Abstract
Bayne and McClelland (2016) raise the matching content challenge for proponents of cognitive phenomenology: if the phenomenal character of thought is determined by its intentional content, why is it that my conscious thought that there is a blue wall before me and my visual perception of a blue wall before me don’t share any phenomenology, despite their matching content? In this paper, I first show that the matching content challenge is not limited to proponents of cognitive phenomenology but extends to cases of cross-modal perception, threatening representationalism about consciousness in general. I then give two responses to the challenge, both of which appeal to intentional modes. The difference in intentional mode between a thought and a visual perception can either explain why we should not expect any phenomenal overlap between the two experiences, or it can make it clear why the phenomenal overlap is easy to overlook. I show that these responses are available to the representationalist about perceptual consciousness, as well as the proponent of cognitive phenomenology. The upshot is that, when it comes to the matching content challenge, both perceptual representationalism and cognitive representationalism stand on equal dialectical footing.
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Notes
Bayne and McClelland cite Horgan and Graham (2012), Horgan and Tienson (2002), Siewert (1998), Pitt (2004), and Smithies (2014) as endorsing CR. Bayne and McClelland’s statement of CR, which they label “the phenomenal content thesis,” also includes the claim that the kind of phenomenal character that thoughts have is distinctive of thought. While many proponents of CR endorse this distinctiveness claim—in particular, that the kind of phenomenal character that thoughts have is non-sensory—it isn’t compulsory.
I am assuming a relational view of phenomenal intentionality, according to which contents are abstract objects to which phenomenal properties stand in intentional relations (Bourget 2019; Pautz 2013). On a non-relational view, in contrast, phenomenal properties instantiate contents (Kriegel 2007; Mendelovici 2018). I assume the relational view for simplicity, but one could replace it with a non-relational view without substantially changing the overall dialectic. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for urging me to make this assumption explicit.
A similar view is developed in Chudnoff (2013).
Some phenomenological accounts of pleasure hold that pleasure is a phenomenal determinable. See Kagan (1992), Crisp (2006), Smuts (2011), and Labukt (2012). This point has been made in response to the heterogeneity problem for hedonism, the objection that there is nothing that all pleasures have in common.
One might protest: “being phenomenally conscious” is not itself a phenomenal property. In response, my view is that having a phenomenal property is just to be phenomenally conscious in some more or less specific way, and having the phenomenal property “being phenomenally conscious” is the most general way of being phenomenally conscious.
The phenomenal determinable of representing that roundness is not a higher-order representation of its determinates; visually representing roundness and tactually representing roundness are simply different determinates of a determinable first-order property.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this issue.
It seems that I can know by introspection when I am occurrently wondering that p or when I am occurrently judging that p. It has been argued that I could only have this introspective knowledge—that I am wondering and judging about p rather than about q, and that these attitudes are directed toward the same content—if there was something it was like to wonder and judge that p as opposed to wondering and judging that q. See Pitt (2004).
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to André Curtis-Trudel, Rick Lamb, Farid Masrour, Tristram McPherson, Takuya Niikawa, David Pitt, and Richard Samuels for comments and discussion. Thanks also to audiences at the 2018 San Diego State Philosophy and Representation Conference and the 2020 American Philosophical Association Central Division in Chicago, and to participants in the dissertation seminar at Ohio State in the spring of 2020. Special thanks to Declan Smithies, who gave extensive feedback on this project from inception to completion. I also wish to thank an anonymous referee at Erkenntnis whose comments greatly improved the paper. Finally, thanks to Tim Bayne and Tom McClelland for getting me thinking.
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Lennon, P. In Defense of Cognitive Phenomenology: Meeting the Matching Content Challenge. Erkenn 88, 2391–2407 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00459-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00459-w