Nyaya Perceptual Theory: Disjunctivism or Anti-Individualism

Noûs, 2011

A satisfactory theory of perception must meet a variety of metaphysical and epistemological demands. What is wanted is a view that simultaneously accounts for, among other things, the epistemic significance of experience, the nature and status of illusion and hallucination, the possibility of unmediated perceptual contact with the world, the “richness” of experience, and the source of perceptual concepts. It has been argued that experience must be conceptual in order to secure the justificatory role of perceptual states; at the same time, it has been thought that such states cannot be conceptual given their phenomenological and explanatory features. Our aim is to introduce and defend a new framework for conceptualism that, by marking ontological and epistemic differences between sensory awareness and perceptual experience, promises to resolve this dispute while accounting for all of the above phenomena. In §1, we clarify the conceptualist thesis at issue. In §2, we present and motiv...

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.

Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 1998

Conceptus, 2010

Ever since it was discovered that hallucinations and illusions are not all that compatible with our natural view of the relation between the perceiving subject and the perceived object, according to which we always perceive the object itself (or, as most epistemologists prefer to say, we perceive it directly), the philosophical position of Direct (or Naïve) Realism which is meant to be the epistemological equivalent of this view, has begun to falter. To express these problems more explicitly, the argument from hallucination and the argument from illusion were created and brought direct realists in dire need of explaining how phenomenons such as hallucinations and illusions could possibly go together with their position. One of the main direct (or naïve) realists’ responses to these arguments is Disjunctivism, a position that, while being able to efficiently deal with both arguments, is subject to quite a few problems in its postulations as well. The intuitive plausibility of both arguments seems to have led many a philosopher to take their validity for granted. Because of this, it will be attempted to give an accurate and adequate reformulation of both arguments in this paper to find out whether their impact on the philosophy of perception is justified in the first place. Citation information: Gebharter, A., & Mirnig, A. G. (2010). Disjunctivism: An answer to two pseudo problems? Conceptus, 39(95), 61–84. doi:10.1515/cpt-2010-9503

Grazer Philosophische Studien, 2021

Michael Ayers’s Knowing and Seeing: Groundwork for a New Empiricism is a rich and detailed development of two ideas. The first is that perception presents reality to us directly in a perspicuous way. We thus acquire primary knowledge of the world: “knowledge gained by being evidently, self-consciously, in direct cognitive contact with the object of the knowledge.” (Ayers 2019, 63) The second idea is that concepts are not needed in perception. In this article, the author examines Ayers’s view. The author proceeds as follows: In the first section, he identifies the target of Ayers’s attacks, conceptualism. He then describes why many philosophers have felt this conceptualist view to be attractive. In the next section, he discusses Ayers’s criticisms of conceptualism in an attempt to disentangle these criticisms from the statement of his positive view, which the author discusses in the following section. He ends by describing some problems for Ayers’s positive position that are, so he argues, the result of his vehement opposition to conceptualism.

2007

In Consciousness and Cognition, Michael Thau adopts bold and engaging positions on a wide range of connected topics; his resourceful arguments in support of these positions amply repay reflection. At the same time, readers may find it difficult to accept the resulting metaphysics as a serious candidate for belief. To some it will seem that the book contains its own unintended reductio ad absurdum, as philosophy bookseven excellent ones-sometimes do. More charitable readers may still find the account seriously incomplete in key respects, rendering any evaluation of the metaphysics premature. In what follows, I offer some reflections on the nature of what I will call ''Thau-properties''-internally specified properties that are distinct from but correspond to the colors, shapes, etc. I will argue that Thau-properties are metaphysically spookier than Thau lets on. I will also sketch a version of the theory of perceptual qualia, and argue that (a) qualia theory suggests a natural point of resistance to Thau's Mary argument for the existence of Thau-properties, and that (b) qualia are less spooky than Thau-properties. According to Thau, the colors, sizes, distances, shapes, tastes, smells, sounds, textures, etc. of perceived things, and bodily sensations-all properties which can serve as the semantic values of predicates like 'red', 'large', 'far', 'cube', 'sweet', 'rotten-egg', 'middle C', 'silky', and 'pain'-are not represented in perception. The properties with which we are perceptually acquainted are distinct from but correspond to the colors, shapes, etc., of perceived things. What distinguishes a belief that an object is red from a perception\ according to which it looks red is precisely the kind of prop

New Issues in Epistemological Disjunctivism (Doyle, Milburn, Pritchard eds.), Routledge Studies in Epistemology, 2019

So-called basic self-knowledge (ordinary knowledge of one's present states of mind) can be seen as both 'baseless' and privileged. The spontaneous self-beliefs we have when we avow our states of mind do not appear to be formed on any particular epistemic basis (whether intro-or extro-spective). Nonetheless, on some views, these self-beliefs constitute instances of (privileged) knowledge. We are here interested in views on which true mental self-beliefs have internalist epistemic warrant that false ones lack. Such views are committed to a form of disjunctivism about basic self-knowledge. We begin by presenting an influential disjunctivist view about perceptual knowledge (Pritchard 2008, 2012, and elsewhere) and articulate a problem for it. We then consider two versions of disjunctivism about basic self-knowledge – one 'constitutivist', the other 'neo-expressivist' – and argue that both can avoid an analogue of this problem for self-knowledge. However, we give reasons for preferring the disjunctivism yielded by neo-expressivism. We conclude by considering briefly whether an acceptable disjunctivism about mental self-beliefs can point the way toward a sensible disjunctivism about perceptual beliefs.

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’.