Disjunctivism unmotivated

Gordon Knight

pp. 355-372

in: Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences 13 (2), 2014.

Abstract

Many naive realists are inclined to accept a negative disjunctivist strategy in order to deal with the challenge presented by the possibility of phenomenologically indistinguishable hallucination. In the first part of this paper I argue that this approach is methodologically inconsistent because it undercuts the phenomenological motivation that underlies the appeal of naive realism. In the second part of the paper I develop an alternative to the negative disjunctivist account along broadly Meinongian lines. In the last section of this paper I consider and evaluate a somewhat similar but rival view of hallucination developed by Mark Johnston.