visits to the SPPA website since 27 Apr 2005
According to intentionalism, perceptual experiences have representational content, and the fact that they do so is constitutively connected with what it is like to have them. Several intentionalists including Tye (2000, 2006) and Thau (2002) have recently argued that the most fine-grained content of experience is a Russellian proposition, in which various properties are assigned to various objects. In this paper I argue that intentionalists ought to reject the Russellian view in favour of a Fregean view, according to which the most fine-grained content of experience is individuated in terms of modes of presentation of properties. Unlike recent arguments for the Fregean view by Chalmers (2004), the argument does not appeal to the possibility of spectrum inversion with no misattribution of properties. Rather, it argues that perceptual experiences enable certain informative identifications which the purely Russellian view cannot explain. In particular, I argue that colour experiences enable informative 'identifications of surface colours.
The argument is couched in terms of Jackson's (1982) familiar story about Mary. I take as a premise that Mary gains propositional knowledge of, or at least a new belief about, what it is like to see red when she has her first experience of red, a claim we may call 'phenomenal cognitivism'. The knowledge or belief Mary thereby gains is in a broad sense introspective, in that first-person reflection on her experience is essential to its acquisition. I consider two major and representative views of introspective access, and argue that both support the following conditional: if introspection of her new experience puts Mary in a position to form a new belief about what it is like to experience red (as phenomenal cognitivism asserts), then that experience puts her in a position to form a new belief about what redness is like. On the 'ascent-routine' view (Evans 1982, Dretske 2000), introspective access is gained via re-using the capacities for making judgements about one's surroundings that is used in ordinary, non-introspective perceptual judgement. Thus Mary's realisation that experiences of red have a certain phenomenal character relies on her ability to judge, taking experience at face value, that ostensibly seen objects have a certain feature. The only relevant feature here is redness. On the 'inner-sense' view (Armstrong 1981, Lycan 2003), introspective access relies on a quasi-perceptual inner monitoring system. Inner-sense phenomenal cognitivists argue that inner perception enables new knowledge or beliefs about mental states not conveyable by book learning. However, since inner perception is modelled on outer perception, this strongly suggests that outer perception enables new knowledge or beliefs about the ostensible objects of outer perception, not conveyable by book learning. Again, the only relevant target for these world-directed beliefs in Mary's case is redness.
In the final section of the paper, I argue that Mary's new belief about what redness is like is most plausibly construed as an identity judgement. It is something Mary could appropriately express in the words: 'So redness is that property!' Whatever precise property experiences of red present things as having, Mary could have beliefs about and refer to that property prior to having her first experience of red, for she could competently use words - for example 'redness' - referring to that property. What is special about her first visual experience of redness, then, cannot simply be that it presents objects as having a certain salient property, redness, as the Russellian suggests. For this would leave it inexplicable how it motivates Mary to form a new belief about redness. We need to appeal to the idea of a visual mode of presentation of that property.
References
Armstrong, D. (1981) 'What is Consciousness?' in his The Nature of Mind. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Chalmers, D. (2004) 'The Representational Character of Experience' in B. Leiter (ed.) The Future for Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dretske, F. (2000) 'The Mind's Awareness of Itself' repr. in his Perception, Knowledge and Belief. New York: Cambridge.
Evans, G. (1982) The Varieties of Reference, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jackson, F. (1982) 'Epiphenomenal Qualia', Philosophical Quarterly, 32.
Lycan, W. (2003) 'Perspectival Representation and the Knowledge Argument', in Q. Smith and A. Jokic (eds.) Consciousness. New Philosophical Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thau, M. (2002) Consciousness and Cognition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tye, M. (2000) Consciousness, Color and Content, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Tye, M. (2006) 'Nonconceptual Content, Richness, and Fineness of Grain', in T. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds.) Perceptual Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at 'http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~phildept/MT/NonconceptualContent.pdf'
To return to the page from which you came, use your browser's "Back" function
| visits to the SPPA website since 27 Apr 2005 |
