Intentionalism and Representational Qualitative Character

1. Intentionalism and Representational Qualitative Character 14th Annual Meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC 14) Toronto, Canada June 26th, 2010 1 Two kinds of mental properties The argument from seeming for intentionalism 3 e.g., the bluish quality of a visual sensation. e.g., the content that it’s raining of a belief. Qualitative Character • Byrne 2001 and Thau 2002 argue (cf. Lycan 2000): • Suppose someone enjoys two qualitatively distinct mental states. • 2. How things seem for the person during the first experience differs from how things seem during the second. • How things seem is a matter of how one is representing things, so the states differ representationally. • If two states differ representationally, then they differ in intentional content. • Two experiences cannot differ in qualitative character without differing in intentional content. • 6. Therefore, qualitative character supervenes on intentional content. Intentional Content 2 What is their relationship? They are distinct. E.g., Kant, Levine, Nagel, Reid, and myself. Qualitative character is identical with, or supervenes on, intentional content . E.g., Byrne, Dretske, Harman, Lycan and Tye. Experience 2 Experience 1 Separatism ≠ Intentionalism How things seem 4 My proposal: qualitative character is nonintentionally representational Many assume that all representation is intentional. E.g., Evans: “we may regard a perceptual experience [having] a certain content--the world is represented a certain way,” (1982, p. 226). I argue there are two distinct kinds of representation: Things may seem a certain way because a state has representational mental qualities, and not because of intentional content. Thus, premise 4 of the argument from seeming is false. IC #2 IC #1 ≠ Experience 2 Experience 1 Intentional Representation Qualitative Representation

2. Jacob Berger Philosophy and Cognitive Science The Graduate Center, The City University of New York jfberger@gmail.com 6 Why qualitative character is representational 5 Why distinguish qualitative from intentional representation? Quality-space theory (e.g., Sellars 1956/1997; Rosenthal 2005) identifies and individuates mental qualities by their relative positions within quality spaces that are homomorphic to the quality spaces of corresponding perceptible properties. Mental qualities provide perceptual access to (but are not the same kinds of properties as) perceptible properties. A natural interpretation is that mental qualities represent perceptible properties. • Folk psychology holds that: • Intentional content can be true or false, whereas qualitative character cannot be. • Intentional states exhibit both intentional content and mental attitude, whereas qualitative states do not exhibit attitude. • Intentional content is sentence-sized, whereas qualitative character is term-sized. • Intentional content is amodal, whereas qualitative character is modality specific. • These observations are compatible with qualitative character’s being representational, but in a nonintentional way. Mental Color Quality Space Perceptible Color Quality Space 7 Objection: undetectable quality inversion • Some claim we can imagine two people who perceive the same colored object, and yet enjoy qualitatively distinct experiences. • If so, qualitatively distinct states can be representationally identical . Thus, quality-space theory fails. • But what one can conceive of depends on one’s beliefs (cf. Quine, 1960). In order to conceive of undetectable quality inversion, one must assume (groundlessly) that qualitative character is known only from the first-person perspective. Bibliography • Byrne, Alex. "Intentionalism Defended." Philosophical Review 110, no. 2 (2001): 199-240. • Dretske, Fred. Naturalizing the Mind: MIT Press, 1995. • Evans, Gareth. The Varieties of Reference. Edited by John McDowell. New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1982. • Harman, Gilbert. "The Intrinsic Quality of Experience." Philosophical Perspectives 4 (1990): 31-52. • Levine, Joseph. Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness: Oxford University Press, 2001. • Lycan, William G. Consciousness and Experience: MIT Press, 1996. • ———. "Representational Theories of Consciousness." In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, 66-69: Stanford: Metaphysics Research Lab, 2000. • Nagel, Thomas. "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" Philosophical Review 83, no. October (1974): 435-50. • Quine, W. V. Word and Object, Studies in Communication. Cambridge: Technology Press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960. • Reid, Thomas. An Inquiry into the Human Mind : On the Principles of Common Sense. Edited by Derek R. Brookes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. • Rosenthal, David M. Consciousness and Mind: Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. • Sellars, Wilfrid, Richard Rorty, and Robert Brandom. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. • Thau, Michael. Consciousness and Cognition, Philosophy of Mind Series. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. • Tye, Michael. Consciousness, Color, and Content, Representation and Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000. Person B Person A