Phenom Cogn Sci (2010) 9:281293 DOI 10.

1007/s11097-010-9155-1

Hallucinations for disjunctivists

Jess Vega-Encabo

Published online: 23 March 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract In this paper, I examine the so-called disjunctive views on hallucinations. I argue that neither of the options open to the disjunctivist is capable of accommodating basic phenomenological facts about hallucinatory experiences and the explanatory demands behind the classical argument from hallucination. A positive characterization of the hallucinatory case is not attractive to a disjunctivist once she is disposed to accept certain commonalities with veridical experiences. Negative disjunctivism glosses the hallucinatory disjunct in terms of indiscriminability. I will argue that this move either renounces to characterize phenomenally the hallucinatory experience or does not take seriously questions about why indiscriminability is possible in the phenomenal realm. Keywords Hallucination . Disjunctivism . Phenomenal character . Indiscriminability . (Non)-relationality

Disjunctivism and hallucinations Classical definitions of hallucination underline the perceptual side of the phenomenon and not just the cognitive confusion that can derive from it. Hallucination is like a virtual perception. It is not a mere delusion; something is phenomenally present for the subject in an hallucinatory experience in such a way that sometimes the hallucinator is liable to be fooled and take it as the basis of a mistaken judgment about how things are in the world. It aims to present in a sensory

J. Vega-Encabo (*) Department of Linguistics, Logic and Philosophy of Science, Universidad Autnoma de Madrid, Crta. Colmenar km. 15,4, 28049 Madrid, Spain e-mail: Jesus.vega@uam.es

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way a rich variety of objects and properties, and it fails. A scientific textbook defined hallucinations in the following terms: Any percept-like experience which (a) occurs in the absence of an appropriate stimulus, (b) has the full force or impact of the corresponding actual (real) perception; and (c) is not amenable to direct and voluntary control by the experiencer (Slade and Bentall 1988, p. 23) Thus, a hallucination is an experiential event that shares the passive character1 and the percept-like nature of perceptual experiences. Both kinds of experience seem to have in common phenomenological features such as the sensory character, the apparent mind independence and existence of the objects and properties presented, the involuntariness, or the sense of reality. The absence of an appropriate stimulation is the way to express why a hallucinatory experience cannot be characterized by an effective relation to objects and properties that stimulate our brain centers. The definition indicates also how a hallucination can have the very same effects as a corresponding real perception. In some respects, they are so similar that some hallucinatory experiences could be mistaken for real perceptions. In a sense, both experiences are indiscriminable if the subject is unable to know that she is actually hallucinating. These facts are gathered by traditional philosophical discussions on the nature of hallucinations. First, hallucinations are experiences characterized by the way things look to the subject. There is something that is what it is like to have the experience. In philosophical jargon, hallucinatory experiences have phenomenal properties or features that characterize what it is like for the subject to have the experience. In principle, we seem entitled to claim that a hallucinatory experience is typed by its phenomenal character. For S to have the hallucinatory state of a field of green grass is like being experientially given for S a field of green grass, so that the hallucination is typed by the fact of being an experience as of a field of green grass. Second, the phenomenal character of the hallucination is not fixed by the relations the hallucinator has with objects and properties in the actual environment. Given that there is no green grass to which the hallucinator is perceptually related, the greenness or the grass cannot contribute to the shaping of the phenomenal character of the hallucinatory experience. Third, at least some hallucinations are presumably indiscriminable from veridical perceptual experiences.2 From the subjects point of view, a hallucination and a corresponding perception are indistinguishable in so far as they seem to present to S the same appearances. Indiscriminability refers to a phenomenological fact about how things look to S. These three notionsphenomenal character, (non-)relationality, and indiscriminabilityplay a main role in delineating a space for debates on the nature of hallucinatory experiences and their relation to our successful perceptual experience
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With this feature, I am just pointing to the idea that the experience is non-voluntary and that its content is taken by the perceiver as passively given. This is not in conflict with the defense of different active theories of perception. 2 In this paper, I focus only on the kind of hallucinations that are indiscriminable from certain perceptions in such a way that the subject even mistakes them for real perceptions. I am aware that not all hallucinatory experiences are of this kind; many of them are real hallucinatory phenomena which the subject experiences as not perceptually relating him to the world. So in my discussion, I consider indiscriminability as a phenomenological fact about some hallucinations, and not just an assumption.

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of the world. The history of our conceptions about perceptual experience is built around these three notions. Phenomenal character, (non-)relationality, and indiscriminability are also at the core of the classical arguments from hallucination. Many are the forms that this argument has adopted in philosophical literature.3 I am only interested in those arguments with metaphysical import that attempt to establish something on the nature of perceptual experience. As other authors,4 I rather like to view the argument from hallucination as a reductio of nave realism and to distinguish two different steps in the structure of the argument. Nave realism claims that the phenomenal character of a perceptual experience is fixed by the instantiation of a relation of the perceiver with objects and properties in the environment. The first step of the argument from hallucination is deemed to establish some conclusion about the hallucinatory case. The second step spreads the conclusion from hallucinations to veridical perceptual experiences. The first step of the argument is difficult to challenge insofar as it makes an appeal to the apparently uncontroversial phenomenological facts that I have mentioned above: subjective indiscriminability and the impossibility of considering that, in the case of hallucinations, the phenomenal character has been shaped by actual relations to mind-independent objects and properties. The second step is certainly more problematic because the extension from hallucinatory experiences to veridical cases requires some further support. Two main lines of support have been offered: the first one appeals to phenomenological motivations; the second one is derived from considerations about the sufficient causal conditions for having a hallucinatory experience.5 Let us focus on the so-called phenomenological argument from hallucination. In this version of the argument, the following premise supports the second step: If an essentially veridical experience and a hallucinatory experience are subjectively indiscriminable, then they are experiences typed by the same phenomenal character.6 This thesis is highly controversial. The antecedent of the conditional is based on phenomenological considerations; the consequent is an ontological claim about the kind of experience instantiated both by the hallucination and the perception. This entanglement of phenomenological and metaphysical claims is misleading. It is certainly not impossible that two experiences be similar in some respects in such a way that they are subjectively indiscriminable and yet have
A first reconstruction of the argument from hallucination can be found in Robinson (1994). See for instance Smith (2002) or Martin (2004). 5 This appeal to certain metaphysical principles about causality will remain out of discussion in this paper. The core of the dispute about the so-called causal argument from hallucination moves around a thesis of local supervenience for perceptual experience. Though prima facie endowed with certain plausibility, the thesis has been challenged by recent embodied and enactive approaches. They provide some interesting criticisms of brain states as sufficient basis for the supervenience of the perceptual character of experiences. 6 In the paper, I consider another reading of this assumption. It could be understood as part of an explanatory argument where the hypothesis that both kinds of experiential states share the same phenomenal character would explain why they are both indiscriminable. So we can consider the truth of the following conditional: If an essentially veridical experience and a hallucinatory experience are typed by the same phenomenal character, then they are subjectively indiscriminable. The fact of sharing the same phenomenal character explains why they are indiscriminable. The whole discussion turns around whether being typed by the same phenomenal character is the best explanation available. Disjunctivists would deny it, as we will see.
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different phenomenal characters (Langsam 1997). If this is true, then it is difficult to accept a generalization from hallucinatory cases to veridical ones. Let us note that this response to the argument from hallucination is indifferent to the characterization we offer of hallucinatory experiences as conclusion of the first step of the argument. The strategy consists in accepting that whatever it be the ontological characterization of a hallucinatory experience, this very characterization is not applicable to veridical perceptual experiences just because they are subjectively indiscriminable. So-called disjunctivism7 relies on this strategy to provide a defense of nave realism against the challenge of the argument from hallucination. Disjunctive views are based on the denial that true statements about how things appear to S are made true by the same state of affairs in hallucinatory cases and veridical ones. There are many ways of building the disjunction. Take the following one as very neutral: S has an experience as of a field of green grass if and only if either S has an essentially veridical experience of a field of green grass or S has a non-veridical (hallucinatory) experience of a field of green grass. By the phrase essentially veridical, I understand the following: A perceptual experience as of a field of green grass is essentially veridical if and only if, under the perspective P under which a field of green grass appears phenomenally to S, the experience puts S in contact with a field of green grass. This characterization is also neutral among many theories of experience. The disjunctivist is also committed to the thesis that the essential veridicality of the experience reflects the way in which mind-independent objects and properties fix the phenomenal character of the experience, that is, by instantiating a relation to these objects and properties. So the disjunction is pointing to the following: two different kinds of experience can make true statements about lookings or appearings. In the left side of the disjunction, the kind of experience is typed by a phenomenal character shaped by the relation of the perceiver with objects and properties in the environment, something that cannot be essential to the alleged phenomenal character of the right disjunct. So what is it essential to the hallucinatory experience? I characterize disjunctivism as a set of two kinds of principles: substantive and methodological ones. Substantive principles SP1. There is no common factor to veridical and hallucinatory experiences. SP2. Veridical perceptual experiences are essentially relations between a perceiver and properties and objects in a mind-independent world. Methodological principles MP1. Veridical perceptual experiences are explanatorily prior to hallucinatory experiences. MP2. A theory of experience must provide a characterization of hallucinatory experiences.8
In the last years, disjunctivism has acquired some prominence among the theories of perceptual experience. Two recent compilations are Byrne and Logue (2008) and Haddock and Macpherson (2008). 8 Different versions of disjunctivism will add more substantive theses and sometimes also methodological ones. SP1, for instance, should be qualified, and the methodological principles would need more discussion.
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SP1 reflects the denial of common factor views on experience. SP2 expresses realist commitments. MP1 has a very neutral reading: veridical perceptual experiences are primary even when we attempt to account for the nature of hallucinations. A stronger reading would require an exclusive relational characterization of hallucinations by reference to perceptual experiences. I will come back to this issue later in my argument. MP2 is not trivial in discussions about disjunctivism. Even if one could have thought that a theory of perceptual experience should take into account both successful and unsuccessful cases, it is true that once one admits that a hallucinatory experience is ontologically different from a successful perceptual perception, one could renounce to offer an account of hallucinations as belonging to the kinds of mental events that could naturally be classified with genuine perceptions. Why should the disjunctivist be committed to give an account of hallucinatory experiences when her main interest lies in providing a theory of perceptual experience in realist terms? But dont we need to offer a characterization of what a hallucination is if we want to fill adequately the scheme of the disjunction? Consider the following quotation by Jonathan Dancy: In the standard formulation of the account, misleadingly, this is explicitly the way in which the second disjunct is characterized: we characterize it solely by saying that it is like what it is not. Presumably, however, there may be available a more direct characterization of the second disjunct, and in a totally explicit version of the theory it would indeed be characterized in that better way (Dancy 1995, p. 436). Some disjunctivists contend: Dancy is wrong to think that the disjunctivist specification is incomplete, that we should supplement the account of experience with a non-relational gloss of what illusory or hallucinatory experiences are (Martin 2004, p. 46). So which is the characterization of the character of a hallucinatory experience favored by a disjunctivist? Firstly, is such a characterization required by the disjunctivist project? Secondly, if it is required, which characterization is to be expected from a disjunctivist? In this paper, I review different versions of disjunctivism and conclude than none of them is adequate to account for the experiential nature of hallucinations.

Positive disjunctivism Positive disjunctivists9 are committed to give a substantive gloss of the right disjunct. They feel the urge to complete the characterization of the disjunction including not just an account of the phenomenal character of perceptions but also an account of the experiential event when the perceiver is unsuccessful. For positive

The terminology of positive and negative disjunctivism that I will use in this paper is introduced in Byrne and Logue (2008).

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disjunctivism, there is a possible characterization of the hallucinatory experience that is not only given by reference to the veridical disjunct. But once the methodological principle MP1 is accepted, the disjunctivist is also committed to the explanatory priority of genuine perceptual experiences. How is it possible to accept both commitments? The positive disjunctivist is sensitive to certain explanatory demands: 1. Intellectually, it seems to be more satisfying to provide an account that could be applied to all the experiences referred in the disjunction that represents the analysis of our ascriptions of something appearing to be in a certain way for the subject. The question is whether there is a possible positive explanation for a disjunctivist that accepts that veridical experiences and hallucinatory ones are ontologically different.10 2. At the same time, this sort of disjunctivism is prone to accept that the phenomenology of hallucinatory experiences makes it plausible to think that there is something to be like for the subject when she is hallucinatorily conscious. In a sense, such a disjunctivist is disposed to reject the idea that there is a possible empty sensory consciousness. The phenomenal character of the hallucinatory experience needs to be explained. But the disjunctivist is not constrained to accept any particular view on the nature of the hallucinatory experience.11 As I suggested above, this is a consequence of accepting the first step in the argument from hallucination no matter how it is built. So, for instance, a disjunctivist could analyze hallucinations in terms of sense-data. Moreover, any other conception in the field is acceptable provided that it is compatible with disjunctivism, that is, provided that it offers a way to explain how can perceptions and hallucinations seem to the subject to be phenomenally the same. So a hallucination could be a relation to sense-data, or the mere instantiation of sensations, or even mental states with intentional content. Let us assume that the best positive characterization of the hallucinatory experience is given in terms of the experience instantiating a representational content. That means that the phenomenal character of a particular hallucination is given by the way the subject represents the world as being and not by the actual layout of the environment. The character of the experience, following an intentional theory, is specified by its correctness conditions, that is, by those objects and properties that would be present if the content were correct. The disjunctivist will then have a conception where the first part of the disjunction is analyzed in terms of the relation with actual objects and properties and the second part in terms of what it would be correct were those objects and properties actually present. The metaphysical structure of each phenomenal character is distinct, as expected in the disjunctivist conception. But this position also entails that there are two very different metaphysical ways to instantiate phenomenal character in general: either
This kind of explanatory demand is explicit, for instance, in Alston (1999, p. 191). Note that the positive disjunctivist needs to offer a view on hallucinations; it is only a radical negative disjunctivist who would argue against such a methodological constraint. The following section would handle mildly epistemic versions of negative disjunctivism which are willing to offer an epistemological characterization of the hallucinatory disjunct. In a sense, all of them care about the nature of the hallucinatory experience.
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by being in effective phenomenal contact with objects and properties or by entertaining mental states with intentional content, in which case the existence and presence of objects and properties represented in the content is not required for the state to be of a particular phenomenal type. Firstly, this position is compatible with SP1 and SP2. Secondly, it explains why things seem the same to the subject both in the perceptual and the hallucinatory cases (because the very same objects and properties are presented to the subject, even though in a very different manner) and so a response is given to the argument from hallucination. Nevertheless, it is more difficult to see how this kind of disjunctivism could comply with the first of the methodological principles. There is no explanatory priority of veridical experiences because in the intentional characterization of a hallucination, nothing depends on how the phenomenal character of the veridical experience is fixed. If both kinds of metaphysical structure are sufficient by themselves to explain how a certain phenomenal character is instantiated, then the priority of the left disjunct needs to be argued. Perhaps the priority is preserved just by acknowledging that the left disjunct indicates the general structure of the kind of experience that we use to call perceptual: that is, a relational structure that could then vary just in terms of the objects that are the proper relata of each disjunct. Also, hallucinatory experiences are relations. So we are committed to posit existing objects and properties that are the relata of the experience and that are not identical to the physical objects (and which we can mistake for them). Traditionally, sense-data have been the favorite option in the philosophical literature. But there are other options: for instance, relations to regions of physical space where the hallucinated object seems to be (Langsam 1997) or relations to vivid mental images that appear to the subject in the same way as objects (Alston 1999, p. 191). Scientific literature is plenty of imaginistic views on the nature of hallucinations.12 But how is the mistake of images with physical objects to be accounted for? A plausible proposal could be based on some bit of psychological speculation. It could be the case that mental images get to be superimposed over our perceptual field. If this happened, it would be open to the subject to mistake these projected images with the objects they are images of.13 The fact that the subject could access introspectively her mental images would also account for the indiscriminability from a veridical perceptual experience. Images would be the objects that shape the phenomenal character of the experiences in the same sense as the scene perceived shapes the phenomenal character of a veridical experience. The question is now whether intentional contents or mental images are also present in a veridical experience. The disjunctivist could accept that there are commonalities between hallucinatory and veridical cases without being committed to the claim that they are typed fundamentally in the same way. That which is
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Some examples are reviewed by Bentall (1990). If one accepts the existence of percepts, then the explanation would be in terms of a confusion of percepts and images (McGinn 2004). But this route is not open to a disjunctivist that would need then to say something about the ontological relation between images and percepts because a critic could easily argue that the very possibility of confusing percepts and mental images is explained by the fact that they are constituted in the same way (probably as images) and that they contribute in the same manner to any perceptual experience, veridical or hallucinatory.

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common does not constitute the instantiation of the same ontological kind of experience. There are good reasons for accepting that the commonalities exist. One of them is the fact that the very same proximal causes seem to be involved in perceptions and their causally matching hallucinations.14 So if mental images, for instance, are also present in a veridical experience, what is their contribution to the determination of the phenomenal character? If, as the nave realist wants, the phenomenal character is fixed by the objects and properties of the world, the effects of these images should be bracketed in the case of a veridical perceptual experience. The disjunctivist could also claim that these vivid mental images are not present in the veridical case. Why is it so, if the same causal conditions seem to be sufficient for instantiating them? Is it not true that the presence of vivid mental images is sufficient to determine a phenomenal character in hallucination and is necessitated by the positive condition that the veridical and the hallucinatory case share? Anyway, the main objection against this sort of positive disjunctivism is its lack of explanatory simplicity. Remember that one of the facts to be explained is the indiscriminability of veridical and corresponding hallucinatory experiences. Positive disjunctivism would claim that there are at least two different ways to sufficiently determine the phenomenal character of an experience. True, the psychological kinds of experiences are deemed to be different for the disjunctivist; but in this version, it is also the case that phenomenal characters are metaphysically constituted in very different ways. If it is so, then there does not seem to be any reason to prefer the kind of explanation of phenomenal character provided by the nave realist. Moreover, if one accepted that the phenomenal character of the experience could be fixed for hallucinatory cases through the instantiation of intentional contents, the dialectical advantages of the nave realist against the intentionalist will be lost. In fact, the intentionalist seems to be ready to offer a unitary account of the phenomenal character for both terms of the disjunction and thus to account for why we are prone to build the disjunction in the first place.

Epistemic views on hallucinations Remember Dancys quotation in the first section. Disjunctivism seems to characterize a hallucination by saying that it is like what it is not. This suggests that disjunctive views just offer a negative characterization of the hallucinatory event. The methodological constraint MP1 seems to entail that it does not make sense to provide a characterization of a hallucinatory state in terms of something that is proper to it. The second disjunct is only specified by reference to the more basic case of successful perception. What kind of relational property is the one that would link hallucinatory events to veridical perception? Some authors have thought that it is an epistemic property, that property that makes indiscriminable both events. So the fact of the indiscriminability becomes central to an epistemic view on hallucinations. The relevant epistemic property has to do with the possibility to discriminate a bad
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Martin, in a series of deep and thoughtful papers (Martin 2004, 2006), has argued that the disjunctivist must allow for this kind of commonalities without renouncing to the essential theses of the disjunctive view. As I indicated before, I need to leave aside this branch of the argument in my discussion.

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case of hallucination from good cases of veridical perception. The only essential feature of a hallucinatory state is that is just impossible by reflection alone to discriminate it from a corresponding veridical perception. Someone who is hallucinating cannot introspectively know that she does not perceive. Martin (2004, 2006) is the most conspicuous defender of this version of disjunctivism, usually labeled as reflective (Sturgeon 2006). This is his gloss of the hallucinatory disjunct: the disjunctivist really has no option other than to claim that such experiences have no positive mental characteristics other than their epistemological properties of not being knowably different from some veridical perception (Martin 2004, p. 82). This is not the only version in town of what could be called an epistemic conception of hallucination. William Fish has also provided definitions couched in epistemic terms: Hallucinations are simply defined as states which have the same kind of effects as, and are therefore indistinguishable from, certain kind of veridical perception (Fish 2008, p. 156) a hallucination is a mental event that, while lacking phenomenal character, produces the same cognitive effects in the hallucinator that a veridical perception of a certain kind would have produced in a rational subject in the same overall doxastic setting (Fish 2009, p. 114). Despite the differences in their respective versions of how to define hallucination, I will discuss Martins and Fishs views together because they attempt to face though in different waystraditional objections against the epistemic view. Both of them try to explain what indiscriminability means. Take for instance Fishs characterization in terms of cognitive effects. For a hallucination to be indiscriminable from a corresponding veridical perception on a particular occasion is necessary and sufficient that it produces the same cognitive effects that the corresponding veridical perception would produce (Fish 2009, pp. 9495). Which kind of cognitive effects? Typically first-order beliefs and introspective judgments: for instance, the firstorder belief that there is in front of me a field of green grass and the second-order judgment that I am seeing a field of green grass. In Fish (2008), he appeals to the classical epistemic theory of experience defended by Armstrong to shape his own disjunctivist position. For Armstrong, these effects (in particular, higher order beliefs about our experiences) constitute by themselves the hallucinatory experience. In appearance, Fish resists this conclusion because this would be a way of intellectualizing the hallucinatory events (Fish 2008, pp. 153154). But he still argues that the appeal to beliefs is explanatorily sufficient; it explains what the hallucinator says, thinks, or does (p. 153). Besides, beliefs are necessary effects of having a hallucination. No hallucination without these effects. Obviously, one of the reasons to reject Armstrongs constitutive view is the fact that unsophisticated animals, incapable of having higher order beliefs, are subject to hallucinatory experiences. Scientific reports are clear on this matter. Fish thinks that the same objection cannot be applied to his own point of view because all he needs

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is to appeal to the cognitive effects of the mental hallucinatory state, and these effects do not need to include higher-order beliefs. Hallucinations in animals without the capacity to entertain states such as I believe that I see that p are characterized by other cognitive effects, mental antecedents of the observed behavior that helps us to ascribe to them the hallucination in the first place. Worries about hallucinations in animals also apply to Martins epistemic view: the inability of the animal to have discriminative knowledge of its own states produces the effect that all hallucinatory experiences count as indiscriminable for the animal because this is all a hallucination is: the epistemological negative property of not being able to know introspectively that it is not a veridical experience. Both kind of worriesand I will not enter here into the responses that the defenders of the epistemic views have provided against themare grounded in the very same intuition: a hallucination cannot consist in an epistemic constraint that is impossible for an animal to satisfy. Moreover, in Fishs view, it will be impossible that my dog and I could have the same kind of hallucinatory experience just because the cognitive effects that individuate the hallucination are necessarily not the same. In fact, the way Fish introduces a clause to relativize hallucinations to doxastic settings makes it also difficult to say which conditions would individuate hallucinatory states. It suffices a set of common effects that a veridical perception would have produced. The question is that we have no criterion to sort out this set of common effects except the supposed hallucinatory state itself. Fishs view is close to some versions of functionalism about mental states (Siegel 2008). But this means that there could be a possible mental state whose causes and cognitive effects would be those of a corresponding veridical perception yet lacking any sensory character. For Fish, it would be taken as a hallucination. So the question is that for this kind of disjunctivism, there is nothing intrinsically experiential in a hallucinatory state. It is not just that a hallucinatory state is not typed by a phenomenal character that could be shared with a corresponding veridical perception, but also that it does not have any phenomenal character at all. That is what makes Fishs disjunctivism so unintuitive. It rejects the alleged uncontroversial fact that we mentioned at the beginning, the phenomenal character of a hallucinatory experience. We are not just certainly wrong each time that we think that we are perceptually experiencing a field of green grass when in fact we are having a hallucination, but we are also deeply wrong when we think to be having an experience in this case with a certain phenomenal character.15 At this point, the disjunctivist is not placed in a comfortable position. First, one of the motivations for disjunctivism is that it accommodates the phenomenology of our perceptual experience. This phenomenal motivation is just applied to the case of veridical perception. No reliance on phenomenology when we deal with hallucinatory experiences. They necessarily fool us about their very nature.16 In the case of perception, phenomenology seems to reveal us the real phenomenal
15 If there is something that it is like for the subject to be in that state, it is certainly not experiential, it would be more like having a certain belief (see Fish 2009, p. 98, ft. 19). 16 Austins contention does not apply here. One can accept that only judgments are true or false and yet claim for an explanation of why it is the experience that leads me to accept a false judgment. It is the bearing of experience on belief that is here at stake. And in this particular case, it is the bearing of experience on introspective judgments that matters.

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character of the experience. As I suggested before, one of the main issues in the discussion about perceptual experience is whether and to what extent phenomenology can be used as guide to the metaphysics of experience. Disjunctivism is a view that tells us that we should rely on phenomenology just in perceptual cases, not in other cases, even if they are indiscriminable from the first. In hallucinating, we are wrong not only about how the world is but also about how the world seems to be or appear to us. Maybe it is just the hallucinatory condition that makes us liable to this deep confusion in our thoughts and introspective capacities. So it is very surprising that disjunctivists do not view the hallucinatory situation as deeply irrational. On the contrary, Fish insists that a certain condition of rationality is required because otherwise, it would be very difficult to identify the very same effects that would be produced in the veridical case (the right effects). This is needed to exclude cases where a hallucinator thinks to see dragons when she is seeing flushing water in a toilet bowl. This would be an anomalous belief formation, a failure of rationality. The relevant effects are those that would have been produced had the subject been rational. So if there is a failure of rationality in hallucinatory moments, this must be of a very different kind from the failure we recognize in the clear delusive situation of believing to see dragons in flushing water. Those philosophers eager to reject disjunctivism claim that this difference in kind is explained by the experiential character of the hallucination, meaning that the effects, in one case, are grounded in the experience (even if the subject is not much justified in holding her first-order belief and her second-order belief that she sees) and in the other case are not so grounded in the experience (even if they are provoked in a sense by it).17 So problems with disjunctivism have mainly to do with the role that experience plays in grounding introspective judgments. For Armstrongs view, this is not a great problem because the experience itself is seen as constituted by beliefs or dispositions to belief. But Fishs disjunctivism needs to distinguish the mental event that produces the effects and the effects themselves. These effects are necessary; by definition, no hallucination without the right kind of effects. So the disjunctivist has to argue that it is impossible to be in a hallucinatory mental state when we do not notice our experiences (and form the corresponding beliefs). Inattention could be one of the causes for not noticing that one is having a so-called hallucinatory experience (Fish 2009, p. 100). Lets grant that. But consider the following situation: the effects are produced later, when the subject remembers that he had an experiential event that he would take as a veridical perception. A first question is: if there is something hallucinatory, when did it take place? Did hallucination take place later, when the effects were produced? But a second question is more pressing: which is the ground of the subjects belief? Is it not the previous mental state that he remembers to have entertained? I take it that it is more plausible to think that it is the remembered state and not the remembering itself that grounds the belief.18 So there must be the presence of some features of the state which the subject has entertained without the corresponding effects at the previous moment that grounds
17 On the nature of delusions and the role played by anomalous experiences in generating delusive beliefs, the paper by Maher (1999) is very helpful. 18 This would require more argument than I am capable of in this paper.

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her judgment. The anti-disjunctivist claims that these are sensory features even if they are not necessarily shared by the veridical experience. Hallucinations that are recognized as hallucinatory by the subject would also require some attention. In a sense, a hallucination that we know not to be a veridical experience is not indiscriminable from the corresponding perception (following Martins test). But I claim that it is still possible that the hallucinating subject knows that it is not veridical without losing the characteristic felt reality that accompanies hallucinatory events in general. The doxastic setting would not prevent the hallucinator from experiencing with reality the scene. The anti-disjunctivist would say that in these cases, the conscious shaping of the experience would not need to change even if the subject knows that it is a hallucination. A possible response could be to acknowledge that the hallucinator is then disposed to make the corresponding introspective judgments even if other considerations (which ones?) would incline him to think that he does not perceive. There is an important question that remains open: we dont know very well what it means that what is phenomenologically given involves a feature that we would introspectively recognize as a sense of reality and, worse, that we would introspectively recognize to be absent in the case of hallucinatory experiences.

Conclusion I began by remembering that traditional accounts of hallucinatory experiences attempt to bring together three apparently non-controversial facts about them: phenomenal character, non-relationality, and indiscriminability. This last one is the core of the phenomenological argument from hallucination. For the proponents of the argument, indiscriminability is the ground to posit a shared phenomenal character for veridical perceptions and matching hallucinations. The best way to explain indiscriminability is to assume that they share phenomenal character. The argument hides an inference to the best explanation. The whole debate between disjunctivists and non-disjunctivists concern the explanatory demands that one is disposed to accept. Maybe the disjunctivist is right in claiming that indiscriminability as such is not enough to support ontological claims about the phenomenal character of hallucinatory experiences. But at the same time, disjunctivists seem either to reject such explanatory demands or to suggest that it suffices to appeal to the indiscriminability property. There is nothing in the way things appear to S that is both characteristic of the hallucinatory state and explanatory of the indiscriminability property. In fact, for some disjunctivists, it is only apparent that hallucinations have phenomenal character. Moreover, it is not just any notion of indiscriminability that does the work: disjunctivists notion needs to be asymmetrical as it is shown by Martins characterization in terms of not being able to know that one is not having a veridical experience. But why should we accept asymmetry in the first place? Indiscriminability can also be regarded as symmetrical and some reasons are needed to exclude that, when we are talking about experiential states, it is the symmetrical notion that is involved. In any case, the explanatory demands are yet in place: why are hallucinations and corresponding perceptions indiscriminable for S? In Fishs terms, why do they have

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the same right kind of effects? In Martins terms, why does the state have the negative epistemic property? It does not seem enough to respond that it is just a definitional issue and that the explanatory requirement is misguided. It would be like asking why bachelors are unmarried (Fish 2009, p. 114). This is, again, not to have understood the challenge posed by the argument from hallucination where the explanatory demands are not merely analytical. At least, to our common sense, it is plausible to offer an explanation in terms of the way things look. If it is so, then the options are two: either to claim for a disjunctivist positive elucidation of the right disjunct (a path that, as we have seen, is not without problems) or to reject disjunctivism.
Acknowledgments I would like to thank Fernando Broncano, Diego Lawler, Juan Gonzlez, and two anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions. This research has been funded by a grant of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Reference: HUM2006-03221).

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