Abstract
Phenomenal beliefs are beliefs about the phenomenal properties of one’s concurrent conscious states. It is an article of common sense that such beliefs tend to be justified. Philosophers have been less convinced. It is sometimes claimed that phenomenal beliefs are not on the whole justified, on the grounds that (i) they are typically based on introspection and (ii) introspection is often unreliable. Here we argue that such reasoning must guard against a potential conflation between two distinct introspective phenomena, which we call fact-introspection and thing-introspection; arguments for the unreliability of introspection typically target only the former, leaving the reliability of the latter untouched (§2). In addition, we propose a theoretical framework for understanding thing-introspection that may have a surprising consequence: thing-introspection is not only reliable, but outright infallible (§3). This points at a potential line of defense of phenomenal-belief justification, which here we only sketch very roughly.
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Notes
One more specification is needed to home in on the beliefs we are interested in against the background of reductive physicalism. According to reductive physicalism, every phenomenal property is identical to some physical property. Wearing a top-shelf cerebroscope connected to an information processing system, one might form beliefs about physical properties of one’s concurrent brain states that are in fact phenomenal properties. This kind of belief is not, however, the kind of belief we are interested in. So for a reductive physicalist, we propose that a phenomenal belief be construed as a belief about the phenomenal properties of one’s concurrent conscious states under a phenomenal description (or presented under a phenomenal mode of presentation). For the sake of simplicity, we will ignore this further specification in what follows.
As noted, concept possession is necessary for language expression. Thus, what is fundamental to fact-awareness is application of concepts – enabling language expression is a derivative feature. However, stressing direct expressibility helps to understand what kind of concepts are deployed in fact-awareness. Dretske himself seems to suggest this: ‘Generally speaking, the concepts necessary for awareness of facts are those corresponding to terms occurring obliquely in the clause (the that-clause) describing the fact one is aware of.’ (1993: 265, fn 8)
It might be argued that, in fact, thing-awareness is directly expressible in public language: a subject who has the concept toast, and is aware of a toast, can directly express her thing-awareness simply by saying ‘toast,’ even if she is not aware of any fact concerning the toast. However, in this case what is directly expressed is not the subject’s thing-awareness of the toast, but rather her fact-awareness that what she is aware of is a toast (i.e., the concept toast applies to it).
Here is how Dretske (1993: 266) puts it: ‘Ignorance of what armadillos are or how they look may prevent someone from being conscious of certain facts (that the object crossing the road is an armadillo) without impairing in the slightest one’s awareness of the things – the armadillos crossing roads – that (so to speak) constitute these facts.’
Dretske himself is aware of this possible objection: ‘One can, to be sure, see armadillos without seeing that they are armadillos, but perhaps one must, in order to see them, see that they are (say) animals of some sort. […] If this sounds implausible (one can surely mistake an animal for a rock or a bush) maybe one must, in seeing an object, at least see that it is an object of some sort. To be aware of a thing is at least be aware that it is… how shall we say it? … a thing. Something or other.’ (1993: 268; italics original)
Indeed, Dretske makes quite a similar point: ‘It seems most implausible to suppose infants and animals (presumably, conscious of things) have concepts of this sort. If the concept one must have to be aware of something is a concept that applies to everything one can be aware of, what is the point of insisting that one must have it to be aware?’ (1993: 268–269)
A qua-object is distinguished from a property-instance in being a bona fide concrete particular. Thus one difference between the tree-qua-green and the tree’s greenness is that you can bump into the former but not into the latter. For the idea of a qua-object, see Fine 1982 (though the notion itself goes back to Aristotle’s discussion of the relationship between the man and the musical man in Physics I.7).
We do recognize the measure of infelicity in the term ‘thing-introspection.’ What we are introspectively aware of are clearly not ‘things’ in the ordinary sense of physical concrete particulars. As we have seen above, however, a ‘thing’ in the relevant sense can belong to any ontological category. This includes mental states, events, and processes, which are the proper objects of what we call thing-introspection. If the reader finds the label too grating, we enjoin her to substitute ‘item-introspection’ for our ‘thing-introspection.’ We use the latter only to underline the analogy with Dretske’s distinction.
It is worth noting the existence of an intermediary report between ‘S introspects her hunger’ and ‘S introspects that she is hungry’; namely, ‘S introspects her hunger as a hunger.’ This latter report is ostensibly a report of an objectual attitude but also one of a concept-deploying state. Accordingly, we would not admit it under the rubric of thing-introspection (as we use the term). We are open to two possibilities. The first is that in addition to fact-introspection and thing-introspection there is a third kind of introspection. The second is that ‘S introspects her hunger as hunger’ is a misleading report of fact-introspection: what it reports is that S introspects that her experience is a hunger experience.
Among them are the argument from ineffability of conscious experience (Schwitzgebel 2008), the argument from introspective disagreement (e.g., Bayne and Spener 2010), the fraternity initiation case (Shoemaker 1996), and the dental drilling case (Rosenthal 2005). Some of them are analyzed in Giustina (2015), and replied to in terms of the thing-introspection/fact-introspection distinction. As noted, we cannot go through all of them here; we plan to address them, using the thing-introspection/fact-introspection distinction, in future work.
On a natural model, a propositional content such as < I am hungry > involves as constituents (i) the concept of hunger, (ii) the indexical I-concept, and (iii) a predicative link between these two (whatever that amounts to). Since (i) is a constituent of the propositional content, it is impossible to entertain the content without possessing and applying the concept of hunger.
We do not mean to commit here to the substantive possibility of instantaneous concept application. Perhaps the process running from an experiential state to the application of a concept to that state must take some time, even if it is automatic. Our present point is just that our account can accommodate both options.
Thanks to Josh Weisberg for this example.
You might apply the concept(s) disgusting viscous experience, but this is not a particularly gustatory set of concepts: disgusting is rather an aesthetic concept, viscous is rather a tactile concept, and experience is more generic than gustatory concepts.
From this perspective, when one mistakenly fact-introspects that one’s experience is such-and-such, there is a sense in which the mistake is actually not one of introspection proper, but of some downstream processes. Imagine a patient whose eyesight is irreproachable, but who, due to brain lesion, routinely misapplies shape concepts to what she sees. As a result, she seems to see that the building is square when in fact it is rectangular, seems to see that the stop sign is round when in fact it is octagonal, and so on. This patient’s perceptual fact-awareness is defective, leading to a preponderance of nonveridical visual judgments. And yet there is a sense in which vision proper is perfectly reliable in her – there is nothing wrong with her eyesight. It is not clear to us that fact-introspection is as unreliable as it is often claimed to be (Giustina 2015), but even where it proves untrustworthy, we maintain that the situation resembles that of the above patient: introspection proper is perfectly reliable, and it is only the downstream processing of introspective information that is defective.
We suppress here a modal operator: clearly, Dretske can allow that some conscious states are such that their subject is aware of them, Rosenthal can allow that some are such that in virtue of being in them we are conscious of something else, and so on. But what they will deny is the necessity of the presence of such consciousness-of (in Dretske’s case) or consciousness-with (in Rosenthal’s).
Might the two come apart? There is no reason why not. Consider the following variation on the inverted spectrum thought-experiment. Imagine two subjects whose spectra are not inverted but whose inner awareness is ‘inverted’: looking at a red strawberry, both enter a visual state that represents the strawberry as red, but one’s inner awareness represents her visual state as phenomenally red while the other’s represents hers as phenomenally green. According to the first version of self-representationalism, the conscious state is phenomenally red but happens to misrepresent itself. According to the second version, the conscious state is phenomenally green, because all there is to a conscious state being phenomenally green is that it represents itself as so.
Rosenthal himself does not seem to recognize thing-introspection in his account of introspection. But a higher-order theorist could, in principle, make room for it. This is especially feasible for a higher-order perception rather than higher-order thought theorist (Lycan 1996).
For a similar consideration see, e.g., Brentano 1874: 121–6.
One might object that second-order states must be posited anyway: for example, we can have beliefs about beliefs. However, there is a considerable asymmetry between the two-state model and the case of a belief about a belief. In the former case a new kind of state is introduced (namely, the introspective second-order state); in the latter the second-order state is not of a new kind (it is just another belief).
One might wonder how thing-introspection is built into the introspected state, and constitutive of its phenomenal properties, given that it requires additional attention resources. It is worth pointing out that thing-introspection is inbuilt and constitutive of the introspected state as thing-introspected – as opposed to the relevant conscious state as non-thing-introspected, namely, simply as conscious. The additional attention involved in thing-introspection contributes to determine the phenomenal character of the thing-introspected state. Therefore, for any conscious state C, the phenomenal character of C as thing-introspected might be different from that of C as non-thing-introspected.
A completely different but coherent view in this area is that fact-awareness and belief are in reality two different descriptions of one and the same state – perceiving that the table is brown just is believing that the table is brown. (Dretske himself often sounds like that.) We set aside this view for purely strategic reasons: we indulge our opponent’s supposition that an extra step is needed here in order to form phenomenal beliefs, and show that even so, phenomenal beliefs are on the whole justified.
In addition, there may be a small subset of phenomenal beliefs that are infallible, namely, phenomenal beliefs with the content < this is like that>. Whether this is so will depend on whether it is possible to endorse a fact-introspective state with that content without introducing the possibility of error – something we have not discussed here.
Obviously, many challenges would have to be faced up to before this account can be taken to be complete. For example, we have said nothing here about how we might address the problem of ‘myth of the given’ (Sellars 1956), that is, the problem surrounding how a non-conceptual state could justify a conceptual one, or even enter the so-called space of reasons.
For comments on a previous draft, we are grateful to Jonathan Farrell, Brie Gertler, and Tom McClelland. We have also benefited from a presentation at Taiwan Medical University; we are grateful to the audience there, in particular Alex Byrne, Austen Clark, Sam Coleman, and Kevin Kimble.
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Giustina, A., Kriegel, U. Fact-Introspection, Thing-Introspection, and Inner Awareness. Rev.Phil.Psych. 8, 143–164 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-016-0304-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-016-0304-5