Abstract
Pautz (Perceiving the world , 2010) has argued that the most prominent naive realist account of hallucination—negative epistemic disjunctivism—cannot explain how hallucinations enable us to form beliefs about perceptually presented properties. He takes this as grounds to reject both negative epistemic disjunctivism and naive realism. Our aims are two: First, to show that this objection is dialectically ineffective against naive realism, and second, to draw morals from the failure of this objection for the dispute over the nature of perceptual experience at large.
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Notes
Pautz’s is the latest in a string of objections that challenge naïve realism’s account of the explanatory power of hallucination (cf. Johnston 2004 and Matthen 2010). Where Pautz focuses on our capacity to think about sensible properties, these other objections isolate different capacities (e.g., a capacity to know higher order facts about sensible properties).
It might turn out that perceptual demonstrative thought isn’t sufficiently distinct from perception to run a version of THP in the first place. But we think this claim is unduly pessimistic at this stage, and could be justified only by further research.
This account of the character of perceptual experience fits nicely with a natural story about perception’s role in grounding certain of our capacities to think about the properties of objects. Subjects acquire the capacity to think about colours and shapes (and other sensible properties) in part because in ‘good cases’ their perceptual experience confronts them directly with such properties. Perceptual experience thus provides some of the subject matter of thought. But this is just one elaboration of the old idea that veridical perceptual experience (the naïve realist’s ‘good case’) grounds our capacities to think about the external world.
Strictly speaking, subjects fail to discriminate what is presented, rather than the experiences themselves, but here we speak of discriminating experiences as shorthand.
This is not Pautz’s case, but we use it here because it represents the hardest case for the argument we present below. If our argument succeeds in showing that Grounding fails in Mary’s case, then it should fail in less extreme cases as well. These include real life cases such as the hallucinations involved in Charles Bonnet syndrome, for which see Fernandez et al. (1997). Thanks to an anonymous referee from this journal for bringing the relevance of Charles Bonnet syndrome to our attention.
For this argument, see pp. 277–279 of Pautz (2010). It is important to emphasize that Pautz’s argument is meant to work in the case of shape as well. We focus on the case of colour only for ease of exposition.
There are various ways of understanding the relationship between transcendental and abductive arguments, depending especially on how ‘transcendental argument’ is understood. Nothing of substance in our paper turns on how one understands the relationship between them (e.g., we could allow that transcendental arguments are a subspecies of abductive arguments).
For Pautz’s attribution of the argument to Mike Martin, together with his reply, see Pautz (2010, p. 278, fn. 19).
Indeed, Pautz (2010, pp. 266–267) tries to push just this sort of response.
Our appeal to causation here is meant to be intuitive. We intend nothing more full-blooded or theoretical in appealing to causation than what is already implicated in our pre-theoretical judgements about cases, such as this case of veridical hallucination.
For the claim that perceptual demonstrative thought about an object demands that perception provide rational access to the object, see Smithies (2011).
It is important to resist the feeling that Mary has come in causal contact with an instance of redness after all, in undergoing her hallucination, since her hallucination is itself red. Her hallucination is not red—at best it is indiscriminable from an experience of something red. For more on whether Grounding is compatible with a (partly) causal story about perception’s role in our account of thought, see our response to Pautz’s Argument from Access against the compatibility of naïve realism and Grounding in Sect. 3.2.
This use of ‘equivalent’ is meant only to make allowance for the fact that we might not want to call demonstrations of imagined objects and properties “perceptual” demonstrations, even when the species of imagination in question is visual, or auditory, etc. It also bears remarking that we are of course not denying that you can think descriptively about people you have never met. We are concerned throughout with the capacity for perceptual/ ‘imaginative’ demonstrative thought in particular.
One might wonder: why doesn’t a history of colour hallucinations suffice when it comes to recovering the missing shade of blue? We do not need to show that this is definitely impossible, but only that it could hardly be agreed to be obvious that it is possible. It is not as though one can test its plausibility by trying to imagine oneself conjuring up a shade of blue one has never seen before while thinking “Also, all my experiences of colour thus far have been hallucinations.” How could one tell, in the course of such a thought experiment, whether what one was imagining was a successful conjuring-up of a shade of blue one had never seen before, rather than a failed attempt at thinking an F-involving thought about a shade of blue? So it looks as though nothing can be done with the missing shade of blue thought experiment to show that one can think imaginatively about a colour without ever having seen any colours.
We owe the point about sense-making to Hellie (2010, p. 104, fn. 5).
Assimilating black and white to the colours is very natural. It is no accident that many early theories of colour and colour vision, including Aristotle’s (see De sensu. 3 in Barnes 2014), explain the other colours in terms of black and white. For a fascinating account of these early theories, informed by contemporary philosophy and vision science, see Kalderon (2015), esp. chs. 5–6.
In a more positive vein, it is tempting to employ heuristics of dubious value. For example, it is tempting, but it won’t do in fact, to imagine her perspective as being similar to our own when, in the course of watching a hitherto black and white movie, an (actually) red rose suddenly appears. But even this strategy inadvertently assimilates Mary to us, for our experiences of the shades of grey on the screen retain important associations with colours (bananas ordinarily look the way yellow things look, and so are represented by a lighter shade of grey than red roses, etc.) that are missing for her.
Some version of this claim is presupposed by all of those theorists mentioned in the previous footnote. There are very nice questions about whether a parallel claim applies to thought about properties (as opposed to perceptual demonstrative thought about objects).
We use ‘\(\langle \)’ and ‘\(\rangle \)’ to represent thoughts (and their components), and ‘\(\langle \upalpha \rangle \)’ and ‘\(\langle \upphi \rangle \)’ to pick out representationally relevant components deployable in thought.
This claim—that grasp of a predicative concept requires knowledge of what it would be for the referent of the concept to be instantiated—has found many adherents. For instance, we find versions of it in Strawson (1959), Dummett (1981), Evans (1982), Peacocke (1992), and Campbell (2002). Also, see Reimer (2002).
One way for someone like Pautz to block this entailment would be to deny that theGrounding Intuition concerns predicative representation of sensible properties. Hallucination might instead enable us to think about sensible properties only via name-like nominal representations (e.g., the thought expressed by ‘redness is not similar to greenness’). The apparent neutrality of Pautz’s notion of F-involving belief (i.e., beliefs whose truth requires something to be F) seems to support this dodge. But this neutrality should be taken with a grain of salt. Predicative concepts are our standard means for thinking about properties, since properties are fundamentally entities we ascribe to objects.
There’s no doubt that we’re going to have to appeal to intuitions about perception and phenomenology at some point. The trick in implementing THP is to delay those appeals for as long as possible, so as to stick to prior and independent considerations about thought as much as possible. This will ensure a maximum of common ground between the two camps.
For the notion of a primitive mechanics, and a discussion of its role in thought about properties, see Evans (1980). Shoemaker (1980) defends a view on which the identity of a property is exhausted by its contribution to the causal role of objects that instantiate it—by the difference it makes to an object.
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Acknowledgments
Michael Arsenault’s contribution was aided by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) award number 752-2012-2079. For comments and conversation, thanks to: Fatema Amijee, Adam Bradley, John Campbell, Imogen Dickie, Benj Hellie, Zac Irving, Alex Kerr, Diana Raffman, Mason Westfall. Thanks also to two anonymous referees for their immensely helpful feedback.
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Alford-Duguid, D., Arsenault, M. On the explanatory power of hallucination. Synthese 194, 1765–1785 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1020-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1020-5