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Is there introspective evidence for phenomenal intentionality?

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Abstract

The so-called transparency of experience (TE) is the intuition that, in introspecting one’s own experience, one is only aware of certain properties (like colors, shapes, etc.) as features of (apparently) mind-independent objects. TE is quite popular among philosophers of mind and has traditionally been used to motivate Representationalism, i.e., the view that phenomenal character is in some strong way dependent on intentionality. However, more recently, others have appealed to TE to go the opposite way and support the phenomenal intentionality view (PIV), according to which intentionality is in some strong way dependent on phenomenal character. If this line of argument succeeds, then not only TE does not speak in favor of Representationalism, but it actually speaks against it, contrary to the philosophical common-sense of the last two decades. Moreover, the representationalist project of naturalizing phenomenal character turns out to be seriously undermined on the same intuitive grounds that were supposed to make it plausible. In this paper, I reconstruct and discuss the line of argument from TE to PIV and argue that our introspective intuitions (TE) do not push us in the direction of PIV. On the contrary, the line of argument from TE to PIV is (at best) simply too weak to force us to conclude that intentionality depends on phenomenal character in the sense required for PIV to be true.

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Notes

  1. I do not question here whether TE actually is an introspective intuition that we have. Nor do I consider alternate descriptions of what we gather from introspection that challenge or call into question TE. For the purposes of this paper, I just assume that TE is genuinely what we gather from introspection. More details on the assumptions that I will be making about TE and its scope will be offered in Sect. 3.

  2. More complicated stories might be told about the representational content of experience; however, for the purposes of this paper, a characterization in terms of conditions of satisfaction will be enough.

  3. Another dispute is as to whether the best way to capture the content of the experience is in terms of existential content (i.e., content involving an existential quantifier) or singular content (i.e., content involving a singular object). Since this issue is orthogonal to what I am discussing here, I want to stay neutral on this in this paper. However, admittedly, my formulation does suggest an understanding of representational content as existential content: this is mainly because existential content seems to be what the supporters of the views I am discussing here usually have in mind when they talk about representational content. So, my formulation wants to reflect this fact and configures more as a matter of terminology than of substance, in the present context. Those who prefer singular content can operate the relevant terminological substitutions and follow my arguments without any significant loss with regards to the main points I will be making here.

  4. I am borrowing the labels “Separatism” and “Inseparatism” from Horgan and Tienson (2002).

  5. Our terminology needs to be broad enough to cover, and be compatible with, slightly different degrees of strength and interpretations of priority. Indeed, my aim is to offer the simplest taxonomy possible that allows us to group slightly different views (or versions of the same views) that clearly share the same background intuition—namely, that something is more fundamental than something else in the relation between phenomenal character and representational content. To my mind, the notion of priority specified above does this job.

  6. Of course, the upshot is not necessarily that, if PIV is true, phenomenal character cannot be naturalized; the point is rather that it cannot be naturalized “representationalist-style,” so to speak. However, arguably, PIV’s truth seems to make phenomenal character’s way toward naturalization much harder.

  7. Horgan and Tienson (2002: 520) explicitly say that representationalists embrace this claim.

  8. Loar (2002) also extensively defends the compatibility of TE and PIV.

  9. This is another possible way of understanding the debate between Representationalism and PIV, one emphasizing TE’s role.

  10. This might sound a bit weird, since the chronological order in which the arguments have been offered is actually the opposite. However, for dialectical purposes, it will be easier to dismiss the chronological order and start with the Argument from Introspection Alone in order to then present the Argument from Phenomenal Duplicates as a possible way of replying to my criticism.

  11. Siewert extensively discusses these issues in two chapters of his book (see Siewert 1998, Ch. 6–7), but he does not offer an explicit, schematic reconstruction of his line of argument for the priority of phenomenal character. So, this is my own reconstruction of it.

  12. This would be a major difference with respect to Siewert, who does not explicitly mention TE, or introspection in general, and does not seem to justify (P1) introspectively.

  13. The square-bracketed locution, “it is introspectively manifest that,” is not part of (P1). I inserted it only to stress the difference between HTG’s and Siewert’s argument and to stress that, in the former, (P1) is a claim justified by introspection and, in particular, by TE.

  14. (#1) is nothing but a slightly more theoretically sophisticated way to put TE.

  15. Horgan and Tienson (2002) explicitly declare this.

  16. I am indebted to an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies for this formulation.

  17. In a way, we are back to the issue we had with the previous argument. Arguing from TE alone forces us to weaken our notion of phenomenal character into a notion that has to include intentionality in phenomenal character from the very beginning. Once we do that, though, we are no longer in a position to determine whether phenomenal character is intentional qua phenomenal, since we are clearly not dealing with something purely phenomenal.

  18. Not necessarily incompatible though. See Loar (2002).

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Acknowledgments

I am largely indebted to Uriah Kriegel for discussing with me this topic and for his insightful comments on previous drafts. For their valuable suggestions I would like to thank Samuele Iaquinto, Mog Stapleton, Giuliano Torrengo, Daria Vitasovič, Alberto Voltolini and an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies. Ancestor versions of this paper were presented at conferences and workshops in Cagliari, Granada, Macau, Madrid, and Prague: I am grateful to the audiences for their very useful questions and remarks.

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Bordini, D. Is there introspective evidence for phenomenal intentionality?. Philos Stud 174, 1105–1126 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0745-9

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