Unpleasant sensations possess a unique ability to make certain aversive actions seem reasonable to us. But what is it about these experiences that give them that ability? According to some recent evaluationist accounts, it is their representational content: unpleasant sensations represent a certain event as bad for one. Unfortunately evaluationism seems unable to make sense of our aversive behavior to the sensations themselves, for it appears to entail that taking a painkiller is akin to shooting the messenger, and is every (...) bit as unreasonable. In this paper I distinguish two versions of the shooting-the-messenger challenge: First, how do we account for the badness of unpleasant sensation? And second, how do we account for our access to that badness? I suggest plausible responses to the first question, but I also argue that the seriousness of the second has not been appreciated. I then propose a solution to the second: when we introspect our pains we also turn our emotional distress inwards, enabling them to represent our pains as bad. (shrink)

This paper controverts the ability of intentionalism about perception to account for unique epistemic significance of phenomenal consciousness. More specifically, the intentionalist cannot explain the latter without denying two well-founded claims: the transparency of experience, and the possibility of unconscious perception. If they are true, intentionality of perception entails that phenomenal consciousness has no special epistemic role to play. Although some intentionalists are ready to bite this bullet, by doing so they effectively undermine one of the standard motivations of their (...) view, i.e. the claim that perceptual experiences justify beliefs. Consequently, whatever reason might there be to think that phenomenal consciousness has unique epistemic import, it is also a reason to reject intentionalism. I recommend replacing the latter with an unorthodox formulation of relationalism about perception. (shrink)

According to the thesis of transparency, subjects can attend only to the representational content of perceptual experience, never to the intrinsic properties of experience that carry this representational content, i.e., to “mental paint.” So far, arguments for and against transparency were conducted from the armchair, relying mainly on introspective observations. In this paper, we argue in favor of transparency, relying on the cognitive neuroscience of attention. We present a trilemma to those who hold that attention can be directed to mental (...) paint. Such attention is either first-order sensory, higher-order cognitive, or higher-order sensory attention. We argue that the notion of first-order sensory attention to mental paint is incompatible with the neuroscience of sensory attention; that higher-order cognitive attention to mental paint is irrelevant to transparency; and that the notion of higher-order sensory attention to mental paint has an apparently incoherent prediction. Via elimination, these considerations support the thesis of transparency. (shrink)

This essay defends the view that pain is a feeling, and thus that token pains are instances of feeling, against a number of objections.

This is the written version of a reply to Michael Tye's "Transparency, Qualia Realism, and Representationalism," given at the 40th Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy. It argues that, given one standard way of understanding these theses, qualia realism is trivially true and transparency theses are trivially false. I also discuss four objections to Tye's claim that the phenomenal character of the experience of red just is redness, and conclude by arguing that philosophers of perception should state their claims as about the (...) properties of subjects of experience rather than as about the properties of experiences themselves. (shrink)

In recent work, Michael Tye has criticized a certain sort of representationalist view of experience for holding that phenomenal characters are properties of experiences. Instead, Tye holds that phenomenal character is 'out there in the world.' This paper has two aims. One is to argue for the somewhat surprising conclusion that Tye’s apparently radical new view is not a change in view at all, but a notational variant of a standard representationalist theory. My more general aim, though, is to lay (...) out a bit more clearly than is usually done the basic metaphysics of representationalist views of consciousness. In the end, what I argue is that unclarity on this score is what has permitted the choice between standard representationalist theories and Tye’s new position to appear to be something more than a verbal question. I conclude by discussing the bearing of this on the question of whether we can be aware of phenomenal character in introspection, and the relative importance of properties of subjects and properties of experiences in the theory of consciousness. (shrink)

I am aware of the red and orange autumn leaves. Am I aware of my awareness of the leaves? Not so according to many philosophers. By contrast, many meditative traditions report an experience of awareness itself. I argue that such a pure awareness experience must have a non-sensory phenomenal character. I use Douglas Harding’s first-person experiments for assisting in recognising pure awareness. In particular, I investigate the gap where one cannot see one’s head. This is not a mere gap because (...) I seem to be looking from here. Critically, I claim, the experience of looking from here has a non-sensory phenomenal character. I argue that this sense of being aware cannot be reduced to egocentric visual-spatial relations nor the viewpoint because it continues when I close my eyes. Neither is a multisensory origin sufficient to explain why I seem to be at this central point rather than elsewhere. Traditionally, claims of a pure awareness experience have been restricted to highly trained individuals in very restricted circumstances. The innovation of Harding’s approach is that it reliably isolates a candidate for pure awareness using methods which can be replicated at any time. (shrink)

The idea that what we perceive are tropes is anything but new. In fact, it was one of the reasons why the ontology of tropes was postulated in the first place. Still, the claim that we perceive tropes is invariably and purely based on pre-philosophical intuitions or, indirectly, either as a supporting argument for the advantages of content view when compared to the relational view of experience, or as a supporting argument in favor of the irreducible subjective character of experience. (...) In this paper, I take the content view for granted and argue in favor of what is herein referred to as the trope-content view of experience. My defense is a case of inference to the best explanation. The trope-content view can meet all reasonable desiderata on the experience and its content without assuming gaps or making the ad hoc assumption that there are different layers of content, or so shall I argue. (shrink)

The long history of theorizing about perception divides into two quite distinct and irreconcilable camps, one that takes sensory experience to show us external reality just as it is, and one that takes such experience to reveal our own mind. I argue that we should reject both sides of this debate, and admit that the phenomenal character of experience, as such, reveals little about the nature of the external world and even less about the mind.

_ Source: _Volume 94, Issue 3, pp 359 - 380 In this paper the author discusses and defends a theory of consciousness inspired by Franz Brentano, according to which every conscious experience involves a certain kind of immediate awareness of itself. All conscious experience is in a certain fundamental sense ‘self-intimating’—it constitutively involves awareness of that very awareness. The author calls this ‘the awareness of awareness thesis’, and she calls the phenomenon that it concerns ‘awareness of awareness’. The author attempts (...) to give a substantive description of what AOA consists in in two ways, first, by listing some of its positive features, and second, by comparing it and contrasting it with introspection. The idea is that there are many different ways we can be aware of our experiences, introspection being one way, AOA being another, distinct way. By clarifying the distinction between AOA and introspection, we can get a better grasp of both phenomena. (shrink)

In this paper I respond to Martina and Wimmer’s review of The Given, focusing on their criticisms of the awareness of awareness thesis.

Strong or Pure Intentionalism is the view that the phenomenal character of a conscious experience is exhaustively determined by its intentional content. Contrastingly, impure intentionalism holds that there are also non content-based aspects or features which contribute to phenomenal character. Conscious attention is one such feature: arguably its contribution to the phenomenal character of a given conscious experience are not exhaustively captured in terms of what that experience represents, that is in terms of properties of its intentional object. This paper (...) attempts to get clearer on the phenomenal contribution of conscious attention. In doing so it considers and sets aside two prominent impure intentionalist accounts, namely the Phenomenal Structure view of Sebastien Watzl, and the Demonstrative Awareness view of Wayne Wu. As an alternative I outline a Modification view, which draws on ideas in Husserlian phenomenology. On this view, we should think of the phenomenal contribution of conscious attention in terms of attentive modifications of what I call a ‘pre-attentive phenomenal field’. I develop this view and highlight its benefits over alternatives. (shrink)

According to some philosophers, when introspectively attending to experience, we seem to see right through it to the objects outside, including their properties. This is called the transparency of experience. This paper examines whether, and in what sense, emotions are transparent. It argues that emotional experiences are opaque in a distinctive way: introspective attention to them does not principally reveal non-intentional somatic qualia but rather felt valenced intentional attitudes. As such, emotional experience is attitudinally opaque.

A central claim in contemporary philosophy of mind is that the phenomenal character of experience is entirely determined by its content. This paper considers an alternative called Mode Intentionalism. According to this view, phenomenal character outruns content because the intentional mode contributes to the phenomenal character of the experience. I assess a phenomenal contrast argument in support of this view, arguing that the cases appealed to allow for interpretations which do not require positing intentional modes as phenomenologically manifest aspects of (...) experience. (shrink)

The philosophical investigation of perceptual illusions can generate fruitful insights in the study of subjective time consciousness. However, the way illusions are interpreted is often controversial. Recently, proponents of the so-called dynamic snapshot theory have appealed to the Waterfall Illusion, a kind of motion aftereffect, to support a particular view of temporal consciousness according to which experience is structured as a series of instantaneous snapshots with dynamic qualities. This dynamism is meant to account for familiar features of the phenomenology of (...) time, such as succession, continuity, and change. Previous theories have typically appealed to a subjective present occupying an interval of time; that is, a “specious present.” I argue, through analysis of motion aftereffect illusions and the rare condition of akinetopsia, i.e. motion-blindness, that the Waterfall Illusion fails to support the dynamic snapshot theory as intended. Furthermore, I suggest that future theories of subjective time should see temporal phenomenology as the result of non-localised processes closely tied to the mechanism underlying consciousness generally. (shrink)

In this review essay of Michelle Montague’s The Given we focus on the central thesis in the book: the awareness of awareness thesis. On that thesis, a state of awareness constitutively involves an awareness of itself. In Section 2, we discuss what the awareness of awareness thesis amounts to, how it contrasts with the transparency of experience, and how it might be motivated. In Section 3, we discuss one of Montague’s two theoretical arguments for the awareness of awareness thesis. A (...) view that accepts the awareness of awareness thesis, Montague argues, is to be preferred over competing views because it outperforms them in accounting for the property attributions one makes in perceptual experience. We suggest that it is not clear that this argument for the awareness of awareness thesis is successful. Finally, in Section 4 we consider the relation between Montague’s view of color experience and what she calls Strawson’s datum, arguing that Montague may not be able to explain this datum as straightforwardly as she supposes. This, we suggest, threatens Montague’s second theoretical argument for the awareness of awareness thesis. (shrink)

This article addresses two issues: the distinction between objective and subjective measures and the directness of such measures. It is argued that the distinction is unambiguous only when based on a methodological criterion rather than a semantic one. Different senses of directness are discussed: metaphysical, methodological, semantic, and causal.

Although adverbialism is not given much attention in current discussions of phenomenal states, it remains of interest to philosophers who reject the representationalist view of such states, in suggesting an alternative to a problematic ‘act-property’ conception. We discuss adverbialism and the formalization Tye once offered for it, and criticize the semantics he proposed for this formalization. Our central claim is that Tye’s ontological purposes could have been met by a more minimal view, which we dub “attributeism”. We then show that (...) there is no incompatibility between the ontology of attributeism and the postulation of pictorial representations in the brain. (shrink)

This paper examines the implications of the Doctrine of Specific Nerve Energies for contemporary philosophy and psychology. Part I analyzed Johannes Peter Muller’s canonical formulation of the Doctrine, arguing that it follows from empirical results combined with methodological principles. Here, I argue that these methodological principles remain valid in psychology today, consequently, any naturalistic philosophy of perception must accept the Doctrine’s skeptical conclusion, that the qualities of our perceptual experience are not determined by, and thus do not reveal the nature (...) of, their causes in the world. Nevertheless, this does not mean that we must be global skeptics; rather, I argue that contemporary epistemology of perception should embrace Muller’s own response to the Doctrine: epistemic structural realism. As articulated by Muller’s student, Helmholtz, structural realism follows from the Doctrine once we recognize that active exploration constitutes part of the mechanism that determines perceptual experience, a view congenial to contemporary theories of embodied perception in cognitive science. Structural realists in philosophy of science should likewise heed the lessons of the Doctrine, as it played a critical part in the early history of their view, and may still serve a constructive role as exemplar today. (shrink)

Externalist representationalism is touted as a superior rival to naïve realism, and yet a careful analysis of the externalist representationalist's analysis of our ordinary perceptual experiences shows the view to be far closer to naïve realism than we might have expected. One of the central advertised benefits of representationalist views in general is that they are compatible with the idea that ordinary, illusory and hallucinatory perceptual experiences are of the same fundamental kind. Naïve realists are forced to deny the ‘common (...) fundamental kind claim’ and adopt disjunctivism. However, I argue that externalist representationalism is also a version of disjunctivism. Consequently, one of the main rivals to naïve realism turns out not to be a rival at all. (shrink)

My first aim in this paper is to show that the transparency claim cannot serve the purpose to which it is assigned; that is, the idea that perceptual experience is transparent is no help whatsoever in motivating an externalist account of phenomenal character. My second aim is to show that the internalist qualia theorist's response to the transparency idea has been unnecessarily concessive to the externalist. Surprisingly, internalists seem to allow that much of the phenomenal character of perceptual experience depends (...) essentially (and not just causally) upon externally located properties. They argue that we can also be aware of internal, non-intentional qualia. I present an alternative response the internalist can make to the transparency claim: phenomenal character is wholly internal, and seeming to be aware of externally located properties just is being aware of internally constituted experiential features. (shrink)

Philosophers of perception have a notoriously difficult time trying to account for hallucinatory experiences. One surprisingly quite popular move, and one that cross-cuts the representationalism/relationalism divide, is to say that hallucinations involve an awareness of uninstantiated properties. In this paper, I provide a new argument against this view. Not only are its proponents forced to classify many hallucinations as veridical, such experiences turn out to be necessarily veridical. In addition, I show that representationalists who endorse the uninstantiated property view must (...) reject the common fundamental kind claim and adopt disjunctivism, and naïve realists/relationalists must radically modify their disjunctivism: The distinction between ‘veridical’ and ‘hallucinatory’ will no longer track a metaphysical distinction between the relevant experiences. (shrink)

The idea that perceptual experience is transparent is generally used by naïve realists and externalist representationalists to promote an externalist account of the metaphysics of perceptual experience. It is claimed that the phenomenal character of our perceptual experience can be explained solely with reference to the externally located objects and properties which (for the representationalist) we represent, or which (for the naïve realist) partly constitute our experience. Internalist qualia theorists deny this, and claim that the phenomenal character of our perceptual (...) experience is internally constituted. However, my concern in this paper is not with the metaphysical debate, but with transparency as a phenomenological feature of perceptual experience. Qualia theorists have presented a number of examples of perceptual experiences which, they claim, do not even seem to be transparent; these experiences involve objects or properties which seem to be internally realized. I argue, contrary to the qualia theorist’s claim, that the phenomenal character of perceptual experience can in fact be characterized solely with reference to externally located objects and properties, and the sense in which some features of our perceptual experiences do not seem external is due to cognitive, not perceptual, phenomenology. (shrink)

Externalist representationalists claim that the phenomenal character of a visual perceptual experience is determined by the representational content of that experience. Their deployment of the idea that perceptual experience is transparent shows that they account for representational content with reference to the properties which are represented – the properties out there in the world. I explain why this commits the externalist representationalist to objectivism and realism about colour properties. Colour physicalism has proved to be the position of choice for externalist (...) representationalists. However, my aim in this paper is to demonstrate that the proponent of the view which combines externalist representationalism with colour physicalism is unable to account for the phenomenal character of colour hallucination. (shrink)

Pitt :735–741, 2017) has argued that reductive representationalism entails an absurdity akin to the “paramechanical hypothesis” Ryle attributed to Descartes. This paper focuses on one version of reductive representationalism: the property-complex theory. We contend that at least insofar as the property-complex theory goes, Pitt is wrong. The result is not just a response to Pitt, but also a clarification of the aims and structure of the property-complex theory.

The thesis of self-elusiveness says, roughly, that the self fails to be phenomenally manifest from the first-person perspective. This thesis has a long history. Yet many who endorse it do so only in a very specific sense. They say that the self fails to be phenomenally manifest as an object from the first-person perspective; they say that self-experience is not a species of ‘object-consciousness’. Yet if consciousness outstrips object-consciousness, then we are left with the possibility that there is another sense (...) in which the self is phenomenally manifest. Alas, efforts to articulate just what this form of self-experience comes to—often a holy grail of sorts for those in, and influenced by, the phenomenological tradition—have remained stubbornly obscure. This essay attempts a partial remedy. Taking a cue from Bernard Lonergan, I suggest that self-experience, while not a species of object-consciousness, is nonetheless partially grounded in it. The result is a view that is compatible with self-experience being representational and relational, contra tradition. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAmbitious Higher-order theories of consciousness – Higher-order theories that purport to give an account of phenomenal consciousness – face a well-known objection from the possibility of ra...

Intermodal representationalism is a popular theory of consciousness. This paper argues that intermodal representationalism is false, or at least likely so. The argument turns on two forms of exceptional episodic memory: hyperthymesia and prodigious visual memory in savant syndrome. Emerging from this argument is a broader lesson about the relationship between memory and perception; that it may be possible to entertain in memory the very same content as in a corresponding perceptual experience, and that the ‘overflow’ interpretation of the classic (...) Sperling paradigm experiments may not fully generalize. (shrink)

Those who endorse the twin theses of transparency and representationalism with regard to visual experience hold that the qualities we are aware of in such experience are, all of them, apparently possessed by external objects. They hold, therefore, that we are not introspectively aware of any qualities of visual experience itself. In this paper I argue that attention to visual noise—also known as ‘eigenlicht’ or ‘eigengrau’—puts pressure on both of these theses, though in different ways. Phenomenally, visual noise does not (...) even seem to belong to any external objects, which is a challenge to transparency. Moreover, visual noise is not the normal visual response to any distinctive external property, such as external graininess. Nor is it treated by our visual system as the perception of any such property. Given extant views of visual representation, it is therefore implausible to claim that it is the transparent representation of any such property. (shrink)

According to the transparency thesis, some conscious states are transparent or “diaphanous”. This thesis is often believed to be incompatible with an inner‐awareness account of phenomenal consciousness. In this article, I reject this incompatibility. Instead, I defend a compatibilist approach to transparency. To date, most attempts to do so require a rejection of strong transparency in favor of weak transparency. In this view, transparent states can be attended to by attending (in the right way) to the presented world: that is, (...) they are merely translucent. Here, I first argue that this understanding of transparency is too weak to qualify as a compatibilist view. Drawing on insights from Franz Brentano, I then describe a middle road between strong and weak transparency. The crucial idea is that, although transparent states cannot be attended to, they can be noticed (under suitable conditions). This view, I submit, allows supporters of inner awareness to commit themselves to a more interesting understanding of transparency—moderate transparency—that preserves the initial intuition underlying the transparency metaphor. (shrink)

The many-property problem has traditionally been taken to show that the adverbial theory of perception is untenable. This paper first shows that several widely accepted views concerning the nature of perception---including both representational and non-representational views---likewise face the many-property problem. It then presents a solution to the many-property problem for these views, but goes on to show how this solution can be adapted to provide a novel, fully compositional solution to the many-property problem for adverbialism. Thus, with respect to the (...) many-property problem, adverbialism and several widely accepted views in the philosophy of perception are on a par, and the problem is solved. (shrink)

A new theory of the neuropsychological underpinnings of phenomenal consciousness, “asynchronous introspection theory,” is proposed that emphasizes asynchrony between different neurocognitive processes. We provide a detailed explanation of how a mind might arrive at a cognitive structure isomorphic to the cognitive structure that would emerge from experiential qualia. The theory suggests that a temporal illusion is created because of the mismatch between the real physical timeline and the neurally constructed timeline composed inside a person’s brain. This temporal illusion leads to (...) the origination of a thought that one has had a certain experience wherein the thought and the feeling seem synchronous to the person but, in fact, are not. This leads to the thought, “I had a feeling.” The theory is elaborated via a metaphorical “robot supervisor model” and is shown to explain many current problems of phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

Some have argued that a subject has an inner awareness of its conscious mental states by virtue of the non-introspective, reflexive awareness that any conscious state has of itself. But, what exactly is it like to have a ubiquitous and reflexive inner awareness of one’s conscious states, as distinct from one’s outer awareness of the apparent world? This essay derives a model of ubiquitous inner awareness (UIA) from Sebastian Watzl’s recent theory of attention as the activity of structuring consciousness into (...) an experiential center and periphery. I develop Watzl’s theory into an account of UIA by suggesting that a subject is acquainted with its own conscious mental states through being reflexively aware of how these states are structured by attention into a unified subjective perspective. I favorably compare this Watzl-inspired account of UIA against other contemporary analytic and classical Buddhist accounts of reflexive awareness and subjective character, which variously ground the inner awareness of conscious states on their intrinsic phenomenal quality of “for-me-ness,” their affective/hedonic valence, or a subject’s disposition to introspect them. The Watzl-inspired account also accommodates possible counter-examples to Watzl’s theory posed by states of minimal phenomenal experience such as lucid dreamless sleep and non-dual meditative awareness. (shrink)

Perceptual experience is often said to be transparent; that is, when we have a perceptual experience we seem to be aware of properties of the objects around us, and never seem to be aware of properties of the experience itself. This is a introspective fact. It is also often said that we can infer a metaphysical fact from this introspective fact, e.g. a fact about the nature of perceptual experience. A transparency theory fills in the details for these two facts, (...) and bridges the gap between them. We have three aims: to scrutinize Michael Tye’s transparency theory :137–151, 2002; Consciousness revisited: materialism without phenomenal concepts, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2009; Philos Stud 170:39–57, 2014a), introduce a new transparency theory, and advance a meta-theoretical hypothesis about the interest, and import, of transparency theories. (shrink)

The transparency of visual experience is a widely held and important thesis in the philosophy of perception. Critical discussion of transparency has focused on visual experiences, such as the experience of visual blur that are taken to be counter examples to transparency. Here, I consider a novel objection to transparency that does not depend on intuitions about examples. The objection is that if transparency is true then we cannot explain our ability to think about our visual experiences as such. In (...) response to this objection, I develop an account of how we are able to think about our own visual experiences as such that is compatible with transparency. (shrink)

This paper is both systematic and historical in nature. From a historical viewpoint, I aim to show that to establish Wittgenstein’s claim that “an ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria” (PI §580) there is an enthymeme in Wittgenstein’s private language argument (henceforth PLA) overlooked in the literature, namely Wittgenstein’s suggestion that both perceptual and bodily experiences are transparent in the relevant sense that one cannot point to a mental state and wonder “What is that?” From a systematic viewpoint, (...) I aim to show that Wittgenstein’s PLA teaches us that the prevailing picture of the nature of phenomenal concepts (henceforth PCs) is upside down: we can only introspectively know what is going on inside our heads after we learn of what is going on outside (PI §580). In this regard, I aim to defend two associate claims against the prevailing view of PCs on the basis of PLA. First, by means of transparency, I aim to show that there is no de re awareness of our private sensation that could determine the meaning of sensation words; for example, I am never aware of the phenomenal blueness of my experience of something blue. The second associated claim is that introspective self-knowledge of our private sensations is always de dicto. We can only know introspectively that phenomenal blueness is the phenomenal character of the experience we are undergoing after we have learned that (de dicto knowledge) blue is the color that usually causes us that kind of experience. Likewise, we can only introspectively know that pain is the phenomenal character of the experience we are undergoing after we have learned that pain is what usually causes some typical pain behavior. (shrink)

[Working Draft — Comments are welcome! — Oct 2023] Reductive strong representationalists accept the Common Kind Thesis about subjectively indistinguishable sensory hallucinations, illusions, and veridical experiences. I show that this doesn’t jibe well with their declared phenomenal externalism and argue that there is no sense in which the phenomenal character of sensory experiences is constituted by the sensible properties represented by these experiences, as representationalists claim. First, I argue that, given general representationalist principles, no instances of a sensible property constitute (...) the phenomenal character of the sensory experience that represents them. Second, I argue that, with two very plausible assumptions in place, no sensible property qua universal can constitute the phenomenal character of experiences either. At the end, I offer an alternative picture that is consistent with a naturalist psychosemantics for sensory experiences without embracing phenomenal externalism. (shrink)

How does one know the phenomenal character of one’s own experience? I aim to present and defend a new view of the epistemology of qualia that addresses this issue. My view results from a reworking of Dretske’s displaced perception model. The guiding line is the key Wittgensteinian insight of his Private Language Argument, namely the claim that no inner perception of qualia can justify our corresponding qualia beliefs. My reworking of the original model starts with the rejection of Dretske’s representationalism, (...) as well as any other metaphysical views about the ultimate nature of qualia. The reworking of the displaced perception model I am proposing is supposed to be compatible with any available metaphysical view on qualia. The second step consists of rejecting the epistemological misgivings of the original model, namely the view that knowing qualia requires “connecting beliefs” along with “meta-representations.” Yet, Dretske’s crucial mistake has been to force knowledge of qualia into the “belief-box.” As a matter of fact, there is only one belief involved in introspecting qualia, namely the qualia-belief itself. The third final step is this. Assuming the key Wittgensteinian insight, I argue that introspection of qualia is a process that is both epis- temically reliable and automatic. It is reliable because it dispenses with justification of any beliefs whatsoever. Moreover, it is automatic because it also dispenses with reflexive connecting beliefs. For example, it takes nonconceptual awareness of the color blue as an input and automatically yields the belief that phenomenal blue is the conscious character of my experience of the sky as an output just by employing the concept BLUE. (shrink)

How does one know the phenomenal character of one’s own experience? I aim to present and defend a new view of the epistemology of qualia that addresses this issue. My view results from a reworking of Dretske’s displaced perception model. The guiding line is the key Wittgensteinian insight of his Private Language Argument, namely the claim that no inner perception of qualia can justify our corresponding qualia-beliefs. My reworking of the original model starts with the rejection of Dretske’s representationalism, as (...) well as any other metaphysical views about the ultimate nature of qualia. The reworking of the displaced perception model I am proposing is supposed to be compatible with any available meta- physical view on qualia. The second step consists of rejecting the epistemological misgivings of the original model, namely the view that knowing qualia requires “connecting beliefs” along with “meta-representations.” Yet, Dretske’s crucial mistake has been to force knowledge of qualia into the “belief-box.” As a matter of fact, there is only one belief involved in intro- specting qualia, namely the qualia-belief itself. The third final step is this. Assuming the key Wittgensteinian insight, I argue that introspection of qualia is a process that is both epis- temically reliable and automatic. It is reliable because it dispenses with justification of any beliefs whatsoever. Moreover, it is automatic because it also dispenses with reflexive con- necting beliefs. For example, it takes nonconceptual awareness of the color blue as an input and automatically yields the belief that phenomenal blue is the conscious character of my experience of the sky as an output just by employing the concept BLUE. (shrink)

The notion of a "mental representation" is, arguably, in the first instance a theoretical construct of cognitive science. As such, it is a basic concept of the Computational Theory of Mind, according to which cognitive states and processes are constituted by the occurrence, transformation and storage (in the mind/brain) of information-bearing structures (representations) of one kind or another.

This dissertation defends the reliability of first-person methods for studying consciousness, and applies first-person experiments to two philosophical problems: the experience of size and of the self. In chapter 1, I discuss the motivations for taking a first-person approach to consciousness, the background assumptions of the dissertation and some methodological preliminaries. In chapter 2, I address the claim that phenomenal judgements are far less reliable than perceptual judgements (Schwitzgebel, 2011). I argue that the main errors and limitations in making phenomenal (...) judgements are due to domain-general factors, which are shared in the formation of perceptual judgements. Phenomenal judgements may still be statistically less reliable than perceptual judgements, though I provide reasons for thinking that Schwitzgebel (2011) overstates the case for statistical unreliability. I also provide criteria for distinguishing between reliable and unreliable phenomenal judgements, hence defending phenomenal judgements against general introspective scepticism. Having identified the main errors in making phenomenal judgements, in chapter 3, I discuss how first-person experiments can be used to control for these errors. I provide examples, and discuss how they overcome attentional and conceptual errors, minimise biases, and exhibit high intersubjective reliability. In chapter 4, I investigate size experience. I use first-person experiments and empirical findings to argue that distant things looking smaller cannot be explained as an awareness of instantiated objective properties (visual angle or retinal image size). I also discuss how an awareness of uninstantiated objective properties cannot adequately account for the phenomenal character of size experience. This provides support for a subjectivist account of variance in size experience. In chapter 5, I investigate the sense of self. I distinguish between a weak sense of self (for-me-ness) and a strong sense of self in which there is a polarity between subject and object. I use first-person experiments from Douglas Harding to demonstrate an explicit strong sense of self, specifically when I point at where others see my face. I also argue that this sense of self is not explained by inference, thoughts, feelings, imagination nor the viewpoint. Rather, it is part of the structure of experience that I seem to be looking from here. Even if there is a sense of self, there may be no self. The question of chapter 6 is whether there can be a direct experience of the self. I argue that to function as a bearer of experience the subject must be single and lack sensory qualities in itself. I use Harding’s first-person experiments to investigate the visual gap where I cannot see my head. I argue that it conforms to the above criteria, and hence is a candidate for being the subject. This finding, in conjunction with the fact that I seem to be looking from the same location, provides prima facie evidence for the reality of the subject. I hold then that contrary to Hume and most philosophers since, that there can be a direct self-experience, if one knows which direction to attend. (shrink)

In this chapter, Pautz raises a puzzle about spatial experience for phenomenal internalists like Ned Block. If an accidental, lifelong brain-in-the-void (BIV) should have all the same experiences as you, it would have an experience as of items having various shapes, and be able to acquire concepts of those shapes, despite being cut off from real things with the shapes. Internalists cannot explain this by saying that BIV is presented with Peacocke-style visual field regions having various shapes, because these would (...) have to be non-physical sense data. They might instead explain this by saying that BIV “phenomenally represents” various shape properties. But since BIV lacks any interesting physical relations to shapes, this would imply that phenomenally representation is an irreducible relation. (shrink)

This paper is both systematic and historical in nature. From a historical viewpoint, I aim to show that to establish Wittgenstein’s claim that “an ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria” there is an enthymeme in Wittgenstein’s private language argument overlooked in the literature, namely Wittgenstein’s suggestion that both perceptual and bodily experiences are _transparent_ in the relevant sense that one cannot point to a mental state and wonder “What is that?” From a systematic viewpoint, I aim to show (...) that Wittgenstein’s PLA teaches us that the prevailing picture of the nature of phenomenal concepts is upside down: we can only introspectively know what is going on inside our heads, after we learn of what is going on outside. In this regard, I aim to defend two associate claims against the prevailing view of PCs on the basis of PLA. First, by means of transparency, I aim to show that there is no _de re_ awareness of our private sensation that could determine the meaning of sensation-words; for example, I am never aware _of _the phenomenal blueness of my experience of something blue. The second associated claim is that introspective self-knowledge of our private sensation is always _de dicto_. We can only know introspectively that phenomenal blueness is the phenomenal character of the experience we are undergoing after we have learned _that _ blue is the color that usually causes in us that kind of experience. Likewise, we can only introspectively know that pain is the phenomenal character of the experience we are undergoing after we have learned that pain is what usually causes some typical pain behavior. (shrink)

I advance an account of quantitative character, a species of phenomenal character that presents as an intensity (cf. a quality) and includes experience dimensions such as loudness, pain intensity, and visual pop-out. I employ psychological and neuroscientific evidence to demonstrate that quantitative characters are best explained by attentional processing, and hence that they do not represent external qualities. Nonetheless, the proposed account of quantitative character is conceived as a compliment to the reductive intentionalist strategy toward qualitative states; I argue that (...) an account of perceptual experience that combines a tracking account of qualitative character with my functionalist proposal for quantitative character permits replies to some notoriously difficult problems for tracking representationalism without sacrificing its chief virtues. (shrink)

I propose that there are two kind's of qualia realism, and that Harman's observations about the transparency of experience pose a threat to only one of these.

The thesis is intended to contribute to the growing understanding of the indispensable role played by phenomenal consciousness in human cognition, and specifically in making our concepts of the external world available. The focus falls on so called observational concepts, a type of rudimentary, perceptually-based objective concepts in our repertoire — picking out manifest properties such as colors and shapes. A theory of such concepts gets provided, and, consequently, the exact role that perceptual consciousness plays in making concepts of this (...) sort available gets settled. In the first half of the thesis, observational concepts get construed as a special type of recognitional concepts. On an analogy with perceptual demonstratives, having such concepts would involve having non-trivial knowledge of their reference. The experiential basis of such concepts would, among other things, provide for such constitutive knowledge. The theoretical background relevant to the hypothesis gets provided in the first chapter. A defence of the hypothesis follows in the second. In the second half of the thesis, care is taken to distinguish among two ways in which the constitutive knowledge of the reference of an observational concept could be fleshed out. In the third chapter, perceptual experience is shown to provide the basis both for knowledge of observational properties by acquaintance, and for knowledge of the essence of such properties — provided that knowledge of essence gets construed in the right, modest way. It might be natural to take knowledge by acquaintance to be the sort relevant to observational concept possession, especially given that in the case of perceptual demonstratives this is the role likely played by experience. However, this initial impression proves to be mistaken. The constitutive knowledge of the referent of an observational concept turns out to consist in the capacity to determine a priori the essence of the respective property. To show this, an argument gets provided in the penultimate fourth chapter, based on the key role played by experiences of instances of observational properties in optimal viewing conditions in enabling the possession of the respective observational concept. (shrink)