Experience and content

Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 59, Issue 236, 2009, Pages 429-451

  Byrne, Alex ^a  

^a MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

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EID: 70349361302     PISSN: 00318094     EISSN: 14679213     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9213.2009.614.x     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. Counter-reformers may well claim that perceptual experience is not capable of correctness either: it is not in the business of either truth or falsity, and so 'infallible' is a tendentious label. Whether this position is plausible is briefly discussed in §III
2. B. Brewer, 'Perception and Content', European Journal of Philosophy, 14 (2006), pp. 165-81, at p. 165
3. J.R. Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge UP, 1983), p. 43
4. Searle later argues (pp. 47-8) that the content of an experience is reflexive, concerning the experience itself
5. C. Peacocke, Sense and Content (Oxford UP, 1983), p. 5
6. For some other statements of (CV), see C. McGinn, Mental Content (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 58
7. G. Harman, 'The Intrinsic Quality of Experience', Philosophical Perspectives, 4 (1990), pp. 31-52, at p. 34
8. M. Davies, 'Individualism and Perceptual Content', Mind, 100 (1991), pp. 461-84, at p. 462
9. M. Thau, Consciousness and Cognition (Oxford UP, 2002), p. 74
10. F. Jackson, 'Mind and Illusion', in P. Ludlow, Y. Nagasawa and D. Stoljar (eds), There's Something about Mary (MIT Press, 2004), pp. 421-32, at p. 428
11. S. Siegel, 'Do Visual Experiences Have Contents?', in B. Nanay (ed.), Perceiving the World (Oxford UP, forthcoming)
12. See also W. Sellars, 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind', Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 1 (1956), pp. 253-329, at §§16-17, on 'experiences as containing propositional claims'
13. §II elaborates on A. Byrne and H. Logue, 'Either/Or', in A. Haddock and F. Macpherson (eds), Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge (Oxford UP, 2008), pp. 57-94, at pp. 82-3
14. J.M. Hinton, Experiences: an Inquiry into Some Ambiguities (Oxford UP, 1973)
15. See, e.g., Harman, 'The Intrinsic Quality of Experience', p. 42
16. A. Millar, Reasons and Experience (Oxford UP, 1991), p. 11
17. C. Siewert, The Significance of Consciousness (Princeton UP, 1998), p. 11
18. B. O'Shaughnessy, Consciousness and the World (Oxford UP, 2000), p. 39
19. A. Byrne, 'Intentionalism Defended', Philosophical Review, no (2001), pp. 119-240, at p. 203
20. M.G.F. Martin, 'On Being Alienated', in T. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds), Perceptual Experience (Oxford UP, 2006), pp. 354-410, at p. 354
21. Siegel, 'Which Properties Are Represented in Perception?', also in Perceptual Experience, pp. 481-503, at p. 484
22. Sometimes philosophers use 'event' extraordinarily broadly, so that if an object o is F at t it supposedly follows that there is an 'event' of o's being F occurring at t. Hence there is an 'event' of this pen's being straight, etc.; cf. J. Bennett, Events and their Names (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), p. 6. It is safe to say that almost none of the philosophers referred to above has such an elastic use in mind
23. W.G. Lycan, 'Dretske's Ways of Introspecting', in B. Gertler (ed.), Privileged Access: Philosophical Accounts of Self-Knowledge (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 15-30, at p. 26
24. Lycan is quoting from, and disagreeing with, Dretske's paper 'How Do You Know You are Not a Zombie?' in the same volume
25. For an example, see Millar, Reasons and Experience, pp. 10-11
26. On some views (e.g., Bennett, Events and their Names) events are property instances. Be that as it may, the point is simply that the existence of events (elections, weddings, etc.) is less controversial than the existence of property instances
27. From Hinton, Experiences, pp. 5-6
28. From M. Tye, Consciousness and Persons: Unity and Identity (MIT Press, 2003), p. 97
29. As Hinton points out (Experiences, pt. I), this paraphrase is not perfect, since having the experience of doing such and such suggests some sort of awareness on the subject's part. If one somehow managed to swim the Bosphorus while fast asleep it would be at least odd to say one had the experience of swimming the Bosphorus
30. See Thau, Consciousness and Cognition, p. 207
31. also B. Farrell, 'Experience', Mind, 59 (1950), pp. 170-98
32. Contrast, for example, 'I deliberately chased ...'/'I was chasing ...' and 'I deliberately saw ...'/'I was seeing ...'. See Z. Vendler, 'Verbs and Times', Philosophical Review, 66 (1957), pp. 143-60, esp. pp. 155-6
33. C. Travis, 'The Silence of the Senses', Mind, 113 (2004), pp. 57-94, at p. 57
34. G.E. Moore, 'The Refutation of Idealism', Mind, 7 (1903), pp. 1-30
35. M. Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness (MIT Press, 1995), p. 30
36. Tye, Consciousness and Persons: Unity and Identity (MIT Press, 2003), p. 24
37. See, in particular, G. Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford UP, 1982), pp. 227-31
38. F. Dretske, Naturalizing the Mind (MIT Press, 1995), ch. 2
39. Tye only offers a paraphrase sufficient for the truth of 'I had n F-experiences today', not one which is necessary and sufficient. 'I had a single experience today that represented n F-things' would be false if I had a nap at lunchtime after fewer than n F-things had been represented, yet 'I had n F-experiences today' might well be true
40. In vision science, 'visual illusions' include 'philosophical' hallucinations. The Hermann Grid illusion, for instance, is arguably an example: one 'sees' non-existent grey spots
41. See Martin, 'On Being Alienated'
42. Further, one may see that the lemon is yellow even if one does not see the lemon
43. Largely encapsulated: if one believes that the lemon before one is white but cleverly illuminated by a yellow spotlight, it will still look yellow. But only largely: for instance, knowledge of the colours of lemons seems to have a slight effect on colour appearance. See T. Hansen et al., 'Memory Modulates Color Appearance', Nature Neuroscience, 9 (2006), pp. 1367-8
44. M. Johnston, 'Postscript: Visual Experience', in A. Byrne and D. R. Hilbert (eds), Readings on Color, Vol. 1: The Philosophy of Color (MIT Press, 1997), pp. 172-6
45. R. Millikan, On Clear and Confused Ideas (Cambridge UP, 2000), p. 111. Johnston actually characterizes the view as identifying 'visual experience' and the 'sui generis propositional attitude'. But that stronger claim is not needed
46. They are also sometimes unconvincing. For instance, Searle (pp. 41-2) notes that 'sees that the F is G' is intensional, whereas 'sees the F' is extensional, and claims that the 'most obvious explanation of this distinction is that the "see that" form reports the intentional content of the perception'. But of course that cannot be the explanation, because 'sees that the stock market has crashed' is also intensional, and the explanation can hardly have anything to do with the content of perception. In any case, although 'sees o' has a distinctively visual sense, 'sees that p' arguably does not
47. Cf. R. Price, 'Content Ascriptions and the Reversibility Constraint', Philosophical Perspectives, 19 (2005), pp. 353-74, at pp. 357-8
48. R.M. Chisholm, Perceiving: a Philosophical Study (Cornell UP, 1957)
49. F. Jackson, Perception: a Representative Theory (Cambridge UP, 1977)
50. See, e.g., R. Stalnaker, Inquiry (MIT Press, 1984), ch. 1. In the course of explaining why the relevant sense of 'represent' has nothing to do with indication (pp. 58-9), Travis actually mentions one of the standard examples used to suggest the opposite, namely, tree rings
51. Cf. Siegel, 'Which Properties are Represented in Perception?', p. 481
52. See Perception, pp. 37-48. There is a comparative construction that with only mild straining can be read as equivalent to the phenomenal/non-comparative use of 'looks red', namely, 'looks like a stereotypically red object'. But this is not the hoped-for analysis, since in order to get the equivalence the intended interpretation of 'stereotypically red object' has to be explained in terms of the phenomenal/non-comparative use: a stereotypically red object is one that would look red. (Merely being red is insufficient.) This point applies equally to the examples of 'looks centurian', 'looks old', and the like, discussed below
53. Jackson's example (Perception, p. 33) is 'The dog looks dangerous'
54. In fact, naked mole rats are exceptionally long-lived: see P.W. Sherman and J.U.M. Jarvis, 'Extraordinary Life Spans of Naked Mole-Rats (Heterocephalus Glaber)', Journal of Zoology, 258 (2002), pp. 307-11
55. For a related view, see S. Shoemaker, 'On the Ways Things Appear', in Gendler and Hawthorne (eds), Perceptual Experience, pp. 461-80
56. J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford UP, 1962)
57. See also Travis, 'The Silence', p. 64, fn. 5
58. See C.L. Hardin, Color for Philosophers (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), pp. 79-80
59. This also poses a problem for the similar account of illusion in Brewer, 'Perception and Content'. Another quite different counter-reformation account of illusion is that developed in the work of M.G.F. Martin (e.g., 'On Being Alienated'). Martin's constitutive account of the illusion just mentioned in the text is roughly this: one sees the grey surface, but cannot tell by introspection alone that one is not veridically perceiving a surface tinged with green. For references to the main discussions of Martin's view, see Byrne and Logue, 'Either/Or', p. 74, fn. 31
60. H. Langsam, 'The Theory of Appearing Defended', Philosophical Studies, 87 (1,7), pp. 33-59
61. W.P. Alston, 'Back to the Theory of Appearing', Philosophical Perspectives, 13 (1999), pp. 181-203
62. See also Jackson, Perception, ch. 4
63. See Byrne and Logue, 'Either/Or', pp. 89-90
64. W.G. Lycan, Consciousness and Experience (MIT Press, 1996), p. 146
65. see also C. Batty, Lessons in Smelling: Essays on Olfactory Perception (MIT: PhD thesis, 2007)
66. Causation, though, is an especially tricky case - locus classicus: A. Michotte, The Perception of Causality (London: Methuen, 1963)
67. see also S. Siegel, 'The Visual Experience of Causation', The Philosophical Quarterly, 59 (2009) (this issue), pp. 519-40
68. D.M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 221
69. see also A.D. Smith, 'Perception and Belief, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 62 (2001), pp. 283-309. It is important to note that the claim that perception constitutively involves belief (in particular, that exing is believing) does not imply that perception can be reduced to belief
70. For advice and assistance which greatly improved this paper, thanks to David Chalmers, James Genone, Jeff King, Heather Logue, Fiona Macpherson, Adam Pautz, Susanna Rinard, Susanna Siegel, Charles Travis, Michael Tye, an anonymous referee, and audiences at the Australian National University and the University of Glasgow