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Felt Reality and the Opacity of Perception

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Abstract

We investigate the nature of the sense of presence that usually accompanies perceptual experience. We show that the notion of a sense of presence can be interpreted in two ways, corresponding to the sense that we are acquainted with an object, and the sense that the object is real. In this essay, we focus on the sense of reality. Drawing on several case studies such as derealization disorder, Parkinson’s disease and virtual reality, we argue that the sense of reality is two-way independent from the spatial and sensory contents of experience. We suggest that the sense of reality is an affective experience akin to a metacognitive feeling. Finally, we present a potentially important implication of our account for the current debate between Intentionalism and Naïve Realism. Since perception is “opaque” with respect to the reality of what is perceived, Intentionalism cannot refer to the sense of reality as what differentiates perception from sensory-like experiences such as imaginings. In contrast, Naïve Realism has an independent explanation of the specificity of perception.

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Notes

  1. Here we shall follow standard terminology and use the phrases “perceptual experience” and “perceptually experiencing” in a non-factive way, as referring to both veridical experiences (i.e. perceptions) and non-veridical (i.e. illusory or hallucinatory) sensory experiences. Moreover, we shall use the phrase “perceptual objects” to refer to what is perceived or at least perceptually experienced.

  2. One might suggest that derealization disorder (see Sect. 3.1) involves the second kind of mediation. Derealized subjects do not perceive any vehicle or representation that stands for the perceived object, but they still lack a sense of acquaintance with respect to the latter.

  3. In previous work (Dokic and Martin 2012, 2015; Martin and Dokic 2013), we argued that the phenomenology of perception is dual: one dimension is constituted by spatio-sensory contents while the other dimension consists in various feelings having to do with familiarity, confidence, but also reality (see Sect. 4).

  4. Note that derealization is most often accompanied by depersonalization in which patients feel an affective detachment from their own body. Some of the quoted literature deals more with depersonalization than with derealization.

  5. A referee suggested that dreams may involve a sense of reality, since dreamers may believe that what they dream about is real. This is debatable. One might claim that dreamers do not have genuine beliefs but only, at best, dreamt beliefs. Independently of this point, though, the dreaming metaphor used by derealized patients could be understood as referring to lucid dreams, which do not involve beliefs that what is dreamt is real.

  6. Could we not say, as a referee suggested, that the subject imagines that someone is around? We are not convinced. First, one might wonder how mere imagination could directly produce the behavioral reaction described by Sacks. Perhaps the suggestion is that the subject mistakes an imagining for a genuine perception. However, parkinsonians are not known to have source monitoring disturbances. Second, if the sense of reality experienced by the subject lacks sensory content, it is not clear what kind of imagination is involved—presumably not sensory (i.e. visual, auditory, tactile, etc.) imagination.

  7. Of course, as an anonymous referee pointed out to us, this kind of behavioral measure should be specific to the sense of reality in contrast to, for example, mere empathetic experiences in which the subject puts herself in the shoes of someone at the edge of a pit without actually having the sense that the pit is real. Empathetic experiences without the sense of reality can also involve physiological responses, but it is an empirical issue whether these responses are the same as the responses that accompany the sense of reality.

  8. The notion of processing fluency refers to the ease with which an operation is processed. It appears that many metacognitive feelings are a (more or less direct) function of processing fluency. See, e.g., Wurtz et al. (2007) and Oppenheimer (2008).

  9. We do not want to say that feelings of reality always depend on the fluency of actual perceptual processes. As we have seen above (Sect. 3.2), the feeling of reality in Parkinson’s syndrome is generated independently of perceptual processes. There is probably more than one kind of cue underlying feelings of reality, and there is also the possibility of monitoring failure (the system over-generates a feeling of reality in the absence of the relevant cue).

  10. This might be seen as an instance of what Travis (2004) calls “the silence of the senses”. Perception does not “tell” us whether the perceptual object is real or not.

  11. Here we discuss only Intentionalist views that allow for singular representations (“This is F”, or “This F”; see Burge 2010), or general representations involving free or bound variables (“x is F”, “There is an F”). All of these representations might be claimed to rest on the possession of suitable criteria of identity. We leave to one side the different view that perceptual experience involves only feature-placing representations in Peter Strawson’s sense (Strawson 1959), namely representations of the form “It’s hot”, “It’s raining”, or “Redness over there”.

  12. For the distinction between sortal concepts and categorial concepts, see Lowe (2012). For a defense of the claim that perception of an object (e.g. a cat) requires the possession and deployment of the relevant categorial concept (e.g. an animal), see McDowell (2008a).

  13. For a defense of the claim that the concept of an object can be a sortal concept, see Xu and Carey (1997). For a dissenting voice, see Wiggins (1997).

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to three anonymous referees for helpful comments, which we hope have led to clarifying our discussion in this essay. This work has been supported by the following two grants: ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC and ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL.

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  1. Institut Jean-Nicod, 29 rue d’Ulm, 75005, Paris, France

    Jérôme Dokic

  2. University of Sussex, School of Psychology, Brighton, UK

    Jean-Rémy Martin

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  1. Jérôme Dokic
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Correspondence to Jérôme Dokic.

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Dokic, J., Martin, JR. Felt Reality and the Opacity of Perception. Topoi 36, 299–309 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-015-9327-2

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