The Admissible Contents of Experience (Philosophical Quarterly Special Issues)

208 Pages·2011·0.97 MB·English

by  Katherine Hawley

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THE ADMISSIBLE CONTENTS OF EXPERIENCE
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THE
ADMISSIBLE
CONTENTS OF
EXPERIENCE
Edited by
KATHERINE HAWLEY
and
FIONA MACPHERSON
@WILEY-BLACKWELL
A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication
This edition first published 2011
Originally published as Volume 59, Issue 236 of The Philosophical Quarterly
This edition first published 2011
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The admissible contents of experience
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
edited by Katherine Hawley, Fiona Macpherson
The admissible pc.o n ctmen.ts of experience
edinitceldu dbeys K baibthlioergirnaep Hhiacawll ereyf,e Freionncae sM anadcp ihnedresxon
ISBN97 8 - 1 p-4p4. 4 3 - 3c3m35.-0 (pbk.)
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I. HawleyI,S KBaNth9e7r8in-1e-,4 D44r3. -I3I.3 3M5-a0c p(phbekrs.)on, Fiona
B105.E9A35.2011
1. Experience. 2. Percepti1o2n8. '3.4. –Edvci2d2ence. 4. Belief and doubt.
I. Hawley, Katherine, Dr. II. Macpherson, Fiona
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128'.4–dc22
This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs (to come); Wiley Online Library
2011001480
(to come); ePub (to come).
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Set in 10.5 pt Baskerville by Christopher Bryant
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgements vi
1 Introduction:
The Admissible Contents of Experience Fiona Macpherson 1
2 Perception and the Reach of Phenomenal Content Tim Bayne 16
3 Seeing Causings and Hearing Gestures S. Butterfill 36
4 Experience and Content Alex Byrne 60
5 Is Perception a Propositional Attitude? Tim Crane 83
6 Conscious Reference Alva Noë 101
7 What are the Contents of Experiences? Adam Pautz 114
8 Aspect-Switching and
Visual Phenomenal Character Richard Price 139
9 The Visual Experience of Causation Susanna Siegel 150
10 The Admissible Contents of
Visual Experience Michael Tye 172
Index 194
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This volume collects together chapters that were originally delivered at a
conference on the Admissible Contents of Experience that took place at the
University of Glasgow in March 2006. The original papers were first
published in a special edition of The Philosophy Quarterly (July 2009), and
the journal, together with The British Academy, The Mind Association,
The Analysis Trust, and The Faculty of Arts Strategic Research Fund at
Glasgow University, provided grants that funded the conference.
The conference was held under the auspices of the Centre for the Study
of Perceptual Experience (CSPE), which is based in the Department of
Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. The primary aim of the Centre is
to conduct and facilitate analytical philosophical research into the nature of
perceptual experience. A secondary aim is to facilitate communication and
collaboration between researchers in philosophy and other disciplines whose
research remit includes perceptual experience. At the time of writing, in its
five-year history, the Centre has hosted, or co-hosted, eight international
conferences: The Individuation of the Senses; Disjunctivism: Perception, Action,
Knowledge; Graduate Interdisciplinary Conference on Perception; The Admissible
Contents of Experience; Hallucination on Crete; Varieties of Experience Graduate
Conference; Phenomenal Presence; Graduate Conference on Mind, Science and Every-
thing!. This is in addition to numerous smaller workshops and events.
Further information about these events and the CSPE is available on the
web: www.gla.ac.uk/philosophy/cspe.
I would like to thank all of the contributors to this volume for their
contributions. I am very grateful to them for producing these excellent,
thought-provoking chapters.
Finally, I would like to thank Moira Gilruth, the administrator at The
Philosophical Quarterly, for helping to prepare the volume, Katherine Hawley,
the editor of The Philosophy Quarterly, for making this publication possible, and
Michael Brady and Stuart Crutchfield for their comments and advice on
this volume and for helping with the conference. And, of course, I owe
much to the staff at Wiley-Blackwell, for publishing the book and bringing it
to press.
Fiona Macpherson
Glasgow, September 2010
1
INTRODUCTION: THE ADMISSIBLE CONTENTS
OF EXPERIENCE
By Fiona Macpherson
This introduction provides an overview of the debate concerning the ad-
missible contents of experience, together with an introduction to the chap-
ters in this volume. The debate is one that takes place among advocates of a
certain way of thinking of perceptual experiences: that they are states which
represent the world. For to say that a state has content is to say that it re-
presents; and its content is usually taken to be that which is represented.
One should not be tempted to think that the debate is therefore marginal or
esoteric, for this view of perceptual experience has been by far the dominant
view of perceptual experience in recent years in philosophy (and in psycho-
logy and neuroscience). The debate is about what answer to give to a
fundamental question about the nature of perceptual experience, namely,
what objects and properties can it represent?
One can ask this question about the admissible contents of perceptual
experience about perceptual experience in toto, but one can also ask it about
the perceptual experiences associated with each sensory modality. Thus
one can ask what objects and properties visual or auditory or tactile experi-
ences can represent, and so on. One can also ask the same question of
experiences which are not in any one modality (if indeed there are any
such experiences, for it is controversial whether there are). Such experiences
are sometimes called ‘cross-modal’ experiences or ‘amodal’ experiences.1 A
good example of such an alleged experience would be a perceptual experi-
ence which represented that the flash of light that one saw was the cause of
1The term ‘cross-modal’ experience is in fact used to refer to many different sorts of
experience, but the usage in the main text is one standard type.
2
FIONA MACPHERSON
the sound that one heard. In fact, the question about what the admissible
contents of experience are is most frequently asked about the experiences in
one modality at a time. Somewhat predictably among these, it is vision that
has received the most attention. In this introduction, I shall focus on out-
lining the debate concerning visual experience, and one can extrapolate to
how the debate would go in other cases.
I. PERCEPTUAL EXPERIENCE AS A REPRESENTATIONAL STATE
As was mentioned above, many people hold that perceptual experiences are
representational states. What does this mean, and why do people hold it to
be true? To say that one state represents another is to say, at least in part,
that one state is about another. Consider examples of things other than
experience which are said to represent. Some are man-made. For example,
photographs typically represent that which was in front of the lens when
they were taken. A photograph of a tree, we might say, represents a tree. A
painting of a flower represents a flower. Certain natural, non-man-made
states of the world are sometimes said to represent too. The angle of a
column of smoke represents the speed of the wind. The number of rings in
the trunk of a tree represents its age. Another case, quite different from the
other two, is language. Sentences represent or are about things. The
sentence ‘The wind blew through the branches of the tree’ represents that
the wind blew through the branches of the tree. The paradigm case of
mental states that represent are the propositional attitudes, such as belief
and desire. Propositional attitudes are so-called because one takes an atti-
tude (holding true, in the case of belief; wanting to be true, in the case of
desire) towards a proposition. For example, if I believe that basking sharks
swim in the Firth of Clyde, then I take the attitude of holding it to be true
towards the proposition that basking sharks swim in the Firth of Clyde. If I
desire it, then I want it to be true that basking sharks swim in the Firth of
Clyde. If I believe or desire that basking sharks swim in the Firth of Clyde,
then my mental state is about or represents that basking sharks swim in the
Firth of Clyde.
Why do people think that beliefs are representational states? One reason
is that beliefs have accuracy- or correctness-conditions. That is to say that
there is a way the world could be which would make the belief true and a
way the world could be which would make the belief false. In the case of my
belief that basking sharks swim in the Firth of Clyde, the way the world
would have to be in order to make the belief true is if basking sharks swim in
the Firth of Clyde, and the belief would be false otherwise.