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Notes
Hopp (2011, p. 172). All references are to this book unless otherwise indicated.
Some terminological stipulations: I use the noun “perception” and related verbs (“to perceive”) and adjectives (with the exception of “perceptual experience”) to refer to genuine perceptions, including illusions, but excluding hallucinations. I use “perceptual experience”, “visual experience”, and “sensory experience” to refer to experiential episodes that may be either perceptions or hallucinations. A “veridical experience” is one that (re-)presents the environment as it actually is, but hallucinations may be veridical in this sense. A “genuinely perceptual experience”, finally, is the sort of experience one has when perceiving (i.e., not hallucinating). Conjunctivists and disjunctivists differ over whether that is an experience of the same fundamental type as the experience a subject may have when hallucinating.
Much more would need to be said here, both in order to distinguish genuine perception from certain cases of veridical hallucination, and to leave room for possible cases of prosthetic vision; but for present purposes, a vague and imprecise characterization will do.
It is important to keep in mind that I am talking about the experience as such, “in isolation”, as it were. For the conjunctivist will of course maintain that veridical and hallucinatory cases are very different, in that it is only in the former case that the experience is caused in the right sort of way (however this is to be specified) by an object of the sort represented by the experience. The disjunctivist’s intuition, however, is that this is not sufficient to enable the experience itself to make any sort of contact with the object that (in the good case) causes it.
“[M]any of the ways the relational view has been developed are unsatisfactory, since they do not adequately explain how and why hallucinations are errors. In the following, I will consider two relational accounts of hallucination: weird object disjunctivism and radical disjunctivism” (p. 153). “Weird object disjunctivism […] has been endorsed by John McDowell” (p. 154).
I might add that, on this understanding of the “constituent” idea, it would seem to be one that “content-embracing” disjunctivists like McDowell could agree with.
I write “ultimately harmonious”, as I take it that most standard illusions belong to the manifolds of the objects they present as having properties those objects do not have. So, for example, experiences that portray a given pair of Müller-Lyer lines as being of unequal length are part of the manifold of that pair. Experiences that present my white mug as reddish are part of its manifold. Once the illusion is unmasked, the experience “stands corrected” as far as the presented colour is concerned, but it is incorporated into the manifold as an experience of that mug as being coloured differently from its true colour. Thus, despite the clash over colour, harmony is ultimately established.
I thank Rasmus Thybo Jensen for helpful discussion, and for comments on a previous draft of this paper.
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Overgaard, S. Motivating Disjunctivism. Husserl Stud 29, 51–63 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-013-9127-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-013-9127-8