Tyler Burge on disjunctivism

Abstract

In Burge 2005, Tyler Burge reads disjunctivism as the denial that there are explanatorily relevant states in common between veridical perceptions and corresponding illusions. He rejects the position as plainly inconsistent with what is known about perception. I describe a disjunctive approach to perceptual experience that is immune to Burge's attack. The main positive moral concerns how to think about fallibility.

Keywords:

• Burge
• fallibility
• experience
• perception

Notes

Spelling this out would require saying something about the various grammars. So far as I can see, Burge takes the idea of a state as clear enough without further explanation, and apart from the remark in the text, I will follow him in this.

This view can be found, with some difficulty, in Burge 2005, 30–1. The difficulty stems from the fact that Burge is there focusing on fallibility in respect of a perceptual state's possession of a referent rather than fallibility in respect of, more generally, representing things as they are. The idea that the fallibility of perceptual capacities shows that perceptual warrants can only be defeasible is explicit in Burge 2003, 535–6.

Burge is distracted here by the fact that in my 1994a, I attributed propositional content to experiences. That was inessential for the fundamental point, that reason is operative in having aspects of objective reality perceptually present to a rational perceiver. (For a shift away from the idea that experiences have propositional content, see McDowell 2008.) And even if we leave in place the idea that rational perceptual capacities yield experiences with propositional content, there is no implication of a quasi-inferential step from experience to knowledgeable belief. Coming to accept that things are a certain way when one perceives them to be that way is not a piece of reasoning. It happens without any need for rational activity.

See, for example, his comparison with Hegel on the number of planets (Burge 2005, 29).

See, for example, Burge 2005, 50: ‘Many of the representations and representational states attributed to the perceptual system … are equally perceptual representations or representational states of or for the whole animal.’

Not just in his response to me. See Burge 2005, 70, n. 20, where he responds to Egan's (1995) obviously conceptual queries about the sense in which theories of psychological subsystems deal with content by claiming that she is ‘misinformed’.

There is a shift between the text and the endnote. The position Burge contemplates in the text reflects his characterization of disjunctivism as a position about referential substitutions and referential illusions. Williamson's point is about knowledge in general, not specifically knowledge that relates the knower to determinate objects. (Williamson's argument is in Williamson 1995.)

‘Mode of presentation’ is a bit of Fregean apparatus. It is common for philosophers not to see how its presence in the conception can be compatible with the thinking's being a matter of standing in relation to the object. I explain how a feature of Burge's thinking underlies his version of blindness to this possibility in McDowell 1998.

It would take me too far afield to go into this in detail. An important point is that the supposed singular contents of the states into which, along with extra-mental conditions, object-dependent states are supposed to be factored can only be content-schemata, not contents proper. Evans makes the point (in a slightly different context) in 1982, 202.

See the devastating treatment of ‘fallibilist’ epistemologies for perceptual knowledge in Chapter 5 of Rödl 2007.