Abstract
Many naive realists are inclined to accept a negative disjunctivist strategy in order to deal with the challenge presented by the possibility of phenomenologically indistinguishable hallucination. In the first part of this paper I argue that this approach is methodologically inconsistent because it undercuts the phenomenological motivation that underlies the appeal of naive realism. In the second part of the paper I develop an alternative to the negative disjunctivist account along broadly Meinongian lines. In the last section of this paper I consider and evaluate a somewhat similar but rival view of hallucination developed by Mark Johnston.
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Notes
I will focus on the case of visual perception, leaving to one side the question whether analogous accounts can be given to the other senses.
Another chief obstacle in naïve realism’s path is illusion. But in this case the defensive disjunctivist strategy is less clear and disjunctivists themselves differ on whether illusions count as aberrant forms of veridical perception or instead be lumped together with hallucinations in the non-veridical disjunct.
This version of the argument from hallucination is most fully developed by Robinson (1994), ch. 6.
In one section of the book, Azzouni develops the idea that while hallucinated objects do not have properties, they do nevertheless present them. But even here, he makes clear that his inquiry is really about how we talk or think about experience. “[D]espite appearances, no questions of the form, ‘what properties do hallucinated objects actually have and which ones do they actually only present?’ are being raised, a kind of indispensable discourse is being investigated and it’s being considered how such a discourse is to be rendered consistent with the rest of our discourse” (85–86).
I am thankful to an anonymous referee for raising this objection.
Interestingly, Adam Pautz has argued against item presentation in perceptual consciousness by appealing to purported cases in which one is perceptually aware of an impossible object such as the waterfall illusion. But another response to the phenomenological datum is to agree with Meinong that the impossibility of such objects does not preclude their being present to consciousness (Pautz 2010, 287).
I am thankful to Brendan Murdray for raising this this objection.
For a detailed discussion of the application of the concept of identity to objects that seem to occur both in dreams and waking life, see Valberg (2007) ch. 2.
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Knight, G. Disjunctivism unmotivated. Phenom Cogn Sci 13, 355–372 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9304-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9304-4