Naïve realism about unconscious perception

Analysis, 2016

Relationalism holds that perceptual experiences are relations between subjects and perceived objects. But much evidence suggests that perceptual states can be unconscious. We argue here that unconscious perception raises difficulties for relationalism. Relationalists would seem to have three options. First, they may deny that there is unconscious perception or question whether we have sufficient evidence to posit it. Second, they may allow for unconscious perception but deny that the relationalist analysis applies to it. Third, they may offer a relationalist explanation of unconscious perception. We argue that each of these strategies is questionable.

This thesis offers a defence of naïve realism. As I understand it, naïve realism involves a claim about the structure of perception, and about the nature of perceptual experience, that is, the sensory experience that one enjoys when perceiving something. It claims that perception is psychologically direct, in that perceptual experience, in its very nature, suffices to put one in contact with normal, mind-independent objects. And it understands this nature in terms of it being presentational of these objects. After explaining the core commitments of naïve realism and presenting the salient alternative views of the nature of perceptual experience and perception, I go on to consider motivations for why it is a position that is worth defending. I discuss epistemological, metaphysical and phenomenological reasons for why naïve realism should be the place where we begin our theorising about perception, and why we should defend it as strongly as we can. I then present the two main challenges to the naïve realist view, the arguments from illusion and hallucination. The possibility of these two kinds of sensory experience is held to make the naïve realist view of the nature of perceptual experience untenable. I present a modified form of adverbialism as the best way for the naïve realist to understand the nature of perceptual experience if they want to successfully accommodate the possibility of illusory experience. On this approach, perceptual experience is the sensing of the object of perception by a subject. Next I consider the disjunctive response to the challenge that hallucination presents to the naïve realist, according to which we should conceive of perceptual and hallucinatory experience as having fundamentally different natures. I argue that such a disjunctivism needs to take an extreme form in which the only positive nature to hallucinatory experience is its being subjectively indiscriminable from perceptual experience. This position is rejected on the grounds that it maintains an implausible view about the nature of sensory experience. Finally, I consider an alternative way in which the naïve realist can deal with hallucination. This is to claim that perceptual and hallucinatory experience can share the same nature, while at the same time perceptual experience can be understood as presentational of the objects of perception. This strategy will require the naïve realist to adopt a stance about the metaphysical nature of the entities to which one can be related in experience.

Analytic Philosophy, 2020

I begin by describing what I call simple naïve realism. Then I describe relevant empirical results. Next, I develop two new empirical arguments against simple naive realism. Then I briefly look at two new, more complex forms of naïve realism: one due to Keith Allen and the other due to Heather Logue and Ori Beck. I argue that they are not satisfactory retreats for naive realists. The right course is to reject naive realism altogether. My stalking horse is contemporary naive realism but there is a larger, positive lesson: new empirical results support a brain-based theory of sensory consciousness.

In the present paper, I shall argue that disjunctively construed naïve realism about the nature of perceptual experiences succumbs to the empirically inspired causal argument. The causal argument highlights as a first step that local action necessitates the presence of a type-identical common kind of mental state shared by all perceptual experiences. In a second step, it sets out that the property of being a veridical perception cannot be a mental property. It results that the mental nature of perceptions must be exhausted by the occurrence of inner sensory experiences that narrowly supervene on the perceiver. That is, empirical objects fail directly to determine the perceptual consciousness of the perceiver. The upshot is that not only naïve realism, but also certain further forms of direct realism have to be abandoned.

Analytic Philosophy, 2018

Perceptual experience has representational content. My argument for this claim is an inference to the best explanation. The explanandum is cognitive penetration. In cognitive penetration, perceptual experiences are either causally influenced, or else are partially constituted, by mental states that are representational, including: mental imagery, beliefs, concepts and memories. If perceptual experiences have representational content, then there is a background condition for cognitive penetration that renders the phenomenon prima facie intelligible. Naïve realist or purely relational accounts of perception leave cognitive penetration less well-explained, even when formulated with so-called 'standpoints' or 'third relata.'

In this chapter I examine past and recent theories of unconscious inference. Most theorists have ascribed inferences to perception literally, not analogically, and I focus on the literal approach. I examine three problems faced by such theories if their commitment to unconscious inferences is taken seriously. Two problems concern the cognitive resources that must be available to the visual system (or a more central system) to support the inferences in question. The third problem focuses on how the conclusions of inferences are supposed to explain the phenomenal aspects of visual experience, the looks of things. Finally, in comparing past and recent responses to these problems, I provide an assessment of the current prospects for inferential theories. (A revised version of this paper is reprinted in Hatfield 2009, Perception and Cognition: Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology, Clarendon Press, 124-152.)

Phenomenal Intentionality, 2013

Philosophical Explorations, 2016

Naïve realism, the view that perceptual experiences are irreducible relations between subjects and external objects, has intuitive appeal, but this intuitive appeal is sometimes thought to be undermined by the possibility of certain kinds of hallucinations. In this paper, I present the intuitive case for naïve realism, and explain why this intuitive case is not undermined by the possibility of such hallucinations. Specifically, I present the intuitive case for naïve realism as arguing that the only way to make sense of the phenomenal character associated with perceptual experiences is by means of a naïve realist ontology. I then explain why this intuitive argument is not undermined by the possibility of hallucinatory experiences that possess the phenomenal character associated with perceptual experiences but, being hallucinations, do not have the ontological nature specified by naïve realism.

Philosophical Studies, 2019

Perceptions are externally-directed—they present us with a mind-independent reality, and thus contribute to our abilities to think about this reality, and to know what is objectively the case. But perceptions are also internally-dependent—their phenomenologies depend on the neuro-computational properties of the subject. A good theory of perception must account for both these facts. But naive realism has been criticized for failing to accommodate internal-dependence. This paper evaluates and responds to this criticism. It first argues that a certain version of naive realism, often called “selectionism”, does indeed struggle with internal-dependence. It then develops an alternate version of naive realism which does not. This alternate version, inspired by an idea of Martin’s, accommodates the internal-dependence of perceptions by recognizing the role that the subject’s neuro-computational properties play in shaping perceptual phenomenology. At the same time, it retains the distinctive naive realist account of the external-directedness of perceptions.

a b s t r a c t I argue that the possibility of non-perceptual experience need not compel a naïve realist to adopt a disjunctive conception of experience. Instead, they can maintain that the nature of perceptual and hallucinatory experience is the same, while still claiming that perceptual experience is presentational of the objects of perception. On such a view the difference between perceptual and non-perceptual experience will lie in the nature of the objects that are so presented. I will defend a view according to which in non-perceptual experience one is presented with mere universals, while in perceptual experience one is presented with the instantiation of a universal by a particular. This is to adopt disjunctivism about the objects of experience, about that which is apparently present in experience.