The admissible contents of visual experience

Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 59, Issue 236, 2009, Pages 541-562

  Tye, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

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EID: 75949096959     PISSN: 00318094     EISSN: 14679213     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9213.2008.575.x     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. See, e.g., J.M. Hinton, Experiences (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973)
2. P. Snowdon, 'The Objects of Direct Experience', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 64 (1990), pp. 121-50
3. M. Martin, 'The Transparency of Experience', Mind & Language, 17 (2002), pp. 376-425
4. and 'On Being Alienated', in T.S. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds), Perceptual Experience (Oxford UP, 2006), pp. 354-410
5. Not everyone accepts this claim. One notable exception is C. Travis, 'The Silence of the Senses', Mind, 113 (2004), pp. 57-94
6. Not all disjunctivists grant that in cases of illusion, perceptual experiences have contents of the same sort as veridical perceptual experiences: see, e.g., Martin, 'On Being Alienated'. Obviously those disjunctivists who take this view cannot use the present consideration to support their theory
7. Assuming that the term 'singular content' is used in the usual way. For an opposing usage, see M. Sainsbury, Reference without Referents (Oxford UP, 2006)
8. This is an over-simplification. Martin, for example, sometimes seems to hold that there is 'no distinctive mental event or state common to these various disjoint situations': Martin, 'The Reality of Appearances', in M. Sainsbury (ed.), Thought and Ontology (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1997), p. 37
9. But he also says (p. 86) that 'the disjunctive view itself should be viewed as strictly neutral between views which assume that experience is a common element and those that deny it'. In the text, I assume that disjunctivism is a definite metaphysical thesis. For more on varieties of disjunctivism, see A. Byrne and H. Logue (eds), Disjunctivism: Contemporary Readings (forthcoming)
10. Cf. J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 50
11. C. McGinn, The Character of Mind (Oxford UP, 1982), p. 39
12. Other philosophers who take a similar view include D.K. Lewis, 'Veridical Hallucination and Prosthetic Vision', Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 58 (1980), pp. 239-49
13. and A. Millar, Reasons and Experiences (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)
14. McGinn also says in an earlier passage (p. 38) that we cannot deduce the identity of the object of an experience from knowledge of its content. His thought here may be that we can know the content of an experience via introspection without thereby knowing which object, if any, is present. However, this claim is open to dispute. If experiences have multiple contents (see here §VI below), it is not at all obvious that we can know each content via introspection. Further, even if experiences have only a single content, it could be held that what we can know via introspection is not the content but the phenomenal character
15. M. Davies, 'Perceptual Content and Local Supervenience', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 92 (1992), pp. 21-46, at p. 26
16. This case is similar to one Grice discusses in H.P. Grice, 'The Causal Theory of Perception', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 35 (1961), pp. 121-52
17. John Searle has a proposal along these lines in his Intentionality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). In Searle's formulation, the content of my experience is that there is a yellow cube (ahead) and the fact that there is such a cube is causing this experience. This obviously will not do as it stands. Without some restrictions on the causal connection, it is easy to construct more complex mirror-case counter-examples
18. I am indebted to Mark Sainsbury here
19. Cf. F. Dretske, Naturalizing the Mind (MIT Press, 1995). The problems do not end here. Veridical hallucinations cannot be handled on the causal version of the existential thesis. On this, see fn. 16 below and the surrounding discussion in the text
20. Another possible view is that the thought is neither true nor false, since there is no object the thought is about either to have or to lack the attributed property. One difficulty for this view is that prima facie it requires us to give up the claim that the thought that this is a china frog is true if and only if this is a china frog in the second case
21. Philosophers who emphasize the singularity or particularity of visual experience include M. Soteriou, 'The Particularity of Visual Perception', European Journal of Philosophy, 8 (2000), pp. 173-89
22. Sainsbury, Reference without Referents
23. Nor can the causal version of the existential thesis discussed in §I. According to that thesis, there can be no such thing as a veridical hallucination, since when a hallucination is present, there is no object of the relevant sort in the scene before the subject's causing his experience. So every hallucination must be counted as falsidical. This obviously will not do
24. D. Kaplan, 'Demonstratives' and 'Afterthoughts', both in J. Almog, J. Perry and H. Wettstein (eds), Themes from Kaplan (Oxford UP, 1989), pp. 481-614
25. M. Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness (MIT Press, 1995)
26. and Consciousness, Color, and Content (MIT Press, 2000)
27. Sainsbury (p. 254) offers an example of this sort
28. For further discussion here leading to the same conclusion, see T. Schroeder and B. Caplan, 'On the Content of Experience', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, forthcoming
29. C.B. Martin, 'Dispositions and Conditionals', The Philosophical Quarterly, 44 (1994), pp. 1-8
30. I do not deny that further conditions could be imposed that would handle this objection. But these conditions would require there to be a sensitivity in the relevant part of the content of the token experience to the relevant object. Given such a sensitivity, it is no longer clear that the object has not been smuggled into the content after all
31. Actually, it is a mistake to suppose that the soap and the lemon are not intrinsically the same. They are, in that they have the same colour and the same three-dimensional shape
32. It might seem that this view cannot distinguish having a hallucination of a red square and a green triangle from having a hallucination of a green square and a red triangle, since each experience represents the same colour and shape properties, viz greenness, triangularity, redness and squareness. But there are other properties represented by each experience too. In the former case, the property of being a red square is represented; not so in the latter. In the latter case, the property of being a green square is represented; not so in the former
33. On this, see my Consciousness Revisited: Materialism without Phenomenal Concepts (MIT Press, 2008)
34. I would like to thank Alex Byrne, Tim Crane and Susannah Siegel for helpful discussion. An earlier version formed the basis for a talk at U.N.A.M. in Mexico City. I thank members of that audience for their comments