Abstract
According to reductive intentionalism, the phenomenal character of a conscious experience is constituted by the experience's intentional (or representational) content. In this article I attempt to show that a phenomenon in visual perception called change blindness poses a problem for this doctrine. Specifically, I argue that phenomenal character is not sensitive, as it should be if reductive intentionalism is correct, to fine-grained variations in content. The standard anti-intentionalist strategy is to adduce putative cases in which phenomenal character varies despite sameness of content. This paper explores an alternative antiintentionalist tack, arguing, by way of a specific example involving change blindness, that content can vary despite sameness of phenomenal character.
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Notes
By “phenomenal character” I take intentionalists to mean, roughly, “appertaining to what a conscious state is like from the first person perspective.” Here is Byrne, a prominent intentionalist, on the matter: “The notion of the phenomenal character of an experience is hard to explain, but easy to understand. (At any rate everyone seems to understand it.) We can start with the stock phrase: ‘what it’s like’ for the subject to undergo the experience. We can give everyday examples of similarity and difference in phenomenal character: the experience of seeing purple is more like, in respect of phenomenal character, the experience of seeing blue than it is like the experience of smelling vanilla” (2001, p. 200; also see Tye 1995, p. 3).
Change blindness (or difference blindness as I will call it) is to be distinguished from a related visual phenomenon called inattentional blindness, which is the inability to perceive (sometimes obvious) features in a visual scene when the subject is not attending to them.
There are some difficult questions regarding difference blindness. For example, what is the role of implicit representation in difference blindness? Is attention required to perceive differences? Is it important for subjects to actively search for differences in reducing difference blindness? For recent discussions of these questions see, respectively, Silverman and Mack (2006), Beck et al. (2007), and Rensink et al. (1997). My argument in this paper does not demand that I take up a position on any of these controversies.
One might object that the individual letters that make up (1) and (2) are not part of the PL-content of the subject’s visual experience, since the subject does not attend to them. (Consider Tye’s claim that “necessarily, if any of the qualities of which you are directly aware change, then the phenomenal character of your experience changes” (2000, p. 48)). This objection misfires, however, because it commits one to affirming that only those objects and properties of an experience that are attended to can form the PL-content of one’s experience, which is implausible. Surely the blue sky, of which I am now peripherally aware as I look outside my window at the mountain in the distance, constitutes part of the PL-content of my visual experience of the mountain. Similarly, the individual letters in (1) and (2), even if the subject does not attend to them, form part of the PL-content of the subject’s visual experience of (1) and (2).
Byrne makes this assumption because although he thinks changes in phenomenal character are self-intimating, he finds compelling an argument from Williamson (2000, ch. 4) against luminosity, which Williamson defines as the thesis that for a condition C and for any case α, one is in a position to know that C obtains if and only if, in α, C obtains. The idea is that if C is luminous, then one will know, in any case in which it obtains, that it has in fact obtained. In his anti-luminosity argument, Williamson uses the example of feeling cold, arguing that, contrary to accepted belief, feeling cold is a condition that is not luminous at all.
I cannot provide a responsible defence of this assumption within the ambit of this paper (below I provide a mere statement of it), so I will simply defer to others who have. Various classical phenomenologists, including Brentano (1874), Sartre (1956), and Merleau-Ponty (1962), have defended it, but a number of contemporary philosophers would also ally themselves with it. See, e.g., Nagel (1974), Woodruff Smith (e.g., 1989), Dwyer (1990), Siewert (1998), Stubenberg (1998), Thomasson (2000), Zahavi (e.g., 1999, 2005), and Carman (2005).
For interesting and stimulating recent discussions of this fallacy see Dwyer (1990) and Rowlands (2001). Both Dwyer and Rowlands characterize the fallacy as a category mistake. According to Dwyer, subjectivity encompasses “categorially autonomous phenomena” (1990, p. 33), and so it is a fallacy to suppose that our actual experience “may be some way in itself transcending the way it is for a subject” (1990, p. 32); and Rowlands claims that since personal and sub-personal levels of content cannot be reckoned to be in the same category, it is a fallacy to suppose that there is a “distinction between (i) the way an experience seems to its subject and (ii) the way an experience really is” (2001, p. 189).
The wording here is perhaps somewhat infelicitous. Strictly speaking, we do not experience a level of content; rather, we experience objects, events, properties, states of affairs, etc. The level of content described in phenomenology just is our experience of these worldly items.
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Janzen, G. Intentionalism and Change Blindness. Philosophia 36, 355–366 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-007-9115-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-007-9115-3