Abstract
This paper is about Susanna Schellenberg's view on the explanatory role of perceptual experience. I raise a basic question about what the argument for her view might be. Then I develop two new problem cases: one involving “seamless transitions” between perception and hallucination and another involving the graded character of perceptual evidence and justification.
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Notes
Schellenberg doesn’t explain “individuated by” here. Maybe she means that your phenomenal evidence on a certain occasion is just identical with a content type, and that your factive evidence is just identical with a token content. On the other hand, maybe she thinks that your factive evidence and phenomenal evidence are distinct from the associated content types or tokens which, she says, “individuate” them. (In line with this, elsewhere (2013, 736) she suggests that your factive evidence and your phenomenal evidence are things that have contents, not things that are identical with contents.) In that case, however, I wonder what kind of thing your factive evidence and phenomenal evidence are, according to Schellenberg.
Schellenberg elaborates on this point elsewhere (2013, 730).
Schellenberg’s view is that the first occurrence of “that cup” in Percy’s imagined speech plays a special “character role” (whereas the second occurrence plays the familiar “content role”, simply referring to the white cup). I note in passing that it is somewhat unclear what this means. There is no sentence of English that expresses (that is, is used to say) the character of “that cup is white”. In general, sentences of English are never used to express characters. Intuitively, in Percy’s imagined speech, both occurrences of “that cup” play the same semantic role, and rigidly designate the particular cup Percy sees. (Thanks here to Josh Dever)
Since she uses the term “phenomenal evidence”, one might think that Schellenberg holds that Hallie’s phenomenal evidence consists in a fact about her own phenomenal or mental life. In particular, one might think that Hallie’s phenomenal evidence is that there appears to be a cup before her, and, in general, a subject’s phenomenal evidence is constituted by facts of this kind. But this is obviously not a correct interpretation of Schellenberg’s view, for a number of reasons. First, on this view, phenomenal evidence would always consist in facts. Against this, at the end of her paper, Schellenberg notes that “phenomenal evidence can be false” (PE&FE, sect. 5, my italics). Second, Schellenberg holds that Hallie’s phenomenal evidence can be characterized in ordinary language with “that cup is white”, without resorting to phenomenal terms like “appears”. So phenomenal evidence is wholly about the environment. Third, Schellenberg holds that Hallie’s phenomenal evidence is constituted by a “content type”, and that instances of this type are ordinary contents about the environment, like that cup is white.
One might think that internalists about justification cannot accept Different Justified Beliefs. But this is not true. Audi (2001, 32) and Silins (2005, 377) both recognize that mere phenomenal duplicates can have different justified beliefs owing to differences in what they are acquainted with, and offer formulations of “internalism about justification” on which it is compatible with this possibility.
I note in passing that it is unclear whether Schellenberg thinks that phenomenal evidence is always false in hallucination cases. Suppose that there happens to be a white cup before Hallie, so she is having a “veridical hallucination”. Maybe in this version of the Hallie case Schellenberg would say that Hallie’s phenomenal evidence is true, just as she would (presumably) say that Percy’s phenomenal evidence is true.
My interpretation of Schellenberg in the text is that she thinks that Hallie’s phenomenal evidence entails Cup. On this interpretation, she holds that phenomenal evidence is truth-conditional, so it makes sense to say that it can stand in entailment relations. That interpretation is also supported by her remark that “phenomenal evidence can be false” (PE&FE, sect. 5, my italics), which shows that she thinks that phenomenal evidence sometimes entails a falsehood like Cup. (If she thinks Hallie's phenomenal evidence doesn't entail Cup, what does she think it entails?) But I should mention that I am not completely sure that this interpretation is correct. For she also claims that phenomenal evidence is “constituted by” a content type. And, while contents are truth-conditional, it is just not clear to me whether “types” of content are also truth-conditional. If Schellenberg holds that types of content are not truth-conditional, and if she holds that phenomenal evidence is “individuated by” types of content, then she might claim that phenomenal evidence is also not truth-conditional. In any case, if Schellenberg’s view is indeed that phenomenal evidence is not truth-conditional, I would say that her view is problematic. For it is a truism that evidence is the sort of thing that can be said to entail or rule out various hypotheses, so, on any reasonable view of evidence, it should be truth-conditional (Williamson 2000, 194–200).
In fact, there are well-known cases where E1 is evidence for H, and E2 is evidence H (on the standard “probability-raising” account of evidence-for), but a subject who has E1 and E2 has less justification for H than a subject who only has E1. (Thanks to Sinan Dogramaci here.) Another potential counterexample to “More Evidence = More Justification” is a case where one acquires new evidence for p but one is already certain that p, so that one doesn’t thereby gain any more justification for believing p.
Here is an analogy. If at time t you get expert testimony for a hypothesis p, so that your belief in p becomes “justified to a higher degree”, then you have a justification for becoming more confident in p. Likewise, if Schellenberg is right that at the transition point Hallie’s belief in Cup becomes “justified to a higher degree”, then Hallie has a justification for then becoming more confident in Cup. I don’t see what could justify treating the cases differently.
The claim that Hallie’s increase in confidence lacks justification does not depend on any controversial transparency assumption about evidence (which Schellenberg rejects in her paper), nor does it depend on the assumption that indistinguishability from the inside entails sameness in justified levels of confidence (an assumption which leads to a sorites paradox). The claim is rather based our immediate reaction to the case. Compare our immediate judgment that in Gettier cases the subjects don’t have knowledge.
For instance, on many views, having an experience that represents a certain proposition is explained in terms of having a state that tracks a certain state of affairs in good cases. But this “tracking” condition doesn’t admit of degrees.
In many cases, Schellenberg might naturally suggest a different answer to the grounding question, one appealing to background beliefs. For instance, suppose that at the zoo you have various confidences in various hypotheses about what kinds of animals you are seeing. This obviously derives from nothing but differences in your degree of justification for background beliefs connecting visible properties with different animal types. However, I don’t see how Schellenberg might similarly appeal to nothing but differences in the justification of background beliefs to answer the grounding question in my Complex Percy case (or the similar cases in Pautz 2011, 397–398). As I am about to explain, here it is very natural to invoke the idea that some propositions about color or distance are presented with more “phenomenal force” than others.
For a brief discussion of the graded phenomenal force idea, both in the perceptual domain and the intuitive domain, see Pautz (2011, 397–398). Morrison (ms) develops a view of this kind in the perceptual domain (though his motivation is not answering my question of what grounds differences in degrees of perceptual justification).
References
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Acknowledgments
This paper is based on my 2012 APA comments on Schellenberg. For helpful comments or discussion, I would like to thank Sinan Dogramaci, John Morrison, Susanna Schellenberg, Susanna Siegel, and David Sosa.
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Pautz, A. What is my evidence that here is a cup?. Philos Stud 173, 915–927 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0531-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0531-0