© 1998
Michael Huemer
All rights reserved
A DIRECT REALIST ACCOUNT OF PERCEPTUAL AWARENESS
by
Michael Huemer
A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Program in Philosophy
written under the direction of
Professor Peter D. Klein
and approved by
New Brunswick, New Jersey
May, 1998
ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
A Direct Realist Account of Perceptual Awareness
by MICHAEL HUEMER
Dissertation Director:
Peter D. Klein
The dissertation presents a direct realist account of our awareness of the external world, embodying two main theses: First, in normal cases, sensory experiences constitute direct awareness of the external world; second, certain beliefs about the external world are prima facie justified by virtue of being based on sensory experiences.
In the first chapter, I explain the concept of awareness and the distinction between direct and indirect awareness. Direct awareness of x is understood as awareness of x which is not based on awareness of anything else, and the "based on" relation is understood as a particular way in which one state of awareness can be caused by another state of awareness when the contents of the two states are logically related.
In chapter 2, I defend a traditional account of perception according to which perceiving can be analyzed into three components: (a) the occurrence of a purely internal mental state, different from belief, called a "perceptual experience", (b) the existence of an external object roughly satisfying the content of the experience, and (c) an appropriate causal connection between the object and the experience.
In chapter 3, I examine the nature of sensory experiences, distinguishing three important aspects of them: their qualia, their representational contents, and their "forcefulness." The content of experience is further divided into conceptual content and non-conceptual content. The attribute of experience by which the objects of experience seem to the subject to be actually present is called "forcefulness."
In chapter 4, I consider how perception leads to knowledge of the external world. I defend an epistemological principle according to which the circumstance of its seeming to S as if P constitutes prima facie justification for S to believe that P. As a result, we are prima facie justified in believing propositions that are entailed by the contents of our experiences.
In the fifth and final chapter, I show how the direct realist
theory developed avoids three important kinds of philosophical
skepticism: first, Hume's external world skepticism; second, the
regress argument of Agrippa; and third, the brain-in-a-vat argument.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the members of my committee; Peter Klein, Brian McLaughlin, Richard Foley, and Richard Fumerton; for their comments and advice on the work in progress. In addition, I would like to recognize the supererogatory efforts made by professors Klein and McLaughlin towards enabling me to graduate this year. None of these philosophers, of course, is responsible for any mistakes contained in the following work.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ii
Acknowledgments iv
Introduction 1
1. The notion of direct awareness 10
1.1. Awareness in general 11
1.2. "Awareness" and "knowledge" 24
1.3. Epistemic dependence 26
1.4. Direct vs. indirect realism 44
2. Perception as awareness 57
2.1. The traditional analysis of perception 57
2.2. The radical intellectualist account 60
2.3. Ultra-direct realism 65
2.4. The content-satisfaction condition 81
3. The nature of perceptual experience 102
3.1. Sensory qualia 103
3.2. Non-conceptual content 121
3.3. Conceptual content 130
3.4. The forcefulness of experience 132
4. Perceptual knowledge 136
4.1. The justification of perceptual beliefs 137
4.2. Defense of appearance conservatism 140
4.3. Objections 147
5. Direct realism & skepticism 158
5.1. Hume's problem 158
5.2. The regress argument 165
5.3. The brain-in-the-vat argument 170
5.3.1. Two contemporary responses 171
5.3.2. What's wrong with these replies? 175
5.3.3. The direct realist's response 179
5.3.4. An objection 185
Bibliography 188
INTRODUCTION
In the following pages, I have defended a general theory of
perception that answers what are probably the three most important
philosophical questions about perception: (1) What is perception?
(2) What is it that perception makes us aware of? And (3) how does
perception enable us to gain knowledge of the external world? In
very broad terms, the theory I have put forward can be described as
a version of direct realism -- or, if you like, naive realism.
Start with the first question: What is it to perceive? The act of perceiving something involves three elements: first, there is the occurrence of a certain kind of purely internal, mental state, a 'perceptual experience'; second, there is an external phenomenon that roughly satisfies the content of this state; and third, there is a causal relation between the object and the experience.
That leaves the question of what a perceptual experience is.
A perceptual experience is understood as a kind of mental state
different from belief, but nevertheless having representational
content -- i.e., there is a way that a given perceptual experience
represents the world to be. Perceptual experiences also have an
attribute I call their "forcefulness": when one has a perceptual
experience, the objects of the experience always seem to one to be
actually present (this is different from, for example, imagination
or mere supposition, which is not forceful). Both of these are
necessary characteristics of perceptual experience. In addition,
I have answered certain currently much-discussed questions about
perceptual experience, namely, whether perceptual experiences have
'non-conceptual content' and whether they have 'qualia'. In both
cases I have answered in the affirmative (see chapter 3).
Second question: What does perception make us aware of?
Philosophers have traditionally given three answers to this:
(i) Direct realism holds that in perception, we are directly aware of the external world.
(ii) Indirect realism (or "representationalism") holds that in perception, we are directly aware only of certain mind-dependent phenomena (e.g., ideas, sense data, appearings), and we are indirectly aware of external objects.
(iii) Idealism holds that in perception, we are directly aware of
mind-dependent phenomena, and we are not aware of anything else.
Idealism is generally regarded nowadays as too prima facie implausible to be considered, so direct and indirect realism remain as the two main alternatives.
Indirect realism has historically been the dominant view among
philosophers, but it really is quite an incredible idea. It seems
to me that I am right now seeing a table in front of me, and thereby
enjoying awareness of that table. This thing of which I find myself
aware, I think, has four sides and a brown surface; it is physically
in front of me; it exists independently of me; I can sit on it and
it will support my weight. It certainly is no mere 'idea' or
'appearance'. Furthermore, there is, as far as I know, no other
relevant thing of which I am enjoying awareness in seeing the table.
There certainly does not seem to be, in addition to the real table,
a second 'table' that exists only in my mind and that I'm also
perceiving, nor is there some thing of a kind radically different
from a table that I'm perceiving or otherwise apprehending when I
see the table. To repeat, it seems obvious that, in seeing the
table, there is exactly one object that I'm aware of, and that
object is a table. Yet it is this seemingly obvious thesis that
Hume, one of the early representationalists, claimed would be "soon
destroyed by the slightest philosophy":
The table which we see seems to diminish as we remove farther
from it: but the real table, which exists independent of us,
suffers no alteration: it was, therefore, nothing but its
image which was present to the mind. These are the obvious
dictates of reason, and no man who reflects ever doubted that
the existences which we consider when we say, this house and
that tree, are nothing but perceptions in the mind, and
fleeting copies or representations of other existences, which
remain uniform and independent.(1)
Admittedly, Hume was one of the more incautious of indirect realists -- surely the indirect realist should not claim that the expression "this tree" typically refers to a perception, rather than to a tree. It is, nevertheless, quite incredible that this thing (the one that I'm now directly aware of, as I (seemingly) view my table) is a mental state or mental object, rather than a table. The story becomes perhaps still more incredible when we hear that I have throughout my life been constantly mistaking mental phenomena for physical objects, and that I have perhaps never once perceived anything without making that mistake. Furthermore, this view generates a problem with respect to our third question, that of how perception enables us to gain knowledge of the external world: if we are only ever directly aware of ideas, how do we know that anything other than ideas exists?
Fortunately, Hume's argument is invalid and his conclusion mistaken. The argument fails because Hume overlooks the possibility that the table we see appears to get smaller but does not actually get smaller -- thus, the real table may, after all, be one and the same with the table we see. In fact, the table we see appears precisely the way one would expect the table to appear, assuming that we did perceive a real table. This tends to confirm that it is the real table we see.(2)
Moreover, we can see that Hume's conclusion is mistaken and
that perception is direct awareness of the external world, by
turning to the analysis of "direct awareness", while keeping in mind
the analysis of perception we have provided. To be aware of a thing
is to have at least a roughly accurate representation of it, where
the accuracy of the representation is not merely accidental (not
merely a matter of chance). To be directly aware of something is
to be aware of it, where one's awareness of it is not based on one's
awareness of something else (this notion is discussed more fully in
chapter 1). Now, in perception, one has a perceptual experience
that represents there to be something having certain physical
characteristics. For example, my current visual experience
represents the table in front of me as being brown and rectangular.
My tactile experience represents it as being hard and smooth. Etc.
The contents of these experiences are at least roughly satisfied by
the real, physical table -- the real table has those characteristics
-- and not by anything else. There is no other brown, rectangular,
etc., object in the offing. Nor do I have any (relevant) second
representational state with another content. (Of course, I might
happen to have a second representational state at the same time, but
that's beside the point -- no such state is required in order for me
to be perceiving the table.) Finally, since my perceptual
experience is caused in the normal way by the real table, the
accuracy of the representation is non-accidental. So my perceptual
experience constitutes direct awareness of the real table, and it
does not constitute awareness of any mental item.
Our third main question was, How does perception enable us to acquire knowledge of the external world? Our perceptual experiences cause us to accept certain beliefs about the external world -- these 'perceptual beliefs' are based on perceptual experiences. What makes it epistemically rational to accept such beliefs?
In chapter 4 I argue for the following epistemological principle: if it seems to S as if P, then S is prima facie justified in believing that P. Thus, the forcefulness of perceptual experience makes our perceptual beliefs justified. I argue that this general epistemological principle underlies our epistemic practices in a very fundamental way -- that in fact there is, excluding such epistemically irrational practices as self-deception or religious faith, no other way of forming beliefs than accepting what seems to oneself to be the case. This principle also underlies our ways of evaluating arguments, or even of identifying what counts as an argument, so that it is impossible rationally to argue against the principle.
I show in the last chapter how my account of perception and perceptual belief avoids three traditional arguments for philosophical skepticism. The first of these is the infinite regress argument, due to Agrippa. It begins with the premise that a person knows a proposition only if he has a reason for believing it. Furthermore, the reason must itself be something he knows to be true, so there will have to be a reason for the reason, and a reason for the reason for the reason, and so on. But no person actually has an infinitely long chain of reasons to support any of his beliefs, and it is not permissible for the chain of reasons to circle back on itself, so ultimately all our beliefs must rest on arbitrary assumptions (claims for which we have no reasons). Hence, all our beliefs are unjustified.
My account blocks the threatened regress of reasons. The series ends when it hits perceptual experience: our perceptual beliefs are rendered justified by our perceptual experiences; hence, they are not mere 'assumptions'. However, since perceptual experiences are not beliefs, it cannot be sensibly asked what one's 'reason for' a perceptual experience is. Perceptual experiences (in normal cases) are indeed a kind of awareness, but they are never a form of knowledge (because not beliefs), so the first premise of the regress argument does not apply to them.
The second form of skepticism that my account blocks is one that was mentioned above, in connection with Hume's representationalism -- indirect realist theories face a problem of explaining how one can get from premises about ideas (or sense data, or whatever) to conclusions about the physical world. Hume himself argued that there was no rational way to do it. My direct realist theory has the advantage of avoiding this problem altogether, since certain propositions about the physical world are prima facie justified and hence do not need to be supported with argument.
Third, I consider the brain-in-a-vat argument. In this
argument, one imagines a situation in which scientists have removed
a brain from its body, keeping it alive in a vat of nutrients. They
insert tiny electrodes into the brain, cleverly stimulating the
sensory cortex of the brain in precisely the patterns in which the
sensory cortex of a brain is normally stimulated when a person is
perceiving and interacting with the world. In such a scenario, the
brain would undergo exactly the same kind of experiences that a
person undergoes during normal life -- in fact, the same kind of
experience that you're having right now. This brain would have no
way of knowing that it was merely a brain in a vat; everything would
seem normal. And this raises the question, How do you know that
you're not a brain in a vat, right now? The skeptic will argue
something like this:
1. If you were a brain in a vat, you would be having just the sort of sensory experiences you're having now.
2. Therefore, your sensory experiences are not evidence that you're not a brain in a vat. (from 1)
3. Your sensory experiences are the only evidence you have for claims about the external world.
4. Therefore, you have no evidence that you're not a brain in a vat. (from 2,3)
5. Therefore, you don't know that you're not a brain in a vat. (from 4)
6. Therefore, you don't know that you have a body, that you're
sitting in this room, etc. (from 5)
The indirect realist should be worried by this argument. On his account, what we are directly aware of is merely what sort of experiences we are having, and it is on that evidence (i.e., that we're having such-and-such experiences) that we must try to build our knowledge of the external world. The skeptic is right to argue that the occurrence of these experiences is no evidence against the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis, since those experiences would occur if the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis were true. But on the direct realist's account, what we are directly aware of -- hence, what we may consider as our available 'evidence' -- is the objects of our perceptual experiences, not our experiences themselves. This may seem like a subtle distinction, but it is of the last importance here. The objects of our perceptual experiences, for the direct realist, are external phenomena. Hence, (3) is clearly false. I do have evidence, other than my sensory experiences, relevant to claims about the external world -- namely, I have the actual physical objects and events that I perceive as evidence for such claims. And taking this into account, (4) is certainly false. Among the evidence I have, for example, is the presence of my two hands. This evidence verifies that I am not a brain in a vat, since a mere brain in a vat has no hands.
This sort of refutation of the brain-in-the-vat hypothesis seems like begging the question; however, it begs the question if and only if ruling out the brain-in-a-vat scenario is a precondition on knowing that one has hands. This is not a precondition under a direct realist form of foundationalism. In fact, as I show in chapter 5, this refutation of the BIV scenario begs the question if and only if one assumes an indirect realist theory of perceptual knowledge; otherwise, the refutation succeeds.
We can see that Thomas Reid's remarks concerning indirect
realism are as appropriate today as they were when he wrote them in
response to the likes of Locke, Hume, and Descartes (imagine "sense
data" substituted for "ideas"):
We shall afterwards examine this system of ideas, and
endeavour to make it appear, that no solid proof has ever been
advanced of the existence of ideas; that they are a mere
fiction and hypothesis ... and that this hypothesis of ideas
or images of things in the mind, or in the sensorium, is the
parent of those many paradoxes so shocking to common sense,
and of that scepticism which disgrace our philosophy of the
mind, and have brought upon it the ridicule and contempt of
sensible men.(3)
My theory of perception, I think, vindicates common sense -- both with respect to the conviction that we are directly aware of physical things when we perceive, rather than ideas or some such, and with respect to the conviction that we know facts about the physical world as a result of perception. And this is among the chief advantages which I would claim for it.
1. THE NOTION OF DIRECT AWARENESS
Stated simply, the thesis of direct realism is that in perception, we have direct awareness of (some parts or aspects of) the external world. The task of the present chapter is to provide an interpretation of this thesis and in particular of the notion of "direct awareness."
Take the easy part first: the "external world" is what exists independent of the mind. Things can be external to one mind but not external to another mind: Boris Yeltsin's beliefs are external for me, but they are not external for Boris Yeltsin, because Yeltsin's beliefs are metaphysically independent of my mind, but they are not metaphysically independent of his mind. In general, what is external for S is what could (metaphysically) exist while S's mind did not. And we can call something "external" without qualification if it is external for everyone. There can be external objects (such as planets and sofas), in addition to external events, external states of affairs, external properties, and so on (fill in the "and so on" with whatever general sorts of things you believe exist). So what the direct realist holds is that there are some things of this very broad kind -- either external objects, or external events, or external states of affairs, etc. -- of which we are directly aware in perception.
The more difficult questions are, first, what is awareness,
and second, what distinguishes direct awareness from indirect
awareness. I won't attempt to provide exact definitions, in terms
of necessary and sufficient conditions, on either of these counts,
but some characterization of these notions short of that can
nevertheless be illuminating.
1.1. Awareness in general
As I use the term, awareness is always awareness of something. And in my view, all of the general metaphysical categories of things that exist are kinds of things of which it is possible to be aware. That is, one can have awareness of objects ("substances" in the metaphysicians' sense), events, universals (if universals exist), tropes (if they exist), facts (if they exist), and so on. Of course, there might be some more specific classes of things of which we couldn't become aware for various non-philosophical reasons (e.g. parallel universes of which we can't become aware due to their inability to interact with our universe). The existence of such objects must, by the nature of the case, remain at best a matter of speculation.
Here are some examples of things that I'm presently aware of: There's a coffee cup on my desk, which I can see, and as a result, I am aware of the coffee cup (a substance). I am also aware of the color of the cup (a trope). If I pick up the cup, I can become aware of its motion (an event). I'm aware of a number of facts about the cup -- I'm aware that it's green (aware of the fact that it's green), I'm aware that it's a cup, and so on. I might also enjoy awareness of more exotic objects, if they exist. If universals exist, then I might have episodes of 'grasping' them, which would be episodes of awareness of the universals, though obviously a different kind of awareness. The same should be said for other abstract objects, such as sets, or propositions, or numbers.
Not all of my awareness is as direct as these examples, of course. I'm also aware of the fact that there are over a billion people in China (and so I am, albeit somewhat tenuously, aware of the people in China themselves), I'm aware of some of the properties of electrons, and I'm aware of the fact that the square on the hypotenuse of any right triangle equals the sum of the squares on the other two sides. These are all certainly cases of indirect awareness, though what that means we will have to discuss further below.
These examples also illustrate that there are different ways of being aware of something -- I can be aware of something by virtue of perceiving it, by virtue of intellectually grasping it (if it is an abstract object), or by virtue of making certain inferences, among other ways.
What can we say about the general nature of this phenomenon --
are there some things that all of these paradigmatic instances of
awareness have in common? I think that in general, we can find the
following three elements in any episode of awareness, namely, when
S is aware of X,
(i) S has a certain kind of intentional (content-bearing) mental state;
(ii) X exists and at least roughly satisfies the content of the state; and
(iii) there is some kind of appropriate connection between X and the
mental state, making it not merely accidental that S is enjoying a
veridical mental state.
The intentional mental state we can call the state of awareness (of course, this means that in some cases, the state of awareness will be a state that might not have been awareness, if the other conditions hadn't been satisfied). The thing that S is aware of we can call the object of awareness, or the object of that mental state. And we can say a mental state is "veridical" if it has an (existent) object that satisfies its content, and "unveridical" otherwise. So all states of awareness are veridical (this is to say that "aware" is a success term), although there are some mental states that are otherwise like states of awareness but for being unveridical. A child who believes in Santa Claus is in a mental state that, to him, probably seems like being aware of Santa Claus. But of course, no one is actually aware of Santa Claus, because there is no such person to be aware of.
Notice that as a consequence of this characterization of awareness, as a mental state related in a certain way to its object, "aware of _______" (where the blank is to be filled in with some referring expression) is an extensional context (for if X stands in some relation to S, then X exists, and if X stands in some relation to S and X = Y, then Y stands in that relation to S). So if I'm aware of this coffee cup and this coffee cup is the 5000th plastic product produced at the Rubbermaid factory in Tacoma, then I'm aware of the 5000th plastic product produced at the Rubbermaid factory in Tacoma, even though I'm not aware that it is the 5000th plastic product produced at the Rubbermaid factory in Tacoma.
Two sorts of apparent counter-examples might be urged against this point and therefore against viewing awareness as a genuine relation between object and subject. The first sort would involve "awareness that ..." Let us suppose that this coffee cup is indeed the 5000th product of the Rubbermaid factory, etc., although I do not know this. Then I am aware that I am drinking from this cup, but I am not aware that I am drinking from the 5000th product of the Rubbermaid factory, etc. Does this show that "aware ..." creates an intensional context? No. What extensionality requires is that if one is aware of X, one is aware of Y whenever Y is identical with X. Now, being aware that I am drinking from this cup is being aware of the fact that I am drinking from this cup. But the fact that I am drinking from this cup is not identical with the fact that I am drinking from the 5000th product of the Rubbermaid factory, etc. So the move from "I am aware that I am drinking from this cup" to "I am aware that I am drinking from the 5000th product of the Rubbermaid factory, etc." does not represent a genuine substitution of identicals in the relevant sense. That is why the move is illegitimate. "aware of the fact that _______ is F" is intensional, even though "aware of _______" is extensional, because substitution of co-referring expressions into the context "the fact that _______ is F" does not guarantee reference to the same fact.
Another, possibly more convincing kind of case involves awareness of properties. Let's suppose that colors are spectral reflectance distributions, so that the color of an object is always identical with its spectral reflectance distribution. Now, I am aware of the color of this cup (the shade of green that it has). But we should at least hesitate to say that I am aware of its spectral reflectance distribution. At least, that doesn't seem like something that perception makes me aware of, even though perception does make me aware of the color of the cup. Does this show that "aware of _______" is an intensional context?
We have to be careful about the phrase "aware of the cup's spectral reflectance distribution." One natural reading of that is that it means aware of which spectral reflectance distribution the cup has, i.e. aware that it has such-and-such spectral reflectance distribution. (Compare: "I know Bill's phone number" means that I know which phone number Bill has, i.e. I know that he has phone number X, for some X.) This would be awareness of a fact. On this reading, I think it is clear that we do not (except perhaps for some scientists) enjoy awareness of the spectral reflectance distributions of the things around us. That is, we do not know what spectral reflectance distributions they have. And certainly we do not know this directly by perception. I think it is also clear that on this reading, we do normally enjoy awareness of the colors of things -- that is, we know which colors things have. But again, this is because, even if colors are identical with spectral reflectance distributions, the fact that an object has a certain color need not be identical with the fact that it has the corresponding spectral reflectance distribution. Notice that, on this reading of "I am aware of the cup's color," "the cup's color" is not being used to directly identify the object of awareness (despite surface appearances). Rather, it is being used to identify a certain determinable, about which the assertion is that I am aware of which determinate value falling under that determinable characterizes the cup. A similar case is "awareness whether": If I say, "I am aware of whether it has rained," I am not saying that there is an object called "whether it has rained" such that I'm aware of that object. Rather, I'm saying that I'm either aware that it has rained or aware that it has not.
The other reading of "aware of the cup's color" is that it is being used to attribute awareness of a trope (a property-instance), so that "the cup's color" really does refer to a certain entity of which I have awareness. But on this reading, I think it is much less clear that I don't have awareness of the cup's spectral reflectance distribution. If that's what colors are, then that is in fact what my visual system is detecting, and making me aware of. If one still wants to insist that I am not aware of objects' spectral reflectance distributions, in the sense of those particular property instances, then one should just reject this particular reductionist account of color.
That's enough to say about condition (ii). It will become clearer later, when we discuss perception in particular, why I say "roughly satisfies" (one can perceive a thing, and thereby be aware of it, while the thing does not exactly satisfy the content of your perceptual experience, but not if the thing's character is radically mismatched from the content of your experience).
The qualification, "a certain kind of," in (i) calls for some comment. Not just any intentional mental state is a candidate for awareness. Some kinds of intentional mental states cannot in principle be states of awareness, for reasons other than failure to satisfy conditions (ii) and (iii). For example, a state of believing that P is a candidate for constituting awareness of the fact that P. But a state of entertaining or wondering whether P is not even a candidate for constituting the awareness of the fact that P, regardless of whether it satisfies the other conditions -- a wondering-whether-P is an intentional mental state, and it might have an object that satisfies its content (namely, there might exist the fact that P), and it might even be appropriately connected with the fact that satisfies its content (depending on what kind of connection one requires -- at least there could be a reliable mechanism that leads to wondering-whether-P whenever P holds), but it still wouldn't be the awareness that P. And similarly, a state of imagining X is not a candidate for being the awareness of X, even if X exists, satisfies the content of the imagining, and is appropriately connected with the imagining (so it is non-accidental that I only imagine things that exist). If I am imagining Margaret Thatcher, I am not thereby aware of her. This is not to say, of course, that I may not be aware of her at the time (indeed, plausibly it is a precondition on my imagining her in particular that I be aware of her) -- I may indeed know that I am imagining a person who exists, and so be aware of Mrs. Thatcher, but my imagining can not constitute my awareness of her. My actual awareness is constituted by the various (true, justified, etc.) beliefs I have about her (or maybe just the belief that she exists), that I bring to mind as I form an image of her.
The only way I have of describing the relevant characteristic of mental states that qualifies them as candidates for being awarenesses -- the characteristic that both beliefs and perceptual experiences have but imaginings and wonderings-whether lack -- is a metaphor, but I think it nevertheless constitutes some clarification of the idea. It is this: certain mental states purport to represent reality. A belief 'purports' that reality satisfies its content, whereas a mere wondering does not. Again, we might say that a belief is 'assertive,' while a wondering-whether is 'neutral.' Likewise, perceptual experience is assertive (it purports to represent reality), while mere imaginings are not. But these metaphors also immediately invite certain misunderstandings that we must explicitly disavow. The metaphor of a belief's making some purport compares a belief to a person who makes an assertion or perhaps to the assertion that a person makes, and this immediately suggests the image of a speaker, a listener, and an utterance the speaker makes, all distinct from one another. But of course there are no such distinctions to be made with respect to beliefs -- there is no distinction between the 'assertion' that a belief makes and the belief itself, and there is no distinction analogous to the speaker/listener distinction. Because of the former point, it might be less misleading to say not that a belief makes a certain purport, but that the believer is purporting that reality is a certain way in having the belief, and likewise that I am purporting that reality is a certain way in having perceptual experience (which is not to say that in having perceptual experience I am believing that reality is a certain way; belief and perceptual experience are two different 'assertive' states). The only point of the metaphor is really this: there is a distinction between assertions and other, non-assertive speech acts (such as questions), and this is analogous to the distinction between beliefs and non-assertive propositional attitudes (such as wonderings-whether), and to the distinction between perceptual experiences and other non-assertive mental representations of particulars (namely, imaginings). The assertiveness of perceptual experience will call for further discussion below when we come to the analysis of perceptual experience.
We now turn to condition (iii), the connection between a state
of awareness and its object. The need for this condition is shown
by examples like the following:
(a) The case of veridical hallucination: suppose that excessive
doses of LSD are causing me to hallucinate a spider crawling on my
desk. As it happens, there is a spider crawling on my desk, but
that isn't what is causing it to look to me as if there is a spider.
It's the abnormal drugs in my brain that are causing me to have this
experience (so the experience would be the same even if there
weren't any spider). I think we have to allow the possibility of
such cases -- whatever abnormal brain processes cause hallucinations
could be going on and causing perception-like experiences while, by
coincidence, there also existed in reality an object of the kind
that the subject is hallucinating. In this case, I would not be
aware of the spider on the desk (nor would I be seeing it), even
though the spider would be satisfying the content of my experience.
(b) The lucky guess: suppose a gambler standing at the roulette
wheel just 'feels' that the ball will land on black. He bets a lot
of money on it, saying, "I just know it will land on black." It is
generally agreed that this does not constitute his genuinely knowing
that the ball will land on black (that is, assuming that he does not
really possess psychic powers), and likewise it does not constitute
his being aware of the fact that the ball will land on black. Of
course, the gambler might get lucky -- the ball might in fact land
on black. But he still was not aware that it was going to; he
merely guessed and got lucky.
(c) The fortuitous leap of faith: Suppose that a number of people
have come to believe, by a leap of faith, in an invisible unicorn
that roams the surface of Mars. That is, these people have no
cogent evidence of the existence of such a being, and have never had
any contact with it, but they have chosen to believe in it by a
sheer act of will (you may object to the notion of choosing to
believe, but certainly there is some phenomenon called taking a
'leap of faith,' evidenced by some religious beliefs, so assume that
that phenomenon is going on). It might happen, as chance would have
it, that there really is an invisible unicorn roaming the surface
of Mars. Still, their belief by virtue of faith does not constitute
awareness of the unicorn, nor awareness of the fact that some such
unicorn exists.
I assume that the reader has the same intuitions about these cases. These sorts of cases not only illustrate the need for condition (iii), but also suggest some ways of interpreting it, i.e. some appropriate kinds of 'connections.' In the first case, the natural analysis is that the veridicality of the experience is 'accidental,' or merely a matter of chance, because the thing that satisfies the content of the experience (the spider) does not cause the experience.
The second case differs in that a belief is involved. However, if one thinks of the gambler's feeling as an experience similar to perceptual experience, then it can seem that this case, too, is a case of veridical hallucination, in which case the causal analysis may seem appropriate here too -- or, better yet, an analysis in terms of reliability. The reliability analysis says that it is accidental that the gambler's belief is true because the sorts of feelings that he is relying on are not generally reliable. The reason I say the reliability analysis may be better than a causal analysis is that, since the gambler's belief is about the future, the thing that makes it true could not possibly cause the feeling that he has; yet we seem to have some sort of idea of what it would be to possess psychic powers in the form of precognition, such that one has to stipulate (in order to get the desired intuitive verdict) that the gambler in case (b) does not possess such powers. What it would be to possess precognition might be to possess some faculty that is reliable in producing the feeling that X is going to happen only when X is something that is really going to happen. The lucky gambler's problem is that he doesn't have such a faculty. This is why the feeling that the ball is going to land on black does not constitute awareness that the ball will land on black. The explanation of why the gambler's belief that the ball will land on black does not count as a state of awareness may simply be that his belief is based on the feeling, and the feeling is not a state of awareness.
Regardless of whether one views the gambler's feeling as analogous to a hallucination and accepts the above analysis, there is in addition, at least, a second reason why the gambler's belief is not a state of awareness. This is that it is epistemically irresponsible for the gambler to hold this belief (not to mention imprudent to bet on it -- and we regard it as foolish to bet on it because it is foolish to hold the belief). There is no reason, or no adequate reason, to think that the ball is going to land on black, and in the context of background knowledge that is available to any mentally competent adult in our society, it is highly unlikely that a given individual's feeling that a ball on a roulette wheel is going to land on black constitutes an extra-sensory perception. (Among other things, if ESP did exist, it would probably have been scientifically validated by now.) Because there is no good reason to think that the ball will land on black, it is a matter of chance that the gambler gets it right.
Case (c) lends itself best to a justification- or epistemic-responsibility-based analysis. That is, since the believers in this case clearly have no epistemic justification for thinking that there is an invisible unicorn on Mars, if they turn out to be right, then they're just lucky. But this case could also be analyzed in terms of reliability -- leaps of faith are not, in general, a reliable way of getting the truth.
One could also, at least in cases (a) and (c), appeal to a counter-factual analysis: what makes it accidental that my perceptual experience in case (a) is veridical is that I would have had the experience even if there were no spider on the table, and what makes the truth of the beliefs in case (c) accidental is that the subjects would have held those beliefs even if there were no invisible unicorn on Mars. (Case (b) is more problematic for this approach, since to apply this approach to case (b) would require one to evaluate a backtracking counter-factual.)
So we've seen four apparent ways of failing to satisfy condition (iii) on awareness: an intentional mental state can be accidentally veridical by reason of lacking justification (if the state is a belief), by lacking a causal connection with its object, by being unreliable (in the sense that states of this kind, or states produced in this manner, do not generally tend to be veridical), or by being such that the state would have occurred regardless of whether its content had been satisfied. I am not going to attempt to say which of these accounts is the correct account of the non-accidentality condition for awareness in general. That project, of course, is the generalized Gettier problem (generalized because it is the problem for awareness rather than just knowledge). I leave it open that different kinds of awareness might satisfy the non-accidentality condition in different ways, and I also leave it open that more than one of these versions of the condition might apply simultaneously. To illustrate what I mean by this, consider one of the things that I said I was aware of earlier. I am aware of the fact that there are over a billion people living in China. I am aware of this partly in virtue of my believing that there are over a billion people living in China. It is particularly plausible in this case that my belief, to constitute a state of awareness, needs to be epistemically justified (I need to have adequate reason for believing that there are over a billion people in China). Perhaps it also needs to be formed by a reliable method. Perhaps it also needs to be caused by the fact that there are over a billion people living in China. Or perhaps its just having one of these characteristics is sufficient (maybe there is a specific one that it needs to have, or maybe any of them will do). About all of that I remain noncommittal.
What I am interested in is two particular species of
awareness: our episodes of perceiving our environment, and our
perceptual knowledge of our environment -- that is to say, the
awareness of our environment that, I claim, is constituted by our
perceptual experiences, and the awareness of certain facts about our
environment that is constituted by our perceptual beliefs. I will
say below how I think the first kind of state satisfies the non-accidentality condition so as to qualify as awareness, and with
regard to the latter state, I will explain how it satisfies what I
take to be the most difficult version of the non-accidentality
condition. It is not difficult to account for the reliability of
our perceptual beliefs, nor for their causal connection to the facts
that make them true, nor for their satisfaction of the counter-factual condition. Of the requirements that might plausibly be
imposed for our perceptual beliefs to count as awareness, the one
that it is most difficult to account for their satisfying (the one
for which the rough account is not immediately obvious) is the
requirement that they should be epistemically justified. So I will
explain how I think perceptual beliefs do satisfy this requirement.
1.2. Awareness and knowledge
So far I've skirted the issue of the relationship between awareness and knowledge, though what I've said should make it clear that there is some close relation between knowledge of the kind epistemologists are usually interested in (i.e. propositional knowledge) and awareness. The relation, I maintain, is that of genus to species, with knowledge being the species. We can now see how knowledge exemplifies the general characteristics of awareness that I've identified above. In the case of knowledge, the state of awareness is a belief. The object of awareness is a fact corresponding to (satisfying) the propositional content of the belief -- i.e., if the content of the belief is that P, then the object of awareness is the fact that P. For a belief to be true is just for there to exist a fact corresponding to it in this sense, so my condition (ii) on awareness, as applied to belief, gives the truth condition for knowledge.
All of the versions of the non-accidentality condition that I made use of above were originally proposed by philosophers as conditions for knowledge -- I have simply generalized them. Where Nozick proposes that S knows that P only if, if P weren't true, S wouldn't believe that P, we can generalize this to: S is aware of X only if, if X didn't exist, S wouldn't be in the intentional state that he's in. Where the reliabilist says that S knows that P only if the mechanism by which S formed the belief that P is reliable (in the sense that it tends to produce mostly true beliefs), we could propose more generally that S is aware of X only if the mechanism that produced S's mental state whose object is X is reliable (in that it tends to produce mostly veridical states). It is straightforward how the causal account generalizes. Again, I do not mean to take a stand on any of these particular analyses of knowledge, and I don't even mean to imply that there must be a unique one of them that is correct for all kinds of knowledge.
The one analysis (or family of analyses) of non-accidentality that does not generalize is the analysis involving justification. From "S knows that P only if S is justified in believing that P," I can not generalize to a possible condition for awareness in general. The reason for this is that the notion of epistemic justification only applies to beliefs. Mental states other than beliefs can not be epistemically justified or unjustified (for example, if I am having a certain sensation, it doesn't make sense to ask whether I'm epistemically justified in having that sensation). What this means is just that we will have to use some other account of non-accidentality for non-belief forms of awareness (we will return to this point in chapter 2), but it may still be true that epistemic justification is a necessary condition on knowledge. One consequence of this point is that it is possible for a philosophical skeptic to argue that we lack knowledge about the external world, without denying that we have perceptual awareness of (i.e., perceive) the external world, on the ground that beliefs have to satisfy a more stringent requirement to count as awareness than perceptual experiences do.
We can summarize the relation between knowledge and awareness
by saying simply that knowledge is the awareness of facts. So when
I said that I am aware of the fact that there are over a billion
people living in China, that was just to say that I know that there
are over a billion people living in China.
1.3. Epistemic dependence
As I briefly mentioned above, sometimes states of awareness
(or mental states that are candidates for awareness) are based on
other states of awareness (or awareness candidates). Let's look at
some examples of this relation before trying to characterize it in
general:
(a) I believe that there are well over a billion people in China. Why do I believe this? Because earlier during the writing of this chapter, I looked up China in a recent almanac, and I then saw that the almanac listed for the population of China a number beginning with a 1 and a 2 and having ten digits. Upon seeing this, I believed that the almanac reported that the population of China was well over a billion. So my belief that China contains well over a billion people is based on the belief that the almanac reported that China contains well over a billion people. Since each of these beliefs do as a matter of fact constitute knowledge, we can also say: my knowledge that there are well over a billion people in China is based on my knowledge that the almanac reported that there were well over a billion people in China.
The based-on relation for beliefs is the most-discussed form
of the relation among philosophers. The relation can also hold
between non-belief intentional states, however:
(b) Return to my example of the gambler who believes that the ball on the roulette wheel will land on black. Why does he believe this? Because he has a feeling that it will. So his belief that the ball will land on black is based on his 'feeling' or hunch (scare quotes around "feeling" because it's not a feeling in the sense of either an emotion or a tactile sensation).
We can see that the feeling and the belief are two different
states, because it would be possible for the feeling to exist
without the belief -- for example, if the gambler were more
reasonable, he might have the feeling that the ball will land on
black but still doubt whether it will, because he might tell himself
that he had no good reason to trust this feeling.
(c) When I converse with other people, I am to some extent aware of their emotional states, other than by their reporting those states. How am I aware of this? Well, in part because people have facial expressions and tones of voice that reflect their emotional states, and I perceive those expressions and tones of voice. So my awareness of their emotional states is based on my awareness of their facial expressions and certain tonal qualities in their voices.
This is not to say that my awareness of people's emotional states is based on beliefs about their facial expressions and tones of voice. In many cases I do not have the relevant beliefs at all, because I do not possess the concepts that would be required to classify complex tonal qualities and combinations of movements of facial features, and/or because I do not take notice of those properties. For example, I may sense that Sally is tired by hearing a certain quality in her voice -- call it tonal quality Q1. At the same time, I may not possess any concept for picking out Q1 and distinguishing it from other qualities. Furthermore, if I did possess such a concept, I might even then fail to believe that Sally's voice had Q1, despite my hearing that quality. In all probability, Q1 would be a very complex and subtle characteristic. The concepts required for identifying it might be complicated and abstract mathematical ones (like the concepts required for identifying a voiceprint), so that it would not be at all obvious at first glance that Sally's voice had Q1. Still, my hearing that quality might in fact be how I know when Sally is tired.
Nor need my awareness of other people's emotional states
consist in beliefs either. We can show that my sensing of a
person's emotional states is distinct from my beliefs about their
emotional states by an argument parallel to the one used in (b)
above -- namely, that it is possible for me to have the sense that
another person is in a certain mental state without believing that
they are. For example, suppose I believe (whether correctly or not)
that the person I am observing is an actor. Suppose that this
person is putting on a great show of grief. I may believe (or even
know) that in fact he is not unhappy at all, while still feeling a
strong impression of his unhappiness -- he seems unhappy.
What we have here are three examples of the 'basing' relation
for states of awareness. In example (a), we have a belief based on
another belief. In (b), there is a belief based upon a non-belief
mental state. And in (c), there are non-belief mental states based
on other non-belief mental states. We can make the following
general observations about the relation:
(i) The based-on relation holds between mental states of the kind that are candidates for awareness.
This is partly a terminological point. Sometimes we speak of
facts or other objects of awareness as bases for states of
awareness. For instance, if asked to explain the basis for my
belief that there are over a billion people in China, I may equally
well say:
"My belief that there are over a billion people in China is based on the belief that the 1996 almanac reported that there were over a billion people in China," or
"My belief that there are over a billion people in China is based on the fact that the 1996 almanac reported that there were over a billion people in China," or
"My belief that there are over a billion people in China is
based on the 1996 almanac's report."
Although all of these sound superficially as though they are identifying radically different things as standing in the same relation to the same belief, I think that they are merely notational variants. There is a certain relation that can hold between one mental state, A, and another mental state, B. When this relation holds, sometimes we describe the situation by saying that B is based on A, and sometimes we describe it (using "based on" in a slightly different sense) by saying that B is based on the thing that is the object of A. We can describe the relationship between these two senses of "based on" as follows: B is based on x in the second sense if and only if there is some mental state, A, such that B is based on A in the first sense, and x is the object of A.
Although these two ways of using the terminology are equally
acceptable in standard English, it is necessary for our purposes to
settle on one usage, so as to avoid confusion -- in a discussion of
direct realism, it is particularly important to avoid any possible
sources of confusion between mental states and their objects. I
will therefore from here on out use "based on" only in the first
sense -- that is, the sense which allows mental states to be based
only on other mental states. This usage has one important advantage
over the other usage: it allows us to characterize a relation that
may hold between unveridical mental states. For example, suppose
that Sam believes that he will have eternal life, (partly) because
he believes that God has promised eternal life to all Christians.
But suppose that Sam is mistaken -- God has not, in fact, made any
such promise. Then it would be incorrect to say Sam's belief that
he will have eternal life is based on the fact that God has promised
eternal life to all Christians, or that it is based on God's promise
to all Christians, because there is no such fact, and there is no
such promise. We can only describe the situation if we adopt the
first way of speaking and say that Sam's belief that he will have
eternal life is based on his belief that God has promised, etc. (We
could try instead speaking of the 'apparent fact' or 'ostensible
fact' that God has promised eternal life to all Christians, but this
seems like really just another way of referring to Sam's belief,
since "apparent" would have to mean apparent to Sam, not apparent
to the speaker.)
(ii) The basing relation is a form of epistemic dependence.
What I mean by this is that, when B is based on A, B's status as awareness depends on A's status as awareness. Intuitively, the basing relation is the relation whereby one mental state can transmit its favorable epistemic status to another mental state. If the first state doesn't have any favorable epistemic status (i.e. it doesn't count as awareness), then it can't transmit any (so the second state won't count as awareness). The 'favorable epistemic status' of a state of awareness amounts to its characteristics of being veridical and appropriately connected with its object, as discussed in section 1.1. So another way to put the point is this: If B is based on A, then B will count as awareness only if A is both veridical and appropriately connected with its object.
Thus, in light of the fact that my belief that there are over a billion people in China is based on my belief that the 1996 almanac reported that there were over a billion people in China, we can say that I know that there are over a billion people in China only if I not only believe but know that the 1996 almanac reported that there were over a billion people in China. If it turns out that my belief about the almanac was either false or unjustified (assuming this is my sole basis for my belief about the population of China), we would not say that I knew the population of China.(4)
We can say the same about example (b): given that the gambler's belief that the ball will land on black is based on a feeling, he knows that the ball will land on black only if the feeling constitutes awareness. If the gambler doesn't actually possess extrasensory powers (so the feeling is not genuine awareness), then he doesn't know (isn't aware) that the ball will land on black. And of course the same goes for cases like (c): if my perceptual experiences of people's facial expressions and voices are not genuine awarenesses (if they're hallucinatory), then I also will fail to be genuinely aware of their emotional states.
Notice that I have not said that, if B is based on A, then if A counts as awareness, B will count as awareness; I have only said that B will not count as awareness unless A does. I have only asserted a necessary condition for B's counting as awareness. There are two reasons why it would be a mistake to make the sufficiency claim: first, because A's being a state of awareness and B's being based on A are not sufficient to guarantee that B is veridical; and second, because even if B is based on A, A is a genuine state of awareness, and B is veridical, all this still is not sufficient for B to be non-accidentally veridical. Both points can be made using an example of Goldman's: Suppose that Henry is driving through an area where there are a lot of phony barns. These phony barns look just like real barns from the road, but in fact they are just façades, with no rear walls or interiors. Henry sees something that looks like a barn, and he believes that there is a barn there. We can now imagine two cases: First, suppose that the barn-like object is a barn façade. In that case, Henry is seeing (hence, is aware of) the barn façade. The barn façade roughly satisfies the content of Henry's visual experience (by having the right size, shape, location, and distribution of colors), and is appropriately connected with Henry's visual experience (by causing it in the normal way). Henry's visual experience is a state of awareness (albeit not the awareness of a barn), and his belief that there is a barn there is based on his visual experience, but his belief is not a state of awareness, because it is false. This sort of example can also be devised for beliefs arrived at through non-demonstrative inference.
Second, we can imagine that the barn-like object is a real
barn, although there are plenty of barn façades in the vicinity, and
if Henry were to see one of them, he would mistake it for a barn.
In this case, Henry's visual experience is a state of awareness (he
is aware of the barn), his belief that there is a barn there is
based on it, and his belief is true, but his belief still does not
amount to awareness, or knowledge, due to the possibility of there
having been a barn façade present instead of a real barn.(5)
(iii) Inference is a special case of basing.
Just as knowledge is the form of awareness which is
constituted by beliefs, inference is the form of the basing relation
in which a belief is based on another belief -- that is, to infer Q
from P is to base a belief that Q on a belief that P. This is
illustrated in example (a). It is interesting that just as
knowledge is the most-studied form of awareness in philosophy,
inference is the most-studied form of the basing relation in
philosophy.
(iv) When B is based on A, the content of A must be relevant to the content of B, such that the existence of something satisfying the actual content of A either entails or makes highly probable, or appears to the subject to entail or make highly probable, the existence of something satisfying the actual content of B.
This relation is most apparent in example (b), for the content of the gambler's feeling is the same as the content of his belief, so of course the existence of something satisfying the actual content of his feeling would guarantee that something satisfies the actual content of his belief. There is an equally strong connection in cases of deductive inferences -- i.e., when I deduce one belief from another, the content of the former is typically related to the content of the latter in such a way that if the latter is true, the former must be.
The "appears to the subject" clause is needed to account for cases in which a person commits a fallacy. In such a case, a person may base a belief that Q, for example, on a belief that P, even though in fact P does not entail or render probable Q. Still, P will at least appear to the subject to entail or render probable Q.
The beginning clause in my statement of (iv) about 'relevance' is not meant to be redundant. It is meant to account for the fact that one cannot, for example, base a belief in the four-color theorem on the belief that today is Tuesday -- even though, technically, one might say the fact that today is Tuesday guarantees (entails) that the four-color theorem is true. (In this sense, any proposition whatever guarantees that the four-color theorem is true, since the four-color theorem is necessarily true.) The relevance condition stipulates that the entailment must hold in virtue of the relevance between the contents of A and B.
The 'making probable' clause applies to both examples (a) and (c). That the almanac reports that there are over a billion people in China does not strictly guarantee that there are over a billion people in China, but it does make it highly probable, in the context of my background knowledge. Similarly, people's having certain facial expressions and tones of voice makes it highly probable that they have certain emotional states, given normal circumstances.
I characterized the probability relation differently for the two cases, and this is something that requires comment. In both cases, the probability relation was itself relative to something (i.e., something other than the mental state that the other state is based upon) -- in the first case, I said it was relative to background knowledge. In the latter case, I said it was relative to normal conditions. I think the motivation for the relativization in either case is clear enough. I don't want to say that, completely a priori, the fact that an almanac reports that the population of China is greater than a billion makes it highly probable that the population of China is greater than a billion. Abstracting from our background knowledge about almanacs, statistics-gathering practices in our society, and so on, I have no idea whether the existence of the almanac's report would confirm the proposition that it reports or not. Likewise, the occurrence of certain facial movements only makes it highly probable that a person is feeling anger in context of certain general but contingent facts about humans.
There is a rationale for relativizing in the first case to background knowledge and for not doing so in the second case. In the first case, we have inferential basing -- i.e., a belief based on another belief. The inferential basing relation needs to be able to transmit justification. That is, inference is a way (at least potentially, if everything goes right) of justifying a belief. But the existence of a probability relation between (the content of) belief B and a set of facts of which I (the believer) am entirely unaware would not contribute to the justification of B. B could, however, be rendered justified by being highly probable relative to another belief of mine and my background knowledge.
The same consideration does not apply to case (c). There is no requirement that non-inferential basings should transmit justification -- in fact, they cannot do so, because non-belief mental states are incapable of being either justified or unjustified. Furthermore, we should not make use of the notion of background knowledge in case (c), if we want to preserve that as an instance of awareness, because the relevant 'background facts' that make it highly probable that a person with certain facial expressions has certain emotions are likely to be unknown to me. What sort of facts would these be? Perhaps facts about the way human beings are generally 'wired up,' together with facts about the sort of conditions that usually obtain in our environment. I am, however, woefully ignorant of physiology (as are most people), and certainly don't know anything that would be adequate to underwrite the sort of probability relation in question. Or perhaps we should look to something simpler, such as the fact that people with facial expression F usually have emotion E. This too, I am afraid, is something I would be unaware of in many if not most cases. You might say, I know that smiles indicate happiness and frowns indicate unhappiness. But I know very little beyond that (and similar simplistic criteria), and this sort of principle is too crude and simple to do justice to my in-practice ability to distinguish a variety of different emotional states on the basis of facial expressions. I do not know what facial expression indicates tiredness, or annoyance, or what distinguishes a happy smile from a nervous smile. I am able to tell when a person is tired, or annoyed, etc., but I do not know how I do it. If someone were to propose to me that when people are tired, their eyes diverge slightly, and this is part of how we are able to tell when others are tired, I would have to say, "That may very well be; I do not know."
Because of these considerations, we should say that when B is
based on A, if B is a belief, then the existence of something
satisfying A makes probable the existence of something satisfying
B, given background knowledge of the subject; and if B is not a
belief, then the existence of something satisfying A makes probable
the existence of something satisfying B, given normal conditions.
We note that normal conditions are not necessarily conditions that
the subject knows or believes to be normal, or even believes to
obtain.
(v) Basing is a species of causal relation.
When B is based on A, A causes or causally sustains B, so that if the subject weren't in or hadn't been in state A, he wouldn't be in state B. This is clear in each of my examples:
(a) My belief that the almanac reports that there are over a billion people in China causes me to believe that there are over a billion people in China, and that is why, if I hadn't believed that the almanac reported that there were over a billion people in China, I wouldn't have believed that there were over a billion people in China. (In actual fact, my belief is also partly based on memory of statements I have heard from other people over the years. But we are pretending that my knowledge of the almanac report is my sole basis.)
(b) The gambler's feeling that the ball will land on black causes him to believe that the ball will land on black, and if he hadn't had the feeling, he wouldn't have had the belief.
(c) My seeing people's facial expressions and hearing their voices causes me to be aware of their emotional states. If I didn't see their facial expressions or hear their tones of voice, then I wouldn't be aware of their emotional states. (It is difficult to judge a person's mood from written correspondence precisely because much of our awareness of others' emotional states is based on awareness of their facial expressions and tones of voice. Of course, some of it is also based on what they say.)
We can appreciate the importance of condition (v) by considering cases where it fails. Here's a simple case involving beliefs: I'm in a math class, and the teacher informs me of the Pythagorean Theorem. This immediately causes me, let's suppose, to believe the Pythagorean Theorem, because I trust my teacher. There are in fact many different ways of proving the Theorem mathematically, though I do not know any of them (in the sense that I have not seen them worked out and could not produce any of them). Some of these ways involve only using certain simple arithmetical and geometrical premises which I do know. From a purely logical standpoint, it might be said that these items of knowledge that I have are grounds for the Pythagorean Theorem, and of course they are better grounds than the knowledge of a teacher's testimony. But I do not think anyone would say they are in fact my grounds for believing the Pythagorean Theorem, because the beliefs comprising them were not active in the process by which I formed my belief in the Pythagorean Theorem. My actual basis for belief is my belief that the teacher has said the Pythagorean Theorem is true.
(v) is also what distinguishes genuine reports of reasons for belief from rationalizations -- if a belief that P has not played any role in either producing or sustaining my belief that Q, then if I cite P as my reason for Q, even if I do happen to believe P and even if P is a good reason for Q, we call this "rationalizing."
Note that the causal connection is fundamental and necessary, and not the counter-factual connection. That is, the reason why most of the time, when B is based on A, B counterfactually depends on A is that whenever B is based on A, A causes B. It is possible to have a case in which B is based on A even though, if the subject hadn't been in state A, he would still have been in B -- just suppose that if S hadn't been in A, he would have been in some other cognitive state, C, which would have generated B instead (the case of the pre-empted cause). But it is not possible to have a case in which A is the basis for B while A plays no causal role in producing or sustaining B.
The causal condition is equally important in cases of basing not involving beliefs. Return to example (c). Suppose that research shows that when human beings get tired, a number of perceptible things happen to their faces. Let's suppose that their eyes diverge slightly and their lower lips sag just a little. And suppose we find that both of these changes are easily detectible to other humans' visual systems. It seems clear that, that much having been discovered, there remains an open question: which of these changes, if any (or both), is it the perception of which forms the basis for our sense that the person undergoing them is tired? The question seems to turn on which of the changes the perception of which plays a role in bringing about the perception of tiredness. It could be that we perceive the eye change but that it doesn't have anything to do with our sensing the person's emotions, for example.
We should be careful now about the difference between a cause and the cause of a state of awareness. It may turn out that there are several different states of awareness that contribute to sustaining state B. For example, there are by now many different causes of my belief in the Pythagorean Theorem -- I have heard it asserted or assumed by many different people and textbooks, I have seen a visual demonstration of it in a museum and another on a television program, and I've seen at least one or two proofs of it. Each of these experiences might be called a cause of my belief, though none of them is the cause, because none of them clearly stands out from the rest as the most important. Shall we say that my belief is based on one or more of these experiences? Well, none of these experiences is the basis for my belief, but my belief is partly based on each of them, and we can say that my belief is (without qualification) based on the totality of the experiences.
We might now worry about deviant causal chains. Observations (i), (iv) and (v) are each necessary for a state B to be based on A, but they are not sufficient, because of the problem of deviant causal chains. If we add in (ii), we might have a sufficient set of conditions, but (ii) isn't really one of the conditions on the basing relation in the same sense that (i), (iv), and (v) are -- once we've stated (ii), we can still wonder under what conditions B's epistemic status does depend on A's epistemic status, and the other conditions are supposed to answer that, at least partly.
Here is an example of a deviant causal chain: Return to my learning of the Pythagorean Theorem. Suppose that earlier in the year, this same teacher has taught me certain axioms of arithmetic and geometry. These axioms are propositions from which the Pythagorean Theorem follows, although just as before, I have not actually seen any of the proofs of the Theorem, and my belief is proximately caused by the teacher's testimony and based on my trust in his veracity. We have agreed that in this case, my belief in the Pythagorean Theorem is not based on the mentioned axioms of geometry and arithmetic. But now add this detail: suppose that the teacher would not have taught me the Pythagorean Theorem unless I had first demonstrated mastery of the material presented earlier in the course. He has very accurate testing techniques, and he never teaches the Pythagorean Theorem to anyone who has not first learned the axioms of arithmetic and geometry. Thus, my knowledge of the axioms of arithmetic and geometry has (indirectly) caused me to believe the Pythagorean Theorem, by causing the teacher to tell it to me. Still, my beliefs in the axioms are not the basis for my belief in the Pythagorean Theorem. My sheer trust in the teacher's veracity is.
We could equally well imagine that the teacher won't teach students the Pythagorean Theorem unless they have first mastered a history lesson, so my knowledge of history would cause me to believe the Pythagorean Theorem -- here the failure of the one belief to be based on the other is even clearer, if that's possible. But to return to the above case: Condition (v) is satisfied: my belief in the axioms causes (albeit indirectly) my belief in the Pythagorean Theorem, explaining why if I hadn't believed the axioms, I wouldn't have come to believe the Pythagorean Theorem. Condition (iv) is satisfied: the axioms are logically relevant to the Pythagorean Theorem and in fact entail it. Condition (i) is unproblematic: beliefs are candidates for awareness (in the shape of knowledge). We can even make a go at condition (ii): suppose that the teacher's testing techniques are very good at distinguishing genuine understanding from mere rote repetition, so that if I hadn't really known but merely believed the axioms, the teacher would not have proceeded with the later course material. Still, my belief in the axioms isn't the basis for my belief in the Pythagorean Theorem.
Here is why I said (ii) might give us a sufficient set of conditions: although it's true in a sense that in this case, my warrant for believing Q depends on my warrant for believing P (where Q is the Pythagorean Theorem and P is the appropriate conjunction of axioms), it can be argued that this is not the relevant sense of "dependence." The dependence involved in the case is causal dependence, whereas what (ii) intends is constitutive dependence. That is, what (ii) requires is not that my warrant for believing P causes me to get warrant for believing Q, but rather that my warrant for believing Q depends on my warrant for believing P in the sense that my warrant for believing Q partly consists in my having warrant for believing P. And intuitively, this 'consists in' relation does not hold in the case at hand. Now, that states the meaning of (ii) for the case of beliefs based on other beliefs (warrant being a property of beliefs). We can convert it into a general statement about awareness easily enough: just as epistemologists use "warrant" (following Plantinga) for the property that converts true belief into knowledge, we could introduce a term for the property that converts a veridical intentional state into awareness -- I have above referred to it as "connectedness," "non-accidentality," and "positive epistemic status." We can then say that when B is based on A, where A and B are any kind of awareness, B's positive epistemic status partly consists in A's positive epistemic status. Consider how this principle would apply to example (c): What makes my awareness of Sally's voice non-accidentally veridical (I mean what makes the veridicality non-accidental) is that my auditory experience as of Sally's voice is caused by Sally's voice. Now what makes my awareness of Sally's tiredness non-accidentally veridical is also, in part, the fact that my auditory experience as of Sally's voice is caused by Sally's voice -- if my auditory experience were a veridical hallucination, then I would not be being aware of Sally's emotional state. This is not because the fact that my auditory experience is caused by Sally's voice causes my veridical sense of Sally's tiredness to be appropriately connected with its object; it is rather that the fact that my auditory experience is caused by Sally's voice (and hence amounts to hearing her voice) partly constitutes the appropriate connection between Sally's tiredness and my sense of Sally's tiredness. The appropriate connection between A's sense of B's emotional state and B's actual emotional state partly consists in the fact that A is perceiving some of the physical features of B that manifest B's emotional state (as opposed to hallucinating them).
I'm not going to press this as a satisfying answer to the deviant-causal-chains problem because I think a genuine analysis of the basing relation would require an answer to the question, "Under what conditions, exactly, does the positive epistemic status of A partly constitute the positive epistemic status of B?" and I do not have an answer to that question, other than to cite conditions (iv) and (v) -- which we have seen are insufficient. We can get closer to a sufficient set of conditions by stipulating that the causal mechanism connecting A to B has to be internal to the subject's mind -- that rules out my case with the math teacher. But there could still be (increasingly farfetched) cases of internally deviant causal chains: suppose that when I learn the axioms of arithmetic and geometry, I am so pleased with my intellectual progress (at having learned such interesting truths), that I get into a mood of reckless intellectual self-confidence, in which I decide that the next proposition I think up will surely be true and important. As it happens, the next proposition that I think up is one that (unbeknownst to me) follows from these axioms -- the Pythagorean Theorem -- and I immediately endorse it. So my knowledge of the axioms of arithmetic and geometry causes me to accept the Pythagorean Theorem, and the axioms entail the theorem, but it isn't the case that my belief in the theorem is based on my knowledge of the axioms. Again, the latter beliefs don't cause the former belief in the right way.
I don't have an answer to this analytical problem, but nothing
crucial turns on the exact analysis of deviancy in causal chains,
and I also do not take the lack of such an analysis as an obstacle
to accepting that cognitive basing is a kind of causal relation.
Deviants crop up wherever causal relations are involved: for an
action to be intentional, it must be caused by an intention in an
appropriate way; for a person to perceive an object, the object must
cause an experience in an appropriate way; for a person to knock
over an object, the person must cause the object to fall in a
certain sort of way; for a person to break a vase, he must cause the
vase to break in a certain way. Deviant causal chains can appear
in any of these cases -- there can even be cases of causing a vase
to break without breaking the vase (suppose I hire Joe to throw the
vase on the floor: have I then broken the vase?), although there is
no doubt that some sort of causal analysis of "breaking" is
correct.(6) The moral is that a problem of deviant causal chains is
what we should expect (even) if a causal account of cognitive
"basing" is correct.
1.4. Direct vs. indirect realism, at last
All of the above has been by way of putting us in a position to appreciate my definition of direct realism: direct realism is the thesis that perception constitutes direct awareness of the external world. That is: in perception, we are aware of certain parts or aspects of the external world, and our awareness of these things is not based on our awareness of anything that's not in the external world. In contrast, idealism holds that in perception, we are aware of some internal (mind-dependent) phenomena, and we are not aware of the external world, since (abstract objects aside) there is no external world to be aware of. And indirect realism holds that either in perception or as a result of perception, we are aware of the external world, but our awareness of the external world (abstract objects aside) is always based on our awareness of something internal.
The way I've just defined the distinction between direct and
indirect realism is not the only way of doing so, of course. It's
not the only reasonable way of drawing the distinction, and it's not
the only way that has been used by writers on perception. Since
"direct realism" is a philosophers' term of art, there isn't really
any unique right way of defining it, but some ways are more useful
than others (mainly by virtue of making the view designated by the
term more interesting). So I propose to look at a few other ways
of drawing the distinction to point out how they differ from mine:
(1) Direct realism is the view that in at least some cases, we directly perceive the external world, where the notion of directness should be understood causally. That is, according to direct realism, the causal link between an object and our perceptual experience of the object is direct, in the sense that there are no intermediate causes between the object and the experience.
There's no need to dwell on the impropriety of this definition
for my purposes. The definition could be appropriate if one wants
"direct realism" to designate a clearly unacceptable view (as
perhaps the term "naive realism" is meant to imply), but not if one
wants it to designate a view of perception that has actually been
held by philosophers. The falsity of 'direct realism' in the above
sense is hardly a recent or surprising discovery of science or
philosophy. The role of the brain in producing (e.g.) visual
experiences may be regarded as a relatively recent and perhaps
surprising scientific discovery, but the rough role of light (i.e.
that light must travel between the object perceived and our eyes in
order for us to see) has been known at least for centuries (it is
why you don't see things if you interpose an opaque object between
them and your eyes), and it would be inconsistent with 'direct
realism' construed in this way. But any view that can be refuted
by the fact that you can't see objects through an opaque screen is
not very interesting. (Granted, a bit more than that might be
required, to show that the reason you can't see through an opaque
screen is that it doesn't transmit light, but I think the point
remains that this form of 'direct realism' isn't very interesting.)
On the other hand, we can also find ways of defining the
direct/indirect distinction that make indirect realism too easy to
refute, such as:
(2) Indirect realism is the view that we never really see, feel, taste, or otherwise perceive anything external, although we nevertheless know that some such things exist. Instead, we only truly see, feel, etc. sense-data or ideas in the mind. Direct realism is the view that we can perceive external objects or events.
This is the form of indirect realism that Berkeley, by and by,
manages to saddle Hylas with:
Hyl. Properly and immediately nothing can be perceived but ideas. All material things therefore are in themselves insensible, and to be perceived only by their ideas.
Phil. Ideas then are sensible, and their archetypes or originals insensible.
Hyl. Right.
There is no need to recount all the fun that Philonous goes on to have from there.(7)
Again, I think this characterization of the distinction just
makes it too obvious which view is correct. The indirect realist
-- even a sense data theorist -- needn't be committed to saying that
we see sense data, still less that we don't see physical objects
(suppose that seeing X is being aware of X on the basis of one's
awareness of a visual sense datum of X: then we don't see visual
sense data, since we don't have visual sense data of visual sense
data, and we do see physical objects, since we are aware of them on
the basis of awareness of visual sense data of them). Whatever
one's account of seeing is, it had better wind up that typical
middle-sized dry goods, such as sofas and elephants, are visible --
and I'm inclined to insist, in addition, that it better not turn out
that sensations or ideas in the mind are visible.
(3) Indirect realism is the view that, in the situations in which we normally say we believe that certain physical objects are present in our environment because we see or otherwise perceive them, we are actually inferring that such objects are present, from our beliefs about what internal states we are enjoying. Direct realism is the view that we typically form physical-object beliefs without inferring them from beliefs about our mental states.
This version of 'indirect realism' just gets the phenomenology
of perception wrong, in a fairly obvious way. Introspection reveals
that we normally don't go through processes of inferring when it
comes to simple physical-object beliefs about our immediate
environment. When I see a coffee cup in an everyday context, I do
not think to myself, "I am now having a visual experience as of a
coffee cup. It is highly probable that if I have a visual
experience as of a coffee cup, then there is a coffee cup present.
Therefore, (probably) there is a coffee cup here." Instead, when
I see the cup I just straightaway take it for granted that there is
a cup there. There are even some people (philosophers, mainly) who
would deny that there are such things as 'visual experiences' (not
that they would deny that we see things, but they would deny that
seeing can be analyzed in terms of enjoying a mental state called
a 'visual experience' -- see chapter 2 below), and yet these
philosophers still know (by seeing) that there are physical objects
around them. There are even more people who, while knowing lots of
things about their physical environment, entertain no opinion about
such things as visual experiences, perhaps not even having the
concept 'visual experience,' or 'tactile experience,' etc. They
just don't think about those things. Unless one is either a
philosopher or a cognitive psychologist, one just doesn't have much
occasion to form or apply such concepts. But again, a view that can
be refuted by (approximately) the fact that you can see that there's
a cup on the desk without having the concept of a visual experience,
is not very interesting.
(4) Direct realism is the view that we are sometimes noninferentially justified in believing a proposition asserting the existence of a physical object.(8) Indirect realism is the view that we are sometimes inferentially justified in believing a proposition asserting the existence of a physical object, but we're never noninferentially justified in believing such a proposition.
This pair of definitions is reminiscent of (3), but not the same as (3), for this reason: According to Fumerton, the claim that S's justification for believing P is inferential does not entail that S's belief that P was actually the product of an inference; there is a derivative sense of inferential justification, having to do in part with a belief's being caused by an experience, such that a belief can be inferentially justified on the basis of an experience, without the belief having been inferred from anything.(9)
How does this formulation differ from mine? One difference is perhaps only verbal: Fumerton and I both agree that a belief might be based on some mental state that's not a belief (such as an experience), where this involves the mental state's causing the belief in an appropriate way. He calls this relationship a form of "inferential justification," while I reserve any term involving a cognate of "infer" for a relation between beliefs. But Fumerton may be using "on the basis of" in the way that I said I was not going to -- i.e., the possibility he allows may only be what I would express by saying that a belief can be based on beliefs about experiences.
Second, Fumerton's version of direct realism is about beliefs,
while I have spoken more broadly of awareness. So my direct
realist, unlike Fumerton's, is not committed to saying that there
are any beliefs that aren't based on anything. Instead, he says
that there are some states of awareness of the external world that
aren't based on anything. Whether this includes beliefs is left
open. Also, my indirect realist is not forced to posit an extra
sense or extra form of "inferential justification" -- although he
would have to posit other forms of 'basing' besides inferential
basing.
My formulation is meant to retain the epistemological spirit
of (3) and (4) while allowing the indirect realist (at least prima
facie) to escape the obvious psychological objections to (3). On
my formulation, the indirect realist must hold that when perceiving,
people are in some manner aware of certain internal states or
events, but the indirect realist need not hold that people believe
these internal events are going on or have concepts of these
internal events. The indirect realist also doesn't have to hold
that any inferring is going on, though he does have to hold that our
awareness of the external world is in some manner based on our
awareness of the internal phenomena. My formulation is thus
designed to give the epistemological indirect realist a break.
(5) Indirect realism is the view that we perceive external things at least in part by virtue of having certain internal mental states that 'represent' them, in the sense of having intentional contents that external things can satisfy or fail to satisfy. Direct realism is the view that people perceive things without having any such states.
It should be clear that this formulation is very different from my own, since on my conception of awareness, being aware of something always entails having a mental state with content, and yet I haven't said anything to imply that 'direct realism' is incompatible with our having awareness (as it would be on the present definition of "direct realism," if that conception of awareness is correct). If one describes such a mental state as a "representation," then being aware of something always involves having a mental representation. It should also be clear that it is not true, on my view, that being aware of something always involves being aware of a mental representation of that thing. For, given the conception of awareness at hand, to be aware of a mental representation would involve having a mental representation of a mental representation, and it is surely false that whenever S is aware of X, S has a mental representation of a mental representation of X. In fact, nothing I've said so far entails that anyone is ever aware of mental representations (except that I do, by talking about mental representations, at least imply that I am, presently, aware that they exist).
To make the issue clearer: according to formulation (5), the
'indirect realist' holds that there's a mental state such that (a)
when you're perceiving a table (where "perceive" is a success term),
you're in that state, (b) you perceive the table at least in part
by virtue of being in that state, but (c) it is metaphysically
possible for you to be in that state while there is no table. The
'direct realist,' under definition (5), holds that there is no such
state; he says that the only mental state that you're in when
perceiving a table, such that you perceive the table by being in
that state, is a state of perceiving the table -- the things I've
been calling "perceptual experiences" don't exist.(10) We'll discuss
this kind of 'ultra-direct realism' further in chapter 2, where I'll
give reasons for rejecting it.
(6) Direct realism holds that there are some external objects that we see, such that we don't see them in virtue of seeing anything else. Indirect realism holds that there are some mental objects that we see not in virtue of seeing anything else, and there are also some external objects that we see, but we always see external objects in virtue of seeing things distinct from them.(11)
This is Frank Jackson's formulation of the issue. One respect in which it differs from mine is that Jackson restricts his concern to visual perception, while I am concerned with perceptual awareness in general. Another difference is that Jackson commits the indirect realist to the view that we can sometimes see mental phenomena. Thus, consider the possible sense-data theorist mentioned above under (2), the one who holds that seeing X should be defined in terms of (among other things) having a visual sense-datum of X: on Jackson's formulation, this would actually be incompatible with indirect realism, because it implies that (given that we don't have visual sense data of any mental phenomena) we don't see any mental phenomena, and it implies that when we see physical objects, we sometimes don't see them in virtue of seeing anything else (given that we don't see any non-physical things). This apparent deficiency in the formulation could be remedied by replacing "see" with "apprehend" or "become aware of," thus: the direct realist maintains that we sometimes are aware of certain physical phenomena not in virtue of being aware of anything else; the indirect realist maintains that we're sometimes aware of certain mental phenomena not in virtue of being aware of anything else, and we're also sometimes aware of physical phenomena, but we're always aware of physical phenomena in virtue of being aware of other things (meaning: for each X such that X is physical and someone is aware of X, there exists a Y such that he's aware of X in virtue of being aware of Y. Y might be physical or non-physical).
More importantly, my formulation is closer to the
epistemological concerns of (4) as a result of using the 'based on'
relation rather than the 'in virtue of' relation. These relations
are importantly different. My distinction between direct and
indirect awareness stems from the observation that sometimes a
mental state gets to count as awareness (in part) in virtue of being
appropriately related to, including being appropriately caused by,
another state of awareness. Jackson's distinction between mediate
and immediate awareness (assuming he would allow the substitution
of "be aware of" for "see") stems from the observation that
sometimes a given mental state gets to count as the awareness of X
(in part) in virtue of being the awareness of Y. So my 'basing'
relation is a kind of causal dependence ("B is based on A" implies
"A causes B"),(12) while Jackson's 'in virtue of' relation is a kind
of constitutive dependence: "S s in virtue of ing" is more like
"S's ing counts as (or constitutes) S's ing" than like "S's ing
causes S's ing." This comes out in his definitions of "in virtue
of":
An A is F in virtue of a B being F if the application of "----
is F" to an A is definable in terms of its application to a B
and a relation, R, between As and Bs, but not conversely.
This A is F in virtue of this B being F if (i) an A is F in
virtue of a B being F (as just defined), (ii) this A and this
B are F, and (iii) this A and this B bear R to each other.(13)
So, perhaps surprisingly, it would be possible to be a direct
realist in my sense while being an indirect realist in Jackson's
sense, and it would be possible to be a direct realist in Jackson's
sense but an indirect realist in my sense. To illustrate, consider
what would be (on my definition) a paradigmatic indirect realism:
suppose a philosopher believes that we have knowledge of the
external world, and the way we know about the external world is
always by inferring propositions about the external world from our
beliefs about the character of our sense data. (Although I have
said that my formulation does not require the 'indirect realist' to
hold this extreme position, certainly this would be one possible
form of indirect realism.) Nevertheless, suppose this philosopher
doesn't think that we are aware of external objects in virtue of
being aware of our sense data, because he denies that being aware
of a physical object can be defined in terms of (or is constituted
by, or anything like that) being aware of a sense datum that has a
certain relation to the physical object. Note that this latter
belief would not be at all an unnatural addition to the first part
of the theory, as we see by comparing other instances of inferential
knowledge. Suppose that I see a soaking wet person enter the room,
and this prompts me to infer (from the belief that a soaking wet
person has entered the room) that it is raining outside. I then,
of course, have two distinct beliefs, which are causally connected.
In this case, we should not say any of the following:
My knowledge (or belief) that a wet person has entered the room constitutes knowledge that it's raining outside.
My knowledge (or belief) that a wet person has entered the room counts as knowledge that it's raining outside.
Knowing that it's raining outside is definable in terms of knowing that a wet person has entered a room.
I know that it's raining outside in virtue of the fact that I
know that a wet person has entered the room.
Any of these would be unnatural, and incorrect, descriptions of the
relation between my two items of knowledge (I take it that all of
the above are similar, if not equivalent, claims -- all describe a
relation something like constitution). On the other hand, the
following would be appropriate descriptions of the case:
My knowledge (or belief) that it's raining outside is based on my knowledge (or belief) that a wet person has entered the room.
My knowledge (or belief) that it's raining outside is caused
by my knowledge (or belief) that a wet person has entered the
room.
So it would be natural for the sense datum fundamentalist I imagine, who holds that all external-object beliefs are inferred from sense-datum beliefs, to expressly deny that we're aware of the external world in virtue of being aware of sense data (the connection is not that close), while holding that our awareness of the external world is, instead, based on our awareness of sense data. This would make the theory a form of indirect realism in my sense, but (oddly enough) direct realism in Jackson's sense.
We could also imagine a sense datum theorist who would be an indirect realist in Jackson's sense but a direct realist in my sense. This philosopher would hold that we enjoy states of awareness of sense data and that these states also sometimes count as awareness of physical objects in virtue of some relation holding between the physical objects and the sense data (much as perceiving Bob's head can count as perceiving Bob, in virtue of a certain relationship between the head and Bob), and he would deny that these states cause us to be aware of physical objects. This position is at least consistent, and the first part of it may actually require the second part (a counts as relation may be incompatible with a causal relation).
I'm not going to argue that either Jackson's or my formulation of the issue is intrinsically better than the other. Rather, we should merely distinguish the two formulations as addressed to different concerns. In fact, the difference will not prove very important, because the account of perception that I defend will be a form of 'direct realism' on either definition of the term, and my criticisms of what I call "indirect realism" will also apply to the view of perception that Jackson has developed. I will be criticizing the idea that in perception, we normally enjoy awareness of our own minds (or mind-dependent phenomena), which would be common ground between the 'indirect realists' of the two preceding paragraphs.
2. PERCEPTION AS AWARENESS
In the last chapter, we developed a general conception of what it
is to be aware of something. The next task is to exhibit perception
as a form of awareness of the external world, under that conception.
2.1. The traditional analysis of perception
The conception that I'm going to call "the traditional
analysis of perception" is probably common ground between my version
of direct realism and a number of forms of indirect realism, though
I shan't worry about arguing that the analysis really is a
traditional one (let alone the traditional one). The conception is
this: For an observer, S, to perceive a physical object, X, four
things have to happen:
(i) S must have a certain kind of mental state called a 'perceptual experience';
(ii) X must exist (this is at least part of what is meant by saying that "perceive" is a success verb);
(iii) X must at least roughly satisfy the content of the experience; and
(iv) X must cause S to have the perceptual experience.
Condition (iii) is probably the most controversial and least worthy of inclusion in something called "the traditional analysis," for reasons that will become clear below.
We can see how, on the above analysis, perception is a form of awareness. The state of awareness is the perceptual experience, conditions (ii) and (iii) secure that the state is veridical (condition (ii) being redundant, of course), and condition (iv) constitutes the 'appropriate connection' between the intentional state and its object for this type of awareness.
I'm not going to spend much time on (ii). That I'll take for
granted. Some doubt about it could be raised in cases like the
following:
(a) Joe is experiencing double vision, when he holds his hand in front of his face. We might describe this situation by saying, "Joe sees two hands, where there really is only one." But it isn't the case that there exist two hands such that Joe sees them.
(b) Suppose that I'm seeing an after-image on the wall. Is it the case that there exists an after-image, such that I'm seeing it on the wall? This seems questionable.
(c) I'm being subjected to brain surgery while I'm still conscious.
The doctor stimulates certain parts of my brain and asks me to
"describe what I see." I say something like, "Okay, I see some
yellow splotches sliding across the ceiling." Do the yellow
splotches exist? Suppose I go on to report, "Ooh, now I'm seeing
some flying pink elephants." Certainly there don't exist any flying
pink elephants such that I'm seeing them.
Examples like this are a little less convincing if one uses
"perceive" instead of "see," though this may just be because "see"
is a more commonly-used word. These examples do not trouble me,
however. I'm not interested in arguing that there is no non-success-verb use of "see" in English (the so-called 'phenomenal
sense' of "see"), and my view of perception will leave room for a
straightforward analysis of 'phenomenal seeing': to phenomenally see
an F is merely to have a visual experience, where "an F" figures in
the content of the experience. What I maintain is just that there
is a use of "see" in which it is a success verb (the 'relational
sense' of "see"). One can see this by reflecting on hypothetical
exchanges such as this:
A: "I think I saw King Ulgar last night."
B: "You couldn't have seen King Ulgar last night; he died over
a week ago."
B's response seems perfectly logical. Well, A could still claim to
have seen Ulgar, if what he thinks he saw was the corpse (or perhaps
a photograph of Ulgar, etc.); but otherwise not. An even more
forceful response (if true) would be something like:
B: "You couldn't have seen King Ulgar. King Ulgar is a
fictional character that I made up."
Similar lessons apply to "perceive" as "see" (I take it that seeing is always a form of perceiving).
I also will not discuss (iv) at length. We saw the motivation for that condition in section 1.1, with the case of veridical hallucination. That was the case where I have an LSD-induced hallucination of a spider crawling on my desk, and by chance, there happens to be a spider right there, but I'm not seeing it.
(iv), of course, raises the issue of deviant causal chains. For example: suppose the proverbial brain surgeon sees a cat, and this causes him to stimulate my brain in such a way as to produce a visual experience of a cat. Then the cat has caused my visual experience, and the other conditions mentioned above are satisfied, but I'm still not perceiving the cat. Because of cases like this, we can't say that (i)-(iv) are a sufficient set of conditions for perceiving. There must be the right (non-deviant) kind of causal chain. But I'm going to pass over the issue of exactly what the right kind of causal chain is.
In the following sections, then, I will defend conditions (i)
and (iii).
2.2. Perceptual experience & the pure intellectualist account
I have been using the concepts of 'perceptual experiences,' 'visual experiences,' and the like up till now without explicitly defining them. My earlier discussion of what I called "ultra-direct realism" (formulation (5) in section 1.4), however, gives a clue. According to the traditional analysis, whenever a person is perceiving, there is a purely subjective (i.e., purely internal) mental event or state that occurs, that is a component of the event of perceiving, and that is the only purely internal component of that event. In other words, when you're perceiving anything, there's a certain mental state that you're in, such that your perceiving is partly constituted by your being in that state, and such that that state could have existed without there being any external object that you're aware of. That mental state (and any mental state intrinsically similar to it) I call a perceptual experience. Of course, I can not make there be such a state by stipulation, so if I am mistaken, and there is no such state, then there are no perceptual experiences. "Visual experience," "auditory experience," and so on, will be understood similarly. That is, 'visual experience' is defined to be the purely internal state that is a component in the process of seeing things, 'auditory experience' is the purely internal state that is part of hearing things, and so on.
'Perceptual experience,' then, is not to be confused with perception. It follows from the above definition (together with the traditional analysis) that it is possible to have a perceptual experience without perceiving and therefore without having a perception -- for, according to the above definition, it is possible to have a perceptual experience without there being any object that you're perceiving, but according to the traditional analysis (condition (ii)), it is not possible to perceive without there being an object that you're perceiving. "Perceptual experience," then, should not be heard like "experience of perceiving," but rather like, "experience subjectively like perceiving."
It also should not be thought that the existence of 'perceptual experiences' in my sense is automatically common ground to all people who believe that there's such a thing as perception. The view I characterized as "ultra-direct realism" holds that we often perceive external objects, but we don't have any perceptual experiences (in my sense of the term). The ultra-direct realist, in contrast to myself, holds that the only mental (or quasi-mental?) event going on during a perception of a table that's a part of the perceiving, is a perception of a table, and that is an event that cannot exist in the absence of a table.(14)
Aside from the above definition, there are two ways of illustrating what I mean by "perceptual experience" and why perceptual experience is important to the analysis of perception. One is to compare two different events that both involve perceptual experience and notice what they have in common. This will be my approach in the next section. The other, the approach of the remainder of this section, is to contrast our perceptual knowledge as it actually is with the way our knowledge of the external world would be or might be if we didn't have perceptual experiences.
This latter way of illustrating the importance of the concept of perceptual experience is inspired in part by Laurence BonJour's coherentist-friendly account of observation. Without (hopefully) simplifying too much, BonJour says that what happens during observation is that you just find yourself believing a bunch of things about your environment. These beliefs are characterized by (1) being extremely specific and detailed, (2) being 'cognitively spontaneous' in the sense that they are not the product of inference or deliberation, and (3) being peculiarly difficult to resist. This is what distinguishes observation beliefs from other beliefs.(15) BonJour's account is motivated partly by his view that beliefs can only be based on other beliefs -- accordingly, other kinds of states of awareness don't have much of a role to play in his epistemology. In fairness, BonJour doesn't actually deny the existence of such things as sensations and perceptual experiences. He concedes that there might be, accompanying our cognitively spontaneous beliefs, such things as 'sense impressions' or 'sensa,' but he remains noncommittal.(16) However, David Armstrong and George Pitcher have each defended the extreme intellectualist position, the position that perception can be analyzed in terms of belief and dispositions to believe as the sole mental components. Armstrong argues, with a few qualifications, that "Perception is nothing but the acquiring of knowledge of particular facts about the world, by means of the senses."(17)
I do not think I am alone in feeling something missing from this account of observation. There doesn't seem to be any seeing or feeling stuff going on in this picture.
I think we can imagine beings for whom the purely intellectualist account would be true. We might even be able to imagine it so they would have knowledge (and not merely beliefs) about the external world. But to imagine it is immediately to see that, phenomenologically, our cognitive relation to the world is not at all like that. I suppose that 'observation' would seem pretty strange for such beings -- you just suddenly find yourself believing a bunch of complicated propositions for no reason. Perhaps certain actual cases in which people have 'premonitions' conform to the intellectualist model (with just the difference that Armstrong would have us having very complex and detailed premonitions all the time), and they are for that reason (among other reasons) often regarded as strange and inexplicable.
What is wrong with the account, of course, is that it attempts to account for perceptual knowledge without involving perceptual experiences. I don't just spontaneously think that there's a green coffee cup on my desk for no reason. I think there's a green coffee cup here because I'm having sensory experiences of a certain sort.
So far, I haven't given any real argument -- nothing beyond a simple appeal to introspection -- for believing in this element of perception that BonJour and Armstrong allegedly neglect. In fact, I rather consider the evident inadequacy of a purely intellectual account as evidence of the reality of perceptual experience than the other way around. But more of an argument can be fashioned, from attention to cases in which we 'don't believe our eyes.' For example, suppose that I am veridically seeing a pink rat on a table, but for whatever reason (my awareness of the improbability of the event, my awareness of my present state of inebriation, etc.), I don't believe my eyes -- i.e., I do not believe that there is a pink rat there. Still, it seems clear that there is something going on in my mind, something that would induce more gullible individuals to accept the existence of a nearby pink rat, something seemingly pink-rat-representing. It is, surely, a visual experience of a pink rat. And once one accepts this, it becomes difficult to see a reason for declining to accept that such states are present also in the cases in which I do believe my eyes. And then it is very implausible to deny to these states any role in explaining observational knowledge.
BonJour does not discuss how he would analyze cases of this kind. One possibility would be to move from actual beliefs to dispositions or 'inclinations' to form beliefs of certain sorts -- perhaps perceiving partly consists in having those kinds of states.(18) I think this suggestion gets things backwards, explanatorily, or at the least neglects to provide an explanation: what gives me a disposition or inclination to think there's a pink rat on the table is the experience I'm having. After all, I don't just suddenly have these dispositions to believe, out of the blue, any more than I suddenly have actual beliefs out of the blue. More to the point, this suggestion doesn't seem to do any better justice to the phenomenology of ordinary perception than the actual-belief theory -- it still doesn't sufficiently differentiate ordinary perceiving from having complicated premonitions or intuitions.
It is true that, if either of these forms of intellectualism
(i.e., the actual-belief theory or the dispositional theory) were
true, we could still say that there were perceptual experiences of
a sort -- for the beliefs or the dispositions to believe that we
formed would then be perceptual experiences under my definition.
In complaining that the intellectualist account leaves out
perceptual experience, I do not mean that it entails some such
proposition as "There are no perceptual experiences." Rather, what
I mean is this: there are certain states that we have that are, in
fact, perceptual experiences, and about those states: the
intellectualist account leaves them out. It is because a purely
intellectualist account of perception is so transparently inadequate
that it provides a useful illustration of the significance of
'perceptual experience.'
2.3. Against ultra-direct realism
2.3.1. The argument from hallucination, round 1: explaining subjective indistinguishability
The main argument for the existence of perceptual experiences
is the argument from hallucination.
(i) Imagine that a person, S, is veridically seeing a pink rat on
the table before him, where everything is normal, so the rat looks
pink and ratlike. S is then in a state that he could describe as
follows: "It looks to me as if there is a pink rat on the table."
(ii) Now imagine, instead, that S, under the influence of
hallucinogenic drugs, diabolical neurosurgeons, or the like, is
standing in front of a table with nothing on it, seeing the table,
but hallucinating a pink rat on the table. Suppose that his
hallucination is so vivid and detailed that it seems to him just as
if there is a pink rat on the table. S is very much tempted to
think that there's a pink rat there and that he is seeing it.
It seems obvious that these two scenarios have something in common, something going on in S's mind and having to do (in some way or other) with pink-rathood. This common element, the traditional analysis says, is a perceptual experience (specifically, a visual experience) of a pink rat (the common element is by definition a perceptual experience, if it exists).
The point is not that typical drug-induced hallucinations, the hallucinations of the mentally ill, or other hallucinations that people have in the actual world are usually indistinguishable (by the subject) from veridical perception. The claim isn't even that it is nomologically or technologically possible to produce such hallucinations in human subjects. In fact I think it is nomologically possible for there to be hallucinations that are subjectively indistinguishable from perceptions (because I think it is nomologically possible for a brain to be stimulated in the same way it is stimulated during perception by something that is not being perceived), but that claim is not required by the argument. The metaphysical possibility of hallucinations that are indistinguishable from perceptions is all the argument requires. The reason for this is that the modality intended in the definition of "perceptual experience" (I stipulated that perceptual experiences are states that 'could' exist in the absence of external objects of awareness) is metaphysical. And I have no doubt that this is at least metaphysically possible. I therefore ask the reader to suppose that S is having a hallucination of that sort in case (ii).
So far, my argument relies on an appeal to introspection or intuition (more precisely, perhaps, imaginative projection) at a crucial stage -- it just seems that there is some element common to cases (i) and (ii). I don't regard this as a flaw in the argument -- insofar as the issue is one of what mental states we have, I think introspection is precisely the appropriate method to rely on. This does not mean I think an appeal to introspection such as I have just made immediately and irrevocably settles the matter, however -- the ultra-direct realist may make an effort at explaining away the appearance. That is, he can try to present reasons for thinking the appearance must be misleading (in this case, that cases (i) and (ii) don't really have anything in common) and an explanation of why things seem the way they do (i.e., why it seems as if the cases do have something in common). But the presumption is against him.
Still, it's best to bolster the intuitive judgement with more of an argument: In case (i), it looks to S as if there is a pink rat on a table in front of him. And in case (ii) as well, it looks to S as if there is a pink rat on a table in front of him. Therefore, cases (i) and (ii) exhibit a common state (or event) -- namely, its looking to S as if there is a pink rat on a table before him. This state is clearly at least partly mental, because it is logically impossible for it to look to S as if there is a pink rat, etc., unless S has a mind, and it is purely internal, since it is metaphysically possible for it to look to S as if there is a pink rat, etc., even while there's no external object that S is aware of (especially, no rat). Therefore, its looking to S as if there's a pink rat on a table in front of him is a perceptual experience, if nothing else is. (It's still possible, consistent with this argument, that its looking to S as if there's a pink rat, etc., is not a perceptual experience but rather only a component or aspect of a perceptual experience. Recall that a perceptual experience is the maximal purely internal component in perception.)
There are two possible ways for the ultra-direct realist to respond to this, each very similar to the other. I don't see it as a plausible option to deny that case (i) involves its looking to S as if there's a pink rat, etc., nor to deny that case (ii) involves its looking to S as if there's a pink rat, etc. So the ultra-direct realist, in order to maintain that there is no state common to the two cases, must claim either that "it looks to S as if there's a pink rat..." is ambiguous, so that it means different things depending on whether it is applied to a case in which S is seeing or a case in which S is hallucinating, or that its meaning is intrinsically disjunctive (in a non-trivial sense).
What makes it implausible that the expression is ambiguous is the fact that S can be in a situation in which all he knows is that it looks to him as if P, but he doesn't know whether he's seeing or hallucinating. Suppose S is in fact in case (i), but he doesn't know that he's seeing a pink rat. He isn't sure; he thinks he might be hallucinating. All he knows is what he expresses by, "It looks to me as if there is a pink rat on a table in front of me." According to the ambiguity theory, S either doesn't mean anything by this, or else doesn't know what he means. According to the ambiguity theory, the words, "It looks to me as if there is a pink rat..." can either mean something like, "I'm seeing something as a pink rat..." or mean something like, "I'm having a hallucination as of a pink rat..." But S doesn't mean to assert either of these things, since he doesn't believe either of these things. So either his words wind up taking on one of those meanings anyway (most likely the first), in which case he doesn't know what he means, or they take on neither of these meanings, in which case S doesn't mean anything. Either of these alternatives is absurd.(19)
The disjunctive theory is a bit less objectionable. On this account, what S would mean in saying, "It looks to me as if there's a pink rat" is something like, "Either I'm seeing something as a pink rat, or else I'm hallucinating a pink rat."(20) The expression isn't ambiguous on this view, since it always means the disjunction. Consequently, I can't argue that on this view S wouldn't know what he meant; he could know that he meant the disjunction, and he just doesn't know which disjunct it is that makes his disjunctive belief true. Against this view, though, I would argue that the traditional analysis provides a more natural, more straightforward explanation of how S comes to know that either he's seeing something as a pink rat or he's hallucinating a pink rat. The proponent of the traditional analysis is in a position to offer the following simple and natural explanation: S is directly acquainted with a state (a visual experience) that is common to both pink-rat sightings and pink-rat hallucinations.(21) Therefore, S can know that one of those two things is going on, without knowing which.
Clearly the ultra-direct realist can't offer that explanation, for he can't accept that S is acquainted with a visual experience. What might the ultra-direct realist say S is acquainted with? A pink rat? But this so far does not explain why S winds up thinking that he's either seeing or hallucinating a pink rat, but not that there's a pink rat. A belief that one is seeing a pink rat might plausibly be partly explained by one's acquaintance with a pink rat, but since pink-rat hallucinations don't involve anything remotely similar to pink rats, it's puzzling why a disjunct mentioning a possible pin