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ABSTRACT
Suppose that Paul, while looking at a tree, sees that that thing over there is a red bird. Paul is having what we may call a ‘singular’ perceptual experience. How should we characterise the representational content of his perceptual experience? I will sketch an original answer to this question, building on the internalist accounts propounded by Searle (1983. Intentionality. Cambridge University Press. Ch. 2) and Recanati (2007. Perspectival Thought. Oxford University Press. Ch. 17). Pace Searle, the content of Paul's experience is not a (general) proposition. Pace Recanati, whose account draws on Lewis’s (1979. “Attitudes De Dicto and De Se.” Philosophical Review 88 (4): 513–543) internalist view of de se attitudes, it is not a property of the perceiving subject. Instead, I submit, it is a property of the perceived object. The content is the property of being a red bird, which determines a set of centred worlds whose centre (an object taken at a time) is a red bird; the object (here, the bird) is part of the relevant situation of evaluation for the experience; and the experience is veridical only if the actual world centred on the object belongs to the set of centred worlds determined by that property. I will argue that this view retains the benefits of Searle's and Recanati's accounts while improving on them.
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Notes
1 Other early proponents of the self-ascriptive view of attitudes are Loar (Citation1976) and Chisholm (Citation1981). Further egocentric views of perceptual content invoking centred worlds or the like are found in Peacocke (Citation1992, Ch. 3), Chalmers (Citation2004, Citation2006), Egan (Citation2006a, Citation2006b), or Brogaard (Citation2010a, Citation2010b). I focus on Recanati (Citation2007) also because he makes very clear the important distinction between incomplete content (lekton) and complete content (Austinian proposition) which is available in any version of the centred world framework (more on this below).
2 See Stalnaker (Citation1981) or Magidor (Citation2015). Some of Lewis's followers will accept to restrict the scope of his arguments for property contents. Thus Feit (Citation2008) argues from internalism to a property view of belief contents.
3 This feature remains prominent in Searle’s (Citation2015) recent book on visual perception. Thus, Searle (Citation2015, 35) writes, ‘it is absolutely essential to be clear about the distinction between content and object. […] For example, if I see a man in front of me, the content is that there is a man in front of me. The object is the man himself’.
4 On the related ‘Generality Thesis’ endorsed by McGinn (Citation1982, 51), when a subject successfully perceives an object, ‘the content of experience is not to be specified by using any terms that refer to the object of experience’.
5 See Grice and White (Citation1961) who introduced this kind of example.
6 Recanati (Citation2007, 135).
7 In his chapter devoted to perceptual content, Recanati (Citation2007, Ch. 17), while discussing a similar case, presents (as in the analysis I ascribed to him above) the content of the experience in a similar case as a general and existential content, that there is a yellow flower there, amounting to a property that the subject would self-ascribe. But although he nowhere mentions singular contents in that chapter, one might suspect based on the rest of his book (and of his work) that Recanati would not necessarily disallow that perceptual experiences can have singular contents as their lekta. This would certainly go against the spirit of a Lewisian analysis, but it would remain consistent with situation theories, such as Barwise and Etchemendy (Citation1987), whose influence is also clear in Recanati (Citation2007). Thus Recanati might want to suggest that the content of E is a singular property of being a subject causally related to a scene such that o1 is a red bird which the subject self-ascribes. Be that as it may, my aim is not exegetical here, and for the purposes of this paper I regard it as an asset of Searle's and Lewis's internalist views, to be preserved if possible, that they do not appeal to singular lekta, assuming that contents play the role of capturing the internal perspective of subjects. The third type of view I will sketch below preserves that asset (‘Generality’) but allows that the complete satisfaction conditions of perceptual experiences can be singular.
8 For the purposes of this paper, given the aim of contrasting the main lines of the three analyses of perceptual content, we can leave open the more specific issue of whether the content of the experience includes also other properties of the object, such as the property of having a certain shape, of singing, etc.
9 Putnam (Citation1975) introduced the famous Twin-Earth arguments to establish externalism about linguistic content. For other arguments from objectuality against Searle's account of perceptual content, see e.g. Soteriou (Citation2000).
10 Although in this paper I do not address the relations between representational and phenomenal properties of perceptual experiences, I will allow myself one brief remark. Like the subject-centred view, the object-centred view can easily explain how differently situated subjects (like Paul and Twin-Paul) perceiving different objects may have experiences with the same phenomenal character (the property content of their experiences, whatever it is, may in principle be the same). But the subject-centred view fares better with secondary qualities. Perhaps, to be phenomenally red for an object is for it to be disposed to cause reddish sensations in the subject (in normal viewing conditions), and it is natural for an advocate of centred worlds to claim that secondary qualities are ‘centring features’ of the subject (e.g. Egan Citation2006b). Such issues deserve to be explored in much more detail. For now, I just want to suggest that the object-centred analysis of the representational content of E does not prevent the subject from figuring in the analysis of the phenomenal character of E. Thus it is not incoherent to say that at the phenomenal level an experience ascribes some relevant property to an object while the property thus ascribed is itself subject-relative. If that is so, one possible suggestion is that an ascription by Paul of a secondary quality such as looking red to an object like the bird o1 is true only if the ordered pair of centred worlds belongs to the set of ordered pairs of centred worlds such that the second member of the pair is disposed (in normal conditions) to cause reddish sensations in the first member of the pair.
11 A problem with a similar structure arises for Lewis's theory of de se attitudes in the realm of communication. See e.g. Stalnaker (Citation2008, 50–51).
12 Of course, as perceptual reports involving that-clauses are factive, the claim that Paul sees that this is a red bird entails (the complete content) that the object in question is a red bird (at that time in the actual world).
13 De re attitudes are attitudes whose complete content directly involves an object in the environment. They are opposed to de dicto attitudes whose complete content involves instead a concept which is a constituent of a fully articulated propositional content grasped in the mind. On my use, de se attitudes are a subclass of de re attitudes.
14 Another related familiar reason why this is an asset is that perceptual experiences are often thought to be what enables us to have thoughts and make utterances that refer directly to objects in our environment. If perception makes this possible at all, then (some) perceptual experiences must have complete contents that are objectual.
15 See Kaplan (Citation1989) for the semantical distinction between ‘context’ and ‘circumstance’ in the philosophy of language, which Recanati (Citation2007) invokes also in an account of perspectival thought in the philosophy of mind.
16 In this paper I am focussed on singular perceptual experiences, and I argue that they are three-place relations. But nothing here precludes the idea that other perceptual experiences might involve more terms. For instance, the alternative view can easily make room for the idea that when I see that Olga is kissing Paul, my perceptual experience is a four-place relation, between me (the subject), the two-place relation of kissing (the content), and an ordered pair consisting of Olga and Paul (the two objects). There are different possible ways of fleshing out this idea, one of which is to invoke ‘multi-centred worlds’ (see e.g. Ninan Citation2013). Although for lack of space, I cannot elaborate here on the relations between this alternative view and a multi-centred world account, I wish to note that the former, unlike the latter (which always involves at least the subject in the relevant situation, and sometimes also other objects), makes room for purely objectual complete contents (i.e. complete contents that do not involve the subject at all), facilitating transitions between perception, on the one hand, and other singular attitudes or directly referential utterances (which are most often regarded as subject-independent), on the other.
17 Recanati (Citation2007, Ch. 38) also holds that the circumstance need not be the context, but in speech and thought.
18 This is one possibility among others. For another kind of reconciliatory view, see Schellenberg (Citation2014).
19 For our purposes, disjunctivism may be roughly defined as the view that veridical, illusory, and hallucinatory experiences are not experiences of the same kind, even when they are internally indistinguishable to the subject.
20 This is because they will be caused by different facts and so different situations (maybe involving the same object but at some other time or in some other world, where the properties of that object can be different), and because, on this view, a CC individuates any experience that qualifies as perceptual (thus any truly perceptual experience must refer to some real situation, and for any pair of truly perceptual experiences A and B, if A and B refer to different situations, then A ≠ B). Here (de re) perceptual experiences, though not experiences generally, are individuated widely.
21 On this disjunctive version of the third view, exactly the same points will apply to the beliefs formed on the basis of the hallucinatory experiences. In the case of illusions, if we say that the perceptual experience is ill-formed and not assessable for satisfaction, the same will hold for the corresponding belief. (This is in fact what many philosophers say about cases of ‘confused’ beliefs nowadays: having different sources/referents that are being conflated, such beliefs are not evaluable as true or false.) On the other hand, if we say that the perceptual experience is not ill-formed, then it actually represents two different facts: that the bird is white and that the window pane is red. For an advocate of that second view, it will be harder to maintain a close connection between perceptual experience and belief in the case of illusions, for it may sound counterintuitive to say that the subject will believe those two things (of the bird that it is white and of the window pane that it is red), at least if what is believed is assumed to be knowable a priori (‘epistemically transparent’) by the subject. That said, many philosophers nowadays deny transparency and some (e.g. Stalnaker Citation2008, Ch. 6) would hold that subjects can have two different beliefs with two different referents even when they take themselves to have one belief with one referent. For lack of space, I cannot elaborate on these issues here.
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Gregory Bochner
Gregory Bochner is a Belgian philosopher currently working as a research assistant in philosophy of language and mind at the Collège de France. His publications include a monograph entitled Naming and Indexicality (2021, Cambridge University Press).