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Does Mary know I experience plus rather than quus? A new hard problem

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Abstract

Realism about cognitive or semantic phenomenology, the view that certain conscious states are intrinsically such as to ground thought or understanding, is increasingly being taken seriously in analytic philosophy. The principle aim of this paper is to argue that it is extremely difficult to be a physicalist about cognitive phenomenology. The general trend in later 20th century/early 21st century philosophy of mind has been to account for the content of thought in terms of facts outside the head of the thinker at the time of thought, e.g. in terms of causal relations between thinker and world, or in terms of the natural purposes for which mental representations have developed. However, on the assumption that consciousness is constitutively realised by what is going on inside the head of a thinker at the time of experience, the content of cognitive phenomenology cannot be accounted for in this way. Furthermore, any internalist account of content is particularly susceptible to Kripkensteinian rule following worries. It seems that if someone knew all the physical facts about what is going on in my head at the time I was having a given experience with cognitive phenomenology, they would not thereby know whether that state had ‘straight’ rather than ‘quus-like’ content, e.g. whether the experience was intrinsically such as the ground the thought that two plus two equals four or intrinsically such as to ground the thought that two quus two equals four. The project of naturalising consciousness is much harder for realists about cognitive phenomenology.

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Notes

  1. For the past 15 years, there has been a slowly growing minority defending this view, e.g. Strawson (1994), Siewert (1998), Horgan and Tienson (2002), Pitt (2004). I expect the two forthcoming Oxford University Press collections by Bayne and Montague and Horgan and Kriegal to bring the view much more into the mainstream.

  2. Semantic phenomenology is a form of cognitive phenomenology, as it is intrinsically such as to ground linguistic understanding.

  3. Strawson (1994) makes use of this kind of comparison between hearing a language you understand and hearing a language you don’t understand. Siewert (forthcoming) develops the idea into an extremely rigorous argument.

  4. Of course we also perceive words in isolation from sentences, but even in these contexts what is represented is a matter of the capacities of words to be used in whole sentences. To experience ‘God’ as meaning God is to have experience which represents ‘God’ as capable of contributing to the making of claims (and other kinds of speech act, but I focus on assertions for the sake of simplicity) in certain specific ways, e.g. as capable of being used to make claims about God. The example I will be considering in the second section will be one in which a word is heard within a complete sentence (see footnote 9) and so avoids concerns about how much content is represented when a word is heard in isolation from a sentence.

  5. As Kripke (1982, p. 43) describes consciousness.

  6. Although there are voices against this tendency, e.g. Strawson (1994), Siewert (1998), Horgan and Tienson (2002), Pitt (2004). Regarding perceptual experience, representationalists are also opposed to this tendency, e.g. Dretske (1995), Tye (2009), Lycan (1996), Carruthers (2000), although they tend to be less sympathetic to realism about cognitive or semantic phenomenology.

  7. A similar strategy could be undertaken to accommodate semantic deference, building the deference to experts into the primary intension.

  8. Strawson (1994, 2008), Horgan and Tienson (2002), Pitt (2004), Siewart (1998, forthcoming).

  9. We can take it that t is some time during which Cuthbert hears a full sentence containing ‘plus’ with understanding.

  10. This story self-consciously steals and merges ideas from Jackson (1982, 1986) and Kripke (1982).

  11. The difficulty for information based accounts is finding some way of account for misrepresentations, for situations where a representation is caused by x but does not represent x, e.g. when my thought that there is a cow in the field is caused by a horse. Dretske (1988, 1994) does this by adding teleology to his account. Fodor (1990) offers a non-teleological way of distinguishing causes of a representation which the representation represents, from causes of a representation which the representation doesn’t represent.

  12. Even if the relevant properties are instantiated in the brain, their being instantiated in the brain is not essential to their role in fixing content. In contrast, I take it that, for those who believe that consciousness is ‘inside the head’, it is essential that the properties which realise consciousness are instantiated where the subject of experience is.

  13. If the facts about which properties are natural and to what degree obtain in all possible worlds, then there will be no difference, on Lewis’s view, between my brain in a vat twin and I vis-á-vis content determining facts. However, content is still ‘outside the head’, in the sense that it is not constitutively determined by goings on inside the head.

  14. Only narrow content is represented in semantic phenomenology, but we still need an account of what makes the narrow content straight rather than quus-like.

  15. More work would need to be done to get from Jack experiences ‘plus’ to mean plus to Jack means ‘plus’ by plus.

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Acknowledgment

I would like to thank David Papineau, Barry Smith, Meredith Williams, David Chalmers, Robert van Gulick, William Seager, Chris Schriner, Emma Bullock, Kirk Surgener, Constantine Sandis, Stephen Boulter, Holly Lawford-Smith and Rory Madden for comments and discussion. I wrote this paper as a Research Fellow with the AHRC project ‘Phenomenal Qualities’.

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Goff, P. Does Mary know I experience plus rather than quus? A new hard problem. Philos Stud 160, 223–235 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9715-4

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