Abstract
The main focus of acquaintance theorists has been the nature and mechanism of perceptual acquaintance with particulars. Generally, one’s view of perceptual acquaintance with general features has taken its bearings from one’s view of perceptual acquaintance with particulars. This has led to the glossing over of significant differences in the mechanisms of perceptual acquaintance with particulars and with general features. The difference in mechanisms suggests a difference in the sort of epistemic state at play in the two kinds of cases. While the existence of such a difference might initially seem to spell trouble for acquaintance theorists, it can be made palatable by being traced back to the distinct basic functions concepts of particulars and of general features serve in thought.
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Notes
Throughout I use “properties” interchangeably with general features, and “property-instances” with tokens of such features. The argument is largely indifferent to the metaphysics of properties, and compatible with most forms of nominalism.
Some Campbell (2002) and Smithies (2011) have argued that perception needs to be phenomenally-conscious, and, in particular, have presentational phenomenology to serve this role. This would rule out any form of blindsight as being apt to provide the same sort of knowledge as perception normally can.
There has been an ongoing tendency to loosen the constraints on singular thought, but the tide may be turning [see Sullivan (2010), Goodman (2018)]. On the present account, which takes perception as the paradigmatic source of singular thought, whether there might be other sources (e.g. participation in a name-using practice) will depend on whether they can provide the same sort of knowledge of reference that perception can (see Sect. 4).
For ease of presentation, from now I will use “properties” to cover both monadic properties and relations.
It might be that the capacity to observe instances of some properties (e.g. Being a Banana, Being an X-ray) depends on the possession of the corresponding concepts. This seems not to be the case with specific colors and shades.
That there is a fundamental level of thought about properties, on which the rest of our concepts of properties rely is a veritable view going back to the work of logical empiricists [see also Strawson (1988)].
A reviewer suggests that the driver might also need to grasp the difference between color in general and shape in general, so that his concept would concern the color of the object, rather than its shape. On my preferred view, this gets accounted by the subject’s capacity to attend to the color of the object. Compare a similar issue arising with demonstrative reference: supposing that every time I perceive a rabbit, I also perceive a collection of undetached animal parts, to single out the rabbit in thought must I intend to think of an animal, as opposed to of a collection of undetached animal parts? Arguably a positive answer would over-intellectualize demonstrative reference. Instead, the work could be fully done by the standard way in which humans attend to animate things, which would select the animal and not the parts [see Campbell (2002: Ch. IV)]. Similarly, insofar as a subject attends to an object in a color-appropriate way, one would be singling out the color and not the shape.
See Giaquinto (2012).
It might be objected that it is patently false that the normal look of roundness is roundness, since: (i) things shaped differently can exhibit the same look, and (ii) round things exhibit a number of looks (and so one for other sensible properties). Neither is a problem for the view: other things might exhibit the look of roundness, but only round things would instantiate the look. Similarly, roundness could present many looks, but would instantiate only one of them [see Martin (2010)].
It might further be objected that roundness cannot be identified with any look, since it is the ground of various looks. But on the current proposal roundness would ground the various ways in which a round thing would appear: awareness of the roundness of a coin would be part of the explanation of why a round coin would look round when facing one head-on, and also of why it would appear oval when faced sideways.
Are the two claims held consistent by the implicit assumption that the experience would constitute a non-perceptual sort of awareness of an instance of Crimson? Perhaps Mary would become aware of a mind-dependent instance of Crimson, whose existence would be fully determined by her neurophysiological condition at the time. This is one way of accounting for the phenomenology and the concept-grounding potential of the experience—but there are others: see Pautz (2010) for an overview. Pace Pautz, even a minimal, purely negative characterization of the experience as being introspectively indistinguishable from perception of an instance of crimson might be apt to account both for its phenomenal character and its concept-grounding power. On the first issue, see Martin (2006); on the second, see Alford-Duguid and Arsenault (2017).
I am grateful to a reviewer for raising this objection.
It would if there were no bona-fide type-demonstratives and their real content was something like “the type of this token”, but we have already dismissed this view.
Brewer (2006) proposes that attending to the apparent lengths of the lines in the Muller-Lyer illusion over time while erasing the hashes flanking them presents evidence that one was aware of their actual lengths from the get-go. My proposal is similar, except that I am not concerned with the nature of any actual visual illusion, but with specifying a possible case.
Mary is able to attend and keep track of the particular instance of color. It is disputable that Mary is able to attend to and keep track of the actual character of that instance, and be able to distinguish it from other shades of red.
A reviewer asks whether the same point could be made using a less far-fetched case, in which Mary would wear colored glasses or contacts. For my purposes, the light-altering potential of such glasses would need to be able to adjust gradually all the way back to none. Otherwise, it would not be possible for the subject to be able to tell—when wearing them—that the color of objects around her appears unaffected over time, in spite of variations in her experiences’ overall phenomenal character.
One possible retort here is that Mary had wanted a scarlet house, and is confused about the content of her want. Surely, Mary would not be satisfied if the painter came up with an excuse of this sort. Moreover, if this were true, it would mean Mary did know what “thus” in “I want my house painted thus” stood for. So if by “thus” she would have meant Scarlet, hers would not be a case of acquaintance-based reference to Scarlet, but of reference without acquaintance.
Compare Almäng (2016). As the earlier objection—pertaining to HalluciMary—which aimed to establish that she could not acquire a non-descriptive way of thinking of the hallucinated shade of red—this one also seems to stem from a conflation among the function and application conditions of token- and type-demonstratives.
A reviewer proposes that Mary might be acquainted with both properties. But while there are good reasons to grant her acquaintance with instances of Scarlet, I have shown that there is no reason to grant her acquaintance with the general feature Being Scarlet.
It has been suggested to me that this observation is at odds with the possibility of an object being constituted by another, qualitatively indistinguishable object. The suggestion strikes me as being beside the point, unless it has been made plausible that in such cases the subject would get acquainted with one of the objects in virtue of perceiving the other. On the face of it, if it were possible to get acquainted with the second object in circumstances in which the first gets perceived, this would not be because the first is perceived, but because in such circumstances the second would also be perceived.
This point is not invalidated by the observation that we can only become acquainted with a property on the basis of perceiving instances of similar properties. Clearly, this restriction is due to the circumstances under which the instances of a given property are perceivable. For example, it is plausible that an instance of roundness could not be perceived in the guise of a vastly dissimilar shape, e.g. squareness. Presumably this is because the way an instance would appear must fundamentally be due to the character of the instance, and it does not seem possible that roundness—with its perfect symmetry—could be the ground of a square look. This makes it unsurprising that it does not seem possible to acquire a concept of a square thing by perceiving a round thing: if something looked square to one, it is safe to conclude that the subject would not be perceiving the roundness of anything in their environment.
I am grateful to a reviewer for helping me hone in on the consequences of the highlighted difference in mechanisms.
See Russell (1912, p. 47).
See Grimm (2011).
On those points, see Bourget (2017).
In his original example, Bourget proposes that to grasp that the Earth is a million times smaller than the sun, he needed to see an apple-seed next to a basketball. Presumably, an experience of this sort is needed to reveal the nature of the relative size relation.
See Ivanov (2019).
I should thank Fiona Macpherson for pushing me to motivate limiting the range of properties eligible for acquaintance to so called low-level properties.
I was alerted to this alternative by a reviewer.
See Eilan (2017).
A similar view about perceptually-anchored concepts of properties gets entertained but all-too-quickly dismissed in Levin (2008)—presumably because the author does not allow that perceptual experience could reveal the nature of external properties.
“Our intuitive idea of being able to distinguish an object collects together several different relations in which subjects may stand to objects, but we have as yet no idea of what unifies them. We cannot rest content with a purely disjunctive understanding of the concept of discriminating knowledge; but a more adequate understanding can be provided only by giving a theory in which the concept of discriminating knowledge is linked to the concepts of thought and judgement by way of Russell’s principle [of acquaintance]. Only a theoretical defence of Russell’s principle will provide us with an account of what common thing it is which descriptive, demonstrative, and recognition-based identification enable a subject to do, by showing us why it is that thought about a particular individual requires the subject to be able to do it” (Evans 1982, p. 91). See also Dickie (2015, pp. 22–27).
That the former capacity is based on the latter is argued in Dummett (1973: Ch. VII). I take it that something like Dummett’s view of the relation between the two capacities is true with regard to our basic stock of property-concepts.
Although, as Quine showed, we can also use such concepts predicatively—but that is a derivative use.
Some take it as having been established it that we can possess a concept of a property, despite having an incorrect understanding of a property, e.g. “arthritis” (see Burge 1979). But the proposed cases of putative incorrect understanding can also be construed as cases in which the subject would possess an accurate but fairly minimal understanding of the property. For instance, to have a concept of arthritis, a subject would need to know that arthritis is the disease experts in their community mean by ‘arthritis’.
The alternative would be to take such grasp to be based on intellectual rather than perceptual acquaintance.
The distinction in requirements for having a concept of each sort has an interesting consequence, which strikes me as plausible. While it is debatable that acquaintance with particulars can be enabled otherwise than on the basis of perceptual contact with them (e.g. by participating in a name-using practice), many have allowed for this. But from the present proposal, it would follow that one cannot similarly get acquainted with a property by virtue of participating in a predicate-using practice. Additionally, it implies that, strictly speaking, we are only acquainted with sensibly and perhaps with a small number of intellectually revealed properties—the rest being conceived descriptively.
The reason why this result strikes me as plausible is that intuitions pertaining to the essentiality of phenomenal consciousness for acquaintance seem to be very strong when it comes to acquaintance properties. While it is reasonable to grant a super-blindseer perceptual acquaintance with particulars, it is a lot less plausible that super-blindsight could acquaint one with properties (compare Mary and her super-blindsighted counterpart). But provided that standing in an informational relation to a particular property by virtue of being able to track and tell instances of the property would be insufficient for an acquaintance with the property, neither would standing in the same sort of relation by exploiting the division of linguistic labor.
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I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their incredibly insightful commentary. Matt Soteriou, Naomi Eilan, Quassim Cassam and Uriah Kriegel provided invaluable comments on earlier drafts. The material of this paper was presented to audiences at the University of Glasgow, the University of Sussex, Beijing Normal University, Macau University, Tsinghua University and Zhejiang University. Thanks to those audiences, and especially to Asher Jiang, Fiona Macpherson, Hao Tang, Kristjan Laasik, Itay Shani, Keith Wilson, Michael Morris, Ru Ye, and Sarah Sawyer. The research leading to these results received funding under Shandong University’s Start-Up Fund (Grant No. 110900078614017).
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Ivanov, I.V. Properties in sight and in thought. Synthese 198, 7049–7071 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02509-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02509-x