Where's the Beef? Phenomenal Concepts as Both Demonstrative and Substantial

Abstract

One popular materialist response to the explanatory gap identifies phenomenal concepts with type-demonstrative concepts. This kind of response, however, faces a serious challenge: that our phenomenal concepts seem to provide a richer characterization of their referents than just the demonstrative characterization of ‘that quality’. In this paper, I develop a materialist account that beefs up the contents of phenomenal concepts while retaining the idea that these contents contain demonstrative elements. I illustrate this account by focusing on our phenomenal concepts of phenomenal colour. The phenomenal colours stand in a similarity space relative to one another in virtue of being complex qualities—qualities that contain saturation, lightness, and various aspects of hue as component elements. Our phenomenal concepts, in turn, provide a demonstrative characterization of each of these component elements as well as a description of how much of that element is present in a given phenomenal colour. The result is an account where phenomenal concepts contain demonstrative elements and yet provide a significantly richer characterization of the intrinsic nature of their referents than just ‘that quality’.

Notes

¹Michael Tye, for instance, explicates ‘the F’ as ‘the bearer of enough of the following features: being a liquid, filling lakes and oceans, coming out of taps, being called 'water’ by English experts, being necessary for life on the planet, falling from the sky' [2000: 29].

²People who have followed Loar's lead in this regard include Hill and McLaughlin [1999], Carruthers 2000, 2004, Tye 1999, 2000, and Levin 2002, 2007.

³Although Loar's account has been the most popular version of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy, it is not the only version of that strategy. John Perry [2001], for instance, has argued that phenomenal concepts are a species of indexical concept and, as such, carry a content that cannot be a priori deduced from non-indexical representations of the same objects/properties. William Lycan [1996], in turn, maintains that our introspective representations of phenomenal states are semantically primitive and, hence, carry a content that cannot be a priori deduced from the content of our non-introspective representations of those states.

⁴To be clear, this challenge can be levelled against most versions of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy, including the versions offered by Perry [2001] and Lycan [1996].

⁵Levine is not alone in making this claim. Block and Stalnaker [1999] are also type-B materialists who maintain that water facts are not a priori deducible from physical/functional facts.

⁶Several type-B materialists have argued that our phenomenal concepts contain as constituents the very phenomenal qualities that they refer to. (See, for example, Papineau [2002] and Block [2007]). Such an account could be offered as a response to the New Challenge. I follow Levine [2007: 163], however, in thinking that such accounts run the risk of conflating the physical presence of a phenomenal quality with the cognitive presence of that quality.

⁷This point was not lost on Loar, who claimed that type-demonstratives often contain non-demonstrative elements—‘ In identifying a thing as of a recognitional kind, we almost always presuppose a more general type to which the kind belongs: four-legged animal, plant, physical thing, perceptible event. A recognitional concept will then have the form of “physical thing of that (perceived) kind” or “internal state of that kind”, and so forth’[1997: 601].

⁸A minor terminological difficulty arises here: a relational description of a quality space of various experiences is probably not best characterized as being a ‘functional’ description. As Austen Clark [2000: 17–18] points out, functional descriptions are typically conceived of as being descriptions of causal structures and relations; descriptions of a quality space, in contrast, are descriptions of the qualitative similarities, not the causal relations, between experiences.

⁹Chalmers [1996: 235], for example, complains that any relational description of the phenomenal colours will fail to capture their intrinsic nature.

¹⁰For an early discussion of the claim that the phenomenal qualities of all sensory experiences can be represented in quality spaces, see Quine [1969]. For more recent discussions, see Clark [1993] and Churchland [1995].

¹¹For additional discussion of these elements of perceived colour, see Hardin [1988] and Palmer [1999].

¹²Munsell intended this model to be a representation of the external colours. But one can also use it as a representation of the phenomenal colours, as I am doing here.

¹³For more details, see Munsell Color Company [1976].

¹⁴See Hering [1964].

¹⁵There is a third mechanism, one where phenomenal black and phenomenal white are at opposition to each other. The activity of this mechanism determines the lightness of a given phenomenal colour. It is controversial, however, to describe this third mechanism as being an opponent processor. Although there are no phenomenal colours that appear to be both phenomenal red and phenomenal green (or both phenomenal blue and phenomenal yellow), phenomenal grey appears to be both phenomenal white and phenomenal black. See Palmer [1999: 110].

¹⁶The claim that these resemblances are internal relations is accepted by a number of philosophers, including Armstrong [1989], Hardin 1988, 1997, Johnston [1992], and Clark [1993].

¹⁷In favour of this claim, Byrne and Hilbert cite studies by Sternheim and Boynton [1966] and Werner and Wooten [1979].

¹⁸For some speculation about the empirical underpinnings of the element of warmth, see Hardin [1988: 129–31] and Hardin [1997: 297–8].

¹⁹In this passage, Byrne and Hilbert are talking about how the external colours are represented by our experience. But since they identify phenomenal colour with experientially represented external colour, this account of represented colour doubles as their account of phenomenal colour.

²⁰I don't want to take a stand on whether warmth and strength exhaust the character of a given unitary hue. So I'm not assuming that the characterization that our phenomenal concepts provide of a given unitary hue can be reduced to the characterization they provide of its warmth and strength.

²¹I am grateful to an anonymous referee for bringing this point to my attention.

²²Recall that Chalmers [2003] thinks that our phenomenal concepts provide a complete characterization of their referents. If Chalmers were to agree with my claim that the phenomenal colours are structurally complex, he would be committed to the idea that our phenomenal concepts provide a complete characterization of the simple elements of these phenomenal qualities. So it is possible that Chalmers would echo Levine's objection.

²³Earlier, I made a point of saying that I didn't want to take a stand on what the ultimate simples are of visual experience of colour. So I am assuming that warmth is a simple phenomenal element only for expositional purposes.

²⁴It could be argued that the simple elements of phenomenal colour (such as warmth, if warmth is simple) could stand in a quality space relative to one another if the resemblances in question were primitive. But the claim that there are primitive (and imperfect) similarities between visual qualities is pretty controversial. At one time, of course, it was thought that the phenomenal colours provided such an example. (This was Hume's Error.) But, as we have seen, this claim was introspectively naïve.

²⁵The basic idea of this paper was developed while I was a resident in John Heil's 2006 N.E.H. Summer Seminar, ‘Mind and Metaphysics’, at Washington University in St Louis. Earlier versions were presented at the 61^st Mountain–Plains Philosophy Conference, September 28th, 2007 and at the 100th meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, March 21st, 2008. I want to thank Dave Beisecker and Kelly Trogdon for their comments on those earlier papers. I also want to thank Torin Alter, Chad Brockman, David Hilbert, Brendan O'Sullivan, and two anonymous referees from this journal for helpful conversations and comments along the way.