Visual Experience: A Semantic Approach (Oxford Philosophical Monographs) [Illustrated] 9780199600465, 0199600465

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Visual Experience

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OXFORD PHILOSOPHICAL MONOGRAPHS Editorial Committee WILLIAM CHILD R. S. CRISP A. W. MOORE STEPHEN MULHALL CHRISTOPHER G. TIMPSON

OTHER TITLES IN THIS SERIES INCLUDE Discrimination and Disrespect Benjamin Eidelson Knowing Better: Virtue, Deliberation, and Normative Ethics Daniel Star Potentiality and Possibility: A Dispositional Account of Metaphysical Modality Barbara Vetter Moral Reason Julia Markovits Category Mistakes Ofra Magidor The Critical Imagination James Grant From Morality to Metaphysics: The Theistic Implications of our Ethical Commitments Angus Ritchie Aquinas on Friendship Daniel Schwartz The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle Hendrik Lorenz

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Visual Experience A Semantic Approach

Wylie Breckenridge

1

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3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Wylie Breckenridge 2018 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2017954089 ISBN 978–0–19–960046–5 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

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For Tim

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Contents Acknowledgements 1. The Project

ix 1

2. A Simple Character

16

3. Ways of Looking

36

4. The Mechanism

49

5. Syntactic Details

70

6. Implicit Domain Restriction

76

7. Concepts and Discrimination

86

8. Other ‘Look’ Sentences

97

9. Other Characters

115

10. The Many Property Problem

125

11. Explaining Phenomena

138

References Index

157 163

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Acknowledgements This book is the culmination of work that I first started in my B.Phil. and D.Phil. theses at Oxford, many years ago. Timothy Williamson was my supervisor. I wanted a topic that would be difficult but worthwhile, and Tim suggested the semantics of ‘look’ sentences. I went with it. It certainly has been difficult; I hope that it has been worthwhile. I owe a great deal of thanks to Tim. He had the wisdom to let me think things through by myself, and make mistakes, but then expect and help me to do better. He was confident that I could do things well, and that kept me going through some tough times. The book is dedicated to him. My D.Phil. thesis was also partly supervised by Stephen Pulman, in the Faculty of Linguistics. Stephen was very patient and generous with his time, and I learned a lot about formal semantics from him. I spent countless hours thrashing out ideas with my fellow graduate students, in particular with Richard Price, Sarah Moss, Ofra Magidor, Stephen Kearns, Nico Silins, Anders Nes, and Susanna Schellenberg. The thesis was examined by John Hawthorne and Bill Brewer. They encouraged me to develop it into a book; without that encouragement I never would have. After Oxford I worked on the book during a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell. The philosophy department was a great place to discuss ideas; I benefited, in particular, from discussions with David Liebesman, Nico Silins, Stephen Kearns, Christy Mag Uidhir, and Susanna Siegel (when she came to visit). I spent a lot of time hanging out with the linguists at Cornell, especially Mats Rooth, Dorit Abusch, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. They expanded my then very limited understanding of how language works. The bulk of the book was written after I left Cornell and took up a position at Charles Sturt University. We have a small but very lively group of philosophers at CSU, and the university largely leaves us

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

alone to explore ideas, free from pressure. Daniel Cohen and Morgan Luck have been my chief sounding boards for several years. Having to explain the semantics of ‘look’ sentences to these two non-specialists, and then defend my theory against their insistent and insightful criticisms, has made the book much better. Elsewhere in Australia, David Chalmers has been very supportive of my work, arranging for me to speak at several conferences, and I’ve had many helpful conversations with Michaelis Michael. Peter Momtchiloff has been an extremely patient editor—the book is many years overdue, but he never gave up on me. Finally, thanks to my parents, Marj and Col. They support everything that I do, without question, and without limit.

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1 The Project 1.1. Visual Experiences and their Characters This book is about visual experience. Visual experience is a common phenomenon and one that is very familiar to us. When you look at the patch below you have a visual experience of the patch—the patch looks some way to you; there is something that the patch is like for you visually. If you close your eyes then you stop having a visual experience of the patch—there is no way that the patch looks to you; there is nothing that the patch is like for you visually (you might even stop having a visual experience altogether).

In particular, I am interested in the ‘what it is like’ of a visual experience, typically called its phenomenal character, or just its character for short. To get a better idea of what I am talking about, compare your visual experience of the patch above with your visual experiences of the patches below:

Your visual experience of the top patch has exactly the same character as your visual experience of the left-most bottom patch, but a different character from your visual experiences of the other three bottom patches. We might describe the differences this way: the character of

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THE PROJECT

your visual experience of the top patch differs from the character of your visual experience of the second bottom patch with respect to colour (I will assume that shades of grey are colours); it differs from the character of your visual experience of the third bottom patch with respect to shape; and it differs from the character of your visual experience of the fourth bottom patch with respect to both colour and shape. As well as these differences there are also some similarities. We might describe the similarities this way: the character of your visual experience of the top patch is the same as the character of your visual experience of the second bottom patch with respect to shape, and it is the same as the character of your visual experience of the third bottom patch with respect to colour. I should emphasize two things. First, I am interested in visual experience (i.e. things looking some way to us), which may not be the same thing as visual perception (i.e. our seeing things). Although the two typically co-occur, there are reasons to think that they are distinct— that visually experiencing is distinct from visually perceiving. One reason is the possibility of blind sight: cases in which a person does not have a visual experience but sees (Weiskrantz (1986)). Another reason is the possibility of hallucination: cases in which a person has a visual experience but does not see. If there are cases of blind sight or hallucination, or at least if there can be such cases, then visually experiencing is distinct from seeing. Perhaps there can’t be such cases, and visually experiencing is identical to seeing. But I will allow that they are distinct. Second, I will only consider visual experience in this book. Other kinds of experience (tactile, olfactory, etc.) are also interesting, and I suspect that much of what I have to say about visual experience applies to those as well. But I will not consider them in this book.

1.2. My Aim I am interested in the character of a visual experience: what kind of thing is it? What is involved in having a visual experience with a certain character? For definiteness I will focus on answering the following question, for any character c:

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What is it to have a visual experience with character c? This is a difficult question to answer. To get a feel for why, consider the character of your visual experience of the patch below. Let’s call the patch ‘p’.

It might initially seem that the character of your visual experience of p is an intrinsic property of p. Evidence for this comes from the fact that when you try to attend more closely to the character of your experience you end up attending more closely to p itself (this phenomenon is sometimes called the transparency of experience—more about this in Chapter 11). Moreover, compare your visual experience of p with your visual experience of the patch below; call this patch ‘p0 ’. Your experience of p and your experience of p0 have different characters, and that difference seems to be a difference in the patches themselves—they seem to differ intrinsically.

But there are reasons to think that the character of your visual experience of p is not an intrinsic property of p. One reason is that different visual experiences of p might have different characters, even though p itself is intrinsically the same in all respects across the experiences. Imagine changing your lighting conditions in such a way that your visual experience of p has a different character, in fact the same character as your visual experience of p0 . Then there is a change in the character of your visual experience of p with no intrinsic change to p itself—just a change in the lighting conditions. So the character of your visual experience of p cannot be an intrinsic property of p. Actually, the reasoning in the previous paragraph makes an assumption that not everyone would accept, at least not without more careful thought—that the character of these two visual

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experiences of p either is an intrinsic property of p in both experiences or is an intrinsic property of p in neither (I’m thinking of disjunctivists—see Hinton (1967a, 1967b, 1973), Snowdon (1980), McDowell (1982, 1987, 1994), and Martin (2002, 2003)). If this assumption is false then it could be that the character of one of these two experiences of p is an intrinsic property of p, while the character of the other experience of p is not an intrinsic property of p, which allows that the two experiences can differ in character even though there is no intrinsic difference in p. But then we still have at least one of the two visual experiences of p with a character that is not an intrinsic property of p, and so we still have the question of what the character is in this case. Let’s suppose that it is the character of your original visual experience of p that is not an intrinsic property of p (nothing depends on this—we could equally well suppose that it is the other). So the character of your visual experience of p is not an intrinsic property of p. Perhaps it is an intrinsic property of the light rays that are striking your eyes? There are reasons to think that this is not right either. Suppose that someone other than you is looking at p under the same lighting conditions as you, so that the light rays that are striking her eyes are intrinsically the same as the light rays that are striking your eyes (I mean: the light rays are qualitatively identical, not numerically identical). And suppose that she has a vision condition, one such that her visual experience of p has a character that is different from your visual experience of p (suppose that she is colour blind). Now there is a difference between the characters of your visual experiences with no intrinsic difference between the light rays that are striking your eyes. So in at least one of the two cases the character of the visual experience is not an intrinsic property of the light rays that are striking the experiencer’s eyes. Let’s suppose that it is the character of your visual experience of p (again, nothing depends on this). At this point I will identify three main kinds of theory, which I will call sense-datum theories, adverbial theories, and representational theories.

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According to sense-datum theories, the character of your visual experience of p is an intrinsic property of a certain mental thing of yours, traditionally called a sense-datum. Your visual experience of p involves a sense-datum of yours that has a certain intrinsic property—this property is the character of your visual experience of p. The colour-blind person’s visual experience of p involves a sense-datum of hers that has a different intrinsic property—this property is the character of her visual experience of p. This allows that your visual experiences can have different characters even though there is no intrinsic difference between either p or the light rays that are striking your eyes. Different sense-datum theories say different things about the nature of your sense-datum and its connection (if any) with p. According to some theories the sense-datum is mind-dependent; according to others it is mind-independent. According to some theories p is an external object, one that you experience by being related to your sense-datum (a position sometimes called indirect realism); according to others p is an external object, but one that you do not experience at all. According to some theories p is not an external object at all—it is merely a complex of sense-data (a position sometimes called phenomenalism). (For more about sense-datum theories see Moore (1903, 1922), Russell (1912), Broad (1923, 1925), Price (1932), Ayer (1956), Jackson (1977), O’Shaughnessy (1980, 2003), Casullo (1987), Lowe (1992), Robinson (1994), Foster (2000), and Garcia-Carpintero (2001).) According to adverbial theories, the character of your visual experience of p is a way (or manner) in which your visual experience of p is occurring. (They are called ‘adverbial’ theories because we typically talk about ways of occurring using adverbs such as ‘clumsily’ or ‘proudly’.) Your visual experience of p is occurring in a certain way—this is the character of your visual experience of p. The colour-blind person’s visual experience of p is occurring in a different way—this is the character of her visual experience of p. It is hoped that ways of occurring are such that your visual experiences can occur in different ways (and thus have different characters) even if there is no intrinsic difference between either p or the light rays that are striking your eyes. (For more

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about adverbial theories see Ducasse (1942), Chisholm (1957, pp. 115–25, 1976, pp. 46–52), Aune (1967a, pp. 129–33 & 147–8, 1967b), Cornman (1971, pp. 178 & 185–90), Sellars (1963, pp. 215–74, 1968, pp. 9–28 & 167–8, 1975), Tye (1975, 1984, 1989), and Jackson (1977).) According to representational theories, your visual experience of p has representational content (it represents the world to be a certain way), and the character of your visual experience of p is somehow connected with this content. There are at least two ways of spelling out the connection. According to the first way of spelling it out, the character of your visual experience of p is part of the content of your experience—it is a property that your experience represents, a property that is represented by your experience. Your visual experience of p represents a certain property (e.g. the property of being light grey)—this represented property is the character of your visual experience of p. The colour-blind person’s experience of p represents a different property (e.g. the property of being dark grey)—this represented property is the character of her visual experience of p. It is hoped that your visual experiences can represent different properties (and thus have different characters) even if there is no intrinsic difference between either p or the light rays that are striking your eyes. According to the second way of spelling out the connection, the character of your visual experience of p is a property of your visual experience that does the representing—a property that has representational content. Your visual experience of p has a certain property that represents a certain thing (e.g. the property of being light grey)—this representing property is the character of your visual experience of p. The colour-blind person’s experience of p has a different property that represents a certain thing (e.g. the property of being dark grey)—this representing property is the character of her visual experience of p. It is hoped that your visual experiences can have different representational properties (and thus have different characters) even if there is no intrinsic difference between either p or the light rays that are striking your eyes. (For more about representational theories see Anscombe (1965), Armstrong (1968), Dretske (1969, 1995), Peacocke (1983, 1993), Pitcher (1970), Harman (1990), Tye (1992, 1995, 2000), Lycan (1996), and Byrne (2001).)

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THE PROJECT

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I have just described (very briefly) three of the main kinds of theory that have been developed to answer the question of what it is for a visual experience to have a certain character. I will not at the outset try to defend a particular one of these theories, nor try to defend any other particular theory. Rather, I will adopt a certain approach to answering the question and see where it leads. (It leads to an adverbial theory.) Note that my characterization of these three kinds of theory does not make them mutually exclusive. It allows, for example, that an adverbial theory can also be a representational theory. Suppose a theory says that the character of your visual experience of p is a way in which your visual experience is occurring. Then it is an adverbial theory. But suppose this way of occurring is a representational property, and that for your visual experience to occur in this way is for it to have this representational property. Then the theory is also a representational theory. My approach leads to an adverbial theory (it gets that far fairly quickly, by the end of Chapter 2). Is it also a representational theory? I think not. I explain why at the end of Chapter 11.

1.3. My Approach My aim in this book is to answer the following question, for any character c: What is it to have a visual experience with character c? To answer this question I will take what I call a semantic approach. The idea is this: we can better understand what it is for you to have a visual experience with character c by better understanding what we mean by ‘you have a visual experience with character c’. How could this help? Because of the following fact: what it is for you to have a visual experience with character c is for whatever it is that we mean by ‘you have a visual experience with character c’ to be the case. This is why we can better understand what it is for you to have a visual experience with character c by better understanding what we mean by ‘you have a visual experience with character c’.

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Suppose that by ‘you have a visual experience with character c’ we mean so-and-so; then for you to have a visual experience with character c is for so-and-so to be the case, because that is what we mean by ‘you have a visual experience with character c’. Suppose we mean that you stand in a certain relation, R, to a certain particular, b; then for you to have a visual experience with character c is for you to stand in R to b, because what we mean by ‘you have a visual experience with character c’ is that you stand in R to b. A certain misunderstanding might make this idea seem more controversial than it is. The claim is about what it is for you to have a visual experience with character c—it is not about whether or not you actually do have a visual experience with character c. From the fact that by ‘you have a visual experience with character c’ we mean so-and-so it follows that for you to have a visual experience with character c is for so-and-so to be the case; it does not follow that so-and-so actually is the case. It would follow with an extra premise: that ‘you have a visual experience with character c’ is true, but without this extra premise it does not follow. There is a tighter connection between what we mean by ‘you have a visual experience with character c’ and what it is for you to have a visual experience with character c, than there is between what we mean by ‘you have a visual experience with character c’ and whether or not you have a visual experience with character c. You might grant that this approach can help in principle but be sceptical about whether it can help in practice. I think that it can help in practice, and I hope that this book shows that. But I’ll say a few things here to give some initial support for the idea. Start by considering the following question: what is it for l’herbe être verte? I do not know what it is for l’herbe être verte. My problem is that I do not understand what people mean by ‘l’herbe être verte’. Actually, I do understand it somewhat—I recognize that it is a French expression, and I know that ‘verte’ in French means green. So I understand that what it is for l’herbe être verte’ has something to do with the colour green. I can better understand what it is for l’herbe être verte by better understanding what people mean by ‘l’herbe

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être verte’. I’m told that by ‘l’herbe être verte’ people mean ‘grass to be green’. So, for l’herbe être verte is for grass to be green. Now I better understand what it is for l’herbe être verte (it is for grass to be green), and I came to better understand it by better understanding what people mean by ‘l’herbe être verte’. This example might seem irrelevant, because it involves an expression that I do not understand. But I do understand ‘you have a visual experience with character c’ (as my competent use of it so far in this chapter shows), so how can I better understand what it is for you to have a visual experience with character c by better understanding what we mean by ‘you have a visual experience with character c’, given that I already understand what we mean by it? My response is this: although I might judge myself to understand what we mean by ‘you have a visual experience with character c’, and although I might be a competent user of the sentence, I might not fully understand it, or my understanding of it might not be fully explicit, in which case there is some clarification to be done. Here is an example. For a long time I have taken myself to understand what we mean by ‘John kissed Mary’, and I have been a competent user of the sentence. But it was not until I read Donald Davidson’s ‘On the Logical Form of Action Sentences’ that I realized that we use this sentence to quantify over events (we use the sentence to mean that there is an event which is a kissing and is in the past and is by John and is of Mary). Perhaps I didn’t understand this before reading Davidson, or perhaps I did but only implicitly. Either way, I did not understand it explicitly, but after reading Davidson I did. Perhaps, in the same way, there are things about what we mean by ‘you have a visual experience with character c’ that I do not yet understand, at least not explicitly. Here is another example. I am a competent user of ‘The average Australian family has 2.2 children’, and until recently I have taken myself to understand what we mean by it. But now, having thought about it, I’m not sure that I fully understand what we mean by it, at least not fully explicitly. There are, for example, two things that we might mean by this sentence, and I’m not sure which one of these two

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things we actually mean. First, we might mean that the average number of children in Australian families is 2.2 (and the sentence that we use is just another way of saying this). Second, we might mean that a certain thing, the average Australian family, has 2.2 children (presumably if we mean this then we hope to communicate something that is true by expressing something that is, strictly speaking, false). I’m not sure which of these two things it is that we mean. I’m not even sure whether these are distinct meanings. On the face of it they are— the latter is committed to there being a thing that has 2.2 children (i.e. the sentence is true only if there is this thing), whereas the former is not. But that’s just on the face of it. There is room here to better understand, at least more explicitly, what we mean by ‘The average Australian family has 2.2 children’. Perhaps, in the same way, there is room to better understand, at least more explicitly, what we mean by ‘you have a visual experience with character c’. Suppose that we do not fully understand, at least not explicitly, what we mean by ‘you have a visual experience with character c’. How can we get a fuller or more explicit understanding? One technique that I use in this book is to appeal to compositionality. What we mean by ‘you have a visual experience with character c’ is composed from what we mean by the constituents of the sentence (so I will assume). That fact by itself might not be much help. But suppose there is a constituent of the sentence that we use with exactly the same meaning in other sentences. And suppose that we have a reasonably full and explicit understanding of what we mean by the constituent in those sentences. Then this might give us a fuller or more explicit understanding of what we mean by the constituent in ‘you have a visual experience with character c’, and thus a fuller or more explicit understanding of what we mean by the sentence itself. One problem with this is that there aren’t really any such constituents of ‘you have a visual experience with character c’—the language employed here is quite technical, and if we do use any of the constituents in other sentences then our understanding of them there is no better than our understanding of them in this sentence.

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Fortunately, there are other ways of saying that you have a visual experience with character c, ways that employ more everyday language. Consider again the patch in Section 1.1. Here is another way of saying that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c: the patch looks grey to you (I take there to be a reading of this sentence on which we are saying the same thing; I’ll say more about this in Chapter 2). Given this, we can better understand what it is for you to have a visual experience of the patch with character c by better understanding what we mean by ‘the patch looks grey to you’. Now we can make some progress. Consider the constituent ‘grey’. There is evidence that what we mean by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ is the very same thing that we mean by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch is grey’ (I give the details in Chapter 2). We have a good explicit understanding of what we mean by ‘grey’ in the ‘The patch is grey’— we mean the property of being grey. So by ‘grey’ in the former we also mean the property of being grey. So what we mean by ‘The patch looks grey to you’ has something to do with the property of being grey. So what it is for the patch to look grey to you has something to do with the property of being grey, and so what it is for you to have a visual experience of the patch with character c has something to do with the property of being grey. There is also evidence that we use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean a way, and that the way that we mean is not the property of being grey (again, I give the details in Chapter 2). So what we mean by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ is a way that is not the property of being grey but is somehow connected with the property of being grey. Moreover, what we mean by ‘The patch looks grey to you’ has something to do with this way, so what it is for the patch to look grey to you has something to do with this way, and so what it is for you to have a visual experience of the patch with character c has something to do with this way. Continuing in this manner we can get a better (explicit) understanding of what we mean by ‘The patch looks grey to you’, and thus of what it is for the patch to look grey to you, and thus of what it is for you to have a visual experience of the patch with this character (I give the details in Chapters 2 to 7).

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There are other ways of saying that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c, using sentences other than ‘look’ sentences: What is it for you to visually experience the patch as grey? What is it for you to have a visual experience of the patch as of grey? What is it for you to see the patch as grey? We might be able to better understand what it is for you to have a visual experience of the patch with character c by better understanding what we mean by any of these sentences instead. But I will focus on ‘look’ sentences, for three main reasons. First, we can use ‘look’ sentences to describe a very wide variety of visual experiences (in fact, I don’t know of any visual experience that we cannot use a ‘look’ sentence to describe). Second, ‘look’ sentences are a part of natural, commonly used, non-philosophical language, so it is likely that we have a reasonably good implicit understanding of what we mean by them, an understanding that we might be able to make explicit. Third, the ‘look’ sentences that we use to talk about visual experience have constituents that we use with the very same meaning in sentences that we use to talk about other phenomena, and whose meaning in those sentences we have a reasonably good explicit understanding of.

1.4. Terminology I will be clarifying, for various sentences s, what we mean by sentence s. By ‘what we mean by sentence s’ I mean what we, as a community of speakers, generally mean by s. Sometimes what an individual speaker means by a sentence might be different from what the community as a whole means by that sentence (perhaps because she misunderstands the sentence, or perhaps because she understands it but intends to use it in a different way). But I take it that there are general facts about what we mean by a sentence, and these are the facts in which I am interested. I take it that a sentence means whatever we generally use it to mean: if it is true that we generally use s to mean m, then it is thereby true that s itself means m (I will not argue for this here). So my

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interest in what we mean by a sentence is equally an interest in what the sentence itself means. What I will be doing, then, can be stated in either of the following two ways: clarifying what we mean by various sentences, or clarifying what various sentences mean. I will use this terminology interchangeably. Similar comments apply to any sub-sentential constituents of a sentence. As part of clarifying what we mean by a sentence I will be clarifying what we mean by its constituents. By ‘what we mean by its constituents’ I mean what we generally mean by those constituents. I take it that there are general facts about what we mean by those constituents, and that a constituent c of a sentence s means whatever we generally use c in s to mean: if it is true that we generally use c in s to mean m, then it is thereby true that c in s itself means m. So my interest in what we mean by the constituents of a sentence is equally an interest in what those constituents themselves mean in that sentence. I will be talking about what a speaker S means by a sentence s on an occasion of use. There are at least two things to which I might be referring here, so I need to clarify which it is. Suppose that I use the sentence ‘Water is wet’ to assert that water is wet. What did I mean by the sentence ‘Water is wet’? On one understanding of ‘what I meant’, I meant that water is wet but not that H20 is wet—the mode of presentation matters. On another understanding I meant that water is wet and also that H20 is wet—the mode of presentation does not matter, as long as the truth conditions are the same. It is in this second way that I intend to be understood. Did I mean that H20 is wet and 1 + 1 = 2? No, even though these have the same truth conditions. Having the same truth conditions is necessary but not sufficient for meaning the same thing. Many people working in the philosophy of language would prefer to talk about ‘the proposition that the speaker semantically expresses on that occasion’, or ‘the content of s relative to that context’, or ‘what S asserts by uttering s on that occasion’, or ‘the truth conditions intuitively conveyed by the utterance’, or one of various other alternatives. I find these ways of talking much less clear, so much so that I can only understand this way of talking by translating it into talk about what S means by s.

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Some might be concerned that there are other things that I might mean by the sentence. What if I say that water is wet in order to get you to pass me some water? That is, in order to implicate (in the Gricean sense) that you should pass me some water. Some will want to say that I meant that you should pass me some water. If that is some other thing that counts as something that I meant by the sentence then I should clarify: it is not what I am referring to. But I’m not sure that it is something that I meant by the sentence. I agree that this is something that I meant when I assertively uttered ‘Water is wet’, but not that it is something that I meant by the sentence. Rather, it is something that I meant by uttering the sentence (or by saying what I did), and the sentence and my uttering of the sentence are distinct things (one is a sentence, one is an act). It is not by ‘Water is wet’ that I meant that you should pass me some water—it was by saying that water is wet that I meant that you should pass me some water. If in response to my uttering ‘Water is wet’ you ask me what I meant by that, seeking to clarify what I was implicating, then you are not using ‘that’ to refer to the sentence that I uttered, but to my act of uttering it. Again, similar comments apply to sub-sentential constituents of a sentence. I shall be talking about what a speaker S means by a constituent c of a sentence s on an occasion of use. In more popular terminology, I mean the content of c relative to that context: when S assertively utters the sentence s she expresses a proposition, and by uttering c she expresses a constituent of that proposition—this is the content of c relative to the context. Again, I find it clearer to talk about what the speaker means by c on this occasion, and this is the terminology that I shall use throughout. If need be, everything that I say can be translated into the more popular (but, in my opinion, often more confusing) technical language.

1.5. The Plan for the Book As I have said, my aim in this book is to answer the following question, for any character c: what is it to have a visual experience with character c?

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I start (Chapters 2 to 8) by trying to answer this question for a very simple character—the colour character of your visual experience of the patch p. I call this character ‘c1’. What is it to have a visual experience with character c1? I consider the following slightly different question first: what is it for you to have a visual experience of the patch with character c1? And I ask this question using the following ‘look’ sentence: what is it for the patch to look grey to you? I then try to better understand what we mean by ‘The patch looks grey to you’, thereby better understanding what it is for the patch to look grey to you, thereby better understanding what it is for you to have a visual experience of the patch with character c1. I argue that by ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we mean that you have a visual experience that is occurring in a certain way. So this is what it is for you to have a visual experience of the patch with character c1. Generalizing from this I conclude that to have a visual experience with character c1 is to have a visual experience that is occurring in a certain way. I thus arrive at an answer to my main question for one particular character. Perhaps this result is enough to conclude that for any character c, to have a visual experience with character c is to have a visual experience that is occurring in a certain way. But it would be nice to check. So, I consider some other characters and apply the same techniques (Chapter 9). In each case I arrive at the same result: that to have a visual experience with a certain character is to have a visual experience that is occurring in a certain way. I thus get an answer to my main question. I end up with an adverbial theory of visual experience. I finish (Chapters 10 and 11) by considering some traditional challenges for adverbial theories, and consider the extent to which the theory that I develop can meet those challenges. And I consider some phenomena that a theory of visual experience ought to be able to explain, and consider the extent to which the theory that I develop can explain those phenomena. Scattered throughout are some discussions of various metaphysical and linguistic questions that arise along the way.

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2 A Simple Character My aim in this book is to answer the following question, for any character c: what is it to have a visual experience with character c? Although I would like an answer to this question for any character c, I will start by trying to answer it for one particularly simple character. I consider this character for Chapters 1–8. I consider other characters in Chapter 9.

2.1. A Starting Character I will start by trying to answer this question for the following simple character—the character of your visual experience of the patch below:

Actually, even this character is more complicated than I would like to start with. It is more complicated because you can see the edges of the patch, which means that your visual experience of the patch has what we might call a ‘shape character’, in addition to what we might call a ‘colour character’. I want to focus on just the colour character of your visual experience of the patch. To clarify what I am referring to here, imagine making the patch bigger, so big that you cannot see its edges or anything other than the patch—all that you can see is what we might call ‘an expanse of grey’. You are now having a visual experience of the patch which has just the character that I would like to start with. I will refer to this as ‘the colour character of your visual experience of the patch’. It will be convenient to have a shorter term for this character, so I will also call it ‘c1’.

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To help you get a fix on which character c1 is, your visual experience of each of the patches below also has character c1 (it has a different shape and size character, but the same colour character):

In contrast, your visual experience of each patch below does not have character c1 (it has the same shape and size character, but a different colour character).

Having isolated this very simple character, c1, the question that I want to answer is this: What is it to have a visual experience with character c1? It will help to simplify in one more way, by considering a particular visual experience that has this character, and by asking what it is to have this particular experience with this character. So let’s consider your visual experience of the patch, and ask the following question: What is it for you to have a visual experience of the patch with character c1? Once we have an answer to this question we’ll be able to generalize it to an answer to the more general question of what it is to have a visual experience with character c1.

2.2. Choosing a ‘Look’ Sentence My approach is to find a ‘look’ sentence that we might use to say that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1, and then try to better understand what we mean by this ‘look’ sentence.

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There are various ‘look’ sentences that we might use, but here is a very natural one, and the one that I will use: The patch looks grey to you I take it that there is a reading of this sentence on which we mean that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1. I will refer to this as the intended reading of the sentence. Perhaps there are other readings of the sentence as well. I will not take a stand on this. What matters to me is that it has a reading on which we mean that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1, and this is the reading with which I intend it to be understood. Actually, ‘grey’ is not quite the right colour word to use, because it is not specific enough. Each patch below is such that the patch looks grey to you, even though in some cases your visual experience of the patch does not have character c1:

Strictly speaking, then, the right sentence to use is not ‘The patch looks grey to you’ but ‘The patch looks greyn to you’, where ‘greyn’ is a term for exactly the right shade of grey (i.e. the most specific colour term t such that ‘The patch looks t to you’ is true). But that would make things a bit more tedious. So I’ll pretend that ‘grey’ picks out exactly the right shade of grey. Some readers might be concerned that there is no reading of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ on which we mean just that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1—on all readings we also mean that you have a certain conceptual capacity (e.g. that you have the concept of being grey) or a certain discriminatory capacity (e.g. that you can visually discriminate grey things from non-grey things). I will argue against this idea in Chapter 7. For now, I will set this concern aside. So, I will take the question of what it is for you to have a visual experience of the patch with character c1 to be the question of what it is for the patch to look grey to you, because what we mean by

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‘The patch looks grey to you’ (on the intended reading) is that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1. My aim now is to clarify what we mean by ‘The patch looks grey to you’ (on the intended reading). In the rest of this chapter I develop the following proposal: by ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we mean that you have a visual experience of the patch that is occurring in a certain way.

2.3. A General View I am going to develop a theory of what we mean by ‘The patch looks grey to you’. I will assume that what we mean by the sentence is a proposition, that the sentence has constituents, that we mean something by each of those constituents, and that what we mean by each constituent somehow contributes to what we mean by the sentence. What kinds of thing do we mean by the constituents of a sentence, and how do they contribute to what we mean by the sentence? I will assume the following view (I will refer to this as the neo-Davidsonian view): by each constituent we mean a property of events, and the contribution works by property conjunction. To see what this means it is perhaps best to consider a simple example. I will only illustrate the basics, no more than what I will need for this book (for more details see Davidson (1980) and Parsons (1990)). Consider the sentence ‘John kissed Mary’. According to the neoDavidsonian view, what we mean by this sentence can be specified as follows: There is an event e such that e is kissing and e is in the past and e is by John and e is of Mary Alternatively, we might use the term ‘agent’ for the role that John plays in the event and the term ‘patient’ for the role that Mary plays in the event and put it this way instead: There is an event e such that e is a kissing and e is in the past and e has John as agent and e has Mary as patient

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What do we mean by the constituents of the sentence, and how do they contribute to what we mean by the sentence? First of all, what are the constituents of the sentence? Let’s take the semantic structure of the sentence to be: [John [[kiss-ed] Mary]] By the semantic structure of the sentence I mean the order in which the constituents of the sentence are combined semantically (the bracketing here is intended to show what the constituents are and the order in which they are combined semantically). I am allowing that the syntactic structure of the sentence can differ from its semantic structure—we will see some examples of this below. According to the above semantic structure the verb ‘kiss’ is first combined with the past-tense inflection ‘ed’ to form ‘kissed’, which is then combined with the name ‘Mary’ to form the verb phrase ‘kissed Mary’, which is then combined with the name ‘John’ to form the sentence ‘John kissed Mary’. Here is what we mean by the constituents, and how they contribute to what we mean by the sentence. First, by ‘kiss’ we mean the property of being a kissing. Next, by the past-tense inflection ‘ed’ we mean the property of being in the past. Next, by ‘kissed’ we mean the conjunction of what we mean by ‘kiss’ and what we mean by ‘ed’. That is, the conjunction of (a) the property of being a kissing, and (b) the property of being in the past. That is, the property of being a kissing and in the past. Next, by ‘Mary’ we mean the property of having Mary as patient. I assume that it is part of the structure of the sentence that we mean the patient role rather than some other role (this is not represented in the simple structural diagram above in this section). Next, by ‘kissed Mary’ we mean the conjunction of what we mean by ‘kissed’ and what we mean by ‘Mary’. That is, the conjunction of (a) the property of being a kissing and in the past, and (b) the property of having Mary as patient. That is, the property of being a kissing and in the past and having Mary as patient.

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Next, by ‘John’ we mean the property of having John as agent. Again, I assume that it is part of the structure of the sentence that we mean the agent role rather than some other role (and this is also not represented in the diagram above). Next, by ‘John kissed Mary’ we mean the conjunction of what we mean by ‘John’ and what we mean by ‘kissed Mary’. That is, the conjunction of (a) the property of having John as agent, and (b) the property of being a kissing and in the past and having Mary as patient. That is, the property of being a kissing and in the past and having Mary as patient and having John as agent. Finally, what we mean by the sentence when we assert it is that there is an event which has this property. So we mean: There is an event e such that e is a kissing and e is in the past and e has Mary as patient and e has John as agent We have, of course, more colloquial ways of putting it. Here are some, in increasing degree of naturalness: There is a kissing in the past whose patient is Mary and whose agent is John There was a kissing whose patient was Mary and whose agent was John There was a kissing of Mary by John John kissed Mary This is my preferred account of what we mean by the constituents of the sentence and how they contribute to what we mean by the sentence. Although the neo-Davidsonian view is one that I like and will assume here there are other views. Some of these, such as Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp (1981)), File Change Semantics (Heim (1982)), Dynamic Predicate Logic (Groenendijk and Stokhof (1991)), Update Semantics (Veltman (1996)), and Situation Semantics (Barwise (1981), Barwise and Perry (1983)), are designed to deal with complex phenomena such as discourse anaphora and donkey anaphora. The issues that motivate these will not arise in what I do here, so there is

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no need to adopt any of these more complex views. I take it, also, that the results at which I would arrive by using any of these more general frameworks would be fundamentally the same as the results at which I arrive here.

2.4. Applying the View I will now use the neo-Davidsonian view to develop a theory of what we mean by ‘The patch looks grey to you’. First, what is the semantic structure with which we use ‘The patch looks grey to you’? I will take it to be the following: [The patch [[[look-s] grey] to you]] According to this structure, the verb ‘look’ is (semantically) combined with the present-tense inflection ‘s’ to give ‘looks’, which then combines with the adjective ‘grey’ to give the verb phrase ‘looks grey’, which then combines with the prepositional phrase ‘to you’ to give the verb phrase ‘looks grey to you’, which then combines with the determiner phrase ‘The patch’ to give the sentence ‘The patch looks grey to you’. This is not the only possibility. There are at least two others. One possibility is that we use ‘look’ in this sentence as a raising verb, using ‘The patch’ as a semantic argument not of ‘look’ but of ‘grey’ instead. Then we would be using the sentence with a structure that we can represent as follows: [[look-s [the patch grey]] to you] (This would be a case of the kind that I mentioned above—one in which the semantic structure of the sentence differs from its syntactic structure.) According to this structure, the definite description ‘the patch’ is (semantically) combined with the adjective ‘grey’ to give the clause ‘the patch grey’, the verb ‘look’ is combined with the present-tense inflection ‘s’ to give ‘looks’, which then combines with the clause ‘the patch grey’ to give the verb phrase ‘looks the patch grey’, which then combines with

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the prepositional phrase ‘to you’ to give the verb phrase ‘looks the patch grey to you’. We sometimes use ‘look’ as a raising verb in this kind of way, and perhaps there is a reading of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ on which we use ‘look’ as a raising verb, but I take it that on the intended reading we do not, so that this is not the structure with which we use the sentence (I have more to say about this in Chapter 8). Another possibility is that we use ‘look’ in this sentence as a control verb, effectively using ‘The patch’ both as a semantic argument of ‘look’ and also as a semantic argument of ‘grey’. Then we would be using the sentence with a structure that we can represent as follows: [The patch [[look-s [PRO grey]] to you]] Here ‘PRO’ is an unpronounced element that is controlled by ‘The patch’, which means that it is to be understood as referring to whatever ‘The patch’ refers to. According to this structure, ‘PRO’ combines with the adjective ‘grey’ to give the clause ‘PRO grey’, the verb ‘look’ combines with the present-tense inflection ‘s’ to give ‘looks’, which then combines with the clause ‘PRO grey’ to give the verb phrase ‘looks PRO grey’, which then combines with the prepositional phrase ‘to you’ to give the verb phrase ‘looks PRO grey to you’, which then combines with the definite description ‘The patch’ to give the sentence ‘The patch looks PRO grey to you’. We sometimes use ‘look’ as a control verb in this kind of way, and perhaps there is a reading of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ on which we use ‘look’ as a control verb, but I take it that on the intended reading we do not, so that this is not the structure with which we use the sentence (I have more to say about this as well in Chapter 8). Having identified the semantic structure of the sentence, the next thing is to identify what we mean by its constituents, and the manner in which they are combined to give what we mean by the sentence. In line with the general neo-Davidsonian view, and filling in the specifics where needed, I make the following proposals. First, by ‘look’ we mean the property of being a looking event. Next, by the present-tense inflection ‘s’ we mean the property of being in the present.

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Next, by ‘looks’ we mean the conjunction of what we mean by ‘look’ and what we mean by ‘s’. That is, the conjunction of (a) the property of being a looking event, and (b) the property of being in the present. That is, the property of being a looking event and in the present. Next, by ‘grey’ we mean some property of events. Which property? That’s a very interesting question, and perhaps the most important one when it comes to clarifying what we mean by this sentence. It requires careful investigation, and I set it aside until later in this chapter. For now I will just call it ‘p’. Next, by ‘looks grey’ we mean the conjunction of what we mean by ‘looks’ and what we mean by ‘grey’. That is, the conjunction of (a) the property of being a looking event and in the present, and (b) the property of having p. That is, the property of being a looking event and in the present and having p. Next, by ‘to you’ we mean the property of having you as an experiencer. Here I am taking there to be such a thing as the experiencer role in a looking event: to play this role is to be someone who is having the experience. I am also taking it to be part of the structure of the sentence that we use the expression in this position to mean the experiencer role, rather than some other role (this is a structural feature that I have not represented in the diagram above in this section). Why think that by ‘to you’ we mean the property of having you as an experiencer? Because had we been talking about someone else’s visual experience of the patch, say John, then we would have said ‘The patch looks grey to John’ instead. (There is another use of ‘to you’, one that is important to recognize—I discuss this in Chapter 7.) Next, by ‘looks grey to you’ we mean the conjunction of what we mean by ‘looks grey’ and what we mean by ‘to you’. That is, the conjunction of (a) the property of being a looking event and in the present and having p, and (b) the property of having you as an experiencer. That is, the property of being a looking event and in the present and having p and having you as an experiencer. Next, by ‘The patch’ we mean the property of having the patch as a stimulus. Here I am taking it that there is such a thing as the stimulus

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role in a looking event: to play this role is to be something that the experience is of. I am also taking it to be part of the structure of the sentence that we use the expression in this position to mean the stimulus role, rather than some other role (this is another structural feature that I have not represented in the diagram above). Why think that by ‘The patch’ we mean the property of having the patch as a stimulus? Because had you been having a visual experience of something else, say a ball, then we would have said ‘The ball looks grey to you’ instead. Next, by ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we mean the conjunction of what we mean by ‘looks grey to you’ and what we mean by ‘The patch’. That is, the conjunction of (a) the property of being a looking event and in the present and having p and having you as an experiencer, and (b) the property of having the patch as a stimulus. That is, the property of being a looking event and in the present and having p and having you as an experiencer and having the patch as a stimulus. Finally, what we mean by the sentence when we assert it is that there is an event which has this property. So we mean: There is an event e such that e is a looking event and e is in the present and e has p and e has you as an experiencer and e has the patch as a stimulus We have, of course, more colloquial ways of putting it. Here are some, in increasing degree of naturalness: There is a looking in the present which has p and whose experiencer is you and whose stimulus is the patch There is a looking grey to you by the patch The patch looks grey to you We have thus arrived at a theory of what we mean by ‘The patch looks grey to you’. This is not yet a very illuminating theory. I am interested in the character of your visual experience, and we use ‘grey’ to specify that character. So the most interesting question is what we mean by ‘grey’. At the moment I am just taking it that we mean some property of

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events, p. In Sections 2.5–2.12 I turn to the question of exactly which property this is. I will assemble four clues about what we mean by ‘grey’, and then use those clues to make the following proposal: by ‘grey’ we mean the property of occurring in a certain way.

2.5. A First Clue about ‘Grey’ There is evidence that by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we mean the property of being grey. First, there is evidence from our use of deletion that by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we mean the same thing that we mean by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch is grey’. There is a reading of the second sentence below on which we mean the same thing by it as we do by the first sentence (the second sentence is obtained by ‘deleting’ the second occurrence of ‘grey’ from the first, which is why I call this ‘evidence from our use of deletion’): The patch looks grey to you and it is grey The patch looks grey to you and it is This would not be possible unless we mean the same thing by ‘grey’ in each of its two occurrences in the first sentence. This can be seen from the examples below. What we mean by ‘red’ in the first sentence below is different from what we mean by ‘grey’ in that sentence. Because of this, there is no reading of the second sentence on which we mean the same thing by it as we do by the first sentence: The patch looks grey to you and it is red The patch looks grey to you and it is For there to be a reading of the second sentences on which we mean the same thing by them as the first sentences it is not sufficient for the deleted expression to be the same expression, or an expression with the same surface form, as the antecedent expression—it must be an expression that we use with the same meaning. This can be seen from the examples below:

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John thought it was a bank, but it was a bank John thought it was a bank, but it was The two occurrences of ‘bank’ in the first sentence can be used with different meanings, and we might use the sentence to mean that John thought it was a financial bank but it was a river bank. Suppose that we do. The second sentence is a variant of the first, obtained by deleting the second occurrence of ‘a bank’, an expression the same as the antecedent expression ‘a bank’, or at least with the same surface form as the antecedent expression ‘a bank’. There is, however, no reading of the second sentence on which we mean that John thought it was a financial bank but it was a river bank. There are only readings on which it means John thought it was a financial bank but it was a financial bank, or that John thought it was a river bank but it was a river bank. So the fact that there is a reading of the second sentence on which we mean the same thing by it as we do by the first sentence is evidence that we use ‘grey’ with the same meaning in each of its two occurrences in the first, and thus that we use ‘grey’ with the same meaning in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ as we do in ‘The patch is grey’. I take it that by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch is grey’ we mean the property of being grey. So we have evidence that by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we mean the property of being grey. This is my first clue about what we mean by ‘grey’.

2.6. A Second Clue about ‘Grey’ There is evidence that in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we use ‘grey’ to mean a way. (This might sound like it contradicts the evidence of Section 2.5, but I will argue that it does not.) There is evidence from our use of echo questions that we use ‘grey’ either singularly to mean a way or plurally to mean some ways. In the conversation below, it is appropriate for B to use ‘how’ in place of ‘grey’ to form what is called an echo question in response to A (this is

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the kind of response that B might make if he doesn’t quite hear what A said): A: The cup looks grey to you. B: The cup looks how to me? This is what we would expect if A uses ‘grey’ singularly to mean to a way or plurally to mean some ways: A: John walks {that way, the way Mary swims, thus, those ways, every way}. B: John walks how? It is not what we would expect if A uses ‘grey’ to mean something else: A: B: A: B: A: B:

John loves Mary. John loves #how? John goes everywhere that Mary goes. John goes #how? John knows that grass is green. John knows #how?

(Here and elsewhere I use ‘#’ next to an expression in a context to mark the fact that there is something semantically odd about using the expression in that context.) There seem to be expressions that we use to do something other than mean a way or some ways, and yet can appropriately be replaced by ‘how’ to form echo questions. Degree words such as ‘very’, ‘somewhat’, and ‘quite’ are examples: A: John swims {very, somewhat, quite} fast. B: John swims how fast? So the fact that B can form an appropriate echo question by replacing ‘grey’ by ‘how’ is consistent with ‘grey’ being used as a degree word, and not to mean a way or some ways. But I take it that we do not use ‘grey’ as a degree word in this case, and that the fact that ‘grey’ can be appropriately replaced by ‘how’ to form an echo question is evidence that we use ‘grey’ to mean a way or some ways.

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The evidence above is that we use ‘grey’ either singularly to mean a way or plurally to mean some ways. There is evidence from our use of anaphora that we use ‘grey’ singularly to mean a way (rather than plurally to mean some ways). In the pair of sentences below, it is appropriate to use ‘that way’ anaphorically upon the use of ‘grey’, but inappropriate to use ‘those ways’: The patch looks grey to you. The page looks {that way, #those ways} to you too. This is just what we would expect if we use ‘grey’ singularly to mean a way rather than plurally to mean some ways: The patch looks this way to you. The page looks {that way, #those ways} to you too. The patch looks a way to you. The page looks {that way, #those ways} to you too. The patch looks some way to you. The page looks {that way, #those ways} to you too. The patch looks the way to you. The page looks {that way, #those ways} to you too. The patch looks thus to you. The page looks {that way, #those ways} to you too. So the fact that it is appropriate to use ‘that way’ anaphorically upon our use of ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’, but inappropriate to use ‘those ways’, is evidence that we use ‘grey’ singularly to mean a way (rather than plurally to mean some ways). This is my second piece of evidence about what we mean by ‘grey’.

2.7. A Third Clue about ‘Grey’ I have given evidence that we use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean the property of being grey, and evidence that we use it to mean a way. Perhaps the way that we mean is the property of being grey? I will grant that the property of being grey is a way—it is a way of being. Nevertheless, I will argue in this section that the way

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that we mean by ‘grey’ is not the property of being grey—it is some other way. To argue that the way that we mean by ‘grey’ is not the property of being grey, I need to consider a different example. Suppose that you have a visual experience of a man, and the character of your visual experience of the man is such that we might describe it by saying, ‘The man looks 22 to you’ (i.e. 22 years old). Just as there is evidence that we use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean the property of being grey, there is also evidence that we use ‘22’ in the ‘The man looks 22 to you’ to mean the property of being 22. And just as there is evidence that we use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean a way, there is also evidence that we use ‘22’ in ‘The man looks 22 to you’ to mean a way (I won’t go through the details again). But there is reason to think that the way that we mean by ‘22’ is not the property of being 22, because there is reason to think the property of being 22 is not way. Consider the following conversation: A: John is 22. B: John is #how? C: Mary is #[that way] too. In this conversation A uses ‘22’ to mean the property of being 22. If the property of being 22 were a way then it would be appropriate for B to replace ‘22’ by ‘how’ to form an echo question in response to A. But it is not appropriate. Similarly, if the property of being 22 were a way then it would be appropriate for C to use ‘that way’ anaphorically upon A’s use of ‘22’. But it is not appropriate. This is evidence that the property of being 22 is not a way. If the property of being 22 is not a way, then the way that we mean by ‘22’ in ‘John looks 22 to you’ is not the property of being 22—it is some other way. If this is right—if the way that we mean by ‘22’ in ‘John looks 22 to you’ is not the property of being 22—then I propose, for reasons of uniformity, that the way that we mean by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ is not the property of being grey. To be clear: when we use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we do mean the property of being grey, which is a way, but there is also some other way that we

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mean. So by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we mean a way, one that is not the property of being grey. This is my third clue about what we mean by ‘grey’.

2.8. A Fourth Clue about ‘Grey’ I have given evidence that we use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean the property of being grey, and evidence that we use it to mean a way. I have also argued that the way that we mean is not the property of being grey. So which way is it that we mean? My fourth clue about what we mean by ‘grey’ is this: we have a mechanism in our language for using adjectives to mean ways of occurring, including adjectives such as ‘grey’, and including adjectives in ‘look’ sentences. Suppose that John is walking with chin up, shoulders back, and confident steps. We might describe the way that John is walking by saying that John is walking as if he is proud, or that John is walking like a proud person. Or we might just say that John is walking proud. It is this last thing that we might say that I am interested in. Not everyone would be happy to use this last sentence, judging it to be to ungrammatical. But it is the kind of thing that people say, and even those who judge it to be ungrammatical can understand what is meant by it. I take it that when we use ‘proud’ in this way we use it to mean a way of walking (i.e. a way in which walking events occur). There is evidence from our use of echo questions and anaphora that we use it to mean a way, and I take it that if we do mean a way then it is a way of walking. So here we have a case in which we use an adjective to mean a way of occurring. Examples can be multiplied. There are readings of the sentences below on which we use the adjective in the sentence to mean a way of occurring: John talks American (i.e. the way Americans talk) John drives scared (i.e. the way scared people drive) John swims tired (i.e. the way tired people swim) These are all cases in which we use an adjective to mean a way of occurring. So we have a mechanism in our language for using adjectives

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to mean ways of occurring. Note that there are readings of at least some of these sentences on which we use the adjective to mean something other than a way of occurring. For example, there is a reading of the second sentence on which we use ‘scared’ to specify the state that John is in when he drives, a reading on which the sentence means something like ‘John drives while he is scared’. That there are readings on which we use the adjective in these ways does not take away from my point that there are readings on which we use the adjective to mean a way of occurring. Note also that some people might judge these sentences to be ungrammatical. That might be so— my point is not that these sentences are grammatical, but that they have readings (grammatical or not) on which we use the adjective to mean a way of occurring. If we have a mechanism in our language for using adjectives to mean ways of occurring, then it would not be surprising to find that we use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean a way of occurring. The following comments might help to make it less surprising. Above I gave an example of a sentence in which we use ‘proud’ to mean a way of walking (‘John walks proud’). We might use ‘proud’ to refer to other ways of occurring, not just ways of walking. In the right contexts we might use ‘proud’ in ‘John talks proud’ to mean a way of talking; we might use ‘proud’ in ‘John dresses proud’ to mean a way of dressing; we might use ‘proud’ in ‘John drives proud’ to mean a way of driving; we might use ‘proud’ in ‘John reacts proud’ to mean a way of reacting; and so on. So we might expect to find that we might use ‘proud’ in ‘John looks proud’ to mean a way of looking. It is only a small step from there to using ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean a way of looking. Or we can approach it from a different direction. Suppose that grey things tend to move in a certain way. Suppose that a certain ball moves in that way. Then we might say that the ball moves as if it is grey, or that the ball moves like a grey thing. Or we might just say that the ball moves grey. It would be unusual, and perhaps in some communities it would be ungrammatical, but it would be intelligible. This would be a case in which we use ‘grey’ to mean a way of

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moving. We can imagine contexts in which we might use ‘grey’ to mean other ways of occurring: the ball bounces grey, the ball burns grey, and so on. So it would not be surprising to find contexts in which we use ‘grey’ to refer to a way of looking: the ball looks grey. This would be especially unsurprising if we find, as we have, that grey things tend to look a certain way. It is only a small step from there to using ‘grey’ in the ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean a way of looking. So this is my fourth clue about what we mean by ‘grey’: we have a mechanism in our language for using adjectives to mean ways of occurring, including adjectives such as ‘grey’, and including adjectives in ‘look’ sentences.

2.9. What we Mean by ‘Grey’ I have gathered four clues about what we mean by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’. There is evidence (a) that we use ‘grey’ to mean the property of being grey, (b) that we use it to mean a way, (c) that the way that we mean is not the property of being grey, and (d) that we have a mechanism in our language for using adjectives to mean ways of occurring, including adjectives such as ‘grey’, and including adjectives in ‘look’ sentences. In light of these four clues I propose the following: in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we use ‘grey’ to mean the property of being grey and thereby mean a way of looking (i.e. a way in which looking events occur). The proposal is that we mean at least two things by ‘grey’: the property of being grey, and a way of looking—we mean the property of being grey and thereby mean a way of looking. We can think of this as proposing that we use ‘grey’ indirectly to mean a way of looking, by first meaning the property of being grey. So we do not use ‘grey’ directly to mean that way of looking (as we might use a proper name or a demonstrative to mean it). Some readers might be concerned about the idea that we mean more than one thing by ‘grey’. I address this concern in Chapter 5.

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2.10. What we Mean by ‘The Patch Looks Grey to You’ By the end of Section 2.4 I had arrived at the following theory of what we mean by ‘The patch looks grey to you’: There is an event e such that e is a looking event and e is in the present and e has p and e has you as an experiencer and e has the patch as a stimulus Which property is p? It is the property of events that we ultimately mean by ‘grey’ in this sentence. I have just made a proposal about which property that is—it is the property of occurring in a certain way. Let’s call this way ‘w1’. So p is the property of occurring in way w1. Now I can say more fully what we mean by ‘The patch looks grey to you’: There is an event e such that e is a looking event and e is in the present and e is occurring in way w1 and e has you as an experiencer and e has the patch as a stimulus We can simplify this. First, I take it that a looking event is a visual experience. Second, given what I mean by ‘stimulus’, for an object o to be a stimulus of a looking event (i.e. of a visual experience) is for the experience to be an experience of o. Third, given what I mean by ‘experiencer’, for a person p to be an experiencer of a looking event (i.e. of a visual experience) is for the experience to be p’s experience. So here is another way of saying what we mean by ‘The patch looks grey to you’: You have a visual experience of the patch that is occurring in way w1

2.11. An Adverbial Theory of Character c1 If this is what we mean by ‘The patch looks grey to you’ then this is what it is for the patch to look grey to you, and so this is what it is for

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you to have a visual experience of the patch with character c1. So, for you to have a visual experience with character c1 is for you to have a visual experience that is occurring in way w1. We can generalize this. If this is what it is for you to have a visual experience of the patch with character c1 then presumably the following is true: To have a visual experience with character c1 is to have a visual experience that is occurring in way w1 We have thus arrived at a theory of what it is to have a visual experience with character c1. Note that this is an adverbial theory, as I characterized them in Chapter 1. I take this to be a significant result, and to show what can be achieved by taking a semantic approach. (I pointed out in Chapter 1 that an adverbial theory might also be a representational theory—it depends on whether the relevant ways of occurring are representational properties or not. I argue at the end of Chapter 11 that they are not. If that’s right, then this theory is not a representational theory.)

2.12. Some Work to Do There is more work to be done to consolidate this result. First, I have appealed to ways of looking, which I have been taking to be properties of events. It would be nice to understand ways of looking better, and to check they are indeed properties of events. I consider that in Chapter 3. Second, I have proposed that we use ‘grey’ in the ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean the property of being grey and thereby to mean a way of looking, and that we employ a general mechanism for doing so. It would be nice to understand this mechanism better. I consider that in Chapter 4. Third, I have proposed that by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we mean two things: the property of being a grey, and way of looking. Does that make sense? I consider that in Chapter 5.

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3 Ways of Looking In Chapter 2 I proposed that by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we mean a way of looking (i.e. a way in which looking events occur). It would be nice to have a better understanding of these things—ways in general, and ways of looking in particular. My aim in this chapter is to go some way towards a better understanding. I will propose that ways are determinates. In particular, ways of looking are determinates of the determinable kind looking event. To be a looking event is to be an event of a certain kind; this kind is a determinable kind (i.e. it has determinates); a way of looking w is a determinate of this determinable; for a looking event to occur in way w is for it to be of this determinate kind w.

3.1. Ways More Generally I am interested in ways of looking, but it helps to think about ways more generally and use them as a guide to what to say about ways of looking in particular (I started to do this in Chapter 2). So as well as ways of looking I will consider ways of walking, ways of swimming, ways of riding a bicycle, and so on. I will assume without argument that there are such things, and that we refer to and quantify over them when we say such things as the following: John walked this way I like the way that Mary swims Tim rode his bicycle one of the ways that he was asked to

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Mary walks a better way than Tim walks John swam thus Mary rode her bicycle awkwardly Tim walks however Tom walks John swims like a duck (Note that sometimes we refer to or quantify over ways by using the word ‘way’, as in the first four examples, but sometimes we do so without using the word ‘way’, as in the last four examples.) What’s common about these ways is that they are all manners: ways of looking are manners of looking, ways of walking are manners of walking, ways of swimming are manners of swimming, ways of riding a bicycle are manners of riding a bicycle, and so on. I could say, then, that in this chapter I am interested not just in ways of looking but in all ways that are manners (and that includes ways of walking, ways of swimming, ways of riding a bicycle, and so on).

3.2. Other Kinds of Way I take it that not all ways are manners. Consider the ways that we refer to or quantify over when we say the following things: We can get some petrol along the way Winning the lottery is a way of getting rich The cinema is a short way up the road The boat is way out to sea There are many parks around our way She came my way We made way for the truck There is no way that it will happen John is in a terrible way The performance was defective in several ways I take it that these ways are not manners. Consider the way in the first example (‘We can get some petrol along the way’). If this way were a manner then that we can get some petrol along the way would entail

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that there is a manner m such that we can get some petrol along m. But it does not entail that. So this way is not a manner. Similar reasoning shows that none of the other ways in these examples is a manner either. If the way in the first example is not a manner then what kind of a way is it? For present purposes this doesn’t matter—what matters is that it is not a manner. But I would say that it is a route. If that’s right, then ways come in at least two kinds—manners and routes. As for the other ways in these examples, I would say that they are: means, distances, locations, regions, directions, possibilities, states, and respects. If this is right then ways come in many kinds—manners, and various others. I am only interested in ways that are manners, ones of the same kind as ways of looking. In the discussion so far I have been assuming that we use the word ‘way’ with the same meaning in all of these examples. Suppose that’s right. Then there is a property which all of these ways have in common—the property of being a way, the property that we express by using the word ‘way’. If I were interested in better understanding the nature of this property then I should not focus just on manners—I should consider all of these ways, because they all have this property. So I should clarify: in this chapter I am not interested in better understanding the nature of being a way, but in better understanding the nature of being a manner (because ways of looking are manners). Then it makes sense to focus just on manners, and set aside all ways that are not manners. Perhaps we do not use ‘way’ with the same meaning in all of these examples. Perhaps it is multiply ambiguous between ‘manner’, ‘route’, ‘means’, and so on. Suppose that’s right. Then I should be more careful in what I say. It is false, for example, that ways come in at least two kinds: manners and routes. For suppose that by ‘way’ here I mean ‘manner’. Then what I have claimed is that manners come in at least two kinds: manners and routes. That’s false. Or suppose that by ‘way’ I mean ‘route’. Then what I have claimed is that routes come in at least two kinds: manners and routes. That’s also false. So rather than saying that ways come in at least two kinds, manners and routes,

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what I should say is that ‘way’ is ambiguous between at least two meanings, ‘manner’ and ‘route’. And I should say that I will only be using ‘way’ to mean ‘manner’. It is an interesting question whether we do use the word ‘way’ with the same meaning in these examples, but it is too complicated for me to try to answer here. I will assume that we do. Then I can say this: I am only interested in ways that are manners, and I am interested in understanding the nature of being a manner (but I will continue to call them ‘ways’).

3.3. Being a Way is Relational The ways in which I am interested are all ways of something: ways of looking, ways of walking, ways of swimming, and so on. This suggests that being a way is a relational matter: to be a way is to stand in a certain relation to something. I propose that this is indeed the case, and I will call this relation the way relation. This is what I propose: For something x to be a way is for there to be something y such that x stands in the way relation to y In this respect being a way is like being a mother, because the following analogous claim is true of being a mother: for something x to be a mother is for there to be something y such that x stands in the mother relation to y. It is not like being a rock, because the following analogous claim is not true of being a rock: for something x to be a rock is for there to be something y such that x stands in the rock relation to y. Having made this proposal my interest moves to the way relation, and to two questions in particular. First, what are the relata of the way relation (i.e. what kinds of thing does the way relation relate)? Second, what is the nature of the way relation (i.e. what is it for two things to stand in the way relation)? I will consider these two questions in turn, and develop the following answers: (a) the way relation relates kinds of event, and (b) for a kind k1 to stand in the way relation to a kind k2 is for k1 to be a determinate of k2.

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3.4. The Relata of the Way Relation What kinds of thing does the way relation relate? Let’s start by considering ways (i.e. the first relata of the way relation). I propose that ways are kinds of event. That is: For all x: if x is a way then x is a kind of event I will assume that kinds are properties, so that kinds of event are properties of events, and for an event to be of kind k is for it to have property k. If that’s right then according to the proposal above ways are properties. There is some precedence for taking ways (of the kind in which I am interested) to be properties. The few people who have discussed them in some form or another in the literature have all taken them to be properties, or at least have come very close to doing so. To address certain problems about proper names, Frege (1892/ 1952) proposed that words have senses. In some places he describes the sense of a word as a way: as a ‘way of determining its referent’ (1918/1956), or as a ‘way of thinking about its referent’ (1914). I take it that these ways are manners. Frege proposes that the sense of a word is a mind-independent thing that can be expressed by a definite description. This is close to proposing, although Frege does not explicitly do so, that these ways are singular properties (i.e. properties that can be had by at most one thing), and thus that they are properties. So Frege comes close to proposing that these ways are properties. Evans (1981, 1982) takes the sense of a word to be a way—a way of thinking about its referent. He makes some claims about the individuation of ways of thinking about an object. Suppose that s1 and s2 are both thinking about an object o. Since s1 counts as thinking about o, there will be some explanation of why s1 counts as thinking about o. Suppose that the explanation takes the form, ‘s1 is thinking about o in virtue of the fact that . . . s1 . . . ’. According to Evans (1982, pp. 20–1) s2 is thinking about o in the same way that s1 is thinking about o iff replacing ‘s1’ by ‘s2’ in this explanation results in a true explanation of

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why s2 counts as thinking about o. This amounts to claiming that there is a certain property such that s1 and s2 are thinking about o in the same way iff they instantiate that property, which is very close to claiming that a way of thinking about o is that property, and thus that a way of thinking about an object is a property. Others have taken ways of one kind or another to be properties: Stalnaker (1976, p. 68) takes ways things might be, and ways things might have been, to be properties of the world; Stanley and Williamson (2001, Section II) take ways of engaging in actions to be properties of events; Leeds (1975, p. 202) takes ways of appearing to be properties of seeing events; Landman and Morzycki (2003) propose that ways (they call them ‘manners’) are kinds of event—if kinds are properties, as I am taking them to be, then this is to propose that ways are properties of events. I have proposed that ways are kinds of event. Why kinds of event? Consider ways of walking. Consider the following way of walking: walking as if one has a sore foot. What kind of thing is walking as if one has a sore foot? A natural answer is this: it is a kind of activity. If this answer is right, and if activities are events, then walking as if one has a sore foot is a kind of event. An event is of this kind (i.e. is a walking as if one has a sore foot) just in case the doer of the event is walking as if she has a sore foot. But why not think that walking as if one has a sore foot is a kind of person rather than a kind of event? The idea would be this: a person is walking as if she has a sore foot iff she is of this kind; an event is a walking as if one has a sore foot only secondarily, in virtue of the doer of the event being of this kind. But there is a problem for this, from direction of explanation. Here is a good explanation: John counts as walking as if he has a sore foot, because he is the doer of an event that is of a certain kind (it is a walking as if one has a sore foot). Here is a bad explanation: the event of which John is the doer counts as a walking as if one has a sore foot, because John is a person of a certain kind. There is also a problem from counting. If we were to count the number of walkings as if one has a sore foot that there were yesterday, we should count events, not people. Given these problems I conclude that walking as if one has a

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sore foot is a kind of event, not a kind of person. So too for ways of swimming, ways of looking, and so on—I propose that these too are all kinds of event. So much for ways, the first relata of the way relation. What about the second relata, the things that ways are ways of? What kinds of things are walking, swimming, and looking? Consider walking. What kind of thing is walking? A natural answer is this: it is a kind of activity. If this answer is right, and if activities are events, then walking is a kind of event. This is also consistent with the neoDavidsonian approach to semantics that I am taking in this book— according to this approach, by ‘walk’ we mean a property of events; if, as I have also been assuming, properties are kinds, then by ‘walk’ we mean a kind of event; and if by ‘walk’ we mean a kind of event then by ‘walking’ we do too; so walking is a kind of event. An event is of this kind (i.e. is a walking) just in case the doer of the event is walking. I propose that this is true of walking, and that similar things are true of swimming, looking, and so on. That is: For all x and y: if x is a way of y then y is a kind of event Putting together the two proposals that I have made in this section we have this: the way relation relates kinds of event. That is: For all x and y: if x is a way of y then x and y are kinds of event

3.5. The Nature of the Way Relation In Section 3.4 I proposed that the way relation relates kinds of event. The next question to consider is this: what is it for one kind of event, k1, to stand in the way relation to another kind of event, k2? Consider the following two kinds of event: Walking without moving one’s arms Walking with a shirt on The first of these is a way of walking. (Quick argument #1: To be told that someone is walking without moving her arms is to be told

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something about the way in which she is walking. Quick argument #2: In response to being told that someone is walking without moving her arms it is appropriate to respond, ‘She is walking how?’) The second of these is not a way of walking. (Quick argument #1: To be told that someone is walking with a shirt on is not to be told anything about the way in which she is walking. Quick argument #2: In response to being told that someone is walking with a shirt on it is not appropriate to respond, ‘She is walking how?’) What’s the difference? Why is the first a way of walking whereas the second is not? I propose that it’s because the first is a determinate of walking, whereas the second is not. Here I am appealing to the determinate relation between properties (see Johnson (1921), Prior (1949), Körner (1959), Searle (1959), Woods (1967), Thomason (1969), Armstrong (1997, pp. 48–63), Johansson (2000), and Funkhouser (2006)). Roughly, for a property p to be a determinate of a property q is for p to be more specific than q (i.e. for q to be more general than p). This is not an analysis, just a guide to help you see which relation I am pointing to. To help further, consider the following two properties: Being coloured and not green Being coloured and square Being coloured and not green is a determinate of being coloured. (Quick argument: To be told, of something that is coloured, that it is coloured and not green is to be told something more specific about its colour.) But being coloured and square is not a determinate of being coloured. (Quick argument: To be told, of something that is coloured, that it is coloured and square is not to be told anything more specific about its colour.) Now return to the event-kinds above. Walking without moving one’s arms is a determinate of walking. (Quick argument: To be told, of someone who is walking, that she is walking without moving her arms is to be told something more specific about her walking). But walking with a shirt on is not a determinate of walking. (Quick argument: To be told, of someone who is walking, that she is walking

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with a shirt on is not to be told something more specific about her walking.) So walking without moving one’s arms is both a way of and a determinate of walking. And walking with a shirt on is neither a way of nor a determinate of walking. I propose that when it comes to manners the way relation is coextensive with the determinate relation: For all x and y: x is a way of y if and only if x is a determinate of y More simply: ways are determinates. The idea is this: walking is a kind of event; this kind is a determinable kind (i.e. it has determinates); ways of walking are determinates of this kind. Walking without moving one’s arms is a way of walking because it is a determinate of walking; walking with a shirt on is not a way of walking because it is not a determinate of walking. There might be some precedent for taking the way relation to be coextensive with the determinate relation. Williamson (2000) seems to suggest that the way relation is coextensive with the determinate relation, at least for some kinds of way. He talks about knowing, remembering, regretting, realizing, seeing, etc., as being factive mental states: they are mental states; and they are factive—one cannot know p unless p is true, one cannot remember p unless p is true, and so on. Of these, he claims, knowing is the most general factive mental state. Other factive mental states are more specific instances of this most general factive mental state. So, on this proposal, remembering p, regretting p, realizing p, seeing p, etc., are determinates of the determinable knowing p. Williamson also refers to remembering p, regretting p, realizing p, seeing p, etc., as ways of knowing p. In effect, then, his proposal is that ways of knowing p are determinates of knowing p (so that the way relation is coextensive with the determinate relation, at least on this domain). Note that this proposal, that ways are determinates, only applies to ways that are manners. I’m not proposing that it extends to ways more generally. For example, it might not extend to the ways that are means. Here is a possible counterexample to such an extension:

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Eating raw chicken is a means of getting salmonella Eating raw chicken is not a determinate of getting salmonella

3.6. More about the Determinate Relation In Section 3.5 I have tried to illuminate the nature of the way relation by appealing to the determinate relation. I take it that I can do so without giving an account of the determinate relation (if I were required to give an account of the determinate relation then I would, for the same reason, be required to give an account of anything appealed to by my account of the determinate relation, and also required to give an account of anything appealed to by that account, and so on, ad infinitum). And just as well, because I don’t have any such account to give. Nevertheless, some readers might feel that an account is in order, or at least some attempt at an account. So in this section I give an idea of one natural line of account that has been pursued. What is it for a property p to be a determinate of a property q? It is natural to try an answer in terms of entailment. It is widely agreed by those who have written about the determinate relation that it is a necessary condition on p being a determinate of q that p entails q. It is also widely agreed that this is not a sufficient condition (see Woods (1967), Armstrong (1997), Searle (1959), and Thomason (1969)). Being coloured and square, for example, entails being coloured, but being coloured and square is not a determinate of being coloured. The reason why being coloured and square is not a determinate of being coloured is, intuitively, that being square does not entail being of any specific colour. This suggests the following account: p is a determinate of q iff (a) p entails q, and (b) for any property r such that p is logically equivalent to (q and r), r entails q This account correctly excludes being coloured and square from being a determinate of being coloured: there is a property r (being square) such that being coloured and square is logically equivalent to being coloured and r, and r does not entail being coloured (it is possible to be square but not coloured). But the account incorrectly

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excludes being red from being a determinate of being coloured (which is often given as a prototypical case): being red is logically equivalent to (being coloured and being not coloured or red), and being not coloured or red does not entail being coloured—anything that is not coloured is not coloured or red but is not coloured. Or we can make the point in the following different way: being red is logically equivalent to (being coloured and being not a non-red colour), and being not a non-red colour does not entail being coloured—anything that is not coloured is not a non-red colour but is not coloured. So this account is not satisfactory. Notice that being not coloured or red and being not a non-red colour at least have something to do with being coloured, even if they don’t entail it. Their negations, for example, entail being coloured. So we might try the following account: p is a determinate of q iff (a) p entails q, and (b) for any property r such that p is logically equivalent to (q and r), either r or not-r entails q This account correctly excludes being coloured and square from being a determinate of being coloured: there is a property r (being square) such that being coloured and square is logically equivalent to being coloured and r, and neither r nor not-r entails being coloured (some sheets of glass are square but not coloured; some signs are not square but coloured). And it correctly includes being red as being a determinate of being coloured. But the account incorrectly excludes being square from being a determinate of being rectangular (another prototypical example of the determinate relation): being square is logically equivalent to (being rectangular and being equilateral), and neither being equilateral nor being not-equilateral entails being rectangular (an equilateral triangle is equilateral but not rectangular; a scalene triangle is not equilateral but not rectangular). So this account is not satisfactory either. This should give some idea of the complications involved in giving an account of the determinate relation in terms of entailment. I won’t pursue it any further.

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3.7. Sets of Ways and Maximally Specific Ways I finish this chapter by making a proposal about ways of looking that will be important for what I do in the book. I have proposed that ways of looking are kinds of event. If this is right, and if, as I have been assuming, kinds are properties, then ways of looking are properties. The proposal about ways of looking that I am going to make is one that I would make about properties more generally, and it will help to first make the proposal about some more familiar properties. Consider shape properties. When something has a shape property it typically has more than one shape property. Suppose that triangle A is equilateral (i.e. each pair of its sides has the same lengths) and that triangle B is scalene (i.e. each pair of its sides has different lengths). Triangle A has a shape property that triangle B does not have (the property of being an equilateral triangle). But there is a more general shape property that both triangles have—the property of being a triangle. So triangle A has at least two shape properties— the property of being an equilateral triangle and the property of being a triangle (these are distinct properties because triangle B has the second property but not the first). Consider the set of shape properties that A has. Call this set S. For some members of S (e.g. the property of being a triangle) there is a distinct member of S that is a determinate of it (e.g. the property of being an equilateral triangle). But for at least one member of S there is not—there is no distinct member of S which is a determinate of it. We might call this a maximally specific member of S. Moreover, there is only one such member of S, and it is a determinate of every other member of S. (I will not argue for this.) We might call this the maximally specific shape of A, or just the shape of A. What goes for shape properties might also go for other kinds of property. In particular, it might go for way properties. I propose that it does. Consider ways of swimming. When something swims it typically swims in more than one way. Suppose that two dogs Fido and Rover are both swimming. Fido and Rover will not be swimming

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in exactly the same way. So there is a way of swimming wF such that Fido is swimming in way wF but Rover is not. But Fido and Rover will both be swimming in the way that dogs swim. So there is a way of swimming w such that Fido and Rover are both swimming in way w. So Fido is swimming in at least two ways—wF and w (wF is distinct from w because Rover is swimming in way w but not in way wF). Consider the set of ways in which Fido is swimming; call it S. For some members of S (e.g. w) there is a distinct member of S that is a determinate of it (e.g. wF). But for at least one member of S there is not—there is no distinct member of S which is a determinate of it. This is a maximally specific member of S. Moreover, there is only one such member of S, and it is a determinate of every other member of S. (I will not argue for this.) This is the maximally specific way in which Fido is swimming, or just the way in which Fido is swimming. Finally, consider the ways in which I am particularly interested: ways of looking. I propose that similar things are true of ways of looking. When something looks some way it typically looks more than one way. Consider the two patches below:

The left patch looks (with respect to colour) a way that the right patch does not (the left patch looks light grey but the right patch does not)—call this way wLG. But there is a more general way that they both look (they both look grey)—call this way wG. So the left patch looks at least two distinct ways—wLG and wG. Consider the set of ways that the left patch looks; call it S. For some members of S (e.g. wG) there is a distinct member of S that is a determinate of it (e.g. wLG). But for at least one member of S there is not—there is no distinct member of S which is a determinate of it. This is a maximally specific member of S. Moreover, there is only one such member of S, and it is a determinate of every other member of S. (I will not argue for this.) This is the maximally specific way that the left patch looks, or just the way that the left patch looks (with respect to colour).

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4 The Mechanism In Chapter 2, I proposed that we use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean the property of being grey and thereby mean a way of looking. In this chapter I consider how, by meaning the property of being grey, we mean a way of looking. I will assume that we do so by exploiting some function, from properties to ways of looking, one that maps the property of being grey to the particular way of looking that we mean. So here is another way of asking the question in which I am interested in this chapter: which function is it that we exploit? I would like to know, for each argument of the function, the value of the function for that argument. I will argue that it is a function that maps a property p to the following way of looking: the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus has p occur in way w (I will explain all of this). In particular, it maps the property of being grey to the following way of looking: the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus is grey occur in way w. It is by exploiting this function that, by meaning the property of being grey, we mean a way of looking.

4.1. A General Mechanism I motivated the proposal that we use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean a way of looking by arguing that we have a mechanism in our language for using adjectives more generally to mean ways of occurring more generally. In using this as motivation I was implicitly suggesting that we use this same general mechanism when we use

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‘grey’ in the ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean a way of looking. It would be nice to have some evidence that this is so. I think that there is such evidence. Let’s start with ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ and work outwards. Suppose that we do exploit some function f when we use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean a way of looking. There is reason to think that we exploit the same function when we use colour adjectives other than ‘grey’ in ‘look’ sentences to say that someone is having a visual experience with a certain character. Suppose I tell you that a certain patch looks chartreuse to me (chartreuse is a colour). You might not know exactly which character I mean, but you know a way to work it out—find some things that are chartreuse in colour and see how they look. The reason that you know this way to work it out is that you understand that I am exploiting the same function when I use ‘chartreuse’ as the complement of ‘look’ as we exploit when we use other colour adjectives as the complement of ‘look’, such as ‘grey’. You understand which function this is (at least implicitly), and you can use this understanding to work out the value of the function in this new case. Changing the example might help to make the point. Consider the mathematical expression ‘23’. We use this expression to refer to the number 8. We do so by exploiting a certain function (the exponent function), which maps the pair of numbers 2 and 3 to the number 8. Now consider the expression ‘4156’. You might not know which number this refers to, but you know a way to work it out—multiply the number 41 by itself 56 times. The reason that you know this is that you understand that we exploit the same function when we use this expression as we do when we use ‘23’. You understand which function this is (at least implicitly), and you can use this understanding to work out the value of the function in this new case. A similar line of reasoning works for adjectives other than colour adjectives in ‘look’ sentences. Suppose I tell you that a certain man looks Lithuanian, using ‘Lithuanian’ to describe the character of our visual experiences of him. You might not know exactly which character I mean, but you know a way to work it out—find some people

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who are Lithuanian and see how they look. The reason that you know this way to work it out is that you understand that I am exploiting the same function when I use ‘Lithuanian’ as the complement of ‘look’ as we exploit when we use colour adjectives as the complement of ‘look’, such as ‘grey’ and ‘chartreuse’. You understand which function this is (at least implicitly), and you can use this understanding to work out the value of the function in this new case. This line of reasoning extends to our use of adjectives in non-‘look’ sentences as well. Suppose I tell you that the man in the example above not only looks Lithuanian but he walks Lithuanian too. You might not know exactly which way of walking I mean, but you know a way to work it out—find some people who are Lithuanian and see how they walk. The reason that you know this way to work it out is that you understand that I am exploiting the same function when I use ‘Lithuanian’ as the complement of ‘walk’ as we exploit when we use it as the complement of ‘look’, and as we exploit when we use colour adjectives as the complement of ‘look’. You understand which function this is (at least implicitly), and you can use this understanding to work out the value of the function in this new case. I have just argued that the function that we exploit when we use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean a way of looking is the same function that we exploit when we use adjectives more generally to mean ways of occurring. If this is right, then the function is not simply a 1-place function from properties to ways of looking, as I took it to be at the start of this chapter. Rather, it is a 2-place function from properties and kinds of events to ways of occurring. When we exploit it by using ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean a way of looking, the arguments of the function are the property being grey and the kind looking event, and the value of the function is the way of looking that we mean. When we exploit it by using ‘Lithuanian’ in ‘The man walks Lithuanian’ to mean a way of walking, the arguments of the function are the property being Lithuanian and the kind walking event, and the value of the function is the way of walking that we mean. I will call this function ‘f ’. Now I want to know: which function is f?

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4.2. An Initial Proposal There are a couple of clues. First, there is a clue from other expressions that we might use in place of an adjective to mean a way of occurring. Consider the case in Section 4.1, in which I tell you that the man is walking Lithuanian, using ‘Lithuanian’ to mean a way walking. I might instead tell you that he is walking the way that Lithuanians walk. This suggests that by ‘Lithuanian’ I mean ‘the way that Lithuanians walk’. Examples can be multiplied. Rather than saying that my dog swims Dalmatian, using ‘Dalmatian’ to mean a way of swimming, I might say that my dog swims the way that Dalmatians swim. This suggests that by ‘Dalmatian’ I mean ‘the way that Dalmatians swim’. Rather than saying that John drives Canadian, using ‘Canadian’ to mean a way of driving, I might say that John drives the way that Canadians drive. This suggests that by ‘Canadian’ I mean ‘the way that Canadians drive’. And so on. Second, there is a clue from how we might figure out the value of the function for a given pair of arguments. Suppose that I tell you that John drives Lithuanian. You understand the sentence—you know which function it is that I am exploiting. You know the arguments of the function—the property being Lithuanian and the kind driving event. But you do not yet know the value of the function—which way of driving it is that I mean. How might you figure it out? Here is one appropriate way: go to Lithuania and see how people there drive. This suggests that the function maps the property being Lithuanian and the kind driving event to the following way of driving: the way that Lithuanians drive. Again, examples can be multiplied. When I tell you that my dog swims Dalmatian, how might you figure out which way of swimming it is that I mean? Here is one appropriate way: observe some Dalmatians swimming and see how they swim. This suggests that the function maps the property being Dalmatian and the kind swimming event to the following way of swimming: the way that Dalmatians

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swim. When I tell you that John drives Canadian, how might you figure out which way of driving it is that I mean? Here is one appropriate way: observe some Canadians and see how they drive. This suggests that the function maps the property being Canadian and the kind driving event to the following way of driving: the way that Canadians drive. Given these two clues I propose that f is the following function. Suppose that p is a property and k is a kind of event; then f maps p and k to the way w such that p things k in way w. That is: f(p, k) = the way w such that p things k in way w For example, f(being grey, looking event) = the way w such that grey things look w; f(being Lithuanian, driving event) = the way w such that Lithuanians drive in way w. I take it that when we use an adjective to mean a way of occurring by exploiting this function, we use the adjective to supply the first argument to f (i.e. the property p), and we use the verb that the adjective complements to supply the second argument to f (i.e. the kind of event k). So, when we use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean a way of looking, the way of looking that we mean is f(being grey, looking event), which is: the way w such that grey things look w. Similarly, when we use ‘Lithuanian’ in ‘The man drives Lithuanian’ to mean a way of driving, the way of driving that we mean is f(being Lithuanian, driving event), which is: the way w such that Lithuanians drive in way w. Given this, we might say the following: we use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean ‘the way w such that grey things look w’, and we use ‘Lithuanian’ in ‘The man drives Lithuanian’ to mean ‘the way w such that Lithuanians drive in way w’. It will be convenient to sometimes talk this way. The proposal above about f is not yet adequate. The problem is that ‘p things k in way w’ can be understood in a number of different ways, and I need to make it clear which way I intend it to be understood. This is my task in the remainder of the chapter.

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4.3. Clarifying the Proposal We should not understand ‘p things k in way w’ as ‘p things sometimes k in way w’. Grey things look such a variety of ways in different situations, depending upon the conditions in which they are observed and the observer by whom they are being observed, that for many (perhaps all) ways of looking w it is true that grey things sometimes look w, so that there is no such way as the way w such that grey things sometimes look w (because there are too many such ways). So if we understood ‘p things k in way w’ in this way then we would not successfully refer to a way of looking when we use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’. But we do successfully refer to a way of looking, so this is not how we should understand ‘p things k in way w’. We should not understand ‘p things k in way w’ as ‘p things always k in way w’. Again, grey things look such a variety of ways in different situations, depending upon the conditions in which they are observed and the observer by whom they are being observed, that either there is no such way as the way w such that grey things always look w or, if there is, it is a very general way. So if we understood ‘p things k in way w’ in this way then either we would not successfully refer to a way of looking when we use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’, or we would refer to a way of looking that is very general. But we do successfully refer to a way that is not so general, so this is not how we should understand ‘p things k in way w’. We should not understand ‘p things k in way w’ as ‘p things always k in way w in normal conditions’. There is, of course, the problem of correctly understanding ‘in normal conditions’. But set that aside. There is still a problem. We might use ‘American’ in ‘John looks American’ to successfully refer to a way of looking by exploiting f. But Americans look all sorts of ways, even in normal conditions (whatever they are), so that if there is any such way as the way w such that Americans always look w in normal conditions then it is too general a way to be the way that we mean by ‘American’ in ‘John looks American’. (This argument illustrates the usefulness of recognizing that the function that we exploit when we use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch

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looks grey to you’ is the same as the function that we exploit when we use ‘American’ in ‘John looks American’.) We should not understand ‘p things k in way w’ as ‘p things generally k in way w’, nor as ‘p things typically k in way w’, nor as ‘p things tend to k in way w’. These understandings all make f an extensional function in the property argument. That is, they make f such that: if properties p and p0 have the same extension (i.e. the things that have p are exactly the things that have p0 ) then f(p, k) = f(p0 , k). But there is reason to think that f is not extensional in the property argument. If f were extensional in the property argument, then ‘The patch looks grey to you’ would be extensional in ‘grey’ (i.e. the following would be the case: if A is an adjective with the same extension as ‘grey’ then ‘The patch looks grey to you’ has the same truth conditions as ‘The patch looks A to you’). But ‘The patch looks grey to you’ is not extensional in ‘grey’. If ‘The patch looks grey to you’ were extensional in ‘grey’ then the following would be a valid argument: The patch looks grey to you The grey things are the round things Therefore, the patch looks round to you But this is not a valid argument. Consider the patch that we have been focusing on:

The patch looks grey to you, but it does not look round to you. This is so, even if the grey things happen to be the round things (i.e. ‘grey’ and ‘round’ have the same extension). Suppose that the patch is square and white but lighting conditions make it look grey to you. Suppose that in the last minute all of the grey things that are not round and all of the round things that are not grey happened to disappear, but there are still some grey things that are round. Then the patch looks grey to you, the grey things are the round things, but the patch does not look round to you. So we have a possible

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situation in which the premises of the argument are both true but the conclusion is false. So the argument is not valid. So ‘The patch looks grey to you’ is not extensional in ‘grey’. So f is not extensional in the property argument. Since f is not extensional in the property argument we should not understand ‘p things k in way w’ in any way that makes it extensional in the property argument. So we should not understand it as ‘p things generally k in way w’, or as ‘p things typically k in way w’, or as ‘p things tend to k in way w’. (Note that this is another reason, in addition to the ones I gave above, why we should not understand ‘p things k in way w’ as ‘p things sometimes k in way w’, or as ‘p things always k in way w’, or as ‘p things always k in way w in normal conditions’—these all make it extensional in the property argument too). We need to understand ‘p things k in way w’ in a way that does not make it extensional in the property argument. I propose that we understand it generically.

4.4. Generic Uses of Sentences We sometimes use sentences generically. When I say that dogs are good pets I use the sentence ‘dogs are good pets’ generically. I do not mean that dogs are always good pets, but rather something like dogs are generally good pets. This is not exactly what I mean, as I will argue, but it should be enough to show the kind of use that I am talking about (I am not trying to give an account of generic uses at this stage—I am just pointing to them). There are at least three kinds of thing that might count as being generic: propositions, sentences, and uses of sentences. I take it that being generic is primarily a property of propositions, and only secondarily a property of sentences and uses of sentences. That is, what it is for a sentence to be generic, and what it is for the use of a sentence to be generic, should both be explained in terms of generic propositions. Here is how I think those explanations should go: for a use of a sentence to be generic is for it to be a use on which we express

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a generic proposition; for a sentence to be generic is for it to be one that we generally use generically (i.e. one that we generally use to express a generic proposition). Here is why I think that being generic is not primarily a property of sentences: a sentence might be used both generically and nongenerically. Consider the sentence ‘Mary jogs in the park’. We might use this sentence generically. But we might also use it non-generically, as a commentator might do to narrate a sequence of events: ‘Now John and Mary leave the house for a while; John feeds the ducks at the pond; Mary jogs in the park’ (I like to call this the commentator use). Since we might use the sentence both generically and non-generically, being generic is not primarily a property of the sentence itself. We can, though, talk about sentences being generic in a secondary sense: a sentence is generic (in a secondary sense) if and only if it is one that we generally use generically. And, as I said just above, a use of a sentence is generic if and only if it is one on which we express a generic proposition. So what is a generic proposition? That is, what kind of proposition do we express when we use a sentence generically? There is a vast amount of literature about this (Krifka et. al. (1995) is a good place to start). Here I will give a brief explanation of my preferred account, staying neutral on as many issues as possible. I will illustrate with a more familiar example, generic uses of ‘Mary jogs in the park’. In Section 4.5 I will consider the uses that I am especially interested in, generic uses (as I will propose they are) of ‘p things k in way w’. When we use the sentence ‘Mary jogs in the park’ generically we mean that a certain relation obtains between a certain pair of eventkinds. There are at least two relations that we might mean, and many pairs of event-kinds that we might mean. So there are many different generic uses of the sentence. To start with I will fix on one pair of event-kinds and use those to discuss the two relations that we might mean; later in this section I will discuss other pairs of event-kinds. First, let’s fix on a pair of event-kinds. There is a reading of ‘Mary jogs in the park’ on which we mean that a certain relation obtains between

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the following pair of event-kinds: being an event in which Mary jogs, and being an event that takes place in the park. To make it clear that this is the pair of event-kinds that is meant we might put it this way: Events in which Mary jogs are events that take place in the park Having fixed on a pair of event-kinds, let’s look at the two relations that we might mean. I will call the two relations ‘GU’ and ‘GE’. If it is GU that we mean then I will call the use of the sentence a universal-like generic use (note that this is my own terminology and not standard). On this use what we mean by the sentence is something like this: events of the first kind are generally events of the second kind (this is not exactly right, but it will do for now). This is a universal-like use because for it to be true many, but perhaps not all, events of the first kind need to be events of the second kind. At least this is what we might say without thinking too much about it (it turns out to be wrong). You want to know where Mary tends to go jogging. I tell you, ‘Mary jogs in the park’. My use of ‘Mary jogs in the park’ in this case is a universal-like generic use. If it is GE that we mean then I will call the use of the sentence an existential-like generic use (again, this is my own terminology and not standard). On this use what we mean by the sentence is something like this: events of the first kind are sometimes events of the second kind (again, this is not exactly right, but it will do for now). This is an existential-like use because it is true if some events of the first kind are events of the second kind, but it still might be true even if it happens to be that no events of the first kind are events of the second kind. Again, at least this is what we might say without thinking too much about it. You tell me that Mary never jogs in the park. I correct you by saying, ‘That’s not true, Mary jogs in the park’. On one reading I just mean that Mary sometimes jogs in the park. But there is another reading which does not require that Mary sometimes jog in the park—it just requires that she not be opposed to doing so. This use of ‘Mary jogs in the park’ is an existential-like generic use. I am taking there to be two relations that we might mean obtain between the pair of event-kinds that we mean: GU and GE. GU is distinct

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from GE, but it might be that GE is somehow related to GU. In particular, and this is a view that I find appealing, it might be that GE is the dual of GU: for an event-kind k1 to stand in the GE relation to an event-kind k2 is for k1 to not stand in the GU relation to not-k2. If this is right then we can say this: what we mean by ‘Mary jogs in the park’ on its existentiallike reading is that it is not the case that Mary does not jog in the park (where ‘Mary does not jog in the park’ is used universal-like generically). We might, more colloquially, put it this way: ‘Mary is not opposed to jogging in the park’. I am not asserting this here, and it plays no role in my argument—I’m just making a suggestion. I am interested in the universal-like generic use of sentences, which involve the relation GU. What more can we say about GU? What are the conditions under which an event-kind k1 stands in GU to an event-kind k2? I will point to the properties that are important for my purposes. It is not sufficient that events of kind k1 are sometimes events of kind k2 (i.e. that some events of kind k1 are events of kind k2)—for it to be true that Mary jogs in the park, on the universal-like generic reading, it is not enough that Mary has jogged or will jog in the park just once. And it is not necessary that events of kind k1 are always events of kind k2—it might be true that Mary jogs in the park, on the universal-like generic reading, even if she occasionally jogs somewhere else. Nor is it necessary that events of kind k1 are mostly events of kind k2—it is true that turtles are long-lived, on the universal-like generic reading of ‘turtles are long-lived’, even though most turtles die at a very young age (so it is not the case that most turtles are long-lived). Similarly, it is not necessary that events of kind k1 are generally events of kind k2 (it is not the case that turtles are generally long-lived), and it is not necessary that events of k1 tend to be events of kind k2 (it is not the case that turtles tend to be long-lived). The relations that I have mentioned so far are all extensional relations between event-kinds: if it is true that events of kind k1 are sometimes (are always, are mostly, are generally, tend to be) events of kind k2, then it is true that events of kind k10 are sometimes (are always, are mostly, are generally, tend to be) events of kind k20 , where k10 and k20

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are any kinds that are coextensive with k1 and k2 respectively. There is reason to think that GU is not any extensional relation between eventkinds. The universal-like generic reading of ‘Turtles are long-lived’ is not a reading on which it is extensional in ‘turtle’. For suppose that ‘turtle’ happens to be coextensive with ‘animal with a hard shell’. If the intended reading of ‘Turtles are long-lived’ were extensional in ‘turtle’, then on the same reading ‘Animals with a hard shell are long-lived’ would be true as well. But on this reading ‘Animals with a hard shell are long-lived’ is not true, so the intended reading of the former is not extensional in ‘turtle’. This reading is, however, one on which ‘turtle’ can be replaced by any other expression for the same property without affecting the truth value. I suggest that on this reading, it expresses a certain non-extensional relation between the property of being a turtle and the property of being long-lived—some kind of law-like connection between the two properties. So much for GU. Now let’s fix on the universal-like generic readings of ‘Mary jogs in the park’ (i.e. the generic readings on which we mean GU rather than GE) and discuss the various pairs of event-kinds that we might mean. In the discussion above I was taking the pair of event-kinds to be: being an event in which Mary jogs and being an event which takes place in the park. But there are readings of the sentence on which what is meant is that GU obtains between some other pair of event-kinds k1 and k2 (so the sentence has many different universal-like generic readings). It might be that k1 is the event-kind being an event in which Mary jogs and k2 is the eventkind being an event which takes place in the park (as I have been taking it to be so far), in which case we could make the claim in the first way below. Or it might be that k1 is the event-kind being an event in which Mary does something in the park and k2 is the event-kind being an event which is a jogging, in which case we could make the claim in the second way. Events in which Mary jogs are generically events which take place in the park Events in which Mary does something in the park are generically events which are joggings

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We can use emphasis to make it clearer which of these two things we mean (it may or may not force one reading or the other—I will remain neutral on that): Mary jogs in the park Mary jogs in the park We can also use a technique that linguists call fronting: It is in the park that Mary jogs It is jogging that Mary does in the park There are various other pairs of event-kinds that we might mean, and in each case we might use emphasis or fronting to make it clear which pair we mean: Mary jogs in the park; It is jogging in the park that Mary does Mary jogs in the park; It is Mary who jogs in the park

4.5. A Proposal Now let’s return to ‘p things k in way w’. Recall that I have proposed that f(p, k) = the way w such that p things k in way w, and I am looking for the correct way to understand ‘p things k in way w’. I argued in Section 4.3 that we must understand it in a way that does not make it extensional in ‘p’. I propose that we understand it generically. To make this clear I will phrase it as: ‘it is generically true that p things k in way w’. As I discussed in Section 4.4, there are many different generic readings of ‘p things k in way w’, so I need to clarify which generic reading I intend in this proposal. First, I intend it to be understood as a universal-like generic use rather than as an existential-like generic use. Second, I intend the pair of event-kinds involved to be these: being an event in which a p thing k-s, and being an event that occurs in way w. So what I mean by ‘p things k in way w’ can be made more explicit as follows: It is generically true that events in which a p thing k-s are events that occur in way w

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Why do I intend the universal-like reading rather than the existentiallike reading? Because on the existential-like reading there are too many ways w such that it is generically true that events in which a p thing k-s are events that occur in way w for there to be such a thing as the such way. Why this particular pair of event-kinds rather than some other pair? It is perhaps easiest to see why by comparing this proposal with the most natural alternative, that we mean the following pair of eventkinds (in which the two event-kinds are interchanged): being an event that occurs in way w, and being an event in which a p thing k-s. Then what we mean by ‘grey things look w’ would be: It is generically true that events that occur in way w are events in which a p thing k-s We can put the two readings of ‘p things k in way w’ as follows (the first is the reading that I intend, the second is the most salient alternative): It is generically true that it is way w in which p things k It is generically true that it is p things that k in way w I intend it to be read in the first way. What this means is that by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we mean ‘the way w such that it is generically true that it is w that grey things look’, and not ‘the way w such that it is generically true that it is grey things that look w’. Why do I think that it should be understood in this way? This will take a little work to explain. First, consider the sentence ‘Mary jogs in the park’. Suppose that I claim that Mary jogs in the park, using ‘Mary jogs in the park’ universal-like generically. This sentence can be understood in at least either of the two ways: It is generically true that it is in the park that Mary jogs It is generically true that it is jogging that Mary does in the park What counts as evidence for and against the truth of ‘Mary jogs in the park’ depends on which of these two ways we understand it. Suppose

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that we understand it in the first way. An event of Mary jogging at the track would count against it being true, but an event of Mary walking in the park would not; to figure out whether the claim is true on the first reading we would check the joggings of Mary and see whether or not they occur in the park. Suppose, on the other hand, that we understand it in the second way. Now an event of Mary jogging at the track would not count against it being true, but an event of Mary walking in the park would; and to figure out whether the claim is true on the second reading we would check the things that Mary does in the park and see whether or not they are joggings. The point is this: how we go about testing the truth of ‘Mary jogs in the park’ tells us something about how we understand ‘Mary jogs in the park’. Now consider the sentence ‘John looks Lithuanian’. I am proposing that by ‘Lithuanian’ here we mean ‘the way w such that it is generically true that Lithuanians look w’. But there are two ways that we might understand the generic here: It is generically true that w is the way that Lithuanians look It is generically true that it is Lithuanians that look w Suppose that John looks a certain way to us and we are trying to figure out whether or not he looks Lithuanian—that is, whether or not John looks the way w such that it is generically true that Lithuanians look w. We do not at this stage know which way of looking it is that ‘Lithuanian’ picks out. How might we figure out whether or not John looks Lithuanian? The following is an appropriate thing to do: find some Lithuanians (e.g. by going to Lithuania) and see how they look and see if John looks that way. The following is not an appropriate thing to do: find some people who look the way that John looks (e.g. by going to his family) and see if they are Lithuanian. This shows that by ‘Lithuanian’ we mean ‘the way w such that it is generically true that w is the way that Lithuanians look’ rather than ‘the way w such that it is generically true that it is Lithuanians that look w’. This is why I propose that we understand the generic in the first way rather than the second. This reasoning generalizes to ‘p things k in way w’.

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Here is another way to make the point. Suppose that there is such a thing as the way that Americans look and such a thing as the way that Canadians look and that these two ways are the same. Call this way ‘w’. Consider someone who looks w. Does he look American but not Canadian? Does he look Canadian but not American? Does he look both American and Canadian? Does he look neither American nor Canadian? I take it that for reasons of symmetry the correct answer is one of the last two. I also take it that the correct answer is that he looks both American and Canadian. So he looks American and he looks Canadian. That is, he looks the way w such that it is generically true that Americans look w, and he looks the way w such that it is generically true that Canadians look w. To get this result we need to understand ‘it is generically true that Americans look w’ as ‘it is generically true that it is w that Americans look’ rather than as ‘it is generically true that it is Americans that look w’, for only on the first reading is there such a w. Similarly, we need to understand ‘Canadians look w’ as ‘it is generically true that it is w that Canadians look’ rather than as ‘it is generically true that it is Canadians that look w’, for only on the first reading in there such a w. This reasoning generalizes to ‘p things k in way w’.

4.6. Some Features of the Proposal In Section 4.2, I proposed that f is the following function: f(p, k) = the way w such that p things k in way w In Section 4.3, I argued that f is not extensional in its first argument, ‘p’. This means that we need to understand ‘p things k in way w’ in such a way that it is not extensional in ‘p’. In Section 4.5, I proposed that we understand it generically, as follows: It is generically true that events in which a p thing k-s are events that occur in way w There is a reading of this on which it is not extensional in ‘p’, and that’s the reading that I intend. It’s the same reading as the one on

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which ‘Turtles are long-lived’ is true (this is a reading which is not extensional in ‘turtle’, as I explained in Section 4.4). Perhaps we can think of this proposal as explaining why f is not extensional in ‘p’—it is not extensional in ‘p’ because its values are determined by a generic that is not extensional in ‘p’. Understanding ‘p things k in way w’ generically, in the way proposed, gives us some other results. Consider the property of looking p. According to this proposal, looking p is the property of looking the way w such that it is generically true that events in which a p thing looks some way are events that occur in way w. This means that for there to be such a property as looking p, there needs to be the property p, and there needs to be a way w such that it is generically true that events in which a p thing looks some way are events that occur in way w (there needs to be exactly one such way—more about this in Sections 4.7 and 4.8). But there need not be any actual events in which a p thing looks some way—the generic, understood as I intend it to be understood, might still be true. Consider ‘Porsches go faster than Volvos on salt lakes’. The corresponding generic reading of this goes something like this: it is generically true that events in which Porsches and Volvos are driven on salt lakes are events in which Porsches go faster than Volvos. This can be true even if Porsches and Volvos never are driven on salt lakes. So too, it can be generically true that events in which a p thing looks some way are events that occur in way w, even if there never are any events in which a p thing looks some way (and even if there never are any p things). Thus, there might such a thing as looking supersaturated red, even if no supersaturated red thing ever looks some way (and even if there never are any supersaturated red things).

4.7. A General Way In Section 4.2, I proposed that f(p, k) = the way w such that p things k in way w. In Sections 4.3–4.6, I clarified how ‘p things k in way w’ is to be understood. On this understanding, f(p, k) = the way w such that it is generically true that events in which a p thing k-s are events that occur in way w.

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According to this proposal, by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we mean ‘the way w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus is grey occur in way w’. If this is what we mean by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ then to successfully refer to a way of looking there needs to be exactly one way w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus is grey occur in way w. That is, there needs to be at least one way w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus is grey occur in way w, and at most one way w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus is grey occur in way w. I think that these two things are the case, but neither of them is obviously so. In this section I will support the idea that there is at least one such way. In Section 4.8 I will modify my proposal to ensure that there is at most one such way. Is there at least one way w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus is grey occur in way w? There might be, given that ways of looking can be fairly general. Start by considering colour properties. Is there a colour property p such that it is generically true that Irish football fans wear shirts with property p at football matches? Presumably not, if we confine ourselves to very specific colour properties: there is no very specific colour property p for which this is true. But if we look to more general colour properties there might be, and plausibly there is (it might be the property of being green, or it might be some more specific colour property). Now consider ways of swimming. Is there a way of swimming w such that it is generically true that dogs swim in way w? Again, not if we confine ourselves to very specific ways of swimming. But if we look to more general ways of swimming then there might be, and plausibly there is. We might even refer to it as ‘the way that dogs swim’, and take ourselves to be picking out a way of swimming, one that is distinct from the way of swimming that we might refer to as ‘the way that dolphins swim’. Finally, consider ways of looking. Is there a way of looking w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus is grey occur in way w? Again, not if we confine ourselves to very specific

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ways of looking. But if we look to more general ways of looking there might be. This is a way that we might naturally refer to as ‘the way that grey things look’, a way that is distinct from the way of looking that we might refer to as ‘the way that red things look’. Suppose that patch1 and patch2 both look grey to you, but look slightly different shades of grey. Since they look different shades of grey, there are distinct ways of looking w1 and w2, such that patch1 looks w1 to you but patch2 does not, and patch2 looks w2 to you but patch1 does not. Here w1 and w2 are ways of a certain degree of specificity. At this level of specificity, there may not be a way w such that it is generically true that grey things look w: w1 is too specific for it to be generically true that grey things look w1, and similarly for w2. For a way w to be such that it is generically true that grey things look w it needs to be a way that is less specific (more general) than both w1 and w2. I propose that there are ways of such generality, and that there is a way w more general than both w1 and w2 such that grey things look w. It is at least plausible, then, that there is at least one way w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus is grey occur in way w.

4.8. A Not-too-General Way I have argued that at a sufficiently high degree of generality there is plausibly a way w such that it is generically true that grey things look w (i.e. that looking events whose stimulus is grey occur in way w). There are actually many such ways, and because of this I need to modify my proposal. Just as there is a way wG such that it is generically true that grey things look wG, there is also a way wC such that it is generically true that coloured things look wC. Now, it is generically true that grey things look coloured. That is, it is generically true that grey things look the way that coloured things look. That is, it is generically true that grey things look wC. So we have two generic truths about the way grey things look: grey things look wG, and grey things look wC (i.e. there are two ways w such that it is generically true that grey things look w). (There are actually infinitely many, one for each colour shade that is more general than grey.)

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This raises a question: In ‘The cup looks grey to you’, which one of these do we use ‘grey’ to mean? One possibility is that it might vary from occasion to occasion— that our use of ‘grey’ is what we might call generality flexible. On some occasions we might use it to mean wG, while on other occasions we might use it to mean wC (or one of the other more general ways). But there is reason to think that this is not so. If our use of ‘grey’ were generality flexible then the following passage would have a reading on which we use both ‘coloured’ and ‘grey’ to mean wC, and thus on which it expresses a valid argument: The patch looks coloured to you Therefore, the patch looks grey to you But there is no reading of this passage on which it expresses a valid argument. Similarly, if our use of ‘grey’ were generality flexible then presumably so too would be our use of ‘red’, and the following passage would have a reading on which we use both ‘red’ and ‘grey’ to refer to wC, and thus on which it expresses a valid argument: The patch looks red to you Therefore, the patch looks grey to you But, again, there is no reading of this passage on which it expresses a valid argument. I conclude that our use of ‘grey’ is not generality flexible—it is generality inflexible. We use it, in every case, to mean a particular one of the infinitely many ways w such that it is generically true that grey things look w. Which one? I propose that we use ‘grey’ to mean the most specific one of them. So, by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we mean: the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus is grey occur in way w More generally I propose, and this is my final proposal: f(p, k) = the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that events in which a p thing k-s are events that occur in way w

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This account explains why there are no readings of the passages above on which they express valid arguments. If the patch looks coloured to you it does not follow that the patch looks grey to you. Why not? If the patch looks coloured to you, then the patch looks wC, where wC is the maximally specific way w such that coloured things look w. It might be that the patch also looks to you the maximally specific way w such that grey things look w, in which case the patch looks grey to you as well. But it might be instead that the patch looks the maximally specific way w such that red things look w, in which case it does not look the maximally specific way w such that grey things look w, and hence does not look grey. So looking coloured does not entail looking grey. Similarly, looking red does not entail looking grey (I won’t go through the details).

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5 Syntactic Details I have argued that by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ (on the intended reading) we mean the property of being grey. I have also proposed that by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we mean a way of looking. And I have argued that the way of looking that we mean is not the property of being grey—it is something else. So what I am proposing is that by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we mean two distinct things with the one use (we use ‘grey’ to mean the property of being grey and thereby mean the way of looking). Some might be concerned by the idea that we use ‘grey’ to mean two distinct things with the one use. In this chapter I address this concern.

5.1. One Word, Multiple Meanings I don’t think it’s crazy to propose that we use ‘grey’ to mean two distinct things with the one use. It is a general fact about use that we can use something to do more than one thing of the same kind in the one use. I might use a button to explode a bomb and thereby explode a dam, thus using the button to explode two distinct things with the one use. I might use a match to light some paper and thereby light a fire, thus using the match to light two distinct things with the one use. I might use a noise to frighten a person and thereby frighten a crowd, thus using the noise to frighten two distinct things with the one use. Given these things, it would not be surprising to find that we use ‘grey’ to mean the property of being grey and thereby mean a way of looking, thus using ‘grey’ to mean two distinct things with the one use.

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There are, of course, some obvious differences between using buttons to explode things, using matches to light things, using noises to frighten things, and using words to mean things, and perhaps these differences are relevant here. There is also the following concern: if we use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean two distinct things, then compositionality entails (so the concern goes) that we use ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean two distinct things; but we do not use ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean two distinct things (at least not in this way), so it can’t be that we use ‘grey’ to mean two distinct things. The issues here are complex, and to defend the idea that we mean at least two distinct things by the one use of ‘grey’ would take a lot of careful work. I think the idea can be defended, but rather than do so I will, in Section 5.2, describe an alternative possibility, one that does not rely upon this idea and that would serve my purposes equally well. (But I will continue to make the simplifying assumption that we mean at least two distinct things by ‘grey’.)

5.2. An Alternative: Aphonic Material The alternative possibility that I have in mind is this: we don’t mean both the property of being grey and the way of looking by the same expression; rather, we mean them by different expressions. More specifically, we use the word ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean the property of being grey, and we use a distinct expression, call it ‘grey’+, to mean the way of looking, an expression that contains the word ‘grey’ and also some additional aphonic material. The idea is that the complement of ‘look’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ is an expression that is distinct from the word ‘grey’. It is an expression that contains the word ‘grey’ and also additional aphonic material— material that is semantically significant but unpronounced. According to this view, we do not mean two distinct things by ‘grey’—we mean just one thing by ‘grey’, the property of being grey, and it is by the distinct linguistic item ‘grey’+ (one that is indistinguishable from ‘grey’ on the surface) that we mean the way of looking.

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How much aphonic material might there be in ‘grey’+? It might be that ‘grey’+ contains a large amount of aphonic material. I have proposed that the way of looking that we mean by ‘grey’ is the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus is grey occur in way w. It might be that there is sufficiently much aphonic material in ‘grey’+ for there to be a one-to-one correspondence between the constituents of ‘grey’+ and the constituents of ‘the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus is grey occur in way w’. If so, then at a fuller level of representation the structure of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ might be this: The patch looks [the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus is grey occur in way w] to you (Here I am using ‘the’ to represent a lexical item that is used with the same meaning as ‘the’ but is unpronounced—similarly for the other expressions that have been struck through.) Alternatively, it might be that ‘grey’+ contains some but not so much aphonic material, perhaps as little as one aphonic item. I have proposed that when we use ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we exploit a function that maps the property of being grey to the way of looking that we mean. It could be that ‘grey’+ contains just a single aphonic item, call it ‘f ’, which expresses this function that we exploit. Then we might represent the structure of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ as follows: The patch looks [f grey] to you As I said in Section 5.1, the issues here are complex, and I do not want to adjudicate between these two accounts of what it is that we use to mean the property of being grey and the way of looking. I will proceed on the simplifying assumption that we use ‘grey’ to mean both.

5.3. Inexplicit Speech Whether or not the complement of ‘look’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ is just the word ‘grey’ (as I will continue to assume) or instead is

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a more complex expression that contains some aphonic material (as I am open to), what I am proposing is that when we use ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we speak inexplicitly—we do not make it fully explicit what we mean. We use the sentence ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean something; we could make it more explicit what we mean by using the sentence ‘The patch looks to you the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus is grey occur in way w’. I take it that inexplicit speech is a general and very common phenomenon. Suppose that a customer in a café eats a ham sandwich and then leaves without paying. The waiter might use ‘The ham sandwich left without paying’ to mean that the customer who had the ham sandwich left without paying (this example comes from Nunberg (1995)). This would be an example of inexplicit speech— the waiter could make more explicit what she means by using ‘The customer who had the ham sandwich left without paying’ instead. Here is another example. Suppose that everyone I invited to my party came to my party. I might use ‘Everyone came to my party’ to mean that everyone I invited to my party came to my party. This would be an example of inexplicit speech—I could make it more explicit what I mean by using ‘Everyone I invited to my party came to my party’ instead. Here is a third example. Suppose that at the party I give the last piece of cake to the hungry person. We might use ‘The last piece of cake was given to hungry’ to mean that the last piece of cake was given to the hungry person. This would be an example of inexplicit speech—we could make more explicit what we mean by using ‘The last piece of cake was given to the hungry person’ instead. In describing these examples of inexplicit speech I am not assuming that the sentences that are used contain aphonic material, and I am not assuming that they do not. It might be that when the waiter uses ‘The ham sandwich left without paying’ to mean that the customer who had the ham sandwich left without paying, the sentence that she uses contains aphonic material by which she means what she does, or it might be that it does not. Either way her utterance is an

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instance of inexplicit speech, as I am using the term. Similar comments apply to each of the other examples. Even very common and seemingly uninteresting utterances are often instances of inexplicit speech. Consider something that I do often: place my order in the café by saying, ‘I would like a cup of coffee please’. I mean much more than I make explicit, which we can see as follows. Were the barista to give me a cup of coffee beans then I might say, ‘That’s not what I meant’. I would say this because what I meant was that I would like a cup of liquid coffee. Were the barista to give me a cup of cold liquid coffee then I might say, ‘That’s not what I meant’. I would say this because what I meant was that I would like a cup of hot liquid coffee. Were the barista to tell me that the coffee will be ready for me tomorrow then I might say, ‘That’s not what I meant’. I would say this because what I meant was that I would like a cup of hot liquid coffee now. I speak inexplicitly when I say, ‘I would like a cup of coffee please’—I could make it more explicit what I mean by using ‘I would like a cup of hot liquid coffee now please’ (and by continuing this line or reasoning we can see that I would still be speaking less than fully explicitly). It is not surprising that I speak inexplicitly when I order my coffee. What I mean when I place my order is quite detailed, and to make it fully explicit would be tedious. Moreover, there is no need for me to make it fully explicit because the barista knows what I mean, even without my making it fully explicit (even if the barista has not taken my order before). (Neale (2004) makes something like this point. He says, ‘Our interpretive abilities are so good that we can reasonably expect our audiences to identify the thoughts we seek to express even when we use expressions whose linguistic meanings fall short of serving up the precise concepts involved in the thought’ (p. 102).) Of course, it is an interesting and difficult question how we manage to achieve this interpretation, but this is a separate issue (see Neale (2004, p. 103)). It is not surprising, then, that I speak inexplicitly: being fully explicit would be tedious and unnecessary. The same is true of a great many of our speech acts (perhaps all of them?)—being fully explicit would be tedious and unnecessary. So it is not surprising

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that we speak inexplicitly very often. Given that inexplicit speech is a general and very common phenomenon, it would not be surprising to find that our use of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ is an instance of it, as I am proposing that it is. I finish this chapter by clarifying two things about inexplicit speech. First, the claim that I am making, that we speak inexplicitly when we use ‘The patch looks grey to you’, should not be confused with a distinct claim that I am not making, that the sentence ‘The patch looks grey to you’ is an elliptical sentence. By ‘elliptical sentence’ here I mean one that is grammatically incomplete, such as the second sentence below: John is not at home. Mary is. When someone speaks inexplicitly the sentence that she uses might be an elliptical sentence (a speaker might use ‘Mary is’ to mean that Mary is at home, thereby speaking inexplicitly by using an elliptical sentence). But it need not be, as each of the examples that I have given shows: ‘The ham sandwich left without paying’, ‘Everyone came to my party’, ‘The last piece of cake was given to hungry’—each of these is a sentence that is used to speak inexplicitly but is not itself elliptical (each is grammatically complete). I take it that the sentence ‘The patch looks grey to you’ is not grammatically incomplete and hence is not an elliptical sentence. Second, if, as I have proposed, we could make more explicit what we mean by ‘The patch looks grey to you’ by uttering ‘The patch looks to you the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus is grey occur in way w’ instead, it does not follow that a speaker who utters the former first formulates the latter and then chooses to remove or leave unpronounced some of its constituents. She may have no particular more explicit formulation in mind. Nevertheless, I maintain that we could make more explicit what we mean by ‘The patch looks grey to you’ by uttering the longer sentence instead.

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6 Implicit Domain Restriction I have proposed that by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we mean: the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus is grey occur in way w. If this is right then we can think of ourselves as using ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to quantify over events. In this chapter I explain why we can think of ourselves as quantifying over events, and show how it can explain certain facts about our use of ‘looks grey’ and similar expressions.

6.1. Quantification over Events That we can think of ourselves as using ‘grey’ to quantify over events is not obvious, so I should say some things to make it more evident. It becomes more evident if we use the following alternative formulation of what we mean by ‘grey’: the maximally specific way w such that: events that are looking events whose stimulus is grey are generically events that occur in way w It is the part in italics, ‘events that are looking events whose stimulus is grey are generically events that occur in way w’, that suggests that we use ‘grey’ to quantify over events. It has the form ‘events of kind k1 are generically events of k2’, which we can think of as expressing a quantification over events, using ‘generically’ as an adverb of quantification (see Lewis (1975)). We often use adverbs to quantify. Here are some more familiar examples (with the adverbs of quantification in italics):

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Mary sometimes jogs in the park Electrons always have negative charge Prime numbers are mostly odd In the first sentence we use the adverb ‘sometimes’ to quantify over events—what we mean is that some events that are joggings by Mary are events that occur in the park. In the second sentence we use the adverb ‘always’ to quantify over particles—what we mean is that every particle that is an electron is a particle that has negative charge. In the third sentence we use the adverb ‘mostly’ to quantify over numbers— what we mean is that most numbers that are prime are numbers that are odd. We can, more generally, think of ourselves as using the adverb in each case to quantify over cases, where a case in the first example is an event, a case in the second example is a particle, and a case in the third example is a number. Then we can express each quantification using a sentence of the following form: Cases of kind k1 are {sometimes, always, mostly} cases of kind k2 We can express the relevant part of what we mean by ‘grey’ using a sentence of this form too: Cases that are lookings whose stimulus is grey are generically cases that occur in way w I hope that this makes it more evident that we can think of ourselves as using ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to quantify. I will take it that we do, and that it is events over which we quantify.

6.2. Implicit Domain Restriction If we do use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to quantify over events, as I am assuming, then we would expect to find that we sometimes employ implicit domain restriction when we use the sentence. Implicit domain restriction is a general and very common phenomenon associated with quantification. Here’s a more familiar example.

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When we use the quantifier expression ‘every seat’ we typically do not mean to quantify over a domain that contains absolutely every seat in the universe, but over a more restricted domain, such as one that contains every seat on a certain train (‘Every seat is taken’), or every seat in a certain lecture theatre (‘Every seat is broken’), and so on. This is domain restriction. In particular, it is implicit domain restriction, because it is not explicit. When we use ‘every seat’ to quantify over a restricted domain of seats in this way we do not make it explicit that we are doing so. To make it explicit we would have to use a more detailed quantifier expression, such as ‘every seat on the train’, or ‘every seat in the lecture theatre’. Implicit domain restriction is a very common phenomenon (you should easily be able to think of more examples). So if we do use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to quantify over events then we should not be surprised to find that we employ implicit domain restriction when we use ‘The patch looks grey to you’. I propose that we do. In the rest of this chapter I consider some phenomena to do with our use of ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ and show how they might be explained as cases of implicit domain restriction. There are contexts in which there is a kind k such that by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we mean ‘the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that looking events of kind k whose stimulus is grey occur in way w’. Note: I will not be arguing that we do employ implicit domain restriction when we use ‘The patch looks grey to you’; rather, I will be assuming that we do and then using this to explain various phenomena. (Although perhaps if the explanations succeed then this can be seen as evidence that the account that I am developing is on the right track.) It will be helpful to give examples that involve adjectives other than ‘grey’. I can extend my proposal about what we mean by ‘grey’ to other adjectives that we might use to specify the character of a visual experience. Consider the shape character of your visual experience of the patch. In order to say that your visual experience of the patch has this character we might say, ‘The patch looks square to you’.

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By ‘square’ in ‘The patch looks square to you’ we mean ‘the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus is square occur in way w’. The general proposal goes as follows. Suppose that A is an adjective. Suppose that by A in ‘The patch is A’ we mean a property p. Then by A in ‘The patch looks A to you’ we mean ‘the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus has p occur in way w’. (This extends to more complex characters, such as looking Japanese.) The full statement of what we mean by A in these cases is quite long—in this chapter I will use some more abbreviated formulations, such as ‘the way that p things look’.

6.3. Lighting Conditions Consider your visual experience of the patch below:

Does the patch look grey to you? No doubt you think not. But suppose that present lighting conditions make grey things look this way. Does the patch look grey to you? Now you might be ambivalent. Why the ambivalence? Implicit domain restriction can explain it. There is a reading of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ on which it is false that the patch looks grey to you, and there is a reading on which it is true. The false reading is one on which we use ‘grey’ to mean ‘the way that grey things look’—this reading is false because your visual experience of the patch is not occurring in that way. The true reading is one on which we use ‘grey’ to mean ‘the way that grey things look in these conditions’ (more fully: the way w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus is grey and in these conditions occur in way w). On this reading, rather than quantifying over looking events whose stimulus is grey, we are quantifying over the more

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restricted class of looking events whose stimulus is grey and is in these conditions (there is understood to be implicit restriction of the domain of events over which we are quantifying with ‘grey’). This reading is true because your visual experience of the patch is occurring in that way. This explanation predicts that no matter what colour the patch actually is, say c, and no matter how the lighting conditions are making the patch look to you, there is always a reading of ‘The patch looks c to you’ on which it is true—it is a reading on which we use ‘c’ to mean ‘the way c things look in these conditions’. Thus, if the patch is green but illuminated in such a way that it looks purple, then there is a reading of ‘The patch looks green to you’ on which it is true. I take this to be the right result.

6.4. Inverted Earth On Earth it is generically true that grey things look the way the left patch below looks, and it is generically true that black things look the way the right patch below looks:

Suppose that there is a planet, Inverted Earth, where things are the other way around: it is generically true that grey things look the way the right patch looks, and it is generically true that black things look the way the left patch looks. Suppose that someone on Inverted Earth is looking at a colour patch and having a visual experience with the following character:

Does the patch look grey to him, or does it look black to him? Some people judge that there is a sense in which it looks grey to him and a sense in which it looks black to him.

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Implicit domain restriction can explain these judgments. There is a reading of ‘The patch looks grey to him’ on which we use ‘grey’ to mean ‘the way that grey things look on Earth’. This is a reading on which it is true (and probably also the most natural reading, probably because when we quantify over looking events we usually quantify over those that occur on Earth; which suggests that there is implicit domain restriction even in our ordinary uses). There is also a reading of ‘The patch looks grey to him’ on which we use ‘grey’ to mean ‘the way that grey things look on Inverted Earth’. This is a reading on which it is false (and a less natural reading). Similar remarks hold for ‘The patch looks black to him’. There is a reading of ‘The patch looks black to him’ on which we use ‘black’ to mean ‘the way that black things look on Earth’. This is a false reading (and the most natural one). There is a reading of ‘The patch looks black to him’ on which we use ‘black’ to mean ‘the way that black things look on Inverted Earth’. This is a true reading (and a less natural one).

6.5. The Rim of a Cup Consider the rim of a cup when viewed at an angle. Does it look round? Does it look elliptical? Some say that it looks round, not elliptical. Some say that it looks elliptical, not round. Some say that it looks round if you take into account its depth, but it looks elliptical if you ignore its depth. Implicit domain restriction can explain these judgments. According to what I have proposed: By ‘The rim looks round’ we mean ‘The rim looks the way round things look’ By ‘The rim looks elliptical’ we mean ‘The rim looks the way elliptical things look’ Of the various ways of looking w such that the rim looks w, at most two are relevant here. One is the way the rim looks if you take into account its depth; call this w3D. The other is the way the rim looks if you ignore its depth; call this w2D. Similarly, of the various ways of interpreting the domain of events over which a speaker means to

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quantify in using ‘round’ in the first and ‘elliptical’ in the second, at most two are relevant. On the first interpretation, she means to quantify over events in which three-dimensional objects look some way; on the second interpretation she means to quantify over events in which two-dimensional objects (viewed square-on) look some way. Given that there are at most two relevant ways of looking and at most two relevant domains of quantification, there are at most four propositions relevant to the truth of each of these two claims. They are listed below, with what I take to be their truth values: Round 3D things look w3D (True) Round 3D things look w2D (False) Round 2D things look w3D (False) Round 2D things look w2D (False) Elliptical 3D things look w3D (False) Elliptical 3D things look w2D (False) Elliptical 2D things look w3D (False) Elliptical 2D things look w2D (True) Given this, what a speaker means by ‘The rim looks round’ is true iff the rim looks w3D and she means to quantify over 3D objects, and what she means by ‘The rim looks elliptical’ is true iff the rim looks w2D and she means to quantify over 2D objects. Anyone who is ignoring w3D will judge that the rim looks elliptical, not round. Anyone who is ignoring w2D will judge that the rim looks round, not elliptical. Anyone else will judge that in one sense the rim looks round (a sense in which the quantification is over 3D objects, and the relevant way is w3D), and in another sense the rim looks elliptical (a sense in which the quantification is over 2D objects, and the relevant way is w2D).

6.6. Looking American By ‘American’ in ‘The man looks American to you’ we typically do not mean ‘the way American things (in general) look’. If there is a way w such that American things in general look w then it would have to be a very general way (it has to be a way w such that American people,

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American cars, American restaurants, and so on, all look w), so general that it is unlikely to be the one that we mean by ‘American’ in ‘The man looks American to you’. What we typically mean, I suggest, is ‘the way American people look’ (perhaps something even more specific: ‘the way American men look’). We implicitly restrict the domain over which we use ‘American’ to quantify, from looking events whose stimulus is an American thing to looking events whose stimulus is an American person (or man). Similarly, by ‘American’ in ‘The car looks American to you’ we typically do not mean to quantify over looking events whose stimulus is an American thing, nor over looking events whose stimulus is an American person. What we typically mean, I suggest, is to quantify over a restricted domain of looking events whose stimulus is an American car. What we mean by ‘American’ in this case is ‘the way American cars look’. Similarly, by ‘American’ in ‘The restaurant looks American to you’ we typically do not mean to quantify over looking events whose stimulus is an American thing, nor over looking events whose stimulus is an American person, nor over looking events whose stimulus is an American car, but over looking events whose stimulus is an American restaurant. What we mean by ‘American’ in this case is ‘the way that American restaurants look’.

6.7. Bound Variable Readings These last examples raise a challenge to the theory that I am developing. If what we mean by ‘American’ in ‘The man looks American to you’ is ‘the way that American people look’, and what we mean by ‘American’ in ‘The car looks American to you’ is ‘the way that American cars look’, then what we mean by ‘American’ in the first is distinct from what we mean by ‘American’ in the second. This suggests that we should have trouble finding a true reading of the following sentence: The man and the car look American At least we should have trouble finding a true reading that is not zeugmatic.

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By a ‘zeugmatic reading’ I mean one that involves a certain kind of weirdness (see Quine (1960), p. 130). Here is an example: The chair and questions were hard There is a reading on which this might be true, but it involves a certain kind of weirdness. This is a zeugmatic reading. Why the weirdness? It’s because we have to understand ‘hard’ in two different ways in the one use. We’d expect any true reading of the ‘look’ sentence above to involve the same kind of weirdness, because it would require us to understand ‘American’ in two different ways in the one use. But we can get a true reading of it that is not zeugmatic, or at least is not as obviously zeugmatic as ‘The chair and questions were hard’. The challenge is to explain why this is so. I propose that this can be explained by appealing to the availability of a reading of ‘looks American’ on which the complement of ‘look’ contains a bound variable, a variable that is bound by the subject of the sentence. By ‘American’, on this reading, we do not mean ‘the way that American people look’ nor ‘the way that American cars look’ but ‘the way that things of its kind look’, where ‘it’ is a variable that gets bound by the antecedent quantifier expression ‘The man and the car’. This gives us a uniform way of interpreting what we mean by ‘American’ in each case, and thus a way of explaining why the conjoined reading is non-zeugmatic: The man looks the way that things of its kind look The car looks the way that things of its kind look The man and the car look the way that things of its kind look (Perhaps there is something zeugma-like about the conjunction. The present proposal can offer an explanation: interpreting ‘American’ in the conjunction requires understanding it in a certain way, a way that might be slightly different from how it is understood in each of the non-conjoined cases—this might explain any residual oddness.) The same explanation does not work in the case of ‘hard’ (this strengthens the case in favour of this explanation). It is not the case

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that there is something that we mean by ‘hard’ in both ‘The chair was hard’ and ‘The questions were hard’. The obvious thing to try is ‘hard for things of its kind’, but that won’t work—we still have the same ambiguity in ‘hard’. This is why, I propose, utterances of ‘The man and the car look American to you’ are not zeugmatic, or at least not as obviously zeugmatic as utterances of ‘The chair and questions were hard’. The appeal to a bound variable in this proposal is not ad hoc, because the explanation works more generally. Here are two more examples: The ant is big The elephant is big The ant and the elephant are big Simon loves his mum Garfunkel loves his mum Simon and Garfunkel each loves his mum What we typically mean by ‘big’ in ‘The ant is big’ is ‘big for an ant’, whereas what we typically mean by ‘big’ in ‘The elephant is big’ is ‘big for an elephant’. But we can also understand that what we mean in each case is ‘big for a thing of its kind’. This is why the sentence ‘The ant and elephant are big’ is not zeugmatic, or at least not as obviously as ‘The chair and questions were hard’ (any residual oddness can be explained by the need to re-interpret ‘big’ in a way that differs from how we typically understand it). What we typically mean by ‘his’ in ‘Simon loves his mum’ is ‘Simon’s’, whereas what we typically mean by ‘his’ in ‘Garfunkel loves his mum’ is ‘Garfunkel’s’. But we can also understand that what we mean in each case is ‘his’, where this is to be understood as a variable. This is why the sentence ‘Simon and Garfunkel each loves his mum’ is not zeugmatic, or at least not as obviously as ‘The chair and questions were hard’ (any residual oddness can be explained by the need to re-interpret ‘his’ in a way that differs from how we typically understand it).

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7 Concepts and Discrimination I have been considering the colour character of your visual experience of the patch below. I have been calling this character ‘c1’.

I have been asking what it is for you to have a visual experience of the patch with character c1. But I have been asking this question in the following way: what is it for the patch to look grey to you? In asking the question this way I have been assuming that there is a reading of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ on which we mean that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1, and this is how I have been using it (I have been pretending that ‘grey’ picks out exactly the right shade of grey). At the start of Chapter 2 I set aside a possible concern about this. I now return to that concern.

7.1. A Concern The concern is that there is no reading of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ on which we mean just that you have a visual experience of the patch with this character. Rather, on any reading we also attribute to you a certain conceptual capacity (that you have the concept of being grey), or a certain discriminatory capacity (that you can visually discriminate grey things from non-grey things). That is, it is part of what we mean by ‘The patch looks grey to you’ that you have this concept or this capacity. Suppose that you do not have this concept or

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this capacity. Then, the concern goes, it is false that the patch looks grey to you, on any reading of ‘The patch looks grey to you’, even if you have a visual experience of the patch with this character. If the concern is right then it undermines what I have been doing to figure out what it is for you to have a visual experience of the patch with character c1, for I have been relying on there being a reading of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ on which we mean just that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1. Note that the concern is not that if you lack the concept of being grey, or the capacity to visually discriminate grey things from nongrey things, then your visual experience of the patch cannot have this character at all. The concern allows that if you lack this concept or this capacity then your visual experience might still have this character. It just denies that the patch can look grey to you, because it is part of what we mean by ‘The patch looks grey to you’ that you have this concept or this capacity. Perhaps the concern can be made more pressing by considering a more complex character—the character of our visual experiences of Lithuanian people. Suppose that you do not have the concept of being Lithuanian, or are not able to visually discriminate Lithuanian people from non-Lithuanian people. Suppose that you are looking at a man and having a visual experience of him. No matter what the character of your visual experience it is not the case, the concern goes, that the man looks Lithuanian to you. This is so even if someone else is also having a visual experience of the man with exactly the same character as yours, and even if the man looks Lithuanian to him. There is no reading of ‘The man looks Lithuanian to you’ on which it means just that you have a visual experience of the man with a certain character. Similarly, although perhaps less clearly, there is no reading of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ on which it means just that you have a visual experience of the patch with a certain character. This is contrary to what I am assuming—that there is a reading of ‘looks grey’ on which, if the patch looks grey to one person, and your visual experience of the patch has exactly the same character as his, then it follows that the patch looks grey to you (even if you do not have the concept

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of being grey, or cannot visually discriminate grey things from nongrey things). In this chapter I defend my assumption against this concern—that is, I defend the idea that there is a reading of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ on which we mean just that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1, without also attributing to you the concept of being grey or the capacity to visually discriminate grey things from non-grey things. I argue that the concern is generated by familiar opacity effects, made even more prominent by a structural ambiguity in how we use the modifier ‘to you’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’, and that if we take care not to be confused by these effects then it becomes clearer that there is the reading that I am taking there to be.

7.2. Opacity Lois Lane believes that Superman is a hero. Does she believe that Clark Kent is a hero? A very natural answer is ‘No’. But we might also answer ‘Yes’, arguing as follows: Lois believes that Superman is a hero, so it follows that Lois believes that Clark Kent is a hero, because Clark Kent is Superman. Moreover, we can typically get someone who initially answers ‘No’ to concede that there is a reading of ‘Lois believes that Clark Kent is a hero’ on which it is true, for the reasons just given, although he might want to point out that because Lois does not realize that Clark Kent is Superman it would be misleading to use the sentence in this way. I accept the following: there is a reading of ‘Lois believes that Clark Kent is a hero’ on which it is true (call it the transparent reading), but because Lois does not realize that Clark Kent is Superman this is not the most natural reading, and it is a reading that can be overlooked. (I can remain neutral on whether there is a reading of ‘Lois believes that Clark Kent is a hero’ on which it is false—a reading that we might call the opaque reading.) I propose that something similar is true of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ in any context in which it is understood that you lack the concept of being grey or the ability to visually discriminate grey things from

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non-grey things: There is a reading of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ on which it is true (its transparent reading), but because it is understood in this context that you lack the concept of being grey or the ability to visually discriminate grey things this is not the most natural reading in this context, and it is a reading that can be overlooked in this context. Anyone who overlooks this reading in this context might mistakenly think that there is no such reading, and that it is part of what we mean by ‘The patch looks grey to you’ that you have the concept of being grey and the ability to visually discriminate grey things from non-grey things. This is how I defend the idea that there is a reading of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ on which we do not attribute to you the concept of being grey nor the capacity to visually discriminate grey things from non-grey things. If I am right, then it is false to claim that there is no such reading. Here is another way of putting it. Suppose that John is also having a visual experience of the patch, and that the colour character of his visual experience is exactly the same as the colour character of yours. But also suppose that John lacks the concept of being grey or the capacity to visually discriminate grey things from non-grey things. Does the patch look grey to John? I say: there is a reading of ‘The patch looks grey to John’ on which it does. It might be unnatural or misleading to say that the patch looks grey to John, because it suggests certain things about John which are not the case (e.g. that John has the concept of being grey, or that John can visually discriminate grey things from non-grey things, or that John would use the word ‘grey’ to describe the character of his experience). But there is a reading on which it is true. And this is the reading with which I have been using it in this book.

7.3. A Second Use of ‘to You’ I will now propose another reason for why we might overlook the reading of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ that I am taking there to be. I have been assuming that there is a reading of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ on which we use ‘to you’ as a modifier of the verb phrase ‘looks grey’, and that in this structural position we use it to mean that you are the experiencer of this visual experience. This is the way that

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I have been using the sentence throughout. But there is also, I will propose, a reading of the sentence on which we use ‘to you’ as a modifier of the sentence ‘The patch looks grey’, and that in this structural position we use it (roughly) to mean that you are the holder of a certain belief. This is not the way that I have been using the sentence, but it is a possible reading of the sentence and a way that some readers might understand it. This is a reading of the sentence on which we use it (roughly) to attribute to you a certain belief, and so anyone who understands the sentence in this way might be even more inclined to think that it attributes to you a certain conceptual or discriminatory capacity (for the reasons that I proposed in Section 7.2). We might expect there to be an ambiguity as to which structural position we use ‘to you’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’. There is evidence that we use ‘to you’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ in adjunct position (rather than in argument position). The evidence is the following two facts: (a) that ‘to you’ is grammatically optional in these sentences (i.e. leaving it out of the sentence does not make the sentence ungrammatical), and (b) that we can use ‘to you’ in a variety of positions to say the same thing: The patch looks grey to you The patch to you looks grey To you the patch looks grey This is not conclusive evidence that we use ‘to you’ in adjunct position (it does not entail it), but it is at least some evidence. I will assume that we do use ‘to you’ in adjunct position. Sentences that contain expressions in adjunct position can be structurally ambiguous—the ambiguity arising from an ambiguity as to where the adjunct attaches (see Carnie (2001), pp. 49–51). A classic illustration of this is the following sentence: John saw a man with binoculars This sentence is structurally ambiguous, between a reading on which ‘with binoculars’ is adjoined to and modifies the noun ‘man’, and a reading on which it is adjoined to and modifies the verb phrase

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‘saw a man’. We can represent the structure of the sentence on the two readings as follows: John saw a [[man] with binoculars] John [[saw a man] with binoculars] If the sentence is used with the first structure, on which ‘with binoculars’ modifies ‘man’, then what is meant is that John saw a man who had binoculars—‘with binoculars’ is used to say something about the man who was seen, that he had binoculars. If the sentence is used with the second structure, on which ‘with binoculars’ modifies ‘saw a man’, then what is meant is that John used binoculars to see a man—‘with binoculars’ is used to say something about how John saw the man, that he used binoculars. We might paraphrase the two readings as follows: John saw a man who had binoculars John saw a man by using binoculars If sentences that contain modifiers in adjunct position can be structurally ambiguous, and if in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we use ‘to you’ as a modifier in adjunct position, then there might be an ambiguity as to where the expression attaches, and thus a structural ambiguity in the sentence. I propose that there is. There is evidence that we can indeed understand ‘to you’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ as being used in more than one structural position. One piece of evidence comes from the fact that we might sensibly include a second modifier of the form ‘to S’. Consider the binoculars case first. Although it would be unusual, we can make perfect sense of the following sentence, which contains two occurrences of ‘with binoculars’: John saw a man with binoculars with binoculars This can be explained on the assumption that ‘with binoculars’ can be understood as occurring in either of two positions within the structure of the sentence. One occurrence of ‘with binoculars’ can be understood as modifying ‘man’, and the other can be understood as modifying ‘saw a man with binoculars’. Thus the sentence can be understood as having

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the structure represented below, and as meaning that John used binoculars to see a man who had binoculars. John [saw a [man with binoculars]] with binoculars It is difficult to account for the acceptability of this sentence if there is just one structural position in which we can understand ‘with binoculars’ being used. For consider the sentence ‘John kissed Mary’. There is just one structural position in which we can understand ‘Mary’ being used—as modifying ‘kissed’. We can use two occurrences of ‘Mary’ in this position, but they have to be conjoined in some way: ‘John kissed Mary and Mary’, ‘John kissed Mary or Mary’, and so on. It is not acceptable to say, ‘John kissed Mary Mary’. Similarly, if there were just one structural position in which we can understand ‘with binoculars’ being used then it would only be acceptable to use two occurrences of ‘with binoculars’ in that position if they are conjoined in some way. Since it is acceptable to use two occurrences of ‘with binoculars’ without conjoining them in any way, there is more than one structural position in which we can understand ‘with binoculars’ being used. Now let’s switch from ‘see’ to ‘look’. Suppose that Jack and Jill agree about which colour character your visual experience of the patch has, but they disagree about how to correctly describe that character. Then we might use the sentences below to describe their situation: The patch looks light grey to you to Jack The patch looks dark grey to you to Jill The acceptability of the first sentence is evidence that we can understand ‘to you’ and ‘to Jack’ as being used in different structural positions in the sentence. Similarly, the acceptability of the second sentence is evidence that we can understand ‘to you’ and ‘to Jill’ as being used in different structural positions in the sentence. Of course, there might be more natural ways of saying these two things, but the point is that these are acceptable ways. I have just given evidence that we can understand ‘to you’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ as being used in more than one structural

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position. Where are those positions? I propose that there is a reading on which ‘to you’ is adjoined to and modifies the verb phrase ‘looks grey’ (I shall call this the VP-modifier reading), and a reading on which it is adjoined to and modifies the sentence ‘The patch looks grey’ (I shall call this the sentence-modifier reading). We can represent the structure of the sentence on the two readings as follows: The patch [[looks grey] to you] [[The patch looks grey] to you] Moreover, I propose that what we use ‘to you’ to contribute to what we mean by the sentence is different in each position. If the sentence is used with the first structure, and that is how I have been using it in this book, ‘to you’ modifies ‘looks grey’, and is used to say something about the looking event about which we are talking—that its experiencer is you. What we mean by the sentence on this reading is that there is a looking event whose stimulus is the patch and whose experiencer is you and which is occurring in the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus is grey occur in way w. If the sentence is used with the second structure, ‘to you’ modifies ‘The patch looks grey’, and is used to say something about the proposition expressed by ‘The patch looks grey’—that you believe it. What we mean by the sentence on this reading is that you believe that the patch looks grey. It will be convenient to paraphrase the two readings as follows: You experience the patch looking grey You believe that the patch looks grey These are not meant to be perfect paraphrases, and they are not. There are two ways in which they are less than perfect. First, an appropriate way for you to disagree when someone says to you, ‘You believe that the patch looks grey’, is to say, ‘No, I do not’. But this is not an appropriate way for you to disagree when someone says to you, ‘The patch looks grey to you’ (on any reading). In the latter case it would be appropriate to say ‘No, it does not’ instead. So there is some kind of difference between ‘You believe that the patch

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looks grey’ and ‘The patch looks grey to you’. But this difference need not be a difference in the truth conditions that they express. Consider the sentences ‘It is possible that you will win’ and ‘You will possibly win’. These are different in the same kind of way: an appropriate way for you to disagree when someone says to you, ‘It is possible that you will win’, is to say, ‘No, it is not’, but this is not an appropriate way for you to disagree when someone says to you, ‘You will possibly win’ (an appropriate way to respond in this case is to say, ‘No, I will not’). Nevertheless, the two sentences express the same truth conditions. So the paraphrases make some difference, but not necessarily a truthconditional difference. Second, and more significantly, there are reasons to think that the attitude involved in the second reading is not quite the attitude of belief (as I am taking it to be). If we do have such a pattern of use, then we ought to be able to report your belief that Canberra is the capital of Australia by saying that Canberra is the capital of Australia to you, and report your belief that 2 + 2 = 4 by saying that 2 + 2 = 4 to you. But these reports are slightly inappropriate. Furthermore, if you believe that it’s raining outside on the basis of testimony, then it would be slightly inappropriate to report this by saying that it’s raining outside to you. This suggests that perhaps belief is not quite the attitude that we use ‘to S’ to attribute and, moreover, that this could make a truth-conditional difference. But for present purposes it should do no harm to take it to be belief. Why think that there is a reading of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ on which we mean that you believe that the patch looks grey? First, it is a general use that we have of modifiers of the form ‘to S’. We sometimes use modifiers of the form ‘to S’ to modify sentences whose main verb is not ‘look’ or any other appearance verb, and plausibly do so to mean something like ‘S believes that’. Here are some uses that I have heard: Friday is the best day of the week to me To you he is just your little boy To me this was my mother’s German potato salad

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To me it is going to rain To people who live there Melbourne is the capital of Australia Runners high to me resembles a perfect golf shot To me it’s just a pile of bricks I take it that what the speaker means by the first sentence above is that she believes that Friday is the best day of the week, and that in each other case the speaker means to be attributing beliefs, and is using ‘to S’ to specify who it is that has the belief. If this is a general pattern of use then we would expect there to be a reading of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ on which ‘to you’ is used as a sentence modifier, and should not be surprised to find that we sometimes use the sentence that way. Here is a second reason. Although I never had a visual experience of Descartes, I believe that Descartes looked German. I might report this by saying: Descartes looked German to me There is a reading of this sentence on which it is true. This cannot be the VP-modifier reading. Since I had no visual experience of Descartes during the period about which I am talking, this cannot be a reading on which ‘to me’ is used to specify that I was the experiencer of a looking event whose stimulus was Descartes. What about my visual experiences of images of Descartes? If this is what I am talking about then I should say the following instead: ‘Descartes looks German to me’ (rather than ‘Descartes looked German to me’). I propose instead that we interpret ‘to me’ as being used to modify the sentence ‘Descartes looked German’, to specify that I believe the proposition expressed by this sentence. This claim is supported by the following. Suppose that you make the following third-person report of this same fact: Descartes looked German to Wylie Upon hearing your utterance someone might respond: Well, if Descartes didn’t look German then Wylie is mistaken

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It is difficult to make sense of this response if ‘to Wylie’ is interpreted as modifying the VP ‘looked German’ in the way suggested, but not if it is interpreted as modifying the sentence ‘Descartes looked German’ in the way suggested. This can be seen from the unacceptability of the first conversation below, and the acceptability of the second: Wylie experienced Descartes looking German #Well, if Descartes didn’t look German then Wylie is mistaken Wylie believes that Descartes looked German Well, if Descartes didn’t look German then Wylie is mistaken I have been arguing that there is a second use of ‘to you’, and along with it a second reading of ‘The patch looks grey to you’, on which we mean (roughly) that you believe that the patch looks grey. The significance of this is that it gives another way of accounting for the judgment that ‘The patch looks grey to you’ is false if you do not have the concept of being grey, or are not able to visually discriminate grey things from non-grey things. The idea is that someone might make this judgment for the following reason: she understands ‘to you’ as being used as a sentence-modifier, and ‘grey’ as being used to specify something about the content of your belief, and as a result takes the mode of presentation associated with ‘grey’ to be semantically significant (for reasons that I suggested in Section 7.2). Her judgment that if you do not have the concept of being grey then the patch cannot look grey to you is just the judgment that if you do not have the concept of being grey then you cannot believe that the patch looks grey; her judgment that if you do not have the ability to visually discriminate grey things from non-grey things then the patch cannot look grey to you is just the judgment that if you do not have the ability to visually discriminate grey things from non-grey things then you cannot believe that the patch looks grey, at least not on the basis of your visual experience of the patch. These judgments may or may not be correct, but their correctness is compatible with there being the reading of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ that I am taking there to be.

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8 Other ‘Look’ Sentences I have been trying to better understand what it is for you to have a visual experience of a certain patch with a certain character, c1. I have been doing this by clarifying what we mean by ‘The patch looks grey to you’, on a certain reading. This is because on this reading of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ what we mean is that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1, so by clarifying what we mean by ‘The patch looks grey to you’, on this reading, we can better understand what it is for you to have a visual experience of the patch with character c1. I have argued that what we mean is this: you have a visual experience of the patch that is occurring in way w1 (where w1 is a certain way of looking). There are other ‘look’ sentences that we might use to say that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1. Since we use these sentences to say the same thing as we use ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to say, we must mean the same thing by these sentences as we mean by ‘The patch looks grey to you’. If, as I have argued, what we mean by ‘The patch looks grey to you’ is that you have a visual experience of the patch that is occurring in way w1, then what we mean by each of these other sentences must be that you have a visual experience of the patch that is occurring in way w1. This is something that I am committed to. So I need it to be the case that by each of these other sentences we mean that you have a visual experience of the patch that is occurring in way w1. My aim in this chapter is to show that it is plausible that we do (I will not try to prove that we do). I will consider various other ‘look’ sentences that we might use to say that

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you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1, and, by appealing to general principles about our use of language, explain how we use the sentence to mean that you have a visual experience that is occurring in way w1.

8.1. Some Other ‘Look’ Sentences I have been considering a certain patch, and your visual experience of the patch, which has colour character c1. For the purposes of this chapter it will be helpful to suppose that there is also a cup such that your visual experience of the cup also has colour character c1 (in colloquial terms: the cup and the patch look exactly the same to you with respect to colour). Below are some other ‘look’ sentences that we might use to say that you are having a visual experience of the patch with character c1, a sample which I take to be fairly representative. The patch looks to you that way (pointing at the cup) The patch looks to you the way that the cup looks The patch looks to you the same as the cup The patch looks to you how the cup looks The patch looks to you like the cup The patch looks to you as if it is grey The patch looks to you to be grey In each case I have used the modifier ‘to you’ immediately after ‘look’. In some cases this is not the most natural position in which to use it. Nevertheless, it is a grammatically acceptable position (because it is an adjunct, and English grammar allows adjuncts to be used in different positions). I have done this simply to make it clear that the sentences differ only in the expression that we use as the complement of ‘look’. When used in the right context we can drop the modifier ‘to you’ from each sentence altogether, confident that our audience will understand that it is to you that the patch looks the way that it does. But for explicitness I have included the modifier in each case. I take it that the sentences all have the same structure, apart from any

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structural differences within the expressions that make up the complement of ‘look’. I also take it (and will assume without argument) that in many respects we use these sentences in the same way that we use ‘The patch looks grey to you’: in each case we use the sentence to say that there is a looking event (we use ‘look’ to do this), that is occurring now (we use the present-tense inflection ‘s’ to do this), whose stimulus is the patch (we use ‘The patch’ to do this), and whose experiencer is you (we use ‘to you’ to do this). The interesting question is what we use the complement of ‘look’ to say in each case. In the case of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ I argued that we use the complement of ‘look’ (i.e. ‘grey’) to mean the property of being grey, thereby to mean the way w1, thereby to say that the event is occurring in way w1—this is what led me to conclude that for you to have a visual experience of the patch with character c1 is for you to have a visual experience of the patch that is occurring in way w1. I am committed to claiming that in each of these alternative sentences we also use the complement of ‘look’ somehow to mean w1 and thereby to say that the event is occurring in way w1. I think that we do indeed use the complement of ‘look’ in this way in each case. My aim in this chapter is to explain how. The details differ a bit from case to case—I will consider the complements one by one.

8.2. Some Initial Evidence Before considering the complements one by one, and explaining how in each case we use the complement of ‘look’ to mean w1, I will start by giving some evidence that we use the complement in each case to mean a way, and then I will say some things to make it plausible that we mean a way of looking. In Chapter 2, I gave evidence that we use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean a way. There is the same kind of evidence that in each of my sample ‘look’ sentences we use the complement of ‘look’ to mean a way.

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First, there is evidence from our use of echo questions that we use the complement in each case either singularly to mean a way or plurally to mean some ways. In each case the complement of ‘look’ can be replaced by ‘how’ to form an echo question: The patch looks to you that way. The patch looks to you how? The patch looks to you the way that the cup looks. The patch looks to you how? The patch looks to you the same as the cup. The patch looks to you how? The patch looks to you how the cup looks. The patch looks to you how? The patch looks to you like the cup. The patch looks to you how? The patch looks to you as if it is grey. The patch looks to you how? The patch looks to you to be grey. The patch looks to you how? Thus we have evidence that in each case we use the complement of ‘look’ either singularly to mean a way or plurally to mean some ways. Second, there is evidence from our use of anaphora using ‘that way’ that we use the complement in each case singularly to mean a way (rather than plurally to mean some ways). In each case we can use ‘that way’ anaphorically upon the complement of ‘look’: The patch looks to you that way. The patch looks to me that way too. The patch looks to you the way that the cup looks. The patch looks to me that way too. The patch looks to you the same as the cup. The patch looks to me that way too. The patch looks to you how the cup looks. The patch looks to me that way too. The patch looks to you like the cup. The patch looks to me that way too. The patch looks to you as if it is grey. The patch looks to me that way too. The patch looks to you to be grey. The patch looks to me that way too.

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Thus we have evidence that in each case we use the complement of ‘look’ singularly to mean a way. Next, some observations to make it plausible that we use the complement of ‘look’ to mean a way of looking. My sample ‘look’ sentences involve complements of various kinds. We use the same kinds of complement in non-‘look’ sentences, and we use them there to mean ways of occurring. Suppose that John is pretending to be a duck by walking in the way that ducks walk, and in fact is walking in the same way that a nearby duck is walking. Here are some sentences that we might use to say that John is walking in the way that he is: John is walking that way (pointing at the duck) John is walking the way that the duck is walking John is walking the same as the duck John is walking like the duck John is walking how the duck is walking John is walking as if he is a duck John is waddling We have these ways of referring to the way in which John is walking. It would not be surprising, then, to find us using them in ‘look’ sentences to mean a way of occurring, and a way of looking in particular. So it would not be surprising to find that we use them in my sample ‘look’ sentences to mean a way of looking. There are a couple of differences here worth mentioning. First, we say ‘The patch looks to be grey’, but we don’t say ‘John walks to be a duck’. I don’t know why this is, but my guess is that it is just a quirk of language—this way of talking has caught on in the case of looking events but not in the case of walking events. Second, we say, ‘John is waddling’, but we don’t say, ‘The patch looks w’, where ‘w’ is a name for a way of looking—we have a name for this way of walking, but we don’t have a name for this way of looking. Again, I don’t think that there is anything significant about this—we could easily introduce a name for this way of looking; in fact, I have already done so in this book: ‘w1’. I have introduced this name for a certain way of looking,

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and having done so I can use it as the complement of ‘look’: ‘The patch looks w1 to you’.

8.3. Direct and Indirect Uses There is one more thing that it will be helpful to do before considering the complements in my sample ‘look’ sentences one by one, and that is to draw a distinction between two ways of using the complement of ‘look’. In Chapters 2 and 4 I argued that we use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to mean a way of looking by meaning the property of being grey. We do so, I proposed, by exploiting a function f, which maps the property of being grey to w1. I described this as our using ‘grey’ indirectly to mean the way of looking. Some of my sample ‘look’ sentences have, I will argue, a reading on which we use the complement of ‘look’ indirectly to mean w1, by meaning the property of being grey. We should not be surprised to find that this is so. In ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we use ‘grey’ indirectly to mean w1, by meaning the property of being grey. We have other ways of meaning the property of being grey. Rather than expressing it using the adjective ‘grey’ we might demonstrate it. It would not be surprising to find, then, that we use demonstratives as the complement of ‘look’ to demonstrate the property of being grey and thereby mean w1 indirectly. I will propose that there is a reading of ‘The patch looks to you that way’ on which this is what we do. We might also definitely describe the property of being grey. It would not be surprising to find, then, that we use definite descriptions as the complement of ‘look’ to definitely describe the property of being grey and thereby mean w1 indirectly. I will propose that there is a reading of ‘The patch looks to you the way that the cup looks’ on which this is what we do. Some of my sample ‘look’ sentences have, I will argue, a reading on which we use the complement of ‘look’ directly to mean w1, without first meaning the property of being grey and exploiting the function f.

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Again, we should not be surprised to find that this is so. In ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we use ‘grey’ to mean w1. In this case we use a certain technique that involves expressing the property of being grey and exploiting the function f. But we have ways of referring to w1 directly, without exploiting f. We might demonstrate it, for example. It would not be surprising to find, then, that we use demonstratives as the complement of ‘look’ to demonstrate w1 directly. I will propose that there is a reading of ‘The patch looks to you that way’ on which this is what we do. We might also definitely describe w1. It would not be surprising to find, then, that we use definite descriptions as the complement of ‘look’ to definitely describe w1 directly. I will propose that there is a reading of ‘The patch looks to you the way that the cup looks’ on which this is what we do. It will be helpful to have a test for whether a reading of ‘The patch looks to you e’ is one on which we use ‘e’ indirectly to mean a way of looking. Here is one (it appeals to the same kind of evidence to which I appealed in Chapter 2, when I argued that we use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ indirectly to mean a way of looking). The reading is one on which we use ‘e’ indirectly to mean a way of looking if and only if it is possible to interpret that what a speaker means by the first sentence below is the proposition expressed by the second (this interpretation is possible if and only if ‘e’ in the first sentence is used to mean a property; see Chapter 2 for details). The patch looks to you e, and it is The patch looks to you e, and it is e I will now consider the complements in my sample ‘look’ sentences one by one.

8.4. ‘That Way’ We might say that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1 by using the following sentence, while pointing at the cup: The patch looks to you that way

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On the most natural understanding of this sentence we use ‘that way’, I propose, to demonstrate w1, thereby using ‘that way’ to mean w1 directly. w1 is a way of looking, which is a property of looking events. How can we demonstrate w1 by pointing at the cup, if w1 is not a property of the cup but a property of looking events? I propose that it works as follows. By directing someone’s attention to the cup we can get her to have a visual experience of the cup that is occurring in way w1, which enables her to attend to w1. Perhaps this does not, strictly speaking, count as demonstrating w1, but at least it succeeds in making the person aware of w1, which is equally effective at communicating that we mean w1. Note that this technique relies upon the person having the right kind of visual experience of the cup—it would not work if her visual experience of the cup did not occur in way w1 (i.e. did not have character c1), as it might not if she were colour blind. Note that w1 is only one of many ways of looking w such that the cup looks w. For example, for every way of looking w such that w1 is a determinate of w, the cup also looks w. One such way is this: the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus is coloured occur in way w (more colloquially: the way that coloured things look). w1 is a determinate of w—looking w1 is a more specific way of looking w (more colloquially: looking grey is a more specific way of looking coloured). We might use ‘that way’ to demonstrate any one of these ways of looking. But to say that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1 we need to demonstrate w1, and I take it that this is the way that we intend to demonstrate. We might also use ‘that way’ in ‘The patch looks to you that way’ to mean w1 indirectly, by using ‘that way’ to demonstrate the property of being grey and exploiting the function f to mean w1. Suppose that the cup is grey (as well as looks grey). Then we can demonstrate the property of being grey by pointing at the cup and saying ‘that way’. (Recall: the property of being grey is a way—it is a way of being.) In this case we use ‘that way’ to demonstrate the property of being grey, and thereby mean w1 by exploiting the function f. This is to use ‘that

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way’ indirectly to mean w1, in the same way that we use ‘grey’ indirectly to mean w1 in ‘The patch looks grey to you’. Anything that is grey will do. Suppose that a certain plate is grey (it doesn’t matter how it looks). Then we might say that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1 by saying, ‘The patch looks to you that way’, while pointing at the plate. Again, if something is grey then there are many ways w such that it is w. For example, for every way of being w such that being grey is a determinate of w, the thing is w. We might use ‘that way’ to demonstrate any one of these ways of being. But to say that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1 we need to demonstrate the property of being grey, and I take it that this is the way of being that we intend to demonstrate. We might use demonstratives other than ‘that way’ to refer to w1 or the property of being grey: ‘this way’ or ‘thus’, for example. Similar remarks apply to our use of these demonstratives.

8.5. ‘The Way that the Cup Looks’ We might say that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1 by using the following sentence: The patch looks to you the way that the cup looks On the most natural way of understanding this sentence we use ‘the way that the cup looks’, I propose, to definitely describe w1, thereby using ‘the way that the cup looks’ to mean w1 directly. The cup looks w1, and because of this we can use ‘the way that the cup looks’ to definitely describe w1. As I discussed in Section 8.4, there are actually many ways w such that the cup looks w, and we might use ‘the way that the cup looks’ to definitely describe any one of them. But to say that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1 we need to definitely describe w1, and I take it that this is the way that we intend to definitely describe (we let the context make this clear).

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We might also use ‘the way that the cup looks’ to mean w1 indirectly, by using it to definitely describe the property of being grey and exploiting the function f to mean w1. The cup looks grey. Because of this we can use ‘the way that the cup looks’ to definitely describe the property of being grey (recall that the property of being grey is a way—it is a way of being). Again, there are actually many properties p such that the cup looks p, and we might use ‘the way that the cup looks’ to definitely describe any one of them. But to say that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1 we need to definitely describe the property of being grey, and I take it that this is the property that we intend to definitely describe (we let the context make this clear).

8.6. ‘The Same as the Cup’ We might say that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1 by using the following sentence: The patch looks to you the same as the cup On the most natural way of understanding this sentence our use of ‘the same as the cup’ is, I propose, short for ‘the same way as the cup looks’. So what we mean by the sentence is this: The patch looks to you the same way as the cup looks Surface form suggests that we use ‘the same way as the cup looks’ to definitely describe a way. I propose that this is how we do indeed use it—by ‘the same way as the cup looks’ we mean ‘the way that the cup looks’. If this is right, then I have already treated our use of this complement in Section 8.5. We might use ‘the same as the cup’ as short for various other things: The patch looks to you the same way as the cup is The patch looks to you the same colour as the cup looks The patch looks to you the same colour as the cup is

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In each case, I propose, we use the complement of ‘look’ to definitely describe the property of being grey, thereby meaning w1 indirectly. In the first case, we use ‘the same way as the cup is’ to mean ‘the way that the cup is’. We can use this to definitely describe the property of being grey because the cup is grey, and the property of being grey is a way (it is a way of being). In the second case, we use ‘the same colour as the cup looks’ to mean ‘the colour that the cup looks’. We can use this to definitely describe the property of being grey because the cup looks grey, and grey is a colour. In the third case, we use ‘the same colour as the cup is’ to mean ‘the colour that the cup is’. If the cup is grey (as well as looks grey) then we can use this to definitely describe the property of being grey because the cup is grey, and grey is a colour.

8.7. ‘How the Cup Looks’ We might say that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1 by using the following sentence: The patch looks to you how the cup looks On the most natural way of understanding this sentence we use ‘how the cup looks’, I propose, to mean ‘the way that the cup looks’. If this is right, then I have already treated our use of this complement in Section 8.5. I hope that this is not a very controversial proposal. I take it to be just a specific instance of a more general phenomenon to do with our use of ‘wh’-phrases. Consider the following non-‘look’ sentences, in which the complements of the main verbs are various ‘wh’-phrases: John lives where Mary lives John sleeps when Mary sleeps John phoned who Mary phoned John ate what Mary ate I take it that by ‘where Mary lives’ in the first case we mean either ‘the place that Mary lives’ (singular), or ‘the places that Mary lives’

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(plural). Similarly, I take it that what we mean by ‘when Mary sleeps’ in the second case is either ‘the time that Mary sleeps’ (singular), or ‘the times that Mary sleeps’ (plural), that what we mean by ‘who Mary phoned’ in the third case is either ‘the person that Mary phoned’ (singular), or ‘the people that Mary phoned’ (plural), and that what we mean by ‘what Mary ate’ in the fourth example is either ‘the thing that Mary ate’ (singular), or ‘the things that Mary ate’ (plural). Similarly, I take it that what we mean by ‘how the cup looks’ in the sentence above is either ‘the way that the cup looks’ (singular) or ‘the ways that the cup looks’ (plural). Moreover, I take it that what we mean in this particular case is the former.

8.8. ‘Like the Cup’ We might say that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1 by using the following sentence: The patch looks to you like the cup On the most natural way of understanding this sentence we use ‘like the cup’, I propose, as short for ‘like the cup looks’, and that by ‘like the cup looks’ we mean ‘a way like the way that the cup looks’. If this is right, then we use the complement of ‘look’ to indefinitely describe a way of looking. Actually, I take it that we mean something even more specific than this. We are trying to say that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1. To do so we need to refer to w1. We can do that by using the indefinite description only if there is exactly one way of looking that fits the description. So I propose that by ‘like the cup looks’ we mean ‘a way exactly like the way that the cup looks’. If this is right then what we mean, in effect, is ‘the way that the cup looks’, in which case I have already treated our use of this complement in Section 8.5. We might use ‘like the cup’ as short for ‘like the cup is’. In a similar way, I propose that in this case we mean ‘the way that the cup is’. I have treated this in Section 8.6.

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8.9. An Interesting Phenomenon There is an interesting phenomenon which the theory that I have developed is in a position to explain. Suppose that Jack looks tired and Jill feels tired. Then we might say the following things: Jack looks the way that Jill feels Jack looks the same as Jill feels Jack looks how Jill feels Jack looks like Jill feels At first glance it seems that in each case we are describing the way that Jack looks by referring to a way of feeling (the way that Jill feels). But how can we describe the way that Jack looks by referring to a way of feeling? Ways of looking and ways of feeling are quite different kinds of thing. Ways of looking are properties of looking events—ways in which looking events occur. Ways of feeling are properties of feeling events—ways in which feeling events occur. Looking events and feeling events are quite different kinds of thing, so presumably ways of looking and ways of feeling are also quite different kinds of thing. Perhaps some ways of looking are also ways of feeling, and when Jack looks the way that Jill feels it is because there is a way w that is both a way of looking and a way of feeling, and Jack looks w and Jill feels w. But there is another way to explain what is going on in these examples, and one that I prefer. Jack looks tired. We don’t have to use ‘tired’ to say this—we can use any expression that refers to the property of being tired. Jill feels tired. So we can refer to the property of being tired by using ‘the way that Jill feels’, or ‘the same as Jill feels’, or ‘how Jill feels’, or ‘like Jill feels’ (as I have discussed in Sections 8.5–8.8). Thus we can say that Jack looks tired by using any of these expressions as the complement of ‘look’. This explanation does not require that some ways of looking also be ways of feeling. It just requires that we have a mechanism in our

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language for using properties to refer to ways of occurring (as I have proposed that we do—the mechanism is to exploit the function f), and that we can use the same property to refer either to a way of looking or to a way of feeling.

8.10. ‘As if it is Grey’ We might say that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1 by using the following sentence: The patch looks to you as if it is grey On the most natural understanding of this sentence we do not use the complement of ‘look’ indirectly. If we did, then there would be a reading of the first sentence below on which it we mean the same thing as the second sentence, but there is no such reading. The patch looks to you as if it is grey, and it is The patch looks to you as if it is grey, and it is as if it is grey There is a reading of the first sentence on which we mean ‘The patch looks as if it is grey, and it is grey’, but this is not a reason to think that we use the complement of ‘look’ in the first sentence indirectly. (Here I am applying the test that I proposed at the end of Section 8.3.) Actually, I propose that we do use the complement of ‘look’ indirectly in this case, but in a slightly different way from all preceding examples of the indirect use. Up until now I have been taking the indirect use to work as follows: we use the complement of ‘look’ to express a property (for example, the property of being grey), and then exploit the function f to mean a way of looking. The function f is a two-place function, from properties and event-kinds to ways of occurring; f(p, k) is the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that events of kind k whose doer has property p occur in way w. In this case, I propose, we use the complement of ‘look’ to express a proposition, and then again exploit the function f to mean a way of looking. But now I need to slightly modify my account of f. If p is a proposition then f(p, k) is the maximally specific way w such that

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events of kind k in which p is true occur in way w. If this is right, then we use ‘as if it is grey’ in ‘The patch looks to you as if it is grey’ to express the proposition that the patch is grey, and thereby to mean w1, where w1 is the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that looking events in which the patch is grey occur in way w. In ‘as if it is grey’ the expression ‘as if ’ is playing the same kind of role that ‘that’ plays when we express propositions. We might even use ‘that’ instead of ‘as if ’ and say, ‘The patch looks to you that it is grey’. This way of talking is not common, but it does occur (as a Google search shows). More common alternatives to ‘as if ’ are ‘as though’ and ‘like’. The following sentences are natural alternatives to the one above: The patch looks to you as though it is grey The patch looks to you like it is grey I will take it that ‘as if ’, ‘as though’, ‘like’, and ‘that’ are just stylistic variants, and that which one we use makes no difference to what we mean. There do seem, however, to be some subtle differences in the way that we use ‘as though it is grey’, ‘like it is grey’, and ‘as if it is grey’. Sometimes it is more natural to use ‘as if ’ than ‘as though’, or vice versa. Travis (2004) claims that we mean different things by ‘as if it is grey’ and ‘as though it is grey’. For one, if I know that it is not the case that the patch is grey then it might look to me as though it is grey, but it cannot look to me as if it is grey (p. 75). These are issues that I will not consider here.

8.11. ‘To be Grey’ We might say that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1 by using the following sentence: The patch looks to you to be grey On the most natural way of understanding this sentence we use it, I propose, as a stylistic variant of ‘The patch looks to you as if it is grey’. If this is right, then I have already treated our use of this complement in Section 8.10.

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Why think that we use this sentence as a stylistic variant of ‘The patch looks to you as if it is grey’? Linguists recognize a phenomenon that they call subject control (see, for example, Carnie (2001, ch. 10)). Consider the first sentence below. It has a reading on which it can be paraphrased using the second sentence, and perhaps also using the third sentence. John wants to win John wants John to win John wants that John wins This is a reading of the first sentence on which we use ‘John’ both as an argument of the main verb ‘want’, and also of the main verb of the complement of ‘want’, ‘win’. Actually, this is not quite right. Wanting to maintain the so-called theta criterion, according to which ‘John’ cannot be used as an argument both of ‘want’ and ‘win’, linguists standardly take there to be an unpronounced pronoun ‘PRO’ in the subject position of the embedded sentence: John wants [PRO to win] ‘PRO’ is controlled by the subject ‘John’ (hence the name ‘subject control’), which means that its role is to co-refer with ‘John’. Strictly speaking, then, ‘John’ is used only as an argument of ‘want’, and it is the distinct element ‘PRO’ that is used as the argument of ‘win’. Our use of ‘John wants [PRO to win]’ in place of the second or third sentence is an instance of subject control. I propose that on its most natural reading our use of ‘The patch looks to you to be grey’ is an instance of subject control—it is a reading on which we use it with the structure shown in the first sentence below, one that we could express using the second sentence, but more naturally express using the third sentence: The patch looks to you [PRO to be grey] The patch looks to you that it is grey The patch looks to you as if it is grey

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This is why I propose that we use ‘The patch looks to you to be grey’ as a stylistic variant of ‘The patch looks to you as if it is grey’. There is another possibility which I need to consider and reject. Linguists also recognize a phenomenon that they call subject raising (see, for example, Carnie (2001, ch. 10)). Consider the first sentence below. It has a reading on which it can be paraphrased using the second sentence. John seems to love Mary It seems that John loves Mary On this reading of the first sentence we use ‘John’ not as an argument of the main verb ‘seem’, but as an argument of the main verb of the complement of ‘seem’, ‘love’. It is another way of saying the following: Seems John to love Mary English grammar does not allow us to use this sentence, because English grammar requires every sentence to have a subject (if there were no such requirement then sentences such as ‘Looks windy’ might be grammatical). Instead, we can do one of two things. Either we can ‘raise’ the subject of the complement into the subject position of the sentence, as we do in the case of ‘John seems to love Mary’ (giving us an instance of subject raising), or we can leave the subject of the complement where it is and use pleonastic (i.e. non-referential) ‘It’ in the subject position of the sentence, as we do in the case of ‘It seems that John loves Mary’. (For a discussion of pleonastic ‘It’ see Carnie (2001), pp. 174–6.) There is another requirement of English grammar which means that we cannot use ‘It seems John to love Mary’ but have rather to use ‘It seems that John loves Mary’. We need not use ‘that’ in the complement—we could use ‘as if ’, ‘as though’, or ‘like’ instead. So any of the following would do equally well: It seems as if John loves Mary It seems as though John loves Mary It seems like John loves Mary

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I propose that ‘The patch looks to you to be grey’ has a raising reading (in addition to its control reading)—a reading on which ‘The patch’ is interpreted not as a semantic argument of ‘look’ but as a semantic argument of the main verb of the complement of ‘look’, ‘be’, and on which it can be paraphrased using any of the following sentences (the first paraphrase is the least natural): It looks to you that the patch is grey It looks to you as if the patch is grey It looks to you as though the patch is grey It looks to you like the patch is grey I proposed at the start of this section that when we use ‘The patch looks to you to be grey’ to mean that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1 we use it as a stylistic variant of ‘The patch looks to you as if it is grey’. This is because I take it that we use the sentence with its control reading. Why not its raising reading? Because we want to say that you have a visual experience of the patch with character c1—we want to commit to the patch being a stimulus of your visual experience. It is only on the control reading that we make this commitment.

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9 Other Characters My aim in this book is to answer the following question, for any character c: What is it to have visual experience with character c? So far I have been focusing on just one character (I have been calling it ‘c1’) and I have arrived at the following result: There is a way of looking w such that to have a visual experience with character c1 is to have a visual experience that is occurring in way w What about other characters? Perhaps the result above is enough to justify the following more general answer, an answer to my main question: For any character c there is a way of looking w such that to have a visual experience with character c is to have a visual experience that is occurring in way w But it would be nice to have some more reason to think that this is the case. I think that there is. In this chapter I consider some other characters, of increasing complexity, and show that the method that I have been using leads to the same result.

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9.1. A Shape Character Let’s consider the shape character of your visual experience of the patch that we have been considering, rather than its colour character. Let’s call this character ‘c2’. Here is the patch again:

To help you get a fix on which character c2 is, your visual experience of each of the patches below also has character c2 (but it has a different colour and/or size character):

But your visual experience of neither of the patches below has character c2 (they have the same colour character but not the same shape character):

What is it to have a visual experience with character c2? Let’s start with a more specific question: what is it for you to have a visual experience of the patch with character c2? We might ask this question using the following ‘look’ sentence: What is it for the patch to look square to you? According to the theory of ‘look’ sentences that I have developed, we use ‘square’ to mean the property of being square and thereby to mean w2, where w2 is the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus is square occur in way w. What we mean by ‘The patch looks square to you’ is the following: There is a looking event whose stimulus is the patch and whose experiencer is you and that is occurring in way w2

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If this is what we mean by ‘The patch looks square to you’ then this is what it is for the patch to look square to you, and so this is what it is for you to have a visual experience of the patch with character c2. Simplifying and generalizing we get: To have a visual experience with character c2 is to have a visual experience that is occurring in way w2 From which it follows that: There is a way of looking w such that to have a visual experience with character c2 is to have a visual experience that is occurring in way w

9.2. A Combined Colour and Shape Character Now let’s consider a more complex character—the combined colour and shape character of your visual experience of the same patch (shown again below). Let’s call this character ‘c3’.

To help you get a fix on which character c3 is, your visual experience of each of the patches below also has character c3 (but it has a different size character):

Note that I am assuming, here, that in addition to having characters c1 and c2 your visual experience of the patch also has a distinct character c3. If this assumption is wrong then we can skip this section, because there is no extra character here to consider. We already have an account of what it is to have a visual experience with character c1 and an account of what it is to have a visual experience with character c2, and so we have an account of what it is to have a

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visual experience with characters c1 and c2. In this section I am considering what it is to have a visual experience with character c3, on the assumption that there is such a character, distinct from both c1 and c2. What is it to have a visual experience with character c3? Again, let’s start by asking a more specific question: what is it for you to have a visual experience of the patch with character c3? We might ask the question using the following ‘look’ sentence: What is it for the patch to look grey and square to you? We must be careful to understand ‘The patch looks grey and square to you’ in the right way here, because there are at least three readings of this sentence, and on only one of those three readings is it asking the intended question. First, there is a reading on which we use ‘look’ within the scope of ‘and’, on which what we mean by the sentence is: The patch looks grey to you and the patch looks square to you On this reading of ‘The patch looks grey and square to you’ what we are asking when we ask, ‘What is it for the patch to look grey and square to you?’ is ‘What is it for you to have a visual experience of the patch with character c1 and a visual experience of the patch with character c2?’ This is not the intended question, so this is not how we should understand ‘The patch looks grey and square to you’. (We already have an answer to this question: it is to have a visual experience of the patch that is occurring in way w1 and a visual experience of the patch that is occurring in way w2.) On the next two readings ‘look’ takes wider scope than ‘and’, which we might make clear using brackets: ‘The patch looks (grey and square) to you’. But there is, I propose, still a scope ambiguity here. There are two readings, which we might paraphrase as follows: The patch looks ((the way grey things look) and (the way square things look)) to you The patch looks (the way (grey and square) things look) to you

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We can think of this as a scope ambiguity involving ‘and’ and f, the function from properties to ways of looking that we exploit in these sentences (I discussed this function in Chapter 4). On the first reading ‘and’ takes wider scope than f; on the second reading f takes wider scope than ‘and’. It might be helpful to represent the two structures as follows: The patch looks f(grey) and f(square) to you The patch looks f(grey and square) to you On the first of these two readings of ‘The patch looks grey and square to you’ what we are asking when we ask, ‘What is it for the patch to look grey and square to you?’ is ‘What is it for you to have a visual experience of the patch with characters c1 and c2?’ This is not the intended question, so this is not how we should understand ‘The patch looks grey and square to you’. (We already have an answer to this question: it is to have a visual experience of the patch that is occurring in ways w1 and w2.) On the second of these two readings of ‘The patch looks grey and square to you’ what we are asking when we ask, ‘What is it for the patch to look grey and square to you?’ is ‘What is it for you to have a visual experience of the patch with character c3?’ This is the intended question, so this is how we should understand ‘The patch looks grey and square to you’. According to the theory of ‘look’ sentences that I have developed, we use ‘grey and square’ to mean the property of being grey and square, and thereby to mean w3, where w3 is the maximally specific way of looking w such that it is generically true that looking events whose stimulus is grey and square occur in way w. What we mean by ‘The patch looks grey and square to you’, on the intended reading, is the following: There is a looking event whose stimulus is the patch and whose experiencer is you and that is occurring in way w3 If this is what we mean by ‘The patch looks grey and square to you’ then this is what it is for the patch to look grey and square to you, and so this

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is what it is for you to have a visual experience of the patch with character c3. Simplifying and generalizing we get the following result: To have a visual experience with character c3 is to have a visual experience that is occurring in way w3 From which it follows that: There is a way of looking w such that to have a visual experience with character c3 is to have a visual experience that is occurring in way w

9.3. A More Complex Character Now let’s consider a more complex character—the character of your overall visual experience when you look at the following scene. I am pointing to your overall visual experience of the scene, including the space around what looks to be a patch. Also, I am making no assumption about whether or not you are experiencing a patch. Let’s call this character ‘c4’.

To help you get a fix on which character c4 is, your visual experience of the following scene also has character c4 (‘size’ and ‘position’ do not matter):

What is it for you to have a visual experience with character c4? That is, what is it for it to look to you as if you are seeing a grey and square thing? There is a reading of ‘It looks to you as if you are seeing a grey and square thing’ on which it means that you are having a visual experience with character c4. Note that when we ask this question

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we are not assuming that there is a patch that you are having an experience of—we are allowing that your experience might be hallucinatory (but also we are not assuming that it is; more about hallucination in Chapter 11). This is why we use ‘It’ as the subject of ‘look’—to remain non-committal about any stimulus that your visual experience may or may not have. According to the theory of ‘look’ sentences that I have developed (see, in particular, Chapter 8, Section 8.10), we use ‘as if you are seeing a grey and square thing’ to mean w4, where w4 is the maximally specific way of looking w such that it is generically true that looking events in which you are seeing a grey and square thing occur in way w. What we mean by ‘It looks to you as if you are seeing a grey and square thing’ is the following: There is a looking event whose experiencer is you and that is occurring in way w4 If this is what we mean by ‘It looks to you as if you are seeing a grey and square thing’ then this is what it is for it to look to you as if you are seeing a grey and square thing, and so this is what it is for you to have a visual experience with character c4. Simplifying and generalizing we get the following result: To have a visual experience with character c4 is to have a visual experience that is occurring in way w4 From which it follows that: There is a way of looking w such that to have a visual experience with character c4 is to have a visual experience that is occurring in way w

9.4. An Even More Complex Character Now let’s consider an even more complex character—the character of your overall visual experience when you look at the following scene. Again, I am pointing to your overall visual experience of the

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scene, including the space around what looks to be two patches, and I am making no assumption about whether or not you are experiencing any patches. Let’s call this character ‘c5’.

To help you get a fix on which character c5 is, your overall visual experience when you look at the following two patches also has this character (‘size’ and ‘distance apart’ do not matter):

What is it to have a visual experience with character c5? Again, let’s ask a more specific question: what is it for you to have a visual experience with character c5? We might ask the question this way: what is it for it to look to you as if you are seeing a grey and square thing to the left of a white and rectangular thing? Again, when we ask this question we are not assuming that there are any patches that you are having an experience of—we are allowing that your experience is hallucinatory (but also not assuming that it is). (This is why we use ‘It’ as the subject of ‘look’.) According to the theory of ‘look’ sentences that I have developed, we use ‘as if you are seeing a grey and square thing to the left of a white and rectangular thing’ to mean w5, where w5 is the maximally specific way of looking w such that it is generically true that looking events in which you are seeing a grey and square thing to the left of a white and rectangular thing occur in way w. What we mean by ‘It looks to you as if you are seeing a grey and square thing to the left of a white and rectangular thing’ is the following: There is a looking event whose experiencer is you and that is occurring in way w5

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If this is what we mean by ‘It looks to you as if you are seeing a grey and square thing to the left of a white and rectangular thing’ then this is what it is for it to look to you as if you are seeing a grey and square thing to the left of a white and rectangular thing, and so this is what it is for you to have a visual experience with character c5. Simplifying and generalizing we get the following result: To have a visual experience with character c5 is to have a visual experience that is occurring in way w5 From which it follows that: There is a way of looking w such that to have a visual experience with character c5 is to have a visual experience that is occurring in way w

9.5. Other Characters I have now considered five characters of increasing complexity: c1, c2, c3, c4, and c5. In each case I have arrived at the result that to have a visual experience with that character is to have a visual experience that is occurring in a certain way. There is reason to think that we will arrive at the same result for any character. Take any character c. What is it to have a visual experience with character c? Ask a more specific question: what is it for you to have a visual experience with character c? There is a proposition p such that we can ask this question using the following ‘look’ sentence: ‘What is it for it to look to you as if p?’ (This is an extremely versatile locution that we have in our language.) According to the semantic account of ‘look’ sentences that I have developed, we use ‘p’ in this sentence to mean w, where w is the maximally specific way of looking x such that it is generically true that looking events in which p is true occur in way x. What we mean by ‘It looks to you as if p’ is that there is a looking event whose experiencer is you and that is occurring in way w. If this is what we mean by ‘It looks to you as if p’ then this is what it is for it to look to you as if p, and so this is

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what it is for you to have a visual experience with character c. Simplifying and generalizing we get: To have a visual experience with character c is to have a visual experience that is occurring in way w If this is right, then we end up with the following answer to the question that I have been aiming to answer: For any character c there is a way of looking w such that to have a visual experience with character c is to have a visual experience that is occurring in way w

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10 The Many Property Problem There are various phenomena to do with visual experiences and their characters that a theory of visual experience ought to allow for and, even better, be able to explain. In this chapter and Chapter 11 I consider the extent to which the theory that I have developed can allow for and explain them. One phenomenon is worth considering in a chapter by itself. Frank Jackson (1975, 1976, 1977) has argued that adverbial theories cannot account for the phenomenon, and that this is a problem for them. He calls the problem the many property problem. My aim in this chapter is to show that the adverbial theory that I have developed can account for the phenomenon.

10.1. Two Facts Consider the scene below:

When you look at the scene you have a visual experience as of a grey and square thing (it looks to you as if you are seeing a grey and square thing). That is, you have a visual experience with a certain character. Call this character cgs (‘gs’ for ‘grey and square’; this is the same character that I called ‘c4’ in Chapter 9). It is also true that you have a visual experience as of a grey thing (it looks to you as if you are seeing a grey thing). That is, you have a visual experience with a certain character. Call this character cg (‘g’ for ‘grey’). And it is true that you

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have a visual experience as of a square thing (it looks to you as if you are seeing a square thing). That is, you have a visual experience with a certain character. Call this character cs (‘s’ for ‘square’). Here is a fact that a theory of visual experience should be able to explain: Having a visual experience with character cgs (i.e. as of a grey and square thing) entails having a visual experience with character cg (i.e. as of a grey thing) and a visual experience with character cs (i.e. as of a square thing) It should be clear enough that this is indeed a fact—any visual experience with character cgs (i.e. as of a grey and square thing) is thereby a visual experience with character cg (i.e. as of a grey thing) and a visual experience with character cs (i.e. as of a square thing). Here is a second fact that a theory of visual experience should be able to explain: Having a visual experience with character cg and a visual experience with character cs does not entail having a visual experience with character cgs Why think that this is a fact? Because it is possible to have a visual experience with character cg and a visual experience with character cs without having a visual experience with character cgs. This is true of you when you look at the scene below—you have a visual experience with character cg (i.e. as of a grey thing) and a visual experience with character cs (i.e. as of a square thing), but you do not have a visual experience with character cgs (i.e. as of a grey and square thing).

10.2. Jackson’s Challenge Frank Jackson (1975, 1976, 1977) has argued that adverbial theories of visual experience cannot explain these two facts. He calls this the

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many property problem for adverbial theories (‘many property’ because the problem has to do with visual experiences as of manypropertied things). Others agree with Jackson. Howard Robinson, for example, says, ‘The programme of construing experience adverbially is . . . demonstrably impossible. Frank Jackson seems to me to have proved this’ (1994, p. 180). The problem, according to Jackson, is that adverbial theories lack the resources necessary to explain these two facts—they have visual experiences, and ways in which visual experiences occur, but nothing else; and these are not enough. Sense-datum theories, in contrast, have sense-data to appeal to, and this makes the explanatory task much easier for them. Here is how a sense-datum theory can explain these two facts. First, according to sense-datum theories, for you to have a visual experience with character cgs (i.e as of a grey and square thing) is for you to have a sense-datum that is grey and square, from which it follows that you have a sense-datum that is grey and a sense-datum that is square (the same sense-datum), which is what it is for you to have a visual experience with character cg (i.e. as of a grey thing) and a visual experience with character cs (i.e. as of a square thing). So sense-datum theories can explain the first fact—that having a visual experience with character cgs entails having a visual experience with character cg and a visual experience with character cs. Second, according to sense-datum theories, for you to have a visual experience with character cg (i.e. as of a grey thing) and a visual experience with character cs (i.e. as of a square thing) is for you to have a sense-datum that is grey and a sense-datum that is square, from which it does not follow that you have a sensedatum that is grey and square (there might be two distinct sense-data involved), which is what it is for you to have a visual experience with character cgs (i.e. as of a grey and square thing). So sense-datum theories can explain the second fact—that having a visual experience with character cg and a visual experience with character cs does not entail having a visual experience with character cgs. Unlike sense-datum theories, adverbial theories cannot appeal to sense-data and their properties, and must make do instead with visual experiences and ways in which visual experiences occur. This is what

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Jackson thinks they cannot do—they cannot make do with just these resources. I hope to show that they can.

10.3. A Clarification I should emphasize that the two facts that need to be explained are facts about three particular characters—cgs, cg, and cs. They are not the following more general facts: For all properties p and q, having a visual experience as of a p and q thing entails having a visual experience as of a p thing and a visual experience as of a q thing For all properties p and q, having a visual experience as of a p thing and a visual experience as of a q thing does not entail having a visual experience as of a p and q thing Neither of these is true, so neither needs to be explained. It is fairly easy to see that the second is not true—it has a false instance, for example, when p and q are both the property of being grey. If p and q are both the property of being grey then we have the following instance: having a visual experience as of a grey thing and a visual experience as of a grey thing does not entail having a visual experience as of a grey and grey thing. And that’s false. It is harder to see that the first is not true. But it’s not: there are p and q such that having a visual experience as of a p and q thing does not entail having a visual experience as of a p thing and a visual experience as of a q thing. Consider the Ainu people of Japan. They look very different from other Japanese people, so much so that they do not look Japanese. That is, a visual experience as of an Ainu Japanese person is typically not a visual experience as of a Japanese person. Let p be the property of being a Japanese person, and q be the property of being Ainu. Then we have a pair of properties p and q such that having a visual experience as of a p and q thing does not entail having a visual experience as of a p thing. So the first claim is false.

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There are some p and q such that having a visual experience as of a p and q thing entails having a visual experience as of a p thing and a visual experience as of a q thing. We have seen an example above, in which p is the property of being grey and q is the property of being square. But this result does not obtain for all properties p and q (which is perhaps a bit surprising).

10.4. What Needs to be Explained According to the theory that I have developed in this book (and adverbial theories in general) to have a visual experience with character cgs is to have a visual experience that is occurring in a certain way, call it wgs. Similarly, to have a visual experience with character cg is to have a visual experience that is occurring in a certain way, call it wg, and to have a visual experience with character cs is to have a visual experience that is occurring in a certain way, call it ws. So according to the theory that I have developed (and adverbial theories in general), here are the two facts that need to be explained: Having a visual experience that is occurring in way wgs entails having a visual experience that is occurring in way wg and a visual experience that is occurring in way ws Having a visual experience that is occurring in way wg and a visual experience that is occurring in way ws does not entail having a visual experience that is occurring in way wgs I will consider two ways of trying to explain these facts, and argue that each fails. Then I will propose what I hope is the correct explanation.

10.5. A Conjunctive Way A natural first way to try and explain these two facts is the following: Conjunction. wgs is the conjunction of wg and ws. That is, for a visual experience to occur in way wgs is for it to occur in ways wg and ws.

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Conjunction requires that a visual experience can occur in two ways at the same time (wg and ws are distinct ways of looking). This is something that I am already committed to. In Chapter 3, Section 3.7, I argued that when something looks a certain way it typically looks more than one way. For example, when a patch looks grey to someone it also looks coloured to her. This is a case in which her visual experience of the patch is occurring in at least two ways—the way that we mean by ‘grey’, and the way that we mean by ‘coloured’ (these are distinct ways—the latter is more general than the former). It is also true of events in general that they can occur in multiple ways at the same time. Consider walking events. It is possible for a walking event to occur in two ways at the same time: someone might be walking as if he is proud, and at the same time as if he has a sore foot (these are distinct ways of walking). Or consider talking events. It is possible for a talking event to occur in two ways at the same time: someone might be talking as if he has a plum in his mouth, and at the same time in the way that Americans talk (these are distinct ways of talking). So events in general can occur in multiple ways at the same time. Given this, we would expect the same to be true of visual experiences in particular. So I accept that a visual experience can occur in two ways at the same time. Conjunction can explain the first fact, that having a visual experience that is occurring in way wgs entails having a visual experience that is occurring in way wg and a visual experience that is occurring in way ws. Suppose that someone has a visual experience that is occurring in way wgs. According to Conjunction, her visual experience is occurring in ways wg and ws. So she has a visual experience that is occurring in way wg and a visual experience (the same one) that is occurring in way ws. So having a visual experience that is occurring in way wgs entails having a visual experience that is occurring in way wg and a visual experience that is occurring in way ws. What about the second fact? Conjunction needs to explain how it is possible for someone to have a visual experience that is occurring in way wg and a visual experience that is occurring in way ws without having a visual experience that is occurring in way wgs. Suppose that someone

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has a visual experience that is occurring in way wg and a visual experience that is occurring in way ws. If these were the same visual experience then she would have a visual experience that is occurring in ways wg and ws, which would mean, according to Conjunction, that she has a visual experience that is occurring in way wgs. So Conjunction needs to say that when someone has a visual experience that is occurring in way wg and a visual experience that is occurring in ws without having a visual experience that is occurring in way wgs it is because the first two visual experiences are distinct visual experiences. This is how Conjunction allows for the possibility that someone can have a visual experience that is occurring in way wg and a visual experience that is occurring in way ws without having a visual experience that is occurring in way wgs, and explains what is going on in such cases. Does this explanation work? Notice that it requires that someone can have two or more simultaneous visual experiences. Under certain circumstances this seems reasonable. For some event-kinds k, someone can be involved in two distinct events of kind k at the same time. Someone can, for example, be the agent of two distinct kissing events at the same time: suppose that I am kissing two women at the same time, moving my attention from one to the other; then there is my kissing of one woman, and my kissing of the other woman, and these are distinct events (the two events are intermingled, but nevertheless they are distinct). Similarly, someone can be the agent of two distinct drumming events at the same time—he could be the agent of a drumming event on one drum and, at the same time, the agent of a distinct drumming event on a second drum. If this is right, then one might expect that someone can be the experiencer of two distinct visual experiences at the same time. And this seems plausible. If you are looking at two patches at the same time, having a visual experience of each, then you are the experiencer of two distinct visual experiences: your visual experience of one patch, and your visual experience of the other patch. But note that in each of these cases there are two things involved, with which we can individuate the two events in a principled way. There are two kissing events, because there are two women being

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kissed; there are two drumming events, because there are two drums being drummed; there are two visual experiences, because there are two patches being experienced. In the case of the drums, perhaps we can have two distinct drummings of just one drum, but any plausible case requires you to be drumming with two arms. Then there are two drumming events, because there are two arms involved. (Here and in the rest of this section I draw upon the very helpful discussion in Tye (1984), pp. 207–9.) According to Conjunction, someone can have a visual experience that is occurring in way wg and a visual experience that is occurring in way ws without having a visual experience that is occurring in way wgs, because in such cases she has two simultaneous visual experiences—one that is occurring in way wg and one that is occurring in way ws. This is plausible only if in such cases there are two things involved that we can use to individuate the visual experiences in a principled way. But there need not be two such things. Consider your visual experience of the scene below:

As a matter of fact there are two patches on the page, and we can use these two patches to claim, in a principled way, that you are having two distinct visual experiences—a visual experience of the left patch, and a visual experience of the right patch. But suppose that there are no such patches—you are hallucinating—and yet your visual experience has the same character. Conjunction still needs to claim that you are having two distinct visual experiences, one that is occurring in way wg and one that is occurring in way ws. But why think that? It’s what Conjunction needs to be the case, but it is not satisfying for Conjunction to give that as a reason to think that it is the case. We need some independent reason. Without an independent reason the claim that you are having two visual experiences is ad hoc. To press the problem a bit harder, consider again your visual experience of the following scene:

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Conjunction claims that in this case you are having a single visual experience that is occurring in ways wg and ws. But why think that? Why not think that you are having two distinct visual experiences, each as of a grey half-square, as represented below? (The dashed vertical line is not part of the character—it is just there to show how we are thinking about the character.)

Again, Conjunction needs the former to be the case rather than the latter, but it is not satisfying for Conjunction to give that as a reason to think that the former is the case. We need some independent reason. Without an independent reason the claim that you are having a single visual experience is ad hoc. So I reject this attempted explanation.

10.6. A Mereological Sum We saw in Section 10.5 that when someone has a visual experience that is occurring in way wg and a visual experience that is occurring in way ws we should not assume that she is having more than one visual experience. So let’s assume that she is having just a single visual experience, and confine our attention to such cases. Then the two facts that we need to explain are the following: Occurring in way wgs entails occurring in ways wg and ws Occurring in ways wg and ws does not entail occurring in way wgs As we saw in Section 10.5, Conjunction (the theory that to occur in way wgs is to occur in ways wg and ws) cannot explain these two facts. It can explain the first, but it cannot explain the second.

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Here’s a different idea. Perhaps switching from conjunction to composition will help. The idea is this: way wgs is a complex way that is composed from ways wg and ws; because of this, when a visual experience occurs in way wgs it follows that it occurs in ways wg and ws; and just because a visual experience occurs in ways wg and ws it does not follow that it occurs in way wgs, because it does not follow that wg and ws compose in this case to form wgs. Let’s call this theory ‘Sum’: Sum.

wgs is the mereological sum of wg and ws (i.e. wgs is wg + ws).

To work, Sum requires two things to be the case: (a) that some ways of looking are mereological sums of other ways of looking, and (b) that ways of looking don’t automatically compose. I’m not sure whether either of these is right. If either is wrong then the proposed explanation fails. But even if both are right the proposed explanation still fails (I will argue). So I will grant that they are both right. Sum can explain the first fact, that occurring in way wgs entails occurring in ways wg and ws. Suppose that a visual experience is occurring in way wgs. According to Sum, wgs is wg + ws, so the visual experience is occurring in way wg + ws. It is also part of Sum that if a visual experience is occurring in way wg + ws then it is occurring in ways wg and ws. So the visual experience is occurring in ways wg and ws. So occurring in way wgs entails occurring in ways wg and ws. What about the second fact? Sum needs to explain how it is possible for a visual experience to occur in ways wg and ws without occurring in way wgs. Sum explains this as follows: when a visual experience is occurring in ways wg and ws it need not be occurring in way wgs, because wg and ws need not compose in this case. When a visual experience is occurring in ways wg and ws but not in way wgs, it is because wg and ws do not compose. This is how Sum allows for the possibility that a visual experience can occur in ways wg and ws without occurring in way wgs, and explains what is going on in such cases. Does this explanation work? We have the worry, again, that Sum has no principled way in which to say when composition occurs and

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when it doesn’t. Consider the two scenes in Section 10.1. Sum needs to say the following. When you look at the first scene and have a visual experience your visual experience occurs in ways wg and ws, and also in way wgs, because in this case wg and ws compose to form wg + ws (which is wgs). When you look at the second scene, on the other hand, you have a visual experience that is occurring in ways wg and ws, but not in way wg + ws, because wg and ws do not compose in this case. Why do they compose in the former case but not in the latter? This is what Sum needs to be the case, but it is not satisfying for Sum to give this as a reason to think that it is the case. We need some independent reason, without which the explanation is ad hoc. So I reject this attempted explanation too.

10.7. A Common Determinate As I discussed in Chapter 3, a visual experience typically occurs in many ways. One of these ways is the maximally specific way in which the experience occurs. Call this way w0. Every other way w in which the experience occurs is a more general way—w0 is a determinate of w. In fact, the experience occurs in way w because w0 is a determinate of w (for all ways of looking w and w0 , if w is a determinate of w0 then occurring in way w entails occurring in way w0 ). The ways in which the experience occurs are completely determined by the maximally specific way in which it occurs. Here is how I propose to explain the two facts: Determinate. wgs is a determinate of both wg and ws. Ways wg and ws are not maximally specific—they have determinates. Way wgs is a determinate of both of them. When a visual experience occurs in way wg (i.e. is a visual experience as of a grey thing) it might also occur in the more specific way wgs (i.e. be a visual experience as of a grey and square thing). But it need not—it might occur in a different more specific way (e.g. it might be a visual experience as of a grey and (non-square) rectangular thing). Similarly, when a visual experience occurs in way ws (i.e. is a visual experience as of a square thing)

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it might also occur in the more specific way wgs (i.e. be a visual experience as of a grey and square thing). But it need not—it might occur in a different more specific way (e.g. it might be a visual experience as of a white and square thing). Determinate can explain the first fact, that occurring in way wgs entails occurring in ways wg and ws. Suppose that a visual experience is occurring in way wgs. Since wgs is a determinate of wg, the visual experience is also occurring in way wg. Similarly, since wgs is a determinate of ws, the visual experience is also occurring in way ws. So occurring in way wgs entails occurring in ways wg and ws. What about the second fact, that occurring in ways wg and ws does not entail occurring in way wgs? Determinate can explain this too, as follows. Suppose that a visual experience is occurring in ways wg and ws. The way wgs is a determinate of the way wg. But it is not the only one, and just because the experience is occurring in way wg it does not follow that it is occurring in way wgs. Similarly, the way wgs is a determinate of the way ws. But it is not the only one, and just because the experience is occurring in way ws it does not follow that it is occurring in way wgs. So it could be that the experience is occurring in ways wg and ws without occurring in way wgs. When this is so it is because the maximally specific way in which the visual experience is occurring is a determinate of both wg and ws, but it is not a determinate of wgs. This is how Determinate allows for the possibility that a visual experience can occur in ways wg and ws without occurring in way wgs, and explains what is going on in such a case. It will help to consider again the two visual experiences that we have been considering and see what Determinate says about them. Start with the first scene:

When you look at this scene you have a visual experience that is occurring in a certain maximally specific way, call it w0. w0 is a determinate of wgs. (It is not the same way as wgs—it is more specific.) So your visual experience is also occurring in way wgs. wgs is a determinate

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of both wg and ws, so your visual experience is also occurring in ways wg and ws. We can represent the determinate structure of the ways in which your visual experience is occurring as follows: wg

w0

wgs

ws

Now consider the second scene:

When you look at this scene you have a visual experience that is occurring in a different maximally specific way, call it w00 . w00 is not a determinate of wgs, so your visual experience is not occurring in way wgs. It is, however, a determinate of wgr (‘gr’ for ‘grey and rectangular’), so your visual experience is occurring in way wgr. wgr, in turn, is a determinate of wg, so your visual experience is occurring in way wg. Similarly, w00 is a determinate of wws (‘ws’ for ‘white and square’), so your visual experience is occurring in way wws. wws, in turn, is a determinate of ws, so your visual experience is occurring in way ws. This is why your visual experience is occurring in ways wg and ws but is not occurring in way wgs. We can represent the determinate structure of the ways in which your visual experience is occurring as follows: wgr

wg

wws

ws

w0′

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11 Explaining Phenomena I continue to consider various phenomena to do with visual experiences and their characters, and the extent to which the theory that I have developed in this book can allow for and explain them.

11.1. Illusion and Hallucination There is such a thing as illusion. As it is typically understood, an illusion occurs when something looks some way to someone but the thing is not the way that it looks. That is, when there is some thing o, some property p, and some person s, such that o looks p to s but o is not p. Suppose that a patch looks grey to you but is not grey. Then this is an illusion—you are the subject of an illusion. (Note that this is a somewhat technical use of ‘illusion’—it is not quite how we would use it in non-philosophical contexts. In this sense of ‘illusion’ much of our daily visual experience is illusory, but in the sense of ‘illusion’ in which we commonly use it this is not so.) According to the account of visual experience that I have developed in this book, there is something strange about comparing the way that an object looks with the way that the object is. The way that an object looks is a way of looking—a way in which looking events occur. This is not the kind of thing that an object can be. But we can make sense of the comparison as follows: whether or not a visual experience is illusory is relative to a way of referring to the way of looking. If we refer to the way of looking indirectly, by expressing a property that objects can have and exploiting the function f (e.g. by saying ‘The patch looks grey’), then we can ask whether or not the object is the

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way that it looks, because we can understand this as asking whether or not the object has that property (i.e. whether or not it is grey). We are not asking whether the object has the way of looking, but whether or not it has the property that is used to refer to the way of looking. This is why, in the paragraph just above, I did not characterize an illusion as a case in which there is some thing o, some way of looking w, and some person s, such that o looks w to s but o is not w. Rather, I characterized it as a case in which there is some thing o, some property p, and some person s, such that o looks p to s but o is not p. I am able to characterize it in this way because we have a mechanism in our language for referring to ways of looking using properties, by exploiting the function f (as I discussed in Chapter 4). The account that I have developed in this book allows for cases of illusion, and it explains what they involve. The feature of the account that does the work is this: when we use properties to refer to ways of looking we employ generics, and generics allow for exceptions. Suppose that o is a patch that is white (not grey). There is a way of looking, wW, which is the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that white things look w. Because this definite description employs a sentence that is used generically, this can be true, even if white things sometimes do not look wW. Moreover, it can be true even if white things sometimes look wG, where wG is the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that grey things look w. That is, it can be true even if white things sometimes look grey. So the account allows that there can be an object o and a person s such that o looks grey to s but o is not grey. So the theory allows that there can be cases of illusion, and it explains what they involve. There is also such a thing as hallucination. As it is typically understood, a hallucination occurs when it looks to someone as if she is seeing an object but she is not seeing any object. That is, when there is some person s such that: (a) it looks to s as if there is an object o such that s is seeing o, but (b) there is no object o such that s is seeing o (I’m not happy with this characterization, but it will do for present purposes). Suppose that it looks to you as if you are

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seeing an object (e.g. a pink elephant) when in fact you are not seeing any object. Then this is a hallucination—you are the subject of a hallucination. The account that I have developed in this book allows for cases of hallucination, and it explains what they involve. Again, the feature of the account that does the work is its appeal to generics. According to the account, there is a way of looking, wN, which is the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that it looks wN to one when one is seeing a scene in which there is no object. Because this definite description employs a sentence that is used generically, this can be true, even if sometimes it does not look wN to one when one is seeing a scene in which there is no object. Moreover, it can be true even if it sometimes looks wO to one when one is seeing a scene in which there is no object, where wO is the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true it looks w to one when one is seeing a scene in which there is an object. That is, it can be true even if sometimes it looks to one as if one is seeing an object when one is seeing a scene in which there is no object. So the theory allows that there can be a person s such that: (a) it looks to s as if there is an object o such that s is seeing o, but (b) there is no object o such that s is seeing o. So the theory allows that there can be cases of hallucination, and it explains what they involve.

11.2. How Things Seem, How Things Appear As we have seen in Section 11.1, the theory that I have developed in this book allows, as it should, that a patch might look grey to you even if the patch is not grey. But can it explain why, in such cases, the patch still seems to you to be grey? Moreover, according to the theory, what is going on in these cases is that you are the experiencer of a looking event that is occurring in a certain way. But it does not seem to you as if this is what is going on. Can the theory explain this? There are two challenges here, and I will respond to each in turn. The first challenge is to explain why the patch seems to you to be grey even though it is not grey. I respond to this challenge as follows.

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The semantic theory of ‘look’ sentences that I have developed in this book can be extended to a semantic theory of ‘seem’ sentences, including the following one: The patch seems to you to be grey According to the corresponding account of ‘seem’ sentences, what we mean by this is that there is a seeming event whose experiencer is you and whose stimulus is the patch and that is occurring in the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that seeming events whose stimulus is grey occur in way w. The account allows that your seeming event might be occurring in this way even if the patch is not grey (for reasons similar to those given in Section 11.1). And this is what is going on, I propose, when the patch seems to you to be grey even though it is not grey. This is the response that I offer to the first challenge. I would offer similar explanations for why the patch seems to you as if it is grey, why it seems to you as if you are seeing a grey square, why it seems to you as if there is a grey square in front of you, why it seems to you as if you are having a veridical experience of a grey square, and so on. The second challenge is to explain why, when the patch looks grey to you, it does not seem to you as if you are the experiencer of a looking event that is occurring in a certain way, if this is what is going on. My response is to say that it typically does—you just might not realize it. Situations in which the patch looks grey to you are situations in which things seem to you various ways—i.e. in which you are the experiencer of a seeming event that is occurring in various ways. There is a maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that seeming events whose experiencer is you occur in way w when the patch looks grey to you. Let’s call this way w0 . It is generically true that when the patch looks grey to you things seem w0 to you. That is, it is generically true that when the patch looks grey to you it seems to you the maximally specific way it seems to you when the patch looks grey to you. That is, it is generically true that when the patch looks grey to you it seems to you as if the patch looks

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grey to you. That is, it is generically true that when the patch looks grey to you it seems to you as if you are the experiencer of a looking event that is occurring in a certain way. Note that it can seem to you as if you are the experiencer of a looking event that is occurring in a certain way even if you do not realize that you are. In Chapter 7, I argued that there is a structural ambiguity in ‘It looks to you as if p’, according to whether ‘to you’ is used to specify that you are the experiencer of a certain looking as if p event, or to specify that you believe that it looks as if p. So too I would argue that there is a structural ambiguity in ‘It seems to you as if p’. Perhaps on the second reading it might not seem to you as if you are the experiencer of a looking event that is occurring in the maximally specific way that looking events whose stimulus is grey occur to you. But I take it that the relevant reading here is the first one. This is the response that I offer to the second challenge. I posed these two challenges in terms of how things seem to you when having a certain visual experience, but I could just as well have posed them in terms of how things appear to you. My responses would be much the same, appealing to the semantics of ‘appear’ instead of the semantics of ‘seem’.

11.3. Transparency In Chapter 1, I mentioned a phenomenon that is sometimes called the transparency of experience. The phenomenon is this: sometimes when we attend more closely to the character of our experiences we do so by attending more closely to the things that they are experiences of (at least in the cases where there are such things). Consider your visual experience of the patch below:

Your visual experience has a certain character; when you try to attend more closely to its character, you might do so by attending more closely to the patch itself. In such cases it is as if your experience is

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transparent (hence the name)—you look right through it, to the patch itself. (On transparency see Moore (1903), Harman (1990), Tye (1995, 2002), Crane (2003); for critical discussion see Martin (2002), Kind (2007), Smith (2008), and Stoljar (2004); for dissenting views about the existence of transparency see Block (1996), Robinson (1998), and Kind (2003, 2008).) I should point out that I am understanding transparency to be a fairly weak claim—that we sometimes attend more closely to our experiences in this way. I am not understanding it to be any of the following three stronger claims: (+) that we typically attend in this way, (++) that we always attend in this way, or (+++) that we must attend in this way. It is controversial whether or not (++) and (+++) are true. Consider the following kinds of visual experience: phosphene experiences (e.g. pushing your eyeball when your eyelids are closed), afterimages (e.g. looking at a bright light and then closing your eyes), and blurry vision (e.g. looking at this page and un-focusing your eyes). If you were to have one of these experiences then you might attend more closely to the character of your experience without attending more closely to something that your experience is an experience of. If doing this is possible then (+++) is false; if we actually do sometimes do this then (++) is also false. Suppose that we do sometimes do this; then I’m not sure whether we typically do this, and I don’t expect us to be able to know whether such an empirical claim is true; so when understood as (+) it is still a risky claim to make. On the very weak way in which I am understanding it transparency stands a good chance of being true. Moreover, even on this very weak understanding it poses a possible problem for the account that I have developed in this book. That’s why I am understanding transparency in the very weak way that I am. Why does transparency pose a problem for the account of visual experience that I have developed in this book? According to this account, the character of a visual experience is a way in which the experience is occurring. If that is right, then why would one ever, when attending to the character of one’s visual experience, attend to the thing that it is an experience of? How would that help us attend

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to the way in which the experience is occurring? There is a challenge here: to explain how my account of visual experience is compatible with the phenomenon of transparency. I respond to this challenge as follows. Consider your visual experience of the patch above. For the patch to look any way to you, you need to be looking at the patch (even if only indirectly), for otherwise there would be no looking event which has the patch as a stimulus and you as an experiencer. So, in order to attend to the character of your visual experience of the patch, you must look at the patch. To attend to any detail of the character of your overall experience—say, to how one of its corners looks to you—you need to look at the corner, for otherwise the corner would not look any way to you (there would be no looking event which has the corner as a stimulus and you as an experiencer). The more closely you want to attend to the features of your experience, the more closely you have to attend to the features of the patch that they are experiences of. Maybe what we are doing is shifting the focus of our attention—I have always been looking at the corner, and thus it looked some way to me. But in order to attend to how it looks to me I have to shift the focus of my attention to it. This is how, I suggest, the present theory can account for the transparency of experience.

11.4. Effects of Understanding Here is a phenomenon that should be familiar: you’re listening to a song in the car; you can’t hear it properly and it sounds like mere noise; then you realize which song it is and it sounds different (it sounds much clearer), or at least it seems to sound different. Question: does the song actually sound different to you? There is an alternative possibility: it sounds the same to you, but you are better aware of how it sounds. Which of these two is right? The case above involves an auditory experience, but there are some similar cases that involve visual experiences (perhaps it is controversial to assimilate the auditory case above to the visual cases below, but nothing that I will say depends on this assimilation). Certain

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diagrams are such that there is more than one way of ‘understanding’ them, and when one understands them in different ways it seems to change the character of one’s visual experience of them. Some well-known examples are the Necker cube and the duck–rabbit diagram. Another example, and the one that I will focus on, is the following diagram (this comes from Nickel (2006)):

There are at least two ways of understanding this diagram—on one way some white squares are sitting on top of a dark background, on the other way some dark squares are sitting on top of a white background. You can change the way that you understand the diagram, and when you do there seems to be some kind of change in your visual experience of the diagram (I am taking this to be the same kind of apparent change that occurs when you come to realize which song is on the radio; again, nothing depends on this). Question: when you understand the diagram in different ways, does the character of your visual experience of the diagram change, or does it stay the same but you become aware of different features of the character? Again, it is not obvious what to say about this. As far as I can see, the account of visual experience that I have developed in this book does nothing to help answer this question. The theory tells us this: the character of your visual experience changes just in case the way in which it occurs changes. But it does not tell us whether or not the way in which it occurs does change in these cases. We might try looking at the ‘look’ sentences that we could use to correctly describe the character of our experience on each way of understanding the diagram. Suppose that you understand the diagram as being of some white squares on a dark background. We might correctly describe the character of your visual experience as follows: ‘It looks to you as if there are some white squares on top of a grey background.’ Now suppose that you understand the diagram as

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being of some dark squares on a white background. We might correctly describe the character of your visual experience as follows: ‘It looks to you as if there are some dark squares on top of a white background.’ We use a different expression in each case to refer to a way of looking: ‘as if there are some white squares on top of a grey background’ and ‘as if there are some dark squares on top of a white background’. Does this tell us that your visual experience occurs in a different way in each case? No—the descriptions might refer to the same way of looking. Moreover, that we use different expressions is exactly what we might expect if we understand the diagram in different ways, even if there is no difference in the character of our visual experience of the diagram. Suppose that John is walking with a limp. There are at least two ways of understanding what is going on: John has a sore foot; John has a short leg. Both of the following are true descriptions: ‘John is walking as if he has a sore foot’, ‘John is walking as if he has a short leg’. The expressions ‘as if he has a sore foot’ and ‘as if he has a short leg’ refer to the same way of walking (near enough). Which one we use to describe the way that John is walking might depend on how we understand what is going on. So, when trying to answer the question of whether or not the character of your visual experience changes when you understand the diagram in different ways, neither the account of visual experience that I have developed, nor the account of ‘look’ sentences that I have developed, seems to be of any help.

11.5. Knowledge of the External World It is a common thought that visual experience is a source of knowledge of the external world (e.g. of knowledge of the objects around us and what they are like). (I will focus on knowledge of the external world in this section, but what I have to say applies equally well to justified belief.) Why think that visual experience is a source of knowledge of the external world? Here is what strikes me as a bad reason to think this: that we sometimes get knowledge of the external world via inferences

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such as, ‘The patch looks grey, therefore the patch is grey’. I’m not sure that we ever make such inferences, and even if we do they seem like very weak inferences, too weak to be a source of knowledge (or even of justified belief). Example: suppose that you look at a patch and claim to thereby know that the patch is grey. How do you know that the patch is grey? The following is pretty weak justification: because it looks grey. Here is some much better justification: because I can see that it is grey. The fact about your visual experience provides only weak justification, if any, whereas the fact about your perception provides much better justification. Here is what strikes me as a much better reason to think that visual experience is a source of knowledge of the external world: someone who lacks any visual experience will find it harder to get knowledge of the external world than someone who has visual experiences but is otherwise the same. This suggests that visual experience is somehow a source of knowledge of the external world. Let’s grant that it is. Does the account of visual experience that I have developed allow that visual experience can be a source of knowledge of the external world? There are two concerns that one might have. The first concern is similar to a concern that one might have about sense-datum accounts of visual experience. The concern is that they place a ‘veil’ over the external world (at least those accounts which allow that there is a world beyond our sense-data). The concern is that, according to such accounts, when we have visual experiences we are not in direct contact with external objects and the properties and relations that they instantiate, but are only in direct contact with sense-data and the properties and relations that they instantiate. The concern is that without such direct contact with the external world visual experience would not be the source of knowledge of the external world that it is. One might have a similar concern about the account of visual experience that I have developed in this book, that it also places a ‘veil’ over the external world (albeit a veil of a different kind). The concern goes like this: according to the present account, when we have visual experiences we are not in direct contact with external objects and

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the properties and relations that they instantiate, but are only in direct contact with certain mental events (looking events; i.e. visual experiences) and the ways in which those events occur; without such direct contact with the external world visual experience would not be the source of knowledge of the external world that it is. I respond to this concern as follows. First, it is not clear to me how having direct contact with things in the external world puts us in a better position to get knowledge about the external world than not having direct contact, but let’s grant that to be the case. My response to the present concern is to point out that the account that I have developed in this book might well allow that we do have direct contact with the external world during at least some of our visual experiences. Consider your visual experience of the patch at the start of Section 11.3. According to the present account, to have a visual experience of the patch is to be an experiencer of a looking event whose stimulus is the patch. I have not said much about what it takes for something to be a stimulus of a looking event, but it might turn out that the experiencer of a looking event is in direct contact with the stimulus of the event. It is not implausible that being a stimulus of a looking event requires standing in some kind of causal relation to the event, and thereby in some kind of causal relation to the experiencer of the event—perhaps this counts as direct contact between the experiencer and the stimulus. If this is right, then during your visual experience of the patch you are in direct contact with the external world (because you are in direct contact with the patch, an object in the external world). Here is a second concern, one that strikes me as more pressing. If the present account is right, then visual experience cannot be a source of knowledge of the external world. To get knowledge of the external world on the basis of visual experience we have to first know things about visual experience, and in particular about the characters of our visual experiences. According to the present account, that is to have knowledge about how those experiences occur. It is not enough to know that a certain visual experience is occurring in way w—we need to know which way that is under a more informative mode of presentation, such as: w is the way that grey things look. But we

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cannot know that unless we already know which things are grey. So, if the present account is correct, without already having knowledge of the external world we cannot get the knowledge of our visual experiences that we need for it to give us knowledge of the external world. My response to this second concern goes as follows. The concern assumes that visual experience is a source of knowledge of the external world in something like the following way: we get knowledge of what our visual experiences are like, then from this we get knowledge of what the external world is like. But this might not be right (and the weakness of the inferences that I considered at the start of this section suggests that it is not right). Suppose that we discover an island on which there are many snakes. We discover that each snake wriggles in one of two ways, which we call w1 and w2. We postulate that the snakes wriggle the way that they do because of the kind of backbone that they have; in particular, we postulate that the snakes that wriggle in way w1 do so because they have a backbone of certain kind, call it k1, and that the snakes that wriggle in way w2 do so because they have a backbone of a certain distinct kind, call it k2. Suppose that this theory is so good that we count as knowing all of these things (I am assuming here that theories that are good enough, whatever that takes, give us knowledge). Then we are in a position to know what kind of backbone a snake has on the basis of how it wriggles. The process might not be as simple as the following inference: the snake wriggles in way w1, so it has a backbone of kind k1—it might be more complicated than that. But the point remains: the wriggling behaviour of the snakes is a source of knowledge of what kinds of backbone the snakes have. Note, also, that once equipped with this theory we can present the wriggling facts in a more informative way: rather than saying that this snake wriggles in way w1, we can say that this snake wriggles the way snakes wriggle when they have a backbone of kind k1 (we might even just say that this snake wriggles k1). But note, also, that we did not need to present the facts in this way when developing the theory in the first place—modes of presentation such as ‘w1’ and ‘w2’ were perfectly adequate.

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It could be that visual experience is a source of knowledge of the external world in the same kind of way. We open our eyes and discover that things look various ways. We postulate (not explicitly— this is all happening too fast) that things that look w1 do so because they have a property p1, and that things that look w2 do so because they have a property p2, and so on. The theory is so good that we count as knowing all of these things. Then we are in a position to know what property something has on the basis of how it looks. The process might not be as simple as: the thing looks w1, so it has property p1—it might be more complicated than that. But the point remains: visual experience is a source of knowledge of what properties things have. Note, also, that once equipped with this theory we can present the visual experience facts in a more informative way: rather than saying that this thing looks w1, we can say that this thing looks the way p1 things look (we might even just say that this thing looks p1). But note, also, that we did not need to present the facts in this way when developing the theory in the first place—modes of presentation such as ‘w1’ and ‘w2’ were perfectly adequate. This is how, I propose, the theory that I have developed allows that visual experience is a source of knowledge of the external world.

11.6. Physicalism Is visual experience a physical phenomenon? I don’t think that the account that I have developed in this book has much, if anything, to say about this (and to see why, we don’t need to worry too much about what it takes to be a physical phenomenon). According to the account that I have developed, visual experiences are events, ones that typically, perhaps always, have an experiencer. Let’s explicitly add to the theory that a visual experience always has an experiencer. I take it that the experience is a mental event of the experiencer. So it is a mental event. But from the fact that a visual experience is a mental event we ought not conclude that it is not physical—that would be to assume that mental events are not physical, which is the kind of thing that is currently at issue.

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It is also part of the theory that visual experiences occur in certain ways (ways of looking). What about these ways of looking—are they physical? Let’s ask the question of ways of walking first: are ways of walking physical? It is perhaps easier to consider the following question: do the physical facts determine the ways of walking facts? It seems that the answer to this is ‘yes’: once we determine all of the physical facts then we have thereby determined all of the ways of walking facts. Let’s conclude from this that ways of walking are physical. We should not automatically conclude, however, that ways of looking are also physical. There might be the following difference between walking events and looking events: walking events are non-mental, looking events are mental. If looking events are mental then we are not in a position to say that the physical facts determine the ways of looking facts. So I don’t think that the account that I have developed in this book has much, if anything, to say about whether or not visual experience is a physical phenomenon.

11.7. Representation It is a currently popular view that visual experiences have representational content (i.e. they represent the world to be a certain way, in the same way that beliefs do). What, if anything, does the adverbial account developed here have to say about this? As far as I can see, there is nothing in the present account to support the idea that visual experiences have representational content. It might even partially undermine the idea. The account does not say much about the nature of visual experiences other than the following: they are events; they have experiencers; they sometimes have stimuli; they occur in various ways. I don’t see anything here to support the idea that they have representational content. Perhaps there is something about the nature of ways of looking. Perhaps ways of looking are representational properties (i.e. they represent things). If so, then this would be a good reason to think that visual experiences have representational content—they have

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representational content in virtue of having properties that are representational properties. But there is nothing in the theory that suggests that ways of looking are representational properties. I have proposed that ways of looking are the same kind of thing as ways of walking, ways of swimming, and so on. One way to support the idea that ways of looking are representational properties would be to argue that ways of walking, ways of swimming, and so on, are representational properties, and then exploit the analogy that I have been exploiting throughout. But I do not see any reason to think that ways of walking, ways of swimming, and so on, are representational properties. For John to walk clumsily is for John to walk in a certain way—for his walking event to have a certain way of walking property, call it w. Is w a representational property? It might be that John walks in way w in order to represent himself as being clumsy (perhaps to pretend that he is clumsy). But in such cases it would be John and not his walking event that represents that he is clumsy. Moreover, it might be that John walks in way w without representing himself as being clumsy—in fact, he might be doing his best to not walk clumsily. In these cases it seems implausible to claim that his walking event represents that he is clumsy, or that it represents anything at all. If so, then w is not a representational property, for if it were then his walking event would have representational content in virtue of instantiating a representational property. So this does not seem like a promising way to support the idea that ways of looking are representational properties (and thus that visual experiences have representational content). I think that we can, in fact, use the present account to partially undermine the idea that visual experiences have representational content, by undermining one motivation for thinking that they do. The motivation that I have in mind is this: taking visual experiences to have representational content (in particular, propositional content) allows for the best explanation of the following facts: Visual experiences are assessable for accuracy Visual experiences can be inaccurate Visual experiences can justify beliefs

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(I do not want to commit myself to thinking that these are indeed facts—I am just describing the motivation that I will soon try to undermine.) Suppose that it looks to you as if you are seeing a grey square. If you are seeing a grey square then your experience is accurate; if you are not seeing a grey square then your experience is inaccurate. So your experience can be assessed for accuracy—it has accuracy conditions. Moreover, your experience can be inaccurate—it is possible for it to look to you as if you are seeing a grey square when you are not seeing a grey square. And the fact that it looks to you as if you are seeing a grey square can justify the belief that you are seeing a grey square. Why think that you are seeing a grey square? Because it looks to you as if you are seeing a grey square. Of course, this is not conclusive justification: it might be that it looks to you as if you are seeing a grey square even though you are not seeing a grey square. But the fact that it looks to you as if you are seeing a grey square provides at least some justification for thinking that you are seeing a grey square. Let us grant that there are indeed these three facts about visual experiences. On the assumption that visual experiences have representational content we can explain them as follows, at least on the assumption that they have propositional representational content. Visual experiences are assessable for accuracy, because for any visual experience there is some proposition p such that the experience represents p, so the experience can be assessed for accuracy according to whether or not p is true. (Perhaps there are some visual experiences for which there is no such p—if Molly looks to John the same as Mary feels, then the most plausible candidate for the content of this experience is the proposition that Molly is the same as Mary feels, but it is not clear that this is indeed the content. More about this below. Also see Travis (2004).) Visual experiences can be inaccurate, because it is possible for a visual experience to represent p even when p is not true—this would be an instance of the more general phenomenon of misrepresentation. Finally, visual experiences can justify beliefs, because visual experiences are mostly accurate (the representation is reliable).

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If this is the best explanation of these facts, then that is at least some reason to think that visual experiences have representational content. I do not think, however, that this is the best explanation of these facts. First, the account that I have developed in this book also offers an explanation. Visual experiences are assessable for accuracy, because for any visual experience there is some proposition, p, such that the experience occurs in the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that visual experiences in which p is true occur in way w; so the experience can be assessed for accuracy according to whether or not p is true. (Perhaps there are some visual experiences for which there is no such p, but this is an issue that the representational explanation must deal with as well, as discussed just above.) Visual experiences can be inaccurate, because it is possible for a visual experience to occur in the maximally specific way that visual experiences occur when p is true even when p is not true. Finally, visual experiences can justify beliefs, because visual experiences are mostly accurate. Second, if we accept the three facts about visual experiences, then it seems to me that we ought to accept three corresponding facts about many other phenomena. We ought to accept, for example, corresponding facts about walkings (i.e. walking events): Walkings are assessable for accuracy Walkings can be inaccurate Walkings can justify beliefs Suppose that John is walking as if he has a sore foot. If he does have a sore foot, then his walking is accurate; if he does not have a sore foot, then his walking is inaccurate. So his walking can be assessed for accuracy—it has accuracy conditions. Moreover, his walking can be inaccurate—it is possible for John to walk as if he has a sore foot, even when he does not have a sore foot. And the fact that John is walking as if he has a sore foot can justify the belief that John has a sore foot. Why think that John has a sore foot? Because he is walking as if he has a sore foot. Of course, this is not conclusive justification: it might be

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that John is walking as if he has a sore foot even though he does not have a sore foot. But the fact that John is walking as if he has a sore foot provides at least some justification for thinking that he has a sore foot. There are corresponding facts about all kinds of events: dancings, floatings, meltings, burnings, and so on. So there seems to be a general phenomenon here. If so, it would be nice to have a uniform explanation. Third, it is strained for the representational explanation to provide a uniform explanation. For it to provide a uniform explanation we would need to assume that walkings, dancings, floatings, meltings, and burnings all have representational content, which seems implausible. (I argued in this section against the idea that walkings have representational content—the argument generalizes.) Fourth, the adverbial explanation can provide a uniform explanation. The account of ‘look’ sentences developed in this book can be modified without much trouble into an account of ‘walk’ sentences. According to this account, by ‘John walks as if he has a sore foot’ we mean that John is the agent of a walking that occurs in the maximally specific way w such that it is generically true that walkings whose agent has a sore foot occur in way w. Since this is what we mean by ‘John walks as if he has a sore foot’, this is what it is for John to walk as if he has a sore foot. This suggests the following explanation of the facts about walkings above. Walkings are assessable for accuracy, because for any walking there is some proposition p such that the walking occurs in the maximally specific way that walkings occur when p is true, so the walking can be assessed for accuracy according to whether or not p is true. (Again, perhaps there are some walkings for which there is no such p, but this is equally an issue for the representational explanation of the facts about visual experiences.) Walkings can be inaccurate, because it is possible for a walking to occur in the maximally specific way that walkings occur when p is true, even when p is not true. Finally, walkings can justify beliefs, because walkings are mostly accurate. Similar explanations can be provided for the corresponding facts about dancings, floatings, meltings, and burnings.

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Given that there is an equally good explanation of the three facts about visual experience that does not appeal to visual experiences having representational content, and given that this alternative explanation generalizes in a way that the representational explanation does not, I suggest that the representational explanation is not the best explanation of these facts, and that this undermines one reason for thinking that visual experiences have representational content.

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References Anscombe, G. E. M. (1965), ‘The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature’, in R. J. Butler (ed.), Analytical Philosophy: First Series (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 55–75. Armstrong, D. M. (1968), A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Armstrong, D. M. (1997), A World of States of Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Aune, B. (1967a), Knowledge, Mind, and Nature (New York: Random House). Aune, B. (1967b), ‘Comments’, in Hector-Neri Castaneda (ed.), Intentionality, Minds, and Perception (Detroit: Wayne State University Press), pp. 275–85. Ayer, A. J. (1956), The Problem of Knowledge (London: Macmillan). Barwise, J. (1981), ‘Scenes and Other Situations’, The Journal of Philosophy 78, pp. 369–97. Barwise, J. and Perry, J. (1983), Situations and Attitudes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Block, N. (1996), ‘Mental Paint and Mental Latex’, Philosophical Issues 7, pp. 19–49. Broad, C. D. (1923), ‘The Theory of Sensa’, in his Scientific Thought (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.), pp. 239–72. Broad, C. D. (1925), The Mind and its Place in Nature (London: Kegan Paul). Byrne, A. (2001), ‘Intentionalism Defended’, Philosophical Review 110, pp. 199–240. Carnie, A. (2001), Syntax: A Generative Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell). Casullo, A. (1987), ‘A Defense of Sense-Data’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 48, pp. 45–61. Chisholm, R. M. (1957), Perceiving: A Philosophical Study (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Chisholm, R. M. (1976), Person and Object: A Metaphysical Study (La Salle, IL: Open Court). Cornman, J. (1971), Materialism and Sensations (New Haven: Yale University Press).

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Jackson, F. (1977), Perception: A Representative Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Johansson, I. (2000), ‘Determinables as Universals’, The Monist 83, pp. 101–21. Johnson, W. E. (1921), Logic, Part I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 173–85. Kamp, H. (1981), ‘A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation’, in J. A. G. Groenendijk, T. M. V. Janssen, and M. B. J. Stokhof (eds.), Formal Methods in the Study of Language (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press), pp. 277–322. Kind, A. (2003), ‘What’s so Transparent about Transparency?’, Philosophical Studies 115, pp. 225–44. Kind, A. (2007), ‘Restrictions on Representationalism’, Philosophical Studies 134, pp. 405–27. Kind, A. (2008), ‘How to Believe in Qualia’, in Edmond Wright (ed.), The Case for Qualia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 285–98. Körner, S. (1959), ‘On Determinables and Resemblance, I’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 33, pp. 125–40. Krifka, M., Pelletier, F. J., Carlson, G., ter Meulen, A., Link, G., and Chierchia, G. (1995), ‘Genericity: An Introduction’, in G. Carlson and F. J. Pelletier (eds.), The Generic Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 1–124. Landman, M. and Morzycki, M. (2003), ‘Event-Kinds and the Representation of Manner’, in N. Antrim, G. Goodall, M. Schulte-Nafeh, and V. Samiian (eds.), Proceedings of the Western Conference in Linguistics (WECOL) 2002 (Fresno, CA: California State University). Leeds, S. (1975), ‘Two Senses of “Appears Red” ’, Philosophical Studies 28, pp. 199–205. Lewis, D. (1975), ‘Adverbs of Quantification’, in E. Keenan (ed.), Formal Semantics of Natural Languages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 3–15. Lowe, E. J. (1992), ‘Experience and its Objects’, in Tim Crane (ed.), The Contents of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 79–104. Lycan, W. G. (1996), Consciousness and Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). McDowell, J. (1982), ‘Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge’, Proceedings of the British Academy 68, pp. 455–79. McDowell, J. (1987), ‘Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space’, in J. McDowell and P. Pettit (eds.), Subject, Thought and Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 137–68.

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McDowell, J. (1994), ‘The Content of Perceptual Experience’, Philosophical Quarterly 44, pp. 190–205. Martin, M. G. F. (2002), ‘The Transparency of Experience’, Mind and Language 17, pp. 376–425. Martin, M. G. F. (2003), ‘Particular Thoughts and Singular Thought’, in A. O’Hear (ed.), Thought and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 173–214. Moore, G. E. (1903), ‘The Refutation of Idealism’, Mind 12, pp. 433–53. Moore, G. E. (1922), ‘Some Judgments of Perception’, in his Philosophical Studies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), pp. 220–52. Neale, S. (2004), ‘This, That, and the Other’, in M. Reimer and A. Bezuidenhout (eds.), Descriptions and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 68–182. Nickel, B. (2006), ‘Against Intentionalism’, Philosophical Studies 136, pp. 279–304. Nunberg, G. (1995), ‘Transfers of Meaning’, Journal of Semantics 12, pp. 109–32. O’Shaughnessy, B. (1980), The Will: A Duel Aspect Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). O’Shaughnessy, B. (2003), ‘Sense Data’, in Barry Smith (ed.), John Searle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 169–88. Parsons, T. (1990), Events in the Semantics of English (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Peacocke, C. (1983), Sense and Content (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Peacocke, C. (1993), A Study of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Pitcher, G. (1970), A Theory of Perception (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Price, H. H. (1932), Perception (London: Methuen). Prior, A. N. (1949), ‘Determinables, Determinates and Determinants’, Mind 58, pp. 1–20, 178–94. Quine, W. V. (1960), Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Robinson, H. (1994), Perception (London: Routledge). Robinson, W. S. (1998), ‘Intrinsic Qualities of Experience: Surviving Harman’s Critique’, Erkenntnis 47, pp. 285–309. Russell, B. (1912), The Problems of Philosophy (New York: H. Holt and Co.). Searle, J. (1959), ‘On Determinables and Resemblance, II’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 33, pp. 141–58. Sellars, W. (1963), ‘Phenomenalism’, in his Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), pp. 60–105 (esp. pp. 91–5). Also in Hector-Neri Castaneda (ed.), Intentionality, Minds, and Perception (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967).

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REFERENCES

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Sellars, W. (1968), Science and Metaphysics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Sellars, W. (1975), ‘The Adverbial Theory of the Objects of Sensation’, Metaphilosophy 6, pp. 144–60. Snowdon, P. F. (1980), ‘Perception, Vision and Causation’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 81, pp. 175–92. Smith, A. D. (2008), ‘Translucent Experiences’, Philosophical Studies 140, pp. 197–212. Stalnaker, R. (1976), ‘Possible Worlds’, Noûs 10, pp. 65–75. Stanley, J. and Williamson, T. (2001), ‘Knowing How’, The Journal of Philosophy 98, pp. 411–44. Stoljar, D. (2004), ‘The Argument from Diaphanousness’, in M. Escurdia, Robert J. Stainton, and Christopher D. Viger (eds.), Canadian Journal of Philosophy (University of Alberta Press), pp. 341–90. Thomason, R. (1969), ‘Species, Determinates and Natural Kinds’, Noûs 3, pp. 95–101. Travis, C. (2004), ‘The Silence of the Senses’, Mind 113, pp. 57–94. Tye, M. (1975), ‘The Adverbial Theory: A Defence of Sellars against Jackson’, Metaphilosophy 6, pp. 136–43. Tye, M. (1984), ‘The Adverbial Approach to Visual Experience’, The Philosophical Review 93, pp. 195–225. Tye, M. (1989), Metaphysics of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Tye, M. (1992), ‘Visual Qualia and Visual Content’, in T. Crane (ed.), The Contents of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Tye, M. (1995), Ten Problems of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Tye, M. (2000), Consciousness, Color, and Content (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Tye, M. (2002), ‘Representationalism and the Transparency of Experience’, Noûs 36, pp. 137–51. Veltman, F. (1996), ‘Defaults in Update Semantics’, Journal of Philosophical Logic 25, pp. 221–61. Weiskrantz, L. (1986), Blindsight: A Case Study and its Implications (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Williamson, T. (2000), Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Woods, J. (1967), ‘On Species and Determinates’, Noûs 1, pp. 243–54.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/2/2018, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/2/2018, SPi

Index ‘#’ 28 adjuncts 90–1 using multiple 91–2 adverbial theories, see visual experience, adverbial theories of adverbs of quantification, see quantification, using adverbs afterimages 143 anaphora 29, 30, 31, 100 discourse 21 donkey 21 ‘appear’ 142 belief 88 blind sight 2 blurry vision 143 character colour character 16–17 definition of 1 overall character 120, 121 shape character 16–17, 116, 117 size character 16–17, 116, 117 colour blindness 4 commentator use of sentences 57 compositionality 10–11, 19, 71 control, see subject control control verbs, see subject control

echo questions 27–8, 30, 31, 100 ellipsis 75 Evans, Gareth 40–1 events agent role 19 patient role 19 undergoing multiple events of the same kind 130–1 experience kinds of 2 olfactory 2 tactile 2 visual, see visual experience experiencer, see looking events, experiencer of extensionality 55–6, 59–60 ‘f ’ 51–6, 61–9, 72, 102–3, 110–11, 119 factive mental states 44 File Change Semantics 21 Frege, Gottlob 40 fronting 61 generics 56–61, 139, 140 as primarily a kind of proposition 56–7 existential-like 58–9 universal-like 58–60 hallucination 2, 121, 122, 139–40

degree words 28 deletion, syntactic 26–7 demonstratives 105–15 determinates and determinables 36, 43–6 discourse anaphora, see anaphora, discourse Discourse Representation Theory 21 disjunctivist theories, see visual experience, disjunctivist theories of donkey anaphora, see anaphora, donkey duck–rabbit diagram 145 Dynamic Predicate Logic 21

illusion 138–9 implicature, Gricean 14 implicit domain restriction, see quantification, with implicit domain restriction inexplicit speech 73–5 ‘It’, see pleonastic ‘It’ ‘look’ as a control and raising verb 112–14 meaning of 23

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/2/2018, SPi

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INDEX

‘look’ sentences ambiguity of ‘looks grey and square’ 118–19 ambiguity of ‘to you’ modifier 24, 88, 89–96, 142 and concepts and discrimination 18, 86–8 and exploiting f, see ‘f ’ and neo-Davidsonian view 22–5 and visual experience 11, 12, 17–18, 97–9 aphonic material in complement 71–2 ‘as if ’, ‘as though’, ‘like’ in the complement 111, 113 bound variable readings of the complement 83–5 direct vs. indirect use of the complement 102–3, 110–11 indirect use of the complement 33, 109–10 structure of 22–3, 98 looking Ainu 128 American 82–3 elliptical 81–2 Japanese 128 Lithuanian 87 round 81–2 looking events 36 experiencer of 24 multiple ways of occurring 130 stimulus of 24–5, 121 manners, see ways, vs. manners many property problem 125–37 and sense data 127 meaning and modes of presentation 13 and truth conditions 13 community 12–14 multiple 33, 70–2 sentence 12–14 speaker 12–14 modifiers, see adjuncts Necker cube 145 neo-Davidsonian view 9, 19–21 opacity, see sentences, opacity and transparency

phenomenal character, see character phosphene experiences 143 pleonastic ‘It’ 113, 121, 122 ‘PRO’ 23, 112 properties as ways of being 29 definitely describing 106, 106–7 demonstrating 104–5 generality of 47, 66–8 maximal specificity of 47–8, 68–9 quantification over events 76 using adverbs 76–7 with implicit domain restriction 77–8 raising, see subject raising raising verbs, see subject raising representational theories, see visual experience, representational theories of roles agent, see events, agent role experiencer, see looking events, experiencer of patient, see events, patient role stimulus, see looking events, stimulus of ‘seem’ 113, 140–2 semantic approach, see visual experience, semantic approach to semantics events in, see neo-Davidsonian view sense 40–1 sense-data 5 and veil of experience, see veil of experience indirect realism about 5 phenomenalism about 5 sense-datum theories, see visual experience, sense-datum theories of sentences commentator use, see commentator use of sentences full vs. partial understanding 9–10 implicit vs. explicit understanding 9–10 opacity and transparency 88–9, 96 structure, syntactic vs. semantic 20, 22

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/2/2018, SPi

INDEX

Situation Semantics 21 stimulus, see looking events, stimulus of subject control 23, 112–13 subject raising 22–3, 113–14 supersaturation 65 syntactic deletion, see deletion, syntactic theta criterion 112 transparency, see sentences,opacity and transparency transparency of experience, see visual experience, transparency of Update Semantics 21 veil of experience 147–8 visual experience accuracy of 152–6 adverbial theories of 5–6, 7, 15, 35 and effects of understanding 144–6 and light rays 4 and representation 151–6 as a source of knowledge 146–50 as opposed to visual perception 2 character of, see character definition of 1 disjunctivist theories of 4 physicalism about 150–1 possibility of simultaneous experiences 131–3 representational theories of 6, 7 semantic approach to 7–12, 35 sense-datum theories of 5 transparency of 3, 142–4

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veil of, see veil of experience ways of describing 11–12 ‘way’ meaning of 38–9 ways existence of 36–7 generality of 47–8 kinds of 37–8 maximal specificity of 47–8, 68–9 nature of 40–2 referring to 37–8, 101, 145–6 referring to singularly vs. plurally 27–9, 99–101 referring to using adjectives 31–3, 49–51 vs. manners 37–8 ways of looking and representational properties 151–2 and the veil of experience, see veil of experience definitely describing 105, 106 demonstrating 104 generality of 65–9, 135 indefinitely describing 108 maximal specificity of 135 mereology of 134–5 names for 101–2 way relation 39–45 ‘wh’-phrases 107–8 Williamson, Timothy 44 zeugma, zeugmatic 83–4