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Notes
My own comments above were followed by some further claims I now repudiate. For some cogent criticisms of those claims, see Martin 2002. In other earlier work, I also sometimes wrote as if the thesis of transparency was best taken to be a thesis about direct awareness/attention and not a thesis about awareness/attention simpliciter. In my present view, this is too restrictive.
I can be aware of a concrete particular in some cases by being aware of a part of that particular. So, there is such a thing as indirect de re awareness; but it evidently is not applicable here to the case of the muffins.
In my view, in no case of perception can we be aware of such features by introspection.
These remarks about attention are intended to be consonant with how we ordinarily think of attention. But prima facie they do not fit very well with some scientific discussions of attention. In particular, they seem not to capture what scientists sometimes call ‘diffuse’ or ‘ambient’ attention (Pashler 1998).
This test for awareness, as stated, oversimplifies minimally. Suppose, for example, you put your head around the door of my office and ask me if I’d like to go to lunch. I see your head. Do I also see you? Intuitively I do. Cases like this can be handled either by modifying the test so that the demonstrative is permitted to pick out some sufficiently large or salient part of the relevant thing or by arguing that the demonstrative can be applied directly to the thing even though only part of it is in the field of view.
As for the case of simple creatures without the capacity to form propositional attitudes, I deny that they see things around them (in the relevant sense of ‘see’). I do not deny, of course, that such creatures may register or detect things in their environments and thus see them in a weaker sense. (Those who are not as liberal in the ascription of propositional attitudes as I may wish to hold instead that the test, as proposed, is only for creatures capable of forming beliefs, etc.).
My own view is that this is the case in all circumstances. For a defense of this stronger claim against putative counter-examples, see Tye (2010). For present purposes, the stronger claim is not needed.
There’s a complication I’m ignoring for moment. More on this later. I should also add that some representationalists (myself included) want to extend this thesis not only to all perceptual experiences but also to all experiences period.
There is a delicate issue in metaphysics I skate over here. If items, a, b, …. jointly have property P, is the bearer of P really an ordered n-tuple of a, b …. ? If John and Jane jointly lift a piano, is it really an ordered pair of John and Jane that has the property of lifting a piano?
I’m inclined to think that both shapes and colors are experienced as intrinsic properties of surfaces and so not dependent on things outside those surfaces including minds.
This is a problem for both versions of the sense-datum view.
You might object that Mary* would (might) not yet have the concepts red, orange and green and so would not (might not) know the fact in question. The use of these color concepts is not crucial to the example. Mary* would certainly know that this color is more similar to that color than to that other color.
I take it that weak property representationalism is a supervenience thesis; strong property representationalism is an identity claim.
Mark Johnston writes, “There are no qualia. It is ordinary qualities and complexes involving them that account for the so-called subjective character of experience” (2004, p. 146). Even though Johnston is not a representationalist, this claim is one I accept.
Cp. Kennedy forthcoming.
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Appendix
Appendix
It may be useful to summarize very briefly how my representationalist views have evolved through time. When I wrote Ten Problems of Consciousness (1995) and Consciousness, Color and Content (2000), I held these three theses:
- (1)
Common Phenomenal Character: Veridical, illusory and hallucinatory experiences can sometimes have the very same phenomenal character.
- (2)
Common Existential Content: Veridical, illusory and hallucinatory experiences all have existential representational content and in some cases have the very same existential content.
- (3)
Strong Content Representationalism: the phenomenal character of a mental state is one and the same as its poised, nonconceptual, existential content (its PANIC, to use my earlier acronym).
I gave up (2) around 2006 and I held for a while in place of (2):
- (2a)
Disjunctivism about Content: Veridical and illusory experiences have singular contents; hallucinatory experiences have gappy contents.
Since I continued to hold (1), I then also gave up (3) about which I had already started to have independent doubts, since it no longer seemed to me to fit well with the transparency of experience. In place of (3), I adopted (2009):
- (3a)
Strong Property Representationalism: the phenomenal character of an experience is one and the same as the complex of properties represented by the experience. A mental state has phenomenal character just in case it is appropriately poised (a functional role condition) and it nonconceptually represents a complex of properties.
I was also then a weak content representationalist:
- (4)
Weak Content Representationalism: necessarily, experiences with the same representational content have the same phenomenal character.
Later around 2010 (see my forthcoming) I came to have doubts about gappy content and so I gave up (2a) and in its place I accepted:
- (2b)
Common Set-Theoretic Content: Veridical, illusory and hallucinatory experiences have as their content a set of possible worlds. Where there is a seen object A experienced as being F, the relevant set is the set of possible worlds at which A is F. Where there is no seen object (the hallucinatory case), so that A is empty, the set of worlds is the set of worlds at which A is F, where this set is now the empty set.
(2b) also fits well with my view about the content of thought elaborated in my 2011 book with Mark Sainsbury, Seven Puzzles of Thought. Once (2b) is accepted, weak content representationalism goes (for reasons given above in the essay). So, now, of the theses above, I hold (1), (2b) and (3a).
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Tye, M. Transparency, qualia realism and representationalism. Philos Stud 170, 39–57 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0177-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0177-8