In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

11 Silencing the Argument from Hallucination István Aranyosi 1 Introduction Ordinary people tend to be realists regarding perceptual experience; that is, they take perceiving the environment as a direct, unmediated, straightforward access to a mindindependent reality. Not so for (ordinary) philosophers. The empiricist influence on the philosophy of perception, in analytic philosophy at least, made the problem of perception synonymous with the view that realism is untenable. Admitting the problem (and trying to offer a view on it) is tantamount to rejecting ordinary people’s implicit realist assumptions as naive. So what exactly is the problem? We can approach it via one of the central arguments against realism: the argument from hallucination. The argument is intended as a proof that in ordinary, veridical cases of perception, perceivers do not have an unmediated perceptual access to the world. There are many versions of it; I propose the following:1 1. Hallucinations that are subjectively indistinguishable from veridical perceptions are possible. 2. If two subjective states are indistinguishable, then they have a common nature. 3. The contents of hallucinations are mental images, not concrete external objects. 4. Therefore, the contents of veridical perceptions are mental images rather than concrete external objects. The key move is, I believe, from the fact that hallucinations that are subjectively indistinguishable from cases of veridical perception are possible to an alleged common element, factor, or nature, in the form of a mental state, in the two cases—that is, premise 2. Disjunctivism, at its core, can be taken as simply denying this move and arguing that all that follows from the premise stating the possibility of hallucinations 1. It is sometimes combined with a causal account of perception, or, as Howard Robinson does (1994, 151), with a causal argument for sense-data. My argument will have effect, I believe, on these modified versions, too; see section 4. 256 I. Aranyosi that are subjectively indistinguishable from cases of veridical perception is that there is a broader category, that of “experience as of … ,” which encompasses both cases. Further, disjunctivists argue that this broader category might not be characterized otherwise than as a disjunction of the two categories it encompasses. The resulting view is that all that veridical perception and hallucination of an object O have in common is the platitude, once we admit the category of experience as of something, that there is a disjunctive description that is true of both: “perceiving O, or hallucinating O.”2 There are various objections—some of them clear, some unclear, some fair, some unfair—to disjunctivism, but there seems to be a complex of critical statements focusing on disjunctivists’ alleged inability to make intuitive the coexistence of the belief in indistinguishability between veridical and hallucinatory experiential states and the belief that the two states do not share a highest common factor (McDowell, 1982) or that they have radically different intrinsic natures (Martin, 2002, 404). On the other hand, it appears as quite intuitive, many would agree, that once we accept indistinguishability , we are entitled to conclude that there is a common nature to both veridical and hallucinatory states. In what follows, I offer an argument to weaken the intuition of a common factor and to strengthen the case for disjunctivism. Before that, however, some clearing of the battleground is called for. I will start with a view on recent discussions around a potentially relevant distinction regarding types of hallucination, which will bring me to the notions of indistinguishability that have been proposed. I will end with a view on indistinguishability that will certainly appear as minimalist or deflationary to many, but which I believe to be very natural and what, for instance, philosophers arguing for the existence of a veil of perception (indirect realism, representative realism, sense-data, idealism, etc.) must have meant all along. 2 Indistinguishability Assuming we had a clear notion of what is meant by indistinguishability in the first premise of the argument from hallucination, the existence of some common intermediary item, like, for instance, a sense-datum, would act as an explanans of this phenomenon. Not so, critics argue, with the lack of such intermediary: by virtue of what does a hallucination of the relevant kind have the property of being indistinguishable from its veridical counterpart, if they have nothing of the sort in common? 2. For a classification of types of disjunctivism, see Haddock and Macpherson (2008, 1–24). For a discussion of the origins and development of disjunctivism, especially in Michael Hinton’s...

Share