In sum, attention to how the brain

In sum, attention to how the brain functions in perception supports constructive realism over empiricism and idealism. The constructive nature of perception with both top-down and bottom-up processing shows the implausibility of a narrow empiricism that ties knowledge too closely to sensory input. On the other hand, the robustness of sensory inputs of different kinds counts by inference to the best explanation against the idealist view that the existence of objects is mind dependent. Our perceptual knowledge is both constructed and about real things. Such constructive realism is also the best approach to theoretical knowledge that uses concepts and hypotheses to go well beyond perception.