On a Defense of the Hegemony of Representation Robert Stalnaker Philosophical Issues, Vol. 7, Perception. (1996), pp. 101-108. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1533-6077%281996%297%3C101%3AOADOTH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y Philosophical Issues is currently published by Ridgeview Publishing Company.
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PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES, 7 Perception, 1995
On a Defense of the Hegemony of Represent ation Robert Stalnaker
On the general ideological issue, I am on Bill Lycan's side: I would like to believe in the hegemony of representation. But I don't find it quite so easy to believe this (or even to understand it fully) as he apparently does. When it comes to the details of his defense of the general thesis against some specific objections and counterexamples, I am not very clear about how the argument is supposed to go. I have worries both about the response to Ned Block's inverted earth argument for a distinction between qualitative and intentional content of experience, and about the response to Christopher Peacocke's proposed counterexamples to his version of the hegemony of representation. First on Block's inverted earth: I will review Block's argument, as I understand it, and then consider Lycan's response. Block told his story in two versions. In both of them, inverted earth is a place much like earth, except that the actual physical colors of things are inverted -switched with the complementary colors. Further, the language spoken by inverted earthians is an inverted version of English: they use "blue" to refer to the color yellow, which is the color of the sky. In the intersubjective version of the story, our subject
(you) remains on earth, but has a counterpart on inverted earth who is like you, except that he is fitted with inverting lenses. In this version of the story, inverted earth might, in fact, just be a counterfactual possible world. But Lycan focuses on the intrasubjective version of the story, according to which inverted earth is a part of our universe, and you are transported from here to there (abducted, perhaps, by some of those aliens that Harvard psychoanalysts like to investigate). It is part of this version of the story that the abduction takes place without your noticing it. As Lycan says, "when you wake up [after the abduction], you experience nothing abnormal", since you were, without your knowledge, fitted with inverting lenses that cancel out the effects of the color inversion on the planet. Your language remains the same, and so when you say "the sky is blue", you mean that the sky is blue, unlike your new compatriots, who mean by words that sound exactly the same as yours that the sky is yellow, and who mistakenly interpret you to mean that as well. But, Block suggests, after many years go by (during which you never learn about the switch), it will eventually become true to say that you have become a speaker of inverted earth's variant of English, and so to mean what they mean by "blue", which is what earthly English speakers mean by "yellow". But while the intentional content of your thoughts about colors (and of your visual experiences) may change, the qualitative content of your color experiences remains the same. Therefore, there must be a difference between the intentional content of experience and their qualitative content. Now Lycan is skeptical about the assumptions about semantics that lead Block to hypothesize that there would be, after enough time goes by, a semantic shift, but he does not think this is where the real problem with the argument is, so he grants Block his semantics for the purpose of the argument. The real problem, he suggests, is that Block has no reason to assume that there are any mental properties of your color experience that remain the same when the semantics shifts. Only by assuming that Qualia are narrow properties p r o p e r t i e s that supervene on the internal molecular constitution of the subject- is this conclusion justified. But this assumption, he says, begs the question: the defender of the hegemony of representation rejects the assumption that there is anything about the qualitative character of color experience that is narrow in this sense. I don't find this persuasive since while I agree that Block believes (with good reason) that Qualitative properties supervene on the internal molecular constitution of the person whose experiences have
8. ON A DEFENSE OF THE HEGEMONY OF REPRESENTATION103
the properties, I don't think that he assumes this, or that it plays any role in the argument. Let us stipulate that to be a Qualitative property of an experience, a property must satisfy at least the following necessary condition: if two experiences are introspectively indistinguishable, then either both or neither have property $. (At this point, the difference between the intrasubjective and the intersubjective versions of the story becomes important, since the introspective indistinguishability relation applies only to experiences of a single person.) Might one deny that there are any properties meeting this condition? Perhaps, but only, I think, by claiming that we cannot make sense of the relation of introspective indistinguishability (or by claiming at least that we cannot make sense of this relation outside of very limited contexts). One might accept the intelligibility of introspective indistinguishability, while rejecting all but holistic Qualitative properties, but holistic properties of this kind, I think, will be enough for Block's purposes. Notice that, while any reasonable materialist will believe that all properties meeting this condition will also meet the supervenience condition (and so will be narrow or intrinsic properties), this further conclusion need play no role in the argument. It is the assumption of introspective indistinguishability that is doing the work. And if one grants the intelligibility of this assumption, it seems to me difficult to deny that in the story as Block tells it, your experiences are introspectively indistinguishable, after the switch, from what they would have been if the switch had never been made. If it is not obvious that this follows from the story as already told, just add the following elaboration of it: consider the following possible experiment: the aliens fill you in about the details of what has happened to you, and then take you back to earth, removing your inverting lenses. "Attend carefully to the character of your visual experience", they say. Then you are returned to the inverted earth situation, with the inverting lenses, told that you are there, and again asked to attend carefully to the character of your visual experience. Finally, you are again blindfolded, and one of the two locations is selected at random. This time, you are not told which of the two conditions you are in, but are asked to attend to the way things look, and on the basis of this to judge whether you are on earth or inverted earth. Let us assume that, were this experiment to be performed, you would be unable to make an informed judgment. You would report that you were unable to tell any difference at all between the way things look on earth and the way they look on inverted earth. (Don't assume that this experiment is actually performed; just assume that
the counterfactual, if the experiment were performed, this would be the result, is true according to the story.)' Now I can't see what question Block has begged if he claims to have told a story in which two experiences have the same Qualitative content (where Qualitative content is understood to be a property meeting the indistinguishability condition), without having the same intentional content. If he is a materialist, he will be committed to the thesis that the experiences of molecular duplicates share all Qualitative properties, but this will be a conclusion, not an assumption, and it will be a conclusion that is not necessary to make the point. Lycan's reasons for being skeptical about any such property seem to me, in any case, pretty weak: Qualia are something like narrow content, which is "notoriously disputed. . . . We should suspect any parallel notion of qualitative character". (p. 10) I have no sympathy for any notion of narrow content, but I think one needs a better reason to suspect a notion that might be thought to share some of its features than guilt by association. Now on Christopher Peacocke's examples: I am inclined to agree with Lycan that perceptual experiences have multiple representational contents, and that these contents may be layered in the sense that for different properties P and Q, it may perceptually appears to one that P by its appearing to one that Q. Further, I am inclined to suspect that Lycan may be right that this is relevant to the task of reconciling a representationalist thesis with the phenomena that Peacocke's examples direct our attention to. But I don't have a very clear idea exactly how the argument is supposed to go. I am not entirely clear either about exactly what the problem that Peacocke is raising is, or about how a recognition of the fact that perceptual representations are multiple and layered is supposed to solve it. Let me first review Lycan's point about olfactory representation and then turn back to the visual examples. I am happy enough to grant that smells are representational, and that they can have multiple intentional contents. Specifically, that a smell can be correctly said to represent both the presence of an object of the kind that normally gives off the smell (the rose) and also the presence of an odor of the kind that such objects normally give off (where an odor is something physical, something that occupies space). In such a case, I take it that one and the same experiential h he role of introspective indistinguishability in Block's argument is most explicit in his summary of the argument in his article on qualia in Samuel Guttenplan, A C o m p a n i o n t o the Philosophy of Mind (Basil Blackwell, 1994). See especially the paragraph on pp. 517-518.
condition -my particular olfactory experience- realizes different intentional states -on the one hand, the state of representing that a rose is in the vicinity, and the state of representing that there is a rose-odor in my environment. The subject has two different representational properties -its olfactorily appearing to him that a rose is present in the vicinity, and its olfactorily appearing to him that a rose-odor is present in the surrounding atmosphere- and he has both of those properties in virtue of having one sensory experience. The one state might represent correctly while the other does not. One can, as Lycan suggests, contrast three possible scenarios in which I have the same rose-smelling experience: In the first, a rose is giving off a rose-odor, which is causing my experience; in the second, there is a rose-odor, perhaps produced by a synthetic chemical reaction, but no rose; in the third, I am having an olfactory hallucination. In the first case, both of the representational states realized by the experience are veridical; in the second one is but the other is not, and in the third, neither is. The character of the experience is the same in all three cases, and in all three cases the experience has the same intentional contents. Now all of this seems fine to me, but what I don't see is how to turn this into a response to Peacocke's counterexample. Let me first try to say what I think the problem is that Peacocke's first example is supposed to raise, and then consider how the recognition of multiple and layered representations might help to solve it. The visual experience, in the example, is of a pair of trees along a road. One fact about the character of this experience is that the trees appear to be of about the same size, with one closer and one farther away. But it is also a feature of the experience, Peacocke suggests, that the nearer tree occupies a bigger part of the visual field than the farther tree. That is, we are inclined to say in describing such an experience that something -a certain tree shaped part of the visual field- is bigger than something else -a different tree shaped part of the visual field. Now the representationalist strategy is to paraphrase all descriptions of the character of experience in representational terms, where the properties expressed in characterizing the experience are not ascribed to anything, but are used to identify a representational content -a proposition. According to this strategy, the reason we can use such words as "green" and "square" to describe the character of a visual experience without committing ourselves to the existence of anything relevant that is actually green or square is that those words occur (in a perspicuous paraphrase of the characterization of the experience) only in the scope of a "that" clause which identifies an intentional content used to characterize the experience -as
the experience of visually representing that something before one is green, or square. Peacocke's example, as I understand it, is supposed to present a prima facie problem for this strategy since while we are inclined to describe our experience in terms of something (a certain shape in the visual field) being bigger than something else, this judgment of comparative size seems to be about a feature of the representation, and not about what purports to be represented. To solve the problern, it would seem that one would need to find a paraphrase of the description of the visual field into the form "it visually appears to the subject that . . . " where the "bigger than" occurs in the that-clause: something visually appears to be bigger than something else, but nothing is said actually t o be bigger than anything else. The recognition that one experience can have multiple contents allows for the possibility that one and the same visual experience might represent two tree as being the same size, while at the same time represent one of them as being bigger than the other. But that does not seem to be the right description of the experience, and it is not what Lycan is suggesting. Intuitively, one is inclined to say that the trees themselves are represented as the same size, while it is the images of the tree that are of different sizes. But the images are representations, and not (it seems) things represented. It is not clear how the analogies with odors is supposed to be applied here. Both roses and rose odors are, as Lycan emphasized, things that we may represent to be present in the nonmental world. If the trees are analogous to the rose, what is it that is analogous to the rose odor in the layered account of the visual experience in Peacocke's example? Lycan suggests that it is "colored shapes and relations between them. Some of these shapes -in particular those corresponding to the trees- are represented as being larger shapes than others". (p. 24) Now there need not actually be any such shapes: we need not be perceiving veridically. While the observer in Peacocke's example is perceiving the trees veridically, Lycan says that "shapes such as Peacocke's larger and smaller tree shapes do not really exist". At this layer of perceptual representation, things are not as they visually appear to be. But to understand what the proposed content is, one has to understand how the world is being represented to be -what the world would have to be like in order for the representation to be veridical. Is the proposal that the content, at this level, of the visual experience is that there are two tree shaped physical objects --one larger than the other? Is that the way, or a way, that things visually appear to be to the observer? One might be inclined to reply that that is not how things seem to appear to the observer.
8. ON A DEFENSE O F T H E HEGEMONY O F REPRESENTATION107
Here is a visual case that seems to me analogous to the smell example: I see a scene (which might be just like the scene described in Peacocke's example) reflected in a mirror (recognizing, let us say, that that is how I am seeing it). In this case, I really do represent both the scene (in which the trees are the same size) and an image -a mirror image- of the scene, in which one tree-image is bigger than the other. Just as in the olfactory example, where my experience represents a rose b y representing an odor, in this case my experience represents trees of the same size b y representing tree images that are of different sizes. As in the rose case, both representational states may be veridical, or one might be veridical, the other not. Suppose I think I am seeing trees reflected in a mirror, but in fact the image is projected on a screen, and there are no real trees. Or it might be that it is the mirror image that is an illusion: in fact I am seeing the trees through an open window that I take for a mirror. But in Peacocke's example, there is neither a mirror, nor the appearance of one. Can one still say that it visually appears to me that there is before me an image (an intermediate physical representation) which contains two tree images, one bigger than the other? This may not seem very plausible, phenomenologically, but it might seem a little better if one said simply that my visual experience is the way it would be if I were seeing an image (a physical image) that contains two tree images, one bigger than the other. This more explicitly externalist characterization puts the description of one shape being bigger than another into a counterfactual condition, rather than a that-clause. Is that change significant, from the point of view of the hegemony of representation? The answer to this question may depend on exactly how the hegemony thesis is formulated, and what work it is intended to do. But this way of paraphrasing the characterization of the experience has this in common with a more straightforward representationalist paraphrase: one explains how the size comparison can be used to describe the intrinsic character of an experience without hypothesizing any actual entities -components of the experience- that are compared with respect to size. If this is what Lycan has in mind, I think I could be talked into this line of response to Peacocke's example. Peacocke emphasized in describing his example that the viewer need have no concept of the visual field in order for it to be correct to describe the viewer's experience in terms of a visual field and various features of it. We are not supposed to assume that the example is one of a sophisticated observer, reflecting on his visual experience and judging that one object takes up more space than the other. The claim is that even for the unreflective viewer who thinks
only about the scene, who does not notice that the one tree takes up more space in his visual field than the other, or perhaps even have the conceptual resources to notice this, there are still features of the experience which we can use the concept of a visual field to describe. This can be granted, I think, without by itself causing any problem for the representationalist. There is no reason why one should not, in order to identify a content for the purpose of attributing an intentional state with that content to a person, make use of concepts that are unavailable to the person. Such externally identified content is perhaps "nonconceptual" in some sense, but it is none the less intentional or representational for that. (Some people find nonconceptual content puzzling. I have no problem with it -it is the other kind that I can't understand.) I will conclude with a very brief comment about Peacocke's second example: the wire frame shaped like a cube that is seen first with one of its faces in front of another, and then with the two reversed. I confess that in this case it is not clear to me what the problem for the representationalist is supposed to be. One does not need a theory of layered representation such as Lycan proposes in order to recognize that one visual experience may have many representational properties. I may describe different features of the way things visually appear to someone, and I might describe them in more or less detail. (I might say that an object before me seems to be blue, and also that it seems t o be navy blue; I might say in addition, describing the same visual experience, that the object seems to be shaped like a cone.) Two visual experiences might be alike in certain respects, and different in others (I might seem to see an object of the very same color, but this time shaped like a sphere), and a single extended visual experience might change in some respects and remain the same in others. (It still looks blue, but now it is a kind of pale sky blue.) In Peacocke's example, the content of my visual experience -how things visually appear to be- changes in some respects, but remains the same in others. I think there must be more to the problem than this but I confess I have a hard time seeing what it might be.
