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The Diversity of Experiences

2020; Wiley; Volume: 100; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/phpr.12687

1933-1592

Michael Martin,

Free Will and Agency

Over the last ten years, Susanna Schellenberg has developed an account of sense perception focused on singular contents directed on particulars in a perceiver’s environment. More recently, she has combined this account with an overview of the epistemological significance of perceptual consciousness: insisting that we possess both factive and phenomenal evidence through the exercise of perceptual capacities. She has now brought these various themes together in one volume, The Unity of Perception (Schellenberg, 2018). In this version we are to conceive of sense perception and sensuous consciousness as fundamentally a matter of perceptual discriminatory capacities. These capacities, identified at a personal and not sub-personal level, are to be individuated in terms of the particulars or types of particular that they function to discriminate and single out. Such capacities are exercised in situations where one comes to perceive accurately and also in cases of dysfunction such as illusion and hallucination. These capacities determine that our sensory experiences possess a singular content, which picks out the particular discriminated in cases of successful perception and has a ‘gappy’ content where that is not the case. The mental activity which is the exercise of these capacities constitutes perceptual awareness. The priority of cases of success, which help determine the function of these capacities, is reflected in the factive evidence that perceptual systems give rise to; while the common exercise of the capacity across success and non-success conditions grounds the phenomenal evidence that it is available to the subject across all circumstances. There are multiple layers to Schellenberg’s position. She presents her reader with many subtle distinctions and considerations, and she offers a barrage of arguments to distinguish among the competing positions in play. It is impossible in such a short space to do justice to the comprehensive and unified theory that Schellenberg offers the reader. So here I’ll just focus on one key aspect of the foundations of her account: the phenomenon of particularity. 1. The core of Schellenberg’s theory concerns the particularity of perception and perceptual experience. According to Schellenberg, we have experience of objects, events, and property instances. For Fregean particularism, the way that we should capture perceptual experience of a white cup is by reference to a mode of presentation of an object, the cup, and of a property instance, an instance of whiteness. The content of the experience has two general elements, the modes of presentation indexed to these particulars. Schellenberg identifies these token instances with the exercises of perceptual discriminatory capacities for singling out objects of a certain kind (this may, or may not, be the kind cups) and a certain property (whiteness, or some shade of whiteness). While these serve to single the particulars out, no property or condition is thereby attributed in the content. While there is a role for the general in the concepts deployed in the mind, in the world there is only a role for particulars. Schellenberg suggests that in cases of hallucination, we not only fail to perceive some particular object, but also some property instance which would have been the property instantiated by that object (44). And she suggests that we should understand perceptual illusion or misperception in terms of the non-existence of property instances which suitable perceptual discriminatory capacities would have singled out (43, 90). Schellenberg insists that in all perception there is perception of particulars, but she denies that we always perceive objects: in some cases, particularity is perception of events or property instances (68). This indicates that Schellenberg would deny that we ever perceive properties without perceiving a given property instance of that property (see in particular 67). Although this is a general commitment of the theory she offers, it is not a claim that she specifically articulates or argues for. But are we entitled to insist on such a condition? Note, my concern here is not whether there are property instances distinct from objects. Nor yet is my concern with the idea that we can perceive property instances. I am willing to grant that in certain cases, when we perceive an object and are informed about the way it is, then we may also perceive a property instance, that object’s instantiating some perceptible property about which we have come to be perceptually informed. I am simply asking whether there must always be a property instance we perceive when we perceive some property.1 Consider a certain slightly unusual range of misperceptions arising under extreme demands on our perceptual capacities: cases of false binding errors, brought on in normal subjects by the use of very short display of targets (Treisman, 1977; Treisman & Schmidt, 1982). (In later work, Treisman looked at pathological cases where false binding occurred even after long display of a stimulus (Friedman-Hill, Robertson, & Treisman, 1995).) Consider first a control condition, in which one is shown: A normal subject, given viewing condition without extreme task demand will typically report: But with demanding viewing conditions, there is a chance of such a subject giving the incorrect report: In this case we have a false, or illusory, conjunction: the colours have been bound with the wrong shape. Taking the verbal report to be indicative of subjective experience, we have an example of illusion without a non-existent property instance. The shapes and colours are all present in the scene and are perceived: it is their combination which has gone wrong. Moreover, errors like this can put pressure on the idea that a specific property instance is perceived at all. Consider the following kind of case. Report: Again, if we can read back from verbal report to subjective experience, then there is only one instance of yellow to be reported, that of the H-shape. Yet note, given the operation of early vision, prior to the operation of securing correct feature binding there is no reason to suppose any malfunction in the subject’s colour perception. Had the probe been concerned with whether she detected a yellow stimulus – pressing a button if the array contained yellow, for example – there is no reason to doubt that she would have succeeded. This appears to give us an example of visually perceiving yellow, but not necessarily perceiving any instance of yellow, given that the H-shape does not instantiate the yellow perceived. There are two instances of yellow in the array perceived; but there is no reason to associate the yellow of the H with one of these rather than the other. Now, of course, it is quite open to us to press the hypothesis that just one of the O-instances of yellow and not the other is what is falsely bound with the H-shape to give the illusory conjunction. And one might even propose a pattern of evidence which would favour the hypothesis that the left-O is responsible for the binding rather than the right-O, or vice versa. But this misses the force of the challenge. If all we have to go on is that the subject has correctly detected yellow in the stimulus condition, then we have been given no concrete ground to suppose the subject has perceived one instance of yellow rather than the other. In paradigm cases of successful perception, of course, we have no difficulty in singling out the property instances as well as the objects which are candidates for perception. If I perceive the red H accurately, then the relevant instance in question is that which the H instantiates. But outside successful perception, we do not have the same guide from the world to tell us what the property instances must be. The psycho-physical and behavioural evidence in the experiment indicates only that the subject is reliable at discriminating yellow from other colours. To insist that, in discriminating yellow the subject must have been discriminating the right instance of yellow rather than the left, is to impose a determinate structure on the situation which has no basis in the experimental work. It would be simply the fiction of a metaphysics, seeking to re-draw the messy facts of what one does in the lab, to insist that matters must be so.2 Schellenberg offers us these commitments without any direct argument for them, or any assessment of their consequences. A mental state manifests phenomenological particularity if and only if it phenomenally seems to the subject that there is a particular present. (17) (NS) It phenomenally seems to the subject [∃x x is a particular ∧ x is present] (WS) ∃x it phenomenally seems to the subject [x is a particular ∧ x is present] Schellenberg’s text does not decisively settle the question which disambiguation is intended.3 Issues arise with (PP) either way. Take first (NS). On Schellenberg’s account, the particularity of the perceptual state is grounded in the particular, α, which would stand witness to the existential claim that there is a particular present. Yet, the existential claim could be true while no suitable object is given to the subject. Consider a familiar example of deferred ostension (Nunberg, 1979). You, as imperialising seaman, stride across the sand and encounter a footprint. You have the immediate sense that you are not alone. In this case, it seems to you that there is someone, someone else, who inhabits this island, and on whom you can discharge the white man’s burden. (NS) is satisfied. Yet, equally clearly Man Friday is not perceptually given to Robinson Crusoe in the scene. Reading the RHS of the biconditional as (NS) is not sufficient for the truth of the LHS, so (PP) is false. This point may be obscured by two confounds. On the one hand, we may be permissive in what we count as a perceptual particular: not only concrete individuals, but events and property instances too. Undoubtedly in confronting the footprint there are other particulars that one is experientially given in the circumstances; and these can vouchsafe the claim that perceptual experience has particularity in virtue of particulars. But this claim is not under test. It is (PP) that is supposed to tell us what it is for there to be phenomenological particularity. And in this case, the relevant α is Man Friday, and he is not phenomenologically given in the relevant sense. Secondly, Schellenberg might resist the contention that the RHS is satisfied. She doesn’t explicitly define the verb ‘to be present’ for us, and I have assumed a common reading of it as meaning the entity is nearby to the location designated as ‘here’, where both ‘nearby’ and ‘here’ are open to contextual restriction. Given such an interpretation, there is no question that it is true. Perhaps, though, Schellenberg requires a philosopher’s sense of ‘to be present’; say one associated with the phrase, ‘perceptual presence’. For something to be present in this sense it must be among the particulars given in experience. Ex hypothesi, the shy Man Friday has kept himself out of view, and so is not given. Of course, it would be fine for Schellenberg to stipulate the intended interpretation of the condition. But then the stipulation reveals that the definition of (PP) couldn’t tell us what is meant by phenomenological particularity: rather, it would presuppose our grasp of that condition in our assessment of the conditions under which the RHS would be true. What of (WS)? In this reading, ‘there is a …’ indicates a variable bound from outside the scope of ‘phenomenally seems’. Such wide scope readings are commonly taken to indicate de re attributions of attitude ascriptions. However, while such a reading might fit fine with the doctrine of Relational Particularity (see below), it can hardly apply to (PP). Schellenberg is at pains to insist that (PP) holds of hallucinations no less than it does of cases of successful perception. And she makes clear that on her preferred understanding of hallucinations no actually existing object is an object of awareness for the subject (15). If we take the variable to be bound by an existential quantifier, then it is assigned a value only given the existence of some object which is such that it seems to the subject that it is present. So, contrary to the stated intention, hallucinations would lack phenomenological particularity. It phenomenally seems to the subject that α is present Where we allow that ‘α’ may be an empty term (expressive of such an empty singular mode of presentation). This is not what Schellenberg explicitly defends, though it seems to me the most defensible version of her formula. And this leads to one final speculative question: Does this really succeed? To state this concern properly, we need to move away from sense experience and consider sensory imagining. It is possible to visualize purely fictionally. Closing my eyes, I may visualize an extraordinary Surrealist sculpture consisting of an iron doughnut ring topped with a crown, sitting on the back of an elephant. No such sculpture exists to my knowledge. And no such sculpture is the basis of my imagining. If we can specify the contents of our visual experiences by reference to Fregean contents, then presumably we can specify the contents of our visual imagery by reference to such contents too. Parallel to the case against (NS), it would seem wrong to fix the content of the visualizing just by some existential condition. One can visualize a situation in which there is such a kind of sculpture without the sculpture thereby being on display, without the sculpture being before the mind’s eye. So, we need to specify the case using some singular term. Yet, given that this is purely fictional, and no actual object is being imagined, we have a parallel with the hallucinatory case: the need for a singular mode of presentation, but one which lacks an existing object as a partial constituent or de re anchor. Describing the activity of so visualizing from the subject’s point of view, we might say that it is a case in which it seems to the subject as if that kitsch sculpture, α, is present to them. Is this, then, to ascribe to some visual imagery the phenomenological particularity which Schellenberg associates with successful perception and hallucination? We should hesitate. This is an example of purely fictional visualizing: there is no such actual sculpture which I have before my mind’s eye. In any case of perception where I have strayed across something, it is appropriate to ask for some further information about the object seen: ‘But, which of those was it?’. In a case of hallucination, there will be no answer to such a question, for a reason Schellenberg underlines: no experienced object need exist. But if the subject is unknowingly hallucinating, such a question will seem entirely appropriate, and one might set out to answer it. The case of fictional visualizing is not like that. A questioner who insists that there must be an answer to the question, ‘Which statue did I imagine?’ is confused over the relational rather than notional understanding of: And the key point is that the contrast made by the notional rather than relational understanding of such attributions is something accessible to the subject. Outside of the frame of make-believe, there is no such thing as that which I imagine or attend to: there is no particular for more to be said about. There are many reasons to exploit the expressive power that comes with empty singular terms. We might well use such a device to say something about the character of visual experience or visual imagining. But once we introduce such a device, we can no longer use merely purported singular reference to capture our commitment to the particularity of successful perception and the apparent particularity of many hallucinations. A subject’s perceptual state M brought about by being perceptually related to the particular α is characterized by relational particularity if and only if M is constituted by α. (17) Part of Schellenberg’s aim is to defend this thesis, and to show that endorsing it is independent of any commitment to disjunctivism or naïve realism. But what are the consequences of this endorsement? Does Schellenberg really need to take on this commitment? In the introduction, Schellenberg presents us with a number of the protagonists. On p.5, we are introduced to ‘austere relationalism’, and then its foil, ‘austere representationalism’. Schellenberg’s own favoured position, ‘capacitism’ is advertised as an alternative to both of these, and we are reassured that the dichotomy between the two antagonists is a false dichotomy. What exactly is this opposition, and does Schellenberg really dissolve it? To a first approximation, austere relationalism has it that perception is constitutively relational and lacks any representational component. To a first approximation, austere representationalism has it that perception is constitutively representational and lacks any relational component that has repercussions for the experiential state. (75) Schellenberg’s two glosses come with a qualifier, but no further definition is offered of either position. Rather, Schellenberg first develops her ‘Fregean particularism’ as an alternative to austere representationalism (84 – 102), and then argues against austere relationalism and in favour of perceptual content in the following chapter (103 – 136). An omission in these definitions is that they draw no connection between the positive (and implicitly existential) claim in each view and the universal negative claim with which Schellenberg then further qualifies the positions. This leaves room for further options. For example, given that most perception involves a manifold of objects of awareness, one might suggest that we are related to some objects through acquaintance, but that our experience of others is to be understood in terms of representing. Such a view could not be a form of ‘austere relationalism’ as defined on p.75, since it embraces representations, and Schellenberg takes as the only defining feature of austere relationalism the absence of any representing. But it needn’t be a version of Schellenberg’s Fregean particularism either. So, this view offers a different way of combining relationalism and representationalism: it keeps with the contention that there is an opposition between experience of an object being constituted by an acquaintance relation and experience of an object being constituted by representing. For any object of awareness with which one is acquainted one is not thereby representing it, and vice versa.5 Let’s label this position, ‘awkwardism’. Awkwardism holds that Schellenberg’s capacitism, and its consequent Fregean particularism, are contradictory, at least when they are characterized as Schellenberg does (75). Schellenberg’s dissolution of the false dichotomy must therefore show awkwardism to be mistaken. For her, there can be no such tension between object-acquaintance as a relation, and object-representing as something non-relational. But because she doesn’t explicitly discuss any position like awkwardism, nor mention any conceivable motivation for it, she doesn’t give us the materials to reject it.6 Step back for a moment and ask how we might define the logical space and the competing motivations. The causal argument from hallucination can be seen as providing a key constraint on all accounts of sense perception and perceptual experience.7 Standardly, it is assumed that the same psychological effects may be produced by matching causal conditions proximate to the subject, regardless of whether we have permuted more distal conditions.8 And, just as this constraint would once have been held to rule out naïve or direct realism, so too now the conclusion can be seen to rule out relationalism, whether austere or abundant. The causal argument would not be inconsistent with ‘relationalism’ as such, if we merely meant the claim that having a perceptual experience involves standing in some relation or other, such as standing in an entertaining relation to an abstract entity, be that a proposition, or a property cluster. Likewise, the causal argument is quite consistent with the idea that one might stand in an awareness relation to mind-dependent entities whose existence is constituted by this awareness. What it rules out is the possibility of perceptual experience being partly constituted by some concrete entity which stands at a causal distance from the experience. For, with any case of perception relating subject and some such environmental object, there will be a causally matching case, with the same proximate causal conditions but lacking the presence of the environmental object. If the same psychological effect may be produced in such circumstances, then that kind of effect could not be constituted in part by such an object, or relation to such: at least, if we assume that the point of this talk of constitution is to highlight some essential, non-causal dependence of the constituted entity on the constituting. The authors that Schellenberg labels as ‘austere relationalists’ on the whole wish to affirm the (non-causal) dependence of some perceptual experiences on environmental objects. They must reject the causal argument: challenging the inference or one of its premisses. Is Schellenberg in the same position? Well, as (RP) spells out, she insists that in at least some cases, a perceptual experience is partially constituted by the particular, α, which the subject thereby perceives. So, one might infer that she embraces the non-causal dependence claim: that is, for that state to obtain in any circumstance, the particular, α, must exist in that circumstance. However, Schellenberg also explicitly commits herself to a ‘common factor’ view which treats alike successful perception, misperception and hallucination; she has no truck with the mysteries of disjunctivism. And that seems to imply that she affirms the independence of perceptual experience from its object: the standard conclusion taken to follow from the causal argument. Given the traditional dialectic, relationalism of any form leads to dependence, and that is inconsistent with any view which affirms the independence of our experience from the existence of its objects. This forced choice grounds awkwardism’s rejection of Schellenberg’s official position: awkwardism says that for any object of awareness we must choose between the dependence of experience on it, or the independence of experience from it, there is no third option.9 Schellenberg seeks to avoid this dilemma, but how can she escape it? Perhaps she would deny that non-causal dependence follows from constitution. But the monograph contains almost no discussion of constitution, beyond an association of it with grounding (16). And there is no acknowledgement that others have taken non-causal constitution to induce constitutive dependence, or that this is liable to conflict with endorsing a common factor account. I doubt that the weight of argument can turn on subtle issues here concerning constitution or grounding. Perhaps Schellenberg supposes that her claims about the constitutive relation between a token perceptual state and some object, α, commits her to claims only about that token, and not to any claim about other states of the same type brought about in different situations. After all, the full-dress presentation of her position involves three levels of analysis. She insists on independence at the level of type states of experience which are the common factor, and affirms the dependence claim only for the token states. She does not address whether one can consistently claim that the token state is dependent on the object while the type state is independent. Insisting that the dependence of token states on objects has no consequence for any type of state the token exemplifies would put her at odds with those who have taken constitutive and modal properties of individuals to require some generic element. It would be a radical move on her part, and one which remains otherwise unaddressed in the monograph. Moreover, the main worry can be put in simpler terms than those which invoke constitution (although not inconsistent with them). Although I do not think that we should take sense experience to be a relation, the traditional sense-datum theorists Moore and Russell certainly did. For them, every sense experience is just a binary relation from some ego to some actually existing entity. Within the theory of extensional relations, they are committed to the principle that if some relation F is ever a binary relation, then any instance of it is a binary relation; and as a consequence are committed to the view that because in some cases acquaintance is a binary relation between ego and sense-datum, it is a binary relation in all cases. From their perspective the question arises whether Schellenberg would accept that any sense experience is a binary relation? When it comes to cases of successful perception, Schellenberg’s endorsement of (RP) seems tantamount to answering this question affirmatively. Yet, Chapter 6 makes clear that she also insists that some sense experiences, most notably hallucinations, are not relations (142). But she also accepts that perceptual experience is the same thing, it is ‘a common factor’, across these different kinds of case. Moore and Russell would simply take this combination of answers to be inconsistent. Schellenberg offers no new theory of relations, nor any paraphrase to her official definitions, to palm away the inconsistency. Without those to hand, one may, with awkwardism, doubt that Schellenberg has dissolved any false dichotomy. (III) If S’s perceptual state M brought about by being perceptually related to α is constituted by discriminating and singling out α, then S’s perceptual state M brought about by being perceptually related to α is constituted by α. (25) … if singling out a particular has any significance, then the subject’s perceptual state is constituted by the particular when she perceives that particular. To think otherwise would be to sever the link between the function of the capacity and its output. (26) Absent a recherché understanding of ‘significance’, this bears no weight. Suppose the function of the capacity is to single out whatever is suitably related to the subject, the successful exercise of the capacity in the presence of α will in fact single out α, but we can happily deny that α constitutes this exercise: an exercise of just this capacity could have resulted in a state which singled out β instead, or no object at all. Function and output remain in harmony, but (III) is rejected. Schellenberg demurs, but advances reason not at all. In the further detailed articulation of her view, Schellenberg wishes to understand the perceptual contents associated with the exercise of perceptual capacities in terms of de re Fregean modes of presentation (see 88 – 92). And these are constituted by the particulars singled out by modes of presentation. If the contents are constituted by particulars, and it is essential to the exercise of perceptual capacities that they have contents, does that suffice to show that the perceptual states are constituted by the particulars? Again, the answer is, ‘No’. Schellenberg insists that perceptual states possess both type-contents and token-contents (88). The type-contents are what the exercises of the same discriminatory capacity in different situations have in common, they are what underwrite the common factor or common nature of these states (142). The token-contents are then determined for each state by further features of the situations in which the capacities are exercised. Given this picture, the entirely standard interpretation is that the nature of the perceptual states is constituted by their type-content and not their token-content. Since the type-contents are not constituted by the particulars, there is no ground to suppose the state is constituted by them either.10 The general form of Schellenberg’s theory of perceptual experience and perceptual content can be preserved almost in its entirety without the controversial additional thesis advanced on p.14 and articulated in (RP). In abandoning this, she would avoid the inconsistency that the standard view of relations threatens for her view. But doing so would remove any entitlement to have shown that there is nothing but a false dichotomy between relationalist and representationalist conceptions of sense experience. 4. The cost of Schellenberg’s framing of these issues is that she gives the impression that all that could ground adoption of what traditionally one might call naïve realism, but which she calls ‘austere relationalism’, is a focus on the objects of awareness: Should these be mind-independent elements? Should these be particulars, or just something of a general nature? There is no discussion of the manner in which the objects of awareness are given to us. I would agree with the reformed Schellenberg that a common factor view can accommodate the particularity of individual experiences without embracing any form of relationality. But I don’t think that begins to settle the debate between naïve realism and representational accounts of sense experience. Rather, the question should be what it is for sense experience to have a representational nature; and what it is about our experiences that might lead us to attribute to them a relational or non-representational character instead. We can get clearer about this if we move away from focusing just on sense experience and consider other examples of experience which we can all agree are manifestly representational. That takes us from the unity of perception to the diversity of experiences.