Midterm Questions Flashcards
What is phenomenal character?
What it is like to have that experience from the subject’s point of view.
OR
What the experience is like to the experiencer.
What is a perceptual hallucination?
It seems to a subject that she is having an experience of an object but there is no object that she percieves
OR
The perceiver experiences an object, when in fact there is no object being perceived.
What is the positive transparency thesis and why does it pose a challenge for sense-datum theorists?
Introspection on visual experience DOES reveal the presence of ordinary objects of perception.
This poses a challenge to sense-datum theorists because:
As their fundamental account of phenomenal character is given in terms of sense-data and their features, it does not explain why it seems to us that perception reveals the presene of ordinary world objects.
How would a sense-datum theorist respond to Martin’s 2 questions:
Is sensory experience dependent on the existence of its object?
Is sensory experience sufficient for the existence of its object?
A sense datum theorist would say that sensory experience is both constitutively dependent on and sufficient for the existence of its object.
This is because sense-datum theory employs the phenomenal principle, meaning that all in all experiences (veridical, illusory, hallucinatory) the direct object of awareness is sense-data, as opposed to external world objects.
Sense-data is a part of an experience’s phenomenal character regardless of the existence of an external world object, and so an experience is dependent on and sufficient for the existence of sense-data as the direct object of awareness.
What is the difference between indirect realism and representationalism?
Indirect realism accepts the phenomenal principle, whereas representationalism does not.
This means that indirect realists believe that the direct objects of sensory awareness are (presumably) mind-dependent entities.
In contrast, representationalists believe that the direct objects of sensory awareness are mind-independent entities.
State the phenomenal principle
If a subject is having a sensory experience of something as having the property F, something of which the subject is directly aware of actually has F.
According to Naive Realism, are sensory experiences of distinct material objects introspectively discriminable?
No.
Potential reasons why:
Naive realism posits that sensory experiences directly represent the external world.
Therefore, distinct material objects with matching phenomenal character may not be introspectively discriminable because our perceptions are immediate and unmediated, leading us to directly experience the external objects without consciously distinguishing the sensory components.
This means our perception doesn’t rely on mental representations and therefore a mental process such as introspection wouldn’t help us to discriminate two distinct objects with matching phenomenal character that we couldn’t discriminate at the moment of perception.
naive realism suggests that we perceive the world “as is,” without the need for internal discriminations between similar sensory experiences.
What is the difference between pure and impure sense datum theory
Pure sense datum theory says that the phenomenal character of a sensory experience can only be explained in terms of the sense-data that the experience presents.
Impure sense datum theory says that the phenomenal character of sensory experience must only partly be explained through more than just the presence of sense data.
What is Anscombe’s argument for Existential Generalization?
Anscome uses EG to highlight how sensory experience is similar to the intentional mental states like belief.
In this way, the statement “I see a red ball” does not necessarily entail the statement “There is a red ball that I see,” because I could be seeing the red ball due to a hallucination or illusion.
In veridical cases, “seeing an object” means seeing a mind-independent material object. In non-veridical cases, “seeing an object” means seeing an intentional object, which does not need ot be mind-independent.
This argument undermines the phenomenal principle, as she argues that having an experience of something does not entail that you need to be directly aware of something with that property.
Thus, she proves you can “perceive X as F” without there being something with F that you are directly aware.
