The visual presence of determinable properties

Several essays in this volume exploit the idea that in visual experience, and in other forms of consciousness, something is present to consciousness, or phenomenally present to the experiencing subject. This is a venerable idea. Hume, for example, understood conscious experience in terms of the various items ‘present to the mind’. However, it is not obvious how the idea should be understood (‘present to’ is not a standard English modification of the adjective ‘present’) and there are grounds for worrying that there is no good way of making it precise. Here I explore a way of making precise the idea that properties of things, such as their shapes and colours, are present to us in visual experience. I argue that this important idea is coherent, well motivated and empirically plausible, provided that we reject two traditional assumptions: (i) that maximally determinate properties, rather than just determinable properties, are visually present; (ii) that we can tell through introspection exactly which properties are visually present to us

Is the folk concept of pain polyeidic?

Philosophers often assume that folk hold pain to be a mental state – to be in pain is to have a certain kind of feeling – and they think this state exhibits the classic Cartesian characteristics of privacy, subjectivity, and incorrigibility. However folk also assign pains (non-brain-based) bodily locations: unlike most other mental states, pains are held to exist in arms, feet, etc. This has led some (e.g. Hill 2005) to talk of the ‘paradox of pain’, whereby the folk notion of pain is inherently conflicted. Recently, several authors have rejected the paradox view, arguing instead that folk hold a univocal, bodily view (i.e. pains are properties of various body parts, not of minds). This paper presents six objections to the bodily view of the folk concept of pain. We then outline a direction for future research – the ‘polyeidic approach’ – whereby the folk notion of pain is held to encompass various divergent (potentially conflicting) strands and we suggest that certain problems surrounding the treatment and communication of pain might be usefully be viewed through the lens of the polyeidic approach

Partial report is the wrong paradigm

Is consciousness independent of the general-purpose information processes known as ‘cognitive access’? The dominantmethodology for supporting this independence hypothesis appeals to partial report experiments as evidence for perceptual consciousness in the absence of cognitive access. Using a standard model of evidential support, and reviewing recent elaborations of the partial report paradigm, this article argues that the paradigm has the wrong structure to support the independence hypothesis. Like reports in general, a subject’s partial report is evidence that she is conscious of information only where that information is cognitively accessed. So partial report experiments could dissociate consciousness from cognitive access only if there were uncontroversial evidence forconsciousness which did not imply reportability. There is no such evidence. An alternative, broadly Marrian methodology for supporting the independence hypothesis is suggested, and some challenges to it outlined. This methodology does not require experimental evidence for consciousness in the absence of cognitive access. Instead it focuses on a function of perceptual consciousness when a stimulus is cognitively accessed. If the processes best suited to implement this function exclude cognitive access, the independence hypothesis will be supported. One relevant function of consciousness may be reflected in reason-based psychological explanations of a subject’s behaviour

Is pain “all in your mind”? Examining the general public’s views of pain

By definition, pain is a sensory and emotional experience that is felt in a particular part of the body. The precise relationship between somatic events at the site where pain is experienced, and central processing giving rise to the mental experience of pain remains the subject of debate, but there is little disagreement in scholarly circles that both aspects of pain are critical to its experience. Recent experimental work, however, suggests a public view that is at odds with this conceptualisation. By demonstrating that the public does not necessarily endorse central tenets of the “mental” view of pain (subjectivity, privacy, and incorrigibility), experimental philosophers have argued that the public holds a more “body-centric” view than most clinicians and scholars. Such a discrepancy would have important implications for how the public interacts with pain science and clinical care. In response, we tested the hypothesis that the public is capable of a more “mind-centric” view of pain. Using a series of vignettes, we demonstrate that in situations which highlight mental aspects of pain the public can, and does, recognize pain as a mental phenomenon. We also demonstrate that the public view is subject to context effects, by showing that the public’s view is modified when situations emphasizing mental and somatic aspects of pain are presented together

Attention, visual consciousness and indeterminacy

I propose a new argument showing that conscious vision sometimes depends constitutively on conscious attention. I criticise traditional arguments for this constitutive connection, on the basis that they fail adequately to dissociate evidence about visual consciousness from evidence about attention. On the same basis, I criticise Ned Block's recent counterargument that conscious vision is independent of one sort of attention (‘cognitive access'). Block appears to achieve the dissociation only because he underestimates the indeterminacy of visual consciousness. I then appeal to empirical work on the interaction between visual indeterminacy and attention, to argue for the constitutive connection

Auditory perception and spatial representation

I investigate the connection between representations of space itself, as opposed to objects' spatial relations, and the representation of objects as mind-independent. I assume that perceptual states are reason-giving in that they represent the world to us as mind-independent, and seek to discover what features of their content might be necessary for this. In my first main chapter (II), I argue that spaces themselves cannot be represented purely auditorily; but I also argue that the representation of spaces themselves plays an important part in both vision and touch. In chapter III, I discuss two interpretations of Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic, in an attempt to uncover necessary conditions for spatial perception that involve the representation of space itself. I start with Daniel Warren's discussion of place-representation, and connect this to discussion of spaces and objectivity (Allison / Strawson). In chapter IV, I discuss arguments for constitutive links between spatial representation and representation as objective, making use of Gareth Evans' and John Campbell's discussions of a simple spatial theory of perception that constitutes our grasp of an empirical world. Having concluded that representation as objective may require the representation of space itself, I explore in chapter V the problem of how this requirement might be met in hearing, despite the fact that spaces cannot be represented purely auditorially. I criticise possible accounts according to which space-representation is extrinsic to hearing. I then offer an account that emphasises the need to characterise the contents of auditory perception in a way that is integrated with our other senses and with perceptual memory: I claim that this integration is essential to auditory perceptual content

Attention and the Indeterminacy of Visual Experience

Visual attention plays an important role in epistemology. You come to know about things you see by paying attention to them, and thereby taking them up in thought and belief. Recent work in the cognitive sciences shows that attention also has a quite different role. Attention dictates not only what you take up in thought and belief, but also how things appear to you in visual experience. Attention enhances the neural signal that's processed for attended aspects of a scene, and so highlights those aspects by changing their visual appearance. For example, drawing attention to a colour makes it appear more saturated; drawing attention to a shape makes it appear larger. This raises a challenge for the epistemology of attention. It threatens to show that attention is a systematic source of illusion, rather than a reliable source of knowledge. Indeed, some scientists working in the area draw that conclusion.To meet this challenge, I argue that visual experience is experience of determinable properties: properties which admit of more specific determinations, as red is determined by crimson, and 90 to 110 feet long is determined by 100 feet long. One determinate property determines many determinable properties. So one determinate shape or colour may take on different appearances, in veridical experiences of its different determinables. And one determinable property has many determinates. So different determinate properties may share an appearance, in veridical experiences of one determinable which they all determine. I argue that the experimental data about attention and visual appearance are in fact well analysed in this way. For example, attention changes the appearance of a colour, giving it the same appearance as a more saturated but unattended colour; visual appearances remain veridical through this change, because they consist in experiences of different determinable colours, each of which the stimulus really instantiates. More generally, I argue that we need to recognise the role of determinable properties in vision, if we're to understand what experiments tell us about the contents of visual experience.To show that visual experience is experience of determinable properties, I draw on empirical work about the limits of visual resolution. Visual processes are not sensitive to the finest details of a scene; they're sensitive to determinable properties, not maximally determinate properties. I argue that visual experience is experience of a property only where visual processes are sensitive to that property. I explore the metaphysics of determinable properties, arguing that they have a natural unity which merely disjunctive properties lack. On this basis, I show how visual experience of a determinable property has the phenomenological unity characteristic of experience of a single shape or colour.With this account of visual indeterminacy in hand, we can also re-assess traditional assumptions about the nature of attention, and about the relationship between attention and visual experience. In traditional Anglophone philosophy, attention is often conceived as a window onto visual experience: attention gives you access to the contents of visual experience, but does not alter them. While this is clearly untenable in light of the empirical findings, a weaker view has attracted recent interest: visual experience is constitutively independent of attention; your seeing as you do does not consist partly in your attending. I make the relevant notion of constitutive dependence precise, and criticise Ned Block's argument for a version of this view, on the grounds that he underestimates the indeterminacy of visual experience.I then argue that, in some instances, visual experience does depend constitutively on attention - and also vice versa. I defend William James's definition of conscious attention as the `focalization, concentration of consciousness'. So conceived, I propose, attention is not a further mode of consciousness, over and above perceptual experience and thought. Rather, attention consists in a focusing of these modes of consciousness. For example, experiments have shown that attention increases visual resolution: when you attend, you see more determinate properties. Here, I argue, attention and visual experience are mutually constitutive: they consist in one another. More generally, I show how to understand attention in terms of the focusing of conscious cognition and perception. This, I propose, is the form of conscious attention we exploit when we take up what we see in thought and belief, and thereby come to know about it. I conclude by exploring some consequences for intentionalism about visual experience