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An Acquaintance alternative to Self-Representationalism

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A Correction to this article was published on 22 October 2022

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Abstract

The primary goal of this paper is to provide substantial motivation for exploring an Acquaintance account of phenomenal consciousness, on which what fundamentally explains phenomenal consciousness is the relation of acquaintance. Its secondary goal is to take a few steps towards such an account. Roughly, my argument proceeds as follows. Motivated by prioritizing naturalization, the debate about the nature of phenomenal consciousness has been almost monopolized by representational theories (first-order and meta-representational). Among them, Self-Representationalism is by far the most antecedently promising (or so I argue). However, on thorough inspection, Self-Representationalism turns out not explanatorily or theoretically better than the Acquaintance account. Indeed, the latter seems to be superior in at least some important respects. Therefore, at the very least, there are good reasons to take the Acquaintance account into serious consideration as an alternative to representational theories. The positive contribution of this paper is a sketch of an account of consciousness on which phenomenal consciousness is explained partly in representationalist terms, but where a crucial role is played by the relation of acquaintance.

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Notes

  1. An argumentative strategy that is in some respects structurally similar to the one proposed here is put forward by Ken Williford (2015). He highlights some shortcomings of First-Order Representationalism and Higher-Order Representationalism, suggests that Self-Representationalism is the most promising representational theory of consciousness, points at some weaknesses of Self-Representationalism, and argues that the only plausible version of it collapses into an Acquaintance theory of consciousness. The details of the argument, however, are quite different from what I articulate in this paper (e.g., drawing a list of desiderata, focusing on the mysteriousness/unfamiliarity objection to the Acquaintance account, etc.). Also, the objections to Self-Representationalism put forward here are (at lest partly) distinct from those articulated by Williford.

  2. Arguably, what Levine calls “subjectivity” is very similar to what I call “subjective character.”

  3. What it takes for a mental state to represent something “in the right way” varies depending on the specific theory. I leave this aside for it is irrelevant to my present purposes.

  4. Arguably, the two most serious objections concern, respectively (i) unconscious representations: things in our environment can be represented unconsciously, as, e.g., in subliminal perception; thus, something more than mere first-order representation is required for consciousness (Sturgeon, 2000; Kriegel, 2002; Chalmers 2004) and (ii) experiences whose phenomenology does not seem to reduce to representational content—e.g. sensations such as pains and tickles, emotions, and especially moods (Block, 1995a, 1995b; Kind 2014; Bordini, 2017).

  5. An anonymous referee suggested that a first-order representationalist could account for subjective character by positing a first-order self-representation, i.e., a first-order representation of the self as subject. However, arguably, it is unlikely that first-order representationalists would accept the existence of such a representation. For first-order representationalism is typically motivated by transparency considerations: when we have a conscious experience, they argue, all we are aware of are (features of) mind-independent objects. Arguably, a representation of the self as subject does not amount to awareness of a mind-independent object. Therefore, allowing for such a representation would violate the transparency thesis which constitutes the main phenomenological motivation of first-order representationalism. Moreover, even if first-order representationalists did allow for first-order representation of the self as subject, such a representation would not be sufficient to explain subjective character. For subjective character is the aspect of phenomenal character in virtue of which there is something it is like for the subject to have a certain experience. So, arguably, if subjective character is to be explained in representationalist terms, the relevant representation needs to be (at least partly) representation of a particular experience (thus a meta-representation).

  6. Though, of course, it is possible that you form the belief that your experience is P while your experience is not P. I will come back to this in a moment.

  7. On phenomenal vs. epistemic appearance see Chisholm (1957) and Jackson (1977).

  8. The same point is made by McClelland (2020: 463, fn. 8).

  9. David Rosenthal (2005: 172), for example, appeals to cases in which dental patients mistake a vibration sensation for a pain sensation to argue in favor of an appearance-reality gap. Other authors who explicitly reject the no-appearance/reality gap intuition include Brown (2010), Churchland (2013), Hill (2016), and Schwitzgebel (2011). So-called illusionists maintain that an appearance/reality gap in conscious experience is not only possible but also ubiquitous: all conscious experiences, they claim, are a sort of “inner hallucination” (Dennett, 1988, 2016; Frankish 2016; Kammerer, 2016).

  10. HOR-theorists may try to satisfy the Intimacy Desideratum by adding to their theory the extra claim that higher-order representations are infallible, in the sense that they cannot mischaracterize or mistarget their first-order representation. However, this move would be ad hoc and unexplanatory (the alleged infallibility would be just a brute fact). Alternatively, they may appeal to a constitutive connection between the higher-order and the first-order representation. The latter move would be akin to Kriegel’s own solution to the intimacy problem (see §2). Since, as I will show, Self-Representationalism is superior to HOR in other respects, HOR’s appeal to constitutive connection would make it neither better nor equal to Self-Representationalism. Moreover, McClelland (2020: 464) argues that the constitutive-connection solution to the intimacy problem jeopardizes HOR’s satisfaction of the Transitivity Desideratum.

  11. If the higher-order state were conscious, there would need to be a third-order mental state to represent it and thereby make it conscious. This kind of case is not excluded by the theory—Rosenthal (1986) argues that this is exactly what happens when we introspect. However, to avoid infinite regress, the theory needs that the representation chain end with an unconscious n-order representation and the most parsimonious way to do it is to stipulate that it is the second-order representation that constitutes the last link of the chain ad is thus unconscious (except for introspective cases, where the last link is the third-order representation).

  12. Kriegel also develops a separate thorough argument, hinging on epistemic considerations, to the effect that the higher-order representation must be conscious (2009: 115–124).

  13. Levine (2015), for example, seems to maintain that what he calls “subjectivity” is not phenomenologically manifest. However, he seems to have in mind a rather “thick” notion of self-awareness—where subjective character being phenomenologically manifest implies the subject’s appearing among the contents of awareness—while only a thinner notion of phenomenological manifestness of subjectivity is assumed here.

  14. I do not intend this list to be exhaustive. Rather, my claim is that a theory of phenomenal consciousness must satisfy at least these desiderata.

  15. Here is the reasoning underlying Kriegel’s explanation of subjective character in terms of a mental state’s self-representation. First, subjective character is explained in terms of transitivity: a mental state M of a subject S has subjective character in virtue of S’s being aware of M. Second, S’s being aware of M is explained in terms of S’s harboring a mental state M* that represents M, and in virtue of which S is aware of M. So, transitivity is explained in terms of meta-representation. The final step is the self-representationalist move: M = M*.

  16. See Kriegel (2009: 113 − 29) for a thorough argument concerning Self-Representationalism’s satisfaction of the Inner Awareness Desideratum.

  17. Uriah, Kriegel, personal communication.

  18. Except, of course, for naïve realists.

  19. This epistemic issue is related to next subsection’s objection.

  20. Uriah Kriegel, personal communication. He also pointed out to me that allowing for the possibility of solipsism and idealism is a virtue of the view, rather than a vice—since this makes it neutral as to any epistemological or metaphysical presupposition around the existence of the external world.

  21. It may be replied that Self-Representationalism rules out intimacy only with the representational properties of the first-order state, but not with the representational properties of the experience. However, since, on Self-Representationalism, the experience and the first-order state are not distinct—they are the same state—the representational properties of the first-order state are also representational properties of the experience.

  22. I owe this objection to an anonymous referee.

  23. I owe this suggestion to Matt Duncan.

  24. “Embedding” or “quotational” accounts of a similar sort have been put forward by Gertler (2001), Papineau (2002), Balog (2012), and Coleman (2015). None of them dubs their account as “self-representational” and some of them explicitly present their theory in contraposition to representationalism (see esp. Coleman 2015). In fact, most of them describe their account in terms of acquaintance.

  25. There are good reasons for thinking that the phenomenology of at least some kinds of experience, such as bodily sensations, emotions, and moods, does not reduce to their representational content (Aydede and Fulkerson 2014; Kind 2014). For some of them—especially moods—it is even unclear that they have representational content at all (Searle, 1983; Block, 1995a, 1995b; Bordini 2017). However, my suggestion is not that the whole phenomenal character of any experience is to be characterized in representational terms (for the representationalist part of my account only concerns qualitative character) nor that it reduces to representational content: saying that any conscious experience has its qualitative character in virtue of representing something is compatible with the qualitative character depending not only on representational content, but also on representational attitude. Therefore, it is compatible with an impure version of representationalism (Crane, 2003; Chalmers 2004).

  26. The epistemic significance of acquaintance is often taken to consist, at least, in its yielding a special kind of knowledge, namely knowledge by acquaintance.

  27. Whereas acquaintance-based accounts of consciousness typically rely on the idea that subjects are acquainted with their experiences, the acquaintance-based accounts of subjectivity cited in the main text rely on the idea that subjects are acquainted with themselves as subjects (see especially Duncan 2018a for an interesting and nicely developed account of subjective character in terms of self-acquaintance). The theory I propose belongs to the former group of acquaintance theories, i.e., those that claim that subjects are acquainted with their experiences and that this is what makes such experiences conscious and constitutes their subjective character.

  28. Raleigh (2019) and Duncan (2021a) offer excellent and very useful introductions to the notion of acquaintance. See also Knowles and Raleigh (2019) for a recent collection devoted to acquaintance.

  29. Whether constitution is full or partial may vary among theories.

  30. I find Ken Williford’s (2019) theory (on which, very roughly, an experience is conscious in virtue of being self-acquainted) particularly interesting and somewhat close to my own views on consciousness and acquaintance.

  31. And this does require thorough argumentation, for not all acquaintance theorists accept it (see, e.g., Duncan 2018). Arguing for this is, indeed, object of further work.

  32. Though note that not all theorists agree on this. Rosenthal (2005) and Carruthers (2005), for example, maintain that there can be unconscious phenomenal states.

  33. Of course, there can be meta-level error when it comes to introspective judgment. Here, however, I am just concerned with merely conscious (non-introspected) experience.

  34. Recall, non-derivative representation is interpretation-independent representation.

  35. I owe this objection to an anonymous referee.

  36. Kriegel himself advocates this line of thought: “[I]t should come as no surprise that an account of consciousness includes a prima facie mysterious element. For consciousness, while perhaps not ultimately mysterious, is surely prima facie mysterious, and its prima facie mysteriousness should be reflected in a prima facie mysterious element in the account of it.” (2003a: 127). Though prima facie mysterious, acquaintance may well turn out not to be ultima facie mysterious.

  37. See, for example, Balog (2012) for an account making promising steps in this direction.

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Acknowledgements

For extremely helpful conversations on the topics of this paper I am grateful to Davide Bordini, Arnaud Dewalque, and Uriah Kriegel. I am particularly grateful to Uriah Kriegel and Matt Duncan for generous and extensive comments on a previous draft, as well as to two anonymous referees for Philosophical Studies. The paper also benefitted from being presented in the Brainstorming seminar at the University of Liège and in the online Monthly Phenomenology seminar.

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Giustina, A. An Acquaintance alternative to Self-Representationalism. Philos Stud 179, 3831–3863 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01868-5

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