Commentary

Color, Mental Location, and the Visual Field☆

The ineffability of qualia and the word-anchoring problem are intimately related. Innate neural structures realize qualitative experiences that we rapidly learn to associate to their aboutness and to other events. Phylogenetically conserved neural structures provide the common endowment that serves as the bases for phenomenal knowledge and for building a virtual language-independent phenomenal-intentional lexicon, in which the ‘entries’ are the what-it-is-like of experiences and their ‘definitions’ consist in their aboutness and in their indexical reference. Qualitative experiences consist in analogue neurophysiological processes, which are ineffable simply because they cannot be duplicated in other brains through propositions or symbolic descriptions.

A second virtual dictionary, the verbal-phenomenal lexicon functions as a ‘bilingual’ dictionary that interconnects signals, utterances and words developed by a specific culture with our common phylogenetic endowment. This grounds words in the phenomenal, establishing a bridge between language and intentionality.

The third lexicon—a personal version of the regular dictionary—explains the meaning of words with definitions, but eventually, it must resort to examples to refer to the meaning of ineffable words anchored in the verbal-phenomenal lexicon. The references to qualitative experiences entered in the regular dictionary are unintelligible to individuals who do not share our genetic endowment and phenomenology, as illustrated by color blindness. The limited hardware of the brain determines the scope and the nature of our experiences. Fortunately, we can transcend the limitations of phenomenal knowledge through propositional knowledge, which incorporates the combinatorial symbolism of language and the normative influence of science and philosophy.

Perceptual experience seems to involve distinct intentional and qualitative features. Inasmuch as one can visually perceive that there is a Coke can in front of one, perceptual experience must be intentional. But such experiences seem to differ from paradigmatic intentional states in having introspectible qualitative character. Peacocke (1983) argues that a perceptual experience’s qualitative character is determined by intrinsic, nonrepresentational properties. But Peacocke, 2001, Peacocke, 1992 also argues that perceptual experiences have nonconceptual representational content in addition to conceptual content and nonrepresentational sensational properties. He thus distinguishes between conceptual, nonrepresentational, and nonconceptual but representational aspects of perceptual experience. I will argue that Peacocke posits too much. Contrary to his (1983) arguments, the sensational properties Peacocke claims are nonrepresentational are best construed as representational; they are best explained in terms of their relation to the perceptible properties they enable us to perceive. Since sensational properties are arguably nonconceptual, they are best construed as nonconceptual representational properties. I offer the Homomorphism View of sensory qualities, pioneered by Sellars (1956), as a unified account of qualitative character and nonconceptual sensory representation. According to this view, a sensory quality represents a perceptible stimulus property in virtue of resembling and differing from other sensory qualities in ways parallel to the ways the stimulus property resembles and differs from other perceptible properties.