Summary |
Disjunctivism in the philosophy of mind typically concerns either the nature of perceptual experience (metaphysical disjunctivism) or its epistemological significance (epistemological disjunctivism). At a minimum, metaphysical disjunctivism holds that veridical experience and at least some non-veridical experiences are fundamentally different. The primary motivation for disjunctivism about perceptual experience is naïve realism, the view that veridical experience fundamentally consists in the subject perceiving things in her environment. Since some non-veridical experiences (total hallucinations) don’t involve perceiving things in one’s environment, these must be fundamentally different from veridical experiences as naïve realism characterizes them. Epistemological disjunctivism holds that veridical experience puts its subject in a superior epistemic position with respect to propositions about her environment than subjectively indiscriminable non-veridical experiences do. It is employed as an anti-skeptical strategy: in the context of one kind of argument for skepticism about the external world, it constitutes a denial of the premise that a veridical experience puts one in the same epistemic position as a subjectively indiscriminable illusion or hallucination. Arguably, epistemological disjunctivism neither entails nor is entailed by metaphysical disjunctivism. |