1. Pritchard-style disjunctivism

The statement of disjunctivism in terms of (1) and (2), from which I started this paper, derives from Duncan Pritchard's influential exposition of the view. As Pritchard writes (Pritchard Reference Pritchard2012: 13):

From this passage, it is clear that Pritchard envisages a certain division of labor in the way the disjunctivist conceives of experience's epistemic value. Specifically, the knowledge-guaranteeing character of a disjunctivist conception of experience's epistemic value centers in (1). If it is a slogan that, for the disjunctivist, the epistemic value of experience does not “stop short of the facts”, then for Pritchard this points to a more literal place that facts hold in a disjunctivist conception of experience's epistemic value. Specifically, perceptual experience is a factive state, which therefore entails the truth of a relevant proposition p. For example, a factive state pertaining to a tiger pouncing at me entails that there is a tiger pouncing at me. Now, for Pritchard it is clearly because experience's epistemic value entails the truth of perceptual beliefs that experience's epistemic value guarantees the subject an opportunity for knowledgeable belief (whether or not the subject manages to avail herself of this opportunity).

In turn, on Pritchard's view the type of “reflective accessibility” articulated by (2) specifies merely the way the subject is in a subjective position to exploit the epistemic value of her experience for knowledge. On this account, the subject reflectively appreciates her possession of entailing grounds for p, and therefore appreciates her being in a secure position to knowledgeably judge that p. Accordingly, the heart of Pritchard's rendering of disjunctivism centers on a specific explanatory connection between the epistemic value of experience and the beliefs it grounds, viz. a connection grounded in entailment.

For Pritchard's version of disjunctivism, it is important that perceptual experience relates subjects to facts, since it is perception's factive character that grounds the way experience entails propositions (Pritchard Reference Pritchard2012: 14). However, it is controversial to claim that we perceive facts,Footnote ¹⁰ and more recently philosophers have suggested that disjunctivists can preserve Pritchard's general model while avoiding the commitment that we perceive facts. On this view, disjunctivism can be grounded not in seeing facts, i.e. true propositions, but in seeing the truth-makers for such propositions (i.e. some set of objects and/or properties o…o_n).Footnote ¹¹ Since seeing is a relation, seeing o…o_n entails the existence of o…o_n. In turn, given that o…o_n are truth-makers for propositions like p, the existence of o…o_n entails the truth of propositions like p. Accordingly, even while seeing o…o_n is not strictly a factive state since it does not take facts as its objects, it nevertheless entails the truth of p. In French's terms, the idea that experience presents the subject with truth-makers grounds a “quasi-factive” relation between experience and propositions, which suffices for disjunctivist purposes.

As French's reference to “quasi-factivity” illustrates, while we can distinguish different disjunctivist accounts in terms of whether they characterize experience as fact-relating or truth-maker-relating, nevertheless Pritchard's model captures something these accounts share in common. As printed in the table below, while truth-maker views deny Pritchard's connection between disjunctivism and strict factivity, these views maintain Pritchard's more fundamental gloss on the disjunctivist thought: the idea that experience's epistemic value guarantees true perceptual judgments by entailing the relevant propositions.

In the rest of this paper I will group together these various forms of disjunctivism as “Pritchard-style disjunctivism”. I will diverge from Pritchard's focus on entailment, and suggest that a better version of disjunctivism centers on a different fundamental paradigm: presentation.

2. Disjunctivism: Evidentialist

As the centerpiece of an experientialist perceptual epistemology, the epistemic value of experience plays a pivotal role in internalist accounts of perceptual justification. Experience's epistemic value is the support that experiencing subjects are supposed to have internalistically available such as to equip them to judge. In what does such internalistic support consist? To bring my version of disjunctivism into view, we should start from what is a broad consensus internalist answer to this question. On this consensus, experience equips the subject with a type of “evidence” for belief.Footnote ¹² I will say that this idea marks “evidentialist” types of internalism.

To appreciate the structure of evidentialist internalism, consider a familiar internalist view:

Defined in this way, dogmatism in effect exploits a central feature of an evidentialist conception of perceptual justification to treat the way experience comes in “good” and “bad” cases. Specifically, the operative idea is that evidential support can fall short of guaranteeing the truth of the proposition it supports.Footnote ¹⁴ Accordingly, for the dogmatist experience provides some evidence for belief – evidence that is sufficient for the subject to be justified in forming beliefs based on how things seem to her in experience. But such justification is always prima facie. In a “good case”, if things are as the subject's evidence would make them seem, then the subject gains perceptual knowledge. But if things are not as they seem, as in the bad case, the subject was no less justified in responding to her experiential evidence. Rather, since the justification provided by her experiential evidence was prima facie and therefore defeasible, the subject merely fails to gain knowledge.

Of course, disjunctivism dissents from the dogmatist idea that perceptual justification is merely prima facie. After all, the Pritchard-style disjunctivist holds that in the good case experience's epistemic value entails the truth of perceptual judgments. But while rejecting the dogmatist's conception of perceptual justification as prima facie, Pritchard does not depart from the more fundamental paradigm of evidentialist internalism. On Pritchard's view, the relevant contrast is that dogmatists hold that evidence experience provides for belief is “prima facie” or “defeasible”, while for disjunctivists it is “indefeasible” or “conclusive”. Being “conclusive” and “indefeasible” are predicated of evidence: these qualifications characterize the way particular pieces of evidence locate on a spectrum of evidential support, specifically as located beyond a point where the obtaining of the evidential support entails the truth of the proposition supported. In this way, in Pritchard's rendering the disjunctivist's dispute lies not in what experience's epistemic value consists, but rather in the strength or status of experiential evidence. By contrast, I will now introduce an alternative paradigm for an internalist perceptual epistemology, intended not to qualify a type of degree of evidence, but to replace evidence as the relevant mode of epistemic support.

3. Disjunctivism: Presentational

Perception famously has a presentational character. As Scott Sturgeon puts the point:

Clearly perception's presentational character is not that it presents one's environment in a “uniquely vivid way”. While it is true that perception stands apart from thought in its qualitative character, the point is not that perception is a particularly striking show of color- and object-experiences. Rather, the central point is that perception does present its objects; that, unlike in thought, the objects of perceptual experience appear quite literally present to one.

If presentational character is an important feature of perceptual experience, Broad has noted an interesting aspect of the phenomenon:

As Broad notes, the presentational character of experience may seem in some sense “paradoxical”. Objects are external to us, yet in experience they seem “right there, available to us” (Valberg Reference Valberg1992: 4). The version of presentationalism at issue in this paper amounts to the idea of taking Broad's paradox at face value. Perceptual awareness appears to present environmental items precisely because perceptual awareness is the presentation of such items. Experience consists of awareness in which the subject is presented with aspects of the environment, i.e. objects and (arguably) their properties, such that the relevant features are present to the subject.

Before moving to give my account of perceptual presence, I should briefly note that by understanding perceptual presentation specifically as a conception of experience's epistemic value, there are other familiar associations with presentation to which I lay no claim. One such association is presentational phenomenology. Several recent philosophers have exploited presentation specifically as an aspect of perceptual phenomenology to answer questions about perceptual justification.Footnote ¹⁵ For my purposes, this is not the right notion since for these views it is experience's merely appearing to present truth-makers for representational contents that provides the subject with justification for belief. That is, presentational phenomenology is not unique to cases of perception, but also can be true of cases like hallucinatory experience. Accordingly, such a notion of phenomenal presence can never guarantee the truth of judgments it justifies.Footnote ¹⁶

My notion of presence also does not mark a naïve realist or anti-representationalist position, which is the idea that objects are presented in a way that makes them part of what metaphysically constitutes the experience in which they are presented. Characterizing the epistemic value of experience in presentational terms is a different issue. As has recently been pointed out (Genone Reference Genone2014), naïve realism is at least partly to be understood in terms of the idea that perception is not fundamentally a representational state.Footnote ¹⁷ By contrast, it is open for me to claim that epistemic value is best understood in terms of a type of representational content.Footnote ¹⁸

Finally, the position at issue in this paper must also be distinguished from the epistemological view that the objects of experience constitute so-called “objectual reasons” which perception provides the subject.Footnote ¹⁹ The idea of an “objectual reason”, on which this view centers, is that presented objects constitute reasons for judgment. This view is more specific than the presentationalism at issue here. My view is that the epistemic significance of experience can be understood through the notion of presentation, whether or not it is reasons that perception thus presents. As I will suggest, perceptual presentation constitutes a fundamental gloss on the link between experience and knowledge, which is something not captured by the notion of a reason as such.

What, then, is presentational disjunctivism? The key to this understanding of disjunctivism lies in a notion to which Pritchard-style disjunctivists frequently pay mere lip service: the subject's mode of “reflective access” to the epistemic value of her experience.Footnote ²⁰ Recall the two clauses of Pritchard's disjunctivism: (1) experience's epistemic value guarantees the truth of her perceptual judgments; and (2) subjects can become aware of this epistemic value by having suitable “reflective access” to her experience. Pritchard-style entailment-based forms of disjunctivism focus on (1): entailment is an explanation of how experience's epistemic value is supposed to guarantee true perceptual judgments. But what about (2)? On my presentational view, it is only through a particular way of understanding (2) that we are in a position to understand (1), and to appreciate what it is that disjunctivism fundamentally tells us about perceptual epistemology. To state the relevant explanatory connection in a third table,

What is our “reflective access” to our mind? How do human subjects come to know the character of their conscious experiences? According to the answer that I will here follow,Footnote ²¹ such self-knowledge is simply internal to the conscious state itself. Compare the question how I know what I am presently thinking. Plausibly, such knowledge is partly constitutive of the act of thinking itself: there is no thinking a thought T that does not partly involve self-awareness of thinking T. The present proposal is that the same goes for the character of experiential states. In having an experience E I can become aware of features of my environment, but I also become aware of features of my mind, namely having E. More specifically, according to the view I have in mind this latter feature of conscious sensory experience is owed specifically to our rational nature as thinkers. States that are constitutively self-conscious are proper to thought, and extend from there to our sensory states.Footnote ²²

Understood in this way, the way perceiving subjects enjoy “reflective access” to their experiences is critical in appreciating the way perceptual presentation grounds a version of disjunctivism. In experience, subjects are presented with the environmental features of which they are thereby placed in a position to gain knowledge: the chairs, tables, people around them, etc. Moreover, just in having such experiences, subjects are also self-aware that these items are presented to them in their experience. But then it follows that the relevant experiences are such that they simply could not be had should the relevant items not exist, or should relevant propositions about them be false. After all, in that case the relevant items could not have been presented in the way they are. Accordingly, perceptual presence guarantees (1) the truth of the perceptual judgments that the subject is positioned to make – and (2) that the subject can be aware of (1).

To further clarify, consider John McDowell's expression of the same line of thought (McDowell Reference McDowell2011: 30–1; emphasis in original):

As McDowell sets out noting, the way mature human conscious experience involves self-awareness gives content to the idea that capacities for such experiences belong to a subject's rationality: the subject's experience is a form of “rationally self-conscious awareness”. In turn, if the subject's experiences can include “having a feature of her environment perceptually present to her”, then this means that experience can ensure the truth of certain judgments. After all, the subject being in such an experiential state, in which certain environment features are present, is simply inconsistent with the falsity of these judgments.

Accordingly, we can now state the way in which conceiving of the epistemic value of experience through a presentationalist paradigm provides a non-evidentialist gloss on the disjunctivist view. In being self-conscious of being presented with features of her environment, the subject is aware of being in a position that ensures the truth of (appropriate) perceptual judgments. In contrast with Pritchard-style views, experience placing a subject in such a position is not a matter of the strength of the subject's experiential evidence or, in Pritchard's precise formulation, such evidence entailing propositions. Rather, it is a matter of the subject's self-conscious awareness being such as to have objects manifestly presented to her. The subject's awareness of standing in a perceiving relation to her environment is non-evidentiary.

So far I have distinguished my presentational disjunctivism from Prichard-style evidentalist disjunctivism. But I have not yet provided grounds for preferring the presentational paradigm over Pritchard's variant. Ultimately (§6) I will suggest that there is a fundamental way in which the presentational paradigm captures disjunctivism as a form of internalism about perceptual justification. But I will first turn to a more specific dialectical advantage.

4. The dialectical infelicity problem

My discussion in this paper has so far focused on disjunctivism's positive claim, viz. the disjunctivist's positive conception of experience's epistemic value. To bring out the present challenge to disjunctivism, I will now turn to its core negative claim, i.e. its treatment of the relevance of bad cases. Classically, disjunctivism's negative claim can be stated as the denial of a thesis along the following lines:

There are many ways of denying claims that philosophers have described as “Highest Common Factor” theses. However, we should here note that on the above claim the highest common factor concerns specifically the epistemic value of experience as it is accessible to the subject. This produces a problem. Perceptual experience equips a subject with an indefeasible, self-consciously possessed opportunity for perceptual knowledge. It would seem to follow that the subject thereby possesses indefeasible grounds for believing anti-skeptical propositions. After all, such propositions are straightforwardly entailed by the truth of perceptual judgments. But then it seems that the subject is capable of distinguishing her condition from the obtaining of skeptical scenarios. But ex hypothesi skeptical scenarios are such that the good and bad cases are subjectively indiscriminable.Footnote ²⁴ This seems sufficient to suggest that disjunctivism occupies a dialectically poor position vis-à-vis the skeptic.Footnote ²⁵

However, appreciating what I call disjunctivism's “dialectical infelicity problem” requires discussing one more wrinkle, since the disjunctivist has a response available to the initial worry introduced in the previous paragraph. The disjunctivist response is that the common skeptical description of good and bad cases as “indiscriminable” relies on an implicit argument.Footnote ²⁶ The implicit argument goes as follows. In a skeptical scenario, the subject in the bad case cannot know, based on her experience, that she is in the bad case. By contrast, the disjunctivist claims that in the good case the subject can know, based on her experience, that she is in the good case. How exactly do these claims seem in tension? The implicit argument bringing these two commitments in tension centers on the premise that if the subject in the bad case cannot know, based on experience, that she is in the bad case, then the subject in the good case cannot know, based on experience, that she is in the good case. Or again, if the subject in the bad case cannot rule out that she is in the bad case, then the subject in the good case cannot rule out that she is in the bad case, either.

According to the disjunctivist, this implicit argument should be rejected. In effect, the argument introduces an auxiliary premise to skeptical arguments to the effect that a subject's knowledge of the nature of her experience must be due to a general ability for self-knowledge, such that the capacity for self-knowledge is operative in the bad case just as it is in the good case. On the assumption of this premise, as experience in the good case allows the subject to know some type of facts F about the character of her experience, experience in the bad case must also put the subject in a position to know facts of type F about the character of her experience. But the bad case shows that F cannot extend to whether or not an experience is perceptual. Therefore, the subject in the good case cannot, on grounds of her experience, know that she is perceiving.Footnote ²⁷ Consider accordingly the auxiliary premise on which the implicit argument hinges:

Understanding the dialectic vis-à-vis the skeptic this way, the disjunctivist's next move is to deny this Auxiliary Premise. For the disjunctivist, we can deny that experience in the bad case provides the same basis for self-knowledge as experience in the good case. Accordingly, in denying the Auxilliary Premise, the disjunctivist marks a distinction between the way the subject's capacity for self-knowledge operates in good and bad cases. Specifically, the disjunctivist seeks to suggest that what the subject in the good case can know about her experience is different (and “more”, so-to-say) than the subject in the bad case. In particular, in the good case what the subject can know includes that she is in the good case, but in the bad case what the subject can know does not include that she is in the bad case. Accordingly, the disjunctivist is committed to the following

This is where I suggest the disjunctivist faces the “dialectical infelicity problem”. Consider: what non-question-begging ground can the disjunctivist offer the skeptic in support of the Asymmetry Claim, other than that her position requires this claim to be true? That is, what recommends the Asymmetry Claim over the Auxiliary Premise? As a first pass, the disjunctivist may hope to exploit the general shape of her view. Specifically, the disjunctivist may hope to transpose her negative claim from perception to self-knowledge. In the good case, experience ensures an opportunity for perceptual knowledge, even as in the bad case it does not. Just so, in the good case experience ensures an opportunity for self-knowledge, even as in the bad case it does not. Accordingly, the dialectical position for the disjunctivist might appear as follows. The Asymmetry Claim appears to flout the indiscriminability of the good and bad cases. However, this appearance merely trades on the same illicit assimilation of the good case to the bad case that the disjunctivist is in general concerned to deny, this time as experience supports self-knowledge.Footnote ²⁸

But this reply is too quick. The reason is that where in the perceptual case the disjunctivist's negative claim picks up on a natural distinction between the good and the bad case, this is not obviously true in the case of self-knowledge. Consider some set of environmental properties G, like redness and so on. It is entirely natural to think that perception is a capacity to pick up properties belonging to G, and that in the good case properties belonging to G are plausibly available for knowledge, whereas in the bad case they are not. But contrast the set of mental properties F. The question concerning the nature of perceptual self-knowledge is precisely whether “is a perceptual experience” is a member of F. Indeed, the upshot of the bad case can plausibly seem that it is not. But then the disjunctivist seems to lack natural grounds for the Asymmetry Claim.Footnote ²⁹

Accordingly, this is the disjunctivist's “dialectical infelicity problem”. Disjunctivism requires the idea that self-knowledge is asymmetrical between the good and bad cases, but we have not been given grounds to favor this view over the view that self-knowledge in two cases is symmetrical. Specifically, the very aspect of experience that is supposed to be subjectively accessible in the good case, i.e. that a state is perceptual, is the aspect that the bad case seems to show is not obviously within a subject's capacity to detect (based on experience alone). Accordingly, the disjunctivist's best result seems a stalemate.

This is where I suggest that, in its reliance on a specific model of self-awareness, the presentational conception of epistemic value bears the unique value of resolving the “dialectical infelicity problem” for the disjunctivist. The central idea is that it is a subtle misreading to take the disjunctivist to repeat or transpose her core strategy of denying inferences from the bad to the good case, now concerning the way experience grounds self-knowledge. Rather, the disjunctivist's strategy at once distinguishes bad from good cases – both as grounds for perceptual knowledge and as grounds for self-knowledge. The reason is that on the presentational paradigm experience's epistemic value is conceived as intrinsically self-conscious, i.e. a single state intelligible only insofar as it provides grounds for perceptual knowledge and as grounds for self-knowledge. That is, the way a presentational state serves as a basis for perceptual knowledge itself resides in its nature as a basis for a relevant type of self-knowledge.Footnote ³⁰

Appreciating the “dual character” of a single state of perceptual presence allows the disjunctivist to provide the following more specific version of the Asymmetry Claim:

What the Defectiveness Claim provides is a particular grounding of the Asymmetry Claim that allows the disjunctivist to overcome her dialectical infelicity problem. The grounding is that, given the foregoing, just as the bad case constitutes a malfunction of perception, so it constitutes a malfunction of self-knowledge.Footnote ³¹ Consider a case where the subject appears to be presented with some item, but is in fact not. This is uncontroversially a defective exercise of the subject's perceptual capacities. But now, if the subject's capacity for self-knowledge is implicated in the very same aspect of this state, it must also be a defective exercise of the subject's capacity for self-knowledge. That is, it goes to the very heart of the disjunctivist view to see it as a mistake that we can picture the bad case as involving a subject's functioning capacity for self-awareness in abstraction from a functioning perceptual capacity. A subject cannot merely appear to be in a state of presence where this is a failure of perception but not of self-knowledge, since being in a state of presence is a single modification of a subject's self-consciousness. In the register of self-knowledge, the bad case will make it seem to the perceiving subject that she is in the same type of state as she would be in the good case. But this is no different than that it seems to her that she is confronted with environmental realities, when she is not. The environmental realities are not there, and neither is she in a position that is like the good case.

This now allows us to appreciate the way the disjunctivist's original argumentative move can be “transposed” to the case of self-knowledge. Just as in the case of ground level perceptual knowledge there is no inference from the defective nature of the bad case to the nature of the good case, so the same inference fails insofar as it relates to self-knowledge. For the disjunctivist, the epistemic value of experience in the good case is such that, by the subject's own self-conscious lights, experience puts her in a position to gain knowledge of the environment. The existence of defective states of this type does not bear on the description of the good case, neither in its perceptual knowledge-granting nor in its self-knowledge granting aspects. Accordingly, indiscriminability is fundamentally asymmetrical between the good and bad cases, since the indiscriminability involves a failure of self-knowledge in the bad case. Accordingly, the disjunctivist need not face a dialectical infelicity problem in her response to skepticism. Perhaps the “holy grail” of epistemology is after all a treasure worth chasing.Footnote ³² In any case, doing so requires the resources of the presentational version of disjunctivism.

5. Objections

In the next section I will conclude with a reflection on the relation between presentational disjunctivism and what has been called “luminous” self-knowledge. However, first let me answer some concerns that may arise at this point.Footnote ³³

First, it may be unclear in what sense precisely the presentational paradigm differs from the evidentiary one. It may seem the difference is merely verbal, turning on the colloquial meaning of the word ‘evidence’. But the distinction is more substantial: evidence and presence mark out two distinct modes of conceiving of the rationality of a state of knowledge. When evidence supports a proposition, it does so by providing a certain type of grounds for the subject's belief: grounds that may be very strong, indeed may entail a proposition, but are qua mode of rational support consistent with other relevant evidence or considerations. That is, when in possession of evidence for a proposition, the subject may find the evidence entails the proposition, but this is a contingent fact that the subject needs to glean from her understanding of the nature of the evidence. By contrast, the present suggestion is that perception is a paradigm of a different mode of rational support for knowledge. In being self-aware of perceiving, the subject is self-aware that the support for her judgment is right there: the nature of the perceptual mode of rational support is per se such as to be conclusive. That is, a perceived object is not an especially strong bit of evidence for a proposition, which the subject can glean to be conclusive. Rather, in self-consciously perceiving, the subject is aware that she is enjoying a state that by its nature presents conclusive support for beliefs. In this sense, the evidence/presence distinction is far from inconsequential or merely verbal. Indeed, the distinction explicates the substance of epistemological disjunctivism as a view of perceptual epistemology. Disjunctivism is not merely the view that, as opposed to the reigning consensus, perceptual support can be conclusive. Instead, it is that the reigning consensus, under apparent force from the possibility of hallucination, is led to altogether mistake the mode of rationality that perception involves.Footnote ³⁴

A second worry concerns the claim that hallucinating subjects lack self-knowledge of a certain sort. On this worry, there is sufficient intuitive support behind the claim that hallucinating subjects are capable of correctly observing the phenomenal character of their experience that this claim cannot effectively be challenged by what appears to be a highly theoretically sophisticated claim that experience involves self-awareness. If this is true, then it can seem to revive a version of the dialectical infelicity problem: epistemological disjunctivism seems to depend on the mere assertion that experience involves the relevant form of self-awareness. However, there are two responses to this concern.

First, it cannot simply be accepted that an introspective claim about the character of hallucinations is immediately straightforward and unassailably “intuitive”. The claim that hallucinations lack phenomenology has been sustained by sophisticated observations about the character of introspection and buttressed by ample responses to objections by such philosophers as Martin (Reference Martin2004, Reference Martin, Gendler and Hawthorne2006) and Fish (Reference Fish2009, Reference Fish2013). Much more generally, “Cartesian” assumptions about introspective infallibility have long been a target of criticism in contemporary epistemology.

Second, we should be careful on the topic of how theoretically sophisticated is the view that experience is self-aware, and exactly what consequences it entails. The claim that experiential states of rational subjects include a self-aware element is not merely popular in recent philosophy of mind, figuring in higher-order theories of consciousness, self-representational theories of consciousness, various forms of disjunctivism and first-order self-consciousness views.Footnote ³⁵ Instead, the claim is also among the animating ideas in philosophers like Kant and Aristotle. As one of Aristotle's paradigmatic statements of the view has it: “we perceive that we perceive” (De Anima 425b12-25). The upshot is that assumptions about the nature of introspection are highly fraught, and self-consciousness is a topic of profound historical attention. To be sure, it can rightly be said that I have not positively argued for the relevant view in this paper. However, given my aim in this paper of explicating epistemological disjunctivism in a critical respect, conclusively arguing for a view of self-consciousness must lie beyond my purview. I'm happy to establish the more limited claim that epistemological disjunctivism turns on a historically storied view of self-consciousness in rational subjects.

Moreover, we should be nuanced about what the epistemological disjunctivist is required to claim. The critical claim is that the subject's self-awareness is deficient, and she can therefore not differentiate her position from a perception – which is not a deficiency that is mirrored in a perceiving subject. However, from this it need not necessarily follow that the subject is wrong about every aspect of her experience. While I do not pursue this question here, it may be possible to allow hallucinatory phenomenology, claiming that the subject is right that it seems to her that p but wrong that she is perceiving that p.Footnote ³⁶

6. Concluding reflection: self-knowledge and anti-luminosity

In this paper I have suggested a contrast between presentational and Pritchard-style evidentialist forms of disjunctivism. Moreover, I have suggested that presentational disjunctivism faces an advantage resolving the “dialectical infelicity problem”. In this last section I will conclude by briefly surveying the philosophically deeper significance of presentational disjunctivism in light of a popular argument first proposed in Williamson's Knowledge and its Limits (Reference Williamson2000) and since repeated elsewhere. I here address a version of Williamson's argument specifically tailored to disjunctivism by Haddock (Reference Haddock2011).

As I have argued, disjunctivism trades strongly on an intimate connection between conscious experience and self-awareness, since this connection grounds the subject's awareness of the epistemic value of her experience. The aim of Williamson's argument is to undermine the possibility of this connection, i.e. a form of self-knowledge that is intrinsic or internal to conscious states.Footnote ³⁷ To arrive at this conclusion, the Williamson-style argument starts by positing that if a mental state is to count as knowledge, it must be subject to some reliability constraint. As Haddock phrases the idea:

What is the idea here? The point is twofold: (i) knowing p requires suitable responsiveness to p being true; (ii) moreover, a capacity for such responsiveness must in some sense be limited in its sensitivity. Humans are simply not perfectly sensitive in detecting truths. As Haddock traces the implication of such a reliability constraint, it follows that where t and t + 1 are some infinitesimally small fraction apart, if a subject knows p at t, then p is true at t + 1. And if she knows p at t + 1, then p is still true at t + 2, etc. Otherwise, the Williamsonian thinking goes, we would not credit a subject with a reliable capacity for detecting the truth of p.Footnote ³⁸

Assume now that p is the subject being in a perceptual state. Then, in an example provided by Haddock (Reference Haddock2011: 30):

But,

Accordingly, we imagine a time span from t through t + n over which the subject gradually stops seeing something (in this case, that a sweater is brown). So at t + n the subject is no longer seeing that the sweater is brown. From the foregoing it follows that if at t the subject knows she is seeing that the sweater is brown, then at t + 1 it is still true that she is seeing that the sweater is brown. Just so, if at t + 1 the subject knows that she is seeing that the sweater is brown, then at t + 2 it is still true that she is seeing that the sweater is brown. And so on. But now assume that at t + n-1 the subject is seeing that the sweater is brown. Then, if perceptual consciousness were constitutively self-known or self-knowable the subject at t + n-1 is in a position to know that she is seeing that the sweater is brown. From this it follows that the subject at t + n is seeing that the sweater is brown. But we have stipulated that at t + n the subject is no longer seeing that the sweater is brown. Contradiction. It seems there cannot be a constitutive connection between conscious mental states and self-knowledge or self-awareness.

While these Williamson-style arguments have been widely accepted, for present purposes the philosophical interest is in seeing the way presentational disjunctivism would resist the objection. Specifically, the disjunctivism I have developed rejects the Williamson-style argument straight from its starting-point – i.e. the idea that self-knowledge is attended by a reliability condition. This is because for the disjunctivist (as I have specified her) it is the nature of thinking minds to have self-consciousness as a feature of their first-order consciousness. For thinkers, experiential consciousness simply is experiential self-consciousness. Haddock shows awareness of this suggestion when he concedes that “unlike my perceptual knowledge that P, my knowledge that I perceive that P is, for [the disjunctivist], in some sense spontaneous”.Footnote ³⁹ As Haddock describes the idea:

As Haddock here outlines, for receptive knowledge (of which perceptual knowledge is a species) the object is not sufficient for knowledge. Instead, the subject must bear a “receptive nexus” to the object. By contrast, for spontaneous knowledge (of which (the relevant type of) self-knowledge is a species) this is not true: the object of such knowledge suffices for knowledge. Therefore, having a conscious perceptual state eo ipso grounds knowledge of the state. But then the disjunctivist can give the following reply to the Williamson-style argument: the idea of a limited reliability condition applies specifically to receptive knowledge, but it does not apply to self-knowledge.Footnote ⁴⁰ Therefore, the argument fails.

The disjunctivist's response to Haddock's argument illustrates the way presentational disjunctivism provides a fundamental gloss on disjunctivism as an expression of epistemic internalism. Internalism about perceptual experience is sometimes articulated in the context of the idea that the acquisition of perceptual knowledge is a case of “rationality at work”, since internalism includes the idea that perceptual judgment is a form of rational responsiveness to what subjective experience provides. Traditionally, it was thought that to capture this idea required a notion of perceptual evidence. And of course it is true that responsiveness to evidence is a paradigm of rationality. However, the type of rational self-consciousness that plays a role in presentational disjunctivism now suggests a different view of internalism. The rationality operative in the subject's acquisition of perceptual knowledge need not reside in responsiveness to evidential support. Instead, self-consciousness as such, extending as it does to the very experiential presence of perceived items, itself furnishes a distinctly rational context in which the subject can transition from experience to judgment. Accordingly, experience's epistemic value is anchored to knowledge not in virtue of its strength but rather just in virtue of what it is, i.e. a manifestation of presentational self-consciousness that belongs to a subject's rationality.