Perceiving the World

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Perceiving the World

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Perceiving the World Edited by

Bence Nanay

2010

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2010 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Perceiving the world / edited by Bence Nanay. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-538619-6 1. Perception (Philosophy) 2. Philosophy. I. Nanay, Bence. B828.45.P47 2010 121¢.34—dc22 2009042125

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

To Hanna Lucia Nanay and Adlhardt Arányi Gitkó Who learned and unlearned how to perceive, respectively, while this volume was being edited.


Acknowledgments

Many of the chapters in this volume were presented at the Syracuse Philosophy Annual Conference (SPAWN) in August 2008 at Syracuse University. Putting on this conference was a major organizational task, and I don’t think I could have done it without the help of Mark Barber, Paul Prescott, Sue McDougal, Lisa Farnsworth, and Bob Van Gulick. The conference was supported by the Alice Hooker Fund and the Department of Philosophy at Syracuse University. The papers at the conference had assigned commentators: Bill Brewer, Alex Byrne, David Chalmers, Christopher Hill, Frances Egan, Brian McLaughlin, Paul Snowdon, Scott Sturgeon, and Charles Travis. Some of these commentaries were almost as long as the papers themselves, and I believe that they greatly improved the papers in the volume. The reader can try to guess which paper in the volume was commented by whom. I am also grateful for the other participants of the workshop: Fiona MacPherson, Nico Silins, Larry Hardin, Cheryl Chen, Matthew Kennedy, Geoffrey Lee, Janet Levin, Sofia Miguens, John Morrison, Alyssa Ney, Brad Thompson, Wayne Wu, André Gallois, Kevin Edwards, David Sanford, and Susanna Schellenberg. I am grateful for the many people at Oxford University Press who helped us with this volume, especially Peter Ohlin, Brian Desmond, Molly Wagener, and Lucy Randall. Finally, my very special thanks to Felicitas Becker.


Contents

Contributors, xi

1 Philosophy of Perception: The New Wave, 3 Bence Nanay

2 Color Relationalism and Color Phenomenology, 13 Jonathan Cohen

3 Perceptual Recognition and the Feeling of Presence, 33 Jérôme Dokic

4 What We See: The Texture of Conscious Experience, 54 Fred Dretske

5 Projectivism without Error, 68 Andy Egan

6 An Externalist’s Guide to Inner Experience, 97 Benj Hellie

7 The Normative Nature of Perceptual Experience, 146 Sean D. Kelly

8 What’s in a Look?, 160 M. G. F. Martin

9 How Things Look (and What Things Look That Way), 226 Mohan Matthen

10 Why Explain Visual Experience in Terms of Content?, 254 Adam Pautz

11 When Is Perception Conscious?, 310 Jesse J. Prinz

12 Do Experiences Have Contents?, 333 Susanna Siegel Index, 369


Contributors

Jonathan Cohen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego.

College London and Mills Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.

Jérôme Dokic is Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and a member of Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris.

Mohan Matthen is Professor of Philosophy and Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto.

Fred Dretske is Senior Research Scholar at Duke University. Andy Egan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University.

Bence Nanay is BOF Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Antwerp and Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge.

Benj Hellie is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto.

Adam Pautz is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin.

Sean D. Kelly is Professor of Philosophy, Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Co-Chair of the Committee on Mind, Brain, and Behavior at Harvard University.

Jesse J. Prinz is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. Susanna Siegel is Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University.

M. G. F. Martin is Professor of Philosophy at University

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1 Philosophy of Perception The New Wave Bence Nanay

I INTRODUCTION Peter Strawson famously wrote more than thirty years ago that “a philosopher’s views on [perception] are a key to his theory of knowledge and to his metaphysics” (1979, 41). At that time, this statement probably came across as quite provocative inasmuch as it made perception sound more important than it was assumed to be. Now, thirty years later, Strawson’s claim sounds too weak. A philosopher’s views on perception are as important as her theory of knowledge or her metaphysics. Some may even be tempted to say that a philosopher’s views on epistemology or metaphysics are a key to her theory of perception. Perception is no longer seen as an inferior subfield of philosophy that may or may not help us to understand the philosophical questions that are supposedly more fundamental. Perception, at present, is as central a philosophical subfield as it gets. This change is not only a merely quantitative one. It is true that more philosophers are working on perception and that their output is more sophisticated and nuanced than ever before, but this is not the whole story. What is more relevant, and more interesting from a philosophical point of view, is that the nature of the questions that are being asked about perception has also changed. The aim of this volume is to give a representative sample of this new wave of philosophy of perception. And the aim of this introduction is to outline the questions contemporary philosophers of perception are concerned with and how they differ from the “old” philosophical questions about perception.

II PHILOSOPHY OF PERCEPTION AND OTHER BRANCHES OF PHILOSOPHY One salient fact about the questions contemporary philosophers of perception are concerned with is that they have intricate links to other subfields 3

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of philosophy: epistemology, philosophy of language, metaphysics, aesthetics, even value theory. To put it somewhat provocatively, philosophy of perception no longer seems to be merely a subfield of philosophy of mind. Many of the chapters in this volume, for example, rely more heavily on the conceptual apparatus of other subfields of philosophy than that of general philosophy of mind. Some of the most influential philosophical questions about perception are located firmly within philosophy of mind: What is the difference between perception and belief? What is the difference between perception and sensation? What is the relation between perception and action? When is perception successful? What is the difference between perception and mental imagery? What are the differences among the different sense modalities? Answering these questions has been possible, indeed desirable, within the boundaries of philosophy of mind. These questions are, of course, still with us. But there are many more, ones that could not even be raised without relying on the conceptual apparatus of subdisciplines other than philosophy of mind. Many of the questions the chapters of this volume ask are of this kind. One such question is whether and in what sense perception is normative. Two of the chapters in this volume argue for the seemingly surprising claim that the concept of normativity plays a crucial role in understanding perception. Sean Kelly uses phenomenological considerations about shape and size constancy to argue that perception is essentially normative. Mohan Matthen’s starting point is also perceptual constancy, and he also pays attention to visual phenomenology, but his concern is mainly the question of how constancy can be explained with the help of the simple fact that different properties are attributed to different parts of the visual scene while preserving the normative character of perceptual content. The claim that there is something normative about perception is not new (see Koffka 1935; Gibson 1979, 138–140; see especially the summary in Hatfield 1990), but it has largely been a neglected view in the last couple of decades. Kelly’s and Matthen’s chapters, taken in tandem, may put the concept of normativity back into mainstream philosophical analyses of perception. Andy Egan argues for a version of projectivism, according to which at least some properties that we perceive objects as having are our projections. This general idea is a very old one that goes back at least to David Hume, but Egan’s way of arguing for a particular version of projectivism uses a general framework of self-locating/de se propositions (Quine 1969; Lewis 1979; Chisholm 1982), which he first used in the context of philosophy of language and epistemology (Egan 2006). Egan’s conclusion about the projectivist character of some of the properties we perceive objects as having shares a number of features with claims he makes elsewhere about seemingly distant philosophical subfields, such as aesthetics (Egan forthcoming). Jonathan Cohen defends a somewhat similar claim, that colors are constituted in terms of relations between subjects and objects, and his

Philosophy of Perception: The New Wave

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argument turns on a sophisticated metaphysical analysis of the nature of properties and dispositions (see also Cohen 2009). Epistemology has always had special ties to philosophy of perception, traditionally because of the role perception is supposed to play in justification. This link between perception and knowledge is at least partly due to the works of Fred Dretske over the decades (starting with Dretske 1969). Dretske’s contribution to this volume, however, turns the established connection between perception and knowledge on its head. He is interested in what we perceive, and some of the considerations he uses in order to answer this question are about what we know (see also Dretske 2006, 2007). This turn demonstrates neatly the change of emphasis in recent philosophical studies of perception. Perception is no longer interesting inasmuch as it can tell us something about knowledge (like the Strawson quote above seems to suggest). Quite the contrary: We can use epistemological considerations to answer intrinsically interesting questions about perception.

III PERCEPTION: REPRESENTATION OR RELATION? But why is it that, of all the subdisciplines of philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception receives all this special attention? What makes perception special? Three potential distinctive features come to mind. First, perception can be analyzed without talking about language or other higher cognitive apparatus, maybe even without talking about beliefs; hence, one possible strategy for understanding the mind would be to explain the relatively simple perceptual processes that human and nonhuman animals share and then move on to complex, exclusively human mental phenomena, such as language or higher order beliefs (this strategy is not so new; see Quine 1974). Second, we have more empirical data on perception than on any other aspects of how the mind works. But the third potential distinctive feature seems to be the most influential: Perception is our window to the world—it is the mental faculty that puts us into direct contact with the world. Much of recent philosophy of perception aims to do justice to this special role that perception plays in our mental life. And this brings us to a central, arguably the most central, question in contemporary philosophy of perception: whether, and in what sense, perceptual states could be considered to be representations. Philosophers and psychologists often talk about perceptual states as representations. Traditionally, one of the most important problems in philosophy of perception has been to explain in what way perceptual states represent the world. This seems to be a very natural framework to use if we want to talk about perception. Some of our mental states are representational. Most of our emotions are about something: We are afraid of a lion, for example. The same goes for beliefs, desires, and imaginings. It seems natural, then,

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to suppose that perceptual states are also representations: When you see a cat, your perceptual state is about this cat—it refers to this cat. To understand perception is to understand in what way perception represents the world. Note that this framework emphasizes the continuity between philosophy of perception and other subdisciplines of philosophy of mind. There is a problem many (maybe even most) branches of philosophy of mind have in common: explaining how mental states represent the world. Philosophy of perception is not an exception: Its concern is to explain how perceptual states represent the world. And many (indeed, most) classic debates in philosophy of perception emerge naturally if we accept this conceptual framework. Furthermore, many classic debates in philosophy of perception have presupposed this conceptual framework, as I try to demonstrate briefly here. If we reject the assumption that perceptual states are representations, these debates will look very different. Talking about perceptual representations has some important explanatory advantages. Two of the most important (and oldest) philosophical questions about perception have been (a) what is the difference between perception and sensation, and (b) what is the difference between perception and belief. According to the standard picture of perceptual processing, mere sensation, that is, the stimulation of our sensory organs, at some point in the processing gives rise to perception, and perception then (sometimes) gives rise to beliefs. In order to know what perception is, we need to have a way of delineating it from sensation, on one hand, and from belief, on the other. If we think of perceptual states as representations, then there is a (relatively) simple way of drawing these lines. Perception is representational, but sensation is (arguably) not. The stimulation of our sensory organs (of the retina, e.g.) does not have content: It does not represent anything (although it may be a reliable indicator, like the number of tree rings is a reliable indicator of the tree’s age). But our perceptual states represent the perceived object as having certain properties. So a clear division could be drawn between sensation, on the one hand, which does not have content, and perception and belief, on the other, which do. And as perception and belief supposedly represent the world differently, this representational difference between the two kinds of mental states may be used to draw the line between perception and belief. There are a number of proposals about the differences between the way beliefs and perceptual states represent the world, and these proposals, taken together, cover a large proportion of the traditional longstanding debates of philosophy of perception. One popular suggestion is that while perception represents the world in a very fine-grained manner, beliefs do so in a rather coarse-grained fashion—an image is worth a thousand words, as they say. This suggestion has been criticized because the content of beliefs can be very fine-grained, and the content of some of our perceptual states is very coarse-grained indeed (see Dennett 1996).


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Another interesting potential difference concerns the indexicality of these representations. Some of our beliefs have indexical content, which means that the correctness of the belief depends on the context of the tokening of this belief. My belief that today is Sunday or that I am now in Vancouver has indexical content because the correctness of these beliefs depends on when (and where) I have these beliefs. Some other beliefs have nonindexical contents: The belief that Paris is the capital of France does not have indexical content; the correctness of this belief does not depend on when or where you have this belief or even who has this belief. Thus, some but not all beliefs have indexical content. But one could argue that the content of perceptual states is always indexical. If you see a cat, you always see it as being in front of you or on your left or on your right— as being localized in your egocentric space. If Bill is sitting across the room from you, he may also see the same cat, but if you see the cat as being on your right, he sees it as being on his left. Thus, although Bill and you see the same cat, the content of his perceptual state is different from that of yours. The content of one’s perceptual state, the argument goes, is always indexed to the person who has this perceptual state (see Peacocke 1986, 1989, 1992a; see also Evans 1982; Noë 2004; Matthen 2005 on the concept of egocentric space). A third potential difference between perceptual content and belief content is that while the content of one’s beliefs is conceptual, that is, could not have the content it has if one did not master certain concepts, the same may not be true of perceptual states. You could not have a belief that Paris is the capital of France if you did not master the concept of capital. But, arguably, you could perceive a cat without mastering any concept at all, including that of cat. You may not see the cat as a cat (which may require some conceptual apparatus), but you see the cat nonetheless (see, e.g., in favor: Evans 1982; Crane 1992; Bermúdez 1995, 2007; Peacocke 1992b, 2001; Cussins 1993; Heck 2000; against: McDowell 1994; Noë 2004; for a good summary, see Byrne 2005). A fourth proposal is the following. The content of your belief that Paris is the capital of France is sensitive to the content of your other beliefs. In fact, you would not be able to have this belief unless you had some other beliefs, such as the one that Paris is a city. The same is not true of perceptual states. Our perceptual states can be very insensitive to our beliefs. We know that the two lines in the Müller-Lyer illusion figure are of the same length, but we can’t help perceiving them as having different lengths. Finally, a potential difference between the contents of beliefs and of perceptual states is the nature of represented properties. Beliefs can represent their objects as having pretty much any property. Perceptual states, in contrast, represent their objects as having a limited set of properties, as having a certain shape, size, color, and spatial location. The list may be extended, but it is unlikely to encompass all properties. You do not perceptually represent the object in front of you as a laptop made in 2006 in

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Malaysia. The question, then, is which properties are represented in perception and which ones are not (Siegel 2006). An important candidate for a perceptually represented property is the property of affording a certain action. It has been argued that we perceive objects as affording a certain action: We do not just infer that they do; we literally perceive this property (Nanay forthcoming, see also Gibson 1966, 1979). These various ways of differentiating between perceptual and nonperceptual representations and their philosophical consequences cover most of the terrain of “traditional” philosophy of perception. In fact, most of the central debates of “traditional” philosophy of perception can be rephrased as debates about the nature of perceptual representation. But what happens if we question the assumption that perceptual states are representations? Although considering perceptual states to be representations may be a natural way of describing our perceptual system, and this assumption dominated both the philosophical and the psychological research on perception, some have recently questioned this entire framework. The proposal is that perceptual states are not representations: Perception is a genuine relation between the perceiver and the perceived object (and not between the agent and some abstract entity called “perceptual content”). This recent antirepresentationalist view of perception is often called the “relational view of perception” (the terminology comes from Campbell 2002). It is important to note that if we reject the representational view of perception, the classic debates of philosophy of perception does not go away. Many of these debates can be easily rephrased in nonrepresentational language (e.g., the question about what properties we perceive objects as having; see Siegel 2006). But some other debates seem more difficult to transplant into the relationalist framework. The representational versus relational debate is one of the most important and influential debates in philosophy of perception today (on the relational side, see Snowdon 1990; Martin 2004, 2006, forthcoming; Travis 2004; Brewer 2006, forthcoming; Fish 2009; Hellie 2007; on the representational side, see Chalmers 2004; Byrne 2001; Byrne and Logue 2008; Siegel 2010; Pautz forthcoming; Tye 2007; see also Crane 2006 for a good summary). Unsurprisingly, no less than four chapters in this volume aim to contribute to this debate, mainly by clarifying its dialectics. Susanna Siegel’s chapter gives a clear account of the basic commitments of the representational view and argues that, to genuinely depart from it, the relational view has to take on a radical and implausible form. Standard versions of the relational view, she argues, are hard-pressed to deny that experiences have contents. Adam Pautz gives a thorough analysis of various possible arguments in the representational–relational debate, for and against (see also Pautz forthcoming). He concludes that none of the alleged knockdown arguments are conclusive, but we have some (although maybe not fully decisive) reason to prefer the representational


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alternative. Together, these two chapters form a very good introduction to debates concerning the status of perceptual states as representations. Benj Hellie’s chapter does not argue for the relational view (he does so in Hellie 2007) but rather examines how we can analyze our inner experiences if we reject representationalism. Mike Martin explores various ways of talking about how things look without endorsing the representational view. They both attempt to carve out a way of examining some of the old problems of philosophy of perception while discarding the supposition that perceptual states are representations. These two chapters indicate an important possible direction for philosophy of perception: If we reject the idea that perceptual states are representations, this does not solve all the problems of perception, nor does it make them become irrelevant. One big challenge for the antirepresentationalist camp is to create a conceptual apparatus for raising some of the old questions about perception while doing justice to the intuition that perception provides our direct contact with the world. Hellie’s and Martin’s chapters in this volume take some steps to this direction.

IV TAKING THE EMPIRICAL SCIENCES SERIOUSLY So far, I have focused on how the questions philosophers ask about perception have changed. But it is important to note that the way these questions are addressed has also changed considerably. An important feature of the new way of arguing about philosophical questions concerning perception is that paying close attention to empirical findings about perception seems to be the norm, rather than the exception. What this means is not that philosophy of perception has became theoretical vision science. Rather, the philosophical arguments about perception are constrained by, and sometimes supported by, empirical evidence. Even in the case of some of the most genuinely philosophical debates, such as the representationalism versus relationalism debate, many of the arguments use empirical findings as premises. The empirical findings used by the authors of this volume are very diverse. Jérôme Dokic uses mainly cognitive neuropsychological evidence about patients with Capgras’s and Fregoli’s syndromes in his treatment of the questions of whether and in what sense the recognition of people is perceptual and in his argument for his positive claim that the recognition of people involves a nonsensory component: the feeling of presence. Jesse Prinz, in contrast, uses pretty much all subfields of psychology and neuroscience to decide the age-old question about what makes perception conscious. His answer is: attention. One important feature of Prinz’s contribution is that, based on neuroimaging and behavioral evidence, he sketches an empirically plausible philosophical account of attention. Given that the concept of attention seems to play an increasingly important role in philosophy of perception, Prinz’s theory provides a valuable

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contribution to the growing body of research on the relation between attention and consciousness (see also Huang and Pashler 2007; Koch and Tsuchiya 2007; Nanay 2010; Mole forthcoming; Prinz forthcoming). It is not at all surprising that philosophy of perception is the field where empirical considerations are used most widely in philosophical arguments. Vision science is in many ways the most advanced branch of cognitive science, and as a result, it seems easier to bring empirical considerations into philosophical arguments about perception than into arguments about beliefs or desires. Yet, the willingness to engage with the empirical literature and to learn from it is an important change in the ways philosophical arguments about perception are being treated, and we can only hope that the rest of philosophy of mind will follow suit sooner or later.

REFERENCES Bermúdez, José Luis. 1995. Nonconceptual Content: From Perceptual Experience to Subpersonal Computational States. Mind and Language 10: 333–369. Bermúdez, José Luis. 2007. What is at stake in the debate on nonconceptual content? Philosophical Perspectives 21: 55–72. Brewer, Bill. 2006. Perception and Content. European Journal of Philosophy 14: 165–181. Brewer, Bill. Forthcoming. Perception and Its Objects. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Byrne, Alex. 2001. Intentionalism Defended. Philosophical Review 110: 199–240. Byrne, Alex. 2005. Perception and Conceptual Content. In Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, ed. E. Sosa and M. Steup, 231–250. London: Blackwell. Byrne, Alex, and Heather Logue. 2008. Either/Or. In Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge, ed. Adrian Haddock and Fiona MacPherson, 57–94. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Campbell, John. 2002. Reference and Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chalmers, David J. 2004. The Representational Character of Experience. In The Future for Philosophy, ed. Brian Leiter, 153–181. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chisholm, R. 1982. The First Person: An Essay on Reference and Intentionality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cohen, Jonathan. 2009. The Red and the Real: An Essay on Color Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crane, Tim. 1992. The Nonconceptual Content of Experience. In The Contents of Experience, ed. Tim Crane, 136–157. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crane, Tim. 2006. Is There a Perceptual Relation? In Perceptual Experience, ed. T. Gendler and J. Hawthorne, 126–146. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cussins, Adrian. 1993. Nonconceptual Content and the Elimination of Misconceived Composites. Mind and Language 8: 234–252. Dennett, Daniel C. 1996. Seeing Is Believing: Or Is It? In Perception, ed. K. Akins, 158–172. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dretske, Fred. 1969. Seeing and Knowing. London: Routledge. Dretske, Fred. 2006. Perception without Awareness. In Perceptual Experience, ed. T. Gendler and J. Hawthorne, 147–180. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


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Dretske, Fred. 2007. What Change Blindness Teaches about Consciousness. Philosophical Perspectives 21: 215–230. Egan, Andy. 2006. Secondary Qualities and Self-Location. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72: 97–119. Egan, Andy. Forthcoming. De Gustibus Non Disputandum Est (At Least, Not Always). In Disagreement, ed. R. Feldman and T. Warfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Evans, Gareth. 1982. The Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fish, William. 2009. Perception, Hallucination, and Illusion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson, J. J. 1966. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gibson, J. J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Hatfield, Gary. 1990. The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Bradford Books. Heck, Richard G., Jr. 2000. Nonconceptual Content and the “Space of Reasons.” Philosophical Review 109: 483–524. Hellie, Benj. 2007. Factive Phenomenal Characters. Philosophical Perspectives 21: 259–306. Huang, L., and Pashler, H. 2007. A Boolean Map Theory of Visual Attention. Psychological Review 114: 599–631. Koch, C., and Tsuchiya, N. 2007. Attention and Consciousness: Two Distinct Brain Processes. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11: 16–22 Koffka, Kurt. 1935. Principles of Gestalt Psychology. New York: Harcourt Brace. Lewis, David. 1979. Attitudes De Dicto and De Se. Philosophical Review 88: 513–543. Lewis, David. 1980. Veridical Hallucination and Prosthetic Vision. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 58: 239–249. Matthen, Mohan. 2005. Seeing, Doing and Knowing: A Philosophical Theory of Sense Perception. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, M. G. F. 2004. The Limits of Self-Awareness. Philosophical Studies 120: 37–89. Martin, M. G. F. 2006. On Being Alienated. In Perceptual Experience, ed. T. Gendler and J. Hawthorne, 354–410. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, M. G. F. Forthcoming. Uncovering Appearances. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McDowell, John. 1994. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mole, Christopher, ed. Forthcoming. Attention. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nanay, Bence. 2010. Attention and Perceptual Content. Analysis 70: in press. Nanay, Bence. Forthcoming. Action-oriented Perception. European Journal of Philosophy. Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pautz, Adam. Forthcoming. Perceptual Consciousness. London: Routledge. Peacocke, Christopher. 1986. Analogue Content. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 60 (Supplement): 1–17. Peacocke, Christopher. 1989. Perceptual Content. In Themes from Kaplan, ed. J. Almong, J. Perry, and H. Wettstein, 297–329. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peacocke, Christopher. 1992a. A Study of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Peacocke, Christopher. 1992b. Scenarios, Concepts and Perception. In The Contents of Experience, ed. Tim Crane, 105–135. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peacocke, Christopher. 2001. Does Perception Have a Nonconceptual Content? Journal of Philosophy 98: 239–264. Prinz, Jesse J. Forthcoming. The Conscious Brain. New York: Oxford University Press. Quine, W. V. 1969. Propositional Objects. In his Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, 139–160. New York: Columbia University Press. Quine, W. V. 1974. The Roots of Reference. La Salle, IL: Open Court. Siegel, Susanna. 2006. Which Properties Are Represented in Perception? In Perceptual Experience, ed. T. Gendler and J. Hawthorne, 481–503. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Siegel, Susanna. 2010. The Contents of Visual Experience. New York: Oxford University Press Snowdon, Paul. 1990. The Objects of Perceptual Experience. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 64: 121–150. Strawson, P. F. 1979. Perception and Its Objects. In Perception and Identity: Essays Presented to A. J. Ayer with His Replies to Them, ed. G. F. MacDonald, 41–60. London: Macmillan. Travis, Charles. 2004. The Silence of the Senses. Mind 113: 57–94. Tye, Michael. 2007. Intentionalism and the Problem of No Common Content. Philosophical Perspectives 21: 495–541.

2 Color Relationalism and Color Phenomenology Jonathan Cohen

Color relationalism is the view that colors are constituted in terms of relations between subjects and objects. The most historically important form of color relationalism is the classic dispositionalist view, according to which, for example, red is the disposition to look red to standard observers in standard conditions (mutatis mutandis for other colors).1 However, it has become increasingly apparent in recent years that a commitment to the relationality of colors bears interest that goes beyond dispositionalism (Cohen 2004; Matthen, 1999, 2001, 2005; Thompson, 1995).2 Accordingly, it is an important project for those interested in the metaphysics of color to sort through and assess different forms of color relationalism. There is, however, a powerful and general cluster of objections that has been thought by many to amount to a decisive refutation of any and all forms of color relationalism. Although this idea has been developed in a number of ways, the basic thought is that relationalism—qua theory of The material in this chapter overlaps with parts of chapter 6 of my book The Red and the Real: An Essay on Color Ontology (2009). I am grateful to members of the audience at the 2008 Syracuse Philosophy Annual Workshop and Network (SPAWN), where a version of this chapter was presented, and particularly to Bence Nanay, David Chalmers, André Gallois, and Brian McLaughlin, for extremely useful criticism and advice that has improved the chapter considerably. 1. Many find versions of this position in the writings of Galileo, Boyle, Newton, and Locke. More recently, forms of dispositionalism have been defended by McGinn (1983), Peacocke (1984), and Johnston (1992). Note that not all accounts of color that invoke dispositions count as relationalist in my sense. For example, the “physicalist” accounts of Byrne and Hilbert (1997, 2003) and Tye (1995, 2000) treat colors as dispositions to affect (not subjects but) light; such accounts are not forms of relationalism since they deny that colors are constituted in terms of relations to subjects. 2. For the record, I favor a form of relationalism according to which colors are identical to the functional roles of disposing their bearers to look certain ways to certain subjects in certain conditions. For example, I hold that red for S in C is the functional role of disposing its bearers to look red to S in C, green for S in C is the functional role of disposing its bearers to look green to S in C, and so on. For defense of this view, see Cohen (2009).

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color—is at odds with the manifest evidence of color phenomenology, and that this clash between theory and data should be resolved by giving up the theory.3 My aim in this chapter will be to defend relationalism from three versions of this phenomenological objection. I’ll begin, in section 1, by responding to the accusation that ordinary color phenomenology presents colors as non-relational and thereby clashes with color relationalism. In section 2, I’ll consider a worry to the effect that, were color relationalism true, colors would be invisible—hence, that there would be no color phenomenology at all. Finally, in section 3, I’ll consider the objection that color relationalism clashes with the evidence of phenomenology by predicting that our color experiences should be partly about experience itself. I’ll conclude that none of these objections ultimately provides a compelling reason for giving up color relationalism.

1. DO COLORS LOOK RELATIONAL? Of course, color relationalism is an extremely controversial thesis about the metaphysics of color. However, a surprisingly wide range of writers with a surprisingly wide range of other commitments have been sympathetic to the allegation that color relationalism fails on phenomenological grounds. Specifically, many have held that—with notable exceptions, such as the colors of holograms and highly glossy materials—ordinary phenomenology presents colors as non-relational properties of their bearers.4 Thus,

3. Most of the objections of this type that occur in the literature are directed against dispositionalist theories; this is unsurprising, since the elaboration and defense of non-dispositionalist forms of relationalism are relatively recent developments. However, it seems clear that many of the arguments I’ll be considering are applicable to forms of relationalism other than dispositionalism. It is my goal in this chapter to defend relationalism generally speaking, rather than this or that particular form of relationalism; consequently, while it will sometimes smooth exposition for me to treat the objections in the anti-dispositionalist form in which they come, I’ll also comment on the potential extension of my defenses to other forms of relationalism as well. I should also mention that there is a second type of more theoretical but still broadly phenomenal objection to relationalism that I won’t consider in this chapter. This second type of objection alleges not that color relationalism conflicts with the phenomenological data, but rather that relationalism cannot be combined with the best metaphysical theories of color phenomenology without leading to incoherence or infinite regress (for a classic articulation of this objection, see Boghossian and Velleman 1989). I develop and respond to this concern in Cohen (2009, ch. 6). 4. See Dancy (1986, 181), Armstrong (1987, 36), Boghossian and Velleman (1989, 85), Averill (1992, 556), Johnston (1992, 226–227), Yablo (1995, 489–490), McGinn (1996, 543–544), Tye (2000, 152–153), Chalmers (2006, 56), Gibbard (2006, 10), Averill and Hazlett (forthcoming), and Johnston (2002, ch. 5). As formulated here and in the sources cited, this objection presupposes that color phenomenology has an intentional content. I am assuming that this presupposition is correct. However, the objection does not presuppose (and I won’t presuppose) that color phenomenology can be reductively understood in terms of its intentional content, or that it supervenes on its intentional content.

Color Relationalism and Color Phenomenology

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whatever successes they have along other dimensions, relationalist accounts are accused of representing colors in a (relational) way that unacceptably clashes with the phenomenology of color. Colin McGinn puts this anti-relationalist worry eloquently (and in a refreshingly explicit way) in the following passage: . . . when we see an object as red we see it as having a simple, monadic, local property of the object’s surface. The color is perceived as intrinsic to the object, in much the way that shape and size are perceived as intrinsic. No relation to perceivers enters into how the color appears; the color is perceived as wholly on the object, not as somehow straddling the gap between it and the perceiver. Being seen as red is not like being seen as larger than or to the left of. The “color envelope” that delimits an object stops at the object’s spatial boundaries. So if color were inherently relational, . . . then perception of color would misrepresent its structure—we would be under the illusion that a relational property is nonrelational. Contraposing, given that perception is generally veridical as to color, colors are not relational. (1996, 541–542)5

However, the phenomenological objection under consideration raises an important puzzle, some answer to which is presupposed by all of the authors mentioned above, and whose solution is necessary before we can properly assess the objection: How, if at all, could phenomenology represent the relationality or non-relationality of color properties in the first place?6

5. In the course of (usefully) attempting to elaborate this complaint, McGinn fleshes out the worry by reference to four distinct features: simplicity, monadicity, locality, and intrinsicness. But it seems to me that the challenges posed by some of these features are more serious than those posed by others. For example, the claim that phenomenology is at odds with various forms of color relationalism in representing colors as simple seems false; on the contrary, phenomenology represents (surface) colors as having at least the dimensions of hue, saturation, and lightness (Clark 1993), and perhaps more. (It is a topic of ongoing controversy how many dimensions are needed to encode color appearances.) On the other hand, if phenomenology represents colors as monadic, so do dispositionalism and other forms of color relationalism. These theories claim that colors are constituted in terms of relations to various relata, but those relata have determinate values and so are not open variables in need of saturation by individuals. Just as to the left of is non-monadic and to the left of Sally is not, so, too, disposed to look x to y in z is non-monadic (if x, y, and z are variables), but disposed to look red to S in C is non-monadic (if S and C pick out determinate individuals/viewing conditions relative to a context). I take the most serious of McGinn’s worries here to concern the allegation that phenomenology does, and relationalism does not, represent colors as intrinsic (given, perhaps, the view that intrinsic properties are those shared by perfect duplicates [Lewis 1986]). Accordingly, this is the form of the objection I am concerned with in what follows. Note also that leading “physicalist” theories of color such as those of Byrne and Hilbert (1997, 2003) and Tye (1995, 2000) that treat colors as dispositions to affect light—theories that do not count as relational for present purposes (see note 1)—also have the consequence that colors fail to be intrinsic in Lewis’s sense, and so face versions of the present objection. 6. One might hope to answer this puzzle by accepting the thesis Mark Johnston (1992) calls “Revelation”: “The intrinsic nature of canary yellow is fully revealed by a standard visual experience as of a canary yellow thing” (223). This principle would have it that undergoing color phenomenology brings with it concomitant knowledge of the intrinsic nature of the colors it represents. (Note

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To see the force of the question we are pondering, notice that corresponding claims about the phenomenology of non-color properties can seem somewhat bizarre. For some non-color properties (e.g., being water, being square, or being a table), it just seems implausible that phenomenology represents their constitution (a fortiori, their relationality or non-relationality) at all. On the contrary, discerning the essences of such properties seems to require much more than simple phenomenology. The additional information needed might be empirical (as in the case of natural kind properties), mathematical (as in the case of shape properties), psychological (as, arguably, in the case of artifact properties), or something else; but in no such case would the simple enjoyment of ordinary phenomenology suffice.7 The relevance of phenomenology to discerning essence is somewhat less clear for paradigmatic relational properties, such as velocity properties.8 However, I take it that it is our best theories of the world, and not phenomenology, that tells us that each velocity property is constituted in terms of a relation to a reference frame. (Were this not true, it would be hard to explain how nonrelativistic conceptions of velocity properties could have had the long scientific life that they did; after all, Newton presumably enjoyed motion phenomenology roughly as often as Einstein did.) One might conclude from these considerations either that (i) phenomenology is entirely non-committal about the relationality or non-relationality of velocity properties or else that (ii) phenomenology represents velocity properties as non-relational but we take phenomenology to be revisable in the light of further (broadly empirical) inquiry. On either reading of the situation with velocity properties, however, it does seem clear that there is some story that needs to be told about when and how phenomenology can have any bearing on questions about property

that Johnston ultimately denies Revelation, although he takes it as a regulative constraint that is part of commonsense conceptions of color, and should be respected as much as possible. Proponents of Revelation-like views include Russell [1912, 47], Strawson [1978, 224], Campbell [1993, 178ff.], and arguably Moore [1903, 7, 10].) Unfortunately, this is an unsatisfactory response to our puzzle. For one thing, nothing has yet been said to motivate Revelation, and it would seem that motivating this thesis is at least as challenging as answering the original puzzle. Second, knowledge of the intrinsic nature of a property may not reveal whether that property is constituted in terms of a relation to subjects (although this turns on one’s theory of intrinsicness). But if not, then even the truth of Revelation would do nothing to explain how undergoing color phenomenology would confer upon oneevidence about the relationality of colors. 7. While some have maintained that phenomenology exhausts the essence of certain kinds of phenomenal properties such as being in pain (Kripke 1980), this conclusion won’t generalize to color properties unless, implausibly, the latter are construed as phenomenal as well. 8. In saying that velocity properties are relational, I mean that velocity properties are constituted in terms of relation to reference frames—something I take to be an uncontroversial lesson of twentieth-century physics. Note that this claim is prima facie compatible with (but by no means makes compulsory) the view, defended by Tooley (1988), that velocities are intrinsic to individual instants.


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constitution in general, and on questions about the relationality or nonrelationality of the properties it represents in particular. As a way of approaching an answer to this question, let us continue to reflect on the case of velocity properties to see what lessons can be gleaned. If, as I have suggested, phenomenology is not the route to discerning the relationality of velocities, then what is? While the answer surely involves a complicated mix of empirical observation and ratiocination, one ingredient of this mix, in particular, strikes me as highly relevant to the answer: comparison. A strong clue to the relationality of velocities—and a clue that Einstein (1905) relies on crucially in arguing for the relationality of motion properties—is that their exemplification by a particular object depends on variations in the reference frame chosen. That is, comparison reveals that the velocity of x with respect to frame F1 is different from the velocity of x with respect to frame F2. Now, it must be emphasized that this sort of evidence is only one piece of a complex chain of reasoning leading to the conclusion that velocity properties are relational; in particular, this evidence won’t establish that conclusion unless we can rule out (by some combination of evidence and ratiocination) the alternative hypothesis that one or the other otherwise incompatible representations of x’s velocity (one representation in F1, the other in F2) is erroneous. But if that alternative hypothesis is rejected, then comparative data of the sort we are considering provides strong (but defeasible) support for the view that velocities are relational. I now want to suggest that this lesson can be generalized more widely. The idea would be that, for other target families of properties, too, comparative evidence of this sort is crucial (but, as always, defeasible) in testing for the relationality or non-relationality of its members. Namely, as in the motion case, we can test for the relationality of a property (in a family of properties) to a parameter by altering the value of that parameter and checking to see whether this change has the effect of modifying which (if any) member of our target family is exemplified. To see the power and correctness of this method, consider its application to a few test properties. The method correctly predicts that shape properties are not constituted in terms of a relation to viewing angle, for example, because square objects (say) continue to be square regardless of the angle from which they are viewed (or so we think). The same method correctly predicts that the “meteorological” properties we ascribe by saying ‘it’s raining’ or ‘it’s sunny’ are constituted in terms of a relation to location and time, since their applicability is a function of those two parameters. Likewise, as Sydney Shoemaker (1994, 254–255) notes, this test shows that being heavy is constituted in terms of a relation to a (potential) lifter and gravitational field. This comparative test, then, delivers the right verdicts about a range of properties other than colors. Of course, phenomenology seems largely irrelevant to the application of the comparative test to the cases I have considered so far; all that this test demands is that we assess whether an object persists in its exemplification

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of a target property as we modify the value of some parameter. But phenomenology could play a role in this test if it should turn out that the object’s exemplification of the target property is somehow essentially tied to phenomenology. To see what this amounts to in a concrete case, consider the so-called shimmering or unsteady colors such as those on the backs of CDs or in holograms—colors that are often put forward as examples of colors that (unusually) are represented phenomenally as being relational (e.g., Johnston 1992, 226–227).9 Applying the comparative test to these unsteady colors (with respect to the parameter of viewing angle) means testing to see whether an object maintains or varies its unsteady color as it is viewed from different viewing angles. Crucially, however, in this case, we assess the object’s unsteady colors from each viewing angle primarily (perhaps only) by attending to the way in which it is phenomenally presented when viewed from that angle. Here, then, application of the comparative test means engaging in comparative phenomenology. And what the test reveals is that unsteady colors are relational (constituted in terms of a relation to viewing angle). That is so because even very slight variations in viewing angle of the kind that we engage in—often involuntarily—in ordinary perceptual circumstances show up in the phenomenal representation of their colors: By very slight and often involuntary motions, we obtain in quick succession a visual representation of x’s color when viewed from angle α and a visual representation of x’s color when viewed from angle β, and find that these two representations differ phenomenally. These considerations involving comparative phenomenology explain three related facts. First, that unsteady colors behave this way explains the widely held view (even among those who take steady colors to be nonrelational) that the unsteady colors of surfaces are constituted in terms of a relation to the viewing conditions under which they are perceived. Second, the fact that the conditions under which we view shimmering surfaces give us (often involuntarily) the comparative information we need to carry out the comparative test explains why the latter view is widely held in the first place—typical perceptual circumstances provide us with the needed data, and once the data are in our possession, it is hard to avoid drawing the obvious conclusion from them. Third, and even more significantly, these considerations address our initial question by showing how phenomenology can speak to the relationality or non-relationality of a target property. Namely, when phenomenology provides our evidence about the exemplification of that property, then comparative phenomenological data collected across variations in relevant parameters can serve as grounds for inferences about the relationality/non-relationality of the target property.

9. The distinction between “unsteady” and “standing” colors is made by Johnston (1992, 141), who attributes it to Rossotti (1983, chs. 3, 4).


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But now I want to suggest that the so-called steady colors meet this criterion, so the comparative phenomenological test just used to assess the relationality of the unsteady colors should be applicable to the steady colors as well. The significant difference between the two is that, in the case of steady colors, we need systematic psychophysical comparison, rather than just the conditions of typical perception, to bring out the relevant comparative data. In particular, we need to compare the visual representation of x’s color when viewed by S1 in conditions C1 against the visual representation of x’s color when viewed by S2 in conditions C2. Now, it turns out that ordinary, everyday color phenomenology does not provide the materials needed for these kinds of comparisons all by itself. For one thing, ordinary phenomenology cannot (by itself) facilitate comparisons between subjects S1 and S2. For another, what distinguishes “steady” colors from shimmers is that one can easily obtain a phenomenal representation of x’s color for oneself in C1 without obtaining a phenomenal representation of x’s color for oneself in C 2. This means that testing for the relationality of “steady” colors will require more than the unsystematic, ordinary phenomenology we undergo outside the psychophysics lab.10 Or, in the words of Janet Levin, Ordinary perception of color may seem to reveal colors to be simple monadic properties, just as a quick glance may seem to reveal an object with color highlights to be an object that is “steadily” striped. But in both cases, the “glances” are too quick to be definitive, given the sorts of experiences required for making the distinction; in neither case can these judgments be expected to reflect what perception in the proper circumstances would in fact reveal. (2000, 157)

On this matter I agree strongly with Levin: isolated and momentary phenomenal presentations (“glances”) are insufficient to bring out the relationality of both so-called steady and unsteady colors, because the comparative information needed to make their relationality apparent is

10. Boghossian and Velleman (1989) miss this point and therefore apply (what seems to me to be) the wrong criterion to test whether phenomenology presents colors as relational/dispositional: If colours looked like dispositions, however, then they would seem to come on when illuminated, just as a lamp comes on when its switch is flipped. Turning on the light would seem, simultaneously, like turning on the colours; or perhaps it would seem like waking up the colours, just as it is seen to startle the cat. Conversely, when the light was extinguished, the colours would not look as if they were being concealed or shrouded in the ensuing darkness: rather, they would look as if they were becoming dormant, like the cat returning to sleep. But colours do not look like that; or not, at least, to us. (85) In fact, if Boghossian and Velleman’s observations are correct, then they show only that (non-shimmering) colors are not constituted in terms of relations to parameters whose values shift under ordinary conditions of perception by a single subject. And, of course, this falls far short of showing that colors are not relational/dispositional.

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more than such isolated and momentary phenomenal presentations make available. Now, one respect in which my thinking about these matters differs from Levin’s is that she focuses on interpersonal comparisons as the key to bringing out phenomenally the relationality of colors. Since interpersonal phenomenal comparisons are, arguably, never made available by ordinary perception (by itself), Levin concludes that the conditions under which colors would be phenomenally represented as relational, “alas, are not available even in a lifetime of normal perceptual experience” (157). But, in my view, phenomenal evidence of the relationality of color can, in principle, be marshaled from intrapersonal phenomenal comparisons—comparisons that are, plausibly, more readily available in ordinary perception. In any case, it seems clear that the most direct and systematic methods for making the relevant comparisons (whether interpersonal or intrapersonal) are those used in the psychophysics lab. That is, the systematic comparisons we need are made available by precisely the kinds of psychophysical methods frequently exploited in motivating relationalism (e.g., see Cohen 2004). Namely, these methods allow us to ask S1 and S2 to make phenomenal matching judgments of x’s color relative to various perceptual conditions and thereby to compare the phenomenal representation of x’s color for S1 in C1 against the phenomenal representation of x’s color for S2 in C2. Significantly, carrying out those comparisons shows that the pair of phenomenal representations differ as a function of the subject and the perceptual circumstances. As in other applications of the comparative method, this finding gives (defeasible) support for the idea that our target property (in this case, x’s color) is constituted in terms of a relation to the parameters under consideration (in this case, the subject and the perceptual circumstance). What all of this shows, I think, is that phenomenology represents the steady colors of tables and chairs as relational to exactly the extent and in exactly the way that it represents the unsteady colors of CDs and holograms as relational. This can be taken in two ways, depending on how expansively we think about what phenomenology amounts to. If phenomenology is restricted to single, isolated representations that are not integrated with ratiocinative reflection (Levin’s “glances”), then I think phenomenology reveals neither steady nor unsteady colors as being relational. On the other hand, if we take a broader view of what phenomenology includes—in particular, if we take within the purview of phenomenology both systematic (psychophysical) and ordinary comparisons between phenomenological representations, together with inferences reached on the basis of such comparative data, then it seems to me that phenomenology reveals both unsteady and steady colors to be relational. Why, then, have many theorists agreed that phenomenology differs in what it reveals about steady and unsteady colors, and therefore endorsed


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the phenomenological objection against color relationalism? Part of the answer, I suspect, is that at least some have been insufficiently clear about the distinction between the narrower and broader understandings of phenomenology spelled out above. As noted, ordinary perceptual circumstances make it difficult to avoid carrying out comparative phenomenology with respect to “unsteady” colors, and I believe this fact has prevented many from seeing that they were engaging in comparisons (or ratiocination based on these comparisons) at all. And this has encouraged many to believe that phenomenology in the narrower sense reveals the relationality of unsteady colors, when, in my view, it is phenomenology in the broader sense that is responsible. In effect, then, such thinkers have gone looking for phenomenological evidence in the wrong place. This, in turn, has led to the erroneous expectation that, were so-called steady colors relational, then phenomenology understood in the narrower sense would also reveal this fact. As it happens, it does not. Moreover, since the manipulations required to bring out the relationality of steady colors do not occur “all by themselves” in ordinary perception, subjects are left without the phenomenological evidence they would need to come to a suitable conclusion on this matter. But since they lack the requisite evidence, and also (wrongly) believe they would possess such evidence if it existed, they have concluded (wrongly) that steady colors are phenomenally represented as non-relational. Which is to say that, after having looked for phenomenological evidence in the wrong place, such thinkers have compounded their error by mistaking an absence of evidence for evidence of absence. This diagnosis is supported by the observation that exactly the same sort of error can arise in the case of non-color properties that are less controversially relational. Thus, to use Shoemaker’s example, the natural limitations on the comparative evidence available to us in assessing the heaviness of objects can erroneously lead us (at least initially, until we seek out comparative evidence and take it into account) to think that phenomenology represents being heavy as non-relational. For, at least initially, I might ascribe or forebear the property being heavy just on the basis of the narrow phenomenal episodes I undergo when I lift them, given the (relatively stable over time) strength and physical build that I happen to have, and in the context of a relatively unchanging gravitational field (it changes so little mainly because, in the course of my ordinary travel, I do not alter significantly my distance from the center of the earth). As before, restricting myself to non-comparative phenomenological evidence of this kind will not show up the relationality of the target property; indeed, my contention is that narrow, isolated episodes of phenomenology (“glances”) neither reveal being heavy to be relational nor to be non-relational. Someone who (wrongly) expected her narrow phenomenology to represent all and only relational properties as being relational would wrongly conclude on the basis of her narrow phenomenology that being heavy is not relational. But, as before,

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this would be an erroneous conclusion reached by taking into account the wrong kind of phenomenological evidence (viz., narrow rather than broad phenomenology). I take these considerations to show that there is both a good sense in which phenomenology can speak to the question of whether colors (steady and unsteady alike) are relational or not, and another good sense in which phenomenology cannot speak to that question. The sense in which it can is the sense in which phenomenology includes systematic comparisons of the sort made available by psychophysical methods, combined with ratiocination. The sense in which phenomenology will have nothing to say about the relationality or otherwise of colors is one in which phenomenology is restricted to introspection on isolated, momentary experiential episodes. Of course, the narrower brand of phenomenology won’t reveal colors as relational—but that is only because it is unsuited to discovery of relationality where it exists at all. In contrast, employing the broader conception of phenomenology leads to the conclusion that colors are relational. On neither, conception, however, are we justified in concluding that phenomenology represents colors as being non-relational.

2. ARE RELATIONAL PROPERTIES VISIBLE? A second potentially powerful and generalizable phenomenal objection against relational theories of color builds on the platitudinous claim that colors are visible—that is, that instances of colors (if not color properties themselves) can be seen. However, critics have alleged, (instances of) dispositional/relational properties are not the sorts of things that can be seen, even if it is allowed that their relata can be seen. Rather, these critics urge, the exemplification of such dispositional/relational properties by particulars is something we infer, possibly on the basis of the exemplification of other properties that we do see.11 If that worry is correct, then relational accounts of color would entail the absurd conclusion that colors are not visible.12

11. Obviously this objection presupposes the viability of a distinction between what we see and what we infer. While this presupposition is controversial (see Churchland 1979; Fodor 1984), it is appropriate for me to grant it for concessive (if for no other) reasons. 12. Johnston (1992, n. 1) attempts to extend the absurdity here by arguing that, if we did not see (instances of) colors, we would not see objects. This argument, however, is unconvincing as it stands: Even if we could not see instances of colors, it is left open that we could (veridically) see objects by undergoing color illusions—that is, we could see objects by seeing that they look colored, even if it turns out that we never see any veridical instances of colors (say,because nothing is colored, as per color irrealism). Once again, it is worth noticing that a version of the worry considered here for relationalism arises for those non-relational theories of color that identify colors with dispositions to affect light.


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Once again, this objection is given a particularly clear exposition by McGinn (1996), who frames the issue in terms of the question of what can be a direct object of the seeing relation: When you look at an object you do not see (de dicto) its dispositions to act in certain ways in certain circumstances, but you do see what color it is. Here, of course, I mean direct object perception, not just seeing-that—seeing the property itself, not merely seeing that it is instantiated. You may see that something is soluble by watching it dissolve, but you do not see its solubility—that property itself. You can see the manifestation of the disposition, and you may also see the categorical basis of the disposition in the object’s molecular structure, but your eyes do not acquaint you with the property of being disposed to dissolve. . . . And now the point about colors is that they enter the very content of primitive visual experience, being part of how objects appear, but dispositions of whatever kind cannot themselves enter visual content in this way. (1996, 540; cf., Mackie 1976, ch. 1)

Although McGinn presents this objection in the first instance as a reason for rejecting the dispositionalism he had endorsed earlier (McGinn 1983), the threat he poses clearly generalizes to other forms of relationalism as well: If colors are possible direct objects of seeing, then any relationalist account of color will be threatened by the worry that relational properties—as opposed to their relata—cannot be direct objects of seeing. Now, one possible line of resistance to this argument turns on a thought developed by McGinn himself, in his earlier defense of dispositionalism (1983, 133–135). This line of resistance turns on the idea that ‘sees’ introduces a highly intensional context—one where sameness of sense and reference does not guarantee intersubstitutability salva veritate.13 If true, this claim would explain why ‘I see redness’ could be true while ‘I see the disposition to look red’ could be false even if (as per some forms of dispositionalism) ‘redness’ and ‘the disposition to look red’ are alike not only in reference but also in sense. Unfortunately, this answer strikes me as unconvincing. For while I take it to be extremely plausible that (the phenomenal use of) ‘looks’ introduces such a highly intensional context (see section 3), it seems (at least, to my linguistic intuition) not only that the context created by ‘sees’ is not so highly intensional, but that it is extensional; but if so, then the proposal under consideration is just inapplicable to the case at hand. On the other hand, I do not believe that the present objection against relationalist views is decisive. In particular, I do not see a reason for accepting the premise that colors, if dispositions or otherwise constituted in terms of relations to perceivers, are ipso facto not suitable for being the direct objects of seeing. (For ease of expression, in what follows I’ll discuss

13. A version of this response to the objection is also considered by McLaughlin (2003), although he does not put much weight on it.

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this point only in terms of dispositional versions of relationalism, but I hope it is clear that the response can be generalized.) At least in McGinn’s presentation above, the case for this conclusion rests almost entirely on the analogy with the dispositional property solubility. Although this is controversial, I am prepared to spot McGinn the assumption that dispositions such as solubility and fragility are not—or, are not directly—objects of the seeing/looking relation (for dissent on this point, see Anscombe 1981; Cartwright 1989). However, this might be thought to overlook relevant differences between dispositions, some of which can be the direct object of seeing, and some of which cannot. The reason we should take this possibility seriously, it seems to me, is that the dispositions identified with colors by dispositionalists—in dramatic contrast to paradigm dispositions like solubility or fragility—have visual experiences as their manifestations. And the reason this matters to the question about whether dispositions can be seen is that it is plausibly constitutive of seeing a disposition to look red (as it might be) that one undergoes the visual experience that is the manifestation of that very disposition. In this spirit, John McDowell asks, “What would one expect it to be like to experience something’s being such as to look red, if not to experience the thing in question (in the right circumstances) as looking, precisely, red?” (1985, 112; cf. Levin 2000, 154–155). We can buttress this thought by locating it against the following sufficient condition for property-seeing: S sees property P if, by visually attending to an exemplification of P by x, S is (non-deviantly) caused to undergo a visual experience that represents x as exemplifying P. Now, a couple of remarks about this condition for property-seeing are in order.14 First, the condition explicates seeing a property in terms of seeing one of its instances. I take this to be appropriate, since I assume we causally interact with properties only in virtue of causally interacting with their instances. Second, some readers might object to the idea that we see properties (or their instances) by visually attending to them, and instead hold that we visually attend to these things only by seeing them. While there may be some understanding of visual attention that substantiates this objection, I am here understanding visual attention as an early and encapsulated mechanism that selectively allocates the resources of the visual system to objects/regions; so understood, it seems to me that property-seeing should depend on visual attention rather than vice versa. Third, the condition is offered only as a sufficient condition, rather than as a necessary and sufficient condition, for property-seeing. One respect in which it fails to be a necessary condition involves misrepresentation: In cases where, by visually attending to an exemplification of P by x, S is non-deviantly caused to undergo a visual experience that (mis)represents x as exemplifying Q, I am inclined to hold that S nonetheless sees property P. Finally, many philosophers have worried that dispositions—as 14. Thanks to Brian McLaughlin for urging me to clarify my thoughts on these matters.


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opposed to their categorical bases—cannot cause their manifestations. If they are right about this, then the present account would not allow that subjects can see dispositional properties (hence, given dispositionalism about color, would not allow that subjects see colors), since it would not be possible for dispositions to look red (for S in C) to cause objects to look red (for S in C). This concern, of course, is only as good as the underlying assumption that dispositions are unable to cause their manifestations. But I think the extant arguments for this assumption, which turn mostly on Kim-style considerations about the threat of causal overdetermination by multiple factors each causally sufficient for the outcome (Kim 1989a, 1989b,1993, 1998), are unconvincing.15 The thought I’d like to pursue, then, is that the dispositionalist’s colors (unlike fragility) can be seen in this sense of property-seeing because the dispositionalist’s colors (unlike fragility) have visual experiences as their manifestations. For example, suppose a ripe tomato exemplifies the disposition to look red, and suppose the viewing conditions are propitious; then precisely in so far as the disposition manifests itself, it will be true that by visually attending to the tomato’s redness I am (non-deviantly) caused to undergo a particular visual experience that represents the tomato as red.16 For this reason, it is plausible for a dispositionalist to hold that the occurrence of the disposition’s manifestation is constitutive of my seeing the tomato’s (by hypothesis, dispositional) color property. Of course, this won’t make it the case that we see all dispositions; in particular, and as desired, this account won’t make it the case that we see dispositions whose manifestations are not visual experiences, for they won’t meet the sufficient condition for property-seeing given above (although this allows that we might succeed in seeing those properties or their instances in some other way—the condition is only a sufficient condition for property-seeing). If, for example, a vase exemplifies fragility,

15. The literature contains a large number of responses to such Kim-inspired arguments. One common response involves the allegation that the argument overgeneralizes and (unacceptably) threatens the possibility of causal explanation in terms of the kinds of special sciences quite generally speaking (Fodor 1989, 138–141; van Gulick 1992, 325; Baker 1993, 77; Burge 1993, 102; but see Kim 1997, 1998, 77–87, 112–120). A different line of response, brought out by Loewer (2007), is that, contrary to what proponents of such arguments often maintain, the multiple factors involved (here, the base property and the disposition) are not causally sufficient for the outcome (here, the manifestation of the disposition). Indeed, nothing less than the total state of the universe at a time is causally sufficient for the outcome; but there seems no reason to fear causal overdetermination by a pair of factors each of which is not causally sufficient for the outcome. 16. The claim here is not that we see the disposition by seeing the visual experience that is the manifestation of the disposition—indeed, I deny that we see our visual experiences except in highly abnormal circumstances (such as those involving invasive neurosurgery). Rather, the claim is that the visual experience itself (when it is appropriately caused by something to which we are visually attending) is the manifestation of the disposition, and that undergoing (rather than seeing) such a visual experience constitutes seeing the disposition (in the direct object sense at issue).

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even if I attend to this state of affairs, the manifestation of the disposition leaves entirely open whether I’ll undergo a visual experience that represents the vase’s fragility. This is because, in this case, the disposition’s manifestation (here, a shattering) is independent of the occurrence of any visual experience at all. What all this shows, I suggest, is that the unsuitability of some dispositions to be objects of the seeing relation is compatible with the claim that colors, if dispositions, can be the objects of the seeing relation. And now we should notice that forms of the response I am recommending are also available to non-dispositionalist relationalists for whom the current threat about the invisibility of colors arises. Although the details of the analysis will differ depending on the form of relationalism on offer, the key insight on which the answer depends is general: viz., we can understand how a relational property R is seen by a subject S if the relevant relation eventuates in a visual experience in S that represents R’s exemplification. I conclude, then, that, contrary to the present worry, color relationalists can endorse the platitudinous view that colors are visible.

3. PHENOMENOLOGY ABOUT PHENOMENOLOGY? According to dispositionalism and several other forms of color relationalism, colors are constituted in terms of relations to subjects that involve those very subjects undergoing phenomenal experiences. For example, suppose we hold the form of dispositionalism according to which red for S in C is identified with the disposition to look red to S in C. If, (plausibly) something’s looking red to S in C requires that S undergo a phenomenal experience of some sort, it would seem that what it is to be red involves constitutively an episode of phenomenology. Now suppose S has a phenomenal experience that represents x as red. Assuming dispositionalism, this means that her phenomenal experience has as its content that x is disposed to look red. And, given what I’ve said above, this means that the phenomenal experience has as its content something like this: that x is disposed to produce in S phenomenal experiences of a certain kind. This means that, assuming the truth of dispositionalism (and the relatively uncontroversial claim that x looks red to S only if S undergoes a certain phenomenal experience), phenomenal experiences of x’s being red will have as part of their content a claim about phenomenal experience. Moreover, and for the same reasons, an analogous conclusion follows from non-dispositionalist forms of relationalism according to which the relation between subjects and objects that constitutes color properties is one that requires the subject to undergo a certain phenomenal experience. All of these relationalist views have the consequence that color phenomenology represents phenomenology (inter alia).


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However, some have found this consequence implausible. Reflecting on their own color phenomenology, they simply do not find that their experiences have any representational commitments about phenomenology. Thus, McGinn complains that, I do not have experiences of experiences when I see something red. When I see an object as red I see it as having a property; I do not see any sensations that might be occurring in perceivers. . . . My experience type does not enter its own content. (1996, 542)

According to this thought, my ordinary experience of a ripe tomato, as it might be, represents the fruit’s size and shape, but is just not committed in any way to any claims about visual phenomenology. One might be sympathetic to this claim because one shares the oft-cited “Moorean” intuition to the effect that phenomenal experience always represents distal objects and their properties rather than mental entities and their properties (see Harman 1990). Alternatively, one might take the weaker view that, at least in ordinary, non-reflective settings, the contents of phenomenal experiences (or phenomenal color experiences in particular) do not involve mental entities, a fortiori do not involve phenomenal experiences. Either way, once again, the worry is that relationalism (in at least some of its forms) seems to have an entailment that is at odds with the data of ordinary color phenomenology. It is important to note that the worry under consideration is not that the invocation of phenomenology in a phenomenal representation results in a theory that is viciously circular or otherwise objectionable (for a response to that worry, see Cohen 2009, ch. 6). That is to say, the difficulty is not merely that the invocation of phenomenology in a phenomenal content is itself somehow incoherent. It is that the invocation of phenomenology as the content of the particular sort of phenomenal representations at issue is, it is claimed, erroneous as a description of that content. How should relationalists respond to the objection now before us? In my view, they should respond by rejecting the alleged phenomenal datum on which it is based. In particular, relationalists should reject the claim that color phenomenology does not represent properties whose nature is explicated in terms of phenomenal experience. What the relationalist should claim is that such experience-involving properties are constituents of the contents of color experience, but that their experience-involving natures are hidden from those who undergo color phenomenology, even when those subjects attend carefully to their experiences. That is, a subject who undergoes color phenomenology thereby has an experience that represents a color property whose nature involves color phenomenology as a component; but in undergoing that phenomenal episode, the (experience-involving) nature of the represented color property is not made apparent to the subject even upon careful reflection on her experience.

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This response, of course, presupposes that it is possible to represent in one’s phenomenal experience properties whose essence is not known to one; but I think that that commitment is perfectly reasonable and well precedented. After all, even if you and I know the essence of water, presumably Homer was able to enjoy—and carefully attend to—water phenomenology despite lacking this piece of knowledge. Had someone proposed to Homer that water is H2O, it would not have been reasonable for him to object that water could not have hydrogen as an essential constituent on the grounds that his water phenomenology failed to disclose the involvement of hydrogen upon careful attention. That this is so should not be thought to depend solely on Homer’s failing to have a concept of hydrogen. For it seems that someone who knows quite a lot about hydrogen might also reflectively undergo water phenomenology without thereby coming to know the constitution of water (cf. Rodriguez-Pereyra 2002, 93–94). Again, it would be unreasonable for such a subject to object that water could not have hydrogen as an essential constituent on the grounds that her water phenomenology failed to disclose the involvement of hydrogen upon careful attention. Likewise, then, it seems to me that it would unreasonable to object to the identification of being red to S in C and the disposition to look red (to S in C) on the grounds that one’s red phenomenology fails to disclose the involvement of visual phenomenology upon careful attention. Another way to put the foregoing is to say that phenomenal occurrences of ‘looks’ in locutions of the form ‘x looks red (to S in C)’ create highly intensional contexts—contexts within which substitution of extensionally (or even analytically) equivalent expressions is not truthpreserving (cf. McGinn 1983, 134ff.).17 Thus, although to be wet just is to be covered in a certain way with H2O, it is illegitimate to infer from ‘x looks wet’ to ‘x looks to be covered in a certain way with H2O.’ Or, again, although to be humorous just is to be disposed to cause characteristic amusement reactions in appropriately situated cognizers, it is illegitimate to infer from ‘x looks humorous’ to ‘x looks disposed to cause characteristic amusemen reactions in appropriately situated cognizers.’ So, too, the failure of the inference from ‘x looks red (to S in C)’ to ‘x looks appropriately related to a (certain type of) phenomenal experience’ should not be

17. I think this is so because color experiences (like water experiences) present the properties that are constituents of their contents under modes of presentation. Proponents of non-relationalist theories of colors (e.g., Tye 1995, 133) have sometimes held this view as well (although Tye [2000, 56–57] later repudiated it). As Tye points out, if there are modes of presentation involved, they should be the kinds of modes of presentation that are available to infants and non-human animals (assuming, plausibly, that things can look colored to such creatures). And this gives some reason—depending on one’s theory of concepts, to be sure—for denying that the modes of presentation in question are conceptual. However, I see no reason that they would have to be conceptual; instead, one might regard them as perceptual (nonconceptual) modes of presentation.


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taken to impugn the color relationalist’s identification of color properties with experience-involving essences. I claim, then, that careful reflection on one’s color phenomenology by conceptually competent subjects can fail to disclose the nature of the properties that are constituents of the contents of those experiences. Experience of colors does not amount to an unmediated, acquaintance-like connection with the colors.18 This explains why, as I suggested in section 1, isolated episodes of color phenomenology must be supplemented by (sometimes extensive) comparison and ratiocination before they can teach us about the nature of colors. Color phenomenology does relate us to the colors, but it is no substitute for the hard, broadly empirical work necessary for determining how colors are constituted. Of course, saying this means accepting that the identity statement linking colors and experience-involving relations to subjects is, at best, a posteriori. I am prepared to accept this conclusion: I hold that broadly empirical support, rather than simple phenomenal experience together with armchair reflection, is necessary to defend color relationalism. Consequently, unlike many other color relationalists, I deny that color relationalism is an a priori thesis. In any case, it seems to me that the absence of phenomenal evidence of experience-involving elements in the color properties one represents phenomenally cannot be taken as evidence of the absence of such elements in the natures of colors. But since the objection under consideration in this section turns on treating our phenomenal evidence as just such a criterion, it is unsuccessful as a complaint against color relationalism.

4. CONCLUSION For many writers, the most important shortcomings of relationalist accounts of color are phenomenological. While they (sometimes) acknowledge its other virtues, these writers allege that color relationalism presents colors in a way that conflicts with the way in which color phenomenology presents colors, and that the only intellectually virtuous response to this clash is to reject the offending theory rather than the data. However, I have argued in this chapter, the phenomenological objections pressed against relationalism by its critics are unconvincing. Once we make clear just what and how color phenomenology can and cannot tell us about the nature of color properties, it turns out that phenomenal data support, rather than detract from, the case for relationalism. I conclude that color phenomenology is not the stumbling block for color relationalism that many have held it to be.

18. For reasons discussed in note 6, this claim can be accepted even by those who endorse Revelation.

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REFERENCES Anscombe, G. E. M. 1981. Causality and Determination. In Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind: Collected Papers, Vol. 2, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, 133–147. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Armstrong, David M. 1987. Smart and the Secondary Qualities. In Metaphysics and Morality: Essays in Honour of J. J. C. Smart, ed. Philip Pettit, R. Sylvan, and J. Norman. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Reprinted in Readings on Color, Vol. 1: The Philosophy of Color, ed. Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert, 33–46. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. Averill, Edward Wilson. 1992. The Relational Nature of Color. The Philosophical Review 101(3): 551–588. Averill, Edward Wilson, and Allan Hazlett. Forthcoming. A Problem for Relational Theories of Color. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Baker, Lynne Rudder. 1993. Metaphysics and Mental Causation. In Mental Causation, ed. John Heil and Alfred Mele, 75–95. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boghossian, Paul A., and J. David Velleman. 1989. Colour as a secondary quality. Mind 98: 81–103. Reprinted in Readings on Color, Vol. 1: The Philosophy of Color, ed. Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert, 81–103. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. Burge, Tyler. 1993. Mind-Body Causation and Explanatory Practice. In Mental Causation, ed. John Heil and Alfred Mele, 97–120. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Byrne, Alex, and David R. Hilbert. 1997. Colors and Reflectances. In Readings on Color, Vol. 1: The Philosophy of Color, ed. Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert, 263–288. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Byrne, Alex, and David R. Hilbert. 2003. Color realism and color science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26(1): 3–64. Campbell, John. 1993. A Simple View of Color. In Reality, Representation, and Projection, ed. J. Haldane and Crispin Wright. New York: Oxford University Press. Reprinted in Readings on Color, Vol. 1: The Philosophy of Color, ed. Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert, 177–190. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. Cartwright, Nancy. 1989. Nature’s Capacities and Their Measurement. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Chalmers, David. 2006. Perception and the Fall from Eden. In Perceptual Experience, ed. Tamar Szabó Gendler and John Hawthorne, 49–125. New York: Oxford University Press. Churchland, Paul M. 1979. Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Austen. 1993. Sensory Qualities. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cohen, Jonathan. 2004. Color Properties and Color Ascriptions: A Relationalist Manifesto. The Philosophical Review 113(4): 451–506. Cohen, Jonathan. 2009. The Red and the Real: An Essay on Color Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dancy, Jonathan. 1986. Two Conceptions of Moral Realism. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplement 60: 167–187. Einstein, Albert. 1905. Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper. Annalen der Physik 17: 891–921. Fodor, Jerry A. 1984. Observation Reconsidered. Philosophy of Science 51(1): 23–43.


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Fodor, Jerry A. 1989. Making Mind Matter More. Philosophical Topics 17:59–79. Reprinted in Fodor, A Theory of Content and Other Essays, 137–159. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990. Gibbard, Allan. 2006. Moral Feelings and Moral Concepts. In Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Vol. 1, ed. Russ Schafer-Landau, 195–215. Oxford: Clarendon Press. van Gulick, Robert. 1992. Three Bad Arguments for Intentional Property Epiphenomenalism. Erkenntnis 36: 311–331. Harman, Gilbert. 1990. The Intrinsic Quality of Experience. In Philosophical Perspectives: Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind, ed. J. Tomberlin, Vol. 4, 31–52. Atascerdo, Calif.: Ridgeview. Johnston, Mark. 1992. How to Speak of the Colors. Philosophical Studies 68: 221–263. Reprinted in Readings on Color, Vol. 1: The Philosophy of Color, ed. Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert, 137–176. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. Johnston, Mark. 2002. The Manifest. Unpublished manuscript, Princeton University. Kim, Jaegwon. 1989a. Mechanism, Purpose, and Explanatory Exclusion. In Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 3: Philosophy of Mind and Action Theory, ed. James E. Tomberlin, 77–108. Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview. Reprinted in Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays, ed. Jaegwon Kim, 237–264. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Kim, Jaegwon. 1989b. The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 63: 31–47. Reprinted in Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays, ed. Jaegwon Kim, 265–284. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Kim, Jaegwon. 1993. The Nonreductivist’s Troubles with Mental Causation. In Mental Causation, ed. John Heil and Alfred Mele, 189–210. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reprinted in Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays, ed. Jaegwon Kim, 336–357. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Kim, Jaegwon. 1997. Does the Problem of Mental Causation Generalize? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 97: 281–297. Kim, Jaegwon. 1998. Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind–Body Problem and Mental Causation [1996 Townsend Lectures]. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Levin, Janet. 2000. Dispositional Theories of Color and the Claims of Common Sense. Philosophical Studies 100: 151–174. Lewis, David. 1986. On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Loewer, Barry. 2007. Mental Causation, or Something Near Enough. In Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind, ed. Brian McLaughlin and Jonathan Cohen, 243–264. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Mackie, J. L. 1976. Problems from Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Matthen, Mohan. 1999. The Disunity of Color. The Philosophical Review 108(1): 47–84. Matthen, Mohan. 2001. Our Knowledge of Colour. Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplement 27: 215–246. Matthen, Mohan. 2005. Seeing, Doing, and Knowing: A Philosophical Theory of Sense Perception. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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McDowell, John. 1985. Values and Secondary Qualities. In Morality and Objectivity: A Tribute to J. L. Mackie, ed. Ted Honderich, 110–129. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. McGinn, Colin. 1983. The Subjective View: Secondary Qualities and Indexical Thoughts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGinn, Colin. 1996. Another Look at Color. Journal of Philosophy 93(11): 537–553. McLaughlin, Brian. 2003. The Place of Color in Nature. In Colour Perception: Mind and the Physical World, ed. Rainer Mausfeld and Dieter Heyer, 475–502. New York: Oxford University Press. Moore, G. E. 1903. Principia Ethica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peacocke, Christopher. 1984. Colour Concepts and Colour Experiences. Synthese 58(3): 365–381. Reprinted in The Nature of Mind, ed. David Rosenthal, 408–416. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Rodriguez-Pereyra, Gonzalez. 2002. Resemblance Nominalism. A Solution to the Problem of Universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rossotti, Hazel. 1983. Color: Why the World Isn’t Grey. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Russell, Bertrand. 1912. The Problems of Philosophy. London: Oxford University Press. Shoemaker, Sydney. 1994. Self Knowledge and “Inner Sense.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54: 249–314. Reprinted in The First-Person Perspective and Other Esays, ed. Sydney Shoemaker, 201–268. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Strawson, Galen. 1978. ‘Red’ and Red. Synthese 78: 193–232. Thompson, Evan. 1995. Colour Vision: A Study in Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Perception. New York: Routledge. Tooley, Michael. 1988. In Defense of the Existence of States of Motion. Philosophical Topics 16: 225–254. Tye, Michael. 1995. Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Tye, Michael. 2000. Consciousness, Color, and Content. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Yablo, Stephen. 1995. Singling Out Properties. Philosophical Perspectives 9: 477–502.

3 Perceptual Recognition and the Feeling of Presence Jérôme Dokic

In this chapter, I address our perceptual ability to recognize familiar persons. I am interested in questions such as the following. Upon seeing Mary, who is an old friend, we can immediately recognize her as Mary, but what is it exactly that we see? Does Mary herself enter the content of our experience, or merely her visual appearance, which in principle other persons can have? Suppose that we are in fact seeing Mary’s twin sister, who looks exactly like Mary. Of course, our recognition judgment “Here is Mary” is false, but is it based on a kind of perceptual (although perhaps not optical) illusion? The general question here is whether and to what extent our ordinary recognition judgments rely on perceptual experience as opposed to background beliefs. I claim that in order to give a proper answer to this question, we need to introduce a third character into the picture: the feeling of presence. Ordinary person recognition involves qualitative recognitional abilities, which enable us to see that a particular person looks just like Mary, but also an independent causal mechanism that generates the feeling that Mary herself is present. When we recognize Mary in person, we identify her (general) visual appearance, but we also feel her presence, and our feeling is an essential contribution to the phenomenology of person recognition.1 The chapter is structured as follows. In section 3.1 I locate the problem of perceptual recognition within a more general epistemological framework

I thank the audience of the 2008 Syracuse Philosophy Annual Conference, where I presented an ancestor of this chapter, and especially my commentator, Scott Sturgeon. I am grateful to him and to the editor, Bence Nanay, for comments that led to many substantial revisions. Thanks also to Santiago Echeverri, David Matheson, and Sam Wilkinson for very helpful remarks. 1. In this chapter, I focus on visual recognition. This is a simplification, of course, since person recognition is typically multimodal. For instance, voices are obvious auditory signatures of familiar persons.

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and introduce the question of how much of the content of ordinary recognition judgments is intrinsic to experience. Section 3.2 presents two views of person recognition: inferentialism, according to which the contents of recognition judgments always go beyond the contents of perception in being at least partly dependent on background beliefs, and literalism, according to which the contents of recognition judgments are already included in the contents of perception. In section 3.3 I introduce the notion of feeling of presence, by reference to relevant pathological cases of recognition. I show that inferentialism does not deal with the feeling of presence and so should be rejected. In section 3.4 I argue that literalism neglects the causal force of the mechanism underlying the feeling of presence, which can lead to recognition independently of the formation of an identity judgment of the form “This person, whom I am seeing, is Mary.” I eventually defend a third view of person recognition: causalism. Section 3.5 is dedicated to a few clarifications and additions to my defense of causalism.

3.1. RECOGNITION AND THE FIXATION OF PERCEPTUAL CONTENT A major task in the epistemology of perception is to determine the respective contributions of sensory experience and cognitive background in the formation of ordinary perceptual judgments. By “ordinary perceptual judgments,” I mean judgments like “Here is my car,” “This wall is red,” “The sun is rising,” “It’s raining,” and so forth, which are formed on the basis of our (visual, tactile, auditory, etc.) experience. What is at stake is the distinction between propositional contents that we accept (or could accept) by taking into account everything that we know, including what we are perceiving, and propositional contents that can be attributed to perception itself. How should we draw the boundary between what we are ready to accept “all things considered” and what is, strictly speaking, presented in our experience?2 One might try to answer this question by exploiting intuitions about how to draw this boundary in particular cases. For instance, suppose that we see letters and newspapers piled into our neighbors’ mailbox. On the basis of our visual experience, we make the judgment: “The Smiths are on

2. See Siegel (2006, 481). I want to stay relatively neutral, in this chapter, with respect to the issue of whether perceptual content is fully conceptual or at least partly nonconceptual (see, e.g., the essays in Gunther 2002). I say “relatively neutral” because I think I am committed to denying that perceptual content is fully nonconceptual. If there are recognitional concepts that are activated by sensory stimulations through the mediation of quasi-modular processes, then they enter the contents of perception in the sense used here. This is compatible with there being another layer of perceptual content that is nonconceptual in the sense that it is canonically specified using concepts that the perceiver need not possess.

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vacation.” Intuitively, the content of our judgment goes beyond what is visually presented to us. It also relies on background beliefs, such as the belief that the Smiths empty their mailbox every day when they are around. In other cases, we have intuitions to the effect that our best judgment goes against the apparent contents of experience. When we look at a Müller-Lyer figure, it visually appears to us that there are two parallel lines of unequal length while in fact they have the same length, and our visual impression persists even after we have been informed of their actual equality. The phenomenology of our visual experience, at least as it concerns the relevant parallel lines, is not affected by cognitive processes of belief acquisition and revision.3 Beyond these particular intuitions, one might ask whether there is a general reliable procedure of self-ascription of experience. Consider Gareth Evans’s (1982) account of such a procedure, which he presents as an extension of the procedure underlying ordinary self-ascription of belief. In the latter case, Evans claims, the answer we should give to a question about the external world can be easily converted into an answer we should give to a question about our own beliefs: If someone asks me “Do you think there is going to be a third world war?,” I must attend, in answering him, to precisely the same outward phenomena as I would attend to if I were answering the question “Will there be a third world war?” I get myself in a position to answer the question whether I believe that p by putting into operation whatever procedure I have for answering the question whether p. (1982, 225)

In other words, the process of self-ascribing the belief that p wholly derives (given that we possess the concept of belief) from the lower level procedure consisting in rationally forming a judgment about the world, namely, the judgment that p. Now Evans argues that the specification of the content of our perceptual experience is an instance of the same procedure, with a crucial difference: The subject “goes through exactly the same procedure as he would go through if he were trying to make a judgment about how it is at this place now, but excluding any knowledge he has of an extraneous kind. (That is, he seeks to determine what he would judge if he did not have such extraneous information.)” (1982, 227–228). Evans is not fully explicit about what he means here by “extraneous,” but we can surmise that extraneous beliefs are at least such that their exclusion or suspension would not modify the apparent content of experience. What is crucial is that Evans presupposes that we know when our beliefs should be counted as extraneous in this sense. For instance, in the

3. The standard empirical explanation of the persistence of perceptual illusions refers to the modularity of what psychologists call “early vision,” which is cognitively impenetrable, or encapsulated with respect to the subject’s beliefs. See Fodor (1983) and Pylyshyn (2004, ch. 2).

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example of the Smiths, we can ask what we would judge if we lacked the extraneous belief that the Smiths empty their mailbox every day when they are around. We would judge, most probably, “This box if full of papers.” Evans’s claim is that the content of this (merely possible) judgment is a better approximation of what we see, strictly speaking. Similarly, in the Müller-Lyer example, we can ask what we would judge if we lacked the extraneous belief that the lines have the same length. We would judge, most probably, “These two lines are of unequal length.” Again, Evans’s point is that the content of this (merely possible) judgment corresponds to what is actually presented in our visual experience. In many other cases, though, it is much less clear how to determine what counts as extraneous or background beliefs, which we are required to exclude in order to self-ascribe the right perceptual content. Let me illustrate this point by reference to Christopher Peacocke’s (2005) criticism of Evans’s procedure. Peacocke objected to Evans’s procedure on the grounds that it leads to intuitively erroneous self-ascriptions. Here is his objection as it focuses on ordinary perceptual categorizations: If you can see something as a car, a computer, or a phone, it is only because of your background knowledge of the function of these perceptually-recognizable objects that we judge that the seen things are cars, or phones, and so forth. If this background knowledge were not there, some of us would not make the judgment that it is a car, or phone, or computer that is in front of us. (2005, 238; see also Peacocke 2008, 225)

Peacocke’s point seems to be the following. The judgment that the seen object is a car depends on extraneous beliefs about the function of cars. So Evans’s procedure would not result in self-ascribing the perceptual content that the seen object is a car. For in the absence of these beliefs, we would make a judgment with a much poorer content about complex distributions of shapes and colors. The problem is that this is an unintuitive specification of perceptual content, for we would still see the object as a car. One might reply that general beliefs about how cars work should not be counted as extraneous, because their absence would modify the apparent content of experience. Here is why. General beliefs about how cars work are presumably required for possessing the concept of car. Now the concept of car is also (at least for many of us) a recognitional concept, in the sense that it is grounded on the perceptual (mainly visual) ability to recognize a car when we are presented with one.4 Whenever this ability is triggered, the concept of car is essential to the correct specification of the

4. On recognitional concepts, see Loar (1990). In this chapter, I assume that recognitional concepts need not be demonstrative (although they are always backed up by some demonstrative concepts, for instance “that kind”) and that they can be singular. In other words, a perceptual recognitional ability can automatically activate a nondemonstrative concept such as the general concept of car or the singular concept of Mary.


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content of experience. Any specification of what is seen that does not involve this concept is phenomenologically incomplete. As a consequence, general beliefs about the functional properties of cars are already involved in our experience of seeing an object as a car. They should not be counted as extraneous in Evans’s sense. At this point, one might concede that general beliefs about how cars work are not extraneous to our experience but insist that the singular belief that the seen object has the functional properties of cars should be counted as extraneous. This will result in self-ascribing the perceptual content that the seen object is car shaped, or perhaps that it looks like a car, as opposed to the logically stronger content that it is a real, functioning car. Note that this self-ascription acknowledges the fact that the concept of car is an integral part of the (conceptual) content of the experience. Does it follow that Evans’s procedure is flawed? It depends on whether we have an independent intuition to the effect that the content of our experience is that there is a car in front of us, as opposed to what Evans’s procedure predicts, namely, that there is something that looks like a car. Peacocke seems to exploit such an intuition when he observes that we can continue to see an object as a car even when we suspend our belief that it is a car. But where does this intuition come from? Perhaps it results from overinterpreting a different intuition, compatible with the prediction of Evans’s procedure that Peacocke objects to, namely, the intuition that the suspension of the relevant belief would not change the content of experience, whatever it is. Let us now turn to another subclass of perceptual judgments, namely, person recognition judgments like “Here/This is Mary,” “Mary is approaching,” “Mary looks happy,” and so forth, which are based on perceptual recognition of a familiar person. The question I am interested in concerns the extent to which the content of a recognition judgment is intrinsic to experience, as opposed to extraneous in Evans’s sense. Interestingly enough, Peacocke has extended his objection to Evans’s procedure to the case of person recognition: A person can have the capacity to recognize the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. When he sees Saddam, his visual experience has a content specified in part by using that recognitional concept: it seems to him that Saddam, so thought of, is in front of him. Other things equal, he will take such visual experiences at face value, and judge that Saddam is in front of him. But his willingness to do so rests, and rationally rests, on his belief that there is only one person, at least in this part of the world, who looks that way. This, seemingly extraneous, belief is essential for our subject to be willing to move from the experience to the judgment that Saddam is in front of him. When our subject comes to learn that Saddam actually employs three look-alikes, he will not move from the experience to the judgment that Saddam is in front of him. But his visual experience will continue to have that content all the same. (2005, 237; see also Peacocke 2008, 224)

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We judge that the person we are seeing is Saddam Hussein only because we believe that there is only one person who looks like Saddam Hussein in the relevant part of the world. On the assumption that the latter belief is extraneous (i.e., belongs to the cognitive background), Evans’s procedure implies attributing to our experience a relatively poor content of the form “Here is someone who looks just like Saddam Hussein,” which is neutral with respect to the actual presence of the former Iraqi dictator, while intuitively our experience has a richer content of the form “Here is Saddam Hussein.” Peacocke assumes that we are willing to report that we seem to see a person as Saddam Hussein even if we do not believe that this person really is Saddam Hussein; perhaps we believe that he is one of his look-alikes. Of course, one might reply, on behalf of Evans, that the belief that there is only one person who looks like Saddam Hussein in this part of the world, or more generally the belief that look-alikes are rare, should not be counted as extraneous, so the correct self-ascription in this case should be “It visually seems to me that Saddam Hussein is present.” However, Peacocke’s objection shows that we do not have robust intuitions about what beliefs are extraneous in Evans’s sense. Now perhaps we have more direct intuitions about perceptual content, and we can move directly from our experience to a correct self-ascription. Indeed, Peacocke appeals to the intuition that we can continue to see someone as Saddam Hussein even when we suspend our belief that he is Saddam Hussein. But is this intuition trustworthy? Once again, perhaps it is just the intuition, compatible with the prediction of Evans’s procedure that Peacocke objects to, that the suspension of this belief does not change the content of our experience, whatever it is. The moral of these remarks, I surmise, is that it is not always transparent to naive perceivers what information is extraneous and what comes from experience itself. As a result, our intuitive self-ascriptions of experience (whether they follow Evans’s procedure or Peacocke’s more direct approach) are not infallible guides to what we perceive, strictly speaking. What we need is a firmer grip on the distinction between what is intrinsic to experience and what belongs to the cognitive background. My aim in this chapter is (fortunately) not to provide a general theory of perceptual content but to focus on a relevant case study, namely, visual recognition of a familiar person. An analysis of this phenomenon should shed some light on the relationship between perceptual content and cognitive background.

3.2. TWO VIEWS OF PERSON RECOGNITION I assume here that the cognitive process of perceptual recognition involves two kinds of mental files or dossiers of information (see, e.g., Perry 2001, 121). On the one hand, it involves a “detached” mental file containing


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stored pieces of information about what is recognized, for instance, what we already know about Mary (including episodic memories). On the other hand, perceptual recognition involves a temporary mental file, which John Perry calls a “buffer,” containing only information gained from the current perception of the recognized entity. When recognition (or misrecognition) occurs, we allow our detached mental file to be controlled by what we see, in the sense that any perceptual information (at least that which is attended to) is immediately put into this file, which goes through a process of updating. Then we can make empirical judgments about Mary that are entirely based on predicative information gained from perception (“Mary looks angry”) but also ones that integrate perceptual and cognitive information. For instance, upon seeing Mary we come to believe that she had a haircut recently, because we remember that yesterday she had long hair. Strictly speaking, though, our judgment rests on background beliefs, most notably what we knew about Mary before encountering her today. Now there are at least two views about the nature of person recognition. Both views acknowledge that the process of person recognition, which culminates in updating some detached mental file, results from, or is constituted by, the formation of what I shall call a “basic” recognition judgment, namely, an identity judgment of the form “This person, whom I am seeing, is Mary.” They differ regarding how this judgment is warranted. Inferentialism says that the basic recognition judgment always goes beyond the content of visual experience. We can see at best that a person looks (perhaps exactly) like Mary, but we cannot, strictly speaking, see her as (being identical with) Mary (even if we are inclined to self-ascribe the latter, richer perceptual content).5 What we see, strictly speaking, is a person with a characteristic visual appearance, which other people can have, at least in principle: Mary, her twin sister, her Doppelgänger, or indeed anyone cleverly disguised as Mary. There would be nothing wrong with our visual experience if someone other than Mary were actually present. On the inferentialist position, the basic recognition judgment is only partly warranted by perception and rests on the availability of the following type of inference: 1. This person, whom I am seeing, looks like Mary. 2. No two persons ever have the same visual appearance in this part of the world 3. Thus, this person, whom I am seeing, is Mary

5. Throughout this chapter, I assume that we can see that someone looks (perhaps exactly) like Mary not in the sense that some epistemic concept of appearance enters the content of perception but in the more mundane sense that we can see a complex objective property (Mary’s visual profile) as a property that Mary exemplifies, whether or not she is actually there in front of us.

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Premise (1) is directly based on perception and is rationally linked with the conclusion only through something like premise (2). From the conclusion (3), we can make other, more substantial recognition judgments that take into account what we perceive, such as “Mary is approaching,” “Mary is sad,” or “Mary had a haircut.” The second view, literalism, says that the content of the basic recognition judgment is already included in the content of visual experience. Our judgment that this person, whom we are seeing, is Mary is warranted insofar as it simply endorses the content of our visual experience. We literally see that the person in front of us is Mary and is approaching. Literalism seems to be implicit in Peacocke’s quotation at the end of the preceding section when he suggests that our visual experience can have a content such as “Saddam Hussein is there in front of me,” assuming that “Saddam Hussein” expresses a recognitional concept in our conceptual repertoire. As it is understood here, the dispute between inferentialism and literalism does not concern the question of whether the recognitional concept expressed by “Mary” can enter the (conceptual) contents of visual experience. An affirmative answer to this question is, of course, constitutive of literalism, but inferentialism can also accept that this recognitional concept is essential for a correct specification of what we see. However, inferentialism insists that this content is not that the person seen is Mary, but merely that she looks (perhaps exactly) like her. We can literally see that a particular person looks like Mary, but of course, this falls short of recognizing Mary herself.6 Both literalism and inferentialism can acknowledge that the experience of seeing that someone has Mary’s visual appearance is modular in the broad sense that it is not (or not easily) affected by background beliefs, including the belief that the person is not Mary after all. Of course, the ability to recognize Mary’s face is an acquired module or submodule (just as my ability to speak French is), in contrast to the general ability to recognize faces (or learn a language), which is innate. The point is that, once acquired, the ability to recognize Mary’s face is relatively independent of the cognitive background. Indeed, empirical studies show that the information used to recognize a familiar face may not be consciously available to the subject. It may also be different from what the subject is able to recall about the person’s visual appearance.7

6. I allow inferentialism to acknowledge that the recognitional concept expressed by “Mary” can enter the contents of perception because it helps me to locate the particular issue of whether we can literally perceive that a particular person is Mary. Most versions of inferentialism would probably make the stronger claim that the recognitional concept of Mary cannot enter the contents of perception, thus excluding even the possibility of literally seeing that a particular person looks like Mary. 7. On the modularity of face recognition, see, for instance, Farah (2000, ch. 5). On the relationship between innate learning modules and acquired modular competences, see Sperber (2005). On the distinction between recall and recognition, see Evans (1982).


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A related point is that inferentialism can take on board an intuition exploited by literalism, namely, that acquisition of modular recognitional capacities affects visual phenomenology. As Charles Siewert (who I suppose is not an inferentialist) rightly observes: “Think of how individual people look different to you after you have gotten to know them than they did when you first met. Notice how different your neighbourhood looks to you now that you have lived there for a while, than it did on the day you first arrived” (1998, 257–258; quoted in Siegel 2006, 495). At least part of Siewert’s observation can be captured by allowing recognitional concepts to enter the contents of experience. There is a visual difference between seeing Mary’s face for the first time, which can only be thought of in demonstrative terms (“I won’t forget that face”), and seeing it as Mary’s face, even in the neutral sense of seeing a face that looks exactly like Mary’s. The contents of these experiences are not the same. The content of the latter, but not the former, must be specified using the proper name “Mary,” as it expresses a recognitional concept in the subject’s repertoire, which is automatically activated by the visual perception of Mary’s face in a normal context.

3.3. THE FEELING OF PRESENCE One may wonder whether inferentialism fully captures the phenomenology of ordinary person recognition. Person recognition involves a characteristic feeling of presence. When we recognize Mary, we have the feeling not merely that we are facing someone who looks just like Mary but that Mary herself is there in front of us. We immediately adjust our emotional state (e.g., we experience a “warm glow of familiarity”) and cheerfully welcome her. In normal experience, recognizing someone’s visual appearance and feeling her presence go together. However, there are pathological cases in which these two components are dissociated. Consider Capgras’s syndrome. Patients with this syndrome have an intact face recognition system but lack the affective experience that is normally associated with the perception of one’s relatives. The faces of their relatives “look right” but “feel wrong.” For instance, a patient might visually recognize his wife’s face, in the sense that he can see that the person whom he is seeing looks just like his wife, without feeling that she is actually present. On a plausible account, this is at least part of the reason why he forms delusional beliefs like “My spouse has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor.” The other relevant pathology is Fregoli’s syndrome. Like Capgras patients, Fregoli patients have an intact face recognition system, but they show an affective overreaction to unknown faces. This is at least part of the reason why they believe that one of their relatives has taken on different appearances. For instance, a patient might form the delusional belief

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“My sister keeps following me in disguise” (see Coltheart and Davies 2000; Coltheart 2007). The best empirical explanations currently available of these syndromes rely on a dual-route model of visual person recognition. For instance, according to Ellis and Young’s (1990) influential model, two distinct cortical pathways are involved in recognizing a familiar person. A purely visual (ventral) pathway underlies the qualitative identification of the person’s face, while a visuoaffective (dorsal) pathway is causally responsible for the emotional response that one produces when one sees a familiar face. The dorsal pathway is claimed to be impaired in both Capgras and Fregoli patients, being either abnormally idle or hyperactive. When a Capgras patient sees his spouse, the relevant recognitional concept (e.g., the one he would express by “my wife Mary”) enters the contents of his visual experience. The person in front of him looks just like his spouse Mary. However, in the absence of the feeling of presence, he forms the belief that she is an impostor. In contrast, when a Fregoli patient sees a complete stranger whom he takes to be his sister, the relevant recognitional concept (e.g., the one he would express by “my sister Pauline”) fails to enter the contents of his visual experience. The person in front of him does not look like his sister Pauline at all. However, a strong feeling of presence leads him to the belief that this person is his (cleverly disguised) sister. Inferentialism may try to deal with the feeling of presence in the following way. Perhaps the feeling of presence results from a basic recognition judgment of the form “This person, whom I am seeing, is my spouse/ my sister.” The absence of such a judgment in Capgras’s syndrome would explain the lack of emotional response. In contrast, its presence in Fregoli’s syndrome would be what drives the process of recognition, in the sense that a detached mental file is allowed to be controlled by the subject’s visual experience even in the absence of appropriate qualitative face recognition.8 However, further problems for inferentialism arise when we consider other pathological cases. There are subjects with ventromedial frontal lesions who have visuoaffective deficits similar to those of Capgras patients but who do not have any delusional beliefs. They believe (indeed, know) that the person whose visual appearance they can identify is there in front of them, but they report that their visual experience is quite strange—that it is as if they were seeing an impostor (Tranel, Damasio, and Damasio 1995; see also Coltheart and Davies 2000, 11; Coltheart 2007, 1048).9

8. This is close to the account of delusional beliefs Campbell (2002) calls “rationalism.” Of course, in the case of Fregoli’s syndrome, the basic recognition judgment is quite irrational. 9. An interesting open question is whether there is a syndrome like Fregoli’s but without the delusional beliefs. For instance, the subject would feel as if his wife is present even though he does not recognize her visual appearance. He would realize that the person he is seeing is not his wife but still feel as if she is visually present.


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In such a case, all the conditions that should lead to person recognition according to inferentialism are met. The relevant detached file is controlled by the perceptual “buffer” as the result of a basic recognition judgment based on background beliefs. In effect, the subject goes through a piece of reasoning he would express by “Despite my weird experience, this person, there in front of me, must be Mary.” However, something is clearly missing: the feeling of presence. The feeling of presence is an important dimension of the phenomenology of person recognition, but inferentialism leaves it out. The foregoing argument against inferentialism suggests that the formation of a basic recognition judgment is not sufficient for the feeling of presence. One can argue that it is not necessary either. Feelings of presence can be experienced in contexts in which we do not form a judgment like “This person, whom I am seeing, is Mary.” Suppose, for instance, that we have strong reasons to believe that the person in front of us is not Mary, even though she looks just like her. We have been told by a reliable informant that we are facing Mary’s twin sister Jane. We refrain from making the judgment that the seen person is Mary, but we might still feel as if she is present.10 Feelings of presence are best viewed as revealing natural inclinations to allow the relevant detached file (in this case, the mental file labeled “Mary”) to be controlled by what we see. Usually these inclinations culminate in genuine recognition, that is, in copying perceptual information into the detached file. However, in other contexts, they can be actively blocked or inhibited. Feelings of presence can then persist, perhaps in an attenuated form, as mere inclinations to update the detached file. These feelings are usually fragile and need to be maintained by regular episodes of genuine recognition. In the absence of such episodes, they are bound to disappear, and we will end up seeing someone with a familiar appearance, who may or may not be the familiar person herself.

3.4. LITERALISM VERSUS CAUSALISM Since inferentialism is unable to account for the phenomenology of ordinary person recognition, it seems as if it should hand over to literalism, namely the view that the contents of recognition judgments are already included in the contents of perception. Literalism can acknowledge that we feel the presence of familiar persons, but maintain that such feelings are part of the apparent contents of experience. Feeling that Mary is present is a way of perceiving that this person, whom we see approaching, is 10. The main protagonist of Stanislas Lem’s science fiction novel Solaris is visited twice by a woman who looks just like his deceased wife. We may suppose that he feels as if his wife is present but that (initially at least) he tries to resist the process of recognition (he knows that she is dead), which would lead him to delusion.

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Mary. The basic recognition judgment “This person is Mary” takes up what we perceive, which includes the instantiation by a particular person of the property of being Mary, and it is spontaneously made in the absence of independent reasons to believe that the person seen is someone else.11 Literalism is certainly congenial to our naive or folk theory of person recognition. We spontaneously self-ascribe experiences we describe as “seeing Mary herself” or “seeing that this person is Mary.” Indeed, as noted above, we can self-ascribe these experiences independently of the background beliefs that would be required to judge that Mary herself is present. We self-ascribe the experience of seeing Mary herself essentially because we feel her presence. This can happen in two cases: Either we genuinely recognize Mary, allowing perceptual information to control our mental file for Mary, or we have a mere inclination to do so. If neither condition is met, we would probably content ourselves with making a more neutral self-ascription, such as “I have the experience of seeing someone who looks just like Mary.” Of course, the fact that literalism is closer to our naive view of person recognition does not make it true. In fact, I would like to present two theoretical considerations that are in tension with literalism. The first consideration may not be decisive, but the second one definitely points to an alternative account of person recognition, which departs from both inferentialism and literalism. (1) The discussion of pathological cases like Capgras’s and Fregoli’s syndromes suggests that the feeling of presence is not genuinely perceptual, in the sense that it does not carry any additional piece of information about the visible world out there, as opposed to revealing our affective response to what we see. When we feel that Mary is present, no genuine perceptual skill is involved beyond our ability to recognize Mary’s visual appearance. There is nothing like a visual ability to recognize the presence of the person we know under the name of “Mary.” Bruce Mangan writes about the feeling of familiarity that it “is not a color, not an aroma, not a taste, not a sound. It is possible for the feeling of familiarity to merge with, or be absent from, virtually any sensory content found on any sensory dimension” (2001, 3). Similarly, the property of being present as Mary is not on par with visible properties such as being tall or looking so-and-so. When we feel that Mary is present, we do not

11. Literalism is implicit in Bayne and Pacherie’s (2004) “endorsement model,” which is itself a straightforward version of what Campbell (2002) calls “empiricism.” Bayne and Pacherie suggest that the Capgras patient’s delusional belief endorses the content of his experience, which is literally something like “This person is not my spouse.” (Of course, a friend of literalism might stick to the claim that we can literally see that a particular person is Mary while rejecting the different claim that we can literally see that a particular person is not Mary.) Since the endorsement model does not explain why the delusional belief is maintained in spite of (what should be considered as) negative evidence, Bayne and Pacherie follow Coltheart and Davies (2000) and defend a two-factor explanation (the patient has an abnormal experience plus a deficit in belief evaluation).


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perceive a property that Mary manifestly has, but our feeling seems to color our experience in a different way. Feelings of presence contribute to the phenomenology of recognition without supervening on perceptual content proper. Perhaps we are led to believe that we can perceive that Mary is present because, as I suggested in section 3.1, we do not have a reliable firstpersonal access to what, in the contents of our ordinary perceptual judgments, belongs to perception proper. In the specific case of person recognition, our intuitions about what we perceive, which drive our ordinary self-ascriptions of perceptual experiences, are indeed biased. Nonperceptual factors such as feelings of presence are easily but wrongly counted as being genuinely perceptual. However, as I said above, the foregoing consideration may not undermine all forms of literalism. The point is that feelings themselves can be used as evidence about the world and our relationship to it. Like sensory experiences, feelings have the ability to warrant judgments (Clore 1992). A sophisticated literalism might then concede that there is a categorical difference between the sensory experience of recognizing Mary’s visual appearance and the nonsensory experience of feeling her presence but maintain that the process of recognition results from, or is constituted by, the formation of a basic recognition judgment (“Here is Mary”) based on both sensory and nonsensory components, which usually go hand in hand. We judge that the person in front of us is Mary because she looks like Mary, but also because we feel that Mary is present (McLaughlin 2008). (2) However, literalism, even in its sophisticated form, is not the only alternative to inferentialism. Consider a third view, which I shall call causalism. Causalism rejects the assumption that the process of person recognition always results from, or is constituted by, the formation of a recognition judgment epistemically based on experience or background beliefs. Rather, person recognition is typically a causal, prerational achievement, which occurs prior (in the causal order of things) to the rational formation of a judgment, whether perceptual or inferential. Recognizing Mary herself just is the quasi-automatic, low-level process of allowing the mental file for Mary to be controlled by information gained from perception. On this view, feelings of presence are neither causal nor epistemic intermediaries in the process of recognition. In the normal case, feelings of presence reflect ex post facto the operation of the low-level mechanism responsible for recognition. Of course, when this mechanism is blocked or inhibited, they can be used to ground judgments about the appearance of Mary’s presence (“It’s as if Mary were there in front of me”). It does not follow that, when recognition occurs normally, we base, even in part, our recognition judgments on feelings of presence. Once we realize that recognition is not evidentially based on conscious perceptual content but results from an independent causal mechanism, there is no point in insisting with literalism that the contents of ordinary recognition judgments are also perceptual contents, as opposed to contents

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that merely figure in our updated detached file for Mary. Indeed, causalism agrees with inferentialism that we cannot see, strictly speaking, that someone is Mary, only that she looks like Mary. The content of our perceptual experience does not entail that Mary herself is present. Of course, when recognition occurs, the subject is able to form additional judgments about Mary, thanks to the fact that his detached file for Mary has been updated. For instance, upon seeing Mary, her old friend Peter knows that she is sad. He knows that she is sad because of her subtle way of smiling. If he had not known Mary for such a long time, he could not have learned that she is sad just by seeing her somewhat forced smile. What he can learn about Mary on the basis of visual perception is made available by the fact that his (informationally rich) mental file for Mary has been updated as the result of recognition. His most spontaneous, noninferential recognition judgments already reflect the quasi-automatic merging of perceptual and nonperceptual information within the mental file. (Note that this is another reason why it is often difficult to keep track of what is, strictly speaking, perceptual information in the formation of our perceptual judgments.) On the causalist point of view, it would be a mistake to explain recognition in terms of the independent formation of a basic recognition judgment of the form “This person is Mary.” For the latter “judgment” is neither evidentially based on perception or feeling nor inferentially based on background beliefs. Of course, when we visually recognize Mary, we believe that the person in front of us is Mary, but this belief is usually tacit. It is a psychologically idle wheel in the mechanism of recognition. We merely take its truth for granted when we make more substantial recognition judgments like “Mary is approaching,” “Mary is sad,” and so forth. Harman and Sherman (2004) observe that our knowledge usually rests on assumptions we take for granted without knowing them to be true. For example, we know that our car is parked outside in front of our house even though we do not know that it has not been stolen in the last hour. I want to suggest that something like this happens with person recognition. We have no independent source of knowledge that the seen person is Mary as opposed to someone else who looks just like her. Once recognition has occurred, though, our ordinary recognition judgments can amount to knowledge provided that we allow knowledge (or justification) to be based on true assumptions that are not themselves independently justified. The nice result is that no special source of knowledge beside perception and memory needs to be postulated in order to explain the epistemic value of ordinary recognition judgments.12 12. Harman and Sherman’s (2004) notion of what we take for granted is akin to Wittgenstein’s notion of framework (or hinge) statement in On Certainty (1969). Indeed, as Naomi Eilan suggested, “the kind of identity statements we make on the basis of ongoing contact with people we know well, which draw inter alia on a bank of shared memories, count as . . . framework statements” (2002, 125).


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Obviously, we need to know much more about our cognitive architecture to assess the value of causalism as an account of person recognition. Given the empirical results reviewed in the preceding section, though, I suggest that causalism is superior to both inferentialism and literalism. Causalism postulates (over and above the rational formation of a basic recognition judgment) a causal mechanism that both underlies recognition and generates a feeling of presence. The first mistake of inferentialism is to ignore the feeling of presence and falsify the phenomenology of person recognition. Its second mistake follows from the first, since it fails to realize that the mechanism underlying the feeling of presence is causally sufficient for recognition independently of an inference-based judgment. Literalism does not make inferentialism’s first mistake, since it can acknowledge the significance of the feeling of presence. However, it makes the analogue of inferentialism’s second mistake, since it fails to realize that normal recognition also precedes any judgment based on our sensory and affective experience.

3.5. CLARIFICATIONS AND ADDITIONS In this section, I make further, more speculative remarks and suggestions that are not, strictly speaking, entailed by causalism as it has been defined up to now but that can be seen as potentially fruitful additions to it. (1) In section 3.3, I did not say much about the subpersonal mechanisms underlying recognition and the feeling of presence. It is plausible that, in the case of normal subjects, recognizing a familiar person’s visual appearance and recognizing the person herself share some mechanisms, including at least early perceptual modules dedicated to the extraction of basic facial features.13 However, it is empirically possible that these two aspects of normal person recognition are based on the later extraction of different kinds of facial traits. According to James Haxby’s model (see Haxby et al. 2000), there are two face-processing (ventral) pathways in the brain, which are specialized in the detection of different kinds of facial traits. The first pathway corresponds to face recognition proper, based on the computation of invariant aspects underlying identity of face. The second pathway corresponds to the interpretation of expressions and is sensitive to the perceived face’s changeable aspects (direction of gaze, expression, angle of profile, lip movements), which are inputs to theory-of-mind abilities and underlie social communication. Now one might speculate that normal recognition is based on implicit computations along the second pathway. Indeed, Hirstein and Ramachandran (1997; Hirstein 2005) suggest, in contrast to 13. An interesting empirical question, whose answer I do not know, is whether person recognition in Fregoli-like cases occurs in a wholly arbitrary way or whether it is based on implicit detection of at least some facial traits normally associated with the familiar person.

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the original dual-route model proposed by Ellis and Young (1990), that Capgras patients have difficulties interpreting others’ expressions, even when qualitative recognition of a familiar face has occurred. These difficulties might be due to the fact that the second pathway is impaired while the first pathway remains intact. It seems to follow from Hirstein and Ramachandran’s model that for a conscious experience of someone looking like Mary to occur, it might be enough that, at the subpersonal level, invariant aspects of the person’s face match stored information about Mary, even in the absence of a corresponding match in the case of dynamic aspects of the person’s face. A further consequence is that there can be nonpathological dissociations between face identification and the feeling of presence. For instance, on seeing Jane, Mary’s twin sister, we recognize Jane’s face in Mary’s, but we do not recognize Mary because the dynamic aspects of Jane’s face do not match what we implicitly know about Mary. In such a case, there is no feeling of presence of a familiar person despite recognition of her face. In general, the feeling of familiar presence depends on the satisfaction of implicit expectations about the dynamic aspects of the person’s face—her way of smiling, of expressing emotions, and so on. In case of mismatch, no feeling of presence is experienced. The idea is that different individuals can have characteristic expressions, such as a crooked smile or a wry grin, that our brain associates uniquely with them, generating a feeling of presence. From the brain’s point of view, so to speak, some facial traits are more “criterial” of person recognition than others. (2) There is an interesting issue about the relationship between the notion of feeling of presence as it is used in this chapter and Mohan Matthen’s notion (2005, ch. 13). Matthen uses the term “feeling of presence” in roughly the sense Husserl (1907) gave to Leibhaftigkeit, namely, to refer to the experience of things and persons as being present “in the flesh,” that is, face to face. The contrast Matthen is interested in is between seeing someone as being present face to face and merely seeing someone in a picture (or visually imagining her). Matthen argues that the experience of a real thing engages motion-guiding vision (the visuomotor system) via a dorsal stream in the brain in a way in which the experience of a depicted thing does not.14 In this chapter I am concerned with another contrast, between seeing someone as being a familiar person present face to face and merely seeing someone as being present face to face and looking (perhaps exactly) like a familiar person. Feelings of presence in the sense used here involve feelings of presence in Matthen’s sense, although the converse is not true. Familiar presence implies physical presence, but of course, we may feel a person’s physical presence without recognizing her. Another consequence is that we cannot have the feeling that someone

14. On the visuomotor system, see Milner and Goodale (1995) and Jacob and Jeannerod (2003).


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familiar is present (hence physically present) when we recognize her in a (static or dynamic) pictorial representation, at least if we know that we are facing a representation. The question remains of whether there is a genuine difference between seeing Mary herself in a pictorial representation and merely seeing someone who looks like Mary in a pictorial representation.15 Suppose that what we have called “feelings of presence” really are composite feelings, namely, feelings of physical presence associated with what we might call “feelings of identity.” When we recognize Mary in person, we have a feeling of physical presence, thanks to the appropriate involvement of the visuomotor system, but we also have a feeling of identity—we are aware that we are facing Mary herself and not merely someone who looks like her. When we recognize Mary in a pictorial representation, we do not have a feeling of physical presence, but we might still have a feeling of identity—we are aware that Mary herself, and not merely a look-alike, is represented. Following Hirstein and Ramachandran’s trail, we might suggest that feelings of identity are sensitive to dynamic rather than static facial traits. The perception of a static representation such as a photograph, in a context in which we know that we are facing a photograph, would not by itself elicit the feeling of identity: We would not experience Mary herself as being represented in the photograph. In contrast, the perception of a dynamic visual representation such as a film, in a context in which we know that we are watching a film, might elicit the feeling of identity. We would be able to experience someone familiar as being represented in the film and not merely someone who looks like a familiar person. Of course, whether or not feelings of presence are composite feelings, which can be divided into feelings of physical presence and feelings of identity, is partly an empirical question, and I certainly do not want to suggest that we have stable and reliable intuitions about whether we can see Mary herself in a photograph. Perhaps we are inclined to say that we are seeing a photograph of Mary because of our background beliefs about the photograph; for instance, we know when and where the photograph has been taken, and we have kept it in our wallet since then. My point here is merely conditional: If Hirstein and Ramachandran are right, there should be a psychological contrast between recognizing Mary in a static picture and recognizing her in a film, whether or not this contrast is available to introspection or reflection. (3) In discussing causalism, I have focused on two main effects of the low-level mechanism underlying recognition, namely, the updating of the

15. Some philosophers (e.g., Walton 1984) claim that photographs are “transparent,” in the sense that by seeing a photograph of Mary, we literally see Mary herself. Even if this is true, it does not follow that we would automatically be inclined to report that we see a photograph of Mary. In other words, it does not follow that we would have a feeling of identity, in the sense used here.

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relevant detached file and the generation of a feeling of presence (through direct links from the visual cortex to the limbic system). One can speculate that recognition also involves the activation of context-sensitive recognitional abilities, such as the ability to recognize sadness or anger in the guise of a certain kind of smile or grin. These abilities might be specific to the recognition of a particular person. They can enrich the perceptual buffer with contents like “This person is sad/angry.” They do not enrich the perceptual buffer with contents like “Mary is sad/angry”; otherwise, literalism wins. When recognition occurs, there is a recombination of perceptual and nonperceptual information within our detached mental file for Mary, but there can also be the activation of acquired person-specific recognitional abilities. Among these abilities are perceptual mind-reading abilities. They are person-specific not at the level of their contents, since they are about shareable states, like being sad or angry, but because our cognitive architecture is such that they are activated only as the result of a (bottom-up) process of recognition. It is worth noting that the existence of person-specific abilities would provide yet another argument against inferentialism. For an inferencebased recognition judgment might not have the same effect on one’s mental organization as the low-level mechanism that causalism postulates. For instance, it might not activate person-specific recognitional abilities.

3.6. CONCLUSION I started this chapter by raising the question of how perception and cognitive background jointly contribute to the formation of recognition judgments. I eventually suggested that the answer to this question should not trust our ordinary procedures of self-ascription of perceptual experiences but should rely, at least in part, on empirical discoveries about the complexity of person recognition. In the course of the discussion, I distinguished three views of person recognition, which can be summarized as follows (assuming that “Mary” expresses a recognitional concept in the subject’s repertoire):

Inferentialism

Literalism

Causalism

The content of the recognition judgment “This is Mary” is included in the content of experience.

–

+

–

The process of recognition results from, or is constituted by, the formation of a warranted judgment of the form “This is Mary.”

+

+

–


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Inferentialism claims that ordinary recognition judgments go beyond what is, strictly speaking, presented in our visual experiences and thus must rely on background beliefs. In contrast, literalism argues that recognition judgments can endorse the contents of visual experience without much reliance on background beliefs. Both inferentialism and literalism assume that the cognitive process of recognition, which involves updating our mental file for the recognized person by taking into account what we perceive, is either constituted or caused by an independently warranted basic recognition judgment of the form “This person, whom I am seeing, is Mary.” Causalism rejects this assumption, and claims that person recognition arises from the operations of two (relatively autonomous) mechanisms: 1. One mechanism gives rise to qualitative recognition of a characteristic visual appearance. It enriches the subject’s perceptual buffer and enables a new way of seeing the person, as looking (perhaps exactly) like Mary. 2. Another mechanism independently causes perceptual information to be copied or incorporated into the relevant detached mental file without the mediation of conscious perception, feeling, or judgment. Even though they normally share some detection modules at the subpersonal level, these mechanisms play quite different functional roles in our cognitive architecture. The first mechanism automatically activates the recognitional concept expressed by “Mary,” which thereby enters the content of the subject’s visual experience. The second mechanism links the perceptual buffer with the detached mental file for Mary and constitutes recognition proper. Whereas qualitative recognition of someone’s appearance is a matter of degree (we can see that the person in front of us looks a bit like Mary, that there is a resemblance between them), person recognition is an all-or-nothing process (either we allow perceptual information to control our mental file for Mary, or we do not). Causalism agrees with inferentialism that, while looking like Mary is a visible property, being Mary is not. We recognize Mary’s face in the face of the person we are seeing because it looks like her face, but we do not recognize Mary in the person we are seeing because she looks like she is Mary. However, while inferentialism conceives of recognition as the product of spontaneity (in the Kantian sense), causalism makes it the passive result of an independent causal mechanism.

REFERENCES Bayne, Tim, and Élisabeth Pacherie. 2004. Bottom-Up or Top-Down? Campbell’s Rationalist Account of Monothematic Delusions. Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 11(1): 1–11. Campbell, John. 2002. Rationality, Meaning, and the Analysis of Delusion. Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 8(2/3): 89–100.

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Clore, Gerald L. 1992. Cognitive Phenomenology: Feelings and the Construction of Judgment. In The Construction of Social Judgments, ed. Leonard L. Martin and Abraham Tesser, 133–163. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. Coltheart, Max. 2007. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry and Delusional Belief. The 33rd Sir Frederick Bartlett Lecture. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 60(8): 1041–1062. Coltheart, Max, and Martin Davies, eds. 2000. Pathologies of Belief. Oxford: Blackwell. Eilan, Naomi. 2002. Meaning, Truth, and the Self: Commentary on Campbell, and Parnas and Sass. Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 8(2/3): 121–132. Ellis, Hadyn D., and Andrew W. Young. 1990. Accounting for Delusional Misidentifications. British Journal of Psychiatry 157: 239–248. Evans, Gareth. 1982. The Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Farah, Martha J. 2000. The Cognitive Neuroscience of Vision. Oxford: Blackwell. Fodor, Jerry A. 1983. The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Gunther, York H., ed. 2002. Essays on Nonconceptual Content. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Harman, Gilbert, and Brett Sherman. 2004. Knowledge, Assumptions, Lotteries. Philosophical Issues 14: 492–500. Haxby, James V., Elizabeth A. Hoffman, and M. Ida Gobbini. 2000. The Distributed Human Neural System for Face Perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4(6): 223–233. Hirstein, William. 2005. Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Hirstein, William, and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran. 1997. Capgras Syndrome: A Novel Probe for Understanding the Neural Representation and Familiarity of Persons. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 264: 437–444. Husserl, Edmund. 1907. Ding und Raum. Vorlesungen 1907. Reprinted in Hussserliana, Vol. 16, ed. Ulrich Claesges. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1973. Jacob, Pierre, and Marc Jeannerod. 2003. Ways of Seeing. The Scope and Limits of Visual Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loar, Brian. 1990. Phenomenal States. In Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 4, ed. James E. Tomberlin. Northridge, Calif.: Ridgeview. Mangan, Bruce. 2001. Sensation’s Ghost: The Non-sensory “Fringe” of Consciousness. Psyche 7(18). McLaughlin, Brian P. 2008. Monothemathic Delusions and Existential Feelings. In Delusions and Self-Deception: Affective Influences on Belief-Formation, ed. Tim J. Bayne and Jordi Fernandez, 139–164. Macquarie Monographs in Cognitive Science. Hove, UK: Psychology Press. Matthen, Mohan. 2005. Seeing, Doing, and Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Milner, A. David, and Melvyn A. Goodale. 1995. The Visual Brain in Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peacocke, Christopher. 2005. “Another I”: Representing Conscious States, Perception and Others. In Thought, Reference and Experience: Themes from the Philosophy of Gareth Evans, ed. José Luis Bermúdez, 220–257. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peacocke, Christopher. 2008. Truly Understood. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pylyshyn, Zenon. 2004. Seeing and Visualizing: It’s Not What You Think. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.


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Perry, John. 2001. Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness. The Jean-Nicod Lectures. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Siegel, Susanna. 2006. Which Properties Are Represented in Perception. In Perceptual Experience, ed. Tamar S. Gendler and John Hawthorne, 481–503. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Siewert, Charles P. 1998. The Significance of Consciousness. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Sperber, Dan. 2005. Modularity and Relevance: How Can a Massively Modular Mind Be Flexible and Context-Sensitive? In The Innate Mind. Structure and Contents, ed. Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence, and Stephen Stich, 53–68. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tranel, Daniel, Hanna Damasio, and Antonio R. Damasio. 1995. Double dissociation between overt and covert face recognition. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 7(4): 425–432. Walton, Kendall L. 1984. Transparent Pictures. Critical Inquiry 11: 246–77. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1969. On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and Georg H. von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell.

4 What We See The Texture of Conscious Experience Fred Dretske

I am interested in what we see insofar as this tells us something about the experience of seeing it. I am interested, that is, in what is occurring in your head when you see things—the conscious experience you can, and sometimes do, extinguish by merely closing your eyes. Closing your eyes does not change the world, at least not that part of it you see, but it does change your experience of it. What I am concerned with is the question of how much of the (visible) detail in the world, how much of the objective texture out there, is captured and thus represented in this subjective experience. What we see is often a complex, multielement array: a street filled with moving people and cars, a forest dense with trees and underbrush, a room full of furniture and bric-a-brac. In looking at such scenes, even in a momentary glance, we have the impression of seeing a lot—a lot more, in fact, than we can describe or remember. We certainly seem to see more than we consciously attend to. What I am concerned with here is how much of that detail, how much of that texture out there in the world, is captured in here, in our conscious experience of this world, and if there is a lot of the detail in here (as I believe there is), how might one possibly demonstrate this to be so. When I talk about what we see, I am talking about what we are conscious (aware) of. If one is not conscious of x, one does not (as I use the word) see x. The word “perception” is often used more inclusively in cognitive studies. One perceives x if one gets information about x via an accredited sensory system whether or not this information is embodied in a conscious experience. Blindsight is thus classified as a form of vision. Although the subject is not conscious of x, she is nonetheless said to perceive x if she gets information about x through the eyes. A statistically I thank the participants of the 2008 Syracuse Philosophy Annual Conference for persistent and insightful questions, and also the tough questioning by my commentators, Sven Walter and Markus Wild, and others who attended the conference on perceptual experience organized by Andreas Kemmerling in Heidelberg in September 2008. An early version of this chapter was given as the Howison Lecture at Berkeley in November 2007. In every case, revisions were in progress within hours. I am grateful for the help I received.

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What We See: The Texture of Conscious Experience

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significant number of correct answers when asked to guess (this is called “forced choice”) about the properties of x demonstrates (according to this way of talking) perception of x. In this case, S perceives x, as they say, without awareness of x—unconscious perception. I have no quarrel with this usage. I merely register my own way of using words. I am concerned with S’s perception of x when S is aware of x, when the information (about x) is embodied in a conscious experience of x. I am interested in how much of what you perceive you actually see. Before I begin, though, a word or two about the kinds of things we see. We see (or describe ourselves as seeing) objects, properties, and facts. Confusion here can and very often does muddy the waters I am trying to negotiate. So I take moment to remind you of important differences.

OBJECTS & EVENTS

SEEING

[spatio-temporal particulars: anything existing or occurring at a place and during a time] sticks, stones, people, houses, trees, stars, . . . battles, games, deaths, weddings, . . .

Figure 4.1

Fingers are objects. The experience one has in seeing three fingers is different from the experience one has in seeing two or four fingers. These experiences have a different texture. The number of objects one sees— whether fingers, people, trees, stars, or leaves—makes a difference to the texture of experience. (There are isolated exceptions to this rule, but I ignore them here.) So, too, does the number of events: games, collisions, and gestures. I do not argue for this—I take it as obvious. We also see properties, and these properties also contribute to the texture of experience. A multicolored object—a flag with 50 stars and 13

OBJECTS

SEEING

PROPERTIES [abstract objects] the color of his tie the size of his house the position of his pawn the shape of her nose . . . includes relations in, on, over taller, than, touching, behind, etc.

Figure 4.2

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stripes on it—contributes greater texture to an experience than does a white sheet. A star-shaped object has more texture than a circle does. I am not sure how to argue for this (since the notion of texture I’m working with is so ill-defined), but once again, it seems more-or-less obvious to me, and if it is not obvious to you, treat it as my way of telling you what I mean by the texture of conscious experience. And, finally, there are the facts we see—the fact that his tie is blue, his eyes are closed, or my keys are on the table. The facts we see are simply what we come to know by seeing objects and properties. Typically, I see (the fact) that my keys are on the table by seeing the keys (an object), the table (another object), and the relation between them (the first being on the other). I do not have to see the objects and properties that figure in the facts I see, but to see a fact I have to see some objects and properties. I can see that the battery in my cell phone needs charging by seeing not the battery but the little battery-charge icon on the screen. Perception is indirect when one sees a fact by seeing objects other than those constitutive of the fact—objects that indicate, by their properties or behavior, the fact in question.

OBJECTS

SEEING

PROPERTIES

FACTS [things we come to know by seeing objects and properties] that her eyes are blue that my keys are on the table that it (what you see) is a squirrel that A and B are different that A is moving Figure 4.3

The facts we see do not contribute to the texture of experience. We both see the daffodil. We see it from the same angle and in the same light. It looks exactly the same to both of us. You, an experienced gardener, see what kind of flower it is. You see (the fact) that it is a daffodil. I do not.


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We nonetheless have exactly the same experience. An experienced diagnostician sees more (facts) when he examines the X-ray photograph, but not—not necessarily—more objects or properties. He sees more facts because he understands, as you do not, what those shadows (you both see) mean or indicate. These verbal distinctions are more-or-less obvious—at least, I hope they are. Over the years, though, I have found that ignoring them leads to philosophical trouble. Let me mention some of this trouble since it threatens to spill over onto the present topic. Suppose one does not distinguish the perception of facts from the perception of objects. Seeing an apple (an object) is then unthinkingly conflated with seeing a fact—that it is an apple. Once this confusion is in place, ignorance (or skepticism) about the world is transformed into a form of blindness. The transformation goes something like this: Fallacy 1

1. I do not know for certain that this (what I experience) is an apple; I could be dreaming, or I could be deceived in some way. 2. Therefore, I cannot see (the fact) that there is an apple before me. 3. Therefore, I do not see an apple (a physical object) before me. What, then, do I see? An apple appearance, an idea, a sense datum, an impression—something that facts concerning which can be known for certain. Ignorance of what is in the physical world leads, in a few (fallacious) steps, to the conclusion that one does not see (at least not directly) the physical world. This fallacy does not shed any darkness on the issue we are concerned with—the texture of conscious experience—since whether one sees an apple or merely an apple idea the experience is (presumably) the same. The perceptual experience has the same texture whether you are a realist or an idealist about the objects of perception. Nonetheless, this fallacy gets the ball rolling in the wrong direction. So consider the next fallacy, which takes us directly to our topic Fallacy 2

1. One cannot see the color of objects in (extreme) peripheral vision (the light from which strikes only the rods, which are not color sensitive). If one sees a blue circle in peripheral vision, then one does not see its color (its blueness). 2. Therefore, one cannot see the colored objects (the blue circle) in peripheral vision. The only objects seen are those that are foveated (light from which hits the color-sensitive and densely packed cones of the retina). This is obviously a confusion of seeing the properties of objects—their color in this case—with seeing the objects that have those properties. But

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one does not have to see the size, shape, orientation, or color of x to see x. I see things at a distance when their color, shape, and orientation are not apparent. Objects can contribute to the texture of experience without revealing much at all about their character. Fallacy 3

1. S does not see (detect, notice) the difference between A and B. 2. Therefore, S does not see (the fact) that they differ. 3. The difference between A and B is x (some object) or P (some property). 4. Therefore, S does not see x (or P)—the object or property that makes A and B different. This is the fallacy one often finds committed in descriptions of change blindness. The fallacy pivots on the ambiguity between an object and a fact sense of “the difference.” The difference between A and B can be either (1) an object that makes them different or (2) the fact that they are different. You do not have to see (the fact) that A and B differ in order to see the objects that make them different. People who do not see the difference (= fact) between A and B might nonetheless see the object that makes them different. When this happens, the texture of conscious experience is different without an awareness of the fact that they are different. To deny this possibility is to confuse object perception with fact perception. It is to confuse ignorance—failure to know a fact—with blindness, the failure to see an object. So we have to keep alert to the difference between the objects, the properties, and the facts we see. If we want to reach conclusions about the texture of experience, about what kind of detail in the world is represented in our conscious experience of the world, we should be careful not to reach these conclusions from what a person does not know, from the facts a person cannot see. What a person does not know is one thing; what the person does not see, what properties and objects he is not conscious of, is quite another. Consistent observance of these distinctions, however, leads to a serious problem—at least, people have nagged me about it and called it a problem for at least thirty years. If S needn’t notice x to be conscious of x, what possible basis, what possible test, can be used to determine the character, quality, and texture of S’s experience? If S needn’t be aware of (the fact that there are) differences in his own conscious experiences in order for such differences to exist, how can we—on the outside, as it were— presume to say whether they do or do not exist? How can there be a science of consciousness if consciousness is this inaccessible? There are, though, degrees of inaccessibility. People can know things, and they can evince this knowledge in their behavior (thus letting us know they know it) without knowing—without even thinking—they know it. If


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what a person knows about x that we, but not he, know he knows is something the person can only know by seeing x, then we have a way of demonstrating that that person (without knowing it) saw x. We thereby have a way of accessing a person’s conscious experience that the person himself does not enjoy.

Collection A:

Figure 4.4

Look, for just a moment, at this collection (call it collection A) of gray balls (they are just ink dots on the page, I know, but think of them as gray three-dimensional balls or balloons): A quick glance (one or two seconds) is enough to see that all the balls are gray. None of them are purple, black, or yellow. If we numbered the balls from left to right, we could express what you could see (and thus know) to be the case in that brief glance as thirteen distinct propositions. You know (because you could see) that #1 is gray #2 is gray #3 is gray . . . #13 is gray

Since this list mentions all the balls in A, there is a sense (call it the distributive sense) in which you saw that all the balls in A were gray. There is, though, another sense (call it the collective sense) in which you did not—indeed, could not—see that all the balls in A were gray. To illustrate the difference between distributive and collective knowledge of all members of a collection, suppose Clyde is attending a party and steps outside to smoke a cigarette. He sees Carol come out and leave. Then Susan. Then George. This goes on for several minutes. It turns out that, unknown to Clyde, everyone has left the party. No one is left in the room. While standing outside, he, without realizing it, watched everyone leave. So there is a sense (this is the distributive sense) in which Clyde knows something about everyone who was at the party. He knows that Carol left, that Susan left, that George left, and so on, for everyone at the party. Clyde, though, does not know that everyone left because he does not

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know whether he saw everyone leave. Maybe there are still some people in the room—he does not know. As Bertrand Russell once noted about inductive inference, to know that all crows are black, one has to do more than examine every crow and find it to be black; one must also know that one has examined all the crows. This is something that may not be known by someone who has, in fact, examined all the crows. Contrast this with another scenario in which Clyde returns to the room after smoking his cigarette and finds the room empty—while he was out of the room everyone left by the back door. Although Clyde did not see a single person leave, he now comes to know (by seeing the empty room) that everyone has left the party. This is the collective way of knowing something about all the members of a collection. Clyde now knows that everyone left the party not (as in the first scenario) by seeing individuals depart (he did not see anyone depart this time) but by seeing (via the emptiness of the room) that all of them left. He comes to know indirectly that Carol left because he knows Carol was at the party and, as he can plainly see, everyone has left the party. Returning, then, to our gray balls, the claim is that one knows (because one can see) in a distributive sense that all the balls in A are gray. One knows something about each member of collection A—that it is gray—in the same way Clyde, standing outside the room, knows something about every person at the party—that he or she left. And just as Clyde does not (or need not) know that everyone at the party left just because he knows of everyone who was at the party that he or she left, you do not (or need not) know that all the balls in A are gray just because you know the color of each ball in A. To know that all the balls in A are gray, one would have to know more than the thirteen propositions listed above (ball #1 is gray, ball #2 is gray, . . .). One would also have to know that those were all the balls in A, and this is something one might not know. One might see all the balls in collection A, and see (in the distributive sense) that they are all gray, without being able to tell whether those are all the balls in A. Suppose, for instance, that a small orange ball is hidden behind one of the (visible) gray balls. You cannot see it. Then all the balls in this collection would not be gray, but the collection would, nonetheless, look exactly the same to you. Since you could not tell in the brief glance you had of A whether one or more balls are concealed, you cannot tell whether all the balls in A are gray. So you cannot see (and therefore do not know in the collective sense) that all the balls in A are gray. Nonetheless, since you were, in fact, looking at a collection of gray balls, all of which were completely visible, you did see (and thus did know in the distributive sense) that each ball in the collection was gray. Logicians have a crisper and more elegant way of expressing this distinction between distributive and collective knowledge of a collection. The scope of the universal quantifier is different. In one case the quantifier is outside the knowledge operator; in the other case, inside.


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Distributive knowledge of the balls: For all x, if x is a ball in collection A, you know that x is gray.

It is in this sense that you can see (and thus know) that all the balls in collection A are gray. Collective knowledge of the balls: You know that, for all x, if x is a ball in collection A, it is gray.

In this sense you do not know, by seeing, that all the balls in A are gray. For all you can tell, just by looking, there may be one or more colored (orange, blue, etc.) balls in A. They may be hidden behind larger gray balls. Well, then, if you really did come to know that ball #7 (to pick one of the balls at random) was gray, you must have seen ball #7. You cannot know, by seeing, that an object is gray without seeing the object (I will qualify this in a moment). One might, of course, receive information about an object—that it is gray—without seeing it. One might also, and without realizing it, use this information to make a decision about what to say when asked to guess about the color of the object. The guesses might then, more often than not, be correct. Something like this apparently happens in blindsight. You, though, did not have to guess about the color of #7. Unlike a person who does not see #7, a person who is not conscious of #7, you knew (the fact) that #7 was gray because you saw #7. You, in fact, without knowing it, saw every ball in row A. That is why you could see and hence knew (in the distributive sense) that all of them were gray. The above list of facts (about the color of the individual balls) you saw is a very definite list. It contains one fact for each ball—a total of thirteen facts. Without counting the balls you, of course, do not know how many facts about the color of balls you know. You do not know how many items there are on this list. If the numbers of balls in the row had been twelve instead of thirteen (call this collection B), you would—without realizing it—have had only twelve pieces of knowledge about the color of balls. You might (glancing back and forth) not notice the difference between collections A and B (difference blindness), not notice that there are fewer balls in B. So, without realizing it, you would know more when looking at A than when looking at B. The list of facts you know when looking at row A is longer than the list of facts you know when looking at B. The explanation of why you (without realizing it) know more (facts) when looking at A is that you (without realizing it) see more objects when looking at A. The texture of your experience is different when viewing collections A and B, and this is reflected in your knowledge.

Collection B:

Figure 4.5

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How do I know it is different? How do I know your experience is different if you (without realizing that A and B differ) do not know it is different? Well, I know things you do not know. You, perhaps, did not notice it, but having constructed A and B, I know A differs from B. A has one more ball. I also know—or if I do not know, I can find out by testing you—that you can, in a quick glance, see (in the distributive sense) whether all the balls in A are gray. So I know you (without realizing it) know more when looking at A than you know when looking at B. If one of the balls is black, for instance, you, in one quick glance, spot it immediately.

Collection A:

Figure 4.6

You, obviously, can see (distributive sense) whether any ball in collection A is black, a collection of thirteen balls. You must, therefore, see all thirteen balls in collection A. On the basis of your performance and my knowledge, then, I know you see all thirteen balls when looking at A. I know your experience when looking at A is different—richer, more textured—than it is when looking at B. Lacking my special knowledge, you do not know this. I, therefore, know things about your conscious experience that you do not know. In reaching this conclusion I have used a test, a criterion, for consciousness of an object (and, thus, for the texture of experience) that needs qualification. I have been assuming that: T: If S sees (and thus knows) that x is F, S sees (is conscious of) x.

This, in effect, is a test that uses fact perception (seeing that x is F) as a guide to object perception (seeing x) and, thus, as a guide to the texture of conscious experience. You cannot know, by seeing, that x is F unless you see x. T needs qualification. I earlier mentioned indirect perception: seeing, by the blinking icon, that my cell phone battery needs charging. This sort of case constitutes an obvious counterexample to T. I see that x (my battery) is F (needs charging) without seeing x. So I hereby qualify T. There must be no intermediate object, condition, or state of affairs (like the blinking icon on my cell phone) the perception of which provides the information that enables one to know that x is F without seeing x. The fact perception (that x is F) must be direct. T*: If S directly sees (and thus knows) that x is F, S sees (is conscious) of x.


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But isn’t T* just a way of saying that one’s knowledge (that x is F) must come by way of seeing (consciousness of) x itself? Aren’t we, then, back to where we started—trying to figure out (in determining whether the perception is direct or not) when one is conscious of x? Not quite. Excluding indirect ways of seeing facts about x is a way of excluding a variety of ways in which one can get information about x without seeing x itself, and although there are cases in which this is hard to judge or just plain puzzling (can one see that someone is angry in a direct way? Or is it always indirect?), there are applications in which this is reasonably clear. In looking at collection A, did one come to know the balls were gray in some indirect way? If so, what intermediate object or condition was it that told one this? If one did not see ball #7 itself when declaring that all the balls in A were gray, what, then, did one see that indicated that #7 (not to mention every other ball) was gray? There does not seem to be any plausible candidate for this intermediate condition— nothing between the viewer and ball #7 that, so to speak, conceals #7 (so you cannot see it) but nonetheless conveys information about #7’s color. I can easily imagine seeing that x is gray by looking at a photograph or by using instruments that register x’s color, but nothing like this is going on in one’s perception of the balls in A. If this is indirect, it is up to the person who claims it is indirect to explain why and how it is. Let me mention, though, a possibility in this regard (the present example is mine, but I thank John Campbell for the idea). Consider the way we can see (indirectly) what is true of the members of a collection by seeing the collection itself but not its members. Unlike a photograph or a measuring instrument, a collection of things does not exactly come between its members and the viewer. So imagine you see a flock of geese flying south. The geese are too far away and bunched too close together to see the individual geese, but the flock is visible. It looks like a small dark cloud in the sky. Yet, though you do not see individual geese, you get information about individual geese: Each goose is flying south.1 So you know something about individual geese without seeing individual geese. Why isn’t seeing that the balls in collection A are gray like this? One sees something to be true of the individual balls not by seeing the individual balls but by seeing, so to speak, the flock of balls and inferring what must be true of the individual balls in the flock. This is, of course, indirect perception because one is getting information about the individual balls not by seeing them but by seeing the

1. I have been told by both Sven Walter and Markus Wild that there might easily be one or more “wayward” geese in this flock flying west without any change in the appearance of the flock. So we do not get information about all the members of the collection from the behavior or appearance of the collection itself. I’m afraid they are right about the geese. But I like the example too much to give it up. For those who insist on verisimilitude with examples, think of a herd of cows instead of a flock of geese. I know Bossie (indeed, every cow in this herd) is in field F because that is where I (from a great distance) see the herd is.

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collection of which they are members. So we already have the answer to this objection. There is, first, the obvious point that A does not look like a flock of indistinguishable balls. It looks, even in a brief glance, like a bunch of individual balls. If we put this point aside, though, perhaps on the grounds that phenomenology is untrustworthy, there is the fact that if one saw that ball #7 was gray in this way, then one’s knowledge that ball #7 is gray would be derived from the collective knowledge that all the balls in A are gray. As we have seen, though you do not have to know (collectively) that all the balls in A are gray in order to see (know) that each one is gray. One’s knowledge that ball #7 is gray is not derived from the general knowledge that all the balls in A are gray (and that #7 is a ball in A) because one sees, and thus knows, that #7 is gray without knowing the general truth that all the balls in A are gray. So seeing that ball #7 (and every other ball in A) is gray is not like seeing that goose #7 (and every other goose in the flock) is flying south. Unlike the flock of geese, one can easily see that ball #7 (and each of the other thirteen balls in A) is gray without being able to see, without knowing (collectively), whether all the balls in A are gray. My claims about what you see when looking at A and, thus, my claims about your conscious experience are, of course, empirical claims. I am assuming that you are a normal perceiver, that you are viewing things at a normal distance and in suitable lighting. These assumptions may not always be true. It may turn out that someone followed my directions but did not see ball #7. Blind in one eye, his glance with the good eye was so brief (too brief for a saccade) that for the entire duration of his glance, the image of #7 fell on the blind spot of his good eye. All the balls he could see looked gray, but these balls would have looked gray even if #7 had been blue. So he did not see (collectively or distributively) that all the balls in A were gray even though he thought (and said) he did see this. Not very likely, I suppose, but who am I to say that it (or something like it) never happens. So my claims about the texture of perceptual experience must be understood to be empirical—and thus possibly false—claims. They are, nonetheless, testable claims about people viewing complex scenes. Most of us, I assume, see all the balls when looking at A, but maybe some people won’t see them all even if they think they can. The texture of their experience, then, will be different than I say it is. That is the risk one runs in making empirical claims about other people’s conscious experience. One final point about test T*. This has to do with how one is to understand the alleged knowledge one acquires of each member as one looks at a large collection. I had dinner with a friend, Andreas, last night. Today, in talking about the evening, I was asked by a nosy colleague whether Andreas was wearing a hat during dinner. I say he was not wearing a hat. My nosy colleague is an epistemologist and wants to know how I know he wasn’t wearing a hat. I reply by saying that Andreas was sitting across the table from me in a well-lit restaurant for two hours. I could see that


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he wasn’t wearing a hat. I did not, it is true, think about this matter at the time—whether or not Andreas was wearing a hat—but now when asked about it, I’m completely certain he was hatless. My colleague persists. Since I did not consciously think about this matter until today (when asked), did I nonetheless know last night, before such a thought ever crossed my mind, that Andreas was hatless? If so, does this mean that one can see, and thus know, that x is F without thinking (judging, believing) that x is F? Yes, it does. I did not just learn that Andreas was not wearing a hat at dinner last night when my colleague asked me about it this morning. I knew it all along. I knew it last night. I remember that Andreas was not wearing a hat and remembering P is something one cannot do unless one (already) knew P. This is a kind of knowledge—call it tacit knowledge— one has in virtue of having had (and retained a memory of) a conscious experience evidentially sufficient for perceptual knowledge. Having (and retaining) such an experience qualifies as knowledge whether or not—at the time of the experience—one has any thoughts on the matter at all. This is why, despite not thinking about it until this very moment, I knew this morning that there were no giraffes in my room when I got out of bed. I raise this issue here because the kind of knowledge we are talking about in T* is often—not always, but often—tacit knowledge. One sees a crowd of objects. Thoughts about their color, orientation, shape, and relative placement do not occur. One’s mind is elsewhere. One nonetheless knows things about the objects in this crowd. Collection A is not much of a crowd, as crowds go, but even in a quick glance, and without thinking about it, one knows something about each member of the crowd. One knows that ball #7 is gray even though the thought ‘The seventh ball from the left is gray’ never occurs to one. One knows this and continues to know it as long as one retains, in memory, the experience one had in looking at A. This is tacit knowledge. It is tacit knowledge (tacit direct knowledge, of course) that according to T* suffices for awareness of the objects one has knowledge of. So the absence of active and conscious thoughts at the time one views a complex scene should not be taken as indicative of the absence of knowledge. One tacitly knows, effortlessly, all manner of things about the world one sees just as I know, tacitly, and with no expenditure of cognitive effort, all manner of things about the contents of my bedroom this morning (come to think about it, there were no elephants there either) and Andreas’s appearance last night (now that I think about it, he did not smoke a cigarette either). And it is the existence of this knowledge—knowledge whose existence is ascertainable by others—that according to T* is symptomatic of the texture of conscious experience. I realize that this conception of tacit knowledge is, perhaps, too liberal to square with our ordinary ways of thinking. It gives knowledge to those

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who really should not have it. It seems a stretch, for instance, to say of a person (a child, say) who does not even know what a porcupine is that it knows (tacitly) that an animal it sees is a porcupine if he sees it nearby in good viewing conditions. Yes, the child’s conscious experience may represent the animal in a way that is sufficient for knowledge by a person who knows what porcupines are and what they look like, but that does not mean the child knows it is a porcupine. It would be better to say that only those who understand what an F is, only those who have the concept F, get to know, tacitly, that something is F by having the appropriate experience. Such a qualification would have to be imposed if one were to seriously propose tacit knowledge as a genuine form of knowledge. I am, however, not much interested in arguing about whether tacit knowledge is a genuine form of knowledge—whether it is really knowledge. I think it captures something interesting about perceptual knowledge—the way we can sometimes have it when it is not accompanied by conscious belief or judgment—but I introduce this notion to do a different job. Tacit knowledge is merely my—perhaps eccentric—way of describing a certain kind of conscious experience, an experience that is rich enough in information to yield knowledge to a properly situated agent. If it does this much, that will be enough for my purposes.

Figure 4.7

In keeping with my theme, and as a closing example, I offer two crowds of gray balls. My bet is that everyone of reasonably normal vision who looks at figure 4.7 will have a (slightly) richer, a (slightly) more textured, conscious experience than when looking at figure 4.8—they will see more. Why do I say this? Because they know more. They know that ball #43 in figure 4.7 is gray, something they do not know (because ball #43 isn’t there) when looking at figure 4.8. If you know #43 is gray (this is testable),


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Figure 4.8

we can conclude, in accordance with T*, that when looking at figure 4.7 you see, and are thus conscious of, #43 and its color. Since ball #43 isn’t in figure 4.8, your conscious experience is different when looking at figure 4.8. Even if you do not know it is different (because you cannot see the differences between figures 4.7 and 4.9), I do. And I can find out by testing you whether you can tell in a quick glance whether ball #43 (or, indeed, any ball) is gray. If you can, then I can tell you something you do not know about your own conscious experience.

5 Projectivism without Error Andy Egan

1. THE PROJECTIVIST THOUGHT Here is a potentially attractive thought to have about perception: Part of the content of our perceptual experience comes from the world, and part of it comes from us. Some of the features attributed in perception are discovered—they are objective, observer-independent properties of the objects in our environment, and the reason we attribute them to the things that we do is that our perceptual mechanisms make us appropriately sensitive to the objective features of objects out in the world. Some of the features we attribute to objects in perception are projected—their attribution is a product, not of our perceptual openness to the objective features of things as they are in themselves, but of the peculiarities of our own particular sensory apparatus. We, or our perceptual systems, do not just take in the features of things in our perceptual neighborhoods—we also “gild and stain”1 them with perceptually attributed features whose origins in perceptual experience have more to do with us than they have to do with the objects we attribute them to.

This is the thought that I am hoping, primarily, to cash out and, secondarily, to justify in what follows. It should be a familiar sort of thought. I take it to be a (the?) central projectivist thought—the thought that some of the features we attribute to things are not “really out there” to be discovered but are instead projected out onto the world by us, or by our perceptual systems. It is a thought that I find quite attractive but also quite puzzling.2

Thanks to audiences at the Australian National University and the Syracuse Philosophy Annual Conference, and in particular to Bence Nanay, Susanna Siegel, Brad Thompson, Christopher Hill, Frances Egan, and Jonathan Cohen, for very helpful comments and questions. 1. In Hume’s (1751, appx. I, pt. V) phrase. 2. The projectivist thought, as characterized here, has a lot in common with the thought that I think lies behind (a lot of the appeal of) the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. It is not surprising, then, that what I say about projected qualities in this chapter is pretty much what I say about secondary qualities elsewhere (Egan 2006a).

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Projectivism without Error

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A lot of different views have sailed under the flag of “projectivism” over the years. I am not going to undertake the impossible task of satisfying every motivation anyone has ever had for offering such a view. All that I am after here is an account that allows me to cash out the attractive thought above, in a way that makes sense and that has some chance of being true. To help give a better sense of the target idea, here are a few places in philosophical history where one can find something like the projectivist thought: John Locke: The particular bulk, number, and motion of the parts of fire, or snow, are really in them, whether anyone’s senses perceive them or no: and therefore they may be called real qualities, because they really exist in those bodies. But light, heat, whiteness, or coldness, are no more really in them, than sickness or pain is in manna. Take away the sensation of them; let not the eyes see light, or colors, nor the ears hear sounds; let the palate not taste, nor the nose smell, and all colors, tastes, odors, and sounds . . . vanish and cease. . . . (1690: bk. 2, ch. 8, §14)

David Hume: ’Tis a common observation, that the mind has a great propensity to spread itself on external objects. . . . (1740, I.iii.XIV) Taste has a productive faculty, and gilding and staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises in a manner a new creation. . . . (1751: 88)

William James: We conceive a given reality in this way or that, to suit our purpose, and the reality passively submits to the conception. . . . In all these cases we humanly make an addition to some sensible reality, and that reality tolerates the addition. (1907: 251–252)

Gideon Rosen: Successful thought amounts to the detection of something real, as opposed to a projection onto the real of our own peculiar or subjective perspective. (1994: 278.)3

I will have two goals in this chapter. Primarily, I am interested in laying out a view that has a good claim to cashing out the projectivist thought and that avoids some of the costs of other ways of cashing it out (in part, because it avoids the commitment to systematic error that seems to go along with projectivism). Secondarily, I am interested in arguing that the proposed version of projectivism is, plausibly, the correct account of some 3. Rosen is not speaking with his own voice here—he is articulating what he takes to be an attractive sort of thought that cannot, at the end of the day, be given a satisfactory theoretical underpinning. One of the purposes of this chapter, and of Egan (2006a), is to provide the sort of underpinning that Rosen’s article argues that we cannot have.

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of the projectivism-motivating perceptual phenomena. The first project is, I think, still interesting even if the second does not succeed—it is helpful to have the best versions of even the views that we do not ultimately want to endorse out on the table. I first survey some of the phenomena that might motivate the projectivist thought, and then I look at some ways of cashing out just what it would amount to for the thought to be correct. I worry a bit about some of the standard ways and then advocate another way of cashing out the thought that I think, at least in some cases, does a better job of both capturing the phenomena and underwriting the projectivist idea.

2. A MOTIVATION FOR PROJECTIVISM One way to motivate the projectivist thought is to look at cases where we find what looks like interpersonal variability in the content of perception— in which different people seem to perceptually represent the same object in incompatible ways—but where we do not want to attribute asymmetric error (because, e.g., we have no good, non-question-begging grounds for saying one party is in a better position to track objective facts in the relevant domain than the other). One attractive response to this sort of situation is to go projectivist and say that, in fact, neither party is really tracking the facts about the world—both parties are, instead, gilding and/ or staining the world (in incompatible ways) with features that are the products of their own sensory particularities. There are a number of places where there is at least a prima facie appearance of being in this sort of situation, where we have perceivers systematically attributing incompatible-looking features to things in their environments and no principled basis for attributing error to one party rather than the other. Consider the following examples: (1) Gustatory qualities such as sweetness and bitterness look like good candidates for projectivist treatment, given the variation we see across individuals in how things taste to them and the lack of a plausible way of picking out a privileged bunch of tasters who are really getting it right. (2) Aesthetic properties, too, seem—or, anyway, have seemed to many—to be good candidates. One often hears people say, for example, that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” or that “no sentiment represents what is really in the object” and “to seek in the real beauty, or real deformity, is as fruitless an enquiry, as to pretend to ascertain the real sweet or real bitter” (Hume 1757, §8).4 (3) Visual-field shapes and sizes—for example, the elliptical appearance presented by the circular (and, indeed, still also circularlooking) plate when it is held at an angle to the eye—are also 4. I say a lot more about the aesthetic case in Egan (forthcoming).


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plausible candidates. There is (one wants to be able to say) some aspect of the way my visual experience represents the plate when I am looking at it edge on that is incompatible with an aspect of the way your visual experience represents it when you are looking at it face on. But it is not attractive to say that, because of this incompatibility in how we represent the plate, it is likely that one of us is representing it correctly while the other is misrepresenting it.5 (4) Perhaps also the sorts of affordances one finds in certain bits of psychological theory, and (perhaps) also in philosophers such as Heidegger (see, e.g., Heidegger 1927; Gibson 1977, 1979; Noë 2004), when objects are presented to us as to be used in certain ways or as offering certain possibilities for how we might engage with them, and similarly, appearances of importance and salience, when objects or features of the environment present themselves as particularly important, relevant, or interesting. In many cases where some object offers different affordances to me than it offers to you, it is not very attractive to say that one of us is tracking the real affordances of the object in question while the other is getting it wrong. This is a diverse list, and obviously there are important respects in which the types of qualities on it differ from one another. What I want to draw attention to, though, is what they have in common: All of these look like candidate cases of perceptual incompatibilities without a plausible basis for an asymmetric attribution of error. (Note also that while I focus on interpersonal variation here, intrapersonal variation will do just as well. Cases of a single perceiver attributing incompatible features to the same thing at different times, in which we do not want either to attribute asymmetric error or to say that the object underwent a relevant change in the intervening time, are also likely to make a projectivist story seem attractive.) I propose to focus on another example: perceptual representation of unique, pure, or true colors (for extensive discussion, see Hardin 1988; Block 1999; Tye 2006a, 2006b, 2007; Byrne and Hilbert 2007; Cohen, Hardin, and McLaughlin 2006, 2007). Asked to pick out which of a series of color chips are, for example, ‘unique blue’—blue with no tinge of any other color—different subjects reliably pick out different ones. Let me simplify and pretend that the only interpersonal differences in unique-hue

5. There is a lot of discussion of this phenomenon of, to coin a phrase, shape-constancy-while-stilllooking-different-in-a-shapey-sort-of-way, and the related phenomenon of color-constancy-while-stilllooking-different-in-a-colory-sort-of-way. In this volume, Mohan Matthen (chapter 9) and Sean Kelly (chapter 7) take up these issues in some detail. The quick motivational remarks above depend on finding attractive an account of shape-constancy phenomena that is like the account of color constancy favored by Sydney Shoemaker (2006), according to which, for example, my visual experience always represents the plate as circular but also attributes some other features to it that explain why it looks different when it is held at different angles. These other features are the ones that I think are good candidates for projectivist treatment.

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perception that exist are gender based.6 Women, let’s suppose, reliably pick chip number 17 of some series as unique blue, while men reliably judge chip 17 to be greenish blue and select chip 15 as the unique blue one. Here we have a case that fits our specifications: We have two groups of people making (apparently) incompatible perceptual judgments, and it does not seem plausible to say that there is some bunch of objective facts that they are both making judgments about, and one group is just doing a better job of tracking those objective facts than the other.7 It is plausible to think that, when our perceptual systems are dealing in attributions of unique hues, this is not a matter of sensitivity to the genuine, out-there-to-be-discovered property of, for example, unique blueness, which some of us are correctly tracking and others not. Instead (the thought continues), this bit of perceptual content is due to idiosyncratic features of our own particular representational apparatus. Stuff that really is about us and our perceptual equipment is getting projected out onto the world. What attributions of qualities such as unique blueness are really responsive to, it is attractive to say, is features of the individuals doing the representing and their perceptual systems and not genuine, objective features of the objects being perceptually represented.

3. CASHING OUT THE METAPHOR These sorts of cases are ones in which it is appealing to think that something like the projectivist thought is correct. Which raises the question: Just what would it amount to for the projectivist thought to be correct, exactly? What would have to be going on in perception for that sort of “gilding and staining” talk to be appropriate? Before going on, let me note some ground rules that I will impose on the kinds of stories under consideration: I am looking at ways of cashing out the projectivist idea as a distinction between the different sorts of qualities or features that we attribute to things in perception, so what I am after is a story about what some perceptually attributed feature has to be like in order for the projectivist thought to be correct about it. The story about what the relevant features are like is told in terms of their contributions to the veridicality conditions of experiences—in terms of what it would take for an attribution of such a feature to be correct. On the sort of picture I am working within, the attribution of a feature to 6. Of course, the actual pattern of interpersonal variation is more complicated; see, in particular, Hardin (1988) and Block (1999). 7. I am not going to be very careful about the distinction between the contents of perceptual experiences and the contents of perceptual judgments. I will write as if it was uncontroversial that the contents of our perceptual judgments (almost) always just reflect the contents of our perceptual experiences. That may be wrong, but even if it is, the added complications will not, I think, make a difference to the argument here.


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some entity determines a veridicality condition. Indeed, the main business, for my purposes, of a feature (e.g., being a dog) is to determine a veridicality condition when it is attributed to an object (e.g., Lassie) in an experience (or a thought, or whatever). So, I am after a distinction between kinds of features attributed in experience, in terms of the veridicality conditions of their attributions, that is fit to underwrite the projectivist thought by providing a satisfying distinction between the projected features and the rest. In addition, I am understanding veridicality conditions in possibilitycarving terms—in terms of the way that they divide up a class of possibilities into the ones in which things are as represented in the experience, and the ones in which things are otherwise. Since I am also (I hereby stipulate) thinking about the objects of thought in possibility-carving terms, determining a veridicality condition is going to be sufficient for determining an object of thought. So what an attribution of a feature to an object does is determine an object of thought—a candidate thing to believe, desire, and so forth. Working in this sort of possibility-carving framework allows me to move smoothly back and forth between talking about the correctness conditions of perceptual experiences and talking about the contents of perceptual experiences. (There are, of course, notions of content that would not allow such smooth movement from one to the other, but I am not employing them here.) We can think of the features that get attributed in perception, and in thought, then, as functions from entities to potential objects of thought— from the entities that they might be attributed to, to the objects of thought that would be determined by such an attribution. This should be a pretty familiar sort of picture. All of these restrictions are partly in the service of keeping the discussion manageable, and partly in the service of restricting the theoretical commitments of the resulting projectivist account to ones that I am comfortable with. I think that we are going to wind up committed to veridicality conditions for experiences come what may.8 But I would prefer that my account of the projectivist thought not force me to take sides in disputes about the details of the representational mechanisms by means of which those veridicality conditions get determined. By imposing these constraints, I am taking a number of candidate accounts off the table—I am ruling out, for example, mode-of-presentation– based views that put important theoretical weight on non-possibilitycarving aspects of representation, and I am ruling out the sort of expressivist projectivism advocated by Simon Blackburn (in, e.g., Blackburn 1984), which does not trade in possibility-carving at all. I am doing this not because I take myself to have some great in-principle objection to such

8. Not everybody agrees, but see Siegel (chapter 12 this volume) for some support.

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accounts but because I want to explore the prospects for a view that satisfies the constraints just set out. I have theoretical and methodological proclivities that make me want to stick to stories told in these kinds of possibility-carving terms until I am forced out of them, but even if you do not share those proclivities, there is value in exploring how much we can do with these resources. I conduct the discussion in terms of the unique hues and cast the task of satisfactorily cashing out the projectivist metaphor as the task of providing a reasonably appealing projectivist account of the perceptual phenomena surrounding our judgments about, for example, unique blue. My hope is that the account of the unique hues will serve as a good illustration of the general projectivist strategy I am advocating, which could then be implemented in other cases (and, indeed, could still be implemented in other cases even if we decide, at the end of the day, that it is not the right story to tell about the unique hues). It also makes presentation simpler to have a particular case to focus on. How to generalize the account of the case should be clear enough. Let’s suppose that Ron and Hermione look at a series of color chips. Hermione’s visual experience represents chip 17 as unique blue. Ron’s visual experience represents chip 17 as greenish blue—as blue slightly tinged with green—and represents chip 15 as unique blue. Suppose that we want to give a projectivist account of this bit of the content of Ron’s and Hermione’s visual experiences, in order to account for their perceptual variation without saying that one, but not the other, is correctly tracking the unique hues of the objects in their environment. What should we say, exactly, about the ways in which their respective experiences represent the chips? In particular, what should we say about the qualities unique blue and greenish blue that Hermione’s and Ron’s experiences respectively attribute to chip 17? Let’s start with some desiderata that we want our projectivist account of the unique hues to satisfy: INCOMPATIBILITY: The features attributed in Ron’s and Hermione’s experiences are genuinely incompatible. One could not have a veridical experience that attributed both to the same object.9 NO ASYMMETRIC ERROR: It is not the case that one of Ron or Hermione is getting it right while the other is getting it wrong. PROJECTION: What is going on warrants talk of projection—of gilding and staining, of being the contribution of us and our perceptual apparatus rather than (just) the way the world is, and so on. The 9. There are a lot of ways to cash out the notion of incompatibility. I do not claim that the incompatibility requirement that I focus on here—about the impossibility of a single perceiver’s veridically representing the thing both ways simultaneously—is the only respectable notion of incompatibility. It is not. What is important to making the argument here go is just that it is a legitimate notion of incompatibility, such that satisfying the incompatibility requirement is a way of underwriting the intuitive appearance of incompatibility.


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qualities attributed (unique blue and greenish blue) have got to be such that their attribution is traceable to features of the subject’s particular sensory apparatus in a way that attribution of other sorts of qualities is not. The intuitive case for INCOMPATIBILITY is, I think, pretty clear and compelling. The way Hermione’s visual experience represents chip 17 is just incompatible with the way Ron’s visual experience represents it—one could not consistently represent chip 17 both as Hermione’s experience represents it and as Ron’s experience represents it. So, being unique blue had better preclude being greenish blue, and vice versa. (More carefully: Hermione’s correctly representing chip 17 as unique blue had better preclude her simultaneously correctly representing it as greenish blue.) We want NO ASYMMETRIC ERROR because neither Ron nor Hermione seems to have a better claim than the other to be tracking the genuine facts of the matter. There seems to be no relevant difference in the way their perceptual systems are responding to the things in the world that they represent that would warrant the claim that one, but not the other, is having a veridical experience of the color of chip 17.10 PROJECTION promises to explain how their perceptual experiences come by a sort of content that is not tracking genuine, objective features of objects in the world—it is there on account of the features of the perceivers and their perceptual apparatus, not on account of objective features of the things perceived. Note that I am not claiming here that these desiderata are nonnegotiable constraints on the theory of unique-hue perception that we want, at the end of the day, to endorse. I do not think that they are. What I do think—and what is important for our purposes now—is just that they are (at least partially) constitutive of a sort of view that has some appeal and that it would be nice to be able to have a plausible version on the table. I look first at a few fairly standard options for how to flesh out this sort of view. I also complain about them a bit in order to motivate the rival account that I offer in the next section. I am not aiming for an argument by elimination here—I certainly do not look at all of the available options, and I am not aiming to conclusively rule out the ones that I do look at. Rather, I use some selected rival theories as points of contrast in order to highlight what I take to be attractive features of the sort of view that I am going to offer.

10. Byrne and Hilbert (2007) offer an account that embraces asymmetric systematic error. On their view, somebody is getting it right, but we are not in good position to say who, since we are not privy to the causal and evolutionary facts that fix the content of the relevant visual experience types. There is a perfectly good metaphysical basis for the asymmetric error, but we are in a lousy position to adjudicate the dispute. I have no good arguments that this could not be the right story, but I think it is an unattractive thing to say, and its unattractiveness ought to incline us to look for other options.

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One option is what Sydney Shoemaker (1990) calls literal projectivism: There are some properties that are in fact just properties of our experiences but that we, and/or our perceptual experiences, mistakenly attribute to things outside the mind. On this kind of view, unique blue and greenish blue are actually qualities of Ron’s and Hermione’s perceptual experiences, which they, or their visual perceptual systems, mistakenly attribute to objects out in the world. Another is what Shoemaker calls figurative projectivism: There are some additional properties, instantiated neither by our experiences nor by the objects in the world that we attribute them to, that we attribute to things on account of having certain sorts of experiences. On this sort of view, unique blue and greenish blue are not features of Ron’s and Hermione’s visual experiences, but neither are they features that are actually possessed by the objects to which they are attributed. Assuming that we fill in the details right, both of these sorts of accounts will satisfy all of the desiderata above. It is easy to specify the properties attributed in such a way that they are incompatible, and such that nothing (or nothing outside the mind) has the properties that either party’s perceptual experiences attribute to the color chips. So both parties’ perceptual experiences are nonveridical, and there is no asymmetry in our attributions of error. And these are pretty clearly projectivist views—either features of our perceptual experience are themselves being attributed to objects in the world, or else other sorts of properties are getting attributed to objects in the world, not on account of our perceptual faculties being receptive to the presence of those properties in the objects we perceive, but (merely) on account of some of the properties of our perceptual experiences of those objects. Still, these accounts are not completely satisfying. Both of these options convict visual perception of a particularly bad sort of systematic error— either confusing properties of experience and properties of things out in the world, or else conjuring properties out of whole cloth to attribute to things out in the world. These are both pretty serious and surprising sorts of error. It should not be surprising that these are both error theories, since given our desiderata, an error theory actually looks kind of inevitable. When we are faced with two perceptual judgments, it looks as if there are only three possible things to say about their veridicality: (1) they are both veridical, (2) they are both nonveridical, or (3) one is veridical and the other is nonveridical. The ban on asymmetric error rules out possibility (3), and the incompatibility requirement rules out possibility (1), which leaves possibility (2) as the only option on the table. So it is likely to seem as if, given INCOMPATIBILITY and NO ASYMMETRIC ERROR, we are stuck with an error theory. Still, it would be better if this could be avoided. (I argue in the next section that it can be.) There are several reasons to be reluctant about signing up for an error theory. One is just the usual sort of application of some (fairly weak)


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charity principle as a constraint on interpretation. Other things equal, it is better to avoid attributing systematic error to the subjects and systems that one is interpreting. Another motivation is the reason-givingness of the relevant bits of perceptual content. It seems as if, for example, gustatory perception of objects as sweet, salty, bitter, and so on, gives us good reasons to eat one sort of thing rather than another. Having a visual experience that represents the streetlight as red gives me a good reason to stop the car, and so on. If those experiences are never veridical, since they are trading in properties not possessed by things outside the mind, we need to do some work to say that they are nonetheless appropriately reason-giving, and our account of their reason-givingness is liable to be less direct, and more convoluted, than it seems like it ought to be. Finally, there are some veridicality-ish distinctions in the neighborhood that we definitely want to be able to make but that a global error theory threatens to mask. Even if we do not want to make a distinction in terms of veridicality between my attributions of unique-blueness in good viewing conditions and your attributions in good viewing conditions, we do want to make such a distinction between, for example, my attributions in good perceptual conditions and bad, my attributions where I am just guessing with my eyes closed and (we would like to say) I get it wrong, and the ones where I am looking in good lighting conditions and (we would like to say) I get it right. Compare the case in which Ron, eyes closed, makes a wild guess about chip 2 (which, if he was looking carefully in good conditions, he would say was unique red) and judges that it is unique blue, to the case in which he looks, in good conditions, at chip 2 and judges that it is unique red. We probably want to say something positive, in a veridicality-ish neighborhood, about the second judgment that we do not want to say about the first. Similarly in the case where Ron looks at (what we would normally be inclined to say is) a white chip, under an appropriately selected sort of blue light, and has a visual experience that represents it as unique blue, compared to the case in which he looks, in paradigmatically good viewing conditions, at chip 15 and has an experience that represents it as unique blue. Another example of the same sort of phenomenon: Asked to put all of the unique-blue things in a pile, there are ways of doing better and worse at the task. We want to be able to draw a distinction between the case in which Hermione winds up with a pile that includes chip 15 and a bunch of appropriately similar blueberries, and the case in which she winds up with a pile that includes, say, chip 17, chip 2, and a bunch of bananas. A general error theory, according to which nothing at all is, for example, unique blue threatens to mask these distinctions by just consigning all attributions of projected qualities to the “nonveridical” bin. If we could manage it, then, it would be best to be able to accommodate a fourth desideratum:

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Perceiving the World CORRECTNESS:

Both Ron’s and Hermione’s perceptual attributions of unique blue and greenish blue are correct.

We could accommodate this desideratum by adopting another popular sort of view—some variety of response-dependent contextualism or externalism, according to which they are each just tracking different objective properties of things under the description or mode of presentation unique blue. On this kind of view, there is no such thing as unique blue simpliciter. There’s just a family of properties, unique blueK for various kinds K. Males’ judgments about what is unique blue are about what is unique bluemale, while females’ judgments about what is unique blue are about what is unique bluefemale, and so on, for whatever the relevant groups turn out to be. (There are different ways to spell out the details of such a view. One, dispositionalist, way is to say that x is unique-blueK iff x is disposed to cause sensations of a certain phenomenally individuated type—call it B—in Ks in normal viewing conditions. Another, physicalist way to cash it out is to say that unique blueK is that physical property, whatever it is, that forms the categorical basis of the disposition to cause B sensations in Ks in normal viewing conditions. This is, obviously, just the beginning of a very long list of options.)11 A nice feature of this is that it allows us to say that everybody is getting it right, because everybody’s perceptual experiences are dealing in different bunches of properties, and everybody is correctly (more-or-less) tracking their own proprietary bunch of properties. In particular, Ron and Hermione

11. I mean to be casting quite a wide net in describing this category of view—there are a lot of people who, as I read them, are offering views of this general type, though not all of them describe their views in quite these terms. Such views exhibit a lot of variety in the sorts of properties that they take to be represented by the relevant types of experiences, and in the sorts of features of the perceiver and/or her perceptual environment that they take to be relevant to determining just which of the selected class of properties a given experience type is going to represent. But these differences, while vitally important for very many purposes, do not matter for ours. The color pluralist views defended in, for example, Kalderon (2007), Allen (2005), Bradley and Tye (2001), and Mizrahi (2006) are pretty clearly of this type. As I read Brian McLaughlin (2003), for example, he is also offering a view of this type, according to which my unique-green-ish-experiences in circumstances C1 and your unique-green-ish-experiences in circumstances C2 are (very likely to be) attributing different physical properties to the objects in our environments. Another sort of view of this type is the sort of relationalist view (or family of views) defended by Jonathan Cohen (in, e.g., Cohen 2004, 2006, 2007, 2009), on which humans’ and pigeons’ visual experiences, and the visual experiences of different humans with appropriately different visual systems, are in the business of representing different classes of relational properties. Color dispositionalist views (e.g., the ones we find in Jackson and Pargetter [1987] and Mark Johnston [1992]), which hold that members of different perceptual kinds are (likely to be) attributing different dispositional properties to objects in their phenomenologically similar visual experiences will also fall into this category. So too will the views of philosophers who, like Brad Thompson (2007, 2009), advocate a Fregean view of perceptual content according to which a common phenomenal mode of presentation can be deployed, in the experiences of different sorts of perceivers, to represent different properties of objects in their environments.


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are both correctly representing chip 17. Ron’s experience correctly represents chip 17 as greenish blueRon (or greenish bluemale), and Hermione’s experience correctly represents it as unique blueHermione (or unique bluefemale). Putting it in terms of concepts deployed in perception, we can say: There is a perceptual concept, unique blue, that different perceivers are deploying differently, but since they each deploy it to track different properties, everybody is deploying it (more-or-less) correctly. If we do not like conceptual content in perception, we can still say: There is a common way they are both deploying their representational apparatus, but in response to different stuff—there is a representationally significant feature of the insides of their heads that they are both deploying, but in different ways. There is some visual representational state R such that Hermione gets into R in response to chip 17, and Ron gets into R in response to chip 15. But since that representational state is tracking different properties in each of them, they are both deploying it/instantiating it/whatever (more-or-less) correctly. I complain about views of this sort below, but the complaints I make are not, primarily, arguments that they are not true, as much as arguments that they are not good ways to capture the projectivist thought. Of course, it could turn out that we ought, at the end of the day, to reject the projectivist thought. But whether or not we want to endorse a projectivist view at the end of the day, it would be helpful to know just what a projectivist account would look like. There are two reasons to be concerned about whether this kind of view really delivers on the projectivist thought: First worry: It gives us no incompatibility in the content of Ron’s and Hermione’s perceptual experiences. There is no incompatibility because there is no common subject matter—they are not really making conflicting or incompatible judgments, since their perceptual mechanisms are just dealing in attributions of different properties. Response: It is true that we do not get incompatible contents—that is, we do not get incompatible correctness conditions. We do, however, get a different sort of incompatibility—we get incompatible ways of representing at the level of something like modes of presentation, or perceptual states. There is a perceptual concept, or a way of perceptually representing, that one applies and the other withholds. (Perhaps better, there are incompatible perceptual concepts, or incompatible ways of perceptually representing, that they apply.) It is not clear that this incompatibility is enough. It would be better, I think, to be able to deliver the story at the level of correctness conditions if we can, first, because it seems to do fuller justice to the intuition of incompatibility, and second, because it does not run the risk of embroiling us in a big fight about the mechanisms of perceptual representation.

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Absent fancy footwork (which is coming in the next section), CORlooks to be incompatible with INCOMPATIBILITY—at least, with incompatibility at the level of veridicality conditions. And so we have to choose one of the initially appealing desiderata to give up. Shoemaker’s literal and figurative projectivisms preserve INCOMPATIBILITY while giving up CORRECTNESS. As a result, they buy themselves some theoretical work in explaining the reason-givingness of perception of unique hues, and the apparent distinctions in terms of veridicality to be drawn between different unique-hue perceptions. The sort of response-dependent contextualist view just considered preserves CORRECTNESS while giving up INCOMPATIBILITY. As a result, it buys itself some theoretical work in explaining the appearance of incompatibility. Whatever we think about the not-enough-incompatibility complaint, there is a second worry that is, I think, more important for our purposes. Whatever there is to be said for this sort of contextualist/externalist story as an end-of-the-day theory of the phenomena, it does not really look good as a way of cashing out the distinctively projectivist idea. This is a theory on which one bunch of perfectly objective properties is being tracked by group A, and another bunch of perfectly objective properties is being tracked by group B—in our case, Ron’s attributions of unique blueness are tracking unique blueRon (or unique bluemale), while Hermione’s are tracking unique blueHermione (or unique bluefemale). This sort of view is probably better described as filterism than projectivism. All the properties that feature in perception are genuine, objective properties to be found “out there,” which we (typically) attribute to things on account of their genuine, objective presence in the things to which we attribute them. It is just that which of the relevant properties our particular sensory faculties are in the business of representing is a contingent, and potentially idiosyncratic, fact about us. This does not look like a good way of capturing the thought that the qualities in question are contributed by us, rather than being “out there” to be discovered. On this sort of view, the ‘projected’ bits of perceptual content are still instances of content that is there as a result of openness to objective facts about the world—it is just that different ones of us are perceptually open to different bunches of objective facts. In addition to not really seeming to warrant talk of projection, this sort of account is not going to provide an interesting distinction between different bits of perceptual content, which allows us to distinguish the projected bits from the rest. For any feature of objects in our environment that we are perceptually sensitive to, it is a contingent fact about us that we have perceptual systems that are sensitive to that feature. So this fact about some perceptually represented quality—that it is on account of some contingent peculiarities of our particular sensory apparatus that our perceptual systems are in the business of tracking that quality rather than some other—does not separate, in the right sort of way, the things about which projectivism is appealing from the things about which it is not. RECTNESS


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Since everything counts as projected by this standard, we do not get the right sort of distinction between the features that are supposed to be projected and the ones that are not.

4. ANOTHER OPTION I am going to advocate a view according to which perceptual experiences typically have self-locating (de se) contents—that is, self-locating veridicality or correctness conditions. At a first pass, the features that warrant projectivist treatment are those whose attribution to objects is responsible for the self-locatingness of perceptual content. (I describe a slightly fancier version of the view below.) Some explanation of this is in order. Perceptual experiences have veridicality conditions. Recall that we are thinking of these as the classes of possibilities in which things are as the perceptual experience represents them to be. The veridicality conditions of an experience are determined by how it attributes features to objects in the perceiver’s environment. Attributing some feature to an object determines a veridicality condition—a class of possibilities. A perceptual experience that attributes squareness to chip 17, for example, will be veridical only in possibilities in which chip 17 is square. Perceptually attributed features are the sorts of things that determine functions from objects to these sorts of possibility-carving veridicality conditions. Let’s simplify our picture of perceptual content a bit and suppose that all perceptual content consists of attributions of features to particular objects in the perceived environment. Each attribution of a feature to an object determines a correctness condition. A perceptual experience as a whole is veridical in just those possibilities where all of the objects represented have all of the qualities attributed to them. (This is the intersection of the classes of possibilities determined by each of the feature-attributions that makes up the total content of the experience.)12 What kinds of things are these possibilities? An initially attractive, and fairly standard, thing to say is that they are possible ways for the world to be, or possible worlds. The class of possibilities picked out by Hermione’s perceptual attribution of squareness to chip 17 is the class of worlds in which chip 17 is square. 12. I am supposing, for presentational convenience, (1) that visual perception has object-involving content—content that attributes features to particular objects in the environment, rather than just representing, for example, that there is some object with the represented feature (contents that it is natural to think of as being of the form Fa rather than ∃x(Fx), and (2) that visual perception has only objectinvolving content. Now, supposition (1) is contentious, and supposition (2) is certainly false. I am making these suppositions because they make for a simpler picture of the content of perception, on which it is easier to talk about how the attribution of features to objects in the environment determines correctness conditions. But we could tell a very similar, though slightly messier, story of the way that the features attributed in perception contribute to, for example, existential rather than object-involving correctness conditions.

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There is, however, good reason to think that the possibilities that we distinguish between in thought, at least, are finer grained than this. When we have beliefs about what time it is, about who we are, or about features of our own particular predicament, for example, we take a stand on more than just the global facts about the world is like—on more than just which world is actual.13 When I believe that it is noon, the accuracy of my belief does not depend only on which world is actual—it also depends on which time is present. Since fixing which world is actual does not fix which time is present, the way in which my beliefs about the time distinguish between possibilities is not well captured by thinking of their contents as sets of possible worlds. When I have a belief about the time, I take a stand not just on which world I inhabit, but (also) on my temporal location within it. My beliefs about the time distinguish not between worlds but between locations within worlds. Other cases show us that this phenomenon is not specific to times. Here is a variation on a familiar sort of example: Harry Potter is lost in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry after an amnesia-inducing magical accident. It could be that he is lost because he is missing some information about what the world is like—that is, because he does not know which world is actual. He could be lost, for example, because he does not know what the actual floor plan of the castle is. But Harry could still be lost, even if he knew everything there is to know about which world is actual. Let Harry be looking at the Marauder’s Map, which shows the complete floor plan of the castle, as well as the location of all of its inhabitants. He does not, then, lack any relevant information about what the world is like. He could, nonetheless, still fail to know where he is, because he could still fail to know which, of all of the creatures in the castle, is him—perhaps the accident robbed both Ron and Harry of their memories, and now Harry is unsure whether he is amnesiac Harry or amnesiac Ron. Harry knows all of the relevant facts about the world—he knows, for example, that Harry Potter is in the west wing, and that Ron Weasley is in the east wing—but he still does not know whether he is in the west or the east wing because he does not know whether he is Harry or Ron. What Harry is ignorant about in this case is not what the world is like—Harry knows all of the relevant facts about the world. What Harry is ignorant about is something about his location within a world about which he is already as well informed as he could hope to be. In order to remedy his ignorance, Harry needs to rule out some possibilities. But the 13. The discussion of self-locating content that follows is my summary of the upshot of an extensive literature, including Castañeda (1966, 1967, 1968), Lewis (1979), Chisholm (1982), Sosa (1983), Peacocke (1992), Noë (2004), among others. Perry (1979) famously dissents from the conclusions that I (along with, e.g., Lewis and Chisholm) want to draw from the phenomena that I take to motivate a selflocating picture of representational content, as does Stalnaker (1981).


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possibilities he needs to rule out are not possible ways for the world to be—they are possible locations, situations, or predicaments within a world. (In this case, the possible predicament that Harry needs to rule out, but has not yet, is Ron’s.) So, to model all of the kinds of belief and ignorance that we want to model, we need our possibility space to be a space not of possible worlds, but of possible predicaments. If the contents of belief ought to be modeled in terms of a space of possible predicaments rather than a space of possible worlds, then so ought the contents of perception. For one thing, we want our theories of belief and perception to play nicely with each other. We want, for example, to be able to say that people often come to believe that things are as their perceptual experiences represent them to be—that is, that people often come to have beliefs with the same contents (i.e., the same correctness conditions) as their perceptual experiences. (At least, sometimes we come to have a belief that P because we have a perceptual experience that represents it as being the case that P. Maybe we never come to believe the whole content of any perceptual experience, perhaps because perceptual experiences are too informationally rich for all of their content to make its way into belief.) Second, it should already have been clear that perception does not just deal in the sort of God’s-eye-view information about which world is actual that is happily modeled in a possible-worlds framework. Visual perception, for example, tells us things about our location, not just God’seye-view stuff about how objects are arranged relative to one another.14 That is a good thing—just knowing the possible-worlds-y stuff is not enough to guide action. For pretty much any world you pick, there will be many different predicaments to occupy within it. The occupants of some of those predicaments would be well advised to duck. The occupants of other predicaments would be well advised to jump. Some of the people who find themselves in hedge mazes would be well advised to turn left, and others to turn right. Some of the inhabitants of the actual world are confronted with glasses of gin, while others are confronted with glasses of petrol. So, just knowing which world is actual will not tell you whether it is a good idea to duck, to jump, to turn left, to take a drink, and so forth. In order to make good decisions about what to do, you need to know not just about what the world is like, but also about the nature of your own particular predicament. So, at least some of our thoughts, and at least some of our perceptual experiences, have a sort of content that distinguishes between possible predicaments, not (just) possible worlds. Call such content self-locating 14. Others who say this, in different terminology, include Peacocke (1992), Schellenberg (2007, 2008), Noë (2004), and Milner and Goodale (2008), to name a few. Talk of situation content or egocentric content in perception and talk of perception as serving to locate us in egocentric space are all instances of this phenomenon.

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content, to contrast it with possible worlds content, which distinguishes (only) between possible ways for the world to be. Both kinds of content serve to carve out regions of a space of possibilities—the difference is just in the nature of the points in the possibility space that they carve up. (I also talk in what follows about self-locating propositions and possible-worlds propositions, by which I mean, respectively, classes of possible predicaments and classes of possible worlds.) An important cautionary aside: It is important not to get so wrapped up in spatiotemporal self-location that we start to think that all self-locating belief is belief about either our temporal or geographical position. When Harry does not know whether he is Harry Potter or Ron Weasley, we do not just want to be able to model amnesiac Harry’s ignorance about such geographical location matters as whether he is in the east or west wing of Hogwarts. We also want to be able to model his ignorance about, for example, such nongeographical (and nontemporal) matters as whether he is the child of Arthur and Molly Weasley or the child of James and Lily Potter, whether he has red hair or black, whether he is expected to be in potions class or divination class on Tuesday afternoons, and so on. Though a lot of the cases that are used in the literature to motivate a move to self-locating/de se content are examples of people who are ignorant of their spatial and/or temporal location,15 those sorts of cases are not the only motivation. The move to a self-locating picture of content can also be motivated by, for example, wanting to find a common object of belief for all of the people who believe that their pants are on fire or that they themselves are millionaires, and by wanting to find a common object of desire for all of the people who want to be firefighters, president of the United States, or heavyweight champion of the world. None of these sorts of beliefs or desires are happily modeled in terms of a possibility space whose points are possible worlds, and none of them are about spatiotemporal location. So the predicaments in our possibility space are best thought of not as spatiotemporal locations but as possible situations for an individual to occupy, which might differ from one another in a host of ways. Some of the important differences and similarities between predicaments will be geographical or temporal, but many will not. What unifies all of the predicaments that are the focus of Hector’s doxastic attention when he thinks the he himself is a millionaire is not anything geographical or temporal—it is something economic. What unifies all of the predicaments that are the objects of Hillary’s and Barack’s common desire when they both want to be president is not anything to do with spatiotemporal location—it is something political. There are, of course, lots of classes of predicaments that are unified by their spatiotemporal features—all of the in-the-oval-office predicaments, and all of the 7:35-P.M.-EST-on-November-15–2008 predicaments, for example. But in 15. Think, for example, of Sleeping Beauty (Elga 2000), Lingens in the library (Perry 1977), or Lewis’s two gods (Lewis 1979).


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addition to these, there are many other interesting classes of predicaments besides: the presidential predicaments, the millionaire’s predicaments, and the predicaments of the burning-pantsed, for example, whose members do not have any interesting geographical or temporal commonalities. I belabor this point because it is very easy to read “self-locating” much too narrowly and to think that self-locating representation must always be all about one’s geographical or temporal location. Many of the usual examples used to motivate the idea make this misreading extremely natural. Please do not read it that way. (If you find it too difficult to read “selflocating” in the broader way, it might help if you take me to be systematically misspelling “de se” throughout this chapter.) While I am digressing, a quick technical aside: There are a number of interchangeable ways of talking about self-locating content. I have been talking in terms of sets of possible predicaments (positions, locations, situations . . .) and treating predicaments as primitive. This is now my preferred way to do things, for reasons that are not relevant to our purposes here. But it is not quite the standard way of talking. A more common way to cash out the same sort of talk about carving up a finer grained space of possibilities is to talk in terms of centered worlds—triples of a world, a time, and an individual.16 Abstracting away from some technical metaphysical complications, these two ways of talking are interchangeable. Centered worlds serve the same purpose of picking out a possible situation in logical space for an individual to occupy. (We could, if we subscribe to the right sort of modal and temporal metaphysics, also do the same work using instantaneous time-slices of world-bound possible individuals as the points of our possibility space.) Another way—probably the most common way—to talk about self-locating content is in terms of the self-attribution of properties.17 Given a permissive ontology of properties, these will all be interchangeable, since properties and sets of predicaments, or sets of centered worlds, will be in one-to-one correspondence. So to self-attribute the property, being in the east wing of Hogwarts is to believe the self-locating proposition that picks out all and only the in the east wing of Hogwarts predicaments—that is, that picks out all and only the world/time/individual triples w, t, i such that i is in the east wing of Hogwarts at t in w. And in fact, as Lewis (1979) points out, we can make do with just the one kind of content—for each possible worlds proposition, there is, to introduce a technical term, a boring self-locating proposition that, for each world, includes either all or none of the predicaments within it. (Equivalently, there is a boring world-occupancy property, of the type, being an inhabitant of a world such that. . . . Equivalently, there is a centered-worlds 16. These are Lewisian (Lewis 1979) centered worlds rather than Quinean (Quine 1969) centered worlds. 17. This is the way that David Lewis and Roderick Chisholm talk most of the time in Lewis (1979) and Chisholm (1982).

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proposition that, for every world w, either contains all or none of the world/time/individual triples that have w as a member.) So the distinction that is actually doing the work here is the one between boring and interesting self-locating propositions, rather than the one between possible-worlds and self-locating propositions. But it makes exposition easier and more intuitive to stick with the possible-worlds/self-locating contrast, with the understanding that everything could be rephrased in the obvious way in terms of the boring/interesting distinction. End technical aside. With this distinction between kinds of contents or correctness conditions in hand, we can make a distinction between kinds of features attributed in belief and perception. We said before that attributing a quality to an object determines a correctness condition—a class of possibilities. Attributing a quality like squareness to an object, say, chip 17 will determine a possible-worlds correctness condition—the class of chip 17 is square worlds. (Equivalently, we might say it determines a boring selflocating correctness condition—the class of predicaments in chip 17 is square worlds.) Lots of qualities will be like this—the correctness conditions determined by their attributions will always be possible-worlds propositions (or boring self-locating propositions). Once we are working in a framework that allows for self-locating content, we have room for a different sort of quality, whose attribution to objects determines a self-locating correctness condition (a genuine, interestingly self-locating correctness condition—one that does not just divide up predicaments along the boundaries of worlds). Some possible candidates include such qualities as being nearby, being on the left, or being three feet away.18 These are qualities that, applied to an object, determine a set of possible predicaments, rather than a set of possible worlds.19 Attributing being nearby to chip 17 will determine a class of possible predicaments that is likely to include some, but not all, of the predicaments in a given world—it will include the near chip 17 predicaments and exclude the rest. Suppose we both have experiences that attribute being

18. Note that by using these English expressions to draw your attention to the relevant qualities, I do not mean to be signing up for the view that, for example, the English word “nearby” typically has such a feature as its semantic value. (In fact, I think it almost certainly does not.) In this chapter, I am concerned only with the contents of perception—the issues about language are complicated, and I do not defend any of those claims here. For some discussion of de se content in language, see Egan (2007, 2010, forthcoming). 19. Again, there are some other, terminologically but not substantively different, ways that we could put the same point: We could give a uniform account of correctness conditions and say that all qualities determine sets of predicaments. We would then say that the centering features are the ones such that the set determined sometimes includes some but not all of the predicaments in a world. We could also characterize attributed features not as functions from objects to sets of points in a possibility space, but as functions from points in a possibility space to extensions. Then we would say that the centering features are the qualities that determine an extension relative to a predicament, not relative to a world (or, alternatively, that sometimes determine different extensions for different predicaments in the same world).


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nearby to chip 17. Our experiences will share a common correctness condition—the class of near chip 17 predicaments. If in fact chip 17 is near you and far from me, your predicament will satisfy this shared correctness condition, while mine will not (since your predicament, but not mine, will be a member of the self-locating proposition determined by the attribution of being nearby to chip 17). So your experience will be veridical, and mine not. Still, there will be a common correctness condition for our two experiences, there will be a common feature that both of our experiences attribute to chip 17, and there will be something that we both believe if we both take our experiences at face value. (Though you would be right to believe it, while I would not.) Let’s call qualities of the first sort—the ones whose attribution always determines a possible-worlds proposition, or a boring self-locating proposition—objective properties. And let’s call qualities of the second sort—the ones whose attribution (at least sometimes) determines an interesting self-locating proposition—centering features.20 Centering features bear a lot of the distinctive marks of projected features, and self-locating content bears a lot of the distinctive marks of projected content. To illustrate this, let’s start with an example of geographical self-location. If Hermione’s visual experience represents chip 17 as square, her experience is representing an objective property of the chip, out there to be discovered by any observer who happens to wander by. If her experience represents chip 17 as three feet away, it is not representing an objective property of the chip, out there to be discovered by just any old passing observer. It is representing something idiosyncratic about Hermione’s particular perceptual predicament. If Harry is standing six feet from chip 17, his visual experience ought, if it is to be veridical, to represent chip 17 as square (and as three feet from Hermione), but it ought not represent the chip as three feet away. If Hermione’s visual system is working properly, the bit of her visual perceptual content in which chip 17 is represented as three feet away will be present in her visual experience not (just) because of her sensitivity to the objective facts about the objects in her environment, but (also) because of the peculiarities of her own particular perceptual situation. If her experience represents the chip both as square and as three feet away, part of the content of her experience will be dealing in the objective properties of things in her environment, and part will be dealing in something else, having to do as much with the perceiver as with the objects perceived. Part of the content of her experience—part of the way that she represents chip 17—will be present on account of Hermione’s perceptual systems’ openness to the objective facts about the objects represented, and part will be present on account of features peculiar to her.

20. In Egan (2006a, 2006b) I used “property” and “centering feature” to mark the same distinction.

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Now consider both Harry’s and Hermione’s experiences: Harry represents chip 17 as six feet away, while Hermione represents it as three feet away. There is a clear sense in which their experiences are incompatible— their correctness conditions are, or pick out, disjoint classes of possible predicaments. No one can correctly represent chip 17 both as Harry represents it and as Hermione represents it. But Harry’s and Hermione’s experiences are both veridical. Harry really does occupy a six feet from chip 17 predicament, and Hermione really does occupy a three feet from chip 17 predicament. So both of their experiences come out as veridical, despite their incompatibility. Since both of their experiences are veridical, we obviously have no asymmetric error. Finally, we have all of this because there is something in the neighborhood of projection going on—attribution of features like being three feet away to things, based not (just) on the objective features of the things perceived, but (also) on the peculiarities of the perceiver and their particular perceptual situation. So in this sort of case, it looks as if we have satisfied all of INCOMPATIBILITY, NO ASYMMETRIC ERROR, CORRECTNESS, and PROJECTION. Just as self-locating belief is not restricted to geographical self-location, centering features are not restricted to relative-position features such as being nearby or being three feet away. Most important for our purposes, they include features that are tied up with the effects that things have on our sensory apparatus. This is particularly relevant because these sorts of subjective features look much more like the sorts of features that would help us cash out projectivism in the sorts of cases where it looks most appealing, and they point us toward my proposed projectivist account of the unique hues. Let B be the phenomenal property that your experiences have when something looks unique blue to you. Here is a self-locating correctness condition: the one that is satisfied by all and only the predicaments the subjects of which are such that chip 17 is disposed to cause B sensations in them. (Making some not-too-contentious assumptions, this is just the set of predicaments whose subjects are disposed to have B sensations in response to chip 17.) That is the correctness condition that is determined by applying unique blue to chip 17. Unique blue is a centering feature. When Hermione’s visual experience attributes it to chip 17, it determines a self-locating correctness condition: the set S including all and only those predicaments whose inhabitants are disposed to get B sensations from chip 17 in normal viewing conditions. The experience is veridical only if its subject is in a predicament that is a member of S. Equivalently, in centered-worlds terms, it determines the class ofw, t, i triples such that at t, in w, i is disposed to get B sensations from chip 17 in normal viewing conditions. The experience is veridical at only those centered worlds. Equivalently, in property–self-attribution terms, it determines a property that those who take such experiences at face value will self-attribute, and such that the experience will be veridical whenever it


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is had by someone with the property being disposed to get B sensations from chip 17 in normal viewing conditions. The experience is veridical only if its subject has that property.21 Perceptual experiences that represent chip 17 as unique blue are veridical in only the disposed to get B sensations from chip 17 in normal viewing conditions predicaments. Everybody who thinks chip 17 is unique blue self-locates as someone who is disposed to get B sensations from chip 17 in normal viewing conditions.22 Again, this is not a case of geographical self-location in the way that attributions of being nearby or being three feet away are, but it is still, like those sorts of attributions, a case of a visual experience with self-locating correctness condition. That is, it is a case in which one’s visual experience has a correctness condition that specifies a set of possible predicaments, rather than a set of possible worlds. Here, the set of predicaments is not unified by geographical or positional similarities, but by a certain response-dispositional similarity: They are not predicaments whose subjects are all in a similar sort of geographical location, but ones whose subjects all are disposed to respond in the same sort of way to the object in question. Similarly, everybody who thinks chip 17 is greenish blue self-locates as someone who is disposed to get a different, incompatible sort of sensation

21. I am simplifying a bit here. The reader is likely to have noticed that a number of different centering features are actually available in this neighborhood, differing with respect to how one fixes the relevant circumstances. I chose the normal circumstances version for simplicity, but there is also, for any C that specifies some possible type of circumstance, the centering feature that, when attributed to an object x, determines the property being disposed to get B sensations from x in C. There is also, perhaps most interestingly, the centering feature that, when attributed to x, determines the property being disposed to get B sensations from x in present circumstances. Attributing this centering feature to chip 17 determines (returning to centered worlds talk) the class of w, t, i triples such that i is disposed to get B sensations from chip 17 at t in w. I think that the normal circumstances versions are probably the best candidates to be the sorts of centering features that our ordinary perceptual attributions of unique hues are trading in, but I also think that this is a place where things are likely to get complicated. (See note 25 for one potential source of complication.) 22. A couple words about how what I say here fits with things I have said elsewhere: It fits nicely with what I say in Egan (2006a). The story here is, essentially, that we can cash out the distinction between the projected qualities and the rest in the same way that I want to cash out the distinction between the secondary qualities and the primary qualities in that article. This should not be terribly surprising—the things projectivists and secondary-quality theorists say about how the qualities in question do not really reside in the things we attribute them to, are not discovered parts of the objective structure of reality, and so on, are pretty similar and seem to call out for a similar sort of treatment. What I say here fits less well with what I say in Egan (2006b). The story there is that, while the colors are fullfledged objective features of things in our environments, perceptual experience also trades in some other features that are not like that. The story I tell here about unique hues is pretty much the story that I tell there about these additional, noncolor qualities, so if what goes for unique hues goes for colors generally (which seems to me to be very plausible, but not quite obviously mandatory), what I say here and what I say there cannot both be true. I do think that they are both plausible candidate views, and they are both views that are good to have on the table. Forced to choose one to endorse, I am not certain which way I would go.

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from chip 17 in normal viewing conditions (let’s call them GB sensations). More generally, perceptual experiences that represent chip 17 as having some shade incompatible with unique blue will be veridical only in predicaments whose subjects are not disposed to get B sensations from chip 17 in normal viewing conditions (because they are disposed to get some other, incompatible sort of sensation—which one will depend on which incompatible shade is attributed). So Ron’s and Hermione’s visual experiences of chip 17 are incompatible—the correctness condition of Ron’s experience is, in virtue of its attribution of greenish blue to chip 17, disjoint from the correctness condition of Hermione’s experience, in which she attributes unique blue to chip 17. Since there are no predicaments whose subjects are disposed to get both B and GB sensations from chip 17 in normal circumstances, the set of predicaments determined by attributions of unique blue to an object and the set determined by an attribution of greenish blue to that object are going to be disjoint. And so it is not possible for anybody to have a veridical experience that attributes both to the same object. So we have INCOMPATIBILITY. Both Ron’s and Hermione’s experiences are veridical. Ron really is in a disposed to get GB sensations from chip 17 in normal viewing conditions predicament. Hermione really is in a disposed to get B sensations from chip 17 in normal viewing conditions predicament. So we have CORRECTNESS. And since we have CORRECTNESS, we have NO ASYMMETRIC ERROR, because we have no error at all. (More carefully: we have no error at all in this case. Of course it is still possible for people, and their experiences, to be make erroneous attributions of these sorts of qualities—e.g., when one is viewing the object in other-than-normal circumstances.) This sort of account is able to deliver both CORRECTNESS and INCOMPATIBILITY because the contents in question are self-locating. The attributions of unique blue and greenish blue to chip 17 are incompatible because no single individual can (simultaneously) correctly attribute both qualities to the same thing. The correctness conditions of the two attributions are not jointly satisfiable (by a single predicament), because the classes of predicaments picked out are disjoint. The attributions are both correct because the people making the different attributions occupy relevantly different predicaments: Ron really is disposed to get GB sensations (and not B sensations) from chip 17, and Hermione really is disposed to get B sensations (and not GB sensations) from chip 17. Finally, we have PROJECTION: Part of how chip 17 is being represented in Ron’s and Hermione’s experiences is an artifact of contingent stuff about the perceivers’ own particular perceptual endowments. Other bits of how chip 17 is represented in Ron’s and Hermione’s experiences are not like that—chip 17 is, for example, represented as being square, because of chip 17’s squareness, and such experiences are veridical in only the chip 17 is square predicaments (or, equivalently, the predicaments located in chip 17 is square worlds). If Ron and Hermione are worldmates, and one of them has an experience that represents chip


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17 as square, while the other has an experience that represents it as, say, circular, one of them has to be wrong. So there is an interesting distinction between the projected bits of perceptual content (e.g., attributions of unique blue) and the nonprojected bits of perceptual content (e.g., attributions of squareness). This is an account on which there are, as the projectivist thought would have it, some bits of the contents of our perceptual experiences that are not really tracking the objective features of objects in our environment. But this is not because they are not tracking anything at all. What the projected bits of perceptual content are tracking—by and large correctly—is aspects of the perceiver’s particular predicament. More specifically, they are tracking something about her situation relative to the object that the projected features are attributed to. This is what allows for projectivism—some of the features attributed to objects in perception are attributed as a result not (just) of openness to what the objects in one’s environment are like, but (also) on account of the peculiarities of one’s own particular perceptual apparatus or situation—without error.

5. OBJECTIONS AND RESPONSES Before I close, I briefly address two concerns, the responses to which will, I hope, help to clarify the proposal. First concern: Maybe we are failing to respect some important distinctions here, by trying to give a one-size-fits-all account of a very diverse range of phenomena. This account lumps the traditional, paradigmatic candidates for projectivist treatment—colors and the like—into the same category with features like egocentric nearness. But these do not, on the face of it, belong in the same category. It seems as if there should be something distinctive about the colors that marks them off as different from these sorts of transparently self-locating egocentric-location features. A properly constructed projectivism should allow us to be projectivists about the colors while still respecting that difference. More generally, we might be concerned that this sort of account will lump too wide a range of phenomena into a common category. Recall the diversity of the list of motivating phenomena we encountered earlier. We probably do not want a uniform account of all of those, which lumps perceptual affordances, unique hues, visual-field shapes, and so on, all in one category. There are important differences between these different kinds of features, and we want our theory (or theories) of them to respect those differences. But the sort of projectivist view I am advocating is not committed to the absence of any interesting distinctions between these sorts of perceptually attributed features. It is committed only to their having something important in common. This still allows for a lot of important diversity within the category of projected features.

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For example, one important difference between location-in-egocentricspace features and the colors, on this account, is that the first wear their involvement in self-locating representation on their sleeves in a way that the second do not.23 Unlike the case of the colors, there is no temptation to treat egocentric-location features like being nearby and being on the left as fully objective, out-there-to-be-discovered properties of the objects in our environments. The self-locatingness of color attributions is an interesting theoretical discovery in a way that the self-locatingness of egocentric-location properties is not.24 In chapter 2 of this volume, Jonathan Cohen discusses some reasons why it might not be immediately phenomenologically apparent that some perceptually attributed quality is relational rather than monadic. A very similar story can be told, I think, about why it would not necessarily be obvious that a given feature attributed in perception is a centering feature rather than an objective property. It could be, for example, that we are tempted to think of color properties as objective rather than self-locating because the telltale interpersonal variations in perception are not immediately obvious, or because the relevant sorts of intrapersonal variation over time are not as prevalent, or as salient, as the ones that we encounter in the case of, for example, locations in egocentric space. It could also be (and here I am departing from Cohen, though I think that he could endorse a very similar thought) that part of the objective (and nonrelational) appearance of some centering features is due to their lack of explicitly relational counterpart concepts (or, perhaps better, lacking readily available, explicitly relational counterpart concepts that are widely acknowledged, in common circulation, etc.). Being three feet away has readily available, commonly thought and talked about, explicitly relational counterparts that are themselves also represented in perception: being three feet away from x for various x. Unique blue, on the other hand, does not seem to have any such readily available, commonly talked and thought about, explicitly relational counterparts. We do not typically talk or think about what is unique blue for x for various x, nor does visual perception attribute these sorts of transparently relational properties to the objects in our environment. On the face of it, anyway, visual perception just takes a stand on what is unique blue simpliciter. These sorts of cases— in which there is not a readily available, explicitly relational counterpart— are plausibly among the cases where it is most likely to be an interesting discovery that the content in question is self-locating, since they may not wear their relationality on their sleeves. 23. At least, a difference between egocentric-location features and the unique hues or maximally specific shades. There is a bit of a step between projectivism for the unique hues and projectivism for colors in general, where one could potentially get off the bus. 24. Features like egocentric nearness, for example, do not even satisfy the requirements for what Joyce (2009) calls “minimal projectivism,” since we do not experience egocentric nearness as an objective feature of the world.


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So one important internal division to draw within the category of centering features is, roughly, the line between the ones that wear their selflocatingness on their sleeves and those whose implication in the determination of self-locating content is an interesting theoretical discovery. Let me also, by way of example, highlight a couple other potentially important internal divisions within the category. One such division is the one between those centering features that have to do with relatively stable facts about the observer’s perceptual apparatus, and those that have to do with relatively transient facts about her particular perceptual situation. This division will help to draw some of the intuitive lines between the different motivating examples from early in this chapter; visual-field shapes, for example, will fall on one side of the line, while the colors (on the sort of view outlined above) will fall on the other.25 (To some extent, this distinction is likely to follow the one just discussed— centering features having to do with the transient details of one’s perceptual situation are, by and large, more likely to wear their self-locatingness on their sleeves than those having to do with the construction of one’s perceptual apparatus. But the two do not track each other perfectly.) Another important difference between the various centering features is be in the aspects of one’s predicament that their attribution serves to characterize. Attributions of colors serve to characterize what we might, for lack of a better term, call one’s sensory circumstances—how one’s sensory apparatus is disposed to respond to particular objects in one’s environment. Attributions of affordances, on the other hand—as when the hammer is represented as to be used for hammering, the nail as to be hammered, the cake as to be eaten, and the bubble wrap as to be popped—would serve, on this kind of view, to characterize one’s practical circumstances, by representing the practical aspects of one’s predicament. Second concern: Does attributing self-locating contents to perceptual experience require overly fancy explicit self-representation? In particular, if attributing colors to things required explicit self-representation, that seems like it would be a problem. It sure seems as if creatures without the capacity for explicit self-representation could have color vision.

25. I think that, in fact, this sort of distinction also turns up between different sorts of color features. I am very sympathetic to Cohen’s distinction between the steady and unsteady colors (see chapter 2 this volume). That is easy to capture on the sort of picture I am offering here, by allowing for a distinction between two kinds of centering features we can attribute to objects in our environment: one kind that has to do with the responses that the objects are disposed to cause in us in normal circumstances, and another kind that has to do with the responses that the objects are disposed to cause in us in present circumstances. Attributions of the first sort of quality take a stand on what sorts of perceptual apparatus we have (and on the long-term, global features of our environment that determine what sorts of circumstances count as normal). Attributions of the second sort of quality also take a stand on the details of the particular, local, potentially fleeting details of our perceptual circumstances. (I am also attracted to an explanation of color-constancy phenomena that exploits this distinction, where the differently illuminated bits of the wall are represented as having the same steady color, but different unsteady colors.)

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Response: No, it does not. It had better not—we need self-locating content to model cognition and perception in lots of creatures that lack the capacity for any kind of conceptually sophisticated explicit self-representation. The representational mental states of dogs and cats are not any better modeled in terms of possible worlds than our own are. What is cognitively in common to Rex and Fido when they both want to go walkies, or when they both think that there is a squirrel nearby, is not going to be happily represented in possible-worlds terms. A satisfactory theory of animal cognition, no less than human, requires the attribution of self-locating content. What is required for a given mental or perceptual representation to have self-locating content is just for it to play the right sort of role in the host’s cognitive and behavioral economy. Perceptual experiences have distinctive sorts of impacts on behavior and tend to give rise to distinctive sorts of beliefs. The perceptual experiences with self-locating contents are the ones whose behavioral and cognitive effects are best modeled with self-locating propositions rather than possible-worlds propositions. For example, a visual experience that disposes the creature that has it to behave in ways that would be appropriate/adaptive/whatever in a certain distinctive sort of predicament, rather than a certain distinctive sort of world. (That is, experiences whose content is better modeled as, e.g., Tiger nearby! than as Tiger near Fred! The first sort of content will be a decent candidate to be what is in common to every prey animal’s tigerin-immediate-foreground sorts of visual experiences, well suited to explain the common behavioral upshots of such experiences in the various animals that have it. The second not so much.)

CONCLUSION I think that there is a lot to be said for an account according to which perception trades both in centering features and in objective properties, both as a way of cashing out the projectivist thought and as part of the correct theory of perception. I think it is an interesting question just which perceptually attributed features should get which sort of treatment, though I think there is a lot to be said for the view that the unique hues, and colors generally, fall on the centering features side of the divide. Making this distinction between the kinds of features attributed in perception is, I think, the most attractive way being a projectivist without being an error theorist.

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6 An Externalist’s Guide to Inner Experience Benj Hellie

The aim of John M. Hinton’s Experiences: An Inquiry into Some Ambiguities is set out in its introduction as follows: Someone who has more sympathy with traditional empiricism than with much of present-day philosophy may ask himself, ‘How do my experiences give rise to my beliefs about an external world, and to what extent do they justify them?’ He wants to refer, among other things, to unremarkable experiences, of a sort which he cannot help believing to be so extremely common that it would be ridiculous to call them common experiences. Drawing a breath of fresh air is still a very common experience in many parts of the globe, but he does not mean that kind of an experience. Like the common experience of doing a monotonous job of work amid exhausting noise, it would be too much of an event in what he calls the external world. He mainly has in mind sense-experiences, and he thinks of them in a particular way. His way of thinking of them, roughly speaking as something ‘inner,’ is one on which recent logico-linguistic philosophy has thrown a good deal of light. I still hope to throw a little more, mainly or wholly reflected, light on it, . . . where the visual case is concerned. (Hinton 1973, 1) Thanks to Stephen Biggs, Bill Brewer, Mike Caie, John Campbell, Tim Crane, Terry Cullen, Imogen Dickie, Kati Farkas, Dominic ffytche, Chris Hill, Jim John, Matt Kennedy, Michael Lachelt, Geoff Lee, Fiona MacPherson, Chris Mole, John Morrison, Jennifer Nagel, Adam Pautz, Ian Phillips, Diana Raffman, Gurpreet Rattan, Howard Robinson, Susanna Siegel, Charles Siewert, Nico Silins, Declan Smithies, Paul Snowdon, Scott Sturgeon, Brad Thompson, Charles Travis, Jonathan Weisberg, the Toronto M&E Working Papers Group, and audiences at the 2008 Syracuse Philosophy Annual Workshop and Network, ‘Consciousness and Thought’ (Dubrovnik, 2008), ‘Hallucination on Crete’ (Rethymno, Crete, 2008), ‘The Philosophical Significance of Attention’ (Dubrovnik, 2009), and the University of Barcelona; and especially to Alex Byrne, David Chalmers, Bence Nanay, and Jessica Wilson. Thanks to Ranpal Dosanjh for LaTeX-to-RTF conversion. I follow Delia Graff Fara’s liberating convention of using single-quotes for all sorts of quotation devices. In June 2009, after this chapter was largely complete, I came to regard as false the doctrine that anything deserving the name ‘consciousness’ or ‘experience’ has the passive character of the visual and sensational states under discussion in the chapter. I came to this opinion in part as a result of the anxieties gestured at in the parenthetical remark at the close of section 3. Unfortunately, this doctrine is a fundamental presupposition of the chapter, and of the literature to which it attempts to contribute. And yet I continue to regard the ideas in the chapter as worth publishing, because I believe both that its conciliatory project leads inexorably to these anxieties about the doctrine of the passivity of consciousness and that if this doctrine were to be dislodged from its current position as a starting point for all discussion in the philosophy of mind, that would be a good thing.

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My aim here can be described in much the same way; the central difference is that the light I hope to reflect on the subject matter emits from philosophy that is still more recent, and of a rather more epistemo-semantic than logico-linguistic character. In a nutshell, working from the perspective of the ‘externalist’—a philosopher who thinks that, in good circumstances, one’s visual consciousness is in part ‘an event in the external world’—I provide a conceptual and metaphysical interpretation of the view that consciousness is ‘something ‘inner’.’’ More expansively, I take for granted a direct realist position on which, when one is seeing, one’s perceptual consciousness is a relation to particular objects in one’s environment and their intrinsic features, and also the doctrine of the ‘transparency of experience.’ My aim then is to strike a balance between keeping externalism vital—by refraining as far as possible both from watering it down with qualifications and from larding it up with finicky theoretical commitments—and clawing back as much as possible of the notion of phenomenality: roughly, a notion of ‘what an experience is like,’ bound to a range of internalist intuitions such as the possibility of perfect hallucination and the possibility of ‘spectral inversion’ without error. This interpretive task is important to the future of externalism for two reasons. First, we have an evident curiosity about the nature of phenomenality. This is reflected in the fact that a great deal of theorizing about consciousness is, whether explicitly or implicitly, in fact theorizing about phenomenality. Most significant, it is phenomenality that is believed to give rise to the ‘explanatory gap’ (Levine 1983): on one way of understanding it, the failure of a priori entailment of certain beliefs distinctively concerning phenomenality by physical or biological theory. And the explanatory gap, in turn, gives rise to the widely discussed threat of dualism (Chalmers 2009). Accordingly, on pain of failure to address much of what motivated us to concern ourselves with consciousness in the first place, the externalist needs to explain what is going on in all this research. Second, phenomenality is widely seen as a paradigm aspect of consciousness. Accordingly, if the externalist posits aspects of consciousness beyond the phenomenal while failing to explain how they relate back to this paradigm, the externalist will be at risk either of being accused of changing the subject (as Fiona MacPherson has put it, of engaging in mere ‘terminological hoodwinking’), or—if, making appeal to the conceptual fundamentality of the concept of consciousness, in reply the externalist insists on a shared subject matter—of saying something obviously false. Moreover, I argue, the externalist needs to provide a story of this relationship from which it can be argued that the phenomenal properties are not the only properties that deserve to be regarded as genuine aspects of consciousness. Given the strength of the internalist tradition, a theory that cannot on its own terms show phenomenal properties to be less than fully fundamental is unlikely to make much dialectical progress when allowed out into the wild. Fortunately, if my arguments are correct, the externalist is in an excellent position. Externalism can be taken neat. The relation of perceiving,

An Externalist’s Guide to Inner Experience

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understood as a sort of primitively conscious openness to one’s environment, generates an explanatory gap all on its own. Almost all internalist intuitions can be chalked up to the structure of our reasoning about the world in response to experience; the remainder can perhaps be ignored. Although my story inevitably links such reasoning to intrinsic features of some sort or other, we can remain entirely neutral on the nature of these features. Indeed, we must remain neutral on this for the time being, because philosophers have yet to produce any arguments which constrain this matter. Putting it roughly, phenomenality can be thought of as a sort of ‘projection’ by thought of these mysterious features onto experience. Section 1 provides an explicit characterization of the externalist view under discussion, contrasting its notion of consciousness with phenomenality. Sections 2 and 3 provide the analytical part of my interpretation of phenomenality. I argue that if there is a coherent notion of phenomenality at odds with the externalist’s notion of consciousness, it is rooted in a kind of introspective or reflective indiscriminability. Section 2 makes some framework points about what it would take to analyze phenomenality and discusses the notion of indiscriminability in general. Section 3 develops a ‘transparency’-based view of reflective knowledge of perceptual experience according to which we extract such knowledge from logical operations on the Fregean senses of perceptual demonstrative judgments. This view yields patterns of reflective indiscriminability tracking the notion of phenomenality, and requires only that these senses somehow track intrinsic aspects of one’s condition. This discussion yields a range of compatibilist conclusions: for instance, transparency and direct realism are compatible with ‘qualia.’ Section 4 turns at last to the metaphysics of phenomenality, developing my claim that phenomenality is a projection onto experience of the intrinsic aspects tracked by the senses of perceptual demonstrative concepts. A recurrent theme in the chapter will be that a pair of epistemic limitations through which the distinct may fail to be discriminable—ignorance and error—have significantly different ‘valences.’ Internalists have tended to regard ignorance as their touchstone, assimilating the distinction between seeing and hallucination to spectral inversion without illusion; externalists, by contrast, have focused exhaustively on error, treating hallucination differently from seeing but, when not ignoring inversion without illusion, implausibly dismissing the possibility. But by fully exploiting the resources inherent in each limitation, a theory can respect both one’s conscious openness to the environment and one’s subjective contribution to one’s sense of the environment.

1. EXTERNALIST PERCEPTUAL CONSCIOUSNESS In this section I characterize a certain strong version of an externalist theory of perceptual consciousness. Rather than arguing for the view, I assume an audience antecedently sympathetic toward externalism about

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consciousness. After stating the view I provide four arguments that the externalist view of consciousness recognizes aspects of consciousness beyond the purely phenomenal. I then explain where the externalist should locate the explanatory gap.

1.1. Theories of Consciousness To begin with, I briefly explain what I mean by ‘theory of consciousness.’ By ‘consciousness’ I mean to express the concept ‘consciousness’ or ‘experience’ and thereby to refer to that property, consciousness, that all and only the experiences share (here and throughout quantifiers and expressions such as ‘extension’ are understood as concerning actual and possible entities). Consciousness generates an explanatory gap: we can conceive of a zombie, a being like us physically but lacking in consciousness. Our concept of consciousness is therefore irreducible to any physical or functional concepts (even if consciousness itself is identical to some physical or functional property), so it will be therefore be a convenience to treat consciousness as an extremely natural property, at least within our image of the world.1 The notion of a theory of consciousness can be sharpened with appeal to two pieces of metaphysical apparatus. The first is the notion of a real definition of a property, the familiar notion applying to the answer to the question of which property the property is, or of what kind of property the property is, and is answered by providing a ‘definition’ or ‘canonical conception’ of the property, or a conceptually most fundamental description of what it is to have that property (e.g., to have the property water is to have the property H2O; accordingly, H2O is the real definition of water). The second is the notion of a determinate of a property. For example, red is a determinate of color, scarlet is a determinate of red, and the exact shade of scarlet instantiated in this thread of the people’s flag is a maximal determinate of scarlet, red, and color. Sometimes the determinate–determinable relation is cashed out so that F is a determinate of G if F metaphysically necessitates G. On my usage, determinate–determinable is more restrictive than metaphysical necessitation: The determinates of a property somehow form a natural family of properties. So, for instance, on my use,

1. I am inclined to agree with Chalmers (unpublished manuscript) that the concept of consciousness is conceptually fundamental and cannot be elucidated or defined in more basic terms. Still, when using any public language term to express a concept, there is a risk that just which concept the term is used to express might be misunderstood. To forestall such misunderstanding, let me say that I do not mean ‘access consciousness’ (Block 1995) or any etiolated substitute such as the representability or representation of some state of a system by another state of that system, at least if representation is understood in terms of ceteris paribus nomic covariation. Rather, by ‘consciousness’ I mean to express the concept that those of us who take zombies to be conceivable apply to the most general respect in which zombies differ from their experiencing twins.


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iodine is a determinate of the determinable chemical element, while iodine in Chicago is not.2 A bit of terminology will improve readability: I will say that a determinate of consciousness is an experiential property. Then, a ‘theory of consciousness’ in my sense provides an at least partial answer to the question ‘what are the real definitions of the experiential properties?’ Many familiar views can be seen as providing (somewhat abstract) answers to this question. For instance, representationalism: Every experiential property is, definitionally, a representational property. Or qualia theory: Every experiential property is, definitionally, a monadic, intrinsic, normatively inert feature. Or sense-datum theory: Every experiential property among the class of those distinctively instantiated in perceptual experience is, definitionally, a case of bearing a primitive relation of awareness (‘acquaintance’) to a mental particular (the ‘sense-datum’). Or direct realist theory: Every experiential property among the class of those distinctively instantiated in veridical perceptual experience is, definitionally, a case of bearing acquaintance to an entity in the subject’s environment. (Henceforth in this context I will leave off the qualifier ‘definitionally.’) In each case, the theory aims to provide a conceptually maximally fundamental characterization of the different varieties of conscious experience. Note a contrast between the representational and qualia theories, on the one hand, and the sense-datum theory, on the other: The former pair are general theories of the natures of experiential properties; by contrast, the latter is more modest in its aim to provide only a theory of perceptual consciousness, of the experiential properties distinctive of perceptual experiences (where I mean these to include not just cases of genuine perception but also cases of perception-like dreams and other ‘perceptual hallucinations’).

1.2. Externalism and Its Antecedents The externalist view I discuss here is rooted in the direct realist view just mentioned. Explicitly, the view is as follows: In a typical veridical perceptual experience, a great many of the experiential properties will be of the form being a case of seeing o’s F-ness, where o is a material particular in the subject’s near environment and F is a color actually instantiated in visible parts of o. 2. Perhaps my commitments here can be weakened slightly: All I insist on is that my subject matter concerns a natural family of properties that in one sense or another are varieties of consciousness and that come in more-or-less specific levels. So it would not trouble me if it turned out that my subject is more aptly treated in terms of some such relation as genus–species. The aim is to capture the Williamsonesque sense that the wide properties I claim to be determinates of consciousness are not merely aggregates that involve some purely narrow variety of consciousness in an entirely consciousness-free environment (Williamson 2000, ch. 1).

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Henceforth this is the view I refer to as ‘externalism.’ (I assume throughout that material particulars and their colors are entirely mind-independent.)3 Externalism can be compared with several more familiar antecedents. A first antecedent is a singularist representational theory of visual consciousness. On such a theory, some experiential properties of visual experiences are representational properties with singular content. For instance, if one sees or hallucinates one’s mother as wielding a tire iron, then, it is alleged, among the experiential properties of one’s visual experience is a singular representational property concerning one’s mother to the effect that she is wielding a tire iron (for discussion, see Siegel 2005, §5.1). On this view, experiential properties are, as I shall say, haecceitistic: They reflect the particular ‘thisness’ of objects in the environment. This contrasts with a nonhaecceitistic ‘abstract’ version of representationalism on which the represented conditions are purely general (for discussion of abstract representationalism, see Chalmers 2006; Byrne and Logue 2008). A second antecedent is a ‘Russellian’ representational theory of visual consciousness. On such a theory, some experiential properties of visual experiences are representational properties with content that is, as it were, Russellian in its predicate position. For instance, if one sees or hallucinates something as red, then, it is alleged, among the experiential properties of one’s visual experience is a representational property concerning redness, to the effect that something before one instantiates it (for discussion, see Chalmers 2004, §6). On this view, experiential properties are, as I shall say, quidditistic: They reflect the particular ‘thusness’ of properties in the environment. This contrasts with a nonquidditistic ‘Fregean’ version of representationalism on which the represented conditions quantify over properties in the environment (for discussion of Fregean representationalism, see Chalmers 2004; Thompson 2009). A third antecedent is a factive/relational theory of veridical visual consciousness. On such a theory, some experiential properties of veridical visual experiences are factive properties concerning facts about the subject’s here-and-now environment, or relational properties relating the subject to entities in the here-and-now environment. For instance, if one sees a black shoe on a brown chair (as such), then, it is alleged, among the experiential properties of one’s visual experience is a property of bearing a certain factive attitude toward the fact that a black shoe is on a brown chair, or a property of being related to a black shoe’s state of being on a brown chair (for discussion, see Campbell 2002;

3. I do not want to deny the existence of such ‘qualified’ experiential properties as blurrily seeing a computer screen and seeing a white wall with extensive phenomenal noise, but I ignore these properties here.


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Hellie 2007a, §§1–2). This contrasts with representationalist views on which experiential properties interact with the environment not directly, by containing the environment, but merely by imposing conditions of correctness that the environment is in the business of rendering met or unmet. Externalism is factivist/relational, and, like the singularist and Russellian approaches, it builds the haecceitistic and quidditistic aspects of the environment into experiential properties. To foreshadow a bit, I treat the factivist/relational aspect of externalism rather differently from its haecceitistic and quidditistic aspects. The crucial epistemic limitation that generates internalistic intuitions about the latter is our propensity to ignorance; about the former, our propensity to error.

1.3. Externalism and the Phenomenal It may perhaps be clear at this point that, according to externalism, at least some experiential properties are not phenomenal properties. To ensure that it is, I will now advance four arguments for this thesis. For now, I will assume that the reader shares an intuitive sense for the notion of phenomenality as used in the literature and sketched in the introduction: roughly, ‘what an experience is like’ understood as a purely internal matter; the next section takes a more analytical approach. The first argument concerns twins. Suppose that Bill sees a red tomato, t, while Tina (whose brain and environment are qualitatively identical to Bill’s) sees a numerically distinct tomato, t′. Going by the common conception of phenomenality, Bill’s and Tina’s experiences are paradigms of experiences that are just alike phenomenally. But externalism predicts that they are distinct experientially. On externalism, among the experiential properties of Bill’s visual experience is being a case of seeing the redness of t; it also predicts that while this is not among the experiential properties of Tina’s visual experience, being a case of seeing the redness of t′ is. (Henceforth, I ignore all experiential properties not explicitly mentioned in this and the following arguments.) Our two subjects thus have two experiences that are the same phenomenally but, according to externalism, differ experientially. The second argument concerns spectral inversion. Suppose that Inez is spectrally inverted with respect to Bill: Her visual system is so wired that, in a situation that causes Bill’s visual system to go into the intrinsic state it typically goes into when he sees a red thing in the position he sees t—let us call this state ‘R’—Inez’s goes into the typical state Bill’s visual system goes into when he sees a green thing in that position (call this ‘G’), and so forth. And suppose that Inez sees a green tomato t″ (in shape and other relevant properties, qualitatively identical to t). Many authors have had a certain pair of intuitions about this sort of case: first, that Bill’s and Inez’s experiences are the same phenomenally; second, that while Bill sees the

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redness of t, Inez sees the greenness of t″.4 If so, then plausibly externalism predicts that among the experiential properties of Inez’s experience is being a case of seeing the greenness of t″ (and that being a case of seeing the redness of t is not among those experiential properties). Accordingly, these two subjects are phenomenally the same but (according to the externalist) experientially different. The third argument concerns illusion. Suppose that Ilya is a normal subject, seeing a tomato t of a rare, white heirloom variety under a carefully tuned red spotlight; his environment is (in all other respects) qualitatively identical to Bill’s, as is his visual system (both are in the state R). Going by the common conception of phenomenality, Bill’s and Ilya’s experiences are paradigms of experiences that are just alike phenomenally. But externalism predicts that they are distinct experientially. After all, there is no redness for Ilya to see: at best, he sees the whiteness of his tomato (as well, plausibly, as its property of being illuminated in red). Accordingly, these two subjects are phenomenally the same but (according to the externalist) experientially different. While it is not a strict consequence of externalism, I assume throughout that Ilya’s experiential properties include being a case of seeing the whiteness of t. The fourth argument concerns hallucination. Suppose that Dean is dreaming of a red tomato (without seeing a red tomato, of course) and that his visual system is in exactly the same condition R as Bill’s. Externalism as stated makes no predictions about what the experiential property of Dean’s dream is.5 But since being a case of seeing the redness of t is not among the experiential properties of Dean’s experience, externalism predicts that his experience differs in experiential properties from Bill’s. Still, going by the common understanding of the notion of phenomenality, 4. In the literature, both intuitions are contested. Granting both makes life harder for the friend of externalism, so I should not be accused of begging any important questions if I operate under the assumption that both are legitimate. Moreover, the latter intuition is often expressed in more theory-laden terms that make certain assumptions about representation. It seems to me that my way of putting the point is on an equally good footing. For discussion of the intuitions, see Chalmers 2004, §§5–9. 5. In my view, it may be unknowable what the property is that replaces the external properties; perhaps there are none. Considering the failure of an attempt to constrain the nature of this property will be instructive. Johnston (2004) advances a certain phenomenological judgment on behalf of the view that a hallucination is a relation to a complex uninstantiated property: namely that Dean’s experience puts him in a position to refer to redness (Hawthorne and Kovakovich (2006) and Pautz (chapter 10 this volume) advance refinements of Johnston’s argument). It is not credible to me that this could be the brute content of a first-person judgment, so Johnston’s judgment must be justified inferentially. On the present approach, we can diagnose the reasoning to which Johnston must be implicitly appealing as running something like this: (i) Dean’s experience has seeing this color as an experiential property; (ii) this color is redness; (iii) when one’s experience has seeing F-ness as an experiential property, this enables one to refer to F-ness; hence Dean’s experience enables him to refer to redness. While step (iii) seems fine, step (ii) concerns the quiddity of a property one sees, and hence, in light of considerations from spectral inversion, one could not hope to establish this claim by first-person reflection. But more relevant in the present context is that (i) is false, and is based on the false presupposition, perhaps requisite for reflection on perceptual experience, that one sees: for more on this see section 3.1.


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Bill’s and Dean’s experiences are paradigms of experiences that are the same phenomenally. We want a final example, a subject phenomenally unlike the other four. This subject will be Greg: a normal subject, seeing green tomato Inez’s t″ under normal conditions. A quick classificatory comment (using the terminology of Byrne and Logue 2008): Since it provides a distinct theory of Bill’s and Dean’s experiential properties, externalism is in one sense a ‘disjunctivist’ theory; since, as extended, it asserts that Ilya’s experience is more similar to Bill’s than Dean’s, externalism counts as a VI∨H disjunctive view rather than a V∨IH disjunctive view.

1.4. Externalism and the Explanatory Gap Where should the externalist locate the explanatory gap? The externalist’s relational properties are asserted to be experiential, or forms of consciousness, so we should expect that they generate an explanatory gap: after all, consciousness does. In which aspect of these relational properties is the gap rooted? To begin with, it would not be plausible for the externalist to locate the explanatory gap in objects or in their colors. Our judgments about Bill, Tina, and Inez seem to prevent doing so. After all, to commit to any of them being distinctively privileged with concepts of the intrinsic nature of their objects or colors (of the sort that would raise an explanatory gap) would be to commit to the others not being so privileged, and the friend of inversion without illusion should reject any such asymmetry. So the externalist must say that some quantity of explanatory gap comes from the relation of seeing: There is nowhere else to locate it. Fortunately, the symmetry considerations just discussed cannot be invoked to prevent doing so. Dean’s condition is worse than that that of our other subjects. He is out of touch with the world, the rest are in touch. Since all of our subjects seem to be in touch with the world, Dean’s condition is delusive, misleading, deceptive. This breaks the symmetry. (Note the ignorance/error alternation: while there is no polarity in the many manifestations of ignorance, error is inferior to truth. Representationalist theories overlook this maneuver, assimilating the relationship between Bill and Dean to the relationship between Bill and Inez, as revealing ignorance by both rather than error by Dean.) So the externalist needs to claim that a physical duplicate zombie of a person who is seeing would not also be seeing. Fortunately, this position is a natural one for the externalist to adopt: it is the relation of seeing, after all, that all veridical experiences have in common, and which is therefore characteristic, according to the externalist, of the distinctive sort of consciousness involved in visual experience: consciousness of one’s surroundings. How is the externalist conceiving of seeing here? Evidently not as a sort of right-causal stimulation by reflected light of visual

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organs: this characterization raises no explanatory gap. Rather, to put the point in terms that may ring somewhat poetical, the externalist is conceiving of seeing as a sort of consciousness of the environment, as a sort of experiential visual openness to the entities in one’s surroundings, through which those surroundings become subjectively manifest. While this sort of openness may require a certain causal or informational substructure in order to be present in the world, the externalist should deny that this substructure suffices to generate it. Conceiving of seeing as conscious visual openness to the world provides an externalist-friendly source of an explanatory gap. But this clearly does not suffice to generate all the explanatory gaps there are. After all, Greg and Bill generate distinct explanatory gaps: knowing a full physical story about the world and also knowing what it is like for Bill would not suffice to know what it is like for Greg. What generates these remaining explanatory gaps? There is nowhere else to look than R, G, and the like. One might think this establishes that these features are also experiential properties, a doctrine the externalist could accommodate by thinking of them as qualifying relations of seeing, so that the experiential properties are features like R-ly seeing o’s redness. I return to the question of whether this doctrine is compulsory in section 3.5.

2. THE CONCEPT OF PHENOMENALITY In this section and the next I carry out the conceptual part of my project of interpreting the notion of phenomenality. I begin with a closer look at the common notion of the phenomenal property. Two styles of explanation of this notion predominate among contemporary philosophers: One appeals to the notion of ‘what it’s like,’ while the other has a more ostensive flavor.6 In the course of discussing these notions, I explain the connection I see between phenomenality and reflective indiscriminability. I then begin the explication of my understanding of the notion of reflective indiscriminability, starting with some general framework discussion and then addressing the issue of taking up the perspective of the other. Section 3 completes the explication of reflective indiscriminability, with a discussion of the nature of reflective knowledge of experience. Before moving into this discussion, I digress briefly into the use of ‘look’-statements to characterize a notion of phenomenality (limitations of space prohibit a full treatment of this important issue). It is sometimes 6. A conception of phenomenality that few advance officially, but that often seems to be running in the background, is that for a property to be phenomenal is, by definition, for it to be a quale, in the sense of section 1.1. The difficulty with this conception is that it rules out as analytically false certain widely discussed theories that are advanced as theories of the phenomenal: Sense-datum theories are ruled out because their relations of acquaintance to sense-data are not intrinsic; representational theories are ruled out because their intentional properties are normatively active. If we are looking for a reasonably ecumenical conception of the phenomenal, we will have to look elsewhere.


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suggested that we can nail down a notion of phenomenal character via a ‘phenomenal use’ of such perceptual copular verbs as ‘look’ and ‘sound’ (Jackson 1977; compare Byrne 2009). So, for example, we would say that their respective tomatoes phenomenally look red to Bill, Tina, Inez, and Ilya (or, to bring Dean in, that it phenomenally looks to each of them as if a red tomato is before them), while Greg’s phenomenally looks green to him. What might this phenomenal use amount to? It is plausible that ‘o looks F to S’ has a function in reasoning or conversation roughly along the lines of ‘taking a certain body of information for granted: taking up S’s perceptual situation: going by looking: o is F.’ The reference to a given body of information (genuinely endorsed, or merely supposed) is not trivial: does the fish in the tank look to be over here, or over there (Siegel, this volume)? The answer changes based on whether the differing refractive indices of water and air are included in the body of information presupposed in the act of looking. So presumably the phenomenal use involves a certain privileged body of information. What information would this be? Is it the information available to the subject of the ‘look’ attribution? It had better not be. After all, Inez will judge when looking that her tomato is green, because she is subject to no illusion. So plausibly Inez implicitly assumes that going R is a sign of seeing something green. So, taking Inez’s beliefs and implicit assumptions for granted, her tomato looks green to her, rather than red, as was desired. So we had better rule out Inez’s beliefs and implicit assumptions as a candidate background to the phenomenal use. Bill’s information would be a better choice: he plausibly implicitly assumes that going R is a sign of seeing something red; so taking Bill’s information for granted, going by looking, the tomato of each subject is red, as desired. But what is special about Bill’s information, which lets it set the standard for the nature of phenomenal properties? The friend of inversion without illusion should say: nothing. So it would be a mistake to look to the phenomenal use for positive characterizations of phenomenal properties. At best we could make an arbitrary selection of a single body of information and use it to establish equivalence classes. This approach would predict that their tomatoes phenomenally look the same to Bill and Inez in the sense that taking Bill’s (Inez’s) beliefs and implicit assumptions for granted: taking up either of their perceptual situations: going by looking: the tomato is red (green). And it would predict that Greg’s tomato phenomenally looks different: taking Bill’s (Inez’s) beliefs and implicit assumptions for granted: taking up Greg’s perceptual situation: the tomato is green (red). (Or we could even take our own information as setting the standard of phenomenal looks.) I have no objection to this approach; indeed, it can be thought of as a compressed and operationalized version of the account of phenomenal sameness to be developed beginning in section 2.2. However, it is important to avoid overreaching, in two ways.

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First, one might think that if o phenomenally looks F to S that F-ness is, as it were, ‘represented in the phenomenal content’ of perception. This would be a mistake. Is redness represented in the phenomenal content of Bill’s experience? Is redness represented in the phenomenal content of Inez’s experience? There is no absolute answer to these questions: taking Bill’s beliefs (or ours) as the standard, both are answered affirmatively; taking Inez’s as the standard, both are answered negatively. Nor would it be promising to use the approach to assess whether these or those general families of properties are represented in the phenomenal content of perception. Are artifactual kinds represented in the phenomenal content of perception? This object is a blender: does it phenomenally look that way to me, or to a technologically unsophisticated person? That object is a really fancy scientific instrument of a certain sort: does it phenomenally look that way to me, or to the experimentalist who built it? Well, whose information is setting the standard here: the scientist’s, mine, or the unsophisticated person? It is hard to see how there could be a correct answer. Second, Chalmers advances the following case against a theory of the nature of phenomenal properties according to which they are Fregean representational features (example modified to accord with mine): Even if Bill’s and Inez’s experiences are associated with distinct properties (redness and greenness), there is a strong intuitive sense in which the tomatoes look to be the same to Bill and Inez. That is, the phenomenal similarity suggests that there is a common property (intuitively, a sort of redness) such that the tomatoes look to have that property both to Bill and to Inez. This intuitive point stands in tension with the Fregean view. . . . The Fregean view does not entail that the experiences represent a common property. In fact, it suggests that Bill’s and Inez’s experiences represent distinct properties, redness and greenness. (Chalmers 2006, 62)

But it does not follow from the claim that there is a property that the tomatoes phenomenally look to have both to Bill and to Inez that their experiences represent a common property. The claim that Bill’s and Inez’s tomatoes phenomenally look F to them is equivalent to the claim that taking certain information for granted: taking up either of their perceptual situations: going by looking: the tomato is F. Nothing in that claim involves any distinctive commitment to what the nature of a perceptual situation is, or what it is to go by looking. It requires only that what one judges going by looking is determined by one’s background assumptions and the intrinsic aspects of one’s perceptual condition. Since nothing about the nature of these intrinsic aspects is revealed in the surface structure of discourse about phenomenal ‘looks’-statements, this is entirely compatible with nearly any claim about the relevant intrinsic aspect of Bill’s and Inez’s perceptual condition, including the claim that it is a Fregean representational property.


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2.1. ‘What It’s Like’ Consider the claim that for F-ness to be among the phenomenal properties of an experience is, by definition, for it to be the case that part of what the experience is like is: F. For instance, for unpleasantness to be among the phenomenal properties of an experience is for it to be the case that part of what the experience is like is: unpleasant (for representative examples, see Block 1995; Chalmers 1996, 2003, 2004, 2006; Byrne 2001; Siewert 2003; Siegel 2006; Gendler and Hawthorne 2006; Thompson 2006; Bayne 2007; Speaks 2009). The externalist should deny the success of this characterization, on the grounds that it fails to yield a notion that both is comprehensible and obviously circumscribes a space that is narrower than the externalist’s experiential properties. The concern takes the form of a dilemma, depending on whether the phenomenalist intends the notion of ‘what it’s like’ to be understood in line with the ordinary use of that notion. If not, then a technical notion of phenomenality is being defined in terms of a technical notion of what an experience is like, so the externalist could reasonably protest a lack of comprehension. If the ordinary use is intended, then the externalist should insist that no clear distinction with externalism has been drawn. After all, it is a part of ordinary practice that we answer questions about what experiences are like by appealing to external properties. For instance, if asked what my experience of writing this chapter at this moment is like, I would say things like ‘as I write this chapter, I see black text appearing on my computer’s screen.’ One very straightforward hypothesis about the semantic function of my answer is that it serves to say that the property being a case of seeing black text appear on screen s is part of what my experience of writing this chapter is like. This property is an external property, so on this interpretation of my answer’s semantic function, if what I say is true, external properties are part of what the experience of writing this chapter is like. So if so, the external properties are phenomenal properties (against the common understanding of phenomenality). Is this the correct interpretation of the ordinary discourse? I don’t know; in my view this discourse is not well understood (compare Hellie 2004, 2007b). Still, in order to establish an obviously nonexternalist notion of phenomenality, the phenomenalist needs to provide some reason to rule this interpretation out, and the work needed to provide such a reason has not (yet) been done.

2.2. Definition by Ostension We will therefore need to look elsewhere for an elucidation of the common notion of phenomenality; the latter, ostensive, approach has much more

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promise (for representative examples of this style of definition, see Chalmers 1996; Byrne and Hilbert 1997a, 1997b; Byrne 2001, 2004; Tye 2000; Lycan 2001; Thompson 2006; see also Pautz, chapter 10 this volume). An especially judicious instance of the relevant ostension is performed by Byrne and Hilbert: We may classify [experiences] by their phenomenology. Experiences as of red objects resemble one another in a salient phenomenological respect. In that respect, they resemble experiences as of orange objects more than they resemble experiences as of green objects. Let us say that a red-feeling experience is an experience of the phenomenological kind picked out by the following examples: the typical visual experiences of ripe tomatoes, rubies, blood, and so forth. (1997b, xii) When people with normal vision look at grass, shamrocks, and jade, in daylight, . . . assuming, as we shall, that ‘spectrum inversion’ does not actually occur, such experiences are also phenomenologically alike: there is something obviously similar in respect of what it is like to undergo them. Let a green-feeling experience be an experience with this phenomenological character. (1997a, 264)

Let us consider the structure of the definition of a phenomenal property that is partly implicit in these passages. A certain relation is ostended by consideration of pairs of experiences that are paradigms of instances and counterinstances of that relation. For Byrne and Hilbert, the relation is phenomenal sameness in respect of color phenomenology: Visual experiences of tomatoes, rubies, and blood stand in this relation, as do visual experiences of grass, shamrocks, and jade; by contrast, experiences of grass and tomatoes do not bear it to one another. But for purposes of technical convenience, I depart from the approach that Byrne and Hilbert adopt in these passages in a way that is inessential to the philosophical issues I am treating: Instead of focusing on phenomenal sameness and difference in a respect, I focus on a relation of phenomenal exact sameness. Experiences of tomatoes do not bear this relation to experiences of rubies. Rather, a famous example of a pair experiences that stand in our phenomenal exact sameness relation would be Descartes’s actual experience of writing in his dressing gown and the (merely possible) dream he was calling on his reader to imagine; less famous examples would be each pair selected from Bill’s, Tina’s, Inez’s, and Dean’s experiences, discussed in section 1.4—henceforth, I will group these four experiences together as our paradigms of phenomenal sameness. (Strictly speaking, it is the pairs of these experiences that are the paradigms.) An example of a pair of experiences that do not stand in this relation would be that consisting my current experience as I write this chapter and the experience of a Canal Street shopkeeper haggling over the price of a belt, as well as Bill’s experience and an experience that differs only in that the color of the tomato seen is a bit more orange. Consider also Greg, who sees the same green tomato as Inez, but who is normal rather than inverted: We judge that Greg’s


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experience differs phenomenally from those of our paradigms of phenomenal sameness. The relation of phenomenal exact sameness (henceforth, sometimes just ‘phenomenal sameness’) induces a partition on experiences, which in turn projects onto the maximally specific phenomenal properties: A property F is a maximally specific phenomenal property just if for some (possible) experience e, all and only the experiences that are phenomenally exactly the same as e have F. Finally, the phenomenal properties are the (proper or improper) determinables of the maximally specific phenomenal properties, and consciousness is the maximally determinable phenomenal property. Note the importance of the appeal to the determinate–determinable structure with consciousness as a maximally determinable element. Without this appeal, the initial ostension leaves it massively underdetermined how the extension and antiextension of ‘phenomenal sameness’ are to spread out beyond the initial sample of paradigms and foils. Summarizing, we can put the definition as a Ramsification, with the following presupposition: There is a relation S over pairs of experiences such that A. (i) S is an equivalence relation on experiences, and (ii) the equivalence classes of S correspond to experiential properties; and B. S holds between these experiences (in particular, holds among our paradigms of phenomenal sameness, Bill’s, Tina’s, Inez’s, and Dean’s experiences) and does not hold between those experiences (in particular, fails to hold between Bill’s experience and my current tomato-free experience). Phenomenal sameness, then, is the relation S, if there is a unique such relation. But we have still not clearly nailed down a reasonably determinate extension. Grant that maximally determinate phenomenal properties are determinates of consciousness that bear to one another the ostensively picked out relation of phenomenal sameness. This does not yet settle which relation phenomenal sameness is, or which determinates of consciousness the maximally determinate phenomenal properties are. After all, the determinates of consciousness form a huge and complex structure, and a vast number of relations on this structure are such that the initial sample of paradigms instantiate them and the initial sample of foils do not. What further condition should we add to the presupposition to secure uniqueness? Candidate approaches come in two varieties: Metaphysical approaches aim to spread the extension and antiextension beyond the initial sample by appeal to conditions concerning further natural structure among the experiential properties, while epistemic approaches aim to do so with conditions that concern the cognitive perspective taken in the course of ostending the initial sample.

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Achieving Determinacy through Metaphysics The most straightforward added condition contributed by the metaphysical approach would look like this: (M) S is an extremely natural relation.

One way to make (M) a bit more specific would assert that the maximally determinate phenomenal properties are maximally determinate experiential properties, so that the phenomenal sameness relation is the extremely natural relation of exact sameness in experiential properties. Since Bill’s and Dean’s experiences instantiate the phenomenal sameness relation, it follows from (M) that they bear some extremely natural relation to one another: on the more specific version of (M) under consideration, that they share exactly their experiential properties. The externalist’s view regarding this approach is as follows: The phenomenal sameness relation is not extremely natural. Bill’s and Dean’s experiences do not have much of significance in common; in particular, they differ in their experiential properties. Accordingly, building (M) in with (A) and (B) yields a falsehood. Hence, any concept introduced via the metaphysical approach is semantically defective: overconstrained in a way that makes no possible entity a semantic value of the concept. Since the discussion of this chapter adopts the externalist’s point of view, we reject the (M)-enhanced concept. Let us say that a concept that incorporates some of the presuppositions of a defective, overconstrained concept, but not so many as to itself be overconstrained, is a descendant of that concept. While the metaphysical approach does not yield a nondefective notion of phenomenal sameness, it does point the way to a metaphysical descendant of that concept. This descendant is introduced by hanging on to (A) and (M) while dumping the initial ostension (B). In effect, then, the metaphysical descendant is the concept of that relation that two experiences share just in case they share all their experiential properties. By the lights of the externalist, this relation is in fact extremely natural, and the maximally determinate phenomenal properties it induces are the maximal determinates of consciousness. So on the metaphysical descendant, the phenomenal properties are just the experiential properties. However, by the lights of the externalist, Bill’s and Dean’s experiences will differ in their maximally determinate phenomenal properties. Accordingly, the metaphysical descendant does not raise any further distinctive interpretive or theoretical challenges for the externalist. Achieving Determinacy through Epistemology The epistemic approach, by contrast, generalizes beyond the initial sample by appeal to a certain indefinite extensibility inherent in the the epistemic capacities exercised in the course of the ostension of the sample.


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The most straightforward added condition contributed by the epistemic approach would look like this: (E) A pair of experiences instantiates S just if they are reflectively indiscriminable.7

Condition (E) is in line with the idea that tying ostension to our own abilities goes with ‘knowing it when we see it’: in this case, knowing whether phenomenal sameness is there when we reflect. The remainder of this section and the next constitute a sustained development of the notion of reflective indiscriminability in such a way as to establish the adequacy for the externalist of the (E)-enriched concept as an interpretation of phenomenal sameness (one that sticks closer to the initial ostensive sample than does the metaphysical descendant). As I discuss in section 2.5, the (E)-enriched concept may well not be equivalent to the common notion of phenomenality: there may well be pairs of experiences that phenomenalists would regard as in the antiextension of phenomenal sameness, which the (E)-enriched concept does not class in its antiextension. Still, I do not see this as a roadblock for our interpretive project. The externalist does not seem to be under any obligation to provide a perfectly accurate account of the concept of phenomenality. It suffices for the interpretive project to provide a concept that makes sense on the externalist’s terms, and that is close enough in spirit to the initial concept to avoid charges of obviously changing the subject. Accordingly, I regard the (E)-enriched concept as an epistemic descendant of ‘phenomenal sameness,’ rather than as an analysis. The criterion of adequacy I adopt for an epistemic descendant is freedom from counterparadigmatic example, a criterion suited to the assessment of nondefective descendants and less stringent than the familiar freedom from counterexample suited to the assessment of analyses. A bit more specifically, what we want out of the epistemic descendant is that it groups together experiences we would be inclined to use as paradigms and separates experiences we would be inclined to use as foils, if we were in the business of explicating the old concept of phenomenal sameness. Such clear paradigms and foils count as the counterparadigmatic

7. Some readers might protest that condition (E) is opposed to condition (A(i)), to the effect that S is an equivalence relation on experiences: after all, isn’t indiscriminability a nontransitive relation? Well, yes, but the nontransitivity of a relation does not entail the nontransitivity of every subrelation of that relation. The more directly relevant issue is whether reflective indiscriminability is nontransitive over experiences. Some authors suggest that this is an obvious part of our everyday life (Byrne and Logue 2008, §5; Stalnaker 2008, 89), but this does not show that there is no legitimate way understanding the modality (e.g., by idealizing our ordinary capacities) that can eliminate nontransitivity. Nontransitivity does not obviously infect the notion I develop over this section and the next. I discuss the bearing of the nontransitivity of visual indiscriminability of colors to the nontransitivity of reflective indiscriminability of color experience in Hellie 2005. I leave as an exercise making that article consistent with this chapter!

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candidate counterexamples. I count our paradigms of phenomenal sameness (the experiences of Bill, Tina, Inez, and Dean) as clear cases that the descendant concept must group together. By contrast, a candidate counterexample that is not counterparadigmatic is one that derives its plausibility as a counterexample only from the assumption that the relation of phenomenal sameness is an extremely natural relation, as with the (M)-enriched concept. Note the important difference between the purpose to which I put reflective indiscriminability and that to which Martin (2004, 2006) puts it. In Martin’s system, ‘there is no more to the phenomenal character’ of a ‘causally matching’ hallucination as of a white picket fence ‘than that of being indiscriminable from corresponding visual perceptions of a white picket fence as what it is’ (Martin 2006, 367): apparently, Martin regards indiscriminability properties as being identical to certain phenomenal properties. By contrast, I regard indiscriminability as merely providing a condition that any property must meet to be regarded as a phenomenal property: Phenomenal properties may well have natures that go beyond those of indiscriminability properties. The distinction is roughly analogous to the famous Kripkean distinction between ‘sense-giving’ (Martin’s approach) and ‘reference-fixing’ (my approach).

2.3. Indiscriminability and the Phenomenal To preview my notion of reflective indiscriminability, when ‘reflective indiscriminability’ is understood as in (E), I intend the claim that two experiences are reflectively indiscriminable to mean that the following is not medically possible: one of us makes a knowledgeable reflective judgment about each of those experiences, where those judgments are a priori inconsistent.

Some comments about the various ingredients in this elucidation: First, following the orthodox approach to indiscriminability due to Williamson (1990), I understand indiscriminability to be unknowability of distinctness of some pair of things; for two experiences to be reflectively indiscriminable in this sense is for it to be in some sense impossible for them to be known to be distinct by reflection.8 (Indiscriminability despite distinctness is an 8. Williamson’s argument that discrimination is (activation of) knowledge of distinctness runs as follows: ‘Discrimination is a cognitive act. . . . If we can characterize discrimination as knowledge, we shall be in a position to explain both why discrimination cannot be in error, and why the alternatives to it are ignorance and error. . . . One cannot discriminate between a and a because there can be no knowledge that a and a are distinct to be activated’ (Williamson 1990, 5–7). Heterodox theorists of indiscriminability include Fish (2009), for whom discrimination need not be a cognitive act; Raffman (2000), for whom discrimination need not be knowledgeable; and Martin (2006), for whom discrimination need not be recognition of numeric distinctness but can rather be predicative (one knows that this is not F). Martin’s notion seems to be a legitimate extension of Williamson’s; I suspect that the others may not be accounts of indiscriminability.


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epistemic limitation, which can result from either ignorance or error; over the course of this chapter, both limitations will make it onto the stage.) Second, I understand the modality in the widest sense that is compatible with assessment of the epistemic capacities of creatures recognizably like us, subject to certain idealizations discussed at length below; I sometimes refer to this modality as ‘medical possibility.’ Third, I assume that two experiences are reflectively discriminable to someone just when reflective knowledge about each is medically available to that person, such that those pieces of knowledge are a priori inconsistent. My approach to reflective discrimination is therefore built on a skeleton of reflective knowledge about single experiences. I know of no developed body of theory concerning the nature of reflective discrimination of experiences; by contrast, the literature on self-knowledge of the features of single experiences is rich and extensive. These phenomena are surely not unrelated, so it would contribute to theoretical neatness if the former could be reduced to the latter. Single-experience self-knowledge has at least the following relation to reflective discrimination: If it is a priori—on the basis of medically available (single-experience) reflective knowledge about each of two experiences— that those experiences are distinct, then the experiences are reflectively discriminable. Does the converse hold? A counterexample would be a case in which one just has a ‘gestalt’ reflective sense that two experiences are distinct, despite there being no features of those experiences that could be arrived at on the basis of reflection that one could point to which would ground this sense. But finding myself in this position, I would begin to question my assessment that the experiences were in fact distinct: The in-principle elusiveness of the distinctness-making factors would undermine my justification, and therefore the knowledgeability, of my judgment of distinctness, so there would not have been discrimination after all. At any rate, I assume that the converse does hold. The condition of apriority reflects the nature of the procedure for ostending phenomenal sameness, as I understand it, on which we simply ignore all other nonreflective evidence about the experiences at issue when introducing them as paradigms or foils of phenomenal sameness. We know, for instance, that Bill’s and Dean’s experiences take place in different people and have different veridicality statuses, but this does not bear at all on whether they count as paradigms of phenomenal sameness. All we have to go on is the evidence of reflection, plus general-purpose rationality. Fourth, my claim that we are the ones whose discriminations are relevant is in reaction to intensive recent investigation of reflective indiscriminability (see, e.g., Siegel 2004, 2008; Martin 2004, 2006; Hawthorne and Kovakovich 2006; Sturgeon 2008; Fish 2009).9 This discussion points the way to a cluster of complaints about the adequacy of the (E)-enriched concept as a 9. For a very early discussion of the relevance of varying powers of discrimination of different subjects to disjunctive theories of perception, see Hinckfuss 1970, 279.

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descendant of ‘phenomenal sameness’: Surely a dog (or baby or inattentive person) can have experiences with phenomenal characters more finely grained than their capacities to knowingly judge experiences distinct; conversely, perhaps an extremely attentive person would be able to discriminate experiences we would regard as phenomenally the same. The notion of reflective discrimination of two distinct experiences doesn’t even make sense, since one can only reflect on a single experience at once, namely, the experience one is undergoing (compare Byrne and Logue 2008, §5). I argue that all of these concerns can be met with a single maneuver, once it is observed that ostension of phenomenal sameness is always from our own case, taking a sort of ‘pseudo-first-person perspective’ on someone else’s experience, a perspective from within which one’s own reflective capacities govern the limits of discriminability. Developing these ideas is the work of the next subsection. Fifth, even granting the success of this approach, one might wonder whether the phenomenal properties of one’s own experience can outrun one’s capacities to know them reflectively. Assessing this concern requires a theory of reflection and of the dimensions along which it can be idealized. Providing such a theory is the work of section 3. At the end of this discussion, quite a fair bit of apparatus will have accreted: idealizations of our psychology as it pertains to self-knowledge that the skeptical reader might greet with incredulity. My response to this reader is that my aim here is to articulate the most charitable possible interpretation the externalist could give of the phenomenalist. It is not clear how to make sense of the phenomenalist position without this apparatus, so the skeptical reader should reject the coherence of the notion of phenomenality. But this would leave the externalist conception of consciousness as the last position standing; accordingly, I count this skeptical reader as an ally on the deeper questions.

2.4. The Pseudo-First-Person Perspective I now address the question of what sense can be made of someone discriminating a pair of distinct experiences—one of which is, a fortiori, not present to the subject during the act of discrimination—reflectively. My take on this question also turns out to dissolve the concern about subjects more and less in a position to acquire reflective knowledge than we are. Assuming that we have in hand some sense in which we can reflect on Bill’s experience, the motivation for taking us to be the discriminating subjects referred to in condition (E) is clear. After all, we perform the ostension involved in the definition of ‘phenomenal sameness.’ Other subjects (e.g., the subjects involved in the paradigms of phenomenal sameness, or some children or dogs, or some zombies, or some idealized version of such subjects, or God)10 might be more or less accurate and/or 10. References to God should not be understood as presupposing theistic commitments by the author.


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complete in their reflective judgments than we are. If so, if such a subject were to set up for itself a concept that functions similarly to our concept of phenomenal sameness, it would correspondingly start out with a smaller or larger set of paradigms. So keying our epistemic descendant of ‘phenomenal sameness’ to the discriminative capacities of other subjects would generate a risk of counterparadigmatic example; by contrast, keying it to our capacities removes this risk. Now to the question of what it is for one to reflect on the experience of another. It seems that there is a sort of ‘pseudo-first-person perspective’ one can take toward an experience one is not currently undergoing that is relevantly like actually undergoing the experience, such that one may then acquire reflective knowledge about that experience. This perspective is the attitude of ‘taking up the point of view’ of or, as I will say, projecting that experience. With respect to our paradigms of phenomenal sameness, one takes up the attitude of projection toward merely possible experiences, but one may also project the experiences of actual other subjects or of one’s own past experiences. Projection is surely an ability we have and regularly use whenever we recollect our own past experiences, ‘put ourselves in the shoes of’ other people, or imagine merely possible experiences (in each case, from the inside). And certainly the acts of ostension that get the concept of phenomenal sameness off the ground in the first place rely on some sort of projection: When we hear the stories about Bill, Tina, Inez, and Dean, we understand these stories by putting ourselves in their shoes and simulating their experiences from the inside. The phenomenalist would undermine the foundation of their position by objecting too strongly to the notion of projection. A few remarks about the psychology of projection should forestall some confusions and highlight a few points at which I idealize. After that, I argue that there is no relevant difference for present purposes (given these idealizations) between projecting an experience and undergoing it. Although one might tend to think of projecting an experience as ‘imagining’ the experience, thinking of projection as a kind of imagining can be misleading. Since projection is targeted at knowledge of some condition that is independent of the act of projection (the experiential nature of some other experience), projecting can be done correctly or incorrectly: The internal representation might be faithful or unfaithful to the character of the experience one was trying to project. For instance, George sees a red thing but someone has told Francine he sees a green thing: She projects George’s experience but does so incorrectly (and, accordingly, she does not know what George’s experience is like/which experiential properties it has). The experiential properties George’s experience is represented as having by Francine’s internal representation diverge from the properties George’s experience actually has, so in this sense Francine’s act of projection is not accurate to George’s actual experience. Accordingly, projection is more closely analogous to perception than to the free, rationally unconstrained faculty of visual imaging.

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Of course, perception and projection are not alike in all respects. One does not literally see the mind of the other, in the way one sees a bucket of pig food before one, in at least the following sense: Causally implicated in any act of projection, there is always another conscious mental representation (this representation could well be what people are thinking of when assimilating projection to ‘imagination’). The ‘input’ to the projective faculty is (or can be) a description of someone’s situation in entirely objective terms of the sorts we offered in characterizing our various paradigms;11 the ‘output’ is a representation of that person’s experience, ‘from the inside,’ as having certain experiential properties. It is the tokening of this representation that I am thinking of as the act of projection. Plausibly, only experiential properties are attributed to an experience in an act of projection: Although one might attribute nonexperiential properties to the experience during the act of projection, this should not be regarded as part of the act of projection. (Despite this disanalogy between perception and projection, there may still be room for raising a debate about theories of projection analogous to the traditional debates in philosophy of perception. Can projection intelligibly be regarded as a sui generis form of ‘mind reading,’ in which in the ideal case one comes into a sort of acquaintance with the mind of the other? Such a view would be analogous to a direct realist theory of visual perception. Although my sympathies are with this acquaintance-like story about projection, present purposes do not require taking a stand on this issue.) Let us say that ideal projection of e is projection done with total relevant knowledge about e as input, and applying whatever method is involved in projection perfectly on the basis of this knowledge. On pain of skepticism about our knowledge of other minds, we should deny that ideal projection can lead us into error; accordingly, if we focus only on ideal projection, we can assume that an act of projection does not misrepresent the projected experience. The converse of accuracy is determinacy: I idealize here as well. It is clear that the representation of an experience generated in any act of projection is, in all realistic cases, far less determinate than any actual experience. Still, when setting up cases for the purpose of ostensively defining phenomenal sameness, the context is such as to implicitly treat points of explicit indeterminacy as points of experiential sameness. (It would not be to the point to complain that Bill’s and Tina’s experiences may not in fact be phenomenally the same, since we have not been told whether Tina’s tomato is sitting on a plate while Bill’s is in a dish.) Accordingly, it will be harmless to assume that an act of projection does not fail to represent any experiential features of its target.12 Putting this pair of 11. Compare Siegel (2008, 212) on the direct realist’s need to characterize the ‘situation’ of the other in nonphenomenal terms. 12. This decision is a result of an earlier choice, namely, to regard the explanandum to be exact phenomenal sameness, rather than phenomenal sameness in some respect. The rejected approach would have allowed us to treat projection in a respect at this stage but would have also considerably complicated the relationship between the relation on experiences and the determinate–determinable structure of consciousness.


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idealizations together, I henceforth ignore cases in which a projected experience has the experiential property F but is not projected as F, as well as cases in which an experience is projected as F but is not F. To project an experience is not yet to reflect on it. To conjure up a sympathetic sense for what it is like to be Bill is not yet to make any judgment about what it is like to be Bill, any more than to see a red thing is to judge that this is what it is like to see a red thing. Still, it seems that when one projects an experience, one can reflect on it and judge how it is, in much the same way as one does when one reflects and judges how an occurrent experience is. Absent this assumption, it is difficult to see how the method of hypothetical example used in the philosophy of perceptual consciousness could get any purchase with the heart of the matter, namely, the natures of our occurrent perceptual experiences. (It is important to distinguish between reflecting on an experience of projecting and reflecting on a projected experience: The difference is akin to that between mention and use. E.g., Bill sees a red thing, and so do I. Our experiences share a large number of their experiential properties. Accordingly, I can apply reflective concepts to either my undergone experience or Bill’s projected experience, and this range of concepts will be very similar. But my experience of projecting Bill’s experience is also an experience. This experience is very different in its experiential properties from my experience of seeing a red thing. It follows that the reflective concepts I apply to Bill’s projected experience, and to my experience of projecting Bill’s experience, will also be very different. I will always intend the former, never the latter.) The upshot of this discussion, then, is the following: One’s epistemic position with respect to acquiring reflective knowledge about an experience with certain experiential properties that one ideally projects is identical to one’s epistemic position with respect to acquiring reflective knowledge about an experience with certain experiential properties that one undergoes. If this is correct, then we are free, henceforth, to suppress consideration of whether an experience is ideally projected or undergone.

2.5. Aliens A straightforward objection to the view that if two experiences—sequential experiences, let us suppose—are reflectively indiscriminable by their subject, they share their phenomenal properties, concerns subjects not in a position to reflect on their experiences (dogs or children, perhaps): All their experiences are indiscriminable to them, but, intuitively, they might nonetheless differ in phenomenal properties. This specific difficulty does not affect our analysis, but it is an instance of a more general issue, namely, the status of experiences that cannot be reflected upon by the subjects at issue in the analysis, whoever they might be: An indiscriminability analysis

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of phenomenal sameness would class any pair of such experiences as phenomenally the same. The form of this issue for our analysis concerns experiences that we are not in a position to project ourselves into: If there are such experiences, we cannot discriminate them; hence, the analysis classes them as phenomenally the same. Could there be such ‘alien’ experiences? Nagel (1974) famously suggested that bat experiences might be unprojectable. Still, even supposing that Nagel is correct here and that there are experiences we cannot project, nothing follows about the adequacy of the proposed epistemic descendant of ‘phenomenal sameness.’ After all, no such experience could be a member of a paradigm of phenomenal sameness. Presenting a paradigm requires reflection on the experiences from the inside, and if the discussion of the previous subsection is correct, this requires projection. Accordingly, no unprojectable experience could be a member of a counterparadigmatic counterexample to the epistemic descendant; hence, this issue does not threaten my aim. The prediction that any pair of experiences including an unprojectable experience is phenomenally the same grates on the ear. Accordingly, I henceforth regard the domain to which the descendant concept is intended to apply as including only pairs of projectable experiences: A pair of experiences containing an alien is neither phenomenally the same nor phenomenally distinct.

3. TRANSPARENCY-BASED ACCOUNTS OF REFLECTIVE KNOWLEDGE In this section, I elaborate two accounts of reflective knowledge of the nature of one’s perceptual state, in the context of the assumption of ‘the transparency of experience.’ In section 3.1, I expand upon the notion of transparency and introduce the first account. This is a sort of ‘displaced perception’ account, according to which, roughly, one comes to know about one’s perceptual state by using the state in making a judgment about what one sees while also self-ascribing seeing these things.13 Sections 3.2 and 3.3 develop technical background for expanding further upon this account: after reviewing the ‘two-dimensionalist’ account of the senses of concepts, I characterize senses of perception-based color concepts, and then explain how one’s self-ascriptive judgment is entailed a priori by an ordinary perceptual judgment about the world. It follows that if one can have perceptual knowledge, one can have reflective knowledge by this route. Section 3.4 employs this apparatus to explain how Bill’s, 13. Precursors to the first account are developed by Evans (1982), Dretske (1995), Martin (1998), Byrne (2001, 2005), and especially Kennedy (2009, 2010). Special thanks to Matt Kennedy for discussion. Precursors to the second account are developed by Shoemaker (1991) and Loar (2003a).


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Tina’s, and Inez’s experiences are indiscriminable from one another, but discriminable from Greg’s experience. Reflection of this sort cannot, however, provide knowledge if one cannot have perceptual knowledge: if one is suffering illusion or hallucination, for example. So this account cannot explain how Ilya’s and Dean’s experiences are discriminable from Greg’s experience. In section 3.5, I develop a second theory of reflection to remedy this gap, involving a style of thinking I call ‘becoming alienated.’ When one becomes alienated, one is in a position to directly refer to properties such as R and G. Section 3.6 draws a range of revisionary morals from this discussion: for example, that transparency is compatible with reflective knowledge of intrinsic qualities of experience and that phenomenological study cannot constrain theories of the nature of these qualities.

3.1. Transparency and Displaced Judgments The core of the displaced perception theory is that reflective knowledge of experiential properties (of visual experiences) involves concepts that themselves incorporate demonstrative concepts based in visual experiences. So, for instance, Bill’s visual experience makes available the object-demonstrative concept ‘that object,’ referring to tomato t, and the color-demonstrative concept ‘that color,’ referring to the property of redness. These concepts have their referents only thanks to acts of attention, of course: If Bill were attending to some other object he saw, or not attending at all but blindly thinking ‘that object,’ the concept would not refer to t (but rather to some other object or to no object at all). The concepts employed in reflective knowledge of experience are concepts such as ‘seeing that object’ and ‘seeing that color’ (or, if you will, ‘having seeing that object/that color as an experiential property’). The apparent logical syntax of these displaced concepts is genuine, in that the demonstrative concepts that appear to be constituents are in fact constituents; moreover, the meaning of a displaced concept reflects the meaning of the perceptual demonstrative embedded within it. A displaced judgment, then, is one that predicates a displaced concept of a demonstrative term referring to an experience (e.g., ‘this experience’), where both the subject and predicate concepts are deployed ‘from the same perspective’ (in particular, so that the displaced concept contains demonstrative concepts made available by the demonstrated experience). In accord with the conclusion of section 2.4, I do not distinguish between cases in which the perspective is the true first-person perspective on a current experience, and those in which the perspective is the pseudo-firstperson perspective on an ideally projected experience. I use expressions like ‘Bill’s judgment’ to encompass our judgment, ideally projecting Bill’s experience. An example of a displaced judgment is ‘this experience [Bill’s experience] has seeing this color [redness, which is of course seen in Bill’s experience] as an experiential property.’

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The key thesis of my displaced perception approach, then, is that any medically possible source of reflective knowledge of which experiential properties one’s experience has is based on the displaced judgment. (And, conversely, for any property a projected subject sees, a displaced judgment concerning that property is possible for us.) For the moment, I ignore the involvement of ‘basing,’ proceeding as if displaced judgments are the only medically possible source of such reflective knowledge; the notion of basing becomes relevant starting in section 3.5. This key thesis is attractive for several reasons. First, it is in line with the so-called transparency of experience. This phenomenon has been explicated in scores of ways, but a central take on the phenomenon is this: Most reflective knowledge of which experiential property one’s experience has requires attention to entities—objects or property tokens—in one’s environment.14 The connection should be obvious: Perceptual attention to entities in one’s environment is required for deployment of displaced concepts. Moreover, little else is: only conceptualization of this attention and conceptual material required for self-attribution of visual openness to the entities. This requirement of minimal added cognitive exercise seems to be implicit in much discussion of transparency: The mere requirement of some element of exterior attention seems compatible with a great range of follow-on exercises that would violate the spirit of transparency. Chalmers (2003) advances a view of reflective knowledge that contrasts with mine in rejecting the key thesis. According to Chalmers, we are able to grasp concepts that fully reveal the natures of phenomenal properties by directing attention to these properties; doing so does not involve any attention to entities in one’s environment. This view is not compatible with transparency as I have characterized it. (Chalmers’s

14. This transparency thesis is sometimes criticized on the grounds that while we can acquire reflective knowledge of hallucinatory perceptual consciousness, in hallucination no attention to external entities is possible (Siewert 2004; Crane 2006). The obvious reply is to deny that total reflective knowledge of hallucinatory perceptual consciousness is possible (Soteriou 2005). As I discuss below, knowledge of the phenomenal properties of hallucinatory consciousness is possible, but the nonphenomenal properties may be unknowable: hence ‘most.’ No requirement stronger than ‘most’ reflective knowledge would be plausible anyway, due to the direct knowability of blurriness, noisiness, double vision, and other visual effects. Finally, we shall see that reflective knowledge of hallucination still involves a sort of apparent attention to external entities, which may be sufficient to undergrid the allure of the unqualified transparency thesis. There are of course alternative theories of reflective judgment that remain firmly in the displaced perception camp: for instance, one might suggest that certain medically possible reflective judgments are along the lines of ‘this experience has visually representing that something has this color as an experiential property.’ If the aim of this is to provide support for a representationalist view on which veridical and hallucinatory experience can share experiential properties, then the demonstrative cannot (in the hallucinatory case) refer to a property-instance in the environment, but must rather refer to a property-type in Platonic Heaven. This seems to run afoul of the transparency of experience. In my view, we do not understand this notion of visual representation: the notion of seeing, by contrast, is part of our common psychological lexicon. Finally, representationalism implausibly assimilates both error and truth to varieties of mutual ignorance.


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later remarks (2004, 176) suggest that this view has been modified, while leaving less than fully explicit what the view is to be replaced with.) Second, the key thesis is in line with a famous Humean observation about the psychological untenability of external-world skepticism: It seems evident, that men are carried, by a natural instinct or prepossession, to repose faith in their senses; and that, without any reasoning, or even almost before the use of reason, we always suppose an external universe, which depends not on our perception. . . . Even the animal creation are governed by a like opinion, and preserve this belief of external objects, in all their thoughts, designs, and actions. (Hume 1777, XII/I)

A displaced judgment about one’s experience presupposes that one sees. If we are medically unable to reflect on the nature of our experience without entertaining displaced judgments at some level, then reflection on our perceptual situation in regard to the external world begins in an antiskeptical stance. I argue in section 3.5 that we can reflectively conceive of ourselves as inhabiting skeptical scenarios; still, doing so is a highly theoretical cognitive achievement, and in any event requires a sort of double consciousness: we cannot entertain the sophisticated skeptical hypothesis without at some level simultaneously affirming an ordinary antiskeptical stance; in kicking the ladder away, we remain standing on it. Third, the theory is austere. It builds our capacity for first-person reflection entirely out of capacities that we obviously already have. Unlike Chalmers’s view, mine does not require any further distinctive capacity of attention to experience. This prediction is attractive: as Byrne (2009, 434) remarks, ‘cognitive scientists have distinguished many different kinds of attention, but have not yet seen the need to suppose that we can attend to our experiences.’ A final reason to accept the key thesis is especially attractive to friends of externalism. Support for that view and its relatives often takes a phenomenological form (compare Hellie 2007a; Kennedy 2009): reflection on experience makes manifest a perceptual connection to external entities, and it suffices for F to count as an experiential property of e that e’s F-ness be made manifest in reflection. The key thesis requires reflective judgment to begin in self-ascription of properties of the form seeing this object/ this color, self-ascription which is accurate when we see without illusion. The key thesis therefore ratifies the phenomenological judgment brought in support of externalism.

3.2. Epistemic Two-Dimensional Semantics From the key thesis, it follows that two experiences are reflectively indiscriminable just when there is a (knowledgeable) displaced judgment about one which is a priori inconsistent with a (knowledgeable) displaced judgment about the other. But to operationalize this thesis, we need a sense for when two judgments are a priori inconsistent. I propose to

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exploit the technical resources of epistemic two-dimensional semantics (Chalmers 2005) for this purpose. On the epistemic two-dimensional approach, the epistemic properties of a judgment are reflected in a set of centered worlds assigned to it (where a centered world is a pair of a possible world and a time slice of a subject in that world). A judgment is true a priori just when every centered world is assigned to it, false a priori just when no centered world is assigned to it, and a posteriori just when some but not all centered worlds are assigned to it. A conjunction is a priori false just when no centered world is assigned to both conjuncts; two judgments are a priori inconsistent just when no centered world is assigned to both. Considerable artistry is involved in stating the assignment of centered worlds to judgments; limitations of space prevent addressing the many nuances here. Put crudely, on the approach I am exploiting, this assignment is supposed to reflect the Fregean sense of the judgment, where this is understood more-or-less as determined syntactically by reference-fixing descriptive conditions competent users implicitly associate with the constituents of the judgment. Working through an example will be of pedagogical value. Consider the judgment that Hesperus is Phosphorus. Here the ‘constituents’ are ‘Hesperus,’ ‘Phosphorus,’ and the identity predicate. A plausible referencefixing description for ‘Hesperus’ is being the first heavenly body visible in the evening from locations near the center, while one for ‘Phosphorus’ is being the last heavenly body visible in the morning from locations near the center; we may assume that the referent of the identity predicate is transparently understood without appeal to a reference-fixing description. Accordingly, a centered world is assigned to the judgment just when, from the perspective of the center, there is a unique heavenly body visible both last in the evening and first in the morning from locations near it. Some centered world does, in fact, satisfy this condition; for instance, the actual world centered on Hammurabi or Kepler, since the planet Venus is just such a heavenly body. But there are also centered worlds that fail to satisfy the condition. For example, it is plausible that there are planets in the actual world containing beings that see distinct heavenly bodies first in the evening and last in the morning. An example of a falsifying centered world, then, is the actual world centered on one of those beings. Since some worlds satisfy the condition and others do not, the judgment is a posteriori. (By contrast, a judgment explicitly identifying Hesperus with the unique satisfier of the reference-fixing description associated with ‘Hesperus’—such as ‘Hesperus is the first heavenly body visible in the evening’—will be true at all centered worlds, hence a priori.)

3.3. The Senses of Displaced Concepts This provides enough of a grasp of the technical apparatus of twodimensionalism for the purpose of explaining the notion of reflective


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indiscriminability as amplified by the displaced perception theory. What is needed to apply the technical apparatus is a sense of the proper reference-fixing descriptions for displaced concepts like ‘seeing that object’ and ‘seeing something with that color.’ Since the meaning of such a concept incorporates the meaning of the perceptual object- or color-demonstrative concept ‘that object’ or ‘that color’ embedded within it, it makes sense to proceed by stating senses for such object- and color-demonstrative concepts. It is probably not too far off to assume that the sense of the objectdemonstrative concept ‘that object’ is something like ‘the first object in the direction of my gaze’ or ‘the object that is right-causing the current visual experience by being seen’; or, incorporating a bit more nuance to accommodate cases of seeing multiple objects, ‘the object that is rightcausing a certain privileged part of the current visual experience by being seen’ (where the privilege in question results from an underlying act of selective attention, characterized perhaps in functional or neurological terms). The true theory of visual demonstration of objects may well be significantly more nuanced still (Dickie 2010). Still, as I discuss below, senses of the sort just described have the merit of generating the correct predictions about reflective discriminability of experiences (e.g., Bill’s and Tina’s) that differ merely haecceitistically, and are therefore at least close enough to correct for present purposes; it is doubtful that any more nuanced theory would differ in the respects that generate this merit. As for color demonstratives, one option would be to straightforwardly roll through the senses just characterized for object demonstratives, along the following lines: ‘the color in the direction of my gaze’/‘the color that is right-causing the current visual experience.’ However, such a ‘blind’ demonstrative does not seem sufficiently to track the subject’s internal condition to count as appropriately perceptual. Suppose that a normal subject sees a red thing on the left and a green thing on the right, and judges ‘that color [gazing left] = that color [gazing right],’ where these are perceptual demonstrative concepts. Intuitively, assuming it to be known that a color is seen with both gazes, the judgment is a priori false, but the ‘blind’ demonstrative theory at issue cannot explain this: The judgment would be true at a centered world just if the color in the direction of the first gaze by the subject at the center = the color in the direction of the second gaze by the subject at the center, and there are such worlds. More important, blind demonstratives could not serve in a displaced perception theory of reflective discrimination, since the result would make the discriminability of Bill’s and Greg’s experiences inexplicable (Bill, recall, sees a red tomato, while Greg sees the same green tomato as Inez). I sketch the fairly straightforward reason (the discussion below provides resources that the reader may use to fill in the details here): Nothing would distinguish the senses of the displaced concepts incorporating them, so that there could be no a priori inconsistency in a single experience satisfying each.

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A superior theory of perceptual color demonstratives builds in the subject’s internal condition into the reference-fixing description (theories resembling the following are discussed in Peacocke 1983; Chalmers 2004; Thompson 2009). Recall the assumption from section 1.4 that when a normal subject sees a red (green) thing under normal conditions, there is some internal property R (G) such that this puts the subject into condition R (G). Consider, then, the following reference-fixing condition associated with perceptual demonstration by a normal subject of redness, ‘the color instances of which when seen typically cause, and an instance of which is now thereby causing, me to instantiate R’; of greenness, ‘the color instances of which when seen typically cause, and an instance of which is now causing, me to instantiate G.’ This theory of the senses of color demonstratives predicts the doctrine from section 1.4 that color concepts do not generate an explanatory gap. If a color concept refers only by description, then if we see that a certain property satisfies the description, we no longer ask how that property could be the color. This theory of the senses of color demonstratives predicts the a priori falsity of the judgment ‘this color [gazing left] = this color [gazing right]’ described in the preceding paragraph. Ignoring the temporal difference between the two demonstrations, a centered world would satisfy the sense of the judgment just if, at the center, R and G are instantiated and caused to be so by colors that, when seen, typically have this effect, in the subject at the center. But this requires R and G to be simultaneously instantiated at the center. Let us suppose that R involves the opponency channels concerning color experience at a certain region of the visual field firing in one way, while G involves them firing in an incompatible way. Accordingly, it is impossible for R and G to be mutually and simultaneously instantiated. Therefore, there is no such centered world, so the judgment is false a priori. Why build in the conditions both of typical causation and current causation? The need doesn’t appear in the case of veridical perception because the current and typical causation requirements come apart only when the current case is atypical, and hence nonveridical. But the requirements come apart in cases of illusion. Consider Ilya’s experience of seeing a white thing under a red spotlight. Ilya’s instantiating R is currently being caused by seeing white, so red does not satisfy the description, and seeing white does not typically cause Ilya to instantiate R, so white does not satisfy the description. So there is no perfect satisfier of the description. White and red both satisfy the description better than any other property, however, so plausibly there is indeterminate reference between white and red. This strikes me as a credible prediction about such an illusory demonstrative: Intuitively, I do not see how to settle the question whether Ilya’s ‘this color’ concerns white or red.


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Completing our theory of the senses of displaced concepts like ‘seeing this object/this color’ requires a story about what ‘seeing’ contributes to the sense. As discussed in section 1.4, it is in the spirit of externalism to think of ‘seeing’ as an irreducible notion along the lines of ‘conscious visual openness to the world’ which could not apply to any ‘zombie’ or nonconscious physical duplicate of a conscious being, and which therefore generates an explanatory gap. If so, the nature of the property itself is revealed in its reference-fixing condition (by contrast, we are assuming color concepts to be natural kind concepts, such that the identity of the referent is not known a priori by competent users of the concept). If this is correct, no further analysis is required here. Assembling this claim with our results about the senses of perceptual demonstratives, we conclude that the sense of ‘seeing this object’ is ‘seeing the object that is right-causing the current visual experience,’ while the sense of ‘seeing this color’ is of the form ‘seeing the color instances of which when see typically cause, and an instance of which is now thereby causing, me to instantiate R’ (varying R as appropriate). We can see that the displaced judgement ‘my current experience is a case of seeing something this color’ is entailed a priori by Bill’s ordinary color demonstrative judgement ‘this object is this color [namely, red].’ After all, the sense of the latter requires the subject at the center to be such that the object causing it by being seen has the color which is now causing and typically causes the subject to be R when seeing it, and the sense of the former requires the subject at the center to be experiencing so as to see something with the color which now and typically causes the subject to be R when seeing it. It is clear that the former requirement cannot be met unless the latter is. The displaced judgement is in this sense implicit in the ordinary demonstrative judgement. Using perceptual experience in even the most elemental judgements carries with it an element of self-knowledge. Now that we have seen the account of the senses of displaced concepts, we should assess whether it genuinely respects the transparency of experience. One might be skeptical about its transparent credentials, due to the involvement in the senses in question of conditions concerning R, G, visual experiences, and other assorted internal conditions and entities. However, as framed, transparency concerns the referential properties of our acts of attention. We attend to instances of colors and objects, with internal properties, along channels opened by conscious visual openness to the world. On my displaced perception theory, there is no reference in our reflective judgments to any purely internal properties or conditions. The concepts in question solely concern external properties such as redness and harmless relations such as seeing. The internal conditions are solely mentioned in theories of the sense of our reflective concepts. Certainly, in some cases reference-fixing conditions are explicitly grasped. Consider the explicit introduction of a name as referring rigidly to the inventor of the zipper: One who grasps the sense of this name would plausibly need

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to be consciously aware of it as referring to the inventor of the zipper. But it does not follow that this is so in all cases. In more typical cases, senses are best regarded as abstractions from tacitly understood rules that guide application of concepts. My claim about the sense of ‘that color [red]’ is intended solely to mean that one applies that concept as if guided by a rule requiring that seeing it now and typically causes, one to instantiate R. Acting in accord with the rule does not require any particularly explicit access to that rule. But if not, then the account does not require that when a subject employs a color demonstrative, the subject needs to have any particularly explicit awareness of R: R needs merely to causally influence the subject’s application of the demonstrative. Before advancing to the next stage in the case for our epistemic descendant, let me pause for a brief aside concerning the broad parameters of the total theory I have developed. In certain respects, the view is Cartesian; in certain other respects, the view is Kantian. On a Cartesian view, perception cannot mislead, and empirical error is always the fault of overreaching thought; the theory here says much the same. Taking his current experience to be a typical case, Ilya judges his tomato to be red and his experience to present red; and yet his experience presents only the whiteness of the tomato. On a Kantian view, perceptual experience consists of a brute relation to an unconceptualized ‘given,’ and both empirical thought and thought about experience require bringing this condition of givenness under concepts. On the theory here, the given in question is not a classical internal sense-datum, but an external entity (exception: I take no stand on whether a hallucination requires givenness of something internal, some other condition, or nothing at all).

3.4. Displaced Discrimination of Veridical Experiences I am now in a position to derive the observed patterns of discriminability and indiscriminability among veridical paradigms and antiparadigms of phenomenal sameness. The next subsection discusses illusion and hallucination. What epistemic status does our displaced perception account assign to a reflective judgment about a veridical experience? Suppose that we judge on the basis of projection into Bill’s experience ‘this experience is a case of seeing this object.’ The former demonstrative refers to Bill’s experience, while the latter refers to tomato t; since Bill’s experience is a case of seeing t, the judgment is true. Is the judgment knowledge? Conclusively answering this question would require a nontrivial sufficient condition for knowledge. Still, supposing that Bill is not at risk of hallucinating or of having an indiscriminable tomato swapped for t, the judgment will be ‘safe’ (Williamson 2000); plausibly, safe true belief is a very good approximation to knowledge (the appeal to safety in this context follows Kennedy 2009).


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(Is it plausible to suppose that Bill cannot know the experiential properties of his experience if he is at risk of hallucinating? This is a fairly straightforward prediction of externalism combined with the safety requirement on knowledge: The latter predicts that the subject at risk of hallucinating cannot know that this tomato is this color; if the subject’s experiential properties include the tomato’s thus-coloredness, an implausible denial of a ‘closure’ principle on knowledge would be required to accept that the subject can know that he has the experiential property. As far as the reflective discriminability of the risky experience from others is concerned, that matter should be assimilated to the discriminability of hallucinations from other experiences.) And suppose that we judge on the basis of projection into Bill’s experience ‘this experience is a case of seeing this color.’ Here the demonstratives refer to Bill’s experience (once again) and to redness. Since Bill’s experience is a case of seeing redness, the judgment is once again true. Supposing once again that Bill is not at risk of hallucination or illusion, the judgment is once again safe. Parallel claims are true of our remaining veridical paradigms and antiparadigms (Tina, Inez, and Greg). Now let me develop the predictions made by this displaced perception theory for the discriminability status of our veridical paradigms and antiparadigms. Consider first Bill’s and Tina’s normal experiences of seeing visually identical but numerically distinct tomatoes. Intuitively, these experiences are reflectively indiscriminable (and they are paradigmatically phenomenally the same). The account predicts that this will be so just in case we can make knowledgeable reflective judgments on the basis of those experiences that are a priori inconsistent; and we cannot. Plausibly, any pair of displaced object judgments are a priori consistent. The sense of Bill’s displaced object judgment is something like ‘the experience at the center is a case of seeing the object that is right-causing it.’ Indeed, this is the sense of any displaced object judgment, including Tina’s. Since Bill’s and Tina’s senses do not differ, it is of course possible that these senses be mutually satisfied by a centered world. Accordingly, there is no a priori inconsistency between Bill’s and Tina’s displaced object judgments. Accordingly, the displaced perception account predicts immediately that mere haecceitistic differences between experiences will never make for introspective discriminability. Note also that Bill’s and Tina’s displaced color judgments will be a priori consistent. The sense of Bill’s judgment is something like ‘the experience at the center is a case of seeing the color instances of which typically cause, and an instance of which is now causing, the subject at the center to instantiate R.’ This is also the sense of Tina’s displaced color judgment. Since the senses of the two judgments are the same, they are of course a priori consistent.

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Accordingly, the displaced perception account predicts that there will be no medically possible reflective judgments on the basis of Tina’s experience that are a priori inconsistent with any medically possible reflective judgment on the basis of Bill’s experience. Accordingly, the experiences are reflectively indiscriminable. The explanation of the indiscriminability of Bill’s experience of a red tomato and inverted Inez’s experience of a green tomato is much the same. Once again, no displaced object judgments can discriminate them. And since Inez is inverted, when she is seeing a green thing, the sense of her displaced color judgment will incorporate R. Accordingly, the sense of her displaced color judgment will be the same as that of Bill’s displaced color judgment. Accordingly, they too will be a priori consistent. The displaced perception account additionally predicts immediately that mere quidditistic differences between experiences will never make for introspective discriminability. Now consider Bill’s experience in relation to Greg’s experience of seeing a green thing: Intuitively, the two are reflectively discriminable, and we have advanced this pair as an antiparadigm of phenomenal sameness. Since Greg is a normal subject, when he sees a green thing, the sense of his displaced color judgment will be along the lines of ‘the experience at the center is a case of seeing the color instances of which when seen typically cause, and an instance of which is now causing, the subject at the center to instantiate G’; and recall that the sense of Bill’s displaced color judgment is ‘the experience at the center is a case of seeing the color instances of which when seen typically cause, and an instance of which is now causing, the subject at the center to instantiate R.’ For reasons I have already discussed, these senses cannot be mutually satisfied: This would require the subject at the center to instantiate both G and R, which is impossible.15

15. It is worth briefly contrasting this discussion with the predictions we would see on the basis of an account of reflective judgment like that of Chalmers (2003), according to which one conceptualizes one’s phenomenal property F with a priori insight into its nature when one ‘attends’ to F or one of its determinates while entertaining a predicate that F alone among these determinates satisfies. First, the Chalmers framework makes room, salutarily, for both ignorance and error. Ignorance is accommodated by an incapacity to attend in the right way (245). Error is accommodated by mismatch between the predicate and the property to which one attends: the conceptualized property is roughly the property satisfying the predicate which is most similar to the object of attention (237–8). This framework is not wholly amenable to our purposes. Accommodating the indiscriminability of experiences that differ merely haecceitistically or quidditistically would require imposing in an ad hoc manner restrictions on the reach of attention to exclude haecceitistic and (some, but not all) quidditistic properties of experiences. Accommodating the indiscriminability of hallucinatory and veridical experiences proceeds more naturally: the externalist could appeal to Hume’s views on the ‘animal creation’ to justify imposing a medically necessary ‘presumption of veridicality’ on deployment of the relevant concepts.


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3.5. On Becoming Alienated I now turn to seeing what it takes to derive the observed patterns of discriminability and indiscriminability among pairs that include experiences that are not safely veridical. The general difficulty is that two experiences are reflectively discriminable just when there are medically possible knowledgeable reflective judgments about them that are a priori inconsistent. As I discuss below, for experiences that are not safely veridical, displaced judgments do not generate knowledge; accordingly, such experiences cannot be reflectively discriminated from other experiences just by displaced judgments. But some experiences that are not safely veridical fall into pairs that are antiparadigms of phenomenal sameness. Unless we can come up with some way of discriminating those experiences other than by displaced judgment, the epistemic descendant falls. But in positing alternative accounts of reflective knowledge, we run the risk of running afoul of the transparency of experience. I now fill in the details behind the claim that displaced judgment does not always provide knowledge. First, as I discussed above, someone with a veridical experience can fail to acquire knowledge via displaced judgments when in danger of hallucinating. Next, consider illusion. Suppose that Ilya advances a displaced judgment about his experience. The sense of this judgment is the same as that of Bill’s displaced judgment. But Ilya’s displaced judgment is not determinately true. Recall that its truth condition is indeterminate as between Ilya sees something red and Ilya sees something white. So at the very least, Ilya’s displaced judgment is not determinately a case of knowledge of what experiential property he has. Hallucinating Dean is worse off still. While the sense of his displaced judgment is the same as that of Bill’s displaced judgment, what is its truth condition? The judgment is ‘I see something this color.’ This judgment is problematic in two ways: First, Dean does not see; second, ‘this color’ does not refer, so the judgment has no truth value. Since truth is a requirement of knowledge, Dean’s displaced judgment is not a case of knowledge of what experiential property he has. Of these three difficulties, Ilya’s is perhaps the easiest to resolve: Perhaps we could just jettison the requirement of determinate knowledge in the analysis, so that even indeterminate discrimination counts as sufficient for phenomenal difference. I do not speculate on the ultimate success of Second, if we had a priori insight into the nature of our experiential properties, the difference of sense required to discriminate Greg’s and Inez’s experiences would ramify as a difference of referent; this difference could not reside in the color seen (in both cases, green), so it would have to reside in properties like G and R. This would make for a violation of the transparency of experience as we have understood it. Chalmers (2006), of course, recognizes this dialectic: his approach (i) opts for a weaker understanding of transparency; (ii) advances as consistent with that understanding an intricate and arcane theory of the natures of G and R involving multiple levels of content and self-misrepresentation of acquaintance with uninstantiated primitive color properties.

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this approach, however, because it is piecemeal and does nothing to resolve the difficulties for hallucinating and endangered subjects. My solution for Dean’s case is clearly effective in the other cases, so I turn directly to it. (Here I treat error, as found in Dean’s case, differently from ignorance, as found in the remainder of our cases.) There are two reasons why the displaced color judgment (‘this experience has seeing something this color as an experiential property’) is not true of Dean’s experience. The first is that Dean does not see anything; the second is that ‘this color’ does not refer. The difficulties are independent: Even if the color predicate were not demonstrative, the first difficulty would make the judgment false; even if the relation to the color were less demanding than seeing, the second difficulty would still rob any judgment containing ‘this color’ of a truth value. What is needed, then, are ways of transforming the initial judgment, first, so that the relation to the color is less demanding than seeing, and second, so that the color term does not require an actual present referent in order to contribute to the truth condition. If we could transform the displaced judgement in these ways, the result would still be ‘based on’ the displaced judgement. Moreover, this would seem to be in accordance with the ‘minimal added conceptual material’ requirement of the transparency thesis: the aim of all this maneuvering is to manufacture a judgement with a content that is less specific than the displaced judgement. On the first difficulty, notice that the sense of the reflective judgment about Dean’s experience contains more information than is strictly necessary to establish a priori its distinctness from Greg’s experience of seeing a green thing. All that is really necessary to establish this are a sense applied to Dean’s experience along the lines of ‘the subject at the center instantiates R’ and a sense applied to Greg’s experience along the lines of ‘the subject at the center instantiates G’ (or perhaps some sense of an abstractness level between these and the senses of displaced judgments). Each of these senses is true, and plausibly safe. And while we are not in a position to directly grasp either of those simple senses, each is entailed by the more complex sense of the actual displaced reflective property judgments. The straightforward remedy here is to abstract from the initial judgment by quantifying. This recalls Smart’s (1959, 149) famous claim that ‘when a person says, ‘I see a yellowish-orange afterimage,’ he is saying something like this: ‘There is something going on which is like what is going on when I have my eyes open, am awake, and there is an orange illuminated in good light in front of me, that is, when I really see an orange’.’’ Plausibly, the Smart-like judgment ‘there is something going on in me which is intrinsically like what is going on when I see something red’ abstracts away the requirement that one see the color that regularly causes R in one from the sense of the initial displaced-color judgment. But the involvement of the context-independent expression ‘red’ prevents the judgment in question of being tied to the nature of the experience in the way displaced judgments are, so the Smart-like judgment does not count as purely reflective in the desired way. A bit more specifically: first, this sort of judgment has nothing to do with the transparency of experience, because


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no attention to anything is involved, and second, we have no guarantee that the Smart-like judgment will be true in any particular case: The thought can be entertained when one is seeing a blue thing, so the story we have been providing to explain the truth of our reflective judgments (viz., that they cannot be entertained in the absence of the internal property they concern) would not be applicable; some other explanation would be needed. The second difficulty for the displaced color judgement as an account of reflective knowledge of Dean’s experience is the problem of simultaneously preserving the tie contributed by the color demonstrative to the internal properties R, G, and the like, and also eliminating the color demonstrative’s attendant dependence of a truth value of the judgment on the existence of an actual present referent. The sense of this color demonstrative is along the lines of ‘the color that now and typically causes me to instantiate R when seen.’ The clause that is responsible for both the cost and the benefit is the current-causation clause: In the veridical case, it assures the tie to the relevant internal properties, but in the hallucinatory case, it deprives any judgment containing the concept of a truth value. What is needed is a concept that is tied to the internal property, perhaps by way of being implicitly understood in terms of the demonstrative concept, but that can refer even without a present instance of its referent. Something like the following explanation seems plausible. A number of authors, including Kripke (1972), have suggested that the sense of a context-independent color concept like ‘red’ is something like ‘the color that typically causes me to instantiate R.’ This sense is more abstract than the sense of our demonstrative concept, in that it lacks the current-causation clause. It is also more objective than our sense, in the sense that it envisages the property in a way that prescinds from the subject’s current circumstances (while still involving the subject as a more statistical measure of the property). It is plausible that we learn to grasp this sort of concept by, as it were, considering a color of which we demonstratively conceive ‘as unseen,’ by abstracting away from the fact that the color is a current object of vision and focusing exclusively on its instances that are not currently present to us. The result of this sort of consideration would be a concept that is pedagogically rooted in the demonstrative concept but that is also semantically self-standing, in that it does not rely compositionally for its semantic properties on the semantic properties of the original concept. We can represent the psychological process by which we learn to grasp a context-independent color concept by abstraction from a colordemonstrative concept by a noncompositional operator ‘O’ (for ‘objective’) on color-demonstrative concepts: If the sense of ‘this color’ is ‘the color that now and typically causes and the subject at the center to instantiate X when seen,’ ‘O(this color)’ is a concept with the sense ‘the color that typically causes the subject at the center to instantiate X when seen,’ and the referent the color, whatever it may be, that typically causes the subject at the center to instantiate X when seen. So, relative to Bill and Dean, the sense of ‘O(this color)’ is ‘the color that typically causes the subject at the center to instantiate R when seen,’ and its referent is redness; for Greg, the sense is ‘the color

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that typically causes the subject at the center to instantiate G when seen,’ and its referent is greenness, and for Inez the sense is ‘the color that typically causes the subject at the center to instantiate R when seen,’ while the referent is greenness. Importantly, the tie between a concept C and the concept ‘O(C)’ is a pedagogical tie rather than a semantic tie. It is a tie at the level of sense, rather than at the level of reference. Because ‘O’ does not function at the level of reference, standard assumptions about compositionality in the determination of truth-conditions need not apply. In particular, there is no need to suppose that in order for ‘O(C)’ to refer, ‘C’ must also refer. Rather, what is true is that in order for ‘O(C)’ to have a sense, ‘C’ must have a sense. And, as we have seen, Dean’s concept ‘that color’ does have a sense. Accordingly, using ‘O(C)’ is a way to form a judgment ‘by way of’ a reference-free concept C without infecting the full judgment with semantic defectiveness. Both of these devices—‘smartening,’ converting a judgement about what is seen into a Smart-like judgement, and ‘objectivizing’—enable one to ‘alienate’ one’s internal situation from its current immediate perceptual tie to one’s surroundings: Smartening enables one to consider situations internally like seeing that need not involve seeing, while objectivizing enables one to consider a property—putting it a bit roughly—as looking a certain way dispositionally (though perhaps not occurrently).16 By exploiting both of these alienating devices, we can entertain the alienated judgment that results from slotting ‘O(this color)’ into the smartened displaced judgment: ‘There is something going on in me that is intrinsically like what is going on when I see something O(this color).’ Alienated judgments can play the required role in explaining the reflective discriminability of Dean’s and Greg’s experiences. First, an alienated judgment is a case of knowledge. The alienated judgment is true of Dean’s experience because ‘O(this color)’ refers to redness, and there is something going on in Dean that is like what is going on when he sees something red: He instantiates R. Moreover, the judgment is safely true (and, in general, alienated judgments will be safely true even when their corresponding displaced judgments are dangerously true). Accordingly, the alienated judgment is a case of knowledge.17 16. These devices bear a certain distant resemblance to Loar’s (2003a) notion of ‘oblique reflection,’ perhaps. 17. More of this sort of semi-technical work remains to be done, I fear, if the externalist is to accommodate the full range of internalist intuitions: to build a style of judgment which any subject we might judge to be R could exploit to acquire a safe belief that they are R. After all, Victor, who is R and envatted, and therefore never caused to be R by seeing any color, would not refer to any property with ‘O(this color),’ and nor is there anything that typically happens when he sees colors. Thanks to Chris Mole for raising this objection. Another concern addresses normativity. Safety is a mere statistical notion; what does it have to do with justification? On Chalmers’s (2003) account of introspection, one who is R is ‘acquainted’ with R, which bestows justification on judgements that one is R. It is not clear that my account cannot appeal to a similar maneuver: accept that R is an experiential property and assert one is acquainted with all of one’s experiential properties. I would need to deny, of course, that one is in a position to conceptualize in a relatively straightforward way every object of one’s acquaintance. But this is a position that Chalmers also advances, though in a rather more restricted form (§4.1). Thanks to David Chalmers for raising this objection.


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Second, the requisite patterns of a priori inconsistency hold. The sense of Dean’s alienated judgment is something like ‘there is something going on in me that is intrinsically like what is going on when I see something the color of which typically causes R in me when seen’—which straightforwardly entails the sense ‘the subject at the center instantiates R.’ This sense is a priori inconsistent with the sense of the displaced color judgment applied to Greg’s experience, so that the experiences are discriminable on the basis of the alienated and displaced judgments. So the alienated judgment does seem to be a (more-or-less reflective) way of discriminating among experiences that are not safely veridical.

3.6. Qualia and Consciousness On the basis of such an alienated judgment, we can construct concepts that refer to the internal qualities R, G, and so forth. Beginning with an alienated judgment of the form ‘there is something going on in me that is intrinsically like what is going on when I see something O(this color),’ we can form the description ‘the property instantiated in me that is intrinsically like what is going on when I see something O(this color).’ We can then use this description to fix the referent of various property terms; for instance, on the basis of Bill’s experience, we could define in this way the expression ‘q-red,’ on the basis of Greg’s experiences, we could define ‘q-green,’ and so on. In this way, we enable ourselves to refer to internal qualities, from something like a first-person perspective.18 This constructed referential ability gives rise to a series of questions that will be relevant in developing the ontological part of our interpretation, and in assessing the broader philosophical impact of the views developed here. 1. Is our ability to reflectively refer to these internal ‘q-properties’ consistent with the key thesis of our displaced perception theory of reflection? Yes: The initial statement of the theory required only that any reflective knowledge of which experiential properties a subject has is based in displaced judgments. Set aside the question whether the q-properties are experiential, and whether q-concepts genuinely provide a sufficiently robust ‘knowledge which’ properties are experiential; these referential q-concepts are in fact ‘based in’ displaced judgments (via smartening, unseeing, abstraction of property descriptions, and reference fixation), in the sense of either semantically or pedagogically defined in terms of displaced judgments. 2. Do q-concepts enable ‘knowledge of which’ properties the q-properties are? On a weak sense of ‘knowing which,’ yes: They enable reference to q-properties. On a very strong sense (Lewis 1995), maybe. On behalf of 18. This is perhaps something like what Shoemaker (1991, 522) refers to as the ‘reconceptualization of what one was aware of all along’ that ‘produce[s] explicit awareness of qualia as such.’

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an affirmative answer, q-concepts appear to be ‘epistemically rigid’: no property other than R might be the property instantiated in one that is intrinsically like what is (typically) going on when one sees something of the color that when seen typically causes one to instantiate R. After all, get rid of the characterization, and it becomes clear that (modulo certain presuppositions) this is just a fancy way of specifying the condition of being equal to R. On behalf of a negative answer, though, the cognitive complexity built into the concept renders it a poor substitute for the ideal of acquaintance, in which the subject simply meets the property face-to-face, as it were. 3. What is the nature of a q-property? The only restriction I can see on theory here is that the q-properties be able to serve in modes of presentation in demonstrative concepts of color. (Moreover, it is far from obvious whether a single filler of this role must have a unified essence.) Though limitations of space prevent full consideration of this point, philosophical considerations that have been advanced on behalf of various answers to this question tend to strike me as not germane.19 4. Is this reference to q-properties consistent with the transparency of experience? First, recall that I phrased the transparency doctrine ‘most reflective knowledge of which experiential property one’s experience has requires attention to entities—objects or property tokens—in one’s environment.’ Q-concepts provide no knowledge of the true nature of hallucinatory experience as hallucinatory, of the experiential properties that it has in exclusion of the external properties an indiscriminable veridical experience would have. Moreover, as I discussed above, it is not clear either that q-properties are experiential or that q-concepts afford ‘knowledge which.’ Second, the very same capacity to attend is exploited in q-concepts as in displaced concepts. Accordingly, the situation ratifies the following: Attempting to acquire reflective knowledge of experiential properties requires attempting to attend to entities in one’s environment. Accordingly, to the extent that we are tempted to apply the transparency thesis even to hallucinatory experiences, this can be explained away by its seeming true, from the first-person perspective, in such cases. Third, the q-concept does not bring in any heavy-duty cognitive resources that offend against the spirit of the transparency thesis: Smartening merely quantifies at the level of the judgment, unseeing merely quantifies at the level of the sense, and descriptive reference fixation is an elementary and highly general semantic capacity. Nothing remotely like direct attention to internal experiential qualities is involved. 19. In particular, (Shoemaker 1994, 2006) and Chalmers (2006) seem to represent our cognitive access to q-properties as being much too direct. In an earlier incarnation, Shoemaker (1991, 521) was right on, regarding this access as ‘theoretical,’ although ‘bringing out something that is implicit in folk psychology.’


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5. What then can be concluded about the nature of perceptual experience on the basis of the transparency of experience? Not very much. First of all, transparency is compatible with veridical spectral inversion. My story does not discriminate between Inez and the rest of our subjects. Second, transparency is compatible with introspective knowledge of intrinsic qualities, such as R. It is very plausible that alienated judgments count as ‘introspective,’ and R is, we are assuming, an intrinsic quality, so alienated judgments bring introspective knowledge of intrinsic qualities of experience, and our capacity to make alienated judgements is compatible with transparency. And, as I argue in the concluding section, all of this is independent of whether R is understood as an experiential property. Third, transparency is compatible with R being any of a wide range of properties: a quale, a relation to sense-data, an intentional property, or some mixture of these. The only constraints I have imposed on R are that it be intrinsic, conceptually irreducible, and in a position to serve in the modes of presentation of colors in the way specified. Nothing in either feature seems to be relevant to these metaphysical debates. (Attempts to constrain the nature of R are discussed in the prefatory text of section 2, and footnotes 5 and 15.) 6. Why have these points been elusive? I speculate that the following may be at work. Philosophers have conflated two styles of reflection: reflection by displaced judgment, and reflection by alienated judgment. Reflecting by displaced judgement, we think we find external aspects to experience: the colors we see. Reflecting by alienated judgment, we think we find internal aspects: the q-properties. But the logical structure of our concepts is opaque. Accordingly, we erroneously take ourselves to have done some unified thing and thereby accessed a unified domain. As a result, we search for theories that eliminate one or the other side (qualia theory, direct realism), or attempt to bundle them together (representationalism). But once we recognize that we have done two things, we need neither eliminate nor bundle. Debate about metaphysics fuelled by apparently conflicting phenomenological results is dissolved if the results do not conflict. 7. Should q-properties be regarded as experiential properties? This question is a loose end from section 1.4. It is not easy to answer. What pictures are attached to the answers to the question? If we answer negatively, we would think of the nature of Bill’s (Greg’s) consciousness as being something like seeing a red (green) thing; if affirmatively, something like R-ly (G-ly) seeing something of some color or other. On the former picture, veridical visual consciousness is a simple relation to the environment, without any intrinsic features, and is characterized solely by one’s openness to various objects and features in one’s environment. (The same could also be said of illusory consciousness. There is no such thing as hallucinatory visual consciousness: a hallucinating subject is simply not visually conscious.) On the

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latter picture, visual consciousness, whether veridical, illusory, or hallucinatory, is more like a ‘field’ with intrinsic features of its own, which serves as the basis of one’s openness to various aspects of the environment. On this picture, visual consciousness involves something like ‘paint that points,’ to use Loar’s (2003b, 251) memorable phrase. The former picture is compatible with externalism, the latter is not. (Note an ignorance/error alternation. According to the externalist, error is radically different from correctness; ignorance is inevitable and forces symmetric treatment of distinct cases. The ‘field’ conception treats error and truth as on a par, assimilating both to cases of ignorance.) Obviously the approaches could be combined to form a view compatible with externalism, by thinking of the nature of Bill’s (Greg’s) consciousness as something like R-ly (G-ly) seeing a red (green) thing. The picture of veridical perceptual consciousness then would be something like a field with external entities dotted around in it. This approach raises obvious if perhaps somewhat vague worries about overdetermination, redundancy, excessive complication, and wishy-washiness, so I will set it aside. On either picture, one’s openness in perceptual consciousness to some object or feature serves as a basis for reference to that entity via perceptual demonstrative concepts. But the relation between perceptual consciousness and the sense of such a concept differs significantly. On the field view, forming such concepts is largely a matter of thought’s borrowing or exploiting resources already available within perceptual consciousness. On the externalist view, forming such concepts is a rather more creative enterprise: thought brings q-properties from without perceptual consciousness to assist in grappling with the entities conveyed to the subject within perceptual consciousness. What considerations motivate answering one way or another? In section 1.3, recall, I argue that q-properties generate an explanatory gap. It does not follow from this that q-properties are experiential properties; after all, in Chalmers’s (2006) Eden, ‘perfect colors’ generate an explanatory gap but are qualities of mindless entities such as trees. There is certainly a sense in which q-properties count as ‘sensational’ or ‘perceptual’; after all, which q-properties one instantiates typically tracks one’s perceptible environment. But it still does not obviously follow that q-properties are experiential; after all, there does not seem to be any obvious contradiction in the notion of an irreducible property of an organism that tracks the perceptible environment without characterizing the organism’s conscious state. It is certainly desirable to provide distinct characterizations of Bill’s and Greg’s conscious states. But this does not settle whether the distinction should be drawn by appeal to the differing q-properties they instantiate or by appeal to the differing colors they see. Nor is it uncontroversial that, despite the fact that Greg is G and Inez is R, we should provide distinct characterizations of Greg’s and Inez’s conscious states (ignoring the numerical difference between their tomatoes): while reflection on Greg’s and Inez’s experiences reveals them to instantiate incompatible properties, this does not settle whether these properties are aspects of consciousness.


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There are semantical considerations both for and against each candidate. Extracting reference to colors from perceptual experience is completely straightforward; by contrast, extracting reference to q-properties from perceptual experience requires extensive theoretical sophistication. It is possible in principle (via alienated judgement) to extract a direct conceptualization of the nature of q-properties from perceptual experience; by contrast, a direct conceptualization of the nature of colors cannot be extracted from perceptual experience. Both of these features are ones it is attractive to attribute to consciousness and its various manifestations. On standard internalist views (compare Chalmers 2003), q-properties are both candidate objects of straightforward reference and candidate objects of nature-revealing conception. But if externalism is correct, this is too much to hope for. (Note here an ignorance/error alternation. Perceptual demonstrative thought leaves us ignorant of the natures of the features and objects we see, and in error when we are hallucinating. The ignorance is indelible; the error is washed out only when we willfully render ourselves ignorant.) Methodological considerations pertaining to the transparency of experience may provide a way of breaking the tie. If q-properties are not aspects of consciousness, visual consciousness of external objects simply involves no intrinsic aspects. This latter doctrine is plausibly regarded as a metaphysical formulation of the doctrine of the transparency of experience. Ordinarily the doctrine is cashed in dispositional epistemic or semantic terms resembling those in section 3. A certain pleasing theoretical unification would be attained by providing these doctrines with a categorical ground along the lines of the metaphysical transparency doctrine; and the metaphysical doctrine is perhaps a bit more in line with the metaphor of transparency (the transparency of glass is a feature of glass which explains but is not identical to our epistemic situation in regard to glass). A great deal remains to be said if this question is to be settled. If we have notionally distinguished consciousness and phenomenality, we lose a way of operationalizing questions about whether a certain property is an aspect of consciousness. Although the externalist must deny that q-properties are aspects of consciousness, the impartial observer may find it still too early to pronounce definitively on the matter. (We may ultimately decide that there is no real distinction between these views. If so, we would need to formulate a strategy for thinking about consciousness rather different from the one employed in this chapter; perhaps a strategy hinted at in the quotation from Hinton with which this chapter begins.)

4. THE METAPHYSICS OF PHENOMENALITY This completes the conceptual part of our project: The notion of reflective indiscriminability I have constructed seems to square up with the paradigms of phenomenal sameness. So now on to the metaphysical part.

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Our questions are: Which properties are the phenomenal properties, and how are they related to the externalist’s experiential properties? The answers here depend on a conceptual issue and an ontological issue. On the conceptual issue, the question is what we mean by ‘phenomenal properties’: A first parameter is whether the metaphysical or epistemic descendant of ‘phenomenal’ is intended; a second is whether we insist that ‘phenomenal’ can apply only to an experiential property. On the ontological issue, the question is what the experiential properties are:in particular, whether the q-properties are counted among the experiential properties. Suppose first that the metaphysical descendant is intended. Then, in effect, ‘phenomenal property’ means ‘experiential property.’ In that case, assessing what the phenomenal properties of an experience are requires assessing what the experiential properties of the experience are. The externalist’s theory here is clear, at least in outline, up to the question of whether the q-properties are counted among the experiential properties. Now suppose that the epistemic descendant is intended. On the epistemic descendant, two (projectable) experiences are phenomenally the same just if they are reflectively indiscriminable. Now, one thing we have noted is that reflective indiscriminability crosscuts all aspects of the externalist’s characteristic experiential properties. Bill’s and Tina’s experiential properties differ haecceitistically in their object but are indiscriminable; Bill’s and Inez’s experiential properties differ quidditistically in their object but are indiscriminable; Bill’s and Dean’s experiential properties differ with respect to factivity but are indiscriminable. Conversely, Greg’s experience is discriminable from Inez’s despite being just alike with respect to factivity, and haecceitistically and quidditistically in their object. Rather, phenomenal sameness tracks q-properties. Suppose either that q-properties are experiential or that it is not analytic that phenomenal properties are experiential. In that case, we can say that the phenomenal properties are q-properties (or, perhaps, q-properties qualifying properties sufficiently abstract to be shared among our paradigms of phenomenal sameness, such as quantified or disjunctive properties). If q-properties are not experiential, and it is analytic that phenomenal properties are experiential, then the metaphysics of phenomenality will end up looking more functionalist: We might end up saying things like ‘Inez’s and Greg’s tokens of seeing t″’s greenness realize different phenomenal properties while Inez’s and Bill’s distinct tokens experiential properties realize the same phenomenal property’ (how exactly to refine the formulation of this theory does not influence our overall aim).20 20. Or maybe the concept of phenomenality, or the only satisfiable concept of phenomenality, is a concept of a quantified higher order response-dependent property of the form ‘having some property that makes for reflective indiscriminability from F.’


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My story in the foregoing sections of this chapter is independent of these nuances of ontological bookkeeping, however. So let me leave these nuances behind and reflect more generally on the explanatory role phenomenality plays in that story. In a nutshell, the view is that most of the work of phenomenality is done by appropriate conceptual first-person thought about perception of external qualities. Fix the senses of such thoughts, and you fix the facts about phenomenality (up to issues of ontological bookkeeping). Phenomenal difference and sameness tracks difference and sameness of such thoughts, crosscutting difference or sameness of experiential properties; phenomenality can perhaps even exist in the absence of experiential properties. (What experiential properties does Dean have? We don’t know; maybe he has none.) Phenomenality may be therefore regarded as a projection of this conceptual structure onto experience. In this respect, my notion of ‘phenomenality’ corresponds closely to Kant’s, with the ‘noumenal’ structure amounting to the nonconceptual relations to the outside world that constitutes the uncontroversial ontological structure of experience. Perhaps some nonartificial, internal aspect of experience corresponds to that structure (i.e., if the q-properties get counted as experiential), but it is far from clear what difference this would make. This is not to say that phenomenality and experience are utterly disconnected, of course. Phenomenality is projected onto experience by a cognitive structure culminating in the q-concepts. The base-level concepts that get this structure up and running are the displaced concepts; these displaced concepts have the externalist’s experiential properties as their ordinary referents, and this referential relationship requires a certain degree of regular association between the experiential properties and the internal features that characterize the senses of those concepts. So the relation between phenomenality and experience is not completely free. While many philosophers have made phenomenality into a paradigm of consciousness, this seems to me to invert the true conceptual order, on which our primary concepts of consciousness concern its external aspects. The explanatory gap arises in the first instance through these concepts, which concern seeing, an irreducible sort of conscious visual openness to the world. External consciousness is the subject matter of the judgments from which our concepts of phenomenal properties are reached by abstraction; phenomenality shapes the contours of our demonstrative access to the external world through—and therefore of our reflective access to—external consciousness.21

21. As I ordered a Brazilian Clover at Toronto’s Manic Coffee to commence the final day of work on this chapter, I spotted a man wearing a Husserl T-shirt with the slogan ‘Phenomenology: leave the world outside.’ But the world outside is still present, if abstractly, in phenomenology.

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Tye, Michael. 2000. Consciousness, Color, and Content. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Williamson, Timothy. 1990. Identity and Discrimination. Oxford: Blackwell. Williamson, Timothy. 2000. Knowledge and Its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

7 The Normative Nature of Perceptual Experience Sean D. Kelly

1. In a famous passage in the Phenomenology of Perception (1998), Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes: The distance from me to the object is not a size which increases or decreases, but a tension which fluctuates round a norm. An oblique position of the object in relation to me is not measured by the angle which it forms with the plane of my face, but felt as a lack of balance, as an unequal distribution of its influences upon me. (302)

This passage comes in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the psychological phenomena known as size and shape constancy. In one way these phenomena are simple to describe. Size constancy, for example, is the phenomenon according to which an object looks to remain constant in size throughout variations in the distance at which it is presented. As I walk toward a friend on campus, it doesn’t look as though she is getting larger; she looks to remain constant in size. And this is true despite its being the case that the size of the image that her body casts onto my retina does, of course, grow as I get closer to her. There are boundaries, of course, outside which the phenomenon of size constancy breaks down. If I am up in an airplane, for example, the cars may look like little ants snaking along the road; they no longer look car size. But within certain boundaries, the size constancy phenomenon is quite robust. Shape constancy is a similar phenomenon: An object looks to remain constant in shape throughout variations in the angle at which it is presented. As I rotate the plate toward and away from me, it doesn’t look as though the plate is becoming elliptical in varying degrees; it looks as though the plate remains constant in shape. Of course, it is true that the image the plate casts onto my retina changes as I vary the angle of presentation, but despite this the plate does not look like it changes shape. As

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with size constancy, there are boundaries to the shape constancy phenomenon. If I viewed the plate side on, then I wouldn’t be able to see what shape it is. But again, within the boundaries of the effect, the shape constancy phenomenon is very robust. I said that in one way these phenomena are simple to describe, and I hope I’ve given a simple description of them here. But this simple description hides the surprising complexity and strangeness of the phenomena. One way to get a grip on this complexity is to consider, following Merleau-Ponty’s model, the inadequacies of a certain kind of empiricist account of them. Ewald Hering, a nineteenth-century German psychologist, gave just such an account. His theory comes in several steps. (I tell the story here for the case of size constancy, but it is exactly analogous for the case of shapes.) First, he assumes that there is an optimal distance to stand from the object in order to see it as the size it really is. Many psychologists nowadays deny that such a claim makes sense except as a radical idealization, but let us assume that it is correct. The question for Hering is how, when I am standing at a suboptimal distance from the object, I come to experience it as having the same size as I do when I am standing at an optimal distance from it. It is to this question that his theory provides an answer: When I am standing at a suboptimal distance from the object, I replace the current experience of its size with the experience I remember having had when I was in the optimal condition. In this way, he argues, I always experience the size of the object to be the same.1 There are a number of concerns one might have about such a theory: How do I know whether the current context is optimal or suboptimal? What if I have never been in the optimal context? Is a memory really identical with a perception? And so on. But the concern that Merleau-Ponty would have is properly phenomenological. Such a story, he would claim, simply gets the phenomenon of size constancy wrong. That is because it presupposes that the experience of the size of an object is identical at every distance. It is true, of course, that the object looks to be the same size at every distance. But the empiricist identifies this with my having the very same experience of the size at every distance, and the phenomenology allows for these to come apart. As Merleau-Ponty says: For science and objective thought, an apparently small object seen a hundred yards away is indistinguishable from the same object seen ten yards away at a greater angle, and the object is nothing but the constant product of the distance multiplied by the apparent size. But for me the perceiver, the object a hundred yards away is not real and present in the sense in which it is at ten yards. (1998, 302)

We can distinguish, therefore, between the size an object looks to be, on the one hand, and the way that size looks at a given distance, on the other.

1. Hering’s position is described this way in Merleau-Ponty (1998, 304). In the context of his discussion of color constancy, which he treats the same as shape constancy, Hering calls the remembered color the Gedächtnisfarbe. See Hering (1920).

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As I walk closer to my friend on campus, she doesn’t look like she’s growing—the size she looks to be remains constant. But it’s also true that my experience of her size when I’m close up is not identical with my experience of her size when I’m farther away; the way her size looks is different in these conditions. Hering’s theory doesn’t allow for this distinction: It reduces the size an object looks to be to a way it has of looking. Now, it is one thing to say that there is a distinction between object sizes and ways they have of looking, and it is another thing to say what the distinction amounts to. What is it, exactly, that changes in my experience of the size of an object as I get closer to or farther away from it? One thing one might say, and many contemporary philosophers do say, is that what changes is an appearance property.2 As I rotate the plate away from me, these philosophers agree, it looks constant with respect to shape, but there is also a sense in which it looks different, they will say, since it looks apparently elliptical in varying degrees. Merleau-Ponty is against this view. In his famous essay on Cézanne he writes: “To say that a circle seen obliquely is seen as an ellipse is to substitute for our actual perception the schema of what we would have to see if we were cameras” (1964, 14). But we are not cameras, he insists, we are engaged perceivers: “The system of experience is not arrayed before me as if I were God, it is lived by me from a certain point of view; I am not the spectator, I am involved” (1998, 304). How, precisely, does being involved in the world affect my experience of its objects and their properties? Here is where the initial passage comes into play, for Merleau-Ponty’s view seems to be that what changes in my experience of the size or shape of an object, throughout variations in the context of presentation, is precisely my experience of the distance or angle at which the object is presented. It is part of my experience of the object as being a certain size that it is presented at a certain distance; it is part of my experience of the object as being a certain shape that it is presented at a certain angle. When the distance or angle of presentation changes, so too does the experience: Now it looks like that constant object is presented to me differently. And this difference is not a matter of the objects looking apparently elliptical or apparently larger. It is a matter of their looking to be presented at a skewed angle or at a distance. But in what way am I aware of the distance to an object when I am focused on its size? Of course it is not true, when I am focused on the size of an object, that I am also focused on its distance from me. I can focus on the distance to an object, perhaps trying to approximate it in feet like a real estate agent or think about how long it would take me to close the gap at full speed. But if the distance to the object is part of my experience of its size at all, it is certainly not present to me in any of these ways. Merleau-Ponty’s proposal is radical and strange: I experience 2. I’m thinking, for instance, of discussions in Noë (2004) and Thau (2002), and perhaps also in Shoemaker (2006).


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the distance to the object normatively, in terms of how well it allows me to see the size; this distance requires me to get closer to see the size better, now I am required to back away. As he says in another famous passage: For each object, as for each picture in an art gallery, there is an optimum distance from which it requires to be seen, a direction from which it vouchsafes most of itself: at a shorter or greater distance we have merely a perception blurred through excess or deficiency. (1998, 302)

The view that emerges here is quite a complex one. Every experience of size or shape is not just the perceptual representation of a property. Rather, the experience already involves a kind of normative self-referentiality: It is part of the very experience of the size of an object that I am drawn to improve the experience by changing my distance to the object. “The distance from me to the object,” as Merleau-Ponty says, “is not a size which increases or decreases, but a tension which fluctuates round a norm.”

2. A natural question at this point is what reason we have to believe such a view. After all, one can easily imagine some sensible person simply denying that it is part of my experience of the shape of the plate that I am drawn to rotate it toward or away from me. Why can’t I just rest content with my experience of it at an angle? More must be said to justify the claim that perception has an essentially normative element. And more can be said. Indeed, it seems to me that it is not just an empirical fact that experience has this normative self-referential structure; it is a necessary feature of our experience of objects. In particular, if it weren’t part of my experience of the size or shape of an object that I were drawn to improve the experience in a certain way, then I claim I wouldn’t be having an experience of the size or shape of the object at all. This is quite a strong claim, and I’m not sure I can entirely make good on it here. But let me try. First, it is worthwhile to point out just how strong the claim is. We are considering a claim of the form: In order to see an object to be p, it has to be a part of my experience that q. (In this case, in order to see an object to be a certain size, it has to be part of my experience that I am drawn to improve that experience by changing my distance to the object.) Consider some other claims of this form. For example, consider the claim that in order to see an object to be octagonal, it has to be part of my experience that the object has eight sides. It is true, of course, that in order to be octagonal an object has to have eight sides. But it does not follow immediately from this that in order for me to see an object to be octagonal I have to see it as having eight sides. Indeed, it seems to me that I can immediately see certain shapes (a stop sign, e.g.) as being octagonal without

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having to count their sides, and so without seeing them as having any particular number of sides. It is an interesting question—I suppose an empirical one—which shapes I can see to be the shapes they are without seeing the number of sides they have. Can I, for example, see something to be a triangle without seeing it to have three sides? Or is it constitutive of the experience of something as being a triangle that it is an experience of it as having three sides? I’m not sure, and I’m not even that sure how to find out. There are tricky questions in the area, both philosophical and phenomenological, as well as empirical. In any case, what is clear from the discussion is that there are no general facts to be gleaned from it. In particular, just because something that is p is necessarily q, it doesn’t mean that in order to see the object to be p I have to see it to be q. One could multiply cases here, but for the sake of brevity I will not. Suffice it to say that it is not obvious that there are any properties such that in order to see an object to have one of them, the other has to be part of the experience as well. And yet, I claim that normative selfreferentiality is a necessary part of the experience of an object. Let me explain why. Let p be the property of being square, and let q be the property of being better seen thus. By better seen thus, I mean to indicate a direction in which the angle of presentation could be changed that is such that, if it were so changed, the perceiver would get a better view of the squareness of the object. This direction is, of course, the direction that moves the angle of presentation closer to face-on. I indicate it as thus, however, since the perceiver need not have any sense for how to characterize this direction except by being immediately motivated to move that way. Now let me ask the question: Could a perceiver see something to be square but not see the squareness to be better seen thus? Let’s try some cases. Can we imagine a perceiver who sees something to be square but who is immediately motivated to get a better view of the squareness of the thing by turning it in the wrong direction, that is, in the direction that is closer to a sideways-on view? Does this make sense? Of course, we may be able to imagine that a subject is motivated to do this but when she does she immediately sees it to be a mistake. But can we imagine a subject who experiences her view of the squareness of the thing to be getting better when she turns the object in such a way that it projects a more and more trapezoidal image onto her retina? This seems impossible. If she experiences these views of the shape as better presenting its squareness, then we feel forced to say that it is not squareness that she is perceiving the object to have. Let me be as clear as I can about the case. We are trying to imagine a subject who experiences what is in fact an increasingly trapezoidal projection as an increasingly better view of the squareness of the object. The question is whether this possibility makes sense, and I submit that it does not. A subject who experiences increasingly trapezoidal projections of the shape of the object as better presentations of its shape cannot be


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seeing the thing to be square. This is not merely because it is a necessary fact about squares that what shape they are is better seen from the front. This is true, but not sufficient to establish the claim. And it is not merely a fact about the contingent phenomenology of some subject’s experience, a fact that could be denied by any sensible person. It is, rather, a claim about what it is to perceive an object to be square. I would not count as seeing the object to be square if it were part of my experience that the shape before me was better seen by rotating it in what, objectively speaking, is the direction that projects increasingly trapezoidal images. What this shows so far is that the direction of improvement correlates with the shape perceived. If it is part of my experience that it is improvable in a certain way, therefore, then the direction of improvement must accord with the demands of the object’s shape. But is it possible that the perceiver just has no sense for what would improve her view of the shape of the object? She sees it to be square, but there is no direction that is such that it seems to the perceiver a change thus would improve her view of the shape of the object. Is this a possibility? Again, I think not. Let’s consider why. We do sometimes have the sense that we are totally lost looking at an object, that we have no sense for how to improve our take on it. But when we have this sense, it always goes along with the sense that we have no idea what shape the object is. To see something as square but to be totally lost as to how to get a better view of it doesn’t seem possible. If I experience the increasingly trapezoidal projection to be an equally good presentation of the shape of the thing as the increasingly square projection, and indeed as any other, then I haven’t seen the object to be square. Perhaps I haven’t even seen the object at all. This, I think, is what happens when we are presented with a nongestalted scene. Being lost before the object is being presented with the scene as nongestalted. Merleau-Ponty considers the transition from a nongestalted scene to a gestalted one at the beginning of Phenomenology of Perception: “If I walk along a shore towards a ship which has run aground,” he writes, “and the funnel or masts merge into the forest bordering on the sand dune, there will be a moment when these details suddenly become part of the ship and indissolubly fused with it” (1998, 17). Merleau-Ponty is interested in the vague expectation I feel when the transition from a nongestalted scene to a gestalted one is about to happen. But before I get this vague expectation, I may have a feeling of being totally lost with respect to the scene before me. What it is to be totally lost in this way just is to have no sense whatsoever for what it would take to improve my experience of the scene. If I am totally lost in this respect, therefore, then I cannot count as seeing any particular thing at all. For this reason, I conclude, part of what it is to perceive an object as anything at all is already to be drawn to improve one’s experience of it in some way or other. So it seems like I’ve found what I’m looking for. I asked whether there are properties p and q such that to see something to be p we must necessarily see it to be q. And now we have a case that fits this description: To see

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something to be square I must see it to be better seen thus. I shall have to do some further work to figure out what it is to see something to be better seen thus, but I think I have enough on the table to say that seeing something to have a certain shape property, for example, necessarily involves a sense for how my own experience of the property could be improved. This reflects Merleau-Ponty’s idea that I always experience myself to be drawn toward a maximal grip on an object, that experiencing the object itself involves optimizing the perceptual take that I have on it.

3. Let me move on to a related issue. In the last paragraph there was some sleight of hand. The view I take myself to have established states that seeing an object to have a certain property necessarily involves having a sense for how my experience of the property could be improved. But what Merleau-Ponty says is that my experience involves actually being drawn toward a maximal grip on an object. Lighting, for example, “leads the gaze,” according to Merleau-Ponty. There is a big difference between merely having a sense for how I could improve my experience, and actually being drawn to improve it that way. What reason do we have to believe Merleau-Ponty’s ambitious claim that experience involves actually being drawn to improve itself? One way to put the ambitious claim is this: Part of what it is to be an experience is to be an openness onto the world that in itself eschews lack of clarity. This is not just the claim that the subject of experience knows something about how to improve his experience, even in the practical sense of knowing-how. It is the far more ambitious claim that something wouldn’t count as an objectual experience in the first place— an openness onto the world—unless it were such as to drive itself away from unclear presentations of its object. Merleau-Ponty is not always as good on this issue as one would like. At one point, for example, he places the motivation for clarity clearly within the subject: “We therefore tend towards the maximum of visibility,” he writes, “and seek a better focus as with a microscope” (1998, 302). But what I have in mind here is not a matter of the subject’s seeking anything, since seeking is a willful act, and therefore one that a subject must decide to perform. My view is much stranger: It is that our experiences themselves simply do not like to be unclear.3 Or better yet, since experiences are not entities

3. This is a deliberately provocative way of putting the point, and it may not ultimately be satisfactory. Perhaps it can be rephrased as follows: Part of having an experience as of an object’s being a certain way is that one is confronted by a nonvoluntary urge to make the experience less unclear. What is crucial to both ways of putting the point is that the urge to clarify is itself a constitutive part of what is given in the experience. Thanks to Bence Nanay for urging this clarification.


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that have properties but ways of being open onto the world, perhaps we can say that perceiving an object involves, in part, the perceiver’s already being driven to get a better grip on it. When I see an object, it is not up to me to decide to get a better view of the thing I’m looking at. Rather, it’s part of being experientially directed toward the object in the first place that this repulsion from lack of clarity is given to me. Or so it seems to me. How can I argue for this point? To begin with, notice that although it is natural for one’s experience to clarify itself, one can resist this process. To do so, stare at an object and deliberately blur your view of it. It is possible to maintain such an unclarified view of the object for a while, but it takes effort. This is the effort of resisting your body’s natural tendency to get a better grip on the world out onto which it opens. When one resists the body’s natural tendency to get a better grip on the world, one withdraws into oneself and away from the world. From this state of withdrawal, it seems to me, the situation can develop itself in one of two ways: Either you find yourself coming back out to the world and attending to the object, or else you find yourself drifting away from seeing altogether and into daydreaming. In the first case the experience takes its natural course of eschewing lack of clarity; in the second case one ceases to have an experience of an object at all. It is a fact about experiences of objects, therefore, that of themselves they eschew lack of clarity. But I claimed more than this. I claimed not just that it is a contingent fact about experience, but that it is part of what it is to be an experience that it eschews lack of clarity. How can we get to this further claim? To get to this further claim we must ask the following question: What would an experience of an object be like if it didn’t eschew lack of clarity? The short answer is that it would be an experience that rests content with an unclear presentation of the thing. In slightly more detail, such an experience would involve not feeling repelled from the lack of clarity that one induces in the withdrawn state, but not drifting away into daydreaming either. I have shown that this is not in fact the way our experiences of objects are. But suppose we did manage to achieve such a state. Would such a putative experience really count as an experience of an object? I claim it would not. There are states and mechanisms that show no preference between focused and unfocused presentations. An image, in the Humean sense, can be blurry or clear but qua image there is nothing good or bad about either of theses states. So, too, for the camera that Merleau-Ponty invoking in the quote above. But perception is not like either of these. To see this, notice that one of the essential features of experience is that it distinguishes between a clear take on a blurry object and a blurry take on a clear object. Understood as Humean images, these are identical with one another, but in real life there is a radical difference between these experiences. When I wake up in the morning and stumble down to the kitchen, it simply does not look as though the world has gone blurry, even though I have a blurry vision of it. I could in principle be

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fooled, of course; Woody Allen makes something of this in one of his movies.4 But even if I am fooled, and the world really is blurry, still my experience makes a distinction between the two cases. It just gets it wrong about which one obtains. Our very understanding of perception, in other words, involves an experiential difference between seeing something to be blurry and having a blurry experience of something you see to be clear. This is what Merleau-Ponty means when he says that “at a shorter or greater distance we have merely perception blurred through excess or deficiency” (1998, 302, emphasis added). Being blurred through excess or deficiency is being blurred in the sense of having too much or too little distance to the object to see it well. And this is simply not the same as having a blurry, but neutral, image before me. This phenomenological distinction is a leading clue for the strange and ambitious claim I would like to make: We could not make the distinction between a blurry take on a clear object and a clear take on a blurry object in the way that we do if our experiences did not eschew lack of clarity. To see this, notice that it could not be the case, for instance, that my perception is a combination of a neutral Humean image plus some knowledge that X will improve my experience of it. That’s because the neutral image by itself is not sufficient ground for me to know what it would take to improve it. Since it is neutral, it simply cannot distinguish between the relevant options. One might respond to this argument by pointing out that even if the Humean images are identical, one can nevertheless make sense of the possibility that the subject to whom they are presented takes them to be presenting different things in different situations. Perhaps he does so, for example, by having certain beliefs about what the images represent. On such a view, the neutral Humean images wouldn’t by themselves distinguish between a blurry take on a clear object and a clear take on a blurry object, but the subject presented with them could nevertheless make such a distinction. He would do so simply by believing some of the time that the image was a presentation of one thing and some of the time that it was a presentation of the other. He wouldn’t have any ground for his beliefs—they might as well be chosen at random—but he could have the beliefs if he liked, and they would allow him to make the distinction in question. But notice that this strategy doesn’t do all the work it needs to, because our experiences don’t just arbitrarily make the distinction between a blurry take on a clear object and a clear take on a blurry one; they tend to get it right. We can be mistaken, of course. But if we were systematically mistaken then there would be something deeply wrong about our experientially take on the world, and it would be so wrong that it would bring

4. In Deconstructing Harry (1997), Robin Williams plays an actor who is literally out of focus or blurry.


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into question whether we were having experiences in the first place. What Donald Davidson said about beliefs one could say equally about experiences: They are in their nature veridical in the sense that they aim at the way things actually are (see, e.g., Davidson 1980). The subject who decides arbitrarily to believe that one neutral Humean image presents a blurry object while a different but identical one presents a clear object is not in a state that aims at the world at all; he is in a state that arbitrarily decides, on the basis of nothing at all, how things are. But this is simply not what an experience is. From this I can approach my ambitious conclusion: If there is a normative dimension to experience, then it must belong to the experience itself and not to the subject’s take on it, for otherwise the experience wouldn’t be sufficient to make the distinction between blurry takes on clear objects and clear takes on blurry ones. Since a being that failed to make this distinction would not be having experiences as we understand them, we can conclude that it is a necessary fact about our experiences of objects that in themselves they eschew lack of clarity. This eschewal is given to us as perceivers, and it makes our perceptual engagement with objects a truly normative sort. This is the strange and ambitious claim I was aiming at.

4. And yet, perhaps it will be thought that I have not quite reached this ambitious conclusion.5 To begin with, let me note that there are three phenomena to distinguish: 1. The object looks neither blurry nor clear, but I know what I have to do to get a better look. 2. I see that the object is clear and that my vision of it is blurry, but I am not motivated in any way to get a better look at it. 3. Part of what it is to see that the object is clear and my vision of it is blurry just is to be motivated to get a better look at it. In section 3, if it is convincing, I seem to establish that phenomenon (1) is not sufficient. If experience by itself made no distinction between blurry takes on clear objects and clear takes on blurry objects, then there is nothing on the basis of which to have any beliefs at all about how to improve one’s view. Still, that leaves phenomena (2) and (3) as possible accounts of what the blurry experience of an object is like, and section 3 fails to distinguish them. The goal was to establish phenomenon (3), but so far all we can tell is that either (2) or (3) is an option. Let us look into this further. 5. I owe the following line of criticism to Bert Dreyfus.

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Option (2) is a version of the view that Roderick Firth held (see, e.g., Firth 1949). It is the view that we see “ostensible physical objects”— objects that present themselves as being three-dimensional. This view is explicitly opposed to the view according to which perception is the presentation of sense-data. On Firth’s view, then, I see the house ostensibly as voluminous or merely as being facade. And maybe, if Merleau-Ponty is right, this involves seeing that I would get a better view by doing thus and such. But seeing that my view is improvable in a certain way is perfectly compatible with my not having any motivation to improve it. What’s wrong with such a view? I think there is something wrong with such a view, but I’m not entirely sure I can say what. Still, I think we can move in the right direction if we think about what it would be like to see that your perception is improvable in a certain way, but not be motivated to improve it. That’s what Firth’s view would require. If we can get a good example of this then we can ask whether such a putative perceptual experience really counts as a perception of an object, and of the object in question. Let’s think of the blurry case. I can imagine deliberately blurring my view of a cup, for instance. In such a state I can see that my view would improve if I unblurred my eyes. Now, as a matter of fact it takes some work to stay in this blurry state, since as a matter of fact the eyes have a natural tendency to come into focus on their object. But what would it be like to be in that state and not to have to do any work? Well, one possibility is that the perception could be just a neutral presentation, indifferent between its being a presentation of a blurry object or a clear one. That was the Humean option discussed in section 3. But suppose, as with Firth, that it was part of the experience that the object was clear and the perception of it was blurry. Can I get myself into the state of resting content with this situation? It seems to me I can, by focusing on the particular details of the experience that make it the experience it is. I can focus on the particular kind of blurriness it involves, on the way that the object is unclear in different ways in its different parts. Perhaps I do this in the eye doctor’s office, when he asks me not whether I’m seeing an E or an A, but whether this view of the E is blurrier or clearer than the previous view of it. In such a context I can see that the experience is improvable in certain ways, and this is a way of seeing that the object it is an experience of is clear. And I can do all this, so to speak, in the objective mode. I can simply take it as a statement of fact about the experience that it would get better if I unblurred my eyes, without being in the least bit inclined to do so. So perhaps this kind of Firthian position is an option after all. Fortunately, I think not, for notice what has happened here. The way in which I have managed to avoid the natural tendency to come to focus on the object is by turning my gaze away from the object and toward the experience I’m having of the object. I can see that the experience would be improvable in a certain way because I can focus on the various features


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of the experience. But there is a big difference between attending to the object and attending to the experience of it, and it is (only?) by shifting my attention from the one to the other that I am able to rest content in the unimproved state. Notice that the structure of certain previous discussions recurs here. You might think, like various philosophers of perception do when they talk about appearance properties (see note 2), that both the experience of the object and the experience of the experience are represented in any given perception of an object. On such a view there would be two different properties represented in experience—the properties of the object and the properties of the experience of the object—but these would be in principle separable. But the same argument against this position recurs. Just because I can come to focus on either the properties of the experience or the properties of the object doesn’t mean that when I’m focused on the properties of the object the properties of the experience are also represented as such (Kelly 2008). Rather, there is a figure/ ground structure here—the sense that the experience is improvable in a certain way serves as background to the experience of the object as being of a certain sort. I can switch back and forth between these—I can make background into foreground and vice versa—but they are not equally available in a given experience. The short answer to Firth, then, is that he can rest content in what he knows to be the unimproved state only insofar as he is focusing on his experience of the object and not on the object he is experiencing. Noticing that the structure of the argument with Noë et al. recurs here ought to allow us to make some progress. In particular, it shows us that there ought to be a phenomenological distinction in the area that is ripe for clarifying. In the earlier case it was the distinction between the shape the object looks to be and the way that shape looks (Kelly 2004). The traditional philosopher of perception reifies the way of looking and puts it into the content as a property represented in experience. So what is the distinction I have in mind here? It must be something like the distinction between what the object looks to be and the way it has of looking like it is that object. The object looks to be a distinct coffee cup, but its way of looking like it is a distinct coffee cup differs in the blurred and the unblurred state. It always has some way of looking to be the distinct object that it is, but that doesn’t mean that the way it has of looking is itself a property represented in the experience. The problem with Firth’s ostensible object view is that it fails to make this distinction.

5. To sum up, I have argued that our experience of object properties such as size and shape already involves an experience of the distance and

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angle at which the object is presented. Following Merleau-Ponty, I claimed that we experience these contextual features normatively, in terms of how well they allow us to see the size or shape of the object. Going beyond Merleau-Ponty, I claimed that normative self-referentiality is a necessary feature of the experience of objects, since if I had no sense for what it would take to improve my experience then it would be as if there were a nongestalted scene before me rather than an object. In section 3 I argued for a further necessary feature of experience, namely, that I must not only have a sense for what it would take to improve my experience, but the experience itself must actually eschew lack of clarity. If it did not, I would not be able to distinguish between a blurry take on a clear object and a clear take on a blurry object, and this distinction is essential to what it is to be an experience. Finally, I argued against the Firthian view that perception is the presentation of an ostensible object. Because such a view lacks the normativity essential to an adequate account of perception, it is incapable of making the phenomenological distinction between what the object looks to be and the way it has of looking like it is that object. I do not know how far Merleau-Ponty would go with me in these claims, but I hope they are at least in the spirit of phenomenology as he understood it. For as he said, Phenomenology is the study of essences; and according to it, all problems amount to finding definitions of essences: the essence of perception, or the essence of consciousness, for example. But phenomenology is also a philosophy which puts essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the world from any starting point other than that of their ‘facticity.’

. . . [I]t alone is consciousness of the world because it reveals the world as strange and paradoxical. (1998, pp. vii, xiii)

REFERENCES Davidson, Donald. 1980. A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge. In Truth and Interpretation, Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest LePore, 307–19. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Firth, Roderick. 1949. Sense Data and the Percept Theory. Mind 58: 434–465. Hering, Ewald. 1920. Grundzüge der Lehre vom Lichtsinn. Leipzig: W. Engelmann. Kelly, Sean D. 2008. Content and Constancy: Phenomenology, Psychology, and the Content of Perception. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76: 682–690. Kelly, Sean D. 2004. Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty. In Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. Cézanne’s Doubt. In Sense and Nonsense, tr. Hubert Dreyfus and Patricia Dreyfus. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.


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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1998. Phenomenology of Perception, tr. Colin Smith. London: Routledge. Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Shoemaker, Sydney. 2006. On the Way Things Appear. In Perceptual Experience, ed. Tamar Szabó Gendler and John Hawthorne. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Thau, Michael. 2002. Consciousness and Cognition. New York: Oxford University Press.

8 What’s in a Look? M. G. F. Martin

This chapter is concerned with the superficial. Its main concern is with the looks of things and with how we manage to speak of these through talk of how things look. But in addition, the picture I want to sketch both of our talk and of what we talk about aims to be more minimalist and parsimonious than many discussions of these matters. One of the most detailed, and influential, discussions of the semantics of “looks” statements is in the first few chapters of Frank Jackson’s Perception: A Representative Theory (1977). Jackson hopes to convince us that we should endorse a sense-datum theory of vision through proper attention to the logical form of looks statements. Thus, he hopes to find in our lexical knowledge confirmation of a substantive and controversial view of the nature of visual experience. Some more recent discussions reflect similar ambitions: It is becoming common to note that we mark a difference between how things look to us and how they are, and this contrast has been taken to indicate our commitment to representational nature of sense experience. That is, some have supposed that the correct account of our “looks” talk reveals a commitment to viewing sensory states as representational states or even propositional attitudes.1 This chapter is written in memory of Barry Hall, a student of the philosophy of psychology and the psychology of vision. Some of the original ideas that resulted in this work arose at a memorial event for Barry in discussion with his supervisor Marcus Giaquinto. In addition Mark Sainsbury’s contribution to a celebration of Alan Lacy’s life in philosophy spurred me to think about looks statements and conditions under which two things may be said to look the same or different.Various versions of this material were presented at talks in Nottingham, Dundee, Fribourg, Oslo, and Toronto, and I am grateful to the audiences on those occasions for comments and questions. Material from this was developed in seminars in Berkeley and London, and I am particularly grateful to Michael Ayers, Michael Caie, John Campbell, James Genone, Hannah Ginsborg, Mark Eli Kalderon, Rory Madden, Mohan Matthen, Matthew Parrott, Ian Phillips, Ian Schnee, James Stazicker, and Paul Snowdon for their persistent questioning on these various occasions. I am also grateful to Charles Travis and John MacFarlane for various discussions of these matters, and to the editor for his great patience with the delivery of this article. 1. See, for example, Tye (2002, ch. 3), Chalmers (2006), Byrne (2009), and Siegel (chapter 12 this volume). For a compelling criticism of the idea that you can read off the commitment to representationalism just from how we can talk of things being the way they appear or failing to be the way that they appear, see Breckenridge (2007b).

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In contrast to both of these approaches, I propose a minimalist approach to the semantics of looks statements. On the whole, we convey information to each other both about the looks of objects and about sensory episodes in which things look some way or other to us through the use of implicitly comparative claims: that the object, or the sensory state, is relevantly similar to some other, paradigm case. That we succeed in conveying information to each other through such talk presupposes that we have more knowledge of looks and visual experience than is explicitly required to grasp the form of the statements we make. On such a minimalist approach, it would be mistaken to look to our semantic competence to argue in favor of one substantive theory of sense experience over any other. Such minimalism in the semantics of looks talk, then, puts more pressure on our knowledge of the nature of looks and of states of things looking some way to us. In turn, here, too, I propose we adopt a strategy of parsimony. Various recent discussions of appearances in general, and looks in particular, have been moved by concerns with conflicting appearances to posit a range of properties in the world as the looks of things over and above the other properties that we are committed to supposing objects have, such as their shapes and colors. According to these accounts, we need to recognize such things as perspectival shapes (‘oval from this angle’, e.g.) and apparent colors to play the role of the looks of things through which we come to experience their colors and shapes. In contrast, the parsimonious view of looks that I sketch here proposes that we identify the looks of objects with their basic visible properties, including their colors and shapes (see, e.g., Nöe 2004; Brewer 2007a, 2007b; Hyman 2006, ch. 5). Accommodating within our ontology the looks of objects does not require that we posit additional features of these objects over and above those properties we are otherwise committed to supposing them to have through what we can know of them through perception. This leads to a final introductory comment about the approach I sketch here. A common strategy in discussing the looks of things is immediately to offer an account of corresponding psychological states: the visual experiences that we enjoy in looking at things. In offering semantic theories, this has led writers to propose accounts of looks statements that take as fundamental ascriptions used to talk about psychological states. Both Jackson and Michael Tye focus on giving accounts of sentences of the form ‘o looks F to S’, rather than the seemingly simpler form ‘o looks F’. Connected with this are at least two lines of thought. The first is that our talk of appearances in general and looks in particular exhibit a subjectivity of use that parallels avowals of psychological states, so one might take this as an indicator that this is best explained by supposing that at root such talk avows the presence of relevant psychological states. Second, one may suspect that with such elements as looks, philosophers are inclined to accept a phenomenalism that they are more likely to reject for what they take to be the intrinsic properties of physical objects, that facts about the looks of objects are constituted by facts about actual or possible visual

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experiences one may have of them. Although the assumption of phenomenalism seems widespread, and with it the assumed priority of statements about how things look to x over statements about how things look, the account here reverses that order. I do not assume that phenomenalism is true, and I seek a sketch of the meaning and use of statements of the form ‘o looks F’ in advance of what will be taken to 0be semantically more complex, ‘o looks F to S’ or ‘o looks F from l’. I do not here directly argue against the more common assumption, but rather indirectly launch a challenge by indicating how the reverse order is perfectly coherent and gives us a clear picture of what the looks of objects are, and how our talk of them may be subjective without having to assume phenomenalism.2 In Part One of this chapter I focus principally on questions about the semantics of looks talk. I take off from Roderick Chisholm’s and Jackson’s proposals that there are three uses and, indeed, three senses of looks statement: epistemic, comparative, and noncomparative or phenomenal. In the discussion that follows, I broadly concur with this idea, at least with respect to how we can talk in English about the looks of things. But, I argue, Jackson is mistaken to suppose that a phenomenal sense of looks statements reveals much about the looks of the ordinary objects that we perceive; instead, I conclude that our talk about how things look red or look oval, examples that Jackson takes to be paradigms of phenomenal talk, instead is best understood as involving comparative uses. As I explain below, this indicates that our ability to discuss informatively the looks of objects around us presupposes common knowledge of how things look directly (i.e., without reference simply to how similar or different they are in look from other things). In turn, then, an account of our talk of looks needs to give some account of what the nature of looks might be such that ordinary speakers who have knowledge of the ways things are through ordinary perceptual capacities of sight thereby are also in a position to know about those things’ looks as well. Part Two sketches an account that shows why we should favor a parsimonious view of looks that identifies them with (logical constructions out of) manifest visible properties such as shape and color. In that discussion, I explore how such manifest visible properties can succeed in playing the epistemological role of looks and make true statements about how things look. Finally, I turn to the ancient problem of conflicting appearances, and connect that with that the fact that much of our looks talk is marked, at least at a pragmatic level, with some form of subjectivity. While many writers have supposed that this can only be explained by taking such talk to be the report of psychological states, I explain how this is quite consistent with the supposition that ways of looking that objects have are among their intrinsic properties (and hence need not be taken as relations between them and perspectival aspects of the environment, or to perceivers and their psychological states or perceptual capacities). 2. Note these thoughts can come apart. Breckenridge (2007a) argues that ‘o looks F’ should not be thought to have a hidden argument place for a subject and treats ‘to S’ as an adjunct. Nonetheless, on his view, looks statements talk about sense experiences but without having to indicate the subject of that experience.

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PART ONE

1. On the surface there is a wide variety of ways of characterizing how something looks—one can say that something looked red, or small, or nearly square—but equally one can say of someone that they look ready for the Queen’s Bench or in need of a good beating. Looking at an unkempt office, one may say that it looks as though a hurricane has hit it; staring at the edge of a design, one may say that it looks straight to one. One can say of someone that her look like a Russian shot-putter or like their mother. Given the diversity in talk of looks and similarity of looks that are permitted linguistically, one might suppose that there is just too much disunity here for anything general usefully to be said about visual appearances. It is no surprise, therefore, to find philosophers seeking to impose order by suggesting different uses or senses that we can put looks talk to, some and not other such uses cleaving to the nature of visual appearances as such. The two most extensive discussions of the semantics of appearance talk in English-speaking philosophy occur in Chisholm’s Perceiving, from 1959, and nearly 20 years later Jackson in Perception: A Representative Theory (1979). According to both authors, we should distinguish three principal uses and, indeed, senses of looks statements: epistemic, comparative, and noncomparative or phenomenal uses. In the case of Chisholm and Jackson, the intention is particularly to focus our concerns on the noncomparative or phenomenal sense of looks statements in order better to read off from this our knowledge of the nature of the looks of things. Recent writers have followed this lead, indicating that we need to focus on the phenomenal or noncomparative sense in order to clarify our ordinary commitments about the nature of appearances. On the other hand, some critics have expressed skepticism of whether there is any variation in sense here and, in particular, whether there is any phenomenal sense of appearance talk (see Thau 2002; for expression of such skepticism, see also Breckenridge 2007a). In what follows, I argue that there is something broadly right about Chisholm’s and Jackson’s proposals. But this gives them only half of what they want. Although I think we can pretty much demonstrate that there is a structural semantic ambiguity between phenomenal and comparative looks statements, there are no true phenomenal looks statements that concern things looking red or looking square, the kinds of examples that Jackson takes to be a paradigm of the phenomenal.

2. Although there is an application for Chisholm’s and Jackson’s threefold distinction of uses (and, in fact, senses), we need first to embed it in a twofold division noted by the linguist Nikolas Gisborne (1993) and echoed in Charles Travis’s writings on looks (Gisborne and Holmes 2007;

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Travis 2004; Gisborne 1993). One thing we can do with looks talk is to put into play a proposition, indicating that there is visual evidence for it. One may say, ‘It looks like it is going to rain’, thereby avoiding committing oneself to an outright assertion of the proposition that it is going to rain but still putting the proposition into play in the conversational context. One can do the same with simpler sentences, such as, ‘She looks pregnant’, thereby commenting on a neighbor, and offering the proposition that she is pregnant for consideration by one’s interlocutors. In this evidential use with a sentence of the form ‘o looks F’, the focus of conversational concern is on the sentence ‘o is F’. That is, we are to consider how the adjective or adjectival phrase F applies to the subject of the superordinate verb. Likewise with a form that has an explicit sentential complement, as in forms such as ‘It looks as if p’, or ‘It looks like p’, focus is on the proposition that the complement expresses. Some writers, noting the lack of all-out assertion, are inclined to talk of a tentative or guarded assertion (most notably, Quinton 1955; see also Quinton, 1973, 180). However, while it may often be a consequence of advancing this speech act that one is taken by an audience likely to be committed to the proposition in question (on failure of being properly conversationally cooperative), it is not clear that assertion itself should come in degrees. So perhaps we just think that the minimum required is that the proposition in question be epistemically possible or, rather, that it be presented as epistemically possible (since the speaker may be dissimulating about their attitudes toward it), that is, that its truth not be inconsistent with what is common knowledge or evidence or is presupposed in the conversational context. One can put the usage in sharper focus by making a contrast with a very different one, for there are uses where the status of the derived proposition is clearly not the focus of discussion. Consider, for example, looking at the image of a seemingly pregnant man, which first made Saatchi & Saatchi famous (see figure 8.1). One might, commenting on the effectiveness of the advertisement, remark on how well the agency succeeded and say: (1) That model looks pregnant.

In this situation, one might not suppose that there is any chance at all that the male model is pregnant or could be; it may be a presupposition among the conversant that male pregnancy is nomologically impossible.3 The purpose of one’s statement, then, is not to discuss the evidential status of the proposition that the model is pregnant, nor is it to allude to some visual evidential ground for that. Instead, it seems that in this case the predicate complement is qualifying not the argument of the main verb but rather the way of looking introduced by that verb: It is helping to specify for us which way of looking the model in question has. It marks out that they have not just made him look as if he were holding a pillow 3. This was in the 1970s, and we can pretend that they could not even imagine transgendered roles.

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Figure 8.1

under his jumper or had simply enjoyed the normal number of pints of beer of an average English middle-aged male. As I discuss shortly, these uses of looks talk Jackson and Chisholm assimilate to what they call “the comparative use.” For the moment, though, what concerns us is solely the contrast in conversational focus (at least for the form ‘o is F’) between a case where one is concerned with a proposition predicating the complement adjectival phrase of the superordinate subject, that is, where one is concerned with whether o is F, and one where the complement in some way seems to qualify the main verb ‘looks’ and the question is simply whether o does look that way. Now, the contrast between the evidential and nonevidential (what Gisborne calls “evaluative” use; it also corresponds to what Travis talks of as “demonstrable looks”) is marked initially as a pragmatic one. And it requires us to focus briefly on the difficult topic of evidentiality. Perhaps a quarter of the world’s languages have syntactic markers (in most cases obligatory) that indicate the evidential standing of the proposition put forward, for example, whether the speaker has direct evidence for it, whether the source is testimony or inference, or whether what is at

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issue is a psychological avowal (for an overview, see Aikhenvald 2004). English has no such syntactic markers, but we can provide our interlocutors with evidential information through use of sense and appearance verbs. For example, where a proposition is evident to us, we may say ‘I see that . . .’; where we know of something through testimony, we say, ‘I heard that . . .’. There are certainly some instances that can be understood purely pragmatically, but there are other examples of evidential forms in some languages that seem to involve a semantic component. Certainly the focus just on the proposition that o is F cannot be affected when the looks sentence is embedded, for example, as the antecedent of a conditional. Moreover, as I note when working my way through the Chisholm and Jackson categories, sentences that otherwise have very different uses can be employed evidentially. So the simplest hypothesis may yet be that in English this is purely a pragmatic effect. On the other hand, Gisborne (1993) argues that historically the evidential use appears earlier than the qualitative, so one may suppose that this is some evidence that there is a distinctive sense associated with it. Since our main concern is with varieties of nonevidential uses, I leave aside the question whether the evidential can be handled purely pragmatically. The most important thing to note is that the evidential use should not be confused with what we may call, following Chisholm and Jackson, the epistemic sense. Jackson introduces it thus: “The epistemic use is propositional in that statements containing it are in (or can naturally be cast into) the form ‘It looks as if p’, where ‘p’ is a sentence expressing a proposition: examples are ‘It looks as if the sun is sinking into the sea’, ‘It looks as if these tomatoes are ripe’, and ‘It looks as if it is about to rain’” (1977, 30). The first of these is clearly not something we would employ in an evidential use, for we do not suppose it possible that the sun should sink into the sea, so this suggests that there is a contrast between being epistemic and having the evidential role. And, I suggest, we can find other examples in English of constructions that seem epistemic in this way without having to be taken as being used evidentially. We have in English the peculiar infinitival form of complement that recommends solely an epistemic reading without thereby having the evidential use indicated above: (2) John looks to be on the verge of tears. (3) Mary looks to have once been a nun. (4) Veronica looks soon to be a vice president.

All of these are naturally read as having an epistemic sense: that there is a visually grounded evidence for the proposition that John is on the verge of tears, that Mary has once been a nun, that Veronica will be a vice president soon. These cases as in the first of Jackson’s examples, do not have to be used evidentially, in the sense I proposed above, of introducing into discourse a proposition and the existence of a visual ground for it. With Jackson’s example, one might take the presence of the comparative particle ‘as’ as indicative of some kind of comparison: The way the situa-

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tion looks is one that is relevantly similar to that in which it would be reasonable to infer that the sun is sinking (i.e., if one lacked sufficient knowledge of astronomy). Likewise, one might find (3) assertible even in a context of common knowledge that Mary has only ever been a bond dealer, indicating that her appearance is nonetheless one on the basis of which it would be reasonable to infer the presence of a sacred vocation. In that case, it is not entirely clear that the epistemic sense contrasts with the alleged comparative sense, rather than providing a special case of it. To say of Mary that she looks to have been a nun is to indicate a visible similarity between her and those about whom one can reasonably infer membership of a Holy order, just as to point at the male model and say he looks pregnant is to indicate a visible similarity between him and certain women. In the former case, the relevant visible similarity is picked out by reference to evidential features that it has, that one can reasonably infer that p, for the more general case, I have yet to articulate what manner can be used to further specify the look. However, while I think these examples show that there definitely is an epistemic use that stands apart from the purely evidential, I also think we can see a confusion in Jackson’s discussion, for at times, no doubt because he does not mark the evidential use, he runs together a distinctive epistemic sense that does not require an evidential use and the evidential use itself. He suggests that sentences of the form ‘o is F’ are ambiguous between an epistemic and a nonepistemic sense. According to him, ‘The dog looks dangerous’ can be used epistemically, in which case it is equivalent to ‘It looks as if the dog is dangerous’, or it can be used comparatively, in which case it is equivalent to ‘The dog looks like dangerous dogs look’. While ‘It looks as if the dog is dangerous’ and ‘The dog looks to be dangerous’ can be used evidentially, that is, to put forward the possibility that the dog is dangerous, both can also be used nonevidentially. Each of these is assertible in contexts where it really is common knowledge that the dog is no more threatening than a hamster. On the other hand, there seems to be no epistemic reading of ‘The dog looks dangerous’ in a context where it is impossible that the dog be dangerous. In such contexts, we can only hear the sentence in the latter of Jackson’s two disambiguations. That suggests that, rather than ‘The dog looks dangerous’ having a sense that coincides with that of ‘It looks as if the dog is dangerous’, both sentences have a use, namely, an evidential use, with the same import. Jackson’s example of ‘The dog looks dangerous’ does not give us a case of an epistemic sense along with a comparative, but rather the fact that this sentence, along with many epistemic looks sentences, can be employed evidentially. This leads to an ambiguity in sense if the evidential use needs to be understood in terms employing a distinctive sense, but in that case it turns out that many other sentences with a very different form are also ambiguous between the evidential and the epistemic sense. Since, as I noted above, it is unclear whether we should suppose the evidential use introduces a distinctive sense, there is as yet no clear

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evidence that any sentence is ambiguous between the epistemic and the comparative.4

3. As noted, (1) is not plausibly used in an evidential way, so what work is ‘pregnant’ doing in this sentence? It seems in some way to be modifying ‘looks’ rather than the subject of the sentence. But at the same time, although there is such a thing as a pregnant look, ‘pregnant’ is not being directly predicated of the look the model has, since we interpret it in its normal sense in which it is true of humans and other animals. And it is here that Chisholm and Jackson are inclined to interpret it as having a comparative import, comparing the model with respect to his look with the looks of things that are pregnant. Chisholm introduces the idea of a comparative use of appearance statements. As he says, “the point of the locution ‘x appears so-and-so’, in its present sense, is to compare x with things that are so-and-so” (1959, 45). And with this comes the contrast between how something appears and how it is. We are interested in the possible possession of the relevant condition introduced by the complement without thereby committing ourselves to the ascription of it to the subject. We may rule out that x is pregnant but still be interested in comparing how x is with the look of those who are in fact pregnant, so, as suggested, we need not think of ‘pregnant’ as qualifying ‘looks’ on its own. To recognize that there is a comparative function in (1) is not yet to explain how the construction ‘looks pregnant’ works, and while Chisholm and Jackson both identify a comparative sense of appearance verbs, understandably, perhaps, they do not do much to explain how such constructions do their job. The further comment that Chisholm makes when he introduces the idea does not address the main difficulty. He writes: “A more explicit rendering of such locutions, therefore, would be something like this: x appears to S in the way in which things that are . . . appear under conditions which are . . .” (1959, 45). What Chisholm wishes to make explicit is that ascriptions of appearance can involve variability with respect to the circumstances of appearing in play in the comparison. But that does not address the question of how we manage to introduce into the conversational context some specific way of appearing connected with pregnant women with which we are to compare the model’s appearance, relying solely on the prompt that we are

4. There is an interesting question about whether there are constructions that could not admit of an evidential use. Arguably forms that contain a quasi-subjunctive mood cannot be used evidentially: The sentence ‘He looks as if he could have just been out of the army’ cannot be said in order to put into play the proposition that he is just out of the army, and the string ‘He could have just been out of the army’ is itself used to express a modal statement with evidential import, given our evidence at some earlier specified time, that it was consistent that he had just been demobbed and cannot be used to assert anything directly.

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to consider pregnant women in some or other circumstance in which one might look at them. For there is no reason to think that there could only be one way of looking that is shared by all women when pregnant, actual or possible. So how do we manage to latch onto some specific look when we come to understand what is being said of the model in uttering (1)? In part, here, the problem is one of simile and metaphor in general. Consider: (5) Mary swims like an otter.

This is an example of a comparative with VP ellipsis in the complement clause. As with all such verb-phrase ellipses, the default interpretation is ‘Mary swims like an otter swims’, with the verb phrase echoed from the main clause. (Note this need not be the preferred interpretation in context; perhaps, in this case, what is to be salient about otters is their running, and so we should understand (5) as ‘Mary swims like an otter runs’, but I leave that complication aside for the moment.) Someone who understands the comparison that the speaker makes with (5) has to draw on more than just knowing the meaning of the word ‘otter’; in addition they need worldly knowledge or opinions about what is characteristic of otters. Indeed, with such mundane comparisons, one may anticipate that the speaker selects a target of comparison on common expectations about the knowledge or opinions of their audience concerning the kinds used as the basis of comparison. In situations of successful communication involving comparison, it is common knowledge what properties are associated with Fs when one says that o in G-ing is like an F. In comprehending the comparative, we may think of the audience as having associated with various terms in their lexicon a database entry of information about the kinds of things the term stands for. We should think of this information as generic: It is what communities of speakers take to be characteristic of Fs. For many such characteristic features, it may well be a matter of knowledge and, indeed, common knowledge that Fs are indeed that way. But comparisons may successfully convey information on the basis of shared false opinion or prejudice: What is required is that it be a presupposition of speaker and hearer that being H is indeed characteristic of Fs. We can represent the audience, then, as exploiting the following kind of cognitive routine in comprehending the comparison: They must execute a function getting-the-characteristic that returns for a suitable kind F (this might be otters, Americans, things desired by Emily, etc., and normally, some suitable restriction of the kinds implicitly articulated in the invitation to compare) a value H, a property or list of properties, that is stored as what is taken by the audience to be characteristic of Fs in relation to some respect R, such as running or swimming. The audience that can fully comprehend the comparison offered in uttering (5) then needs to apply getting-the-characteristic

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to ‘otter’ and ‘swimming’ and thereby return the value ‘lithe and graceful’. Of course, this is very much a toy model of how we make and comprehend comparisons. I have focused here on comparisons of aspects of individuals with what is characteristic of kinds, but one can compare kinds with kinds, and individuals with individuals. Moreover, many of the most interesting similes require effort on the part of an audience to understand, and the interpretation of the simile may be somewhat open-ended. The richest or most intriguing similes may well require exploiting knowledge or conceptions of objects that go well beyond what one could anticipate others would already know or could easily work out about objects or kinds. For our purposes, we can restrict ourselves to those mundane comparisons focused on kinds and on what someone can anticipate an audience should know about the kind in question, for if any statement of the form ‘o looks F’ is plausibly read as comparative in intent, then that can only sensibly be construed as belonging to this mundane category. Note, of course, that we need to distinguish between the sense of the comparative sense of (5) as uttered, and the comparison that the speaker makes and that the audience should grasp in order to grasp fully the information to be conveyed by speaker, for one can perfectly understand (5) without being in a position to grasp the comparison made and yet evaluate it. For example, one may perfectly well be in a position to evaluate how Mary swims but be ignorant of facts about otters. In that situation, one may come to accept (5) as correct not through making the comparison, but rather using adding-the-characteristic to enter relevant values for swimming for otters into one’s database based on one’s appreciations of the virtues of Mary’s swimming. And someone may understand (5) without yet knowing anything about Mary’s swimming, or know anything about otters other than that they are a kind of animal. What they understand of (5), then, is a recipe for going about making the comparison: Find out what people take to be characteristic of otters in respect of swimming. So, even where a speaker uses a comparative statement to make a comparison, one can grasp what is said without yet being in a position to understand the comparison made. In addition, sentences can have the form of comparatives without the speaker thereby making the comparison. Suppose that, instead of (5), one says: (6) Mary swims like something in this room.

Surely one has not in uttering (6) made any comparison. Rather, one has indicated that there is a comparison to be made. And this point turns out to be important for my discussion below, for even if comparative claims do not necessarily involve making comparisons, it may well be that commonly we do make comparisons in uttering a comparative sentence, and the point of our so speaking will then involve an assessment of the comparison made and not just the truth conditions of the comparative sentence.

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In short, in the above linguistic exchange, an audience that fully grasps what the speaker intends to communicate understands the indirect claim that there is some similarity between Mary’s way of swimming and that of an otter. In doing so, they take up the invitation to make that comparison and grasp the specific proposition that Mary’s way of swimming is similar to a lithe and graceful way of swimming. In responding to the speaker’s utterance, such an audience is as liable to respond to the proposition conveyed through the comparison as to the pure comparative claim. In contrast to (5), though, (1) lacks any explicit comparative particle. Moreover, unlike ‘swims’ in (5), the verb ‘looks’ in the relevant sense cannot occur on its own: ? (7) John looks.

This is simply semantically incomplete, at least in the sense in which we are concerned with some aspect of his visual appearance and not an activity of visually attending as in looking at or looking for. In this we have a parallel with ascriptions of weight: ? (8) John weighs.

Again, this is semantically incomplete, at least where we are concerned with the attribute of mass under gravitational force rather than the activity of measuring the weight of objects or of considerations. In order to have said something with respect to John’s weight, some further specification must be added as complement to ‘weighs’, some measure (which might itself be taken implicitly to be a comparison with some scale) or a comparison between John and someone else or some kind of thing. For example, (9) John weighs as much as a sumo wrestler.

This, by default, would be interpreted as ‘John weighs as much as a sumo wrestler weighs’ but could in some contexts be interpreted as ‘John weighs as much as a sumo wrestler eats’. We can understand the parallels here as follows: In each case, the main verb introduces an attribute of the subject that must then be further specified by the complement of the verb. One way to do this is to employ James Higginbotham’s (2002) generalization of Donald Davidson’s (1967) and Terence Parson’s (1990) approach to action sentences and eventives. For the examples in play, we might the note the near equivalence of ‘John weighs as much as sumo wrestler’ and ‘John has the weight of a sumo wrestler’ and ‘That model looks pregnant’ and ‘That model has the look of being pregnant’. We might represent (9) as: (9#) ∃s [has (John, s ) ∧ [weight(s ) ∧ Φ(s )]] where the second conjunct tells us that the state John is in is a weight state, which is further specified by how Φ is filled out, in this case, that

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which is derived from the comparison with the weight of a sumo wrestler.5 In parallel, we can think of (1) as having the form (1#) s [has (that model, s ) ∧ [look(s ) ∧ '(s )]] with the adjectival complement of ‘looks’ somehow specifying the way of looking attributed to the model. One issue highlighted by thinking of the form of the sentence in this way is that it suggests a very simple picture of how looks statements may vary in their sense: The complement phrase to the main verb is required to further specify the way of looking attributed; it is clearly an open possibility, then, that there may be different means of providing that further specification, and hence different truth conditions for sentences with similar surface forms. Precisely this possibility I explore below in the discussion of phenomenal senses. Chisholm and Jackson seek to explain what they take to be the comparative sense of a looks statement by reference to sentences with an explicit comparative particle, ‘like’ or ‘as’, but it should not be a condition on acceptance of their proposals that the simpler ‘o looks F’ have the same logical form as ‘o looks like an F [looks]’. Rather, with respect to the comparative use of a looks sentence, we may construe the role of the complement adjectival phrase as specifying a way of looking by inviting a comparison. The sentence needs to convey that there is some way of looking characteristic of the pregnant that is similar to the model’s way of looking. The simplest way we might represent this is assuming it is directly reflected in logical form: (1*) ∃s [has (that model, s ) ∧ [look(s ) ∧ SIM(C (pregnant, look, k ), s )]] Here we are to take SIM as a predicate of predicates and individuals: SIM(F, i) is true of i just in case i is relevantly similar to the Fs, the metric of similarity (and so which function is selected) being itself a contextually determined matter. (The need for this is something to which I return in due course.) In turn we should understand C(F, R, k) as the function that returns the value that the psychological operation getting-the-characteristic ought to return for the lexical item F, for respect R, given a contextual restriction k. That is, in our current situation, C will return the property characteristic of the kind ‘pregnant’ with respect to ‘looks’ when we are 5. One might rather prefer, even in the context of a Davidsonian logical form, that the adverb be taken as a modifier of the main verbal predicate of the event or state, rather than conjoined as a further predicate. For example, as Hornsby (1979) and Wiggins (1986) have pointed out, it is plausible even in the context of Davidson’s ontology of events to suppose that an event is with a stick only qua walking rather than simpliciter (if the event is also a signaling, it need not be a signaling with a stick, though it is a walking with a stick). Such refinements are not required for my current purposes and I ignore them here. Note that Breckenridge (2007a) exploits the eventive form in analyzing looks statements but takes the variables to be ranging over experiences rather than ways objects are.

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considering the understood restriction, human female in the nth week of pregnancy. So someone who understands (1), on this view, can tell it will be true if the look that model has is relevantly similar to whatever look is characteristic of the k pregnant. This is, of course, an indirect characterization of the model’s way of looking. But an audience that has suitable worldly knowledge associated with the lexical item ‘pregnant’ is in a position straight off to make the invited comparison and so comes to appreciate directly the way of looking attributed. That raises questions about what looks are and about our knowledge of them, to which I turn below. For the moment, though, parallel with the comparative ascription of weight, all we need assume is that there is some way of specifying a look, just as specifying a weight, by associating a way of looking as being characteristic of those things picked out by the complement, just as a given weight may be associated with a characteristic way of being picked out in the comparison clause. For the present discussion I assume that the logical form does contain at least all of these elements, and hence that there is unarticulated in surface form an appeal to a similarity metric and the function C, as well as an indexical restriction on the kind with respect to which we considering what is characteristic of it. Note that not only is there no surface trace of these elements, but also that there is no obvious opportunity for them to interact with any other overt syntactical elements, such as through binding or anaphora. In the light of this, one might instead suggest the simpler semantic proposal that pragmatic processing is called for here: On encountering the sentence ‘o looks pregnant’, an audience, discerning that no look can literally be pregnant, enriches the lexicon with a new predicate true of looks, ‘pregnant*’, which is true of something just in case it is relevantly similar to whatever is the characteristic look of pregnant things restricted to k. This approach would allow for semantic and syntactic simplicity, and some theorists suggest that this is the way we should understand the import of metaphor, some similes, and various approximations. The linguistic intuition we have that ‘pregnant’ does not qualify the look as such, but things like o might be taken as the trigger for this enrichment.6 For my purposes, there is no need to try to choose among these options, but for

6. One might object at this point that the adjectival complement can be filled by a pro-predicate, bound or anaphoric on another element. Compare ‘The box really is red, but the vase merely looks so’. The ‘so’ here has to be interpreted as reintroducing ‘red’ in the same sense as the first clause, but this no more tells against the enrichment approach than do examples of literal and metaphorical talk. ‘Felix is a cat, and when you think about it, so is Mary’ is perfectly construable, where Felix is an animal and Mary a human being. The latter example does not definitely rule out an enrichment account of the import of metaphors (the pragmatic enrichment acts on the value returned by the anaphor), and the same strategy can be returned in the case of looks talk.

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presentation I assume the more articulated form rather than enrichment.7 Note that the appeal here to activating knowledge of a look characteristic of Fs may explain why we are hesitant to accept the move from ‘That model looks pregnant’ to ‘That model looks female’. Leaving aside recent complications with the transgendered, it may be a common assumption among discussants that only women can be pregnant, so it may seem that if the model has a way of looking that is similar to that of pregnant people, then it is one similar to a way of looking that only women can have, so doesn’t the model look female? This is not evidently a good inference, and that should be predicted on what I have so far said: A way of looking that is the way of looking characteristic of those pregnant is not thereby a way of looking characteristic of those female (pet fish are all fish, but what is characteristic of a pet fish is not thereby necessarily characteristic of a fish). A full-dress account would need to explain more of the nature of comparative claims and their interactions with comparisons we make, but in closing this part of the discussion I want to highlight just three further points that complicate the simple story. First, it is important to note an element of the account, at least with respect to the information derived from comparison, that cannot be modeled extensionally. It should be clear in general that we can meaningfully make comparative claims involving mythical or fictional characters. One can say of Ellen that she is as acute as Sherlock Holmes. There is no human being of whom ‘Sherlock Holmes’ is the name, and the fictional character employed in Conan Doyle’s stories is an abstract entity and so not the kind of thing to be acute. I take it that we can count as correct both the comparative sentence itself, along with many sentences comparing one to a living or historical figure, and the conveyed proposition derived from the comparison. Whatever exact form we discern in the comparative, this suggests that the phrase introducing the compared measure is nonextensional. This, of course, fits with the underlying cognition of comparison: What matters is that the interlocutor extract the information that it is commonly known to be associated with the term in question, and this only indirectly connects with what is true of what the term stands for. Jackson seems somewhat to miss this point in his discussion of comparative looks statements when he writes: To say that something looks centaurian is simply to say that it looks the way a centaur would. This means the claim that something looks centaurian is to a certain degree speculative; as there are no centaurs, one must be speculating on 7. The intersection between this account and Breckenridge’s (2007a) proposals is a nice question, quite apart from the contrasting appeals to properties of objects versus experiences of objects. Where here I appeal to knowledge of characteristic features of F, Breckenridge appeals to the interpretation of generic claims. There may well be a strong connection between interpreting generic claims and exploiting knowledge of paradigms (compare Leslie 2008).

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how they would look if there were any . . . should it turn out (to our great surprise) that in some remote place there are centaurs, we might well have to revise our conception of what looking centaurian is like. (89)

Jackson is surely right that we would use the comparative claim to make a different comparison were we to discover that there are actually centaurs in the world, and that they look very differently from how they have always been depicted in art, and hence that at least in that circumstance the state of affairs that would make true the comparative claim would be different from how we conceive things as they stand. What is much less obvious is that claiming that something is like a centaur is claiming a similarity between the object and how centaurs would in fact turn out to be, rather than how characteristically we conceive of them. The second point takes me to the main issue that both Chisholm and Jackson raise about comparative uses of looks statements: Exactly which comparison one wishes the audience to take into account can vary from context to context, and this can affect what we understand of the import of the speech act made. Consider, for example, (10) That one looks red.

Consider (10) as used in two different circumstances about the same object. Under the condition SHOWROOM, we are surrounded by kitchen apparatus and utensils in a brightly lit shop. You have asked me if I can see a brightly colored kettle, and I see partly obscured in the corner a kettle and pointing utter (10). Under the condition STOREROOM, we are surrounded by kitchen apparatus and utensils in a poorly lit warehouse. It is common knowledge among us that the red enamel used by appliance manufacturers attracts a kind of luminous mold. Though we cannot really discern the chromatic coloring of any surface, I can see the kettle in the corner with bright spots speckled across it, and pointing at it I utter (10). I take it that in both situations we are inclined to judge the utterances of (10) as correct. But equally it seems as if the two speech acts concern different aspects of the kettle picked out. In SHOWROOM the audience is invited to make the comparison between the kettle and red things as they look in the bright light of the shop; in STOREROOM, the comparison invited involves the special way red enamel things look when viewed in the gloom of the warehouse. The proposition conveyed in the first situation attributes the look of bright red objects to the kettle; that in the second situation attributes the look of enamel objects with luminous mold. So the two utterances of (10) give us speech acts that seem to concern very different aspects of the same object. It would be consistent with what I have said so far that this variability in the use of (10) relates solely to the proposition conveyed through making the comparison, leaving the comparative proposition expressed by the sentence uniform across the situations. But at least some reason to suppose

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this is not so is given, first, by the fact that someone who can understand the comparative claim but is not yet in a position to evaluate the comparison (i.e., is ignorant of the relevant characteristic case) should be able to understand that the speaker wishes them to pursue different recipes in assessing the truth of each utterance, and second, by the fact that it is quite intelligible in STOREROOM to utter: (11) That does not look red.

without thereby intending or even inadvertently effecting a denial of (10) as used in STOREROOM but rather commenting on the difference between these circumstances and what one would notice in SHOWROOM. Exploiting the form that I have proposed for (1), the variability in what is said by the different uses of (10) would amount to different values being understood for the restriction k in specifying the comparison to be made. Chisholm and Jackson interpret the variability here as showing both that the comparative claims are relativized to locations and viewers and that the relevant parameter can be filled by what we would vocalize with the adjective ‘normal’. Now, that there is a default interpretation for the comparative is suggested by the fact that, without special stage setting, it is difficult to hear (11) as uttered in SHOWROOM as avoiding contradicting the utterance of (10) made in that circumstance. That is, there seems reason to suppose that the comparative in SHOWROOM invokes a default domain or interpretation. But the ways in which Chisholm and Jackson spell out the idea of variation here still treats comparatives too much like elements of speech that can be handled extensionally. If I say of Mary that she is as ferocious as Jekyll, I will be interpreted as offering one comparison, or as ferocious as Hyde as making another. It little matters here that Jekyll and Hyde are one, if we associate different characteristics with Jekyll and with Hyde. Likewise in the present situation, with comparative claims about the looks of things, what should concern us is what is characteristic of Fs in circumstances C, and what is characteristic of Fs in circumstances C′, regardless of whether Fs in fact have just the same attributes in both circumstances. This point leaves me neutral on the question of whether looks have themselves to be relativized to places or subjects, and whether looks themselves actually vary across the situations. These issues are the focus of discussion when I turn to the question of the nature of looks and the viability of Parsimony. The third complication to consider briefly also raises questions about the relation between a comparative claim and the comparison conveyed. In the examples I have discussed so far, I have assumed that in making a comparative appearance claim there is some one way of appearing that is to be attributed to the subject of the main clause, whether a very determinate appearance or something determinable. But this really cannot always be the case, even for an audience in a position to assess the relevant comparisons. Commenting on how well a friend from New Zealand has fabricated a new cheese, you might say,

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(12) This really tastes French.

I imagine that for many speakers, paradigms of French cheeses are Camembert, Brie, or Roquefort. But the speaker may not intend to claim that the cheese tastes like any of these three. There is a huge variety to French cheese (for Churchill, more than 300; for de Gaulle, a more meager 240; according to some sources, more than 1,000), and one might think that among that variety there are still things for each specific sort of cheese that makes it distinctively French. However, this need not mean that in addition one supposes that there is a determinable taste shared by all French cheeses that marks them as French. Rather, one might suppose that each French variety is recognizably French as opposed to some other nationality of cheese. In this case, classifying all those tastes together as French would be grouping them together by a consideration outside of qualitative dimensions of taste. So the speaker in uttering (12) may just wish to indicate that the cheese has at least one of the distinctive tastes that are those of a French cheese. On the one hand, this highlights a point about appearances: We may group or classify them other than by their similarities to each other. But it also has an implication for the so-called comparative use: Rather than seeing (12) as claiming that the taste is similar to the taste French cheeses have (there is no such unique determinable taste), it claims that it is similar to the French tastes for cheese. The way ‘French’ qualifies taste here is to be understood as generalizing over the account I offered above in terms of comparisons (i.e., a taste is French if it is one of the tastes that is characteristic of some group of French cheeses). The point can be made even more salient with claims about appearance involving quantifiers. Drawing on an example of Wylie Breckenridge, consider the claim: (13) Everything in the room looks American.

Suppose we accept the claim as true and that the room in question has a wide diversity of kinds of object in it, including food stuffs, sporting goods, casual wear, mobile phones, and magazines. While it is possible that speaker and hearer both assume that there is an overarching common way of looking that these all have in common, it is not a necessary condition on understanding and assenting to (10): One may simply think that for each relevant item in the domain it is true of it that its look is an American one (with the comparison involving characteristic items suitable for it, be it baked goods, a piece of cheese, a mobile phone, a pair of shorts, or a magazine). In contrast to my discussion of the model and his apparent pregnancy, I am not here concerned with one particular comparison but rather with the various comparisons we could make for the different kinds of objects we are considering. The simplest way to recognize this possibility is to switch from an indexical restriction on the kind for comparison specified by the adjectival complement to a generalization over the possible restrictions:

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(13*) xs [in the room (x ) l

[has (x , s ) ∧ [look(s )

∧ k SIM(C(American, look, k ), s )]]] Given the possibility of asserting this generalized comparative form, one might ask whether all comparative uses might not be better understood in terms of these truth conditions, rather than those I offered above for (1). On this proposal, the apparent additional information conveyed by appearance statements is to be understood entirely in terms of what the audience can pick up through making the pragmatically invited comparison. Now, it must be said, it is not entirely clear how a purely pragmatic account can be offered on the basis of the generalized account. As the examples of STOREROOM and SHOWROOM make clear, it seems as if we are interested in making different comparisons in slightly different circumstances and thereby conveying different information. If the proposition asserted simply quantifies over the variety of possible comparisons (and hence relevant restrictions), it is not clear how it could convey to the audience that they should focus on one comparison in one context, ignoring other possible ones, and shift to another comparison in other circumstances. One way to make this vivid is to consider one of the items in the room. Suppose there is a novelty cake made in the form of an issue of the magazine French Vogue. It is a fact that European women’s magazines look distinctively different from their American counterparts, and it is imaginable that seeming to be a novelty food item (a cake in the form of a magazine) is entirely an American appearance. In this case, ‘That looks American’ seems to be assertible of the magazine-cake qua cake, and hence novelty food stuff, but not qua magazine. If we only could assert the generalized comparative form as indicated in (13*),8 then there would be no option to hear an assertion of ‘That looks American’ of the cake as false. Hence, it is probably best for us to proceed on the assumption that there are two varieties of the comparative use: one on which one invites a particular comparison by demonstrating some particular restriction on the kind to be compared, and another on which one generalizes over the possible restrictions that might be in play.

4. The map of different uses of looks statements that I have sketched so far develops as follows: There is a contrast between evidential and nonevidential uses, focusing on the idea of a speech act that introduces a proposition that o is F into the discourse. Very different linguistic forms can all be used to effect this result, ‘o looks F’, ‘o looks to be F’, ‘It looks as if o is F’. It may be that the evidential use requires a distinctive sense applied across these different forms, but one might equally seek to handle the use in a purely 8. As I noted for the original form offered for the comparative use, there is a simpler enriched form that may be proposed, which introduces a new predicate ‘American**’ understood in terms of the generalization over possible comparisons analogous to the condition offered in (13*).

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pragmatic form. Fixing now just on the nonevidential use, I have so far demonstrated echoes of both the epistemic and comparative senses that Chisholm and Jackson highlight. In English, there are constructions of the form ‘o looks to be F’ that indicate an evidence-related tie between a way of looking and being F; one might note for other senses the availability of ‘smells of’ or ‘tastes of’ that play a similar role. If the cake tastes of coffee, then the way it tastes is evidence of the presence of coffee, but that is consistent with solely artificial flavoring having been used. ‘Looks’ also allows the propositional appositive equivalence that Jackson takes as the mark of epistemic use: ‘It/o looks as if p’, or ‘o looks as if it is F’. In turn, I have discussed how such constructions as ‘o looks F’ and ‘o looks like a G’ have a comparative import: One can say something about the way o looks by indicating its similarity to what is characteristic of the look of Fs. In relation to this, I have shown that there may be both direct and generalized comparative claims, depending on whether the ascription is tied to some specific comparison the audience is invited to make. This leaves just one further use that Chisholm and Jackson are interested in, and indeed are most interested in: the noncomparative (for Chisholm) or phenomenological/phenomenal use (for Jackson). In the background here is an assumption made by both authors that I have not entirely vindicated: that the same simple form ‘o looks F’ may be ambiguous among different uses. I have, it is true, shown that pretty much every construction has an evidential as well as nonevidential use, and this requires ambiguity of sense if the evidential involves a shift of sense as well as use. But Jackson also claims that such sentences as ‘The dog looks dangerous’ is ambiguous between the epistemic and comparative uses. If he is not assimilating evidential to epistemic, there is no evidence of this. For the cases I have so far discussed, therefore, one might hypothesize a mirroring of overt syntactic form and sense: The difference between the epistemic sense and the comparative is reflected in the different structures that complement of ‘looks’ has, be it infinitival, or a comparative clause for the epistemic sense, or an adjectival phrase for the comparative. Chisholm and Jackson, however, are also interested in and, indeed, are primarily interested in a further use or sense: that of the noncomparative (for Chisholm) or phenomenological/phenomenal (for Jackson). Potential examples of this use exhibit the same overt form as some examples of the comparative. According to Jackson, ‘That looks red’ has, at least most commonly, a phenomenal use, yet its overt syntactic form is the same as that of ‘That looks dangerous’, which can be read as a comparative. Moreover, Jackson seems to tie the phenomenal sense to a strikingly different logical form from that for the comparative. Jackson introduces the phenomenal sense thus: It is sometimes doubted whether there is any such use, but in the sense I will give the term, what is open to doubt is not the existence of the phenomenological use but, rather, whether it is analysable in terms of concepts pertaining to the epistemic or comparative uses.

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The phenomenal use is characterized by being explicitly tied to terms for colour, shape, and/or distance: ‘It looks blue to me’, ‘It looks triangular’, ‘The tree looks closer than the house’, ‘The top line looks longer than the bottom line’, ‘There looks to be a red square in the middle of the white wall’, and so on. That is, instead of terms like ‘cow’, ‘house’, ‘happy’, we have in the phenomenal use, terms like ‘red’, ‘square’, and ‘longer than’. (33)

This passage indicates that Jackson intends to mark out the phenomenal use of looks statements entirely superficially: It is a simple looks statement where the adjectival-phrase complement falls under his list of terms for color, shape, and distance. Since there is no doubt that there are such sentences in English, this explains why one could not doubt in his sense the existence of a phenomenological or phenomenal use of looks statements. Moreover, in arguing that there is a phenomenal use of looks statements, Jackson offers no gloss on what the distinctive sense associated with the use is; instead, he argues only that it cannot be reduced to the epistemic or comparative sense, so it is no accident that, for the strategy of argument, the phenomenal use should be singled out like this. Whatever the presentational advantages of this strategy given the purposes of Jackson’s book, it must surely be a mistake to stipulate the existence of a phenomenal use or sense in this way. In due course, Jackson makes a nonsuperficial proposal about the logical form of phenomenal looks statements, a very different form from that he gestures at for comparative or epistemic uses, so this raises the question of why there should not be a comparative use of ‘That looks red’, the very sentence for which I showed at least one comparative use (in STOREROOM above); that is why there should not be a sentence that has the superficial form of the phenomenal sense but of which the substantive account of the sense of such sentences is not true. To say that, by stipulation, it counts as phenomenal is no answer if, in addition, phenomenal uses require to be read with a logical form that is not guaranteed to be present just by the use of the adjective ‘red’ or ‘square’ in the sentence. Hence, it is better to read Jackson here as supposing that a necessary condition of being a true phenomenal use of a looks statement is the presence of one of these adjectives, and that the restriction to these is explained by the truth conditions derived from the underlying logical form. Jackson arrives at his preferred account of the logical form of these statements later in the book, on the basis of the correct interpretation of the entailments we should accept on the basis of looks statements; the preferred interpretation of the phenomenal use is given in the following passage: (22) X looks blue to S entails something like (23) There looks to S to be something blue.

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On the Sense-datum theory, the explanation for this is that (22) is equivalent to (24) S immediately sees a blue sense-datum belonging to X. While (23) is equivalent to (25) S immediately sees a blue sense-datum. And the entailment from (24) to (25) is a simple, formal one. (104)

At first sight, Jackson’s proposal about the sense of phenomenal uses seems to be a radical one. Intending, in effect, to model accurately the inferences we should be committed to in making looks statements, he proposes a logical form that is radically different from anything we might discern on the surface of looks statements. Jackson’s (24) seems to have a very different form from his (22). The verbs of the two sentences seem to have different meanings, and (25) involves quantification over a range of entities for which there is no surface marker in (22). Moreover, given the radical shift in logical form, there is little to find in common with comparative uses of looks statements. And that might seem to indicate that the hypothesis that there are different senses of looks statements requires us to assume that the verb ‘looks’ is ambiguous across these different uses. Well, as I discuss shortly, there is an interpretation of Jackson’s proposal that is not very far from an understanding I have committed to in relation to other appearance verbs. And, correspondingly, there is a way of interpreting his theory that allows me to insist on a uniform treatment of the verbal form ‘looks’. So the proposal that we should find a phenomenal use here need not be taken to require a radical revision of the logical form I read off these sentences. That is, we could accept Chisholm’s and Jackson’s claims that there is a distinctive phenomenal use and even sense of looks statements without thereby supposing this involves a radical difference in form from the comparative use; indeed, one could accept the claim that there are different senses of the sentences here without supposing that there need be any difference in the sense of the verb ‘look’ or, indeed, other appearances verbs, at least as it holds between the comparative use and an alleged phenomenal use. Given the parallel with ascriptions of weight, I have suggested that the role of the appearance verb is to introduce a way of appearing that is to be ascribed to the subject, which way of appearing is further to be specified through the complement phrase, adjectival or infinitival. So one could hold that the appearance verbs ‘looks’, ‘tastes’, and ‘smells’ all have a constant interpretation across the different uses that Chisholm and Jackson try to highlight; the difference in sense across these different uses comes in the way that the way of appearing is further specified for the audience. In effect, then, the idea that there should be a variation of sense here would amount to the proposal that the complement predicate may be taken to modify the appearance verbs in different ways. With this structural proposal in mind, one might then look for evidence that the complement predicate of an appearance statement can be read as qualifying the appearance verb in different ways.

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Independently of these syntactical considerations, one might think anyway that there are broader concerns that should lead us to posit a phenomenal use of looks statements. One can sum up the idea as follows: When I say of Fido that he looks to be a dog, or I say of Mary that she looks like a ballet dancer, I seem to be saying that there is a look (i.e., way of looking) that Fido has, and that look gives me evidence for concluding that Fido is a dog, and that there is look that Mary has, and that it is a similar look to one that characteristically ballet dancers have. But, one might now suppose, if there are these looks that can stand evidence for facts and that can be more or less similar to each other, then what are they? Is there any way of specifying directly the looks that Fido has, or that Mary has, such that in the one case one can conclude something about Fido’s species and on the other what kind of role Mary’s appearance matches? And it does seem as if, when pressed, you can say more about Fido in virtue of which you can conclude that he is a dog. And when you so specify, you seem to be reporting on how Fido looks, but not thereby indicating simply that there are ways that you can conclude that Fido is on the basis of looking some way. In that case, you are reporting on Fido’s (phenomenal) look. If we shift sense modalities for a moment, it is fairly easy to find examples that fit the role of telling us which appearance it is that the object is said to have. For example, suppose we say (14) This wine tastes sweet.

Then it is perfectly natural to understand ‘sweet’ here as qualifying the way in which the wine tastes. Wines count as sweet in virtue of being disposed to manifest sweet tastes, so ‘sweet’ here qualifies the taste that the wine produces primarily and applies to the wine as the substance that produces or is associated with the taste only secondarily. The same seems true in the case of smells. In complaining of the person in the railway carriage next to you (15) He smells rank,

‘rank’ here is most easily understood as an epithet for the odor given off by the gentleman, rather than offering an evaluation of the man himself. In both of these cases, in the relevant sense of ascribing the taste or the smell, it is not appropriate to question whether it is really sweet or whether he is really rank. (That (15) and indeed (14) admit of multiple readings is something I touch on further below.) Of course, that is not to deny that the sweet smell of the one or the rank odor of the other might not be misleading as to the nature of the wine or the character of the gentleman. In these cases, then, we seem to have examples where the complement is used directly to qualify the manner of appearance. There certainly are some examples of ascriptions of looks that can be understood in terms of such specifications. For example, one might say:

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(16) The arrangement of these columns looks graceful.

And commenting on a regular of Soho, one might say (17) His face looks lived in.9

In both cases, we need to understand the ascription as telling us something about the manner of visual appearance alone and as not going beyond that in any way. As with the cases of taste and smell, the possibility of contrasting appearance with the way things are seems to be absent. It does not make sense to question whether someone’s face really is lived in. Again, that is not to deny that such an appearance may not yet be misleading. Imagine an 11-year-old choir boy with the face of late middle-aged Auden: the look of his face would certainly be a lived-in one, inasmuch as it has a certain arrangement of features and elements, yet it would mislead as to his character and experience. But to raise these cases is also to highlight how rare such specifications of visual appearance are where the aim of the ascription is manifestly to qualify the manner of visual appearance. Returning for a moment to the ascriptions of taste and smell, I suggest that we can find in such statements evidence for the kind of structural ambiguity in the manner in which complements of appearance verbs qualify the manner of appearance ascribed. When I introduced the example (14) I suggested that we could hear it as telling us what the taste of the wine was, noting that, so understood, it claims that the taste of the wine is sweet, and that, so understood, it makes no sense to ask whether the taste really is sweet. However, it also does clearly make sense to ask in response to some uses of (14) whether the wine really is sweet. How can that be? One might suggest the following: ‘Sweet’ as used in (14) primarily applies to tastes, but given this application to tastes, it also has a secondary sense applicable to those things that have a sweet taste. There is no reason to suppose that our only understanding of what it is for a substance to be sweet is for there to be some occasion or other on which it produces a sweet taste. One might rather have an understanding of sweet on which that substance should be liable to produce sweet tastes. In that case, while there may be no question that on this occasion the wine produces a sweet taste, and it can yet be open whether the wine itself is sweet. If this is the right way to respond, then we not only have with (14) an example of a phenomenal use of an appearance sentence, but we also have an ambiguity between a comparative and a phenomenal sense, and that ambiguity lies both in the sense given to the adjectival complement and in the structural interaction between the complement and the 9. The example is Gisborne’s (1993), as too is the test for the nonevidential use. Charles Travis pointed out to me that this is not clearly a case of noncomparative use; unpacking the metaphorical application of ‘lived in’ quickly takes us back to a relevant comparison.

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appearance verb. Read one way, (14) involves a complement that is true or false of tastes, or ways of tasting, and we are to understand the complement as predicating something of the way of tasting and thereby specifying the way the wine tastes on this occasion.10 On the other reading, (14) involves a complement true of objects, individuals, liquids, or substances, and in that sense the adjective is not to be predicated directly of the way of tasting. In this sense, the way of tasting is specified indirectly and comparatively, it is that which is similar to that characteristic of sweet things. Once we see the possibility of these structural ambiguities, then I suggest it is easy to find such in the case of looks talk and thereby provide a (partial) vindication of Jackson. Consider, for example: (18) The spread looks splendid.

On one way of taking this, we are concerned simply with the look of the repast, the way in which it is laid out on the table and makes a pleasing spectacle. We are appraising the look itself as one that is splendid. In this sense, it would be parallel to saying of the view from across the gardens from the back of Blenheim Palace that it is a splendid view. And it makes little sense here to suppose that one can question whether, given the splendid look, it really is splendid, where that is to question whether there is a splendid look, since that has already been settled. On the other hand, when evaluating something as splendid, one may more be concerned with ways in which the food itself could be; one might think that the visual appearance of food, although important, is not the most important factor. For a meal really to be splendid in itself, it must entice the palate with interesting and complementary tastes; it must be nutritious and not too cloying or heavy. Its visual appearance may be indicative of this, and it may be an appearance shared by splendid meals in general, so one may pick out that way of appearing by saying that the meal looks splendid. And in this case it makes sense to grant that the meal looks splendid and still ask whether it is splendid. So we seem here to have with (18) the possibility of two different senses, circumstances in which read one way (18) must be true, and read another, it is false. Moreover, in this example, there seems no reason to suppose that we need multiple senses of the evaluative adjective ‘splendid’. The variation rather comes from evaluating, on the one hand, just the visual appearance of something or, on the other, the meal as a whole. In the forms I introduced above, we can understand these two readings so: 10. In other constructions, adverbial modification plays a parallel role. Although, as I noted above, Davidson himself in discussing the ontological implications of use of action verbs and adverbial modification recommended seeing verbal adverbs as predicates of events, it is much more plausible in examples such as ‘John runs swiftly’ to treat ‘swiftly’ as qualifying the way of running that the event exemplifies, rather than directly qualifying the event as a swift one that is also, in fact, a running.

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(18*a) s [has (the meal, s ) ∧ [look(s) ∧ splendid(s )]] (18*b) s [has (the meal, s ) ∧ [look(s ) ∧ SIM(C(splendid, look, k ), s )]] So any ambiguity in (18) itself will derive from a structural feature: that the adjectival phrase that is complement to the appearance verb comes to qualify or modify that verb in different ways. Read one way, it modifies the verb directly providing a specification of the way of looking in question, namely, that it is a splendid one. Read the other way, it modifies it only indirectly, by means of a comparison: The way of looking is the one that splendid meals have.11 This vindicates Jackson’s and Chisholm’s suggestion that we need to find noncomparative or phenomenal uses of looks statements in addition to comparative ones. I have shown such an example, and an easy recipe to generate a host of cases, where we need to posit a structural ambiguity, and in some cases a shift in sense, in order to understand a shift in truth conditions.12 Moreover, in fixing on appropriate examples, we can see that acknowledging the shift in sense here need not lead to positing a radical shift in the logical form of sentences, or even the hypothesis that appearance verbs like ‘look’ are themselves ambiguous. Nonetheless, this result also offers only a partial vindication of Jackson. When he insists that there is a phenomenal sense of looks statements in contrast to comparative ones, Jackson makes clear that he means this explicitly to hold for statements that talk of the color, shape, distance, and movement of objects. He does not introduce or discuss evaluative terms, nor does he make any comparison with appearance verbs for other senses. So now, one should ask, can the same point be applied to examples such as (10)? I suggest that the way that I have just introduced the possibility of an ambiguity between a comparative and phenomenal sense of appearance statements does not easily extend to the case of looks statements about the color and shape of objects. The concern here is not with questions about logical form, for I take it that examples such as (14) and (18) are sufficient to establish that there can be ambiguities of the general form 11. Note that if we take the approach through pragmatic enrichment of the lexicon, then strictly speaking there is no structural ambiguity here but only a lexical ambiguity, between a use where one understands ‘splendid’ as normally used and another where one extends the lexicon with ‘splendid*’, which is understood by meeting the comparative condition. Note also (as Mark Johnston reminded me) that ‘splendid’ is itself a gradable adjective and so implicitly carries a standard or measure for it. With the two readings, we are concerned, on the one hand (most plausibly), with a look being splendid for the look of a spread and, on the other (most plausibly), with a spread being splendid for a spread. 12. As noted in footnote 11, the fact that ‘splendid’ is a gradable adjective introduces a further structural element that can account for ambiguities, but in explaining the different evaluations of things as splendid, we must assume that, on the one hand, it is the look that is being evaluated and, on the other, it is the meal, so this presupposes the presence of the ambiguity we are seeking to reveal and cannot supplant all others as a sole explanation of the variation in truth condition.

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that Jackson needs. The problem is rather with what we already know about the nature of looks, and the contrasts between them and appearances in other sense modalities. There are contrasts in what we can do with appearance statements across the sense modalities that echo something in the different natures of the objects of those sense modalities, and hence the status of appearances with respect to taste, smell, and indeed hearing, on one side, and vision, on the other (touch raises a further issue as well, but not one I pursue here). The idea that there is something proper discovered by each sense modality is often put in terms of the Aristotelian contrast between special sensibles and common sensibles. According to Aristotle, the special sensible of sight is color, as that of hearing is sound and that of taste flavor (touch is separated out as having no unique determinable special object, but many distinct ones).13 In current discussion this is commonly interpreted in terms of the idea that certain qualities of objects are discernible only by one sense and not by others. So understood, there is a symmetry among all of the traditional five senses, with the exception of touch, which lacks any overarching determinable quality. The symmetry breaks down, however, when we interpret it not in terms of what qualities or properties we can perceive objects as having, but what the objects of perception are. As Berkeley was keen to stress, we think of the proper object of hearing to be the sounds that we hear: We take ourselves to hear objects through hearing the sounds that they produce, reflect, or reproduce. Although we often characterize sounds in terms of the kinds of events or objects that produce them (e.g., singling out a sound as a dog’s barking), the sound itself is nonetheless an object of sensory awareness and attention. One can select a sound to attend to without thereby selecting any concrete object to attend to as well. So we need not listen to sounds as simply qualities or properties of objects. What is true of sound perception here holds also for olfaction and taste or flavor. We can certainly perceive concrete objects through smelling them, but we do so through smelling the smells associated with them. And those smells we can detect and fix on without necessarily locating an object as bearer of the smell. Walking into the room, you may catch the rank odor, without thereby being aware of the person whose odor it is. Likewise, tastes can linger in the mouth without one thereby tasting it as the taste of some particular liquid or substance. There are commonalities here but also differences. The sounds we hear we tend to treat as individuals: It makes perfect sense to suppose that distinct sounds can be qualitatively identical; if I make the sound ‘water’ through uttering [w :ʔə] and 13. “I call special-object whatever cannot be perceived by another sense, and about which it is impossible to be deceived, e.g. sight has colour, hearing sound, and taste flavour, while touch has many varieties of object. But at any rate each judges about these, and is not deceived as to the fact that there is colour or sound, but rather as to what or where the coloured thing is or as to what or where the object which sounds is” (Aristotle 1993, 418a11)

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you mock my accent by mimicking perfectly the noise I make, then we suppose that there are two sounds, albeit identical in auditory properties, rather than just one sound presented by different events of production. In contrast, however elaborate the mixing and production of Chanel No. 5, we consider it to have just the same smell as some cheap perfume sold under that name on Oxford Street by a barrow boy if the two scents are absolutely indiscernible to the finest nose. It matters not at all that Chanel No. 5 is associated with glamour and has no bad side effects, while the cheap perfume causes a rash—that speaks to the fact that the two substances are different and is quite consistent with them having the same smell. So we think of identity of smell as a matter of qualitative resemblance among olfactory qualities. Smells are pure universals or qualitative stuffs. And as with smell, so too with taste: A perfect artificial substitute for sugar has the taste of sugar, if it is qualitatively the same. All of this contrasts sharply with the case of vision, despite Aristotle’s claim that color is the special object of vision.14 The problem here is not that we can see some things that lack color at all, although that is often an issue raised for Aristotle. If one means just by ‘color’ chromatic color, then objects that are black or white have no color. Even if one accepts that these have color, one may question whether objects that are transparent or that simply blaze with light (an example Aristotle himself notes), or that lack a surface, such as holes or shadows, have color. But perhaps Aristotle does not mean by ‘chromatous’ anything quite as restricted as the English ‘color’, and so one might still claim that there is a determinable quality that the transparent and brightly illuminated share with the matte and only partly reflective surfaces that we think of as color.15 This would be to acknowledge a range of qualities that all visible objects share as special to the realm of sight, even if there is no special English word to pick it out, just as Aristotle claims. The problem arises, rather, when we think not only in terms of what qualities the objects perceived may have but also in terms of the objects that can be perceived. What puts vision apart from hearing, smell, and taste is that we do not conceive of the visible world as offering us objects of visual awareness and attention distinct from (but coincident with) the concrete objects that we also see. Normally, when we see the color of some object, say, a patch of bright scarlet along one side of a sleeve, we see the object and see it as being colored in this way. The color does not float off the sleeve as a distinct object of attention that we think of as produced or associated with the concrete material that we may come to know through the color. 14. As O’Shaughnessy stresses: “Two properties, both possessed by sight, are I think responsible. The first is, that when in sight the attention lands upon a colour it lands thereby in addition upon its material object bearer; the second is, that it lands upon the material object in and through (or ‘in virtue of’) landing upon its colour or brightness value. . .. Sight differs in the first respect from smell, taste, and hearing, and differs in the second respect from touch” (2002, 571–572). 15. For an introduction to the differences in import of ancient Greek ‘color’ words and modern English, see Lloyd (2007, ch. 1).

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One can make some sense of the idea of an audible world containing just the sounds that one hears or could hear. Such a world would stand apart from and in contrast to the physical realm of concrete objects and the happenings that befall them. In part, the fantasy of the sound world that P. F. Strawson employs in Individuals (1959, ch. 2) exploits the intelligibility of this, for Strawson supposes that we cannot make sense of the ordinary world around us other than in terms of its being spatially ordered, but he thinks it a potentially open question whether a world simply of sounds would need to be spatially ordered. This connects, I suggest, with the intelligibility of the idea that we can single out just the sound among the things we hear, without thereby supposing ourselves to have latched onto the object or event that has produced it.16 In contrast to this, the visible world seems to contain both purely visual objects together with the concrete entities that we suppose are the medium-sized dry goods of the material world. We see lights, we see shadows, we see highlights, we see rainbows, we see the sky, and we can see mirror images or holograms; all of these things seem to be creatures solely of the visual world, and nothing about them reveals how they would extend into physical space in dimensions beyond that we can detect visually.17 Alongside these visual ephemera, we see tables and chairs, rocks and sparrows, fires and hurricanes—entities that we can single out among visible phenomena but that also have an existence and an impact well beyond the visible realm. This is not to say that we could not imagine how the visible world might be were physical objects to be excluded from it. For example, when we see rainbows on the horizon, it is not clear that we can identify them directly with any physical phenomenon. We know what their (main) physical basis is, the refraction of light through rain droplets, but we do not see rainbows to be exactly where the rain drops are; rainbows are sketched for us normally on the horizon, normally as an aspect of the vault of the sky. They are among the pure visibilia that we encounter. Now, someone convinced that physical objects cannot have colored surfaces might interpret our visual experience of the world as if elements of rainbows are stretched out across the surfaces of objects. That is, he might suppose that purely visual objects, echoing the location and shape of physical objects, take the visual position of the physical objects we learn about through vision. A color or a visible shape will count as the color or shape of a physical object, on this view, through the pure visual object being associated with the physical entity just as a smell or a sound might be with a physical object.

16. That is not to say that our understanding of sounds runs entirely autonomously of our interest in the concrete world. Matthew Nudds (2010) points out the role in our understanding of auditory phenomena that is played by classifications of sounds in terms of the kinds of physical world events that produce them. 17. Not all people agree that shadows should be thought of as creatures solely of the visual world. For a vigorously argued contrasting view, see Sorensen (2008).

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Jackson nowhere makes the comparison with sound, taste, or smell, nor does he talk of visual sense-data as being the looks of objects; despite this, we might take this fiction as a way of making sense of the proposals he makes in his defense of sense-data. Jackson’s master argument for the role of visual sense-data in all perception is an argument against the possession by physical objects of colors (Jackson 1977, ch. 4). Assuming that we see entities that are colored, if we see anything immediately, Jackson concludes that we never immediately see physical objects. So we might interpret his talk of visual sense-data in terms of the rainbows stretched over those regions of space also occupied by physical entities. Certainly this would have the virtue of not requiring a drastic revision to the gloss we give on looks statements when employed phenomenally. The verb ‘taste’ has associated with it the noun ‘taste’, and these are linked at least by the principle that any entity that tastes in some way thereby has a taste. Any object that looks some way has a look, and on this proposal, the look just is a visual sense-datum. Where we have terms for the qualities of tastes— sweet, sour, bitter, salt, umami—we could equally have terms for the qualities of looks. Given the exclusion of physical objects from the visible world, these would plausibly be the color terms and how they are spatially configured. With this picture in mind, the relevant reading of (10) would parallel those of (14). While this picture offers a way of reconciling Jackson’s bold proposals about the sense of looks statements with what we know from other appearance verbs, it comes with a cost, for this story about looks is revisionary of how we ordinarily take ourselves to visually experience the world. It is part of our ordinary day-to-day experience that there is a contrast manifest to us between solid objects and those that merely cause a perturbation in the visible world. Rainbows do not look solid to us, shadows contrast with the objects that cast them, and the sky is not viewed by us just as a ceiling. It is part of our understanding of the visual world that this very thing that I can kick is also that which I can single out and attend to in a particular region of visible space. On the proposal just given, that would be wrong: I can only sensorily encounter its look, just as auditorily I can encounter it only through encountering the sounds it makes. And if this picture is revisionary of our ordinary view of what is available to us in the visual world, then the story is unlikely to make best sense of what we actually mean by our appearance talk now, when we have not yet accepted the necessary revision to our ways of talking in the light of allegedly scientifically revealed fact. Jackson’s defense of the sense-datum theory is not intended to be revisionary in quite that way. He leaves open whether we already recognize the alleged fact that no physical object is colored, but the proposed account of the phenomenal sense of looks statements is intended to be independent of that move in his overall argument. Jackson’s inference to the best explanation of logical form is intended as an account of what we already say. It is a discovery for us that concrete objects cannot be immediate objects of sight, but it is supposed

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already to be a commitment for us that there are immediate objects of sight and that we talk about them with the phenomenal sense of looks talk. That contrasts sharply with the picture that belongs with other sense modalities.18 In taking sounds, smells, and tastes to be primary objects for audition, olfaction, and gustation, we suppose that these entities have sensible qualities, and in attending to the sound or the smell or the taste one can come to focus on which specific such qualities a given sound or smell or taste has. It is no surprise, then, that we can use our talk of appearances in relation to taste or smell to indicate the way in which the given taste or smell is qualified. So when we consider (14), we can see that ‘sweet’ as an adjective holding of objects can be considered as predicated of the wine or of the taste that the wine has and in virtue of which it tastes in some way. The predicate complement of ‘tastes’ can then easily be taken to qualify a sensible object since we conceive of the sense and that aspect of the world it reveals in just that way. We can make sense of there being purely visual objects, but that is not how we treat the visible world in general: When one sees a physical object, there is no separate visual object with which it comes to be associated, so we do not have to hand a range of qualities that we take primarily to be the ways such entities are qualified, in parallel to the ways in which sounds or smells are. We do not initially think of color or shape in the visual domain as being primarily qualities of looks that only secondarily apply to concrete objects; contrast this with the way that we think of loud or sharp as being qualities primarily of sounds and only secondarily of concrete objects or events, or the way in which we may think of a taste as bitter, and only by association take a substance to be bitter that typically has such a taste. That explains why the range of examples of qualities that intelligibly qualify looks themselves is so meager: various evaluative examples, such as ‘graceful’ or ‘splendid’, and certain dead metaphors such as ‘lived in’. Therefore, given the model of ambiguity I have articulated, one has reason to posit a use of a sentence in a phenomenal and noncomparative sense only where it makes sense to suppose that the adjective or adjectival phrase in complement position qualifies directly the kind of entities picked out by the nominalization of the appearance verb. As a consequence, we should suppose that phenomenal uses of looks statements 18. More exactly, Jackson (date, ch.1) seeks to argue that we never immediately perceive opaque physical objects but only ever, at best, proper parts of them, their surfaces. I elaborate and criticize Jackson’s arguments for that view in Martin (2006), where ch. 2 presents the argument in favor of a phenomenal sense of some looks statements; ch. 3 argues that at least in cases of visual hallucinations we should suppose that we are aware of mental objects and nonphysical visual sense-data; ch. 4 argues that the best explanation of the truth of looks statements lies in cases of visual illusion, where the environmental object of perception lacks the qualities reported in a phenomenal looks statement and turns on some mental sense-datum actually having the quality that the environmental object merely looks to have; and ch. 5 argues that no physical object is colored, and hence, given that all seen objects look colored, the immediate objects of sight are all sense-data.

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concern red or square looks only where in the primary sense of ‘red’ or ‘square’ it should make sense to speak of a red look or a square look. Since typically one can talk of red looks only in a secondary sense (i.e., that kind of look that red things have), this suggests that the examples of looks statements that Jackson singles out as unexceptional cases of the phenomenal use are better understood as employing the comparative sense.

5. Of course, the ways that I have construed (14) and (18) offer only one way in which one might give an account of how appearance statements allow of an ambiguity among different senses, so it remains open for a defender of Jackson to try to argue that a further possibility of shift of sense is possible here, one that should not be modeled on the example of (14) or (18). Certainly nothing a priori rules this out this as a possibility, but, of course, one should be happy to multiply the senses here only if there is a compelling reason to suppose that there must be a further difference in sense, one that our discussion has not yet captured. This brings me to Jackson’s own explicit argument against treating looks statements involving color and shape vocabulary as involving a comparative sense. Here is the key part of Jackson’s discussion: We noted in §2 that comparative looks-statements need to be understood in terms of the schema ‘X looks like an F normally does in C to S.’ How might such a schema be employed to give an account of (1) X looks red to me Does (1) perhaps mean something like (2) X looks the way red things normally look to me in normal circumstances. . . . I will now argue that (1) and (2) are not equivalent on the ground that (1) may be true when (2) is false, and on the ground that (2) may be true when (1) is false. . . . [T]here might be a disparity between the colours objects have and those they look to have. For example, there might be a shade of red which objects look to have at sunset but which no object actually has. . .. It could even be the case that there were no red objects at all, although objects looked red on occasion. This shows that (1) may be true when (2) is false, for it shows that X may look red to me even though nothing is red; but then X cannot be looking the way red things normally do to me, or indeed, the way red things normally do to anyone. . . . The case for saying that (2) may be true when (1) is false is that someone might, like the totally colour-blind, see the world in shades of grey, but, unlike the totally colour-blind, have extremely good ‘grey vision’; in particular, he might be able to make among the greys the same number of colour discriminations normal people make in the whole colour spectrum. . . .

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Such a person might well see red objects as a unique shade of grey, and for such a person it might well be true that X looks the way red things normally look to him in normal circumstances, namely, that special shade of grey, without it being true that X looks red to him. (Jackson, 34–36)

The first half of Jackson’s argument seeking to establish that a looks-red statement can be true even where a comparative gloss is false can be set aside immediately. Jackson’s argument for this possibility turns on his assumption that somehow the comparative element must be tracking the actual extension of a term and hence will be problematic only if this assumption is right. It is surely false in general that explicit comparative claims can be made truly only where they make comparisons with things that actually exist. There is really no problem in saying ‘Ellen is as acute as Sherlock Holmes’ such that an audience understands a truth by it. For the more restrictive case of appearance statements that have no explicit comparison particle, the same verdict plausibly holds, so no challenge seems to be posed to construing all talk of color looks comparatively just from the possibility of there being uninstantiated colors. The second half of the argument, seeking to show comparative looksred statements true where there is a reading of the looks-red statement as false, is more interesting. Unlike the first argument, the conclusion drawn depends specifically on the fact that Jackson is concerned with relativized appearance statements, containing a modifier ‘to S’. Jackson is not questioning the claim that the object looks red simpliciter when in fact red, but rather whether, in whatever sense we give to it, it looks red to or for the sorter. Since I have explicitly made the assumption in this discussion so far that we should treat the superficially simpler sentences ‘x looks F’ as more basic than ‘x looks F to S’, and since I have yet to address that the role of what I am proposing should be thought of as an adjunct and a modifier, rather than an explicit argument place, I cannot fully address Jackson’s claim on his own terms. Still, I can articulate something of the argumentative position in terms of the unmodified looks statements, now looking at what someone can grasp or convey by uttering (10) (i.e., ‘That one looks red’). In that case, Jackson’s “super-achromatic-color-sorter,” as one might call him, or “Oliver” for short, is somewhat in the position of our shop workers condemned forever to work in the situation specified in STOREROOM. As I noted above, plausibly, there is a claim that these workers can make using (10) that expresses a different claim from that we would normally make with (10) with respect to an object in good daylight. Since (10) is assertible for the workers, a suitably relativized claim, say, (10′) That one looks red to me,

also seems appropriate for one of them to make in that context. Nonetheless, (10) as used in the context of SHOWROOM says something different from what is said in STOREROOM, and correspondingly, used in

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the same way, (10′) would seem to say something different from its use in STOREROOM and, as so used, plausibly does not express a truth. As applied to Oliver, therefore, we can say that on a comparative reading of (10′), there are different claims that may be made, depending on the relevant restriction on comparison invoked, and that while it is true on one reading, there is a natural reading on which it is false. While Jackson is right to say that there is a true reading of the modified looks-red statement when applied to Oliver, he is wrong to think that this is sufficient to show that the claim must have a noncomparative reading, for the comparative reading can be used to make more than one claim, and as I have just noted, another such reading comes out false. We do not, therefore, yet have a compelling argument on the basis of disparity of truth conditions for the existence of a noncomparative red-looks statement. However, this does not quite capture all that Jackson (and Chisholm before him) have in mind against reading looks statements about color as having a comparative import. One element here, we might note, is something parallel to Jackson’s later discussion of Mary in the black-and-white room (see Jackson 1982, 1986), for there is something that Oliver does not know about red and the look of red when he is engaged in his sorting, and that lack of knowledge is reflected in the intuitive falsity of (one reading of) (10′). From this, one may express one concern with a purely comparative construal of (10). Suppose we can paraphrase the comparison as roughly this: (10#) That one has a way of looking that is similar to the way of looking characteristic of red things in k.

If we assume that Oliver can pick out the implicit restriction on comparison, k, then plausibly one might conjecture that he does understand (10#) and so can come to know that it is true. But surely there is something that he does not know about the look of the object and could only know if he came to have chromatic color vision. Moreover, the fact that he does not know about the look of the object in question we can express by using (10), which seems to suggest that (10) is not properly glossed, in at least one of its uses, by (10#). There is an important insight about what we can convey with (10) in this complaint, but it really does not tell against supposing that (10) can be true only on a comparative use. To see that, consider an explicitly and uncontroversially comparative claim, such as one we considered earlier about weight: (9) (‘John weighs as much as a sumo wrestler’). Someone can certainly understand (9) and even come to know it is true while lacking any real knowledge of what a speaker intends to convey about John’s weight in uttering (9). Someone who knows that ‘sumo wrestler’ is true of x where x engages in wrestling of a sumo kind may nonetheless have no knowledge of what sumo wrestlers are like or what would typically be taken to be paradigmatic of them. As I stressed in my initial discussion of comparatives, for such a person, (9) offers, at best, a recipe, if taken to be

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true, of determining John’s weight: Go and find out what is paradigmatic for sumo wrestlers and then take John to weigh at least that much. Normally utterances of (9) convey much more to an audience, and the point of making a comparison is often to convey such information to the audience exploiting their knowledge of the world that goes beyond their mere lexical competence. If that is right, then we may suppose that even when taken to be a comparative, (10) is typically used to express or convey more information than is grasped by someone who lacks the appropriate worldly knowledge. Ex hypothesi, Oliver lacks the necessary knowledge and so cannot grasp what we convey with (10). That is to say, I have reconstructed Jackson’s argument as indicating that an ordinary audience of (10) grasps a truth conveyed by it that Oliver does not. Jackson notes that there is a truth that Oliver can come to know from understanding (10) when construed as a comparative. But in itself that does not show that, even when construed as a comparative, a particular use of (10) does not also mean, even if not express, a further proposition that Oliver cannot grasp but an ordinary audience can. To make the further move to show that there must be a noncomparative sense of (10) from this result, Jackson needs to give us some reason to suppose that the additional information is expressed by (10) and not just meant or conveyed in the use of (10). I suggest that this would be an extremely difficult thing for Jackson to show, since the phenomena he highlights are common to explicit comparative sentences and general uses of comparisons, so any argument he may add at this point is in danger of overgeneralizing beyond the example of looks talk.19 The only alternative move that Jackson might make at this point that would be specific to the example of looks statements would be to show that the additional information that ordinary audiences grasp itself can properly be expressed only in the form of a looks statement and, hence, on the assumption that all such communicated information is linguistically articulable, that there must be some phenomenal looks statements to articulate that knowledge. Jackson provides no such argument in his own discussion, and it is unclear what further considerations might be brought to bear in support of it. Indeed, as I underline shortly, Jackson himself strictly speaking is committed to denying this further lemma: Given the semantics he offers for looks statements about ordinary objects, the information we possess about the looks of things is best articulated in terms of the attribution of phenomenal qualities to sense-data, and these sentences just do not employ the verb ‘looks’. But if the arguments that Jackson and Chisholm offer fail to show that there is an interesting phenomenal sense of looks sentences embedding color and shape vocabulary, that is not to say that no serious challenge has

19. The same worry applies to Byrne’s more recent attempt at defending a noncomparative sense of looks statements.

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been raised in their discussions. The moral to draw is that our focus here needs to shift. Chisholm and Jackson are right to claim that there are different senses of appearance statements, both comparative and noncomparative. But that gives us no reason to suppose that there are any true noncomparative uses of looks statements with adjectival complements involving color or shape. Jackson is also right to suppose that we know more about the looks of objects than just that they are more or less similar to the looks of other things. However, rather than offering a speculative account of the semantics of natural language appearance talk, we should instead focus simply on questions about what we all know about the nature of the looks of things—that knowledge that we manage to convey to each other through some, if not all, of our talk about appearances.

PART TWO My discussion in Part One highlights the following constraints on an account of the nature of looks: (a) looks are ways objects are, states that objects have, that we associate with kinds of objects; (b) it is common knowledge among us that others who have normal vision know the looks associated with properties they know of through vision; (c) someone who lacks normal vision (e.g., is blind, or lacks chromatic vision, or lacks form vision) lacks knowledge of the look associated with corresponding kinds of thing. In the discussion that follows, I argue that these constraints provide us with the material for identifying what the looks of ordinary objects are: They are some among the properties that objects have anyway (i.e., those properties we must ascribe them in order to understand the truth of statements about them that are warranted through visual grounds, without yet considering any explicit talk about the looks of things; nothing about the semantics or pragmatics of looks talk takes us beyond this range of properties). First I offer some general reasons for endorsing this picture of the nature of looks, what I labeled at the outset as Parsimony. Then I address a couple of concerns regarding whether conceiving looks in this way really allows them to play the general epistemic role we associate with the appearances of things. Third, I address a more long-standing concern about the viability of supposing that looks are just some among the properties that objects have, rather than relations between objects and perceivers, or the perceptual states of perceivers. A particularly pressing challenge can be drawn from the ancient problem of conflicting appearances. In responding to these worries, I finally fill out the semantic proposals from Part One by explaining how we can understand more complex sentences of the form ‘o looks F to S’ and ‘o looks F from l’ as deriving from the simpler form ‘o looks F’ with the addition of an adjunct phrase that modifies the verb phrase of the simpler sentence. In turn, the account of these more

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complex sentences offers us the basis to solve the problem of apparent change in appearance raised by certain cases of conflicting appearance.

6. In my discussion of Jackson above, I noted a striking contrast between vision and certain other sense modalities. At least as far as ordinary inspection of how things are presented to us is concerned, the visual world is not principally populated by special visual objects, such as Jackson’s visual sense-data. Pure visibilia are presented to us alongside concrete objects that have a life beyond their visually manifest one. In itself, this settles nothing about what properties of any of these entities can be visually manifest to us. For Jackson’s part, though, it is notable that having originally introduced a new range of entities, nonphysical, visual sense-data, the account then seeks to explain the truth of looks talk by ascribing to them only properties we might otherwise have thought physical objects have. On Jackson’s preferred interpretation of ‘phenomenal’ looks statements (i.e., those statements that I have argued ought to be treated as having comparative import, e.g., ‘the table looks brown’), such claims are made true by facts about the characteristics of the immediate objects of perception. If the physical table looks brown, then there is some immediate object of perception, a sense-datum, that is brown and in virtue of which one sees the table. In support of Jackson’s proposals about the properties that make up the look of objects (but not the objects that bear these properties), we might note that we cannot normally dissociate the mere appearance of a visible object from others of its properties. It is true that one can engage with a scene purely with an interest in its appearance and that this can make a difference in what one knows of the scene in contrast to a case of simply seeking to give a complete and accurate description. But even in this case, one cannot avoid taking in, and paying attention to, such features of objects as their colors, shapes, and sizes, so there is no evidence that we can be aware just of the visual appearance of objects independent of other ways they are. This suggests that any account that wishes to posit appearances distinct from other properties must seek to explain why awareness of appearances is tied to awareness of these other properties. Given that my concern is with our ordinary understanding of looks talk, there is a further point to note. Some writers who wish to draw our attention to the wondrous variety of visual appearance encourage us to take the stance of a Sunday painter attempting to frame a picture: With careful attention one can recognize the need to deal with apparent size and shape in projecting a three-dimensional scene onto a two-dimensional sketch; through blurring a scene, one may better attend to the variegation of light and the colored mosaic that Impressionist painting is so often thought to evoke for the viewer. When suitably instructed to shift one’s attention, it can well seem that the visual world has so many more features than we normally talk about. Surely, then, is it not this additional

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detail that we should have in mind when giving an account of looks and visual appearance? The problem with this line of thought is that both writer and reader recognize that they may come to learn something new about their visual experience by following the instructions, so it need not have been something that the reader explicitly knew before attempting to fix on apparent shape or field color. But before this learning exercise, the reader already had a normal comprehension of looks talk. And the author presumably employs common knowledge of what he or she can expect of a readership, only some of whom are Sunday painters or amateur vision scientists. Either these newly highlighted features play their role in guiding our use of looks statements through implicit knowledge of them, or our ordinary understanding does not require appeal to any such features. Now, one might hypothesize that the principal reason for Jackson to introduce new entities, and for other writers to appeal to new properties, is a concern with the problem of conflicting appearances. For surely, the key point that everyone agrees with about looks statements is that something can look a certain way without being that way. For example, (19) The stick looks bent.

This may be true when said of a straight stick, placed partly in water. However bentness comes in to play here, it cannot be via the stick’s being bent, since the stick simply is not that way. Jackson deals with this by positing some other entity that really is bent, the visual sense-datum, and other writers seek to deal with it by suggesting that looking bent is a distinct property from being bent. As I shortly spell out, the minimalist semantics we already have in hand throws doubts on this assumption. Given the hypothesis above, that would remove the key reason for supposing that we need appeal to any additional properties introduced just to interpret looks talk. Our default approach should then be to see how far we can get just through appeal to what we need otherwise. And this is to adopt, for the moment, Parsimony: looks statements are made true just by properties of objects that we need to appeal to in order to explain the truth of sentences that are not explicitly looks sentences. Does the above consideration lead us to visual sense-data or new properties? On the comparative reading, we have the form (19*) s [has (the stick, s ) ∧ [look( s ) ∧ SIM(C(bent, look, k ), s)]] This attributes to the stick a state that is relevantly similar to that characteristic of bent things. For all I have so far said, the value of C for ‘bent’ and ‘look’ will be the property of bentness itself; that is, consistent with everything so far, what everyone knows is characteristic of bent things with respect to their look is that they have a bent shape. For (19) to be true, in that case, the stick would have to have a look state that is relevantly similar to a state of being bent. Since ex hypothesi the stick is not bent, this look state is not a state of bentness (at least on this occasion).

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But that does not rule out that on other occasions what makes (19) true just is the bentness of something and hence that it is bentness itself that counts as the characteristic look for bent things. Clearly, for this story to be fully satisfactory, we need to know how some property other than bentness that the stick possesses can be relevantly similar to being bent. But that task I leave for my explicit discussion of conflicting appearances. For the moment, the only moral I need to draw is that once we see the logical form of a comparative use, we have as yet no reason to go beyond the domain of properties needed to interpret F in ‘o looks F’ and, more generally, properties that o may instantiate independently of any looks statement being true, in order to find what can make ‘o looks F’ be true.

7. Endorsing Parsimony requires us to seek the looks of objects only among the properties they can exemplify anyway. But that is not to say that just any property of an object or, indeed, just any visible property of an object is a suitable candidate for being a way that an object looks. Adapting the concern that Jackson raises in his discussion of Oliver the achromatic sorter, we can see that some properties, even if visible, cannot play the role of looks. Start with the plausible assumption that one can, in propitious circumstances, tell just by looking whether there are tomatoes at the stall in front of the greengrocer’s. One of the things about tomatoes is that they have, or rather, many varieties of them have a look that is distinctive of just tomatoes. Some unusual tomatoes may not be recognizable as such given their weird shapes or colors (think of some of the heirloom tomatoes of California), but on the whole, this fruit is bred to be instantly recognizable to the choosy shopper. It is not merely the case that we can learn that there are tomatoes at the greengrocer; it seems part of the explanation of how we tell this that some of the things there have the distinctive look of tomatoes, and it is through recognizing them in virtue of this look that we can come to know the presence of the fruit in our environment. One further thing: We can rely on the idea that there is a distinctive appearance to tomatoes when we teach people what tomatoes are. A suitable picture book with drawings or photographs that highlight the way tomatoes look can be used to teach someone how to use the word ‘tomato’ in English and to come to know what fruit it is that we are interested in. Now, this pattern of recognition and learning relies on us having the cognitive capacities for grouping certain appearances together as saliently similar when we come to recognize tomatoes. This learning process, and the maintenance of the capacity acquired through it, turn on the contingent fact that predominantly only tomatoes have the appearances in question. Suppose that there was another kind of fruit, the schmato, that, although entirely different in taste and culinary application, shared the exact same characteristic appearance and variety of appearances as tomatoes have. A linguistic community that developed in an environment

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equally full of tomatoes and schmatoes would not normally be able to tell that there were tomatoes at the stall rather than that there were either tomatoes or schmatoes. Likewise, they would not think in terms of tomatoes having a characteristic look that was the look of tomatoes—the look in question would be one that belonged to the motley of tomatoes and schmatoes. So we have a useful cognitive capacity that turns on a lack: the absence of ringers or doppelgangers for tomatoes in our normal intercourse with the world. Consider now an isolated community stuck just with schmatoes and not tomatoes—one in which the idea of a sweet- and acidic-flavored fruit to be used like a vegetable has never arisen. They do have the schmato, though, and they use it as best they can in cooking. Going to the greengrocer, members of this community can tell straight off whether there are schmatoes in stock rather than persimmons or kumquats. They associate with the schmato a distinctive appearance, and they can train learners how to use the word and to come to know about the kinds of produce available in their greengrocer’s through using depictions that make salient this appearance. The possibility of this community illustrates for us why we have to distinguish between the look of a tomato and the property of being a tomato. Ex hypothesi, schmatoes share the visual appearances of tomatoes. Members of the schmato-only community recognize schmatoes by their visual appearance. That visual appearance is the same as that of tomatoes, although they do not think of the appearance in those terms. Members of that community are acquainted with the visual appearance of tomatoes: As long as one picks it out as ‘the appearance of schmatoes’, they know what you are talking about in intimate detail. But none of them has ever heard of a tomato; they do not know what one is. So we can teach one of them, William, something new by presenting him with a tomato. William may well exclaim, ‘Oh, it looks just like a schmato, though it is not one!’ In this possible scenario, it seems as if William has learned something new in encountering a tomato for the first time, so his visual acquaintance with a sample tomato puts him in a position to know about some kind or property he had not encountered before: the kind tomato, and the property of being a tomato. Nonetheless, William recognized straight off the appearance that the sample had, so the appearance was not something new to him—it was something he already had knowledge of and was acquainted with. Taking ‘S is acquainted with x’ here as an extensional context, this indicates that William had been acquainted with the appearance of being a tomato but not with the property of being a tomato and, consequently, that the two properties are not identical. There is nothing particularly special about the case of tomato here. In general, where we can derive a suitable complement for ‘looks’ from a term, F—that is, get an adjectival phrase involving F, such as F-ish, or consider the nominal ‘the F look’—then we know that the way of looking here to be picked out (which is to say that value entered as characteristic of F with respect to looking) cannot itself be F where the following things

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hold: (a) it is possible that there should be some other property G such that in suitable circumstances Gs exhibit the look that Fs in fact do, (b) someone could recognize the presence of Gs in such circumstances and come to be aware that Gs exhibit that distinctive look, and (c) such a person lacks all knowledge of the Fs. Parsimony will fail if none of the properties that objects otherwise have can meet this condition. But, as has often been discussed in relation to the theory/observation distinction, there are an important range of properties that arguably escape this line of argument: observational properties.20 I now want to make a bit more precise the idea I have used in the tomato/schmato story of a doppelganger or, as I define it, a visual duplicate. In terms of this, I can explain both the idea of the overall look of an object and that of an observational property through which we can fill out the Parsimonious story. The idea of perfect twins or duplicates that are taken to share all their qualities or intrinsic properties is familiar from attempts to make precise the contrast between quality and relational property, or intrinsic versus extrinsic property. But no tomato is the perfect duplicate of any schmato: Every tomato has the property of being a tomato, and no schmato has that property; no tomato has the property of being a schmato. My story goes through even if plenty of intrinsic properties differ between the tomatoes and the schmatoes. Nonetheless, one may well think that there is an important kinship between the idea of perfect duplicates and the notion I have so far inexplicitly employed in the story. When we consider concrete individuals to be perfect duplicates, we restrict the range of properties that necessarily have to be the same among them: Twins differ in their spatial relations, and properties deriving from that, and differ in properties of being identical to themselves, or properties that derive from that. So, we might hypothesize, to get the notion of a visual duplicate we simply need to employ a suitable further restriction. When asking of two objects whether they are visual duplicates of each other, our concern should be restricted just to those properties they possess that can be detected visually. So, although the tomato is not a perfect duplicate of any schmato, it may yet be the visual duplicate of one, since in the context of comparison, its being a tomato is not a visually detectible difference between it and the matching schmato. But to put things this way is to raise a puzzle. At the beginning of the tomato/schmato story I appealed to the plausible thought that one can in propitious circumstances tell just by looking whether there are any tomatoes at the greengrocer’s.21 So this suggests that, at least in some 20. For key discussions of the notion of the observational on which the account here draws, see Wright (1982) and Peacocke (1983, ch. 4; 1986, ch. 1; 1992, chs. 1, 3). 21. Although Christopher Peacocke takes there to be a significant observational/nonobservational contrast, he argues (Peacocke 1983) that recognitional concepts figure in the content of sense experience, too. Siegel (2006) also argues against the claim that natural kinds cannot be represented in sense experience, although her discussion does not address the standard worry often expressed that in principle there could be duplicates of kinds.

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circumstances, whether something is a tomato is a visually detectible feature of it. Yet in the argument I assumed that schmatoes may be visual duplicates of tomatoes, and in the gloss I have just given of that notion I have suggested that it requires that being a tomato or being a schmato not be a visually detectible feature of the object. Have I then contradicted myself in the story? And, supposing that I have, which assumption should I give up: that on occasion one can just see whether tomatoes are present, or that there could be schmatoes that were visual duplicates of tomatoes? We can solve this puzzle if we reflect a bit more on what it is for us to be able to discern through vision the presence of one concrete individual as opposed to any other. Since individuals can be perfect duplicates of each other, an ability to tell through vision what intrinsic properties an object has will not necessarily settle the question of which object it is that is before one’s eyes. Some writers claim that spatial and temporal features have a constitutive role in individuating concrete individuals; on that view, to be sensitive to the nonidentity of two concrete individuals is in part to be sensitive to the difference in their histories. In a situation in which one views two identical objects simultaneously, as when one confronts the twin rubber ducks Huey and Dewey, one can tell that there are two ducks there and not just one, even given the fact that they are perfect duplicates, because one can see the different locations that these objects occupy.22 In such a situation, one can certainly distinguish what is in fact Huey from what is in fact Dewey by appealing to one’s knowledge of the differences in spatial location between them. However, we normally think not only that we can single out objects through perception in a one-off way, as when we think demonstratively, but also that we can, at least sometimes, reidentify the very same individual on reencounter, and so be thinking of it through the exploitation of a capacity whose presence appeals to further capacities for tracking that go beyond the immediate moment. Consider, for example, the sometimes difficult but always essential task of identifying your own suitcase on the carousel at the airport: The ideal occasion is one where, despite the presence of various rather similar items, your own bag leaps out at you through its distinctive appearance. Given the theoretical possibility of perfect duplicates, one will have been successful in identifying a unique individual through such visual inspection only if the path of the object one takes oneself to be reencountering has not crossed with one of its duplicates. At the airport, that might be a real possibility, if you are the kind of traveler with a brand-new suitcase and the flight is full of other such rich travelers with their own new suitcases of the same design. But often we are surrounded by objects that do not have such perfect duplicates so readily to hand., And for these, it seems, we can often succeed in picking out the same one again and we recognize it as the same one again. 22. However, for skepticism about the role of location here, see Scholl and Pylyshyn (1999).

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A concern with duplicates, then, would suggest that we need to be suitably safe from, or sensitive to, the possibilities where a duplicate has crossed paths. Assuming the nonskeptical stance that the logical possibility of perfect duplicates does not deprive us of having recognitional capacities for individuals that give rise to knowledge, our correct deployment reflects such safety. Those further factors that differentiate this particular object from any other need not all be entirely manifest visually for one to take in that it is none other than this individual (the lucky, old, battered suitcase) that stands before one. So we can contrast those situations in which one relies on visual means to determine whether an object is one’s suitcase, and those where one cannot. Any situation in which one cannot detect or rely on spatiotemporal differences are of the latter sort. In such circumstances, perfect duplicates will not be distinguishable by visual means. One would not, in such circumstances, be able correctly to deploy any recognitional capacity for that individual. The idea of a visual duplicate can then be elaborated in this way: In conditions where one cannot visually discriminate a concrete individual a from any possible perfect duplicate of it (i.e., where one cannot visually exploit nonintrinsic differences to determine nonidentity), any object that is either a perfect duplicate of a or is not a perfect duplicate of a but that one also cannot discriminate on visual grounds from a will thereby be a visual duplicate of a. In turn, this suggests that what holds for individuals can hold for kinds or properties. In suitably propitious circumstances, one can recognize the presence of a kind or exemplification of a property by being presented with a suitable concrete individual that is saliently characteristic of kind or property. But this ability is contingent on being safe from confounding duplicates. When such conditions are compromised, vision will not distinguish potentially matching cases, and we have the idea of doppelganger or ringers. Where two concrete individuals are visual duplicates, we can say that they share an overall look. Two points to bear in mind here: It is often suggested, on the basis of possible sequences of just noticeable differences, that visual indiscriminability is nontransitive. If this is so, then no object has an overall look. But the alleged examples of nontransitivity in relation to observation do not quite demonstrate this possibility—they exploit the thought that there are some circumstances in which a cannot be distinguished from b, and some where b cannot be distinguished from c, while there is some circumstance where a and c can be distinguished. What we need for the notion of an overall look is rather that there should be no possible circumstance in which a and b be discriminable by vision (i.e., in circumstances where one could not exploit vision to distinguish perfect duplicates) for them to share an overall look. I assume in what follows that the notion of an overall look as introduced here is coherent. I doubt that anything for this discussion turns on it, though, other than need for circumlocutions that track powers of visual discrimination rather than

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similarities among their objects. Note also that we may induce different notions of overall look if we focus on different visual powers: It is conceivable that someone with something like human vision might be sensitive to a broader spectrum than are ordinary human beings and thereby distinguish objects that for us are visually indiscernible.23 Extend from visual duplicates for individuals to the idea of a kind or property being visually nonunique. A kind is visually nonunique when there is a concrete individual that is a member of that kind and has the look characteristic of the kind but that possibly also has a visual duplicate that is not a member of that kind. Likewise, a property is visually nonunique when some concrete individual has the property and has the look characteristic of the property but at the same time has a visual duplicate that lacks the property. (Note that these conditions are weaker than that exploited in the tomato/schmato example, for there we considered a possible situation in which every characteristic tomato had a double that was a member of the same kind, schmato. Clearly, that condition is not guaranteed to obtain wherever a kind or property turns out to visually nonunique in the sense here defined.) The idea of a perfect duplicate is intended to capture the idea of pure resemblance among individuals, and the properties or universals in virtue of which things perfectly resemble each other. The idea of a visual duplicate mirrors the idea of visual resemblance among individuals. Overall looks, therefore, are manners in which concrete individuals may share visual resemblances. In this notion, we are not privileging any particular vantage point or viewing condition for an object. Much discussion of looks exploits the idea that we single out such special conditions when we say how things look now in this situation in contrast to how it might look in some other. But the fact that we do sometimes contrast looks by possible viewing conditions should not obscure the fact that we also have the notion of an overall look. For example, if I tell you that the Michelangelo slaves have a rather rough-hewn look, I need have in mind no particular vantage point that you should take up on the statues in order to vouchsafe my claim. The idea of an overall look, then, invites you to try as hard as you might to take in whatever could be visually manifest from whatever angle in whatever conditions. However rare, if some circumstance will indicate a difference, two objects will differ in overall look and thereby fail to be visual duplicates. And now I am in a position to specify the idea of an observational property: those properties that necessarily are visually unique. That is to say, observational properties are those properties for which necessarily no object that exemplifies them, and is characteristic with respect to look for that property, has a visual duplicate that lacks them. For example, being 23. In addition, note that we do not have here the makings of an abstraction principle: We cannot assume that the universe is suitably populated with concrete individuals such that every overall look is instantiated by some individual.

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cubic is an example of an observational property: There is no visible object that is both cubic and visibly shaped but that has a twin, a visual duplicate, that lacks the property of being cubic. Indeed, what goes for shape such as being cubic arguably goes for Jackson’s complete list of features by which he defined phenomenal uses of looks talk: All of them give us examples of visually unique properties.24 Is it really so obvious that being a cube meets the condition I have laid down for observationality? First, what of holograms? Can there be pure visibilia that nonetheless look solid? There might be seemingly a perfect pink cube in front of you, which by tactual investigation you discovered to be a pure light phenomenon. Would this be a case of something looking to be cubic without in fact being cubic? I would respond to this last question negatively: Not only does the hologram look to be cubic, but it is cubic. What the example of holograms shows is that there are ways of being visually shaped that are distinct from being tactually or physically shaped. The hologram has no tactually detectible shape, but that does not mean it has no shape at all. Consider, then, another example. Suppose one is in the realm of those marvelous and entertaining creatures, the shape shifters. These wondrous beasts typically present an amorphous, blobbish appearance. But, now and again, when there is only one potential perceiver in the vicinity, one of them will determine to present a visual profile that matches that of a cube to whichever vantage point on it a perceiver has. Whatever the perceiver might do in order to catch the shape shifter out by changing position or jumping around to get a glimpse of its backside, the shape shifter will keep to the policy of only presenting to that person a profile that a cube would also present. All other aspects of it occluded from the viewer remain, as normally, amorphous, so it never actually takes on the form of a cube but nonetheless for such a viewer continues to present an appearance to that matches that of a cube. Is this not, now, an example of an object that, when playing such games, has the look of a cube without being a cube? Would not it then be the visual duplicate of some cube without itself being cubic? We do not have to, and should not, concede this claim. For all I have so far said, the shape shifter is an entity that is constantly changing both its shape and its visual appearance, so it has no constant visual appearance for the viewer to latch onto. The shape shifter’s game puts the viewer at a disadvantage: The viewer cannot use vision to determine the overall shape 24. That surface color meets this condition (which I would argue it does) requires settling some further delicate issues to prove. If we are indifferent among viewing conditions, as I have indicated in the text, then we are required to treat metamers as distinct colors, since there will be some viewing conditions under which individuals with the same color, say, typical denim blue, will be visually discriminable if the dyes used in the fabrics are metameric. Our normal use of color vocabulary tracks conditions under which we have commerce with objects—so we might well count both pairs of jeans as blue and as being of the same color even though there are some conditions under which the one pair will look blue and the other will look purple.

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of the creature, nor can the viewer take in its visual appearance. Now, it is true that throughout the viewing period the shape shifter has a disposition that reflects a psychological fact about the viewer, for throughout the inspection, it looks to the viewer as if there is a cube before him or her, and this fact is brought about through the activity and the nature of the shape shifter. But now the question is whether the presence of this disposition is enough to establish that the shape shifter has the visual appearance of a cube, that is, that we should think of visual appearances of objects as nothing more than such dispositions to provoke sense experience. Since nothing has yet forced on us the view that the looks of things are no more than the shadows of such psychological facts, then there is as yet no reason to concede that the shape shifter genuinely possesses the appearance, rather than finkishly making it seem as if it has the appearance. But this conclusion appears to generalize to all of the properties on Jackson’s original list for defining the phenomenal sense of looks statements. If visual shape is visually unique, then so too are number, color, shape, size, and spatial position or relation. And the condition of being visually unique is sufficient to block the argument used in the tomato/ schmato story concerning what William knows: Since William could not encounter any other object with the distinctive appearance characteristic of being a cube that was not a cube, he could not come to have knowledge of that appearance without having knowledge of being a cube. There is no possibility, therefore, of appearance and visually unique property coming apart. So, for all that I have so far said, the property of being a cube can feature as the value of what is characteristic of being a cube with respect to looks.25 This list of properties meets the negative condition of not being subject to the William argument, but what positive reason could there be for identifying ways of looking with the observational properties? We can bring that out by considering another reason for distinguishing the property of being a tomato from that of the look of tomatoes. There can be individual tomatoes that do not have the look characteristic of a tomato while still being tomatoes. This requires, at least, that the property of being a tomato and the property of having the characteristic look of a tomato be distinguished. That said, one might yet suppose that for each way of looking some tomato has, that should count as one of the ways of looking that belong to tomatoes. Even if that is true, still there is no determinable 25. But what if William had only ever encountered shape shifters? Would he have knowledge of some property, the look of them, or some shape? The shape shifters look cubic to William, but he does not apprehend their look (which is constantly changing). In that respect his sense experience is illusory regarding both shape and look of the objects. On a view that allows acquaintance knowledge of uninstantiated universals in sense experience (e.g., Johnston 2006), William could nonetheless be acquainted with both the look of a cube and the property of being a cube in encountering the shape shifters. What he will not have, though, is acquaintance with some other property nonidentical with being cubic that plays the parallel role to schmato.

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look that is associated with being a tomato that is exemplified by determinations of all the ways of looking that tomatoes might have. In contrast, when we consider the example of being cubic, or any other pure shape, any visible individual that is also visibly shaped will thereby exhibit the look characteristic of being a cube: There just are not any examples of cubes that are visibly shaped but that fail the test of looking like a cube.26 And this, we might hypothesize, is what brings out the reason for attributing to the observational properties the role of being the looks of things. This is because, in sorting objects into visual duplicates, and hence by their overall looks, we are sorting them by ways in which they purely resemble or differ from each other that manifest entirely visually. A way of looking that an object has may be conceived just as some aspect in which it resembles or fails to resemble any other object in respect of overall look. The standard list of observational properties in the visual realm gives us a group of properties such that objects can be grouped as more or less similar with respect to them, and the presence or absence of which properties for visually perceptible objects are visually detectible. So we might surmise that the overall look of an object is a function of its observational properties, and the various ways of looking it may share or contrast with other objects are just conjunctions or disjunctions of the observational properties it has. And getting to this point reveals one further option for inclusion among the ways of looking that objects may have. With the observational properties we have a necessary coincidence between having the look of that property and having that property (at least when the domain is restricted to objects that are visible, and visibly determined along dimensions relevant to each of its observational aspects). But what matters for playing the looks role is presumably that the property should constitute the visual resemblance among objects with certain looks. And that raises the possibility that some property may be such that it constitutes visual similarity or difference but may be such that entities can visually appear to have it when they do not. Such a property would fail to be visually unique, so there would be the possibility of a doppelganger. But it might not be subject to the William argument, for if the property in question really determines visual similarity among objects, then in taking in the appearance of the objects visually, one will be acquainted with the property, even if one or more of the objects in fact fails to instantiate it. The theoretical possibility of this option is perhaps best made clear through example. I noted above that a key feature of the visual world as it manifests to us is that, among the visible objects, some are pure visibilia and seem to have determinations that relate just to the visible world, and 26. This is not to say that there are no examples of physical cubes that are too small to be seen as cubic in shape, or that there are no medium-size cubes that are invisible, or yet some medium-size cubes that, though visible, do not manifest their shapes visually, perhaps giving off a faint glow that does not quite indicate the extent of the object or where its surfaces are positioned.

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those whose nature extends beyond the purely visual. It is not just that some visible objects turn out to be more than features of light, but that the visible world seems to us to be sorted into objects proper and the pure visibilia. One aspect of this is the distinction for us between objects and shadows: We can see both concrete objects and shadows cast by them, or over them. But normally we do not see a shadow as just another object. Indeed, as research has revealed, it is difficult for people to focus on or attend to what they see as a shadow. So, one might hypothesize, one aspect of the visible world that is manifest to us, and an aspect of some objects that is also manifest, is whether they are pure visibilia or not. That is, echoing Locke, we might surmise it as a visibly manifest feature of solidity. (Albeit, for the term to encompass the intended domain, clouds or mists have to count as appearing solid even when thinly dispersed.) If we suppose that solidity is a visually manifest property in this way, we must also concede that some solid objects (i.e., ones that have a nature beyond the purely visible realm) and some purely visible objects can take on the appearance of the other camp. An entirely solid glass arc may cunningly be made to present the appearance of a beam of light; a hologram, on the other hand, may appear to be the solid object whose appearance has been photographically captured. In both cases we have something that has the appearance of what it is not. Nonetheless, one might insist, in any situation in which something presents the appearance characteristic of a solid object, it must appear to be solid. The appearance that we associate with solidity could not have been the visual mark of any other property; to discern and appreciate that appearance within the visual world is to grasp the way in which the world is sorted into the purely visual and those objects that have life beyond what can play before the eyes. Allowing that solidity has this role in the realm of visual appearances comes with a cost, for we must suppose that there is something essentially delusive about perfect holograms or other such visual illusions. Moreover, if it is conceivable that someone should have visual access to a world that contained no solid objects but did contain some holograms, then we would have to grant the possibility that someone can be acquainted with the property of solidity through encounter with these holograms, without ever having encountered an object that exemplified the property. Rather than attempting here to settle the matter, I propose that we interpret Parsimony in a way that does not rule out the possibility of such properties but yet need not rely on them. We should talk of the visually basic properties of objects, those by which visual resemblance is fixed. These include the observational properties of objects: size, shape, color, visible texture, spatial arrangement of parts; it may also include such nonobservational properties as solidity in the sense introduced above. With these as the most generic visible properties by which we can tell whether objects resemble or fail to resemble each other, any perceiver with ordinary vision will be acquainted with these properties and able therefore to update their worldly knowledge associated with linguistic

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terms by reference to them. Moreover, it is easy to see how it could be common knowledge among us that people do know what these properties are, so in inviting a comparison from an audience, one may reasonably expect them to extract the information that such and such an object is similar to one with such and such visually basic properties. The basic elements of the role that looks need to play in order to make true our statements about the way objects look can be satisfied through this Parsimonious account. But does it really address all that we need the notion of look to do? In these final sections, I address the challenge by considering the ways in which appearance statements may be subjective and finally the question of conflicting appearances.

8. With the bare details of Parsimony outlined, I can now return to the most pressing problem: How should we understand correct uses of (19) (‘The stick looks bent’) where the object in question is not itself bent? As I made clear earlier, the problem is not the most direct one of seeing how (19) can be true, if the relevant way of looking characteristic of bent things is being bent but yet the stick is not bent. The form of (19) taken as comparative already allows for the possibility of this being true inasmuch as the sentence is used to describe a resemblance between some way the object is and that characteristic. So the truth conditions of (19) do not require that the subject be the way that it is compared with, whatever our preferred account of looks themselves. The problem is rather one of understanding what the relevant gloss on (19) should be in this case: Someone who utters (19) truly commits to there being a relevant similarity between the stick’s way of looking and that look characteristic of bent things, namely (according to Parsimony), being bent. But if the stick is not bent, in what way is it relevantly similar to something bent? In addition, while the unavailable answer, being bent, would supply an obvious unity across cases in which (19) can be truly asserted to indicate what they all have in common, it is not clear what else needs to hold in common across the various situations at hand. (19) may be true when the stick is partly immersed in water, or otherwise viewable in part through a refractive medium, but it may also be appropriate when the lighting or shadows cast across the stick are strange, or where a surrounding visual context distorts the appearance, or where the viewer suffers a severe astigmatism or has suffered an unfortunate brain lesion. Finally, I should note those aspects of appearance talk that indicates an element of subjectivity to the discourse, as I noted in the introduction. Someone who asserts, (20) The stick is bent

is open to challenge about the evidence they have for the claim as well as its correctness. The assertion is a possible point of agreement or

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disagreement across interlocutors in a conversational context. But speakers who report on their current psychological states are typically granted a certain authority on the matter: Normally, their interlocutors are not taken to be in a position to disagree, and any challenge from an interlocutor about the grounds for such a claim seems inappropriate. One might point out that in at least some circumstances, an utterance of (19) behaves more like a psychological self-report than a description of the shape of the stick. A speaker can retreat from potential challenge in saying (20) to a more secure position by uttering (19) instead, and when speakers so retreat, it is inappropriate normally to challenge the claim or the grounds of the claim. So, one may suppose, this shows that (19) at least on a common interpretation comes to report the speaker’s psychological state and is a subjective report, a report of the speaker’s perspective, and not a claim about any object in the environment. One way of putting these elements together is just to assume that the unity in question across the various circumstances is one that lies in the viewer or viewers that are liable to assert (19). Some psychological state, most saliently a visual experience, is what marks out the various circumstances as relevantly similar and appropriate to be reported on by (19). In turn, if we understand (19) as somehow reporting a psychological fact, then it should be no surprise that our attitude to such an assertion is parallel with avowals of many other psychological states, such as first person reports of belief, sensation, or desire. But if we seek to explain the subjectivity of these looks statements by taking such uses of (19) to be a report of the speaker’s psychological state, then we face a problem with certain other aspects of our talk about the ways in which things look. First, it looks as if sentences like (19) can be true of certain circumstances in which no relevant psychological states occur. For example, it is not obviously incorrect to claim that the stick would have looked bent even if no one had been around to see it. And one might add as a rider on an utterance of (19), ‘and that would still have been true had none of us been here’. Contrast this with the oddity of claiming that there would still have been a pain had no one been around to feel it, or of adding the above rider to someone’s complaint that they have a headache. And the pattern of subjectivity in our talk of appearance is more complex than the simple psychological report model would predict. It should be granted that utterances of (19) can introduce the possibility of doubt or denial and hence reduce the speaker’s assertoric commitments in a conversational context. But that does not in itself immediately show that in making such a move one must simply be moving to a subjective statement or psychological report, for, first, one may well inquire of an interlocutor how something looks, and here be interested in, and partly informed by, the answer: Judgments about the looks of things can be intersubjective, and a speaker may be concerned to come to convergence with others in their judgments. Second, just as the move to (19) may

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indicate a reduced assertoric commitment and a certain immunity to challenge, so too can a move from (19) to (21) The stick looks bent to me.

For example, one asserts (19) and then an interlocutor questions: ‘Are you sure? I think it looks entirely straight.’ One might not quite give way on (19) but simply retreat to uttering (21). One can well understand (21) acting as a stopping-off point for further challenge. It is difficult to see how (21) could be used to do this, if we suppose both that (21) is explicitly a report on one’s psychological state and that (19) in effect does the same, for then no further move would have been made in uttering (21). And that suggests that rather than thinking in terms of a simple duality between either objective reports that are open to third-party challenge and subjective reports that are entirely immune, we need rather to make sense of how there can be a kind of continuum, with different kinds of stopping-off points: an objective assertion like (20) at one end and a purely subjective report like (21) at the opposite end, with different uses of (19) in between allowing for a variable claim to objectivity or retreat to subjectivity. A preferable approach here would be one that could both accommodate the idea that there is some subjectivity in our appearance talk, that it reflects something about our psychological states, or the perspective from which one makes an appearance judgment and that allows that in making such judgments we may be committing ourselves more or less with respect to the way the objects are that we are talking about. We can progress on this, I suggest, by filling in a bit more the details on how (19) and (21) may differ, while on occasion having a very similar conversational role.

9. On those approaches to looks statements that take as basic the idea of reporting a psychological state, one may suppose that the difference between (21) and (19) is simply that the modifier ‘to S’ in (21) makes explicit an argument place that is present at least in our semantic understanding of the appearance verbs. For some, this is understood as making explicit what is already present unvoiced in syntax. But one might think it present in what is said without necessarily being marked beyond our semantic knowledge. Compare here what one should say of the adjectives ‘charming’ and ‘generous’. The sentence ‘Alfred was charming’ seems to offer a complete proposition without having to suppose that implicitly we are indicating to whom Alfred was charming or that he was charming to everyone; nonetheless, ‘Alfred was charming to Mary’ equally makes sense, without us having to suppose a difference in sense in the adjective. On the other hand, while ‘Gerald was generous’ is syntactically complete, we may note that ‘Gerald was generous to Robyn’ makes explicit something in our understanding even of the former sentence, that someone

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cannot manifest the disposition of generosity without thereby being generous to some individuals or other. In the approach I took in Part One, I sketched ways of understanding looks statements without making any appeal to such an argument position. And given the metaphysics of Parsimony, it is difficult to see how that which makes true objects having the looks they do should involve a relation to some individual or some psychological state of that individual. If the ways of looking objects have just are their basic visible properties, then it is not obvious how they possess these in the basic case in relation to particular individuals, as in the case of generosity, nor yet how in some cases they can simply be an aspect of the individual and in other cases be directed toward an individual, as in the case of being charming. The alternative would be to suppose that ‘to S’ introduces additional semantic material into the sentence to which it is added, that it modifies the sense of the sentence or some part of it. Just as the question arose how any use of (19) could be true without (21) being true, so the question arises how any use of (19) can simply seem to do the same work as some use of (21), if (21) has additional material. So, if we are to suppose ‘to S’ introduces a modification, then we had suppose that what it does is somehow introduce or make explicit some subjective or psychological aspect in making an appearance statement. The minimal such sketch we could give of this, I suggest, is by looking to the materials out of which one might build a conceptual role. First, where (21) is used as an occasion sentence (i.e., where its use is not equivalent to ‘The stick usually/normally/always looks bent to me’ but ‘The stick now looks bent to me’), we have the entailment that given a speaker, S: (22) S sees the stick.

On the other hand, there is no simple entailment from (21) to (19), nor (19) to (21), so there is no simple measure on which the one claim is weaker than the other. At the same time, there do seem to be no evidential connections between them. First, for any party, if that party determines that a speaker, S, accepts (19) on characteristic visual evidence, then that party also has grounds to accept (23) The stick looks bent to S.

And where a subject accepts on experiential basis (21), then that subject has defeasible evidence in favor of (19). These two last elements play off against each other. While, in some conversational contexts, the shift from (19) to (21) can express a retreat on the part of an interlocutor, avoiding possible challenge to what is claimed, in other contexts proffering (21) can be put forward in support of (19). Moreover, this aspect of the behavior of ‘to me’ is reflected in some other locutions not concerning appearances as such, but relating to matters that involve a potential element of subjectivity. So, for example, we have not only

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(24) The statue is beautiful,

but also (25) The statue is beautiful to me.

And, one might utter (25) both as a retreat in the face of someone’s withering scorn of one’s taste and, alternatively, as evidential support to someone in favor of accepting (24). I want to fill out the account that respects these roles and the intuition that the judgment both reports on the stick and some way it is and also reports in some way how things subjectively are with someone who sees the stick. There is some way the stick is; it has a way of looking, but this is also to someone, and that involves the person seeing the stick. But what more can be said about the subjective side of this report? As I noted in Part One, ways of looking are often specified indirectly through making a comparative claim—that the way an object looks is relevantly similar to some other condition. If we apply the same idea here, then we might suppose that the subjective aspect in (23) is carried by making a comparison between how the look is to S and how looks are paradigmatically to perceivers. That is to say, in Part One, I hypothesized that mundane comparative claims are often informative through exploiting worldly knowledge of the audience of the paradigm features associated with the comparisans; associated with various adjectives F, we are to suppose that speakers commonly associate certain looks as paradigmatic of Fs. The extension required for my proposal here is that we add to our stock of worldly knowledge information about psychological states associated with Fs. That is, just as I suggested that in your database of worldly knowledge about Fs you have an entry for looks that Fs have, so too you can have an entry for the psychological state, the visual experience, associated with paradigmatic cases of seeing an F. Most typically, for those things that we suppose to be visible and have distinctive looks, we may assume that viewers suitably placed can simply recognize that an F is there when they see one. So, one element of the characteristic psychological response to a paradigm F would simply be a disposition to judge that an F is there. When you are invited to consider what it is for one to see some aspect of the world, the invitation can invite imagining from inside that point of view, or may require one simply to note the kind of impact such seeing may have on the subject and the world. We might then want to consider that there is a first-person entry, recording what it is for one as perceiver to see an F, and a third-person entry, what consequences are notable for others when one sees an F. With such information to hand, it would be possible to convey information about someone’s psychological state in uttering (23) by indicating that the psychological state of how the stick looks to S is relevantly similar to that psychological state paradigmatically associated with how bent things look to one. This is to say, we are to take ‘to S’ as modifying the

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adjectival complement of ‘looks’ and that it operates to shift our interpretation of the manner in which the way of looking is specified. On the assumption that this (as with epistemic and comparative uses) is a form of comparative specification, we can understand the subjectivity present in (23) as indicating a similarity between the way of looking with respect to its psychological impact on S and the impact that bent things have on one with respect to their look. And, given the proposal above, that is to compare them with the look paradigmatic of bent things. Hence, the look of the stick to S, how it bears on S, is claimed to be relevantly similar to that characteristic psychological state associated with the look for bent things. If it is common knowledge among us that looks have a psychological impact on individuals through being seen, and the only relevant way a look of an object could have a similar psychological impact on an individual is being seen, then we have the consequence of semantic entailment that in this case the stick is seen. But this is the case only given that we take synesthesia to be nonparadigmatic. Viewing matters this way allows that ‘to S’ has a common contribution to make across different sense verbs: We extract for each the relevant perception verb consequence given our more general knowledge about the appearances. The cost of the proposal, however, is that it must be assumed that it is not epistemically possible that, for example, a way of looking of an object might have the psychological impact on S through being smelled that was relevantly similar to how it would look to a generic perceiver, or that the seeing of its look in S should be relevantly similar to how that quality is heard in a generic perceiver. One might question whether we really have the grounds for supposing these options are ruled out just by our background presuppositions. Since it seems clear that we do have the entailment to S’s seeing, and that, inasmuch as the claim is comparative, we are concerned with how S’s seeing is like other people’s seeing, one may instead suggest that the modifier ‘to S’ when attached to ‘looks’ introduces reference to seeing and when attached to ‘smells’ introduces reference to the sense of smelling, and so on. Either way, the basic idea of the proposal remains the same: The modifier switches us from a statement about a way the object is to instead a report of a subjective state through claiming a similarity between the perceiver and a paradigm or generic perceiver of a certain way of looking. Although it is common to interpret sentences such as (23) as reporting on our psychological states, little has been done to explain how such statements equally report on ways that objects seen are, namely, that those very objects look some way to us. In contrast, on the account sketched here, ‘to S’ makes explicit a comparison between how the look of an object bears psychologically on S and how paradigmatically it bears on paradigm or generic perceivers. Such a use of the sentence both reports something about S’s psychological state and talks about a relation between the object and S.

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10. I return now to the case of (19), the use of a sentence that lacks any explicit modifier. What now are we to make of uses of this sentence that indicate some subjectivity and thereby seem close in impact to a use of (21)? The answer lies, I suggest, in recognizing how in general there is a potential for subjectivity in the act of comparison and in judging things to be similar. Commonly, in comparing things and judging them to be similar, we respond to how they strike us as alike, or how we find them to be similar. In his discussion of recognition-based concepts, Gareth Evans goes as far as to suggest that the relation ‘looks like’ [is] what we might call a secondary relation—on analogy with the secondary qualities of traditional philosophy, which hold of objects in virtue of the effects they have upon human beings. According to this view, something will be objectively look like something else if it strikes people as like that other thing; or, rather more usefully, b is objectively more like a than c is if an only if b strikes people as more like a than c does. (1982, 292)

Evans emphasizes that the basis of finding things similar, or being struck by their similarity, is not itself a judgment, since it is not in itself necessarily open to evaluation as true or false. But this response of finding things similar plays a central role in our judgments of similarity and in comparison. In general, when we make a comparative claim, the objects being compared are not strictly qualitatively identical. Even when we restrict ourselves to some relevant aspect of the object for comparison, when we are concerned just with its color or its shape, still we need not have strict community of properties among the objects compared. Rather, what is required is that, as far as speaker and audience are concerned, there is a relevant measure of similarity in terms of which the two would strike one as similar. That clearly seems to be relevant to my original example (1). The pregnant man does not have to have a belly shape that absolutely matches the shape of a paradigm woman in the second trimester, if indeed there is any such determinate shape. Rather, it has to be a shape that evokes the recognitional response that one has to pregnant women: one has to find it similar. I might now suggest that typically for those appearance statements with a comparative element we are inviting the audience to make a comparison based on the relevant sense associated with the appearance verb. When one talks of the look of an object inviting a comparison by the audience, one indicates that one finds the objects similar, given one’s visual experience, and invites the audience to do so, too. I suggest that we understand the connection between (19) and (21) in terms of this idea of finding things similar, and correspondingly in there being a similarity not only among the objects perceived but among states of perceiving them. Take some circumstance in which it is appropriate for me to utter (21) (e.g., we are looking at a stick partially immersed in water). Given the suggested treatment above, in uttering (21) I am at least putting forward

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the opinion that as things are for me subjectively, it is very similar to how it is for one (i.e., a generic or paradigm viewer) when confronting characteristic bent things. In a circumstance in which one did confront a bent stick in good lighting, a paradigmatic circumstance for encountering the shape of being bent, one would be inclined to recognize the object as being bent; it would strike one as similar to bent things, and one would find in it an obvious similarity with bent things and a contrast with other shapes. If the psychological situation a subject is in when he or she truly utters (21) is relevantly similar to this paradigm kind of circumstance, then the subject is inclined to find the shape before one as similar to the paradigm of bent things—as more like being bent than anything else. But now, if that is true, we have a simple answer to the question of what could be in common between the way the stick is and the way bent things are. The stick is similar to bent things simply with respect to how it strikes me, or the subjective bearing it has on me. So, we can imagine that (19) could be uttered as a way of expressing how I find things similar, rather than taken as directly reporting on ways that they are. This would both be a description of the object, singling out some respect it has, and yet implicating some response on my part. It is expressive of my psychological state since the relevant metric of similarity here is one of how, in inspecting the object, one finds it similar to other things, and my audience will grasp the import of what I say only if they recognize that the contextually salient metric of similarity tracks my current sense experience in this way. Now, if you are in much the same situation as me, that is, if you, too, are looking at the stick partly immersed in the water, then how it strikes me is likely to be how it strikes you, and there can be common knowledge of this between us, if we both happen to have knowledge of how sticks strike one in these kinds of circumstances. As matters stand, on such an occasion, in uttering (19), I can invite you to make the comparison in question, that is, one that is accessible to someone when in the psychological state that we have in common (i.e., a psychological state relevantly similar to that which one is in when the characteristic impact of the look of bent things affects one). Given the possibility of agreement here, there also seems the possibility of correction and hence disagreement, so in trading on some of the psychological facts of the situation, I can put forward a claim that is a matter of intersubjective accord or dispute.27 Of course, if the relevant comparison to be made requires that one’s audience be suitably psychologically similar, then they are liable to find 27. That is, even if we think that there is an aspect of my speech act in uttering (19) that makes it subjective through expressing my psychological state, it does not follow from this that there could be no room for genuine dispute. The options are not simply subjective + avowal, fully objective + open to dispute. We can instead recognize a progression here, with room for dispute given an intersubjectivity given overlap of sense experience among some discussants, without full objectivity, since there need be no assumption that how things are with the two interlocutors is necessarily how they would be for a standard or paradigm perceiver in such circumstances.

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the object similar in the relevant respect, and as speaker I may fail to express a comparison that you can directly comprehend and evaluate. Consider a situation in which, due to the sudden onset of severe astigmatism, I see many straight sticks as bent. In this case, no one else is liable to be in the position to verify the similarity that I find between the stick before me and other things that I could encounter. You cannot both evaluate similarities and differences among the visible properties of the stick and rely on how visually it strikes you as similar or different to objects if you are to track the relevant metric of similarity that I now employ, for that trades on something idiosyncratic about me. In such circumstances, there is no claim I make that you can make in quite the same way. Saying this might suggest that what I say is literally incomprehensible to others, that since they lack my idiosyncratic psychological state they cannot understand precisely what I say. But that is not quite the case. In treating my statement as sincere, they can infer that I am in a psychological state relative to which I find the stick similar to a bent thing, and hence that the psychological state is relevantly similar to one that one would be in were one confronting something bent. That is, they perfectly well understand that taking S to pick me out, (23) is true. The audience need have no difficulty in imagining themselves into my position and so seeing how (19) would then be correct exploiting the metric of how I find things to be. So it need not make my statement unintelligible, at least if we can coordinate our knowledge of each other’s sense experience by reference to its similarity to what a paradigm or generic perceiver would enjoy. But what it does do is explain the pragmatic force of subjectivity in such utterances of (19), for if my situation is so idiosyncratic that my audience has no expectation of sharing a relevantly similar visual experience to me, then while they can well understand what sort of visual experience I am having, and hence what kind of metric of similarity I am invoking, they cannot verify for themselves whether the claim I make is indeed correct relative to that metric. For this reason, my utterance will be parallel to a first person avowal in the way it can avoid challenge. I should note a complication of the account. The proposal here is that the subjectivity in (19) arises from a potential subjectivity in inviting a comparison: One indicates to the audience that one is to consider how one finds the object similar to the comparisans on the basis of how it strikes one visually. And it is this subjectivity that is the basis of explaining the near equivalence in uses between (19) and (21). Yet not all appearance statements are comparative. I have argued that among nonevidential uses, epistemic and comparative uses have a comparative element. But we also saw reason to admit phenomenal uses, certainly for appearance verbs for senses other than sight, but arguably even for ‘looks’. If the subjectivity of (19) results from the subjectivity inherent in making comparisons, we have no reason to suppose that any subjectivity in phenomenal uses of looks talk should be explained in the same way.

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Should we expect a uniform treatment here? First, is any use of (18) (‘The spread looks splendid’) equivalent to (26) The spread looks splendid to me

as an utterance? Certainly (26) makes perfect sense, and we can imagine someone adding (26) as an afterthought to (18) to buttress an evaluation of the wondrous look of the spread. But here perhaps we have a parallel with certain other judgments of taste, as illustrated above with (24) and (25). It really is not obvious that an utterance of (25) does not seem to indicate the presence of a distinctive psychological state of the speaker yet does implicate some kind of subjectivity or relativity. So in the case of (18) and (26), we might suppose that (26) makes explicit a subjectivity without expressing some distinctive feature of the visual experience: One may propose rather that evaluation of looks as splendid or not evokes some measure of splendidness that is idiosyncratic to the speaker and in such cases (26) makes explicit what may be implicit in putting forward (18) in the first place. In turn what is to be said here is different from what seems appropriate in the case of examples such as (14) and (15) above, for I suggest that the explicitly modified forms of these, namely, ‘The wine tastes sweet to me’, and ‘The man smells rank to me’, do seem to exhibit the feature we find with the comparative looks reports: They report on one’s psychological state and indicate its similarity to that in which one tastes something sweet or smells something rank. On the other hand, any subjectivity in (14) and (15) themselves seems directly to flow from a subjectivity in the simple predications of taste and smell; that is, (14) and (15) cannot indicate any retreat from the simple predications in the way that looks statements can. In these cases, therefore, any equivalence between (14) and (15) and the modified forms (something about which I remain agnostic) derive just from the subjectivity of the qualities ascribed in the first place: that one’s being in the relevant psychological state is sufficient for the object to have the smell or taste in the first place.28 If all of this is right, then we should not predict or expect an entirely uniform treatment of how modifiers ‘to S’, or ‘for S’ report on, or otherwise introduce a subjectivity into the discourse. Is this a serious problem in what I have proposed? It is not clear that there ought to be a uniform account, given the dimensions on which subjectivity may arise.

28. The subjectivity of judgments of personal taste has recently been taken as a battleground for debates among relativists and absolutists: compare Kölbel (2002), Lasersohn (2005), and MacFarlane (2007) for defense of the relativist position, and Glanzberg (2007) and Cappelen and Hawthorne (2009) for absolutist ripostes. The idea here of a perspective from which one finds things similar can be accommodated by both sides: For the absolutist we can think of it as a parameter within the judgment, the metric of similarity, as I have presented in the text, but a relativist could as easily suggest it provides us a point of assessment and suggest that typically we evaluate appearance propositions employing a point of assessment relative to the psychological state of a speaker or of a location within the relevant scene.

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Subjectivity in most looks statements will arise on an occasion when a speaker is in a position to exploit his or her perceptual state as the basis of finding the object seen similar in look to the relevant comparison. Just as a speaker can convey information through a purely subjective use of a looks statement through indicating something about his or her psychological state, so too we can talk about these situations generically, implicating the psychological states that one would have in those circumstances. That is, we can evaluate the claim ‘When half-immersed, the stick looks bent’ as a generic claim that indicates that, for someone viewing the stick under those conditions, a relevant comparison groups the way the stick looks with bent things. And we can grasp that there is such a relevant metric of comparison because we know how the stick would look to one in such circumstances. We exploit our own knowledge of what it would be like to see the stick (imagining the point of view from the inside). On the model offered here, where the comparison occurs within the scope of a relevant metric of similarity, the subjectivity does not reside in any quality attributed to the object but rather in the measure we employ of similarity. In this way, there is no requirement that, in a possible situation we consider in which objects are considered that look bent, there should be anyone in that situation who sees them as bent.29 And this completes the basic sketch of how, through taking such simple forms as ‘o looks F’ as the primitive form, we can give an account of what looks are in terms of the basic visual properties of things. One datum about our appearance talk is the subjectivity of some but not all of our claims about how things appear. While the commonest approaches to this take the report of psychological states as basic and work out, the account I have sketched here remains with the simple form in treating the basic examples as attributions of ways of being to objects. At the same time, it does offer, or so I have argued, an account of how some such talk counts as subjective.

11. How does Parsimony compare with other approaches to looks? The problem of conflicting appearances has driven philosophical discussion since the earliest Greek discussions of the nature of the world. In some variants of the problem, we are to focus on the variation in appearance from perceiver to perceiver: Something sweet to me is bitter to you; something hot to one hand is cold to the other. Is the subject here (or some part of the subject) the relevant measure of reality? If so, should we think of the truth of judgments of sensible qualities only true relative to the subject or as speaking of some limited element of reality accessible 29. Compare here Fara (2000, 2006) on the use of interest-relative standards in understanding the vagueness of gradable adjectives.

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only to that subject (and hence with that subject as authoritative about it). Should we think of the sensible world as one of a world of flux, or should we think of the empirical world as one to which we have only limited sensible access, conveyed to us by a pattern of varying ideas, under which a constant and shared reality lies?30 The problem is not with sensible judgments per se, the judgments about qualities of objects, as for the appearance judgments, of how things look, smell, or taste that are closely related to these sensible judgments. And the keenest problem, I propose, relates not so much to variation in appearance judgment from viewer to viewer as seeming change in appearance in an object over time. Consider a very simple example: We hold the stick up in good light and all inspect it. In this circumstance, OPEN AIR, the following seems an appropriate thing to say: (27) The stick does not look bent.

And, correspondingly, (19) does not seem correct to assert in this circumstance and would most naturally be heard to be contradicting (27). Suppose now that we together place the stick half in a bowl of tap water and admiringly regard the optical results. In this context, HALF WATER, (19) seems entirely appropriate to assert and (27) seems the wrong thing to say. And conversely, (28) The stick looks straight

is assertible in OPEN AIR and not assertible in HALF WATER, and (29) The stick does not look straight

is not assertible in OPEN AIR, seemingly contradicting (28), and is assertible in HALF WATER. This pattern supports the simple thought that the appearance of the stick changes between OPEN AIR and HALF WATER. Now, across the two occasions, the stick does not change in any of its intrinsic properties; it does stand in some different relations to the surrounding medium and viewers, and there are changes in the perceivers, notably, certainly psychological changes in how things look to them. In the example I have chosen, relational changes within the stick’s environment match the psychological changes and themselves may potentially be perceptible, but there are variations on the example that need involve no other relevant alteration but a psychological one in the interlocutors and in which the same pattern can be exemplified. For example, suppose that I wish to illustrate the effects of a TMS device31 connected to certain areas of early visual processing in both speaker and audience, and that OPEN AIR corresponds to the machine being off and HALF WATER to its being on. 30. For a classic discussion of these matters, see Burnyeat (1979). 31. A TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) device sends magnetic signals through the skull, activating electrical impulses in the brain.

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On the one hand, the stick need not have shifted at all in its intrinsic properties, or (in the second example) any of its salient relations to elements in its environment, between the two contexts; on the other, we are inclined to say that there is a change in the appearance of the stick between the two contexts. Either, then, we distinguish between the appearance of the object and any properties it has, intrinsic or relational, and accept that a change in appearance need not be a change in the thing itself, or we resist the intuition that the appearance has changed, although what we can say of the appearance changes, and we continue to hold that appearances are among the ways of being that ordinary objects have. Treating looks statements as principally reports of our psychological states would seem to accord well with the pattern described above, for the shift in assertibility tracks the shift in speaker’s and audience’s psychological states. If the statements are at least in part concerned with these psychological states, then we can understand how what is reported is a change even while there is no change in the stick itself. On the other hand, the simple approach makes it difficult to see how looks statements can be true when there is no suitable viewer around to take the object in. But it is plausible that (28) is true whether or not anyone is there to see the stick, and that when the stick is immersed in water (19) is true. A phenomenalist approach to looks statements can handle this by drawing on the contrast between an occasional use of a looks statement and a habitual or generic one, but now it is unclear why we do not just face the problem for generic statements of the sort I have just spelled out. Let me leave these concerns aside for a moment and spell out the position for Parsimony. According to Parsimony, the ways of looking that the stick has just are among its basic visible properties, most saliently its length and shape, and potentially its surface color. These simply do not change when it is placed half in the water (or when the TMS machine is turned on), so whatever ways of looking the stick had in OPEN AIR it continues to have in HALF WATER, and vice versa. Of course, as I have spelled out above, looks statements ascribe ways of looking to objects by making comparisons between those ways of looking and some paradigm. But now, if by some relevant metric the way of looking the stick has when considered in HALF WATER is similar to that paradigmatic of bent things, then it is likewise still similar in that manner in OPEN AIR. That is to say, whatever is said by (19) in HALF WATER is, according to Parsimony, true in OPEN AIR, even if (19) cannot itself be appropriately uttered in that context and (27) as uttered in that context, since it is true, cannot be taken to be contradicting that. Conversely, (28) as uttered in OPEN AIR says something true with respect to HALF WATER even if the sentence cannot be correctly asserted in that context, and hence what (29) says in HALF WATER, given that it is true, cannot contradict that proposition. If we endorse Parsimony, then we must reject the claim that the stick has changed in appearance. On the other hand, we should not reject the

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claim that (27) is appropriate to assert in OPEN AIR and (19) is not. The above discussion makes a further point clear: The defender of Parsimony cannot explain this through denying that what (19) can be used to say in context HALF WATER is true in OPEN AIR. What else is there? In the preceding section, I suggested that the subjectivity of some looks statements reflects what we might call the perspective of comparison the speaker adopts: In verifying the claim, an audience is invited to find the similarity through exploiting the same (kind of) visual experience as the speaker. In this way, we can see looks statements in such circumstances as being expressive of a speaker’s psychological state, without explicitly being about that state or reporting on a relation between it and the object to which a look is ascribed. And on this view, (19) will be unassertible in OPEN AIR because the truth that it could express about that situation (as used in other circumstances) is inexpressible in this context in using this sentence. Neither speaker nor hearer in OPEN AIR enjoys a visual experience of the stick relative to which they would find the stick similar to a bent thing. So, if the utterance of (19) can be a subjective statement of appearance only through expressing the speaker’s experiential perspective, (19) as uttered in OPEN AIR cannot invoke the relevant metric of similarity with respect to which the claim would be true. Correspondingly, (27) does not deny what (19) says in HALF WATER because (19) in that context appeals to a perspective of comparison that (27) does not appeal to. (27) as asserted in OPEN AIR invites either the comparison relative to the visual experiences therein enjoyed, or some measure of similarity not specifically tied to what experience one has; and relative to that metric the look of the stick does fail to be similar to the look for paradigmatic bent things. Equally, I suggest, we are inclined to hear (28) as incorrect in HALF WATER and (29) as correct, because we interpret them as inviting the perspective of comparison to be that of the visual experiences enjoyed in that context, and in those circumstances one does not find the stick similar to a paradigmatic straight object. On the picture I have sketched, there are variations in the world, namely, variations in our psychological states, but our talk about appearances is not normally a matter of reporting those states, but rather a matter of expressing them. On this view, when how objects strike us varies as we change in relation to them, or when they are differently situated in the world, their appearance properties need not change. If we report on their appearances, rather than on how things strike us, what we say is made true by the appearance properties the objects have. So a change in our propensities to characterize their appearances need not thereby be a change in their appearances. On this view, what varies is the assertibility of certain claims, tracking the psychological states that we would most naturally express by making them. An ancient response to the problem of conflicting appearances is to posit a constantly changing world of appearances that we apprehend. Faced with a world of flux, varying reports of appearance over time reflect

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changes in that flux. Standard realism supposes the world around us to be more constant than this flux of appearance. If appearance reports are to reflect change, then those reports must be reports of the changes that do occur, namely, those in our own minds. In some recent discussions of perceptual illusion, there has been a tendency again to posit within the stable world around us a flux of appearances. A motivation for this profligacy has been the desire to hold onto the natural thought that describing how a stick looks is offering a description of something in the world around us and saying something about the way it is. The semantic story I have developed here is quite consistent with Parsimony and hence does not require a world of flux that we apprehend. Our appearance talk may report on our psychological states when we employ explicit modifiers such as ‘to me’, but in other circumstances it can reflect our psychological situation through expressing it in indicating how, on the basis of our current sense experience, we find what we perceive to be similar to other things. The variation in the appearance reports that we find assertible therefore reflects the variation in our psychological states without having to be reports on them. In that way, this account holds on to the natural view that to talk about the look of the stick is to talk about some way an object in the common world is.

12. I have sketched over the last few pages an account of looks statements, and a corresponding account of the nature of looks on which we can explain how interlocutors can both have and convey a large amount of information about the looks of objects. I have also accommodated the fact that many looks statements seem explicitly to report on our visual experiences and that others exhibit subjectivity in their use. Nonetheless, the semantics I have offered for these statements is minimal in at least the sense that it commits us hardly at all to the underlying nature of sense experience: The principal forms that we have for talking about both appearances and sensory states are ones that indicate that things are more or less similar to each other. Likewise, in taking looks statement to attribute properties to objects, I have shown that there is no reason from the semantics alone to attribute to objects more than the basic visible properties that we were committed to positing anyway. Parsimony is adequate to the job of finding witnesses to the truth of the variety of claims we make about how things appear. The semantic account sketched is a very minimal one; on this, the main point of most of our talk about the looks of things and of how things look to us is to invite comparison between objects, or between psychological states that are what we take to be paradigm examples. So on this account, little can be read off about the nature of the psychological states that we are reporting on. And indeed, the point of the account here sketched is not to offer grounds for preferring one theory of sensory experience over

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another. The minimal semantics I have offered is quite consistent with a representational or intentional theory of sense experience and equally with a sense-datum approach. Nor have I said anything that compromises naive realism. The aim here has not been to favor one such account over any other, but rather to indicate reasons for why we should not look for evidence in favor of one of these views over the any of the others in the ways in which we talk of appearances. One might be tempted here to dismiss the focus on quite how we talk of looks in particular and appearance in general as tied too closely to the idiosyncracies of English (compare Byrne 2009, 444; Siegel, chapter 12 this volume). Our concern should surely be on the phenomena in the world that are our interest. It is true that the means that various natural languages use to comment on appearances are extremely varied. But the little sketch I have given here depends on very little that is peculiar to English itself, so it at least gives us a model of the most general facts of appearance that we tend to focus on in debating the philosophy of perception. Without a demonstration that the proper dress version of this approach fails to provide an adequate semantics for English looks talk, one should remain skeptical that we can draw any substantial conclusions about the nature of perceptual states solely from observations about what we say in certain circumstances. My discussion underlines what many accepted anyway: Jackson was mistaken when he thought that he could replace the bold conviction of earlier sense-datum theorists in the manifest existence of sense-data by careful investigation of the logical form of appearance talk and still have an argument that demonstrates the existence of nonphysical visual sensedata. It would equally be mistaken to suppose that one relies on anything more than faith to take the pattern of our talk about illusion in the senses to reveal the truth of intentionalism about sense experience. When we ask of the forgery of a Ming vase whether it is an accurate copy of the original, we do not assume that either the original or the copy possesses a representational content. So in general, to ask of something whether it is accurate or not need not require it to be a representation or to have representational content, even if in some specific cases it is; it is simply to invite someone to match things. The picture I have sketched above of talk of sense experience reveals that the question of whether some experience (in being, e.g., a case of its looking as if a red patch was there) was veridical is, in its nonspecificity, equally just a question about matching. Our talk of things being as they appear does not in itself presuppose the presence of representational content. To ask of the experience whether in this respect it is veridical is to look for a match between how things were in the situation the subject was in and the kind of situation a paradigm perceiver would be in, to whom the subject’s experience was saliently similar. Making the match does not presuppose, but also does not rule out, that such experiences in some sense possess an intentional content.

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Settling the larger questions in the theory of perception, whether sense experience is in any aspect representational, whether there are any nonphysical sense-data or qualia, whether in any respect experience is a relation of awareness to objects independent of us, requires that we draw on considerations from outside those that bear just on how we manage to talk to each other about how things look, or how those looks bear on us.

REFERENCES Aikhenvald, Alexandra. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Aristotle. 1993. De Anima, ed. D. W. Hamlyn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Breckenridge, Wylie. 2007a. Against One Reason for Thinking That Visual Experiences Have Representational Content. Philosophical Perspectives 21: 117–123. Breckenridge, Wylie. 2007b. The Meaning of ‘Look’. DPhil dissertation Philosophy, Oxford University. Brewer, Bill. 2007a. How to Account for Illusion. In Disjunctivism, ed. Fiona Macpherson and Adrian Haddock. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Brewer, Bill. 2007b. Perception and Its Objects. Philosophical Studies 132: 87–97. Burnyeat, Myles. 1979. Conflicting Appearances. Proceedings of the British Academy 65: 69–111. Byrne, Alex. 2009. Experience and Content. Philosophical Quarterly 59(236): 23. Cappelen, Herman, and John Hawthorne. 2009. Relativism and Monadic Truth. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Chalmers, David J. 2006. Perception and the Fall from Eden. In Perceptual Experience, edited by Tamar Szabó Gendler and John Hawthorne. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Chisholm, Roderick. 1959. Perceiving. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Davidson, Donald. 1967. The Logical Form of Action Sentences. In Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Evans, Gareth. 1982. The Varieties of Reference, ed. J. McDowell. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Fara, Delia Graff. 2000. Shifting Sands of Relativism. Philosophical Topics 20: 45–81. Fara, Delia Graff. 2006. Profiling Interest Relativity. Analysis 68(4): 326–335. Gisborne, Nikolas. 1993. Nominalisations of Perception Verbs. University College London Working Papers in Linguistics 5: 23–44. Gisborne, Nikolas, and Jasper Holmes. 2007. A History of English Evidential Verbs of Appearance. English Language and Linguistics 11(1): 1–29. Glanzberg, Michael. 2007. Context, Content and Relativism. Philosophical Studies 136: 1–29. Higginbotham, James. 2002. On Events in Linguistic Semantics. In Speaking of Events, ed. J. Higginbotham, F. Pianesi, and A. C. Varzi. New York: Oxford University Press. Hornsby, Jennifer. 1981. Verbs and Events. In Proceedings of the Keele Conference in Philosophy of Logic and Language, ed. Jonathan Dancy. Keele: Keele University Press. 88–111. Hyman, John. 2006. The Objective Eye. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press. Jackson, Frank. 1977. Perception: A Representative Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Jackson, Frank. 1982. Epiphenomenal Qualia. Philosophical Quarterly 32: 127–136. Jackson, Frank. 1986. What Mary Didn’t Know. Journal of Philosophy 83 :291–295. Johnston, Mark. 2006. The Obscure Object of Hallucination. Philosophical Studies 103:113–183. Kölbel, Max. 2002. Truth without Objectivity. London: Routledge. Lasersohn, Peter. 2005. Context Dependence, Disagreement and Predicates of Personal Taste. Linguistics and Philosophy 28: 643–686. Leslie, Sarah-Jane. 2008. Generics: Cognition and Acquisition. Philosophical Review 117: 1–48. Lloyd, G. E. R. 2007. Cognitive Variations. Oxford: Clarendon Press. MacFarlane, John. 2007. Relativism and Disagreement. Philosophical Studies (132): 17–31. Martin, M. G. F. 2006. Perception. In The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Frank Jackson and Michael Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Nöe, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Nudds, Matthew. 2010. What Are Auditory Objects? Review of Philosophy & Psychology1(1), ed. Bullot, N.J. & Egré, P.. O’Shaughnessy, Brian. 2002. Consciousness and the World. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Parsons, Terence. 1990. Events in the Semantics of English. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Peacocke, Christopher. 1983. Sense and Content: Experience, Thought, and Their Relations. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Peacocke, Christopher 1986. Thoughts: An Essay on Content. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Peacocke, Christopher 1992. A Study of Concepts. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Quinton, Anthony. 1955. The Problem of Perception. Mind 64: 28–51. Quinton, Anthony. 1973. The Nature of Things. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Sainsbury, Mark. 2007. A Puzzle about How Things Look. In Perspectives on Perception, eds. Mary Margaret McCabe and Mark Textor. Heustenstamm: Ontos Verlag. Scholl, B. J., and Z. W. Pylyshyn. 1999. Tracking Multiple Items through Occlusion: Clues to Visual Objecthood. Cognitive Psychology 38: 259–290. Siegel, Susanna. 2006. Which Properties Are Represented in Perception? In Perceptual Experience, ed. Tamar Szabo Gendler and John Hawthorne. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sorensen, Roy. 2008. Seeing Dark Things. New York: Oxford University Press. Strawson, P. F. 1959. Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. London: Methuen. Thau, Michael. 2002. Content and Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press. Travis, Charles. 2004. Silence of the Senses. Mind 113: 57–94. Tye, Michael. 2002. Consciousness, Color and Content. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Wiggins, David. 1986. Verbs and Adverbs and Some Other Modes of Grammatical Combination. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 86: 273–306. Wright, Crispin. 1982. Strict Finitism. Synthese 51: 203–282.

9 How Things Look (and What Things Look That Way) Mohan Matthen

What color does a white wall look in the pinkish light of the late afternoon—well before sunset, when the light turns lurid? Does it look different in color than at noon, when the light is harsh and bluish white? What shape does a circular table look when you are standing next to it— viewing it from a moderately oblique angle, not as if you were squatting down by it? Does it look different in shape than if you were suspended above its center, looking directly down? These questions seem simple enough, but philosophers disagree sharply about them. 1. Variable appearance: Some imply that the white wall looks pinkish in the late afternoon and that the table viewed obliquely looks elliptical. This used to be the majority view. 2. Constant appearance: Others insist, on account of the phenomenon known as color constancy, that the wall looks white. Shape constancy would lead them to say that the table looks circular. (I discuss perceptual constancy at length in sections II–IV below.) 3a. Both: Sydney Shoemaker (1994, 2006) takes a more complex view: He acknowledges constancy and holds that in pink light the wall looks white, just as it does at noon, but insists that it nonetheless looks different in some “unnamed” color-related way. Shoemaker would presumably hold that the table looks circular but nonetheless different than when viewed straight on in some unnamed shape-related way. (These “unnamed” properties are sometimes known as appearance properties. Susanna Schellenberg [2008] defends something like appearance properties—she calls them “situation-dependent properties.”—these are objective features of the world, she claims.)

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3b. Both: Alva Noë (2004) says that the table looks both circular and elliptical, these being, as he says, two “moments” of visual perception. He takes a similar position on color. 4. Neither: Finally, some are persuaded that the wall looks no color; the table, no shape. This is an intractable dispute, because each party seems motivated by considerations quite different from the others and seem not even to agree about how to go about settling their differences. Introspection has not helped: if it rendered an easy verdict, there would presumably be no disagreement. In this chapter, I attempt to provide a new approach to these questions. After a brief overview of this complex dispute (section I), I embark on a reexamination of perceptual constancy (sections II and III). This leads to a reinterpretation of this phenomenon, which I will call the scene-parsing thesis (section IV). In the second half of the chapter, I apply the sceneparsing thesis to the task of showing that, although it seems most correct to say that the wall looks white in pinkish light, and the table looks circular when viewed at a moderately oblique angle—in line with the “constant appearance” option above—none of the options mentioned above gives a full account of visual phenomenology. The questions posed above assume that color, shape, and other visual features are always ascribed to the wall or to the table. On the account I propose this is not correct: Some features are visually ascribed to other things in the scene, for it might be that, though it is true that the wall looks white, it is nevertheless true that the light looks pink and that, as a consequence, the wall looks as white things do in pink light. This introduces a complexity to the discussion of the issue that helps sort out some of the intuitions that lead to the conflicting positions described above. My main goal is theoretical, of course, but I also hope that my discussion will actually enrich introspection and help readers become more acutely aware of certain aspects of their own visual experiences.

I. THE DISAGREEMENT AND ITS CONTEXT

1. Locality Much empiricist theorizing about perception begins from the vague intuition that sensory experience reflects the state of the sensory receptors. Hermann von Helmholtz, the great physicist and pioneer of sensory psychology, propounded a precise version of this doctrine.1 He thought that This chapter owes a lot to a lot of people, including Imogen Dickie, Todd Ganson, Jennifer Nagel, Bence Nanay, Calvin Normore, Susanna Schellenberg, and Dustin Stokes. 1. See Hamlyn (1977) for a concise and informative account, from which the following quotations are drawn. See also Helmholtz (1977), Hatfield (1990), and Turner (1994).

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things produce sensory experiences that reflect the energy patterns by which they excite sensory receptors. He held, first of all, that “the excitation of any given nerve attached to a sense-organ produces its own experience.” And further, he held that the functioning of each such nerve is “discrete,” in the sense that it cannot influence the others. He concluded that: Locality thesis: The visual experience occasioned by an object depends solely on the excitation of the retinal neurons onto which that object projects.

2. Immediacy Some empiricists draw from the locality thesis (or some vaguer precursor) the rather startling notion that we do not immediately see things as having any properties. Here is the first step of their argument: By definition, we immediately see x only if seeing x is not wholly or partly constituted by seeing something else. Suppose that seeming to see x does not guarantee that one is really seeing x. Then, seeming to see x is wholly or partly constituted by seeing something other than x.

Here is an example that illustrates the move. It might seem that we immediately see three-dimensional objects such as tables and chairs. However, if we were presented with only the hollowed-out facing surfaces of the tables and chairs that we see, we would still seem to see the threedimensional tables and chairs. For this reason, the visual state of seeming to see three-dimensional objects does not guarantee that we really see such objects. Now, there is something in common between these situations—in both cases, we see the surfaces. The philosophers I am talking about claim that in such a case, we see three-dimensional tables and chairs by seeing the common element—that seeing the facing surfaces partially constitutes how we see the tables and chairs. Generalizing from this, they claim that whenever error is possible, there is something that we see both in the nonerroneous situation and in the erroneous one. This common element is explanatorily what we see immediately in both situations.2 Reasoning along the lines outlined above, some classic empiricists constructed immediate seeing along the following lines: Definition 1: S immediately sees x—where x may be a material object, fact, or event—if and only if the occurrence of S’s visual experience guarantees, necessarily and a priori, the presence or occurrence of x, that is, if no error is possible with respect to seeing x. (I often drop the “immediately” in what follows.)

Berkeley, for example, argued (apparently following William Molyneux) that we cannot immediately see distance, for, given locality, our 2. For a discussion of this kind of argument, see Martin (2005), who uses the term “directly” where I have written “immediately.”


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visual experience changes with conditions of viewing, so there is nothing about the patch that a thing projects on the retina that guarantees that the thing is any particular distance away. By definition 1, this means that we do not see things as at any definite distance from ourselves (Berkeley 1709).3 In fact, since no visual state guarantees any external state of affairs, we do not immediately see anything external.

3. ISOLATION How do these precepts apply to the white wall viewed in the late afternoon, and the circular table viewed from a moderately oblique angle? (I return repeatedly to these examples and often refer to them simply as “the wall” and “the table.”) The wall reflects a pinkish packet of light to the eye, and the relevant retinal neurons respond in a way that correlates with this color. But the same pinkish packet of light could have been reflected by a pinkish wall in white light. By the locality thesis, it follows that this, too, would produce the same kind of color experience. This experience is compatible, then, both with the wall being pink and with its being white. So it is not an immediate visual apprehension of either color in the wall or, for that matter, of any other. The same holds true of shape perception: A thing looks a certain shape because of the topography of the retinal points to which it projects. Given different angles of viewing, the same projection could have been thrown by an object of a different shape. Hence, we do not (immediately) see any particular shape. Generalizing from this, and assuming that what we immediately see corresponds to visual experience, some conclude that: Isolation thesis: Visual experience does not constitute cognition of (is not “as of”) anything possessing an objective property (where an “objective property” is one that an object has independently of anybody experiencing or thinking about it).

Anil Gupta offers what is perhaps the best recent development of this view: “Experience . . . is not an informant. . . . Experience taken in isolation is mute.” (2006, 203; see also Travis 2004, which is entitled “The Silence of the Senses.”).4 This, of course, corresponds to position 4 above (labeled “Neither”). It is a thesis about sensation, about the kind of cognition that it is or contains—about the cognitive significance of how 3. Berkeley’s argument is somewhat more complicated than my representation here. He allows that, in binocular vision, the inward turning of the eyes betokens distance. However, he takes distance to be a tactual quality and insists that this betokening is by learned association. 4. Gupta and Charles Travis both attribute the argument to Descartes, but Descartes holds in the Sixth Meditation that “the proper purpose of the sensory perceptions given me by nature is simply to inform the mind of what is beneficial or harmful for the composite of which the mind is a part.” It seems from this that Descartes holds that sensation pronounces on something outside the perceiver. The Third Meditation could be read as testing the minimum extent to which external objects are implicated in perceptual content.

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things look. Gupta holds that experiences lead to perceptual judgments only when conjoined with “views” about the world but that, taken by themselves, they imply nothing about how the world is. This is the argument for the “Neither” position.

4. Externality Let us simply grant that there is no sensory state S such that my being in S implies that the external world is a certain way. The isolation thesis is obviously not forced on us, since we may reject definition 1. Some philosophers maintain, contrary to definition 1, that: Externality thesis: A visual experience is in and of itself (by virtue of its phenomenal character, e.g.) as of an objective visual sense feature.5

The idea behind externality is that, in order to know the message conveyed by a perceptual state, a perceiver needs nothing more than to undergo the experience itself. When I look at the table, I know in virtue of the experience itself, and nothing else, that it looks a certain shape. In order to know this, I do not need to know whether my being in this state increases the likelihood that the table is that shape. Moreover, these philosophers claim, the message conveyed by perception is about external things: When we look at the wall or at the table, we receive a message that is about purportedly objective properties of these things.

5. Normative Construals Now, a considerable complication: At first sight, externality directly contradicts the position that Charles Travis and Gupta take: It asserts, contrary to them, that visual experience does pronounce on how things are, even if it is sometimes unreliable. But it may be an oversimplification to counterpose externality and isolation in this way, for the isolation thesis may be intended, by at least some of its proponents, normatively, not “naturalistically,”6 for one might make something like the following a condition of adequacy on how visual states are to be described: Epistemic norm of correlation: A visual presentation of x should be a source of knowledge about x: it is therefore stipulated that,in order for visual state V to count as a seeing of x, V must be a reliable indicator of x in the following manner: . . . .

5. Tyler Burge (1986) argues that certain scientific approaches to sensory processing are committed to something like externality. 6. See Hatfield (1990, esp. ch. 1) for a stimulating discussion of this distinction. Gary Hatfield takes Descartes and Locke to be concerned with norms; for Descartes in particular, “to call something a ‘thought’ is to imply that it meets certain standards” (Hatfield, 17).


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Definition 1 can be understood as one way of filling in the dots in the above epistemic norm.7 It sets a very high standard, of course, but this is a product of a certain kind of attitude toward knowledge, not perception. One could get a more accommodating norm of correlation by lowering one’s demands on knowledge—however that might be, one’s conception of perception would derive from these demands. On a normative construal, the isolation thesis is a conceptual consequence of the fact that no visual state satisfies the chosen epistemic norm with respect to any external object. Because they fail the epistemic norm (as filled out by them), some philosophers refuse to characterize visual states as informing us of external states of affairs. By contrast, externality tells us only how visual states instinctively seem to us—as determined by introspection, or by the kind of investigation of this question that takes place in a psychological laboratory. On this construal, there is no conflict between the two perspectives. Externality is advanced as a fact about phenomenology; understood normatively, isolation seeks to undermine the epistemological pretensions of visual phenomenology. This complication about normativity need not concern us right away; the debate that occupies our attention for most of this chapter occurs within the province of the externality thesis, though in due course, I shall sketch an alternative to the epistemic norm of correlation.

6. The Disagreement Bracketing the epistemic norm, then, here is the debate. There are some externalists, first, who claim, on the basis of introspection or on other psychological grounds, that the wall looks pinkish in the late afternoon, and that the table looks elliptical when one is standing next to it—or, more generally, that these external things look different as conditions of observation change.8 Change the light, and the sensed color properties of the wall also change; change the angle of viewing, and (generally speaking) the sensed shape properties change. Thus: Variation thesis: When (relevant) viewing conditions change, things look different (provided that these things themselves stay the same in the relevant respect).

7. Gupta insists that his theory is not empirical but logical (2006, 182); it is about the justificatory relationship that perceptual experience bears to judgment. Travis is harder to read on this point. 8. Noë (2004, 89) borrows from painters’ techniques a way to prove these claims. He says that the table “looks elliptical to me because, to indicate its shape, I can (and indeed, in some sense, must) move my hand in a characteristic manner.” Similarly, he says, the white wall looks pink because you can tell that it matches a pink chip (140). While his approach is suggestive, I do not agree that it proves that the table looks elliptical or the wall pink. (I return to this in section V.) However this may be, it is worth noting that Noë is proposing a principled way of deciding a question that others attempt to adjudicate on intuition alone.

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Because variation is meant to be a phenomenological fact, it is not hostage to the locality thesis or to any other psychophysical theory, even though it is often inspired by locality and ends up with similar results. Supporters of the locality thesis (e.g., Helmholtz) are committed to variation at some level of perceptual processing—though they may think, as Helmholtz apparently did, that some subsequent associative process corrects the earlier sensory process and restores constant appearance. However, supporters of variation (e.g., Berkeley, Shoemaker, and Noë) need not take any position on locality. Other externalists deny variation, insisting instead that: Constancy thesis: In good conditions of viewing, things look the way they are, even if these conditions change (provided that they remain “good”).9

Proponents of this way of thinking point out that, contrary to what one might expect given variation, normally endowed perceivers have no tendency at all to mistake the color of things in polychromatic light (compare Bradley and Tye 2001), or their shape at moderate angles of viewing. Indeed, if asked to describe things in such circumstances, or to draw a picture, they tend, spontaneously and immediately, to represent them as they really are, and not as the variation thesis supposes they look. Of course, there are situations in which things look otherwise than they are. In a particularly vivid sunset, white things might look violet. Or there may be situations in which our visual states do not present things very clearly: it may not always be visually evident whether something is circular or elliptical. (This is why I have been emphasizing good viewing conditions in relation to constancy.) Finally, there are hybrid positions. Shoemaker endorses both constancy and variation but with reference to two different sets of properties: He suggests that constancy is true of color and shape, while variation is true of a different set of unnamed color-related and shape-related properties (the appearance properties). Noë suggests that constancy and variation mark two different “moments” of visual experience: In one way, or relative to one attentional attitude, the wall looks white; relative to another, it looks pink.

II. PERCEPTUAL CONSTANCY The philosophical disagreement among those who subscribe to the externality thesis is about how things look phenomenally. As I noted in the introduction to this chapter, the persistence of this disagreement seems to 9. Note a certain parallelism between constancy and definition 1. The latter sets a normative standard of correlation that a visual state must meet in order to count as a perception of something. Constancy suggests that in good conditions a similar standard is satisfied—though not as strong a standard as definition 1 assumes. This opens up the possibility of plugging other conditions into the epistemic norm of correlation to produce something less demanding than definition 1. I ignore this—I am interested in formulating a rather different kind of epistemic norm.


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imply that casual introspection will not decide the issue. We need, cautiously and with due regard for proper philosophical methodology, to consult empirical studies of perceptual experience to help and enrich introspection. In the bulk of what follows, I am concerned with variation and constancy; I try to show that neither tells the whole truth and propose a third alternative—the scene-parsing thesis—that also presupposes externality. I make some remarks about the isolation thesis along the way and conclude with a brief assessment in section VII. I begin with a well-known phenomenon or, rather, with the well-known aspects of a phenomenon that, as I discuss below, turns out to be surprisingly complicated. It has been known for a very long time that in a wide range of circumstances, things tend to look the way they really are. Here is Robert Woodworth’s classic description: It is a fact of common observation that coal looks black even in sunlight, and chalk white even in shadow. Yet under these conditions the eye receives much stronger light from the coal than from the chalk. The retinal image of the coal is much the brighter, but the observer’s impressions seem to conform to the objects rather than to the stimuli. He sees no paradox here, for if coal is really black, it certainly ought to look black in a good light. Not a bad answer, perhaps, but one that poses a problem for the psychologist. (Woodworth and Schlosberg 1954, 428)

Woodworth’s observation is one of many that seem to support constancy. As I observed earlier, it is also commonly observed that things look the color they are in a variety of viewing conditions. Similar observations have been made with regard to the visual perception of shape. Jolicoeur and Humphrey (1998) review evidence that, given certain “canonical” angles of viewing—for example, views that reveal three sides of an object without excessive foreshortening—even relatively irregular or asymmetric objects (wrenches, saucepans, and even odd-looking contrivances with armlike or noselike attachments) can reliably be recognized after rotation. These observations are bolstered by experiments in comparative vision. Train a bee or a bird to expect pure water in green dishes and sugar water (which they generally prefer) in yellow ones. Now place the yellow dishes in conditions where they reflect greenish light—under heavy leaf cover, for instance. The bees will still go to the yellow dishes in search of the sweet water they prefer. This shows that they recognize the yellow dishes for the color they are, despite the color of light they reflect. Notice the three elements of this behavioral complex: (1) An unlearned or unconditioned input, perceived color (2) An innate operation—for example, classical or (as in this case) operant conditioning—that modifies the organism’s responses to the environment in response to discovered correlations (3) A learned or conditioned response to yellow dishes

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Note that bees that have been trained to expect sugar water in yellow dishes will go to these dishes the very first time they see them in nonstandard illumination. Learning is involved with regard to where the bees search for sugar water—in yellow dishes, not green—but not with regard to how they perceive color in nonstandard illumination. In short, animals react to the same color or the same shape the same way, even when these features are presented in unfamiliar conditions of viewing. And this is true very widely across the animal kingdom. As Christa Neumeyer has written, “In all animals investigated so far, color constancy has been found. Even animals with color vision systems probably developed during evolution independently of each other, such as the honeybee, the goldfish, and the rhesus monkey, show this property” (1998, 347). Color constancy in animals is tested by learning or conditioning experiments such as the one just described. Now, it is possible that nothing looks any way to honeybees; perhaps honeybees do not possess consciousness at all (see Hardin 1988, 151–152). Still, it is not unreasonable to suppose that as consciousness emerges in evolution, it sits, however precariously, on top of the kind of visual processing that is present in more primitive visual systems. In other words, the unlearned input to conditioning in these more primitive systems is preserved in more evolved systems as a determinant of conscious visual experience. This is confirmed by the fact that, in humans, who can directly report how things look, conditioned responses to things correlate with how they look subjectively. The Gestalt psychologists emphasized a shape-related phenomenon of the same kind. Kurt Koffka describes it in this way: If the after-image of a circle is projected on a plane which is not frontal-parallel, it will appear as an ellipse. . . . What is true of shape is equally true of size, the size of an after-image being a direct function of the distance at which it is projected. . . . Mrs Frank (1923) . . . had her students project after-images on a plane surface on which a perspective drawing of a deep tunnel had been made. Then the size of the after-image varied with the place on the sheet of paper on which it was projected; if it fell on a part corresponding to a near part of the tunnel it was considerably smaller than when it was thrown on a part corresponding to a remote part of the tunnel. (1935, 211–212)

Koffka cites this phenomenon in support of the view that the perception of wholes is not simply composed of the perceptions of their parts. Rather, as Max Wertheimer put it, “what takes place in each single part already depends upon what the whole is” (1924). All of this vindicates the constancy thesis. Variation cannot be a proper account of how things look—at least not on the simplistic reading on which it is taken to imply that things always look a different color in different-colored light or a different shape when viewed from different angles. (Note that Shoemaker and Noë, who endorse variation, do not take it this way: Both think that things look the same color in different conditions—but also a different color.) Organisms clearly react to colors


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and shapes as such, even though they encounter them in different conditions of viewing. Now, Woodworth’s “problem for the psychologist” is this: How does the visual system accomplish the feat of converting variable retinal signals received from objects into invariable features as they really inhere in objects? Historically, the key to solving this puzzle lay in the discovery that, contrary to the locality thesis, the same local retinal response can produce very different observer impressions in different contexts. One particularly revealing demonstration was provided in 1789 by Gaspard Monge. Here it is, in the words of J. D. Mollon: To illustrate his lecture, Monge had hung a red cloth on the wall of a house opposite the west facing windows of the meeting room of the Academy. He invited his fellow académiciens to view the red cloth through a red glass. The appearance of the cloth was counter-intuitive. Seen through a filter that transmitted predominantly red light, it might have been expected to continue to look a saturated red. But no, it looked pale, even whitish. The same was true when the assembled company inspected one of their fellows who happened that day to be wearing a red outfit. A yellow-tinted paper examined through a yellow glass looked absolutely white. Monge was aware that his illusion (we may call it the Paradox of Monge) was strongest when the scene was brightly lit and when there was an array of variously colored objects present in the scene, including objects that one knew to be naturally white. When all that was visible through the red glass was a red surface, the effect was abolished. (2003, 20)

So much for the locality thesis:10 The apparent color and shape of an object do not covary with the image it projects to the retina taken in isolation, for, as the Gestalt psychologists realized, how an object looks depends on the array of light received by a much larger area of the retina, or perhaps the whole of it. (This is a simpler thesis, and more in line with infant-perception studies, than the idea that constant appearance is achieved by a second, associative process, which corrects non-constancy.) The visual system computes the true color of a small region using characteristics of the whole scene. (Early theorists, e.g., Ewald Hering, were inclined to think that constancy is entirely a retinal effect, involving an interneuron damping process now known as lateral inhibition. This is almost certainly wrong, as the computational approaches discussed later on imply.)

10. William James was already well aware of this. In a section of The Principles of Psychology that was written by E. B. Delabarre, we find the following “law of contrast”: “The color and brightness of one object always apparently affects the color and brightness of any other object seen simultaneously with it or immediately after” (James 1890/2007, vol 2, 662). James noted that Helmholtz had attributed the law of contrast to a “deception of judgment,” but he himself endorsed Hering’s contrary view that the effect depends “purely” on the “physiological action of the terminal apparatus of vision” (667). (This is probably wrong, as I note in the text.)

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These experiments and demonstrations (and hundreds of others like it) led investigators like Monge to suppose that the context-sensitive process that leads to evident mistakes of perception—the red cloth looking white—leads in more normal circumstances to things looking the way they really are. The mistakes are, in other words, diagnostically valuable errors of normal sensory processing. This would show that the variation thesis outlined in the preceding section must be wrong if it is taken in a certain way—a rather simplistic way, as I discuss in the next section. Woodworth’s lump of coal looks black in good light, even though it is reflects less light than the chalk in shadow right beside it. In this respect, at least—with respect to looking black, that is—the coal looks the same in bright light as it does in shadow.11 Similarly, the very same afterimage looks different sizes and shapes when projected on different backgrounds. Of course, this is not to claim that things will always look exactly the color they are. The claim is just that in a wide range of circumstances—in “good” conditions of viewing—they will look the color they are. Even this has to be qualified. It has been demonstrated that constancy is only approximate. Observers cannot match color samples shown side by side in different illumination. They are usually successful in identifying what broad color name (e.g., blue, yellow) should be applied to a sample, but they make plenty of mistakes within such categories. Nevertheless, there is some level of description under which things look the same color in different conditions of viewing.

III. EXTRACTING THE ILLUMINANT Let these observations about constancy rest for a while—I am not quite ready to deal with them systematically. Here, however, is a question prompted by the material just covered: Does constancy imply that things look in all respects the same in good viewing conditions? Even disregarding the approximate nature of color and shape constancy, surely not, for the simple introspective observation that proponents of variation offer does seem in some sense correct. It is impossible to deny that a lump of coal looks different in bright light than it does in shadow, and that a wall looks different in pinkish light than it does at noon. How exactly do they look different? Many—among them, the proponents of variation—find it reasonable and straightforward to answer that the coal looks lighter, the wall pinker. But on the face of it, this contradicts the constancy phenomena 11. Interestingly, Woodworth qualifies this: “The regression or shift is from the stimulus color, size, or shape toward the object color . . . the coal looks black in any light but not quite so black under very bright as under a relatively dim light.” (Woodworth and Schlosberg 1954, 428) This seems wrong to me. Assuming the presence of an “array of variously colored objects” in the scene (see Mollon 2003), it seems to me that the coal will look blackest in bright light.


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just discussed, so we have a problem: If things look the same in color and shape despite changes of viewing conditions, how are we to account for the widely acknowledged—undeniable, really—difference of appearance? Common sense suggests a way to resolve this difficulty. Admittedly, sunlit coal looks the same in one way as it does in the dark—it looks black. But it simply can’t be the case that a lump of coal looks just the same in bright light as it does in shadow. If it did, how could one tell by looking at it whether it is in bright light or in shadow? And surely one can tell this. It follows that the coal should, at the very least, look, when it is in bright light or shadow, as if it were in bright light or shadow. And this suggests a different possibility concerning how it looks: It may look the same in one way and different in another. Perhaps it looks black both in sunlight and in shadow, but differently illuminated in different conditions of illumination. Similarly, the table: Perhaps it looks round viewed perpendicularly and also from any moderately oblique angle, but when it is viewed obliquely it looks different in that it looks as if it is being viewed obliquely. Perhaps, then, the cure for the ills of constancy is more constancy— constancy with respect to conditions of viewing as well as constancy as to properties of objects. Note, however, that this accommodates the variable appearance attitude (1) sketched in the introduction above, but with a subtle amendment: The wall and the table look different (as does the coal), but they look different with regard not to their color but to how they are illuminated, or viewed. This elementary reflection is taken up and supported by a seminal but somewhat neglected reflection on color constancy. Dorothea Jameson and Leo Hurwich complain that recent computational approaches to constancy concentrate exclusively on a single question: How can constant surface reflectance properties of objects be derived from reflections under unknown illuminants? But, they protest, apart from its use in the computation of surface reflectance characteristics for object recognition, perceptual information about the different conditions of illumination as relevant in its own right [is] largely if not totally ignored in [the computational approach]. Our own judgment is that human visual systems . . . are likely to have evolved a design that provides perceptual information about change as well as constancy—about light, weather, and time of day, as well as about the relatively constant physical properties of mainly opaque objects within a scene. (1989, 2–3)

In other words, much of the literature assumes that the visual system’s overriding task is to discover constant properties of external objects and simply to discard the interfering variable information that confuses the retinal image. This is the idea implicit in Helmholtz’s famous phrase “discounting the illuminant.” But, as Jameson and Hurwich imply, the visual system does not simply discard or discount information about transitory environmental conditions—it provides us with this information also. It

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would be much more accurate to say that the system extracts the illuminant, as well as many other features of the scene. In short, color vision tells us not simply that an object is white or pink but also that the illumination in which it stands is bright or dull, bluish white, or slightly pink. Above, I implied that in the late afternoon the wall might look as a white thing does in when it stands in pinkish light. If Jameson and Hurwich are right, this would be a consequence of the wall looking white and the light looking pink. It is easy to extend this reasoning to the perception of shape. We recognize shapes from different angles of viewing. Suppose you are shown a long-handled oval saucepan, and then you are shown it again after it has been rotated by a small amount (e.g., 20°) in three dimensions. The rim might project a different shape; the handle might now be somewhat foreshortened. Still, you would not find it difficult to recognize the shape or to detect a switch with a pan of different shape or dimensions. Presumably, the visual system is able to register the shape of the pan and then to rotate this shape (or rather its image) for purposes of comparison. The difficulty of this feat of visual recognition should not lead one to think that in such cases the system is interested simply in shape. Though it is only a transitory property of a viewer in a scene, orientation is just as important in general—after all, it is key to how we locate ourselves and find our way around. When the visual system identifies shapes presented at different angles, it is simultaneously making a diagnosis of how the perceiver is oriented relative to the thing in question.

IV. CONSTANCY VERSUS SCENE PARSING In the traditional view, a river of undifferentiated information flows from different parts of the visual field to the observer. In response to perceptual “constancies,” theorists have asked how and to what extent the perceiver, or her subpersonal visual system, is able to extract object information from this flow by discounting changes and variations of viewing conditions. The preceding section provided a glimpse of an alternative way of posing the problem. We can take the visual system to be parsing the flow of information into its various components. The task is not to assign a definite value to one variable despite the interference of others; it is rather to assign values to all—perhaps better to say many—of these variables simultaneously. I call this the Scene-parsing perspective: When sensory receptors are excited by signals determined by several environmental objects varying independently in their properties, the function of the sensory system is to extract from the state of the sensory receptors an assignment of properties to all such environmental objects as are of interest to the organism. (Generally, it does so by exploiting normally existing environmental correlations found in scenewide statistics.)


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Terminological note: Up to now, I have used the term “object” somewhat vaguely but mostly to refer to material objects. This is in line with the views that I have been discussing, which restrict their focus to material objects and to certain other things with definite boundaries, such as figures on a ground. I continue to use “object” this way (i.e., vaguely) but with a focus on material objects. However, I henceforth use the terms “environmental object” and “stimulus” to refer more broadly to anything in the environment that is of interest to the organism. This would include illumination, for example. It might be thought that the two problems of solving constancy problems and parsing scenes are not very different. Given that the color and brightness of the light received by the retina depend on both object reflectance and ambient illumination (as well as a number of other variables that need not be mentioned here), the visual system has to solve a single equation in more than one unknown in order to assign a value to reflectance. The problem, as traditionally conceived, is to figure out where in the undifferentiated information flow the system finds enough information to solve for two unknowns simultaneously. Now, it is surely no more difficult to solve a simultaneous equation in order to determine reflectance than to solve it in order to determine both reflectance and illumination. What, then, is the advantage of adopting the new perspective? The question is correct in its presuppositions, but I am not proposing the change in perspective in order to lighten the computational load on the visual system or to simplify its task. (And it is surely a good thing that I am not suggesting that more than two centuries of work on constancy be thrown away.) The advantage I am claiming is that the scene-parsing perspective enables us to reinterpret the function and output of visual processing, and thus to look differently at a number of long-standing puzzles. Already, one old puzzle has taken on a new aspect. A number of philosophers have wondered how perceptual constancy is compatible with the obvious fact that in some clearly color-related (or shape-related) way, things look different when illuminated differently (or when viewed from a different angle). This puzzle is dissolved when we note that things may look different not only when they look a different color (or shape), but also when they look differently illuminated, or as if they are being viewed from a different angle. A second puzzle or, rather, challenge is one that C. L. Hardin (see, e.g., 2003) has been posing forcefully for quite a while. Hardin protests that color constancy is a myth. It is certainly true, he would concede, that there is less variation in appearance than the locality thesis might lead one to expect. Still, it is demonstrable that observers make a lot of mistakes about the colors of things in different illumination, different surrounds, different conditions of adaptation, and so on (for more details, see Jameson and Hurwich 1989; Foster 2003). And similarly, it is demonstrable that people make a lot of mistakes about the shape of things after they have been rotated (Jolicoeur and Humphrey 1998). Why, then, should

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anyone insist that the color vision system is trying to discount the illuminant or that the shape perception system is trying to discern object shape? If these systems are so bad at doing these things, why suppose that this is their function? Thus, some psychologists and some philosophers propose that constancy is not what the system is after: Constancy is merely a side effect of certain properties of neurons, they say—lateral inhibition, contrast, and such—not a scenewide constraint. However, the scene-parsing thesis need not and does not insist on absolute constancy; indeed, given the complexities of the computational problem alluded to above, it is better that it should not do so. The claim is that the organism has an interest in a number of different variables, not just one. The light that reaches the eye contains information about many of these all mixed up together in a way that would impede the visual system’s attempt to deal with them separately. The following questions have very different implications for the perceiver: Is that thing round or elliptical? Am I positioned directly above it or off to one side? If information about shape and orientation were inextricably mixed together, the perceiver has no way of dealing appropriately with either. Any help with this matter is useful—“more or less circular” and “somewhat oblique” are vague answers, but they improve on the confusion of the retinal image. There is, therefore, no need to insist on constancy in a sense that betokens a precise assignment of values. We should rather focus on the separation of relevant aspects of the scene with as much precision as the task and the circumstances allow. On the scene-parsing proposal, then, Hardin’s challenge misses the mark. It is entirely plausible, then, that perceptual constancy is, as Hardin has said, at best an approximation. But the visual system’s function ensures that things will look different in different conditions of viewing, and this function can be adequately performed even if things do not end up looking exactly the way they are in all good conditions of viewing. The system is trying to gather useful information about a variety of environmental factors. Information can be useful even if it is not exact. The benefit of the scene-parsing thesis is that it emphasizes separation, not exactness.

V. THE THINGS WE SEE As noted before, many philosophers who embrace the externality thesis multiply sense features in the attempt to illuminate the complexity of visual experience. For example, Shoemaker correctly argues that there is more to color experience than the colors attributed to external things: “If the surface of a table is partly in shadow, one may say that the way the shadowed part of it looks is different from the way the unshadowed part of it looks without implying that the two parts look to have different colors” (2006, 462). He concludes that there are “phenomenal ways that things look,” unnamed visual properties that account for the different color


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appearance of things that look the same in color. The idea is that the brown of the shadowed table appears differently to a perceiver than the same brown when unshadowed because it has a different appearance property. Brown is a color, but there is also an “appearance property” associated with brown in each condition of viewing, and vision attributes appearance properties to things, not just colors. Similarly, Noë argues that perceptions of shape and color have two “moments.” When a circular table is viewed obliquely, it is perceived as both circular and elliptical, though in different ways. This is an attempt to deal with the fact that the table looks different when viewed from different angles, though it does not look as if it had changed shape. The scene-parsing thesis offers us a different way of accounting for complexities of visual appearance. Where Shoemaker and Noë account for the phenomenology by supposing that vision attributes new kinds of properties—appearance properties—to the same object, or attributes different familiar properties to this object in multiple “moments,” scene parsing appeals to familiar kinds of properties and attaches them to a plurality of familiar stimuli, including material objects, but also illumination and so on. The claim is that the color vision system separates information concerning illumination from information concerning color. Thus, it might determine not only that the surface of the table is brown, but also that the light that falls on it is uneven—bright here, less bright there. If so, the different appearance of different parts of the table lies not just in the sense features that these parts possess in themselves, but also in differences concerning the illumination in which these parts stand. Here, then, are two accounts of the logical form of the content of the visual state. Shoemaker’s analysis runs like this: Appearance property analysis: Brown (whole table) and appearance-differentbrown (unshadowed part) and appearance-yet-different-brown (shadowed part). I am suggesting an analysis along different lines: Scene parsing analysis: Brown (whole table) and in-the-light (unshadowed part) and in-shadow (shadowed part).

Scene parsing can be a good bit more complex than indicated here. I come to that in the next section. The point to note for now is the familiarity of the properties and stimuli to which I appeal. The analysis does not make use of appearance properties, so it retains the idea that vision is concerned with properties that environmental things possess independently of observers; it also does not make use of anything like Husserl’s “phenomenological reduction” or Noë’s “two moments” to account for differences of appearance. I do not want entirely to deny the validity of such approaches, but in my view, they are most at home when one wants deal with meta-visual states—attention and reflection. They are out of place in the account of visual content.

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To add weight to the scene-parsing thesis, consider now how the visual system computes illumination. First, a largely unappreciated fact: Direct indicators of illumination are available to vision. The size of the pupillary aperture indicates average brightness, and lightness of color is calibrated across the scene in part by setting surfaces near to this average as of middling lightness.12 Moreover, both the brightness and the color of illumination are evident in shiny surfaces (Lee 1992). These surfaces reflect light in two ways: Some of the light incident on them bounces off a shallow layer without much selective absorption (“specular” reflection), and some of it goes deeper and is selectively reflected. The specular reflections are chromatically close to the incident illumination, while the deep ones convey information about the surface reflectance of the object. Thus, a leaf looks green because deep reflections absorb and reflect light selectively; nevertheless, its shiny surface gives your visual system a good indication of the quality of ambient illumination. Shiny surfaces are ubiquitous, of course—water, shiny leaves, metallic objects, and human faces. The shiny spot on your friend’s forehead affords your visual system direct access to the color of illumination in his vicinity. The very fact that color is inextricably associated with qualities such as shiny, luminous, matte, and so on, indicates this aspect of the scene-parsing activity of the color vision system. Second, the visual system employs certain “higher-order scene statistics,” as Jurgen Golz and Don MacLeod have called them (Golz and MacLeod 2002; MacLeod 2003).13 For example, it computes the correlation between chromaticity and luminance over the whole scene: If it finds, for instance, that all of the brightest places in the visual field are sending mostly red light to the eye, then it infers that the scene is either being illuminated by red light or being filtered through a red film (thus, the paradox of Monge). Now, here is the important point: The computations that have just been mentioned are ways to estimate the brightness and color of the illuminant at various points of the scene. The assignment of reflectance to surfaces comes (mathematically and computationally) after the system has estimated illuminant information. Why? Because the system assumes, as it were, that illumination is a property of the whole scene—not that it is uniform across the scene, but that it obeys certain laws of variation in

12. Lightness is a component of color sensed as belonging to objects. Pale yellow is lighter than orange; pink is lighter than red. Brightness, on the other hand, is a measure of the amount of light that a surface sends to the eye. Strong light is generally sensed as brighter than dim light, but also light of certain colors (e.g., yellow) is brighter because it excites more cone-cell types than does light of other colors (e.g., violet). 13. I am deliberately careless in what follows about attributing personal agency to the subpersonal visual system. It would be more accurate, but also annoyingly circumlocutory, to say something like: “Neural activity in the visual system shows certain parallels to a process that computes higher order scene statistics, and the output of this process correlates with the color of the illuminant.”


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that scene. If it comes from a certain direction, it will weaken in the opposite direction; if it falls on an angled planes, it will show predictable variations of brightness across the edge; an opaque object in its path will cast a shadow; if there is more than one light source, there will be complex patterns of brightness and darkness, including illumination fringes. In all these conditions, light spreads across a scene in more or less predictable ways. Visual computation takes such predictability into account. For example, Donald Hoffman suggests that the visual system employs a computational rule: “Interpret gradual changes of hue, saturation, and brightness in an image as changes in illumination” (1998, 115). Reflectance, by contrast, varies more or less randomly across the scene,14 and the reflectance (i.e., color) of something in one place gives no indication of the reflectance of other things elsewhere; for example, thing of one color offers no indication of the color of an object next to it. Thus, the system figures out the predictable first and computes the unpredictable in the light of its conclusions. Once illumination is mapped out, the residual variations in color of light arriving from different parts of the scene are attributed to differences of surface color. All of this means that from very early in visual data processing, the various causes of receptor activity at a point are separated out and differently treated. These separated flows of information result eventually in our awareness of different kinds of environmental stimulus—I have mentioned material objects and illumination so far; I discuss some other kinds of stimuli in the next section. Suppose that red light is emanating from a certain place P in the visual field. How the visual system utilizes this information depends in part on the kind of stimulus the red light is attributed to. Suppose that P is diagnosed as occupied by a shiny surface specularly reflecting a spot of red light. The visual system will construe the red light coming from P as red illumination in the general vicinity, even though this illumination directly manifests only at P. As a consequence, red light emanating from adjacent matte surfaces will be discounted, and these surfaces will look less red than the light they reflect. Suppose, by contrast, that the red light coming from the very same place P is attributed to the reflectance of a matte surface. Then there will be a tendency for surrounding surfaces to look more red if they are within the same object boundary as P. The locality thesis is completely off track here: One’s experience of P does not depend solely on the kind of light that emanates from P. Attributing red light to the reflectance of a matte surface

14. John Mollon (2000) has argued that primate color vision is specially adapted to “dappled and brindled” scenes. A brindled scene is presumably one in which there is a high spatial frequency of random reflectance variance, as in an Ishihara color plate (a display used for diagnostic purposes, consisting of a alphanumeric character formed out of large dots against a background of a different color also in large dots); a dappled one is where there are equally frequent changes in illumination, as in a forest where there are many pinholes in the leaf cover. Notice that even in dappled scenes, the color of the illumination is predictable, even though its intensity is highly variable.

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has quite a different phenomenological consequence than attributing it to specular reflection off a shiny surface or to a red light. This kind of scene parsing has an impact on visual phenomenology. The representation of illumination is not amodal, nonvisual, or merely implicit. It is visually apparent to a sighted observer that she is standing in reddish illumination, or in bright sunlight, or in the dark. This impression is distinctly voluminous, as Hering says, quoted by William James: “A shady corner in an otherwise well-lighted room is full of a darkness which is not only on the walls and floor but between them in the space they include. Every sensation is there where I experience it, and if I have it at once at every point of a certain roomy space, it is then a voluminous sensation” (1890/2007, vol. 2, 137). It is sometimes assumed that seeing color is a matter of seeing colored objects. Thus, it is assumed that sensing the color of illumination is a matter of sensing the resultant color of the objects that this illumination falls upon. This assumption is contradicted by the observation that one senses the color of illumination and darkness as voluminous, for material-object color is always surface color. The impression of reddish illumination that one gets at dusk is not merely a matter of seeing a lot of reddish objects. A red thing is seen at a definite distance at a definite angle relative to the viewer. The pink of dusk, by contrast, engulfs the viewer—it is not located in any surface. It has an effect on surfaces, of course, and it is visible in such stimuli as rays. In a ray, the motes of dust reflect colored light—but in such a way that the illumination is sensed, less directly but nevertheless sensed, between the motes of dust. Such visual data are a result of the system extracting the illuminant and ascribing it to the observer’s environs, rather than to any particular stimulus in it. The visual impression of the dark is similarly not simply a matter of seeing nothing, or seeing things dimly: One has the impression that one would not be able to see something close by, even if there was something to see. If there is a small bright spot in the dark corner, it looks luminous— as if it were producing its own light in the midst of the gloom. The impression of being in darkness has its effect on how one behaves, too: Instinctively, one is cautious and picks one’s way carefully. These are not learned responses: One does not act in these ways because one senses that it is dark. These action potentials are rather part of the instinctive response to the dark; they mark the phenomenology of darkness. This phenomenology is not merely a matter seeing dark objects. Rather, it is a matter of sensing that there is no illumination. Very much the same sort of thing holds for shape perception. To some extent, this phenomenology is multimodal; different sensory systems are involved. Observers are proprioceptively aware of their own orientation relative to the horizon. When your head is tilted, you are aware that it is, not just by visual means but by the body’s own specialized sensing system for position. Moreover, you are able to track the changes in your position


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as you move. As you move, the projected shapes of things around you change. Thus, you are able to track the correlation between your own movements and changes in projected shape. This gives you a great deal of information about the shapes of things around you. This information is not all muddled together. Perceptually speaking, it does not express itself as a single changing variable—the two-dimensional-projection-of-thatthing-relative-to-my-current-perspective. Rather, it appears as two separate parameters, one of which is changing—the observer’s position—and the other of which is normally invariant: the shape of the object. (Imagine something changing shape as you move, keeping its retinal projection constant: Since the system is able to utilize proprioceptive information about your own movement, this thing will look as if it is changing in shape.) In addition to this, the system uses probabilistic information relating to invariants of projection in “canonical” or “generic” views. This information, too, enables the visual system to assign values separately to the distinct variables that contribute to patterns that objects throw on the retina.

VI. SUBJECTS AND PREDICATES IN VISION Let us concede that when we look at a pinkly illuminated wall we are visually aware of an instance of pink in the same location as the wall. It does not follow that the wall appears pink. It is possible, after all, to experience two visual features in the same place without experiencing them as belonging to the thing. Suppose that you are looking through a window at a flower outside. Somebody standing behind you is reflected in the window and appears to be in exactly the same place as the flower. You would have no tendency to attribute to the flower the qualities of the reflected person: The flower may be blue and the reflected person brown, but these colors do not leak from one object to the other. Though the two objects are in the same place, the visual system keeps their qualities separate. By the same token, one cannot assume that just because the pink we sense is co-located with the wall, it is therefore attributed to the wall (or, as Austen Clark 2000, 2004 would have it, to the place where the color is located). It could be the illumination that looks pink. Or pink could be manifested more locally—perhaps the wall looks as if it stands in pink illumination. The question I am asking is this: Within what sort of predicative structure does vision place the instance of pink I see over there? Or alternatively: What is the subject of this predicate, pink? The argument to this point has rested largely on how the visual system processes data; I have attempted to use these data to show that vision presents us with separated data packages. But since the data concerns preconscious processes, it does not tell us about the details of visual phenomenology. The current question concerns just these details. And without some way of anchoring

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this issue in empirical bedrock, the question might seem excessively speculative. But what would count as evidence toward a resolution? Let me start with this important clue. It has been known at least since the 1930s that constancy experiments depend crucially on instructions. As Jameson and Hurwich say, there is a difference between “making an adjustment to make a particular part of a display look identical to the same area in a differently illuminated display, as contrasted with an adjustment to make a particular surface in a display seem identical in its surface characteristics to the same object in a differently illuminated display” (1989, 4; emphasis original). Arend, Reeves, Schirillo, and Goldstein (1991) similarly distinguish between matching “unasserted color,” color that corresponds closely to that of light coming off a surface, and “asserted color,” the color of the surface itself. These experimenters worked with pairs of colorwise identical Mondrian displays (quiltlike patchworks of colored papers) under different illumination. Experimental subjects tried to adjust the color of a patch in one display (the test patch) so that it would match a patch (the target) in the other. To test their abilities regarding unasserted color, subjects were asked to make the test patch match the hue, saturation, and brightness of the target disregarding all other areas in the display as much as possible. It turns out that, in this task, they adjust the test display away from its true color, so that it is sending close to the same light to the eye as the target. With regard to asserted color, they are asked to “make the test patch look as if it were cut from the same piece of paper” as the corresponding patch in the other display. In this task, they are good at matching the true color of the target. This confirms the intuition that we have been relying on all along: On the one hand, these subjects were good at determining what color things were, even when the color of the illumination changed; on the other hand, there was a difference of unasserted color in different illuminations. The task dependency of color matching is significant. Suppose that the scene-parsing thesis is correct. Then one would expect that if one had to perform some task involving a seen material object, one would consult one’s store of visual data about that object—its surface reflectance, its shape, and so on. On the other hand, if one were faced with a task involving the illumination in the vicinity of the object, one would ignore object information and consult one’s records concerning the illumination. Further, it seems that we are able to match the total look of different places in the visual field—we can, albeit with some difficulty, perform the visual artist’s task of muddling sources of color together in what Arend and colleagues call “unasserted” color. These different deployments of visual data parallel the phenomenological facts that I earlier indicated. Illumination is sensed as voluminous; the color of objects is two-dimensionally located; hence, they are sensed as independent scene parameters. There is a parallel between these facts and the actions to which the data contribute. The phenomenology is in part an instinctive awareness of what the data allow us to do.


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The scene-parsing thesis implies that there is a certain separation between one’s records concerning different things. And the experimental data just cited confirms this. Now, data concerning something is just information predicated of that thing. One’s record of data concerning a material object consists of features predicated of, or attributed to, the material object, and the same for data about illumination or about the light coming off the object. The work of Arend and colleagues suggests that color data coming from the same location is separated into separate stores or files (Kahneman, Treisman, and Gibbs 1992). Location does not index these separate files—the different things in a location do. This relationship between data and index corresponds to predication. With these points in mind, let me return to the pinkness that one senses upon viewing the white wall in the afternoon—the pinkness that accounts for matches of “unasserted” color. To what is this attributed? In order to answer this question, one would need to figure out where in the perceiver’s cognitive records this sensum is, so to speak, “filed.” Does the sensed pinkness modify or augment the perceiver’s records concerning the wall, or is it used for some other purpose? If we can identify the stimuli that various tasks target, one will have a clue to the predicative structure of the sensory states that aid, or serve as input to, these tasks. What kind of evidence could one hope to find about these issues? Earlier, I described how color constancy is tested in animals. They are operantly conditioned to prefer dishes of one color over those of another, for instance, yellow over green. Then they are presented with yellow and green dishes in greenish illumination. If they explore the yellow dishes over the green ones, then they are seeing them as they really are with respect to color. This is generally taken as evidence for the constancy of color perception. It is important to see that it is also evidence for the attribution of constant colors to the dishes, that is, to material objects. The bees can be assumed to be searching for sugar water. And the visual states in question are the means by which these animals are able to use or to modify their factual records about where to find sugar water—namely, yellow dishes. (I am not aware of experiments that test animal responses to unasserted color.) The dishes were the target of the animals’ learned behavior, not the illumination or anything else in the vicinity. Now, I can return to the question I have been discussing: To what does the visual system attribute the pinkness that it detects in the vicinity of a white wall awash with the slightly pink light of the late afternoon? I am suggesting that one way into answering this question is to ask: What stimuli are implicated in the actions that the sensed pinkness triggers (often through the intermediacy of stored knowledge)?15 To me, it seems unlikely that the sensed pinkness influences our propensities concerning the wall—at least if the wall is correctly perceived. Clearly, it does not 15. Remember that I am exploring unlearned data gathering as a source of input to learned inferential patterns (see section II).

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influence the formation or application of expectations concerning this material object—this is what the constancy experiments on animals demonstrate. With the bees and the dishes, it is different: When it comes to applying their expectations about where to find sugar water, bees disregard the color of light coming off a material object and concentrate on the color of such objects (and the same goes, mutatis mutandis, for shape). On the other hand, the sensed pinkness does make certain other tasks possible. It helps us if we are asked to adjust the illumination in such a way as to make the wall look as if it is being viewed at noontime. It helps painters depict how the wall is illuminated. These tasks are directed toward the wall-as-it-is-illuminated, or perhaps the light that is reflected off it. This is, or is the result of, an interaction between the wall and the illumination in which it stands. My suggestion is that there is a difference, a phenomenological difference, between pinkness emerging from this interaction and its being attributed to the wall. The pinkness is experienced as ephemeral, not as a continuing property of the wall.16 Here, then, is my proposal: The question is, to what is a perceived feature attributed? And the answer, that it is attributed to that perceived stimulus with regard to which expectations and records are modified by the perceiving of that feature. If perceiving F modifies our records and expectations regarding x but not y, then F is attributed to x but not y. One last observation in elaboration of this way of looking at the matter. There is a large variety of visual objects in a scene (see Gibson 1986)—we see not only material objects and illumination, but also shadows, patches of light, and shade. Consider cast shadows—that is, shadows that are cast by one object on to another.17 Shadows obscure the color of the objects on which they fall. They appear as something on a background, a figure on a ground, such that you can see through them to the ground, but somewhat indistinctly. As far as vision is concerned, then, a shadow appears to be an object distinct from that on which it falls. Shadows do not modify the color of objects on which they fall (as the variation thesis would hold). Nor would one naturally file away the visual information one gets from a shadow-on-a-surface as of a piebald surface (though the entire region can be seen as a patchwork of unasserted color). Shadows obscure the color of what they fall on and make the latter difficult to see. This said, I should note that we do not keep records concerning shadows; likely, we are not conditioned to expect of them that they will

16. It is possible that there is a role here for Shoemaker’s “appearance properties”—it could be that he meant to be pointing to the pinkness of the light reflected off the wall. (I am indebted to Todd Ganson for this clarification.) If so, I would still contest Shoemaker’s attribution of the property to the wall. 17. Cast shadows are phenomenologically different from implied shadows, which consist of the darker parts of objects that are farther away from the source of illumination, and self-shadows, which envelop parts of objects that face away from the light. In my analysis of Shoemaker’s shadowed table discussed in section V, I assumed an implied shadow. See Casati (2003) for an extraordinarily rich treatment of shadows and their phenomenology.


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behave in this way or that. (Do we track shadows, and if so, how and under what circumstances? Is it the same as or different than tracking objects?) Shadows provide us with information about sources of light and of objects between these and the objects on which they fall. When the color of an object changes, our attention is drawn to the object itself. When a shadow falls on an object, our attention is drawn away from that object to the source of light or, rather, to the object that obscures it. When, for example, a moving shadow suddenly falls on the ground beside a rodent or rabbit, it runs away from an assumed predatory bird. And we, too, tend to look behind us in similar circumstances. Shadows are attributed, then, to the objects that throw them, not to the objects on which they fall.18 Similarly, colored light: My desk lamp has a yellow shade, and it is casting a yellow patch on the pastel-colored wall beyond it. This makes it difficult to see the color of the wall. But it is, at the same time, visually perfectly evident to me that the color of the light cast by the shaded lamp is not the color of the wall—the visual system is easily able to tell the spot of yellow for what it is because of the softness of its boundaries, and the way it interacts with shadows and the light coming from the window. Of course, the fact that the spot of yellow light obscures the color of the wall can lead to errors of perception regarding the wall. But this does not mean that it modifies the color of the wall, or makes it look as if it has a different color. It is not that the light spot makes the wall look a definite color, different from the color that the wall actually is (though this could happen in certain cases). I am talking, rather, of a case where one is aware of the color of the spot, but at the same time one finds it difficult to tell what color the wall is. Errors of perception are not what I am discussing. The question, therefore, is this: To what is the pinkness cast by the afternoon sun attributed when no error is made? This is—or at least ought to be—the question that vexes all of the parties to the disagreement of section I. And by the test just suggested, it would seem that it is not attributed to the wall, for it is not implicated in any object-directed action.

VII. THE ISOLATION ARGUMENT Back, finally, to the isolation thesis: The externality thesis was endorsed, you may recall, by proponents of both the variation and the constancy theses. Those who endorse these theses assume, on the basis of introspection, that there is a way that the objective world looks, despite its not always being the way it looks. The isolation thesis attempts to put in doubt the coherence of this conception. What is it for something to look blue,

18. This is true, of course, of cast shadows—not of the implied shadows, which are the dark sides of objects illuminated from the other side. Implied shadows inform us of the source of illumination.

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Berkeley and Travis and Gupta ask, if the very color-look that it presents could equally well have been presented by something white? These authors take the possibility of error about objective facts to invalidate the idea that visual experience has objective content. Definition 1 and the isolation thesis thus relativize perceptual content to the contribution that perception makes to certainty. Since perceptual experience never gives us certainty concerning objective external facts, they conclude that it has no such content. The approach adopted in the preceding section is helpful in suggesting a different approach to how things look, one that I can only sketch briefly here. I have suggested that the visual system contributes to object-directed actions, especially (but not exclusively) epistemic actions. In short, visual appearance is a trigger for the activation of certain action complexes, for example, operations that lead to the formation of certain expectations concerning things of a certain types. The claim is that vision groups external things together so that these expectation-forming operations enable an organism better to cope with its environment when they are used and applied consistently. This suggests that the significance of perception is not as much the information that is contained in it as it is the instinctive epistemic actions it triggers. Both these approaches tie perception to knowledge (by contrast, e.g., to the sensorimotor approach of Noë). But where the traditional approach takes perception to be the repository of knowledge, and therefore rejects the possibility of its possessing content that could be mistaken, the approach I propose takes the significance of perception to lie in the subpersonal inferential processes it initiates. This implies that the epistemic norm of correlation is on the wrong track. Rather, we should have: Epistemic norm of use: A visual presentation of x should be an occasion for launching record-keeping operations concerning x: it is therefore stipulated that in order for visual state V to count as a seeing of x, V must affect records concerning x thus: . . .

And we might replace definition 1 with the following: Definition 2: x looks F to y if and only if how x looks leads the perceiver to respond instinctively to x in a way that is functionally appropriate for F things.19

Objective sense features such as blue or round can be constructed out of the similarity relations defined by definition 2, provided that we discount error and bad viewing conditions and look only to the ideal or proper uses of perception. Definitions such as the above focus on how perception is naturally used in organisms. They are still normative, because they govern the application of the concept of seeing and looking similar. 19. There are instinctive responses to learned things; a conditioned response is an example of this.


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Definition 2 is not constructed, as is definition 1, with an eye to solving problems that come to philosophy from skepticism. Rather, it takes up what James Gibson (1986) called an “ecological approach” to perception. This approach regards perception as a facility that orients an organism to its contingent and changing surroundings, and does so in part by constructing revisable but nonmomentary records concerning those surroundings. It recognizes that organisms need specific information about different kinds of object in the world around them, both to exploit those surroundings for their own advantage and to avoid the dangers that may be concealed within them. The scene-parsing perspective assumes that this problem is not solved merely by gathering information. Information that is gathered must be parsed into usable data about different objects in the scene. The thesis acknowledges that the task of data analysis cannot be performed with certainty. However, it takes it to be the function of perceptual systems to feed into usable rules of action in such a way as to put an organism into an optimally advantageous position from the Bayesian point of view of expected utilities. What I have tried to contribute to this ecological approach in this chapter is to connect it with visual phenomenology—my contention has been that the ecological approach explains and illuminates visual phenomenology without thereby sacrificing a normative view of content.

REFERENCES Arend, Lawrence E., Jr., Adam Reeves, James Schirillo, and Robert Goldstein. 1991. Simultaneous Color Constancy: Papers with Diverse Munsell Values. Journal of the Optical Society of America A: Optics and Image Science 8: 661–672. Berkeley, George. 1709. An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision. Dublin : printed by Aaron Rhames, for Jeremy Pepyat. Bradley, Peter A., and Michael Tye. 2001. Of Colors, Kestrels, Caterpillars, and Leaves. Journal of Philosophy 98: 469–487. Burge, Tyler. 1986. Individualism and Psychology. Philosophical Review 95: 3–45. Casati, Roberto. 2003. The Shadow Club: The Greatest Mystery in the Universe— Shadows—and the Thinkers Who Unlocked Their Secrets, tr. Abigail Asher. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Clark, Austen. 2000. A Theory of Sentience. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Clark, Austen. 2004. Feature-Placing and Proto-Objects. Philosophical Psychology 17: 443–469. Foster, David H. 2003. Does Color Constancy Exist? Trends in Cognitive Science 7: 439–443. Frank, H. 1923. Über die Beeinflussung von Nachbildern durch die Gestalteigenschaften der Projektionsfläche. Psychologische Forschung 4: 33–37. Gibson, James J. 1986. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hilldale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Golz, Jürgen, and Donald I. A. MacLeod. 2002. Influence of Scene Statistics on Colour Constancy. Nature 415: 637–640.

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Gupta, Anil. 2006. Experience and Knowledge. In Perceptual Experience, ed. Tamar Szabó Gendler and John Hawthorne, 181–204. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hamlyn, D. W. 1977. Unconscious Inference and Judgment in Perception. In Images, Perception, and Knowledge, ed. J. M. Nicolas, 195–211. Dordrecht: Reidel. Hardin, C. L. 1988. Color for Philosophers: Unweaving the Rainbow. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett. Hardin, C. L. 2003. A Spectral Reflectance Doth Not a Color Make. Journal of Philosophy 100: 191–200. Hatfield, Gary. 1990. The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, Bradford Books. Helmholtz, Hermann von. 1977. Epistemological Writings. The Paul Hertz/Moritz Schlick Centenary Edition of 1921, tr. Malcolm Lowe, ed. Robert S. Cohen and Yehuda Elkana. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 37. Dordrecht: Reidel. Hoffman, Donald D. 1998. Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See. New York: W. W. Norton. James, William. 1890. The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. Reprint, New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007. Jameson, Dorothea, and Leo M. Hurwich. 1989. Essay Concerning Color Constancy. Annual Review of Psychology 40: 1–22. Jolicoeur, Pierre, and G. Keith Humphrey. 1998. Perception of Rotated TwoDimensional and Three-Dimensional Objects and Shapes. In Perceptual Constancy: Why Things Look as They Do, ed. Vincent Walsh and Janusz Kulikowski, 69–123. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kahneman, Daniel, Anne Treisman, and Brian J. Gibbs. 1992. The Reviewing of Object Files: Object-Specific Integration of Information. Cognitive Psychology 24: 175–219. Koffka, Kurt. 1935. The Principles of Gestalt Psychology. London: K. Paul, Trench, Tubner. Lee, Hsien-Che. 1992. Method for Computing the Scene-Illuminant Chromaticity from Specular Highlights. In Color ed. G. E. Healy, S. A. Shafer, and Lawrence B. Wolff, 303–308. London: James and Bartlett. MacLeod, Donald I. A. 2003. The Verriest Lecture: Colour Discrimination, Colour Constancy and Natural Scene Statistics. In Normal and Defective Colour Vision, ed. J. D. Mollon, J. Pokorny, and K. Knoblauch, 188–217. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, M. G. F. 2005. Perception. In The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, ed Frank Jackson and Michael Smith, 701–738. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mollon, J. D. 2000 Uses and Evolutionary Origins of Primate Colour Vision. In Evolution of the Eye and Visual System. ed. J. R. Cronly-Dillon and R. L. Gregory, 10–30. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan. Mollon, J. D. 2003. The Origins of Modern Color Science. In The Science of Color, ed. S. K. Shevell, 1–40. Amsterdam: Optical Society of America, Elsevier. Neumeyer, Christa. 1998. Comparative Aspects of Colour Constancy. In Perceptual Constancy: Why Things Look as They Do, ed. Vincent Walsh and Janusz Kulikowski 323–351. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.


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10 Why Explain Visual Experience in Terms of Content? Adam Pautz

The standard arguments for explaining visual experience in terms of intentional content are based on the transparency observation, physicalism about the mind, or the analysis of statements describing how things look. Recently, some have questioned these standard arguments for the intentional view of visual experience. I agree with the critics that the standard arguments fail. In my view, there is no quick and easy argument for the intentional view.1 Nevertheless, there is an argument to be made for the intentional view of visual experience. It takes the form of an inference to the best explanation. Both veridical and nonveridical visual experiences can ground the capacity to have beliefs about the external world. Visual experiences, like standard intentional states, can be indeterminate and depict impossible

This chapter was discussed at the 2008 Syracuse Philosophy Annual Conference on perception held at Syracuse University and organized by Bence Nanay. I am indebted to my commentator, Bill Brewer, for his very helpful comments. I am also indebted to David Chalmers, Fred Dretske, Andy Egan, Benj Hellie, Fiona Macpherson, Michael Martin, Brian McLaughlin, Jesse Prinz, and Susanna Schellenberg. Finally, my thanks to Bence Nanay, not only for his role in organizing a great conference but also for providing very helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 1. For recent skepticism about the case for the intentional view, see Burge (2003) and Travis (2004). I agree with Tyler Burge that the transparency argument fails, but for reasons other than those he gives (Pautz 2007). For a response to Travis (2004), see Pautz (2008b: §2). Byrne (2001) provides an argument that, like the argument I develop here, depends on neither transparency nor physicalism. For criticism, see Pautz (2008b). It should be noted that here my aim is not to argue for the weak claim that experiences merely have contents in some sense, a claim that I elsewhere (Pautz 2008b) suggest may be established easily. Indeed, I argue that this claim is compatible with nearly every view on experience, including disjunctivist (or “naive realist”) views. Rather, my aim is to argue for the stronger claim that experiences are identical with relations to contents, so that there is a deep link between content and phenomenology. For this distinction, see Pautz (2007: 497; 2008b). Siegel (chapter 12, this volume) draws a similar distinction and addresses the weak claim. For more on this issue, see note 11.

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scenarios. The best explanation of these and other features of visual experience, I argue, is that both veridical and nonveridical experiences are themselves intentional states of a kind more basic than belief. Making good on this argument for the intentional view requires seriously engaging with rival views. My plan is as follows. In sections 1 and 2 I develop an interpretation of the debate over the nature of visual experience and formulate the main rival views. Then in sections 3–6 I argue that, among these views, the intentional view best explains the features of visual experience. Finally, in section 7 I show how the intentionalist can handle blur and attention.

1. THE INTENTIONAL VIEW AND RIVAL COMMON FACTOR VIEWS There are many questions in the philosophy of perception. The success question: What is the correct analysis of perceptual success? For instance, what is it to perceive an object? The epistemic question: How does perceptual experience justify beliefs about the external world? The phenomenal question: What determines the phenomenology of visual experience? I am mainly concerned with the phenomenal question in this chapter. It is not clear how to interpret the phenomenal question. On one interpretation, it concerns the analysis of “looks” reports. But this interpretation is problematic. Many such reports do not describe phenomenology at all. Rather, they are doxastic in the sense that they describe visual evidence or inclinations to form beliefs on the basis of visual experience. Some say that there are nondoxastic, phenomenological “looks” reports, but this is unclear, and even if there are such “looks” reports, they do not describe phenomenology alone. For instance, ‘the apple looks red to Jones’ also encodes perceptual success, entailing that there is an apple that Jones sees. For these reasons, there is no straightforward connection between the analysis of looks-reports and the nature of visual phenomenology. On another interpretation of the phenomenal question, it concerns the nature of properties expressed by predicates of the form ‘has an experience as of ___,’ where the blank is filled by some description of the ostensible objects of the experience. This interpretation, too, is problematic, for two reasons. First, some “qualia theorists” hold that ‘has an experience as of a red object’ does not describe visual phenomenology at all but, rather, intentional content, which they think can vary independently of visual phenomenology. For instance, they would say that in an inverted spectrum case, two individuals might both have experiences as of a red object while having quite different color experiences. Second, the thesis that experiences can be fully described with such predicates, so that there is a one-to-one mapping between such predicates and possible experiencetypes, is arguably false. For instance, as I discuss in section 7, some say that the distinction between blurry and clear visual experiences cannot be captured with such predicates.

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In my view, the phenomenal question should be taken to be a question about the real definition of certain properties of people that we can get a grip on through examples. Since the properties are introduced by example, no questions are begged at the outset. For instance, imagine you first experience a red and round tomato in normal circumstances, so that it looks red and round to you. Then you experience a green and oval tomato in abnormal circumstances, so that it looks red and round to you. Finally, you have a hallucination of a red and round tomato. And suppose that in all three cases your experience is, as we would put it, exactly the same. Intuitively, despite the differences between the cases, there is a salient property you have in all three of them. Further, this property is one that a person would possess in any experientially identical case and lack in any experientially different case. Call it R, and call such properties of people visual experience properties. Everyone can accept that individuals have visual experience properties in both veridical and nonveridical cases. This, I suggest, is a pretheoretical datum. It is left open whether these properties can be fully characterized by predicates of the form ‘has an experience as of ___,’ where the blank is filled by some description of the ostensible objects of the experience. Since I have introduced visual experience properties by example, the correct account of such properties is also left open. In the case of visual experience, the phenomenal question can be taken to be, What is the correct account of visual experience properties? One major division is between common factor views and disjunctive views. I provide a more exact formulation of how I think this division should be understood in section 2 on disjunctive views, but very roughly, common factor views hold that visual experience properties are nondisjunctive properties common to veridical, illusory, and hallucinatory cases, whereas disjunctive views hold that they are disjunctive properties. In this section, I formulate the common factor views that I will discuss in this chapter, including the intentional view. In section 2, I formulate some disjunctive views. First, the traditional sense datum view: This common factor view holds that, in both hallucinatory cases and cases of genuine seeing, having R is a matter of being aware of the redness and roundness of a mental object. Next, the sensationalist view defended by Christopher Peacocke (see Peacocke 2008): Having a visual experience is a matter of being related to a region of a visual field that has certain properties. This view is similar to the sense datum view, but his visual field is not an array of mental sense data, as many commentators have supposed. Rather, it is a real, curved plane in the physical space immediately before one’s eyes. More exactly, it is the curved plane that would coincide with the surface of, in his words, “a Cyclopean eye with a single extended retina,” if one had such a single eye in the place of one’s two eyes (Peacocke 2008: 12). So if an individual has R while moving around in physical space, then his visual field is an ever-changing region of physical space immediately before his eyes. According to Peacocke, when one has R, one senses a physical region that is round. Further, it is red′ with respect to one’s visual experience.


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Why the primed notation? Because, according to Peacocke, only physical objects are red. Why the qualification “with respect to one’s visual experience”? Because, according to Peacocke, the property of being red′ is some kind of relational property of visual field regions: A region of physical space is red′ just in case it stands in some relation (which Peacocke does not explain) to an individual’s experience. On this view, in hallucination, one is related to a region of the visual field with certain properties, but there is no corresponding physical object before one that has these properties. Next, the multiple relation view, also known as the theory of appearing (see Alston 1999): There is a three-place relation x presents y to z such that having a visual experience consists in an object (or n-tuple of objects), an external property (or n-place relation), and a sentient individual standing in this relation. So, for instance, R is identical with the relational property of being such that some object presents the property of being red and round to one. In veridical and illusory cases, the relevant object is an ordinary physical object, for example, a tomato. And, in such cases, the relevant property, the property of being red and round, is an abstract item that may exist even if it is not instantiated. In the veridical case, the tomato happens to instantiate the property. In the illusory case, the tomato does not instantiate the property. What is the object that presents the property of being red and round to the subject of a hallucination? On one version of this view, here the relevant object is a nonstandard object, such as a region of physical space. In this version, the multiple relation view is a common factor view, holding that in every case having R is a matter of being such that some object presents one with the property of being red and round. (However, in section 2 I introduce a disjunctivist version of the multiple relation view that denies that hallucination can be explained in terms of an object presenting properties.) Note that, on both the sensationalist view and this version of the multiple relation view, having R in the hallucinatory case involves being related to a region of physical space. But, whereas on the sensationalist view the relevant region is immediately before the subject’s eyes, on the multiple relation view it is at some distance from the subject, namely, where the property of being red and round is ostensibly presented to him. Intentionalists often ignore this view, but there is something very intuitive about it. When Macbeth hallucinates the dagger, a fairly natural description of what is going on is that a cluster of properties is presented to him at a certain region of physical space. Next, the intentional view: All visual experience properties are at least partly identical with properties of the form standing in relation R to content c involving external properties P, Q, R, . . . 2 Here by “external properties” I mean properties that are not instantiated by visual experiences themselves. When I refer to “intentional contents” I mean both propositions that can 2. See, e.g., Tye (2000), Dretske (1995), and Byrne (2001). The intentional view is typically formulated in terms of supervenience. In Pautz (2008b) I provide reasons to prefer the identity formulation used here rather than a supervenience formulation.

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be true or false and property complexes that can be instantiated or uninstantiated. Therefore, the so-called the property-complex view of visual experience counts as a version of intentionalism in my sense (see Bealer 1982; Johnston 2004; for discussion, see Pautz 2007). For convenience, in general I assume that all visual experience properties involve the same intentional relation, even though some versions of intentionalism deny this, as I describe below. Unlike believing and desiring, this intentional relation has no name in English. But we may introduce a theoretical term for the relation, defined according to the Ramsey-Lewis method for defining theoretical terms: “Sensorily entertaining” refers by description to the relation S such that, for every visual experience property E, having E is at least partly identical with bearing S to some content or other. If intentionalism is false, then there is no such relation (for the Ramsey-Lewis method, see Lewis 1970). The intentional view departs from the views considered so far in an important respect. On the intentional view, when an individual has R, there need not exist a mental object or a region of space or anything else that instantiates or presents the relevant external properties. Intentionalism comes in a bewildering variety of forms. In particular, there are various views on what the contents are—singular propositions or general propositions, Fregean or Russellian propositions, and so on. On the property-complex view, the contents are not propositions at all but property-complexes. The argument I develop is neutral between all these views. But I must explain the distinction between strong intentionalism and qualia-content intentionalism, since it comes up in section 7. Strong intentionalism (intentionalism for short) maintains that every visual experience property is wholly identical with standing in some intentional relation to a content. It comes in two versions. On pure intentionalism, there is a single intentional relation, sensorily entertaining, involved in all visual experiences. All differences among visual experience properties are explained by differences in content. On relation-content intentionalism, different visual experience properties might involve different intentional relations, so that in some cases differences among visual experiences properties can be explained by differences in the relation as well as differences in the content. We might call the intentional relation the intentional mode. What unites both versions of strong intentionalism is that they hold that visual experience properties are wholly intentional, so that all differences among them can be explained in purely intentional terms—in terms of intentional content or intentional mode. My aim in this chapter is to establish strong intentionalism. Qualia-content intentionalism, by contrast, holds that there are counterexamples to strong intentionalism. There are different visual experience properties that involve the very same intentional mode and intentional content. As I describe in section 7, some would say that a clear experience and a blurry experience of the same object are a case in point. According to qualia-content intentionalism, such visual experience properties are


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only partly identical with standing in a relation to a content; they also involve nonintentional qualia, which explain the difference between them. Despite their differences, the common factor views considered so far have something important in common. Say that a property is relational when its real definition is bearing R to a or bearing R to some F. The common factor views considered so far agree (1) that visual experience properties are relational properties and (2) that their relata involve external properties, that is, properties that need not be instantiated by the experience itself in the head of the experiencer. Call them relational views. For instance, on the sense datum view, visual experience properties are relations to sense data having certain external properties. These properties count as external in my sense because they are not instantiated by the experiences themselves; they are instantiated by the sense data that are the objects of the experiences. The intentional view counts as a relational common factor view as well. On the intentional view, experience properties are relations to intentional contents that involve external properties in the sense that they have external properties as constituents, or attribute them to external objects. The common factor views considered so far differ only in whether visual experiences relate the subject to external properties by relating him to a particular existing object that instantiates or presents those properties, with intentional views rejecting this assumption and other relational views endorsing it. There is also an entirely different category of common factor views: nonrelational common factor views. They maintain that all visual experience properties are entirely nonrelational properties of persons in the sense that they are not even partly identical with standing in a relation to an item that involves properties external to the experience. I call such views pure qualia views, or qualia views for short. They go beyond the qualiacontent version of intentionalism mentioned above in claiming that all differences among visual experiences consist in differences in qualia rather than intentional content or intentional mode. They are compatible with the claim that in some sense visual experiences have contents, but they deny that any differences among visual experience properties consist in differences in content. They come in physicalist and dualist versions. A physicalist version is the type-type identity theory of visual experience. By this, I mean the view that R is necessarily identical with some neural property N of persons, not merely contingently realized by such a property. In general, on the identity theory, all visual experience properties (types) are necessarily identical with neural properties. So, all differences among visual experiences consist in neural differences. Different versions differ in what kind of neural property R ought to be identified with. On some versions, the relevant neural property N is a fairly local neural property L that a normal person possesses when and only when he has R. On others, it is a more global neural property: the property of having L while satisfying some global background condition requiring that L be part of a normally functioning brain. On some versions, N is a very low-level neural property.

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common factor views

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sense datum view sensationlist view multiple relation view intentional view

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Figure 10.1

On other versions, N is a more abstract, functional-computational property realizable in creatures with quite different neurophysiologies. In what follows, I use neural properties broadly to include all such properties.3 A dualist version of the qualia view might hold that R is identical with undergoing a nonphysical experiential event that has a reddish quale and a roundish quale, where these properties are nothing like the associated external properties. On another version, each visual experience property is an entirely unstructured, primitive property. Common factor views are represented in Figure 10.1. Among common factor views, the great divide is between relational and nonrelational views. As an intentionalist, I favor a relational view. As I describe below, relational views can accommodate (among other things) the obvious fact that experience grounds the capacity for thought involving external properties, while nonrelational views are unable to do so.

2. DISJUNCTIVE VIEWS Disjunctivists reject the basic approach to perception taken by common factor theorists. Traditionally, common factor theorists first develop an exotic theory of what happens when you have R while hallucinating a tomato and then apply this theory to the case of actually seeing a tomato. By contrast, disjunctivists start with the naive intuition that, when you have R while seeing a tomato, you do so simply by virtue seeing the tomato and its characteristics (an intuition I return to in section 6). I will be in a position to offer a better formulation at the close of this section, 3. For the identity theory, see Block (2003), Churchland (2007: ch. 9), McLaughlin (2007), and Polger (2004).


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once I have discussed the versions of disjunctivism, but for starters I roughly define disjunctive views as views that attempt to retain this naive intuition by analyzing visual experience properties in terms of success properties. By a “success property” I mean one that is such that, necessarily, if one has that property, then one sees a mind-independent object. Such views are called disjunctive views because the simplest such analyses are disjunctive in form: Having R is a matter of either seeing the redness and roundness of an object or satisfying some other condition. Disjunctivism comes in many different versions. One division concerns what kind of success property is invoked to analyze R. According to VI∨H disjunctivism, R is analyzable in terms of a success property that one possesses in both the veridical case V and the illusory case I but not in the hallucinatory case H. For instance, one version of VI∨H disjunctivism appeals to the same success property invoked by the multiple relation view (section 1): being such that some object presents with the property of being red and round. Above, I discussed a common factor version of the multiple relation view, according to which hallucinatory experience has the same basic structure as veridical and illusory experience but with a nonstandard object presenting the relevant property. But what I have in mind now is a disjunctivist version of the multiple relation view, according to which in hallucinatory cases one has R by virtue of satisfying some quite different condition, not involving the presentation of properties by an object. This version of the multiple relation view would be an example of VI∨H disjunctivism. On VI∨H disjunctivism, the great divide is between veridical and illusory cases, on the one hand, and hallucinatory cases, on the other.4 According to V∨IH disjunctivism, by contrast, R is analyzable in terms of a success property that one possesses in veridical cases only, for instance, the property of seeing the redness and roundness of some mindindependent object. On this version of disjunctivism, in illusory and hallucinatory cases one has R by virtue of satisfying some quite different condition. So, on this version of disjunctivism, the great divide is between veridical cases, on the one hand, and illusory and hallucinatory cases, on the other. This version appeals to what we might call state-seeing, for instance, seeing the redness and roundness of some mind-independent object. This differs from fact-seeing (‘John sees that the tomato is red’) and object-seeing (‘John sees the tomato’). It is a nonconceptual mode of seeing: Seeing the redness of a tomato does not require having the concept red. And it is directed at states of the world, otherwise known as conditions, property-instantiations, or tropes, rather than propositions about the world or mere objects. For instance, the redness and roundness of a tomato are concrete states of the world that go out of existence when the 4. For an example of VI∨H disjunctivism, see Langsam (1997). My terminology here, as well as the “negative” and “positive” terminology introduced below, comes from Byrne and Logue (2008). However, I differ from them in the distinctions I mark with this terminology and in my general understanding of disjunctivism (see notes 7 and 39).

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tomato ceases to be red and round. In what follows, I focus mainly on versions of V∨IH disjunctivism that analyze R in terms of state seeing the redness and roundness of something. There is a second, orthogonal division among versions of disjunctivism that concerns the following question: How can R be analyzed in terms of some success property, for instance, seeing the redness and roundness of something, given that we can have R even in unsuccessful cases in which we do not have this success property? We may distinguish between two methods for carrying out the analysis in the light of this fact. According to negative disjunctivism, R is defined in terms of standing in some relation to the success property of seeing the redness and roundness of something, where you can bear the relevant relation to the success property even in unsuccessful cases in which you do not actually possess the success property. Negative disjunctivism comes in epistemic and nonepistemic versions (see figure 10.2 at the end of the present section). Epistemic versions define the relevant relation to the success property in epistemic terms. To illustrate, suppose you have R while hallucinating a tomato. You do not then have the success property of seeing the redness and roundness of an object, but you do bear a certain epistemic relation to this property: You cannot know by reflection that you do not have it. Of course, in successful cases in which you do have this success property, you also cannot know by reflection that you do not have it. So, in both successful and unsuccessful cases, you bear this negative epistemic relation to the success property of seeing the redness and roundness of an object. On a very simple form of epistemic negative disjunctivism, having R just is bearing this negative epistemic relation to the success property of seeing the redness and roundness of an object. Note that this view identifies R with a nondisjunctive property. Nevertheless, as I understand disjunctivism, it still counts as a form of disjunctivism. By contrast to epistemic versions of negative disjunctivism, nonepistemic versions hold that having R is a matter of bearing some nonepistemic relation to the success property of seeing the redness and roundness of an object. There are different variants of the epistemic version and the nonepistemic version of negative disjunctivism (see figure 10.2), and I turn to these in section 4. Negative disjunctivism is so named because it says that, when you hallucinate a tomato, there is no more positive characterization of what is happening with you than that you are standing in some relation to the success property of seeing the redness and roundness of something (see Martin 2004; Brewer 2008: 15). This is in contrast to positive disjunctivism, which proposes a quite different method for handling the unsuccessful cases. This view holds that R is a disjunctive property of either having the success property of seeing the redness and roundness of something or having some “quite different” property U, which, contrary to negative disjunctivism, is not simply a


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matter of bearing some relation to the success property. The idea is that U may be given a more positive characterization that is not parasitic on the success property.5 To explain U, the positive disjunctivist might appeal to any one of the views listed under common factor views in figure 10.1. But, whereas the common factor theorist applies one of these views across the board, the positive disjunctivist would apply it to the unsuccessful cases only. A version that will loom large in section 6 is disjunctive intentionalism. On this view, R is identical with the disjunctive property of either actually seeing the worldly instantiation of redness and roundness by a mindindependent object (the perfectly veridical case) or sensorily entertaining an intentional content involving redness and roundness (illusory and hallucinatory cases). As I discuss in section 6, this view differs profoundly from common factor intentionalism (see section 2), which explains visual phenomenology in terms of sensorily entertaining contents across the board.6 Now I am in a position to say what disjunctive views have in common. At the start of this section I offered a first-pass formulation of disjunctive views as views that analyze visual experience properties such as R in terms of success properties. There is a counterexample to this formulation. On the version of the multiple relation view discussed in section 1, R is analyzed in terms of the success property of being such that there is an object presenting one with the property of being red and round. Nevertheless, it counts as a common factor view, since it maintains that hallucination has the same basic structure, with a nonstandard object presenting the relevant properties. Therefore, a better formulation is this: Disjunctive views analyze visual experience properties in terms of success properties, and they deny that we have the relevant success properties in the bad cases, so they must invoke the negative or positive method for analyzing visual experience properties in terms of success properties. I can now provide a 5. It might be wondered whether singular intentionalism counts as a version of positive disjunctivism. This view holds that having R is a matter of sensorily entertaining a singular content of the form a is red and round (the veridical and illusory cases) or a nonsingular (general or gappy) content involving redness and roundness (the hallucinatory case). For discussion, see Hawthorne and Kovakovich (2006); for a defense, see Tye (2007). I do not count this as a form of positive disjunctivism but rather as a form of common factor intentionalism, because the properties that are the disjuncts here are not “quite different.” Further, it is simple to formulate the view in a way that reveals that it is a common factor view: Having R is a matter of sensorily entertaining some (singular or nonsingular) content involving redness and roundness (see Pautz 2007: 497; Tye 2007: 608). Singular intentionalism should not be confused with what I below call disjunctive intentionalism, which holds that having R is a matter of either seeing the redness and roundness of something (a completely nonintentional property) or sensorily entertaining a content involving redness and roundness (an intentional property). On disjunctive intentionalism, by contrast to singular intentionalism, the disjuncts of R are radically different. Consequently, I do count disjunctive intentionalism as a form of positive disjunctivism. For more on singular intentionalism and how it differs from disjunctive intentionalism, see section 6 and note 35. 6. On one interpretation, John McDowell accepts disjunctive intentionalism (see Hawthorne and Kovakovich 2006: 161), but according to Johnston’s interpretation (2006: 269), McDowell does not. Instead, he accepts the fact view, which is just a version of common factor intentionalism. For more on this issue, see Pautz (2008c: n. 14).

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Figure 10.2

more exact formulation of common factor views than the one offered in section 1. Common factor views may be defined via negativa as views that deny that visual experience properties are analyzable in terms of success properties according to the negative method or the positive method.7 The versions of disjunctivism are represented in Figure 10.2. Among disjunctive views, the great divide is between negative and positive disjunctivism. As I describe below, negative disjunctivism, which is probably the more discussed version, faces counterexamples and cannot 7. In my opinion, the formulation of disjunctivism offered in the text is superior to more standard formulations. As Byrne and Logue note (2008: 80), Michael Martin sometimes seems to formulate disjunctivism as a claim about fundamental kinds (2006: 354; 2004: 53), although this may not be his official formulation. But I do not understand this notion (Pautz 2007: 528). Following a fairly widespread formulation, Byrne and Logue (2008) themselves identify disjunctivism with the view that there is no common “mental state” between successful and unsuccessful cases of perception; they themselves accept the moderate view that there are mental commonalities and also mental differences. This formulation makes disjunctivism a verbal issue. Everyone admits that there are commonalities and differences between the cases. How are we to decide whether these count as “mental” or not? And why should we care? There is another problem with both the “fundamental kinds” formulation and the “no common mental state” formulation of the distinction between disjunctive views and common factor views. These views are typically understood to concern the nature of phenomenology. (I am excluding what Byrne and Logue [2008] call epistemological disjunctivism.) But, on these formulations, they are not views about phenomenology at all. Therefore, these formulations strike me as too weak. For instance, a common factor theorist could accept the fundamental kinds claim (see section 6; see also Pautz 2007: 528–529). And a disjunctivist could accept that there is a mental state common to successful and unsuccessful cases of perception (see note 39). I hope that my formulation avoids this problem by making the distinction between disjunctive views and common factor views one that concerns the real definition of visual experience properties.


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account for the fact that unsuccessful experience might play a positive explanatory role in grounding the capacity for thought involving external properties. This leads me to consider the relatively unexplored category of positive versions of disjunctivism, in particular, disjunctive intentionalism.

3. THE STRUCTURE OF THE ARGUMENT Now that I have presented the lay of the land, I may commence the main business of the chapter: arguing for the superiority of the intentional view of visual experience over rival common factor views and disjunctive views. I continue to focus on R. Let H be the property of having R while hallucinating, let I be the property of having R while undergoing an illusion, and let V be the property of having R while having a veridical experience. Note that here and throughout, R, H, I, and V are properties (or types) rather than particular experience-tokens. The argument comes in four installments. Following tradition, I begin by defending an exotic account of hallucination and then apply it to the other cases: 1. Against negative disjunctivism and pure qualia views, we have reason to accept a positive, relational view of H (section 4). 2. Additional considerations favor an intentional relational view of H over nonintentional relational views such as the sense datum view (section 5). 3. At this point, we might accept positive disjunctivism, agreeing that in hallucinatory cases having R involves sensorily entertaining a content but providing a naive realist account of nonhallucinatory cases. But this view is unsatisfactory: We should generalize intentionalism across the board (section 6). 4. Additional considerations favor strong intentionalism over qualia-content intentionalism (section 7). While the argument starts with hallucination, it does not depend on the assumption that the analysis of hallucination is the fundamental problem for a theory of perception. On the contrary, I present the argument in stages for expository purposes. The argument for the intentional view is simply that it provides the overall best account of visual experience. In each stage, I rely on certain intuitions about experiences, by which I simply mean claims that we have some pretheoretical reason to accept.

4. FIRST STAGE: IN FAVOR OF A POSITIVE RELATIONAL VIEW OF HALLUCINATION Typically, arguments for a positive relational view of hallucination, as against negative disjunctivism and qualia views, depend on one of the following two intuitions: Price’s intuition that in all cases of R, even H,

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there is an external item involving redness and roundness of which the subject is aware; or the transparency intuition that in all cases of R, even H, the subject knows what his experience is like by focusing on an external item, for instance, a tomato or the property of being red and round.8 I reject these arguments. The intuitions are compelling, but there are also good reasons to doubt them. What is the relevant external item of which one is aware in the case of H? One option is a strange particular: a sense datum, a visual field region, a region of physical space, or a Meinongian object. But, as I will show in section 5, this option is implausible. Another option is the uninstantiated property of being red and round. But it is strange to say that uninstantiated universals might be objects of awareness (see Pautz 2007). In what follows, I develop three alternative arguments. The intuitions they depend on require that H is in some sense essentially externallydirected, without presupposing the doubtful claim that in having H there actually is an external item of which one is aware. First I wield these three arguments against qualia views. Afterward, I argue that the first argument also tells against negative disjunctivism. In arguing against qualia views I focus on the type–type identity theory. This view holds that R (a property or type) is necessarily identical with some nonrelational neural property N and that H is necessarily identical with having N as the result of some aberration, or N&A for short. Like early arguments against the identity theory, all three of my arguments are applications of Leibniz’s law. But, unlike early Leibniz law arguments, they depend on the modal properties of visual experience properties. The first argument depends on the grounding intuition about H. Intuitively, having H endows certain individuals with the capacity to have certain kinds of color and shape beliefs. Maybe a dog lacking the capacity for conceptual thought altogether might have H and yet lack the capacity to have such beliefs. And maybe having H does not endow individuals with the capacity to have singular beliefs about particular objects. But, intuitively, it is necessary that, if an individual who has the capacity to have belief at all has H (for a sufficient period of time), then he will thereby have the additional capacity to have a general belief that is true only if something or other is present that is red and a general belief that is true only if something or other is present that is round. He himself might express these beliefs by saying ‘something is that way’ and ‘something is this way.’ For these beliefs to be true, it is not enough that the individual’s experiences be a certain way: Items other than his experience must be a certain way.9 8. For Price’s intuition, see Price (1932), Smith (2002: 224–225), and Hawthorne and Kovakovich (2006: 178). For transparency, see Tye (2000). Martin (2006) argues that the kind Pricean intuition discussed by Smith and Hawthorne and Kovakovich does not provide a good argument against negative disjunctivism. 9. The grounding intuition is similar to intuitions expressed by Heck (2000: n. 15), Horgan, Tienson, and Graham (2004), and Johnston (2004). But there are also important differences, and I do not think that the intuitions these philosophers discuss could be used to provide a good argument against the qualia view. For more on the differences, see Pautz (2008c: n. 23).


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Given the existence of properties, the grounding intuition entails that H necessarily endows believers with the capacity to have a belief that is true just in case something has the property of being red and a belief that is true just in case something has the property of being round. Let us say that a belief involves a property P iff it is true just in case something has P. Then the grounding intuition entails that H necessarily endows believers with the capacity to have beliefs involving external properties. It may seem that this presupposes a Russellian view according to which the contents of beliefs have properties as constituents, as opposed to a Fregean view according to which they have concepts of properties as constituents. But this is not so, for the Fregean no less than the Russellian holds that the truth-conditions of the relevant beliefs are specified by mentioning external properties. For instance, an individual might have a belief that is true only if something has the property of being round. So, in my sense, the Fregean can allow that some beliefs and their contents “involve” the property of being round. The Fregean will just provide a different analysis of this than the Russellian: for him it means that the contents of the beliefs have as a constituent a concept that determines the property of being round. In this chapter, I remain neutral between Russellian and Fregean views. The grounding intuition differs from the justification intuition: the intuition that having H necessarily provides individuals with a justification for believing that something red and round is present. I think that the justification intuition as well as the grounding intuition could support an argument against a qualia view of H and for a relational view. But the grounding intuition is more fundamental. How does having H endow individuals with the capacity to have such beliefs at all, whether justified or not? The qualia theorist might reject the grounding intuition about H. Instead, he might offer a surrogate: Necessarily, if a believer with the capacity for introspection has H, then he will merely have the capacity to have beliefs about the qualia of his own experiences, where these might in turn be identified with neural properties. This seems wrong. Since his experiences do have those qualia, such beliefs would be true. But, intuitively, whoever has H would thereby immediately have the capacity to have some false beliefs about the world, describable in terms of expressions like “red” and “round.” Now some relationalists say that H is necessarily identical, not with a relation to the color “red” as I maintain, but with a relation to a colorlike property not named in public language. We might call it phenomenal red. This is not a quale possessed by the experience but an external property: a primed property of the visual field, an appearance property of external objects, the property of having some property that plays the red-role, or an uninstantiated perfect color.10 Such philosophers would agree with the 10. For primed properties of the visual field, see Peacocke (2008). For appearance properties, see Shoemaker (1994). For the property of having some property that plays the red-role, see Chalmers (2004). For uninstantiated perfect colors, see Chalmers (2006).

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grounding intuition in spirit but not in letter. They would reformulate the grounding intuition in terms of phenomenal red. Although I formulate the grounding intuition and the other intuitions introduced below in terms of the public term “red,” the argument to be given is neutral on this issue. The grounding intuition entails that H necessarily possesses the following second-order grounding property: being a property that is such that, if a believer has it, then he thereby has the capacity to have beliefs involving redness and roundness. The argument against the identity theory is now this: 1. H has the grounding property necessarily. 2. N&A does not have the grounding property necessarily. 3. Therefore, H is not identical with N&A. The case for premise 2 is based on a thought experiment. Suppose we discover an alien creature, Slug. Slug has no visual system, but he has a taste system and an auditory system. Further, Slug has the general capacity to have beliefs, for instance, beliefs about tastes and sounds. In fact, he is very intelligent. Neuroscientists give Slug whatever neural assemblies are involved in having human neural property N and artificially make them fire in such a way that Slug himself has N&A. If the identity theorist says that N is a global nonrelational neural property, then the neuroscientist gives him this global neural property. Now, in humans, N is apt to be caused by a red and round object and is apt to cause behavior appropriate to such an object. In other words, N realizes a certain longarm dispositional, functional property. But, we may suppose, this is not so in Slug. In fact, when Slug has N, he bears no interesting physical or functional relations to redness and roundness of the kind that could ground the capacity to have beliefs involving redness and roundness. This is possible because N is a nonrelational property that is wholly distinct from any relational property with redness and roundness as relata. Since (irrelevant counterexamples aside) distinct properties are modally separable, Slug might have N but lack any such relational property. Finally, we add a totality clause to the effect that there are no relevant additional, nonphysical facts of the case. If the capacity to have beliefs involving properties is grounded in primitive intentional relations to those properties, then Slug also does not bear such relations to redness and roundness. Here now is how this case provides an argument for premise 2. If Slug has the capacity to have beliefs involving redness and roundness, then there must be something about him that could plausibly make this the case. But there is nothing that could make this the case. By stipulation, he bears no interesting physical or primitive relations to these properties. Therefore, Slug has the general capacity for belief, and he has N&A, but N&A does not give him the capacity to have beliefs involving redness and roundness. So, unlike H, N&A does not have the grounding property necessarily. Hence, H is not identical with N&A.


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My second argument against nonrelational, qualia views of H depends on what I call the matching intuition. If one has a hallucination of a square, and there happens to be a square present, then one’s experience matches the world, even though it is hallucinatory. We have no expression in English for this notion. Nevertheless, we have pretheoretical grip on it. This is shown by the fact that, given some examples, we quickly catch on. Of course, there may be some vagueness in the notion. But this does not mean that there are no truths about what must be the case in order for an experience to match the world. One such truth is the matching intuition about H: Necessarily, if one has H, then one is in a state that matches the world only if a red and round object is present. Some may think that the matching intuition presupposes the intentional view that H is a relation to a content involving redness and roundness, that experiences, like beliefs, have a “mind-to-world direction of fit” or “purport to represent the world,” and that experiences are the sort of things that can be in error. This is not so. The matching intuition presupposes none of these things.11 Indeed, the matching intuition is consistent with all relational views and all disjunctive views. Matching need not be explained in terms of truth of content. For instance, a sense datum theorist could say that, when we say that an experience matches the world only if an F is present, what we are implicitly picking up on is that it consists in the presentation of an F sense datum. And the negative disjunctivist might say that, when we say that an experience matches the world only if an F is present, what we are implicitly picking up on is that in

11. The notion of matching the world is the same as notion of accuracye (accuracy as introduced by example) introduced in Pautz (2008b). There I explain that the claim that experiences can be accurate in the sense I have in mind does not presuppose that experiences have a mind-to-world direction of fit (a claim that is evidently false if to say that a state has such a direction of fit is to say that it is normatively responsive to the acquisition of evidence). Nor does it presuppose that experiences, like beliefs and unlike hopes, are “committal” or “purport to tell us what the world is like.” Here I differ from Siegel (chapter 12, this volume). For Siegel, the issue of whether experiences are accurate or inaccurate and have contents turns on the issue of whether these slogans are correct, so that experiences are more like beliefs than hopes. The reason I work with a notion of accuracy that does not presuppose the correctness of these slogans is that I am not entirely sure how to understand them. Evidently, they should not be taken literally, since only agents literally commit or purport to tell things. And, since they are supposed to be controversial, I assume that they should not be taken to mean merely that experiences compel belief. Therefore, the claim that experiences are accurate, or match the world, with respect to various situations, in the sense I have in mind, is extremely thin. In an analogous sense, a reflection of a scene in a puddle of water can be said to be accurate with respect to the scene. Now, it might be said that, once we grant that experiences are accurate under certain conditions, it immediately follows that they have contents, so the aim of this chapter has been accomplished. This is not so. Granted, it does follow that experiences have contents in some weak sense (viz., in the sense given by what in Pautz [2008b] I call the accuracy conception of content). In this sense, sense datum theorists and disjunctivists can agree that experiences have contents. In an analogous sense, a reflection of a scene in a puddle of water can be said to “have” various propositional contents. But this does not mean that the aim of this chapter has been established, for the aim of this chapter is not to argue that experiences have contents in this extremely weak sense—a claim that I think can be established quite easily. Rather, my aim is to argue for the stronger claim that experiences are identical with relations to contents.

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having the experience the subject bears some (epistemic or nonepistemic) relation to actually seeing the F-ness of something. What the matching intuition is not consistent with are qualia views such as the identity theory. The argument parallels the previous one: 1. H has the matching property necessarily. 2. N&A does not have the matching property necessarily. 3. Therefore, H is not identical with N&A. The case for statement 2 is again based on Slug. If Slug is in a state that matches the world only if a red and round object is present, then there must be something about him that makes this the case. But, when he has N&A, he does not bear any relations to redness and roundness that could make this the case. So Slug has N&A, but he is not in a state that matches the world only if a red and round object is present. So, unlike H, N&A does not have the matching property necessarily. Hence, H is not N&A. My third argument is founded on the characterization intuition: Necessarily, if someone has H, it is correct to characterize her as having a hallucination of a red and round object. In other words, H has the following characterization property necessarily: If someone has it, then ‘has a hallucination of a red and round object,’ as we use this predicate, applies to her. This goes beyond the often-made point that we use the same words to describe visual experience properties that we use to describe external objects. The point is that visual experience properties are essentially thus describable. This is not something that is true of mere neural properties, which refutes the identity theory: 1. H has the characterization property necessarily. 2. N&A does not have the characterization property necessarily. 3. Therefore, H is not identical with N&A. Again, the case for premise 2 depends on Slug. He has N&A, but there is nothing that could make it the case that ‘has a hallucination of a red and round object’ as we use it applies to him. For instance, you might think that satisfying this predicate depends on being in a state which, among one’s kind, is caused by a red and round object under normal conditions. But Slug is not in any such state.12 Although I have focused on the identity theory, the arguments generalize to dualist qualia views holding that R is necessarily identical with a 12. I have justified the second premise of each of my three arguments by appealing to the case of Slug in which N plays no interesting functional role. But the second premise of each argument could also be justified by considering cases in which N plays a radically different functional role than it does in actual humans. Imagine, for instance, a case in which it is caused by green and square objects and causes behavior appropriate to such objects. In that case, it is implausible that N has the same externally-directed properties that it has in actual humans. For instance, it is implausible that it matches the world only if a red and round object is present. What could make this the case? Therefore, whereas H necessarily matches the world only if a red and round object is present, this is only a contingent feature of N&A. Hence, H cannot be identical with N&A.


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primitive nonrelational property P and H is necessarily identical with P&A. As we saw, intuitively, H necessarily possesses the following three externally-directed properties: the grounding property, the matching property, and the characterization property. Not so P&A. To see this, consider a case in which Slug has P&A but bears no interesting physical or primitive relations to redness and roundness. These, then, are the three arguments. They differ from the standard arguments against the identity theory. They obviously differ from the argument from multiple realizability. Although it may be less obvious, they also differ from another functionalist argument against the identity theory. Suppose that the identity theory is true, so that R is necessarily identical with N. Then, since an individual like Slug has N, he must also have visual experience property R. But an individual like Slug lacks the R-functional properties: the functional properties that typically accompany R, such as being in a state that is caused by red and round objects and that causes behavior appropriate to red and round objects. And, according to the argument, we have the functionalist intuition that having R requires having the R-functional properties, so an individual like Slug cannot have R, contrary to the identity theory.13 My arguments nowhere invoke the functionalist intuition. Indeed, my arguments are consistent with the falsity of this intuition. Granted, by my arguments, Slug, as originally described, cannot have R, since I argued that having R requires being in a state with certain externally directed properties, and I stipulated that Slug does not bear any physical or primitive relations to redness and roundness of the kind that might ground his being in such a state. But my arguments are consistent with the supposition that that R should be possessed by an individual who is like Slug in failing to possess the R-functional properties. For instance, maybe R is identical with standing in a primitive intentional relation to a content involving redness and roundness. Further, maybe there are no functionalist constraints on bearing this primitive relation to such a content. Then an individual like Slug might have R by bearing this primitive relation to such a content, even though he fails to possess the R-functional properties. In that case, the functionalist intuition is false. But the intuitions on which my arguments rely are still true, for even in such a case, the state of bearing the relevant primitive relation to a content involving redness and roundness (and hence R) might possess the grounding property, the matching property, and the characterization property. Note that the modal formulation of the three arguments is crucial. Qualia views are consistent with H’s contingent possession of the externally-directed properties. For instance, it is perfectly consistent with the identity theory that in the actual world a bit of mental paint such as N realizes the representation of a red and round object because in the actual 13. For this argument against the identity theory, which is just the reverse of the argument from multiple realizability, see Jackson (1993).

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world it is normally caused by a red and round object. If that is so, then in the actual world N brings with it the capacity to have certain beliefs as well as the other externally-directed properties. But, as I have discussed above, qualia views are inconsistent with the intuition that H necessarily brings with it the relevant externally-directed properties, for this is something no mere neural property such as N could do. The matching argument and the characterization argument are analogous to arguments one might give against an identity theory of belief properties. Consider the property B: the property of believing that a red and round object is present. One bizarre view is that B is necessarily identical with a certain neural property N. The view I have in mind is not that B is a long-arm functional property that is realized by N; rather, the view is that B is necessarily identical with N itself. No one would accept this view. For one thing, B has a certain truth-theoretic property necessarily, somewhat as H has a certain matching property necessarily. For another, B has a certain characterization property necessarily. Like H, B is necessarily describable in terms of the same expressions that we use to characterize external objects, such as red and round. But, evidently, no mere nonrelational neural property like N has these properties necessarily. Therefore, B is not identical with a mere neural property. Contrary to the identity theory, B must be a relation to an item involving redness and roundness, such as a proposition. Perhaps belief properties are realized by neutral properties, but since belief properties have certain properties necessarily that neutral properties do not have necessarily, it cannot be said that belief properties are necessarily identical with neural properties. What identity theorists fail to appreciate is that exactly parallel considerations apply to visual experience properties such as H. Such properties might be realized by neural properties but cannot be strictly identical with neural properties. Phenomenology, like belief, isn’t in the head.14 By contrast to the qualia view, the intentional view is consistent with the fact that H has certain externally-directed properties necessarily. On the intentional view, H is necessarily identical with sensorily entertaining a content involving redness and roundness. The intentionalist will say that this intentional property already incorporates the links to redness and roundness required to have beliefs involving them. And he will say that sensorily entertaining a content matches the world just in case the content is true. Finally, he will say that ‘has a hallucination of a red and round object’ simply picks out the relevant intentional property and that here “red” and “round” have their usual meanings and are characterizing the properties that enter into the intentional content. Therefore, the relevant intentional property, like H, has all three externally-directed properties necessarily. 14. To say that visual phenomenology isn’t in the head, in the sense of being relational, is not to deny that what goes on in the head has a significant role in configuring visual phenomenology. See Pautz (2010).


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But we cannot yet conclude that the intentional view of H is correct. Nonintentional relational views are also consistent with the intuition that H has the three externally-directed properties necessarily. Defenders of nonintentional relational views will simply provide different accounts of how experience grounds general belief, of matching, and of predicates such as ‘has a hallucination of a red and round object.’ For instance, on the sense datum view, H is necessarily identical with a relation to the redness and roundness of a sense datum. The sense datum theorist might say that whoever has the general capacity for belief also has the capacity for abstraction. So he might say that, necessarily, if a believer is aware of the redness and roundness of a sense datum, then he will have the capacity to abstract out the redness and roundness, and so he will have the capacity to have general beliefs involving redness and roundness. The sense datum theorist might also say that being aware of the F-ness of a sense datum matches the world just in case an F object is present. Finally, he will say that ‘has a hallucination of a red and round object’ simply picks out the relevant sense datum property; and that here “red” and “round” have their usual meanings and are characterizing the properties of a sense datum. In short, the property of being aware of the redness and roundness of a sense datum, like H, might have the three externally directed properties necessarily. Therefore, additional considerations are needed to support the acceptance of the intentional view of H over nonintentional relational views. I provide such additional considerations in section 5. I said that the aim of the first stage of the argument is to argue against negative disjunctivism as well as qualia views concerning H. I now turn to negative disjunctivism. This view is invulnerable to the matching argument and the characterization argument. On this view, H is necessarily identical with standing in some relation to the success property of seeing the redness and roundness of something. A proponent of this view might say that having this relational property is just what it is to have an experience that “matches the world” only if a red and round object is present. And he might say that this state is essentially describable in terms of “red” and “round”, because it is defined in terms of a relation to seeing the redness and roundness of an object. Nevertheless, we should reject negative disjunctivism. As I will discuss in section 6, there is no strong argument for this view, since there is no strong argument for any form of disjunctivism. There are, on the other hand, persuasive arguments against it. First, it is open to counterexamples. Second, while it is invulnerable to the matching argument and the characterization argument, it is vulnerable to the grounding argument. I elaborate these points in turn. It is helpful to begin by raising counterexamples to the simplest version of epistemic negative disjunctivism (section 2), even though no one has ever actually defended it. Recall that on this version having R is just a matter of not being able to know by reflection that one is not seeing the redness and roundness of something. Similarly for H. Against this, a rock

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cannot know by reflection that it is not seeing the redness and roundness of something. But it does not have R. A blind dog incapable of reflection likewise cannot know this by reflection. But it does not have R.15 Again, it is well known that if one looks at a waterfall for an extended period of time, and then looks at a stationary object, then the stationary object will appear to move and stand still. This is called the waterfall illusion, even though it is not an experience of a waterfall but an aftereffect produced after seeing a waterfall. Now suppose that for some reason Charlie often has hallucinatory experiences that are exactly like the waterfall illusion. In each case, he has a certain visual experience property, W. This raises a challenge for the epistemic negative disjunctivist. Any adequate theory of experience must provide some account of this property. But what account might the epistemic negative disjunctivist provide? He cannot say that W is the property of not being able to know by reflection that one is not veridically seeing something moving and standing still. Since it is possible to know by reflection that nothing can move and stand still, it will always be possible to know by reflection that one is not veridically seeing something moving and standing still. Nor can I see what other account the epistemic negative disjunctivist might provide, since it is possible to know by reflection that Charlie is not seeing any actual state of the world.16 15. Counterexamples involving cognitively unsophisticated individuals to epistemic analyses of mental states originate with Timothy Williamson (1995: 562). Williamson considers an epistemic analysis of believing, and he rejects it as hopeless owing to such counterexamples. In the case of the epistemic analysis of experience, such counterexamples are discussed by Martin (2004: 76), Siegel (2004), and Hawthorne and Kovakovich (2006). It might be thought that the rock counterexample is avoided by the following version of the epistemic analysis: x has R iff x undergoes an experience such that x cannot know by reflection that the experience is not a veridical experience of the redness and roundness of something. For since a rock undergoes no experiences, in the case of a rock the right side as well as the left side of this biconditional is false. But, even if this helps with the rock, it would not help with the dog, since we may suppose that the dog has, for example, taste experiences. In fact, it does not even help with the rock, for x has an experience iff x has an experience property, and on the epistemic analysis, having an experience property is presumably analyzed in terms of satisfying a negative epistemic condition. Such a negative epistemic condition will trivially be satisfied in the case of the rock. 16. For reasons that I explain elsewhere (Pautz 2008c: n. 27), the waterfall illusion is more troublesome for epistemic negative disjunctivism than are other cases of impossible experiences discussed in the literature (e.g., the cases discussed by Siegel [2004] involving color irrealism and the Escher staircase). It should be mentioned that the negative disjunctivist might identify W with the property of being such that it is impossible to know by reflection that one is not having a possibly illusory experience in which something appears to be moving and standing still. This revised analysis handles the case of Charlie, who has W while undergoing a hallucination. For while it is possible to know by reflection that he is not having a veridical experience of something moving and standing still, it is not possible to know by reflection that he is not having a possibly illusory experience in which some actual thing appears to move and still. This would be a version of VI∨H disjunctivism (see section 2). But this analysis would still face problems about rocks and dogs. And it is not the analysis that Martin (2006: 360–362) defends. He explains having an experience in terms of not being able to know by reflection that one is not having a certain veridical experience of an actual scene. In other words, he adopts a V∨IH version of disjunctivism, with illusory and hallucinatory experience being explained in terms of indiscriminability from veridical experience (see Hawthorne and Kovakovich 2006: 161–163; Byrne and Logue 2008: 61). Since Brewer (2008: 173) cites Martin, presumably he accepts the same veridicality-based epistemic analysis. As we have seen, such a veridicality-based analysis inevitably founders on the waterfall illusion.


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It may be thought that the counterexamples are avoided by an idealized version of epistemic negative disjunctivism. On one variety, having a certain visual experience property P is a matter of being such that, if one were capable of reflection, then one could not know by reflection that one is not seeing a certain state of the world. But this is unpromising for several reasons. For instance, it is unclear that a rock or a dog could be capable of reflection. Further, it does not help with Charlie. While Charlie has W, he is capable of reflection, yet he can know by reflection that he is not seeing any actual state of the world. On another variety of idealized epistemic disjunctivism, x has a certain visual experience property P just in case x is such that it is impossible that someone y in the same experiential situation as x could know by reflection that y is not seeing a certain state of the world. Evidently, this is circular or leads to an infinite regress, since it appeals to the notion of an experiential situation, which itself must be analyzed in epistemic terms. Further, it again does not help with Charlie. Anyone in the same experiential situation as Charlie could know by reflection that he is not seeing any actual state of the world.17 Another response to the counterexamples would be to reject epistemic negative disjunctivism and retreat to nonepistemic negative disjunctivism (see section 2). We can imagine different versions of this view. On the functionalist version, having an experience as of an F is a matter of standing in a functionally-defined relation to the success property of seeing the F-ness of something. The idea is that one bears the relevant relation to the success property of seeing the F-ness of something, and hence has an experience as of an F, iff one is in a state that under optimal conditions would be caused by the F-ness of something in the manner required for seeing the F-ness of something. This version avoids the counterexamples about the rock and the dog because neither the rock nor the dog is in a state that under optimal conditions would realize seeing the redness and roundness of an object. But I do not see how it helps with Charlie. And, while the difference between disjunctivism and intentionalism is thought to be profound, this functionalist version of negative disjunctivism is hardly different from versions of intentionalism that explain content in terms of causal-covariation under optimal conditions (see Tye 2000). Another version of nonepistemic negative disjunctivism, the primitivist version, postulates a completely primitive, nonepistemic, nonphysical relation P and identifies having R with bearing P to the success property of seeing the redness and roundness of something. In my view, disjunctivists who answer counterexamples by appealing to “impersonal unknowability” 17. Although he ultimately rejects epistemic negative disjunctivism, Sturgeon (2006: 195–197) argues that counterexamples concerning rocks and dogs and the like can be avoided by appealing to a certain type of idealization. But elsewhere (Pautz 2008c: n. 28) I argue that the analysis he suggests faces the same problems I raise in the text.

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are primitivist disjunctivists in disguise.18 The primitivist version avoids the counterexamples about the rock and the dog, provided that neither the rock nor the dog bears the postulated primitive relation P to the success property of seeing the redness and roundness of something. And it avoids the problem about Charlie, provided that Charlie bears P to the success property seeing something moving and standing still, even though it is knowable by reflection that this success property is necessarily uninstantiated. (As I discuss in section 5, intentionalism provides a similar account of impossible experiences in terms of bearing the relation of sensorily entertaining to a content that is necessarily false.) So, the primitivist version of negative disjunctivism avoids the counterexamples. What then is my argument against primitivist negative disjunctivism? Many would object to its primitive ontology. But I cannot endorse this objection, since, for reasons that I will not explain here, I myself accept a nonreductive, primitivist version of intentionalism, according to which R 18. For impersonal unknowability, see Martin (2006). In his comments on an earlier version of this chapter, Bill Brewer also appealed to impersonal unknowability to handle counterexamples to epistemic negative disjunctivism about hallucination. The disjunctivist who appeals to impersonal knowability says that x has visual experience property E iff x stands in the following relation to some success property y: It is impersonally unknowable of x and y that x does not have success property y. Further, he says that there is no interesting analysis of this relation—it is some primitive relation. In particular, he insists that to say that something is impersonally unknowable is not to say that someone could not know it under certain circumstances (Martin 2006: n. 44). This analysis avoids counterexamples about rocks and blind dogs, provided it is “impersonally knowable” that they do not see any worldly states, even though neither they nor anyone else could know this. But I do not see how it helps with Charlie, for it is “impersonally knowable” by reflection that he is not seeing something moving and standing still. And it is unclear what ‘it is impersonally unknowable of x and y that x does not have success property y’ means. After all, this predicate contains technical jargon (‘impersonally unknowable’) that is not part of ordinary language. This technical jargon must somehow be explained before we can understand the view. One response is that impersonal unknowability can be explained by example. For instance, it might be said that when a mathematician says that a mathematical proposition p is unknowable, he has the alleged impersonal sense of unknowability in mind (example due to Bill Brewer). Against this, I would have thought that when a mathematician says that it is unknowable that p, he means what the rest of us mean: It is not possible that someone or other should know it, even under idealized circumstances. Another response is that ‘it is impersonally unknowable of x and y that x does not have success property y’ can be understood as a theoretical predicate and its meaning can be given by description in accordance with the Ramsey-Lewis method for defining theoretical terms: It expresses the supposed primitive relation P such that having an experience property E consists in bearing P to some success property. As far as I can see, this is the only explanation that makes impersonal disjunctivism comprehensible. Evidently, according to this interpretation, impersonal disjunctivism is just primitivist disjunctivism. Hawthorne and Kovakovich (2006: 166–167) also favor this interpretation of Martin’s impersonal disjunctivism, but I differ from them on two points. First, they still count the view as a version of epistemic disjunctivism. By contrast, I count it as a form of nonepistemic disjunctivism in disguise. A relation is an epistemic relation only if it can be explained in epistemic terms. Granted, impersonal disjunctivists refer to the relevant relation using epistemic language. But I think that this is misleading, for they deny that the relevant relation can be explained in epistemic terms or indeed in any more basic terms at all: They hold that the relevant relation is wholly primitive. In what sense, then, are they advocating an epistemic analysis? Second, Hawthorne and Kovakovich object to primitivist disjunctivism on the grounds that it is ad hoc (2006: 167). In my view, this objection is not sufficiently strong. I develop a quite different objection based on the potential explanatory role of hallucination in grounding the capacity for belief.


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is identical with standing in a primitive intentional relation to a content involving redness and roundness. In my view, the real argument against primitivist negative disjunctivism is simply that there is no reason to accept it as well as reason to reject it. There is no reason to accept primitivist negative disjunctivism, because the only potential argument for accepting disjunctivism of any kind is that it honors the naive intuition that in a veridical case one has R by virtue of having the success property of seeing the redness and roundness of something (see section 6), but primitivist negative disjunctivism fails to honor this intuition. This may be seen by contrasting it with epistemic negative disjunctivism, which does honor the intuition. On epistemic negative disjunctivism, in the veridical case, one actually sees the redness and roundness of something. By virtue of actually having this success property, one has the negative epistemic property of not being able to know by reflection that one does not have it. So, in the veridical case, the negative epistemic property does not “screen off” the success property from playing a role in determining that one has R; on the contrary, one has the negative epistemic property, and hence R, by virtue of having the success property. In this way, epistemic negative disjunctivism honors the naive intuition. By contrast, on primitivist negative disjunctivism, it is presumably not the case that, in the veridical case, one bears the relation P to the success property of seeing the redness and roundness of something, and thereby has R, by virtue of actually having that success property. For, on his view, since P is a primitive relation, it is presumably not instantiated by virtue of anything more basic. Therefore, on primitivist negative disjunctivism, in the veridical case, the property of bearing P to a success property does “screen off” the success property itself from determining that one has R. Indeed, primitivist negative disjunctivism is even more contrary to the naive view of perception than are common factor views. For, on primitivist negative disjunctivism, in all cases, having R consists in standing in a certain relation (viz., P) to a mental state (viz., seeing the redness and roundness of something), rather than standing in a relation to an actual or apparent state of the world. That is why there is no reason to accept primitivist negative disjunctivism. There is reason to reject it because, while it avoids counterexamples, it is vulnerable to the second problem I advertised for negative disjunctivism. In particular, like all versions of negative disjunctivism, it is vulnerable to the grounding argument. It is best to begin by stating the problem as it arises for epistemic negative disjunctivism. Suppose that John previously lacked the capacity to have beliefs involving redness and roundness but now has H and thereby acquires this capacity. This case affords a simple argument against epistemic negative disjunctivism. The first premise is that H is such that John’s having it explains his new capacity to have beliefs involving redness and roundness. The second premise is that this could not be true of the mere property of failing to satisfy a certain epistemic condition. The conclusion

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is that, contrary to epistemic negative disjunctivism, H cannot be identical with the property of failing to satisfy a certain epistemic condition. Note that the first premise is actually modally weaker than the grounding intuition, since it merely asserts that in John’s case H explains the capacity to have beliefs involving redness and roundness. This is all the argument requires. The argument for the first premise is simply that it is very intuitive. Everyone agrees that V might explain the new capacity to have general beliefs involving redness and roundness. Intuitively, H has exactly the same explanatory potential.19 It is difficult to see how one could justify accepting the intuition in the case of V while rejecting it in the case of H. As for the second premise, there are a few potential arguments in its favor. First, John’s failing to satisfy a certain epistemic condition explains his new capacity to have beliefs involving redness and roundness only if there exists some explanation going from his failing to satisfy the relevant epistemic condition to his having the capacity to have such beliefs. But I cannot see what that explanation might be. A second argument for the second premise (suggested to me by David Chalmers) is that, irrelevant counterexamples aside, if a’s possessing F explains a’s possessing G, then if a had not possessed F, a would not have possessed G. But it is not intuitively true that, if John had satisfied the relevant epistemic condition (viz., being such that it is knowable by reflection that he does not see the redness and roundness of something), then he would have lacked the new capacity to have beliefs involving redness and roundness. Therefore, by contrast to John’s having H, his failing to satisfy this epistemic condition cannot be said to explain his new capacity to have beliefs involving redness and roundness, in agreement with the second premise. A third potential argument for the second premise is that, on some views, having a belief involving redness and roundness consists in standing in some physical relation (e.g., causal-covariation under optimal conditions) to redness and roundness. But John’s merely failing to satisfy a certain epistemic condition could not explain his standing in such a relation to redness and roundness and hence could not explain his new capacity to have beliefs involving redness and roundness. By contrast, if, as on some versions of intentionalism, John’s having H itself consists in standing in the same kind of physical relation to redness and roundness, then it might explain his new capacity to have such beliefs (see note 22). 19. It may be objected that it is question-begging to use the first premise in an argument against epistemic negative disjunctivism, because the epistemic negative disjunctivist will deny this premise, as he identifies H with the property of failing to satisfy a certain epistemic condition, and this property cannot explain John’s new capacity to have beliefs. (An objection along these lines was put to me by Michael Martin.) But the argument is not question-begging. If it were, then it would always be questionbegging to use intuitions against a theory when the theory is incompatible with those intuitions. And this is not the case. Of course, the epistemic negative disjunctivist could just deny the intuition, but this would be a serious cost. Another objection to the first premise (put to me by Bill Brewer) is that, since having a belief involving redness and roundness requires possessing mind-independent concepts and tracking existing red and round objects, a mere hallucination cannot provide the capacity to have such a belief. I address this objection elsewhere (Pautz 2008c: §5).


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The same argument applies against the primitivist version of nonepistemic negative disjunctivism. How could bearing some primitive relation to seeing the redness and roundness of something explain the capacity to have beliefs involving redness and roundness? Disjunctivists often stress that nonhallucinatory experience explains the capacity to have beliefs involving particular objects (Campbell 2002: 122). (Although, as I describe in section 6, this is in fact quite compatible with a common factor view and consequently offers no support for a disjunctive view.) But we must also account for the potential thoughtgrounding role of hallucinatory experience. There do not merely exist particular objects; there also exist such things as general properties. (Try analyzing ‘reds resemble oranges more than greens’ without properties.) And hallucinatory experience, while it might not ground the capacity to have singular beliefs involving particular objects, does ground the capacity to have general beliefs involving certain properties. To suppose that we must explain the fact that nonhallucinatory experience grounds the capacity to have beliefs involving particular objects but may ignore the fact that hallucinatory experience grounds the capacity to have beliefs involving general properties would to be to endorse an unjustified double standard. To account for the explanatory role of hallucinatory experience, we need a positive, relational theory of hallucinatory experience, contrary to negative disjunctivism. I conclude that both the qualia view and negative disjunctivism fail. However, as I have explained, the arguments I have offered so far are quite consistent with nonintentional relational views of H such as the sense datum view as well as with the intentional view. So I cannot quite yet conclude that an intentional view of H is correct. In the second stage, I draw on additional considerations to argue that the best relational view of H is an intentionalist one.20

5. SECOND STAGE: AN INTENTIONAL VIEW OF HALLUCINATION In the first stage, I appealed to intuitions about the externally directed properties of H to argue that we need a positive, relational view of H. However, as I explained, these intuitions are consistent not only with the intentional view of H but also with nonintentional relational views of H: the sense datum view, the sensationalist view, the multiple relation view, and the intentional view. That is because, on all of these views, in having H, an individual is necessarily related to redness (or phenomenal redness) and roundness. Such a state might ground the capacity to have beliefs involving redness and roundness; it matches the world only if a red and 20. Elsewhere (Pautz 2008c: §5) I address objections to my arguments against the qualia view concerning brains in vats, inverted spectra, visual agnosia, Sperling-type experiments, rigidification, and magical theories of intentionality.

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round object is present, and it is essentially characterizable in terms of the expressions “red” and “round.” Intentional and nonintentional relational views only differ on whether H relates an individual to redness and roundness by relating him to a particular existing object that instantiates or presents those properties, with intentional views rejecting this assumption and nonintentional relation views endorsing it I now argue on the basis of two additional considerations that the intentional relational views are superior to nonintentional ones. First, hallucinations can take place without any suitable physical particular before the subject. Call this particular-independence. Second, hallucinations can be contradictory and indeterminate. Call this indeterminacy-impossibility. Consider the sense datum view first. Many would rule this view out of court because it is inconsistent with physicalism. But, as I said at the outset, I reject this argument, because physicalism is far too controversial to be the basis of an argument for rejecting the sense datum view in favor of an intentional view. We may, however, appeal to considerations about particular-independence and indeterminacy-impossibility. Since the sense datum view of H only appeals to mental particulars, it is compatible with particular-independence. But, as is well known, it runs afoul of indeterminacy-impossibility. Suppose that Mabel views a pink object in the periphery of her visual field and has a vague impression of pink. Now suppose that the brain state she then had is somehow produced in the absence of any pink object. Consequently, she has a hallucination H+ in which she has a vague impression of the color pink but fails to experience any specific shade of pink. The sense datum theorist could say (1) that there is some maximally specific shade of pink that the sense datum of which Mabel is aware (determinately) possesses, but Mabel cannot make it out, or (2) that the sense datum is pink but no specific shade of pink. Neither option is plausible. The first option is implausible because, if the sense datum in Mabel’s periphery has some specific color, say, pink17, then there must be some neural explanation of why it has this color rather than some other. But there is no such neural explanation. Peripheral vision is subserved by the wavelength-insensitive rods on the retina. So the visual system does not “know” the determinate color of the object. And it is implausible that it arbitrarily produces a pink17 sense datum but then makes Mabel’s awareness of the sense datum “fuzzy” so that she cannot determine its precise color.21 The second option is implausible because there intuitively could not be an object that is pink but no specific shade of pink. Now consider as an example of an impossible experience the waterfall aftereffect discussed in section 4. If you look at a waterfall or other moving body for an extended period and then look at a stationary object, then the object will appear to move and stand 21. The speckled hen is the classic illustration of the problem of indeterminacy for the sense datum view. But elsewhere (Pautz 2008c: n. 45) I argue that the sense datum theorist can easily handle the speckled hen.


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still at once. Suppose that Charlie has a hallucination H– with the same phenomenal character as this illusion. The sense datum theorist might claim (1) that the sense datum of which he is aware has one of these properties (moving or standing still) but not the other or (2) that it has both properties. Again, neither option is plausible. Therefore, against the sense datum view, the best view is that in H+ and H– there is no existing object of which the subject is aware that instantiates the apparent properties. Once we say this, it becomes plausible to say that there is no such object in the case of H, despite the considerable pull of the intuition that there is such an object. In the case of the sensationalist view and the multiple relation view, the situation is reversed. These views might accommodate indeterminacy-impossibility. The sensationalist does not say that the regions of physical space constituting the visual field instantiate merely determinable colors or properties such as moving and standing still. And the proponent of the multiple relational view says that a region of space merely presents the problematic combinations of properties to the subject, without instantiating them. But the sensationalist view and the multiple relation view run afoul of particular-independence. Consider first the sensationalist view defended by Peacocke, who defines the visual field as the region of curved space that would coincide with the surface of, in his words, “a Cyclopean eye with a single extended retina,” if one had such a single eye in the place of one’s two eyes (Peacocke 2008: 12). So he says that an unfortunate subject with no eyes has no visual field. Nevertheless, such a subject might have vivid hallucinations. For such a subject, Peacocke writes, “it is as if there is something [a visual field] parts of which enjoy the relevant sensational properties, . . . even though . . . there is no such thing” (Peacocke 2008: 15). Peacocke, then, appears to provide a straightforward intentionalist account of the phenomenology of such an individual’s experiences: Talk of particulars such as visual field regions and the properties they present takes place entirely within the intensional operator ‘it is for the subject as if [ . . . ],’ which is of the same kind as ‘the subject sensorily entertains [ . . . ].’ So Peacocke is in effect admitting that an intentionalist account is suitable in the case of the eyeless man. Indeed, since the eyeless man could have the whole range of human visual experiences, Peacocke is in effect admitting that all human visual experiences could be explained entirely in terms of intentional content. This admission is problematic for two reasons. First, it robs Peacocke of his motivation for preferring his sensationalist account to a strong intentionalist account in the first place, for his motivation is that there are some human visual experiences that cannot be explained entirely in terms of intentional content. Second, once Peacocke allows that a strong intentionalist account is suitable in the case of the eyeless man, considerations of uniformity suggest applying it to the experiences of normal individuals.

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Next consider the multiple relation view, focusing on the common factor version introduced in section 1. (In section 6 I consider the disjunctivist version introduced in section 2.) Recall that this view, like the sensationalist view, holds that in both nonhallucinatory and hallucinatory cases R consists in a subject standing in a relation to a region of physical space. But, unlike the sensationalist view, it holds that the relevant region of space is at some distance from the subject, namely, where the property of being red and round is ostensibly presented to him, rather than being immediately before his eyes. And, by contrast to the sensationalist view, the multiple relation view does not define the region in terms of the subject’s eyes. Therefore, it is invulnerable to the problem of the eyeless man. Nevertheless, this view has difficulty accommodating particular-independence for other reasons. For instance, a person presumably could have a hallucination of an ostensible object five feet away from him, even though he is at the end of a spatially bounded world, so that there is no region of space five feet away from him. This obviously counts against a version of the multiple relation view that appeals to regions of space in hallucinatory cases. We can also have experiences in dreams and imaginings. In response, the proponent of this type of view might say that in these cases it is not a region of space but rather a mental object, a Meinongian object, or an abstract object that presents (without instantiating?) the relevant properties (see, respectively, Alston 1999; Levine 2008; Kripke 1973). But such a view would be ontologically extravagant, so the question arises: Why should we accept such a view over the intentional view, which need not appeal to any such object? In response, it might be said that the multiple relation view is more intuitive than the intentional view. But I find these views equally counterintuitive, for I find it counterintuitive to suppose that experiences, as opposed to beliefs, might consist in relations to such abstracta. For instance, even though I accept the intentional view, I grant that it is counterintuitive—it is counterintuitive that having R might consist in standing in a relation to an intentional content in Plato’s heaven involving the possibly uninstantiated universals being red and being round. I find the multiple relation view no less counterintuitive. It is equally counterintuitive that having R should consist in the obtaining of a threeplace relation between an object, some possibly uninstantiated universals, and oneself. Therefore, the intentional view and the multiple relation view are on a par, except that the intentional view easily accommodates the particular-independence of hallucination. I conclude that the intentional view of hallucination is correct. On the intentional view, having a hallucination consists in sensorily entertaining a content involving external properties. The case for this view is that it the best view consistent with the features of hallucinations discussed in section 4 and here. It explains how hallucinations ground the capacity to have beliefs involving those external properties and how they have the other externally-directed properties discussed in section 4. At the same time, unlike rival relational views, it easily accommodates


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indeterminacy-impossibility and particular-independence, for on this view, there need not exist any object, such as a sense datum or region of space, that actually instantiates or presents the relevant properties. This view trades problematic impossible and indeterminate objects with innocuous indeterminate and impossible contents. Once we accept this view in the case of the relevant problematic hallucinations, we should accept it in the case of H as well.22

6. THIRD STAGE: AGAINST POSITIVE DISJUNCTIVISM AND FOR COMMON FACTOR INTENTIONALISM In sections 4 and 5, I argued for a positive, intentional view of hallucination. On this view, in the hallucinatory case H, one has R owing to sensorily entertaining a content involving redness and roundness. Once this is accepted, it is natural to suppose that, in illusory case I and veridical case V as well, one has R owing to sensorily entertaining a content involving redness and roundness. This would yield the following: Common factor intentionalism: having R = sensory entertaining a content involving redness and roundness.

However, nothing I have argued for so far makes such a view compulsory. I have argued that negative disjunctivism fails (section 4). But everything I have said is also consistent a positive version of disjunctivism of the following form: Positive disjunctivism: having R = either having some success property S not involving intentional content or sensorily entertaining a content involving redness and roundness.

The proponent of this version of positive disjunctivism can agree with the conclusion of the sections 4 and 5 that in the hallucinatory case H one has R owing to sensorily entertaining a content involving redness and roundness. But, on this version of positive disjunctivism, by contrast to common factor intentionalism, in the veridical case V and perhaps in the 22. Campbell (2002: 122) rejects intentionalism on the grounds that it “takes the intentional character of experience as a given” See also Brewer (2006). It is unclear what he means—maybe that it violates the vaguely Russellian view that all intentionality is grounded in nonintentional acquaintance with objects. But this Russellian view must be argued for. What exactly is wrong with rejecting this Russellian picture and holding that the mind is intentional “all the way down”? On another interpretation, Campbell’s argument is that, on intentionalism, either sensorily entertaining something is F is itself a way of grasping something is F, or it is not. Either way, one might think, it cannot explain how it is that we can grasp something is F, contrary to the grounding intuition. I want to make two points here. First, disjunctivists like Campbell and Brewer face the same dilemma. In the case of Brewer’s account (discussed in section 6), the dilemma is this: Either seeing an object that looks F due to having visually relevant similarities to a paradigm F is itself a way of grasping the concept of an F, or it is not. Either way, one might think, it can never ground our grasp of such a concept, contrary to intuition. Second, for the intentionalist at least, this dilemma is not serious. See Pautz (2008a, 2008c: §6).

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illusory case I, one has R owing to having some success property S not involving intentional content: as it might be, seeing the redness and roundness of an object, or being such that an object in one’s environment presents one with the property of being red and round. So far I have explained how the positive disjunctivist and the common factor intentionalist answer what I have called the phenomenal question (section 1). But before we can assess them properly we must also know how they answer the success question. According to these views, what is the nature of successful perception? What is it to see a tomato, for instance? The common factor intentionalist will most likely accept a factorization account of such success properties. He holds that sensorily entertaining a tomato-like content is common to both seeing a tomato and hallucinating one. The most obvious difference is that, when one sees a tomato, ones sensorily entertaining a tomato-like content is caused by the presence of tomato. This suggests that the property of seeing a tomato is a conjunctive property that can be factored into two components: sensorily entertaining a content that sufficiently matches the tomato, and doing so as the appropriate causal result of the presence of the tomato. However, it is important to realize that a common factor view of phenomenology, such as common factor intentionalism, does not entail a factorization account of perceptual success. The two often go together, but they are in fact completely separable. Therefore, even if the factorization account of perceptual success failed, this would not in the least support the rejection of a common factor view of phenomenology. The proponent of the common factor view could always retreat to a nonfactorization view. Consider an analogy. Believing is a common factor between knowing and merely believing. This might naturally suggest a factorization view of knowledge in terms of having a belief meeting certain further conditions, but it does not strictly speaking require one. It is consistent with this that knowledge is a wholly different state, whose essence involves the world (see Williamson 1995: 563). Likewise, according to the common factor intentionalist, sensorily entertaining a content is a common factor between seeing and merely hallucinating. This does not strictly require factorization view of seeing in terms of sensorily entertaining a content and meeting some further conditions. Consistently with this, the common factor intentionalist could accept the view that seeing is a wholly different state whose essence involves the world. For the common factor intentionalist, then, it is extremely natural, although not compulsory, to adopt a factorization account of perceptual success. By contrast, for the positive disjunctivist—indeed, for the disjunctivist of any kind—the factorization account is ruled out from the beginning. Suppose, for instance, that the positive disjunctivist analyzes R in terms of either seeing the redness and roundness of something or else


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sensorily entertaining a content involving redness and roundness. Since this account explains R in terms of the success property of seeing the redness and roundness of something, it renders circular a factorization account of this success property in terms of having R while meeting some further conditions. Some objections to common factor views such as common factor intentionalism are founded on the notion that they cannot adequately explain perceptual success. But in my view they are based on misunderstandings. One objection relies on the history of failed attempts to specify a complete, counterexample-free analysis of seeing that factorizes it into having a matching experience and some causal condition. There are two responses available to the common factor intentionalist. First, he might say that seeing reduces to matching and causation but that there is no algorithm that we can specify codifying exactly what kinds of matching and causation are required for seeing. Second, he might simply grant that the factorization account of seeing is mistaken. As I argued above, it is a mistake to think that the common factor intentionalist is committed to a factorization account of seeing in terms of matching and causation. In response to the history of failure, the common factor theorist could accept a nonfactorization account of seeing like the disjunctivist.23 A second objection is that a common factor view is in conflict with the slogan that objects are “essential constituents” of nonhallucinatory experiences. This slogan is supposed to motivate a disjunctivist view. This again is not so. There is no obvious conflict between the slogan and a common factor view of phenomenology. There is no conflict even if the common factor view is combined with a factorization account of perceptual success. Of course, the proponent of such a view will grant that, when John hallucinates a tomato, ‘John’s experience’ refers to an event not essentially involving any mind-independent object. But he might plausibly claim that, when John actually sees a tomato, ‘John’s experience’ refers to a more bloated kind of event, one that reaches out into the world and essentially involves the particular tomato John sees. Consider an analogy. Kicking is a common factor between John’s kicking a ball and his kicking without hitting anything. And his kicking the ball involves this common factor and some further conditions involving the ball. Nevertheless, when John kicks the ball, the kicking is plausibly an event that essentially involves the ball, in the sense that the very same event of kicking would not have occurred were the

23. For an objection to the factorization account of perceptual success based on a counterexample, see Johnston (2006). I suggest that Johnston’s case can be handled by a safety-based factorization account in Pautz (2007: n. 1). The first of the two alternative responses I consider in the text is based on the idea that reductions do not require explicit analyses. For this idea, see Jackson and Chalmers (2001: §3). Consider an analogy: The gestalt properties of a pixel screen, for instance, the property of making a face, are identical with some extremely complicated, disjunctive properties definable in terms of the pixels. But we cannot specify the relevant reductions.

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ball not present.24 A third objection is that a common factor view, together with a factorization account of perceptual success, is in conflict with the evident fact that V and I (which involving seeing an object that looks red and round) ground singular thought involving a particular object. This is supposed to motivate a disjunctivist view that rejects the factorization account of perceptual success. But, again, there is no obvious conflict here. On the factorization account, there is a common factor running through V, I, and H: They all involve sensorily entertaining a content involving redness and roundness. This accounts for the overlapping cognitive powers of V, I, and H: The fact that they all ground the capacity to have general thoughts involving redness and roundness, in accordance with the grounding intuition (see section 4). But, on this view, there is an additional factor present in V and I that is not present in H, namely a causal link to a particular object. This accounts for the fact that V and I ground the additional capacity to have singular thoughts involving a particular object.25 Now that I have described common factor intentionalism and positive disjunctivism, I begin to address the issue of which we should prefer. Like

24. For the intuition that objects are essential constituents of nonhallucinatory experience, see Martin (2006: 357). Occasionally, Martin formulates the intuition using the notion of a fundamental kind (2006: 361). These formulations are not equivalent, because the notion of a fundamental kind differs from the notion of an essential property (Pautz 2007: 528). Here I focus on the essential properties formulation, because the notion of a fundamental kind has not been sufficiently clarified (Pautz 2007: 528). It should be mentioned that my suggestion concerning how the common factor theorist might accommodate the essence claim does not require him to say that in the veridical case John undergoes two experiential events, one that consists in the instantiation of a success property and essentially involves the tomato and another that consists in the instantiation of an intentional property and does not essentially involve the tomato. This is a view that Martin (2004: 59) criticizes in a different connection. To see this, consider again the analogy with kicking. In the good case in which John kicks something, he does not undergo two kicking events. 25. For the claim that the common factor theorist cannot explain singular thought, see Campbell (2002: ch. 6). Brewer has recently raised a number of objections to common factor intentionalism, but his fundamental objection also involves perceptual success (2006: 172): If intentionalism is true, then we do not “genuinely” perceive physical objects. Alston (1999: 193–195) says the same. (Pautz [2007] addresses a related but distinct objection to intentionalism.) What Brewer means is unclear, but I think there is an argument in the vicinity. The ordinary concept of seeing is such that, when one sees a tomato, one has a certain visual experience property (e.g., R) directly by virtue of seeing the tomato and its character (e.g., its redness and roundness). In other words, what I call the “naive intuition” below is built into our very concept of seeing. Since (as I discuss shortly) intentionalists must reject the naive intuition, they must deny that we see things in exactly the way demanded by our pretheoretic concept. But to conclude that intentionalists must deny that we see things would be a non sequiter. Consider an analogy: Given the atomic theory of matter, no physical relation perfectly satisfies our concept of contact. But there is a relation that satisfies this concept well enough to count as contact. So the proponent of the suggested argument faces a question: Why think we see things in exactly the way demanded by our pretheoretic concept? Further, a tu quoque looms. Brewer says that, on his own visual similarities account (a version of disjunctivism to be discussed below), the object of an experience helps to constitute the experience’s phenomenology. But he does not specify the sense in which this is so. It looks as if all that matters are its “visually relevant similarities” (analogous to the intentionalist’s “how it is represented”). Below I argue that no version of VI∨H disjunctivism, such as Brewer’s, accommodates the “naive intuition.” So the intentionalist


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any version of disjunctivism, positive disjunctivism comes in VI∨H versions and V∨IH versions (see section 2). I begin by arguing against three VI∨H versions of positive disjunctivism. Then I look in greater depth at a V∨IH version of positive disjunctivism, arguing that it is somewhat better motivated but that nevertheless common factor intentionalism is ultimately preferable. The three VI∨H versions of positive disjunctivism are as follows. First, on the visual similarities version, having an experience as of an F object is a matter of either perceiving an object with “visually relevant similarities” to a paradigm F object (covers V and I) or sensorily entertaining a content to the effect that an F object is present (covers H). Roughly, a perceived object o has visually relevant similarities to a paradigm F object iff a paradigm F object would have similar effects on the visual system as the perceived object o. Paradigm F objects are those whose association with ‘F’ partly constitutes our understanding of ‘F,’ given our training. This view is open to clear counterexamples: (a) The periphery: Suppose that an object in the periphery of one’s visual field looks red but no specific shade of red. On the visual similarities view, this is so only if a paradigm object that is red but no specific shade of red would normally have similar effects on the visual system as the object perceived. The problem is that there could be no such paradigm object. (b) The waterfall illusion: In this illusion (see section 4), an object appears to move and stand still. On the visual similarities view, this is so only if a paradigm object that both moves and stands still would normally have similar effects on the visual system as the object perceived. Again, the problem is that there could be no such paradigm object. (c) Standard variation: John and Jane look at a pure blue object. Due to slight innate differences that are entirely within the range of normal, it looks pure blue to John, but it looks green-blue to Jane. How does the visual similarities account explain the object’s looking green-blue rather view and Brewer’s view are in the same boat. In fact, Brewer’s view seems very similar to singular intentionalism. Brewer has other objections to intentionalism: (i) In discussing the problem of falsity, Brewer asks why, on intentionalism, one cannot see a circular object as square (2006: 171–172). My reply is that, on intentionalism, seeing an object requires not merely causation but also a suitable degree of match between the object and experiential content. In his comments on an earlier version of this chapter, Brewer asked just how much matching is required for seeing and why. A difficult question—but this does not undermine the account. It is likewise hard to say just what nonbeautiful features are required for beauty. Further, the disjunctivist faces an analogous question: Just how much deviancy is required to turn a perceptual experience into the (according to him) radically different state of hallucination? Indeed, the fact that the issue seems indeterminate favors a common factor view. (ii) In discussing the problem of generality, Brewer considers whether the intentionalist might provide a “procedure” for determining the content of an experience (2006: 175ff.). This amounts to a request for a reductive psychosemantics. But the intentionalist is not committed to a reductive psychosemantics. Again, a tu quoque: Does the proponent of the visual similarities account have a hard-and-fast procedure for going from wholly nonperceptual facts to visually relevant similarities? (iii) Brewer has a number of objections concerning the Müller-Lyer illusion. For a response, see Pautz (2008b: §2).

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than pure blue to Jane? The problem is that it seems that the perceived object has for Jane visually relevant similarities to a paradigm pure blue object, since a paradigm pure blue object would (indeed, does) produce in her the very visual state she is in. (d) The pigeon: Consider a world in which all and only paradigm red objects, which normally look red to us, normally look F to pigeons, where F is other than red. Indeed, suppose that all and only paradigm red objects are also paradigm F objects, and suppose that in this situation redness and F-ness are realized by, and coextensive with, the very same reflectance property, which is processed differently by humans and pigeons. Then, when a viewed object looks F to a pigeon, the object has visually relevant similarities to a paradigm red object as well as to a paradigm F object, since such an object would have the same effects on the pigeon’s visual system as the viewed object. Indeed, given that redness and F-ness are constituted by the same reflectance property, in this case a paradigm red object has visually relevant similarities to the viewed object (would reflect the same light, etc.) by virtue of being red no less than by virtue of being F. But it does not look red to the pigeon. (e) No paradigms: Suppose it turned out that, in the actual world, although there are sentient creatures, there are no concept users. Then there would be no paradigm Fs, but things could presumably look F to the sentient creatures. The intentional view easily handles all of these cases.26 A second VI∨H version of positive disjunctivism is the points of view version. This version holds that having an experience as of an F object is a matter of either seeing an object relative to a certain type of “point of view” (covers V and I) or sensorily entertaining a content to the effect that 26. For the visual similarities account of nonhallucinatory experience, see Brewer (2008). The pigeon is what I have elsewhere (Pautz 2010) called a coincidental variation case, and the problem such cases pose for Brewer’s account is similar to the problem they pose for optimal cause accounts of content. This is unsurprising, since at a certain level of abstraction Brewer’s account is similar to an optimal cause account of content. In Pautz (2007, 530–531) I develop but do not defend an alternative disjunctivist account, the matching causation account, which handles standard variation and some versions of the pigeon. In response to the waterfall illusion, Brewer might say that it not the case that one has an experience of an object as moving and standing still iff the object has visually relevant similarities to an impossible object that both moves and stands still, as I assumed in the text. Rather, one has an experience of an object as moving and standing still iff (a) the object has visually relevant similarities to a moving object and (b) the object also has visually relevant similarities to an object that stands still. There are two problems with this reply. First, as Brewer explains visually relevant similarities, they are “identities in such things as, the way in which light is reflected and transmitted from the objects in question, and the way in which the stimuli are handled by the visual system” (2008: 172). So, in the waterfall illusion, the perceived object has visually relevant similarities to an object that moves (i.e., condition (a) is met) iff the perceived object reflects light and produces a neural response that are similar to the light reflected by, and the neural response produced by, an object that is moving. But this is simply not so. In the waterfall illusion, the perceived object is in fact not moving, so the light coming from it is radically different from the light that would come from a moving object. Further, it produces a neural response that codes for stillness as well as for movement. By contrast, a moving object would produce a neural response that only codes for movement. The second problem with this reply is that it in any case does not carry over to the other counterexamples.


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an F object is present (covers H). Here point of view is to be understood broadly to include not only the perceiver’s location but also his internal state and the viewing conditions. The idea is that in illusion one’s “point of view” is a bit askew. This version is unsatisfactory because it does not accommodate the grounding intuition. Suppose a green and oval tomato looks red and round to an individual. This grounds the capacity to have the (false) belief that the tomato is red and round, which involves the tomato, the property of being red, and the property of being round. On this view, the tomato is a constituent of the experience, so it explains how the experience grounds the capacity to have a belief involving the tomato. But, on this view, the property of being red and the property of being round are not constituents of the experience, so it fails to explain how the experience grounds the capacity to have a belief involving these properties. The proponent of this view seems to think we need to explain how nonhallucinatory experience grounds thought involving particular objects, but we do not need to explain how it grounds thought involving general properties. This is an unjustified double standard. In fact, although I believe that we must admit properties (think of ‘reds resemble oranges more than greens’) and so put the point in terms of properties, even the disjunctivist who is a nominalist has an explanatory burden here: How can a nonhallucinatory experience involving a certain “point of view” ground the capacity to think that something is F?27 A third VI∨H version of positive disjunctivism is the multiple relation version. This version holds that having an experience as of an F object is a matter of either being such that some object presents one with the (possibly uninstantiated) property of being F (covers V and I) or sensorily entertaining a content involving the property of being F (covers H). This is a VI∨H disjunctivist version of the multiple relation view (see section 2). It is superior to the visual similarities version of VI∨H disjunctivism as well as the points of view version. Unlike the visual similarities version, the multiple relation version avoids the counterexamples about peripheral vision and the waterfall illusion. Unlike the points of view version, the multiple relation version accommodates the grounding intuition, for on this version, if a green and oval tomato looks red and round, then the tomato, the property of being red, and the property of being round are all constituents of the experience. Hence, this view explains how the 27. For the points of view account, see Campbell (2009). Brewer says that his visual similarities account is a version of the points of view account (2008: 171), although this is unclear. The points of view account is evidently very similar to the multiple relation account defended by Langsam (1997) and Alston (1999). On both accounts, nonhallucinatory experiences consist in obtaining a three-place relation among an object, a subject, and a third item. But whereas on the points of view account the third item is a “point of view,” on the multiple relation view it is an apparent property of the object. In fact, Alston’s argument is similar to Brewer’s (see note 26). Despite the similarity, neither Campbell nor Brewer considers the multiple relation account, so it is unclear why they prefer their own accounts to it. I argue below that the multiple relation account has some important advantages over the visual similarities account and the points of view account.

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experience grounds thought involving these properties as well as the tomato. In addition, this disjunctivist version of the multiple relation view has an important advantage over the common factor version of the multiple relation view criticized previously (see section 5). Whereas the common factor version explains hallucinatory experience as well as veridical and illusory experience in terms of particular presenting properties, the present disjunctivist version explains hallucinatory experience in terms of intentional content. Therefore, unlike the common factor version, the present disjunctivist version accommodates the particular-independence of hallucination. But the multiple relation version of VI∨H disjunctivism is poorly motivated. Why accept disjunctivism of any kind? In my view, the standard arguments fail. For instance, one argument relies on the slogan that external objects are essential constituents of nonhallucinatory experiences. Another relies the fact that nonhallucinatory experience can ground singular thought. I criticized these arguments above. In my view, the most interesting argument is based on the naive intuition that when one sees a tomato one has R simply by virtue of seeing the actual redness and roundness of the tomato. This argument will be examined in detail when we look at V∨IH disjunctivism, since this version of disjunctivism honors the naive intuition. But for now it suffices to note that all versions of VI∨H disjunctivism fail to honor the intuition. This includes the multiple relation version of V∨IH disjunctivism. By definition, on VI∨H disjunctivism, in the veridical case V, one has R by virtue of having some success property S that one also has in the illusory case I when no red and round object is present. Hence, S is other than the property of simply seeing the actual redness and roundness of the tomato, for one fails to have this property in the illusory case I. On the multiple relation view, S involves being presented with a possibly uninstantiated universal. On the visual similarities view, S involves visual relevant similarities to a paradigm red and round object. On the points of view version, S involves one’s point of view. All such views violate the naive intuition that, in the veridical case V, one has R by virtue of simply seeing the redness and roundness of an object, rather than by virtue of having some property S that one could also have in an illusory case when there is no red and round object before one. Hence, the multiple relation view and, indeed, all versions of VI∨H disjunctivism cannot be motivated by appealing to the naive view concerning the ground of visual phenomenology. In fact, as I discussed in section 5, the multiple relation view is no less counterintuitive than intentionalism. On the other hand, there is reason to reject the multiple relation version of positive disjunctivism, for all versions of positive disjunctivism are complicated and peculiar. However, I postpone development of this point until my evaluation of V∨IH disjunctivism, to which I now turn. In my view, V∨IH disjunctivism may be somewhat better motivated than the three versions of VI∨H disjunctivism just discussed. Therefore I consider in some detail what I take to be the best version of V∨IH


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disjunctivism. On this view, R is identical with the disjunctive property of either seeing the redness and roundness of something (covers V) or sensorily entertaining a content involving redness and roundness (covers I and H). Previously, I called this disjunctive intentionalism (see section 2). Disjunctive intentionalism accommodates all of the intuitions so far discussed. For instance, it accommodates the grounding intuition. On this view, in every possible case having R grounds the capacity to have beliefs involving redness and roundness. In the illusory and hallucinatory cases, the ground of the capacity to have such beliefs is sensorily entertaining a content involving redness and roundness; in veridical cases, it is seeing the actual instantiation of redness and roundness by some object before one. Given that both disjunctive intentionalism and common factor intentionalism accommodate all of the intuitions so far discussed, how we are to decide between them? First I examine an argument for preferring disjunctive intentionalism to common factor intentionalism based on naive intuitions concerning the ground of visual phenomenology. Then I examine an argument for preferring common factor intentionalism to disjunctive intentionalism based on the fact that the former is far simpler than the latter. I suggest that between these arguments the simplicity argument in favor of common factor intentionalism is by far the more persuasive. Consider first the argument for disjunctive intentionalism. As noted above, I believe that the standard arguments for disjunctivism fail. But I will now consider a very simple but overlooked argument that is based on the type of naive intuition about the ground of visual phenomenology that I have already alluded to. I arrive at the argument in steps: I begin by considering a general version of the intuition I have in mind. This version of the intuition is compelling, but it is arguably false and cannot be used to support disjunctivism. This leads me to consider a different version of the intuition, which might be thought to lend some support to disjunctivism but that is problematic in the end. The version of the intuition that I consider first is that having R is identical with seeing the redness and roundness of something. In other words, it is a matter of what in section 2 I called state-seeing the state of an object. Let us call this the general naive intuition, since pretheoretically it is the natural view concerning the nature of the general visual experience property R. And let us call the property of seeing the redness and roundness of something a naive realist property. By the general naive intuition, R is identical with a relation to an item that is very different from an intentional content, namely, an actual state of the world. This item has the following properties: It exists only if a red and round object is present. It is located in space before one. It is not true or false. It is seen by the subject. Some clarifications are in order. First, some say that intuition supports the further claim that the relevant item involves a mind-independent

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object. I disagree. After all, some sense datum theorists would have said that sense data are three-dimensional and located in physical space, so they are naturally mistaken for mind-independent objects. This view cannot be ruled out on the basis of mere reflection on our experience.28 Second, against my formulation of the general naive intuition, some would say that what intuition supports is not that having R is a matter of seeing a state or condition involving an object, namely, the redness and roundness of an object. Rather, they would say, what intuition supports is that having R is a matter of simply seeing the object itself, an object that is red and round. I disagree. This object-seeing version may seem plausible at first blush, but it is ruled out by further reflection. For instance, one might see an object that is in fact red and round but fail to have R because one is subject to an illusion in which the object looks otherwise than red and round. Intuitively, in this case, one does not have R because, although the object is red and round, one does not see its redness and roundness. In fact, the object-seeing version is arguably false even if what we most directly see are sense data. For, presumably, one could be aware of a sense datum that is in fact red and round for a brief moment and yet fail to have R because in this brief moment one was not aware of its redness and roundness. Therefore, on reflection what intuition supports is indeed that having R is a matter of being aware of the redness and roundness of an object, not merely an object that is in fact red and round. Third, the general naive intuition is an intuition about R only. I do not say that we have analogous intuitions about all visual experience properties. For instance, where B is just like R except that it is blurry, I would not say that it is intuitive that having B is just a matter of seeing the blurriness, the redness, and the roundness of an object (see section 7). The intentional view is inconsistent with the general naive intuition. Suppose that you have R while viewing a tomato. The general naive intuition is that having R is a being related to an actual state of the world, namely, the redness and roundness of an object. By contrast, on the intentional view, having R is a matter of being related to an intentional content. Such an intentional content is radically different from a state of the world. Indeed, it lacks all the properties enumerated above: It would continue to exist even if there were no red and round objects. It is unextended and is not located in space before one. It is true or false. It cannot be seen.

28. For the view that sense data are three-dimensional and located in physical space, see Jackson (1977: 77–78, 102–103). In claiming that the mind independence of the objects of experiences is not supported by mere reflection on our experience, I differ from Martin (2004: 42).


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Pretheoretically, the intentional view that your having R consists in being related to such a peculiar item, as opposed to the concrete redness and roundness of the object before you, is very counterintuitive. It would be a mistake to think that the general naive intuition only counts against reductive physicalist versions of intentionalism, so that it is merely a special case of more general antiphysicalist intuitions. It counts equally against “primitivist” forms of intentionalism, which maintain that the relevant relation is a primitive, nonphysical relation. The intuition that such a view cannot be correct finds expression in the apparent conceivability of an individual who bears the relevant primitive relation to such a nonextended intentional content but does not have R, that is, is not ostensibly presented with an extended, red and round object. By contrast, intuitively, an individual could not see the redness and roundness of something without having R. I grant that the general naive intuition is very compelling and provides a reason for rejecting intentionalism. But I believe that impossible and indeterminate hallucinations (see section 5) provide a more powerful reason for rejecting the intuition. For instance, having an experience of something moving and standing still cannot be a matter of being aware of any actual condition. So, the general naive intuition provides some reason, albeit defeasible reason, to reject common factor intentionalism. But it could not be used to support the acceptance of disjunctivism intentionalism instead, because the disjunctive intentionalist, no less than the common factor intentionalist, rejects the general naive intuition. For the disjunctive intentionalist agrees with the common factor intentionalist that in illusory and hallucinatory cases one has R owing sensorily entertaining a content involving redness and roundness, rather than owing to seeing the redness and roundness of something. The only type of view that the general naive intuition supports is a common factor act-object view such as the sense datum theory, which I rejected previously on the basis of impossible and indeterminate hallucinations.29 However, it might be thought that a different type of intuition in the same ballpark lends some support to disjunctive intentionalism. The general naive intuition is framed in terms of the identity relation: The intuition is that the property of having R is identical with the property of seeing the redness and roundness of something. But it may be thought that there is a weaker by-virtue-of relation that can hold between properties. In a certain specific case, an object might have P by virtue of having Q. This does not mean that P is identical with Q, for in another case an object might have P by virtue of having some property other than Q: A property can have a plurality of grounds. If there is such a relation, and if we have an intuitive grip on it, then it might be said that, in addition to the single general naive intuition, we have indefinitely many specific naive intuitions about R. In particular, for every possible 29. McGinn (2004) accepts this type of view, but he holds that in every case the relevant object is a nonexistent, Meinongian object rather than a sense datum. For criticism, see Pautz (2007).

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case in which someone has R, we would have the intuition that in that case he has R by virtue of seeing the redness and roundness of something. Common factor intentionalism apparently never honors these intuitions (but see below). This view maintains that in every case one has R by virtue of being related to a content involving redness and roundness, an abstract object that exists even if no red and round object is present. Indeed, even singular intentionalism never honors specific naive intuitions. On this view, when viewing a tomato, one has R by virtue of sensorily entertaining the singular content the tomato, being red and round . Such a content has none of the properties enumerated above. It is not located before one, it would exist even if no red and round object were present (as in illusion), and it is not something one sees. The view that while one views the tomato one has R by virtue of being related to such a peculiar entity, rather than by virtue of simply seeing the actual redness and roundness of the tomato, is counterintuitive.30 The situation is otherwise with disjunctive intentionalism. On this view, R is the disjunctive property of either seeing the redness and roundness of something or sensorily entertaining a content involving redness and roundness. Like common factor intentionalism, this view does not honor naive intuitions in cases of illusion or hallucination, since it agrees that in these cases one has R by virtue of satisfying the second disjunct. Only the sense datum view honors these intuitions across the board. But disjunctive intentionalism does at least honor specific naive intuitions in the veridical cases. It holds that in such cases one has R by virtue of satisfying the first disjunct, that is, by virtue of simply seeing the redness and roundness of something—which, as we saw above, is quite different from a content. Indeed, on this view, in the veridical cases one presumably does not sensorily entertain a content at all. In this case, something very special happens: The concrete world itself is simply laid bare to one, and this determines the character of one’s experience. Therefore, unlike Siegel (chapter 12, this volume), I understand the naive view and the intentional view (roughly, what she calls ‘the strong content view’) in such a way that they are apparently incompatible. In short, on both common factor intentionalism and disjunctive intentionalism, the general naive intuition is false. But when it comes to specific naive intuitions, disjunctive intentionalism has a slight advantage over common factor intentionalism. According to the latter, specific naive intuitions are always false; according to the former, they are at least 30. Schellenberg (forthcoming) argues that singular intentionalism shares some of the advantages of the kind of disjunctivist view defended by Martin (2004, 2006) and others. However, if I am right, singular intentionalism does not accommodate the intuition that I regard as providing the best argument for disjunctivism, the naive intuition.


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sometimes true. This, it might be said, provides an argument for accept disjunctive intentionalism over common factor intentionalism.31 My guess is that when disjunctivists invoke the slogan that objects are essential constituents of nonhallucinatory experiences (or that objects are “immediately present” in experience without cognitive distance), they are attempting to give expression to what I have called naive intuition about ground of visual phenomenology. But this slogan misidentifies the naive intuition. Indeed, this slogan is not even about the ground phenomenology. By contrast, common factor intentionalism is only a claim about the ground of phenomenology, so the slogan about essential properties (or immediate presence) is not even incompatible with common factor intentionalism, as I argued above. By contrast, the naive intuition is about the ground of phenomenology, and it is genuinely incompatible with the common factor intentionalist’s view about the ground of phenomenology. Therefore, it is this intuition, rather the intuition about the essential properties of nonhallucinatory experiences, that should be the focus of discussion. However, the argument for disjunctive intentionalism from naive intuitions is subject to two objections. The first objection is not entirely persuasive. But the second objection identifies a serious flaw in the argument. The first objection is that, contrary to what I have suggested, common factor intentionalism can honor naive intuitions no less than disjunctive intentionalism. In other words, the intentionalist can have his cake and eat it too, for, it might be said, the common factor intentionalist might adopt a special version of intentionalism. On all versions of intentionalism, in nonveridical cases of R, it is not the case that one sensorily entertains a content involving redness and roundness by virtue of having any more basic mental property. What mental property could it be? Therefore, on all versions of intentionalism, in nonveridical cases, sensorily entertaining contents is a basic form of intentionality that is not grounded in any further mental properties a person has and that grounds more advanced 31. As I have said, this argument is strangely overlooked. For instance, Martin’s (2002) main argument for disjunctivism appears to be that it is the only view that accommodates the committal nature of imagination. For a critical discussion, see Pautz (forthcoming). Martin also claims that the intuition that objects are essential constituents of nonhallucinatory experiences supports disjunctivism (a claim I criticized above). In neither argument does Martin use the naive intuition. However, he does seem to endorse this intuition, for he says that the naive aspects of an experience are explanatorily relevant to the phenomenal aspects of the experience (Martin 2004: 59, 63, 71). This provides the materials for an extremely simple argument for disjunctivism that is discussed in the text, which differs from Martin’s (in my view) more problematic arguments about the committal nature of imagination and the essential properties of nonhallucinatory experiences. For if this naive intuition is to be honored, then as you look at a tomato you must have R simply by seeing the redness and roundness of something. Since, contrary to the sense datum view, in nonveridical cases you do not have R by virtue of seeing the redness and roundness of an object, it would follow that some kind of disjunctivism must be true. Byrne and Logue (2008: 87) ask why would it be “bothersome” or “problematic” to reject the naive intuition. I think that a good answer is that it is just very intuitive.

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forms of intentionality. But, on the special version of intentionalism I have in mind, in veridical cases the situation is quite different. On this version of intentionalism, in veridical cases, one sensorily entertains a content involving redness and roundness by virtue of possessing a more basic mental property, namely, seeing the redness and roundness of something (perhaps together with performing some kind of abstraction). In short, in veridical cases, one has R by virtue of sensorily entertaining a content involving redness and roundness, and one sensorily entertains a content involving redness and roundness by virtue of actually seeing the redness and roundness of something. By the transitivity of the by-virtue-of relation, it would follow that in veridical cases one has R by virtue of seeing the redness and roundness of something, as well as by virtue of sensorily entertaining a content involving redness and roundness. Accordingly, we might call this naive realist intentionalism. If naive realist intentionalism is viable, then the argument from naive intuitions for preferring disjunctive intentionalism to common factor intentionalism fails, since there is a version of common factor intentionalism that accommodates naive intuitions just as well as disjunctive intentionalism does. But naive realist intentionalism is inconsistent with a factorization account of seeing the redness and roundness of something. And I think we should accept such an account because it allows us to avoid the view that seeing is a primitive mind–world relation. The factorization account is inconsistent with naive realist intentionalism for the following reason. On this account, the naive realist property seeing the redness and roundness of something is a conjunctive property: having the intentional property of sensorily entertaining a content involving redness and roundness and doing so as the appropriate causal result of something’s being red and round. Intuitively, given that the naive realist property has the intentional property as a conjunct, it cannot be said that one might have the intentional property (and hence R) by virtue of having this naive realist property, contrary to naive realist intentionalism. In general, it cannot be said that a is F by virtue of being F and G. That would be like saying that John is a man by virtue of being an unmarried man. Therefore, if it is combined with a factorization account of seeing, common factor intentionalism inescapably violates naive intuitions. So far, I have yet to identify a flaw in the argument from naive intuitions for preferring disjunctivism intentionalism to common factor intentionalism. In my view, the main objection to this argument is simply that naive intuitions are very dubious. Therefore, it is no great loss if common factor intentionalism cannot accommodate them. Naive intuitions are dubious for three reasons. (1) They are formulated in terms of an alleged “by-virtue-of” relation, but it is not clear that we have a grip on such a relation.32 (2) It may be that intuition does not directly support specific claims to 32. This reason for thinking that naive intuitions are dubious can be put as a dilemma. We attempt to explain ‘by virtue of’ either by example or by definition. Suppose first that we attempt to explain ‘by virtue of’ by example. Then it is unclear that we succeed in giving ‘by virtue of’ any meaning. One alleged


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the effect that in veridical cases one has R by virtue of seeing the redness and roundness of something. Instead, it may be that intuition directly supports the general claim that R is identical with seeing the redness and roundness of something, which in turn supports the more specific claim about the veridical case. But, as I have argued, considerations concerning indeterminate and impossible hallucinatory experiences defeat whatever intuitive justification we may have for accepting the general claim. If this is right, then they also defeat whatever indirect justification we may have for accepting the more specific claims about veridical cases. (3) Even if intuition somehow directly supports the specific naive realist claims about the ground of R in the veridical cases, rather than supporting it via the discredited general naive intuition about R, there is a reason to doubt intuition on this matter. In nonveridical cases no less than in veridical cases, one has the strong intuition that one has R by virtue of seeing the redness and roundness of something. But then such intuitions are false, since then we are not seeing the redness and roundness of anything. On this point the disjunctivist agrees. Of course, just as perception may provide fallible justification for beliefs about the nature of the external world, intuition may provide fallible justification for beliefs about the nature of perception. But the extreme fallibility of this particular type of intuition does at the very least significantly defeat whatever justification it may provide for accepting a naive realist account only in the special case of perfectly veridical experience.33 Having considered the argument for disjunctive intentionalism, I now turn to the argument against it. The standard argument against positive example is the relation between a disjunctive property and one of its disjuncts. Another is the relation between a determinable property and a determinate falling under this determinable. The trouble is that it is not clear that a single ‘by virtue of’ relation is involved in these examples. Rather, there are different relations involved in the different examples. Next suppose that we attempt to explain ‘by virtue of’ relation by providing a stipulative definition; for instance, we might say that an individual has P by virtue of having Q iff it follows from the analysis or “real definition” of Q that if an individual has P then the individual has Q. Then we definitely succeed in giving ‘by virtue of’ a meaning. The trouble is that the content of the naive intuition is now a highly theoretical claim about the real definition of the visual experience property R. It is unclear that pretheoretical intuition can be used to support this claim. 33. There is, I think, an interesting alternative argument for disjunctivism that does not rely on naive intuitions about experience in the actual world. Isn’t there at least a “possible world” in which whenever one has R one has it simply by virtue of actually seeing the redness and roundness of a mind-independent object—something like David Chalmers’s (2006) Eden world? In this world, there is never perceptual error, and hence no need to account for experience in terms of intentional content. If such a world is possible, then R must be a disjunctive property: either sensorily entertaining a content involving redness and roundness or actually seeing the redness and roundness of something. In the actual world, we always have R by virtue of satisfying the first disjunct, so our naive intuitions are always false. In the Eden world people have R by virtue of satisfying the second disjunct, so their naive intuitions are always true. Indeed, perhaps we should be pluralists about phenomenology: In some worlds the naive realist view is true, in some worlds the multiple relation view is true, in other worlds the sense datum view is true, and so on. This would lead to multijunctivism about R. It would avoid a problem Martin (2004: 50–52) raises for the common factor theory, namely, that such a theory might be too restrictive in its account of experience. Now, if naive realist worlds are really possible, so that R is a multiply disjunctive property, then I would

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versions of disjunctivism such as disjunctive intentionalism concerns a “screening off” worry. In the case of disjunctive intentionalism, the argument is as follows. Suppose that John sensorily entertains a content involving redness and roundness in nonveridical cases. Since his physical state is relevantly similar in the veridical cases, John presumably also sensorily entertains such a content in the veridical case. But then in the veridical case John’s sensorily entertaining such a content will “screen off” the naive realist property of seeing the redness and roundness of something from explaining why John has R. In this way, disjunctive intentionalism entails that naive realist properties are explanatorily redundant to the phenomenal aspects of experience, so it does not after all honor the naive intuition that in the veridical case ones has R by virtue of simply seeing the redness and roundness of something, even though the main argument for it was supposed to be that it honors this intuition (for this argument, see Martin 2004: 59, 64). Although I reject disjunctive intentionalism and other versions of positive disjunctivism, I believe that this standard argument against it fails. To see this, I first examine the only two possible versions of disjunctive intentionalism. Afterward I show that neither faces the screening off worry. Consider first the overdetermination version. It combines disjunctive intentionalism with the claim sensorily entertaining a content (a proposition or property-complex) involving redness and roundness is not necessitated by some positive condition that is present in the case of V as well as in the case of I and H, for instance, being in a state that is optimally caused by a red and round object or that has the biological function of indicating a red and round object. The overdetermination version entails that, in the veridical case V, John has both of the properties that, on disjunctive intentionalism, are disjuncts R: He sees the redness and roundness of something, and he sensorily entertains a content involving redness and roundness. In this sense, in the veridical case V, his having R is overdetermined. Consider next the restrictive version of disjunctive intentionalism. By contrast to the overdetermination version, this version combines disjunctive intentionalism with the claim that sensorily entertaining a content (a proposition or property-complex) involving redness and roundness is not necessitated by some positive condition that is present in the case of V as well as in the case of I and H. Rather, there is a strange necessary condition on sensorily entertaining contents that prevents one from sensorily entertaining contents in cases of perfect successful perception, namely, that one is in an unsuccessful case. On the restrictive version, in the retreat to actual-world common factor intentionalism: In the actual world, at least, whenever one has R, it is by virtue of being related to an abstract object, namely, an intentional content. This goes against actualworld disjunctive intentionalism, which says that in the actual world one sometimes has R by virtue of standing in a primitive seeing relation to the redness and roundness of a mind-independent object. The argument for accepting actual-world common factor intentionalism over actual-world disjunctive intentionalism is simply the argument in the text: It is vastly simpler, and there is no strong argument for any form of actual-world disjunctivism.


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perfectly veridical case V, John’s having R is not overdetermined, for in this case, John does not sensorily entertain a content involving redness and roundness. He simply sees the redness and roundness of something. It is owing to this alone that he has R.34 These are the only possible forms that positive disjunctivism might assume, and neither is vulnerable to the screening off argument. This is obvious in the case of the restrictive version. On this version, as he views the tomato, John does not have the intentional property at all. He only has the naive realist property, and it is by virtue of this alone that he has R. Although it may be less obvious, the overdetermination version is also invulnerable to the screening off argument. On that version, R is the disjunction of a naive realist property and an intentional property. Further, when John views a tomato, he satisfies both disjuncts. The screening off worry for the overdetermination version is that John has R by virtue of having the intentional property rather than by virtue of having the naive realist property. But the proponent of the overdetermination version will rightly reply that, whatever the problems for his view, this is not among them. For him, the naive realist property and the intentional property are entirely on a par: Each is a disjunct of R, and John has each of them. Therefore, there is no reason to say that John has R by virtue of having one of the disjuncts but not the other. Instead, the proponent of the overdetermination version might say that, in general, if F is the disjunction of P and Q, and if an individual has both P and Q, then the individual has F by virtue of having P and the individual has F by virtue of having Q. If this is right, then the present version of positive disjunctivism entails that John, as he views the tomato, has R by virtue of having the intentional property and he has R by virtue of having the naive realist property, so the intentional property does not screen off the naive realist property from explaining why John has R. Therefore, the argument against versions of positive disjunctivism such as disjunctive intentionalism cannot be that they make naive realist properties explanatorily redundant to the phenomenal aspects of experience. In my view, the best argument against them is simply that they are peculiar and complicated. On overdetermination version, there is a bizarre overdetermination of phenomenology in veridical cases. On the restrictive version, it is a brute modal fact that, necessarily, one can sensorily entertain a content only if one is in an unsuccessful case.35 By contrast, common factor intentionalism is attractively simple. It provides a simple account of sensorily entertaining on which sensorily entertaining a content supervenes on a positive condition present in the 34. Johnston (2004: 171) flirts with the restrictive version. Elsewhere (Pautz 2010: §12) I explain how the restrictive version might work. 35. Singular intentionalism faces the same dilemma, even though I do not count it as a form of disjunctivism (see note 5). On one version of this view, having R is a matter of either sensorily entertaining a singular content involving redness and roundness (covers V and I) or sensorily entertaining a gappy

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case of V as well as in the case of I and H. At the same time, it avoids the bizarre overdetermination of phenomenology in the veridical case V. Granted, on this view, in the veridical case V, John has both the intentional property and the naive realist property. However, in this case as in other cases, his having R consists in his having the intentional property. There is a second respect in which disjunctive intentionalism is complicated. As I argue above, the disjunctive intentionalist must deny that seeing the redness and roundness of something can be factorized into having R and meeting some further, causal condition. Elsewhere I argue on the basis of variation in color vision that he must also say seeing a state of the world is not a complex relation constructible out of more basic physical and topic-neutral ingredients. He must say that it is a simple or primitive mind–world relation that supervenes on a certain kind of causal process proceeding from external states to the mind. This is something disjunctivists themselves seem to accept on independent grounds.36 content involving redness and roundness (covers H). Either sensorily entertaining a gappy content involving redness and roundness supervenes on a positive condition that is present in the cases of V and I (e.g., tracking redness and roundness under optimal conditions), or it does not. If sensorily entertaining a gappy content supervenes on such a positive condition, then in cases of V and I, one sensorily entertains both a singular content and a gappy content, so that one’s having R is overdetermined. If it does not, then we must explain why one can sensorily entertain a gappy content only in the case of H. Of course, general intentionalism faces no such dilemma, since it holds that having R is in all cases simply a matter of sensorily entertaining the same general content involving redness and roundness. Further, in my view, there is no reason to accept singular intentionalism over general intentionalism. Tye (2007: 604) supports the acceptance of singular intentionalism over general intentionalism on the grounds that singular intentionalism avoids counterexamples to general intentionalism in which the general content of an experience is true but the experience is intuitively nonveridical. But the generalist may avoid the counterexamples by appealing to centered contents (for this notion, see Lewis 1994). For instance, if John hallucinates a red and round object, then the general, centered content of his experience will be the property of being in front of a red and round object. This content is false when evaluated with respect to the time and place of John’s hallucinatory experience, even if it is true when evaluated with respect to some other time and place. Tye raises some objections to a similar, Kaplan-style view, but they do not carry over to the centered contents suggestion. Alternatively, the generalist may avoid the counterexamples by appealing to a complex account of veridicality (Pautz 2008b: §3). Tye (2007: 608) also supports the acceptance of singular intentionalism over general intentionalism on the grounds that singular intentionalism accommodates what he calls the “singular phenomenology” of visual experience, whereas general intentionalism does not. But I am unsure what he means by this. If a veridical experience has a singular phenomenology, then presumably so too does an indistinguishable hallucinatory experience. On one interpretation, to say that a hallucinatory experience has a singular phenomenology is to say that there is some object x such that it seems to the subject of the hallucinatory experience that x is present (a de re interpretation). But on this interpretation the claim is false, at least if we set aside sense datum views and Meinongian views. On another interpretation, to say that a hallucinatory experience has a singular phenomenology is to say that it seems to the subject of the hallucinatory experience that there is some specific object x such that x is present (a de dicto interpretation). On this interpretation, the claim may be true, but it is precisely the claim made by the generalist. 36. For why I think the disjunctivist must say that the seeing relation is primitive, see Pautz (2009: §12). Campbell (2002: 117–118) and Johnston (2004: 138–139, 2006) appear to accept this conclusion on independent grounds. In Pautz (2010: §12) I also argue that, even if realism about color is correct, we probably never see the actual colors of objects, so naive intuitions are probably never true. This would provide yet another reason to doubt the argument for disjunctivism based on naive intuitions.


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By contrast, the common factor intentionalist does not have to postulate a primitive seeing relation in order to account for veridical phenomenology. He accepts a seeing relation, but he does not need to take it as a primitive. As I argued at the start of this section, the common factor intentionalist can accept a factorization account of seeing the redness and roundness of something in terms of having R (i.e., sensorily entertaining a content involving redness and roundness) and doing so as the appropriate causal result of something’s being red and round. To sum up, the best version of positive disjunctivism is disjunctive intentionalism. This version satisfies all of the intuitions so far discussed as well as the kind of common factor intentionalism that I favor. I considered an argument for accepting disjunctive intentionalism over common factor intentionalism based on naive intuitions about the ground of visual phenomenology. But these intuitions are dubious for a number of reasons. For one thing, it is agreed by both sides that they are false in nonveridical cases. Once this is admitted, we have little reason to accept the complicated disjunctive theory in order to accommodate them in veridical cases. And there is strong argument against accepting such a theory: We get a vastly simpler theory if we provide an intentional account across the board.

7. FOURTH STAGE: IN FAVOR OF STRONG INTENTIONALISM I have focused on R, but the arguments I have developed would clearly apply to other visual experience properties. However, these arguments are neutral between strong intentionalism and qualia-content intentionalism (see section 1). I now argue that there can be no clear counterexamples to strong intentionalism. In other words, all differences among visual experience properties can be associated with different intentional contents or different intentional relations. I do not say that this alone establishes strong intentionalism. In other words, I do not say that this alone establishes that these experience properties are identical with relations to the intentional contents. For instance, the sense datum theorist would grant that reddish experiences and greenish experiences can be associated with different propositions about the colors of objects, but he would maintain that the experiences are identical with relations to sense data rather than with relations to propositions. It was my aim in sections 4–6 to establish that some version of intentionalism is correct, so that every visual experience property is at least partly identical with a relation to a content. My aim in this section is merely to establish that there are no clear counterexamples to the strong intentionalist view that every visual experience property is wholly identical with a relation to a content, so that strong intentionalism emerges as the best version of intentionalism. The argument depends on the spatial characterization intuition. This intuition is related to the characterization intuition discussed in section 4. The characterization intuition was that R is essentially characterizable in

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external terms. The spatial characterization intuition is both more general and more specific. The spatial characterization intuition is that, for all visual experience properties P and Q, if P and Q differ, then the difference is partly characterizable in spatial terms. For instance, suppose that one undergoes a change in mood while viewing an object. It is difficult to see how this phenomenological difference can be explained in terms of content. But this is not a problem for intentionalism about visual phenomenology, for it is also difficult to see how the difference counts as a difference in visual phenomenology, the type of phenomenology that the intentionalist about visual phenomenology is trying to give an account of, because the difference in phenomenology cannot be characterized in spatial terms. If the difference between having P and Q can be partly characterized in spatial terms, then there are two possibilities concerning the nature of the difference: A. In having P and Q one would perceive an ostensible difference at some place in one’s visual field. B. The difference between P and Q is a covert attentional difference: In having P one would be focusing here, and in having Q one would be focusing there. I maintain all visual differences are A-type or B-type. (Even in a case of change blindness, I would maintain that one perceives a difference, in the sense that one perceives something that is different: One just does not perceive it as a difference; that is, one does not perceive that there is a difference.) Further, both A-type and B-type differences can be explained as differences in intentional content or intentional mode. This is why there can be no clear counterexamples to strong intentionalism. Suppose first that the difference between P and Q is an A-type difference. Then in having P and Q one would perceive an ostensible difference at some place in one’s visual field. Now all differences are differences in properties. Therefore, the ostensible difference will be an ostensible difference in some property F at some place in one’s visual field. But then the strong intentionalist can explain the difference between P and Q by saying Q but not P relates one to a content associating F with the relevant place. So if the difference between P and Q is an A-type difference, then it cannot constitute a clear counterexample to strong intentionalism. In fact, whatever account the nonintentionalist adopts, the strong intentionalist can transform it into an intentionalist account. For instance, where the sensationalist would say that F is a property of a region of the visual field, the strong intentionalist can simply say that F is a property entering into the intentional content of the experience. In this way, he avoids appealing to visual fields, which we previously found to be problematic (see section 5).37 37. This point has the consequence that it is not possible to justify the acceptance of sensationalism over pure intentionalism on the basis of possible cases, contrary to Peacocke (2008). I argued in section 5 that Peacocke’s account of the “eyeless man” has the same consequence.


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This argument does not assume that we will always be in a position to say what the different property F is. For instance, if one views a penny straight on and then at an angle, is the new property being round and tilted or being elliptical?38 Or again, suppose that one experiences the Mach diamond now as a diamond and now as a square on its side. This would be an A-type difference because one would perceive an ostensible difference where the figure is. But what is the new property? If the difference between P and Q is an A-type difference, then it may be a difficult theoretical issue what the new property is. But we can nevertheless be justified in believing that there is some new property involved. It may be objected that some A-type differences cannot be handled by strong intentionalism and require qualia-content intentionalism. Suppose you take off your glasses while viewing a tomato. This is an A-type spatial difference, because you perceive an ostensible difference everywhere in your visual field. But what might the new content of the experience be? It may be thought that the intentionalist is committed to the object-determination thesis: A property enters into the content of an experience only by being attributed to some object (for a discussion of the objectdetermination thesis and blurry vision, see Smith 2008). If so, then the only option for the strong intentionalist is to say that the new content is of the form the tomato has the B-type property, where the B-type property is the new property that seems to permeate your visual field. Against this, when you take off your glasses, you have no inclination to believe that the tomato or any other object in your field of vision has acquired a new property. Therefore, it might be said, the case is best handled with a nonintentionalist view. For instance, the sensationalist will say that, when you take off your glasses, every region of your visual field presents you with the B-type property. And the proponent of qualia-content intentionalism might say that, while most phenomenal differences consist in differences in intentional content, the phenomenal difference you undergo when you take off your glasses consists in a nonintentional neural difference in your brain. This objection fails. I grant that visual blur is unique, for when you take off your glasses while looking at a tomato it is true that you have no inclination to believe that the tomato has acquired a new property. The waterfall illusion (discussed in section 4) is unique in a similar way. According to one fairly apt description of this illusion, one has a sense of movement, but the movement does appear to attach to anything, so one has no inclination to believe that anything is moving. The strong intentionalist needs to account for this, but I think that he can do so by rejecting the objectdetermination thesis. Contrary to the objection, the intentionalist is not committed to this thesis. For instance, in the blur case he might say that 38. For the view that the new property is being round and tilted, see Tye (2000: 79). For the view that the new property is being elliptical, see Peacocke (2008). For an argument that the new property is being elliptical, see Pautz (2008b: §3).

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the new content is correctly rendered as there is blur everywhere. Similarly, in the waterfall illusion, he might say that the content is simply there is movement going on. On this view, the relevant content of your blurry experience is in a sense nonpredicational, like ‘it’s raining.’ Hawthorne and Cortens (1995) have shown that such feature-placing contents need not and should not be treated as predications on objects or locations. This would explain why the experience gives you no inclination to believe that the tomato or any other object has the B-property. Alternatively, the strong intentionalist might take a leaf from the property-complex theorist’s book (see section 1) and say that, in this case at least, the content is not a complete proposition but simply the property being blurry everywhere. Similarly, one might say that the content of the waterfall illusion is simply the property moving, where this property is not attributed to anything by the experience. Since on this view too the B-property is not attributed to the tomato by experience but simply is presented, we again have the needed explanation of why one has no inclination to believe that the tomato has the B-property. On these intentionalist accounts, sensory intentionality does not always involve attributing properties to objects. Similar intentionalist accounts would be natural for nonvisual experiences (gustatory experiences, olfactory experiences, bodily experiences) that appear to lack the rich predicative structure of visual experiences. It is worth mentioning that versions of intentionalism that reject object determination in some cases need not be inconsistent with the “transparency observation,” for in one formulation the transparency observation is neutral on object-determination: We always know what our experiences are like by attending to properties that are not instantiated by our experiences (on physicalism, events in the brain). Not only is an intentionalist account of visual blur available once we reject the object determination thesis, but such an account is preferable to the nonintentionalist alternatives. Unlike a sensationalist account, an intentionalist account avoids the problematic reification of visual fields. As for qualia-content intentionalism, it is vulnerable to the arguments about external-directedness presented in section 4. For instance, it is inconsistent with the characterization intuition, for when you take off your glasses the phenomenal difference is essentially describable in external terms, specifically, in spatial terms: One perceives blur everywhere. However, as the case of Slug (see section 4) shows, no mere neural difference is essentially describable in external terms. Therefore, the phenomenal difference cannot be a mere neural difference. By contrast, a strong intentionalist account is quite consistent with the characterization intuition. On this account, having a blurry experience consists in sensorily entertaining a spatially articulated content along the lines of there is blur everywhere. The experience is essentially characterizable in spatial terms because the content of the experience is essentially so characterizable. So much for A-type differences. Now suppose that the difference between P and Q is a B-type difference, that is, a covert attentional


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difference. For instance, suppose that you look at two pinpoint red lights and shift attention from left one to the right one, without moving your eyes (Chalmers 2004: 161). Plausibly, you have two different visual experience properties L and R. Since strong intentionalism comes in two versions (see section 1), the strong intentionalist has two options. First, the strong intentionalist might adopt a pure intentionalist account. The phenomenal difference between L and R is a difference in content: for instance, a difference in how determinately they represent the dots or in the representation of contrast. I reject pure intentionalism about attention. Maybe in all actual attentional shifts there is such a difference in content. But, of course, strong intentionalism as I have formulated it is an identity thesis that would require a much stronger modal thesis—that there is some cluster of properties such that, necessarily, one’s attending to an object just is one’s representing the object as having those properties. This is intuitively implausible. Suppose that the two red dots in our case are very close together. If one focuses on one and then the other, must there be a difference in content that constitutes the attentional difference? Alternatively, the strong intentionalist might adopt relation-content intentionalism. This is the option I favor. On this view, L and R might have the same content. But, in having L one is quasi attending to the property being a red dot on the left, whereas having R one is quasi attending to the property being a dot on the right. In that case, there is a difference in intentional mode rather than content. I take attention to properties to be more basic than attention to objects. The reason is that ‘a attends to b’ entails ‘there is something a attends to.’ Further, attentional shifts could presumably occur in hallucination. Since I reject Meinongian objects, I take attention shifts to be directed on clusters of properties in this case. Such properties exist, although in this case they are not instantiated. And since I am a common factor theorist, I apply the same account to nonhallucinatory cases. I use “quasi attending” because one might worry that since properties are unextended abstract objects, it is not literally true that we can visually attend to them. It is worth mentioning that many empirical models also take properties to be the fundamental objects of attention (for an overview, see Chun and Wolfe 2001). This is a thoroughgoing intentionalist account of attention, because quasi attending is an intentional relation that takes possibly uninstantiated properties as objects. No appeal to qualia is made. Note, however, that it is inconsistent with a strong transparency thesis, since it maintains that some introspective phenomenal differences are not differences in the properties given to one but are rather are differences in the intentional mode. As in the case of visual blur, an intentionalist account seems preferable to a qualia-based account. For instance, identity theorists such as Ned Block (2003) would presumably say that attentional differences just are neural differences in the head. Against this, attentional differences are

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essentially externally-directed and characterizable in spatial terms. As the case of Slug (see section 4) shows, this is not true of any mere neural difference, so attentional differences cannot be mere neural differences. What is quasi attending? Maybe it is simply the relation x demonstratively cognizes y on the basis of experience. (Again, because of hallucination, the relata would be properties rather than objects.) This cognitive account of attention would be especially plausible if attention shifts can occur outside of the sensory domain. If one accepts that, one might reject my initial assumption that attentional, B-type differences are essentially differences in visual phenomenology while granting that in the actual world they are often accompanied by phenomenological differences in determinacy or contrast. In my twist on the two-dots case in which the dots are very close, the attentional difference might simply be a nonphenomenal difference in what visually presented elements one is thinking of. (Michael Tye suggested to me in conversation that in this case one has greater speed and accuracy with respect to possible changes in the attended dot. This is compatible with my suggestion because it can be taken as a functional account of what makes it the case that one is demonstratively thinking of this dot as opposed to the other dot.) But to me this seems to be a verbal issue. The important point is that we have an account of the situation. I conclude that there can be no clear counterexamples to strong intentionalism. In fact, phenomenal differences among visual experiences are explained better by strong intentionalism than by qualia-content intentionalism. Therefore, once we accept that some version of intentionalism is correct, we should opt for strong intentionalism.

8. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION I have presented an argument for the intentional view that depends neither on the transparency intuition nor on physicalism about the mind. I have presented the argument in stages only for expository convenience. I accept the intentional view simply because it is superior to disjunctive views as well as rival common factor views. I conclude by summarizing my reasons for thinking this. Consider common factor views first. Qualia views such as the identity theory, in my view, cannot be ruled out on the basis of Price’s intuition or the transparency intuition, since there are reasons to doubt these intuitions. Instead, I argued against these views on the basis of their inconsistency with the intuition that R (and hence H) necessarily possesses certain externally-directed features. Phenomenology isn’t in the head: The only viable common factor views are those of relational variety (section 4). I then argued on the basis of impossibility-indeterminacy and particularindependence that the intentional view is superior to rival relational views


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such as the sense datum view. The intentional view, then, is superior to all alternative common factor views (section 5). Common factor intentionalism is also superior to rival disjunctive views. Like intentional views and unlike qualia views, disjunctive views rightly hold that phenomenology isn’t in the head. But arguments for preferring these views to common factor intentionalism are unpersuasive. I believe that the standard arguments fail, and I criticized an overlooked argument based on naive intuitions (section 6). Once we admit that naive intuitions are false in unsuccessful cases, we have little reason to accept a complicated disjunctive theory in order to accommodate them in successful cases. On the other hand, there are strong arguments for preferring common factor intentionalism to disjunctive views. Consider negative disjunctivism first. It faces several problems. In section 4 I mentioned only two: it is open to counterexamples involving rocks, dogs, and impossible experiences; and it is vulnerable to the grounding argument. The intentional view avoids these problems and is to be preferred. This led me to consider the somewhat unexplored category of positive versions of disjunctivism, in particular, disjunctive intentionalism (section 6). This view accommodates the “data” about visual experience as well as common factor intentionalism: external directedness, particular independence, and indeterminacy impossibility. But it is poorly motivated and extremely complicated. Again, a simple common factor intentional view is to be preferred.39

39. Byrne and Logue (2008: §9) develop a different argument against disjunctivism (or at least VI∨H disjunctivism). First, they argue that, in cases of V, I, and H, when one has a visual experience property (e.g., R), one’s experience represents a certain general content (e.g., that there is a red and round object present). Second, they suggest that, if this is so, then disjunctivism fails, since there is then a “comment mental element” among V, I, and H. It would be surprising if this argument were sound because it would mean that disjunctivism may be swiftly refuted. In my view, it is not. One question about this argument is, How do we demonstrate the first premise? This depends on what Byrne and Logue mean by saying that an individual has an experience that “represents” that a red and round object is present. Byrne and Logue (2008: 89) do not explain what they mean, but they appear to be working with either the appears-looks conception or the accuracy conception, in terminology I introduce in another paper (Pautz 2008b). As I explain in that paper, these are fairly lightweight conceptions of what it means to say that experiences have contents, so under these conceptions the first premise can be justified fairly easily. The real problem with this argument, I think, concerns the second step. It seems to me that the presence of a common representational content is quite consistent with disjunctivism, for a disjunctive view with the following two components is coherent: (1) Necessarily, whenever one has R, one has an experience that represents that a red and round object is present, in some fairly lightweight sense. In other words, possession of R is accompanied by representing this general content, so there is a common mental element between successful and unsuccessful cases of R. (2) R is not identical with the common content-theoretic property: Phenomenology is not to be explained in terms of content. Rather, disjunctivism about the nature of phenomenology is correct. In other words, R is a disjunctive property, for instance, the property of either seeing the redness and roundness of an object or not being able to know by reflection that one is not seeing the redness and roundness of an object. This is compatible with clause 1, because both disjuncts might be accompanied by a common content-theoretic property.

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REFERENCES Alston, W. 1999. Back to the Theory of Appearing. Philosophical Perspectives 13: 181–203. Bealer, G. 1982. Quality and Concept. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Block, N. 2003. Mental Paint. In Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge, ed. M. Hahn and B. Ramberg. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Brewer, B. 2006. Perception and Content. European Journal of Philosophy 14: 165– 181. Brewer, B. 2008. How to Account for Illusion. In Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge, ed. A. Haddock and F. Macpherson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burge, T. 2003. Qualia and Intentional Content: Reply to Block. In Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge, ed. M. Hahn and B. Ramberg. Cambridge, Mass/: MIT Press. Byrne, A. 2001. Intentionalism Defended. Philosophical Review 110: 199–240. Byrne, A., and H. Logue. 2008. Either/Or. In Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge, ed. A. Haddock and F. Macpherson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Campbell, J. 2002. Reference and Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Campbell, J. 2009. Consciousness and Reference. In Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, ed. B. McLaughlin and A. Beckerman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chalmers, D. 2004. The Representational Character of Experience. In The Future for Philosophy, ed. B. Leiter. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chalmers, D. 2006. Perception and the Fall from Eden. In Perceptual Experience, ed. T. Szabo Gendler and J. Hawthorne. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chun, M., and J. Wolfe. 2001. Visual Attention. In Blackwell’s Handbook of Perception, ed. E. Goldstein. Oxford: Blackwell. Churchland, P. 2007. Neurophilosophy at Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dretske, F. 1995. Naturalizing the Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Hawthorne, J. (O’Leary-) and A. Cortens. 1995. Towards Ontological Nihilism. Philosophical Studies 79: 143–165. Hawthorne, J., and Kovakovich, K. 2006. Disjunctivism. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 80 Supplement.: 145–183. Heck, R. 2000. Nonconceptual Content and the Space of Reasons. Philosophical Review 109: 483–523. Horgan, T., J. Tienson, and G. Graham. 2004. Phenomenal Intentionality and the Brain in a Vat. In The Externalist Challenge: New Studies on Cognition and Intentionality, ed. R. Schantz. Amsterdam: de Gruyter. Jackson, F. 1977. Perception: A Representative Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Jackson, F. 1993. Review of Christopher S. Hill, Sensations: A Defense of Type Materialism. Philosophical Review 102: 614–616. Jackson, F., and D. Chalmers. 2001. Conceptual Analysis and Reductive Explanation. Philosophical Review 110: 315–360. Johnston, M. 2004. The Obscure Object of Hallucination. Philosophical Studies 120: 113–183. Johnston, M. 2006. Better Than Mere Knowledge? The Function of Sensory Awareness. In Perceptual Experience, ed. T. Szabo Gendler and J. Hawthorne. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


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Kripke, S. 1973. Reference and Existence. Unpublished John Locke Lectures. Langsam, H. 1997. The Theory of Appearing Defended. Philosophical Studies 87: 33–59. Levine, J. 2008. Secondary Qualities: Where Consciousness and Intentionality Meet. Monist 91:15–36. Lewis, D. 1970. How to Define Theoretical Terms. Journal of Philosophy 67: 427– 446. Lewis, D. 1994. Reduction of Mind. In A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, ed. S. Guttenplan, 412–431. Oxford: Blackwell. Martin, M. 2002. The Transparency of Experience. Mind and Language 17: 376– 425. Martin, M. 2004. The Limits of Self-Awareness. Philosophical Studies 120: 37–89. Martin, M. 2006. On Being Alienated. In Perceptual Experience, ed. T. Szabo Gendler and J. Hawthorne. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGinn, C. 2004. The Objects of Intentionality. In McGinn, Consciousness and Its Objects. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McLaughlin, B. 2007. Type Materialism for Phenomenal Consciousness. In The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, ed. M. Velmans and S. Schneider. Oxford: Blackwell. Pautz, A. 2007. Intentionalism and Perceptual Presence. Philosophical Perspectives 21: 495–541. Pautz, A. 2008a. The Interdependence of Phenomenology and Intentionality. The Monist 91: 250–272. Pautz, A. 2008b. What Are the Contents of Experiences? Philosophical Quarterly, 59, 483–507. Pautz, A. 2008c. How Visual Consciousness Reaches to the World. Available online at https://webspace.utexas.edu/arp424/www/index.html Pautz, A. 2010. A Simple View of Consciousness. In The Waning of Materialism, ed. R. C. Koons and G. Bealer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available online at https://webspace.utexas.edu/arp424/www/index.html Pautz, A. Forthcoming. The Puzzle of Perception. London: Routledge. Peacocke, C. 2008. Sensational Properties: Theses to Accept and Theses to Reject. Revue Internationale de Philosophie. 62: 7–24. Polger, T. 2004. Natural Minds. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Price, H. 1932. Perception. London: Methuen. Schellenberg, S. Forthcoming. The Particularity and Phenomenology of Perceptual Experience. Philosophical Studies. Shoemaker, S. 1994. Phenomenal Character. Nous 28: 21–38. Siegel, S. 2004. Indiscriminability and the Phenomenal. Philosophical Studies 120: 90–112. Smith, A. 2002. The Problem of Perception. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Smith, A. 2008. Translucent Experiences. Philosophical Studies 140: 197–212. Sturgeon, S. 2006. Reflective Disjunctivism. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 80(Supplement): 185–216. Travis. C. 2004. The Silence of the Senses. Mind 113: 57–94. Tye, M. 2000. Consciousness, Color and Content. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Tye, M. 2007. Intentionalism and the Problem of No Common Content. Philosophical Perspectives 21: 495–541. Williamson, T. 1995. Is Knowing a State of Mind? Mind 104: 533–565.

11 When Is Perception Conscious? Jesse J. Prinz

Once upon a time, people thought that all perception was conscious. Indeed, it was widely believed that all mental states are conscious, so the problem of explaining consciousness collapses into the problem of explaining mentality. But things have changed. Most people now believe that a lot goes on unconsciously. Indeed, some people believe that mental states that are not perceptual in nature are never conscious. That’s a matter of controversy. Less controversial is the claim that perceptual states are conscious some of the time, but not all of the time. This raises a question: When are perceptual states conscious? A theory of consciousness is, in large part, an answer to that question. In this chapter, I offer a defense of an answer that has emerged out of cognitive science. To avoid undue suspense, the answer that I favor is that perceptual states become conscious when and only when the perceiver is attending.

11.1. THE CONSCIOUS/UNCONSCIOUS DIVIDE

11.1.1. Unconscious Perception In case there is any doubt, it will help to briefly review some reasons for thinking that perception can occur unconsciously. Evidence comes in various forms. I focus here and throughout on the visual modality, because vision has been most thoroughly studied. One line of evidence comes from brain injury. Consider blindsight. People with lesions in the primary visual cortex (V1) are said to be cortically blind: They claim not to see objects presented in the affected portion of the visual field. In cases of

In writing this chapter, I had helpful discussions with Felipe De Brigard, Dave Chalmers, Anya Farennikova (who also corrected my English), Bill Lycan, and Bence Nanay (without whom this chapter would not exist). I also benefitted considerably from audience feedback at the 2008 Syracuse Philosophy Annual Conference at Syracuse University.

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global V1 damage, these individuals cannot spontaneously detect any changes made available to the eyes, even if they are quite dramatic. In one recent case report, for example, a subject with global V1 damage could not tell when the bright lights in a room were turned on and off (Hamm et al. 2003). But, in some cases of cortical blindness, there is residual visual ability: When asked to guess where an object is located, these individuals do quite well, even though they think they do not see the objects they are pointing at (Weiskrantz 1986). Blindsight, as it is called, is a case of visual perception without conscious experience of what is being perceived. It counts as perception because people with blindsight are receiving information through a sensory transducer (the ideas) and responding to it. Some people with blindsight even retain some ability to recognize objects in the blind field. De Gelder et al. (2005) presented a blindsight subject with emotional facial expressions, and these influenced subsequent emotion tasks, even though the subject showed no sign of having consciously perceived the faces. Hamm et al. (2003) were able to condition a person with blindsight to have an aversive response to pictures of airplanes even though he reported no conscious awareness of the airplane pictures or control pictures when they were being presented. Unconscious perception can also be demonstrated in individuals with intact brains. The most widely practiced method for doing this is backward masking. Subjects are briefly presented with a visual stimulus, which is followed by a second stimulus (the “mask”) that prevents them from consciously seeing the first. If the first stimulus is presented for a long enough duration (e.g., 200 milliseconds), subjects can consciously see it, identify it, and spontaneously report on their experience. At shorter durations (e.g., 50 milliseconds), the stimulus cannot be identified, but subjects are confident that they saw something flash before their eyes. At even shorter durations (e.g., 16 milliseconds), subjects do not report seeing a first stimulus prior to the mask. Indeed, if they are given a sequence of trials in which some show a stimulus before the mask and others do not, subjects are at chance in guessing which kind of trial they are on. They have no idea that there has been a first stimulus. Nevertheless, the masked stimuli are perceived. They influence information processing in measurable ways. Unconscious perception is shown to occur in masking studies using a family of methods called priming. A masked word can influence answers given on a word completion task or facilitate memory access to associated words. A masked color can facilitate detection of the same color. In some cases, the influence is dramatic and wide ranging. For example, Winkielman et al. (2005) presented subjects with masked facial expressions, which were either angry or happy, and then asked subjects to evaluate a soft drink. After unconsciously seeing happy faces, subjects said the soft drink was more delicious, they were willing to pay more for it, and they poured more of it into their cups, compared to responses after angry faces. Clearly,

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they were recognizing the emotional valence of the face, but they were doing so unconsciously.

11.1.2. Which Perceptions Can Be Conscious? Before we can figure out how perceptions become conscious, we need to figure out which perceptions are even candidates for consciousness. Sensory systems contain many subsystems, and some of these never produce conscious representations. We must figure out where in perceptual processing consciousness arises, and then when representations in these privileged subsystems become conscious. Like all sensory systems, the visual system is hierarchical (Marr 1982). It begins with cell populations that operate relatively independently of each other and respond to very discrete features of a stimulus, such as a small edge or bit of color. At this level (associated with V1), the visual system is not very interested in how these edges and colors hang together or how foreground differs from background. This is low-level vision. It corresponds to what Marr calls the “primal sketch.” At the next stage of processing (the intermediate level), edges are connected together to form coherent, bounded contours. In addition, figure is separated from ground, and binocular information is more thoroughly integrated to reveal depth. Marr calls this the 2.5-dimensional sketch; it is two-dimensional like a painting, but also includes depth, like a 3D movie, hence the extra half dimension. Neuroscientists associate this level with a family of structures in extrastriate cortex, which contains areas labeled V2–V5. In these structures, the visual system shows sensitivity to global context effects: Color-sensitive cells fire in a way that is sensitive to the color in other areas, spanning over distances that are larger than the receptive fields of cells in early vision. Illusory contours are also registered, completing shapes that are only partially present in the stimulus. The intermediate level is not the last stage of visual processing. Representations there are very specific to vantage point. Objects are represented form a specific point of view, and they occupy a specific location and size in the visual field. This level of specificity is not ideal for object recognition. To recognize objects, it is useful to abstract away from specific vantage points and discern the underlying structure of objects (what Marr calls three-dimensional models). Cells in high-level visual areas (in inferior temporal cortex) do just that. They abstract away from location, visual size, and, to a considerable degree, viewing angle. In some sense, cells at these different stages are representing different things (a vantage-point– specific representation encodes different features than a vantage-point– invariant representation), but the crucial difference is in the degree of abstraction (the same kinds of stimulus dimensions are represented in ways that are less and less like the pattern of stimulation on the retina). It was against the background of this picture, that Ray Jackendoff (1987) put forward his intermediate-level theory of consciousness. Of the


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three levels just described, it is the intermediate level that best corresponds to what people report in conscious experience. If I see a walrus in the zoo, I experience it as a bounded whole, separate from its environment, occupying a specific region of space, and oriented from a specific point of view. In this respect, visual experiences are a little bit like realist paintings. They are not like Picasso’s cubist portraits, simultaneously representing multiple perspectives, as we find in high-level vision, and nor are they like Seurat’s pointillist paintings viewed from an inch away, obscuring the boundaries and decomposing the surfaces. I have argued elsewhere, on neurobiological grounds, that Jackendoff’s conjecture is right (Prinz 2000; see also Koch and Braun 1996). Visual consciousness arises at an intermediate level of processing, and other visual representations are always unconscious. We know, however, that mere activation of visual cells at the intermediate level is not sufficient for consciousness. That is because there is such a thing as unconscious perception. This unconscious perception often involves the unconscious recognition of objects, as described above. Priming studies show that people can respond in content-specific ways to unconsciously perceived faces, spiders, airplanes, words, numbers, and everyday objects, such as desk lamps. This suggests that cases of unconscious vision involve processing through the entire visual hierarchy (see, e.g., Bar 2000). For many objects, recognition is achieved only in high-level visual centers, and this, in turn, requires prior activation in intermediate and low levels of processing. This conclusion, confirmed by neuroimaging, shows that mere activation of intermediate-level visual representations is not sufficient for consciousness. All this confirms the common observation that theories of consciousness need two parts: an account of qualitative character of conscious states (what kinds of things are we conscious of) and an account of how states become conscious. The intermediate-level hypothesis is a contribution to a theory of the first part. But what about the second part? We need a theory of how intermediate-level representations become conscious. What is the difference between conditions under which these representations are and are not conscious?

11.2. THE AIR THEORY

11.2.1. Attention as the Key to Consciousness To empirically identify the factor that is responsible for conscious experience, one needs to determine what variable covary with consciousness: What variables allow consciousness when present and prevent consciousness when absent? We have already seen one variable that seems to make a difference: time. If a stimulus is presented too quickly, it will not be experienced. But time itself probably isn’t the key—there are conditions

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under which stimuli presented for reasonably long durations do not get consciously experienced. It is more likely that time plays an indirect role. Stimuli that are presented for long enough durations become candidates for other processes to act on them, and one of these other processes is responsible for rendering perceptual states conscious. But which one? Happily, recent research points to one very plausible answer. There is increasing support for the conjecture that attention is the key. We are conscious when and only when we attend. It’s a commonplace that we can fail to see things when we are not paying attention. But platitudes are often false. To put this one to the test, vision scientists Arien Mack and Irvin Rock (1998) developed an experimental paradigm in which subjects are presented with shapes or words while performing a concurrent task that demands a lot of attention. In particular, subjects are asked to determine which of two intersecting lines is longer—hard work if lines are similar in length. While doing this, an unexpected polygon, face, or word flashes in the center of the visual field for 200 milliseconds, which is normally well above the conscious threshold. In these studies, about 25% of observers fail to notice the unexpected stimulus. It’s not just that they see something and can’t identify it—they seem to see nothing at all. Immediately after the critical trial, subjects are given a series of increasingly leading questions to see if they experienced anything other than the intersecting lines. In many cases, the answer is no; the subjects simply don’t see an object presented in clear view. This is called inattentional blindness, and it has now been replicated many times. The most dramatic case may be a study by Most et al. (2005). They had subjects count how many times animated black or white shapes bounced against the side of a computer screen. While this is going on, a red cross travels across the center of screen, taking a full five seconds to reach the other side. The cross differs from the other letters in color, luminance, shape, and trajectory, but it is still missed by 28% of the subjects. Inattentional blindness suggests that attention is necessary for consciousness. This conjecture gains further support from other experimental paradigms. For example, Macdonald and Lavie (2008) have demonstrated what they call “load-induced blindness.” Subjects are asked to search for a target letter in a group of letters, and, while performing this task, a meaningless shape is flashed. Subjects know what the shape will look like in advance, but only 37% detect it when they are given six letters for the search task, which introduces a large attentional load. In addition, there is a phenomenon called the attentional blink, in which subjects fail to see the second of two targets in a rapid series of letters or numerals (Raymond et al. 1992). The first target captures attention briefly, and the second goes unseen if presented shortly thereafter. Researchers have recently discovered a related phenomenon called the emotional blink (Arnell et al. 2007). If subjects are asked to look for the name of a color in a series of words, they


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will fail to see it if it is displayed shortly after an emotionally charged word that captures attention, such as “orgasm.” These behavioral experiments on healthy subjects reconfirm something that has been well known in neurology for a long time: Damage to attention centers of the brain disrupts consciousness. The most familiar case of this is visual neglect. People who sustain injuries to attention centers in the right inferior parietal cortex seem to be blind in the contralesional region: They are oblivious to stimuli presented on the left (or the left side of an object), despite the fact that their visual systems are intact and responsive to those stimuli. When asked to compare two objects that differ only on the left, subjects with neglect report that the objects are identical, even though there is sometimes evidence for unconscious processing of the invisible features (Marshall and Halligan 1988). Neglect can also affect perception in other sense modalities. Some patients become oblivious to the left sides of their bodies, even insisting that their left limbs are not their own. In auditory neglect, words heard in the left ear go unnoticed during dichotic listening tasks. The evidence strongly suggests that attention is necessary for consciousness. Attention may also be sufficient. When we attend to things, they are consciously experienced. This can be demonstrated, for example, in cases of visual “pop-out” where objects capture attention. If you see an array of objects in which one differs from the others in color, shape, position, or orientation (Figure 11.1). Objects that pop out this way are nearly impossible to ignore; they are experienced whether we are looking for them or not. In fact, pop-out can cause us to experience stimuli that are presented under conditions that ordinarily preclude conscious detection. This happens with stimuli that have personal significance. The classic example is the cocktail party effect: If your name is mentioned by someone across the room at a crowded cocktail party, you will hear it, even if the conversation there had been inaudible. Mack and Rock (1998) found a visual analogue for the cocktail party effect in their inattentional blindness studies. Subjects often fail to notice surprise stimuli when they are focusing attention on the central task, but they always notice the surprise stimulus if it is their own name. Mack et al. (2002) show that subjects also can’t fail to notice their own names in attention blink and attentional load paradigms. These cases I have described involve the capture of attention by a stimulus; they are bottom up. The impact of attention on consciousness can also be demonstrated in top-down cases. If you search for an object in an array, you use stored object representations as a filter so that the sought object comes under the attentional spotlight more readily. For example, look at Figure 11.2 and try to find the circle. When you do this, the circle is more quickly identified and it enters consciousness. Objects similar to the circle, like the crescent, become more vivid in consciousness, too. If you search for the hexagon, it will become salient, as will the octagon. If you search for the triangle, you might spot the trapezoid or the diamond.

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In each case, search draws attention to a class of shapes, and they are consciously experienced as a result. In sum, it seems that attention is both necessary and sufficient for making intermediate-level representations conscious. Conscious states are attended intermediate-level representations, or AIRs (Prinz 2000, 2005).

11.2.2. What Is Attention? I have been claiming that consciousness arises when, and only when, we attend. But, as stated, this may seem unsatisfying because I have not yet said what attention is. By way of elucidation, let me consider four objections that will lead to a substantive theory of attention and a more precise statement of the AIR theory. First, one might object that the theory is circular. I say perception becomes conscious when we attend. But, one might think that attention should be defined in terms of consciousness. An attended stimulus, on this view, is by definition one we are conscious of.


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I do not think the conceptual link between consciousness and attention is so tight. Indeed, some researchers claim that they are dissociable. In any case, I think attention can be defined without reference to consciousness. Empirically, there is a close link between attention and working memory. “Working memory” refers to the storage buffers that are used to temporarily retain information, and we use it for controlled cognitive processes. It is what we use when we hold a phone number in our heads, calculate in our heads, or keep track of which plates have been filled when doling out potatoes at a dinner party. Working memory is the mind’s scratch pad. In perception, working memory is where we jot down the contents of our senses in order to report on them, reflect on them, act on them, or just keep them in mind for brief intervals. And it could not do this without attention. Attention is a change in the way perceptual representations are processed that allows them to send signals to working memory. Put more simply, attention is what makes information available to working memory. In a slogan, attention is availability. This is not a conceptual analysis but rather an a posteriori identity, supported by empirical evidence. For example, Rock and Gutman (1981) showed that, when attending to one of two overlapping shapes, subjects can remember the attended one but not the unattended one. When attention is spread thin, fewer things can get into working memory (Sperling 1960). And, when working memory is occupied, attention is limited. Fougnie and Marois (2007) have shown that inattentional blindness can be induced by giving people a heavy working memory load. Neuroimaging studies show that, compared to unconsciously perceived stimuli, conscious perception is associated with coactivation of parietal attention structures and dorsolateral prefrontal working memory structures (Rees et al. 2002). In response to this a posteriori definition of attention, critics might advance a second objection. Surely, they’ll say, attention cannot be identified with any one thing. It is very tempting to say attention is not a coherent category. After all, we use the word to refer to a wide range of different mental phenomena. These include vigilance (“Pay attention!”), monitoring (“Maintain attention on this spot here”), tracking (“Attend to the ball!”), pop-out (“The stimulus captured my attention”), focus (“Attend to the fine details”), and selection (“I attended to Xs and ignored Ys”). I already noted that attention can be top down or bottom up. Why think that all these phenomena have a common essence? Attention seems to be mixed bag of independent mechanisms. If so, the claim that consciousness arises when we attend is unpromising, because attention is not one thing but many. Here again, I think the working memory account can do some work. It is true that there are many ways to control attention. One can monitor a whole scene, track an object, or select one object over another. Attention can be controlled by a perceiver’s plans or by features of the stimuli perceived. But the variability of control should not dupe us into thinking

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attention itself is varied. In each of these cases, attention coincides with availability. If you monitor an object in the scene in front of you, its features and changes become available to working memory, and if things to pop out, those things will become available to working memory. It seems the impact of attention is more or less the same regardless of the source. There may be uses of the term “attention” outside the perceptual domain that involve different mechanisms, but perceptual attention, at least, seems to involve a single process. One important consequence of the single process view is that attention can retain its identity as a process even when applied very differently. Attention can be highly focused, as when we study discrete features of an object in our field of view, or quite diffuse, as when we scan a scene or passively take in a vista. Stage light metaphors are useful here. Attention can act like a floodlight or a spotlight, and there can even be an attentive spotlight (point of focus) within a diffusely lit scene. Attention also seems to have a limited capacity—some things go unlit. As focus increases, there may be less attention left for diffuse monitoring. Talk of diffuse attention raises a third objection. Working memory has a highly limited capacity: It seems we can only store about four items at once (Cowan 2001). And what we store seems quite coarse grained. For example, recognition of color patches after short temporal delays is very limited. So it looks like working memory stores small numbers of relatively abstract chunks. But attention, I have just said, can be diffuse, covering large areas, and it can also be highly detailed. We can attend to specific colors and shapes, which have no hope of getting stored in working memory. The hypothesis that attention is a mechanism that makes information available to working memory seems hopeless when these facts are considered. The difficulty can be addressed if we distinguish availability and encoding. A perceptual stimulus is available to working memory when it is processed in a way that would allow for working memory encoding, but many things are available and never get encoded. If you glance at a scene, you could store information about many parts of it, but you don’t. Most things are forgotten instantly, because they are not stored in working memory. Evidence for this comes from studies of change blindness. When subjects are consecutively presented with two slightly different images, they regularly fail to detect how the second differs from the first (Simons and Levin 1997). This happens even if they are looking for the change and see the two images repeatedly. Presumably, they can experience each image in its entirely, but they cannot store the details from moment to moment. When a change is detected, it is usually because the changing feature was, by chance, encoded. The changing feature could have been encoded at any point—it is always available for encoding—but typically appears without being encoded numerous times before subjects notice the change.


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Working memory encoding is not simple copying. When a perceived item is stored in working memory, working memory does not encode a duplicate of the item. Indeed, the duplication metaphor is false on two counts. First, working memory stores information in a coarser code than what we experience in perception. Second, working memory may store information in the form of procedural knowledge rather than re-representing features of perception. More specifically, working memory encodings can be thought of as commands for maintaining activity in perceptual systems rather than reproducing copies of perceptual states. Putting these two points together, we might imagine the following picture. When an intermediate-level perceptual representation is encoded, that means a high-level perceptual representation that captures the gist of the intermediate-level representation sends a signal to working memory systems, which, in turn, uses this representation as a set of instructions for maintaining perceptual states during a temporal delay. The high-level representation can be used to generate a mental image of the stored item by projecting back into intermediate-level areas, but because it is coarse grained, the resulting image will be indeterminate and unstable (for more details, see Prinz 2007). If this picture is right, then consciousness does not require working memory encoding. It just requires availability for encoding. Available representations can be coarsely coded and stored, but consciousness does not depend on that. The picture is borne out by various psychological studies; I will mention three. It finds support in the fact that color discrimination far outstrips recall, suggesting that we can experience many more colors than we can encode (Halsey and Chapanis 1951). Or consider Sperling’s (1960) widely discussed experiments with letter arrays. When subjects are briefly presented with a three by three array, they can recall three or four letters but not more. Nevertheless, they seem to experience the entire array, and absolutely any of the letters could be stored if they are cued after the stimulus is removed. Thus, each letter is available for encoding and consciously experienced, but only a handful are encoded. The claim that encoding is not necessary for consciousness can also be confirmed by neuroimaging results. Working memory is located in the lateral frontal cortex, but these structures are not always operative during conscious perceptual tasks. Lateral frontal cortex is more-or-less dormant, for example, when we watch movies (Goldberg et al. 2006). This suggests that encoding doesn’t matter. Conscious arises with mere availability. This raises one final objection: Availability is a dispositional property; consciousness, on the other hand, cannot be dispositional. Having an experiential quality is an occurrent property of a perceptual state, not merely something that the state could do. So, if attention is availability, attention cannot be what makes perception conscious. The slogan, attention is availability, is a bit of loose talk. It would be more accurate to say that attention is the categorical basis of availability. This is what I implied above when I introduced the proposal. Attention is a process, I said, that makes information available to working memory. It

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is an actual change that takes place in perceptual representations in virtue of which they become candidates for encoding. But what is this process? What is the categorical basis for availability? Here the science is still under way, but it is possible to advance an empirically driven guess (for more discussion, see Prinz in press). To see how perceptual representations become available for working memory encoding, it is necessary to descend to the level of cellular neuroscience. The mechanisms of availability cannot be adequately described using psychological vocabulary. What accounts for availability at the neuronal levels seems to be something like this: The various structures that control levels of attention seem to work by increasing activity in interneurons, which are inhibitory cells that modulate activity in pyramidal cells, which respond to the features of perceptual stimuli. By inhibiting pyramidal cells, interneurons cause them to synchronize their activity (Sohal and Huguenard 2005). Synchrony can be measured in the axon potentials and in the local field potentials around dendrites, though it is not fully clear which, if either, form of synchrony is more important. The key thing is that neural synchrony seems to be a very good candidate for availability. Neurons that are in sync speak as one voice and can be heard above the din (Salinas and Sejnowski 2001). This may turn out to be mistaken, but it gives some idea of what a theory of availability should look like, and it currently enjoys some empirical support. In this section, I have considered four objections that have led, in turn, to helpful insights about the nature of attention. Attention is the categorical basis of availability. Attention can be controlled by different sources and can therefore be diffuse or focused, top down or bottom up. Attention can occur without encoding and has a finer grain than working memory. And, at the neurocomputational level, attention may be identified with processes such as interneuron inhibition and pyramidal synchronization, which make neural signals available for downstream propagation. The AIR theory of consciousness states that consciousness arises when and only when we have attended intermediate-level representations (AIRs). The four objections that I have considered allow us to make this a bit more precise. We can now say that, attention is a process that • makes perceptual states available to working memory; • qualifies as a natural kind, even though it can be initiated by different control structures and allocated with varying degrees of diffuseness; • does not necessarily result in perceptual states being encoded in working memory; and • is physically realized by neural synchronization and interneuron inhibition. Thus, the AIR theory can be elaborated as the view that consciousness arises when intermediate-level representations become available for working memory encoding as a result of specific neural process that can operate under multiple sources of influence.


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11.2.3. AIR Compared to Other Theories AIR is not the only game in town—there are other theories of consciousness in the literature. This is not the place to critically review these, but it will help you understand the AIR theory if I compare and contrast it to some of the leading alternative accounts. The most prominent class of alternatives is the higher order representation (HOR) theories of consciousness. According to these, a mental state becomes conscious when and only when it is represented (or disposed to be represented) by another mental state. That other mental state is, on some versions, a higher order thought (HOT) or, on other versions, a higher order perception (HOP). Proponents of HOR theories often defend their approach by armchair arguments. One popular move goes roughly like this (Lycan 2001; see also Rosenthal 1997): Premise 1: A conscious state is a state of which a subject is conscious. Premise 2. To be conscious of a state, a subject must represent it. Conclusion: Therefore, a state is conscious only if it is represented by a subject. I reject both premises. Defending my dissent is beyond the scope of this chapter, but declaring my rejection will help clarify how AIR and HOR theories differ. I reject premise 1 because I think consciousness is a first-order affair. States are conscious when they become available to working memory, not when a subject becomes conscious of them. This is one reason why the distinction between availability and encoding is so very important. As I emphasized above, conscious states need not be encoded. When there is no encoding, there can be conscious states, but we are not conscious of those states, contrary to what HOR theorists maintain. I also have misgivings about premise 2. I think the locution “conscious of” deceptively implies that we have a representation of the states of which we are conscious. But an alternative analysis would say a subject is conscious of a mental perceptual when that state is encoded in working memory. Encoding may explain “consciousness of” (also sometimes called “awareness”). But, I think one can consciously experience as stimulus without being conscious of it (i.e., encoding it), and encoding, I submit, is not metarepresentational. A working memory encoding is not a higher order representation of a perceptual state but rather a mechanism that can serve to maintain a perceptual state or reactivate it after a brief interval. As I said above, working memory encodings can be thought of as a kind of procedural knowledge (see also Prinz 2007). If I am right, then a subject becomes conscious of a perceptual state without representing it, contrary to premise 2. This distinguishes the AIR theory from HOR theories. The point about availability versus encoding is also crucial for distinguishing AIR from another approach to consciousness that enjoys considerable

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support: the global workspace theory (Baars 1988; Dehaene and Nacchache 2001). Proponents say that consciousness arises when perceptual states are broadcast to a more central cognitive mechanism, involved in reporting, deliberation, and executive control. This looks a lot like the AIR theory at first glance, but there is a crucial difference. On the global workspace theory, consciousness requires working memory encoding. Dehaene and Nacchache are quite explicit about this, but the evidence from their own research suggests that consciousness involves availability rather than encoding. For example, in masked priming studies, they have shown that, under some short latencies, stimuli can be consciously detected but not recalled, suggesting that they are available but not encoded (Kouider et al. 2007). The AIR theory is not the only theory, however, to identify consciousness with availability. Consider, for example, Kirk’s (1994, 146) account, according to which perceptual states become conscious when they become available for interpretation, assessment, decision, and control processes. Or consider Tye’s (1995) thesis that conscious states are PANICs: poised, abstract, nonconceptual, intentional contents. The last four criteria (abstract, nonconceptual, intentional contents) constitute Tye’s account of which mental states are candidates for consciousness and will not concern us here. The key thing is the term “poised,” which is supposed to characterize how these states become conscious. More specifically, Tye thinks consciousness arises when perceptual states are available to make an impact on beliefs and desires. Thus, both Kirk and Tye invoke availability, which strikes me as exactly right. The problem is that neither author offers an adequate account of what availability consists in. What is the mechanism that makes perceptual states available? The AIR theory answers that question: Attention is the essence of consciousness. The theory is not so much an alternative to these order accounts, as an implementation (though Tye, in press, doubts that attention is the right mechacnism). Kirk and Tye identify the key symptom of consciousness without identifying the mechanism that makes this symptom possible. Without specifying the mechanism, their theories may be vulnerable to objections. If availability is defined as a mere disposition, these theories may be to liberal (e.g., most items in long term memory are always available for retrieval, but they are not conscious); if availability is defined as actual encoding in working memory, these theories are too conservative (as argued above). At the very least, the theories are incomplete. By analogy, a theory of biological inheritance is not complete without the double-helix account of the underlying mechanisms. The AIR theory attempts to extend extant availability theories by offering a possible implmentation. In summary, then, the AIR theory resembles other theories of consciousness in various respects but also differs in important ways. It is a first-order account that emphasizes availability, rather than encoding in working memory. Of course, the major difference can be stated more directly. None of these other accounts says that attention is the essence of consciousness.


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This is the chief claim that I have been trying to defend. The link between attention and consciousness enjoys considerable empirical support, which has not been fully recognized by defenders of these other theories. That said, the AIR theory also faces objections. The strong evidence linking consciousness to attention has come under attack recently on both empirical and methodological grounds. I consider what I take to be the most pressing concerns in the next section.

11.3. OBJECTIONS

11.3.1. Attention Is Not Necessary I have claimed that attention is necessary and sufficient for making intermediate-level perceptual states conscious, but this claim can be challenged. Within cognitive neuroscience, it has become popular to argue that consciousness and attention are dissociable. Much of the evidence is reviewed by Koch and Tsuchiya (2007). Koch used to think attention and consciousness were closely linked (Crick and Koch 1990) but now thinks they are independent mechanisms. My goal here is not to assess each experiment that has been described as supporting this conclusion, but rather to consider a few representative examples. In showing how the AIR theory can handle these apparent counterexamples, I am hoping that readers will be able to extrapolate or devise replies to others (see also Prinz in press; De Brigard and Prinz 2010). I begin with two studies that purport to show that attention is not necessary for consciousness. First consider a study by Li et al. (2002). Here subjects are presented with the attention-demanding task of finding a rotated T in a group of rotated Ls. While performing the task, an image is briefly presented in the periphery, and subjects are asked to make a judgment about the image, such as whether it contained an animal or whether it contained a vehicle. For some of these discriminations, subjects perform exceptionally well. This leads the Koch and Tsuchiya (2007) to describe the study as evidence for conscious perception in the near absence of attention. This counterexample is problematic in various ways. First, “near absence” is not absence. Subjects may be allocating some attention to the periphery. In fact, if they were not, we have antecedent reason to think they would not be able to freely report on what they saw, because this is precisely what inattentional blindness studies establish. Second, the flashed stimuli, may capture attention, unlike the small shapes used in inattentional blindness studies. Performance was poor for meaningless color patterns or letters, and excellent for meaningful objects, which may be especially effective as attention lures. Third, subjects had 10 hours of training, going through 12,000 trials before being tested, which may have reduced the attentional demands of the central task. Fourth, unlike the

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Mack and Rock studies, subjects knew in advance that they were in a dual-task study, and they may have allocated some attention to the perimphery. Fifth, we do not know for sure that subjects are conscious of the peripheral stimuli. Success at forced-choice guessing after extensive training is not necessarily a measure of conscious awareness. In sum, the research by Li et al. (2002) does not provide strong evidence for consciousness without attention. Turn now to another study purporting to show that there can be consciousness without attention. Landman et al. (2003) devised a clever experiment that combines change blindness with Sperling’s (1960) letter array paradigm. Subjects see an array of rectangles, which are either horizontal or vertical, followed by a gray screen, and then a second array. In the second array, one rectangle has changed its orientation, but subjects are usually incapable of detecting the change. However, on some trials, subjects see a cue during the gray screen pointing to where a particular rectangle has been located in the original array. When this is done, subjects can reliably report whether than rectangle changed when the second array is presented. Thus, subjects have the potential to detect every change if attention is directed. The crucial finding is that the attention cue can come after the stimulus. The authors interpret this as showing that the stimulus has been consciously perceived when the display was originally presented but unattended (see also Lamme 2003; Block 2007). This interpretation rests on two conditional assumptions. If it had been unconscious, the presentation of a postdisplay cue should not be effective. If the stimulus had been attended, it would have been reportable. Both of these conditional assumptions can be questioned. First, consider the claim that unconscious stimuli cannot be cued after they are removed. Sperling’s original study proved that visual stimuli produce iconic memories: rapidly fading traces in the visual system. For all we know from this research, iconic memories can be produced by unconsciously presented stimuli. If so, a cue presented during the period in which an unconsciously induced iconic memory is fading may serve to bring that iconic trace into consciousness. On the AIR theory, this would be readily explained: The cue brings attention to a visual trace, and the trace becomes conscious thereby. In the Landman et al. (2003) study, this may be exactly what takes place. The rectangles used in their displays are depicted with a noise gradient against a noisy background, and it is far from obvious that every rectangle is consciously perceived. But suppose these rectangles in the original display are consciously perceived. There is still a possibility that the second conditional assumption is false. To argue that this study illustrates consciousness without attention, Landman et al. (2003) must say that, if a rectangle had been attended, it would have been reportable. But I reject that assumption. Reportability arises when attended stimuli are encoded in working memory, but I have already argued that attention outstrips working memory. So Landman et al. do not provide evidence for thinking their stimuli are


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not attended. It is quite plausible that subjects try to attend to the whole display, since they know they will be tested on it. And the allocation of diffuse attention may bring each rectangle into consciousness. If so, the study establishes only that consciousness can arise without encoding, which is consistent with the AIR theory. In summary, Landman et al. do not establish consciousness without attention because they establish neither that the stimuli in question are conscious nor that they are unattended. These studies are illustrative of the best recent attempts to show that consciousness can arise without attention, and they have been emphasized by leading defenders of that dissociation. But the studies fail to establish any such thing.

11.3.2. Attention Is Not Sufficient Granting that attention is necessary for consciousness, critics may still object that it is not sufficient. Recent experiments have been constructed to establish that attention can occur in the absence of consciousness. These experiments pose a threat to the AIR theory. Fortunately for AIR, they do not provide compelling evidence for what they seek to establish. Let’s begin with a study by Kentridge et al. (2008), which extends earlier work by the first author. The study combines “metacontrast masking” with attentional cueing. Metacontrast masking is a special kind of masking. In typical masking studies, the mask is a stimulus that occupies the same region of space that was occupied by the first stimulus. In metacontrast masking, subjects see a mask that occupies the area surrounding the space in which the first stimulus had been presented. Just like masks that overlap the region that was occupied by a previous stimulus, these surrounding metacontrast masks also prevent the previous stimulus from being consciously perceived. In the Kentridge et al. (2008) study, subjects see colored disks followed by colored rings, and the rings mask the disks, resulting in unconscious perception. Their task is to detect the ring as quickly as possible. On some trials the disk is preceded by an arrow that serves a lure for attention. The arrow does not bring the disk into consciousness, but it does have a significant affect: If the disk is the same color as the ring, it facilitates ring detection, but this happens only when the disk is preceded by an arrow. Thus, the arrow seems to give this unconscious stimulus the power to exert priming influence. The authors interpret this as showing that the unconscious stimulus has been enhanced by attention. Thus, it seems to be a case of attention without consciousness. As compelling as this may seem, it is not a counterexample to the AIR theory. In fact, there is reason to think that attention cannot be responsible for the observed effect. The disk is presented very briefly and followed by a ring in the surrounding area. According to the leading interpretation of metacontrast masking, the ring is able to mask the disk precisely because

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it draws attention away from the region of space in which the disk is located (Enns and DiLollo 2000). Attention does not have time to enhance the representation of disk, and it cannot enhance the iconic trace of the disk because the ring draws attention away. How, then, can we explain why the subjects in the Kentridge et al. (2008) study show improved performance when cued? There are several possibilities, but the simplest answer is that cueing affects where subjects look. More specifically, the arrow may elicit saccadic eye movements to the region in which the disk will be presented, and that could result in a more accurate representation of the disk. Vision scientists sometimes refer to saccadic eye movements as “overt shifts of attention,” but the term is misleading because attention and eye movements are dissociable—we can look in one place while attending to another (Posner 1980). Direction of gaze can enhance vision even when attention is absent. Foveal vision has a higher concentration of color-receptive cells and results in more saturated representations. If the cue leads to a more saturated representation, that could explain why color-based priming is found in the cued condition. This interpretation of the results appeals to a well-known process and, for reasons just mentioned, is more plausible than the claim that attention is involved. Turn now to a second study that attempts to establish attention in the absence of consciousness. Jiang et al. (2006) use a technique called interocular suppression in which a low-contrast stimulus presented to one eye is masked by a higher contrast stimulus presented to the other eye. Cleverly, Jiang et al. used nude photographs as the masked stimuli, assuming that these would attract attention, despite the fact that they could not be consciously perceived. Sure enough, when the interocular displays were taken away, subjects were asked to detect a target, and target detection was superior in the location that had been occupied by the nude. The effect worked only when the nude was a member of the subject’s preferred sex. The study has two features that make it a very powerful response to the AIR theory. First, the method allows the stimulus to be presented for an extended duration, which means attention has enough time to act on the stimulus representation. Second, the stimulus itself serves as the attention cue, so it seems especially plausible that the representation of the stimulus is modulated by attention. This looks like a case of an unconscious AIR (attended intermediate-level representation). But, once again, an alternative interpretation is available. Perhaps the nude attracts saccades and not attention. In fact, the nude might just cause an intention to shift gaze and attention, which gets carried once the colorful suppression stimulus is removed. This would facilitate target detection when the target is displayed in the region that was occupied by the nude. There is reason to prefer this interpretation over the one given by Jiang et al. (2006). They say that attention is being allocated to the unconscious stimulus, but the experimental setup seems to preclude that possibility. In interocular suppression, the rival stimulus is an attention lure. Suppression


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results from the fact that the high-contrast stimulus is able to attract attention away from the low-contrast stimulus. In support of this, there is evidence that binocular rivalry, of which interocular suppression is a special case, involves the same mechanisms as selective attention (Mitchell et al. 2004). Moreover, if the nude were being attentionally enhanced, we might expect to see increased activation in the ventral stream, where object representations are processed. Jiang et al. did not measure brain response, but functional MRI studies of interocular suppression suggest that suppressed stimuli are not in fact associated with increased ventral processing (Fang and He 2005). The increases are observed in the dorsal stream, which plays a role in saccadic eye movements and spatial perception. Thus, the existing evidence offers better support for my interpretation than for the interpretation given by Jiang et al. The two studies I have discussed fail to establish that there can be unconscious AIRs. I think these studies are the best efforts to establish that attention is insufficient for consciousness, and, if I am right, they do not succeed. So I conclude that current empirical evidence provides strong support for the claim that attention is necessary and sufficient for making perceptual representations conscious and no convincing evidence to reject that claim.

11.3.3. Alternative Interpretations of the Evidence I might rest my case here, but there is one more challenge that deserves attention. This one was put to me forcefully in a commentary that David Chalmers delivered in response to a related article (Chalmers 2008). Chalmers attacks the evidence offered in support of the view that attention is necessary for consciousness. In this respect, his critique echoes the theme of the studies discussed in section 11.3.1, but it deserves to be treated separately because it raises very different issues. Chalmers is not offering counterexamples to the necessity thesis; he is challenging the interpretations of experiments that were used to support the thesis in first place. If these challenges succeed, the AIR theory cannot even get off the ground. I offered two main sources of evidence for the conclusion that consciousness requires attention. Healthy subjects fail to report stimuli when attention is divided (inattentional blindness), and damage to attention centers leads to visual neglect. Chalmers argues that both sources of evidence can be challenged. Subjects may have conscious experiences that they simply fail to report. In visual neglect, subjects may be incapable of reporting stimuli in their blind fields precisely because they cannot attend. Perhaps attention is required for reporting but not for experience itself. If so, visual neglect provides no evidence for the conclusion that consciousness requires attention. In discussing inattentional blindness, Chalmers notes that there is an alternative interpretation of these studies: Subjects may suffer from inattentional amnesia (Wolfe 1999). They may

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consciously experience the surprise stimuli and instantly forget them. We know that visual memory is not very good, so the subjects’ retrospective reports are not necessarily reliable. I reply to these two alternative interpretations in turn. First, consider visual neglect. The evidence that people with visual neglect do not experience things on the left is not restricted to self-report. Neglect can be demonstrated in many ways. When asked to copy line drawings, features on the left are ignored; when asked to form mental images of familiar places, landmarks on the left are forgotten; when asked to bisect lines, the midpoint is placed too far to the right; when asked to find target letters in a group of distractors, targets on the left are missed. Thus, they fail to demonstrate consciousness on both implicit and explicit measures. In the absence of a positive reason to think these individuals are conscious of items in their left visual field, I think this widespread constellation of behaviors should be taken as evidence that they are not. What about inattentional blindness? Chalmers says this might better be regarded as inattentional amnesia, but I see little reason to explain the results that way. Mack and Rock (1998) consider this possibility and devise a clever experiment to rule it out. If unattended stimuli were consciously seen, then they should able to integrate with other conscious stimuli presented consecutively and proximately to produce illusory motion. But they exert no such influence. Chalmers replies that motion perception involves binding, and binding is associated with attention. Thus, the absence of illusory motion is explained by the absence of attention, not the absence of consciousness. But this reply only serves to support the AIR theory. Conscious experiences are characteristically bound, and if attention is required for binding, that is another powerful reason for thinking that attention coincides with consciousness. Moreover, there is good reason to reject the inattentional amnesia story. The main positive argument for taking the story seriously is given by Wolfe (1999). He demonstrates that visual memory does not last very long, and he points out that Mack and Rock’s stimuli are quickly presented. But, the argument doesn’t hold water. First of all, some inattentional blindness studies present stimuli for long intervals (recall Most et al. [2005], whose stimuli were present for five seconds). Second of all, subjects in Wolfe’s studies fail to retain shape information and object identities, but they are quite sure they have seen something, which is strikingly different from what we find in inattentional blindness studies. If the memory limitations measured by Wolfe were behind the Mack and Rock results, their subjects should be able to report that they saw a stimulus but forgot what it was. The point can be extended to other cases. Generally speaking, visual memory limitations affect subjects’ reports of what they see, not whether they saw anything at all. Consider the profound difference between the


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studies performed by Sperling (1960) and those by Mack and Rock (1998). In the Sperling studies, subjects are sure they have seen a letter array, even if they cannot make out the letters. In the Mack and Rock studies, subjects have no idea there has been a surprise stimulus. They would be at chance if they had to guess whether something was presented. Sperling’s subjects would readily report that they have seen something and forgotten it. Not so with Mack and Rock’s subjects. Even on interrogation, they deny having seen anything. This difference cries out for an explanation. If both cases were just forms of amnesia, they should seem similar to subjects, but they do not. We can readily explain the contrast if we suppose that the Sperling’s subjects are forgetting what they experienced whereas Mack and Rock’s subjects are not experiencing anything at all. This is an argument to the best explanation. It accounts for why Sperling’s cases and inattentional blindness cases seem so different (if you are in doubt, try the stimuli yourself). The standard interpretation of inattentional blindness also hangs together elegantly with the standard interpretation of neglect: Where Chalmers appeals to different failures (memory and report), the standard view says that both are direct results of absent attention. The standard story also explains why unattended stimuli cannot be picked up using any normal measure of awareness (self-report, forced choice, drawing, spontaneous action, etc.). Indeed, the only reason we even know these stimuli are perceived is that they induce priming effects. But priming is a hallmark of unconscious perception. Of course, it is always possible that people with neglect or subjects in inattention studies are having conscious experiences that they cannot demonstrate using subjective or objective measures. I think this possibility is a bit like skeptical hypotheses: We cannot refute it, but we should not take it very seriously. We should not postulate conscious experience in cases where we have no strong evidence that there is experience. The standard interpretation of neglect and inattentional blindness studies is preferable to the alternatives that Chalmers would have us consider.

11.4. CONCLUSION It has been known for a long time that perception can occur without consciousness. In this chapter, I’ve tried to identify the factor that makes a difference. I suggested that consciousness arises when and only when intermediate-level representations are modulated by attention—what I call the AIR theory. Attention is the difference maker. This conclusion is based on empirical research but has also come under recent empirical attack. I deflected what I take to be the most powerful objections. Perhaps some further finding will force a revision of the view, but for now, it looks like attention is the key to consciousness.

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Rees, Geraint, Gabriel Kreiman, and Christof Koch. 2002. Neural Correlates of Consciousness in Humans. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3: 261–270. Rock, Irvin, and Daniel Gutman. 1981. The Effect of Inattention on Form Perception. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 7: 275–285. Rosenthal, Daven M. 1997. A Theory of Consciousness. In The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates, ed. Ned Block, Owen Flanagan, and Guven Güzeldere, 729–753. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Salinas, Emilio, and Terrence J. Sejnowski. 2001. Correlated Neuronal Activity and the Flow of Neural Information. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2: 539–550. Simons, Daniel J., and Daniel T. Levin. 1997. Change Blindness. Trends in Cognitive Science 1: 261–267. Sohal, Vicaas S., and John R. Huguenard. 2005. Inhibitory Coupling Specifically Generates Emergent Gamma Oscillations in Diverse Cell Types. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102: 18638–18643. Sperling, George. 1960. The Information Available in Brief Visual Presentations. Psychological Monographs 74: 1–29. Tye, Micael. 1995. Ten Problems of Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Tye, Michael. In press. Attention, Seeing and Change Blindness. Philosophical Issues. Weiskrantz, Lawrence. 1986. Blindsight: A Case Study and Implications. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winkielman, Piotr, Kent C. Berridge, and Julia L. Wilbarger. 2005. Unconscious Affective Reactions to Masked Happy versus Angry Faces Influence Consumption Behavior and Judgments of Value. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 1: 121–135. Wolfe, Jeremy M. 1999. Inattentional Amnesia. In Fleeting Memories, ed. Veronika Coltheart, 71–94. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

12 Do Experiences Have Contents? Susanna Siegel

If you want to know whether there is any mustard in the refrigerator, it is a good idea to open the door and look. If you see the mustard, you can end up knowing its whereabouts: it’s in the fridge. If instead of looking for the mustard, you pictured the fridge interior in a daydream and then relied on your daydream to confirm whether the fridge contained mustard or not, you would not end up knowing anything about the mustard or the fridge, but you might nevertheless end up with a true or false belief. As the mustard example illustrates, it is common to regard perception as a special kind of input to belief that allows us to compare hypotheses with the world, so that we may assess whether those hypotheses are true. Even philosophers who were cautious about assigning perception more than a causal role in relation to knowledge regard perception as involving a special sort of input to the mind, different in kind from belief and judgment. Hume distinguished impressions from ideas, while Locke found special inputs in the vicinity of perceptual experience, distinguishing ideas of sensations from ideas of reflection. Both in common practice and in philosophy, perception is regarded as a distinctive kind of mental state that serves as an input to belief and is distinct from it. Despite the differences between perception and belief, perception involves states that are importantly similar to beliefs: visual experiences,

Starting in 2006, earlier versions of parts of this chapter were presented to audiences at London, Australian National University, Glasgow, Stirling, Vermont, Umeå, and Syracuse Philosophy Annual Workshop and Network (with comments from Charles Travis), and in graduate seminars at Cornell, Brown, and Harvard/MIT. Thanks to these audiences, and to Nico Silins, Adam Pautz, Daniel Stoljar, Alex Byrne, Fiona Macpherson, John Morrison, M. G. F. Martin, Bence Nanay, David Bain, Kathin Glüer, Bernhard Nickel, Bill Brewer, Kati Farkas, Joshua Schechter, Chris Hill, Jeff McDonough, Louis deRosset, Matthew Nudds, Matthew Soteriou, and Frank Jackson for further discussion. Many thanks to David Chalmers for numerous conversations and to Charles Travis for permission to quote from his comments.

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where these include visual hallucinations of ordinary objects and scenes. This chapter interprets, develops, and defends an important thesis about visual perceptual experiences:1 The Content View: All visual perceptual experiences have contents.

This chapter explains what the Content Ciew says and argues that its commitments are shared across a wide range of philosophical theories of perception. (I’ll sometimes use “experience” without the modifiers “visual perceptual” as a shorthand.) The kind of content at issue in the Content Ciew meets two constraints. Contents are true or false, and contents of experience are conveyed to the subject by her experience.2 The sense in which experiences have contents (according to the Content View) thus picks up the strand of ordinary usage that takes contents to be things conveyed by sources of information (as when we speak of the contents of a newspaper story). Experience contents need not individuate experiences. And we can, apparently, ostend experiences by using introspection or by describing the circumstances in which the experience is had, without first settling whether experiences have any contents at all, let alone which contents (if any) they have. In contemporary discussions, the Content View is widely held and is even presupposed in many debates about perceptual experience.3 But some philosophers have objected to it on the basis of Naive Realism, claiming that Naive Realism is the more commonsensical view, and in one case finding precedent for it in the works of Bishop George Berkeley.4 Naive Realism comes in a variety of forms, but the main idea (to be qualified later) is that some phenomenal states are identical with certain states of seeing and so involve relations to objects in the environment. One might think that this view is incompatible with the Content Ciew, perhaps on the grounds that if experiences involve relations to the objects in an environment, they do not involve relations to contents. Here I argue that standard versions of Naive Realism are compatible with the Content

1. Visual perceptual experiences, as opposed to visual experiences simpliciter, exclude marginal experiences such as the pink glow that comes from facing a light source with your eyes closed or the brain gray that comes from closing your eyes otherwise, and may or may not involve entoptic phenomena such as afterimages that you can have while your eyes are open and you are seeing. Some visual perceptual experiences figure in states of seeing, while others are hallucinations in which no such objects are seen yet it seems from a first-person perspective as if they are. 2. A third constraint will be introduced shortly: contents are accuracy conditions. 3. The Content View has the status of an undefended presupposition in Evans (1982) and Peacocke (1992), as well as in debates about whether phenomenal character supervenes on representational features, such as having content (e.g., Block 1990, 1996; Chalmers 2004; Egan 2006; Kind 2007; Levine 2003; Pace 2007; Rey 1998; Speaks 2009; Thompson 2009; Tye 2003; Wright 2003and others). 4. Martin (2002, 2004), Campbell (2002), Johnston (2006), and Brewer (2006) claim that Naive Realism is incompatible with the Content View. Brewer argues that Berkeley would have opposed it, too.

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View. To oppose the Content View, Naive Realism would have to take a radical form that leaves out reference to properties. The resulting versions of Naive Realism, I argue, are implausible. More generally, I argue that once the role of properties in phenomenal character is acknowledged, the Content View is unavoidable. The Content View can be distinguished from a thesis with stronger commitments, the Strong Content View, which is discussed toward the end of this chapter. Unlike the Strong Content View, which says that visual experience consists fundamentally in a propositional attitude, the Content View gives us a relatively neutral framework within which other theses about perception can be assessed. After developing the Content View and discussing the notion of accuracy in section 1, I present an argument that apparently supports the Content View in section 2: the Argument from Accuracy. In section 3, I identify a flaw with this argument. In section 4, I present an argument for the Content View that corrects the flaw: the Argument from Appearing. In section 5, I consider two objections, each suggested by Charles Travis, concerning uses of “looks” and its cognates. These objections target the Argument from Accuracy, the Argument from Appearing, and the Content View itself. Finally, in section 6 I discuss the significance of the Content View and its status vis-à-vis Naive Realism.

1. CONTENTS AS ACCURACY CONDITIONS It is common for philosophers to distinguish between veridical and nonveridical experiences. Descartes’s evil demon scenario is often described as a scenario in which our experiences are not veridical. One might think that the Content View follows easily from the very idea that we sort experiences into the veridical and the nonveridical. If experiences can be veridical, it might be thought, then they have veridicality conditions, and if they have veridicality conditions, then they have contents, so the Content View is true. This argument does not sufficiently constrain what contents may be. For all the argument says, veridicality conditions may be like blueness conditions. A blueness condition is a condition that obtains exactly when something is blue. All blue things satisfy the same blueness condition: they are blue. If veridicality conditions are like blueness conditions, then all veridical experiences satisfy the same veridicality condition: they are veridical. If all there was to an experience’s veridicality condition was being veridical, then veridicality conditions would not be very useful for defining contents, since all veridical experiences would have the same contents. A version of the Content View that entails that no two veridical experiences differ in their contents would not be worth defending. What’s needed is a way to avoid this result. This result is avoided if contents are a kind of accuracy condition. To develop this idea, the Content View can be refined into a proposal that finds

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the following similarity between visual experiences and beliefs: like beliefs, maps, and newspapers, visual experiences have contents, and just as the contents of beliefs are conditions under which the belief state is true, so the contents of experiences are conditions under which the experience is accurate. According to this proposal, experiences are the kinds of states that can be accurate, and their contents are conditions under which they have this status. Just which accuracy conditions are contents of experience is discussed in detail in the sections that follow. We can begin by focusing on accuracy itself. If something is accurate, then there is something else in relation to which it is accurate.5 If a map is accurate, then there is some spatial area in relation to which it is accurate. If a story about Simone is accurate in some respects but not others, then Simone has some of the features attributed to her by the story but not others. When a map, a story, a mental state, or anything else is accurate, there is a situation of which it is accurate. Attributing accuracy to something thus involves assessing it with respect to something else. Let us focus on the case of episodic experiences (though the following points hold for maps, stories, and anything else that can be accurate or inaccurate as well). If an experience is inaccurate, then there is some mismatch between the experience and a situation. If there were no mismatch, the experience would be accurate. The conditions in which there is no mismatch are accuracy conditions. When we categorize token experiences as veridical (or veridical in certain respects), we are in the simplest case assessing them with respect to the situation in which they are had. If these classifications involve accuracy, then when we categorize an experience as veridical, we are saying that it is accurate with respect to this situation. The Content View construes accuracy as freedom from error. When accuracy is construed in this way, the idea that accuracy comes in degrees can be understood by considering separate respects (such as location, color, or shape) in which an experience is or is not accurate and then breaking accuracy conditions down into separable contents. The Content View can thus respect the observation that accuracy comes in degrees. Completely accurate experiences would be ones in which all contents are true. Partly accurate experiences would be ones in which only some contents are true. For example, suppose that experiences have contents, and consider an experience with the contents that there is a red cube in front of you and a blue ball off to the left. If there really is a red cube in front of you and a ball off to the left, but the ball is black rather than blue, then your experience would be accurate with respect to the location of the ball but inaccurate with respect to its color. It would be partly accurate, but inaccurate overall. 6 5. This claim is compatible with deflationism about accuracy, where this is analogous to deflationism about truth. Even the deflationist about truth agrees that truth-apt sentences have truth conditions. Likewise, even the deflationist about accuracy can agree that if experiences can be accurate or inaccurate, then they have accuracy conditions. 6. When accuracy is construed as freedom from error, merely omitting truths about a situation will not by itself result in an inaccurate experience. A different notion of accuracy construes it as acuity, where


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In the case of belief, there are two things that can be true or false: the belief state, and the belief contents. Contrast the case of hope. If you hope that winter ends soon, your hope itself is neither true nor false, but the content that winter ends soon is. (Here the notion of content is tied not to accuracy conditions of the state of hoping but simply to something that can be true or false.) According to the Content View, experiences are more like beliefs than like hopes, in that they involve two things that can be free of error: the experience itself, and its content. Given the construal of contents as accuracy conditions, we can distinguish between two aspects of experience that mirror the Fregean distinction between the force and sense of a sentence (Dummett 1981). An analogous distinction for mental states between their function and content was drawn by the nineteenth-century German psychologists Carl Stümpf and Oswald Külpe in their discussions of perception and imagery.7 To argue for the Content View, one has to show both that experiences (like hopes) involve relations to a relatum that can in turn be true or false, and also that experiences (unlike hopes) can themselves be accurate or inaccurate.

2. THE ARGUMENT FROM ACCURACY We can now examine the first argument aimed at supporting the Content View. It resembles the argument with which we began in section 1. But now we are armed with two additional ideas: contents are a kind of accuracy condition; and due to the nature of accuracy, accuracy conditions differ from blueness conditions, in that two experiences can be accurate yet differ in their accuracy conditions.

greater acuity involves a higher degree of resolution. When accuracy is construed as acuity, the greater the degree to which an experience is accurate, the greater acuity the perceiver has, so that having microscopic eyes of the sort Locke and Leibniz discussed would yield relatively more accurate experiences, whereas having normal human eyes would yield relatively less accurate experiences. (bk. 2, ch. 12, §14). Compare Leibniz (1705): If our eyes became better equipped or more penetrating, so that some colors or other qualities disappeared from our view, others would appear to arise out of them, and we should need a further increase in acuity to make them disappear too; and since matter is actually divided to infinity, this process could go on to infinity also. (NE II.xxiii.12, 219) In contrast to this notion of acuity, visual acuity is operationally defined in terms of ability to identify letters on a Snellen chart. At some levels of visual acuity, one might not reliably identify a Q (e.g., one might mistake it for an O), and that would be a misrepresentation at the level of belief—or, if one is guessing, an erroneous guess. The standard notion of visual acuity does not take a stand on whether the errors that operationally define such low levels of acuity also occur at the level of experience. For all the operational definition says, experience may be neutral on the exact configuration of the letter’s limbs (assuming that an individual letter can be made out at all), or it may misrepresent them. 7. Unlike Frege’s notion of sense, Stümpf and Külpe’s notion of content does not build in that contents are truth evaluable. For discussion, see Boring (1929).

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The Argument from Accuracy

Premise 1: All experiences are accurate or inaccurate. Premise 2: If all experiences are accurate or inaccurate, then all experiences have accuracy conditions. Conclusion: All experiences have accuracy conditions. Let us examine each premise.

The Case for Premise 1 Accuracy and inaccuracy are properties a token experience would have relative to a situation—most naturally, the situation in which the experience is had. Later on, we will consider whether token experiences might be accurate or inaccurate with respect to other situations. For now we can take Premise 1 to say that for all token experiences, there are some respects in which the experience is accurate or inaccurate relative to the situation in which it is had. We can easily distinguish hallucinations and illusions from completely successful perceptions. Here are some examples: Airport hallucination: You are at home but hallucinate being in an airport. Fishtank: The fish you are seeing is blue, and it looks blue. It is at location L but looks to be at location L*, which is a bit to the right of L. Lunchtime: Behold your sandwich, cut in half on a plate. It is as it looks. Although experiences like Airport hallucination probably never occur, we still find it easy to distinguish them from illusions and completely successful perceptions such as Fishtank and Lunchtime, which occur frequently. In hallucination, perceptual contact is missing; illusions are misleading guides to what is in the environment. In contrast, completely successful perceptions typically lead to knowledge.8 Experiences in this last group are often called “veridical.” This distinction suggests the following defense of Premise 1. When given certain descriptions pairing token experiences with situations in which they are had, we easily classify them into these categories. The best explanation of these classifications is that the experiences classified as veridical are accurate (at least as far as the descriptions specify—further specification of the same experience in its situation could introduce inaccuracies), and experiences classified as illusions are inaccurate. I will argue that this defense of Premise 1 is basically correct. One might think that the argument is too simple, in light of further complications 8. The stronger claim that completely successful perceptions always lead to knowledge seems false. There may be cases in which the cube’s greenness plays the right role in producing the experience of seeing the cube but yet do not lead to knowledge, either because the subject does not form any belief, or she does but has countervailing evidence against it, or some other necessary condition on knowledge is not met.


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that arise once we distinguish between further varieties of veridicality. After drawing these further distinctions, I defend Premise 1 in a way that takes them into account.

Varieties of Veridicality In addition to the distinction between Fishtank, Lunchtime, and Airport hallucination, a related distinction between kinds of experiences is also natural for us to draw, even if we don’t have labels in ordinary language that mark this difference. In that sense, the distinction is pretheoretical. It is illustrated by contrasting Fishtank with another experience, Fishtank 2: Fishtank: The fish you are seeing is blue, and it looks blue. It is at location L but looks to be at location L*, which is a bit to the right of L. Fishtank 2: The fish you are seeing is blue and at location L, and it looks blue and looks to be at L. In Fishtank, there need be no illusion with respect to the fish’s color or shape, but there is an illusion with respect to location. The experience is veridical with respect to color and shape but not with respect to location. It is thus partly but not completely veridical. In contrast, Fishtank 2 is completely veridical, as far as this experience is described. Interestingly, hallucinations, too, can be veridical in some respects and can differ from one another in their degree of veridicality: Airport: You are at home but hallucinate being in an airport. Amazing Coincidence: Your experience is just as it is now, from your point of view, but you are hallucinating, and the scene before your eyes is nonetheless exactly as presented in your hallucination. In one sense, Airport is less veridical than Amazing Coincidence. But this sense differs from the sense of “veridical” used to label completely successful perceptions, as distinct from hallucinations and illusions, since Airport and Amazing Coincidence are both hallucinations. We can label the two uses of “veridical” as follows. Sometimes it is used to denote experiences that are veridical of the things seen.—Call these experiences “strongly veridical.” Hallucinations cannot be strongly veridical. Other times, “veridical” is used to describe experiences that are veridical without being veridical of any object that is seen. For instance, through an amazing coincidence, a hallucination could occur in the presence of exactly the sort of scene that is hallucinated. Call “weakly veridical” experiences that are veridical whether or not they are strongly veridical. Strongly veridical experiences may fall short of being completely successful. Completely successful experiences are best thought of as experiences in which the subject perceives both an object and its properties. Consider Simone, who systematically misperceives green things so that to her green things look yellow. Suppose that by stimulating Simone’s brain

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area V1 while she looks at a green cube, you accidentally induced in her an experience as of seeing a green cube, when otherwise she would have an experience as of seeing a yellow cube. The intervention does not correct Simone’s systematic error. But on the basis of the experience that the intervention helps produce, it would be natural for Simone to form the true belief that there is a green cube before her. Intuitively, Simone’s experience is not completely successful, because the greenness of the cube does not play the right role in producing the experience. Simone perceives the cube, and it looks green to her, but she does not perceive its greenness.9 Cases like this one are called “veridical illusion.”10 They suggest that leading to true belief is not enough for complete success. In general, an experience will be completely successful if it is a case of seeing o when o looks F, o is F, and o’s looking F is due to o’s F-ness, that is, not to any irregular intervention. These experiences are not just strongly veridical— they are superstrongly veridical. They are cases of optimal perceptual contact with an object and select properties. The case of Simone illustrates how an experience could be accurate of an object the perceiver sees (and so strongly veridical) even if there is something missing from their perceptual contact with what they see. With the distinction between strong and weak veridicality in hand, we can see that the pretheoretical distinction that was illustrated above between degrees of veridicality is not sensitive to whether experiences are strongly veridical (let alone superstrongly veridical). It is a distinction between degrees of weak veridicality. According to the straightforward account of what underlies our classification of experiences into partial and complete veridicality, weak veridicality is accuracy, and degrees of weak veridicality are degrees of accuracy. Amazing Coincidence is accurate with respect to the situation that the hallucinator is actually in, even though the hallucinator is not perceiving anything in that situation. If Amazing Coincidence represented that you were in a room containing yellow chairs, when in fact you were hallucinating while standing in a room containing red chairs, it would not be completely weakly veridical, but it could still be weakly veridical to a high degree. 9. For a similar case, see Johnston’s (2006) discussion of the twins in the Ames room. 10. We can distinguish between two kinds of veridical illusion. The case of Simone illustrates predicative veridical illusions, which are strongly veridical even though, intuitively, the experience is not completely successful (for discussion of other cases in which something similar goes wrong, see Johnston 2006; Smith in press). What seems to go wrong is that the perceiver’s contact with the object’s properties is suboptimal. In contrast to predicative visual illusions, objectual veridical illusions are veridical of an object distinct from the object that is seen and so are weakly veridical without being strongly veridical. For instance, a red cube at location L* looks orange and looks to be at location L, while hidden behind a mirror at location L there is an orange cube that otherwise looks exactly the way the red cube looks. So the experience is veridical of an orange cube, which is not seen by the perceiver, but is falsidical of the red cube, which the perceiver does see. A case with this structure is discussed by Grice (1961).


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How does the abductive defense of Premise 1 fare in light of the complications introduced by veridical hallucinations and veridical illusions? Using the notion of weak veridicality, we can refine the defense as follows. When given certain descriptions pairing token experiences with situations in which they are had, such as Fishtank, Fishtank 2, Lunchtime, Airport, and Amazing Coincidence, we easily classify them into completely falsidical, partly veridical, or completely veridical (at least, completely veridical for all the descriptions specify), where veridicality is weak veridicality. The best explanation of these classifications is that the experiences classified as completely veridical are completely accurate (as far as the descriptions specify), and experiences classified as partly veridical are only partly accurate.

What Else Might Explain Our Classifications? The abductive defense of Premise 1 just described does not succeed if there are alternative, superior explanations of what underlies comparative classifications of Fishtank and Fishtank 2, Airport and Amazing Coincidence and our classification of some of these (Fishtank) as partly veridical, others (Lunchtime, Fishtank 2, and Amazing Coincidence) as completely veridical, and still others (Airport) as completely falsidical. The straightforward account has simplicity on its side. But let us consider the alternatives. One might try to argue that the only classifications of accuracy in the vicinity are classifications of judgments downstream of experiences. This alternative brings us straight to the heart of the controversy over the Content View, and it is useful to have the second argument for the Content View on the table before exploring it. That argument—the Argument from Appearing—is presented in section 4, and I return to the alternative explanation of our comparative classifications of experiences in section 5. Another alternative is in the spirit of Naive Realism, in that it attempts to define weak veridicality in terms of strong veridicality or more generally in terms of the “good” case of experience. According to this alternative, the classifications are sensitive to a notion of weak veridicality that does not involve the notion of accuracy, but instead involves the notion of indiscriminability from strongly veridical experiences. Such a notion of weak veridicality might be defined as follows: An experience is weakly veridical iff it is indiscriminable from a good case of perceiving something that has a cluster of properties F, and the experience is had by someone in the presence of something that has that cluster of properties.11

11. Thanks to Adam Pautz for suggesting this proposal. Pautz (2009) considers the right-hand side of this proposal in a different dialectical context. He uses it to formulate a disjunctivist account of accuracy, which he draws on to argue that Naive Realists can respect the standard classifications of experiences as accurate or inaccurate.

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If properties are in a cluster, then if they are instantiated, they are all instantiated by the same thing. The cluster of properties F would have to be such that any two experiences that presented something as having F would be indistinguishable to the subject. Veridicality would then be partial if something is present with only some of the properties in the cluster; it would be complete if something is present with all the properties in the cluster. On this proposal, a good case of perceiving something that has the cluster of properties F could be a strongly veridical experience as defined above (a case of perceiving the object and its properties), or it could be more strongly an experience that provides a basis for knowing that the object has those properties, or more strongly still, it could be a case of knowing that the object has those properties. No matter how the good case is defined, weak veridicality is derivative on the notion of the good case, which is something like strong veridicality. By itself, the status of weak veridicality as less fundamental than strong veridicality does not preclude experiences from being assessable for accuracy. Ultimately, this proposal does not seem to succeed in avoiding the notion of accuracy. Its right-handside relies on the idea that there is a cluster of properties that an experience can either match or mismatch. According to the proposal, the status of an experience as weakly veridical depends on whether the cluster of properties that figures in the indiscriminability property is instantiated. An experience will be weakly veridical if and only if a cluster of properties is instantiated that matches the properties in the indiscriminability. Little daylight can be found between this kind of matching and accuracy. Through the dependence of weak veridicality on this kind of match, the proposal reintroduces the notion of accuracy, rather than providing an alternative to it.12 And from this fact we can draw an important moral: the claim that experiences can be accurate or inaccurate can be true even if the assessability of an experience for accuracy is less fundamental than its status as a “good” case of perception.

The Case for Premise 2 So far, I have defended the first premise in the Argument from Accuracy. The second premise is as follows:

12. The proposal also faces another objection: since weak veridicality is defined in terms of indiscriminability, which is in turn standardly defined in terms of knowledge (Williamson 1990; Martin 2004, 2006), it appears that cognitively unsophisticated creatures cannot count as having strongly veridical experiences. (More specifically, if a mental state cannot provide a basis for knowledge in a creature that is not capable of knowledge, then it seems that such creatures cannot have strongly veridical experiences.) This objection is developed in Siegel (2004). See also Byrne and Logue (2008), Farkas (2006), Hawthorne and Kovakovich (2006), Sturgeon (2006) and Pautz (chapter 10 this volume).


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Premise 2: If all experiences are accurate or inaccurate, then all experiences have accuracy conditions.

There are two routes to Premise 2. First, Premise 2 is true on the simple grounds that accuracy (like blueness) is a property, and so if all experiences are the kinds of things that can be accurate or inaccurate, then there will be conditions under which experiences are accurate. From Premise 1 and Premise 2, it follows that all experiences have accuracy conditions. The first route to Premise 1 yields only accuracy conditions that obtain when the experience occurs. In contrast, the second route to Premise 2 yields accuracy conditions that may obtain even when the experience does not occur. Premise 2 is true if experiences can be assessed for accuracy with respect to situations other than those in which they are had. And it is plausible to think that they can be so assessed. Recall the cases described above: Fully Falsidical Hallucination: You are at home but are hallucinating being in an airport. Fully Amazing Coincidence: You hallucinate being in an airport, and you are in an airport. The scene before your eyes is exactly as presented in your hallucination. Less Amazing (but still pretty amazing) Coincidence: You hallucinate being in an airport, and you are in an airport that is exactly like the one you are hallucinating in some but not all respects. These cases describe pairs of hallucinations and situations in which they are had. But we can also fix on the first hallucination (Fully Falsidical Hallucination) as an anchor point and think of the other cases as counterfactual situations relative to which we can evaluate the original hallucination. For the purposes of evaluating the original hallucination in this way, we can just ignore the experiences that occur in the two amazing coincidences and consider the extent to which they are situations that match the original hallucination. Relative to the less amazing (but still pretty amazing) situation, the original hallucination would be more veridical than it is in the original case (when you are at home). Relative to the fully amazing situation, the original hallucination would be even more veridical. We reach these verdicts concerning veridicality on the basis of information about what conditions obtain in the counterfactual situation. In general, suppose we evaluate an experience (e.g., Fully Falsidical Hallucination) with respect to a situation other than the one in which it is had.—Call this situation world w. We will count the experience as veridical with respect to w only when properties are instantiated in w that are presented in the experience.13 This kind of assessment does not trivially require the presence of an experience. The conditions are veridicality conditions that can be satisfied in worlds where the experience does not occur. 13. On the plausible assumption that visual phenomenology presents spatial features such as being nearby the perceiver (considered as the center), we will count an experience as veridical with respect to a centered world only when such features are instantiated in it.

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3. A FLAW IN THE ARGUMENT FROM ACCURACY Considered as a defense of the Content View, the Argument from Accuracy is not good enough. Nothing in the argument tells us that the accuracy conditions are fit to be contents. This flaw is especially vivid on the first route to Premise 2. If I see a red cube and my experience of seeing it is accurate, one of the conditions that obtains exactly when my experience is accurate is the condition that my experience is accurate. For all the Argument from Accuracy says, this condition is included in the accuracy conditions had by experiences. But it may be implausible to suppose that this accuracy condition counts as content, depending on the conception of contents. If contents are sets of possible worlds, then this accuracy condition may be equivalent to more substantive ones, but on other conceptions it would be distinct. If it is distinct, it is intuitively not conveyed to the subject. This potentially silly kind of accuracy condition is in some ways analogous to a blueness condition, in that it is shared by all accurate experiences just as the blueness condition (blueness) is shared by all blue objects. Yet nothing in the argument from accuracy rules it out as a content of experience. In reply, one might point out that the potentially silly kind of accuracy condition is avoided by the second route to Premise 2, on which experiences can be assessed for accuracy with respect to situations other than those in which they are had. Accuracy conditions that can be satisfied in worlds where the experience does not occur will not include the condition that the experience is accurate, because they do not require the presence of the experience at all. But even this defense of Premise 2 leaves the Argument from Accuracy with the same general flaw. The flaw is that the argument does not tell us whether the accuracy conditions had by experiences are suitable for being contents of experience, given the constraint that contents are conveyed to the subject by her experience. What needs support is not just the generic conclusion that experiences have any old accuracy conditions, but the more robust conclusion that they have accuracy conditions that are conveyed to the subject. The mere fact that accuracy conditions we get from the second route to Premise 2 (i.e., those defined over worlds in which the experience does not occur) avoid the potentially silly accuracy condition does not by itself ensure that the rest of the accuracy conditions are conveyed. And it could turn out that some accuracy conditions defined only over worlds where the experience does occur are conveyed (the potentially silly accuracy condition mentioned above—the condition that the experience is accurate—is not the only condition that can be so defined). So drawing the distinction between the two routes to Premise 2 brings us no closer to the heart of the matter.14 14. At least, it does not bring us any closer, absent a good account of why accuracy conditions defined over worlds where the experience does not occur always are conveyed. If there were such an account, the Argument from Appearing would not be needed.


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The general flaw with the Argument from Accuracy is that it is not an argument for the Content View as contents have been defined here. A good argument for the Content View should tie together accuracy conditions and contents, elucidating why experiences are assessable for accuracy in the first place and how they could convey their accuracy conditions to the subject.

4. THE ARGUMENT FROM APPEARING We can find such elucidation in the Argument from Appearing. It attempts to unearth the idea that experiences are assessable for accuracy, aiming to explain what gives them accuracy conditions that are suitable for being contents, thereby bridging the gap between accuracy conditions and contents. It does this by starting with something that is conveyed to the subject, out of which accuracy conditions fit to be contents can be built. The Argument from Appearing proceeds from premises about the phenomenal character of visual perceptual experience. The accuracy conditions that figure in its conclusion derive from the properties that are presented in visual phenomenology. Premise (i) claims that properties are presented in visual phenomenology, and premise (ii) links these properties to instantiation at a world, which is in turn linked to accuracy conditions in premises (iii) and (iv): The Argument from Appearing

Premise (i): All visual perceptual experiences present clusters of properties as being instantiated. Premise (ii): If an experience E presents a cluster of properties F as being instantiated, then: Necessarily, things are the way E presents them only if property cluster F is instantiated. Premise (iii): If necessarily: things are the way E presents them only if property cluster F is instantiated, then: E has a set of accuracy conditions C, conveyed to the subject of E, such that C is satisfied in a world only if there is something that has F in that world. Premise (iv): If E has a set of accuracy conditions C, conveyed to the subject of E, such that E is accurate only if C, then: E has a set of accuracy conditions C*, conveyed to the subject of E, such that E is accurate iff C*. Conclusion: All visual perceptual experiences have contents. The general strategy of the argument is to reason about an arbitrary visual perceptual experience, E, and then draw a conclusion about all visual perceptual experiences.

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Premise (i) According to Premise (i), all visual perceptual experiences present clusters of properties as being instantiated. Is this description of experiences phenomenologically apt? Typically, our visual perceptual experiences are cases of seeing objects, where the category of objects includes ordinary objects such as cars, cups, and pencils.15 Why think that properties are presented in such experiences? Consider the claim (made sometimes in discussions of metaphysics) that there is no such thing as a “bare particular,” that is, an object shorn of all of its properties.16 Premise (i) is motivated by the idea that it is not possible for us to represent objects as so shorn in our visual experience. When we see (or even when we merely seem to see) ordinary objects, such as a cube, bare particulars do not figure in visual phenomenology in any way. Properties enter the picture as well. For you to see a cube at all, it must be part of your visual phenomenology that the cube has certain properties: having a certain number of facing edges and surfaces, having a certain color, location, and so on. Most of the time, visual phenomenology takes a stand on which objects instantiate clusters of properties, both at a time and over time.17 For instance, when you see a bird flying by, it looks as if a single object is moving. Your experience does not remain neutral on whether it is the same object at various points along the trajectory. But in some cases, an experience may present the perceiver with a property without specifying what is instantiating it. For instance, Dretske (1999) discusses the

15. The category should also be taken to include “Spelke objects”—roughly, things that can survive radical changes in kind but are bounded, capable of continuous motion (and not of discontinuous motion), and are not parts of other objects. There is debate among psychologists concerning what principles of individuation govern perceptual representations of objects (for discussion, see Scholl 2002; Dickie (2011)). A similar question could be raised specifically about visual phenomenology: does visual phenomenology ever attribute properties to Spelke objects, or is it neutral on the status of objects as Spelke objects or ordinary objects? (The answer will probably vary between infants and adults.) It wouldn’tmatter for the Argument from Appearing how this question about visual phenomenology is answered, because accuracy conditions of the sort described in (iii) can be defined on any of these construals of objects. But the answer will bear on which accuracy conditions experiences have. 16. As bare particulars are defined here, they are objects without properties. Bare particulars thus should not be identified with the substrata recognized by opponents of the bundle theory. Substrata are not meant to be (even potentially) bare particulars in the present sense. The debate between proponents of substrata and proponents of the bundle theory concerns whether denying the bundle theory forces you into saying that there are bare particulars in the present sense. For discussion, see Locke (1689), Martin (1980), and Sider (2006). 17. Clark (2000) suggests that visual phenomenology presents us only with properties instantiated at locations (“feature-placing”) without taking a stand on which objects are instantiating the properties. The objection that this is phenomenally inadequate in cases of perceived motion can be found in Siegel (2002). Clark (2004) makes explicit that visual phenomenology is not limited to feature placing.


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case in which you cannot tell whether the moving train is the one you are seeing or the one you are sitting in. Even here, though, this is part of a visual experience that does attribute properties to objects (Dretske 1999).18 We thus see objects, and we cannot seem to see them without our experience presenting them as having certain properties. It should be noted that premise (i) can be read de dicto or de re, depending on the relative scope of “presentation” and “properties.” I have been assuming the de re reading, on which for each visual perceptual experience there are some properties (color, relative location, etc.) such that the experience presents those properties as instantiated. On the de dicto reading, in contrast, each visual perceptual experience presents it as being the case that some properties are instantiated, but given an experience E, there need be no specific properties such that E presents them as instantiated. At first glance, it might be hard to see how the de dicto reading could be phenomenologically apt, given that properties characterize how things look to the perceiver. But if one adds another moving part to the equation, such as a mode of presentation of a property, the de dicto reading can begin to look more plausible. Modes of presentation will be discussed in connection with premise (iv), by which time it will be easier to assess their impact on the Argument from Appearing. For now, more can be said about how properties figure in experience, whether we read premise (i) de dicto or de re. Suppose you see a cube, and it looks red and cubical. Here your experience presents it as being the case that there is a red cube before you. Contrast a hope that there is a red cube in front of you. The properties of being red and cubical figure in the content of the hope. But in hoping that there is a red cube in front of you, it need not be presented to you as being the case that there is a red cube in front of you. To make this vivid, suppose your eyes are closed, and you are not holding onto anything or engaging in any visual imagination. Under such circumstances you could still hope that when you open your eyes there will be a red cube in front of you. In contrast, when such a property cluster (redness, cubicality, and being nearby) figures in visual perceptual experience, the experience presents it as being the case that a red cube is nearby. It is the fact that properties figure in this way that will eventually allow us to draw the link to the contents of the state, rather than merely to accuracy conditions. These considerations about the kind of visual phenomenology involved in seeing ordinary objects support premise (i), and they apply equally to cases of merely seeming to see objects.19 The same considerations also 18. Unlike Clark (2000), Dretske (1999) accepts that properties are sometimes attributed to objects in experience. 19. Hallucinations that are indiscriminable from perception are not cases of seeming to see a bare particular, nor of seeming to see properties that are not instantiated by anything.

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suggest that a sense of “looks” and “appears” can be defined in which when you see an object, it looks (appears) to you to have properties. (We will revisit this suggestion for defining a sense of “looks” in section 5.) It should be taken as analytic that if an experience presents a property as being instantiated, then it presents the property as being instantiated by something other than the experience itself. For all premise (i) says (and, indeed, for all the Content View says), there may be more to the phenomenal character of an experience than what it presents. For instance, premise (i) allows that experiences present themselves as having nonrelational properties such as being blurred. On some accounts of blurred vision (e.g., Smith 2008; Pace 2007), part of what is presented (in a broader sense than the one used here) to the subject by her blurred experience is that her vision is blurred. The more restrictive notion is compatible with treatments of blurred vision such as Smith’s, but it is better suited than the broader notion for being linked to accuracy conditions.20

Premise (ii) If an experience E presents a cluster of properties F as being instantiated, then: Necessarily, things are the way E presents them only if property cluster F is instantiated.

Premise (ii) is an instance of a more general claim about presentation that is independently plausible: if a state presents such-and-such as being the case, then things are the way the state presents them only if such-andsuch. The general claim seems plausible, no matter what presentation is. But to bring the general claim into focus, it may be useful to discuss the notion of presenting such-and-such as being the case a bit further.21 Other mental states besides experiences can present things as being the case, and some states can do this without involving any phenomenal character, though premise (ii) would be just as plausible even if presentation were tied specifically to phenomenal character. For instance, belief and suppo-

20. Premise (i) is at odds with a view explored by Sturgeon (2006, 2008) and defended by Fish (2008, 2009), according to which hallucinations do not have any phenomenal character at all. If hallucinations lack phenomenal character altogether, then (assuming they are nonetheless visual perceptual experiences), they will be counterexamples to premise (i). The idea that hallucinations lack phenomenal character is at odds with the crudest deliverances of introspection. Fish’s proposal is discussed and criticized in Siegel (2008). 21. Searle (1983) discusses a closely related category of mental states, called “Bel-states,” of which belief is supposed to be a paradigm. For Searle the defining feature of Bel-states is their mind-to-world direction of fit, which is in turn illustrated using the metaphor that it is the “fault” of the world, not the mind, if the Bel-state is not satisfied (1983, 7). Once we stop relying on the metaphor, the notion of mindto-world direction of fit seems best understood as a norm to the effect that beliefs should be adjusted to fit the evidence, and evidence should not be gerrymandered to match antecedently formed beliefs. But this understanding of mind-to-world direction of fit is not useful for delimiting any class of mental states that includes experiences, since unlike beliefs, experiences are not the kinds of states that can be supported by evidence.


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sition are modes in which things may be presented as being the case. The kind of commitment involved in belief is a specific kind of presentation, but not the only kind, as it is missing in supposition and imagination. My supposition that it will not rain tomorrow presents it as being the case that it will not rain tomorrow, but my supposition does not involve the same kind of commitment as belief.22

Premises (iii) and (iv) Like premise (ii), premises (iii) and (iv) are closely related to more general claims. Without the conveying constraint, these premises follow from more general claims, and these claims are independent of any claims about phenomenology. Consider premise (iii) without the conveying constraint: (iii-minus-conveying-constraint) If, necessarily, things are the way E presents them only if property-cluster F is instantiated, then: E has a set of accuracy conditions C such that C is satisfied in a world only if there is something that has F in that world.

This claim follows from an independently plausible more general thesis: If things are the way that a state X presents them as being only if conditions C obtain, then X has accuracy conditions that are satisfied in a world only if C obtains.

Given that premise (iii) without the conveying constraint follows from this independently plausible thesis, our question should be whether once we add the conveying constraint, we end up with accuracy conditions that meet this constraint. Are accuracy conditions that derive from properties presented in experience conveyed to the subject? We can distinguish between three ways in which a content can be conveyed to the subject by her experience. First, a content is conveyed by experience if it would be a content of explicit beliefs that are natural to form on the basis of visual experience.23 Second, a content is conveyed to the subject by her experience if it enables the experience to guide bodily 22. What about states of visual imagination: do they present things as being the case? This is a matter of controversy. Imagining that there is a red cube in my house, or that your uncle is standing on his head, seems to be as presentational as supposing the same things. There may also be a simpler kind of imagery that is not presentational, as when I just imagine a red cube. According to Martin’s Dependency Thesis (Martin 2002), every case of imagining a red cube is a case of imagining that I am seeing a red cube. If something like the Dependency Thesis is true, then visual imagery would seem to be thoroughly presentational. 23. According to some philosophers, potential contents of visual experience are so fundamentally different from potential contents of beliefs that it is impossible to believe exactly what you experience, and so the contents of experiences could not be conveyed to the subject in this first sense. They could, however, be conveyed in a similar sense, if there was a systematic relationship between experience contents and belief contents. Providing such an account would need to be done anyway in order to describe the differences between beliefs that are closer to the deliverances of perception and those that are farther removed from them. For discussion, see Heck (2007).

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actions. For instance, suppose you see the door but do not form any explicit beliefs about the shape of its doorknob, yet you adjust your grip in advance of touching the doorknob as you reach for it. This could be a case of visual experience guiding action. Finally, a content is conveyed to the subject by her experience if it is manifest to introspection that it is a content of experience. If there are properties presented in visual phenomenology, this opens the possibility that since those properties are conveyed to the subject, the accuracy conditions they directly determine are also so conveyed. What would it be for a property presented in experience to be conveyed to the subject by her experience? In cases of seeing objects, properties that are presented in visual phenomenology are properties that objects look to the perceiver to have when she sees them. Such properties can be conveyed to the subject in the same ways that the contents of an experience can be conveyed to a subject. And there is good reason to think that such properties are conveyed in these ways. For instance, upon seeing the banana, it is natural to believe that it is yellow and bent, and this is arguably because those properties (being yellow, being bent) are presented in visual phenomenology (compare Logue 2009).24 Similarly, upon seeing the doorknob, it is natural for one’s active movements to adjust to what one sees, as when you automatically adjust your grip to match its shape.25 Finally, it seems manifest to introspection that visual phenomenology presents spatial properties (e.g., being nearby or in front of the perceiver), color properties (or properties closely related to colors), and shape and luminance properties—though it is doubtful that for every property presented in visual phenomenology, it is manifest to introspection that it is so represented.26 Supposing that properties presented in experience are conveyed to the subject, does this support the idea that accuracy conditions that derive directly from those properties are so conveyed? It is hard to see how such accuracy conditions could fail to be conveyed to the subject in whatever

24. Cf Logue 2009. Since we bring plenty of standing representations to bear on perceptual beliefs, one cannot infer from the fact that one believes that, say, somebody is Franco that the property of being Franco is presented in visual phenomenology. But what is at issue here are inferences in the other direction: if a property is presented in visual phenomenology, then it is natural to attribute that property to something one sees. 25. The Ebbinghaus illusion suggests that action is also guided by visual representations of properties that do not figure in visual phenomenology. The claim of interest here is not that if action is guided by a visual representation of some properties, then those properties figure in visual phenomenology. Rather, the claim is that if properties are presented in visual phenomenology, then they may be fit to guide action. 26. Discovering which properties figure in experience is difficult, and in many cases introspectively reflecting on an experience provides little help in deciding whether a property is presented in visual phenomenology, or farther downstream. For example, introspection alone does not seem to tell us whether visual phenomenology presents an object as Franco (and so not as his twin), or as someone with certain facial features that Franco’s twin could equally share, or as merely as a human-shaped entity that a nonhuman alien could equally share.


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way the properties they derive from are. If it is natural to believe that the banana is yellow when it looks yellow because the property of yellowness is conveyed to the subject by her experience, then the content that something is yellow will be conveyed as well. Likewise, if the property F-ness is presented in experience and guides one’s action, then this seems enough for the content that something is F to guide one’s action. Premise (iv) also follows from an independently plausible general thesis, when divorced from the conveying constraint. (iv-minus-conveying-constraint): If there are some conditions C such that E is accurate only if C, then there are some conditions C* such that E is accurate iff C*.

In general, is plausible that whenever there are some conditions C such that X is accurate only if C (where X is any kind of mental state), there are some (perhaps stronger) conditions C* such that X is accurate iff C*. Once the conveying constraint is added in, is the resulting premise true? In effect, our question is whether E has ‘iff’-accuracy conditions that are conveyed to the subject. Can the ‘only-if’ conditions of premise (iii) be turned into ‘iff’ contents? Premise (iii) remains plausible once ‘only if’ is replaced by ‘iff’. But for this replacement to preserve the argument’s force, ‘only if’ would have to be replaced by ‘iff’ in premise (ii) as well. A version of premise (ii) with ‘iff’ would be true only given the assumption that what an experience E presents as being the case is exhausted by E’s presenting certain properties as instantiated. And here two complications arise that could raise the suspicion that iff-accuracy conditions for experience cannot be derived from the only-if accuracy condition stated in premise (iii). The first complication concerns the role of objects that we see in accuracy conditions, and the second concerns whether there are conditions on accuracy other than properties. To quell the suspicion, what’s needed are reasons to think that these complications present no bar to defining full iff-accuracy conditions that are fit to be contents.

What about Objects? Suppose you see Franco, and your experience represents him as sitting down. In order for the experience to be accurate with respect to a world, does Franco himself have to be sitting down in that world, or is it enough for accuracy if a qualitative duplicate of Franco is sitting down in that situation? For instance, is your experience veridical with respect to a world where Franco’s twin is sitting down but Franco is standing up? As they stand, the ‘only-if’ versions of premises (ii) and (iii) leave unsettled whether accuracy conditions track objects seen across worlds, since they do not specify which object has to instantiate the cluster of properties F, in order for the experience of seeing that object to be accurate. To get a full definition of accuracy conditions, this issue must be settled.

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But whichever way the issue is settled, the resulting accuracy conditions are fit to be contents of experience. If you see Franco and your experience represents him as sitting down, it is natural to believe on the basis of your experience that Franco is sitting down. It is also natural to believe that someone with a certain appearance is sitting down. These are both ways for contents to be conveyed to a subject. So both options result in accuracy conditions that have a good claim to being conveyed to the subject by her experience.27

Why Properties? Fregean Contents, Centered Worlds, and Tropes The assumption that what an experience E presents as being the case is exhausted by E’s presenting certain properties as instantiated is called into question by scenarios in which it seems prima facie that two perceivers accurately represent different properties, yet have experiences that are phenomenally the same. Objects typically look to stand in certain spatial relations to the perceiver, such as being nearby or within reach. On some views (e.g., Egan 2006; see also Egan, chapter 5 this volume), this involves the presentation of “centering features” defined in terms of evaluation in centered worlds, where these are not properties. For example, in contrast to being nearby Susanna, which is a property, the centering feature being nearby the center is not a property, since being a center is merely a formal feature of a centered world. The claim that centering features are presented in experience is motivated by the idea that pairs of veridical phenomenally identical experiences can nonetheless be associated with different locations and thus convey different contents. Centering features provide a level at which such phenomenally identical experiences present the same thing. Fregean modes of presentation have been invoked to play a similar role in response to inversion scenarios. In spectral inversion, phenomenally identical pairs of veridical color experiences are associated with different color properties. In one such scenario, Invert’s and Nonvert’s color experiences are phenomenally the same, but Invert’s experience presents red while Nonvert’s experience presents green. Is the phenomenal similarity between Invert and Nonvert a mere “raw feel,” or does it have some other status? Chalmers (2004) argues that Invert’s and Nonvert’s shared phenomenal character covaries with a level of content that is composed of Fregean modes of presentation, where these are part of a two-dimensionalist theory of experience content. Thompson (in press) defends a similar

27. In Chapter 6 of Siegel 2010 the distinction between strong and weak veridicality figures in an argument that an experience could have both kinds of accuracy conditions.


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two-dimensionalist theory on the basis of inversion scenarios involving spatial properties.28 A version of premise (ii) with “iff” would be true only given the assumption that what an experience E presents as being the case is exhausted by E’s presenting certain properties as instantiated. But this assumption is false if experience presents centering features rather than properties, or in addition to them. A modified version of the argument could deal with this issue, however, by replacing references to properties by references to features (properties or centering features) and by replacing references to worlds by reference to centered worlds. So this obstacle to defining ‘iff’accuracy conditions is easily overcome. A similar dialectic surrounds two-dimensionalist Fregean views. On these views, even if the contents of an experience E derive from what E presents as being the case, what experiences present as being the case is not exhausted by the instantiation of properties, because properties are presented under a mode of presentation that can pick out different properties in different worlds. For instance, according to Chalmers and Thompson, the mode of presentation for redness (roughly ‘the property normally causing reddish experiences in me’) picks out different properties in different worlds. These theories allow that two experiences could present redness as being instantiated, yet differ in the mode of presentation of redness and hence in their accuracy conditions. It is possible to formulate versions of premises (ii) and (iii) that would accommodate these two-dimensionalist Fregean views, on which accuracy conditions are determined by modes of presentation of properties.29 In

28. Both the two-dimensionalist Fregean theory of experience content and the theory that experiences present centering features suggest an objection to premise (i): when you see objects, they look to have features that are not properties, such as centering features or modes of presentation. However, this objection to premise (i) can be met, since centering features and modes of presentation could be presented in experience along with the location and color properties with which they are associated. Indeed, each of these theoretical devices is invoked to explain the means by which such properties are presented in experience. Premise (i) does not entail that any pair of phenomenally identical experiences present exactly the same properties. In addition, both the view that experiences present centering features and the Fregean views about experience are versions of the Content View and so do not ultimately challenge the conclusion of the Argument from Appearing. 29. Premises (ii) and (iii) might be reformulated to accommodate two-dimensionalist Fregean views as follows: 2D Fregean (ii): If an experience E presents a cluster of properties F as being instantiated, then: Necessarily, things in world w are the way E presents them only if: Something in w has a cluster of properties that meet the conditions on extension that F meets in the world where E occurs. 2D Fregean (iii): If, necessarily, things in world w are the way E presents them only if something in w has a cluster of properties that meet the conditions on extension that F meets in the world where E occurs, then: E has a set of accuracy conditions C, conveyed to the subject of E, such that: C is satisfied in a world w only if something in w has a cluster of properties that meet the conditions on extension that F meets in the world E occurs.

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effect, these theories posit two sets of accuracy conditions for experience: one set that covaries with phenomenal character (found at the level of sense or modes of presentation), and another set that does not (found at the level of reference or properties presented in experience). When coupled with two-dimensional theories of belief, both sets of accuracy conditions in experience will be conveyed to the subject to the extent that they each have an analog in the contents of beliefs formed on the basis of experience.30 Finally, one might think that it is tropes rather than universals that are presented in experiences and that ultimately figure in their accuracy conditions. The Argument from Appearing could easily be reformulated to accommodate this position. In the reformulation, “tropes” could be substituted for “properties,” except the consequent of premise (ii) would read “things are the way E’s visual phenomenology presents them only if a cluster of F tropes is instantiated.” For instance, F might be a cluster of red-cubical tropes, where type of trope is determined by a primitive resemblance relation between tropes.31

5. TWO OBJECTIONS FROM “LOOKS,” “APPEARS,” AND THEIR COGNATES Premise (i) of the Argument from Appearing, like the descriptions given earlier of Airport, Fishtank, Fishtank 2, Lunchtime, and so on, all use “looks,” “presents,” or cognates. Without relying on descriptions like these, the argument could not get off the ground. I now consider a pair of objections to such uses of “looks” and its cognates. The second objection in the pair brings us to the heart of the controversy over the Content View. According to the first objection, there are no natural uses of English terms “looks,” “visually presents,” or their cognates that pick out contents of experience exclusively.—Call this the semantic objection: Semantic objection: No actual uses of “looks” (or “looks F”) and its cognates in ordinary English exclusively track what is presented in experience. 30. A potential dialectical difficulty might remain. To defend a version of the Argument from Appearing that included two-dimensional Fregean premises (ii) and (iii), what would be needed are reasons to accept these premises that do not antecedently assume the Content View. The defenses of Fregean contents given by Chalmers and Thompson take the Content View for granted. They argue that the Fregean contents are needed to make the right predictions about the veridicality of experiences involving inversion with respect to color and spatial features. (Thompson [2006] also argues that his contents are needed to make the right predictions about color constancy.) Perhaps related considerations about these phenomena could be used to support two-dimensional Fregean (ii) and (iii) in note 40 without assuming the Content View. 31. A trope version of premise (iii) would look like this: If, necessarily, things are the way E presents them only if a cluster of F-tropes is instantiated, then E has a set of accuracy conditions C, conveyed to the subject of E, such that C is satisfied in a world only if there is something that has a cluster of F-tropes in that world.


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The discussion so far has relied on the idea that we can use ordinary English expressions (including such locutions as looks F) to identify visual perceptual experiences, as opposed to mental states farther downstream of perception. According to a specific version of the semantic objection, the only mental states that can be picked out by ordinary English uses of looks F and looks to be F are judgments that it would be reasonable to make on the basis of experience. If that is true, then the putative descriptions of experiences used in arguing for Premise 1 of the Argument from Accuracy and in discussing premise (iii) of the Argument from Appearing are defective. Similarly, the Argument from Appearing uses the phrase “experience presents clusters of properties,” and in cases where the experience is a case of seeing an object, the properties presented are meant to be properties that the object looks to the perceiver to have. So the Argument from Appearing depends on the idea that objects look to have properties—and here again the English expressions looks F and looks to be F are indispensable. Something close to the semantic objection seems to be in play in Travis 2004. Travis raises doubts that any actual uses of “looks” in English report contents of visual perceptual experience. His official target is the idea that “the representational content of an experience can be read off of the way, in it, things looked.” He says he will “begin to examine that idea by distinguishing and exploring two different notions of looks,” and that “neither . . . makes room for it” (69).32 The first notion of looks is characterized in Travis (2004) as follows: On the first notion, something looks thus-and-so, or like such-and-such, where it looks the way such-and-such . . . does (would, might) look. On this notion, Pia may look . . . like . . . her sister. . . . That man on the bench looks old. (He looks the way an old man would, or might.) (70)

In a footnote, Travis makes explicit that public looks—which can be expressed by the locutions looking like X or looking F—are supposed to contrast with looking like X or looking F to a perceiver (70, n. 12). Travis sometimes calls looks on the first construal “demonstrable looks” (compare Ginet 1975, ch. 5). His main criticism is that demonstrable looks do

32. Although Travis sets out to attack the idea experiences have “representational content,” the characterizations offered of the official target is more restricted than standard characterizations of the view. First, the target holds that contents can be “read off” of the ways things look. Substituting “phenomenal character” for “the ways things look” would result in the view that for any two experiences with the same phenomenal character, there is some content that both share. But some proponents of the idea that experiences have content deny this—such as Block (1996), who argues that that there are pairs of experiences that have the same phenomenal character, but differ in their content. Second, substituting “known by introspection alone” for “read off” results in the claim that introspection can tell us what contents experiences have. This claim is not entailed by the Content View. A wider target for Travis (and one that would make his criticisms more powerful) would look to constraints on contents by phenomenal character, without endorsing the supervenience claim, and without importing the assumption that we can discover what contents experiences have using introspection alone.

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not fix on any single way the world has to be, in order for an experience to be accurate. Travis takes the question facing his opponent to be: what way does something have to be, in order to be the way that it demonstrably looks?33 If there are conflicting ways a thing could be in order to be the way it demonstrably looked, then, Travis concludes, contents of experience cannot be read off of demonstrable looks. Travis thinks this is just what we find.34 A lemon, a lemon-shaped and colored soap, a small football in a lemon disguise, and countless other things could all share a demonstrable lemony look. How does the lemon (or the disguised football, etc.) have to be in order to be the way it looks? You might think the answer is: it has to be yellowish and roughly lemon shaped. But there are many lemony demonstrable looks, not all of which involve being yellowish and lemon shaped. Maybe the lemon is cut in half. Maybe it has a green patch. So a lemony demonstrable look seems too coarsely grained an item to determine any set of contents for experience. Alternatively, you might think the answer is: it has to be a lemon. But that may seem arbitrary: why a lemon, as opposed to a football in disguise, or a well-crafted yellow soap? Even if we fix on a specific lemony demonstrable look that pins down shape, color, and illumination, we still do not seem to fix on any set of truth conditions. Finally, you might think the answer is: once you fix a specific lemony demonstrable look, for something to be the way it demonstrably looks, it has to have just those properties that are involved in fixing the specific lemony demonstrable look: as it might be, lemon shaped, roughly textured, yellowish, and so on. Of these three answers to Travis’s question, the third seems the most sensible, as far it goes. But whatever status the answers may have, the question itself seems flawed, driven as it is by the idea that demonstrable looks might fix contents of experience. If the fact that a lemon demonstrably looks lemony does not entail that it looks lemony to S, why should we think that the lemon’s demonstrable looks fixes the facts about the contents of S’s experience when she sees the lemon? At best, these facts are fixed by S’s experience somehow picking up the demonstrable look of the lemon, when she sees it. But the notion of picking up on a demonstrable lookwe’ve introduces another kind of looking altogether. Demonstrable looks are irrelevant to fixing the content of experience. Since they are public, they are part of the way the world is and, as such, do not automatically determine how the world looks, appears,

33. “If perception is representational, then for any perceptual experience, there must be a way things are according to it . . . things looking as they do on a given occasion must fix what representational content experience then has” (Travis 2004, 71). 34. “Things looking (first notion) as they do fixes no way things should be to be the way they look full stop. . . . There is just too much things look like . . . in having the demonstrable looks they do” (Travis 2004, 78–79). Compare: “The conclusion so far is that on our first notion of looks, looking like such-andsuch cannot contribute to determining how things should be to be the way the look simpliciter. For so far as it goes, there is no particular way things should be to be the way they look simpliciter” (74).


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seems, or is presented to a perceiver. If any notion of looking is going to constrain the contents of experience, it must be looking some way to a perceiver.35 Suppose we grant that “looks” and its cognates as actually used in English do not exclusively track what’s presented in visual phenomenology. This could be true even if there was a special, regimented sense of “looks” that did track what’s presented in visual phenomenology, yet bears enough resemblance to ordinary uses to make it reasonable to choose the English word for that purpose.36 For the objection to have any force against the Content View, what’s needed is reason to think that there couldn’t be any such regimented use that could figure in the Argument from Appearing when it uses the notion of visual phenomenology presenting properties to a subject. We can thus distinguish the semantic objection from a more powerful objection, according to which no such regimentation is possible. Call this the psychological objection: Psychological objection: There is no mental state for any uses of looks F and its cognates to track, other than judgments that would be reasonable to make on the basis of experience.

If the psychological objection stands, then we can explain why we make the comparative classifications of veridicality in cases such as Fish tank, Airport, and the other cases described in section 2 without relying on the idea that experiences themselves are assessable for accuracy. Rebutting this objection thus contributes to defending the claim that the best explanation for our classifications is that experiences themselves can be accurate or inaccurate. What structure would the phenomenal character of a visual perceptual experience have to have, in order for the psychological objection to hold? There seem to be two answers: Answer 1: Visual phenomenology is a pure raw feel, or Reidian sensation.

35. The second construal of looking that Travis considers is also a notion of public looks and so likewise does not directly challenge the Argument from Appearing or, more generally, the idea that the phenomenal character of an experience constrains its contents. The second notion is expressed by locutions that begin with “It looks as if . . .” and take an indicative propositional complement, such as “It looks as if Pia will sink the putt” (or “It looks like Pia will sink the putt”—these are Travis’s examples). Like demonstrable looks, these (putative) facts are also supposed to be public facts about how things look, rather than facts about mental states. Travis (2004) writes: “It cannot look as if X on this notion where it is perfectly plain that X is not so” (76). It might be “perfectly plain” that the sphere is to the right of a green cube while nonetheless looking as if it is alone on the table to someone who is blind in their right visual field. If “it looks as if p” were reporting a contentful experience, then it could certainly look to a subject S as if X, even if it were perfectly plain that X were not so—for instance, if S were hallucinating an airport lounge while standing alone on an empty beach. 36. Byrne (2009) argues that some uses of “looks F” do reflect contents of experience but grants Travis’s semantic objection and goes on to argue for the Content View on the grounds that it offers the best explanation of perceptual illusion.

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Answer 2: When a visual experience is not hallucinatory, its visual phenomenology does not consist, even in part, in the subject’s perceiving properties. According to Answer 2, in nonhallucinatory experiences, we perceive entities that are concrete and worldly. If the entities are objects and we perceive both the objects and some of their properties, then this will allow us to define a sense of looks F that picks out the properties objects look to us to have. This sense could then figure in the Argument from Appearing and in the descriptions of Fishtank, Lunchtime, and the other experiences discussed above. So this model of visual experience does not support the psychological objection, which denies that any special use of “looks” could be defined that would exclusively track what’s presented in visual phenomenology. To support the psychological objection, it has to be the case that properties are never presented in visual phenomenology. Travis seems to endorse this conclusion. He writes: Perception can . . . make the world bear on what one is to think by furnishing access to things being as they are. Insofar as things being as they are is a different candidate object of perception than A being F, G, H, . . . then that’s a reason not to think that perception or its phenomenal character (whatever that is) involves a commitment to the truth of some proposition. (20, quoted with permission)

According to Travis, nonhallucinatory experiences are perceptual relations to ‘things being as they are’, and things being as they are differs from objects (or anything) having properties, and from anything individuated by objects and the properties they instantiate. The phenomenal character of nonhallucinatory experiences consists in this relation. Travis’s position is a version of what we can call Radical Naive Realism. According to Radical Naive Realism, all nonhallucinatory experiences consist in a perceptual relation to something other than properties. Radical Naive Realism: All nonhallucinatory experiences consist in a perceptual relation to a worldly item, and properties are not among the things the subject is perceptually related to.

A form of Radical Naive Realism is the Pure Object View, according to which nonhallucinatory experiences are perceptual relations to objects. Pure Object View: All nonhallucinatory experiences are perceptual relations to objects and only to objects.37

A potential proponent of the Pure Object View is Bill Brewer, who writes:

37. The Pure Object View could be extended to nonhallucinatory experiences generally, including illusions. If extended it in this way, it would become a version of Naive Realism on which the main division among experiences is between hallucination, on the one hand, and nonhallucinatory experiences on the other (Byrne and Logue [2008] call this VI vs. H disjunctivism).


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The only alternative to characterizing experience by its representational content is to characterize it as a direct presentation to the subject of certain objects which constitute the way things are for him in enjoying that perceptual experience. Call these the direct objects of experiences: the objects which constitute the subjective character of perceptual experience. (2006, 168)

Brewer holds that in cases of illusion, ‘direct objects’ of experience “have the power to mislead us, in virtue of their perceptually relevant similarities with other things” (168). Since similarities have to hold in virtue of something, it seems that they would hold in virtue of properties of the objects. And at that point it is hard to see how the resulting version of Naive Realism avoids perceived properties.38 Both Answer 1 (the raw-feel view) and Answer 2 (Radical Naive Realism) deny that properties ever figure in experiences. (Answer 1 says the same about objects.) Phenomenologically this is highly dubious, for reasons related to those that arose in defending premise (i) of the Argument from Appearing. Normally, when we see objects, we can discern where they are in relation to us, which bits of space they occupy, and in this informational feat visual phenomenology does not seem to be merely incidental. Visual phenomenology changes with big changes in what perception furnishes us access to. If we see a teapot in one case and a writhing snake in another, then the specific conscious character of each experience differs, as do the features of the world to which the experience gives us access. Within a Naive Realist framework, we need properties (or something in the vicinity, such as centering features or tropes) to specify which aspects of the experience we pick up on in experience and, correlatively, which specific phenomenal character an experience has. Radical Naive Realism denies, implausibly, that experience presents us with properties of the things we see. Radical Naive Realism is radical in another way as well. It denies the intuition that something is missing from cases of predicative veridical illusion, such as the case of Simone (see section 1). Since according to Radical Naive Realism, we never perceive properties (or propertyinstances) of the things we see, there is no departure from completely successful perceptual contact when blue things look blue to Simone, due to an intervention that removes a color illusion to which she would otherwise be subject if left to her own devices. Radical Naive Realism denies that there are any superstrongly veridical experiences. In contrast, standard Naive Realism may take superstrongly veridical experiences to be the central case of visual perceptual experience from which theorizing should proceed. Does standard Naive Realism provide any support for the psychological objection? In standard formulations of Naive Realism, the worldly

38. Ultimately, Brewer’s theory of illusions assimilates them to strongly veridical experiences, with the only errors in the picture located downstream of experiences.

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items that partly constitute the relevant class of nonhallucinatory experiences are individuated by both objects and properties. Since different proponents of Naive Realism define this class differently, we can call such experiences Good and say that Naive Realists differ among themselves about which nonhallucinatory experiences are Good. But standardly, Naive Realists take Good experiences to be relations to both objects and properties.39 And to the extent that Good experiences are tied closely to knowledge, they will be superstrongly veridical.40 For instance, John Campbell writes: On a Relational View, the phenomenal character of your experience, as you look around the room, is constituted by the actual layout of the room itself: which particular objects are there, their intrinsic properties, such as colour and shape, and how they are arranged in relation to one another and to you. (2002, 116)

Likewise, M. G. F. Martin describes “Good” experiences by invoking both objects and properties: The Naive Realist claims that . . . some of the objects of perception—the concrete individuals, their properties, and the events these partake in—are constituents of the experience. (2004, 39)

A similar commitment is incurred by Matthew Kennedy (2009) and by Mark Johnston (2006).41 To oppose the Content View, these proponents of Naive Realism need grounds for denying that token Good experiences are accurate with respect to the situation in which they are had. It is hard to see what grounds these might be. According to one line of thought, Good experiences (as standard Naive Realism construes them) are not accurate, because it is not possible for such experiences to be inaccurate. This line of thought assumes that it makes sense to ascribe accuracy to a state only

39. Martin talks about experiences as relations to events involving properties, rather than objects having properties, for example, the ball’s hitting the cube, rather than the fact that the ball is hitting the cube. A more fine-grained ontology than I will assume here would recognize metaphysical distinctions between the ball hitting the cube, the ball’s hitting the cube, and the fact that the ball is hitting the cube, considering the first two as events rather than as facts. For the purpose of understanding the relationship between Naive Realism and the Content View, it would not matter if we ignore the ontological differences between these relata, since they are all individuated at least partly by perceived objects and properties (the ball, the cube, being hit, being in the process of being hit, etc). Depending on how the perceived properties are construed, Naive Realism also comes in a trope version and a universal version. 40. Arguably, in the case of Simone, the connection between the belief that the cube is green, the experience in which it looks green, and the cube’s being green is too spotty to support knowledge. In nearby worlds where there is no intervention to cancel out Simone’s illusion, her experience would lead her to make a mistake about the cube’s color. 41. Kennedy: “Naive Realists think of veridical experience as a relation between subjects and material particulars and their perceptible properties” (2009, 579). Johnston (2006) discusses superstrongly veridical experiences explicitly (though not under that label) and argues that they are not fundamentally contentful states, but rather states of perceptual awareness.


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if it is possible for instances of that state to be inaccurate. The assumption, however, is wrong. The state of believing that 3 + 5 = 8 is never inaccurate. But it doesn’t follow that the belief is not true.42 According to a different attempt to deny that Good experiences (as standard Naive Realism construes them) are accurate, if a state is accurate, then it must be possible to compare the state with the situation of which it is accurate. As standard versions of Naive Realism construe Good experiences, those experiences contain the relevant situations as constituents. One might conclude from this that no comparison is possible. But there is no metaphysical bar to comparing a state that is partly composed of a situation with the situation of which it is partly composed. (Compare: when a Russellian proposition composed of an object and a property is evaluated with respect to worlds where the object exists, a proposition that is partly composed of an object is compared with a situation containing that very object.) The relata are different, even if overlapping. If the idea of comparison still seems strained, the feeling of strain seems rooted in the redundancy of the perceived situation, which figures on both sides of the comparison. If the state in the alleged comparison is a state of seeing Franco’s sitting down, then in describing the state, we have already described the situation in which the state is had: it is a situation in which Franco is sitting down. Since a situation is not accurate with respect to itself, it may seem as if any comparison covertly targets an aspect of the state that is separable from the things and properties perceived. Since Naive Realism denies precisely that there are any such separable aspects, such comparison would be illicit. In response, the Naive Realist is committed to the idea that perceptual contact with Franco and some of his properties constitutes the subjective character of the experience. When we focus on the subjective character of the experience, comparing it with the situation in which it is had seems to make sense, no matter what metaphysical structure it may have. Franco appears to be sitting down, and we can ask whether things are as they appear. In making this comparison, we do not have to make any assumptions about the underlying metaphysical structure of the experience. So the idea of comparing a Good experience with the situation in which it is had is not illicit, even if those experiences are structured the way Naive Realism says they are. In summary, nothing in the structure of Good experiences as standard Naive Realism construes them precludes experiences from presenting it as being the case that the object seen has the properties seen, and nothing prevents such experiences from having a presentational character. The 42. Of course, experiences as standard Naive Realism construes them differ structurally from beliefs. The present point is just that it is not in general true that a state is assessable for accuracy only if it is possible for instances of that state to be false. This is shown by the case of beliefs whose contents are necessarily true propositions. So no such general point supports the claim that strongly veridical experiences as Naive Realism construes them are assessable for accuracy.

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contrast drawn above between experiences and hopes holds independently of whether Naive Realism is true. If so, it is hard to see the daylight between standard Naive Realism and the claim that Good experiences are accurate.

6. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CONTENT VIEW We have seen that the Content View can be resisted by denying that properties are presented in experience. We can also ask: is the Content View unavoidable, as long as properties are presented in experience? If so, this would be a powerful philosophical result. There are many ways in which properties could be presented in experience. In particular, properties are presented in experience, even according to theories that are traditionally taken to be at odds with the idea that experiences have contents, such as Naive Realism as it is standardly construed. If the Content View is unavoidable given widely accepted assumptions, then it will not be a parochial thesis, of interest only in a small corner of philosophy, but will rather be a thesis that can be used in the analysis of perception across a wide range of theoretical assumptions. Just as important questions about belief are usefully posed within a framework assuming that beliefs have accuracy conditions, the same may be true of perception. One way for properties to be presented in experience leads directly to the Content View. Call this way the Property View. Property View: All experiences involve relations to properties presented in experience and are accurate only if those properties are instantiated.43

Since the Property View says that experiences have accuracy conditions that derive from the properties presented in experience, it leads to the Content View (given the assumption defended above that these properties are conveyed to the subject). Since the Property View entails the Content View, to oppose the Content View one must also oppose the Property View. The Property View may be resisted in several ways. First, properties might figure in experience in a way that avoids it. For instance, according to classical sense-datum theories of the sort defended by Bertrand Russell (1912), experiences consist in perceptions of sense-data (construed as mental objects) and their properties. The properties had by sense-data were thought to be different from properties of external objects but systematically related to them. For instance, whereas apples are red, the sense-data you have when seeing an apple are red′ (red prime). And since sense-data were thought to be located in mental space (rather than in the same space as the external apple), they couldn’t have exactly the same spatial properties (notably depth) as the external objects that were 43. ‘Property’ can be construed broadly to include either universals or tropes or centering features, as none of these options alters the dialectic surrounding the Argument from Appearing.


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thought to cause them.44 The discrepancy between the properties of external objects and the properties of sense-data makes the latter ill-suited to figure in accuracy conditions and so is at odds with the second conjunct of the Property View. If an experience as the sense-datum theory construes it is allowed to count as accurate, it won’t have this status thanks to the “primed” properties of sense-data, but rather will have this status thanks to the properties of external objects. So some versions of the classical sense-datum theory that avoid the Property View can nonetheless embrace the Content View.45 Second, Reidian sensations or raw feels involve properties to the extent that they purport to provide qualitative types of experience (so that two perceivers, or the same perceiver in different situations, could have experiences with the same raw feel). Since these properties are not presented in experience as properties instantiated by anything at all, the Property View is avoided. The pure raw feel view and the classical sense-datum theory each face substantial objections. First, according to the raw feel view, neither objects nor properties are presented in experience, which leaves it mysterious what role experience plays in enabling the subject to distinguish objects from one another and figure from ground. Second, the raw feel view allows that two experiences could be phenomenally the same while varying enormously in which contents it would be natural to believe on the basis of the experience. Finally, the classical sense-datum theory faces the challenge of making sense of the notion of mental space to house sense-data, where mental space is distinct from the space in which our bodies and other external bodies are found. A full case against each of these views would require separate discussion, but these objections suggest that neither position provides a powerful basis from which to deny the Property View. Many proponents of Naive Realism, including Campbell, Brewer, Martin, and Johnston, have been vocal critics of the Content View. As we’ve seen, standard Naive Realism is hard-pressed to avoid the Property View. The most stable way for Naive Realists to oppose the Content View is by embracing the Pure Object View or some other form of Radical Naive Realism. But Radical Naive Realism runs afoul of phenomenological considerations. If standard Naive Realism cannot avoid the Property View, it must embrace the Content View as well.

Naive Realism and the Strong Content View When proponents of Naive Realism criticize the idea that experiences have contents, their criticism is best understood as directed at a strong 44. For discussion of depth and other spatial properties, see Foster (2000). 45. For instance, nothing in Russell’s theory rules out that an experience of seeing an (external) apple is accurate, even on the assumption that the experience consists in the perception of sense-data. One could consistently hold that such an experience is accurate if it is caused by something that has properties systematically related to the “primed” properties of the sense-data. And primed properties could be presented in experience in our sense, since sense-data are not all experiences all by themselves—the subject has to be related to them via a mental act.

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form of the Content View according to which experiences are fundamentally structured as a propositional attitude. One version of this idea is the Strong Content View: Strong Content View: All visual perceptual experiences consist fundamentally in the subject’s bearing a propositional attitude toward the contents of her experience.

The Strong Content View is not entailed by either the Content View or the Property View. It is compatible with both the Property View and the Content View that experiences (or some subset of them) are fundamentally structured by a perceptual relation, either to external objects (as in Naive Realism) or to mental objects (as in the classical sense-datum theory). So neither the Content View nor the Property View is committed to the Strong Content View. Given this difference between the structures posited by Naive Realism and the Strong Content View, one might think that these views are incompatible. But this claim is an overgeneralization, and the difference in the structures per se is of little philosophical interest. We can see this by considering versions of these views that are clearly at odds and contrasting them with versions of the views that have close affinities. Versions of the Strong Content View according to which no contents are individuated by perceived objects are clearly at odds with Naive Realism. And some versions of Naive Realism are clearly incompatible with the Strong Content View. These include standard Naive Realism, Radical naive realism, and “negative” disjunctivism, according to which hallucinations consist entirely in a negative epistemic fact, rather than in a mental state with a specific structure.46 Other versions of each view, however, bring them closer together. For instance, as McDowell (1996) construes them, facts are both true propositions and concrete things that can be perceived. There could be a version of standard Naive Realism that took facts so construed to be constituents of superstrongly veridical experiences. This version of Naive Realism would clearly be compatible with the Strong Content View. There are also versions of the Strong Content View that closely resemble standard Naive Realism. First, according to content disjunctivism, the contents of nonhallucinatory experiences (e.g., the strongly veridical Lunchtime, or the illusory Fishtank) are individuated by objects that are seen (e.g., the sandwich, the fish etc.), whereas the contents of hallucinations that are indiscriminable from these experiences—such as a hallucination of a sandwich that looks just like your lunch, or of a fish tank—would have contents that are not individuated by any perceived objects.47 It is also possible to formulate content disjunctivism in a way that individuates 46. The epistemic conception of hallucination was first explained and defended by Martin (2004; see also Martin 2006). Pautz (chapter 10 this volume) discusses the distinction between negative and positive disjunctivism. See also Hellie (in press).


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the contents of strongly veridical experiences by perceived properties, as well as by perceived objects. The structure of such experiences still differs from the structure posited by Naive Realism, on the assumption (contra McDowell) that propositions are never also worldly items that can be perceived. But a necessary (and possibly sufficient) condition for entertaining the relevant sort of proposition is to perceive an object and a cluster of its properties. It may seem merely a matter of terminology whether the experience is the entertaining of the object- and propertyinvolving proposition, as per this kind of content disjunctivist, or whether the experience is the perception of objects and properties that gives rise to the entertaining of such a proposition. Whether or not this issue is merely terminological, this sort of content disjunctivism remains closely related to standard Naive Realism. Second, there could be a disjunctivist version of the Strong Content View according to which strongly veridical experiences are a variety of factive propositional attitude (e.g., seeing that p), while other experiences are nonfactive propositional attitudes. In the end, whatever dialectical status Naive Realism has in relation to the Strong Content View, it seems clear that Naive Realism and the Content View are compatible. Even the forms of standard Naive Realism that are incompatible with the Strong Content View are compatible with the Content View. To reject the Content View while maintaining Naive Realism, it is necessary to move away from standard Naive Realism and toward the radical form, which I have argued is implausible. It is easy to get the impression from recent discussions that fundamentally different approaches to perception are exemplified by Naive Realism, on the one hand, and the Content View, on the other (see, e.g., Campbell 2002, ch. 6; Martin 2002; Schellenberg in press; Logue 2009; see also Pautz, chapter 10 this volume). While the impression of a great divide between these positions is sociologically apt, philosophically it is overdrawn, and it makes a poor guide to the underlying issues. The philosophical divide is not between these approaches per se, but between positions on two questions. The first question concerns whether properties are presented in experience. The Content View stands or falls with the answer to this question. If experiences do not present us with properties (as per Radical Naive Realism and the raw feel view), then the Content View is false. The second question concerns whether there is any need to individuate experiences by the particular things that the subject of the experience perceives. Naive Realism stands or falls with the answer to this question. If experiences are not individuated by such objects, then Naive Realism is false. To the extent that these two questions are independent of each other, Naive Realism and the Content View are independent of each other too.

47. For defenses of content disjunctivism, see Bach, Byrne and Logue (2008), Schellenberg (in press), and Tye (2007).

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Index

access-consciousness, 59, 100n1 accuracy, 82, 118, 269n11, 306, 307n39, 338, 343–54, 362–63 conditions, 334–37 aesthetics, 4 (see also depiction; seeing-in) affordance, 71, 91, 93 (see also Gibson, James J.) after-image, 132, 234, 236, 334n1 Aikhenvald, Alexandra, 166 Allen, K., 78 Alston, William, 257, 282, 286n25, 289n27 Anscombe, G. E. M., 24 appearance, 15n5, 33, 39–45, 47, 51, 57, 63n1, 65, 70–71, 92, 106, 235–39, 241, 250, 352 properties, 148, 157, 221, 224, 232, 241, 248n16, 267 verbs (see looks) a priori, 29, 98, 114, 115, 120, 124–32, 135, 191, 228 Arend, Lawrence E. Jr., 246–47 Aristotle, 186–87 Armstrong, David M., 14n4 Arnell, K. M., 314 attention, 9, 10, 24, 84, 121–23, 125–27, 130n17, 133, 136–37, 157, 186–87, 196, 232, 241, 249, 255, 302, 304–6, 310–32 Averill, E. W., 14n4 Baars, B., 322 Bach, Kent, 365n47

Baker, L. R., 25 Bar, M., 313 bare particulars, 346, 347n19 Bayne, Tim, 44, 109 Bealer, George, 258 belief, 4–7, 10, 33, 46, 49–51, 66, 97–99, 107, 154–55, 254–55, 266–73, 276–84, 289–91, 297, 322, 333, 336–40, 348–50, 354, 360n40, 361–62 self-locating, 82–84, 86–88, 94 “Bel-state,” 348n21 bent stick, 215 Berkeley, George, 186, 228, 229, 232, 250, 334 Bermúdez, José Luis, 7 Blackburn, Simon, 73 blindsight, 54, 61, 310–11 Block, Ned, 71, 72n6, 100n1, 109, 260n3, 305, 324, 334n3, 355n32 Boghossian, Paul A., 14n3, 19n6 Boring, E., 337n7 Bradley, Peter A., 78n11, 232 Braun, J., 313 Breckenridge, Wylie, 160n1, 162n2, 163, 172n5, 174n7, 177 Brewer, Bill, 8, 161, 162, 274n16, 276n18, 278n19, 283n22, 286n25, 287n25, 288n26, 289n27, 334n4, 358–60 Burge, Tyler, 25n15, 230n5, 254n1 Burnyeat, Myles, 219n30

369

370

Byrne, Alex, 7, 8, 13n1, 15n5, 71, 75n10, 102, 105, 107, 109–10, 113n7, 116, 120n13, 123, 160n1, 194n19, 223, 254n1, 257n2, 261n4, 264n7, 274n15, 295n31, 307n39, 342n12, 357n36, 358n37, 365n47 Campbell, John, 8, 16n6, 42n8, 44n11, 63, 102, 279, 283n22, 286n25, 289n27, 300n36, 334n4, 360, 363, 365 Capgras’s syndrome, 9, 41–42, 44, 48 Cappelen, Herman, 217n28 Cartwright, Nancy, 24 Casati, Roberto, 248n17 Castañeda, Henri, 82n13 causalism, 43, 45–51 centered contents, 300n35 (see also centered worlds) centered worlds, 85, 88, 89n21, 124–26, 129, 343, 352–53 Cézanne, Paul, 148 Chalmers, David, 8, 14n4, 98, 100n1, 102–3, 108–9, 122–24, 126, 130n17, 131n17, 134n19, 136n21, 138–39, 160n1, 267, 278, 285n23, 297n33, 305, 327–29, 334n3, 352–53, 354n30 change blindness, 58, 302, 318, 323–24 Chapanis, A., 319 Chisholm, Roderick, 4, 82n13, 85n17, 162–63, 165–66, 168, 172, 175–76 Churchland, Paul M., 22n11, 260n3 Clark, Austen, 15n5, 245, 346n17, 347n18 Clore, G., 45 Cohen, Jonathan, 4–5, 13–32, 71, 78n11, 93n25 color, 4, 13–32, 57–63, 71, 74–78, 89n22, 91–94, 101, 104n5,

Index

105, 113n7, 120–39, 147n1, 175, 186–93, 204n24, 226–53, 267, 280–81, 300n36, 301, 311 perception, 13–32, 247, 300, 312, 318, 325–26 phenomenology, 14, 15n5, 16n6, 19, 26–27, 29, 110 relationalism, 4, 13–32 steady, 18–22, 93n25 unsteady, 18–22, 93n25 Coltheart, M., 42, 44n11 common factor, 255–65, 277–37, 290–301, 305–7 comparative evidence, 17–22, 29, 233 comparison, See looks, comparative use conditioning, 233–34 consciousness, 10, 58, 97–145, 158, 234, 310–32 higher-order theories of, 321–22 tests (criteria) for, 62–63 constancy, 4, 71n5, 93n25, 146–47, 226–27, 232–40, 246–49, 354n30 content conceptual vs. nonconceptual, 7, 28n17, 34n2, 37, 40, 79, 128, 261, 266, 322 perceptual, 4, 7, 8, 34, 36–39, 45, 72, 77, 78n11, 80–81, 87, 91, 229n4, 250 Russellian, 102, 258, 267, 283n22, 361 Fregean, 78n11, 99, 102, 108, 267, 352–54 two-dimensionalist Fregean, 120, 352–53 Content View strong, 294, 335, 363–65 weak, 334–37, 341, 344–48, 353–57, 360–5 (see also intentionalism; representationalism)

Index

context-sensitive recognitional abilities, 50 Crane, Tim, 7, 8, 122n15 Crick, Francis, 323 Cussins, Adrian, 7 Damasio, A. R., 42 Damasio, H., 42 Dancy, Jonathan, 14n4 darkness, 19n10, 244 Davidson, Donald, 155, 171, 172n5, 184n10 Davies, Martin, 42, 44n11 De Brigard, Felipe, 323 De Gelder, B., 311 Dehaene, S., 322 delusions of identification, 41–44 demonstration, 125–26 Dennett, Daniel C., 6 depiction, 48–49, 199 Dickie, Imogen, 125, 346n15 DiLollo V., 326 direct realism, 99, 137 (see also naïve realism) discounting the illuminant, 237 disjunctivism, 260–66, 273–79, 283, 286–301, 307, 358n37, 364–65 content, 364–65 negative, 262, 264–66, 273–79, 283, 307, 364 positive, 262, 263n5, 264–65, 283, 286–90, 298–301, 364n46 displaced perception, 120–32, 134–37 dispositions, 5, 13, 14n3, 15n5, 19n10, 22–26, 78, 89, 134, 139, 205, 211–12, 268, 319, 322 dog objection, 266, 274–76, 307 Dokic, Jérôme, 9, 33–53 dorsal visual subsystem, 42, 48, 327 Dretske, Fred, 5, 54–67, 120n13, 257n2, 347

371

Dreyfus, Hubert, 155n5 Dummett, Michael, 337 Ebbinghaus illusion, 350n25 Egan, Andy, 4, 68–96, 334n3, 352 Eilan, Naomi, 46n12 Einstein, Albert, 16, 17 Ellis, H. D., 42, 48 Enns, J. T., 326 epistemology, 3–5, 33–34, 65, 112–14, 162, 231, 264n7 essence, 16, 28–29, 136, 158, 284, 286n24, 317, 322 Evans, Gareth, 7, 35–38, 40n7, 120n13, 214, 334n3 event, 97, 172n5, 184n10, 188n16, 260, 285, 360n39 experience self-ascription of (see selfascription, of experiences) transparency of, 98, 99, 120–39, 254, 266, 304–6 visual perceptual, 334, 345–48, 355–59, 364 externalism, 78, 80, 96–145, 231–32 face recognition, 40n7, 41–42, 47 factorization account of seeing, 284–86, 296, 301 Fang, F., 327 Fara, Delia Graff, 218n29 Farah, M. J., 40n7 Farkas, Katalin, 342n12 feelings of identity, 49 of presence, 9, 33–34, 41–49 Firth, Roderick, 156–58 Fish, William, 8, 114n8, 115, 348n20 Fodor, Jerry A., 22n11, 25n15, 35n3 Foster, David H., 239 Foster, J., 363n44 Fougnie, D., 317 framework statements, 46n12

372

Frank, H., 234 Fregean theories of reference, 124 (see also content, Fregean) Fregoli’s syndrome, 9, 41–44, 47 Ganson, Todd, 248n16 Gendler, Tamar Szabó, 109 Gestalt, 115, 151, 285n23 Gestalt psychology, 234–35 Gibbard, Alan, 14n4 Gibbs, Brian J., 247 Gibson, James J., 4, 8, 71, 248, 251 Ginet, Carl, 355 Gisborne, Nikolas, 163–66, 183n9 Glanzberg, Michael, 217n28 global workspace, 322 Goldberg, I., 319 Golz, Jürgen, 242 Goodale, M. A., 48n14, 83n14 Graham, G., 266n9 Grice, H. P., 340n10 grip, 152–53, 350 Gunther, Y., 34n2 Gupta, Anil, 229–31, 250 Gutman, D., 317 Halligan, P. W., 315 hallucination, 98–104, 114, 121–22, 128–39, 190n18, 256–57, 260–65, 269, 297, 300n35, 305–6, 334, 338–43, 347–48, 357n35, 358, 360, 364 explanatory potential of, 278 veridical, 339, 341 Halsey, R., 319 Hamlyn, D. W., 227n1 Hamm, A. O., 311 Hardin, C. L., 71, 72n6, 234, 239, 240 Harman, Gilbert, 27, 46 Hatfield, Gary, 227n1, 230n6 Hawthorne, John, 104, 109, 115, 217n28, 263n6, 266n8, 274n15, 274n16, 276n18, 304, 342n12 Haxby, J. V., 47

Index

Hazlett, A., 14n4 Heck, Richard G. Jr., 7, 266n9, 349n23 Heidegger, Martin, 71 Hellie, Benj, 8, 9, 97–145, 364n46 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 227, 232, 235n10, 237 Hering, Ewald, 147–48, 235, 244 Hilbert, David, 13n1, 15n5, 71, 75n10, 110 Hinckfuss, Ian, 115n9 Hinton, John Michael, 97, 140 Hirstein, W., 47–49 Hoffman, Donald D., 243 Holmes, Jasper, 163 hologram, 14, 18, 20, 188, 204, 207 Horgan, Terence, 266n9 Hornsby, Jennifer, 172n5 Huang M., 10 Huguenard, J. R., 320 Hume, David, 4, 68n1, 69, 70, 123, 130n17, 153–56, 333 (see also image, Humean) Humphrey, G. Keith, 233, 239 Hurwich, Leo M., 237–39, 246 Husserl, Edmund, 48, 142n23, 241 Hyman, John, 161 identity theory, 259, 260n3, 266–72, 306 illumination, 234–49, 356 (see also discounting the illuminant) illusion perceptual, 22n12, 33, 35n3, 99, 104, 105, 107, 121, 123, 128–31, 190n18, 207, 222–23, 234, 265, 281–89, 292, 294, 338–41, 357n36, 358n37, 359 (see also Ebbinghaus illusion; Müller-Lyer illusion; waterfall illusion) veridical, 340–41, 359 image, Humean, 153–55 imagery, mental, 4, 319, 328, 337, 349n22

Index

imagination, 5, 48, 63, 117–18, 212, 216, 218, 282, 295n31, 347, 349 inattentional amnesia, 327–29 inattentional blindness, 314–17, 323, 327–29 inconsistent concepts, 114–15, 123–24, 129–35 indirect perception, 57, 60, 62–4 indiscriminability, 99, 106, 113–15, 119–21, 123–25, 128–31, 136, 139–40, 202, 274n16, 341–42, 347n19, 364 inference, 18, 20, 28, 60, 104n5, 165, 250 (see also Inferentialism) inferentialism, 34, 39–47, 50–1 intensional context, 23, 28 intentionalism, 223, 258–309 (see also Content View; representationalism) disjunctive, 263, 265, 291–301, 307 internalism, 98–99, 103, 134n19, 139 inverted spectrum, 103, 110, 130, 255, 279n20 Jackendoff, R., 312–13 Jackson, Frank, 78n11, 107, 160–68, 172–81, 184–98, 204–5, 223, 271n13, 285n23, 292n28 Jacob, Pierre, 48n14 James, William, 69, 235n10, 244 Jameson, Dorothea, 237–39, 246 Jeannerod, Marc, 48n14 Jiang Y., 326–27 Johnston, Mark, 13n1, 14n4, 15n6, 16n6, 18, 22n12, 78n11, 104n5, 185n11, 205n25, 258, 263n6, 266n9, 285n23, 299n34, 300n36, 334n4, 340n10, 360, 363 Jolicoeur, Pierre, 233, 239 Joyce, R., 92

373

justification, 5, 46, 97, 104, 134n19, 231n7, 255, 267, 297, 303, 360n40 Kahneman, Daniel, 247 Kalderon, M. E., 78n11 Kelly, Sean D., 4, 71, 146–59 Kennedy, Matthew, 120n13, 123, 128, 360 Kentridge, R. W., 325–26 Kim, J., 25 Kirk, R., 322 knowing one knows, 59, 64 knowing which, 135 knowledge, 5, 36, 46, 59–66, 99, 106, 114–24, 128–31, 134–37, 174, 205, 230–31, 250, 284, 333, 338, 342, 360 collective, 59–61, 64 distributive, 59–62, 64 procedural, 319, 321 tacit, 65–66 knowledge-how, 152 Koch, Christof, 10, 313, 323 Koffka, Kurt, 4, 234 Kölbel, Max, 217n28 Kouider, S., 322 Kovakovich, Karson, 104n5, 115, 263n5, 266n8, 274n15, 274n16, 276n18, 342n12 Kripke, Saul, 16n, 114, 133, 282 Lamme, V. A. F., 324 Landman, R., 324–25 Langsam, Harold, 261n4, 289n27 Lasersohn, Peter, 217n28 Lavie N., 314 Lee, H-C., 242 Leibniz, Georg Wilhelm, 337n6 Leslie, Sarah-Jane, 174n7 Levin, D. T., 318 Levin, Janet, 19–20, 24 Levine, Joseph, 98, 282, 334 Lewis, David, 4, 15n5, 82n13, 84n15, 85, 135, 258, 276n18, 300n35

374

Li, F. F., 323–24 Literalism, 34, 40–45, 50–51 Lloyd, G. E. R., 187 Loar, Brian, 36n4, 120n13, 134n18, 138 Locke, John, 13, 69, 207, 230n6, 333, 337n6, 346n16 Loewer, Barry, 25n15 Logue, Heather, 8, 102, 105, 113n7, 116, 261n4, 264n7, 274n16, 295n31, 307n39, 342n12, 350, 358n37, 365 looks, 23, 28, 108, 160–225 comparative use, 162–85 epistemic use, 39n5, 162–68, 179–80, 213 evidential use, 164–68, 178–83, 211 phenomenal use, 162–63, 172, 179–91, 196, 204–5, 216 Lycan, William G., 110, 321 Macdonald J., 314 MacFarlane, John, 217n28 Mack, A., 314–15, 324, 328–29 Mackie, J. L., 23 MacLeod, Donald I. A., 242 Macpherson, Fiona, 98 Mangan, Bruce, 44 manifest, 105, 123, 243, 245, 350 manifestation, of a disposition, 23–26 Marois, R., 317 Marr, David, 312 Marshall, J. C., 315 Martin, C. B., 346n16 Martin, M. G. F., 8, 9, 114, 115, 120n13, 160–225, 228n2, 262, 264n7, 266n8, 274n15, 274n16, 276n18, 278n19, 286n24, 292n28, 294n30, 295n31, 297n33, 298, 334n4, 342n12, 349n22, 360, 363, 364n46, 365 masking, 311, 325

Index

Matthen, Mohan, 4, 7, 13, 48, 71n5, 226–53 McDowell, John, 7, 24, 263n6, 364–65 McGinn, Colin, 13n1, 14n4, 15, 23–24, 27–28, 293n29 McLaughlin, Brian P., 23n13, 24n14, 45, 71, 78n11, 260n3 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 146–58 Milner, A. D., 48n14, 83n14 Mitchell, J. F., 327 Mizrahi, V., 78n11 modular competences, acquired and innate, 40n7 Mollon, J. D., 235, 236n11, 243n14 Moore, G. E., 16n6, 27 Most, S. B., 314, 328 Müller-Lyer illusion, 7, 287n25 multiple relation view, 257, 260–64, 279, 281–82, 289–90, 297n33 Nacchache, L., 322 Nagel, Thomas, 120 Naive Realism, 223, 334–35, 341, 358–65 (see also direct realism) radical, 358–59, 363, 365 Nanay, Bence, 3–12, 152n3 Neumeyer, Christa, 234 Noë, Alva, 7, 71, 82n13, 83n14, 148n2, 157, 161, 227, 231n8, 232, 234, 241, 250 normative self-referentiality, 149–50, 158 normativity, 4, 106n6, 134n19, 146–59, 230–32, 250–51, 269n11 Nudds, Matthew, 188n16 observational property, 200, 203–7 ostensive definition, 109–18 Pacherie, Elisabeth, 44n11 PANIC theory, 322

Index

Pargetter, R., 78n11 Parsimony, 161, 176, 195–200, 207–11, 218–22 Pautz, Adam, 8, 104n5, 110, 254–309, 341n11, 342n12, 364n46, 365 Peacocke, Christopher, 7, 13n1, 36–40, 82n13, 83n14, 126, 200n20, 256–57, 267n10, 281, 302n37, 303n38, 334n3 perceptual hierarchy, 312–13 perceptual norm. See normative self-referentiality; normativity perceptual success, 255, 284–86 perfect duplicate, 15n5, 200–203 peripheral vision, 57–58, 280, 289, 324 Perry, John, 38–39, 82n13, 84n15 phenomenalism, 161–62, 220 phenomenality, 97–116, 139–41 phenomenology, 35, 41, 64, 110, 141n22, 147, 151, 158, 227, 231, 241, 244–48, 251, 254n1, 255, 263–64, 272, 281, 284–86, 290–91, 295, 297, 299–302, 306–7, 343, 345–50, 354, 357–59 color. See color phenomenology of person recognition, 33, 41, 43, 45, 47 Polger, Thomas, 260n3 Posner, M. I., 326 predicates of vision, 102, 121–24, 130n17, 172–73, 182–84, 190, 245–47, 255–56, 270 (see also subjects of vision) Price, H., 265, 266n8, 306 Prinz, Jesse J., 9–10, 310–32 property-seeing, 24–25 Property View, 362–64 Pure Object View, 358, 363 Pylyshyn, Zenon, 35n3, 201n22 qualia, 99, 101, 135–37, 224, 255, 258–60, 265–173, 279, 301, 303–7

375

Quine, W. V. O., 4, 5, 85n16 Quinton, Anthony, 164 Raffman, Diana, 114n8 Ramachandran, V. S., 47–49 raw feel, 352, 357, 359, 363, 365 Raymond, J. E, 314 recognition, 9, 33–53, 114n8, 198, 202, 214, 237–38, 312–13, 318 judgments, 33–34, 37, 39–47, 50–51 concepts, 34n2, 36–37, 40–42, 50–51, 200n21 Rees G., 317 reflectance, 237, 239, 242–43, 246, 288 representationalism, 5–9, 27, 101–8, 122n15, 137, 223 (see also Content View; intentionalism) retinal image, 146, 156, 233, 235, 237, 240 Rock, Irvin, 314–15, 317, 324, 328–29 Rodriguez-Pereyra, Gonzalo, 28 Rosen, Gideon, 69 Rosenthal, David M., 321 Rossotti, H., 18n9 Russell, Bertrand, 16n6, 60, 102, 103, 362, 363n45 (see also, content, Russellian) Salinas, E., 320 scene-parsing, 227, 233, 238–42, 246–51 Schellenberg, Susanna, 83n14, 226, 294n30, 365 Schlosberg, Harold, 236n11 Scholl, B. J., 201n22, 346n15 seeing-in, 48–49, 149 Sejnowski, T. J., 320 self-ascription of experiences, 35–38, 44–45, 50 of properties, 123

376

self-knowledge, 115–16 sensation, 4, 6, 27, 69, 78, 88–90, 229, 244, 357, 363 sensationalism, 256–57, 264, 279, 281–82, 302–4 sense-data, 128, 137, 156, 181, 194, 196–97, 223–24 sense-datum theory, 101, 106n6, 160, 180, 189–90, 362–64 shadows, 187–89, 205, 207–8, 236–37, 260–63, 248–49 shape perception, 229, 240, 244 Sherman, B., 46 Shoemaker, Sydney, 17, 21, 71n5, 76, 80, 120n13, 135n20, 136n21, 148n2, 226, 232, 234, 240–41, 248n16, 267n10 Sider, Ted, 346n16 Siegel, Susanna, 8, 34n2, 41, 73n8, 102, 107–8, 115, 118n11, 160n1, 200n21, 223, 254n1, 269n11, 274n15, 274n16, 294, 333–68 Siewert, Charles, 41, 109, 122n15 similarity, 89, 108, 167–79, 206–18, 221, 250, 352 Simons, D. J., 318 Smart, John Jamieson Carswell, 132–36 Smith, A. D., 266n8, 303, 340n10, 348 Snowdon, Paul, 8 Sohal, V. S., 320 Sorensen, Roy, 188n17 Sosa, Ernest, 82n13 Soteriou, Matthew, 122n15 Speaks, Jeffrey J., 109, 334n3 spectral inversion. See inverted spectrum Sperber, Dan, 40n7 Sperling, G., 317, 319, 324, 329 cases, 279n20, 319, 324, 329 Stalnaker, Robert C., 82n13, 113n7 Strawson, Galen, 16n6

Index

Strawson, Peter F., 3, 5, 188 Sturgeon, Scott, 115, 275n17, 342n12, 348n20 subjective, 88, 99, 106, 162, 208–22, 234, 359, 361 subjects of vision, 245–9 (see also predicates of vision) subliminal perception, 322 Thau, Michael, 148n2, 163 Thompson, Brad, 78n11, 102, 109, 110, 126, 334n3, 352, 354 Thompson, Evan, 13 Tienson, J., 266n9 Tooley, Michael, 16n8 Tranel, D., 42 transparency of experience, 98, 99, 120–39, 254, 266, 304–6 of photographs, 49n15 Travis, Charles, 8, 163–65, 183n9, 229–31, 250, 254n1, 335, 355–58 Treisman, Anne, 247 tropes, 261, 352–62 Tsuchiya, N., 10, 323 Turner, R. Steven, 227n1 two-dimensional semantics, 120, 123–24, 352–54 Tye, Michael, 8, 13n1, 14n4, 15n5, 28n17, 71, 78n11, 110, 160–61, 232, 257n2, 263n5, 266n8, 275, 300n35, 303n38, 306, 322, 334n3, 365n47 van Gulick, Robert, 25n15 Velleman, J. D., 14n3, 19n10 ventral visual subsystem, 42, 48, 327 veridicality, 72–81, 87–90, 101–5, 115, 127–38, 155, 223, 254–57, 261, 335–42 strong, 340–42, 352n27 weak, 340–42, 352n27 vision science, 9, 10 visual duplicate, 200–206

Index

visually relevant similarities, 283n22, 286–88 visual objects, 188–90, 196, 248 visuo-affective pathway. See dorsal visual subsystem visuo-semantic pathway. See ventral visual subsystem Walter, Sven, 63n1 Walton, Kendall, 49n15 waterfall illusion, 274, 287, 288n26, 289, 303–4 Weiskrantz, L., 311 Wertheimer, Max, 234 Wiggins, David, 172n5 Wild, Markus, 63

377

Williamson, Timothy, 101n8, 114, 128, 274n15, 284, 342n12 Winkielman, P., 311 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 46n12 Wolfe, J. M., 305, 327–28 Woodworth, Robert S., 233, 235–36 working memory, 317–24 Wright, Crispin, 200n20 Wright, W., 334n3 Yablo, Stephen, 14n Young A. W., 42, 48 zombies, 100n, 105, 116, 127

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