Seeing and Experiencing: The Revelation of Particulars in Visual Perception.

Abstract

This dissertation is organized around extending and defending Grice’s account of the seeing relation. On the basis of the Argument from Veridical Hallucination and the Argument from Competing Objects, Grice argues that seeing is constituted by causal relations between experiences and objects. It is clearly insufficient for seeing a thing merely that one’s experience causally depend on it. What is required is the right kind of dependence. In the first half of the dissertation, I advocate a counterfactual account of the requisite dependence. My account survives the host of counterexamples that have been given against counterfactual theories. In particular, I advocate a process-relative counterfactual account – were the seen thing different (in appropriate ways) and were the process actually eventuating in your experience operational, then your experience would represent those differences. The second half of the dissertation is devoted to defending the possibility of veridical hallucination. If veridical hallucination is impossible, then the Argument from Veridical Hallucination cannot be accepted. There are two threats to the possibility of veridical hallucination. First, it has been argued that an acceptance of the possibility of veridical hallucination has unacceptable entailments. I defend the possibility of veridical hallucination by proposing that phenomenally identical experiences possess different contents in different perceptual situations. If this is true, then one can affirm that veridical hallucination is possible, while avoiding unacceptable entailments. Second, John Searle proposes that experiences have contents that represent the obtaining of perception-grounding relations. On Searle’s account, veridical hallucination is impossible. My treatment of Searle has two parts. In the first, I examine the connections between content and phenomenology. They are not sufficient to defeat Searle’s account; but neither do they lend it strength. Thus, they do not provide sufficient warrant for Searle’s account to reject the possibility of veridical hallucination. In the second, I examine a case Searle must classify as reference-failing mental anaphora. In such cases, Searle is stuck with the kind of conclusion the rejection of which motivates his anti-externalist descriptivism. Thus, again, we have no reason to prefer Searle’s account of the contents of visual experiences over the possibility of veridical hallucination.