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Thesis Austin answered the argument from illusion, but the argument from hallucination survives him

Pieter van Dijkhuizen Fellow
· 5 replies
PerceptionAnalyticOrdinary language philosophyA. J. AyerJ. L. Austin#argument-from-illusion#disjunctivism#hallucination#sense-data
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Where it stands

Lately I have been rereading J. L. Austin's Sense and Sensibilia (1962), the lectures reconstructed after his death in which he takes apart A. J. Ayer's sense-datum theory.

Austin's treatment of the stick in water is brilliant. The argument from illusion says: the stick looks bent, nothing bent is there, so you are aware of something other than the stick, a mental item. Austin replies that the first step is a misdescription. You are aware of a straight stick that looks bent in water, which is exactly how straight sticks look in water. Nothing odd has happened, and no inner object has been conjured.

Fine. But the strongest version of the argument never needed illusion. It uses hallucination. Suppose someone has an experience exactly like seeing a stick, with no stick there at all. There is no straight stick to look bent. And since the hallucination is, by hypothesis, indistinguishable from the real perception, it is tempting to conclude that the two share a common inner element.

My thesis: Austin's reply works against illusion because illusions involve a real object misperceived. It has no grip on hallucination. Anyone who rejects the inner object must pay a price, and that price is disjunctivism: the claim that seeing and hallucinating differ in kind despite feeling identical. I think that is a high price, and that Austin's admirers often forget it has to be paid.

Objections welcome, especially from the ordinary-language people.

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5 replies

For the thesis 1

  1. Priya Raghavan

    For Fellow

    I'll take Pieter's side with one qualification. Some neuroscientists describe ordinary perception as a kind of controlled hallucination: the brain predicts its input and corrects the prediction. If that is right, seeing and hallucinating really do share most of their machinery, which makes the common-factor intuition hard to dismiss. My qualification is that this is a claim about mechanism. Shared mechanism does not show a shared object of awareness, so the disjunctivist is not refuted by the science either.

    Helpful · 1

Against the thesis 3

  1. Oskar Nyberg

    Against Fellow

    I think you are underselling Austin. His real target is not one example but a style of argument: moving from "it seems to me as if I see a stick" to "I see something", and from there to "I see a sense-datum". The hallucination version makes the same move. It assumes that if there is an experience there must be an object of the experience. Austin's point applies directly: you have described a way of seeming, not discovered a thing.

    1. Pieter van Dijkhuizen

      Fellow

      Oskar, I accept that Austin's critique of the slide from "seeming" to "something" applies to both versions. Where I'm stuck is Tomasz's point. If disjunctivism is the ordinary view, why does the hallucinating person, from the inside, have no way to tell which disjunct they are in? That indiscriminability is where the pull of the common factor comes from, and I don't think the ordinary-language reply addresses it.

      Helpful · 3
  2. Tomasz Szewczak

    Against Fellow

    I don't see why disjunctivism is a "price". "Seeing a stick" and "having a stick-like hallucination" have different truth conditions: one entails there is a stick, the other doesn't. That is just what the words mean. Treating them as two species of one inner state is the theory-laden move; the disjunction is the ordinary one.

    Helpful · 2
  3. Ignacio Cárcamo

    Against Fellow

    Both sides assume a spectator receiving images. I work with organisms that don't have brains at all, and I've come to think perception is something an animal does while moving through its world. On that view, a hallucination is a breakdown in an activity, not a picture with nothing behind it. Merleau-Ponty and the enactivists make this case much better than I can.