Disjunctivism is a position in the

philosophy of perception The philosophy of perception is concerned with the nature of Perception, perceptual experience and the status of sense data, perceptual data, in particular how they relate to beliefs about, or knowledge of, the world.cf. http://plato.stanford.ed ...

that rejects the existence of sense data in certain cases. The

disjunction In logic, disjunction (also known as logical disjunction, logical or, logical addition, or inclusive disjunction) is a logical connective typically notated as \lor and read aloud as "or". For instance, the English language sentence "it is ...

is between appearance and the reality behind the appearance "making itself perceptually manifest to someone." Veridical perceptions and

hallucination A hallucination is a perception in the absence of an external stimulus that has the compelling sense of reality. They are distinguishable from several related phenomena, such as dreaming ( REM sleep), which does not involve wakefulness; pse ...

s are not members of a common class of mental states or events. According to this theory, the only thing common to veridical perceptions and hallucinations is that in both cases, the subject cannot tell, via introspection, whether he is having a veridical perception or not. Disjunctivists claim this because they hold that in veridical perception, a subject's experience actually presents the external, mind-independent object of that perception. Further, they claim that in a hallucination there is no external object to be related to, nor are there sense-data to be a part of the perception. Most disjunctivists are also naive realists (also commonly known as direct realism), although John McDowell, a prominent disjunctivist, is not a naive realist. Disjunctivism was first introduced to the contemporary literature by Michael Hinton, and has been most prominently associated with

John McDowell John Henry McDowell (born 7 March 1942) is a South African philosopher, formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford, and now university professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Although he has written on metaphysics, epistemology, anci ...

. It has also been defended at length by Duncan Pritchard. Other prominent disjunctivists include Bill Brewer, Mike Martin, John Campbell and Naomi Eilan. Matthew Soteriou has also discussed disjunctivism extensively. Disjunctivists often hold that an important virtue of their view is that it captures the common sense idea that perception involves a relation to objects in the world.M.G.F Martin, "On Being Alienated" in T. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds), ''Perceptual Experience'' (2006). Disjunctivism can be contrasted to the Triggered Hallucination Theory of perception, which holds that veridical perception and hallucination are the same thing, but differ only in aetiology.

References

External links

* * Philosophical realism Philosophy of perception Theory of mind Epistemological theories {{epistemology-stub