Episode 87: Susanna Schellenberg discusses perceptual particularity
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What is the central question about sense experience that the episode begins with?
Hey, Matt Techman here from Elucidations. Before we get going today, I just thought I'd ask if you're a fan of the show, to maybe go to our iTunes page and leave a rating and a review, and that way more people can discover it. Alright, thanks.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast ordinarily recorded at the University of Chicago, but which today is being brought to you from New York. I'm Matt Teichman, and with me is Susanna Schellenberg, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. And she's here to discuss perceptual particularity. Susanna Schellenberg, welcome.
Thanks, Matt. I'm very glad to be here.
So I guess uh uh one interesting question we can begin with is what is sense experience? And I think a very common idea to have about what sense experience is, is it's something like a movie playing in your head. A lot of philosophers, especially in the twentieth century, have raised problems for that idea of what sense experience is. What are some of the problems with that idea? 'Cause it seems pretty intuitive.
Yeah, so that's a very old idea and it's one that in a certain way is still quite um wildly held. So for example, you know, most people have the intuition when you perceive, say uh water bottle, we have one here on our desk, um, then your perceptual state, you know, your state of perceiving that water bottle. And you are being aware of that water bottle has something to do or is in some way prompted by that water bottle. You have some sensory input. And you represent something there's some, you know, processing going on and you end up being phenomenally aware or sensorly aware of the water bottle. But now the problem of course is that sometimes we hallucinate. So I'm when I s when I talk about hallucination I mean the case when
It seems to you that there is a bottle where in fact there is no such bottle. And You know, in the extreme case, that hallucination could be subjectively indistinguishable from the perception. And so if that's right, then of course in the hallucination case, it couldn't be that the hallucination is constituted by the water bottle on the table because there isn't a water bottle on the table in that case. Right? It just seems to you that there is a water bottle. And now people infer all sorts of things from that.
How does Schellenberg distinguish perception from hallucination?
And one thing they infer is that in the case of hallucination, what you're directly aware of obviously can't be the water bottle, so it must be something else. And one thing people used to think is that it's a sense data, you know, some strange particular floating in front of your eyes. Others have thought it's some intentional object that is some object that you posit exists in the environment even though it might not actually exist in the environment. Or more recently qualia that is again some kind of strange um particular that constitutes your sensory state, your phenomenal state. Or even more recently, what you're directly aware of are phenomenal properties, that is sort of the properties of your experience.
And then of course people want to give a unified account of all sorts of experience, that is, of both perception and hallucination. And so then a typical move i for people is to say that you're not just aware of these you know, strange particulars or abstract entities in the case of hallucination, but also in the case of perception. And so then, going back to the original case where you perceive the water bottle, It turns out your being aware of a water bottle doesn't seem to have anything to do anymore with the water bottle out in the world that you're causally related to. What you're aware of is just a matter of, you know, being aware of, you know, sense data or phenomenal properties or qualia or some representational state you're in, you know, some sort of properties you represent.
Okay, right. So maybe uh a worry you could you might have then about this idea that sense experience is just a thing in your head is that it becomes too detached, as it were, from Reality from the world outside your head.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the central question about sense experience that the episode begins with?
0:00–2:33
2
How does Schellenberg distinguish perception from hallucination?
2:33–6:26
3
Why do hallucinations seem subjectively identical to real perceptions?
6:26–11:24
4
What are ‘perceptual capacities’ and how do they function in both perception and hallucination?
11:24–15:51
5
How does perception ground our knowledge of objects in the world?
15:51–20:03
6
What does the horse‑and‑cup example illustrate about reference failure in hallucination?
20:03–24:41
7
How does Schellenberg’s ‘middle‑way’ avoid the extremes of naive realism and disjunctivism?
24:41–30:57
Speakers
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