The disjunctive conception of experience

Abstract

§1 The Disjunctive Conception of Experience Descartes was surely right that while normal waking experience, dreams and hallucinations are characteristically distinguished at a purely phenomenological level, — by contrasts of spatial perspective, coherence, clarity of image, etc., — it is not essential that they be so.1 What is it like for someone who dreams that he is sitting, clothed in his dressing gown, in front of his fire can in principle be subjectively indistinguishable from what it is like to perceive that one is doing so, fully conscious and awake. The same holds for multi-sense hallucination and, it is assumed, would hold of the experience of an envatted brain in the usual postulated scenario. This thought — that normal perceptual experience allows in principle of perfect phenomenological counterfeit — is, to the best of my knowledge, nowhere seriously challenged in John McDowell's writings.2 What he rejects is an idea that builds upon and would be potentially explanatory of it: the Lockean idea that, as far as the states enjoyed by the experiencing subject are concerned, there is actually no generic distinction between dream, hallucination, and wakeful perception: — that one and the same type of state of consciousness is involved in all three cases, and that which (if any) of the three a particular occurrence of the type falls under is a matter of how it is caused. On this model, the distinction between Descartes' notional fully lucid dream and the corresponding raft of perceptions of his dressing-gowned, sedentary state is like that between a certain kind of sunburn and nettle rash. For Disjunctivism, however, the Lockean — as McDowell likes to say, “Highest Common Factor” — conception of perceptual experience and its potential counterfeits is a conceptual error. There is no single type of state of consciousness present in each of dreaming, perceiving and hallucinating, whose instances fall under one or other of those characterisations purely by virtue of their aetiology..

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

  • Only published works are available at libraries.

Similar books and articles

The disjunctive conception of perceiving.Adrian Haddock - 2011 - Philosophical Explorations 14 (1):23-42.
The Disjunctive Theory of Perception.Matthew Soteriou - 2009 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 edition).
In defense of disjunctivism.Ram Neta - 2008 - In Fiona Macpherson & Adrian Haddock (eds.), Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge. Oxford University Press. pp. 311--29.
On being alienated.Michael G. F. Martin - 2006 - In Tamar S. Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Perceptual Experience. Oxford University Press.
Dreams.Thomas Metzinger & Jennifer Michelle Windt - 2007 - In D. Barrett & P. McNamara (eds.), The New Science of Dreaming. Praeger Publishers.
The Unity of Hallucinations.Fabian Dorsch - 2010 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9 (2):171-191.
Perception and hallucination: A new approach to the disjunctive conception of experience.S. Glendinning - 1998 - Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 29 (3):314-19.
Silencing the Argument from Hallucination.István Aranyosi - 2013 - In Fiona MacPherson & Dimitris Platchias (eds.), Hallucination (MIT Press). MIT Press.
What the Nose Doesn't Know: Non-Veridicality and Olfactory Experience.Clare Batty - 2010 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 17 (3-4):10-17.
The disjunctive conception of experience as material for a transcendental argument.John McDowell - 2006 - In Fiona Macpherson & Adrian Haddock (eds.), Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge. Oxford University Press. pp. 376-389.
McDowell and idealism.Adrian Haddock - 2008 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 51 (1):79 – 96.
Disjunctivism.Stephan Blatti - 2006 - In A. C. Grayling, A. Pyle & N. Goulder (eds.), Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy. Continuum.

Analytics

Added to PP
2010-12-22

Downloads
173 (#103,960)

6 months
5 (#246,492)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references