10
Explanation in Good and Bad Experiential Cases
Abstract
Michael Martin aims to affirm a certain pattern of first-person thinking by advocating disjunctivism, a theory of perceptual experience that combines naive realism with the epistemic conception of hallucination. In this paper, I argue that we can affirm the pattern of thinking in question without the epistemic conception of hallucination. The first part of my paper explains the link that Martin draws between the first-person thinking and the epistemic conception of hallucination. The second part of my paper explains how we can achieve Martin’s ambition without Martin’s theory. One resource that I enlist for this purpose is a naive-realist-friendly conception of first-person access to experience. The metaphysical theory that I enlist is a form of naive realism that endorses an intentionalist or representationalist “common-factor” approach to veridical and hallucinatory experience. The third part of my paper briefly develops this theory.
One main challenge in the philosophy of perception is to reconcile our apparent contact with the world in successful cases of perception with the possibility of exactly matching perceptual errors. The latter cases are experiential cases that do not involve contact with the world, but are exactly like successful experiential cases in some subjectively salient way. An increasingly prominent position on this problem is Michael Martin’s disjunctivist form of naive realism. In this paper, I pursue a particular set of issues that Martin’s work brings to our attention.
If we look at Martin’s papers (2004, 2006), and at the papers that engage Martin’s work, we find support for two not necessarily consistent theoretical ambitions. We find support for the claim that
(1) Theories ought to affirm a certain pattern of first-person (or introspective) pretheoretic thinking about experience.1,2
Support for this claim is strongest in Martin’s work. In the recent debate, we also find support for the following claim:
(2) Theories ought to avoid the epistemic conception of hallucination (ECH).
Support for this claim is strongest in the critical reaction to Martin’s work.3 I define the epistemic conception of hallucination in section 1.
Notably, Martin brings the epistemic conception of hallucination onto the table by arguing that we can affirm the first-person thinking about experience only if we accept the epistemic conception of hallucination. Martin’s overall theory of perceptual experience is built on this argument. Martin advocates naive realism about veridical experience and endorses the epistemic conception of hallucination. This is Martin’s “disjunctivism,” which he offers as a theory that affirms the relevant pattern of first-person thinking, and a theory that, as a necessary part of this affirmation, endorses the epistemic conception of hallucination.
But if the epistemic conception of hallucination is a necessary component of affirmation of the first-person thinking about experience, then the recent debate suggests that this pattern of thinking is in trouble. This is a philosophical predicament with a familiar structure. As a way out of this predicament, we could reject ambition (1) and accept that the first-person thinking in question is flawed. Another option is to oppose ambition (2) by defending the epistemic conception of hallucination. But for my part, I find both of these theoretical ambitions to be compelling. For reasons that I won’t be able to elaborate, I find the first-person thinking very attractive, and I believe that the ECH is problematic. My plan in this essay, then, is to challenge Martin’s sense of the ECH’s connection to the first-person thinking. I contend, against Martin, that we can validate the first-person thinking without the epistemic conception of hallucination. We do need naive realism for this validation; here I agree with Martin. But we don’t need the epistemic conception of hallucination.
These claims are somewhat, but not exactly, parallel to an idea that is becoming widely recognized. An idea with an increasing presence on the radar screen is that one can endorse the naive realist view of veridical experience without accepting the epistemic conception of hallucination (Pautz, 2007; Byrne & Logue, 2008; Sturgeon, 2008). Naive realism is compatible with a common-factor approach to veridical experience and hallucination. This idea is correct, but it has only a limited contextual payoff. For an important theme in Martin’s work is that not all forms of naive realism are able to affirm the first-person thinking identified in ambition (1). Martin thinks that only ECH-endorsing versions of naive realism can meet ambition (1). The increasingly recognized idea does not challenge this part of Martin’s position. In addition, I do not think that current work contains the resources to make this challenge. My paper is meant to address this gap.
I defend a common-factor, non-ECH version of naive realism with the specific aim of validating the first-person thinking that Martin identifies. I aim to satisfy Martin’s precise ambition without adopting Martin’s precise theory. If the epistemic conception of hallucination is indeed problematic, my effort will put naive realism, and the first-person thinking that it sponsors, in a dialectically stronger place.
In sections 1–4 of this paper, I explain the link that Martin draws between the first-person thinking and the epistemic conception of hallucination. Since other writers have been puzzled by this part of Martin’s work (Byrne & Logue, 2008, 86–87), I will take a careful look at it. In sections 5–7, I explain how we can affirm the first-person thinking without the epistemic conception of hallucination. One resource that I enlist for this purpose is a naive-realist-friendly conception of first-person access to experience. The metaphysical theory that I enlist is a form of naive realism that endorses an intentionalist or representationalist common-factor approach to veridical and hallucinatory experience. In section 8, I briefly develop this theory.
By way of a preview, I accept the letter of traditional common-factor theories while rejecting their spirit. Veridical experience and hallucination share common, object-independent properties. But these properties are not the only objects of first-person awareness of veridical experience (sec. 6). And the common properties do not exhaust, or even harmonically align with, the fundamental structure of veridical experience (sec. 8).
Here are some key terms. Naive realists and their opponents distinguish between veridical experiences, on the one hand, and perfectly matching hallucinations, on the other. The former experiences are successful cases of seeing a public object, and the latter experiences are hallucinations that match veridical experiences in a subjectively salient way. It is not clear that the nature of this matching can be specified in noncontroversial fashion. But the basic contrast is familiar. Marking the same contrast, I will also speak of Good experiences and Bad experiences, and more generally of Good and Bad experience.4
Another important notion in this paper is that of an object-dependent proposition. A proposition p is object-dependent with respect to object O just in case p is a proposition involving O such that the truth value of p with respect to any possible world depends solely on how things stand with O at that world.5 Object-dependent propositions contrast with general propositions. General propositions are propositions that are not object dependent with respect to any object. General propositions can determine particular properties, locations, and times, but not particular objects. Sometimes general propositions are called “abstract” propositions, but I will stick with the “general proposition” terminology.
I will use some related terminology. Object-dependent judgments and thoughts are judgments and thoughts whose contents are object-dependent propositions. Object-independent judgments and thoughts are judgments and thoughts whose contents are general propositions. Object-involving properties are properties whose real nature is at least partly defined in terms of particular objects. For instance, the property of being Barack Obama’s best friend is an object-involving property. By contrast, object-independent properties are properties whose nature is independent of particular objects.
Two more distinctions are as follows. First, we can model a lot of work in the philosophy of perception in terms of a distinction between “surface-level” features of experience and “structure-level” properties of experience. For present purposes, the surface-level features of experience include the phenomenal character of experience, and the apparent capacity of experience to justify beliefs about the external world. Philosophers of perception want to explain the surface-level features of experience. These philosophers invoke structure-level properties of experience to explain the surface-level features of experience. Different theories of the nature of experience posit different structure-level properties of experience.
The second distinction marks a subdivision within the first. Although the notion of a structure-level property will take us a long way, in section 8, I distinguish between “jointlike” structure-level properties of experience, and structure-level properties that lack this honorific. Jointlike properties constitute the fundamental structure of experience, and non-jointlike properties stand in a more attenuated relationship to this structure.
Martin’s work focuses us on the relationship between naive realism and the epistemic conception of hallucination (ECH). In this section, I define these positions. Here is a simple, familiar statement of naive realism:
(NR) In a case of a subject S accurately seeing an object O, S’s visual experience (his conscious, subjective experiential state) consists in a relation of awareness to O and O’s perceptible properties. The experience has a world-involving nature in that an external item is part of its structure. The relational nature of S’s experience has modal consequences. Since O is a part of the structure of S’s experience, S could not have that experience unless he were seeing O.
Perspectival aspects of perception might make trouble for the theory as stated.6 But the present paper puts this issue on the sidelines. In this paper I develop the core naive realist ideas in the context set out by Martin’s work.
Turning to the epistemic conception of hallucination, in some parts of Martin’s papers, he insists that the ECH applies only to hallucinations that have the same immediate causal antecedents as veridical perceptions (2004, 71, 73). In these passages, Martin presents the ECH as a narrowly tailored response to the causal argument from hallucination.7 But in other passages, he suggests that the explanatory problem to which ECH responds is at least somewhat independent of any issues raised by the causal argument from hallucination (2006, 368, 370). Although I will appeal to the causal argument at certain points, I think that Martin is correct that the motivation for ECH has greater generality. In this spirit, I take Martin’s ECH to apply to a broader category of hallucinations. Roughly, these are matching hallucinations or Bad experiences. My version of Martin speaks of matching hallucinations as follows:
The only mental properties that such events possess are those of being indiscriminable from veridical perceptions and any properties which follow from their being so indiscriminable. (2004, 71)
When it comes to a mental characterisation of the hallucinatory experience, nothing more can be said than the relational and epistemological claim that it is indiscriminable from the perception. (2004, 72)
On the basis of these quotations, we can introduce the epistemic conception of hallucination:
(ECH) The only mental properties possessed by matching hallucinations are properties of being indiscriminable from veridical perceptions. The mental nature of matching hallucinations is epistemic and, moreover, definable only in terms of relations to veridical perception.
As I said in the introduction, Martin argues that philosophical affirmations of a certain pattern of first-person, pretheoretic thinking must endorse ECH. This was a “no-warm-up” introduction to Martin’s view. For present purposes, however, I want to back up a few steps and work with a more coarse-grained statement of Martin’s view. The more coarse-grained statement is simply that naive realists must endorse ECH. As we pursue this idea, at a certain point we will need to bring in the first-person thinking to keep contact with Martin’s position. But we begin with the more coarse-grained claim that naive realists must endorse ECH.
To evaluate the coarse-grained claim, we need to look at an example departure from ECH, and at the problems for naive realism that this departure raises.
Our example departure involves what I’ll call the “common-factor general intentionalist” approach to visual experience.8 I begin with a background point on the content of experience. I see the content of experience as a potential explanatory resource. According to this “explanatory” conception of perceptual content, the content of an experience is a proposition that is associated with the experience in a privileged way. This close association allows the content of experience to function as an explanatory resource. The association that I’m indicating between a proposition and an experience need not take the form of visual awareness. Someone who accepts the explanatory conception of the content of experience need not claim that we are visually aware of propositions. A proponent can simply insist that the content of an experience is associated with the experience in some other way. What is essential to the explanatory conception is that the propositional content of experience can be used to explain other features of experience.
Keeping contact with other terminology, the explanatory conception of the content of experience sees an experience’s possession of content as a structure-level property of the experience.9
Common-factor general intentionalists analyze visual experience in terms of the content of experience. They say that the structure of both veridical and hallucinatory experience consists in a relation to a general proposition. (For my definition of general propositions, see the introduction of this chapter.) The general-intentionalist account of hallucination opposes the epistemic conception of hallucination (ECH) by claiming that hallucinations have a nonepistemic structure-level property, the possession of general content. I will work with a form of common-factor general intentionalism that says that the contents of experience are existential propositions. By way of simple illustration, suppose that a subject has an experience as of something red and round. According to “existential” general intentionalism, the content of the subject’s experience is a proposition of the form ∃x(x is red and round and at location L). Accepting the explanatory conception of the content of experience, the general intentionalist seeks to explain surface-level features of visual experience in terms of its possession of general propositional content.
Let’s pursue the general intentionalist’s explanatory ambitions, starting with hallucinations. Martin (2004, 61) describes some surface-level features of hallucinations as follows:
• “Hallucinations no less than perceptions are liable to coerce our beliefs and move us to action.”
• Hallucinations provide some type of epistemic justification (or rational support) for beliefs about one’s immediate environment.
• In addition, “reflection on experience or introspection of it [in hallucination] is likely to lead to much the same judgments [as those that we make when perceiving] about how things are with the subject: that it looks to him or her as if there is a lavender bush there.”
I will assume that general intentionalism can provide fully adequate explanations of these phenomena. As Martin indicates in the just-quoted passages, veridical experiences have many of the same features that attach to hallucinations. Like hallucinations, veridical experiences coerce our beliefs and move us to action, they justify beliefs about our environment, and they also prompt specific judgments about how things look to us. Martin’s discussion calls our attention to a class of features that I will refer to as the Common Phenomena. These features are features of typical veridical experiences and typical matching hallucinations. For present purposes, I assume that a common feature does not vary in nature or profile according to whether it occurs in Good or Bad experience. The Common Phenomena include, but are not necessarily limited to, the features mentioned in the last few paragraphs.
If we accept common-factor general intentionalism, we can explain the existence of the Common Phenomena in terms of the common structure-level properties that common-factor general intentionalism introduces. This explanatory opportunity is one reason to accept common-factor theories of experience. In addition, the idea that Good and Bad experiences have common, structure-level properties may be forced on us by the causal argument from hallucination. This prospect is a motivating concern in Martin (2004). With the causal argument from hallucination in the vicinity, we should explore whether naive realism is compatible with the existence of common, structure-level properties, and common-factor general intentionalism allows us to do that.
However, picking up with our examination of Martin, he correctly notes that the introduction of common, structure-level properties of experience is worrisome from a naive realist perspective (2004, 46). To elaborate the worry, let’s temporarily assume that common-factor general intentionalism is correct. Let’s also distinguish between the surface-level features present in Good experience, the surface-level features present in Bad experience, and the surface-level features present in both Good and Bad experience. This distinction gives us three potentially overlapping sets of phenomena:
• The Good Phenomena
• The Bad Phenomena
• The Common Phenomena
Finally, assume for illustrative purposes that
(GP = CP) the Good Phenomena = the Common Phenomena
If (GP = CP) is right, and if common general content provides an adequate explanation of the Common Phenomena, then the naive realist claims about veridical experience do not perform any distinctive explanatory work. The naive realist wants to explain the Good phenomena in terms of the relational link to objects that is at the heart of the naive account of Good experience. But if GP = CP, and Good experience shares a structure-level property with Bad experience (e.g., general content), then the intended naive explanation of Good Phenomena is superfluous. Under current assumptions, we can explain all phenomena present in Good experience in terms of the structure-level property that such experience shares with Bad experience. Thus we can explain all phenomena present in Good experience without invoking the structural properties posited by naive realism. In this way, our current assumptions seem to leave the naive account of Good experience without any motivation. For the naive theorist cannot point to any aspect of Good experience that he can explain, and that his common-factor opponents cannot explain. In fact, Martin argues, common-factor elements may offer better explanations of the Common Phenomena, since these items occur together in a wider variety of cases (2004, 62).
If GP = CP, then well-chosen common structure-level properties make redundant any naive properties of experience. It appears, then, that the naive realist must either (i) reject the idea that the Good Phenomena = the Common Phenomena or (ii) reject the idea that Good experience shares a structure-level property with Bad experience. In his argument for the claim that naive realists must endorse ECH, Martin examines efforts in each direction.
Consider the effect of rejecting (GP = CP). If some Good Phenomena are not Common Phenomena, then the naive realist can argue that his account of Good experience is the best explanation of the distinctively Good Phenomena. Martin (2004, pp. 63–64) considers two arguments of this type. First, if Good experience enables us to have object-dependent beliefs about our environment, and Bad experience does not, the naive realist can argue that his account provides the best explanation of the distinctive Good capacity to ground the phenomenon of object-dependent belief. Second, a related suggestion says that perceptually based intentions to act are object dependent, too. You perceive some books on a shelf, and you decide to pick that book up. Your intention is partly individuated by the perceived book itself and could not be formed on the basis of a hallucination. Again, the naive realist can argue that he offers the best explanation of the distinctive capacity of Good experience to ground object-dependent intentions.
These responses look like promising attempts to demonstrate that the naive realist account of Good experience has explanatory virtues that its opponents cannot claim. But Martin argues that these responses are not dialectically sufficient, in that even after they have been made, the naive realist is still in a bad place. Martin’s comments at this point introduce the issues that I will pursue in the rest of this paper, so it’s worth quoting these comments in full.
With these two responses one can at least rebut the challenge that the disjunctivist’s conception of sensory experience is guaranteed to be explanatorily redundant. But they are not sufficient to lay the worries raised here to rest. For the responses block the conclusion through finding some implicitly or explicitly relational facts which are not in common between the two situations. This strategy does not address the question whether there are any common properties to the two situations which are distinctive of the subject’s conscious perspective on the world. Nor yet the question whether, if there are any, why they can only be explained by what is common to perception and hallucination rather than what is distinctive of perception.
It would be a severe limitation on the disjunctivist’s commitment to Naive Realism if the Naive Realist aspects of perception could not themselves shape the contours of the subject’s conscious experience. Yet this aim would be frustrated if we rested with the above responses, since so far no reason has been offered to show why we must think of the fabric of consciousness as relational, and as not common to perception and hallucination. (Martin, 2004, 64)
My somewhat simplified interpretation of this passage takes it to introduce a certain subject matter, to ask a question about this subject matter, and to voice a view about the question’s implications. Following other writers on Martin (Byrne & Logue, 2008, 86), I suggest that the subject matter in question is the phenomenal character of experience. The question that Martin introduces is whether the phenomenal character of experience, perhaps of all types of experience, can be explained in terms of the naive realist account of Good experience. And the view about this question’s import is that if the answer is no, then this is a big setback for the naive realist project. (On these points, see also Martin, 2004, 59.)
Against this background, it appears that Martin’s problem with the earlier proposals concerning object dependence is that they do not obviously motivate a naive realist explanation of the phenomenal character of experience. As a result, these proposals do not obviously avoid the (not yet elaborated) setback that Martin envisions, and in this way they leave the naive realist project in a precarious position.
A naive realist explanation of phenomenal character says, at a minimum, something like the following:
Good [or veridical] character derives from bits of the physical world standing in an explanatorily basic relation to percipients. (Sturgeon, 2008, 116)
This naive realist explanation of phenomenal character is limited to the phenomenal character of Good experience. Martin’s disjunctivism grounds the phenomenal character of all types of experience in the perception of objects, or in epistemic links to such perception. But for the present, we can continue our discussion in terms of the more limited naive realist explanation of phenomenal character that Sturgeon describes. I turn now to Martin’s view of the dialectical effect of this explanation. What, from a naive realist point of view, is so great about this explanation? Some other writers on Martin have had trouble with this part of his discussion (see Byrne & Logue, 2008, 86–87).
The sought-after explanation of phenomenal character must establish the viability of some important component of the naive realist project. We have reason to think that the component in question is not the basic naive realist idea that in a Good case, one’s experience involves the perceived object as a constituent. In the above quotation, Martin concedes that the earlier claims about object-dependent belief and intention could provide support for the basic naive realist idea. At this stage in our discussion, then, the basic naive idea is not without sponsors. So it appears that the payoff in a naive realist explanation of phenomenal character has to do with some other aspect of the broad naive realist milieu.
This appearance prompts two questions. First, what is this other aspect of the naive realist milieu? Second, why does the viability of this aspect depend on a naive realist explanation of phenomenal character? In the rest of this section, I pursue the first question. The next section takes up the second question.
I suggest that the target element is a project that is set up by Martin’s introduction of naive realism as a view with strong connections to first-person thinking about experience. Here is one relevant quotation from Martin’s work:
We should think of Naive Realism as the best articulation of how our experiences strike us as being to introspective reflection on them. (2004, 42; see also 2006, 354)
This quotation suggests that there is a philosophically salient line of thinking that begins with introspective reflection on one’s experience and ends with a conception of experience with strong affinities to naive realism. It will be helpful to imagine a subject who introspects his experiences, reflects on these experiences, and, on the basis of this, adopts a conception of experience that is close to naive realism. I will refer to this schematic pattern as the first-person line of thinking.10
In his work, Martin wants to validate this line of thinking (2006, 354–355). I take it that Martin wants to validate this line of thinking in a strong sense. The idea is not simply to make the subject’s transition to a naive style view appear rational or explicable. The intended outcome of Martin’s work on naive realism is that this first-person line of thinking about experience is deeply right.
Why is this a desirable outcome? First, assume that the subject in question turns to the topic of his experiences with an interest in describing them accurately. As he reflects on his experiences, our subject produces what he regards as an accurate description of his experience. On the basis of this description, the subject adopts a conception of experience with strong affinities to naive realism. Following the quotation from Martin, the somewhat technical naive realist theory of experience articulates this conception.
Turning to the payoff, the preceding sketch suggests that the naive realist may be able to make an appealing phenomenological argument for his view. The naive realist may be able to claim that his theory of Good experience is the most descriptively accurate theory of Good experience, where such accuracy is assessed from the first-person perspective.
Part of Martin’s interest in the first-person line of thinking is that he wants to be able to make a phenomenological argument for naive realism (Martin, 2002). Furthermore, I suggest that his interest in phenomenological support is connected, tightly, to his conception of naive realism as a view about the nature of experiential subjectivity. (Compare the long passage from Martin quoted earlier in this section.) Martin’s conception of naive realism is presumably partly defined by the type of evidence that he takes to be available for the theory. And I suggest that his ambitions regarding subjectivity are compromised if first-person support for naive realism cannot be found. If this suggestion is on the right track, then it’s important for Martin that a phenomenological argument for naive realism be available.
A second source of interest in the first-person thinking is that Martin believes it has close connections with pretheoretic common sense. Most prominently in his (2006, 354–355), Martin claims that a pro-naive conception of experience is part of our everyday outlook. We think that we know specific and general facts about the spatiotemporal world. Martin claims that we also have a tacit sense of how we are able to know these facts. According to Martin, this tacit epistemological commitment incorporates a pro-naive conception of experience. If the latter conception turns out to be faulty, this could lead to a fairly serious form of skepticism, because we would have to accept that we don’t have the kind of contact with the world that we thought we had. Martin wants to avoid this skeptical outcome by defending the first-person line of thinking.
In the last section, I described the reasons why Martin takes the pro-naive thinking seriously. Now we need to examine why Martin ties the credibility of this pattern of thinking to a certain possible explanation of the phenomenal character of experience.
Martin writes: “Many have supposed that what we mean by the phenomenal character of an experience is just that aspect of it which is introspectible” (2006, 366–367). According to this suggestion, introspective awareness of one’s experience is first-person awareness of the phenomenal character of the experience. Applying this suggestion, when our protagonist first-person subject introspects his experience, he is aware of its phenomenal character. The subject’s conception of experience is based on this first-person awareness of phenomenal character.
If we understand our first-person subject in the preceding terms, I think the only way to fully vindicate the subject’s transition to a pro-naive view is to claim that the phenomenal character of his experiences is grounded in the structure that naive realists attribute to Good experience. On this model, the phenomenal character of Good experience is a reflection of the structure of experience, and our subject accurately picks up on this structure via his awareness of phenomenal character.
At this point, we are not far from the epistemic conception of hallucination, for Martin thinks that naive realists cannot workably make the preceding claims about the phenomenal character of Good experience if they do not adopt the ECH.
Let’s remind ourselves about what it takes to reject ECH. We reject ECH if we hold that hallucinations have nonepistemic structure-level properties. The general-intentionalist approach to hallucination is one of many possible non-ECH views.
One theme of Martin’s work is that if you claim that hallucinations have nonepistemic structure-level properties, it will be very hard for you to avoid accepting that veridical experiences also have such properties. The causal argument from hallucination, and the explanatory appeal of a common-factor view, both promote this sort of “mission creep” (my term, adapted from U.S. foreign affairs). I will assume that mission creep, from hallucination over to veridical experience, results from rejection of ECH. So let’s consider a form of naive realism that accepts the common-factor, general-intentionalist theory from earlier sections. This form of naive realism says that hallucinations have a nonepistemic, structure-level property, the possession of general content, and accepts that veridical experiences have this property as well.
According to Martin, this form of naive realism faces the explanatory “screening off” problem from earlier sections (2004, 70–71). Since we have already examined some other ways for the naive realist to address this problem, Martin’s specific concern at this point is that the presence of a common, structure-level property undermines the naive realist’s ambitions to ground the phenomenal character of Good experience in the structural elements that are present in Good experience alone. Once a common structure-level property is in hand, we can put it to work in our explanations of the phenomenal character of experience. We can say that the phenomenal character of both Good and Bad experience is grounded in the experiential representation of general propositional contents. With general content present in Good experience, and obviously up to the job of explaining phenomenal character (as it does in Bad experience), any distinctively naive explanation of the phenomenal character of Good experience will seem superfluous.
Within Martin’s narrative, the idea that hallucinations have “positive” properties turns out to be inimical to the naive realist project. If you say that hallucinations have such properties, then the properties of hallucination that you identify attach to veridical experience via mission creep. So situated, the properties in question allow us to explain the phenomenal character of veridical experience, in a way that compromises naive realist attempts to vindicate the first-person thinking that is congenial to the naive theory of Good experience.
We can generate the preceding problem simply by claiming that hallucinations have positive structure-level properties. Accordingly we can avoid the preceding problem only by adopting the epistemic conception of hallucination. Here again is my statement of the epistemic conception of hallucination:
(ECH) The only mental properties possessed by matching hallucinations are properties of being indiscriminable from veridical perceptions. The mental nature of matching hallucinations is epistemic and, moreover, definable only in terms of relations to veridical perception.
Martin’s epistemic conception of hallucination does say that Good and Bad experiences share common structure-level properties. The properties in question are properties of being indiscriminable from veridical perceptions. A token veridical experience will have the property of being indiscriminable from a veridical experience, namely, itself. However, at least according to Martin, the veridical experience’s possession of the property of being indiscriminable from itself does not threaten the explanatory potential of the distinctive structural properties that naive realists attribute to this and other veridical experiences (2004, 68–70).
In section 2, I introduced an explanatory problem for naive realists. I said that to deal with this problem, the naive realist must either (i) reject the idea that the Good Phenomena = the Common Phenomena or (ii) reject the idea that Good experience shares a structure-level property with Bad experience. In section 3, we looked at some attempts to develop idea (i). Martin rejected these attempts because they did not speak to the viability of our first-person thinking about experience. According to Martin, the only way to vindicate this thinking in the face of the explanatory problem is to develop response (ii) along the lines of ECH.
Having introduced Martin’s overall theory of experience, I want to question whether a defense of the first-person thinking must really take this course. With numerous objections to ECH on the table,11 it is far from clear that Martin has provided a rescue for the first-person thinking. In fact, the materials present in the current literature suggest that this thinking is seriously flawed. For it’s easy to see the problems for ECH as problems that fall back on the set of ideas that allegedly motivates this approach to hallucination.
In the rest of this paper, I want to counteract these impressions. Since a large number of ideas are in play in our discussion, I emphasize that, like Martin, I’m interested in defending a form of naive realism that aims to vindicate a certain pattern of first-person thinking about experience. Unlike Martin, however, I believe we can vindicate this pattern of thinking without the epistemic conception of hallucination.
Full affirmation of the first-person thinking goes beyond the claim that its conception of the structure of veridical experience is correct. Someone who defends naive realism on the section 3 grounds concerning object-dependent belief can make this claim. But this claim on its own does not engage the full content of the first-person thinking about experience. By contrast, someone who aims for full affirmation of this thinking specifically describes its first-person transition to naive realism as absolutely on the right track.
My problem with Martin’s affirmative story is the central role that it assigns to phenomenal character. As far as I can tell, phenomenal character’s place of prominence stems from a link that Martin makes between introspection and phenomenal character. If we reject this link, we can affirm the first-person thinking in question without adopting the epistemic conception of hallucination. In this section, I identify Martin’s link between introspection and phenomenal character, and I take some steps away from it.
Let’s go back to an earlier quotation from Martin: “Many have supposed that what we mean by the phenomenal character of an experience is just that aspect of it which is introspectible” (2006, 366–367). We can spell out this conception of phenomenal character with the following principle:
(ID) The phenomenal character of experience is the dimension of experience that is accessible to introspection.
A preliminary point about (ID) is that the notion of introspection (“inner looking”) is not friendly to naive realism’s externalist, relational conception of Good experience. We need a more neutral term for the distinctive types of self-knowledge that are traditionally of interest to philosophers, and for the distinctive methods that we use to achieve this knowledge. Instead of “introspection,” I have been writing in terms of “first-person awareness.” Here is an appropriately modified statement of (ID).
(ID*) The phenomenal character of experience is the dimension of experience that is accessible to first-person awareness.
Although it is hard to find explicit affirmation of (ID*) in recent literature, this difficulty may be a sign of wide consensus. However, the naive realist should be wary about the centrality that (ID*) assigns to phenomenal character. The concept of phenomenal character is not sensitive to differences that the naive realist regards as vital. Suppose that a subject sees a book (call this book “O”) on his shelf. Rehearsing some familiar points about phenomenal character, David Chalmers writes:
On the face of it, there might be an experience with the same phenomenal character as the original experience, directed at a quite different object O’ (perhaps an experience I could have when looking at a different copy of the same book, for example). And plausibly, there might be an experience with the same phenomenal character as the original experience, directed at no objet at all (a hallucinatory experience, for example). (Chalmers, 2006, 53)
I believe, and will assume, that Chalmers’s claims about sameness of phenomenal character across different experiences partly define our concept of phenomenal character. On the (further) assumption that the concept accurately reflects the property, this property is a property of experience that is indifferent to the type of perceptual particularity emphasized by naive realists. With these assumptions in place, it’s unwise for naive realists to accept that this property is the sole object of our first-person awareness of experience.
Martin, of course, shares this concern. However, his reaction to it is to keep (ID*) and to reject the conception of phenomenal character that Chalmers describes. According to Martin, veridical experience and hallucination differ in phenomenal character, even in cases where the hallucination is indiscriminable from the veridical experience. The veridical experience has object-involving phenomenal character, and the hallucinatory experience does not (2006, 366–369). As a part of his advocacy of naive realism, Martin recommends reform of our concept of phenomenal character.
But reform of this sort is difficult. The opposing conception of phenomenal character is deeply embedded. Chalmers writes:
It seems that even in Eden, there could be two phenomenally identical experiences of different objects. (Chalmers, 2006, 108)
Chalmers’s Eden is a world in which we enjoy perfect perceptual contact with items in our environment. No one hallucinates in Eden itself. However, worlds can approximate Eden to greater or lesser degrees (Chalmers, 2006, 78–79). And in lesser but still highly Edenic worlds, subjects can have hallucinations with the same phenomenal character as veridical perceptions (ibid.).
Chalmers’s language may be idiosyncratic, but his views about phenomenal character are not. The robust prevailing convention is that phenomenal character is not an object-friendly notion. For this reason, Martin’s way of handling this notion is ill-advised.
A better way forward for the naive realist is to challenge principle (ID*).
(ID*) The phenomenal character of experience is the dimension of experience that is accessible to first-person awareness.
(ID*) says that first-person awareness of experience is first-person awareness of phenomenal character. In our context, in which the Chalmers-type view of phenomenal character is well established, (ID*) wields a big stick. Packaged with the conventional view of phenomenal character, (ID*) says that even if naive realism is true, we have no first-person access to the relational, object-involving elements of veridical experience. This package swiftly discredits the first-person thinking of interest to naive realists like Martin and myself.
But on the upside, (ID*) has the look of a stipulation. The principle may not have much substantial backing. I think (ID*) is the proper point of naive realist attack.
I will assume that phenomenal character is a property of experience that is not object involving. But I will outline a form of naive realism that works around this assumption, that works around phenomenal character so conceived.12 My first step in this is to develop an account of the first-person thinking from section 3 that does not assign phenomenal character a central role. In the rest of this section, I will try to get some distance between the first-person line of thinking and the notion of phenomenal character. In the next section, I will argue that despite this distance from phenomenal character, the first-person line of thinking is just that: a genuine instance of first-person thinking. This argument works against principle (ID*). I won’t try to establish that principle (ID*) is false, but I will try to indicate that opposition to this principle is viable.
I will rely on two ideas from the recent discussion of the transparency of experience. My argument against (ID*) is conditional on their acceptance. Participants in the transparency debate agree on some important points. Two main participants are representationalists and qualia theorists. I suggest that these theorists increasingly agree on the following claims:
(Anti) The inner sense theory of first-person awareness of experience is incorrect.
(By) A subject attends to the phenomenal character of his experience by attending to the objects and properties represented (or presented) to him in his experience.
Representationalists tend to accept both claims (see Tye, 2000). Many qualia theorists accept (Anti).13 In addition, many qualia theorists accept (By) or ideas very much like it.14 Tending to accept the ideas themselves, representationalists and qualia theorists disagree about the implications of (Anti) and (By). The emerging question in the representationalist/qualia discussion is not whether (Anti) and (By) are true but what they show about our awareness of intrinsic qualities of experience.
I will pursue a different set of implications of (Anti) and (By). Turning to some preliminary points, many writers on transparency and other topics make a distinction between attention and what we can call mere awareness.15 Mere awareness of item X is awareness of X that falls short of the levels of focus that we associate with attention to X. Principle (By) is a thesis about the mechanics of first-person attention to phenomenal character. One effect of this restriction is that someone could accept (By) and maintain that we also have or can have mere awareness of phenomenal character that has a different basis (cf. Nida-Rümelin, 2007).
Attention and mere awareness are two species of awareness. I see principle (Anti) as applying to both types of awareness. A consequence of (Anti) is that awareness of experience takes the form of thought, belief, or knowledgeable belief about experience (cf. Tye, 2000; Stoljar, 2004). Our awareness of experience does not take the form of inner sensing, nor is such awareness based on inner sensing. Turning to principle (By), this principle claims that first-person attentive knowledge of phenomenal character is based on normal, “outer” perceptual attention to the objects and properties presented in one’s experience.
To examine the pro-naive first-person thinking, I will introduce a specific hypothetical first-person subject. Suppose that Patrick sees a brown dog in his backyard. Patrick has the concept of experience, and he is currently disposed to attend to his experiential situation. Patrick believes that he sees the dog. Attempting to describe this situation, Patrick considers several descriptions and finds them inapposite. But Patrick settles on the following description:
(J) That dog is just directly presented to me.16
On the basis of this judgment and other similar judgments made over time, Patrick comes to accept something like the naive realist view of veridical experience.
Consider a continuum of conceptual sophistication on which the familiar “common man” occupies his traditional unassuming spot, and the familiar philosophical figure resides much higher. I see Patrick as falling between these two paradigms. My example credits Patrick with an interest in his perceptual experiences, and with a modest stock of modest phenomenological concepts, including the concept of direct presence. My example does not credit Patrick with command of the concepts involved in the naive realist account of Good experience. We don’t need to suppose that he is aware of other theories of experience, either. At the end of his deliberation, Patrick does not accept naive realism. He adopts a conception of experience that has strong affinities to naive realism but perhaps does not match the explicitness and technical dimension of the latter theory. For these reasons, although Patrick is engaged in a somewhat sophisticated form of first-person deliberation, his reflection also has a genuine pretheoretic character.
In the example, Patrick implements a procedure that is similar to the procedure described in (By). The similarities will be important in the next section, but here I want to emphasize the differences between Patrick’s pattern of thinking and the pattern indicated in (By). Patrick does not form a belief that contains a phenomenal-character concept as a constituent. Furthermore, although (J) represents Patrick’s attempt to describe his experiential situation, (J) is not well regarded as a description of the phenomenal character of his experience. (J) tells us about the experiential presence of the dog. In this way, (J) tells us about something object involving. As noted, however, the phenomenal character of Patrick’s experience is not an object-involving property of this experience. Patrick, then, is talking about something else. We don’t respect Patrick’s view of what is salient if we take (J) to be a description of the phenomenal character of his experience.
Even if (J) does not describe the phenomenal character of Patrick’s experience, one might argue that this belief is nonetheless based on Patrick’s awareness of the phenomenal character of his experience. According to (Anti), awareness of phenomenal character does not take the form of inner perception of the phenomenal properties of one’s experience. Rather, awareness of phenomenal-character properties is cognitive, taking the form of thought or belief about these properties. So the current proposal is that Patrick’s belief (J) is based on a psychologically prior belief about the phenomenal character of his experience. Assuming that Patrick has a belief about the phenomenal character of his experience, this proposal makes a claim about this belief’s specific psychological role.
The idea that our perceptual beliefs about dogs and other worldly objects are based on beliefs about object-independent phenomenal properties is no longer popular. And I don’t think any features of Patrick make this idea specially applicable to his case. Here is an alternative account of Patrick’s pattern of thought. Patrick perceptually attends to the dog and forms the belief I see that dog. (Call this the “seeing belief.”) We can take Patrick’s deliberation to involve only his seeing belief and his commitment to (J) itself. Patrick’s deliberation is guided by his self-aware perception of the dog. His deliberation consists in his coming to believe (J) with increasing explicitness and conviction. As noted, in the course of this deliberation, other descriptions of his experiential situation seem inapposite to Patrick. But we can see this seeming as a manifestation of the beliefs we have already introduced.
While Patrick perceptually attends to the dog, he may be merely aware, in a belief-like way, of the object-independent phenomenal character of his experience. But I suggest that this belief need not and does not play a central role in Patrick’s acceptance of (J) and ensuing acceptance of a pro-naive view of experience.
In the last section, I argued that judgment (J) does not express a belief about phenomenal character, and (J) is not based on a belief about phenomenal character. Someone might accept these points and argue that, in our context, they are actually disqualifying. This objection says that since (J) is a perceptually anchored, object-dependent belief about a certain dog in the external world, (J) is not a properly first-person judgment. For this reason, (J) can’t be part of the first-person thinking about experience of interest to naive realists like Martin and myself.
This objection can be filled out in various ways. Perhaps (J) is not the product of properly first-person capacities, or perhaps (J) is not made on properly first-person grounds. According to this objection, (J) might not fit with the notion of phenomenal character, but it can’t be part of a first-person line of thought either.
Rather than respond specifically to this objection, I will use it as a stepping-stone to a related larger issue. The objection highlights the fact that naive realism and its opponents have different conceptions of first-person access to experience. Naive realists claim that we can have first-person awareness of object-involving facts (Martin, 2004, 65). Their opponents deny this (cf. Stoljar, 2004, 381–382). Both stances fit tightly with the corresponding views about the nature of experience. Focusing on the naive realist’s expansion of first-person access, we can see this expansion as an almost mandatory corollary of the naive conception of the nature of Good experience. There wouldn’t be much point to a relational theory of Good experience if we couldn’t have first-person access to the theory’s distinctive relational elements. Accordingly we should expect the naive realist to press for expansion of first-person access.
The local obstacles to this expansion are the object-independent conception of phenomenal character, and principle (ID*):
(ID*) The phenomenal character of experience is the dimension of experience that is accessible to first-person awareness.
Interpreted in terms of the conventional account of phenomenal character, (ID*) is a very natural principle for an opponent of naive realism. Equally, the principle is anathema for the naive realist.
In support of the naive realist, I will appeal to the increasingly popular principles (Anti) and (By) and argue that these principles render (ID*) unconvincing. The recent transparency debate moves the goalposts in a way that makes it hard to exclude judgments like (J) from the category of first-person judgments.
Here again are the relevant transparency principles:
(Anti) The inner sense theory of first-person awareness of experience is incorrect.
(By) A subject attends to the phenomenal character of his experience by attending to the objects and properties represented (or presented) to him in his experience.
My argument against (ID*) involves another hypothetical first-person subject. George is interested in the phenomenal character of his experiences. With this interest in mind, George perceptually attends to the objects and properties presented to him in his experience, and on this basis he forms an attentive belief about the phenomenal character of his experience:
(G) My experience has phenomenal character R.
Patrick from section 5 has a similar interest, an interest in the nature of his experiential situation. With this interest in mind, Patrick perceptually attends to the dog that is presented to him in his experience, engages in some deliberation, and makes judgment (J) on the basis of these resources.
(J) That dog is just directly presented to me.
The basic problem with principle (ID*) is that it depicts one of these subjects as making a properly first-person judgment about his experiences, and one of these subjects as doing something else. But the significant parallels between the two subjects make this division uncompelling.
One point that I need to address is that the two patterns of thought are not wholly isomorphic, in that Patrick engages in some deliberation, and George does not. George forms a belief about phenomenal character directly on the basis of perceptual attention. I suggest that this difference does not matter. Patrick’s deliberation is minimal: I suggested in section 5 that we can describe this deliberation in terms of only two beliefs. Patrick’s pattern of thought does not depart much from George’s.
The deliberative character of Patrick’s pattern of thought is in any case dialectically insignificant. The feature of current interest is that this pattern produces an object-dependent judgment, which I claim is properly first-person in character.
Let’s return to (ID*)’s division between Patrick and George. Patrick and George have similar interests. Regardless of precisely how they conceive these interests, we as theorists can say that both subjects are interested in aspects of their subjective situations. George and Patrick use the same empirical procedure: the procedure of perceptually attending to the objects presented in their experiences. Their use of this procedure yields two beliefs. George forms a belief about the phenomenal character of his experience, and Patrick forms a belief about the dog that he sees. Moreover, with these beliefs, the two subjects make claims that are at least partly “self-directed,” in that the claims concern the nature of the protagonists’ subjective situations. However, (ID*) says that only George’s belief counts as properly first-person awareness of experience. But given the similarities between the two beliefs—including the fact that they are both beliefs—and between the psychological backgrounds that lead to these beliefs, (ID*)’s elevation of phenomenal character is uncompelling.
Starting with similar interests, George and Patrick both perceptually attend to the objects and properties presented to them in their experiences. We can describe George and Patrick as following very similar paths up to the point of their selection and application of concepts. And even then, although they employ different concepts, both subjects form self-directed beliefs. (ID*) claims that with his choice of concepts, Patrick drops off the path of the first-person. I don’t think the naive realist creates a lot of static for himself by rejecting this claim.
Drawing on outer perceptual attention, Patrick makes an object-dependent, but still self-directed, judgment in the course of an apparently first-personal project. This judgment shares important parallels with uncontroversial examples of first-person awareness of experience. Accordingly the claim that (J) is properly first-person in character seems pretty reasonable.
My argument has wider application beyond judgment (J). A judgment like I see that brown dog is also importantly parallel to George’s judgment (G). The former seeing judgment is self-directed, in the sense described earlier, and it is based on perceptual attention to worldly items. So the seeing-judgment has a good claim to first-person status too.
First-person judgments can comprise first-person knowledge. Most explicitly, the naive realist says that at least in some cases, subjects can have first-person knowledge that they see particular objects. This claim draws support from the “parallels” argument of the present section, and from additional considerations that I develop in other work.17
Returning to local actors, I describe Patrick as knowing, in a first-person way, that he sees a particular brown dog. His judgment (J) is his attempt to describe his relation to the dog. It is not important for present purposes whether Patrick knows judgment (J). Knowledge of judgment (J) is a complex topic, which I don’t need to pursue here. What is important for our purposes is that Patrick believes (J), that it represents his attempt to get things right. Or again, the key point for our discussion is that Patrick finds (J) to be an apt, compelling description of his situation.
Two sections ago, I argued that judgment (J) does not express a belief about phenomenal character, and that (J) is not based on a belief about phenomenal character. In the last section, I argued that despite this distance from the notion of phenomenal character, (J) is nonetheless a genuinely first-person judgment. I will now try to indicate how these points enable us to affirm the pro-naive first-person thinking about experience.
My conception of first-person access to experience rejects principle (ID*) and holds that object-dependent judgments like (J) can be properly first-person beliefs about one’s experience. On this view, judgments like I see that brown dog are also admissible. If we accept this conception of first-person awareness, we can begin to see our first-person vantage point as a potential source of support for naive realism. Against the background of the last couple of sections, the idea of someone adopting naive realism on the basis of first-person grounds should acquire some credibility. But in a climate where principle (ID*) goes unchallenged, this idea is problematic. So we take a step toward vindicating the pro-naive first-person thinking by getting a more supportive model of first-person access in place. This is an important step toward vindication, since we currently live in an (ID*)-friendly climate.
We can take another step by returning to Patrick’s judgment (J). After making judgment (J), Patrick goes on to form a conception of the nature of experience with strong affinities to naive realism. We can affirm these segments of Patrick’s pattern of thought by developing the sort of explicit phenomenological argument for naive realism advertised in section 3. That is to say, we can vindicate Patrick’s judgment (J) and his ensuing pro-naive conception of experience by (i) arguing that judgment (J) is an accurate description of Good experience, and (ii) arguing that out of all the available theoretical options, naive realism has the best fit with judgment (J). Full development of such arguments would portray Patrick as forming an accurate description of Good experience, and as adopting the theory of experience that this description makes most eligible. I make arguments of this type in another paper (Kennedy, 2009). The specific targets in that paper are representationalism and the qualia theory, but I believe that the arguments generalize. Here very briefly is the basic idea.
Let’s assume that that judgment (J) and other parallel judgments provide good, but of course incomplete, descriptions of Good experience. (J) says that we have a certain kind of intimate contact with worldly objects in Good experience. I suggest that a naive realist account of Good experience preserves this intimate contact in a way that other theories do not. I suggest, in fact, that all other theories significantly attenuate this contact. If we take judgment (J) as our departure point, accepting a pro-naive conception of experience is the best move. Naive realism has the best available fit with the content of (J).
Of course, this claim requires more development and defense. But consider here how the claim connects with the theoretical ambitions that we find in Martin’s work. Like the contributions that he criticizes in Martin (2004, 63–64), I argue for naive realism by drawing on the phenomenon of object-dependent thought. The earlier (sec. 3) appeal to object dependence said that the naive realist account of Good experience provides a better grounding for our general capacity to form thoughts with object-dependent contents on the basis of our Good experiences. As we have seen, Martin’s problem with this proposal is that it does not address the first-person concerns that he regards as vital.
By contrast, I maintain that the naive realist account of Good experience has the best fit with the content of a specific object-dependent judgment, namely, judgment (J). Since (J) is a properly first-person judgment, my claim about theoretical fit does connect with Martin’s first-person concerns. We avoid Martin’s objections to the section 3 proposal by claiming a different theoretical virtue for naive realism and by making contact with a different part of the landscape. Again, the virtue that I claim for naive realism is the theory’s fit with the content of a first-person, object-dependent judgment, rather than the theory’s capacity to ground our general capacity to make object-dependent judgments.18
Turning to Martin’s own proposal, we saw in earlier sections that the key claim in his affirmative story is that the phenomenal character of Good experience, and indeed the phenomenal character of experience in general, is grounded in the naive realist structural properties of Good experience. This claim allows Martin to describe first-person subjects as picking up on the nature of Good experience via their first-person awareness of its phenomenal character. This description is the only way to model the first-person thinking in a setting that construes first-person awareness of experience as awareness of phenomenal character.
However, Martin’s commerce with the notion of phenomenal character raises the specter of a counterattack, in the form of an explanation of phenomenal character in terms of a structure-level property common to both Good and Bad experience. Martin cuts off this counterattack by adopting the epistemic conception of hallucination, on which the only admissible common properties are properties that are unable to trump the explanatory primacy of the distinctively naive structural aspects of Good experience.
But a main contrast with Martin is that I do not claim that naive structure grounds phenomenal character. More precisely, this claim plays no role at all in my attempt to affirm the first-person thinking. (For more discussion of naive realism and phenomenal character, see sec. 8.) Instead I claim that the naive theory is the best fit with judgment (J), a judgment that I have taken pains to distance from the notion of phenomenal character.
For this reason, the specter of a counterattack does not raise the alarm bells that it raises within Martin’s theory. Here are three points that we should stress. First, the possibility of grounding the phenomenal character of Good and Bad experience in a common structure-level property does not undermine the pro-naive first-person thinking about experience. For I have described this pattern of thinking as having nothing substantial to do with phenomenal character. Again, I argued that the centerpiece of this thinking, judgment (J), does not express a belief about phenomenal character, and I argued that (J) is not based on a belief about phenomenal character. Moreover, I have argued that naive realism connects with the first-person thinking via its fit with the content of judgment (J), not via a grounding relation to phenomenal character. How we ground phenomenal character is a separate issue. We will come back to the issue of grounding phenomenal character later in this section and in the next.
Second, the anchor that I put in place of phenomenal character, judgment (J), is much less vulnerable than the notion of phenomenal character to common-factor takeover attempts. As we have seen, takeover attempts of this type claim that a common-factor account of Good experience can do a given theoretical job at least as well as a naive realist account. But consider how such contentions work with respect to the theoretical virtue that I have identified for naive realism, the virtue of fit with judgment (J). The relevant claim is that a pure common-factor view of Good experience fits just as well as naive realism with the content of judgment (J). Or more generally, the claim is that pure common-factor accounts are in fact phenomenologically adequate. Naive realists already have material in place against this claim, in the form of phenomenological arguments for their view.19
Compare this situation with the situation regarding phenomenal character. Martin’s view is that nonepistemic common-factor groundings of phenomenal character defeat naive realist groundings if the former are allowed on the playing field. Martin’s view is that naive realists must keep the former explanations off the playing field by adopting the epistemic conception of hallucination. It is easy to feel critical sympathy for Martin: since phenomenal character is not an object-friendly notion, we should expect common-factor explanations of phenomenal character to look and feel superior to naive realist explanations of phenomenal character. However, common-factor claims of fit with judgment (J) are more tenuous. The first-person thinking is in much better shape if the naive realist rejects phenomenal character as a source of motivation and assigns a central place to judgments like (J).
The third point is that since the specter of a common-factor counterattack is no longer ominous, the naive realist of current interest can reject the epistemic conception of hallucination and accept that veridical and hallucinatory experience share a common factor. The naive realist can affirm the first-person thinking while accepting that Good and Bad experience share nonepistemic, structure-level properties.
The common properties that I accept are general-intentionalist properties. Good and Bad experiences both have general content. A matching pair of Good and Bad experiences can represent the same general proposition.20
Focusing on Good experience, one immediate reminder is that possession of general propositional content is an object-independent property. This point limits the impact of general intentionalism on our first-person concerns. In a Good case, a subject can, in a first-person way, be aware of more than just the general propositional content of his experience. A subject can know, in a first-person way, that he sees a particular object. With this knowledge in hand, a subject can go on to make judgments like (J). Once (J) is on the table, we can, I suggest, use it in arguments against pure general intentionalism and other non-naive theories. The phenomenological case for naive realism is not undermined by the introduction of a common, object-independent, structure-level property of experience. The case for naive realism proceeds on other lines—more precisely, this case proceeds on object-dependent lines.
Turning back to phenomenal character, let’s distinguish two claims:
(Common) Good and Bad experiences share nonepistemic, structure-level properties.
(Grounding) These common structure-level properties ground the phenomenal character of Good and Bad experiences.
I have argued that naive realism and its first-person ambitions are compatible with (Common). It may appear at first glance that these interests are also compatible with (Grounding). Judgment (J) and naive realism stand in a relation of mutual support, a relation that does not bring in phenomenal character. It would seem, then, that we could ground phenomenal character in something else, in a common structure-level property, without breaking up the main lines of naive realist theorizing.
This suggestion is partly right, and partly wrong. The suggestion is right that the (Grounding) claim does not damage the lines of support between the first-person thinking and naive realism. (Grounding) does not compromise the relationship between these elements. This is a noteworthy point, given Martin’s emphasis on the first person and on phenomenal character.
However, this point does not tell the whole story about the relationship between (Grounding) and naive realism. I won’t try to tell the whole story, either, but in the next section I will point to a difficulty. Even if we set Martin’s first-person interests to the side, there is some tension between the naive realist metaphysical theory and (Grounding). In my hands, at least, the tension is generated not by the naive realist’s first-person ambitions but rather by metaphysical features of the common-factor form of naive realism indicated in this section. In the next, concluding section, I briefly describe this form of naive realism and the tension between it and (Grounding).
On my view, a token Good experience consists in a relation of awareness to an item in one’s environment. I also accept the general-intentionalist claim that a general proposition is associated with the Good experience in a privileged way. As a naive realist, I reject the further, and far more committal, claim that the structure of Good experience consists in its association with a general proposition. In this way, my acceptance of general intentionalism about Good experience is importantly qualified.
Turning to hallucinations, I accept conventional general intentionalism about hallucinations without any alteration. A general intentionalist says that hallucinating subjects are related in a certain way to general propositions, and that the structure of hallucinatory experience is exhausted by this relation and its relata.
Following Adam Pautz (2007), I introduce general intentionalism as a theory that rejects the idea, associated with Mark Johnston and others, that in hallucination, a subject is visually aware of uninstantiated properties.21 In his work on intentionalism, Pautz draws a sharp line between the conditions of being related to a general proposition, and of being visually aware of uninstantiated properties. My development of general intentionalism accepts this distinction and defines general intentionalism in terms of it. General intentionalism holds that hallucinating subjects are not visually aware of anything or visually acquainted with anything. These subjects are merely related in a certain way to general propositions.22
Go back now to my common-factor form of naive realism, which accepts that Good and Bad experiences both involve the representation of general propositions. In spelling out this theory, I will use the distinction between concepts that “carve nature at the joints” and concepts that do not carve nature at the joints. This distinction between concepts corresponds to a distinction between properties. The jointlike properties of a phenomenon constitute its fundamental structure. Any other properties of the phenomenon are nonfundamental.
In these terms, we can say that the ontological material present in Good experience tolerates the carving that general-intentionalist concepts impose on it. Good experience does instantiate the visual representation of a general proposition. But this property is not a jointlike property of Good experience. By contrast, the ontological material present in Good experience positively invites the carving that naive realist concepts impose.23 These concepts accurately capture the fundamental structure of the phenomenon. Naive realist properties constitute the fundamental structure of Good experience.
On my view, instantiation of the naive realist properties entails—it does not cause—instantiation of the property of visually representing a general proposition. But this entailment does not trace the joints of Good experience. The property of visually representing a general proposition is not a natural part of the fundamental structure of Good experience. Nor does this property closely mirror this structure.
Take the property of seeing Lucky the dog and being visually aware of Lucky’s brown coat, and the property of visually representing a proposition of the form ∃x(x is brown and dog-shaped and at location L). The seeing property is a success property that involves visual awareness of a specific animal. The general-intentionalist property is a neutral (nonsuccess) property that does not involve visual awareness of anything at all. Despite these differences, there are other parallels between the two properties. Drawing on these parallels, my proposal is this: When you see a brown dog, a constitutive consequence of your relation to the dog is that a general proposition of the foregoing type is associated with your experience in a privileged way. Since the two ingredient relations share some parallels—they are both visual relations to items that implicate the same perceptible properties—this consequence is not a bizarre surprise. But the general-intentionalist property of your experience of the dog does not fully reflect the character of the more fundamental structure that sponsors it.
Rounding out my position, and turning to hallucination, the fundamental structure of hallucination is intentionalist. General-intentionalist concepts carve this phenomenon perfectly well.
It seems to me that these claims are an attractive way for the naive realist to accept common structure-level properties while preserving priority for his distinctive conception of Good experience. My form of naive realism, which should be taken to incorporate rejection of principle (ID*) from section 5, has the following features:
(i) The theory affirms the first-person thinking about experience.
(ii) The theory avoids the epistemic conception of hallucination.
(iii) The theory keeps the upper hand in its (ii)-prompted partnership with a common-factor theory.24
Turning again to phenomenal character, if naive properties are fundamental in Good experience, then certain salient claims about the grounding of phenomenal character are problematic. Recall that our stalking-horse claims regarding phenomenal character are as follows:
(Common) Good and Bad experiences share nonepistemic, structure-level properties.
(Grounding) These common structure-level properties ground the phenomenal character of Good and Bad experiences.
I accept (Common), out of acceptance of common-factor general content. So one specific grounding claim of interest is this:
(Grounding-GI) The property of visually representing general intentional contents grounds the phenomenal character of Good and Bad experience.
The basic case for (Grounding-GI) is familiar from Martin’s work. Since the general-intentionalist property co-occurs with phenomenal-character properties in both Good and Bad experience, the general-intentionalist property has a good claim to be the ground of the phenomenal-character properties (cf. Martin, 2004, 62). The problem that I see with (Grounding-GI) has to do with its claim about Good experience. The general-intentionalist property is not a fundamental property of Good experience. The fundamental properties, or at least the contextually fundamental properties, of Good experience are naive realist properties.25 I suggest that it is awkward to ground a phenomenon in a property that is not contextually fundamental. Arguably, an implicature of metaphysical claims of the form property X grounds phenomenon Y is that property X is contextually fundamental. But the general-intentionalist property is not contextually fundamental. This point may not cancel out the property’s claim to ground the phenomenal character of Good experience. But it seems to me that the nonfundamental character of the advertised ground makes (Grounding-GI) somewhat problematic.
Let’s consider another grounding claim, one that is apparently more in line with naive realist ideology.
(Grounding-NR) The phenomenal character of Good experience is grounded in naive realist structure-level properties.
According to the naive realist, this claim does not run afoul of the problem that besets (Grounding-GI). (Grounding-NR) links the phenomenal character of Good experience to contextually fundamental elements. But there is still a drawback, which again derives from the implicatures or expectations that I believe are generated by metaphysical grounding claims.
The operative expectation in this case is that the grounding property X and the target phenomenon Y stand in a harmonic relationship of some kind. Perhaps features of Y are importantly isomorphic with features of X, in a way that allows Y to be smoothly reduced to X, or that allows Y to be simply identified with X. The notion of harmony that I have in mind is very inclusive. But what I emphasize against this is that the property of phenomenal character, as discussed in this paper, is quite importantly nonharmonic with respect to naive realist structure-level properties. Again, the property of phenomenal character is not sensitive to the presence of particular objects in one’s experience. However, naive realist structure-level properties are individuated in terms of the experiential presence of particular objects. The property of phenomenal character and the naive relational properties do not share the same “logic.” It seems to me that endorsing (Grounding-NR) obscures this disharmony. As a result, although (Grounding-NR) is a slightly better fit with naive realist ideology, I think that its assertion promotes misunderstanding.26
General-intentionalist properties presumably do harmonize with phenomenal-character properties. But according to the naive realist, general-intentionalist properties are not contextually fundamental properties of Good experience. Naive realist properties are contextually fundamental. But these properties do not harmonize with phenomenal-character properties. Both of the canvassed grounding claims, then, are problematic.
This outcome is to some degree predictable. The question of how to ground the phenomenal character of Good experience draws on presuppositions that the naive realist rejects. A lot of work in the philosophy of perception proceeds on the assumption that the property of phenomenal character stands in a harmonic relationship with fundamental aspects of visual experience. However, since phenomenal character is an object-independent property of experience, we should not expect it to have a comfortable place within the naive realist theory of Good experience. For this reason, the most perspicuous way of capturing the naive realist view of phenomenal character is not with a positive grounding claim. The sharpest naive realist statement about phenomenal character is that the guiding assumption about phenomenal character is false.
Our concept of phenomenal character makes a kind of off-kilter reference to the structure of Good experience. But the concept fails to capture the relational, world-involving orientation of this structure. Nor does the concept land on a natural part or component of this structure.
My naive realist aversion to phenomenal character should not be confused with a lack of interest in the topic of conscious, or subjective, experience. In section 6, I argued that phenomenal character, considered as an object-independent property of visual experience, does not have a monopoly on first-person access to experience. Equally, I claim that phenomenal character so conceived does not exhaust the nature of conscious experience. As I have stressed, the structure of Good experience is object involving. The lines of Good experiential subjectivity run along the relational, world-involving joints marked out by the naive realist.
Michael Martin and I both accept this conception of Good conscious experience. Much of my paper has pursued differences with Martin on how to develop and defend this view of Good conscious experience. I have argued that naive realism, and Martin’s first-person ambitions for this theory, can flourish as part of a package with some traditional elements that Martin opposes: as part of a package that rejects the epistemic conception of hallucination and accepts a common, structure-level element in veridical and hallucinatory experience. A key part of the effort has been to get the notion of phenomenal character out of the way.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank an audience at the University of Nottingham, and Benj Hellie, Carrie Jenkins, and Susanna Siegel, for helpful comments and discussion.
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1. Following Martin, I will describe a certain pattern of thinking that feeds into naive realism as both first person and pretheoretic. See sections 5 and 6. I will put more weight on the first-person character of this thinking. For this reason, I will often simply refer to the relevant pattern of thinking as “the first-person thinking.” Martin, especially in his (2006), puts more weight on the pretheoretic character of this thinking, but I think we can keep contact with his position without assigning quite the same prominence to this notion.
2. For reasons that I state in section 5, I use “first-person access” rather than “introspection” to refer to paradigm forms of self-knowledge, and to the characteristic methods that produce this knowledge. Prior to section 5, however, I will occasionally write in terms of “introspection” to avoid confusion.
3. For criticisms of ECH, see Siegel (2004, 2008), Hawthorne and Kovakovich (2006), Sturgeon (2008), and Smith (2008).
4. One feature that I build into Bad experience is that the subject of a Bad experience cannot know via first-person methods available to him that he is not having a Good experience. Good experiences do not necessarily involve a symmetric epistemic deficiency. I think that a typical subject who is having a Good experience can know, via first-person methods available to him, that he is having a Good experience. This sort of asymmetric position is familiar from Williamson (2000). For related discussion of first-person knowledge of experience, see Kennedy (2011).
5. I take this definition of object dependence from Manley (2007, 404, n. 3).
6. The phenomenal character of visual experience varies over and above the standard color, shape, and size properties that we perceive objects to have, typically as a function of one’s perspective on the objects one perceives. Some philosophers address this phenomenal variation by positing an expanded range of perceptible properties (see, e.g., Tye, 2000; Noë, 2004). This approach could be absorbed by the foregoing statement of naive realism. For a different proposal, see Kennedy (2007). In that paper, I argue that the structure of experience includes manners of presentation of perceptible properties. I also suggest that the naive realist can incorporate manners of presentation into his view. However, with the exception of one later footnote (n. 26), I will leave manners of presentation out of the present discussion, which works in a Martin-focused context.
7. In addition to Martin (2004), recent discussions of the causal argument from hallucination include Robinson (1994) and Johnston (2004). For a related line of reasoning, see Burge (2005).
8. The term “general intentionalism” comes from Pautz (2007).
9. Although I write simply of “the content of experience,” the explanatory conception is compatible with the idea that multiple contents are associated with a single experience, and each content property has a distinctive explanatory role. For extensive development of the multiple-contents idea, see Chalmers (2006). For very brief discussion of the multiple-contents idea in connection with naive realism, see note 24 of this paper.
10. For a more expansive description of the first-person line of thinking, see sections 5 and 6.
11. See again the works cited in note 3.
12. As we have seen, Michael Martin takes what we can call a naive realist “reformist” stance on phenomenal character. He argues, against the conventional view, that the phenomenal character of veridical experience is object involving. Hellie (2007) discusses a form of naive realism that follows this reformist path. But Hellie (2010) pursues an alternative project similar to one that I pursue in the remaining sections of the present paper. Broadly described, our common project is not to refashion the current “internal” notion of phenomenal character into something naive realist but to give this notion a circumscribed place within a fundamentally naive realist conception of the nature of veridical experience. My “internal” terminology here follows Hellie.
13. See Siewert (2004), Stoljar (2004), Nida-Rümelin (2007).
14. Cf. Siewert (2004, 35); Stoljar (2004, 356, 376); Nida-Rümelin (2007, 434).
15. See, e.g., Block (1995), Martin (1998), Stoljar (2004), Nida-Rümelin (2007).
16. Tyler Burge (2005, 29–30) criticizes the disjunctivist tradition as fixated on the idea of a subject’s direct perceptual contact with the world. (There are other points of overlap with Burge’s paper that space considerations prevent me from pursuing.) True to form, as it were, the notion of direct presence will play an important schematic role in my paper. This notion strikes me as economically descriptive of veridical visual experience. Also, as Burge says, the idea that physical objects are directly present to us in perception has been denied, for instance, by some versions of the sense-datum theory. I take the notion to have further pertinence because I think that non-naive theories that explicitly reject the commitments of the sense-datum theory nonetheless generate parallel phenomenological problems. So it is worth keeping “direct presence” on the table, if only as a cue to a more extended line of argument. For phenomenological criticism of two non-naive theories, representationalism and the qualia theory, see Kennedy (2009).
17. We think that privileged access is a mark of genuinely first-person belief. Privileged access consists, at least in part, in (i) a first-person subject’s having a large epistemic advantage over third-person subjects on the topic of his own mind; and in (ii) a first-person subject’s forming beliefs about his mental states via methods that are importantly asymmetric to third-person beliefs about another subject’s mental states. In Kennedy (2011), I argue that the naive realist theory of Good experience is compatible with moderate but nonetheless substantial renderings of these privileged-access ideas. A typical subject’s belief that he sees a particular object has both of the preceding privileged-access properties. This profile suggests that beliefs of this type constitute genuine first-person access to the worldly elements that the naive realist describes as constituents of our experiences in Good cases.
18. Here are some brief bookkeeping points. In section 2, I described an explanatory challenge for naive realism. I said that in response to the challenge the naive realist must either (i) reject the idea that the Good Phenomena = the Common Phenomena, or (ii) reject the idea that Good experience shares a common structure-level property with Bad experience. I take the first option. Object-dependent judgments like (J) are a distinctively Good phenomenon: they occur only in the wake of Good experience. As I indicate in the main text, I think the naive realist can claim the comparative advantage of having the best theoretical fit with the content of (J).
Martin develops the second option by adopting ECH, but he also rejects GP = CP. Martin maintains that there are distinctive and theoretically relevant features of Good experience in addition to those discussed in section 3 (Martin 2004, 65). However, I believe Martin sees these additional phenomena as bound up with the pro-naive first-person line of thought. As we have seen, Martin argues that the ECH is required to validate this line of thinking. So, according to Martin, although there are salient phenomena uniquely present in Good experience, a proper response to the explanatory challenge does bring in the ECH.
19. See Alston (1999), Martin (2002), Johnston (2004), Kennedy (2009).
20. Not all pairs of Good and Bad experiences that subjectively match each other will involve representation of the same general proposition. The subject of a hallucination that relates him to one general proposition might be unable to discriminate this experience from a range of veridical experiences that involve the representation of slightly different general propositions. Also, turning to causal matching, I don’t think that all pairs of Good and Bad experiences that are alike in their narrowly individuated immediate causal antecedents involve the visual representation of the same proposition. But I will leave this issue for another occasion. The position at work in the main text is that all veridical and hallucinatory experiences involve the representation of general propositions, and some pairs of these experiences represent the same general propositions.
21. See Johnston (2004). In the final section of an earlier paper (Kennedy, 2009), I defended Johnston’s theory of perception from a challenge to its naive realist credentials. In brief, Johnston’s theory is that we are visually aware of uninstantiated properties in hallucination, and visually aware of material particulars and their properties in perception. The current paper is a partial retraction of my endorsement of Johnston’s theory. Although general intentionalism and Johnston’s theory are fairly similar common-factor theories, I believe the general intentionalism of the main text fits better with an idea that I develop in this section, that common structure-level properties are not jointlike properties of Good experience. But I wholeheartedly endorse another part of Johnston’s work: his consistent aversion to the idiom of phenomenal character, and to the patterns of thinking that this idiom promotes. (For more on this, see Kennedy, 2009.)
22. It is an intuitive idea that hallucinating subjects are visually aware of things. I used to accept this idea. But since the main candidates to serve as the objects of hallucination are sense-data, nonexistent objects, and uninstantiated properties, we would do well to temper our adherence to act-object conceptions of hallucination. Also, we should note that general intentionalism keeps some contact with the intuitive idea by advocating a relational theory of hallucinations and claiming that hallucinating subjects are related to propositions that either contain or refer to properties like colors and shapes. These points are developed in Pautz (2007).
23. The idea of a phenomenon tolerating and inviting different conceptual carvings is from Yablo (unpublished ms.). Yablo uses this idea in discussion of a parallel topic: Frege’s suggestion that we can sometimes use different sentences to carve the same linguistic content in different ways.
24. One clarification about my theory is that while I describe general intentional content as a non-jointlike property of Good experience, I am receptive to the idea that Good experience has other content properties that are more closely connected to the fundamental structure of Good experience. In the main text, I treat the distinction between jointlike properties and other properties as a sharp, on–off distinction. But we can also talk in terms of degrees and conceive of properties as more or less jointlike (cf. Hawthorne & Kovakovich, 2006; and, using other terms, the discussion in Lewis, 1983, of degrees of naturalness). The property of visually representing a general proposition is neither object dependent nor factive. But content properties that improve on these dimensions—for instance, the property of visually representing an object-dependent content—could be more jointlike aspects of Good experience, in that they are closer fits with the fundamental properties of Good experience. David Chalmers (2006) ascribes multiple contents to visual experience. A more developed version of my theory would recognize specific content properties in Good experience and rank them as more or less jointlike according to their fit with the fundamental naive properties of Good experience.
25. I understand philosophy-of-perception claims about the fundamental structure of experience as claims that draw on a certain contextual restriction. Although philosophers of perception treat the structure-level properties they identify as fundamental, this policy itself does not close off the possibility of other legitimate projects that see these properties as nonfundamental. We can understand philosophers of perception as making claims about the fundamental psychological or mental properties of experience. These claims are compatible with different views about the place of the mental in the ultimate ontological hierarchy. There is a similar statement of compatibility in Martin (2006, 360, n. 9).
26. The basic antagonism between the property of phenomenal character and the naive realist account of experience is not alleviated by the structural manners of presentation that I defend in Kennedy (2007) (see also note 6 of the present paper). Manners of presentation do not determine the phenomenal character of visual experience, nor does an experience’s possession of a specific phenomenal-character property entail that the experience involves a particular manner of presentation. According to Kennedy (2007), the color character of an experience is fixed jointly by the manner of presentation and the color property ingredient in the experience. Within this framework, a specific phenomenal-character property could perhaps be identified with a profligate disjunction of pairs of manners and perceived colors. This identification would nicely illustrate the lack of fit between phenomenal-character properties and the metaphysical proposals that appeal to naive realists.