Abstract

Nicholas Nathan tries to resist the current version of the causal argument for sense-data in two ways. First he suggests that, on what he considers to be the correct reconstruction of the argument, it equivocates on the sense of proximate cause. Second, he defends a form of disjunctivism, by claiming that there might be an extra mechanism involved in producing veridical hallucination that is not present in perception. I argue that Nathan’s reconstruction of the argument is not the appropriate one, and that, properly interpreted, the argument does not equivocate on proximate cause. Furthermore, I claim that his postulation of a modified mechanism for hallucinations is implausibly ad hoc