In an attempt to revive discussion of the argument from illusion this paper amends the classic version of the argument to avoid Austin's main objection. It then develops and defends a version of the intentional object reply to the argument, arguing that an "unendorsed story" account of reports of dreams and hallucinations avoids commitment to nonexistent objects.

The paper's first four sections give a taxonomy and criticism of three classes of objections to the argument from illusion. the last section raises the question whether its main premise does not misclassify perceptual accusatives (e.g. 'sensation of bentness') as individuatives that imply the existence of, say, bent particulars.

The argument from illusion attempts to establish the bold claim that we are never perceptually aware of ordinary material objects. The argument has rightly received a great deal critical of scrutiny. But here we develop a criticism that, to our knowledge, has not hitherto been explored. We consider the canonical form of the argument as it is captured in contemporary expositions. There are two stages to our criticism. First, we show that the argument is (...) invalid. Second, we identify premises that can be used to make the argument valid. But we argue that the obvious fixes are problematic. If our arguments are successful, we show that the argument from illusion is even more difficult to defend than is commonly acknowledged. (shrink)

Firth argues that austin's criticisms of the argument from illusion do not destroy the argument. We can reformulate it in two ways so that it succeeds as a method of ostensibly defining terms denoting the sensory constituent of perceptual experience. One way maintains the act-Object distinction of the cartesian tradition and the other uses the language of "looks." (staff).

One crucial premise in the argument from illusion is the Phenomenal Principle. It states that if there sensibly appears to be something that possesses a sensible quality, then there is something of which the subject is aware that has that sensible quality. The principle thus enables the inference from a mere appearance to an existence (usually a mental one). In the argument from appearance, a similar move is taken by some philosophers—they infer a content (...) from a mere appearance. There are two kinds of defences for the Phenomenal Principle in the literature, namely, the epistemological one (e.g. H.H. Price) and the semantic one (e.g. Frank Jackson). I argue that neither consolidates the Phenomenal Principle. I particularly demonstrate that the appearance verb in premise 1 of the argument from illusion is not used in the phenomenal sense as it is used in the Phenomenal Principle, which renders the argument essentially invalid. To avoid invalidity, the proponents either give up the phenomenal use, which makes the argument unable to serve its original purpose, i.e. inferring an unusual existence, or they insist on the phenomenal use in all premises of the argument, which will trivialise the argument. I also demonstrate that a similar objection applies to the argument from appearance. (shrink)

For A. J. Ayer, the occurrence of delusions confutes the notion that we perceive the world directly. He argues instead that perceptions are caused by immaterial “sense data” which somehow represent the properties of material things to us in our experiences. J. L. Austin systematically rejects Ayer’s claims, arguing that the occurrence of delusions does not preclude the possibility of direct perception, and that, indeed, our normal perception is direct. I challenge both philosophers’ ideas by examining how they deal with (...) the phenomenon of colour. (shrink)

• A coin appears to be elliptical when looked at from an angle, but it’s round. • A stick appears to be bent when it is partly immersed in water, but it’s straight. • An oasis appears to exist, but it doesn’t. • A bucket of water appears to be two different temperatures to two different hands, but it’s all..

In his paper “Has Austin Refuted the Sense-Datum Theory?” A. J. Ayer contends that the argument from illusion calls attention to perspectival distortion, perceptual misidentification and elusive perceptual belief only in order to establish the possibility of perceptual error. Pointing to our occasional perceptual failures reminds us that perceptual error is always logically possible—that any particular perceptual belief to the effect that one is perceiving a physical surface could be mistaken. This in turn is thought by Ayer (...) to show that the ordinary belief that we perceive physical surfaces requires qualification—along lines urged by sense-datum philosophers—to the effect that even in those situations properly described for non-philosophical purposes as perceptions of physical surfaces it cannot be physical surfaces that are literally present to one's senses. Ayer believes that this can be established, for any given case, by the possibility of perceptual error alone. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to defend what I call the action-oriented coding theory (ACT) of spatially contentful visual experience. Integral to ACT is the view that conscious visual experience and visually guided action make use of a common subject-relative or 'egocentric' frame of reference. Proponents of the influential two visual systems hypothesis (TVSH), however, have maintained on empirical grounds that this view is false (Milner & Goodale, 1995/2006; Clark, 1999; 2001; Campbell, 2002; Jacob & Jeannerod, 2003; Goodale & (...) Milner, 2004). One main source of evidence for TVSH comes from behavioral studies of the comparative effects of size-contrast illusions on visual awareness and visuo- motor action. This paper shows that not only is the evidence from illusion studies inconclusive, there is a better, ACT-friendly interpretation of the evidence that avoids serious theoretical difficulties faced by TVSH. (shrink)

This paper resurrects two discredited ideas in the philosophy of mind. The first: the idea that perceptual illusion might have something metaphysically significant to tell us about the nature of phenomenal consciousness. The second: that the colours and other qualities that ‘fill’ our sensory fields are occurrent properties (rather than representations of properties) that are, nevertheless, to be distinguished from the ‘objective’ properties of things in the external world. Theories of consciousness must recognize the existence of what Daniel (...) Dennett mockingly labels ‘figment,’ but this result—though metaphysically and epistemologically significant—is not incompatible with either physicalism or naturalized semantics. (shrink)

Philosophers of perception are familiar with the argument from illusion, at least since Hume formulated it to challenge a naïve form of realism. In this paper, I present an analogous argument but in the domain of action. It focuses on slips, a common kind of mistake. But, otherwise, it is structurally similar. The argument challenges some contemporary views about the nature of action inspired by Wittgenstein. The discussion shows how thinking about these common mistakes helps (...) illuminate aspects of human agency that tend to be overlooked whenever too much emphasis is placed on the rationality of human actions. (shrink)

This paper is an "ordinary language" analysis of the philosophical discussion of visual perception in the context of Twentieth Century British "sense datum" theorists, primarily G.E. Moore. -/- The title of the paper is derived from A.J. Ayer's "argument from illusion", which also forms part of the context of this paper. Both Moore and Ayer believed in sense datum theory, but Moore provides an interesting illustration that is intended to clarify (and also prove) sense datum theory (...) in his paper, "A Defence of Common Sense". Moore invites us to inspect his hand. I try to follow suit, but succeed only in falling out with the viewpoints of both Moore and Ayer. (shrink)

The argument from contradictory contents presented here is based directly on observations about the content of experience. It claims that experience content, if conceptual, allows for contradictions within one and the same content. There are at least two examples of this, the waterfall illusion and the visual experiences of some grapheme-color synesthetes. However, due to a Fregean principle of content individuation, no conceptual contents are contradictory. So experience content is nonconceptual. I motivate a particular version of the (...) argument and defend it against two central objections: First, the objection that there is more than one content involved in apparently self-contradictory experiences and second, the claim that conceptual contents are sometimes contradictory, as is true of some desires. In reaction to the second objection, I argue that we need an explanation of why subjects are not irrational if they do not revise their self-contradictory perceptual experiences, and that the conceptualist has no good account of this. For on his view, just as in thought, conceptual abilities are involved in experience and we are dealing with the same Fregean propositional contents. By contrast, nonconceptualism provides such an explanation, for no conceptual abilities are involved in experience itself, and scenario content is not the kind of content that can be revised under rational pressure. (shrink)

The section on the Argument from Design in collections of readings in the philosophy of religion usually begins with an expository selection drawn from Archdeacon William Paley’s Natural Theology, and follows with a critical selection drawn from David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Only from the footnotes does the student learn that Hume’s Dialogues was published over twenty years before Paley’s Natural Theology. Probably the student will feel that Hume’s devastating critique of the Argument (...) must strike every reasonable person with equal force, and so he will conclude that Paley must have been an archetypal intellectual conservative—a man whose ideas were dead and fossilized long before he put pen to paper. In fact, historically, the very opposite was the case. Although few could deny Hume’s towering intellect—“God’s greatest gift to the infidel” one fellow Scot grudgingly called him—Hume failed entirely to break the hold that the Argument from Design had on people’s imaginations. As many of us feel about Descartes’s arguments from illusion, people “knew” that somehow there must be a flaw in Hume’s argumentation, for, in the words of the anatomist Richard Owen, organic characters like the hand, the foot, and the eye, bear “irrefragable evidence of creative foresight.” Far from being outdated before it appeared, Paley’s book, in which he drew lucidly upon the most recent findings in natural science, rapidly became the standard work on the Argument from Design. It was, for instance, considered essential reading in any young man’s university education. (shrink)

Among the central theses defended in this paper are the following. First, the logical incompatibility version of the argument from evil is not one of the crucial versions, and Plantinga, in fostering the illusion that it is, seriously misrepresents claims advanced by other philosophers. Secondly, Plantinga’s arguments against the thesis that the existence of any evil at all is logically incompatible with God’s existence. Thirdly, Plantinga’s attempt to demonstrate that the existence of a certain amount of evil (...) in the world does not render improbable the existence of God involves both a false claim and a fallacious inference. (shrink)

The claim that perceptual illusions can motivate the existence of sense-data is both familiar and controversial. My aim is to carve out a subclass of illusions that are up to the task, and a subclass that are not. It follows that when we engage the former we are not simply incorrectly perceiving the world outside ourselves, we are directly perceiving a subjective entity: one’s grip on the external world has been marginalized – not fully lost, but once-removed. However, admitting that (...) various illusions do not give evi¬dence for sense-data considerably limits the power of the argument from illusion (Section 6) and brings out its distinctness from the argument from perceptual relativity (Section 7). To reach these conclusions we will examine the role of ambiguity in perception (Section 3), its connection to illusion (Section 4), and the link reference has to every element of this dis¬course (Sections 2 and 5). (shrink)

Various illusions of meaning appear to be insensitive to counter-evidence. That is, in a similar fashion to the well-known Müller-Lyer illusion in vision, certain illusions of meaning seem not to fade away even after one endorses beliefs that rebut the illusion one is having. Such apparently evidence-insensitive illusions have been employed to support the view that we can perceive meanings because evidence-insensitivity is typically taken to be a perceptual trait. In this paper, I offer a comprehensive examination of (...) allegedly evidence-insensitive illusions of meaning and argue that none is, in fact, evidence insensitive in a way that might support the view that we can perceive meanings. (shrink)

In this chapter I consider various potential challenges to free will from the modern mind sciences. After motivating the importance of considering these challenges, I outline the argument structure for such challenges: they require simultaneously establishing a particular condition for free will and an empirical challenge to that condition. I consider several potential challenges: determinism, naturalism, and epiphenomenalism, and explain why none of these philosophical challenges is bolstered by new discoveries from neuroscience and psychology. I then respond (...) to relevant empirical challenges to the role of consciousness and rationality in action. (shrink)

This paper elaborates on an argument in my book *Perception*. It has two parts. In the first part, I argue against what I call "basic" naive realism, on the grounds that it fails to accommodate what I call "internal dependence" and it requires an empirically implausible theory of sensible properties. Then I turn Craig French and Ian Phillips’ modified naïve realism as set out in their recent paper "Austerity and Illusion". It accommodates internal dependence. But it may retain (...) the empirically implausible theory of sensible properties. And it faces other empirical problems. Representationalism about experiences avoids those problems and is to be preferred. (shrink)

This paper pioneers the use of methods and findings from psycholinguistics in experimental philosophy’s ‘sources project’. On this basis, it clarifies the epistemological relevance of empirical findings about intuitions – a key methodological challenge to experimental philosophy. The sources project (aka ‘cognitive epistemology of intuitions’) seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions, which help us assess their evidentiary value. One approach seeks explanations which trace relevant intuitions back to automatic cognitive processes that are generally reliable but predictably (...) generate cognitive illusions under specific vitiating circumstances. The paper develops and experimentally tests such an explanation for intuitions at the root of a historically influential paradox about perception (‘argument from illusion’). The explanation traces these intuitions to stereotype-driven amplification, an automatic process routinely involved in language comprehension (e.g., understanding philosophical case-descriptions). Distributional semantics analysis and a forced-choice plausibility ranking task are employed to establish the relevant verb-associated stereotypes. The paper argues that the inferences facilitated by these stereotypes are generally reliable, but shows that vitiating circumstances obtain in the formulation of the targeted paradox. On this basis, the paper explores two complementary strategies for assessing the evidentiary value of intuitive judgments. (shrink)

: Vasubandhu, an advocate of the idealist Yogācāra school of Buddhism, argues that the nonexistence of external objects can be inferred from the appearance of nonexistent things in perceptual illusion. The idealist view and the argument from illusion are criticized by proponents of the realist Nyāya school on the grounds that illusory experience is parasitic upon veridical experience. The parasitism objection successfully defeats Vasubandhu's argument from illusion but fails to decisively disprove the (...) idealist view because it remains possible that each illusory experience gets its content from a previous illusory experience in an infinite chain. (shrink)

Contemporary biologists are not agreed on the question of whether there are any human races, despite the widespread scientific consensus on the underlying genetics. For most purposes, however, we can reasonably treat this issue as terminological. What most people in most cultures ordinarily believe about the significance of “racial” difference is quite remote, I think, from what the biologists are agreed on. Every reputable biologist will agree that human genetic variability between the populations of Africa or Europe or Asia (...) is not much greater than that within those populations; though how much greater depends, in part, on the measure of genetic variability the biologist chooses. If biologists want to make interracial difference seem relatively large, they can say that “the proportion of genic variation attributable to racial differences is … 9 – 11%.”1 If they want to make it seem small, they can say that, for two people who are both Caucasoid, the chances of difference in genetic constitution at one site on a given chromosome are currently estimated at about 14.3 percent, while for any two people taken at random from the human population, they are estimated at about 14.8 percent. The statistical facts about the distribution of variant characteristics in human populations and subpopulations are the same, whichever way the matter is expressed. Apart from the visible morphological characteristics of skin, hair, and bone, by which we are inclined to assign people to the broadest racial categories—black, white, yellow—there are few genetic characteristics to be found in the population of England that are not found in similar proportions in Zaire or in China; and few too which are found in Zaire but not in similar proportions in China or in England. All this, I repeat, is part of the consensus . A more familiar part of the consensus is that the differences between peoples in language, moral affections, aesthetic attitudes, or political ideology—those differences which most deeply affect us in our dealings with each other—are not biologically determined to any significant degree.[…]In this essay, I want to discuss the way in which W. E. B. Du Bois—who called his life story the “autobiography of a race concept”—came gradually, though never completely, to assimilate the unbiological nature of races. I have made these few prefatory remarks partly because it is my experience that the biological evidence about race is not sufficiently known and appreciated but also because they are important in discussing Du Bois. Throughout his life, Du Bois was concerned not just with the meaning of race but with the truth about it. We are more inclined at present, however, not to express our understanding of the intellectual development of people and cultures as a movement toward the truth; I shall sketch some of the reasons for this at the end of the essay. I will begin, therefore, by saying what I think the rough truth is about race, because, against the stream, I am disposed to argue that this struggle toward the truth is exactly what we find in the life of Du Bois, who can claim, in my view, to have thought longer, more engagedly, and more publicly about race than any other social theorist of our century. 1. Masatoshi Nei and Arun K. Roychoudhury, “Genetic Relationship and Evolution of Human Races,” Evolutionary Biology 14 : 11; all further references to this work, abbreviated “GR,” will be included in the text. Anthony Appiah is associate professor of philosophy, African studies, and Afro-American studies at Yale. He is the author of Assertion and Conditionals and For Truth in Semantics . In addition, he is at work on African Reflections: Essays in the Philosophy of Culture. (shrink)

Perhaps the greatest challenge to an existential phenomenological account of perception is that posed by the argument from illusions. Recent developments in research on the behaviour of subjects suffering from illusions together with some seminal ideas found in Merleau-Ponty''s writings enable us to develop and corroborate an account of the phenomenon of illusions, one, which unlike the empiricist account, does not undermine our conviction that in perception we reach the things themselves. The traditional argument from (...) illusions derives its force from an uncritical assumption that the process of experience takes place in time conceived as an infinite series of distinct moments. Once this assumption has been bracketed we are able to recognise the paradoxical truth that in the disillusion something can become that which it has always been and can cease to be that which it has never been. Furthermore, through a reflection on our experience of others overcoming their illusions, and on psychological evidence, we are able to show that there is nothing to suggest that this description of the disillusion is a description of a private or subjective event. (shrink)

Wegner (Wegner, D. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. MIT Press) argues that conscious will is an illusion, citing a wide range of empirical evidence. I shall begin by surveying some of his arguments. Many are unsuccessful. But one—an argument from the ubiquity of self-interpretation—is more promising. Yet is suffers from an obvious lacuna, offered by so-called ‘dual process’ theories of reasoning and decision making (Evans, J., & Over, D. (1996). Rationality and reasoning. Psychology Press; (...) Stanovich, K. (1999). Who is rational? Studies of individual differences in reasoning. Lawrence Erlbaum; Frankish, K. (2004). Mind and supermind. Cambridge University Press). I shall argue that this lacuna can be filled by a plausible a priori claim about the causal role of anything deserving to be called ‘a will.’ The result is that there is no such thing as conscious willing: conscious will is, indeed, an illusion. (shrink)

This study analyses how online participants of celebrity gossip position themselves in relation to their audience through forms of moral argumentation and thereby contribute to social hierarchies. In this study, forms of moral argumentation are seen as enthymemes, that is, claim-reason units based on moral norms as premises. The material consists of a total of 900 asynchronous online comments in English and 900 in Finnish. In addition to rhetorical argumentation analysis, the study investigates the dependency of moral argumentation on three (...) contextual variables: gendered violence as the topic of discussion, as the shared culture of participants and a media institution as the moderator of online discourse. Four forms of moral argumentation were found in the material: 1) theoretical, 2) practical, 3) categorical and 4) digital enthymeme. Theoretical, practical and categorical enthymemes are rhetorical in a traditional sense because they include the hierarchical idea of moral norms as the shared, more or less authoritarian, basis of a community. Digital enthymemes, conversely, are texts without clear borders or any notion of moral norms. Such arguments characterized especially user-generated, English-language discussions concerning female celebrities’ fights. This indicates that the digital enthymeme is particularly prevalent where there is a lack of obvious hierarchies in the context of argumentation. As this study argues, however, the seemingly non-hierarchical and individualistic participation through digital enthymemes is a mere illusion, for these enthymemes are based on crowd behaviour supportive of sexist and class-bound domination. (shrink)