Shiwei Chen

Bence Nanay (2016) claims that hallucination can be understood as a form of mental imagery. If one also holds that mental imagery shares a substantive similarity with perception—namely, representational content—then it would follow that hallucination shares a substantive similarity with perception, thereby directly challenging disjunctivism. In this paper, I defend disjunctivism against his objection by arguing that no such substantive similarity in representational content exists between mental imagery and perception. Furthermore, mental imagery is not a homogeneous phenomenon; it itself exhibits a disjunctive structure. While one form of mental imagery, represented by amodal completion, may resemble perception, the other, represented by hallucination, does not. Consequently, it is possible for us to accept that hallucination is a form of mental imagery while still denying that it bears any substantive similarity to perception.

Practical knowledge, as Anscombe understands, is agent's knowledge of what they are doing intentionally. McDowell (2010) contends that if Anscombe insists that one can possess the same practical knowledge even when failing to execute their intention, this view readily leads to a “highest common factor” conception of practical knowledge. As an alternative, McDowell then suggests a disjunctive conception of practical knowledge. In this paper, I first reconstruct McDowell's criticism as a skeptical argument against practical knowledge, which parallels that against perceptual knowledge based on a similar highest common factor conception. I then contend that although disjunctivism is the promising framework to solve this skeptical challenge, McDowell's approach leads it into the wrong way. His success‐centered disjunctivism fails to accommodate two salient features of Anscombean practical knowledge. Finally, I propose an aptness‐centered disjunctivism about practical knowledge based on a what I call Triple‐C (Conducive to success, Capacity, Circumstance) model of aptness as a better response to the skeptical argument. The crucial point of this new version is that it takes aptness, rather than success, as the criterion for distinguishing the disjuncts.