Abstract
When we see a tomato in standard circumstances, we see something red and round. According to common sense, the red, round thing we see is the tomato itself. When we have a hallucinatory vision of a tomato, however, there may be present to us no red and round physical object. Still, we use the words ‘red’ and ‘round’ to describe that situation as well, this time applying them to the visual experience itself. We say that we have a red, round visual image, or a visual experience of a red disk, or some such. Because we see physical objects far more often than we hallucinate, we apply terms for color and shape to physical objects far more often than to visual experiences. Moreover, different theories of perception explain in different ways the applications such terms have to physical objects and to visual experiences. But whatever their frequency and explanation, it seems clear that both sorts of application occur.
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Notes
I.e., shape as it is seen, rather than as sensed by some other sensory modality, e.g., touch.
Descartes (1941), Meditation VI; Locke (1700, III, iv, 16); Berkeley (1713, I, 10) (cf. Hume [1739, I, iv, 4]); Aristotle (1907), B5, 417b2–418a6 and r2, 425b-19–25; Chisholm (1957, ch. 4); McGinn (1983, esp. chs. 2 and 8); Smart (1963, chs. 4 and 5); Armstrong (1980, ch. 3, p. 28 and chs. 7, 8, and 9).
When not otherwise indicated, parenthesized references are to this book.
Thus John R. Searle insists that “[r]edness is not part of my visual experience... ; the experience is of something red, but is not itself a red experience” (1983, p. 131).
This kind of possibility has been usefully explored by Wilfrid Sellars (1960) and (1963), and Christopher Peacocke (1983) and (1984).
For useful remarks on the connection between the two types of property for various sensory modalities, see Austen Clark (1993, pp. 124–130).
It has not been noted that this type of reasoning is an important part of what underlies the inviting idea that sensory states cannot occur without being conscious. On this picture, sensory qualities are in effect relocated versions of the commonsense qualities we consciously perceive physical objects as having. So on this relocation story, consciousness is actually built into the very way we conceive of sensory qualities. Indeed, the familiar metaphor of consciousness as a mental light without which our sensory qualities would not exist makes little sense unless we conceive of them this way. For more on this conception and its avoidability, see David M. Rosenthal (forthcoming).
See, e.g., Smart (1963, chs. 4 and 5); Armstrong (1980, chs. 7, 8, and 9). This is not to say that our commonsense concept of physical color is the concept of a light-reflecting property, any more than our commonsense concept of heat, e.g., is the concept of mean molecular kinetic energy. Rather, in both cases we identify the properties to which our commonsense concept applies with suitable properties described in terms of physics.
Cf. Evan Thompson (1995, pp. 242–243), who points out that such perceiver-relativity fails to preclude a view on which color is a relational property of physical objects. Hardin also urges that the organization of colors into “an opponent unitary-binary structure... that [has] no counterpart in the world of color-relevant extradermal physical processes” shows that color properties cannot be properties of physical objects and processes (1991, p. 61); see also (1990, pp. 563–564) and (1988, ch. 2). But the opponent structure Hardin appeals to is less well-established scientifically than Hardin claims, and also less obvious phenomenologically (see, e.g., Davida Y. Teller [1991, pp. 51–53]). For an excellent account of metamerism, see Clark (1993, pp. 38ff.). For arguments similar to Hardin’s, see James A. McGilvray (1994).
And commentators have focused on this. See, e.g., A. Olding (1980, pp. 158–162).
The ideas that animate double-meaning theory have useful historical antecedents. Berkeley (1710, §158), e.g., wrote that at least some of our words for sensible qualities are ambiguous. Thus, he held, ‘plane’ and ‘solid’ apply primarily to the immediate objects of touch, and only derivatively to the objects of sight. Berkeley sometimes seems even to claim that such terms are radically ambiguous. Thus he writes that the visual and tactile objects to which we apply these terms are “of a nature intirly different.” But he also insisted that planes and solids are both “equally suggested by the immediate objects of sight, [and] accordingly are themselves denominated plains and solids.” (I am grateful to Robert Schwartz for this reference). Reid (1785, II, xvi, p. 243) too claimed that, when I smell a rose, “the sensation I feel, and the quality in the rose which I perceive, are both called by the same name...; so that this name has two meanings.” And “[a]ll the names we have for smells, tastes, sounds, and for the various degrees of heat and cold, have a like ambiguity.... They signify both a sensation, and a quality [in physical objects] perceived by means of that sensation” (1785, p. 244). And G. E. Moore insisted that all words for sensible qualities are “each used in two very different senses” to refer to perceptible properties of physical objects and to the qualities of sensory experiences (1942, p. 657); see also (1942, pp. 655–8).
If the mental colors and shapes of visual experiences are relational properties, we would be introspectively aware only of the intentional and relational properties those experiences have. Gilbert Harman (1990) also argues, as part of a defense of functionalism, that we are introspectively aware of no properties of experiences except their intentional and relational properties. Harman concludes that we are never aware of qualities of our sensations, but only the qualities of perceived physical objects. But he does not consider the possibility that the qualities of our experiences are relational properties.
So pace Thomas Nagel (1974) and others, we can develop a pretty good idea of what the sensory qualities experienced even by somewhat distant species are probably like.
Consider mental sense data, which are paradigms of mental objects. Because they are data, that is, given to the senses, their nature is perforce independent of the perceiver.
As noted earlier, Jackson himself remarks on the apparent equivalence of adverbial and state theories (63). See also George Pitcher (1969, p. 204), who rightly notes the difficulty of isolating an issue that divides act-object theorists from so-called adverbial theorists, whose accounts proceed in terms of mental states. Pitcher’s hypothesis about the difference is that act-object theorists allow experiences to exist unperceived, whereas adverbial theorists find this impossible. This squares with Jackson’s adoption of the mental-object model, since he does permit visual experiences that we are unaware of (1969, pp. 24–26). But it is unclear why mental-state and adverbial theorists would not have the same sorts of reasons to do so as well, and many do. See, e.g., Rosenthal (1986, 1996). Robert Audi convincingly and elegantly demonstrates that adverbial theories can do justice to a range of considerations that, according to some, support the existence of mental objects (1978, pp. 348–61). And Robert Kraut develops a formalism designed to show that a single account can capture the crucial components of both act-object and adverbial theories (1982, pp. 277–293). Pitcher, Audi, and Kraut do not, however, consider the central role of the univocality issue. More recently, Michael Tye has defended a variant of the adverbial theory that he calls the “operator theory” (Tye [1989], esp. chs. 3–5). Tye quickly dismisses mental objects, largely on the ground that color words would then have to apply univocally to visual experiences and physical objects, and words such as ‘stabbing’ and ‘burning’ univocally to pains and physical processes (56–57).
See Jackson (103) on locating mental objects in a special, “mysterious space,” and Dennett (1978, p. 186 and passim) on phenomenal space as “Mental Image Heaven.”
See, e.g., Harman (1973). Tacit recognition of the role of such inference to the best explanation may also underlie the suggestive force of a remark of Wittgenstein’s: Let us imagine the following: The surfaces of the things around us (stones, plants, etc.) have patches and regions which produce pain in our skin when we touch them.... In this case we should speak of pain patches on the leaf of a particular plant just as at present we speak of red patches. I am supposing that it is useful to us to notice these patches and their shapes; that we can infer important properties of the objects from them (1968, Part I, §312).
On the connection between consciousness and what it’s like to have an experience, see Nagel (1974) and Rosenthal (1986, §3).
On the mental-light metaphor, see fn. 7.
Rosenthal (1986), (1993), and (1996). The explanation I advance construes a mental state’s being conscious as the extrinsic property of that state’s being accompanied by a certain type of thought: A mental state is conscious just in case one has a higher-order thought that one is in that state. But for present purposes it is irrelevant what specific explanation one adopts as long as it construes a state’s being conscious as some extrinsic property of the state.
No problem would arise if experiences were simply intentional states, as Armstrong (1980, chs. 7, 8, and 9) holds; experiences of red would then all be intentional states that are about physical red. But if, as most theorists assume, sensory experiences have characteristic nonintentional properties, it is unclear how knowing what physical red is could help us come to know what nonintentional mental property all experiences of red have in common.
See, in this connection, Clark’ s discussion of multidimensional scaling (1993, pp. 100ff.,117ff.).
So introspective access to our experiences cannot be simply an extrapolation from the information we get about physical objects to the states that represent them, as Fred Dretske (1994/95, and 1995, ch. 2) has urged.
This is a much revised version of a paper written during a research year at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, Germany, issued as ZiF Report No. 28/1990. I am greatly indebted to the Center for its generous support, and for the exceptionally congenial and stimulating environment provided there. I am grateful also to A. H. C. van der Heijden for helpful reactions to an earlier version of the paper, especially to the material that became §IV, and to Peter Ross for useful comments, also especially on §IV. Portions of this paper also derive from Rosenthal (1984, §V) and (1985).
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Rosenthal, D.M. (1999). The Colors and Shapes of Visual Experiences. In: Fisette, D. (eds) Consciousness and Intentionality: Models and Modalities of Attribution. The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 62. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9193-5_5
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