Perceptual Error,Conjunctivism, and Husserl

Claude Romano (2012) and Andrea Staiti (2015) have recently discussed Husserl’s account of perception in relation to debates in current analytic philosophy between so-called “conjunctivists” and “disjunctivists”. Romano and Staiti offer strikingly different accounts of the nature of illusion and hallucination, and opposing readings of Husserl. Romano thinks hallucinations and illusions are fleeting, fragile phenomena, while Staiti claims they are inherently retrospective phenomena. Romano reads Husserl as being committed to a form of conjunctivism that Romano rejects in favour of a version of disjunctivism. Staiti, by contrast, claims that, from a Husserlian viewpoint, conjunctivism and disjunctivism are equally untenable. I suggest that both Romano and Staiti offer implausible accounts of illusions and hallucinations, and deliver premature verdicts on Husserl in relation to the analytic debates on perception.     

Husserl Bibliography

Husserl Bibliography     

Husserl bibliography

Husserl bibliography     

Husserl and Haugeland on Constitution

Both Husserl and Haugeland develop an account ofconstitution to address the question of howour mental episodes can beabout physical objects and thus, through the intentionalrelation, bridge the gap betweenthe mental and the physical. The respectivetheories of the two philosophers of very differentbackground show not only how mentalepisodes can have empirical content, but also howthis content is shaped by pastexperiences or a holistic background of other mentalepisodes. In this article I first outlineand then contrast their positions in order to showhow the notion of constitution can beadopted to address major problems of contemporaryphilosophy of mind, especially thequestion of how the mind can be related to itsphysical environment.     

Husserl on Analyticity and Beyond

Quine’s criticism of the notion of analyticity applies, at best, to Carnap’s notion, not to those of Frege or Husserl. The failure of logicism is also the failure of Frege’s definition of analyticity, but it does not even touch Husserl’s views, which are based on logical form. However, some relatively concrete number-theoretic statements do not admit such a formalization salva veritate. A new definition of analyticity based not on syntactical but on semantical logical form is proposed and argued for.

---