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Vehicle-representationalism and hallucination

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Abstract

This paper is a new defense of the view that visual hallucinations lack content. The claim is that visual hallucinations are illusory not because their content is nonveridical, but rather because they seem to represent when they fail to represent anything in the first place. What accounts for the phenomenal character of visual experiences is not the content itself (content-representationalism), but rather the vehicle of content (vehicle-representationalism), that is, not the properties represented by visual experience, but rather the relational properties of experience (or of the brain) of representing singular contents, namely particular instantiations of properties. I argue that the Russellian particular-involving proposition is the only appropriate model for the representational content of visual experience and hence that visual hallucinations are just like failed demonstrations.

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Notes

  1. However, I do not believe that both view are completely contradictory. Indeed, in the last years I defended a sui geris combinations of both views. See Pereira (2016, 2017). Be that as it may, in this paper I take the content view for granted.

  2. To my knowledge, Alves (2014) is the only philosopher in the field who has defended the “counterintuitive” view that visual hallucinations lack content. We both take Tye’s book (2009) and in particular Kaplan’s account for demonstratives as the appropriate mode for the content of visual experience as a start-point. However, this is the only similarity between our positions.

  3. Both examples are adapted from Tye (2009:79).

  4. The prominent defender of content-pluralism is certainly Perry since 1977.

  5. The idea is far from being original. According to Burge: “Thus the content must include context-dependent singular representational elements, analogs of singular demonstratives.” (2003:523).

  6. This is what Tye has called weak representationalism, namely a supervenience claim. See Tye (2009:112).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Federal University from Rio de Janeiro/UFRJ/CNPQ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Roberto Horácio de Sá Pereira

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de Sá Pereira, R.H. Vehicle-representationalism and hallucination. Philos Stud 177, 1727–1749 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01282-4

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