Disjunctivism

The disjunctivist claims that the mental states involved in a case of successful – “veridical” – perception of an object differ from those involved in a hallucinatory experience of such an object, even in those cases in which the two experiences are indiscriminable for their subject. Among its supporters, there tend to be two main motivations for endorsing disjunctivism: because it is necessary if we are to hold that, in cases of successful perception, worldly objects and properties are literally constituents of our experiences, and because it offers us a way of responding to the challenge of skepticism. Among other things, its opponents argue that it is inconsistent with both empirical findings in, and the underlying commitments of, the psychology of vision, and challenge the disjunctivist to provide explanations of hallucination and illusion that explain how such states can be indiscriminable from veridical perceptions without positing some common factor – such as a common conscious / experiential core – that is shared by the different cases.