Aspects of Psychologism 9780674726581

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Aspects of

Psychologism

Aspects of

Psychologism Tim Crane

H A RVA R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2014

Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crane, Tim. Aspects of psychologism / Tim Crane. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-72457-0 1. Psychologism. 2. Phenomenology 3. Intentionality (Philosophy) I. Title. BF41.C73 2014 150.1—dc23 2013015770

To my brothers, Larry and Simon

Contents

Preface

1 Introduction: In Defence of Psychologism (2012)

I Historical Essays

ix 1 21

2 Brentano’s Concept of Intentional Inexistence (2006)

25

3 Wittgenstein and Intentionality (2010)

40

4 The Origins of Qualia (2000)

61

II Intentionality 5 Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental (1998)

87 91

6 Intentional Objects (2001)

111

7 The Intentional Structure of Consciousness (2003)

124

8 Intentionalism (2009)

149

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CONTENTS

III Perception 9 The Non-conceptual Content of Experience (1992)

171 175

10 Is There a Perceptual Relation? (2006)

196

11 Is Perception a Propositional Attitude? (2009)

217

12 The Given (2012)

235

IV Consciousness

257

13 Unconscious Belief and Conscious Thought (2012)

261

14 Subjective Facts (2003)

281

15 Papineau on Phenomenal Concepts (2005)

298

16 Tye on Acquaintance and the Problem of Consciousness (2012)

307

Notes

317

References

345

Credits

363

Index

365

Preface

TH I S I S A CO LLEC TI O N of my essays from the last twenty years which together

express a philosophical approach to the mind that I call psychologism. As Essay 1 explains, ‘psychologism’ is a term that has been traditionally used for the discredited view that logic and mathematics must be explained in psychological terms. This is not the view I defend here: my view is rather psychologism about the psychological itself. But to an uncharitable ear, this might sound at best a joke, at worst a pointless pleonasm. After all, how else should we explain the psychological other than in psychological terms? I actually think that the analytic philosophy of mind of the last fifty or so years has taken a somewhat different view. Philosophy of mind has developed its account of the mind largely through an investigation of common-sense (or folk psychological) discourse about the mind. Hence it will often make as many distinctions among mental phenomena as are made in this everyday discourse. A good example of what I mean can be found in Christopher Hill’s claim in his recent book on consciousness that ‘it is customary to distinguish five forms of consciousness’: agent consciousness, propositional consciousness, introspective consciousness, relational

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consciousness and phenomenal consciousness (Hill 2009: 1). Hill’s reason for distinguishing these forms of consciousness is the way we ordinarily talk about consciousness: we say that a person or an agent is conscious (agent consciousness), we say that someone can be conscious that such-and-such is the case (propositional consciousness), we say that someone can be conscious of something (relational consciousness), and so on. We certainly do talk in these ways. But to what extent does this way of talking reveal different ‘forms’ of consciousness? Is the distinction between a conscious person and a conscious state a distinction in ‘forms’ or ‘kinds’ of consciousness? Why? Why can’t we say that for a person to be conscious is just for him or her to be in conscious states? And if we do this, how many forms of consciousness would remain? Looked at from the other direction, might there not be distinctions in the forms of consciousness that conscious creatures enjoy, without these distinctions being reflected in our everyday psychological discourse? If we focus solely on our everyday psychological discourse, we might be led to see the philosophy of mind as what I call a purely conceptual investigation: an investigation of the concepts embodied in this discourse. At its most general, this is what I am rejecting. Psychologism is the view that the study of the mind should not be a purely conceptual investigation. Psychologism holds that there is a single self-standing psychological reality, a single subject-matter which may be investigated phenomenologically and empirically as well as conceptually. So psychologism rejects the idea that the philosophy of mind is a purely conceptual investigation, whose findings are relatively independent of empirical psychology and introspective phenomenology. The mind is a single subject-matter and the concepts of our everyday psychological discourse may characterise this subject-matter more or less precisely, and more or less successfully. An analysis or account of this discourse—for example, a semantics of propositional attitude attributions—is one thing, but an account of the underlying psychological reality is another. The contrast I am making here is not the familiar one between ‘conceptual analysis’ and empirical science. Conceptual analysis, as that is usually understood (e.g., by Jackson 1998), is one kind of conceptual investigation, but it is not the only kind. The kind of ‘grammatical’ investigation that Wittgenstein and his followers have gone in for is also a conceptual investigation, as I think are formal semantic accounts of psychological discourse

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(for example, the semantics of propositional attitude sentences). Formal semantics is a systematic regimentation of the meanings of our natural language words and sentences; if the meanings of words are concepts, then broadly speaking this too is an investigation into concepts. I am not claiming here that conceptual investigations of mental discourse are of no value, or are not needed, and that all philosophy can do is to comment on what psychology says, or collaborate with psychologists on experimental work. The contrast I am making is rather that between the investigation of the mind understood as an autonomous investigation solely into the concepts embodied in our psychological discourse, and an investigation which takes phenomenological and empirical data along with the conceptual, to gain a more realistic picture of the whole of the mind. Psychologism holds that phenomenological and empirical data have to be taken together with the conceptual data to derive the whole picture of a single subject-matter: the mind. To take another illustration, consider Fred Dretske’s (1969) famous distinction between ‘epistemic’ and ‘non-epistemic’ seeing: between seeing that p and seeing x. This is a real (and important) distinction in the way we talk. But there is no reason to suppose that it corresponds to a distinction in the nature of seeing—the psychological process—itself. My reason for saying this is not just that vision science says nothing about such a distinction—although I believe this is true. My reason is also that the distinction corresponds to nothing in our actual conscious experience of the world. Reflection on conscious visual experience yields nothing which corresponds clearly to the relational ‘extensional’ sense of the word ‘see’, and nothing which corresponds to a propositional attitude sense of the word. Rather, there is a single kind of event, which can be investigated phenomenologically and empirically. This single kind of event has a number of distinct underlying mechanisms, and the event itself can be described in many different ways. But a study of these ways is one thing, and a study of the event another. Psychologism, then, aims for a more phenomenologically realistic account of mental phenomena than is obtained in a purely conceptual investigation. It does not assume that the categories we need to understand the mind correspond in any straightforward way with the semantic categories used to understand (say) propositional attitude ascriptions (e.g., de re/de dicto, direct

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reference, semantic value, logical form, and so on). And it does not hold that the philosophy of mind is an autonomous conceptual inquiry, independent of what we learn about the mind from other sources. The essays collected here develop themes which are more or less psychologistic in this sense. The collection consists of an introductory essay plus fifteen more, divided into four parts: History, Intentionality, Perception, and Consciousness. The introductory essay elaborates on the conception of psychologism sketched here and argues for a specific version of psychologism about intentional content. The historical essays in Part I discuss three aspects of the history of philosophical discussions of intentionality: the re-introduction of the terminology of intentionality by Brentano in 1874, Wittgenstein’s attempts to dissolve the problems of intentionality, and the relationship between intentionality and consciousness (in terms of the notion of ‘qualia’). Part II contains four essays on intentionality, the central concept of my psychologistic conception of the mind. Psychologism holds that the mind forms a unified subject-matter, and intentionalism is the view that the subject-matter is unified by intentionality: the direction of the mind upon its objects. What this means is developed in these essays. The essays in Part III discuss the intentionality of perception. I have argued that perception is in a certain sense non-conceptual, and also that it has intentional content which is not propositional. I now think of these claims as underpinned by psychologism, in the way explained in Essay 12, ‘The Given’. Part IV contains four essays on consciousness, which make contributions to a number of the central debates in the recent philosophy of consciousness. The essays in this section are mostly negative: they criticise some of the orthodox ideas in terms of which the ‘problem of consciousness’ is sometimes understood. These are: that there is a meaningful distinction between conscious and unconscious belief; that the knowledge argument is a threat to physicalism; and that notions of ‘phenomenal concepts’ and ‘acquaintance’ are helpful notions to use in understanding consciousness. It is probably inevitable that since these essays were written over a period of twenty-odd years, not everything I say in the essays is wholly consistent with what is said in the rest. I have not modified the content of any of the essays, apart from correcting an occasional grammatical or bibliographical

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(or an egregious factual) error. The introductions to the four groups of essays explain how I now see the issues. I am very grateful to Ian Malcolm of Harvard University Press for his generous encouragement and support in bringing this project to completion, and to Sacha Golob for helpful discussion of the project.

Aspects of

Psychologism

E S S AY O N E

Introduction: In Defence of Psychologism

(2012)

We know of the efforts of such philosophers as Frege and Husserl to undo the ‘psychologizing’ of logic (like Kant’s undoing Hume’s psychologizing of knowledge): now, the shortest way I might describe such a book as the Philosophical Investigations is to say that it attempts to undo the psychologizing of psychology. —Stanley Cavell (2002: 91)

1. I NTRO D U C TION

The term ‘psychologism’ is normally used for the doctrine that logical and mathematical truths must be explained in terms of psychological truths (see Kusch 1995 and 2011). As such, the term is typically pejorative: the widespread consensus is that psychologism in this sense is a paradigm of philosophical error, a gross mistake that was identified and conclusively refuted by Frege and Husserl. The consensus is surely correct: there is no future in defending psychologism about logic and mathematics. But as the above remark by Stanley Cavell indicates, ‘psychologism’ and ‘psychologizing’ have been used in a broader way too, to describe attitudes to knowledge, meaning, and mind more generally. Michael Dummett, for example, treats Frege’s critique of psychologism as applying to doctrines about meaning as well as doctrines about logic and mathematics: When Frege engages in polemic against psychologism, what he is concerned to repudiate is the invasion of the theory of meaning by notions concerned

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INTRODUCTION

with mental processes, mental images, and the like, and the confusion between the process by which we come to acquire a grasp of sense and what constitutes such a grasp. (Dummett 1981: 240)

The term ‘theory of meaning’ here should be taken to include more than logic, since logic is silent on what constitutes the meanings of any terms other than the logical constants. Dummett is claiming, then, that Frege’s attack on psychologism can be extended to views outside logic. Psychologism in Dummett’s discussion is a view about understanding the meanings of words (‘grasp of sense’). Psychologism holds that what ‘constitutes’ our grasp of sense is connected in some way with the ‘processes by which we come to acquire’ such a grasp. Dummett thinks this is a confusion, and that it is one of the targets of Frege’s arguments. What exactly this view about sense is, and whether it is really a confusion, is something I will return to below. At the moment I only want to illustrate the way in which ‘psychologism’ has been used as a name for doctrines other than the disreputable idea that logic and mathematics should be explained psychologically. Another example of this kind of use can be found in the work of John McDowell, who once described psychologism as the view according to which ‘the significance of others’ utterances is a subject for guesswork or speculation as to how things are in a private sphere concealed behind their behaviour’ (McDowell 1981: 225). Where Dummett sees psychologism as involving a confusion between constitutive questions about understanding and questions about mechanisms, McDowell sees it as a positive (and surely incredible) proposal about how understanding works. These views are not, of course, incompatible. So in addition to psychologism about logic and mathematics, there are views about meaning and understanding that have also been called ‘psychologism’. My interest here, however, is in the mental or the psychological. According to Cavell, then, Wittgenstein’s target in the Philosophical Investigations is ‘psychologism about psychology’—or about the psychological, since we are not interested here in a discipline but in its subject-matter. What might this be? What does it mean to undo the psychologizing of the psychological? For that matter, what does it mean to ‘psychologize’ the psychological in the first place? How could one take any other approach to the psychological? The answer is complicated by the fact that ‘psychologism’ has been used for a number of different views about the psychological. Ned Block uses the

INTRODUCTION

3

term for ‘the doctrine that whether behavior is intelligent behavior depends on the character of the internal information processing that produces it’ (Block 1981: 5). And Adrian Cussins has defined psychologism as ‘the doctrine that psychology provides at least part of the explanatory basis for the constitutive understanding of the mental’ (Cussins 1987: 126–7). The term is a sensible one for both of these views, and both of them (unlike the view described by McDowell, say) are very plausible. So if Wittgenstein’s aim was to attack these views, then he had his work cut out. But what was his aim? On Cavell’s view, Wittgenstein’s point is that the connections between psychological phenomena and (say) their behavioural manifestations are in a certain way not contingent. The assumption seems to be that a psychologistic approach will only identify causal or contingent connections between phenomena, and that misses something central about the psychological. Wittgenstein wanted to articulate a conception of these connections in terms of notions like ‘criteria’ and ‘grammar’, which play the role of something like necessary or analytic connections in other philosophers; or as Cavell puts it, he wanted to ‘show the necessity controlling our application of psychological and behavioural categories’ (2002: 91). To the extent that an investigation to these necessary connections is a conceptual investigation, then we can describe anti-psychologism about the psychological as the view that the psychological should be investigated in purely conceptual terms. But where does this leave the science of psychology itself? At the end of the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein famously said that scientific psychology involves ‘experimental methods and conceptual confusion’ (1953: 232). This was written over sixty years ago, but it is unlikely that he would have had a different view if he were alive today. However, not all followers of Wittgenstein take this invidious attitude to psychology. Some of them think that the conceptual investigation of the mind is one thing, and psychology another. These philosophers might rely, for example, on a distinction between the normativity that orders the mind and the underlying causal structure in the brain; or on a distinction between the personal and sub-personal levels of explanation. But whichever they choose, they distinguish between the conceptual investigation undertaken by philosophy and the empirical, causal, or nomological investigation undertaken by psychology. Treating anti-psychologism as the idea that the study of the mind is a purely conceptual investigation fits well with Block’s and Cussins’s

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INTRODUCTION

definitions of psychologism. Although I agree with the substantive views defended by Block and Cussins, my focus in this essay will be on something more specific in the debate between psychologism and anti-psychologism: their contrasting approaches to intentionality or mental representation. The specific version of anti-psychologism about intentionality I will consider here is the view that intentionality should be understood primarily in semantic terms: that is, in terms which relate only to the conditions for the truth and falsehood of representations. I claim that this is a purely conceptual investigation in the sense that it treats the subject-matter of a theory of intentionality as consisting in the attributions articulated in our folk psychological discourse. Psychologism about intentionality, then, is the denial of this view: intentionality should not be understood primarily in semantic terms. This version of psychologism can be directly linked to Frege’s discussion of psychologism about logic, via the views of his followers, Dummett and others; as we shall see. I will start with Frege.

2 . M E AN I NG , CO M M U N IC ATION , AN D I NTE NTIONAL CONTE NT

Frege’s anti-psychologism about logic was based on the maxim that we should ‘always separate sharply the logical from the psychological, the objective from the subjective’ (Frege 1884 ). His target was Mill: So far as it is a science at all, [Logic] is a part, or branch, of Psychology; differing from it, on the one hand as the part differs from the whole, and on the other, as an Art differs from a Science. Its theoretical grounds are wholly borrowed from Psychology, and include as much of that science as is required to justify its rules of art. (Mill 1865: 359)

Frege’s objection to psychologism was based on two features of logic: its objectivity and its normativity. The objectivity of logic consists in the fact that logical truths are true independently of whether anyone judges them to be so, or whether anyone thinks about (‘grasps’) them. So they cannot be truths about psychological facts, since psychological facts cannot obtain regardless of whether they are instantiated in any particular psychological structure.

INTRODUCTION

5

The normativity of logic consists in the fact that the laws of logic are not like the laws of physics: they are not generalizations about what actually happens, but prescriptions about what ought to happen. As Michael Potter puts it: In Frege’s hands anti-psychologism was a thesis about logic with normative content: logic is the study not of the laws by which we in fact think but of those by which we ought to think; and the normativity of the ‘ought’ here was not, Frege thought, simply to be resolved into an account of the benefits that accrue if we reason according to these rules rather than others. (Potter 2008: 18)

A system of laws or generalizations could be objective without being normative (the laws of physics are an example) and could be normative without being objective (moral laws are like this, on some conceptions). But for Frege, logical laws were both normative and objective. If this is the essence of Frege’s anti-psychologism, it is easy to see how it might be extended to apply to the phenomena of meaning and understanding, as Dummett suggests. For it is plausible that that facts about meanings of words have a certain objectivity in relation to any particular linguistic acts of thinkers. Of course, this does not mean that facts about meaning are entirely independent of what speakers do; how could they be? But we can deny this consistently with holding that they are independent of any particular linguistic act or intention. Similarly, meaning does seem to have a normative dimension in the sense that the rules governing the public meanings of words are something to which competent speakers see themselves as answerable. Individual speakers can use words correctly or incorrectly; that is, either in accordance with the norms governing the usage in their language, or in accordance with their own idiolect. Neither of these claims is exactly parallel to what Frege says about logic and mathematics. A ‘platonistic’ view of view of meaning—according to which the facts about meaning are somehow timelessly there independently of the acts of language-users—is deeply problematic, as Crispin Wright and others have argued (Wright 2001). And the normativity of meaning is notoriously hard to articulate, since it clearly is not quite the same thing as whatever normativity attaches to logic.

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INTRODUCTION

Nonetheless, it is hard to deny that there is something to the idea of the objectivity or publicity of meaning. Similarly, we should not deny that there is something to the idea that one can go right or wrong in one’s use of words, and that meaning is to this extent normative. Frege’s own distinction between sense and reference made room for both of these features. The objectivity of reference is an aspect of Frege’s realism, and the objectivity of sense he thought was required for the possibility of communication. Communication, he claimed, involves thinkers associating the same or similar thoughts (propositions, the sense of a sentence) with the words expressed. In a letter to Peano, Frege wrote: “The task of our vernacular languages is essentially fulfilled if people engaged in communication with one another connect the same thought, or approximately the same thought, with the same proposition” (Frege 1980: 115). Communication obviously involves understanding, which Frege described in terms of the metaphor of ‘grasping’ thoughts. What grasping actually involves is a question Frege himself—by his own admission—did not answer. Grasping must presumably involve some psychological processes; but according to Dummett at least, an account of these processes is not part of a ‘constitutive’ account of grasp of sense. What matters for the ‘constitutive’ account is rather that communication must involve a relation to thoughts. As articulated in his classic essay, ‘The Thought’ (Frege 1918–1919), thoughts are inhabitants of the ‘third realm’; they exist independently of what anyone thinks, independently of whether anyone grasps them. Thoughts are objective, and to treat them otherwise would be to lapse into psychologism about meaning. In his much earlier essay, ‘On Sense and Reference’ (1892), Frege encapsulated this idea in a famous analogy between the sense and reference of a word and the act of looking at the moon through a telescope. The reference of a word is analogous to the moon itself—it is out there, no matter what. The sense is analogous to the image in the telescope—it is partial, from a (literal) point of view, but can be seen by different perceivers. As Frege says, it is ‘property of many people’ (1892: 29). The third element in the picture is the image on the retina of the person viewing the moon. Frege says this is analogous to the idea (Vorstellung) in their mind, and the idea plays no part in what constitutes the thought (Gedanke) or proposition; nor, if Dummett is right, does it play any part in what constitutes the ‘grasp’ of the thought. (More on ‘ideas’ in § 3 below.)

INTRODUCTION

7

Anti-psychologism about meaning can now be loosely expressed in terms of Frege’s three-fold distinction. It is the view that meaning, communication, and understanding involve only sense and reference, and not ‘ideas’ in Frege’s use of that word. In order to understand meaning and communication, all that we need to appeal to are the objective referents of our words in the world and the objective thoughts they express. The error of psychologism about meaning, on this conception, is to think that meaning (and communication, understanding, etc.) has anything to do with ideas. This is why Dummett attributes to psychologism the ‘confusion’ between what constitutes a grasp of sense—our relation to thoughts—and the processes by means of which we come to acquire this grasp. These processes might involve ‘mental imagery’ and such things (‘ideas’), but these things should not be allowed to ‘invade’ the theory of meaning. The theory of meaning is sometimes called semantics, and at the heart of semantics is the notion of truth. A compositional semantics for a language demonstrates how the semantic properties of whole sentences (in particular, truth and falsehood) are determined by the semantic properties of their parts (either truth and falsehood in the case of sentences, or other referents in the case of other types of term). What is semantically relevant is only what determines truth-value. Anything else—‘tone’, ‘colouring’, or ‘ideas’—is not relevant to semantics. Compositional principles tell us how the parts of sentences join together to form something assessable as true or false. Predication is fundamental in these constructions. As Quine put it: “Predication joins a general term and singular terms to form a sentence that is true accordingly as the general term is true of the object to which the singular terms refer” (Quine 1960: 96). Other theories offer explanations of how this comes about. Frege’s theory of predicates (and their referents) as unsaturated is one attempt at an explanation. Montague and his followers (e.g., Lewis 1970) offer another. (See Davidson [2005] for a penetrating discussion.) My interest here, however, is not in the details of these approaches but to draw attention to this conception of the semantic as the realm of the determination of truth-value. Frege himself made this explicit. On his view, the bearers of truth-value are thoughts: and a thought is ‘that for which the question of truth arises’ (Frege 1918–1919). Thoughts, like sentences, have a structure: they are made up of senses. But thoughts are also the ‘contents’ of sentences, and of the judgements that assertions of sentences express. Judgements, of course, are

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INTRODUCTION

judgements that something is the case, or is true, so the content of a judgement—what is judged—is something for which the question of truth arises. As well as its use in the theory of meaning (or semantics), the notion of ‘content’ is also used in the philosophy of mind, in the theory of intentionality or mental representation. ‘Content’ is a technical term and there is no agreed characterization of the notion of the content of an intentional state. My own definition (Crane 2009a), which I think is as good as any at capturing all the various things that the term is used for, is that the content of a state is the way it represents its object. Many theories of intentionality take intentional content to be propositional: that is, they take intentional states to be those with propositional content. Propositional content is truth-evaluable content. If anti-psychologism about meaning is the view that questions about meaning should only be answered by using notions like Frege’s notions of sense and reference (or notions akin to these), then a parallel anti-psychologism about intentionality holds that that questions about intentional content should only be answered by appealing to these notions. To echo Dummett: anti-psychologism about intentionality is the opposition of the infection of the theory of intentionality with notions like mental imagery. Intentionality should be understood in terms of sense and reference, not in terms of ‘ideas’. We can put the issue more precisely. If the content of intentional representation is propositional, then anti-psychologism about intentionality is the view that a theory of content is theory of what determines the truth or falsehood (or the conditions for the truth and falsehood) of these propositional representations. In other words, a theory of intentional content is a semantic theory, in the sense just introduced. Such a theory should explain how the truth-values of intentional states are determined by the semantic properties and relations (e.g., reference) of the significant parts of intentional states: in other words, it should give a compositional semantics for the contents of intentional states. Given this, and the assumption that all intentional content is propositional, anti-psychologism about intentionality is the view that an account of intentionality only needs to appeal to semantic facts about the mind. Of course, the term ‘semantic’ is sometimes used as a synonym for ‘intentional’—to mean anything having to do with mind-world relations—and if the term is used in that way then anti-psychologism becomes trivial. But I am using the term ‘semantic’ as it is used to talk about semantic theories of natural language and/or formal semantics. In these contexts, the main

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goal is to have a theory of the determination of truth-value (see Evans 1982: 8). But it seems to me that it worth distinguishing the very idea of representation (whether mental, linguistic, pictorial etc.) from the idea of a truth-evaluable representation. This is why I reserve the term ‘semantic’ for a theory of the latter. Anti-psychologism about intentionality is a species of anti-psychologism about the psychological, in the sense I outlined above (§1). There I said that anti-psychologism was the view that the philosophical study of the mind is a purely conceptual investigation. I take a semantics of propositional attitude attributions to be a purely conceptual investigation in the broad sense that it can be constructed by a theorist on the basis of their grasp of the concepts involved in the attribution. Anti-psychologism about intentionality treats the theory of intentional as, in effect, deriving from the semantics of propositional attitude attributions. There are many motivations for anti-psychologism about the intentional, some of which may be related to Frege’s ideas about communication, or to the idea (often attributed to Wittgenstein) that facts about our mental lives should be in some sense ‘publicly accessible’. If the contents of intentional states are propositional in nature, and propositions are what is expressed in communicative acts, then these contents are in principle publicly accessible. Many people can ‘grasp’ the same content and there is no hidden, private ‘residue’ which in principle escapes communication or expression. But as I mentioned above, a commitment to anti-psychologism about the intentional is not restricted to followers of Wittgenstein, or to those who are worried about the problem of other minds or about the ‘privacy’ of the mental. In fact, many contemporary theories of intentional content have anti-psychologistic elements, in the sense I have just explained. It is for this reason too that anti-psychologism is worth the attention of contemporary theories of mind. Here are a few illustrations. To begin with, consider the reductionist view of intentionality championed by Fodor and others in the 1980s. This view attempted to make sense of the propositional attitudes in terms of a language of thought. Their starting point was that beliefs and desires (the supposed paradigms of intentional states) are relations to propositions, and propositions are abstract objects. What was needed, in Field’s phrase, was a ‘materialistically acceptable account of the relationship between an organism and a proposition’ (Field 1978: 9). The account involved two projects: the first is to hypothesize

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INTRODUCTION

a system of internal representations or sentences in a language of thought; the second is to explain how these sentences get their meaning, by giving a semantics for this language of thought. This approach to intentionality as an anti-psychologistic element, in the sense just defined above, because it explains intentionality in terms of the semantics of sentences. More relevant to my interests here, though, are the more recent intentionalist theories of consciousness, such as those of Tye (1995), Byrne (2001), and others. According to these views, the phenomenal character of a conscious experience is identical to its representational/intentional content. (A weaker alternative is that the phenomenal character supervenes on intentional content; but the difference between these views is of no significance here.) The representational content of an experience is a proposition which expresses how the experience represents the world to be. Hence the intentionality of consciousness is explained purely in terms of the propositional content of experiences. What is essential to propositions, as I emphasized above, is the fact that they are bearers of truth-value. Hence this form of intentionalism is a form of anti-psychologism: intentional content is truth-evaluable content. Another, but very different, anti-psychologistic view of experience is John McDowell’s famous view in Mind and World (1994a) that what we perceive to be the case is also the kind of thing that we can judge. When we perceive that, for example, a particular pig is in the garden, this is something that can be the case or not the case. We can also judge that a particular pig is in the garden. The content of a judgement can be the content of a perception too. This is an essential step in McDowell’s (1994a) account of how experience can justify belief. (He has since given up this view of the content of experience: see McDowell 2009a and Crane 2012: §1 for a discussion.) There are, then, a number of contemporary views of the intentionality of experience which count as anti-psychologistic by my criteria. The essence of these views is that the content of experience is propositional, and that conscious perceptual experience is a matter of propositional representation of the world. However, some philosophers who explicitly reject intentionalism about consciousness, and even reject the idea that perception has propositional content, come close to endorsing very similar views. An example is Tyler Burge’s recent account of perception in Origins of Objectivity (2010). Burge claims there that ‘perception is not propositional and hence is not thought’ and that ‘perception lacks propositional structure’ (2010: 36). He concludes from this that ‘perceptual attributives are not concepts’. An

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‘attributive’, for Burge, is something attributed by perceptual states to the objects of perception. So, on Burge’s view, although it does not involve predication in the sense that linguistic or propositional representations do, perception does involve the attribution of properties. The attribution of properties by the visual system can be correct or incorrect, depending on whether things are as they are visually represented to be: ‘perceptual representational contents constitute accuracy conditions’ (Burge 2010: 83). To illustrate what this means, consider Burge’s example of the visual representation of a cylindrical solid: There are two aspects of perceptual representational content of the state— general and singular. The singular aspect functions fallibly to single out (refer to) perceived particulars. When successful, the perceptual state refers to a particular cylindrical solid and perhaps to particular instances of cylindricality and solidity. The general aspect in the representational content functions fallibly to group or categorize particulars by attributing some indicated kind, property or relation to them. When successful, the perceptual state attributes cylindrical solidity to a particular cylindrical solid. (Burge 2010: 83)

Burge makes a distinction here between singular and the general aspects of content, which seems to correspond to the distinction between a singular and a general term (or concept). The singular and general aspects function as referring and predicating components of the content: the singular aspect picks something out and the general aspect groups or categorizes it. While Burge has good reasons for denying that perceptual content is conceptual, it is hard to see why he denies that it is propositional, given the obvious similarity between what he says is going on in perception and simple cases of predication. What Burge says is going on in this case of visual perception is strikingly similar the paradigmatic form of a predication (as described in the quotation from Quine above). There is a singular ‘aspect’ which refers to a particular, and there is a general ‘aspect’ which classifies it. And the resulting accuracy condition—that a certain perceived solid has the property of being cylindrical—looks very much like a proposition. Whether or not perceptual content actually has this kind of structure, and what sense can be made of the idea of a perceptual state ‘attributing’ properties, are empirical and theoretical questions which I will not pursue here (but see Crane 2012). The point I want to make here is that this picture

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of perception is not forced upon us by the mere idea that perception is intentional, that it involves the representation of reality. The idea that this is the way perception must be would follow if we adopted the anti-psychologistic assumption that intentionality can only be understood in semantic terms. But this is the assumption which I am trying to undermine. The apparent inevitability of the semantic conception of intentionality has, I think, another consequence regarding the intelligibility of intentionalist theories of consciousness. Burge himself has expressed strong scepticism about such theories; indeed, he thinks that there cannot be any kind of explanatory or necessary connection between perception and consciousness (‘I think perception can, and apparently does, occur without any sort of consciousness’; 2010: 368). Certainly, there can be unconscious perception—in the sense of the registration of information about the environment—and this is not denied by intentionalists about perceptual consciousness. Their concern is with a mature subject’s perceptual experience: their claim is that the phenomenal character of such an experience is determined by its intentionality. And yet if intentionality were only understood in the semantic sense—as propositional representation—then it can be hard to see why one should believe this claim. For there seems nothing in the idea of propositional representation as such that has anything to do with consciousness. In this sense, Burge is right. However, I think what is at fault here is not intentionalism, but the anti-psychologistic conception of intentional content (see Crane 2012). I hope I have said something to indicate how widespread anti-psychologistic assumptions about intentionality are. But this just raises the question: if the intentional is not the same as the semantic, then what else might it be? What is intentionality if not propositional representation? To answer this question, I would like first to return briefly to Frege, and his conception of ‘ideas’. Where do ideas fit in to the present debate about intentionality? 3. FREG E ON I DE A S

As mentioned above, Frege’s interest was in logic and the determination of truth and falsehood. He had no substantive theory of the psychological—of what it takes to ‘grasp’ a thought, or of what ideas are, or of what consciousness is. His main concern to emphasise that logic was not about ideas.

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Ideas, then, must be distinguished between concepts (the referents of what we now call ‘predicates’). So in the Grundlagen he writes: ‘I have used the word “idea” always in the psychological sense, and have distinguished ideas from concepts and from objects’ (Frege 1884: §10). And in his much later essay, ‘The Thought’, he says that ‘what is a content of my consciousness, my idea, should be sharply distinguished from what is an object of my thought’ (Frege 1918–1919: 72). The object of a thought is the reference, the item in the world; the idea is the content of consciousness. One of Frege’s concerns in ‘The Thought’ is to argue for this realistic assumption that the objects of our thoughts are things in the world and must not be confused with ideas. (It is worth pointing out that the essay was originally published in a journal for the study of German idealism: Beiträge zur Philosophie des Deutschen Idealismus.) Similarly, thoughts themselves must be distinguished from ideas. One of the distinguishing marks of ideas is that they need a bearer: the sense impression I have of green exists only because of me, I am its bearer. It seems absurd to us that a pain, a mood, a wish, should rove around the world without a bearer, independently. An experience is impossible without an experiencer. The inner world presupposes the person whose inner world it is. (Frege 1918–119: 67)

Ideas, then, are the inhabitants of the ‘inner world’: they are subjective entities in the sense that they are dependent for their existence on the particular subject of the idea. In essence, Frege’s point is just that ideas are concrete mental states or episodes, rather than abstract objects, inhabitants of what he called the third realm. But it would be a mistake to assimilate them, because of this, to subjective entities as conceived by contemporary philosophy: for example, to those things some philosophers call ‘qualia’. As Frege makes clear, ideas are not qualia in the normal philosophical sense, but ordinary folk psychological mental states: the inner world of sense-impressions, of creations of [the] imagination, or sensations, of feelings and moods a world of inclinations, wishes and decisions . . . I want to collect all these, with the exception of decisions, under the word ‘idea’. (Frege 1918–1919: 66)

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Sense-impressions, imaginings, inclinations are wishes are all unproblematically intentional states: they are all states or episodes with intentional content. One can have the visual impression of a pig, one can imagine a pig, one can be inclined to stroke a pig, and one can wish for a fat pig as a present. Whether feelings and moods are intentional states may be a more controversial matter, depending on exactly what one has in mind when talking about feelings and moods. But even so, it is worth emphasising that there is some debate about this: at least some of the things we call feelings and moods have some intentional content, and whether they all do does not affect Frege’s initial classification of them as ideas. It should not be surprising that Fregean ideas are intentional: the word Frege uses here is ‘Vorstellung’, familiar in philosophy to readers of Kant and his followers. English translations of Kant typically render ‘Vorstellung’ as representation. In some later writers, such as Brentano, ‘Vorstellung’ is translated into English as presentation. Representation and presentation are sometimes used as synonyms for ‘intentionality’, or as ways of explaining that concept. Some writers (Searle 1983; McDowell 1984) see an important difference between something’s being presented and something’s being represented. There may well be such differences between the concepts expressed by the English words ‘representation’ and ‘presentation’, but I very much doubt that these differences can be traced to any differences in the use of ‘Vorstellung’ by Kant, Brentano, or Frege. So Fregean ideas are not qualia, but ordinary psychological states with intentional content. Although genuine perception might involve a propositional content (‘thought’) he insists that ‘for the sensible perception of things we should need sense-impressions as well, and these belong entirely to the inner world’ (1918–1919: 75). Sense-impressions are ideas, and belong to the inner world in the innocuous sense that they belong to a subject’s conscious life. I conclude that Frege was not anti-psychologistic about the intentional (in my sense) and in this respect, his view is preferable to that of some of his followers. I mention this not because I want to appeal to the authority of Frege, but to illustrate that even someone who is motivated by the claim that some mental acts have semantically evaluable, propositional, publicly available, ‘objective’ contents can also hold that some do not, and that these can be as fully intentional as the others. Not all intentionality need be a

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semantic matter. The theory of intentionality need not simply be the theory of propositional content.

4. P SYC HOLOG I S M ABO UT I NTE NTIONALIT Y

If we are interested in moving beyond a merely semantic account of intentionality, we can appeal to two features of ‘ideas’ as Frege discusses them. The first is that ideas are subjective states or episodes. The investigation of intentional states need not then be limited to their propositional contents (if they have them) but also to the nature of their psychological ‘mode’ or ‘attitude’—the nature of memory, of attention, of imagination and so on. Inevitably, then, such a study must move beyond the merely conceptual to the empirical study of psychological modes. This is not a different subject-matter from the study of intentionality: the difference between memory and imagination, for example, is a difference in the way these states represent their objects, it is a difference in their intentionality. A theory that wants to ground consciousness in intentionality, then, should be allowed to appeal to facts about intentional modes or attitudes as well as contents (see Chalmers 2004; Crane 2009a). It might be said that these differences are merely differences in ‘vehicles’ of intentionality, and not relevant to the theory of intentional content. But there is no generally accepted version of the distinction between ‘vehicle’ and ‘content’ which is neutral between psychologism and anti-psychologism. The clearest account of the distinction appeals to an analogy with language: the same message can be conveyed in different sentences, and to that extent the sentences are different ‘vehicles’ for the same content. But unless we think that a theory of intentional content should be modelled on a theory of the semantics of sentences, we will not be tempted by this way of drawing the distinction. The difference between visualizing and seeing something is certainly a psychological and a phenomenological difference; but there is no good reason to assimilate this difference to the difference between different sentences and their contents. The second lesson we can draw from Frege’s discussion is that states of mind (‘ideas’) can have intentional content without being propositional attitudes. If I imagine a pig in the garden, does my imagining have

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a propositional content? In some cases perhaps—if asked to imagine that there is a pig in my garden when there plainly is not, I am asked to imagine something false. But I might imagine a pig being in my garden—merely visualizing it, calling it to mind—without imagining that there is a pig in my garden, that is, without imagining anything that is false. Other cases (wanting, looking for, etc.) can be treated in similar ways. In any case, even when a state of mind has propositional content, it is not plausible that all aspects of the phenomenology of perceptual experience are determined by what determines this content (or its correctness-, accuracy-, or truth-condition). Blurred vision or objects in shadow are examples where either facts about a subject’s visual experience, or facts about the illumination of objects, can give rise to differences in how things seem visually, which are not differences in the correctness conditions of the objects of visual perception. But these differences can still be aspects of the intentionality of experience: what is given or conveyed to the subject in experience It is true that the psychologistic project as I have outlined it does begin with categories that are broadly speaking part of our folk psychology: memory, desire, imagination, and so on. This, it seems to me, is the starting point for any philosophy of mind, as well as for psychology. Where psychologism departs from the standard non-psychologistic philosophy of mind is that it allows for two possibilities: 1. There can be more to the intentionality of psychological states than is given by an account of propositional attitude attributions; and 2. There can also be less to the intentionality of psychological states than is given by an account of propositional attitude attributions. The significance of Claim (1) has already been touched on above. An account of intentionality should incorporate a psychological account of the psychological modes (vision, imagination, memory, etc.) as well as an account of their propositional contents, if they have them. The second commitment, Claim (2), needs a little more explanation. The idea is that our folk psychological descriptions of thoughts can make more distinctions than there are distinctions in mental reality. A few examples would be useful. One is Dretske’s (1969) famous distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic seeing. There is a well-established distinction between the way we describe visual cognition in epistemic terms (‘x sees

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that p’) and in non-epistemic terms (‘x sees y’). The distinction is important and its logical and semantic features have been much investigated. But does the existence of this distinction mean that there are two kinds of seeing, that is, two kinds of psychological state or episode? Psychologists have distinguished, for example, between different visual pathways corresponding to the different functions of vision (see Goodale and Milner 1992). But neither this, nor other psychological distinctions, correspond to Dretske’s distinction. Dretske’s distinction is a conceptual or semantic one; it does not correspond to a distinction in psychological reality. Another example is the well-worked distinction between ‘ de re’ and ‘ de dicto’ attributions of mentality. When considering Quine’s famous example of Ralph and whether or not he believes that Bernard J. Ortcutt is a spy, many will agree that although Ralph does not believe that Ortcutt is a spy, he does believe of Ortcutt that he is a spy (Quine 1956). Many will agree that this requires us to distinguish two ‘senses’ of belief: belief de dicto and belief de re. In the de dicto sense, Ralph does not have the belief that Ortcutt is a spy; in the de re sense he does believe of Ortcutt that he is a spy. The distinction is perfectly intelligible, and makes sense of some aspects of the complex business of attitude ascriptions. But should we draw a similar distinction between different kinds of belief states, as Tyler Burge (1977) and others have done? Why should these differences in our ways of talking lead us to assume a difference in mental state? One might expect that if there were such a fundamental distinction between kinds of mental state, that it would show up somewhere in cognitive psychological studies. But as Dennett (1982) pointed out, the de re/de dicto distinction does not appear anywhere in psychology; and things have not changed significantly since he made that point thirty years ago. Let me make it explicit what I am saying here. I am not saying that there is no value in the project of giving a systematic account of the semantics or pragmatics of propositional attitude attributions. Of course there is; but this project is distinct from the project of understanding intentionality. Nor am I saying that philosophers should not speculate about mental states or capacities which are not theorized about in psychology. This depends entirely on the individual case. What I am saying is that we should not assume that the ‘joints’ of mental reality correspond to the distinctions made in our ascriptions. We should not rely on our ascriptions as the sole guide to where these joints lie. Once again, Dennett puts it well: ‘our very

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capacity to engage in linguistic interactions . . . seriously distorts our profile as intentional systems, by producing illusions of much more definition in our operative systems of mental representation than we actually have’ (Dennett 1983). 5. CONC LU S ION

I use the label ‘anti-psychologism’ for the general idea that the philosophical study of the mind can only be a study of our mentalistic concepts—either through a conceptual analysis, a grammatical investigation, a semantics of propositional attitude ascriptions, an account of the nature of propositional content, or in some other way. The notion of propositional content has played a particularly important role in the anti-psychologism of recent analytic philosophy of intentionality, and it is this idea in particular is one that I have criticized here. In my initial characterization of anti-psychologism, I identified significant similarities between the approaches to mind and meaning described by Cavell, Dummett, and McDowell. I then connected Cavell’s idea of ‘undoing the psychologizing of psychology’ with the Frege-inspired idea of a theory of meaning as a theory of mind-independent ‘propositions’ or ‘thoughts’. I then argued that this idea has an obvious affinity with the theory of intentionality as the theory of the propositional content of mental states. I claimed that whatever its merits as a theory of meaning, the theory of intentionality cannot simply be a theory of propositional content, and a fortiori nor can it be the semantics of propositional attitude attributions. The overall diagnosis I would offer of how we got into this situation is that the philosophy of mind has concerned itself with only what I call ‘conceptual investigation’. Psychologism, as I conceive of it, is the rejection of this. Obviously, there are risks in identifying large trends in ideas in this kind of way. The connections between these different ideas are not supposed to be deductive or necessary. Rather, my hypothesis is a (fairly abstract) historical conjecture of how ideas about meaning have given rise to a certain conception of intentionality. Someone may doubt this conjecture. Or they may doubt the specific connections I have claimed there are between Cavell’s anti-psychologism and Frege-inspired semantics. Or they may doubt that there is a connection between Frege’s views about the ‘objectivity’ of sense

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and the propositionalist view of intentionality which I have been criticizing. To make these connections more robust would need more defence than I have been able to give in the very sketchy remarks above; nonetheless, I think that this can be done. What cannot be doubted, though, is that thinking about intentionality in recent analytic philosophy has been dominated by thinking about the propositional attitudes, and an account of the intentionality of these attitudes has been conceived of as an account of their propositional content. This is what I have labeled ‘anti-psychologism about intentionality’ and this has been the main target of this essay. I have argued that if we do not start from the starting-points about intentionality identified above, then the possibility of a broader, more realistic conception of intentionality begins to emerge. I hope that the essays in this book will serve as examples of what such a conception might look like.

* * * This essay is based on my plenary address to the 7th European Congress for Analytical Philosophy in Milan in September 2011. Other versions have been presented to the Brazilian Society for the Philosophy of Mind in Fortaleza, to an audience in Fribourg in April 2012, to the ‘Minds, Bodies and Problems’ conference in Bilkent in June 2012, and to the LEMMings Graduate Conference in Cologne in December 2012. I am grateful to the audiences on these occasions for comments, but especially to Andrea Giananti, Katalin Farkas, Barry C Smith, and Marcus Wild.

I Historical Essays

F

ranz Brentano is rightly acknowledged as the philosopher who brought the Scholastic terminology of intentionality back into the philosophical limelight with the publication of his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint in 1874. But it is important to emphasise that it was the terminology (and some of its connotations) that he brought back, not the very idea of intentionality itself. The idea of thoughts ‘having objects’ was not abandoned with the decline of Scholasticism in the early modern era. Some examples: Descartes’s discussion of the ‘objective reality’ of ideas in his third Meditation, Locke’s theory of ideas, and Kant’s theory of judgement—these are all theories of intentionality, even if they do not use that terminology. Brentano’s own term for intentionality is Intentionale Inexistenz. Brentano’s term was derived, as he explicitly acknowledged, from the scholastic ideas of esse intentionale (see Crane 2001: §4, for a simple explanation of the terminology). As Essay 2 explains, the term Inexistenz means ‘existence-in’. It does not mean ‘non-existence’. Some contemporary philosophers use the terms ‘inexistence’ and ‘inexistent’ in this latter way, as a technical terms (see Kriegel 2007; Rey 2005). Given what Brentano meant by this word, this usage might give rise to confusion. But the usage is also unnecessary, since there is already are non-technical terms with the same meaning in English (i.e., ‘non-existence’, ‘non-existent’). The point of Essay 2 is explain what Brentano meant; it is not a defence of Brentano. Brentano’s underlying metaphysics is not something we should accept, and this underlying metaphysics is integral to his view of intentionality. So although in the essays in Part II of this volume defend what is sometimes known as ‘Brentano’s thesis’ (all mental states exhibit intentionality) this is not because I defend Brentano’s specific conception of intentionality. Section 4 of this essay contains an error in the interpretation of Brentano. When Brentano says in the 1911 edition of his Psychology that a mental act cannot have ‘something other than a thing as it object’, this is an expression of his reism, not his realism. Reism is the view that (as we might put it today) only concrete particular things exist. Realism is the view that many of the entities we think about are mind-independent. These views are consistent with one another, and Brentano in his later work held them both; but the quoted passage is not an expression of his realism. Thanks to A.D. Smith for pointing this out to me.

Essay 3 is concerned with some of Wittgenstein’s ideas on intentionality as they emerge in his later work. I offer an interpretation of his remarks about expectation and fulfilment in his Philosophical Investigations, in particular, his claim that ‘it is in language that an expectation and its fulfilment make contact’ (1953: §445). Wittgenstein hoped to dispel some of the problems of intentionality by appealing to the ‘grammatical’ fact that the same words are often used in the description of the expectation as are used in the description of what fulfils the expectation. I argue that this cannot be the whole story, and that we should not try to avoid an appeal to the idea of mental representation in the description of intentionality. ‘The Origins of Qualia’ (Essay 4) was born out of a dissatisfaction with the contemporary debate about ‘qualia’. If qualia are supposed to be the properties which in some way constitute the conscious character of experience, how can anyone deny that there are qualia? And yet philosophers do debate the existence of qualia; so what are these debates about? I approach this question through a historical investigation of the ways in which the different—but related—ideas of qualia and sense-data developed in the twentieth century. They both have their source in the idea that something is given to the subject in experience; the substantive dispute over the nature of this ‘given’ is what explains the puzzling debate over phenomenology. The connection between the idea of the ‘given’ and the idea of intentionality is developed further in Essay 12. The main weakness of ‘The Origins of Qualia’ now seems to me to be the suggestion at the end of §5 that the important difference between theories of perception is between those that see perception as involving something like an apparent relational structure, and those that do not. This puts intentionalism, disjunctivism, and the sense-datum theory on one side, and the adverbial theory and contemporary qualia theories on the other. I now do not think this is the best way to locate the really important issues in the philosophy of perception; Essay 10 gives a better account, which emphasises principally the difference between relational and representational views. However, this weakness is independent of the historical discussion of qualia and sense-data in the rest of the essay.

E S S AY T W O

Brentano’s Concept of Intentional Inexistence

(2006)

to distinguish mental from physical phenomena by employing the scholastic concept of intentional inexistence is often cited as re-introducing the concept of intentionality into mainstream philosophical discussion. But Brentano’s own claims about intentional inexistence are much misunderstood. In the second half of the twentieth century, analytical philosophers in particular have misread Brentano’s views in misleading ways.1 It is important to correct these misunderstandings if we are to come to a proper assessment of Brentano’s worth as a philosopher and his position in the history of philosophy. Good corrections have been made in the recent analytic literature by David Bell (1990), Dermot Moran (1996), and Barry Smith (1994) among others. But there is also another, more purely philosophical lesson to be learned from the proper understanding of Brentano’s views on this matter. This is that Brentano’s struggles with the concept of intentionality reveal a fundamental division between different ways of thinking about intentionality, a division which Brentano himself does not make fully clear. Making the nature of this division explicit is the aim of this essay.

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First, I will attempt to expound Brentano’s concept of intentional inexistence in its original 1874 context. This will enable us to eliminate some of the relatively superficial misunderstandings alluded to above. Then I will outline Brentano’s change of mind when he later came to write the appendices to his 1874 Psychology (Brentano 1995). Although any reasonably careful reading of the text will show that Brentano did in fact change his mind, it is not always clearly recognised in the discussions of Brentano’s thesis what it is that he changed it from. Third, I will show how the tension between his earlier view and the later view of the appendices is in fact the tension which is responsible for the problem of intentionality as we have it today.

1. I NTE NTIONAL I N E XI STE NC E AN D NON E XI STE NC E

Brentano is perhaps best known for the following passage: Every mental phenomenon is characterised by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction towards an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing) or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation, something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. (1995: 88)

But what is this ‘intentional inexistence’? One popular understanding of this phrase is that intentional inexistence has something to do with the possible or actual non-existence of objects of thought. We can think about objects which exist, and objects which do not exist. But what makes it possible for us to think about things which do not exist? Some have claimed that this question was what motivated Brentano’s whole theory of intentionality. According to Gabriel Segal, for example, Brentano was particularly concerned with the problem of how we can represent things that don’t exist outside of the mind, such as unicorns. His original idea was that if one thinks about a unicorn, then one’s thought has an intentional object that does exist. The object is not, however, a concrete

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inhabitant of external reality, but an ephemeral entity, existing in the mind only. (Segal 2005: 284)

Segal’s claim is that Brentano introduced ‘intentional objects’ to solve the problem of how we can think about objects which do not exist, like unicorns. Brentano’s solution, on this understanding, was to say that the object of thought in this case is not something in ‘external reality’ but something in the mind only. Hence every thought has an object, it’s just that the objects of thoughts about non-existent entities are mental objects. And according to Segal, this is true of thought about existent entities too: ‘Brentano held that the objects of thought and experience were always such intentional entities. Thus if one is thinking about Paris, the immediate object of one’s thought is an intentional object rather than a city’ (Segal 2005: 284). The idea that the objects of thought about the non-existent are mental objects—for this is how I will understand objects as ‘existing in the mind only’—is a view which is often discussed in connection with the problem of non-existence. There are obvious and well-known objections to the view (see Harman 1990). But I will not dwell on these objections here, since I want to examine instead the line of thought behind Segal’s interpretation of Brentano, since it is an interpretation which is frequently found in analytic philosophy. Segal seems to think that the thesis that objects of thought (intentional objects) are mental is a solution to the problem of non-existent objects of thought. The idea is this: how do we think about Pegasus? Answer: we do this by having in mind an ephemeral or mental entity; hence what we are thinking about is an ephemeral or mental entity. This suggests that if we were just considering the phenomenon of thought about what we normally take to be existing entities, then we would not have any reason to say that objects of thought are mental. A clear implication of Segal’s view is that we would have no inclination to think that an object of thought is mental if it were itself a real or existing object: say, the Darley Arabian rather than Pegasus. But whatever the merits of this approach to the problem of non-existence, it cannot be Brentano’s 1874 view. The reason is that his original introduction of the terminology of intentional inexistence in the 1874 book does not appeal to, and nor does it presuppose, any distinction between existent and non-existent objects of thought at all. So the reason for introducing the idea of intentional inexistence can hardly have been because of any problem presented by non-existent objects like Pegasus. This is not,

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however, because Brentano thinks that all objects of thought exist. Rather, it is closer to the truth to say that he thinks none of them exist, not even the things we take to be ordinary physical objects. To a contemporary ear, this is a rather paradoxical or nihilistic way to put the view; it would be closer to the truth to say that none of the things we take to be ordinary physical things have any kind of ultimate or transcendent reality. At the beginning of his Psychology of 1874, Brentano discusses physical phenomena, the subject-matter of physical or natural science. He writes: The phenomena of light, sound, heat, spatial location and locomotion which [the natural scientist] studies are not things which really truly and exist. They are signs of something real, which, through its causal activity, produces presentations of them. They are not, however, an adequate representation of this reality, and they give us knowledge of it only in a very incomplete sense. We can say that there exists something which, under certain conditions, causes this or that sensation. We can probably also prove that there must be relations among these realities similar to those which are manifested by spatial phenomena of shapes and sizes. But this is as far as we can go. We have no experience of that which truly exists, in and of itself, and that which we do experience is not true. The truth of physical phenomena is, as they say, only a relative truth. (Brentano 1995: 19)

It is clear from this passage that Brentano’s view is not that there is a distinction between ‘physical objects’ which exist, and ‘intentional objects’ which do not exist. His view is rather that none of the things which are studied by science ‘really and truly exist’: they are phenomena, mere appearances, which are signs of an underlying reality but which are not real themselves. Since all objects of natural scientific investigation are phenomena, then they all have the same status vis-à-vis reality: none of them are real. But this is not because they are unreal in the way we think Pegasus is; rather it is because they are only phenomena. So Brentano did not begin with the problem that Segal says he did. Segal sets up the problem against the background of a kind of twentieth and tewnty-first century ‘common sense’ realism which assumes that there is a realm of ordinary objects which exist independently of our minds, that relations hold between such objects, and that things cannot be more real or less real. Given these assumptions, then the problem of intentionality can

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be posed as follows: how can a non-existent entity like Pegasus be the object of an act of thought, since it cannot be something which stands in relation to the subject of a mental act, because anything which stands in a relation to anything else must exist. Clearly the assumption that something can only stand in a relation to something which exists is one of the assumptions which form part of the metaphysical background of contemporary realism. Now I am not disputing these assumptions; in fact, like many analytic philosophers, I accept them. My point here is that they cannot be Brentano’s assumptions, and so the problem which Segal says Brentano is addressing cannot really be his problem.2 And neither, therefore, does Brentano encounter the problem with the view—that intentional objects are mental objects—which Segal then goes on to claim he does: One’s thought is true if there is a match of the right kind between the properties of the intentional object and those of the real object. An obvious problem with this view is that it offers no account of what determines the real object of thought (Paris), and hence leaves the nature of intentionality mysterious. Brentano himself came to realise this and abandoned the doctrine. (Segal 2005: 284)

The problem presented here is like a version of the ‘veil of perception’ objection to the sense-data theory: if all we have access to are the immediate objects of perception, then how does our perceptual experience ever reach out to (what we really know to be) the real objects of perception? But given that Brentano thinks that we have little conception of ‘that which truly exists, in and of itself’, and that science’s job is simply to account for the data of experience, then this problem does not arise for him, in the case of perception or in the case of thought. In other words, since Paris, too, is simply a phenomenon, the question of what determines Paris as the ‘real object of thought’ makes no literal sense for him. Segal is right, however, that Brentano later abandoned his 1874 view of intentionality; we shall look into this below. But the present issue is what Brentano’s earlier views actually were. I have claimed that these views involve assumptions which would be rejected by many analytic philosophers today: that phenomena are not real in themselves but only signs of a fundamentally unknowable independent reality; and that some things are, in a certain way, more real than others. Hence philosophers today cannot

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accept Brentano’s views, and in a sense these views are invisible to them. If our aim is simply to get clear about the facts of intentionality then this does not matter very much. But if we are going to make claims about what Brentano’s views actually were, and what therefore is alive or dead in them, then we have to see what his assumptions were, rather than ignoring them or translating them into our terminology which disguises distinctions which he might have made. However, we have not yet said what Brentano actually meant by ‘intentional existence’. This is the task of the next section.

2 . I NTE NTIONAL I N E XI STE NC E

To understand properly the concept of intentional inexistence, we have to set the famous passage in the context of the general project of the Psychology. The overall aim of the book was to establish the intellectual foundations of psychology as a science. It is a science whose data comes from experience and introspection—hence it is psychology from an empirical standpoint.3 He thought that if psychology was to be established as a science, there has to be a criterion which distinguishes its subject-matter from the subject-matter of physical or natural science. In Book 1 of the Psychology Brentano had defined psychology as the ‘science of mental phenomena’, opposing the etymologically more correct definition of it as the ‘science of the soul’. Before we examine what makes a phenomenon mental, we should say something about this use of the terms ‘phenomenon’ and ‘science’. These two terms should really be understood together. As we have seen, Brentano believed that natural science does not uncover the real nature of things. In particular, physics is not the science of bodies because even if we can be said to encounter the properties of bodies, ‘we never encounter that something of which these things are properties’ (1995: 11). All that science can ever discover are the appearances of things: these are the ‘physical phenomena’ like ‘light, sound, heat, spatial location and locomotion’. Science studies phenomena; that is all that science can do. These phenomena or appearances are things which only exist in the mind. As Barry Smith puts it: at the time of the first edition of the Psychology Brentano conceives physical phenomena like experienced colours and sounds as existing in the mind as parts of consciousness, so that the intentionality of outer perception is in

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fact a relation between two mental entities, the (real) act of sensation and the (non-real, non-causally efficacious, abstract) quality sensed. The latter, for example experienced sounds and colours, have a diminished sort of existence, an existence ‘in the mind’. (Smith 1994: 41)

Physical phenomena are the objects of experiences; but physical phenomena are appearances. Appearances are fundamentally mind-dependent (pace, for example, Morrison 1970). So Segal is quite right to say that according to Brentano’s 1874 view, intentional objects only exist in the mind. But Brentano did not think this because he was trying to solve the problem of non-existence. Rather, it is simply a consequence of the fact that sciences study phenomena. It is easy to see, then, that the differences between sciences amount to the differences between the phenomena studied by the sciences. The distinction between psychology and physics therefore amounts to the distinction between mental and physical phenomena. But it is crucial for understanding Brentano’s Psychology that this distinction is a distinction among the ‘data of consciousness’ (1995: 77). Brentano talks approvingly of Lange’s idea of ‘psychology without a soul’ (1995: 11). What he has in mind here is that psychology can proceed while being indifferent on the question of whether there is a soul: for ‘whether or not there are souls, there are mental phenomena’ (1995: 18). So what, then, are mental phenomena? This brings us back to the famous definition quoted above. A mental phenomenon (or a mental ‘act’ in Brentano’s terminology) always contains an object within itself. The ‘directedness towards an object’, ‘relation to a content’, or ‘immanent objectivity’ all therefore amount to the same thing: there is an object—that is, another phenomenon, whether physical or mental—in the mental act itself. All mental phenomena are directed upon phenomena, and such phenomena may be physical or mental. In the former case, a mental act would have as its object something like a sound or a shape or a colour. In the latter case, a mental act would have as its object another mental act. For example, one may think about the mental act of hearing a sound, for example. But whether physical or mental, the objects of acts are phenomena and hence fundamentally mind-dependent. Hence Brentano was not proposing how we think about mind-independent ‘external’ objects. The intentional inexistence of an object means, literally, existence in the mental act itself. As Smith comments, the thesis that ‘every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself’ is ‘to be taken

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literally—against the grain of a seemingly unshakeable tendency to twist Brentano’s words at this point’ (Smith, 1994: 40; see further Jaquette 2004). The background to this view is partly Aristotelian, as Brentano indicates in a well-known footnote (1995: 88). Aristotle had talked in the De Anima about how in perception, the perceiving organ takes on the ‘form’ of the perceived object: in seeing something blue, the eye takes on blueness without taking on the matter of blueness (see Sorabji 1991; although see Caston 1998 for further discussion). Brentano, like Aquinas, wanted to follow Aristotle in at least this respect: the proper objects of thought and perception—what it is that we are thinking of, and what makes thought possible at all—are actually immanent in the act of thinking, and do not transcend the mental act. In this respect, objects of thought may be compared to universals on an Aristotelian conception of them, according to which they are immanent in the particulars which instantiate them, and no not transcend those particulars. Finally, I should briefly mention the fact that Brentano divides mental phenomena into three kinds: presentation, judgement, and emotional phenomena including love, hate, and desire. A presentation (Vorstellung, sometimes translated as ‘idea’ or ‘thought’) may be inner or outer. An inner presentation may be a feeling or an awareness of some mental act; the objects of inner perception are thinking, feeling, and willing. The objects of outer presentation or perception are warmth, colour, sound, and so on (i.e., physical phenomena). A distinctive feature of his view is that every mental act is also directed on itself (although in what he called a ‘secondary’ sense) as well as on its primary object.4 Much of Book 2 of the Psychology is concerned with articulating the distinction between the three kinds of mental phenomena (see Mulligan 2004 for a recent discussion). In the 1874 book, Brentano held that presentations never occur alone but only together with some other mental activity (judgement or love/hate) but he later came to abandon this view, as he acknowledged in the 1911 edition of selections from the Psychology (1995: 276).

3. M E THODOLOG IC AL PH E NOM E NALI S M

The picture of Brentano’s 1874 views which we have arrived at is in some ways foreign to contemporary discussions of intentionality, which tend to assume a common-sense realism about the material world, and a physicalist

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conception of the findings of science. But, placed in wider context, the views should not be so strange. For Brentano’s conception of science has a lot in common with the kind of phenomenalism which was common in nineteenth century philosophy of science, which survived into the twentieth century in logical positivism, and which has echoes in Quine’s claim that the purpose of science is to explain and predict the course of experience.5 At the beginning of the Psychology, Brentano mentions Mill approvingly as ‘one of the most important advocates of psychology as a purely phenomenalistic science’ (1874: 14), and although not a card-carrying phenomenalist himself, he expressed sympathy with Ernst Mach’s phenomenalism on a number of occasions (cf. Smith 1994: 41, n.8). But Brentano was not a phenomenalist because phenomenalism holds that the world is constructed from phenomena, appearances, or (in some versions) sense-data. And as we saw above, Brentano holds that there is a world which transcends the phenomena; physical phenomena are ‘signs of something real, which, through its causal activity, produces presentations of them’ (1995: 19). This is what distinguishes Brentano from phenomenalism proper: he believes that there is something beyond the phenomena, although we can never know it. Nonetheless, this knowledge can never come through science; so as far as science is concerned, phenomenalism might as well be true. Peter Simons has usefully called Brentano’s approach methodological phenomenalism (Simons 1995: xvii) and I will adopt this label. One obstacle for Anglophone readers to seeing the importance of Brentano’s sympathy with phenomenalism is the complex and somewhat messy text which was eventually published as Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint in 1973 (Brentano 1995).6 The text as it has come down to us is larded with footnotes by Brentano’s editor Oskar Kraus, many of them substantive and interpretative in nature, and a less-than-careful reader might be misled into thinking that some of them are actually Brentano’s own. After the passage on page 19 of the 1874 work, which I quoted above in full and which is central to understanding Brentano’s methodological phenomenalism, Kraus adds a note saying that this passage is ‘misleading’ because it does not distinguish light from colour, and sound from the heard sound. But Brentano can easily distinguish light from colour and still say that light is a phenomenon, that is, not something which really and truly exists and that it is still among the things which physics studies. Brentano’s methodological phenomenalism is not simply a belief in the existence of secondary qualities. Moreover, immediately after this passage, Brentano contrasts the ‘relative

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truth’ of physical phenomena with the phenomena of inner perception (or introspection) which are ‘true in themselves. As they appear to be, so are they in reality’. This is why he says that the phenomena psychology studies are ‘true and real in themselves’ (1995: 20). What Brentano is talking about here is ‘inner perception’: when a mental act is presented as the object of another mental act there is no further ‘external’ reality to which it corresponds. This is the kind of point that contemporary philosophers might express by saying that where consciousness is concerned, the ‘appearance is the reality’.7 Kraus adds a footnote at this point saying that this does not mean that Brentano is a phenomenalist. Of course, it does not; but in his care to avoid casting Brentano as a phenomenalist, Kraus goes too far the other way and tries to present him as if he were (in the 1874 edition) a realist about the physical world: ‘in Brentano’s opinion, the physicist, too, is concerned with “things which are true and real in themselves”’ (1995: 20). But not only does this not follow from the denial of phenomenalism, it is also inconsistent with other things Brentano says in the 1874 text. One could deny phenomenalism and still think that physics only studies phenomena, but phenomena which are the result of an underlying reality which we cannot fully know. And this seems to be Brentano’s actual view, clearly and un-misleadingly expressed in the passage from page 19 quoted above. As he says later, ‘what are physical phenomena if not the colours, sounds, heat and cold etc., which manifest themselves in our sensations?’ (1995: 69, emphasis added). We are now in a position to take something of an overview of the doctrine of intentional inexistence. The distinction between mental and physical phenomena is that, while both kinds of phenomena are among the ‘data of consciousness’, only mental phenomena are directed upon something else as an object. But this object too is only a phenomenon. So what happens when someone hears a sound is that there is a mental act (a mental phenomenon: in this case, a presentation) which is directed upon a physical phenomenon (a sound). This is an act of outer perception. In acts of inner perception, a mental act is directed upon another mental phenomenon. But there is no distinction between those phenomena—the objects of mental acts—which exist and those which do not. This is because, according to methodological phenomenalism, science can only study phenomena. Physical phenomena do not exist, in the sense in which their underlying causes exist—they ‘should not be considered a reality’—but nor should they be

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thought of as unreal or non-existent, like Pegasus. From the point of view of consciousness, they are there, given to consciousness and there to be studied, like the mental phenomena whose objects they are. Hence there is no issue, from the perspective of methodological phenomenalism, about ‘objects of thought which do not exist’. All objects of thought or presentation are in this way intentionally ‘inexistent’ in some mental act or other, and this is all that can be studied in psychology. The reality or non-reality of the causes of these phenomena is beyond scientific investigation: psychology as an empirical science can only study the data of consciousness. The conclusion I want to draw from this account of Brentano’s theory of intentionality is therefore quite simple: Brentano’s original 1874 doctrine of intentional inexistence has nothing to do with the problem of how we can think about things that do not exist. Although his account of intentionality would certainly supply an account of thought about, say, Pegasus, this is only because it is an account of thought in general, and not because that was what was motivating the account. But if this is true, then an interesting exegetical question remains: why have so many philosophers taken Brentano to be concerned with this question in his 1874 definition of mental phenomena? To point to a verbal similarity between ‘inexistence’ and ‘nonexistence’ is surely not sufficient; more charity is needed if we are to untangle this mess of ideas. In the next section I will answer this question, and point out a general moral. 4. B RE NTANO’ S CHANGE OF M I ND

Those who are familiar with Brentano’s work only through those passages which are quoted by analytic philosophers of intentionality might be puzzled by what has been said so far. For in addition to the famous definition of mental phenomena discussed above, there are other often-quoted pieces of Brentano’s text which seem to contradict what I have said. Consider, for example, these passages from the 1973/1995 English edition of the Psychology: What is characteristic of every mental activity is, as I believe I have shown, the reference to something as an object. In this respect, every mental activity seems to be something relational. . . . If I take something relative from among the broad class of comparative relations, something larger or smaller

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for example, then, if the larger thing exists, the smaller one must exist too. If one house is larger than another house, the other house must also exist and have a size. . . . It is entirely different with mental reference. If someone thinks of something, the one who is thinking must certainly exist, but the object of his thinking need not exist at all. . . . For this reason, one could doubt whether we are really dealing with something relational here, and not, rather, with something somewhat similar to something relational in a certain respect, which might therefore be called ‘quasi-relational’. (1995: 272)

And later he writes: All mental references refer to things. In many cases, the things to which we refer do not exist. But we are accustomed to saying that they then have being as objects. This is a loose use of the verb ‘to be’ which we permit with impunity for the sake of convenience, just as we allow ourselves to speak of the sun ‘rising’ and ‘setting’. All it means is that a mentally active subject is referring to those things. It is only consistent to go on and permit such statements as ‘A centaur is half man, half horse’ although in the strict sense centaurs do not exist and so, in a strict sense, there is no centaur which has a body that is half of human form and half in the form of a horse. (1995: 291)

These passages seem to be in simple opposition to the interpretation of Brentano’s views which I have advanced in the previous sections of this essay. For Brentano here seems to be expressing the problem of intentionality in the way that contemporary analytic philosophers do (see, e.g., Stalnaker 1984: Chapter 1): thinking about something appears to be a relation between the thinker and the thing thought about; but relations entail the existence of their relata; yet we can think about things which do not exist. Yet everything that I have been trying to say so far has been dedicated to showing that this was not Brentano’s concern. So how can my interpretation of Brentano be correct? The answer to this question, of course, is that Brentano changed his mind—as all those familiar with the Psychology will know. In 1911, Chapters 5–9 of Book 2 of the 1874 edition were reprinted, under the title On the Classification of Mental and Phenomena. To this were added, as an appendix, several ‘supplementary remarks’ from which the above quotations above are taken. In the Preface to this 1911 edition, describing the ways in which his

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views had evolved, Brentano wrote that ‘one of the most important innovations is that I am no longer of the opinion that mental relation can have something other than a thing as it object’ (1995: xxvi) . To describe this as an ‘innovation’, however, is at worst misleading and at best an understatement. For the whole account of intentionality in the 1874 work was based on the idea of intentional inexistence, which is unproblematic only to the extent that objects of thought are immanent to the act of thinking. As we saw, this fits smoothly into a view of all science and its subject-matter: science does not treat of the real, but only of phenomena, which we have some reason to think is a causal effect of an underlying reality whose character we do not fully understand. Once it is admitted that objects of thought can be themselves real things, and therefore transcend the act of thought, then this whole picture starts to fall apart. Seen in this context, Brentano’s description of his ‘innovation’—that the mental relation cannot have anything ‘other than a thing as its object’—is somewhat disingenuous, for it strongly suggests that he used to think that the mental relation could sometimes have a real thing as its object, and sometimes something else. But as we saw above, he did not think this when he wrote the 1874 work; indeed, if I am right, he could not have thought this. The situation is not helped by the fact that in 1924 a second edition, edited by Oskar Kraus, was published, with the addition of Kraus’s explanatory notes, discussed above, and some extra essays. This is the edition which was then translated almost in its entirety in 1973 under the editorship of Linda L. McAlister. A reader interested chiefly in the philosophical content, and inattentive to the way Brentano’s work has been served up to Anglophone readers, might be forgiven for thinking that Brentano’s concept of intentional existence is both more obscure than it actually is, and also motivated by the problem of intentionality as we have it today. Or, to put it slightly differently: even if such a casual reading of a text is unforgivable, it is certainly understandable.

5. CONC LU S ION : TH E PROB LE M OF I NTE NTIONALIT Y

According to many scholars, Brentano changed his mind under pressure from some of his students, who argued that objects of thought must transcend the act of thinking (see, e.g., Smith 1994: 54; Moran 2000: Chapter

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2). Kasimir Twardowski, for instance, argued that a distinction is needed between the object of a thought and its content, where it is the content which is something immanent to the thought. Alexius Meinong, on the other hand, thought that the realm of objects should include objects of all kinds, including non-existent and impossible objects. And of course, in one of the most famous and influential discussions of Brentano’s doctrine of intentional inexistence, Husserl argued that objects of thought are always transcendent (Husserl 1901; see also Føllesdal 1978). When a thought concerns a non-existent object, then we should say that there is no object at all to which the subject is related; there is only an act of thought with a certain intentional ‘matter’ (or was would be said today, intentional content). Though his thought later took an idealist turn, Husserl was never a phenomenalist, and nor was he a methodological phenomenalist as Brentano was. In his discussions of intentionality in the earlier work, Husserl was very clear that the object of thought was not immanent in the thought, and that therefore intentionality should not be conceived as a relation to its objects (see Zahavi 1998). Brentano’s later discussions of intentionality, which entail the rejection of methodological phenomenalism, do not approach anywhere close to the sophistication of Husserl’s. Indeed, it is hard to see that they do more than state the problem. Calling something a ‘quasi-relation’ (Relativliches) without further explanation does little but draw attention to the phenomenon we are trying to understand. But nonetheless, we can see that with the move away from methodological phenomenalism, Brentano is facing up to the problem of intentionality as we conceive of it today. This problem is pretty much invisible as long as we stay within the framework of methodological phenomenalism. If one is a methodological phenomenalist, one construes intentional relations as relations to phenomena, which are mental or mind-dependent. Since every intentional mental act is a relation to some phenomenon or other, then there simply is no issue about the non-existence, or the possible non-existence of objects of thought. So, in that sense, there is no problem of intentionality. But once one moves beyond the methodological phenomenalist framework—as Brentano did when he adopted his ‘innovation’—one has to say something about what it is that characterises your thought when the object of thought does not exist. This simply is the problem of intentionality for anyone who accepts the minimal ‘realist’ assumptions that there is a mind-independent realm of objects, our thought

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can concern them, and moreover, that the way they concern these mind-independent objects is what distinguishes thoughts from one another. These assumptions easily generate the conception of thought as relational—as a relation to its objects—which, together with the metaphysical assumption that relations entail the existence of their relata, give us our problem. In this way, we can see how Brentano’s move away from the doctrine of intentional inexistence, and towards the embracing of transcendent objects of thought, dramatizes within his philosophy the problem of intentionality itself. Nonetheless, it has to be admitted that the conclusion to which we are leading is a somewhat negative one: that it is hard to see Brentano’s discussions of intentionality as something which we can interact usefully with today in any depth. The concept of intentional inexistence as introduced in the 1874 Psychology presupposes a metaphysical and epistemological framework in which the idea of an intentional relation certainly made sense, but few would accept this framework today and it was rejected by Brentano himself (in the guise of an innovation) in the 1911 edition. Once this framework is rejected, then, as Husserl saw, there is no real place for an intentional relation at all, and Brentano’s concept of intentional inexistence is not one which is profitably employed in discussions of intentionality.

* * * I am grateful to Mike Martin, David Smith, Peter Simons, and Dan Zahavi for discussion of these matters, and to Mark Textor for his patience and guidance.

E S S AY T H R E E

Wittgenstein and Intentionality (2010)

Like everything metaphysical, the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language. —Ludwig Wittgenstein (1974: §162)

1. I NTE NTIONALIT Y AN D G R A M M AR

The concept of intentionality—what Brentano called ‘the mind’s direction on its objects’—has been a preoccupation of many of the most significant twentieth century philosophers. The purpose of this essay is to examine the place of the concept of intentionality in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, and to criticize one aspect of his treatment of intentionality. Although the word ‘intentionality’ is not (to my knowledge) used in the English translations of Wittgenstein’s philosophical writings, the idea it expresses was central at all stages of his philosophical development. This should be obvious on a little reflection, not least because the philosophical notion of intentionality is closely related to the notion of meaning, and questions about meaning are, of course, central to both the Tractatus and Wittgenstein’s later work.1 Indeed, P. M. S. Hacker has claimed that the topic of intentionality is central to Wittgenstein’s later critique of the Tractatus’s account of meaning: ‘Wittgenstein’s detailed criticism of the picture theory was conducted by way of an investigation of intentionality’ (1996:79).

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A full treatment of Wittgenstein’s views on meaning is not a task for a single essay. Instead, what I want to do here is to narrow the focus and discuss some specific claims in Wittgenstein’s middle and later work about the role of the notion of grammar in his attempts to solve (or dissolve) some quite specific problems of intentionality. In particular, I want to restrict myself to the discussion his later remarks about the relationship between expectation and fulfilment, and the parallels with the relationship between an order and its execution, and with the relationship between a proposition and what makes it true. These relationships all exhibit what Wittgenstein once called ‘the harmony between thought and reality’. I shall follow him in talking about the relationship between thought and reality, and of the problem of intentionality as the problem of this relationship. But this talk should not be taken too literally—as we shall see, the later Wittgenstein did not think that intentionality really was a relationship between thought and reality.2 But I will use this term as a convenient label for the particular aspect of the problem of intentionality which interests Wittgenstein. Other problems lie in the vicinity: for instance, the problem of how a physical object can come to think about anything in the world; or of how thinking can in general be a relation if it is possible to think about that which does not exist. These problems are, I believe, all related; but here I will not have much to say about them here. A central commitment of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is that philosophical problems (like the problems of intentionality) do not arise because of our ignorance of the metaphysical structure of the world, or of facts about our minds. So we will not solve the problems by making discoveries about the world or our minds. ‘Problems are solved’, he writes, ‘not by reporting new experience, but by arranging what we have always known’ (PI §109). I will therefore take seriously and literally his remarks about the nature of philosophy (PI §§100–132ff.) and in particular, his insistence that the aim of philosophy is not to construct theories which explain the phenomena. Rather, what we should be trying to do is to give a ‘perspicuous representation’ of the phenomena themselves, in order to ‘command a clear view of the use of our words’ (PI §122). We do this, among other things, by ‘giving prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook’ (PI §132). This is what Wittgenstein calls a ‘grammatical investigation’. As Marie McGinn has persuasively argued, the concept of a grammatical investigation is ‘the key to understanding Wittgenstein’s [later] work’

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(McGinn 1997: 13). But what exactly did Wittgenstein mean by ‘grammatical’ and ‘grammar’? It is clear from his actual discussions in the Philosophical Investigations and elsewhere that he used the term much more broadly than in its normal use, which encompasses only syntax and morphology. Grammatical observations are normally remarks about the meaning of words— they are often what others might call partial definitions or conceptual or analytic truths—and no remarks about syntax or morphology could possibly have the consequences which his grammatical remarks do. Someone who denies that ‘one plays patience by oneself’ (PI §248) is not breaking any rules of syntax—the sentence ‘One does not play patience by oneself’ is perfectly well formed. Rather, someone who says this has not grasped what patience is, or what ‘patience’ means, or the concept of patience, or (as Wittgenstein might prefer to say) the way the word is used. Wittgenstein’s later investigations, then, are concerned with what McGinn calls the ‘distinctive patterns of use that constitute what Wittgenstein calls the “grammar of our concepts”’ (McGinn 1997: 14). So it is, I claim, with Wittgenstein’s treatment of intentionality. Wittgenstein’s attempted solutions to the problem of the relationship between thought and reality in his later philosophy appeal to the idea of grammar and grammatical remarks. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had attempted to answer the question of the relationship between thought and reality with his picture theory of the proposition: the proposition and what it represents are related by what he called an ‘internal relation’. This metaphysical account of the relationship between thought and reality was then replaced by a ‘grammatical’ account in the middle period and later philosophy. Thought and reality are not related by some substantial metaphysical relation like ‘picturing’; rather, the relation (if it is one at all) is merely grammatical. In order to explain this contrast and its significance, we need to look briefly at the account of representation in the Tractatus. 2 . I NTE NTIONALIT Y I N TH E TR AC TATUS

One of the central and most famous claims of the Tractatus is that a proposition is a picture of reality. This ‘picture theory’ is an attempt to explain how linguistic representation, and therefore truth and falsehood, are possible. The fundamental unit of representation is the proposition, which represents

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a possible fact. The idea of the picture theory is that, contrary to appearances, the proposition shares a kind of structure with the fact it represents: At the first glance the proposition—say as it stands printed on paper—does not seem to be a picture of the reality of which it treats. But nor does the musical score appear at first sight to be a picture of a musical piece; nor does our phonetic spelling (letters) seem to be a picture of our spoken language. And yet these symbolisms prove to be pictures—even in the ordinary sense of the word—of what they represent. (TLP 4.011)

Just as a picture represents by parts of the picture being related in something like the way the parts of what is represented are, so all these different forms of symbolism relate to what they represent by sharing what Wittgenstein calls ‘structure’: ‘to all of them the logical structure is common’ (TLP 4.014). This is why he says that they are all pictures. The proposition and the fact are related to one another by the picturing relation. But this relation is supposed to be ‘internal’ to the relata: The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world. (TLP 4.014, my emphasis)

Wittgenstein initially defines ‘internal’ in this way for properties: ‘a property is internal if it is unthinkable that its object does not possess it’ (TLP 4.123). But it is clear that the idea applies to relations too, as Wittgenstein goes on to illustrate with his example of one shade of colour being darker than another: ‘this bright blue colour and that stand in the internal relation of bright and darker eo ipso. It is unthinkable that these two objects should not stand in this relation’ (TLP 4.123). So we might say that an internal relation is one which is essential to its relata (see Beaney 2006: 45). Wittgenstein’s use of the phrase ‘internal relation’ is somewhat different from the way the phase is used these days. Today’s terminology has it that a relation is internal when it supervenes on intrinsic properties of the relata, and external when it does not. (Spatial or causal relations are paradigm examples of external relations.) This allows us to distinguish between internal relations which are essential to their relata and those which are not. For example, I might stand in the internal relation of being taller than my brother, because

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this relation supervenes on our intrinsic heights: given our heights, we could not fail to stand in this relation. But our standing in this relation is essential neither to me nor to my brother. There may, however, be relations I stand in which are essential to me. For example, if Kripke (1980) is correct, the fact that I have the parents I do is a relational fact which is essential to me. But not all internal relations, in the contemporary sense, are essential to their relata, and therefore the contemporary sense is not Wittgenstein’s. The contemporary use of the term ‘internal relation’ enables us to make a distinction which Wittgenstein’s does not. Nonetheless, our concern here is with Wittgenstein and not with contemporary metaphysics. What Wittgenstein meant by saying that a thought and reality are internally related—in the sense defined in the Tractatus—is this: if the thought that p is internally related to the fact that p, it is unthinkable that the thought and the fact do not stand in that relation. Standing in that relation is, in other words, essential to the thought and the fact. The essence of the picture theory, then, is that the proposition (or thought) and reality are related internally. P. M. S. Hacker has called this the ‘fundamental insight’ of the Tractatus: thought and proposition alike are internally related to the state of affairs that makes them true. The thought that p is the very thought that is made true by the existence of the state of affairs that p, and so too, the proposition that p is the very proposition that is made true by the existence of the state of affairs that p. What one thinks, when one thinks that p, is precisely the case if one’s thought is true. In this sense one’s thought reaches right up to reality, for what one thinks is that things are thus-and-so, not something else—for example, a proposition or a Fregean Gedanke, which stands in some obscure relation to how things are. (Hacker 1996: 31)

Hacker argues that Wittgenstein’s predecessors failed to see that thought and reality were internally related, and that therefore they had to postulate something ‘between’ the thought and the reality, like an idea or a Fregean sense. But Hacker also expresses this idea by saying that that what one thinks (the thought) is what is the case if one’s thought is true, and that this is what it means to say that thought ‘reaches right up to reality’.3 Someone might understand this idea along the lines of the so-called ‘identity theory of truth’, in terms of the thesis that the true thought is identical to the fact. Note that this identity theory is not implied by Wittgenstein’s claim that

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thought and fact are internally related, since internally related items can be non-identical (as the colours are in Wittgenstein’s example). But this idea gives rise to the traditional Platonic puzzles of non-being and falsehood: if what one thinks is identical to what is the case if the thought is true, then how can one ever think something false? However, since false thoughts plainly are possible, it is surely better to have a conception of thought and reality that does not raise this problem at all. Such a conception should reject, at a minimum, the identification of the true thought with the fact. Of course, ‘fact’ can mean a number of different things. In one usage, a fact is just a truth—a fact is ‘a thought [Gedanke] which is true’ as Frege puts it (1918–1919: 35). On another usage, a fact is something in the world, something on an ontological level with objects and properties (McTaggart 1921), something that makes truths true. If we adopt this second use of ‘fact’, the Platonic problem arises: how is falsity possible? We might be tempted to think that the Platonic problem would arise even if we reject the identification of the true thought with the fact. For if it is unthinkable that the true thought should not stand in a relation to its fact, and if only existing things can stand in relations, then it looks as if any true proposition is essentially true. As Michael Beaney puts it, ‘the relation a picture has to what it depicts, in virtue of [their] shared form, is an internal relation. Without such a relation, a picture could not be the picture it is’ (Beaney 2006: 45). So the picture could not be the picture it is—it could not picture what it does—unless it shared a form with the fact. But if there is no fact, then there is nothing to share. No fact, no shared form; no shared form, no picturing; no picturing, no proposition. One way around this is to talk of propositions sharing their form with possible states of affairs rather than actual facts (e.g., TLP 4.124). If we say this, though, then we have to give up the claim that a true proposition is a fact. For any contingent proposition, it is what it is (it says what it says) regardless of whether it is true. So its saying what it says cannot consist in its being identical to an actual fact. Maybe the true propositions of the Tractatus reach ‘right out to reality’ in some other way; but it had better not be by being identical to actual facts. Despite the complexities of some of the Tractatus’s doctrines, some things are clear even after this brief discussion. There is not much philosophy of mind (in the contemporary sense) in the Tractatus, but there is a theory of

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representation. So insofar as the Tractatus has anything to say about intentionality at all, it lies in its treatment of representation. The Tractatus’s theory of representation is the theory of the proposition. And the theory of the proposition is the picture theory: the proposition and what it represents stand in an internal relation of picturing. An internal relation is one which is essential to its relata: the relata could not both exist and fail to stand in that relation. To accommodate falsehood, we should say that contingent propositions stand in this internal relations to possible states of affairs.

3. I NTE NTIONALIT Y I N TH E M I DDLE PE RIOD

In abandoning the metaphysics of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein abandoned the idea that thought and reality stand in an internal relation, and in fact the term does not seem to appear in his later writings.4 In his so-called middle period of the 1930s, the notion of an internal relation seems to be replaced in places with the notion of a ‘grammatical relation’ (see Moore 1954). Nonetheless, the concern with the relationship between thought and reality remained at the centre of Wittgenstein’s preoccupations. And according to Hacker, ‘the insight into the internal relations between thought, language and reality . . . is no less pivotal for Wittgenstein’s later treatment of the problems of intentionality than it was for the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’ (Hacker 1996: 32). In Section 4, I shall examine this claim of Hacker’s. The source of some of the later claims in the Philosophical Investigations about thought and reality lies in the collection of remarks that came to be published as Philosophical Grammar in 1974. Here we find Wittgenstein comparing the relation between an order and its execution, and between a proposition and a fact: Suppose someone says that one can infer from an order the action that obeys it, and from a proposition the fact that verifies it. What on earth can one verify from a proposition apart from itself? How can one pull the action out of the order before it even takes place? (PG: 159)

The puzzle here is how the action specified by an order can be, so to speak, ‘contained’ within the order before that action takes place (so it can be ‘pulled out’ of it); and there is supposed to be a parallel puzzle about how the fact that verifies the proposition can be ‘pulled out’ of the proposition itself.

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The worry here is clearly about the possibility of representation. How can one thing (an action) represent another (an action) if the second thing is not literally contained within the first? This way of putting the puzzle, though, is not especially compelling. For why should we be tempted to think that one thing can only represent another if what is represented is contained within it? If there is a temptation here, it seems to me, it must derive from the idea that something cannot represent something unless it is related to it—an idea that Wittgenstein embraced in the Tractatus, as we saw. And yet, an order can represent the action which would fulfil it without that action ever happening—so its representation of the action cannot be a relation to it. This reading certainly makes sense of Wittgenstein’s concern with the problem of the relationship between thought and reality, which he sees exemplified in the Philosophical Grammar’s remarks in the ‘relationship’ between orders and their executions, expectation or a wish and its fulfilment, and propositions and what makes them true. In each case we are puzzled because we think that the ‘thought’ (expectation, wish, order, proposition etc.) must be related to what it represents, but representation can occur without any such relation. Insofar as Wittgenstein offers a solution to this problem at this stage in his philosophy, it occurs in the following passage: “The proposition determines in advance what will make it true.” Certainly, the proposition ‘p’ determines that p must be the case in order to make it true; and that means: (the proposition p) = (the proposition that the fact p makes true)

And the statement that the wish for it to be the case that p is satisfied by the event p, merely enunciates a rule for signs: (the wish for it to be the case that p) = (the wish that is satisfied by the event p)

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language. (PG 161–162; see also Z 55)

Wittgenstein here denies that there is any kind of ‘metaphysical’ relation between ‘thought’ (expectation, wish, order, proposition, etc.) and ‘reality’ (fulfillment, action, fact, etc.). What there is rather is a ‘rule for signs’, or a grammatical rule: if your expectation or wish is an expectation or wish that p, then it will be fulfilled by the fact that p; if a proposition is a proposition

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that p, then it will be made true by the fact that p. And these ‘grammatical’ truths about expectation and the like—i.e., that they are distinguished and specified in terms of what we now call a ‘content-clause’—are all that the harmony between thought and reality consists in.

4. I NTE NTIONALIT Y I N TH E PH I LOSOPH IC AL I NVE STIG ATIONS

The Philosophical Grammar was assembled by Wittgenstein’s executors a while after his death, and parts of it are earlier drafts of passages which were incorporated into the Philosophical Investigations. So, unsurprisingly, there is a more extended discussion in the later work of the problem of the relationship of thought and reality which was discussed in the earlier work. However, the discussion of the problem in the Philosophical Investigations is more circumspect, qualified, and less easy to summarize than the discussion in the middle period work. I will concentrate on §§428–465 of the Investigations, where we find some of Wittgenstein’s most famous remarks about intentionality: How was it possible for thought to deal with the very object itself? We feel as if by means of it we had caught reality in its net. (§428) Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?—In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?—Or is the use its life? (§432) A wish seems already to know what will or would satisfy it; a proposition, a thought, what makes it true—even the thing is not there at all! Whence this determining of what is not yet there? This despotic demand? (§437) I can look for him when he is not there, but not hang him when he is not there. One might want to say: ‘But he must be somewhere there if I am looking for him’—Then he must be somewhere there too if I don’t find him and even if he doesn’t exist at all. (§462)

In these passages Wittgenstein gives his most concise, vivid and forceful expression to some of the traditional philosophical concerns about intentionality: how thought can concern the world outside the mind, particular real things, not just representations of them (‘the very object itself ’); how

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signs, which are in themselves intrinsically meaningless, can come to have significance (‘every sign by itself seems dead’); how wishes and thoughts specify what would satisfy them (‘whence this determining of what is not yet there?’); and how one can think about people or things which are not there (‘I can look for him if he is not there, but not hang him if he is not there’). If we take the underlying worry to be the one described in the previous section—as being about relationality—then we can see how the concerns in some of these quotations are all connected. For example, one might be tempted to think that for thought to catch reality in its net, objects of thought have to be actually related to the thought; but how is this possible given that I can think about someone who doesn’t exist (§462). Similarly, wishes and propositions seem to ‘determine’ what fulfils them, or makes them true, and this determining looks like a relation; but how can there be such a thing, if the fulfilment has not yet occurred (§437)? I am not saying that Wittgenstein is proposing that these problems only have one source; only that it might be useful for us to see their source in this way. In fact, it seems to me that Wittgenstein would not identify one source to these problems. But nonetheless a general line is suggested in these passages (§§428–465): Wittgenstein is attempting to use various kinds of grammatical investigation in order to dissolve these problems of intentionality. Let us see how he applies his grammatical method in his treatment of the main examples of these passages: the relationship between expectation and fulfilment, and that between wishes and their satisfaction. We can begin with expectation. Any expectation is the expectation of something (§438). So it seems that there is your expectation, and what you expect, and these are different things. But how, then, is your expectation related to what you expect? One mistaken picture Wittgenstein wants to undermine is that what you expect must in some mysterious way already be contained in your expectation: I see someone pointing a gun and say ‘I expect a bang’. The shot is fired.— Well, that was what you expected; so did that bang somehow already exist in your expectation? (§442)

—to which the answer is obviously, no. The other mistaken picture he wants to undermine is the idea that the expectation and what satisfies it can be

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connected by a mental action of ‘meaning’ something: ‘hocus pocus in the soul’. Taken at face value, there is no future in either of these suggestions. (After all, who in their right mind would want to defend hocus pocus? Or the soul, for that matter? Or mysterious immaterial bangs contained in our expectations?) An alternative suggestion is then aired, that ‘there is some other kind of agreement between your expectation and what occurred’. But what other kind of agreement? Wittgenstein is at pains to emphasise that what satisfies your expectation is the event itself (in this example, the bang itself). The satisfaction of the expectation is not given by a feeling, to which the bang is something additional. So this is the question: there is your expectation (of a bang), there is what satisfies it (a bang) and there is ‘agreement’ between them when the latter occurs; but what is this agreement? In §444 he begins to give his answer to this question, by describing an actual situation in which we might talk of expecting something: But it might now be asked: what’s it like for him to come?—The door opens, someone walks in, and so on.—What’s it like for me to expect him to come?—I walk up and down the room, look at the clock now and then, and so on.—But the one set of events has not the smallest similarity to the other! So how can one use the same words in describing them?—But perhaps I say as I walk up and down: ‘I expect he’ll come in’—Now there is a similarity somewhere. But of what kind?! (§444)

The similarity Wittgenstein is pointing to here is simply that the words ‘I expect he’ll come in’ can be used as an expression of the expectation, and by containing the sentence ‘he’ll come in’, they contain a description of what fulfils the expectation. It seems clear that the next remark (§445) is intended to sum up the preceding discussion: ‘It is in language that an expectation and its fulfilment make contact’. In this famous and puzzling remark, Wittgenstein implies that there is no need to think in terms of any kind of relationship (or nexus) between expectation and some extra-linguistic reality in order to give an account of the intentionality of expectation. We find the ‘contact’ between expectation and fulfilment in the fact that we use the same words (‘he’ll come in’) as an expression of what we expect, and as a description of what fulfils it. If we look at how we actually use the language of expectation (the grammar of ‘expect’), then our puzzlement should be dispelled.

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The agreement or similarity between the expectation and what fulfils it is not a matter of some relationship between a state of mind and some not-yet-realised mysterious entity; nor is it (as in the Tractatus) an internal relation (‘picturing’, maybe) between the proposition describing the expectation and the event that fulfils it. Rather, the agreement simply consists in the grammatical fact that we use the same sentence ‘p’ in the description of the expectation that p as we do in the description of what is expected: p. In §458 Wittgenstein explicitly applies this idea to orders and their executions: ‘An order orders its own execution’. So it knows its execution, then, even before it is there?—But that was a grammatical proposition and it means: If an order runs ‘Do such-and-such’ then executing the order is called ‘doing such-and-such’. (§458)

The proposition ‘An order orders is own execution’ is a grammatical proposition: that is, it specifies the regularities for using the terms ‘order’ and ‘execution’. It does not specify a relationship (‘ordering’) between one event (‘the order’) and another (‘its execution’). Someone who did not grasp that an order orders its own execution would not know how to use the word ‘order’ or ‘the execution of an order’. These passages in the Philosophical Investigations seem to be a development of the Philosophical Grammar’s claim that ‘the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language’ (PG 162). There Wittgenstein argued that to say that ‘the wish for it to be the case that p is satisfied by the event p, merely enunciates a rule for signs’. The example of a ‘rule for signs’ he gave there was: ‘(the wish for it to be the case that p) = (the wish that is satisfied by the event p)’. In Hacker’s words ‘these are simply alternative specifications’ of the wish (1996:79). What is true of wishes and expectations, it seems, can be applied to the other examples of the relation between thought and reality: the thought and what makes it true, and the order and its execution, for example. In all these cases we might be tempted to think that there is some kind of special metaphysical relationship between the state of mind and its object, just as the Tractatus had postulated an internal relation between the proposition and the fact it represents. The later Wittgenstein’s approach to this problem is to declare these ‘relations’ to be merely reflections of grammatical propositions, in the sense described above.

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Generalising from the examples of expectation, wishing, and ordering, we can say that Wittgenstein’s account of intentionality is based on the rejection of any metaphysical relationship between thoughts and the world. To say that the belief that snow is white is made true by the fact that snow is white is not to relate one thing (the belief) to another (the fact) by a relation (‘truth-making’). Rather it is simply to specify how to use the expression, ‘the belief that snow is white’. The expression is to be used in the same way as the expression ‘the belief that is made true by the fact that snow is white’. This is as much a grammatical observation as is the observation that ‘an order orders its own execution’. P. M. S. Hacker, and some of those influenced by him, tend to see a deep continuity between the Tractatus’s idea of an internal relation, the Philosophical Grammar’s idea of a grammatical relation, and the Investigations’s idea of the contact between expectation and its fulfilment being made ‘in language’.5 Hacker argues that the Philosophical Grammar’s point is that what the Tractatus took to be an internal relation between these things is ‘merely the shadow of a grammatical relation between expressions’ (1996: 79). And he goes on to argue that this is the Investigations’s position too: the expectation that it will be the case that p simply is the expectation that is satisfied by its being the case that p: ‘these are simply alternative specifications of that expectation’ (1996: 79). According to Hacker, from the Philosophical Investigations onwards, ‘what gives “life” to language is its use in the practices of living beings’ (1996: 129). On this view, the point of Wittgenstein’s writings on intentionality is to undermine the idea that there is an ‘extra-linguistic nexus’ (1996: 129) between a proposition and the fact that makes it true. The Tractatus had said that these relations are internal, but postulated a metaphysical structure to account for them. In the Investigations, Wittgenstein ‘now elucidates the intentionality of thought and language in intra-linguistic terms. Expectation and its fulfilment make contact in language, in the grammatical relation between the expressions “the expectation that p” and “the expectation that is fulfilled by the event that p”’ (1996: 129). This is what Hacker calls Wittgenstein’s ‘resolution of the problems and puzzles of intentionality’ (1996: 129).6 In the rest of this essay I will examine whether the discussion in the Philosophical Investigations does provide, as Hacker claims, a generally satisfactory resolution of the puzzles Wittgenstein has uncovered.

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5. E VALUATION

How satisfactory is this proposed solution to the problem of the relation between thought and reality? The idea that meaning might be explained by intra-linguistic regularities of use is an idea that has had some currency in recent philosophy of language. Philosophers who put emphasis on ‘use’ in explaining meaning often claim to have inspiration from Wittgenstein (see Horwich 1998) or from Sellars (Brandom 1998; cf. Sellars 2007). But what we have to evaluate here is not whether one or another doctrine of ‘meaning as use’, or some related ‘inferentialist’ conception of intentionality, is correct. What we have to evaluate is whether Wittgenstein’s specific proposals, as just described, give effective solutions to the problems of intentionality as he construes them. It is tempting to say: how can the relationship between thought and fact be an ‘intra-linguistic matter’? After all, the thought is one thing, the fact quite another! The thought that Magellan’s voyage of 1519–1522 was the first successful circumnavigation of the globe is something which is true, something which people can think, deny, or doubt. It might have been false. The fact that the voyage was the first circumnavigation of the globe is something else altogether: the fact is not something one can think or doubt or deny. The fact is not true; the fact is something that obtains, something which involved other facts, like the fact that Ferdinand Magellan sailed through the Magellan straits, that he was killed in the Philippines; these are facts about events that happened on this voyage. These events are things that went on in the world; they are what is described by, or conceived of in, the thought. They are not the same kind of thing as the thought itself, of course. I do not think, however, that Wittgenstein is denying that there is a sense of ‘fact’ in which all these things are true of facts: the facts are in the world, and that the thought describes the facts. What he is attempting to reject is a certain picture of how thought and fact are connected: the picture that gives rise to our feeling that what is represented must in some sense be ‘already contained’ in the thought (§442), or that representation can only be achieved by some kind of ‘hocus pocus in the soul’. His rejection of these pictures goes on to involve a diagnosis of how they arise from the ways in which we talk about fact and thought. His idea is that we are misled by the way we talk into thinking that things must be the way they are pictured in these misleading pictures. He clearly does not mean that there is no

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distinction between how things are and the way we talk about them; that would be absurd. Wittgenstein is surely right to reject the idea that what is represented is in any sense ‘already contained’ within the thought; and he is right to reject the idea that representation is achieved by ‘hocus pocus’ in the soul (that is, by some mysterious process stipulated ad hoc solely for the purpose of explaining intentionality). But his own account of the problem goes further: he claims that there is no relation between thought and reality. Rather, there are grammatical relations between sentences describing thoughts (desires, expectations etc.) and sentences describing what would make them true (satisfy them, fulfil them etc.). Can this be the entire account of how intentionality works? Is the only thing we have to say about the relationship between the thought that p and the fact that makes it true that we have a ‘grammatical’ rule of signs linking expressions? Can this approach dissolve our deep sense of confusion and puzzlement about intentionality? To begin to answer these questions, let us return to the case of expectation. Wittgenstein’s idea is that to resolve our puzzlement, all we need to say about the link between expectation and its fulfilment is that a phrase of the form ‘the expectation that p’ can be used interchangeably with a phrase of the form ‘the expectation that is fulfilled by the fact that p’. This is simply because of the grammatical fact that (to modify §458) if an expectation is called ‘an expectation of such-and-such’ then what fulfils this expectation is called ‘such-and-such’. However, it appears that this is not all one can say about the relationship between an expectation and its fulfilment; and what more can be said does not obviously seem to be a matter of grammar at all, even in Wittgenstein’s extended (and undeniably eccentric) use of that term. I will illustrate this with a simple example. Consider my expectation that the postman will bring my mail in the morning. This expectation is the expectation that it is, according to Wittgenstein, because it is the expectation that is fulfilled by the event of the postman bringing my mail. Let us suppose that, unknown to me, there are two postmen in my neighbourhood: Mr Jones and Mr Smith. On Monday Mr Jones brings my mail, on Tuesday Mr Smith does. On Monday, then, my expectation is fulfilled by Mr Jones bringing my mail, so the following seems to be true on Monday:

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(1) My expectation that the postman brings my mail is the expectation that is fulfilled by Mr Jones’s bringing my mail. Whereas the following is true on Tuesday: (2) My expectation that the postman brings my mail is the expectation that is fulfilled by Mr Smith’s bringing my mail. And yet, on Monday and Tuesday, it is equally true that: (3) My expectation that the postman bring my mail is the expectation that is fulfilled by the postman’s bringing my mail. It is just that different things count as the postman’s bringing my mail, on Monday and Tuesday. So different things can fulfil the same expectation. In other words, the expectation that p can be the expectation that is fulfilled by the fact that q, where q and p are not the same fact.7 This can be an informative thing to say about what fulfils my expectation. In fact, on reflection, we can see that it is almost commonplace that we can describe the facts which would fulfil the expectation that p in many ways; we do not, and we are not obliged to, restrict ourselves to describing it as ‘the fact that p’. It is a consequence of this that your expectation can be fulfilled by an event e even if, in a certain sense, you did not expect e to happen. What this means is that e might have properties which you did not expect it to have. Suppose that Mr Smith is the local parson, but unknown to you he works as a postman to supplement his income. You are surprised to discover the parson in your yard on Tuesday with a mailbag. Yet this event, the event of the parson delivering your mail, is what fulfils your expectation that the postman deliver your mail. An expectation, it seems, can be fulfilled even if it is fulfilled in ways you do not expect. What this shows is that you can describe what actually fulfils your expectation—what I shall call the object of the expectation—in a way that is independent of the description of the expectation itself. Wittgenstein’s point, by contrast, is that you can only describe the object of the expectation in the way it is specified in the description of the expectation itself. Yet this does not seem to be true: you did not expect Mr Smith the parson to

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deliver your mail, yet this is what fulfils your expectation that the postman deliver your mail. In her famous essay on the intentionality of sensation, G. E. M. Anscombe (1965) argued that when one gives what she calls the ‘intentional object’ of an intentional verb, one has to give the object ‘under a description’—the description which the subject would recognize as characterizing the object of their thought, desire and so on. This is true, of course, if our aim is to describe how subjects themselves are thinking of, or conceptualizing, the object of their state of mind—what it is they want, what they expect, what they fear and so on. But if our aim is to truly describe what it is that fulfils the expectation, then it is not true that we always are obliged to describe the object of the expectation in a way that the subject would recognize. What satisfies the expectation is an event, and not an ‘event under a description’. For there are no events ‘under descriptions’, there are only events and descriptions of events; and descriptions of events do not fulfil expectations. This suggests that we should distinguish, then, between what fulfils the expectation—the object of expectation—and how subjects themselves think of this object. If we call how the subject thinks of the object ‘what is expected’ then we can describe without paradox how someone’s expectation might be fulfilled by what they did not expect. What I expected was that a postman would deliver my mail. I did not know that Mr Smith the parson was also a postman, so I did not expect that he would deliver my mail. But he is a postman, so his delivery fulfils my expectation. This already is enough to show that there cannot be any straightforward identification between what is expected and what fulfils the expectation. What fulfils the expectation is an event, while what is expected is an event conceived in a certain way.8 If we cannot identify what is expected with what fulfils the expectation, then how should we think of the relationship between these two things? As I have said, we can call what fulfils (or would fulfil) the expectation the object of the expectation. When we describe the expectation from the subject’s point of view, we have to describe the object in a certain way—this is a description of what is expected in the sense just mentioned. Following Husserl, I call what is expected in this sense the content of the expectation (see Crane 2001: Chapter 1). The content of the expectation is a representation of its object: it is a representation of what would fulfil it. Thus my

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general expectation that the postman will bring my mail in the morning is a representation of a type of state of affairs; this is its content. Any event that belongs to this type will be an event which fulfils the expectation, and may therefore be called the object of the expectation. This description of the link between what is expected and what fulfils the expectation is more complicated than Wittgenstein’s description that they are linked by the simple ‘rule of signs’: the expectation that p = the expectation that is satisfied by the fact that p. But as we have seen, this rule is inadequate, because it does not tell us that the event of Mr Smith the parson delivering my mail is one of the things that satisfies my expectation that the postman will deliver my mail. So we need the more complicated story.9 The point is not restricted to expectation, but it can also apply to propositions (or judgements) and what makes them true. If I judge that some of the best-value wines in the world are to be found in the South of France, then this judgement is certainly distinguished from others by its content (what is reported in the content-clause), but the judgement could be made true by a number of different states of affairs—for example, the best wines coming from Minervois, or from the Languedoc, or from Provence. All of these things would make true the judgement, and so to state what would make true the judgement, we can do much more than merely repeat the content clause of the judgement. (Similar points can be made about the other examples of intentionality discussed by Wittgenstein.) It may be responded that Wittgenstein himself anticipated this point in the Philosophical Grammar, when he wrote: Suppose you now ask: then are facts defined one way or another by an expectation—that is, is it defined for whatever event may occur whether it fulfils the expectation or not? The answer has to be: Yes, unless the expression of the expectation is indefinite, e.g. by containing a disjunction of different possibilities. (PG 162)

The example above might be thought to be one in which ‘the expression of the expectation is indefinite’ since there are a number of different facts (‘a disjunction of different possibilities’) that would satisfy it. So my expectation that the postman will deliver my mail in the morning would therefore count as an indefinite expectation since it is satisfied either by Mr Jones bringing my mail or Mr Smith bringing my mail.

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It is not clear that this would help, since Wittgenstein gives us no specific advice about how to construe the grammar of such ‘indefinite’ expectations. But in any case, the suggestion seems off-key, since it does not seem right to call the expectation ‘indefinite’ in the first place. After all, I expect something perfectly definite: my mail to be delivered by the postman. To say that this is ‘indefinite’ seems to set a standard of definiteness which is not only very remote from the ‘rough ground’ of ordinary language which is the ostensible subject-matter of the Philosophical Investigations, but also independently implausible. It would be equally flat-footed to say that I have a ‘disjunctive’ expectation, any more than I make a ‘disjunctive’ judgement when I judge that the best-value wines come from the South of France. Let me attempt to generalize the point. The thought that p can be made true by the fact that q; the expectation that p can be satisfied by the fact that q; the desire that p can be satisfied by the fact that q—and in all these cases, the fact that q can be distinct from the fact that p, on anyone’s way of distinguishing facts. (The same thing can be said, mutatis mutandis, for events.) This is as obvious as Wittgenstein’s grammatical claim that the thought that p is the thought that is made true by the fact that p. I do not deny that Wittgenstein is right in making this grammatical claim—I only insist that there is more to be said. But it is not plausible that what more there is to be said is anything to do with grammar. If all that someone knows is that I expect the postman to deliver my mail, then it is true that they know ipso facto that my expectation is one which is fulfilled by the fact that the postman brings my mail. But they do not know ipso facto that it would be satisfied by Mr Smith the parson bringing my mail, since they might not know that Mr Smith the parson is a postman. And they would not fail to understand what an expectation is if they did not know this. So their lack of knowledge here would not be a failure to appreciate the grammar of ‘expectation’. It is rather a lack of knowledge of the world. Yet it is also a lack of knowledge of what would satisfy the expectation. Therefore the knowledge of what would satisfy the expectation that p cannot be restricted to the grammatical knowledge that the expectation simply is the expectation that p. The point can be put in another way. Wittgenstein’s answer in §437 to his own question about what makes a proposition true—‘Whence this determining of what is not yet there?’—seems to be this: the ‘determining’ of what is not there simply consists in the grammatical truth that ‘the

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thought that p is the thought that is made true by the fact that p’. But, as we have observed, the thought that p can be made true by the fact that q: and this is not a grammatical remark. It is for this reason that we must reject Wittgenstein’s view that ‘it is in language that an expectation and its fulfilment make contact’ (§445). I interpreted this remark as follows: rather than thinking of the fulfilment of an expectation in terms of a relation between something linguistic (the expression of an expectation) and something non-linguistic (the fact which fulfils it), we should see that this apparent ‘relation’ is just a shadow of the grammatical truth that ‘the expectation that p simply is the expectation that is fulfilled by the fact that p’. To say that the ‘contact’ is made ‘in language’ is another way of saying that the only ‘relation’ here is a grammatical one. Now I have just argued that the reason we should reject this claim of Wittgenstein’s is that we could be in a position where we know that the expectation that p is fulfilled by the fact that q, where the fact that p is not the fact that q, and where what we know when we know this is not a matter of grammar at all. Therefore there is more to the relation between an expectation and its fulfilment than grammar. And the same applies to the other examples discussed by Wittgenstein of the relation between thought and reality.

6 . CONC LU S ION

I have argued that the problem of the relationship between thought and reality is not solved by the method of grammatical investigation, or at least, not by the employment of the grammatical remarks used by Wittgenstein in the sections of the Philosophical Investigations I have considered. Hacker and his followers are wrong to think that these passages provide a dissolution of the problems of intentionality identified by Wittgenstein. No satisfactory general account of intentionality is offered here. If this argument is right, then we should be prepared to reconsider the idea that there might be something else that explains the connection, or apparent connection, between an expectation and what fulfils it, a proposition and what makes it true, an order and what executes it, and so on. This does not mean that we should return to the bad pictures discarded by Wittgenstein: that the expectation must ‘already contain’ what fulfils it, or that there is ‘hocus pocus in the soul’. And nor should we return to the idea,

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described by Hacker and others, that the only way for thought to genuinely concern an objective reality is for what you truly think to be identical with what is the case; for this would make falsehood impossible to understand. The very natural idea which was briefly mentioned in the previous section is the idea of representation. The statement of an order represents its execution, an expectation represents what is expected, a judgement represents what it judged, and so on. An appeal to the notion of representation is not supposed to be a solution to the problem of intentionality, since ‘representation’ is arguably just another word for the same phenomenon. (For instance, representation, like intentionality, is not a relation to its objects since one can represent what does not exist.) However, one of the lessons of the previous section is that it is hard to see how we can make any progress in even describing the phenomena if we cannot help ourselves to the concept of representation. Those who think that the idea of representation always implies interpretation, with the result that any commitment to mental representation is either ‘hocus pocus in the soul’ or involves a further commitment to a ‘homunculus’, will resist this appeal to mental representation as a foundational notion in the study of intentionality. But we can reject their assumption that representation always implies interpretation. And in doing so, we can take our inspiration from Wittgenstein himself. For just as he argued that to solve the rule-following paradox, we need to accept that ‘there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation’ (PI §201), so we can say, in a similar vein, that there is a way of representing the world which does not, itself, need interpretation.

* * * I am grateful to Hanoch Ben-Yami, Colin Johnston, and Marie McGinn for very helpful discussion of this subject. I am also grateful to Peter Hacker for correcting some misrepresentations of his views in the original version of this essay.

E S S AY F O U R

The Origins of Qualia

(2000)

1. TH E CONTE M P OR ARY M I N D - BODY PROB LE M

The mind-body problem in contemporary philosophy has two parts: the problem of mental causation and the problem of consciousness. These two parts are not unrelated; in fact, it can be helpful to see them as two horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, the causal interaction between mental and physical phenomena seems to require that all causally efficacious mental phenomena are physical; but on the other hand, the phenomenon of consciousness seems to entail that not all mental phenomena are physical.1 One may avoid this dilemma by adopting an epiphenomenalist view of consciousness, of course; but there is little independent reason for believing such a view. Rejecting epiphenomenalism, then, leaves contemporary philosophers with their problem: mental causation inclines them towards physicalism, while consciousness inclines them towards dualism. To accept that this is the way that the problem is generally conceived is not to accept that the problem has been well formulated. One may legitimately question the assumptions which give rise to the mental causation

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problem: for instance, what are the grounds for believing that anything that interacts with something physical must itself be physical? And how can we formulate a conception of the ‘physical’ which does not render the question trivial (as would be done by treating the physical as the causal)?2 However, as an account of the current state of the debate within contemporary philosophy of mind, the above description of the problem ought to be fairly uncontroversial. It is perhaps equally uncontroversial to say that while the problem of mental causation is regarded as a relatively ‘technical’ problem—whose solution requires only a more careful treatment of the notions of causation or physical realisation—the problem of consciousness is thought to be a deeper and more difficult problem for physicalists and non-physicalists alike. The problem is often expressed in terms of ‘qualia’: the ‘qualitative’ or ‘phenomenal’ features of conscious states of mind. How can a mere physical object, which we know a person to be, have states of mind with qualitative features or qualia? This question, which poses what David Chalmers calls the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, is supposed to be the real heart of the mind-body problem in today’s philosophy.3 As Jaegwon Kim puts it, ‘the stance you take on the problem of qualia [is] a decisive choice point with respect to the mind-body problem’.4 To have a clear understanding of this problem, we have to have a clear understanding of the notion of qualia. But despite the centrality of this notion in formulating this aspect of the mind-body problem, it seems to me that there is not a clear consensus about how the term ‘qualia’ should be understood, and to this extent the contemporary problem of consciousness is not well posed. The difficulty here can be vividly brought out at first by considering the fact that there seems to be a real dispute about whether qualia exist at all. Anyone with the slightest familiarity with the recent debate will be aware that some philosophers take the existence of qualia to be an obvious fact, while others deny their existence. So on the one hand, we find Ned Block responding to the question, ‘what is it that philosophers have called qualitative states?’ with the quip: ‘As Louis Armstrong said when asked what jazz is, “If you got to ask, you ain’t never gonna get to know’”.5 But on the other hand, we find Michael Tye (1992) and Gilbert Harman (1990) arguing that there are no qualia in visual experience, and Daniel Dennett denying the existence of any qualia whatsoever. In Consciousness Explained, Dennett says:

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Philosophers have adopted various names for the things in the beholder (or properties of the beholder) that have been supposed to provide a safe home for the colors and the rest of the properties that have been banished from the ‘external’ world by the triumphs of physics: ‘raw feels’, ‘sensa’ ‘phenomenal qualities’, ‘intrinsic properties of conscious experiences’, the ‘qualitative content of mental states’ and of course ‘qualia’ . . . There are subtle differences in how these terms have been defined, but . . . I am denying there are any such properties.6

At first sight, this dispute might seem to be a straightforward ontological matter, like a dispute about the existence of numbers or universals. But closer reflection shows that the dispute cannot be exactly like this, for the normal route to introducing numbers or universals into an ontology is that they explain some phenomenon which is agreed on all sides to exist and require an explanation: mathematical practice, or apparent sameness of kind. The claim is that we should believe in these entities because they explain the obvious truths about the ‘appearances’, broadly understood. But the truths about qualia, by contrast, are supposed to be truths about the appearances themselves, about how things seem to us in experience. And it is reasonable to expect that how things seem to us should not be a theoretical posit, but a pre-theoretical starting point: a point from which to embark on a debate, where things are relatively obvious to all its participants. This is clear from Block’s remark: that there are qualia is supposed to be something obvious, something whose existence a moment’s reflection on experience or consciousness is supposed to establish. A theory of consciousness is a theory of qualia: qualia are the data to be explained by a theory of consciousness. A similar approach is taken by Kim and Chalmers. Yet Dennett, Tye and Harman take themselves to be giving theories of experience while denying the existence of qualia (or at least of qualia of a certain kind). And Fred Dretske and W. G. Lycan argue, against Block, that qualia should be conceived as intentional states.7 Furthermore, Tye and Harman argue against qualia by reflecting on experience and claiming that it is obvious that there are no such things as qualia in perceptual experience. What Block claims obviously exist Tye and Harman claim obviously do not exist. What is going on? How can there be such extreme disagreement about what is obvious?8 The aim of this essay is to gain an understanding of this dispute by examining some of its historical origins in twentieth-century philosophy. In particular, I shall be concerned with the origins of the terms ‘quale’ and ‘qualia’

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and with how these terms became central in the formulation of the mindbody problem. I shall claim that the debate will not be advanced by ‘focussing inwards’ (to use a phrase of Colin McGinn’s) and swapping intuitions about what is obvious. Rather, we should try and make progress by understanding how the term ‘qualia’ (the concept of qualia) has entered the debate, by trying to see what role the term was introduced to play and for what purpose, and how this purpose may or may not differ from the purposes of contemporary disputants. The question on which I want to focus is: what was the original point of talking in terms of qualia, and does this point differ from the point which contemporary philosophers are trying to make by using the term? I begin by examining a connection between the dispute about qualia and a dispute which many would now consider defunct: the debate over sensedata in the philosophy of perception. I argue that a similar puzzle arises there as arises over qualia, and that the solution to the puzzle gives the resources to suggest, in broad outline, how the dispute over qualia may be resolved. Section 3 then gives an account of the origin of the notion of qualia and its relation to the notion of sense-data. I claim that in the philosophy of mind of the first half of this century, qualia and sense-data play similar roles: sensedata are objects of experience and qualia their properties. In Section 4, I explain how qualia came to play a different role in subsequent discussions of the mind-body problem: rather than being properties of the objects of experience, they became properties of the experiences themselves. Section 5 outlines why this change took place, and suggests the conclusion that the most plausible conception of qualia in contemporary philosophy is an intentionalist one (or, better, a conception which rejects qualia as they are normally understood). This final conclusion is, strictly speaking, independent of the investigation into the origins of qualia—but I nonetheless believe that the proper lesson of the historical investigation is that to appreciate the origins of qualia is to appreciate why we no longer need to talk in terms of them.

2 . TH E ORIG I N S OF S E N S E- DATA

The idea that perceptual experience involves awareness of sense-data was a dominant theme in discussions of perception and epistemology in the first half of this century.9 In contemporary discussion, by contrast, little attention is paid to the idea of sense-data, or to the question to which they were

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supposed to provide an answer, ‘what are the direct objects of perception?’10 But it has not been sufficiently noted that a puzzle emerged about sense-data that is closely parallel to the puzzle noted above about qualia. In an essay published in 1936, called ‘Is There a Problem about Sense-Data?’, G.  A. Paul remarked that “Some people have claimed that they are unable to find such an object [as a sense-datum] and others have claimed that they do not understand how the existence of such an object can be doubted.”11 Sense-data were supposed to be the immediate objects of experience. So conceived, our awareness of sense-data are among those facts about experience which are open to philosophical reflection, rather than scientific theorising. One would expect, then, that awareness of sense-data is something that can be gleaned from thinking about ‘what it is like’ to have an experience, in Nagel’s phrase. Since facts about what it is like to have experience ought, on the face of it, be obvious to us, or obvious on reflection, then the existence of sense-data ought to be obvious to us. If this is so, then how can the situation described by Paul arise? How can it be that some philosophers deny that they find sense-data in their experiences, and others claim that it is obvious—it cannot be denied—that there are sense-data? This is the puzzle, parallel to our puzzle about qualia, towards which Paul’s remark points. To solve this puzzle, we need to know more about the role of the concept of sense-data in the philosophy of the early twentieth century. Many students of philosophy first encounter the sense-datum theory of perception in the opening chapters of Russell’s 1912 The Problems of Philosophy. Like much in Russell’s philosophy of this period, the doctrines advanced in these chapters reflect strongly the influence of G. E. Moore.12 And it was Moore who was the first to introduce the term ‘sense-data’ into philosophy, in his 1910–1911 lectures called Some Main Problems of Philosophy.13 But there is a difference in the way that Moore thought of sense-data, and the way they have come to be conceived in the later philosophical discussion. In contemporary discussions, the sense-datum theory of perception is often put forward only to be refuted by the manifest absurdity of its commitment to mysterious non-physical objects, the sense-data of which we are supposedly aware.14 This commitment was influentially criticised by J. L. Austin,15 and would be rejected by many naturalistic philosophers today on broadly metaphysical grounds. Now certainly, the idea of being aware of (and therefore causally affected by) non-physical objects seems to be suggested by Russell’s account in the Problems. But in his initial discussions, Moore did not introduce the term

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as having this meaning. In his 1910–1911 lectures, Moore defines the term ‘sense-data’ by using an example of looking at a white envelope. He then claims that what are seen are patches of colour and shapes: These things: this patch of a whitish colour, and its size and shape I did actually see. And I propose to call these things, the colour and size and shape, sense-data, things given or presented to the senses.16

Moore commented much later (1952) that he should have called the patch the sense-datum, and not the properties of the patch—the colours are properties of the particular patch. In another lecture in the 1910–1911 series, Moore employs a similar strategy. In asking us to look at a pencil, he says that what you ‘directly apprehend’ is ‘a patch of brownish colour, bounded on two sides by fairly long parallel straight lines’. These coloured patches are the sense-data you see.17 Moore distinguishes between the sense-datum, which is given to the mind, and the sensation, which is the act or event of being aware of the datum. (This is what used to be called an ‘act-object’ conception of experience.) Having made this distinction, we can see that two possibilities emerge within the terms of the definition put forward so far. One is that sense-data are mind-independent objects presented in experience. The other is that sense-data are not mind-independent objects. Are sense-data objects of the first kind, or of the second? Moore’s answer to this question oscillates throughout all his discussions of perception. In his 1910–1911 lectures, he denies that sense-data are ordinary material objects, since while two people can see the same object, no two people can sense the same sense-datum.18 This suggests an indirect realist account of perception: sense-data, non-physical objects, are the immediate objects of experience in virtue of which we are aware of physical objects. But, in a 1918–1919 essay, ‘Some Judgements of Perception’, we find him reverting to a direct realism (at least about the objects of perception if not how they appear). Perhaps because of this oscillation, Moore’s first attempts to define sensedata did not meet with universal acceptance.19 So in a later essay, ‘A Defence of Common Sense’ (1925) he attempts to define them again in terms that should be so uncontroversial that ‘there is no doubt at all that there are sense-data, in the sense in which I am now using that term’.20 Again, his method is ostensive:

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In order to point out to the reader what sort of things I mean by sense-data, I need only ask him to look at his own right hand. If he does this he will be able to pick out something . . . with regard to which he will see that . . . it is a natural view to take that that thing is identical, not, indeed, with his whole right hand, but with that part of his surface which he is actually seeing, but will also (on a little reflection) be able to see that it is doubtful whether it can be identical with the part of the surface of his hand in question. Things of the sort (in a certain respect) of which this thing is, which he sees in looking at his hand, and with regard to which he can understand how some philosophers should have supposed it to be the part of the surface of his hand which he is seeing, while others have supposed that it can’t be, are what I mean by ‘sense-data’.21

Moore adds that he meant to define the term in such a way that it should be an open question whether or not the sense-datum is identical with part of the surface of his hand. This attempt to clarify the position was famously criticised by O.  K. Bouwsma on the grounds that the procedure cannot identify sense-data in this neutral way unless we already have Moore’s conception of what sense-data are.22 If we follow Moore’s instructions and pick out the surface of our right hand, we will not be able to doubt whether the thing we have picked out is the surface of our right hand unless we have already picked it out as something which might not be the surface of our right hand: that is, as a sense-datum. It is Moore’s conception of sense-data which is driving the possibility of doubt, not vice versa. However, Bowsma misses Moore’s point. What Moore is trying to do in this passage, as the last quote makes plain, is to bring out the sense in which (almost) all philosophers have agreed on something. They have disagreed about whether one sees the surface of one’s hand: some say that what is seen is the surface of one’s hand, others deny that it is the surface of one’s hand. But what is the ‘it’ I am talking about when I say that others ‘deny that it is the surface of one’s hand’? The ‘it’ is what Moore means by sense-data: the object of experience, whatever it is. All one needs to do to understand this definition of Moore’s is to understand how a philosopher might doubt that what one sees when one seems to see the surface of one’s hand is indeed the surface of one’s hand. To do this is not to propose any particular philosophical theory about the object: it is just to entertain the idea of an object of experience. The matter becomes clearer when we consider H.  H. Price’s views in Perception (1932). Price, who had attended Moore’s lectures in Cambridge, introduces the notion of sense-data in Moore’s way:

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The term sense-datum is meant to be a neutral term . . . The term is meant to stand for something whose existence is indubitable (however fleeting) something from which all theories of perception ought to start.23

To illustrate what kind of things these are whose existence is indubitable, Price introduced the example of seeing a tomato: When I see a tomato there is much that I can doubt. I can doubt whether it is a tomato I am seeing, and not a cleverly painted piece of wax. I can doubt whether there is a material thing there at all . . . One thing however I cannot doubt: that there exists a red patch of a round and somewhat bulgy shape, standing out from a background of other colour-patches, and having a certain visual depth, and that this whole field of colour is presented to my consciousness . . . that something is red and round then and there I cannot doubt . . . that it now exists and that I am conscious of it—by me at least who am conscious of it this cannot possibly be doubted . . . This peculiar and ultimate manner of being present to consciousness is called being given, and that which is thus present is called a datum.24

Price points out here that what can be doubted here is that it is a tomato I am seeing, or that the thing is a material object. But what cannot be doubted is that there is something red and round which I am seeing. Like Moore, then, Price introduces his reader to the idea of sense-data as the entities, whatever they are, which are present to consciousness in experience in this ‘peculiar and ultimate manner’. Since J. L. Austin’s criticism of the sense-datum theory in Sense and Sensibilia (1962) it has become common to attribute the errors of the sense-datum theory to foundationalist, infallibilist epistemology: sense-datum theorists were trying to find the certain basis of all knowledge.25 And the conclusion is drawn from this that once we dispense with these epistemological requirements, the motivation to posit sense-data evaporates. But, as M. G. F. Martin has made clear, the natural interpretation of the passage from Price does not require attributing to him these epistemological motives.26 Price’s point is essentially the same as Moore’s: that perception presents us with something, something is given to us—this something is the given. Price distinguishes two methods by which we may distinguish different senses of the given, the physiological and the immanent or phenomenological. The physiological enquiry into perception delivers the given in a

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causal sense: the immediate causal precursors of experience. The immanent method delivers the given in the phenomenological sense: ‘what is given to consciousness or presented to the mind’. Price’s point, then, is that perceptual experience is relational: experience relates us to something which is given to us.27 Among recent writers, Howard Robinson endorses this view in what he calls his ‘Phenomenal Principle’: that when one has a sensory experience as of something being F, there is something F which one is experiencing.28 Now this principle may be controversial—and we shall find reasons for doubting it—but it is not controversial because it entails a foundationalist infallibilist epistemology or an attempt to refute scepticism. And if we compare Robinson’s Phenomenal Principle with Moore’s and Price’s remarks about sense-data, it is plain that Robinson is essentially following through the same lines of thought as they were.29 C. D Broad argued along the same lines that when we approach perception from what he calls the ‘purely phenomenological point of view’, perception is ‘ostensibly prehensive of the surfaces of distant bodies as coloured and extended’.30 Now Price thought it a ‘gross absurdity’ to suppose that the existence of sense-data depend on our awareness of them.31 But nonetheless, he could not straightforwardly identify sense-data with material objects or their surfaces. The reason comes from the essential consideration underlying the argument from illusion: if my experience could be the same even if the material object of the experience did not exist, then the material object is not essential to the experience. But since it is indubitable that experience is relational, that all experiences have objects, then the objects of experience are not material objects. And since what is present to our minds does not exist in our minds, then we are led to the conclusion that sense-data are non-mental, non-physical objects. The argument involves many steps and many assumptions, and it is not my aim to discuss it in detail here. The important point at this stage is that the argument which leads sense-data theorists to the idea that sense-data are non-physical objects is a further step, further to the introduction of the idea of sense-data itself. This brief survey has given us enough material to solve the puzzle in Paul’s article. What Moore and Price think is obvious is that, phenomenologically, perception has a relational character: that experience involves being given something. To this extent, they think that the existence of sense-data cannot be denied. But a more demanding conception of sense-data arises from

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reflection on how to reconcile the idea that experience is relational with the apparent possibility that a perceiver could be in an indistinguishable mental state from a perception of a mind-independent object, and yet the mind-independent object not exist. If we allow this possibility, and we hold that experience is relational, then it is a short step to admitting that what is given cannot be a mind-independent object. Since the experience is qualitatively identical in both cases, the conclusion is drawn that the object of the experience is the same in both cases—assuming, of course, that the nature of the experience supervenes on the nature of its objects. And it is this conception of sense-data as objects which the opponents of sense-data claim not to be able to find in experience. In short, when Moore and Price say that the existence of sense-data cannot be denied, what they mean is that it cannot be denied that experience is relational. But when the critics of sense-data say they cannot find sense-data in experience, they are questioning the existence of sense-data in the more demanding sense, the sense which is generated by the conception of experience as relational plus the argument from illusion. This, it seems to me, is the solution to the puzzle posed by G. A. Paul’s remarks.32 In fact, it can be denied that experience is relational. This is, after all, what an ‘adverbial’ theory of perception says. An adverbialist holds the qualities sensed in experience to be modifications of experience itself: sensing a blue patch ought to be understood as sensing bluely. This theory does deny what Moore and Price take to be obvious. But it is not hard to understand how such a theory could have arisen out of a resistance to sense-data in the demanding sense: since it is absurd to suppose that there are such strange objects outside the mind, the distinctions in experience which these objects are supposed to mark must really be modifications of the experiences themselves.33 As we shall see, a similar distinction—between those who think that differences between experiences are explained in terms of differences in their objects, and those who think that some such differences are explained in terms of differences in properties of the experiences—will be what provides the key to the puzzle about qualia posed in Section 1. This should not be surprising if I am right in my claim that sense-data and qualia were introduced to play very similar roles. I shall attempt to argue for this claim in the next section.

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3. TH E ORIG I N S OF Q UALIA

While sense-data are largely a British invention, it is American philosophy which can lay claim to the invention of qualia. The first philosopher to use terms ‘quale’ and ‘qualia’ in something like its modern sense was C. S. Peirce. When Peirce wrote in 1866 that ‘there is a distinctive quale to every combination of sensation . . . a peculiar quale to every day and every week—a peculiar quale to my whole personal consciousness’, he was talking about what experience is like, in a general sense, not restricted to the qualia of experience in the sense in which it is normally meant today.34 William James occasionally used the term specifically to discuss sensation, but as far as I can see the term had no special technical significance in his philosophy or psychology.35 The term is occasionally used by some of the so-called New Realists: for instance, we find R. B. Perry talking of ‘sensory qualia which are localisable in the body’ but as with James the term means little more than ‘sensation’.36 It is fairly clear that the chief source of the technical use of the term ‘qualia’ is C. I. Lewis’s discussion in Mind and the World Order (1929).37 The theme of this work is to reconcile what Lewis saw to be correct in the idealism of those such as Royce, who held that experience always involves interpretation or conceptualisation, and the realism of his day, which held (along with Russell and Moore) that whatever the mind grasps must be independent of the mind. The basis of Lewis’s reconciliation is a distinction between two elements in our cognitive lives: the immediate data ‘which are presented or given to the mind’ and the ‘construction or interpretation’ which the mind brings to those data.38 Lewis rejects the idealist critique that any experience is so entirely conceptualised that there is no non-conceptualised core: The distinction between this element of interpretation and the given is emphasised by the fact that the latter is what remains unaltered, no matter what our interests, no matter what we think or conceive. (p. 52)

But the fact that there is this unaltered ‘given’ does not entail that we are able to describe it, since ‘in describing it . . . we qualify it by bringing it under some category or other, select from it, emphasise aspects of it, and

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relate it in particular and unavoidable ways’ (p.  52). So the given is in a sense ineffable: The absolutely given is a specious present, fading into the past and growing into the future with no genuine boundaries. The breaking of this up into the presentation of things marks already the activity of an interested mind. (p. 58)

Having made this claim, however, Lewis then goes on to say a little more about what it is that is given: In any presentation, this content is either a specific quale (such as the immediacy of redness or loudness) or something analyzable into a complex of such. The presentation as an event is, of course, unique, but the qualia which make it up are not. They are recognisable from one to another experience. (p. 60)

Qualia, then, are properties of what is given. However, although they are universals, since they can re-occur in distinct experiences (p.  121), qualia should not be confused with the objective properties of objects in the external world. The critical realists—R. W. Sellars, C. A. Strong, together with C. D. Broad—are criticised for making this confusion. Lewis’s reasons for distinguishing qualia from objective properties are that objective properties are always more complex in nature than qualia, and their existence extends beyond the specious present. The same objective property, for instance blueness, can give rise to many different colour qualia in different situations (p. 121). It is the confusion between properties of objects and qualia that gives rise, in Lewis’s view, to the absurdity of the idea of unsensed sensa—a problematic idea with which those in the sense-data tradition struggled. Objective properties are what we have knowledge of; we have no knowledge of qualia since ‘knowledge always transcends the immediately given’ (p. 132). How then does Lewis allow himself to talk of the ‘immediacy of redness or loudness’ as qualia? His answer reveals a commitment to the possibility of inverted qualia: Qualia are subjective; they have no names in ordinary discourse but are indicated by some circumlocution such as ‘looks like’ . . . All that can be done to designate a quale is, so to speak, to locate it in experience, that is, to designate the conditions of its recurrence or other relations of it. Such location does not touch the quale itself; if one such could be lifted out of

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the network of its relations, in the total experience of the individual, and replaced by another, no social interest or interest of action would be affected by such substitution. (p. 124)

We can talk about qualia, then, by comparing them to properties in the world and by locating them in terms of their relations to what brings them about. But our access to qualia in this way will be inevitably indirect. Qualia are properties, then; but what are they properties of? They cannot be properties of material objects for the reason stated. Lewis’s answer is they are properties of an event, the event which is the ‘presentation of the given’ (p.  60). Qualia are the ‘recognisable qualitative characters of the given’ (p. 121). Lewis actually says that ‘what is given may exist outside the mind—that question should not be prejudiced’ (p. 64). Initially, it is hard to square this thought with the idea that qualia are ‘subjective’ (p. 124). However, Lewis’s remarks could be defended on the grounds that exists outside the mind does not entail mind-independent. An object may be mind-dependent even though it exists outside the mind: it may be an object of awareness, distinct from the state of mind which is the awareness of it, which is brought into existence by the state of awareness itself. This recalls the conception of sense-data as the given: non-physical, non-mental items which are present to the mind in experience. So what actually is the difference between qualia and sense-data? As we have noticed, one difference is simply a difference in metaphysical category: qualia are properties (so, universals) and sense-data are particulars. But this need not be significant, since sense-data have properties too, and qualia are the properties of a particular, the given. What exactly would be wrong with an interpretation of qualia- and sense-datum theories which treats sense-datum as the given, and qualia as the properties of the given? Many of Lewis’s contemporaries and commentators saw the matter that way. E. M. Adams explicitly identifies sense-data and qualia (though, as we have seen, this is to confuse particulars and universals) and Lewis’s student Roderick Firth straightforwardly asserts that Lewis was a sense-datum theorist.39 This interpretation is to true to the common meaning of ‘datum’ and ‘given’: after all, and Lewis clearly would reject an adverbialist conception of experience. Both Lewis and the sense-data theorists emphasise the given element in experience, and like Price, Lewis finds it to be a plain fact about conscious experience that something is given in experience. As he

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says, ‘no-one but a philosopher could for a moment deny this immediate presence in consciousness of that which no activity of thought can create or alter’ (p. 53).40 However, the identification of qualia with the properties of sense-data would be resisted by many contemporary philosophers who are happy to accept qualia (in their sense) but will have nothing to do with sense-data, or even the given in any form. Many of these philosophers would agree with the view Firth attributes to Lewis: Lewis never makes the mistake that Thomas Reid so eloquently charged to Descartes and the British Empiricists—the mistake of treating sense-experience as the object of perception.41

The point attributed here to Reid became a common criticism of sense-data theories: we do have sensations in perception, the objection runs, but that does not mean we perceive those sensations. Rather we perceive objects by having sensations—that is the only role of sensation in perception. Now it is true that Lewis will not say that we perceive experiences, since an experience is the state of being aware of the given. But we are aware of the given: the given is not a sensation, but this is not a reason for saying it is not a sense-datum. The criticism of sense-data theories just mentioned misses the point, since as we saw with Moore and Price, sense-datum theories are careful to distinguish the sense-datum from the ‘act’ of sensing it. They are not committed to the view that we ‘see sensations’. The heart of the matter, it seems to me, is this. Lewis’s qualia-theory and the sense-datum theory resemble each other in their central claim: that in experience, something is given. They differ in that Lewis thinks that the qualitative properties of experience are in a sense ineffable, and can only be indirectly described; but in the context of their common commitment to the given, this is a relatively unimportant disagreement. As far as the core commitments of the two theories go, it would not mislead to say that the given is a sense-datum, and qualia are its properties. There is a radical difference in contemporary philosophers’ attitude to qualia and their attitude to sense-data. Contemporary philosophers are fairly unanimous in their rejection of sense-data. The idea that experience is not awareness of non-physical objects is thought to be an out-dated product of a discredited epistemology and philosophy of mind. But it is perhaps

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equally clear that there are as many contemporary philosophers who accept the existence of qualia as there are those who reject sense-data. Sense-data are the product of confusion; qualia, on the other hand, are troublesome but undeniable features of our experience of which we have to give a physicalist or naturalist account. What has all this got to do with the mind-body problem? Lewis and Goodman both had theories in which qualia play an important role; but they did not see this as relevant to the question of the relationship between mind and body. We can trace the explicit interest in the bearing of qualia on this relationship to Herbert Feigl’s 1958 essay, The ‘Mental’ and the ‘Physical’.42 Feigl accepts the ‘very persuasive arguments [which] point simply to the existence .  .  . of immediate experience, i.e. the raw feels or hard data of the immediately given’.43 But he explicitly distinguishes his own form of empiricism from C. I. Lewis’s epistemology, ‘according to which physical knowledge concerns only the form or structure of events in the universe, whereas acquaintance concerns the contents or qualia of existence’.44 The difference is that whereas Lewis denied that qualia can be known at all, Feigl thought that they could be known by acquaintance (for Lewis, acquaintance is not a form of knowledge). The given element in immediate experience gives rise to the mind-body problem: for having allowed that there can be knowledge of qualia, Feigl explicitly states what has now become known as the ‘knowledge argument’ (though he does not, of course, draw the conclusion that physicalism is false). This gives us one link between Lewis’s conception of qualia and the current ‘problem of qualia’ for physicalism. But given the many ways that the term ‘qualia’ has been used, do we have any firmer analytic reasons to suppose that the qualia which pose the problem for physicalism are the qualia which are the properties of sense-data or the given? I think there is, but teasing out the connection is a little complex: this is the task of the next section.

4. TH E CONTE M P OR ARY PROB LE M OF Q UALIA

When qualia are discussed in contemporary philosophy, how are they being conceived? As might be expected, there is not one answer to this question, since in the contemporary debate, the term ‘qualia’ is used in a number of different ways. Dennett says ‘qualia are supposed to be properties of a

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subject’s mental states that are 1. ineffable; 2. intrinsic; 3. private; 4. directly or immediately apprehensible in experience’45 Sydney Shoemaker describes the objection that functionalism cannot account for qualia as substantially the same as the objection that functionalism ‘cannot account for the “raw feel” component of mental states, or for their “internal” or “phenomenological” character’.46 And Scott Sturgeon has said that qualia are just those properties in virtue of which the experience has the conscious subjective character it has.47 Frank Jackson and David Braddon-Mitchell distinguish the use of the word ‘qualia’ to denote non-physical properties of the mind (according to which the existence of qualia is incompatible with physicalism) and the use of the word to denote intrinsic non-functional properties (according to which the existence of qualia is incompatible with functionalism).48 And M. G. F. Martin distinguishes (in the contemporary debate) between qualia as conceived as properties of experiences, and qualia conceived as apparent properties of the objects of the experiences.49 What should we make of these very different uses of the term? The first thing to notice is that the variety of uses provides us with a straightforward way of solving the puzzle of Section 1, in a parallel way to the solution provided with sense-data. As with sense-data, there is a relatively innocuous sense of ‘qualia’ (roughly, Sturgeon’s) where for a state to have qualia is just for it to be a conscious state. In this sense, Block is right that the existence of qualia cannot be denied. But if qualia are the things Dennett and Jackson/ Braddon-Mitchell are talking about, qualia in the more demanding sense, then it is not obvious that there are qualia. This predictable solution to our puzzle parallels the solution for sense-data. Solving this puzzle, however, does not resolve the substantial debate. For we still need to know what qualia in the more demanding sense are, and whether there are any such things. Here, since the mind-body problem is our concern, we should follow the link I made above between Feigl and C. I. Lewis, and ask: which notion of qualia is important for understanding their role in the mind-body problem? When Frank Jackson said that he is a ‘qualia freak’ and went on to argue that the existence of qualia presents a problem for physicalism, what did he mean by ‘qualia’? We can address this question by asking what qualia would have to be for qualia-based objections to physicalism to succeed.50 For the main role which qualia play in contemporary debate is as the source of the central objection to physicalism: that physicalism cannot account for qualia.

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An argument against physicalism which simply appealed to the existence of certain mental states (e.g., sensations) and then claimed that physicalism could not ‘account’ for these states is not an argument which should trouble physicalism. As David Lewis has put it, in discussing the sensation of pain, Pain is a feeling. To have pain and to feel pain are one and the same. For a state to be pain and for it to feel painful are likewise one and the same. A theory of what it is for a state to be pain is inescapably a theory of what it is like to be in that state, of how that state feels, of the phenomenal character of that state . . . Only if you believe on independent grounds that considerations of causal role and physical realisation have no bearing on whether a state is pain should you say that they have no bearing on how that state feels.51

The mere assertion that a physicalist cannot identify a supposed qualitative state with a brain state is not an objection, but a straightforward denial of physicalism. To put the point in this way is to beg the question. Jackson’s well-known knowledge argument, however, does not beg the question in this way against physicalism. The question it raises (as Lewis goes on to note in a postscript to the essay just quoted) is Feigl’s question: whether physicalism can account for our knowledge of qualia, and the answer it gives is that physicalism cannot do so, and that (surprisingly) there are therefore non-physical facts. The argument starts with a thought-experiment involving a person, Mary, who is virtually omniscient about colour and colour vision, who has lived all her life in a black-and-white room, and has done all her learning there. When she leaves her room and sees something red for the first time, she comes to know something new: what it is like to see red. Let us call this knowledge of the qualia of red. Jackson argues that if you cannot know about qualia no matter what knowledge you have of the physical facts, then knowledge of qualia cannot be the same as knowledge of anything physical. So if facts are simply identified as the objects of knowledge, facts about qualia cannot be physical facts. I am not concerned here with whether the knowledge argument is successful, or with the physicalist responses to the argument. I am only concerned here with what has to be assumed about qualia if the argument is going to stand a chance of succeeding. For this will tell us what qualia are, insofar as qualia are intended to present a problem for physicalism. To begin

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with, we can ask what knowledge of qualia is supposed to be being contrasted with. We are told that Mary knows all the physical facts, so it might be thought that the contrast is between knowing everything physical, and knowing something non-physical. Hence the relevance of the conclusion to the truth of physicalism. But in fact, if the reasoning is sound, the conclusion is not just that physicalism is false, but something stronger. For it is not directly relevant that the knowledge which one acquires about colours inside Jackson’s black-and-white room is stated in the language of physics— or even in the language of physics plus physiology. What is relevant is that the knowledge can be stated at all: what one learns in the black-and-white room is just knowledge which can be stated in some form or another. As David Lewis says, ‘our intuitive starting point wasn’t just that physics lessons couldn’t help the inexperienced to know what it is like. It was that lessons couldn’t help’.52 This tells us something about what ‘physical facts’ are, for the purposes of the knowledge argument: they are anything which could be learned in the black-and-white room. So what about qualia? A first conjecture might be that qualia are those properties knowledge of which requires experience of them. But this is not quite right: redness may be a property full knowledge of which requires experience; but one can learn about redness in the black-and-white room (one can learn, for instance, that tomatoes are red). What has one still to learn by experience? What is left out? The answer is obvious, but in this context unhelpful: knowledge of what red is like. To say that this is knowledge that cannot be imparted through any lessons only tells us about the knowledge, it does not tell us about what the knowledge is knowledge of. What is it knowledge of? It is plain that the knowledge is knowledge of a property, since many people can know what red is like. So using ‘qualia’ just to mean the properties which can only be known by experiencing them, we can ask: what are qualia properties of? Many philosophers assume that they are properties of experiences.53 But this does not follow from the fact that knowledge of them requires experience. One could say that colours are properties of public material objects, but they are properties which can only be fully understood when experienced. If fully understanding something is understanding all its properties, then understanding a property P is understanding P’s own properties. So on this view, the qualia of red—i.e., what one has to experience in order to fully understand red—are properties of properties. A red quale is a property of red. The lesson of the knowledge argument on this view is

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that there are certain properties of colours which can only be learned about through experience. This is not the only possible view, of course. I mention it here only to point out that it does not follow that just because one needs experience to know X, that X is a property of one’s mind. The fact is, as Martin has pointed out, that expressions like ‘how something looks to you’ hide an ambiguity. The ambiguity is between: —how it is with you when you are looking at something and —how that something appears to be when you are looking at it.54 As Martin shows, when Dennett says that qualia are ‘how things seem to you’ and then goes on to identify the reference of this phrase with properties of experiences (only in order to deny the existence of such properties, of course) then he is taking the phrase only in the first way. And when a representationalist like Lycan or Dretske identifies qualia with represented properties, they are using the phrase in the second sense. In the first sense, qualia are properties of experiences; in the second sense, qualia are properties of mind-independent properties. Dennett’s claim that qualia are the ‘very properties the appreciation of which permits us to identify our conscious states’55 only serves to keep the distinction blurred. But the qualia of the knowledge argument (call these properties ‘K-qualia’ for convenience) cannot be straightforwardly identified with qualia in either of these senses, to the exclusion of the other. All that K-qualia need to be is properties (of properties) which can only be known by experience of those properties. ‘How red looks’ or ‘what it is like to see red’ could pick out properties of redness, or properties of the experience of seeing red. Whether or not the argument succeeds does not depend on which of these understandings of ‘qualia’ we choose. It just affects the conclusion we draw: we might say that, amazingly enough, there are properties of some physical properties which are beyond the reach of objective science; or we might say that, amazingly enough, there are properties of some mental properties which are beyond the reach of objective science. The term ‘quale’ is neutral, then, in the role it plays in the knowledge argument, between being a property-of-a-mind-independent property,

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and property-of-a-mental-property. It is also neutral, as should be obvious, between the question of whether qualia are intentional or non-intentional. For suppose we assume intentionalism: that all mental properties are intentional.56 This does not itself block either the soundness or the validity of the knowledge argument: the conclusion is that there are some intentional properties (representing redness by experiencing it) which are inaccessible to objective science. An intentionalist could endorse this conclusion. Assume the denial of intentionalism, and the argument’s conclusion is equally unaffected. The generality of the knowledge argument’s conception of qualia might help explain the pervasive appeal of the argument, and explain too why it is that the argument seems so hard to refute. But just as most interpreters have taken the target of the argument as physicalism narrowly conceived—i.e., all facts are physical or physiological—so they have taken K-qualia in one particular way—as properties of experience. In itself, there is nothing wrong with this: all I have said so far is that this would have to be justified on grounds independent of the actual argument. This does raise another question, though: what are these grounds? Why has it become so standard to take qualia as properties of experiences? In the next section I shall attempt to answer this question.

5. Q UA LI A A S PRO PE RTI E S O F E X PE R I E N C E

It is not at all obvious that when we learn what it is like to taste retsina, we are learning about a property of an experience. Is it not slightly more obvious, at least at first sight, that we are learning something about retsina: viz., what it tastes like, or what it is like to taste it? Yet many philosophers do take such knowledge to be obvious.57 This just illustrates, once again, the puzzle with which we started: appealing to the obvious at this stage makes progress impossible. So if we cannot appeal to what is obvious, how should we proceed? We want to understand why contemporary philosophers take K-qualia to be properties of experience. Many current diagnoses of this view, however, are as unsatisfactory as the appeal to the obvious itself, in that they account for philosophers’ adoption of the view in terms of pathological intellectual urges or simple errors. Dennett, for example, has offered two such diagnoses of the urge to posit qualia as properties of experience. The first is in terms

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of ‘the seductive step, on learning that public redness .  .  . is a relational property after all is to cling to [its] intrinsicality . . . and move it into the subject’s head’. The second diagnosis is an equally unthinking resistance to physicalism: ‘qualia seem to many people to be the last ditch defense of the inwardness and elusiveness of our minds, a bulwark against creeping mechanism . . . otherwise their last bastion of specialness will be stormed by science’.58 Neither of these diagnoses, it seems to me, gets to the heart of the matter. The first diagnosis has no explanation of why someone subject to this illusion should want to ‘cling to the intrinsicality of redness’. When someone learns that weight is a relational property, there is no parallel urge to ‘cling to its intrinsicality’, despite the fact that weight hardly seems relational. So what is so special about redness? The diagnosis does not say. The second diagnosis, on the other hand, leaves it utterly mysterious why physicalists should affirm the existence of qualia, conceived of as properties of experience, regardless of whether they feel troubled by them.59 So what is the reason to believe that qualia are properties of experience? This is where matters can be illuminated by returning to the origins of the idea of qualia. For there is a parallel here with the discussions of C. I. Lewis and the sense-data theorists. On Lewis’s conception, qualia are a kind of K-qualia: they can only be known through experience. As we saw above, Lewis’s qualia can be conceptualised, but this only gets at their nature ‘indirectly’. So someone in the black-and-white room is someone who cannot really understand which subjective qualia are being denoted by the term ‘red’. (This is true for Feigl too, for obvious reasons: qualia or raw feels can only be known through acquaintance.) But Lewis denies that learning about K-qualia is learning about the higher-order properties of objective properties (i.e., what they look like). As noted above, he denies this partly because objective properties (e.g., the surface properties of objects in virtue of which they are red) are more complex in nature than simple qualia, and partly because the same objective property can give rise to distinct qualia (remember that he endorsed the inverted spectrum possibility). So Lewis’s qualia are not properties of public objects or objective properties. But Lewis, like Price after him, does not thereby infer that they are properties of states of mind. Rather, they are properties of an event, the event which is the presentation of the given—a ‘phenomenal individual’. As I noted at the end of Section 3 above, it is would not be misleading to call this individual a sense-datum.

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These reasons for denying that qualia are objective properties parallel (to a certain extent) the reasons of those who are reluctant to identify colours in any straightforward way with surface properties of objects. First, it is widely held that the properties of objects which are responsible for colour experience (or K-qualia) do not stand in any simple correlation with perceived colours. This does not stop us from identifying colours with these properties in a more sophisticated way, but we have to concede if we do this that either these properties will be lacking in the simplicity which perceived ‘phenomenal’ colour has (perhaps they will be so-called disjunctive properties60) or we will often be in error about the nature of the properties.61 Although some of the details differ, the reasoning here is parallel to Lewis’s reasoning about why qualia are not properties of public, objective properties. The second reason for refusing to identify qualia with properties of objects derives from the inverted qualia thought-experiment.62 Some have argued that if it is possible for a person A seeing red to have an experience with the same K-qualitative character as person B has when they see green, when both A and B are looking at physically identical objects, then the difference in their experience cannot be a difference in the objects. Therefore K-qualia, whatever they are, are not properties of public objects, and nor are they properties of those properties. This parallels Lewis’s acceptance of the inverted qualia hypothesis, and his view that locating a quale relationally ‘does not touch the quale itself’. But even if both these lines of argument are sound, they do not entail that K-qualia are properties of experiences, without some further assumption. The most they establish is that K-qualia are not properties (first- or second-order properties) of public, physical objects. For all that has been said, K-qualia could be properties of non-physical, non-mental objects: sensedata, the given, on the Price/Lewis conception of them. However, few philosophers these days take the idea of such objects seriously.63 The naturalism which has dominated philosophy in the last forty or so years has removed sense-data theories such as Price’s from the philosophical agenda: even raising the question of committing oneself to these objects would be, in effect, to raise the question of the adequacy of the methodology of current science. I am not recommending bringing these theories back for serious consideration. I mention their departure from the range of acceptable theories here just to fill the gap in the argument which leads to accepting K-qualia as features of experience. For contemporary

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thinkers, to deny that qualia are properties of physical objects leaves them with no alternative to thinking that K-qualia are properties of experience. No matter how complex the physical properties which are causally responsible for colour experience, the properties of the experience—phenomenal red—are perceptibly simple. It turns out, then, that when one is aware of a red thing in experience, one is also aware—in some sense—of a feature of one’s experience. But merely to say this does not settle the question about the nature of this feature. This brings us to the next distinction in the use of the term ‘qualia’ mentioned in Section 4 above: qualia conceived either as intentional or as non-intentional properties of experience. The view of qualia as intentional properties of experience is well expressed by Lycan. Lycan begins by explaining that he has C. I. Lewis’s conception of qualia in mind: ‘a quale is the introspectible monadic qualitative property of what seems to be a phenomenal individual, such as the colour of what Russell called a visual sense datum’. But his theory of qualia is that ‘a quale is a represented property, an intentional object; S’s visual sensation represents the tomato as having the colour red’.64 Qualia, on this intentionalist’s view, are the represented properties, the properties which experience represents the world as having; they are ‘properties of experience’ in the sense that the content of a belief is a property of it. The belief that it is raining has the property of representing the world as being such that it is raining. Perhaps this is a relational property—perhaps it is a monadic property identified in terms of a relation to an abstract object. It does not matter for present purposes. Obviously, intentionalists have their work cut out in accounting for the inverted spectrum possibility—and usual approaches may deny that the relevant kind of inversion is a possibility, or they hold that that one of the ‘inverts’ is in error about the real colour of things, or they adopt an error theory of colour altogether.65 Opposed to the intentionalist view is the view that treats qualia as intrinsic, non-intentional properties of experiences, the view defended forcefully by Block. Phenomenal red, the other colours, all the conscious properties of experience which make it have the phenomenal character it has—these are all intrinsic properties of experiences, with no intentional content themselves.66 Block takes this as apparent from reflection on experience, or from reflection on certain thought-experiments, notably the ‘inverted earth’ thought-experiment. But insofar as what makes us talk in terms of qualia at all is the considerations which give rise to the knowledge

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argument—subjective experience—we have no reason to prefer non-intentionalism to intentionalism. Block is wrong therefore when he accuses the intentionalist of a fallacy: the fallacy of intentionalising qualia.67 Even if it is a mistake, not all mistakes are fallacies. But is it a mistake to intentionalise qualia? This is a question I cannot address in detail here.68 However, I do think that if we are to learn anything at all from the discussion of these matters in the early twentieth century, a negative answer is strongly suggested. Recall the lesson of our investigation into sense-data: what was supposed to be obvious in the sense-datum theory was the idea that in experience, something is given to the experiencer. Or, in other words, experience has an apparently relational structure. Sense-data are, in Price’s phrase, what is ‘immediately given to consciousness or present to the mind’. It is a further step, derived from the arguments from illusion and hallucination, to say that what is given is a mind-dependent object. So to reject such objects is not to reject the very idea of the given. As I said in Section 3 above, there were philosophers—the adverbialists—who rejected the idea that something is given in experience, that experience has a relational character. For an adverbialist, to experience an F is to experience F-ly; that is, to have one’s experience modified in a certain way. Contemporary non-intentionalists like Block do not accept the adverbialists’ way of speaking, but the essence of their view is the same, when it concerns the qualitative or conscious character of an experience: this character derives from intrinsic non-intentional properties of the experience, rather than from what is given in experience. The natural suggestion, to complete the picture, is that the contemporary counterpart for the idea of the given is the idea of intentionality. For an intentional state is one in which the mind is directed on an object, one which presents an object, or one which has a content or a subject-matter. As these phrases suggest, intentional states seem to be relational. Of course, many theories of intentionality end up denying that intentional states are genuine relations—some call them ‘quasi-relational’—but the point is rather that these states give the appearance of presenting something, even if (as in the case of hallucination) there is nothing there to be presented. So a theory which treats perceptual experiences as intentional states understands the given in a particular way: what is given is an intentional object. This is why Lycan can claim to be following C. I. Lewis in defending qualia as the properties of the given, translating them into modern intentionalist terms.

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The dispute between intentionalists like Tye and Lycan, on the one hand, and non-intentionalists like Block on the other, resembles in an important respect the dispute between sense-data theorists and adverbialists. What they are debating is whether the consciousness involved in experience is exhausted by its relational or quasi-relational intentional structure; that is, by what is given to the mind and the way it is given. Both can agree that in some sense qualia are properties of experiences; to say that they are intentional properties is partly to say that the idea of the given is the central idea in understanding perceptual consciousness; to say that they are non-intentional intrinsic properties is to say that perceptual consciousness cannot be understood in terms of what is given to the mind. Nothing I have said in this section should be regarded as an argument against the non-intentionalist conception of qualia. What I have tried to do is to diagnose why qualia are treated as properties of experiences and to show that even once this has been accepted, there are still two remaining conceptions of qualia: the intentionalist and the non-intentionalist. That is, accepting that qualia are properties of experience does not yet get you to Block’s conclusion. Nonetheless, I believe that if we want to recover the truth in the sense-datum theorist’s claim that experience presents itself as relational, then we should favour an intentionalist conception of qualia. But to defend this claim in detail would need further work.

6 . CONC LU S ION

One main debate in contemporary theories of consciousness and qualia is between intentionalists like Tye, Dretske and Lycan, and non-intentionalists like Block. I draw two lessons for this debate from this investigation into the origins of qualia. First, insofar as what makes us talk in terms of qualia at all are the considerations which give rise to the knowledge argument— considerations relating to subjective experience—we have no reason to prefer non-intentionalism to intentionalism. Second, the very considerations which originally drove philosophers to qualia—the relational conception of experience, the idea of the given—now tend to favour an intentional conception of the qualia of perceptual experience rather than an intrinsic conception. However, given the many, varied, and conflicting uses to which the term ‘qualia’ has been put, and given the dominant association of the idea

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of qualia with non-intentionalist views, it may be less misleading to express this conclusion by saying that the reflections on the nature of the given should lead us to reject qualia. In this sense, appreciation of the origins of qualia should discourage us from talking about qualia in experience at all.

* * * This essay was originally written for a conference on the future of analytic philosophy at the University of Warwick in 1996. Later versions were presented at a conference in Miskolc, Hungary, and at the Universities of Cambridge, Uppsala, Helsinki, and University College Cork. Thanks to Katalin Farkas, Peter Lipton, Greg McCulloch, Howard Robinson, and Jonathan Wolff for comments. I would like to express a special debt to Mike Martin for invaluable criticism and the influence of his writings.

II Intentionality

P

sychologism, as I use the term, is the view that the mental is a self-standing part of reality, which can be investigated phenomenologically and empirically, as well as conceptually. What makes this part of reality mental is its defining characteristic, which I identify as intentionality. The view that intentionality is the defining characteristic of the mental is known as intentionalism. Intentionality is variously described as the ‘aboutness’ or ‘directedness’ of the mental, or as mental representation. Some influential twentieth century philosophers identified the topic of intentionality by first identifying a particular kind of discourse with particular logical or semantic properties (see Chisholm 1957, Quine 1960, Dennett 1969). A psychologistic approach to intentionality, by contrast, attempts to characterise intentionality more directly, in psychological or phenomenological terms. My own attempt starts with the idea of a mental state’s having an object. The object of an intentional state (an ‘intentional object’) is what the mental state is directed on. Essay 6 defends the coherence and the usefulness of the idea of an intentional object. I argue that it we want to retain the intuitive idea of intentionality as ‘aboutness’ then we should also employ the idea of an intentional object. The category of an intentional object is not an ontological category, since not all intentional objects exist, and one’s ontology should not extend beyond what exists. However, this essay does not offer any account of non-existent intentional objects; that is the subject of my book The Objects of Thought (Crane 2013). Essay 5, ‘Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental’, was my first attempt to outline and defend intentionalism, a project which is developed in Essays 7 and 8. These three essays offer (with some repetition, which is regrettable but I hope understandable given the context of their creation) a general picture of a psychologistic intentionalism. Unfortunately, Essay 7 introduces some distinctions between kinds of intentionalism which may be confusing in the light of recent philosophical discussion of intentionality in the literature; so I will take the opportunity to clear up these confusions here. (The next few paragraphs will only be of interest to those who have followed recent discussions of intentionalism and representationalism. Those who have not may move on in blissful ignorance.) Essay 7, ‘The Intentional Structure of Consciousness’, distinguishes between something I call ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ intentionalism: weak

intentionalism says that all mental states are intentional, but that some have non-intentional mental properties (‘qualia’). Strong intentionalism is defined as the view that all mental states have only intentional mental properties. This distinction now strikes me as unhelpful and confusing, for two reasons. First: what I there called ‘weak intentionalism’ should not really be called intentionalism at all. And second: since this paper was written the terminology of ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ has been used by other writers in a different way, to distinguish two views about the relationship between phenomenal character and intentional content, and this terminology has now become standard. Weak intentionalism in the now standard sense is the view that the phenomenal character of a mental state supervenes on its intentional content; strong intentionalism is the view that the phenomenal character is identical with its representational content. Although I do not think this distinction is of much significance or value (see Essay 8), there is no point trying to resist what has become standard terminology. One final terminological clarification should be made, in connection with recent debates: in Essay 7 I contrast Tye’s ‘representationalism’ with what I call ‘the perceptual theory’. Since that essay was written in 1998, I have adopted David Chalmers’s (2004) terminology and I now call Tye’s view ‘strong pure intentionalism/representationalism’. What I call in Essay 7 the ‘perceptual theory’ is, similarly, a version of what Chalmers calls ‘impure intentionalism/representationalism’. Apart from these terminological tangles, the main substantive points in Essay 7 still strike me as mostly correct. The exception is the claim at the beginning that it is ‘obvious’ that perception has a propositional content (see Essays 11 and 12 for what is wrong with this claim). Essay 8 refines some of the claims made in Essays 5 and 7, and gives a general argument for intentionalism, based on the idea that mental phenomena are unified around the idea of the subject having a point of view on things. One thing that is left out of these three essays is much discussion of the nature of intentional modes themselves. Intentional modes are not supposed to be anything mysterious: they are what is picked out by the familiar psychological categories of (e.g.) visual perception, memory, visual imagination etc. It is perhaps worth saying explicitly, though, that much empirical psychology is (in effect) a study of what I am calling intentional modes.

E S S AY F I V E

Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental

(1998)

1. B RE NTANO’ S TH E S I S

‘It is of the very nature of consciousness to be intentional’ said Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘and a consciousness that ceases to be a consciousness of something would ipso facto cease to exist’.1 Sartre here endorses the central doctrine of Husserl’s phenomenology, itself inspired by a famous idea of Brentano’s: that intentionality, the mind’s ‘direction upon its objects’, is what is distinctive of mental phenomena. Brentano’s originality does not lie in pointing out the existence of intentionality, or in inventing the terminology, which derives from scholastic discussions of concepts or intentiones.2 Rather, his originality consists in his claim that the concept of intentionality marks out the subject matter of psychology: the mental. His view was that intentionality ‘is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon manifests anything like it’.3 This is Brentano’s thesis that intentionality is the mark of the mental. Despite the centrality of the concept of intentionality in contemporary philosophy of mind, and despite the customary homage paid to Brentano as

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the one who revived the terminology and placed the concept at the centre of philosophy, Brentano’s thesis is widely rejected by contemporary philosophers of mind. What is more, its rejection is not something which is thought to require substantial philosophical argument. Rather, the falsity of the thesis is taken as a starting-point in many contemporary discussions of intentionality, something so obvious that it only needs to be stated to be recognised as true. Consider, for instance, these remarks from the opening pages of Searle’s Intentionality: Some, not all, mental states and events have Intentionality. Beliefs, fears, hopes and desires are Intentional; but there are forms of nervousness, elation and undirected anxiety that are not Intentional. . . . My beliefs and desires must always be about something. But my nervousness and undirected anxiety need not in that way be about anything.4

Searle takes this as obvious, so obvious that it is not in need of further argument or elucidation. And many others agree with him.5 Brentano’s thesis is normally rejected for one or both of the following reasons. First, it is supposed to be obvious that there are both intentional and non-intentional mental states: intentionality is not necessary for mentality. Non-intentional mental states can either be of the kind Searle mentions (emotions or moods, like undirected anxiety) or they are the so-called purely ‘qualitative’ mental phenomena—states which have ‘qualia’—of which sensations (like pains) are the most commonly cited examples. Both kinds of example are mentioned in an implicit rejection of Brentano’s thesis by Louise Antony: while mental items like beliefs and desires clearly have objects or contents (an idea is an idea of something, and a desire is a desire for something), things like pleasures, pains, moods and emotions don’t, on the face of it, appear to be about anything at all.6

Antony remarks in passing that the opposing view—in effect, that pains, moods and emotions are intentional—’seems counter-intuitive’. The second reason for the rejection of the thesis is that there are non-mental phenomena which exhibit intentionality: intentionality is not sufficient for mentality. Examples are more controversial here, but we find phenomena such as the disposition of plants to move towards the source of light

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offered as primitive non-mental forms of intentionality.7 Not every philosopher who rejects Brentano’s thesis rejects it for both of these reasons, but it is nonetheless fair to say that there is a tacit consensus that the thesis should be rejected. But this consensus raises a puzzling historical and exegetical question. If it is so obvious that Brentano’s thesis is false, why did Brentano propose it? If a moment’s reflection on one’s states of mind refutes the thesis that all mental states are intentional, then why would anyone (including Brentano, Husserl, Sartre, and their followers) think otherwise? Did Brentano have a radically different inner life from the inner lives of contemporary philosophers? Or was the originator of phenomenology spectacularly inattentive to phenomenological facts, rather as Freud is supposed to have been a bad analyst? Or—surely more plausibly—did Brentano mean something different by ‘intentionality’ than what many contemporary philosophers mean? The question of what Brentano and his followers meant by ‘intentionality’ is an important one, both for our understanding of the origin of current debates, and, relatedly, for our conception of these debates themselves.8 However, my concern in this essay is not with Brentano’s theory of intentionality, but with a more general question: what would you have to believe about intentionality to believe that it is the mark of the mental? I argue here that if we think of intentionality in the light of this question, a conception of the mental begins to emerge which abandons some of the usual assumptions of contemporary philosophy of mind. The rest of this essay falls into three parts. In the next two parts I examine the standard counterexamples to Brentano’s thesis—certain kinds of sensations and emotions. I argue that they are not genuine counterexamples, and I sketch a conception of intentionality which arises from my discussion of these examples. In the final part, I claim that intentionality, properly understood, should be thought of as exclusive to the mental domain, and I conclude with some more speculative remarks about the significance of the question: why do we need a mark of the mental at all? 2 . TH E I NTE NTIONALIT Y OF S E N SATION

Since ‘intentionality’ is a technical term, it is standard practice when introducing it to use some slightly less technical synonym or gloss. In contemporary philosophy this is often done by saying that intentionality is the

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about-ness or of-ness of mental states.9 Intentional states are those which are about or of things, normally things other than themselves. So one might demarcate the class of intentional states by considering a mental state and asking ‘what is it about?’ If the question does not make much sense, or if it has the obvious answer ‘nothing’, then the state is classified as non-intentional. Consider a pain you may have in your ankle; what is it of or about? Silly question: it is not of or about anything. And so, since intentionality is of-ness or about-ness, pain is not intentional. In this way, we find Colin McGinn arguing that ‘bodily sensations do not have an intentional object in the way perceptual experiences do’ on the grounds that ‘we distinguish between a visual experience and what it is an experience of; but we do not make this distinction in respect of pains.’10 This is one quick way to arrive at a denial of Brentano’s thesis. It certainly sounds awkward to talk of a distinction between a pain and what a pain is ‘of’ or ‘about’. But all this means is that those who follow Brentano in holding intentionality to be the mark of the mental—call them ‘intentionalists’—will not gloss the concept of intentionality solely in terms of ‘of-ness’ or ‘about-ness’. Intentionalists must introduce what is involved in the phenomenon of intentionality in another way. How should they do this? Brentano’s own view was that every mental phenomenon exhibits what he called ‘intentional inexistence’. The term ‘inexistence’ has little or nothing to do with the fact that intentional states (or ‘acts’) can be about objects which do not exist.11 Rather, the term describes the way in which every intentional act ‘includes something as an object within itself’.12 ‘Inexistence’ expresses the idea that the object on which the mind is directed exists in the mental act itself. For example: in hearing a sound, the sound which one hears—a physical phenomenon—is contained within the act of hearing the sound—a mental phenomenon. So, to generalise, we can say that ‘in the idea something is conceived, in the judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated and so on’.13 Brentano rejected the claim that sensations of pain and pleasure are not intentional. He argued that although intentional acts can take external phenomena as their objects, sometimes their objects are internal. In the case of sensation, for instance, the mind is directed on an internal object—a sensation.14 Just as ‘in the idea something is conceived’, we can say that ‘in the sensation something is sensed’. So one response an intentionalist can give to McGinn’s argument is this. Intentionality is directedness on

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an object, and in having a sensation, one’s mind is directed on an object: a sensation. A pain, for instance, is the object of the mental state of being in pain. (This way of thinking of sensation is what used to be called an ‘act-object’ account.) The idea that sensations are objects is associated with the sense-datum theory of perception, which is not a popular view in contemporary philosophy. These days it is widely agreed that perception does not involve the mind directing itself upon internal, mental objects—sense-data. But this agreement does not derive from a general rejection of the directedness, or intentionality, of perception. On the contrary, there is a widespread consensus—as illustrated by McGinn’s remark just quoted—that perception is intentional. It is just that the objects of perception are not inner mental objects or sense-data, but the ordinary outer objects of the external world. So there will be no dispute between intentionalists and many contemporary philosophers over the question of whether perception exhibits intentionality. If perception were the only mental state under discussion, intentionalism would not be a controversial thesis.15 There are philosophers, of course, who think that although perception exhibits intentionality—perceptions are directed on things outside the mind—this does not exhaust their nature. This is the view, defended for instance by Sydney Shoemaker, that in addition to their intentional properties, perceptual states also have non-intentional properties, called ‘qualia’, which account for the particular conscious or ‘phenomenal’ character of perceptual states.16 Qualia are not sensation-objects, but properties of mental states. If there are qualia, then there are aspects or properties of mental states which are not intentional, even if those states also have intentional aspects. Qualia raise many questions which I want to avoid for the purposes of this essay. Certainly the strongest form of intentionalism will reject qualia outright, as contemporary intentionalists like Michael Tye and Gilbert Harman have done.17 But in this essay, I want to consider only a weaker form of intentionalism, which says that all mental states are intentional, regardless of whether these states also have non-intentional properties. This weaker claim is certainly within the letter of Brentano’s thesis that intentionality is the mark of the mental, although it is not so obviously within its spirit. However, there is a good dialectical reason for discussing the weaker thesis first: for if the weaker thesis is false—i.e., there are mental states which are entirely non-intentional—then there is no chance whatsoever of the

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stronger thesis being true. So from now on, I will mean by ‘intentionalism’ this weaker thesis. Let’s return now to the first group of apparent counterexamples to intentionalism: bodily sensations like pains, itches, and so on. McGinn says that we can distinguish between a visual experience and what it is of, but we do not make this distinction in the case of pains. Pains, on this view, are not about anything, they are not of anything, they represent nothing: they have no intentionality. Rather, pains are purely subjective qualities: their existence consists in the existence of a subjective state that tells us nothing about the external world. To hold this view is to distinguish pain from other cases of bodily sensation where we are able to distinguish between the sensation and what it is of: sensations of warmth, of cold, of pressure, of tiredness, of hunger can all be described in terms of what they are sensations of, and what they are sensations of are properties of the external world (temperature, pressure etc.). So these are examples of bodily sensations which can be accommodated by intentionalism: the intentionalist can say that these states of mind are intentionally directed at those objective properties of the world in terms of which we characteristically describe them. But what should an intentionalist say about sensations where it does not seem as if this distinction can be made, as seems to be the case with pain? The answer mentioned above is that there is an object presented in a state of pain, but it is an internal or mental object. Now even if we reject mental objects in the case of the perception of the external world, can a case be made for their existence in the case of bodily sensation? Phenomenologically, the case for mental objects seems somewhat stronger here than in the theory of visual perception. For it could be argued, against McGinn, that a distinction can be made between a pain and the feeling of the pain. Consider, for example, someone being woken up from a dreamless sleep by a pain. For the pain to have woken the person up, and therefore to have caused the person to wake up, it must have existed prior to the awakening. But since the awakening is a matter of becoming conscious of various things, including the pain, it might seem that the pain can exist without the consciousness of it. Less controversially, perhaps, we can distinguish between having a pain and noticing or paying attention to a pain; we might therefore think that we can ‘pull apart’ the pain itself and our attitude to or awareness of it. These phenomena seem to provide some support for the view that pains are distinct from the consciousness or awareness

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of pain, and that we can therefore think of pains as the entities on which the mind is directed in states of pain. Further features of the way we think and talk about sensations lend some plausibility to the view. Pains normally seem to have location and extension in space and time, and we effortlessly talk about them using singular terms and we predicate properties of them as we do of objects and events.18 While many contemporary philosophers are happy to accept the existence of irreducible mental properties, it is fair to say that most would prefer to reject irreducible mental objects.19 Mental objects are generally rejected for metaphysical reasons: their criteria of identity are obscure, and it is hard to see how they can be accommodated by a ‘naturalistic’ world view. However, my concern in this essay is with not with metaphysics, but with phenomenology: the correct account of how things seem to us. It would be consistent to hold that although phenomenology commits us to mental objects, nonetheless we know on metaphysical grounds that there are no such things. To say this would be to hold an ‘error-theory’ of the phenomenology of sensation, analogous to J. L. Mackie’s error theory of the phenomenology of ethical value.20 Although I think that we must be alive to this possibility, it seems to me that—independently of the metaphysical objections to mental objects— phenomenology does not decisively establish their apparent existence. For each of the examples discussed above admit of alternative, equally plausible descriptions which do not require us to posit mental objects. The phenomenon of being woken by pain, for instance, can be re-described as follows: I might be in pain when I wake up, but it does not follow from this that the pain woke me up. It is equally consistent with the story that I was awoken by some non-conscious event in my brain, which then gave rise to pain when I become conscious. Likewise, the attempt to separate pain from the consciousness of pain by appealing to the distinction between having a pain and attending to it ignores the complexity of the phenomenology of attention and awareness. There are different ways of being aware of an event in consciousness: even when I am not paying attention to it, a pain can nonetheless be in the background of my consciousness.21 But I do not need to dwell on the arguments for mental objects here, since the defence of intentionalism does not need to appeal to them. Intentionalism about bodily sensations can be defended instead by appealing to a perceptual account of bodily sensations, such as that of D. M. Armstrong, or the kind more recently defended by M. G. F. Martin.22 On this account,

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bodily sensation is a form of perceptual awareness of one’s body. It is by experiencing bodily sensations that we come to be aware of the state of our body and of events happening within it. The qualities of which we are aware in bodily sensation—the sensory qualities of hurting, feeling cold or warm, and so on—are predicated in these experiences of parts of the body. When one feels a pain, one normally feels it to be in a part of one’s body; and even when a pain is felt where there is no body part in which to feel it—as in the case of phantom limb pains—what subjects feel is that their body extends further than it actually does. They do not feel as if their pain exists in midair, a few inches from where they have lost their limb. The strongest considerations in favour of this view derive from this felt location of bodily sensation. An ache in my hand feels to be in my hand, not in my mind. Rather than being something which is contained within my mind, it presents itself as something on which my mind can concentrate, attend to, and try to ignore. In fact, this much is common ground between the believer in mental objects and the perceptual theory. But what tells in favour of the perceptual theory is the fact that to concentrate on the ache, I must necessarily concentrate on the part of my body which aches; the mental object theory cannot explain this necessity. Attending to bodily sensations is achieved by attending to a part of the body where these sensations feel to be. This is because bodily sensation is a form of awareness, the awareness of things going on in one’s body.23 Why call this intentionality? What this perceptual theory says is that in bodily sensation, something is given to the mind, namely the body, or a body part. Calling this phenomenon ‘intentionality’ classifies it together with the case of outer perception, where the perceived portion of the world is ‘given’ to the mind; and with thought, where some object, property, or state of affairs is ‘given’ to the mind. What is in common between these different states of mind is expressed in Brentano’s formulation: ‘in the idea something is conceived, in the wish something is wished’. And in the sensation something is sensed: the body.

3. TH E I NTE NTIONALIT Y OF E M OTION

That is the basis of my case for an intentionalist view of bodily sensation. I now want to move on to the second kind of counterexample to Brentano’s thesis: Searle’s examples of ‘nervousness, elation, and undirected anxiety’.

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How should an intentionalist deal with these apparent examples of non-intentional mental phenomena? First we need to identify the phenomena in question. This is actually harder to do than it might initially seem. Everyone will agree that there is such a thing as being anxious and yet not being able to give an answer to the question ‘what are you anxious about?’ But this by itself does not show that anxiety can lack intentionality. For one thing, we have just seen that asking ‘what is X about?’ is not always the most uncontroversial way of deciding whether X is intentional. And more importantly, it should not be a condition of a state’s being intentional that the subject of that state must be able to express what the state’s content is, or even which kind of state it is. Every theory of intentionality must allow that subjects are not always the best authorities on all the contents of their minds. A possible intentionalist account of the state of mind in question would be to say that the intentional object of the state of mind is its cause. So, on this view, when we describe ourselves as ‘just anxious without being anxious about anything in particular’, we mean that we do not know the cause of our anxiety. Now in some cases, it is certainly true that to identify the cause of an emotion is to identify its intentional object. But this cannot be true in general. For one thing, the object of the emotion might lie in the future. Or the cause of an emotion might be a past event which is too remote from the present manifestation of the emotion to be properly regarded as its object. (It may be true that the cause of someone’s fear of dogs was a childhood encounter with a certain dog—but it would not always be right to say that that dog was the object of their current state of fear in the presence of a different dog.) Or the cause of the emotion might be something completely unrelated to its object. (A drug may cause you to hate some person or thing.) So the fact that an emotion has a cause does not by itself entail that it has an intentional object. The intentionalist cannot refute Searle merely by pointing to the fact that emotions have causes of which we are sometimes ignorant. But, as we have just seen, nor can Searle infer that there are non-intentional emotions merely from the fact that we sometimes say we are anxious without being able to say what we are anxious about. Searle presents the existence of non-intentional emotions as if it were something entirely obvious. An intentionalist, however, will deny that it is obvious. There can be no real debate about this matter if we are restricted to each participant stating what they think is obvious. So how can the debate proceed?

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In order to assess what is at issue between Searle and the intentionalist, we need to know more about how they would classify the various emotions into kinds. What is it that makes anxiety, for instance, the state it is? Whatever it is, it must be common to the cases where anxiety clearly does have an intentional object and the cases which Searle is calling ‘undirected’. Remember that these are the cases where someone is anxious but it is not clear to them what they are anxious about. The issue between Searle and the intentionalist is whether the existence of these cases establishes that there are mental states which have no intentionality. If we learn more about what the intentionalist and non-intentionalist think emotions are, we can assess their competing claims over whether any of them are ‘undirected’ in Searle’s sense. Let’s start with non-intentionalism, Searle’s position. Perhaps non-intentionalism could say that anxiety is distinguished from (say) an undirected state of contentment by the functional roles of the two states. The functional roles must be explicable in common-sense psychological vocabulary, since we are after a phenomenological classification of the emotions. And yet the functional roles must be relatively informative—’behaving anxiously’ will not do, in this context, as a characterisation of the functional role of anxiety. So perhaps we can say that anxiety is characterised by the anxious person’s inability to concentrate, or by an obsessive concern with trivial details of life, or by jumpy, nervous form of behaviour. Contentment, by contrast, might be characterised by a benign way of behaving towards the world, an enthusiasm for its daily tasks and so on. However, this style of identifying the functional roles of anxiety and contentment does so in terms of forms of behaviour which are manifestly intentional. So while it might suffice for an account of intentional (‘directed’) anxiety, it will not do for undirected anxiety. For the non-intentionalist, there must be something directed and undirected anxiety have in common, which licenses them both being called ‘anxiety’. And this ‘something’ must be detectable from the subject’s point of view, if Searle’s claim is going to have any force—remember that Searle was appealing to what is obvious to us. Yet this something must also be non-intentional: it cannot be directed on anything. So the non-intentionalist must say that an emotion like anxiety (directed or undirected) has properties which are phenomenologically detectable to the subject, but are non-intentional, involving nothing beyond themselves. These properties

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must therefore be qualia: non-intentional, subjective properties. Just as there are (according to many philosophers) pain-qualia and seeing-redqualia, there are also emotion-qualia which give the emotions the characteristic phenomenal ‘feel’ which they have. Let us suppose, then, that anxiety is partly characterised by its distinctive qualia. Now it is a plausible general thesis about qualia that there is no intrinsic connection between any particular quale and being in any particular objectively-identifiable mental state. For instance, there is nothing intrinsic to the qualia involved in seeing red that links these qualia with the state which plays the functional role of seeing red in normal observers. The coherence of inverted qualia thought-experiments depends on there being no such links, and most defenders of qualia, like Shoemaker, believe that qualia inversion is possible.24 In fact, it seems part of the very idea of qualia that there be this possibility, for qualia ‘point to’ nothing beyond themselves, which would make them associated with one kind of objectively-identifiable state rather than another. So on the non-intentionalist view of emotion, it must be true that there is nothing about the qualia associated with anxiety themselves which make them anxiety-qualia: that is, associated with a state with the particular functional role of anxiety. Just as seeing-red-qualia could, in some other possible world, be associated with the state which in the actual world is seeing green, so anxiety-qualia could be associated with some other emotion-state, say contentment. This is because there is nothing in the qualia themselves which connects them with particular kinds of emotion, objectively identified (for instance, in terms of functional role). So now it appears that a non-intentionalist has to accept the possibility that there is a world in which contentment feels to someone as anxiety feels to me. And while the inverted qualia story seems plausible when applied to simple colour-qualia—after all, why should green things not look to you the way red things do to me?—the story is very hard to believe when applied to the putative emotion-qualia. For here we are supposing that the same emotion might feel in opposite ways to two subjects in different possible worlds—emotions have their distinctive ‘feel’ only contingently. But does this possibility really make sense? One might respond to this: so much for the plausibility of the view that there are emotion-qualia. And I agree: even if there are qualia, to assimilate anxiety to the experience of seeing red is a distortion of ordinary experience.

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But how else is the non-intentionalist going to describe the characteristic phenomenology of anxiety, undirected and directed? The nature of these states cannot be described in terms of how things seem to the subject, however vaguely stated, for descriptions of how things seem are patently intentional, and so they will not capture the phenomenology of undirected anxiety. Non-intentionalism is committed to emotion-qualia because it is committed to emotions having properties which are non-intentional yet phenomenologically salient—and non-intentional, phenomenologically salient properties of mental states just are qualia, by definition. But what is the alternative to this non-intentionalist view? How should an intentionalist give an answer to the question about how to distinguish the different emotions? One answer has already been suggested. Someone experiencing anxiety might not be able to put into words what it is they are anxious about; but they may still be able say how things seem to them in their state of anxiety. And even if they cannot express it, there is still nonetheless such a thing as how things seem to them. To begin with, the intentionalist will start by distinguishing being anxious for oneself and being anxious for another. This is clearly an intentional distinction: in the one case, one’s mind is directed on oneself, in the other case, it is directed on another. The cases Searle mentions are not cases where one is anxious for another: otherwise it would be directed anxiety. So the intentionalist will say that these are cases where one is anxious for oneself—so in these cases, one’s anxiety is directed upon oneself. Being anxious in this way is a matter of having a certain attitude to oneself and one’s position in the world: it is to regard the world, for example, as a potentially disturbing place for oneself. This is one way in which anxiety exhibits directedness. And it is an alternative to seeing Searle’s cases as examples of mental states which are directed on nothing, as Searle does. It might be helpful to contrast, in these very general terms, anxiety with depression. In depression, the world seems to the subject to be a pointless, colourless place: nothing seems worth doing. The change involved in coming out of a depression is partly a change in the subject’s apprehension of the world. Things seem to have a significance, a purpose which they previously lacked. And this can be true of a subject even when they cannot say what they are depressed about. In this way, the phenomenon Searle would call ‘undirected depression’ can be seen as having a certain directedness or intentionality.

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These brief remarks suggest that the difference between anxiety and depression resides in the different manners in which the world, and the subject’s place in the world, are apprehended in the emotion. This was Sartre’s view: My melancholy is a method of supressing the obligation to look for . . . new ways [to realise the potentialities of the world] by transforming the present structure of the world, replacing it with a totally undifferentiated structure . . . In other words, lacking both the ability and the will to carry out the projects I formerly entertained, I behave in such a manner that the universe requires nothing more from me. This one can only do by acting upon oneself, by ‘lowering the flame of life to a pin-point’—and the noetic correlate of this attitude is what we call Bleakness: the universe is bleak; that is, of undifferentiated structure.25

Sartre’s view of emotions, in general, is that they are characterised by their intentionality. ‘Emotion is a specific manner of apprehending the world’26 he writes, and ‘all the emotions have this in common, that they evoke the appearance of a world, cruel, terrible, bleak, joyful etc.’27 Sartre’s view provides one general framework in which to defend the intentionality of all emotions—even those which Searle describes as ‘undirected’. Let me summarise this line of thought. Searle says that there are emotions which have no intentionality. But this does not follow from the fact that people cannot say what it is that their emotions are about. Nor does its denial follow from the fact that the objects of emotions are sometimes their causes, of which we are sometimes ignorant. To decide the issue about whether there are non-intentional emotions, we should first ask what distinguishes, from the phenomenological point of view, the different emotions. The non-intentionalist answer to this question is committed to the existence of emotion-qualia, and the implausible possibility of inverted emotion-qualia. But the intentionalist who accepts (for example) Sartre’s view of emotion as a mode of apprehending the world is not committed to this possibility. The differences between the different emotions would not be explained in terms of qualia but in terms of the different ways the emotions present the world and the subject’s place in it. This is one way an intentionalist can characterise the emotions Searle is talking about, like anxiety and depression, where the subject is not able to say what they are anxious or depressed about.

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The phenomenology of emotion is a very complex area, and I have only touched the surface of the issues. What I have tried to do is to suggest a way in which an intentionalist can argue that these apparent counterexamples to Brentano’s thesis are not really counterexamples.28 But what does this treatment of the counterexamples show about the nature of intentionality in general? My original question was: what would you have to believe about intentionality in order to believe that it is the mark of the mental? The way I have approached this question is to try and specify the sense in which something is ‘given’ to the mind in sensation and emotion, just as something is given to the mind in thought and experience. The heart of the view is inspired by Brentano’s phrase that in the idea, something is conceived; I say that in the sensation, something is felt, in the emotion, something is apprehended— and so on. The issue is in danger of collapsing into an uninteresting question of terminology if the notion I am identifying as intentionality had nothing in common with what others call intentionality. But this is not the case. It is possible to isolate two main elements of the concept of intentionality as discussed by recent philosophers.29 The first is the apparently relational structure of intentionality, the structure Sartre and other phenomenologists express by saying that consciousness is always the consciousness of something.30 While intentional states appear to be relations between thinkers and the objects of their thoughts, this cannot be true in general, since intentional states can be directed on things which do not exist, and relations entail the existence of their relata.31 (This point holds independently of the truth or falsity of the doctrine of externalism, since even the most extreme externalist must allow that intentional states can concern the non-existent.) The second element is what some call the perspectival or fine-grained nature of intentionality, what Searle calls ‘aspectual shape’.32 This is just the familiar idea that when something is apprehended as the object of an intentional state—whether a particular object, fact or property—it is always apprehended in a certain way. Both features of intentionality are present in my treatment of the counterexamples to intentionalism. I claimed that instead of seeing bodily sensations as instantiations of purely subjective, monadic properties, we should see these experiences as presenting something—a part of the body—as modified in a certain way. Bodily sensations, then, are primarily states of

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awareness, and therefore apparently relational states. They are only apparently relational since, according to the perceptual theory, phantom limb phenomena (e.g.) are cases of awareness of a felt quality in merely apparent body part. They are therefore analogous—in this respect only—to cases of perceptual hallucination, where one perceives a quality to be instantiated in an object which does not actually exist.33 If Sartre’s account of the phenomenology of emotions is right, then there is a similar apparent relationality in emotional experience: there is the experiencing subject, the world experienced (or the thing in the world experienced) and the particular way of apprehending the world. The second element of intentionality—its fine-grained character—is also contained within my account of sensations and emotions. A pain in one’s ankle is a state of awareness of one’s ankle, presented as such, not as the organic organisation of tendons, bone, and muscle which one’s ankle actually is. Similarly with the so-called undirected emotions. In a particular undirected emotion, the same world appears under one aspect— bleak, terrible, threatening—rather than another. (Of course, there may be debate about whether the world could properly be said to have the aspects or properties attributed to it in an emotion—but this does not affect the present point.) So the core of the concept of intentionality, as discussed in much contemporary philosophy of mind, is present in the theses advanced by intentionalism. The dispute between the intentionalist and the non-intentionalist is substantial and not just terminological. Where this characterisation does depart from some recent discussions is in not starting the discussion of intentionality with the notion of a propositional attitude. A propositional attitude is an intentional state whose content—that which characterises its directedness—is something evaluable as true or false. I do not question the applicability of the notion of a propositional attitude itself, but rather the tendency in some contemporary philosophers to see the propositional attitudes as the sole home of the concept of intentionality.34 Obviously, the form of intentionalism I am defending here cannot accept such a view, but even putting this to one side, the thesis that all intentional mental states are propositional attitudes lacks phenomenological plausibility. To take a nice example of Victor Caston’s: when asked to think of a number between one and ten, what comes to mind is a number, not a proposition. And it is a familiar fact that certain emotions, notably love and hate, can be directed

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on objects rather than always on states of affairs. While the notion of a propositional attitude must play an important role in any theory of intentionality, it does not exhaust the application of the concept of intentionality.

4. I NTE NTIONALIT Y, TH E NON - M E NTAL , AN D TH E M ARK OF TH E M E NTAL

I have been defending the claim that all mental phenomena exhibit intentionality. Now I want to return to the other part of Brentano’s thesis, the claim that intentionality is exclusive to the mental domain. This will give me the opportunity to air some speculations about why we should be interested in the idea of a mark of the mental. Now, the way I am suggesting we should think about intentionality, it is a concept which applies to all mental phenomena, including conscious, phenomenally salient mental states such as perception, sensation, and conscious emotional episodes, but also to unconscious beliefs, desires, and other mental dispositions. The binding idea is captured by the Brentanian slogan that in the intentional state something is given. But can we find intentionality in the non-mental? It is sometimes said that Brentano’s thesis is a threat to physicalism because it implies that intentionality can only be found in the mental and never in the physical. Dennett, for instance, says that ‘the Intentionalist thesis . . . proclaims an unbridgeable gulf between the mental and the physical’.35 But we must distinguish between the view that intentionality is not present in the physical, and the view that intentionality is not present in the non-mental. For if physicalism is true, then the physical is not the same as the non-mental. Of course, Brentano himself—to whom the question of physicalism would have been of little interest—says that ‘no physical phenomenon manifests anything like’ intentionality. But if we want to remain neutral on the question of physicalism, we should prefer a weaker version of Brentano’s thesis which only says that intentionality is characteristic of the mental alone. Whether the mental is reducible to the physical is a further question; if it is, then some physical things manifest intentionality. But no non-mental things do. However, some philosophers take a view of intentionality which makes it unproblematically a feature of many non-mental things. For instance,

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some follow Chisholm and Quine and take the non-extensionality of certain linguistic contexts as criterial for the intentionality of the phenomena described in those contexts.36 Chisholm’s approach was to ‘formulate a working criterion by means of which we can distinguish sentences that are Intentional . . . in a certain language from sentences that are not’.37 In essence Chisholm’s criterion was that a sentence S is intentional if: S contains a singular term yet does not entail the usual existential generalisation; or S contains an embedded sentence in a non-truth-functional context; or the principle of the substitutivity of co-referring singular terms does not apply to S. This disjunctive criterion is supposed to establish the intentionality (in Brentano’s sense) of the phenomena described by the sentence S. Dennett, for instance, says that ‘Chisholm’s three criteria come close to reproducing Brentano’s distinction’.38 I will call this this the ‘linguistic criterion’ of intentionality. Some of those who adopt the linguistic criterion take a deflationary approach to the distinctively mental characteristics of intentionality. They point out that intentionality, in their sense, is common to non-mental linguistic contexts, too—for instance: modal, causal, dispositional, probabilistic, or functional contexts—and they draw various conclusions from this fact. They might draw the relatively weak conclusion that intentionality is not the mark of the mental; or they might draw the stronger conclusion that there is no special problem of intentionality, if intentionality is shared by so many different and (in some cases) unproblematic phenomena.39 The version of intentionalism defended here cannot accept this. This is not to say that it would have to reject the view that causal, probabilistic, and the other contexts are non-extensional. Nor does intentionalism have to deny that the features of intentionality I have just mentioned receive expression in the linguistic structures which we use to describe it. So, for instance, the apparent relationality is evident in ascriptions of intentionality (in the failure of existential generalisation in non-extensional contexts) as is the fact that intentionality is perspectival (in the failure of substitutivity of co-referring terms). What intentionalism must reject is rather the linguistic criterion of intentionality itself. These linguistic phenomena are guides to the presence of intentionality in ascriptions of intentionality, but they do not constitute its essence. And given the way I have been proceeding in this essay, this should not be surprising. Intentionality, like consciousness, is one of the

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concepts which we use in an elucidation of what it is to have a mind. On this conception of intentionality, to consider the question of whether intentionality is present in some creature is of a piece with considering what it is like for that creature—that is, with a consideration of that creature’s mental life as a whole. To say this is not to reject by stipulation the idea that there are primitive forms of intentionality which are only remotely connected with conscious mental life—say, the intentionality of the information-processing which goes on in our brains. It is rather to emphasise the priority of intentionality as a phenomenological notion.40 So intentionalists will reject the linguistic criterion of intentionality precisely because the criterion will count phenomena as intentional which are clearly not mental. This would be a perverse or circular way to proceed if we did not already have a grasp on the concept of a mind. But we do have such a grasp: it is that concept which we try and express when we say that to have a mind is to have a point of view or perspective on the world, or when we say that there is something it is like to be conscious, or when we talk about the world being manifest to a subject of experience, or when we talk about the world being a phenomenon for a subject. Some philosophers associate these ways of talking solely with the conscious or phenomenal side of the mind, where the conscious or the phenomenal is contrasted explicitly with the intentional.41 Consider, for instance, how McGinn formulates his pessimism about our inability to explain consciousness: We can, it is felt, explain what makes a mental state have the content it has; at least there is no huge barrier of principle in the way of our doing so. But, it is commonly conceded, we have no remotely plausible account of what makes a mental state have the phenomenological character it has.42

Here ‘phenomenological character’ is explicitly contrasted with ‘content’, as if the two categories were exclusive. Sometimes composite states are envisaged—as when perceptions are conceived of as having content and qualia. But in general, the picture of the mind which lies behind remarks such as McGinn’s is one on which we have two kinds of mental state: intentional states which are not essentially conscious, and conscious states whose consciousness is intrinsically unrelated to any intentionality they may have. The trouble with this picture of the mind is that the classification of both kinds of phenomena as mental seems to lack a rationale. The most we can

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say is that mental is an accidental category, which presupposes no underlying nature to the phenomena it picks out. As Kathleen Wilkes puts it, ‘it is improbable that something bunching together pains, and thoughts about mathematics, is going to be a reliable pointer towards a legitimate natural kind’.43 Wilkes here echoes Richard Rorty’s complaint of about the heterogeneity of the concept of mind: The attempt to hitch pains and beliefs together seems ad hoc—they don’t seem to have anything in common except our refusal to call them ‘physical’.44

There are two possible ways of reacting to these points. One is simply to accept that there is no more than a nominal unity to the concept of mind. The other is to object that there is something wrong with the whole picture—specifically, with the way of distinguishing between intentionality and consciousness that we find expressed, for instance, in the above passage from McGinn. If this is our reaction, then we need to find a way of characterising mental phenomena which reflects the underlying unity of their classification as mental: that is, we need a mark of the mental. Some philosophers have argued recently that consciousness is the only true mark of the mental.45 But this view battles with the widely accepted and uncontroversial view that many mental states are unconscious, so its defence is an uphill struggle. The alternative, which I have been canvassing here, is that it is intentionality, the mind’s directedness on the world, which should be thought of as the mark of the mental. If we take this view, then we must reject the distinction implicit in McGinn’s, Rorty’s, and Wilkes’s remarks, that the phenomenal is one thing, the intentional another. Whatever the fate of qualia, we must accept that all mental states are permeated with intentionality, and characterising their phenomenal character—giving a phenomenology—can be achieved by characterising their intentionality.46 Brentano’s view was that the science of psychology should be distinguished from both physiology and philosophy, not by its methods, but by its subject-matter. These days, it is less common for there to be serious dispute among psychologists about the subject-matter of psychology. But there is perhaps more disagreement in today’s philosophy of mind about what its subject-matter is, and in some cases there is even disagreement about whether it has one. Those who find this situation unacceptable may

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wish to reconsider the popular rejection of Brentano’s thesis that intentionality is the mark of the mental, and therefore the subject-matter of the philosophy of mind.

* * * I am very grateful to Michael Martin and Gregory McCulloch for many conversations which have greatly influenced my views on this subject. I am also grateful to the participants in the discussion at the Royal Institute of Philosophy meeting in February 1997, and to Victor Caston, Katalin Farkas, Marcus Giaquinto, Paul Horwich, Michael Martin, Gregory McCulloch, Paul Noordhof, and Scott Sturgeon for comments on earlier versions of the essay.

E S S AY S I X

Intentional Objects

(2001)

I S TH E R E , or should there be, any place in contemporary philosophy of mind

for the concept of an intentional object? Many philosophers would make short work of this question. In a discussion of what intentional objects are supposed to be, John Searle’s answer to our question is brisk and dismissive: an Intentional object is just an object like any other; it has no peculiar ontological status at all. To call something an Intentional object is just to say that it is what some intentional state is about. Thus, for example, if Bill admires President Carter, then the Intentional object of his admiration is President Carter, the actual man and not some shadowy intermediate entity between Bill and the man.1

The last claim expressed here seems obviously correct. For on the face of it, Bill’s admiration of President Carter makes direct contact with the man himself; Bill does not first admire something else—some mental or non-mental ‘intermediary’—and in virtue of admiring this thing, he admires President Carter. This makes little phenomenological or metaphysical sense, and there

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is no particular reason to believe it. We should surely join Searle, then, in rejecting ‘shadowy intermediaries’ in thought. But the rest of this passage of Searle’s, it seems to me, is problematic. For one thing, it is in need of an obvious and simple clarification, since as it stands it cannot be true. But even once this clarification is made, Searle’s claim entails an absurdity when combined with a familiar and recalcitrant fact about intentionality: that intentional states can be about things which do not exist. I will make the clarification first, and then bring out the absurdity. In elaborating his claim about intentional objects, Searle says that intentional objects are ‘ordinary objects’.2 If he means by ‘object’ what is usually meant when we contrast objects with properties, relations, events, propositions, facts or states of aff airs—that is, particular objects—then the claim that all intentional objects (defined above as ‘what some intentional state is about’) are objects in this sense is simply false. Intentional states can be about events, properties, and all things in all the ontological categories just mentioned. There is no reason to think that the only things our intentional states are about are particular objects in the ordinary sense. So Searle cannot mean object in this sense; he must rather mean something like ordinary existing thing or entity (where thing or entity is the most general ontological category: properties, relations, and so on are all things or entities). So now the claim that intentional objects are ordinary objects just means that what intentional states are about are ordinary existing entities.3 But once we make this clarification, and once we bring into play the idea that intentional states can be about things which do not exist, then the absurdity of Searle’s claim comes to the surface. For consider the conjunction of Searle’s two claims with this idea: 1. Intentional objects are ordinary existing entities. 2. Intentional objects are what intentional states are about. 3. Intentional states can be about things which do not exist. It follows from (1)–(3) that some ordinary existing entities do not exist, which is absurd, and clearly not what Searle has in mind. It might be thought that the way to respond is to drop ‘existing’ in (1), but the conclusion that some ordinary entities do not exist is only superficially less absurd. If there are entities which do not exist, then they hardly deserve to be called ordinary.

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What has gone wrong? It seems that (1)–(3) cannot be true together; but which of them is false? Claim (2) is simply a definition and so cannot be sensibly debated. But is (3) true? It is certainly hard to deny. Consider a debate between an atheist and a theist, and suppose for the sake of argument that the atheist is right: God does not exist. (Let us suppose that the debate they are having is a straightforward one over the existence of the Christian God as traditionally conceived: the all-powerful creator of the universe who loves us as a father loves his children, etc.) If the atheist is right, then the theist has been talking about (and thinking about) something which does not exist. Yet the theist’s words made sense; it seemed that he was able to put these thoughts about God into words. His thoughts are thoughts about something that does not exist. Or consider H. H. Price, hallucinating a pile of leaves on his counterpane under the influence of mescaline.4 If Price thought ‘That pile of leaves was not there this morning’ then he was thinking about something which does not exist: there is no pile of leaves. And there are many other kinds of examples: from myth and fiction (Pegasus), the history of science (Phlogiston, Vulcan), and from the experience of after-images and double vision etc. Even if you thought you could explain away some of these examples without appealing to the idea of ‘thinking about something which does not exist’, the prospect of explaining all of them away seems unpromising. So the initial simple plausibility of (1) is misleading; given (2) and (3), it seems that we should abandon it. If we do, then it may seem too that we need a theory of the special nature of these intentional objects. In appealing to intentional objects in giving an account of perceptual experience, Gilbert Harman admits that he has no ‘fully worked-out account’ of intentional objects— implying that this is what is needed for a proper account of perceptual intentionality. Harman agrees that it is no solution to say that intentional objects are mental objects (or, at any rate, that not all of them are). When Ponce de Leon looked for the Fountain of Youth, he was not looking for something in his (or anyone else’s) mind. So however the final theory of intentional objects turns out, it ‘had better end up agreeing that Ponce de Leon was looking for something when he was looking for the Fountain of Youth, even though there is no Fountain of Youth, and the theory had better not have the consequence that Ponce de Leon was looking for something mental’.5 But if intentional objects are not mental objects, what are they? If we accept (2) and (3), then on the face of it we must accept that some intentional objects do not exist. So we need a theory of non-existent objects or

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entities. (Harman himself mentions Terence Parsons’s theory.6) According to such theories, the things which exist do not exhaust all the things that there are, for there are many things which do not exist. Of all the things we think about, some of them (like Carter) exist, and some of them (like Pegasus) do not. It could be said that Pegasus has being, but he does not exist. And if we can think about impossible objects, then there are these things too. They necessarily do not exist. It cannot be an objection to this theory that it denies Quine’s view that the English phrase ‘There are . . .’ expresses existence (so that ‘There are things which do not exist’ is a contradiction) since the theory is explicitly proposed in opposition to the Quinean orthodoxy.7 But it seems to me that such a theory is fraught with problems. How are we supposed to understand the distinction between being and existence? Specifying two domains of quantification, one a subset of the other, is not enough by itself, since what we need to understand is what distinguishes the things in the subclass (the existent) from the things in the broader class (the entities, things which have being). Moreover, the nature of the postulated entities is obscure. On the face of it, we do not have any idea of what makes it the case that two people are thinking about the same non-existent object. Indeed, intentional objects can be indeterminate, even in a sense that vague objects (if there are such things) never are. As G. E. M. Anscombe puts it, I can think of a man without thinking of a man of any particular height; I cannot hit a man without hitting a man of any particular height, because there is no such thing as a man of no particular height.8

So we need to understand not just the idea of objects which do not exist, but also the fact that they can be indeterminate in this way. But what sense can be made of an indeterminate object? The man who is of no particular height: what colour is his hair? No particular colour? But that surely means: no colour at all. And how can anything have hair without that hair being any colour at all? Is this just an expression of our ‘prejudice in favour of the existent’, that something which has hair has hair of some particular colour? But what is the real alternative to this prejudice? The view, as far as I can see, offers no real answer to these questions. What has emerged is a dilemma: either deny that intentional states can be about things that do not exist, or accept that there are non-existent objects.

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Neither position is acceptable. The way out of the dilemma is to reject an assumption shared by both unacceptable positions: that to be an intentional object is to be a thing or entity of a certain kind. The position which denies (3) assumes that intentional objects are just existing entities. The position which postulates non-existent objects assumes that all intentional objects are entities, although some of them are non-existent ones. The common assumption is that to be an intentional object is to be an entity. This is what I shall deny. This might sound perverse or paradoxical. If I am thinking about Carter, Carter is the intentional object of my thought. Yet Carter exists, he is an entity. So how can I deny that some intentional objects actually are entities? I do not deny this: this is just another way of saying that some intentional objects exist and some do not. What I am denying is that being an intentional object as such is being an entity of any kind. The basis of this view is a proper understanding of what an object is in this context. We use the term ‘object’ in a number of different ways, and some of these ways are very different from others. One is when we talk about physical objects. Here the word can be replaced by ‘thing’: my computer is a physical object; therefore it is a physical thing. Interestingly the converse is not true: if x is a physical thing, it is not always true that x is a physical object. It makes sense to say that gravity is a physical thing; but not that it is a physical object. Someone who says that love is a physical thing is not thereby committed to its being a physical object. This supports my suggestion above that ‘thing’ picks out a more general ontological category than ‘object’. So all physical objects are physical things, but not all physical things are physical objects. Contrast the phrases ‘object of attention’ or ‘object of experience’. As J. J. Valberg has pointed out, we cannot replace the word ‘object’ in these phrases with the word ‘thing’ and retain sense: ‘thing of attention’ and ‘thing of experience’ make no sense.9 The word ‘object’ has a different meaning in these phrases than it does in the phrases ‘physical object’, ‘material object’, ‘mental object’, and even ‘abstract object’. This is the key to the idea that being an intentional object is not being a thing of any kind. For ‘intentional object’ in this respect (unsurprisingly) is like ‘object of attention’ rather than ‘physical object’. If it makes sense at all, ‘intentional thing’ means the same as ‘intentional entity’, which someone might take to mean intensional entity, in the sense in which propositions and other intensions

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are intensional entities. Whatever the merits of the view that there are intensional entities, such entities are plainly not what is meant by talking of intentional objects. When I consider my cat Jeffrey, it is the cat which is the object of my thought, the thing I am thinking about. I am not thinking about an intension. I am thinking about a cat. So even if there are intensional entities, this is not what intentional objects are. When something is a thing of a certain kind, there are general conditions that it meets which make it a thing of that kind. Here I do not want to propose any view about what these conditions might be in any detail; I am just assuming that we do have an idea of such conditions, even if detailed accounts of them are disputable. For example, it is a necessary condition for something’s being a physical object that it has a location in space-time. Or: it is a necessary condition of being a mental event that it exhibits either consciousness or intentionality or both. To develop a full account of mental and physical things or entities would be to elaborate what I shall call a ‘substantial’ conception of a thing or entity. A substantial conception of a thing tells us about the nature of that thing. Ontology deals in such substantial conceptions: an ontological theory of physical objects, for example, tells when such objects are the same or different, what the necessary conditions for being such an object are, and whether objects of these kinds are fundamental, or whether they reduce to other kinds of entity (that is, whether their existence and nature consists in the existence and nature of some other kind of thing). What I am denying is that there is, or can be, any similarly substantial conception of intentional objects. This is the mistake of both unsatisfactory theories dismissed above: each theory assumes that they have to give an account of what intentional objects are, and then goes on to say either (with Searle) that the existence of intentional objects consists simply in the existence of some other ‘ordinary’ entities, or (with the theory of non-existent objects) that some intentional objects are non-existent entities. There is no necessary condition which something must meet in order to be an intentional object, in the sense of there being something substantial that all intentional objects in themselves have in common. There can be no substantial conception of intentional objects, since there is nothing entities have to be, in general and in themselves, in order to be intentional objects. Intentional objects, considered as such, have no nature. Of course, it is true that all intentional objects are the objects of intentional states or acts. (By ‘act’ I mean a mental phenomenon that has an

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object and has a place in a time-series, like an act of judgement, or a decision.) But this does not mean that the nature of intentional objects is to be the objects of intentional states, in the sense that the nature of physical objects is to have a certain spatio-temporal location and to have certain physical properties. What is true, rather, is that something is an intentional object only in so far as it is an object for some thinker or some subject. ‘Object’ in this sense makes sense only relative to ‘subject’. Objects are what is given or presented to subjects in intentional states of mind. When a real thing is given or presented to a subject there is nothing about it, considered in itself, which makes it the object of that subject’s thought. The fact that an intentional object is an object only for a subject entails the possibility that something might be an object for me, say, but not for you, or that certain kinds of minds or creatures can direct their minds on certain objects which are unavailable to other kinds. If you are more musically sophisticated than me, then you can hear things in music which I cannot; you may be able to hear an interrupted cadence in a piece of music which I cannot. The cadence is an object of your musical attention, but it is not an object of mine. It is an object for you but not an object for me. The high-pitched sounds which dogs can hear are objects for them but not for us; the colours of objects which sighted people see are objects for the sighted but not for the blind. The idea of an intentional object, then, is similar to the idea of a world, in the sense in which a creature that is conscious can be said to ‘have a world’. It is in this sense that the world of the blind is very different from the world of the sighted. ‘World’ in this sense is not, of course, the metaphysical idea of all that is the case or the totality of facts. I can say that the world of the blind is different from the world of the sighted without denying that there is one totality of facts. A. R. Luria’s famous book The Man with the Shattered World tells how the world is from the point of view of a soldier who has suffered massive brain damage, resulting in chaotic visual experience, impaired linguistic ability, and little sense of himself as an integrated, unified locus of thought and consciousness.10 The soldier’s world is different from ours. It would be perverse to take this perfectly ordinary idiom to be purporting to imply that there is more than one world, in the sense of more than one totality of facts. Similarly, when I say that X is an intentional object for me but not for you (because you cannot, for some reason, apprehend X in an act of thought, say) I do not mean to imply that X exists in my world but

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not in yours, or that X exists for me, but not for you. X either exists or it does not. But whether or not it does has nothing to do with whether it is an intentional object for me or for you. Nonetheless, two people’s thoughts can have the same intentional object, when they are thinking about (looking for, desiring, contemplating, etc.) the same thing. To say that something is an object for me does not imply that it cannot be an object for you. The idea of an object in this sense plays an important role in the theory of intentionality of Husserl and his followers. But in analytic philosophy, this kind of idea has been somewhat neglected. There are a number of different sources of this neglect. One is a deflationary tendency to treat the idea of an intentional object as a merely grammatical idea. This is the approach taken in a classic essay by Anscombe.11 Anscombe claimed that to be an intentional object is to be a kind of direct object in the grammatical sense, that is, the object of certain transitive verbs, which she calls intentional verbs. The comparison of grammatical and intentional objects is illuminating; it shows again how the word ‘object’, used in both cases in contrast with ‘subject’, does not always mean what it does in (e.g.) the phrase ‘physical object’. A direct object is just what plays a certain role in a sentence containing a transitive verb. However, we can find this comparison illuminating without having to agree with Anscombe that an intentional object is just the direct object of an intentional verb; i.e., that the idea of an intentional object is really a grammatical idea. For one thing, Anscombe’s criterion of what makes a verb intentional is unsatisfactory, on at least two grounds. First, it is really a criterion of intensionality, and has often been pointed out, intensionality and intentionality are importantly different concepts.12 And second, Anscombe’s criterion fails to count ‘belief’ as an intentional verb (as she herself admits). But surely an account of intentionality which does not put the concept of belief at its centre is barely an account of intentionality at all. In any case, it would surely be surprising if the idea of an intentional object, and related ideas like object of attention, object of experience and object of thought, were mere shadows of the grammar of our language (unless, of course, one held the implausible view that all philosophically interesting concepts were mere shadows or artefacts of grammar). These ideas are phenomenological ideas, ideas we use in trying to articulate to ourselves the fundamental nature of what our experience and thought is like. Why should we expect the fundamental nature of experience and

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thought to be explained in terms of grammar? If anything, the explanation should be the other way around. A more popular reason for the neglect of this idea of an intentional object in recent years is a certain re-alignment in discussions of intentionality. One dominant contemporary approach to the problem of intentionality has identified intentionality with representation. States of mind are representations: an intentional state is one which involves a representation of things as being a certain way. The state thus has a representational or intentional content, which is how the world is represented as being. A desire that p, a belief that p, an expectation or wish that p: all these mental states have the same content, they involve a representation of the world as being the p-way. In a desire, the world is desired to be the p-way, in a belief it is believed to be the p-way, and so on. The fundamental notions here are representation, intentional state, and intentional or representational content. One reason to avoid bringing in talk of intentional objects may be the one I located in my discussion of Searle’s views above: all intentional states are about something but what they are about sometimes does not exist, so (given the equation of object and entity) their ‘aboutness’ in general cannot consist in a relation to an object/entity. So aboutness should just consist in a state’s having an intentional or representational content. The concept of an intentional object is not one which a fully worked-out theory needs to employ. I want to dispute this view, and argue for an indispensable role for the concept of an intentional object. In fact, I think that the concepts of intentional object and intentionality should be explained together with the concept of representation; intentionality cannot be explained in terms of representational content. I say this not because I reject the idea of intentional content. On the contrary, I think we need both the idea of intentional object and the idea of intentional content in a proper account of intentionality.13 Two states of mind may have the same intentional object—they may be about the same object—but differ in the way in which they present that object, or in what they predicate of it. These differences are differences in content. I would also claim that two intentional states may have the same content but differ in their objects (indexical thoughts are an example) but this use of ‘content’ is controversial and I will not defend it here. The content of a state of mind is, in a phrase of Valberg’s, what you would put into words: when you put your thoughts into words, what you express is the content. (This is assuming, of course, that you have the words into which to put the thoughts. And this is

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also not to deny that there may be elements of content which cannot be put into words. It is just that what you do put into words, when you put your thought into words, is the content.) So I do not replace the talk of content with talk of objects; rather, I want to argue for an indispensable role for the idea of an intentional object. So we should not replace talk of intentionality and intentional objects with talk of representation or representational content. The two ways of talking should be understood together. At first sight, one way in which it might seem as if the idea of representation is more straightforward than the idea of intentionality is that we are familiar with many everyday concrete examples of representations: written and spoken sentences, signs, pictures. Compared to these, the idea of something being an object of thought can seem worryingly insubstantial and evanescent. After all, here are the concrete things, the representations, before us: we can pick them up and manipulate them. Is this not an indication that the idea of representation is a better starting point? This is, of course, an illusion. Sentences and pictures are concrete representations, but no-one thinks that they represent in and of themselves. They have their power to represent only derivatively, deriving from the states of mind of thinkers who use them. To understand why these things are representations we need to appeal to the thoughts, intentions, plans, and desires of thinkers: in short, their intentional states. Even those who follow Jerry Fodor and think that these intentional states themselves involve sentences in a language of thought do not think this because they think that sentences are in some way better equipped to represent the world, in and of themselves. No, the justification for the language of thought hypothesis derives from the systematic nature of mental processes, not from any assumption about the power of sentences to represent.14 Those who defend the hypothesis are at pains to make it clear that postulating sentences in the head is one thing and explaining how those sentences get their meaning—giving a ‘semantics for the language of thought’—is quite another. So, familiar concrete representations get their meaning from the use that is made of them by thinkers. If we are to explain how the representational states of our minds ‘get their meaning’ then we had better do this in some other way. In what way? The standard approach among physicalist philosophers of mind is to give some account of what some call the ‘representation relation’ in non-intentional (usually causal) terms. But thus formulated, the project cannot succeed. For if it is possible to represent things which do

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not exist, then there can be no representation relation, since relations entail the existence of their relata. It follows from this that—whatever the other problems with the idea that representation reduces to causation—causation cannot underpin representation in general, since causation is a relation and representation is not.15 Beliefs might be relations to mental sentences; they might be relations to propositions; but none of this makes ‘x represents y’ express a relation, if x can represent y when y does not exist. These points might be acknowledged, but dismissed on the grounds that the causal model of representation being assumed is far too crude. This it doubtless is; the question is whether the more sophisticated versions of the theory can avoid this fundamental problem. The question is: where does one place the causal relation in a more sophisticated account? What role, precisely, does causation play? Could one say that causation can explain representation when the object represented does exist, but not when it does not? What, in that case, does one say about the case where the represented object does not exist? One proposal is that we should explain the representation in this case in terms of the represented item’s counterfactual causal relation to the representation, rather than its actual causal relation.16 Thus we might say, not that Pegasus causes my Pegasus-representations, but that Pegasus would cause my Pegasus-representations were he to exist; or alternatively, that what makes a representation a Pegasus-representation is that it would be caused by Pegasus in worlds in which he exists. But even if this counterfactual is true, it is hard to see the proposal as an advance over the idea that one can represent things which do not exist. We started off with the idea that one could represent something even if that thing does not exist. Now this is supposed to be explained by the idea of a causal relation that does not exist. We are still in the position of needing an explanation of how something (either an object or a causal relation) which does not exist can be connected to an actual (not a counterfactual) thought about that ‘something’. ‘Representation’ is certainly a good word for this connection, but in that case we should not think we have explained the representation of the non-existent in terms of a non-existent causal relation. How could this be an advance in our understanding? It seems to me, then, that the appeal to causation in the theory of representation is a mere gesture unless it can say something more about the representation of the non-existent. Of course, it is true that thinkers think about many of the things they causally interact with, and that in many

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cases, it is hard to see how they could have come to have thought about these things unless they had causally interacted with them. But what we are after, presumably, is not the causal history of this or that specific representation (or representation-type) but rather what makes representation possible in general. And no answer to this question is satisfactory unless it gives an answer to the question of representation of the non-existent. So, moving to the idea of representation has not enabled us to get away from the notion of what a representation is about— that is, its intentional object—for a representation is a representation of Pegasus not because it necessarily looks like Pegasus, nor because it is caused by Pegasus, but because it can be used to express thoughts (intentional states or acts) about Pegasus. A mental representation of Pegasus just is a thought (of some kind) about Pegasus. But to say that a thought is about Pegasus is to say that Pegasus is the intentional object of the thought. A thought’s being about x and x’s being its intentional object are just the same idea. So as long as we talk about a thought’s being about something, then we are talking in terms of intentional objects. That we do employ the idea of a thought’s being about something (and not just the idea of a thought’s having representational content) is shown by the fact, noted above, that we can count thoughts as being about the same thing even when they have different contents. You might be thinking about Napoleon’s exile on Elba, I might be thinking about his exile on St Helena. There is a sense in which we are thinking about the same thing: our thoughts have the same object. So we need more than the idea of content. This is hardly surprising: one of the intuitive glosses which we put on the notion of intentionality is that it is aboutness. And it is clearly a better starting-point to say that thoughts are about their objects than to say that they are about their contents. Thoughts have contents, and it is because of this that they are about their objects. Retaining the intuitive notion of aboutness means retaining the intuitive idea of what thoughts are about, and this in turn means retaining the idea of an intentional object. In this essay, I have argued that the idea of an intentional object creates an dilemma for theories of intentionality: either intentional objects are ordinary existing entities, or they are the kind of entities some of which do not exist. If we say the first thing, then how do we make sense of intentional objects which do not exist? But if we say the second, then we have to accept the incredible view that there are non-existent entities. The way out

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of this dilemma is to deny an assumption made by each horn: that being an intentional object is being an entity of some sort. Rather, an intentional object is just the object (for some subject) of an intentional state or act. Of course, if all we have to say about intentional objects is that they are what intentional states are about, and all we have to say about intentional states is that they have objects, then the proposal is hopelessly circular. But a proper account of intentionality will have more to say, by giving a detailed account of the nature of various intentional phenomena. (I do not pretend to have even started on such an account here.) However, I believe, for the reasons given above, that a theory of intentionality will not be helped by appealing to causal relations between thoughts and their objects. And nor do I think that progress would be made by replacing talk of intentional objects with talk of representation. For a representation (linguistic, pictorial or mental) is the representation it is partly because of what it is about. And as long as we continue to make use of the idea of what a mental state is about, then we will need to make use of the idea of an intentional object.

* * * I am grateful to Katalin Farkas, Paul Horwich, Greg McCulloch, David Smith, Jerry Valberg, and the participants at the Reading conference on Meaning and Representation in April 2000 for discussion of the issues raised in this essay.

E S S AY S E V E N

The Intentional Structure of Consciousness

(2003)

1. TH E I NTE NTIONAL AN D TH E Q UALITATIVE

Newcomers to the philosophy of mind are sometimes resistant to the idea that pain is a mental state. If asked to defend their view, they might say something like this: pain is a physical state, it is a state of the body. A pain in one’s leg feels to be in the leg, not ‘in the mind’. After all, sometimes people distinguish pain which is ‘all in the mind’ from a genuine pain, sometimes because the second is ‘physical’ while the first is not. And we also occasionally distinguish mental pain (which is normally understood as some kind of emotional distress) from the ‘physical pain’ one feels in one’s body. So what can be meant by saying that pain is a mental state? Of course, it only takes a little reflection shows that this naive view is mistaken. Pain is a state of consciousness, or an event in consciousness, and whether or not all states of mind are conscious, it is indisputable that only minds, or states of mind, are conscious.1 But does the naive view tell us anything about the concept of pain, or the concept of mind? I think it does. In this essay, I shall give reasons for thinking that consciousness is a form of

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intentionality, the mind’s ‘direction upon its objects’. I shall claim that the consciousness involved in bodily sensations like pain is constituted by the mind’s direction upon the part or region of the body where the sensation feels to be. Given this, it is less surprising that the naive view of pain says what it does: the apparent ‘physicality’ of pain is a consequence of confusing the object of the intentional state—the part of the body in which the pain is felt—with the state of being in pain. The naive view therefore provides a kind of indirect evidence for what I call intentionalism: the view that all mental states are intentional.2 Intentionalism is a controversial doctrine, and conscious bodily sensations are often thought to be obvious counter-examples to the view.3 It is often said that such sensations are ‘qualitative’ in nature, and qualitative mental states are not intentional. This is the doctrine I call non-intentionalism about sensations. Thus David Rosenthal: There are two broad categories of mental property. Mental states such as thoughts and desires, often called propositional attitudes, have content that can be described by ‘that’ clauses. For example, one can have a thought, or desire, that it will rain. These states are said to have intentional properties, or intentionality. Sensations, such as pains and sense impressions, lack intentional content, and have instead qualitative properties of various sorts.4

Here intentional properties are described as those with a propositional content and qualitative properties are those properties which are characteristic of sensations. Propositional content is what ascribed in a ‘that’-clause and is normally assessable as true or false. Now no-one should deny that some states of mind have propositional content and others do not. But the question is whether this distinction is what is being rejected by intentionalists. This depends on whether Rosenthal is right to equate a phenomenon’s being intentional with its having propositional content. If he is right, then intentionalism should be understood as the thesis that all mental states are propositional attitudes: since all intentional states are propositional attitudes and all mental states are intentional. Intentionalism of this form is alluded to in the last sentence of this quotation from Alvin Goldman: Philosophers commonly divide mental states into two sorts: those that have and those that lack propositional content. The former are propositional attitudes, and the latter sensations, qualia or the like. Propositional attitudes are

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recognised by the sentences used to ascribe them, the telltale sign being an embedded ‘that’-clause . . . In addition to propositional attitudes, the class of mental states includes sensations like pains, itchy feelings, and perceptual experiences, all of which are said to have qualitative character. However, some theorists hold that even these mental states have propositional content; and a few theorists try to explain away qualitative character in terms of propositional content.5

The views Goldman mentions at the end of this quotation are initially implausible. The first credits sensations like ‘itchy feelings’ with propositional content; but what is the propositional content supposed to be? When we say things of the form ‘X hopes that p’, ‘X desires that p’, and so on, we know what sort of thing it makes sense to put in the place of ‘p’—but what are we supposed to put in the place of ‘p’ in ‘X itchy-feels that p’, or ‘X feels itchily that p’? The second view Goldman mentions ‘explains away’ the qualitative character of sensations—presumably by showing that such character is illusory. But the qualitative character of sensations is normally introduced in terms of how the sensation feels; and what merit can there be in a conception of sensation which says that how a sensation feels is an illusion, something to be explained away? If intentionalism were saying this sort of thing, then it would be of little interest. My view is that what is at fault here is not intentionalism as such, but the initial distinction between two kinds of mental state. We can immediately see that something is wrong when Goldman classifies perceptual experiences as among the states with qualitative character. The reason for doing this is presumably because there is (as Nagel put it) something it is like to see, hear, smell, or touch something, just as there is something it is like to have a sensation.6 But it has long been recognised that perceptual experiences also have propositional content: one sees that the bus is coming, smells that someone is cooking goulash, or hears that the glass broke. So it seems like perceptual experiences are propositional attitudes which also have qualitative character. One could respond that all this means is that the distinction between qualitative states and propositional attitudes is not exclusive: some qualitative states can have propositional content. But what exactly is it for a state to be qualitative? What independent grip do we have of the idea of the qualitative, other than in terms of the contrast with propositional content? We can say that perceptions and sensations feel a certain way, to be sure; but

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it does not take much reflection to realise that the way a perception ‘feels’ is different from the way a bodily sensation feels; we can talk about how it feels to see red, so long as we do not think of this in terms of a certain ‘feel’ of redness (say) around one’s eyes.7 So whatever qualitative features are, we should not think of them as being the same in perception as in sensation. The most we can say at this stage is that qualitative states of mind are conscious states of mind, and consciousness comes in many forms. But if we say this, then it seems that not just perception, but many other propositional attitudes can have qualitative features, since many propositional attitudes can be conscious. I can consciously realise that now is the time to book the table for the restaurant: there is something it is like for this to suddenly come into my mind. So if the qualitative is just the conscious, then there are many propositional attitudes that are qualitative. And the fact that some propositional attitudes are not conscious just means that we have to distinguish between conscious mental states and non-conscious ones. In effect, there are two options. The first is that a state of mind is ‘qualitative’ when it has qualities which are like those of sensation. In this sense, perceptions are not qualitative states. So the category of the qualitative is a sub-category of the conscious. One might be happy with this way of talking, so long as one had a satisfactory way of describing non-qualitative conscious states. The second option is to say that a state of mind is qualitative when it is conscious. In this case, perceptions are qualitative, but then so are many other propositional attitudes. One might be happy with this latter way of using the term ‘qualitative’, but then the distinction being made is essentially that between the conscious and the non-conscious. It is therefore misleading (at best) to say that the fundamental distinction between states of mind is between qualitative states and propositional attitudes. For depending on how one understands ‘qualitative’, either qualitative states form a sub-category of conscious states, or ‘qualitative’ just means the same as conscious. Either way, the more fundamental distinction seems to be the distinction between the conscious and the non-conscious. And if this is the fundamental distinction between states of mind, then intentionalism does not seem to be such an obviously absurd view: for an intentionalist is then saying that all mental states are intentional, and that some are conscious and some are not. Intentionalism is then not denying consciousness (i.e., the ‘qualitative’ in the broad sense) or explaining it away; it simply accepts consciousness as a fact, just as non-intentionalism does.

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However, there remains a question about what intentionalism should say about the ‘qualitative’ in the narrower sense (i.e., sensations). For as noted above, it does not seem right, on the face of it, to say that itches and pains are propositional attitudes in anything like the way beliefs are. So how can there be an intentionalist account of sensation? I want to address this problem by first breaking the connection between intentional states and propositional attitudes and proposing a somewhat different understanding of intentionality (§2). I will then go on to argue that bodily sensations should be thought of as intentional states on this understanding (§3). However, the fact that bodily sensations are intentional states does not rule out their having (narrowly) qualitative properties (qualia) in addition to their intentional character. One could hold that all mental states are intentional, but that some have non-intentional qualia. This is the view I call ‘weak intentionalism’. I discuss this view in §4, and reject it. Weak intentionalism is contrasted with strong intentionalism, which says that all mental states have only intentional mental properties.8 Two types of strong intentionalism are distinguished in §5, and I argue for the type which I call the ‘perceptual theory’. But before doing anything else, I need to say something about the idea of intentionality.

2 . TH E I DE A OF I NTE NTIONALIT Y

I understand intentionality in a traditional way, as the mind’s direction or directedness upon its objects. When a state of mind is about something— say, as a belief that my doctor smokes is about my doctor—I shall say that the state of mind has an object. (Of course, intentionalism is the view that all mental states have objects; but one should not build this into the definition of intentionality.) An intentional state is a state which has, in J. J. Valberg’s phrase, ‘a need for an object’.9 One cannot adequately understand what the state is without knowing what its object or objects are.10 The objects of intentional states are sometimes called ‘intentional objects’, and I will follow this usage. But I do not mean by this that the predicate ‘x is an intentional object’ is true of a special class of objects having a certain nature. There is no such special class of objects; no-one could write a treatise on intentional objects as one might write a treatise on abstract objects, mental objects, or physical objects. For there is nothing interesting or substantial which all intentional

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objects have in common. Intentional objects are just whatever one’s intentional states are directed on. My thought about my doctor is directed on my doctor, on smoking, and on the fact that he smokes: intentional objects can be ordinary objects, properties, events, or states of affairs (so ‘object’ here does not mean particular). One state of mind might also have many intentional objects. And, notoriously, some intentional objects do not exist. This last fact is one of the most puzzling and much-discussed features of intentionality. But there is not space to say much about it here.11 All I mean by the phrase intentional object is that at which one’s mind is directed. If a state of mind has an object, if is directed on an object, then it is intentional. This means that there is an answer to the question, ‘on what is your mind directed?’ (The question is more natural in specific cases: ‘what are you thinking about?’, ‘what are you afraid of?’, ‘what do you want?’) Sometimes the answer to this question is a word or phrase which picks out nothing: ‘Pegasus’, ‘phlogiston’, ‘the fountain of youth’ all have no reference, but are answers to the question (e.g.), ‘what are you thinking about?’. By ‘directedness’, then, I mean that feature of states of mind in virtue of which they have intentional objects. And by ‘some intentional objects do not exist’ I mean that some answers to the question, ‘on what is your state of mind directed?’ have no referents, they refer to nothing. Directedness is the first essential feature of intentional states. The second is what I call (following Searle) aspectual shape.12 This is the idea that when something is presented to a subject (in thought, perception, desire, and so on) it is always presented under a certain aspect, or in a certain way. There is no such thing as simply thinking about an object, as opposed to thinking about it (say) as a present from one’s mother, or as one’s most precious possession. This is what Searle means by ‘aspectual shape’. The term is useful, because it is not yet tied to a particular theory or account of intentionality and related phenomena, as some terms are (e.g., Frege’s Sinn or sense). Aspectual shape, like directedness, is something which any theory needs to explain, not a theoretical posit. An intentional state, then, has an intentional object—this is directedness—and the object is presented under certain aspects and not under others—this is aspectual shape. (I say ‘object’ for convenience, but bear in mind that an intentional state can have more than one intentional object.) When we say what the object of an intentional state is, we have to pick a certain way of saying it, and the way of talking about the intentional object

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gives or expresses the intentional content of the intentional state. The content of two states can differ even when their objects do not: you and I can be thinking about the same person, but you think of him as Cicero and I think of him as Tully. Our thoughts have the same objects but different contents. In general, we can say that a state’s having an intentional content is a matter of its having an intentional object with a certain aspectual shape. Non-existent intentional objects mean that we cannot rest with this neat formulation, since we need to understand how something non-existent can be present in a state of mind. We can ignore the refinements needed for the purposes of this essay. But one thing is plain: non-existent intentional objects are not a special kind of object, any more than existent intentional objects are. And since (at least according to the orthodox view, which I accept) there are no non-existent objects, it follows that not every intentional state is a relation to an intentional object: for relations must relate what exists. However, this is consistent with saying that all intentional states are relations to intentional contents. For whether or not every state has an existing intentional object, every intentional state must have an intentional content: one cannot think without thinking something, perceive without perceiving something, and want without wanting something. The ‘something’ here is what is wanted, what is thought, what is perceived: this is the intentional content. The content is what one puts into words, if one has the words into which to put it.13 And therefore the content of a state is part of what individuates that state: that is, what distinguishes it from all other states. The other thing which distinguishes an intentional state is whether it is a belief, or a desire, or hope, or whatever. Again following Searle, I call this aspect of the state—the relation which relates the subject to the content—the ‘intentional mode’.14 Every intentional state, then, consists of an intentional content related to the subject by an intentional mode. The structure of intentionality is therefore relational, and may be displayed as follows: Subject—Intentional mode—Intentional content This is relational because there are two dimensions of variation in any intentional state of a subject: one may be presented with the same content under various modes (as, for instance, when one can believe or hopes the same proposition) and one can be presented with different contents under the

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same mode (two perceptual states can have different contents, but under the same mode). To fix any intentional state of a given subject requires that two things therefore be fixed: mode and content. Much of this fairly abstract description of intentionality should be uncontroversial.15 But notice that introducing intentionality in this way does not require any particular account of what the modes in question are, and it does not require any particular conception of content (except that it accommodate the phenomenon of aspectual shape). One could, for example, accept the general picture yet hold that the only intentional modes are the propositional attitudes as normally conceived (e.g., belief and desire). Or one could accept a wider class of intentional modes. Similarly, one could accept the general picture yet hold that the only content is propositional content, content that can be said to be true or false. Or one could accept a wider conception of content and say that some content is propositional and some is not. But nothing in the very idea of intentionality compels us to choose one way or the other. Other considerations are needed to settle these issues. So, in particular, nothing in the idea of intentionality as outlined above compels us to say that content must be propositional. In fact, I believe that not all content is propositional. A state of mind has propositional content when we can say that the content of the state is true or false. But many intentional states have, on the face of it, non-truth-evaluable contents. The emotions of love and hate, for example, are directed at particular objects; fear and pity are often the same; desire is often naturally construed as having a non-propositional content; and then there is the general phenomenon of thinking about an object, which is not always explicable in propositional terms. Some of these examples are controversial, but I will not enter the controversy in this essay. All I need for the time being is to open up the possibility of non-propositional content, since once this possibility is opened up, then the equation (found in the quotations from Rosenthal and Goldman above) between intentional states and propositional attitudes is not compulsory. And once this is accepted, then the fact that sensations are not obviously propositional attitudes is not a refutation of intentionalism. So much for intentionality; but what are non-intentional states supposed to be? Well, if the above definition of intentionality is accepted, then a supposedly non-intentional state or property is one which is mental, (probably) conscious, but has no intentional structure: it is not directed on anything, it has no intentional object, no aspectual shape, and no distinction can

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be made between anything like mode and anything like content. The term ‘qualia’ has been used for such properties, and I will follow this usage. It is also possible to use the term ‘qualia’ for the ‘qualitative’ in the broad sense (= the conscious) mentioned in §1; but to avoid confusion I will here use the term for qualitative properties in the narrow sense. I will use the term ‘phenomenal’ for qualitative in the broader sense (after all, the English phenomenon derives from the Greek for appearance16). So the phenomenal character of experience is its conscious character, and an account of the phenomenal character of experience is an account of what it is like to have that experience. In this terminology, then, it is not tautological to say that one can give an account of phenomenal character in terms of qualia. And it is not contradictory to say that one can give an account of phenomenal character in terms of intentionality.17 These are both substantial theses. Qualia are either mental states or properties of mental states. For example, one could call the mental state of having a toothache a quale, or one could call the particular naggingness of the toothache the quale. Intentionalism must reject qualia in the first sense—obviously, since intentionalism is the view that all mental states are intentional. But it need not reject qualia in the second sense. A version of intentionalism—weak intentionalism— maintains that all mental states have some intentionality, but that some of these states have qualia-properties. The experience of a toothache, for instance, has intentionality (it is tooth-directed) but on top of this it may have specific qualia which account for its particular feeling. A stronger form of intentionalism says that no mental state has any non-intentional mental properties. In §4, I shall argue for strong intentionalism and against weak intentionalism. But first I must put non-intentionalism to one side.

3. I NTE NTIONALI S M AN D NON - I NTE NTIONALI S M ABO UT S E N SATION

The quotation from Rosenthal in §1 expresses a straightforward non-intentionalist view: there are two kinds of mental states, propositional attitudes and qualia. As noted in §1, the view ought to classify sense perception as a kind of hybrid, having both propositional content and qualia. And we also saw that this view should not equate the qualitative with the conscious, since there are conscious mental states (e.g., conscious thoughts, conscious

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episodes of thinking) which have no qualia in the sense just defined (§2). The consciousness involved in these non-qualitative states must be explained in some other way—for instance, in terms of the states’ being the objects of higher-order states (this is the ‘Higher-Order Thought’ or HOT theory of consciousness).18 So on this non-intentionalist view, there are conscious propositional attitudes which have qualia (e.g., perceptions) and there are conscious propositional attitudes which have no qualia (e.g., conscious thoughts). If this is granted, then it has been granted that there can be states of mind which are purely intentional, which lack qualia, and yet are conscious states. There can be no objection in principle, then, to the idea of explaining consciousness (in the case of certain mental states) using only the resources of intentionality. And this, of course, is what strong intentionalism will end up saying about all conscious states—but we have not got there yet. The existence of conscious states which are intentional does not trouble non-intentionalism, of course; the view would only be refuted if there were no qualia. So to refute non-intentionalism, an intentionalist must examine the supposed cases of qualia, and show either that they do not exist or that they have been mistakenly classified as non-intentional. Here the chief examples, as we saw in §1, are bodily sensations. How should an intentionalist argue that bodily sensations are intentional? There are a number of ways to proceed here, some of which will be discussed below. (For instance, Michael Tye has argued that pains actually represent damage to the body.19) But it seems to me that the strongest case for the intentionality of bodily sensation comes from a correct understanding of their felt location. It is essential to bodily sensation, as we normally experience it, that it feels to have a location in the body.20 The phenomenological facts are as follows. Pains and other sensations feel to be located in parts of the body. To attend to a sensation is to attend to the (apparent) part or region of the body where the sensation feels to be. The location of a bodily sensation need not be felt to be precise; and it can involve the whole body. A feeling of nausea can overwhelm the middle of one’s whole body, and a feeling of physical exhaustion can pervade one’s whole body. The point is not that a sensation must be felt to occupy a non-vague relatively circumscribed location, but that it is felt to be somewhere within one’s body. The necessity of this would explain why we find it so hard to make sense of the idea of a sensation of one’s own which has a location (say) ten inches outside one’s left

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shoulder. Phantom limbs are not such cases: what subjects feel in a phantom limb pain is not that they have a pain at some distance from the point at which the limb was severed; rather, they feel that their body extends further than it actually does.21 That bodily sensation has an apparent location may be uncontroversial; that its location is felt may be less so. The non-intentionalist view mentioned above might say that the ‘felt’ location really involves two things: a sensation (a quale) and a belief that the sensation is located in a certain part of the body. On this view, the location of a sensation is not part of the feeling of a sensation; rather it is a result of a belief about where the sensation is. But this view cannot be right. Belief is a state of mind which is revisable on the basis of other beliefs and evidence. When rational subjects come to have a reason which tells decisively against a belief, then they revise the belief. So if the apparent location of a sensation is explained by a belief about its location, one would expect the belief to be revised when a subject comes to have a reason to think that the sensation does not have that location. But this is not so. Someone who becomes convinced by the physicalist arguments for identifying sensations with brain states will come to believe that sensations are really located in the brain. But having this belief does not change the apparent location of the sensation in the body. Moreover, this person is not irrational—i.e., does not have a contradictory belief—when they claim that a sensation is in the brain but it seems to be in the leg. Feeling a sensation to be located at a certain place is not the same as believing that one has a sensation located at that place. If we accept that a sensation feels to be located at a certain point, then I claim we should accept that sensation-states have intentionality. But why? John Searle has claimed that we should not let our ways of talking mislead us here: The ‘of’ of ‘conscious of’ is not always the ‘of’ of intentionality. If I am conscious of a knock on the door, my conscious state is intentional, because it makes reference to something beyond itself, the knock on the door. If I am conscious of a pain, the pain is not intentional, because it does not represent anything beyond itself.22

But ‘X is conscious of a pain’ can mean at least three things. First, if being conscious of a pain means that one is aware of being in a pain-state, then

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it is a higher-order awareness of another mental state and is as intentional as any other higher-order mental state (its content may be: I am in pain). Second, if being conscious of a pain is being aware of a pain-object, then the analogy with a knock on the door holds: the state can be as intentional as being conscious of a knock at the door. For the fact that the pain-object (if there is such a thing) is not itself intentional is no more relevant to the intentionality of the awareness of the pain-object than the non-intentional nature of the knock is relevant to the intentionality of the consciousness of the knock. And finally, being conscious of a pain may simply mean being in pain, which is in its nature a conscious state. But the intentionality of this is precisely what is at issue. So how can the question be settled?23 In §2 I outlined the two essential features of intentionality: directedness and aspectual shape. These features generate what I call the relational structure of intentionality: intentional states involve presentations of intentional objects with aspectual shape. The presentation of an object with an aspectual shape is what I call an intentional content. Subjects are related to intentional contents (e.g., propositions) by intentional modes (e.g., belief). The nature of an intentional state is given by giving the intentional mode and the content. What are the intentional object, the mode, and the content in the case of bodily sensation? Take the example of a pain in one’s ankle. The first thing to note is that this is a form of awareness, and it is not a ‘mere’ awareness or ‘bare awareness’. It is an awareness of one’s ankle. It is for this reason that I say, pace Searle, that the ankle is the object of the state. Being in this state of pain is a matter of the ankle being presented to one in a certain way. In general, the intentional object of a state S is what is given in an answer to the question, ‘what is your mind directed on when in S?’ For example, the correct answer to the question, ‘what is your belief about?’, gives the intentional object of your belief. Now pains are not naturally said to be ‘about’ things; instead one asks ‘what hurts?’ or ‘where does it hurt?’ and the answer gives the intentional object of a pain: my leg, my arm, etc. That there is a relational structure here is shown by the fact that there is a distinction between the subject of the experience and the object or region which hurts; that there is an intentional object is shown by the fact that the subject’s mind is directed on that object. And as with other intentional objects, there are cases where the intentional object of a sensation does not exist: for example, in phantom limb cases.

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The intentional object of the pain—the ankle—is presented to the mind in a certain way. One’s ankle is a part of one’s foot, it is made up of bones and muscle, but it may not be presented as such in the state of pain. One may have a pain in one’s liver, but not have any idea that the liver is where the pain is—one could have a pain which one can only identify as being ‘over here’ without even knowing that one has a liver. Thus bodily sensations exhibit aspectual shape: their objects are presented in certain ways, to the exclusion of other ways. And the content of a sensation-state is a matter of its object being presented in a certain way. This content need not be propositional. A full account of this phenomenon needs to probe more deeply into the relationship between the experience of one’s body in sensation, in kinaesthesia and proprioception, and the awareness of one’s body as a unique and unified object of one’s bodily awareness. The account would also need to link bodily awareness with one’s sense of one’s body in agency. I do not give such an account in this essay; but I note here the need for further investigation. This is all I shall say for the time being about the directedness and aspectual shape of bodily sensations. What about the concept of an intentional mode—how does this apply to sensations? This is a question on which different intentionalist theories differ, so we must leave it until we come to discuss these theories in §5. Here I take myself to have argued for three things: first, that even non-intentionalists must accept the coherence of purely intentional conscious states; second, that all bodily sensations involve a felt bodily location; and third, that this can be understood as a form of intentionality, as that idea was introduced in §2.

4. W E AK I NTE NTIONALI S M

Suppose these points are accepted. And suppose, for the sake of argument, that intentionalist accounts of other mental phenomena, such as moods and so-called undirected emotions, are accepted. (I shall not discuss these phenomena in this essay.) Then even if one accepted all this, one could still accept that certain mental states have qualia, in addition to their intentional properties. This is the view I call weak intentionalism. Weak intentionalism says that all mental states are intentional, but that some have non-intentional conscious properties: qualia. The weak

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intentionalist holds that qualia are higher-order properties of states of mind. And since states are normally understood as instances of properties, qualia are properties of properties. Another way to express weak intentionalism in this sense24 is to say that the intentional nature of certain conscious states does not exhaust their conscious or phenomenal character: two experiences could share their intentional nature and differ in their phenomenal character. Yet another way to express the view is as follows: not every phenomenal or conscious difference in states of mind is an intentional (or a representational) difference. One could be a weak intentionalist about all mental states, or one could apply the view only to particular kinds of mental states: one could say, for instance, that all perceptual experiences have intentional content, and that they also have qualia, but this is not true of beliefs.25 Weak intentionalism about perceptual experience is a popular view; it has been defended by Loar, Peacocke, and Shoemaker among others.26 The view is normally defended by describing ways in which the phenomenal character of an experience can change even if the representational content does not (e.g., the inverted spectrum) or cases where the phenomenal character remains the same across changes in representational content (e.g., Block’s ‘inverted earth’). I do not find these arguments convincing in the case of visual experience; my sympathies are with those who defend a strong intentionalist conception of visual experience.27 Here my concern is with bodily sensation, since I am taking bodily sensations as one of the main sources of resistance to an intentionalist theory of mind, regardless of what happens to theories of perception. But I will talk for convenience about ‘weak intentionalism’ as if it were a view about all mental states. (Conceivably someone could agree with me about sensation but nonetheless hold that some mental states are ‘pure’ qualia; such a person should understand my term ‘weak intentionalism’ as meaning ‘weak intentionalism about sensation’.) Since there are not many existing weak intentionalist accounts of sensation, I shall describe a weak intentionalist view of sensation drawing on the weak intentionalist views of perceptual experience just mentioned. On this view, having a pain is an intentional state, for the reasons given in §3: it is an awareness of something happening in a part or region of your body. That part or region is the intentional object of the state. But this is not the whole story about the consciousness involved in pain. For there are also qualia which are characteristic of the feeling of pain. Thus, the conscious nature of the sensation-experience is determined by two things: the part of the body

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the experience presents as its object, and the qualia. We can illustrate this by considering two pains, one in the right ankle and one in the left, which feel to be in different places and yet in some sense feel the same. The sense in which they feel the same is given by the qualia which the pain-states share. The sense in which they feel different is given by their intentional objects. (I assume here that the location of the sensation is part of how the sensation-state feels, for the reasons given in §3.) The view therefore locates the consciousness involved in bodily sensations in two places: in the relation to the body part and in the intrinsic non-intentional qualia. What are these non-intentional qualia properties of? The natural answer is that they are apparent properties of the part of the body which hurts. But if we are to maintain the parallel with the weak intentionalist theory of perception, this cannot be the right answer. In the case of perception, colour-qualia are supposed to be properties of states of mind, not properties of the coloured objects (physical objects do not have qualia, on the normal understanding of qualia). So pain-qualia, construed on the same model, are also properties of mental states: the naggingness of a toothache is a property of the toothache, while the toothache itself is a (partly intentional) state of a conscious subject. A non-intentionalist, by contrast, holds that certain conscious mental states (call them ‘pure qualia’) have no intentionality at all. So if it is to distinguish itself from non-intentionalism, weak intentionalism must deny that there can be pure qualia: qualia cannot be instantiated except as properties of properties: i.e., intentional state types. If qualia were properties of body parts, then they would not be properties of properties. But they must be properties of properties, because otherwise there could be instantiations of pure qualia. I will assume then that according to weak intentionalism, the qualia involved in pain are properties of the intentional state of being in pain, just as putative colour qualia are properties of the perceptual experiences of seeing objects. And I will assume that these properties are instantiated only when the intentional state is instantiated. (If one thought that ‘zombies’ in David Chalmers’s sense were impossible, then one might add ‘when and . . .’ to the ‘only when’.) But is this thesis plausible? The difficulty with the theory is phenomenological: it derives from the unclarity of what it is to be ‘aware of an intrinsic property of a state of mind’. Certainly being aware of a pain in my ankle is not like being aware of a knock at the door. The pain in my ankle seems to be a part of me, and

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it seems to be the ankle which is hurting me. It is not as if I am aware of the location of my ankle, and (in addition to this) I feel that my being so aware has a quale. To make sense of this, we have to make sense of the possibility of separating out, in thought, the quale from the intentional awareness. But this requires we can make real sense of pure qualia, and this is denied by the theory. The intentionality and the phenomenal character of the pain just do not seem to be separable in this way. The essence of my objection is this: in a state of pain (in the ankle, say) there do not seem to be two things going on—the intentional awareness of the ankle and the awareness of the pain-quale. Rather, the awareness of the ankle seems to be ipso facto awareness of its hurting. The hurting seems to be in the ankle. How the ankle feels seems to be a property of the ankle. It does not seem to be an intrinsic property of the intentional awareness of the ankle.28 In this respect, the objection parallels the transparency objection to visual qualia: colours seem to be properties of objects, not intrinsic properties of experiences. Of course, the idea that colour-qualia and pain-qualia are properties of states of mind can arise from a metaphysical resistance to the idea that things like surfaces of inanimate objects can have certain sorts of properties.29 The inverted spectrum shows (allegedly) that the qualitative nature of colours is in the mind; and the qualia of pain can hardly be in a physical body. But the theory is nonetheless supposed to save the appearances, the phenomena: for what is the point of a theory of consciousness which puts the phenomena in the wrong place? I propose that we put this theory to one side and see if the other intentionalist alternatives are preferable. Do strong intentionalist theories do any better?

5. STRONG I NTE NTIONALI ST TH EORI E S OF S E N SATION : RE PRE S E NTATIONALI S M

These theories say that the conscious character of a sensation consists purely in that state’s intentional features. There are three ways this can be understood. It can be understood as locating the conscious character of a mental state in features of the intentional content of the state; differences in conscious character must be differences in content. Second, the theory could locate the conscious character of a mental state in features of the

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intentional mode—the subject’s relation to that content. And third, differences in content can consist in some combination of differences in content and differences in mode. This threefold distinction is just a result of the fact (outlined in §2) that intentional states can differ in their modes, their contents or both. Tye has recently advanced a theory of the first sort; this is his representationalism.30 Tye claims that pain (for example) is a representation of damage to the body, or disturbance in the body. The conscious state is a representation of a certain state of affairs, and the consciousness consists in the fact that this state of affairs is represented. The theory’s treatment of pain, however, is not very convincing. It seems clear that there are many varieties of pain, not all of which the suffering subject would be aware of as representing damage to the body. Tye responds to this objection that the subject need not possess the concept of damage to the body in order to be in pain: the representational content of pain is non-conceptual content. This may be so; but it seems to me that appealing to non-conceptual content puts the explanation of how pain feels beyond the facts which are open to mere phenomenological reflection; it builds in a complexity to the content of pain which, although it may be part of the content of unconscious representations in the subject’s brain, is not part of what is given to the subject in cases of pain. This brings to the surface a problem with Tye’s use of the notion of non-conceptual content, which I shall now explain. The notion of non-conceptual content has been used in (at least) two ways. One way it has been used is to describe the phenomenologically available content of a person’s conscious experience: for example, one might be aware of many different colours within one’s present visual experience without having concepts for all these determinate shades of colour. Some describe this as a case where the colours are represented by the non-conceptual content of the experience (or better: they are represented in a non-conceptual state of mind).31 The other use of the idea of non-conceptual content is in connection with the content of informational states of the brain—say, states of the visual system. Here the idea is that a psychologist might attribute a representation to a state of the brain which has a complex, articulated content, without there being any requirement that the subject whose brain it is can have thoughts with this content. The first notion of non-conceptual content is phenomenological, the second belongs to ‘sub-personal’ theories of mental processing.32

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As noted above, Tye considers the objection that someone who feels a pain need not be aware that there is damage occurring in their body, since ‘such a proposal is too complicated to fit the phenomenology of pain experiences’. He responds that ‘to feel a pain, one need not have the resources to conceptualise what the pain represents’.33 The content of pain is non-conceptual. Which notion of non-conceptual content is Tye using? This presents a dilemma. If he is using the sub-personal notion of non-conceptual content, then the problem is that there is no requirement that any sub-personal states need enter the subject’s awareness at all. So the feature Tye appealed to in order to explain the consciousness of pain (representational content) is now being articulated in terms which deny the need for awareness at all. Tye has explained consciousness in terms of the idea of non-conceptual representational content, an idea which (it is agreed on all sides) has no essential connection to consciousness.34 Tye’s opponent can accept that there is non-conceptual sub-personal representation of damage to the body while still consistently holding that there are qualia which are responsible for the conscious phenomenal character of the state. On the other hand, if Tye is appealing to the phenomenological notion of non-conceptual content, then he does need to say that the features represented enter into the subject’s awareness. In the case of visual experience, the colours manifest themselves to the subject’s awareness; one can be aware of things for which one has no concepts. So the subject must, contrary to what Tye says, be aware of tissue damage. Certainly, I am not saying that the subject has to think that there is tissue damage; this needs the concept of tissue damage. But the subject must be aware of it, on Tye’s view, in the non-conceptual way. The original objection was not that one could not be aware of such things in a non-conceptual way, but that the characterisation of the content seemed too complex to characterise the experience of pain. My diagnosis of the difficulty here is that Tye is appealing to the sub-personal conception of non-conceptual content when responding to the objection that the subject need not be aware of damage, but appealing to the phenomenological conception when using the notion of non-conceptual content to explain consciousness. The latter conception is what he needs. But then he needs to say more about why we should regard the subjects as being (non-conceptually) aware of damage to their bodies. I think that the trouble is that Tye has no resources except those of the idea of representational

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content. To see how we might make progress if we used more resources, we should consider the other strong intentionalist alternative. 6 . STRONG I NTE NTIONALI ST TH EORI E S OF BODI LY S E N SATION : TH E PE RC E P TUAL TH EORY

Tye’s theory locates differences in the phenomenal or conscious character of a sensation in the representational content of the state alone; hence the complexity of the content. The alternative strong intentionalist view says that the phenomenal character of a state is fixed not just by the content, but by the content and the intentional mode. This is the third view I mentioned at the beginning of the previous section, and it is the view I want to defend. (The second view, that the phenomenal character of the state of mind is fixed purely by the mode, has little to be said for it: obviously, any plausible intentionalist view must allow that the intentional object and content contribute to phenomenal character.) I call this theory the ‘perceptual theory’, since it treats bodily sensation as a form of perception, the perception of things going on in one’s body. (The view derives from D. M. Armstrong.35) Consider first a strong intentionalist theory of perception, and what it would say about the phenomenal character of (say) visual experience. The phenomenal character of a visual experience of an aeroplane flying overhead is given by giving its content— the aeroplane, its shape and size, and so one—and by giving the experience’s intentional mode: seeing. The phenomenal difference between seeing an aeroplane overhead and hearing one is partly a matter of the content—what is experienced—but also a matter of the mode of apprehending this content, the intentional mode in Searle’s sense. Certain properties of objects (e.g., colours) can only be apprehended in certain modes, so do not figure in the content of certain modes (you cannot smell colours). But others are not mode-specific: thus, for example, the difference between seeing shapes and feeling them is partly a matter of the intentional mode in question. According to a strong intentionalist theory of perception, the phenomenal character of a perception is fixed by two things: mode and content. I say the same thing about bodily sensations. The consciousness involved in bodily sensations is a result of two things: the intentional content of the sensation, and the intentional mode. Consider a pain in one’s ankle. I said

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that the ankle is the intentional object of the pain-state. Like the intentional objects of many outer perceptions (e.g., aeroplanes) the ankle need not itself be a conscious entity. In perception and in sensation, consciousness need not reside in the intentional objects of awareness in order for the state of awareness to be conscious. Fred Dretske puts this point well: Just as a visual experience of a tree is an awareness of a nonconscious object (the tree) pain is an awareness of a nonconscious bodily condition (an injured, strained or diseased part) . . . pains, tickles and itches stand to physical states of the body (they are experiences of these physical states) the way olofactory, visual and auditory experiences stand to physical states of the environment. In all cases, the experiences are conscious, yes, but not because we are conscious of them, but because they make us conscious of the relevant states of our bodies.36

However, we are interested not just in objects of awareness, but in these objects as they are apprehended under various aspects—that is, in intentional content. The intentional content of a pain might be something like this: my ankle hurts. (This makes the content propositional for simplicity; but remember that I am not committed to all content being propositional.) But we have not fully specified the phenomenal character of this state until we have said in which intentional mode it is presented. Compare: we have not fully specified the phenomenal character of a perception of an aeroplane overhead until we have said whether the aeroplane is seen or heard. What is the nature of the mode, in the case of pain? At the very least, it must be that the ankle is felt: the content is the content of a feeling, one must feel that one’s ankle hurts. Pressing the analogy with perception, we can say that pain is a kind of feeling, just as seeing is a kind of perceiving. There are of course many other kinds of bodily feeling: each of these ways in which one can feel one’s body are the intentional modes which have parts of the body as their intentional objects.37 We can capture the spirit of this view by saying that there is a way in which English misleads when we say that Vladimir has a pain in his ankle, as if the pain were a kind of object he had in his ankle. Rather we might say that Vladimir pains his ankle, where paining is a relation between the ankle and Vladimir. (This is not suggested as a piece of semantic analysis, but rather as an attempt to make the view vivid. But it is worth pointing out that not all languages talk of pains as if they were objects.)

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This presents pain, and other bodily sensations, as a kind of relation between oneself and one’s body. Given the problems with treating intentionality as a relation to intentional objects, this cannot be quite right; but we will return to this problem shortly. For there is a more immediate problem with the suggestion: how can it accommodate the fact, which we raised as a problem for weak intentionalism, that pain seems to be in the part of the body, that it seems to be a property of the body? When we attend to our pains, as I said in §3, we attend to the part of the body in which we feel the pain. This is analogous to part of what is meant by the ‘transparency’ of visual experience: if we want to attend to our visual experiences, what we normally do is to inspect the objects of experience. (In a slogan: introspection is inspection.) The fact that there is this analogy is good for my perceptual theory; but the fact that attending to the pain is attending to the part which hurts does not seem to be so good. For have I not said that pain is a way of being aware of one’s ankle, and therefore something more like a relation and not a property? In fact, there is not a problem here, and the transparency analogy does hold up. The way to understand the transparency of sensation is to understand the special nature of the concepts which we apply when we talk and think about our pains. The content of a pain in one’s ankle might naturally be put into words as ‘my ankle hurts’. On the face of it, this sentence seems to be saying that there is a property of hurting which my ankle has. But on reflection, it is clear that the concept of hurting is covertly relational. Something cannot hurt unless it hurts someone; in fact, a part of one’s own body cannot hurt unless it hurts oneself. We can make no real sense of the idea that a part of one’s own body might hurt, without its hurting oneself. Hurting is therefore not just a matter of a part of one’s body having an intrinsic property, but rather a matter of that body part and its properties apparently affecting oneself. So what one is attributing to one’s ankle when one says that it hurts is something which has what I called in §2 a relational structure: the content of the sensation is that one’s ankle hurts, the object of the sensation is the ankle (apprehended as one’s ankle), and the mode is the hurting. This relies on the idea that the part of one’s body which hurts is doing something to oneself, that there is something about the body part which is responsible for one’s feeling in this way. Peacocke has plausibly claimed that such a claim is part of the concept of pain:

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To have the concept of pain is to have the concept of a state which allows its possessor to discriminate those (nonpsychological) properties whose possession by a part of his body makes that part hurt him.38

This expresses two of the important phenomenological claims about pain for which I have been trying to argue in this section so far: first, that hurting is a matter of a part of the body hurting the subject. This is why I call it an intentional mode. Second, pain presents body parts in a way that the subject can (normally) discriminate them: normal sensations allow the subject to locate the pain, however roughly. This is close to, but importantly different from, Tye’s view that pain represents damage to a part of the body. It differs in two ways, one specific to the claims about pain, the other more general and theoretical. I claimed that damage need not enter into the content of the pain-experience; all that need enter into the content is the part of the body (with a certain aspectual shape) which is hurting. The perceptual theory can agree with Tye that damage to one’s body can be represented by a pain experience in the sense that (e.g.) the stimulation of the retina is represented by a visual experience. But this is non-conceptual representation in the ‘sub-personal’ sense, and this is not our subject here. These disagreements with Tye relate to his specific claims about pain. The more general theoretical difference is that, for Tye, differences in conscious states are wholly explained in terms of the representational content of the state. In the case of bodily sensation, the intentional mode is the same in different states: it is representing. A pain represents damage, a tickle represents a mild disturbance, orgasm is a ‘sensory representation of certain physical changes in the genital region’—and so on.39 The perceptual view, by contrast, does not locate the conscious differences solely in differences in what is represented, but also in the different modes in which one is related to what is represented. The experience of pain is ‘transparent’ because to pay attention to a pain is to pay attention to the place which hurts. But one cannot pay attention to the place which hurts without paying attention to the hurting, and the hurting, I have claimed, is the way the body part or location is (so to speak) forcing itself upon oneself. Therefore, in being aware that one’s ankle hurts, one is aware that it is hurting you. This is why I say that according to the perceptual theory, the phenomenal character of the pain is given by two things: the content of the experience and the intentional mode.

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What is novel about this view is that it locates the phenomenal character of the state partly in the intentional mode. It might be objected that I am simply assuming the phenomenal, stipulating it into existence by my assumption that some intentional modes are conscious and some are not. This objection is confused. Of course I am assuming that some mental states have phenomenal character and some do not. But so do those who talk in terms of qualia. Rather than assuming that certain intentional states are by their nature conscious, they assume that there are certain non-intentional properties which are by their nature conscious. If I assume consciousness, so do my opponents. But we have no alternative, since there are no prospects for anything like a definition of consciousness in other terms. (Whether this worries you depends on your attitude to physicalism; some remarks on this in §7.) Finally, I need to return to the question of how, on this view, one can have a pain in one’s ankle even if one does not have an ankle. The account of the relational structure of intentionality described in §2 makes intentionality a relation, not to an actually existing object, but to an intentional content. A part of the point of the idea of content is to express or capture the aspect under which the object of the intentional state is presented; the other part is to distinguish different states in the same mode. And these can be distinguished even when the intentional object does not exist. This is why we cannot say in general that intentional states are relations to intentional objects. As noted in §3, phantom limbs show that someone can feel a pain in a part of their body even when this part does not exist. So an intentionalist cannot say that pain is a relation to a body part. Rather, pain is a relation to an intentional content, where the intentional content is the way things seem to the subject. It seems to the subject that they have a limb, and this is compatible with them knowing that the limb does not exist. It could be said that pain is always a relation to the intentional object, but the intentional object is the cause of the pain in the body or brain. But this would break the connection between the idea of an intentional object and the phenomenology, the idea of how things seem to the subject. What the perceptual theory is trying to capture is how things seem. The cause of the sensation in the body may be another matter. So it can be true, then, that someone can feel a pain in their foot even when they have no foot. And this is compatible with its being appropriate to tell someone ‘it’s not your foot that hurts, there’s no such thing; it’s an

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effect of the amputation’. Compare: it could be true that someone thinks that fate is against them, and this is compatible with its being appropriate to tell them ‘it’s not fate, there’s no such thing; it’s just bad luck’. The cases are, in the relevant respects, parallel. 7. CONC LU S ION

I have argued for the perceptual theory of the kind of consciousness involved in sensation in a somewhat indirect way. My general aim, as I said in §1, is to dispute the simple division of states of mind into intentional states and qualitative states: this is the essence of the division assumed by non-intentionalism. The best case for this division is often claimed to be the case of bodily sensation. But, I argued, bodily sensations do exhibit the marks of intentionality, specifically in the felt location of sensation. The question then is whether such states of mind also have non-intentional properties (qualia). Weak intentionalism says they do. I claimed that this view is unstable, tending to collapse back into non-intentionalism. If we want to maintain an intentionalist position, then we should adopt strong intentionalism. Having set the rival view (representationalism) to one side, we end up with the perceptual theory. It turns out that, from a phenomenological point of view, this theory is not as strange as it might first seem. At the beginning of this essay I asked whether there is anything we can learn from the (admittedly false) naive view that pain is not a mental state. If an intentional theory of bodily sensation is correct, then we can see why it is so natural to think of pain as a physical state: since it is essential to pain that it feels to be in one’s body. But nonetheless, it is a mental state, because it involves the characteristic mark of the mental: the intentional directedness of the mind upon an object. As Armstrong puts it: This account of the location of pain enables us to resolve a troublesome dilemma. Consider the following two statements: ‘The pain is in my hand’ and ‘The pain is in my mind’. Ordinary usage makes us want to assent to the first, while a moment’s philosophical reflection makes us want to assent to the second. Yet they seem to be in conflict with each other. But once we see that the location of the pain in the hand is an intentional location . . . it is clear that the two statements are perfectly compatible.40

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This seems to me exactly right, apart from the suggestion that an ‘intentional location’ is a kind of location, or way of being located. An intentional location is, in this case, simply the felt location of sensation. It is this essential feature of bodily sensation which nourishes an intentional conception of sensation, and therefore the intentionalist conception of the mind. The perceptual theory of bodily sensation is supposed to be a phenomenological theory, a systematic account or a general description of what it is like to have a certain kind of experience. As such, it does not solve some of the problems which some accounts of consciousness address. The theory is silent on the explanatory gap, it leave the knowledge argument where it is, and it says nothing about how there can be a physicalist reduction of consciousness. But these are not the only questions about consciousness. There is also another traditional philosophical project: that of ‘understanding how different types or aspects of consciousness feature in the fundamental notions of mentality, agency, and personhood’—as Tyler Burge puts it. Burge continues: ‘such understanding will be deepened when it is liberated from ideological and programmatic preoccupations with materialism and functionalism that have dominated the revival of philosophical interest in consciousness.’41 The view defended in this essay is put forward as part of an attempt at such an understanding.

* * * This essay has been presented in various forms in a number of places: at the Oxford Philosophical Society, the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club, the 1998 conference on consciousness at Santa Barbara City College, the 1999 meeting of the Australasian Association of Philosophy in Melbourne, and at the Universities of Bristol, Lund, Otago, Sheffield, and Uppsala. The essay was completed with the help of a grant from the AHRB Research Leave Scheme. For helpful comments and discussion, I thank David Chalmers, Katalin Farkas, Chris Hill, Paul Horwich, Brian Loar, Mike Martin, Adam Morton, Lucy O’Brien, Kim Sterelny, Helen Steward, Michael Tye, and Jerry Valberg. I dedicate this essay to the memory of my friend Greg McCulloch (1951–2001).

E S S AY E I G H T

Intentionalism

(2009)

1. I NTRO D U C TION

The central and defining characteristic of thoughts is that they have objects. The object of a thought is what the thought concerns, or what it is about. Since there cannot be thoughts which are not about anything, or which do not concern anything, there cannot be thoughts without objects. Mental states or events or processes which have objects in this sense are traditionally called ‘intentional,’ and ‘intentionality’ is for this reason the general term for this defining characteristic of thought. Under the heading of ‘thought’ we can include many different kinds of mental apprehension of an object—including relatively temporary episodes of contemplating or scrutinising, as well as persisting states, like beliefs and hopes, which are not similarly episodic in character. These are all ways of thinking about an object. But even construing ‘thought’ in this broad way, it is clear that not all mental states and events are thoughts: sensations, emotions, and perceptual experiences are not thoughts, but they are also

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paradigmatically mental. Do these mental states and events have objects too? Or are there mental states and events which have no objects? The view that all mental phenomena have objects is sometimes called ‘Brentano’s thesis’ or the thesis that intentionality is the ‘mark’ of the mental.1 Sometimes the name ‘Brentano’s thesis’ is given to certain other views too: for example, to the view that only mental phenomena are intentional, or that all and only mental phenomena are intentional, or that nothing physical is intentional. These views are, however, distinct from the view that all mental phenomena are intentional. For holding that all mental phenomena are intentional does not imply that nothing non-mental is.2 And holding that all mental phenomena are intentional does not imply (pace Dennett 1969) that nothing physical is intentional, since if physicalism were true, then the mental itself would be physical. What I am concerned with here, however, is the idea that all mental states are intentional, regardless of whether anything else is, or whether anything physical is. In recent years there has been considerable debate over whether all mental states are intentional; in particular, over whether all conscious mental states are intentional or entirely intentional. I will use the term intentionalism for the general thesis that the nature of a conscious mental state is determined by its intentionality. (Intentionalism is sometimes called representationalism; the difference is purely terminological. I prefer ‘intentionalism’.3) There are a number of ways of developing this general thesis; in what follows I shall examine two of them. One is the view that the conscious character of a state of mind is determined by its intentional or representational content. The other is the view that the conscious character of a state of mind is determined by (what I shall call) its entire intentional nature. I shall argue for the superiority of the second view over the first. But before doing this, I need to explain what I mean by intentional nature and intentional or representational content.

2 . OB J EC T, M ODE , AN D CONTE NT

I stipulated above that the object of an intentional state is what the state is about, or what it concerns, or what it is directed upon. The object of a thought can therefore be given in a correct answer to the question, ‘what is this thought about?’ (This is why intentionality is sometimes called

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‘about-ness’). Hence my thought that Odysseus was cast ashore at Ithaca while fast asleep is about Odysseus. But it is also about Ithaca, and maybe other things too. In other words, intentional states need not have only one object: the question ‘what is this intentional state about?’ (‘what are you thinking about?’) can have many answers, all of which may be correct. For some states of mind which are intuitively intentional or representational—in the sense that they intuitively seem to concern things other than themselves—the question ‘what is this intentional state about?’ is awkward or makes little sense. It is awkward, if not ungrammatical, to say ‘what is your desire for a bottle of inexpensive champagne about?’ A desire is a desire for something, not a desire about something. But clearly my desire concerns something other than itself, just as my thought about Odysseus concerns something other than itself. And it is the nature of this ‘concerning’ which is the focus of the study of intentionality. Hence we should not become too attached to the words ‘about’ and ‘about-ness’ in describing intentionality. If we do, then we might find it hard even to understand the view that conscious states are intentional. For example, intentionalists say that a headache is an intentional state, but the question ‘what is your headache about?’ makes little sense. Here we can avoid this superficial problem by thinking of intentional states in a more general, abstract, and semi-technical way to begin with: intentional states are ‘directed upon’ objects, and ‘objects’, by definition, are what intentional states are directed on. Sometimes intentionality is described even more abstractly as ‘self-transcendence,’ the idea being that intentional states are concerned with what transcends the state itself. Given what I mean by ‘object,’ this is just another way of saying that intentional states have objects. So much should be uncontroversial. To say more, we have to start constructing a theory of intentionality. I begin with intentional objects. Intentional objects, as I think of them, have two distinctive characteristics. First, since intentional objects are what we think about, desire, or hope for, and we can think about or desire or hope for things that do not exist, it follows that some intentional objects do not exist. These can be called ‘mere intentional objects.’ Remember that my use of ‘object’ here is just a stipulation, meaning whatever it is on which your state of mind is directed. So saying that there are mere intentional objects is another way of describing the uncontroversial fact that we can think about (hope for, etc.) things that do not exist; it is a further question how this fact should be understood. Some philosophers

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(e.g., Parsons 1980) think that we need a logical and metaphysical account of non-existent objects; others believe that all apparent reference to such objects must be explained away in the style of Quine (1948). Here I simply note the fact and do not attempt to explain it. The second characteristic is related to the first. As indicated above by my talk of ‘self-transcendence’, intentional objects are not immanent in intentional states. That is, if an intentional object exists at all, its existence ‘transcends’ any intentional state which has it as its object.4 I mean this transcendence of the intentional object to imply that it is never essential to an intentional object that it is the object of any particular state of mind. (This applies even to those intentional states which are the objects of ‘higher-order’ intentional states: my thought that p is independent from, and inessential to, the thought that I think that p.) Externalists about mental content may say that it is essential to certain states of mind that they involve a real relation to some real thing (e.g., water). But they do not think that it is essential to water that it is the object of any particular mental state. Saying what the intentional object of a state of mind is does not yet tell us what the state of mind itself is, since the same intentional object can be the object of many different states of mind. In order to fully characterise different states of mind, we need to make two further distinctions. One is that the same object can be the object of a desire, a thought, a hope, and so on. This is what I call a difference in intentional mode.5 The other distinction is that the same object could be presented to the mind in different ways even when the mode is the same: my bottle of inexpensive champagne could also be thought of as a bottle of inexpensive famous sparkling wine from France. This kind of difference in the way the intentional object is presented is what I call a difference in intentional content. Every intentional state must have an intentional content in this sense. This is because the intentional object of a state is what the state is directed on; but a state cannot be directed on something without that thing being represented in one way or another. There is no such thing as a state of mind which has an object represented in no particular way—what could this possibly mean? The idea of representation itself implies representation in a particular way: in representing something in language or in pictures, one has to choose some particular way of representing it. The particular way in which the intentional object is represented is what I call the content of the

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state. So for a state to have a content is for it to have an object represented in a particular way. Intentional content is representational content. Intentional states, then, involve both intentional mode and intentional content. But what is the relationship between the intentional content and the intentional object of a state? Different theorists have different views of this relationship. Some think that the content of an intentional state must determine its object: in other words, that states with the same content must have the same object. Someone who thinks this might then be led to think that even though its existence transcends the intentional state, the intentional object is nonetheless an essential part of the state, since states with different objects are different in their nature.6 Since I believe that many intentional states have the same content regardless of whether their objects exist, I must reject the thesis that intentional content determines intentional object. On the conception of intentionality I favour, the intentional object is never part of the state. The nature of the intentional state is exhausted by its mode and content. In a famous passage, Brentano gave some examples of the ‘intentional inexistence of an object’: ‘in presentation, something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on’ (Brentano 1874: 88). This implies that the object of a presentation is what is presented, the object of love is what is loved, etc. However, given what I have just said about intentional objects, we should not characterise an intentional object as what is Ф-d for any intentional mode Ф. One reason is that what is believed, for example, is a proposition, and a proposition is not the intentional object of a belief. When someone believes something, the proposition that they believe exists (or so I say); but the object of their belief might not. There is a debate about the existence of propositions, but this is not the same issue as the issue of the existence of intentional objects. Those who are sceptical of propositions do not think that some of them exist and some of them do not. Also, the propositional content of a belief is, on most views, essential to it. But on the conception of intentionality I favour, it’s not the case that the existence of the object is essential to the intentional state. Finally, it is clear that the belief that Odysseus was cast ashore at Ithaca while fast asleep is about Odysseus (its object) and not about any proposition. The phrase ‘what is Ф-d’ picks out a different intentional element for different intentional modes. In the case of fear, for example, we can say that

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what you fear is the object of your fear, not its content. If you are frightened of the dog around the corner, that is the object of your fear, that is what you are frightened of. Matters are different for hope, belief, and wonder, for example. What is believed, hoped, or wondered is the content of the belief, hope, or wonder. The lesson is that we cannot derive a systematic conception of intentional content and object simply from reflection on phrases like ‘what is believed/feared/etc.’ alone. This whole way of thinking about intentionality allows for a number of different understandings of content. On a dominant view, for example, the contents of all intentional states are assessable as true or false; in other words, the content is propositional. There is an on-going debate about the nature of propositions (see Salmon and Soames 1988; Schiffer 2003). Here all I shall mean by ‘proposition’ is the content of an intentional state that is true or false. As we shall see, some philosophers think that all intentional content is propositional. Yet it seems to me that there are many intentional states whose contents are not assessable as true or false: for example, the object-directed attitudes of love and hate (see Crane 2001, §34; Montague 2007). Hence I reject the thesis that all intentional content is propositional. Although I will rely on this rejection later in the essay, I will not defend it further. Another question about intentional content is whether it is conceptual or non-conceptual. A state of mind has conceptual content when a subject needs to possess the concepts definitive of its content in order to be in that state. Some philosophers have claimed that certain experiences have non-conceptual content, and I agree. But it is not a debate which needs to be settled in this context.

3. T WO KI N DS OF I NTE NTIONALI S M

Having clarified the elements of intentionality, in this section I will consider how these elements are employed in different developments of intentionalism, the idea that consciousness is a form of intentionality. One development of intentionalism is the view that the conscious character of a state of mind is determined by its intentional content alone. Chalmers (2004) calls this view ‘pure representationalism’. I am indebted to Chalmers’s discussion, but in keeping with my terminological decision of Section 1, I will call the view ‘pure intentionalism’.

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Pure intentionalism about consciousness is standardly expressed in terms of a close relationship between the phenomenal character of a state of mind and the state’s representational content. A state has phenomenal character when there is something it is like to be in that state, while the representational content of a state is how it represents the world to be, and this is taken to be propositional (Byrne 2001, p. 7; Bain 2003, p. 507). Two versions of pure intentionalism are sometimes distinguished: strong pure intentionalism, which says that the phenomenal character of a mental state is identical with its representational content (see Tye 1995, p. 137), and weak pure intentionalism, which says that the phenomenal character of a state is determined by or supervenes on its representational content (see Byrne 2001, p. 7; McLaughlin 2003; Kind 2007). Taken literally, strong pure intentionalism is of dubious coherence. It says that the phenomenal character of an experience is identical with its representational content. The representational content of an experience, according to pure intentionalism, is a proposition. The phenomenal character of an experience is what it is like to have that experience. But how can what it is like to have an experience be identical to a proposition? Propositions are abstract objects—maybe Fregean thoughts, maybe modelled by sets of possible worlds or intensions or ordered n-tuples of objects and properties—and what it is like to have experience is (arguably) a feature of an experience, a concrete event. How can a feature of a concrete event be identical to an abstract proposition? If we are to take strong intentionalists at their word, their claim makes little sense.7 However, we should interpret the claim with a charitable pinch of salt. Let’s instead understand strong pure intentionalists as saying that for an experience to have a certain phenomenal character simply is for it to have a certain intentional content. Strong pure intentionalists should not say that the phenomenal character is identical with the content; rather they should say that an experience’s having phenomenal character is identical with its having a certain content. Weak pure intentionalism can then be expressed as follows: any two experiences which share intentional content will share phenomenal character. This is consistent with the identity claim made by strong pure intentionalists, but does not imply it since it allows that experiences could have non-representational phenomenal properties which (for some reason) supervene on the experience’s having the representational content it does. It seems to me that the distinction between strong and

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weak pure intentionalism is of little significance in the present context, and in what follows I will accordingly understand pure intentionalism as the weaker supervenience claim. As noted, pure intentionalists tend to hold that all intentional content is propositional. Since I reject this thesis, this is one reason for rejecting pure intentionalism as usually understood. But maybe this thesis is not essential to pure intentionalism; it does not seem that there is anything in the essential idea behind pure intentionalism which implies that content must be propositional. So I want to concentrate here on a problem which is closer to the heart of pure intentionalism. In a recent essay, David Bain (2003) defends the pure intentionalist view that the experience of pain represents damage to the body. Part of his defence involves addressing what he calls the ‘distinctiveness’ problem: how a pure intentionalist should characterise what is distinctive about pain sensations. At one point, he expresses this problem in terms of how one can distinguish between (for example) seeing that one’s body is disordered and somatosensorily feeling the same thing: The phenomenal difference between seeing disorder and somatosensorily feeling it cannot reside in the difference between the experiences’ contents, since their contents do not differ—both represent disorder. (Bain 2003, p. 516)

Some pure intentionalists (e.g., Dretske 2000, p. 458) respond by insisting that such experiences must in fact differ in what they represent. Others (e.g., Tye 1995) say that the contents of the experiences themselves have different natures (for example, the content of a somatosensory experience is non-conceptual). Bain’s own view is that what is represented does not differ in these two cases, but that there is a difference in ‘modes of presentation’ (i.e., their Fregean content; Bain 2003, pp. 517–518). These responses are really very similar: they all attempt to locate the differences in these experiences in their intentional contents. Yet it seems to me that there is a much simpler response available, which is unavailable to pure intentionalists like Bain and Tye (although it is quite within the spirit of their view). This simple response is that the difference between feeling one’s leg to be damaged and seeing it to be damaged is just the difference between feeling and seeing. In other words, it is a difference in what Searle and I call mode, and what others would call attitude. We already know that sameness

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of content does not suffice for sameness of mental states in general; a belief and a hope might have the same content. So why should we expect that it suffices for sameness of phenomenal states, states which are distinguished by their phenomenal character? As outlined in Section 2 above, intentionality is directedness on an object, but there are three dimensions of variation in the ways one’s states of mind might be directed upon an object: they may differ in their object, in their content and in their mode.8 So since we know that, as a general rule, intentional states can differ in mode even when they share content, it is surely only to be expected that differences in mode might make a difference to the phenomenal character of states of mind. The point is even easier to appreciate when we consider concrete examples: it should not be surprising, for example, that seeing that it is raining and hearing that it is raining have different phenomenal characters, since seeing and hearing are different conscious modes or attitudes. So the simple answer to Bain’s question is that what distinguishes feeling that one’s body is damaged and seeing that one’s body is damaged is the fact that in one case the fact is apprehended by the faculty of eyesight, and in the other it is apprehended by the faculty of somatosensory perception. There may also be differences in content too; but the point is that there is an obvious uncontentious difference that pure intentionalists like Bain and Tye overlook. (Of course, this does not explain what makes the products of these faculties conscious, but neither does pure intentionalism explain this. Bain’s question was about what distinguishes the conscious character of these experiences, not about what makes them conscious in the first place.) Bain considers this response, but rejects it on the grounds that admitting that mode or sense modality contributes to phenomenal differences is ‘to give up without a fight’ (Bain 2003, p. 517). But this seems to put the cart before the horse. If we start off with an inclination in favour of intentionalism in general, perhaps inspired by the idea of unifying the phenomena of mind around the notion of a subject’s point of view (see the next section) or inspired by Dretske’s idea that ‘all mental facts are representational facts’ (see Dretske 1995, p. xiii), then one should have an open mind about whether all mental facts are fixed by all the intentional or representational facts (mode plus content plus object) or whether they are fixed by content alone. A little reflection can show that all the intentional facts about a state of mind (including facts about mode) contribute towards fixing the phenomenal character. Moreover, saying this is not something

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which is in conflict with the motivation behind the general intentionalist view of the mind, as I shall explain in the next section. Therefore I think we should reject pure intentionalism and deny that the phenomenal character of an experience is determined by its representational content alone.9 The alternative way of developing the view that all mental states are intentional is what I call (following Chalmers 2004) impure intentionalism.10 This says that the phenomenal character of an experience is determined by its entire intentional nature: in particular, by its mode and its content. The phenomenal character of an experience therefore supervenes on its intentional nature. There cannot be two experiences which are identical in their intentional nature but differ in their phenomenal character. Note that both pure and impure intentionalism are actually strengthenings of the original claim (which I called ‘Brentano’s thesis’) that all mental states are intentional. For someone could hold that all mental states are intentional but nonetheless reject intentionalism and representationalism if they were to hold that two experiences could be identical in their intentional nature but differ in their non-intentional properties (sometimes called ‘qualia’). Call this the ‘qualia theory.’ The qualia theory might be considered a version of the view that all mental states are intentional, but one that stops short of intentionalism by holding that there are non-intentional properties which contribute to phenomenal character. Impure intentionalism, by contrast, insists on the determination of the phenomenal character of an experience by its intentional nature alone, and therefore implies the rejection of the qualia theory.11 So far we have only said what the doctrine of impure intentionalism is; we have not yet said anything about reasons for believing it. This will be the task of the next section.

4. TH E M OTIVATION FOR I M P U RE I NTE NTIONALI S M

Impure intentionalism as a general thesis says that the entire mental character of a mental state is determined by its intentional nature. Resistance to pure and impure intentionalism comes primarily from those who think that there are aspects of conscious experience which are not determined by the intentionality of the experience; or even that there are conscious states which have no intentionality at all. Hence the defence of any form

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of intentionalism depends upon the defence of intentionalism about consciousness.12 What positive reasons are there for believing that conscious states are entirely intentional at all? Pure intentionalists sometimes argue by appealing to what has come to be called the transparency of perceptual experience: that introspective reflection on a perceptual experience only reveals the external objects of experience and their features, and does not reveal intrinsic features of experiences themselves (Harman 1990; Tye 1995). There has been much discussion of the transparency of experience in recent years (see Stoljar 2004; Martin 2002; Siewert 2003). Here I shall understand it as the combination of these two claims: (i) that reflection on a perceptual experience only reveals aspects of the objects of experience; and (ii) that reflection on a perceptual experience does not reveal aspects of the experience itself. The first claim is relatively uncontroversial, although it does raise the question of what a defender of transparency should say about objects of experience which do not exist (see Crane 2006a; Johnston 2004). It is the second claim which is normally disputed by those who reject transparency. These philosophers claim that in certain cases—e.g., blurry vision—one can come to be aware of something more than how one is representing the world to be, or of the objects of experience. When one sees something in a blurry way, one does not necessarily represent the world as blurry. Hence the second transparency claim (ii) is false, and insofar as pure intentionalism implies this claim, pure intentionalism is false too. There are, of course, pure intentionalist responses to this kind of objection (Tye 2000). But given that we have already rejected pure intentionalism (Section 3), I will not pursue them here. Let’s consider instead what someone might say who rejects pure intentionalism and the second transparency claim. There seem to be at least two possibilities. The first is the impure intentionalist response: that blurry vision and other such phenomena are part of the intentional character of the experience, since phenomena like this can result from the particular intentional mode of the experience: it is the particular way of being aware of the world, the particular acuity of one’s visual perception, which (in addition to its content) determines the phenomenal character of the experience. After all, individuals differ in their perceptual acuity; it is hardly surprising that this should affect the phenomenal character of the experience. The second view is the qualia theory: that blurry vision and other such phenomena result from experiences

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having certain non-intentional qualia, understood as properties which can vary independently of the intentional nature of an experience. It can be rather hard to see what is at issue in the debate between these two views. One reason for this is that it is not always clear exactly what non-intentional qualia are supposed to be (for discussion, see Dennett 1988; Martin 1998). But what does seem to be clearly in dispute is the truth of the supervenience thesis: does fixing the intentional nature (mode and content) of the experience fix its phenomenal character? The impure intentionalist says yes, and the non-intentionalist says no (Block 1990, 1996). To sharpen the debate, then, perhaps we do not need a positive account of qualia. Rather, we only need treat non-intentionalism as a negative claim: the denial of the supervenience of phenomenal character on intentional nature. This puts the impure intentionalist on the defensive: they need to explain why intentional mode and content determine phenomenal character. One thing which is inadequate about the mere appeal to transparency and introspection is that it does not help us understand why it is that experience is wholly intentional. If we want to know why it is that phenomenal character is determined by intentional nature, then we don’t just need a statement of what some philosophers take to be obviously true, we want some kind of understanding of the intrinsic connection between the idea of the intentional and the idea of phenomenal character. An analogy: it may well be that universal suffrage is a feature of all liberal democracies. Hence being a state with universal suffrage supervenes on being a liberal democracy. But merely stating the supervenience connection will not explain why this is so; what we need is some explanatory connection between the idea of liberal democracy and the idea of universal suffrage. It will be helpful to return for a moment to pure intentionalism. Alex Byrne (2001) has provided a direct argument for pure intentionalism which does not simply appeal to either of the intuitions about transparency. Byrne’s discussion is instructive, but it seems to me that his argument is ultimately unsuccessful. Nonetheless, a brief examination of the argument will indicate an underlying reason for believing in impure intentionalism. Byrne aims to defend the weak pure intentionalist supervenience claim: sameness of intentional content implies sameness of phenomenal character. Hence if experiences differ in phenomenal character, they differ in content. He argues for this conclusion as follows:

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1. If a (suitably idealised) subject has two consecutive experiences which differ in phenomenal character, then the subject will notice the difference; 2. If a subject notices a change in the phenomenal character of these experiences, then the way things seem to the subject will be different in each case; 3. But the way things seem to the subject is the content of the experience: if two experiences share a content then the way things seem is exactly the same in each experience; 4. Therefore if experiences differ in phenomenal character they differ in content. The key move in this argument is the step between (2) and (3). The idea is that if the way things seem to the subject changes so does the content, since the way things seem to the subject just is the content of the experience. Now it is certainly plausible to say that ‘the way things seem to the subject’ can be read as a synonym for the content of an experience. But someone who doubts the pure intentionalist supervenience claim can say that the ‘way things seem to the subject’ can be read in another way too: it can pick out aspects of the phenomenal character of the experience itself. It could be said that when one experiences something, the world seems a certain way to the subject; but in addition, having the experience also seems a certain way: ‘things’ covers both aspects of this seeming. Hence an opponent of the supervenience claim can say that the argument equivocates between stages (2) and (3): in (2) the phrase ‘the way things seem’ picks out the content and aspects of the experience itself, while in (3) it picks out simply the content. Byrne’s appealing argument therefore fails. Nonetheless, there is something we can learn from the failure of this argument. What Byrne’s argument relies on is that in the case of perceptual experience at least, the notions of how things seem to the subject and how an experience represents the world to be are intimately intertwined. Suppose I am asked how things perceptually seem to me now, and I give a description of this. Then suppose I am asked how my perceptual experience represents the world to be. It is reasonable to expect that I might give the same or a similar description (see Strawson 1979). Or rather, if I did, then I would not obviously be failing to carry out the task asked of me. After all,

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how things seem to me in perceptual experience is at least a matter of how the world around me is experienced, and it is plausible (though not mandatory) to think of this world as represented by my experience.13 Someone might think that the descriptions must differ because ‘how things seem to me’ must refer to the ‘seeming’ itself and not what seems. But this would simply be a stipulation about how to use the phrase ‘how things seem,’ and would therefore be deliberately ignoring the ambiguity I have drawn attention to. I am not saying that when you describe how things seem to you, you should only describe the objects of experience. If I say, because I am short- (or near-) sighted, that a distant building looks blurred, I need not be describing the object as blurred. Rather, I am describing the object and how it seems to me. My point here is that describing accurately how things seem to you in perceptual experience will involve describing the objects of experience, even if it also involves other things as well. Byrne’s argument trades on this fact. (The point is not just about the phrase ‘how things seem’: the same could be said for ‘what it is like’ and ‘how it is with me’; see Martin 1998.) Like Byrne, I have been talking about perception, and it may be thought that the situation is different where bodily sensations and some emotions are concerned. I will return to this question in the next section. But for the moment I would like to draw out what I see to be the moral of this discussion of Byrne’s argument. I have argued that Byrne’s argument fails because the notion of how things seem to the subject may be read in two ways: as describing how the world seems to be and how the experiencing ‘seems’ to be, or what reflection on the experience itself yields. Hence the step from (2) to (3) equivocates. But the fact that the notion has these two readings is very significant for impure intentionalism. For what we are trying to describe when we describe an experience is the subject’s perspective on the world, the subject’s point of view. A description of the subject’s point of view is not a description of (e.g.) the arrangements of some ‘blank’ or ‘blind’ intrinsic properties; it is a description of a point of view on something. Already contained within the idea of how things seem to the subject is the idea of a perspective or point of view on ‘things.’ The same is true for the idea of what it is like to have an experience. A description of what it is like to experience something visually is inevitably a description of what it is for this thing to be experienced. If you leave this out, you leave out part of what it is like for the subject, part

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of what makes the experience have the phenomenal character it does. This is why it is so easy for Byrne to move from talk about how things seem to the subject (‘what it is like’) to talk about the experience’s representational content (‘how it represents the world to be’). Of course, the move is very natural: for few these days will deny that what it is like to have a perceptual experience is partly a matter of how the experience presents or represents the world to be.14 Many of Byrne’s opponents will accept this, but they will nonetheless deny the supervenience thesis. However, the best explanation of the fact that the notions of how things seem and how things are represented to be are so close to one another, it seems to me, is that they have a common core. They describe what is captured at a more abstract level by the idea of intentionality. These notions which are so useful to us in characterizing what it is, phenomenologically speaking, to have an experience are in fact inextricable from the notion of intentionality. The notion of intentionality, properly understood, is the notion of something being presented to the mind, the notion of a state of mind having an object (or what Martin [1998] has called a ‘subject-matter’). If experience involves things seeming a certain way, they must seem a certain way to a subject; seeming is always seeming to some subject. What is presented to the subject (‘things’) is the subject-matter of the experience. Hence things seeming a certain way in experience is a kind of intentionality: the intentionality of experience. Impure intentionalism gives a better description of this than pure intentionalism, since impure intentionalism can accommodate the way in which the ‘seeming’ itself can enter into the phenomenal character of the experience. This is not supposed to be a demonstrative argument for impure intentionalism. What I have been trying to do is to motivate the application of the whole idea of intentionality from the two ideas appealed to by Byrne: how things seem to the subject and how things are represented as being. The ambiguity I noted in ‘how things seem to the subject’ is dismantled by impure intentionalism in terms of content (‘how things seem’) and mode (‘how things seem’). It is true that I have not shown that Block’s non-intentionalist construal of ‘how things seem’ in terms of qualia is incoherent. But I have shown how impure intentionalism would answer the non-intentionalist challenge. There is a further reason for adopting impure intentionalism which has been proposed by a number of writers recently and which deserves brief

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discussion here. This is the view that a (pure or impure) intentionalist conception of mental phenomena will render them more amenable to a physicalist reduction (see Byrne 2001; Hellie 2002). According to a widespread view, there are two challenges which any physicalist account of mind faces: the reduction of content and the reduction of consciousness. An aspect of this widespread view is that while progress has been made in the attempt to reduce representational content—e.g., by explaining it in terms of information or causal co-variation—little progress has been made in reducing consciousness. While content is widely considered to be based on causal relations to the environment, there is almost no consensus about the physical basis of consciousness. Some see the advantage of (pure or impure) intentionalism as offering a way out of this deadlock (Byrne 2001, p. 7). I am sceptical of this kind of motivation for intentionalism, for two reasons. First, I am sceptical about the prospects of reduction of intentionality. The fundamental doubts about misrepresentation which arose in the discussions of naturalized intentionality in the late 1980s have still not been answered (see Chalmers [2004] for a recent expression of scepticism). Second, even if prospects were better for a reductive account of intentionality than they actually are, this would not help with the problem of reducing consciousness, unless it were explained what it is about certain intentional states that made them conscious. Certain reductive pure intentionalist theories (like Tye’s [1995] so-called PANIC theory) do attempt to address this question, by drawing attention to specific features of the intentional content of conscious states. But the difficulty here is that to the extent that there was an original worry about consciousness and its explanation, this worry will carry over to the pure intentionalist account in terms of representational content. For example, if the worry was that zombies seem to be possible, then (given the manifest possibility of non-conscious intentionality) this worry will arise even on a (pure or impure) intentionalist approach. I doubt, then, whether intentionalism can really help a reductive account of mind. But as I see it, its appeal for reductionists is not the main reason for believing in intentionalism. The line of thought developed earlier in this section is a defence of intentionalism as a phenomenological thesis: a thesis about what it is like to be a subject of experience. As a phenomenological thesis, intentionalism offers the prospect of a unitary account of states of mind, an account which explains the unity of our concept of mind. Our concept of mind, on this account, essentially involves the

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concept of a subject’s point of view on the world. The essence of intentionality is having such a point of view. There are those who are sceptical about the unity of the concept of mind. But given the connections just drawn between phenomenal character and intentionality, the burden is now upon them to explain why intentionality is not the mark of the mental. In the final section of this essay, I will consider what some claim to be the strongest objections to this thesis.

5. S E N SATION S AND MOODS

The general thesis that intentionality is the mark of the mental has been denied on the grounds that there are clear cases of mental states which have no objects. The examples normally offered (e.g., by Searle 1983, p. 1) are bodily sensations and certain emotions or moods. Let us examine these supposed counterexamples more closely, taking pain as our paradigm of a bodily sensation. A non-intentionalist account of pain is one which says either that pain has no intentionality or that it is not exhausted by whatever intentionality it may have. On these views, the phenomenal character of pain is wholly or partly characterised by its non-intentional qualitative properties or qualia. Many non-intentionalists have come to accept that insofar as they are felt to have a location, pains exhibit some intentionality.15 But they insist that there is more to these experiences than their intentionality: they also have their characteristic qualia. Pure and impure intentionalists resist this, normally on the grounds that the notion of qualia is obscure and ill-defined. But it is not enough to say this; they also have to explain what it means for a pain or a mood to be an intentional state. Some pure intentionalists (Tye 1995; Bain 2003) have argued that the representational content of a pain in a part of one’s body is that the part of the body is damaged or otherwise disturbed or disordered (the view derives from Armstrong 1968). The view has a number of advantages, not least of which is the way it connects the representational content of pain to its manifest function of alerting an organism to harm which has been done to its body. But nonetheless it seems to me that the view cannot be correct. The main reason is that it is phenomenologically implausible, and the task

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we are engaged in here is a phenomenological one. Although there might well be cases where an experience of pain in a part of the body seems also to be an experience of damage to that part, there are also many cases where it does not. There is nothing in an experience of a headache which connotes damage to the subject, and it would be entirely irrational for the subject to conclude that his head was damaged purely on the basis of a headache. (To insist that nonetheless the headache is experienced as a disorder in the head may be true, but it hardly helps the thesis unless we know what kind of disorder it is, which is what the idea of ‘damage’ was meant to do for us. The mere idea of disorder is surely too unspecific to single out what is distinctive of the phenomenal character of pain.) To this kind of criticism, Tye (1995) responds that the content of the pain experience is ‘non-conceptual’ and this is why an experience of pain does not connote damage to the subject. But the non-conceptual character of this experience does not seem to be relevant here. For suppose the experience does have a non-conceptual content in the way that it has been claimed that visual experience has a non-conceptual content. In the visual case, the differences between colours which are supposed to be non-conceptually represented are themselves phenomenologically salient (Evans 1982). But our criticism of the damage/injury theory is that damage is often not phenomenologically salient at all, conceptually or not. Tye might respond that the ‘damage’ proposal is meant to be one about ‘sub-personal’ information processing below the level of consciousness. But this would then be changing the subject; he would not in this case be offering an account of the conscious character of the experience. We should, I think, reject the pure intentionalist idea that the content of pains must be characterized in terms of damage. And as we saw above, the pure intentionalist view that phenomenal character is wholly determined by the content of an experience is independently implausible. So an intentionalist account of pain should rather explain the phenomenal character of pain in terms of three things: intentional mode, intentional content and intentional object, where these do not involve a representation of damage to the body. On the picture I recommend, the intentional object of a pain is the felt location of the pain, the part or region of the body which hurts. Treating the location or apparent location of a pain as its intentional object allows us to say, as in other cases of intentionality, that the intentional object

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of a pain transcends the experience itself, and might in certain cases not exist, or not be real. (For example, this is how we should treat the case of a phantom limb.) The intentional content of the pain is the representation of its felt location. This representation is always representation in a certain way or under a certain aspect. For example, if one feels that one has a pain in one’s arm, the arm is the intentional object of the experience, and its content is the representation of one’s arm as one’s own. This is the ‘aspect’ under which it is experienced. It might be possible in certain pathological cases for someone to feel a pain in their arm even when they did not recognize the pain as being in their own arm. This would not be to experience one’s arm under the same aspect; it would be not be an experience with the same content. (Notice that a view which said that pain is simply a representation of damage to one’s arm might have difficulty in distinguishing these two experiences.) The intentional mode is the relation—or apparent relation, a form of representation—in which the body part or region stands to the subject of the experience. It is such a relation which we generically call ‘hurting’—it is my leg which hurts, that is, it hurts me. Of course, there are many different ways in which something can hurt. So the term ‘hurt’ can pick out different intentional modes in different cases; in any particular case, the hurting will have a distinct intensity and phenomenal character. Hence the intensity of a pain should not be thought of so much as a property of the pain, but rather as a determination of an intentional mode.16 According to impure intentionalism, the same is true of all bodily sensations—although much more needs to be said about the phenomenal character of these sensations to give a full defence of impure intentionalism. Turning now to the second supposed counterexample to intentionalism—the cases of supposedly objectless feelings, moods or emotions—we find a topic which is much less widely discussed than pain, and much less well-understood, philosophically and empirically. Everyone should accept that there are emotions which have intentional objects. But some say that there are also feelings or moods which have no objects at all: one might feel generally gloomy, for example, without being gloomy about anything in particular (Dretske 1995, p. xv). What should a (pure or impure) intentionalist say about such phenomena? In some cases, although it might not be immediately obvious what the intentional object of a mood is, it may have an object which is revealed

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by further examination. So it is with those moods whose objects are their causes. For example, you might feel generally irritated and it not be clear to you what you are irritated about, but only on reflection do you realize that it is the presence of your aged relative who is both the cause and the object of the irritation. So it is, too, with another kind of case: those moods whose objects can only be characterized in the most generalized way. A mood of depression can have as its object ‘things in general’ or ‘everything,’ a point underlined by the important commonplace that the depressed person and the non-depressed person live in different worlds.17 Further reflection on this kind of case opens up the possibility of a slightly different approach. One way of spelling out what is meant by saying that the depressed and the non-depressed ‘live in different worlds’ is to say that a mood like depression can be something which affects a subject’s entire mental condition: not just every conscious episode of thought and experience, but the subject’s motivation, imagination, and action are all permeated with the mood. In this kind of case, then, perhaps we should not think of the mood as an individual mental state in its own right, so to speak, but rather as a commonality among all the mental states of someone experiencing such a mood. In general, it is plausible that every conscious episode of thought, perception, or desire has a certain affective ‘colouring’ to it. Objects are presented to us as meaningful in various ways, and part of this meaning is their affective significance: objects can seem loveable, valuable, in need of care, frightening, or nauseating. This can be, depending on the case in question, an aspect of their content or an aspect of their intentional mode. If this is so, then we can see how it might be that an aspect might be common across many different mental states, how such an aspect might give a thoroughly negative colouring to all one’s experiences, and how we might generalize across this aspect by calling it a mood of depression. A mood like this might therefore be a general way in which experience might be modified, a way which can be common across many different kinds of mental episodes. To what extent each recognisable mood fits into one of the intentionalist classifications discussed is something which will need further investigation. The category of the emotions (including moods) is a category in which it is crucial to pay attention to individual differences between the mental phenomena in question. It may be unlikely that one general theory will apply to all the things we recognize as emotions. But nonetheless we

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have found no good reason to think that there are emotions which lack intentional objects altogether. 6 . CONC LU S ION

The general idea that intentionality is the ‘mark’ of the mental can be developed in a number of ways. Different developments will differ in what they say about intentionality, but also in what they say about consciousness— since as I argued above, the general idea only becomes controversial where consciousness is involved. In this essay I have considered two such developments: the pure intentionalist thesis that the phenomenal character of a conscious state of mind is determined by its representational or intentional content; and the impure intentionalist thesis that the phenomenal character of a conscious state is determined by its intentional content and its intentional mode. I argued for the phenomenological superiority of impure intentionalism. In addition, there seems no good motivation for pure pure intentionalists to insist on their conclusion. The guiding idea behind pure intentionalism—captured in Dretske’s slogan that ‘all facts about the mind are representational facts’—can be better developed by the impure intentionalist than by the pure intentionalist.

* * * Thanks to Katalin Farkas, Hong Yu Wong, and Dan Zahavi for discussion, and to Mario De Caro and Alfredo Paternoster for their helpful comments at the first meeting of the Italian Society for Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Calabria in June 2006. This essay was written with the support of the EU 6th framework NEST project, REFCOM.

III Perception

T

wo assumptions have become dominant in the philosophy of perception since it rose from the ashes of ordinary language philosophy in the 1990s: one is that the intentional content of perception is propositional, the other that this content is conceptual. In some of my writings on perception, I have challenged these assumptions. Essays 11 and 12 criticise the idea that perception is a propositional attitude. As mentioned in the Preface, we do talk about perception as if it were a propositional attitude, and we also talk as if it were a simple relation between perceiver and object. Dretske’s pioneering study of these ways of talking—Seeing and Knowing (1969)—remains one of the best things written on this distinction, as applied to verbs of seeing. But without some significant methodological assumptions, we should not move to the idea that there are two kinds of seeing, understood as a psychological state or event. That is, we should not assume that non-epistemic seeing— reported by ‘. . . sees X’—and epistemic, propositional seeing—reported by ‘. . . sees that p’—are two kinds of mental state. Essay 11 is largely negative, but it does introduce the distinction between the content of a perceptual experience (how it represents its objects) and how the content is described. What the content of an experience is, is a complex matter—but it is a matter about which there are truths of many kinds. The fact that there are these truths about the content of an experience shows that the content can be described in propositional terms; but this does not mean the content is propositional. In Essay 12, ‘The Given’, I develop this distinction, by giving an account of what it means for the content to be described in propositional terms, in terms of propositions ‘indexing’ or modelling concrete mental states. Using a proposition to index a mental state is one thing; the state’s representing the world in a ways that is true or false is another. ‘The Non-conceptual Content of Experience’ (Essay 9) is the oldest essay in this collection, and so perhaps it is not surprising that it needs the longest commentary now. The basic idea—that experience represents more of the perceived environment than a subject is capable of conceptualising in thought or judgement—still strikes me as correct. Furthermore, it is an empirical matter which aspects of the environment can be represented in perception. And the basic account of what it means for a state to be a non-conceptual state still seems to me to be on the right lines. For those familiar with the recent debate, it is a version of what Richard Heck

(2000) calls the ‘state’ account of non-conceptuality, as opposed to the ‘content’ account. Nonetheless, the view that perception has a propositional content now strikes me as mistaken. With hindsight, I would like to think that what I was groping for when saying that beliefs and perceptions have the same content ‘at the level of whole contents’ was the idea I went on to develop in ‘The Given’, that mental states can be modelled by propositions, even if they do not represent the world in a propositional way. But talking about ‘the level of whole contents’ was a fudge. The central argument of the essay is that the only reason for identifying concepts as constituents of mental states is to explain their role in inference. So where inference is not involved, there is no reason to think that concepts are required either. To this it could be objected that inferences only relate beliefs or suppositions, so my argument could also be used to show that desires and fears (say) have non-conceptual contents, which seems incorrect. Even if there are some kinds of non-conceptual fears and desires, there are also conceptual fears and desires—fears and desires whose objects are conceptualised by the thinker. So my argument proves too much if it proves there are no such things. This criticism does undermine the letter of the argument. Optimistically, I would like to think that the spirit remains. The essential idea is that the notion of a concept is one that belongs with the notion of a reason, or with the notion of rational explanation of thought and action, along with notions like practical and theoretical reasoning, judgement, argument, inference- and decision-making (here I agree with John McDowell). Attitudes like desire and fear might operate at this level, insofar as they are conceptual—that is, insofar as their objects are conceptualised by the subject to play a role in that subject’s reasoning. But to a certain extent, perception does not: perceptual representation of the world involves a level of representation which is invulnerable to reasoning and inference and cannot be penetrated by the processes that lead to rational decision-making. What exactly that extent is and how it should be characterized are empirical questions, as I indicate in the essay. This position is compatible with the view that mature perceptual experience also has conceptual content: experience can have many ‘layers’ of content, as Christopher Peacocke (2001) has emphasized. Put in my terms, this means that an experience can represent its objects in many different

ways, as having many different properties and characteristics. Some of these properties can be represented conceptually while others are simultaneously represented non-conceptually. In any case, despite its shortcomings, it seems to me that this essay still contains material relevant the current debate on perception. One aspect of that debate which it does not touch on—the aspect usefully characterized by John Campbell (2002) in terms of the contrast between ‘relational’ and ‘representational’ conceptions of experience—is anatomized in Essay 13. The only thing I would like to change about this essay is the title, which I regret. Of course there is a perceptual relation! When you perceive something you are related to it—for example, by the relation of seeing. I should have called the essay something like, ‘Can experience be characterized essentially in terms of a relation to the existing objects of experience?’ But this is somewhat less catchy, so perhaps I can be excused for choosing the shorter one, misleading as it is.

E S S AY N I N E

The Non-conceptual Content of Experience

(1992)

1. CONC E P T S AN D PE RC E P TUAL E X PE RI E NC E

To what extent do our beliefs about the world affect what we see? Our beliefs certainly affect where we choose to look, but do they affect what we see when we look there? Some have claimed that people with very different beliefs literally see the world differently. Thus Thomas Kuhn: ‘what a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see’ (Kuhn 1970: 113). This view—call it ‘Perceptual Relativism’—entails that a scientist and a child may look at a cathode ray tube and, in a sense, the first will see it while the second will not. The claim is not, of course, that the child’s experience is ‘empty’, but that, unlike the scientist, it does not see the tube as a cathode ray tube. One way of supporting this claim is to say that one cannot see something as an F unless one has the concept F. Since the child plainly lacks the concept of a cathode ray tube, it cannot see it as a cathode ray tube.

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Although Perceptual Relativism is hard to believe, this supporting suggestion is not so implausible. After all, when we see (and more generally, perceive) the world, the world is presented to us in a particular way; so how can we see it as being that way unless we have some idea or conception of the way it is presented? We need not be committed to a representative theory of perception to think that perceptions in some sense represent the world. We can express this by saying that perceptions have content. Now it is a commonplace that the contents of beliefs and the other propositional attitudes involve concepts. The belief that this thing is a cathode ray tube involves, in some sense, the concept cathode ray tube. So the line of thought behind Perceptual Relativism may be expressed thus: seeing an F as an F is a state with content. So the content of this perception must involve the concept F—for if it did not, why should we say that the experience represents the F in question as an F? Thus Christopher Peacocke: the representational content [of an experience] is the way the experience presents the world as being, and it can hardly present the world as being that way if the subject is incapable of appreciating what that way is.1 (Peacocke 1983: 7)

On the other hand, it is plausible to say that the child and the scientist have something perceptually in common, when (let us suppose) they look at the object from the same position, in the same lighting, with normal eyesight. And this common state need not just be qualitative—not just a matter of their visual sensations, or properties of their visual fields, if there are such things.2 Rather, there is surely a sense in which their experiences present or represent the world in the same sort of way. When the child comes to acquire the concept of a cathode ray tube, there is surely something in common between the ways the world was represented before and after this acquisition. Otherwise, how could it come to recognise, for instance, that that thing is a cathode ray tube? So there are reasons for thinking that the concepts perceivers have do affect what they see, and reasons for thinking they do not. I think we should therefore reject Perceptual Relativism in its most extreme form. We should accept that the experiences of two perceivers in a situation such as the one described will be perceptually similar. If this is granted, then the question

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is: how should a theory of perception classify the similarities between such experiences? Let us agree that these similarities should be expressed, in some sense, in terms of the contents of the experiences—in terms of how the experiences represent the world to be. To capture the relevant similarities, we would then have to deal with the above suggestion that one cannot have an experience of something as an F without that experience involving the concept F. There are two reasonable strategies we could employ. One is to say that the experience does involve concepts, but these are concepts that any two such perceivers will share. So, for instance, the infant and the scientist would experience the cathode ray tube as (perhaps) tubular, grey, shiny, etc. The common content of their experiences would be given in terms of observational concepts that they both possess (see McGinn 1989: 59ff.). The second strategy is to say that what they have in common is (at least) an experience with content, but content that is non-conceptual: it does not, in some sense, ‘involve’ concepts. It is this strategy I shall examine in this essay. The claim that experiences have non-conceptual contents is a familiar one in recent philosophy of perception.3 But what does the claim really mean? Saying that an experience has a content that does not ‘involve’ concepts is, as yet, too vague. We need to know more about concepts, contents, and the notion of a mental state ‘involving’ concepts before we can really understand the claim. In this essay, I shall try to give enough of an account of these notions to yield a notion of non-conceptual content—one which is at least consistent with the leading theories of non-conceptual content. In Section 2, I shall consider how the term ‘non-conceptual content’ should be defined. In Section 3, I shall give a sketch of what it is for a state to be ‘composed of concepts’ or have conceptual content, and derive from that a sketch of what it is for a state to have non-conceptual content. I shall then argue, in Section 4, that this notion of non-conceptual content does apply to perception.

2 W HAT I S NON - CONC E P TUAL CONTE NT?

What is this non-conceptual content supposed to be? I shall begin with three examples of states that philosophers have claimed to have non-conceptual contents.

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First, there are perceptual experiences—perceiving that it is raining, that the cat is on the mat, and so on.4 Second, there are the states of the so-called sub-personal computational systems like the visual system—states which have content, but whose content is not (unlike the first sort of state) phenomenologically salient.5 Third, there are the states that, following Dretske, we may describe as carrying ‘information’ in the sense of communication theory. To take a well-known example of Dennis Stampe’s (1977), if a tree has seventy rings, then it is seventy years old. Thus this state of the tree’s has a content—it carries the information that the tree is seventy years old (see Dretske 1981). What makes these all examples of states with non-conceptual contents? Let’s start by assuming that all these states do actually have contents.6 To say that any state has content is just to say that it represents the world as being a certain way. It thus has what Peacocke (1992) calls a ‘correctness condition’—the condition under which it represents the world correctly. It is in this minimal sense of ‘content’ that perceptions, the states of the visual system, and the tree’s rings all have content. It is well known that we will need to add more to this minimal definition to capture the kind of content that beliefs and other propositional attitudes have. So we may say that the content of a belief is a Russellian Proposition, or a set of possible worlds, or something more fine-grained yet, like a Fregean Thought. But whatever the contents of beliefs are, we should not assume at the outset that just because experiences (and the other states mentioned) have content, they have the same sort of content that beliefs have. This minimal definition of content does not mention concepts. It does not seem to be part of a state’s having a correctness condition that the state (or its content) ‘involves’ concepts. Yet we tend to assume that beliefs (or their contents) involve concepts. What does this mean? It might mean that the concepts are literally the constituents of the belief. So when someone believes that the sun is shining, this belief state is literally composed of the concepts sun and shining. Or it might mean that the concepts are the constituents of the content of the belief: it is the content The sun is shining, rather than the belief state as such, that is literally composed of the concepts sun and shining—just as the sentence ‘The sun is shining’ is composed of its constituent words. If this is what it is for a state to have conceptual content, then a state with non-conceptual content is one which is not composed of concepts. So if

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experiences have non-conceptual contents, then they do not have concepts as constituents. The experience of the sun shining is not composed of the concepts sun and shining. Or perhaps it is the content of the experience that is not composed of these concepts. So perhaps the idea is this: just as conceptual content is content that is composed of concepts, so non-conceptual content is content that is not composed of concepts. Conceptual content is ‘structured’ content, and non-conceptual content is ‘unstructured’ content. But on the face of it, this definition will not explain why the examples I mentioned above are all examples of non-conceptual content. For the mere fact that a state has a structured content (in this sense) seems neither necessary nor sufficient for its being conceptual. It is not necessary because it seems that some conceptual and non-conceptual states can share contents. When I believe that the sun is shining because I see that it is, then in an obvious sense I believe what I see. What I am believing is surely in some sense the same as what I am experiencing—namely, that the sun is shining—the way the world is represented to be, or the content, in the minimal sense of that term mentioned above. But if experiences have non-conceptual contents, and beliefs do not, then how can this apparently obvious fact be explained? How can the belief have a structured content if the experience hasn’t?7 It is not sufficient because it seems that the contents of computational states can be structured without being conceptual. According to certain computational theories of vision, light is reflected onto the retina, and the information it contains is processed—by algorithms that compute functions—to form a representation of the scene perceived. The states involved in this process represent visually perceptible properties of the scene: properties such as reflectance, illumination, and the orientation of edges of objects. Now many think it obvious that the contents processed by the visual system do have constituents. For the theory assigns structure to these states, analysing them—as it may be—in terms of concepts such as that of a zero-crossing (Marr 1982). But if a concept just is a constituent of a content, then the constituents of these computational contents will be concepts by definition: some of the states of a perceiver’s visual system will have contents with zero-crossing-representations as constituents, and will thus be composed of concepts, including the concept zero-crossing. But these were supposed to be states with non-conceptual contents.

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So the mere idea of a content that is not composed of concepts does not help to explain the idea of non-conceptual content. To this it may be said: so much for the idea of non-conceptual content. If the only sense we can make of the idea of a concept is as the constituent of a representational state (or of the content of that state), then why not just define ‘concept’ thus and have done with it? It is not, after all, as if the everyday notion of a concept is clear enough to be saved for systematic philosophy, and what can be saved applies just as well to these allegedly ‘sub-personal’ states as to beliefs. But this reaction is premature. My point so far is only that the idea of non-conceptual content should not be defined simply in terms of having constituents. This does not mean that there is nothing in the idea of non-conceptual content. It’s just that it should not be defined that way. What I need to show is how it should be defined. To get a better grip on the notion of non-conceptual content, take the simplest of our three examples: the tree’s rings. Why should anyone think that this state does not ‘involve’ concepts? The answer is obvious: the state of the tree cannot involve concepts in any sense, since the tree has no mental states, and so a fortiori possesses no concepts. When we describe the tree as representing its age, or as carrying the information that it is seventy years old, we do not suppose that the tree possesses the concept of a year—or indeed any other concept. However, we think that when someone believes that they are seventy years old, they presumably cannot believe this unless they possess the concept of a year—whatever concepts may be. The believer needs to possess the concepts; the tree does not. To generalise from this: for something, X, to believe that a is F, X must possess the concepts a and F. But for X to merely represent that a is F, X does not have to possess these concepts. It is in the latter case that X is in a state with non-conceptual content. Rather than being defined merely in terms of the content’s having constituents, the notion of conceptual content is now defined in terms of whether its constituent concepts need to be possessed in order for something to be in that state. Adrian Cussins has recently outlined and defended this idea (see Cussins 1990: 380–401). It will be instructive to look at the way he sets the issues out. Cussins begins by defining conceptual and non-conceptual properties: A property is a conceptual property if, and only if, it is canonically characterised, relative to a theory, only by means of concepts which are such that an

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organism must have those concepts in order to [instantiate] the property. A property is a non-conceptual property if, and only if, it is canonically characterised, relative to a theory, by means of concepts which are such that an organism need not have those concepts in order to [instantiate] the property.8

Conceptual and non-conceptual content are then defined as ‘content which consists of conceptual properties’ and ‘content which consists of non-conceptual properties’ respectively. This definition is not entirely straightforward, and a few comments are in order. First, it is obvious that according to the definition, almost all properties are non-conceptual, since there are very few properties that require an organism to have a concept of the property in order to instantiate it. And that is how things should be. But it looks initially as if some obviously conceptual properties come out as non-conceptual on this definition. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the type-identity theory is true: mental properties are identical with brain properties. Then my instantiating the property thinking about Vienna is my instantiating a certain brain property—call it ‘B’. But I need have no concept of the property B in order to instantiate it—I do not need to be a neuroscientist in order to think! So B is a non-conceptual property. But then so is the property thinking about Vienna, since it is identical with B. But surely you have to have a concept of Vienna in order to think about it? Cussins’s answer is not that thinking about Vienna and B are different properties, but that specifying that property as ‘B’ does not, from the point of view of the theory of content, specify it in the right way. It is not what he calls a ‘canonical characterisation’ of the property. A theory canonically characterises something when it describes it in terms of the properties that it treats as essential to that thing. Content, Cussins says, is ‘canonically characterised by a specification which reveals the way in which it presents the world’ (see Cussins 1990: 383, n.25). So describing my instantiation of the property as B does not reveal the way the world is presented to me—the world is not presented, in that instantiation, as containing instances of B. This is why ‘B’ is not a canonical characterisation of the property. Second, it is plain from this that although ‘B’ is not a canonical characterisation of the property for the purposes of the theory of content, it will be canonical for, say, neuroscience. This is why Cussins says that canonical characterisations are ‘relative to a theory’. He thus leaves open the possibility

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that the same property could be canonically characterised as conceptual by one theory, and as non-conceptual by another. The route from conceptual and non-conceptual properties to conceptual and non-conceptual content is straightforward. A state with conceptual content—e.g., a belief—is one such that the subject of that state has to possess the concepts that canonically characterise its content in order to be in that state. Any state with content that does not meet this condition has a non-conceptual content. More strictly, we can use Cussins’s definition to construct a definition of non-conceptual content as follows: For any state with content, S, S has a non-conceptual content, P, if a subject X’s being in S does not entail that X possesses the concepts that canonically characterise P. This definition can now be applied to the examples I introduced at the beginning of this section. (1) Experience: X’s seeing that the sun is shining does not entail that X has the concepts of the sun, or shining. That is, in order to see that the sun is shining, a subject does not have to possess these concepts (though of course he or she may possess them). (2) The visual system: in order for a subject’s visual system to compute its solution to the complex equations that take retinal information as input and a 3D description of the scene as output, the subject does not have to possess the concepts that canonically characterise these equations (though again, he or she may possess them). You do not need to know the theory of vision in order to see. (3) The tree’s rings: in order for the tree to represent or indicate that it is seventy years old, it does not have to possess the concepts seventy, year, and being old. This is just as well, since it would not be able to possess these concepts anyway. Saying that it makes sense to apply the definition of non-conceptual content to these cases is not, of course, saying very much. We still have to establish that there are any mental states which have non-conceptual content. To do this, we must probe the definition further. A state with conceptual content, C, may be defined in terms of the conditional: if X is in C, then X possesses the concepts that canonically

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characterise C. The point, therefore, is not that conceptual contents have constituents and non-conceptual contents do not—as we saw above, this will not work. It is rather that X needs to ‘possess’ these constituents in order to be in the state. But what is it to ‘possess’ these constituents, these concepts? It cannot simply be a matter of having the literal parts of the state ‘written’ inside one’s head. (After all, the tree has seventy rings; in no sense does this amount to possessing the concept seventy.) There must be more to possessing a concept than being in contentful states that have constituents. But what more? It seems, then, that to understand what concepts are, we need to understand what it is to possess a concept. Indeed, Christopher Peacocke has advanced an even stronger thesis, his ‘Principle of Dependence’: that ‘there can be no more to the nature of a concept than is determined by a correct account of what it is to possess the concept’ (Peacocke 1989c: 2, my emphasis).9 In the next section, I will try to give an argument for this Principle.

3. CONC E P T S AN D CONTE NT S

So what is it to possess a concept? It is often said that thought requires the possession of concepts (see Evans 1981: 132). This can seem almost tautological, as can its converse: there is no possession of concepts without thought. This latter truism is almost self-evident: it is hard to make sense of a thinker whose mental life just consists of a series of concepts, with no intentional states of which they are ‘constituents’. So we may conjecture that a concept, C, is possessed by a thinker, T, only if T is in intentional states in whose contents C figures. But is the former truism just as obvious? Why should thought require the possession of concepts? Consider my possession of the concept cheese. According to the above conjecture, I only possess this concept if I am in intentional states in which the concept cheese figures. Suppose, for example, I believe that cheese is nutritious. It will not be possible for me to have only this belief about cheese, since I cannot believe that cheese is nutritious (call it ‘P’) without having certain beliefs that are the obvious logical consequences of this belief—the belief that not(P & not-P) for example.10 These beliefs are uninteresting consequences of P, but there are more interesting beliefs I must have too, that are not related to P by logic alone. For example, if I believe that cheese is nutritious, I must believe that cheese is edible, and

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arguably, if my belief is genuinely to be about cheese, I must believe that cheese is made of milk. This list of beliefs could be extended; but there is no need to do so to underline the familiar point that having one belief entails having a lot. While there is, arguably, nothing incoherent in supposing that a mental life could consist of just one sensation, it seems plainly incoherent to suppose that it could contain just one belief. If a thinker has a belief, then he or she must also have many others. These beliefs will be either those related logically to the original belief (P or not-P) or those related by what we can call the ‘semantic’ properties of their contents (the belief that cheese is nutritious and the belief that cheese is edible). So if I cannot have the concept of cheese unless I have beliefs in which the concept figures—whatever concepts are—then I cannot have the concept if I only have one belief about cheese. For I cannot have only one belief about cheese. Since intentional states come not in single spies but in whole battalions, then since possession of concepts needs intentional states, it needs a multiplicity of them. Moreover, the reason why there has to be this multiplicity is that beliefs have to stand in these relations to other relevant intentional states in order for them to have the contents they do. The upshot of the ‘cheese’ example is that the belief would not just be about cheese unless the thinker had the other relevant beliefs. The much-discussed ‘holism of the intentional’ resides not simply in the fact that there must be a multiplicity of intentional states if there are to be any, but in the fact that the content of any one intentional state depends, to some extent, on the contents of the others. Indeed, it is this latter fact that explains the former. But a thinker’s beliefs about the world are also sensitive to perceptual evidence, and in some cases, their contents are partly defined by the perceptual evidence that a thinker would take as counting in their favour. Someone could not believe that it is raining unless they were disposed to regard a perception of drops of water falling from the sky as evidence for this belief. Intentional states stand not only in logical and semantic relations to one another, but also in evidential relations to perceptions. All these three kinds of relations help to fix the content of a given intentional state. But what does this tell us about concepts and their possession? These uncontroversial points about holism do not answer our initial question about why thought requires the possession of concepts. To answer this

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question, we next need to ask why a theory of the mind needs the notion of a concept at all. When looking for the notion of the content of an attitude, there are straightforward dissections we can make in the anatomy of the mind—we can dissect people into their mental properties and their other properties; then we can dissect their mental properties into their intentional states and their non-intentional mental states; and we can dissect their intentional states into their attitudes and the contents of these attitudes. That gets us down to whole contents, the bearers of truth values. But where do concepts fit in? What do we add to the claim that people have beliefs, desires, intentions (and so on) about cheese by saying that they have the concept of cheese? Why talk about concepts at all? (See Hart 1983.) To answer this, we need to know what the idea of a concept is meant to explain. Frege writes: The task of our vernacular language is essentially fulfilled if people engaged in communication with one another connect the same thought, or approximately the same thought, with the same proposition. For this it is not at all necessary that the individual words should have a sense and meaning of their own, provided only that the whole proposition has a sense. Where inferences are to be drawn the case is different: for this it is essential that the same expression should occur in two propositions and should have exactly the same meaning in both cases. It must therefore have a meaning of its own, independent of the other parts of the proposition.11

Frege was concerned here with language, but a parallel point can be made for thought. If we simply wanted to represent facts, then our beliefs would only need to have ‘whole’ contents. All that would matter would be whether a content was true or false. The fact might have constituents (particulars and properties) but they would have no reflection in the content, since (to echo Frege) they would as it were have no role, no ‘meaning of their own’. But once we consider the role our beliefs play in reasoning, then it starts to become clear why their contents need constituents. A thinker who believes that a is F, and that b is F, and that a is not b will be disposed to believe that at least two things are F. Surely the states in this inference cannot just have unstructured contents, or we would not be able to explain its validity. And if we cannot explain this, we cannot explain why the constituent beliefs have the contents they do—according to the holistic proposal just outlined.

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To recall Frege’s remark: it is essential that the same (type of) ‘part’ of the content should occur in the two states, and that ‘it should have exactly the same meaning in both cases’—i.e., the parts should be tokens of the same semantic type. So in the simple example above, the states must both contain F as a part. I say that it is only a terminological variant of this to say that they must contain the concept F. To account for the inferential powers of these beliefs, then, the thinker’s beliefs should contain an element common to their contents: the concept F. What I want to suggest, then, is that concepts are the inferentially relevant constituents of intentional states. To discern conceptual structure in a thinker’s thoughts, we need to look (as it were) not ‘down’ into the propositional content, but ‘up’ into the nature of the intentional states themselves. The idea is to derive the psychological notion of a concept from facts about the inferential relations among beliefs.12 The notion of possessing a concept is then naturally explained as follows. To possess a concept is to be in intentional states whose inferential relations are an appropriate function of their contents. The elements in a thinker’s network of intentional states are essentially inferentially related to one another. Concepts are the constituents required to explain these inferential relations. So a thinker could not be in the relevant intentional states unless they contain concepts. Since possessing concepts entails that one is disposed to make certain inferences, then possessing concepts entails that one’s intentional states are ‘composed’ of concepts. This establishes the link we sought at the end of Section 2, between a state’s being composed of concepts and its subject possessing concepts. To say that beliefs have conceptual structure because of their inferential relations is not yet to say anything about the mechanism that underpins this structure. The structure of this mechanism need not mirror the inferential structure of beliefs. The mechanism could be a giant ‘look-up table’ that ‘infers’ the ‘belief’ that at least two things are F from the inputs a is F, b is F, and a is not b simply by having the first ‘belief’ written, as it were, at the intersection of the others.13 But I do not need to be committed to any a priori claims about mechanisms. My definition of a concept is a claim about the relations between beliefs, not a claim about their underlying mechanisms. This is why the definition does not commit me to the Language of Thought (LOT) hypothesis (Fodor 1987: appendix), for that is precisely the claim that the structure

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of the mechanism of thought mirrors its inferential structure. To say that beliefs are inferentially related to one another, and that they therefore have a structure that makes this possible, does not entail that this structure is underpinned by anything syntactic—in any interesting sense of ‘syntactic’. Maybe the underpinning mechanism is that of a connectionist network. The LOT hypothesis is independent from the present claim about concepts.14 This proposal about concepts is not ad hoc, for at least two reasons. First, it explains why the claim that there is no thought without possession of concepts is not just a vacuous slogan. We should distinguish between the content and having an attitude with that content—in Frege’s terminology, for example, between the Thought and its ‘grasping’. I claim that if contents are to be grasped at all, their inferential relations must be grasped. That is, according to my definition of possessing a concept, contents must be grasped by means of the thinker possessing certain concepts. So there is no thought without possession of concepts because states can have the contents they do only if they have inferentially relevant structure. Second, the proposal offers us an independent motivation for (something like) Peacocke’s Principle of Dependence, that ‘there can be no more to the nature of a concept than is determined by a correct account of what it is to possess the concept’.15 A correct account of possessing a given concept, C, would on my proposal involve a specification of the beliefs one has to have in order to have any belief about Cs. The account would have to specify what those beliefs are, and how they are related.16 The constituent, C, of these relevant beliefs is invoked only to explain the inferential relations between them. Since that is what the concept is, then of course there is no more to its nature than is given in an account of its possession. We can now return to non-conceptual content. In Section 2, I said that a state, S, has conceptual content iff X’s being in S entails that X possesses the concepts that characterise S. In this section I have argued that a concept is an inferentially relevant constituent of an intentional state; and that possessing a concept is therefore being in states with inferentially relevant constituents. So S has a conceptual content iff X’s being in S entails that S has inferentially relevant constituents, and this requires that X is in other states which are inferentially related to S. Similarly for non-conceptual content. X is in a state with non-conceptual content if X does not have to possess the concepts that characterise its content in order to be in that state. Since possessing a concept is being

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in intentional states whose contents are appropriately inferentially related, then a state with non-conceptual content is one whose contents are not so related. So in order to be in such a state, one does not have to be in other inferentially related states of the kind that give the contents of beliefs their conceptual structure.

4. B E LI E F, E X PE RI E NC E , AN D NON - CONC E P TUAL CONTE NT

What has all this got to do with experience? I think that this proposal about concepts provides us with a two-stage argument for the non-conceptual content of perceptual experience. The first stage is to show why, contrary to what some philosophers think,17 perceptions are not beliefs. The second will be to show how this entails that perceptions have non-conceptual contents. Any theory of perception must explain how perceptions can give rise to beliefs—what makes it the case that we can believe what we see. The belief theory of perception gives a simple answer to this: perceptions just are beliefs, acquired in a certain way. One standard objection to this is that we often do not, and cannot, believe what we see. Consider the famous Müller-Lyer Illusion (see Figure 9.1), where a perceiver, P, is presented with two lines of equal length, one with arrows going out (L1), the other with arrows going in (L2), and suppose P does believe that the lines are the same length. No matter how strong this belief of P’s is, P cannot help but see L1 as longer than L2. A theory that holds a straightforward equation of perception with belief has to say, on the face of it, that the perceivers have contradictory beliefs. But this is implausible. Surely it is better to say that they are in two states with different contents, perceiving that L1 is longer than L2, and believing that L1 and L2 are the same length.18 It will not do to explain the illusions in terms of a ‘prima facie but suppressed’ inclination to believe that L1 is longer than L2—in Armstrong’s words, in terms of ‘a state which would be a belief state but for the inhibiting effect of other, contrary beliefs’ (Armstrong 1968: 140). For there would still be an unexplained component—the difference between this state and other, non-perceptual, inclinations to believe. When conclusive evidence is presented against my non-perceptual inclination to believe that p, this inclination should vanish. But when conclusive evidence is presented against

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L1

L2

Figure 9.1 The Müller-Lyer Illusion.

my (alleged) inclination to believe that L1 is longer than L2, this alleged inclination remains. (Happy, therefore, are those who believe and have not seen.) Perceptions are resilient to conclusive counter-evidence in such a way that precludes their definition simply in terms of inclinations to believe (see Crane 1988b). None of this, of course, prevents us being normally disposed to believe what we perceive. Perceptions (unlike desires, for instance) are representations of how the world is, and thus ‘made true’ by the facts. In Searle’s terminology, they have ‘mind-world direction of fit’ (Searle 1983: 53). Perceptions seem to ‘aim’ at truth in something like the way beliefs do. But the way perceptions aim at truth is not the same as the way beliefs do. For part of what it is for belief to aim at truth is shown by Moore’s so-called paradox: the absurdity, for all p, of asserting ‘I believe that p but not p’. Yet as the Müller-Lyer Illusion shows, there are values of p for which asserting ‘I perceptually experience that p but not p’ is perfectly coherent. There is thus no Moorean ‘paradox’ of perceptual experience. So one clear reason perceptions are not beliefs—and there are others—is that they are not revisable in the light of either other perceptions or beliefs that the perceiver has. Although perceptions do normally involve inclinations to believe, they cannot be identified with these inclinations, since unlike inclinations to believe, they are resilient to conclusive counter-evidence. In Section 3 I claimed that beliefs were holistically related to one another by at least three kinds of inferential relations. The first were the logical or deductive relations. The second were what I called the ‘semantic’ relations. And the third were the evidential relations. I claimed that since beliefs would not have the contents they do if they did not stand in these relations,

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then standing in these relations was essential to beliefs. Moreover, it is because beliefs stand in these relations that they have conceptual structure. Now take the case of evidential relations. Certain beliefs are partly characterised by the evidence—perceptions and other beliefs—that believers count for or against them. They are therefore revisable on the basis of such evidence. But as we have seen, perceptions are not like this. While they may be pieces of evidence, they are not revisable on the basis of other evidence— whether that evidence is another belief or another perception. Moreover, if conceptual structure is only imposed by these evidential relations and the other inferential relations, then perceptions will not have conceptual structure. This is why their contents will not have inferentially relevant constituents: they will not be composed of concepts. Although perceptions are unrevisable, the conclusion that they have non-conceptual contents will not follow from this fact alone. For they may yet stand in some of the other inferential relations that are essential to beliefs. Do these other relations hold between experiences? Take the deductive relations first. On the face of it, it seems plain that there is no such thing as deductive inference between perceptions. If I perceive that a is F, and I perceive that a is G, there is no such thing as inferring the perception that a is F and G. If a’s F-ness and its G-ness are both perceptible at the time of the two perceptions, then the content of my perception is surely a is F and G in the first place. But if a’s F-ness and its G-ness are not both perceptible on the same occasion, then I can only infer the belief that a is F and G. That is, if I perceive the fact that a is F and G, then there is one perception; but if I do not, there are two perceptions and one belief. Either way, there seems to be no deductive inference between perceptions. Or consider the case of contents of the form P & not-P. One of the deductive constraints on beliefs is that we cannot have explicitly contradictory conscious beliefs. But, in the case of certain striking visual illusions—notably the ‘Waterfall Illusion’—we can have contradictory perceptions: a conscious perception with an explicitly contradictory content (Crane 1988a). So once again, perceptions lack certain individuating features of beliefs. However, matters are not quite as straightforward as this.19 Can I see that the table is brown and rectangular without also simultaneously seeing that it is brown? Surely not. So why does this not mean, on my account, that the content of the perception must have constituents of some sort—a constituent that ‘means’ rectangular and one that ‘means’ brown?

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To say that perceptions lack inferential structure of the kind typical of beliefs does not mean that they are entirely unstructured. But reflection on this example shows that there is an important difference between the kinds of structure involved in the cases of perception and belief. The difference is that in the case of perception, there is strictly speaking no such thing as the perception of the brownness of the table, in isolation from the perception of its rectangularity. It is simply not possible to perceive that the table is brown without also perceiving its actual shape. Of course, it also is not possible to believe that the table is brown without believing that it has a shape. But the difference is that whereas the perception is of the table’s actual shape, the belief is merely that the table has a shape. It would be possible for someone to believe that there is a brown table in a certain room without having any beliefs about its definite size or shape. It would be enough to believe simply that it has a definite size—somewhere between the size of the room it is in, and the size of a shoebox, perhaps; and a definite shape—round, rectangular, or hexagonal, etc. But it would not be possible for a normal perceiver to see a brown table in the room without also seeing its actual size and shape. Dretske expresses this distinction by saying that the perception of the table contains ‘more specific, more determinate’ information than the belief about the table.20 The mere belief that there is a brown table in the room is less specific and determinate than the perception, in the sense that its correctness is compatible with more possibilities. The correctness of this belief is compatible with the table being six feet long, or four feet, six inches—and so on. Within certain obvious limits, the belief about its colour and location does not rule any of these out. The perception that the table is brown, on the other hand, rules out many more possibilities. There are far fewer ways the length of the table can be that are consistent with the correctness of the perception, so the content of the perception is more specific in that it rules out more possibilities.21 (This distinction captures the important and non-misleading sense in which perceptions are more like pictures than statements.) We may put the point thus: the content of the perception that the table is brown already contains the perception of its shape. But the mere belief that the table has a shape can only be inferred from the belief that the table is brown, plus the general belief that whatever has a colour has a shape. The belief about the shape arises, plainly, from a process of reasoning. But the perception of the shape does not, for the obvious reason that you cannot

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have a perception of the general fact that whatever has a colour has a shape, since such general facts are not perceptible. But as we have seen, you do not need such a general ‘perception’ in order to perceive the shape of the table and its colour—which is just as well, since it cannot be had. So although it is possible to infer ascriptions of perceptions from one another, this does not entail that the perceptions themselves enter into deductive relations. This brings me to the question of whether those relations that I called ‘semantic’—those relations between contents that are not just a matter of logic—apply to perception. The idea was that if you have the belief that p, then there are certain other beliefs that you ought to have if that belief is to have the content p. Once again, perception does not share this feature of belief: to perceive that p, there are no other perceptions that you ought to have. There is no ‘ought’ about it. You simply perceive what the world and your perceptual systems let you perceive. If these systems go wrong, then they can produce states with contents—e.g., contradictions—that the belief system would not tolerate. But unlike the case of beliefs, failing in this way does not stop the perceptions from having those contents. (A Davidsonian might put this point by saying that perception is not subject to the ‘constitutive ideal of rationality’: see Davidson 1980: 213.) So I conclude that the structure in the contents of perception is not conceptual structure: that is, the inferential structure of the contents of beliefs. But how then should we understand its structure? My general account of non-conceptual content does not entail one particular answer to this question. But it is consistent with the most fully developed current theory of non-conceptual content—Peacocke’s theory of ‘scenario content’.22 Peacocke’s idea is that the content of a perception can be given by specifying a scenario: a set of ways of filling out the space around the perceiver with properties (colours, shapes, temperatures, and so on) relative to an origin and a family of axes. The origin will depend on the position and posture of the perceiver. When specifying a given scenario, we will of course use concepts that pick out the various aspects of the scenario—the properties that constitute it. But, Peacocke claims, ‘the fact that a concept is used in fixing the scenario does not entail that that concept is somehow a component of the experience’s representational content’ (Peacocke 1989c: 15). This claim fits neatly into my account of non-conceptual content. According to the argument of Section 3, to say that concepts are not components of contents is to say that the subject does not have to possess the

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concepts used to characterise the content in order for his or her state to have such a content. Applied to scenarios, this means that the subject’s being in a state with a scenario content does not entail that he or she possesses the concepts that characterise the scenario. And this in turn means that the subject does not have to be able to make inferences involving beliefs about the properties of the scenario, in order for his or her perceptual states to have such contents. And this seems right: surely if experiences have such scenario contents, we should not expect perceivers to have beliefs about all the myriad properties that characterise them, and make inferences involving those beliefs. So although a scenario content does have a structure, it does not have inferential structure—and so does not have conceptual constituents. There is still an outstanding issue. How will this picture of perception explain the relation between perception and belief? Perceptions cause beliefs, and these perception-caused beliefs interact with other beliefs inferentially. It may then be asked: how can my account of the content of perception answer our question about the relation between perception and belief? Why does this inferential relation not impose structure? My answer is this: when a perception that p causes a belief that p, the whole contents of these two states are of the same type—p. The (causal) relation between perception and belief takes place at the level of whole contents. But on the perception side of this transaction, the contents are not composed of concepts: concepts come later when thinkers employ the beliefs they thus formed, and the desires they have, in reasoning—belief conceptualises the content of perception. So treating the transition from perception to belief in terms of whole contents allows us to explain how perceptions have contents that can be the contents of beliefs. It is crucial here to remember the argument of Section 3: the idea of a content was not explained as a combination of concepts. We extracted the idea of a concept from the idea of a system of beliefs; we did not extract the idea of the content of a belief from an antecedently given idea of a concept. That completes my argument for the non-conceptual content of perception. But what about the other two examples of non-conceptual content that I mentioned at the beginning of Section 2? Will my account apply to them too? I have nothing to say on the subject of the rings of the tree representing its age. Since, for me, possessing concepts entails at least having beliefs, then since the tree has no beliefs, a fortiori it possesses no concepts. And I need

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not take a stand here on the controversial issue of whether the tree is in a state with content. The case of the visual system is more complex. As I said in Section 2, many people think that the contents of states attributed by computational theories of vision are non-conceptual. But these theories often describe the stages in visual information-processing in terms of making inferences.23 So if these theories are right, how can my argument possibly apply? I shall end this essay by sketching an answer to this question. There is an important difference between the ways in which intentional states are inferentially related in thought, and the way computational states are related. The inferences a thinker is disposed to make, on which the conceptual structure of his or her thought depends, are constrained only by rationality, which allows the mind to range over its whole territory for its material. The resources of the visual system are, by contrast, severely restricted. Although we can treat it as deducing consequences from premises, the contents of these premises are not holistically related in the way the contents of beliefs are. Consider, for example, how Irvin Rock explains one striking effect of the Julesz random dot stereograms: it would seem that the perceptual system ‘knows’ certain laws of optics that normally obtain, and then ‘interprets’ seeming departures from these laws in such a way as to be compatible with them. (Rock 1983: 10)

Although it may well be correct to attribute to the visual system representations of certain laws of optics, this is not the same as what goes on when we know or believe laws of optics. To echo a remark of Gareth Evans: to make sense of this case, we do not need to suppose that the visual system is capable of entertaining contents about any other sort of law.24 But this is precisely what we do suppose when attributing to someone a belief about a law—we suppose that the subject can make inferences about laws, and thus entertain other contents about laws. If subjects could not do this, then they would not have the concept of a law. But this is not so with the visual system—for its states to have content, they do not need to be so holistic. And I have argued here that the holistic constraints of rationality are the only motivation for postulating concepts. So the fact that the visual system does not meet these constraints helps

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explain why it possesses no concepts. And this would be why its states are not composed of concepts, in the sense I have defended in this essay.

* * * Earlier versions of this essay were presented at University College London, the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, King’s College London, and at the Universities of Sheffield, Stirling, and York. I am grateful to the audiences on these occasions and especially to John Campbell, Bill Hart, Stephen Makin, Mike Martin, Hugh Mellor, Alan Millar, Philip Percival, Tom Pink, Mark Sainsbury, Barry C. Smith, and Michael Tye for discussions and written comments that have helped me greatly with the essay.

E S S AY T E N

Is There a Perceptual Relation? (2006)

1. I NTRO D U C TION

P. F. Strawson argued that ‘mature sensible experience (in general) presents itself as . . . an immediate consciousness of the existence of things outside us’ (1979: 97). He began his defence of this very natural idea by asking how someone might typically give a description of their current visual experience, and offered this example of such a description: ‘I see the red light of the setting sun filtering through the black and thickly clustered branches of the elms; I see the dappled deer grazing in groups on the vivid green grass . . .’ (1979: 97). In other words, in describing experience, we tend to describe the objects of experience—the things which we experience—and the ways they are when we are experiencing them. Some go further. According to Heidegger, We never .  .  . originally and really perceive a throng of sensations, e.g., tones and noises, in the appearance of things . . . ; rather, we hear the storm whistling in the chimney, we hear the three-engine aeroplane, we hear the

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Mercedes in immediate distinction from the Volkswagen. Much closer to us than any sensations are the things themselves. We hear the door slam in the house, and never hear acoustic sensations or mere sounds. (Heidegger 1935: 156; quoted by Smith 2002: 105)

Whether or not we all want to agree with Heidegger that we have immediate consciousness of the difference between a Volkswagen and a Mercedes, many of us will agree with him that in normal perceptual experience the ‘things themselves’ seem much closer to us than a ‘throng of sensations’. This does not by itself imply that we are not in any way aware of a throng of sensations in perceptual experience. Heidegger only says that we are not originally and really aware of them; even if the things themselves are ‘closer’ to us than sensations, this still implies that the sensations are somewhere to be found, so to speak, in the experiential neighbourhood. It is obvious that perceptual experience is sensory in a way in which thought is not, and a theory of perception has to make room for this. Nonetheless, in recent years a number of philosophers have argued that all we are aware of in experience—and all we can be made aware of by introspecting an experience—are the ‘things themselves’: the everyday objects of experience and their properties. On this view, known as ‘representationalism’, introspection of a perceptual experience never reveals awareness of any properties of the experience itself or of what Heidegger calls a ‘throng of sensations’. The opposing view holds that although we are aware in perceptual experience of things outside us, introspection of an experience can reveal awareness of properties of the experience itself. One reason someone might hold this is because they think experience always involves the instantiation of intrinsic, non-representational ‘qualitative’ properties, known as qualia.1 I will call this view the ‘qualia theory’. The qualia theory combines rejection of representationalism with an explanation of that rejection in terms of qualia. Ned Block has called the dispute between representationalism and the qualia theory the ‘greatest chasm in the philosophy of mind’ (Block 1996:19). The main purpose of this essay is to dispute this claim of Block’s. I will argue that as far as the philosophy of perception is concerned, the dispute over the existence of qualia is not very significant at all. It may be that in other parts of philosophy of mind—for example, in the debate about the physicalistic reduction of consciousness—the existence of qualia is a

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chasm-creating question. (Actually, I doubt this too; but I will not argue for it in any detail here.2) My concern here is just with philosophical debates about perception: my claim will be that as far as the philosophy of perception is concerned, the question of qualia is not an important question. The debate to which Block is referring is often discussed in terms of whether experience is ‘transparent’ or ‘diaphanous’. But, as we shall see in Section 2, whatever is correct in the idea of the transparency of experience cannot establish the truth of representationalism. In fact, it seems to me that it is relatively easy to show that representationalism is false. This rejection of representationalism does not touch the main problems of perception, although the reasons for the rejection point towards what these real problems are. Accordingly, in Sections 3–5 of this essay, I will argue that there is a large chasm in the philosophy of perception, but that it is created by the dispute about whether experience is relational. It is this dispute—between ‘intentionalists’ and ‘disjunctivists’—which concerns the most recalcitrant problems of perception. The major theories of perception in contemporary analytic philosophy line up on either side of this dispute. I will argue that when seen in this context, the debate about the existence of qualia is a relatively minor side dispute among intentionalists, rather than a major chasm in the philosophy of perception. My aim in demonstrating this is not simply negative. It is also an attempt to show what it means to say that perception is intentional, and therefore what the essence of an ‘intentionalist’ approach to perception is—something which I think has not been very well understood in recent philosophy of perception. A correct understanding of intentionalism about perception must derive from a correct understanding of the problems of perception. But before explaining this, I will begin with a few remarks about the transparency of experience. 2 . TR AN S PARE NCY

What recent philosophers call the ‘transparency’ or ‘diaphanousness’ of experience is the idea that that reflection on what it is like to have an experience does not reveal properties of experiences themselves, but only of their objects. As a number of writers have pointed out (Martin 2002; Siewert 2003: 18; Stoljar 2004), there are really two claims here: (i) we are aware of the objects of experience, and (ii) we are not aware of features of experiences

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themselves. In his expositions of the transparency idea, Michael Tye makes both claims. First, the positive claim about what we are aware of: When one tries to focus on [an experience of blue] in introspection one cannot help but see right through it so that what one actually ends up attending to is the real colour blue. (Tye 1992:160)

And second, the negative claim about what we are not aware of: When we introspect our experiences and feelings, we become aware of what it is like for us to undergo them. But we are not directly aware of those experiences and feelings; nor are we directly aware of qualities of experience. (Tye 2000: 51)

Plausible as these two claims might initially seem, I think it is easy to show that they are not true. What is right about the first claim is that introspection does typically reveal the objects of perceptual experience, and that we typically describe our experiences in terms of these objects, as Strawson pointed out. But it does not follow from the fact that we typically describe our experience in this way, that in every case in which we introspect an experience of (e.g.) something blue, we ‘see right through’ to the real colour blue. For if this were so, then all introspectible experiences would involve relations to real objects and real instances of properties, like colours (assuming, for the sake of argument, that colours are real properties of external objects). But not all experiences do involve relations to real objects or property instances: one can have hallucinatory or otherwise deceptive experiences which involve no such relations.3 So it cannot be true that in every case of perceptual experience ‘the qualities to which we have direct access . . . are qualities of external things’ (Tye 2000: 51). Tye’s response to this is to say that what one is aware of when hallucinating are ‘specific aspects of the content of the experience’. And since he believes that one’s state of mind when hallucinating is the same as when one is perceiving, this is what we are aware of when we introspect our perceptions as well as our hallucinations. What is meant by the ‘content of experience’? This is where we move into more specific areas of theories like his. Philosophers like Tye think that perception is a propositional attitude, and that like belief, it has a content which

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is expressed by the ‘that’-clause in ascriptions of perceptual experiences. The content of perception is therefore a proposition. Taking what Tye says literally, then, he is saying that in introspection we are aware of aspects of propositions. I will discuss this view in Section 4 below. But notice here that we seemed already to have moved away from claims about what is obvious about perception: the immediate initial appeal of the idea that all we are aware of in perception are things like the wind in the chimney and the blue of the sea starts to crumble in our hands. If we are merely hallucinating something blue, then blueness is not instantiated at all. But that means that there is no instance of the real colour blue for us to be aware of in introspection. Even if we are aware of the fact that our experience represents something blue, this does not by itself mean that there is anything blue which we are aware of. What about the second, negative, claim? It seems initially plausible that in normal perceptual experience one is not aware of features of one’s experience. I started this essay with the observation that perceptual experience seems to be an awareness of the world, of the things themselves. So it might seem equally natural to say that in perceptual experience I am not aware of qualities of my experience; I have the experience, and in having the experience, I become aware of the world. But why should it never be true that one can be aware of qualities of one’s experience? Is it impossible to take what J. J. Gibson once called the ‘painterly attitude’ to visual experience and attend to the way the experience itself is, as opposed to the features of the things themselves? It may still be true in this kind of case that ‘the public, mind-independent objects of perception and their features are not banished from one’s attention just because one shifts one’s interest from how things are in the environment to how things are experientially’ (Martin 2002: 384). But this does not imply that one is not able to attend to how things are experientially. Tye agrees with this; his view is that ‘we attend to the external surfaces and qualities and thereby we are aware of something else, the “feel” of our experience’ (2000: 51–52). You become aware of how your experience phenomenally is (its ‘feel’) by attending to what is represented. I think we should agree with Tye that this is often—or even usually—the case. But the next question is whether there is any situation in which you can become aware of how your experience is by attending to the experience itself rather than by attending to its objects (e.g., ‘external surfaces and qualities’). For after all, the question for a theory of perception is surely not how often we

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are aware of things of a certain kind, or (pace Kind 2003) how difficult it is to be aware of such things; the question is whether we are ever aware of things of that kind. So if we are ever directly aware of features of our experience which are not features of the objects of experience—or features which these objects are represented as having—then Tye’s negative claim is false: we can be ‘directly aware of qualities of experience’. Brief reflection on some everyday phenomena seems to reveal many cases of such awareness. I remove my glasses and things seem blurry. Introspecting this experience, blurriness does certainly seem to be instantiated somewhere. But does it seem to be instantiated in the familiar objects of experience? Surely this need not be the case: it need not seem as if these objects are themselves blurry. When I say that ‘everything seems blurry’ I do not mean that it seems as if the things around me are blurry—any more than when I say that ‘everything is dark in here’ I mean that it seems as if the things around me are dark (‘the chairs are dark, the table is dark . . .’). What I mean is that I am experiencing things in a blurry way. Isn’t this a straightforward case of where one can be ‘directly’ aware of an aspect of one’s experience which is not an aspect of the objects of experience? It is natural to say that I am aware of blurriness; but I am not aware of blurriness by being aware of any other properties; and blurriness does not seem to be a property of objects of experience. Tye’s response to cases like this appeals again to representation. He claims that there are cases when one experiences something as blurry, when one’s visual experience ‘comments inaccurately on boundaries’: it ‘says’ that the boundaries of things are fuzzy (2000). We can concede that there are cases like this; but they are not relevant. The relevant case is one in which one experiences things blurrily without experiencing them as blurry. About this kind of case, Tye says that one ‘simply loses information . . . one undergoes sensory representations that fail to specify where the boundaries and contours lie’ (2000). In this kind of case, then, the experience does not ‘say’ incorrectly that things are blurry; it just fails to specify how things are in enough detail. But how does this bear on the question of whether one can be ‘directly aware of qualities of experience’? Let’s accept that Tye is right that the experience underspecifies the perceived environment. The phenomenal upshot of this, everyone agrees, is that things are seen blurrily. So blurriness does seem to be a property of some kind, which does seem to be instantiated somewhere. Unlike when things are seen as blurry, it does not seem to be

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instantiated by the objects of experience. So what is wrong with saying that it is instantiated (in some way) in the experience itself? Moreover, since I do not have to make myself aware of blurriness by first making myself aware of other things—the awareness of blurriness comes along all together with the awareness of everything else—introspection of seeing blurrily does seem to reveal a case of being ‘directly aware of qualities of experience’ in an uncontroversial sense of that phrase. Neither part of the transparency claim, then, is true without qualification. To be sure, it is generally true that the things we see directly are ordinary things and their properties: and in this sense we normally ‘see through’ experiences to the real-world objects and properties themselves. But if subjectively indistinguishable hallucinations are possible, then this is not always true. Likewise, it is generally true that we are not directly aware of properties of experiences themselves. But there also seem to be uncontroversial cases where we are, and it is not obvious why we should argue them away. If representationalism is committed to the transparency theses, then it is false. But this fact does not itself imply the qualia theory. For the qualia theory as defined above is not simply the denial of representationalism; rather it denies representationalism and gives an explanation of this denial in terms of qualia (intrinsic, conscious, non-representational properties of experience).4 I will return to the qualia theory in Section 6. Nonetheless, our brief investigation of transparency has brought to light two questions at the heart of the traditional philosophical debates about perception. Reflection on the positive transparency claim raises the question: how should we give an account of what we experience when we hallucinate something? And reflection on the negative transparency claim raises the question: how should we give an account of the properties which seem to be instantiated in experience when those properties are not—and do not even seem to be—properties of external objects? This second question leads us back to the argument from illusion, while the first leads us to the argument from hallucination.

3. TH E PROB LE M S OF PE RC E P TION

The traditional arguments from illusion and from hallucination deserve separate treatment. Some philosophers (occasionally following Austin 1962) have expressed scepticism about whether these arguments are still

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worth discussing. I will not target such scepticism directly, but instead I will rely on the recent defences of the arguments by Howard Robinson (1994) and A. D. Smith (2002). First, the argument from illusion. An illusion here we can define with Smith as ‘any perceptual situation in which a physical object is actually perceived, but in which that object perceptually appears other than it really is’ (Smith 2002: 23). So illusion in this sense need not involve deception. The argument from illusion says that when one is subject to an illusion (in this sense) then one is experientially aware of something’s having a quality, F, which the real object being perceived does not actually have. It is then argued that when one is experientially aware of something’s having a sensory quality F, then there is something of which one is aware which does have quality F (this claim is what Robinson [1994: 32] calls the ‘Phenomenal Principle’). Since the real object in question is, by hypothesis, not F, then it follows that one is not aware of this real object after all; or if one is, one is aware of it only ‘indirectly’ and not in the direct, unmediated way in which we normally think we are aware of objects. Hence this normal belief—sometimes called ‘naive realism’ or ‘direct realism’—is false. The standard traditional alternative to direct realism is the sense-datum theory, which says that the thing of which one is aware (or immediately or directly aware) is not a public physical object but an object (a ‘sense-datum’) whose existence depends on the existence of the experience. It is this object which has the quality F which the real object does not have. The argument from illusion is often rejected because the Phenomenal Principle is rejected: why should it be that whenever anyone is aware of something as having a property, there really is something which has this property? This is not true for the case of belief or judgement, for example: that when someone consciously judges that something has a property, then there is something which has this property. Indeed, it is often said that perception, like belief, is a form of representation of the world, and it is not true of representations in general that when a representation represents that something has a property, there is something which does have that property. To claim that it must be otherwise in the case of perceptual experience is to beg the question in favour of sense-data. Nonetheless, even if one rejects sense-data, one might hold that the quality F of which one is aware in having an illusory experience is not a quality of any object of experience, but is rather a quality of the experience itself. This is the essence of the ‘abverbial’ conception of experience

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(Chisholm 1957; Ducasse 1942). When one experiences a blue object, this is understood as experiencing bluely—where the adverb ‘bluely’ modifies, and therefore attributes a property to, the experience. The idea that perceptual experience involves this kind of property of experience resembles the central claim of the qualia theory. Like the adverbial theorist, the qualia theorist need not say that the quality predicated of an experience is the same kind of quality as the quality predicated of the object of experience. Instead they might say, with Peacocke (1983: Chapter 1), that while objects are blue, regions of the visual field are blue', where being blue' is the way the visual field is when a blue object is perceived in normal circumstances. I will return to the relation between the adverbial theory and the qualia theory at the end of this essay. The argument from hallucination can be formulated as follows. Perceptual experience in all five senses seems intuitively to be a relation to mind-independent objects of experience. But it seems possible for there to be an experience which seems just like a perception of a real mind-independent object but where there is no real mind-independent object being perceived. This is what we shall call a hallucination. If a hallucination is a mental state of the same fundamental kind as the perception, then it turns out that perceptual experience is not a relation to a mind-independent object after all. The conclusion of this bit of the argument is that our pre-theoretical conception of perception as a relation to mind-independent objects must be wrong. So what should we say instead? A traditional answer again is that perception is instead a relation to sense-data, construed as mind-dependent entities (Broad 1952; Price 1932). This answer has been widely criticised and I will not add to these criticisms here. But other answers are possible. One is to deny that perception is essentially a relation at all. Rather, perception is a representation of the world; and as we saw above, it is not generally true that if X represents Y, then Y must exist. So a perceptual representation need not essentially involve a relation to what it represents. This is the intentionalist conception of perception, which I will discuss in Section 4 below. Another response to the argument is to deny that a perception and a subjectively indistinguishable hallucination are mental states or events of the same fundamental kind. Perception is a genuine relation to the world, but hallucination is a mere appearance or mere representation, and there is no more fundamental kind of mental state (‘perceptual experience’) to which they both belong. This is

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the disjunctivist conception of perception, to be discussed in Section 5. The contrast between these two views is well described by John Campbell as the contrast between the ‘Relational’ and ‘Representational’ views of experience (Campbell 2002: 114–124). Looked at from a sufficient distance, the arguments from illusion and hallucination have a similar form. They both present a conflict between an apparently manifest or obvious fact about perceptual experience, and a kind of perceptual error or misperception of the world. The apparently obvious fact is that experience seems to be a relation to its objects. From the subject’s point of view, experience seems to be a kind of ‘openness to the world’: how things are in perceptual experience is partly determined by how things are with the objects of experience. And how things are in an experience is partly determined by how the objects of experience are at the time at which one is experiencing them. This seems an obvious apparent difference between perception and thought: what you can think about does not seem to be constrained, in general, by the existence and characteristics of the objects of thought; what you can perceive, however, does. (This point is not intended to presuppose internalism about thought; even if externalism were true, this contrast between perception and thought would stand.)5 The importance of this apparent relationality is especially obvious in the case of the argument from hallucination, which can be construed as a reductio ad absurdum of the idea that perception is a relation to mind-independent objects. But it is also implicit in the central premise of the argument from illusion, Robinson’s Phenomenal Principle. Recall that this principle says that when a subject has a sensory experience as of something being F, then there is something which is F which the subject is experiencing. In other words, an experience of something’s being F must be or involve a relation to an instantiation of F-ness. Faced with the apparent presence of F-ness even when the object perceived is not F, the sense-datum theorist says that F-ness is a property of a sense-datum. The adverbialist responds to this by saying that the experience has the property of being a sensing F-ly. This property is not F-ness: experiences of blue things are not themselves blue. But nonetheless even the adverbial theory holds that experience must be explained in terms of the instantiation of phenomenal mental properties of a certain kind. Our reflections on the inadequacy of the transparency thesis led us back to the traditional problem of perception. The essence of this problem, it

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seems to me, is how to account for the apparent relationality of perception, given the possibility of illusion and hallucination. In other words, is there really a perceptual relation, as there seems to be?6 The three dominant theories respond to this in different ways: the sense-data theory and the disjunctivist say that there is a perceptual relation, but while the sense-data theorist says that in cases of illusion and hallucination the relatum is not an ordinary mind-independent object, the disjunctivist says that genuine perception is a relation to ordinary mind-independent objects, but that there is no common fundamental kind of state—‘perceptual experience’—present in cases of genuine perception, which is a relation to a mind-independent object, and illusion and hallucination, which are not. The intentionalist theory of perception in effect denies that perceptual experience is a relation at all. In the next two sections I will consider this opposition between the intentionalist and disjunctivist theories of perception, before returning to the question of qualia in section 6.7

4. I NTE NTIONALIT Y

We saw that a natural response to the arguments from illusion and hallucination was to deny what Robinson calls the Phenomenal Principle. And the reason to deny it in the case of perceptual experience is because experience seems an obvious case of representation of the world, and principles like this are not generally true of representations. So we are not obliged to accept the Phenomenal Principle. To deny the Phenomenal Principle is to hold, then, that the existence of a perceptual experience does not entail the existence of its object. This implies straightforwardly that experiences are not relations to the objects of experience.8 It has traditionally been part of the concept of intentionality—the mind’s directedness upon its objects—that the existence of an intentional state does not entail the existence of its object and that therefore intentionality is not a relation in the sense just specified (see Brentano 1874: 271–272; Husserl 1901: 216; Anscombe 1965). It is for this reason that I call the non-relational, representational conception of experience intentionalism. I will also assume, along with the philosophical orthodoxy, that if a condition or property is not relational then it is intrinsic. So intentionality in this traditional sense must be an intrinsic feature of mental states or acts.

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And intentionalism therefore says that the intentionality of perception is intrinsic to perceptual experiences themselves. This traditional understanding of intentionality—that it is not a relation, and therefore an intrinsic feature of states of mind—has been obscured in recent discussion by a number of other ideas. One is externalism, which I will discuss below. Another is the fact that qualia are typically characterised as intrinsic features of states of mind, in contrast with intentional features which are then supposed to be relational. Intentional properties are sometimes said to be relational because intentionality is understood functionally, in terms of ‘relations to other states of mind’. But in fact this is not an adequate understanding of functionalism—since many of these ‘relations’ are only dispositional in nature, and dispositions clearly are not relations to their manifestations—and it would in any case beg the question against a functionalist account of qualia, such as that presented by Shoemaker (1975). Yet another reason why intentional properties are thought to be relational is that they are supposed to involve relations to ‘intensional entities’ such as propositions. In a recent essay, Daniel Stoljar introduces a thesis about the phenomenal character of experience which he calls the relational thesis: ‘the phenomenal character of an experience is wholly determined by the objects that one is related to in having the experience’. Put this way, Stoljar’s thesis sounds the same as Campbell’s relational view of experience: ‘the phenomenal character of your experience, as you look around the room, is constituted by the actual layout of the room itself’ (Campbell 2002: 116). But it turns out that Stoljar means something different, since the view he calls ‘intentionalism’ (which is in fact Tye’s representationalism) holds this relational thesis too: According to intentionalism . . . to have an experience is in effect to stand in a relation to some intentional object—say a property or proposition. . . . the relational thesis tells us that the phenomenal character of the experience is determined by features of the proposition or property that is the intentional object of the experience. (Stoljar 2004: 358)

But we should distinguish the propositional content of an experience—the way it represents the world as being—from its intentional object. The intentional object of an intentional state or act is traditionally understood as what the intentional act is about or directed at. Hence the intentional object

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of a perceptual experience is what it is that is experienced. If I see a rabbit, the rabbit is the intentional object of my experience. My experience may also have the propositional content that there is a rabbit running through the field. But I do not see such propositional contents or propositions; I see rabbits and fields. For this reason, even if perceptual experience should be analysed in terms of relations to propositions, it is at best misleading and at worst absurd to say that these propositions are the intentional objects of experience in the normal understanding of this phrase. In treating an intentional theory of perception as committed to what he calls the relational thesis—with ‘object’ understood to apply to propositions as well as ordinary objects—Stoljar conflates two ideas: relations to intentional objects and relations to propositions. If we are considering the special case of so-called singular (or object-dependent) propositions, to be examined below, then it is natural to move from one to the other. But nonetheless the ideas are distinct: one could consistently deny that intentionality is a relation to intentional objects and yet maintain that it can involve relations to propositions of some kind. This might mean, for example, that intentional states have a structure which can be analysed in various ways. For instance, one can distinguish within a propositional attitude the attitude type (belief, hope, etc.) from the specific content of the attitude.9 And one can hold this together with the denial that intentionality is essentially a relation to its objects. In the case of perception, this means that experiences are not essentially relations to the object of experience: what is seen, touched, smelled, etc. And since it would be absurd to think that a proposition is the object of an experience in this sense, the thesis that intentional states are ‘relations to propositions’ is consistent with the thesis that they are not relations to their objects. So an intentionalist theory of perception, on this understanding, says that perceptual representation is intrinsic to the perceptual state itself that it represents the world, even if the state is one which can be analysed into its various components.10 Some philosophers, however, will deny that intentionality or representation is non-relational: externalists about intentionality or mental content will say that some intentionality is genuinely relational. They will say that some representations are relational and others are not. Hence they will say that some intentionality is relational and some is not. Of course, I cannot object to someone who decides to use the term ‘intentionality’ in this way; the important thing here is not which words one uses but which ideas

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and distinctions among ideas one is trying to express. Nonetheless, I doubt whether this is the most helpful way to use the terminology of intentionality in this context. For it seems to me extremely obscure how one of the fundamental characteristics of the mind (or, indeed, anything) could, in itself, be sometimes a relation, and sometimes not. But I will not address this issue directly here. Instead, I will briefly address the question of whether such a ‘mixed’ view of intentionality can properly accommodate the distinction I am drawing (to use Campbell’s words) between relational and representational views of experience. The mixed view says that this is best accommodated by the distinction between object-dependent and object-independent intentional contents or states. An object-dependent intentional state is one whose existence depends on the existence of a particular object; an object-independent state is one whose existence does not. So the idea is that a representational conception of experience must employ an object-independent conception of intentional states, and a relational conception must employ an object-dependent conception. However, the first of these claims is not true: as Burge (1991) has shown, a representational theory of perception can allow that particular episodes of perceiving are object-dependent in character. On Burge’s theory, hallucination and perception have the same content, and hence are states of the same fundamental kind, even though the specific nature of a particular episode of perceiving may involve the existence of a particular object. We need to distinguish between what is true of the individual episode of perceiving and what is true of states belonging to that same fundamental kind (see Martin 2003 for a detailed defence of this distinction). But even if the representational conception does not have to employ an object-independent conception of mental states, could the essence of the relational conception not be expressed by the idea of an object-dependent intentional state? The answer to this question is complex. First, it should be pointed out that the very idea of an object-dependent state of mind is not sufficient to account for genuine perception as the relational conception understands it. For object-dependent states of mind, if there are any such things, might be object-dependent for many reasons: maybe because they are essentially expressed using proper names; or maybe because they concern ‘natural kinds’; or maybe because they exploit some causal link to the object of thought. In all of these cases, the existence of the particular state of mind is dependent on the existence of an object. But in none of them is

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the object present to the mind in the way which the relational conception says objects are present to the mind in perception. What is distinctive of this presence to the mind we find in perception? The defender of the mixed view may answer that what is distinctive of perception is that the specific kind of intentional act required is an act with a demonstrative content: thoughts with content of the form that is F or that F is G. The idea is then that the relational conception of perceptual experience will give an account of the object-dependent intentionality of perception in terms of the subject’s capacity to have demonstrative thoughts about the objects perceived. This is a plausible thing for the defender of the mixed view to say. But notice that it is making a claim about the distinctive content of perception depend on a claim about the distinctive kinds of demonstrative thoughts which perception makes available. As Campbell has argued, there is a more fundamental question: what is it for perception to make something available for thought in the first place? And here I think we get a better understanding of the sense in which perception is relational if we ask, not about the contents of thoughts based on perception, but about perception itself (see Campbell 2002). The fundamental idea behind the relational view of perception is that perception somehow makes the world itself manifest to the mind. To understand this idea better we should suspend this talk of object-dependent thoughts and try and locate the real heart of the relational conception of perceptual experience.

5. DI S J U NC TIVI S M

The theory which best accommodates the relational conception of perceptual experience is the disjunctivist theory. Disjunctivism is best seen as a response to the problem of hallucination which attempts to do justice to the fact that in genuine perception the objects of experience are present to the mind in a way in which they can never be in thought. In attempting to do justice to the sense in which the world itself—and not just a representation of it, even an object-dependent representation of it—is present to the mind in perception, disjunctivism proposes that different accounts should be given of genuine perception and hallucination. Disjunctivism makes the possibility of hallucination compatible with the relationality of perception by denying that the hallucination and the subjectively indistinguishable

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perception are states of the same fundamental psychological kind. The theory denies therefore that subjective indistinguishability of experiences is sufficient for them to be of the same fundamental kind. By denying this, disjunctivism does not deny that there is some true description under which both the perception, say, of a rabbit and a subjectively indistinguishable hallucination of a rabbit can fall. It is easy to provide such a true description: both experiences are experiences which are subjectively indistinguishable from a perception of a rabbit. Disjunctivists do not deny that there is such a true description. What they deny is that what makes it true that these two experiences are describable in this way is the presence of the same specific kind of mental state in the case of perception and hallucination. In the case of the perception, what makes it true that the description applies is that the experience is a perception of a rabbit; in the hallucinatory case, what makes it true that the description applies is that the experience is a hallucination of a rabbit. What the disjunctivist therefore rejects is what J. M. Hinton calls ‘the doctrine of the “experience” as the common element in a given perception’ and an indistinguishable hallucination (Hinton 1973: 71). The most specific common description of both states, then, is a merely disjunctive one: the perceptual appearance of a rabbit is either a genuine perception of a rabbit or a mere hallucination of a rabbit. Hence the theory’s name.11 Disjunctivism is sometimes misunderstood, by its friends as well as by its enemies. In his endorsement of the theory, Putnam argues that its distinctive claim is ‘that there is nothing literally in common’ in perception and hallucination, ‘that is, no identical quality’ (1999: 152). But this cannot be right. For as we have just observed, disjunctivists do say that there is something literally in common between a perception of an X and a hallucination of an X—each state is subjectively indistinguishable from a perception of an X—and to that extent they exhibit a common ‘quality’. As McDowell says, ‘the uncontentiously legitimate category of things that are the same across the different cases is the category of how things seem to the subject’ (1986: 157). But what the members of this category have in common is not that they are all the same kind of experience. It is rather that to be a member of this category, a state of mind merely has to satisfy a disjunctive condition of the kind described in the previous paragraph.12 Disjunctivists need not deny either that there is a common physical state— for example, a brain state—shared by the perceiver and the hallucinator.

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What they will deny is that the state of perceiving an object is identical with, or supervenes upon, this physical state. This is because perceiving an object is an essentially relational state, of which the object perceived is a constituent; so the perception is constitutively dependent on the object perceived. Whereas the intentionalist sees the qualities presented in perceptual experience as represented, the disjunctivist sees these qualities as instantiated in perception, and as merely represented in hallucination (Martin 2002: 392–395). This is why disjunctivists sometimes argue that only by treating qualities as instantiated in this way can we do justice to the sense in which perception is the presentation as opposed to the representation of the things perceived (see the discussion in Searle 1983: 45–46 and the commentary on this in McDowell 1994b). For this reason, it seems to me preferable not to say that the relationality of perception is best captured, according to this view, by a special kind of relational (or object-dependent) ‘representational content’. Rather, the key idea is this: the phenomenal character of a genuine perception is determined by how the perceived world is. The essence of the disjunctivist view, on the present understanding, is its attempt to preserve the genuine relationality of perception. As we saw at the beginning of this essay, that perceptual experience is a genuine relation to its objects seems at first like the most obvious fact about experience. It is easy to see how it lies behind Strawson’s claim about our ordinary descriptions of experience, and behind the positive claim of the transparency thesis. So to preserve this relationality would be to preserve one of the central features of perception as we experience it—part of the common sense conception, if you like. Disjunctivists preserve this feature by denying something which is not (they claim) so obviously part of the common sense conception of perception: that conscious states which are subjectively indistinguishable are states of the same fundamental, determinate or specific kind. So it is wrong to say, as Tye (2000) does, that disjunctivism can be rejected because it is contrary to common sense. Rather, the view is attempting to preserve what seems to be one of the most obvious or common-sense features of perception—its relationality—in the face of the challenge from the argument from hallucination. The price it pays for this is that it cannot count subjectively indistinguishable states of mind as states of the same fundamental kind, and therefore it imposes limits on what can be known about the nature of experience from the subjective perspective; in other words, limits on authoritative introspective self-knowledge (Martin 2003). These

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limits should not, however, come as a surprise to anyone tempted by externalist conceptions of the mind. For despite the continued debate about the compatibility of externalism and authoritative ‘self-knowledge’, it is arguably part of the essence of externalism that it imposes limits on what can be known about the mind through introspection (Farkas 2003). The intentionalist view also comes with a price. For it must deny that perceptual experience is a relation. When one does succeed in perceiving an object, one is related to it, of course; but this relation is not essential to the perceptual experience being of the fundamental kind that it is. In a certain sense, then, critics of intentionalism are right when they say that on the intentionalist view, perception ‘falls short’ of the world, and in this sense creates what Putnam calls an ‘interface’ between the mind and the world. The essence of perception—perceptual experience itself—does fall short of the world. But according to the intentionalist, this is not something which should create any metaphysical or epistemological anxiety; it is simply a consequence of a general aspect of intentionality as traditionally conceived.

6 . TH E Q U E STION OF Q UALIA

Where does this discussion of the intentionalist and disjunctivist theories leave the question of qualia? To answer this question, I need to step back and recapitulate some of the points I have been trying to make here. One reason we are provoked to offer a philosophical theory or account of some phenomenon is that the phenomenon is itself intrinsically puzzling, or because some argument is constructed to demonstrate that it is problematic or even impossible. So it is, I have argued, with philosophical theories of perception. The sense-data, intentionalist, and disjunctivist theories of perception are attempts to answer the apparent contradictions found within the phenomena of perception when we consider certain actual or possible perceptual scenarios. Without challenges like this, it is somewhat hard to see why we would need a philosophical theory of perception at all. I argued in Section 2 that the transparency claims brought to light two questions: (i) how should we account for what we see when we see what is not there? And (ii) how should we account for those properties instantiated in experience which are not properties of objects of experience? In Section 3, I showed how these two questions lie behind the arguments from hallucination and

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illusion, and how the main theories of perception are best seen as responding to these problems. Sections 4 and 5 described in a bit more detail what the conflict between these theories of experience—the disjunctive and the intentionalist theories—really amounts to. I claim that the fundamental disagreement is about whether there is a perceptual relation. Where does the qualia theory fit into this conception of the problems of perception? One possible place might seem to be that occupied by the adverbial theory. The adverbial theory says that when it seems that a perceived object is F even though it is not, the experience has the property of being a sensing F-ly. The theory can then use this account to answer the argument from hallucination: the objects one is aware of in hallucination are really modifications of one’s own experience. Regardless of its plausibility, the adverbial theory is an intelligible response to the problems of perception as described here. But today’s qualia theory is not the adverbial theory. The qualia theory typically accepts that perception exhibits intentionality, that it has intentional content. But it holds that this cannot account for the entire phenomenal character of perceptual experience (Block 1996; Peacocke 1983: Chapter 1). Hence it does not try to explain all aspects of what is given in experience in terms of qualia; only the ‘qualitative’ aspects. We need not embark on a discussion of what ‘qualitative’ means here; we need only observe that while it is often said that there are ‘red qualia’ or ‘sour taste qualia’, few qualia theorists these days will say there are tomato qualia or round qualia. The adverbial theory, on the other hand, did attempt to explain all aspects of what is given in experience in terms of properties of experience: this is because it was responding—however unsuccessfully—to the problems posed by the arguments from illusion and hallucination. Today’s qualia theory, by contrast, does not seem to be a direct response to these problems. It may be said here that this objection is purely ad hominem: even if today’s qualia theory does not actually go all the way with the adverbial theory, what is stopping it from doing so? That is, why should the qualia theory not attempt to explain all features of what it is like to have an experience in terms of intrinsic, non-intentional qualities of experience? The simple answer to this is that if it did this—and became a real adverbial theory— then it would cease to have any plausibility at all. There are familiar reasons why the adverbial theory is indefensible (see Jackson 1977) and their source can be traced back to the theory’s failure to accommodate even the apparent

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relationality of perception (see Martin 1998; Crane 2000). So it is central to any plausibility the qualia theory has that it is not identical with the adverbial theory. As it is normally formulated, then, the qualia theory is best seen as a form of intentionalism: the idea is that in addition to an experience’s having representational content, the experience also has qualia. As explained in Section 1, this claim is not simply the denial of representationalism. That is, it is not just the view that one can be aware of how one’s experience is, as opposed to how the objects of experience are. I argued in Section 2 that this view is very plausible, and that Tye’s representationalism is therefore false. One can be aware, for example, that one is seeing something, and the fact that one is seeing something (as opposed to hearing it) is not itself a fact about the objects of one’s experience (see Block 2003). Rather, it is an introspectible fact about the experience itself. The same is true of the case of seeing blurrily. However, these facts do not have to be understood in terms of the instantiation of intrinsic qualia. This is a further claim, which needs further argument.13 Disjunctivists and intentionalists should both deny Tye’s representationalism for the reason just given. But since disjunctivists reject the idea that perceptual experience can be given an intrinsic qualitative characterization, they will accordingly reject the idea that experience involves qualia: the only characterization of a genuine, veridical, perceptual experience is a relational one; and the only experiential way of characterizing the hallucinatory experience is as a mental episode which is subjectively indistinguishable from a veridical experience. If there were qualia, then there would be a further common characterization of the perception and the hallucination in terms of their common intrinsic nature. Since the disjunctivist holds that there is no such thing, disjunctivists must reject qualia. The upshot is that the debate about qualia should be seen as an in-house dispute among intentionalists. If they reject Tye’s representationalism, then intentionalists may still want to argue about whether there are qualia. But whatever are the reasons on either side of this argument, they do not spring from the debates at the heart of the philosophy of perception, understood in terms of the traditional problems of illusion and hallucination. For adopting the qualia theory does not advance these debates, nor does denying it. This is because these debates turn fundamentally on the question of whether there is a perceptual relation, and the qualia theory simply fails to engage

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with that question. Far from creating a chasm in the philosophy of perception, then, the question of qualia does not even make a small crevasse.

* * * Earlier versions of this essay were presented at ELTE in Budapest, the University of York, the Joint Session of the Mind Association and the Aristotelian Society at Belfast in 2003, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Tufts University, and the Centre for Subjectivity Research in Copenhagen. Thanks to the participants on these occasions, and especially to Alex Byrne, Stephen Everson, Katalin Farkas, Howard Robinson, Jonathan Schaffer, Susanna Siegel, Hong Yu Wong, Dan Zahavi, and an anonymous referee for Oxford University Press for their comments. I am especially grateful to Tamar Gendler and John Hawthorne for their detailed and insightful comments on the penultimate version. This essay was written while I was a fellow of the Collegium Budapest, during a period of leave sponsored by the AHRB’s Research Leave Scheme.

E S S AY E L E V E N

Is Perception a Propositional Attitude?

(2009)

1. I NTRO D U C TION

It has for a long time been noted by philosophers that we talk about our perceptual experiences in a number of different ways.1 Sometimes we describe our experiences using perceptual verbs with sentential complements, as when we say that someone can see (or hear) that the bus has arrived. On other occasions we use transitive perceptual verbs whose direct objects are given by noun phrases, as when we say that someone saw (or heard) the bus, or saw (or heard) the arrival of the bus; sometimes what is perceived is given by so-called small clauses, as when we say that someone saw (or heard) the bus arrive. The kinds of things which are referred to by these noun phrases and small clauses are varied: complex events, people, sounds, and smells are among them. There are other obvious distinctions to be made in our ways of talking about experiences. For example, some ways of talking about experience are factive (‘sees that . . .’) or relational (‘. . . sees . . .’), while some are not (‘seems to see . . .’); and then there is the less everyday, more philosophical idiom ‘has an experience as of . . .’.

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Faced with this variety, it is natural to ask whether any of these ways of talking is more fundamental. Is there a way of talking about perception or perceptual experience which more closely corresponds to its metaphysics or its phenomenology? Opinions differ. In this essay, I want to examine an answer to this question which has gained some popularity in recent years: the view that perceptual experience is a propositional attitude. According to Alex Byrne, it is widely accepted that perceiving is very much like a traditional propositional attitude, such as believing or intending . . . when one has a perceptual experience, one bears the perception relation to a certain proposition p.2

It is natural for someone who takes this view to hold, then, that the canonical or fundamental form which ascriptions of perception should take is one on which perceptual verbs have sentential complements. Since experiencing is a relation to a proposition, the best way to ascribe an experience to someone is to say that they perceptually experience that ____, where the ____ is filled in with a sentence which expresses that proposition.3 Some philosophers also believe that if the content of experience is propositional, then the content of experience is the kind of thing that can be the content of a belief or judgement, since these are propositional too. This claim has been famously defended by John McDowell. In Mind and World, John McDowell argues that In a particular experience in which one is not misled, what one takes in that things are thus and so. That things are thus and so is the content of the experience, and it can also be the content of a judgement: it becomes the content of a judgement if the subject decides to take the experience at face value.4

McDowell’s idea is a specific version of the claim that experience has a propositional content. McDowell thinks that experience can only have this structure if its content is conceptual. Some of those who believe that experience has a non-conceptual content (like Byrne) will disagree with this claim: experience can have a propositional content without that content being conceptual. Nonetheless these philosophers agree that experience has propositional content, and in this sense it is a propositional attitude. In this essay I will argue that both Byrne and McDowell are wrong: the content of experience is not propositional, and so it cannot be the kind of

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thing that can be the content of a belief or judgement. Neither perceptual experience, nor perception proper, is a propositional attitude. Some assumptions. I assume the now-standard terminological distinction between perceptual experience—which is non-factive or non-relational—and perception—which is both factive and relational. I will adopt the usual understanding of propositional contents—or propositions—as the bearers of truth value, the meanings of indicative sentences, the relata of truth-functional logical relations, and so on. However, nothing in particular turns on any particular detail of the theory of propositions assumed. I will first introduce one neutral way to understand the ideas of the object of a mental state, and I will define one sense in which experiences have content. I will then examine the familiar claim that experience must have a propositional content because experiences can be accurate or inaccurate. I will argue that accuracy is not the same thing as truth (for example, a picture can be accurate or inaccurate without being true or false). Now it is undeniable that we do use propositions to describe, express, or otherwise give the contents of some of our experiences. But I will argue that it does not follow from the fact that we give the content by using a proposition that the proposition is the content of the experience. I will conclude by commenting on the connection between this issue and the debate about non-conceptual content. 2 . CONTE NT AN D OB J EC T

The terms ‘content’, ‘intentional content’, and ‘content of experience’ are technical terms. So we should not expect to be able to analyse them in terms of the meaning of the ordinary word ‘content’. Any discussion of the idea of the ‘content’ of experience should take place against the background of the theoretical assumptions that should be made about content and experience. It would not, for example, be helpful to start off by assuming that ‘content’ means propositional content, since then I would have to express my thesis by saying that perceptions do not have content at all; but this would be a very misleading thing to say in the context of today’s philosophy of perception. In any case, philosophical discussions of intentional content have not always used the term to mean propositional content, so history does not oblige us to take this starting point. The notion of content belongs within the theory of intentionality. Intentional mental states fall into different kinds: there are hopes, beliefs, fears,

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desires, and so on. All these mental states exhibit what has been called ‘aboutness’ or ‘directedness’: they are about or directed on things. I would like to express this idea in a general way, as follows: for every intentional state of kind Ф, there is something on which the Ф-ing is directed. What the Ф-ing is directed on is the object of the state. This is what I mean by saying that every intentional state has an object. Like many others, I take my lead from a famous remark of Brentano’s: ‘in presentation, something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on’.5 Sometimes we can say that what the Ф-ing is directed on is what is Ф-ed. For example: in a state of desire, there is something that is desired; what is desired is the object of the desire. In a state of fear, there is something that is feared; in a state of love, there is something that is loved; and so on. What is Ф-d in each of these cases is the object of the Ф-ing. Note that in some cases this need not be true. In the case of the paradigm intentional state of belief, for example, what is believed is the propositional content of the belief. But we also need the idea of what a belief is ‘about’; so I will say that the object of a belief is what it is about. In some cases, the object of a state might be something that does not or cannot exist. I might hope for everlasting world peace, desire a cheap bottle of champagne, or fear the ghost under the bed, even though there are not, and never will be, any such things. But in other cases, the object of an intentional state does exist, and when it does, it is an ordinary real thing. So when I am imagining my mother in her kitchen, what I am imagining is my mother herself, the real person, in her very real kitchen. When the object of an intentional state exists, then it is the very same thing as a real existing entity. We cannot describe the whole nature of every intentional state by describing the kind of state it is (fear, imagination, desire, etc.) and describing its object. For there are many ways to imagine my mother in her kitchen: she might be baking bread, she might be listening to the radio, she might be frying onions, and so on. A particular episode of imagining my mother will present my mother in one way and not in others. These ways need not be determinate in every respect. But every episode of visual imagining will certainly exclude some ways of presenting the object of the episode. This is where I would introduce the idea of content. There are three distinct reasons for introducing this idea, which I label aspect, absence, and accuracy.

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(i) Aspect. The object of a state of mind can be presented or represented in many ways, even when the states of mind are of the same general kind (desire, fear, etc.). States can have the same objects but differ in the aspects under which they represent these objects.6 In the general framework I am proposing here, that fact that an object is represented under an aspect is what is called the content of that state. There is a further question about whether different objects can be represented under the same aspect. Those who agree with Frege’s doctrine that sense determines reference will deny this, since they believe that a difference in reference must correspond to a difference in sense. I reject Frege’s doctrine, but I will not pursue the matter here.7 (ii) Absence. Searle says that not all intentional states have objects, since he takes objects of intentional states to be entities.8 I prefer to say that some intentional states do not have existing objects, or real objects. Nonetheless, whichever of these ways of talking is preferable, there is something real in each intentional state, and that is what we can call its real content: there is a representation of an object, whether real or unreal, in every intentional state or act.9 For some intentional states, their reality can be what it is independently of the real existence of their objects. The state is a state of a certain kind (belief, hope, whatever) and it also incorporates a representation of its object. This representational aspect of the state is its content. (iii) Accuracy. Some intentional states present their objects in a certain way, but they might not be that way. Some intentional states can be inaccurate. I can fantasize about an inexpensive bottle of champagne, but there is no such thing. Insofar as my fantasizing was representing reality, it is not accurate. Intentional states, then, can be accurate or inaccurate. This is a matter of how they represent their objects: and this, again, is what I call content. These three ideas—aspect, absence, and accuracy—are what motivate the introduction of representational content. They do not all apply to each intentional state, but at least one of them applies to every kind. How should we apply this to the idea of perceptual experience? Perceptual experiences can be of different kinds—they can be visual, auditory, etc.—and they have objects. The objects of perceptual experiences are what is seen, what is heard, and so on. Since it is plausible that different experiences of the same kind can differ in the aspect under which they represent their objects (aspect), they can represent what does not exist (absence) and they can be accurate or inaccurate (accuracy), then this is why it is

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plausible to say that experience has content. I realize this is not uncontroversial, but I will not defend this idea further in this essay. The notion of the content of experience, then, is the notion of the way the world is represented in experience. The basic commitment one incurs in saying that experience has content (in this sense) is the commitment that experiences represent the world. This way of introducing content is in line with most contemporary uses of the term. For those who reject the idea that experiences represent the world tend also to reject the idea that experiences have content.10 Hence my usage of the term ‘content’ is not just a stipulation: it corresponds to the way many philosophers use the term. However, it does not follow from the way I have introduced the notion of content that content must be propositional. In the next section I will consider, and reject, one reason that has been given for thinking that it must be.

3. ACCU R ACY AND TRUTH

Those who think that content is a propositional attitude often appeal to the fact just mentioned that experiences have accuracy (correctness) conditions.11 If an experience represents its object in a certain way, then the experience is accurate just in case it has an actual object which is the way the experience represents it as being. The content of the experience then is the proposition which gives the way the object or objects of experience are represented to be. I see the grey cat on the mat, it is represented in a particular way in my experience; the experience is accurate (correct) if the cat and the mat actually are that way. The content of the experience is, then, the proposition that the cat is on the mat. The propositional attitude thesis (as I shall call it) is not the thesis that perceptual experiences are beliefs, a view famously defended by Armstrong.12 There are many well-known reasons against identifying experiences with beliefs. (More precisely, since experiences are events rather than states, the identification should at most be with the acquisition of beliefs.) For example, systematic illusions show that experiences can present the world in a way we know it not to be, but this is not plausibly represented as a case of contradictory belief. But the propositional attitude thesis does not say that perceptions are beliefs, it only says that they have the same kind of content as belief. As McDowell says, the content of an experience is ‘the sort of thing

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one can also . . . judge’.13 What one can judge is a proposition: something that is true or false. Since propositions are what are true and false, then the propositional attitude thesis says that the contents of experience can be true or false. But this claim does not follow from the fact that experiences can be accurate or inaccurate. Accuracy is not truth, since accuracy admits of degrees and truth does not. (The same can be said of correctness.) A picture, for example, can be more or less accurate, but a picture is not true or false. So there is no straightforward deductive inference from the claim that experiences can be accurate and inaccurate to the conclusion that they can be true or false, that they have propositional contents. The defenders of the thesis can respond that the conclusion is not meant to follow; rather it is the best explanation of the fact that experience has accuracy conditions. And it also explains the other two A-s of Section 2 above: absence (so long as the propositions in question are not ‘object-dependent’) and aspect (so long as the propositions in question are not ‘Russellian’). This is a possible thing to say. But the comparison with pictures suggests that it is not the best thing to say. Light will be shed if we pursue this comparison further. Like an experience, a picture can be more or less accurate. A proposition, on the standard understanding at least, cannot be more or less true. Truth and falsehood are all or nothing. It is central to the idea of a proposition that it can be true or false, since truth and falsehood are the crucial semantic concepts of propositional logic. Propositional logic shows how the truth or falsehood of complex propositions depend on the truth or falsehood of others. Truth-functions operate on propositions: propositions can be negated, disjoined, conjoined; they can imply one another or be equivalent. That there are things which stand in these logical relations is one of the reasons for talking in terms of propositions at all (though it goes without saying that not all philosophers of logic accept this). None of this is true of pictures. Just as pictures are not true or false, so they do not stand in logical relations.14 Complex pictures do not stand to their pictorial parts as complex propositions stand to their constituent propositions. Pictures do not imply one another; they cannot be negated or disjoined. Perhaps it will be replied that although pictures and experiences do not stand in logical relations, their contents might. Just as we should distinguish

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between a sentence and its content, we should distinguish between a picture and its content. A sentence as such is something which can be characterized non-semantically. When a sentence is characterized semantically (interpreted), we say that it expresses a proposition. After all, on the standard view it is propositions, not sentences, which stand in logical relations, since the things which stand in logical relations must be the bearers of truth-values. We can distinguish in a similar way between a picture and its content. Pictures themselves can be characterized non-semantically. When characterized ‘semantically’—in terms of what it depicts—then we can say that the picture represents something. What it represents (and the way it does so) is the content of the picture. This content, the objection goes, can be affirmed and denied, it can be negated and disjoined, it can imply other contents. So although pictures themselves do not stand in logical relations, nothing has been said to prevent their contents standing in logical relations. Therefore, nothing has been said to prevent their contents being propositional. We should, of course, concede the distinction between a picture (the physical object) and its content. And we should concede that logical relations hold between the contents of sentences. This is illustrated by the fact that just as pictures themselves do not assert anything, so sentences themselves do not assert anything either. But nonetheless, the analogy between pictures and sentences fails at a crucial point. This can be brought out by considering assertion. As just noted, a sentence itself does not assert anything. Nor does a proposition assert anything, either. Assertions are speech acts. Speakers use sentences to assert things: what they assert is the proposition the sentence expresses. How can a parallel thing be said about pictures? Pictures themselves do not assert something, but can someone assert something by using a picture? Can someone assert the proposition which the picture allegedly expresses? It seems to me that someone could assert something by using a picture— but only by saying something too. If I take Jacques-Louis David’s famous picture of the coronation of Napoleon, and I want to assert what it represents, then I have to say ‘Napoleon crowned himself ’ or something of this sort. I cannot simply use the picture itself to assert this. (How could I possibly do this? By holding it up to my audience? But what would make that an assertion?) Similarly, I can only deny what the picture represents by using some words to do so. I can hold up the picture and say, ‘this is not how it was; Napoleon did not crown himself ’. There is no way of simply using a picture

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alone to deny what it represents. The same applies to the logical operations of negation and disjunction. You can only negate or disjoin the content of a picture by using some non-pictorial symbol. You cannot simply append another picture to a picture and display a logical relation between them. The upshot is that even though we must distinguish between the picture and its content, and between a sentence and its content, this does not imply that pictures and sentences both have propositional content. For in order to obtain something which one can assert, or to which one can apply logical operations, you need to employ non-pictorial symbols. Without these non-pictorial symbols, it makes little sense to say that the content of the picture can be something which can be asserted, denied, negated, or disjoined. But the propositional attitude theory can be defended from a different direction. Although it may be conceded that the content of the picture cannot be directly asserted (nor negated, disjoined, etc.) by using pictures only, couldn’t there be a sentence that has the same content as the content of the picture? In other words, couldn’t the following principle, (P), be true: (P) For any picture P, there is a sentence which gives the content of P. This principle seems undeniable. For given what I mean by the content of the picture—the way the object of the picture is represented—then this principle is merely a commitment to the idea that there can always be a sentence which describes what a picture represents and the way it represents it. And, short of an argument for the conclusion that there are some ineffable aspects of the content of pictures, there seems no reason to deny this. It might be thought that some pictures are too complex to allow description in language. But where is the argument for this? Principle (P) does not say that the sentence must be short, or that it must be restricted to any one language, or that we cannot make up words for aspects of the content when lacking one in a natural language. In fact, it is easy to show that (P) is true, if we allow that sentences containing demonstratives can give descriptions of pictures and help to express their content. A sentence of the form ‘Napoleon did this and this . . .’ can express the content of David’s picture. It is not an objection to say that someone could not understand this sentence without seeing the picture. Sentences containing demonstratives obviously can express propositions; what it takes to understand an utterance of such a sentence is another question, on which principle (P) is silent.

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Principle (P), then, says that there is always a sentence which gives the content of a picture. ‘Gives’, in this sense, means describes. But describing the content and being the content are not the same thing. The content of a representation, I have stipulated, is the way its object is represented. Content in this sense can be described in many ways; the description of this content is not the same thing as the content itself. For example, the content of a picture can be given by asserting: ‘this is the content of this picture’ or ‘this is what this picture represents’. This objection can be answered by drawing on a recent suggestion by Zoltán Szabó.15 Szabó argues that there is a distinctive mental state of believing in things, in terms of which the notion of ontological commitment can be explained. Philosophers who think that all intentional states are propositional attitudes will reject this: they will say that ‘believing in’ can always be given some kind of propositional analysis: believing in Fs just is believing that there are Fs. But Szabó argues that such an approach cannot make sense of a number of perfectly intelligible phenomena; for example, someone can acknowledge that there are things in whose existence they do not believe. One of his examples is Hamlet’s remark to Horatio: ‘there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy’. Hamlet is not saying: there are things of this kind, and we do not believe that there are things of this kind. Rather, he is expressing a certain kind of epistemic modesty. Szabó’s view is that ‘believing in’ is an intensional transitive verb, which can take a singular or plural object. Belief in has much in common with belief that; in particular, and most importantly, it aims at a correct representation of the world. The representation Szabó calls (following Russell) a term and he represents the term for the plural object Fs thus: [Fs]. The condition for the correctness of this representation he gives as follows: [Fs] is representationally correct iff Fs exist and the conception of Fs is true The idea is that it is not just enough for your belief in Fs to be correct that Fs exist; in addition, you have to have a conception of Fs, and that conception has to be true. We need not concern ourselves here with the details of this novel proposal. The point I want to use for the moment is that one can represent the condition for the correctness of a representation in terms of a sentence—the right-hand side of the biconditional quoted above—without

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the representation itself being sentence-like. So even if the right-hand side of this biconditional gives the content of the representation [Fs], this is not enough to make this representation propositional. The thesis that pictures have propositional content cannot, therefore, be the same as the thesis expressed by principle (P). To say that for every picture there is a sentence which expresses a proposition and this sentence gives the content of the picture is not the same thing as saying that pictures have propositional content.

4. TH E CONTE NT S OF E X PE RI E NC E

I now want to apply some of these ideas about pictures to the content of experience. I started by discussing the idea that fact that a state or representation has accuracy conditions does not itself imply that it has a propositional content, since propositions are (by definition) true or false, and accuracy is not the same as truth. This is why I introduced pictures: pictures can be accurate or inaccurate but not true or false. Thus presented, this argument was unpersuasive; but it led us to arguments which were, I hope, more persuasive. I will now argue that a view on which the content of perceptual experience is more like the content of a picture gives a better account of the fact that experiences can be accurate or inaccurate than the propositional attitude theory does. I do not mean to imply that having a visual experience is like looking at a picture. This is not the right way to think about experience, for many familiar reasons. But the comparison between pictures and experiences is nonetheless apt because one of the things a painter, for example, is doing when painting a (realistic) picture is portraying how things look. The point, then, is not that visual perception is essentially pictorial, it is rather that picturing is essentially visual. In the previous section I claimed that pictures do not have propositional content because propositions can be asserted or denied, and they can stand in logical relations. The only sense in which pictures stand in logical relations is when uses a picture along with some non-pictorial representation to make some claim. Similarly, if a proposition were the content of a perceptual experience, then it should be capable of being negated, disjoined, conjoined etc. But it seems that just as one cannot do these things to the content of pictures, one cannot do them to experiences either.

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The only literal sense we could make of negating, disjoining, and asserting the content of pictures was when we were considering descriptions of pictures. We need to distinguish, then, between the content of a picture and a description of the content (or: a description which gives the content). This distinction can apply to intentional states. There is a principle for intentional states which parallels our principle (P) for pictures: (I) For any intentional state, I, there is a sentence which gives the content of I. But just as principle (P) does not imply that pictures have propositional content, so principle (I) does not imply that intentional states have propositional content. Take a case where an intentional state is clearly not a relation to a proposition: for example, love. Napoleon’s love for Josephine is not a propositional attitude. But nonetheless there is a sentence which describes the content of Napoleon’s love—i.e., describes what he loves and the way in which he represents her, namely as Josephine—and that is: ‘there is someone who is identical with Josephine’. This is not who Napoleon loves, of course: it is a description of who he loves (the object of his love). It gives or describes the content of his love, without being the content of his love. For perceptual experience, the relevant principle is (E): (E) For any perceptual experience, E, there is a sentence which gives the content of E. Principle (E), like (P), is an unexceptional principle. Of course, it may be difficult in some cases to describe in non-demonstrative ways what the content of the experience is, but we can always do it with a sentence that includes a demonstrative: ‘things are like this’ or ‘things look like this’ or something of that sort. Again, we should not worry that someone would not know what was being said unless they could see what the speaker was seeing; principle (E), like (P), makes no claim about what it is to understand the sentence which gives the content of an experience. Nonetheless, it is clear that (E) cannot be all that is meant by the thesis that perceptual experience is a propositional attitude. As Byrne states the thesis, perceptual experience is a matter of standing in a ‘perception relation’ to a proposition.16 Someone sceptical of propositions, and relations to them,

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can agree with (E) without agreeing with Byrne’s thesis. For all that (E) says is that the content of any experience can be given or described by a sentence. And as we have seen, that does not imply that the content is propositional. Nor does principle (E) imply McDowell’s thesis that what we ‘take in’ in experience is also something we can judge, unless all that ‘taking in’ means is that one can assert a sentence which describes what one experiences. (Certainly, for McDowell, this is necessary for ‘taking in’, but it is not sufficient.) For whenever we make a judgement and express it in language, we are expressing something which has a sentential form. This is why when we make a judgement about how things look, or how they are in the experienced environment, what we judge is a proposition: something we judge to be true or the case. Of course: but this is a consequence of making the judgement, not of having the experience. Or at least, that is all that is implied by principle (E). It might be said on behalf of McDowell that the essence of his account of perception is that what we take in are facts: things actually being a certain way. This is certainly the way he originally presented his disjunctive theory of appearance: an appearance of an X is either a mere appearance, or it is the fact that there is an X before you making itself manifest.17 But whatever the merits of that idea, it does not support the claim that what we take in in experience is what we can judge. For we do not judge facts, we judge that something is a fact: in other words, that something is true. And McDowell clearly thinks that we can withhold judgement on what we ‘take in’ in experience: that is, we can judge that it is not a fact. The idea that we perceive facts may well be the right description of veridical perception; but it does not fit well with the idea that what we perceive is what we can judge. The propositional attitude thesis, then, is more than the anodyne principle (E). It is a claim about the structure of experience, and the structure of its content: that is, how experience represents the world, not how those representations can be described. The propositional attitude theory (in Byrne’s formulation) says that experience has a relational structure, as belief does: it is a relation to a proposition. And it says that the content of an experience—its objects and the aspects under which they appear—is always that something is a certain way, and that the content is true when things are that way, and false when it is not. One lesson of the comparison with pictures is that just because things are represented in a certain way, this does not mean that the representation

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is true or false. Another lesson is that although what is represented can be described in a sentence (as principles (P) and (E) say), this is not the only way to describe what is represented. What does David’s painting represent? ‘Napoleon crowning himself ’ would be an answer; and ‘Napoleon crowning himself ’ refers to an event, not a fact (though of course, if there was such an event, then there will also be the fact that there is such an event). So a picture can represent an event; and so can an experience. The content of an experience (what you experience, and how) might be snow falling in the back yard. This is an event (though of course, if there really is such an event, there will also be the fact that there is such an event). Dispensing with the straightjacket of the propositional attitude theory allows us to say that an event, presented in a certain way, can be the content of a perceptual experience. When we move beyond the case of vision to the other senses, this approach is equally attractive. The objects of the sense of smell, I would claim, are smells, represented as such. The object of smell is what you smell. You smell the cheese by smelling the smell of the cheese, and it is presented to you as such, not as the cloud of particles which the cheese releases when you unwrap it. You hear the sound of the coach on the cobbles; you taste the sourness of the wine; you feel the ferns tickling your leg . . . These are what you hear, what you taste, what you touch. Once we are not in the grip of the propositional attitude theory, we can accept these natural idioms at face value, as giving the obvious phenomenological content of perceptual experience. On this alternative picture, what is represented experience are objects, properties, and events, in what might loosely be called a ‘manifold’, but which does not have the structure of judgeable content. We are faced with the perceptual ‘given’ in all its complexity, and we make judgements about how things are or how things look (sound, smell, etc.) on the basis of this. In attending to some element or elements of what is experienced, we judge that things look, or are, a certain way. Perceptual judgement (judgement made on the basis of perception) is normally selective, and the result of attention. This is, of course, only a starting point for a description of the relationship between perceptual experience and judgement. But whatever the exact account of this relationship, my point in this essay is that it is a mistake to read back from the content of a perceptual judgement a hypothesis about the structure of experience on the basis of which it is made.

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5. NON - CONC E P TUAL CONTE NT

What is the relationship between the line of thought defended in the previous section and the recent debate about non-conceptual content? The idea that the content of perceptual experience is a different kind of thing from the content of belief and judgement might be thought to be related to this debate. One might think this, perhaps, because of McDowell’s association of the propositional attitude thesis with the thesis that experience has conceptual content. But in fact, the question about whether the content of experience is propositional is a different question from whether it is conceptual, on the correct understanding of the conceptual/non-conceptual debate; though it is easy to link the two questions. I will end this essay with some comments on this issue. I agree with Richard Heck that there are two ways of understanding the thesis that experience has non-conceptual content.18 One is a view about the structure or composition of contents themselves, so to speak. On this view, conceptual contents are contents which are composed of concepts, where concepts are (for example) entities individuated at the level of sense rather than reference. Non-conceptual contents are therefore contents which are not composed of concepts. I will follow Heck in calling this way of understanding the idea of non-conceptual content, the ‘Content View’. On the alternative view, the thesis of non-conceptual content is fundamentally a thesis about types of mental states (so it is not really very well named). The view says that a conceptual state is one to be in which requires the possession of certain concepts: the concepts which canonically characterise the content of the state. A canonical characterisation of a state of mind is one which characterises it in such a way that captures the point of view of someone who is in that state. So a state is conceptual when the subject does have to possess the concepts that are required in order to characterise it from the subject’s own point of view. A non-conceptual state is, then, a state to be in which does not require the possession of such concepts. This view of the non-conceptual is what Heck calls the ‘State View’. In the past I have defended the State View both as a thesis about the way to understand ‘non-conceptual’ and as a way to understand experience.19 Given what I have said in this essay, it follows that I should withdraw my claim in this work that the content of perception can literally be the content

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of a belief.20 This is not a consequence of the State View of non-conceptual content, and reflection shows that it is itself of dubious coherence. My reason for understanding ‘non-conceptual’ in terms of the State View, as opposed to the Content View, is essentially the following. If the Content View were the right way of understanding ‘non-conceptual’ then a Lewis/Stalnaker conception of the contents of beliefs (as sets of worlds or sets of possibilia) would be a conception of non-conceptual content, since neither worlds nor individuals are concepts. But a theory which counted beliefs as having non-conceptual contents would miss the point of the original introduction of non-conceptual content, which was to identify a form of mental representation which is in some ways more primitive, more basic than belief.21 If our purpose in introducing the notion of non-conceptual content is to identify such a form of representation, then we should reject the Content View and accept the State View. But what is the relationship between the State View and the view that experience is a propositional attitude? It seems to me that these views are strictly speaking independent of one another. Suppose you believe that perception has a propositional content. Then nothing follows from that about whether you have to possess the concepts which are canonical for the content in question in order to be in that state. That is, nothing follows about whether the state is a conceptual state. Suppose, on the other hand, you believe that perception does not have a propositional content. Likewise, nothing follows about whether you have to possess the concepts which canonically characterise that content in order to be in that state. That is, nothing follows about whether this state is a conceptual state. Approaching the issue from the other side, suppose you had reason to believe that perceptual states are non-conceptual. Nothing would follow about whether the content in question is propositional or non-propositional. Likewise if you thought that perceptual states are conceptual. Is this independence an artefact of my commitment to the State View? Suppose for a moment that the Content View is the right way of conceiving of the thesis that a state has non-conceptual content. Then if experience had a non-conceptual content as the Content View understand this, then the question would still be open whether it has a propositional content, so long as propositions can be constituted by things other than concepts. Likewise, if experience had a conceptual content as the Content View understands

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this, then the question would still be open whether it has a propositional content, so long as propositions are not by definition the only kind of content states can have. Of course, I have argued briefly above that the Content View is mistaken. But my point here is that even if it were not, then the issues about the propositional content of experience and its non-conceptual content would still be independent. These issues are conceptually independent, then; strictly speaking, they are not the same issue. But it would be wrong for an investigation into perception should treat them independently. For after all, a theory of perceptual representation needs to take a stand on whether it is conceptual (in the sense of the State View) just as it needs to take a stand on whether it is propositional. My own view is that perceptual states are non-conceptual as well as non-propositional. By this I mean: in order for a subject’s perceptual state to represent X, they do not have to possess the concepts which canonically characterise X. Although this is a ‘State View’ conception of non-conceptual content, it does have consequences for what kinds of abstract objects should be employed to best model the content X. In particular, the ‘canonical characterisation’ requirement does place a constraint on what kinds of contents perceptual states must have: the contents must be individuated in terms of aspects or quasi-Fregean ‘modes of presentation’. Purely ‘Russellian’ contents will not do. This is because the canonical description of experience describes it in terms of the way it represents the objects of experience to the subject. (Given the way I have introduced the idea of content, this is a constraint I willingly accept.)22 An account of the content of experience which shows how it is both (a) non-propositional, and (b) non-conceptual (in the State View’s sense) might look something very similar to Christopher Peacocke’s conception of ‘scenario content’.23 Peacocke proposed that we should think of the content of a perceptual experience as given by a set of ways of filling out the space around the perceiver consistent with the correctness of the experience. Such a set he called a ‘scenario’. An experience is correct, Peacocke claimed, when the actual space around the perceiver is in this set. On the face of it, Peacocke’s theory might seem to be a version of the Content View; but properly understood, it is a version of the State View. The reason that a state with scenario content is non-conceptual is because it is not required that a subject possess any of the concepts that canonically characterise the scenario in order for their state to be canonically characterised in

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terms of it. Here the distinction made in the previous section, between the content of a state and a description of that content, may be useful: relating the experience to a scenario is a way of giving a description of the content of the state. It is because this abstract object can be used in the description of the experience that the experience might be said to have this object as its content. But it is non-conceptual because of what this attribution requires of its subject, not because of anything to do with the structure of the object itself. Peacocke’s 1992 proposal is, therefore, very congenial to the main conclusion of this essay. 6 . CONC LU S ION

I have argued that experience does not have propositional content. I have not argued for this claim directly, but indirectly, by showing that it does not follow either from the claim that experiences have accuracy conditions, or from the claim that the content of experience can always be described in a sentence which expresses a proposition. It remains, of course, to give a positive characterisation of perceptual content which does not treat it as propositional. But the present essay has a more general lesson for theories of perception, and if its argument is correct, then this general lesson should form a starting point for discussions of perception. The general lesson is this: we do not have to choose between a theory which treats perception as propositional (like Byrne, Siegel, and Thau) and those which treat it as relational (like Brewer, Campbell, and Travis). For there is, it seems, a third way: experience might be representational without being a propositional attitude.

* * * Thanks to an anonymous referee for the Philosophical Quarterly, and to Alex Byrne, Katalin Farkas, James Genone, Hannah Ginsborg, John MacFarlane, Ian Phillips, Murali Ramachandran, Dan Zahavi, and audiences in Berkeley, Copenhagen, Glasgow, Sussex, and Zagreb. Special thanks to Susanna Siegel for her detailed and penetrating written comments; I am sure my answers have not satisfied her. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the EU NEST project REFCOM.

E S S AY T W E LV E

The Given

(2012)

1. TH E G IVE N , AN D TH E M Y TH OF TH E G IVE N

In The Mind and the World Order, C. I. Lewis made a famous distinction between the immediate data ‘which are presented or given to the mind’ and the ‘construction or interpretation’ which the mind brings to those data (1929: 52). What the mind receives is the datum—literally, the given—and the interpretation is what happens when we being it ‘under some category or other, select from it, emphasise aspects of it, and relate it in particular and unavoidable ways’ (1929: 52). So although any attempt to describe the given will inevitably be an interpretation of it, this should not give us reason to deny its existence: ‘no-one but a philosopher could for a moment deny this immediate presence in consciousness of that which no activity of thought can create or alter’ (1929: 53). Whatever those outside philosophy might think, Lewis was certainly right about what philosophers were prepared to deny. His conception of the ‘given’ is without question one of the targets of Wilfrid Sellars’s influential critique of the notion of the ‘whole framework of givenness’ (1957).1 One

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of the things Sellars was attacking was the idea that something that was merely given by the senses could put one in a position to be justified in making a judgement about the empirical world. The ‘given’ in this sense is a myth because one cannot be given what one is not in a position to receive. In the case of experience, Sellars’s point is that one’s experience cannot serve as the justification for one’s empirical beliefs unless one is able to bring the experience, in some way, into the ‘space of reasons’. In his presidential address to the APA in 2005, Hubert Dreyfus reminisces about how as a student at Harvard he attended C. I. Lewis’s lectures on epistemology where Lewis gave epistemological arguments for the existence of the given (Dreyfus 2005). Dreyfus himself accepts the Sellarsian critique of the given, as does John McDowell, and as do many others. But Dreyfus thinks that even those who, like McDowell, reject the ‘myth of the given’ nonetheless fall under the influence of another myth: the myth of the mental. This is the idea that our fundamental way of interacting with the world in experience is intellectual or rational in character. Dreyfus argues that this is a myth because it ignores the more fundamental enactive engagement with our world, which he calls ‘embodied coping’. McDowell has responded to Dreyfus’s charge that there is no reason why his conception of experience cannot fully accommodate an account of embodied coping. I think McDowell is right: there is nothing in his views that make it impossible for him to recognize the phenomenon of embodied coping and fully incorporate it within his conception of the mind. But it seems to me that a deeper disagreement between McDowell and Dreyfus lies not in their attitudes to embodied coping, but in their attitudes to experience. Despite his rejection of the given in the mythical sense with all its works and empty promises, it is clear that in recent work McDowell does accept something like a distinction between what is given to us and what we bring to experience. This is not meant as a criticism of McDowell; later in this essay I will defend a similar distinction. But it is important to emphasis what McDowell is saying here is very different from Dreyfus’s view of experience: there is something like a given, for McDowell, as he himself acknowledges (McDowell 2009a). In order to set the stage for this, I must first briefly explain the developments of McDowell’s views about experience. In Mind and World (1994), McDowell had argued that the challenge posed by Sellars can only be met if experience has conceptual, propositional

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content. An experience is an experience that things are thus and so, and that things are thus and so is something one can also judge (a proposition). That things are thus and so is the propositional content of the judgement, and a judgement’s having this content is an actualization of the conceptual capacities of the subject. Likewise, McDowell argues, when an experience has the propositional content that things are thus and so this too is an actualization of the conceptual capacities of the subject. Because experience involves the exercise of conceptual capacities, experiences themselves—and not just the beliefs based on them—can be relevant to a subject’s standing in the ‘space of reasons’ and therefore can act as justifiers of a subject’s beliefs. McDowell has changed his mind recently (2009a) on certain details of this account, under pressure from objections from Charles Travis (see, e.g., Travis 2007). He now rejects the idea that experience has propositional content, and replaces this with a conception of experience as ‘intuition’ in a Kantian sense, which has a non-propositional content. An intuition in this sense is defined as ‘a having in view’ (2009a: 260). Let’s assume, to borrow one of Travis’s examples, that seeing a pig underneath an oak is an example of having something in view, and therefore of an intuition. This experience has a certain content, which should not be understood as representing something ‘as so’, since that would be propositional (2009a: 267). But neither should experience be understood as some understand it, simply as relating us to objects—the pig and the oak (see Brewer 2006). Rather, the content of an intuition is something structured, it has a unity (2009a: 264–265). The details of this proposal are complex, but at their core is the Kantian proposal that the content of an intuition—what is presented in the experience—is structured by (for example) formal categories of object and property. The view is not, however, that in experiencing the pig under the oak, we ‘apply’ the concept of an object to the pig. This would confuse the content of the intuition with the content of the ‘discursive activity’ which it can give rise to—for example, when describing the thing under the oak as a pig or as an animal. So there is a distinction between the content of an intuition and the content of a judgement or an assertion which is based upon it. McDowell no longer thinks that what one can see is also what one can judge. Nonetheless, he still insists that the content of an intuition is conceptual, in the sense that ‘every aspect of the content of an intuition is present in a form in which it is already suitable to be the content associated with a discursive

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capacity’ (2009a: 264). What it is for content to be conceptual, then, is not for it to be conceptualized—in the sense that one has to be actually exercising a conceptual capacity when in a state with such a content—but for it to be conceptualizable. Travis’s own picture is somewhat different (Travis 2007, Travis forthcoming). He thinks that there is no need to think of experiences as having ‘content’ at all. Seeing a pig under an oak simply is an awareness of some portion of the visible world, our visible surroundings. If we have the concept of a pig, or the ability to recognize pigs, then we can judge that the pig is under the oak on the basis of this experience plus our ability to recognize that what we experience is an instance of a thing of a certain kind. Concepts for Travis involve generality—in his terminology, they ‘reach’ beyond the particular situation of (e.g.) seeing something. Making the judgement that the pig is under the oak involves asserting that this particular situation is a situation of a certain kind (a pig-under-an-oak kind). And if the situation is one of this kind, then this experience can ‘bear for you’ on what you should think. McDowell claims that Travis’s picture—although correct in some respects—ultimately involves a commitment to the Myth of the Given. McDowell’s charge is that on Travis’s view, ‘having things in view must be provided for by sensibility alone’ (2009a: 267). However, this is not something that should worry Travis. Having things in view—seeing, experiencing—is provided for by sensibility alone, since he conceives of seeing ‘as seeing what is there (roughly before the eyes) to be seen’ (Travis forthcoming). So if something is before one’s eyes, one’s visual capacities are working as they should, one sees it: it is ‘in view’. Travis answers the distinct question of how seeing justifies one’s belief—of how, in Travis’s own words, it ‘bears for us on what to think’—by claiming that one can recognize what is seen as an instance of a general kind of thing, and that this role is carried out by the application of concepts, or reason. Although McDowell thinks that this correctly describes one way in which experience is related to conceptual judgement, he argues that this is not the only way (2009a: 266). This is because what has to be in view is not just what is there to be seen—the pig under the oak—but the pig ‘present to one through the presence to one of some of its properties, in an intuition in which concepts of those properties exemplify a unity that constitutes the content of a formal concept of an object’. It is only if this is so that ‘one

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is thereby entitled to judge that one is confronted by an object with those properties’ (2009a: 271). Both Travis and McDowell, then, accept that at a certain point in the description of justification, we arrive at a connection between two kinds of fact, and this connection is what justification consists in. For McDowell, the connection is between the unified non-propositional content of an intuition and the propositional content of the judgement which one makes. For Travis, the connection is between what is seen and the judgement which one makes by applying concepts to what is seen. The difference between them concerns whether there is any role for something like the ‘content of an intuition’ in describing this connection. But they both agree that there is a connection, and that once this connection is made, the Myth of the Given is avoided: neither view involves saying that one can be given something which justifies which one is in no position to receive. For neither view says that what justifies you in believing that there is a pig under the oak is mere sensibility: on each view, you can only be justified if you bring concepts to bear on what you see. It is not clear to me what remains of the Sellarsian attack on the given for someone who has the conception of the relationship between seeing and conceptualizing which Travis has. If seeing is an encounter with some portion of reality, and making a judgement about what is seen is applying one’s concepts to what one sees on the basis of this seeing, then I see no obstacle to the claim that seeing something can justify one’s judgement.2 Suppose, then, we put the debate about the Myth of the Given to one side. Is there still any point in talking about what is given in experience, or about the distinction between what is given and what is brought to experience? In the rest of this essay I will try and answer this question. But first I need to introduce some concepts central to the recent debate in the philosophy of perception.

2 . TH E CONTE NT OF E X PE RI E NC E

Apart from the discussions inspired by Sellars, recent philosophy of perception has not had much to say about the idea of the given. Theories of perception talk instead about the ‘content’ of experience, or the representational or ‘intentional’ content of experience. But if there is a question about the given, then surely it ought to be connected in some way with the question

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about representational content. The claim that experiences represent the world is supposed to be a description of the connection between the mind and the world in experience. Surely there must be some link between this and the idea of the given sketched above, if that idea has any value at all? That experience has ‘content’ is, of course, a piece of philosophical jargon or terminology, and it has meant many different things to different writers. It’s worth reminding ourselves of some of them. When G. E. Moore in ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ (1903) talks about the view (which he rejects) that the sensation of blue involves blueness as its ‘content’, what he means is that it involves the instantiation of a property.3 Today this would be better classified as a ‘qualia’ view rather than a content view. Another example is Moritz Schlick’s 1932 essay ‘Form and Content’. Schlick says that ‘the difference between form and content is, roughly speaking, the difference between that which can be expressed and that which cannot be expressed’ (1932: 291). Schlick was not only talking about the mind, but he does apply the distinction between form and content to things like the experience of colours. He argues that although one can express some truths about the colours of things, ‘the content itself (e.g. the green of the leaf) . . . cannot be grasped by any expression’ (1932: 303). This is ‘not because content is too difficult to get at, or because the right method of investigating it has not yet been found, but simply because there is no sense in asking any questions about it. There is no proposition about content, there cannot be any’ (1932: 306; see also Harrison 1973). Again, these remarks would make little sense if ‘content’ had its contemporary meaning; in its inexpressibility at least, Schlick’s notion of content again has more in common with the contemporary notion of qualia. ‘Content’ in these earlier uses referred to something specifically sensory. In contemporary discussions, however, ‘content’ refers to the representational dimension of mental states. One of the merits of Susanna Siegel’s 2005 Stanford Encylopedia article, ‘The Contents of Perception’, is that she gives a definition of content of experience which can apply to both the sensory and to the (putative) representational aspects of experience. Siegel defines content as ‘what is conveyed to the subject by her perceptual experience’ (Siegel 2005). On some views, what is conveyed to the subject is something sensory (‘qualia’ or what Moore calls ‘content’), on some views something representational (an intentional content), while on some views what is conveyed to the subject is simply one’s visible surroundings.

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McDowell’s view is something else again: what is given is the content of an intuition, neither a representation nor simply one’s visible surroundings (2009a: 264). To my ear, ‘what is conveyed’ sounds rather close to ‘what is given’. So if we adopt Siegel’s definition of ‘content’ we can also say that the content of an experience is what is given to the subject in that experience. Not all participants will accept this use of the word: Travis and Brewer, for example, will not describe their position as a view about content, since they take content to be something representational. For this reason, I will use the word ‘content’ as Siegel defines it, and I will use ‘representational content’ to describe the putative feature of experience which Travis and Brewer think does not exist. Similarly, McDowell thinks that intuitions have content but that this content is not representational (2009a: 266–267). So we can mark this distinction again by distinguishing content in the broad sense from representational content. A common definition is that a state of mind has representational content when it is assessable as accurate or inaccurate: Michael Tye says ‘any state with accuracy conditions has representational content’ (Tye 2009a: 253). If content is what is given or conveyed to the subject (by definition) then the substantive question is what content is. In other words, what is given or conveyed to the subject in an experience? In the next section I will outline the dominant contemporary answer to this question, which I call ‘standard intentionalism’ and in the section after this I will describe an alternative.

3. I NTE NTIONALI S M AN D PRO P OS ITIONAL CONTE NT

Intentionalism about the mind is that all mental phenomena exhibit intentionality, the directedness of the mind upon its objects (see Crane 2009a). Intentionalism about experience is the view that experience is (wholly or in part) an intentional state or event. Since it is common to call intentionality mental representation, then we can say that an intentionalist view of experience is the view that experience is a representational state. The content of an experience, according to intentionalism, is how the world is represented to be by the experience. This again conforms to Siegel’s definition: how things are represented as being is what is conveyed or given to the subject in an experience.

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What I will call the ‘standard’ intentionalist view is that the content of experience is propositional. A proposition is something that can be true or false. An intentional state which has propositional content is a propositional attitude; hence perceptual experience is a propositional attitude. As Alex Byrne puts it: All parties agree that perceiving is very much like a traditional propositional attitude, such as believing or intending . . . when one has a perceptual experience, one bears the perception relation to a certain proposition p. (Byrne 2005: 157)

When Byrne says that perceivers stand in a ‘perception relation’ to a proposition, he obviously does not mean that we perceive propositions, in the sense that we perceive pigs and people. This would be to confuse the representational content of an experience with what it is in the world that we experience (what I would call, following Husserl, the ‘object’ of the experience: Crane 2009a). What Byrne means is that a subject perceiving a pig should be understood in terms of their being in a representational state which is assessable as true or false. There are well-known reasons for taking such representational states to be relations between the subject of the state and a proposition (see Fodor 1981). This ‘perception relation’ then should not be confused with the ‘perception relation’ which holds between a subject and a pig when they perceive a pig. It is unfortunate perhaps that the same name has been given to both relations; but once the distinction is made, confusion should evaporate. Having said that the content of experience is propositional, the next question that typically arises is what the nature of these propositions is. And here it may seem as if there are already a number of well-established theoretical options. One can take propositions to be ‘coarse-grained’ as Russell did: containing the objects and properties in the world that they (or the states whose contents they are) are about. Or one can take them to be composed of modes of presentation of objects and properties, as Frege did (see the excerpts from Russell and Frege in Moore 1992). The Russellian view takes the sentences ‘Hesperus shines in the evening’ and ‘Phosphorus shines in the evening’ as expressing the same proposition; the Fregean view denies this. A position which combines some elements of each is the Stalnaker-Lewis view of propositions as sets of worlds, or related ideas such as

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centered worlds, or sets of possibilia. This view tries to capture some of the intensionality of the Fregean view while building up propositions only out of ordinary (albeit non-actual) objects and properties. What is to decide between these different conceptions of propositional content? On the one hand, one might want to choose the Russellian conception because it gives the best account of the fact that perception is ‘direct’: that it directly concerns objects and properties in the world. Or it might be thought to give the best account for the fact that perception seems to be ‘object-involving’. On the other hand, one might want to respect the fact that perception has an ‘aspectual’ element: that when one perceives things, one always does in some limited way; some properties are perceptible while others are not, and even the properties themselves might fall under some ‘mode of presentation’. On the face of it, the Russellian conception would count any perceptual experiences of the same object as having the same properties as having the same content (the same thing is ‘conveyed to the subject by the experience’). The Fregean, by contrast, would count experiences as having different contents when they present their objects in different ways (according to the way Fregean modes of presentation are individuated). Michael Tye has clearly expressed the kinds of reasons someone might have for taking different views on the nature of the propositional content of experience. He asks us to consider his visual experience of the surface S of an object O looking red: My visual experience intuitively represents S as having the property of being red. At this level my experience is accurate if and only if S is red. But my experience also has something important in common with certain other visual experiences not directed at S. Suppose, for example, that O is replaced with another object O’ that looks just like O or that I am hallucinating a red surface so that phenomenally it is for me just as it is in seeing S. Intuitively, in all three cases, it seems to me that there is a red surface before me. At this phenomenal level, my experience is accurate if and only if there is a red surface before me. This content is existential, not involving S, though it does also include the subject of the experience. (Tye 2006: 508)

The issue Tye is addressing is when we should count experiences as being the same or different. The three distinct experiences Tye mentions can be

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classified as having different contents, but also at some other ‘level’ as having the same representational content. There is something to be said for each answer. After all, in the first case, the subject is actually seeing S, so the correctness of the experience should depend on how things are with S itself. But on the other hand, if we should count experiences as representing the world in the same way when they seem the same to the subject, then we should treat the representational content as general or ‘existential’. Which should we choose? David Chalmers has responded to this tension by adopting a ‘pluralistic’ conception of the representational content of experience: One should be a pluralist about representational content. It may be that experiences can be associated with contents of many different sorts by different relations: we can call such relations content relations. For example, there may be one content relation that associates experiences with object-involving contents, and another which associates experiences with existential contents. . . . On this view, there may not be such a thing as the representational content of a perceptual experience. Instead, a given experience may be associated with multiple representational contents via different content relations. (Chalmers 2006: 78)

The idea is that rather than there being one ‘perception’ relation between the subject and the propositional content of experience, there are many, one for each distinctive kind of content (not just Russellian and Fregean, but for the different kinds of contents within these categories: object-dependent, quantificational etc.). Chalmers’s proposal is based on the idea that ‘associating’ different kinds of contents can serve to highlight different aspects of the state in question. If we think of the representational dimension of experiences in terms of associating different propositions with a concrete event, then content pluralism about experience is plausible, just as it is plausible about attributions of some other mental states. Consider desire: did Oedipus want to marry his mother? In one sense, obviously not; he would not have assented to that sentence, he would not have entertained that thought to himself, and he would have done many things inconsistent with having the desire. So we should say that the sentence ‘Oedipus wanted it to be the case that he married his mother’ has a false reading. But there is also a sense in which it is true that he wanted to marry his mother: his mother is such that Oedipus wanted

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to marry her; he wanted to marry Jocasta, and Jocasta was his mother. It would be pointlessly dogmatic to insist that these claims are false, or that they serve no purpose in the description of the situation (after all, this was the source of the tragedy). In struggling to make sense of these phenomena, philosophers have appealed to various distinctions between kinds of attitude ascriptions: for example, it is common to say that in the de dicto sense (‘Oedipus wanted it to be the case that . . .’) it is not true that he wanted to marry his mother, but that in the de re sense (‘His mother is such that Oedipus wanted . . .’) it is true. That there are these two kinds of descriptions and that they can make explicit the ambiguities in these situations is very plausible. We might think, then, of different contents (the complete dictum in the de dicto case, and the incomplete content in the de re case) as being associated with Oedipus’s state of mind via different ‘content relations’. And this might be the model for perceptual representational contents, as Chalmers has argued. If an experience literally has multiple contents, and the content of an experience is what is conveyed to the subject, then it follows that multiple contents are conveyed to the subject in an experience. So if my experience conveys to me that Hesperus is shining in the sky, it also conveys to me that Phosphorus is shining in the sky, it also conveys to me that there is something shining in the sky; and so on. What does it mean to say all these things are ‘conveyed’ to me by my experience? If it is a claim about the information which the experience delivers, or what kind of information can be derived from the fact that I am having this experience, then it is not difficult to make sense of the claim (whether or not the claim is true). But if it is a description of the phenomenology of the experience, of what it is like to have an experience, then it is less clear what it means. When having a visual experience of the planet Venus in the evening, it does not seem as if many distinct (and possibly incompatible) contents are being conveyed to me. What is given or conveyed to me is a certain scene, a certain region of concrete reality, which seems like a reasonably unified thing. It does not seem like receiving multiple messages saying different things (even if these messages are relayed by different ‘content relations’). Or take the Lewis-Stalnaker conception of propositions as sets of possible worlds, and consider my experience of a pig under the oak. What is conveyed by my experience is that there is a pig under the oak. This is the

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propositional content of the experience, and according to the Lewis-Stalnaker view, this propositional content is the set of all worlds in which the pig is under the oak (we can ignore the details of centering, etc., since these are not relevant to the basic point here). In what sense could what is phenomenologically (consciously) conveyed to me simply be this set of worlds? It is hard to see how content pluralism, whatever its other merits, could be a theory of the phenomenology of experience. But if we take it at its word, standard intentionalism is precisely intended to be a theory of phenomenology. According to Peter Carruthers, for example, ‘phenomenal consciousness consists in a certain sort of intentional content’ (2003: xiii). And Tye is well known for the claim that phenomenal character is one and the same as representational content (1995). So these intentionalist views are explicitly intended to be views about phenomenology. In fact, even independently of the defence of intentionalism, it is widely supposed that content has supposed to have something to do with phenomenology. Siegel, for example, writes: Another commonly held constraint is that the contents must be adequate to its phenomenology . . . The notion of phenomenal adequacy has considerable intuitive force. This suggests that the contents of experience have to in some way reflect the phenomenology of the experience. (Siegel 2005)

Given how Siegel originally introduced the word ‘content’, it seems like an understatement to say that phenomenal adequacy is simply another ‘constraint’ on content. Content, remember, is what is conveyed to a subject in an experience, and an experience is a conscious state or event. Surely part of what is conveyed is how things are consciously? So the question remains: what has an experience’s propositional content got to do with its phenomenology? Part of the answer, presumably, is that what is given to me has a certain form: not just the pig, the oak, but that the pig is under the oak. It is in this sense then that what is given to the subject (and therefore what the subject takes in) is something that can be true or false, a proposition in this sense. Certainly the idea that what we take in in experience is something with a propositional structure is an idea which is widely defended, even outside the circles of standard intentionalists. This is what McDowell famously argued for in Mind and World, even though he has now rejected it. But there he said that ‘one takes in, for instance,

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sees, that things are thus and so. That is the sort of thing one can also, for instance, judge’ (McDowell 1994a: 54). Nonetheless, it is not easy to make literal sense of the idea that what we take in in experience is what we can judge. When I judge, because of what I can see, that the pig is under the oak, this is something which, in a certain way, abstracts from the real presence of the pig there. The content of the judgement can outlive the experience, it can be the content of others’ judgement, things can follow from it (for example, that something is underneath the oak). What can outlive the experience, of course, is the concrete state of affairs: the pig actually being under the oak. Could this be what is given to the subject? Maybe; but not according to the standard intentionalist account. Th is is because, for the standard intentionalist, what is given is something that can be true or false. But the pig being under the oak is not something that can be true or false. It is just something that is there. Nor is it something from which things follow. Things follow from truths or propositions; the pig being in the garden is not a truth or a proposition, but something in the world. And things in the world are not true or false.4 So we have to distinguish between the propositional content of an experience and what is phenomenologically given to the subject. The reason for this is the plausibility of content pluralism, plus the implausibility of saying that multiple representational contents are given to the subject. Of course, it is possible to question content pluralism; but I will not examine this route here. Rather, I want to propose a very different way of thinking about the intentionality of perception. I do not think we should abandon the idea of propositional content; but we have to see it as playing a different role.

4. A PH E NOM E NOLOG IC AL CONCE P TION OF CONTE NT

In ‘On Sense and Reference’ Frege employed an analogy with seeing the moon through a telescope to distinguish between sense, reference and what he called ‘idea’ (Frege 1892). The moon is analogous to the reference of a word; the image on the telescope lens is the sense (it is the ‘property of many people’) and the idea is compared to the image on the retina. An idea is something which is dependent on a particular perceiver, a particular subject, at a particular moment. It is, therefore, by definition unshareable.5

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Standard intentionalism treats the content of experience as something at the level of Frege’s sense (whether or not they individuate propositions in the Fregean way). Contents are abstract objects, and intentional states are relations to these objects. But there is no need for intentionalists to deny the existence of Fregean ideas, just because they accept Fregean sense. Moreover, intentionalists need not treat ideas as simple ‘qualia’ in the usual sense of that word: non-representational conscious mental properties. An idea is plausibly construed—like an image on the retina, with which the analogy is made—as a representation. But it is a representation which is concrete and particular, specific to this person, this time and this place. Fregean ideas are a model for what I want to call the content of experience in the phenomenological sense—what is phenomenologically given or conveyed to subjects in their experience. This particular way of representing the world in this experience is what we might call (following Husserl 1901) the ‘real content’ of the experience. Real here is contrasted not with unreal, fake, or imaginary but with ideal. Ideal objects are what contemporary Anglophone philosophers would call ‘abstract’ objects: objects without a location in space and time. In order to identify content in the ‘real’ sense, we need to make a distinction between the particularity of any perceptual episode, and the ‘abstract’ or ‘general’ nature of propositional content. By abstract here, I mean: not tied to any particular moment of thinking or experiencing. It is because of this that a proposition does not have a spatio-temporal location: it can be the content of many acts of thinking, even if it is an indexical proposition that represents a certain particular time. Contrast this with the mental representation of this particular pig at this particular moment. This representation is tied to this moment; although another event could represent the same pig, in the same way, it would not be this particular representation—just for the reason that this particular representation is an unrepeatable, dated, located ‘concrete’ occurrence. The distinction between a concrete, particular act with what I am calling its ‘real’ content, and the abstract, ‘general’ content which can be assigned to the act, should be fundamental to the theory of intentionality. The propositional content which can be assigned to an act is ‘abstract’ not just in the sense that it is an object which has no spatio-temporal location, but in the sense that it ‘abstracts’ from some of the concrete reality of the experiential episode. If the propositional content of the act is something that can be shared between different subjects, or something that can be shared in

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different acts of the same subject, then it is something which abstracts from the particularity of the subject’s own condition. The real content, however, is unrepeatable because essentially linked to the state and time of the act’s occurrence, and specific to its bearer. In this sense of content, no-one other than I can have mental episodes with the content of my mental episodes. Someone could have a very similar experience, of similar things, or even an experience which seemed exactly the same. But that would be to generalise across different concrete experiences, and describe the sense in which they are the same. Describing is relating the experience to a propositional content. But this description is an attempt to capture some aspect of how the representation represents the world. It—the description—is not the representation itself. The ideas involved in experiences—particular, conscious episodes— have content, since they are a case of something being given or conveyed to the subject. But what kind of content do they have? I have argued elsewhere that experiences have non-propositional content, in the sense that their fundamental way of representing the world is non-propositional. Non-propositional content ought not to be mysterious. Many pictures have non-propositional content: they have represent objects and their properties but are not the kind of thing you can use to ‘say’ things. Pictures can have correctness conditions, but there is a difference between a representation having a correctness condition expressed as a proposition and its having a proposition as its content (see Crane 2009b: 10). Experiences construed in this way have something in common with McDowell’s ‘intuitions’. They have non-propositional content, and their content has a certain kind of unity: as McDowell says, ‘in a visual intuition, an object is present to a subject with those of its features that are visible to the subject from her vantage point’ (2009a: 265). A intuition is a particular event or occasion of something being brought into view. McDowell insists that the content of an intuition is conceptual, but this is consistent with not every aspect of the content actually being conceptualised, or thought about, or made the content of a judgement (2009a: 264; see also 2009b: 346–347). The view that not everything that is presented in an experience is conceptualised is one I find very plausible; but I would prefer to call it the view that experience has non-conceptual content! Judgement (or McDowell’s ‘discursive activity’) is the conceptualisation of the content of experience (cf. Crane 1992: 155). Experiences or McDowell’s intuitions ‘reveal things

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to be as they would be claimed to be in claims that would be no more than a discursive exploitation of some of the content of the intuition’ (McDowell 2009a: 267). It is useful to think of conceptualisation as the ‘discursive exploitation’ of the content of an experience, which is there to be conceptualised but not necessarily so exploited. And it seems to me that many of those who taken themselves to believe that experience has ‘non-conceptual content’ can agree with McDowell here.6 Where I depart from McDowell, though, is in taking experience to be representational. I need to explain what I mean by this, although the basic line of thought is familiar. We should start with a basic perceptual phenomenon: the case of seeing. When we see the world, it is quite correct to say that we take in concrete reality. The things we see around us present themselves to us from particular perspectives, in particular conditions of illumination and in concrete relations to things around us. One possible position is to say that this is all we need to understand experience: what is experienced and the relations in which these things stand to us (see Brewer 2006). If this were so, then there would be no difficulty in explaining how experience takes in concrete reality: for that is what experience is, a relation to the layout of concrete reality. This is the ‘relational’ conception of experience. The basic idea behind intentionalism, however, is that experience could be essentially the same way without the objects of experience being the way they seem to be. Or: concrete reality need not be the way it seems to be in order to be experienced as being this way. It is this simple idea—the idea which lies behind the arguments from illusion and hallucination—which motivates intentionalists to treat experience as essentially representational. Experience may not seem like a representation, they say, but if an experience can be essentially the same despite the change or absence of its objects, then a theory of perception should recognise that this is what it really is.7 If experience is a representation—and I do not claim to have given an argument for this view—then it is a concrete, particular event or state of affairs. It represents the experienced world in a particular, concrete way: from this perspective, in these conditions. The conditions of the way it represents the world are specific to the way I am experiencing it now. Suppose I am looking at the pig under the oak in my garden. Of course, someone else can see what I see, they can look at what I look at. But my experience on this particular occasion and the way it representing the world to me now, that is specific to me and to this particular experience.

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In the quotation above from Chalmers, he talked of ‘associating’ a content with a state of mind. What makes this ‘association’? Some philosophers will say that the only way in which something can be a representation is if it is interpreted as such, if it can be assigned a correctness condition. I assume here that this is false. There can be an intrinsic form of representation which is not simply a matter of the assignment of a correctness condition by an interpreter, of something being described as representing something. An experience is, on this view, such a representation. What the assignment of a correctness condition does is to specify one or more of the many ways in which the experience represents the world. But the nature of that experience itself as a representation is what is described by the correctness condition; it does not consist in the assignment of a correctness condition. Another way to put this point is to say that it is not part of the fundamental psychological reality of the act that it is a relation to a proposition. The psychological reality of the act is its reality as a representation; a representation is an intrinsic state (of the person, or the brain, or the soul), and this intrinsic state is something which has a specific, concrete nature of its own. This concrete nature does not consist in some unanalysed relation to a proposition. That is a theoretical, external description of the state, not what it is in itself. The position I have described might be criticised on the grounds that ignores the distinction between vehicle and content of a representation. It might be said that of course there is a distinction between the particular, concrete event of representing something and the propositional content of that event. But this is just the distinction between the concrete vehicle of representation—the ‘way’ something is represented—and its propositional content. And, the objection runs, my observations above about the concrete nature of experiences are only relevant to the vehicle of perceptual representation, not to their content. Just as the same proposition might be expressed by a sentence or by a picture, so the same proposition might be the content of a belief and the content of an experience: the differences noted above are to do with vehicles, not content. So we do not need an additional ‘phenomenological’ notion of content. Before responding to this objection, I need to make one clarification. The term ‘vehicle’ has been used for (at least) two different kinds of distinction in ways of representing (see Crane 2004: 135–137). One is the distinction between the linguistic and imagistic representation. The other is

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the distinction between ways in which (say) an image or a linguistic representation can be physically realised. An image, for example, can be realised analogically or digitally. Here I am interested only in the first distinction, and use the word ‘vehicle’ to mark the difference between linguistic and imagistic representation. (I admit that it can be used in the other way too.) My response to this objection is first to point out that we adopted Siegel’s definition of ‘content’ as ‘what is conveyed to the subject in an experience’. If what is conveyed to the subject has a phenomenological dimension—as it surely must have—then it cannot be irrelevant to the content of an experience in this sense that what is conveyed is conveyed in a certain concrete form. If the way an experience represents the world has something in common with an image, then this fact is relevant to what is conveyed to the subject in an experience. Compare the debate about visual imagination: if visualising employs something like images, as has been argued, then this fact is not irrelevant to what is conveyed to the subject in an act of visualising, and therefore not irrelevant to the content of the act, in the present sense. In other words, if one is trying to characterise the phenomenology of a particular experiential episode, then it is not irrelevant to that phenomenology that the episode involves a specific kind of ‘vehicle’ in this sense. One might even say that where the phenomenological conception of content is concerned, we should not make the distinction between vehicle and content: it is central to the phemomenology of an experience that what is conveyed to the subject includes its specific vehicle.

5. TH E ROLE OF PRO P OS ITION S

I have argued that if content pluralism is true, then a theory of perceptual experience needs another phenomenological notion of content, something resembling Frege’s ‘ideas’ or Husserl’s ‘real’ content. But this is not to deny that certain mental states can also be thought of as relations to propositions. There is nothing wrong with this way of thinking, so long as one thinks of it as a theoretical way of characterising or describing mental states. One way to do this is by using David Lewis’s analogy between numbers and propositions.8 Lewis proposed that we can think of the way in which propositional attitudes are ‘relations’ to abstract propositions as analogous to the way in which physical magnitudes are ‘relations’ to abstract numbers. Just as the

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weight of a standard bag of sugar can be thought of as a relation (‘weight-inkilos’) between the bag and the number 1, so the belief that Mongolia had the second largest empire in the history of the world can be thought of as a relation (‘belief’) to the proposition expressed by the sentence ‘Mongolia had the second largest empire in the history of the world’. It is true, literally true, that the weight can be related to this number in this way; but this is not what something’s weight fundamentally is. Fundamentally, weight is an intrinsic (or near-intrinsic) property of an object. Similarly, it is literally true that the belief is a relation to a proposition; but this is not what the belief fundamentally is. What is going on here, it seems to me, is that the concrete belief state is being ‘modelled’ by the abstract proposition. Propositional contents can be used to ‘model’ mental states in the way that (e.g.) relations between numbers can model physical systems; or idealised systems can model target physical systems. Abstract objects of various kinds are assigned to mental states; relationships among these objects parallel relations among the mental states. Propositions can be used as part of the model of a mental state— under the proviso, of course, that there is an element of idealisation in any model (this is why, for example, we do not expect a system of a subject’s real beliefs to exhibit deductive closure). I call this the ‘semantic’ conception of content. ‘Semantic’ because the standard practice of formal semantics is to assign objects (e.g., functions, sets, properties) to parts of sentences in an attempt to show how relations between these objects determine the semantic properties (truth or falsehood) of the whole sentences. This is what an interpretation is. To take a simple example: an interpretation might assign a particular object to a name, ‘a’, and a set of objects assigned to a predicate ‘__is F’, and the sentence ‘a is F’ is true just in case the object assigned to the name is a member of the set assigned to the predicate. Interpretations become more complex with propositional attitude states, of course, but the overall aim is to let the relationships between the objects assigned by the interpretation determine the intuitively correct truth-values of the sentences. In the case of intentional states, different assignments of propositional objects highlight different aspects of the mental state being modelled. We can say this consistently with saying that some kinds of propositional objects do better than others in capturing how things seem to the subject. If we want to express how the world seemed to Oedipus in the complex

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condition he was in, then we will want to assign a proposition to his desire that does not represent his mother as his mother, for example. This is consistent with assigning the state a de re content which relates him to his mother herself. There is no conflict here; it is just a aspect of our complex practice of attitude attribution. Nonetheless, it is also possible to hold that the desire itself is an intrinsic state of the subject which has its own representational nature which is only partly captured by the various ways of relating it to propositions. In the case of perceptual experience, Christopher Peacocke’s well-known theory of ‘scenario content’ is a good example of a style of assignment of content which aims to get close to the way a experience represents the world in all its detail (Peacocke 1992). A scenario in Peacocke’s sense is a set of all the ways of filling out the space around the perceiver with objects and properties which is consistent with the correctness of the experience. As such, it attempts to describe much more detail of the real content of an experience than (say) a simple subject-predicate proposition does. But it is still a content in the semantic sense. Treating relations to propositions as models therefore enables us to see why Chalmers’s content pluralism is so plausible. Different kinds of propositional objects can be used to highlight or emphasise different aspects of an experience: some might highlight the fact that the state involves an episode of seeing some particular object, others might highlight the fact that things would seem the same if one were experiencing a distinct but indistinguishable object. Content pluralism allows different kinds of contents to be used in different models. It is the best theoretical representation of our practice of attributing semantic content to intentional states. 6 . CONC LU S ION

There is, I have claimed, something like a ‘given’ in experience: it is the phenomenological conception of content (‘what is conveyed to the subject’). The propositional content of a perceptual experience is also something that deserves the name of ‘content’. But it must be distinguished from content in the phenomenological sense. The content in the phenomenological sense is something spatiotemporal, concrete, particular, and specific to its subject. The content in the propositional sense is not. There are, therefore, two

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conceptions of the content of experience, the semantic and the phenomenological. I think that the phenomenological conception has a certain priority, since it is part of what is being modelled. Semantic contents can only be ‘descriptions’ of this content. I would like to end with a more general moral. Frege and Husserl both rejected psychologism about logic. Logic cannot be the science of human thought, for familiar reasons. Hence logic is better understood as being about abstract (‘ideal’) relations between items which are timeless, shareable, and abstract. Many contemporary philosophers join Husserl and Frege in rejecting psychologism about logic. But in embracing a purely semantic conception of the content of experience, they go too far in rejecting psychologism about the psychological. Psychologism about logic is an extreme thesis, and surely false. Psychologism about the psychological, on the other hand, is very likely to be true.

* * * This essay derives from lectures given at the Universities of Barcelona (to the LOGOS group), Lausanne, Stockholm, Hertfordshire, St. Andrews, Parma, Warwick (the MindGrad conference), and at the Institute of Philosophy in London. I am grateful to participants on these occasions for discussions, and especially to Katalin Farkas, Pepa Toribio, and Charles Travis.

IV Consciousness

T

he essays here do not present a systematic treatment of the problems of consciousness and the mind-body problem. Instead they engage with some specific debates which have dominated recent discussions of consciousness, identifying in each case some assumption which is an obstacle to a proper understanding of the phenomenology of consciousness. Some of these assumptions I like to identify now as anti-psychologistic. I have written about physicalism and the mind-body problem elsewhere (see for example Crane 2001: Chapter 2). But I should perhaps say explicitly that psychologism, as I conceive of it, is neutral on the question of physicalism. Psychologism holds that the mental is a distinctive subject-matter, but this does not mean ‘the mental-as-opposed-to-the-physical’. The mental might supervene on the physical, it might be identical with it, or it might not. Almost everything I say in these essays is compatible with physicalism or its negation. Essay 13 is my contribution to the current ‘phenomenal intentionality’ movement. I argue that although thoughts are conscious, beliefs are not; and that there is a sense in which thoughts are conscious in the same way that sensory experiences are: they are episodes in the stream of consciousness. This is not supposed to be a definition of ‘consciousness’, since it assumes the idea of a stream of consciousness. But it does try to identify one essential aspect of the phenomenology of consciousness: its event-like or process-like nature. ‘Subjective Facts’ (Essay 14) was written in 2003 for a festschrift for my teacher D. H. (Hugh) Mellor. The essay is a partial defence of Frank Jackson’s (1982) famous knowledge argument against physicalism. Partial because, although it defends the argument, it does not defend Jackson’s original attack on physicalism. My view is that the conclusion of this argument is that there is propositional knowledge that we can only have if we have certain kinds of experience. This knowledge is typically expressed in indexical or demonstrative terms (e.g., ‘red looks like this’) and some have found such knowledge problematic. Problematic or not, I think this knowledge is real and its existence should not be a problem for physicalism. The knowledge argument, properly understood, is an argument about knowledge, not about physicalism. Essays 15 and 16 take issue with David Papineau’s and Michael Tye’s attempts to defend physicalism against the arguments from consciousness.

As with Essay 14, I take issue with these attempts not because I want to attack physicalism. It is rather that their defences of physicalism involve appealing to ideas about the mind which I think are quite implausible independently of the question of physicalism. Along with a number of other philosophers, Papineau has appealed to the idea of a ‘phenomenal concept’ in order to answer the arguments against physicalism which appeal to the phenomena of consciousness. A phenomenal concept is a concept which in some way involves, or recreates, or (as some say) ‘quotes’ its referent: so when I use the phenomenal concept of pain I somehow bring to mind a painful experience. In Essay 15 I explain why I do not think there are any such concepts. What now strikes me as anti-psychologistic about the phenomenal concept strategy is the unreflective adoption of a conception of concepts which models them on words. Concepts are items that can ‘refer directly’ by ‘quoting’ experiences themselves. This is a peculiar view of concepts which would only come naturally to those who think of them as being something like words, to which semantic ideas like ‘direct reference’ can be applied. I think we should resist such a view of concepts. Michael Tye shares my view that this phenomenal concept strategy is unsuccessful. His defence of physicalism against the arguments appeals instead to something like Russell’s idea of ‘acquaintance’. In Essay 16 I explain why I do not believe in acquaintance in this sense either. I hope that this critique of acquaintance might be of independent interest—for example, to those who discuss the idea of acquaintance in connection with singular thought. It strikes me in retrospect that these essays exhibit a kind of scepticism about the significance of physicalism that Hugh Mellor and I expressed some time ago (see Crane and Mellor 1990). Conscious beliefs, phenomenal concepts, a relation of acquaintance, or subjective knowledge: whether there are these things is an important question. But it is not the same question as the question of physicalism, and is not essentially related to that question. Much of the philosophy of mind—even the psychologistic kind defended here—can be undertaken without even raising the question of physicalism.

E S S AY T H I R T E E N

Unconscious Belief and Conscious Thought

(2012)

1. I NTRO D U C TION

We call our thoughts conscious, and we also say the same of our bodily sensations, perceptions, and other sensory experiences. But thoughts and sensory experiences are very different phenomena, both from the point of view of their subject and in their functional or cognitive role. Does this mean, then, that there are very different kinds or varieties of consciousness? Philosophers do often talk about different kinds of consciousness: Christopher Hill, for example, claims that ‘it is customary to distinguish five forms of consciousness’ (Hill 2009: 1). These are: agent consciousness, propositional consciousness, introspective consciousness, relational consciousness, and phenomenal consciousness; to which Hill adds experiential consciousness, making six in total. It is an important question for the theory of consciousness whether these labels pick out genuinely different psychological phenomena, or whether some (or all) of them are just different ways of talking about the same thing. I cannot address this large question here, but I will instead focus on a more

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specific question: is the kind of consciousness involved in sensation an entirely different thing from the kind of consciousness involved in thought? Or is there a single kind of consciousness which both these kinds of mental phenomena exhibit, regardless of how else they might differ? In this essay I will attempt to answer this question. Some dominant theories of consciousness give it quite unsatisfactory answers. I will consider three recent theories: that consciousness consists in the instantiation of a simple quality; that consciousness consists in higher-order representation; and that there are two independent kinds of consciousness with wholly different natures (in this connection, I will consider Block’s well-known distinction between ‘phenomenal’ and ‘access’ consciousness). None of these gives entirely the right answer, although the last comes closest. I will argue for three claims: (1) that Block’s notion of access consciousness must be understood in terms of phenomenal consciousness, and in this sense phenomenal consciousness is the more fundamental notion; (2) beliefs are never phenomenally conscious, though episodes of thinking are; (3) the sense in which thoughts and experiences are conscious is that they are both a certain kind of episode, that I call an episode in the stream of consciousness. This last claim provides the answer to the question posed above: there is a single kind of consciousness which thoughts and experiences exhibit. I do not give a definition of what phenomenal consciousness is, nor a description of it in non-mental terms. Indeed, like many philosophers working in this area, I take the fact of consciousness for granted, and I do not believe that it can be reduced or ‘defined’. Rather, I will attempt to outline some of the relationships between conscious thoughts, other conscious episodes, and unconscious mental states like beliefs, with the aim of getting a clear overview of aspects of the phenomenology of consciousness. How do my claims connect to the currently popular idea of ‘phenomenal intentionality’? The term ‘phenomenal’ has been understood in a number of ways in contemporary philosophy, but if we restrict it only by its etymology, then ‘phenomenal’ means pertaining to appearances. So phenomenal intentionality is intentionality that relates to how things appear—but ‘appear’ must mean ‘consciously appear’ if the term’s current usage is to make any sense. Conscious thought is the most crucial phenomenon for theories of phenomenal intentionality. All theories of consciousness recognize the existence of phenomenal consciousness in the sense I have just described (even if they

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do not use this term). Sensations and sensory experiences are the paradigm examples. Many theories hold in addition that such experiences have intentional content—that they represent states of the world or states of the subject. Intentionalist theories of consciousness are now widely accepted, even if they are not entirely uncontroversial. But just as intentionalist theories of consciousness are not news, the phenomenal intentionality they talk about— the intentionality of bodily sensation and perception—is not news either. What is controversial is whether there is a distinctive kind of conscious or phenomenal intentionality associated with conscious thought (see, e.g., Pitt 2004; Bayne and Montague 2011). This is not something which is implied by the very idea of an intentionalist theory of consciousness. It is possible to hold that all consciousness is intentional, or representational, without holding that conscious thinking has any distinctive phenomenology of its own. Michael Tye, for example, is a well-known defender of intentionalism about consciousness; but recently he has explicitly denied that thoughts have ‘a further phenomenology over and above the imagistic and sensory phenomenology that may accompany conscious thoughts’ (2009b: 201). For Tye, there is only imagistic or sensory phenomenal consciousness, and since all consciousness is intentional, there is only imagistic or sensory phenomenal intentionality. However, I am persuaded by the arguments of Kriegel (2007), Pitt (2004), Strawson (1995), and others that there is a distinctive kind of phenomenal intentionality associated with conscious thought: thought has a so-called proprietary phenomenology. But I will not attempt to argue for this here. Rather, I am attempting something more modest: to sketch an account of the structure of conscious thinking, in order to make it intelligible how thought can be conscious in the same sense as sensations and sensory experiences. In the next section, I will argue that two well-known theories of consciousness fail to give an adequate answer to the question of why thoughts and sensations are both conscious, and that Block’s claim that ‘conscious’ is ambiguous also fails to answer this question in a satisfactory way. I will then argue in Section 3 that my approach to Block’s distinction also helps to illuminate what is sometimes called (I think misleadingly) conscious belief. In Section 4 I show the bearing of these points about belief on the phenomenon of conscious thought and hence on the thesis of phenomenal intentionality.

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2 . T WO I NADEQ UATE AN S W E R S TO O U R Q U E STION

Some popular theories of consciousness, it seems to me, are unable to give a single account of the consciousness involved in thought and in sensation. One is the theory that consciousness involves the instantiation of intrinsic, non-intentional properties, known as ‘qualia’ (Block 1996). Another is the theory that consciousness is higher-order thought or representation: the ‘HOT’ theory of consciousness (Rosenthal 1986). While the qualia theory may have some plausibility for conscious sensations, it is hard to apply it to conscious thought. And while the HOT theory might make sense in the case of conscious thought, it has little plausibility when applied to sensation. The qualia theory identifies consciousness with the instantiation of qualia: properties which are variously described as intrinsic, non-intentional, ineffable, and private. The details of particular theories of qualia do not matter here, since my objection is quite general. The paradigms of qualia are bodily sensation properties, like the property of being in pain, or perhaps some specific properties of pain states or events. Sensory qualities like this have a particular ‘feel’ which is essential to them. To each distinctive type of quale corresponds a distinctive sensory ‘feel’. Conscious thought cannot plausibly be described in this way. If you are currently thinking about the causes of the current financial crisis, there is no particular sensory feel that this episode has. In fact, it sounds strange to talk of this episode as having any ‘feel’ at all. If it feels like anything to be thinking about the financial crisis, this kind of ‘feeling’ has so little in common with sensory feelings that it is unilluminating to describe them both as having qualia. If we are inclined to say that thinking ‘feels like’ something, then all we can really mean by this is that it is conscious. But this is what we are trying to understand, so it is hardly an explanation to say that there are ‘feelings’ in this sense associated with thinking, or that thinking involves qualia. The HOT theory might appear to fare better in accounting for conscious thought. On this theory, a mental state’s being conscious is a matter of its being the object of a higher-order thought or other representation. Theories differ as to whether the higher-order state actually has to be instantiated or whether one needs only to have the capacity or disposition to have these higher-order representations (for the latter view, see Carruthers 2003). But again, the details do not really matter here, since my question is the general

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one of whether such a view can possibly apply both to conscious thought and to conscious sensation. In the case of thought, it might seem a plausible approach: what it is to have a conscious thought is to be conscious of your thought, and what is being conscious of a thought other than representing it? (Lycan 2001 uses this point as part of his ‘simple argument’ for a higher-order theory of consciousness.) The point is not indisputable, but it has something to be said for it. (In §4 below I will dispute it.) Yet in the case of sensation, being conscious of a sensation cannot be understood simply in terms of representing it. We can envisage creatures who are incapable of thought about their mental states but nonetheless can feel sensation—surely many animals are actually like this. And even in our own case, the consciousness of a sensation is plausibly something which is internal to the sensation itself, rather than a product of thought or representation of it. ‘Conscious of’ does not always mean ‘representing’. Being conscious of a pain in one’s toe—in the sense of being aware of it when you have it—is a different thing from being conscious of the pain when you think about it and attend to it. Merely having the pain, in normal cases, is sufficient for awareness of it. One way to respond to the inadequacies of these two theories is to say that each is right in its own way—the qualia theory is on the right lines when it comes to conscious sensation, while the higher-order thought theory is on the right lines when it comes to conscious thought. This is either because ‘consciousness’ is ambiguous, or because there are two (or more) kinds of consciousness; or these might be two ways of saying the same thing. I will briefly examine the best-known version of this proposal: Ned Block’s distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness. In his original (1995) presentation of the distinction, Block said that ‘“consciousness” is an ambiguous word, though the ambiguity I have in mind is not one I’ve found in any dictionary’ (Block 1995: 391). Phenomenal consciousness he defines in a usual way as ‘experience: what makes a state phenomenally conscious is that there is something “it is like” to be in that state’ (Block 1995: 380). Access consciousness is defined for representations, and in terms of these representations’ role in reasoning and control of action: ‘a representation is access-conscious if it is poised for free use in reasoning and for direct “rational” control of action and speech’ (1995: 382). In later writings on this subject (e.g., Block 2007), Block modified

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his presentation somewhat, to answer criticism suggested by his choice of terminology. To indicate that he is using the words in a more technical sense, he called phenomenal consciousness ‘P-consciousness’ and access consciousness ‘A-consciousness’. For Block, sensations are the paradigms of P-conscious states, while propositional attitudes (e.g., belief) are the paradigms of A-conscious states (2007: 281). Could this be the answer to my question, then: that sensations are phenomenally (P) conscious, and thoughts are merely access (A) conscious? On the face of it, the answer seems to be no, for two reasons. First, thoughts can be phenomenally conscious too, as we noted above, in a perfectly ordinary sense of ‘phenomenal’. When consciously thinking about something, things can appear to you a certain way—you might be imagining something, reflecting on it intellectually, or preoccupied by memories of it. But all these cases involve the appearance of things in the world, and (as we noted above) this is the original meaning of ‘phenomenal’. It is, of course, common these days to use the word ‘phenomenal’ to apply only to sensory consciousness. But even if one were to restrict the word in this way, visual imagination still counts as thinking, even though it involves sensory ‘phenomenal’ qualities. So if visually imagining can be a kind of thinking, then some thinking can be phenomenally conscious, in the broader or narrower sense of that word. The second reason why Block’s distinction cannot be straightforwardly used for answering our question is that sensations themselves can be available to reasoning systems; they are accessible for verbal report; they are available to memory, and so on. So sensations can be A-conscious too. It might be said that sensations are not representations, so by definition are not A-conscious states. But it is not obvious that sensations are not representations: representationalists or intentionalists explicitly claim that they are (see Tye 1995; Crane 2001). Such representationalism may be false, but it is not obviously false. Block’s distinction does not provide a clear and simple answer to our question. The distinction (between being conscious as such and ‘accessing’ one’s conscious states) is certainly something real, but I am sceptical of the way he tries to distinguish one from the other as independent phenomena, or distinct existences, by showing how they can be dissociated. The reason for my scepticism is that although there clearly is such a thing as ‘accessing’ one’s states of mind, this cannot be fundamentally understood

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independently of the idea of phenomenal consciousness. I will now argue for this claim. When Block originally introduced the notion of access consciousness, he introduced it in term of the notion of being ‘poised’ for control of action and speech. ‘Poised’ in this sense is a dispositional notion—I can be poised to dive into the swimming pool even if I do not actually do it. In this respect it is like the ordinary notion of ‘access’: I can have access to the money in my bank account even if I am not actually ‘accessing’ it. Yet as Block later acknowledged, a dispositional notion is not what is needed here since consciousness is an occurrence (2002: 279). So he revised his definition of A-consciousness by saying that a representation is A-conscious if it is broadcast for free use in reasoning and so on (2002: 278). Broadcasting seems to be an event-like thing, or a process, and hence something occurrent. (I will return to occurrences in §§3–4.) But when Block spells out what ‘broadcast’ literally means, he appeals once again to dispositional ideas. At one point he glosses ‘broadcast’ in terms of the senses ‘making available’ representations to other ‘consuming systems’, such as systems of classification, memory, and so on (2002: 278). But what if these representations are made available to other systems and these systems never take advantage of their availability? Are they still conscious in any ordinary sense? Block also says that an element in A-consciousness is ‘reportability’ (2002: 278). But, again, what if these representations are reportable and no-one actually reports on them? Are they still conscious? I do not think it is particularly helpful here to identify A-consciousness with information-processing, as Block does. It is not just that there is nothing in the idea of processing information which requires that it be conscious (although this is true). It is rather that all the paradigm examples of cognitive information-processing which we have are examples of things that take place unconsciously. Block may say that this is to use the word ‘conscious’ in the phenomenal sense. But the difficulty is that everyone will agree that much of our psychological information-processing is unconscious. What is it, then, that distinguishes the A-conscious information-processing from the unconscious? Block is sensitive to the criticism that a creature who only had A-consciousness in his sense would (in some intuitive sense) be an unconscious creature, but nonetheless insists that it is worth calling A-consciousness

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a kind of consciousness. As he points out, the access-related notion is the notion used in some psychoanalytic discourse—when one has an unconscious desire in something like the Freudian sense, it is one that one cannot access. And the notion of consciousness as accessibility or reportability is also used in much psychology and cognitive neuroscience. These are his reasons for insisting that if a creature were purely A-conscious, it would still be conscious in an ordinary sense. But he concedes that ‘A-consciousness can be a kind of consciousness even if it is parasitic on a core notion of P-consciousness’ (2002: 282). I think Block is quite right to make this concession. But how should we spell out the idea that A-consciousness is parasitic on P-consciousness? I think the connection is simpler than Block says. The idea that there is an interesting category of states which we can access is (in general) quite true. And we should understand access in terms of availability to other processes and cognitive systems in the way Block says. Assuming that accessing something is bringing something about, then we can ask: what kind of thing is brought about? The obvious answer is: a phenomenally conscious occurrence. To access or ‘broadcast’ a mental state is to bring about a change in phenomenal consciousness. So understood, accessing our mental states is not a special kind of consciousness, but rather a matter of bringing those mental states to phenomenal consciousness. This understanding of ‘access’ (or ‘broadcasting’) presupposes phenomenal consciousness. However, it does not follow from the fact that some essentially non-conscious state S brings about a change in phenomenal consciousness that S itself is made conscious. Many states or events in the brain bring about changes in phenomenal consciousness without being conscious in any way whatsoever. The important thing is not just that the state brings about the change in phenomenal consciousness but that the state itself ‘figures’ (in some sense) in consciousness. And since mental states are individuated by their contents, what is important about the state itself ‘figuring’ here is its content. Consciously accessing your belief that Mongolia had the second largest empire in the history of the world implies that this content is brought to phenomenal consciousness, since that is what distinguishes that belief from all others. So to bring a state of mind to phenomenal consciousness is (at the very least) to bring its content to consciousness: that is, to bring about an event in phenomenal consciousness in which that content figures. The next

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question, then is this: what is it to bring the content of some mental state to phenomenal consciousness? I will discuss this question in §4. But before doing this, I will explain how my way of understanding Block’s distinction makes sense of what is sometimes called ‘conscious belief’.

3. ‘OCCU RRE NT ’ AN D ‘CON SC IO U S ’ B E LI E F

It is frequently said that there is a distinction between beliefs which are conscious and those which are unconscious. Some go further: Christopher Peacocke has attempted to define the concept of belief partly in terms of the idea of conscious belief: A relational conception R is that of belief only if the following condition is met: (F) The thinker finds the first-person content that he stands in R to the content p primitively compelling whenever he has the conscious belief that p, and he finds it compelling because he has that conscious belief. (Peacocke 1993: 163)

For Peacocke’s definition to be intelligible, there must be an intelligible distinction between conscious and unconscious belief. But what is this distinction? Some theories attempt to explain the distinction in terms of lower-order versus higher-order attitudes: D. H. Mellor, for example, has argued that a conscious belief in a proposition is simply the belief that one believes it (1977: 90). Mellor’s proposal resembles the higher-order thought theory defended by Rosenthal (1986). But unlike Rosenthal, he does not think it is the correct account of all forms of consciousness. Others explain conscious belief in terms of the idea of an ‘occurrent’ belief, which is distinguished from ‘dispositional’ belief. Here I will focus on this latter thesis: that conscious belief is occurrent belief. When we identify what is wrong with this thesis, it will show us what is wrong with the idea of conscious belief as higher-order belief. The reasons for taking beliefs to be dispositions—to combine with other mental states to cause actions or other mental occurrences—are well known, and I will not dwell on them here.1 Belief understood as a disposition is

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sometimes contrasted with occurrent belief, usually in order to identify and describe the phenomenon of ‘conscious belief’. Uriah Kriegel, for example, argues that we should ‘construe a conscious belief as one that is at once an occurrent first-order belief and an occurrent second-order belief’ (Kriegel 2004: 108; see also BonJour 1999: 131). Kriegel implies that the distinction between first- and second-order beliefs is not sufficient to pick out the conscious beliefs: the beliefs must be occurrent too. An occurrent belief is presumably supposed to be a kind of occurrence: that is, an event or episode. A disposition is a different kind of thing: a state or property, something that persists beyond its manifestations (which are themselves occurrences). So an occurrent belief cannot be the very same thing as a dispositional belief, any more than a breaking can be the very same thing as an instance of fragility (pace Gennaro 1996: 41). It cannot be right to say that the very same belief state is both conscious and unconscious, if ‘conscious belief’ is understood as occurrent belief. What must be meant (at least) by saying that a conscious belief is the same as an unconscious belief is that it has the same content: these are states in which you believe the same thing (i.e., the same proposition). But the state also needs to involve accepting or endorsing that content, if it is to be anything like a belief. As Laurence BonJour puts it, ‘what one is primarily conscious of in having such a belief is precisely its propositional content (together with one’s acceptance of that content)’ (1999: 131). There can be no objection in principle to the idea that mental phenomena of different types may have the same content. You can hope that the weather will improve, and you can believe that the weather can improve. But hope and belief are unquestionably different mental phenomena. More controversial, but still widely endorsed, is John McDowell’s well-known claim that the content of a perceptual experience can also be the content of a judgement (1994a: 9).2 So there cannot be a general objection to the idea of conscious and unconscious beliefs having the same content. However, in cases like these, the states are different because what (we can call) their ‘attitudinal’ components are different: belief, hope, perception, or judgement. But occurrent and dispositional belief are both supposed to be kinds of belief. So they must both have some or all of the distinguishing marks of belief. But it hard to see how whatever occurrence it is that is being labelled by the words ‘occurrent belief’ can have these distinguishing marks.

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The essence of belief, I take it, is that it is taking something to be the case. We could also say that a belief is taking something to be true, so long as this does not imply that in order to have beliefs, a believer must have the concept of truth. This is a more controversial thesis and should not be built into the minimal idea of belief which all should accept. Likewise, a believer (in this minimal sense) need not have the concept of something’s being the case. In this sense, a relatively simple creature can have beliefs, so long as it takes the world to be a certain way, or takes certain things to be the case. ‘Taking something to be the case’ could be understood in terms of perceptual consciousness, where what is taken to the case is present to the mind at the moment it is perceived. But this is not how it is with belief: belief is not just a matter of taking something to be the case for the duration of (e.g.) a perceptual experience. Rather, it is essential to beliefs that they persist through changes of in current consciousness. Beliefs are stored in memory and can be called upon when future action is needed. It is crucial that they do this if they are to guide the actions of organisms in the way they do. An organism which could only take things to be the case as they perceptually seem at the present moment would have to learn anew each fact about its environment. It is hard to know whether there are any such creatures, but it is clear enough that we and other believers are not like this. When a belief is formed, by perception or by other means, it can be stored in the organism’s mind and then can be put at the service of the organism’s projects in various ways—either by guiding action, by being used in reasoning or by being used in planning. For beliefs to play this functional role, they must continue to exist—that is, persist—beyond the moment of their acquisition. This feature of beliefs is reflected in our common-sense psychological understanding: we do not count someone as stopping believing something when they go to sleep, lose consciousness, or when the subject-matter of their belief is not before their conscious mind. A defender of ‘conscious beliefs’ must say that this is one of the reasons that we should recognize the phenomenon of unconscious belief: in descriptions of this phenomenon, we are typically invited to think of all the things which we believe which have rarely, if ever, come before our conscious mind. This is quite right—but it is rarely recognized that since the persisting character of belief is essential to it, it makes conscious belief hard to understand.

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If a conscious belief were an occurrence, it would exist for as long as that occurrence were to exist. For a belief to cease to be conscious, then, on this understanding, would be for the occurrence to cease, or to go out of existence. But if the occurrence thus went out of existence—for example, when the subject paid attention to something else, or became unconscious—then it cannot play the essential role of belief as I have characterized it. So whatever such an occurrence is, it cannot be belief: ‘occurrent belief’ is not belief at all. It might be objected that this is a merely verbal point: that all I am doing here is deciding to use the word ‘belief’ for the persisting, unconscious functional state, and forbidding its use for occurrent, conscious episodes of judgement. But since I do not deny that that there are such conscious episodes, then what can be wrong with calling them ‘beliefs’, so long as we also distinguish episodes from persisting states? It is, of course, notoriously difficult to say when a thesis or question is a ‘merely verbal’ one. But if I am right that there is a fundamental metaphysical distinction between episodes/occurrences and persisting states, then it is misleading at best to use the term ‘belief’ for entities in both categories. For one kind of entity goes out of existence when we go to sleep and another does not. How much more different could these entities be? Calling these two states ‘belief1’ and ‘belief2’ would only obscure the fundamental difference between them. Some support for this view of belief—that conscious belief is not a kind of belief—comes from reflection on the phenomenon of knowledge. Although on most views, there is a close connection between belief and knowledge, it is not common to hear talk of ‘conscious knowledge’, as there is this tendency to talk of conscious belief. And no-one talks of ‘occurrent’ knowledge.3 This is revealing: for if belief can be occurrent, why can knowledge not be so too? And yet knowledge often plays the same kind of functional role as is often attributed to belief, in organizing an subject’s behaviour and reasoning (see Williamson 2000: 60–64). And we do not consider that someone necessarily loses their knowledge when they go to sleep. Knowledge can be lost, of course: there is forgetting, and there are maybe other ways of losing knowledge too (see Dretske and Yourgrau 1983). But someone does not lose knowledge in any sense simply because they think about something else, or lose consciousness. So for the same kinds of reason why belief cannot be an occurrence, knowledge cannot be an occurrence either.

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What is undeniable is that there is such a thing as bringing what you know to mind, or to consciousness. Bringing X to mind is without question an occurrence; but this fact on its own does not make ‘bringing X to mind’ a special kind of X. One could stipulate here, and say that all that is meant by calling a belief ‘occurrent’ is that it is one which you are bringing to mind, or bringing to consciousness, or consciously attending to. This is how I understand a remark like this of Graham Oddie’s: ‘a belief is occurrent if it is the belief that you are consciously attending to’ (Oddie 2005: 240). Whatever the merits of such a stipulation, it clearly is not supposed to be part of an explanation of consciousness, since it assumes the idea of ‘consciously attending’ to something. This is not an objection to the stipulation as such; it is just to point out what the stipulation is, and is not, supposed to be doing. Nonetheless, whatever stipulations we make, we should accept that there is such a thing as attending to what we know and believe. ‘Bringing what we believe to consciousness’ is a good description of this, however this notion should be further understood.4 And it is plausible that this is the same phenomenon as the phenomenon Block calls ‘A-consciousness’. I argued above that we should understand Block’s notion of A-consciousness in terms of bringing about a phenomenally conscious episode. That is, a state is A-conscious when it is accessible to consciousness, where this is understood in terms of being available to figure in an episode or occurrence in phenomenal consciousness. This is also how I think we should understand the talk of conscious belief. As I argued in the previous section, we should not say that A-consciousness is a distinct sort of consciousness simply because it is a disposition to bring about events in phenomenal consciousness. And the same applies to the idea of ‘conscious belief’. Just as, on Block’s view, a representation is ‘A-conscious’ when it can be brought to phenomenal consciousness, so a belief is ‘conscious’ or ‘occurrent’ when it can be brought to phenomenal consciousness. ‘Occurrent’ in ‘occurrent belief’ is a sort of transferred epithet: what is occurent is not the belief itself, but the episode of being conscious of that belief. It is important to emphasise that bringing a belief to consciousness is not just a matter of being aware of its content—since, as we saw above, the same content can be the content of many different kinds of mental state. When a belief is brought to phenomenal consciousness, the ‘attitudinal component’

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(what in other work (2001) I have called, following Searle (1992), the ‘intentional mode’) must also be an object of phenomenal consciousness So my understanding of ‘bringing something to consciousness’ is the same as my understanding of A-consciousness: what is conscious, first and foremost, is an event, not a persisting state. If this is right, then this tells against those accounts of ‘conscious belief’ (like Mellor’s and Rosenthal’s) which attempt to explain the consciousness of a belief in terms of the existence of a certain kind of state (i.e., a higher-order belief). For all belief states must have the essential characteristic of beliefs: namely, they must persist through changes in consciousness, or even through the absence of consciousness. But if this is an essential characteristic of all belief states, it will be possessed by higher-order belief states as well. So higher-order belief states cannot be conscious episodes. 4. THO UG HT AN D TH E STRE A M OF CON SC IO U S N E S S

In §2 I argued that what Block calls A-consciousness should not really be thought of as a different kind of consciousness, distinct from phenomenal consciousness. Rather, to call a state ‘A-conscious’ is to say that it can give rise to phenomenally conscious episodes. I then applied the same idea to the distinction between conscious and unconscious belief. What are called ‘conscious beliefs’ are not really beliefs at all, but rather phenomenally conscious episodes: episodes of being aware of what you believe and the fact that you believe it. The belief state itself is not conscious; rather, you can be conscious of what you believe when such a phenomenally conscious episode occurs. So when we call persisting mental states ‘conscious’ what we really mean is that they can give rise to a certain kind of phenomenally conscious events. It follows that when Block talks of A-conscious states, he should be interpreted as talking about states which can give rise to—or manifest themselves in—certain phenomenally conscious events, or what can be called more generally ‘occurrences’. What the philosophy of consciousness needs, then, is the distinction between occurrences and persisting states.5 Events and processes are both occurrences: they take time, they can unfold over time and have temporal parts. My watching a bird catching a worm in the garden is an event, as is the event I am watching. Both events take time, they unfold or develop over

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time, they typically consist of earlier parts or periods. Maybe there are also instantaneous events; in which case, not all events have significant temporal parts. But nonetheless, an instantaneous event is still an occurrence: something that happens. States do not unfold or evolve over time: they consist in the instantiation of properties and/or relations in objects. If we think of an object as changing its state—e.g., its temperature—this is not because the state itself evolves over time, but because one state is followed by a different one. This is because states do not have temporal parts. My having the height I do is a state of me; it makes no sense to talk about the earlier part or the later part of my having the height I do. D. H. Mellor once distinguished between objects and events by saying that unlike events, objects are ‘wholly present’ at each moment of their existence (1981: 104). This distinction can be used also to distinguish between events and states. An event with temporal parts cannot be wholly present throughout each moment of its existence: at any moment at which the event is ‘going on’ or happening, some temporal parts of the event exist or are present, and others do not. This is not true with states. Consider a state which consists in an instantiation of a property in a particular over a period of time (note that I am not saying that all states have this structure; this is just an example). The property and the particular are wholly present at each moment of the state’s existence or instantiation. If the particular ceases to have this property, then it undergoes a change of state. The change itself is an occurrence, but the resulting state is not. It is the distinction between occurrences and states which gives the non-metaphorical backbone to William James’s famous image of a stream of consciousness: Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instant. It is nothing jointed: it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let is call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. (James 1890: 233)

The image of a stream flowing suggests motion, and one thing following another. But ‘following’ in the case of consciousness must mean following

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in time. Events follow one other in time; objects do not (see Davidson 1967: 691). A cat can literally follow a mouse in space (e.g., around a room), but the event of the cat’s eating the mouse ‘follows’ the event of the cat’s catching the mouse only in its temporal ordering. Of course, states too can be ordered in time, since they are defined in terms of objects, properties and times. States can be ordered as their constituent times are ordered: as earlier than, later than or simultaneous with others. For some philosophers, this shows that all we need is the notion of a state, and no independent notion of an event. (Alternatively, they might, like Lewis (1986) and Kim (1976), use the word ‘event’ for what I am calling states.) I cannot here show that such a reductionist view of events—a reduction of events to what I would call ‘states’—is incorrect. All I will assume here is that the distinction is phenomenologically plausible for the reason James says: a sequence of states is something more like a train or a chain than something flowing, and conscious processes do not seem like chains or trains. Of course, this phenomenological observation is not decisive: it could be said that what appears to be continuous and flowing at the phenomenological level might be constituted by states which are discrete at the level of the underlying reality (just as a film in the cinema might represent continuous motion, despite the fact that it is made up of many discrete images shown one after another). Here, though, my concern is with consciousness, with the phenomenal, with the apparent metaphysics of how things seem, and not with the fundamental metaphysics. The distinction between the state of something—(e.g., the shape of the tree outside my window) and an event (e.g., the woodpecker pecking against its bark)—is a distinction which it is easy to appreciate from within consciousness. Whether the fundamental reality of the universe is event- or state-like is a further question. In §§2–3 I argued that we should think of A-conscious states (for example, so-called conscious beliefs) as states which could be ‘brought’ to phenomenal consciousness. But what does it mean to ‘bring’ a state to phenomenal consciousness? One answer is clear: it is not to create another, conscious, version of the state itself. What is brought to mind when reflecting consciously on one’s beliefs is not itself another belief. My claim is that what is brought to mind is, rather, a conscious thought. A conscious thought is an episode of thinking something. ‘Thought’ here refers to the episode or ‘act’ of thinking, not to what is thought (the latter is

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a proposition, or a Gedanke in Frege’s terminology). Thoughts in the sense in which I use the word form a heterogeneous category: I include episodes of speculation, wondering, imagining, planning, as well as the central phenomenon of judgement. There are three broad kinds of conscious occurrence which can be called judgement. The first kind occurs when a subject is making up their mind about something. When they have not formed a belief about some subject-matter and need to do so, they may weigh up the evidence and come to one conclusion or other; or they may ‘suspend judgement’. Here judgement is the formation (or the attempted formation) of belief. Judgement stands to belief in this case as decision stands to intention. Just as a conscious judgement is (in this kind of case) an event which is the formation of a belief, so a conscious decision is an event which is the formation of an intention. Intentions, like beliefs, are persisting states, and like beliefs they can manifest themselves in consciousness. (Another similarity is that one can take oneself to have formed a belief, and yet future circumstances show that one did not really have this belief; the same can be true of intention.) Episodes of the second kind of judgement are those which occur when our beliefs are brought to mind without effort, or any act of will. We need our beliefs to guide our action in the world, and often this needs to be conscious. Or we reveal what we believe in consciousness when someone asks us a question, and the answer occurs to us immediately, without effort or without having to make up one’s mind. The third kind of case occurs when one deliberates explicitly in consciousness about what one already believes. This can occur when one is trying to work out what one believes, or remember some fact, or draw out some consequence of what one believes. As with the second kind of case, this is not a case of forming a belief, but rather a case of revealing to oneself what one believes anyway. But this case involves effort, and what is sometimes called introspection. In contemporary terminology, occurrences of all three kinds are manifestations of our capacity for ‘self-knowledge’ (see Cassam 1994). The term ‘self-knowledge’ is misleading in a number of different ways: we are not talking here about knowledge of the self, but of the special kind of epistemic access that we have our own states of mind, and events in our mind. Hence, the awareness we have of our own sensations and experiences is also a form of ‘self-knowledge’ in this sense. Also, it is questionable whether

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such awareness is itself knowledge, or whether it is simply something that makes knowledge possible. (Compare: is perception itself knowledge, or is it something that makes knowledge possible?) Nonetheless, these qualifications made, we can take ‘self-knowledge’ in the contemporary sense to be a term for the distinctive capacity to access one’s own mind, as opposed to the access one has to the minds of others. In the first kind of case, of the capacity is exercised in coming to believe something (making up one’s mind). In the second kind of case, it is exercised in our spontaneous access to what we believe anyway. And in the third kind of case, the capacity is exercised in our ability to introspect and examine our own beliefs. But it is important to emphasise that not all thoughts (in my sense) are judgements. Consciously thinking something can be pursued without the desire to commit to the truth of any particular proposition thought. One could simply be considering something, without needing or wanting to make up one’s mind. Such speculation takes place against a background of belief, of course; but not all of these beliefs need to be brought to mind in order for one to speculate. Conscious thoughts, then, are episodes. My claim is that without employing the idea of a phenomenally conscious episode, it is not possible to make sense of what underlies the talk of ‘conscious belief’ or ‘access (A) consciousness’. It is true that information could be used by a cognitive system, and hence ‘accessed’ even at the level of the information–processing in the brain. But there is no reason to call this kind of ‘accessing’ a kind of consciousness. The only point of saying that these states are A-conscious, as far as I can see, is to mark the fact that they can manifest themselves in consciousness. And the same applies to the talk of ‘conscious belief’. We are now in a position to answer the question with which I began this essay: are thoughts and sensations/sensory experiences conscious in the same way? Is there a single sense of ‘conscious’ in which all these otherwise very different mental phenomena are conscious? My answer is that they are conscious in the same way, because thoughts and sensory experiences are episodes or events in the ‘stream’ of a subject’s consciousness. Of course, this is not a definition of the sense in which they are conscious, because it appeals to the idea of a stream of consciousness. But the image of the stream is supposed to tell us something significant about the structure of conscious phenomena. It is essential that thoughts or episodes of thinking,

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like sensations and sensory experiences, are occurrences: they are events or processes that have a particular temporal extent and duration. This is compatible with sensations and thoughts differing in all sorts of other ways (for example, in the extent to which it is intelligible to think of them as subject to constraints of reason or rationality). But what I have been arguing for here is the fundamental similarity between them, rather than any differences. Finally, we have seen that the other thing sensations and conscious thoughts have in common is that they can both be known by the exercise of our capacity for self-knowledge—or, as I would prefer to say, they are both available to the subject through privileged access. Why this is, and what the exact connection is between non-conscious states of mind like beliefs and our capacity to know these states with privileged access, are questions which must be left to another occasion.

5. CONC LU S ION : PH E NO M E NAL I NTE NTIONALIT Y AN D CON SC IO U S THO UG HT

What are the implications of the answer to our question for the idea of phenomenal intentionality? The first implication is that if we want to look for phenomenal intentionality outside the less controversial examples (e.g., perceptual experience), we should not be asking ourselves whether beliefs exhibit a phenomenal character of their own. If phenomenal character is the character of phenomenal episodes, and these are episodes in the stream of consciousness, then since beliefs are not episodes in the stream of consciousness, beliefs can never have phenomenal character. But thoughts—in the sense characterized in §4 above—do have phenomenal character, since they are episodes in the stream of consciousness. The next question is whether thoughts have phenomenal character of their own: i.e., phenomenal character which is not the character of some other kind of episode. It is true that some thoughts are accompanied by imagery or words (talking to yourself, words running through your mind, images coming to you). But part of the phenomenal character of the experience is something that cannot be conveyed by these sensory or linguistic representations: it is the attitudinal component of the thought. Maybe the

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‘vehicle’ of the content of a conscious thought is words running through your mind; but the attitude (judging, hoping, desiring, etc.) cannot be. There need be no words which correspond to the attitude when you judge that p rather than manifest hope that p: you do not have to verbally articulate your attitude in order for the thought to involve that attitude. To develop this argument properly would be the next stage in the defence of the thesis that conscious thoughts have a phenomenal intentionality to call their own. But the first stage is to get a correct view of the metaphysics, or apparent metaphysics, of phenomenal intentionality. This is what I have attempted to do here.

* * * The ideas in this essay were first aired at an ESF-sponsored conference in Sardinia, as part of the EUROCORES ‘Consciousness in its Natural and Cultural Context’ (CNCC) initiative. I’m very grateful to Pierre Jacob, Barry C Smith and Till Vierkant for helpful discussion on that occasion, and to subsequent audiences at King’s College London (Institute of Psychiatry, Philosophy Group), Oxford Brookes University and the University of Durham, the RIP conference in Edinburgh in honour of Timothy Sprigge, and the Conference in Liverpool on the work of Barry Dainton. Special thanks to Katalin Farkas, Alexander Greenberg, and to an anonymous reader for Oxford University Press for their very useful suggestions; and thanks to Mike Martin and Matt Soteriou for discussion of these matters some years ago.

E S S AY F O U R T E E N

Subjective Facts

(2003)

It is obvious that a man who can see knows things which a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics. Thus the knowledge which other men have and he has not is not a part of physics. —Bertrand Russell (1927: 389)

1. M E LLOR’ S OB J EC TIVI S M AN D S U B J EC TIVE FAC T S

An important theme running through D. H. Mellor’s work is his realism, or as I shall call it, his objectivism: the idea that reality as such is how it is, regardless of the way we represent it, and that philosophical error often arises from confusing aspects of our subjective representation of the world with aspects of the world itself. Thus, central to Mellor’s work on time has been the claim that the temporal A-series (previously called ‘tense’) is unreal while the B-series (the series of ‘dates’) is real. The A-series is something which is a product of our representation of the world, but not a feature of reality itself. And in other, less central, areas of his work, this kind of theme has been repeated: ‘Objective Decision Making’ (1980) argues that the right way to understand decision theory is as a theory of what is the objectively correct decision, the one that will actually as a matter of fact achieve your intended goal, rather than the one that is justified purely in terms of what you believe, regardless of whether the belief is true or false. ‘I and Now’ (1991) argues against a substantial subjective conception of the self, using

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analogies between subjective and objective ways of thinking about time and subjective and objective ways of thinking about the self. And in the essay which shall be the focus of my attention here, ‘Nothing Like Experience’ (1992-1993), Mellor contests arguments which try and derive anti-physicalist conclusions from reflections on the subjective character of experience. A common injunction is detectable: when doing metaphysics, keep the subjective where it belongs: inside the subject’s representation of the world. Mellor’s objectivism is of a piece with the Australian metaphysics which he admires. Australian metaphysics is, however, characteristically physicalist in letter and in spirit. But Mellor has rejected physicalism in a number of places; in most detail in an essay we wrote together, ‘There Is No Question of Physicalism’ (1990). One view which is implicit in this essay is that each area of investigation should be answerable to its own standards and should not be required to justify itself in terms of how it relates to physics. The facts discovered by the various sciences can all be as objective as the facts discovered by physics. Objectivism, therefore, is not physicalism, since the former does not entail that all of objective reality is physical, while the latter does. Yet I shall argue here that in the case of the subjective quality of experience, Mellor has adopted ideas from physicalism which are implausible, and arguments which are mistaken, and that he would be better off without them. In his various discussions of the problem of the subjective character of experience, Mellor has expressed his view by denying that there are any ‘subjective facts’. In ‘I and Now’ he writes: Many philosophers overrate the present subject. Pace Nagel, there are no subjective facts or selves; nor . . . does our ability to think and talk about our present selves, and the world as seen from our present point of view, pose any special metaphysical, semantic or epistemic problems.1

And in ‘Nothing Like Experience’, he says that ‘there are, I believe, no subjective facts about anything: they have all been falsely inferred from certain kinds of knowledge’.2 The inferences he is talking about are made most lucidly in Frank Jackson’s famous ‘knowledge argument’, which is designed to show, from apparently uncontroversial premises and simple reasoning, that the physicalist conception of the world is false. Mellor rightly points out that, if sound, the argument would show more than that: it would show

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that some facts are subjective, and thus that a view which says that all facts are objective would be false. (Since a lot of what follows depends on what ‘objective ‘ and ‘subjective’ mean, the reader will have to wait for a more precise statement.) So Mellor thinks he has to show that the knowledge argument is unsound, since he thinks he cannot accept its conclusion. He therefore adopts the ability hypothesis of Lewis and Nemirow, which is intended to show that the knowledge argument is fallacious, resting on an equivocation on ‘knowledge’.3 I shall argue here, against Lewis, Nemirow, and Mellor, that the ability hypothesis is mistaken and that all the other physicalist attempts to reject the argument (either as invalid or as unsound) are equally mistaken. The knowledge argument is a sound argument for the conclusion that there are subjective facts: facts about the subjective character of experience. However, unlike some defenders of the argument,4 I do not think that this conclusion threatens any plausible version of physicalism, and nor should threaten the most plausible understanding of Mellor’s views. Mellor and the physicalist should both accept that there are subjective facts, and they should both deny, therefore, that all facts are objective, in the sense I shall explain.

2 . TH E KNOW LE DG E ARG U M E NT

Jackson’s famous knowledge argument does not move from a claim about the existence of experience to the denial of physicalism; it moves from a claim about how we know about experience to the denial of physicalism; hence its name.5 The argument starts with a thought-experiment about Mary, who has spent all her life in a black-and-white room, has never seen any colours other than black and white. Now imagine that Mary has made an intensive study of the science of colour in all its aspects—physics, physiology, psychology, and so on. In fact, let us suppose that she knows all the physical facts about colour. Now suppose that one day Mary leaves her black-and-white room, and the first thing she sees is a red tomato. It is natural to say that she now knows something which she did not know in the black-and-white room: what it is like to see red. Yet this thing she now knows is not a physical fact, since by hypothesis she knew all the physical facts in the black-and-white room. So if a new piece of knowledge is a new fact, then Mary learns a new fact when she leaves the black-and-white room.

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If physicalism is (as seems plausible enough) the view that all facts are physical facts, then it appears that physicalism is false. The knowledge argument does not beg the question against physicalism. This is clear if we represent its premises and conclusions as follows: 1. In the room, Mary knows all the physical facts about colour. 2. Having left the room, Mary learns something new about colour. 3. Therefore: not all facts are physical facts. That, in essence, is the argument—though some extra assumptions are needed to demonstrate its validity properly. But it is clear that neither premise (1) nor premise (2) obviously beg any questions against physicalism. A physicalist could hardly object that the idea of someone learning all the physical facts begs the question against physicalism. And (2) seems an irresistible and simple thing to say about the story as described above. Maybe, when these premises are scrutinised, they will come to show some deep incoherence—but the argument as stated does not obviously beg the question. Physicalists have tried to resist the conclusion by impugning either the validity of the argument, or the truth of the premises. I think they are wrong. I think that the argument is valid, and that physicalists should accept its premises. So they should accept its conclusion. Yet I shall argue too that they should not worry about this conclusion; so this conclusion cannot be that physicalism, properly understood, is false. In §3, I will assess the objection that the argument is invalid, and in §4, I will assess the objections to the premises. In §5 I will bring out what I think the argument really shows: that there are subjective facts. In §6 I shall examine the consequences of this conclusion for physicalism and for Mellor’s views.

3. C HALLE NG I NG TH E ARG U M E NT ’ S VALI DIT Y: TH E ‘AB I LIT Y HY P OTH E S I S ’

Those who challenge the argument’s validity normally claim that it involves an equivocation on ‘know’.6 In the first premise, ‘know’ is used to express propositional knowledge, but (they say) in the second premise it is used to express knowledge-how or ability knowledge. We should agree that Mary

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learns something new, but what she learns when she first sees red is how to recognise red, to imagine red, and to remember experiences of red things.7 Having seen something red, she can now recognise the colour of fire engines, she can consider whether she wants to paint her bedroom red, and she can remember this decisive encounter with a tomato. These are cognitive abilities, not pieces of propositional knowledge, and it is a widely held view that there is no reduction of ability knowledge to propositional knowledge. So Mary can learn something new—in the sense of gaining an ability—but it is not a new piece of propositional knowledge. Knowing what it is like to see red is know-how. So the knowledge argument is invalid because it involves a fallacy of equivocation: ‘know’ means something different in the two premises. Since it is only in the case of propositional knowledge that the objects of knowledge are facts—if I know how to ride a bicycle, how to ride a bicycle is not a fact—it is concluded that Mary does not come to know any new facts and physicalism is saved. This response, known as ‘the ability hypothesis’, presupposes two things: (i) that knowledge-how is ability knowledge, and it is completely different from, and irreducible to, propositional knowledge; and (ii) that regardless of the abilities she acquires, Mary does not come to know any new propositions whatsoever. The first claim (i) is a general theoretical claim about the relation between know-how, abilities, and propositional knowledge. This claim is actually more dubious than is normally assumed; but space does not permit me to examine it here.8 I shall concentrate rather on the second claim, (ii). The defenders of the ability hypothesis say that Mary learns no new propositional knowledge at all. But this claim is really very implausible. For there is a very natural way for Mary to express her knowledge of what it is like to see red: ‘Aha! Red looks like this!’ (Let’s suppose, for simplicity, that Mary knows that tomatoes are red, and she knows that she is seeing a tomato; these are innocuous assumptions.) Now, ‘Red looks like this’ is an indicative sentence; in a given context, it surely expresses a proposition; and in the context described, the proposition is true. (It could have been false. Suppose Mary were shown a joke tomato, painted blue; the proposition expressed by ‘Red looks like this’ would be false; red does not look like that.) And it is a proposition that Mary did not know before. This all assumes that a sentence containing a demonstrative can be used to express a proposition; but this assumption is innocuous and should be accepted by all participants in the debate (we shall see its full relevance later). So even

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if Mary did acquire lots of know-how, and even if know-how is essentially different from propositional knowledge, then there is still something that she learns which she could not have known before. And that is enough for the argument to succeed. Further support for the view that there is a proposition which is learned is provided by Brian Loar’s observation that someone can reason using the sentence ‘Red looks like this’: they could embed it in a conditional, for example, ‘If red looks like this, then either it looks like this to dogs or it does not’. On the face of it, this is a conditional of the form ‘If P then Q’; the substituends for P and Q are bearers of truth-values and therefore possible objects of propositional knowledge.9 The ability hypothesis has to explain this away if it is to support its conclusion that nothing propositional is learned. I doubt whether this can be done. For all these reasons, I reject the ability hypothesis. An alternative way to question the validity of the argument is to say that the knowledge gained is knowledge by acquaintance.10 Mary is acquainted with some feature of redness (what it looks like) or with some feature of her experience (qualia, as it may be). Acquaintance knowledge is not reducible to propositional knowledge; but these features (of redness, or of experiences) may nonetheless be physical. To this objection, my response is essentially the same as my response to the ability hypothesis: unless the objector can show that Mary does not learn any propositional knowledge too, then the fact that she does gain acquaintance knowledge is irrelevant to the argument’s conclusion. And we have a perfectly clear example of the kind of proposition Mary learns: the proposition expressed by the sentence ‘red looks like this’. Mellor thinks that the Ability Hypothesis refutes the knowledge argument; he also says it explains why Nagel is wrong about the limits of objective knowledge: These are not the only otherwise mysterious facts which the know-how theory explains. It also explains science’s mysterious inability, which so impresses Nagel, to tell us what a bat’s sonar experiences are like. But on the know-how theory this is no mystery, nor a limitation on the factual scope of objective science. For the only knowledge any science ever gives us is knowledge of facts. And even if many abilities depend on knowing facts, there is always more to having those abilities than knowing those facts.11

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But if the ability hypothesis is false, then it cannot explain why Nagel is wrong about the ‘factual scope of objective science’. Indeed, it seems rather that there are facts about the bat’s experience (assuming it has experiences) which are beyond the scope of objective science: the facts which would be truly expressed (per impossibile) by saying ‘Experiencing the world from a sonar point of view is like this’. Or to take a more everyday example, the fact that I can express when I say ‘red looks like this’ is a fact that a blind person cannot know. Yet, as Russell points out, a blind person can know the whole of physics. And there is nothing relevant to this debate which stops the blind person learning the whole of objective science. True enough, the sighted person has abilities which the blind has not, and Mellor is right that no amount of science can give you these abilities. But this is irrelevant. The important point is not that there are these abilities which someone who knows what it is like has; the important point is that someone who knows what it is like knows that certain things are the case. This is the propositional knowledge which the sighted have and the blind lack, in addition to whatever abilities they may also have. 4. C HALLE NG I NG TH E PRE M I S E S

I therefore reject these attempts to dispute the validity of the argument; the argument is valid. But what about the premises? Few physicalists wish to challenge the first premise, that in the story as told, Mary knows all the physical facts about colour vision.12 For suppose a physicalist did deny this. Then they would have to accept that there are some physical facts which in principle cannot be known without having certain experiences. Physics, the science which states the physical facts, is in principle incompletable until certain very specific experiences are had. Now it may be true that having knowledge in general requires having experiences of some kind. Yet how can physicalism, which bases its epistemological outlook on physical science, require that science demands us to have certain specific experiences? The suggestion has little plausibility. So most responses to the argument have challenged the second premise instead, and claimed that Mary does not learn any new fact. In a recent survey, Güven Güzeldere describes this character of this dominant response as follows:

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The pivotal issue here is whether the having of an experience constitutes a special class of irreducible ‘first-person facts’ or whether what is lacking in Mary has to do with her experiential ‘mode of access’ to facts that she is already acquainted with.13

The idea seems to be that Mary already knows all the facts in question, she simply gains a new ‘mode of access’ (whatever that is) to a fact she already knew. If this response were right, then certainly the argument would be undermined. But it seems to me that, despite its popularity, the response cannot be correct. The central idea is that Mary apprehends or encounters in a new way something she already knew. The phrase ‘mode of access’ is often used to describe what this encountering in a new way is. But what are ‘modes of access’? One way to understand them is in terms of a new Fregean mode of presentation of the objects and properties already known under other modes of presentation. On this interpretation, the puzzle about the argument is of a piece with other puzzles about intensionality, and many authors have explicitly drawn this comparison. Vladimir might know that Hesperus shines in the evening but not know that Phosphorus shines in the evening. We do not conclude from this that Hesperus is not Phosphorus since, as is well known, ‘X knows that p’ is not an extensional context. On this view, the fact that Hesperus shines in the evening is the same fact as the fact that Phosphorus shines in the evening—after all, they are the same star, the same shining, the same evening! So although Mary knows that red looks like this, this is not a new fact that she has learned but, analogously, a new mode of presentation of a fact she knew before. But which fact is this? We need to identify something which can be referred to in more than one way, the relevant fact concerning which can be learned about in the black and white room. One way of putting it might be like this. When she leaves the black-and-white room, Mary judges that seeing red is like this. The physicalist says that seeing red is being in brain state B, so let us suppose Mary knew this in the black and white room. Mary can therefore infer that being in brain state B is like this. We therefore have two terms, ‘seeing red’, ‘being in brain state B’ which pick out the same thing, and a predicate ‘like this’ which can only be used when one is having the experience. But nonetheless, the experience is the brain state for all that.

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So far so good. But remember that the distinction between different modes of presentation of the same thing is supposed to show that the second premise of the argument is false: Mary does not learn anything new. But it cannot show this. For if this construal of Mary’s case and the case of Hesperus and Phosphorus are really parallel, then this entails that someone who comes to believe that Phosphorus shines in the evening because of their belief that Hesperus is Phosphorus does not learn anything new, but only comes to appreciate a previously known fact under a new mode of presentation. And this cannot be right: the original point of the distinction between sense and reference was to do justice to the fact that the discovery that Hesperus is Phosphorus can be a significant advance in someone’s knowledge. It was a discovery about the heavens that Hesperus is Phosphorus, it was a new piece of knowledge that the ancients gained. So similarly the knowledge that Phosphorus shines in the evening is a new piece of knowledge. If facts are what you learn when you gain knowledge, then the normal approach to the distinction between sense and reference entails that what the ancient astronomers learned when they learned that Hesperus is Phosphorus is a new fact. Of course, there is something which is the same before and after this particular discovery: how things are in the world, the reference of the terms, the entities. No-one disputes this about the Hesperus/Phosphorus case. So one could say: ‘in a sense the facts are the same, in a sense they are different’. But the relevant question is whether anything is learned when someone acquires the belief that Hesperus is Phosphorus, whether there is any new knowledge at all. And if there is a sense in which the fact learned is a new fact (even if there is a sense in which things are the same too) then there is new knowledge. This surely cannot be denied. Note that if you do deny this, you have to deny at the very least that there is new knowledge in the following sense: the knowledge that the two modes of presentation are modes of presentation of the same thing.14 But this makes it impossible to even state what it is that the ancients learned. Since they introduced the parallel, it would be fruitless for physicalists to try and draw some principled difference between the Mary case and the case of Hesperus and Phosphorus. So either physicalism says that nothing new is learned in either case—which is a hopeless thing to say—or it says that something is learned in both cases. This is the only plausible thing to

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say. But then Mary does learn something new, the argument’s premises are true, and we already decided it was valid. So is physicalism refuted?

5. PHYS IC AL FAC T S AN D S U B J EC TIVE FAC T S

This depends, of course, on what physicalism is. What is refuted is the doctrine that all facts are physical facts—given a certain understanding of ‘physical’ and ‘fact’. The argument assumes a certain understanding of what ‘physical facts’ are. What are facts? Philosophers have disagreed over the nature of facts and over whether there are such things. Some say that facts are true propositions, others that they correspond one-one with true propositions, and others say that since they are what make true propositions true (they are ‘truth-makers’) they need not correspond one-to-one with true propositions.15 What conception of fact does the knowledge argument assume? It is obvious, I think, that the knowledge argument has to assume that facts are objects of propositional knowledge—where a state of propositional knowledge is one described in claims of the form ‘X knows that p’ where X is a knower and ‘p’ is replaced by a sentence. So for something to be a new fact is at least for it to be a new piece of knowledge, an advance in someone’s knowledge, some piece of knowledge that they did not have before. Does this mean that the knowledge argument covertly begs the question against physicalism by assuming a conception of fact which physicalism would reject? No. Whether or not physicalism decides to call objects of propositional knowledge ‘facts’, physicalism should certainly accept that there are objects of propositional knowledge, and that knowledge states are individuated partly by their objects. Everyone accepts that there are such objects of propositional knowledge, whether or not they also accept that there are facts in some other sense. So I think it is a mistake to say that we need to establish which theory of facts is correct before settling whether the knowledge argument works. This would be to claim that the argument had to have as a hidden premise that one particular theory of facts is the right one. But this is not so; everyone has to accept that there are objects of propositional knowledge. The knowledge argument’s conception of fact does not beg any questions. What it says is that a distinct piece of propositional knowledge is knowledge

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of a distinct fact. This is surely a very natural and uncontroversial idea. We can learn skills or pieces of information, when we learn pieces of information what we learn are facts. But it is sometimes said that there are two notions of pieces of information (or fact): a coarse-grained notion and a fine-grained notion.16 According to the fine-grained notion, facts are individuated at the level of sense; for the coarse-grained notion, facts are individuated at the level of reference. Note that this point is sometimes put in service of the mistaken idea (dismissed above) that Mary learns nothing new, but only gains a new ‘mode of access’ to what she knew already. If one uses the distinction between coarse and fine grained facts to support this mistaken idea, then one is forced to say that only the coarse-grained notion is relevant to the individuation of knowledge. But this is clearly false, and not something a physicalist should appeal to, for all the reasons given in the previous section. In The Facts of Causation (1995), written after the essays in philosophy of mind under discussion here, Mellor makes a distinction between facts and what he calls facta. Facts are the ‘shadows’ of truths—if it is true that p it is a fact that p. Facta are the truth-makers for truths; it is an empirical question which facta there are, just as it is an empirical question which properties there are. So we should not infer difference of facta from difference of facts; facta and facts do not stand in one-one correspondence. This distinction, which for present purposes corresponds to the distinction between finegrained and coarse-grained facts, marks a terminological departure from his earlier work, in which (as we saw) Mellor claimed that there were no subjective facts. In the earlier work, the term ‘fact’ was reserved for truth-makers only. The terminological change is welcome, since without it, Mellor would have to deny that the ancients learned a new fact when they learned that Hesperus is Phosphorus—he would have to express what is new about the ancients’ condition in a different way. But the terminological change cannot help Mellor in his campaign against the knowledge argument, as we shall see below. I think we should agree with Mellor that both notions of fact (or the notions of fact and factum) have their place. This is consistent with saying what I said above, namely that the objects of knowledge are normally individuated in a fine-grained way. Maybe sometimes we individuate the objects of knowledge in a coarse-grained way. That is perfectly acceptable, too. But so long as we do also individuate objects of knowledge in a fine-grained way, then we should accept the conclusion that Mary learns a new fact.

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Having said what the argument means by ‘fact’ we can now turn to ‘physical’. What we are asked to imagine is that the knowledge which one acquires about colours inside Jackson’s black-and-white room is stated in the language of physics. But it would not help Mary if she learned things in the room which were in the language of psychology and physiology. Nor would it help her if she learned a fully developed dualist psychology (if there were such a thing) talking about states of consciousness while explicitly acknowledging their utterly non-physical nature. None of these theories would help tell her what it is like to see red. The point is not that the kind of knowledge she gains in the black-and-white room is physical knowledge; rather, the point is that it is the sort of knowledge that can be stated in some form or another: it is ‘book-learning’. As David Lewis puts it, the ‘intuitive starting point wasn’t just that physics lessons couldn’t help the inexperienced to know what it is like. It was that lessons couldn’t help’.17 So although physicalism—understood as the view that all facts are physical facts—is one of the targets of the argument, it is really an instance of a more general target: the view that all knowledge of the world is the kind that can be imparted in lessons, without presupposing any particular kind of experience. Thus any view which was committed to this view of knowledge would come within the knowledge argument’s range. Likewise with Cartesian dualism—one could not know what it is like to see red, the argument implies, even if one learned the complete Cartesian theory of the mind. Paul Churchland has argued that this feature of the argument shows that it proves too much.18 He thinks that Jackson’s argument involves a ‘logical pathology’: it ‘makes any scientific account of our sensory experience entirely impossible, no matter what the ontology employed’. But this is plainly a non-sequitur: all that follows from the knowledge argument is that if one knew the full scientific account of our sensory experience, it would not follow that one knew what it was like to have the experience. This entails nothing about whether such a full scientific account of the workings of our senses can be given. Now Churchland himself identifies this as the main issue at one point: if it works at all, Jackson’s argument works against physicalism not because of some defect that is unique to physicalism; it works because no amount of discursive knowledge, on any topic, will constitute the nondiscursive knowledge that Mary lacks.19

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But he takes this to be connected to the claim that any scientific account of experience must be impossible. This, I think, is a mistake, for the reason just given. (Note that since I think Mary gains propositional knowledge, I would not identify ‘discursive’ with ‘propositional’.) It is true that what Mellor calls ‘the factual scope of objective science’ is shown to be restricted by the knowledge argument. For no scientific account of vision will tell the blind what it is like to see, and I have argued that what the blind lack here is (in addition to ability-knowledge and acquaintance knowledge) propositional knowledge. These pieces of propositional knowledge—these kinds of fact—are what objective science cannot express. But no-one should expect it to; this should not be seen as a mysterious ‘restriction’ on the powers of science. I conclude that there is no fallacy in the knowledge argument; but perhaps now we are beginning to see that its conclusion is stated rather misleadingly, i.e., as an objection to physicalism. For even if physicalism is the view that all facts are physical facts, the knowledge argument is an objection to more than this (so far, Churchland is right). It is really an objection to the view that all facts are, so to speak, ‘book-learning’ facts: facts the learning of which do not require you to have a certain kind of experience or occupy a certain position in the world. (As Jackson says, ‘you do not need colour television to learn physics or functionalist psychology’.20) ‘Objective’ would be a good name for these facts. And ‘subjective’ would therefore be a good name for those facts the learning of which requires that one has certain kinds of experience, or occupies a certain position in the world, etc. This is why I say that the knowledge argument is an argument for the view that there are subjective facts. It is an argument which shows that in order to gain new knowledge of a certain sort—to learn new facts—you have to have experiences of a certain sort. That there are subjective facts in this sense should not really come as a surprise. For another example of a fact whose apprehension depends on the subject’s specific location in space and time, consider the case of indexical knowledge. Consider, for example, Vladimir lost in the forest; he consults his compass and a map and remarks with relief ‘I am here!’ pointing to a place on the map. When Vladimir exclaims ‘I am here!’ pointing at the map, this is something he learned. He now knows where he is, and he did not before. In a classic essay, John Perry describes himself following a trail of sugar around a supermarket, intending to tell the shopper from whom it

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came that he was making a mess.21 When Perry realised that he was making a mess he learned something, which he expresses by saying ‘It’s me! I am making a mess!’ And this piece of knowledge is distinct from the knowledge he would express by saying ‘The shopper with the leaking sugar bag is making a mess’. Both examples of new pieces of knowledge require one to have a certain position in the world: Vladimir and Perry cannot learn what they learn without occupying certain positions, or being the person that they are. In particular, they cannot learn these pieces of knowledge, these facts, from books. How could they? (Some writers have noted here the analogy with the knowledge argument. I will discuss this further below.)22 What Mary, Vladimir, and Perry have all learned are subjective facts. Mellor may try to neutralise this conclusion at this point by appealing to the distinction between facts and facta. Perhaps he may admit that there are subjective facts in the sense of subjective truths, or in the sense of objects of knowledge (so long as objects of knowledge are individuated by sense rather than solely by reference). After all, Mellor will not want to deny that Vladimir and Perry learn something new, since his account of time requires that indexical propositions are genuinely distinct propositions from their non-indexical truth-makers.23 But he may say that the original denial of subjective facts should now be interpreted (in the terminology of The Facts of Causation) as a denial of subjective facta, or truth-makers. That is, even if Mellor were persuaded by my argument that Mary does learn a new fact, and that her situation is relevantly like the indexical case, he may nonetheless say that this is just another way of saying that there are subjective truths. What really matters is the denial of subjective facta. And this, as the indexical analogy shows, is untouched by the knowledge argument. But what would a subjective factum be? A subjective fact, as I defined it above, is a fact the learning of which requires that the learner has a certain kind of experience or occupies a certain position in the world. Facta, by contrast, are not learned: they are what make true the truths that are learned. So maybe we could say this: a subjective factum is the truth-maker for a subjective truth or fact. Or: a subjective factum is what has to exist in order for a subjective fact to be learned. (This is rough, but nothing here depends on its being more precise.) So what needs to be the case for Mary to learn that red looks like this? An obvious part of the answer is: a visual experience of red. Mary’s visual experience of red needs to exist if she is to learn that red looks like this. Now if a subjective factum is an experience,

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then no-one should deny the existence of subjective facta; for the issue is not about the existence of experiences. Experiences are subjective in the sense that they depend on the existence of experiencing subjects; but Mellor does not deny the existence of experiencing subjects (e.g., Mary) either. So what could Mellor be denying if he were to deny that there are subjective facta? The objective/subjective distinction I drew above was between different kinds of knowledge. Admittedly, it is hard to see how it clearly applies to kinds of entity. Mellor should certainly say that one of the facta which constitute the truth-maker for Mary’s knowledge that red looks like this is: Mary’s experience of the tomato. And this experience might be called a subjective entity in the sense that it is an entity which is dependent on a subject of experience. The experience could be called a subjective factum, then. So it seems that Mellor must accept that there are subjective facts and that (in so far as the idea makes sense) there are subjective facta too, since there are experiences. The fact/facta distinction does not help Mellor to sustain his earlier denial that there are subjective facts. I have argued that Mellor and the physicalist should accept that there are subjective facts. The question now is how this can be made compatible with more plausible versions of physicalism and Mellor’s objectivism; that is, versions which do not say that all facts are physical or objective.

6 . PHYS IC ALI S M AN D OB J EC TIVI S M RE VI S ITE D A N D R E - DE SC R I B E D

The knowledge argument takes physicalism to be the view that all facts are physical. Given what it means by ‘fact’, this means that all propositional knowledge is physical. And given what is meant by ‘physical’, this means that all knowledge is the kind of knowledge which can be learned inside a scenario like the black-and-white room—that is, without having to have any particular kind of experience. So the target of the argument is that all facts are ‘objective facts’. And this is the view that the knowledge argument refutes. Conclusively. But: why should physicalists have to say that all knowledge is physical in this sense? Indeed, why should physicalism be a thesis about knowledge at all? Physicalism is a view about what there is and only derivatively about how we know it. The strongest and clearest motivation for physicalism, I

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have argued, comes from its claim to explain mental causation.24 In order to do this, physicalism need not be committed to the view that all knowledge must be expressible without the expresser having to have any particular experiences. It just needs to be committed to the idea that physics is causally closed, not even to the view that physics is explanatorily adequate.25 Therefore, physicalism does not need to say that physics must state all the facts. (The idea that it must may derive from the image of the book of the world, with all the truths written down in the one true story of reality. But the image is misleading; if what I say here is right, there could never be such a book. For the book cannot express the proposition that Vladimir expresses when he says ‘I am here!’ and that Mary expresses when she says ‘red looks like this!’.) It is at this point—rather than in the mistaken attempt to dispute the argument’s second premise—that the physicalist should appeal to the parallel with indexicality. The idea that Vladimir and Perry gain new knowledge—knowledge of new facts—is compatible with every object and property involved in these stories being physical, in the sense of the subject matter of physical science. And it is compatible with every object and property being objective, in the sense relevant to Mellor’s objectivism: the subject matter of objective science. The fact that these pieces of knowledge are only available from certain perspectives does not entail that there are some further non-physical/non-objective objects and properties involved in these situations. What is subjective are the facts. Now many have made the connection between indexicality and the knowledge argument. But it is important to emphasise that to appreciate it, we do not need to enter the debate about what is the correct theory of facts or resolve the question of how to individuate propositions.26 And we do not have to make the implausible move that Mary learns nothing that is really new. All we need is to recognise that there is knowledge which can only be had from certain points of view: knowledge of subjective facts. This knowledge will not be physical knowledge in the knowledge argument’s sense. And it will not be objective knowledge in Mellor’s sense. But this should not worry Mellor or the physicalist. Surprising as it may seem, a physicalist can (and should) sensibly deny that all knowledge is (in the relevant sense) physical knowledge.27 And they should therefore deny that all facts are physical facts. And Mellor should deny that all knowledge is (in the relevant sense) objective knowledge—that is, knowledge of objective facts. He should therefore deny that all facts are objective facts.

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A number of writers have drawn attention to the fact that the argument moves from epistemological premises to a metaphysical conclusion.28 Mellor says that the existence of subjective facts has ‘been falsely inferred from certain kinds of knowledge’.29 In so considering the matter, Mellor and others have tried to find something wrong with the argument. But as I have tried to show, there is nothing wrong with the argument; there is no false inference. Indeed, demonstrating exactly what the argument achieves should in itself tell us why we should not be worried by it. So long as Mellor and the physicalist do not hold that all knowledge is physical or objective, that all facts are physical or objective, or that physics must be ‘explanatorily adequate’—or that objective science can state all the facts—then the knowledge argument poses no objection to Mellor or to the physicalist. It tells us, rather, something important about our knowledge, something even physicalists and hard-headed objectivists like Mellor must accept. At the beginning of this essay, I said that a common theme in Mellor’s work is that we should not confuse aspects of the subject’s representation of reality with aspects of reality itself. Saying that there are subjective facts in the sense I have defended here is not to make any such confusion. For subjective facts are simply facts about our subjectivity. And these facts are, if you like, facts about the subject’s representation of reality. Putting it this way, we can see that there should be nothing out of keeping with the fundamental spirit of Mellor’s metaphysics in allowing facts about our subjectivity to be facts about the subject. For what else, after all, should we expect them to be?

* * * An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Philosophy of Science seminar at the Eötvös Lórand University, Budapest, at the Universities of Birmingham, Oslo, and Wales (Swansea), and at the conference Mind and Action III at the Institute for Philosophy of Language, Lisbon. Many thanks to Brian McLaughlin, my commentator at the Lisbon conference, for his comments there (and for the Russell quote); to Hallvard Lillehammer for his excellent editorial advice; and to Katalin Farkas, Carsten Hansen, Penelope Mackie, Greg McCulloch, Harold Noonan, Alex Oliver, and James Tartaglia for discussion and criticism. And special thanks to Hugh Mellor, without whom I would never have learned enough to realise why he is wrong about subjective facts.

E S S AY F I F T E E N

Papineau on Phenomenal Concepts

(2005)

OV E R TH E PA S T D EC A D E or so, David Papineau has given an account of the content and motivation of a physicalist conception of the world with more thoroughness and argumentative defence than many physicalists have thought necessary. In doing this, he has substantially advanced the debate on physicalism, and physicalists and non-physicalists alike should be grateful to him.1 At the heart of Papineau’s defence of physicalism in his recent book (2002) is his theory of phenomenal concepts. Like many physicalists, Papineau diagnoses the apparent threats to physicalism posed by the phenomena of consciousness by locating the source of anti-physicalist intuitions in features of our thinking rather than in non-physical features of reality. But what is new in Thinking about Consciousness is his detailed account of which features of our thinking it is that generate these supposedly confused anti-physicalist arguments. Hence the bulk of the book is an attempt to show that the most famous ‘consciousness-based’ anti-physicalist arguments—the knowledge argument, the zombie argument, and the explanatory gap argument—rest on a mistaken understanding of certain kinds of concepts: phenomenal concepts.

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I agree with Papineau that physicalism (properly understood) should not be troubled by the knowledge argument and the explanatory gap argument, and that some other anti-physicalist arguments seem to move from assumptions about ways of thinking to conclusions about reality. But I doubt whether his theory of phenomenal concepts can help his defence of physicalism and his diagnosis of the errors of dualism. My reason for saying this is that I do not think there are any such concepts. In saying this I do not mean to deny that there is a useful distinction to be made between scientific concepts, the mastery of which requires knowledge of a certain amount of theory, and concepts which are acquired on the basis of experience, which can be called ‘phenomenal’ concepts. Many areas of philosophy will need some such distinction, I think, however it may be drawn in detail. What I deny is that there are any phenomenal concepts in Papineau’s sense. The essence of Papineau’s theory of phenomenal concepts is that they ‘recreate’, ‘simulate’, or otherwise ‘involve’ their referents. (Although Papineau does not always make this explicit, he must be talking about episodes in which such concepts are exercised, rather than the concepts themselves.) Papineau distinguishes two ways in which phenomenal concepts can be employed: in introspection and in imagination (2002: 116–122). When one is employing a phenomenal concept of pain in introspecting a pain, the pain is a constituent of the act of introspection; but also, when thinking about the pain after it has occurred, say in imagining it or remembering it, the pain (or something like it) is also involved in the experience, as (something like) a constituent. Papineau then uses this idea to explain why it is that many philosophers have an intuition that mental and physical states are distinct (the ‘intuition of distinctness’: 2002: 6–7). His explanation is that when philosophers think about conscious states, they typically employ phenomenal concepts. These concepts, according to the physicalist, refer to the same physical states as ‘material’ or scientific concepts. But because uses of phenomenal concepts involve these states themselves, and material concepts do not, then it can appear that they cannot both refer to the same state. So it seems that mental and physical states must be distinct. But this kind of reasoning is fallacious—Papineau calls it the ‘antipathetic fallacy’ (2002: 171–174)—since for a physicalist, the distinctness is between the concepts, not the referents of the concepts. The illusion of distinctness is created by the fact that phenomenal and material concepts are so different. But once we have recognised what this real difference

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between the concepts consists in, we can see that this fact is not incompatible with physicalism. It is debatable, but I think very plausible, to say that there are some concepts which one can only have when one has had certain kinds of experience. However, it seems to me entirely incredible that when one thinks about, say, pain, one must, as a necessary part of that very act of thinking, have an experience which in any way resembles pain. When the narrator of E. M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread says that ‘physical pain is almost too terrible to bear’, he is clearly intending to talk about pain in the phenomenal sense, pain as a feeling, an event in the stream of consciousness. In any normal sense of ‘phenomenal’, then—any sense that relates it to its etymology and its traditional philosophical meaning—he is employing the phenomenal concept of pain. But in order to understand this remark, and therefore grasp the concepts which it expresses, I do not think I need to undergo, as a part of that very understanding, an experience which is in any sense painful. Yet this is what Papineau seems to be saying. In this essay, I will attempt to justify my scepticism about this remarkable view. To begin with, we should note that what is important for Papineau’s theory is his account of the imaginative use of phenomenal concepts. If his theory of the imaginative uses of phenomenal concepts fails, then his whole theory fails. Unfortunately, Papineau himself is not always entirely clear about this. At the end of Chapter 6 of Thinking about Consciousness, Papineau considers a version of the scepticism I have just raised about whether exercises of concepts must ‘resemble their referents’ (as he puts it) and offers two responses. His first response is as follows: even if imaginative uses of phenomenal concepts do not resemble the experiences imagined, these are not the only uses of phenomenal concepts. There are also introspective uses of phenomenal concepts. . . . I take it to be uncontentious that these uses of phenomenal concepts resemble the experiences they refer to . . . Given that this referential act includes the pain, it will feel like a pain. (2002: 172)

His second response is to say that the issue is whether ‘normal people take there to be a resemblance between imaginative uses of phenomenal concepts and conscious feelings’. For if they do, then ‘this will push them towards the antipathetic fallacy’. Papineau claims that it is a ‘common, everyday

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thought that imaginative uses [of phenomenal concepts] resemble the experiences imagined, even if it possible to raise philosophical doubts about such resemblances’ (2002: 173). He claims that this is enough to diagnose the fallacious reasoning in the arguments against physicalism. I will ignore this second response here. Since I have no idea whether the claim Papineau makes about normal people is true, and he himself provides no evidence for it, the point will have to be left for another occasion. In any case, the first response fails. Papineau is right that it is uncontentious that an introspective exercise of a phenomenal concept ‘involves’ the very property it refers to. But the reason for this is not the one he offers—i.e., that act of introspecting the pain is a ‘vivid copy’ of the pain, and therefore resembles the pain, and therefore feels like the pain. The introspective act is not a copy of a pain at all. It may be a representation of a pain, but not all representations are copies. It is entirely wrong to say that the introspective act feels like a pain, since this implies that there are two things which hurt: the pain and the introspective act.2 But it is impossible to distinguish the pain one feels when having a pain from the pain one feels when introspecting it. And the obvious reason for this is that they are the same thing. Papineau surely misdescribes introspection: I do not want the referential act to go away, I want the pain to go away. The real reason his claim is uncontentious is that if someone introspects an experience, E, then E must exist at the time of the introspective act. Otherwise one could not introspect it. For it is surely true that if it seems to someone that they are having an experience, then they are having an experience of some kind—even if they make a mistake about how to classify it. The principle I am assuming here is not a principle about the infallibility of our powers of discrimination, but only this: that anything which seems like an experience is an experience of some kind. In this sense, thinking about an experience—introspectively exercising a phenomenal concept—must ‘involve’ the experience, whatever it exactly is, since it implies its existence at the moment when one is thinking of it. There can be no objection, then, to treating the entire introspective event as a complex event containing the act of introspection itself and the introspected experience. Papineau’s thesis applied to introspective uses of phenomenal concepts is not just uncontentious, it is close to a truism. For a simple illustration, return to the case of pain. We can assume here for the sake of argument that whenever someone thinks they are in pain,

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they are in pain. (Of course, this principle has been questioned, but nothing turns on this here.) It follows that if I introspectively judge that I am in pain, exercising the phenomenal concept pain, what I think is true: I am in pain. There can be no objection, then, to treating the pain itself as a constituent of the episode of introspection, just as one might treat the introspection of a conscious thought as containing that thought itself. This is why I say that Papineau’s account of the introspective use of phenomenal concepts is an unexceptional thesis, which should be accepted by everyone who holds that when one thinks one is having an experience, one is having an experience. (There are difficult questions about self-knowledge and the classification of experiences which arise here, but they do not need to be addressed in this context.) If Papineau’s allows himself only to appeal to the introspective uses of phenomenal concepts, then his explanation of the intuition of distinctness will fail. For there is absolutely no reason to suppose that those who have this intuition only have it when they are introspecting their experiences. Someone could clearly and distinctly conceive that the pain they had last week was something distinct from any brain state; in having this intuition, the intuition which Papineau is so keen to diagnose away, they are employing the phenomenal concept of pain in the imaginative way. So it is his imaginative uses of phenomenal concepts which provide the problem—the intuition of distinctness—just as much as the introspective uses. For this reason, the unexceptional idea that introspective uses of phenomenal concepts involve their referents is toothless in the defence of physicalism. So it is crucial for Papineau’s theory that not just the introspective exercises of phenomenal concepts, but the imaginative exercises of them, involve their referents. So from now on I will focus simply on the imaginative exercises. For brevity, I will sometimes use the term ‘phenomenal concepts’ to mean ‘imaginative exercises of phenomenal concepts’. At some points in his book, Papineau says that phenomenal concepts instantiate the experiences they refer to (e.g., ‘we refer to a certain experience by producing an example of it’, 2002: 116; cf. also 105). Now he says this; but he cannot mean it literally. For Papineau also thinks that experiences are physical states, and that these states typically play certain causal roles (2002: 102). Indeed, a description of these physical states in terms of the causal roles they play would express the material concept of the state, as opposed to the phenomenal concept (2002: 98). So, like most physicalists,

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Papineau thinks that when one has an experience, one is in a physical state which plays a certain causal role. Now if such physicalism were true, and phenomenal concepts really did instantiate the very types of experience they refer to, then the phenomenal concept of pain would instantiate the physical state of pain, playing its causal role. But this simply does not happen when one is thinking about pain in the imaginative, non-‘material’, non-scientific way. So it cannot be true that the phenomenal concept of pain instantiates the very property it is about. Papineau actually concedes this point: An imagined pain may not be unpleasant in just the same way as a real one, but it can still make you feel queasy, or make you twitch, or make the hairs on your neck stand on end. Again, imagining tasting chocolate feels akin to actually tasting chocolate. Even if it’s not as nice, it can still make your mouth water. (2002: 174)

But if this is what Papineau thinks, then he should not express his view by saying that phenomenal concepts instantiate their referents. He should rather stick to the formulation which he chooses elsewhere in his book: that phenomenal concepts ‘resemble’ their referents: When I think imaginatively about some earlier experience, like seeing red . . . I won’t actually have the experience of seeing red, but my experience is likely to bear some phenomenal similarity to the experience of seeing red—a ‘faint copy’ as Hume put it. (2002: 105)

Let us now consider, finally, this hypothesis: that phenomenal concepts involve an experience which is phenomenally similar to the experience referred to by the concept. We should not confuse Papineau’s thesis with another idea: that all imaginative episodes are sensory or experiential in character. In other words, all imagination involves having a quasi-sensory experience (seeing in the mind’s eye, hearing in the mind’s ear, etc.). This may or may not be true, but it is a thesis about imagination, not about concepts. So it might help sidestep possible confusion to avoid the term ‘imaginative’ and rather use the neutral term, ‘non-introspective’. After all, phenomenal concepts have two uses, according to Papineau: imaginative and introspective. So we can

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replace ‘imaginative’ with ‘non-introspective’. We then arrive at this way of putting the thesis: (P) Exercising a phenomenal concept in the non-introspective way always involves an experience which resembles the experience referred to by the concept. Difficulties for this thesis emerge when we consider in some detail the apparent possibility that someone might forget or otherwise be unable to bring to mind what an experience feels like and yet still think about it in a way that is non-scientific, non-‘material’ in Papineau’s sense, and obviously non-introspective. In other words, someone could employ a phenomenal concept non-introspectively, referring to an experience E, but not have any experience resembling E at the time of employing the concept. If there really are such cases, then thesis (P) is false. It seems to me that there are many examples of this kind of thing. I think have the phenomenal concept of a diminished 7th chord. I can recognise the sound of this kind of chord when I hear it, I can tell you how it is constructed, and I can say some more or less precise phenomenal things about it—for example, about how the felt ‘tension’ of this chord, in the context of classical harmony, derives from the presence of the augmented fourth/ diminished fifth interval. But although I can hum the arpeggio to myself, I am entirely unable to call to mind the sound of the chord as such. Another example: I think I have the phenomenal concept of a wine made from Gewürztraminer grapes. I can recognise these wines when I taste them, and I can say various phenomenal things about them, for example, that they have a taste like lychees. But I am unable to bring this taste to mind now, as I think about Gewürztraminer in this phenomenal way. Finally, return to the phenomenal concept of pain. Like many human beings, I think I am very bad at imagining and remembering pain. Hence my thoughts which employ the ordinary concept of pain have not normally been accompanied by anything resembling a feeling of pain. I have been very fortunate to have led a relatively pain-free life; but I do not think this inhibits me from employing the non-material, non-scientific concept of pain in imagination and conscious thought. Notice three things about these examples. First, it is consistent with all these examples, as I have described them, that I would not possess the

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relevant phenomenal concepts—diminished 7th, Gewürztraminer, and pain—if I had not had the experiences in question. So the dependence of phenomenal concepts on prior experience is not the issue. Second, it is consistent with these examples that when I actually can imagine something, then the imagination has a sensory character. So, as noted above, the nature of imagination is not the issue. And third, these are truths about my experience, but even if they were not, it is incredible that truths of a similar kind could not be true of someone. For all that is required is a situation where a person could think in a non-introspective yet phenomenal way about certain sounds or tastes or other experiences, but be unable to recreate them in imagination. And not only does this seem very hard to deny, it is even harder to see why anyone would want to deny it. Curiously, when discussing one physicalist response to Jackson’s knowledge argument, Papineau allows that a very similar kind of case is possible. He says that someone might be able to ‘think imaginatively about experience’ but have ‘forgotten how to locate any actual past experience of the requisite kind’ and hence that the phenomenal concept of an experience cannot be identified with an indexical concept referring to a past experience (2002: 122). But Papineau does not see that it only takes a slight modification to this plausible example to create the problem cases I have described above. (Forgetting is only one way in which someone could fail to ‘locate’ an experience.) If he admits that cases like this are possible, there seem to be only two ways for Papineau to respond. First, he could say that since any episode of conscious thinking is an experiential phenomenon in a broad sense of ‘experiential’, then whatever experience the subject is having when exercising the concept is the one which resembles, in one way or another, the referent of the phenomenal concept. But surely the only way in which conscious acts of thinking must resemble experiences is by being conscious, or experiential; and a resemblance this weak clearly will not do any work for Papineau in his diagnosis of the intuition of distinctness. What he actually says about the relevant kind of resemblance—that ‘subjects be disposed to use these terms [concepts] and respond to such resembling instances in a uniform way’ (2002: 119)—does not help him, since as we saw above, subjects plainly do not respond to having pain and imagining pain in a uniform way. Secondly, Papineau could respond that these uses of concepts that I have described are not uses of genuinely phenomenal concepts. But if he says

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this, then he leaves himself open to the charge that his thesis is a mere definition of a special sense of ‘phenomenal concept’, a sense which his opponents are not obliged to employ. Since in my examples, I am not employing scientific or ‘material’ concepts of diminished 7th, Gewürztraminer, and pain, Papineau will have to accept a threefold division of concepts: material, phenomenal (in his sense) and the ‘other kind’. And then his thesis will have no especial force against the anti-physicalist, who can simply say that they are using this ‘other kind’ of concept when they have their intuition of distinctness. I agree with Papineau that the nature of the concepts we use to think about experience is a subject of interest in its own right (2002: 5). But I see no reason to believe that exercises of these phenomenal concepts must resemble the experiences they refer to in any way at all, except trivially (e.g., by being conscious or experiential in some way or another). Therefore, despite its neat attack on the intuition of distinctness, I reject Papineau’s theory of phenomenal concepts. This is not because I want to defend the arguments against physicalism. It is simply because I have not been convinced there are any such concepts.

E S S AY S I X T E E N

Tye on Acquaintance and the Problem of Consciousness (2012)

1. I NTRO D U C TION

Michael Tye’s book (2009b) has two main themes: (i) the rejection of the ‘phenomenal concept strategy’ as a solution to the problems of consciousness for physicalism, and (ii) a new proposed solution to these problems which appeals to Russell’s (1910–1911) distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. Interweaved between these two main themes are a number of radical new claims about perceptual consciousness, including a defence of a sort of disjunctivism about perceptual content and an interesting account of the phenomena of change blindness and inattentional blindness. Tye’s book shows all his usual philosophical virtues: it is bold, clear, inventive, and demonstrates his admirable willingness to scrutinise critically his earlier views. I agree with Tye that the phenomenal concept strategy—as pursued by Balog, Block, Loar, Papineau, and others—is unsuccessful. And I agree with him about this for essentially the same reason: there simply are no phenomenal concepts in the relevant sense (Tye 2009b: 56; see Crane 2005). In what

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follows, then, I will concentrate on the second main theme: the use of the notion of acquaintance to give a materialist response to some of the common anti-materialist arguments: the Knowledge Argument, the Explanatory Gap Argument, and the challenge posed by the ‘Hard Problem’. I will argue that Tye’s appeal to the notion of acquaintance fails, since there is no reason to think that there is such a thing as acquaintance in Tye’s sense. But it turns out that the essence of Tye’s response to the Knowledge Argument (at least) does not require him to appeal to the dubious notion of acquaintance.

2 . ACQ UAI NTANC E AN D T YE ’ S U S E OF IT

Tye introduces the notion of knowledge by acquaintance by means of a comparison with seeing. Just as we distinguish between seeing things and seeing facts (seeing that something is the case), so we can distinguish between knowing things and knowing facts (knowing that something is the case). This latter distinction Tye glosses in terms of Russell’s distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. Acquaintance for Tye is knowledge of things: objects, events, and their properties. It is knowledge we have simply in virtue of being conscious of those things, regardless of whether we know any truths about them. Tye rejects Russell’s claim that we are acquainted with sense-data, and he also rejects Russell’s ‘principle of acquaintance’: that ‘every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted’ (Russell 1912: 5). But he agrees with Russell’s separation of knowledge of things from knowledge of truths: ‘knowing a thing can occur without knowing any truth about it, simply in virtue of being acquainted with the thing’ (Tye 2009b: 96). Tye believes that there is a sense of ‘know’ in which ‘one knows a thing if and only if one is acquainted with that thing’ (2009b: 96). I will return to Tye’s notion of acquaintance shortly. But let me first explain how he uses this notion to respond to the anti-materialist arguments. I will assume here that these arguments (the Knowledge Argument, the Explanatory Gap Argument, the Zombie Argument, and the challenge posed by the ‘Hard Problem’) are well known in their general outlines. Tye’s response to the Knowledge Argument is that it assumes that ‘all worldly knowledge is knowledge that’ (2009b: 131). Mary’s new knowledge

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is ‘worldly’ knowledge, but it is not simply knowledge that something is the case. This is not because, as Lewis and Nemirow have argued, Mary’s knowledge is ability-knowledge; Tye (rightly) rejects their argument (2009b: 125). Rather, it is because she acquires knowledge by acquaintance or ‘objectual knowledge’. Knowing what it is like to see red, on Tye’s current view, is a ‘mixture of factual and objectual knowledge’ (2009b: 133). Mary is acquainted with the colour red when she sees red for the first time, and because of this she knows the proposition that this is what it is like to experience red (2009b: 133). Tye’s response to the Explanatory Gap argument is that it too ignores the distinction between knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance (2009b: 143). ‘The knowledge we get by acquaintance with red is logically independent of our knowledge of truths. It is physically possible for someone . . . to know all the physical facts pertaining to the experience of red and not know red (in the relevant sense of “know”)’ (2009b: 139). Because of this independence, we have the sense of a gap between the physical facts and the experiential phenomenon. There is a gap between the kinds of knowledge we have, but this does not imply a gap between the phenomena themselves. The response to the ‘Hard Problem’—which Tye sees as an extension of the Explanatory Gap problem—is essentially the same. There is an epistemic gap between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, in the sense that these are logically and metaphysically different kinds of knowledge. Because of this, we may ‘have the sense that something is missing from the physicalist story’ (2009b: 144). But, as the familiar line runs, the existence of such an epistemic gap—a gap between the two kinds of knowledge—does not entail that there is anything missing from the physicalist story about reality. Tye’s response to the Zombie Argument does not rely on the distinction between acquaintance and knowledge by description. His response to this argument instead develops, in an interesting way, the familiar physicalist line that although zombies might be conceivable, they are not metaphysically possible—because what is metaphysically possible is partly determined by what our best theory of the world is (2009b: 152). And according to physicalists, physicalism is our best theory of the world. Given this, the appeal to the possibility of zombies is question-begging as an argument against physicalism.

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Tye’s discussion of the zombie point raises many interesting points and deserves further discussion. But I will ignore it here, since my interest is in the use of the notion of acquaintance in the defence of physicalism.

3. I S TH E RE S UC H A TH I NG A S ACQ UAI NTANC E?

Tye repeatedly claims that we know things by acquaintance in a ‘perfectly ordinary’ sense of ‘know’ (see, e.g., 2009b: 95, 98, 131). The claim requires closer examination. It is, of course, quite true that we talk about knowing people and places, and we sometimes might use the (somewhat old-fashioned) word ‘acquaintance’ to describe this. Michael Tye himself is an acquaintance of mine; and like him, I am acquainted with the city of Athens. In other words, I know Michael Tye and Athens. Tye is surely right that this knowledge is pervasive, unexceptional, and very different from the knowledge that (e.g.) Michael Tye has run a marathon, or that Athens was the home of the 2004 Olympics. But this ‘perfectly ordinary’ kind of knowledge is not acquaintance in Tye’s sense. There are three important differences, which are enough to undermine Tye’s appeal here to an ordinary sense of ‘knowledge’ and ‘know’. First, on Tye’s notion of acquaintance ‘one can be acquainted with a thing (in [this] sense, following Russell) without knowing any truths about it’ (2009b: 101). If ordinary knowledge of things were like this, then it would make sense for me to say that I could know Michael Tye even if I have no idea who he is, or even what kind of thing he is! Tye admits that his notion is in tension with the ordinary concept here: ‘there is a familiar sense of “know” under which I would not count as knowing [someone] if I did not know any truths about him’. But nonetheless he also wants to insist that ‘knowing a thing can occur without knowing any truths about it simply in virtue of being acquainted with it’ (2009b: 96). Acquaintance does not entail that one knows any truths about that thing. But this is not so with the ordinary concept of knowing a thing. Second, knowing things in the ordinary sense admits of degrees. I know Michael Tye fairly well, but not as well as some other people do. Although I have been to Athens a few times, I do not know it as well as Tye does. This

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contrasts with propositional knowledge, which (on most conceptions) does not admit of degrees. But this is also a respect in which knowing things differs from Tye’s notion of acquaintance. ‘Knowledge of a particular shade of brown via direct awareness of it’ Tye writes, ‘is knowledge of a sort that cannot itself be improved or deepened by knowing truths about that shade of brown’. In this respect, he concludes ‘knowledge by acquaintance of the colour is complete and perfect’ (2009b: 97). But my knowledge of Athens can always be improved by knowledge of truths—about how to get to Kolonaki from the Parthenon by foot, for example. So knowing Athens cannot be a case of acquaintance in Tye’s sense. Third, knowledge of things in the ordinary sense is a persisting or standing mental state, as opposed to something episodic or event-like. Knowing Tye the man, or Athens the city, is not something which disappears when asleep or when one is not thinking of these things. I have known Tye and Athens for many years, and if all goes well I will continue to know them when I wake up tomorrow. In this sense, knowing things is more like propositional knowledge than it is like, say, visual perception. But Tye’s notion of acquaintance seems like something more episodic: it occurs when, and only when, one is conscious of the object of knowledge. ‘In being conscious of a particular shade of red at a particular moment’ he writes, ‘I know that shade of red’. But ‘I may not know that shade of red a few moments later after turning away’ (2009b: 98). Why would one not know the shade when one turns away? The obvious answer suggested by Tye’s remarks is that knowledge by acquaintance can be restricted to the moment in which one is conscious of it. This, I think, marks the third major difference between knowing things in the ordinary sense and Tye’s knowledge by acquaintance. I am not especially concerned to identify the essential marks of ‘the’ ordinary concept of knowing things. Obviously, there are many different concepts in this area, and room for debate about what the ordinary language meaning of words like ‘knowledge’ is. But I hope it is clear that the phenomenon I have identified as ‘knowing things’ is very different from Tye’s knowledge by acquaintance. Knowing things—in the sense in which I know Tye the man and Athens the city—is something that requires knowledge of some truths, it admits of degrees, and it is a persisting mental state, not an event in the stream of consciousness. Tye’s acquaintance does not require knowledge of truths at all, it need not admit of degrees, and it is event-like. So Tye’s acquaintance is not knowledge in ordinary sense.

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However, this does not mean that acquaintance in Tye’s sense does not exist. It just means that Tye is not entitled to appeal to the ordinary notion of knowing in his defence of acquaintance; his notion of acquaintance must be a technical notion. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But the next question is: why think this technical notion corresponds to anything in our cognitive lives? Russell’s notion of acquaintance was a technical notion too. The idea that there is one kind of experiential relation in which we stand to sense-data, universals and (possibly) ourselves is part of Russell’s complex epistemology and metaphysics from the first few decades of the early twentieth century, and is very much shaped by his preoccupations in that era. We have already seen that Russell’s view is somewhat different from Tye’s. Apart from the differences Tye himself notes, Russell also seems to think of acquaintance as something more like a persisting state: ‘it is natural to say that I am acquainted with an object even at moments when it is not actually before my mind, provided it has been before my mind, and will be again whenever occasion arises’ (Russell 1910–1911: 109). So Tye cannot simply rely on the idea that Russell has established that there is such a thing as acquaintance. Russell has not established this, and his notion of acquaintance is different from Tye’s. So if we cannot appeal to the ordinary notion, or to Russell, why believe that there is such a thing as acquaintance in Tye’s technical sense? Why think that there is a special kind of ‘objectual knowledge’ which we only get by being conscious? Tye offers a number of answers, none of which is persuasive. He begins by saying that consciousness is ‘undeniably epistemically enabling’ (2009b: 98). In other words, when I am conscious of something, I am put in a position to know facts about it. Tye is right that this is undeniable; but he is also aware that this goes nowhere to show that we need a technical notion of acquaintance. This point could be granted by someone who thinks that there is conscious experience, and that conscious experience can make propositional knowledge possible. Tye then moves to what he calls ‘a more direct answer’: it is simply incoherent to suppose that one might be genuinely (non-inferentially) conscious of an entity and yet not know it at all. In being conscious of a particular shade of red at a particular moment, say, I know that shade of

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red. How could I not? I know it just by being conscious of it. I may not know that shade of red a few moments later, after turning away; I may not know any truths about that shade of red; but as I view the shade, know it I do in some ordinary basic sense of the term ‘know’. (2009b: 98)

I have already disputed whether Tye is right to call this an ‘ordinary’ sense of ‘know’, so I will ignore this point here. What I want to examine instead is the idea that when I am conscious of a shade of red, I know it. What does it mean, to know a shade of red? It might mean: to know which shade it is; or to know that it is called ‘vermillion’, for example; or know simply that it is a shade or red. But Tye clearly does not mean these things, since they are examples of knowledge of truths. Nor does it mean that one can recognise it, for this means being able to identify it when seen again, and Tye rules this out by saying that I may not know the shade a moment later. So what is this knowledge? There is something to be said for Tye’s claim that it incoherent to suppose that one might be conscious of something and not know it at all (so long as we restrict ourselves, as Tye reasonably does, to the consciousness of creatures capable of thought and propositional attitudes). Even in cases where one might be tempted to say that one has no idea what it is that one is conscious of, one can always classify the object of consciousness in some way—as a sound, a shape, a colour etc. But this does not support Tye’s claim, because these classifications are—or result in—just more propositional knowledge. To insist that ‘I know it just by being conscious of it’ is, in this context, question-begging. The whole question is whether there is a special kind of non-propositional knowing which derives simply from being conscious. Tye has not provided an independent reason that there is. I am sceptical, then, that there is any such thing as acquaintance as Tye construes it, and so sceptical too that there is any such thing as knowledge by acquaintance. There is conscious experience of the world, e.g., in vision. There is propositional knowledge. And there is everyday knowledge of things. But none of these amount to acquaintance in Tye’s technical sense. However, it turns out that Tye does not need to appeal to acquaintance in his technical sense in order to give the kind of solution to the Knowledge Argument he offers. I do not think he needs it for his solution to the other puzzles too, but I will concentrate here on the Knowledge Argument.

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4. TH E KNOW LE DG E ARG U M E NT

Tye says that the Knowledge Argument relies on the assumption that ‘all worldly knowledge is knowledge that’ (2009b: 131). In fact, this is not the case: a defender of the argument can easily agree that we can know objects, in the ordinary sense described above. Rather, what the argument relies on is that some of the worldly knowledge Mary gains is knowledge that—for the argument aims to show (at the very least) that she knew a truth that she did not know in the black-and-white room. It is consistent with this conclusion that Mary comes to have new knowledge of objects when she leaves the room, just as it is consistent with this conclusion that Mary comes to have know-how that she did not have before. Tye agrees that Mary learns a new truth, so he agrees with this part of the conclusion of the argument. He thinks that Mary learns the truth that this is what it is like to experience red (2009b: 133). She did not know this truth before, according to Tye, because she was not acquainted with the colour red. When she is acquainted with the colour red, she is then in a position to know this proposition. However, we have found Tye’s notion of acquaintance hard to pin down. Fortunately, he does not need it. For the same point can be made using a psychological concept which really is ‘perfectly ordinary’: seeing (or visually experiencing, it does not matter which). It is part of the story that Mary sees red for the first time when she leaves the room. It is also independently plausible that seeing is a way of getting knowledge (as Tye says, consciousness is ‘epistemically enabling’: 2009b: 98). Putting these two ideas together, we can say that it is because she sees red for the first time that she now knows that this is what it is like to experience red. This knowledge is propositional, as Tye says, but it is based on a mental state which is non-propositional, namely seeing red. This account of Mary’s situation is very similar to Tye’s, except that the obscure notion of acquaintance is replaced with the perfectly familiar notion of seeing. This account would solve the puzzle if we accept the principle that there are some truths that you cannot know unless you have had certain experiences. So Mary can only know that this is what it is like to experience red after she has experienced red. She could not know this in the black-andwhite room: not because it is a truth about some mysterious non-physical feature of the world, but because it is the kind of truth that requires the

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knower to have an experience. I think this ‘empiricist’ principle is plausible (see Crane 2005), though it has been challenged (see, e.g., Dennett 2007). Certainly, more would have to be said to defend it than I can say here. But for present purposes, it is enough to point out that the principle is perfectly compatible with physicalism and with the main lines of thought in Consciousness Revisited. Finally, it is worth pointing out that taking this line on the knowledge argument is not a way of re-introducing the phenomenal concept strategy which Tye rightly rejects. The concepts which Mary employs when she comes to know that this is what it is like to experience red are perfectly ordinary concepts (this, experience, red, etc.) which she possessed in the black and white room. No ‘phenomenal concepts’ are required. 5. CONC LU S ION

In the preface to his book Tye says that when he first read The Problems of Philosophy he ‘could not make head or tails’ of Russell’s idea of knowledge by acquaintance, but that now he realises it is the key to understanding the puzzles of consciousness (2009b: xii). If I am right in what I say here, Tye’s initial reaction was the correct one. There is irreducible ‘objectual knowledge’, to be sure. But neither Russell’s nor Tye’s attempts to account for it in terms of theoretical notions of ‘acquaintance’ are at all plausible, or even fully intelligible. I have argued that Tye is also wrong in thinking that such a notion is needed to give a physicalist response to the Knowledge Argument. The essence of Tye’s response can be preserved without appealing to acquaintance, but simply by appealing to aspects of the relationship between seeing and knowing. Indeed, most of the theses advanced in Consciousness Revisited can survive the excision of the dubious notion of acquaintance.

Notes

2. B R E N TA N O ’ S C O N C E P T O F I N T E N T I O N A L I N E X I S T E N C E

1. Two classic examples are Quine’s remark that Brentano’s thesis of the intentionality of the mental is the claim that ‘there is no breaking out of the intentional vocabulary by explaining its members in other terms’ (1960: 220); and Hartry Field’s claim that Brentano thought it was impossible to give a ‘materialistically adequate’ account of the relation between a person and a proposition (1978: 78). Both Field and Quine link Brentano’s thesis of the intentional inexistence of the mental with physicalism in the twentieth century sense. But as we shall see, physicalism was not one of Brentano’s concerns, and Field’s and Quine’s attributions bear little relation to what Brentano really said. 2. Cf. Barry Smith: ‘one will find no coherent interpretation of Brentano’s principle of intentionality so long as one remains within the framework of our usual, commonsensical notions of both the mind and its objects’. (1994: 40) 3. Note the difference between this use of ‘empirical’ and the contemporary conception of psychology as an empirical science. From a contemporary perspective, to say that psychology is an empirical science is to say that it uses the kinds of methods (e.g., quantitative or statistical methods) which are characteristic of the other natural sciences. From that perspective, Brentano’s introspective psychology is no more

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empirical than William James’s. I ignore here the later distinction Brentano makes between descriptive and genetic psychology; but see Brentano 1890, in the useful edition by Benito Mueller. 4. This is a part of Brentano’s view which has been taken up recently in some discussions of consciousness; see Thomasson 2000 and Hossack 2002. 5. See Quine (1960: Chapter 1) and see also (e.g.) Poincare (1914: 14), for phenomenalism about science in the early twentieth century. 6. The English translation of the Psychology is by A. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and L. L. McAlister, published by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1973; the paperback edition was published by Routledge in 1995. This is essentially a reprint of the 1973 text with an excellent introduction by Peter Simons. However, Kraus’s intrusive and misleading notes remain in this edition, a fact for which I must bear some responsibility, as one of the editors of the series in which the reprint book appeared. 7. For classic discussions, see Nagel 1974, Kripke 1980: Lecture 3. 3. W I T TG E N S T E I N A N D I N T E N T I O N A L I T Y

1. I use the following abbreviations for the works of Wittgenstein: TLP = Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 1961) PG = Philosophical Grammar (Wittgenstein 1974) PI = Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 1953) RFM = Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Wittgenstein 1956) Z = Zettel (Wittgenstein 1967) 2. I agree with him, for independent reasons: see Crane 2001: §7. 3. For a similar suggestion about how to understand thought ‘reaching right up to reality’ see Ammereller 20014: 60. 4. A few exceptions: PI Part 2: 212; and RFM: 363–364. 5. Hacker (2001) writes: ‘The truth is that there is an internal relation between thought and fact (or state of affairs that obtains), and that the intrinsic individuation of thought and fact alike employs the same form of words “that p”. But this is not a matter of two objects matching each other, like a piston and cylinder, for the indisputable internal relation is forged within language, not between language and reality—by the grammatical equivalence of the phrases “the thought that p” and “the thought that is made true by the fact that p”, which are two different ways of characterizing one and the same thought.’ For similar claims, see Glock 1996 and Ammereller 2001. 6. Hacker elsewhere talks of the investigation of intentionality in the text known as the ‘Big Typescript’ which ‘demystified “the harmony between thought and reality” which lay at the heart of the Tractatus’ (1996: 86). 7. I have changed Wittgenstein’s ‘event that p’ to the more grammatically felicitous ‘fact that p’; this changes nothing of any substance. Of course, the arrival of the

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postman is an event, but we can also talk of the fact that the postman arrived. We can talk in either way, since if any event e occurs, then it is a fact that e occurred. So we can either say that the event e satisfied the expectation, or that the expectation was satisfied by the fact that e occurred. This should be taken for granted in the discussion that follows. 8. Of course, one could say, correctly, that the actual event e is the very same event as the event e conceived in a certain way; but this is not what I mean when I deny that these phenomena should be identified. For an event can be conceived in a certain way without there ever being such an event. 9. These remarks merely scratch the surface of the complexities of the semantics and the psychology underpinning our use of intentional verbs like ‘expect’. A proper treatment would start by distinguishing the form of these verbs which take sentential complements and those which take noun-phrases (the so-called ‘intensional transitives’). See Forbes 2006 for a useful treatment of the second kind of verb. 4. T H E O R I G I N S O F Q U A L I A

1. For this way of seeing the mind-body problem as a dilemma, see Tim Crane ‘The Mind-Body Problem’ in F. Keil and R. Wilson (eds.) MIT Encylopedia of Cognitive Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1999). See also Jaegwon Kim, ‘The mind-body problem after fifty years’ in A. O’Hear (ed.) Current Issues in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998) p. 21, and David Braddon-Mitchell and Frank Jackson, Philosophy of Mind and Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell 1996) pp. 134–135. 2. See Tim Crane, ‘The mental causation debate’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 95, 1995, and ‘Against physicalism’ in S. Guttenplan (ed.) A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell 1994). 3. See David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996). 4. Kim, ‘The Mind-Body Problem after Fifty Years’ p. 20. 5. Ned Block, ‘Troubles with functionalism’ in Block (ed.) Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume I (London: Methuen 1980) p. 278. 6. Consciousness Explained (London: Allen Lane 1991) p. 372 7. See Fred Dretske, Naturalizing the Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1995); W. G. Lycan, Consciousness and Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1996). 8. My understanding of this issue is indebted to M. G. F. Martin, ‘The Transparency of Experience’, Mind and Language 17, 2002. This essay gives the best account of the problem of the disagreement about the obvious in the theory of perception. 9. A good anthology of key essays on the subject of sense-data is Perceiving, Sensing and Knowing ed. R. Swartz (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press 1965). 10. For an account of this change of emphasis in twentieth century philosophy of perception, and of the underlying, persisting problem of perception, see M. G. F.

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Martin, ‘A Problem of Interpretation’, in Tim Crane and Sarah Patterson (eds.) History of the Mind-Body Problem (London: Routledge 2000). 11. G. A. Paul, ‘Is There a Problem about Sense-Data?’ (1936) reprinted in Swartz (ed.) Perceiving, Sensing and Knowing p. 103. 12. See The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1912), where Russell explicitly acknowledges Moore’s influence on his views on perception; Peter Hylton, Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytical Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989), and Thomas Baldwin, G. E. Moore (London: Routledge 1990), e.g., p. 323 fn. 6. 13. Moore’s most important writings on perception are collected in T. Baldwin (ed.) G. E. Moore: Selected Writings (London: Routledge 1993) See also Baldwin, G. E. Moore, pp. 148–151. 14. See, for example, W.  H.  F. Barnes, ‘The Myth of Sense-Data’ (1944–45) in Swartz (ed.) Perceiving, Sensing and Knowing 15. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1962). 16. Moore, ‘Sense-Data’ from Some Main Problems of Philosophy (London: Unwin 1953); reprinted in Baldwin (ed.) Selected Writings, p. 48. 17. ‘Hume’s Theory Examined’ in Selected Writings, ed. Baldwin p. 65. 18. ‘Sense-Data’ in Selected Writings, ed. Baldwin p. 51. 19. For a discussion, see Baldwin, G. E. Moore. 20. ‘A Defence of Common Sense’ in Selected Writings, ed. Baldwin p. 128. 21. ‘A Defence of Common Sense’ in Selected Writings, ed. Baldwin pp. 128–129. 22. O. K. Bouwsma, ‘Moore’s Theory of Sense-Data’ in P. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of G. E. Moore (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court 1942). 23. Price, Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1932) p. 19. 24. Price, Perception p. 3. 25. Austin’s diagnosis of the errors of sense-data theorists was that their ‘real motive’ is ‘that they wish to produce a species of statement which is incorrigible’ (Sense and Sensibilia p. 103). 26. See Martin, ‘J.  L. Austin: Sense and Sensibilia Revisited’, http://www.ucl. ac.uk/~uctymfm/Background%20Readings/Austin%20Sense%20and%20Sensibilia%20Revisited.pdf (last accessed May 12 2013). 27. Price, Perception, p. 63. 28. Robinson, Perception (London: Routledge 1994) Chapter 2. 29. For other writers who argue for sense-data without making epistemological assumptions, see F. Jackson, Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1977); E. J. Lowe, ‘Experience and Its Objects’ in Tim Crane (ed.) The Contents of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992). 30. C. D. Broad, ‘Elementary Reflexions on Sense-Perception’ (1952) in Swartz (ed.) Perceiving, Sensing and Knowing, p. 32. By the phenomenological point of view, Broad means ‘as they appear to any unsophisticated percipient, and as they inevitably go on appearing even to sophisticated percipients whose knowledge of the physical

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and physiological processes assures them that the appearances are misleading’ p. 30. By ‘prehension’ Broad means what Russell meant by ‘acquaintance’. 31. Price, Perception p. 126. 32. Cf. Barnes, ‘The Myth of Sense-Sata’ (1944–1945) in Perceiving, Sensing and Knowing p. 159. See also Chapters 1 and 2 of J. J. Valberg, The Puzzle of Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1992). 33. See C. Ducasse’s criticism of Moore’s theory, and defence of adverbialism, in ‘Moore’s “Refutation of Idealism”’ in Schilpp (ed.) The Philosophy of G. E. Moore. 34. C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers volume 2 §223 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; 8 volumes vols. 1–6, 1931–1935; vols. 7–8, 1958). For today’s usage, see the discussion in Sections 4 and 5 below. 35. See, for example, Chapter 20 of his Principles of Psychology, the § on ‘The meaning of localization’: ‘No single quale of sensation can, by itself, amount to a consciousness of position . . . a feeling of place cannot possibly form an immanent element in any single isolated sensation’ (Principles of Psychology New York: Holt 1890). In The Origins of Pragmatism (San Francisco: Freeman 1968) A. J. Ayer puts forward a theory of experience in terms of qualia in the context of a discussion of James, but it is clear that Ayer does not attribute this conception of qualia to James. For Ayer, qualia are essentially sense-data in the sense discussed in Section 2 above: see pp. 299 and 317. 36. R. B. Perry, ‘The Definition of Value’ in Journal of Philosophy 9, 1914: 141–62 p. 153; see also the discussion in J. Dewey, ‘Value, Objective Reference and Criticism’ Philosophical Review 34 (1925), pp. 313–332. 37. Mind and the World Order (London: Constable 1929). It is not difficult to see where Lewis might have got the term from: his teachers at Harvard as an undergraduate were James and Royce, and his postgraduate teacher in 1908–1910 was Perry. 38. Mind and the World Order p. 38. 39. E. M. Adams, ‘C. I. Lewis and the inconsistent triad of modern empiricism’ pp. 377 and 384; Roderick Firth, ‘Lewis on the given’ p. 330, both in The Philosophy of C. I. Lewis ed. P. A. Schilpp (La Salle Illinois; Open Court 1968). 40. Further reason for identifying qualia with the properties of sense-data can be derived by looking at Nelson Goodman’s use of the concept of qualia in The Structure of Appearance (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press 1951). For Goodman, qualia are the primitives of a phenomenalist system of accounting for the whole of reality: they are the phenomenal individuals out of which enduring public objects are constructed. To this extent, they resemble the sense-data of Ayer, in The Central Questions of Philosophy (London: Weidenfeld 1973). One thing that makes this discussion difficult to integrate with the contemporary issues about qualia is that the distinction between the physicalistic and the phenomenalistic systems is supposed to be a difference in ‘choice of language’ rather than in any matter of fact. On this aspect of Ayer’s view, see Martin, ‘Austin: Sense and Sensibilia Revisited’, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uc tymfm/Background%20Readings/Austin%20Sense%20and%20Sensibilia%20 Revisited.pdf .

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41. Firth, ‘Lewis on the Given’ p. 331. 42. ‘The “Mental” and the “Physical”’ first published in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science eds. H. Feigl, M. Scriven and G. Maxwell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1958). Reprinted with a postscript by the same publisher in 1967. Lawrence Nemirow makes the explicit connection between his presentation of the problem and Feigl’s in his ‘Physicalism and the Cognitive Role of Acquaintance’ in W. G. Lycan (ed.) Mind and Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell 1987). 43. ‘The “Mental” and the “Physical”’ p. 8. The expression ‘raw feel’ is from E. C. Tolman, Purposive Behaviour in Man and Animals (London: Century 1932). 44. ‘The “Mental” and the “Physical”’ p. 83. 45. D. Dennett, ‘Quining qualia’ in A. Marcel and E. Bisiach (eds.) Consciousness in Contemporary Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 42–77. Reference to reprint in W. G. Lycan (ed.) Mind and Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell 1987) p. 523. 46. S. Shoemaker, ‘Functionalism and Qualia’ in Identity, Cause and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980) p. 185. 47. ‘The Epistemic View of Subjectivity’ Journal of Philosophy 91(1994), pp. 221–235. 48. Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson, Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, pp. 123–4. 49. See M. G. F. Martin, ‘Setting Things before the Mind’ in Current Issues in the Philosophy of Mind ed. A. O’Hear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998) pp. 158–163. 50. Frank Jackson, ‘Epiphenomenal qualia’ Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982), pp. 127–136. 51. ‘Mad Pain and Martian Pain’ Philosophical Papers volume I (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1983). 52. See David Lewis, ‘What experience teaches’ in Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999) p. 281; see also D. H. Mellor, ‘Nothing like experience’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 92, 1992–1993. 53. See (e.g.) Joseph Levine, ‘Materialism and qualia: the explanatory gap’ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64, 1983, 354–361. 54. ‘Setting Things before the Mind’ p. 161. 55. ‘Quining Qualia’ pp. 539 and 523. 56. For intentionalism, see Tim Crane, ‘Intentionality as the mark of the mental’ in O’Hear (ed.) Current Issues in the Philosophy of Mind, and Michael Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1995). 57. See, for example, the opening pages of Joseph Levine’s essay, ‘Qualia: Intrinsic, Relational or What?’ in T. Metzinger (ed.) Conscious Experience (Paderborn: Schöningh-Verlag 1995). 58. ‘Quining Qualia’ p. 524. One of the weaknesses of Dennett’s discussions of this issue is his failure to account for his disagreement with his opponents: Dennett gives us no account of why it is that any reasonable person should think differently from him.

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59. See, for example, David Lewis, ‘Should a materialist believe in qualia?’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73 (1995):140-44. 60. Or disjunctions of properties. This approach is taken by Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998) Chapter 4, ‘The Primary Quality View of Colour’. 61. See David Hilbert, Color and Color Perception (Stanford: CSLI 1987). 62. See Shoemaker, ‘Qualities and qualia: what’s in the mind?’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50, Supplement: 109–131. 63. A striking exception is Robinson, Perception. 64. W. G. Lycan, Consciousness and Experience p. 99 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1996). 65. For further discussion, see Chapter 4 of Lycan, Consciousness and Experience. 66. Though they may be properties of states which have intentional content—e.g., perceptual states. 67. Ned Block, ‘Inverted earth’ in N. Block, O. Flanagan and G. Güzeldere (eds.) The Nature of Consciousness (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press 1997). 68. I do try and address it in ‘Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental’ and also in ‘The Intentional Structure of Consciousness’, in A. Jokic and Q.Smith (eds.) Aspects of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2003). 5. I N T E N T I O N A L I T Y A S T H E M A R K O F T H E M E N TA L

1. The Psychology of the Imagination (London: Routledge, 1995; originally published 1940) 211. 2. For the origins of the concept of intentionality, see Christian Knudsen, ‘Intentions and Impositions’ in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy A. Kenny et al. (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Victor Caston, ‘Aristotle on the Problem of Intentionality’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (1998): 249–298. For a general survey, and further bibliography, see Tim Crane, ‘Intentionality’ Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, E. J. Craig (ed.) (London: Routledge, 1998). 3. F. Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (London: Routledge, 1995; originally published 1874) 89. 4. John R. Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 1. 5. A representative example of this position is Colin McGinn, The Character of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) Chapter 1. 6. Louise Antony, ‘What It’s Like to Smell a Gardenia’ Times Literary Supplement, 4897 (February 7 1997): 25. See also Fred Dretske, Naturalizing the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995) 28. 7. For examples of this kind of approach, see Fred Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981); B. Enç, ‘Intentional States of Mechanical Devices’ Mind 91 (1982).

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8. For a helpful attempt to relate Brentano’s concerns to current debates, see Dermot Moran, ‘Brentano’s Thesis’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 70 (1996). 9. See (for example) Martin Davies, ‘Philosophy of Mind’ in Philosophy: A Guide Through the Subject A.  C. Grayling (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Searle, op. cit. note 4, 1; Jerry Fodor, Psychosemantics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987) Chapter 4. 10. McGinn, op. cit. note 5, 8. 11. For examples of this common misunderstanding of Brentano, see Daniel C. Dennett, Content and Consciousness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969) 21; Michael Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995) 94–95. A useful account of Brentano’s views is contained in Chapter 1 of David Bell’s Husserl (London: Routledge, 1990). For the scholastic views to which Brentano is alluding, see Knudsen, op. cit. note 2, and John Marenbon, Later Medieval Philosophy (1150–1350): An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1987) Chapter 8. 12. Brentano, op. cit. note 3, 88. 13. Ibid., 88. 14. This is the essence of Brentano’s response to Sir William Hamilton’s view that in sensation ‘there is nothing but what is subjectively subjective; there is no object different from the self ’; see Brentano, op. cit. note 3, 90. 15. Here I am taking as ‘intentionalist’ two kinds of theory of perception: the theory which holds that perception is the direction of the mind upon objects (mental or physical) and the theory which treats perception as a kind of propositional attitude, akin to belief. My usage involves a broader sense of ‘intentional’ than is sometimes adopted in discussions of the intentionality of perception, where it is restricted to theories of the latter kind: see, for instance, the useful discussion in M. G. F. Martin, ‘Perceptual Content’ A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind S. Guttenplan (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 16. See, for example, Sydney Shoemaker, ‘Qualities and Qualia: What’s in the Mind?’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (1990) Supplement: 109–131. . 17. See Gilbert Harman, ‘The Intrinsic Character of Experience’ Philosophical Perspectives 4: Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind J. Tomberlin (ed.) (Ascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1990); and Michael Tye, ‘Visual Qualia and Visual Content’ The Contents of Experience Tim Crane (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 18. Those who approach questions of ontology via questions of logical form might say that just as we can argue for the existence of propositions, the objects of belief, by analysing the logical form of valid inferences involving belief-sentences, so we can argue for the existence of pains, the objects of pain-states, by looking at the valid inferences which are made with statements concerning pain. For example: X has a pain in his foot; therefore there is something X has in his foot. The plausibility of these arguments is, in my view, relatively superficial, for the reasons given in note 21 below.

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19. A notable exception is Frank Jackson, Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). However, Jackson no longer holds these views. 20. See J. L. Mackie, Ethics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), Chapter 1. 21. As Michael Martin says: ‘at best [these cases] demonstrate the gap between having a feeling and making a judgement about it’. See M.  G.  F. Martin, ‘Bodily Sensations’ in the Encylopedia of Philosophy E.  J. Craig (ed.) (London: Routledge, 1988). Nor are the inferences involving statements about sensations uncontroversial; for although we might be happy with the inference from ‘X has a pain in his foot’ to ‘There is something which X has in his foot’, the inference from ‘X has a pain; Y has a pain; therefore there is something which X and Y both have’ is clearly invalid if the ‘something’ is supposed to be a particular object, and irrelevant to the present issue if it is supposed to be a property. 22. See D. M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968); M. G. F. Martin, ‘Bodily Awareness: a Sense of Ownership’ The Body and the Self J-L. Bermúdez, N. Eilan, and A. Marcel (eds.) (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1995); and his ‘Sense Modalities and Spatial Properties’ Spatial Representation B. Brewer, N. Eilan, and R. McCarthy (eds.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). 23. Note that an advantage of this view is that it can give a univocal account of both the bodily sensations which are naturally identified in terms of what they are of—warmth, cold, pressure etc.—and those which are not, like pains and so on. This version of the thesis that bodily sensations are intentional should be contrasted with Tye’s view that pains give one non-conceptual representations of damage to one’s body: see Tye, op. cit., note 11, Chapter 4. Tye’s view is, however, consistent with the view defended here. Pains may have many levels of representational content; my concern in this essay is with the uncontroversial phenomenological content they appear to have. 24. See Shoemaker op. cit. note 16, 108–113, where he discusses the inverted qualia speculation. 25. Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (London: Methuen 1971; originally published 1939) 68–69. For an illuminating introduction, see Gregory McCulloch, Using Sartre (London: Routledge, 1994) Chapter 2. 26. Sartre, op. cit. note 25, 57. 27. Ibid., 81. 28. Of course, this is not the only way for an intentionalist to account for emotion. Compare Tye’s views: Tye, op. cit., note 11, Chapter 4. 29. For a representative of recent discussions, see Tye, op. cit., note 11, 94–96. 30. For instance: ‘all consciousness, as Husserl has shown, is consciousness of something’ Being and Nothingness (London: Methuen, 1958; first published 1943) xxvii. Compare Searle: ‘It is characteristic of Intentional states, as I use the notion, that there is a distinction between the state and what the state is directed at or about or of.’ op. cit. note 4, 2; for a different way of formulating the same kind of point, see E. Levinas,

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‘Beyond Intentionality’ Philosophy in France Today A. Montefiore (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 106. 31. This fact gives rise to one of the main problems of intentionality. For an excellent presentation of this problem, see Michael Dummett, Origins of Analytical Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1993) 35–36. See also Caston, op. cit., note 2. Brentano came to appreciate the importance of this point when he wrote the appendix to his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (op. cit. note 3). There he says that ‘If someone thinks of something, the one who is thinking must certainly exist, but the object of his thinking need not exist at all’. He goes on to observe that ‘we might doubt whether we are dealing with something relational here, and not, rather, with something somewhat similar to something relational in a certain respect, which might therefore better be called “quasi-relational”’ (Brentano, op. cit. 272). Sometimes it is supposed (see Dennett op. cit. and Tye op. cit. note 11) that Brentano was concerned with the question of non-existence even before he wrote the Appendix to his Psychology. It is true that in a famous passage, Brentano says that the object of thought ‘should not be understood as a reality’ (88); but by this he is just reminding his readers that he is talking about ‘phenomena’ or ‘appearances’, not about the ‘underlying reality’. In this sense, the physical phenomena with which he contrasts mental phenomena ‘should not be considered a reality’ either. Compare, for example, the following passage: ‘the phenomena of light, sound, heat, spatial location, and locomotion which [the natural scientist] studies are not things which really and truly exist. They are signs of something real, which through its causal activity, produces presentations of them. They are not however, an adequate representation of this reality . . . We have no experience of that which truly exists, in and of itself, and that which we do experience is not true.’ Brentano, op. cit. note 3, 19. 32. John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992) 155. 33. Only in this respect, since it is not quite correct to say that a phantom limb pain is an illusory pain—the pain certainly exists, one just perceives it as having a location which it does not (indeed, in the circumstances, cannot) have. An analogy would be perhaps with some device which made it seem to you as if sounds were coming from one direction when they were in fact coming from the opposite direction (as when a ventriloquist ‘throws’ his voice). 34. For a clear-headed (but in my view mistaken) statement of this policy, see Dennett, op. cit. note 11, 27–29. Even Searle (op. cit. note 4) who admits that much intentionality cannot be expressed in terms of whole propositions (6–7), seems to commit himself implicitly to the opposite in his analysis of intentional states by analogy with his account of speech acts (26). The tendency is still pervasive: see, for instance, the definition of ‘intentionality’ given in William Lyons, Approaches to Intentionality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 1–2. 35. Dennett, op. cit. note 11, 21. The point derives from Quine: see Word and Object (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1960), 221. See also the opening pages of Hartry

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Field, ‘Mental Representation’ Erkenntnis 13 (1978): 9–61. . Obviously, if one thinks of intentionality as a property of sentences (as Quine and Dennett do) Dennett’s quoted remark makes more sense than it would do otherwise. I quote it here because the idea that Brentano’s thesis presents a problem for physicalism has survived the waning of the popularity of the linguistic criterion of intentionality. 36. See Chisholm, Perceiving (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957), Chapter 12, and Quine, op. cit. note 35, esp. the § on ‘The Double Standard’. Note especially the following passage: ‘the Scholastic word ‘intentional’ was revived by Brentano in connection with the verbs of propositional attitude and related verbs . . . e.g. ‘hunt’, ‘want’ etc. The division between such idioms and the normally tractable ones is notable. We saw how it divides referential from non-referential occurrences of terms.’ 37. Chisholm, op. cit. note 36, 170. 38. Dennett, op. cit. note 11, 23. Compare Searle, op. cit., note 4, 22–25, who takes the correct view of this matter, as I see it. See also William Kneale, ‘Intentionality and Intensionality’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 42 (1968). 39. A good example of this general approach is Enç, op. cit. note 7; see also C. B. Martin and Karl Pfeifer, ‘Intentionality and the Non-Psychological’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 46 (1986), and U. T. Place ‘Intentionality as the Mark of the Dispositional’ Dialectica 50 (1996). 40. For the idea of intentionality as a phenomenological notion, see Gregory McCulloch, ‘The Very Idea of the Phenomenological’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 93 (1992–193); and ‘Intentionality and Interpretation’ in A. O’Hear (ed.) Current Issues in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); J.  E. Malpas, in Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) §4.2, gives an interesting reading of intentionality as a phenomenological notion, drawing on the Heideggerian notion of a ‘horizon’. For a survey of various ways in which the idea of intentionality can be applied beyond the central cases, see Martin Davies, ‘Consciousness and the Varieties of Aboutness’ Philosophy of Psychology: Debates on Psychological Explanation Cynthia and Graham Macdonald (eds.) (Oxford: Blackwell 1995). 41. For the contrast between the phenomenal and the intentional, see, for example, Sydney Shoemaker, The First-Person Perspective and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 112, 138. 42. Colin McGinn, ‘Consciousness and Content’ The Problem of Consciousness and Other Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) 24. See also his later remark that ‘subjective features lie quite outside the proper domain of the theory of content’ (33). 43. Quoted by Martin Davies, op. cit., note 40, 358. 44. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979) 22. 45. See John Searle, op. cit., note 32; for his view of the unconscious, see 155–156. A similar view is taken by Galen Strawson in Mental Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT

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Press, 1995): ‘the only distinctively mental phenomena are the phenomena of conscious experience’ (xi). 46. For some different approaches to the same idea, compare M.  G.  F. Martin, ‘Setting Things before the Mind’ and Gregory McCulloch, ‘Intentionality and Interpretation’, both in in A. O’Hear (ed.) Current Issues in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). My remarks in this last section are highly speculative, and raise many issues which demand further elaboration. One question is whether the suggested ‘unification’ of the phenomena of mind by the concept of intentionality can be achieved within the weak intentionalist picture I defend here. For if one allows that the existence of non-intentional phenomenal properties (qualia) is compatible with the intentionality of all mental states, then it appears as if a question can be raised for weak intentionalism which is parallel to the question I am raising for the McGinn/ Rorty picture. More needs to be said about non-intentional properties in order to assess the force of this question. Here I am indebted to participants in the discussion at the Royal Institute of Philosophy meeting, and especially to Paul Boghossian. 6. I N T E N T I O N A L O B J E C T S

1. John R. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983). 2. John Searle, Intentionality p. 18. 3. Cf. M.  G.  F. Martin, ‘An Eye Directed Outward’ in C. Wright, B.  C. Smith and C. Macdonald (eds.) Knowing Our Own Minds (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998) p. 101. 4. The story is referred to by G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature’ in R. J. Butler (ed.) Analytical Philosophy: 2nd Series (Oxford: Blackwell 1965). 5. Gilbert Harman, ‘The Intrinsic Quality of Experience’ in J. Tomberlin (ed.) Philosophical Perspectives 4 (Atascadero: Ridgeview 1990); reprinted in Ned Block, Owen Flanagan, and Güven Güzeldere (eds.) The Nature of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1997) p.  666 in the reprint. I should add that Harman does not commit himself to the theory of non-existent objects. As he says: ‘I am quite willing to believe that there are not really any nonexistent objects and that apparent talk of such objects should be analysed away somehow’. 6. Terence Parsons, Non-existent Objects (New Haven: Yale University Press 1980). 7. See W. V. Quine, ‘On What There Is’ The Review of Metaphysics 2 (1948): 21–28. 8. G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘The Intentionality of Sensation’, p. 161. 9. J. J. Valberg, ‘The Puzzle of Experience’ in Tim Crane (ed.) The Contents of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992) p. 22. 10. A. R. Luria, The Man with the Shattered World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1987).

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11. G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘The Intentionality of Sensation’. 12. See Searle, Intentionality, Chapter 1, and my Elements of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001) §4. 13. For more details, see my Elements of Mind §§5–8. 14. See, for example, Jerry Fodor, Psychosemantics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1987) Appendix. 15. I assume here that causation is a relation, though this has been denied—for example by D. H. Mellor in The Facts of Causation (London: Routledge 1995). 16. For a good account of the move from actual to counterfactual causal relations, see the introduction to Barry Loewer and Georges Rey (eds.) Meaning in Mind (Oxford: Blackwell 1993). 7. T H E I N T E N T I O N A L S T R U C T U R E O F C O N S C I O U S N E S S

1. Putting to one side the sort of panpsychism discussed by Thomas Nagel (‘Panpsychism’ in his Mortal Questions [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979]) and aired as a possibility by David Chalmers in The Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 2. I take the term ‘intentionalism’ from Gregory McCulloch, ‘The Very Idea of the Phenomenological’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 93 (1993): 39–57. 3. The other cases of mental states which are thought to be obvious counter-examples to intentionalism are certain kinds of emotions and moods. I discuss these briefly in ‘Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental’ in Current Issues in the Philosophy of Mind ed. A. O’Hear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), §3. For a different kind of view, see also Michael Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), Chapter 4. 4. David Rosenthal, ‘Identity Theories’ in A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind ed. Samuel Guttenplan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) p. 349. 5. Alvin I. Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986) p. 14. 6. ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ in Nagel, Mortal Questions. 7. It is of course important to distinguish between the sense in which a perception ‘feels’ like something and the sense in which a bodily sensation ‘feels’ like something. But it would be a mere terminological stipulation to insist on these grounds that perceptions do not ‘feel’ like anything: here I disagree with McCulloch, ‘The Very Idea of the Phenomenological’. 8. The distinction I am drawing between strong and weak intentionalism is somewhat different from that drawn, using the same terms, by Brian McLaughlin (Color, Consciousness and Color Consciousness). But the distinctions are nonetheless related: McLaughlin’s strong intentionalism is a variety of strong intentionalism in my sense (i.e., they are representationalists in the sense of §5 below), and his weak intentionalism is a

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variety of weak intentionalism in my sense (i.e., they are those weak intentionalists who believe that all phenomenal properties supervene on intentional properties). [NOTE ADDED IN 2013: For a discussion of this terminology and how it relates to the terminology which has recently developed, see the Introduction to Part II of this book.] 9. J. J. Valberg, The Puzzle of Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) p. 151, n.10. See G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature’ in Analytical Philosophy: Second Series, ed. R. J. Butler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965); and Tim Crane, ‘Intentionality’ in Encyclopedia of Philosophy ed. E. Craig (London: Routledge, 1998). 10. For instance: ‘all consciousness, as Husserl has shown, is consciousness of something’ Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (London: Methuen, 1958; first published 1943) p. xxvii. Compare John Searle: ‘It is characteristic of Intentional states, as I use the notion, that there is a distinction between the state and what the state is directed at or about or of.’ Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) p. 2. 11. I discuss it at greater length in Elements of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), Chapter 1. 12. John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992) p. 155. 13. I borrow this way of putting things from an unpublished essay by J. J. Valberg. 14. Searle, Intentionality, Chapter 1. I follow Searle in the terminology, but not in some other things: for instance, he denies that intentional states are relations to their contents. 15. For an example of someone who accepts these points, see Tye, Ten Puzzles of Consciousness, pp. 94–96. 16. And as McCulloch aptly points out in ‘The Very Idea of the Phenomenological’, one English dictionary definition of the term ‘phenomenon’ is ‘the object of a person’s perception; what the senses or mind notice’. 17. It should be obvious that I am talking throughout about what Ned Block calls ‘phenomenal consciousness’: see Ned Block, ‘On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (1995), 227–247; reprinted in The Nature of Consciousness eds. Ned Block, Owen Flanagan, and Güven Güzeldere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1997). 18. For HOT theories of consciousness, see David Rosenthal, ‘Two Concepts of Consciousness’ Philosophical Studies 49 (1986): 329–359; D. H. Mellor, ‘Conscious Belief ’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 78 (1977–1978): 87–101; Peter Carruthers, ‘Brute Experience’ Journal of Philosophy 86 (1988): 435–451. Sometimes HOT theories are put forward as theories of all conscious states, not just conscious thoughts. This has the consequence that a sensation is not conscious unless it is the object of a higher-order thought. Also, sometimes consciousness is explained in terms of the availability to higher-order thought, in other cases it is explained in terms of an

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actual episode or act of thinking. I find all these views implausible, but I do not have space to discuss them here. 19. Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness, Chapter 4. Tye’s view is discussed in §5 below. 20. I mean to describe normal experience; of course, there are many interesting borderline cases (e.g., referred pain and so-called deep pain, apparently unlocatable by the subject) and many pathological cases which are hard to describe adequately. The extent to which we find these cases unintelligible tracks the extent to which they depart from the normal case of localisable sensation; it is clear that non-intentionalism should not defend itself by appealing to cases such as these. 21. I am deeply indebted here to M.  G.  F. Martin, ‘Bodily Awareness: A Sense of Ownership’ in The Body and the Self eds. J-L. Bermúdez, N. Eilan, and A. Marcel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). See also D.  M. Armstrong, Bodily Sensations (London: Routledge, 1962). 22. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, p. 84. 23. Curiously, in a footnote to the above discussion, Searle qualifies his denial of the intentionality of pains: ‘The sense of body location does have intentionality, because it refers to a portion of the body. This aspect of pains is intentional, because it has conditions of satisfaction. In the case of a phantom limb, for example, one can be mistaken, and the possibility of a mistake is at least a good clue that the phenomenon is intentional.’ The Rediscovery of the Mind p. 251, n.1. 24. Though not in McLaughlin’s sense: see footnote 8 above. [NOTE ADDED IN 2013: For a discussion of this terminology and how it relates to the terminology which has recently developed, see the Introduction to Part II of this book.] 25. For a useful taxonomy of varieties of intentionalism, see Alex Byrne, ‘Intentionalism Defended’ Philosophical Review 110 (2001): 199–240. 26. See Brian Loar, ‘Transparent Experience’ in A. Jokic and Q. Smith (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Christopher Peacocke, Sense and Content (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), Chapter 1; Sydney Shoemaker, ‘Qualities and Qualia: What’s in the Mind?’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (1990): 109–131. 27. The phenomenon of the ‘transparency’ of experience—that in visual experience one ‘sees through’ to the object itself—has often been thought to support strong intentionalism. See Gilbert Harman, ‘The Intrinsic Quality of Experience’ in Philosophical Perspectives 4, ed. J. Tomberlin (Atascadero, CA : Ridgeview, 1990); Michael Tye, ‘Visual Qualia and Visual Content’ in The Contents of Experience, ed. Tim Crane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Loar, ‘Transparent Experience’, argues for the unusual position that the existence of qualia is compatible with the facts about transparency. For an illuminating general discussion of transparency, see M. G. F. Martin, ‘The Transparency of Experience’, Mind and Language 17 (2002): 376–425.

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28. This is a point well made by Tye, ‘A Representational Theory of Pains and Their Phenomenal Nature’ in The Nature of Consciousness eds. Block, Flanagan, and Güzeldere, p. 333. 29. For a hypothesis about how qualia came to be thought of as properties of states of mind, see my ‘The Origins of Qualia’ in History of the Mind-Body Problem eds. Tim Crane and Sarah Patterson (London: Routledge, 2000), §§4–5. 30. Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness, Chapters 3–7. 31. See Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) p. 229. For the distinction between non-conceptual content and non-conceptual states, see Tim Crane ‘Non-Conceptual Content’ in Encyclopedia of Philosophy ed. E. J. Craig (London: Routledge, 1998). 32. For an excellent discussion of this issue, see Martin Davies, ‘Externalism and experience’ in The Nature of Consciousness eds. Block, Flanagan, and Güzeldere, pp. 309–311. 33. Tye, ‘A Representational Theory of Pains and Their Phenomenal Character’ in The Nature of Consciousness eds. Block, Flanagan, and Güzeldere, p. 333. 34. Here I am indebted to discussions with Fiona Macpherson. 35. See D. M. Armstrong, Bodily Sensations; and A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge, 1968). 36. Fred Dretske, Naturalizing the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 102–103. 37. It might be objected, as it was to me by Jerry Levinson, that this proliferates modes unnecessarily. However, the same kind of objection could be raised against a theory which explained differences in consciousness in terms of differences in qualia: there would be very many distinct qualia properties postulated. It is not clear why this should be a problem for either view. 38. Christopher Peacocke, ‘Consciousness and Other Minds’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 48 (1984), p.  115. I am indebted in this paragraph to Peacocke’s discussion of the concepts of pain and hurting, though I do not mean to imply that Peacocke holds a perceptual theory of sensation in my sense of the term. 39. For these views, see Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness pp. 113, 117, 118. 40. A Materialist Theory of the Mind p. 316. 41. Tyler Burge, ‘Two Kinds of Consciousness’ in The Nature of Consciousness eds. Block, Flanagan, and Güzeldere, p. 433. 8. I N T E N T I O N A L I S M

1. See Moran (1996) for a historical discussion of this thesis, and Crane (1998a) for further elaboration of the thesis; for Brentano’s views, see Brentano (1874); for some discussions of their contemporary relevance, see Crane (2006b).

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2. Some philosophers think that certain non-mental states and events exhibit a kind of intentionality: for example, the rings of a tree can represent or indicate their age (see Dretske 1981). 3. For recent discussions of representationalism or intentionalism, see Bain (2003), Block (1990), Byrne (2001), Chalmers (2004), Dretske (1995), Hellie (2002) , Jackson (2002), Kind (2003), O’Dea (2006), Siewert (2003), Stoljar (2004), Thau (2002), Tye (1995). Note also that the contemporary use of ‘representationalism’ differs from an earlier usage: namely, from the view that our perceptual access to the world is ‘mediated’ by representations. This is a view which is obviously very different from representationalism as discussed here; to avoid confusion, Block prefers to use the term ‘representationism’. 4. In saying this I side with Husserl (1901) as opposed to Brentano (1874). Brentano originally thought that the objects of intentional acts were phenomena (i.e., appearances); Husserl rejected this and emphasised the transcendence of the object. 5. Here I follow John Searle (1983). Husserl (1901) calls this difference a difference in intentional ‘quality’; David Chalmers (2004) uses the term ‘manner’. Those (like Davidson [1980]) who think that all intentional states are propositional attitudes would call it a difference in ‘attitude.’ 6. Hilary Putnam (1975) employs a similar principle (‘intension determines extension’) in his argument for the claim that ‘meanings ain’t in the head’. See Farkas (2006) for discussion of such principles in connection with externalism and internalism. 7. Here I am indebted to discussions with Barry Hall. 8. Note: (i) mode is not Fregean mode of presentation, which is an element of the content of the state. Chalmers (2004) prefers his term ‘manner’ to my ‘mode’ because of the risk of confusion with ‘mode of presentation.’ (ii) To make this claim about modes or manners is not to agree with Lycan’s (1996: 11) view that the functional role of a state of mind contributes towards its phenomenal character. To get here one would have to add the further claim that differences in mode are explained by differences in functional role; a plausible thesis but not one which follows from intentionalism. Here I disagree with Block (2003); my sympathies are more with Jackson (2002), McLaughlin (2003), and O’Dea (2006). 9. See Chalmers (2004) for an additional plausible argument against pure intentionalism. 10. Terminology has really started to grow wild here: Byrne (2001) calls this view ‘inter-modal intentionalism,’ while Block (2003) calls it ‘quasi-representationism’. 11. For the qualia theory, see Block (1990) and (2003). In Crane (2003), written in 1998, I called this version of the qualia theory a version of intentionalism (‘weak’ intentionalism). Since this theory does not say that phenomenal character is determined by intentionality, it now seems to me misleading to call this a form of intentionalism at all. 12. Resistance might also come from a defender of a kind of ‘Higher-Order Thought’ (HOT) theory of consciousness, which holds that bodily sensations (for

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example) are neither essentially intentional nor essentially conscious—they only become conscious when they are the objects of higher-order thoughts (see Rosenthal 1986). I find the view that sensations are not essentially conscious very implausible and will not discuss it further here. 13. Disjunctivists such as Martin (2002) will disagree; for them, the objects and properties we experience are not represented but instantiated in veridical perception. In Crane (2006a) I discuss the difference between disjunctivism and intentionalism in terms of whether they think experience is representational. Here I am not providing an argument against disjunctivism, but describing the options for someone tempted by intentionalism. 14. Hence it is very unnatural, as many recent philosophers (Siewert 1998; Chalmers 2004; McCulloch 2003; Horgan and Tienson 2002) have noted, to think that the notion of ‘what it’s like’ only has application to the qualia of mental states, conceived of as non-intentional intrinsic properties. 15. Even Searle (1992: 251) accepts this. For further criticism of the non-intentionalist views of pain, see Crane (1998, §2), and Grahek (2001). 16. Here I am especially indebted to discussion with A. W. Price. 17. For more on the intentionality of moods, see Goldie (2000: 143–151) and Crane (1998a, §3). 9. T H E N O N - C O N C E P T U A L C O N T E N T O F E X P E R I E N C E

1. As we shall see, Peacocke has changed his views since this was written. 2. For sensational properties of experiences, see Peacocke 1983, Chapter 1. Michael Tye argues that there are no such things in ‘Visual Qualia and Visual Content’ (1992). 3. See, in particular, Dretske 1981, Chapter 6; Evans 1982: 122–129, and 154– 160; Peacocke 1986, 1989c, 1992; Cussins 1990. The proposal has some affinities with the account of the individuation of experiences in Millar 1991. 4. See Peacocke 1986, 1989c, 1992; cf. Dretske 1981: 155, n.7, and 162. 5. See Evans 1982: 104, n.22; Campbell 1986: 172; Davies 1986; and Cussins 1990. Colin McGinn labels non-conceptual mental content ‘sub-personal content’: ‘the kind of content routinely attributed by cognitive scientists to information-processing systems of which the subject has no awareness’ (McGinn 1989: 163). 6. Some philosophers dispute whether information in Dretske’s sense is really content (see, e.g., Cussins 1990: 392). For my purposes, it does not really matter if they are right, since I ultimately want to argue that perceptions have non-conceptual contents, and these are not just states with Dretskean informational content. So the fate of Dretskean information as content does not matter to me—I use it only as an example. Others (e.g., Stich 1983) deny that computational states too have content. I do dispute this; see Crane 1990.

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7. At the end of Section 4 of this essay I shall suggest an answer to this question. The present point is that it is hard to see how it can be correctly answered if we simply define non-conceptual contents as ‘contents that are not composed of concepts’. 8. Cussins 1990: 382–383. I replace Cussins’s ‘satisfy’ with ‘instantiate’, since the term ‘satisfy’ is more usually applied to predicates rather than properties. 9. Cf. also Peacocke 1989b: 51, where Peacocke says that ‘the idea that a concept is individuated by a correct account of its possession’ is ‘a master key’ to the theory of concepts. 10. I do not mean to commit myself to the view that people believe the logical consequences of what they believe. 11. The quotation is from a letter from Frege to Peano (29 Sept. 1896) in Frege 1980: 115. I am grateful to Bill Hart for drawing my attention to this passage. Notice, of course, that the term ‘proposition’ in this context means what I mean by ‘sentence’, and the term ‘thought’ means what I call ‘content’. 12. The idea is not new, of course. Compare Gareth Evans’s remark that ‘behind the idea of a system of beliefs lies that of a system of concepts’ whose structure ‘determines the inferential properties’ of the beliefs (Evans 1981: 132). John Campbell (1986) has argued from inference to structure, but not in the very general way suggested here. Campbell’s strategy is to examine certain primitive patterns of spatial reasoning and show how they thereby exploit the conceptual structure of the thoughts involved. 13. For a giant look-up table, see, e.g., Clark 1989: 56. I am here indebted to discussions with Barry C. Smith. 14. This paragraph merely glances at a number of complex issues. For the idea of syntax as used in the LOT hypothesis, see Crane 1990. Martin Davies (1991) has argued, ingeniously, that the conceptual structure of thought needs the truth of the LOT hypothesis. But I agree with Fodor and others that the LOT hypothesis should rather be thought of as the best empirical explanation of conceptual structure. 15. Peacocke argues that inferential role is necessary for the possession of certain concepts—see his remarks about the concept of conjunction in Peacocke 1989b: 51–52. 16. Which beliefs these are for any given concept would thus determine whether ‘prototype’ or ‘definition’ theories of that concept are correct. See Putnam 1975 and Fodor 1981. 17. See especially Armstrong 1968, Chapter 10, and Pitcher 1971 . I would also count as belief theories those theories which employ notions like ‘judgement’ (Craig 1976) or ‘hypothesis’ (Gregory 1970)—notions which must be defined in terms of belief. Many of the arguments for the belief theory are disposed of by Jackson 1977. 18. Compare the curious ‘Waterfall Illusion’: see Frisby 1980: 100; and Crane 1988a. 19. I am indebted to Mark Sainsbury for pressing this objection.

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20. Dretske 1981: 137. This is what he means by saying that the content is coded in analogue form. Note that Dretske means ‘information’ in his own sense, but in this context it can be easily read as ‘content’. In this context, see also Peacocke, 1992: Section 2. 21. I do not think, however, that the content of an experience should be represented in standard possible worlds terms—whatever their merits for the contents of beliefs—since it is possible to have contradictory experiences: experiences whose contents would be sets of impossible worlds. Again, see Crane 1988a. 22. See Peacocke 1989c, Peacocke 1989b, and 1992. The last essay introduces a distinction between scenarios and another ‘level’ of non-conceptual content, the ‘proto-proposition’. I do not need to discuss this refinement here. 23. See Segal 1989: 192. Cf. Marr: ‘the true heart of visual perception is the inference from the structure of an image about the structure of the real world outside’ (Marr 1982: 68). 24. I have in mind a well-known passage from Evans 1982: 104: ‘When we attribute to the brain computations whereby it localises the sounds we hear, we ipso facto attribute to it representations of the speed of sound and the distance between the ears, without any commitment to the idea that it should be able to represent the speed of light or the distance between anything else.’ See also Davies 1989. 10. I S T H E R E A P E R C E P T U A L R E L AT I O N ?

1. For defences of the qualia theory, see Peacocke 1983; Shoemaker 1990; Block 1996, 2003. For defences of representationalism, see Harman 1990; Tye 1992, 1995, and 2000; Thau 2002; Hilbert and Kalderon 2000; Byrne 2001. Two important discussions which defend neither side as described here are Martin 2002 and Stoljar 2004. 2. But let me give a brief indication of my reasons for this doubt. Many people express the problem of consciousness in terms of the notion of qualia. Chalmers (1996) and Block (2003) put the problem in this way. Yet while Block thinks there must be a naturalistic, physicalistic account of qualia, Chalmers thinks that there cannot be. So their dispute is not over the existence of qualia, but over whether they can be physicalistically explained. To this it may be said, as Byrne (2001) does, that if there were no qualia and if we therefore had a representational account of consciousness, this would be one step on the road to a physicalistic reduction of consciousness. But if this were the case, it would still be necessary to give a physicalistic explanation of why certain representations were conscious and others were not, and—‘Higher-Order Thought’ views notwithstanding—representationalist accounts of consciousness have made no more progress with this question than qualia-based accounts have with their parallel question. So it seems to me that in this case too, it is unlikely that the existence of qualia is the kind of issue in relation to which the real chasm develops.

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3. I am putting to one side here (and in Section 3) the view that in a hallucination we are aware of uninstantiated universals, a view defended by Johnston (2004). The view demands further discussion. 4. Sceptics about qualia will not find this definition of ‘qualia’ very illuminating; while I am sympathetic to this scepticism, I will assume this standard characterisation in what follows for the sake of argument. 5. Nor is the issue whether ordinary perceptual verbs, like ‘sees that . . .’ are factive. All participants to this dispute can agree with this, but this semantic point is independent of all the substantive issues raised by the problem of perception. 6. Note added in 2013: please see the Introduction to Part III of the current volume for an important clarification of this question. 7. It will be obvious to anyone familiar with Mike Martin’s work on perception (especially 2000, 2002, 2003) how much the discussion in this section is indebted to him. 8. Assuming, of course, that the objects of hallucinations are not non-existent real objects. See Smith (2002: Chapter 9) for an illuminating discussion of this kind of view. 9. More generally, we can distinguish between what I call, following Searle (1983) intentional mode and intentional content (Crane 2001: 28–33). This is the distinction Husserl expresses as the distinction between intentional quality and intentional matter (Husserl 1901: 233). 10. This characterisation of the intentionality of perception differs from that recently offered by Alex Byrne (2001). Byrne describes intentionalism about perception as the view that ‘the propositional content of perceptual experiences in a particular modality (for example, vision) determines their phenomenal character. In other words: there can be no difference in phenomenal character without a difference in content’ (Byrne 2001: Section 2; see also Tye 2000: 45). Byrne takes intentionalism so characterised to be compatible with both a version of the sense-data theory and with disjunctivism (2001: n.7, and end of Section 1). This is because he thinks that these theories all hold that perception has a representational propositional content; they just differ over what the content exactly concerns or is about. Therefore the only non-intentional theories of perception are (a) the adverbial theory and (b) the qualia theory. This way of thinking is initially appealing: indeed, I accepted something like it myself in Chapter 5 of Crane 2001; but I now think this way of thinking about perception misrepresents the essence of the intentional theory, since it does not make the significant distinction between the relational and representational views of experience. 11. The theory was first proposed by Hinton (1973) and was later developed by P.  F. Snowdon (1979-1980), John McDowell (1982, 1987) and M.  G.  F. Martin (2002). It has recently been endorsed by Hilary Putnam (1999) and Timothy Williamson (2000). 12. Putnam thinks, however, that there is an argument against the view that there is anything in common between perception and hallucination. Hallucinations are

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defined as states of mind which are subjectively indistinguishable from perceptions. But, he argues, subjective indistinguishability cannot define a condition for the identity of mental states since (as reflection on the so-called phenomenal sorites shows) subjective indistinguishability is not transitive whereas identity must be (1999: 130). If Putnam’s argument were sound, then it would show that there can be no common identical condition or state, defined simply in terms of subjective indistinguishability, in hallucination and perception. But as we have seen, the existence of such a state or condition is a consequence of the definition of hallucination in this context; so everyone, disjunctivists included, must accept it. So there must be something wrong with Putnam’s argument; for myself, I am persuaded by Graff 2001 that subjective indistinguishability is, contrary to widespread opinion, transitive. 13. To give an illustration of how you can deny representationalism while denying qualia: an intentionalist about perception might want to say that what one is aware of in these cases is something like the intentional mode (Crane 2001: 143–144) rather than visual field qualia like Peacocke’s (1983) ‘primed predicates’. 11. I S P E R C E P T I O N A P R O P O S I T I O N A L AT T I T U D E ?

1. For a classic discussion, see Fred I. Dretske, Seeing and Knowing (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). 2. Alex Byrne, ‘Perception and Conceptual Content’ in Ernest Sosa and Matthias Steup (eds.) Contemporary Debates in Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 232. 3. For some statements of this view, see John Searle Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Chapter 3; Christopher Peacocke, Sense and Content (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), Chapter 1; Michael Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); Michael Thau, Consciousness and Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 4. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 26. 5. Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (originally published in 1874; English edition edited by L. McAlister, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973; reprinted with an introduction by Peter Simons, London: Routledge 1995), 88. 6. I follow John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 131, in this use of the word ‘aspect’; for more details see Tim Crane, Elements of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), §6. 7. But see Katalin Farkas, The Subject’s Point of View (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Chapter 7. 8. John Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 9. The idea derives from Husserl, Logical Investigations (originally published in Halle by M. Nieymeyer 1901). Translated by J.  N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 1970), No. V, Chapter 2.

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10. For non-representational views of experience, see Bill Brewer, ‘Perception and Content’ European Journal of Philosophy 14 (2006): 165–181; Charles Travis, ‘The Silence of the Senses’ Mind 113 (2004): 57–94; John Campbell, Reference and Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Brewer explicitly rejects the use of the word ‘content’ in the theory of perception. 11. See Susanna Siegel, ‘The Contents of Perception’ in Edward N. Zalta (ed.) Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-contents/ 2005 (Spring 2013 Edition.) ; Alex Byrne ‘Perception and Conceptual Content’ in E. Sosa and M. Steup (eds.) Debates in Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell) 231–250. 12. D. M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge, 1968). 13. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 36. 14. pace Jan Westerhoff, ‘Logical Relations between Pictures’, Journal of Philosophy, 102: 2005, 603–623. 15. Zoltán Szabó ‘Believing in Things’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 66 (2003): 584–611. 16. Alex Byrne, ‘Perception and Conceptual Content’ in Ernest Sosa and Matthias Steup (eds.) Contemporary Debates in Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 231–250; cf. Daniel Stoljar, ‘The Argument from Diaphanousness’, in M. Ezcurdia, R. Stainton, and C. Viger (eds.) New Essays in the Philosophy of Language and Mind. Supplemental volume of The Canadian Journal of Philosophy (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2004), 341–390; Michael Thau, Consciousness and Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 17. John McDowell, ‘Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge’, Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982): 455–479. 18. Richard Heck, ‘Non-conceptual Content and the “Space of Reasons”’ Philosophical Review 109 (2000): 483–523. 19. See Tim Crane, ‘The Non-Conceptual Content of Experience’ in Tim Crane (ed.) The Contents of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and ‘Content, Non-Conceptual’ in E. J. Craig (ed.) Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998) 20. Crane, ‘The Non-Conceptual Content of Experience’ in Tim Crane (ed.) The Contents of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), §4. 21. Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 22. I am especially indebted here to Ian Phillips. 23. Christopher Peacocke, ‘Scenarios, Concepts, and Perception’ in Tim Crane (ed.) The Contents of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). For a discussion of Peacocke, see José Luis Bermúdez, ‘The Sources of Self-Consciousness’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 102 (2001): 87–107.

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12. T H E G I V E N

1. As is, surely, H. H. Price’s view in Perception (1934). Sellars studied with Lewis at Harvard and with Price in Oxford. 2. I am indebted here to unpublished work by Ciara Fairley. 3. When Moore discusses the view that ‘blue is said to be part of the content of the “the sensation of blue”’ he compares a sensation of blue to a blue bead or a blue beard, and says that ‘the relation of the blue to the consciousness is conceived to be exactly the same as that of the blue to the glass or hair: it is in all three cases the quality of a thing’ (1903: 447–448). 4. Here I am especially indebted to Charles Travis’s unpublished ‘Unlocking the Outer World’, though we somehow end up with very different views. Mark Johnston (2006) has raised some some similar criticisms of standard intentionalism, a view which Johnston (rather misleadingly) calls ‘the fact-directed view’. 5. For making me see the importance of this analogy, I am indebted again to Travis. 6. This is an over-simplification, since it ignores McDowell’s view that the unity of the content of an intuition is the actualization of conceptual capacities, albeit employing formal concepts akin to Kant’s categories (see 2009a: 265). Discussion of this idea must wait for a later occasion. 7. This is, of course, what is denied by disjunctivists like Martin (2002, 2004); but I will not deal with this in this essay. 8. I understand that the analogy derives from Lewis, but it has been illuminatingly discussed by Field 1978, Churchland 1981, Stalnaker 1984, and most recently in an important study by Matthews 2007. 13. U N C O N S C I O U S B E L I E F A N D C O N S C I O U S T H O U G H T

1. A distinction is sometimes made between dispositional belief and a disposition to believe (see, e.g., Audi 1994). This is a useful distinction but it is not directly relevant to what I want to argue here. 2. This is a claim McDowell went on to reject: see his 2009a. 3. We should ignore here Russell’s (1910–1911) notion of ‘knowledge by acquaintance’, which is supposed to be an occurrent mental act. It is arguable how much it has to do with the ordinary concept of knowledge: see Crane 2011. 4. David-Hillel Ruben remarks, of the term ‘occurrent belief ’ that ‘I know of no plausible characterisation of what is intended by this term, except the one that ties it to present awareness or consciousness’ (Ruben 2003: 114); and he further writes that ‘many, like Alvin Goldman, thought of “occurrent” as I do, as elliptical for “occurrent to present consciousness”’ (Ruben 2003: 116). 5. I am indebted here to discussions with Mike Martin and Matt Soteriou: see Soteriou 2007.

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14. S U B J E C T I V E FAC T S

1. D. H. Mellor, ‘I and Now’ in Matters of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 17. 2. ‘Nothing Like Experience’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 93 (1992–1993): 1. 3. See David Lewis, ‘What Experience Teaches’ in Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), who acknowledges a debt to Lawrence Nemirow, ‘Physicalism and the Subjective Quality of Experience’ in W. G. Lycan (ed.) Mind and Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 4. See Howard Robinson, Matter and Sense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982) and Jackson’s original essay, ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’ Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982): 127–136. It should be noted that Jackson has changed his mind about what the knowledge argument shows. See his ‘Postscript to “What Mary Did not Know”’ in Paul Moser and J.  D. Trout (eds.) Contemporary Materialism (London: Routledge, 1995); for Jackson’s physicalism, see From Metaphysics to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Chapters 1 and 2. If I am right in what I say here, he did not need to change his mind about the soundness of the argument, even after his conversion to physicalism; he just needed to re-describe the conclusion. Of the many discussions of Jackson to which I am indebted, I must single out Terence Horgan, ‘Jackson on Physical Information and Qualia’ Philosophical Quarterly 34 (1984) 147–152. 5. See the references to the statements of the argument by Jackson and Robinson in footnote 5. In its essence, the argument has a longer history than this, of course. Earlier twentieth century sources are Herbert Feigl’s ‘The “Mental” and the “Physical”’ in H. Feigl, M. Scriven, and G. Maxwell (eds.) Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), 68; and in C.D. Broad’s The Mind and Its Place in Nature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1926), 71. 6. For a useful catalogue of responses to the knowledge argument, see Robert Van Gulick, ‘Understanding the Phenomenal Mind’, in Ned Block, Owen Flanagan, and Güven Güzeldere (eds.) The Nature of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 559–563. 7. See David Lewis, ‘What Experience Teaches’, Lawrence Nemirow, ‘Physicalism and the Cognitive Role of Acquaintance’, D. H. Mellor, ‘Nothing Like Experience’. 8. For excellent discussion of this, see A. W. Moore, Points of View (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Chapter 8 (esp. p. 171) and Paul Snowdon, ‘Knowing How and Knowing That: A Distinction and Its Uses Reconsidered’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 104 (2004): 1–29. . 9. Brian Loar, ‘Phenomenal States’ in Block et al. (eds.) The Nature of Consciousness, p.  607. I must ignore here the bearing this point has on the famous ‘Frege-Geach’ problem.

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10. This is the line taken by Paul Churchland in ‘Reduction, Qualia, and the Direct Introspection of Brain States’ Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985): 8–28. 11. Mellor, ‘Nothing Like Experience’ p. 7. 12. But see Churchland, ‘Reduction, Qualia, and the Direct Introspection of Brain States’. In Consciousness Explained (London: Allen Lane, 1991), Dennett launches a general attack on the methodology of thought-experiments as a way of learning about consciousness. 13. Güven Güzeldere, ‘Approaching Consciousness’ in Block et al. (eds.) The Nature of Consciousness, p. 38. 14. See David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 15. For these views, see G. Frege, ‘The Thought: A Logical Inquiry’ in P. F. Strawson (ed.) Philosophical Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); D. H. Mellor, The Facts of Causation (London: Routledge, 1995); J. L. Austin, ‘Unfair to Facts’ in Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961); and Donald Davidson, ‘True to the Facts’ in Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 16. See, e.g., Van Gulick, ‘Understanding the Phenomenal Mind’ pp. 562–563. 17. See David Lewis, ‘What Experience Teaches’ p. 281; see also D. H. Mellor, ‘Nothing Like Experience’. 18. Churchland, ‘Reduction, Qualia, and the Direct Introspection of Brain States’; see also ‘Knowing Qualia: A Reply to Jackson’ in Block et al. (eds.) The Nature of Consciousness p. 574. Jackson attempts to answer this criticism in ‘What Mary Did not Know’ (in Block et al. [eds.] The Nature of Consciousness), but on the implausible grounds that there is a difference between the kind of knowledge a dualist psychology would give and the kind a physicalist theory would give. 19. ‘Knowing Qualia: A Reply to Jackson’ p. 574. 20. ‘What Mary Did not Know’ p. 569. 21. See John Perry, ‘The Problem of the Essential Indexical’ Nous 13 (1979): 3–21. 22. For the use of the parallel with indexicals as a response to the knowledge argument, see Georges Rey, ‘Sensational Sentences’ in Block et al. (eds.) The Nature of Consciousness. 23. See Real Time II (London: Routledge 1998). 24. See David Papineau, ‘The Rise of Physicalism’ and Barry Loewer, ‘From Physics to Physicalism’ both in Carl Gillett and Barry Loewer (eds.) Physicalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 25. Lewis argues that physics has ‘explanatory adequacy’ in ‘An Argument for the Identity Theory’ Journal of Philosophy 63 (1966): 17–25. ; but the argument from mental causation to physicalism only needs the claim that physics is casually closed, not that it is explanatorily adequate: see my Elements of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), §12.

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26. So I disagree with Van Gulick (‘Understanding the Phenomenal Mind’ pp. 562–563) that this is the most fruitful line to pursue. 27. Here I agree with Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 28. See Frank Jackson, ‘Postscript to “What Mary Sid not Know”’; and David Lewis, ‘What Experience Teaches’; Joseph Levine, ‘On Leaving Out What It’s Like’ in M. Davies and G. Humphreys (eds.) Consciousness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Horgan, ‘Jackson on Physical Information and Qualia’; among many others. 29. ‘Nothing Like Experience’ 1992 p. 1. 15. PA P I N E AU O N P H E N O M E N A L C O N C E P T S

1. If I may be permitted a personal footnote: my own understanding of why anyone would want to be a physicalist at all has been deeply influenced by reading David’s work and from many valuable discussions with him over the years. I am grateful for this further opportunity to respond to David’s stimulating views. 2. It may be thought that this is an uncharitable interpretation. But Papineau explicitly puts it this way himself: ‘Given that this referential act includes the pain, it will feel like a pain. It [i.e., the referential act] will hurt, and make me want it to go away’ (2002: 172; my emphasis).

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Credits

E S S AY 1: ‘In Defence of Psychologism’ has not been previously published. E S S AY 2 : ‘Brentano’s Concept of Intentional Inexistence’ originally published in

The Austrian Contribution to Philosophy, edited by Mark Textor (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 20–35. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis. E S S AY 3 : ‘Wittgenstein and Intentionality’ originally published in the Harvard

Review of Philosophy 17 (2011), pp. 88–104. Reproduced with permission. E S S AY 4 : ‘The Origins of Qualia’ in History of the Mind-Body Problem, edited by Tim Crane and Sarah Patterson (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 169–194. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis. E S S AY 5 : ‘Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental’ in Contemporary Issues in the

Philosophy of Mind, edited by A. O’Hear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 229–251. Reproduced by permission of Cambridge University Press. E S S AY 6 : ‘Intentional Objects’, Ratio 14 (2001), pp. 336–349. Reproduced by

permission of Wiley Blackwell Publishers. E S S AY 7: ‘The Intentional Structure of Consciousness’ in Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, edited by A. Jokic and Q. Smith (Oxford and New York:

364

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Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 33–56. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. E S S AY 8 : ‘Intentionalism’, in the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, edited by Ansgar Beckermann, Brian McLaughlin, and Sven Walter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 474–493. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. E S S AY 9 : ‘The Non-conceptual Content of Experience’, in The Contents of Experience, edited by Tim Crane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 136–157. Reproduced by permission of Cambridge University Press. E S S AY 10 : ‘Is There a Perceptual Relation?’ in Perceptual Experience, edited by Tamar Szabó Gendler and John Hawthorne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 126–146. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. E S S AY 11: ‘Is Perception a Propositional Attitude?’ Philosophical Quarterly 59

(2009), pp. 452–469. Reproduced by permission of Wiley Blackwell Publishers. E S S AY 12 : ‘The Given’ in Mind, Reason and Being-in-the-World: The McDow-

ell-Dreyfus Debate, edited by Joseph Schear (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 229– 249. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis. E S S AY 13 : ‘Unconscious Belief and Conscious Thought’ in Phenomenal Intentionality: New Essays, edited by Uriah Kriegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 156–173. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. E S S AY 14 : ‘Subjective Facts’ in Real Metaphysics, edited by H. Lillehammer and G.

Rodriguez-Pereyra (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 68–83. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis. E S S AY 15 : ‘Papineau on Phenomenal Concepts’, Philosophy and Phenomenological

Research 71 (2005), pp. 155–162. Reproduced by permission of Wiley Blackwell Publishers. E S S AY 16 : ‘Tye on Acquaintance and the Problems of Consciousness’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (2012), pp. 190–198. Reproduced by permission of Wiley Blackwell Publishers.

Index

aboutness, 94. See also intentionality accuracy, 223–224 acquaintance, 259, 286, 307–308 adverbial theory of perception, 70, 203–204, 214 Anscombe, G. E. M., 56, 114, 118 anti-psychologism. See psychologism anxiety, 100–102 Armstrong, D. M., 97, 142, 147, 188, 222 aspectual shape, 104–105, 129, 135–136 Austin, J. L., 68 Bain, David, 156–157 belief, 271–272; conscious and occurrent, 270; de re and de dicto, 17 Block, Ned, 3, 62, 83–84, 197, 265–266 blurred vision, 201 Bouwsma, O. K., 67 Brentano, Franz, 22, 25–39, 91, 153, 220; definition of intentional inexistence,

31, 34; on non-existent objects of thought, 326n31 Brentano’s thesis, 91, 150; common rejection of, 92–93 Brewer, Bill, 237, 241 Broad, C. D., 69 Burge, Tyler, 10–12, 148, 209 Byrne, Alex, 160–163, 218, 228, 242 Campbell, John, 174 Carruthers, Peter, 246 Caston, Victor, 32 Cavell, Stanley, 1–2 Chalmers, David, 62–63, 138, 154, 244 Chisholm, R. M., 107 Churchland, Paul, 292 concepts, 183–186; phenomenal, 259, 299–306 conceptual investigation, x, 3

366

consciousness, ix–x, 261; access and phenomenal, 262–269; HOT theory of, 264– 265, 330n18; and physicalism, 258–259; and qualia, 264. See also qualia content, defined, 8; conceptual, 218; of experience, 161; intentional, 152; non– conceptual, 140–141, 154, 166, 177–183, 231–234, 249; non-propositional, 222, 249; phenomenological conception of, 247–248; physicalist reduction of, 164; pluralism, 244; semantic conception of, 253; Siegel’s definition of, 240 correctness conditions, 178 Cussins, Adrian, 3, 180–182 Davidson, Donald, 192 de re and de dicto, 17, 245 demonstrative thought, 210 Dennett, Daniel, 62–63, 79, 80–81, 106 depression, 102–103 desire, 244 disjunctivism, 206, 210–213 Dretske, Fred, 63, 143, 157, 172, 191 Dreyfus, Hubert, 236 Dummett, Michael, 1–2, 6 emotion, intentionality of, 99, 103 epistemic seeing. See seeing Evans, Gareth, 194 events, 274–276; contrast with states, 276; perception of, 230 experience, content of. See content: of experience externalism about content, 152 facts, 290–291; subjective, 293 Farkas, Katalin, 213 Feigl, Herbert, 75 Field, Hartry, 317n1 Frege, Gottlob, 4–6, 12–14, 185; on ideas, 12–15, 248; his telescope analogy, 6, 247

INDEX

Gibson, J. J., 200 given, the, 71, 85, 230, 235–236; myth of the, 235, 238 Goldman, Alvin, 125–126 Goodman, Nelson, 321n40 Güzeldere, Güven, 287–288 Hacker, P. M. S., 44, 46, 52, 318n5 hallucination, argument from, 204 Harman, Gilbert, 62–63, 79, 80–81, 106 Heck, Richard, 172–173, 231–232 Heidegger, Martin, 196 Hill, Christopher, ix, 261 Hinton, J. M., 211 Husserl, Edmund, 38, 56, 118 illusion, argument from, 69–70 information, 334n6 intensional entities, 115–116 intentional inexistence, 26–30, 94; and non-existence, 22 intentional objects; 150–152, 220; Brentano on 27–28; contrasted with things, 115; defined, 88, 128–129; as grammatical objects, 118; as indeterminate, 114; as lacking a nature, 116, 128; non-existent, 88, 113–114, 326n31, 328n5; as objects for a subject, 117; as ordinary objects, 112 intentionalism, 10, 12, 80, 88, 125; contrasted with representationalism, 150; impure, 158; pure, 154–156; standard, 242, 246; strong and weak, 88–89, 155; varieties of, 88–89 intentionality: as having an object, 84; as having a world, 117; as the mark of the mental, 108; phenomenal, 258, 262–263, 279–280; as self-transcendence, 151–152 Jackson, Frank, 77; his change of mind on the knowledge argument, 341n4, 342n18; and David Braddon-Mitchell, 76 James, William, 71, 275

INDEX

knowledge argument, 75, 77–78, 283–284, 314 Kuhn, Thomas, 175 language of thought, 120, 186 Lewis, C. I., 71, 235 Lewis, David, 77, 78, 292; ability hypothesis, 285–287; analogy between numbers and propositions, 252 Luria, A. R., 117 Lycan, W. G., 63, 83 Malpas, J. E., 327n40 Marr, David, 179 Martin, M. G. F., 68, 76, 79, 97, 163, 209, 212 McDowell, John, 2, 10, 173, 211, 218, 222–223, 236–239, 246; on intuition, 249 McGinn, Colin, 64, 108 Meinong, Alexius, 38 Mellor, D. H., 269, 275, 281–283 methodological phenomenalism, 33 Mill, J. S., 4 mind-body problem, 61, 75, 258 modes, intentional, 130, 135, 142, 146, 152, 156, 332n37, 333n8 moods, 167–169 Moore, G. E., 65–67, 240 Müller–Lyer illusion, 188–189 naturalism, 82–83, 97 non-conceptual content. See content: non-conceptual non-epistemic seeing. See seeing normativity, 5 pain, 96, 124, 300–302; intentionalist view of, 142–144; as a mental object, 97; in phantom limbs, 326n33 Papineau, David, 298–299 Paul, G. A., 65

367

Peacocke, Christopher, 145, 173, 176; on conscious belief, 269; his principle of dependence, 187; his theory of scenario content, 192–193, 233, 254 Peirce, C. S., 71 perception: and belief, 188; content of, 11; intentional theory of, 206–210, 337n10; as non-conceptual, 172; as a propositional attitude, 172, 218, 232–233; and qualia, 23, 213–216; perceptual relativism, 175–6 Perry, John, 294 Perry, R. B., 71 phantom limb, 326n33 phenomenal concepts. See concepts phenomenal principle. See Robinson, Howard phenomenal states, 132 Philosophical Grammar (Wittgenstein), 46, 47, 52, 57 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), 1, 48, 51 physicalism, 258, 292–293; and intentionality, 106 pictures, 223–227 Potter, Michael, 5 Price, H. H., 67–69, 113 properties, canonical characterization of, 181 propositional attitudes, 105, 126 propositionalism, 10, 242, 246 propositions, 45, 153–154, 208, 243; as models, 253; as sets of worlds, 245–246 psychologism, ix–x, 1, 18, 88; anti-, 4, 7, 9–12; about intentionality, 4, 15–16; about the psychological, 9, x Putnam, Hilary, 211 qualia, 13, 23, 62, 71–85, 95, 137–139, 160, 197, 202; as intentional objects, 83; inverted 82, 101; and physicalism, 336n2

368

qualitative states, 126–128 Quine, W. V., 7, 317n1 realism, naïve, 203 representation, causal theory of, 121; and intentionality, 60, 119 representational view of experience, vs. relational view, 174, 205 Robinson, Howard, 69, 203; his phenomenal principle, 69, 203, 206 Rock, Irvin, 194 Rorty, Richard, 109 Rosenthal, David, 125 Russell, Bertrand, 307–308, 312; on the knowledge argument, 281, 287; on sensedata, 65 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 91, 325n30; on emotion, 103 scenario. See Peacocke, Christopher Schlick, Moritz, 240 Searle, John, 92, 100, 111–112, 134–135, 189, 221 seeing, epistemic and non-epistemic, 17, 172 Segal, Gabriel, 26–27, 29 Sellars, Wilfrid, 53, 235–236 semantics, defined 7–8, sensation, 92, 94–98, 125, 165–167; Moore on, 340n3; non–intentionalism about, 132; perceptual theory of, 97–98, 142

INDEX

sense–data, 64–70; as mind-dependent, 69–70 Shoemaker, Sydney, 76, 95 Siegel, Susanna, 240 Smith, A. D., 22, 203 Smith, Barry, 30, 317n2 Sorabji, Richard, 32 Stampe, Dennis, 178 Stoljar, Daniel, 207 Strawson, P. F., 196 Sturgeon, Scott, 76 subject’s point of view, 162 subjective facts. See facts subjective indistinguishability, 337–338n12 Szabó, Zoltán, 226 thought, intentional nature of, 149–150 transparency of experience, 144, 159–160, 198 Travis, Charles, 237–239 Twardowksi, Kazimierz, 38 Tye, Michael, 62–63, 95, 133, 145, 199, 243, 307–314 Valberg, J. J., 115, 119, 128 vehicle versus content, 15, 251 Wilkes, Kathleen, 109 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3, 9, 23, 40–60; on expectation, 50–51, 55, 56; on grammar, 41–42, 54; on internal relations, 43–44