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.

Perceptual Experience and Physicalism

Purpose and Procedure in Philosophy of Perception

Although there is much disagreement within the philosophy of perception, there is one thing that the majority of philosophers agree on: our philosophical account of perceptual experience should be compatible with physicalism. The aim of this paper is to explore the impact this has had within the philosophy of perception, and to point out some of the problems a physicalist approach must face. Representationalism is the leading account of perception, and was developed precisely to meet the physicalist’s criteria. This chapter supports and expands on an existing argument that representationalism fails in this aim. It then points out a problem with the new view—non-relationalism—which has arisen as a result of the failure of standard representationalism to qualify as a genuinely physicalist view. Non-relationalist accounts have difficulty doing justice to the idea that our perceptual experiences are assessable for accuracy or veridicality.

Perceptual experience and its contents

The Journal of Mind and Behavior, 2002

The contents of perceptual experience, it has been argued, often include a characteristic "non-conceptual" component (Evans, 1982). Rejecting such views, McDowell (1994) claims that such contents are conceptual in every respect. It will be shown that this debate is compromised by the failure of both sides to mark a further, and crucial, distinction in cognitive space. This is the distinction between what is doubted here as mindful and mindless modes of perceiving: a distinction which cross-classifies the conceptual / non-conceptual divide. The goal of the paper is to show that there can be both mindful personal level perceptual experiences whose content cannot be considered conceptualpace McDowell (1994)-and that there are mindless personal level perceptual experiences whose content cannot be considered-pace Evans (1982)-nonconceptual. The resulting picture yields a richer four dimensional carving of the space of perceptual experience, and provides a better framework in which to accommodate the many subtleties involved in our sensory confrontations with the world.

Reflections on the Possibility of Perceptualism

The Incarnate Word, 2019

The following is a paper presented for the Course Rahner and Lonergan at the University of Toronto (Winter, 2014), revised and edited Winter, 2018. Our purpose is to defend the possibility of “perceptualism,” that is to say, the position maintaining that the intelligible content of consciousness is given in perception and not posited by the activity of the subject. Assisted by the insights of Cornelio Fabro, this defense contrasts perceptualism with Bernard Lonergan’s “critical realism”. This paper focuses on the notion of experience, seemingly the basis of the opposition between perceptualism and critical realism.