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Notes
Contrast the converse principle that, if something that is F visually appears to you, then it visually appears to you that something is F. Sense-data theorists needn’t accept any such principle. For instance, many of them will want to maintain that, although sense-data are mind-dependent, they do not wear their mind-dependence on their sleeves.
Perhaps a sense-data theorist might accept that sense-data are mind-independent, without simply being ordinary things such as tables or chairs. My argument isn’t aimed against such a theorist, and might indeed be exploited by her.
For further problem cases raised by high-level contents, consider the following:
If I hallucinate an iPad, am I related to a sense-datum which is an iPad???
If I hallucinate my mother, am I related to a sense-datum which is my mother???
For another upshot of high-level content for the philosophy of perception, consider the question of whether our experiences can have contents which are not just false but necessarily false. Suppose I’m walking around a lake, and am charmed when it visually appears to me that that is a swan. Sadly that thing is merely a plastic bag. Now something that is a plastic bag couldn’t have been a swan. So if my experience has the high-level content that that is a swan, my experience has a content which is necessarily false.
High-level content could still be important for those who deny that we have immediate justification from our experiences for beliefs about the external world. For example, if our experiences have high-level contents, it might be that our experiences will justify high-level beliefs only by depending on a priori beliefs about the link between our experiences and the world, rather than depending on any a posteriori justified beliefs about the link between our experiences and the world. It would already be a striking result if our experiences plus a priori beliefs could get us to justified high-level beliefs.
High-level content could connect as well with traditional coherentist views in epistemology. If those views at least allow a constraint that beliefs must cohere with experiences, it might well matter to those views if our experiences have high-level contents (thanks here to Terry Horgan).
Even if experiences fail to have contents at all, as is maintained by Travis (2004) and Brewer (2006), we perhaps could reformulate our questions to respect the point. Rather than saying that Anne’s experience has the content that John is in pain, we could say that Anne is aware of pain in having the experience, or is aware of John’s being in pain in having the experience. Or if you prefer, we could speak of what Anne is “presented with” or “confronted with” when she has the experience. It will be more straightforward however to speak of experiences as having contents in what follows.
McDowell makes the point himself in the following passage: “the rejection of the inferential model [of knowledge of other minds] does not turn on mere phenomenology. Theory can partly ground a claim to knowledge even in cases where it is not consciously brought to bear; as with a scientist who (as we naturally say) learns to see the movements of particles in some apparatus (1982/1998, p. 344)”.
Thanks to David Chalmers for bringing me to consider this argument.
For a line of doubt about the Experience to Belief thesis suggested to me by Richard Price, consider the access internalist proposal that, in order for your experience with the high-level content that p to give you reason to believe that p, you must know that you have the experience with the high-level content that p. On this line of thought, ignorance of philosophy of mind leads to the incapacity of experience to justify belief. In order for the line of thought to succeed, the access internalist thesis must be carefully formulated. On many views, having failed to form a belief that one has an experience (whether due to conceptual incapacity or negligence) results in ignorance about whether one has the experience, but does not prevent the experience from providing justification for belief. Weaker access internalist theses can be brought in at this stage, but now there will be controversy over whether we fail to meet their requirements, in addition to controversy over whether they are true.
For sample arguments that experiences have phenomenal contents, see Siewert (1998), Byrne (2001) and Tye (2002).
Notice that phenomenal contents of experiences are not defined as being narrow contents, where a content is narrow if it is not individuated by one’s relations to the environment. For all we’ve said, it might be that the phenomenal contents of experiences are themselves externally individuated (Lycan 2001).
For a more subtle discussion of what it would take to entertain such contents, see Burge (1982).
According to the views of philosophers such as Ned Block, Sydney Shoemaker and David Chalmers, even color contents are not phenomenal contents of experiences. So the Phenomenology Constraint might be used to argue that experiences do not even give immediate justification for low-level beliefs, such as beliefs which attribute colors to things. For more discussion, see Silins (2011).
For dispute, see Price (2006, chap. 1).
The argument here assumes that if fact #1 obtains in part in virtue of fact #2, and fact #2 obtains in part in virtue of fact #3, then fact #1 obtains in part in virtue of fact #3.
For a potential occurrence of this argument in the literature, see Plantinga (1993, p. 99–101).
A further objection to the argument was pointed out to me by Adam Pautz. Consider content holist views according to which, for instance, you believe that Moby Dick is a whale only if you have ever so many further beliefs, given how the contents of beliefs are individuated. Such views presumably are not committed to the claim that your belief that Moby Dick is a whale is justified, or is able to justify, only if all of those further beliefs are justified. This suggests that a belief can play a role in determining the content of a mental state without needing to be justified for the determined mental state to receive or give justification.
Experimental work on facial recognition and scene perception is highly relevant here—I hope to pursue the connection in future work.
There is a further problem here as well. To see the further problem, remember that an experience gives me immediate justification only if it gives me justification in a way that does not depend on my having justification for some background belief. So if any background belief plays a role in giving me justification, that it is enough for me to fail to have immediate justification, even if the belief is a general belief which plays a role in each case of perceptual justification. My belief that there is a plate of nachos before me could then be mediately justified without being mediated by any low-level beliefs concerning the external world. In particular, it might be that my experience gives me justification only in virtue of my having justification to believe that my experiences are reliable. This belief might play a role in the nachos example even if no belief concerning color, shape and location plays a role in the example.
One might object that, if our experiences are reliably correlated with the truth of a given content, then our experiences have that content, since a suitable correlational theory is correct of how experiences get to have their contents. On this line of thought, even if simple reliablism is true, it still fails to supply cases in which we have immediate justification for high-level beliefs despite lacking experiences with high-level contents. The problem with the response is that it invokes too crude a theory of how experiences get their contents. Our experiences are reliably correlated with ever so many properties, including properties of the brain and of light, without representing them all.
Alternatively, one might insist that once a relevant perceptual process is suitably specified by the reliabilist, they will settle on the view that only an experience with the content that p can give one justification to believe that p. Without further defense though the move looks ad hoc.
The line of thought is now endorsed by McDowell as well:
On my old assumption, since my experience puts me in a position to know non-inferentially that what I see is a cardinal, its content would have to include a proposition in which the concept of a cardinal figures… But what seems right is this: my experience makes the bird visually present to me, and my recognitional capacity enables me to know non-inferentially that what I see is a cardinal. Even if we go on assuming my experience has content, there is no need to suppose that the concept under which my recognitional capacity enables me to bring what I see figures in that content (2009, p. 259).
Millar 2000 develops the proposal by using the notion of a “distinctive appearance”:
If one knows perceptually that A is an F from the way it appears, relative to some sense, then A must have an appearance relative to that sense which is (nearly enough) distinctive of Fs in that most things which have that appearance are Fs (2000, p. 87).
The necessary condition proposed here is too strong. Suppose I adeptly disguise myself as Michelle Obama and sneak into a party where she is present. Her appearance will now fail to be distinctive of being Michelle Obama, since only one out of two things with that appearance is her. Still I will have no trouble in gaining perceptual recognitional knowledge that Michelle Obama is present, even if others do.
Rather than focusing on the proportion of things which have the appearance which are Fs, it would be better to focus on whether the subject is in danger of making a mistake on a similar basis about whether A is an F. I am in no danger of making such a mistake, even though others are.
A further challenge is that, depending on how the notion of a “perceptual recognitional capacity” is fleshed out, having such a capacity with respect to lemons might suffice for experience to have high-level contents regarding lemons. If having the right kind of expertise affects the contents of one’s experiences, and having a perceptual recognitional capacity is an instance of having that kind of expertise, the recognitional capacity approach would end up being one on which experiences do have high-level contents after all. Thanks to Kate Manne for discussion of this point.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Richard Boyd, David Chalmers, Stewart Cohen, Juan Comesaña, Terry Horgan, Kate Manne, John Morrison, Adam Pautz, Susanna Siegel, Jonathan Vance, Jonathan Vogel, Matt Frise, and Richard Price, as well as to audiences at the University of Arizona, Jawaharlal Nehru University, a Harvard University seminar, and a workshop on perception at Barnard.
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Silins, N. The significance of high-level content. Philos Stud 162, 13–33 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9991-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9991-7