Abstract
Is property-awareness constituted by representation or not? If it were, merely being aware of the qualities of physical objects would involve being in a representational state. This would have considerable implications for a prominent view of the nature of successful perceptual experiences. According to naïve realism, any such experience—or more specifically its character—is fundamentally a relation of awareness to concrete items in the environment. Naïve realists take their view to be a genuine alternative to representationalism, the view on which the character of such experiences is constituted by representation. But naïve realists must admit qualities or property instances as items of awareness if they are to remain wedded to common sense, and the nature of property-awareness may smuggle constitutive representation into the naïve realist account of character. I argue that whether property-awareness involves representation, and consequently whether naïve realism is distinct from representationalism or not, depends on what qualities are fundamentally. On universalist and nominalist accounts, property-awareness turns out to involve representation. Not so under tropism.
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Notes
Compare McDowell’s claim in (1998) that, once we admit inhering properties as part of visual consciousness, it follows that “visual intuitions of objects simply are seeings that… looked as if from a different angle” (ibid., 462) with Johnston’s insistence in (2006) that once we distinguish predication from instantiation, we can help ourselves to property-awareness free of representation, since “the ‘logical togetherness’ of the property of being a cube and the cube is not the same in the sensed exemplification and the judgement” (ibid., ff 16).
Siegel herself suggests that the argument goes through regardless of what account we give of properties. From what follows, it should become clear that she is mistaken.
By external, I mean mind-independent. By concrete, I mean located in space and time. By particular, I mean an entity for which qualitative and numerical identity are distinct relations.
By “physical object” I mean a bearer of physical qualities.
I expand on the prospects of explaining such phenomenal differences solely in terms of a modification of one’s perspective in Ivanov (ms).
See Armstrong (1978), vol I, 16.
See Schellenberg (2010).
With some complications arising from P(iv) (see ibid., 351–354).
Perhaps a proponent of the weak interpretation of P(i) would at this point appeal to the different ways in which qualities are given in perception and sensory imagination as evidence that in perceptual experience, in contrast with imagination, qualities are presented as existing. But there are promising alternative ways of making sense of the phenomenal difference; e.g. as a matter of determinacy or of particularity.
The above should be taken as a reference-fixing description rather than as an elucidation. A more elucidating account has been proposed by Ehring (2011), who analyses universal as a type of entity to which the principle of identity of indiscernibles applies with necessity. For an exemplary account of universals, see Armstrong (1989).
For convenience, I set aside the issue of material constitution.
Regarding experiential cases in other modalities, specifically cases in which the subject is not directly aware of the bearers of qualities, the qualities would need to be presented at distinct spatial regions.
Intuitively, a qualitatively identical property possessed by a different object would be numerically distinct. See Ehring (2011, pp. 50–52), for an extended defence.
This is Siegel's favoured tropist formulation of P(i) (ibid., 354).
“As located with” may suggest that an experience of a trope presents a general condition being the case, and may be seen as a way to move from awareness of tropes to representation. However, there is no general condition involved, since the trope theorist takes collocation to be a particularised relation. “Being presented with a trope as located with an object” is a shorthand for “being presented with a trope, an object, and the collocation relational trope, obtaining between the object and the trope”.
That this is Siegel's favoured formulation of P(i) is suggested by her reformulation of the consequent in P(ii) using “a cluster of F-tropes” (ibid.).
The same point can be made if tropes fall into primitive natural classes. That the naturalness of a trope class is determined by intrinsic aspects of its members is not the same as that the naturalness of the class is reducible to those aspects.
Bear in mind that both class and resemblance nominalists must adopt possibilism to account for coextensive properties.
For the same reason, it is implausible that I am aware of the cup’s natural class membership.
Here is a reason why nominalism may in fact be the worst option for the radical naïve realist: on both universalism and trope theory, property-awareness is distinct from and prior to property-classification. I have argued that property-awareness must ground property-classification-and that it cannot do so under universalism without involving representation. But some will not be persuaded that property-awareness must serve such a role, in effect allowing that even under universalism property-awareness may not involve representation. On nominalism, however, property-awareness and property-classification collapse, so a nominalist who acknowledges the need for property-awareness must take perceptual phenomenology to involve representation.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the first installment of the Warwick–London Mind Forum. Thanks to the audience of the event, and to my commentator Solveig Aasen. Considerable thanks are due to Naomi Eilan, Richard Gray, Matt Nudds, and Keith Wilson for reading and commenting on the present version of the paper, and to Sanford Goldberg, Axel Mueller, and Adam Pautz for doing so on a rudimentary draft.
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Ivanov, I.V. Property-Awareness and Representation. Topoi 36, 331–342 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-014-9274-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-014-9274-3