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THERE IT IS*
Author(s) -
Hellie Benj
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
philosophical issues
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.638
H-Index - 18
eISSN - 1758-2237
pISSN - 1533-6077
DOI - 10.1111/j.1533-6077.2011.00200.x
Subject(s) - citation , computer science , library science
This article concerns the relation between direct realism and perceptual justification. My method will be this: presupposing a direct realist outlook , I will develop a semantical framework for characterizing perceptual justification. I understand a 'direct realist outlook' to involve a cluster of methodological attitudes, such as: comfort with offering contrasting treatments of 'good cases' of veridical perception and 'bad cases' of matching hallucination; a desire to explain the so-called 'transparency' of perception; and an aversion to theories which would require pretheoretic opinion to be significantly in the dark about the characters of perceptual states which are rationally influential. Road map: section 1 advances a picture of the nature of rationality and rational explanation in which consciousness plays a central role and then identifies the place of perceptual justification within this picture; section 2 links the theory of rationality to the traditional concerns of formal semantic theories; section 3 advances a direct realist-friendly semantical theory of justification by veridical perception; section 4 argues that this story cannot be extended to accommodate justification by hallucination; and the final section extends the discussion to a treatment of illusion, the de re, seeing-as, and other related phenomena. If the reader is looking for a punch line, it is perhaps this: according to the direct realist, when one is taken in by hallucination, one's picture of the world is defective—incoherent, inconsistent, unsatisfiable. For when one is taken in, the picture encoded within one's background presuppositions about one's condition is, according to the direct realist, inconsistent with the picture one accepts in one's perceptual state. As a result, an explanation of the impact of such delusive hallucination on the remainder of one's cognitive system cannot be an intentional or rationalizing explanation: a 'ceteris paribus' assumption of coherence implicit in such explanation goes unmet; such situations break