Perception and intermediaries

Kathrin Gler

Donald Davidson famously held that nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief (Davidson 1983, p. 141). If he is right, perceptual experiences do not provide reasons for holding beliefsunless experiences themselves are beliefs. Davidson himself did not think that experiences were beliefs; in fact, he thought that experiences are not among the propositional attitudes at all, since they do not even have propositional content. Precisely for that reason, he was quite happy to deny them any justicatory role: Lacking content, Davidson thought, their epistemic contribution not only was doomed to remain mythical, it would alsoquite ironicallyinevitably lead to scepticism.1 Davidson has been taken to task for his views on perceptual experiences by John McDowell and others, who have urged us not to give up on the intuitive, reasonproviding role of perceptual experience (cf. esp. Mcdowell 1994; 1999). McDowell originally argued, pace Davidson, that perceptual experiences do have propositional content and, therefore, can provide reasons for belief. However, on McDowells account, experiences provide reasons only in a sense very different from the Davidsonian. In this paper I shall argue that there is a better way of rescuing the intuitive, reason-providing role of experience. If we go one step further than McDowell, and construe experiences not only as having propositional contents, but also as being a (very special) kind of belief, they provide reasons for belief in precisely the Davidsonian sense. Moreover, the doxastic account of experience I suggest integrates naturally both with the Davidsonian picture of content determination and, consequently, with Davidsonian anti-scepticism. I shall proceed as follows. In the rst three sections of this essay I shall set out Davidsons view of perception and its relations to his epistemology, his anti-scepticism, and his account of content determination. In the fourth section I shall look at McDowells alternative view. In the fth and nal sections I shall sketch my own

1 Cf. Davidson 1983. For a concentrated summary of Davidsons views on this issue, cf. Davidson 1999b, p. 105f.

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proposal for a doxastic account of experience, the epistemology that goes with it, and its relation to the Davidsonian account of content determination.

1 The belief principle and the testimony of the senses

Terminology has changed since Davidson coined the slogan that nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief (Davidson 1983, p. 141). These days, people have misgivings about calling beliefs, or other mental states, reasons. When believing p gives you a reason for believing q, your reason for believing q is not that you believe p, but simply p. Believing p is merely a wayif Davidson is right, the only wayfor a subject to possess that reason. The belief, as I shall therefore put it, provides its subject with a reason for holding a (further) belief. And the reason provided is the proposition believed. This naturally leads to the idea that a (true) proposition, in a certain objective sense, can be a reason even if not possessed by anyone. Consequently, one might object to the Davidsonian slogan because of its inbuilt form of subjectivism. It seems to make possession by a subject a condition, not only on a subjects having a reason, but on somethings being a reason in general. Moreover, a belief providing a Davidsonian reason does not have to be true; this is a second sense in which Davidsonian reasons are subjective. Further worries might concern the idea that all reasons are propositional. It is probably fair to say that Davidson held these views; Davidsonian reasons are subjective in the sense of being possessed by their subjects, and they are propositional.2 I shall not take any stand on whether he was right about that; for all I can tell, the issue might be mainly terminological. What is clear, I think, is that the Davidsonian sense of reason is an important, very intuitive sense. Whether there are other kinds of reasons or not, there are Davidsonian reasons. And Davidsonian reasons play an essential role in both our folk psychology and our everyday epistemology. Even so, the following more precise and more neutral formulation of the Davidsonian slogan is controversial enough: (BP) The only propositional attitude that provides its subject with reasons for (further) belief is that of belief. Let us call (BP) the belief principle. Controversial or not, the belief principle strikes me as very plausible. The notion of belief used here is, after all, the notion used in theorizing about folk-psychologya quite theoretical, and very wide, umbrella notion designed to capture a certain characteristic common to states of believing or knowing, perceiving, noticing, remembering (cf. Davidson 1963, p. 3). Such a notion is desirable, and useful, precisely because it allows for unied theorizing about folkpsychological reasoning, in both its theoretical and its practical form. And what unies

2 For further evidence, see Davidson 1983, p. 143; 1997, p. 136.

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the states just listedand doubtlessly many moreis that they all are ways of holding a proposition true. What that more precisely amounts to, we can, in turn, gather from further investigation of the folk-psychological conception of reasoning. Once we look at it this way, the belief principle appears to be nothing more than a sharp articulation of an essential part of the folk-psychological conception of what it is to have reasonsa conception that is both subjective and inferential in nature. According to this conception, a proposition is a reason for a subject only if that proposition stands ready to gure as a(n asserted) premise in their reasoning. Such reasoning need not be explicit, or conscious. There are reasons in this sense wherever there are reasons explanations. But if you have a reason you are prepared to actually draw independent conclusions from itconclusions to which you are committed and that are not conditional on the relevant premise. Where these commitments are beliefs (as opposed to intentions or actions), the premises themselves need to be held true. No proposition merely desired, entertained, assumed, or accepted for some purpose or other, is a reason in this sense. If you do not hold the proposition in question true, you do not even have a reason for believing its most obvious logical consequences.3 Plausible or not, the belief principle might easily seem to have the consequence of ruling out (R): (R) Perceptual experiences provide their subjects with reasons for belief. Denying (R) has struck some philosophers of perceptionrst and foremost, McDowell (1994)as unacceptable.4 To me, (R) seems as much part of the intuitive conception of experience, as much a non-negotiable platitude of folk-psychology as the claim that beliefs provide reasons for (further) beliefs.5 Davidson, however, seems to have wholeheartedly embraced (R)s denial, even though he rarely even talked about experiences without putting them into scare quotes. He writes:
No doubt meaning and knowledge depend on experience, and experience ultimately on sensation. But this is the depend of causality, not of evidence or justication. (Davidson 1983, p. 146) Perception, once we have propositional thought, is direct and unmediated in the sense that there are no epistemic intermediaries on which perceptual beliefs are based, nothing that underpins our knowledge of the world. (Davidson 1997, p. 135) Many of my simple perceptions of what is going on in the world are not based on further evidence; my perceptual beliefs are simply caused directly by the events and objects around me. (Davidson 1991, 205)

3 See Gler 2009 for a more detailed treatment of this question. 4 Others include Brewer (1999) and myself (2009). 5 Both McDowell and Brewer subscribe, or used to subscribe, to (R) for less pedestrian reasons. Both have provided elaborate transcendental arguments to the effect that (R) is a condition on the possibility of beliefs having empirical content (cf. McDowell 1994; Brewer 1999). As far as I can see, McDowell still holds this, while Brewer has abandoned the view that experiences have content altogether (cf. Brewer 2008).

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What results is a picture on which the senses are, in a certain sense, mute; they do not provide any testimony. Or rather, it is a picture on which the senses do not provide any testimony other than, or prior to, perceptual beliefs: What the senses deliver, Davidson writes, is perceptual beliefs, and these do have an ultimate evidential role (Davidson 1999b, p. 106). Perception, Davidson claims, often, or in the most basic cases, directly causally relates a subjects beliefs to certain objects, or events, in her environment. This, of course, does not mean that the causal chains leading from those external objects, or events, to perceptual beliefs do not have any intermediate events on it. Rather, direct here means epistemically direct. The senses do not deliver anything epistemically more basic than perceptual belief. In particular, perception does not provide any epistemically more basic reasons for perceptual belief.6 For Davidson, this picture of perception as the merely causal production of belief has important epistemological consequences. Davidsonian epistemology, just as his notion of reasons, is essentially subjective, or rst-person, epistemology: the epistemic or evidential relations in which he is interested are reasons relations. These are relations accessible from the point of view of the epistemic subject. It is from this point of view that he is concerned with answering the sceptic. Consequently, once the sole testimony of the senses consists in perceptual beliefs, the crucial epistemological task, according to Davidson, is to nd a reason for supposing most of our beliefs are true that is not a form of evidence (Davidson 1983, p. 146). According to Davidson, answering scepticism of the senses thus involves two components: rst, an argument for the claim that most of our (perceptual) beliefs are in fact true, and second, an argument that ordinary epistemic subjects have good reasons to believe this. Moreover, the argument can no longer involve any kind of grounding of perceptual beliefs in something epistemically more basicsomething such as experience, sense data, stimulations of nerve endings, or any other epistemic intermediary. Rather, what is needed is recognition of the fact that belief is in its nature veridical (ibid.). According to Davidson, this is something that can be known by anyone who knows what a belief is, and how in general beliefs are to be detected and interpreted (ibid.). The Davidsonian answer to the sceptic thus comes from the nature of beliefespecially the determination of belief content. Most intriguingly, Davidson does not see the absence of epistemic intermediaries as a complication in this context; rather, he thinks that answering the sceptic requires the rejection of epistemic intermediaries in general, and the rejection of (R) in particular. I shall investigate these matters in a little more detail in the next section.

6 This does not mean that perceptual belief cannot be revised: no, the beliefs that are delivered by the senses are always open to revision, in the light of further perceptual experience, in the light of what we remember, in the light of our general knowledge of how the world works (Davidson 1999b, p. 106).

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2 Perception, scepticism, and content determination

According to Davidson, it is precisely the muteness of the senses that saves us from scepticism. For as long as the senses tell us something, they may be lying. The moral is obvious. Since we cant swear intermediaries to truthfulness, we should allow no intermediaries between our beliefs and their objects in the world (Davidson 1983, p. 144). Let us call this the lying senses argument. Its basic idea is to preclude the possibility of massive, systematic deception by the senses by not letting them tell us anything in the rst place. Cutting the epistemic links between perceptual experience and perceptual belief in this manner has conjured up threatening visions of coherentismvividly illustrated by the McDowellian metaphor of our belief systems as a frictionless spinning in a void (McDowell 1994, p. 11).7 And clearly, just cutting the epistemic links between experience and belief in response to the lying senses argument does nothing more than push the problem of lying one step further. For what prevents the beliefs, once on the loose, from making up all sorts of stories? The Davidsonian answer, as I said, comes from content determination, and what is particularly interesting about it here is that content determination is supposed to be able to swear beliefs, and only beliefs, to truthfulnessbeliefs, that is, but no other output of the senses. As we saw above, Davidson claims that perceptual beliefs are often, or in the most basic cases, directly caused by objects or events in the subjects environment. And not by any old objects or events; according to Davidson, perceptual belief is such that it is in the most basic casestypically caused by the very objects, or events, it is about. This is not meant to completely exclude the possibility of illusion or even outright hallucination, but it is meant to establish the veridical nature of belief:8
What stands in the way of global scepticism of the senses is, in my view, the fact that we must, in the plainest and methodologically most basic cases, take the objects of a belief to be the causes of that belief. (Davidson 1983, p. 151)

Without any epistemic links between experience, or sensation, and belief, Davidson seems to be saying, there cannot be any semantic or content determining link between them either: [A]lthough sensation plays a crucial role in the causal process that connects beliefs with the world, it is a mistake to think it plays an epistemological role in determining the contents of those beliefs (Davidson 1988, p. 46). This passage is not easy to interpret; of course, for Davidson, sensation, or experience, does not play an epistemic role in determining the content of perceptual beliefs, since it does not play any epistemic role at all with respect to these beliefs. But does Davidson presuppose that any epistemic role that sensation or experience could play with respect to empirical
7 McDowell himself does not think the main problem here is epistemological scepticism, however. He thinks this move threatens the very possibility of our beliefs having any empirical content whatsoever. Cf. McDowell 1994, pp. 17f. 8 In Davidsonian parlance, veridical means something like mostly true.

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belief ipso facto is a semantic (or content-determining) role, and vice versa? That would seem wrong. Even without epistemic links between them, experience or sensation could, for instance, play a causal role in determining the contents of perceptual beliefs. Of course, Davidson does not think this is so; he thinks that the content of perceptual beliefs is determined by the external objects, or events, typically causing them. But it should be clear that this does not follow from his rejection of epistemic links just by itself. According to Davidson, the principle governing the determination of belief content is, of course, the principle of charitymore precisely, the part of charity that Davidson sometimes called the Principle of Correspondence (Davidson 1991, p. 211). In a late summary of his arguments for charity, Davidson explains:
The second part of the argument has to do with the empirical content of perceptions, and of the observation sentences that express them. We learn how to apply our earliest observation sentences from others in the conspicuous (to us) presence of mutually sensed objects, events, and features of the world. It is this that anchors language and belief to the world, and guarantees that what we mean in using those sentences is usually true. (Davidson 1999, p. 343)

The upshot is that sensation, or experience, not only is epistemically irrelevant for perceptual belief, but also semantically. According to Davidson, perceptual beliefs would have the content they in fact have even if the experiences mediating between the beliefs and their objects were different from what they in fact are, if there were no such experiences at all, and even if the formation of those beliefs did not run through the familiar organs of sense:
It is an empirical accident that our ears, eyes, taste buds, and tactile and olfactory organs play an intermediate role in the formation of beliefs about the world. The causal connections between thought and objects and events in the world could have been established in entirely different ways without this making any philosophically signicant difference to the contents or veridicality of perceptual belief. (Davidson 1988, p. 45)

There are, of course, many details that I have omitted in this brief sketch of Davidsons answer to the sceptic of the senses. My main interest was to bring out that Davidsonian anti-scepticism crucially derives from his account of content determination. I am not going to discuss either anti-scepticism or content determination any further here.9 What I am interested in is their relation to the Davidsonian account of perception. Davidson clearly thought that his rejection of epistemic intermediaries, and thus his rejection of (R), was necessary to his anti-scepticism. But that, I think, he was wrong about. Consider the lying senses argument again. Its conclusion was that epistemic intermediariesbe they experiences, sensations, or what have younecessarily bring on

9 I am largely in sympathy with the Davidsonian account of the latter (see my 2006 and 2007a for further discussion), but not with the former.

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scepticism. In contrast to intermediaries, the anti-sceptical line of thought then proceeds, beliefs can be shown to be mostly true by considerations of content determination. But the obvious question then is: Why cannot experiences be shown to be mostly veridical by the same means? Of course, to apply considerations of content determination to experiences presupposes that experiences have content, and this is something Davidson denies (cf. Davidson 1983, p. 143; 1997, p. 136). But he denies it for independent reasons, or rather seems to take it to be completely obvious.10 But then, there is an important lacuna in the lying-senses argumentwhich by itself does not establish that intermediaries necessarily bring on scepticism. As long as the possibility of intermediaries with content is still open, so is the possibility that these intermediaries are as veridical in nature as Davidson claims belief to be. But bringing on scepticism was only one of the objections Davidson had against the idea of epistemic links between experience, or sensation, and perceptual beliefs. The other one, which I have already hinted at, was that it couldnt be done (Davidson 1999b, p. 105). So, why exactly did he think it could not be done?

3 Sensation, experience, and content

Davidsons second argument against (R)that is, against the claim that experience provides reasons for beliefcan be found in two, not obviously identical, versions in Davidson. The original formulation is the following:
The relation between sensation and belief cannot be logical, since sensations are not beliefs or other propositional attitudes. What then is the relation? The answer is, I think, obvious: the relation is causal. Sensations cause some beliefs and in this sense are the basis or ground of those beliefs. But a causal explanation of a belief does not show how or why the belief is justied. (Davidson 1983, p. 143)

Years later, Davidson rehearses the point again:

There is a simple explanation for the fact that sensations, percepts, and sense data cannot provide epistemic support for beliefs: reasons have to be geared conceptually to what they are reasons for. The relation of epistemic support requires that both relata have propositional content, and entities like sensations and sense data have no propositional content. Much of modern philosophy has been devoted to trying to arbitrate between an imagined unconceptualized given and what is needed to support belief. We now see that this project has no chance of success. The truth is, nothing can supply a reason for belief except another (or many another) belief. (Davidson 1997, p. 136)

The later version suggests that the general argument in which we are interested goes something like this:

10 I do not think he ever actually argues for this.

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(1) To provide reasons for belief, you need to have propositional content. (2) The only perceptual states with propositional content are perceptual beliefs. (3) Perceptual experiences do not provide reasons for belief. Let us call this the content argument. The immediate trouble with the content argument is, of course, that there is widespread agreement today that even though sensationswhatever they precisely aremight not be propositional, perceptual experiences do have propositional content. Perceptual experience, philosophers holding this view are wont to say, represents the world as being a certain way. There is a certain way the world has to be in order for the experience to be veridical, a condition the world has to full, so to speak. Perceptual experiences thus have, or determine, conditions of correctness, satisfaction, or truth, and that simply means that they have representational, or propositional, content. In this minimal, and fairly uncontroversial sense of being mental states with a content that at least determines a truth condition there is widespread agreement: perceptual experience is a propositional attitude.11,12 So, while we might agree with Davidson that mere sensation, understood as the purely phenomenal quality of a state such as pain or an experience as of something red, is not propositional, and even that percepts or sense data (whatever they exactly are) are not propositional, the content argument does not supply us with any reason to deny that there are (other) perceptual states that are propositional attitudes. This holds especially for the states that we these days usually call perceptual experiences. We have therefore not been given any reason to think that perceptual experiences do not provide reasons. This is, of course, precisely the line that McDowell took in Mind and World. There, he argued that perceptual experiences not only have propositional, but conceptual content. I shall not be concerned here with anything that hangs on this difference, and shall therefore ignore the notoriously difcult question of spelling it out in a precise way.13 Once we recognize this, McDowell argues, there is no obstacle to thinking of the contents of experiences as standing in rational relations, such as implication or probabilication (McDowell 1994, p. 53) to those of perceptual beliefs. Now, I take it

11 There was a period in which philosophers of perception simply took this to be obvious. Prompted mainly by disjunctivist dissent (cf. Martin 2002 and Travis 2004, even though not all disjunctivists reject the content view; cf. Tye 2009), the need to argue for the claim that experience has propositional content now is widely recognized. Such arguments are, among others, provided by Siegel 2005, Byrne 2009, 2010; Pautz 2009; Schellenberg 2011. Others have recently abandoned this view; cf. Brewer 2008; McDowell 2008; Crane 2009. At least in McDowells case, I am inclined to think that the intuitional content (McDowell 2008, p. 4) which he characterizes experiences as having actually qualies as propositional according to the minimal understanding just given. 12 Moreover, there is widespread agreement that experiences not only have propositional content, they also have what Searle calls mind-to-world direction of t (cf. Searle1983, pp. 7ff ); they represent the world as actually being the represented way, as actually fullling their condition of correctness or truth. They are thus committal (Burge 2003, p. 452) or stative (Martin 2002, pp. 386f ) statesstates assertively representing a proposition (Pryor 2005, pp. 187f ). 13 See Heck 2000 and Speaks 2005 for instructive discussion.

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to be extremely plausible that experiences have propositional content in the minimal sense used here, but this is not the place to defend this view. My claims shall, thus, remain conditional on its defensibility. And once we grant experiences propositional content, the content argument does nothing to exclude them from the reason providers. But here is an objection: Having propositional content is only a necessary condition on providing reasons for belief. In order to provide your subject with reasons for belief, it is not enough that you are any old propositional attitude. Certainly, being a desire will not do, and neither will being an assumption (be it for the sake of argument, or for reductio, or whatever), an imagining, or an entertaining. You need to be a holding true: a belief (cf. Stroud 2002; Gler 2004, 2009; Ginsborg 2006). This suggests that there is an argument against (R) at Davidsons disposal that is better than the content argument. This argumentlet us call it the attitude argumentproceeds like this: (BP) The only propositional attitude that provides its subject with reasons for (further) belief is that of belief. (4) Perceptual experiences are not beliefs. (3) Perceptual experiences do not provide reasons for belief. Even though the attitude argument might be suggested by the rst passage quoted above (cf. p. 198), I have my doubts about its being Davidsons. The attitude argument uses the belief principle as a premiseand both the passages quoted above at least give a strong impression of Davidsons considering the belief principle as a consequence of, among other things, the claim that experiences do not have propositional content. But Davidson did not have to construe matters like that; he could have provided independent arguments for the belief principle. Its plausibility does not derive from excluding states such as perceptual experiences from the realm of the propositional, it seems to me. Rather, it derives from the inferential nature of the intuitive conception of reasons Davidson works with. On such a conception, a reason providing attitude provides propositions from which to draw conclusionsreal conclusions: conclusions that you can detach and commit to. To have such a reason for the conclusion of an argument, the subject needs to be committed to its premise, not just desire, imagine, or assume it to be true. In other words: to have such a reason, the subject needs to hold the premise true. As far as Davidson is concerned, that sufces for making any such attitude into a belief. The upshot is that the belief principle, the claim that experiences provide reasons for belief, and the claim that experiences are not beliefs, form an inconsistent triad. For the friend of the belief principle, this means that the only way of holding on to the reason providing role of experience is to adopt a doxastic account of belief. And that is precisely what I shall suggest; in the last part of this paper (}5) I shall argue that there is a way of combining a Davidsonian conception of reasons, the belief principle, and the claim that experiences provide reasons for belief. Moreover, or so I shall argue, this

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account of experience is fully compatible with a Davidsonian account of content determination. But the belief principle is controversial, of course. Before I get to my own suggestion, I shall therefore look at an alternative way of defending the idea that experiences provide reasons for belief. In writings after Mind and World, McDowell has claried and developed his defense of the reason providing role of experience. He proposes to give up on both the belief principle and the inferential conception of reasons. Instead, he construes perceptual experience as providing a different kind of warranta specic form of entitlement to belief.14 Even though I shall argue that such entitlement ultimately is not enough when it comes to reason providing, this is an interesting alternativenot the least because in arguing for it McDowell introduces a novel argument against belief theories of experience that substantially restricts the form that such accounts can take.

4 McDowell on perceptual entitlement

McDowell suggests that there are rational relations between experiences and perceptual beliefs, but that they are not of the same sort as those between such beliefs and further beliefs. To capture the nature of the rational relations between experience and belief, McDowell suggests, we have to use a notion of non-inferential entitlement:
[P]erceptions, as I see them, are experientially acquired entitlements to belief. No doubt it does not make sense to suppose one might avail oneself of such an entitlement, in moving inferentially to beliefs whose contents are consequences of the claim that things are as one perceives them to be, unless one believes that ones experience is indeed a case of perceiving things to be a certain way, not just having it appear to one as if things are that way, and concomitantly believes that things are indeed that way. But we have to ask not only about ones entitlement to those consequential beliefs, but also about ones entitlement to the belief that . . . things are as they appear to be. Ones perceptual experience is what entitles one to that belief not by way of an inferential step, because the content of the experience is the same as the content of the belief. This entitling circumstance is, by all means, a propositional attitude. . . . But it is not itself a belief. (McDowell 2004, p. 215)

There are two elements in this conception of the rational relation between experience and empirical belief that are crucial here: the idea that the relation is non-inferential, and that it is one of entitlement. I shall start with the latter. According to McDowell, a visual experience as of things being thus and so entitles its subject to the belief that things are thus and so iff it is a seeing that things are thus and so (McDowell 2004, p. 214; see also McDowell 2002,

14 Cf. McDowell 1997, 1998, 2002, 2004. In McDowell 2008 he goes one step further and construes the content of experiences as intuitional (and conceptual), but not propositional. As far as I understand, McDowell stands fast on the entitlement providing role of experience.

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pp. 277f). Seeing, in the sense used here, is factive. The justier provided by a seeing thus is not a proposition that might, or might not be true, but a fact:
If it were not for distortions inicted on our thinking by philosophy, I think it would be obvious that the idea of observational judgment, in particular, involves a a specic, content-sensitive justiernamely, the fact observed. (McDowell 1998, p. 430)

McDowellian entitlement thus combines subjective and objective elements in a way rather different from the Davidsonian conception of reasons. As for Davidson, what provides the entitlement is a propositional attitude, thus making the justier available to subjects (McDowell 1998, p. 430), but this justier needs to be a fact. Consequently, while for Davidson false beliefs are capable of providing reasons, illusory perceptual states cannot provide McDowellian entitlements. My point here is not that there is something inherently wrong with this notion of entitlement, or its application to experience. Such a notion might very well be useful in epistemology. The problem is that McDowell not only suggests that experiences provide such entitlement to belief, but that this is the only kind of rational relation obtaining between experiences and beliefs. That strikes me as a counter-intuive claim. Folk-psychology, it seems to me, is with Davidson here; folk-psychology provides genuine reasons explanations in terms of both false beliefs and illusory experiences. There is a clear, if subjective, sense in which it is rational for the subject of an (unknown) illusion to take his experience at face value, and it is in precisely this sense that we can cite his illusory experience to explain, and rationalize, the resulting mistaken belief. The Davidsonian conception of reasons captures this genuinely subjective sense in which forming a belief we are, in McDowells sense, not entitled to can nevertheless be rational, or even justied. If experience provides nothing but entitlement, we lose this genuinely subjective sense of observational rationality. We end up having to deny that there is any sense in which the subject deceived by an illusion has so much as a prima facie reason for his mistaken belief. We end up having to claim that it is completely irrational for such a subject to form her belief, despite the fact that from her perspective, everything might have pointed to its truth. Just how counterintuitive this is might become even clearer if we consider another crucial difference between the intuitive conception of reasons and the McDowellian notion of entitlement: Entitlements cannot be overridden by background belief. According to McDowell, there is a sense of seeing in which seeing not only is factive, but also does not imply believing. For instance, you can, in this sense, see that a certain necktie is green without believing it to be green. Assume, for instance, that the tie looks green to you, but that you believe that the lighting is such that things appear to have colours other than their real ones. You therefore withhold judgment as to the ties colour. Assume further that that background belief is false, and the lighting in fact is such that things appear to have precisely the colours they actually have. In that case, McDowell submits, you see that the tie is green even though you do not believe it (cf. Mcdowell 2002, pp. 277ff ). Consequently, you are entitled to the belief that the tie

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is green. Entitlement thus cannot be defeated by background belief since it comes from the perceived state of affairs itself (McDowell 2004, p. 277). Again, in and by itself, there might not be anything wrong with such a notion of entitlement, but if we combine it with the claim that entitlement is the only rational relation between experience and belief, we now have to say that it would be perfectly rational for the necktie subject to believe that the tie is green. There is no sense in which forming this belief would be irrational, despite the presence of the intuitively defeating background belief. Again, this strikes me as quite counterintuitive. A resulting difference between the Davidsonian conception of reasons and the notion of entitlement is that entitlement is all-or-nothing, and not a matter of degree. A subject either is entitled to the belief that p, or not. There is no such thing as being entitled to the belief that p to any degree (greater than 0 but) less than 1. But as we just saw, there is a clear intuitive sense in which the reasons provided by experience can be overridden by background belief. These reasons are defeasible reasons. And in order to be a defeasible reason for the belief that p, a reason has to evidentially support p precisely to a degree (large enough to be a reason, but) less than 1. Again, it is counterintuitive to deny that there is any sense in which experience provides defeasible reasons for belief. McDowell has a comeback to all of this, however. To see this, we must look at the second element in his conception of the rational relation between experience and empirical belief: the idea that the relation is non-inferential. McDowell here directly engages the Davidsonian conception of reasons. And if he is right, this conception, when applied to experience, actually has some of the very same counterintuitive consequences that we just brought out for the notion of entitlement. McDowells argument is quite simple. As we saw, in order for experience to be able to provide defeasible inferential reasons, the degree to which an experiential content evidentially supports that of a perceptual belief must be less than 1. But, as McDowell repeatedly points out, when it comes to experience and perceptual belief, what we seem to be concerned with are two propositional attitudes with the same content. The degree to which p evidentially supports p is 1. An inference from p to p thus is not defeasible; there is no kind of background belief that could (rationally) override such an inference.15 Consequently, having such a reason is not really a matter of degree, either. Rather, you either have an experience as of p, and are forced to believe it, or you do not. Here is how McDowell expresses the point:
[W]hat matters is the rationality exemplied in judging whether things are thus and so in the light of whether things are (observably) thus and so. The content of the item in the light of which a judgement of this kind has its rational standing is the same as the content of the judgment itself. The only inferences corresponding to the rational connection in question would be of the stuttering form, P, so P. No doubt that inference-form (if we allow it the title) cannot lead

15 This, of course, holds even if you construe the content of the perceptual belief as just part of the much richer (conjunctive) content of the experience.

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one astray, but its freedom from risk seems a quite unhelpful model for the rationality of observational judgment. (McDowell 1998, p. 405; cf. also McDowell 1997, p. 161)

McDowell certainly is right in complaining that, intuitively, basing beliefs on experience is not risk-free in the sense of experience, just by itself, providing indefeasible or conclusive reasons for them. Even though experience intuitively provides strong reasons, there is some risk involved in believing them. Let us call this the stuttering inference argument. McDowell concludes that the Davidsonian conception of reasons cannot plausibly be extended to experience. If this were correct, where would it leave us with respect to (R), the claim that experience provides reasons for belief? The stuttering inference argument seems to show that the Davidsonian conception is no better at capturing the intuitive picture of the rational relation between experience and belief than the McDowellian notion of entitlement. If those were the only alternatives, we simply would have to give up signicant parts of our intuitions regarding this relation. As I have argued elsewhere (cf. Gler 2009), however, I do not think that these are the only alternatives. Most importantly, we do not have to construe experiences as having the same contents as perceptual beliefs. And if we can plausibly construe them as having contents that evidentially, but defeasibly support those of perceptual beliefs, the stuttering inference argument no longer stands in the way of conceiving of experiences as providing inferential reasons for belief. The result, then, of these considerations concerning entitlement and defeasibility is the following. Construing the rational relations between experience and belief exclusively as relations of entitlement is quite counterintuitive. Moreover, construing them as relations of Davidsonian reason providing is still possibledespite the stuttering inference argumentif we conceive of experiences as having contents different from those the beliefs for which they provide reasons.16 I shall provide a sketch of such a
16 McDowell himself now thinks that so much as conceiving of experiences as states with propositional contents already commits us to construing them as beliefs: [I]f we avoid the Myth [of the Given] by conceiving experiences as actualizations of conceptual capacities, while retaining the assumption that that requires crediting experiences with propositional content, Davidsons point seems well taken. If experiences have propositional content, it is hard to deny that experiencing is taking things to be so, rather than what I want: a different kind of thing that entitles us to take things to be so (McDowell 2008, p. 11). Therefore, McDowell proposes to construe experience contents as of a different kind than belief contents. According to him, experience content is intuitional (McDowell 2008, p. 4), not propositional. As noted above (cf. fn. 11), I suspect that intuitional content is propositional in the minimal sense used hereespecially, as McDowell repeatedly stresses the possibility of making an intuitional contentthat very content (McDowell 2008, pp. 78)explicit and thereby propositional. This suggests that the differences he has in mind concern, not so much the contents themselves, as their medium of representation (cf. McDowell 2008, pp. 6ff). These are differences to do with the structure, and the supposedly active nature of the composition, of thought content. Such differences are not relevant to the question of whether a content is propositional in the minimal sense used here. But even if my hunch here is wrong, I do not see how construing experiences as having a different kind of content would alleviate any of the felt pressure towards construing them as beliefs. If this is hard to deny with respect to a propositional content, how could it be any easier with any other kind of content? Moreover, denying that the relevant relation, or attitude, the subject has to the intuitional contentafter all, this content is supposed to be available to the subjectis one of

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semantics for experience in the next, and last section where I shall briey outline my suggestion for a doxastic account of experience. I shall round off the paper by showing just how Davidsonian in spirit such an account is.

5 A doxastic account of experience

The doxastic account of perceptual experience I suggest construes experiences as a kind of belief with contents of a special form. This is in no way meant to deny that there are many very important differences between those beliefs that are experiences and other, more usual beliefs. Maybe most importantly, it is not meant to deny the characteristic sensory nature of perceptual experiences. Phenomenally, having an experience is very different from having a belief, say, about the gross national product of Sweden. Phenomenally, having an experience as of a blue book in front of you is very different from having a belief that there is a blue book in front of you, a belief of the kind that you can retain when you rst see a blue book in front of you and then close your eyes. But phenomenology is not what types the propositional attitudesas we philosophers talk about them; what types the propositional attitudes is nothing but attitude and proposition.17 And the attitude component in perceptual experience, I suggest, is best construed as that of holding true or belief.18 One of the most important and immediate
holding true, or belief, threatens to falsify the phenomenology of having experiences. Consider the following passage from McDowell: I agree with Travis that visual experiences just bring our surroundings into view, thereby entitling us to take certain things to be so, but leaving it a further question what, if anything, we do take to be so (McDowell 2008, p. 11). Of course, experiences can be overridden by background beliefs, but still, having a visual experience has a kind of phenomenal immediacy (Searle 1983, p. 45), that is not at all captured by this description. Having an experience is like having the world around you directly presented to you; experiences represent the world as actually being a certain way, they are making claims (cf. Sellars 1963, }16). And as long as we construe experiences as relations to contents, be they propositional or not, we cannot capture this aspect of their phenomenology by means of the content alone: contents, just by themselves, do not represent anything as actually being the case. If experiences are relations to contents, immediacy therefore needs to be captured via the attitude, or relation, the subject has to the content (cf. Martin 2002, pp. 387f, for what I think is basically the same point). This does not necessarily mean that the attitude needs to be one of belief, it could also be a sui generis attitude of a supposedly more general committal or stative kind, but anything less than that, I think, threatens to seriously falsify the phenomenology. It might be worth noting that the point just made does not depend on whether we think of experiences as factive states or not. Nor does it in any way depend on whether experiential content is singular content or not. Neither singularity nor factivity necessitate, or explain, the claim-like phenomenology of experience. 17 This is immediately clear when it comes to what we philosophers call desire or pro-attitude. There are, as David Lewis once put it (cf. Lewis 1988, p. 323), warm desires and cold desires; a warm desire, for instance, a desire to hire a very nice person, feels very differently from a cold one like a desire to hire the best candidate (the examples are Lewiss). 18 I am not here going to argue against any kind of sui generis account of experience that allows experiences to be holdings true, without thereby subsuming them under the beliefs. As I see the matter, holding true amounts to belief in the sense we are interested in here, in the austere philosophers sense allowing us to subsume all sorts of states under the umbrella headings of belief and desire. Further distinctions must, it seems to me, depend on properties beyond attitude and content. To a certain extent, the controversy over sui generis vs. doxastic accounts therefore might seem terminological. See my (2009), however, for an argument to the effect that the availability of doxastic accounts that preserve the special functional role of experience undermines the very motivation for sui generis accounts.

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advantages of thus construing the attitude component is that it allows us to subscribe to (R): If experiences are beliefs, they provide reasons for (further) belief in the relatively well understood, traditional, inferential sense in which beliefs provide reasons for (further) beliefs.19 The question is how to hold on to these advantages without losing the difference between an experience as of a blue book in front of you and a belief that there is a blue book in front of you (a belief that you can have with closed eyes). Even more pressingly, the question is how to hold on to the advantages without falling prey to the stuttering inference argument and a whole host of more traditional anti-doxastic arguments. These latter arguments all use what Evans called the belief-independence of experience (Evans 1982, p. 123) to derive absurd consequences for the belief theory. In certain cases of known illusion, for instance, knowing that your experience is illusory does not make any introspectible difference to the experience. But if having the experience is having a belief, the subject of a known illusion would seem to end up in the absurd situation of, in full consciousness, holding contradictory beliefs of a very simple, observational kind.20 My suggestion is to slightly change the semantics of experience. Even though it is quite natural to think that if experiences have propositional content, their contents will be such that they ascribe sensible properties such as blueness or squareness to ordinary is not forced on us. While we material objects such as books or tables, such na vete ought to hang on to the claim that the objects of perception indeed are ordinary material objects, we could construe experiences as ascribing phenomenal properties to themproperties such as looking blue or looking rectangular. Contents that ascribe such phenomenal properties to ordinary material objects such as books or tables I shall call phenomenal contents. Equivalently, I shall talk of looks p contents or Lp-contents.21 Adopting a phenomenal semantics for experiences immediately takes the bite out of the stuttering inference argument and the more classical anti-doxastic arguments; all of them work with a hidden premise to the effect that experiences have na ve contents. It also allows for distinguishing the belief that there is a blue book in front of you (that you can have with your eyes closed) from the experience as of a blue book in front of youfor the latter now is a belief that there looks to be a blue book in front of you.22 Obviously, this is sketchy, and there are many details to be worked out yet. A host of
19 Another immediate advantage is that that it allows us to account for the phenomenal immediacy of experience in a very straightforward way. Cf. fn. 16. 20 For a more detailed account of this and other classical anti-doxastic arguments, see my (2009). 21 The use of looks I have in mind here is the phenomenal sense. Cf. Jackson 1977, p. 33. As is quite usual, I shall exclusively focus on visual experience. The account, however, might generalize to other sense modalities. 22 But cannot I believe that x looks blue even with my eyes closed? Not in the sense of looks blue that I have in mind; what can be believed with ones eyes closed is, for instance, that x would look blue if one opened ones eyes, that x has a disposition to look blue when viewed under proper circumstances, or things like that.

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semantic, epistemological, and metaphysical questions ought be investigated. All I can do here is pursue some of them a little further. When it comes to semantics, we would of course want a much more detailed analysis of the phenomenal contents and their logical form. Do they contain a place for a subject? And a time? Or are these rather to be construed on the model of unarticulated constituents? Most pressing, however, is the need for some further analysis of the phenomenal predicates themselveswhen exactly does something look blue, for instance? A rst idea is that something looks blue (to a subject S at a time t) iff it causes experiences of a certain kind (in S at t). Obviously, the relevant kind cannot be that of experiences with the content that x looks blue. Such a content would contain itself, so to speak; it would generate some sort of non-wellfounded object. This naturally suggests that something looks blue iff it causes experiences of a certain qualitative kind. Socalled primed predicates could come in handy herepredicates such as blue used for ascribing qualitative properties to experiences or sensations (cf. Peacocke 1984). We might then say something along the following lines:23 (LB) x looks blue (to a subject S at a time t) is true iff x causes a blue0 sensation (in S at t). However, I think this is not yet quite right, eitheror rather, it is on the right track only under an interpretation of the primed predicates slightly, but signicantly different from the one suggested so far. I shall return to this below.24 We also want a clearer sense of the epistemology of perceptual belief that is induced by a phenomenal belief theory of experience. So far, I have said that experiences with phenomenal contents provide reasons for perceptual beliefand indeed, it seems very plausible to say that an experience-belief that x looks blue provides its subject with an inferential reason for believing that x is blue. But of course, we also want to know when such a reason is a good reason, when the subject not only has a reason for, but is justied in forming that belief. Just as with the semantics, this is not the place to do more than provide a sketch of an answer. Moreover, I shall not say anything about the issue of personal justication. When it comes to doxastic justication, it seems very plausible to me that experiences

23 An alternative to (LB) might be to identify looking blue with an objects disposition to cause blue sensations, or its categorical base. In Shoemaker (1994) it is such dispositional properties that are called phenomenal properties; later, he calls them appearance properties (cf. Shoemaker 2000, 2006). If we analyzed looking blue along such dispositional lines, experience beliefs could no longer be distinguished from others merely by their content. It would still be possible to distinguish them by their distinctive phenomenal character, however. 24 Another question is the following. Does looks as it gures in the content of experiences work as a predicate modier or as a sentential operator? I tend to think that the analytically prior use is that of a sentential operator L1(p), mainly because that allows for construing the content of complete hallucinations without existential commitment. The basic idea then is to dene a predicate modier L2 by means of the following equivalence: x ((L2(F))(x)) df x L1(Fx). Perceptions, illusions, and hallucinations can then have the same basic phenomenal contents: L1 (x (Fx)).

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with phenomenal contents provide prima facie reasons for beliefsin the sense originally introduced by Pollock. These are reasons that are good reasons if there are no defeaters (cf. Pollock 1974, pp. 40ff ). Thus, xs looking blue is a good reason for believing that x is blue if there is no good reason to believe any defeater. Defeaters standardly come in two kinds: rebutting defeaters and undercutting defeaters. A rebutting defeater in this case could for instance be that someone reliable told the subject that x is not blue, and an undercutting defeater could be that the lights are iffy. But if the subject does not have any good reason to believe any such defeater, the subject has good reason to form the belief that x is blue on the basis of the experience that x looks blue. Unlike other fans of prima facie reasons, however, I do not think that the inference schema Lp p is analytic in any sense, that its validity is meaning constitutive, or a priori.25 Rather, I think that the validity of that inference schema is hostage to how the world actually is. The inference from Lp to p is valid only in the sense that it reliably leads from truth to truth. And that is an entirely contingent matter. Let us call reasons of this kind reliable prima facie reasons. Obviously, there is no anti-sceptical mileage to be obtained directly from the idea that experience provides reliable prima facie reasons for (further) belief.26 This does not mean, however, that other anti-sceptical arguments could not be brought to bear also on a phenomenal belief theory of experience according to which experience provides reliable prima facie reasons for (further) belief. In particular, it does not mean that Davidsons anti-scepticism could not be extended to this account of experience. For even though Davidson himself made heavy weather of epistemic intermediaries and their tendency to bring scepticism along for the ride, his argument for this had nothing to do with intermediaries per se. Rather, the problem was how to

25 Pollock held that a prima facie reason is a logical reason that is defeasible (Pollock 1974, p. 40), and explains logical reason as follows: Whenever the justied belief-that-P is a good reason for one to believe that Q, simply by virtue of the meanings of the statements that P and that Q, we will say that the statement-that-P is a logical reason for believing the statement-that-Q (Pollock 1974, p. 34, emphasis added). Pryor holds that it is a priori that experiences as of p in the absence of defeaters justify believing that p (Pryor 2000). 26 This becomes drastically clear once we spell things out in terms of probabilities. Plausibly, reason (or evidence) providing is governed by the following principle (cf. Carnap 1950, pp. 382ff; Spectre 2009, pp. 91ff): (EP) r is a reason for s only if Pr(s/r)  Pr(s). But now consider the following example: (Lp) It looks as if there is something red in front of you. (p) There is something red in front of you. (q) There is something white in front of you that is illuminated with red light. It clearly holds that Pr(p/Lp)  Pr(p). But it holds equally clearly that Pr(q/Lp)  Pr(q). Moreover, Pr(q/Lp) clearly is greater than Pr(q), which means that it is not the case that Pr(:q/Lp)  Pr(:q). Consequently, that it looks as if there is something red in front of you provides you with a reason for, not against, believing that there is something white in front of you that is illuminated with red light. Of course, this reason will (normally) be much weaker than that simultaneously provided for believing that there is something red in front of you; but nevertheless, experiences do not provide reasons against phenomenally compatible sceptical hypotheses.

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prevent them from lying. Now, as I said, I am not interested in actually defending Davidsonian anti-scepticism. All I am claiming is that adopting a phenomenal belief theory of experience does nothing to preempt Davidsons anti-sceptical arguments, whether these arguments are ultimately successful or not. Modest as it is, this claim is of some independent interest, since Davidsonian antiscepticism is supposed to derive from the principles of content determination. These, he thought, did not cover perceptual experiences for the simple reason that he did not construe experiences as states with content to begin with. But once we adopt a doxastic account of experience, this changes; then, the principle of charity should apply to experiences as much as to any other beliefs. To round things off, I would therefore like to ask how well a phenomenal belief theory goes together with a Davidsonian account of content determination. In its possibly most classical formulation, the principle of charity says (cf. Davidson 1973, p. 137): (PC) Assign truth conditions to alien sentences that make native speakers right when plausibly possible. The rst thing to note here is that construing experiences as beliefs with phenomenal contents does not violate this principle; such beliefs certainly will be mostly true, and thus mostly true when expressed. On the account of perceptual justication suggested, sincere assertions of sentences like this looks red express epistemically very basic beliefs, however. For Davidson, [t]he methodology of interpretation is nothing but epistemology seen in the mirror of meaning (Davidson 1975, p. 169). Making the speaker right (by the interpreters own lights) on phenomenal matters therefore is very important, indeed: disagreement about how things look or appear is less tolerable than disagreement about how they are, Davidson himself wrote early on (ibid.). For Davidson, the epistemically basic would thus seem to coincide with the semantically basic. In later writings, Davidson slightly shifts focus when it comes to charity and its application to observational matters, however. In the (semantically) most basic cases, he comes to stress, both interpreter and speaker react to the same object, or event, and its publicly observable features. In these cases, beliefs are about common, or shared, causes; they are about objects, or events, and their features that cause beliefs with the same content in both interpreter and speaker: Communication begins where causes converge: your utterance means what mine does if belief in its truth is systematically caused by the same events and objects (Davidson 1983, p. 151).27
27 Moreover, in Davidsons later writings, especially those concerned with triangulation (cf., for instance, Davidson 1991), the cases considered basic for content determination are also often considered basic from the point of view of language acquisition (cf. Davidson 1999a, p. 343, already quoted above). This, however, strikes me as illicit a priori speculation about empirical matters. In any case, there is no philosophical reason to think that what is semantically basicthat is, basic for the theory of content determinationmust also be basic when it comes to language acquisition. This is fortunate, as it would be very implausible to claim that

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This shift from agreement to common causality might seem to spell trouble for phenomenal contents. If an object x looks blue iff x causes an experience or sensation of a certain qualitative kind, talking about xs looking blue might easily seem to be as private a matter as the nature of the quale in question. But in fact, the very same kind of trouble can be seen as arising already from the idea of agreement on phenomenal matters: if talk about phenomenal properties remains somehow private, how could we agree on it? There are several things to say in response. For one, we ought to distinguish the semantically basic from the epistemically basic. As pointed out above, epistemic relevance and semantic relevance do not necessarily coincide. Nor does what is semantically basic necessarily coincide with what is epistemically basic. Thus, we could accept what we might call Davidsons shared-cause externalism and argue that what is semantically basic are not Lp-sentences, but more traditional observation sentences such as this is red or it is raining. We could maintain this even though sentences like this looks blue or it looks as if it is raining do express epistemically more basic beliefs.28 There might, however, be a better answer. Whether or not looks-matters are semantically basic, agreement on them certainly seems possible, and our semantics for Lp-sentences should allow for it. We should, that is, allow for the possibility of agreeing that an object looks blue to you, to me, and even to both of us. This can be done if we specify the kind of sensation that is caused when something looks blue functionally instead of qualitatively. Above, I suggested the following: (LB) x looks blue (to a subject S at a time t) is true iff x causes a blue0 sensation (in S at t). This might well be ne if we interpret the primed predicate functionally: A blue0 sensation, we can say, is a sensation of the qualitative kind that plays a certain functional role in its subject. It is caused by certain kinds of objects or events, and it causes certain kinds of reactions. Different qualitative kinds can then realize the same functional role in different subjects, thus allowing for instance for spectrum inversion and preserving the essential privacy of the quality itselfwithout preventing us from publicly talking about, and referring to it.29 Once such an analysis of the primed predicates is in place, we can see how, and in what sense, we can agree on phenomenal matters. If an object x looks blue (to S) iff it causes a sensation of the qualitative kind that realizes a certain functional type F in S,

Lp-sentences play a basic role in language acquisition. There is also a tension here, it seems to me, with Davidsons own early stress on the importance of agreement on phenomenal matters. 28 A similar point can be made about the Jones of Sellarsian myth (cf. Sellars 1963). Even if we granted that the story shows something about the order of analysiswhich I am not prepared to grantrather than just about concept acquisition, the order of analysis might very well be different from the order of justication. 29 Construing sensations terms such as pain in this way is proposed in Pagin (2000). In my (2007) I extend the analysis to primed predicates in general, and explain how these then can be used in a non-circular analysis of colour terms. For a different suggestion in what I take to be a similar spirit, see Lewis 1997.

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then you and I can straightforwardly agree that x looks blue to you (or to me). But we can also agree that x looks blue to both of us in the following sense: x is such that in each of the subjects in question it causes a sensation of the qualitative type that realizes F in that subject. As long as we are concerned with the phenomenal use of looks and that is what we are concerned with heremore agreement than that is not to be expected. The upshot of these considerations is that adopting a phenomenal belief theory of experience does not prevent content determination from being governed by the principle of charity. As we saw earlier, the phenomenal belief theory allows us to combine (R), the claim that experience provides reasons for belief, with a fully Davidsonian understanding of reasons as subjective and inferential. Moreover, since perceptual experience no longer provides a counter-example to the very plausible claim that the only propositional attitude that provides reasons for belief is that of belief, the phenomenal belief theory allows us to subscribe to the belief principle. Slightly tongue-in-cheek, I therefore conclude that the phenomenal belief theory provides the truly Davidsonian account of perceptual experience.30

References
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30 The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Communitys Seventh Framework Programme FP7/20072013 under grant agreement no. FP7-238128. I am very grateful to the es (IEA), and the Institut Jean-Nicod (ENS/EHESS), Paris. Most of this essay was Institut dEtudes Avance written in Paris in the spring of 2010, while I was an IEA fellow. Some of the material in }5 has been presented at the Perception and Knowledge workshop, ANU, August 2009, at ENFA 4, Evora, September 2009, and at the APIC seminar at the Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris, February 2010. I would like to thank all participants for very helpful comments, especially David Chalmers, Susanna Schellenberg, Brit Brogaard, Manuel Garc a-Carpintero, Kit Fine, Joelle Proust, Francois Recanati, Pierre Jacob, Jerome Dokic, andas alwaysPeter Pagin.

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