Naïve realism and extreme disjunctivism

Abstract

Disjunctivism about sensory experience is frequently put forward in defence of a particular conception of perception and perceptual experience known as naïve realism. In this paper, I present an argument against naïve realism that proceeds through a rejection of disjunctivism. If the naïve realist must also be a disjunctivist about the phenomenal nature of experience, then naïve realism should be abandoned.

Keywords:

• perception
• naïve realism
• Martin
• disjunctivism

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to two anonymous referees for their helpful comments.

Notes

For more detail about the notion of psychological immediacy, see Foster (2000).

Most conjunctive accounts are causal theories of perception, in that they take perception to break down into experience plus a causal relation of the right kind to the object perceived.

It should be noted that as I am using the expression, perceptual experience refers only to the sensory experience that a subject enjoys when perceiving.

There are many different formulations of naïve realism, but most are committed to the sort of claims expressed here (see, e.g. Smith 2002; Martin 2004, 2006; Brewer 2007, 2008).

Everyone should agree that a perceptual experience at least appears presentational, in the sense that it really does seem as if there is something literally present to mind in an immediate way when we perceive. Not everyone, of course, agrees that perceptual experience actually is presentational.

There are numerous versions of this argument from hallucination (see, e.g. Robinson 1994; Smith 2002).

It tends to be acknowledged that disjunctivism originated in the work of Hinton (1973). For an illuminating discussion of the origins of the idea prior to Hinton, and its connection with naïve realism (Snowdon 2008).

David Ruben, for example, talks about disjunctivism in respect to denying that there are intrinsic events to basic actions. Every bodily movement is either an action or a mere event (Ruben 2008).

For a survey of different debates in which a disjunctive approach can be adopted, see Dancy (1995). Haddock and Macpherson (2008a) contains works on disjunctivism in perception, action, and theory of knowledge.

Byrne and Logue (2008) also articulate a position that they refer to as Austinian disjunctivism (which can also be found in Thau (2004)). According to Austinian disjunctivism, nothing follows about the nature of the object of experience (that which appears to the subject in experience) from the subjective indiscriminability of experiences. It is compatible with this view that perceptual and non-perceptual experiences have the same fundamental nature, and that the difference between them resides in the nature of the object of experience. This position is, ultimately, the one that I believe the naïve realist should adopt. I refrain from including it in a discussion of the main disjunctivist positions because, while it is a disjunctive position of sorts, it is not what is usually understood to be what disjunctivism is all about, which is far more commonly expressed in terms of a commitment to either experiential or phenomenal disjunctivism. In light of this, I should perhaps restate the aim of the paper, which is to argue that if the naïve realist must adopt disjunctivism about the phenomenal nature of experience, and if this must take the form of extreme disjunctivism, then naïve realism must be rejected.

According to epistemic disjunctivism, nothing follows about what a subject knows on the basis of the indiscriminability of perceptual from non-perceptual experience. The point of adopting disjunctivism is to defend the view that in the perceptual case, what a subject knows does not fall short of knowledge about the world external to them. In the perceptual case, what a subject knows is a fact about the world, that is made manifest to them, while in the non-perceptual case this is not the case. Epistemological disjunctivism in the sense put forward here is consistent with a neutral stance towards either phenomenal or experiential disjunctivism. One could plausibly maintain that the experience one enjoys across perceptual and non-perceptual cases is of the same metaphysical or phenomenal nature, but that its epistemic significance differs. It is not entirely clear to me that the epistemological disjunctivism laid out here can really be attributed to any incarnation of McDowell, as many authors wish to do (Snowdon 2005; Byrne and Logue 2008; Haddock and Macpherson 2008b). Irrespective of whether or not McDowell holds this position, it is one that is available and salient in current discussions of disjunctivism.

It should be noted that a phenomenal disjunctivist will be committed to experiential disjunctivism, but not vice versa (Haddock and MacPherson 2008b).

Although he does not describe himself as such.

Langsam (1997, 46) later writes that the theory of appearing ‘need not commit itself to any particular account of the ontological character of hallucinations’.

This expression is from Smith (2008). Sturgeon (2006, 2008) refers to it as ‘Reflective disjunctivism’.

See Martin (2004) and Johnston (2004).

For criticisms of extreme disjunctivism that are based upon counterexamples, see Siegel (2004), Sturgeon (2006, 2008), Smith (2008), and Hawthorne and Kovakovich (2006).

A very useful overview of CBS can be found in Menon et al. (2003).

For this point, see Sturgeon (2008, 131) and Hawthorne and Kovakovich (2006, 163–4).

This fact was confirmed to me in correspondence with Anu Jacob.

Smith (2008) makes a similar claim about lucid dreamers who just know that they are dreaming. I am just not clear what entitles him to the assumption that the obtaining of this epistemic state is external to the subject's experiential situation in this way.

Martin argues for the conception of sensory experience as that which is subjectively indiscriminable from perceptual experience on the grounds that this provides the best starting point for theorising about a sensory experience. Any theory that starts off with a positive conception of what it is to be a sensory experience has ‘weightier’ epistemic commitments than one that does not. I do not consider this argument here (Hawthorne and Kovakovich 2006; Byrne and Logue 2008). The problems I discuss here regarding a sensory experience in this way make me doubtful that any such strategy could be successful.

One further objection to the thought that a sensory experience is necessarily indiscriminable from a perceptual experience is that not all genuinely sensory experiences have a corresponding possible perceptual experience. It may be possible for one to have an experience of an ‘impossible’ object (such as the Escher triangle) which, in virtue of the object of experience being impossible, could not be indiscriminable from any veridical perceptual experience as such an experience would itself be impossible. Martin deals with such possibilities by claiming that the experiences of the various constituent parts of the impossible object are indiscriminable from perceptual experiences, rather than the experience of the object as a whole (Siegel 2004).