PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

Transparency and Representationalist Theories of Consciousness

Amy Kind* Claremont McKenna College

Abstract

Over the past few decades, as philosophers of mind have begun to rethink the sharp divide that was traditionally drawn between the phenomenal character of an experience (what it’s like to have that experience) and its intentional content (what it represents), representationalist theories of con- sciousness have become increasingly popular. On this view, phenomenal character is reduced to intentional content. This article explores a key motivation for this theory, namely, considerations of experiential transparency. Experience is said to be transparent in that we ‘look right through it’ to the objects of that experience, and this is supposed to support the representationalist claim that there are no intrinsic aspects of our experience.

1. Introduction

Over the past two decades, considerations about the transparency of experience have begun to play a central role in the debate about phenomenal consciousness; in particular, these considerations have been invoked to argue against qualia realist views and in favor of representationalist theories, i.e., theories that identify the phenomenal character of experience with its intentional content. If experience is transparent – that is, if we cannot attend to any properties that are intrinsic to experience – then this seems to support the claim that there are no intrinsic properties to experience. There has long seemed to be a strong philosophical consensus in favor of transparency, and given that transparency has often been taken to be a basic datum about our introspective situation, the representa- tionalist argument from transparency seems quite compelling. But, this article will suggest, matters are not quite as they appear. In what follows, we look more closely at the repre- sentationalist argument for transparency and the interpretation of transparency that it requires. As we will see, it is by no means obvious that experience is transparent in the sense required by representationalism.

The first part of this article provides a brief background to representationalism and its philosophical motivation. We next consider in more detail the representationalist argu- ment from transparency. In the final two sections, we evaluate the plausibility of this argument by way of a closer examination of the phenomenon of transparency itself.

2. The March Towards Representationalism, or ‘‘Tear Down This Wall’’

For much of the twentieth century, philosophers of mind drew a sharp separation between the intentionality of mental states – their directedness – and the phenomenal character of such states – their subjective or qualitative feel. In fact, some mental states (e.g., propositional attitudes like beliefs and desires) were classified as solely intentional whereas some mental states (e.g., bodily sensations like pains and itches) were classified as

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solely phenomenal. 1

My belief that there’s a hairy tarantula on the hiking trail ahead repre- sents a certain state of affairs in the world, and hence has intentional content, but there is no phenomenology to my having that belief. In contrast, the itchy feeling I’m currently experiencing as a result of reflecting on tarantulas has a certain phenomenal character, its itchiness (to use a locution introduced by Thomas Nagel (1974), there is something that it’s like to have an itch), but that itchiness does not purport to represent anything about the world. My belief is about something, but there is nothing it is like to have it; in con- trast, my itchiness is like something, but it is not about anything. Although some states like perceptual experiences were recognized as having both intentional content and phe- nomenal character, these two aspects were thought to be distinct elements of the mental state. When I spot the tarantula ahead of me on the hiking trail, my visual experience not only represents that tarantula, but it also, independently, has a certain brownish aspect to it.

By century’s end, this separatist picture had changed considerably – a process that began in the late 1980s when it began to seem to many philosophers that it was a mistake to draw such a sharp line between consciousness and intentionality, i.e., that in fact there is a close relationship between a mental state’s intentional content and its phenomenal character. At that time, what was transpiring in philosophy of mind in many ways mir- rored what was transpiring in Germany. Just as Ronald Reagan was exhorting Mikhail Gorbachev to ‘Tear down this wall,’ thereby ushering in a period of German reunifica- tion, philosophers of mind were beginning to dismantle the wall between phenomenality and intentionality, thereby ushering in a period of mental reunification.

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What brought down the wall between consciousness and intentionality? What led phi- losophers to see that, as Colin McGinn puts it, what a given ‘experience is like and what it is of are not, prima facie, independent properties of the experience’? (1991, 295) Although the full story is no doubt quite a complicated one, it’s fair to say that the drive for mental reunification stemmed in large part from purely practical concerns.

3 Though

the task of developing a philosophical account of intentionality has proved quite difficult, the problem nonetheless seems tractable; in fact, with the advent of functionalist theories that have dominated philosophy of mind since the publication of articles such as Hilary Putnam’s ‘Minds and Machines’ (1960), significant philosophical progress has been made on the intentionality front. Thus, by collapsing the problem of phenomenal consciousness into the problem of intentionality, we’d have a way to make progress on a problem that has seemed considerably less tractable.

4 Take Fred Dretske, for example, who makes his

motivation quite explicit when arguing that all mental facts are representational facts: ‘The reason I am interested in this thesis is that, as far as I can tell, it is the only approach to the topic of consciousness that has much to say about the baffling problems of phe- nomenal experience. It does not, to be sure, remove all the mysteries. It removes enough of them, though to justify putting one’s money on the nose of this philosophical horse.’ (1995, xiii)

More could surely be said on this point, but rather than focus further on what led to mental reunification, I will focus instead on the mental reunification itself – and in partic- ular, on a specific species of it. Interestingly, the reunification has been achieved in two importantly different ways. Some philosophers like John Searle have argued that ‘there is a conceptual connection between consciousness and intentionality that has the conse- quence that a complete theory of intentionality requires an account of consciousness.’ (1992, 132; see also Horgan and Tienson 2002) Simultaneously, however, other philoso- phers began to argue for a conceptual connection that runs the other way round. On the representationalist view, the phenomenal character of a mental state depends on its

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intentional content. 5

Weak representationalism claims only that all phenomenal states have representational content. In contrast, strong representationalism claims that the phe- nomenal character of a mental state can be reduced to its intentional content, i.e., that intentional content of a suitable sort suffices for phenomenal character.

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In what follows, our focus will be on strong representationalism, and more specifically, on a particular argument that has been increasingly offered for the view, namely, what we might call the argument from transparency. (I will hereafter drop the qualifier ‘strong’ and use ‘representationalism’ to refer to strong representationalism unless I’ve explicitly indicated otherwise.) The argument from transparency begins with the widely shared intuition that the phenomenal character of our conscious mental states is introspectively transparent, a claim I will refer to as the transparency thesis. Just as we look right through a transparent pane of glass to whatever is on the other side of it, so too it is claimed that we ‘look’ right through our visual experience to whatever that visual experience is an experience of. Right now, as I look out into the family room, among the many toys scattered on the floor is my older son’s yellow Bumblebee Transformer. But what hap- pens when I try to attend to the yellowness of my visual experience of Bumblebee? Pro- ponents of transparency say that my attention will slip right through to the yellow toy itself, that there is no way for me to attend to the yellowness of my experience itself without attending to what it represents. And if I cannot attend to the phenomenal char- acter of my experience except by attending to its representational content, then that seems to lend support to the representationalist claim that there’s nothing to the yellow- ness of my experience over and above that representational content.

In the following section, we will look more closely at this argument Before doing so, however, it is worth noting some other philosophical contexts in which considerations of transparency play an important role. First, in discussions about the senses, some have wor- ried that the phenomenon of transparency is at odds with our apparent introspective abil- ity to distinguish experiences in different sensory modalities. Grice, for example, raises exactly this worry in his famous discussion of the senses. Though it ‘might be suggested that two senses, for example, seeing and smelling, are to be distinguished by the special introspectible character of the experiences of seeing and smelling,’ (1962, 37), this runs up against the fact that such experiences:

seem to be, as it were, diaphanous: if we were asked to pay close attention, on a given occa- sion, to our seeing or feeling as distinct from what was being seen or felt, we should not know how to proceed; and the attempt to describe the differences between seeing and feeling seems to dissolve into a description of what we see and what we feel. (1962, 45)

Second, considerations of transparency play a crucial role in debates about the nature of perception. In particular, some have worried that considerations of transparency are at odds with our ability to distinguish perceiving that p from imagining that p or hallucinat- ing that p. (See, e.g., Crane 2005)

3. The Representationalist Argument from Transparency

In some ways, representationalism is a natural outgrowth of functionalism, the view that mental states should not be seen fundamentally as physical states but as functional states. Despite its continuing popularity, functionalism has long been plagued by the charge that it cannot account for the subjective aspect of our experience. Critics such as Ned Block (1978) have offered examples to show that two mental states could be functionally identi- cal without being qualitatively identical; in fact, a creature that lacks qualia altogether

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might nonetheless be in a state that is functionally identical to one of our qualitative states. In attempting to defend functionalism against objections of this sort, Gilbert Harman (1990) offers one of the earliest statements of the representationalist view in ‘The Intrinsic Quality of Experience.’

7 At the same time, he also introduces considerations of introspec-

tive transparency into the contemporary debate about phenomenal consciousness. That’s not to say that the phenomenon of transparency had gone unrecognized prior

to Harman. In fact, philosophers have remarked on this phenomenon at least since the early modern period. To give just one example from that timeframe, consider Thomas Reid’s discussion of sensation, in which he treats words as ‘signs’ of the objects signified:

We are so accustomed to use the sensation [of hardness] as a sign, and to pass immediately to the hardness signified, that, as far as appears, it was never made an object of thought, either by the vulgar or by philosophers… There is no sensation more distinct, or more frequent; yet it is never attended to, but passes through the mind instantaneously, and serves only to introduce that quality in bodies, which, by a law of our constitution, it suggests. (Reid 1764 ⁄ 1970, 61– 62)

In the early 20th Century, G.E. Moore’s invocation of transparency in ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ earned him the nickname ‘the father of transparency.’ (See, e.g., Tye 2009). On Moore’s view: ‘The moment we try to fix our attention upon consciousness and to see what, distinctly, it is, it seems to vanish: it seems as if we had before us a mere empti- ness. When we try to introspect the sensation of blue, all we can see is the blue: the other element is as if it were diaphanous.’ (Moore 1903, 25)

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But in ‘The Intrinsic Quality of Experience,’ Harman puts these considerations of transparency to new use. Consider what he says about Eloise, a woman who is having a visual experience of a tree:

When Eloise sees a tree before her, the colors she experiences are all experienced as features of the tree and its surroundings. None of them are experienced as intrinsic features of her experi- ence. Nor does she experience any features of anything as intrinsic features of her experience. (1990, 667)

These claims about Eloise are explicitly meant to be generalizable to all visual – and, indeed, all perceptual – experiences, and from this, Harman draws a representationalist conclusion: ‘Two perceptual experiences with the same intentional content must be psy- chologically the same.’ (1990, 673)

In developing and defending representationalism, other philosophers following Harman have generalized these claims about transparency yet further. Chief among them is Michael Tye, who claims that all our phenomenally conscious experiences – perceptual experience, bodily sensations, emotions, and even moods – are transparent. About the case of pain, for example, Tye claims that we can attend to our pain only by attending to the bodily region where the painful disturbance is located: ‘If I have a pain in my leg, all I end up focusing on, when I introspect my experience, is how things seem to be in my leg.’ (1995, 31) Tim Crane makes a similar point, ‘[t]he experience of pain is ‘transparent’ because to pay attention to a pain is to pay attention to the place that hurts.’ (2003, 54) Or consider what happens when we are overcome by a feeling of emotion. We experi- ence a great variety of changes in ourselves – a newfound sense of energy, a disposition to smile more easily and quickly, a disposition to respond more pleasantly to whatever’s happening around us. Tye claims, however, that if we try to turn our attention away from these experiential changes to the feeling of elation itself, we will be unable to do so. (1995, 136)

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According to the repesentationalists, we can best account for the phenomenon of trans- parency by adopting a representationalist view. As Dretske puts it, his representationalist thesis ‘helps one understand, for example, why conscious experiences have that peculiar diaphanous quality – the quality of always being present when, but never where, one looks to find them.’ (1995, xiii) Likewise, Tye claims that we can best understand why our experience seems only to reveal aspects of what we experience rather than revealing aspects of the experience itself by embracing representationalism. The reason that we can- not introspectively find any intrinsic features of our experience is that there are none to find; the phenomenal character of experience is wholly constituted by the intentional content of the experience. (See, e.g., 1995, 136) Tye’s own version of representationalism reduces phenomenal character to a special kind of intentional content, namely, intentional content that is poised (i.e., in a suitable position to make a direct impact on an individ- ual’s belief ⁄ desire system), abstract (i.e., independent of any particular concrete objects), and non-conceptual. But the argument from transparency does not exploit any of the details specific to his view. Rather, as was intimated above, his argument proceeds by way of an inference to the best explanation. The best explanation for the fact that we cannot focus on the phenomenal character of our experience without focusing on what our experience represents is that the former reduces to the latter.

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As Tye himself recognizes, there might be other possible explanations available to us. One is the explanation that Moore had adopted when remarking on the phenomenon of transparency, namely, the sense-datum theory. According to this theory, we perceive objects in the world only indirectly by way of sense data, i.e., our own mental images. When I look at my son’s yellow Bumblebee toy, I do not perceive it directly; rather I have direct awareness of a mental image that is itself yellow and that also has all the other properties I take the toy to have. The sense-datum theorists typically draw a sharp dis- tinction between the act of sensing and the thing sensed, namely, the sense data. Like representationalism, then, the sense-datum theory claims to offer an explanation for why we cannot attend to the phenomenal character of our experience without attending to what it represents. Not everyone agrees that the sense-data theory is compatible with transparency, let alone that it can offer an explanation of it (see Martin 2002). But sup- pose we grant that it does. Still, Tye argues, that explanation is inferior to the one offered by representationalism, since the sense-data theory entails that visual experience is ‘sys- tematically misleading.’ (2000, 46) Though it seems to us that we have direct perceptual access to publicly observable objects in the world, really we have direct awareness only of our own private sense data. Thus, even if we grant that the sense-datum theory can explain transparency, the fact that the sense-datum theory convicts our perceptual experi- ences of massive error gives us good reason to prefer representationalism.

The argument from transparency is not the only argument offered on behalf of repre- sentationalism, but it has certainly been one of the most influential.

10 Faced with this

argument, opponents of representationalism seem to have three options. First, they might argue that representationalism does not actually explain transparency. Second, they might argue that some other theory better explains transparency. Third, they might deny the phenomenon of transparency itself, at least as it is understood by the representationalists. Perhaps the most common strategy pursued by opponents of representationalism consists in combining the third option with one of the first two options. This hybrid strategy involves two moves: (a) showing that the representationalists mischaracterize the phenom- enon of transparency, a version of the third strategy; and either (b1) showing that a cor- rect characterization of the phenomenon of transparency cannot be explained by representationalism (and, perhaps, is even inconsistent with it), a version of the first

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strategy; or (b2) showing that a correct characterization of the phenomenon of transpar- ency is best explained by a theory other than representationalism, a version of the second strategy. In the following section, as we turn to the phenomenon of transparency itself, we will see how some of these moves play out.

4. The Plausibility of the Transparency Thesis, Part I: Which Experiences Are Transparent?

To evaluate the plausibility of the representationalist argument from transparency, we need first to evaluate the plausibility of the transparency thesis. It makes sense to begin where the intuitive considerations in favor of the thesis are strongest, namely, cases of ordinary visual experience. Unsurprisingly, these are the sorts of cases that are usually offered to motivate the thesis. Thus we find Tye exhorting his reader as follows:

Focus your attention on a square that has been painted blue. Intuitively, you are directly aware of blueness and squareness as … features of an external surface. Now shift your gaze inward and try to become aware of your experience itself, inside you, apart from its objects. Try to focus your attention on some intrinsic feature of the experience that distinguishes it from other experiences, something other than what it is an experience of. The task seems impossible: one’s awareness seems always to slip through the experience to blueness and squareness, as instantiated together in an external object. In turning one’s mind inward to attend to the experience, one seems to end up concentrating on what is outside again, on external features or properties. (1995, 30)

Although there are some isolated voices of dissent, when it comes to this kind of visual case, Tye’s description of our introspective predicament is generally taken to be correct, and correspondingly, the transparency thesis is generally taken to be unproblematically true with respect to ordinary visual experience.

11 The consensus breaks down, however,

when we consider other types of experience. The first problems arise when we turn to more exotic visual cases – cases that Tye treats as ‘oddities’ (2000, 69). Three examples often cited as counterexamples to transparency are phosphene experiences, afterimages, and cases of blurry vision.

Phosphene experiences result from putting pressure on your eyeball when your eyelids are closed, a process that causes color sensations. Such sensations, however, don’t seem to be suggesting that there are colored moving expanses out there somewhere. Moreover, given that we don’t take there to be any actual colored expanses out there, it becomes implausible to say that in attending to our phosphene experiences we’re attending to any colored expanses out there; rather, we seem to be attending to the experiences them- selves. (See Wright 1981; Block 1996).

Similarly, consider the afterimages that occur subsequent to the removal of some origi- nal (usually intense) stimulus. For example, when you turn away after staring at your bright computer screen for a few moments, you might experience a vivid glow ‘floating’ before your eyes; in fact, this glow might persist even if you close your eyes. Likewise, if you stare at a green dot for half a minute and then shift your attention to a bright white piece of paper, you will visually experience a red dot similar in size and location to the green dot you had been staring at. But it seems implausible to suppose that we attend to our afterimage experience by attending to the red dot, for we don’t take there to be any red dot at all. As Block has suggested, afterimages ‘don’t look as if they are really objects or as if they are really red. They look … illusory.’ (Block 1996, 32; ellipsis in original; see also Wright 1983, 57–8)

Finally, suppose that a woman takes off her reading glasses while perusing a menu. Whereas she previously perceived the list of appetizers sharply and clearly, now

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everything has gone blurry. Someone who doesn’t need to use reading glasses can achieve the same affect by unfocusing her eyes; in doing so, the phenomenal character of her experience changes. In describing this change, many people find it implausible to say that the words on the menu themselves have become blurry; rather, what seems blurry is the experience itself. In other words, it looks like we can focus on the blurriness of our expe- rience independently of what the blurriness is of.

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Each of these cases suggests that we can attend directly to our experiences without attending to the objects of our experiences – either because there is no object of our experience as in the phosphene and afterimage cases, or because the experience comes apart from the object that it represents, as in the case of blurry vision. They thus pose a threat to the transparency thesis. Such cases are also taken to be threats to representation- alism, since they are plausibly cases demonstrating that there can be phenomenal aspects to an experience that cannot be captured by its intentional content. Interestingly, in responding to such cases, representationalists like Tye tend to focus directly on the threat to representationalism, rather than on the threat to the transparency thesis, i.e., rather than defending representationalism by defending transparency in these cases, Tye attempts to show that the representational content of these experiences is richer than we might have thought. For example, his discussion of blurriness attempts to establish that there is a representational difference between seeing objects as blurry and seeing them in a blurry way. (See, e.g., his Tye 2000, Ch. 4)

Turning away from vision to the other sensory modalities, we find that considerably less attention has been paid to whether the transparency thesis is true. Granted, Tye does explicitly extend his claims about the transparency of visual experience to the other per- ceptual modalities. On his view, in attending to our auditory, olfactory, or gustatory experiences, what we attend to are, respectively, sounds, odors, and tastes – all three of which are publicly accessible. (2000, 49) But virtually no one else has explicitly consid- ered whether non-visual sensory experience is transparent. Clare Batty’s recent attempt to show that transparency holds true of olfaction is one notable exception.

13 The fact that

human olfactory experience is considerably less rich than visual experience may seem to present a prima facie case against transparency – there is in many cases no particular object of an olfactory experience, and thus no object to attend to. As she summarizes this prima facie case, ‘There is no way that things smell because there is never this kind of spa- tial differentiation in olfactory experience.’ (Batty, forthcoming). On her view, however, the lack of spatial differentiation does not mean that olfactory experiences are not trans- parent. Olfactory properties are still presented as ‘out there in the world’ or ‘around me,’ and hence when we try to attend to our olfactory experience, we ‘smell’ through that experience directly to the world, even if not to discriminate external objects.

One might try to object to Batty’s claims by considering the following kind of case. Suppose I enter a room and start to smell something. I don’t know and don’t really care what external thing the smell is emanating from – I’m just concerned to pinpoint what the smell is, and how to describe it, whether it smells more pumpkin-like or apple-like. What exactly am I focusing on when I’m trying to figure this out? Insofar as it seems that I am (or that I can be) focusing on my experience – that is, insofar as it seems that my attention isn’t outwardly directed – then the transparency thesis is threatened. Whether this kind of case really counts against transparency, however, is far from certain. Perhaps as additional attention is paid to the olfactory case, more compelling counterexamples will surface.

We might think that the case for auditory transparency would be even stronger than the case for olfactory transparency, since auditory experience does, plausibly, represent

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the location of objects in space (see, e.g., O’Callaghan 2009). As yet, however, the case for auditory transparency – like the cases for tactile and gustatory transparency – has not been made. Tye’s claims notwithstanding, it seems more fitting to say that the jury is still out on the plausibility of the transparency thesis with respect to the non-visual senses, and we should certainly be hesitant to make claims about those senses purely on the basis of what we’ve found true in the visual case. As O’Callaghan has persuasively argued, ‘Reading lessons about other perceptual modalities off of vision is poor methodology in science and in philosophy. We should not assume that the structure and function of audi- tory, gustatory, or olfactory awareness mirrors that of vision. Doing so risks neglecting the diversity that is most striking about experience across the modalities.’ (O’Callaghan 2008)

Outside of the perceptual realm, considerable attention has been paid to bodily sensa- tions. Tye defends the transparency of such sensations by consideration of the case of pain: ‘Suppose you have a pain in your toe. Then your toe is where you feel the painful disturbance to be. Now try to turn your attention away from what you are experiencing in your toe to your experience itself apart from that.’ (1995, 136; see also his 2000, 50.) On his view, when we do so, we are inevitably led to focusing our attention on the toe itself; we cannot focus on our pain without focusing on the bodily disturbance that the pain represents. One might wonder why exactly these claims are sufficient to motivate transparency; at best, they seem to require an implausible model of attention such that we cannot attend to our pain if we are simultaneously attending to our toe. But a more heated debate about the transparency of bodily sensations has played out over an example that Block has repeatedly raised, namely, the example of orgasm. To say that our experi- ence of orgasm is transparent would be to claim that we can only attend to it by attend- ing to the bodily changes that it represents but, as Block claims, this doesn’t seem faithful to the phenomenology of orgasms. Even if in attending to the orgasm we must attend to a particular bodily location, that doesn’t seem to be all that we’re doing.

Representationalist discussions of transparency often take there to be general agreement about the transparency thesis, but as the discussion in this section shows, this is at best true about the case of ordinary, visual experiences. To respond to these considerations, it appears that the representationalist has the following three options:

First, he might limit the scope of his theory to the class of states for which transparency is true, i.e., he might adopt a version of restricted rather than unrestricted representational- ism. But restricted representationalism fails to offer us a general theory of phenomenal character; at best, it can offer us a theory of some type of phenomenal character. As such, much of the motivation for the view seems to be undercut.

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Second, the representationalist might marshal additional considerations in support of the transparency thesis, considerations that show it is true not only for ordinary cases of vision, but for the complete range of our experiences. This strategy, if successful, would save the representationalist’s argument from transparency, but the force of that argument would be somewhat blunted. The suggestion that we need to adopt representationalist to account for an uncontroversial datum of introspection is a powerful one. But if the fact we’re accounting for not only fails to be a basic datum, but in fact is quite controversial, the argument from transparency will be considerably less compelling.

Third, the representationalist might simply withdraw the argument from transparency, and rest his case for the theory on other grounds. This strategy, however, carries a signifi- cant risk. While other arguments in favor of representationalism may well be compelling, the failure of transparency may well provide a powerful argument against representation- alism. This point will be explored further in the following section.

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5. The Plausibility of Transparency, Part II: What exactly is transparency, after all?

The considerations of the previous section addressed the scope of the transparency thesis. But further questions have been raised about the thesis itself. In short, although there ini- tially appears to be a considerable consensus surrounding the transparency thesis, a closer examination of that thesis reveals that the thesis itself has not been well understood.

First, considerations have been raised to suggest that the notion of attention or awareness employed by the thesis has not been sufficiently developed (see, e.g., Siewert 2004). One source of this worry stems from worry about the perceptual model of introspection. Many philosophers have argued that we should not view introspection as a perceptual or even a quasi-perceptual faculty. Insofar as the transparency thesis seems to presuppose a quasi-per- ceptual understanding of introspection, the thesis itself might be thought to be problematic.

Second, worries have been raised about whether the transparency thesis is meant to be a negative thesis, a positive thesis, or both. (see, e.g., Stoljar 2004) That is, in claiming that experience is transparent, are we (a) making a claim about what we can’t directly attend to; (b) making a claim about what we can directly attend to; or (c)? Some of Batty’s work on olfaction suggests that a transparency thesis that is sufficiently generalized across all sensory modalities is best seen as making only a negative claim; although there is commonality between visual experience and non-visual experience about what we can’t attend to when we introspect those experiences (namely, intrinsic properties of our experience), what we can attend to in the case of vision (namely, properties of external objects) might well be different from what we can attend to in the case of other senses (since, e.g., olfaction does not put us in direct contact with external objects). Other phi- losophers have raised converse worries (stemming from different concerns) that suggest that transparency should be seen as making only a positive claim about what we experi- ence, not about what we don’t experience. For example, Bernard Molyneux has argued that while it is plausible ‘that we indeed experience the properties of which we are directly aware as the properties of external surfaces and objects,’ it’s not at all clear that we can add to that claim an additional clause specifying that we don’t experience them as properties of the experience itself; this additional claim, in his view, ‘looks to be illicitly tacked on.’ (Molyneux 2009). On his view, transparency claims do not have the assertori- al force that many have taken them to have.

This kind of worry about the transparency thesis will have direct consequences for its use in the representationalist argument for transparency. Representationalism may well offer the best explanation for transparency if transparency means that we cannot attend directly to the properties of our experience. But if transparency is silent on this question, then it may be that qualia realist views can explain the phenomenon equally as well.

Finally, a different set of worries can be raised about the strength of the transparency claim. These worries can be brought out by looking at the full context in which Moore – the so-called ‘father of transparency’ – remarks on the phenomenon:

[T]hough philosophers have recognised that something distinct is meant by consciousness, they have never yet had a clear conception of what that something is. … [T]he moment we try to fix our attention upon consciousness and to see what, distinctly, it is, it seems to vanish: it seems as if we had before us a mere emptiness. When we try to introspect the sensation of blue, all we can see is the blue: the other element is as if it were diaphanous. Yet it can be distinguished if we look attentively enough, and if we know that there is something to look for.

The final sentence of this passage suggests a weaker version of transparency than the one we’ve been considering. What we might call strong transparency (following Kind 2003)

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suggests that it is impossible to attend directly to our experience, i.e., we cannot attend to our experience except by attending to the objects represented by that experience. But what we might call weak transparency claims merely that it is difficult to attend directly to our experience, i.e., we can most easily attend to our experience by attending to the objects represented by that experience.

In fact, once this distinction is drawn, it becomes clear that much of the alleged con- sensus about transparency is really a consensus about weak transparency. Thus, for exam- ple, consider Robert Van Gulick’s endorsement of the transparency thesis: Experiences ‘are so transparent that we typically ‘look’ right through them.’ (Van Gulick 1992, my emphasis) Likewise, though Brian Loar is usually classified as a proponent of transparency, his discussion of these issues suggests a rejection of strong transparency. Though he thinks that when we adopt an attitude of untutored reflection to our experience, such experi- ence strikes us as transparent, he also thinks that we can adopt an attitude of ‘oblique reflection’ to our experience. When we do so, Loar claims that we are able to discern and attend to visual qualia as such. (Loar 2003)

15

But when representationalists such as Harman and Tye invoke the transparency thesis in support of their views, they clearly intend strong transparency. Interpreting the trans- parency thesis in terms of weak transparency would be problematic for their case for rep- resentationalism. In fact, not only would this interpretation of the transparency thesis fail to support representationalism, but the claim that we can directly attend to our experi- ence seems to be inconsistent with it.

6. Concluding Remarks

As the process of German reunification unfolded following the fall of the Berlin Wall, things did not always run smoothly – and no one would have expected that they would have. Likewise, we should not be at all surprised that the process of mental reunification has not always been smooth. Although philosophers in these early years of the 21st cen- tury seem convinced that we should not be separatists about phenomenal character and intentional content, there is not yet a clear philosophical sense of what their connection is. Although representationalism, which provides one unification strategy, has become increasingly popular, it is not clear that the transparency considerations that have been invoked in its favor can bear the philosophical weight needed. It does seem, however, that one of our best strategies for achieving a successful reunification would be to sort out precisely what the lessons of transparency are.

Short Biography

Amy Kind’s research takes two distinct tracks in the philosophy of mind: One track focuses on issues relating to the imagination while the other track focuses on issues relat- ing to phenomenal consciousness. Her work has appeared in philosophical journals such as Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophical Studies, and The Philosophical Quar- terly. Most recently, she has been focused on the role of imagination in diverse areas of philosophy (e.g., modal epistemology, emotional engagement with fiction, and theory of mind). In particular, she is investigating whether there is a unitary conception of the imagination across these various debates. She has spent her entire academic career thus far on the faculty of Claremont McKenna College, where she won the Crocker Award for Merit in 2008. She holds an AB from Amherst College and a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles.

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Notes

* Correspondence: Department of Philosophy, Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, California, 91711, USA. Email: [email protected]

1 See Rosenthal (1994, 349) or Searle (1994, 380) for paradigmatic expressions of this separatist view.

2 I say mental reunification since the anti-separatist movement that began in the late 1980s (and began really to take

off in the mid-1990s with the publication of Tye 1995 and Dretske 1995) was in many ways a rediscovery of the work of Brentano a century earlier; on Brentano’s view, intentionality was the mark of the mental. 3

Of course, this is not the whole story. As Levine has noted, a unificationist view not only seems ‘more satisfying’ than the separatist view, but it also promises to ‘lead to a more thorough understanding of the mind.’ (2003, 60) 4

In fact, the intractability of the problem of phenomenal consciousness—and in particular, the fact that we seem unable in principle to explain why brain processes are associated with states with phenomenal character – has earned this problem the name the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers 1996). 5

It’s worth noting that in attempting to explain phenomenology in terms of intentionality, representationalists are not concerned to achieve complete mental reunification. Although they deny that there can be phenomenal states that are non-intentional, they typically leave intact the idea that there can be intentional states that are non-phenomenal, e.g., propositional attitudes. 6

Examples of strong representationalist theories can be found in Dretske (1995), Tye (1995, 2000), and Lycan (1996). 7

McGinn gives another early statement of the view: ‘Differences of content do determine differences of subjectiv- ity; ‘‘ofness’’ fixes ‘‘like-ness.’’ (1991, 304) Armstrong’s perceptual theory of bodily sensations (1968) anticipates the present-day representationalist view. 8

For a particularly well-developed contemporary expression of transparency prior to Harman, see McGinn (1982, 14). 9

For further discussion of how the argument works, see Kind (2007) and Stoljar (2004). 10

Tye also offers an argument stemming from the intensionality of phenomenal discourse (2000, 54ff). Byrne (2001) offers a different sort of argument aimed to show that changes in qualitative character must be changes in intentional character. 11

For dissenting views, see Block (1996), Robinson (1998), and Kind (2003, 2008). 12

For an interesting discussion of blurriness, see Pace (2007). On his view, blurred vision serves as a counterexam- ple to the transparency thesis, but it may nonetheless be compatible with representationalism. Smith (2008) also argues convincingly that blurred vision presents a counterexample to transparency. 13

Lycan also discusses olfaction (1996, 144ff). 14

For related arguments against restricted representationalism see Byrne (2001, 205–6) and Kind (2007). 15

See also Shoemaker (1991); Chalmers (1996).

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