Hallucination by Philosophy & Psychology

Author:Philosophy & Psychology
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262019200
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2013-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

1. Schellenberg (2010) also puts forward a mixed position. But her conception of the intentional element of perception is different from the one suggested here. While she promotes a Fregean picture, my proposal is more Husserlian in spirit.

2. I use the term “perceptions” exclusively to denote veridical perceptual experiences. The expression “perceptual experiences” is intended to cover both perceptions and perception-like (or “perfect”) hallucinations—but not hallucinations that are, from the inside, discriminable from perceptions. The class of “experiences,” finally, is meant to include not only perceptual experiences but also other sensory episodes, such as episodic memories, imaginings, and subjectively discriminable hallucinations.

3. This strengthening of the epistemic conception of perception-like hallucinations has been defended in Martin (2004, 2006) and Fish (2009) and criticized in Sturgeon (2000) and Siegel (2008), among others.

4. Just like other proponents of the epistemic conception, I do not have much to say in this chapter about hallucinations that are subjectively discriminable from perceptions. I address the issue of what they have in common with perception-like hallucinations in Dorsch (2010c).

5. There is one notable difference between the two readings. If we cannot discriminate the character of a given experience first-personally, we cannot discriminate it at all. Even reductionist physicalism has to assume that our canonical access to what is to be reduced is first-personal. Otherwise it would be impossible to decide which brain states are to be identified with pain, say, and which with pleasure. So if the character of a given hallucination is distinct from that of perceptions but cannot subjectively be known to be distinct from perceptions, we cannot say anything positive about it at all. By contrast, the structure of experiences is open to third-personal investigation. Indeed, identifying the subjectively accessible aspects of the structure may be impossible without relying on such a third-personal access (cf., for instance, the external determination of content). Hence, even if we cannot tell from the inside that a given hallucination differs structurally from perceptions, the sciences or metaphysics can still reveal their structure (Dorsch, 2010c).

6. See the writings of Martin, especially Martin (2004, 2006). In §§13–14 and 22, I characterize in more detail both this version of disjunctivism—which is sometimes also called “naive realist disjunctivism” (see Martin, 2002; and Nudds, this volume) or “phenomenal disjunctivism” (Macpherson & Haddock, 2008)—and its understanding of subjective indiscriminability in terms of introspection. The term “disjunctivism” and its counterpart “conjunctivism” are, if taken literally, perhaps not particularly apt, but I follow the tradition in using them for the positions at issue.

7. Martin (2004, 2006) and Nudds (2010) are notable exceptions, though they limit their discussion to introspection.

8. The following considerations draw heavily on Williamson (1990) and, to some extent, also on Martin (2006).

9. This should be obvious for cases in which both entities are accessible to us at the same time and in the same way (e.g., when we can simultaneously see them). In other cases, however, it is less clear whether indiscriminability is symmetric (e.g., when we see one entity while merely remembering the visual appearance of the other).

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