Disjunctivism is a position in the

philosophy of perception The philosophy of perception is concerned with the nature of perceptual experience and the status of perceptual data, in particular how they relate to beliefs about, or knowledge of, the world.cf. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-epi ...

that rejects the existence of sense data in certain cases. The

disjunction In logic, disjunction is a logical connective typically notated as \lor and read aloud as "or". For instance, the English language sentence "it is raining or it is snowing" can be represented in logic using the disjunctive formula R \lor ...

is between appearance and the reality behind the appearance "making itself perceptually manifest to someone." Veridical perceptions and

hallucination A hallucination is a perception in the absence of an external stimulus that has the qualities of a real perception. Hallucinations are vivid, substantial, and are perceived to be located in external objective space. Hallucination is a combinati ...

s are not members of a common class of mental states or events. According to this theory, the only thing common to veridical perceptions and hallucinations is that in both cases, the subject cannot tell, via introspection, whether he is having a veridical perception or not. Disjunctivists claim this because they hold that in veridical perception, a subject's experience actually presents the external, mind-independent object of that perception. Further, they claim that in a hallucination there is no external object to be related to, nor are there sense-data to be a part of the perception. Thus, disjunctivism is a form of

naive realism Naivety (also spelled naïvety), naiveness, or naïveté is the state of being naive. It refers to an apparent or actual lack of experience and sophistication, often describing a neglect of pragmatism in favor of moral idealism. A ''naïve'' may ...

(also commonly known as direct realism). Disjunctivism was first introduced to the contemporary literature by Michael Hinton, and has been most prominently associated with

John McDowell John Henry McDowell, FBA (born 7 March 1942) is a South African philosopher, formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford, and now university professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Although he has written on metaphysics, epistemolo ...

. It has also been defended at length by Duncan Pritchard. Disjunctivists often hold that an important virtue of their view is that it captures the common sense idea that perception involves a relation to objects in the world.M.G.F Martin, "On Being Alienated" in T. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds), ''Perceptual Experience'' (2006). Disjunctivism can be contrasted to the Triggered Hallucination Theory of perception, which holds that veridical perception and hallucination are the same thing, but differ only in aetiology.

References

External links

* * Philosophical realism Perception Theory of mind Epistemological theories {{epistemology-stub