Abstract

This paper aims at offering a new disjunctivist solution – anomalous disjunctivism – to the screening-off problem. Anomalous disjunctivism focuses on the necessary causal conditions for perception and hallucination. It argues that the proximate cause is contingent on causing a particular kind of sensory experience that can either be perceptual or hallucinatory. It further shows that the perceived thing is a necessary causal condition for perceptual experience and the failure of perception is a necessary causal condition for the hallucinatory counterpart. It is the case that any account of a hallucinatory experience relies on the nature of hallucination, and, therefore, the anti-naïve realist has to agree that the necessary causal condition matters. As a consequence, whatever account we take for a hallucination, it need not apply to its perceptual counterpart. The screening-off problem, thereby, is dissolved.