Abstract
The two main theories of perceptual reasons in contemporary epistemology can be called Phenomenalism and Factualism. According to Phenomenalism, perceptual reasons are facts about experiences conceived of as phenomenal states, i.e., states individuated by phenomenal character, by what it’s like to be in them. According to Factualism, perceptual reasons are instead facts about the external objects perceived. The main problem with Factualism is that it struggles with bad cases: cases where perceived objects are not what they appear (illusions, broadly speaking) or where there is no perceived object at all (hallucinations). The main problem with Phenomenalism is that it struggles with good cases: cases where everything is perfectly normal and the external object is correctly perceived, so that one’s perceptual beliefs are knowledge. In this paper we show that there is a theory of perceptual reasons that avoids the problems for Factualism and Phenomenalism. We call this view Propositionalism. We use ‘proposition’ broadly to mean the entities that are contents of beliefs and other doxastic attitudes. The key to finding a middle ground between Phenomenalism and Factualism, we claim, is to allow our reasons to be false in bad cases. Despite being false, they are about the external world, not our phenomenal states.
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Notes
Throughout, we leave out ‘basic’, but it should be taken as understood.
Aren’t there versions of Factualism according to which we have no reasons for beliefs of this kind—not because they are not justified, but because they are not justified by reasons? Yes. The main argument we offer below against Factualism will not apply to this version of Factualism, simply because this version denies our assumption that there are basic perceptual reasons for beliefs of this sort. However, it is not difficult to devise analogous arguments targeting justified beliefs downstream from perceptual classificatory beliefs. Even Factualists who claim we lack reasons to believe that there is a tomato in front of us will grant that we do have reasons to believe, for instance, that we have the key ingredient for the marinara sauce.
We are ignoring complications about the relationship between doxastic and propositional justification—see, for example, Comesaña (2006).
Some philosophers think that facts are different from true propositions—they are what make true propositions true. This distinction will not matter for our purposes in this paper, insofar as our arguments could be recast to take this position into account. For instance, instead of asking what perceptual reasons are about we could ask what perceptual reasons involve—in the sense in which the fact that Lucas is cute involves Lucas.
Here and throughout, we use ‘in order to’ and ‘requires’ to imply explanatory dependence rather than modal dependence. So, when we say that for the Phenomenalist one need not be justified in believing P in order for P to be a reason one has, we mean: if P is a reason one has, this isn’t because one is justified in believing P.
A subject can, of course, be mistaken about what appearance an object has, but objects with different intrinsic properties can still have the same appearance—for instance, a red wall might have the same appearance as a white wall illuminated by red light (or it might not, of course). For a discussion of objective appearances, see Genone (2014).
In Comesaña and McGrath (2014), we use principles very much like EJ and SB to argue that we can have false practical reasons.
For a development of this objection, see Cohen and Comesaña (forthcoming).
The kind of reliabilism advocated in Comesaña (2010) has the resources necessary to avoid the problem just presented, for it insists that beliefs must be based on evidence, and we are free to impose a subject matter constraint on what counts as evidence for a given proposition.
See McGrath (forthcoming) for discussions of these matters.
What exactly are these thought types? One promising proposal, due to Sainsbury and Tye (2011), takes thought-types to be complexes built up from concepts conceived as enduring abstract particulars.
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Acknowledgments
A version of this paper was presented at a conference on perceptual evidence organized by James Genone at Rutgers, Camden, in March 2014. Our thanks to the participants in that conference for their helpful comments, and especially to Ian Schnee, the commentator on the paper. Thanks also to Stew Cohen, Carolina Sartorio and James Genone for very helpful comments on previous drafts.
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Comesana, J., McGrath, M. Perceptual reasons. Philos Stud 173, 991–1006 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0542-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0542-x