Disjunctivism

Disjunctive Accounts in Epistemology and in the Philosophy of Perception

Marcus Willaschek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415623063
• eBook ISBN: 9781135739676
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Does perception provide us with direct and unmediated access to the world around us? The so-called 'argument from illusion ' has traditionally been supposed to show otherwise: from the subject's point of view, perceptual illusions are often indistinguishable from veridical perceptions; hence, perceptual experience, as such, cannot provide us with knowledge of the world, but only with knowledge of how things appear to us. Disjunctive accounts of perceptual experience, first proposed by John McDowell and Paul Snowdon in the early 1980s and at the centre of current debates in the philosophy of perception, have been proposed to block this argument. According to the traditional view, a case of perception and a subjectively indistinguishable illusion or hallucination can exemplify what is fundamentally the same kind of mental state even though they differ in how they relate to the non-mental environment. In contrast, according to the disjunctive account, the concept of perceptual experience should be seen as essentially disjunctive, encompassing (at least) two distinct kinds of mental states, namely genuinely world-involving perceptions and mere appearances.

This book presents seven recent essays on disjunctivism first published in two special issues of Philosophical Explorations: An International Journal for the Philosophy of Mind and Action.

Transparency and imagining seeing

Fabian Dorsch
Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley, USA

In his paper, The Transparency of Experience, M.G.F. Martin has put forward a well-known – though not always equally well understood – argument for the disjunctivist, and against the intentional, approach to perceptual experiences. In this article, I intend to do four things: (i) to present the details of Martin’s complex argument; (ii) to defend its soundness against orthodox intentionalism; (iii) to show how Martin’s argument speaks as much in favour of experiential intentionalism as it speaks in favour of disjunctivism; and (iv) to argue that there is a related reason to prefer experiential intentionalism over Martin’s version of disjunctivism.

One of the most powerful arguments against intentionalism and in favour of disjunctivism about perceptual experiences has been formulated by M.G.F.Martin in his paper The Transparency of Experience. The overall structure of this argument may be stated in the form of a triad of claims which are jointly inconsistent.¹

1. As reflection on the phenomenal character of visualising an external thing reveals, it is not neutral about the presence of the visualised thing in the imagined situation.
2. At least in some cases, visualising an external thing consists in imagining a visual perception of it.
3. But imagining a visual perception of an external thing is neutral about the latter’s presence in the imagined situation.

Given that visualising cannot be non-neutral and identical with a neutral form of imagining at the same time, one of the three claims has to go. Martin presents detailed arguments in favour of (i) and (ii) and concludes that we should give up (iii). Intentionalists, on the other hand, typically attack (i) or (ii), while holding on to (iii). In this paper, I would like to suggest that the intentionalist response gets its target wrong: instead of trying to undermine one of the first two claims, it should instead raise doubts about the last. In particular, I argue that intentionalism has the resources to ensure and explain the non-neutrality involved in imagining and perceiving something.

Much of the paper will be concerned with a reconstruction of Martin’s complex argument. Intentionalists have been misunderstanding key steps in his line of reasoning, so that it is worthwhile to explore where they went wrong, and why the challenge raised by Martin is real. The resulting formulation of the argument against intentionalism may very well be more mine than Martin’s. My goal is not to provide a scholarly introduction to Martin’s writings, but instead to make his case against intentionalism as strong as possible. Having a detailed look at the problems which visualising poses for theories of perceptual experience makes it possible to find a satisfactory response on behalf of intentionalism. Indeed, it will turn out that some aspects of visualising thereby discovered actually favour intentionalism over disjunctivism.

The version of intentionalism to be defended here differs significantly from those currently en vogue – most notably in linking intentionality essentially to consciousness, and in assuming a self-presentational (i.e. experiential and self-reflexive) element as part of perceptual (and other kinds of) intentionality.² It may therefore be aptly labelled experiential intentionalism. Much of the paper will be devoted to showing that, while many current versions of intentionalism cannot provide a satisfactory answer to Martin’s challenge, experiential intentionalism can do so. Experiential intentionalism is thus to be preferred, not only over disjunctivism, but also over other versions of intentionalism.

In the first section, I introduce the intentionalist and the disjunctivist approaches to perceptual experience and contrast their distinct accounts of the transparency and non-neutrality of perceptions.³ The next three sections elaborate on why we should accept the claims (i) and (ii), respectively, and why intentionalists have been misguided in rejecting them. In particular, the nature of experiential imagination – that is, imagining an experience – and that of imaginative projects involving the former are considered in detail. The fifth section is intended to illustrate why current forms of intentionalism cannot avoid the challenge posed by Martin’s argument for thesis (iii). It also aims to illustrate how both disjunctivism and experiential intentionalism can do better, especially with respect to an explanation of the transparency and non-neutrality of visualising. In the final section, I use the previous discussions about what it means to imagine having a perceptual experience in order to formulate an objection against disjunctivism. I conclude with some remarks about the fact that experiential imagination seems to involve two different objects of awareness, namely the imagined experience and the latter’s own object.

1. Intentionalism and disjunctivism

Intentionalism and disjunctivism disagree about the nature of perceptual experience. That is, they put forward different accounts of the first-personal side of our perceptual awareness of external things and their features. But they do so before a background of common assumptions and observations. One is that perceptual awareness differs from propositional thought in showing us objects, rather than describing, naming or indexing them. This contrast is not restricted to the realm of the mental. It also characterises the difference between, say, pictures and sentences. Another, closely related shared observation is that perceptions are not merely about objects, but take them to be a certain way: they are non-neutral about how thing sare. This aspect distinguishes perceptions, for instance, from desires which may also be directed at objects, but do not involve a claim about how they are.⁴ And finally, both parties agree that perceptions are immediate in that they present their objects as part of our actual environment. That is, their non-neutrality concerns the actual presence of things before our senses. This perceptual commitment about how things actually are is reflected in the fact that perceptions enjoy epistemic authority over our beliefs about our actual environment. Furthermore, the non-neutrality of perceptions is salient from the first-person perspective, as part of their transparency. Perceptions are transparent insofar as introspective attention to them reveals the external things and features of which they make us aware, and no other candidate objects of awareness (such as sense-data or mental pictures). The positive element of this aspect of the phenomenal character of perceptions – of what perceptions are like for the subject – consists in their non-neutrality: when attending to our perceptions, we find objects that are given to us as part of our actual environment.

However, intentionalism and disjunctivism provide different theories of how perceptions relate us to external things, and of why they are non-neutral and immediate. Intentionalism about perceptual experiences does not distinguish between perceptions and hallucinations when addressing these issues. It maintains that perceptual experiences – whether they are veridical or not – make us intentionally aware of those entities. Accordingly, they are understood as presenting us with external objects without requiring their existence. They are non-relational appearances of things which do not involve the latter as their constituents. Moreover, intentionalism characterises the form of intentionality common to both perceptions and hallucinations as distinctively perceptual. This means that they involve a specific intentional attitude towards their objects which takes the latter to be actually present before us. This explains why they are committal to aspects of our actual environment, and why they have authority over our respective beliefs.⁵ Given that perceptions and hallucinations are said not to differ in respect of how they make us subjectively aware of things, intentionalism concludes that they share the same phenomenal character and are therefore of the same fundamental kind of experience.⁶

By contrast, disjunctivism about perceptual experiences (as it is defended by Martin) maintains that there is an essential difference between the character of perceptions and the character of hallucinations, to the effect that they belong to different fundamental kinds of experience. The difference in question is that, while perceptions make us relationally aware of objects, hallucinations donot.⁷ That perceptual awareness is relational means that the character of perceptions – and thus the perceptions themselves – are constituted by the external objects of which they make us aware. This explains why we find those objects when reflecting on our perceptions, and also why the latter are non-neutral about the presence of the former in the situation before our senses.

Intentionalism and disjunctivism, so defined, are incompatible with each other. They provide rival accounts of how perceptual experiences make us aware of objects and which character(s) they show. And they give different answers to the question of whether perceptions and hallucinations belong to the same fundamental kind of experience. Nonetheless, it will become important in the last two sections that intentionalism can endorse – if not in fact, then at least in spirit – some of the central ideas of disjunctivism, such as the priority of perceptions over hallucinations.

In particular, it may be argued that perceptual experiences do not only have a first-personal side to them, but also a third-personal side. The disjunctivist position considered so far has been concerned with how to conceive of perceptual object awareness – that is, of how it is for the conscious mind to be presented with objects. But when we are perceiving something, we also stand in interesting causal or similar relations to the world, which are missing in the case of hallucination and which can be investigated from the perspective of the natural and cognitive sciences. It is surely not uncontroversial whether these third-personally accessible, structural features of our cognition of objects should really figure in an account of the nature of our predominantly first-personal experience of objects. But the two phenomena are clearly related (e.g. we can influence our perceptual awareness of things by influencing our structural relation to the world). In particular, if there is indeed a difference in character between perceptions and hallucinations, it is very likely to be due to some structural difference between cases in which we perceive something and cases in which we hallucinate something. That is, it should be expected that any constitutional difference between the two kinds of perceptual experience is accompanied by – and perhaps also partly derivable from – a difference in some causal or similar element.

This leaves room for a version of intentionalism which, despite claiming that perceptions and hallucinations possess the same character, accepts that the two differ structurally – perhaps even essentially so. In this way, intentionalism can accommodate the (fairly) uncontroversial idea that, while some intentional experiences (i.e. perceptions) relate us to the world, others (i.e. hallucinations) do not. It just takes the relation in question to be, not a relation of awareness, but some other kind of relation that is accessible to empirical investigation. If we label the view that perceptions and hallucinations differ also in character phenomenal (or naive realist) disjunctivism, and the view that they differ merely in structure structural disjunctivism, then we can say that intentionalism is compatible with the structural variant of disjunctivism, but not with the phenomenal one. Intentionalism can accordingly even assume that perceptions and hallucinations differ in nature – namely in their third-personal side. However, if not stated otherwise, my focus in what follows will be on the phenomenal version of disjunctivism. And I will understand intentionalism as being neutral on the issue of whether the structural difference between perceptions and hallucinations amounts to a difference in nature.

2. The transparency of visualising

Perceptual awareness is not the only form of object awareness which is transparent and committal. Imaginative experiences – and, notably, visualising – possess both features as well (Martin 2003, 413ff.).⁸ Most of all, episodes of visualising, too, enjoy some kind of epistemic authority over our beliefs – this time only over our beliefs about what is part of the imagined situations. It makes sense to ask which entities are part of the possible situation that we are visualising at a given moment. And our answer should be influenced by what we are visualising, given that the latter typically determines what is contained in the imagined world. Other things equal, if it is a green tree that we are visualising, then there is a green tree in the situation that we are imagining. Hence, picking up on what we are visualising should guide us in forming beliefs about what is part of the respective imagined situation. This authority of visualising over our beliefs about the imagined world may be countered, or perhaps need not always be present. For instance, we may visualise a green tree simply as part of imagining having a hallucination of a green tree, in which case we should not believe that there is a ‘hallucinated’ green tree in the imagined world, but at best that there is a hallucinatory experience as of such a tree.

The epistemic dimension of visualising becomes important in cases where we are using visualising to acquire knowledge – say, about possibilities or conditional truths.⁹ In his most recent book, Timothy Williamson argues that visualising is one of the many empirical capacities that we may employ in order to acquire modal knowledge – or, in his concrete example, knowledge of some conditional, which forms the first step to modal knowledge. Considering a situation in the mountains, he describes the largely non-inferential process involved in coming to know that a certain rock would have landed in a lake, if its path had not been blocked by a bush:

You notice one rock slide into a bush. You wonder where it would have ended if the bush had not been there. A natural way to answer the question is by visualizing the rock sliding without the bush there, then bouncing down the slope. You thereby come to know this counterfactual: [...] If the bush had not been there, the rock would have ended in the lake.

(Williamson 2008, 42)

Acquiring knowledge in this way is possible only if, by visualising the rock, the slope and the lake, we take them all to be part of the same possible situation. And this requires that our episode of imagining is committed to their existence in that situation. Two things need to be noted about this commitment. The first has already been hinted at: it is not trivial to claim that the visualised object is part of the imagined situation. The example of a desire for something (e.g. an ice-cream) shows that there can be mental states which are object-directed, but do not take a stance on how things are in a certain world.¹⁰

The second point to consider is that the non-neutrality linked to visualising cannot be external to it, that is, derive from its further intellectual context rather than from the basic episode of visualising itself. The distinction between the episode and its context is not meant to deny that simple instances of visualising – or ‘images’, if one prefers – may include intellectual or other non-sensory elements (e.g. the presentation of objects as mind-dependent or -independent). An episode of visualising differs from the additional thoughts in two other respects, namely that the former is an instance of object awareness, and that it may occur without the latter – although it may also form a more complex imaginative project with them. Now, that we end up being committed to the presence of what is visualised in the imagined situation is due to the fact that visualising itself is committal in this way. That visualising presents us with, say, a green tree is not neutral on whether there is such a green tree in the imagined world (rather than, say, a yellow flower, or no such object at all). We may cancel out this commitment by adding the thought that, within the imagined world, the green tree is merely hallucinated and therefore not really part of that world. But, as a default, visualising takes the visualised object to be part of the imagined situation.

If it were instead neutral on this issue, the commitment would have to come from some additional thought specifying that the imagined situation indeed contains whatever is visualised. The green tree would become part of the imagined world, not by being visualised, but instead by being thought to be part of that world. This is in fact, roughly, the view suggested by Burge as an alternative to the disjunctivist’s take on visual experience. For him, the commitment to the presence of the visualised object – or, in the case of visualising an external thing by imagining a perception of it, the veridicality of the latter – in the imagined world comes not with the basic episode of visualising, but instead with a suppositional thought accompanying the first. Note, however, that Burge ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Transparency and imagining seeing
• 2. Naïve realism and extreme disjunctivism
• 3. Perceiving events
• 4. Tyler Burge on disjunctivism
• 5. Disjunctivism and the urgency of scepticism
• 6. The disjunctive conception of perceiving
• 7. Disjunctivism again
• Index