DIMENSIONAMIENTO DEL SISTEMA

People in streets everywhere and on buses in Clapham, philosophers have traditionally claimed, take their perceptual experiences to be episodes of immediate apprehension of parts of reality that do not depend for their existence on those experiences of them, although they might not put it in quite this way. This conception of perceptual experience, to which Sartre subscribes, is one aspect of direct, naïve, or common-sense realism. Opponents of this view traditionally argued that perceptual experiences are episodes of apprehension of subjective objects whose existence is dependent on those experiences, objects variously labelled ideas, impressions, percepts, sensa, sensations, and sense data. There are two forms of this classical philosophical view. The historically dominant form classifies an experience as

perceptual if and only if it stands in some specified representative and / or

causal connection with a part of reality that lies beyond it and does not depend for its existence on any experience of it or thought about it. This is indirect realism: when I see a bus, my token experience consists in apprehending an object that requires for its existence only my apprehension of it, but which is related to a mind-independent bus that lies beyond it (e.g. Hume 1975, § 12: Russell 1912, ch. 1). The other form of the classical view is phenomenalism, according to which the world and its furniture consist in sequences of actual and possible subjective objects of awareness. A bus, for phenomenalists, is not a mind-independent object lying beyond appearances, but a regulated sequence of subjective entities; an experience is perceptual if and only if the subjective object of apprehension is part of an ordered sequence of such entities (e.g. Berkeley 1975).

The central target of Sartre’s attack in T he Pursuit of Being’ is the classical view common to indirect realism and phenomenalism. In arguing against this view, Sartre takes himself to be establishing the naïve, common sense, or direct realist view that perceptual experience is apprehension of part of mind-

independent reality. But this issue is no longer that simple. The classical view fell out of philosophical favour in the middle of the twentieth century, subsequent to but not consequent on the publication of Being and

Nothingness, and since then two distinct theories have developed which both

claim to be direct, naïve, or common-sense realism. This occurred because there are two ways of framing the debate between the classical and the purportedly common-sense views. To say that a perceptual experience is apprehension of a part of mind-independent reality is to deny two classical claims. It is to deny that experiences can be adequately specified without reference to parts of mind-independent reality (see Strawson 1979, 43-7). And it is to deny that when I demonstratively identify a part of the world on the basis of my experience of it, the reference of that demonstrative is derived from another, implicit demonstrative, so that my reference to ‘that bus' is in fact a reference to ‘the entity causing or represented by this experience’ or ‘the sequence of appearances of which this experience is a member’ (see Snowdon 1992). These two denials have now come apart, and two rival theories of experience have developed in anglophone philosophy.

One is intentionalism. Having an experience, on this view, consists in being in a state that represents a way the surrounding world might be, but being in this state does not require any subjective objects of awareness. If the experience correctly represents the way the surrounding world is, and perhaps is also caused in an appropriate way by the features of the surrounding world it represents, then it is perceptual; otherwise it is hallucinatory. So although there are no subjective objects either shielding or helping to constitute the world, intentionalists agree with the classical theorists that the experience involved in a perception is in principle independent of the perceiver’s immediate environment. The lack of subjective objects means that the experience can be specified only in terms of what it represents, which brings reference to the world into the specification. But since the experience involved in my perception of a bus is independent of the bus, my demonstrative identification of the bus on the basis of my experience is a derivative

demonstrative, it has a logical form such as ‘that which this experience represents’ or ‘that which is appropriately related to this experience’ (e.g. Searle 1983, ch. 2; Dancy 1985, ch. 11; McGinn 1989, 58-99; Dretske 1995, ch. 1).

The other is disjunctivism. This view alone denies that there is a single type of experience common to perception and hallucination, claiming instead that a perceptual experience of a bus is a kind of event on the basis of which direct demonstrative reference to the bus can be made, whereas an hallucinatory experience of a bus is a different kind of experience as there is no bus to be designated ‘this’. An experience is not an element in common between perception and hallucination, but rather any experience is itself either perceptual or hallucinatory. Because this theory denies that demonstrative reference made on the basis of perceptual experience is derived from an implicit demonstrative reference to the experience, claiming instead that the demonstrative is direct, it also denies that a perceptual experience can be adequately specified without reference to the seen object: my perceptual experience of a bus can be adequately specified only as an experience of a bus (see Hinton 1973, 76-82; Snowdon 1981 and 1990; McDowell 1982 and 1986; Martin 1997).

Both intentionalism and disjunctivism are forms of direct realism: intentionalism claims experiences to be direct in the weak sense that there are no subjective entities shielding reality from the subject; disjunctivism agrees and adds that experiences are direct in the strong sense that they afford direct (non-derivative) demonstrative reference to seen objects. Whether intentionalism or disjunctivism deserve to inherit the titles ‘naïve’ and ‘common-sense’, though, is not an important question here, partly because it is not clear what these titles indicate. There seem to be three ways of understanding them: as equivalent to the term ‘pre-theoretical conception’, as indicating how experience seems to the subject taking into account no factors but those derived from experiences themselves, or as an understanding of

experience embodied in our culture. But the term ‘pre-theoretical conception' appears to be an oxymoron, equivalent in this case to ‘what we think about experience before we think about experience’, unless it is supposed to indicate an innate understanding of experience. But in this case, as in the cases of understanding it as how experience strikes the subject or as a cultural notion, the question of what the naïve or common-sense idea amounts to is a question to be settled by qualitative social research, such as conducting focus groups on buses in Clapham, rather than by pure philosophical analysis.

The view that Sartre is attempting to establish by attacking the classical view is clearly disjunctivism, not intentionalism. Intentionality is relational for Sartre, not representational. It involves apprehension of a mind-independent object and cannot occur in the absence of that object, and hence is not the same as the intentionality postulated by anglophone intentionalist theories of experience (see 1.1). And experience is ‘positional’ for Sartre, which means that a perceptual experience itself affords direct demonstrative reference to the object perceived (see 1.1 and 1.2).

There are various forms of disjunctivism in current anglophone philosophy, but these can be construed as hues of two basic disjunctivist colours. One colour holds that perceptual experiences are brain states or events whose representational content is in some way dependent on the object of perception (Hinton 1973, 76-82; McDowell 1986; Martin 1997, 87 n i l ) . The other distinguishes perceptual from hallucinatory experience without commitment to the claim that perceptual experiences occur within the skin (Snowdon 1981 and 1990). Sartre’s disjunctivism is a hue of the second colour. He considers intentionality to be an alternative to representation (see B&N: xxvii), and does not consider the possibility of object-dependent representation. The notion of object-dependent representation grew out of the work of Frege and Russell on the meanings of names and descriptions and the relations between them (see McCulloch 1989), and it is against this

background that the notion is applied to perceptual experiences (e.g. McDowell 1986). It is quite foreign to Sartre, as it is a product of an analytic approach to philosophy resulting from a linguistic turn that Sartre never took. To say that perceptual experience is intentional, for Sartre, is to say that it literally (spatiotemporally) includes the object as a part, and so does not occur within the skin.

The details of Sartrean disjunctivism are the subject of chapter 3. I argue there that Sartre evades all forms of the argument from hallucination, which concludes that perceptual experience cannot ground direct demonstrative reference to the seen object on the grounds that the same experience could occur as an hallucination, where the form of disjunctivism that holds perceptual experiences to be generated within the skin cannot evade all forms of this argument (3.3). For the purposes of this chapter, though, all that matters is that Sartre’s position is a form of disjunctivism, and hence opposed to indirect realism, phenomenalism, and intentionalism. The concern of this chapter, that is, is whether Sartre succeeds in establishing the disjunctivist claim that perceptual experience requires the existence of its object, that in perceptual experience ‘consciousness is born supported by a being which is not itself (B&N: xxxvii).

Sartre attempts to establish this conclusion by arguing against the view common to indirect realism, which he labels simply ‘realism ’, and phenomenalism or ontological idealism, which he often calls simply ‘idealism’. These theories have in common the view that perceptual experience consists in apprehension of objects that are dependent for their existence on that apprehension. This view is the target of Sartre’s attack. If Sartre’s arguments are to establish his conclusion, however, they must also rule out intentionalism, which does not postulate subjective objects of apprehension but which denies that perceptual experiences themselves ground direct demonstrative reference to seen objects. But the question of whether Sartre has succeeded in establishing his position cannot be answered without first

extricating the arguments he uses from the tangled passage they are bound up in.