The greatest chasm in the philosophy of mind--maybe even all of
philosophy--divides two perspectives on consciousness. The two perspectives
differ on whether there is anything in the phenomenal character of conscious
experience that goes beyond the intentional, the cognitive and the functional. A
convenient terminological handle on the dispute is whether there are "qualia".
Those who think that the phenomenal character of conscious experience goes
beyond the intentional, the cognitive and the functional are said to believe in
qualitative properties of conscious experience, or qualia for short.
The debates about qualia have recently focused on the notion of
representation, with issues about functionalism always in the background. All
can agree that there are representational contents of thoughts, for example the
representational content that virtue is its own reward. And friends of
qualia can agree that experiences at least sometimes have representational
content too, e.g. that something red and round occludes something blue and
square. The recent focus of disagreement is on whether the phenomenal
character of experience is exhausted by such representational contents. I
say no. Don't get me wrong. I think that sensations--almost always--perhaps even
always--have representational content in addition to their phenomenal
character. What's more, I think that it is often the phenomenal character itself
that has the representational content. What I deny is that representational
content is all there is to phenomenal character. I insist that phenomenal
character outruns representational content. We can call this view
"phenomenism". Phenomenists believe in qualia, as defined above. The opposed
view, which we can call "representationism", holds that the phenomenal character
of an experience does not go beyond its representational content.
(Terminological note: everyone believes that experience has what I am calling
phenomenal character--the disagreement is about whether that phenomenal
character is exhausted by its representational content.) In its most extreme
form, this view holds (e.g. Dennett, 1991, following Armstrong) that sensation
is just a form of judgement. This version is close to eliminativism about
phenomenal character. But other representationists recognize that sensations and
other experiences are not judgements. Nonetheless, according to them, all
experiences have representational content, and these representational contents
completely capture the phenomenal character of the experiences.
This paper is a critique of representationism. First I will briefly discuss
an internalist form of representationism, then I will go on to the main topic of
the paper, externalist forms of the view.
One form of representationism holds that the phenomenal character of experience is its "narrow intentional content", intentional content that is "in the head" in Putnam's phrase. That is, heads that are the same in aspects of their physico-chemical configuration that don't involve relations to the environment share all narrow intentional contents. In holding that phenomenal contents supervene on what is in the head, this view is "internalist". A full dress discussion of this view would discuss various ideas of what narrow intentional content is supposed to be. But this isn't a full dress discussion. I will simply say that all versions of this view that I can think of that have even the slightest plausibility (and that aren't committed to qualia) are in some way functionalist. They are functionalist in that they involve the idea that narrow intentional content supervenes on internal functional organization as well as physico-chemical configuration. That is, there can be no differences in narrow intentional contents without corresponding differences at the level of causal interactions of mental states within the head. The view comes in different flavors: functional organization can be understood in terms of the interactions of common-sense mental states or in terms of the causal network of computational states. In both cases, there is a level of "grain" below which brain differences make no differences. One functional organization is multiply realizable physico-chemically in ways that make no difference in narrow intentional content. In other words, there is a level of organization above the level of physiology ("mental" or "computational") that determines narrow intentional content. (Tye, 1994 takes this view and I understand Rey, 1992a, 1992b and White, 1995 as evincing some sympathy for it.)
Of course phenomenists can (and should) be internalists about phenomenal character too. But phenomenists can allow that phenomenal character depends on the details of the physiology or physico-chemical realization of the computational structure of the brain. Of course, there are also dualist forms forms of phenomenism, but both the physicalist and dualist forms of phenomenism agree that there is no need to suppose that qualia supervene on functional organization.1
There is a very simple thought experiment that raises a serious (maybe fatal) difficulty for any such (functionalist) internalist form of representationism. Suppose that we raise a child (call her Eliza) in a room in which all colored surfaces change color every few minutes. Further, Eliza is allowed no information about grass being green or the sky being blue, etc. The result is that Eliza ends up with no standing beliefs that distinguish one color from another. We can allow that Eliza learns the color names in English, but nothing else that distinguishes the colors. Now we may suppose that the result is that there are no functional differences among her color experiences (except the attachment to different names). For example, it may be that the result of this process is that Eliza has no associations or behavioral inclinations or dispositions towards red that are any different from her associations or inclinations or dispositions towards blue. Nonetheless, she can name the colors and describes vividly different color experiences, just as we do.
Suppose this is so. The challenge to the internalist representationist, then, is to say what the difference is in intentional content between the experience of red and the experience of blue? There is a difference in phenomenal character, so the internalist representationist is committed to finding a difference in function. But the example is designed to remove all differences in function.
Of course, there may be innate behavioral differences between the experience of red and the experience of blue. Perhaps we are genetically programmed so that red makes us nervous and blue makes us calm. But despite claims of this sort (Dennett, 1991), I think it is fair to say that such assertions are empirical speculations. (See Dennett's only cited source, Humphrey, 1992, which emphasizes the poor quality of the empirical evidence.)
Perhaps the internalist will say that there would be no differences among her experiences. Red would of necessity look just the same to her as yellow. But this is surely an extraordinary thing for the internalist to insist on. It could be right of course, but again it is surely an unsupported empricial speculation.
In short, the internalists are caught in a dilemma. Either they claim that there are innate functional differences between the experiences of red, blue, etc. In that case, they depend on an empirical speculation. Or else they claim that there would be no differences between Eliza's experience of red, of blue, etc. And in that case too, they depend on an empirical speculation.
Let me be clear about what I am not claiming. I admit that I do think it immensely plausible that Eliza would have color experience much like ours. However, I am not depending on that, but rather on something much weaker, namely that this is an open empirical question. Further, I am certainly not claiming that there are no genetically programmed behavioral differences among color experiences, but only that this also is an open empirical question. Representationists usually see the belief in qualia as confused or otherwise ruled out on purely logical or conceptual grounds. I am maintaining that the dispute between lovers of qualia and internalist representationism depends on an open empirical question.
But physicalism is an empirical thesis, so why should the representationist be embarrassed about making an empirical claim? Answer: physicalism is a very general empirical thesis having to do with the long history of successes of what can be regarded as the physicalist research program. Internalist representationism, by contrast, depends on highly specific experimental claims. For example, the issue would be settled if newborn babies showed differences in their reactions to red and green before having had any differential experience with these colors. I doubt that very many opponents of qualia would wish their point of view to rest on speculations as to the results of such experiments.
Of course the defender of qualia does not rest everything on a prediction about the results of such experiment. Our view is that even if such experiments do show some asymmetries, there are possible creatures--maybe genetically engineered versions of humans, in whom the asymmeteries are ironed out. (See Shoemaker, 1982.) And those genetically engineered humans could nonetheless have color experience much like ours.
The version of functionalism I have been tacitly assuming is psychofunctionalism, a version of functionalism that holds that mental states can be defined in terms of contingent empirically determined features of their causal roles. But many functionalists (e.g. Lewis) hold that functional characterizations are something more like analytic and a priori. The Eliza case presents a different dilemma for them. They would have to say that the situation I described is in some way incoherent or contradictory. The would say that it is not possible for Eliza to have different experiences of red, blue, yellow etc., unless these experiences function differently. Internalist analytic functionalists cannot rely on the different relations to the actual colors--they say that there has to be a difference in internal function. This is not a very attractive point of view.
That is all I will have to say about internalist representationism. Now I will move to the main topic of this paper, externalist representationism. In this section, I will try to motivate externalist representationalism. The consideration I will advance in motivating it will be of use to me later. Then I will advance various considerations that cause one or another sort of difficulty for the view.
Often, when I see water I see it as water; that is, my visual experience represents it as water. (Sometimes my visual experience represents milk as water, and then when I drink the milk, I get a dreadful shock, the shock of clashing representations.) Most of you have seen water as water all your lives, but I'm different, I'm a foreigner. I was born on Twin Earth and emigrated to Earth at age 18. When I was 15 and looked at the sea on Twin Earth, my visual experience represented the twin-water as twin-water (though of course we didn't call it that). Perhaps you are skeptical about whether visual experience represents such properties, but please bear with me. When I first got here, I saw water as twin-water, just as you, if you went to Twin Earth would see the liquid in the oceans as water. Now, many years later, my practices of applying concepts are relevantly the same as yours: my practices show that I am committed to the concepts of my adopted home, Earth. Now when I look at the sea of my adopted home, my visual experience represents the water as water just as yours does. (Again, let's suppose.) So the representational content of my experience of looking at the sea has changed. But my visual experience is nonetheless indistinguishable from what it was. If you took me up in a space ship and put me down by some sea-side, I wouldn't know whether I was on Earth or Twin Earth. (See Stalnaker's (1996) commentary on Lycan (1996) on Block (1990)) The representational content of my experience has changed, but the phenomenal character has stayed the same. And that shows, someone (not me) might argue, that there is some sort of gap between representational content and phenomenal character.
One way for the representationist to answer would be to note that though all phenomenal character is (according to representationism) representational content, the converse is not true. Not all representational contents are phenomenal characters. For example, the thought content that mu-mesons have odd spin is not a phenomenal character. But how is this point supposed to apply to the issue at hand? The putative gap between representational content and phenomenal character has to do with the representational content of visual experience, not thought. Here is one way of extending the representationist response: the representationist should hold that visual experience has two kinds of representational content: one kind of representational content can be identified with phenomenal character and another kind of representational content is distinct from phenomenal character. The (relevant) phenomenal character of experience that has remained the same throughout my life is a matter of the observable or appearance properties of the liquids in oceans, rivers and streams, their color, sheen, motion, taste, smell, etc. It is these properties that my experience has represented liquids as having that have been shared by my experiences of both twater and water. Those are the representational contents that make my visual experience of the ocean at age 15 indistinguishable from my visual experience of the ocean now.
Of course, as Burge (1979 and elsewhere) has noted, color concepts and other "appearance concepts" are vulnerable to the same sort of "twin earth" arguments for externalism as is the concept of water. Indeed, such a twin-earth argument will be discussed later in this paper. (Perhaps only truly phenomenal concepts are invulnerable to such arguments.) So in my view, the reply just discussed will ultimately fail to sustain the representationist point of view. But for the moment, we can take the representationist reply just given as a success for representationism. We started with an experiential continuity despite representational change that challenged the representationist. But then it turned out that the representationist can give a representational explanation of the difference. The main burden of this paper is to explore some reasons for thinking that the representationist cannot always repeat this success.
Two preliminary issues: First, one might object to my claim that visual experience can ever represent anything as water. Perhaps, you might say, visual experience can represent something as round or at least red, but not as water. Nothing that is really important to my argument will depend on this issue. Nonetheless, I will note that disallowing visually representing water as water has the effect of limiting the resources available to the representationist.
Next, a terminological reminder. I take a qualitative character or quale as a
phenomenal property of an experience that eludes the intentional, the functional
and the purely cognitive. 'Phenomenal character' is a more neutral term that
carries no commitment to qualia. Both the representationist and the phenomenist
can agree that there are phenomenal characters, even though the former but not
the latter thinks phenomenal characters are wholly representational.
Supervenience
If phenomenal character supervenes on the brain, there is a straightforward argument against representationism. For arguably, there are brains that are the same as yours in internal respects (molecular constitution) but whose states represent nothing at all. Consider the swampman, the molecular duplicate of you who comes together by chance from particles in the swamp. He is intended as an example of total lack of representational content. How can he refer to Newt Gingrich when he has never had any causal connection with him; he hasn't ever seen Newt or anyone else on TV, never seen a newspaper, etc. But although he has no past, he does have a future. If at the instant of creation, his brain is in the same configuration that yours is in when you see a ripe tomato, it might be said that the swampman's state has the same representational content as yours in virtue of that state's role in allowing him to "track" things in the future that are the same in various respects (e.g. color) as the tomato. It might be said that he will track appearances of Bill Clinton in the future just as well as you will. But this invocation of the swampman's future is not very convincing. Sure, he will track Bill Clinton if he materializes in the "right" environment (an environment in which Bill Clinton exists and has the superficial appearance of the actual Bill Clinton), but in the wrong environment he will track someone else or no one at all. And the same point applies to his ability to track water and even color. If put on Twin Earth, he will track twater, not water. Of course, you will have the same tracking problems if suddenly put in "wrong" environments, but your references are grounded by the very past that you have and the swampman lacks.
If we can assume supervenience of phenomenal character on the brain, we can
refute the representationist. The phenomenal character of the swampman's
experience is the same as yours but its experiences have no representational
content at all. So how can phenomenal character be captured representationally?
Maybe some differences in the representational contents of experience don't make
a phenomenal difference; but if representationism is right, some do.
There is more to experience than representational content. But if this argument
is successful, there will be a great temptation for the representationist to
deny supervenience. And in fact, that's what representationists often do (Lycan,
1996a, 1996b; McDowell, 1994).
What is the Issue?
One of the ways that I have been framing the issue is this: Is there more to experience than its representational content? But if experiences are brain states, there will be more to experiences than their representational contents just as there is more to sentences in English than their representational contents. For example, the size of the font of this sentence is something more than (or anyway, other than) its representational content. So the question is better taken as: is there anything mental in experience over and above its representational content? I say yes, the representationist says no.
Harman (1990, 1996) expresses his version of representationism about experience by claiming that in experience we only are aware of properties of what is represented, not the vehicle of representation. When we look at a red tomato, no matter how hard we try to introspect the aspect of the experience that represents redness, all we succeed in doing is focusing our attention on the redness of the tomato itself. Harman relies on the famous diaphanousness of perception (Moore, 1922), that is, when one looks at a red tomato, the effect of concentrating on the experience of red is simply to attend to the redness of the tomato itself. As a point about introspection, this seems to me to be straightforwardly wrong. For example, close your eyes in daylight and you will find that the diaphanousness of perception fades--you will have experiences that are not clearly and uncontroversially as of anything. (More on this below.)
Of course, Harman can allow that we know when an experience happens and how long it lasted, but that will no doubt be glossed by him as a matter of when we looked at the tomato and how long we looked. Harman concludes that introspection gives us no access to anything non-representational about the experience, no access to "mental paint". He argues that the contrary view confuses properties of what is represented, the intentional object of perception, with properties of the vehicle of representation, what is doing the representing. I don't agree with the imputation of fallacy. But my point right now is more preliminary: that if Harman means to define representationism in this way, his definition is too narrow. I also think his view depends on an unreliable approach to introspection.
He writes as if the issue is whether we can introspect the representational features of the experience, the mental paint that represents the redness of the tomato. But there are two deeper issues.
Mental ink (or paint) is a representational feature of experience; mental fonts are non-representational features of experience. The analogy is in some ways misleading. The use of "font" here is not meant to invoke the "Language of Thought" doctrine. A more misleading aspect is that print always has some font, but I do not want to claim that there are non-representational phenomenal features of every experience.
To sum up then, we can distinguish three things:
As I mentioned, Harman says that we are only aware of what is represented by our experience, the intentional object of the experience, not what is doing the representing, not the vehicle of representation. But what will Harman say about illusions, cases where the intentional object does not exist? Surely, there can be something in common to a veridical experience of a red tomato and a hallucination of a red tomato, and what is in common can be introspectible. This introspectible commonality cannot be constituted by or explained by the resemblance between something and nothing. It seems that the representationalist ought to appeal to the intentional content that is shared by the two experiences, the content that there is a red tomato in front of me. Suppose Harman were to hold that we are aware of the shared intentional content; what would that come to? What is it to be aware of the intentional content that I am seeing a red tomato or that two experiences have that intentional content? I don't see what awareness of an intentional content could come to if not awareness that some state has that intentional content. And surely, awareness that two experiences have the same intentional content requires awareness that each has that intentional content. So if Harman were to give this representationist account of the introspectible similarity, he would have to concede that we have introspective awareness of some mental properties of experience, not just of the intentional objects of experience.
The representationist view I've just mentioned is taken by Lycan (1995)--that one can be aware of a family of mental properties of an experience, namely that the experience represents something, that it represents a tomato, that it represents the tomato as red, etc. So Lycan can deal with illusions by saying that when one hallucinates a red tomato, there is something introspective in common with a normal veridical perception of a tomato, namely in both cases one is aware that the experience represents a red tomato. These mental properties aren't mental inks because they don't represent. However, my definition of mental font does, unfortunately, count them as mental fonts because they are mental properties of experience that do not represent. So let's understand the definition of mental font as containing a qualification: the property of having certain intentional contents does not count as a mental font.
I can't resist interjecting the observation that from the point of view of a phenomenist (like me), the view that I have just described sounds like a bizarre religion. The conception according to which the phenomenal character of experience is the same as the content of belief sounds even stranger when we think of what makes two experiences experientially similar, because when we concentrate on experiential similarity, our attention is drawn more firmly to the phenomenal character itself.
Some representationists combine externalism and internalism. For example, Rey (1992a, 1992b) individuates color experience partly in terms of what colors it represents and partly in terms of what he sees as syntactic properties of the vehicle of representation.(There is a similar view in Lycan, 1996b.) I won't try to consider such mixed views here.
Those who deny both mental ink and font are representationists; those who
countenance one or the other are phenomenists. The representationists include
Dretske (1995, 1996), Harman (1990, 1996), Lycan (1995, 1996), McDowell (1994),
Rey (1992a,b) and Tye (1995, 1996) (See also White (1995) for a
representationist view of color experience). The phenomenists include
Burge(1996), Block (1990, 1994a), Loar (1990), McGinn (1991), Peacocke (1983)
and Shoemaker (1982, 1994a, 1994b). Shoemaker and I hold that the inverted
spectrum argument and the inverted earth argument make strong cases for
phenomenism. (Loar, McGinn and Peacocke have declared doubts about the inverted
spectrum arguments; I don't know what they think of the inverted earth
argument.) I won't go into the inverted spectrum argument here, and I will only
be able to mention inverted earth briefly. I will mention some other
considerations that are less effective but which I hope put some pressure on the
representationist.
Bodily Sensations
Is the experience of orgasm completely captured by a representational content that there is an orgasm? Orgasm is phenomenally impressive and there is nothing very impressive about the representational content that there is an orgasm. I just expressed it and you just understood it, and nothing phenomenally impressive happened (at least not on my end). I can have an experience whose content is that my partner is having an orgasm without my experience being phenomenally impressive. In response to my raising this issue (Block, 1995a, 1995b), Tye (1995a) says that the representational content of orgasm "in part, is that something very pleasing is happening down there. One also experiences the pleasingness alternately increasing and diminishing in its intensity." But once again, I can have an experience whose representational content is that my partner is having a very pleasing experience down there that changes in intensity, and although that may be pleasurable for me, it is not pleasurable in the phenomenally impressive way that that graces my own orgasms. I vastly prefer my own orgasms to those of others, and this preference is based on a major league phenomenal difference. The location of "down there" differs slightly between my perception of your orgasms and my own orgasms, but why should that matter so much? Of course, which subject the orgasm is ascribed to is itself a representational matter. But is that the difference between my having the experience and my perceiving yours? Is the difference just that my experience ascribes the pleasure to you rather than to me (or to part of me)? Representational content can go awry in the heat of the moment. What if in the heat of the moment I mistakenly ascribe your orgasm to me or mine to you? Would this difference in ascription really constitute the difference between the presence or absence of the phenomenally impressive quality? Perhaps your answer is that there is a way in which my orgasm-experience ascribes the orgasm to me that is immune to the intrusion of thought, so there is no possibility of a confused attribution to you in that way. But now I begin to wonder whether this talk of 'way' is closet phenomenism.
No doubt there are functional differences between my having an orgasm-experience and merely ascribing it to you. Whether this fact will help to defend representationism depends on whether and how representationism goes beyond functionalism, a matter to be discussed in the section after next.
According to me, there are features of the experience of orgasm that don't represent anything; so mental fonts exists. I don't expect this example to force representationists to concede that there are mental fonts. Appeals to intuitions about relatively unstructured cases are rarely successful. That is why the complex thought experiments such as those involving the inverted spectrum and inverted earth are useful. The disagreement focuses not on the intuitions themselves (I believe that they reflect our concepts so directly that everyone can be brought to agreement on them) but on what the intuitions show.
Of course, we should not demand that a representationist be able to capture his contents in words. But if we are to try to believe that the experience of orgasm is nothing over and above its representational content, we need to be told something fairly concrete about what that representational content is. Suppose the representational content is specified in terms of recognitional dispositions or capacities. One problem with this suggestion is that the experience of orgasm seems on the face of it to have little to do with recognizing orgasms. Perhaps when I say to myself "There's that orgasm experience again" I have a somewhat different experience from the cases where no recognition goes on. But there is no plausibility in the insistence that the experience must involve some sort of categorization. And if you are inclined to be very intellectual about human experience, think of animals. Perhaps animals have the experience without any recognition.
The representationists should put up or shut up. The burden of proof is on
them to say what the representational content of experiences such as orgasm and
pain are.
Phosphene-Experiences
As I mentioned, representationists often emphasize the diaphanousness of visual experience. For example, Harman says "Look at a tree and try to turn your attention to intrinsic features of your visual experience. I predict you will find that the only features there to turn your attention to will be features of the represented tree." (1990). But the diaphanousness of perception is much less pronounced in a number of visual phenomena, notably phosphene-experiences. (I use the cumbersome 'phosphene-experience' instead of the simpler 'phosphene' by way of emphasizing that the phenomenist need no have any commitment to phenomenal individuals.) I believe that reflection on such phenomena reduces the attraction of representationism. Phosphene-experiences are visual sensations "of"color and light stimulated by pressure on the eye or by electrical or magnetic fields. (I once saw an ad for goggles that you could put on your eyes that generated phosphenes via a magnetic field.) Phosphene-experiences have been extensively studied, originally in the 19th Century by Purkinje and Helmholz. Close your eyes and place the heels of your hands over your eyes. Push your eyeballs lightly for about a minute. You will have color sensations. Are they representational? It is hard to say. What would the world have to be like for a phosphene experience to be veridical? "The world would have to be such that there are colored moving expanses somewhere," it might be said. (Mark Johnston urged this.) Perhaps phosphene-experiences are representational in a way that leaves many features (e.g. location) indeterminate. Nonetheless, no one should conclude that introspecting a phosphene experience is purely a matter of attending to an intentional object of perception.
Lycan (1987) says: "...given any visual experience, it seems to me, there is some technological means of producing a veridical qualitative equivalent--e.g. a psychedelic movie shown to the subject in a small theater. " (p. 90) But there is no guarantee that phosphene experiences produced by pressure or electromagnetic stimulation could be produced by light. (Note: I don't say there is a guarantee that phosphene-experiences could not be produced by light, but only that there is no guarantee that they could; I have no idea whether they could or not.) I do wonder if Lycan's unwarranted assumption plays a role in leading philosophers to suppose that phosphene-experiences, afterimage-experiences and the like are entirely representational.
According to me, in normal perception one can be aware of the mental ink--the sensory quality that does the representing. This idea can be illustrated (this is an illustration, not an argument) by Bach-y-Rita's famous experiment in which he gave blind people a kind of vision by hooking up a TV camera to their backs which produced tactual sensations on their backs. Bach-y-Rita says that the subjects would normally attend to what they were "seeing". He says "unless specifically asked, experienced subjects are not attending to the sensation of stimulation on the skin of their back, although this can be recalled and experienced in retrospect." (Quoted in Humphrey, 1992, p. 80.) When I am looking at a tomato and attending to the color of the tomato, I am not attending to the visual sensation, but I believe that we can attend to the visual sensation just as Bach-y-Rita's subjects could attend to their tactual sensations. Of course, the analogy is not perfect. In attending to visual sensations, we are not normally attending to sensations of the eye (Harman, 1996).
I think that the Bach-y-Rita experiment is useful in thinking about the two versions of representationism mentioned above. Let me remind you about the difference. Harman says that all we can introspect in experience are the intentional objects of experience. Lycan, however, allows that we can actually introspect certain properties of the experiences themselves. At first glance, reflection on the the Bach-y-Rita experiment provides support for Lycan over Harman. For the ability of Bach-y-Rita's subjects to introspect their tactual sensations helps to remind us that we really can notice features of our own visual sensations. But Lycan's concession, you will recall, was to allow introspection of the property of having certain intentional properties. But is that what Bach-y-Rita's subjects were doing? Were they introspecting that the sensations on their backs represented, say a couch? Perhaps occasionally, but I doubt it that that's what Bach-y-Rita was talking about. I think he meant that they were attending to the experiential quality of the feelings on their backs. And I think that this case helps to remind us that at least sometimes when we introspect visual experience, we are attending to the phenomenal properties of experience, not the fact that they have certain intentional properties. So although Lycan's version of representationism is superior to Harman's in allowing the existence of introspection of something other than intentional properties of experience, it does not seem true to what that introspection is often like. 2
Moving now to the orgasm and pain cases, there is a challenge here for the
representationist. Just what is the representational content of these states? In
vision, it often is plausible to appeal to recognitional dispositions in cases
where we lack the relevant words. What's the difference between the
representational contents of the experience of color A and color B, neither of
which have names? As I mentioned earlier, one representationist answer is this:
The recognitional dispositions themselves provide or are the basis of these
contents. My experience represents A as that color, and I can
misrepresent some other color as that color. But note that this
model can't straightforwardly be applied to pain. That color is a feature
of objects, but that pain is a feature of the mind. Suppose I have two
pains that are the same in intensity, location, and anything else that language
can get a handle on--but they still feel different. Say they are both twinges in
the belly that I have had before, but they aren't burning or sharp or throbbing.
"There's that one again; and there's that other one." is the best I can
do. If we rely on my ability to pick out that pain, (arguably) we are
demonstrating a phenomenal character, not specifying a representational content.
(Note the difference between Loar's (1990) proposal of a recognitional view of
phenomenal concepts and the current suggestion that a recognitional disposition
can specify phenomenal character itself. Phenomenal character is what a
phenomenal concept specifies or refers to.) The appeal to recognitional
dispositions to fill in representational contents that can't be specified in
words has some plausibility, so long as the recognitional dispositions are
directed outward. But once we direct them inward, one begins to wonder whether
the resulting view is an articulation of representationism or a capitulation to
phenomenism. I will return to this point. 3
Is Representationism Just a Form of Functionalism?
Consider what I shall call "quasi-representationism". Quasi-representationists agree with phenomenists that there are differences between sensory modalities that cannot be cashed out representationally. One modality is flashing lights, another is tooting horns. But quasi-representationists agree with representationists that within a single modality, all phenomenal differences are representational differences. (I think that this is the view that Peacocke, 1983, Ch 1 argues against.)
Quasi-representationism seems to me to be an unstable view. Some philosophers are attracted to representationism but can't bring themselves to treat the experiential differences between say vision and touch as entirely representational. So they treat this difference functionally. They plug a gap that they see in representationism with functionalism. But they should tell us why they don't reject representationism altogether in favor of functionalism. Do they think that functionalism is in some way inadequate? Is there some phenomenon (e.g. afterimages) that requires the functionalist to add a non-functional element to supplement the account? 4
Many philosophers in the representationist ballpark are rather vague about whether they are pure representationists or quasi-representationists, but Tye (1995b) makes it clear that he is a pure representationist. (Harman tells me he is a quasi-representationist.)
How can we decide whether representationism needs supplementation by
functionalism? Suppose I both touch and see a dog. Both experiences represent
the dog as a dog, but they are different phenomenally. Representationists
are quick to note that the two experiences also differ in all sorts of other
representational ways. (See Tye, 1995a, for example.) The visual experience
represents the dog as having a certain color, whereas the tactual experience
represents it as having a certain texture and temperature. In Block (1995a, b) I
tried to avoid this type of rejoinder by picking experiences with very limited
representational content. If you wave your hand in the vicinity of your ear, you
experience movement without size, shape or color. You have a visual experience
that plausibly represents something moving over there and nothing else.
And I imagined that there were auditory experiences with the same content.
But my expert consultants tell me that I was wrong. There is no auditory analog
of peripheral vision. For example, any auditory experience will represent a
sound as having a certain loudness. But that does not ruin the point. It just
makes it slightly harder to see. Imagine the experience of hearing something and
seeing it in your peripheral vision. It is true that you experience the sound as
having a certain loudness, but can't we abstract away from that, concentrating
on the perceived location? And isn't there an obvious difference between the
auditory experience as of that location and the visual experience as
of that location? If so, then there is either mental ink or a mental font.
(The ways in which representationally identical experiences might be
phenomenally different could involve differences in either ink or font.) 5
Seeing Red for the First Time
Marvin is raised in a black and white room, never seeing anything of any other color. He never learns that fire engines and ripe tomatoes are red or that grass is green, etc. Then he is taken outside and shown something red without being told that it is red. (I've changed 'Mary' to 'Marvin' so as to emphasize the small differences between this and Jackson's (1982) argument.) He learns what it is like to see red, even though he does not know what that color is called. He might say: "So that's what it is like to see that color."
Lewis (1990) (following Nemirow) says that Marvin aquires an ability, some sort of recognitional know-how. But as Loar (1990) notes, this idea can't account for embedded judgements. Here's an example that fits the Marvin case: "If that's what it is like to see red, then I will be surprised."
What does the representationist say about what Marvin has learned? If Marvin is told that what he sees is red, the representationist might say that he has acquired a visual representational concept, the concept of red. But can the representationist say this if Marvin doesn't know that it is red? Perhaps the representationist will say "Sure, he acquires the concept of red without the name 'red'." Perhaps the representationist will say that what Marvin acquires is a recognitional concept. After all, he can say "There's that color again". He has a recognitional concept that he applies on the basis of vision, even though it doesn't link up to his linguistic color concepts.
But there is a trap for the representationist in this reply. For what, according to the representationist, is the difference between Marvin's concept of red and Marvin's concept of blue? He recognizes both. When he sees a red patch he says "There's that color again" and when then sees a blue patch he says "There's that other color again", each time collating his outer ostension with an inner ostension. But what, according to the representationist, is the difference between Marvin's concept of red and Marvin's concept of blue? The phenomenist will link the difference to an internal difference, the difference in the phenomenal quality of the experience of blue and the experience of red. But the representationist can't appeal to that without changing sides. And there is nothing else that is internal for him to appeal to. (Remember, we are supposing, as with Eliza raised in the room of changing colors, that Marvin knows nothing that distinguishes the unnamed colors.) The appeal to a recognitional disposition suggests that the representationist is appealing to the colors themselves. What makes his concept of red different from his concept of blue is that he applies the former in recognizing red and the latter in recognizing blue. But it is obvious that these concepts are different independently of what they pick out; the concepts would be different even if they were concepts of the same thing. The representationist owes us a better answer.
Here is a closely related point. If the representationist is willing to recognize a color concept that has been cut loose from everything but recognition, why shouldn't he also recognize such concepts turned inward? Why can't he have a recognitional concept of his own phenomenal state-- "There's that experience again." (As I mentioned, Loar 1990 argues that a recognitional concept of one's own experiences just is a phenomenal concept.)
Rey (1992a, 1992b) postulates that color experiences involve the tokenings of
special restricted predicates. So he would say that Marvin tokens 'R' when he
sees red and 'B' when he sees blue. Is that a suitable representationist answer?
Recall that we are now discussing externalist representationalism, and
Rey's view would deal with this problem by bringing in an internalist element.
Recall my objection to internalism in terms of Eliza, the girl raised in the
room in which everything changes colors. Eliza perhaps has more or less normal
color experience but may have no asymmetrical associations in her color
experience. So what's the representational difference between her 'R' and
'B'? Suppose Rey says: who needs a representational difference; the syntactic
difference is enough. Then it becomes difficult to distinguish his position from
the phenomenist position. I am a physicalist phenomenist. I believe that the
difference between Marvin's experience of red and of blue is a physical
difference. I suspect it is a difference in brain events, not naturally
capturable in terms of :"syntax", but this is not an important feature of the
phenomenist position. I allow that it is an empirical question (of course) what
the physical natures of phenomenal qualities are. Perhaps these natures are even
functional.
Externalist Memory
At the beginning of the discussion of externalism, I discussed the thought experiment in which I, a native of Putnam's Twin Earth, emigrated to Earth. When I first looked at water, I thought it was twater and, let's suppose, my visual experience represented it as twater. Much later, after learning everything that I've just told you, I decided to become a member of the Earth language community, to speak English, not Twenglish. Now, when I look at the sea, I take what I am seeing to be water and my visual experience represents it as water (let's suppose), not twater. But in some very obvious sense, water looks the same to me as it did the first time I saw it even though my representational content has changed. If you blindfolded me and put me down at the sea side, I wouldn't know from looking at the liquid in the ocean whether it was water or twater. My phenomenal character has stayed the same even though the representational content of my visual experience changed. But this doesn't yet show that there is anything non-representational about phenomenal character. For the shared representational contents can be appealed to to explain why there's no difference in what its like to see water. Here is the representationist picture: experiences have representational properties of two types: the phenomenal character of an experience can be identified with one of those two types. The non-phenomenal type includes the representation of water as water, the phenomenal type includes representations of such "appearance properties" as color. (See Block, 1995a,b and Tye, 1995a.) What I will argue is that there is a twin earth case that turns on a property that does not allow a reply corresponding to the one just made. The property is color, which is an "appearance property" if anything is. The upshot, I will argue, is that there is mental ink (but there is no argument here for mental font). I will illustrate this point with an argument from Block (1990, 1994a) about color. I won't go into this argument in full detail. 6
Inverted Earth is a place that differs from Earth in two important ways. First, everything is the complementary color of the corresponding earth object. The sky is yellow, the grass-like stuff is red, etc. Second, people on Inverted Earth speak an inverted language. They use 'red' to mean green, 'blue' to mean yellow, and so forth. If you order a sofa from Inverted Earth and you want a yellow sofa, you FAX an order for a "blue" sofa (speaking their language). The two inversions have the effect that if inverters are inserted in your visual system (and your body pigments are changed), you will notice no difference when you go to Inverted Earth. After you step off the space-ship, you see some Twin-grass. You point at it, saying it is a nice shade of "green", but you are wrong. You are wrong for the same reason that you are wrong if you call the liquid in a Twin-earth lake 'water' just after you arrive there. The grass is red (of course I am speaking English not Twenglish here). But after you have decided to adopt the concepts and language of the Inverted Earth language community and you have been there for 50 years, your word 'red' and the representational content of your experience as of red things (things that are really red) will shift so that you represent them correctly. Then, your words will mean the same as those of the members of your adopted language community and your visual experience will represent colors veridically.
There is a small difference between this form of the thought experiment and
that of my 1990 and 1994.7
In the old version, you are kidnapped and inserted in a niche in Inverted Earth
without your noticing it (your twin having been removed to make the niche). In
the new version, you are aware of the move and consciously decide to adopt the
concepts and language of the Inverted Earth language community. The change has
two advantages: first, it makes it clearer that you become a member of the new
community. On the old version, one might wonder what you would say if you found
out about the change. Perhaps you would insist on your membership in the old
language community and defer to it rather than to the new one. The new version
also makes it easier to deal with issues of remembering your past of the sort
brought up in connection with the inverted spectrum in Dennett, 1991.
The upshot is:
Your phenomenal character stays the same but what it represents changes. This provides the basis of an argument for mental ink, not mental font. Mental ink is what stays the same; its representational content is what changes.
What exactly is the argument for mental ink? Imagine that on the birthday just before you leave for Inverted Earth, you are looking at the clear blue sky. Your visual experience represents it as blue. Years later, you have a birthday party in Inverted Earth and you look at the Inverted Earth sky. Your visual experience represents it as yellow (since that's what color it is and your visual experience by that time is veridical let us suppose--I'll deal with an objection to this supposition later). But the phenomenal character stays the same, as indicated by the fact that you can't tell the difference. So there is a gap between the representational content of experience and its phenomenal character. Further, the gap shows that phenomenal character outruns representational content. Why? How could the representationist explain what it is about the visual experience that stays the same? What representational content can the representationist appeal to in order to explain what stays the same? This is the challenge to the representationist, and I think it is a challenge that the representationist cannot meet.
The comparison with the water case is instructive. There, you will recall, we also had phenomenal continuity combined with representational change. But the representationist claimed that the phenomenal continuity itself could be given a representational interpretation. The phenomenal character of my visual experiences of twater and water were the same, but their representational contents differed. No problem because the common phenomenal character could be said by the representationist to be a matter of the representation of color, sheen, flow pattern and the like. But what will the representationist appeal to in the Inverted Earth case that corresponds to color, sheen, flow pattern, etc.?
There are many obvious objections to this argument, some of which I have considered elsewhere. I will confine myself here to two basic lines of objection.
Bill Lycan has recently objected (1996a, 1996b) that the testimony of the subject can only show that the phenomenal character of color experience is indistinguishable moment to moment, and that allows the representationist to claim that it shifts gradually, in synch with the shift in the representational content of color experience. (I briefly considered this objection in my 1990, p. 68.) If that were right, the refutation of representationism would evaporate. But this objection ignores the longer term memories. The idea is that you remember the color of the sky on your birthday last year, the year before that, ten years before that, and so on, and your long term memory gives you good reason to think that the phenomenal character of the experience has not changed gradually. You don't notice any difference between your experience now and your experience 5 years ago or 10 years ago or 60 years ago. Has the color of the American flag changed gradually over the years? The stars used to be yellow and now they are white? No, I remember the stars from my childhood! They were always white. Of course, memory can go wrong, but why should we suppose that it must go wrong here? Surely, the scenario just described (without memory failure) is both conceptually and empirically possible. (As to the empirical possiblity, note that the thought experiment can be changed so as to involve a person raised in a room who is then moved to a different room where all the colors are changed. No need for a yellow sky, a yellow ceiling will do.)
Now a different objection may be mounted on Lycan's behalf-- that the externalist representationist should be externalist about memory. According to my story, the representational contents of the subject's color experience have shifted without his knowing about it. So if my story is right, Lycan (if he is to be an externalist about memory) should say that the subject's color experience has shifted gradually without the subject's knowing it. And that shows that the subject's memory is defective. 8
One possible justification is simply that the nature of phenomenal character is representational (and externalist), so the phenomenal character of experience shifts with its representational content. Since memory is powerless to reveal this shift, memory is by its nature defective.
But this reply is weak, smacking of begging the question. The Inverted Earth argument challenges externalist representationism about phenomenal character, so trotting in externalist representationism about memory of phenomenal character to defend it seems a bit pathetic. The idea of the Inverted Earth argument is to exploit the first person judgement that in the example as framed the subject notices no difference. The subject's experience and memories of that experience reveal no sign of the change in environment. Yet his representational contents shift. Since the contents in question are color contents, the move that was available earlier about a set of representational contents that capture what stays the same is not available here. And that suggests for reasons that I just gave that there is more to experience than its representational content. The defender of the view that memory is defective must blunt or evade the intuitive appeal of the first person point of view to be successful. It is no good to simply invoke the doctrine that experience is entirely representational. But the reply to the Inverted Earth argument as I presented it above does just that. It says that the memories of the representational contents are wrong, so the memories of the phenomenal characters are wrong too. But that is just to assume that as far as memory goes, phenomenal character is representational content. For the argument to have any force, there would need to be some independent reason for taking externalism about phenomenal memory seriously.
We could dramatize what is question-begging about the argument by augmenting the thought experiment so that the subject understands the philosophical theories that dictate that his representational contents shift. Then, being careful, he will acknowledge that the thought he used to think with the words "The sky is blue" is not the same as the thought he now thinks with those words. And he will acknowledge something similar about the representational content of his perception of the sky. So in the new version of the thought experiment, he knows that the representational contents of his experiences have shifted. But that gives him no reason to back down from his insistence that there is no difference in the way the sky looked to him (in one sense of that phrase), that if he could have both experiences to juxtapose, he would not be able to discern a difference. Plainly, he is justified in saying that there is no difference in something, something we could call the phenomenal character of the experience of looking at the sky.
It will be useful to briefly consider a related objection to the Inverted Earth argument. Suppose it is said that the subject's (that is, your) representational contents don't ever switch. No matter how long you spend on Inverted Earth, the sky still looks blue to you. After all, I have insisted that you notice no difference. This line of objection has more than a little force, but it can easily be seen not to lead away from my conclusion. For it is hard to see how anyone could accept this objection without also thinking that the subject (viz, you) on Inverted Earth has an "inverted spectrum" relative to the other denizens of Inverted Earth. The sky looks yellow to them but blue to you. And you are as functionally similar to them as you like. (We could even imagine that your monozygotic twin brother is one of them.). But once such easy generation of an inverted spectrum is allowed, we can imagine it happening on earth. Twins are raised, one with, the other without, inverting lenses. They end up functionally and representationally identical, but phenomenally different. And that provides an even clearer counter to representationism than the Inverted Earth argument.
It may be objected to this last point that even if raised on earth, the twins are not representationally identical. It may be said that the sky looks blue to one and yellow to the other, so they are representationally different. But if inverted spectra are rife (and given the huge variation in genes for cone pigments, there is reason to expect substantial differences in color perception among normal perceivers) then why should we suppose that the sky looks blue to some of us, but looks green to others and looks yellow to others? Why should it be supposed that only some of us perceive the sky veridically? Better to suppose that English color words do not express phenomenal characters. Phrases like 'looks blue' should be used to characterize all normal perceivers who are seeing something as blue (that is, whose intentional content of perception is as of blue), even if their spectra are shifted or inverted with respect to one another. 9
Now we are in a position to counter another of Lycan's (1996a, 1996b) arguments. He notes that I concede that our Inverted Earth subject has experiences whose representational contents (on looking at the Inverted Earth sky) shift from looking blue to looking yellow. And he concludes that this undermines the subject's claim that there is no difference between the way the sky looked to him on earth and the way the sky looks to him now 50 years later on Inverted earth. I have admitted that the sky looked blue to him at the beginning of our story on earth, and that the sky looks yellow to him at the end of our story on Inverted Earth. So how can I (or he) claim that the sky looks the same to him as it always did? Since he can't remember any change, we must conclude that the reason is that the change was gradual. But this argument ignores the distinction just made. "Looks blue" does not express a phenomenal character but rather a representational content! We can all agree that his color representational contents have changed. But it is phenomenal character that is relevant to noticing a difference, and it is phenomenal character that has remained the same. Representational content has changed purely externally.
I began the discussion of externalism by discussing a thought experiment
involving Putnam's Twin Earth. The idea was that I had emigrated from Twin Earth
to Earth and that after many years on Earth the representational contents of my
visual experiences of the liquid in the oceans shifted even though the
phenomenal character of the experiences stayed the same. I noted that there is
no immediate problem for the representationist here, since the constant
phenomenal character can be understood in representational terms. However, there
is no corresponding move available to the representationistin the case of an
emigration to or from Inverted Earth. And this puts the burden of proof on the
representationist. 10
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1. Shoemaker 1994a, 1994b combines phenomenism with internalist representationism. He holds that when one looks at a red tomato one's experience has a phenomenal character (that is not exhausted by its functional characterization) that represents the tomato as having a phenomenal property and also as being red, the latter via the former. The view is representationist because the phenomenal character of the experience consists in representing phenomenal properties of objects. (The objects have those phenomenal properties in virtue of standing in causal relations to those experiences).
2. Harman tells me that his view is actually the same as what I ascribe to Lycan. So his published statements on this issue are misleading.
3. As I mentioned earlier, there is also a problem for the recognitional view in the plausibility of the idea that we (or animals) can have an experience without any sort of categorization or recognition.
4. My impression is that Lycan (1995, 1996b) regards functionalism as inadequate to capture the experiential content of images and that motivates his form of representationism. See also White (1995).
5. See the papers in Crane (1992) for more on this issue.
6. I will make use of Harman's (1983) Inverted Earth example. Block (1980) uses a cruder example along the same lines. (P 302-303 of Block (1980)--reprinted on p. 466 of Lycan (1990) and p. 227 of Rosenthal (1991)). Instead of a place where things have the opposite from the normal colors, I envisioned a remote arctic village in which almost everything was black and white, and the subject of the thought experiment was said to have no standing color beliefs of the sort of "Grass is green". Two things happen to him: he confuses color words, and a color inverter is placed in his visual system. Everything looks to have the complementary of its real color, but he doesn't notice it because he lacks standing color beliefs. In the 1980 version of the paper, I mistakenly attributed the suggestion to Sylvain Bromberger who told me when he later read it that he had no idea why I had attributed any such idea to him. Harman used the Inverted Earth example to make a different point from that made here: that representational content does not supervene on the brain.
7. I am indebted to Bob Stalnaker for suggesting the change.
8. I took this point to be raised by some of the discussion of Lycan's paper at the meeting of Sociedad Filosofica Ibero-Americano in Cancun in June, 1995. If I had to credit it to anyone, it would be Alan Gibbard.
9. Clearer because it is a case of same representational content, different phenomenal character, and this yields a more direct argument that phenomenal character goes beyond representational content. Inverted earth provides the converse, same phenomenal character, different representational content. And so I have had to resort to a burden of proof argument. I have challenged the representationist with a question: what kind of representational content of experience stays the same?
10.
I am grateful for discussions with Tyler Burge, Brian Loar, Paul Horwich, Pierre
Jacob and Georges Rey and to Bill Lycan and his NEH Summer Seminar, 1995. I am
grateful to Burge, Lycan, Rey and to Sydney Shoemaker for helpful comments on an
earlier draft.