Hallucinations at the interface of philosophy and the empirical sciences.
Frontiers in psychology January 1, 2025 Nevia Dolcini
Hallucinations are studied differently in philosophy and empirical science, creating a conceptual misalignment. Philosophers treat them as experiences indistinguishable from veridical perception to test theories of perception and consciousness, while scientists study diverse, clinically embedded phenomena that often differ phenomenologically from ordinary perception. This paper clarifies key distinctions—indistinguishability, insight, sense of reality, agency, ownership—and sketches points of contact with scientific constructs. It examines bottom-up, top-down, and predictive processing models, highlighting their explanations and limitations. It re-situates hallucinations within philosophical debates on perception, mental imagery, and phenomenology, showing how empirical findings complicate current accounts. The analysis supports pluralist, integrative approaches, recasting hallucinations as a family of related phenomena.