Perception

PERCEPTION

Philosophical Issues, 7, 2 996

PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES Edited by Enrique Villanueva

(Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mdxico)

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Ned Block (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Paul Boghossian (New York University)

Jerry Fodor (Rutgers University)

Richard Foley (Rutgers University)

James Higginbotham (University of Oxford)

Jaegwon Kim (Brown University)

Brian Loar (Rutgers University)

Christopher Peacocke (University of Oxford)

Sydney Shoemaker (Cornell University)

Ernest Sosa (Brown University)

James Tomberlin (California State University, Northridge)

Previously published volumes:

CONSCIOUSNESS

(Philosophical Issues, 1, 1991)

RATIONALITY IN EPISTEMOLOGY

(Philosophical Issues, 2, 1992)

SCIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE

(Philosophical Issues, 3, 1993)

NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY

(Philosophical Issues, 4, 1993)

TRUTH AND RATIONALITY

(Philosophical Issues, 5, 1994)

CONTENT

(Philosophical Issues, 6, 1995)

Forthcoming volumes: TRUTH

(Philosophical Issues, 8, 1997)

Philosophical Issues, 7, 1996

PERCEPTION

edited by

Enrique Villanueva SOCIEDADFILOSOFICA IBEROAMERICANA

Ridgeview Publishing Company

Atascadero, California

Copyright O 1996 by Enrique Villanueva All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electrical or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any informational storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.

Paper text: ISBN 0-924922-25-7 Cloth (library edition): ISBN 0-924922-75-3

The typesetting was done by Jose Luis Olivares.

Published in the United States of America by Ridgeview Publishing Company Box 686 Atascadero, California 93423 Printed in the United States of America by Thomson-Shore, Inc.

Contents

1

2 3

4

5 6

Preface Enrique Villanueva Explaining Objective Color in Terms of Subjective

Experience

Gilbert H a n a n Mental Paint and Mental Latex Ned Block Orgasms Again Michael Tye Colors, Subjective Relations and Qualia Sydney Shoemaker Is Color Psychological or Biological? Or Both? Ernest Sosa Qualia and Color Concepts Gilbert H a n a n

7 Layered Perceptual Representation William Lycan 8 On a Defense of the Hegemony of Representation Robert Stalnaker 9 Perception and Possibilia James Tomberlin 10 Perceptual Experience Is a Many-Layered Thing Michael Tye 11 Replies to Tomberlin, Tye, Stalnaker and Block William L ycan 12 Phenomenal Externalism

Fred Dretske 13 Dretske's Qualia Externalism

Jaegwon K i m

vii

14 Comnient on Dretske Paul Horwich 15 Dretske on Phenomenal Externalism John Biro 16 Reply to Commentators Fred Dretske

17 Is the External World Invisible? Mark Johnston 185 18 Visible Properties of Human Interest Only Allan Gibbard 199 19 Getting Acquainted with Perception David Sosa 209 20 Would more acquaintance with the external world relieve epistemic anxiety? Enrique Vil lanueva 215 21 A Mind-Body Problem at the Surface of Objects Mark Johnston 219 22 Precis of Mind and World John McDowell 23 Perception and Rational Constraint: McDowell's Mind and World Robert Brandom 24 Spin Control. Comment on John McDowell's Mind and World Alex Byrne 25 McDowell's Direct Realism and Platonic Naturalism Roger Gibson 26 Reply to Gibson, Byrne, and Brandom John McDowell 27 Molineux's Question John Campbell 28 Comments on John Campbell, "Molineux's Question" Brian Loar 29 Shape Properties and Perception Kirk Ludwig 30 Shape Properties, Experience of Shape and Shape Concepts John Campbell

Contributors

231 241 261 2 75 283 301 319 325 351 365

Preface The papers in this volume are concerned with issues on perceptual representation, functionalism, qualia, phenomenal externalism, acquaintance, realism, naturalism, rationality, shape and perceptual properties and other subtopics. Those issues spin on the frontiers of Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind and Epistemology. The papers in this volume were presented at the Eighth Annual Philosophy Conference of our Sociedad Filosofica Ibero Americana, SOFIA, held in Cancun, Mkxico, June 19-21. The volume reflects the order and structure of that Conference. It is composed of six symposia each with a speaker followed by a number of comments and ending with the speaker's replies. This new structure suits better the purpose of getting a closer dialogue, one that brings about warm memories of Classical Greece. We will keep tailoring a better structure to fit adequately the excellence of those participating. In our Society's name I want to express our gratitude to Lic Javier Barros Valero form Subsecretaria de Educaci6n Superior e Investigaci6n Cientifica (through anexo 94-01-09-160-212) for continuous support that made possible to hold our annual conference even in the face of financial stress. I want to express again my gratitude both to Ernie Sosa and Jim Tomberlin by their generous assistance through the organisation of this conference. Lourdes Valdivia again offered invaluable help before and through the celebration of the conference. Lic Gerardo Osuna offered kind support while in Cancun City. Once more I want to express my gratitude to my university the Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de Mkxico who provided a sabbatical leave and support through Direcci6n de Asuntos del Personal Acadkmico, Dr Josk Luis Boldu, Director. For a second year I want to thank the P h D Program in Philosophy at the Graduate Center, at CUNY, Chair Mr Richard Mendelsohn

who generously provided a room from where I kept organising this Conference. Thanks also to Mr Peter Klein Chair at the Department of Philosophy, at Rv.tgers, for kindly renewing my status as a visiting fellow. Thanks to Josk Luis Olivares who did the typesetting again. Enrique Vzllanueva Tepoztlan, January 1996

PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES,7 Perception, 1995

Explaining Objective Color in Terms of Subjective Reactions Gilbert Harman

I am concerned with attempts to explain objective color in terms of subjective reactions so I had better begin by saying what I mean by "objective color" and what I mean by "subjective reactions". By "objective color" I mean the color of an object, in a very broad sense of "object" that includes not only apples and tables, but also the sky, a flame, a shadow, and anything else that has color. So, objective color in this sense includes the red of an apple, the blue of the sky, the yellow of a flame, the purple cast of a shadow, and so forth. By "subjective reactions" I mean a normally sighted perceiver's subjective impressions of color: how color looks. A person blind from birth might learn that objects have colors and might in some sense have subjective reactions to color, but not the sort of subjective reactions I mean. I will be concerned both with the sort of explanation of color and the relevant subjective reactions to color that is available to normally sighted perceivers and with the sort of explanation that is available to others, including those who cannot have the relevant subjective reactions themselves.

1 Why Objective Color Should Be Explained in Terms of Subjective Reactions hIany salient facts about color cannot be explained purely in terms of properties of the surfaces of colored objects. Lie need also to appeal to the biology and psychology of color perception. These facts include red's being closer in color to blue than to green, even though the frequency of pure red light is farther from that of pure blue than from pure green. Related to that fact is the circular structure of hues, as opposed to the linear structure of relevant light frequencies. There is also the way in which colors can be organized in terms of three polar contrasts, white-black, red-green, and blue-yellow. These aspects of color are due to facts about the biology and psychology of color perception rather than to facts about the structures of surfaces. Shepard (1992, 1993) offers an evolutionary explanation of the biological and psychological facts by noting that natural illumination from the sun varies in three independent respects: (1) in amount of total overall illumination, (2) in relative amount of longer red wavelengths (depending on the sun's angle), and (3) in relative amount of shorter blue wavelengths (depending on whether illumination is directly from the sun or indirect from light scattered by the atmosphere). (If the red wavelengths are removed from sunlight, the remaining wavelengths center on green. If the blue wavelengths are removed instead, the remaining wavelengths center on yellow.) Given these sorts of variation in natural illumination, a visual system structured like ours, in which light is analyzed in terms of white versus black, red versus green, and yellow versus blue, will be able to achieve a kind of constancy in colors attributed to objects, a color constancy that Shepard sees as having evolutionary benefits. Shepard's evolutionary account contrasts with the suggestion in Dennett (1991) that human color perception and the colors of natural objects have evolved toget her. But Shepard's proposal explains facts of color perception not accounted for by Dennett's suggestion. In what follows, I will assume Shepard is basically right. In any event, it would seem that we have to explain facts about objective color in terms of facts about perceivers (Gold, 1993). One simple way to do so identifies a n object's being a particular color C with its tendency to be perceived as C by normal observers viewing it under standard lighting conditions. Various complications arise here, e.g., concerning chameleon's that change color when looked at (Johnston, 1992). I want to disregard those (significant)

issues in order to try to say more about the relevant subjective reaction, "perceiving something as C".

2

Color Sensations

Some authors call the relevant subjective reactions "color sensations". A normal viewer's perception of a red object in adequate lighting provides the viewer with "red color sensations". Some authors (Shoemaker, 1981; Peacocke, 1983) use the term "color qualia" in much the same way that other writers use the term "color sensations". I will argue below (section 4) that talk of color sensations is misleading in important respects, but let me use that terminology for the time being. In these terms, a blind person does not in the normal way obtain color sensations from the perception of objects. Someone blind from birth may never have experienced color sensations. Such a person would normally not know what it is like to have such sensations. Red color sensations are not red in the same sense in which red apples are red. We might say that red apples are red in the sense that they tend to produce certain reactions when viewed by perceivers. But red color sensations are not red in that sense. Red sensations cannot be viewed and they are (supposed to be) the relevant reactions, not the causes of the reactions. To avoid possible confusion, some authors use a symbolism that distinguishes these senses of the word red, for example, distinguishing the word red from the word red' and saying we have red' color sensations rather than red color sensations (Peacocke, 1983). One problem is to say how these senses are related.

It may seem that the most obvious way to relate the two senses of color terms along the lines of the suggested reduction of objective color to subjective reactions is to try to define the colors of objects in terms of the color sensations they produce in observers: An object is red if and only if perception of it would give normal perceivers red' sensations under standard viewing conditions. A number of issues arise here. What makes a perceiver a normal perceiver? What determines standard viewing conditions? Circularity must be avoided. A normal perceiver cannot be defined as one who gets the right sensations from colored objects, nor can

standard viewing conditions be defined as those in which normal perceivers get the right sensations. One possible approach simply asserts that there are objective criteria of normalcy N and objective criteria of standardness S such that an object has color C if and only if perception of it by perceivers who are N in conditions that are S would produce C color sensations. Let us suppose for the sake of argument that such criteria exist. (A full account would have to investigate the criteria S and N.1

A further issue concerns the nature of color sensations. What are they and what makes a sensation that sort of color sensation that it is? Many authors (e.g., Nagel, 1974) believe that no purely scientific account of color sensations is possible. In their view, the essence of such sensations is precisely their subjective "qualitative" character. They believe that there is no way to describe this qualitative character in purely scientific terms so that it would be fully understood by someone who had never experienced the sensation first hand; someone who has never experienced a red' sensation cannot know what it is to have such a sensation. In their view, the notion of a red' sensation is the notion of a sensation "like this", where "this" refers to a sensation that one is actually experiencing or imagining. Since in this view the redness of an object is its power to produce red' sensations in perceivers, it follows that someone who has never experienced a red' sensation cannot fully understand what it is for an object to be red. A red object is an object with the power to produce sensations "like this" in perceivers. Someone who never experiences a red' sensation is never in a position to be able to identify red objects as objects with the power to produce sensations "like this". I postpone discussion of what conception of color and color sensations might be available to someone who has never had such experiences.

It is interesting to consider the possibility that different people might have relevantly different sorts of sensations when perceiving objects that they call "red".

This possibility may seem quite likely, (1) if the relevant aspect of a sensation is its intrinsic qualitative character, (2) if the intrinsic qualitative character of a sensation depends on the exact nature of the underlying physical events in the brain giving rise to the sensation, and (3) if there are differences in these underlying physical events from one brain to the next (Block, 1990, pp. 56-57). The suggested analysis of objective color in terms of sensations implies that, if there are relevant differences in people's color sensations, then different people have difference concepts of the colors of objects and do not mean the same thing by their color terms. They do not mean the same thing by "red", "green", etc. even though they use the terms in exactly the same way of exactly the same objects, at least as far as their outer usage is concerned. For George, an object is red if and only if it has the relevant power to produce sensations "like this" in normal perceivers, where George refers to the kind of sensation that he gets from viewing red objects. For Mary, an object is red if and only if it has the relevant power to produce sensations "like this" in normal perceivers, where Mary refers to the kind of sensation that she gets from viewing red objects. If George and Mary get different sorts of sensations from viewing red objects, they mean different things when they say that an apple is "red", in this view. This is actually a pretty strange consequence: that people might mean different things by their words even though they use them in the same way with respect to objects in the world. But a further consequence is even stranger. Given the hypothesis that people do get different kinds of color sensations from objects they call "red", the suggested analysis implies that no objects have any colors (Block, 1990, p. 56)! According to the analysis, an object is red if and only if it has the power to produce sensations "like this" in normal perceivers viewing the object in standard viewing conditions. But, by hypothesis, no object has that power. A ripe tomato may have the power to produce sensations '(like this" in me under those conditions, but it does not have the power t o produce sensations of that sort in all other normal perceivers viewing the object in standard conditions. By hypothesis, viewing a ripe tomato produces different kinds of sensations in different otherwise normal perceivers. So, the analysis we are considering implies that a ripe tomato has no color, given that hypothesis. So we have two absurd results. First, different people mean different things by their color terminology even when they use the terminology in the same way of external objects. Second, when people

use color terminology to say that eternal objects are "red", "blue", or whatever, what they say is always false. To avoid such absurd results, we must either abandon the suggested analysis of objective color or rule out the possibility that different perceivers get different sorts of color sensations from viewing objects called "red".

3

Functional Definitions of Color Sensations

The discussion so far has assumed that it is possible to fix on a kind of sensation by attending to it and intending to include in that kind of sensation anything "like this". But a sensation that occurs on a particular occasion can be classified in infinitely many ways and is therefore an instance of many different kinds of sensation. The sensation itself does not determine a single kind or type of sensation. Saying that red objects are objects with the power to produce sensations "like this" is not yet to say what type of sensations red objects have the power to produce, since there are infinitely many different ways in which sensations can be "like this". It is necessary also to say in what respect sensations have to be "like this" in order to count as "red' sensations". It would be wrong to say that a sensation has to share every aspect of "this sensation" if it is to be "like this", for then no other occurrences would count. There are always some differences among sensations: they occur at different times, have different causes, different effects, occur to different people, and so forth. Not all these differences are important. For example, the fact that "this sensation" is a sensation of mine distinguishes it from all sensations of other people, but that had better be irrelevant to its being a red' sensation if anyone else is to be able to have a red' sensation. What is needed is a way of classifying sensations so that the sensations normal observers have on viewing a given color normally fall under the same classification, even if, according to some other way of classifying sensations, people have different sorts of sensations from viewing a given color. One approach to solving the problem of type specification appeals to a "functional definition" of the relevant type of sensation in terms of typical causes and effects (Armstrong, 1968; Lewis, 1966). For example, the sensations classified as pains are those that are typically caused by tissue damage or extremes of pressure or heat applied to some location in one's body and that typically have as effects the

belief that something undesirable is occurring at the relevant bodily location and the desire to be free of the occurrence. A first stab at a functional definition of color sensations might suppose that they are typically caused by the perception of appropriately colored objects and that their typical effects are beliefs that perceived objects have the appropriate colors. So, a red' sensation would be a sensation that is typically caused by the perception of red things and that typically leads to the belief that one is perceiving something red. Various worries can be raised about this account and more needs to be said. If it could be made to work, the suggested account would avoid some of the problems raised about the previous account. The account would not have to suppose that differences in the brain events that underlie color sensations mean that different otherwise normal perceivers have relevantly different sensations from the perception of the same objects. If you and I are both normal color perceivers, we will both receive red' sensations from the perception of ripe red tomatoes. What we mean by "red object" (namely, "object with the power to produce red' sensations.. . ") will be the same if we use the word in the same way of external objects, even if our red' color sensations differ in their detailed neurophysiological realizations. However, when a functional account of color sensations is combined with an explanation of objective color in terms of color sensations, the resulting account of objective color is circular. It reduces to the claim that red objects are those that produce the sort of sensation that red objects produce. This is not only to explain the notion of objective color in terms of itself but to do so in a way that is almost completely empty.

4

Complication: There Are No Color Sensations

Before addressing the problem of circularity, it is necessary to clear up a point we have been so far ignoring, namely, that it is wrong to describe color impressions as color "sensations". Normally, we use the term "sensation" for bodily feelings. Usually sensations have a more or less definite location in one's body -a headache, a pain in one's foot, butterflies in the stomach, etc. There are also other cases, such as a sensation of dizziness. But the perception of color does not normally involve sensations in any ordinary sense of the term "sensation". When someone literally has visual sensations, they are pains or other feelings in the eye,

resulting from overly bright scenes, perhaps, or itching from allergies or minor eye injuries. Color perception does not normally involve such sensations. On seeing what appears to be a ripe tomato, one does not feel a sensation of red in one's eye, nor is there literally a sensation or feeling at the location at which the tomato looks red. How then should we think of perceptual experience, if not as involving visual sensations?

One important point is that perceptual experience has a certain presentational or representational character, presenting or representing the environment in a certain way. When it looks to you as if you are seeing a ripe tomato, your perceptual experience presents or represents the environment as containing a red and roughly spherical object located at a certain distance and orientation "from here". When you think about visual representation, it is very important to distinguish (A) qualities that experience represents the environment as having from (B) qualities of experience by virtue of which it serves as a representation of the environment. When you see a ripe tomato your visual experience represents something as red. The redness is represented as a feature of the tomato, not a feature of your experience. Does your experience represent this redness by being itself red at a relevant place, in the way that a painting of a ripe tomato might represent the redness of the tomato with some red paint on the appropriate place on the canvas? No. That is not how visual representation works. Does your experience represent this redness by having a t some place some quality other than redness, a quality of red'ness, which serves to represent the redness of the tomato in some other way, different from the way in which a painting might use red paint to represent a tomato? Well, who knows? You have no conscious access to the qualities of your experience by which it represents the redness of the tomato. You are aware of the redness of the represented tomato. You are not and cannot become consciously aware of the mental "paint" by virtue of which your experience represents the red tomato. It follows that your concept of a red object cannot be analyzed into your concept of a red' experience, meaning the specific quality that your perceptual experience has in order to represent objective redness, because you have no such concept of a red' experience. You

have no idea what specific quality of your perceptual experience is used to represent objective redness. You only have the concept of objective redness!

In fact, your color concepts are almost certainly basic and not analyzable in causal terms. You perceive colors as simple primitive features of the world, not as dispositions or complexes of other causal features. (Maybe some color concepts like orange can be analyzed in terms of concepts of primary colors, like red and yellow. And maybe some color concepts like brown can be analyzed in terms of hue, brightness, and saturation. I am not concerned with such internal analyses. I am concerned only with analyses of color in external terms, especially causal terms.) Now, a scientific explanation may involve an analysis of something without claiming to be analyzing an ordinary concept. For example, when a scientific explanation of facts about the circle of hues treats color as a tendency to produce certain responses in perceivers, it is not offering that analysis of color as an account of the perceptual concept of color. The perceptual concept of color can be quite simple even if color itself is a complex phenomenon. Of course, it would be useful to give an account of what it is to have a basic perceptual concept like the concept of redness, an account that might even be understood by someone lacking that basic perceptual concept. A congenitally blind person can understand that a normal color perceiver might have a basic perceptual concept of redness, for example. And normal color perceivers can understand that there may be animals or other alien creatures with basic perceptual concepts that humans do not have. To this end, we might try to provide a functionalist account of what it is for perceptual experience to have a given perceptual concept. Now, in general, perceptual experience represents the environment in ways that enable a perceiver to negotiate paths among objects, to locate desired things and to avoid undesired things. Normally and for the most part, a perceiver accepts his or her (or its) perceptual representation, believing that things are as they appear, although the strong disposition to acceptance can be inhibited on special occasions. The perceptual concept of red figures as part of the perceptual experience of red objects, enabling a perceiver to identify and reidentify objects as red. In other words, if a perceptual concept is a

concept Q such that one has perceptual experiences of something being Q, then (roughly speaking) we can say that the concept Q is the concept of redness if perception of red things tends to produce experiences of something being Q. But we must be careful to avoid circularity. Recall that we have been supposing that red is a tendency to produce perceptual reactions of a certain sort. We have seen that it is incorrect to describe the relevant reactions as sensations. Suppose then that we take the relevant reactions to be experiences with a certain representational or presentational content. If the relevant representational or presentational content is then identified functionally, we seem to be identifying rediness as a property R, where R is a tendency to produce experiences that represent something as Q, where Q is the concept produced by perception of R things. That characterization is circular and does not distinguish red from green, for example. Sosa (1990) points out that we can avoid circularity if we use the normally sighted person's primitive perceptual concept of red objects in our account. Then we can say that something is red if and only if it has a property R, where R is a tendency to produce experiences that represent something as Q, where Q is the concept produced by perception of red things, where here we are using the primitive perceptual concept red. Of course, a person lacking that perceptual concept of red could not avoid circularity in the way Sosa suggests. Nor could normal human perceivers use that approach to provide noncircular accounts of animal or alien perceptual concepts that do not correspond to human perceptual concepts. One noncircular account that might be useful to those lacking the relevant perceptual concepts would identify color in terms of biological mechanisms of color perception, perhaps via the evolutionary reasons for those mechanisms. In this view, for something to be red is for it to have a tendency to have a certain specific complex affect on a normal perceiver's sensory apparatus, in ways described by the scientific theory of color.

5 The Inverted Spectrum Supposing this last account can be made to work up to a point, one might still worry that it seems to leave out an important aspect of color perception. As Block (1990) puts the objection, the functional account of what it is to have a concept of red captures the "intentional content" of the concept, but not its "qualitative content".

Qualitative content is what we imagine to be different when we imagine that one person perceives colors in a way that differs from the way in which another person perceives them. We seem even to be able to imagine the possibility of an inverted spectrum in the sense that the way things look to one of two otherwise normal color perceivers, George, might be qualitatively hue inverted with respect to the way things look to the other, Mary (Shoemaker, 1981). It is not that (we imagine that) what looks red to George looks green to Mary. A given object looks green to both or red to both. That is, the colors their experiences represent the environment as having are the same. The imagined difficulty is that "what it is like" for George to see something as red is different from "what it is like" for Mary to see something as red. The "what is it like" terminology comes from Nagel (1974). I am not convinced that this particular appeal to "what is it like" for a particular person to see something as green is in the end really intelligible. (I discuss what this might mean in section 7, below.) But let us assume that it is intelligible in order to explore the idea. As I have argued, the difference in "what it is like" for George and Mary to see something as red cannot be a difference in visual sensations, so it has to be a difference in how George and Mary perceive objects to be. And it cannot be a difference in what colors they perceive objects to have, because they both count as correctly perceiving the colors of objects. The difference between them cannot be at that level. So, the difference must be a difference in other qualities that objects are presented or represented as having. What we are imagining, then, seems to be something like this (Shoemaker, 1994). When George sees a red apple, his perceptual experience represents it as being Q. His experience also represents the apple as being red. Furthermore, the fact that his experience represents the apple as being Q makes it true in present circumstances that his experience represents the apple as being red. It seems we can imagine other circumstances in which neuronal connections leading from George's retina to his visual cortex were switched before birth in such a way that later, when his experience represents something as being Q, that constitutes representing it as being green, because, in these imagined circumstances, the perception of green things normally leads George to have perceptual experiences of those things as Q. When we imagine normal perceivers like George and Mary with inverted spectra, we are then imagining something like this: A red object looks Q to George and T to Mary. A green object looks T to George and Q to Mary. An object's looking Q to George counts as

its looking red to George. An object's looking Q to Mary counts as its looking green to Mary. This may seem odd, so let me briefly review what led to this seemingly strange idea. We want to describe a case in which two people have inverted spectra with respect to each other. The difference between them has to be a difference in what they experience, but it cannot be a difference in properties they perceive their experience to have, because the relevant properties are perceived as properties of objects in the environment. The difference cannot be a difference in the colors they perceive these objects to be, because we are assuming that, as normal color perceivers, they attribute the same colors to external objects. So, it has to be a difference in other properties objects are experienced as having, properties we can identify as Q and T.

6 Worries about Inverted Spectra I am not sure that the imagined possibility of inverted spectra is really coherent. (Please note: I a m not sure.) A red object supposedly looks Q t o George and T to Mary. It would seem that an object cannot be both Q and T in the same place at the same time in the same way. That would be like an object's being both red and green at the same place and time in the same way. But then, either George's experience or Mary's experience or both of their experiences must be in some respect nonveridical, incorrectly representing the object seen. Shoemaker (1994) observes that the best way to avoid this result is to suppose that the properties Q and T are radically relational, so that something can be Q to one person without being Q to another. Q and T would be incompatible only in the sense that an object cannot be both Q and T to the same person at the same place at the same time in the same way. On the other hand, an object could be Q to George and T to Mary a t the same place at the same time in the same way. What is it for an object to be Q to a given person? Shoemaker (1994) mentions two possibilities. First, it might be that an object is Q to a given person S if and only if S's perceptual experience currently represents the object as Q. Second, it might be that an object is Q to a given person S if and only if the object has a tendency to provide S with perceptual experiences representing that object as Q. In the first case, objects are Q to S if and only if S is experiencing them as Q. In the second case, objects can be Q to S even if S is not

currently experiencing them if they are such as to produce relevant experiences under the right conditions.' But either of these possibilities involves a serious circularity. In order to understand what the concept Q is, we need to understand what objects are Q to someone, but in order to understand what objects are Q to someone, we need to understand what the concept Q is.2 Recall Sosa's point, noted on page 10 above, that we might use the perceptual concept of color possessed by normal color perceivers to give a key part of a functional account of what it is to have such a concept: the perceptual concept of red is activated in perceptual experiences produced by the perception of red objects. Could we use the same idea here --experiences involving the concept Q are produced by perception of Q objects? That explanation would be satisfactory only if one had a firm grasp of the concept Q. But I do not find that I have a firm grasp of that concept. If it is suggested that we try to break out of this circle as I suggested we might break out of our earlier circle with respect to actual color terms, like "red" and "green", by appeal to some tendency objects have to affect S's perceptual mechanisms, I find myself at a loss to know what aspects of perceptual mechanisms would be relevant. Settling on something, for example, certain events in the visual cortex would seem simply to let the same problem arise all over again. For surely we can imagine even molecule for molecule identical people with the same events occurring in their visual cortex having inverted spectra with respect to each other. That seems to be just as imaginable as the previous case. But this suggests the "problem" is really a pseudo-problem. This makes me doubt that there is a concept Q of the claimed sort and so doubt that I have the relevant grasp of "what it is like for so and so to see red" that would allow me to suppose that red things might look different to different, otherwise normal, color perceivers. 'I have oversimplied. Shoemaker's actual account supposes t h a t a n experience has a certain intrinsic phenomal feature x t h a t is responsible for its representing something as Q. For something t o be Q is for it t o be such as t o produce experiences with feature x. 'Shoemaker's attempted way out of this circle is t o say, for example, t h a t experiences of something as Q (i.e., experiences with feature x) are those experiences t h a t "are phenomally like those I have when I see a ripe tomato". T h a t would help only if we already had t h e sort of account of interpersonal phenomenal similarity t h a t would enable us t o make sense of interpersonal inverted spectrums. B u t we are in the process of trying t o develop such a n account. So t h a t account would be circular if we adopted Shoemaker's suggestion.

But let me try to say more about "what it is like" to have an experience of a certain sort.

7 What Is It Like To See Red? Terniinology can become confusing here because different people seem to use similar terminology in different ways and people often use a variety of terminology. For example, philosophers talk about "what it is like" to have a given experience, about a n experience's "phenomenological charecter" , and about "qualia" , as if these are different ways of getting at the same thing. In fact, at least two different issues are involved. Let me explain by citing two different ways in which the term "qualia" has been used. First, qualia are sometimes taken to be experienced qualities of a mental experience, those qualities by virtue of which one's experiences represent what they represent (when they represent things), the mental paint of one's picture of the environment, one's mental sense-data. Philosophers who use the term "qualia" in this sense tend to hold that not all mental experiences involve qualia. They take qualia to be involved in perception and sensation but not always in relatively abstract beliefs and thoughts. In this sense of "qualia", it is at least a matter of controversy whether all experiences involve qualia. O n the other hand, qualia are sometimes identified with what it is like to have a given experience and it is supposed to be relatively obvious that all mental experiences involve qualia. Even with respect to a relatively abstract judgment, there is something that it is like to have that judgment -some qualitative character in this second sense. Now, as I have indicated already, I am strongly inclined to deny that there are qualia ill the first sense, the mental paint or sense datum sense. In perception, all qualities of which we are aware seem to be presented to us as qualities of perceived things, external objects for the most part. Introspection does not support the claim that we are aware of mental paint. And, although arguments can be given for supposing that despite appearances we are aware of mental paint, these arguments seem to be uniformly fallacious through confusions over intentionality (Harman, 1990a). So I see no reason to suppose that we are aware of mental paint. With respect to qualia in sense (2), what it is like to have a given experience, I agree with Nagel (1974) that there is a distinctive kind of understanding that consists in finding a n equivalent in one's own

case. That is "knowing what it is like to have that experience". I have compared that sort of understanding with knowing what an expression used by someone else means. One understands it to the extend that one finds an equivalent expression in one's own language or by learning how to use the expression oneself. Even if use determines meaning, an external objective description of use need not provide the sort of understanding that comes from knowing the translation into one's own terms. (Harman, 1990b, 1993a). Translation is a holistic enterprise. I map as much as I can of your language into mine in a way that tries to preserve certain constraints as much as possible (Harman, 1993b). Similarly, in trying to understand what it is like for you to have certain experiences, I map as much as I can of your total experiential system into mine in a way that tries to preserve certain constraints as much as possible. In either case, there is the possibility of "indeterminacy of translation" (Quine, 1960). We can imagine that there are two different ways to map your color vocabulary into mine, or your color experiences into mine, preserving relevant constraints as much as possible. That is to imagine a genuine indeterminacy as to what it is like for you (or me) to see red, just as there is a genuine indeterminacy as to the best interpretation of numbers in set theory. With respect to the color experiences of normal perceivers who are normal speakers of English, there is no such indeterminacy, because the relevant constraints on mapping one person's experiences into another's include taking into account what objects in the world give rise to those experiences. So, what it is like for one normal color perceiver to see red is quite similar to what it is like for any other normal color perceiver to see red.

8 Conclusion My tentative conclusion is that objective color is plausibly identified with a tendency to produce a certain reaction in normal perceivers, where the relevant reaction is identified in part with reference to the mechanisms of color perception. The subjective response to color is constituted by perceptual experience presenting or representing the environment as relevantly colored. The concept of color as it figures in this representation is simple and unanalyzable in causal terms, because color is experienced as a simple basic quality, rather than a disposition or complex of causal properties. Possession of a perceptual concept of color is

to be understood functionally: objective color leads to experiences in which the perceptual concept of color is manifested. These causal accounts do not capture everything we seem to be able to imagine about color. In particular, they do not allow for possible inverted spectra in otherwise normal color observers. But it is far from clear that what we seem to be able to imagine is actually a coherent possibility.

Armstrong, D., (1968). A materialist theory of the mind. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Block, N., (1990). Inverted earth. Philosophical Perspectives 4 pp. 53-79. Dennett, D., (1991). Explaining consciousness. Boston: Little, Brown. Gold, I., (1993). Color and other illusions: A philosophical theory of vision. Princeton University Ph. D. Dissertation. Harman, G., (1982). Conceptual role semantics. Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 23. Harman, G., (1990a). "The Intrinsic Quality of Experience", Philosophical Perspectives 4 pp. 31-52. Harman, G., (1990b). "Immanent and transcendent approaches to the theory of meaning". In Roger Gibson and Robert B. Barrett, eds., Perspectives on Quine. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 144157. Harman, G., (1993a). "Can Science Understand the Mind?" in Gilbert Harman, ed., Conceptions of the Human Mind: Essays i n Honor of George A. Miller, Hillside, New Jersey; Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 111-121. Harman, G., (1993b). "Meaning holism defended", Grazer Philosophische Studien 46, pp. 163-171. Johnston, M. (1992). How to speak of the colors. Philosophical Studies 6 8 pp. 221-263. Lewis, D., (1966). An argument for the identity theory. Journal of Philosophy 6 3 pp. 17-25. Nagel, T., (1974). What is it like t o be a bat? Philosophical Review 83 pp. 435-450. Peacocke, C., (1983). Sense and Content. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shepard, R.N. (1992). The perceptual organization of colors: an adaptation to regularities of the terrestrial world? The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, edited by J.H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby. New York: Oxford University Press. Shepard, R.N. (1993). On the physical basis, linguistic representation, and conscious experience of colors. Conceptions of the Human Mind: Essays i n Honor of George A. Miller, edited by G. Harman. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Shoemaker, S., (1981). The inverted spectrum. Journal of Philosophy 74 pp. 357-381. Shoemaker, S., (1994). Phenomenal character. Nous 28 pp. 21-38. Sosa, E., (1990). Perception and reality. Information, Semantics and Epistemology, edited by E . Villaneueva. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Quine, W.V., (1960). Word and Object. Cambridge, Massachusetts: M.I.T. Press.

PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES,7 Perception, 1995

Menta1 Paint and Ment a1 Latex Ned Block

The greatest chasm in the philosophy of mind -maybe even all of philosophy- divides two perspectives on consciousness. The two perspectives differ on whether there is anything in the phenomenal character of conscious experience that goes beyond the intentional, the cognitive and the functional. A convenient terminological handle on the dispute is whether there are "qualia". Those who think that the phenomenal character of conscious experience goes beyond the intentional, the cognitive and the functional are said to believe in qualitative properties of conscious experience, or qualia for short. The debates about qualia have recently focused on the notion of representation, with issues about functionalism always in the background. All can agree that there are representational contents of thoughts, for example the representational content that virtue is its own reward. And friends of qualia can agree that experiences at least sometimes have representational content too, e.g. that something red and round occludes something blue and square. The recent focus of disagreement is on whether the phenomenal character of experience Copyright @ Ned Block 1995.

is exhausted by such representational contents. I say no. Don't get me wrong. I think that sensations -almost always -perhaps even always- have representational content in addition to their phenomenal character. What's more, I think that it is often the phenomenal character itself that has the representational content. What I deny is that representational content is all there is to phenomenal character. I insist that phenomenal character outruns representational content. We can call this view "phenomenism". Phenomenists believe in qualia, as defined above. The opposed view, which we can call "representationism", holds that the phenomenal character of an experience does not go beyond its representational content. (Terminological note: everyone believes that experience has phenomenal character -the disagreement is about whether that phenomenal character is exhausted by its representational content.) In its most extreme form, this view holds (e.g. Dennett, 1991, following Armstrong) that sensation is just a form of judgement. This version is close to eliminativism about phenomenal character. But other representationists recognize that sensations and other experiences are not judgements. Nonetheless, according to them, all experiences have representational content, and these representational contents completely capture the phenomenal character of the experiences. This paper is a critique of representationism. First I will briefly discuss an internalist form of representationism, then I will go on to the main topic of the paper, externalist forms of the view.

1 Internalism One form of representationism holds that the phenomenal character of experience is its "narrow intentional content", intentional content that is "in the head" in Putnam's phrase. That is, heads that are the same in aspects of their physico-chemical configuration that don't involve relations to the environment share all narrow intentional contents. In holding that phenomenal contents supervene on what is in the head, this view is "internalist". A full dress discussion of this view would discuss various ideas of what narrow intentional content is supposed to be. But this isn't a full dress discussion. I will simply say that all versions of this view that I can think of that have even the slightest plausibility (and that aren't committed to qualia) are in some way functionalist. They are functionalist in that they involve the idea that narrow intentional content supervenes on internal functional organization as well as physico-chemical configuration. That is, there can be no differences in narrow intentional contents without

2. MENTALPAINTA N D MENTALLATEX

21

corresponding differences at the level of causal interactions of mental states within the head. The view comes in different flavors: functional organization can be understood in terms of the interactions of common-sense mental states or in terms of the causal network of computational states. In both cases, there is a level of "grain" below which brain differences make no differences. One functional organization is multiply realizable physico-chemically in ways that make no difference in narrow intentional content. In other words, there is a level of organization above the level of physiology ("mental" or "computational") that determines narrow intentional content. (Tye, 1994 takes this view and I understand Rey, 1992a, 1992b and White, 1995 as evincing some sympathy for it.) Of course phenomenists can (and should) be internalists about phenomenal character too. But phenomenists can allow that phenomenal character depends on the details of the physiology or physico-chemical makeup of the brain. Of course, there are also dualist forms forms of phenomenism, but both the physicalist and dualist forms of phenomenism agree that there is no need to suppose that qualia supervene on functional organization.' There is a very simple thought experiment that raises a serious (maybe fatal) difficulty for any such (functionalist) internalist form of representationism. Suppose that we raise a child (call her Eliza) in a room in which all colored surfaces change color every few minutes. Further, Eliza is allowed no information about grass being green or the sky being blue. The result is that Eliza ends up with no standing beliefs that distinguish one color from another. We can allow that Eliza learns the color names in English, but nothing else that distinguishes the colors. Now it may be that the result is that there are no functional differences among her color experiences (except the attachment to different names). For example, it may be that the result of this process is that Eliza has no associations or behavioral inclinations or dispositions towards red that are any different from her associations or inclinations or dispositions towards blue. Nonetheless, she can name the colors and describes vividly different color experiences, just as we do. 'Shoemaker 1994a, 1994b combines phenomenism with internalist representationism. He holds t h a t when one looks a t a red tomato one's experience has a phenomenal character ( t h a t is not exhausted by its functional characterization) t h a t represents t h e tomato as having a phenomenal property and also as being red, t h e latter via t h e former. T h e view is representationist because t h e phenomenal character of t h e experience consists in representing phenomenal properties of objects. (The objects have those phenomenal properties in virtue of standing in causal relations t o those experiences).

Suppose this is so. The challenge to the internalist representationist, then, is to say what the difference is in intentional content between the experience of red and the experience of blue? There is a difference in phenomenal character, so the internalist representationist is committed to finding a difference in function. But the example is designed to remove all differences in function. Of course, there may be innate behavioral differences between the experience of red and the experience of blue. Perhaps we are genetically programmed so that red makes us nervous and blue makes us calm. But despite claims of this sort (Dennett, 1991), I think it is fair to say that such assertions are empirical speculations. (See Dennett's only cited source, Humphrey, 1992, which emphasizes the poor quality of the empirical evidence.) Perhaps the internalist will say that there would be no differences among her experiences. Red would of necessity look just the same to her as yellow. But this is surely an extraordinary thing for the internalist to insist on. It could be right of course, but again it is surely an unsupported empricial speculation. In short, the internalists are caught in a dilemma. Either they claim that there are innate functional differences between the experiences of red, blue, etc. In that case, they depend on an empirical speculation. Or else they claim that there would be no differences between Eliza's experience of red, of blue, etc. And in that case too, they depend on an empirical speculation. Let me be clear about what I am n o t claiming. I admit that I do think it immensely plausible that Eliza would have color experience much like ours. However, I am not depending on that, but rather on something much weaker, namely that this is an o p e n e m pirical q u e s t i o n . Further, I am certainly not claiming that there are no genetically programmed behavioral differences among color experiences, but only that this also is an open empirical question. Representationists usually see the belief in qualia as confused or otherwise ruled out on purely logical or conceptual grounds. I am maintaining that the dispute between lovers of qualia and internalist representationism depends on an open empirical question. But physicalism is an empirical thesis, so why should the representationist be embarrassed about making an empirical claim? Answer: physicalism is a very general empirical thesis having to do with the long history of successes of what can be regarded as the physicalist research program. Internalist representationism, by contrast, depends on highly specific experimental claims. Fol example, the issue would be settled if newborn babies showed differences in their reactions to red and green before having had any differential experience

2. MENTALPAINT A N D MENTALLATEX

23

with these colors. I doubt that very many opponents of qualia would wish their point of view to rest on speculations as to the results of such experiments. Of course the defender of qualia does not rest everything on a prediction about the results of such experiment. Our view is that even if such experiments do show some asymmetries, there are possible creatures -maybe genetically engineered versions of humans, in whom the asymmeteries are ironed out. (See Shoemaker, 1982.) And those genetically engineered humans could nonetheless have color experience much like ours.

2

Externalism

That is all I will have to say about internalist representationism. Now I will move to the main topic of this paper, externalist r e p resentationism. In this section, I will try to motivate externalist representationalism. The consideration I will advance in motivating it will be of use to me later. Then I will advance various considerations that cause one or another sort of difficulty for the view. I won't be making any crushing objections here, though I will be discussing some issues having to do with one objection that, when properly spelled out (something I won't try to do here), does crush one form of representationism. The purpose of this paper is more exploratory. I will be discussing a number of considerations that are relevant to the issue even if inconclusive. The structure of what follows is that of a list. I list considerations, discuss them, then go on to the next one. Often, when I see water I see it as water; that is, my visual experience represents it as water. (Sometimes my visual experience represents milk as water, and then when I drink the milk, I get a dreadful shock, the shock of clashing representations.) Most of you have seen water as water all your lives, but I'm different, I'm a foreigner. I was born on Twin Earth and emigrated to Earth at age 18. When I was 15 and looked at the sea on Twin Earth, my visual experience represented the twin-water as twin-water (though of course we didn't call it that). Perhaps you are skeptical about whether visual experience represents such properties, but please bear with me. when I first got here, I saw water as twin-water, just as you, if you went to Twin Earth would see the liquid in the oceans as water. Now, many years later, my practices of applying concepts are relevantly the same as yours: my practices show that I am committed to the concepts of my adopted home, Earth. Now when I look at

the sea of my adopted home, my visual experience represents the water as water just as yours does. (Again, let's suppose.) So the representational content of my experience of looking at the sea has changed. But my visual experience is nonetheless indistinguishable from what it was. If you took me up in a space ship and put me down by some sea-side, I wouldn't know whether I was on Earth or Twin Earth. (See Stalnaker's (1996) commentary on Lycan (1996) on Block (1990)) The representational content of my experience has changed, but the phenomenal character has stayed the same. And that shows, someone (not me) might argue, that there is some sort of gap between representational content and phenomenal character. One way for the representationist to answer would be to note that though all phenomenal character is (according to representationism) representational content, the converse is not true. Not all representational contents are phenomenal characters. For example, the thought content that mu-mesons have odd spin is not a phenomenal character. But how is this point supposed to apply to the issue at hand? The putative gap between representational content and phenomenal character has to do with the representational content of visual experience, not thought. Here is one way of extending the representationist response: the representationist should hold that visual experience has two kinds of representational content: one kind of representational content can be identified with phenomenal character and another kind of representational content is distinct from phenomenal character. The (relevant) phenomenal character of experience that has remained the same throughout my life is a matter of the observable or appearance properties of the liquids in oceans, rivers and streams, their color, sheen, motion, taste, smell, etc. It is these properties that my experience has represented liquids as having that have been shared by my experiences of both twater and water. Those are the representational contents that make my visual experience of the ocean at age 15 indistinguishable from my visual experience of the ocean now. The reply just considered is a success for representationism. We started with an experiential continuity despite representational change that challenged the representationist. But then it turned out that the representationist can explain the difference representationally. The main burden of this paper is to explore some reasons for thinking that the representationist cannot always repeat this success. Two preliminary issues: First, one might object to my claim that visual experience can ever represent anything as water. Perhaps, you might say, visual experience can represent something as round

2. MENTALPAINT A N D MENTALLATEX

25

or at least red, but not as water. Nothing that is really important to my argument will depend on this issue. Nonetheless, I will note that disallowing visually representing water as water has the effect of limiting the resources available to the representationist. Next, a terminological reminder. I take a qualitative character or quale as a phenomenal property of an experience that eludes the intentional, the functional and the purely cognitive. 'Phenomenal character' is a more neutral term that carries no commitment to qualia. Both the representationist and the phenomenist can agree that there are phenomenal characters, even though the former but not the latter thinks phenomenal characters are wholly representational.

3 Supervenience If phenomenal character supervenes on the brain, there is a straightforward argument against representationism. For arguably, there are brains that are the same as yours in internal respects (molecular constitution) but whose states represent nothing at all. I will produce an example that supports this idea by combining two somewhat less successful attempts. Consider first the poor swampman, the molecular duplicate of you who comes together by chance from particles in the swamp. He is intended as an example of total lack of representational content. How can he refer to Newt Gingrich when he has never had any causal connection with him; he hasn't ever seen Newt or anyone else on TV, never seen a newspaper, etc. But although he has no past, he does have a future. If at the instant of creation, his brain is in the same configuration that yours is in when you see a ripe tomato, perhaps the swampman's state has the same representational content as yours in virtue of that state's role in allowing him to "track" things in the future that are the same in various respects (e.g. color) as the tomato. He will track appearances of Bill Clinton in the future just as well as you will. So let's try another familiar case. The brain in a vat is also often intended as a case of no representational content. But there is something in the idea that one can apply causal theories of reference and come up with the conclusion that its states represent features of the vat computer. Now we can do better at avoiding these difficulties by combining the two thought experiments. A moleculefor molecule duplicate of your brain comes into existence in my bathtub just now. It has no life support system so it won't last long. Unlike the swampman, it has no future, and unlike the brain in a vat it has no past. So we should allow that its states represent nothing.

Objection: the bathtub-brain has the capacity to track things in the future in virtue of counterfactuals about what it would do if it were embodied. Well, yes, but it is not clear how damaging this point is. (Note: not clear.) To say the bathtub-brain has the capacity to track is like saying that men have the capacity to become pregnant if only they were to be given wombs (Block, 1981). Or to use Strawson's (1994) example, it is like saying that a heap of unassembled piano parts has the capacity to play music. The bathtub-brain has exactly the same internal configuration as your brain when you are looking at a ripe tomato. If we can assume supervenience of phenomenal character on the brain, we can refute the representationist (depending on the success of the reply just considered). The phenomenal character of the bathtub-brain's experience is the same as yours but its experiences have no representational content at all. So how can phenomenal character be captured representationally? Maybe some differences in the representational contents of experience don't make a phenomenal difference; but if representationism is right, some do. There is more to experience than representational content. But if this argument is successful, won't the representationist just deny supervenience? And in fact, that's what representationists often do (Lycan, 1996a, 1996b; McDowell, 1994). I don't think that this is a no-cost move for the representationist, but I won't labor the point.

4 What is the Issue? One of the ways that I have been framing the issue is this: Is there more to experience than its representational content? But if experiences are brain states, there will be more to experiences than their representational contents just as there is more to sentences in English than their representational contents. For example, the size of the font of this sentence is something more than (or anyway, other than) its representational content. So the question is better taken as: is there anything mental in experience over and above its representational content? I say yes, the representationist says no. Harman (1990, 1996) expresses his version of representationism about experience by claiming that in experience we only are aware of properties of what is represented, not the vehicle of representation. When we look at a red tomato, no matter how hard we try to introspect the aspect of the experience that r e p r e s e n t s redness, all we succeed in doing is focusing our attention on the redness of the tomato itself. Harman relies on the famous diaphanousness of per-

2. MENTALPAINTA N D MENTALLATEX

27

ception (Moore, 1922), that is, when one looks at a red tomato, the effect of concentrating on the experience of red is simply to attend to the redness of the tomato itself. As a point about introspection, this seems to me to be straightforwardly wrong. For example, close your eyes in daylight and you will find that the diaphanousness of perception -you will have experiences that are not clearly and uncontroversially as of anything. (More on this below.) Of course, Harman can allow that we know when an experience happens and how long it lasted, but that will no doubt be glossed by him as a matter of when we looked at the tomato and how long we looked. Harman concludes that introspection gives us no access to anything non-representational about the experience, no access to "mental paint". He argues that the contrary view confuses properties of what is represented, the intentional object of perception, with properties of the vehicle of representation, what is doing the representing. I don't agree with the imputation of fallacy. But my point right now is more preliminary: that if Harman means to define representationism in this way, his definition is too narrow. I also think his view depends on an unreliable approach to introspection. He writes as if the issue is whether we can introspect the representational features of the experience, the mental paint that represents the redness of the tomato. But there are two deeper issues. 1. The first is whether there is mental paint, even if Harman is right that we cannot become aware of it when we are seeing a tomato. One way -not the only way- of seeing why there is a real issue here is to consider the idea that the possibility of an inverted spectrum shows that there is more to experience than its representational content. According to this argument (Shoemaker, 1982; Block, 1990; see also Block and Fodor, 1972), your experience and my experience could have exactly the same representational content, say as of red, but your experience could have the same phenomenal character as my experience as of green. Shoemaker (1994a, 1994b) agrees with Harman's views about introspection. He agrees that we cannot be aware of mental paint, that when we try to introspect the experience of the redness of the tomato, all we succeed in doing is attending to the color of the tomato itself. But according to Shoemaker, we have a kind of indirect introspective access to the phenomenal character of the experience via our intuitions about the inverted spectrum. By imagining that things we both call red look to you the same way that things we both call green look to me, we succeed in gaining indirect introspective access to men-

tal paint. Thus there is mental paint. So Shoemaker's view gives us a n example of how on certain assumptions it would be reasonable to think that there is mental paint even if we can't be directly aware of it, and that is one way of illustrating the distinction. 2. A second deeper issue is whether there are phenomenal features of experience that are not even vehicles of representation. For example, according to me, the phenomenal character of the experience of orgasm is partly non-representational. and further, when we have both auditory and visual representions as of something moving, there are experiential but non-representational differences between these representations in different sensory modalities. A light flashes in one modality, a horn blows in another. Even in the case of mental paint, phenomenal character that is representational, perhaps that same phenomenal character might sometimes not represent anything, just as paint can represent color in one painting but not in another. So the even more controversial issue is whether there are phenomenal features of experience that are not representations at all. Such a mental feature would be (in this respect) like the font of a line of print or like the latex in latex paint. Paint has pigment t h a t differs from color to color- and also a base that can be common to many colors. One such base is latex. The pigment represents the color, the latex represents nothing. So the two issues are whether there is mental paint and whether there is mental latex.

T h e analogy is in some ways misleading. Paint always has a base, latex in one paint, oil in another. But I do not want to claim that there are non-representational phenomenal features of every experience or that when there are, these non-representational features form support the representational features in the manner of a "base". I don't even believe this for color experience. The quale that represents red fur me might represent green for you, and that same quale might represent nothing at all for the bathtub-brain. But that doesn't suggest that there is anything phenomenal in common to all color experience. And even if there is something in common, that something may be fully representational in you and me (though not in the bathtub-brain). There is an ambiguity in the phrase 'representational feature of experience' that interacts with the mental paintlmental latex distinction. As I mentioned earlier, Harman (1990,1996) argues that we are only aware of representational features of our experience and

2. MENTALPAINTA N D MENTALLATEX

29

we cannot be aware of any non-representational features. But 'representational feature of our experience' as used by Harman does not encompass mental paint -that's what he holds we are never aware of. In Harman's lingo, a representational feature of experience is a feature of what is represented, not what is doing the representing. On his way of making the representational/non-representational distinction, both mental paint and mental latex are non-representational. But as I have just been noting, there is another way of making the representational/non-representational distinction that draws the line between paint and latex. Paint is representational (It represents); latex is not (It does not represent). To sum up then, we can distinguish three things: 1. The intentional content of an experience. I am currently looking at a tomato and my experience represents the tomato as red.

2. Mental properties of the experience that represent the redness of the tomato. This is mental paint. According to me, the phenomenal character of the experience is such a mental property: it represents the tomato as red. According to me, one can have introspective access to this phenomenal character. Harman denies both claims. 3. Mental properties of the experience that don't represent anything. This is mental latex. I don't know whether there are any such properties in the case of a normal experience of a red tomato, but I do claim that such properties are involved in orgasm-experience,

As I mentioned, Harman says that we are only aware of what is represented by our experience, the intentional object of the experience, not what is doing the representing, not the vehicle of representation. But what will Harman say about illusions, cases where the intentional object does not exist? Surely, there can be something in common to a veridical experience of a red tomato and a hallucination of a red tomato, and what is in common can be introspectible. This introspectible commonality cannot be constituted by or explained by the resemblance between something and nothing. It seems that the representationalist ought to appeal to the intentional content that is shared by the two experiences, the content that there is a red tomato in front of me. As I understand Harman, this is very much not his view; he seems to insist rather that one is aware of the intentional object, not the intentional content. But suppose Harman were to hold that we are aware of the shared intentional content;

what would that come to? What is it to be aware of the intentional content that I am seeing a red tomato or that two experiences have that intentional content? I don't see what awareness of a n intentional content could come to if not awareness that some state has that intentional content. And surely, awareness that two experiences have the same intentional content requires awareness that each has that intentional content. But if Harman were to give this account of the introspectible similarity, he would have to concede that we have introspective awareness of some mental properties of experience, not just of the intentional objects of experience. The view I've just mentioned is taken by Lycan (1995) -that one can be aware of a family of mental properties of an experience, namely that the experience represents something, that it represents a tomato, that it represents the tomato as red, etc. So Lycan can deal with illusions by saying that when one hallucinates a red tomato, there is something introspective in common with a normal veridical perception of a tomato, namely in both cases one is aware that the experience represents a red tomato. These mental properties aren't mental paint because they don't represent. However, my definition of mental latex does, unfortunately, count them as mental latex because they are mental properties of experience that do not represent. So let's understand the definition of mental latex as containing a qualification: the property of having certain intentional contents does not count as mental latex. I can't resist interjecting the observation that from the point of view of a phenomenist (like me), the view that I have just described sounds like a bizarre religion. The conception according to which the content of experience is the same as the content of belief sounds even stranger when we think of what makes two experiences experientially similar. Some representationists combine externalism and internalism. For example, Rey (1992a, 199213) individuates color experience partly in terms of what colors it represents and partly in terms of what he sees as syntactic properties of the vehicle of representation.(There is a similar view in Lycan, 1996b.) I won't try to consider such mixed views here. Those who deny both mental paint and latex are representationists; those who countenance one or the other are phenomenists. The representationists include Dretske (1995, 1996), Harman (1990, 1996), Lycan (1995, 1996), McDowell (1994), Rey (1992a,b) and Tye (1995, 1996) (See also White (1995) for a representationist view of color experience). The phenomenists include Block (1990, 1994a), Loar (1990), McGinn (1991), Peacocke (1983) and Shoemaker (1982,

2. MENTALPAINT A N D MENTALLATEX

31

1994a, 1994b). Shoemaker and I hold that the inverted spectrum argument and the inverted earth argument make strong cases for phenomenism. (Loar, McGinn and Peacocke have declared doubts about the inverted spectrum arguments; I don't know what they think of the inverted earth argument.) I won't go into the inverted spectrum argument here, and I will only be able to mention inverted earth briefly. I will mention some other considerations that are less effective but which I hope put some pressure on the representationist.

5 Intentional Inexistents The phenomenist can allow (and I do) that pain often has some representational content. For example, pain-experiences often represent a location. Of course the representationist also says that the representational content of a pain is all there is (that is mental) to it. (Well, this isn't quite right, since as just noted, there is good reason for the representationist to count the property of having a certain intentional content as an introspectible and therefor mental property of an experience.) Since both representatists and phenomenists should agree that there is more to pain than location, the representationist should say more about what this extra intentional content of pain is. Some representationists say that the intentional object of a pain experience is simply this: a pain. But what are these intentional objects? And do they exist? One line of thought is that they are sense data, mental individuals. Lycan (1995) defines a "quale" as an "introspectible monadic qualitative property of what seems to be a phenomenal individual." And he goes on to say "I am among those philosophers who think that qualia are merely the representational contents of the sensations that feature them." So he believes in qualia in what he calls the loose-Lewisian (C.1, not David) sense, namely introspectible monadic qualitative properties of what seem to be phenomenal individuals and are referred to and individuated as such. Lycan's view is that phenomenal individuals don't exist (I agree). He says they are merely seeming phenomenal individuals. So qualia, in Lycan's view are never really instantiated. (However, he also says that we can take them to be colors of sub-regions of the visual field -and what is the visual field if not a phenomenal individual? It looks like Lycan himself is buying into the doctrine that he officially rejects.) So the theory is that the representational content of a red afterimage-experience is that there is a phenomenal indidividual that is red -really red, like a tomato!! But as Boghossian and Velleman (1989)

point out, there is something suspect about the phenomenology that this claim is based on. Afterimages -at least the ones that I have tried- don't look as if they are really objects or as if they are really red. They look.. . illusory. Try it out yourself. Don't get me wrong. I agree that a n image experience and a tomato experience share something that one might call a color property. My point is that when one has a n afterimage one has no tendency to think thereby that anything is really red, and so the introspective foundation for the theoretical claim that the afterimage represents something in the world as really red is weak. The fact that the afterimage-experience and the tomato-viewing experience share something that one might call a color property might be better glossed, I think, as sharing a phenomenal property that represents red in one case but not the other. More importantly, this whole discussion gets us off the track. If we are interested in the phenomenism/representationalism issue, we would do well to ignore the question of whether there really are phenomenal individuals. For even if there are no such things (as I believe), we can put all the important issues in terms of whether there are any mental properties of experience that go beyond the functional, the intentional and the cognitive. Lycan uses the word 'quale' to mean a property (a color) which he thinks our experience ascribes to phenomenal individuals (which don't actually exist). But to the extent that the word 'quale' is the terminological locus of the representationism/phenomenism issue, it ought to be used to mean a property of experience that goes beyond the intentional, the functional and the cognitive. Further, even if Lycan were right about the intentional content of afterimage experiences -that they ascribe colors to seeming phenomenal objects- that would cast no light on the main issue of representationism w h e t h e r there are properties of those experiences that go beyond these intentional contents. I could decide to go along with Lycan on his claim about the representational content of imageeexperiences, but insist that in addition to these representational contents, image experiences have phenomenal character that goes beyond the representational content (as shown, e.g. by the inverted earth thought experiment). Even if we were to accept Lycan's view of the representational content of after-image experiences, it would not be clear how it applied to other experiences, e.g. pain. If the intentional object is a pain, what are the properties experience ascribes to it? And do we really want to claim that pain experiences ascribe phenomenal properties to non-existent objects? A less counter-intuitive account has it that the intentional object of a pain-experience is not the pain itself (a

2 . MENTAL PAINTAND MENTAL LATEX

33

non-existent phenomenal individual), but, say in the case of a pain in the leg, the leg itself (which normally does exist). This more plausible view would say that one's pain-experience ascribes a property to the leg, the property of hurting. But the plausibility of this view is purchased at the price of a difficulty from the representationist point of view -how to give a representational account of hurting. Instead of discussing this approach to pain, I will switch to another bodily sensation, orgasm.

6 Latex and Orgasm Is the experience of orgasm completely captured by a representational content that there is an orgasm? Orgasm is phenomenally impressive and there is nothing very impressive about the representational content that there is an orgasm. I just expressed it and you just understood it, and nothing phenomenally impressive happened (at least not on my end). I can have an experience whose content is that my partner is having an orgasm without my experience being phenomenally impressive. In response to my invocation of the non-representational content of orgasm (Block, 1995a, 1995b), Tye (1995a) says that the representational content of orgasm "in part, is that something very pleasing is happening down there. One also experiences the pleasingness alternately increasing and diminishing in its intensity." But once again, I can have an experience whose representational content is that my partner is having a very pleasing experience down there that changes in intensity, and although that may be pleasurable for me, it is not pleasurable in the phenomenally impressive way that that graces my own orgasms. I vastly prefer my own orgasms to those of others, and this preference is based on a major league phenomenal difference. The location of "down there" differs slightly between my perception of your orgasms and my own orgasms, but why should that matter so much? Of course, which subject the orgasm is ascribed to is itself a representational matter. But is that the difference between my having the experience and my perceiving yours? Is the difference just that my experience ascribes the pleasure to you rather than to me (or to part of me)? Representational content can go awry in the heat of the moment. What if in the heat of the moment I mistakenly ascribe your orgasm to me or mine to you? Would this difference in ascription really constitute the difference between the presence of absence of the phenomenally impressive quality? Perhaps your answer is that there is a way in which my orgasm-experience ascribes the orgasm to me that is immune to

the intrusion of thought, so there is no possibility of a confused attribution to you in that way. But now I begin to wonder whether this talk of 'way' is closet phenomenism. No doubt there are functional differences between my having an orgasm-experience and merely ascribing it to you. Whether this fact will help to defend representationism depends on whether and how representationism goes beyond functionalism, a matter to be discussed in the section after next. According to me, there are features of the experience of orgasm that don't represent anything; so mental latex exists. I don't expect this example to force representationists to concede that there is mental latex. Appeals to intuitions about relatively unstructured cases are rarely successful. That is why the complex thought experiments such as those involving the inverted spectrum and inverted earth are useful. The disagreement focuses not on the intuitions themselves (I believe that they reflect our concepts so directly that everyone can be brought to agreement on them) but on what the intuitions show. Of course, we should not demand that a representationist be able to capture his contents in words. But if we are to try to believe that the experience of orgasm is nothing over and above its representational content, we need to be told something fairly concrete about what that representational content is. Suppose the representational content is specified in terms of recognitional dispositions or capacities. One problem with this suggestion is that the experience of orgasm seems on the face of it to have little to do with recognizing orgasms. Perhaps when I say to myself "There's that orgasm experience again" I have a somewhat different experience from the cases where no recognition goes on. But there is no plausibility in the insistence that the experience must involve some sort of categorization. And if you are inclined to be very intellectual about human experience, think of animals. Perhaps animals have the experience without any recognition. The representationists should put up or shut up. The burden of proof is on them to say what the representational content of experiences such as orgasm and pain are.

Representationists often emphasize the diaphanousness of visual experience. For example, Harman says "Look at a tree and try to turn your attention to intrinsic features of your visual experience. I predict you will find that the only features there to turn your attention

2. MENTALPAINT A N D MENTALLATEX

35

to will be features of the represented tree." (1990). But the diaphanousness of perception is much less pronounced in a number of visual phenomena, notably phosphene-experiences. (I use the cumbersome 'phosphene-experience' instead of the simpler 'phosphene' by way of emphasizing that the phenomenist need no have any commitment to phenomenal individuals.) Phosphene-experiences are visual sensations "of" color and light stimulated by pressure on the eye or by electrical or magnetic fields. (I once saw an ad for goggles that you could put on your eyes that generated phosphenes via a magnetic field.) Phospheneexperiences have been extensively studied, originally in the 19th Century by Purkinje and Helmholz. Close your eyes and place the heels of your hands over your eyes. Push your eyeballs lightly for about a minute. You will have color sensations. Are they representational? It is hard to say. What would the world have to be like for a phosphene experience to be veridical? "The world would have to be such that there are colored moving expanses somewhere," it might be said. (Mark Johnston urged this.) Perhaps phospheneexperiences are representational in a way that leaves many features (e.g. location) indeterminate. Nonetheless, no one should conclude that introspecting a phosphene experience is purely a matter of attending to an intentional object of perception. I don't take phospheneexperiences to compel anyone to believe that there is mental paint or latex. I don't think one can show that via such a simple introspection. But phosphenes do serve to remind us that not all of visual experience is clearly and obviously diaphanous. Lycan (1987) says: ". . .given any visual experience, it seems to me, there is some technological means of producing a veridical qualitative equivalent -e.g. a psychedelic movie shown to the subject in a small theater" (p. 90). But there is no guarantee that phosphene experiences produced by pressure or electromagnetic stimulation could be produced by light. (Note: I don't say there is a guarantee that phosphene-experiences could not be produced by light, but only that there is no guarantee that they could.) I do wonder if Lycan's unwarranted assumption plays much of a role in leading philosophers to suppose that phosphene-experiences, afterimage-experiences and the like are entirely representational. According to me, in normal perception one can be aware of the mental paint -the sensory quality that does the representing. This idea can be illustrated (this is an illustration, not an argument) by Bach-y-Rita's famous experiment in which he gave blind people a kind of vision by hooking up a TV camera to their backs which produced tactual sensations on their backs. Bach-y-Rita says that

the subjects would normally attend to what they were "seeing". He says "unless specifically asked, experienced subjects are not attending to the sensation of stimulation on the skin of their back, although this can be recalled and experienced in retrospect." (Quoted in Humphrey, 1992, p. 80.) When I a m looking at a tomato and attending to the color of the tomato, I a m not attending to the visual sensation, but I believe that we can attend to the visual sensation just as Bach-y-Rita's subjects could attend to their tactual sensations. I think that the Bach-y-Rita experiment is useful in thinking about whether Lycan's version of representationism is better than Harman's. Let me remind you about the difference. Harman insists that all we can introspect in experience are the intentional objects of experience. Lycan, however, allows that we can actually introspect certain properties of the experiences themselves. At first glance, reflection on the the Bach-y-Rita experiment provides support for Lycan over Harman. For the ability of Bach-y-Rita's subjects to introspect their tactual sensations helps to remind us that we really can notice features of our own visual sensations. But Lycan has a very limited idea of introspecting the phenomenal properties of experiences. His concession, you will recall, was to allow introspection of the property of having certain intentional properties. But is that what Bach-y-Rita's subjects were doing? Were they introspecting that the sensations on their backs represented, say a couch? Perhaps occasionally, but I doubt it that that's what Bach-y-Rita was talking about. I think he meant that they were attending to the experiential quality of the feelings on their backs. And I think that this case helps to remind us that at least sometimes when we introspect visual experience, we are attending to the phenomenal properties of experience, not the fact that they have certain intentional properties. So although Lycan's version of representationism is superior to Harman's in allowing the existence of introspection of something other than intentional properties of experience, it does not seem true to what that introspection is often like. Moving now to the orgasm and pain cases, there is a challenge here for the representationist. Just what is the representational content of these states? In vision, it often is plausible to appeal to recognitional dispositions in cases where we lack the relevant words. What's the difference between the representational contents of the experience of color A and color B, neither of which have names? As I mentioned earlier, one representationist answer is this: T h e recognitional dispositions themselves provide or are the basis of these contents. My experience represents A as that color, and I can misrepresent some

2 . MENTALPAINT AND MENTALLATEX

37

other color as that color. But note that this model can't straightforwardly be applied to pain. That color is a feature of objects, but that pain is a feature of the mind. Suppose I have two pains that are the same in intensity, location, and anything else that language can get a handle on -but they still feel different. Say they are both twinges in the belly that I have had before, but they aren't burning or sharp or throbbing. "There's that one again; and there's that other one." is the best I can do. If we rely on my ability to pick out that pain, (arguably) we are demonstrating a phenomenal character, not specifying a representational content. (Note the difference between Loar's (1990) proposal of a recognitional view of phenomenal concepts and the current suggestion that a recognitional disposition can specify phenomenal character itself. Phenomenal character is what a phenomenal concept specifies or refers to.) The appeal to recognitional dispositions to fill in representational contents that can't be specified in words has some plausibility, so long as the recognitional dispositions are directed outward. But once we direct them inward, one begins to wonder whether the resulting view is an articulation of representationism or a capitulation to phenomenism. I will return to this point.2

8 Is Representationism Just a Form of Functionalism? Consider what I shall call "quasi-representationism" . Quasi-representationists agree with phenomenists that there are differences between sensory modalities that cannot be cashed out representationally. One modality is flashing lights, another is tooting horns. But quasi-representationists agree with representationists that within a single modality, all phenomenal differences are representational differences. (I think that this is the view that Peacocke, 1983, Ch. 1 argues against .) I think the first thing to note about quasi-representationism is that it is something of a contrived view. Some philosophers are attracted to representationism but can't bring themselves to treat the experiential differences between say vision and touch as entirely representational. So they treat this difference functionally. They plug a *AS I mentioned earlier, there is also a problem for the recognitional view in the plausibility of the idea that we (or animals) can have an experience without any sort of categorization or recognition.

gap that they see in representationism with functionalism. But they should tell us why they don't chuck representationalism altogether in favor of functionalism. Do they think that functionalism is in some way inadequate? Is there some phenomenon (e.g. afterimages) that requires the functionalist to add a non-functional element to supplement the a ~ c o u n t ? ~ Many philosophers in the representationist ballpark are rather vague about whether they are pure representationists or quasi-representationists, but Tye (1995b) makes it clear that he is a pure representationist . How can we decide whether representationism needs supplementation by functionalism? Suppose I both touch and see a dog. Both experiences represent the dog as a dog, but they are different phenomenally. Representationists are quick to note that the two experiences also differ in all sorts of other representational ways. (See Tye, 1995a, for example.) The visual experience represents the dog as having a certain color, whereas the tactual experience represents it as having a certain texture and temperature. In Block (1995a, b) I tried to avoid this type of rejoinder by picking experiences with very limited representational content. If you wave your hand in the vicinity of your ear, you experience movement without size, shape or color. You have a visual experience that plausibly represents something moving over there and nothing else. And I imagined that there were auditory experiences with the same content. But my expert consultants tell me that I was wrong. There is no auditory analog of peripheral vision. For example, any auditory experience will represent a sound as having a certain loudness. But that does not ruin the point. It just makes it slightly harder to see. Imagine the experience of hearing something and seeing it in your peripheral vision. It is true that you experience the sound as having a certain loudness, but can't we abstract away from that, concentrating on the perceived location? And isn't there an obvious difference between the auditory experience as of that location and the visual experience as of that location? If so, then there is either mental paint or mental latex. (The ways in which representationally identical experiences might be phenomenally different could involve differences in either paint or late^.)^

%y impression is t h a t Lycan (1995, 199613) regards functionalism as inadequate t o capture t h e experiential content of images and t h a t motivates his form of representationism. See also White (1995). 4See the papers in Crane (1992) for more on this issue.

2. MENTALPAINTA N D MENTALLATEX

39

9 Seeing Red for the First Time Marvin is raised in a black and white room, never seeing anything of any other color. He learns that fire engines and ripe tomatoes are red, but he never actually sees anything red. Then he is taken outside and shown something red without being told that it is red. (I've changed 'Mary' to 'Marvin' so as to emphasize the small differences between this and Jackson's (1982) argument.) He learns what it is like to see red, even though he does not know what that color is called. He might say: "So that's what it is like to see that color." Lewis (1990) (following Nemirow) says that Marvin aquires an ability, some sort of recognitional know-how. But as Loar (1990) notes, this idea can't account for embedded judgements. Here's an example that fits the Marvin case: "If that's what it is like to see red, then I will be surprised." What does the representationist say about what Marvin has learned? If Marvin is told that what he sees is red, the representationist might say that he has acquired a visual representational concept, the concept of red. But can the representationist say this if Marvin doesn't know that it is red? Perhaps the representationist will say "Sure, he acquires the concept of red without the name 'red'." Perhaps the representationist will say that what Marvin acquires is a recognitional concept. After all, he can say "There's that color again". He has a recognitional concept that he applies on the basis of vision, even though it doesn't link up to his linguistic color concepts. But there is a trap for the representationist in this reply. For what, according to the representationist, is the difference between Marvin's concept of red and Marvin's concept of blue? He recognizes both. When he sees a red patch he says "There's that color again" and when then sees a blue patch he says "There's that other color again", each time collating his outer ostension with an inner ostension. But what, according to the representationist, is the difference between Marvin's concept of red and Marvin's concept of blue? The phenomenist will link the difference to an internal difference, the difference in the phenomenal quality of the experience of blue and the experience of red. But the representationist can't appeal to that without changing sides. And there is nothing else that is internal for him to appeal to. (Remember, we are supposing, as with Eliza raised in the room of changing colors, that he knows nothing that distinguishes the unnamed colors.) The representationist can't distinguish the concepts simply on the basis of the colors

themselves, for we can have different concepts of the same thing. The representationist owes us an answer. Here is a closely related point. If the representationist is willing to recognize a color concept that has been cut loose from everything but recognition, why shouldn't he also recognize such concepts turned inward? Why can't he have a recognitional concept of his own phenomenal state -"There's that experience again." (As I mentioned, Loar 1990 argues that a recognitional concept of one's own experiences just is a phenomenal concept.) Rey (1992a, 19928) postulates that color experiences involve the tokenings of special restricted predicates. So he would say that Marvin tokens 'R' when he sees red and 'B' when he sees blue. Is that a suitable representationist answer? Recall that we are now discussing externalist representationalism, and Rey's view would deal with this problem by bringing in an internalist element. Recall my objection to internalism in terms of Eliza, the girl raised in the room in which everything changes colors. Eliza perhaps has more or less normal color experience but may have no asymmetrical associations in her color experience. So what's the representational difference between her 'R' and ' B y ?Suppose Rey says: who needs a representational difference; the syntactic difference is enough. Then it becomes difficult to distinguish his position from the phenomenist position. I am a physicalist phenomenist. I believe that the difference between Marvin's experience of red and of blue is a physical difference. I suspect it is a difference in brain events, not naturally capturable in terms of :"syntaxn, but this is not a n important feature of the phenomenist position. I allow that it is an empirical question (of course) what the physical natures of phenomenal qualities are. Perhaps these natures are even functional.

10 Externalist Memory At the beginning of the discussion of externalism, I discussed the thought experiment in which I, a native of Putnam's Twin Earth, emigrated to Earth. When I first looked at water, I thought it was twater and, let's suppose, my visual experience represented it as twater. Much later, after learning everything that I've just told you, I decided to become a member of the Earth language community, to speak English, not Twenglish. Now, when I look at the sea, I take what I am seeing to be water and my visual experience represents it as water (let's suppose), not twater. But in some very obvious sense, water looks the same to me as it did the first time I saw it

2 . MENTALPAINTAND MENTALLATEX

41

even though my representational content has changed. If you blindfolded me and put me down a t the sea side, I wouldn't know from looking at the liquid in the ocean whether it was water or twater. My phenomenal character has stayed the same even though the representational content of my visual experience changed. But this doesn't show that there is anything non-representational about phenomenal character. For the shared representational contents are sufficient t o explain why there's no difference in what its like to see water. The key to the success of the representationist move here is that the representational change (from of twater to of water) is a change in a "non-appearance" property. The representationist move involves the following picture: experiences have representational properties of two types: the phenomenal character of an experience can be identified with one of those two types. The non-phenomenal type includes the representation of water as water, the phenomenal type includes such properties as color. (See Block, 1995a,b and Tye, 1995a.) What I will argue is that there is a twin earth case that turns on a property that does not allow a move corresponding the one just made. The property is color, which is an "appearance property" if anything is. The upshot, I will argue, is that there is mental paint (but there is no argument here for mental latex). I will illustrate this point with a n argument from Block (1990, 1994a) about color. I won't go into this argument in full detail.5 Inverted Earth is a place that differs from Earth in two important ways. First, everything is the complementary color of the corresponding earth object. The sky is yellow, the grass-like stuff is red, etc. Second, people on Inverted Earth speak an inverted language. They use 'red' to mean green, 'blue' t o mean yellow, and so forth. If you order paint from Inverted Earth and you want yellow paint, you FAX an order for "blue" paint. The two inversions have the 5~ will make use of Harman's (1983) Inverted Earth example. Block (1980) uses a cruder example along the same lines. (P. 302-303 of Block (1980) reprinted on p. 466 of Lycan (1990) and p. 227 of Rosenthal (1991).) Instead of a place where things have the opposite from the normal colors, I envisioned a remote arctic village in which almost everything was black and white, and the subject of the thought experiment was said to have no standing color beliefs of the sort of "Grass is green". Two things happen to him: he confuses color words, and a color inverter is placed in his visual system. Everything looks to have the complementary of its real color, but he doesn't notice it because he lacks standing color beliefs. In the 1980 version of the paper, I mistakenly attributed the suggestion to Sylvain Bromberger who told me when he later read it that he had no idea why I had attributed any such idea to him. Harman used the Inverted Earth e x a m ~ l eto make a different ~ o i n tfrom that made here: that representational content does not supervene on the brain.

effect that if inverters are inserted behind your eyes (and your body pigments are changed), you will notice n o difference when you go to Inverted Earth. After you step off the space-ship, you see some Twin-grass. You point at it, saying it is a nice shade of "green", but you are wrong. You are wrong for the same reason that you are wrong if you call the liquid in a Twin-earth lake 'water' just after you arrive there. The grass is red (of course I am speaking English not Twenglish here). But after you have decided to adopt the concepts and language of the Inverted Earth language community and you have been there for 50 years, your word 'red' and the representational content of your experience as of red things (things that are really red) will shift so that you represent them correctly. Then, your words will mean the same as those of the members of your adopted language community. There is a small difference between this form of the thought experiment and that of my 1990 and 1994.~In the old version, you are kidnapped and inserted in a niche in Inverted Earth without your noticing it (your twin having been removed to make the niche). In the new version, you are aware of the move and consciously decide to adopt the concepts and language of the Inverted Earth language community. The change has two advantages: first, it makes it clearer that you become a member of the new community. On the old version, one might wonder what you would say if you found out about the change. Perhaps you would insist on your membership in the old language community and defer to them rather than to the new one. The new version also makes it easier to deal with issues of remembering your past of the sort brought up in connection with the inverted spectrum in Dennett, 1991. The upshot is: 1. The phenomenal character of your color experience stays the same. That's what you say, and why shouldn't we believe you? 2. But the representational content of your experience, being ex-

ternalist, shifts with external conditions in the environment and the language community. (Recall that I am now discussing representationists who are externalists; I discussed internalist representationalism at the beginning of the paper.) Your phenomenal character stays the same but what it represents changes. This provides the basis of an argument for mental paint, -

61 am indebted to Bob Stalnaker for suggesting the change.

not mental latex. Mental paint is what stays the same; its representational content is what changes. What exactly is the argument for mental paint? Imagine that on the birthday just before you leave for Inverted Earth, you are looking at the clear blue sky. Your visual experience represents it as blue. Years later, you have a birthday party in Inverted Earth and you look at the Inverted Earth sky. Your visual experience represents it as yellow (since that's what color it is and your visual experience by that time is veridical let us suppose -1'11 deal with an objection to this supposition later). But the phenomenal character stays the same, as indicated by the fact that you can't tell the difference. So there is a gap between the representational content of experience and its phenomenal character. Further, the gap shows that phenomenal character outruns representational content. Why? How could the representationist explain what it is about the visual experience that stays the same? What representational content can the representationist appeal to in order to explain what stays the same? This is the challenge to the representationist, and I think it is a challenge that the representationist cannot meet. The comparison with the water case is instructive. There, you will recall, we also had phenomenal continuity combined with representational change. But this created no problem for the representationist because the phenomenal continuity itself could be given a representational interpretation. The phenomenal character of my visual experiences of twater and water were the same, but their representational contents differed. No problem because the common phenomenal character could be said by the representationist to be a matter of the representation of color, sheen, flow pattern and the like. Put what will the representationist appeal to in the Inverted Earth case that corresponds to color, sheen, flow pattern, etc.? That's the challenge that the thought experiment raises for representationism. There are many obvious objections to this argument, some of which I have considered elsewhere. I will confine myself here to two basic lines of objection. Bill Lycan has recently objected (1996a, 199613) that the testimony of the subject can only show that the phenomenal character of color experience is indistinguishable moment to moment, and that allows the representationist to claim that it shifts gradually, in synch with the shift in the representational content of color experience. (I briefly considered this objection in my 1990, p. 68.) If that were right, the refutation of representationism would evaporate. But this objection ignores the longer term memories. The idea is that you remember the color of the sky on your birthday last year, the year before that,

ten years before that, and so on, and your long term memory gives you good reason to think that the phenomenal character of the experience has not changed gradually. You don't notice any difference between your experience now and your experience 5 years ago or 10 years ago or 60 years ago. Has the color of the American flag changed gradually over the years? The stars used to be yellow and now they are white? No, I remember the stars from my childhood! They were always white. Of course, memory can go wrong, but why should we suppose that it must go wrong here? Surely, the scenario just described (without memory failure) is both conceptually and empirically possible. (As to the empirical possiblity, note that the thought experiment can be changed so as to involve a person raised in a room who is then moved to a different room where all the colors are changed. No need for a yellow sky, a yellow ceiling will do.) Now a different objection may be mounted on Lycan's behalf that the externalist representationist should be externalist about memory. According to my story, the representational contents of the subject's color experience have shifted without his knowing about it. So if my story is right, Lycan (if he is to be an externalist about memory) should say that the subject's color experience has shifted gradually without the subject's knowing it. And that shows that the subject's memory is d e f e ~ t i v e . ~ One possible justification is simply that the nature of phenomenal character is representational (and externalist), so the phenomenal character of experience shifts with its representational content. Since memory is powerless to reveal this shift, memory is by its nature defective. But this reply is weak, smacking of begging the question. The Inverted Earth argument challenges externalist representationism about phenomenal character, so trotting in externalist representationism about memory of phenomenal character to defend it seems a bit pathetic. The idea of the Inverted Earth argument is to exploit the first person judgement that in the example as framed the subject notices no diflerence. The subject's experience and memories of that experience reveal no sign of the change in environment. Yet his representational contents shift. Since the contents in question are color contents, the move that was available earlier about a set of representational contents that capture what stays the same is not available here. And that suggests for reasons that I just gave that '1 took this point t o be raised by some of t h e discussion of Lycan's paper a t t h e meeting of Sociedad Filos6fica IberwAmericana in Canclin in June, 1995. If I had t o credit it t o anyone, it would be Alan Gibbard.

2. MENTAL PAINTAND MENTAL LATEX

45

there is more to experience than its representational content. The defender of the view that memory is defective must blunt or evade the intuitive appeal of the first person point of view to be successful. It is no good to simply invoke the doctrine that experience is entirely representational. But the reply to the Inverted Earth argument as I presented it above does just that. It says that the memories of the representational contents are wrong, so the memories of the phenomenal characters are wrong too. But that is just to assume that as far as memory goes, phenomenal character is representational content. For the argument to have any force, there would need to be some independent reason for taking externalism about phenomenal memory seriously. We could dramatize what is question-begging about the argument by augmenting the thought experiment so that the subject understands the philosophical theories that dictate that his representational contents shift. Then, being careful, he will acknowledge that the thought he used to think with the words "The sky is blue" is not the same as the thought he now thinks with those words. And he will acknowledge something similar about the representational content of his perception of the sky. So in the new version of the thought experiment, he knows that the representational contents of his experiences have shifted. But that gives him no reason to back down from his insistence that there is no difference in the way the sky looked to him (in one sense of that phrase), that if he could have both experiences side by side he would not be able to discern a difference. Plainly, he is justified in saying that there is no difference in something, something we could call the phenomenal character of the experience of looking a t the sky. Another way to dramatize the point I've just been making about the externalist view of defective memory is by appeal to a different thought experiment. Different languages cut up the color spectrum differently (Berlin and Kay, 1969). Suppose I move to a different language community in a different country, knowing full well that they cut up the colors differently. I immediately resolve that I will reject my old language community and be loyal to the new one. I commit myself to deferring to their experts, not the experts of my old language community. If according to the standards of my new community, I have misapplied a color concept, I commit myself to agreeing that I have misapplied it (Burge, 1979). Perhaps visually experiencing something as red involves a comparison to a memory image. If so, we can suppose that the memory images I use are derived from my first few experiences of red things in my new country. Now on one way of thinking of color concepts, my color concepts

have changed in a flash. And thus the representational content of my color experience has changed. But there is no time here for "gradual" but unnoticed change in what it is like to see red. T h e externalist view of memory would dictate that my memory of what it was like to see ripe tomatoes just a few moments ago before my decision is wrong. Five minutes ago, before my decision to change loyalties, I was looking at a ripe tomato. Now I have made the decision and I am looking at the same ripe tomato. It looks just the same -as far as I can tell. Yet the externalist about memory has to say that I mis-remember. Now you may want to reject the view of color concepts I a m using in this paragraph (but not earlier) on the ground that it ties color concepts too closely to language and conscious decision-making. Perhaps you are right. My point is that if anything is wrong with the claim about this thought experiment that the representational contents of my experiences changed in a flash while their phenomenal characters stayed the same, it is this theory of color concepts, not taking memory at face value. It will be useful to briefly consider a related objection to the Inverted Earth argument. Suppose it is said that the subject's (that is, your) representational contents don't ever switch. No matter how long you spend on Inverted Earth, the sky still looks blue t o you. After all, I have insisted that you notice no difference. This line of objection has more than a little force, but it can easily be seen not to lead away from my conclusion. For it is hard to see how anyone could accept this objection without also thinking that the subject (viz, you) on Inverted Earth has an "inverted spectrum" relative to the other denizens of Inverted Earth. The sky looks yellow to them but blue to you. And you are as functionally similar to them as you like. (We could even imagine that your monozygotic twin brother is one of them.). But once such easy generation of an inverted spectrum is allowed, we can imagine it happening on earth. Twins are raised, one with, the other without, inverting lenses. They end up functionally and representationally identical, but phenomenally different. And that provides an even clearer counter to representationism than the Inverted Earth argument.' 'clearer because it is a case of same representational content, different phenomenal character, and this yields a more direct argument t h a t phenomenal character goes beyond representational content. Inverted earth provides t h e converse, same phenomenal character, different representational content. And so I have had t o resort t o a burden of proof argument. I have challenged t h e representationist with a question: what kind of representational content of experience stays t h e same?

2. MENTALPAINT A ND MENTALLATEX

47

It may be objected to this last point that even if raised on earth, the twins are not representationally identical. It may be said that the sky looks blue to one and yellow to the other, so they are representationally different. But if inverted spectra are rife (and given the huge variation in genes for cone pigments, there is reason to expect substantial differences in color perception among normal perceivers) then why should we suppose that the sky looks blue to some of us, but looks green to others and looks yellow to others? Why should it be supposed that only some of us perceive the sky veridically? Better to suppose that phenomenal character is not expressible in English. Phrases like 'looks blue' should be used to characterize all normal perceivers who are seeing something as blue (that is, whose intentional content of perception is as of blue), even if their spectra are shifted or inverted with respect to one another. Now we are in a position to counter another of Lycan's (1996a, 199613) arguments. He notes that I concede that our Inverted Earth subject has experiences whose representational contents (on looking at the Inverted Earth sky) shift from looking blue to looking yellow. And he concludes that the subject's claim that he notices no difference is thereby undermined. Not so, for "looks blue" does not express a phenomenal character but rather a representational content! Phenomenal content is what is relevant to noticing a difference; representational content can change purely externally. I began the discussion of externalism by discussing a thought experiment involving Putnam's Twin Earth. The idea was that I had emigrated from Twin Earth to Earth and that after many years on Earth the representational contents of my visual experiences of the liquid in the oceans shifted even though the phenomenal character of the experiences stayed the same. I noted that there is no problem for the representationist here, since the constant phenomenal character can be understood in representational terms. However, there is no corresponding move available to the representationistin the case of an emigration to or from Inverted Earth. And this puts the burden of proof on the representationist.g

BIBLIOGRAPHY Berlin, Brent & Kay, Paul, 1969: Basic Color Terms. Berkeley: University of California Press. '1 am grateful for discussions with Tyler Burge, Brian Loar, Paul Horwich, Pierre Jacob and Georges Rey and t o Bill Lycan and his NEH Summer Seminar, 1995. I am grateful to Burge, Lycan, Rey and to Sydney Shoemaker for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Block, Ned, 1980: "Troubles with Functionalism", in Block (ed.), Readings i n Philosophy of Psychology Vol. 1, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Block, Ned, 1981: "Psychologism and Behaviorism", The Philosophical Review LXXXX, 1, January, 1981, 5-43. Block, Ned, 1990: "Inverted Earth", in James Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives 4, Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind, 53-79. Atascadero: Ridgeview. Block, Ned, 1994a: "Qualia". In S. Guttenplan (ed.), A Companion to Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Blackwell, 514-520. Block, Ned, 1994b: "Consciousness", in S. Guttenplan (ed.), A Companion to Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Blackwell, 209-218. Block, Ned, 1995a: "On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18, 227-247. To be reprinted in Block, Flanagan and Guzeldere, 1996. Block, Ned, 1995b: "How Many Concepts of Consciousness?", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18. Block, Ned & Fodor, Jerry, 1972: "What Psychological States are Not", The Philosophical Review LXXXI, 2, 159-181. Block, Ned, Flanagan, Owen & Guzeldere, Guven, 1996: The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical and Scientific Debates. Cambridge: MIT Press. Boghossian, Paul & Velleman, David, 1989: "Color as a Secondary Quality", Mind 98, 81-103. Burge, Tyler, 1979: "Individualism and the Mental", Midwest Studies i n Philosophy IV, 73-121. Crane, Tim, 1992: The Contents of Experience. Dennett, Daniel, 1991: Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little Brown. Dretske, Fred, 1995: Book. Cambridge: MIT Press. Dretske, Fred, 1996a: "Phenomenal Externalism or If Meanings Ain't in the Head, Where are Qualia?", in this volume. Harman, Gilbert, 1982: "Conceptual Role Semantics", Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 23. Harman, Gilbert, 1990: "The Intrinsic Quality of Experience", in James Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives 4, Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind, 31-52 Atascadero: Ridgeview. Harman, Gilbert, 1996: "Explaining Objective Color in Terms of Subjective Reactions", in this volume. Humphrey, N. 1992: A History of the Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster. Jackson, Frank, 1982: "Epiphenomena1 Qualia" , Philosophical Studies 32, 127-36. Lewis, David, 1990: "What Experience Teaches", in Lycan, 1990.

2. MENTALPAINT A N D MENTALLATEX

49

Loar, Brian, 1990: "Phenomenal Properties", in James Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives 4, Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind. Atascadero: Ridgeview. Lycan, William G., 1987: Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT. Lycan, William G., 1990: Mind and Cognition, A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Lycan, William G., 1995: "We've Only Just Begun", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18, 262-263. Lycan, William G. 1996a: "Layered Perceptual Representation", in this volume. Lycan, William G. 1996b: Consciousness and Experience. Cambridge: MIT Press. McDowell, John, 1994: "The Content of Perceptual Experience", Philosophical Quarterly April. McGinn, Colin 1991: The Problem of Consciousness. Oxford: Blackwell. Peacocke, Christopher, 1983: Sense and Content. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rey, Georges, 1992a: "Sensational Sentences", in Consciousness: Psychological and Philosophical Essays, ed by M. Davies and G. Humphreys. Oxford: Blackwell. Rey, Georges, 1992b: "Sensational Sentences Switched", Philosophical Studies 68, 289-331. Rosenthal, David, 1991: The Nature of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shoemaker, Sydney, 1982: "The Inverted Spectrum", The Journal of Philosophy 79, 7 , 357-81. Shoemaker, Sydney 1994a: "Self-Knowledge and Inner Sense; Lecture 111: The Phenomenal Character of Experience", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research VIV, 2, June 1994, 291-314. Shoemaker, Sydney, 1994b: "Phenomenal Character", Nous 28, 21-38. Stalnaker, Robert, 1996: "On a Defense of the Hegemony of Representation", in this volume. Strawson, Galen: Mental Reality. Cambridge: MIT Press. Tye, Michael, 1994: "Qualia, Content and the Inverted Spectrum", Nous 28: 159-183. Tye, Michael, 1995a: "Blindsight, Orgasm and Representational Overlap", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18, 268-269. Tye, Michael, 1995b: Ten Problems of Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press. White, Stephen, 1995: "Color and the Narrow Contents of Experience", in Philosophical Topics.

PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES, 7 Perception, 1995

Orgasms Again Michael Tye

Ned Block, in his reply to Gil Harman, raises some interesting issues for representationists to consider.' I do not believe that my own version of representationism (see here Tye 1995 for the full view) is presented with any insuperable difficulties by the various objections and examples Block adduces. But I lack the space to argue for this general claim here. Instead, let me focus upon a specific demand that Block makes of representationists. Block says (at the end of the section entitled "Latex and Orgasm"): The representationist should put up or shut up. The burden of proof is on them to say what the representational content of experiences such as orgasm and pain are. On one way of understanding this demand, it is reasonable enough. On another, it is too strong. This needs a little sorting out. Representationism, in my view, is a theory that is justified by its capacity to explain a variety of pieces of data about phenomenal consciousness in a simple, straightforward way, and to solve a number of perplexing philosophical problems (I distinguish ten in Tye 'The term "representationist" is Block's. See his "Mental Paint and Mental Latex" in this volume.

1995). On my account, what it is exactly that a given experience or feeling represents need not be accessible to the subject's cognitive centers, including his or her powers of introspection, except in the most general and uniformative way (for example, as an experience of this sort). Nonetheless no two states that differ in the relevant representational contents can differ phenomenally, I claim; moreover, any two states that are alike in the relevant contents must be alike phenomenally. Why? Because phenomenal character is one and the same as representational content of the appropriate sort. What is the relevant sort of content? Here I agree with Block that the representationist should indeed put up or shut up. For without a further story at this level, there is no clearly defined theory.2 But to concede this is not to grant that the representationist needs to specify what the pertinent content is in particular cases. T h a t , I argue next, is a matter for empirical investigation. Sensory experience is often contrasted with judgement or belief or thought. States of the latter sort demand concepts on the part of their possessors. I cannot think that the violin is being played or judge that the man most likely to succeed is N.N., for example, unless I possess the concepts, violin, man, and success, among others. These concepts are then exercised in the judgement or thought or belief. But sensory experience, in its most basic form, doesn't seem to be like this. Our experiences are imbued with a wealth of detail that far outstrips our conceptual resources. For example, the experience or sensation of the determinate shade of color, red2g, is phenomenally different from that of the shade, reds2. But I have no such concept as red2g. So, I cannot see something as red29 or recognize that specific shade as such. My ordinary color judgements are, of necessity, far less discriminating than my experiences of color. Human memory simply isn't up to the task of capturing the wealth of detail found in the experiences. Beliefs or judgements abstract from the details and impose more general conceptual categories. Sensory experience is the basis for many beliefs or judgements, but it is far, far richer. This point is not restricted to color, of course. Experiences of shapes can likewise go beyond our concepts. Presented with an inkblot, for example, I will likely have an experience of a shape for which I have no matching concept. %n my view, t h e relevant sort of content is PANIC ( s u i t a b l y ) poised, abstract, nonconceptual, intentional content. See here Tye 1995 and Tye 1996. My conception of what it is for a state t o be poised, I might add, is not t h e same as Block's in his 1995. In what follows, I focus on nonconceptual content without further qualification. But I am certainly not suggesting t h a t any state with nonconceptual content is phenomenally conscious.

Of course, the ways in which things are conceived sometimes have a n effect upon how they phenomenally appear. Conceiving of a scene in one way rather than another may sometimes influence how I break it up cognitively into spatial parts, for example, and the shapes I then experience may not be the ones I would have experienced under a different conceptualization. But the sensory experiences of shapes (at the most basic level) do not require concepts. In this way, they, and other sensory experiences, have nonconceptual contents. Sensory experiences, broadly understood, often have conceptual contents as well as nonconceptual ones.3 I cannot see that the dog is wagging its tail or hear that the soprano is off-key unless I possess the concepts, dog, soprano, etc. One issue representationists sometimes disagree upon is whether these conceptual contents are themselves directly phenomenally relevant. My own view is that they are not. In cases like the two just mentioned, the states are compound, having both thoughts and sensations as components, and thoughts, I claim, have no intrinsic phenomenology.4 I do not deny, of course, that often when we think, we are subject to linguistic (or verbal) images, which have the phonological and syntactic structure of items in our native language. These images frequently even come complete with details of stress and intonation. It is as if we are speaking to ourselves. We 'hear' an inner voice. Images of this sort clothe our conscious thoughts; and it is, I maintain, in features of the nonconceptual contents of these images that the phenomenology sometimes attributed t o thoughts really resides. T h e images are not always present in thought, however. They are not essential to thought. Consider, for example, the thoughts of creatures without a natural language.5 Even if you disagree with me here, it does not undermine my main point. Sensory experiences have nonconceptual contents. Representationists are free to appeal to these contents as phenomenally relevant (and, in my view, they should make such an appeal). But representationists need not be in a position to say just what enters into these contents in specific cases. I do not know what it is exactly that my orgasms nonconceptually represent, for example. I can 3 ~ I snoted in my reply t o Bill Lycan (this volume), perceptual experience has many Some. but not all, of these layers are nonconce~tual. - lavers. " 4Harman seems t o take t h e opposing view of thoughts. 'Block (1995) mentions two cases which may appear problematic for nonconceptual representationism (one involving visual experience as of a building versus visual e x ~ e r i e n c eas of a facade and another involving ~ h e n o m e n a ldifferences in hearing a language one understands versus hearing t h e same language without understanding it). I respond t o these in Tye 1996.

".

make some very general remarks, and I did so in the passage Block quotes in his paper, but I never claimed that they told the whole story. Clearly, my orgasms represent something much more specific than just that something very pleasing is going on down there. They also nonconceptually represent a certain sort of physical change in my body. This is crucially relevant to their phenomenal character. Orgasms, at heart, are bodily sensation^.^ Like other bodily sensations, under optimal conditions (conditions of well functioning), they 'track' bodily states, just as perceptual sensations 'track' environmental state^.^ This, in my view, is how they get their nonconceptual contents. Which states are tracked is not t o be settled a priori. Still, it seems to me plausible t o suppose that orgasms track certain physical changes in the genital region (just as the feeling of thirst tracks dryness in the throat; hunger pangs track contractions in the stomache walls when the stomache is empty; pains track tissue damage; and so on). Moreover, my orgasms track certain bodily changes in me. This, in part, is why I do not experience an orgasm when I see that my partner is having one. Here I represent something about her; moreover, my representation is conceptual. I form the belief that she is having an orgasm on the basis of associated visual sensations. Feeling an orgasm, however, requires the right sort of nonconceptual representation of the pertinent bodily changes, not conceptual representation of the generic state. No belief about myself or my partner is necessary. Nor is visual experience -I might be blind. That need not impoverish my bodily experience. Let us all enjoy our orgasms, then. There is nothing to trouble the representationist here.

Block, N. 1995 "On A Confusion about a Function of Consciousness", Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 18, 227-247. Tye, M. 1995 Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, Bradford Books. Tye, M. 1996 "The Function of Consciousness", Nous forthcoming. Tye, M. forthcoming "Is Consciousness in the Head?".

re or mall^, when an orgasm is experienced, strong desires are also present. These have a characteristic felt quality t o them. One feels "pulled" or "tugged". This general feeling (which is also to be handled representationally) contributes t o t h e overall phenomenal character of one's state. needs t o be said here, of course. See Tye 1995 and Tye forthcoming.

re ore

PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES, 7 Perception, 1995

Colors, Subjective Reactions, and Qualia Sydney Shoemaker

Let me begin by indicating where I think Harman and I are in agreement. We both think that "subjective reactions" must come into an account of color, although we have different views about how they do. We both think that perceptual experience has a "presentational or representational character", and that color is represented by our visual experiences as a feature of external objects, not as a feature of our experience. Moreover, we agree that, as Harman puts it, "color is experienced as a simple basic quality, rather than a disposition or complex of causal properties". As Harman emphasized in an earlier paper,' what we are introspectively aware of in our experience is its presentational or representational content, not any "mental paint" which bestows this content. I shall refer to all of this as Harman's "phenomenological point". Because we agree on this, we also agree that if his characters George and Mary were spectrum inverted relative to each other, supposing that to be possible, this would have to '"The Intrinsic Quality of Experience", in James Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives, 4 , Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind. Ascadera, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Co., 1990. 31-52.

involve their perceiving the same objects as having different properties, this despite the fact that as normal perceivers they would perceive these objects as having the same colors. And I think we agree that in this case the properties would have to be relational ones, defined or constituted by their relations to the experiences of the subject perceiving them. On all these points I think we are in substantive agreement. There is another point on which our agreement is, I think, merely verbal. We agree that there are no "color sensations". But for me this is just the point that the current meaning of "sensation" makes it an inappropriate term for our color experiences, while for Harman the rejection of color sensations seems to be linked with the rejection of "qualia". Now in agreeing with Harman's phenomenological point, I agree with him in rejecting one conception of qualia -the "mental paint" conception, according to which we are aware of the representational content of our color experiences by being aware in a quasi-perceptual way of their qualia, in much the way we are aware of what colors are represented in a painting by perceiving the pigments on the canvas. But I think that there is another conception of qualia on which they are required by a satisfactory account of color experience. Finally, there is one point of difference between us that is not quite, or not yet, a point of disagreement. Harman says that he is "not sure" whether the imagined possibility of spectrum inversion is coherent, whereas I am quite sure that it is coherent. One of the main things I want to do in what follows is to show that if Harman were to climb off the fence on this issue, and climb down in my direction, then given our other points of agreement he could not stop short of accepting the rest of my view, qualia and all. Along the way I will show that the circularities Harman claims to find in my view are simply not there; they seem to be there only because, perhaps out of misguided charity, he states my view in a way that omits its commitment to qualia. That is truly a case of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. So let me start laying out the argument. Since my object is to show what Harman is committed to on the assumption that spectrum inversion is possible, I assume that it is possible. Assuming Harman's phenomenological point, we have 1) If George and Mary are normal perceivers who are spectrum inverted relative to each other, then when George sees a red object it looks to him to have a property, call it Q, which green objects look to Mary to have, and when Mary sees a red object

4. COLORS, SUBJECTIVE REACTIONS, A N D QUALIA

57

it looks to her to have a property, call it T, which green objects look to George to have. But Harman thinks, as I do, that 2) If George and Mary are normal perceivers, then (under normal conditions) red objects look red to both and green objects look green to both.

It follows that 3) The Q and T referred to in (1) are distinct from redness and greenness.

It is compatible with (3) that Q and T are in fact not properties that visible objects ever have -that while George and Mary always perceive red and green objects as having one or the other of these properties, their color experiences are to that extent illusory. There are two versions of this view. One, which I call "literal projectivism", says that Q and T and the like are in fact properties of experiences, qualia in fact, which are projected onto external objects. So on this view we do perceive "mental paint", but perceive it (misperceive it) as belonging to external things. I take this to be the view that Paul Boghossian and David Velleman have advanced in several papers. On their version of the view it is colors that are falsely but unavoidably projected onto objects by our experience, and this conflicts with (1) and (2), which presuppose that objects literally do have colors. But there could be a version of literal projectivism which allows that external objects can be colored but holds that our visual experience projects onto objects properties -Q and T, and their ilk- which in fact are instantiated only in our minds. A different version of projectivism is what I have called "figurative projectivism"; according to this, Q and T would be properties that, are in fact instantiated neither in external objects nor in our minds, but which certain experiences falsely (but unavoidably) represent external objects as instantiating. This seems to be the view that J.L. Mackie endorses and ascribes to Locke in his book Problems From Locke. But I take it that Harman agrees with me in rejecting all such projective error views. So, still assuming for the sake of discussion the possibility of spectrum inversion, he would agree that 4) Under normal circumstances, when George or Mary perceives an object to be Q or T, that object is Q or T.

This means that when both George and Mary are looking at a red object under normal circumstances, that object is both Q and T .

Now one could perhaps tell a story according to which in addition to their colors objects have other intrinsic properties -or other properties with as good a claim to being intrinsic as colors have- and that Q and T are among these, and that for some reason George can perceive something to have Q only when the thing is red while Mary can perceive something to be Q only when it is green, and so on. But such a story would have no plausibility at all as applied to actual objects. I take Harman to agree that given the nature of the actual world, the only plausible view about the nature of Q and T is

5) Q and T are relational properties that objects have in virtue of their relations to the visual experiences of subjects viewing them. It should be emphasized that (5) does not mean that Q and T are perceived as relational properties. Harman says that it is compatible with colors having a complex nature that "the concept of color as it figures in [perceptual representation] is simple and unanalysable in causal terms, because color is experienced as a simple basic property"; and the same could be said about the concepts of Q and T, as they occur in our perceptual representations.' And certainly one can perceive what is in fact a relational property without perceiving it as relational. When a n object feels heavy to one, one does not perceive it as having a property that is relative to people of one's own build and strength, yet it is true, even conceptually true, that the heaviness one feels is such a property. The question now becomes, what relation is involved in such properties as Q-ness and T-ness, and what it is a relation to? Elsewhere I have used the term "phenomenal property" for properties of the sort Q and T are supposed to be, and I have suggested that a phenomenal property is a property an object has in virtue of actually causing, in a certain sort of way (the way involved in normal cases of vision), an experience having a certain qualitative character, i.e., having a certain quale. The suggestion Harrnan attributes to me is different. The relevant difference is that instead of specifying the mental term in the relationship in terms of qualitative character, it specifies it in terms of representational content. So, in the case of 2 ~ a t h e trhan say t h a t our experience represents colors, and properties such as Q and T, as simple, it would be better (if we want t o avoid a projective error theory) t o say t h a t it does not represent them as complex. Likewise, rather than

say t h a t our experience represents such properties as mo~ladic,it is better t o say t h a t it does not represent them as relational. Here our experience is best thought of as noncommittal about such matters.

the phenomenal property of being Q, this would be constituted by a relation to an experience that represents the object as Q. But of course this makes the account circular. As Harman puts it, "In order to understand what the concept Q is, we need to understand what objects are Q to someone, but in order to understand what objects are Q to someone, we need to understand what the concept Q is" But that circularity has nothing to do with me, because the view that is afflicted with it is not mine. In a footnote Harman says that he has "oversimplified", and goes on to say "Shoemaker's actual account supposes that an experience has a certain intrinsic phenomenal feature x that is responsible for its representing something as Q. For something to be Q is for it to be such as to produce experiences with feature x". But the view ascribed to me in the footnote, unlike the view ascribed to me in the text of Harman's paper, is not circular. So "oversimplified" isn't quite the right word. Let me take stock. We have seen that Harman seems committed to holding that if spectrum inversion is possible then color percep tion involves the perception of relational properties of objects that are defined, or constituted, by relations to visual experiences. And we have seen that it is unacceptable, because circular, to specify the mental terms of these relationships, i.e., the experiences, in terms of what properties of this sort they represent. It seems obvious that there is no prospect of our being able to specify these experiences in terms of any other representational properties they have. So it seems that it must be the case that having such a property consists in being appropriately related to experiences having a certain nonrepresentational property. I.e., 6) Q and T are properties objects have in virtue of being related in certain ways to experiences having certain nonrepresentational properties. It seems to me that Harman is committed to its being the case that (6) is true if spectrum inversion is possible and the story about George and Mary is coherent. But (6) is my view. And properties that can play the role that (6) assigns to the nonrepresentational properties are what I mean by qualia. So I think that Harman is committed to allowing that if spectrum inversion is possible, there are qualia as I understand them. Let me guard against a misunderstanding. (6) of course will not do as a definition of the terms "Q" and "T". For it does not say what the nonrepresentational properties in question are; it just says that there are such and (by implication) that the one associated with Q is different from the one associated with T. What (6) says, generalized,

is that for each different phenomenal property we can perceive an external thing to have, there is a different nonrepresentational property of perceptual experiences, such that having that phenomenal property consists in standing in the appropriate relation to an experience having the corresponding nonrepresentational property. It is a further part of my account that when an experience has a nonrepresentational property of this kind, it represents the experienced object as having the corresponding phenomenal property, and does so in virtue of having that nonrepresentational property. Supposing 'Q' to name such a phenomenal property, there is no suggestion here that the appropriate way to "define" 'Q', in the sense of explaining its meaning, is by specifying the corresponding nonrepresentational property. I might define it, in the sense of fixing its reference, by saying that it is the phenomenal property my experience of red things represent them as having. And while there may conceivably come a time when we can specify the nonrepresentational properties in neurophysiological terms, the only way of picking them out that we are likely to have in the foreseeable future is by means of such descriptions as "the nonrepresentational property that underlies my experience of red things". Although Harman says that he is uncertain whether the idea of spectrum inversion is coherent, he takes the alleged circularity of my account as raising problems for it. And he mentions other reasons for rejecting qualia. Since the account he finds circular is not mine, and since the notion of qualia he attacks (the mental paint view) is not mine either, I find nothing in his paper that threatens either the claim that spectrum inversion is possible or my account of it in terms of phenomenal properties and qualia. But what is there to be said in favor of my account? As is implied by what I have said already, any case for the possibility of spectrum inversion will at the same time be a case for my account. At any rate, Harman should think so, for given assumptions I share with him, my account gives the only way of accommodating spectrum inversion. I have believed for some time that reflection on the possibility of intrasubjective changes in color experiences provides strong support for the claim that the notion of intersubjective inversion is at least ~ o h e r e n t .The ~ conceivability of a partial intrasubjective inversion -where the appearance of things of most colors remains unchanged, but two narrow bands of colors change place in 3See my "The Inverted Spectrum", Journal of Philosophy, 79, 7, 1982, 357-81. Also my L'Lovelyand Suspect Ideas", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LIII, 4 , 1993, 905-910.

4. COLORS, SUBJECTIVE REACTIONS, A N D QUALIA

61

the subject's color quality space- should be uncontroversial. Such a change would involve changes in the subject's discriminatory and recognitional capacities that could be detected without relying on the subject's testimony. But it would seem that a series of such partial inversions could add up to a total inversion. And I think that if one allows the coherence of the supposition that there could be a total intrasubjective inversion, one will be hard pressed to find plausible reasons for denying the coherence of the supposition that there could be total intersubjective inversion. But rather than pursue this line of thought further, I want to argue more directly for the view that a satisfactory account of perceptual experience requires qualia. While, as I have argued, the existence of qualia is implied by the view that spectrum inversion is possible, the converse is not true. I myself am prepared to allow that it may be that the structure of our color quality space is asymmetrical in ways that make it impossible that there could be behaviorally undetectable spectrum inversion for creatures having such a quality space. The asymmetries I have in mind include the fact, or alleged fact, that if we consider the four "unique hues", pure red, pure yellow, pure green, and pure blue, there are fewer discriminable shades between the last two than between the first two. This has the consequence that there is no mapping that maps each unique hue onto a different unique hue, maps any two discriminable shades onto two other discriminable shades, and preserves the similarity ordering of the hues. That our color quality space is asymmetrical in this way -if it is- does not rule out the possibility of there being creatures, otherwise very much like ourselves, whose color quality space is not asymmetrical in such ways and for whom undetectable spectrum inversion is possible. But I want to focus on what it is for there to be, or not to be, such asymmetries. The existence or nonexistence of such asymmetries does not have to do with the structure of the system of colors, thought of as mind independent properties. Nothing in the physical basis of colors in objects or in the light answers to the distinction between unique and nonunique hues, and there are no relations between the physical bases of colors in objects or in the light that fix the similarity relations between colors as we perceive them. We are talking here about something "subjective" -the color "quality space", to use Quine's term, of creatures having a certain sort of perceptual system. A creature's quality space can be thought of as (among other things) imposing a similarity ordering on possible stimuli; the position of stimuli in that ordering will have to do with such things as whether they are discriminable by that creature, and, if they are, how easy or

difficult such discrimination is -also, as Quine points out, with what sorts of inductions the creature is apt to engage in. We know that in the case of color there are stimuli that are physically very different -involving combinations of wavelengths that are metamers- that occupy the same place in the similarity ordering of creatures like us. What I want to suggest is that the notion of a quale is implicit in the very notion of a quality space. Harman has always been willing to admit that our perceptual experiences have, in addition to the representational properties we are introspectively aware of, nonrepresentational properties that in some sense underlie these. These, he says, are physical (physiological) properties to which we have no introspective access. But he would surely allow that there is no a priori reason to think that whenever two visual experiences are phenomenally exactly the same, their physiological properties are the same; as a good functionalist, he presumably allows that being an experience of a certain phenomenal type is "multiply realizable" at the physical level. And assuming physicalism, having a quality space that imposes a similarity ordering on external stimuli must surely go with having a quality space that imposes a similarity ordering on the physical states of the creature that realize the perceptual experiences produced by the stimuli in the first quality space. This will group these states into equivalence classes, the members of each of which all realize experiences of a single phenomenal character, and it will order these equivalence classes in a way that corresponds to the phenomenal similarity ordering of the experiences realized by their members. Now there is a very strong sense in which we lack introspective access to individual physical states of these kinds. While there is a sense in which our perceptual system is sensitive to the presence of such a state, it is not sensitive in the same way to its absence, since it will be in the same conscious perceptual state whether it is in that state or in some other state belonging to the same equivalence class. But for each of these equivalence classes there is a higher-order state a creature is in just in case it is in some state or other belonging to that class. In the case of these higher-order states, there is sensitivity both to their presence and to their absence. Insofar as one is aware of whether two experiences are phenomenally the same or different, one is sensitive to whether they are realized by members of the same equivalence class or by members of different ones. As a first approximation, one could say that qualia are these higher-order states. Equivalently, they are functional states corresponding to these equivalence classes -functional states of which the members of the corresponding equivalence class are realizations.

4. COLORS, SUBJECTIVE REACTIONS, AND QUALIA

63

The reason this is just a first approximation is that experiences are phenomenally similar and different along a number of different dimensions. Experiences that are phenomenally different may be phenomenally exactly alike on one dimension while differing on another. So we need a more fine grained account. Not only must there be a similarity ordering on the physical states that realize experiences having complex contents; there must also be a similarity ordering on the physical properties of these states that contribute to their similarity or difference along particular dimensions. It will be equivalence classes of these, as grouped by such an ordering, that correspond to individual qualia.4 What all of this requires is something I have long insisted on that there must be functionally characterizable relations of phenomenal similarity and difference amongst experiences. Roughly, these are the functional relations between experiences that bestow the behavioral capacities, the recognitional and discriminative capacities, and the dispositions to belief, that go with having a certain quality space in Quine's sense. These similarity and difference relations are closely related to, but must be distinguished from, what might be called relations of "intentional" similarity and difference between experiences -i.e., relations that hold between experiences in virtue of similarities and differences in their representational content. The phenomenal similarities and differences significantly constrain what relations of intentional similarity and difference there can be, but they do not by themselves determine them. For the relations of intentional similarity and difference are partly determined by relations to the environment. Supposing that the neural states of a brain in a vat could duplicate mine over an interval, it would have states that stand to one another in the same relations of phenomenal similarity and difference as mine do, but it would not necessarily have states that stand in the same relations of intentional similarity and difference as mine do -if it were a brain that had always been in a vat, its experiences would not be of color in the sense in which mine are, and so could not be similar or different with respect to what colors they represent. However, given a background of externalist constraints on content, the qualitative similarities and differences can be said to determine the intentional similarities and differences; and, with the same qualification, the qualitative character of an experience can be said to determine its representational content. 4See my "The Phenomenal Character of Experience", Lect. 111 of "Introspection and 'Inner-Sense"', Philosophy and Phenomenologzcal Research, LIV, 2, 1994, 249-314.

I have said that we are "sensitive to" the presence or absence of qualia in our experience. In saying this I a m not reneging on my acceptance of Harman's phenomenological point and returning to the "mental paint" conception of qualia. In part this sensitivity is a subpersonal affair; it amounts to the fact that (with the qualification just mentioned) the qualia instantiated in our experiences, and the relations of phenomenal similarity and difference between them, determine their representational contents and the relations of intentional similarity and difference between them. What in the first instance we are perceptually aware of are properties of things in our environments, and similarities and differences with respect to these; and what in the first instance we are introspectively aware of is the representational content of our experiences, i.e., what properties, similarities and differences there appear to be in our environments. That is what I am calling Harman's phenomenological point. But on reflection we can come to realize that the intentional similarities and differences we are aware of are grounded in phenomenal similarities and differences, and that these are grounded in the nonrepresentational features of experiences I a m calling qualia. So there is a sense in which we can be aware of the latter; knowing what intentional similarities and differences there are, we can know what phenomenal similarities and differences there must be. But this is a far cry from the quasi-perceptual awareness required by the mental paint conception of qualia. I should also say that in speaking as I have done of qualia, or experiences of phenomenal types, as "multiply realizable" I am not going back on my denial, argued elsewhere, that individual qualia are functionally definable. That denial was premised on the assumption that "qualia inversion" is possible. It is compatible with this that the notion of being a quale is functionally definable, and that is enough to give sense to speaking of qualia as multiply realizable, e.g., by neurophysiological states or properties. What the denial does imply is that we cannot specify an individual quale in purely functional terms. Any such specification must involve an indexical element, or an element of reference-fixing a la Kripke. For example, a particular quale might be specified as the one that characterizes experiences of red things in creatures neurophysiologically like me. What does this view say about the nature of color? Given that I think that experiences of the same color can be qualitatively different e i t h e r in different persons, or in the same person at different t i m e s I obviously cannot accept any view that defines colors in terms of the sorts of experiences they are apt to produce. (It should be noted that one doesn't have to believe in the possibility of be-

4. COLORS, SUBJECTIVE REACTIONS, AND QUALIA

65

haviorally undetectable spectrum inversion in order to believe in this possibility. It is clear, I think, that there can be creatures who perceive at least some of the same colors as we do but have differently structured color quality spaces -i.e., differ from us in the similarity and difference relations they perceive between things of the various colors. Clearly, the experiences of at least some colors would have to be qualitatively different in these creatures than they are in us.) What ought to be uncontroversial is that color similarity and color difference are "subjective" in the sense of being perceptual system relative. And perhaps the property of being a color (or a color "realization") is likewise perceptual system relative -maybe there are reflectance properties of objects that are colors for bees and not for us, and ones that are colors for us and not for creatures of some other species. As for our concepts of particular colors, I think I must assign them a bit more complexity than Harman does. Consider again George, who perceives redness by perceiving the phenomenal property Q. George, if he is an ordinary person, won't have a name for Q -the only name he has available for describing his of-Q experiences is "red". But if he is willing to listen to reason, he can come to appreciate that his concept of Q -looking like that - and his concept being red are different. For those of us who can see, the reference of a particular color word gets fixed by reference to whatever phenomenal property is involved in perceiving things with that color. But we take the property the word refers to be one that objects have independently of whether they are being viewed, and we take ourselves to be entitled to say that other persons, and other animals, are perceiving something to be red when we are not in a position to have an informed opinion as to whether their experiences are phenomenally like the ones we have when we view red things. Harman says that objective color "is plausibly identified with a tendency to produce a certain reaction in normal perceivers, where the relevant reaction is identified in part with reference to the mechanisms of color perception". What if normal perceivers were divided equally into the likes of George, who perceives red by perceiving Q, and the likes of Mary, who perceives red by perceiving T? It seems to me that it would then be true to say that red can be "identified" both with the tendency to produce of-Q perceptions in George-like creatures, and with the tendency to produce of-T perceptions in Mary-like creatures. Maybe "identified" isn't the right word; for how can one thing be identified with two different things? But if whatever has the one tendency will necessarily have the other, perhaps "identified" can be allowed to stand. In any case, neither of

these "identifications" will be privileged. If in fact everyone is like George, or everyone is like Mary, then we can identify red with a tendency to produce a certain reaction in normal perceivers. But even still this identification will not be privileged; for it may be that red can also be identified with a tendency to produce some quite different reaction in bees. Yet another way of saying what red is will involve picking some object or kind of objects -e.g., ripe tomatoesand saying that something is red just in case it is, for creatures with our sort of quality space, indistinguishable from such objects with respect to color, where indistinguishability with respect to color is in turn explained in terms of indistinguishability simpliciter in certain circumstances, namely those in which other properties are masked. None of these ways of picking out red gives a meaning equivalence; all are "reference-fixing~"that depend on synthetic truths about the world. And I think that is all we can expect. Here I don't expect Harman to disagree. As best I can tell, such differences as there are between Harman and me about color, and about the concept of color, go back to the differences about color experience discussed earlier.5

5My thanks to Harold Langsam for comments on an earlier draft of these remarks.

PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES, 7 Perception, 1995

Is Color Psychological or Biological? Or Both? Ernest Sosa

'Objective color' means the color of an object in a broad sense of 'object'. To this definition Harman adds an assumption -the observer relativity of objective color:

ORC [We] ". . . have to explain facts about objective color in terms of facts about perceivers" (2).'

I grant both the definition and the assumption. A familiar way of implementing ORC is then considered, which I label color subjectivism: CS An object is red if and only if perception of it would give normal perceivers red sensations under standard viewing conditions. This proposal requires three explanatory notes, a s follows: El T he sense of 'red' that applies to sensations is different from the sense that applies to objects (3).2 'Parenthetical references are all to Gilbert Harman, "Explaining Objective Color in Terms of Subjective Reactions". 'Harman adopts Christopher Peacocke's device of using the term red for the sense of 'red' that applies to sensations.

E2 For the sake of argument we are assuming that there are objective criteria in terms of which we can understand normalcy and standardness (3-4).

E3 The perception of color does not normally involve sensations in any ordinary sense of the term 'sensation' (8). I also grant these three claims. Given E3, accordingly, when I speak of "color sensations" or of "visual sensations", the word 'sensation' is used in a technical sense in which it amounts to 'impression' or 'experience'. Thus Harman sets up a framework for discussion of objective color, and his discussion is at many points insightful. What follows will be restricted to his main thesis and his main line of argument, and here, fortunately for my role a s commentator, I do have some disagreement, or anyhow some questions to raise. However, there is much in the paper that deserves more discussion than I will be able to give it.

Here is a main thesis of Harman's paper: IT For something to be red is for it to have a tendency to have a certain complex effect on a normal perceiver's sensory apparatus, in ways described by the scientific theory of color (12; cf. 1 8 ) . ~ To defend IT Harman attacks CS, with an argument that runs as follows in its main lines: H1 We consider first the qualitative conception of the redness of sensations. According to this conception, ". . . the notion of a red' sensation is the notion of a sensation "like this", where "this" refers to a sensation that one is actually experiencing or imagining" (5). 3However, in the end Harman's position is not entirely clear to me. His three concluding paragraphs seem compatible with the following view: that particular objective colors are tendencies to produce visual experience presenting or representing the environment as characterized in terms of corresponding simple concepts of (objective) color. But it is not clear to me how that view is related to the earlier IT: whether it is meant to replace I T or to supplement IT. In either case, the view courts vicious circularity. See the distinction between CS2 and CS3 below.

H2 Suppose now that different people have different sorts of sensations when perceiving objects they call 'red'. In that case a ripe tomato may have the power to produce sensations "like this" in me under standard conditions, but not in other normal perceivers in standard conditions. And the same may even hold true of every other perceiver (5-6). H3 On this, qualitative, version of CS, therefore, under supposition H2 we get such absurd results as that no objects have any colors (6)! H4 To avoid such absurdity, we must either (a) give up the qualitative version of CS, or else (b) rule out the possibility presented by supposition H2 (6). H5 Opting for H4a, Harman considers an alternative, "functional" conception of color sensations: ". .. a red' sensation would be a sensation that is typically caused by the perception of red things and that typically leads to the belief that one is perceiving something red" (7). H6 But when CS is combined with this functional conception of color sensations, it ". . . reduces to the claim that red objects are those that produce the sort of sensation that red objects produce" (8). And this is unacceptably circular and empty. H7 Harman next considers a second functional conception of color impressions) but dismisses it for beL L ~ e n ~ a t i (experiences, on~" ing, again, unacceptably circular (10-12). H8 Thus we reach eventually proposal IT (12). However, I T seems inappropriate as a response to the sorts of difficulties raised for CS. Just as it seemed possible that people have qualitatively different sensations when perceiving ripe tomatoes, so it seems also possible that they have different complex effects on their visual sensory mechanisms. In such a possible situation we would again have the absurdity that no objects have any colors! So, to avoid such absurdity, we must either give up the likes of IT, or else rule out the possibility that the effects on our visual mechanisms could differ as just supposed above. Presumably, Harman would now take the latter option. He would perhaps say that we have a right to assume that the biological (sensory mechanism) effects of perceiving ripe tomatoes (in standard conditions by normal perceivers) are relevantly uniform. That is to

say, he would hold that the effect on people's sensory mechanisms determinative of the redness of a ripe tomato is an effect that the ripe tomato would have uniformly on everyone normal when in standard conditions. However, the advocate of CS can now plausibly protest: hasn't he a similar right to assume that the psychological (qualitative) effects of perceiving ripe tomatoes (in standard conditions by normal perceivers) are also relevantly uniform? But if so, then the reasoning above can be blocked at step H5: at that stage one could simply opt for H4b rather than H4a. Harman does sketch an argument against option H4b. That option amounts, again, to ruling out the possibility, presented by H2, that different otherwise normal people have relevantly different sorts of sensations when they perceive ripe tomatoes in standard conditions. "This possibility may seem quite likely", we are told ". . . if the relevant aspect of a sensation is its intrinsic qualitative character, .. . if the intrinsic qualitative character of a sensation depends on the exact nature of the underlying physical events in the brain giving rise to the sensation, and . . . if there are differences in these underlying physical events from one brain to the next" (5). That seems the only argument offered in favor of opting for H4a, rather than H4b, at stage H5. Two questions arise about the argument, one general and one specific to Harman's overall project. First, suppose that indeed there are differences in the brain events that give rise to impressions with qualitative character in different people viewing ripe tomatoes. It does not follow that these differences make the brain events "relevantly different", i.e., different in such a way that the resulting impresssions will themselves have relevantly different qualitative character. Secondly, to the extent that there are such differences in the brain events and to the extent that these differences do seem "relevant", this would militate equally against I T as against CS. After all, I T has to postulate brain effects that are relevantly similar in normal perceivers who see ripe tomatoes in standard conditions.

There is a further charge of unfair treatment also available to the color subjectivist. For the attack on color subjectivism is based on the assumption that CS is a certain sort of analysis or definition of objective color terms. This assumption is crucial, for example, to stages H6 and H7 above. But the proposed I T is no such analysis or definition but only a n "identification" of objective color with a

tendency to produce certain biological effects in our sensory mechanisms. What has not been ruled out, then, is the similar "identification" of objective color with a tendency to produce certain psychological effects on the quality of our sensory experience. The attack on CS depends on viewing it as a certain sort of conceptual or meaning analysis. This may be seen, for example, in the following passages: The suggested analysis of objective color in terms of sensations implies that, if there are relevant differences in people's color sensations, then different people have different concepts of the colors of objects and do not mean the same thing by their color terms (5; my emphases). [Your].. . concept of a red object cannot be analyzed into your concept of a red' sensation, meaning the specific quality that your perceptual experience has in order to represent objective redness, because you have no such concept of a red' sensation. You have no idea what specific quality of your perceptual experience is used to represent objective redness (8). Compare with this last passage the following corresponding objection to IT: Your concept of a red object cannot be analyzed into your concept of a certain sort of complex effect on normal perceivers' sensory mechanisms. You have no idea what such complex effect is caused in normal perceivers by viewing red objects in standard conditions. Here no doubt IT is to be defended by stressing that it is no meaning or conceptual analysis. I t is rather a n account of the constitution of objective color properties such as the redness of a tomato. It tells us what such properties are in reality, and does not try to analyze our concepts of such properties, nor the meanings of our terms for such properties. But if the color subjectivist's CS is in competition with IT, then it should be viewed as a competing identification of such properties. How would CS fare under such an interpretation? First of all we could weaken CS to the following (where 'nsc-perceivers' abbreviates 'normal perceivers under standard conditions'):

CS1 For something t o be red is for it to have a tendency to produce a distinctive sort of qualitatively defined sensation (impression, experience) in nsc-perceivers. Of course this does not specify what the relevant quality is but neither does IT specify the relevant complex effect on one's sensory apparatus. We can however do a little better as follows:

CS2 For an object to be red is for it to give nsc-perceivers the qualitative sort of sensation distinctively produced in nsc-perceivers by red objects. This might be rejected as "unacceptably circular and empty", as at H6 above. However, CS2 has two very different readings: one does invite the objection of empty circularity; but the other seems safe from that objection. On that alternative reading CS2 is better formulated as follows: CS3 Consider the sort of sensation distinctively produced in actual nsc-perceivers by red objects. For an object to be red is for perception of it to give nsc-perceivers a sensation of that sort. With CS3 we first pick out a certain sort of sensation: sensation produced by red objects in nsc-perceivers. And we then go on to identzfy what it is to be objectively red as being a producer of that sort of sensation. Note that CS3 therefore has a certain advantage over IT. For CS3 at least is able to pick out the sort of effect it claims to constitute objective redness, at least in part. I T does not get that far. Of course a defender of I T could try for an improved I T as follows: IT1 Consider the sort of effect distinctively produced by red objects in the sensory apparatus of nsc-perceivers. For an object to be red is for perception of it to give nsc-perceivers an effect of that sort. Presumably Harman would reject CS3, arguing that there is no such thing as the intrinsic qualitative sort of any sensation. The qualities we are "aware" of in our visual experience are said to be qualities that our experience represents and not qualities that our experience exemplifies. But this is of doubtful relevance, since CS3 does not require us to be aware of the relevant qualities of our experience.4 If not thus, however, then how might one argue against special qualities 4Except perhaps (perhaps!) in some innocuous sense according to which simply by virtue of our experience's exemplifying or encompassing a quality, that quality thereby qualifies or constitutes our experiential "awareness", and in a corresponding sense we are "aware" of it. If there is such a sense, then of course we are after all aware of such a quality whenever our experience exemplifies or encompasses it. Someone might also conceivably use 'awareness' in such a way that whenever anyone is the subject of any thinking, desiring, sensing, and so on --of any psychological Xing of any sort- then by just having the thought, desire, sensation, or whatever, he is thereby "aware" of it. This might derive from the thought that just as one jumps jumps and smiles smiles, so one experi-

exemplified by or constitutive of our experience, ones that might be of use in a dispositional analysis of objective colors? It might be argued that the burden rests on the proponent of such qualities. This seems especially reasonable if we grant that we are not necessarily aware of such qualities through introspection. But, actually, what has been made plausible is only that we are not aware of such qualities directly, that we do not introspect them as such. Suppose now that our experience is constituted by some intrinsic ontological constitution -and that there are some distinctive qualities, of whatever sort, that are respectively constitutive of our experiences of various sorts. In that case, it would seem that when we are aware that we are having visual experience of something red (as if we saw a ripe tomato), we are in some sense indirectly aware of a sort of experience we are having: it is, say, experience distinctive of seeing something red. Of course we can sometimes be more sure, introspectively, that we are having such experience than that we are then seeing something objectively red. But we are sure of it under its indirect characterization and perhaps not directly; perhaps in such knowledge we do not characterize the experience as it is intrinsically, in itself. Still, for such distinctive experience to be allowable in a proposed analysis of objective color, it may be enough that we have some reason to reach certain conclusions about it, however we characterize it, whether indirectly or directly.If we may conclude that it does exist, that it comes in various sorts, and that the different sorts correlate with corresponding objective colors, perhaps that will suffice. One argument that there is such experience -whatever may be its intrinsic ontological constitution- is now that we are able to distinguish varieties of it, and that we are able to tell that a certain sort, as opposed to others, is present, when it is present, even without rendering a judgment as to the objective origins of that experience on that occasion. Indeed, such accessibility to introspection might even be made a hallmark of "experience" without requiring that the accessibility of the item in question to such introspection must be in terms of the properties that are ontologically constitutive of it. Under such a conception, a quality might qualify as both experiential ences experiences. And since experiencing may reasonably be considered a form of awareness, it follows that whenever one undergoes an experience, one thereby "experiences" it and is hence "aware" of it. And if the experience is constituted by certain sensory properties or ways of sensing that one exemplifies, then it might be argued that in being aware of the experience one is thereby aware of its constitutive properties. (I am not at all sure that there are actually in use any such senses as those required by the reasoning just displayed, but if there are such senses, then we need to put them aside as just indicated.)

and physical: the intrinsic ontological constitution of a distinctive sort of experience might turn out to be just physical, though also experiential. For it might be experiential just in virtue of being accessible to introspection when present, accessible at least indirectly, as being an experience as if there is something red before one, or the like. Which is more plausible: (a) to suppose that there is an experientially distinctive sort of visual experience caused in nsc-perceivers by the likes of ripe tomatoes, or (b) to suppose that there is a distinctive effect caused in the sensory apparatus of nsc-perceivers by the likes of ripe tomatoes? Color subjectivism in the form of CS3 may well opt for (a), while the identity theory in the form of IT1 may instead choose (b). I end with an irenic conclusion: In finding (a) more plausible one need not make any commitment on the nature or physical basis of color sensations (or impressions or experiences), nor on what constitutes or physically underlies the experiential character of such sensations. So it might even be that CS3 is true because IT1 is true.5

5My comments here are in line with my "Perception and Reality", in Information, Semantics, and Epistemology, edited by E. Villanueva (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), proceedings of the first SOFIA meeting, held in Tepoztlan, MCxico, in 1988.

PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES,7 Perception, 1995

Qualia and Color Concepts Gilbert Harman

1 Qualia as Mental Paint Can we become directly or introspectively (as opposed t o inferentially) aware of those aspects of perceptual experience -the mental paint, etc.- that serve to represent what we perceive? I say we cannot. Obviously we can become directly aware of intentional of certain intentional or representational features of our experiences, e.g. that a given experience is a visual experience of a red tomato. Ned Block appears to believe that I deny this. He says, "In Harman's lingo, a representational feature of experience is a feature of what is represented, not what is doing the represent.ingV. So let me insist that by "a representational feature of experience" I mean a feature of experience. My point was that we can be aware of such features of experience without being aware of the "mental paint" by virtue of which the experience represents what it represents. Block says that there is a "prior question", namely, whether there is such a thing as mental paint. I take it he means the question whether perception involves mental representations, the answer distinguishing a certain approach to cognitive science from a certain kind of connectionism, on the one hand, and from behaviorism, on the other hand. Of course, this is a "prior" question only for someone who holds, as Block does, that we can directly introspect men-

tal paint. The view that we cannot become introspectively aware of mental paint is compatible with the claim that there is no such thing as mental paint. Much of Block's comments are concerned to argue against what he calls "representationalism", the view that everything about what it is like to have a given experience is determined by the content of the experience, how it represents the world to be. Block claims that I am committed to representationalism in this sense, but he does not say why, and I do not think I am. I am certainly inclined to think that there can be different attitudes with the same content and that what it is like to be in one of these attitudes need not be the same as what it is like to be in another. For example, what it is like to believe that P is not the same as what it is like to desire that P. Similarly, what it is like to see something as ahead and to the right is not normally the same as what it is like to hear something as ahead and to the right. (There may be exceptions. In dim light, one may have the impression that one sees an obstacle ahead and to the right, whereas in fact one has detected it by echolocation.) To feel a pain in one's foot may be a t least in part to perceive a certain sort of event in one's foot. A feeling of pain may also involve a more or less intense desire to escape the cause of the relevant event. Presumably a desire with that content is different from a belief or other attitude with that content. Similarly for Block's orgasm example. An organism is a bodily event of a certain sort, normally, but not always noticed by the person having the orgasm. The experience of orgasm involves a perception of the relevant bodily events and usually includes other things as well, including intense feelings of desire and enjoyment. In any event, let us return to the issue whether we can become directly or introspectively (as opposed to inferentially) aware of those aspects of perceptual experience -the mental paint, etc.- that serve to represent what we perceive. This issue is distinct from the issue of representationalism. Block says, "When I a m looking a t a tomato and attending t o the color of the tomato, I am not attending to the visual sensation, but I believe that we can attend to the visual sensation just as Bach-yRita's subjects could attend to their tactual sensations". The cases are so obviously different, that I have no idea what Block has in mind here. It is certainly not true that, on reflection, we are aware of sensations in our eyes in the way that Bach-y-Rita's subjects were aware, on reflection, of sensations in the skin on their backs, sensations that serve to represent the external objects perceived.

6 . QUALIA A N D COLOR CONCEPTS

77

Block says that phosphene experiences are a challenge to the idea that we cannot attend to visual paint. I fail to see the challenge. What I experience are bright flashing lights spread out before me at an indeterminate distance, the experience being similar to the very end of a fireworks show and moments a t certain rock concerts. It's certainly true that I have no inclination t o believe that these experiences are veridical, but that is irrelevant, since the objects of visual perception may be merely intentional objects. Block suggests that such experiences could not be veridical. I a m not sure why he says that, nor why he thinks it is relevant. It is well known one's visual system sometimes presents one with "impossible objects", (Gregory, 1987) just as one can believe propositions that cannot possibly be true.

2 Inverted Earth I grant the intuitive force of Block's inverted earth example, just as I grant the intuitive force of other inverted spectrum examples. Such examples suggest that there is a real question whether the way colors look the same to two otherwise normal color perceivers. This leaves the apparently insoluble problem of providing a satisfactory account of the relevant respects of sameness. So, it is possible t o doubt whether there is a real question of the suggested sort. Block claims that the burden of proof rests on someone who denies that this is a real question. Someone else might say that the burden of proof lies on someone who thinks that adequate sense can be made of the question. I say that "the burden of proof" is a legal notion, not a philosophical notion. In any event, let me turn now to Shoemaker and Sosa's commentaries.

3 Qualia as Bases of Experiences of Phenomenal Properties Sydney Shoemaker defines a "phenomenal property" as follows:

(P) a phenomenal property is a property an object has in virtue of actually causing, in a certain sort of way (the way involved in normal cases of vision), an experience having a certain qualitative character, i.e., having a certain quale.

He says that this definition avoids the sort of circularity involved in a definition like the following:

(P*) a phenomenal property is a property an object has in virtue of actually causing, in a certain sort of way (the way involved in normal cases of vision), an experience that represents something as having that phenomenal property. Notice that circularity would not be avoided if having a certain quale were defined as follows: (Q) for an experience to have a certain qualitative character or quale is for the experience to represent something has having the corresponding phenomenal property. But Shoemaker does not offer any such definition as (Q). Later Shoemaker says that "the only way of picking.. . out" qualia in this sense is "by means of such descriptions as 'the nonrepresentational property that underlies my experience of red things"'. I reply that there isn't just one such nonrepresentational property; there are infinitely many! Some of these properties underlie the experiences of all other normal perceivers of red things; others underlie only a given person's perceptions of red things. Shoemaker's "only" method for picking out qualia simply does not pick out anything. (I am about to raise a similar objection to Sosa.) Shoemaker could pick out the qualia if he were to add, for example, that a certain qualitative character not only underlies my experience of red things but also underlies the experience of anyone else who perceives something in the way that I perceive red things, that is, anyone who perceives something as having the phenomenal character that I perceive red things as having. But that amounts to accepting (Q) and makes (P) circular.

4

Explaining Color in Terms of Qualities of Experience

Consider (CS) An object is red' if and only if perception of it would give normal perceivers red sensations under standard viewing conditions. What Ernest Sosa calls the "qualitative" version of (CS) takes the notion of a red' sensation to be the notion of a sensation "like this",

6 . QUALIA A N D COLORCONCEPTS

79

where "this" refers to a sensation that one is actually experiencing or imagining. Sosa says that I reject this qualitative version of (CS) on the grounds (from Block, 1990) that it, together with certain other assumptions, leads to such absurd results as that people mean different things by color words and that no objects have any colors. Sosa replies it would be better to reject one of the other assumptions than to reject the qualitative understanding of (CS). I reply instead that the notion of a sensation "like this" is indeterminate, since there are infinitely many ways in which one sensation can be like another (see the first two paragraphs of section 3 in my original paper). The qualitative version of CS needs to be supplemented with an account of the respects in which sensations have to be like each other. (That is why I go on to discuss functionalism and biological criteria of the relevant sort of sameness: color' sensations are the same if and only if they are functionally the same in certain respects, or if and only if they result from the biological mechanisms that are the same in certain indicated respects.) Sosa ultimately puts forward the following thesis: (CS3) Consider the sort of sensation distinctively produced in actual nsc-perceivers by red objects. For an object to be red is for perception of it to give nsc-perceivers a sensation of that sort (where "nsc perceivers" are "normal perceivers under standard conditions"). As his discussion indicates, the relevant "sort of sensation" is not (on pain of circularity) to be defined as a sensation that is produced in actual nsc-perceivers by red objects. As I understand (CS3), it presupposes a prior sorting of sensations and also presupposes that exactly one of the relevant sorts of sensation is such that all sensations produced in actual nsc-perceivers by red objects are of that sort and no sensations produced in actual nsc-perceivers by objects that are not red are of that sort. I object that Sosa has not indicated what this prior sorting might be. In particular, I do not see how he might give a noncircular account of the relevant interpersonal similarities by virtue of which different people's sensations are of the same relevant sort for the purpose of (CS3). This is the same as my objection to Shoemaker, above.

Gregory, R.L. (1987). Illusions. In Gregory, R.L., ed., The Oxford Companion to the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 337-43.

PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES, 7 Perception, 1995

Layered Perceptual Represent at ion William G. Lycan

My purpose in this paper is to commit a fallacy. -Or rather, to continue defending a position of mine that has been rather grandly labelled a fallacy, by Ned Block (1990, p. 55), who calls it "the fallacy of intentionalizing qualia". But more on the labelling business very shortly. 1. My present effort is part of a larger project: to secure what I call the Hegemony of Representation. That thesis is a weak version of Brentano's doctrine that the mental and the intentional are one and the same: I hold that the mind has no special properties that are not exhausted by its representational properties (together with its underlying constitutive functional properties). It would follow that once representation is eventually understood, then not only "qualia", but the subjectivity of the mental, "what it's like", consciousness in any of that term's eleven or twelve dzflerent senses, and every other aspect of the mental, will be explicable in terms of representation (and the underlying functionally organized neurophysiology), without the positing of any further ingredient not already well understood from the naturalistic point of view.' 'I began this project with respect t o conscious awareness, subjectivity and qualia respectively in Chs. 6, 7 and 8 of Lycan (1987). Parts of it have also been pursued by Harman (1990), Shoemaker (1994), and Tye (1994).

My particular concern here is with qualia a n d , or but, in a n admirably specific sense of that much-abused term: By a "quale" I shall start by meaning roughly what C.I. Lewis (1929) originally did: A quale is the introspectible monadic qualitative property of a phenomenal individual, such as the color of a Russellian sense-datum. For example, if you are visually healthy and looking a t a ripe strawberry in good light, the strawberry will look red to you, and if you introspect and focus your attention on the corresponding subregion of your visual field, you will see that subregion as an individual red patch having a slightly bulgy heart shape. The redness of the phenomenal patch is the quale of the visual sensation that contains or incorporates it.2 One registers such a quale whenever one perceives a colored object as such. 2. Qualia in this comparatively clear sense pose a nasty problem for materialist theories of mind. There is (one hopes) nothing strawberry-red in one's brain, but as everyone knows, one may experience a strawberry-red quale even when there is nothing physically that color in one's environment either, as when one is hallucinating or just after-imaging. So the redness of the latter quale needs explaining, and philosophers have been hard put to explain it in materialistic terms. N.b., not even the most carefree Cartesian Dualist denies that the unveridical occurrence of redness can be explained psychophysically; the problem is rather to account for the redness as a firstorder property. Of what, exactly, is the redness a property? Not of anything physical in the brain, nor (by hypothesis) of anything physical in the neighborhood. So it seems the red patch is a nonphysical thing. In response to this puzzle or to others like it, many philosophers3 have seen fit to deny that there are qualia of this sort. There is in the situation no individual thing that is red, they say; rather, the afflicted subject senses redly, and that manner of sensing can be explicated without reference to any sort of object so weird as a Russellian sense-datum. But for reasons I have set out elsewhere14 I think this "adverbial" maneuver is doomed to failure; there is no getting around the referential character of talk about apparent phenomenal individuals. If you doubt me p e r h a p s because you are 2 0 n e need not endorse Russellian sense-datum metaphysics or epistemology in order t o use t h e term "quale" in this way; just think of t h e color t h a t suffuses a particular subregion of your visual field a t such-and-such a time. 3Notably Chisholm (1957), Sellars (1968), and Smart (1959). 4 ~ y c a n(1987), pp. 85-88. For somewhat different objections, see Jackson (1977) and Butchvarov (1980).

already a satisfied a d v e r b i a l i s t then (a) just take my word for it, or at least (b) please grant me the assumption for the sake of argument, or, best of all, (c) as soon as we are through here, go read my book in a spirit of uncritical awe.5 But this is worse and worse: I am insisting that there is a red individual, specifically a red patch, present to one's consciousness even when nothing physical inside or outside one's brain is red. It sounds as though we have abandoned materialism already. Happily, there is an escape hatch: In the mediaeval tradition revived thirty years ago by Elizabeth Anscombe ( 1 9 6 5 ) , ~we can treat phenomenal individuals as intentional inexistents. Suppose I am having a strawberry-red after-image. Then there is a red patch in my visual field. Do I conclude that I am confronted by something that is actually red? I do not. It merely seems to me that there is a red individual before me; it is in my mind visually as if a red object were before me. And that impression of mine is, in actual fact, false; I am in the grip of optical illusion, even though I am not deluded, taken in. (The illusion can be explained by psychophysiology, for my visual analyzers are functioning in some of the same ways they do when I really do perceive a red physical object.) The red object is a representatum, and "exists" only as an object of thought.7 So we may extend the original C.I. Lewis sense of "quale" analogically: A quale is, not the introspectible monadic qualitative property of an actual phenomenal individual (there being no such things), but that of what seems to be a phenomenal individual and is referred to, individuated and counted as such. Call this the "loose Lewisian" sense. 5lhave been told by people I deeply respect t h a t t h e book is both more pleasant and more invigorating t o read if one is reading a copy t h a t one has bought and paid for (particularly a hardback copy). 'See also Hintikka (1969), Thomason (1973), Adams (1975), Kraut (1982), and Lewis (1983). 7 ~ my n view, t h e best going semantics for intentional inexistence is a possibleworlds semantics: T h e apparent mental references t o phenomenal individuals are really t o objects existing in or "at" alternative worlds. I maintain t h a t t h e latter otherworldly objects are physical a t their containing worlds, so we need not worry anywhere about nonphysical phenomenal individuals. (Granted, we need t o explain t h e physical natures of their qualitative properties in their own containing worlds. Lycan (1987, pp. 88-93) makes a s t a b a t t h a t . ) B u t it is important t o see t h a t t h e possible-worlds metaphysics is inessential t o my view of phenomenal individuals as intentional inexistents. I happen t o think t h a t intentional inexistents are denizens of other possible worlds, but if you have a different metaphysic of intentional inexistents, apply it and d o not waste paper criticizing mine. (Have a nice day.)

The view that qualia such as phenomenal color are the intentional objects of sensory experiences is a n instance of my general doctrine of the Hegemony of Representation, specifically applied to qualia. It is also precisely Block's "fallacy of intentionalizing qualia", mentioned in my opening paragraph: as he characterizes it, "the supposition that experiential contents that can be expressed in public language such as looking red are qualitative contents" (p. 55). Peacocke (1983, pp. 8-10) calls it the "extreme perceptual theory" of sensory experience. Now, in my view, Block has committed the LLfallacyfallacy", that of imputing fallaciousness to a position with which one disagrees but without doing anything to show that that position rests on any error of reasoning (cf. "the naturalistic fallacy", et al.). 3. The position does face a number of objections. Sydney Shoemaker (1981, 1990), Christopher Peacocke (1983) and Block offer arguments designed precisely to enforce a distinction between an experience's intentional content and its more specifically and distinctively "qualitative" content or aspect. (Peacocke's terms are "representational" and "sensational". Such dichotomies go back a t least to Chisholm's (1957) distinction between "comparative" and "noncomparative" senses of "appears".) T h e idea is that while two people's visual experiences may be alike in intentional content -e.g., the two people are both "sensing redly", perceptually-believing that there is something red before them, disposed to shout "Red!", and even visually appeared to as by a red object- the same two experiences may differ in their intrinsic qualitative or "sensational" contents. Shoemaker and Block concentrate on color, and offer inversion hypotheses: one of the foregoing two subjects may be acquainted with a green quale rather than a red one. Thus visual experiences have distinctive intrinsic color contents that do outrun those experiences' merely intentional color contents. Both Shoemaker and Block speak of those intrinsic contents as "qualia". Thus the already abused term "quale" has grown yet another ambiguity.$ One can believe in qualia, as I do -in introspectible '1ts most noticeable ambiguity up tiil t h a t point had been t h a t between its very strict and commissive Lewisian sense, which I defined in section 1, and a more general and more common use, meaning whatever it is about experience t h a t constitutes phenomenal character in any sense, often run together with diffuse notions of "consciousness", "subjectivity" and t h e like. (Considerable harm has been done in t h e philosophy of mind by the use of terms such as "qualia" or (especially) "consciousness" in t h a t diffuse sense.) In section 2 I introduced a third, but fairly precise sense, the "loose Lewisian", which differs only in dispensing with actual phenonemal individuals. Block's use is a fourth.

first-order color properties given phenomenally in experience- while insisting that qualia are merely intentional aspects of sensation, r e p resented properties, and rejecting the possibility of the relevant inverted spectrum;g or one can insist that there are not merely qualia in the sense of intentional color contents, but also "intrinsic" qualitative contents that outrun the intentional. We might call the latter "Q-ualia" with a capital and boldface "Q". It is very important to keep the distinction in mind, and also not to let Shoemaker and Block kidnap Lewis' term and keep it for themselves. 4. But let us confront Block's particularly ingenious inversion scenario. What is distinctive about it is that what inverts is not its victim's inner experience, but the real physical colors in the victim's environment .lo Here is Block's argument against intentionalizing qualia. He posits an "Inverted Earth", a planet exactly like Earth except that its real physical colors are (somehow) inverted with respect to ours. The Twin Earthlings' speech sounds just like English, of course, but their intentional contents in regard to color are inverted relative to ours: When they say "red", they mean green, if it is green Twin objects that correspond to red Earthly objects under the inversion in question, and green things look green to them even though they call those things "red". (Let us suppose there is no split internal to their own population.)

he qualification "the relevant" is massively important here. There is a double relativity t o t h e notion of "inverted spectrum", and it has been widely missed and/or exploited in the literature. We must always ask, what is inverted with respect to what? T h e second parameter just expressed has been more salient, though not salient enough: Many people grant t h e possibility of spectrum inversion with respect to (just) behavioral dispositions or input-utput relations; less obvious is t h e possibility of inversion relative t o behavioral dispositions and underlying functional profile; still less obvious and granted by hardly anyone is t h e possibility of inversion relative t o one's entire molecular constitution. If we are Functionalists, our concern will be t h e second of those three relativized hypotheses, and if we are Functionalists, we will not grant t h e possibility of inversion with respect t o global functional state. One must be very careful, as many writers are not, t o distinguish spectrum inverted merely with respect t o 1-0 relations from t h e much more contentious and usually question-begging inversion with respect t o global functional state. The first parameter of the double relativity can be important too: W h a t is getting inverted? Notably, Shoemaker and Block each owe us an answer t o that, when they posit inversions with respect t o global functional state plus intentional color content, and neither has (in print) supplied a satisfactory answer. "Block claims t o avoid the question of inverted spectrum's metaphysical possibility -successfully, since he does not invert anyone's internal spectrum. But that does nothing to show that his own example is metaphysically possible.

Now, a n Earthling victim is chosen by the customary mad scientists, knocked out, fitted with color inverting lenses, transported to Inverted Earth, and repainted to match that planet's human skin and hair coloring. (Block calls the victim "you".) When you wake up, you experience nothing abnormal, because the inverting lenses cancel out the new planet's color inversion. Your language remains as always, so the natives do not notice anything either. But note that you are now misperceiving; you see green objects as red. You speak falsely, and have false intentional contents. Yet, Block argues, this would change over time: At first, when you look at the sky, thinking the thought that you would express as 'It is as blue as ever', you are expressing the same thought that you would have been expressing yesterday at home, only today you are wrong. . . .Nonetheless, according to me, after enough time has passed on Inverted Earth, your embedding in the physical and linguistic environment of Inverted Earth would dominate, and so your intentional contents would shift so as to be the same as those of the natives. . . .If you were kidnapped at age 15, by the time 50 years have passed, you use 'red' to mean green, just as the natives do. Once your intentional contents have inverted, so do your functional states. The state that is now normally caused by blue things is the same state that earlier was normally caused by red things. So once 50 years have passed, you and your earlier stage at home would exemplify what I want, namely a case of functional and intentional inversion together with the same qualitative contents t h e converse of the [usual] inverted spectrum case. This is enough to refute the functionalist theory of qualitative content and at the same time to establish the intentional/qualitative distinction. [p. 641

5. I shall make two replies to all this. (I have a third as well, but it is dialectically thorny and would take too long to expound here." The first reply is only superficial: Block assumes a nai've psychosemantics for intentional states, done in terms of "normal causes" or causal "grounding" or both, where these notions are understood more or less statistically. That is, he assumes that when for a given type of state, a new kind of cause comes to predominate over the state's original normal cause, the state's intentional content actually changes and the state then refers to the new kind of cause. I reject that psychosemantics. Like Ruth Millikan, I think of "normal cause" not statistically but teleologically, and I tend to understand teleology in terms of selection history. (A state may have its " S e e Ch. 6 of Lycan (in press).

teleologically normal cause but rarely -possibly never, if there is sufficient mismatch between the state's evolutionary origin and its subject's present environment.) Thus, for me, the Inverted Earth transportation victim's intentional states would not change their intentional contents even if that person stayed on Inverted Earth for a very long time and the states ceased having their evolutionarily normal causes altogether. But the nai've psychosemantics is probably inessential to Block's strategy. It would not take much work to construct a variant Inverted-Earth case that could be applied mutatis mutandis against my etiological psychosemantics. Here is my reason for saying that: What I think is really at stake here is a general Putnamian "narrow1,-us.-"wide" issue. ("Narrow" properties supervene on the subject's total molecular state, while "wide" properties can vary despite molecule-for-molecule sameness.) And biosemantics makes intentional content as "wide" as does the naive psychosemantics. As I interpret Block's real objection to intentionalizing qualia, it is that intentional contents are wide while qualia are narrow. So let us move right on. 6. Block's Q-ualia are very like the "narrow content" allegedly possessed by propositional attitudes. (He almost draws the analogy himself, on p. 69.) Viz.: they are like the undisputed intentional contents except that they supervene on molecular constitution and so do not shift when the subject's environment is hypothetically or actually rearranged. Generically, my second objection is that any such notion is dubious. "Narrow content" for propositional attitudes is notoriously disputed, often on the grounds that "narrow 'content' isn't content". By analogy, we should suspect any parallel notion of qualitative character, especially when the suspicion is backed by my general argument against Q-ualia (given in the previous section of this paper). But more specifically, Block's argument depends on the assumption, explicitly admitted by him on p. 66, that qualia supervene on molecular constitution. At least, I think this supervenience assumption is doing some heavy work in shoring up the Inverted Earth example; viz., it nails down Block's claim that despite radical variations in the subject's environment or history or whatever, the subject's qualitative experience remains the same so long as there has been no intrinsic physical change in the subject herlhimself. Here the dialectic gets slightly tricky: On my own view, qualia (first-order monadic properties of ostensible phenomenal individuals) do not supervene on molecular constitution because they are intentional contents. Block believes there to be Q-ualia that out-

run intentional contents, and he chooses to add that those Q-ualia supervene on molecular constitution. (Note that the latter claim is additional, even though it figures in motivating the former.) So the question between us is that of whether there are any Q-ualia, not that of whether qualia in my intentional sense supervene on molecular constitution. Block seems to agree that there are nonsuperveliient qualia in the sense of intentional contents, so we may distinguish "intentional qualia" from Q-ualia. And I see no reason to grant that there are Q-ualia at all, much less supervenient Q-ualia. I know of nothing that particularly warrants the supervenience claim, and it begs the question against the view that all qualia are intentional qualia: If one is already assuming that qualia are nonintentional, "intrinsic" features of sensation, then one will find the supervenience claim plausible; not otherwise.12 Nonetheless, n.b., we should grant the plausibility of the supervenience claim for the case of bodily sensations such as pain. For even if such sensations are intentional (as I believe they are (Armstrong (1962, 1968); Pitcher (1970)), their intentional objects are parts of the subject's own body, and so molecular duplicates can be supposed to share them. I suspect that this is a major source of the notion that qualia generally are supervenient, for I conjecture that philosophers extrapolate from the supervenience of bodily-sensory qualia to that of colors and other world-perceptual qualia; it is tempting to assimilate the "feels" of perceptual states to those of sensory states, so far as we consider perceptual states to have feels. But the "feel" terminology suits perceptual states less well than it does bodily-sensory states. Bodily sensations are themselves conceived as feelings, while perceptual states are not; as Harman (1990) observes, we norrnally "see right through" perceptual states to external objects and do not even notice that we are in perceptual states.13 Thus, it is fallacious to infer that since bodily qualia supervene on molecular constitution, perceptual qualia do also. I turn to Peacocke. '2Actually I have a global objection t o Shoemaker's and Block's idea as described here, b u t it is dialectically tedious; see Ch. 6 of Lycan (in press). 13 "When Eloise sees a tree before her, t h e colors she experiences are all experienced as features of t h e tree and its surroundings. None of them are [sic] experienced as intrinsic features of her experience. And t h a t is t r u e of you t o o . . . . Look a t a tree and t r y t o turn your attention t o intrinsic features of your visual experience. I predict you will find t h a t t h e only features there t o turn your attention t o will b e features of the presented tree, including relational features of the tree 'fro111 here"'. [p. 391

7. Peacocke offers three arguments in favor of Q-ualia, or as he calls them, nonrepresentational sensational properties. As he says, the Hegemony of Representation or "extreme perceptual theory" implies the "Adequacy Thesis (AT)": "that a complete intrinsic characterization of a n experience can be given by ernbedding within an operator like 'it visually appears to the subject t h a t . . . ' some complex condition concerning physical objects", or alternatively, that **thereare [no] intrinsic features of visual experience which are not captured by representational content". His arguments are by counterexample to the AT. Actually I shall address only the first and the third, for the second, though offered as an elaboration of the first, admits of a special and unrelated reply (see fn 22 below). Here is the first alleged counterexample. (1) Suppose you are standing on a road which stretches from you to the horizon. There are two trees at the roadside, one a hundred yards from you, the other two hundred. Your experience represents these objects as being of the same physical height and other dimensions; that is, taking your experience at face value you would judge that the trees are roughly the same physical size. . . . Yet there is also some sense in which the nearest tree occupies more of your visual field than the more distant tree. This is as much a feature of your experience itself as is representing the trees as being of the same height. The experience can possess this feature without your having any concept of the feature or of the visual field: you simply enjoy an experience which has the feature. (p. 12) This is a striking phenomenon and the argument is impressive. How to respond?14 I think that (like Block), Peacocke here relies on an assumption that can fruitfully be challenged. He supposes that what a visual experience represents is an array of everyday states of affairs involving ordinary physical objects and their standard properties (the road, the trees, the objective sizes of the trees and their relative positions, etc., etc.). That supposition itself is not what I wish to contest, since of course the visual experience in question does represent those things. (Or I should say, I agree with Peacocke and Block that it does. Russell would not have agreed that the components of a visual experience represent anything, and possibly not even that the experience itself does.) What Peacocke further seems to assume, and what I do dispute, is that those everyday environmental things are all that is represented in vision. I4Michael Tye (1992, p. 173) has made one doughty response, but I do not find it entirely convincing.

More specifically and at the same time more generally, I want to suggest that a perceptual experience has more than one layer of intentional objects. Indeed a single apparent color patch in one's visual field, does not represent only one kind of external object, but at least two at the same time. This will take a bit of getting used to. Let me introduce the idea by switching to a different sense modality, that of smell. (In another work (Lycan (1989)) I have argued that the olfactory perspective is extremely useful in correcting misapprehensions that arise from overattention to vision, since vision is a radically atypical and unrepresentative sense modality.) In the same essay I argued -what I grant is not obvious- that olfactory sensations represent. To wit, I claim that a smell actually has semantical properties: reference, a truth- and/or satisfaction-condition. A smell be treated formally, a' la Hintikka, as a function from possible worlds to sets. And it can be given a linguistic-functional "dot" characterization, a' la Sellars. A smell can be incorrect, a mzsrepresentation. If these perhaps surprising things are true, then surely smells are indeed representations. 8. And I believe they are true. It may seem that, phenomenally speaking, a smell is just a modification of our consciousness, a qualitative condition or quale or Q-uale in us, lingering uselessly in the mind without representing anything. Disinclination to think of smells as representations increases when we ask what they might be representations of. One might first think that one smell represents natural gas, while another represents roses. The latter is, after all, referred to in English as "the smell of a rose". But if the rose smell represented roses, then (a) it would be true or satisfied or correctly tokened only in response to roses, false or incorrect otherwise; ( b ) it v~oulddetermine a function that, given a world, spit out exactly the set of roses at that world; and/or, (c) it would be, in Sellarsian terms, a .rose -something that plays an internal functional role analogous to the riorm-governed role played by the word "rose" in the public English language. The rose snlell does none of those things in humans. In particular, there are objects other than roses that set off the rose smell -artificial rose smells can be made of any substance whose rnolecules are shaped similarly to those of roses. The point is not that the nose can be fooled. Au contrazre; it is that in the artificial case, the nose is not fooled, and the rose smell is riot incorrectly tokened. An artificial rose that produces the rose smell is smelled correctly, for it does have that smell even though it is not a rose. KO one would ever suggest that if we discover other things on other planets sniell like roses, the initial categorizatioli "rose odor"

was mistaken. (And conversely, of course, if one experiences the rose smell when presented with an odorless variety of rose, one is not smelling correctly, though it does not follow that one is smelling incorrectly.) Thus smells do not represent the external things by reference to which they are usually classified, even though they are usually rightly taken by subjects to indicate those external things as well. Nor do phenomenal smells represent, as some Gibsonians would have it, broader ecologically significant properties of things, for the same reason and for others.15 Thus it is tempting to conclude that smells merely accompany external objects with a fair degree of type-type reliability, but do not represent them. However, there is another candidate for external representatum. Consider what an odor is, in the public sense of the term. It is a vaporous emanation, a diffusing collection of molecules typically given off from a definite physical source. It is itself a determinate physical thing that makes physical contact with the smell receptors in one's olfactory epithelium and sets them to firing. Moreover there is nothing arcane about this. We are publicly and commonsensically aware of odors; they are public physical entities available for sensing by anyone who happens, fortunately or unfortunately, by. (I am sure each of us can think of our own lovely or loathesome examples.) Now, odor is a candidate for representatum, and the idea of an odor as an intentional object of smell resists the objection I have made to the more colloquial candidates. For things other than roses can give off the odor "of roses", and roses can fail to give off that odor. (Again, I am not talking about olfactory deficiencies or misfires, but about the match in the physical world between types of object and types of odor.) Perhaps, then, smells represent odors. But why think that, even so? Perhaps, to the contrary, all there is to the relation is that smells are highly but imperfectly correlated with odors, and that is not enough to make for a case of representing. Actually I can think of two positive arguments for awarding representational status to smell, now that the main objection has been circumvented, though I shall offer only the first here.16 It is that once smells are correlated with odors rather than with types of object, a kind of incorrectness does manifest itself, hence a correctnessor truth-condition. If I hallucinate a rose smell in the absence of any rose or anything else that is giving off the rose odor, I am misperceiving. The point is not just that my belief that a rose is present 15See Ch. 3 of Perkins (1983).

16The other is lengthy, and is given in Lycan (1989).

is erroneous. I may not even have that belief, knowing full well that my olfactory experience is hallucinatory. Something is perceptually wrong; my olfactory bulb is saying "Rose odor" when there is no rose odor physically present, and that report is a lie. Where there is falsehood there is representation.17 9. One may suppose, then, that phenomenal smells represent odors in the sense I have specified. And so I maintained in Lycan (1989). But (in conversation) Ruth Millikan has contended against me that my arguments in the previous section against the idea that smells represent environmental objects must be flawed. If we are t o agree with anything like her pleasantly Panglossian evolutionary-historical psychosemantics (mentioned in section 5 above), we must suppose that if smells do represent anything, they do after all represent environmental objects of potential adaptive significance. Surely that is what olfaction is for, to signal food, predators, shelter, mates, and other objects of interest ultimately derivative from those; and signalling is at least a crude form of representing. I now think Millikan is right about that. But it does not force me to abandon my claim that smells represent odors. What I suggest is that smells represent adaptively significant environmental entities and they also represent odors. In fact, they represent the environmental entities by representing odors. By smelling a certain familiar odor I also smell -veridically or not- a dog. Let us return briefly to my original argument against the idea that the rose smell represents roses. It was essentially that if I experience the rose smell when the rose odor is present but no actual rose is, I a m smelling correctly, and if I experience the smell when a n odorless rose is present, I am not smelling correctly. But in the face of my layeredintentional-objects view, this argument is too simple. For that view (hereafter just the "Layering thesis") introduces the possibility that a mental representation can have more than one truth value at once. And indeed, I think it is fairly plausible to say that in the first case --that of experiencing the rose smell in the absence of any roseI am representing both correctly and incorrectly, the odor correctly and roses incorrectly. "I a m not entirely sure of t h a t last claim. One can grant t h a t a detector or indicator is registering a false positive without being forced t o admit fullbore representation, if one wishes t o place further conditions on what it takes for something t o be a genuine representation. My claim for this first argument is only t h a t smell has a possibly inexistent intentional object in a t least t h e rudimentary sense t h a t detectors and indicators have intentional objects. (However, I would add t h a t smell's strong and multifarious functional connections t o memory and other cognitive agencies suggest a representational connection as well.)

I do not know how to defend this analysis against the objection, voiced above, that my rose representation is the result of unconscious inference from the olfactory representation rather than being olfactory itself. But that is because philosophy has not resolved the general question of whether the incredibly busy pre-processing that goes on in our perceptual modules should be counted as un- (because pre-) conscious inference. A clue may be taken from Jerry Fodor's (1983) notion of a module's operation's being mandatory and informationally encapsulated. Whether or not such-and-such automated perceptual processing counts as "inference" in some legitimate sense of the word, (a) it is not a n inference performed by the subject in the usual way, but is only something that happens within the subject, (b) it is utterly insensitive to other things the subject knows and can use in inference (such as that the Miiller-Lyer illusion is a n illusion and that the two straight lines involved in it are of just the same length), and most importantly, (c) the output of a perceptual module unequivocally counts as a n object of perception in the ordinary sense of the term; indeed, in listening to human speech we perceive phonemes rather than raw vocal sounds, faces rather than geometrical arrangements of particular features, and so on. Thus, even if my rose representation is the result of unconscious inference in one sense, that does not disprove the claim that it is also itself olfactory. My claim, then, is that a given sensory state typically has, not just a single intentional object, but two or more arranged hierarchically by the "by" relation. A good model here is that of deferred linguistic reference: By referring to a numeral I refer to a number (and perhaps by doing that I refer to a building, and perhaps by doing that I refer to a government official, all in the same linguistic act -I see no a priori limit on this layering of designata). 10. Now, how to apply the Layering thesis to vision? As we saw, Peacocke seems to assume that everyday environmental things are all that is represented in vision; that is why the Q-ualia are left over. But the following is a reasonable thing to say: In vision, I see a n array of colored shapes, and by seeing those I see a room full of furniture, and perhaps by seeing that I see something still more concept-laden. (In each case, "see" is colloquial for "visually represent" .) As in the case of smell, optical illusion phenomena afford a t least a weak argument for the Layering thesis as applied to vision. Consider first the example of the Ames chair demonstrations (Ittelson (1952)). Here is a description of Adelbert Ames' device, from Gombrich (1960). [Because of technical difficulties, my originally supplied photographs are not included here.]

Most of these demonstrations are arranged in the form of peep shows. One of them which can be fairly successfully illustrated.. .makes use of three peepholes through which we can look with one eye at each of three objects displayed in the distance. Each time the object looks like a tubular chair. But when we go round and look at the three objects from another angle, we discover that only one of them is a chair of normal shape. The right-hand one is really a distorted, skewy object which only assumes the appearance of a chair from the one angle at which we first looked at it; the middle one presents an even greater surprise: it is not even one coherent object but a variety of wires extended in front of a backdrop on which is painted what we took to be the seat of the chair. One of the three chairs we saw was real, the other two illusions. So much is easy to infer from the [here omitted] photograph. What is hard to imagine is the tenacity of the illusion, the hold it maintains on us even after we have been undeceived. We return to the three peepholes and, whether we want it or not, the illusion is there. (pp. 248-49) A more vivid but still actual example is that of the peep-box, which I believe was a toy of the Victorian period in England. It was a more elaborate version of the Ames chair display.18 A little cabinet roughly the size of a shoe-box had a peep-hole a t one end, and a light source. When one looked inside through the peep-hole, one saw a miniature furnished drawing-room, in the manner of a doll's house; the furnishings were suitably heavy and ornate. But if one then took off the top of the box and looked directly down on the contents, all one saw was seemingly random little bits of wood and wire and cloth. In fact, those bits had been arranged in precisely just such a way as to present a viewer a t the peep-hole with a perfectly credible but utterly illusory Victorian room. Now, when one innocently views the contents of a peep-box through its peep-hole, does one see veridically? Here again, I think a very proper answer is, "Yes and no". Yes, because one does see shapes and textures that are physically real; there really is a dark red plushy object at two o'clock, for example, even though it is not the sort of object one supposes it is and it may be nearer or farther away from one's eye than one thinks; and one sees real edges, lines and expanses. But also, no, because one sees a miniature Victorian drawing-room that simply does not exist. Here again one might protest that the room is not perceived but only inferred from what is perceived. But my reply would be the 1 8 ~ o ar related example, see Dorothy L. Sayers' "The Haunted Policeman", reprinted in Lord P e t e r (New York, NY: Avon Books, 1972).

same: that even if it is "inferred" in some sense, that does not stop it from being seen, an object of the visual experience. 11. If all this is right, then we can answer Peacocke's first argument by denying that the representational content of our visual experience in his example is exhausted by the everyday environmental array of road, trees and background. We do visually represent the trees, and as being of the same size etc., but we do that by representing colored shapes and relations between them. Some of the shapes -in particular those corresponding to the trees- are represented as being larger shapes than others, as occluding others, and so forth. As with all intentional objects, it does not follow that there are any actual things that have such relational properties. And an intentional object is normally "incomplete" in Meinong's way: There are many properties P such that the object is represented neither as having P nor as having P's complement; if the object is nonexistent, it may indeed have neither P nor P's complement. I a m maintaining that the experiential features Peacocke claims to be sensational rather than representational are represented contents after all, though the representata are not physical objects of the everyday sort.lg But if they are not physical objects of the everyday sort, what are they? What is a "shape", or a n "expanse"? The first important point to note is that the shapes etc. are (represented as being) objects external to oneself, not as mere contents of one's consciousness. When one looks into the peep-box, one sees shapes arranged in a certain complex design, but one sees them as residing inside the box, on the other side of the peep-hole, not in one's own head. They are external things.20 The second important point is that not all the shapes etc. are actual. Perhaps some of the edges and lines are actual physical edges and lines seen veridically for what that is worth, but shapes such as ''In more recent work, Peacocke (1992) has put forward some ideas t h a t seem not inhospitable t o the Layering thesis, though they d o not include it. (i) He posits a nonconceptual kind of representational content, embodied in his notion of a "spatial type" or "scenario". (ii) He posits a second and more primitive kind of nonconceptual representational content, in t h e form of "protopropositions" incorporating concepts such as "square", "curved" and "parallel to", though those terms apply t o ostensible everyday objects and their surfaces, rather than t o what I a m calling "shapes". 20Jackson (1977) got this right, even though he believed t h e shapes t o be actual ~ h e n o m e n a ilndividuals. s e n s e d a t a . As has been widely pointed out, vision presents us with very finely-grained content t h a t outruns our own ability t o express in words. I d o not suppose t h a t all t h e shapes and expanses we see fall under our own everyday concepts.

Peacocke's larger and smaller tree shapes do not really exist; there are no two actual tree-shaped objects, one larger than the other, in the environment we as his protagonists are observing. (In this way, they differ from the rose odor in virtue of smelling which we smell the rose itself.) The third important point is that the shapes etc. are physical or at least not immaterial. Here as before, that means, represented as being physical or a t least not immaterial, because they are intentional objects and most of them are intentional inexistents. The shapes one sees in the peep-box are visually taken to be physical things of some sort, even if one suspects one is being toyed with and deliberately withholds one's assent to the drawing-room perception. As represented, they may not be very robust physical things; one may think they are mere faqades, or that they are flimsy and filmy, or one may not know what to think of them. This is a good case of Meinongian incompleteness. T h e intentional inexistents are not robustly physical, but they are not nonphysical or immaterial either.21 Thus, I think shapes etc. are unobjectionably ill-behaved intentional objects, representata. Let us turn, then, to Peacocke's third argument for Q - ~ a l i a . ~ ~ 2 1 ~ is t sometimes objected against t h e intentional-inexistent view of sensed a t a t h a t apparent colors inhere in things t h a t are obviously not physical objects. E.g., we say t h a t the sky is blue, but no one thinks there is even any nonexistent physical thing u p there. B u t I contend there is a nonexistent physical thing u p there: It is a n illusion. Vision represents "the sky" as a n object. Poets write about it. Visually, t h e sky is a canopy, or the vault of heaven. 2 2 ~ isecond s alleged counterexample goes as follows.

(2) . . .Suppose you look a t a n array of pieces of furniture with one eye closed. Some of the pieces of furniture may be represented by your experience as being in front of others. Imagine now t h a t you look a t t h e same scene with both eyes. T h e experience is different. It may be tempting t o try t o express this difference by saying t h a t some chairs now appear t o be in front of others, but this cannot suffice: for t h e monocular experience also represented certain objects as being in front of others. (p. 13) T h e idea here is additional t o t h a t which case (1) was meant t o illustrate: Not only d o t h e intrinsic experiential properties or Q-ualia outrun representational content, but they can vary despite sameness of representational content. T h e binocular experience differs from t h e monocular, but not in representational content, since all t h e frontlback relations represented by the binocular experience were already represented by t h e monocular. But I a m not a t all convinced. For consider t h e very point of what stereoscopic vision does. When one eye is located a t a distance t o t h e left of t h e other, it sees just slightly further leftward around the side of a n object t h a t is in view,

(3) . . . [A] wire franework in the shape of a cube is viewed with one eye and is seen first with one of its faces in front, the face parallel to this face being seen as behind it, and is then suddenly seen, without any change in the cube or alteration of its position, with that former face now behind the other. The successive experiences have different representational contents. . . . Yet there seems to be some additional level of classification at which the successive experiences fall under the same type. (p. 16)

Peacocke infers that there is a nonrepresentational sameness between the two experiences, hence a nonrepresentational or intrinsic feature. I have two replies t o this. First, Peacocke seems to be assuming that in such aspect-seeing examples, informational or representational content tracks with the aspectual conceptualization, and all underlying aspects of the experience in question are nonrepresentational. But that would be far too hasty. Seeing-as is a large subject (Lycan (1971)), and I cannot begin to go into the needed subtleties here, but a key point to grasp is that aspectual conceptualization often outruns features of experience that are themselves uncontroversially representational. Under suitably rigged circumstances, I can see almost anything as almost anything else. If we are discussing military history and using everyday objects to represent important events, I can come to see a meerschaum pipe as the Battle of Jena. Perhaps that last example suggests an irrelevantly frivolous use of "see as", and that there is a more strictly visual use. But consider the locus classicus of seeing-as, Jastrow's duck-rabbit figure (known to most philosophers by way of section 11, xi of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations). When we look a t that figure, we visually while t h e right eye sees slightly further rightward around t h e object's other side. It follows, I think, t h a t t h e binocular experience contains more information than did t h e monocular, for one gets a very slightly fuller view of each object t h a t one looks a t , even though no new frontlback relations are represented. (This observation is hardly new. Hear Joseph Harris' Treatise on Opticks, published in 1775: And by t h e parallax on account of t h e distance betwixt our eyes, we can distinguish besides t h e front, part of the two sides of a near object.. . and this gives a visible relievo t o such objects, which helps greatly t o raise or detach them from t h e plane, on which they Lie: Thus, t h e nose on t h e face, is t h e more remarkably raised by our seeing each side of it a t once! [Quoted in Gregory (1986), p. 1561) For this reason, Peacocke's second argument seems t o me a nonstarter. (1992) makes a similar point.)

(Tye

represent it as such, though it is then optional whether we take it in t u r n t o picture a duck or a rabbit. Even in this core case, seeing-as is posterior t o some visual representation. Peacocke nearly anticipates this response (p. 17), agreeing that something is seen first as a representation of a duck, and then is seen as a representation of a rabbit. But then what is so seen, an arrangement of lines on paper, remains constant in the representational content of the successive experiences. . . . [However, i]n the example of the wire cube, this reply is not available: for after the aspect switch, the wires do not all seem to be in the same relative positions as before. But now my second reply is that t h e two cube experiences share some shapes, edges and lines; and, according t o me, all those items are visually represented. So there is after all a representational sameness underlying the aspectually different seeing-as experiences; the Layering thesis saves the day again, and Peacocke's third argument fails. 13. I a m not under the illusion t h a t the debate over the Hegemony of Representation, Q-ualia, and nonrepsentational sensational features is finished. I suppose there will be more arguments for Q-ualia, that will have t o be answered in their turn. But I have stood a t Armageddon and battled for the Lord, I hope sufficiently for today.

REFERENCES Adams, E.M. (1975), Philosophy and the Modern Mind (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press). Anscombe, G.E.M. (1965), "The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature", in R.J. Butler (ed.), Analytical Philosophy: Second Series (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). Block, N.J. (1990), "Inverted Earth", in Tomberlin (1990): 53-79. Butchvarov, P. (1980), "Adverbial Theories of Consciousness", in P.A. French, T.E. Uehling and H. Wettstein (eds.), Midwest Studies i n Philosophy, V: Studies i n Epistemology (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press). Chisholm, R. (1957), Perceiving (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Crane, T . (ed.) (1992), The Contents of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Fodor, J.A. (1983), The Modularity of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books / MIT Press). Gombrich, E.H. (1960), Art and Illusion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

Gregory, R.L. (1986), Odd Perceptions (London: Methuen). Harman, G. (1990), "The Intrinsic Quality of Experience", in Tomberlin (1990): 31-52. Hintikka, K.J.J. (1969), "On the Logic of Perception7', in N.S. Care and R.H. Grimm (eds.), Perception and Personal Identity (Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University Press). Ittelson, W.H. (1952), The Ames Demonstrations in Perception (Princeton and London: Hafner Publishing). Jackson, F. (1977), Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Kraut, R. (1982), "Sensory States and Sensory Objects", Notis 16: 277-295. Lewis, C.I. (1929), Mind and the World Order (New York, NY: C. Scribner's Sons). Lewis, D. (1983), "Individuation by Acquaintance and by Stipulation", Philosophical Review 92: 3-32. Lycan, W.G. (1971), "Gombrich, Wittgenstein and the Duck-Rabbit", Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 30: 229-237; reprinted in J.V. Canfield (ed.), The Philosophy of Wittgenstein: Aesthetics, Ethics and Religion (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985), pp. -. Lycan, W.G. (1987), Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/ MIT Press). Lycan, W.G. (1989), "Philosophy and Smell", unpublished monograph, excerpts from which constituted the Presidential Address delivered a t the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Tucson, Arizona (April, 1989). Lycan, W.G. (1990), "What is the 'Subjectivity' of the Mental?", in Tomberlin (1990): 109-130. Lycan, W.G. (1996, in press), Consciousness and Experience (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press). Peacocke, C. (1983) Sense and Content (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Peacocke, C. (1992), "Scenarios, Concepts and Perception", in Crane (1992): 105-35. Perkins, M. (1983), Sensing the World (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing). Sellars, W. (1968) Science and Metaphysics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Shoemaker, S. (1981), "The Inverted Spectrum", Journal of Philosophy 74: 357-81. Shoemaker, S. (1990), "Qualities and Qualia: What's in the Mind?", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (Supplementary Volume): 109-31. Shoemaker, S. (1994), "Phenomenal Character", Notis 28: 21-38. Smart, J.J.C. (1959), "Sensations and Brain Processes", Philosophical Review 68: 141-156.

Thomason, R. (1973), "Perception and Individuation", in M. Munitz (ed.), Logic and Ontology (New York, NY: New York University Press). Tomberlin, J.E. (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives, 4: Action Theory and

Philosophy of Mind (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1990).

Tye, M. (1992), "Visual Qualia and Visual Content", in Crane (1992): 158-

76. Tye, M. (1994), "Qualia, Content, and the Inverted Spectrum", N o h 28: 159-83.

PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES, 7 Perception, 1995

On a Defense of the Hegemony of Represent ation Robert Stalnaker

On the general ideological issue, I am on Bill Lycan's side: I would like to believe in the hegemony of representation. But I don't find it quite so easy to believe this (or even to understand it fully) as he apparently does. When it comes to the details of his defense of the general thesis against some specific objections and counterexamples, I am not very clear about how the argument is supposed to go. I have worries both about the response to Ned Block's inverted earth argument for a distinction between qualitative and intentional content of experience, and about the response to Christopher Peacocke's proposed counterexamples to his version of the hegemony of representation. First on Block's inverted earth: I will review Block's argument, as I understand it, and then consider Lycan's response. Block told his story in two versions. In both of them, inverted earth is a place much like earth, except that the actual physical colors of things are inverted -switched with the complementary colors. Further, the language spoken by inverted earthians is an inverted version of English: they use "blue" to refer to the color yellow, which is the color of the sky. In the intersubjective version of the story, our subject

(you) remains on earth, but has a counterpart on inverted earth who is like you, except that he is fitted with inverting lenses. In this version of the story, inverted earth might, in fact, just be a counterfactual possible world. But Lycan focuses on the intrasubjective version of the story, according to which inverted earth is a part of our universe, and you are transported from here to there (abducted, perhaps, by some of those aliens that Harvard psychoanalysts like to investigate). It is part of this version of the story that the abduction takes place without your noticing it. As Lycan says, "when you wake up [after the abduction], you experience nothing abnormal", since you were, without your knowledge, fitted with inverting lenses that cancel out the effects of the color inversion on the planet. Your language remains the same, and so when you say "the sky is blue", you mean that the sky is blue, unlike your new compatriots, who mean by words that sound exactly the same as yours that the sky is yellow, and who mistakenly interpret you to mean that as well. But, Block suggests, after many years go by (during which you never learn about the switch), it will eventually become true to say that you have become a speaker of inverted earth's variant of English, and so to mean what they mean by "blue", which is what earthly English speakers mean by "yellow". But while the intentional content of your thoughts about colors (and of your visual experiences) may change, the qualitative content of your color experiences remains the same. Therefore, there must be a difference between the intentional content of experience and their qualitative content. Now Lycan is skeptical about the assumptions about semantics that lead Block to hypothesize that there would be, after enough time goes by, a semantic shift, but he does not think this is where the real problem with the argument is, so he grants Block his semantics for the purpose of the argument. The real problem, he suggests, is that Block has no reason to assume that there are any mental properties of your color experience that remain the same when the semantics shifts. Only by assuming that Qualia are narrow properties p r o p e r t i e s that supervene on the internal molecular constitution of the subject- is this conclusion justified. But this assumption, he says, begs the question: the defender of the hegemony of representation rejects the assumption that there is anything about the qualitative character of color experience that is narrow in this sense. I don't find this persuasive since while I agree that Block believes (with good reason) that Qualitative properties supervene on the internal molecular constitution of the person whose experiences have

8. ON A DEFENSE OF THE HEGEMONY OF REPRESENTATION103

the properties, I don't think that he assumes this, or that it plays any role in the argument. Let us stipulate that to be a Qualitative property of an experience, a property must satisfy at least the following necessary condition: if two experiences are introspectively indistinguishable, then either both or neither have property $. (At this point, the difference between the intrasubjective and the intersubjective versions of the story becomes important, since the introspective indistinguishability relation applies only to experiences of a single person.) Might one deny that there are any properties meeting this condition? Perhaps, but only, I think, by claiming that we cannot make sense of the relation of introspective indistinguishability (or by claiming at least that we cannot make sense of this relation outside of very limited contexts). One might accept the intelligibility of introspective indistinguishability, while rejecting all but holistic Qualitative properties, but holistic properties of this kind, I think, will be enough for Block's purposes. Notice that, while any reasonable materialist will believe that all properties meeting this condition will also meet the supervenience condition (and so will be narrow or intrinsic properties), this further conclusion need play no role in the argument. It is the assumption of introspective indistinguishability that is doing the work. And if one grants the intelligibility of this assumption, it seems to me difficult to deny that in the story as Block tells it, your experiences are introspectively indistinguishable, after the switch, from what they would have been if the switch had never been made. If it is not obvious that this follows from the story as already told, just add the following elaboration of it: consider the following possible experiment: the aliens fill you in about the details of what has happened to you, and then take you back to earth, removing your inverting lenses. "Attend carefully to the character of your visual experience", they say. Then you are returned to the inverted earth situation, with the inverting lenses, told that you are there, and again asked to attend carefully to the character of your visual experience. Finally, you are again blindfolded, and one of the two locations is selected at random. This time, you are not told which of the two conditions you are in, but are asked to attend to the way things look, and on the basis of this to judge whether you are on earth or inverted earth. Let us assume that, were this experiment to be performed, you would be unable to make an informed judgment. You would report that you were unable to tell any difference at all between the way things look on earth and the way they look on inverted earth. (Don't assume that this experiment is actually performed; just assume that

the counterfactual, if the experiment were performed, this would be the result, is true according to the story.)' Now I can't see what question Block has begged if he claims to have told a story in which two experiences have the same Qualitative content (where Qualitative content is understood to be a property meeting the indistinguishability condition), without having the same intentional content. If he is a materialist, he will be committed to the thesis that the experiences of molecular duplicates share all Qualitative properties, but this will be a conclusion, not an assumption, and it will be a conclusion that is not necessary to make the point. Lycan's reasons for being skeptical about any such property seem to me, in any case, pretty weak: Qualia are something like narrow content, which is "notoriously disputed. . . . We should suspect any parallel notion of qualitative character". (p. 10) I have no sympathy for any notion of narrow content, but I think one needs a better reason to suspect a notion that might be thought to share some of its features than guilt by association. Now on Christopher Peacocke's examples: I am inclined to agree with Lycan that perceptual experiences have multiple representational contents, and that these contents may be layered in the sense that for different properties P and Q, it may perceptually appears to one that P by its appearing to one that Q. Further, I am inclined to suspect that Lycan may be right that this is relevant to the task of reconciling a representationalist thesis with the phenomena that Peacocke's examples direct our attention to. But I don't have a very clear idea exactly how the argument is supposed to go. I am not entirely clear either about exactly what the problem that Peacocke is raising is, or about how a recognition of the fact that perceptual representations are multiple and layered is supposed to solve it. Let me first review Lycan's point about olfactory representation and then turn back to the visual examples. I am happy enough to grant that smells are representational, and that they can have multiple intentional contents. Specifically, that a smell can be correctly said to represent both the presence of an object of the kind that normally gives off the smell (the rose) and also the presence of an odor of the kind that such objects normally give off (where an odor is something physical, something that occupies space). In such a case, I take it that one and the same experiential h he role of introspective indistinguishability in Block's argument is most explicit in his summary of the argument in his article on qualia in Samuel Guttenplan, A C o m p a n i o n t o the Philosophy of Mind (Basil Blackwell, 1994). See especially the paragraph on pp. 517-518.

condition -my particular olfactory experience- realizes different intentional states -on the one hand, the state of representing that a rose is in the vicinity, and the state of representing that there is a rose-odor in my environment. The subject has two different representational properties -its olfactorily appearing to him that a rose is present in the vicinity, and its olfactorily appearing to him that a rose-odor is present in the surrounding atmosphere- and he has both of those properties in virtue of having one sensory experience. The one state might represent correctly while the other does not. One can, as Lycan suggests, contrast three possible scenarios in which I have the same rose-smelling experience: In the first, a rose is giving off a rose-odor, which is causing my experience; in the second, there is a rose-odor, perhaps produced by a synthetic chemical reaction, but no rose; in the third, I am having an olfactory hallucination. In the first case, both of the representational states realized by the experience are veridical; in the second one is but the other is not, and in the third, neither is. The character of the experience is the same in all three cases, and in all three cases the experience has the same intentional contents. Now all of this seems fine to me, but what I don't see is how to turn this into a response to Peacocke's counterexample. Let me first try to say what I think the problem is that Peacocke's first example is supposed to raise, and then consider how the recognition of multiple and layered representations might help to solve it. The visual experience, in the example, is of a pair of trees along a road. One fact about the character of this experience is that the trees appear to be of about the same size, with one closer and one farther away. But it is also a feature of the experience, Peacocke suggests, that the nearer tree occupies a bigger part of the visual field than the farther tree. That is, we are inclined to say in describing such an experience that something -a certain tree shaped part of the visual field- is bigger than something else -a different tree shaped part of the visual field. Now the representationalist strategy is to paraphrase all descriptions of the character of experience in representational terms, where the properties expressed in characterizing the experience are not ascribed to anything, but are used to identify a representational content -a proposition. According to this strategy, the reason we can use such words as "green" and "square" to describe the character of a visual experience without committing ourselves to the existence of anything relevant that is actually green or square is that those words occur (in a perspicuous paraphrase of the characterization of the experience) only in the scope of a "that" clause which identifies an intentional content used to characterize the experience -as

the experience of visually representing that something before one is green, or square. Peacocke's example, as I understand it, is supposed to present a prima facie problem for this strategy since while we are inclined to describe our experience in terms of something (a certain shape in the visual field) being bigger than something else, this judgment of comparative size seems to be about a feature of the representation, and not about what purports to be represented. To solve the problern, it would seem that one would need to find a paraphrase of the description of the visual field into the form "it visually appears to the subject that . . . " where the "bigger than" occurs in the that-clause: something visually appears to be bigger than something else, but nothing is said actually t o be bigger than anything else. The recognition that one experience can have multiple contents allows for the possibility that one and the same visual experience might represent two tree as being the same size, while at the same time represent one of them as being bigger than the other. But that does not seem to be the right description of the experience, and it is not what Lycan is suggesting. Intuitively, one is inclined to say that the trees themselves are represented as the same size, while it is the images of the tree that are of different sizes. But the images are representations, and not (it seems) things represented. It is not clear how the analogies with odors is supposed to be applied here. Both roses and rose odors are, as Lycan emphasized, things that we may represent to be present in the nonmental world. If the trees are analogous to the rose, what is it that is analogous to the rose odor in the layered account of the visual experience in Peacocke's example? Lycan suggests that it is "colored shapes and relations between them. Some of these shapes -in particular those corresponding to the trees- are represented as being larger shapes than others". (p. 24) Now there need not actually be any such shapes: we need not be perceiving veridically. While the observer in Peacocke's example is perceiving the trees veridically, Lycan says that "shapes such as Peacocke's larger and smaller tree shapes do not really exist". At this layer of perceptual representation, things are not as they visually appear to be. But to understand what the proposed content is, one has to understand how the world is being represented to be -what the world would have to be like in order for the representation to be veridical. Is the proposal that the content, at this level, of the visual experience is that there are two tree shaped physical objects --one larger than the other? Is that the way, or a way, that things visually appear to be to the observer? One might be inclined to reply that that is not how things seem to appear to the observer.

8. ON A DEFENSE O F T H E HEGEMONY O F REPRESENTATION107

Here is a visual case that seems to me analogous to the smell example: I see a scene (which might be just like the scene described in Peacocke's example) reflected in a mirror (recognizing, let us say, that that is how I am seeing it). In this case, I really do represent both the scene (in which the trees are the same size) and an image -a mirror image- of the scene, in which one tree-image is bigger than the other. Just as in the olfactory example, where my experience represents a rose b y representing an odor, in this case my experience represents trees of the same size b y representing tree images that are of different sizes. As in the rose case, both representational states may be veridical, or one might be veridical, the other not. Suppose I think I am seeing trees reflected in a mirror, but in fact the image is projected on a screen, and there are no real trees. Or it might be that it is the mirror image that is an illusion: in fact I am seeing the trees through an open window that I take for a mirror. But in Peacocke's example, there is neither a mirror, nor the appearance of one. Can one still say that it visually appears to me that there is before me an image (an intermediate physical representation) which contains two tree images, one bigger than the other? This may not seem very plausible, phenomenologically, but it might seem a little better if one said simply that my visual experience is the way it would be if I were seeing an image (a physical image) that contains two tree images, one bigger than the other. This more explicitly externalist characterization puts the description of one shape being bigger than another into a counterfactual condition, rather than a that-clause. Is that change significant, from the point of view of the hegemony of representation? The answer to this question may depend on exactly how the hegemony thesis is formulated, and what work it is intended to do. But this way of paraphrasing the characterization of the experience has this in common with a more straightforward representationalist paraphrase: one explains how the size comparison can be used to describe the intrinsic character of an experience without hypothesizing any actual entities -components of the experience- that are compared with respect to size. If this is what Lycan has in mind, I think I could be talked into this line of response to Peacocke's example. Peacocke emphasized in describing his example that the viewer need have no concept of the visual field in order for it to be correct to describe the viewer's experience in terms of a visual field and various features of it. We are not supposed to assume that the example is one of a sophisticated observer, reflecting on his visual experience and judging that one object takes up more space than the other. The claim is that even for the unreflective viewer who thinks

only about the scene, who does not notice that the one tree takes up more space in his visual field than the other, or perhaps even have the conceptual resources to notice this, there are still features of the experience which we can use the concept of a visual field to describe. This can be granted, I think, without by itself causing any problem for the representationalist. There is no reason why one should not, in order to identify a content for the purpose of attributing an intentional state with that content to a person, make use of concepts that are unavailable to the person. Such externally identified content is perhaps "nonconceptual" in some sense, but it is none the less intentional or representational for that. (Some people find nonconceptual content puzzling. I have no problem with it -it is the other kind that I can't understand.) I will conclude with a very brief comment about Peacocke's second example: the wire frame shaped like a cube that is seen first with one of its faces in front of another, and then with the two reversed. I confess that in this case it is not clear to me what the problem for the representationalist is supposed to be. One does not need a theory of layered representation such as Lycan proposes in order to recognize that one visual experience may have many representational properties. I may describe different features of the way things visually appear to someone, and I might describe them in more or less detail. (I might say that an object before me seems to be blue, and also that it seems t o be navy blue; I might say in addition, describing the same visual experience, that the object seems to be shaped like a cone.) Two visual experiences might be alike in certain respects, and different in others (I might seem to see an object of the very same color, but this time shaped like a sphere), and a single extended visual experience might change in some respects and remain the same in others. (It still looks blue, but now it is a kind of pale sky blue.) In Peacocke's example, the content of my visual experience -how things visually appear to be- changes in some respects, but remains the same in others. I think there must be more to the problem than this but I confess I have a hard time seeing what it might be.

PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES,7 Perception, 1995

Perception and Possibilia James E. Tomberlin

Actualism, as I will understand it here, is minimally the view that there are no objects that do not actually exist.' By this view, there are no philosophical problems whose solution calls for or requires an ontological commitment to non-actual objects. To his credit, William G. Lycan has seriously challenged this ontological stance. In particular, as regards perception, he has set out and defended a position that the best account of qualia invokes possibilia: phenom'There are in fact grades of actualism. Alvin Plantinga (1985a), for example, endorses actualism as the view that there neither are nor could have been objects that do not actually exist. But Nathan Salmon (1987) accepts actualism only by affirming the first half of Plantinga's characterization while explicitly rejecting the second (and modal) half. As the reader may easily verify, my discussion here applies t o both versions of actualism. The literature on actualism and related modal matters is now extensive. Besides the works of Plantinga and Salmon just cited, there are excellent (even though jointly conflicting) treatments in Adams (1974, 1981), Bealer (1993), Castaiieda (1974, 1983, 1989), Deutsch (1990, 1994), Fine (1985, 1994), Fitch (1988, 1993), Forbes (1985), Kaplan (1975), Kripke (1980), Lewis (1986), Linksy and Zalta (1994), Lycan and Shapiro (1987), McMichael (1983), Menzel (1990, 1991), Parsons (1980), Plantinga (1974, 1976, 1985a, 198513, 1987), Pollock (1985), Rapaport (1978, 1979), Salmon (1981), Stalnaker (1976), van Inwagen (1987), Yagisawa (1988, 1992), and Zalta (1983, 1988).

enal individuals such as sense-data turn out to be possible but nonactual objects (Lycan 1987a, 1987b, and this conference). Now I share Lycan's anti-actualism concerning perception. And in what follows I seek to extend the argument: setting qualia aside, I shall argue, there are ample reasons to think that possibilia are properly invoked for a correct account of certain perception sentences. Consider this scenario. Jones, as it happens, has taken up nouvelle cuisine with its laudable emphasis on fresh and unusual ingredients. One weekend, in seclusion, he opts to prepare for himself the remarkable ragout of wild mushrooms with veal stock and red wine concocted by Alice Waters for her renowned restaurant, Chez Panisse. For the preparation, Jones decides, why not utilize wild mushrooms he gathered from the nearby woods just yesterday? A splendid dish indeed, he observes upon dining. But alas, some time later, Jones, still home alone and miles from the nearest person, is rendered comatose. Several of the wild mushrooms were highly toxic and Jones, alone and physically incapable of conveying his plight, faces certain death. In this situation, I take it, (1) and (2) are true but (3) is false: (1) For any individual x, if x has normal vision and x comes across Jones, x will see that Jones needs aid. (2) No actual individual comes across Jones. (3) For any individual x, if x has normal vision and x comes across Jones, x will not see that Jones needs aid. If so, however, the actualist cannot read the perception sentences (1) and (3) as universally quantified material conditionals. For suppose otherwise. Since no actual individual satisfies the open sentence

x has normal vision and x comes across Jones, every actual individual satisfies both ( l a ) (x has normal vision and x comes across Jones) that Jones needs aid)

> (x will see

and (3a) (x has normal vision and x comes across Jones) see that Jones needs aid).

> (x will

not

But then (1) and (3) are both true, after all. These considerations lead directly to a specific challenge for actualism:

9. PERCEPTION A N D POSSIBILIA111

Challenge. With objectual quantification,2 provide an interpretation of (1) and (3) satisfying these conditions: (1) and (2) are true, (3) is false, and the quantifiers range over actual individuals only. Denied the interpretation of (1) and (3) as universally quantified material conditionals, how exactly might the actualist meet this challenge? Here I consider each of three alternative proposals in turn. Strict Conditionals. By this alternative, (1) and (3) are to be construed as universally quantified strict conditionals, where a strict conditional O ( A > B ) is true (at a world w) if and only if B is true in every logically and/or metaphysically possible world (relative to w) where A is true. So understood, this proposal plainly fails the above challenge: since it is logically possible that some actual individual has normal vision and comes across Jones without seeing that he needs aid, (1) comes out false under this interpretation. Nomic Conditionals. According to this view, (1) and (3) are to be taken as universally quantified conditionals of nomic necessity, where a conditional of nomic (= physical) necessity H ( A > B ) is true (at a world w) exactly on the condition that B is true in every physically possible world (relative to w) in which A is true. While more modest than the previous interpretation, it should nevertheless be clear that the present alternative fails: insofar as no law of nature or statement of nomic necessity is violated under the assumption that some actual individual has normal vision and comes across Jones without seeing that he needs aid, true (1) won't be true, after all. Counterfactuals. With the current alternative, (1) and (3) become the universally quantified counterfactuals ( l b ) and (3b), respectively: ( l b ) For any individual x, if it were the case that x has normal vision and x comes across Jones, then it would be the case that x sees that Jones needs aid. (3b) For any individual x, if it were the case that x has normal vision and x comes across Jones, then it would be the case that x does not see that Jones needs aid. A tempting view indeed for anyone who demands an account of the truth-conditions for our target sentences while insisting on an ontology devoid of non-actual individuals. But any such theoretical attraction notwithstanding, this counterfactual interpretation is fraught with troubles, including each of the following prominent ones: 'As opposed to substitutional quantification. For criticisms of substitutional quantification, see Tomberlin (1990 and 1993).

First, as we learned from Stalnaker (1968) and Lewis (1973), transitivity and contraposition both fail for counterfactuals. And yet, (I) and (11) seem harmlessly valid. (I) For any individual x, if x has normal vision and x comes across Jones, x will see that Jones needs aid. For any individual x, if x sees that Jones needs aid, then x will attempt to help Jones. Thus, for any individual x, if x has normal vision and x comes across Jones, then x will attempt to help Jones. (11) For any individual x, if x has normal vision and x comes across Jones, then x will see that Jones needs aid. Thus, for any individual x , if x does not see that Jones needs aid, then x does not both have normal vision and come across Jones. Second, while there is room for genuine disagreement over the correct rule of truth for a counterfactual A PB, to facilitate matters I assume the one provided in Lewis (1973): A b B is true (at a world w) if and only if either (i) there are no possible A-worlds (in which case A O-+ B is vacuously true) or (ii) some A-world where B holds is closer (to w) than is any A-world where B does not hold. Next, suppose with Kripke (1980) genetic essentialism -any actual individual necessarily has the origin it in fact has. Return now to Jones and let me expand on his background. Rebounding from a failed and childless marriage, Jones, vowing not to contribute to a world of overpopulation, underwent a successful and irreversible vasectomy three years ago. That is, we have the truth of (4): (4) No actual individual is a biological offspring of Jones. Now surely any reason for treating (1) and (3) as ( l b ) and (3b), respectively, should likewise dictate that (5) and (6) are to be parsed as (7) and (8), in turn: (5) For any individual x, if x has normal vision and x comes across Jones and x is a biological offspring of Jones, then x will see that Jones needs aid. (6) For any individual x, if x has normal vision and x comes across Jones and x is a biological offspring of Jones, then x will not see that Jones needs aid. (7) For any individual x , if it were to be the case that x has normal vision and x comes across Jones and x is a biological offspring

9. PERCEPTION AND POSSIBILIA 113

of Jones, then it would be the case that x sees that Jones needs aid.

(8) For any individual x, if it were to be the case that x has normal vision and x comes across Jones and x is a biological offspring of Jones, then it would be the case that x will not see that Jones needs aid. With all of the above, however, actualism comes to grief: owing to the Lewis rule of truth for counterfactuals, genetic essentialism, and the truth of (4), actualism dictates that (7) and (8) are both true. But in the scenario about Jones it seems clear that whereas (5) is true (6) is false. Conclusion. With this negative verdict of four alternative actualistic interpretations of (1) and (3), I scarcely claim to have exhausted all of the positions in logical space open to the actualist. (But when, after all, has anyone exhausted all of the positions in logical space as regards any serious philosophical matter?) Still, I do think I have addressed the most promising ones. If so, until and unless some other interpretation is offered that suits actualism, it seems entirely appropriate to theorize that possiblia are to be invoked for a correct account of perception sentences like (1) and (3).314

Adams, R.M., 1974, "Theories of Actuality," Nozis 8: 211-231.

Adams, R.M., 1981, "Actualism and Thisness," Synthese 49: 3-41.

Bealer, G., 1993, "A Solution to Frege's Puzzle," Philosophical Perspectives

7: 17-60. 3The present discussion sharpens and extends the scepticism as regards actualism in Tomberlin (1988, 1991, 1993, forthcoming) and Tomberlin and McGuinness (1994). In Lycan (1993), there is a fascinating theoretical proposal for indicative conditionals: with Lewis and Stalnaker, he finds antecedent-strengthening, contrap* sition, and transitivity invalid; but unlike Lewis and Stalnaker, Lycan mounts a powerful case against modus ponens. The resulting view is an original and important contribution t o the vexing topic of conditionals. Still, owing to his (essential) quantification over possible but non-actual objects, Lycan's view provides no aid to actualism concerning items like (1) and (3). 4For rewarding discussion and/or correspondence, I am grateful to Bill Lycan, John Biro, Gilbert Harman, Bernie Linsky, Bob Stalnaker, Ed Zalta and my colleagues Frank McGuinness, Jeff Sicha, and Takashi Yagisawa. Linsky and Zalta (1994) contains an original and important version of actualism, one far too intricate for adequate treatment here. But I do critically examine their fascinating proposal in Tomberlin (forthcoming).

Castaiieda, H.N., 1974, "Thinking and the Structure of the World," Philosophia 4: 4-40. Castafieda, H.N., 1983, "Reply to Alvin Plantinga," in J.E. Tomberlin, ed., Agent, Language, and the Structure of the World, Indianapolis, Hackett. Castaiieda, H.N., 1989, Thinking, Language, and Experience, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota. Deutsch, H., 1990, "Contingency and hlodal Logic," Philosophical Studies 60: 89-102. Deutsch, H., 1994, "Logic for Contingent Beings," Journal of Philosophical Research 19: 273-330. Fine, K., 1985, "Plantinga on the Reduction of Possibilist Discourse," in J.E. Tomberlin and P. van Inwagen, eds., Alvin Plantinga, Profiles, Dordrecht, D. Reidel. Fine, K., 1994, "Essence and Modality," Philosophical Perspectives 8: 1-16. Fitch, G.W., 1988, "The Nature of Singular Propositions," in D. Austin, ed., Philosophical Analysis, Dodrecht, Kluwer. Fitch, G.W., 1993, "Non-Denoting," Philosphical Perspectives 7: 461-486. Forbes, G., 1985, The Metaphysics of Modality, Oxford, Clarendon. Kaplan, D., 1975, "How to Russell a FregeChurch," Journal of Philosophy 72: 716-729. Kripke, S., 1980, Naming and Necessity, Cambridge, Harvard. Lewis, D., 1973, Counterfactuals, Cambridge, Harvard. Lewis, D., 1986, On the Plurality of Worlds, Oxford, Blackwell. Linsky, B. and Zalta, E., 1994, "In Defense of the Simplest Quantified Modal Logic," Philosophical Perspectives 8: 431-458. Lycan, W.G., 1987a, Consciousness, Cambridge, MIT. Lycan, W.G., 1987b, "Phenomenal Objects," Philosophical Perspectives 1: 513-526. Lycan, W.G., 1993, "MPP, RIP," Philosophical Perspectives 7: 411-428. Lycan, W.G., this conference, "Levels of Perceptual Representation". Lycan, W.G. and Shapiro, S., 1987, "Actuality and Essence," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 11: 434-477. McMichael, A., 1983, "A Problem for Actualism About Possible Worlds," Philosophical Review 92: 49-66. Menzel, C., 1990, "Actualism and Possible Worlds," Synthese 85: 355-89. Menzel, C., 1991, "The True Modal Logic," Journal of Philosophical Logic 20: 331-374. Parsons, T., 1980, Nonexistent Objects, New Haven, Yale. Plantinga, A., 1974, The Nature of Necessity, Oxford, Clarendon. Plantinga, A., 1976, "Actualism and Possible Worlds," Theoria 42: 139-60. Plantinga, A., 1985a, "Self-Profile," in J.E. Tomberlin and P. van Inwagen, eds., Alvin Plantinga, Dodrecht, D . Reidel.

9. PERCEPTION AND POSSIBILIA 115 Plantinga, A,, 1985b, "Replies," in J.E. Tomberlin and P. van Inwagen, eds., Alvin Plantinga, Dodrecht, D. Reidel. Plantinga, A., 1987, "Two Conceptions of Modality," Philosophical Perspectives 1: 189-232. Pollock, J.L., 1985, "Plantinga on Possible Worlds," in J.E. Tomberlin and P. van Inwagen, eds., Alvin Plantinga, Dodrecht, D. Reidel. Rapaport, W., 1978, "Meinongian Theories and a Russellian Paradox," NoCs 12: 153-180. Rapaport, W., 1979, "How to Make the World Fit our Language: An Essay in Meinongian Semantics," Grazer Philosophische Studien 14: 1-21. Salmon, N., 1981, Reference and Essence, Princeton, Princeton U.P. Salmon, N., 1987, "Existence," Philosophical Perspectives 1: 49-108. Stalnaker, R., 1968, "A Theory of Conditionals," in N. Rescher, ed., Studies in Logical Theoy, Oxford, Blackwell. Stalnaker, R., 1976, "Possible Worlds," No& 10: 65-75. Tomberlin, J.E., 1988, "Semantics, Psychological Attitudes, and Conceptual Role," Philosophical Studies 53: 205-226. Tomberlin, J.E., 1990, "Belief, Nominalism, and Quantification," Philosophical Perspectives 4: 573-579. Tomberlin, J.E., 1991, "Belief, Self-Ascription, and Ontology," in E. Villanueva, ed., Philosophical Issues 1, Atascadero, Ridgeview. Tomberlin, J.E., 1993, "Singular Terms, Quantification and Ontology," in E. Villanueva, ed., Philosophical Issues, 4, Atascadero, Ridgeview. Tomberlin, J.E., and McGuinness, F., 1994, "Troubles with Actualism," Philosophical Perspectives 8: 459-466. Tomberlin, J.E., forthcoming, "Ontology and Possibilia," Philosophical Studies. Van Inwagen, P., 1987, "Two Concepts of Possible Worlds," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 11: 185-213. Yagisawa, T., 1988, "Beyond Possible Worlds," Philosophical Studies 53: 175-204. Yagisawa, T., 1992, "Possible Worlds as Shifting Domains," Erkenntis 36: 83-101 Zalta, E., 1983, Abstract Objects, Dodrecht, D. Reidel. Zalta, E., 1988, Intensional Logic and the Metaphysics of Intentionality, Cambridge, MIT.

PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES, 7 Perception, 1995

Perceptual Experience Is a Many-Layered Thing Michael Tye

Like Bill Lycan, I am a strong representationalist about perceptual experience. I hold that the the phenomenal or 'what it is like' aspects of perceptual experiences (and indeed all experiences and feelings) can be understood in terms of their representational contents. Like Lycan, I believe that perceptual experience is layered. Like Lycan, I am not moved by any of the putative counter-examples adduced by Chris Peacocke (in his 1983). And like Lycan, I have a book coming out shortly with MIT Press, defending the representational approach to qualia.l (It too reads better when bought.) So, Lycan's heart, in my view, is unquestionably in the right place. I am less confident about the location of his other organs and limbs. Lycan's version of representationalism seems to me to place him under considerable strain. What he needs is a good massage (or a few days on the beach in Cancun) -something that will smooth out some of the tensions in his position. My primary aim in this reply is not to play the role of masseur but to explain why Lycan requires the services of one. ' S e e Tye 1995

1 The Layering Thesis According to the sense-datum theory, we do not really directly see ordinary, everyday physical objects at all. Instead, we only directly see the appearances these objects present to us, the colored expanses or sense-data that are supposedly present in our visual fields. By seeing sense-data, we thereby indirectly see tomatoes or tables or trees. So, sense-datum theorists are committed to the view that perceptual experience (broadly understood) is layered. The basic or foundational layer consists in seeing or sensing colored expanses, the upper layer consists in the conceptual representation of commonsense physical objects and their standard properties and relations. Seeing that the tomato is red consists in sensing a red, round, bulgy sense-datum and, on that basis, judging that there is a red tomato present. Lycan, if I understand him correctly, accepts this general, layered conception of perceptual experience with one major twist: there really are no sensedata. In Lycan's view, perceptual experience is representational all the way down. The bottom level consists in the sensory representation of colored shapes. This no more demands that, for each visual experience, there really be such a shape than does my hoping for eternal life demand that there be eternal life. So, sense-data, conceived of as real existents, are not required. Suppose, for example, it appears to me that there is a tomato before me. Where the sense-datum theorist would claim that I sense or directly see a red, round, bulgy sensedatum -a special sensory object that really exists whether or not the experience is veridicalLycan holds that it merely appears to me that there is a red, round bulgy shape before me. This is as much a case of representation as its appearing to me that a tomato is present. So, it too can go wrong. If, for example, I am hallucinating and nothing at all is present before my eyes, then, there really is no red, round shape out there any more than there really is a red, round tomato. Misrepresentation, then, is occurring at both levels. My perceptual experience acquires its distinctive phenomenal character not from the sensory qualities of any sensum I am apprehending, but from the fact that I am undergoing a sensory representation of a certain colored shape, whether or not the representation is accurate and the shape really exists. That, then, is the basic picture Lycan offers us. In my view, it is both too simple and too complex. It is too simple because it ignores some further layers of perceptual experience. It is too

complex because the basic layer, as Lycan conceives it, is not really different from the upper one. Let me begin with the latter charge. If perceptual experience does indeed include a layer of representation of colored shapes, then there should be possible cases of illusion at that level of representation. But what exactly makes for a case of illusion here? What exactly are the truth-conditions or correctness conditions at this level? Consider again the case of its appearing to me that there is a red, round bulgy shape present. This is correct if, and only if, there is a real, red, round bulgy shape. But what makes a shape real? And when it is real, what is the relevant shape a shape of? In the course of discussing the example of the strawberry-red after-image, Lycan says that the imager is in the grip of an illusion (p. 83). It merely seems to the imager that there is a red individual or object present. That impression, however, is false. Later, when Lycan addresses the example of the shapes seen in the peep box and Peacocke's example of the two trees, he comments

. . .not all the shapes etc. are actual. Perhaps some of the edges and lines are actual physical edges and lines. . . , but shapes such as Peacocke's larger and smaller tree shapes do not really exist; there are no two actual tree-shaped objects, one larger than the other, in the environment we as his protagonists are observing. (p. 95-6, my italics) For Lycan, then, a shape is real or actual if, and only if, some physical thing or object has that shape. So, the truth-onditions at the base level of perceptual representation advert to the shapes of physical objects or individuals (or their facing surfaces). In the case that it appears to me that there is red, round, bulgy shape ahead, my experience is accurate -things are as they appear- if, and only if, there is before me a physical object with a red, round, bulgy shape. Not only is this the account to which Lycan is committed by his various comments on shape but it also seems to me that there is no plausible alternative available to him. For example, it will not do to say that, in the above case, my experience is accurate just in case there is before me a red, round, bulgy region of space. There is no such region of space, even if I am viewing a ripe tomato and my experience is veridical. What is red, round, and bulgy is the tomato (or its facing surface). Unfortunately, Lycan is now in trouble. For one thing, perceptual representations no longer come in two wholly distinct layers, one concerned with ordinary, physical objects and their standard properties and the other concerned with colored shapes. Since the latter layer really represents the colors and shapes of physical objec.ts, it is

contained within the former layer. For another, Lycan's response to Peacocke's case of the two trees is now untenable. Let me explain.

2

The Two Trees

There are two trees beside the road that stretches from me to the horizon. The trees are of the same size, but one of them is twice as far away as the other. My visual experience of these trees is such that it appears to me that they are of the same size. Yet, there is a sense in which the nearer tree occupies more of my visual field than the one that is further away. Lycan proposes to account for these facts without the introduction of non-intentional qualia by recourse to the layering thesis. My experience represents that the one tree is of the same size as the the other tree. This is representation at the level of ordinary physical objects and their standard properties. But my experience also represents that a certain colored tree-shape is larger than another such shape. This is representation at a different level. Lycan comments: We do visually represent the trees, and as being of the same size etc., but we do that by representing colored shapes and relations between them. Some of the shapes -in particular those corresponding to the treesare represented as being larger shapes than others, as occluding others, and so forth. (p. 95) T h e problem with this proposal is as follows. For my experience to represent that the one tree shape is larger than the other, it must represent that there are two objects, both tree-shaped, one larger than the other. This is required by the account of the representation of colored shapes in the last section. But my experience also represents that those two very objects are trees of the same size. So, my experience represents that there are objects of both different and the same sizes. That, however, it surely cannot do. It will not help here to insist that there are two very different levels at work. Even leaving aside the point that the levels are not really distinct at all, how could my experience represent that there are two objects of different sizes, and thereby represent that they are of the same size? Nor does it help to qualify the account by saying that, at the alleged bottom level, the experience represents that there are two objects whose facing surfaces are of different sizes. For the experience also represents that those facing surfaces are of the same size.

There is also the further point that intuitively, the person who looks down the road is not in the grip of any sort of illusion. True, there is a sense in which the nearer tree occupies more of the visual field than the one that is further away, even though they appear to be the same size. But intuitively, no illusion exists here. This is not the case on Lycan's view, however. For his account of the above fact, as I am understanding it, is that the experience represents that there are two objects, one larger than the other; and that is a case of misrepresentation. In reality, the objects are of the same size. So, Lycan's response to Peacocke seems to me unconvincing. I remarked earlier that, in my view, his account of the way in which perceptual experience is layered is both too complex and too simple. I have tried to explain how it is too complex: layers Lycan introduces as distinct are not really distinct a t all (at least in the way he supposes). I want next to explain how his account is too simple. This will also enable me to suggest another response to Peacocke that is much more satisfying.

3 There are More Layers t o Perceptual Experience than are Dreamt of in Lycan's P hilosophy2 Perceptual experience, in my view, is a many-layered thing. This too is the view of most cognitive psychologists. Higher level vision begins, so the story normally goes, with the combining of local elements of the visual field into contours, regions, and/or surfaces. The first thing that can go wrong, then, in higher level vision is this process of grouping. The resulting impairment is known as apperceptive agnosia (in the narrow sense). It is typically brought about by damage to the occipital lobes and surrounding regions (by, e.g., carbon monoxide poisoning). Patients with this impairment often have roughly normal visual fields, so their perception of colour, brightness, and local contour is adequate. But they are strikingly impaired in the ability to recognise, match, or even copy simple shapes as well as more complicated figures.3 In general, they have great difficulty in performing any visual tasks that require combining information across local regions 2 0 r , without t h e poetic license: there are more levels t o perceptual experience t h a n are explicitly distinguished in Lycan's paper. 3 ~ o v e m e n tof shapes sometimes helps these patients t o identify them. See, for example, R. Efron 1968, p. 159.

FIGURE 1.

of the visual field.4 For example, when shown figure 1, one patient consistently read it as 7415.~ Evidently he was unable to see two parts of a line with a small gap as parts of a single line.6 The obvious conclusion is that there is a stage in normal vision in which representations of the local elements of the visual field are combined or grouped into an overall representation of the surfaces visible from the given point of view. This latter representation, which specifies lines, edges, ridges, and other surface features, is a vital foundation for nearly all higher level visual processing. Experiments performed by Stephen Kosslyn (1980) and others suggest that it occurs in a medium that is shared with imagery and that it has the structure of a grouped array like Marr's 2 ; - ~ sketch (Marr 1982), the cells of which are devoted to specific lines of sight relative to the viewer (with different cells devoted to different line^).^ As such, it does contain information about local features of the visual field too, e.g., colour, texture, and orientation. The most fundamental level of representation in visual experience, then, consists in what is represented in the array prior to any grouping. The array itself can be thought of as being like a large transparent matrix which is placed over the visual field.* Each cell in the 4They do better a t identifying real objects (e.g., toothbrushes, safety pins), than simple shapes. However, their improved performance here is based on anferences from clues provided by color, texture, etc. 'The patient made this identification by tracing around t h e figure with movements of his hand and relying on local continuity. See here