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Notes
There is, of course, an alternative interpretation, which takes Lyons’s reference to “identical visual experiences” to refer solely to the phenomenal component, in which case both the property of being a copperhead and the property of being a snake may both feature in the interpretative component of the experience.
Other intentionalists agree that phenomenal character and perceptual content are intimately connected, but hold that it is the experience’s phenomenal character that fixes its perceptual content (Siewert 1998; Byrne 2001). Then the question of whether cognitive differences can yield experiences with different perceptual contents will inherit its answer, at least for the relevant kind of content, from the question of whether cognitive differences can yield phenomenally different experiences.
Just to add to the complications, some intentionalists suppose that it is part of the job of cognitive psychology to tell us what the relevant perceptual contents are (e.g. Tye 2002, p. 63). If this is the case, then the question of what properties can appear in the relevant perceptual contents is likely to connect with the debate over cognitive penetrability. Closely related but distinct approaches can also overlap, depending upon a particular theorist’s commitments. Cognitive penetrability can connect with our gloss on the question without passing through intentionalism. Suppose that one holds a view of consciousness on which consciousness supervenes on a particular stage of visual processing. Then we might hold that the properties that appear in phenomenal character are those that correspond with that stage of visual processing. This will itself be impacted upon by the cognitive penetration debate.
What is more, it may well be a phenomenological, introspective method that grounds the claim that there is a distinction between presentational and interpretative components in the first place. Consider, in this light, Lewis’s (1929, p. 38, my emphasis) insistence that to reject such a distinction would be to deny “obvious and fundamental characteristics of experience”.
Although it is not always clear what methodology they use to derive the result, the idea that the phenomenal aspects of experience are limited to basic properties can be found in the work of many others, including Broad (1923, p. 243); Price (1933, p. 3); Jackson (1977, p. 33); Peacocke (1983, pp. 20–21); Tye (1995, p. 141); Byrne (2009, p. 449).
We can see why this is problematic when we note that Pylyshyn (1999, p. 362) argues that “the content of our phenomenological experience… is not the output of the visual system itself” on the grounds that “the phenomenology of visual perception… provides us with a rich panorama of meaningful objects”!
Block (2010, p. 57) agrees that if we can demonstrate adaptation to a property, this is “a very strong argument” for supposing that the property in question is represented in vision.
Available here: http://www.current-biology.com/cgi/content/full/18/6/425/DC1/. Keep looking at the second slide until the effects of the adaptation fade away. As we slowly come to recognise that the two patches are, in fact, the same, it is not the case that any specific dots disappear (from the patch that appears densely populated) or appear (on the sparse patch), but rather that we just realise that the two patches are, in fact, equally numerous (see Burr and Ross 2008, pp. 426–427). This experience provides, perhaps, a more direct problem for the idea that our experience of unequal numerosity must be based on having an experience of two patches in which one is more densely-populated with dots than the other, and then inferring that that patch is more numerous. If this were the case, it would seem that our recognising the falsity of this judgment would need to be preceded by some of the dots disappearing from one patch and/or appearing in the other. But this does not happen. Instead, it just slowly dawns that, in fact, the patch that appeared to be more numerous actually has the same number of dots as the other patch.
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Fish, W. High-level properties and visual experience. Philos Stud 162, 43–55 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9986-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9986-4