INTROSPECTION
AND PHENOMENAL CHARACTER
Sydney
Shoemaker – Cornell University
I
[…] One view I
hold about the nature of phenomenal character, which is also a view about the
relation between phenomenal character and the introspective belief about it, is
that phenomenal character is “self-intimating.” This means that it is of the essence of a state’s having a
certain phenomenal character that this issues in the subject’s being
introspectively aware of that character, or does so if the subject
reflects. Part of my aim is to give an
account which makes it intelligible that this should be so.
A more substantive view I hold about phenomenal character
is that a perceptual state’s having a certain phenomenal character is a matter
of its having a certain sort of representational content. This much I hold in common with a number of
recent writers, including Gil Harman, Michael Tye, Bill Lycan, and Fred
Dretske. But representationalism about
phenomenal character often goes with the rejection of “qualia,” and with the
rejection of the possibility of spectrum inversion and other sorts of “qualia
invesion.” My version of
representationalism embraces what other
versions reject. It assigns an
essential role to qualia, and accepts the possibility of qualia-inversion. A central aim of the present paper is to
present a version of this view which is free of the defects I now see in my
earlier versions of it.
II
As
I have said, one of my aims in this paper is to give an account of phenomenal
states, and our awareness of them, that is compatible with the possibility of
spectrum inversion. But what I mean by
the possibility of spectrum inversion is something more modest than what is
commonly meant. What is often at issue
in discussions of spectrum inversion is the possibility of a state of affairs
in which the phenomenal character of the visual experiences of two subjects is
systematically different when they are in the same circumstances and viewing
objects alike in color, and in which the phenomenal character of the subjects’
visual experiences is sometimes the same when the objects they are viewing are
different in color, and yet there is no behavioral difference between those
subjects – they make the same color discriminations, apply color words in the
same way, and so on. Such a case
would be a case of behaviorally undetectable spectrum inversion. One reason why the discussion has fastened
on the possibility of such cases is that the supposition that they are possible
can seem to aggravate the problem of knowledge of other minds. Another reason is that it is the possibility
of such cases that seems to imply that qualia, the properties that give
experiences their phenomenal character, are not functionally definable. It seems a short step from holding that there
can be behaviorally undetectable spectrum inversion to holding that two
subjects who are functionally indistinguishable, at the psychological level,
can be spectrum inverted relative to each other -- and if this is possible, there can be a psychological
difference where there is no corresponding functional difference.[1] It is of course the claim that behaviorally
undetectable spectrum inversion is possible that has raised verificationist
objections. It is also this claim that
has been the target of the empirical objection that our color quality space is
asymmetrical in ways that preclude a mapping of determinate shades of color
onto other determinate shades of color in a way that preserves the similarity
relationships between different shades, preserves boundaries between color
categories, and maps unique hues onto unique hues.[2] For some purposes the empirical objection
can be finessed by construing the claim about behaviorally undetectable
spectrum inversion as saying, not that there could be such inversion in the
case of creatures whose color quality space is like our own, but that there
could be creatures who perceive colors and whose color quality space is such
that for them such inversion is possible.[3] But for
my present purposes it is unnecessary for me to claim even this; the
claim that behaviorally undetectable inversion is possible plays no role in my
argument.. All that I need claim is
that it is possible for the visual experiences different creatures have of
objects of certain colors to differ in their phenomenal character without any
of these creatures thereby misperceiving the colors, and for the visual
experiences of two creatures to be alike in phenomenal character when they are
viewing things of different colors, again without either of the creatures
misperceiving the colors.
If
there were creatures whose color qualia were “alien” relative to ours, so that
no color experience of theirs was phenomenally like any color experience of
ours, and if these creatures were equivalent to us in their ability to perceive
colors, then the relation of their color experience to ours would realize the
first of the possibilities but not the second.
This would be a case of “alien qualia” but not “inverted qualia.” [4]
What is true if there can be either alien color qualia or inverted color qualia is that no phenomenal character is
such that an experience’s having that phenomenal character is a
necessary condition of its representing
a certain color. What additionally is
true if there can be inverted color qualia is that no phenomenal character is
such that an experience’s having that phenomenal character is sufficient for
its representing a certain color.
Anyone
who makes the inverted qualia and alien qualia claims about color experience
will presumably make the corresponding claims about the perception of other
“secondary qualities” – sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile properties like
warmth and coldness. Such claims have
been made as long as the perception of such properties has been discussed. They are motivated in part by the idea that
the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences should be a function not
only of the objective states of affairs being perceived but also of the nature
of the perceptual system of the perceiver.
That idea, taken as completely general, would imply that such claims
should be made about the perception of “primary qualities” as well. But in the case of secondary qualities the
idea derives much of its plausibility from the fact that there seems to be an
“explanatory gap” between the phenomenal character of the experiences and what
we know independently of this character about the objective properties of the
things that cause them. If we ask why
something with a certain molecular structure should taste the way bitter things
taste to us, or or why something with a
certain surface spectral reflectance should look the way blue things look to us, it seems clear that at least part
of the answer must have to do with the
nature of the perceptual system involved in our perception of these
properties. It may indeed seem that an
explanatory gap remains even when we bring in the nature of the perceiver.[5] But this remaining gap is an aspect of the
mind-body problem, having to do with the relation between states of the brain
and the phenomenal character of experiences, and is one that we cannot even
formulate without assuming that the phenomenal character of our experiences of
things having certain objective properties is fixed by physical states of ours
that are caused by things having those properties, and is only contingently
related to those properties.
This assumption is supported
by what we know about the mechanisms involved in the perception of such
properties. We know that what shades of
color are perceived as “unique hues” is determined by the rates at which lights
of various wavelengths are absorbed by
pigments in the cones on the retina, and that because the amount of
these pigments varies slightly from one individual to another there are
individual differences among normal observers as to what shades are perceived
as unique hues – e.g., as to whether something is a unique green or a slightly
bluish green. [6] There is no good reason to say that some of
these observers are getting it right and the others are misperceiving. So this can count as a case of behaviorally
detectable spectrum inversion. We know
that because of the way our perceptual system operates many different
combinations of wavelengths are
visually indistinguishable (such indistinguishable combinations of wavelengths
are called “metamers”), and thus that what we perceive as sameness of color and
difference of color is determined in part by the nature of our visual
system. If whether things look the same
or different with respect to color is determined in part by the nature of our
visual system, it would seem that how things look must be determined in part by
the nature of our visual system.
III
If the phenomenal character
of perceptual experiences consisted in their
representational content, and if this content consisted entirely in the
representation of “objective” properties,
then experiences that have the same objective representational content
would be alike in phenomenal character, whether the perceptual mechanisms of the subjects of these experiences were the same or
different. In that case inverted qualia
and absent qualia would be impossible.
The way I reconcile the claim that inverted qualia and absent qualia are
possible with representationalism about phenomenal character is by holding that
among the properties represented by perceptual experiences are what I call
“phenomenal properties,” and that the phenomenal content of experiences
consists in their representation of these.[7] These properties are perceiver relative, in
such a way that perceivers can differ in what phenomenal properties they are
perceiving the same objects to have while veridically perceiving these objects
to have the same objective properties, and in such a way that different
perceivers can, when veridically perceiving different objects, perceive the
same phenomenal properties even though the objective properties they perceive
are different. The idea is that we
perceive the colors and other secondary qualities of things by
perceiving phenomenal properties that are associated with them, and that
individuals can differ with respect to what phenomenal properties are
associated in their experience with the same objective secondary
properties. Originally I held that
phenomenal properties are relational properties that things have only when
perceived – so, for example, the “color-like” phenomenal property I perceive
when I see something red is a property something has just in case it produces
an experience of a certain sort in the creature perceiving it. [8] More recently I have suggested that
phenomenal properties are instead dispositional properties of a certain kind –
dispositions things have to produce experiences of certain sorts in one or more
sorts of creatures.[9] The role of qualia in the account is to
determine the types of experiences in terms of which the phenomenal properties
are individuated, and, what goes with this, to bestow on experiences their
phenomenal character, i.e., the part of their content that consists in the
representation of phenomenal properties.
One needs such an account if
one is to combine representationalism about the phenomenal character of
experiences with the view that qualia inversion is possible – more generally,
with the view that to some extent the phenomenal character of experiences and their
objective representational content can vary independently of one another. If phenomenal character is representational
content, phenomenal character can vary independently of objective
representational content only if there is another sort of representational
content that can vary independently of objective representational content.
There is a view about what
the phenomenal properties are that makes them aptly called “subjective,” and
makes the experiential contents in which they are represented aptly called
subjective representational contents.
This is the projectivist view that they are in fact properties of our
experiences themselves, which the experiences falsely represent as instantiated
in objects of outer perception – so one’s experiences (correctly) represent the
tomato as red by (falsely) representing it as having a certain property that is
in fact instantiated in the experience itself and is never instantiated except
in experiences. This sort of error
theory I am anxious to avoid. On my view,
the phenomenal properties, although relational and individuated with respect to
kinds of experiences, really do belong to the external things in which we
perceive them as being instantiated. So
while it seems right to say that the representation of these is not part of the
objective representational content of experiences, I am reluctant to speak of
it as subjective representational content.
I said that one needs a view
of this sort if one is to reconcile representationalism about experience with
the possibility of spectrum inversion and the like. So if one already accepts both representationalism and the
possibility of spectrum inversion, one
has a reason to hold such a view. But
it seems offhand that if one already accepts the possibility of spectrum
inversion, there is a consideration that gives one a reason to hold this view
even if one does not already accept representationalism – and which by giving
one a way of reconciling the possibility of spectrum inversion with
representationalism, gives one a reason to hold representationalism. It is this I want to look at next.
IV
Earlier I characterized the possibility of qualia inversion as the
possibility that the phenomenal character of experience and the objective
representational content of experience can, to some extent, vary independently
of one another, without this resulting in misperception. So, for example, one might characterize a
case of spectrum inversion as one in which one person’s experiences of red are
phenomenally like another person’s experiences of green, and vice versa. This should not be put by saying that to one
of the people red things look red and green things look green, while to the
other red things look green and green things look red. For that of course would imply that one of
them systematically misperceives the colors of things. But there is a way of putting this in terms
of how things “look” which is not defective in this way – one can say that the
way red things look to one of them is the way green things look to the other,
and the way green things look to the first is the way red things look to the
second. This formulation has the
advantage that it does not employ notions – such as those of an experience, of
the phenomenal character of experiences, and of the objective representational
content of experiences – which might be held to be loaded with questionable
philosophical theory. But this way of
putting the possibility can seem to lead immediately to the conclusion that the
possibility of spectrum inversion requires that our experiences represent
phenomenal properties that are distinct from colors. If red and green things look different to the two people, and yet
red things look red to both and green things look green to both, and they don’t
differ in what other objective properties the things look to them to have, it
would seem that there must be a kind of properties other than these colors, and
other than any kind of objective properties, such that one of the persons
perceives red things to have one property of this kind and green things
another, while the other perceives green things to have the first of these
properties and red things to have the second.
The guiding idea here is that if something looks a certain way to a person,
there is, corresponding to that “certain way,” a certain property that thing
looks to the person to have. It is this
idea I shall be examining and developing in the remainder of this section and
in the one that follows.
If this idea is right, it
would seem that we can get to phenomenal properties without invoking anything
as controversial as the claim that spectrum inversion is possible. For it is absolutely commonplace for things
to look different (either to the same person, or to different persons) without
there being any misperception and without there being any difference in the
objective representational content of the experiences of them. Consider a case in which I look at a table
surface that is partly in shadow, or on which there is a highlight. Different parts of the surface will look
different to me. There is no
misperception here – indeed, given the circumstances, only a malfunctioning of
the visual system could result in the parts of the surface not looking
different. Supposing that the table
surface is in fact uniform in color, and that I am not misperceiving, this is
not a case in which the objective representational content of my experience of
one part of the surface differs from the objective representational content of
my experience of another part of the surface.
This will be a case of “color constancy”; the part in shadow, although
it looks different from the part not in shadow, does not look to have a
different color. Of course, it may look
to me as if the one part has, while the other lacks, the objective property of
being in shadow. But it would get things backwards if we said that it is
because of this that the two parts look different to me. Things can look different to one in the way
these parts do when one is in doubt whether this is due to a difference in color
or a difference in illumination, and if in the present case one part looks to
be in shadow and the other doesn’t, this is partly because they look different
in the way they do (and partly because of clues about illumination provided by
the context). If their looking
different to me in this way consists in there being different properties they
appear to have, these won’t be objective properties. They will candidates for being phenomenal properties in my sense
of the term.
What properties might these
be? One sort of property that is
certainly instantiated in such case is the property something has just in case
it is currently looking a certain way to someone. I would construe this as the property of causing, in a certain
way, an experience of a certain sort.
Call such a property an “occurrent appearance property.” This is the sort of property I first took
phenomenal properties to be. But a
thing’s having such a property is bound to be an exercise of a dispositional
property it has – the property it has of being apt to produce experiences of a
certain sort in some kinds of observers when those observers are related to it
in a certain way. Call such a property
a “dispositional appearance property.”
This is the sort of property I took phenomenal properties to be in a
more recent discussion.
It should be noted that any
object will have a vast number of dispositional properties of the sort
indicated – even if we put aside the possibility of spectrum inversion, which
entails that the object may be apt to appear differently to different observers
because of differences in their perceptual systems. For it will be disposed to appear in different ways depending on
the illumination conditions, the distance of the observer from it, the way in
which the observer is oriented relative to it, and so forth. [10]
In earlier discussions I
have written as if for any sort of observer, each shade of color is associated
with a single phenomenal property, in such a way that for an observer of that
sort perceiving something to be of that shade of color involves perceiving it
to have that phenomenal property. It is
clear that if phenomenal properties are any of the “appearance” properties just
mentioned, this is a gross oversimplification. Plainly, for any shade of color there will be a large number of
different occurrent appearance properties such that, given the right
circumstances, perceiving a thing having one of those appearance properties
will be sufficient for perceiving it to have that shade. The same is true of the dispositional
appearance properties. As noted, an
object will have a large number of such properties, and a perceiver will
perceive one of these only if she is the right sort of observer and is related
to the object in the right sort of way and in the right sort of
circumstances. The exercise of these
dispositions will always be an instantiation of an occurrent appearance
property. And associated with a given
shade of color there will be at least as many dispositional properties of this
sort as there are occurrent appearance properties associated with it. In fact, there are bound to be more, since
sometimes it is one and the same occurrent appearance property that is
instantiated in the exercise of the dispositions associated with a number of
different dispositional appearance
properties.
Among the occurrent
appearance properties associated with a color, some will have an especially
close relationship to it – relative to a certain sort of observer. It is one or another of these that a thing
will have when viewed (by an observer of the relevant sort) under normal or
standard viewing conditions. When one
speaks of something as looking a particular shade of blue, one is likely to
have in mind a way of appearing that belongs to this privileged subset. Call this a “canonical” way of appearing
associated with blue. But expressions
like “looks blue” seem to be ambiguous.
In saying that something looks blue, one may be indicating that if one
took one’s experience at face value one would judge that the thing is
blue. Following Fred Dretske, call this
the “doxastic” sense of “looks blue.”[11] But saying that something looks blue in this
sense is in a certain way unspecific about how it looks. It is unspecific about what occurrent
appearance property it has, for the statement could be true even if the way the
thing looks is not a canonical way for blue things to look – it is enough if
the way the thing looks is such that, given the circumstances, the thing’s
looking that way indicates that it is blue (and the perceiver is sensitive to
this fact). In a different sense of
“looks blue,” call it (again following Dretske) the “phenomenal” sense, saying
that something looks blue is saying that the way it looks belongs to the privileged
subset, i.e., is a canonical way for blue things to look (relative to observers
like oneself). And one could say that
something looks blue in this sense, looksp blue, even if taking
one’s experience at face value would not lead one to judge that it is
blue. Under certain circumstances snow
looksp blue (or at any rate bluish). This is not a case of misperception, and it is not a case in
which one is disposed to think that the snow is blue. If there is a highlight on the table, one might say that part of
its surface looksp white – but one is not thereby judging, or even
disposed to judge, that it is white, and one also will not think one is
misperceiving. On the other hand, it is
quite common for white things not to lookp white, i.e., not look the
way white things look in normal or standard viewing conditions, even though
they do look white in the doxastic sense (do lookd white). Roughly speaking, if F is a color then
something looks F in the phenomenal sense if a painter would use F pigment to
represent how it looks.
We see here that there is an
understanding of “ways of looking” such that a thing’s looking a certain way
(namely lookingp that way) is not in and of itself a matter of
its appearing to have certain objective
properties. Of course, things appearing
to have certain objective properties (appearingd certain ways) is
grounded in their looking phenomenally (lookingp) certain ways. But the transition from the ways things
appear phenomenally to what objective properties they have, and what objective
properties they appear to have, rests on certain contingencies. These include facts about illumination
conditions and the spatial relation of the perceiver to the object, and facts
about how these combine with the objective properties of a thing to determine
how it will lookp. The
observer needn’t have explicit knowledge of these facts, but she must show an
appropriate sensitivity to them. And
there is a further contingency: how things with certain objective properties
appearp, given illumination conditions and the relation of the
observer to the object, depends on what sort of visual system the observer
has. This is the point that is
dramatized by inverted qualia and alien qualia scenarios.
If the way something looksp
to one does not itself amount to one’s experience representing the thing as
having certain objective properties, does it amount to representing the thing
as having any properties at all? In
particular, does it amount to representing the instantiation of any of the
properties mentioned earlier as candidates for being phenomenal
properties? That there are what
I have called occurrent appearance properties and dispositional appearance
properties seems to me beyond question.[12] The question is whether any of these can be
properties our experiences represent.
For unless some of them are, we cannot characterize the phenomenal
character of experience in the way I proposed earlier – namely by saying that
an experience’s having a certain phenomenal character is a matter of its
representing something as having certain phenomenal properties.
V
If one has a perceptual
experience in which one is “appearedp-to” in a certain way, an
experience “as of” something appearingp a certain way, then unless
one is hallucinating there is something that does appearp to one
that way – something that has the occurrent appearance property of so
appearing. For such an experience to be
veridical, there must be something that has that property, and if there is
something having that property, the experience is to that extent
veridical. This does not of course
exclude its failing to be veridical in other ways. One’s first thought is that it fails to be veridical if the thing
fails to be the way it appears to be – e.g., if it looks blue but is not blue. But remember the different senses of “looks
blue” distinguished earlier. If
something appearsd blue,
appears blue in the doxastic sense, then its not being blue would be a failure
of veridicality. But if the thing
appearsp blue, appears blue in the phenomenal sense, then its not
being blue is not sufficient for its failing to be veridical – for it may be
that while it is not blue, the circumstances are such that something with its
intrinsic properties should lookp blue to an observer like
oneself. So the requirement of
veridicality could be put as follows: for an experience of a thing to be
veridical, the way the thing appearsp must be such that a thing’s
appearingp that way to an observer of that sort in those
circumstances would not count as misperception. And this amounts to saying that the thing must have a
dispositional appearance property of a certain sort. It must be such that in circumstances of this sort it appearsp
this way, or can appearp this way, to an observer of this sort with
a normally functioning perceptual system who is related to it as this observer
is related to it. [13]
So the veridicality of an
experience as of something that appearsp a certain way requires that
there be something that has the occurrent appearance property of appearingp
that way and also the dispositional appearance property of appearingp
that way to observers of a certain kind who view it under certain
conditions. This seems a reason for
saying that such an experience represents the instantiation of properties of
both sorts. It is of course not true in
general that if something’s having a certain property is a necessary condition
of an experience’s being veridical then that property is represented by the
experience. If an experience is of a
glass of water, it is a necessary condition of its being veridical that the
glass in front of the subject contains hydrogen atoms, but we would not want to
say that the experience represents the property of containing hydrogen
atoms. But whereas the experience of
the glass of water does not, by itself, put the subject in a position to judge
that there are hydrogen atoms in front of him, the experience in which
something looksp blue does put the subject in a position to judge
both that the thing has the occurrent appearance property of lookingp
blue and that it has the, or rather a, dispositional property of lookingp
blue. And that makes it plausible to
say that these are properties of the thing thing that are represented.
There is a difficulty with
this that is indicated by my shift from “the” to “a” a couple of sentences
back. Presumably the dispositional appearance property a subject perceives on a
particular occasion should be one whose associated disposition is exercised on
that occasion by the instantiation of an occurrent appearance property. But when something has the occurrent
appearance property of appearingp F, there will be any number of
different dispositional appearance properties of which this could be the
manifestation, and the nature of the experience will not in general indicate of
which of these it is in fact the manifestation – for the nature of the
experience will not reveal all of the relevant details about the circumstances
under which the thing is observed. So
the experience will not put the observer in a position to judge that the
observed thing has any specific appearance dispositional property – and that
seems a reason for saying that it does not represent any such property.
But for any way a thing can
appear, there will be the higher order property shared by all things that are
disposed, under some circumstances or other, to appear that way to normal
observers of one or more sorts situated in one or another way with respect to
them.[14] This will be the higher order property of
having one or another of the dispositional
appearance properties which can manifest themselves in an instantiation
of a given occurrent appearance property, and will be a property that a
perceived thing will have just in case it has that occurrent appearance
property. Call this a higher-order
dispositional appearance property. If
one has an experience as of something that appearsp F, it is a condition of the experience being
veridical that the thing have the higher-order dispositional appearance
property of appearingp F.
And having such an experience does put one in a position to judge that
the object perceived does have that property.
There seems a good case for saying that such properties are represented
by experiences. And these, and the
associated occurrent appearance properties, seem good candidates for being the
phenomenal properties my account requires.
VI
But suppose we deny that any
of these appearance properties are perceived and represented in our perceptual
experiences. It will still be true that
it is because things appearp to us in certain ways that we perceive
them as having certain properties. And
it will still be true that the nature of our experiences, and what we are
introspectively aware of in having them, will reflect the ways things appear to
us. If anything deserves to be called
the phenomenal character of our experiences, it is the part of their
introspectable nature that reflects how things look, feel, taste, smell,
or sound to us. If this is part of the
representational content of our experiences, the appearance properties I have
mentioned seem the only candidates for being the properties that are
represented. And if this is not part of
the representational content of our experience, then representationalism about
phenomenal character is false. .
But how could this not
be part of the representational content of our experience? It could be so only if what we are
introspectively aware of here, in being aware of the look, feel, etc. of
things, are features of our experiences that are not themselves
representational. But how could awareness
of intrinsic, non-representational features of experience constitute awareness
of the look, feel, etc. of things? One
view would be that the features we are introspectively aware of are related to
the appearance of things in something like the way the paint we see on a canvas
is related to what the painting represents – that our awareness of how things
appear is grounded on our awareness of non-representational features of the
experience in something like the way our perceptual awareness of what the
painting represents is grounded on our perceptual awareness of the lines,
shapes and colors on the canvas.[15] This view seems to me false to the
phenomenology, and to be avoided for all the reasons that have led to the
demise of the sense-datum theory.
But my aim in the present
paper is not so much to argue for representationalism about phenomenal content
as to argue, first, that if representationalism is to be acceptable it must
allow that the properties whose representation bestows phenomenal character are
phenomenal properties in my sense, which I now claim to be appearance
properties of the sort I have characterized, and, second, that in allowing this
a representationalist must allow something that representationalists have
usually been unwilling to allow – that the phenomenal character of experiences
is independent of their objective representational content (their
representation of objective properties) in a way that allows for the
possibility of cases of inverted qualia and alien qualia. To complete the case for this I need to say
more about how qualia figure in my account.
But before I do this I want to say something about how the account
applies to the case of pains and other bodily sensations.
VII
One of my claims about
introspective awareness is that it is fact awareness unmediated by thing awareness – awareness that
which does not involve awareness of any object. One source of resistance to this is the
awareness we have in cases of after-imaging and the like. It is certainly very natural to say that my
awareness that I see a yellowish-orange after image is grounded on an awareness
of an object, namely the after-image.
Here I follow the lead of J.J.C. Smart, in his seminal paper “Sensations
and Brain Processes”; I affirm the existence of “experiences of after-imaging”
while denying the existence of after-images.[16] This is the rejection of the “act-object”
conception of sensation. In my view, to
hold that “seeing a yellowish-orange after-image” involves the existence in
one’s mind of something that is yellowish-orange is to hold a view that can be
adhered to consistently only by someone who embraces a sense-datum theory of
perception. So I hold that we should
not “reify” after-images.
But it is one thing to hold that we should not reify after-images, and
another thing to say that we should not reify pains. Intuitively, a more serious obstacle to holding that
introspective awareness is fact awareness unmediated by thing awareness is the
overwhelming naturalness of saying that pains, itches, tingles, etc. are
particular items of which we are introspectively aware, and that it is by being
aware of these items – these “objects” – that one is aware of such facts as
that one has a pain in one’s foot. It
is common to take pains and the like as paradigms of sensations, and sensations
as paradigms of experiences – and then it is no wonder that we fall into
thinking of experiences as objects that we are aware of in a quasi-perceptual
way when we introspect.
This way of thinking is
extremely natural, but I think that it is confused. I think that when, as we say, a person has a pain in his foot and
feels it, there are two sorts of awareness occurring that need to be
distinguished, and which ordinary ways of talking encourage us to
conflate. There is perceptual awareness
of the condition of some part of one’s body.
This involves awareness of the instantiation of a phenomenal property –
in the sense discussed above – in that part of one’s body. By perceiving the instantiation of such a
property one may also perceive that there is damage of some sort in that part
of one’s body – no doubt the biological function of pain and pain awareness
intimately involves the perception of bodily damage.[17] Here one can properly be said to be aware
of some particular, a region of one’s body, as having one or more
properties. This awareness is not
simply awareness that; it is, if you like, awareness of an object. But also, this is not introspective
awareness; it is perceptual awareness.
Now, having this perceptual awareness involves being in a perceptual
state, a somatic perceptual state, which represents some part of one’s body as
being a certain way. And of this state
one can, and normally will, have introspective awareness. This awareness will be like the introspective
awareness one has of one’s visual, auditory, tactile, etc.
sense-experiences. It is best thought
of as awareness that – awareness that one is in a certain somatic
perceptual state. The content of this
awareness will embed the content of the perceptual state, in the same way that
the content of an introspective belief about visual experience will embed the
content of the visual experience. The
somatic experience is no more in the part of one’s body it represents than the
visual experience is in the portion of one’s visual field it represents. And it no more has the phenomenal property
it represents as instantiated in a certain part of one’s body than the visual
experience has the phenomenal property it represents as instantiated in in some
object in front of one – at any rate, this is so unless some projectivist view
of phenomenal properties is correct.
But in the same sense in which the visual experience has a phenomenal
character, the somatic experience has a phenomenal character; its phenomenal
character is fixed by what phenomenal properties it represents.
Supposing this account is
right, how do we map it onto our ordinary talk of pains and itches, and of
feeling pains and itches? I think there
is no neat way to do so. We speak of
pains and itches as located in parts of our bodies. And we speak of them as felt, which seems to make them objects of
some kind of perception. But we also
speak of them as mental entities. And
the instantiation in some part of one’s body of a phenomenal property that can
be felt is no more a mental state of affairs than is an apple’s having a
phenomenal property that is detectable by sight. The somatic experience of pain is mental, and to that extent is a
better candidate for being pain than the phenomenal property
instantiation. And it seems to be what
we are averse to, which also makes it a better candidate. We are as averse to “hallucinatory” somatic
experiences of this sort as we are to veridical ones. But the somatic experiences are not located in the parts of our
bodies where we are said to feel pains – if they are located anywhere, they are
located in the brain. And the somatic
experiences are not felt, just as visual experiences are not seen. So nothing there is seems an ideal candidate
for being pain as we ordinarily talk about it.
Similarly for itches and tingles.
This doesn’t prevent there being quite definite truth conditions for
statements about pains, or about itches and tingles. A person counts as being in pain if she has a somatic experience
having a certain phenomenal character, i.e., representing the instantiation of
a certain phenomenal property at some point in the person’s body. And someone counts as having a pain in a
certain location if she has a somatic experience which represents an
instantiation of that phenomenal property in that location – even if, as in the
case of “referred pains,” the organic cause of the pain is in some other part
of the body. Because these truth
conditions concern the somatic experiences, these may seem the best candidates
for being pains. But if we take them to
be the pains, we must allow that it is only in what G.E. Moore called a
Pickwickean sense that pains have location, and are felt. And we must be
careful not to confuse the introspective awareness of pains so understood,
i.e., the introspective awareness of this class of somatic sense experiences,
with the perceptual awareness that normally accompanies it, viz the perception
of conditions of one’s body.
The confusion we are apt to
fall into here has a parallel in the case of other sorts of sensory
experience. It is certainly not unheard
of for philosophers to confuse our introspective awareness of visual sense
experiences with perceptual awareness of phenomenal properties represented in
such experience. This happens in
sense-datum accounts. What probably
makes the confusion harder to resist in the case of bodily sensations is a fact
about our interests. Whereas in the
case of other sorts of perception our primary interest is not in experiences but
in the things they represent, in the case of pains and itches we have at least
as direct an interest in the experiences themselves, namely in avoiding or
eliminating them. Being in the habit of
taking the items of primary interest to be objects of perception, as they are
in other cases, we are prone to do this here, thereby blurring the distinction
between perceptual experience and item perceived. So we are apt to accept a sense-datum view about bodily sensation
even when we have abandoned it elsewhere.
But, as I suggested earlier, taking bodily sensations as our paradigms
of experiences can lead one to think that even in the case of vision and
hearing our experiences are objects which we can be introspectively aware of as
having certain properties – and this is a sort of residue of the sense-datum
view. At any rate, that is how I would
diagnose my own past thinking about these matters.
VIII
I said above that the instantiation in some part of one’s body of a
phenomenal property, e.g., in a case of pain, is “no more a mental state of
affairs than is an apple’s having a phenomenal property that is detectable by
sight.” But does this mean that it is
not a mental state of affairs at all?
Recall that my earlier discussion settled on two sorts of properties as
the best candidates for being phenomenal properties – higher order dispositional appearance properties, and the
occurrent appearance properties in which these are manifested. I see no reason not to count both of these
as phenomenal properties. The
instantiation of a phenomenal property of the first sort is a “mental” state of
affairs only in the very thin sense that the instantiation of such properties
requires that there be minded creatures capable of perceiving such
instantiations. But the instantiation
of a phenomenal property of the second sort, an occurrent appearance property,
is a mental state of affairs in a much
more robust sense – for it requires that the thing having it be actually
perceived.
So it is perhaps not out of
the question that pains can be held to be both located where we say they are
and mental – or at least partly mental.
They will be so if they are instantiations of phenomenal properties of
the second sort, occurrent appearance properties. Such a view would not save everything we want to say about
pain. For it would allow for the
possibility of pain hallucinations, and would imply, contrary to ordinary ways
of speaking, that a “referred pain in the arm” is not really in the arm. But then, neither does the view that pains
are somatic experiences of (i.e., representing) such property instantiations
save everything we want to say about pain.
But I think it is useful to
reflect on the fact that insofar as our perceptual experiences represent
instantiations of occurrent appearance properties, they represent states of
affairs that are in part mental. For
this raises a question about the relation between perceptual awareness and the
introspective awareness of perceptual experiences. If the properties represented by perceptual experiences were
exclusively objective properties, ones whose instantiation was in no way a
state of affairs that involves the existence of minds, then the contents of
perceptual awarenesses and introspective awarenesses would be logically
independent of each other. But if the
properties represented by a perceptual experience include occurrent appearance properties, then part
of the content of the perceptual experience seems closely related to the
content of an introspective awareness the subject might have. Let it be that I am perceptually aware that
something has the occurrent appearance property of lookingp blue,
and am introspectively aware that I am “appearedp blue to,” i.e., that I am having an
experience as of something that looksp blue. The relation of “That looksp blue to me” to “I am having an experience
as of something that looksp blue” seems to be one of conceptual
entailment. So the introspective awareness expressed by the second
proposition seems implicit in the perceptual awareness expressed by the
first.
Now of course one can have a
perceptual experience that represents that a thing has a certain property
without judging that the thing has that property. This can happen when one’s attention is not on the thing in question,
or when the experience of it is just a momentary glimpse. And it can happen when the property is an
occurrent appearance property. So it
would be wrong to say that whenever one’s experience represents such a
property, one is in a position to make the introspective judgment that it
does. What seems to be true, however,
is that whenever one is in a position to make the perceptual judgment that
something has such a property, one is in a position to make the introspective
judgment that one’s experience represents the property.
In earlier discussions of
phenomenal properties I have insisted that while such properties are in fact
relational, we are not normally aware of them as relational. I now want to qualify this. It is true, I think, of the case where one perceives
something to have a phenomenal property but does not judge that the thing has
it. But the situation is more
complicated in the case where one does judge that a thing has a phenomenal
property. One thing that remains true
is that while the property is relational, only one of the relata, namely the
external object, is perceived – so perceiving the property is not a matter of
perceiving a relation between two things.
And in some cases the judgment one makes is not relational in form; one
judges simply “It looks blue.” It may
not occur to the person making this judgment that the thing’s looking blue is a
matter of its looking blue to her.
For one thing, the person very likely is not distinguishing the
occurrent appearance property of lookingp blue and the dispositional
appearance property of lookingp blue, and of course the thing’s having the latter is not a matter
of its standing in a relation to the subject.
However, insofar as the subject is ascribing to the thing the occurrent
appearance property of lookingp blue, nothing more than reflection
on what having this property amounts to should be needed for the person to
realize that “looks blue” here means “looks blue to me,” and that the property
is relational. And, as suggested above,
nothing more than reflection on the content of the latter realization should be
needed for the person to realize that she is “appeared blue to,” i.e., has an
experience that represents something as lookingp blue.
This gives us one way of
cashing out the claim that the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences is
“self-intimating.” It is obvious that
insofar as perception is a source of knowledge of the environment, it requires
the subject to have at least a
sensitivity, which may be only subpersonal, to the contents of perceptual experiences -- only so can these
give rise to perceptual beliefs with corresponding contents. If it is further the case that perceptual
experiences must represent occurrent appearance properties, this sensitivity
extends to the representation of these.
It would be rash to claim that in general this sensitivity amounts to
introspective awareness. But in the
case of the representation of occurrent
appearance properties, it is arguable that it grounds such awareness. Insofar as experiences representing such
properties put one in a position to judge that such properties are instantiated
in perceived objects, they put one in a position to judge that they are
represented in one’s experience – assuming, of course, that one has the concepts
such judgment requires.
IX
As I said earlier, my version of representationalism about phenomenal
character differs from other versions in assigning a central role to
qualia. I must now try to make clear
what that role is.
There is a way of putting my
view which on first pass does not involve introducing qualia, and seems to be in line with ordinary ways of
thinking. We start by saying that we
are perceptually aware of the way things appear, and that this involves being
aware of the instantiation of appearance properties, both occurrent and
dispositional, where the instantiation of the occurrent ones are manifestations
of the dispositional ones. The instantiations of the occurrent ones
involve the occurrence of states of being-appeared-to on the part of observers,
and can be construed as the causing of such states by observed objects; so the
dispositional ones can be thought of as dispositions to produce such states
under certain circumstances. The states
of being-appeared-to are states that represent the appearance properties that
cause them or are disposed to cause them.
Here it looks as though the
appearance properties are individuated in terms of the states of being appeared
to, and that the ways of being appeared to are individuated in terms of the
appearance properties. How do we break
out of this seeming circle? Could we
take the appearance properties as primitive and define the states of being
appeared to in terms of them? That
obviously will not do. It would not
enable us to make sense of the fact that differently constituted observers
observe different appearance properties when they perceive the same objects –
that what appearance properties a creatures observes when viewing a thing is a
function of the nature of the perceiver as well as the nature of the
thing. Could we take the states of
being appeared to as primitive, and define the appearance properties in terms
of them? This won’t do, given that the
states of being appeared to are states that have to be specified in terms of
their representational contents, namely in terms of what appearance properties
they represent.
Could there be a “package
deal” definition, say one involving the Ramsey-Lewis technique, which
simultaneously defines both the appearance properties and the states of being
appeared to? As a first stab we might
try to define a particular state/property pair by saying that the state of
being appearedp blue to and the property of appearingp
blue are the unique state S and the unique property P, such that S represents P
and something has P just in case it is producing (or has the disposition to
produce in some sort of observers) a state of type S, and in the case of
creatures like us something is P only if it looks the way blue things look
under optimal conditions. This does
not, as it stands, tell us how to apply “is appearedp blue to” to
creatures of kinds other than our own.
And, what goes with this, it does not provide a way of distinguishing
the appearance property in question from the property that realizes it in the
case of observers like ourselves – it doesn’t distinguish the dispositional
appearance property from the intrinsic surface property that is its categorical
base in the case of observers like ourselves, and doesn’t distinguish the
occurrent appearance property from the property something has when it is instantiating that intrinsic surface
property. It should be noted that it
invokes the notion of “looking the way…,” i.e., the notion of sameness of
appearance properties. We would need to
be able to apply this notion intrasubjectively in order to apply the definition
at all. And we would need to be able to
apply this notion intersubjectively in order to extend the definition so as to
apply to creatures in whose experience the phenomenal property in question is
associated with a different color.
Supposing we could do this, we could revise the account as follows: The state of being appearedp blue
to and the property of appearingp blue are the unique state S and
the unique property P such that S represents P, someone is in state S just in
case the way something looks to him is the way blue things look to us under
optimal conditions, and something is P just in case it is producing state S in
some observer (in a way that does not involve misperception), or is disposed to
produce S in some sort of observer.
This is still rough and in need of refinement. But plainly any account
of these properties and states needs an account of sameness of state of being
appeared to.
Here is where qualia come
in. We need a kind of sameness,
applicable to states of being appeared to, that is not simply defined as
sameness with respect to what property is represented. The only thing that will do is sameness with
respect to qualitative character, which I think has to be a functionally
defined sort of sameness. Qualia will
be the properties of perceptual states in virtue of which they stand in
relations of qualitative similarity and difference. In the first instance, the relations of qualitative similarity
and difference will be defined in terms of the role they play when they hold
intrasubjectively. An important part
of this role has to do with what sorts of perceptual beliefs experiences
related by these relations are apt to cause, and this is of course intimately related
to their role in affecting the discriminatory and recognitional behavior of the
creature. Discrimination will require
qualitatively different experiences, and recognition will require qualitative
similarity between experiences occurring in the same subject at different
times. Different experiences of the
same objective property may be qualitatively different; but once illumination
conditions and the relation of the perceiver to the object are fixed, sameness
of objective property represented will go with qualitative sameness. And, of course, sameness of phenomenal
property represented will go with qualitative similarity, independently of
viewing conditions.
I believe that in order to
apply the notion of qualitative similarity and difference intersubjectively one
must (assuming physicalism) have recourse to the notion of the physical
realization of qualia. Supposing that
qualia are multiply realizable, each quale will be associated with a set of
properties that can be said to be realizers of it in virtue of the way
instantiations of them in the same subject are related – i.e., are such that
experiences in which different ones of them are instantiated, but are otherwise
the same (at the appropriate functional level of description), are qualitatively
alike. If two creatures are alike with
respect to what physical properties of their brain states serve as realizers of
the qualia involved in their experiences, then an experience of one of them is
qualitatively similar to an experience of the other to the extent that the
qualia realizers they instantiate are ones whose instantiation would yield
qualitatively similar experiences if instantiated in the same subject. While it is the intrasubjective functional
role of a property that makes it a
quale realizer, its being a realizer means that it realizes the same quale in
whatever creature it is instantiated in – so if the same realizer is
instantiated in the experiences of two different subjects, or two different
qualia realizers are instantiated in them but these are ones that realize the
same quale when instantiated in the same subject, the experiences of the two
subjects will be to that extent the same.[18]
Qualia can be thought of as
the vehicles of the representation of properties of perceived objects. As such, they can be said to represent such
properties. In the case of objective
properties, it will be only contingently that a given quale will represent a
particular property – e.g., that a particular quale represents red (or red as
viewed under certain conditions). Any
view which holds that perceptual experiences represent what they do in virtue
of causal correlations between types of experiences and features of the
environment, or in virtue of an evolutionary history that bestowed on certain
types of experiences the function of indicating certain features of the
environment, requires a way of typing experiences that makes it a contingent
fact that experiences of a given type represent the particular features of the
environment they do. It may be thought
that all this requires is that the experiences belong to physical types,
which physicalist representationalists who reject qualia can readily
allow. But I think it is clear that the
typing must be functional rather than physical. The types must be so related to each other, and to the rest of
the subject’s psychology, as to determine its “quality space,” and so must play
an appropriate role in determining its
discriminatory and recognitional capacities, and in generating beliefs
about its environment. What must be
true of different tokens of the same type is that they share a certain causal
role; this allows for “multiple realization,” and so for the possibility that
tokens of an experiential type might be physically heterogeneous. Spelling out the conditions for type
membership requires a functional account of qualitative similarity and
difference, and qualia are the properties of sensory states, presumably
physically realizable properties, in virtue of which they stand in these
relationships. Thus it is that it is
qualia that type the experiences, and thus it is that qualia contingently
represent the objective environmental features they do.
But it is necessary,
not contingent, that qualia represent the phenomenal properties they do. Phenomenal properties are individuated in
terms of the types of experiences they produce, and these experiences are typed
by their qualitative character. The
qualitative character of an experience, what qualia are instantiated in it,
thus fixes its phenomenal character, i.e., what phenomenal properties it
represents.
As a representationalist, I
hold that our introspective awareness of the phenomenal character of our
experience is an awareness of an aspect of their representational content,
namely their representation of phenomenal properties. In earlier discussions of this I have maintained that this
awareness should not be construed as awareness of qualia, and that qualia are
known “only by description.” I now
think that this was a mistake.[19]
One source of my former view
was the idea that I would be involved in vicious circularity if I both typed experiences by their phenomenal
character, i.e., what phenomenal properties they represent, and defined
phenomenal properties in terms of what types of experiences they produce – and
that typing the experiences in terms of qualia would not avoid the circularity
if the qualitative character of experience and the phenomenal character of
experience turned out to be the same.
But as I think the discussion in the earlier part of this section shows,
what is needed in order to avoid circularity is a “package deal” account which
defines phenomenal properties and phenomenal character together in a way that
essentially involves a functional account of sameness of appearance properties
and ways of being appeared to – or what comes to the same thing, a functional
account of qualitative similarity and difference. And it is compatible with this that qualia, thought of as the
properties in virtue of which experiences are qualitatively similar and
different, should turn out to be the same as the properties of experiences
which are essentially representative of phenomenal properties, and so the same
as the properties of experiences we are introspectively aware of when we are
aware of that part of the representational content of our experiences which is
the representation of phenomenal properties.
No doubt another source of
my former view was my taking for granted that qualia are “intrinsic” and
non-representational features of experiences – that being, of course, a common
way of characterizing them. It is, I
think, less than clear what it means to speak of intrinsic features of
experiences, given that experiences themselves are states of persons. But it is part of my view that having an
experience with a certain qualitative character – one having certain qualia –
is an intrinsic feature of a person. If
the only properties of things represented by perceptual experiences were
objective properties, and if, as I think, we need an externalist account of the
representation of objective properties,
it would follow that qualia are non-representational – that while they can be
“vehicles” of representation, they can be only contingently the vehicles of the
representation of particular objective properties. But of course I hold that in addition to
representing objective properties, our experiences represent phenomenal
properties – occurrent and dispositional appearance properties. About the representation of these my view is
internalist rather than externalist.
And it is compatible with this that qualia, although internally
determined, are essentially representative of such properties.
So I now think that in being
introspectively aware of the phenomenal character of one’s experience, being
aware of how one is appearedp-to, one can be said to be
introspectively aware of the qualitative character of the experience, and of
the qualia that make up that character.
But I should emphasize again that this awareness should not be thought
of as a matter of introspectively singling out an experience and noticing that
it has certain features. For there is,
I think, no such thing as introspectively singling out an experience and
noticing something about it.
Experiences are states of persons, not quasi-substances to which their
subjects have quasi-perceptual access.
What one does have in introspective awareness is awareness that
one has an experience with a certain phenomenal character, which is an
awareness one has in being aware that one is “appeared to” in a certain way in
a certain sense modality. Again,
introspective awareness is awareness that.
X
Part of what I have to say
about the belief involved in introspective awareness of phenomenal character is
derivative from what I have to say about phenomenal character. Given that phenomenal character is not a
matter of mental objects, sense-data or the like, having certain properties,
the beliefs this gives rise to are not about such objects. They are beliefs about how things look,
feel, smell, etc. – about how one is “appeared to.”
But there is a puzzle
here. Given that phenomenal character
is an aspect of representational content, beliefs about it should be to the
effect that one is in a state having such and such representational content. It is natural to suppose that if the
introspective belief is true then its content embeds the content, or part of
the content, of the perceptual state; and that in any case it embeds what could
be the content, or part of the content, of a perceptual state. The way the perceptual content is embedded
should be like the way the content of the belief that it is raining is embedded
in the content of the belief that one believes that it is raining. But it has recently been urged, with
considerable plausibility, that the content of perceptual states is, at least
in part, nonconceptual content.[20] If this is true, it seems plausible that the
part that is nonconceptual includes the part that determines the phenomenal
character of the state. On the other
hand, it is widely held that the content of beliefs is, of necessity,
conceptual. And how can a content that
is conceptual embed a content that is nonconceptual?
Let the state be one of
being visually appeared to in a certain way.
The introspective belief will simply be the belief that one is visually
appeared to in that way. The content of
this belief will certainly be partly
conceptual – it will involve the concept of
being visually appeared to, or of things looking some way. No one who lacks this concept can have the
belief that things look a certain way to her, or that she is visually appeared
to in a certain way. What is held to be
nonconceptual is the “certain way” one is appeared to, the “certain way” things
look – or at least some part or aspect of this certain way. If this is nonconceptual, and is embedded in
the content of the perceptual belief, then that content will be in part
nonconceptual.
I have nothing much, and
certainly nothing new, to offer by way of a characterization of non-conceptual
content. What I have in mind is similar
to what Christopher Peacocke calls “scenario content” -- a content “individuated by specifying which ways of filling
out the space around the perceiver are consistent with the representational
content being correct.”[21] On the account I have offered, the “ways of
filling out the space” would have to be ways phenomenal properties are
distributed in that space. For a
person’s experience to have such a content it is not required that the person
have the concepts such a specification would require. And even if she does, the content is not in any sense composed of
those concepts, in the way the content of the belief that rollerblading is
dangerous can be thought of as composed of the concepts of rollerblading and
danger.
If one thinks that the
content of perceptual experience is non-conceptual, and that the contents of
beliefs are conceptual, one might offer an account of introspective beliefs
about perceptual experience along the lines of one Richard Heck has recently
offered as an interpretation of what Gareth Evans had to say about this.[22] Heck’s proposal is about how we should
understand a person’s awareness that things appear a certain way to her. Roughly, it is an awareness, based on an
exercise of the conceptualizing capacity that the person uses in making
ordinary perceptual judgments about the world, of what one would judge in the
absence of certain “extraneous” information – information that bears on whether
the experience is veridical. The
content of this awareness, and the associated belief, is conceptual. But it “tracks” the nonconceptual content of
the experience in question – that to which the conceptualizing ability is
applied. As I understand this view, it
is never the case that we have a perceptual belief that actually embeds the
nonconceptual content of the perceptual experience; the closest we come to this
is having a perceptual belief whose content embeds a conceptual content that
“tracks” that nonconceptual content.
The awareness of how things
“appear” that this view is designed to explain seems to be awareness of how
they appear in what I have called, following Dretske, the doxastic sense – the
sense in which the way things appear is the way one would take them to be if
one took one’s experience at face value.
How, along these lines, could one explain awareness of how things appearp,
i.e., appear in the phenomenal sense?
As noted earlier, something can appearp white without
appearingd white – the highlighted part of a table surface may look
the way white things look under standard or normal conditions, without its
being true that one would judge that it is white if one took one’s experience
at face value. In dim light many
things lookp black without lookingd black. If one describes something as lookingp
F, where F is a color word, one is of course conceptualizing the content of
one’s experience in a way. Assuming the
possibility of spectrum inversion, an expression like “looksp blue”
may stand for different ways of looking in the mouths of observers with
different sorts of perceptual systems – so either it expresses a different
concept for different sets of perceivers, or it expresses a concept that picks
out a particular way of looking only if indexed to a particular sort of
perceiver. And it would seem that in
order to employ such a concept a perceiver must know, independently of having
it, how blue things appearp to her under normal viewing conditions
and that this is the same as the way a particular thing appearsp to
her. This knowledge involves a representation
of a way of appearingp; and if this representation is by way of a
concept, it is not a concept standardly expressed by any natural language
expressions. John McDowell, who thinks
that the content of perceptual experience is always conceptual, holds that the
concepts involved in this content are often “demonstrative” concepts.[23] And no doubt one can have a demonstrative
concept of a particular way of appearingp – a particular phenomenal
property. Such a concept might be
expressed on a given occasion by a phrase of the form “The way this looksp
to me now.” If, as I think, it is
implausible to suppose we have enough such concepts to capture the rich content
of our perceptual experience at a particular time, that is a reason for
rejecting the view that the representational content of perceptual experience
is always conceptual. And if, as I am
also inclined to believe, it is implausible to suppose that we have enough such
concepts to capture the content of our awareness of the content of our perceptual
experience, that is a reason for questioning the view that the embedded content
of such awareness is always conceptual – and so for questioning the view that
the contents of beliefs is always conceptual.
We certainly have
introspective beliefs about how things appear that conform to the Evans/Heck
account, and whose contents are entirely conceptual. But I am attracted by the idea that we also have introspective
beliefs whose embedded content is nonconceptual, and that these are, or
include, beliefs about the phenomenal character of our experience. This idea goes nicely with a view which if
true would explain the self-intimation of phenomenal character, and permit some
introspective beliefs to be infallible.
On this view, there is just one tokening of the content that is both the
phenomenal character of the perceptual state and the embedded content of the
introspective belief about the phenomenal character of that state. Part of the perceptual state is literally
included in the perceptual belief, making it impossible to have the belief
without having that part of the perceptual state. While this would make introspective beliefs infallible when their
content embeds the part of the content of a perceptual state that is the
nonconceptual representation of
phenomenal properties, it is compatible with it that all beliefs whose content
is entirely conceptual are fallible.
The self-intimation of phenomenal content would consist in the fact that
we are such that when in a perceptual state having a certain phenomenal
character, a certain sort of reflective act results in that state, or part of
it, being included in a larger state that plays the functional role of a belief
embedding the phenomenal part of the content of that state.
While I am attracted by this
view, and think that it is worth developing, I am not at all sure it is
correct. The single-tokening view faces
the difficulty that an introspective belief about the phenomenal character of
an experience can be retained in memory after the experience has ceased to
exist; the tokening of the embedded content of the memory belief obviously
cannot be identical with the no longer existing tokening of the content of the
perceptual experience, and it is unclear how a belief could start by sharing a
content tokening with an experience and then come to token that same content in
an entirely different way.[24] And any defense of the view that the
contents of beliefs can embed nonconceptual contents must take account of the powerful considerations in support of
the view that belief content is always conceptual.[25]
XI
What is central to the view
advanced in this paper is the claim that the contents of perceptual experiences
include representations of properties of external objects (or parts of our
bodies) which things have in virtue of appearing to us, or being disposed to
appear to us, in certain ways, these being what I call phenomenal properties,
and that the phenomenal character of experiences that we are introspectively
aware of is this part of their representational content. I think that this view is recommended by the
fact that it reconciles representationalism about perceptual content, and the
avoidance of phenomenal objects (such as sense-data), with the view that
phenomenal character is bestowed by qualia and that inverted qualia and alien
qualia are at least conceptually possible.
On the present version of this view, unlike the versions in earlier work
of mine, our introspective access to the phenomenal character of experiences is
equally an access to the qualia that bestow this content, which I hope is a
further recommendation of it.[26]
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NOTES
[7] This was perhaps an unfortunate choice of terminology, since the term “phenomenal property” is sometimes used to refer to properties of experiences, i.e., as a synonym of “quale,” whereas I am using to to refer to properties of external things. But having made the choice, I will stick with it.
[8] See Shoemaker 1994a, and Lecture III of Shoemaker 1994b.
[9] See
Shoemaker 2000.
[10] If we think of the dispositional properties as ones the thing has in virtue of its intrinsic properties, then the specification of the exercise of the disposition will be in conditional terms – it is disposed to appear a certain way to an observer if the observer is of a certain sort and related in such and such ways to it, and if the illumination conditions are such and such. We can also speak of a dispositional property the object has in virtue of its intrinsic properties plus its current situation, minus any facts about observers. Then the disposition is simply a disposition to appear a certain way to an observer of a certain sort related to it in a certain way. Here the dispositional property will be in part relational – having it will involve being in certain lighting conditions, and perhaps being adjacent or proximal to other objects having thus and such intrinsic properties. Dispositional properties of both kinds will be properties the object can have when not perceived; but while a thing can lose a dispositional property of the first kind only by undergoing an intrinsic change, a thing can lose a dispositional property of the second kind without undergoing any intrinsic change, namely by undergoing of change of situation.
[12] Well, beyond question unless one has a very austere view about what it takes to be a genuine property.
[13] If a temporary defect in my perceptual system makes something lookp blue, my experience will fail to be veridical, according to the principle stated here. But since the thing does lookp blue to me, won’t it have the occurrent appearance property of lookingp blue? One could define “occurrent appearance property” in such a way that this is true; but I think it is better to make it a requirement of something’s having such a property that the way it appearsp is not due to a defect in the perceiver’s perceptual system.
[14] The reason for saying “one or more sorts” rather than “some sort” is that I want to allow that the same appearance property can be observed by observers of different sorts. This must be so if spectrum inversion and the like are possible – for individuals who are spectrum inverted relative to each other will have to be of (at least slightly) different sorts.
[16] Smart 1962.
[17] It is quite common to hold that pains can be thought as experiences of bodily damage. But it does not seem right to say that the primary content of these experiences is a proposition having to do with bodily damage. What these experiences are, in the first instance, is perceptions representing some part of one’s body as instantiating a phenomenal property, e.g., achiness, which is a sign of bodily damage.
[19] I am grateful to many people for helping to persuade me that this is so, including Ned Block, Tyler Burge, David Copp, and Tom Nagel.
[26] This paper is a descendent of a paper I presented at Bowling Green University, the University of Colorado, New York University, and UCLA in the Spring of 2000. I am grateful to the audiences at these places, and in particular to David Copp, George Bealer, Daniel Stoljar, Michael Tooley, Ned Block, Tom Nagel, Tyler Burge, Andrew Hsu, and Michael Thau for comments and criticisms that led me to rethink and extensively revise the paper. Thanks also to Carl Ginet and Benjamin Hellie for comments on the penultimate draft of the present version.