There is currently no consensus about a general account of hallucination and its object. The problem of hallucination has de facto generated contrasting accounts of perception, led to opposing epistemic and metaphysical positions, and, most significantly, exposed a manifold of diverging views concerning the intentionality of experience, in general, and perceptual intentionality, in particular. In this article, I aim to clarify the controversial status, experiential possibility, and intentional structure of hallucination qua distinctive phenomenon. The analysis will first detect a phenomenological, (...) Husserlian-informed concept of hallucination in its irreducibility to other kinds and modes of sensory experience. This will set the theoretical basis to develop an account of hallucination by means of a morphological description of those diversified structures of intentional consciousness that lend themselves to generate hallucinatory appearances. I will then describe both the turning of certain kinds of intentional experience into hallucinatory perceptions and the status of hallucinatory objects. This will support the possibility of hallucination in a strict and rigorous sense, elucidate the enigmatic claim that ‘in hallucination we are conscious of something while nothing truly appears,’ and offer a seminal perspective concerning the alleged problem that hallucinations pose on perceptual intentionality. With the aid of some crucial distinctions, I will then argue that hallucinations do not affect perceptual intentionality as a dyadic, relational structure. (shrink)

Interpretations abound about Husserl’s understanding of the relationship between veridical perceptual experience and hallucination. Some read him as taking the two to share the same distinctive essential nature, like contemporary conjunctivists. Others find in Husserl grounds for taking the two to fall into basically distinct categories of experience, like disjunctivists. There is ground for skepticism, however, about whether Husserl’s view could possibly fall under either of these headings. Husserl, on the one hand, operates under the auspices of the phenomenological reduction, (...) abstaining from use of any epistemic commitments about mind-transcendent reality, whereas conjunctive and disjunctive accounts of perceptual experience, on the other hand, are both premised on some form of metaphysical realism. There seems to be a basic incompatibility between the former approach and the latter. I examine this line of thinking and argue that the incompatibility is only apparent. (shrink)