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Externalism, biconditional intentionalisms, and
phenomenal content
phil 93507
Jeff Speaks
November 23, 2009
1 Biconditional vs. conditional intentionalism.................... 1 2 Three problems for biconditional intentionalisms................. 2 2.1 From liberal views about the scope of perceptual content......... 2 2.2 From cases of ‘mixing’............................ 2 2.3 From the representation of change...................... 3 3 Phenomenal content................................. 3
1 Biconditional vs. conditional intentionalism
One of the (many) distinctions between various intentionalist theses which we made at the start of the semester was the distinction between conditional and biconditional formu- lations of intentionalism. If we stick to an interpersonal intramodal local intentionalism, the relevant formulations are:
Conditional: Necessarily, if two perceptual experiences of the same sense modality differ in phenomenal character, then they differ in content. Biconditional: Necessarily, two perceptual experiences of the same sense modality differ in phenomenal character iff they differ in content.
The difference between these is important because, at least on the face of it, it seems that the second is needed to support the claims about phenomenal character being indentical to a certain sort of representational content which intentionalists often want to make. Over the last few decades, most intentionalists have been biconditional intentionalists, whatever their views on the other choice points — intramodal vs. intermodal, global vs. local.
2 Three problems for biconditional intentionalisms
Here are three problems for biconditional intentionalisms, all of which are attempts to produce pairs of experiences which differ in content but not phenomenal character.
2.1 From liberal views about the scope of perceptual content
An obvious one comes from any view about the scope of perceptual content liberal enough to let in external particulars or natural kinds (or, if you prefer individual essences to the objects themselves, liberal enough to let perceptual experiences of perceptually indistin- guishable objects to represent the individual essences of the relevant objects).
Or, think about the Caplan & Schroeder article on the representation of space and time. If you think that I represent not just that yellow is instantiated somewhere but also that it is instantiated in this place at this time, and that there can phenomenally indistinguishable places and times, we can get pairs of experiences of the right sort.
Probably the same can be said of any externalist theory of perception, so long as we are internalists about phenomenal character. We will always be able to generate counterex- amples to biconditional intentionalism by getting the differences in content from purely external changes.
2.2 From cases of ‘mixing’
Recall the cases of color contrast and color constancy that we discussed earlier. One way of accommodating cases of color constancy is to say that our visual representation of surfaces represents not just color, but also illumination; cases of color constancy are then described as cases in which we represent as constant the color of the relevant object, but represent its illumination as changing. But that kind of view makes a case in which two color/illumination pairs conspire to create a pair of experiences with the same phenomenal character.
Suppose, for example, that I am looking at a yellow banana and that the light illuminating the banana is slowly changing from white to red. One might say that I represent the color of the banana as constant, but the lighting as changing. Now contrast that with a case in which I am out banana picking and come across a (quite rare) orange banana. Presumably I can represent the banana as orange. Couldn’t some experience in the first series match the second in phenomenal character? If so, we would have a pair of experiences which differed in content but not phenomenal character.
It seems as though we might be able to generate experiences of this sort whenever, intu- itively speaking, one ‘phenomenal aspect’ of our experience involves the representation of two different properties. Another possibility: an experience of a coin on its side and the perception of a very narrow elliptical figure.
representation should be closed under disjunction (or closed under disjunction for a certain restricted class of propositions).
Or one might say that phenomenal contents are existentially quantified claims. So, for example, take two experiences of indistinguishable golf balls. Perhaps these differ in content; but surely both perceivers represent it as the case that there is something which is white and dimpled. But this does not seem obvious to me either; it seems to me that this is something that I will believe in the standard case based on the experience, but it is not at all obvious that I represent these kinds of general propositions as well as particular object-directed propositions.
It also gets more difficult to see how this strategy can be carried out if we think about cases of mixing. What would the existentially quantified proposition be in the above case?
How could this be applied to the representation of change? Would we say that we represent the duck as moving in some direction at some speed, where ‘0 in/s’ counts as a speed?
This is a problem for theorists who want to say that, even if biconditional intentionalism is false, phenomenal character is identical to a certain kind of content, namely phenomenal content. More needs to be said that there is such a kind of content.
There’s also a lesson here for narrow content theorists. One can’t just say that narrow content is ‘the kind of content that intrinsic duplicates have in common’ because it is far from obvious that there is such a thing.
