immediate awareness
Cartesian doctrine that we are immediately aware only of our own ideas.
The Cartesian viewpoint is natural and therefore prevalent in a scientific culture like ours for reasons I will touch on in the glossary entry on “laws of nature.” It is so prevalent, in fact, that people are automatically socialized to adopt certain Cartesian assumptions without being fully aware that they are doing so. To take an example from popular culture, movies like the Matrix inure us to the idea that even the report of the senses is unreliable. But even without cultural influences like SciFi fantasy, the importance of scientific modeling to our way of life would by itself incline us towards the Cartesian perspective.
What is the alternative?
The principal competitors with the (Cartesian) epistemology of immediate awareness are one variant or another of a theory of intentionality.
Theories of intentionality hold that things that are known have a real presence in the intellect of the knower. See the glossary entry on intentionality for further details.