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Colour hallucination: In defence of externalist representationalism

Colour hallucination: In defence of externalist representationalism Abstract In a recent paper, Gow (2017) raised a new and interesting problem for externalist representationalism, the conclusion of which is that its proponents are unable to provide an acceptable account of the phenomenal character of colour hallucination. In contrast to Gow, we do not believe that the problem is particularly severe – indeed, that there is any problem at all. Thus our aim is to defend externalist representationalism against the problem raised by Gow. To this end, we will first reconstruct her reasoning, and then show that it poses no real challenge to externalist representationalism. To set the stage for Gow’s problem, we will start by briefly listing some assumptions on which there is no disagreement. Representationalism is the claim that the phenomenal character of a perceptual experience e is determined by (or even identical to) the property that is represented by e. Externalist representationalists further claim that the property represented by e is an external property, that is, a property that, if instantiated at all, is instantiated by objects in the external world. Applied to colour experiences, this means that the alleged yellow-quale that qualia friends believe they are ‘sensing’ while having an experience of a yellow object is identical to the external property whose instantiation their experience represents. And what is this property? Of course, the property of being yellow, as it is typically instantiated by material objects in the external world such as sunflowers, cheese and lemons – ‘external’ yellowness, so to speak. The philosophically interesting point then is that externalist representationalists identify the alleged properties of our experiences with the quite ordinary properties of material objects in the external world. At this point, however, the externalist representationalist has to face the question of what external yellowness, say, actually is. One widespread view is that colours are so-called response-dependent properties. That is, the property of being yellow is nothing more than the property of having the disposition to evoke an experience that instantiates phenomenal yellowness in normal observers under normal conditions. Externalist representationalists cannot accept this view, however, as it would force them into a vicious circle. At least, it would be explanatorily questionable to claim on the one hand that phenomenal yellowness is identical to external yellowness while also claiming that external yellowness is the disposition to evoke experiences that instantiate phenomenal yellowness. Thus externalist representationalists are well advised not to consider colours as response-dependent, but to embrace colour physicalism, according to which colours are identical to surface spectral reflectance profiles. However, as Gow notes, ‘the colours we experience do not map one-to-one onto particular surface reflectance profiles’ (2017: 695); instead we often experience two or even more different surface reflectance profiles as being exactly the same colour. Thus colour physicalists do not identify colours simply with surface reflectance profiles, but rather with disjunctions of surface reflectance profiles. The property of being yellow then is identified with, say, the disjunctive property of having surface reflectance profile A or surface reflectance profile B or surface reflectance profile C. As previously stated, none of these assumptions is controversial between Gow and us. Thus, for the sake of argument, let us agree with Gow that externalist representationalists are committed to the view that phenomenal yellowness is identical to the disjunctive property of having surface reflectance profile A, B or C. We will now turn to the issues that are controversial between Gow and us. To introduce the problem, Gow compares two situations: a normally caused veridical experience of a yellow plastic duck and a hallucination of a yellow plastic duck. In both the veridical and the hallucinatory case, the experience in question represents that the property of being yellow is instantiated. Thus in both cases the property of being yellow ‘makes it into the content’ of the subject’s experience (Gow 2017: 699). But how, Gow asks, does the property of being yellow make it into the content of the experience? After all, the property of being yellow is a disjunctive property! So the externalist representationalist owes us an explanation. In the normally caused veridical case, says Gow, the explanation is straightforward. The duck seen by the subject has the property of being yellow in virtue of having one of the surface reflectance profiles listed in the disjunction; let us say it has surface reflectance profile B. Since the subject sees the duck, her experience is caused by the duck’s surface reflectance profile B. Hence the subject is ‘relevantly related’ (Gow 2017: 699) to one of the disjuncts belonging to the property of being yellow.1 Consequently, says Gow, the subject ‘is aware of the disjunctive property “yellow” by being aware of the particular surface spectral reflectance property which is instantiated in her environment’ (2017: 699–700). According to Gow, this explains how the property of being yellow makes it into the content: ‘it piggy-backs on one of the disjuncts’ (2017: 699). This kind of explanation, however, is not available in the case of hallucination – for, in this case, none of the relevant surface spectral reflectance properties A, B or C is instantiated in the subject’s environment. Consequently, the hallucinating subject is not relevantly related to any of the disjuncts belonging to the property of being yellow, so there is nothing on which the property of being yellow could piggy-back. This would seem to present a problem for externalist representationalists. It should be noted, however, that this problem is based on the particular reading that Gow gives to externalist representationalism. Gow is not explicit about it, but given what she says in her paper, it looks as if she understands it to mean that the representational content of any token experience is determined by the external property by which the token in question is actually caused. In short, Gow seems to understand externalist representationalism as follows: (Gow’s Thesis) The property represented by an experience token is determined by the external property by which the token in question is actually caused. Now, in our view, the problem for Gow is that Gow’s Thesis does not adequately reflect externalist representationalism. Neither Dretske (1995), Lycan (1996), Tye (1995, 2000) nor any other externalist representationalist that we know of claims that the representational content of a token experience is determined by the external property by which the token in question is caused.2 Thus Gow’s problem is based on a philosophical position that externalist representationalists do not hold. Even worse for Gow, if we instead take as a basis what externalist representationalists actually say about how experiences acquire their representational content, then the problem entirely evaporates. Externalist representationalism is a claim about types of experience, not tokens. A token experience, as externalist representationalism might be paraphrased, ‘inherits’ its content from the type to which it belongs. Abstracting from all the differences that may exist among the various authors, one might say that, according to externalist representationalism, the content of a given experience token of a certain type is determined not by its actual cause, but by the property that would have caused tokens of that type under certain conditions. Lycan’s ‘psychosemantic schema’ is a good starting point to make this clear: a sensation ‘represents greenness’, says Lycan, ‘iff this sort of sensation is “normally caused by” green physical objects’ (Lycan 1996: 74, our emphasis). Of course, this is not an elaborated theory of representation, and Lycan does not want it to be understood that way. It is merely a general schema that awaits a more precise specification. For example, Tye’s view could be rendered as replacing the schematic normality clause with a clause to the effect that the sort of sensation in question is caused by green physical objects under optimal conditions (Tye 1995: 101), whereas Dretske’s view could be rendered as replacing the schematic normality clause with a clause to the effect that the sort of sensation in question is caused by green physical objects under conditions for which the visual system was designed and in which it performs its biological function (Dretske 1995: 2–6). However one specifies Lycan’s scheme though, it should be clear that what determines content according to externalist representationalists is not the actual causal relations that exist between an experience token and the currently instantiated properties in the subject’s actual surroundings, but the truth of certain counterfactuals regarding experience types and properties, of which the latter do not need to be currently instantiated in the subject’s actual surroundings. If the foregoing is correct, Gow’s analysis of the normally caused veridical experience of a yellow plastic duck is already flawed from the outset. Recall that Gow claims that the property of being yellow makes it into the content of the normally caused veridical experience by virtue of the fact that the subject is relevantly related to the particular surface spectral reflectance property instantiated by the plastic duck. Thus Gow suggests that the content of the normally caused veridical experience is determined by the particular surface spectral reflectance property whose instantiation actually causes the experience token. But, in light of what has been said above, this is simply incorrect. According to externalist representationalism, the content of a normally caused veridical experience token is determined by the property that would have caused tokens of the relevant type under such-and-such conditions. Certainly, in the case of a normally caused experience, the property that actually causes the experience coincides with the property that would have caused experiences of the same type under the relevant conditions. But one should not conclude from this that, in general, the content of any experience token is determined by the property that actually causes it. The property that enters into the content of a given experience token cannot be identified just by looking at the property by whose instantiation the experience token in question is actually caused. That is simply the wrong place to look. Rather, one must look at the property that is such that it would have caused tokens of the relevant type under favourable conditions – be they described as normal (Lycan), optimal (Tye) or such that the sensory system can successfully perform its biological function (Dretske). Thus our deeper diagnosis is that Gow confuses the properties that actually cause an experience token with the properties that enter into its content. Gow seems to think that externalist representationalists are committed to the view that the properties that enter into the content of an experience token are determined by the properties by whose instantiation the token in question is actually caused. But this does not adequately reflect the position of externalist representationalists. They do not claim that one’s current experience token has the property of being yellow in its content because it is actually caused by something yellow. Rather, they claim that one’s current experience token has the property of being yellow in its content because it belongs to an experience type whose tokens would have been caused by something yellow if conditions had been favourable. Thus the answer to Gow’s question ‘How does the property of being yellow make it into the content of a hallucination of a yellow plastic duck?’ is quite simple: it makes its way into the content by virtue of the fact that the experience token in question belongs to a type whose tokens, given favourable conditions, are caused by yellow physical objects. No piggy-backing required. Problem solved.3 Footnotes 1 It is not entirely clear to us what ‘being relevantly related to’ means. However, as will become clear in a moment, Gow suggests that said relation is present in cases of veridical perception at least. For example, when I see something yellow, then I am relevantly related to one of the disjuncts of yellowness. In contrast, when I hallucinate something yellow, then I am not relevantly related to one of the disjuncts of yellowness. Thus it seems that the relation of being relevantly related to requires a causal link between the relata. 2 One might also think here of authors commonly classified as externalist representationalists such as Millikan (1984), Fodor (1990), Neander (2017) and Shea (2018), who all endorse a theory of mental content according to which representation is a matter of detecting, carrying information about, or otherwise corresponding with external properties. However, it is doubtful whether these authors count as externalist representationalists according to Gow’s taxonomy. The reason is that (as far as we can see) these authors do not commit themselves to the view – characteristic of Dretske, Lycan and Tye – that the phenomenal character of a perceptual experience e is determined by (or even identical to) the external property represented by e. Consequently these authors are not targeted by Gow’s problem in the first place. 3 Thanks to an anonymous referee for Analysis for helpful comments on a previous draft. References Dretske F. 1995 . Naturalizing the Mind . Cambridge, MA : MIT Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Fodor J. 1990 . A Theory of Content and Other Essays . Cambridge, MA : MIT Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Gow L. 2017 . Colour hallucination: a new problem for externalist representationalism . Analysis 77 : 695 – 704 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Lycan W. 1996 . Consciousness and Experience . Cambridge, MA : MIT Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Millikan R. 1984 . Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories . Cambridge, MA : MIT Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Neander K. 2017 . A Mark of the Mental: In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics . Cambridge, MA : MIT Press . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Shea N. 2018 . Representation in Cognitive Science . Oxford : Oxford University Press . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Tye M. 1995 . Ten Problems of Consciousness . Cambridge, MA : MIT Press . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Tye M. 2000 . Consciousness, Color, and Content . Cambridge, MA : MIT Press . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Analysis Oxford University Press

Colour hallucination: In defence of externalist representationalism

Analysis , Volume 82 (1): 5 – May 14, 2022

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0003-2638
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Abstract

Abstract In a recent paper, Gow (2017) raised a new and interesting problem for externalist representationalism, the conclusion of which is that its proponents are unable to provide an acceptable account of the phenomenal character of colour hallucination. In contrast to Gow, we do not believe that the problem is particularly severe – indeed, that there is any problem at all. Thus our aim is to defend externalist representationalism against the problem raised by Gow. To this end, we will first reconstruct her reasoning, and then show that it poses no real challenge to externalist representationalism. To set the stage for Gow’s problem, we will start by briefly listing some assumptions on which there is no disagreement. Representationalism is the claim that the phenomenal character of a perceptual experience e is determined by (or even identical to) the property that is represented by e. Externalist representationalists further claim that the property represented by e is an external property, that is, a property that, if instantiated at all, is instantiated by objects in the external world. Applied to colour experiences, this means that the alleged yellow-quale that qualia friends believe they are ‘sensing’ while having an experience of a yellow object is identical to the external property whose instantiation their experience represents. And what is this property? Of course, the property of being yellow, as it is typically instantiated by material objects in the external world such as sunflowers, cheese and lemons – ‘external’ yellowness, so to speak. The philosophically interesting point then is that externalist representationalists identify the alleged properties of our experiences with the quite ordinary properties of material objects in the external world. At this point, however, the externalist representationalist has to face the question of what external yellowness, say, actually is. One widespread view is that colours are so-called response-dependent properties. That is, the property of being yellow is nothing more than the property of having the disposition to evoke an experience that instantiates phenomenal yellowness in normal observers under normal conditions. Externalist representationalists cannot accept this view, however, as it would force them into a vicious circle. At least, it would be explanatorily questionable to claim on the one hand that phenomenal yellowness is identical to external yellowness while also claiming that external yellowness is the disposition to evoke experiences that instantiate phenomenal yellowness. Thus externalist representationalists are well advised not to consider colours as response-dependent, but to embrace colour physicalism, according to which colours are identical to surface spectral reflectance profiles. However, as Gow notes, ‘the colours we experience do not map one-to-one onto particular surface reflectance profiles’ (2017: 695); instead we often experience two or even more different surface reflectance profiles as being exactly the same colour. Thus colour physicalists do not identify colours simply with surface reflectance profiles, but rather with disjunctions of surface reflectance profiles. The property of being yellow then is identified with, say, the disjunctive property of having surface reflectance profile A or surface reflectance profile B or surface reflectance profile C. As previously stated, none of these assumptions is controversial between Gow and us. Thus, for the sake of argument, let us agree with Gow that externalist representationalists are committed to the view that phenomenal yellowness is identical to the disjunctive property of having surface reflectance profile A, B or C. We will now turn to the issues that are controversial between Gow and us. To introduce the problem, Gow compares two situations: a normally caused veridical experience of a yellow plastic duck and a hallucination of a yellow plastic duck. In both the veridical and the hallucinatory case, the experience in question represents that the property of being yellow is instantiated. Thus in both cases the property of being yellow ‘makes it into the content’ of the subject’s experience (Gow 2017: 699). But how, Gow asks, does the property of being yellow make it into the content of the experience? After all, the property of being yellow is a disjunctive property! So the externalist representationalist owes us an explanation. In the normally caused veridical case, says Gow, the explanation is straightforward. The duck seen by the subject has the property of being yellow in virtue of having one of the surface reflectance profiles listed in the disjunction; let us say it has surface reflectance profile B. Since the subject sees the duck, her experience is caused by the duck’s surface reflectance profile B. Hence the subject is ‘relevantly related’ (Gow 2017: 699) to one of the disjuncts belonging to the property of being yellow.1 Consequently, says Gow, the subject ‘is aware of the disjunctive property “yellow” by being aware of the particular surface spectral reflectance property which is instantiated in her environment’ (2017: 699–700). According to Gow, this explains how the property of being yellow makes it into the content: ‘it piggy-backs on one of the disjuncts’ (2017: 699). This kind of explanation, however, is not available in the case of hallucination – for, in this case, none of the relevant surface spectral reflectance properties A, B or C is instantiated in the subject’s environment. Consequently, the hallucinating subject is not relevantly related to any of the disjuncts belonging to the property of being yellow, so there is nothing on which the property of being yellow could piggy-back. This would seem to present a problem for externalist representationalists. It should be noted, however, that this problem is based on the particular reading that Gow gives to externalist representationalism. Gow is not explicit about it, but given what she says in her paper, it looks as if she understands it to mean that the representational content of any token experience is determined by the external property by which the token in question is actually caused. In short, Gow seems to understand externalist representationalism as follows: (Gow’s Thesis) The property represented by an experience token is determined by the external property by which the token in question is actually caused. Now, in our view, the problem for Gow is that Gow’s Thesis does not adequately reflect externalist representationalism. Neither Dretske (1995), Lycan (1996), Tye (1995, 2000) nor any other externalist representationalist that we know of claims that the representational content of a token experience is determined by the external property by which the token in question is caused.2 Thus Gow’s problem is based on a philosophical position that externalist representationalists do not hold. Even worse for Gow, if we instead take as a basis what externalist representationalists actually say about how experiences acquire their representational content, then the problem entirely evaporates. Externalist representationalism is a claim about types of experience, not tokens. A token experience, as externalist representationalism might be paraphrased, ‘inherits’ its content from the type to which it belongs. Abstracting from all the differences that may exist among the various authors, one might say that, according to externalist representationalism, the content of a given experience token of a certain type is determined not by its actual cause, but by the property that would have caused tokens of that type under certain conditions. Lycan’s ‘psychosemantic schema’ is a good starting point to make this clear: a sensation ‘represents greenness’, says Lycan, ‘iff this sort of sensation is “normally caused by” green physical objects’ (Lycan 1996: 74, our emphasis). Of course, this is not an elaborated theory of representation, and Lycan does not want it to be understood that way. It is merely a general schema that awaits a more precise specification. For example, Tye’s view could be rendered as replacing the schematic normality clause with a clause to the effect that the sort of sensation in question is caused by green physical objects under optimal conditions (Tye 1995: 101), whereas Dretske’s view could be rendered as replacing the schematic normality clause with a clause to the effect that the sort of sensation in question is caused by green physical objects under conditions for which the visual system was designed and in which it performs its biological function (Dretske 1995: 2–6). However one specifies Lycan’s scheme though, it should be clear that what determines content according to externalist representationalists is not the actual causal relations that exist between an experience token and the currently instantiated properties in the subject’s actual surroundings, but the truth of certain counterfactuals regarding experience types and properties, of which the latter do not need to be currently instantiated in the subject’s actual surroundings. If the foregoing is correct, Gow’s analysis of the normally caused veridical experience of a yellow plastic duck is already flawed from the outset. Recall that Gow claims that the property of being yellow makes it into the content of the normally caused veridical experience by virtue of the fact that the subject is relevantly related to the particular surface spectral reflectance property instantiated by the plastic duck. Thus Gow suggests that the content of the normally caused veridical experience is determined by the particular surface spectral reflectance property whose instantiation actually causes the experience token. But, in light of what has been said above, this is simply incorrect. According to externalist representationalism, the content of a normally caused veridical experience token is determined by the property that would have caused tokens of the relevant type under such-and-such conditions. Certainly, in the case of a normally caused experience, the property that actually causes the experience coincides with the property that would have caused experiences of the same type under the relevant conditions. But one should not conclude from this that, in general, the content of any experience token is determined by the property that actually causes it. The property that enters into the content of a given experience token cannot be identified just by looking at the property by whose instantiation the experience token in question is actually caused. That is simply the wrong place to look. Rather, one must look at the property that is such that it would have caused tokens of the relevant type under favourable conditions – be they described as normal (Lycan), optimal (Tye) or such that the sensory system can successfully perform its biological function (Dretske). Thus our deeper diagnosis is that Gow confuses the properties that actually cause an experience token with the properties that enter into its content. Gow seems to think that externalist representationalists are committed to the view that the properties that enter into the content of an experience token are determined by the properties by whose instantiation the token in question is actually caused. But this does not adequately reflect the position of externalist representationalists. They do not claim that one’s current experience token has the property of being yellow in its content because it is actually caused by something yellow. Rather, they claim that one’s current experience token has the property of being yellow in its content because it belongs to an experience type whose tokens would have been caused by something yellow if conditions had been favourable. Thus the answer to Gow’s question ‘How does the property of being yellow make it into the content of a hallucination of a yellow plastic duck?’ is quite simple: it makes its way into the content by virtue of the fact that the experience token in question belongs to a type whose tokens, given favourable conditions, are caused by yellow physical objects. No piggy-backing required. Problem solved.3 Footnotes 1 It is not entirely clear to us what ‘being relevantly related to’ means. However, as will become clear in a moment, Gow suggests that said relation is present in cases of veridical perception at least. For example, when I see something yellow, then I am relevantly related to one of the disjuncts of yellowness. In contrast, when I hallucinate something yellow, then I am not relevantly related to one of the disjuncts of yellowness. Thus it seems that the relation of being relevantly related to requires a causal link between the relata. 2 One might also think here of authors commonly classified as externalist representationalists such as Millikan (1984), Fodor (1990), Neander (2017) and Shea (2018), who all endorse a theory of mental content according to which representation is a matter of detecting, carrying information about, or otherwise corresponding with external properties. However, it is doubtful whether these authors count as externalist representationalists according to Gow’s taxonomy. The reason is that (as far as we can see) these authors do not commit themselves to the view – characteristic of Dretske, Lycan and Tye – that the phenomenal character of a perceptual experience e is determined by (or even identical to) the external property represented by e. Consequently these authors are not targeted by Gow’s problem in the first place. 3 Thanks to an anonymous referee for Analysis for helpful comments on a previous draft. References Dretske F. 1995 . Naturalizing the Mind . Cambridge, MA : MIT Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Fodor J. 1990 . A Theory of Content and Other Essays . Cambridge, MA : MIT Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Gow L. 2017 . Colour hallucination: a new problem for externalist representationalism . Analysis 77 : 695 – 704 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Lycan W. 1996 . Consciousness and Experience . Cambridge, MA : MIT Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Millikan R. 1984 . Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories . Cambridge, MA : MIT Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Neander K. 2017 . A Mark of the Mental: In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics . Cambridge, MA : MIT Press . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Shea N. 2018 . Representation in Cognitive Science . Oxford : Oxford University Press . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Tye M. 1995 . Ten Problems of Consciousness . Cambridge, MA : MIT Press . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Tye M. 2000 . Consciousness, Color, and Content . Cambridge, MA : MIT Press . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust.

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AnalysisOxford University Press

Published: May 14, 2022

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