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)

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)

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)

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).

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..

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)

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)

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 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)

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)

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)

: 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)

As far back as we know, there have been individuals incapacitated by memories that have filled them with sadness and remorse, fright and horror, or a sense of irreparable loss. Only recently, however, have people tormented with such recollections been diagnosed as suffering from "post-traumatic stress disorder." Here Allan Young traces this malady, particularly as it is suffered by Vietnam veterans, to its beginnings in the emergence of ideas about the unconscious mind and to earlier manifestations of traumatic memory (...) like shell shock or traumatic hysteria. In Young's view, PTSD is not a timeless or universal phenomenon newly discovered. Rather, it is a "harmony of illusions," a cultural product gradually put together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, and treated and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments mobilizing these efforts. This book is part history and part ethnography, and it includes a detailed account of everyday life in the treatment of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. To illustrate his points, Young presents a number of fascinating transcripts of the group therapy and diagnostic sessions that he observed firsthand over a period of two years. Through his comments and the transcripts themselves, the reader becomes familiar with the individual hospital personnel and clients and their struggle to make sense of life after a tragic war. One observes that everyone on the unit is heavily invested in the PTSD diagnosis: boundaries between therapist and patient are as unclear as were the distinctions between victim and victimizer in the jungles of Southeast Asia. (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)

The argument from reason states that if naturalism is true, then our beliefs are caused by physical processes rather than being causally based in their reasons, so our beliefs are not knowledge—including the belief in naturalism itself. Recent critics of the argument from reason provide dual process replies to the argument from reason—our beliefs can have both a naturalistic cause/ explanation and be caused/explained by its reasons, thereby showing that naturalism can accommodate knowledge. In (...) this paper I consider three dual process replies and conclude that none of them are successful. (shrink)

In C. S. Lewis’s Christian Apologetics: Pro and Con, I took the con in a debate with Victor Reppert about the soundness of Lewis’s famous “argument from reason.” Reppert then extended his argument in an article for Philosophia Christi; this article is my reply. I show that Reppert’s argument fails for three reasons. (1) It “loads the die” by falsely assuming that naturalism, by definition, can't include mental causation "on the basic level." (I provide multiple examples (...) of naturalist theories of mind that do exactly that). (2) Physical processes can reliably produce true beliefs. And (3) reasoning isn’t necessarily mental. (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)

Ordinary people tend to be realists regarding perceptual experience, that is, they take perceiving the environment as a direct, unmediated, straightforward access to a mindindependent reality. Not so for (ordinary) philosophers. The empiricist influence on the philosophy of perception, in analytic philosophy at least, made the problem of perception synonymous with the view that realism is untenable. Admitting the problem (and trying to offer a view on it) is tantamount to rejecting ordinary people’s implicit realist assumptions as naive. So what (...) exactly is the problem? We can approach it via one of the central arguments against realism – the argument from hallucination. The argument is intended as a proof that in ordinary, veridical cases of perception, perceivers do not have an unmediated perceptual access to the world. There are many versions of it; I propose the following1: 1. Hallucinations that are subjectively indistinguishable from veridical perceptions are possible. 2. If two subjective states are indistinguishable, then they have a common nature. 3. The contents of hallucinations are mental images, not concrete external objects. 4. Therefore, the contents of veridical perceptions are mental images rather than concrete external objects. The key move is, I believe, from the fact that hallucinations that are subjectively indistinguishable from cases of veridical perception are possible to an alleged common element, factor, or nature, in the form of a mental state, in the two cases – that is, premise 2. Disjunctivism, at its core, can be taken as simply denying this move, and arguing that all that follows from the premise stating the possibility of hallucinations that are subjectively indistinguishable from cases veridical perception is that there is a broader category, that of “experience as of...”, which encompasses both cases.. (shrink)

The argument from silence is a pattern of reasoning in which the failure of a known source to mention a particular fact or event is used as the ground of an inference, usually to the conclusion that the supposed fact is untrue or the supposed event did not actually happen. Such arguments are widely used in historical work, but they are also widely contested. This paper surveys some inadequate attempts to model this sort of argument, offers a (...) new analysis using a Bayesian probabilistic framework that isolates the most problematic step in such arguments, illustrates a key problem besetting many uses of the argument, diagnoses the attraction of the argument in terms of a known human cognitive bias affecting the critical step, and suggests a standard that must be met in order for any argument from silence to have more than a very weak influence on historical reasoning. (shrink)