How to Account for Illusion

Abstract

Abstract Early modern empiricists think of perceptual experience as the presentation of an object to a subject. Phenomena of illusion suggest that such objects must be mind dependent things. Alternatively, perceptual experience may be characterized instead in terms of its representational content (this is the Content View). In that case, illusion is simply false perceptual content. This chapter argues that the early modern empiricists had a key insight: the idea that the core subjective character of perceptual experience to be given by citing the object presented is more fundamental than any appeal to perceptual content, and can account for illusion, and indeed hallucination, without resorting to the problematic postulation of any mind-independent objects distinct from the mind-independent physical objects we all know and love (this is the Object View). It is also suggested that the Object View provides a more promising context for the basic commitments of disjunctivism than the current orthodoxy of the Content View.

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