The intentional theory of perception claims that perceptual experiences are experiential states with content that represent the world as being a certain way. Your representational experience is correct when the world actually is the way your experience represents it to be and incorrect when it is not. I take representational states to be neurophysiological states with contents whose proper function is to carry information about the environment. Unlike natural signs, mental representations sometimes misrepresent, that is, do not work according with design. Under this interpretation genuine perceptions and perfectly matching hallucinatory experiences share an important aspect apart from being representational states. They are phenomenologically indiscriminable on the basis of introspective reflection.
The disjunctive theory of perception has recently appeared as a new philosophical trend. The crucial claim in this theory is a metaphysical one according to which perceptions and hallucinations involve fundamentally different kinds of experiential states. In other words, you could not be in the same fundamental kind of experiential states you are now (assuming that you are veridically perceiving) if you were hallucinating. Some philosophers argue that this last point rebuts intentionalism and that the disjunctive view provides a better understanding of the relational structure of perceptual awareness. They seem to offer disjunctivism as a rejection of the intentional theory.
In this paper I expect to clarify the discussion claiming that the debate between Disjunctivism and Intentionalism is not really a debate between the disjunctive thesis and the basic commitments of the intentional theory as such, but only a debate between disjunctivism and a particularly narrow interpretation of the 'same proximate cause, same effect' principle usually taken to be an essential part of the argument from hallucination. This narrow interpretation forces us to claim that the manipulation of the neural cortex is sufficient to bring about and experience of the same fundamental kind. After defining what are the minimal commitments that an intentionalist theory should assume I will argue that disjunctivism, considered as a metaphysical/ontological thesis regarding the fundamental nature of experiential states is fully compatible with intentionalism. To ground my intuitions I will appeal to (i) the limits of our introspective discriminatory abilities, (ii) non-causal ways of distinguishing between representational states and finally to what I call (iii) the fundamental ontological asymmetry between perceptions and hallucinations.