

It is very contentious whether the features of the manifest image have a place in the world as it is described by natural science. For the advocates of strict (or scientific) naturalism, this is a serious problem, which has been labelled ‘placement problem’. In this light, some of them try to show that those features are reducible to scientifically acceptable ones. Others, instead, argue that the features of the manifest image are mere illusions and, consequently, have to be eliminated from our ontology. In brief, the two options that are open to strict naturalists for solving the placement problem are ontological reductionism and eliminativism. Other advocates of naturalist philosophers, however, claim that both these strategies fail and, consequently, opt for ‘mysterianism’, the view according to which we cannot give up the recalcitrant features of the manifest image even if we are not able to understand the ways (which certainly exist) in which they could be reduced to the scientific features. Mysteria...