Abstract
The unobservability thesis (UT) states that the mental states of other people are unobservable. Both defenders and critics of UT seem to assume that UT has important implications for the mindreading debate. Roughly, the former argue that because UT is true, mindreaders need to infer the mental states of others, while the latter maintain that the falsity of UT makes mindreading inferences redundant. I argue, however, that it is unclear what ‘unobservability’ means in this context. I outline two possible lines of interpretation of UT, and argue that on one of these, UT has no obvious implications for the mindreading debate. On the other line of interpretation, UT may matter to the mindreading debate, in particular if we think of it as a thesis about the possible contents of perceptual experience. The upshot is that those who believe UT has implications for the mindreading debate need to be more specific about how they understand the thesis.
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Notes
Some have a narrower understanding of mindreading, but my use accords, I think, with that of Nichols and Stich (2003, p. 1–2), among others.
Note that, in maintaining that the mental states of others are ‘completely’ hidden, Leslie goes beyond a simple rejection of behaviourism. His statement also commits him to rejecting mereological views, according to which some mental states may be composites, parts of which are hidden and other parts of which are straightforwardly perceivable (e.g. Green 2007).
Epley and Waytz, for example, suggest that the inferential ‘leap from observable behavior to unobservable mental states’ that is mindreading requires ‘is so common and routine that people often seem unaware that they are making a leap’ (2009, p. 499).
‘Identify’ is (I suppose) normally used as a success term. As I use it here, however, it includes wrongly classifying someone as being angry. What matters in the present context is not whether or not a mental state attribution is correct, but whether it must be underpinned by extra-perceptual cognitive elements.
I must note two complications here. First, Gallagher in fact tends to associate the term ‘mindreading’ with the making of judgments (as does Goldman; cf. the quote in the introduction). Consequently, Gallagher tends not to present his proposal as offering an account of how we sometimes mindread, but rather as explaining why we often don’t have to. However, nothing important for what follows hangs on my more liberal use of the term ‘mindreading’. If one prefers the narrower use, one can just read ‘understanding in terms of mental states’ whenever I write ‘mindreading’. Second, Gallagher also tends to use the term ‘mental state’ in a more restricted way than I do. He seems to use it to refer to what I call mental states, but thought of in a particular way, namely as ‘hidden’. Again, nothing important hangs on my more liberal use of the term. Anyone who prefers Gallagher’s narrower use can read ‘understanding in terms of [emotion, sensation, intention, belief, or...]’ whenever I write ‘mindreading’.
I do not claim that these exhaust the options. But they are sufficient to establish that there is more than one way to think of (un)observability, and hence, depending on the way one thinks about it, UT may or may not have clear implications for the mindreading debate.
For the sake of simplicity, I will restrict my discussion to the visual modality. If there is such a thing as observing others’ mental states, the auditory modality is likely to be as important as the visual. I believe the points I will make also hold (mutatis mutandis) for that modality. As for the other modalities, my guess is the tactile may also be of some importance, while the olfactory (notwithstanding talk of ‘smelling fear’) and the gustatory play no significant role.
I wish to avoid the labels ‘non-epistemic’ and ‘epistemic’ seeing, as my topic is not an epistemological one. It is thus not important to my notion of t-seeing whether the seen ‘fact’ obtains or not. If it makes sense to think of ‘seeing-as’ as a non-factive form of seeing-that (cf. Smith 2015), then seeing-as is the relevant notion of t-seeing in the present context. Moreover, if we want to think of the debate between Gallagher and his opponents as a dispute over whether the mental states of others are t-observable, we must not require that the subject believes what she seems to see. I will return to the latter point in Sect. 6.
One can imagine the moving mass of air having dyed dust particles. In this sort of case, it would (I take it) be possible to pick out the moving mass of air from the stationary one. But one would do so by s-seeing the moving dust particles, not the moving air as such. In other words, this case is in principle similar to detecting wind by s-seeing moving leaves.
Again, perhaps ‘seeing-as’ fits the bill here. I see one Müller-Lyer line as longer than the other, but I don’t believe it to be.
I am sidestepping a host of difficult issues here. Philosophers disagree about whether or not the contents of perceptual experiences are (or may be) object-dependent, singular, non-conceptual, rich (see below), and so on and so forth. In fact, although most philosophers think perceptual experiences have representational content, some variants of disjunctivism reject this idea altogether (See e.g. Brewer 2011; Travis 2004). Although he is sympathetic to the general idea of perceptual content, Pautz (2009) raises some worries about common ways of conceiving of the contents of experience.
See Sect. 3, especially footnote 8.
Silins (2013) discusses the epistemological significance of the debate about the scope of perceptual content.
If we think about the unobservability thesis in this way, it is not only of significance to the mindreading debate. In the philosophy of perception, there is currently much discussion about the permissible contents of perception. The main focus has been on the prospects of including natural kind properties in the content of experience, but causal and mental properties, too, have been mentioned as potential candidates for inclusion. See Bayne (2009) and Masrour (2011) for permissive (or ‘rich’, or ‘thick’) views, and Brogaard (2013) for a more restrictive (‘poor’, ‘thin’) view.
Spaulding (2015) argues that phenomenal contrast arguments fail because they do not distinguish between ‘causally relevant and constitutive properties of perception’ (ibid.). Spaulding contrasts the experiences of an expert art historian and a novice looking at the same impressionist painting. The undeniable phenomenal difference between their experiences, she claims, could be due to high-level properties (e.g. ‘impressionist’) in the content of the expert’s, but not the novice’s, perceptual experience. But it could also be that the expert’s knowledge of art causally influences which features of the work she attends to, or finds interesting, or her expectation about the work. Consider the explanation in terms of attentional differences. The expert’s knowledge may lead her to focus her attention on the special character of the brush strokes (say), which renders her experience different from that of the novice (whose attention might be grabbed by the depicted scene, say). But if this is the sort of thing Spaulding has in mind, then it is not clear that her criticism affects the method of phenomenal contrast as outlined above. For the obvious question to ask is how, precisely, the two experiences are supposed to differ phenomenally. The obvious candidates seem to be precisely the options Siegel highlights. Either the two experiences differ in terms of low-level contents (one, but not the other, represents short and broken brush strokes, say). Or else they differ in terms of non-representational features. Or, finally, the difference is in terms of non-sensory states. (Similar points apply to explanations in terms of different interests or expectations. The latter, for example, seems most naturally thought of in terms of different non-sensory states.) It is of course possible that Siegel’s alternatives do not exhaust the options; but for all Spaulding has shown, they may well be exhaustive.
Spaulding goes on to argue that the best explanation of the phenomenal contrast between the two experiences is one that refers simply to differences in attention. She concedes that this second argument presupposes the controversial view that attention cannot itself be a constitutive element of perception (see Mole [forthcoming] for arguments against this view), but she maintains that the first argument stands independently of the second. The reverse is not the case, however. If Spaulding’s explanation in terms of differences in attention is captured by one of Siegel’s options, then Spaulding’s second argument does not target the contrast method as such. Rather, it amounts to the suggestion that, at least in the particular case of the impressionist painting, the contrast method leads to a result that does not involve high-level content.
For a more fully developed discussion of the various explanatory strategies and their respective merits—focusing on ‘kind properties’ rather than mental states or properties—see Siegel (2010, ch. 4).
Previous versions of this paper were presented at conferences in Copenhagen, Vienna, Bochum, and Kirchberg am Wechsel. I am grateful to all audiences for helpful comments. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to two referees at Synthese for pressing me to make a number of significant improvements to the paper.
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Overgaard, S. The unobservability thesis. Synthese 194, 743–760 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0804-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0804-3