Susanna Schellenberg 'The Gappy Content of Hallucination'
I will argue that a hallucination and phenomenologically indistinguishable perception share a comment element that grounds the phenomenology of the experience, but that a part of the contents of the two experiences differ since the hallucination fails to refer to an object. This failure of reference is marked by a gap in the content of the hallucinatory experience. I consider several ways of thinking about gappy contents and argue that the content of experience is best understood as potentially gappy object-related modes of presentations. This Fregean gappy content view makes it possible to forge a road between factorizing and relationalist accounts. According to the factorizing account, a subject is perceiving an object if and only if she has a certain phenomenology and some additional conditions obtain. The phenomenology constitutes the common element that is shared by a perceptual and a hallucinatory experience. Relationalist or disjunctive accounts characterize hallucinations in terms of a deficiency of an accurate perceptual experience. On the Fregean gappy content view, phenomenologically indistinguishable perceptions and hallucinations share a common element that co-varies with phenomenology, but hallucinations exhibit a deficiency that can only be explained in terms of successful perceptual experiences.