THE CONTENT OF COMPLEX VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS
According to a widespread view about the content of conscious experience (Peacocke, 1992; Siegel, 2007), an experience has content when it is accurate relative to a possible scenario. Suppose you saw a ripe tomato. Your visual experience would have content if what you saw looked exactly like a ripe...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | German |
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Babeș-Bolyai University
2020-08-01
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| Series: | Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai. Philosophia |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://studia.reviste.ubbcluj.ro/index.php/subbphilosophia/article/view/2688 |
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| Summary: | According to a widespread view about the content of conscious experience (Peacocke, 1992; Siegel, 2007), an experience has content when it is accurate relative to a possible scenario. Suppose you saw a ripe tomato. Your visual experience would have content if what you saw looked exactly like a ripe tomato, be it a genuine tomato or an expertly designed wax copy of a tomato. I argue that this view cannot account for the content of a hallucination whose content is impossible. A 95-year old patient seems to see small pumpkins and flowers coming out of her body (Rocha et al., 2012). Intuitively, the patient's hallucination has content. But the accuracy-conditions view has to classify the experience as devoid of content, because what the patient hallucinated is impossible – accurate to no possible scenario. On the concept of flower we possess, it is incoherent for flowers to erupt from under one's skin. This visual hallucination is a counterexample to the view that an experience is endowed with content only relative to its accuracy conditions.
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| ISSN: | 2065-9407 |