A Point of View on Points of View

Abstract

A number of writers have deployed the notion of a point of view as a key to the allegedly theory-resistant subjective aspect of experience. I examine that notion more closely than is usually done and find that it cannot support the anti-objectivist's case. Experience may indeed have an irreducibly subjective aspect, but the notion of a point of view cannot be used to show that it does.

Keywords:

• Consciousness
• Experience
• Objectivity
• Point of view
• Subjectivity

Notes

Notes

[1] For an overview of this line of argument, see Davies and Humphreys (1993). There are some who go further and deny that it would be even about thought, agreeing with Searle (1992), who has vigorously argued that there can be no intentionality without consciousness. (For resistance, see Nelkin, 1993.)

[2] A prominent proponent of this contention is McGinn (1983). My criticism of his employment of the notion of a perspective is not intended as a challenge to his main argument for the ineradicable mysteriousness of consciousness (McGinn, 1999), which I find interesting and somewhat persuasive.

[3] Well-known recent proponents of some version of the line include, in addition to Searle (1992) and McGinn (1983), Jackson (1982), Levine (1983) and Nagel (1974). Noteworthy dissenters include Dennett (1991), Foss (1989), Russow (1982), and van Gulick (1985).

[4] See, for example, Mandik (2001). For reasons not to think of this difference as one between types and tokens, see below.

[5] Nagel (1974) speaks in all these ways about what it is that we cannot do. Actually, the differences among these characterizations do matter, but they will not play a role in my discussion.

[6] It is a curious feature of Nagel's (1974) paper that his anti-physicalist argument rests on a premise that appears to assume at least a weak form of physicalism: that a (kind of) creature's physiology determines the nature of that (kind of) creature's experience. I discuss this feature in Biro (1991).

[7] While Nagel (1974) develops his notion of a point of view, initially, in terms of a creature's location in sensory space, he also argues that that location determines, at least to some extent, the creature's location in conceptual space. The notion of a perspective has, by contrast, sometimes been applied directly to intentional states. (Indeed, McGinn's way of putting things in the passage just cited is clearly intended to be general enough to apply across the board.) On such application, see Loar (1987); for skepticism about it, see Biro (1992).

[8] The thought here seems to be that if it is necessary for a state to exist that it should have an owner, it is no ordinary state. But this cannot be right as just stated, since this necessary condition applies to many, perhaps all, perfectly ordinary states. Consider basic states of bodies: Nothing can be a state of being in motion, unless it is some body's being in motion. In fact, nothing can be a state without being a state of someone or something. Surely, something more is needed to make a state a state of a special kind than the fact that it needs an “owner” in this trivial sense. (As for how to understand ‘subjective’—I discuss the various senses of ‘objective’ with which ‘subjective’ in Nagel's (1974) and Searle's (1992) sense might be contrasted in Biro (1993))

[9] Or, perhaps, spatiotemporal location. I shall side-step the complications this would present for the common-sense picture that points in space are individuatable independently of time and that different things can occupy them at different times. I think this will not matter for present purposes. The important thing is that even a spatiotemporal location can be occupied by different things (including different observers) in different possible worlds. This is clearly not the case with the other way of individuating points of view about to be discussed.

[10] I shall sometimes use ‘attitudinal’ to cover all the propositional attitudes involved in this conception.

[11] For a fuller discussion of this aspect of the matter, see Biro (1993)

[12] For some clear cases, see Biro (1993).

[13] Consider Perry's (1979) example of the shopper's discovery that it was he who had laid the trail of sugar he has been following on the supermarket floor. That discovery will certainly change his plan of action, from wanting to warn someone else to seeking to secure his own bags, and is, as Perry rightly insists, essential to the correct specification of the shopper's post-discovery propositional attitudes. But, important as the shopper's discovery is, what he discovers is a relational fact between an event (in this case) and himself, one that is not constitutive of what the event in question is. After all, a moment ago he believed that the same event was related in the same way to someone else! So, the defender of the notion of a point of view that is nontrivially subjective can get no mileage from considerations about the so-called essential indexical. (See Perry, 1979; Lewis, 1977; but also Millikan, 1990.) (I am grateful to David Copp and to a referee for this journal for pressing me on this.)

[14] Hare (1988, p. 282) agrees. See also Vendler (1984).

[15] It may be countered that the subjectivist is not saying that the identity of a point of view depends on whose it is, on whether it is Bat's or Pat's, only that depending on which it is, it will seem different to Bat and Pat, respectively. True—but we have already seen that to think of something as one's own is to attribute a relational property to that thing and that to do so is to leave the intrinsic properties of the thing owned unchanged. It is not that such relational properties are unimportant: Realizing that I am the sugar-spiller does make all the difference—but not to what I am, namely, a sugar-spiller. Sugar-spilling is the same whoever does it, just as a point of view is the same whoever has it.