Representationalism showdown

I see that Alex Byrne and Michael Tye have just posted their reply, "Qualia Ain't in the Head", to Adam Pautz's paper "Sensory Awareness is not a Wide Physical Relation".  Both papers are forthcoming in Nous.  Pautz argues against externalist representationalism about sensory experience, and Byrne and Tye defend it.  The centerpiece of Pautz's case is the scenario of Twin Maxwell.  Maxwell is an ordinary perceiver of orange who represents it as a mixed hue, via activation of dual opponent-processing channels.  Twin Maxwell is a counterfactual perceiver in a different environment, who normally responds to (what we call) orange things with activation of a single channel, the sort of activation that normally goes along with representing a color as a unique hue.  Pautz argues that (1) Maxwell and Twin Maxwell have different experiences when looking at an orange in typical circumstances: Maxwell has a "mixed hue" experience, Twin Maxwell has a "unique hue" experience.  He also argues that (2) wide representationalism (at least of the Dretske/Tye variety, where states represent those properties that they causally covary with under normal conditions) is committed to saying that Maxwell and Twin Maxwell have the same sort of experience: both are in an internal state that is caused by the same external physical property P in optimal conditions, so both states will represent P, so both states will have the same phenomenal character. So externalist representationalism is false.

Byrne and Tye say various things in reply, questioning (1) in some cases, and also noting that externalist representationalism is not committed to Dretske/Tye representationalism.  But the core of their reply, toward the end of their paper, is to deny (2), holding that even Dretske/Tye representationalism is consistent with Maxwell and Twin Maxwell having different experiences.  (Or at least, that it is consistent with there being different experiences in all the cases where (1) is plausible.)  Their key point is that when Twin Maxwell looks at an orange thing, and assuming he has an experience as of unique red or some other unique hue here, then he is not perceiving under optimal conditions, precisely because he is perceiving the orange object as red (or as having some other unique hue), and such an experience will be nonveridical.  If so, the state does not causally covary with P under optimal conditions, so it does not represent P, so it need not have the same phenomenal character as Maxwell's experience.

I think the state of play favors Pautz here.  It seems illegitimate to appeal to nonveridicality in explaining why conditions are not optimal.  For an experience to be nonveridical is for it to have a false content; and on the Dretske/Tye account, the content of an experience is to be explained partly in terms of the notion of optimality.  If optimality is then explained partly in terms of veridicality, this account will be circular.  So a noncircular account requires that optimality be explained without invoking notions such as veridicality and content, perhaps instead using notions such as normality, fitness, and so on.  So to make their case, Byrne and Tye need to show that Twin Maxwell's conditions are suboptimal in some such independent sense.  But they have not done this, and it is not easy to see how this could be done, since Maxwell and Twin Maxwell's circumstances seem to be symmetrical with respect to the natural candidates for the relevant independent features.  (A version of this point is made by Pautz in his reply to the second objection [pp. 27-30] in the long version of his paper on the web, and, I gather, in a footnote in the abridged version that will appear in Nous.)  Perhaps there is some independent grounding for suboptimality that could be found, but this is far from obvious. 

Of course there are other replies available.  If the externalist abandons the Dretske/Tye account of content, other options will be available.  But it looks like the symmetry considerations generalize to many other accounts, so it would at least be interesting to see some other options spelled out.  Personally I think the best reply for the externalist representationalist is Pautz's "third objection" [pp. 30-31 of the web version]: the appeal to compositional representation of distinct but necessarily coextensive complex properties.  Maxwell might represent the property <R to degree 0.5 and Y to degree .5>, while Twin Maxwell might represent the coextensive property <R' to degree 1 and Y' to degree 0>, where R' and Y' are the properties tracked by Twin Maxwell's opponent-process channels corresponding to our R and Y channels. Pautz suggests in response that even the states of the single channels in Twin Maxwell (activation 1 on the first channel, activation 0 on the second channel) will track <R to degree 0.5> and <Y to degree 0.5> respectively.   But the externalist can easily handle this by holding that the different states of a single channel are constrained to represent different degrees of a single quantifiable property R', which must differ from R, and that <R' to degree 1> and <R to degree 0.5> are distinct properties.  As Pautz notes, this reply doesn't generalize to other inversion cases involving noncompositional representation in cases involving pain and taste.  But the externalist might reply that the real power of Maxwell case comes from the compositionality, and that in these other cases it is easier for them to deny that the relevant subjects have different experiences.

Of course there's a lot more to be said.  It will be interesting to see where things go from here.  It's interesting in any case to see the recent groundswell of support for internalist versions of representationalism, in the work of people like Tim Crane, Terry Horgan and John Tienson, Joe Levine, Georges Rey, Sydney Shoemaker, Charles Siewert, and Brad Thompson, as well as Pautz and yours truly.  Clearly this is the wave of the future!

Comments

[Gregg Rosenberg]

Has anyone done a fine grained taxonomy of representationalist positions? In addition to the externalist/internalist cut, I can see four possible further divides within each. In order of strength:

1) Extensional representationalism - As a matter of extensional fact, all the phenomenal properties in the human mind are representational. However, phenomenal properties as a type may include properties that are not representational and which occur in other contexts than human cognition.

2) Supervenience representationalism - All phenomenal properties supervene on certain kinds of representations or representation forming activity, though some phenomenal properties may not themselves be representational.

3) Essentialist representationalism - All phenomenal properties are essentially representational in character.

4) Representational identity -- There is nothing to phenomemanl content except a certain type of representational content.

I disagree with all 4 views, though I'm relatively open-minded about (1) while being pretty settled about the falsity of (2)-(4).

There is also a dimension in which the claim can be coarse grained or fine grained. For example, one could hold that the phenomenal state corresponding to an entire unified conscious experience has, of necessity, certain representational content. One could hold a similar position about the content of a unified state of a perceptual modality. Or one could hold it about the simpler sensory properties within phenomenology.

I find some of the four theses above harder to deny at the coarse grained level than at the fine grained level.

And to play the grouch here: I find this whole debate between internalist and externalist representationalists to be like a depressing argument between tweedle dee and tweedle dum. No matter what kind of representational content is associated with experience, internal or external, focusing on it isn't going to help us explain consciousness any more perspicuously. In fact, it is just going to muddle things as we become hopelessly bogged down in conflicting "intuitions" about what experiences might represent what kinds of things. Once we accept the hard problem, we should be looking for ways to bridge to less arguable evidence, not agree to collectively turn our Titanic into the iceberg of intentionality.

This mad, faddish rush towards representationalism is really depressing because it seems to take philosophy 20 yrs or more to ring its mistakes out of its system; which means, essentially, with this turn down the garden path, all the brightest minds will be withering together as they argue ceaselessly about undecidable counterfactuals, and no significant progress will be made on the hard problem in my lifetime. And that stinks, because I've only one life to live.

[djc]

Hi Gregg, my paper "The Representational Character of Experience" has a taxonomy of various sorts of representationalism, though not quite the sorts you mention here. Obviously I don't agree about the depressingness. First, it's not the case that the only interesting problem about consciousness is the hard problem. Understanding the structure and character of consciousness is interesting and important in its own right, whether or not it yields a bridge across the explanatory gap. Second, it may well be that this sort of project will ultimately shed some light on the hard problem. I think that to really cross the explanatory gap, we will need a much better understanding of the structure and character of consciousness. If that character is essentially representational, then that gives us some constraints on the construction of an explanatory bridge. Obviously I don't think the matter is nearly as simple as some reductive representationalists do. But speaking just for myself, one central motivation of my recent attention to the representational character and the unity of consciousness is to try to get a better grip on just what sort of creature stands on the other side of the explanatory gap.

[Gregg Rosenberg]

Hi Dave, I think your work on the unity of consciousness has been first rate, and I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from trying to understand the structure and representational character of consciousness.

It's just that I'm pessimistic the questions about what consciousness is and what representation is are the same, or even largely the same. But that seems to be the direction that the ongoing Representationalist debate is going. Perhaps I'm misreading it?

To continue being a grouch: I'm dispirited by what I see published on representationalism because people signing onto the movement seem to be falling very enthusiastically into the standard trap of claiming too much for their answers and stopping too soon in their questioning. Almost by habit, papers being written seem to be more in the character of staking out professional territory than carefully (and appropriately tentatively) exploring what we can claim confidently about the structure of consciousness. And that's sending people off after red herrings. Maybe I'm just in a foul mood and am being unfair but that certainly seems to me to be the pattern.

I certainly think conscious states are largely representational, and at a course grain of consideration, a grain covering states of whole unified modalities, I would probably sign up to the essentially representational camp. From there, I'm at least pretty open minded about how much finer-grained the claim can plausibly be made between there and the level of primitive sensory properties. Finally, I also think there is an interesting question around What is the meaning of experience and where does meaning come from? But all that is a far cry from Representationalism as it seems to be evolving, which is towards a collapse or essential intertwining of the two questions of intentionality and phenomenal character.