[DISSERTATION] The Nature of Hallucinatory Experience (original) (raw)
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Naïve Realism and the Conception of Hallucination as Non-Sensory Phenomena
Disputatio, 2018
In defence of naïve realism, Fish has advocated an eliminativist view of hallucination, according to which hallucinations lack visual phe-nomenology. Logue, and Dokic and Martin, respectively, have developed the eliminativist view in different manners. Logue claims that hallucination is a non-phenomenal, perceptual representational state. Dokic and Martin maintain that hallucinations consist in the confusion of monitoring mechanisms, which generates an affective feeling in the hallucinating subject. This paper aims to critically examine these views of hallucination. By doing so, I shall point out what theoretical requirements are imposed on naïve realists who characterize hallucinations as non-visual-sensory phenomena.
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
What are hallucinations? A common view in the philosophical literature is that hallucinations are degenerate kinds of perceptual experience. I argue instead that hallucinations are degenerate kinds of sensory imagination. As well as providing a good account of many actual cases of hallucination, the view that hallucination is a kind of imagination represents a promising account of hallucination from the perspective of a disjunctivist theory of perception like naive realism. This is because it provides a way of giving a positive characterisation of hallucination—rather than characterising hallucinations in negative, relational, terms as mental events that are subjectively indistinguishable from veridical perceptual experiences.
Relationalism in the Face of Hallucinations
Relationalism claims that the phenomenal character of perception is constituted by the obtaining of a non-representational psychological relation to mind-independent objects. Although relationalism provides what seems to be the most straightforward and intuitive account of how experience strikes us introspectively, it is very often believed that the argument from hallucination shows that the view is untenable. The aim of this thesis is to defend relationalism against the argument from hallucination. The argument claims that the phenomenal character of hallucination and perception deserves the same account, and that relationalism cannot be true for hallucinations, therefore relationalism must be rejected. This argument relies on the Indiscriminability Principle (IND), the claim that two experiences that are introspectively indiscriminable from each other have the same phenomenal character. Before assessing the plausibility of this principle, I first consider and dismiss versions of the argument which wouldn’t depend on IND. Although widely accepted, no satisfactory support for IND has been presented yet. In this thesis I argue that defending IND requires that we understand the notion of ‘indiscriminability’ employed in IND in an impersonal sense. I then identify what underwrites IND: the intuition that, in virtue of its superficiality, the nature of a phenomenal character must be accessible through introspection, together with the claim that it is not possible to deny IND without denying the superficiality of phenomenal characters too. I argue that the relationalist can deny IND while preserving the superficiality of phenomenal characters. This can be done by adopting a negative view of hallucination and an account of introspection whereby the phenomenal character doesn’t exist independently of one’s introspective awareness of it and where having introspective access to our experience depends on our perceptual access to the world.
The obscure object of hallucination
Philosophical Studies, 2004
Like dreaming, hallucination has been a formative trope for modern philosophy. The vivid, often tragic, breakdown in the mind's apparent capacity to disclose reality has long served to support a paradoxical philosophical picture of sensory experience. This picture, which of late has ...
My primary aim in this article is to provide a philosophical account of the unity of hallucinations, which can capture both perceptual hallucinations (which are subjectively indistinguishable from perceptions) and non-perceptual hallucinations (all others). Besides, I also mean to clarify further the division of labour and the nature of the collaboration between philosophy and the cognitive sciences. Assuming that the epistemic conception of hallucinations put forward by M. G. F. Martin and others is largely on the right track, I will focus on two main tasks: (a) to provide a satisfactory phenomenology of the subjective character of perceptions and perceptual hallucinations and (b) to redress the philosophers’ neglect of non-perceptual hallucinations. More specifically, I intend to apply one of the central tenets of the epistemic conception—that hallucinations can and should be positively characterised in terms of their phenomenological connections to perceptions—to non-perceptual hallucinations as well. That is, I will try to show that we can positively specify the class of non-perceptual hallucinations by reference to the distinctive ways in which we first-personally experience them and perceptions in consciousness. The task of saying more about their underlying third-personal nature may then be left to the cognitive sciences.
Hallucinations and Perceptual Content: Why Intentionalists and Naïve Realists Just Can't Be Friends
Filosofisk supplement, 2017
In The Contents of Visual Experience, Susanna Siegel argues at length in defense of the Content View (CV), which is the view that all visual perceptual experiences have contents (Siegel 2011:28). One interesting aspect of Siegel’s defense of CV is that she takes it to be acceptable not only for intentionalists, but also for the typically content-skeptical naïve realists. I argue that whether or not this compatibility holds depends crucially on how the naïve realist conceives of hallucinations. If prominent naïve realist William Fish's account of hallucinations is correct – and I will argue that Siegel does not provide us with any good reasons to deny it – then Siegel’s argument for the compatibility of CV and naïve realism fails.
A New Approach to 'Perfect' Hallucinations
Journal of Consciousness Studies
I consider a new, non-disjunctive strategy for 'relational' or 'naïve-realist' theories to respond to arguments from 'perfect' (causally matching) hallucinations. The strategy, in a nutshell, is to treat such hypothetical cases as instances of perception rather than hallucination. After clarifying the form and dialectic of such arguments, I consider 3 objections to the strategy. I provide answers to the first 2 objections but concede that the 3 rd -based on the possibility of 'chaotic' (uncaused) perfect hallucinations -cannot obviously be dealt with by the proposed strategy. However, such 'chaotic' scenarios are also problematic for standard representational accounts of experience. Thus I conclude that perfect hallucinations pose no more of a threat to the relational theory than to its main representational rival.
Determining the Natures of Hallucination and Veridical Perception
This paper is a possible thesis topic for my undergraduate thesis. A prior paper on this subject was written that I do not have access to any longer; and this paper still is not the finalized draft - there are a fair array of inaccuracies, typos, and ideas that need to be recast compositionally. However, I felt that I should upload this paper in order to share my ideas and perhaps receive feedback. In the argument that follows, I will pose two cases in order to help me navigate the phenomenon of veridical perception and the phenomenon of hallucination, so as to try and determine the threshold between these visual experiences. In doing so, I recognize the benefits of disjunctivism and support naive realism (out of respect to Hinton's article " Visual Experiences "), despite continuing to accept my own theory of perception, " Representational Sense Data ". In the following pages I use these theories accordingly across two main cases of seeing, in order to illustrate how the content of our veridical experience is defined through two types of contexts, as they are necessitated by the processes of veridical perception. In this way, I illustrate how the content of our visual experiences varies in how we represent the phenomenology of our experiences to ourselves and how this notion can allow for hallucination to be indiscriminable to veridical perception while at the same time accepting that it has no phenomenological basis in the present. I thenceforth support Fish's theory of hallucination, as it is laid out in his book " Perception, Hallucination and Illusion ". The theory, which defines just what a " pure " hallucination is, is the crux of my argument; it shows how a hallucination is only as indiscriminable inasmuch as its content is similar to a veridical perception (of its same kind). I reveal its merits through the positing of my two-context theory about content of veridical perception (as it constitutes sense-data) and concept (constituted into two types of higher-order processes, both of which create a third process - that is, of our attempt to reconstruct the world using language in light of indiscriminability about epistemology.)
Really, I suppose that the clear line between hallucination and reality has itself become a kind of hallucination… Philip K. Dick 1 Psychosis can involve disruptions in how reality is experienced, even if this is not an invariable characteristic of this structure. However, the vast majority of those with psychosis have little difficulty in orienting themselves in time and space and their perception of reality remains unchanged, especially when they are not in an acute phase of the disorder. When such a disturbance does occur, for example in hallucinatory phenomena, could it be said that there is a disintegration or decomposition of reality? Does psychosis involve disturbances in perception as such? Although Sigmund Freud holds that psychosis involves a loss of reality, his idea that fantasy and dreaming are hallucinatory expressions of desire tones this position down a bit. Let us not forget how he states, in his 1924 text of the same name, that there is a loss of reality in neurosis and psychosis, one that occurs differently in the two cases. 2 With his tripartite registers of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real, which he refers to as " dit-mensions " 3 of experience, Jacques Lacan shakes up the idea that there is some common reality that serves as a truth-function for the subject in his/her relation to the world. 4 Truth and reality concur: in a Lacanian perspective, they are always in a relation with meaning, and meaning is never reliable for it belongs to the imaginary and is always guided by the fantasy. The real is to be distinguished from reality, that is, from the representation of the external world that is structured by the symbolic and the imaginary. The real is of the order of jouissance, and this jouissance affects the body, as it does, for example, in the symptom. 5 From the perspective of the real, it is impossible to speak of the agreement or lack thereof between the subject and the world. There is, instead, an affective relation: the subject is affected by the world and the real involves the body that is affected. What then is the relation between the body and hallucinations or between hallucinations and perception? Can we claim that, in the relation that the subject establishes with the world, perception is disrupted by the real?
Does hallucinating involve perceiving?
Philosophical Studies, 2018
A natural starting point for theories of perceptual states is ordinary perception, in which a subject is successfully related to her mind-independent surroundings. Correspondingly, the simplest theory of perceptual states models all such states on perception. Typically, this simple, common-factor relational view of perceptual states has received a perfunctory dismissal on the grounds that hallucinations are nonperceptual. But I argue that the nonperceptual view of hallucinations has been accepted too quickly. I consider three observations thought to support the view, and argue that all three are dealt with equally well by an alternative view, illusionism, on which hallucinations do involve perception. Since this is so, adopting a common-factor relational view of all perceptual states remains a tenable option.