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proposal for a doxastic account of experience, the epistemology that goes with it, and
its relation to the Davidsonian account of content determination.
1 The belief principle and the testimony of the senses
Terminology has changed since Davidson coined the slogan that nothing can count as
a reason for holding a belief except another belief (Davidson 1983, p. 141). These
days, people have misgivings about calling beliefs, or other mental states, reasons.
When believing p gives you a reason for believing q, your reason for believing q is not
that you believe p, but simply p. Believing p is merely a wayif Davidson is right, the
only wayfor a subject to possess that reason. The belief, as I shall therefore put it,
provides its subject with a reason for holding a (further) belief. And the reason provided
is the proposition believed.This naturally leads to the idea that a (true) proposition, in a certain objective sense,
can be a reason even if not possessed by anyone. Consequently, one might object to the
Davidsonian slogan because of its inbuilt form of subjectivism. It seems to make
possession by a subject a condition, not only on a subject s having a reason, but on
somethings being a reason in general. Moreover, a belief providing a Davidsonian
reason does not have to be true; this is a second sense in which Davidsonian reasons are
subjective. Further worries might concern the idea that all reasons are propositional. It is
probably fair to say that Davidson held these views; Davidsonian reasons are subjective
in the sense of being possessed by their subjects, and they are propositional.2
I shall not take any stand on whether he was right about that; for all I can tell, theissue might be mainly terminological. What is clear, I think, is that the Davidsonian
sense of reason is an important, very intuitive sense. Whether there are other kinds of
reasons or not, there areDavidsonian reasons. And Davidsonian reasons play an essential
role in both our folk psychology and our everyday epistemology.
Even so, the following more precise and more neutral formulation of the Davidso-
nian slogan is controversial enough:
(BP) The only propositional attitude that provides its subject with reasons for
(further) belief is that of belief.
Let us call (BP) the
belief principle
. Controversial or not, the belief principle strikesme as very plausible. The notion of belief used here is, after all, the notion used in
theorizing about folk-psychologya quite theoretical, and very wide, umbrella notion
designed to capture a certain characteristic common to states of believing or knowing,
perceiving, noticing, remembering (cf. Davidson 1963, p. 3). Such a notion is
desirable, and useful, precisely because it allows for unified theorizing about folk-
psychological reasoning, in both its theoretical and its practical form. And what unifies
2 For further evidence, see Davidson 1983, p. 143; 1997, p. 136.
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the states just listedand doubtlessly many moreis that they all are ways ofholding a
proposition true. What that more precisely amounts to, we can, in turn, gather from
further investigation of the folk-psychological conception of reasoning.Once we look at it this way, the belief principle appears to be nothing more than a
sharp articulation of an essential part of the folk-psychological conception of what it is
to have reasonsa conception that is both subjective and inferential in nature.
According to this conception, a proposition is a reason for a subject only if that
proposition stands ready to figure as a(n asserted) premise in their reasoning. Such
reasoning need not be explicit, or conscious. There are reasons in this sense wherever
there are reasons explanations. But if you have a reason you are prepared to actually
draw independent conclusions from itconclusions to which you are committed and
that are not conditional on the relevant premise. Where these commitments are beliefs
(as opposed to intentions or actions), the premises themselves need to be held true. Noproposition merely desired, entertained, assumed, or accepted for some purpose or
other, is a reason in this sense. If you do not hold the proposition in question true, you
do not even have a reason for believing its most obvious logical consequences.3
Plausible or not, the belief principle might easily seem to have the consequence of
ruling out (R):
(R) Perceptual experiences provide their subjects with reasons for belief.
Denying (R) has struck some philosophers of perceptionfirst and foremost, McDo-
well (1994)as unacceptable.4 To me, (R) seems as much part of the intuitive
conception of experience, as much a non-negotiable platitude of folk-psychology asthe claim that beliefs provide reasons for (further) beliefs.5 Davidson, however, seems to
have wholeheartedly embraced (R)s denial, even though he rarely even talked about
experiences without putting them into scare quotes. He writes:
No doubt meaning and knowledge depend on experience, and experience ultimately on
sensation. But this is the depend of causality, not of evidence or justification. (Davidson
1983, p. 146)
Perception, once we have propositional thought, is direct and unmediated in the sense that
there are no epistemic intermediaries on which perceptual beliefs are based, nothing that
underpins our knowledge of the world. (Davidson 1997, p. 135)
Many of my simple perceptions of what is going on in the world are not based on furtherevidence; my perceptual beliefs are simply caused directly by the events and objects around me.
(Davidson 1991, 205)
3 See Gler 2009 for a more detailed treatment of this question.
4 Others include Brewer (1999) and myself (2009).
5 Both McDowell and Brewer subscribe, or used to subscribe, to (R) for less pedestrian reasons. Both have
provided elaborate transcendental arguments to the effect that (R) is a condition on the possibility of beliefs
having empirical content (cf. McDowell 1994; Brewer 1999). As far as I can see, McDowell still holds this,
while Brewer has abandoned the view that experiences have content altogether (cf. Brewer 2008).
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What results is a picture on which the senses are, in a certain sense, mute; they do not
provide any testimony. Or rather, it is a picture on which the senses do not provide any
testimony other than, or prior to, perceptual beliefs: What the senses deliver,Davidson writes, is perceptual beliefs, and these do have an ultimate evidential
role (Davidson 1999b, p. 106). Perception, Davidson claims, often, or in the most
basic cases, directly causally relates a subjects beliefs to certain objects, or events, in
her environment. This, of course, does not mean that the causal chains leading from
those external objects, or events, to perceptual beliefs do not have any intermediate
events on it. Rather, direct here means epistemically direct. The senses do not deliver
anything epistemically more basic than perceptual belief. In particular, perception does
not provide any epistemically more basic reasons for perceptual belief.6
For Davidson, this picture of perception as the merely causal production of belief has
important epistemological consequences. Davidsonian epistemology, just as his notionof reasons, is essentially subjective, or first-person, epistemology: the epistemic or
evidential relations in which he is interested are reasons relations. These are relations
accessible from the point of view of the epistemic subject. It is from this point of view
that he is concerned with answering the sceptic. Consequently, once the sole testi-
mony of the senses consists in perceptual beliefs, the crucial epistemologicaltask, accord-
ing to Davidson, is to find a reason for supposing most of our beliefs are true that is not
a form of evidence (Davidson 1983, p. 146).
According to Davidson, answering scepticism of the senses thus involves two
components: first, an argument for the claim that most of our (perceptual) beliefs are
in fact true, and second, an argument that ordinary epistemic subjects have goodreasons to believe this. Moreover, the argument can no longer involve any kind of
grounding of perceptual beliefs in something epistemically more basicsomething
such as experience, sense data, stimulations of nerve endings, or any other epistemic
intermediary. Rather, what is needed is recognition of the fact that belief is in its
nature veridical (ibid.). According to Davidson, this is something that can be known
by anyone who knows what a belief is, and how in general beliefs are to be detected
and interpreted (ibid.). The Davidsonian answer to the sceptic thus comes from the
nature of beliefespecially the determination of belief content. Most intriguingly,
Davidson does not see the absence of epistemic intermediaries as a complication in this
context; rather, he thinks that answering the sceptic requires the rejection of epistemicintermediaries in general, and the rejection of (R) in particular. I shall investigate these
matters in a little more detail in the next section.
6 This does not mean that perceptual belief cannot be revised: no, the beliefs that are delivered by the
senses are always open to revision, in the light of further perceptual experience, in the light of what we
remember, in the light of our general knowledge of how the world works (Davidson 1999b, p. 106).
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2 Perception, scepticism, and content determination
According to Davidson, it is precisely the muteness of the senses that saves us from
scepticism. For as long as the senses tell us something, they may be lying. The moral
is obvious. Since we cant swear intermediaries to truthfulness, we should allow no
intermediaries between our beliefs and their objects in the world (Davidson 1983,
p. 144). Let us call this the lying senses argument. Its basic idea is to preclude the
possibility of massive, systematic deception by the senses by not letting them tell us
anything in the first place.
Cutting the epistemic links between perceptual experience and perceptual belief in
this manner has conjured up threatening visions of coherentismvividly illustrated by
the McDowellian metaphor of our belief systems as a frictionless spinning in a void
(McDowell 1994, p. 11).7 And clearly, just cutting the epistemic links between
experience and belief in response to the lying senses argument does nothing more
than push the problem of lying one step further. For what prevents the beliefs, once on
the loose, from making up all sorts of stories? The Davidsonian answer, as I said,
comes from content determination, and what is particularly interesting about it here is
that content determination is supposed to be able to swear beliefs, and only beliefs, to
truthfulnessbeliefs, that is, but no other output of the senses.
As we saw above, Davidson claims that perceptual beliefs are often, or in the most
basic cases, directly caused by objects or events in the subjects environment. And not
by any old objects or events; according to Davidson, perceptual belief is such that it is
in the most basic casestypically caused by the very objects, or events, it is about. This
is not meant to completely exclude the possibility of illusion or even outright halluci-
nation, but it is meant to establish the veridical nature of belief:8
What stands in the way of global scepticism of the senses is, in my view, the fact that we must, in
the plainest and methodologically most basic cases, take the objects of a belief to be the causes of
that belief. (Davidson 1983, p. 151)
Without any epistemic links between experience, or sensation, and belief, Davidson
seems to be saying, there cannot be any semantic or content determining link between
them either: [A]lthough sensation plays a crucial role in the causal process that
connects beliefs with the world, it is a mistake to think it plays an epistemological
role in determining the contents of those beliefs (Davidson 1988, p. 46). This passage
is not easy to interpret; of course, for Davidson, sensation, or experience, does not play
an epistemicrole in determining the content of perceptual beliefs, since it does not play
any epistemic role at all with respect to these beliefs. But does Davidson presuppose
that any epistemic role that sensation or experience could play with respect to empirical
7 McDowell himself does not think the main problem here is epistemological scepticism, however. He
thinks this move threatens the very possibility of our beliefs having any empirical content whatsoever. Cf.
McDowell 1994, pp. 17f.
8 In Davidsonian parlance, veridical means something like mostly true.
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one astray, but its freedom from risk seems a quite unhelpful model for the rationality of
observational judgment. (McDowell 1998, p. 405; cf. also McDowell 1997, p. 161)
McDowell certainly is right in complaining that, intuitively, basing beliefs on experi-
ence is not risk-free in the sense of experience, just by itself, providing indefeasible or
conclusive reasons for them. Even though experience intuitively provides strong
reasons, there is some risk involved in believing them. Let us call this the stuttering
inference argument. McDowell concludes that the Davidsonian conception of rea-
sons cannot plausibly be extended to experience.
If this were correct, where would it leave us with respect to (R), the claim that
experience provides reasons for belief? The stuttering inference argument seems to
show that the Davidsonian conception is no better at capturing the intuitive picture of
the rational relation between experience and belief than the McDowellian notion of
entitlement. If those were the only alternatives, we simply would have to give up
significant parts of our intuitions regarding this relation. As I have argued elsewhere (cf.
Gler 2009), however, I do not think that these are the only alternatives. Most
importantly, we do not have to construe experiences as having the same contents as
perceptual beliefs. And if we can plausibly construe them as having contents that
evidentially, but defeasibly support those of perceptual beliefs, the stuttering inference
argument no longer stands in the way of conceiving of experiences as providing
inferential reasons for belief.
The result, then, of these considerations concerning entitlement and defeasibility is
the following. Construing the rational relations between experience and belief exclu-
sively as relations of entitlement is quite counterintuitive. Moreover, construing themas relations of Davidsonian reason providing is still possibledespite the stuttering
inference argumentif we conceive of experiences as having contents different from
those the beliefs for which they provide reasons.16 I shall provide a sketch of such a
16 McDowell himself now thinks that so much as conceiving of experiences as states with propositional
contents already commits us to construing them as beliefs: [I]f we avoid the Myth [of the Given] by
conceiving experiences as actualizations of conceptual capacities, while retaining the assumption that that
requires crediting experiences with propositional content, Davidsons point seems well taken. If experiences
have propositional content, it is hard to deny that experiencing is taking things to be so, rather than what
I want: a different kind of thing that entitles us to take things to be so (McDowell 2008, p. 11). Therefore,
McDowell proposes to construe experience contents as of a different kind than belief contents. Accordingto him, experience content is intuitional (McDowell 2008, p. 4), not propositional. As noted above
(cf. fn. 11), I suspect that intuitional content is propositional in the minimal sense used hereespecially, as
McDowell repeatedly stresses the possibility of making an intuitional contentthat very content
(McDowell 2008, pp. 78)explicit and thereby propositional. This suggests that the differences he has in
mind concern, not so much the contents themselves, as their medium of representation (cf. McDowell 2008,
pp. 6ff). These are differences to do with the structure, and the supposedly active nature of the composi-
tion, of thought content. Such differences are not relevant to the question of whether a content is
propositional in the minimal sense used here. But even if my hunch here is wrong, I do not see how
construing experiences as having a different kind of content would alleviate any of the felt pressure towards
construing them as beliefs. If this is hard to deny with respect to a propositional content, how could it be any
easier with any other kind of content? Moreover, denying that the relevant relation, or attitude, the subject
has to the intuitional contentafter all, this content is supposed to be available to the subjectis one of
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semantics for experience in the next, and last section where I shall briefly outline my
suggestion for a doxastic account of experience. I shall round off the paper by showing
just how Davidsonian in spirit such an account is.
5 A doxastic account of experience
The doxastic account of perceptual experience I suggest construes experiences as a kind
of belief with contents of a special form. This is in no way meant to deny that there are
many very important differences between those beliefs that are experiences and other,
more usual beliefs. Maybe most importantly, it is not meant to deny the characteris-
tic sensory nature of perceptual experiences. Phenomenally, having an experience is
very different from having a belief, say, about the gross national product of Sweden.
Phenomenally, having an experience as of a blue book in front of you is very differentfrom having a belief that there is a blue book in front of you, a belief of the kind that
you can retain when you first see a blue book in front of you and then close your eyes.
But phenomenology is notwhat types the propositional attitudesas we philosophers
talk about them; what types the propositional attitudes is nothing but attitude and
proposition.17 And the attitude component in perceptual experience, I suggest, is best
construed as that of holding true or belief.18 One of the most important and immediate
holding true, or belief, threatens to falsify the phenomenology of having experiences. Consider the following
passage from McDowell: I agree with Travis that visual experiences just bring our surroundings into view,
thereby entitling us to take certain things to be so, but leaving it a further question what, if anything, we do
take to be so (McDowell 2008, p. 11). Of course, experiences can be overridden by background beliefs, but
still, having a visual experience has a kind of phenomenal immediacy (Searle 1983, p. 45), that is not at all
captured by this description. Having an experience is like having the world around you directly presented to
you; experiences represent the world as actually being a certain way, they are making claims (cf. Sellars
1963, }16). And as long as we construe experiences as relations to contents, be they propositional or not,
we cannot capture this aspect of their phenomenology by means of the content alone: contents, just by
themselves, do not represent anything as actually being the case. If experiences are relations to contents,
immediacy therefore needs to be captured via the attitude, or relation, the subject has to the content (cf.
Martin 2002, pp. 387f, for what I think is basically the same point). This does not necessarily mean that the
attitude needs to be one of belief, it could also be a sui generis attitude of a supposedly more general committal
or stative kind, but anything less than that, I think, threatens to seriously falsify the phenomenology. It
might be worth noting that the point just made does not depend on whether we think of experiences as
factive states or not. Nor does it in any way depend on whether experiential content is singular content or
not. Neither singularity nor factivity necessitate, or explain, the
claim-like
phenomenology of experience.17 This is immediately clear when it comes to what we philosophers call desire orpro-attitude. There
are, as David Lewis once put it (cf. Lewis 1988, p. 323), warm desires and cold desires; a warm desire, for
instance, a desire to hire a very nice person, feels very differently from a cold one like a desire to hire the
best candidate (the examples are Lewiss).
18 I am not here going to argue against any kind of sui generis account of experience that allows experiences
to be holdings true, without thereby subsuming them under the beliefs. As I see the matter, holding true
amounts to belief in the sense we are interested in here, in the austere philosophers sense allowing us to
subsume all sorts of states under the umbrella headings of belief and desire. Further distinctions must, it seems
to me, depend on properties beyond attitude and content. To a certain extent, the controversy over sui generis
vs. doxastic accounts therefore might seem terminological. See my (2009), however, for an argument to the
effect that the availability of doxastic accounts that preserve the special functional role of experience under-
mines the very motivation for sui generis accounts.
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advantages of thus construing the attitude component is that it allows us to subscribe to
(R): If experiences are beliefs, they provide reasons for (further) belief in the relatively
well understood, traditional, inferential sense in which beliefs provide reasons for(further) beliefs.19
The question is how to hold on to these advantages without losing the difference
between an experience as of a blue book in front of you and a belief that there is a blue
book in front of you (a belief that you can have with closed eyes). Even more
pressingly, the question is how to hold on to the advantages without falling prey to
the stuttering inference argument and a whole host of more traditional anti-doxastic
arguments. These latter arguments all use what Evans called the belief-independence
of experience (Evans 1982, p. 123) to derive absurd consequences for the belief theory.
In certain cases of known illusion, for instance, knowing that your experience is
illusory does not make any introspectible difference to the experience. But if havingthe experience is having a belief, the subject of a known illusion would seem to end up
in the absurd situation of, in full consciousness, holding contradictory beliefs of a very
simple, observational kind.20
My suggestion is to slightly change the semantics of experience. Even though it is
quite natural to think that if experiences have propositional content, their contents will
be such that they ascribe sensible properties such as blueness or squareness to ordinary
material objects such as books or tables, such na vete is not forced on us. While we
ought to hang on to the claim that the objects of perception indeed are ordinary
material objects, we could construe experiences as ascribing phenomenal properties
to them
properties such as looking blue or looking rectangular. Contents that ascribesuch phenomenal properties to ordinary material objects such as books or tables
I shall call phenomenal contents. Equivalently, I shall talk of looks p contents or
Lp-contents.21
Adopting a phenomenal semantics for experiences immediately takes the bite out of
the stuttering inference argument and the more classical anti-doxastic arguments; all of
them work with a hidden premise to the effect that experiences have nave contents.
It also allows for distinguishing the belief that there is a blue book in front of you (that
you can have with your eyes closed) from the experience as of a blue book in front of
youfor the latter now is a belief that there looks to be a blue book in front of you.22
Obviously, this is sketchy, and there are many details to be worked out yet. A host of
19 Another immediate advantage is that that it allows us to account for the phenomenal immediacy of
experience in a very straightforward way. Cf. fn. 16.
20 For a more detailed account of this and otherclassical anti-doxastic arguments, see my (2009).
21 The use oflooks I have in mind here is the phenomenal sense. Cf. Jackson 1977, p. 33. As is quite
usual, I shall exclusively focus on visual experience. The account, however, might generalize to other sense
modalities.
22 But cannot I believe that x looks blue even with my eyes closed? Not in the sense of looks blue that
I have in mind; what can be believed with ones eyes closed is, for instance, that x would look blue if one
opened ones eyes, that x has a disposition to look blue when viewed under proper circumstances, or things
like that.
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semantic, epistemological, and metaphysical questions ought be investigated. All I can
do here is pursue some of them a little further.
When it comes to semantics, we would of course want a much more detailed analysisof the phenomenal contents and their logical form. Do they contain a place for a
subject? And a time? Or are these rather to be construed on the model of unarticulated
constituents? Most pressing, however, is the need for some further analysis of the
phenomenal predicates themselveswhen exactly does something look blue, for
instance? Afirst idea is that something looks blue (to a subject Sat a time t) iff it causes
experiences of a certain kind (in Sat t). Obviously, the relevant kind cannot be that of
experiences with the content that x looks blue. Such a content would contain itself, so to
speak; it would generate some sort of non-wellfounded object. This naturally suggests
that something looks blue iff it causes experiences of a certain qualitative kind. So-
called primed predicates could come in handy here
predicates such as blue usedfor ascribing qualitative properties to experiences or sensations (cf. Peacocke 1984). We
might then say something along the following lines:23
(LB) x looks blue (to a subject S at a time t) is true iff x causes a blue0 sensation
(in S at t).
However, I think this is not yet quite right, eitheror rather, it is on the right track
only under an interpretation of the primed predicates slightly, but significantly different
from the one suggested so far. I shall return to this below. 24
We also want a clearer sense of the epistemology of perceptual belief that is induced by
a phenomenal belief theory of experience. So far, I have said that experiences withphenomenal contents provide reasons for perceptual beliefand indeed, it seems very
plausible to say that an experience-belief that x looks blue provides its subject with an
inferential reason for believing that x is blue. But of course, we also want to know
when such a reason is a goodreason, when the subject not only has a reason for, but is
justified in forming that belief.
Just as with the semantics, this is not the place to do more than provide a sketch of an
answer. Moreover, I shall not say anything about the issue of personal justification.
When it comes to doxastic justification, it seems very plausible to me that experiences
23 An alternative to (LB) might be to identify looking blue with an object s disposition to cause blue
sensations, or its categorical base. In Shoemaker (1994) it is such dispositional properties that are called
phenomenal properties; later, he calls them appearance properties (cf. Shoemaker 2000, 2006). If we
analyzed looking blue along such dispositional lines, experience beliefs could no longer be distinguished from
others merely by their content. It would still be possible to distinguish them by their distinctive phenomenal
character, however.
24 Another question is the following. Does looks as it figures in the content of experiences work as a
predicate modifier or as a sentential operator? I tend to think that the analytically prior use is that of a
sentential operator L1(p), mainly because that allows for construing the content of complete hallucinations
without existential commitment. The basic idea then is to define a predicate modifier L2 by means of the
following equivalence: x ((L2(F))(x))dfx L1(Fx). Perceptions, illusions, and hallucinations can then have
the same basic phenomenal contents: L1 (x (Fx)).
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with phenomenal contents provide prima facie reasons for beliefsin the sense
originally introduced by Pollock. These are reasons that are good reasons if there are
no defeaters (cf. Pollock 1974, pp. 40ff ). Thus, xs looking blue is a good reason forbelieving that x is blue if there is no good reason to believe any defeater. Defeaters
standardly come in two kinds: rebutting defeaters and undercutting defeaters.
A rebutting defeater in this case could for instance be that someone reliable told the
subject that x is not blue, and an undercutting defeater could be that the lights are iffy.
But if the subject does not have any good reason to believe any such defeater, the
subject has good reason to form the belief that x is blue on the basis of the experience
that x looks blue.
Unlike other fans of prima facie reasons, however, I do not think that the inference
schemaLp
pis analytic in any sense, that its validity is meaning constitutive, or a priori.25
Rather, I think that the validity of that inference schema is hostage to how the worldactually is. The inference from Lp to p is valid only in the sense that it reliably leads
from truth to truth. And that is an entirely contingent matter. Let us call reasons of this
kind reliable prima facie reasons. Obviously, there is no anti-sceptical mileage to be
obtained directly from the idea that experience provides reliable prima facie reasons for
(further) belief.26
This does not mean, however, that other anti-sceptical arguments could not be
brought to bear also on a phenomenal belief theory of experience according to which
experience provides reliable prima faciereasons for (further) belief. In particular, it does
not mean that Davidsons anti-scepticism could not be extended to this account of
experience. For even though Davidson himself made heavy weather of epistemicintermediaries and their tendency to bring scepticism along for the ride, his argument
for this had nothing to do with intermediaries per se. Rather, the problem was how to
25 Pollock held that a prima facie reason is a logical reason that is defeasible (Pollock 1974, p. 40), and
explains logical reason as follows: Whenever the justified belief-that-P is a good reason for one to believe
that Q, simply by virtue of the meanings of the statements that P and that Q, we will say that the statement-that-P is a
logical reason for believing the statement-that-Q (Pollock 1974, p. 34, emphasis added). Pryor holds that it
is a priori that experiences as ofp in the absence of defeaters justify believing that p (Pryor 2000).
26 This becomes drastically clear once we spell things out in terms of probabilities. Plausibly, reason (or
evidence) providing is governed by the following principle (cf. Carnap 1950, pp. 382ff; Spectre 2009, pp. 91ff):
(EP) r is a reason for s only if Pr(s/r) Pr(s).
But now consider the following example:
(Lp) It looks as if there is something red in front of you.(p) There is something red in front of you.(q) There is something white in front of you that is illuminated with red light.
It clearly holds that Pr(p/Lp) Pr(p). But it holds equally clearly that Pr(q/Lp) Pr(q). Moreover, Pr(q/Lp)
clearly is greater than Pr(q), which means that it is not the case that Pr(:q/Lp) Pr(:q). Consequently, that it
looks as if there is something red in front of you provides you with a reason for, not against, believing that there is
something white in front of you that is illuminatedwith red light. Of course, this reason will (normally) be much
weaker than that simultaneously provided for believing that there is something red in front of you; but
nevertheless, experiences do not provide reasons against phenomenally compatible sceptical hypotheses.
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prevent them from lying. Now, as I said, I am not interested in actually defending
Davidsonian anti-scepticism. All I am claiming is that adopting a phenomenal belief
theory of experience does nothing to preempt Davidsons anti-sceptical arguments,whether these arguments are ultimately successful or not.
Modest as it is, this claim is of some independent interest, since Davidsonian anti-
scepticism is supposed to derive from the principles of content determination. These,
he thought, did not cover perceptual experiences for the simple reason that he did not
construe experiences as states with content to begin with. But once we adopt a doxastic
account of experience, this changes; then, the principle of charity should apply to
experiences as much as to any other beliefs. To round things off, I would therefore like
to ask how well a phenomenal belief theory goes together with a Davidsonian account
of content determination.
In its possibly most classical formulation, the principle of charity says (cf. Davidson1973, p. 137):
(PC) Assign truth conditions to alien sentences that make native speakers right
when plausibly possible.
The first thing to note here is that construing experiences as beliefs with phenomenal
contents does not violate this principle; such beliefs certainly will be mostly true, and
thus mostly true when expressed.
On the account of perceptual justification suggested, sincere assertions of sentences
like this looks red express epistemically very basic beliefs, however. For Davidson,
[t]he methodology of interpretation is nothing but epistemology seen in the mirror of
meaning (Davidson 1975, p. 169). Making the speaker right (by the interpreters own
lights) on phenomenal matters therefore is very important, indeed: disagreement
about how things look or appear is less tolerable than disagreement about how they
are, Davidson himself wrote early on (ibid.). For Davidson, the epistemically basic
would thus seem to coincide with the semantically basic.
In later writings, Davidson slightly shifts focus when it comes to charity and its
application to observational matters, however. In the (semantically) most basic cases, he
comes to stress, both interpreter and speaker react to the same object, or event, and its
publicly observable features. In these cases, beliefs are about common, or shared,
causes; they are about objects, or events, and their features that cause beliefs with thesame content in both interpreter and speaker: Communication begins where causes
converge: your utterance means what mine does if belief in its truth is systematically
caused by the same events and objects (Davidson 1983, p. 151).27
27 Moreover, in Davidsons later writings, especially those concerned with triangulation (cf., for instance,
Davidson 1991), the cases considered basic for content determination are also often considered basic from the
point of view of language acquisition (cf. Davidson 1999a, p. 343, already quoted above). This, however,
strikes me as illicit a priorispeculation about empirical matters. In any case, there is no philosophical reason to
think that what is semantically basicthat is, basic for the theory of content determinationmust also be
basic when it comes to language acquisition. This is fortunate, as it would be very implausible to claim that
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This shift from agreement to common causality might seem to spell trouble for
phenomenal contents. If an object x looks blue iff x causes an experience or sensation
of a certain qualitative kind, talking about xs looking blue might easily seem to be asprivate a matter as the nature of the quale in question. But in fact, the very same kind of
trouble can be seen as arising already from the idea of agreement on phenomenal
matters: if talk about phenomenal properties remains somehow private, how could we
agree on it?
There are several things to say in response. For one, we ought to distinguish the
semantically basic from the epistemically basic. As pointed out above, epistemic relevance
and semantic relevance do not necessarily coincide. Nor does what is semantically basic
necessarily coincide with what is epistemically basic. Thus, we could accept what we
might call Davidsons shared-cause externalism and argue that what is semantically
basic are not Lp-sentences, but more traditional observation sentences such as this isred orit is raining. We could maintain this even though sentences like this looks
blue orit looks as if it is raining do express epistemically more basic beliefs.28
There might, however, be a better answer. Whether or not looks-matters are
semantically basic, agreement on them certainly seems possible, and our semantics
for Lp-sentences should allow for it. We should, that is, allow for the possibility of
agreeing that an object looks blue to you, to me, and even to both of us. This can be
done if we specify the kind of sensation that is caused when something looks blue
functionally instead of qualitatively. Above, I suggested the following:
(LB) x looks blue (to a subject S at a time t) is true iff x causes a blue0 sensation
(in S at t).
This might well be fine if we interpret the primed predicate functionally: A blue 0
sensation, we can say, is a sensation of the qualitative kind that plays a certain functional
role in its subject. It is caused by certain kinds of objects or events, and it causes certain
kinds of reactions. Different qualitative kinds can then realize the same functional role
in different subjects, thus allowing for instance for spectrum inversion and preserving
the essential privacy of the quality itselfwithout preventing us from publicly talking
about, and referring to it.29
Once such an analysis of the primed predicates is in place, we can see how, and in
what sense, we can agree on phenomenal matters. If an object x looks blue (to S) iff itcauses a sensation of the qualitative kind that realizes a certain functional type F in S,
Lp-sentences play a basic role in language acquisition. There is also a tension here, it seems to me, with
Davidsons own early stress on the importance of agreement on phenomenal matters.
28 A similar point can be made about the Jones of Sellarsian myth (cf. Sellars 1963). Even if we granted that
the story shows something about the order of analysiswhich I am not prepared to grantrather than just
about concept acquisition, the order of analysis might very well be different from the order of justification.
29 Construing sensations terms such as pain in this way is proposed in Pagin (2000). In my (2007)
I extend the analysis to primed predicates in general, and explain how these then can be used in a non-circular
analysis of colour terms. For a different suggestion in what I take to be a similar spirit, see Lewis 1997.
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then you and I can straightforwardly agree that x looks blue to you (or to me). But we
can also agree that x looks blue to both of us in the following sense: x is such that in
each of the subjects in question it causes a sensation of the qualitative type that realizesFin that subject. As long as we are concerned with the phenomenal use oflooks
and that is what we are concerned with heremore agreement than that is not to be
expected.
The upshot of these considerations is that adopting a phenomenal belief theory of
experience does not prevent content determination from being governed by the
principle of charity. As we saw earlier, the phenomenal belief theory allows us to
combine (R), the claim that experience provides reasons for belief, with a fully
Davidsonian understanding of reasons as subjective and inferential. Moreover, since
perceptual experience no longer provides a counter-example to the very plausible
claim that the only propositional attitude that provides reasons for belief is that of belief,the phenomenal belief theory allows us to subscribe to the belief principle. Slightly
tongue-in-cheek, I therefore conclude that the phenomenal belief theory provides the
truly Davidsonian account of perceptual experience.30
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