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Phenomenalist dogmatist experientialism and the distinctiveness problem
Abstract
Phenomenalist dogmatist experientialism (PDE) holds the following thesis: if
S
has a perceptual experience that
p
, then
S
has immediate prima facie evidential justification for the belief that
p
in virtue of the experience’s phenomenology. The benefits of PDE are that it (a) provides an undemanding view of perceptual justification that allows most of our ordinary perceptual beliefs to be justified, and (b) accommodates two important internalist intuitions, viz. the New Evil Demon Intuition and the Blindsight Intuition. However, in the face of a specific version of the Sellarsian dilemma, PDE is ad hoc. PDE needs to explain what is so distinct about perceptual experience that enables it to fulfill its evidential role without being itself in need of justification. I argue that neither an experience’s presentational phenomenology, nor its phenomenal forcefulness can be used to answer this question, and that prospects look dim for any other phenomenalist account. The subjective distinctness of perceptual experience might instead just stem from a higher-order belief that the experience is a perceptual one, but this will only serve to strengthen the case for externalism: externalism is better suited to provide an account of how we attain justified higher-order beliefs and can use this account to accommodate the Blindsight Intuition.
... A straightforward phenomenalist answer is that perceptual experience has epistemic power in virtue of having a distinctive presentational phenomenology shared by good and bad cases 1 of perpetual experience (Tolhurst 1998;Pryor 2000;Heck 2000;Huemer 2001;Tucker 2010;Chudnoff 2012;Bengson 2015;Smithies 2019;Berghofer 2020;Koksvik 2020). However, a rising resistance against phenomenalism denies the sufficiency or even the necessity of phenomenal consciousness for perceptual justification (Ghijsen 2014;Berger, Nanay, and Quilty-Dunn 2018;Berger 2020;Teng 2018Teng , 2024. ...
... Phenomenalists allow non-presentational states such as hallucinations to have presentational phenomenology despite not presenting the subject with an object or fact (Huemer 2001: 58;Smithies 2019: 94;Berghofer 2020: 175). Anti-phenomenalists also argue that some presentational states might not have presentational phenomenology (as in the 'perky effect', where a subject believes that he or she is hallucinating when he or she is actually perceiving [Ghijsen 2014]). ...
Contra both phenomenalists and anti-phenomenalists, I defend the following thesis in this paper: the epistemic power of perceptual experience is grounded in its presentational property that is (i) uniquely possessed by the experience in the good case and (ii) essentially a phenomenal property. In §2, I set the ground for my argument by elaborating on the phenomenalist account of presentational phenomenology. In §3, I argue (against phenomenalism) for the first part of the phenomenal presentation thesis: (i) perceptual experience’s epistemic power is grounded in instances of a presentational property possessed by perceptual experience in the good, but not in the bad case. In §4, I argue (against anti-phenomenalists) for the second part of the phenomenal presentation thesis: (ii) presentational property is essentially a phenomenal property. In §5, I address some potential objections to the phenomenal presentation thesis. §6 concludes.
... 14 See Walton (1990) for a similar distinction between deliberate imaginings and spontaneous imaginings. force (Ghijsen 2014;Siegel and Silins 2015). It is based on a classic experiment conducted by Perky (1910). ...
... I will explain it more in the final section, where I consider possible objections to my argument.10 Ghijsen (2014) calls this the "distinctiveness problem." ...
As an important view in the epistemology of perception, dogmatism proposes that for any experience (e.g. perceptual, memorial, imaginative, etc.), if it has a distinctive kind of phenomenal character, then it thereby provides us with immediate justification for beliefs about the external world. This paper rejects dogmatism by looking into the epistemology of imagining. In particular, this paper first appeals to some empirical studies on perceptual experiences and imaginings to show that it is possible for imaginings to have the distinctive phenomenal character dogmatists have in mind. Then this paper argues that some of these imaginings fail to provide us with immediate justification for beliefs about the external world at least partly due to their inappropriate etiology. Such imaginings constitute counterexamples to dogmatism.
... This point will come up in discussion in section 3.3. 2 But see Ghijsen (2014Ghijsen ( , 2015 for discussion. 3 McGrath (2018, pp. ...
Many philosophers take experience to be an essential aspect of perceptual justification. I argue against a specific variety of such an experientialist view, namely, the Looks View of perceptual justification, according to which our visual beliefs are mediately justified by beliefs about the way things look. I describe three types of cases that put pressure on the idea that perceptual justification is always related to looks‐related reasons: unsophisticated cognizers, multimodal identification, and amodal completion. I then provide a tentative diagnosis of what goes wrong in the Looks View: it ascribes a specific epistemic role to beliefs about looks that is actually fulfilled by subpersonal perceptual processes.
... 20 The idea that the specific phenomenal character of perceptual experience is responsible for its power to justify can also be found in the works of many other internalist foundationalists (e.g., Tolhurst 1998 ;Huemer 2001;Pryor 2004;Tucker 2010;Chudnoff 2012;Bengson 2015). For discussion, see Ghijsen (2014). So perhaps we should look at an even weaker form of internalist foundationalism that ascribes the source of justification for epistemically basic beliefs to the priors and likelihoods on the basis of which perceptual experiences are formed according to PP. 21 Although we could still count this as a form of internalism on the grounds that the relevant factors for justification are still part of a subject's mental states [along the lines of Feldman and Conee (2001)], it would become more difficult to see what would be left of the foundationalism. ...
Predictive processing accounts of perception (PP) assume that perception does not work in a purely bottom-up fashion but also uses acquired knowledge to make top-down predictions about the incoming sensory signals. This provides a challenge for foundationalist accounts of perception according to which perceptual beliefs are epistemically basic, that is, epistemically independent from other beliefs. If prior beliefs rationally influence which perceptual beliefs we come to accept, then foundationalism about perception appears untenable. I review several ways in which foundationalism might be reconciled with PP from both an internalist and externalist perspective, and argue that an externalist foundationalism provides the best match with PP.
Perceptual experience usually comes with “phenomenal force”, a strong sense that it reflects reality as it is. Some philosophers have argued that it is in virtue of possessing phenomenal force that perceptual experiences are able to non‐inferentially justify beliefs. In this article, I introduce an alternative, inferentialist take on the epistemic role of phenomenal force. Drawing on Bayesian modeling in cognitive science, I argue that the sense of reality that accompanies conscious vision can be viewed as epistemically appraisable in light of its rational etiology.
According to phenomenal conservatism or dogmatism, perceptual experiences can give us immediate justification for beliefs about the external world in virtue of having a distinctive kind of phenomenal character—namely phenomenal force. I present three cases to show that phenomenal force is neither pervasive among nor exclusive to perceptual experiences. The plausibility of such cases calls out for explanation. I argue that contrary to a long‐held assumption, phenomenal force is a separate, non‐perceptual state generated by some metacognitive mechanisms that monitor one's first‐order mental processes and states. This new account advances our understanding of the nature of phenomenal force.
An increasing number of epistemologists defend the notion that some perceptual experiences can immediately justify some beliefs and do so in virtue of (some of) their phenomenal properties. But this view, which we may call phenomenal dogmatism, is also the target of various objections. Here I want to consider an objection that may be put as follows: what is so special about perceptual phenomenology that only it can immediately justify beliefs, while other kinds of phenomenology—including quite similar ones—remain ‘epistemically inert’? I will argue that, to overcome this objection, the phenomenal dogmatist should incorporate into her view a general principle—I call it the ‘experiential attitude/doxastic content link’ principle—that essentially extends the view from the perceptual case to other phenomenal states.
Epistemological disjunctivists make two strong claims about perceptual experience's epistemic value: (1) experience guarantees the knowledgeable character of perceptual beliefs; (2) experience's epistemic value is “reflectively accessible”. In this paper I develop a form of disjunctivism grounded in a presentational view of experience, on which the epistemic benefits of experience consist in the way perception presents the subject with aspects of her environment. I show that presentational disjunctivism has both dialectical and philosophically fundamental advantages over more traditional expositions. Dialectically, presentational disjunctivism resolves a puzzle disjunctivists face in their posture vis-à-vis skeptical scenarios. More systematically, presentational disjunctivism provides an especially compelling view of disjunctivism as an internalist view of perceptual consciousness by explaining the way perceptual presence manifests the subject's rationality in a distinct way.
According to the recent Perceptual Confidence view, perceptual experiences possess not only a representational content, but also a degree of confidence in that content. The motivations for this view are partly phenomenological and partly epistemic. We discuss both the phenomenological and epistemic motivations for the view, and the resulting account of the interface between perceptual experiences and degrees of belief. We conclude that, in their present state of development, orthodox accounts of perceptual experience are still to be favoured over the perceptual confidence view.
The goal of this paper is to show that certain perceptual experiences are non-assertoric due to penetration by attitudinal, belief-like imaginings. After surveying common interpretations of perceptual assertoricity and implications of these readings, we adduce cases of non-assertoric perceptual experience. We argue that in such cases, perceptual experience is non-assertoric due to penetration by belief-like imaginings. We then explain that because imaginings are, in a crucial sense, not directed at the real world, the experiences they penetrate are rendered non-assertoric.
In recent epistemology many philosophers have adhered to a moderate foundationalism according to which some beliefs do not depend on other beliefs for their justification. Reliance on such ‘basic beliefs’ pervades both internalist and externalist theories of justification. In this article I argue that the phenomenon of perceptual learning – the fact that certain ‘expert’ observers are able to form more justified basic beliefs than novice observers – constitutes a challenge for moderate foundationalists. In order to accommodate perceptual learning cases, the moderate foundationalist will have to characterize the ‘expertise’ of the expert observer in such a way that it cannot be had by novice observers and that it bestows justification on expert basic beliefs independently of any other justification had by the expert. I will argue that the accounts of expert basic beliefs currently present in the literature fail to meet this challenge, as they either result in a too liberal ascription of justification or fail to draw a clear distinction between expert basic beliefs and other spontaneously formed beliefs. Nevertheless, some guidelines for a future solution will be provided.
The phenomenon of cognitive penetration has received a lot of attention in recent epistemology, as it seems to make perceptual justification too easy to come by for experientialist theories of justification. Some have tried to respond to this challenge by arguing that cognitive penetration downgrades the epistemic status of perceptual experience, thereby diminishing its justificatory power. I discuss two examples of this strategy, and argue that they fail on several grounds. Most importantly, they fail to realize that cognitive penetration is just an instance of a larger problem for experientialist theories of perceptual justification. The challenge does not lie in explaining how cognitive penetration is able to downgrade the epistemic status of perceptual experience, the challenge lies in explaining why perceptual experience would have a special epistemic status to begin with. To answer this challenge, experientialists have to solve the distinctiveness problem: they have to explain what is so distinctive about perceptual experience that enables it to provide evidential justification without being in need of justification itself. Unfortunately, an internalist answer to this problem does not appear to be forthcoming, even though it would certainly help with explaining the problem of cognitive penetration.
Perceptual Dogmatism (PD) holds that if it perceptually seems to S that p, then S has immediate prima facie justification for the belief that p. Various philosophers have made the notion of a perceptual seeming more precise by distinguishing perceptual seemings from both sensations and beliefs to accommodate a) the epistemic difference between perceptual judgments of novices and experts, and, b) the problem of the speckled hen. Using somewhat different terminology, perceptual seemings are supposed to be high-level percepts instead of low-level sensations. I argue that although it is right that perceptual seemings should not be identified with sensations, they should also not be identified with percepts. There is no strong reason to assume that sensations and percepts exist as separate conscious states, and it appears therefore best to identify perceptual seemings simply with perceptual experiences interpreted as high-level representational entities. However, even with this plausible identification in hand, the speckled hen will remain problematic for PD.
We have previously argued that visual mental images are not substitutable for visual percepts, because the interfering effects of visual stimuli such as line maskers on visual targets differ markedly in their properties from the interfering effects of visual images (the “Perky effect”). Imagery interference occurs over a much wider temporal and spatial extent than masking, and unlike masking, image interference is insensitive to relative orientation. The lack of substitutability is theoretically interesting because the Perky effect can be compared meaningfully to real line masking in that both types of interference are visual, not due to optical factors (accommodative blur or poor fixation) or to high-level factors (attentional distraction, demand characteristics, or effects of uncertainty). In this report, however, we question our earlier position that spatial extents of interference are markedly different: when images and real lines are matched in contrast, which was not done previously, their interference effects have very similar spatial extents. These data add weight to the view that spatial properties of images and percepts are similar in respect to extent. Along with the wider temporal extent and the insensitivity to orientation, the new results remain compatible with our older hypothesis that to create a clear mental image in a region of visual space, incoming signals from the eye must be suppressed (Craver-Lemley and Reeves, 1992). We have pursued this idea in this report using “unmasking,” in which adding elements to the visual image in the region beyond the zone of suppression reduces the Perky effect.
Perky's 1910 observation that mental images were indistinguishable from external stimuli is considered as two issues: (1) description of images which apparently resemble the unidentified stimulus, has been given, but not satisfactorily measured; (2) poorer detection of ambiguous signals while experiencing images, has been consistently demonstrated. While distraction may play some role, the critical finding was with sensitivity (d′), which was highest in a simple discrimination task, intermediate when Ss were told both to describe imagery and detect the signals, and poorest when they lacked information that signals might be present during imaging and relied on retrospective judgments (Perky replication). In the intermediate task, alerting Ss to the signals by having them project the slides themselves, did not alter sensitivity or bias (Lx).
A framework for understanding source monitoring and relevant empirical evidence is described, and several related phenomena are discussed: old-new recognition, indirect tests, eyewitness testimony, misattributed familiarity, cryptomnesia, and incorporation of fiction into fact. Disruptions in source monitoring (e.g., from confabulation, amnesia, and aging) and the brain regions that are involved are also considered, and source monitoring within a general memory architecture is discussed. It is argued that source monitoring is based on qualities of experience resulting from combinations of perceptual and reflective processes, usually requires relatively differentiated phenomenal experience, and involves attributions varying in deliberateness. These judgments evaluate information according to flexible criteria and are subject to error and disruption. Furthermore, diencephalic and temporal regions may play different roles in source monitoring than do frontal regions of the brain.
Virtually all philosophers agree that for a belief to be epistemically justified, it must satisfy certain conditions. Perhaps it must be supported by evidence, or perhaps it must be reliably formed, or perhaps there is some other 'good-making' features it must have. But does a belief's justification also require some sort of awareness of its good-making features? The answer to this question has been hotly contested in contemporary epistemology, creating a deep divide among its practitioners. Internalists insist that such awareness is required for justification whereas externalists insist that it is not. The first part of this book argues that internalism faces an inescapable dilemma: either it leads to vicious regress problems and, ultimately, radical skepticism or it is entirely unmotivated. The second part of the book begins by developing the author's own externalist theory of justification, one imposing both a proper function and a no-defeater requirement. It concludes by demonstrating the failure of two prominent critiques of externalism: that it is infected with epistemic circularity and that it cannot respond adequately to skepticism. Together, the two parts of the book provide a decisive refutation of internalism and a sustained defense of externalism.
The essays in this book defend evidentialism. This is the view that whether a person is epistemically justified in believing a proposition is determined entirely by the person's evidence. Fundamentally, it is a supervenience thesis according to which facts about whether or not a person is epistemically justified in believing a proposition supervene on facts describing the evidence that person has. According to evidentialism, epistemic evaluations are distinct from moral and prudential evaluations of believing, and epistemically justified beliefs may fail to be morally or prudentially valuable. The evidence to which the theory refers includes other justified beliefs and, ultimately, experiences. While evidentialism is not an inherently anti-skeptical view, we argue that people do have knowledge level justification for many beliefs. Several essays in the volume criticize rival theories of justification, notably externalist theories such as reliabilism. © in this volume Earl Conee and Richard Feldman 2004. All rights reserved.
Introduction Part I: Theoretical Foundations 1. The Elements of Epistemology 2. Skepticism 3. Knowledge 4. Justification: A Rule Framework 5. Justification and Reliability 6. Problem Solving, Power, and Speed 7. Truth and Realism 8. The Problem of Content Part II: Assessing Our Cognitive Resources 9. Perception 10. Memory 11. Constraints on Representation 12. Internal Codes 13. Deductive Reasoning 14. Probability judgments 15. Acceptance and Uncertainty 16. Belief Updating 17. Production Systems and Second-Order Processes Conclusion: Primary Epistemics and Cognitive Science Notes Illustration Credits Author Index Subject Index
Here I set the stage, putting the issues in their historical context. I introduce a theory I call "External Object Foundationalism", according to which some basic beliefs are beliefs about external objects and not merely beliefs about simple a priori truths and one's current mental states. I explain how this view, construed as an epistemological view and not a metaphysical view about the nature of perception, is poised to solve the traditional skeptical problem of the external world as well as offer a handy solution to the perennial problem of whether there is a principled distinction between perception and inference and if so, where to draw the line.
Critics of disjunctivism have argued that the disjunctivist needs to provide a plausible explanation of just how two distinct mental states might be indistinguishable for their subject without simply taking the fact of indistinguishability for granted. This chapter examines the everyday notion of indistinguishability alongside relevant empirical findings. It offers an account of hallucinatory indistinguishability which suggests that the indistinguishability of hallucination from veridical perception is grounded in the similarity of their effects, rather than in any phenomenal similarities between the two states. This analysis is then elaborated to show how it can account for the first-person aspects of hallucinations, to show how it is possible for conceptually unsophisticated creatures - such as animals and infants - to hallucinate, and to show how a subject may suffer from hallucinations whilst being aware that their experiences are non-veridical.
McDowell has argued that external world scepticism is a pressing problem only in so far as we accept, on the basis of the argument from illusion, the claim that perceiving that p and hallucinating that p involve a highest common factorsomething which functions, in the manner of the classical 'veil of ideas', as a perceptual intermediary. McDowell traces the power of this argument to disput- able Cartesian assumptions about the transparency of subjectivity to itself. I argue, contra McDowell, that the reflections to be found in, paradigmatically, Descartes's First Meditation are better interpreted as offering a causal argument for scepticism that depends upon a naturalistic conception of sense experience. This is more powerful than the argument from illusion, since it requires no commitment to a highest common factor in perception, nor to the transparency of the mental. The availability of this alternative route to scepticism raises serious problems for McDowell's quietism, which aims to earn the right to avoid, rather than answer, the sceptic. Since the appeal to externalism about content cannot settle the matter, I conclude that there is, at present, an unsatisfactory stand-off between the sceptic and McDowell's position.
The Sellarsian dilemma is a famous argument that attempts to show that nondoxastic experiential states cannot confer justification on basic beliefs. The usual conclusion of the Sellarsian dilemma is a coherentist epistemology, and the usual response to the dilemma is to find it quite unconvincing. By distinguishing between two importantly different justification relations (evidential and nonevidential), I hope to show that the Sellarsian dilemma, or something like it, does offer a powerful argument against standard nondoxastic foundationalist theories. But this reconceived version of the argument does not support coherentism. Instead, I use it to argue for a strongly externalist epistemology.
Internalists tend to impose on justification higher‐level requirements, according to which a belief is justified only if the
subject has a higher‐level belief (i.e., a belief about the epistemic credentials of a belief). I offer an error theory that
explains the appeal of this requirement: analytically, a belief is not justified if we have a defeater for it, but contingently,
it is often the case that to avoid having defeaters, our belief must satisfy a higher‐level requirement. I respond to the
objection that externalists who endorse this error theory will be forced to accept a radical form of scepticism.
I defend the principle of Phenomenal Conservatism, on which appearances of all kinds generate at least some justification for belief. I argue that there is no reason for privileging introspection or intuition over perceptual experience as a source of justified belief; that those who deny Phenomenal Conservatism are in a self-defeating position, in that their view cannot be both true and justified; and that the demand for a metajustification for Phenomenal Conservatism either is an easily met demand, or is an unfair or question-begging one.
A central issue in epistemology concerns the connection between truth and justification. The burden of our paper is to explain this connection. Reliabilism, defended by Goldman, assumes that the connection is one of reliability. We argue that this assumption is too strong. We argue that foundational theories, such as those articulated by Pollock and Chisholm fail to elucidate the connection. We consider the potentiality of coherence theories to explain the truth connection by means of higher level convictions about probabilities, which we call doxastic ascent, and defend such a theory. Our defense appeals to the work of Reid and contemporary cognitive psychology in order to account for the psychological reality of higher level evaluations.
Reliabilism about epistemic justification – thethesis that what makes a belief epistemicallyjustified is that it was produced by a reliableprocess of belief-formation – must face twoproblems. First, what has been called ``the newevil demon problem'', which arises from the ideathat the beliefs of victims of an evil demonare as justified as our own beliefs, althoughthey are not – the objector claims – reliablyproduced. And second, the problem of diagnosingwhy skepticism is so appealing despite beingfalse. I present a special version ofreliabilism, ``indexical reliabilism'', based ontwo-dimensional semantics, and show how it cansolve both problems.
In this paper I articulate and defend a view that I call phenomenal dogmatism about intuitive justification. It is dogmatic
because it includes the thesis: if it intuitively seems to you that p, then you thereby have some prima facie justification
for believing that p. It is phenomenalist because it includes the thesis: intuitions justify us in believing their contents
in virtue of their phenomenology—and in particular their presentational phenomenology. I explore the nature of presentational
phenomenology as it occurs perception, and I make a case for thinking that it is present in a wide variety of logical, mathematical,
and philosophical intuitions.
KeywordsIntuition–Epistemology–Phenomenology–Dogmatism–Justification
Disjunctivism has attracted considerable philosophical attention in recent years: it has been the source of a lively and extended debate spanning the philosophy of perception, epistemology, and the philosophy of action. The seventeen chapters in this book examine the different forms of disjunctivism and explore the connections between them.
Between 8 and 40% of Parkinson disease (PD) patients will have visual hallucinations (VHs) during the course of their illness. Although cognitive impairment has been identified as a risk factor for hallucinations, more specific neuropsychological deficits underlying such phenomena have not been established. Research in psychopathology has converged to suggest that hallucinations are associated with confusion between internal representations of events and real events (i.e. impaired-source monitoring). We evaluated three groups: 17 Parkinson's patients with visual hallucinations, 20 Parkinson's patients without hallucinations and 20 age-matched controls, using tests of visual imagery, visual perception and memory, including tests of source monitoring and recollective experience. The study revealed that Parkinson's patients with hallucinations appear to have intact visual imagery processes and spatial perception. However, there were impairments in object perception and recognition memory, and poor recollection of the encoding episode in comparison to both non-hallucinating Parkinson's patients and healthy controls. Errors were especially likely to occur when encoding and retrieval cues were in different modalities. The findings raise the possibility that visual hallucinations in Parkinson's patients could stem from a combination of faulty perceptual processing of environmental stimuli, and less detailed recollection of experience combined with intact image generation.
Some of the symptoms of schizophrenia may reflect a difficulty discriminating between information that was perceived from the outside world and information that was imagined. This study used fMRI to examine the brain regions associated with this reality monitoring ability in healthy volunteers, who recollected whether information had previously been perceived or imagined, or whether information had been presented on the left or right of a monitor screen. Recent studies have suggested that schizophrenia may be associated particularly with dysfunction in medial anterior prefrontal cortex, thalamus, and cerebellum. In our data, activation in all three of these regions of interest was significantly greater during recollection of whether stimuli had been perceived or imagined versus recollection of stimulus position. In addition, reduced prefrontal activation was associated with the same misattribution error that has been observed in schizophrenia. These results indicate a possible link between the brain areas implicated in schizophrenia and the regions supporting the ability to discriminate between perceived and imagined information.
this paper is devoted to articulating and defending a dogmatist account of perceptual justification which enables us to reject the skeptic's arguments that we have no justified perceptual beliefs. I will present the positive case for my account in III, and I will defend it against an important objection in IV. My primary concern will be questions about perceptual justification rather than questions about perceptual knowledge. This is because the connections between justification and knowledge are complicated. I believe that the account of perceptual justification I will be arguing for can be extended to provide an account of perceptual knowledge, as well. But I will not attempt to do that. 6 I will also be concentrating throughout on questions about what propositions we have justification for believing. When we're evaluating the epistemic merit of a belief you hold, we're sometimes concerned with more than just whether it's a belief in some proposition you have justification for. We also take into consideration what sorts of justification, if any, your belief is based on. One may have very good reasons for believing p, but base one's belief in p
Presentational phenomenology
- E Chudnoff
Empiricism and the philosophy of mind, intro. by Richard Rorty and study guide by Robert Brandom
- W Sellars