Abstract
Even if spectrum inversion of various sorts is possible, spectrum inversion without a difference in representation is not. So spectrum inversion does not pose a challenge for the intentionalist thesis that, necessarily, within a given sense modality, if two experiences are alike with respect to content, they are also alike with respect to their phenomenal character. On the contrary, reflection on variants of standard cases of spectrum inversion provides a strong argument for intentionalism. Depending on one’s views about the possibility of spectrum inversion, the impossibility of spectrum inversion without a difference in representation can also be used as an argument against a variety of reductive theories of mental representation.
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Notes
At least within the analytic tradition; talk about perceptual states as intentional states has been a more or less constant feature of discussions of perception in the phenomenological tradition since Brentano.
For a defense, see, among other places, Shoemaker (2001).
The use of ‘red-feeling’ as a term for ‘having the phenomenology characteristic of my experiences which represent an object as red’ is borrowed from Byrne and Hilbert’s introduction to Byrne and Hilbert (1997).
See, for example, Hilbert (2005).
Similar remarks are in order about the ‘same color illusion’ and other cases in which the representation of the color of a surface appears to differ depending on the colors of surrounding surfaces. We can simply abstract from contextual dependence of this sort by imagining that, in the above cases, the experience of the colored surface occupies the whole of the subject’s visual field.
For an alternative to views of this sort, see Cohen (2008).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for helpful discussion of the relevance of color constancy to the above argument.
For discussion of the distinction between epistemic and phenomenal senses of ‘seems,’ see, among other places , Chisholm (1957).
One might give a similar objection to the idea that cases of constant phenomenology + psychedelic content are impossible, based on a case in which you know that your visual system generates a constant charcoal-gray-feeling experience only in response to surfaces which are rapidly changing from bright red, to bright green, to bright blue.
A different sort of objection than the two considered is that in the case of psychedelic phenomenology, what must be changing is the representation of ‘appearance properties’, not color properties. I’m ignoring this possibility for the moment—I return to it below.
Here I’m thinking of the two language users as alike at the level of perceptual content and phenomenology—not as spectrum inverted as well as vocabulary inverted. This is important for considering certain kinds of inverted spectrum arguments against intentionalism. See the discussion of Thau in note 33.
We are not licensed to build in the assumption that the same relation R must do this work in the case every agent; just that any relation which plays this role must be a one-to-one relation between experiences of certain phenomenal types and the color properties they represent. Maybe, for all we have said, there are a number of irreducibly distinct ways in which a linguistic expression can come to have a given referent, and perhaps, just so, there are a number of irreducibly distinct ways in which a color-phenomenology can come to be associated (for a given agent) with a certain color property. We’re also not licensed to assume that the same relation must do this work at every time in the life of a single agent. These points are irrelevant to the arguments of this section; I return to them explicitly in the discussion of Quietist Moderate Anti-Intentionalism in the section which follows.
See, among many other places, Stampe (1979) and Stalnaker (1984). One, could, of course, stipulate that indication is a one-to-one relation, by adding to the definition the requirement that x can only indicate y if nothing else does. This sort of view would be open to the objection to covariational theories discussed below.
It’s important to keep in mind here that we’re talking only about perceptual experiences, and not about ‘phenomenal states’ more generally. So I’m not here denying Block’s plausible claim that, e.g., ‘orgasm experiences’ lack a representational content. See Block (2003).
I think that the best reply for the covariational theorist is to deny the possibility of the sorts of cases described above: to deny that it is possible for experiences of a certain phenomenal type to fail to covary with color properties in the conditions specified by the theory. Another way to put this is to say that the conditions specified by the theory are such that it is impossible for experiences of the relevant phenomenal types to fail to covary with colors when those conditions obtain. But this is hard to believe. The ‘conditions specified by the theory’ must be loose enough to allow for spectrum inversion, so they must be loose enough to allow my phenomenal-green experiences to covary with a different color than do those of my invert. But how could they be loose enough to allow this without also allowing for the possibility that someone’s phenomenal-green experiences could fail to covary with any color property?
This is the analogue of the move from solipsistic to non-solipsistic conceptual role semantics, in the terminology of Harman (1987).
These horizontal relations might impose further requirements to do with relative location in color space, or subsumption of certain similar determinate shades under single determinable colors, as in the theory of Hilbert and Kalderon (2000). Though Hilbert and Kalderon are intentionalists, it seems to me that an argument of the present sort might be used against their theory of the contents of color experiences. In future work, I hope to show how arguments of the present sort might be brought to bear on functionalist theories of the content of color experience more generally, whether those are accompanied by intentionalist or anti-intentionalist views of the relationship between phenomenal character and perceptual content.
Of course, the same complaint might be made against the Interpersonal Intentionalist who fails to offer any explanation of this supervenience claim.
Here I’m again assuming that color phenomenology is linked to representation of color properties, and setting to the side views which make use of the representation of appearance properties. I discuss these views below.
There is a kind of analogy here to sorites arguments and the range of cases in which, intuitively, it is indeterminate whether a predicate applies to a thing. Truth-value gap approaches are the analogue of the interval of contentless experience, and epistemicism is the view that t = 0. One thought is that one or another view about vagueness might come to the aid of the Intrapersonal time-restricted intentionalist who rejects Intrapersonal Time-Unrestricted Intentionalism. So far, I haven’t been able to come up with any plausible candidates.
This sort of moderate anti-intentionalist must claim that there are properties relevant to the determination of the contents of the states of a subject which, by their nature, cannot change over the course of that subject’s life. The obvious thought here is that something to do with the subject’s evolutionary history is relevant. No matter how long a subject lives, one might think, the purposes for which his states evolved cannot change. I’m skeptical that this way out can work. For one thing, the plausibility of evolutionary theories of content seem to decrease when we consider sufficiently long-lived and protean organisms. Further, it’s hard to see how these sorts of theories of content can avoid the problem discussed above: that two distinct types of phenomenal states could have evolved to represent the same color property, which would make cases of psychedelic phenomenology + constant content possible. However, I don’t think that anything I’ve said shows definitively that no version of this response on the part of the moderate anti-intentionalist who wants to endorse Intrapersonal Time-Unrestricted Intentionalism will work.
This may make some want to rethink the earlier claim that, for example, cases of psychedelic phenomenology + constant content are impossible. Maybe the right thing for an anti-intentionalist to say is just that, contrary to our initial intuitions, these cases really are possible. I’ve said nothing against this position other than the statement of intuitions about cases above.
For defenses of intentionalism, see especially, Harman (1990), Byrne (2001), and Tye (2002). For an illuminating discussion of types of perceptual experience which have been thought to be problematic for intentionalism, see Chap. 4 of Tye (2000).
One might think that the present argument is incomplete without some response to the Lockean argument against Interpersonal Intentionalism above. There are different versions of the Lockean argument—which include different arguments for the conclusion that neither of the inverted subjects is misrepresenting the colors of things. Consideration of all of these is well beyond the scope of this paper. But there is something to be said about the ‘parity’ argument above: no one who thinks that radical skeptical scenarios are possible should be convinced by it. In a skeptical scenario of almost any sort, the subject would arguably be reasonable to think that the skeptical scenario does not obtain, for just the same reasons that we think that we are reasonable in thinking that we aren’t living in some such scenario. But we shouldn’t infer from this point that there’s something impossible about radical skeptical scenarios. Just so, we shouldn’t infer from the correct point that a spectrum-inverted subject would have good reason to believe that she was not misrepresenting the colors the conclusion that it is impossible that she is.
This does not entail that every sort of perceptual representation of properties has an associated phenomenology. I think it is plausible that, for example, perceptual experiences can represent objects as belonging to certain natural kinds, even though two experiences can differ in their representation of natural kind properties without there being any difference between the phenomenal characters of the two experiences. For argument, see Speaks (2009), which is based on some examples from Johnston (2004).
I’m skirting questions about ‘nonconceptual content’, which I think are ultimately beside the point here. While it is true that the easiest way of reading the present argument involves attributing the same kind of content to perceptual states and to beliefs—an assumption that most proponents of nonconceptual content will want to reject—the only assumption which is strictly required is that in the default case, a difference in the content of a perceptual experience will issue in a difference in the content of the perceptual belief formed by taking that experience at face value.
There’s a connection here with a powerful version of the inverted spectrum argument against intentionalism which can be taken from the discussion in Thau (2002):
Suppose that two subjects spectrum inverted relative to each other, Invert and Nonvert, are members of a single linguistic community. Since they both use, for example, ‘blue’ and ‘yellow’ to apply to the same things, and seem to understand each other perfectly well, we can take it that each uses these words with the same meaning. But they use these words to report their perceptual beliefs; and surely they aren’t mis-reporting the contents of their own beliefs! So, since each says on the basis of their visual experience ‘I believe that that marigold is yellow’, we can safely assume that they have the same beliefs about the colors of things. But they form these beliefs on the basis of their visual experiences of the colors of things; and surely they aren’t mistaken about how their own visual experiences represent the world as being! So we can take it that their visual experiences agree in their representation of the colors of things. But then two subjects can have experiences alike with respect to the representation of color but different with respect to color phenomenology, and Interpersonal Intentionalism (or at least the kind defended above) must be false, after all.
In my view, this is the most challenging version of the inverted spectrum argument against intentionalism. I’m inclined to think that the right response is to reject the supposition that the two use the words ‘blue’ and ‘yellow’ to stand for the same property. Why not think that in some cases two people can use words to stand for different properties, even if this difference in meaning could never come to light?
See Fodor (1990).
This is a kind of reversal of the powerful argument against intentionalism in Block (1999), and is connected to recent discussion of the puzzle of ‘true blue’ in, for example, Tye (2006). The response to these arguments suggested by the foregoing is pretty much the one in Byrne and Hilbert (2007); see also Tye (2007).
Since there are actual cases of spectrum shifted subjects, this gives us a test for proposed theories of mental representation. To again use Fodor’s theory as an example, do every pair of spectrum shifted subjects differ with respect to, for example, dependence relations among nomological connections between mental representations and instantiations of color properties?
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Acknowledgments
Thanks for helpful comments on previous versions of this paper to Casey O’Callaghan, Adam Pautz, participants in a colloquium at McGill University, and the students in my graduate seminar at Notre Dame in the Spring of 2007.
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Speaks, J. Spectrum inversion without a difference in representation is impossible. Philos Stud 156, 339–361 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9607-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9607-z