Abstract
Many theorists maintain that perceptual experience exhibits the what is often called the phenomenology of particularity: that in perceptual experience it phenomenally seems that there are particular things. Some urge that this phenomenology demands special accounts of perception on which particulars somehow constitute perceptual experience, including versions of relationalism, on which perception is a relation between perceivers and particular perceived objects, or complex forms of representationalism, on which perception exhibits demonstrative or special particular-involving types of content. I argue here that no such account required. I develop and defend a novel account of such phenomenology, grounded in the higher-order theory of consciousness. In short, this view holds that the phenomenology of particularity arises because suitable higher-order states make it appear to one that one is in perceptual relations to particulars, even if perception is not in any way constituted by particulars. I argue that this account has many advantages and avoids problems that other theories of such phenomenology face.
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Notes
The phenomenology of particularity is arguably related to other sorts of perceptual phenomenology, such as what some theorists have called ‘phenomenal presence’ or ‘presentational character’ (see, e.g., Schellenberg, 2018: 17, fn. 11). And some HO theorists have offered accounts of that latter (e.g., Berger & Brown, 2021, Sect. 5.2). But it is unclear exactly how phenomenological particularity and presentational character relate—and the account developed here differs from previously proposed HO-theoretic accounts of other aspects of perceptual phenomenology.
At the outset, I note that some theorists recently distinguish two types of such phenomenology. Following French and Gomes (2019), we should distinguish between a perceptual experience’s exhibiting what they call generic phenomenological particularity, or the fact that it may perceptually appear to one that some particular or other is present, from its exhibiting specific phenomenological particularity, or the fact that it may perceptually appear to one that a specific particular is present. When you consciously see your best friend, it does not merely visually seem that someone or other is present. Your experience does not exhibit mere generic particularity. Rather, it visually seems that that very person is present. Your experience has specific particularity. Going forward, references to phenomenological particularity are to specific phenomenological particularity.
Since phenomenological and relational particularity are often conflated, perhaps some generalist representationalists, such as Harman (1990), mean to deny only that there is relational particularity. But it is natural to see how generalist representationalism fits with phenomenological generalism—and some, such as Hill (2022), explicitly defend this combination of views. Indeed, some phenomenological generalists even endorse relational particularity. Mehta (2014: 321ff), for example, is clear that particulars do not constitute perceptual phenomenology, but holds that they are nonetheless non-phenomenal parts of perceptual experiences.
Phenomenological generalists have offered several reasons to deny that particulars appear in the character of experience. Mehta (2014: 318ff; Mehta & Ganson, 2016), for example, imagines a visual experience of seeing a glass of red wine on a table and a tactile experience of that same glass of wine in one’s lap. He argues that the phenomenological particularist must maintain that there would be some phenomenal similarity between these two experiences, as they involve the same particular, though there would seem to be none. Phenomenological particularists have replied to such cases, however, urging either that a commitment to phenomenological particularity need not predict any phenomenal similarities between such experiences or that there are at least some phenomenal similarities between them (see, e.g., Anaya & Clarke, 2023; French & Gomes, 2016). For reasons of space, I cannot adjudicate these debates here, except to say that I think denying the datum of phenomenological particularity is a significant theoretical cost.
Although a complete account of perception (independent of consciousness) is plainly beyond the scope of this paper, I assume at a minimum that such states are personal-level mental episodes that track items in the environment in modality-specific ways, but of which individuals are unaware and for which there is nothing that it is like to be in them.
One might deny that we need a theory of consciousness distinct from a theory of perception by denying there is nonconscious perception (e.g., Phillips, 2021). As others have urged (e.g., Zięba, 2019, Sect. 2.2), however, arguments for skepticism about the experimental evidence for nonconscious perception typically depend on assuming questionable techniques for assessing consciousness or fairly demanding conceptions of perception. So, while the current evidence in favor of nonconscious perception may not be dispositive, there are good reasons to think that nonconscious perception will be experimentally vindicated. I thus proceed on the assumption that perception can occur without being conscious.
In this terminology, a mental state is HO only if it is of, about, or in some way targets another mental condition.
Going forward, I typically drop the ‘suitable’ and ‘standard’ modifiers, insofar as all reference to HO states refers to suitable HO states and all reference to HO theory refers to standard versions of it.
Although the name ‘HO perceptual relationalism’ may seem akin to HO-perception theory (e.g., Lycan, 1996), it is important to stress that they are distinct. HO-perception theory is an account of the nature of the relevant HO states—namely, that they are perceptual or quasi-perceptual states. In contrast, HO perceptual relationalism is an account of the nature of the first-order perceptual states represented by the relevant HO states—namely, that the suitable HO states represent first-order perceptual states as perceptual relations.
Because HO states’ contents are typically thought to involve the indexical ‘I’, as I too have it here, one may suspect that their contents are not general. On standard analyses of indexical and demonstrative expressions such as Kaplan’s (1989), such elements make singular reference to particulars. It may be, however, that we may offer an eliminativist view about indexical reference in thought that redescribes such apparent instances of ‘I’ in general terms (e.g., Rosenthal, 2012).
I leave open whether or not HO states ever fail to represent perceptual states as relational—that is, if they ever represent things in a generic way. If perceptual experiences sometimes do not or never exhibit phenomenological particularity, then such HO states explain those cases.
This proposal thus echoes the view in the philosophy of language, sometimes referred to as predicativism, on which the semantic values of names (for objects) in natural language are predicate-type semantic values (see, e.g., Fara, 2015).
This isn’t to say that those relata are not represented at all; if that were the case, then perhaps we would experience something such as bare particulars, which is at least typically not the case. But one does not on this view perceptually experience particulars by (first-order) representing them; rather, one experiences them by (HO) seeming to be perceptually related to them.
Some HO theorists understand the theory to hold that a first-order mental state is conscious just in case there is an actual HO state that stands in an appropriate awareness relation to an actually existing first-order state (e.g., Gennaro, 2012). These are what Brown (2015) calls relational versions of the view, on which HO states are necessary but not sufficient for consciousness. Relational versions of HO theory depart from Rosenthal’s standard version of the view, which Brown calls nonrelational versions of HO theory, on which consciousness only requires the suitable HO state, which is responsible for the relevant mental appearance. As many nonrelational-HO theorists have urged, such relational versions are in tension with the transitivity principle as motivation for HO views in general and face other problems (see, e.g., Berger & Brown, 2021). So, despite the fact that HO perceptual relationalism posits that suitable HO states represent one as being in perceptual relations, it remains a nonrelational-HO theory in Brown’s terminology.
My point here is related to the so-called transparency claim—that we somehow “look through” our experiences to the objects and properties that we perceive there to be; that we are never thereby phenomenally presented with our experiences themselves (e.g., Harman, 1990; Tye, 2000). The transparency claim is controversial and I need not endorse it here (for discussion in the context of HO theory, see, e.g., Rosenthal, 2005: 117ff). Perhaps, for example, we can be in introspection aware of our experiences as such. But it does seem plausible that in (non-introspective) perceptual experience it does not phenomenally seem that there are experiences or that objects are the causes of our experiences.
Of course, it may be that there are arguments for such views that depend on other kinds of phenomenological considerations or that do not depend on considerations of phenomenology at all. The putative datum of particularity, for example, might be described not as the phenomenological claim that, in experience, there appear to be particulars, but the metaphysical claim that, in experience, there are particulars that appear to us. This is in effect a motivation to explain not phenomenological, but relational particularity. But this way of describing the datum is perhaps question begging. Moreover, as phenomenological generalists have urged, that perception discriminates particulars could be explained by the fact that perceptual states are causally connected to particulars, though their contents are wholly general (e.g., Mehta & Ganson, 2016: 3224). In any case, my point here is not to argue that relational particularity is unfounded, but that phenomenological considerations of particularity do not support it.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Craig French, Joseph Gottlieb, Rebecca Keller, Ryan McElhaney, Neil Mehta, David Pereplyotchik, David Rosenthal, Susanna Schellenberg, Kenneth Williford, Josh Weisberg, and audiences at the 2022 Meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology and at a 2022 session of the CUNY Cognitive Science series for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this material.
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Berger, J. A Higher-Order Account of the Phenomenology of Particularity. Erkenn (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-023-00764-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-023-00764-6