Abstract
A celebrated problem for representationalist theories of phenomenal character is that, given externalism about content, these theories lead to externalism about phenomenal character. While externalism about content is widely accepted, externalism about phenomenal character strikes many philosophers as wildly implausible. Even if internally identical individuals could have different thoughts, it is said, if one of them has a headache, or a tingly sensation, so must the other. In this paper, I argue that recent work on phenomenal concepts reveals that, contrary to appearances, this standard conjunction of externalism about content and internalism about phenomenal character is ultimately untenable on other models of phenomenal character as well, including even “qualia realism.” This would be significant for a number of reasons. The first is patent: it would undermine a primary objection to representationalism. The fact that representationalism is incompatible with the conjunction would be no serious problem for representationalism if no other plausible model of phenomenal character is compatible with it. The second is that the many philosophers who embrace the conjunction would be forced to abandon one of the two views; externalism would be true either of both content and phenomenal character, or of neither. Likewise, those philosophers who have taken a stance on only one of the two internalism/externalism debates would have to be seen as thereby committed to a particular stance on the other. The third reason stems from the fact that qualia realism typically goes hand in hand with internalism about phenomenal character. To the extent that it does, my argument would reveal that qualia realism is itself in tension with externalism about content. This would perhaps be the most surprising result of all.
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Notes
A number of senses of “internal” emerged from Hilary Putnam’s Twin Earth arguments concerning meaning. In Putnam (1975), to say that two subjects were internally identical was to say that they were “psychologically” identical–identical in “appearance, … sense data … dispositions, etc.” On this sense of “internal,” externalism about the contents of thought (or about phenomenal character) is an oxymoron. On another sense of “internal,” to say that two subjects are internally identical is to say they are physically identical—identical “from the skin in.” This is the sense I employ in this paper.
Dretske (1995), for instance, sees this as the most significant obstacle for representationalism. Dretske, himself a representationalist, proceeds to argue that externalism about phenomenal character may in fact be correct. His argument there bears some similarities to what I will ultimately propose. See footnote 25 below for some of the significant similarities and dissimilarities between our approaches.
This is how Byrne and Tye (2006, p. 242) describe the standard charge; they themselves are among those who have recently denied the intuition. Most of those who deny it do so because they endorse either a representationalist approach to perception (e.g., Dretske 1995; Tye 1995; Lycan 1996) or an “enactive” one (e.g., Noë 2006). (Dretske and Noë argue only that the intuition may be incorrect.) The intuition is so commonplace that arguments for it are rarely advanced; typically, the view is merely asserted, or assumed. For a recent argument in its favor, see Pautz (2006).
The arguments I offer in this paper do not apply to the possibility of conjoining internalism about content and externalism about phenomenal character; however, I am unaware of any reason one would wish to embrace this particular conjunction, or of anyone who does.
Indeed, the fact that many philosophers of mind have in print taken a stance on only one of the two debates may explain why some readers might have the impression that the conjunction is not as dominant as I am suggesting. In my experience, the great majority of philosophers engaged with these issues holds the conjunction. Another part of why it may seem (again, I think falsely) as if the conjunction does not dominate the field is that in recent years those who have been most vocal about the conjunction, representationalists, have denied it. But this is only because their theories of phenomenal character require that they deny it, and so they attempt to render that denial more palatable. (There are also those who deny the conjunction because they are internalist about both, e.g., Searle 1980, Heil 2004, and Horgan et al. 2004.)
Some philosophers allow for the possibility of a representationalist’s being externalist about some forms of representation but internalist about the representation involved in phenomenal character (see Rey 1998).
Eliminativists about phenomenal qualities reject representationalism yet do not espouse the idea that phenomenal qualities are introspectively accessible; but nor do they espouse the conjunction of externalism about content and internalism about phenomenal character.
I have constructed Twin Inability so as to concern introspectively capable twins because it is only of introspectively capable subjects that Accessibility guarantees that for any phenomenal quality of their experience they can employ a phenomenal concept that refers to that quality. I will return to this qualification in Sect. 3.
See Sosa (2003) on this sense of awareness and its relation to certain doctrines of privileged access.
The force of “can” in Accessibility (and in Twin Inability) is important. For now, it suffices to note that it is on a par with the force of “accessible” in the claim that phenomenal qualities are introspectively accessible. I will return to this issue in Sect. 7. Also, some readers might find strange such talk of concepts “referring,” as opposed to their (say) “applying.” I will return to this terminological issue and to the notion of reference in general in Sect. 6. Let me here simply clarify that I mean “refers” in as theoretically unladen a sense as possible.
It is worth being explicit that I’m using “(EPC)” to refer to externalism about phenomenal concepts, not externalism about phenomenal character (i.e., quality). I won’t use an abbreviation for the latter.
David Chalmers, for instance, opposes it. See especially Chalmers (2007).
In that paper, I employed the conclusion that standard arguments for content externalism lead to externalism about phenomenal concepts, which I supported there with the same arguments I will provide here in Sects. 5 and 8, to infer that if content externalism is in tension with the idea that we have privileged access to the contents of our own beliefs, as some have argued (e.g., Boghossian 1989), then it is also in tension with the idea that we have privileged access to the phenomenal character of our own experience. In the present paper, I conjoin the overlapping arguments with premises (A) and (CR) to infer conclusions about the individuation of phenomenal character. I support the overlapping arguments in considerably more depth in this paper by addressing a variety of objections (in Sects. 5, 9) that I did not discuss in the earlier paper.
One might wonder how, if what I argue here is correct, we could ever acquire the concept color on this view. We could not acquire it from the concept phenomenal color or from particular phenomenal color concepts if the concept color is required for their acquisition. Nor perhaps could we acquire it from our particular color concepts if the way in which we acquire those is through demonstration. CEs, however, are not committed to the idea that attention to color properties is conceptual; nor are they committed to a demonstration-based conception of color concepts. Indeed, Burge’s argument suggests that the community plays at least some role in determining the color concepts we possess.
Moreover, if it could plausibly be argued both that the process of demonstration involved in the formation of particular phenomenal color concepts involves the concept phenomenal color and not color, and that the concept phenomenal color is formed independently of the concept color and particular color concepts, it seems we could still construct a Burge-style thought experiment on another concept that is centrally involved in the demonstration of phenomenal colors (the concept quality, perhaps).
The same general point would apply to an objector who granted that Twin Al would form a concept of a legitimate property but who argued that the property would not be a phenomenal property (and that concept not a phenomenal concept). Since Al does form a phenomenal concept, (EPC) would still hold.
For an account of phenomenal concepts on which they have substantive, “thick” modes of presentations, see Levine (2001). Some philosophers claim that phenomenal concepts are in part constituted by the phenomenal properties they refer to, and that the property itself is what serves to fix their reference (e.g., Hill and McLaughlin 1999; Block 2006). This idea is closely related to the idea that phenomenal concepts refer directly. Block, for instance, notes about his own account of phenomenal concepts that it “has some affinities with the ‘directness’ story in which there is no metaphysical mode of presentation at all, since [Block’s] phenomenal MMoPs [‘metaphysical’ modes of presentation] are not very different from the referent itself” (2006, p. 299). Regardless, on the claim that phenomenal concepts are in part constituted by the phenomenal properties they refer to, and that the property itself is what serves to fix their reference, it is difficult to see how concepts such as phenomenal red and phenomenal reen could refer to the same property. (In Sect. 9, we will see why CEs who make this claim should accept (EPC).)
Several philosophers who provide careful characterizations of the semantic relation between phenomenal concepts and their referents do not explicitly employ the notion of direct reference. And so it is worth pointing out that my argument applies to these philosophers as well. What (CR) requires is that phenomenal concepts do not refer by way of modes of presentation that would make it possible for subjects to use different phenomenal concepts to refer to the same phenomenal property. That is guaranteed even on models that do not speak of direct reference, as in Hill and McLaughlin (1999), Perry (2001), and Block (2006) (as I read them, at least).
The proposition that different phenomenal concepts could not refer to the same phenomenal quality does not, with (EPC), entail Twin Inability. The two propositions are compatible with possibilities such as that whenever physical twins have different phenomenal color concepts, say, their experiences have few or no phenomenal color qualities. But there is little reason to entertain such possibilities, as our example of the twins and the tomato reveals.
I am now in a position to explain the relationship between my treatment of these issues and Dretske’s. Dretske (1995, ch. 5) and I both argue that content externalism leads to externalism about phenomenal character, and that part of the reason it does is that content externalism (or for me, many standard arguments for content externalism) implies that the primary concepts through which we think about phenomenal qualities are themselves externally determined. One important respect in which our arguments differ concerns the reasons for thinking that content externalism implies such an externalism about phenomenal concepts. For Dretske, this implication follows quickly from his representationalist theory, and so he simply assumes the implication on that basis. But I am concerned with those who resist representationalism. It is views like the qualia realist’s for which the conjunction of content externalism and internalism about phenomenal character would appear to provide little problem, and for which externalism about phenomenal character is perhaps especially counter-intuitive. And little has been done in work on these topics to show why anyone who is not a representationalist should suppose that the standard arguments for content externalism lead to externalism about phenomenal concepts. Indeed, many qualia realists would resist this idea. Some of the central arguments of this paper are thus directed at showing why this is the case. Another significant difference between us concerns the relation between externalism about phenomenal concepts and externalism about phenomenal character. Dretske assumes that if phenomenal qualities are introspectively accessible (or “knowable”), then externalism about phenomenal concepts implies externalism about phenomenal character. But this is not as straightforward as Dretske makes it seem. Dretske does not countenance the salient possibility that individuals can think about, or “access,” the same phenomenal quality by employing different concepts. This too is the result of his assuming a representationalist model.
Shoemaker (1994, p. 229). Shoemaker places the final two sentences quoted here in a footnote.
It is true that some subjects would have the ability to form the other concepts just as we have formed the concept reen out of the concepts red and green, and observed before the year 4000. However, the spirit of the idea of introspective access does not involve this kind of conceptual fancywork.
Putnam focuses more on words than concepts, but his conclusion is typically taken to apply to concepts as well.
Three notes are in order here. First, Papineau also countenances the possibility of appealing to the causal properties of phenomenal concepts as opposed to their teleological ones, but he is wary (as am I) of the difficulties concerning misrepresentation that causal or informational accounts of content face. Still, Papineau does not rule out the possibility of a “revised version of the causal theory sophisticated enough to deal with misrepresentation” (Papineau 2002, p. 113). Whether such a view would ultimately entail (EPC) would depend on its details. Second, Papineau (2007) has recently revised his account of phenomenal concepts. I discuss his older account here because of the substantial attention it has received, but my arguments apply similarly to his new account. Third, similar considerations will apply to those accounts I mentioned in fotenote 22, on which phenomenal concepts are in part constituted by the phenomenal properties they refer to, and on which the property itself is what serves to fix their reference. The substantive issue concerns the mechanism that begins with a subject’s having a particular experience, which has countless properties, and ultimately results in a particular set of conditions of application.
Thanks to Jason Bridges, David Chalmers, Fred Dretske, Jack Hanson, Jim John, Sean Kelly, Bill Lycan, Alva Noë, Casey O’Callaghan, Brendan O’Sullivan, Ric Otte, Steven Ross, Sarah Sawyer, John Searle, Barry Stroud, Martin Thomson-Jones, Michael Tye, and Wai-hung Wong for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Ellis, J. Phenomenal character, phenomenal concepts, and externalism. Philos Stud 147, 273–299 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9278-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9278-1