Abstract
There are two main accounts of what it is for external objects to be presented in visual experience. According to particularism, particular objects are built into the representational contents of experiences. Existentialism is a quite different view. According to existentialism, the representational contents of perceptual experiences are general rather than particular, in the sense that the contents can be fully captured by existentially quantified statements. The present paper is a defense of existentialism. It argues that existentialism is much better equipped than particularism to explain the contents of hallucinations, and it defends existentialism against three objections.
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Notes
As a referee who self-identified as a vision scientist has pointed out, a hallucination that is absolutely indistinguishable from a veridical perception is something of a “mythical creature.” It is of course appropriate for a philosopher to appeal to what is in principle possible, but I would like to maintain the interest of readers who prefer arguments that do not involve idealizations. Accordingly, in both of the parts of the paper in which I argue for claims by appealing to indistinguishable hallucinations, I have given additional arguments for the same claims that are based on different considerations.
It is widely held that the contents of conscious experiences are intimately related to the contents of object files, but as a referee has observed, there is a certain amount of experimental evidence, presented in Mitroff et al. (2005), that contents of these two kinds can diverge in special cases. In view of this evidence, it would be a bit risky to infer that the existentialist interpretation of the contents of conscious experiences is correct from the present argument for an existentialist interpretation of the contents of object files.
In view of this observation, I should emphasize that it is not my intention to make such an inference. In arguing for an existentialist interpretation of the contents of object files, I am aiming only to ward off Pylyshyn’s contention that existential contents are in principle incapable of accommodating diachronic tracking. I am not trying to supplement the arguments in earlier sections for an existentialist interpretation of the contents of conscious experiences. As I see it, those earlier arguments can stand alone.
I add that as far as I can tell, although the cited paper suggests that inferences from object file contents to experiential contents can be risky, there is nothing in it that favors a particularist interpretation of contents over an existentialist interpretation, whether the contents belong to object files or to experiences.
It has been suggested that I supplement this line of thought by considering a somewhat different form of the veridical hallucination objection. The original charge was that existentialism inappropriately implies that a hallucination should count as a veridical perception in cases in which an external object miraculously happens to possess the properties that the hallucination represents as instantiated. Suppose it’s granted that an existentialist can avoid this charge by insisting that perception involves a causal relation between the perceiver’s experience and the perceived object. Even so, it might be urged, existentialism allows that a hallucination can be veridical, and that result is sufficiently counterintuitive to pose a problem. Hallucinations should not count as veridical experiences, whether they count as perceptions or not.
This concern can be paraphrased by saying that the veridicality conditions of hallucinations involve more than instantiation by objects of represented properties. This seems wrong to me. As a considerable literature attests (Google “veridical hallucination” for confirmation), no intuitions are violated by speaking of veridical hallucinations. On the contrary, the idea of a veridical hallucination is quite natural: one is drawn to it as soon as an example is described. But this would be impossible if the veridicality conditions of hallucinations required more than instantiation of represented properties, because a case of veridical hallucination is by definition a case in which a local object is causally and informationally sealed off from the experiencing subject. In such a case, there is nothing other than the intrinsic properties of the object on which veridicality could turn.
Reflection shows that complex cases of “veridical misperception,” like the one developed in Soteriou (2000), can also be accommodated.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Susanna Schellenberg and two referees for Erkenntnis for very helpful comments on earlier versions, and also for steering me towards relevant parts of the literature.
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Hill, C.S. Perceptual Existentialism Sustained. Erkenn 86, 1391–1410 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00160-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00160-z