Disjunctivism: Contemporary Readings

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. Disjunctivism : contemporary readings / edited by Alex Byrne and Heather Logue. p. cm.—(MIT readers in contemporary philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. The philosophy of perception has been undergoing something of a resurgence recently, enlivened by fresh positions and arguments. One central debate concerns the status of perception as intentional or representational (see many of the essays in Crane 1992, Gunther 2003, Gendler and Haw-thorne 2006). Another (related) central debate concerns the disjunctive theory of perception, the present topic. This book collects together work on disjunctivism, from its beginnings in the 1960s to a few years ago, that has played a significant role in the development of the theory and its rivals; a comprehensive bibliography follows these selections. We hope this book will be something of a companion volume to Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge (Haddock and Macpherson 2008b), a collection of new essays on disjunctivism. Imagine that you are looking at an ordinary lemon in good light. Your vision is good: you see the lemon, and it looks yellow and ovoid. Now suppose that, unbeknownst to you, some minor deity removes the lemon, while preserving its proximal neural effects. Your brain is in the same local physical states as it was in when the lemon was there: the neurons in your visual cortex, for instance, are firing in the same pattern. After the removal, you do not see the lemon, because the lemon is not around to be seen. Yet—we can all grant—you notice nothing amiss. Questioned after the removal , you claim that you have been looking at the lemon for the last few minutes. In Mark Johnston's terminology (''The Obscure Object of Halluci-nation'': 230, this volume 1), you have undergone a ''subjectively seamless transition'' from seeing the lemon to not seeing anything at all—at least, to not seeing any material object. The minor deity has changed your situation: it has removed the lemon, for one thing. But has the deity changed you mentally, or psychologically? More specifically—assuming that we can help ourselves to the notion of a ''visual experience''—has the deity changed the kind of visual …