March 21, 2012

McDowell and Wright on Disjunctive Conception of Experience

McDowell presents his Disjunctive Conception of perceptual experience, in contrast to the “highest common factor” conception and the Argument from Illusion, in a formulation of an indirect response to skepticism. He argues against the Argument from Illusion and the “highest common factor” model that is central to skeptical arguments suggesting that since every experience is mediated through appearances and sense-data, and the commonality of our experiences (in both veridical and non-veridical cases) remains compatible with or without the external facts obtaining, we cannot have knowledge or warranted belief for our claims about the external world.

For McDowell, the distinction between the various types of perceptual experiences has to do with their reality vis-à-vis the external world. He concedes phenomenal indistinguishability between veridical and non-veridical experiences, but not epistemic sameness. Though they may share common phenomenal features, which he admits can be subjectively indistinguishable, they are essentially distinct with different epistemic significance. So it is a conceptual mistake to reduce the experiences merely to their phenomenal commonalities since the fact present in the experiences cannot be exhausted to their common subjective components as the “highest common factor” suggests. The difference in epistemic significance that McDowell supports allows for the “epistemically distinguished class” where the objective facts are directly present to the subject, and in order to establish this difference in epistemic value, he tries to dissociate the link between subjective indistinguishability and “highest common factor” model that makes them indiscernible. And the epistemic significance of veridical cases comes in with the direct access to the objective world in perceptual experiences and rests on the claim that the content of experience is the content of the world.

Disjunctive Conception

In response to the skeptical position that even the best experiences cannot present facts due to the mediation of appearances or sense data, which leave our beliefs and knowledge about the external world unwarranted, he presents his Disjunctive Conception, which entails a direct encounter with facts or objects of external reality. McDowell’s Disjunctive Conception of perceptual experiences presents deceptive (e.g., hallucinations and illusions) and non-deceptive (veridical) experiences in terms of mere appearance vs. facts being perceptually manifest to the subject respectively. It is intended to replace the “highest common factor” that entails appearances as intermediaries in all perceptual experiences between the subjective and the objective. In contrast, the disjunctive conception allows a direct access and “unmediated openness” between the subject and external world, which is a required ground for his proposal against the skeptic’s position.

In his view, perceptual experiences entail standing in a certain relation to the external world that is absent in cases of hallucination and illusion; in perception, the external objects and facts form part of the constituent of our experiences. So that the direct engagement and encounter with the objective state of things entails the justification of perceptual claims about them. But in order to show that our perceptual experience are, in fact, of objective reality, he needs evidential support for his view of direct access to the external world unmediated by appearances.

The skeptical predicament, according to McDowell is due to the lack of recognizing that environmental facts can be directly available to us. He thinks the foundation on which the whole skeptical edifice rests is the idea of the untenability of external facts being directly presented in experience and that of “direct perceptual access” to the external reality. And so categorizes the skeptic’s argument as “misguided interiorization of reason” which is out of touch with the external world. This is what forms the center of his counter-argument against skepticism: his Disjunctive Conception positing the idea of direct access to objective facts, which become manifest to the subject in veridical experiences without the intermediary of appearance and interface that is part of the “highest common factor” conception. He further wants to invert the skeptical argument and say that we know about the external world and our environment precisely because we are directly in touch with it, i.e., have direct perceptual access to our environment.

Part of McDowell’s attempt at a rational account is to introduce the notion of “objective purport” entailed in his transcendental argument, which ideally is a match between reality and appearance and without which our experiences seem vacuous and in his word: ‘blind.’  It is supposed to add intelligibility to the content of our experiences, viz., appearances, and compatibility with the idea that objective reality can be directly accessible perceptually. He believes that the “objective purport,” a notion that Wrights regards as too simple to seriously have any substantial impact on skepticism, can undermine the independency of the interior realm that leads to the skeptical position. For perceptual experiences to be intelligible, they purport to be of objective reality without which the notion of appearance and perceptual experience do not make much sense. So our perceptual experiences cannot autonomously sustain intelligibility without “objective purport.” His theory requires a direct engagement, and the application and implication of “objective purport” is supposed to be where experience and reality come together.  And as he mentions and with which I concur, the notion of appearances fails (i.e., is self-undermining) without the contrast of some reality behind it.

Wright vs. McDowell

For skeptics the deceptive experiences, i.e., when things are not as the experience reveals them as being becomes the basis and focus of their argument, and the non-deceptive cases, i.e., when things are as the experience reveals them as being becomes that of McDowell’s. They seem to be opposite approaches to the problem. Whereas skepticism maintains doubt on the basis of fallibility and indistinguishability that puts one out of touch with the objective realm, McDowell presents his view on the basis of veridical cases involving direct access to it.

Although McDowell thinks that an appeal to the direct access with the facts can overcome or mitigate the skeptical doubts, Wright points out, rightly in my view, that the very notion or status of “facts” or external reality becomes problematic (as it falls within the very domain of skepticism) due to epistemic indistinguishability. In his rejoinder to McDowell, Wright states that McDowell seems to view skepticism “as a kind of anxious preoccupation” and something in need of “diagnosis and therapy.”  But for the purposes of diagnosis it should be pointed out that the sameness of mental states between veridical and non-veridical experiences such as dreaming and hallucination are not the core of the issue; the real issue is the epistemic challenge of discerning them which undermines our very ability to separate “good” and “bad” disjuncts so that what lies at the heart of the problem is exactly their epistemic indistinguishability (which McDowell, in fact, concedes) and not the “highest common factor,” which he insists on.

So how is our direct access to the external reality justified? As McDowell himself states: “What does entitle one to claim that one is perceiving that things are thus and so, when one is so entitled?  The fact that one is perceiving that things are thus and so.”[1] So here the fact of perception is supposed to count as justification of our beliefs about objective reality, and the object of experience being the fact itself implies that experience entails its own justification. Thus he claims that experience can be its own justification through the fact being manifest to the subject, though it seems to remains epistemically inaccessible to her in the form of self-knowledge, and unsatisfactory to the skeptical point of view.

McDowell sees the “highest common factor” model to be at the root of the problem, which can be viewed as a metaphysical claim about the structure and content of the experiences, whereas Wright views subjective indistinguishability as the problem (as already mentioned), which is essentially epistemic, and in light of which the best position and justification we can sustain is agnosticism. As McDowell argues that perceptual experience entails direct engagement and encounter with the external objects so that the fact of the external reality becomes present in one’s experience, reality is supposed to be entailed in the experience, hence the justification for our beliefs about them. But according to Wright, direct awareness or acquaintance with P does not warrant our beliefs about P. He fails to see that external objects being directly present to one’s experiences can justify our claims about them and regards McDowell’s assertion here as “canonical” articulated in this way:”This justification is not defeasible. If someone sees that P, it cannot fail to be the case that P.” [2]

As Wrights state, it is the path to our knowledge that is the problem and here is where McDowell’s basic and critical assumption comes into focus: he claims that we have knowledge through direct access because the lack of the interface makes it so that the content of objective world is presented in the content of our experience without any mediation from an interface existing between them as the “highest common factors” model implies. Thus, there is no question of an appearance being misleading or misrepresenting in that case; one is simply in contact with the fact (objective reality). But what it seems he fails to address is that we do not know or cannot claim to know that based on our own subjective perspectives, i.e., what is available to us cognitively or epistemically. Even if the reality is laid open before us, due to the nature of our experience, their subjective similarity makes it untenable that we can claim to know the difference. So again the knowledge is outside our reach with epistemic justification lacking.

However, as Wright points out that the problematic move is from the internal cognitive access to which we have “direct cognitive apprehension” to the external reality that lies beyond it, McDowell’s position emphasizes that objective facts are also matters of “direct cognitive apprehension” without the intermediary of the interface according to his Disjunctive Conception. This is a point worth reiteration and serious consideration.

It may appear that McDowell gives an ontological argument rather than an epistemic one, in response to an epistemic problem. Since even if different processes are involved in the two types of experiences, the difference is not available to the subject and therefore epistemically inefficacious so that the epistemic inaccessibility of this underlying disjunction and distinction does nothing to help us against the skeptical argument and assuage skeptical concerns. Although McDowell doesn’t explicitly categorize his claim as metaphysical, the essential distinction in his Disjunctive view and the fact that there is no way for the subject to epistemically ascertain the difference between various types of experiences, seems to suggest that. Yet how can a metaphysical claim have any weight that seems outside our epistemic reach? How can one lay claim to an ontological account that seems to lie outside the epistemic domain of the subject? And how can we make a metaphysical claim about something that is epistemically inaccessible to us in a way that is considered rational and supportable? For, in order to make any metaphysical claims, one has to get around the epistemic barrier between the subject and the object that the skeptical view poses. And that may be why McDowell proposes the interpenetration of the inner and the outer realms. He also believes that self-contained subjectivity can be infallible in its own domain, but problematic as we see in the skeptical position. Furthermore, subjective infallibility does not imply that the whole truth about a state or event can be known internally. He wants to bridge the gap between internal and external facts and subjective and objective truths and reconcile our fallible external knowledge with our infallible internal knowledge. It is the separation and divide between the internal and external reality, the subjective and objective realm of experiences that is at the root of the problem in the skeptical stand and central to McDowell’s argument. It is a challenge in response to which he has presented his Disjunctive Conception in place of the “highest common factor” that suggests mediation through appearances and makes direct contact between the subjective and the objective realms untenable and insurmountable.

The skeptical argument relies on a gap between our perceptual experiences and facts, which cannot be crossed. This can only be maintained through the subjective and objective divide. So the clue might lie in the supposed gap between the inner and outer realms and the objective and subjective truths, as well as ontological and epistemic domains, which I believe deserves more attention.