Adam Pautz

A surface cannot appear both pure red and pure green at the same time, or both round and square at the same time. And nothing can appear square if it is red; there are conditional beliefs but not conditional experiences. In my book *Perception* and elsewhere, I raised the question: what explains such “laws of appearance”? I also noted that “representationalists” about experience may seem to have trouble explaining them. If we can represent in thought that something is round and square, or that something is square if it is red, why are we forbidden from representing these things in experience? In his article “Empirical Explanations of the Laws of Appearance” (this JOURNAL), E. J. Green suggests that representationalists can provide empirical explanations of the laws of appearance. Here I will explain why I think we should not yet accept Green’s approach. First (§1) I will show that Green’s approach requires rejecting “weak rationalism” and accepting “strong empiricism” about the laws of appearance. Then (§§2-3) I will question Green’s case for strong empiricism and explain why I think we should favor weak rationalism.

I very much enjoyed Matt Duncan’s elegant and innovative book (and also have benefited from our many discussions of these issues with him over the years). I agree with Matt Duncan about something important: experience matters. Conscious experience is one of the things that has genuine epistemic, aesthetic, and moral significance. But I disagree with him about something fundamental to his book — namely, why experience matters. On Matt’s acquaintance-based account, the significance of experience always derives from acquaintance with existing items — even in the case of hallucination. In this he follows a tradition running through Russell and Fumerton. It is the central claim of the book. On my own acquaintance-free account, by contrast, experience is fundamentally intentional: its significance is grounded in how things seem, not in acquaintance with any existing item. Here I side with Pryor, Siegel, and Smithies, among others. My comments proceed in three parts. First, I present a traditional argument from hallucination for an acquaintance-free account of the epistemic significance of experience. Second, I consider Matt’s objections to such an account, and offer my replies. Third, I ask whether this “in house” disagreement really matters — and confess that I am not sure it does. What unites us is greater than what divides us!

The debate over the nature of perceptual experience has been going on for quite a while now. How can we make progress? A recent trend in the philosophy of perception has been to look to empirical studies. For instance, some have used vision science to argue against naïve realism (e.g. Block 2010, Pautz 2017). However, science can only take us so far. For example, the representational view and the opposing “internal physical state view” (Papineau 2021) are equally consistent with vision science. In such cases, we have no choice but to try a different and older methodology that draws on introspection. For instance, as we will see, some say that we should prefer the representational view to the internal state view because it fits better the “transparency” of experience or the “externally directed character” of experience. This chapter will provide an introductory overview of the role of introspection in the debate over the nature of perceptual experience

In “Radical Interpretation” (1974), David Lewis asked: by what constraints, and to what extent, do the non-intentional, physical facts about Karl determine the intentional facts about him? There are two popular approaches: the reductive externalist program and the phenomenal intentionality program. I argue against both approaches. I will agree with friends of phenomenal intentionality that reductive externalists neglect the role of our internally determined conscious experiences in grounding intentionality, but I will fault them for not adequately explaining intentionality. They cannot just say “conscious experience explains it” and leave it at that. However, I will sketch an alternative multistage account incorporating ideas from both camps. In particular, by appealing to Lewisian ideas, we can explain how Karl’s conscious experiences help to ground the contents of his other mental states.

The chapter criticizes the thesis that “cognitive phenomenology” might help ground mental content. Criticisms concern what the chapter calls “altered cognitive qualia cases”, “absent cognitive qualia cases”, and “disembodied cognitive qualia cases”. But the chapter defends a thesis in the same vicinity. In the chapter's view, it is sensory phenomenology, not “cognitive phenomenology”, that is the source of all determinate intentionality. To explain how, a modified version of David Lewis’s theory of mental content is developed.

What is the role of conscious experience in the epistemology of perceptual knowledge: how should we characterise what is going on in seeing that o is F in order to illuminate the contribution of seeing o to their status as cases of knowing that o is F? My proposal is that seeing o involves conscious acquaintance with o itself, the concrete worldly source of the truth that o is F, in a way that may make it evident to the subject that o is an instance of ‘x is F’ as she understands this, and hence evident that o is F. Seeing that o is F is thus a way of its being evident that o is F and is therefore a way of knowing that o is F.

We are all familiar with Frank Jackson’s (1982) story about Mary. Mary has lived all her life in a black-and-white room. She has never been “acquainted with” the quality red, although maybe she has read about it in a book. One wonderful day she is released. She sees a tomato and becomes acquainted with this quality for the first time. Jackson used the Mary case to illustrate the “epistemic gap” between the physical and the experiential. That was the basis of his knowledge argument against physicalism. I will use a new Mary case to illustrate a different argument against physicalism: the significance argument. However, my argument will only target one form of physicalism: the austere “reductive” form of physicalism defended by David Lewis, Ted Sider, Cian Dorr, and others. I call it "identification physicalism".

I begin with an initial sketch of French and Phillips’ brand of naive realism, which appeals to "ways of perceiving". Then I consider two arguments for it: their own argument concerning illusion, and another argument based on what I have called "internal dependence". Next I turn to criticism. I argue that their “quietism” about "ways of perceiving" is unmotivated; there are several possible positive accounts and it is unclear why French and Phillips reject them. I raise three phenomenological problems for the view. Finally, I raise a problem about sensible qualities.

I reply to comments on my book Perception (Routledge 2021) by Umrao Sethi, Jeff Speaks and Brian Cutter. Sethi objects to my representational view of perception on the ground that that having an experience of a color or shape can enable you to know what that color or shape is like only if it is actually present in the experience. Speaks has a very interesting discussion of my puzzle of the laws of appearance for the representational view. And Cutter asks what I have against 'neural sense datum theory'. In my responses, I try to take the discussion forward. At the end, I develop a new argument against reductive physicalist theories of sensible qualities based on a principle I call "qualitative closure".

This is a reply to Luke Roelof's comments (2017) on my paper "A Dilemma for Russellian Monists about Consciousness" (2015). On both Russellian monism and dualism, experiences are distinct from neural-functional states and they are correlated with some neural-functional states and not others. The only difference between them concerns the status of the extra-logical principles linking experiences with their neural-functional correlates (e. g. increasing S1 firing rates results in increasing pain): Russellian monists hold that they are a priori and necessary, while dualists say that they are a posteriori and contingent. How are we to decide between them? Roelofs suggests that Russellian monism is simpler than dualism. I argue against this. Both face the "T-shirt problem": both require a swarm of extra-logical principles linking brain states with experiences. The Russellian monist might engage in some unbridled speculation: they are somehow derivable from small set of more basic extra-logical principles ("principles of combination"), even if we cannot supply the details. But the dualist can do the same. The only difference is that the dualist will speculate that those more basic principles are contingent rather than necessary a priori. Given our limited evidence, there is no reason (and in particular no simplicity-based reason) to prefer the Russellian monist's speculations to the dualist's parallel speculations.

Unlike identity physicalism, ground physicalism does not achieve the physicalist dream. It faces the T-shirt problem for ground physicalism (Pautz 2014; Schaffer this volume; Rubenstein ms). In the case of insentient nature, it may be able to get by with small handful of very general ground laws to explain the emergence of nonfundamental objects and properties – for example, a few “principle of plenitude”. But I argue that for the case consciousness it will require a separate huge raft of special, anomalous psychophysical ground laws. So it is just as complex and nonuniform as dualism.

In this chapter, Pautz raises a puzzle about spatial experience for phenomenal internalists like Ned Block. If an accidental, lifelong brain-in-the-void (BIV) should have all the same experiences as you, it would have an experience as of items having various shapes, and be able to acquire concepts of those shapes, despite being cut off from real things with the shapes. Internalists cannot explain this by saying that BIV is presented with Peacocke-style visual field regions having various shapes, because these would have to be non-physical sense data. They might instead explain this by saying that BIV “phenomenally represents” various shape properties. But since BIV lacks any interesting physical relations to shapes, this would imply that phenomenally representation is an irreducible relation.

This is a chapter from my introductory book *Perception* covering the representational view of experience. I use the Ramsey-Lewis method to define the theoretical term "experiential representation". I clarify and discuss various questions for representationalists, for instance, "how rich is the content of experience?" and "is the content of visual experience singular or general?" Finally, I address some objections to representationalism - in particular, that it cannot explain perceptual presence (John Campbell), and that it cannot explain the "laws of appearance" (constraints on how things can appear).

This volume is a collection of new work on the significance of consciousness: in what ways does conscious experience matter, and why? Many have thought that consciousness is not merely a theoretically puzzling phenomenon, but that it is important morally, epistemically, or in other ways. For example, this is a key reason why people care how consciousness is distributed: do animals, insects or even near future AIs have it? But in what sense (if at all) is this true, and why? And how does this relate to our view of what consciousness is? Do different theories of consciousness have different implications for how it matters? Does the view that consciousness reduces to a physical state of the brain imply that it does not matter in the way we think it does? The Importance of Being Conscious brings together a variety of perspectives on these questions from leading theorists in ethics and philosophy of mind.

This paper elaborates on an argument in my book *Perception*. It has two parts. In the first part, I argue against what I call "basic" naive realism, on the grounds that it fails to accommodate what I call "internal dependence" and it requires an empirically implausible theory of sensible properties. Then I turn Craig French and Ian Phillips’ modified naïve realism as set out in their recent paper "Austerity and Illusion". It accommodates internal dependence. But it may retain the empirically implausible theory of sensible properties. And it faces other empirical problems. Representationalism about experiences avoids those problems and is to be preferred.

In his excellent book *The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience* (2021), David Papineau argues against standard theories of sensory experience: the sense datum view, representationalism, naïve realism, and so on. The only view left standing is his own “qualitative view”. On Papineau’s physicalist version, all experiences are nothing but neural states, and the only features essentially involved in experience are intrinsic neural properties (29-30, 95-97). In my book *Perception* (2021), I developed an argument from spatial experience against this kind of view (also Pautz 2010, 2017). Here I elaborate on that argument in the light of Papineau’s discussion.

In his superb book, The Metaphysics of Representation, Williams sketches biconditional reductive definitions of representational states in non-representational terms. The central idea is an extremely innovative variety of interpretationism about belief and desire. Williams is inspired by David Lewis but departs significantly from him. I am sympathetic to interpretationism for some basic beliefs and desires. However, I will raise three worries for Williams’s version (§2–4). It neglects the role of conscious experience, it makes beliefs and desire too dependent on "hidden facts", and it commits to the unmotivated and problematic claim that mental content is always explanatorily prior to linguistic content. Then, I will suggest a modified version of interpretationism that avoids these problems (§5). I will conclude with a general question (§6).

One of Jerry Fodor’s many seminal contributions to philosophy of mind was his inner sentence theory of belief and desire. To believe that p is to have a subpersonal inner sentence in one’s “belief-box” that means that p, and to desire that q is to have a subpersonal inner sentence in one’s “desire-box” that means that q. I will distinguish between two accounts of box-inclusion that exhaust the options: liberal and restrictive. I will show that both accounts have the mistaken implication that in certain cases there can be radical but “secret” changes in a subject’s beliefs and desires. I will suggest that the correct moral to draw is that we should instead accept what Eric Schwitzgebel has called a “surface-level” theory of belief and desire.

1. IntroductionIn this superb book, Williams sets a very ambitious goal for himself: to sketch biconditionals that define representational conditions in non-representational terms (p. xvii). Representation is not a spooky, primitive capacity of the mind; it is built from more basic ingredients. At the centre is his radical interpretation theory of belief and desire, inspired by the work of David Lewis. To a first approximation: Basic radical interpretation theory. The correct assignment of beliefs and desires to an agent is the most rationalizing assignment given her perceptual evidence and dispositions to act. (pp. 16, 97ff)Williams does not give a master argument for this account of belief and desire over rival accounts in which constitutive rationality plays no role. Rather, his main goal is the laudatory one of theory-building. In this respect, his book hearkens back to the decade or so from the early 80s to the early 90s that was the heyday for developing grand theories of representation. In particular, his main aim is to develop the details of the basic radical interpretation theory – something Lewis never fully did. The result is a unique, multi-stage theory of representation that departs importantly from Lewis in many places.

In previous work (Nanay ed. 2017, Phil Issues 2020), I developed "the problem of the laws of appearance" for representationalism. There are metaphysically necessary constraints appearance and representationalists have difficulty explaining them. Here I develop the problem in a somewhat different way. Then I address the question of whether naive realist might be better placed than representationalists to answer the problem. Perhaps they can derive constraints on appearance from constraints on reality. If so, then the laws of appearance provide a neglected argument for naive realism over representationalism. However, in the end I question whether naive realists really are better placed to answer the problem.

In “Radical Interpretation” (1974), David Lewis asked: by what constraints, and to what extent, do the non-intentional, physical facts about Karl determine the intentional facts about him? There are two popular approaches: the reductive externalist program and the phenomenal intentionality program. I argue against both approaches. Then I sketch an alternative multistage account incorporating ideas from both camps. If we start with Karl's conscious experiences, we can appeal to Lewisian ideas to explain his other intentional states. This account develops the multistage Lewisian approach presented at the end of my earlier "Does Phenomenology Ground Mental Content?" (2013).

This is a chapter from my book Perception (Routledge). I explain the physical state view of sensory experience (Papineau, McLaughlin, others). I criticize an argument against it based on the "transparency observation". Then I develop two alternative arguments against it. The first is a Leibniz's Law argument based on the essentially externally directed character of some experiences. The second concerns "brains in vats". Finally I consider a recent response due to David Papineau, which involves rejecting essential external directedness.