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Notes
While a naïve realist like Fish would reject the strong claim that phenomenal character of your experience of the tomato is constituted by representational content, he could accept the very weak claim that the experience can be associated with a representational content (Pautz 2009, p. 13).
Suppose Vanessa (a rational agent) has a brief veridical experience V of an oval thing; but suppose that, because the experience is brief and because her “doxastic background” happens to include overwhelming inductive evidence that all things in the environment are round, she rationally forms the (mistaken) belief that a thing before her is round. Given this, if a moment later she or someone else with the same doxastic background unwittingly has a hallucinatory experience H of a round thing and so believes a round thing is present, then Fish’s account will misclassify it as a hallucination of an oval thing, because H has exactly the same cognitive effect as Vanessa’s veridical experience V of an oval thing (namely, the single belief that a round thing is present).
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Fish might reply that Mabel’s belief that a round thing is present is justified by virtue of her having the inclination to have that very belief: a kind of doxastic seeming. Against this, if all the “seeming” amounts to is an inclination to have the belief, then it cannot justify the belief. A mere inclination to believe that p cannot evidentially justify believing that p. .
I would add a problem with Fish’s view that hallucinations lack phenomenal character that goes beyond the usual “incredulous stare”. Since Fish thinks that individuals’ introspective beliefs about the presence of visual phenomenal character are often totally mistaken even in apparently paradigm cases, he must in general decrease his credence in all such introspective beliefs about the presence of visual phenomenal character, even in veridical cases. Even if he thinks that in veridical cases these beliefs can constitute knowledge (because knowledge does not require certainty), my point is that he must say that they do not have the extremely high degree of justification we take them to have.
It is not contradictory to hold that the chip instantiates one color that is pure blue and so not at all greenish, and a distinct color that is somewhat greenish. .
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Acknowledgments
This paper is a written version of comments delivered at the Pacific Division Meetings of the APA in Seattle in 2012. My comments benefited from discussion of Fish’s book with Susanna Siegel and David Chalmers.
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Pautz, A. Do the benefits of naïve realism outweigh the costs? Comments on fish, perception, hallucination and illusion . Philos Stud 163, 25–36 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0080-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0080-8