Cognitive phenomenology: in defense of recombination

ABSTRACT

The cognitive experience view of thought holds that the content of thought is determined by its cognitive-phenomenal character. Adam Pautz argues that the cognitive experience view is extensionally inadequate: it entails the possibility of mix-and-match cases, where the cognitive-phenomenal properties that determine thought content are combined with different sensory-phenomenal and functional properties. Because mix-and-match cases are metaphysically impossible, Pautz argues, the cognitive experience view should be rejected. This paper defends the cognitive experience view from Pautz’s argument. I build on resources in the philosophy of mind literature to show that cognitive-phenomenal properties are modally independent from sensory-phenomenal and functional properties. The result is that mix-and-match cases, though modally remote, are metaphysically possible. The possibility of mix-and-match cases allows us to move from defensive posture to a critical one: it poses problems for any theory of content that imposes rationality constraints, including Pautz’s positive view, phenomenal functionalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Thought
• cognitive phenomenology
• phenomenal consciousness
• Adam Pautz
• rationality

Acknowledgments

Thanks to André Curtis-Trudel, Scott Harkema, Brett Karlan, Tristram McPherson, Daniel Olson, Adam Pautz, Richard Samuels, Charles Siewert, Declan Smithies, Abe Wang, and an anonymous referee for comments and discussion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This is Goff’s (2018) label for Pautz’s cases.

2 In Pitt’s (2004) terminology, thought has proprietary phenomenology.

3 See Strawson (1994/2010), Siewert (2011), Horgan and Tienson (2002), Graham, Horgan, and Tienson (2007), and Pitt (2009).

4 For an account of phoneme perception, see O’Callaghan (2010).

5 This example is Siewert’s (1998).

6 Pautz says that he is unable to ‘positively imagine’ these cases (Pautz 2013, 216–217). By ‘positively imagine’, he might have in mind what Chalmers (2002) calls positive conceivability. Specifically, Pautz seems to think that we should be able to perceptually imagine isolation cases, if such cases are possible. But perceptual imagination does not exhaust imaginability. We can positively imagine Germany winning the second World War, where this content isn’t a candidate content of perceptual experiences. We can, following Chalmers, ‘modally imagine’ such contents. I adopt this notion of conceivability when arguing that we can conceive of mix-and-match cases.

7 For support of the claim that zombies are conceivable, see Chalmers (1996). For criticism, see Balog (1999).

8 In the postscript to ‘Radical Interpretation’ (1983), Lewis explicitly extends his treatment of mad pain to the attitudes, acknowledging that ‘mad belief’ is possible as well as mad pain.

9 See the continuity argument in Smithies, Lennon, and Samuels (2022) which makes a similar move.

10 Prinz (2011) argues that the contents of thought are conscious only in the sense that thoughts’ sensory vehicles are conscious.