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Perception and the external world

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Abstract

In this paper, I argue that perception justifies belief about the external world in virtue of its phenomenal character together with its relations to the external world. But I argue that perceptual relations to the external world impact on the justifying role of perception only by virtue of their impact on its representational content. Epistemic level-bridging principles provide a principled rationale for avoiding more radically externalist theories of perceptual justification.

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Notes

  1. In Smithies (2006) and (2014), I defend an internalist theory on which justification depends upon phenomenal character alone. To avoid false advertising, I should note that the position defended in this paper counts as a version of internalism by many standard criteria, including mentalism and access internalism.

  2. I regard ‘justification’ as synonymous with ‘reasonableness’ or ‘rationality’.

  3. The distinction is standard, although the terminology varies. Compare Firth’s (1978) distinction between propositional and doxastic senses of reasonableness and Goldman’s (1979) distinction between ex ante and ex post senses of justification.

  4. I assume that perception provides justification that is non-inferential in the sense that it does not depend on empirical justification to believe anything else. This is consistent with the view that perception provides justification that depends upon a priori or default justification to believe, say, that perception is reliable.

  5. See Block (1997) for the distinction between the phenomenal sense of consciousness and various functionally defined senses, including access consciousness and metacognitive consciousness.

  6. See Weiskrantz (1997) for an overview of empirical work on blindsight. Patients with type-1 blindsight report no visual experience, whereas patients with type-2 blindsight report some degraded visual experience. I restrict my discussion to cases where visual experience is entirely lacking.

  7. See McDowell (1982) for a dissenting view.

  8. One qualification: Block’s super-blindsighter is “trained to prompt himself at will, guessing without being told to guess” (1997: 385). But we can stipulate instead that he forms beliefs spontaneously without any need for self-prompting.

  9. See Lyons (2009: Ch. 5) for opposing verdicts about clairvoyance-style cases.

  10. In Smithies (2012a), I use these points in defending the level-bridging principles against the charge of over-intellectualization and psychological regress problems.

    See also Smithies (2012c) for my response to Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument.

  11. See Smithies (2012a) for a more detailed version of this argument. Bergmann (2005) and Littlejohn (2013) argue (to put the point in my terminology) that justification for believing Moorean conjunctions is “finkish” in the sense that it is destroyed in process of believing them. See Smithies (2012a: 16–20) for my response.

  12. See Smithies (2015) for the proposal that justification is the epistemic property that makes a belief suited to survive a fully justified process of critical reflection.

  13. See Smithies (2012b) for a more extended discussion of the relationship between consciousness and introspection in the context of a defence of internalism.

  14. See McGinn (1988), Siewert (1998), Horgan and Tienson (2002), and Chalmers (2004) for related arguments. See also Harman (1990), Tye (1995), and Byrne (2001) for arguments from transparency. Peacocke (1983) and Block (2003) raise purported counterexamples that are discussed in some of the papers mentioned above.

  15. See Pryor’s (2000) defence of dogmatism and Huemer’s (2001: Ch. 5) defence of phenomenal conservatism for related principles.

  16. Silins (2011) raises objections to the Content Principle that I don’t have space to discuss here, including a version of the problem of the speckled hen. See Smithies (2012c: 729–731) for some relevant discussion.

  17. Two-level theories of the representational content of perceptual experience are defended by Horgan and Tienson (2002), Chalmers (2004), and Siegel (2011: Ch. 6).

  18. A de re proposition about an object is true or false of that object in in every possible world in which it exists. See Evans (1982: Ch. 6), Martin (2002), and Siegel (2011: Ch. 6) for relevant background.

  19. In this paper, I focus on de re belief that is based on perception, but I don’t mean to exclude the possibility of de re belief that is based on memory, testimony, or inference. Regarding hallucination, Johnston notes that “although we can hallucinate real things and real people, no such hallucination can provide an original source of de re thought about those particular things or people” (2004: 129).

  20. This view is sometimes called “naïve realism”. Proponents include Campbell (2002), Martin (2004), Brewer (2006), and Fish (2008). One can deny that phenomenal character is intrinsic without endorsing the relational view of experience, but this would not be sufficient to block the argument.

  21. Martin (2002) allows that perceptions of numerically distinct but qualitatively identical objects can share a general phenomenal character while differing in their particular phenomenal nature.

  22. Farkas does not deny that there are semantic differences between singular terms and definite descriptions, but on her view, these semantic differences concern reference rather than content. The view is that content determines reference only relative to a context and the way in which reference is determined depends on the phenomenal character of experience.

  23. See Strawson (1959), Putnam (1975) and Burge (1979) for examples of this kind.

  24. Peacocke (1993), Yablo (1997), and Williamson (2000: Ch. 3) develop this argument in more detail than I have space for here.

  25. See Smithies (2006: 27–28) and (2014: 112). I am grateful to Nico Silins and Alex Byrne for conversations that eventually led me to change my mind on this issue.

  26. Another way to make essentially the point is that the externalist contents of these beliefs are inconsistent, but the phenomenal modes of presentation are consistent. See Chalmers (2002) for this diagnosis of Kripke’s puzzle about belief.

  27. The principle needs a qualification to deal with finkish cases in which believing a proposition destroys one’s justification, including Moorean conjunctions of the form, ‘p and I don’t believe that p’. But adding this qualification doesn’t solve the problem that I am raising here.

  28. The debate in epistemology between uniqueness and permissiveness is relevant here. See the exchange between White (2013) and Kelly (2013) for discussion. All I need is what Kelly calls intrapersonal (as distinct from interpersonal) uniqueness.

  29. Silins rejects the Content Principle, but he endorses a related thesis of Content Mediation: “When an experience has the indirect content that P, an experience can immediately justify you in believing that P even if it is not a phenomenal content of experience.” (2011: 355).

  30. These constraints are called “grounding presuppositions” in Horgan and Tienson (2002) and “conditions on extension” in Chalmers (2004).

  31. See Williamson (2000: Chs. 1–3) for arguments against factorizability.

  32. See also Conee and Feldman (2004: 82) for a version of Moderate Externalism. Conee (2007) calls the view “externally enhanced internalism”.

  33. Proponents of Reliabilism include Goldman (1979), Sosa (1991), Burge (2003), Bergmann (2006) and Lyons (2009). These authors disagree about the kind of reliability that is necessary for justification.

  34. Proponents of Factivism include McDowell (1995), Williamson (2007), Roessler (2009), Littlejohn (2012), Pritchard (2012), and Schellenberg (2013), this volume.

  35. Proponents of Etiologism include Siegel (2011) and McGrath (2013).

  36. Some versions of Radical Externalism reject both directions of the Content Principle, but I will focus on less radical versions of Radical Externalism, since my arguments will extend to more radical versions too.

  37. Williamson (2007) holds that one has some degree of justification in the bad case, but more justification in the good case. Schellenberg’s (2013) distinction between phenomenal evidence and factive evidence has the same effect; see Schellenberg, this volume for further discussion.

  38. See Goldman (1988), Williamson (2007), Littlejohn (2012), and Pritchard (2012).

  39. Notice that this option is incompatible with Factivism: if justification is factive, then second-order justification entails first-order justification.

  40. McDowell (1982, 1995) and Pritchard (2012) combine Factivism with Level Bridging.

  41. In Sect. 6, I explain why de re propositions don’t provide a good precedent.

  42. Epistemically inert propositions provide counterexamples to an unrestricted version of the J–J Principle, which states that one lacks justification to believe a proposition if and only if one has justification to believe that one lacks justification to believe it (see Smithies 2012a). But given plausible assumptions, the Extended Level Bridging principle entails a version of the J–J Principle that is restricted to propositions that are not epistemically inert.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to audiences at MIT and Texas, Austin in 2014 for discussions of this paper and especially to Alex Byrne, Ben Caplan, James Genone, Clayton Littlejohn, Berislav Marusic, and Susanna Siegel for helpful comments on a previous draft.

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    Declan Smithies

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Smithies, D. Perception and the external world. Philos Stud 173, 1119–1145 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0535-9

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