ATTENTION AND MENTAL PAINT¹

Abstract

Much of recent philosophy of perception is oriented towards accounting for the phenomenal character of perception-what it is like to perceive-in a non-mentalistic way-that is, without appealing to mental objects or mental qualities. In opposition to such views, I claim that the phenomenal character of perception of a red round object cannot be explained by or reduced to direct awareness of the object, its redness and roundness-or representation of such objects and qualities. Qualities of perception that are not captured by what one is directly aware of or by representational content are instances of what Gilbert Harman has called "mental paint" (Block, 1990;Harman, 1990). The claim of this paper is that empirical facts about attention point in the direction of mental paint. The argument starts with the claim (later modified) that when one moves one's attention around a scene while keeping one's eyes fixed, the phenomenology of perception can change in ways that do not reflect which qualities of objects one is directly aware of or the way the world is represented to be. These changes in the phenomenology of perception cannot be accounted for in terms of awareness of or representation of the focus of attention because they manifest themselves in experience as differences in apparent contrast, apparent color saturation, apparent size, apparent speed, apparent time of occurrence and other appearances. There is a way of coping with these phenomena in terms of vague contents, but vague contents cannot save direct realism or representationism because the kind of vagueness required clashes wth the phenomenology itself.

Introduction: Perception Without Representation

“…5 For example, many philosophers claim that there are irreducible qualitative properties, or qualia, that either totally (e.g. Block 2003Block , 2010 or in part (e.g. Peacocke 1983;Block 1996;Shoemaker 1990) determine the phenomenal character of experience, though we do not engage directly with these views here.…”

“…1 In particular, advocates of non-representational views of perception maintain that the phenomenal character of veridical perception-broadly, "what it is like" (Nagel 1974) for the subject to undergo the relevant experience-is explained by the obtaining of a non-representational psychological relation to external mind-independent objects. This places the resulting views in opposition not only to representational or intentional theories, but also to adverbialism (Ducasse 1942;Chisholm 1957;Tye 1984), sense-datum theory (Broad 1952;Moore 1953), and nonrepresentational qualia or 'mental paint' (Block 1996(Block , 2010 views of perception.…”

Rethinking naive realism

“…This description does not violate the plausibility constraint, assuming a patch can simultaneously look both 22 and 16-28% contrast to a normal perceiver under normal conditions. However, as Block (2010) argues, the experimental results clearly suggest that the patches look equally determinate ways to both perceivers. So the first response fails.…”

Visual prominence and representationalism

“…1 Several philosophers have recently argued that representationalism about visual experience is unable to accommodate the effects that shifts in attention have on visual phenomenology (Block 2010, Chalmers 2010, Nickel 2007, Speaks 2010, and Wu 2011. 2 Of course, overt shifts in attention involving muscular contractions (e.g.…”