phenomenological directness

Thesis Statement                            

The question of how to best capture or explain the distinctive phenomenology of perceptual experience and how to develop a theory of perception that explains the phenomenological directness of perceptual experience and other perceptual experiences like illusion and most especially hallucination, has been a major difficulty.

Development of Thesis         

Two theories made significant efforts to explain the phenomenological directness of experience, along with all other forms of perceptual experiences. These theories include, naive realism and the representational or content view. The naive realism or relational view is the view that to perceive is to stand in a primitive relation of awareness or acquaintance to the world. Acquaintance with a property of some particular object requires that the relevant property is instantiated by that object. While the content theorist claims that, just as a true belief is true in virtue of the fact that the proposition that constitutes its content is true, a veridical perceptual experience is veridical in virtue of the fact that the proposition that constitutes its content is true. When the proposition that constitutes the content of a given perceptual experience is false, the relevant experience is an illusion or hallucination.

There is a problem with the naive realist’s story regarding why perceptual experiences possess their distinctive phenomenology and why it can’t explain the phenomenological directness of illusions and hallucinations. For when I suffer an illusion, a property of some object seems to be immediately present to me even though it is not instantiated by that object. But the perceptual acquaintance still cannot explain the phenomenological directness of such an experience since perceptual acquaintance with a property of some particular object requires that the relevant property is instantiated by that object. And when I suffer a hallucination, some object seems be immediately present to me even though there is no such object—but perceptual acquaintance can’t explain the phenomenological directness of such an experience since one can only be perceptually acquainted with objects that exist. Thus, naive realism would seem to have difficulty handling what we might call the phenomenological problem of perception. Hallucinations are phenomenologically distinct from thinking, imagining, and brute sensation in the ways just described—that they possess phenomenological directness. There are at least two powerful reasons for thinking hallucinations possess the phenomenology at issue. First, hallucinations possess the same phenomenological directness that veridical experiences possess. unlike consciously thinking or imagining, it’s as though some object itself seems to be immediately present to you. In addition, you will find that, unlike a brute sensation, the object that seems to be immediately present to you seems to be something that exists apart from your experience of it.

According to naive realist accounts of phenomenological directness, “perceiving an object is an essential relational state, of which the object perceived is a constituent; so the perception is constitutively dependent on the object perceived”. The naive realist who appeals to the fact that veridical experiences have physical objects as constituents cannott explain the phenomenological directness of hallucinations since there is no appropriate object to serve as a constituent of the experience. Boyd Millar believed that the content theorist might be able to provide an account of phenomenological directness by appealing to the special nature of the representational contents that perceptual experiences involve. That is, they can maintain that perceptual experiences are phenomenologically distinct from conscious thoughts, imaginings, and brute sensations, not in virtue of involving a unique attitude, but in virtue of involving unique representational contents. The most promising approach to identifying what distinguishes perceptual experiences from other kinds of experiences, Millar holds is to appeal to the representation of the causal relation between the object of perception and the perceiver.

Regarding the causal relation between the object of perception and the perceiver, Searle held that; there is a difference between the voluntarily formed images we would experience as caused by us and the visual experience of the house we would experience as caused by something independent of us. And the differences in the two cases are the causal content of the two experiences. Specifically, while Searle’s view explains the phenomenological difference between perceptual experience and imagination, it cannot explain the phenomenological difference between perceptual experience and conscious thought. The direct causal content view has two unique features that are particularly important for present purposes. First, when there is a causal connection between a conscious thought about (or an episode of imagining) a particular physical object and that object, that causal connection always involves the mediation of some distinct experience. Conversely, the causal connection between a veridical perceptual experience of a given object and that object never involves the mediation of some distinct experience. Secondly, a veridical perceptual experience of a given object is only ever caused automatically (in the sense that the experience could not have been precipitated and cannot be terminated by the exercise of the subject’s will) by a causal link to the (approximately) present state of that object. Conversely, a conscious thought about (or episode of imagining) some particular physical object is typically under the voluntary control of the subject and does not require a causal link between that thought and the present state of the object. When an experience is caused by some physical thing, the causal connection between them does not first involve the mediation of some distinct experience.  And second, the experience is generated automatically by a causal link to the present state of the relevant physical thing.

Questions

            To what extent is perception constituently dependent on the perceiver? What determines the explanation between the object of perception or the perceiver?

Conclusion

The direct causal content view explains the phenomenological directness of perceptual experiences by appealing to the representation of a certain specific relation rather than to the representation of objects as such. As a result, both veridical perceptual experiences and hallucinations can possess that feature that the direct causal content theorist claims suffices for phenomenological directness; and thus the present view provides a unified account of the phenomenological directness of both veridical and hallucinatory experiences. The direct causal content view is also straightforwardly compatible with Fregean views where a mode of presentation of an object rather than the object itself is a constituent of the content of a perceptual experience. According to the direct causal content view, to have a perceptual experience is to stand in the perceptually-experiencing-relation to a specific sort of content, which suffices for phenomenological directness.