Abstract
I propose that the fundamental challenge Berkeley left realists is to account for experiences’ ability to present items as mind-independent, consistent with the claim that experiences always present themselves among the items of awareness. By exploring two ways of responding to this challenge, and ruling out the second, I hope to show that realists aiming to secure a role for experiences in grounding our grasp of mind-independence need to adopt a specific view of perceptual experience. They must take experiences to have translucent aspects, and accord such aspects an essential role in presenting us with a mind-independent world.
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Notes
Cf. Campbell and Cassam (2014: pp. 35–39).
This second horn of the dilemma has been put succinctly by Cassam: “If the qualitative character of experience has nothing to do with experience, then so much the worse for experientialism” (Campbell & Cassam, 2014: p. 157). At the same time, Cassam fails to recognize the seriousness of the first horn of the dilemma—helping himself to the view that experiences represent some of their objects not just as independent of themselves, but also—as independent of any possible experience.
I borrow the distinction between absolute and particular mind-independence (i.e. independence of a particular collection of experiences or other mental states) from Mackie (2020).
I should note that Moore himself argued merely for the distinctness of the object of experience from its subject, not for the metaphysical independence of the object from the subject. In the following passage, he shows himself to be in principle open to the idea that the items experienced might be mind-dependent and grounded in what he calls “mental images”: “[E]ven if there are mental images, no mental image and no sensation or idea is merely a thing of this kind: that 'blue,' even if it is part of the content of the image or sensation or idea of blue, is always also related to it in quite another way, and that this other relation, omitted in the traditional analysis, is the only one which makes the sensation of blue a mental fact at all” (Moore 1903: p. 449). What Moore maintains against his idealist opponent in the passage is: (1) that the would-be mind-dependence of the objects of experience would not be experientially manifest, and (2) regardless of whether such objects are mind-dependent or not, they would be distinct from ourselves and our experiences—hence sensed qualities are not qualities of experiences.
As will become clear, on the account I end up endorsing this claim would be false. Specifically, if an item were (and not merely appears) solid, it could not be mind-dependent. But I can hold this precisely because I subscribe to the translucency view. The proponent of experiential transparency must grant that perceptible solidity is compatible with mind-dependence. This is the grain of truth in Spener’s and Mackie’s discussion of the relation between perceptible properties and mind-independence.
This is a must on reductive forms of representationalism.
See Kriegel (2015).
Cf. Siegel and Byrne (2017).
Cf. Smith (2002: p. 155).
This is why Berkeley’s (1713) argument for reducing sensible heat to sensation is so persuasive.
See Campbell and Cassam (2014: pp. 25–26).
Cf. Fulkerson (2013), Ch. III.
Cf. Kalderon (2017), Ch. I.
In this regard, Buras and Dougherty’s main foil—Reid—is an apt target of their criticism, since he took the feeling of resistance as a mere sensation in no way intrinsically connected to hardness.
Mackie (2020) has argued that nothing prevents mind-dependent objects from having causal powers, which would entail that apparent exercise of a causal power is insufficient to indicate mind-independence. Granting this point to Mackie, I argue that tactile experiences represent the exercise of intrinsically grounded causal powers.
Buras and Doherty anticipate the proposal that possessing solidity rules out mind-dependence, and argue that solidity is fully compatible with mind-dependence. According to them, our positive conception of solidity is of a topic-neutral relation among the microphysical parts of an object—putting no significant constraints on the nature of the parts. However, solidity as felt is not some hidden relation among the microscopic parts of an object, but a manifest property of the whole object. Solidity is presented in tactile experiences in a manner direct and substantial enough for the property’s possession to be able to account for the respective item’s impenetrability (see Crowther 2018: pp. 261–262).
See Mackie (2020: pp. 462–463).
The account of the nature of our awareness of solidity proposed here might help resolve the debate in which Mackie intervenes. While Cassam deems solidity, Campbell deems causal unity as the basis of the sensory representation of mind-independence. Neither author finds their opponent’s candidate suitable, because each sees it as compatible with mind-dependence (Campbell & Cassam, 2014: pp. 182 and 195, resp.). Mackie, on the other hand, sees both candidates as thus compatible.
If my proposal is correct, not only would (pace Mackie) solidity turn out to be incompatible with mind-dependence, but it would also ground some of an object’s causal powers. Intrinsically-grounded causal unity might be what Campbell means by the more loaded term “causal autonomy”. Consequently, Campbell and Cassam would be thinking of the same property.
Crowther (2018) has recently defended the second view. On his account, visual objects would be presented as tangible as a result of the cross-modal integration of vision and touch.
Even the opponents of this way of understanding vision admit that the extramissive account is extremely natural (see e.g. O’Shaughnessy 2003: p. 183).
I am grateful to a reviewer for raising this issue.
Some might not share the intuition that perfect holograms appear deceptive in any further sense beyond looking tangible. They do seem to provide some visual resistance, but there might be nothing deceptive about this, since they appear to be objective entities, constituted by light. Here I need to show my hand: I take holograms—along with mirages and rainbows—to be mind-dependent entities. In my view, all those are dispositions for incapacitation of a region of one’s gaze, grounded in certain physical properties possessed by a space region (e.g., the character of light pervading it).
Compare Chalmers’ (2004) proposal that Edenic colors and shapes serve as regulative ideals for our color and shape representations.
One might worry that, when conjoined with this sort of response, my proposal ends up not being substantially different from proposals on which visual experiences indicate the mind-independence of visual objects on the basis of attributing to them some modal relation. Certainly, similar sorts of issues would arise for both: e.g. how is it possible for an experience to represent the interactive gazing relation if the relation is not instantiated in the here and now? But even if it faced such issues, my proposal would still be more phenomenologically plausible than the alternative modal proposals (moreover, above I argued that on the most natural way to pursue it—in terms of the visual representation of tangibility—the modal approach proves inadequate).
Kalderon (2017) argues that the relational view is best understood in this interactivist fashion.
It might be proposed that the phenomenon I construe as the effortful mode of awareness could be cashed out by the proponent of transparency as the putative positing of mind-independence. But it would be perverse to argue that an item’s apparent resistance to my touch or gaze really consists in its being represented as independent of the experience of any minded subject. The explanation clearly should go in the other direction. This I believe to be a general issue with positional intentional modes: they do not provide satisfying explanations of the relevant distinctive phenomenal aspects. But that shortcoming is most obvious in the particular case.
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Acknowledgements
This paper was presented at online events hosted by Peking University and Sun Yat-sen University (Zhuhai). I would like to thank the audience, especially Heath Williams, Itay Shani, Kris Laasik and Nick Rimell, for their useful feedback. I am also grateful to Arthur Schipper, Dominic Alford-Duguid, Matt Soteriou, and three anonymous reviewers for their generous written comments. This research was supported by a Humanities and Social Sciences General Research Project of the Chinese Ministry of Education, titled ‘Perceptual Experience: Beyond the Mainstream Intentional Approach' (21YJA720001).
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This article belongs to the topical collection “Demystifying the Given", edited by Andrea Altobrando and Haojun Zhang.
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Ivanov, I.V. Sensing mind-independence. Synthese 199, 14931–14949 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03449-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03449-1