Abstract
Naïve Realism claims that the Phenomenal Character of perception is constituted by the mind-independent objects one perceives. According to this view, the Phenomenal Character of perception is object-dependent: experiences of different objects have different Phenomenal Characters, even if those objects are qualitatively identical. Proponents of Naïve Realism often defend this conception by arguing that it is necessary to accommodate the cognitive role of perceptual experience. John Campbell has presented the most influential version of this argument, according to which only an object-dependent conception of the Phenomenal Character of experience can explain its epistemic role—how (conscious) perception ‘justifies’ the patterns of inference that reflect our conception of mind-independence. In this paper, I argue that Campbell’s argument is unsound. First, I reconstruct the relevant patterns and argue that, independently of one’s conception of Phenomenal Character, perceptual experience does not ‘justify’ them in the way Campbell intends—by making their validity transparent to the subject. Second, I suggest that perception justifies those patterns by justifying their premises. I argue that a Representationalist, object-independent conception of its Phenomenal Character is at least as well suited as an object-dependent one to explain how this is possible. This undermines one of the main motivations to endorse a Naïve Realist, object-dependent account of the Phenomenal Character of perception.
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Notes
The introduction of ‘what it is like’ talk in the philosophical debate is usually attributed to Farrell (1950). The expression became so ubiquitous after Nagel’s classical discussion (1974) that it would be pointless to provide specific references. Similar considerations apply to the notion of ‘Phenomenal Character’ with its alternatives of ‘conscious’ (i.e., Martin, 1997, p. 93) and ‘qualitative’ character (i.e., Campbell, 2002b, p. 152, Levine, 2003, p. 57).
The term ‘Representationalism’ is sometimes reserved to designate the view according to which the representational content of experience exclusively determines its Phenomenal Character (Crane 2003, p. 48). I use the term to more liberally designate all views claiming that the representational content of experience essentially contributes to determining its Phenomenal Character.
A further consequence of claiming that the Phenomenal Character of perception is object-dependent is that experiences lacking a mind-independent referent (hallucinations) cannot have a Naïve Realist’s Phenomenal Character, even if they are subjectively indistinguishable from a corresponding veridical case. This arguably commits Naïve Realism to endorse a form of Disjunctivism about perceptual experience—the claim that veridical experiences and corresponding hallucinations are experiences of fundamentally different kinds (see, for instance, Martin, 2004, 2006).
Arguably, this allows Representationalism to give a unified account of veridical and non-veridical perceptual experiences—including hallucinations. These kinds of accounts are sometimes referred to as ‘Common factor’ views of perceptual experience (i.e., Martin, 2006).
Brewer calls the first group ‘Bottom-up theorists’, and the second ‘Top-down theorists’ (2017, p. 224).
To mention a few significative examples: Burge discusses Campbell’s work as one of the five most prominent proposals of a Disjunctive view of experience (2005, pp. 54–63); Schellenberg mentions Campbell’s argument as providing one of the four main objections to Representationalism (2011, p. 716); Logue as one of the three ‘sophisticated arguments’ for Naïve Realism (2012, p. 213); Fish as the reason to think that Naïve Realism is ‘well placed’ to account for ‘our ability to think about the mind-independent world’, thus making ‘the question of whether Naïve Realism is defensible a matter of philosophical interest’ (2009, p. 28); Mehta as one of the main reasons why philosophers ‘have been attracted by Naïve Realism’ (2022, p. 197).
Although Campbell does not explicitly put things in these terms, this structure is particularly clear in Campbell (2002a).
Allen (2020, p. 635) also suggests reading Campbell’s argument in this way.
Transcendental arguments are sometimes associated with an anti-sceptical value, but this is not necessary for an argument to be called ‘transcendental’ (Smith and Sullivan 2011, p. 6). Campbell’s argument aims to establish something about the nature of our cognitive abilities, not about the mind-independent world. These arguments have been called ‘self-directed transcendental arguments’ (Cassam, 2003), and it is debatable whether they are supposed to carry any anti-sceptical value (Cassam 2003, pp. 87–90). An interesting question is whether one can develop Campbell’s argument into an anti-sceptical one. The answer to this question depends on how we understand the notion of the ‘epistemic role’ of experience, but this is an issue that I will not address in this work.
At times, Campbell seems to endorse both claims. For instance, he claims that Naïve Realism can explain how perceptual experience makes our conception of objects as mind-independent available to us and that it can ‘describe how experience of objects can justify our use of the patterns of inference that express the mind-independence of experienced objects’ (2002a, p. 140). In this paper, I focus on the second interpretation. See Soteriou (2016, pp. 84–116) for a detailed discussion on the acquisition version of the claim.
Before moving on, it is important to stress that the relevant reading of (P1) is that perception plays its epistemic role in virtue of its Phenomenal Character—that is, in virtue of being a conscious experience. Campbell presents this claim on multiple occasions. While discussing Locke’s theory of perception, he argues that taking experiences to be merely ‘reliable signs to their regular causes’ would end up giving ‘no role to consciousness in providing us with a conception of what the world is like’ (2002a, p. 131. The emphasis is mine). He also clarifies that the Naïve Realist’s Disjunctive account of the ‘qualitative’ or ‘phenomenal’ character of experience allows accounting for its epistemic role (2002b, pp. 152–53). See Fn. 20 for further discussion.
This does not entail that one must know how to verify a proposition to know what it means, as Campbell recognises by mentioning the case of the Goldbach conjecture in mathematics (2002b, p. 22). Campbell seems to argue that if you can verify a proposition, you do not do it randomly: knowledge of what it is for the proposition to be true guides your choice of the verification method. In other words: you may know the meaning of a proposition without being able to verify it, but if you can do so, the method you choose will somehow depend on your knowledge of the meaning of the proposition.
See, for instance, McDowell (1986).
The distinction between the two steps is not explicit in Campbell’s contributions, but it is strongly suggested by how he develops his line of reasoning. This is evident in Campbell and Cassam (2014), which also adopts a similar terminology. Campbell claims that we can only understand how experience ‘grounds the ability to think in terms of mind-independent objects’ once ‘we have freed ourselves from the internalist conception of sensory experience’ (Campbell & Cassam, 2014, pp. 40–41). He then raises specific objections to Representationalism, focusing on McLaughlin’s (2010) version.
See Campbell and Cassam (2014, pp. 158–178) for a critical evaluation of Campbell’s general objections to Representationalism.
This premise is too strong. It would make sense to weaken it into something like ‘almost every fruit that tastes like an apple is an apple’. In doing so, however, the pattern of inference would become invalid. Although we could rephrase the discussion in terms of inductive force, I will avoid this unnecessary complication.
See, for instance, Campbell (2002b, p. 97). The inferences that trade on identity are those that depend on ‘the occurrence of the same singular term having the same referent’ (Campbell, 1988, p. 275). According to Campbell, this is not the same as claiming they rely on a suppressed identity premise because this would lead to a regress problem (see Sect. 4.1).
Campbell believes this is the natural way to understand ‘the point of perceptual experience’ and that it is a claim that ‘would find many supporters among contemporary philosophers’ (Campbell & Cassam, 2014, p. 26). While it is overwhelmingly plausible that you need to experience an object to refer demonstratively to it, it is more contentious whether your experience must also be conscious. Burge, for instance, claims that it does not: ‘a lot of perceptual singular reference is not conscious. That is one reason why consciousness cannot explain reference’ (2010, p. 364) (see (2010, pp. 367–436) for Burge’s defence of this claim). A widely mentioned example supporting Burge’s view is the phenomenon of blindsight. Blindsight occurs in subjects with a lesion in their primary visual cortex (see Weiskrants (1986) for a classic overview). Blindsight patients report a complete lack of awareness in a portion of their visual field. However, when forced to guess what is happening in that portion, they are incredibly reliable to ‘detect and locate targets and discriminate shape, pattern, orientation, motion and colour’ (Holt, 2003, p. 21). Blindsight patients believe to be merely guessing and are surprised to learn that their reports are accurate. This phenomenon has led some to suggest that it is possible to have visual information in the complete absence of phenomenal consciousness. However, Campbell believes this (unconscious) visual information is insufficient for demonstrative reference (2002b, pp. 7–9). He considers the following situation. Suppose you experience a crowd without singling out any individual. Suppose someone asks you to point at ‘that person’ and that, without singling any person out, you can accurately guess who ‘that person’ is by pointing at her. According to Campbell, you still could not understand who ‘that person’ is despite your accurate guesses. Blindsight patients are in the same situation: accurately guessing the presence of an object in their blind field does not amount to understanding a demonstrative. It is difficult to settle the dispute, especially because there are controversial aspects to the phenomenon of blindsight (see Overgaard, 2012). For the sake of argument, I will grant that conscious perceptual experience gives us knowledge of demonstratives such as ‘this fruit’ in Apple. In Sect. 6, however, I claim that perceptual experience does not play the epistemic role that Campbell identifies and suggest an alternative one for which the necessity of experience being conscious seems more straightforward.
See Sect. 6 for more on this.
I cannot discuss the temporal case in detail for space reasons, but we could extend to it the same considerations developed in this section.
The interpersonal case relates more directly to our conception of mind-independence. Even if Campbell was correct about the cross-modal case, the fact that the Phenomenal Character of experience must reflect the sameness of the perceived object does not entail its mind-independence. There does not seem to be anything contradictory in proposing that there could be private objects you could perceive by different sense modalities. However, suppose that the validity of a pattern of inference one would use in the interpersonal case depended on two different people being perceptually related to the same object. It would follow that the perceived object would be public—that its existence would not depend on the existence of one specific mind. Campbell believes that this is the case: ‘In the interpersonal case, what justifies you in reasoning in a way that exploits the sameness of the object that you and the other person have encountered is that you have both been experientially related to one and the same object’ (Campbell & Cassam, 2014, p. 34). Assuming this is correct, it would follow that the object you perceive must be mind-independent for the pattern to be valid.
One could weaken (B3) and rephrase what follows in terms of inductive force. As I did while focussing on Apple, I will avoid this complication (see Fn. 18).
The three demonstrative thoughts seem to have the same reference because they are grounded in the same perceptual experience. Even if this were false, we would have to deal with a pattern of inference that trades on the identity of an object perceived at different times, not by different people.
In this case, we would have to rephrase the premises as follows:
(B1’) That(vision)1 looks like a bear to (a).
(B2’) That (vision)2 looks like a bear to (b).
(B3’) If something looks some way to more than one person, it is that way.
(C) That(vision)1/that(vision)2 is a bear.
The demonstratives are grounded respectively in the experiences of (a) and (b). Only an entity with first-person access to the experiences of both could use this pattern. This cannot be the correct reconstruction of the pattern of inference you would use in the bear case.
See also Campbell (2002a, p. 137) for a similar example.
The best reconstruction of the pattern of inference you would use is in terms of a merely inductively forceful argument, not a valid one:
(D1) This desk(vision) has my initials carved on it.
(D2) Probably, if this desk(vision) has my initials carved on it, it is my old desk.
(C) This desk(vision) is my old desk.
This pattern is invalid but inductively forceful (given a suppressed identity premise—see below). Moreover, (D1) and (D2) are plausibly true even if ‘my initials’ means the initials of my name, not necessarily the same initials I carved on a desk many years ago. This makes (D1) easier to verify. As I did before (Fn. 18), I will avoid this complication and set up the discussion in terms of validity.
This is how Campbell and Cassam (2014, p. 167) seems to reconstruct the pattern.
Overall, I find this reconstruction (Desk-2) artificial. While you can surely remember seeing your old desk, it is less plausible that you remember any specific instance of perceiving it. This makes it implausible that your memory of the desk is directly based on any specific perception of it, which, in turn, makes the connection between this pattern of inference and the epistemic role of experience unclear.
Remember that this is Bear, not Bear-2. On this reconstruction, the demonstratives are all grounded in your experience, so it makes sense to ask how your experience justifies you to accept them.
Accommodating the ‘particularity’ of perceptual experience—that perception is an experience of particulars in the world—and articulating its relationship with demonstrative reference is one of the most pressing issues this work leaves open. See Burge (1991, 2005, 2009) for a defence of the claim that a form of object-independent representational content can accommodate particularity and explain how experience grounds demonstrative reference (see also Martin (2002) for discussion). There is also a legitimate question regarding whether we should distinguish between two forms of particularity—‘perceptual’ and ‘phenomenal’ (see Montague (2011) and Schellenberg (2010) for discussion). I find the claim that perceptual experience has phenomenal particularity (that the Phenomenal Character of perception reflects its particularity) contentious, but I will develop this claim in a future study.
See also Campbell (2011), where he differentiates between ‘the right to use empirical concepts like “that tree”’ and ‘the right to use the demonstrative as we do’ (2011, p. 45)—that is, the right to use them in patterns of inference that reflect our conception of mind-independence. The issue at stake is the latter, not the former.
Therefore, the question is how perception justifies certain beliefs. Notice that I am not attributing this view to Campbell, who explicitly distinguishes between the justification of beliefs and patterns of inference (2010, pp. 199–200).
See Burge (2005, p. 55) for a similar objection.
The deeper issue here is to explain how, on a Naïve Realist’s reading, experience could justify one to endorse any thought. Naïve Realism conceives perceptual experience as an acquaintance relation with mind-independent objects and their properties (see Campbell (2002b, p. 45) and (2009, p. 651)). But can a ‘brute’ acquaintance relation ground empirical knowledge? Sellars (1956) famously argued that it cannot, classifying as a ‘myth’ the idea that something lying outside the ‘logical space of reason’ (a ‘given’) could play any justificatory role. Since this issue does not apply exclusively to Naïve Realism, I will not address it in this work. However, if I am right to maintain that the epistemic role of perception is to justify some perceptual demonstrative thoughts, it is a problem Naïve Realism must deal with.
In introducing the notion of a ‘third relatum’, Campbell is not concerned with the phenomenology of experience but rather with the issues of reference and trading on identity (2009). See Brewer (2011) for a more complete (and phenomenologically oriented) account of this ‘third relatum’. Brewer takes the third relatum to be ‘constituted’ by the ‘spatiotemporal point of view’, the ‘particular sense modality’ and ‘certain specific circumstances of perception (such as lighting conditions in the case of vision)’ (2011, p. 96).
See Brewer (2011, pp. 62–64) for some considerations on this issue.
Notice that the argument is not that the mind-independence of an object never shows up in the Phenomenal Character of experience because it sometimes does not show up. The problem here is that the fact that a perceived object is mind-independent is not sufficient to justify the corresponding belief. I contend that Naïve Realism is not better suited to explain what else is needed than some of its rival accounts—for instance, representational accounts of experience.
We can see the role of grounding demonstrative thought as a further cognitive role of perceptual experience. I believe that the claim that there is an irreducible role for phenomenally conscious experience to play here is contentious (Burge, 2010). As I mentioned in Fn. 34, I will focus on this problem in future work.
See Campbell (2011, p. 38).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Sean Crawford and Joel Smith for their constant words of encouragement and for providing valuable feedback on many versions of this paper. Thanks to Bill Brewer for his useful comments and stimulating discussions on this material and to Marta Cabrera for taking the time to read and comment on an even longer draft of this paper. Finally, I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer whose insightful objections helped me to improve the quality of some crucial arguments in the article.
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Raineri, C. Phenomenal character and the epistemic role of perception. Synthese 203, 72 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04479-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04479-7