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16 Hallucination, Mental Representation, and the Presentational Character Costas Pagondiotis Abstract In this paper, I argue that the indirect realists’ recourse to mental representations does not allow them to account for the possibility of hallucination, nor for the presentational character of visual experience. To account for the presentational character, I suggest a kind of intentionalism that is based on the interdependency between the perceived object and the embodied perceiver. This approach provides a positive account to the effect that genuine perception and hallucination are different kinds of states. Finally, I offer a tentative suggestion as to how a hallucinatory experience may still be mistaken for a genuine perceptual experience. The first part of the argument from hallucination is intended to show that hallucinations involve the awareness of mental particulars, and the second, generalizing part concludes that the same kind of particulars are involved in veridical perception. All parties agree that what necessitates the adoption of mental particulars in the case of hallucination is the acceptance of an assumption that Robinson (1994, 32) called “Phenomenal Principle”:1 If there sensibly appears to a subject to be something which possesses a particular sensible quality then there is something of which the subject is aware which does possess that sensible quality. Thus when a subject hallucinates a blue square, there is something of which the subject is aware that is actually blue and square; and since there is no blue square in the external environment, the subject is aware of a mental particular that is blue and square. Intentionalists attempt to resist this conclusion by pointing to the phenomenology that characterizes both hallucinatory and genuine experience: “In turning one’s mind 1. Robinson introduces this principle in the context of his analysis of the assumptions involved in the argument from illusion, but the same principle must be used in the argument from hallucination in order, from the commonsensical idea that in hallucination we appear to see something that does not exist, to infer that in hallucination we are aware of a mental particular. See also Smith (2002, 194) and Crane (2006, 135). 362 C. Pagondiotis inward to attend to the experience [of a blue square], one seems to end up concentrating on what is outside again, on external features or properties. And this remains so, even if there really is no blue square in front of one” (Tye, 1995, 30). Hallucinatory experience, like genuine experience, is transparent; introspection of it does not reveal any mental particulars and their qualities, but only objects and their qualities appearing in the external environment. Thus the acceptance of the Transparency Thesis, prima facie, seems to undermine the idea that when one hallucinates, one is aware of mental particulars and their qualities.2 But an indirect realist could respond that though what we are aware of appears to be an external object with its qualities, it is actually a mental particular with its qualities . In other words, we are aware of the mental particulars not as mental particulars but as external objects. This means that the Phenomenal Principle can be compatible with the Transparency Thesis. In this paper, after setting the stage in the first section, I argue in the second section that the acceptance of this compatibility does not allow the indirect realist to account for the possibility of hallucination. This calls for a close examination of the postulated mental particulars and of the way they are taken to be involved in perception and hallucination. Here I critically examine one dominant way mental particulars are conceived by indirect realists, namely, as mental representations of a particular kind, and I argue that this conception does not account for the possibility of hallucination. In the third section, I argue that the way indirect realists could use mental representations to account for the presentational character of visual experience does not do justice to its phenomenological difference from visual imagination or visual recall. In the fourth section, I suggest a kind of intentionalism that is based on the interdependency between the perceived object and the embodied perceiver in order to account for the presentational character of perceptual experience. This approach provides a positive account to the effect that genuine perception and hallucination are different kinds of states. Finally, in the fifth section I offer a tentative suggestion as to how a hallucinatory experience may still be mistaken for a genuine perceptual experience. 1 Two Basic Problems of Perception Any adequate theory of perception has necessarily to account for two basic problems...

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