Abstract
There is an ongoing debate in philosophy of mind and epistemology about whether perceptual experience only represents those “thin” features of our environment that are apprehended by our senses, or whether, in addition to these, at least some perceptual experiences represent more complex, “thick” properties. My aim in this paper is to articulate an important difference between thin and thick properties, and thus to diagnose a key intuitive resistance many proponents of the thin view feel towards the thick view. My diagnosis then provides us with a novel and compelling argument against the thick view. In what follows, first I consider two unsuccessful versions of an alternative strategy against the thick view found in the literature. Next, I present my own argument. The argument involves proposing two constraints on the phenomenal contents of perceptual experience, which I call the Presentation Principle and the Containment Principle, and then reasoning from these principles to a conclusion that is fatal to (most forms of) the thick view—an outcome that I call the problem of Phenomenal Explosion. I conclude by responding to several objections.
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Notes
Sounds, smells, tastes, surface textures, spatial location, temperature, and so on, are thin properties picked up by other modalities. I will mostly restrict myself to talking about visual experience.
I follow most parties to this debate in characterizing it in terms of representational/intentional content. Doing so excludes theories of perceptual experience—notably naïve or direct realist views—that deny that perceptual experience has content at all. However, most or all of what I argue below could be restated, with some inconvenience, in terms that are neutral between content and no-content views.
Cf. Bayne (2016, 108–109, 117).
Since I have defined PPC not in terms of experiential presence, but in terms of supervenience on phenomenal character, there is some wiggle room here. In Sect. 3.1 below, I address the gap between presence/presentation and supervenience.
One should not get hung up on the notion of property instantiation: if there is a way for a property in PPC to seem to be present without seeming to be instantiated, then that should suffice for the Presentation principle.
Some philosophers are skeptical of the transparency of perceptual experience. But the claim is popular and likely to be accepted by many Liberals in the admissible contents debate. Its rejection could be accommodated by my argument, with considerable expository inconvenience.
The most natural way to understand being “contained within what is presented” is that these properties themselves must be presented. That might be fine. But I prefer to stick with the broader notion of containment, because I want to leave open the possibility of a property that the subject must be directly consciously aware of as a feature of another presented property, but which itself is not presented. E.g. is it possible for the subject to be directly aware of the property of being married as part of the presentation of bachelorhood, without the former property also seeming to be present? In what follows, for ease of style I sometimes gloss over this distinction, speaking only of the individuating features being presented, but nothing in my argument is meant to turn on this omission.
Cf. Prinz (2011, 178–179) on “chairness”.
At least on the second version of this picture, the problem is not just epistemic but metaphysical: how could phenomenology necessitate the presented properties except by necessitating their individuating features?
Cf. Siegel (2013a, 814).
This way of rejecting Containment is a live option because I defined PPC only in terms of supervenience, rather than a stronger phenomenal intentionality thesis that appeals to a relation of grounding or identity.
Even then, it might seem possible to hardwire me so that I am disposed to believe that the person across the room is, say, a married woman, while my visual “bachelor-presenting” phenomenology remains fixed. But in that case, provided phenomenal character really presents all the individuating features of bachelorhood, we could conclude that my visual experience does represent bachelorhood and I am simply forming irrational beliefs on its basis. So it seems this way of accounting for why PPC supervenes on phenomenal character regardless of a subject’s actual inferential dispositions requires we adopt some kind of rationality constraint on those dispositions that can contribute to fixing content. Similarly, for the view that causal/teleological relations help determine which properties are phenomenally presented: an analogous explanation of the supervenience thesis that appealed to the individuating features of the presented properties being contained in the presentation probably would require we adopt phenomenal externalism in order to work. (See Sect. 4.2 below.)
Cf. Forrest (2017).
These are just toy examples. I am not making a serious attempt to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for belonging to the kind, Animal. And of course one might reasonably be skeptical that such necessary and sufficient conditions exist, or play an important role in our kind concepts. I address this issue below.
One need only go back and read the abstract and introductory section of Siegel’s influential (2006) essay to see what I mean. An anonymous reviewer points out that some philosophers [notably Thompson (2010) and Chalmers (2004, 2006, 2019)] apply a Fregean account to colors and shapes as well. This paper’s argument is not intended for a Phenomenal Liberalism that embraces such a thorough neo-Fregean, “phenomenal functionalist” theory of perceptual phenomenal content. If the Liberal gives all perceptual phenomenal contents—thin and thick properties alike—the same Fregean treatment, then perhaps the charge of misleading advertising no longer sticks. But, first, I suspect neo-Fregeanism about all thin properties in PPC is a minority view among philosophers and Phenomenal Liberals. And, second, I think a Fregean analysis of the experience of thin properties (or at least secondary qualities such as color) enjoys an advantage over Fregeanism applied to thick properties in order to save Phenomenal Liberalism, for reasons I try to explain in Sect. 4.3 below.
In recent years, Susanna Siegel has hinted that the version of Liberalism she defends isn’t committed to the supervenience of phenomenal content on phenomenal character (2013b, 851, and in conversation). Fair enough. But she cannot have her cake and eat it too: she cannot present her position in a way that suggests a bold, iconoclastic interpretation of the Liberal thesis, while at the same time distancing her position from the problematic consequences of that interpretation. She owes us an account of how, if experiential content does not so much as supervene on phenomenal character, it could still be true, in an interesting sense, that “nothing counts as a content of experience if it does not reflect the phenomenal character of experience, either by co-varying with phenomenal character or by otherwise reflecting it” (2013b, 850). Much seems to hinge on this “otherwise reflecting”. If the best she can offer by way of explanation is along the lines of the neo-Fregean account sketched above, then I think her view runs afoul of the present dilemma.
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Forrest, P.V. The limits of perceptual phenomenal content. Philos Stud 177, 3725–3747 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01405-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01405-x