Summary |
How should we explain why perceptual experience
provides us with evidence? Dogmatism and evidential internalism
treat conscious mental states as explanatorily basic and posits a particular rule for justification,
namely, that if it perceptually seems that p, then one has prima facie justification for p (Pollock 1974, Feldman and Conee 1985, Pryor 2000, Huemer 2007, among others). The
knowledge-first view treats knowledge as explanatorily basic and analyzes
justification in terms of a deficiency of knowledge (McDowell 1982, Williamson
2000, Millar 2008, Nagel 2013, Byrne 2014 among others). Reliabilism treats the
reliability of the perceptual or cognitive system as explanatorily basic and
analyzes evidence and justification as a product of this reliable system—be it
in virtue of a reliable indicator or a reliable process (Goldman 1979, 1986,
Lyons 2009 among others). By contrast, capacity views treat capacities as
explanatorily basic and analyze evidence, justification, and knowledge as a
product of the capacities employed. Among
capacity views there is a distinction to be drawn between normative capacity
views, on which mental capacities are understood as virtues or in other
normative ways (Sosa 1991, 2006, 2007, Greco 2001, 2010, Bergmann 2006), and
capacity views that forego normative terms (Burge 2003, Graham 2011,
Schellenberg 2013, 2014). So on the first cluster of views,
conscious mental states are explanatorily basic, on the second cluster knowledge, on the
third reliability, and on the fourth capacities. These
options are neither exclusive nor exhaustive. One might think that more than
one of these four elements are explanatorily basic, or one might think that
what is explanatorily basic is something else entirely.
What evidence
does perceptual experience provide us with? To answer this question lets first
distinguish between phenomenal evidence and factive evidence. We can understand phenomenal evidence as determined by how
our environment sensorily seems to us when we are experiencing. We can understand factive
perceptual evidence as necessarily determined by the environment to which
we are perceptually related such that the evidence is guaranteed to be an
accurate guide to the environment.Standard internalist views have it that we have the
very same phenomenal evidence when we perceive and when we hallucinate.
Standard knowledge-first views have it that when we perceive, we have factive
evidence; when we hallucinate we have no evidence provided directly through
experience: When we hallucinate we have only introspective evidence. Capacity
views can go either way on the question of whether we have the very same or
different evidence when we perceive or when we hallucinate. One option is to
argue that when we perceive we have phenomenal and factive evidence; when we
hallucinate, we have only phenomenal evidence.
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