Fabian Dorsch / Writings / Articles
Peer-Reviewed Articles
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Experience and Introspection
Fiona Macpherson & Dimitris Platchias (eds.), Hallucination, MIT Press, forthcoming
[abstract]
One central fact about hallucinations is that they may be subjectively indistinguishable from perceptions. Indeed, it has been argued that the hallucinatory experiences concerned cannot - and need not - be characterised in any more positive general terms. This epistemic conception of hallucinations has been advocated as the best choice for proponents of experiential (or 'naive realist') disjunctivism - the view that perceptions and hallucinations differ essentially in their introspectible subjective characters. In this chapter, I aim to formulate and defend an intentional alternative to experiential disjunctivism called experiential intentionalism. This view does not only enjoy some advantages over its rival, but also can largely hold on to the epistemic conception of perception-like hallucinations.
First of all, I try to spell out in a bit more detail in which sense hallucinations may be subjectively indistinguishable from perceptions, and why this leads us to erroneously judge them to be perceptions (cf. sections I-III and VIII). Then, I raise three challenges each for experiential disjunctivism and its orthodox intentionalist counterparts (cf. sections IV and V), notably in respect of the need to explicate why a perception-like hallucination still makes the same judgements reasonable for the subject as the corresponding perceptions. And, finally, I propose my alternative both to experiential disjunctivism and to orthodox intentionalism. Experiential intentionalism takes perceptions and perception-like hallucinations to share a common character partly to be spelled out in intentional - and, hence, normative - terms (cf. sections VI and VII). The central thought is that the hallucinations concerned are intentionally - and erroneously - presented to us as perceptual relations to the world. I aim to show that the resulting view can meet all six challenges (cf. sections VI-VIII). I end with some comments on the consequences for the nature of perceptual experiences (cf. section IX).
Experiential intentionalism is compatible with the epistemic conception of hallucinations, as well as with the disjunctivist view that perceptions and hallucinations differ essentially in their third-personal structures (e.g., their causal, informational or constitutive links to reality). It also maintains that there are actually two aspects to the subjective indistinguishability of mental episodes: (i) that we cannot distinguish their first-personal characters in introspective awareness; and (ii) that we cannot distinguish their third-personal structures in experiential awareness - that is, in how they are given to consciousness. While experiential disjunctivism makes the mistake of ignoring (ii) and reducing subjective indiscriminability to (i), experiential intentionalism correctly identifies (ii) as the primary source of the subjective indistinguishability of perception-like hallucinations. Accordingly, the intentional error involved in such hallucinations is due to the fact that we consciously experience them as possessing a relational structure. -
Emotional Imagining and Our Responses to Fiction
Enrahonar, vol. 46, 2011, pp. 153-176
[abstract]
The aim of this article is to present the disagreement between Moran and Walton on the nature of our affective responses to fiction and to defend a view on the issue which is opposed to Moran's account and improves on Walton's. Moran takes imagination-based affective responses to be instances of genuine emotion and treats them as episodes with an emotional attitude towards their contents. I argue against the existence of such attitudes, and that the affective element of such responses should rather be taken to be part of what is imagined. In this respect, I follow Walton; and I also agree with the latter that our affective responses to fiction are, as a consequence, not instances of real emotion. However, this gives rise to the challenge to be more specific about the nature of our responses and explain how they can still involve a phenomenologically salient affective element, given that propositionally imagining that one feels a certain emotion is ruled out because it may be done in a dispassionate way. The answer - already suggested, but not properly spelled out by Walton - is that affectively responding to some fictional element consists in imaginatively re- presenting an experience of emotional feeling towards it. The central thought is that the conscious and imaginative representation of the affective character of an instance of genuine emotion itself involves the respective phenomenologically salient affective element, despite not instantiating it.
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Transparency and Imagining Seeing
Philosophical Explorations, vol. 13 (3), 2010, pp. 173-200
[abstract]
In his paper, The Transparency of Experience, M.G.F. Martin has put forward a well-known - though not always equally well understood - argument for the disjunctivist, and against the intentional, approach to perceptual experiences. In this article, I intend to do four things: (i) to present the details of Martin's complex argument; (ii) to defend its soundness against orthodox intentionalism; (iii) to show how Martin's argument speaks as much in favour of experiential intentionalism as it speaks in favour of disjunctivism; and (iv) to argue that there is a related reason to prefer experiential intentionalism over Martin's version of disjunctivism.
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The Unity of Hallucinations
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 9 (2), 2010, pp. 171-191
[abstract]
My primary aim in this article is to provide a philosophical account of the unity of hallucinations, which can capture both perceptual hallucinations (which are subjectively indistinguishable from perceptions) and non-perceptual hallucinations (all others). Besides, I also mean to clarify further the division of labour and the nature of the collaboration between philosophy and the cognitive sciences. Assuming that the epistemic conception of hallucinations put forward by M. G. F. Martin and others is largely on the right track, I will focus on two main tasks: (a) to provide a satisfactory phenomenology of the subjective character of perceptions and perceptual hallucinations and (b) to redress the philosophers' neglect of non-perceptual hallucinations. More specifically, I intend to apply one of the central tenets of the epistemic conception - that hallucinations can and should be positively characterised in terms of their phenomenological connections to perceptions - to non-perceptual hallucinations as well. That is, I will try to show that we can positively specify the class of non-perceptual hallucinations by reference to the distinctive ways in which we first-personally experience them and perceptions in consciousness. The task of saying more about their underlying third-personal nature may then be left to the cognitive sciences.
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Colour Resemblance and Colour Realism
Rivista di Estetica, vol. 43 (1), 2010, pp. 85-108
[abstract]
One prominent ambition of theories of colour is to pay full justice to how colours are subjectively given to us; and another to reconcile this first-personal perspective on colours with the third-personal one of the natural sciences. The goal of this article is to question whether we can satisfy the second ambition on the assumption that the first should and can be met. I aim to defend a negative answer to this question by arguing that the various kinds of experienced colour resemblances - that is, similarities in hue distance, sameness in superdeterminables, and resemblances between surfaces, volumes and illuminants - cannot be accounted for in terms of the mental representation of the scientifically studied properties, with which colours are identified in response to the second ambition.
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Judging and the Scope of Mental Agency
O'Brien & Soteriou (eds.), Mental Actions, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 38-71
[abstract]
What is the scope of our conscious mental agency, and how do we acquire self-knowledge of it? Both questions are addressed through an investigation of what best explains our inability to form judgemental thoughts in direct response to practical reasons. Contrary to what Williams and others have argued, it cannot be their subjection to a truth norm, given that our failure to adhere to such a norm need not undermine their status as judgemental. Instead, it is argued that we cannot form judgements at will because we subjectively experience them as responses to epistemic reasons, and because this is incompatible with our experiential awareness of direct mental actions, such as instances of imagining. However, this latter awareness does not extend to indirect agency, which relies on epistemic or causal processes as means. Judging may therefore still count as an indirect action - just like, say, breaking a window by throwing a stone.
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Sentimentalism and the Intersubjectivity of Aesthetic Evaluation
dialectica, vol. 61 (3), 2007, pp. 417-446
[abstract]
Within the debate on the epistemology of aesthetic appreciation, it has a long tradition, and is still very common, to endorse the sentimentalist view that our aesthetic evaluations are rationally grounded on, or even constituted by, certain of our emotional responses to the objects concerned. Such a view faces, however, the serious challenge to satisfactorily deal with the seeming possibility of faultless disagreement among emotionally based and epistemically appropriate verdicts. I will argue that the sentimentalist approach to aesthetic epistemology cannot accept and accommodate this possibility without thereby undermining the assumed capacity of emotions to justify corresponding aesthetic evaluations - that is, without undermining the very sentimentalist idea at the core of its account. And I will also try to show that sentimentalists can hope to deny the possibility of faultless disagreement only by giving up the further view that aesthetic assessments are intersubjective - a view which is almost as traditional and widely held in aesthetics as sentimentalism, and which is indeed often enough combined with the latter. My ultimate conclusion is therefore that this popular combination of views should better be avoided: either sentimentalism or intersubjectivism has to make way.
Other Articles
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The Diversity of Disjunctivism (Review Article)
European Journal of Philosophy, vol. 19 (2), 2011, pp. 304-314
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Conceptual Qualia and Communication (with Gianfranco Soldati)
Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (ed.), The Foundations of Interaction Design, 2005, pp. 1-14
[abstract]
The claim that consciousness is propositional has been widely debated in the past. For instance, it has been discussed whether consciousness is always propositional, whether all propositional consciousness is linguistic, whether propositional consciousness is always articulated, or whether there can be non-articulated propositions. In contrast, the question of whether propositions are conscious has not very often been the focus of attention. In this paper, we would like to render two ideas plausible and defend them against certain objections that have been raised against them. The first, perhaps less controversial idea is that at least certain propositional mental states - such as judgements, thoughts or felt desires - involve a particular kind of consciousness, which has often been called phenomenal or qualitative consciousness. The second and more important, since far more controversial, idea is that propositions - and concepts as their constituents - possess distinct and specific phenomenal characters, or qualia, in virtue of which they are experienced differently when entertained or held in thought. Both claims, we shall see, have immediate consequences on our conception of understanding and communication. Contrary to a widespread view, a view which has its roots in the linguistic turn, we maintain that phenomenal quality is constitutive of the understanding and grasping of meanings.