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Phenomenal evidence and factive evidence

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Abstract

Perceptions guide our actions and provide us with evidence of the world around us. Illusions and hallucinations can mislead us: they may prompt as to act in ways that do not mesh with the world around us and they may lead us to form false beliefs about that world. The capacity view provides an account of evidence that does justice to these two facts. It shows in virtue of what illusions and hallucinations mislead us and prompt us to act. Moreover, it shows in virtue of what we are in a better epistemic position when we perceive than when we hallucination. In this paper, I develop the capacity view, that is, the view that perceptual experience has epistemic force in virtue of the epistemic and metaphysical primacy of the perceptual capacities employed in perception. By grounding the epistemic force of experience in facts about the metaphysical structure of experience, the capacity view is not only an externalist view, but moreover a naturalistic view of the epistemology of perceptual experience. So it is an externalist and naturalistic alternative to reliabilism. I discuss the repercussions of this view for the justification of beliefs and the epistemic transparency of mental states, as well as, familiar problem cases.

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Notes

  1. Naturally, there are big differences between these different views but what they all have in common is that they treat conscious mental states as explanatory basic.

  2. One could make the case that insofar as on some of the views categorized as capacity views it is essential that the capacities in play are reliable, those views should better be classified as reliabilist views.

  3. Williamson (2000) famously holds that knowledge cannot be analyzed. But one can accept the insights of his account of justification as derivative from knowledge while rejecting his view that knowledge cannot be analyzed.

  4. Williamson’s notion of method can be understood as a kind of capacity.

  5. See my (2013a). For critical discussion, see (Byrne 2014).

  6. For the contrast between analyzing sensory character in terms of awareness relations to peculiar entities, such as strange particulars or abstract entities, on the one hand, and understanding sensory character in terms of a mental activity, such as employing perceptual capacities, see my (2011a).

  7. For a detailed development of such a color realist view, see Byrne and Hilbert (2003).

  8. According to Williamson, we have only evidence provided by an appearance proposition in the bad case. For discussion of the problems with this, see my (2013a).

  9. For a discussion of the relationship between evidence and justification, see McGrath and Fantl (2002, 2009).

  10. An alternative would be to think of the quality of the epistemic position as an aspect of knowledge distinct from justification. On this way of thinking, one would say that the perceiver and the hallucinator are equally justified, but the perceiver is still in a better epistemic position in virtue of having knowledge, where this difference in epistemic position makes the difference between knowledge and ignorance.

  11. An interesting question is what the connection is between the strength of the evidence we have for a proposition and our confidence in that proposition. For a discussion of the relationship between having evidence for p and having confidence in p, see Neta (2003, 2008) and Silins (2005).

  12. I am taking for granted here that being in a mental state is closed under constitution: what is constituted by the mental is itself mental. For an argument for the thesis that the evidence one has is a matter of what mental state one is in, see Williamson (2000).

  13. See Williamson (2000: 11) for both principles. For a critical discussion of both principles, see Smithies (2012).

  14. For a recent discussion of related issues, see Greco (2014).

  15. Some internalists have understood the accessibility of evidence as an essential part of the very nature of evidence. Indeed, it has been argued that denying the accessibility of evidence amounts to changing the subject (Cohen 1984: 284). It will lead too far astray to address this issue here.

  16. For a more general discussion of the limits and unreliability of introspection, see Pereboom (1994), Goldberg (2000), Bar-On (2004), Schwitzgebel (2008), Fumerton (2009) and Gertler (2011).

  17. To keep issues of personal identity out of the picture, I will focus on inanimate objects. Putting aside issues specific to personal identity, everything said about inanimate objects carries over to persons.

  18. Thanks to Dan Greco for helpful discussions on these issues.

  19. For a defense of such a view, see my (2011b) and (2014b). See also Dretske (1995), Tye (1995), Byrne (2001), Chalmers (2006) and Pautz (2010).

  20. For a discussion of such an approach, see McGrath (2013).

  21. For a defense of such a weak representationalist view, see Schellenberg (2010, 2013b).

  22. This case differs from BonJour’s (1980) Norman case, since there is no assumption that Vernon comes at her hallucination by way of a reliable process. By contrast clairvoyant Norman comes to his beliefs by way of a reliable process that however is not based on any evidence or reasons.

  23. Given that one has factive evidence, one already has (at least some) safety. One has safety since singular content entails its truth. So arguably adding a safety requirement on knowledge would not be an option for the capacity view. One might argue however that there is a safety condition on the content type. If that is right, then the capacity view is compatible with a safety requirement on knowledge. We can remain neutral on this issue here.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to James Genone and Dan Greco for comments on a draft of this paper as well as audiences at the Evidence workshop in Philadelphia and The Epistemology of Perception workshop at SMU.

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    Susanna Schellenberg

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Schellenberg, S. Phenomenal evidence and factive evidence. Philos Stud 173, 875–896 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0528-8

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