Description
Suppose you see an object on your desk (say, a book). Your perceptual capacities make this object present in your experience. Call this the “good case”. Now suppose that, in another moment, you seem to see the book on your desk. Apparently, the same book is present in your experience, but the moment you try to fetch it, you hit the desk. The book was a mere hallucination! Call this the “bad case.”
Philosophers of perception are divided about the nature of the good and bad cases. According to some philosophers, both the good and bad case are the same kind of mental states. Disjunctivists disagree: on their view, a mental state is either a good case (an instance of perception) or something altogether different (perhaps, an hallucination!), although it seems to us to be perceiving something. This raises some questions: If the two mental states are different, why are we deceived by hallucinatory cases? What is the nature of our access to perceptual appearances? What arguments can be given in support of Disjunctivism? Is Disjunctivism plausible in light of contemporary cognitive science? The issue of Disjunctivism touches thus on the very nature of perceptual experience and our perceptual access to the world.
In this seminar we will discuss together some classic and recent texts on Disjunctivism, and get
thereby better acquainted with one of the most important topics in contemporary philosophy of
perception.
Study material
As a preliminary introduction to the topic, I recommend Matthew Soteriou’s entry “The
Disjunctive Theory of Perception” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2020):
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-disjunctive/
We will read papers by Hinton, McDowell, Burge, Martin, and Snowdon, among others. The
papers will be made available on Moodle.
- Kursleiter/in: Alfredo Vernazzani