Dretske on the mind's awareness of itself

Philosophical Studies

Volumn 95, Issue 1-2, 1999, Pages 125-133

  Lycan, William G ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA   (United States)

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EID: 52549103166     PISSN: 00318116     EISSN: 15730883     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/a:1004567524880     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. 'Phenomenal Objects: A Backhanded Defense', in J. Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives, I: Metaphysics, 1987 (Atascadero: Ridgeview Publishing, 1987); Ch. 8 of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press, 1987); Chs. 4, 6 and 7 of Consciousness and Experience (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press, 1996).
2. I originally got the idea from Elizabeth Anscombe ('The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature', in R. J. Butler (ed.), Analytical Philosophy: Second Series (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965))
3. and Jaakko Hintikka ('On the Logic of Perception', in a famous Oberlin Colloquium volume, N. S. Care and R. H. Grimm (eds.), Perception and Personal Identity (Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1969)).
4. Ch. 6 of Consciousness (loc. cit.), and Ch. 2 of Consciousness and Experience (loc. cit.). I got that idea from David Armstrong (Chs. 6 and 15 of A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968)).
5. 'Conscious Experience', Mind 102 (1993): 263-83; Chs. 2 and 4 of Naturalizing the Mind (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press, 1995).
6. In this footnote I shall take the opportunity of saying what I myself think was wrong with that account. Examples of ordinary displaced perception would be seeing how much gas there is in your tank by (merely) seeing the gas guage, or hearing what President Clinton said by hearing it reported by a TV announcer rather than by hearing the President. One is able to "perceive" in this very indirect way (I'll say "dperceive") when one has a justified belief that the literally perceived object would not have the perceived feature it does unless the target object "(probably)" had the properties d-perceived as inhering in it (p. 42). Thus, I have d-heard what the President said only if I am justified in believing that the TV announcer would not have said he said it unless he (probably) had said it. (Notice that this is a very liberal criterion of displaced perceiving). Of introspection, Dretske said, ". . . an experience (of blue, say) is conceptually represented as an experience of blue via a sensory representation not of the experience, but of . . . (typically) . . . the blue object one sees" (p. 44), where the "via" is that of displaced perception. So the suggestion was that for me to introspect, to metarepresent, that e has is for me (a) to represent that e has , (b) on the basis of my seeing that the pumpkin has P, (c) the former representation being mediated by the justified belief that the pumpkin would not have P unless e had (probably) had . That can't be right. I doubt that many people ever have such beliefs as specified in clause (c), much less justified ones - that, e.g., a pumpkin's being round counterfactually depends on one's own experience's being a certain way. One can see the point of the counterfactuals in the ordinary examples: We are able to d-hear the President through the TV announcer because the announcer's saying that she does is a reliable auditory sign of the President's having said what he did. But our pumpkin's being round is not a sign, reliable or unreliable, of e's having.
7. Knowledge and the Flow of Information, (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press, 1981).
8. Note that on this usage, the quale is not a property of the experience, but only of the experience's intentional object. (Cf. Dretske: "[W]e are now assuming that the properties we are aware of in having the experience are not properties of the experience" (p. xx10xx).) The relevant property of the experience is that of visually-representing redness.
9. My reading of his remarks on Jackson and Mary in Naturalizing the Mind (loc. cit., pp. 82-88) indicates - I'm not sure how reliably - that he is thinking of "what it's like" in the sense of the quale itself, expressible in everyday English. But as we have just seen, what concerns Jackson is rather "what it's like" in the other, higher-order sense. (A brief passage on pp. 87-88 suggests that were Dretske to address the latter explicitly, he might take a line similar to mine in Ch. 7 of Consciousness (loc. cit.), "What is the 'Subjectivity' of the Mental?" (in J. E. Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives, 4: Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1990)) and Ch. 3 of Consciousness and Experience (loc. cit.).
10. Nemirow, 'Physicalism and the Cognitive Role of Acquaintance', in W. G. Lycan (ed.) Mind and Cognition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990); Lewis, "What Experience Teaches", ibid.
11. For the rest, see Ch. 5 of Consciousness and Experience (loc. cit.).
12. See S. Boer and W. G. Lycan, Knowing Who (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press, 1986).
13. This argument is due to Brian Loar ('Phenomenal States', in J. E. Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives, 4: Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind, (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1990), p. 86). Loar is reprising Peter Geach's famous point against emotivism about moral judgments.
14. Despite the derogatory things I said about Modus Ponens at the Thirty-First Oberlin Colloquium, in 1993 ('Conditional Reasoning and Conditional Logic', Philosophical Studies 76: 223-45).
15. This argument is Janet Levin's ('Could Love Be Like a Heatwave?: Physicalism and the Subjective Character of Experience', Philosophical Studies 49 (1986): 245-61, reprinted in Lycan (ed.), op. cit.).