Abstract
The argument from appearance for the content view or intentionalism attracts a lot of attention recently. In my paper, I follow Charles Travis to argue against the key premise that representational content can be ‘read off’ from a certain way that a thing looks to a subject. My arguments are built upon Travis’s original objection and a reinterpretation of Rodrick Chisholm’s comparative and noncomparative uses of appearance words. Byrne, Schellenberg and others interpret Travis’ ‘visual looks’ as Chisholm’s comparative use, and appeal to the noncomparative use as an alternative to avoid Travis’s objection. I demonstrate that they misunderstand both Chisholm and Travis. Both the comparative use and the noncomparative use are semantic notions, while ‘visual looks’ is a metaphysical one. Although Chisholm’s appearance objectivism –– that appearance expressions attribute appearances to ordinary objects –– is close to ‘visual looks’, appearance objectivism is not exceptional to the noncomparative use as Byrne interprets. In the end, I also show that Byrnean’s conception of distinctive visual gestalt cannot exclude contrary representational contents, because a distinctive visual gestalt can be shared by different kinds of things. Besides, Byrne and others do not explain why a distinctive visual gestalt should be presented as ‘being instantiated’. Therefore, I conclude that representational content cannot be read off from a certain way that a thing looks to a subject; the argument from appearance thus fails.
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Notes
A similar view is shared by Brewer (2006, p.174).
For the detailed and more lucid discussion about the notion of availability, see Wilson (2018).
Briefly, Jackson argues that material things do not have color properties because color properties do not serve any scientific causal explanation of the interactions between objects, while sense-data as the immediate perceptual objects have color properties. Hence, sense-data are not material but mental. See Jackson (1977, pp. 120–28).
Jackson’s detailed argument for the independence of the phenomenal use can be seen in (1977, pp. 34 − 6). For the objection, see Martin (2010, p. 180-1).
See Jackson (1982).
Wilson (2018) has a more detailed analysis on Travis’s view on looks.
I thank one referee for posing this challenge.
Brogaard (2017) has a more detailed discussion of dual looks.
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Acknowledgements
This article was written when I was a graduate student at CEU. Its earlier version was presented at the Copenhagen Summer School in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind, and I am indebted to discussions with audiences there, especially Søren Overgaard. I’m also grateful to Keith Allen, Tim Crane, Damian Aleksiev, and Hanoch Ben-Yami for their valuable comments on the article’s various earlier versions.
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Gu, Z. Propositional Intentionalism and the Argument from Appearance. Philosophia 51, 697–715 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00575-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00575-z