Philosophy of Mind Visiting Speakers Seminar (Friday - Week 4, MT19)

Naïve realists embrace disjunctivism: the view that successful perceptions and hallucinations are not of the same fundamental mental kind. This is in reaction to the famous argument from hallucination. Here, I draw on the philosophy of science work on kindhood to show that this debate has relied on an over-simplistic view of mental kindhood. I argue that this simplistic view should be replaced with a more sophisticated one, which acknowledges that mental kinds can exhibit polymorphisms. Once we do this, the upshots for theories of perception are dramatic. Specifically, I show that the naïve realist can respond to the argument from hallucination without embracing disjunctivism. I develop this view, and demonstrate some of its advantages over traditional forms of naïve realist disjunctivism.