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The Puzzle of Perceptual Justification pp 33–66Cite as

Dogmatism and the Distinctiveness Problem

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Part of the book series: Synthese Library ((SYLI,volume 377))

Abstract

In the previous chapter I introduced experientialism as the view that perceptual experience evidentially justifies beliefs. Although this view was motivated by the New Evil Demon Intuition and Blindsight Intuition, it faced a dilemma in how it construed perceptual experience. Either experience is non-propositional, but then it is entirely unclear how it could evidentially justify beliefs; or it is propositional, but then it is ad hoc to hold that it can evidentially justify beliefs without being justified itself. Evidentialism succumbed to the first horn of the dilemma by being unable to explain the supposed evidential relation between non-propositional experience and belief. In this chapter I present the perhaps most popular variant of experientialism that grasps the other horn of the dilemma: dogmatism.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that Huemer is concerned with a general theory of justification based on seemings that p (called phenomenal conservatism), Pryor with a specific theory of perceptual justification, and Chudnoff with a specific theory of intuitive justification.

  2. 2.

    Note that I do not present the dogmatist thesis as “necessarily, if it perceptually seems to you that p, then you thereby possess some prima facie justification for believing that p”. Although some dogmatists explicitly subscribe to this latter thesis (e.g., Tucker 2010), the necessity claim is left out in the original formulation of the thesis by Pryor (2000).

  3. 3.

    Note that reliabilist dogmatist experientialism is also an option, Comesaña’s (2010) evidentialist reliabilism appears compatible with such a view.

  4. 4.

    This last condition might actually be problematic. For instance, Huemer says the following about the basing relation: “when one apprehension, B, is based on another, A, A causes B because A (apparently) logically supports B” (2001, p. 56). This suggests that a subject needs to recognize, or think he recognizes, that an experience supports a certain belief for his belief to be based on that experience. And this seems too demanding for unsophisticated agents.

  5. 5.

    Note that access to the experiences should be spelled out here in terms of being conscious of the experiences rather than believing that one has the experiences. The latter would immediately lead to the hyper-intellectualization worry.

  6. 6.

    Note that, given that dogmatism merely provides a sufficiency claim for justification, it is merely compatible with the Blindsight Intuition but does not imply that it is correct. However, the dogmatist could easily make perceptual experience necessary as well as sufficient for perceptual justification. The main reason why the general claim is not phrased in this way stems from the fact that there are, of course, different means by which beliefs can be justified (e.g., my belief that there is a laptop in front of me could also be inferentially justified).

  7. 7.

    I’ll admit that both for Feldman and Conee’s example and Sosa’s, it’s not entirely clear what is meant with respectively ‘visual presentation’ and ‘visual image’. But the cases can also be understood simply as a challenge for dogmatism to explain the difference in epistemic status by elucidating the notion of perceptual experience.

  8. 8.

    Note, though, that Chudnoff himself does not distinguish between sensations and seemings, but thinks that experiences and seemings are identical (Chudnoff 2014).

  9. 9.

    An exception is Matthew McGrath (2013a), who appears to take both sensations and percepts to be seemings. My account of perceptual seemings will have negative consequences for the theory he develops in both McGrath (2013a,b).

  10. 10.

    Note that Lyons remarks the distinction is a “somewhat outdated oversimplification”. Lyons merely uses the distinction to argue against another position and does not seem to need it to support his own.

  11. 11.

    Note the “if anything” in condition (3).

  12. 12.

    This becomes perfectly clear in his discussion of associative agnosia (Sect. 3.3.3.2).

  13. 13.

    Tucker provides a similar response to the problem of non-inferential perceptual identification (Tucker 2010, p. 538).

  14. 14.

    Note that Tucker does provide separate motivations for the sensation-seeming distinction. However, as I argue in the next section, these motivations are not very strong.

  15. 15.

    In fact, the phenomenon of associative agnosia seems to have also been used by Tim Bayne (2009) to defend such a rival view. But I think that Brogaard (2013a) is correct in her contention that associative agnosia also does not motivate this view over the alternative.

  16. 16.

    Lyons (2009, p. 71) even suggests that experience and belief might be token-identical in the usual case.

  17. 17.

    Note that Lyons’ sympathies also lie with such a view despite his argumentative use of the sensation-percept distinction: “experience […] is a matter of the introspectible features of a host of different representational states” (Lyons 2009, p. 48).

  18. 18.

    Susanna Siegel (2006), Tim Bayne (2009), Farid Masrour (2011), and William Fish (2013) are in favor of the idea that high-level properties are represented in perception, while e.g. Michael Tye (2000), Berit Brogaard (2013a), and Indrek Reiland (2014) are against it.

  19. 19.

    Although this does not mean that the phenomenology of perceiving these high-level properties is similar to the phenomenology of seeing low-level properties. As Prinz (2006) puts it, there might not be any “poodle-qualia” just as there are red-qualia.

  20. 20.

    Michael Tye (2009) gives a similar response to the problem of the speckled hen.

  21. 21.

    Note that Chudnoff (2014) also believes that dogmatists have a different way of responding to the speckled hen (and novice vs. expert) problem, but I will get to that in Sect. 3.5.

  22. 22.

    Note that this does not deny Pryor’s claim that it’s not enough for prima facie justification to think you have the phenomenology (Pryor 2004, p. 357). I’m envisaging a situation in which a higher-order belief actually gives rise to the necessary phenomenology.

  23. 23.

    See e.g., Markie (2005), Lyons (2011), Siegel (2012, 2013a), McGrath (2013a), and Tucker (2014) for more on this problem. Also see Ghijsen (2015) for more on the relation between the Distinctiveness Problem and the problem of cognitive penetration.

  24. 24.

    Perhaps this is better captured by the novel way in which Chudnoff describes presentational phenomenology in his book on intuition: “what it is for an experience of yours to have presentational phenomenology with respect to p is for it to both make it seem to you that p and make it seem to you as if this experience makes you aware of a truth-maker for p” (2013, p. 37).

  25. 25.

    Chris Tucker (2010, p. 530) mentions a similar property of ‘assertiveness’, and William Tolhurst (1998, pp. 300–1) talks of the property of ‘presence’.

  26. 26.

    The problem of cognitive penetration could also be raised against this proposal again, as badly cognitively penetrated experiences are just as forceful as other perceptual experiences. However, Huemer responds to this problem by simply biting the bullet: according to him, cognitively penetrated experiences do provide immediate prima facie justification (Huemer 2013).

  27. 27.

    Although this is not so easy to determine, as the ‘Perky effect’ nowadays refers in psychology to the general interference of imagination on perception. Although it is implausible to explain this general effect by appealing to confusion of perception with imagination, in specific instances (viz., the types of experiences in the 1910 Perky experiment) this confusion might still take place.

  28. 28.

    Cf. Reeves and Craver-Lemley (2012, p. 7): “An [attractive] alternative hypothesis is that the Perky effect results from a combination of real and imagined features that makes the real features more difficult to extract.”

  29. 29.

    I discuss the possibility of such an introspective mechanism in more detail in Chap. 6

  30. 30.

    See for instance (Siegel 2013b, p. 757) for this type of reply.

  31. 31.

    Note that Chudnoff also discusses some apparent counter-examples to this claim, such as environmental Gettier cases.

  32. 32.

    McGrath (2013a) makes this point against proponents of dogmatism who respond to bad cases of cognitive penetration by pointing out that the subjects are still entirely reasonable to believe what they do.

  33. 33.

    If you find the example hard to imagine, you could treat it as a bad case of cognitive penetration where Sherri’s strong desire for cherries makes grapes look like cherries. But there could also be a different kind of cognitive malfunctioning that simply ends in Sherri’s having cherry-experiences whenever she sees grapes.

  34. 34.

    But see e.g., Millikan (1989) for objections.

  35. 35.

    The same can be said for Brogaard’s (2013b) sensible dogmatism.

  36. 36.

    See Lyons (2009, pp. 60–1) for more on this line of thought.

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  1. Centre for Logic and Analytic Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Harmen Ghijsen

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Ghijsen, H. (2016). Dogmatism and the Distinctiveness Problem. In: The Puzzle of Perceptual Justification. Synthese Library, vol 377. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30500-4_3

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