Revisiting the hallucination argument

Abstract

The so-called “hallucination argument” has been traditionally used to justify or reinforce skeptical positions in epistemology, and delimit perception theories conceptually –thus becoming a basic concern in the theory of knowledge. In this paper I will defend the idea that such an argument has been overestimated and that, in its classical formulation, it is neither compatible with empirical arguments nor does it withstand a detailed phenomenological scrutiny. Based on naturalistic and phenomenological considerations, I will present several reasons that discredit the argument and force us to reconsider it in a different light, which has some important consequences for the theory of knowledge.