An externalist's guide to inner experience

In Bence Nanay (ed.), Perceiving the World. Oxford University Press. pp. 97–145 (2010)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Let's be externalists about perceptual consciousness and think the form of veridical perceptual consciousness includes /seeing this or that mind-independent particular and its colors/. Let's also take internalism seriously, granting that spectral inversion and hallucination can be "phenomenally" the same as normal seeing. Then perceptual consciousness and phenomenality are different, and so we need to say how they are related. It's complicated!<br><br>Phenomenal sameness is (against all odds) /reflective indiscriminability/. I build a "displaced perception" account of reflection on which indiscriminability stems from shared "qualia". Qualia are compatible with direct realism: while they generate an explanatory gap (and colors do not), so does /seeing/; qualia are excluded from perceptual consciousness by its "transparency"; instead, qualia are aspects of thought about the perceived environment. <br><br>The asymmetry between my treatments of color and seeing is grounded in the asymmetry between ignorance and error: while inversion shows that normal subjects are ignorant of the natures of the colors, hallucination shows not that perceivers are ignorant of the nature of seeing but that hallucinators are prone to error about their condition. Past literature has treated inversion and hallucination as on a par: externalists see error in both cases, while internalists see mutual ignorance. My account is so complicated because plausible results require mixing it up.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 91,219

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Direct realism and perceptual consciousness.Susanna Siegel - 2006 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (2):378-410.
On being alienated.Michael G. F. Martin - 2006 - In Tamar S. Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Perceptual Experience. Oxford University Press.
Generalizing qualia inversion.Neil Campbell - 2004 - Erkenntnis 60 (1):27-34.
Heirs of nothing: The implications of transparency.Matthew Kennedy - 2009 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (3):574-604.
Indiscriminability and the sameness of appearance.Katalin Farkas - 2006 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106 (2):39-59.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
293 (#65,888)

6 months
8 (#292,366)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Benj Hellie
University of Toronto at Scarborough

References found in this work

Naming and Necessity: Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium.Saul A. Kripke - 1980 - Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Edited by Darragh Byrne & Max Kölbel.
Knowledge and its limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - New York: Oxford University Press.
The Varieties of Reference.Gareth Evans - 1982 - Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edited by John Henry McDowell.
What is it like to be a bat?Thomas Nagel - 1974 - Philosophical Review 83 (October):435-50.

View all 93 references / Add more references