Abstract
Humans sense things and do things. This, we will see, is reflected in the form of our experience, and in the two sorts of elements found in basic contents, phenomenal and causal microevents. We have phenomenal experience in particular because we sense things. This chapter concerns phenomenal microevents, which capture that experience.
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Notes
Galileo, “Excerpts from The Assayer”.
This wouldn’t necessarily require that the other microevents in the content be different.
It may be that the hereness of centered contents which are not seed contents is introduced in much the indirect manner that nowness is introduced, so that we really need another hereness predicate also. But I will ignore this complication.
This in fact was already suggested by Chapter Three.
C.L. Hardin, Color for Philosophers.
Such a space would have unoccupied points.
Given some arbitrary cartesian coordinatization of that space.
If we wanted the stories of the language C to show, in the wittgensteinian sense, more color structure, we’d need to deploy a coordinatization which gave, for instance, the unique hues some revealing characterization, and also which captured the proper metric of similarity between colors. But I will ignore these complexities.
Reinier Plomp, Aspects of Tone Sensation (London: Academic Press, 1976), ch. 6.
If we want the language C to showmore of the structure of phenomenal sound, for instance metrics of similarity, a particular sort of coordinatization or even a different space would be required. A spiral may capture some octave structure that a line for rising pitch cannot.
I should admit that perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is arbitrary whether, on the one hand, C attributes more than one sound to a location or, on the other, admits more complexity of structure into the characteristic sound properties, but the strategy I deploy here seems the most economical way to deal with these matters.
In analogy with color, we might expect the speaker itself to have a null or perhaps translucent sound, and the sound to be projected back to its source. Though, on the other hand, we recognize the surface of a TV screen to have the color of what it represents.
See Linda Bartoshuk, “History of Taste Research”, in E. Carterette and M. Friedman (editors), Handbook of Perception, VIa (New York: Academic Press, 1978), 3–18, and the references cited there.
As always, I will ignore complexities introduced by similarity metrics and attempts to show more structure.
See William S. Cain, “History of Research on Smell”, in Carterette and Friedman, 197–229, and the references cited there. See also R.J. Christman, Sensory Experience(Scranton, PA: International Textbook Company, 1971).
As always, I’ll ignore metrics.
See Joseph Stevens and Barry Green, “History of Research on Feeling”, in E. Carterette and M. Friedman (editors), Handbook of Perception, VIb (New York: Academic Press, 1978), 3–23, and other readings in that volume, especially Dan Kenshalo, “Biophysics and Psychophysics of Feeling”, 29-63.
Note that pleasure is not usually considered a skin sense. This doesn’t seem that plausible to me, but let me ignore that complication.
Do people naively consider pain on the inside of someone else’s body to be something they’d feel as pain if they reached inside the other person?
I am assuming that there is a phenomenalfeeling here, only contingently connected with traditional causal associations like down-pulling gravity.
Scientific American 273:7, July 1995, 22–23.
If we admit contents looping in time, which I think would be a mistake, then we should separately specify which are before and which are simultaneous with which. If we can ignore such cases, then if two events are before or simultaneous with each other, they are simultaneous.
There are more economical ways to express all the spatio-temporal structure than this, since for instance the structure in one field may duplicate that in another with which its elements are fused, so this is a minor extravagance.
And certain angles are greater than certain others.
Some may worry that this excludes some obvious truths which twentieth century physics has uncovered. But we are now only discussing certain model basic contents consisting of phenomenal microevents. There are also merely causal basic contents, which exclude phenomenal microevents but include causal microevents of the sort we will discuss in the next chapter, and some of these fit with at least a lot of twentieth century physics. Causal basic contents can lack the familiar sort of “phenomenal” spatio-temporal structure. We will return to these issues at length in Part Three.
This is admittedly a controversial claim.
See Joseph Mendola, “Objective Value and Subjective States”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research L, 1990, 695–713, and C.I. Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation(La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1971), 397-431.
And pleasure too, if that’s a sensation.
It may also suggest that the smiley may also be an irreducible and not abstracted feature of experience.
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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Mendola, J. (1997). Phenomenal Elements. In: Human Thought. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 70. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5660-8_6
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