The Obscure Object of Hallucination

a individuated by their constituent properties, where the constituent properties are those the subject is inclined to predicate on the strength of his hallucination.38 Charles, who starts out as real and then is evidently unreal, (if I may put it that way) is not to be found among such this-worldly abstracta. Once again, even an abstract entity that includes the property of being first real and then unreal will not do, since it would have also to be the object of Nash’s earliest hallucinations of Charles. But Nash could have had those very hallucinations individuated by their objects without ever, as it THE OBSCURE OBJECT OF HALLUCINATION 165 were, ‘seeing through them’ and coming to regard his roommate as a figment of his imagination. Our account of hallucination gives the following diagnosis of the case of Nash’s roommate. At various times throughout his life Nash is presented with a series of qualitatively related sensible profiles, which include visual, auditory and tactile qualities. These are the sort of sensible profiles that might be enjoyed by someone having veridical experience of a charming, supportive English roommate. At first, Nash takes the sensible profiles to be a certain Englishman, Charles Herman, whom he takes to be his roommate. Later, as he gains some control over his reactions to his hallucinations, Nash still takes certain sensible profiles to be Charles, but he regards Charles as a mere figment of his imagination. Hence the intensional “identity” of Charles through episodes in which “he” is regarded as real and unreal. Perhaps some viewers of the film will see another, less subtle, possibility depicted there. First Nash takes the sensible profiles to be an English roommate. Later, as he gains control over his reactions to his hallucinations, Nash then takes similar sensible profiles to be mere figments of his imagination. Rather than rest anything on an interpretation of the film, it is enough to point out that the two interpretations represent two distinct psychological possibilities. The first interpretation but not the second captures the centrality of Charles, a mere object of hallucination, in Nash’s mental life. The sensible profile account with its resort to secondary, construaldependent “objects” of hallucination distinguishes and deals with both interpretations. Another route to the insufficiency of the Meinongian approach to hallucination derives from the fact that the object of hallucination is not wholly immanent. Its whole nature is not necessarily exhausted by how it strikes the subject. For example, my hallucination of a deep red patch could fade continuously, so that the reds I am visually aware of might be less and less saturated. A combination of physiology and an appeal to supervenience might support this claim of continuous fading. But then, thanks to the difference in grain between visual experience and what attention can reveal, there could be times t, t′ and t* such that: