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Perception :: Special topics :: Transparency

• Rocco Gennaro (2007). Representationalism, peripheral awareness, and the transparency of experience.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: It is an interesting and somewhat curious fact that two claims based on phenomenological observation are at the heart of contemporary defenses of some forms of representationalism. Representationalism is, generally, the view that pheneomenal consciousness can be explained in terms of the intentional features of experience. More precisely, a representationalist will typically hold that the phenomenal properties of experience (that is, the “qualia” or “phenomenal character” or “what it is like of experience”) can be explained in terms of the experiences’ representational properties. The first phenomenological assertion is that, in addition to our frequent focused (or attentional) awareness of outer objects, we also have peripheral (or inattentional) conscious experience at the “edges” of consciousness. It is often said that some kind of peripheral conscious awareness accompanies our focal consciousness. Indeed, it seems reasonable to suppose that conscious awareness is broader than those aspects of conscious experience to which one is paying conscious attention. The second claim is that there is what has been called the “transparency of experience;” namely, that when we try to introspect, say, our visual experiences we “look through them” only to find the outer objects of those experiences. I say that it is a ‘curious fact’ because many representationalists are motivated by a desire to reduce consciousness to intentionality without any reference to phenomenal terms, or at least to render consciousness explicable in naturalistic terms. This desire is often accompanied by a decided third-person

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  approach to consciousness and sometimes even a disdain for introspective or phenomenological methods
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/archive/00000218/
  http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/218/
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/c628645863404p3q.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/c628645863404p3q/fulltext.pdf
  
• Amy Kind (2003). What's so transparent about transparency?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Intuitions about the transparency of experience have recently begun to play a key role in the debate about qualia. Specifically, such intuitions have been used by representationalists to support their view that the phenomenal character of our experience can be wholly explained in terms of its intentional content.[i] But what exactly does it mean to say that experience is transparent? In my view, recent discussions of transparency leave matters considerably murkier than one would like. As I will suggest, there is reason to believe that experience is not transparent in the way that representationalism requires. Although there is a sense in which experience can be said to be transparent, transparency in this sense does not give us any particular motivation for representationalism—or at least, not the pure or strong representationalism that it is usually invoked to support
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://phil-rlst.claremontmckenna.edu/akind/Transparency.doc
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/q220810l8k517482/fulltext.pdf
  
• Pierre Livet (2005). What is transparency?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Opacity, in Metzinger’s sense, is access to processed information _as_ processed, while transparency is only access to the _content _of our phenomenal states. I suspect that transparency conflates different notions. First I show that every conscious experience has a “transparent” core (involving intentionality, directedness and assumption of existence, insensitivity to some unconscious process). Anyway, to be sensitive to earlier processing steps does not imply to take the representation “as modeled by our simulator”. There are other ways of being sensitive to this processing experience: experience of gaps in perceptive synthesis, experience of incompleteness, queerness of experience, phenomenal incoherence, searching consciousness. Many of them implies only to put in abeyance incoherence or incompleteness (to be laterally aware of a conflict without dealing with it), or even to put this abeyance into abeyance (not to take into account the absence of solution). But if the conflict becomes serious, we revise our assumption, and this requires the assumption that the conflict is about existing things. The self has a peculiar property here. Even when I revise one aspect of my self, I have to presuppose a self, in the sense that I put in abeyance other revisions of this presupposed self. Self is not a simulation, even if we have only this peculiar access to it.
• Michael Martin (2002). The transparency of experience.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://web.gc.cuny.edu/cogsci/private/martin-transparency.pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1468-0017.00205/abs/
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0017.00205
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/2002/00000017/00000004/art00205
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/2002/00000017/00000004/art00002
  
• Daniel Stoljar (2004). The argument from diaphanousness.   (More)
• Michael Tye (2002). Representationalism and the transparency of experience.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Representationalism is a thesis about the phenomenal character of experiences, about their immediate subjective ‘feel’.1 At a minimum, the thesis is one of supervenience: necessarily, experiences that are alike in their representational contents are alike in their phenomenal character. So understood, the thesis is silent on the nature of phenomenal character. Strong or pure representationalism goes further. It aims to tell us what phenomenal character is. According to the theory developed in Tye 1995, phenomenal character is one and the same as representational content that meets certain further conditions. One very important motivation for this theory is the so-called ? transparency of experience.? The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the appeal to transparency more carefully than has been done hithertofore, to make some remarks about the introspective awareness of experience in light of this appeal, and to consider one problem case for transparency at some length, that of blurry vision. Along the way, I shall also address some of the remarks Stephen Leeds makes in his essay on transparency
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0068.00365
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/nous/2002/00000036/00000001/art00365
  
• Kenneth Williford (ms). The logic of phenomenal transparency.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ceps.com.tw/ec/ecjnlarticleView.aspx?atliid=1000417&issueiid=58567&jnliid=3226
  

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