What is "disjunctivism"

n. (context philosophy English) A school of thought that rejects the existence of sense data in certain cases, believing that a hallucination differs from a veridical experience in that the latter is the experience of an actual external entity.

Disjunctivism is a position in the philosophy of perception that rejects the existence of sense data in certain cases. The disjunction is between appearance and the reality behind the appearance "making itself perceptually manifest to someone."

Veridical perceptions and hallucinations are not members of a common class of mental states or events. According to this theory, the only thing common to veridical perceptions and hallucinations is that in both cases, the subject cannot tell, via introspection, that he is not having a veridical perception. Disjunctivists claim this because they hold that in veridical perception, a subject's experience actually presents the external, mind-independent object of that perception. Further, they claim that in a hallucination there is no external object to be related to, nor are there sense-data to be a part of the perception. Thus, disjunctivism is a form of naive realism or direct realism.

Disjunctivism was first introduced to the contemporary literature by Michael Hinton, and has subsequently been associated with John McDowell. Disjunctivists often hold that an important virtue of their view is that it captures the common sense idea that perception involves a relation to objects in the world.