Epistemological Disjunctivism and the Value of Presence

Abstract

Epistemological disjunctivists make two strong claims about perceptual experience's epistemic value: (1) experience guarantees the knowledgeable character of perceptual beliefs; (2) experience's epistemic value is “reflectively accessible”. In this paper I develop a form of disjunctivism grounded in a presentational view of experience, on which the epistemic benefits of experience consist in the way perception presents the subject with aspects of her environment. I show that presentational disjunctivism has both dialectical and philosophically fundamental advantages over more traditional expositions. Dialectically, presentational disjunctivism resolves a puzzle disjunctivists face in their posture vis-à-vis skeptical scenarios. More systematically, presentational disjunctivism provides an especially compelling view of disjunctivism as an internalist view of perceptual consciousness by explaining the way perceptual presence manifests the subject's rationality in a distinct way.

The Hard Problem of Access for Epistemological Disjunctivism

“…(McDowell 2010: 246) Likewise, for Logue, For example, the subject of a veridical experience of a yellow banana attends to the banana's yellowness and thereby comes to know that she's having a phenomenally yellow experience. (2018: 224) See also de Bruijn (2022). In some contexts, Pritchard allows that non-perceptual states (e.g., background beliefs) can ground reflective access to the factive nature of perceptual experience.…”

“…Proponents of the anti-hybrid strategy sometimes appeal to the specific character of rational beings' consciousness to motivate their view. The argument is that internal access to the factive character of experience is provided by the fact that the requisite selfknowledge of the factive character of experience is internal to the conscious state presenting S with worldly objects in the good case (McDowell 1982; see also de Bruijn 2022). But, this sounds like begging the question against the hard problem of access.…”