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Introduction: symposium on disjunctivism: Part two

This is the second part of a two-part symposium on disjunctivism. Part 1 has appeared in issue 13.3 (September 2010) of Philosophical Explorations and includes papers by Fabian Dorsch, Matthew D. Conduct, Matthew Soteriou, and John McDowell. Part 2 consists of three papers by Søren Overgaard, Adrian Haddock, and Tyler Burge. John McDowell, in various of his writings, has put a disjunctive conception of experience to anti-sceptical use: not so much in an explicit argument against scepticism, but rather as part of an attempt to show that the sceptical challenge is based on a presupposition that can, and should, be rejected. This presupposition is what McDowell calls the “highest common factor” conception of experience, according to which a veridical experience and its subjectively indistinguishable non-veridical counterpart (e.g. in cases of illusions or hallucinations) belong to the same fundamental type of mental state and differ only in their non-mental aspects. This would suggest the sceptical consequence that an experience that p as such, even if in fact veridical, could not serve as a basis for knowing that p, since as an experience it would be entirely compatible with it’s not being the case that p. This sceptical consequence is blocked, according to McDowell, by the disjunctive conception of experience, according to which there are two fundamentally different types of experiences that p, namely those in which someone perceives that p and those in which it merely perceptually appears to them that p. Given this disjunctive conception, from the fact that cases of the latter type cannot serve as the basis for knowledge that p nothing at all follows for the veridical case. The sceptical consequence would be blocked. Against this, various critics have objected that disjunctivism does not have the anti-sceptical consequences McDowell attributes to it, mainly because disjunctivism does not, and cannot reasonably, deny that with respect to any given experience, its subject is not in a position to tell the veridical case from its subjectively indistinguishable non-veridical counterpart. Now Søren Overgaard, in his contribution to the present volume, defends McDowell against this kind of criticism by distinguishing, with Mike Martin, between Cartesian and Humean scepticism. Whereas Overgaard grants that McDowellian disjunctivism is no adequate response to Cartesian scepticism (which focuses on subjectively indistinguishable scenarios), and he argues that it does have considerable force against Humean scepticism (according to which perception as such does not give us epistemic access to mind-independent objects or facts). Adrian Haddock, in his contribution, suggests that we should supplement McDowell’s disjunctive conception of experience with a disjunctive conception of perceiving. In