Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2012) 727–736

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Consciousness and Cognition

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Naïve realism without disjunctivism about experience q

Matthew Conduct ⇑Department of Philosophy, Durham University, 50 Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP, United Kingdom

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history:Available online 17 March 2011

Keywords:PerceptionDisjunctivismNaive realismThe argument from hallucination

1053-8100/$ - see front matter � 2011 Elsevier Incdoi:10.1016/j.concog.2011.02.009

q This article is part of a special issue of this jour⇑ Fax: +44 0191 334 6551.

E-mail address: m.d.conduct@durham.ac.uk1 So on this usage illusions are perceptual experien

the world that appears other than it is. In a hallucina2 There are many different formulations of naïve re

Brewer (2007, 2008) and Smith (2002).3 Everyone should agree that perceptual experienc

present to mind when we perceive. Not everyone, of4 See Martin (2004).5 The distinction can be illustrated as follows. Glaci

shape the landscape by actually being the contours o6 For uses of disjunctivism to defend naïve realism

I argue that the possibility of non-perceptual experience need not compel a naïve realist toadopt a disjunctive conception of experience. Instead, they can maintain that the nature ofperceptual and hallucinatory experience is the same, while still claiming that perceptualexperience is presentational of the objects of perception. On such a view the differencebetween perceptual and non-perceptual experience will lie in the nature of the objects thatare so presented. I will defend a view according to which in non-perceptual experience oneis presented with mere universals, while in perceptual experience one is presented withthe instantiation of a universal by a particular. This is to adopt disjunctivism about theobjects of experience, about that which is apparently present in experience.

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1. Introduction

I shall use the expression ‘perceptual experience’ to refer to the sensory experiences that subjects enjoy when perceivingthings in the world. I shall use ‘non-perceptual experience’ to refer to those sensory experiences that subjects enjoy whennot perceiving anything in the world.1 I shall use ‘sensory experience’ to refer to experiences in general, covering both percep-tual and non-perceptual experiences. Naïve realism regards perceptual experiences as being presentational of the objects of per-ception.2,3 In enjoying a perceptual experience a subject stands in a relation to the thing that they perceive, such that thesubjective aspect of their experience, the peculiar way in which the subject is appeared to on such an occasion, is constitutedby that which they perceive. As Mike Martin puts it, the things in the world that we perceive ‘shape the contours’ of our per-ceptual experiences, where ‘shaping’ is to be understood in its constitutive rather than causal sense.4,5 It is frequently arguedthat this naïve realist view of the nature of perceptual experience requires one to adopt disjunctivism about experience. Dis-junctivism is the view that in order to accommodate the possibility of hallucinatory experiences that are subjectively indiscrim-inable from perceptual experiences (hereafter perfect non-perceptual experiences) the naïve realist must maintain that suchexperiences are of a fundamentally different nature to those that occur when perceiving.6 Or so the argument goes.

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nal on Standing on the Verge: Lessons and Limits from the Empirical study of Consciousness.

ces while hallucinations are non-perceptual experiences. In an illusion a subject perceives something intion a subject does not perceive anything in the world.

alism, but most are committed to the sort of claims expressed here. See, for example, Martin (2004, 2006),

e at least appears presentational, in the sense that it really does seem as if there is something literallycourse, agrees that perceptual experience actually is presentational.

ers shape the contours of a landscape by causing the landscape to have a certain shape. The sides of a hillf the landscape. This example is from Fish (2009: 6).in the face of the possibility of hallucination see, for example, Martin (2004, 2006) and Fish (2009).

728 M. Conduct / Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2012) 727–736

It is my intention to show that the possibility of such non-perceptual experience need not compel a naïve realist to adopt adisjunctive conception of experience.7 Instead, they can maintain that the nature of perceptual and hallucinatory experience is thesame, while still claiming that perceptual experience is presentational of the objects of perception. On such a view the differencebetween perceptual and non-perceptual experience will lie in the nature of the objects that are so presented. This is to adopt dis-junctivism about the objects of experience, about that which is, according to the naive realist, present in experience.

There are two problems for this line of thought. First, this results in a picture of the objects of experience in cases of per-fect non-perceptual experience as being both actual and mind-independent. And it may be objected that this is just tooimplausible to accept, given what we know about how such experiences can be brought about.

Second, if we think that the causal basis of some non-perceptual experience is sufficient for the occurrence of the aware-ness of some entity, then a perceptual experience whose causal basis includes the whole of the causal basis of the non-perceptual experience (a causally matching perceptual experience) must involve awareness of the same kind of entity.But how can this be consistent with supposing that in the perceptual experience one is presented with things in the world?The naïve realist who accepts a common view of the nature of perceptual and non-perceptual experience faces the problemof explaining how what is in common does not ‘get in the way,’ or ‘screen off’ the objects that we perceive from being whatone is most immediately aware of.

I intend to outline what sort of strategy the naïve realist needs to adopt, and consider one particular way of implementing it.In Section 2 I will look at what reasons there are for thinking that the naïve realist must reject a view of the nature of perceptualand non-perceptual experience such that they share the same nature. In Sections 3 and 4 I present motivations for taking non-perceptual experiences to be presentational of entities whose existence is independent of one’s awareness of them. In Section 5I argue that there are two prima facie plausible strategies for accommodating this view of non-perceptual experience alongsidea commitment to said experiences being part of the natural causal order. We could take the physical basis of non-perceptualexperiences to generate entities of which we then become aware. Or we could take the physical basis of non-perceptual expe-rience to be sufficient for our awareness of entities that we are also aware of in causally matching perceptual experience. InSection 6 I argue that the first of these strategies is defeated by the possibility of there being non-perceptual experiences withthe same proximal causes as perceptual experiences. In Section 7 I present the remaining alternative in more detail and inSection 8 I defend this from a number of objections, including the ‘screening off’ objection outlined above.

2. Naïve realism and the common kind assumption

The naïve realist conception of the nature of perceptual experience does not automatically rule out a conception of hal-lucinatory experience according to which it shares the same nature. According to the naïve realist a perceptual experienceconsists in the subject of the experience standing in a relation to some entity (an object in the world) such that the entityconstitutively contributes to the phenomenal character of the experience , in the sense that it ‘shapes the contours’ of thesubject’s conscious experience (as described earlier). This relation has gone by many names, such as ‘acquaintance’ and‘sensing.’8 What makes it a perceptual experience is the fact that this entity is something in the world. If the naïve realist alsothought that a hallucinatory experience consists in the subject of the experience standing in the same relation to something,then they are conceiving of hallucinatory experience as having the same nature as perceptual experience. What would makethe experience hallucinatory would be something about the kind of entity to which the subject was related in experience.

The fact that there is no immediate conflict between naïve realism and giving a common account of perceptual and non-perceptual experience is not widely recognised. This is probably because it seems incredible to most people that a storycould be given of the nature of hallucination that could generalise to perception in a way that does not threaten naïve real-ism. Nevertheless, the possibility is clearly there.

To conceive of the difference between perceptual and hallucinatory experiences to lie in a difference in the nature of the ob-ject that is presented in such experiences is to adopt what we can refer to as disjunctivism about the objects of experience.9

Mike Martin has argued that the naïve realist cannot avail themselves of this sort of disjunctivism. His reason is that thefollowing two claims:

1. Whatever kind of thing perceptual experience is, hallucinatory experience is also that kind of thing. (The Common KindAssumption).

2. Experiences are ‘part of the natural causal order, subject to broadly physical and psychological causes’ (Experiential Nat-uralism). (Martin, 2006: 357).

are inconsistent with,

3. Perceptual experience is a relation between a subject and a mind-independent object (naïve realism).

7 Experiential disjunctivism may well prove unworkable, at least if Martin is correct about the form it must take. For Martin’s version of disjunctivism and hisarguments for it see Martin (2004, 2006). For substantial criticisms of this approach, see Siegel (2004, 2008) and Smith (2008).

8 See, for example, Fish (2009) and Price (1950) respectively.9 Byrne and Logue (2008) refer to it as ‘Austinian disjunctivism’ and Thau (2004) talks about ‘disjunctivism about the objects of experience’. There are

affinities with what Price (1950) called ‘The Selective Theory.’ Martin expresses the position in his (1997: 95–96), and links it with Austin.

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This is because experiential naturalism commits us to rejecting hallucinatory experience as a relation to a mind-indepen-dent object. By the common kind assumption, whatever kind of thing perceptual experience is, hallucinatory experience isalso that kind of thing. If perceptual experience were a relation to a mind-independent object, then so too would hallucina-tory experience. But hallucinatory experience is not a relation to a mind-independent object. So naïve realism must be false.As experiential naturalism is not easily contestable, the naïve realist must reject (1), the common kind assumption, and soadopt disjunctivism about experience. I will argue that experiential naturalism does not in fact compel us to reject a view ofhallucinatory experience according to which it is a relation to a mind-independent object, and that there is therefore spacefor the naive realist to generate a common view of the nature of perceptual and non-perceptual experiences.

Let us look at the argument for why Martin does not take it to be plausible that non-perceptual experience could be arelation to a mind-independent object.

First, such a position maintains that non-perceptual experience is relational. If this is the case then it is a necessary con-dition for the obtaining of non-perceptual experience that there is some object to which the subject is related.

Second, the commitment to experiential naturalism in turn commits us to something like the following claim:

Appropriate stimulation of the various sensory areas of the cortex should be sufficient to bring about a visual, auditory ortactual experience, or at least to fix the chance of its occurring. (Martin, in press)

These two conditions generate the following constraint: If neural stimulation is sufficient for the occurrence of a non-perceptual experience as of an object with a certain character, and the existence of an object that appears to have that characteris necessary for the experience, then it must be the case that whenever the neural stimulation obtains, the object obtains.

Martin then claims that if we suppose the object to have an existence independent of the experience of it then the mind-independent objects of non-perceptual experience have some sort of objectionable role to play in determining whether thephysical conditions sufficient for the occurrence of such experience obtain. He raises three ways we might conceive of sat-isfying the constraint, while maintaining that the experience has a mind-independent object.

The first is that there is a multitude of non-perceptual objects such that whenever a subject is caused to have a suitablepattern of neuronal excitation there is always a non-perceptual object of the right sort for him to be related to.

The second option considered is that non-perceptual objects prevent the neural stimulation that would result in an expe-rience in all situations in which there is no non-perceptual object appropriately placed.

The third option is that the obtaining of the neural excitation, as well as being sufficient for the obtaining of a non-per-ceptual experience, causes the obtaining of the non-perceptual object of that experience. As Martin puts it:

The physical causes of acts of sensing are also causally active in bringing appropriate sensibilia into a position to besensed [. . .] the causes of sensing are causally sufficient for them because they are also causally sufficient for the actsof sensings independent objects. (Martin, in press)

According to Martin the first option should be ruled out on the grounds of its extravagance in postulating a non-percep-tual object of every kind that there could be, in every location that there could be. The second and third options are ques-tionable on the grounds that they posit casual relations between perceptual and non-perceptual objects that we have nosupporting evidence for other than the need to preserve a conception of non-perceptual experience as a relation to suchobjects.

I suppose the thought here is that, if there are non-normal objects of non-perceptual experience then the postulation thatthey are dependent upon non-perceptual experience is all that is reasonably supported by what we know about the world.To claim that they are experience independent is to go further then we need to, given that we know that neural stimulation issufficient for non-perceptual experience.

And, given this, the simplest, most parsimonious account to give is one in which the object depends for its existence uponthe experience. Other accounts, while not being impossible, are more extravagant in postulating causal relations betweennormal and non-normal objects, and so, all things being equal, should be ruled out. If we are trying to explain the apparentrelationality of non-perceptual experience, given what we know about how such experiences can come about, we shouldconsider such experience as either a relation to a mind-dependent object, or not relational at all.

Once we accept this, then if we are to be naïve realist about the nature of perceptual experience, we must reject thecommon kind assumption and embrace disjunctivism. For it seems that the naïve realist cannot give an account of hal-lucination in terms of it consisting in the same relation between subject and object that they maintain occurs when per-ceiving, as this is highly implausible. There are two options left to the naïve realist at this point. The first is to maintainthat hallucination is a relational state of affairs, but of a very different kind to that involved in their conception of per-ceptual experience. In hallucinatory experience the object is constituted, in some sense, by the relation in which the sub-ject stands to it. In the perceptual case the object is independent of this relation. The alternative option is to reject theidea that hallucination is relational. Either way, the naïve realist has denied the common nature of perceptual and hal-lucinatory experience.

I will argue that naive realism can adopt either the first or third option that Martin considers without violating any com-mitment we might have to experiential naturalism. Before doing so I will offer some reasons, independent of any defence ofnaive realism, for why we should think that non-perceptual experience is presentational of mind-independent entities, andhence that non-perceptual experience is relational in the way that the naive realist conceives of perceptual experience.

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3. Hallucination as presentational

Perfect non-perceptual experience will seem presentational upon reflection upon it. This follows from it being subjec-tively indiscriminable from perceptual experience. In perceptual experience it seems to us as if we are presented with someitem in an ontologically immediate way. When one hallucinates and one is unable to discriminate one’s experience from per-ceptual experience, then such experience will also appear presentational, or else it will be discriminable from perceptualexperience.

To think of such experience as being presentational in nature is, then, to be less revisionary about how such experienceappears to us to be than an account that does not regard it as presentational. We might say that we have a ‘naïve conceptionof hallucination,’ and that a presentational construal of the nature of such experience is in accord with this conception.10

4. Why the object of experience must be awareness-independent

John Foster offers a rejection of the intelligibility of a state of affairs in which a genuine entity is present to a subjectwhose existence is not independent of this state of affairs. We cannot make sense of this being a genuinely relational stateof affairs between subject and object, for the object threatens to ‘vanish’ into the experiential episode (Foster, 2000: 164–170). But for a visual experience to be genuinely relational the object of experience (what he refers to as a sense-datum)must have ‘a form of existence which transcends its standing in that presentational relationship’ (Foster, 2000: 170).

He considers three ways in which we might make sense of the notion that the episode of awareness ‘constitutes’ itsobject.

(i) The object may be constituted by the fact of its presentation to a particular subject on a particular occasion.(ii) The object may consist in the fact of its presentation to a particular subject on a particular occasion.

(iii) The object and its presentation to a particular subject on a particular occasion are constituted by that subject’s being ina further psychological state on that occasion. This state would not involve the occurrence of its object. (Foster, 2000:169).

Foster takes the first possibility to be ‘manifestly incoherent’ and the second to be incoherent at least upon first reflection.If we think that the object of experience is constituted by the presentation of that object to a subject at a particular time, weare already assuming its existence in explaining how it comes to be.

The second approach is that which, presumably, reflects how most philosophers would conceive of the awareness-depen-dence of objects of experience. And the intuitive problem with this is as to how, in the object of experience deriving its beingfrom an act of awareness, it can be available as the object of that awareness, as that which the awareness is directed upon.

The last alternative which Foster considers for the sense-datum theorist to take is the view that the object of experienceand the presentational episode are both constituted by some other, more fundamental fact. Foster takes this further funda-mental fact to be a psychological one, and accordingly rejects it on the grounds that, firstly, we have no idea what this psy-chological fact would be and secondly, that this would mean that the sense-datum account of experience is not getting togrips with what the fundamental nature of experience really is. The basic nature of experience would be given by an accountof what this mysterious further psychological episode is.

Given the difficulties in making sense of the idea that non-perceptual experiences could consist in our standing in a gen-uine relation to an entity whose existence depends upon our awareness of it, and given that such experiences appear to bepresentational upon reflection upon them, then this gives us reason to believe that the entities of which we are aware in suchexperiences are independent of those experiences.

5. Accommodating experiential naturalism

It might be thought that even if there is introspective evidence for causally matching hallucination being presentational,and hence relational in nature, and even if a relational conception of causally matching hallucination requires us to think ofthe objects of such experiences as being mind-independent, if such a position violates our commitment to experiences beingpart of the natural causal order, then we must reject one of the two claims that has led us to this violation. Either such expe-rience is not relational, and appearances are misleading, or there is some way of making good the thought that experiencecan be genuinely relational even thought the objects of that experience depend for their existence upon it.

It is not clear to me, however, that a denial of experiential naturalism is necessitated by an attempt to conjoin the com-mon kind assumption with naïve realism. It seems clear that the second strategy that Martin considers is not satisfactory. Itsupposes that there is a causal interaction between the non-normal objects that we are aware of in hallucination and thephysical world in the sense that they must play a role in preventing the obtaining of the physical conditions that will gen-erate a hallucination in any situation in which there is no suitable non-normal object to be sensed. It is not clear, however,that the first and third strategies that Martin considers are quite so unpalatable.

10 See Hawthorne and Kovakovich (2006: 178).

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According to the third strategy the physical basis of a causally matching perfect non-perceptual experience brings intoexistence the object of that experience, which is then sensed by the subject. We should recognise that there is, at leaston the face of it, nothing obviously implausible about the thought that objects can be generated out of, or depend for theirexistence upon, physical processes and events that are not parts of those objects. So one might take seriously, for example,the thought that virtual objects are genuine objects that depend for their existence upon the physical processes and states ofthe computer that we quite naturally think of generating them. Of course it is open to someone to argue that these are notgenuine objects, perhaps along the lines that they do not exist independently of our awareness of them. But to advocate thatvirtual objects are genuine objects would not be to violate a naturalistic understanding of the world. Such objects wouldhave a place within the natural causal order. They would depend for their existence and characteristics upon the operationsof the computer that generates them. We could appeal to the notion of supervenience in order to reconcile the existence ofsuch objects with naturalism. Virtual objects would then be conceived of as entities that supervene upon the physical realm.It seems, then, at least plausible that we have a perfectly good example of objects being generated, or brought about, ordepending upon, physical goings on in the world, in such a way that does not necessarily violate a naturalistic world view.As we shall see, however, the problem with this strategy is not in its violation of any of our naturalistic assumptions, but inits inability to provide the naive realist with a picture of hallucinatory experience that does not damage their conception ofperceptual experience.

According to the second strategy considered by Martin, whenever the physical conditions sufficient for a hallucinatoryexperience occur, there is a non-normal object for the subject of the experience to become aware of. As Martin presentsit the claim is that every kind of non-normal object exists in every place, so that when the conditions sufficient for experienceare brought about, it is guaranteed that there is an appropriate object for the subject to be aware of. But if we thought thatthe objects of non-perceptual experience were abstract entities with no spatio-temporal location (such as universals, on atleast one understanding of them) then we would not be saying that the world is filled with non-normal objects in the kind ofabsurd way that Martin pictures. Rather, we would take the physical basis of non-perceptual experience to be sufficient tomake us aware of these abstract entities (the awareness would be spatio-temporally located, but not the entities them-selves). And we might think that this is not under motivated, nor in conflict with experiential naturalism. The existenceof universals, for example, is not appealed to solely to answer a problem in the philosophy of perception. And the existenceof such entities need not conflict with experiential naturalism. The physical basis of hallucinatory experience is sufficient topresent us with universals that are not instantiated in anything present in experience. The commitment to uninstantiateduniversals is not compatible with a thoroughgoing naturalism that rejects the existence of anything that is not in spaceand time. But it is compatible with an experiential naturalism that takes experiences to be part of the natural causal order,because it does not give such universals a causal role to play in experience.

6. The common element

In maintaining that the nature of perceptual and causally matching non-perceptual experience is the same, the naïve real-ist need not be violating any commitment that we might have to experiential naturalism. Furthermore, there is phenome-nological support for the thought that philosophers’ hallucination is presentational, and hence relational, in nature. If there isgood reason to suppose that for experience to be genuinely presentational, the objects of experience must be independent oftheir presence in experience, then to satisfy this phenomenological intuition that hallucination is presentational, we shouldthink that the objects of such experiences are awareness-independent.

So far, so good for the naïve realist. There is one major obstacle remaining to their being able to provide a satisfactoryaccount of hallucination. How can the naïve realist understand the objects of causally matching perfect non-perceptual expe-rience as being present when one enjoys a perceptual experience without these objects getting in the way of things in theworld being present in experience? David Smith expresses this worry as follows:

If such stimulation [a replication of the stimulation that would occur in some perceptual experience] is regarded as caus-ing a real entity or process to exist, it can hardly be supposed that giving this same type of stimulus one rather thananother type of causal antecedent can annihilate or prevent occurrence of this sensory entity, and the consequenceawareness of it. (Smith, 2002: 235)

But if the perceptual and non-perceptual experiences involve awareness of the same kind of entity, how can the naïverealist maintain that the perceptual experience is also an awareness of an entity that is a normal object in the world? Toput it another way, the naïve realist supposes that the object of experience in a perceptual experience is the object of per-ception, a normal object in the world. But how is this possible, if the object of experience in such a case is also the same kindof thing as the object of experience in a causally matching non-perceptual experience, which is not a normal object?11

I believe this objection to be fatal for any attempt to think of the physical basis of non-perceptual experience as bringingabout the existence of entities which are then sensed by the subject in experience. For given the presence of the very samephysical basis in the case of a causally matching perceptual experience these entities would also have to be generated andsensed in such a case. In which case it would surely be these entities, and not any entities that the subject perceives in the

11 SeeJohnston (2004) and Valberg (1992) for presentations of the problem.

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world, which would be the immediate objects of experience and which would constitute the phenomenal character of thesubject’s experience.

I do not, however, believe that the second strategy that Martin considers is susceptible to this line of objection. In whatfollows I will outline a view of non-perceptual experience which takes such experience to be presentational, and the objectsof such experiences to be universals. I will argue that the presentation of these entities in causally matching perceptual expe-rience does not threaten our immediate awareness of normal objects in the world.

7. The strategy

One important point to mention is that we should not be confused by the fact that we refer to that which is present inexperience as the ‘object of experience’ and we more generally use the term ‘object’ to denote a kind of entity. But by ‘objectof experience’ we do not actually mean ‘object’ in this other sense. Reflection upon experience leaves it open as to what meta-physical category the entity that is the object of experience belongs to. I shall use the term ‘entity’ to refer to anything of anyontological category whatsoever. So universals, tropes and particulars are all entities as I understand the term. I shall under-stand the distinction between universals and particulars in terms of a difference between what it makes sense to supposesuch entities to instantiate. Particulars can instantiate universals. Universals can of course instantiate universals, but the cru-cial difference between the two kinds of entity is that universals are in their very nature capable of instantiation by entitieswhereas particulars are not. Universals are ways that particulars can be.

Given this understanding of the distinction between universals and particulars how can these different categories of en-tity be appealed to in order to allow the naive realist to escape from the objection above? Mark Johnston (2004) offers anaccount of the relation between perceptual and hallucinatory experience that, with some minor modifications, can beadopted by the naïve realist. The essence of the account is illustrated in the following passage:

Just as the constitutional basis for a hallucination can be a proper part of the constitutional basis of another, subjectivelyindiscernible, act of seeing so also the objects of a hallucination can be proper parts of the objects seen in another, sub-jectively indiscernible act of seeing. (Johnston, 2004: 139–140)

Johnston fleshes this out in the following way. In enjoying a sensory experience a subject is aware of a sensible profile, ‘acomplex, partly qualitative and partly relational property, which exhausts the way the particular scene before your eyes is ifyour perceptual experience is veridical’ (Johnston, 2004: 134). When one is perceiving the world, one is aware of the partic-ulars that instantiate aspects of this profile. When one is hallucinating, one is aware only of the sensible profile.

The objects of hallucination and the objects of seeing are in a certain way akin; the first are complexes of sensible qual-ities and relations while the second are spatio-temporal particulars instantiating such complexes [. . .] When the visualsystem misfires, as in hallucination, it presents uninstantiated complexes of sensible qualities and relations, at least com-plexes not instantiated there in the scene before the eyes. (Johnston, 2004: 135)

It is rather misleading for Johnston to talk of hallucination as being the presentation in experience of uninstantiated uni-versals while perception is the presentation of instantiated universals, for, as he himself acknowledges in a footnote, in casesof veridical hallucination the universals that one is aware of are instantiated in the scene before the eyes.12 So if perceptionwere just the awareness of instantiated universals we would not be able to make sense of the possibility of veridical halluci-nation. So perception and hallucination cannot be understood in merely this way. It is better to say that in hallucination oneis presented only with universals, whereas in perception one is presented with universals and particulars.

So the naïve realist can say that one possibility for the naïve realist is to conceive of the entities that are the objects ofexperience in the hallucinatory case as merely sensible profiles. These entities are present when one perceives something,but in such a case are instantiated by the thing perceived. The object of experience is an instantiated sensible profile, andalso, the thing that instantiates this profile. In hallucination you are sensing a certain sort of entity, and in perception youare sensing the same sort of entity, but this time it is instantiated by a normal object, which you are also sensing.

The entity does not get in the way of the object in the perceptual case. In the hallucinatory case, one is not presented withan object, understood as a bearer of properties that cannot itself be borne by other things. Rather, one is presented with acomplex of properties. In the perceptual case, one is presented with a complex of properties and an object which bears, orpossesses these properties. But the properties that are in common between the perceptual and the non-perceptual case donot get in the way of the awareness of the object; they do not render the awareness of the object indirect (this will be de-fended in more detail below).

8. Objections

I want to finish by highlighting some potential problems of such an account and in doing so make clearer the view of themetaphysical structure of perception and hallucination that has been sketched above.

12 See Johnston (2004: 178–179n16). In a veridical hallucination there is a match between how things appear to someone and the way that the world aroundthem actually is, but it is still nevertheless the case that they do not perceive the world.

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8.1. Universals are causally inert, but the things that we see cause us to see them13

It may be objected that we cannot be aware of universals as in order to perceive something that thing must cause anexperience in us. But universals, having no spatial or temporal location (at least on the understanding of universals beingadopted here) cannot cause anything to happen. So we cannot perceive universals.

This objection fails because it relies upon a conception of experience that the naive realist is committed to denying inde-pendently of any ontological commitments they may make. It relies upon adopting some form of the causal theory of per-ception, according to which it is a necessary truth that perception of something requires an experience that is caused by thatthing. This is because the causal theory of perception conceives of the structure of perception as consisting in experiencestanding in a causal relation to the world. A subject enjoys a perceptual experience only if they enjoy a sensory experiencethat is caused in the right kind of way by things in the world. So for example, on this account what makes my experience of achair in front of me a perceptual experience of the chair that is in fact in front of me is my experience standing in the rightsort of causal relation to that chair. We only see something if it makes a causal impact in experience. Experience is not, initself, perceptual. The naive realist rejects this picture of perception. For them, it is the presence in experience of the chairthat makes my experience a perceptual experience of the chair. The experience in itself is perceptual for it has the object ofperception as a constituent. The chair constitutively contributes to the way in which things appear to me. It is present in myexperience.

The naive realist does not of course reject the claim that there is a causal story to be given about perception, in which theobjects around us affect us and in so doing bring about experience. Rather, what is denied is that conscious sensory expe-riences stand external to things in the world as their effects. At the level of sensory experience the world itself is presentin that the world, at least in part, constitutes experience. A causal interaction between world and body may well be requiredfor this to take place, but the nature of perception is not such that it breaks down into experience plus a causal relation to theworld. The causal relation does not enter into the story of what perception itself consists in, but into the story of the physicalconditions required for perception to take place. And the objection under consideration here, that we cannot perceive uni-versals because they are causally inert, only gets a grip if we think that perception is in its nature a state of affairs in whichexperience stands in a causal relation to the world. For on such a picture the world only gets into experience, as it were,through its effects upon it. But if we reject this picture, then we can think that while universals play no role in the physicalconditions required for perception to take place, nevertheless when the appropriate physical conditions are in place we canbecome aware of them.

8.2. The objects of experience are concrete

Does it really make sense to suppose that we can be aware of entities in visual sensory experience that are not concrete, inthe sense that they do not exist in space, as we seem to be committed to if we think we can be aware of universals?14 Theworry here is that the claim that we are aware of universals in sensory experience is in tension with an intuition that we haveabout the objects of sensory experience.

Pautz (2007) expresses the intuition as follows:[#] If x is visually aware of y (if x sees y), then y is spatially extended. (Pautz, 2007: 517)Or if not this then at least:[$] If x is visually aware of y (if x sees y), then y must look extended to x. (Pautz, 2007: 517)

The thought behind principal # is presumably something like this. It is intuitive to suppose that to be visually aware ofanything in the physical world requires that thing to be spatially extended, because what could be in the physical world thatwe can see that is not spatially extended?15 But it is far from clear that principal #, which extends to all objects of visual aware-ness, is really as intuitive as Pautz suggests.

Some theorists maintain that there are entities that one can be visually aware of that are not spatially extended. So forexample most sense-datum theorists would deny that when one is visually aware of a sense-datum then that sense-datum isspatially extended. Such theorists would have no problem in rejecting principle #, for they believe that the possibility of illu-sion and hallucination give them good reason to postulate non-physical objects as the immediate objects of visualawareness.

Principle # also rules out the possibility that we can see a person’s mental states, if mental states are not taken to be phys-ical things. It may turn out to be false upon theoretical reflection, that we visually perceive sadness, or that sadness is not aphysical state of an organism, but it is no part of our intuitions that either of these claims is false.

13 See, for example, Dunn (2008).14 Alternatively, if we do not wish to think of the object of experience as being a universal, perhaps we could think of it as being a particularised property, or

trope. In this way the object of experience in the perceptual and non-perceptual experience can be of the same kind, but the object in the perceptual case, aswell as being a particularised property, is also a normal object, for the trope could be thought of as being possessed by this object. But then we would be facedwith the new problem of explaining how this particularised property can occur unattached to any object, in hallucinatory experience.

15 There are all sorts of entities appealed to in modern physics that are not spatially extended but we cannot see these things.

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What about principle $? If something visually appears to us must it appear extended? I would say that if something visu-ally appears to us it must take up space in the visual field, and in that sense it is true that things must appear extended. Sothere is a sense of ‘extended in space’ as in ‘extended in the visual field’ which makes $ true. If, on the other hand, in theexpression ‘extended in space,’ ‘space’ means what it means when we talk about extension in breadth, depth and heightin the physical world then $ does not seem nearly so intuitively appealing. So for example if I enjoy an after image withmy eyes closed the image does not appear extended in the physical world, but it does appear to be extended in the visualfield. And it is only ‘extended in space’ in the sense of appearing physically extended that is troubling for the theorist whomaintains that we can be visually aware of universals.

The expression ‘visual field’ can refer to many different things. In some uses it is simply that part of the physical worldthat is in view from some position occupied by the visual organs of an experiencing subject. In which case the visual field isextended in the same sort of way that the things of which we are visually aware are extended. But there is (at least) one othersense of ‘visual field’ in which it does not refer to the tract of the world that is visible from a certain position in space, but tothe subjective visual experience that a subject enjoys when consciously perceiving the world (or when hallucinating.) In thissense the visual field is the complete phenomenal structure of a subject’s visual experience.

If we understand ‘looks extended’ to mean ‘takes up space in the visual field’, where ‘visual field’ means the completephenomenal structure of a subject’s visual experience, then I accept that the principle ‘If x is visually aware of y (if x seesy), then y must look extended to x’ is intuitive, but on this reading the principle is not something that proponent of awarenessof universals need worry about. The complex of universals that one is merely aware of in hallucinatory experience has a cer-tain structure, and it is this structure that explains the phenomenal structure of one’s experience.

8.3. Our account of perception should not involve a commitment to any particular ontological categories

The strategy presented here requires the naïve realist to make some substantial metaphysical claims. In particular it re-quires acceptance of there being uninstantiated universals, which is by no means an uncontroversial metaphysical commit-ment. And one might object that an adequate conception of the nature of perceptual experience should be one that does notrequire any specific story about what kinds of entity that there are (universals, tropes, and so on). The appeal to such a meta-physics to make the naïve realist position work might strike us as ad hoc. On the other hand, the naïve realist can respond tothis charge by pointing out that a metaphysical response here is appropriate because what it is that they are presented withis a metaphysical challenge. How can the nature of the object of experience in causally matching perfect non-perceptualexperience be such that its presence in perceptual experience does not prevent the object of perception in such cases frombeing the object of experience?

8.4. Awareness of universals gets in the way of awareness of particulars16

According to the picture being presented here one is aware merely of universals in hallucinatory experience, while one isaware of particulars and universals in perceptual experience. And remember that ‘awareness’ is understood by the naiverealist as consisting in the presence in experience of these entities. An entity is present in experience if it constitutes partof the phenomenal character of experience. But if in the hallucinatory case it is the presence in experience of universals thatexplains the phenomenal characteristics of such experience, why is it not the case that in the perceptual case it is not also theuniversals alone which explains these features? What work are the particulars doing? Why think that the particulars con-stitute, in part, the phenomenal character of experience?

It would be wrong to think the universals that are in common between perceptual and hallucinatory experience preventthe particulars that instantiate those universals in the perceptual case being present in experience.

Consider a slightly different case. We can only see three dimensional objects by seeing their facing surfaces, and thesefacing surfaces are not identical with the objects that we see. And so in this sense we could be said to see three dimensionalobjects only indirectly because we only see them in virtue of seeing things not identical to them. But this sense of ‘indirect’does not carry with it any implication that we are not in immediate phenomenological contact with the three dimensionalobjects around us. If the facing surface of an object contributes to the phenomenal character of my experience then the objectitself does, for the facing surface is a part of the object. Compare the act of touching an apple. In a single act two non-identicalentities are brought into contact with my hand, namely the apple and its facing surface. I cannot touch the apple withouttouching its facing surface, and I could touch the facing surface without touching the apple (were the rest of the applescooped away somehow). But none of this prevents my touching the apple. The relationship between the facing surfaceof the apple and the apple is such that in a single act of touching I touch both the apple and its facing surface. The parallelthought for the experiential case is that in a single act of awareness I am presented with both the facing surface of the appleand the three dimensional apple.

From the observation that perception of something is not direct, it does not follow that it is not available to perception inthe sort of phenomenological way required by the naive realist. The naive realist can accept that perception of three

16 Dunn (2008) presents a form of this objection.

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dimensional objects is indirect in that we perceive them only by perceiving their facing surfaces, while at the same timemaintain that nevertheless what is present in experience is the three dimensional object.

My purpose in talking about the naive realist stance with regards to the issue of the presence in experience of threedimensional objects versus merely the presence of their facing surfaces is to point out that it is the relationship betweenfacing surface and the whole object which means that it is the object itself that is present in experience. The moral that Idraw from this example is that if we are faced with the question of whether one entity gets in the way of another with re-spect to constituting phenomenal character we can ask whether the relationship between the two is such that there is reallyno problem here.

If we turn now to the position being considered here the idea would be that the connection between universals and theparticulars that instantiate them is such that while we can talk about being aware of particulars by being aware of the uni-versals they instantiate, and even accept that we cannot be aware of particulars without being aware of the universals theyinstantiate, we can also think that in a single act of awareness we are aware of both universal and the particular that instan-tiates it.

Seeing the three dimensional object is just seeing the facing surface of the object. The connection between facing surfaceand object is the connection between part and whole. But the connection between universal and particular is not the con-nection between part and whole. Universals are not parts of objects. Awareness of the particular is not just awareness of theuniversal, for, as mentioned earlier, to suppose otherwise is to rule out the possibility of veridical hallucinations. Universalsare ways that objects may be. In perceptual experience one is aware of a way an object is, the instantiation of a universal by aparticular, and so one is aware of the particular and one is aware of the universal. Awareness of the universal is not aware-ness of the particular. Are there then two acts of awareness here? No. There is a single act of awareness which has as itsobject the instantiation of a universal by a particular.

There is a single act of awareness in which multiple entities of different ontological category are presented to the subject.The subject is aware of the instantiation of a universal by a particular. It is true to say that the subject cannot be aware of theinstantiation of the universal without being aware of the universal, that these are not identical entities, and that the subjectcould be aware of the universal without being aware of the instantiation of it. But none of this prevents the subject frombeing aware of the instantiation of the universal as immediately as they are aware of the universal so instantiated. Theinstantiation of the universal is present in experience.

8.5. If I have a hallucination of a red apple, then on this account I am merely aware of the universal ‘redness’. But something appearsred to me – there is something present in experience that appears red. So you are saying that the universal ‘redness’ appears red.But this is absurd

It is not clear why this is supposed to be such an absurd thought. The universal ‘redness’ is of course not itself red, but I failto see why this should prevent it from appearing red.

8.6. If I have a hallucination of a red apple, then on this account I am merely aware of the universal ‘redness’, which appears red tome. If I perceive a red apple, then the same universal appears red to me, but the account also wants to say that the apple appearsred to me. So don’t we have two things appearing red, the apple and the universal? But this is absurd

This objection again stems from a failure to appreciate that the relation between universal and particular is such that wecan experience both in a single act of awareness. In the perceptual case it is the instantiation of the universal redness by theapple that we are aware of in a single act of experience that gives us awareness of both the particular and the universal.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the participants of the 2nd Online Consciousness Conference at which an earlier version of this paperwas presented. I would particularly like to thank Michelle Montague, Susanna Siegel, Adam Pautz and Heather Logue fortheir extremely useful comments. I would also like to thank an anonymous referee for their very helpful comments andsuggestions.

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