disjunctivism

   The term disjunctivism is indebted to the Latin dis (apart, away from each other) and iungere (to connect). It translates loosely as 'disconnection doctrine'. The term disjunctivism is used to denote a philosophical doctrine based on the disjunctive theory ofappearances introduced in 1973 by the British philosopher John Michael Hinton (1924-2000). Hinton's theory denies that genuine sense perceptions and subjectively indistinguishable hallucinations are states of the same fundamental psychological kind. Starting from the premise that the two types ofpercepts arepsycho-logical experiences that may have identical qualities, the disjunctive theory suggests that they are nevertheless fundamentally different, due to the fact that thequalities ofperceived objects orstim-uli are instantiated in cases of genuine sense perception, whereas in cases of hallucinatory phenomena they are merely represented.Inthewords of the British philosopher Tim Crane "What the disjunctivist therefore rejects is what J.M. Hinton calls 'the doctrine of the "experience" as the common element in a given perception' and an indistinguishable hallucination. The most specific common description of both states, then, is a merely disjunctive one: the perceptual appearance of a rabbit is either a genuine perception of a rabbit or a mere hallucination of a rabbit. Hence the theory's name." A theory opposing disjunctivism is known under the name * qualia theory.

   References

   Crane, T. (2006). Is there a perceptual relation? In: Perceptual experience. Edited by Gendler, T.S., Hawthorne, J. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

   Hinton, J.M. (1973). Experiences: An inquiry into some ambiguities. Oxford: Clarendon Press