Primitive Knowledge Disjunctivism

European Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 2009

According to the phenomenological argument for disjunctivism, the reasons why we should prefer the disjunctive theory over its rivals is that (1) the disjunctive theory conforms the most to our pretheoretical or natural convictions about perception (what Michael Martin calls naïve realism), and (2) we should commit ourselves to naïve realism because it conforms the most to the phenomenology of the perceptual experience of objects. In this paper I try to explain why is the phenomenal argument exceptionally strong argument for disjunctivism and at the same time against sense-datum and intentional theories. Furthermore I try to show that the disjunctivist’s explanation of hallucination (which is allegedly the weak point of the theory) is as plausible as its rivals’.

Synthese, 2021

Disjunctivist views in the theory of perception hold that genuine perceptions differ in some relevant kind from misperceptions, such as illusions and hallucinations. In recent papers, Tyler Burge has argued that such views conflict with the basic tenets of perceptual psychology. According to him, perceptual psychology is committed to the view that genuine perceptions and misperceptions produced by the same proximal stimuli must be or involve perceptual states of the same kind. This, he argues, conflicts with disjunctivism. In this paper, I defend epistemological disjunctivism from Burge's inconsistency charge. To this end, I survey the perceptual psychological literature, and reveal that the perceptual kinds they tend to employ differ from and imply nothing about the kinds at issue to the epistemological disjunctivist. I then argue that Burge's concerns with epistemological disjunctivism are best interpreted as motivated not by his commitment to empirical science, but instead by his views in epistemology and human rationality. In "Disjunctivism and Perceptual Psychology" and "Disjunctivism Again," Tyler Burge wages a many-faced attack on a view about the nature of perceptual states which he calls 'disjunctivism.' Disjunctivism about perceptual states is the view that successful and unsuccessful perceptual states are different in some relevant kind.

Ergo (forthcoming), 2025

Consider two experiences, one a veridical perceptual experience of a black cube in front of one, and a matching hallucinatory experience. From the perspective of the subject undergoing these experiences they at least can be phenomenologically indistinguishable. Call this the phenomenological indistinguishability claim (PI for short). My aim in this paper is to argue for a distinctive view which I call phenomenological disjunctivism, drawing on the works of classical phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. Phenomenological disjunctivism significantly qualifies the PI claim, and in doing so is able to establish, through phenomenological analysis of the relevant experiences, an intrinsic difference in kind between veridical perception and (matching) hallucination, that is a difference in 'essence' purely on phenomenological grounds. Phenomenological disjunctivism accepts that veridical perception and hallucination either are or at least can be phenomenologically indistinguishable at a time but argues that due to a key difference in the possibilities of fulfilment of their 'horizon structure' are nonetheless phenomenologically distinguishable as fundamentally different types of experience over time (i.e., diachronically). This is the key Husserlian insight I will be reconstructing and attempting to make sense of in an articulation of phenomenological disjunctivism.

International Journal for the Study of Skepticism

Negative disjunctivists like Mike Martin and Bill Fish understand hallucinations in purely epistemic terms, and do not attribute phenomenal character to these visual misfires. However, the approaches by Martin and Fish are importantly different, and there has been little systematic work on how negative disjunctivism is motivated. In this paper, I argue for a version of negative disjunctivism that centers on the idea that perception involves the exercise of a fallible self-conscious capacity. I claim that this at once explains hallucinations in purely negative terms that are close to Martin’s approach, while at the same time providing negative disjunctivism with an explanatory basis that Fish attempts to provide and Martin’s view lacks.

2019

Hallucinations serve as special cases for philosophers of perception. Roughly, there are two general theories of perception and perceptual experience that philosophers may invoke to 'properly' accommodate hallucinations-these two theories are, respectively, representationalism and disjunctivism. In this paper, I wish to make an argument that gives credence to a certain form of disjunctivism by showing how a plausible and explanatorily powerful account of delusional experience invites us to conceive of delusions as more like articulations of hallucinatory ways of being in the world, i.e. non-ordinary ways of being attuned to environmental affordances, rather than obviously false beliefs that one firmly holds about the objective world in the face of counter-evidence, thanks to certain organic malfunctions that have taken place in the brain. First I will gloss the difference between representationalist and disjunctivist views of perception as they bear on the special case of hallucinations. In turn, I will review top-down and bottom-up approaches to delusion, highlighting the ways in which they come up short in sufficiently explaining delusions, and specifically I will focus on how these shortcomings stem from 1) their taking an approach to cognitive systems that is paradigmatically representationalist, whether concerning higher-order functions of reasoning or lower-order functions of perceptual experience, and 2) the fact that they focus on what ​ causes delusions as opposed to what delusions ​ are​. Then I will review a plausible alternative framework of delusions offered by Shaun Gallagher, highlighting how this alternative account makes up for the shortcomings found in the other approaches by employing a disjunctivist view of perceptual experience that I call affordance disjunctivism.

Disjunctivism in the philosophy of perception claims that (*) in order to maintain the idea that perceptions allow us to gain knowledge of the world, we have to abandon the idea that a subject currently having a veridical perceptual experience would be having the same perceptual experience if she were instead having an indistinguishable hallucination. In this paper, I argue that both M. G. F. Martin and John McDowell subscribe to this formulation of disjunctivism, but I argue that their implementations of it are incompatible. Further, I argue that the "objection from perceptual content", which some critics have brought against disjunctivism, applies only to the variety of disjunctivism that Martin defends. I conclude that McDowell's disjunctivism represents a stronger candidate for a successful implementation of (*). More importantly, I argue that a construal of (*) along the lines proposed by Martin robs disjunctivism of its initial promise.

Perceptual disjunctivism, as I regard it in this paper, is the view that veridical perceptions and hallucinations, while indistinguishable via introspection, are states of fundamentally different kinds. This fundamental difference can be spelled out in various ways. According to the view I will be concerned with (structural disjunctivism, as I shall call it), it is a fundamental difference in the personal-level structure of both states. Against this version of disjunctivism I will raise a new challenge. It is a variant of what can be seen as the standard challenge against disjunctivism: how to do justice to the indistinguishability of (corresponding) veridical perceptions and hallucinations. It differs, however, from common versions of this challenge in where it locates the potential incompatibility of disjunctivism with the relevant fact of indistinguishability. Commonly, it is the disjunctivist assumption of a fundamental difference between both kinds of states which is regarded as incompatible with the indistinguishability of these states. In contrast, I will suggest that (i) if hallucinations and veridical perceptions differed in the way proposed by structural disjunctivism, this difference would induce a corresponding difference in the psychological processes of their introspection and that (ii) the assumption of such a difference in the manner of introspection is most likely incompatible with a properly formulated indistinguishability claim.

Journal of Consciousness Studies

Along with what J. McDowell has called the disjunctive conception of experience (DCE), and against a venerable tradition, the veridical experience that P and the subjectively indistinguishable hallucination that P are not type-identical mental states. According to McDowell, a powerful motivation for DCE is that it makes available the sole internalistically acceptable way out of a sceptical argument targeting the possibility of perceptual knowledge. In this paper I state in explicit terms the sceptical argument McDowell worries about, and show that DCE has not the epistemological merits that McDowell ascribes to it. To begin with, I join a series of commentators in arguing that the way out of the sceptical argument made available by DCE is not internalistically acceptable, and so argue that it is not a way out that an internalist about epistemic justification would have any special reason to prefer to a parallel externalist way out that does not commit to DCE. Secondly, I show that the internalist can resist the sceptical argument by denying a different premise of it that McDowell takes for granted. I conclude by maintaining that McDowell's epistemological motivation for DCE is undercut.

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, March 2013

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.