Abstract
In this paper, I examine the so-called disjunctive views on hallucinations. I argue that neither of the options open to the disjunctivist is capable of accommodating basic phenomenological facts about hallucinatory experiences and the explanatory demands behind the classical argument from hallucination. A positive characterization of the hallucinatory case is not attractive to a disjunctivist once she is disposed to accept certain commonalities with veridical experiences. Negative disjunctivism glosses the hallucinatory disjunct in terms of indiscriminability. I will argue that this move either renounces to characterize phenomenally the hallucinatory experience or does not take seriously questions about why indiscriminability is possible in the phenomenal realm.
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Notes
With this feature, I am just pointing to the idea that the experience is non-voluntary and that its content is taken by the perceiver as passively given. This is not in conflict with the defense of different active theories of perception.
In this paper, I focus only on the kind of hallucinations that are indiscriminable from certain perceptions in such a way that the subject even mistakes them for real perceptions. I am aware that not all hallucinatory experiences are of this kind; many of them are “real” hallucinatory phenomena which the subject experiences as not perceptually relating him to the world. So in my discussion, I consider “indiscriminability” as a phenomenological fact about some hallucinations, and not just an assumption.
A first reconstruction of the argument from hallucination can be found in Robinson (1994).
This appeal to certain metaphysical principles about causality will remain out of discussion in this paper. The core of the dispute about the so-called causal argument from hallucination moves around a thesis of “local supervenience” for perceptual experience. Though prima facie endowed with certain plausibility, the thesis has been challenged by recent embodied and enactive approaches. They provide some interesting criticisms of brain states as sufficient basis for the supervenience of the perceptual character of experiences.
In the paper, I consider another reading of this assumption. It could be understood as part of an explanatory argument where the hypothesis that both kinds of experiential states share the same phenomenal character would explain why they are both indiscriminable. So we can consider the truth of the following conditional: “If an essentially veridical experience and a hallucinatory experience are typed by the same phenomenal character, then they are subjectively indiscriminable”. The fact of sharing the same phenomenal character explains why they are indiscriminable. The whole discussion turns around whether being typed by the same phenomenal character is the best explanation available. Disjunctivists would deny it, as we will see.
Different versions of disjunctivism will add more substantive theses and sometimes also methodological ones. SP1, for instance, should be qualified, and the methodological principles would need more discussion.
The terminology of positive and negative disjunctivism that I will use in this paper is introduced in Byrne and Logue (2008).
This kind of explanatory demand is explicit, for instance, in Alston (1999, p. 191).
Note that the positive disjunctivist needs to offer a view on hallucinations; it is only a radical negative disjunctivist who would argue against such a “methodological” constraint. The following section would handle mildly epistemic versions of negative disjunctivism which are willing to offer an epistemological characterization of the hallucinatory disjunct. In a sense, all of them care about the nature of the hallucinatory experience.
Some examples are reviewed by Bentall (1990).
If one accepts the existence of percepts, then the explanation would be in terms of a confusion of percepts and images McGinn (2004). But this route is not open to a disjunctivist that would need then to say something about the ontological relation between images and percepts because a critic could easily argue that the very possibility of confusing percepts and mental images is explained by the fact that they are constituted in the same way (probably as images) and that they contribute in the same manner to any perceptual experience, veridical or hallucinatory.
Martin, in a series of deep and thoughtful papers (Martin 2004, 2006), has argued that the disjunctivist must allow for this kind of commonalities without renouncing to the essential theses of the disjunctive view. As I indicated before, I need to leave aside this branch of the argument in my discussion.
If there is something that it is like for the subject to be in that state, it is certainly not “experiential,” it would be more like having a certain belief (see Fish 2009, p. 98, ft. 19).
Austin’s contention does not apply here. One can accept that only judgments are true or false and yet claim for an explanation of why it is the experience that leads me to accept a false judgment. It is the bearing of experience on belief that is here at stake. And in this particular case, it is the bearing of experience on introspective judgments that matters.
On the nature of delusions and the role played by “anomalous experiences” in generating delusive beliefs, the paper by Maher (1999) is very helpful.
This would require more argument than I am capable of in this paper.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Fernando Broncano, Diego Lawler, Juan González, and two anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions. This research has been funded by a grant of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Reference: HUM2006-03221).
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Vega-Encabo, J. Hallucinations for disjunctivists. Phenom Cogn Sci 9, 281–293 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9155-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9155-1