An Alternative to the Adverbial Theory: Dis-Phenomenalism

Abstract

An apple appears in my visual field. As a matter of fact there may be no apple in front of me. I may be mistaking a patch on the table for an apple, or only be hallucinating. But even in such cases the visual episode seems to involve, in some sense, an apple. Metaphorically, we might want to say that the apple episode takes place in the cognizer's internal or subjective world, or from his first-person point of view; while as things are from the outside, in the objective world, from a third-person point of view, the apple may not really exist. But these are of course mere metaphors. What, more precisely, is the nature of such an 'internal' apple episode? The standard response nowadays is the so-called adverbial theory, according to which the items (entities, events) that appear in the visual episode, such as the apple, are not real items. What exists in the world is only the cognizer's non-relational state of having an experience of those items. The ordinary motivation for this move is the common belief that it is the only way to avoid positing non-existents or non-physical entities such as sense-data, and thus to account for the nature of our experience in an ontologically plausible way. But this commonly accepted view, as well as its motivation, is, I think, mistaken. First, as I will argue, denying the existence of the items that appear in the visual episode runs contrary to the phenomenological fact that they confront with their presence. And second, for those who are suspicious of phenomenological facts, there is an alternative account of the nature of such episodes which is both ontologically elegant and phenomenologically plausible. This alternative to the adverbial theory (which is relatedto views proposed by Gustav Bergmann, and later by Laird Addis)' is the view that I will suggest here. As we