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Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge
Disjunctivism has attracted considerable philosophical attention in recent it has been the source of a lively and extended debate spanning the philosophy of perception, epistemology, and the philosophy of action. Adrian Haddock and Fiona Macpherson present seventeen specially written essays, which examine the different forms of disjunctivism and explore the connections between them. This volume will be an essential resource for anyone working in the central areas of philosophy, and the starting point for future research in this fascinating field.
- GenresPhilosophy
400 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2008
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March 18, 2022
This is a superb introduction to readers interested in a seemingly very intuitive view, but which is somehow nonetheless very controversial in the philosophy world -- disjunctivism (which also goes by the names of relationalism, regarding perceptual experience, or naive realism). Reading through each chapter does not currently seem relevant for my interests, but let me summarize the introductory chapter to this volume (which might help potential readers see whether they're interested), and one chapter that I found especially fascinating.
In the introductory chapter "Varieties of disjunctivism" Haddock argues that we ought to distinguish between three distinct theories of disjunctivism in the respective fields of metaphysics/perception, epistemology, and action. He also offers a framework for understanding the common thread between these three theories. This is a lot of conceptual work; this chapter is no ordinary introduction to an anthology but deserves to be read as a contribution to understanding disjunctivism in its own right. Disjunctivism, traditionally, is formulated as a theory of perception in response to theories that posit that we do not make direct contact with the world when we have perceptual experience. According to these theories (i.e., sense data and intentionalist theory) we only directly perceive certain mental objects, like splotches of color, or mental representations of objects -- the mind-independent world is inaccessible.
Disjunctivist theorists of perception, against this, argue that the mind-independent world is constitutive of perceptual experience; we do make direct contact with it. Understanding the classic argument from illusion, against disjunctivism, and the disjunctivist response is helpful for seeing what the fuss is all about. According to this argument (which goes all the way back to Descartes) it is possible to have hallucinations that are phenomenally identical to veridical perceptions (e.g., we cannot tell in a dream that we're dreaming, or it seems to be phenomenally identical to wakeful experience). This means that hallucination and perception are the same kind of experiential state. But in hallucination we do not make contact with the world. So in perception we also do not make contact with the world (given that hallucination and perception must share the same nature, being in the same category). Instead, something that is shared between hallucination and perception (e.g., sense data or representational states) are the cause of our phenomenal experience of making contact with the world.
Disjunctivist theorists argue, against this, that hallucination and perception amount to different kinds of experiential state. Sure, from our first-hand perspective it could be impossible to distinguish between the two kinds in certain instances. But just because we're bad at telling them apart doesn't mean that they are the same thing in nature. Perceptions intrinsically involve mind-independent objects, while hallucinations do not; they do not share the same nature. There are different ways of making sense of what it means for mind-independent objects to be intrinsically involved -- is it that we can't characterize the intrinsic nature of a perception without mentioning the mind-independent object? Or does the mind-independent character of the object have some phenomenal correlate -- so it's the phenomenology of perception itself that presents to us mind-independence?
Second, there is epistemological disjunctivism. This is the view that if we know that P, then we have a reason to believe that P, although this reason is defeasible. This view is formulated against the problem of other minds: it is possible to doubt that other people have minds, so it seems that we are not entitled to knowledge that other people have minds (given that knowledge must be justified; if we have a reason to doubt in it, it isn't justified). Epistemological disjunctivism holds that in regular experience when we "see that P" (e.g., I see that you have a mind and that solipsism isn't true), P is a fact, and this supplies us reason for believing that P. Seeing that P is genuinely experiential; it isn't a matter of noticing sense data then drawing inferences, which could be fallible, for instance. Of course there are cases where we are wrong about what it seems that we see; but these cases do not count as proper cases of "seeing that P" but rather constitute their own kind of experiential state, which isn't sufficient for knowledge. In other words, epistemological disjunctivism denies the move from fallibility of knowledge to defeasibility of knowledge -- just because we could be wrong about what we see doesn't mean that this counts as sufficient reason for us to not have knowledge about what we see.
What this shares with disjunctivism regarding perception is that just because two states are indistinguishable from our experience doesn't mean that they have the same nature. In the perceptual case, hallucination is a distinct kind from perception; and in the epistemological case, failing to have reason to believe that P is a distinct kind of state from having reason to believe that P (when in both cases it seems to us that we see P). But the truth of epistemological disjunctivism doesn't require that of disjunctivism regarding perception, and vice-versa.
Third, there is disjunctivism regarding actions. We may distinguish between behavior that is intentional (and thus amounts to action) and behavior that is merely automatic and fails to amount to action. There may be two experientially indistinguishable cases of behavior, and only one amounts to action (e.g., in two instances someone grimaces; in one instance he is in pain, and in the other, it is solely caused by a motor tic in his face). But this shouldn't cause us to think that we can never have knowledge of other people's actions (or their intentions, which drive their behaviors). In a similar move to that of epistemological disjunctivism, we can rather say that we do know other people's intentions in usual cases; when we see another person's intentions, this is a kind of experiential state that warrants knowledge. In the cases where we're wrong about this, these cases amount to a different kind of experiential state.
The chapter I liked most (but also read most closely because it's most aligned with my interests -- so my selecting this chapter doesn't reflect that it's actually special or better than the others) is "Starting afresh disjunctively: perceptual engagement with the world" by Sedivy. In this chapter, Sedivy argues that the version of disjunctivism regarding perception that has the best bet at truthfulness would be a conceptualist direct realism, and she argues for how such a theory could hold. Conceptualist direct realism holds that perception is world-involving and also conceptually determinate; we make direct contact with the mind-independent world, and also our experience is thoroughly imbued with our human-relative concepts.
Conceptualist direct realism is our best bet because a common objection that could be leveraged against disjunctivism is that we obviously don't see a mind-independent world; for example, fundamental physics tells us the world isn't as we perceive it to be, and it's easy to imagine that for different species of animal, the world shows up different, so the particular world humans see is structured relative to our bodily make-up and capacities. Sedivy argues that we're engaged with the objects themselves, even though there are representations that show up to us as we're engaged with them. For example, if a person is hiking up an especially rough and steep cliffside, it will not do if she is only making contact with mental representations, based in the understanding, of differently shaped rocks. Instead, she needs to make direct perceptual contact with the surfaces of these rocks in order to navigate across them. The understanding would be too slow and potentially fallible; only when she perceives the rocks themselves can her body immediately adjust to them.
The contrast between perceiving the world itself and perceiving mental representations or sense data might be drawn out in the case of looking at a beautiful forest and then later visually imagining it. Only when we're there can we explore all the details of the view, and will these details show up with a particular vividness; once we are merely imagining it we cannot explore the scene in this way because we are no longer hooked onto the mind-independent world.
Sedivy also explores the question of what is the nature of this mind-independent world that factors into our experience -- to let disjunctivism get off the ground, would we have to define it in such a peculiar way that it no longer makes sense to speak of it as "mind-independent"? She presents two ways of making sense of it. First is appealing to interpretivism (e.g., Dennett, Davidson). On this view, we need multiple registers of explanation of the world to make sense of categorically different entities we encounter (e.g., stones v. people), and the entities themselves figure into our explanations. So our sense of the world consists in explanations which track mind-independent entities; there is a layer of our humanness in this all (we're doing the explaining) but nonetheless the entities we're explaining are mind-independent. Second, Sedivy proposes we may appeal to late Wittgenstein; he has a view that human practices and rule-following lets us make contact with mind-independent objects, which thereby show up under the context of our practices. Likewise here there's a human element in what we see, but those objects are still mind-independent.
Reading all of this leaves me with some pressing questions. How are we to make sense of theoretical entities we deal with in our practices and seem to be making contact with, in the analogous fashion to that of contact with the physical world? For example, I can "encounter" the law of noncontradiction in experience; as I look at my hand and notice its having 5 fingers, I notice that my hand couldn't also not have 5 fingers simultaneously. This law of noncontradiction really shows up as real and exists "objectively." We may contrast this to other theoretical/abstract entities that don't show up as real (e.g., the geocentric cosmological view; the conspiracy theory that Hilary Clinton is literally a lizard).
The problem seems to be that we can't invoke disjunctivism to make sense of our encountering abstract entities as part of reality. This is because we can't talk about mind independent objects here -- it seems that, by nature, abstract entities do not exist mind-independently, unless we want to be Platonists. The law of noncontradiction isn't an object out there in the world that we can make contact with through our bodily appendages. So what's going on here? What is the basis of the contrast between truthful theoretical entities and false ones? We also may draw the analogous point for cases of temporally or spatially distant objects or states of affairs. I take ancient Egypt to have really existed, to be part of reality, while I do not take Jesus's walking on water to be so.
Maybe it's beyond the scope of disjunctivism to account for such cases, and it's misleading of me to imagine that it might do so. But also maybe there could be a metaphysical distinction between factual abstract or temporally/spatially distant entities, and the fictional ones, and we have not perceptual capacities per say but other sorts of capacities that enable us to be put in direct contact with the former and not the latter, by virtue of their metaphysical differences? To evaluate this, it seems that I could look into the literature on the realism v. antirealism regarding abstract entities; but somehow I have the intuition that this wouldn't be a fruitful way to develop my interests.
Perhaps what I'm really interested in here is that there is an overall phenomenal and functional contrast between taking something to be real v. fictional. Maybe (this is a very imaginative hypotheses) there is a feeling of objectivity (Dorsch talks about this in his paper "The phenomenal presence of perceptual reasons") which we learn from original cases of encountering mind-independent, physical objects. Then, as we grow up, this feeling comes to be extended to abstract entities that are presented by thought or the imagination (not just physical objects presented by perception). And we happen to learn to do this because we come to experience such abstract entities as bearing upon our lives, directly and causally, as much as physical objects (e.g., think about how the thought of an aging loved one's death can cause genuine fear, as much as a spider in front of one's face can). When I put it this way, it's so obvious that abstract things can be as real to us as concrete things, that it's silly I'm mentioning this. But I haven't seen much work on directly working through the implications this has on the nature of what we take to be reality -- at the least, this means it consists of both low-level and high-level entities, and the high-level somehow come to share certain functional roles as the low-level entities.
Let me ramble just a bit more. If it is the case that the feeling of objectivity of low-level entities comes to be extended to high-level ones, how does this come about? Here are some preliminary thoughts about it: (1) There are local cases of things we can't see that we know are real (oxygen molecules), and it's easy for us to take ourselves as interacting with those, which becomes 'second nature' (i.e., a deep habit or skill); and then we extend this capacity of seeing the reality of something invisible to the conceptually abstract, not just physically invisible to the eye; (2) In the spirit of conceptual metaphor theory, we have a way of making sense of the 'physical' presence of this thing, based in basic physical things we do interact with; we extend our sense of interaction with the latter to the former, and (3) We don't need to interact with it at all but can imagine that it is interacting with things near it, and have a grasp on what interaction is in general, which allows for our imagination of this interaction between abstract or distant things to show up vividly, as part of reality.
Ok, rambling done. To tie things back in with the contents of this anthology: it seems that the one place where disjunctivist theories get close to treating high-level entities is in the theories regarding action. Other people's beliefs, desires, and intentions are pretty conceptually abstract, and disjunctivist theorists who hold that we can have knowledge of them on the basis of experiencing other people's behaviors must hold that we are experiential sensitive to them themselves. But the chapters on action (9-11) don't focus on the question of how we can be so directly hooked onto other's intentions (regardless of whether we respond to this question by proposing a theory of how we come to experience ourselves as hooked as such phenomenologically, or how we objectively do come to be hooked as such).
In the introductory chapter "Varieties of disjunctivism" Haddock argues that we ought to distinguish between three distinct theories of disjunctivism in the respective fields of metaphysics/perception, epistemology, and action. He also offers a framework for understanding the common thread between these three theories. This is a lot of conceptual work; this chapter is no ordinary introduction to an anthology but deserves to be read as a contribution to understanding disjunctivism in its own right. Disjunctivism, traditionally, is formulated as a theory of perception in response to theories that posit that we do not make direct contact with the world when we have perceptual experience. According to these theories (i.e., sense data and intentionalist theory) we only directly perceive certain mental objects, like splotches of color, or mental representations of objects -- the mind-independent world is inaccessible.
Disjunctivist theorists of perception, against this, argue that the mind-independent world is constitutive of perceptual experience; we do make direct contact with it. Understanding the classic argument from illusion, against disjunctivism, and the disjunctivist response is helpful for seeing what the fuss is all about. According to this argument (which goes all the way back to Descartes) it is possible to have hallucinations that are phenomenally identical to veridical perceptions (e.g., we cannot tell in a dream that we're dreaming, or it seems to be phenomenally identical to wakeful experience). This means that hallucination and perception are the same kind of experiential state. But in hallucination we do not make contact with the world. So in perception we also do not make contact with the world (given that hallucination and perception must share the same nature, being in the same category). Instead, something that is shared between hallucination and perception (e.g., sense data or representational states) are the cause of our phenomenal experience of making contact with the world.
Disjunctivist theorists argue, against this, that hallucination and perception amount to different kinds of experiential state. Sure, from our first-hand perspective it could be impossible to distinguish between the two kinds in certain instances. But just because we're bad at telling them apart doesn't mean that they are the same thing in nature. Perceptions intrinsically involve mind-independent objects, while hallucinations do not; they do not share the same nature. There are different ways of making sense of what it means for mind-independent objects to be intrinsically involved -- is it that we can't characterize the intrinsic nature of a perception without mentioning the mind-independent object? Or does the mind-independent character of the object have some phenomenal correlate -- so it's the phenomenology of perception itself that presents to us mind-independence?
Second, there is epistemological disjunctivism. This is the view that if we know that P, then we have a reason to believe that P, although this reason is defeasible. This view is formulated against the problem of other minds: it is possible to doubt that other people have minds, so it seems that we are not entitled to knowledge that other people have minds (given that knowledge must be justified; if we have a reason to doubt in it, it isn't justified). Epistemological disjunctivism holds that in regular experience when we "see that P" (e.g., I see that you have a mind and that solipsism isn't true), P is a fact, and this supplies us reason for believing that P. Seeing that P is genuinely experiential; it isn't a matter of noticing sense data then drawing inferences, which could be fallible, for instance. Of course there are cases where we are wrong about what it seems that we see; but these cases do not count as proper cases of "seeing that P" but rather constitute their own kind of experiential state, which isn't sufficient for knowledge. In other words, epistemological disjunctivism denies the move from fallibility of knowledge to defeasibility of knowledge -- just because we could be wrong about what we see doesn't mean that this counts as sufficient reason for us to not have knowledge about what we see.
What this shares with disjunctivism regarding perception is that just because two states are indistinguishable from our experience doesn't mean that they have the same nature. In the perceptual case, hallucination is a distinct kind from perception; and in the epistemological case, failing to have reason to believe that P is a distinct kind of state from having reason to believe that P (when in both cases it seems to us that we see P). But the truth of epistemological disjunctivism doesn't require that of disjunctivism regarding perception, and vice-versa.
Third, there is disjunctivism regarding actions. We may distinguish between behavior that is intentional (and thus amounts to action) and behavior that is merely automatic and fails to amount to action. There may be two experientially indistinguishable cases of behavior, and only one amounts to action (e.g., in two instances someone grimaces; in one instance he is in pain, and in the other, it is solely caused by a motor tic in his face). But this shouldn't cause us to think that we can never have knowledge of other people's actions (or their intentions, which drive their behaviors). In a similar move to that of epistemological disjunctivism, we can rather say that we do know other people's intentions in usual cases; when we see another person's intentions, this is a kind of experiential state that warrants knowledge. In the cases where we're wrong about this, these cases amount to a different kind of experiential state.
The chapter I liked most (but also read most closely because it's most aligned with my interests -- so my selecting this chapter doesn't reflect that it's actually special or better than the others) is "Starting afresh disjunctively: perceptual engagement with the world" by Sedivy. In this chapter, Sedivy argues that the version of disjunctivism regarding perception that has the best bet at truthfulness would be a conceptualist direct realism, and she argues for how such a theory could hold. Conceptualist direct realism holds that perception is world-involving and also conceptually determinate; we make direct contact with the mind-independent world, and also our experience is thoroughly imbued with our human-relative concepts.
Conceptualist direct realism is our best bet because a common objection that could be leveraged against disjunctivism is that we obviously don't see a mind-independent world; for example, fundamental physics tells us the world isn't as we perceive it to be, and it's easy to imagine that for different species of animal, the world shows up different, so the particular world humans see is structured relative to our bodily make-up and capacities. Sedivy argues that we're engaged with the objects themselves, even though there are representations that show up to us as we're engaged with them. For example, if a person is hiking up an especially rough and steep cliffside, it will not do if she is only making contact with mental representations, based in the understanding, of differently shaped rocks. Instead, she needs to make direct perceptual contact with the surfaces of these rocks in order to navigate across them. The understanding would be too slow and potentially fallible; only when she perceives the rocks themselves can her body immediately adjust to them.
The contrast between perceiving the world itself and perceiving mental representations or sense data might be drawn out in the case of looking at a beautiful forest and then later visually imagining it. Only when we're there can we explore all the details of the view, and will these details show up with a particular vividness; once we are merely imagining it we cannot explore the scene in this way because we are no longer hooked onto the mind-independent world.
Sedivy also explores the question of what is the nature of this mind-independent world that factors into our experience -- to let disjunctivism get off the ground, would we have to define it in such a peculiar way that it no longer makes sense to speak of it as "mind-independent"? She presents two ways of making sense of it. First is appealing to interpretivism (e.g., Dennett, Davidson). On this view, we need multiple registers of explanation of the world to make sense of categorically different entities we encounter (e.g., stones v. people), and the entities themselves figure into our explanations. So our sense of the world consists in explanations which track mind-independent entities; there is a layer of our humanness in this all (we're doing the explaining) but nonetheless the entities we're explaining are mind-independent. Second, Sedivy proposes we may appeal to late Wittgenstein; he has a view that human practices and rule-following lets us make contact with mind-independent objects, which thereby show up under the context of our practices. Likewise here there's a human element in what we see, but those objects are still mind-independent.
Reading all of this leaves me with some pressing questions. How are we to make sense of theoretical entities we deal with in our practices and seem to be making contact with, in the analogous fashion to that of contact with the physical world? For example, I can "encounter" the law of noncontradiction in experience; as I look at my hand and notice its having 5 fingers, I notice that my hand couldn't also not have 5 fingers simultaneously. This law of noncontradiction really shows up as real and exists "objectively." We may contrast this to other theoretical/abstract entities that don't show up as real (e.g., the geocentric cosmological view; the conspiracy theory that Hilary Clinton is literally a lizard).
The problem seems to be that we can't invoke disjunctivism to make sense of our encountering abstract entities as part of reality. This is because we can't talk about mind independent objects here -- it seems that, by nature, abstract entities do not exist mind-independently, unless we want to be Platonists. The law of noncontradiction isn't an object out there in the world that we can make contact with through our bodily appendages. So what's going on here? What is the basis of the contrast between truthful theoretical entities and false ones? We also may draw the analogous point for cases of temporally or spatially distant objects or states of affairs. I take ancient Egypt to have really existed, to be part of reality, while I do not take Jesus's walking on water to be so.
Maybe it's beyond the scope of disjunctivism to account for such cases, and it's misleading of me to imagine that it might do so. But also maybe there could be a metaphysical distinction between factual abstract or temporally/spatially distant entities, and the fictional ones, and we have not perceptual capacities per say but other sorts of capacities that enable us to be put in direct contact with the former and not the latter, by virtue of their metaphysical differences? To evaluate this, it seems that I could look into the literature on the realism v. antirealism regarding abstract entities; but somehow I have the intuition that this wouldn't be a fruitful way to develop my interests.
Perhaps what I'm really interested in here is that there is an overall phenomenal and functional contrast between taking something to be real v. fictional. Maybe (this is a very imaginative hypotheses) there is a feeling of objectivity (Dorsch talks about this in his paper "The phenomenal presence of perceptual reasons") which we learn from original cases of encountering mind-independent, physical objects. Then, as we grow up, this feeling comes to be extended to abstract entities that are presented by thought or the imagination (not just physical objects presented by perception). And we happen to learn to do this because we come to experience such abstract entities as bearing upon our lives, directly and causally, as much as physical objects (e.g., think about how the thought of an aging loved one's death can cause genuine fear, as much as a spider in front of one's face can). When I put it this way, it's so obvious that abstract things can be as real to us as concrete things, that it's silly I'm mentioning this. But I haven't seen much work on directly working through the implications this has on the nature of what we take to be reality -- at the least, this means it consists of both low-level and high-level entities, and the high-level somehow come to share certain functional roles as the low-level entities.
Let me ramble just a bit more. If it is the case that the feeling of objectivity of low-level entities comes to be extended to high-level ones, how does this come about? Here are some preliminary thoughts about it: (1) There are local cases of things we can't see that we know are real (oxygen molecules), and it's easy for us to take ourselves as interacting with those, which becomes 'second nature' (i.e., a deep habit or skill); and then we extend this capacity of seeing the reality of something invisible to the conceptually abstract, not just physically invisible to the eye; (2) In the spirit of conceptual metaphor theory, we have a way of making sense of the 'physical' presence of this thing, based in basic physical things we do interact with; we extend our sense of interaction with the latter to the former, and (3) We don't need to interact with it at all but can imagine that it is interacting with things near it, and have a grasp on what interaction is in general, which allows for our imagination of this interaction between abstract or distant things to show up vividly, as part of reality.
Ok, rambling done. To tie things back in with the contents of this anthology: it seems that the one place where disjunctivist theories get close to treating high-level entities is in the theories regarding action. Other people's beliefs, desires, and intentions are pretty conceptually abstract, and disjunctivist theorists who hold that we can have knowledge of them on the basis of experiencing other people's behaviors must hold that we are experiential sensitive to them themselves. But the chapters on action (9-11) don't focus on the question of how we can be so directly hooked onto other's intentions (regardless of whether we respond to this question by proposing a theory of how we come to experience ourselves as hooked as such phenomenologically, or how we objectively do come to be hooked as such).
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