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DISJOINING DISJUNCTIVISM
 Clayton LittlejohnMcDowell has argued that perceptual knowledge is possible onlyif perceptual experience provides us with reasons thathallucination cannot. Perceptual experience, he continues, couldprovide these reasons only if experiential disjunctivism is true. Inresponding to his argument for experiential disjunctivism,McDowell’s critics criticize his epistemological disjunctivism andinsist that our options are not limited to epistemologicaldisjunctivism and skepticism. Epistemological disjunctivism is afar more plausible view than McDowell’s critics would have us believe and the prospects for an anti-skeptical view that dispenseswith epistemological disjunctivism are quite dim. WhereMcDowell and many of his critics err is in their shared assumptionthat epistemological disjunctivism requires experientialdisjunctivism. In this paper, I shall try to save epistemologicaldisjunctivism from the disjunctivists.0.
INTRODUCTION
 You can have a good reason to believe
 p
when it looks to you as if 
 p
. Indeed, if it looks to you as if 
 p
, you can have good enough reason to believe
 p
. Since it can look to you as if 
 p
even if ~
 p
, itseems experience can provide you with a sufficiently good reason for believing
 p
even if ~
 p.
Reasons provided by veridical perceptual experience give you the right to believe. Subjectivelyindistinguishable hallucination gives you this same right to believe. If this is right, it is thoseelements of your experience common to hallucination and perception that do the justificatory workregardless of whether you perceive things how they truly are or suffer some sort of hallucination.
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 After all, you have the same evidence either way.
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 McDowell thinks this is a horrible muddle. He thinks that hallucinations do not provide uswith the same reasons provided by subjectively indistinguishable perceptual experiences. It comesas no surprise that he does not think that the reasons we have for our beliefs are grounded infeatures common to perception and subjectively indistinguishable hallucination. Some externalistepistemologists might agree with him in saying that we do not have adequate justification for believing in the bad case. Depending upon how she describes the processes that produce the beliefs, a reliabilist could say that hallucinations do not generate justified beliefs while recognizingthat perceptual experiences do. Perhaps the idea would be that taking perceptual experience atface value is reliable, but believing on the basis of hallucination is not. Note that on such a view, thefactors that determine whether a subject’s belief is justified would seem to be factors external tothe subject’s perspective. One of the reasons McDowell’s view is so interesting is that he thinksthat justifications must have a footing in something internal to the subject’s perspective. In spite of this, he rejects the view that is commonly taken to be the proper expression of this sort of epistemological internalism. He rejects the view that asserts that our experience and evidence arethe same in the good and bad case.
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He writes:The root idea is that one’s epistemic standing … cannotintelligibly be constituted, even in part, by matters blanklyexternal to how it is with one subjectively. For how could suchmatters be other than beyond one’s ken? And how could matters
 
2 beyond one’s ken make any difference to one’s epistemicstanding? … But the disjunctive conception of appearances showsa way to detach this “internalist” intuition from the requirement of a non-question begging demonstration. When someone has a factmade manifest to him, the obtaining of this fact contributes to hisepistemic standing on the question. But the obtaining of the fact isprecisely not blankly external to his subjectivity, as it would be if the truth about that were exhausted by the highest common factor(1998: 390).McDowell thus argues that nasty epistemological consequences are avoided only if we adopt acertain view of the metaphysics of perceptual experience, one that denies that perception andhallucination are part of a common psychological kind.Our skeptic says that perception cannot furnish us with knowledge of the external world,not even if our experience is veridical. Most of us disagree. We all agree that hallucination cannotprovide knowledge. If skeptic is wrong, it is only because perceptual experience gave us somethinghallucination does not. McDowell thinks that the difference between the good and bad case cannotsimply be a difference in what subjects in these cases know (or can know). There must be furtherepistemic differences having to do with reasons or justifications and these further epistemicdifferences trace to mental differences that distinguish perception from hallucination. Any attemptto explain the difference in what can be known on the basis of perception versus hallucination thatdoes not trace to a subjective difference between the good and bad case will explain the difference between knowledge and ignorance in terms of features of the situation that are beyond the subject’sken (i.e., in terms of conditions that would be ‘blankly external’ to these subjects’ subjectivity).Thus, McDowell concludes, we can avoid skepticism only if we adopt a disjunctivist conception of experience, one that allows for the possibility of subjective differences that distinguish perceptualstates from the state of mind one is in when hallucinating.
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On this view, it can look to S as if 
 p
 even if it is not the case that
 p
(e.g., when S hallucinates), but in the case of deception it is a
mere
appearance before the mind whereas in the case of veridical perception experience embraces theexternal facts themselves and thus there is no reason to think there is some mere defeasibleconnection between perceptual experience and the world.
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 McDowell’s argument can be restated as follows:(1) If perceptual knowledge of the external world is possible,then epistemological disjunctivism must be true.(2) Epistemological disjunctivism could be true only if experiential disjunctivism is true.(C) Perceptual knowledge of the external world is possibleonly if experiential disjunctivism is true.The epistemological disjunctivist thinks beliefs based on perceptual experience enjoy a better standing than those based on subjectively indistinguishable hallucination. We need tosharpen this talk of epistemic standing. Everyone thinks that knowledge is possible only in the caseof perception. It is plausible to think beliefs based on perceptual experience could be warrantedwhile insisting that beliefs based on hallucinations cannot. The real controversy concernsMcDowell’s claims about justification and justifiers.
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Let’s say that
weak epistemological disjunctivism
 is the view that the reasons or evidence provided by experience in the good case are not just thereasons are evidence we have in the bad case. Let’s say that
strong epistemological disjunctivism
is theview that it is only in the good case where it looks to S as if 
 p
and S’s belief that
 p
is the case is justified. I shall defend both weak and strong epistemological disjunctivism. Like McDowell, I
 
3think weak epistemological disjunctivism is non-negotiable for non-skeptics. I shall argue in thispaper that weak epistemological disjunctivism is something that non-skeptical contemporaryfoundationalists will just have to live.It can look to S as if 
 p
whether S perceives that
 p
is the case or is hallucinating. The
experiential 
 
disjunctivist
says that perception and hallucination do not belong to a commonpsychological category. The difference between perception and hallucination is a kind of subjectivemental difference, albeit one that might not allow the subject to introspectively distinguishperception from hallucination.
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 Here is a common reaction to McDowell: he defends a deeply implausible claim aboutperceptual experience on the basis of deeply implausible claims about perceptual knowledge andthe justification of perceptual belief. I do not intend to defend his claims about perceptualexperience. I don’t have any view about experiential disjunctivism to defend. I think hisepistemology is sound and is not nearly as interesting as McDowell or his critics would have us believe. McDowell’s epistemology is one that even the sense-data theorist could love.
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 1.
THE STATUS OF EPISTEMOLOGICAL DISJUNCTIVISM
 I want to begin by addressing objections to epistemological disjunctivism. After explaining why theobjections to epistemological disjunctivism are not convincing, I shall offer an argument for theweak epistemological disjunctivist thesis.1.1
OBJECTIONS TO EPISTEMOLOGICAL DISJUNCTIVISM
 Because McDowell says that the evidence S has for her beliefs in the good case are better than whatshe would have in the bad case on the grounds that only subjects in the good case have knowledge,some take him to be committed to the view that among the conditions necessary for knowledge isthat the possession of evidence or reasons that the subject could have only in the good case.Because of this, some might take McDowell to be saying that it is impossible for the truth of a belief to be the only thing that distinguishes a good case of perceptual knowledge from the bad case. Inturn, this suggests that his view is that a perceptual belief constitutes knowledge only if based onsomething that is incompatible with the falsity of that belief. Does that mean that McDowellsubscribes to the infallibilist view that S can know
 p
only if S’s basis for believing
 p
is incompatiblewith ~
 p
? He might, but epistemological disjunctivism as such does not entail infallibilism.
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Atleast, I hope it doesn’t. Infallibilism leads to skepticism.
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It might not lead to a skeptical attitudeconcerning perceptual knowledge, but it leads to skepticism concerning induction. If knowledge ispossible only when we have infallible grounds for our beliefs, the external world skeptic might bewrong but I cannot see how the inductive skeptic could be.Is McDowell committed to infallibilism? According to fallibilism:(F) It is possible for a subject to know that
 p
is the case on the basis of evidence or grounds that do not entail that
 p
.If fallibilism is true, subjects in good and bad cases could have just the same evidence or reasons for believing
 p
, but one of these subjects will be mistaken in believing
 p
. But, then it seems that thedifference between the good and bad case will be ‘blankly external’ to the subjects in these cases.So, either there can be differences in epistemic standing that are blankly external to the subjects inthe good and bad case or infallibilism is true and knowledge based on non-entailing grounds orevidence is impossible. If the former is true, we do not need experiential disjunctivism tounderstand how perceptual knowledge is possible. If the latter is true, we trade one skepticalproblem for another.
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