Continuing through our summer reading, we’ve just looked at Tim Bayne’s “Perception & the Reach of Phenomenal Content”, forthcoming in Phil. Q., where Tim attempts to defend the idea that so-called “higher-level” properties figure in the phenomenal content of perceptual experience. A few remarks/worries about the issue and Tim’s argument.

THE ISSUE: Conservatives think that [...]

THE ISSUE: Conservatives think that perceptual experiences only represent so-called ‘lower-level’ properties such as, in the case of vision, colour, shape, spatial, topological, and mereological properties, orientation, etc., whilst liberals insist that perceptual experiences also represent so-called ‘higher-level’ properties including (still in the case of vision) object types such as being a tomato, being a eucalyptus tree, a kangaroo, a Toyota, etc. Liberals don’t just want perceptual representation tout court: they want perceptual representation of ‘higher-level’ properties with some sort of phenomenal saliency. That’s in line with the sort of ‘contrast’ arguments typically advanced for liberalism, attempting to show that whether or not a ‘higher-level’ property is represented in experience makes a phenomenal difference to it. (As Tim rightly points out, the terminology is unfortunate, since the difference between lower-level and higher-level really corresponds to different levels of processing in the visual system, not to different kinds of properties as such.)

Tim says that the issue is vague, somewhat messy, and may well collapse. In any case, reading through Tim’s paper, it strikes me that, currently at least, the action should pretty clearly take place between the following 2 claims:

Conservatives: whenever two experiences allegedly differ in content in that one represents a ‘higher-level’ property so that they are phenomenally different as a result, what is really the case is that (i) neither represents a higher-level property, but (ii) there is a representational difference in the representation of lower-level properties, which (iii) explains the phenomenal difference.

This embodies the conservatives’ best re-description strategy against the liberals’ contrast arguments: grant the phenomenological difference but explain it away as a difference in the representation of lower-level properties. In contrast,

Liberals: two experiences can differ phenomenally in that one represents a ‘higher-level’ property in a phenomenally salient way, even though there is no difference in the ‘lower-level’ properties represented.

Unless liberals argue for this strong view, their contrast arguments, it seems to me, simply won’t have much bite against the conservatives’ strategy, and we’ll end up in a stalemate. And the weaker liberal position (status-quo liberals), flagged by Tim, according to which the representation of higher-level properties might supervene on the representation of lower-level properties, is of little help in this respect.

PERCEPTION & THOUGHT: Tim doesn’t like the conservatives’ re-description strategy much. He asks why, in all the relevant cases, there should always be ‘low-level’ representational/phenomenal differences. Of course, there doesn’t have to, but insofar as the conservative can propose plausible alternative explanations involving such ‘low-level’ differences, that’s all it takes to block the liberals’ contrast arguments.

Nor does he like another re-description strategy (advanced by Michael Tye and others), according to which perceptual experiences only represent ‘lower-level’ properties, and ‘higher-level’ properties only figure in doxastic states based on experiences: whether a given ‘higher-level’ property figure in such states will depend on whether the subject recognizes the property on the basis of her experience of ‘other lower-level’ properties. Against this, Tim argues that an associative agnosiac (of which more below) could believe that the thing in front of her is a pipe, and still lack the experience of a pipe as of a pipe, which shows, he suggests, that recognition of ‘higher-level’ properties isn’t doxastic (he also mentions the fact that recognition resists cognitive penetration). He further argues that such a belief could even satisfy Tye’s requirement that recognition be based on experience, if the agnosiac’s belief is caused by a neurological condition causing her to believe everything she sees is a pipe. This is meant to show, I take it, that (a) Tye’s account of recognition as doxastic is no good because recognition is perceptual, and hence that (b) ‘higher-level’ properties can be represented in experience.

Regarding (a), I suspect Tim’s response fails to consider Tye’s suggestion seriously enough. To say that perceptual recognition is a doxastic state based on experience isn’t to simply identify perceptual recognition with beliefs, or to take the basing relation as merely causal. Perceptual recognition, rather, is a process by which a certain kind of transition from an experience to a belief takes place, where a belief with a certain content that can represent ‘higher-level’ properties is formed as the output of such a process. As such, there’s no reason to think it should be cognitively penetrable in exactly the same way beliefs can be revised on the basis of other beliefs: one may be able to revise one’s recognitional beliefs on the basis of further information, but not the process by which these beliefs are produced. And though recognition is causal, it isn’t just that For one thing, the basing relation must clearly be sensitive to the content of the experience (obviously not the case in Tim’s example), and, to some extent, reliably so: if all perceptual identifications a subject comes up with are completely inaccurate in relation to the content of her experiences, this suggests the subject isn’t sensitive in the right way to those contents. But that’s also lacking in Tim’s example.

Finally, it doesn’t help liberals to suggest, as Tim seems to, that recognitional beliefs, like thoughts, have phenomenology (‘cognitive phenomenology’). For it provides the conservatives another weapon: they can grant that there are further phenomenological differences when ‘higher-level’ properties are  allegedly represented, but these differences owe simply to the cognitive phenomenology of recognitional beliefs, which accompany a perceptual experience but are distinct from it.

THE ARGUMENT FROM ASSOCIATIVE AGNOSIA: Tim claims that traditional contrast arguments for liberalism haven’t fared all that well and offers a new one, based on the phenomenon of associative agnosia. He relies on the traditional description of associative agnosia, according to which patients with this condition (a) perceive shape perfectly well but (b) are unable to recognize and identify what they perceive: the impairment is one of ‘category perception’, not one of ‘form perception’. The argument goes: (1) associative agnosiacs have experiences phenomenally different from ours, based on the fact that they can’t recognize types of objects, and (2) what is missing from their experiences, and explains the phenomenal difference, is the representation of ‘higher-level’ properties, which suggests that (3) our experiences do represent such properties.

Some worries:

i) I’m not as well versed as Tim in the empirical literature on this topic, but I would have thought that the traditional description of associative agnosia is contentious, at best, given Martha Farah’s rather compelling case for scepticism in the 2^nd edition of her book (2004). One traditional reason for thinking that associative agnosiacs perceive shapes perfectly well is their ability to draw very good copies of what they see. But, Farah points out, one little mentioned fact is that their drawing is very slow and piecemeal. She suggests that, in fact, associative agnosiacs do suffer from a perceptual impairment involving global spatial perception, based on the fact that, typically, (a) they also fail to recognize meaningless shapes , (b) their mistakes usually involves types of objects similar in shape, (c) they cannot discriminate geometrically impossible objects from possible ones, and (d) have difficulties perceiving fragmented shapes. If she’s right, there’s some reason to think that associative agnosia may in fact involve a deficit in the representation of low-level (thought complex) spatial properties.

ii) Even if the traditional description of associative agnosia is correct, it’s far from clear it supports Tim’s case. The evidence primarily suggests that associative agnosiacs can’t recognize what they see. This is entirely consistent with the suggestion that the representational content of their experiences is exactly the same as ours, it’s just that their faculty of recognition is impaired, thus precluding them from forming perceptual beliefs about types of objects.

iii) Tim grants that we can’t really know what the phenomenology of their experiences is like. Yet, oddly, he insists that it is “extremely plausible” that their experiences are phenomenally different from ours. I find this puzzling. I’d like to know what makes this plausible–as opposed to agnosticism. And if standard contrast arguments based on allegedly introspectible phenomenal differences don’t fare all that well, as Tim points out, it’s a bit mysterious to me how this new contrast argument based on some phenomenal difference we have no access to is supposed to fare any better.

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 This week we read Tom Polger and Larry Shapiro’s “Understanding the Dimensions of Realization” (forthcoming in JPhil) which is a critical response to Carl Gillett’s earlier paper on realization.  I will argue that two central issues in this debate are merely terminological.  This teapot is brimming with tempest but sadly lacking in substance.
One central issue [...]

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We recently read an interesting paper by Vul, Harris, Winkielman, and Pashler which effectively accuses many researchers of having used laughably poor statistical methodology in using brain-imaging to establish conclusions about where in the brain the processing occurs for many psychological states including emotion, personality, and social cognition.  If this accusation is correct, it calls into [...]

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In chapter 3 of Consciousness Revisited, Michael Tye argues that
·      There are no special phenomenal concepts of the sort required by the phenomenal concept strategy for defending physicalism
·      Accounts of phenomenal concepts developed by Block, Papineau, Balog, Loar, Perry, and Tye all have serious problems
·      Although there are concepts of consciousness that are not a [...]

In chapter 3 of Consciousness Revisited, Michael Tye argues that

·      There are no special phenomenal concepts of the sort required by the phenomenal concept strategy for defending physicalism

·      Accounts of phenomenal concepts developed by Block, Papineau, Balog, Loar, Perry, and Tye all have serious problems

·      Although there are concepts of consciousness that are not a priori reducible to physical concepts, this is also true of many nonphenomenal concepts, including the concept water—despite claims to the contrary by Frank Jackson, David Chalmers, and other proponents of “the Canberra program”

I will discuss only the first claim, regarding the nonexistence of special phenomenal concepts. Tye does not deny that there could be such concepts. Instead, he argues that our phenomenal concepts—the ones we actually have—do not work in the way that the phenomenal concept strategy requires. He concludes that the strategy is misguided.

I will raise some questions about Tye’s argument. I will not challenge his claims about how Burgean intuitions apply to phenomenal concepts. Nor will I deny that those claims create problems for the phenomenal concept strategy, as it is usually formulated. Instead, I will suggest that there is a viable fallback position available to the phenomenal concept strategist: a revised strategy. The difference is that, while the original strategy emphasizes distinctive conditions for possessing phenomenal concepts, the revised strategy emphasizes distinctive conditions for understanding those concepts—or rather, conditions for understanding them sufficiently well for phenomenal knowledge (knowledge of what it’s like). The Burgean intuitions do not create problems for the revised strategy. But in other respects the two versions are dialectically on a par.

(Let me note three things before beginning. First, Tye’s argument is similar to that of Derek’s Ball’s, “There are no phenomenal concepts,” which has not yet been published, as far as I know. Tye acknowledges Ball’s influence. Second, Daniel Stoljar introduced the term “the phenomenal concept strategy” for a way of defending a posteriori physicalism specifically. Tye uses the term more broadly, for any attempt to defend physicalism by appealing to distinctive features of phenomenal concepts. And his argument applies yet more broadly, to any view (physicalist or not) on which Mary acquires phenomenal color concepts only after leaving the room. Third, I will follow Tye in focusing on the application of the strategy to the knowledge argument, with which I will assume familiarity.)

The phenomenal concept strategy

Tye describes phenomenal concepts as those we deploy in introspecting phenomenal character. They are associated with phenomenal knowledge. Consider the phenomenal knowledge that, according to some, Jackson’s Mary acquires when she leaves the room and sees her first red rose. She learns that seeing red has such-and-such phenomenal quality. Her such-and-such concept is a phenomenal concept.

The phenomenal concepts strategy explains Mary’s epistemic progress (= what her learning what it’s like to see in color consist in) in terms of her acquisition of phenomenal concepts. The explanation runs roughly as follows. Knowing what it’s like to see in color consists at least partly in knowing propositions that contain phenomenal color concepts. Mary does not acquire any such concepts until she leaves the room and sees colors for herself. Before then, she cannot even apprehend the relevant propositions. Seeing colors enables her to possess the requisite concepts and thereby to apprehend those propositions. However, those concepts pick out physical properties, which she already knew about under different concepts.

That is just a rough, schematic description of the strategy. Details vary considerably from version to version, depending partly on how phenomenal concepts are thought to work. But such differences are unimportant for the purposes of Tye’s argument. On any version, the reason Mary learns what it’s like to see in color when she leaves the room is that, upon seeing colors, she acquires phenomenal color concepts—concepts she did not previously possess. Tye rejects that claim. On his view, Burgean intuitions show that phenomenal concepts work much like concepts such as elm and arthritis. And he takes this to imply that Mary possesses phenomenal color concepts before leaving the room.

Consider the idea, emphasized by Putnam and Burge, that one can possess the elm concept without knowing much about elms. Those who possess this concept are typically willing to accept correction from others about its extension. As Tye puts it, the concept is deferential. He claims that the same is true for our phenomenal concepts. Recall Burge’s well-known case of the patient who believes he has developed arthritis in his thigh. When his doctor explains that arthritis, being a disease of the joints, cannot occur in the thigh, the patient will presumably accept that his earlier belief was false. And even before the doctor enlightens the patient about the nature of arthritis, the two can agree that the patient has arthritis in his ankles. As Tye emphasizes, the possibility of such agreement seems to require that they share a single concept.

Tye argues that similar reasoning applies to phenomenal concepts. These concepts are deferential too, on his view. For example, he explains, someone undergoing dental work might at first classify her experience as pain but later accept correction from an expert who says the experience was actually a borderline case of pain and pressure. Further, pre-release Mary might share various beliefs about the phenomenal character of color experiences with colorsighted people outside the room. For example, she might agree that seeing red is phenomenally more similar to seeing black than to hearing a trumpet play middle C. According to Tye, the possibility of such agreement demands that she have the same phenomenal concepts as those outside the room have. He infers that our phenomenal concepts are not experientially perspectival: possessing them does not require undergoing relevant experiences. And he takes that result to undermine the phenomenal concept strategy.

The revised strategy

If Tye’s argument is sound, then the phenomenal concept strategy is mistaken in claiming that Mary acquires phenomenal color concepts only after leaving the room. But how central is that claim to the strategy? Does his argument, if sound, show that the strategy is fundamentally misguided?

Here is a rough description of what I take to be the strategy’s core idea:

When Mary leaves the room and sees in color for the first time, she acquires a new way of thinking about color experiences—a new perspective on them. If physicalism is true, then her new perspective does not correspond to any nonphysical properties, distinct from those she learned about through her science lectures. Even so, her post-release perspective differs substantially from her pre-release perspective. That is why she gains knowledge when she leaves the room.

That core idea is usually explicated partly by describing Mary as acquiring phenomenal color concepts only when she leaves the room. This explication has advantages. In particular, it facilitates attempts to relate the core idea to relevant epistemic issues. But the explication has costs too, and Tye’s argument could be seen as an attempt to demonstrate that the costs are too high.

There is another way to explicate the core idea, which does not seem to run afoul of Burgean intuitions. The explication depends on three general epistemic assumptions, all of which seem plausible to me. First, apprehending a proposition is not an all-or-nothing matter. S can apprehend P well or poorly, to varying degrees. Second, how well one apprehends a proposition depends partly on how well one understands the concepts it contains. It might be that S’s apprehension of P is poor because of her poor understanding of a concept C that P contains. (Her poor apprehension of P might have other sources as well: she might lack C altogether; or she might be unable combine the C appropriately with other relevant concepts.) Third, in some cases, knowledge requires that the relevant proposition be apprehended well. S might not know P because, although she apprehends P, she does not apprehend P sufficiently well.

Given those assumptions, the phenomenal concept strategist could begin to explicate her core idea roughly as follows. Knowing what it’s like to see in color involves apprehending certain propositions relatively well. Those propositions contain phenomenal color concepts. Although Mary has those concepts before leaving the room, her understanding of them is poor. For that reason, she does not apprehend the relevant propositions well enough to know what it’s like to see in color. All this changes when she leaves the room and sees colors. When this happens, her understanding of phenomenal color concepts improves dramatically. That enables her to apprehend the relevant propositions well enough to know what it’s like to see in color. Call this the revised strategy.

The revised strategy appears to be consistent with Tye’s argument. In particular, on the revised strategy, phenomenal concepts are not experientially perspectival, just as he argues. But is the revised strategy really so different from the original version? On the revised strategy, although phenomenal concepts are not experientially perspectival, phenomenal knowledge is (or rather, on the revised strategy phenomenal knowledge cannot be arrived at by a priori reflection on the sort of information conveyed to Mary pre-release). Seeing colors when she leaves the room provides her with a better understanding of concepts she already possesses rather than with new concepts. But this difference seems largely terminological.

To appreciate why, let’s consider how the phenomenal concept strategy is applied. One application concerns a priori physicalism, according to which (roughly put) any phenomenal information there is could in principle be a priori deduced from physical information.  Some a priori physicalists appeal to phenomenal concepts to reconcile their view with the claim that there is information about color experiences that Mary cannot deduce while still in the room. On their view, although the deduction can be done, actually doing it requires possessing phenomenal color concepts—concepts that Mary does not acquire until she leaves the room. If Tye is right, then that last claim is false.

But that problem can be easily fixed, in accordance with the revised strategy. A priori physicalists can still maintain that Mary’s inability to do the deduction fails to show that the deduction cannot be done. They need simply attribute her inability to an inadequate understanding of concepts she possesses, rather than a failure to possess those concepts. This revised defense of a priori physicalism seems dialectically equivalent to the original version. The application of the phenomenal concept strategy to a posteriori physicalism can be modified similarly, mutatis mutandis, also without substantial loss, as far as I can tell.

The revised strategy elaborated

If all of that is right, then Tye’s opponents have a fallback position that is no weaker than the original phenomenal concept strategy. Let me now address two pressing questions about the revised strategy. First, what exactly are the propositions that one must well apprehend in order to know what it’s like to see in color? Second, in what way does Mary’s pre-release apprehension of them fall short?

Regarding the first question, there are various propositions that might figure into knowing what it’s like to see in color, including certain identity claims. Consider what Chalmers calls “the community relational concept, or red_C,” which he glosses as “the phenomenal quality typically caused in normal subjects within my community by paradigmatic red things” (in his paper on the epistemology of phenomenal belief). One of the propositions in question might be the identity claim

(1) red_C = phenomenal redness

This brings us to our second question: in what way does Mary’s pre-release apprehension of  propositions such as (1) fall short? (1) is plainly informative, and there is an important sense in which Mary learns it only after leaving the room. But what is that sense? We cannot explain it by saying that only after leaving does she acquire the phenomenal redness concept, if Tye’s argument is sound. Also, there is arguably another sense in which she knows (1) before leaving the room—at least, she then knows that (1) is true, if not the truth it expresses. So, in what does her pre-release ignorance of (1) consist?

It consists partly in the fact that there are many epistemic possibilities that she cannot eliminate until she leaves the room—possibilities for what phenomenal redness picks out. However, it is not as though she well understands those possibilities and merely lacks sufficient grounds for zeroing in on one of them. She does not well understand the possibilities. And she has no understanding of the phenomenal differences between them. Only when she leaves the room and sees colors does she understand the possibilities well enough to eliminate those that are incorrect. Only then does she apprehend (1) well enough to be properly described as knowing what it’s like to see red.

Here a third question arises. Recall a claim mentioned earlier:

(2) Seeing red is phenomenally more similar to seeing black than to hearing a trumpet play middle C.

Assuming Tye is right, Mary knows (2) before leaving the room. How can this be, if what I said about (1) is correct? (2) contains the phenomenal redness concept no less than (1) does. If her poor understanding of that concept prevents her from knowing (1), why isn’t the same true of (2)?

The answer is that not all knowledge involving phenomenal concepts is equally demanding. Knowing (1) (in the sense relevant to knowing what it’s like to see in color) requires a much better understanding of phenomenal redness than knowing (2) requires. Unlike knowing (1), knowing (2) requires little more than a minimal understanding of the phenomenal concepts it contains.

To see this, consider another thought experiment. Suppose Martians have experiences of types X, Y, and Z that are phenomenally alien to us. A Martian you know to be entirely trustworthy assures you that

(3) X is phenomenally more similar to Y than to Z.

Do you know (3)? Your understanding of the phenomenal concepts (3) contains is almost nonexistent. For you, there are countless open epistemic possibilities for the phenomenal qualities expressed by X, Y, and Z.  However, (3) concerns only phenomenal similarity relations among X, Y, and Z. Knowing that those relations obtain does not seem to require understanding or narrowing down the countless relevant open possibilities—at least not in the way that typical Martians would be able to. So, arguably, you do know (3) despite your impoverished understanding of the relevant phenomenal concepts.

If that is right, then it is no mystery why pre-release Mary can know (2) despite her tenuous grip on one of the phenomenal concepts (2) contains. To know (2) requires only that one know that the relevant phenomenal similarity relations obtain, and pre-release Mary satisfies that condition. Her room lacks colors but not sounds. It might as well contain a recording of a trumpet playing scales. She has had more than enough visual and auditory experiences to appreciate the great phenomenological difference between the two, and thus to infer (2) with justified confidence. Thus, knowing (2) does not require understanding phenomenal redness in the way that knowing (1) does—or rather, in the way Mary knows (1) only after leaving the room (I will explain the need for this qualification below).

Similar considerations apply to other arguments Tye adduces against the phenomenal concept strategy. For example, on one response he considers to his shared-belief argument, pre-release Mary has a nonphenomenal concept of experiencing red, which explains how she can share beliefs about that experience with her interlocutors, and post-release Mary has an additional phenomenal concept, which explains her epistemic growth upon leaving the room. Tye argues that this double-concept line cannot account for cases such as the following. Mary is in a pessimistic mood and thinks to herself while in the room,

(4) I will never know what it’s like to experience red.

After leaving the room, while staring at a ripe tomato, she thinks to herself

(5) I now know what it’s like to experience red.

Tye writes (on page 67),

Prima facie, these thoughts have contradictory contents. But if the latter exercises a phenomenal concept for what it is like to experience red and the former exercises a non-phenomenal concept for the same, then they are not contradictory, any more than are thoughts with the following contents: I know that Cicero was and orator; I do not know that Tully was an orator.

This case presents no problem for the revised strategy. On the revised strategy, Mary exercises one and the same phenomenal concept in thinking (4) and (5), and so their contents are contradictory.

However, the case does illustrate how second-order knowledge can vary in its demands regarding how well one must understand the relevant concepts, just as first-order knowledge can. Knowing (5) requires a richer understanding of the phenomenal redness concept than knowing (4) requires.

Mary, Blind Mary, and Zombie Mary

I have several times qualified phenomenal knowledge attributions with qualifications such as “in the way post-release Mary does.” The reason this is necessary is connected to a point not much noted in discussions of the Mary case: even before leaving the room, she knows what it’s like to see in color to some extent, simply because she knows what it’s like to see (more precisely, she knows what it’s like to have visual experiences). To appreciate this, compare her pre-release phenomenal knowledge to that of Blind Mary, who learns the complete physical truth from audio lectures and books written in Braille. Indeed, even Blind Mary is not, so to speak, completely in the dark on the matter of what seeing colors is like: she knows what it’s like to have conscious experiences. That is more phenomenal knowledge than Zombie Mary ever has, even after Zombie Mary leaves the room. As compared to that of Blind Mary or Zombie Mary, Mary’s pre-release knowledge of what it’s like to see in color is substantial. But as compared to that of her colorsighted interlocutors outside the room, her phenomenal knowledge is impoverished, as the dramatic epistemic progress she makes when she leaves indicates. Something along these lines is all that could reasonably be meant by saying that, before leaving the room, she does not know what it’s like to see in color.

In any event, if what I have argued is correct, then the implications of Tye’s argument for the phenomenal concept strategy are less dire than one might have thought.

 

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“Consciousness Online” is a web-based philosophy conference organized by Richard Brown from LaGuardia College, CUNY.  Richard has done a great job bringing together some great papers presented by excellent philosophers around the globe. Papers are presented by video and by narrated powerpoint, and comments and discussion will also be handled online.  It’s an interesting format, [...]

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Clayton Littlejohn has accepted a tenure track position at U. Texas San Antonio!  It’s an excellent job and well deserved–in my opinion Clayton is a top notch philosopher who has already made excellent contributions to the field and is one of the best teachers we’ve had at SMU.  We’ll be terribly sorry to see him [...]

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A bit of product placement on Brainpains: our colleague Robert just got a book out with OUP, co-authored with Torin Alter. (open the post to see the beautiful cover!)

I haven’t quite finished reading it, but it’s a very good intro to the mind-body problem– clear, clever, entertaining, and a  good survey of recent debates about [...]

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Shaun Nichols asked that I post the following information about the the NEH summer institute he’s helping to organize.  It looks like a good opportunity for people interested in experimental philosophy.

Experimental Philosophy is a new movement that uses experiments to address traditional philosophical questions.  Although the movement is only a few years old, it has [...]

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The other week, we read an interesting and intriguing paper by Joe Levine and Kelly Trogdon on “The Modal Status of Materialism” (Phil.Studies), arguing that the contingency of physicalism clashes with the necessity of realization and physicalist supervenience. The upshot isn’t that such a clash can be avoided, but that we shouldn’t think of physicalism [...]

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We recently read Derek Brown’s “Indirect perceptual realism and demonstratives” (Philosophical Studies, forthcoming [click on post title for link]). I’m currently writing up a paper on perceptual demonstratives, and have some sympathies to views in the ballpark of Indirect Realism, so I was especially interested in Brown’s paper. Brown’s task in the paper is to defend Indirect Realism from two related arguments he finds in Snowdon (1992, Crane volume) and A.D. Smith (2002, The Problem of Perception). Smith argues that Indirect Realism is incoherent (there is no genuinely Realist view once we abandon the idea that we directly perceive the external world), and Snowdon argues that perceptual demonstrative judgments are fundamental to our belief-acquisition and knowledge of the external world but that Indirect Realism fails to render those judgments true, and thus undermines our knowledge of the external world. Both arguments rely on some claims about the status of demonstrative judgments about external objects on the Indirect Realist view. Brown defends Indirect Realism by arguing that there is nothing problematic about those judgments according to Indirect Realism.

Without going into too much detail on the particulars of Snowdon or Smith (although I will reconstruct Smith’s argument or something like it, below), I might simply note that Brown finds both arguments to rely on an ungrounded assumption that demonstrative judgments such as “That is a violin” would be false under Indirect Realism. Brown thinks that both authors might be confusing the epistemic dependence of such judgments (on the ability to perceive a perceptual intermediary) with a kind of semantic dependence. Brown’s notion of semantic dependence is that such judgments, in the case of indirect perception, are about propositions that include the dependence relation as a constituent. He suggests that both Smith and Snowdon might mistakenly be assuming that perceptual demonstrative judgments include the fact that we are non-dependently perceiving as part of their content. If they did, then such judgments would come out as false on the Indirect Realist view.

Now I certainly agree with Brown that it is implausible to suppose that perceptual dependence has a semantic status in his sense. But I also think it is unlikely that either Snowdon or Smith had such a view in mind. Perhaps Smith comes closest to such a view, since he puts weight on the claim that we take ourselves to be referring with a demonstrative to an item that is directly perceived (p. 16). But perhaps these claims are meant to motivate something like my premise 1 below, rather than a claim about the content of demonstrative judgments.

I find two problems with Brown’s response to these arguments. First, his positive support for the claim that a demonstrative can refer to an item that is only indirectly perceived is based on the use of demonstratives in a public language. His primary example is of a person viewing a violin on television and saying “That is a violin”. I share the intuition that this sentence can be true, and that the demonstrative here plausibly refers to a violin and not to something more directly perceived (such as a region of the television screen). But the opponent of Indirect Realism might concede that the use of demonstratives in a public language have this feature while denying that a certain sort of demonstrative thought is possible toward items that are only indirectly perceived.

This leads to my second worry. I think a more plausible version of the “semantic dependence” view would be precisely one that insists that items that are indirectly perceived can only be referred to in thought descriptively, whereas items that are directly perceived have a special status as items toward which we can directly refer via a demonstrative. Direct perception puts us into cognitive contact with externalia in a way that is not possible otherwise. This strikes me as a view that many Direct Realists appear to hold, and as part of the explanation for why they think defending Direct Realism is so important.

Right or wrong, the above suggestion allows for us to make sense of Smith’s argument in a way that makes it more plausible. Smith appears to argue as follows:

1. To be a Realist about the external world, one must hold that the items we can perceive and thereby demonstratively refer to in thought are “public objects of common reference”. The subject matter for which the question of Realism arises is precisely that which we demonstratively refer to in this way.

2. We can only demonstratively refer in thought to items that are directly perceived.

3. According to Indirect Realism, that which we directly perceive is never a “public object of common reference”.

4. If Indirect Realism is true, then we cannot demonstratively refer in thought to “public objects of common reference”.

5. Therefore, “Indirect Realism” is not a genuine form of Realism.

Obviously premises 1 and 2 deserve scrutiny. But they each have some plausibility. In defense of 2, it does seem that for items that we only perceive indirectly, they are in some sense thought about or known only via a description. They are in a sense theoretical entities, items posited on the basis of what we perceive directly. Smith’s defense of something like premise 1 is that the world for which the question of Realism arises is the world we take ourselves to directly perceive. We ask ourselves, “Is this book a public object?” But if on the Indirect Realist view genuine demonstrative reference (in thought) can only be toward sensory intermediaries, then the answer to such questions must always be “no”.

I find this point about the subject matter of Realism somewhat compelling. On the other hand, it is worth noting that this argument does not show that Indirect Realism is incompatible with the claim that there exists a mind-independent external world of “ordinary objects”. I think many would find that Smith’s notion of Realism is overly restrictive, and that the existence of a mind-independent external world that each of us inhabits and causally interacts with is sufficient for Realism.

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