Abstract
Representationalism is the view that the phenomenal character of experiences is identical to their representational content of a certain sort. This view requires a strong transparency condition on phenomenally conscious experiences. We argue that affective qualities such as experienced pleasantness or unpleasantness are counter-examples to the transparency thesis and thus to the sort of representationalism that implies it.
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Notes
‘Affect’ as used here is sometimes called in the literature ‘valence’ or ‘hedonic tone’ that can be positive or negative. Hereafter, unless otherwise noted, we shall use ‘affect’ to refer exclusively to primary affect. Primary affect, as we shall sometimes say, is perceptual affect, affect directly presented to us in perceptual experiences. Intuitively, perceptual experiences, when they have an affective phenomenology, seem to present to us the affective qualities of perceptual objects. For this reason, it seems proper to say that the phenomenology of primary affect is the phenomenology of affect-presenting experiences, whereas the phenomenology of secondary affect may be identified with the phenomenology of affect-causing perceptual experiences (such as the extreme unpleasantness of feeling a lump under my arm after 5 years of remission of a lymph cancer). We don’t claim that the distinction between primary and secondary affect is simple, clean, or clear-cut.
Throughout the paper we will assume phenomenal realism about affective qualities, according to which there is a distinctive episodic phenomenology to experiencing affective qualities when we perceive or introspect them. The phenomenology of affect is a fairly interesting question that needs more serious discussion. One of the main worries is that experiencing affective qualities doesn’t have the same kind of phenomenology as that of experiencing standard sensible qualities (like colors for instance). Characterizing the difference turns out to be difficult and controversial (see e.g., Robinson 2006; Clark 2005; Aydede 2000). But for our critical purposes in this paper, we don’t need to address this issue: what we mean by ‘phenomenal realism’ is that there is some episodic affective aspect to our experiences that makes an introspectable difference. Affective qualities, then, are just those features (whatever they are) that are partly or wholly constitutive of these aspects. They may not be intrinsic or simple, they may not even be qualitative in the sense of there being qualia for which a quality space can be specified through standard multidimensional scaling experiments (Clark 1993, 2000, 2005). In this weak sense, phenomenal realism about affect is common ground between us and our opponents. However, some early representationalists such as Armstrong (1968) and Pitcher (1970), who advocated affect as purely attitudinal responses to sensation, could be interpreted as phenomenal eliminativists about affective qualities.
In what follows, we will assume (for convenience) a primary quality view of all sensible qualities including so-called secondary qualities. On such a view, all sensible qualities are extra-mental objective/physical properties (or relations). But nothing very important hangs on this for our present purposes: all our opponents assume such a view of sensible qualities.
We will see that both these claims (that the properties are distinct and that there is dependency relations between them) are common ground between us and our opponents.
For example, Dretske writes in the prologue to his 1995 that his Representation Thesis (a version of SR) holds two tenets: “(1) All mental facts are representational facts, and (2) All representational facts are facts about informational functions.” He concludes that this view provides “a satisfying account of the qualitative, the first-person, aspect of our sensory and affective life—distinguishing in naturalistic terms between what we experience (reality) and how we experience it (appearance).” Later in his lectures, he fills in the details of this naturalistic account: “According to the Representational Thesis, the facts that make what is in the head mental, the facts that convert electrical and chemical activity in the cortex into blue-dog experiences, are facts that are not identifiable by looking, exclusively, at what is in the head. What makes a certain pattern of electrical activity in the cortex into a blue-dog experience is a fact about what this activity represents, what it has the function of indicating” (Dretske 1995, p. 36–37). Dretske thus defends a teleological form of indicator psychosemantics. For a summary of varieties of psychosemantics proposed for conscious sensory representations, see Lycan (2008).
As Tye writes, “The broad picture I have here of perceptual sensations draws a sharp distinction between these states and beliefs or other conceptual states. Perceptual sensations, in my view, form the outputs of specialized sensory modules and stand ready to produce conceptual responses via the action of higher-level cognitive processing of one sort or another. So perceptual sensations feed into the conceptual system, without themselves being a part of that system. They are nondoxastic or nonconceptual states. This, I want to stress, does not mean that perceptual sensations are not symbolic states. But, in my view, they are symbolic states very different from beliefs” (Tye 1995, p. 103–104). Tye (1995, 2000), like Dretske (1981, 1995), puts further conditions on a representation to count as sensory such as being poised to be consumed by central cognitive systems, abstract, non-object-involving, etc.
The notion of ‘epistemic encounter’ is left deliberately vague in this formulation in order to avoid making substantive assumptions about how introspection works and what it requires. Nevertheless, we will be assuming that introspection, when it yields introspective knowledge as it often does, requires appropriate concepts. This should not be controversial between us and our opponents in this essay—see below for more on this.
See especially Harman (1990) and Tye (2000, 2002)—cf. Dretske (1999, p. 103): “(1) Conscious perceptual experiences exist inside a person (probably somewhere in the brain). (2) Nothing existing inside a person has (or needs to have) the properties one is aware in having these experiences.” However, we don’t want to claim that the way the transparency intuitions are supposed to support SR is very clear in the writings of these authors. In fact, despite the fast growing literature on the topic, we don’t think there is any emerging consensus about what exactly transparency is and what it is supposed to show about theories in philosophy of perception. See Aydede (forthcoming) for an attempt to clarify the thesis in more detail. Accordingly, our point in the main text can be taken as a way of clarifying our target of criticism: roughly, we want to criticize the kind of representationalism that has ST as its consequence. We don’t think this should be controversial—whatever the more accurate historical or philosophical scholarship on existing literature turns out to reveal.
Tye (1995, 1997, 2000, 2005a, b). For other representationalist treatments of pains and other bodily sensations, see Harman (1990), Dretske (1995, 1999), Byrne (2001), Seager (2002), Bain (2003, 2007); for the affective aspects of pains, see especially Bain (2013) and O'Sullivan and Schroer (2012). Our criticism below will equally apply to the latter two. For a sustained criticism of representationalism about intranstive bodily sensations in general, see Aydede (2006, 2009, forthcoming).
For instance, we think that the main part of our criticism below, when modified suitably, will also be effective against versions of naïve realism as well as certain weaker forms of intentionalism.
To illustrate, suppose that I am in my study room and I hear my spouse in the kitchen telling my son not to touch the red apple on the counter. I form the belief: THAT APPLE IS RED. On our use this belief is not a direct perceptual belief—although it may be a perceptual belief if its content can be the content of a perceptual experience—because it’s not formed as a non-mediated direct response to a perceptual experience of an appropriate sort. Dretske sometimes calls this sort of indirect perceptual belief formation, displaced (epistemic) perception. Note that direct perceptual beliefs are psychologically mediated—by appropriate experiences, but not, intuitively, by other beliefs.
Although the terminology is somewhat ours, the clarifications and claims just made are common ground among intentionalists. In fact, Dretske (1981, 1995) and Tye (1995, 2000) take this capacity to form direct perceptual beliefs as a necessary condition for perceptual experiences to be phenomenally conscious. For instance, Tye’s requirement that the content of experiences be poised minimally requires this sort of capacity.
By ‘P(e)’ we don’t assume that experiences have intrinsic phenomenal qualities. Following our opponents, all we want to mark with this way of talking is that there is a way of characterizing experiences according to what it’s like to undergo them for their subjects. So, for instance, if representationalism is true, P is a representational property. Also we will be assuming that whatever further conditions presumed necessary for experiential representation (like being poised, non-conceptual, etc.) are in place.
We will use the property, red, as our arbitrary sensible quality that the objects of our experiences have. Similarly for the concepts, RED, REDDISH—see below. Later we will switch the example from red to bodily disorder as the latter is presumed to be a sensible bodily condition represented by the sensory-discriminative aspect of pain experiences.
Also, following the more or less standard practice, we will use the capitalized words as names of concepts, where concepts are understood to be mental representations of a certain sort in more or less the psychologists’ sense.
Here we will ignore skeptical possibilities such as “veridical hallucinations”. These are not relevant to our present discussion. We will also ignore a particular line of representationalist response to inverted spectrum arguments, according to which Invert’s color experiences systematically misrepresent the actual colors of things she sees around herself despite the fact that her perceptual judgments about colors are correct. So, for instance, when Invert sees a ripe tomato in good light, her experience misrepresents its color as green—as having the same color as represented by Nonvert’s experiences of cucumbers—while her perceptual judgment, THIS IS RED, is true, when made as an appropriate response to her seeing the red tomato. This is a controversial response to a controversial scenario (even among representationalists), and is irrelevant to the way in which we will claim that parallelism would be counterexampled if SR were to adopt the Object View—see below. So we set it aside here.
For example, we sometimes talk about sweet tastes, acrid smells, prickly or warm sensations. On SR, if there is any natural sense in which these qualities qualify the taste, smell, touch experiences, etc., this is only a façon de parler whose truth-conditions depend on whether these experiences correctly represent their object as being qualified by these qualities.
It is important to note that, for present purposes, we will be following representationalists in assuming that pain experiences are perceptual and represent (actual or potential) bodily disorders—this will be pains’ sensory-discriminatory aspect. Here, our quarel with strong representationalists is with their claims about pains’ affective-motivational aspect, not with its sensory-discriminative aspect. Nevertheless, see Author (XXXX) for an argument that pain experiences are not perceptual and that SR cannot explain pain’s sensory-discriminative phenomenology either.
Similarly, we will take painfulness, thus P*, as an arbitrary affective quality for what follows.
Bain (2012) and O'Sullivan and Schroer (2012) also claim that the representational content of pain affect (P*) is that d is bad. They are all strong representationalists but they leave open what kind of property d’s badness (painfulness) comes to—although they seem to have a naturalistic property in mind to be identified with badness.
Similarly, Cutter and Tye (2011) identify pleasantness with the natural property of being apt to benefit individual A to degree x (=H). In what follows, ‘H’ will refer to the naturalistic non-mental property (whatever it is) represented by the affective phenomenology, P*, of experiences.
It is H (or, “badness”) so understood that is the target of our criticism below. Although the particular value proposed by C&T under consideration seems perhaps the most natural candidate for H, we believe that our argument will generalize to any other proposed value of H so understood. Also, under OV, the representationalists could be seen as proposing that the affective qualities should be interpreted as a species of objective sensible qualities. However, because H is a highly relational (and possibly, partly but essentially historical) second-order property of sensible qualities, we are reluctant to describe representationalists this way.
This (and, in general, the frequent non-veridicality of all kinds of affective experiences) is readily admitted by Cutter and Tye (2011), and other representationalists—see below.
Even though this paper is jointly co-authored, to augment argumentative force and clarity, we will switch our writing style between first-person singular and first-person plural depending on the context and example we are discussing. We hope this won’t cause any confusion.
The next section is inspired by passages like this:
…phenomenal properties of experiences, i.e., properties constitutive of what it’s like to undergo those experiences, are identical to certain representational properties of those experiences, in particular properties which are constitutive of what the experience represents (as opposed to, say, intrinsic properties of the vehicles of representation), such as the property of ascribing redness to something, the property of representing loudness, the property of having the content that p, etc. And most versions of representationalism at least accept the weaker claim that for every phenomenal property P, there is a representational property R such that, necessarily, an experience has P iff it has R. Take, for example, the phenomenal property—call it phenomenal reddishness—distinctive of experiences as of red things. Plausibly, the representational property corresponding to reddishness, i.e., the representational property R such that necessarily, an experience has phenomenal reddishness iff it has R, is the property of representing something as red. But now consider the property of pain experiences—call it painfulness—that we allude to when we say that a pain in the leg feels bad. What is the corresponding representational property in virtue of which our pain experiences are painful? (Cutter and Tye 2011, p. 92–93, italics ours).
Note the infelicity in the opening line: the properties constitutive of what an experience represents cannot be the properties such as “the property of ascribing redness to something, the property of representing loudness, the property of having the content that p, etc.” Such infelicities abound in the representationalist literature. Nevertheless, what follows is a way of developing the idea that a pain experience has the intentional property of representing-harm and it is this quality of pain experiences that we directly introspect when we introspect the painfulness of pain experiences.
Well, along with representationalists, let’s assume there isn’t—we are granting this only for the purposes of the present dialectic. We, in fact, think that there are serious problems with any view of introspection compatible with SR+ST.
Here we don’t discuss representationalists’ preferred theory of introspection of experiences that sometimes goes by the name of ‘displaced perception model’ (DPM) baptized and initially developed by Dretske (1995, 1999). DPM is an inferentialist theory of introspection, according to which introspective knowledge is not direct at all but inferred from a certain sort of first-order perceptual knowledge with additional premises. See Aydede (2002) for a criticism of this view. Tye has declared his allegiance to this model in many of his writings (e.g., Tye 2000), but he rejects inferentialism. Frankly, we have difficulty understanding Tye’s account of introspection. In fact, as far as we can tell, all representationalists seem to be having difficulties with deciding on a suitable theory of introspection, or else keep silent on the topic. Byrne (2009, 2012), for instance, further develops the inferentialist view. But as far as we can see, he appears to save Dretske’s version at the expense of the existence of experiences. It appears that it’s beliefs all the way down for Byrne. So he ends up denying that there are experiences in the sense that makes them philosophically interesting as above and beyond the puzzles that attach to beliefs. Besides, his positive account doesn’t work—see Aydede (2002). Dretske has given up and become a skeptic about self-knowledge and he confesses that it is a “mystery” how we acquire introspective knowledge at all (see, for instance, his 2003, 2006, 2012). Tye’s account in his recent work (2009) has become increasingly more difficult to follow. We think none of this is accidental.
Luckily, though, we don’t need to discuss DPM or its variants. All representationalists under discussion in this paper, recall, are phenomenal externalists and believe in some form of transparency; accordingly, they think that the introspection of an experience of a sensible quality F requires the availability of the p-concept of F, and that’s all we need in this paper. They differ in their commitments to how this concept is deployed in the process of introspection. DPM says that this concept is not directly applied to any quality of the introspected experience, but is used rather to describe what property is being represented in the experience. (Note that to say that p-concepts are required for the introspection of experiences is not to say that we can’t experience/perceive the represented sensible qualities without these p-concepts: on this view, without p-concepts we are blind only to our experiences, not to the world).
Interestingly, Tye, until his 2009 book, had also been defending so-called phenomenal concepts. We think that the way phenomenal concepts are currently understood among physicalists is incompatible with the fundamental tenets of representationalism—what follows in this section lays out the gist of how an argument for this claim would go. It is tempting to speculate that this might be part of the reason why Tye in fact gave up phenomenal concepts in his (2009). It’s interesting to observe that no other representationalists have ever being friendly towards phenomenal concepts. (Lycan might seem to be an exception but he is not a pure and non-restricted intentionalist, thus not a strong representationalist in our sense: for example, Lycan defends a functionalist account of affective qualities and of phenomenological differences among modalities—see his 1987, 1996. Furthermore, his introspection-first view about what makes perceptual states phenomenally conscious states—his HOP account of conscious states—is seriously at odds with SR.)
Compare the following passage: “On my account, what it is exactly that a given experience or feeling represents need not be accessible to the subject's cognitive centers, including his or her powers of introspection, except in the most general and uninformative way (for example, as an experience of this sort). Nonetheless no two states that differ in the relevant representational contents can differ phenomenally, I claim; moreover, any two states that are alike in the relevant contents must be alike phenomenally. Why? Because phenomenal character is one and the same as representational content of the appropriate sort” (Tye 1996, p. 52). It’s not clear to us at all what kind of concept may be expressed by ‘this sort’ in ‘experience of this sort’ consistent with the demands of ST.
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For useful feedback and commentary, many thanks to David Bain, Jonathan Cohen, Jennifer Corns, Adam Pautz.
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Aydede, M., Fulkerson, M. Affect: representationalists’ headache. Philos Stud 170, 175–198 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0206-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0206-7