In the early 1980s, John McDowell and Paul Snowdon (influenced by work from Michael Hinton from the late 1960s) suggested a new strategy to resist the argument from illusion: the so-called disjunctive account of perceptual experience. According to the traditional view, a perception and a subjectively indistinguishable illusion or hallucination can exemplify what is fundamentally the same kind of mental state even though they differ in how they relate to the non-mental environment. According to the disjunctive account, in contrast, the concept of experience should be seen as essentially disjunctive, encompassing (at least) two distinct kinds of mental states, namely genuinely world-involving perceptions and mere appearances. For instance, according to McDowell's version of disjunctivism, to say that someone has an experience that p is to say that she either perceives that p or that it merely appears to her as if p. However, various other disjunctive accounts of perceptual experience have been proposed that differ both in their aims, in the arguments on which they are based, and in the details of the disjunctive formulation they employ. Moreover, over the years, the disjunctivist idea has found applications in other fields such as action theory, philosophy of mind and the theory of emotions. At the same time, there have been various kinds of criticism of disjunctivist theories, both directed at the disjunctivist idea in general and at its specific versions and applications.
This issue of Philosophical Explorations contains the first part of a symposium on disjunctivism. It consists of four papers, two of which criticize and two of which defend (versions of) disjunctivism.
The first paper, by Fabian Dorsch, is directed against the disjunctivism about perceptual experience developed by Michael G.F. Martin in a series of influential papers. Martin invokes disjunctivism specifically as part of a defense of ‘naive’ or direct realism about perception against sense datum and intentionalist theories. Martin bases his view in part on an argument according to which the intentionalist cannot adequately account for the transparency and non-neutrality of perception – the fact that focussing one's attention at one's current perceptual state typically amounts to attending to the objects one perceives and their properties and thus is not neutral with respect to the existence of these objects. One version of this argument works with the idea that transparency and non-neutrality extend even to the imagining of external objects, since imagining such an object is imagining perceiving it – a claim that has been criticized by intentionalists. Dorsch engages this argument and defends it against various criticisms that have been raised against it, but only to criticize it as inconclusive for a different reason, namely that it is possible to develop a version of intentionalism that can accommodate the transparency and non-neutrality of imagined experiences.
Matthew D. Conduct takes on a different aspect of Martin's account. Martin defends what Conduct, in his paper, calls ‘extreme disjunctivism’ – the view that for a typical case of hallucination there is no positive characterization of its experiential character available, but only the negative one that it is subjectively indistinguishable from a corresponding perception. In effect, this means that being subjectively indistinguishable from a genuine case of perception is necessary and sufficient for being a perceptual (or, in Conduct's terminology: a sensory) experience. Against this view, Conduct mounts a two-pronged attack: on the one hand, he argues that there are cases of hallucinatory experiences that are subjectively distinguishable from a corresponding perception, for instance, in the case of Charles Bonnet syndrome; on the other hand, he argues (following A.D. Smith) that there are experiences, for instance, the so-called momentary experiences, that are subjectively indiscriminable from a case of perception, but which are not sensory (and hence not perceptual) experiences. If this is correct, the extreme disjunctivist faces the challenge of coming up with a notion of sensory experience that excludes cases of the latter kind without admitting cases of the former kind. Conduct concludes that in light of this challenge, if naive realism requires extreme disjunctivism, then naive realism should be abandoned.
The next two papers both defend versions of disjunctivism. Matthew Soteriou, in his contribution, develops a novel argument for the view that genuine perception is relational (object-involving) in a way that cannot be accommodated by the intentionalist (and thus requires a disjunctive account of perceptual experience). This argument applies the idea that experience is transparent to the temporal phenomenology of experience. In particular, we can be aware of perceiving an occurrence unfold in such a way that each temporal part of one's experience is transparent to the simultaneous temporal part of the occurrence one is perceiving. Soteriou argues that the representational content in terms of which intentionalists characterize the phenomenology of experience should be thought of as a non-successive unity, and he argues that this prevents intentionalists from being able to account adequately for this feature of the phenomenology of perceptual experience.
John McDowell's work has been one of the major sources for the current vogue of disjunctivist theories. As such, it has attracted a fair amount of criticism from proponents of intentionalist and other representationalist theories of perception. One particularly forceful criticism was put forward by Tyler Burge in a paper against disjunctivism from 2005. There, Burge argues that disjunctivism is incompatible with empirical findings and theories in brain science and cognitive psychology. These disciplines, according to Burge, clearly prove what disjunctivism denies, namely that there are explanatorily relevant mental states types in common between genuine perceptions and corresponding illusions and hallucinations. McDowell's response is to deny that he ever held the view that there is no mental state type in common between perceptions on the one hand and illusions and hallucinations on the other. McDowell rehearses the argument for disjunctivism to which Burges reacts; disjunctivism, as McDowell sees it, is a way of resisting a faulty inference from the fallibility of perceptual experience. This inference goes from the indisputable observation that we are sometimes misled by perceptual experience to the conclusion that perceptual experience can never be an indefeasible warrant for believing that things are as we perceive them to be. According to McDowell, this inference is faulty because fallibility pertains to capacities (such as the capacity to perceive one's environment) and not to individual exercises of these capacities (such as an individual case of perception). Disjunctivism is a way of blocking that inference by insisting that, from the fact that illusions and hallucinations do not provide indefeasible warrant for beliefs about our perceptible environment, it does not follow that genuine perceptions, too, do not provide such warrant. McDowell then goes on to counter a different, although related objection raised by Burge, namely that disjunctivism seems to deny that we share our perceptual capacities with other, non-rational animals. McDowell responds in part by distinguishing the conceptual framework of perception (that includes concepts such as representation, knowledge, and the like) from the conceptual framework of perceptual systems as employed in the empirical sciences. While animals may share with us mental state kinds that can feature in explanations on the latter level, they do not share mental state kinds with us that feature on the former level.
This is the first part of a symposium that will be continued in the next issue of Philosophical Explorations with, among other contributions, a reply to John McDowell by Tyler Burge.
Notes on contributor
Marcus Willaschek is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt am Main. His publications include: Praktische Vernunft. Handlungstheorie und Moralbegründung bei Kant, Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 1992; Der mentale Zugang zur Welt. Realismus, Skeptizismus und Intentionalität, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2003; numerous articles on Kant, the philosophy of action, on free will, and epistemology. Personal URL: http://www.philosophie.uni-frankfurt.de/lehrende_index/Homepage_Willaschek/