The Phenomenal and the Representational

Abstract

As its title indicates, this book is about two kinds of properties of perceiving subjects: their phenomenal properties, and their representational properties. In particular, it focuses on three questions: What are phenomenal properties? What are representational properties? What is the relationship between phenomenal and representational properties? My answers to these questions are guided by two ideas, which have both been around for a long time. The first is that experience is transparent, in the sense that attention to one's perceptual experiences is, or is intimately involved with, attention to the objects and properties those experiences present as in one's environment. Though the label is due to Moore, versions of this idea can be found in earlier philosophers as well, and it has played a central role in recent work in the philosophy of perception. The second is that one of the roles of perceptual experience is to make objects and properties available to the perceiver for thought. The idea that perception must play this role is of course explicit in empiricists like Locke, and in recent work it has been emphasized by, among others, John McDowell and Mark Johnston. The term 'availability' is taken from Johnston's paper, 'The Obscure Object of Hallucination.' These two ideas are central enough to the book that it used to be called 'Transparency and Availability'-until an anonymous referee pointed out, reasonably, that no one would have any idea what a book with that title was about. If there's anything original in this book, it's the idea that, suitably formulated, these two ideas can go quite a long way in revealing the nature of the contents of experience, and the way in which those contents are related to phenomenal properties. Most of the book is concerned with tracing this argumentative path. The rest is concerned with some problems which arise from conclusions reached along the way. These problems are mainly metaphysical, and take us into questions both about the nature of propositions and the nature of phenomenal properties. As is true of any book like this, one can question the starting points, as well as some of the assumptions-often assumptions about whether certain sorts of experiences are possible or, about their veridicality conditions-made throughout. This book is the attempt to think through the consequences of certain assumptions which seem to me plausible starting points for thinking about

Relational vs Adverbial Conceptions of Phenomenal Intentionality

“…We can read Russell (1912) as proposing a relation view in terms of "acquaintance", though this is no doubt a debatable exegetical claim. More recent and explicit proponents include , Pautz (2007Pautz ( , 2009bPautz ( , 2009aPautz ( , 2010forthcoming), Speaks (2015), Woodling (2016), and me (2010, 2017, 2018, forthcoming b). Tracking representationalism (Dretske 1995, Tye 1995, Lycan 1996, 2001) may also be counted as a kind of relation view, but my focus here will be on non-reductive relation views.…”

“…It might be possible to analyze PSOAs and propositions away when giving a more fundamental description of experience, and one might reasonably claim that PSOAs and propositions composed of a limited set of properties are parsimonious enough. An additional answer that is available to the Platonist is that PSOAs are simply properties of everything or the world as a whole (Speaks 2015). If Platonic properties of objects are ontologically unproblematic, then so should be properties of the world.…”

Implications of Intensional Perceptual Ascriptions for Relationalism, Disjunctivism, and Representationalism About Perceptual Experience

“…22 This type of representationalism (modulo the limitation to basic phenomenal properties) is endorsed by Pautz (2009Pautz ( , 2010bPautz ( and 2010a, Speaks (2009Speaks ( , 2010Speaks ( , 2015b, and Sosa (2010). Other proponents of representationalism include: Byrne (2001), Byrne and Tye (2006), Chalmers (2004Chalmers ( , 2006, Crane (2003), Dretske (1995), Harman (1990), Hill (2009), Jackson (2004), Lycan (1987Lycan ( , 1996Lycan ( , 2001), Mendelovici (2013Mendelovici ( , 2014, Nanay (2012), Schellenberg (2010Schellenberg ( , 2011Schellenberg ( , 2014, Tye (1995aTye ( ,b, 2000Tye ( , 2002Tye ( , 2003aTye ( ,b, 2007Tye ( , 2008Tye ( , 2015, and myself , 2017cand 2017bBourget and Mendelovici 2014).…”

Multisensory evidence

“…1010On what discriminability requires, see Williamson (1990); Raffman (2000); Farkas (2006); Speaks (2015). …”