Disjunctivism and the Causal Conditions of Hallucination

Abstract

Disjunctivists maintain that perceptual experiences and hallucinatory experiences are distinct kinds of event with different metaphysical natures. Moreover, given their view about the nature of perceptual cases, disjunctivists must deny that the perceptual kind of experience can occur during hallucination. However, it is widely held that disjunctivists must grant the converse claim, to the effect that the hallucinatory kind of experience occurs even during perception. This paper challenges that thought. As we will see, the argument for thinking that the hallucinatory kind of experience is present even in cases of perception depends on prior acceptance of a ‘non-demanding’ conception of hallucination, on which all it takes to produce an hallucinatory experience is to induce in the subject the right kind of neurological condition. On the view developed here, by contrast, there are substantive causal conditions, going beyond the mere occurrence of the right kind of neurological state, that must be met if an experience of the hallucinatory kind is to occur. By drawing on this view, I argue, disjunctivists can deny that the kind of experience involved in hallucination ever occurs during perception. This then allows disjunctivists to avoid certain important problems they would otherwise face. It also leaves them with considerably more freedom when it comes to theorising about the nature of hallucinatory experience.

The integration problem for naive realism

“…One way to answer the challenge (Moran 2022; Gu ms.) is to propose that the naive realist has good reasons to reject the principle, issuing from their understanding of the fundamentally relational nature of the experiential effects in the good cases. But the experiential effects in the bad cases would not be fundamentally relational, so the reasons do not carry over from the good cases to the bad.…”

(In defence of) preservationism and the previous awareness condition: What is a theory of remembering, anyway?

“…. ] it lies in the nature of experiences of this kind to be [appropriately] caused" (Moran 2021); "what is distinctive of experiential memory, in contrast to imagery, is that it has an…”

“…On this view, in referential remembering “one undergoes an experience of a distinctive kind. […] it lies in the nature of experiences of this kind to be [appropriately] caused” (Moran 2021); “what is distinctive of experiential memory, in contrast to imagery, is that it has an intrinsic particularity of content inherited from earlier sensory experience […] [so that] one aspect of how the world is now depends non‐causally on how it was” (Martin 2001: 277).…”

Naïve realism, imagination and hallucination

“…Recently, however, some naïve realists have attempted to argue against Martin's screening off argument (Allen, 2015;Moran, 2019Moran, , 2022Ivanov 2022). They emphasize that the screening off argument relies on the local supervenience principle, which claims that the phenomenology of perfect hallucination supervenes solely on the subject's neural states/activities.…”

“…There is, however, a specific kind of non-veridical experience that supposedly poses an explanatory difficulty to naïve realism, namely total and neurally matching 1 I owe this formulation of naïve realism to Soteriou (2016, 83). The following figures can be counted as naïve realists: Allen (2019); Beck (2019aBeck ( , 2019b, Brewer (2011Brewer ( , 2017, Campbell (2002), French and Gomes (2019), Fish (2009), Ivanov (2022), Kennedy (2009Kennedy ( , 2013Logue (2012a), Martin (2002Martin ( , 2004, Moran (2019Moran ( , 2022 and Niikawa (2021). It is natural, though controversial, to interpret Johnston (2004Johnston ( , 2006 as a naïve realist.…”