Rethinking Epistemology Volume 2 Edited by Gunter Abel and James Conant De Gruyter Editors Pro£ Dr. Gunter Abel Technische Universitat Berlin Institut fur Philosophie StraBe des 17. Juni 135 10623 Berlin Germany e-mail: abel@tu-berlin.de Pro£ Dr. James Conant The University of Chicago Dept. of Philosophy 1115 E. 58th Street Chicago IL 60637 USA e-mail: jconant@uchicago.edu ISBN 978-3-11-027782-1 e-ISBN 978-3-11-027794-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliogra£e; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http:/ I dnb.dnb.de. © 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Gi:ittingen oo Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Motivating Disjunctivism Thomas Lockhart Disjunctivism in the philosophy of perception claims that: (*) in order to maintain the idea that perceptions allow us to gain knowledge of the world, we have to abandon the idea that a subject currently having a veridical perceptual experience would be having the same perceptual experience if she were instead having an indistinguishable hallucination. In this paper, I argue that both M.G.F. Martin and John McDowell subscribe to this formulation of disjunctivism, but I argue that their implementations of it are incompatible. Further, I argue that the objection from perceptual content, which some critics have brought against disjunctivism, applies only to the variety of disjunctivism that Martin defends. I conclude that McDowell's disjunctivism represents a stronger candidate for a successful implementation of (*). More importantly, I argue that a construal of (*) along the lines proposed by Martin robs disjunctivism of its initial promise. 1. Introduction According to the disjunctivist, the history of epistemology has shown how difficult it is to hold together the following two thoughts : 1. In virtue of perception, we can come to know about the world around us. 2. A subject, currently having a veridical perception, is having an experience which is exactly the same as the experience she would be having were she instead having an indistinguishable hallucination. The disjunctivist claims that the reason philosophers have found it so hard to reconcile these two claims is that it is impossible to do so. In this, disjunctivism agrees with scepticism. The sceptic abandons the first thought. Instead, disjunctivism urges that if we want to maintain the first thought, we must defend a conception of perception which rejects (a common understanding of) the second. 310 Thomas Lockhart My focus in this paper will be on the work of the two most influential contemporary proponents of disjunctivism: M. G. F. Martin and John McDowell. My first goal is both to explain the significant differences between their views and correctly to situate these views so that we can see their common core motivation. I'll start by articulating what I take to be the core commitments of disjunctivism to which they both subscribe. I'll argue that the difference between Martin and McDowell can rather fruitfully be understood as a disagreement about the implications of this core view, and thus a disagreement about what-beyond the common core-the disjunctivist is required to defend. Once the arguments of Martin and McDowell are clearly separated, I'll make the case that their two positions are, far from being complementary, essentially incompatible. Disjunctivism has attracted a lot of attention and criticism. But the relationship between McDowell and Martin has been misunderstood and therefore this attention and criticism is often misdirected. Sometimes, philosophers assume that Martin and McDowell must be defending exactly the same view, and so they think that criticisms of the view Martin defends must apply also against McDowell. 1 In this paper, I'll consider an objection which has been brought against Martin's disjunctivism, and show why it does not cut against the version of disjunctivism which McDowell defends. I'm not the first to notice that confusion can be avoided if we carefully separate Martin's disjunctivism from that of McDowell. For example, Byrne and Logue notice the significant differences between the two authors. But as Byrne and Logue characterize the views of the two, they are compatible and (in one direction) independent: Epistemological disjunctivism [which they associate with McDowell] is not a rival to metaphysical disjunctivism [Martin]; in fact ... the latter leads naturally if not inexorably to the former. However, epistemological disjunctivism is quite compatible with the denial of metaphysical disjunctivism.2 1 A good example of this phenomenon is Burge (2005). McDowell, in his McDowell (2010) (reprinted in this volume), rightly disowns the view Burge ascribes to him. Another good example of this confusion can be found in Travis (2005). Travis assumes that the only viable form of disjunctivism is the form Martin defends. He notes that this form of disjunctivism is inconsistent with views that McDowell elsewhere holds, and so he concludes that, in so far as McDowell claims to be a disjunctivist, he is guilty of inconsistency. By the end of this paper we'll be in a position to see how this charge is wrong. 2 Byme/Logue (2008), 67. Motivating Disjunctivism 311 Byrne and Logue, however, fail to recognize (a) that there is a critical sense in which Martin and McDowell are engaged in the same project and (b) that when we recognize what they have in common, we can clearly see that their views are incompatible. 3 It is precisely this incompatibility which I articulate in this paper. In §2 I argue that at the heart of disjunctivism is the following thought: (*) in order to maintain the idea that perceptions allow us to gain knowledge of the world, we have to abandon the idea that a subject currently having a veridical perception would be having the same perceptual experience if she were instead to be having an indistinguishable hallucination. Martin and McDowell have very different arguments for (*). In §3, I argue that Martin believes that in order to defend (*), the disjunctivist will have to insist that there is no non-trivial sense in which veridical and non-veridical perceptions have anything 'in common', and I rehearse his argument for this claim. In §4, I show that McDowell's implementation of(*) does not require such a claim. In §5, I argue for the following three claims: (a) that Martin will have to reject any view according to which perceptions have any kind of representational or conceptual content, (b) that McDowell's disjunctivism can and must have 3 Byrne and Logue see Martin's position as the more interesting contender for the title 'disjunctivism' because it enters a bold metaphysical claim about the nature of perceptual experience, whereas they see McDowell as merely making a point about the epistemological status of veridical and non-veridical perceptual experience. But if I am right, McDowell is no less interested in the nature of veridical perceptual experience-indeed, his claim about the epistemological credentials of veridical perceptual experience follows from a claim about what a veridical perceptual experience is (Byrne and Logue seem to lose track of this in their eagerness to mark a distinction between the two authors). Haddock and Macpherson also distinguish between McDowell's disjunctivism and that of Martin, and follow Byrne and Logue in labelling McDowell's disjunctivism 'epistemological' (Haddock and Macpherson are somewhat more nuanced in their discussion of the relative implications between the views-see Haddock/ Macpherson (2008b), 12£ and 17 £). It is certainly open to these authors to discriminate and label the forms of disjunctivism as they do. My point in this paper is that this kind of labelling runs the risk of losing track of the sense in which Martin and McDowell are incompatibly attempting to implement the same core idea. Excessive attention to the differences between the various species of disjunctivism runs the risk of overlooking or trivializing the sense in which they are all species of the same genus. 312 Thomas Lockhart room for the idea that perceptions themselves have conceptual content,4 and (c) that McDowell has a ready way to reject Martin's argument that there is no non-trivial sense in which veridical and non-veridical perceptions have 'something in common'. I'll conclude in §6 by suggesting that this means that McDowell's is a more promising implementation of the basic idea of disjunctivism. 2. The Basic Claim of Disjunctivism Before beginning to see the differences between the two philosophers I consider in this paper, I start by offering a characterization of the basic insight at the heart of disjunctivism-an insight which I take Martin and McDowell both to want to be able to claim for their respective versions of disjunctivism. 5 It is (or it should be) a truism that in virtue of perceptual experience we can have access to the world around us. One of the tasks facing the philosopher of perception is to articulate a conception of perception which will allow us to maintain this truism in the face of arguments which seem to deprive us of the resources we need to defend it. Consider three perceptual experiences Smith might have. First, she might see a lemon6 in her kitchen. Second, she might see a perfect wax copy of a lemon in her kitchen. Third, she might hallucinate a lemon in her kitchen. If the illusion or the hallucination is good enough, then Smith won't be able to distinguish it from a veridical perceptual experience of a lemon; that is, we can imagine a situation in which Smith 4 McDowell's disjunctivism can make room for the idea that experiences themselves have propositional content. However, McDowell's own current view about the content of perceptual experience is weaker-perceptual experiences 'draw on' conceptual capacities. See McDowell (2008a). As we'll see, even this view would be incompatible with Martin's disjunctivism. 5 I don't argue directly for the claim that the presentation of the basic idea of disjunctivism I offer in this section is correct-instead, the definition is supposed to prove its worth by its fruitfulness in helping us to see a common background against which emerges the sense in which McDowell and Martin are attempting to implement the same project in incompatible ways. Finding a properly generic characterization of disjunctivism matters not only in order to clearly identify the specific difference which distinguishes Martin's variant from McDowell's but also in order to frame the genus in such a way that one can see how it applies to other areas of philosophy. 6 To use a canonical example. Motivating Disjunctivism 313 cannot tell whether she is having a veridical perceptual experience of a lemon or a non-veridical perception of a lemon. This has led philosophers to conclude that we are forced to accede to some version of an indistinguishability thesis regarding the relation between veridical and non-veridical experiences. So let us, for the moment, accept some version of the following, intentionally vaguely-worded, version of such a thesis: IND Suppose a subject is currently having a veridical perception. If, instead, she were to be having a sufficiently impressive non-veridical perception, her experience would be, to her, indistinguishable from the experience she is currently having. One familiar tendency amongst epistemologists is to take this observation to show that there is some common item that figures in the subject's experience in both cases. I will call this way of further specifying the implicit commitments involved in such an indistinguishability thesis, via the postulation of a common experiential component, the traditional epistemologist's conception if an apparent perception. Thus we arrive at the following way of specifying the concept of an apparent perception: TAP An apparent perception of <pis the component in a subject's experience which figures in both a veridical and a non-veridical perceptual experience of <p. Once we thus introduce the notion of an apparent perception, it is natural to ask what it is that distinguishes a veridical perception from a nonveridical perception by asking what it is that a veridical perception has, over and above being an apparent perception, that makes it a veridical perception. Let's call the following the traditional epistemologist's equation: TEE Veridical perception of <p = Apparent perception of <p + x. The resulting project (which has preoccupied much of the last few centuries of epistemology) might be summed up by the following question: Can we find a non-trivial solution to TEE? Let us say that a philosopher who attempts to find a non-trivial solution to TEE subscribes to the conjunctive conception if perceptual experience (or conjunctivism, for short)-that is, a conception of experience according to which a veridical perception is an apparent perception (conceived of as the common factor between a veridical and non-veridical perception) plus something else. The conjunctivist starts by identifying something which he calls Smith's 'experience' in terms which abstract from the question whether her perception is veridical or not. If we accept this analysis of the notion 314 Thomas Lockhart of an apparent perception (that is, in terms of a TAP), it makes sense to ask what additional feature is present in the case of a veridical perception over and above this common experience, and thus attempt to analyze a veridical perception into a TAP plus x (for some x). According to the disjunctivist, if we accept (with the conjunctivist) that Smith has a perceptual experience in the good case which would be, in the required sense, exactly the same in the bad case, then we will have to give up on the idea that we can have access to the world around us in virtue of our perceptual experience. It is important to see that a rejection of this way of analyzing the concept of an apparent perception does not in itself amount to a rejection of the familiar fact that if Smith were hallucinating she might not be able to tell that she was hallucinating (IND). All the disjunctivist claims is that we need not-and should not-conclude from the bare fact of IND to the adequacy ofT AP as the analysis of the concept of an apparent perception. We can perhaps start to see more clearly what the disjunctivist is rejecting by first noting the rather different and philosophically less committal manner in which he seeks to account for the fact that non-veridical perceptions can be, from the point of view of the perceiving subject, indiscriminable from veridical perceptions. His mode of accounting for this fact turns on the idea that the philosopher of perception ought to start with the case of veridical perception, working out from there to an understanding of the case of non-veridical perception through an analysis of the manner in which it falls short of or is an otherwise defective instance of a properly veridical perception. This leads him to a philosophically less committal conception of an apparent perception than the one a traditional epistemologist employs, in which an apparent perception is conceived of (not as a genus which includes both veridical and non-veridical perceptions as its species, but rather) as a deficient mode of perception. Let us call this disjunctivist concept of an apparent perception a merely apparent perception, and define it as follows: MAP A merely apparent perception is a perception which is in fact not veridical, but which turns out, as a further matter of fact, for a given subject in a given circumstance, to be indistinguishable from a veridical perception. Whereas the notion of a TAP is sufficiently philosophically committal so as to be one the disjunctivist is obliged to reject, the notion of a MAP is sufficiently philosophically non-committal so as to be one which both a conjunctivist and a disjunctivist can happily employ; they will, however, give very different analyses of what is involved in Motivating Disjunctivism 315 such cases of merely apparent perception. (A conjunctivist will insist on employing the notion of a TAP to spell out what is involved in the case of a MAP.) To see how the disjunctivist analysis differs radically from the conjunctivist one, it will help first to introduce a further notion-namely that of the genus which subsumes both deficient and non-deficient modes of perception as its species. I will call this an ostensible perception: OP An ostensible perception of <p is either a veridical perception of <p or a merely apparent perception of <p. The notion of an OP provides us with a different model for how to accommodate the truth of IND. With OP in hand, nothing forces us to define a MAP in terms of a TAP. It is open to us to analyze the notion of a MAP in such a way that it can be made to depend essentially on the notion of a veridical perception (for example, if we take a MAP to be a defective case of veridical perception). Indeed, the disjunctivist will want to urge a stronger claim here: namely, that we cannot correctly account for the truth of IND without properly appreciating the asymmetry between the two disjuncts here, and acknowledging the priority of the veridical over the non-veridical case. Consequently, from the disjunctivist point of view, the notion of a TAP builds too much into its description of what is involved in the case of a MAP. TAP and OP are equally attempts to introduce a comparatively inclusive concept of an apparent perception-that is, a concept of an apparent perception which is able to encompass both cases of veridical perception and non-veridical perception as its instances. TAP and OP involve different ways of spelling out what the two cases 'have in common'. A TAP is supposed to be a sort of experience which is a common factor between a veridical and a non-veridical perception; whereas an OP is not an experience which is a common factor, but rather a concept of what two specifically different instances of a concept have generically 1n common. For many philosophers, conjunctivism has seemed compulsory. This is in part because, in their employment of the ordinary language expression 'apparent perception', traditional epistemologists have tended to equivocate between the three different ways of understanding what an apparent perception is encapsulated in TAP, MAP, and OP respectively. Part of the interest of disjunctivism lies in the mere observation that once we clearly disambiguate these three different ways of understanding what is at issue in a case of apparent perception, conjunctivism is no longer compulsory. Once we come to see that disjunctivism itself is an 316 Thomas Lockhart option, then the conjunctivist, in order to defend the intelligibility of his project of solving TEE, will now be obliged to show that the bare concept of a MAP itself must be analyzed in terms of a TAP. Since we are now faced with two possible ways of accounting for a MAP, either in terms of a TAP or an OP, the traditional epistemologist is no longer able simply to slide from the philosophically non-committal notion of a MAP to the philosophically committal notion of a TAP with no further argument. The ambition of the disjunctivist, however, is not merely to shift the burden from himself (about how to analyze the concept of an apparent perception) back onto the traditional epistemologist, but rather to show that the traditional epistemologist's analysis of that concept, in effect, concedes to the epistemological sceptic that which he most desires-namely that our perception always falls short of taking in what in the case. The disjunctivist therefore is concerned to mount an argument (as we shall see) to the effect that we will never arrive at a satisfactory account of veridical perception-one which allows us to maintain the idea that in virtue of perception we can come to know the world around us-if we insist on a conjunctivist schema for analyzing what is involved in a veridical perception. So, on this account of what is generically constitutive of disjunctivism, what different species of disjunctivist will all share is the idea that we will not be able to arrive at a satisfactory account of veridical perception if we insist upon analyzing that which a veridical and a non-veridical perception 'have in common' in terms of the concept of a TAP. This leaves room for different sorts of disjunctivist to offer differing accounts of what veridical and non-veridical perceptions do 'have in common', while all equally eschewing a form of analysis in terms of a common experiential constituent. This is precisely the question over which the two disjunctivists I consider in this paper differ. However, before we are in a position to see precisely how Martin and McDowell differ in this regard, first we need to uncover a further layer of difference between them-one which arises in their more specific reasons for holding that the conjunctivist will never be able to arrive at a satisfactory account of the fact that veridical perception allows us to come to know about the world. In the next section, §3, I will explore Martin's disjunctivist critique of the traditional epistemologist. In the following section, §4, I will highlight some respects in which McDowell's disjunctivist critique of the traditional epistemologist differs from that of Martin. Finally, in §5, we will be in a position to specify how Martin and McDowell differ Motivating Disjunctivism 317 on the particular question of what it is that veridical and non-veridical perceptual experiences 'have in common', and thus to see why there is an important difference in the species of disjunctivism they respectively advocate. 3. Martin's Disjunctivism For Martin, disjunctivism arises as a result of an attempt to defend what he calls 'Naive Realism'. What is Naive Realism? One might have thought that a maximally philosophically non-committal way of specifying what Naive Realism in the philosophy of perception comes to would be something like the following: "Perceiving is a way of knowing the world". Or perhaps: "Perception discloses what is the case". Martin's ways of specifying what Naive Realism comes to tend to be terminologically more heavy-handed. At one point, he tells us that Naive Realism is the claim that "veridical perception is a relation of awareness to mind-independent objects".7 On the face of it, even this formulation might still seem to be fairly innocuous-so much so that one might plausibly take it as a constraint on any philosophy of perception that it be able to endorse a claim which can be expressed using this form of words. As he goes on, however, Martin tends to further burden his specifications of that to which the Naive Realist is committed, so that they come to feel less and less naive. Thus, for example, Martin takes the formula to be amenable to the following gloss: So-Called Naive Realism "That is to say, taking experiences to be episodes or events, the naive realist supposes that some such episodes have as constituents mind-independent objects."8 This gloss ought to strike one as a little stronger than that which it glosses, and when I use 'So-Called Naive Realism' in this paper I will intend it in this stronger way. The crucial point for the moment is simply that Martin takes achieving clarity about that to which the Naive Realist is committed to be the proper starting point for a disjunctivist line of thought. 9 7 Martin (2006), 357. 8 Ibid. 9 It is worth noting that already here we encounter a significant difference between Martin and McDowell: namely in their respective accounts of what the philosophical starting point for a disjunctivist line of thought ought to 318 Thomas Lockhart Martin takes So-Called Naive Realism to express the thesis that best describes our pre-reflective common-sense attitude towards perception; and he thinks, therefore, that we should abandon this thesis only if we are forced to by a compelling argument. Furthermore, Martin thinks that unless we can defend So-Called Naive Realism, we will find ourselves in a position where we lack knowledge of the empirical world "because we lack the kind of perceptual access to it we supposed ourselves to have" .1° For these allied reasons, Martin thinks that we should do what we can to defend So-Called Naive Realism. Martin thinks that a defence of So-Called Naive Realism will require us to adopt disjunctivism. For that reason, let us provisionally suppose he is right that we should defend So-Called Naive Realism, and ask why he thinks it will require disjunctivism. As Martin summarizes things: "Disjunctivism . . . is reactive: it blocks a line of argument which would threaten to show we have no knowledge of the empirical world because we lack the kind of perceptual access to it we supposed ourselves to have" .11 The attack on Naive Realism which disjunctivism repels is what Martin calls the Argument From Hallucination. The Argument From Hallucination is, he writes, "best underst[ ood] ... as a form of reductio against Naive Realism" .12 be. Martin starts by announcing that the aim of disjunctivism is to vindicate our entitlement to a particular epistemological thesis-one which he identifies with Naive Realism. Thus, for Martin, in order to understand what disjunctivism is, we first need an account of what Naive Realism is, what it commits us to, and what would be involved in defending it. Martin's aim is to argue for a philosophical thesis which he takes to be true, and against one which he takes to be false. This is very different from McDowell's self-understanding. McDowell takes the task of disjunctivism to be to make perspicuous how any analysis of what is involved in an exercise of a perceptual capacity must allow it to come intelligibly into view as an exercise of a capacity. McDowell's criticism of the traditional epistemologist is that his analysis fails to do this. The criticism turns on the idea that (in the traditional epistemologist's account of the relation between a successful and an unsuccessful exercise of our perceptual capacity) he no longer operates with a coherent conception of a cognitive capacity. On this account, the problem with the traditional epistemological concept of an apparent perception is that it is incoherent. Such a critique simply returns to us the idea that our perceptual capacity is a capacity which admits of successful and unsuccessful exercises. It is not meant to furnish a preliminary move toward a defence of some particular substansive philosophical thesis in epistemology. 10 Martin (2006), 355. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 357. Motivating Disjunctivism 319 In order to allow the crucial differences between Martin and McDowell which will concern us later to come into view, it will be helpful initially to summarize the overall shape of Martin's argument for disjunctivism in the following schematic manner: 1. The Argument From Hallucination constitutes a reductio of SoCalled Naive Realism. 2. Disjunctivism is the best way to avoid this reductio. 3. We should defend So-Called Naive Realism because it represents our natural pre-theoretic conception of perception without which we would be forced to conclude that we lack knowledge of the empirical world "because we lack the kind of perceptual access to it we supposed ourselves to have". 4. By 2, disjunctivism is the best way to defend So-Called Naive Realism. 5. So, assuming that we want to hold onto the idea that we have knowledge of the empirical world, by 3 and 4, we should accept disjunctivism. 3.1 First Objection and Response: Argument from Hallucination The aim of the present section is to assess the credentials of steps 1 and 2 in the above argument. This requires addressing the following two questions: 'How does the Argument From Hallucination constitute a reductio against So-Called Naive Realism?', and, 'How does disjunctivism thwart the Argument From Hallucination?' We'll address the first question first. The Argument From Hallucination, as Martin understands it, has two steps: 1. one aimed at establishing what Martin calls the Common Kind Assumption, 2. another aimed at showing that the Common Kind Assumption is inconsistent with So-Called Naive Realism. The Common Kind Assumption is, for Martin, an assumption. His choice of terminology is designed to reflect his claim that there is no good argument for the Common Kind Assumption, and so the disjunctivist can feel free to refuse to accept it. The Common Kind Assumption is Martin's way of formulating the conjunctivist claim that we must ac320 Thomas Lockhart count for IND by reference to the notion of a TAPY Recall (from §2) that all IND requires us to hold is that Smith, as a matter of fact, cannot distinguish between a sufficiently impressive hallucination of a lemon and a veridical perception of one. As we saw, the conjunctivist is moved on this basis to conclude that we need to postulate the existence of a TAP to account for that which a case of a veridical and a non-veridical perception 'have in common'. Rather than introduce something like our notion of a TAP, in his own account of the crucial misstep of the traditional epistemologist, Martin charges him instead with the error of postulating what he calls a 'Common Kind'. We could try to perhaps offer a provisional notion of a common kind as follows: Common Kind Although Smith is currently having a veridical perception of a lemon, she would be having just the same kind of experience were she hallucinating a lemon. Martin puts the conclusion that I have labelled 'Common Kind' this way: "whatever kind of mental, or more narrowly experiential, event occurs when one perceives, the very same kind of event could occur were one hallucinating". 14 With the Common Kind Assumption in hand, the second step in the Argument From Hallucination is to show that the Common Kind Assumption is inconsistent with SoCalled Naive Realism. Recall that according to So-Called Naive Realism, "[t]aking experiences to be episodes or events, ... some such episodes have as constituents mind-independent objects" .15 The argument that we cannot hold both the Common Kind Assumption and SoCalled Naive Realism goes this way: suppose we "bring about a hallucinatory experience through suitable manipulation ofbrain and mind".16 By the Common Kind Assumption, whatever kind of mental or experiential event occurs when one perceives also occurs in that hallucination. Since a hallucination does not constitutively involve a relation between a subject and a mind-independent object (it either involves arelation between the subject and a mind-dependent object, or no relation between the subject and an object at all) and hallucinations are the very 13 See above, §2. 14 Martin (2006), 357. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 358. That this is possible is a further assumption which I will not dispute. Martin guarantees it through what he calls Experiential Naturalism: "Our sense experiences are themselves part of the natural causal order, subject to broadly physical and psychological causes" (Martin (2006), 357). Motivating Disjunctivism 321 same kind of things as veridical perceptions, it follows that veridical perceptions do not constitutively involve mind-independent objects. This contradicts So-Called Naive Realism. To see more clearly how Martin thinks this argument works, it helps to imagine a So-Called Naive Realist trying to argue that the Common Kind Assumption is not inconsistent with So-Called Naive Realism: According to the Common Kind Assumption, the kind of event that occurs when one has a veridical perception could occur were one instead to be having a hallucination: for example, whether she is having a veridical perception or not, Smith is having an experience as of a lemon in front of her (she is also, in both cases, having an apparent perceptual experience, and, in both cases, having a Tuesday-apparent-perceptual experience, and so on). But if she were having a veridical perceptual experience of a lemon, her experience would be one of those kinds of experiences which has, as component, a lemon (and thereby one of those kinds of experiences which has, as constituent, an external object). By contrast, if she were having a hallucination, she would not be having an experience which falls under those kinds. To make sense of the Argument From Hallucination as Martin understands it, the Common Kind Assumption needs to be understood against the background of a particular metaphysical presupposition: Kind Presupposition There is a most specific answer to the question 'What is it?' asked of Smith's veridical perception of a lemon, and this most specific answer is the fundamental kind of her veridical perception (call it K1). There is also a most specific kind to which an indistinguishable hallucination would belongs (call it K2) . 17 With the Kind Presupposition in hand, Martin goes on to elaborate what he calls the Common Kind Assumption. It can be put this way: CKA The fundamental kind to which a veridical perceptual experience belongs is the same fundamental kind to which an indistinguishable apparent perception belongs; that is, K1=K2• Since the fundamental kind to which a mental episode belongs "tells us what essentially the event or episode is", we can see more clearly why Martin thinks the Common Kind Assumption is inconsistent with So17 Martin puts the Kind Presupposition this way: "[E]ntities (both objects and events) can be classified by species and genus; for all such entities there is a most specific answer to the question, 'What is it?' In relation to the mental, and to perception in particular, I will assume that for mental episodes or states there is a unique answer to this question which gives its most specific kind; it tells us what essentially the event or episode is" (Martin (2006), 361). 322 Thomas Lockhart Called Naive Realism. The defender of the Common Kind Assumption can concede that there might well be kinds to which veridical perceptions belong but indistinguishable hallucinations do not. But if the Common Kind Assumption is correct, veridical perceptions and indistingushable hallucinations belong to the same fundamental kind, and so share their essential features. Since it is not essential to a hallucination to involve a mind-independent object, it cannot be of the essence of a veridical perception to involve a mind-independent object. And this contradicts So-Called Naive Realism. It is also worth highlighting that for Martin, the Common Kind Assumption is the claim that a veridical perception and an indiscriminable hallucination belong to the same fundamental mental kind of event or episode. It is not a claim about the brain-state kinds which are involved in such experiences. Martin flags this with a further term-of-art: 'phenomenal'. The Common Kind Assumption is a claim about the phenomenal, rather than, say, the physiological, kind to which veridical perceptions and hallucination belong. 18 What has emerged is the following: the Argument From Hallucination, according to Martin, will only have teeth against So-Called Naive Realism if we take the Common Kind Assumption to amount to the claim that veridical perceptions and indistinguishable hallucinations belong to the same fundamental phenomenal kind. Disjunctivism, according to Martin, blocks the Argument From Hallucination by adumbrating a conception of perception according to which the move from IND to CKA would be an error. It does so by insisting that "veridical perceptual experience is of a distinct kind from hallucination" 19, where, as we have seen, what this comes to is the following claim: veridical perceptual experience is of a distinct, fundamental, phenomenal kind from hallucination. So a disjunctivist, according to Martin, claims: (I) No instance of the specific fundamental phenomenal kind of experience I have now, when seeing the white picket fence for what it is, could occur were I not to perceive such a mind-independent object as this. 20 18 See, for example, Martin (2006), 367. 19 Ibid., 354. 20 Martin's actual formulation of this claim runs as follows: "No instance of the specific kind of experience I have now, when seeing the white picket fence for what it is, could occur were I not to perceive such a mind-independent object as this" (Martin (2006), 357). This formulation, however, as it stands, is sufficiently vague as to allow it to appear to coincide with something McDowell Motivating Disjunctivism 323 Before we continue, it is worth noting that Martin's account not only satisfies the constraints on a generically disjunctivist view adumbrated in §2, namely by rejecting the traditional epistemologist's highly philosophically committal way of analysing what it is that veridical and nonveridical perceptions 'have in common' but he has offered his own alternative account of this analysis which turns on our willingness to buy into a great deal of additional metaphysics regarding the differences between fundamental and non-fundamental kinds, their respective relations to essences, and between phenomenal and non-phenomenal kinds; so that it now appears that a successful argument against the traditional epistemologist turns on the proper deployment of all these additional notions. 3.2 Second Objection and Response: The Explanation Objection We started from the fact that Martin thinks that in order to hold onto the idea that perception allows us to gain knowledge of the world, we will have to defend a conception of perception according to which veridical perceptions have as constituents mind-independent objects. He thinks that a defence of this claim will lead to a rejection of the Common Kind Assumption and an acceptance of (I). Since Martin is interested in defending So-Called Naive Realism from attack, he focuses on the objections which might be raised against it. So far we have seen him claim that in order to defend So-Called Naive Realism, we will not be able to accept any view according to which veridical perceptions and indistinguishable hallucinations are of fundamentally the same kind. This led Martin to formulate (I) as a central claim of disjunctivism. But Martin thinks that there is a powerful variant of the Argument From Hallucination which also casts doubt on So-Called Naive Realism. I dub this further objection the Explanation Objection. The stout disjunctivist defender of So-Called Naive Realism needs more than (I) to defeat the Explanation Objection. Once one begins to see how and why Martin feels the need to further strengthen disjunctivism in order to provide it with additional resources holds. It is only once we see that Martin is committed to an analysis of 'the common kind' here at issue in terms of kinds that are both fundamental and phenomenal in his sense that his divergence from McDowell can come into vrew. 324 Thomas Lockhart for meeting the Explanation Objection, it becomes even more apparent how radically his disjunctivism differs from that of McDowell. For this reason, I will linger for a moment over the Explanation Objection and the materials Martin furnishes the disjunctivist to respond to it. Remember that, according to Martin, the Argument From Hallucination causes trouble for So-Called Naive Realism in virtue of an application of the Common Kind Assumption (CKA). To defend So-Called Naive Realism, Martin thinks the disjunctivist has to block CKA by accepting (I). The Explanation Objection causes trouble for So-Called Naive Realism by working with a variant of CKA which concedes (I). I'm going to give this variant of CKA-whose ultimate aim is again to make trouble for So-Called Naive Realism-a name: CKA Redux. Recall that the problem with CKA was that it claimed that veridical perceptions and indistinguishable hallucinations were of essentially the same kind-so veridical perceptions could not feature mind-independent objects as essential constituents. CKA Redux concedes that veridical perceptions have mind-independent objects as essential constituents, but threatens to deprive this feature of veridical perceptions of any explanatory significance. That is, the proponent of CKA Redux insists that although veridical perceptions and indistinguishable hallucinations belong to different most specific kinds, they both belong to a less specific common kind. And it is this common, less-specific kind which does all the explaining. The proponent of CKA Redux issues a challenge to the So-Called Naive Realist: Take some fact the explanation of which you think involves So-Called Naive Realist veridical perceptions. I'll show you that the explanation would be just as good if, instead of appealing to veridical perceptions, we appealed to that kind to which an indistinguishable hallucination would belong. So, to the extent that we are concerned with generating adequate explanations, there is no need to invoke veridical perceptions, understood as the So-Called Naive Realist wishes to do. It might help to lay this argument out step-by-step. We'll start with: CKA Redux Although Smith's veridical perception of a lemon belongs to a different most specific phenomenal kind than would an indistinguishable hallucination, nevertheless there is a less specific phenomenal kind (i) to which the veridical perception belongs, and (ii) to which the hallucination (were she to be having it instead) would belong. Motivating Disjunctivism 325 The Explanation Objection starts with CKA Redux, which is consistent with (I). 21 Let us introduce another kind of experience that Smith might have-a SEEMING-LEMON-SEEING. This kind is supposed to meet the characterization introduced in CKA Redux: Smith's hallucination of a lemon is of fundamental kind SEEMING-LEMON-SEEING, and her veridical perception of a lemon is also of this kind. 22 To see how the objection proceeds, imagine the following two scenarios: Situation 1 Sitting in a London pub, Smith has a veridical perception of a lemon-an experience of fundamental kind LEMON-SEEING. By So-Called Naive Realism, the lemon she sees is a constituent of her experience. It is summer, and seeing the lemon awakens in her a craving for a gin and tonic, so she orders one. Situation 2 Sitting in a London pub, Smith has a hallucination of a lemon, indistinguishable from a veridical perception of a lemon. Her experience is of fundamental kind SEEMING-LEMON-SEEING, a kind different (by (I)) from LEMON-SEEING. It is summer, and apparently seeing the lemon awakens in her a craving for a gin and tonic, so she orders one. According to the Explanation Objection, if the disjunctivist admits the existence of the kind SEEMING-LEMON-SEEING which (a) embraces both veridical perceptions of lemons and lemon hallucinations and (b) explains Smith's behaviour, then the disjunctivist will have thereby "made the kind of episode which is unique to the perceptual situation redundant in an account of consciousness and the mind".23 We could dub this conclusion: Explanatory Redundancy Even if there were So-Called Naive Realist veridical perceptions, they would be explanatorily redundant in an account of consciousness and mind. The argument goes this way: 21 I'm not here going to rehearse Martin's reconstruction of an argument for CKA Redux (Martin (2003), 53£), for our purposes it'll do merely to observe that (I) is consistent with CKA Redux. 22 We'll have to think of a SEEMING-LEMON-SEEING as different from an OP. From Martin's point of view, the notion of an OP is formed by disjoining two kinds, and thus does not give the most specific answer to a 'What is it?' question. A SEEMING-LEMON-SEEING is supposed to give the fundamental answer to the question: 'What is it?' asked of a lemon hallucination, although not the most specific answer to this question asked of a veridical perception of a lemon (see fu. 9). 23 Martin (2003), 61. 326 Thomas Lockhart 1. In both Situation 1 and Situation 2, we take Smith's action of ordering the G&T to be a "causal (and possibly rational)" consequence of the experience she has had.24 2. In Situation 2, the explanation of Smith's ordering-behaviour will derive from an appeal to the kind of experience she had-a SeemingLemon-Seeing. 25 3. By CKA Redux, the kind of event Seeming-Lemon-Seeing also occurs in Situation 1 (as does the kind Lemon-Seeing). 4. Since the drink-ordering-behaviour is the same in Situations 1 and 2, and Smith's having an experience of the kind Seeming-Lemon-Seeing explains her ordering-behaviour in Situation 2, and that very same kind of event occurs in Situation 1, it is natural to conclude that what explains her ordering-behaviour in Situation 1 must also be the fact that she is having an experience of kind Seeming-Lemon-Seeing.26 5. So the fact that Smith has a veridical perception of a lemon in Situation 1 is redundant in an explanation of her behaviour in that situation. 27 Martin notes that this argument is not deductive-the conclusion is simply that it is far more natural to think that what does the explaining is the kind common to veridical perceptions and hallucinations. But Martin thinks that the onus is squarely on the disjunctivist to show why we should not conclude Explanatory Redundancy. That is, the disjunctivist who wants to admit CKA Redux must say something to defend his claim that "there is a distinctive role for only veridical perceptual experiences to play". 28 Martin puts the challenge for the disjunctivist this way: "[W]hat shows that what is relevant to the explanations we 24 Hallucinations and perceptions alike are "liable to coerce our beliefs and move us to action" and naturally enough we take these beliefs and actions to be "causal (and possibly rational) consequences" of those experiences (Martin (2003), 61). 25 "[I)n the case of hallucination, to the extent that these phenomena do have any explanation, that explanation will derive from appeal to the kind of experience that the subject is then having" (Martin (2003), 61). 26 "The phenomena which are in common between the hallucination and the perception are accompanied by a common kind of occurrence in both situations. So, the objector suggests, those phenomena will have a common explanation in the two situations, namely the occurrence of a kind of experience common to both perception and hallucination", "the common kind of event between hallucination and perception seems better correlated with these common phenomena than the kind of event unique to perception and so seems to screen off the purely perceptual kind of event from giving us an explanation" (Martin (2003), 61 f). 27 "[A)nd the kind of event which is unique to perceptual situations will be explanatorily redundant" (Martin (2003), 62). 28 Martin (2003), 63. Motivating Disjunctivism 327 want to give is ever the kind of event peculiar to veridical perception rather than what is common to veridical perception and causally matching hallucination ?"29 Martin thinks that the only satisfactory way to block the Explanation Objection is to deny CKA Redux and to insist that there is never a nontrivial kind to which both veridical perceptions and indiscriminable hallucinations belong. 30 Thus he generates: (III) For certain visual experiences as of a white picket fence, namely causally matching hallucinations, there is no more to the phenomenal character of such experiences than that of being indiscriminable from corresponding visual perceptions of a white picket fence as what it is. 31 29 Martin (2006), 369. 30 The argument that this is the only satisfactory response here is somewhat delicate. If the Explanation Objection is correct, then any reasonably 'positive' characterization of hallucinations will run foul of the objection. But clearly a veridical perception of a lemon and an indiscriminable hallucination of that lemon both belong to the kind INDISCRIMINABLE FROM A VERIDICAL PERCEPTION OF A LEMON. Furthermore, hallucinations sometimes have "causal (and possibly rational)" consequences, and so there are sometimes explanations we need to give which will involve an appeal to hallucinations (as, for example, in our Situation Two). Martin thinks that membership of this kind (INDISCRIMINABLE FROM A VERIDICAL PERCEPTION OF A LEMON) will be enough to make such explanations work (so it is in virtue of having an experience of the kind INDISCRIMINABLE FROM A VERIDICAL PERCEPTION OF A LEMON that Smith ordered a gin and tonic in Situation Two). But the fact that both veridical perceptions and indistinguishable hallucinations are members of this common kind does not, Martin argues, allow us to run the Explanation Objection. Essentially, this is because what makes the explanations involving hallucinations work is that these explanations are parasitic on the explanations which involve veridical perceptions (so an explanation of Smith's behaviour in Situation One must make appeal to her veridical perceptual experience, and the explanation of her behaviour in Situation Two is only adequate in virtue of the goodness of the explanation of her behaviour in Situation One). That is, although we can explain her behaviour in Situation Two by appealing to the fact that her experience is of kind INDISCRIMINABLE FROM A VERIDICAL PERCEPTION OF A LEMON, this is only because we have to explain her behaviour in Situation One by appealing to the fact that her experience is of the kind VERIDICAL PERCEPTION OF A LEMON. See Martin (2006), 67-70. 31 Martin (2006), 369. I have termed (I) and (III) '(I)' and '(III)' respectively because Martin does. The progression of his argument from (I) to (III) goes via thesis (II). Both the details of this progression and of the intermediary thesis need not concern us here. In order not to needlessly exercise the reader's curiosity, here it is: "(II) The notion of a visual experience of a white picket fence is 328 Thomas Lockhart (III) stakes out a bold metaphysical claim about the nature of and the relationship between veridical perceptions and hallucinations. If Martin is right, all disjunctivists will need to defend the view that we can say nothing more to characterize hallucinations than to say that they are indiscriminable from veridical perceptions. This might seem like a difficult task, and disjunctivism has come under attack precisely because (III) has seemed to many not to leave us with sufficient resources for a satisfactory account of the relationship between veridical and non-veridical perceptions. But is Martin right that in order to defend So-Called Naive Realism, we will ultimately have to accept (III)? In particular, is defending (III) the only way that a disjunctivist could hold onto the idea that "there is a distinctive role for only veridical perceptual experiences to play"? I'll argue below that McDowell's is a disjunctivism which does allow us to insist that there is a distinctive role for only veridical perceptions to play without needing our to defend (III) or, for that matter, without our needing to commit ourselves to numerous collateral philosophical theses regarding the metaphysics of kinds (of the sort which, according to Martin, are required for the defence of disjunctivism). It is worth looking back on the territory we have just travelled. Disjunctivism, as it was first introduced in the generic characterization I offered in §2, originally looked to be a position that charges the traditional epistemologist with a philosophically overly-committal conception of what is required to make sense of the idea that veridical perceptions and non-veridical perceptions 'have something in common'. Martin enters the scene as someone who purports to strengthen the credentials of disjunctivism. We have now seen that his way of purporting to do this places a considerable burden on the disjunctivist. Rather than merely shifting the burden onto the conjunctivist and querying whether he has left us with a satisfactory account of our perceptual capacities, according to Martin's choreography of the dialectic between the conjunctivist and the disjunctivist, the disjunctivist must discharge two formidable philosophical obligations before he is in any position to really rebut the conjunctivist: (1) to adumbrate and defend his own metaphysics of phenomenal kinds, and, (2) to use this metaphysics of phenomenal kinds to articulate thesis (111)-his own substantive metaphysical account of that of a situation being indiscrirninable through reflection from a veridical visual perception of a white picket fence as what it is" (Martin (2006), 363). Motivating Disjunctivism 329 that which veridical and non-veridical perceptual experiences 'have in common'. Much of the current philosophical literature on disjunctivism has now become sidetracked and bogged down in the debate about the prospects for mounting a defence of a version of (III). Prima facie, if there is an alternative sort of disjunctivism on offer which does not require of the disjunctivist that he first discharge these two prior dialectical obligations, it would seem to represent the cleaner and preferable philosophical option. Moreover, if there is such a variety of disjunctivism on offer, then Martin's representation of the dialectic involves, in effect, a hijacking of the debate. In what follows, I will argue that McDowell's disjunctivism is of the cleaner and preferable variety, and that it has been hijacked. 4. McDowell's Disjunctivism We have just seen that Martin constructs an argument for disjunctivism which concludes by insisting that there can be no non-trivial common kind to which both veridical perceptions and indistinguishable hallucinations belong. McDowell-! contend-disagrees with Martin on precisely this point; indeed, according to McDowell, we will not be entitled to the idea that in a veridical perception a state of affairs makes itself manifest to the subject unless we admit that there can be a non-trivial account of that which veridical perceptions and indistinguishable hallucination 'have in common'. We won't see clearly why this is until §5.2. The task of the present section is to outline McDowell's considerably less baroque argument for disjunctivism. McDowell puts the basic claim of disjunctivism this way: [P]erceptual appearances are either objective states of affairs making themselves manifest to subjects, or situations in which it is as if an objective state of affairs is making itself manifest to a subject, although that is not how things are. 32 In McDowell's terminology, the position opposed to disjunctivism is the highest common factor view, which instead maintains that what it is to be a perceptual appearance is to be whatever it is that is the highest common factor between a veridical perceptual experience and an indis32 McDowell (2008b), 231. Cp. OP in §2. 330 Thomas Lockhart tinguishable hallucination. 33 Recall that in §2 we noticed that it is natural to want to introduce some idea or other of an 'apparent perception' to account for IND. We went on, however, to distinguish three different ways to define an 'apparent perception': a TAP, a MAP, and an OP. What McDowell calls a 'highest common factor' is what I have called a TAP in §2: it is a term meant to capture in as uncomplicated a way as possible what is philosophically suspect in the traditional epistemologist's concept of an apparent perception. Any excessive complication introduced at this point in the characterization of that concept threatens to distract us from what is hopeless about philosophical attempts to solve the TEE. McDowell himself employs the terminology of 'perceptual appearance' in an artfully equivocal fashion: sometimes to mean a TAP, and sometimes to mean an OP. McDowell's point is that all a philosophically unprejudiced account of the datum of IND can entitle us to employ is 'perceptual appearanceOP' and that 'perceptual appearanceTAP, is both insufficiently motivated and epistemologically disastrous. For McDowell, disjunctivism allows us to see our way to a satisfactory conception of what it is to know something on the basis of perception. The key idea here is that the concept of perception is a concept of a way of knowing-that is, a concept of a cognitive capacity. The problem with conjunctivism according to McDowell is that it ends up rendering this truistic thought unintelligible. The aim of McDowell's disjunctivism is to restore to us our grip on this truism. This contrasts starkly with the aim of Martin's disjunctivism, which is to convince us that a vindication of the thesis of Naive Realism requires a sort of philosophical heavy lifting via an account of the metaphysics of kinds and a defence of claim (III). McDowell does say some things that can sound like things that Martin says. For example, McDowell suggests that a satisfactory account of what it is to come to know something on the basis of perception will require us to be able to hold onto the idea that in perception "we 33 Martin thinks that what McDowell calls the highest common factor conception of a perceptual appearance is just the claim that a veridical perception and an indistinguishable hallucination belong to the same fundamental phenomenal kind (i.e., the Common Kind Assumption (as defined in §3.1)). Martin claims this equivalence explicitly at his Martin (2006), 357. It should, however, already be clear that Martin's CKA involves a different and more elaborate analysis of the notion than that provided above in our gloss of what is involved in an apparent perception being a TAP. Motivating Disjunctivism 331 can have environmental facts directly available to us". 34 This can sound a lot like one of Martin's less philosophically burdened formulations of Naive Realism: "veridical perception is a relation of awareness to mind-independent objects". It is not part of my point to argue that McDowell would necessarily be concerned to disown such a form of words, nor to deny that his broader philosophical project is meant to allow us to maintain a conception of perception that is consistent with what that form of words might be taken to say on a sufficiently philosophically innocuous construal of it. But it is crucial for me to deny that McDowell and Martin agree on the question of how much is required of the philosopher in order to be able to restore our hold on the bare idea that in perception "we can have environmental facts directly available to us". Although both Martin and McDowell think that the chief benefit of disjunctivism is to allow us to defend a satisfactory conception of what it is to know something on the basis of perception, they differ in their respective accounts of the relationship between disjunctivism and Cartesian scepticism. On McDowell's account, the relationship between them is considerably more intimate than on Martin's. 35 For McDowell, disjunctivism simply amounts to the denial of what I have called conjunctivism above, where conjunctivism, on his account, is to be seen as immediately committing us to a Cartesian conception of the mind-that is, a conception of the mind according to which any exercise of our perceptual capacities necessarily falls short of achieving cognitive contact with the state of affairs which such an exercise purports to put us in touch with. For McDowell, conjunctivism therefore threatens to force us to conclude that we cannot come to know anything on the b . f . 36 as1s o percept10n. 34 McDowell (2008b), 229. 35 Martin does think that disjunctivism is in tension with Cartesian scepticism, but the tension is one of some kind of intellectual aporia. See Martin (2006), §10. 36 Notice that for McDowell, it is the conjunctivist claim about what veridical perceptions are which threatens to deprive us of the idea that we can know about the world on the basis of perception; and it will only be by finding an altemative account of the nature of veridical perception that we can restore this 'epistemological' truism. So this epistemological truism is neither the only claim of McDowell's disjunctivism (although vindicating the epistemological truism is part of what motivates it), nor does it separate McDowell from Martin since, as we've seen, Martin too is concerned to vindicate some version of the same epistemological truism. 332 Thomas Lockhart 4.1 McDowell's Disjunctivism and the Cartesian Sceptic McDowell's basic strategy is to argue as follows: 1. Traditional epistemology relies on the highest common factor conception of a perceptual appearance (or, a TAP), 2. This forces on us a conjunctivist (i.e. a Cartesian) account of what is involved in veridical perception, leaving us with the task of having to solve the TEE, 3. Solving the TEE in a way that preserves the idea that veridical perception allows us to know about the world is doomed to failure, 4. The disjunctivist schema (OP) shows that we need not adopt the highest common factor conception of experience, 5. Therefore, we can reject the task of solving the TEE and thus need not be troubled by Cartesian scepticism. Notice how very different is the role which disjunctivism plays in the above argument against the traditional epistemologist from the role it plays in Martin's argument for Naive Realism. This difference between them becomes invisible if we attempt to reduce disjunctivism to a two sentence statement of a 'philosophical position'. At the latter level of description, it is extremely difficult to see how different Martin's and McDowell's approaches to their shared topic really are from each other. What we need to appreciate, in order to see this, is the very different dialectical contexts in which their respective employments of the disjunctivist schema of §2 are embedded. This difference amounts, in a significant sense, to a difference in what disjunctivism is for each of them. For McDowell, Cartesian scepticism is the inevitable result of analyzing what a veridical and a non-veridical perception 'have in common' in terms of a TAP-that is, Cartesian scepticism is, essentially, a way of drawing attention to the impossibility of solving TEE. We can better appreciate the role that disjunctivism plays in McDowell's philosophy by seeing why this is the case. The Cartesian sceptical argument, according to McDowell asks us to "Consider a situation in which a subject seems to see that, say, there is a red cube in front of her. The idea is that even if we focus on the best possible case, her experience could be just as it is, in all respects, even if there were no red cube in front of her". 37 He comments that 37 McDowell (2008b), 228. Motivating Disjunctivism 333 The familiar sceptical scenarios-Descartes's demon, the scientist with our brains in his vat, the suggestion that all our apparent experience might be a dream-are only ways to make this supposed predicament vivid.38 The next step in the Cartesian sceptical argument-as reconstructed by McDowell-is to conclude from this observation that we never have a better reason to believe that things are as experience presents them to be than we would have in the case of a hallucination. So on McDowell's reconstruction, the standard Cartesian sceptical argument has two steps: 1. To 'make vivid' the predicament posed by highest common factor conception of apparent perception; 2. To draw from this predicament the conclusion that we never have good reason to believe that the external world is as our perceptions seem to reveal it to be. Let us grant, for a moment, that McDowell is right about 1, that is, that the Cartesian sceptic must begin by presupposing the highest common factor conception of perception. What about 2? That is, how does the sceptical conclusion follow from the highest common factor conception of apparent perception? Recall that, according to the highest common factor conception, not only must we hold that a veridical and a non-veridical perceptual experience 'have something in common', but we must analyze that which they 'have in common' literally in terms of their having some thing in common, that is, in terms of the concept of a TAP. So, if that highest common factor conception is correct, then there is nothing about perceptual experience considered as such to provide me with more than inconclusive reasons for thinking that the external world is a certain way. This is because my perceptual experience would be, as such, exactly the same even if the external world were not as my experience seems to reveal it to be. The best epistemic standing which we can achieve in virtue of our perceptual experience is not yet enough to licence any beliefs about the external world. If 2 is right, what of 1? Is it really the case that the Cartesian sceptic must start by, in essence, insisting on the highest common factor conception of apparant perception? At first glance, it seems quite plausible to think that McDowell is just wrong about this-surely the familiar Cartesian sceptical arguments don't require anything so strong as a 38 Ibid. 334 Thomas Lockhart claim about the nature of experience ?39 We might try to defend a reading of Cartesian scepticism which does not presuppose the highest common factor conception of apparent perception this way: The sceptic urges that Smith cannot tell, by mere reflection on her experience, whether she is in the good case or a bad case. For all she knows, she might always be in a bad case. So really, she should not have any confidence that she knows any of the things she takes herself to have come to know through perceptual experience. But this reconstruction of the sceptical argument does not depend on the highest common factor conception of apparent perception. Indeed, the sceptic, as far as I can see, could concede disjunctivism and thereby acknowledge that the good cases are constitutively linked to the states of the world they represent, and the bad cases aren't. The sceptical point is merely that Smith can never be sure which case she is in, and so she shouldn't be confident that she knows anything on the basis of perception. Let us give this kind of Cartesian sceptic-the sceptic who concedes disjunctivism (and denies the highest common factor conception of experience) but still attempts to run a sceptical argument-a name. Call him a weak Cartesian sceptic. And let us call the kind of sceptic McDowell is interested in-the kind who relies on the highest common factor conception of apparent perception-a strong Cartesian sceptic. McDowell's claim is, in effect, that the Catesian sceptical argument is only interesting in so far as it is a version of strong Cartesian scepticism. We need not bother with the weak Cartesian sceptic. But why? To see why McDowell dismisses weak Cartesian scepticism, we need a further premise. McDowell thinks that if we adopt the disjunctive conception of experience, we will thereby have admitted the intelligibility of the following: that some perceptual experiences, considered as such, are cases of an objective state of affairs making itself manifest to a subject. But to admit this, thinks McDowell, is to acknowledge that the epistemic standing of an agent in the good case is different from the epistemic standing of an agent in the bad case. That is, suppose we acknowledge the conceivability of a perceptual experience in which an objective state of affairs makes itself manifest to a subject, where this is a different kind of perceptual experience from those perceptual experiences which merely seem to be cases of an objective state of affairs making itself manifest. McDowell thinks that the two cases correspond to two possible 'standings in the space of reasons'. Although in a sufficiently vivid version of the bad case (in which she is having a non-ve39 Martin, for one, insists on this in his Martin (2006), §10. Motivating Disjunctivism 335 ridical perceptual experience) Smith herself wouldn't know that she were having a non-veridical perceptual experience, in the good case (where her exercise of her perceptual capacities afford her a way of knowing) she is justified in believing that there is a lemon in front of her. The bad case, as specified in the preceding sentence, is too underdescribed to determine what her degree of epistemic responsibility is in this failure to know. If she failed to exercise due care or otherwise undermined her capacity to do so (e. g. by taking hallucinogenic mushrooms) then she is not blameless for coming to believe that things are as they perceptually seem to her to be. If she is a victim of bad epistemic luck (e. g. confronted with a compelling perceptual illusion) then she may be blameless for coming to believe that the world is as her perception presents it as being. Neither of these cases, however, impugn her claim to know when she is responsibly exercising her perceptual capacities under normal conditions. We can give the underlying idea here a name: Knowledge Premise When a perception constitutively involves an objective state of affairs making itself manifest to a subject, that subject has a different epistemic standing than in the case-potentially indiscriminable to the subject-when her perception does not constitutively involve an state of affairs making itself manifest. The Knowledge Premise has seemed contestable and has been contested by many. My point here is simply that the Knowledge Premise plays a crucial role in McDowell's case for his disjunctive conclusion, but is not to be identified with the conclusion itself A proper understanding of what McDowell takes to be involved in committing oneself to the Knowledge Premise should reveal, however, that it is simply a further condition on one's being able to retain one's grip on the idea that perception is a capacity to come to know about the world, since any adequate account of a capacity will involves a certain form of asymmetry in how successful and unsuccessful exercises of the capacity are related to one another. That is, if we are to retain the idea that perception is a capacity to come to know about the world, then we have to acknowledge that it "is a capacity-of course fallible-to get into positions in which one has indefeasible warrant forcertain beliefs". 40 This is because, McDowell claims, it simply makes no sense to (a) maintain that perception is a capacity to know about the 40 McDowell (2010), 245 (in this volume, 293). 336 Thomas Lockhart world and (b) deny that in "non-defective exercises"41 of that capacity we can have indefeasible warrants for certain beliefs. McDowell defends this claim by contrasting a view which maintains (a) and (b) about our perceptual capacities with a parallel claim about another capacity: "Some people have a capacity to throw a basketball through the hoop from the free-throw line". 42 To hold both (a) and (b) would be tantamount to thinking that "there cannot be a capacity-of course not guaranteed success on all occasions-in whose non-defective exercises one actually makes free throws". 43 I introduced the Knowledge Premise as part of an attempt to explain why McDowell thinks we can dismiss weak Cartesian scepticism. Suppose we grant McDowell the Knowledge Premise. How can he now respond to weak Cartesian scepticism? We can think of the response as itself having two steps. First, with the Knowledge Premise in hand, McDowell can point out that in the good case-since the good case is simply a case of the world presenting itself to Smith as it is-Smith is entitled to her knowledge claim. If the animal in front of me is a zebra, and conditions are suitable for exercising my ability to recognize zebras when I see them (for instance, the animal is in full view), then that ability, fallible though it is, enables me to see that it is a zebra, and to know that I do. 44 To put it another way: weak Cartesian scepticism, in conceding disjunctivism, concedes the intelligibility of the idea that Smith can be justified in believing that there is a lemon in front of her in virtue of having an experience which presents that lemon to her. So the first step in McDowell's response to weak Cartesian scepticism is this: in conceding disjunctivism, the weak Cartesian sceptic concedes that if Smith has a veridical perception of a lemon, then in virtue of the fact that that experience directly presents a lemon to her, she is justified in believing that there is a lemon there. The second step in McDowell's way with the weak Cartesian sceptic is this: Nothing the weak Cartesian sceptic has said forces us to give up the idea that most of the time I am justified in believing that things are thus and so in virtue of the fact that I can open my eyes and see that things are thus and so. As McDowell puts it, if scepticism concedes disjunctivism, we can 41 Ibid., 246 (in this volume, 293). 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 McDowell (2008b), 239. j Motivating Disjunctivism 337 simply "appeal to ordinary cases of perceptual knowledge in ruling out the sceptical scenarios". 45 So McDowell's strategy here is this: we only need bother with a sceptical argument if the sceptic can put us in a position where we have to abandon something which commonsense tells us to be the case. If scepticism concedes disjunctivism, it thereby concedes the intelligibility of Smith's being justified in believing that she sees a lemon in virtue of her seeing a lemon. And once this possibility is intelligible, then the sceptic no longer has the resources to force us to abandon our commonsense knowledge claims. Therefore, for McDowell, we are not compelled to engage with the sceptic. To put the point the other way around: if the sceptic can do no more than to draw attention to our fallibility, then there is no need to engage with him. We only need engage with the sceptic if he can force an engagement by presenting us with an argument which leaves us with no choice but to abandon the commonsense idea that I can know many things on the basis of perception. The weak Cartesian sceptic cannot do this, but the strong Cartesian sceptic does: by relying on the notion of a TAP, he introduces a conception of perception according to which Smith's epistemic standing is identical in both good and bad cases. To summarize: the weak Cartesian sceptic admits that it is intelligible for there to be perceptual experiences which directly present the external world. In this case, McDowell urges that we need not feel compelled to engage with scepticism. Weak Cartesian scepticism, in effect, does no more than draw attention to our fallibility, and we can instead rely on our common sense and rule out the sceptical scenarios. We only need engage with the sceptic if he can rationally compel an engagement by forcing us into a position where we can no longer rely on common sense. Cartesian scepticism is only compelling, argues McDowell, if it forces us to conclude that we never have a better epistemic warrant for believing the world to be as it seems than the warrant we would have were we the victims of a hallucination. And this can only be done by foisting on us the highest common factor conception of perceptual appearances (that is, by insisting that we analyze what it is that a veridical and a non-veridical perception 'have in common' in terms ofa TAP). So far then, McDowell's claim is this: only strong Cartesian scepticism forces us to abandon the idea that we can ever know that the world 45 Ibid., 237. 338 Thomas Lockhart is thus-and-so on the basis of perception. But it can do this only because it relies on the highest common factor conception of perceptual appearances (that is, by insisting that we analyze a perception in terms of a TAP). Conversely, McDowell thinks that by accepting the traditional epistemologist's conception of an apparent perception, Cartesian scepticism is the inevitable result: for veridical experience, as such, will never give us better warrant for believing the world to be thus-and-so than would an indistinguishable hallucination. Since (strong) Cartesian scepticism is the inevitable result of accepting the analysis of an apparent perception in terms of a TAP, the project of solving TEE is doomed to failure. If, instead, we acknowledge that it is so much as intelligible that some perceptions are cases of the world making itself manifest, then we need not be troubled by Cartesian scepticism, and we need not abandon the idea that we can come to know that the world is thusand-so on the basis of perception. It is precisely the intelligibility of this conception of experience which is brought into view by the disjunctivist. 4.2 The Intelligibility of Disjunctivism For McDowell, Cartesian scepticism is an expression of what happens if we allow ourselves to be talked into analyzing what veridical and nonveridical perceptions 'have in common' in terms of a TAP. In order to avoid the difficulties of Cartesian scepticism and TEE, we need to remove the key prop required by the Cartesian sceptic. According to McDowell, the key prop of Cartesian scepticism is accepting the traditional epistemologist's notion of a TAP. Disjunctivism knocks out this prop by guarantee the mere intelligibility of the idea of a perceptual experience in which the world makes itself manifest. And (still according to McDowell) the disjunctivist analysis of perceptual experience is, in turn, secured by something the Cartesian sceptic will not deny: that both veridical and non-veridical perceptions seem to present the world to be thus-and-so. The disjunctivist analysis is 'transcendentally' required in order to understand the very idea that experiences 'purport' to present the world as being a certain way. Motivating Disjunctivism 339 McDowell claims to find an appropriate transcendental argument in Sellars. 46 Sellars starts with what he calls a "simple but fundamental" 47 observation: the sense of 'red' in which things look red is, on the fact of it, the same as that in which things are red. When one glimpses an object and decides that it looks red (to me, now, from here) and wonders whether it really is red, one is surely wondering whether the color-red-which it looks to have is the one it really does have. 48 That is, "being red is logically prior, is a logically simpler notion, than looking red"49 Sellars cashes this by saying that whilst "This necktie is green" has a straightforward reporting use, "This necktie looks green" is used when the speaker is reluctant to endorse the report which she would issue if she said "This necktie is green". On Sellars' account, 'is green' is a straightforward report; but 'looks green' has both a 'reporting' and an 'inferential' component.50 "[W]hen I say 'x looks green to me now' I am reporting the fact that my experience is, so to speak, intrinsically, as an experience, indistinguishable from a veridical one of seeing that x is green"51 but I use that locution because "I may have reason to think that x may not after all be green". 52 So suppose Smith says sincerely 'x looks green to me'. Then either Smith sees that x is green and is unwilling to endorse that claim or Smith is having an experience which is, from her point of view, exacdy like the experience she would have if she were seeing that x is green, but 46 This is how McDowell glosses Sellars: "In order to find it intelligible that experience has objective purport at all, we must be able to make sense of an epistemically distinguished class of experiences, those in which (staying with the visual case) one sees how things are--those in which how things are makes itself visually available to one" (McDowell (2008b), 230). 47 Sellars (1997), §12. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 This claim arises as Sellars imagines how looks-talk might have come to be useful to a community which lacks it. He puts the question this way: what is John the tie salesman (who has not yet learned looks-talk) to say when confronted with a tie under suboptimal lighting conditions? His (i.e. John's) natural response is this: "I don't know what to say. if I didn't know that the tie is blue-and the alternative to granting this is odd indeed-! would swear that I was seeing a green tie and seeing that it is green. It is as though I were seeing the necktie to be green" (Sellars (1997), §14). 51 Sellars (1997), §16. 52 Ibid. 340 Thomas Lockhart x isn't green, and Smith is unwilling to endorse the claim that xis green. McDowell summarizes the point thus: In order to understand the very idea of the objective purport of visual experience (to single out one sensory modality), we need to appreciate that the concept of experiences in which, say, it looks to one as if there is a red cube in front of one divides into the concept of cases in which one sees that there is a red cube in front of one and the concept of cases in which it merely looks to one as if there is a red cube in front of one. 53 Thus, for McDowell, the basic claim of disjunctivism follows from a consideration of an idea that no party to the dispute denies: that veridical and non-veridical perceptions alike seem to put us in contact with the world. 5 The Incompatibility of Martin and McDowell In this section, I argue that the fundamental incompatibility between McDowell's disjunctivism and that of Martin is this: for McDowell, disjunctivism not only can, but must, leave open the possibility that there is a non-trivial account of that which veridical and non-veridical perceptions 'have in common'. Martin cannot admit the existence of such a non-trivial account. In the first subsection, I argue that Martin's form of disjunctivism is incompatible with any theory of perception according to which perceptions themselves have content. In the second subsection, I argue that McDowell's disjunctivism is, and must be, compatible with such views. 5.1 Martin's Disjunctivism and the Content of Perception McDowell, we have seen, maintains that Cartesian scepticism threatens to render unintelligible something which seems commonplace: that on the basis of perceptions which reveal the world to be thus-and-so we can come to know that the world is thus-and-so. He claims that in order to disarm the Cartesian sceptic, it will be enough to show that the mere intelligibility of this commonplace is guaranteed by something that the Cartesian sceptic takes for granted: that veridical and non-veridical perceptions alike seem to present the world to be a certain way. 53 McDowell (2008b), 230. Motivating Disjunctivism 341 Focussing on the idea that the Cartesian sceptic already admits that veridical and non-veridical perceptions alike both purport to present the world to be a certain way is, from Martin's point of view, dangerous. For Martin, it is critical that we do not embrace a conception of perception according to which perceptions themselves have any form of representational content. There are various ways that philosophers have maintained that perceptions themselves have content. Suppose, for example, we have a view according to which veridical perceptions draw on conceptual capacities. 54 Once we admit that a veridical perception draws on conceptual capacities, it becomes natural enough to say that an indistinguishable hallucination draws on precisely the same conceptual capacities. That is, Smith's veridical perception of a lemon and her hallucination of a lemon both somehow draw on her lemon concept. But to say that both Smith's veridical perception of a lemon and her hallucination of a lemon draw on her lemon concept is, from Martin's point of view, a significant enough characterization of what they 'have in common' to fall prey to the Explanation Objection. That is, experience which draws on Smith's concept lemon is a 'positive' 55 characterization of a 'common kind' under which both Smith's veridical perception of a lemon and an indistinguishable hallucination she might have would fall. It is a positive enough common kind that it will be overwhelmingly natural to conclude that we must explain Smith's gin-and-tonic-ordering behaviour in both Situation One and Situation Two (above, §3.2) by appealing to the fact that her experience is of this kind-and so make her veridical perception of a lemon explanatorily redundant. To admit that Smith's veridical perception of a lemon and her hallucination of a lemon both draw on her concept lemon is thus to fall foul of Martin's third tenet of disjunctivism: 'For certain visual experiences as of a white picket fence, namely causally matching hallucinations, there is no more to the phenomenal character of such experiences than that of being indiscriminable from corresponding visual perceptions of a white picket fence as what it is.'56 Martin's disjunctivist 54 On such a view, veridical perceptions won't be full-blooded representations. This view is the one currently favoured by McDowell-although not much will turn on exactly how we formulate the point. 55 See fu. 17 for this terminology. 56 A Martinian disjunctivist might try to salvage the idea that veridical perceptions draw on conceptual capacities without admitting that there is a significant common kind shared by veridical perceptions and indiscriminable hallucinations. We might, for example, claim that although veridical perceptions draw on con342 Thomas Lockhart must insist that veridical and non-veridical perceptions 'have something in common' only in the most trivial sense. 57 For this reason, those who have wanted to take Martin's form of disjunctivism seriously have insisted that there can be no sense in which either veridical perceptions or indiscriminable hallucinations draw on conceptual capacities at all: perceptions must themselves be totally non-conceptual. 58 Furthermore, Martin's disjunctivism has been criticized precisely for this reason-because it does not allow us to maintain the idea that perceptions themselves have content. 59 Call this the objection from perceptual content. 60 In the next section, we'll see that McDowell's version of disjunctivism is not subject to this objection. 5.2 McDowell's Disjunctivism and the Content of Perception McDowell's disjunctivism is, for all I have said so far, consistent with the claim that there might be a non-trivial way of characterizing what it is that a veridical perception and an indistinguishable hallucination 'have in common'. In this section, I want to urge that this is a crucial feature of McDowell's account. I've made the case that McDowell's disjunctivism emerges as part of his project to defend a satisfactory account of how we could come to know about the world on the basis of perception. As a further component of that very same project, McDowell is also, notoriously, committed to the view that "capacities that belong to reason ... be operative in experiencing itself'. 61 ceptual capacities, indiscriminable hallucinations merely seem to the subject to draw on those same conceptual capacities. This strikes me as a difficult and somewhat ad hoc position to take: what is the difference between actually drawing on a conceptual capacity and merely seeming to the subject to draw on a conceptual capacity? 57 Seefn.17. 58 See, for example, Travis (2005). 59 See, for example, Byme/Logue (2008). 60 Another objection which has been brought against Martin's view is that it does not leave sufficient resources to give a robust account of hallucinations. See Burge (2005), Fish (2008), Brewer (2008) and Siegel (2008). If my argument below is correct, it will also follow that McDowell's version of disjunctivism won't fall prey to this criticism. 61 McDowell (2008a), 258. Motivating Disjunctivism 343 I won't now rehearse the reasons that McDowell has for thinking that an adequate account of perception requires the idea that perceptual experience itself draws on conceptual capacities. For my purposes, it will suffice to observe that, for McDowell, a satisfactory account of how perceptual experience can put us in touch with the world must maintain both: (a) the idea that perceptual experiences involve actualizations of perceptual capacities and (b) disjunctivism. If Martin's were the only form of disjunctivism available, then McDowell could not hold both (a) and (b) together. McDowell, from Martin's point of view, must abandon one of his commitments. One response here is to abandon the idea that Martin and McDowell both attempt to defend the position I outlined in §2. This would be an overreaction. McDowell can consistently maintain both (a) and (b) because Martin is simply wrong to conclude that they are incompatible: in particular, Martin is wrong to think that defending disjunctivism requires insisting that the only sense in which veridical and non-veridical perceptions 'have something in common' is trivial. McDowell defends a conception of perception according to which there are non-trivial features shared by veridical and non-veridical perceptions62 -in the case of Smith sitting in the London pub, both the veridical perception she in fact has and the indistinguishable hallucination she might have both draw on her concept lemon. This, I contended in §5.1, is sufficient to violate Martin's condition (III) on disjunctivism. Given our work in §3.2, we are now in a position to see exactly why Martin thinks the disjunctivist should not admit that Smith's veridical perception and her indiscriminable hallucination share this feature. To do so is to make So-Called Naive Realist veridical perceptions explanatorily redundant in an account of consciousness and mind. Rehearsing the reasoning of §3.2, appropriately modified for the case at hand: the explanation of Smith's ordering a G&T in the situation where she merely hallucinates a lemon will appeal to the kind of experience she is having-that kind of experience which draws on the concept lemon. But since she is also having an experience of that kind when she actually perceives a lemon, it is, Martin contends, overwhelmingly natural to conclude that when we are called upon to explain her ordering of a gin and tonic in the case where she has had a veridical perception of a lemon, it is this fact about her experience (that her experience is merely one which involves the concept lemon) which does the explanatory work 62 He is insistent about this in McDowell (2010). 344 Thomas Lockhart (rather than the fact that her experience is a veridical perception of a lemon). We are also now in a position to see how McDowell can reject this line of thought. We've seen that what I called the Knowledge Premise plays a critical role in McDowell's disjunctivism. 63 According to the Knowledge Premise, a subject who is having a veridical perception has a different episternic standing than a subject who merely seems to be having a veridical perception. In Situation 1, Smith is justified in believing that she sees a lemon. In Situation 2, although Smith believes she sees a lemon, she is not justified in this belie£ Let us suppose then that in both Situation 1 and Situation 2, Smith comes to believe that she sees a lemon. Suppose further that in both cases, her experience draws on her concept lemon. How can McDowell explain why she forms the belief she does? In Situation 1, Smith believes that she sees a lemon because she sees a lemon. In Situation 2, Smith believes that she sees a lemon merely because she takes herself to see a lemon. Although she has the same belief in the two cases, our explanation of her corning to form that belief is different in the two cases because her epjsternic standing is different (in virtue of the fact that her experiences are different): in the one case, we explain her belief by appealing to the fact that her belief is justified by an experience which presents to her a lemon, in the second case we explain her belief by pointing to the fact that she takes her belief to be justified, in virtue of an experience which merely seems to present a lemon to her. The fact that a difference in justificatory standing leads to a difference in how we explain Smith's patterns of belief formation will also allow us to explain the differences in Smith's behaviour in the two cases. In Situation 1, Smith ordered a gin and tonic because she saw a lemon and this led her to crave that drink. In Situation 2, Smith ordered a gin and tonic because she took herself to see a lemon, and that led her to crave the drink. Martin issued a challenge for the disjunctivist who wishes to maintain that there can be a non-trivial characterization of what veridical and non-veridical perceptions 'have in common'. The challenge was this: "[W]hat shows that what is relevant to the explanations we want to give is ever the kind of event peculiar to veridical perception rather than what is common to veridical perception and causally matching hal63 Although I urged that we should not identify it with McDowell's disjunctivism. Motivating Disjunctivism 345 lucination ?"64 Although it isn't clear that Martin takes any actual philosophers to fall into the range of his challenge, I've argued that McDowell is the kind of disjunctivist at whom Martin's challenge can be directed. But McDowell can answer the challenge: in virtue of the different experiences they are, veridical perceptions have a different justificatory standing than non-veridical perceptions, and therefore they have a different explanatory status in our account of consciousness and mind. 6 Conclusion In §2, I offered a conception of disjunctivism which I take to be neutral between Martin and McDowell. In §3 and §4, I outlined the different ways that Martin and McDowell implement this basic disjunctivist project. If my reconstruction is correct, it is both wrong to think (as some have) that Martin and McDowell are simply engaged in the same project, but also wrong to think (as some have) that they are engaged in essentially different projects. In §5, I drew attention to a specific way in which the disjunctivisms of Martin and McDowell are incompatible. Martin thinks that the disjunctivist will be required to defend the view that there can be no non-trivial way of characterizing what it is that a veridical and a non-veridical perception 'have in common'. So Martin's form of disjunctivism rules out any account according to which perceptions themselves involve representational or conceptual content. If Martin is right, no philosopher who thinks that perceptions have representational or conceptual content can be a disjunctivist. Martin is wrong about this conclusion. McDowell is a disjunctivist who maintains that perceptions 'draw on' conceptual capacities. I've argued that McDowell can hold this view without inconsistency. McDowell avoids inconsistency because he can respond to a rhetorical question Martin poses. Martin thinks that any disjunctivist who wants to admit that veridical and non-veridical perceptions can, non-trivially, 'have something in common' will face the unenviable task of explaining how disjunctivist-approved veridical perceptions do not become explanatorily redundant. McDowell can respond to this challenge: even if there is a significant way of characterizing what a world-involving veridical perception and an indistinguishable hallucination 'have in com64 Martin (2006), 369. 346 Thomas Lockhart mon', the veridical perception will not be explanatorily redundant because it will have very different justificatory force. Many have been persuaded by Martin's claim that disjunctivism cannot admit a non-trivial characterization of what veridical and non-veridical perceptions 'have in common', and some have criticized disjunctivism in the light of this claim. I've argued that McDowell's is a species of disjunctivism which is not subject to these criticisms. But the contemporary literature on disjunctivism has tended to focus on Martin's very distinctive understanding of what veridical and non-veridical perceptions have 'in common', and the metaphysical presuppositions which this claim requires. Martin's bold metaphysical claims have thus hijacked the debate about disjunctivism. I've shown that Martin's is only one way to implement the generic disjunctivist project of §2, and when seen in this way, it is clear that his claims about what veridical and non-veridical perceptions 'have in common' are-far from representing the core of disjunctivism-only a curious feature of one of its species. The point of this paper is to arrive at a vantage point from which it is evident that McDowell's disjunctivism is equally a way to implement the project of §2, but one which avoids the difficult and attention-grabbing metaphysical flourishes of Martin's species. From this vantage point, McDowell's species of disjunctivism emerges as a far more appealing instantiation of the genus.65 Riferences Brewer (2008): Bill Brewer, "How to Account for Illusion", in: Haddock/ Macpherson (2008a), 168-180. Burge (2005): Tyler Burge, "Disjunctivism and Perceptual Psychology", in: Philosophical Topics 33, 1-78. Byme/Logue (2008): Alex Byrne/Heather Logue, "Either/Or", in: Haddock/ Macpherson (2008a), 57-94. Fish (2008): William Fish, "Disjunctivism, Indistinguishability, and the Nature of Hallucination", in: Haddock/Macpherson (2008a), 144-167. 65 Tills paper grew out of a series of discussions in the Philosophy of Mind Workshop at the University of Chicago. Thanks to the participants in that workshop, especially Stina Backstrom, Rachel Goodman, and Aidan Gray. Thanks also to the participants in the Wittgenstein Workshop at the University of Chicago, who listened to a version. James Conant and David Finkelstein provided tireless support in the final stages of this paper, and I owe a great deal to both of them. Finally, enormous thanks to Jennifer Lockhart, without whose tireless efforts in support of Cartesian scepticism this paper would not exist. Motivating Disjunctivism 347 Haddock/Macpherson (2008a): Adrian Haddock/Fiona Macpherson (eds.), Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge, Oxford. Haddock/ Macpherson (2008b): Adrian Haddock/Fiona Macpherson, "Introduction: Varieties of Disjunctivism", in: Haddock/Macpherson (2008a), 1-24. Martin (2003): Mike G. F. Martin, "The Limits of Self-Awareness" in: Philosophical Studies 120, 37-89. Martin (2006): Mike G. F. Martin, "On Being Alienated", in: T. Gendler/]. Hawthorne (eds.), Perceptual Experience, Oxford, 354-410. McDowell (2008a): John McDowell, "Avoiding the Myth of the Given", in: McDowell (2009b), 256-272. McDowell (2008b): John McDowell, "The Disjunctive Conception of Experience as Material for a Transcendental Argument", in: McDowell (2009a), 225-242. McDowell (2009a): John McDowell, The Engaged Intellect, Cambridge/MA. McDowell (2009b): John McDowell, Having the vvorld in View. Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars, Cambridge/MA. McDowell (2010): John McDowell, "Tyler Burge on Disjunctivism", in: Philosophical Explorations 13, 243-255 (reprinted in this volume, ???-???). Sellars (1997): Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge/ MA. Siegel (2008): Susanna Siegel, "The Episternic Conception of Hallucination", in: Haddock/Macpherson (2008a), 205-225. Travis (2005): Charles Travis, "Frege, Father of Disjunctivism", in: Philosophical Topics 33, 307-334.