The words “content” and “character” in my title refer to the representational content and phenomenal character of color experiences. So my topic concerns the nature of our experience of color. But I will, of course, be talking about colors as well as color experience. Let me set the stage by mentioning some things, some more controversial than others, that I will be taking for granted. I assume, to begin with, that objects in the world have colors, and have them independently (...) of being perceived to have them, and independently even of there being creatures capable of perceiving them. I think, and this of course sets me apart from the many color irrealists among philosophers and color scientists, that any reasonable semantics for color terms, and any reasonable account of the reference of color concepts, should yield the result that colors are properties of external things that are realized in certain of their physical properties, namely those responsible for their reflecting or emitting the light whose impact on our retinas is involved in causing our color perceptions. This brings me to a further assumption that I shall be making, namely the truth of physicalism. I take physicalism to be the thesis that all properties of things either are or are realized in basic physical properties, where basic physical properties are the properties that underlie the behavior and causal powers of inanimate things. There are two ways in which the commitment to physicalism will figure in my discussion. First, I assume that colors are physically realized properties. Second, I assume that color experiences are physically realized. These two commitments frame the problem I am discussing – how can colors be properties realized in the microphysical properties of things, and how can color experience be so realized? I don’t think there is any generally accepted account of what it is for a property to be “realized in” other properties. For those who think, as I do, that properties are individuated by their causal features, it should seem plausible to say that property P realizes property Q just in case the forward looking causal features of Q are a subset of the forward looking causal features of P, and the backward looking.... (shrink)
From now on I will assume that it is possible in principle for there to be cases of spectrum inversion in which the invertees are equally good perceivers of the colors. What I want to show next is that while allowing this possibility is incompatible with standard representationalism, it requires acceptance of a different version of representationalism. Consider the standard way of describing a case of spectrum inversion. Returning to Jack and Jill, we say that red things look to Jack (...) the way green things look to Jill, blue things look to Jack the way yellow things look to Jill, and so on. Of course, we might also express this by saying that the phenomenal character of Jack’s experience of red things is like the phenomenal character of Jill’s experience of green things, and so on. Or by saying that “what it is like” for Jack to see red things is “what it is like” for Jill to see green things, and so on. But “phenomenal character” is philosophical jargon, and “what it is like” is on its way to being that. We need to be able cash these locutions in terms that we are sure we understand. And I think that the best way of doing that is in terms of how things look. Now the sense in which red things look different to Jack and Jill cannot be that they look to have different colors in the epistemic sense. We can suppose that both perceive red things as being red, and therefore that to both red things look red in the epistemic sense. Nor can it be the comparative sense – to each, we can suppose, red things look like standard red things under standard conditions. The remaining sense of “looks” is supposed to be the phenomenal sense. Now those who employ this notion typically speak of things as looking red, blue, yellow, etc., in the phenomenal sense. But if Jack and Jill are both accurate perceivers of the colors of things, it can’t be that the difference in how things look to them is a difference in what colors things look to them, even if “looks” is used in the phenomenal sense.. (shrink)
These lectures have been organized around the question of whether there is any good sense in which our introspective access to our own mental states is a kind of perception, something that can appropriately be called "inner sense." In my first lecture I distinguished two versions of the perception model of introspection, based on two different stereotypes of sense perception. One of these, based primarily on the case of vision, is what I called the object perceptual model -- it takes (...) perception to be in the first instance a relation to objects and only secondarily a relation to facts. I argued in my first lecture that introspection does not have non factual objects of the sort required to make this model applicable. The other, which does not require perception to have non factual objects, I called the broad perceptual model; its key tenet is that the existence of the objects of perception, whether they be factual or non factual, is independent both of their being perceived and of there being the possibility of their being perceived. The view that introspection conforms to this was my target in my second lecture, where I argued that it is of the essence of various kinds of mental states that they are introspectively accessible. (shrink)
This paper is about the relation between two metaphysical topics: the nature of properties, and way the instantiation of a property is sometimes “realized in” something more fundamental. It is partly an attempt to develop further, but also to correct, my earlier treatments of these topics. In my published work on realization, including my book Physical Realization, I was at pains to insist that acceptance of my view about this does not commit one to the causal theory of properties I (...) have defended in several places. I held that it commits one to the claim that within any given world, properties with the same causal profile are identical, but not to the requirement that a property must have the same causal profile in any world in which it can be instantiated. I now think that this was a mistake. There is an argument from the account of realization I have offered to the conclusion that, if physicalism is true, properties of macroscopic objects have their causal profiles essentially. In what follows I will present that argument.Along the way I will correct what now seem to me mistakes in my earlier presentationsof the account of realization. And I will conclude with an additional argument for the causal theory of properties, one that does not tie it to the assumption that physicalism is true or to my account of realization. (shrink)
Tyler Burge argues on the basis of an account of memory that the notion of quasimemory cannot be used to answer the circularity objection to psychological accounts of personal identity. His account implies the impossibility of the "Parfit people," creatures psychologically like us who undergo amoeba-like fission at the age of twenty-one, with only one offshoot allowed to survive, and who have "quareers," made up of the career of the original person and the career of the sole survivor, that exhibit (...) the same sort of psychological continuity that characterizes normal human careers, and are such that epistemic warrant is preserved across the episodes of fission and often involves quasimemories that are not memories. But what he says about memory does not support the denial that such creatures are possible. Where he thinks de se attitudes are necessary, de se * attitudes, indexed to quareers instead of to careers, would serve equally well. It is further argued that the circularity objection to psychological accounts can be answered without appeal to the notion of quasi-memory. Because of the internal relations between the causal profiles of mental states and the persistence conditions of their possessors, in principle there can be a "package deal" definition that simultaneously defines both. (shrink)
The paper defends the view that there is a constitutive relation between believing something and believing that one believes it. This view is supported by the incoherence of affirming something while denying that one believes it, and by the role awareness of the contents one’s belief system plays in the rational regulation of that system. Not all standing beliefs are accompanied by higher-order beliefs that self-ascribe them; those that are so accompanied are ones that are “available” in the sense that (...) their subjects are poised to assent to their contents, to use them as premises in reasoning, and to be guided by them in their behavior. The account is compatible with the possibility of negative self-deception—mistakenly believing that one does not believe something—but the closest thing to positive self-deception it allows is believing falsely that a belief with a certain content is one’s dominant belief on a certain matter through failure to realize that one has a stronger belief that contradicts it. The view has implications about Moore’s paradox that contradict widely held views. On this view self-ascriptions of beliefs can be warranted and grounded on reasons—but the reasons are not phenomenally conscious mental states (as held by Christopher Peacocke) but rather available beliefs. (shrink)
The paper is concerned with how neo-Lockean accounts of personal identity should respond to the challenge of animalist accounts. Neo-Lockean accounts that hold that persons can change bodies via brain transplants or cerebrum transplants are committed to the prima facie counterintuitive denial that a person is an (biologically individuated) animal. This counterintuitiveness can be defused by holding that a person is biological animal (on neo-Lockean views) if the “is” is the “is” of constitution rather than the “is” of identity, and (...) that a person is identical with an animal in a sense of “animal” different from that which requires the persistence conditions of animals to be biological. Another challenge is the “too many minds problem”: if persons and their coincident biological animals share the same physical properties, and mental properties supervene on physical properties, the biological animal will share the mental properties of the person, and so should itself be a person. The response to this invokes a distinction between “thin” properties, which are shared by coincident entities, and “thick” properties which are not so shared. Mental properties, and their physical realizers, are thick, not thin, so are not properties persons share with their bodies or biological animals. The paper rebuts the objection that neo-Lockean accounts cannot explain how persons can have physical properties. To meet a further problem it is argued that the biological properties of persons and those of biological animals are different because of differences in their causal profiles. (shrink)
The sense in which having the available belief that P gives one a reason for believing that one believes that P is just that if one has that available belief one is thereby justified, or warranted, in believing that one has it. In explaining why it is so it helps to bring in the notion of rationality. We noted earlier that it is a requirement of full human rationality that one regularly revise one’s belief system in the direction of greater (...) consistency and coherence, and, as a condition of one’s being able to do this, that one have access to its contents and their relations to one another. Judging that one believes something when one does, and judging that one doesn’t believe something when one doesn’t, are manifestations of the satisfaction of this requirement of rationality. That seems a sufficient reason to say that one is warranted in doing so. (shrink)
In Physical Realization, Sydney Shoemaker considers the question of how physicalism can be true: how can all facts about the world, including mental ones, be ...
Since the appearance of a widely influential book, Self-Knowledge and Self-ldentity, Sydney Shoemaker has continued to work on a series of interrelated issues in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. This volume contains a collection of the most important essays he has published since then. The topics that he deals with here include, among others, the nature of personal and other forms of identity, the relation of time to change, the nature of properties and causality and the relation between the (...) two, dualism and immortality, and the nature of mental states. All the essays show the same care and precision in argument as the earlier book, but they also reveal a substantial shift in Professor Shoemaker's position to a form of materialism. In fact, a number of papers together constitute what is probably the most subtle and rigorous defence yet of a sophisticated functionalism in the account of the mind. (shrink)
Let thin properties be properties shared by coincident entities, e.g., a person and her body, and thick properties ones that are not shared. Thick properties entail sortal properties, e.g., being a person, and the associated persistence conditions. On the first account of realization defined here, the realized property and its realizers will belong to the same individual. This restricts the physical realizers of mental properties, which are thick, to thick physical properties. We also need a sense in which mental properties (...) can be realized in thin physical properties shared by a person and her body. Defining this in turn requires defining a sense in which the instantiations of sortal properties and of thick properties are realized in micro-structural states of affairs. A fourth notion of realization is needed to allow for the possibility of coincident entities that share a sortal property, e.g., coincident persons. (shrink)
Emergence requires that the ultimate physical micro-entities have micro-latent causal powers, which manifest themselves only when the entities are combined in ways that are emergence-engendering, in addition to the micro-manifest powers that account for their behavior in other circumstances. Subjects of emergent properties will have emergent micro-structural properties, specified partly in terms of these micro-latent powers, each of which will be determined by a micro-structural property specified only in terms of the micro-manifest powers of the constituents and the way they (...) are related. If the determiner and the determined properties are distinct, this determination is the basis of the supervenience of emergent properties on non-emergent physical properties. If not, emergence does not involve such supervenience. Either way, there is no problem with diachronic downward causation. (shrink)
[…] One view I hold about the nature of phenomenal character, which is also a view about the relation between phenomenal character and the introspective belief about it, is that phenomenal character is “self intimating.” This means that it is of the essence of a state’s having a certain phenomenal character that this issues in the subject’s being introspectively aware of that character, or does so if the subject reflects. Part of my aim is to give an account which makes (...) it intelligible that this should be so. A more substantive view I hold about phenomenal character is that a perceptual state’s having a certain phenomenal character is a matter of its having a certain sort of representational content. This much I hold in common with a number of recent writers, including Gil Harman, Michael Tye, Bill Lycan, and Fred Dretske. But representationalism about phenomenal character often goes with the rejection of “qualia,” and with the rejection of the possibility of spectrum inversion and other sorts of “qualia invesion.” My version of representationalism embraces what other versions reject. It assigns an essential role to qualia, and accepts the possibility of qualia inversion. A central aim of the present paper is to present a version of this view which is free of the defects I now see in my earlier versions of it. (shrink)
A common conception of what it is for one property to “realize” another suggests that it is the realizer property that does the causal work, and that the realized property is epiphenomenal. The same conception underlies George Bealer’s argument that functionalism leads to the absurd conclusion that what we take to be self-ascriptions of a mental state are really self-ascriptions of “first-order” properties that realize that state. This paper argues for a different concept of realization. A property realizes another if (...) its “forward looking” causal features are a subset of those of the property realized. The instantiation of the realizer property will include the instantiation of the property realized; and when the effects produced are due to the causal features of the latter, it is the instantiation of it that is appropriately regarded as their cause. Epiphenomenalism is avoided, and so is Bealer’s absurd conclusion. (shrink)
A major objection to the view that the relation of persons to human animals is coincidence rather than identity is that on this view the human animal will share the coincident person's physical properties, and so should (contrary to the view) share its mental properties. But while the same physical predicates are true of the person and the human animal, the difference in the persistence conditions of these entities implies that there will be a difference in the properties ascribed by (...) these predicates, with the result that the physical properties that determine the person's mental states will belong to the person and not to the human animal. (shrink)
[Sydney Shoemaker] A major objection to the view that the relation of persons to human animals is coincidence rather than identity is that on this view the human animal will share the coincident person's physical properties, and so should (contrary to the view) share its mental properties. But while the same physical predicates are true of the person and the human animal, the difference in the persistence conditions of these entities implies that there will be a difference in the properties (...) ascribed by these predicates, with the result that the physical properties that determine the person's mental states will belong to the person and not to the human animal. /// [Galen Strawson] What are the grounds of self-consciousness? I consider 29 proposals and reject 22, including a number of proposals that experience of body (or bodies) is necessary for self-consciousness. A popular strategy in debates of this sort is to argue that one cannot be said to have some concept C (e.g. the concept ONESELF, necessary for self-consciousness) unless one has a need or a use for C given the character of one's experience considered independently of the character that it has given that one possesses C. I suggest that such arguments are invalid. (shrink)
Let me begin by indicating where I think Harman and I are in agreement. We both think that "subjective reactions" must come into an account of color, although we have different views about how they do. We both think that perceptual experience has a "presentational or representational character," and that color is represented by our visual experiences as a feature of external objects, not as a feature of our experience. Moreover, we agree that, as Harman puts it, "color is experienced (...) as a simple basic quality, rather than a disposition or complex of causal properties." As Harman emphasized in an earlier paper, 1 what we are introspectively aware of in our experience is its presentational or representational content, not any "mental paint" which bestows this content. I shall refer to all of this as Harman's "phenomenological point." Because we agree on this, we also agree that if his characters George and Mary were spectrum inverted relative to each other, supposing that to be possible, this would have to involve their perceiving the same objects as having different properties, this despite the fact that as normal perceivers they would perceive these objects as having the same colors. And I think we agree that in this case the properties would have to be relational ones, defined or constituted by their relations to the experiences of the subject perceiving them. (shrink)
Sydney Shoemaker is one of the most influential philosophers currently writing on philosophy of mind and metaphysics. The essays in this collection deal with the way in which we know our own minds, and with the nature of those mental states of which we have our most direct conscious awareness. Professor Shoemaker opposes the 'inner sense' conception of introspective self-knowledge. He defends the view that perceptual and sensory states have non-representational features - 'qualia' - that determine what it is like (...) to have them. Amongst the other topics covered are the unity of consciousness, and the idea that the 'first-person perspective' gives a privileged route to philosophical understanding of the nature of mind. This major collection is sure to prove invaluable to all advanced students of the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. (shrink)
* Argument from authoritative self-knowledge ("privileged access" to one's own mental states) 1. We have a "privileged access" to our own mental states in the sense we have the authority on what mental states we are in. 2. Through introspection, we are aware of our mental states but not aware of them as physical states of any sort or as functional states. 3. Therefore, our mental states cannot be physical states.
These lectures have been organized around the question of whether there is any good sense in which our introspective access to our own mental states is a kind of perception, something that can appropriately be called "inner sense." In my first lecture I distinguished two versions of the perception model of introspection, based on two different stereotypes of sense- perception. One of these, based primarily on the case of vision, is what I called the object-perceptual model -- it takes perception (...) to be in the first instance a relation to objects and only secondarily a relation to facts. I argued in my first lecture that introspection does not have non-factual objects of the sort required to make this model applicable. The other, which does not require perception to have non-factual objects, I called the broad perceptual model; its key tenet is that the existence of the objects of perception, whether they be factual or non-factual, is independent both of their being perceived and of there being the possibility of their being perceived. The view that introspection conforms to this was my target in my second lecture, where I argued that it is of the essence of various kinds of mental states that they are introspectively accessible. (shrink)
