The Argument from Illusion (original) (raw)
Beyond Appearances: The Content of Sensation and Perception
Perceptual Experience, 2006
There seems to be a large gulf between percepts and concepts. In particular, concepts seem to be capable of representing things that percepts cannot. We can conceive of things that would be impossible to perceive. (The converse may also seem true, but I will leave that to one side.) In one respect, this is trivially right. We can conceive of things that we cannot encounter, such as unicorns. We cannot literally perceive unicorns, even if we occasionally ''see'' them in our dreams and hallucinations. To avoid triviality, I want to focus on things that we can actually encounter. We perceive poodles, perfumes, pinpricks, and pounding drums. These are concrete things; they are closely wedded to appearances. But we also encounter things that are abstract. We encounter uncles and instances of injustice. These things have no characteristic looks. Percepts, it is said, cannot represent abstract things. Call this claim the Imperceptability Thesis. I think the Imperceptibility Thesis is false. Perception is not restricted to the concrete. We can perceive abstract entities. This may sound like an obvious claim. We often use perceptual terms widely to say things such as: ''I perceive a lack of agreement'' or ''I see where you are going with that argument.'' But, by most accounts, these uses of perceptual terms are either metaphorical or, at any rate, different from the use of perceptual terms in cases that more directly involve the sense modalities: ''I perceive distant rumbling''; ''I see a red light over there.'' The abstract cases are interpreted as involving the sense modalities, if only indirectly. The presumption is that we must first pick up something with our senses and then judge that there is, say, a lack of agreement. Moreover, the abstract cases are presumed to require a level of mental representation that is not perceptual in format. I want to deny all of this. Perceiving abstracta can be just like perceiving concreta. Those willing to abandon the Imperceptibility Thesis might dig in their heels elsewhere. If there is no semantic gulf between percepts and concepts, there I am deeply indebted to two anonymous referees and, especially, Tamar Gendler. This paper benefited tremendously from their detailed comments and excellent advice.
The Epistemic Force of Perceptual Experience
What is the metaphysical nature of perceptual experience? What evidence does experience provide us with? These questions are typically addressed in isolation. In order to make progress in answering both questions, perceptual experience needs to be studied in an integrated manner. I develop a unified account of the phenomenological and epistemological role of perceptual experience, by arguing that sensory states provide perceptual evidence due to their metaphysical structure. More specifically, I argue that sensory states are individuated by the perceptual capacities employed and that there is an asymmetric dependence between their employment in perception and their employment in hallucination and illusion. Due to this asymmetric dependence, sensory states provide us with evidence.
The Particularity and Phenomenology of Perceptual Experience
Philosophical Studies
I argue that any account of perceptual experience should satisfy the following two desiderata. First, it should account for the particularity of perceptual experience, that is, it should account for the mind-independent object of an experience making a difference to individuating the experience. Second, it should explain the possibility that perceptual relations to distinct environments could yield subjectively indistinguishable experiences. Relational views of perceptual experience can easily satisfy the first but not the second desideratum. Representational views can easily satisfy the second but not the first desideratum. I argue that to satisfy both desiderata perceptual experience is best conceived of as fundamentally both relational and representational. I develop a view of perceptual experience that synthesizes the virtues of relationalism and representationalism, by arguing that perceptual content is constituted by potentially gappy de re modes of presentation.
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2019
This paper develops a form of transcendental na€ ıve realism. According to na€ ıve realism, veridical perceptual experiences are essentially relational. According to transcendental na€ ıve realism, the na€ ıve realist theory of perception is not just one theory of perception amongst others, to be established as an inference to the best explanation and assessed on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis that weighs performance along a number of different dimensions: for instance, fidelity to appearances, simplicity, systematicity, fit with scientific theories, and so on. Rather, na€ ıve realism enjoys a special status in debates in the philosophy of perception because it represents part of the transcendental project of explaining how it is possible that perceptual experience has the distinctive characteristics it does. One of the potentially most interesting prospects of adopting a transcendental attitude towards na€ ıve realism is that it promises to make the na€ ıve realist theory of perception, in some sense, immune to falsification. This paper develops a modest form of transcendental na€ ıve realism modelled loosely on the account of the reactive attitudes provided by Strawson in 'Freedom and Resentment', and suggests one way of understanding the claim that na€ ıve realism is immune to falsification. 1. Transcendental Na€ ıve Realism According to the version of the na€ ıve realist theory of perception that I will take as representative, veridical perceptual experiences are essentially relational: veridical perceptual experiences are constituted at least in part by the mind-independent objects and properties in our environment that they are experiences of. Because on this view veridical perceptual experiences are essentially relational, a particular perceptual experience could not have occurred if the subject had not been perceptually related to precisely those elements of their environment. 1 In this respect, na€ ıve realist theories of perception differ from common kind theories of perception, like sense-datum or representationalist theories, which allow that how things are with the subject is constitutively independent, at least on a particular occasion, of how things are in their environment. According to common kind theories, it is possible for the subject to have fundamentally the same kind of experience whether or not the environment This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Beyond Perceptualism: Introduction to the Special Issue
Dialectica, 2015
Assuming that objects in the world not only instantiate descriptive properties like being round or being blue but also evaluative properties like being admirable or being unjust, how can we come to be aware of these evaluative aspects of reality? Some philosophers think that just as perceptions give us access to the perceptual descriptive aspects of reality, emotions give us access to the evaluative aspects of reality. This is one way to motivate a perceptual theory of emotion. Another way is to point to how emotions make it rational and justify it to hold something to be true or to perform a certain action. Many have argued that emotions do play a rational and justifying role, and that this role is best understood by analogy with the rational and justifying role of perception. According to 'strong perceptualism', emotions are (a special kind of) perceptions (see, e.g.,
The Content and Phenomenology of Perceptual Experience
2013
The paper’s main target is strong and reductive “representationalism”. What we claim is that even though this position looks very appealing in so far as it does not postulate intrinsic and irreducible experiential properties, the attempt it pursues of accounting for the phenomenology of experience in terms of representational content runs the risk of providing either an inadequate phenomenological account or an inadequate account of the content of the experience.