Greg Detre
@10 on Monday, 15 January, 2001
Exam Schools 9, Matthew Soteriou
what can our reflections tell us about the nature of perceptual experiences?
they�re conscious episodes � there�s something it�s like to have them
are these reducible to the physiological mechanisms?
the objects of our common sense world are not those we are immediately aware of
= the orthodoxy, the sense datum theory
argument from illusion
e.g. Russell, �The problems of philosophy�, chapter 1
things sometimes appear to be different from how they actually are
illusion (e.g. Muller-Lyer) vs hallucination (drugs, pink elephants)
there isn�t something out there that your perception of a pink elephant corresponds to
the phenomenal principle (Robinson, 1994) � if it seems as though there�s something pink in front of you, then there is something pink of which you are aware
and we�ll call this that we�re aware of �sense data�
appearance-reality distinction � reality may be masked and different to how it appears to be, but by definition appearances must be as they appear to be � so it seems odd that there�s so much disagreement about the nature of these experiences � shouldn�t it be just obvious to introspection
are sense data mind-dependent or mind-independent?
when you have a hallucination, your experience does not correspond to something out there, so it�s the sense data you�re experiencing
but that must be true of all experiences, not just hallucinatory experiences
hallucinatory and non-hallucinatory experiences are subjectively indistinguishable
\ the experiences must be of the same kind, and we should give the same account of both
but can we generalise from hallucinatory cases to all cases of experience? (Austin, Locke)
stimulating the optic nerve in the right way, bringing about neural events, is causally sufficient for you to be aware of sense data, i.e. to have a hallucinatory experience
this must be true, unless we think that the mind is more directly aware of the real world in some way or that the chair which light is bouncing off into our retina is exerting action at a distance somehow
representational/intentional theory of perception � experience is a way of gaining information about the world because it causally affects us in some way � the information is the content of your experience, e.g. it seems that there is a brown table in front of me.
non-veridical, i.e. hallucinatory, = false