Işık Sarıhan
I am an analytic philosopher working mainly on problems in philosophy of mind and metaphilosophy.
I obtained my PhD in 2017 from the Department of Philosophy at Central European University, where I was later involved as a research affiliate from 2018 to 2020. During my doctoral studies I spent a term as a visiting student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2014) and a year at University of Fribourg as a member of EXRE (Experience and Reason) research group (2014-2015).
I wrote my MA thesis on the incompatibility of content externalism and mentalistic causal explanation for METU Cognitive Science graduate program. I hold a BA degree in linguistics from Ankara University, with a thesis on the biological evolution of the human language faculty.
In philosophy of mind, I am interested in the problems of phenomenal consciousness, introspection, mental content and perception, and the methodological issues surrounding these problems.
In my PhD thesis, I propose the view that the two rival approaches to the problem of consciousness are both problematic: Qualia theorists who think that the problem of consciousness cannot be solved are wrong, because there are no such mentally realized qualities we find in experience, only qualities that experiences represent the world as having, the qualities of the intentional objects of experience. However, I also argue that those who think that the problem of consciousness can be solved via a combination of representationalism and an externalistic information-theoretical theory are also mistaken. I defend internalism about mental content both in cognition and conscious experience, arguing that intentionality is not a matter of the subject's relational properties, but a matter of how the subject intrinsically is at any given moment. A revised section from my thesis was published under the title "Double Vision, Phosphenes and Afterimages: Non-Endorsed Representations rather than Non-Representational Qualia" (EuJAP, 2020).
Part of my project also involves an attempt to see whether we can solve various puzzles about conscious experience and perception by positing a direct epistemic relation between the subject and abstract entities: "possibilities" or "ways the world could be". I argue that such an epistemic relation is a common factor between veridical and non-veridical experiences. A paper where I elaborate on these ideas is currently under review.
I have also been developing a strategy to deflate the explanatory gap between matter and consciousness with the help of a non-reductive realist view of sensible properties of objects, arguing that there are countless explanatory gaps in the world: There is no explanation for why physical properties identified by science necessiate the existence and the nature of perceived qualities such as colors, timbre, smells, and the like. I also argue that a realist view of color qualities (as opposed to a qualia-theoretical view of color perception) renders the hard problem of consciousness less puzzling. Relatedly, I defend a view that I call "imperfect realism" that reconciles the reality of such qualities with the possibility of systematic error in perceptual experience. These ideas were recently published in an article titled "Deflating the Hard Problem of Consciousness by Multiplying Explanatory Gaps" (Ratio, 2023)
In metaphilosophy, I work on philosophical method, philosophical progress, and disagreement in philosophy. I hold the view that our current ways of conducting philosophical research impede philosophical progress in various ways, and I promote new ways of structuring philosophical research in a more goal-oriented, systematized and collective manner, with the long-term goal of establishing an actual research group to try out this methodology. A paper where I discuss these matters is currently under review. I also recently published a paper where I argue that publishing philosophical claims we do not believe is detrimental for philosophical progress, against those who recently argued that such publishing practices are permissible. ("Problems with Publishing Philosophical Claims We Don't Believe", Episteme, 2023.)
At the intersection of philosophy of mind and metaphilosophy, I published on the question of whether it is possible to settle philosophical disputes with the help of empirical data (focusing on cases in neurophilosophy) and argued that it is not possible. ("Philosophical Puzzles Evade Empirical Evidence" in "Human Sciences after the Decade of the Brain" edited by J. Leefman and E. Hildt, Elsevier 2017)
Supervisors: Katalin Farkas, Gianfranco Soldati , and Alex Byrne
I obtained my PhD in 2017 from the Department of Philosophy at Central European University, where I was later involved as a research affiliate from 2018 to 2020. During my doctoral studies I spent a term as a visiting student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2014) and a year at University of Fribourg as a member of EXRE (Experience and Reason) research group (2014-2015).
I wrote my MA thesis on the incompatibility of content externalism and mentalistic causal explanation for METU Cognitive Science graduate program. I hold a BA degree in linguistics from Ankara University, with a thesis on the biological evolution of the human language faculty.
In philosophy of mind, I am interested in the problems of phenomenal consciousness, introspection, mental content and perception, and the methodological issues surrounding these problems.
In my PhD thesis, I propose the view that the two rival approaches to the problem of consciousness are both problematic: Qualia theorists who think that the problem of consciousness cannot be solved are wrong, because there are no such mentally realized qualities we find in experience, only qualities that experiences represent the world as having, the qualities of the intentional objects of experience. However, I also argue that those who think that the problem of consciousness can be solved via a combination of representationalism and an externalistic information-theoretical theory are also mistaken. I defend internalism about mental content both in cognition and conscious experience, arguing that intentionality is not a matter of the subject's relational properties, but a matter of how the subject intrinsically is at any given moment. A revised section from my thesis was published under the title "Double Vision, Phosphenes and Afterimages: Non-Endorsed Representations rather than Non-Representational Qualia" (EuJAP, 2020).
Part of my project also involves an attempt to see whether we can solve various puzzles about conscious experience and perception by positing a direct epistemic relation between the subject and abstract entities: "possibilities" or "ways the world could be". I argue that such an epistemic relation is a common factor between veridical and non-veridical experiences. A paper where I elaborate on these ideas is currently under review.
I have also been developing a strategy to deflate the explanatory gap between matter and consciousness with the help of a non-reductive realist view of sensible properties of objects, arguing that there are countless explanatory gaps in the world: There is no explanation for why physical properties identified by science necessiate the existence and the nature of perceived qualities such as colors, timbre, smells, and the like. I also argue that a realist view of color qualities (as opposed to a qualia-theoretical view of color perception) renders the hard problem of consciousness less puzzling. Relatedly, I defend a view that I call "imperfect realism" that reconciles the reality of such qualities with the possibility of systematic error in perceptual experience. These ideas were recently published in an article titled "Deflating the Hard Problem of Consciousness by Multiplying Explanatory Gaps" (Ratio, 2023)
In metaphilosophy, I work on philosophical method, philosophical progress, and disagreement in philosophy. I hold the view that our current ways of conducting philosophical research impede philosophical progress in various ways, and I promote new ways of structuring philosophical research in a more goal-oriented, systematized and collective manner, with the long-term goal of establishing an actual research group to try out this methodology. A paper where I discuss these matters is currently under review. I also recently published a paper where I argue that publishing philosophical claims we do not believe is detrimental for philosophical progress, against those who recently argued that such publishing practices are permissible. ("Problems with Publishing Philosophical Claims We Don't Believe", Episteme, 2023.)
At the intersection of philosophy of mind and metaphilosophy, I published on the question of whether it is possible to settle philosophical disputes with the help of empirical data (focusing on cases in neurophilosophy) and argued that it is not possible. ("Philosophical Puzzles Evade Empirical Evidence" in "Human Sciences after the Decade of the Brain" edited by J. Leefman and E. Hildt, Elsevier 2017)
Supervisors: Katalin Farkas, Gianfranco Soldati , and Alex Byrne
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The version uploaded here is a preprint. For the published version, contact isiksarihan@gmail.com
Talks by Işık Sarıhan
Theorizing about abstract entities to solve various issues related to perceptual experience is not entirely new (see e.g. Bealer 1982; Butchvarov 1998; Pautz 2007) but the idea has not been developed to its full potential. I will argue that the view can help us to reconcile the main intuitions behind the intentionalist theory with the intuitions that motivate the other prominent theories in philosophy of perception. More particularly, I will claim that:
(Claim 1) The view allows us to satisfy the sense-data intuition that in hallucination we are in direct epistemic contact with various entities, but without postulating concretely existing objects (sense-data) or properties (mental paint, qualia) to explain this contact; and:
(Claim 2) The view also allows us to satisfy the naïve realist intuition that veridical experience puts us in direct epistemic contact with concrete objects in our environment (construed here as actualized possibilities) while not giving up the idea that veridical and non-veridical states have a shared content and phenomenology.
I will begin with clarifying some of the key terms and theoretical positions, and then present the reasons to believe that we are in a direct epistemic contact with abstract entities in perception, illusion, hallucination, imagination and dream. After countering some common misunderstandings regarding abstract entities and our epistemic relation to them, I will present a defense of the above two claims. I will conclude with a brief discussion of what to make of the Knowledge Argument (Jackson 1982) in light of the current view.
References:
Bealer, G. (1982) Quality and Concept. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Butchvarov, P. (1998) Skepticism about the External World. Oxford University Press.
Pautz, A. (2007) Intentionalism and perceptual presence. Philosophical Perspectives 21(1): 495-541.
Jackson, F. (1982) Epiphenomenal qualia. Philosophical Quarterly 32: 127–136.
In a recent, thought-provoking article, Alexandra Plakias (2019) argues for the permissibility of publishing without belief (hereafter ‘PWB’), that is, penning and publishing the defense of a philosophical claim without believing the claim, which also includes cases where the author’s lack of belief is not mentioned anywhere in the published work. She argues that an author’s attitude towards the claims she defends in a publication is irrelevant to the merit of those claims, and therefore not permitting PWB would deprive us of a significant amount of philosophical work that has merit. She also argues that PWB doesn’t have any undesirable consequences, while not permitting PWB would have an unfair outcome: Some philosophers, such as junior researchers with unsettled views, or philosophers who do not believe any philosophical claims due to certain metaphilosophical convictions (such as those, motivated by the conciliationist stance on disagreement, who think that persistent peer disagreement among philosophers should make us suspend belief in all philosophical claims), would be able to publish less than others if PWB is not permitted. She limits the scope of the argument to academic philosophical publications, leaving out philosophical assertion outside publications, public philosophy, empirical sciences and journalism.
In a reply to Plakias, Will Fleisher (2020a) offers a distinction between two types of claims, which he calls ‘advocacy role claims’ and ‘evidential role claims’. The former are claims which ‘aim to promote productive debate and disagreement’ (p.8), while the latter are those that ‘aim to add to the common stock of evidence’ (p.9). Fleisher argues that publishing evidential role claims without belief is impermissible, and some philosophical publications do involve such claims.
In this talk, I will introduce the following argument into this discussion:
(1) When an author does not believe a philosophical claim she defends, she often has a reason for not believing it.
(2) Some of the reasons for not believing a philosophical claim are trivial, but some are substantive: they have something to do with the shortcomings of the philosophical evidence that supports the claim (or they have something to do with the availability of equally compelling evidence that supports an alternative one.)
(3) PWB involves withholding philosophical evidence if one’s substantive reasons for disbelief are not presented within the publication.
(4) Withholding one’s reasons for disbelief (and therefore withholding relevant evidence), is impermissible.
Therefore,
(5) PWB is impermissible when it involves withholding substantive reasons for disbelief.
(Here, ‘disbelief’ should be understood as referring not only to the doxastic attitude of believing that something is false, but also to cases where judgement is suspended and cases that involve a significant amount of doubt.)
I will begin with introducing and discussing Plakias’ argument in more detail, followed by a discussion of Fleisher’s reply to Plakias. While Fleisher includes only philosophical claims that have an empirical component in the category of evidential roles claims (which he takes to be impermissible cases of PWB), I will argue that purely philosophical claims without an empirical component are also evidential role claims: they involve philosophical evidence: arguments, analyses, intuitions and phenomenological descriptions that help us to judge whether a philosophical claim is true or not, or at the very least, whether some degree of increased credence in a philosophical claim is justified. After further clarifying the notion of philosophical evidence, I will expand on the distinction between trivial and substantive reasons for disbelief. Trivial reasons for disbelief include what I call ‘metaphilosophical convictions’ and ‘mere incredulity’, where the reason for disbelief is too general and does not concern the specific claim the author defends, or where there is no further evidence-gathering the authors can do to support the claim. Substantive reasons for disbelief are what I call ‘insufficient literature review’, ‘insufficient reflection’, ‘significant incredulity’ and ‘opportunistic omission’, which involve omitting philosophical evidence that the authors readily possess or that could be acquired from further literature review, discussion with peers, or philosophical reflection. I will claim that withholding such evidence from a publication, especially when such withdrawal is concealed and the defense is not enveloped in a second-order conditional claim that points at the shortcomings of the defense, constitutes a vice according to Cassam’s characterization of epistemic vices, as it ‘systematically obstruct[s] the gaining, keeping, or sharing of knowledge in the actual world’ (2019:12). I will also argue that the reasons for premature or omissive publications are extra-philosophical, often involving a mixture of time constraints and careeristic motivations, as there does not seem to be a reason why one would publish defenses of claims one does not believe and conceal one’s reasons for doubt towards such claims for the sake of philosophical inquiry.
I will conclude the discussion with a practical suggestion: We can do more good for researchers and to the field of philosophy if we tolerate PWB only when it is strongly justified and if we try to find ways to eliminate academic factors that pressure philosophers to publish their unsettled views or to withhold their reasons for disbelief. These ways include doing away with publication pressure, especially on junior philosophers, by coming up with novel ways to assign academic prestige and merit to philosophers beyond the outputs of their research that are expected to be presented in the form of articles that defend a claim, and by promoting a form of academic honesty that would prevent authors from concealing the problems with the claims they defend.
References
Cassam, Q. (2019). Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fleisher, W. (2020a). ‘Publishing without (Some) Belief.’ Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 9 (4), 237–246.
Plakias, A. (2019). ‘Publishing without Belief.’ Analysis 79 (4), 638–646.
In response to this deflationist view, I will argue that sciences have indeed progressed more than philosophy. I will point out that there is more substantive agreement among scientists compared to philosophers, and the claim that there is no agreement on many central scientific questions results from a misleading comparison between the two fields in the context of the “centrality” of the questions asked. I will claim that a scientific question can have two types of significance, philosophical and non-philosophical. The mistake of Frances and others is to pick up examples from unresolved questions in sciences that have philosophical import (e.g. questions regarding fundamental physics or origins of life), which gives the impression that sciences have also not solved their “big” questions, and distracts us from seeing the immense amount of progress sciences have made on questions that are significant but that do not have philosophical import. Moreover, most “small” questions in sciences have intrinsic significance, while the value of such questions in philosophy are parasitic on bigger ones.
I will also try to demonstrate that while genuine scientific disagreements often result from the lack of clear evidence, persistent philosophical disagreements result from factors at the intersection of sociology of academic philosophy and philosophical methodology, which I call “professional factors”. I will briefly present fours factors, which are (1) a lack of explicit agreement about what counts as clear philosophical evidence and what are the steps to resolve a disagreement; (2) philosophical research being conducted in a solitary manner rather than in large research teams; (3) slow pace of philosophical exchange that leads to loss of philosophical data; and (4) factors such as publication pressure that promote disagreement for its own sake. Coupled with the fact that the falsity of a philosophical theory cannot be straightforwardly demonstrated and the related fact that a philosophical view’s being wrong has no immediate practical consequences, these four factors enable philosophers to easily disagree with their peers. My overall aim is not to arrive at a pessimistic picture of philosophical progress, but to help identify the factors that prevent philosophy from progressing in a more robust manner.
References
Balcerak Jackson, M. (2013) Conceptual analysis and epistemic progress. Synthese 190:3053–3074.
Frances, B. (2017) Extensive philosophical agreement and progress. Metaphilosophy 48 (1-2):47-57.
Olson, D. (2019) Epistemic progress despite systematic disagreement. Epistemology & Philosophy of Science 56 (2):77–94.
In response to this view, I will argue that there has indeed been much more progress in natural sciences compared to philosophy. First of all, I will point out that there is more substantial agreement among the practitioners of natural sciences compared to the practitioners of philosophy, and the claim that there is no agreement on many central questions in sciences results from a misleading comparison between the two fields in the context of the “centrality” of the questions asked. I will also try to demonstrate that while scientific disagreements result from the lack of clear evidence (and that agreement is reached relatively quickly when evidence is obtained), philosophical disagreements result from a deeper problem regarding a lack of explicit agreement about what counts as clear philosophical evidence and what are the steps to resolve a disagreement based on philosophical data. This methodological defect, coupled with the fact that the falsity of a philosophical view cannot be straightforwardly demonstrated, enables philosophers to easily resist various theories no matter how detailed and appealing are the arguments in defense of a rival theory. The fertile ground for philosophical disagreement, created by the above factors that relate to the method and the subject matter of philosophy, is further reinforced by psychological and professional factors such as a philosopher’s not giving up on a pet theory, or the constant search for avenues of disagreement in response to the pressure to come up with novel material for publication – which is an easy task given that in many areas of philosophy there is little or no immediate practical consequence of a theory’s being wrong, unlike the theories in empirical sciences.
The overall aim of the above argument is not to arrive at a pessimistic picture of philosophy where there has not been any progress at all or there won’t likely be much more progress. On the contrary, I will claim that a proper understanding of the predicament of philosophical progress in contrast to natural sciences can help us fix the shortcomings of philosophical methodology that prevents philosophy from progressing in a more robust manner. I will conclude by speculating on how academic philosophical practices can be reformed to bolster philosophical progress, and what, if any, can be learned from the example of progress in empirical sciences.
References
Balcerak Jackson, M. (2013) Conceptual analysis and epistemic progress. Synthese 190:3053–3074.
Chalmers, D.J. (2015) Why isn't there more progress in philosophy? Philosophy 90 (1):3-31.
Dietrich, E. (2011) There is no progress in philosophy. Essays in Philosophy 12 (2):9.
Frances, B. (2017) Extensive philosophical agreement and progress. Metaphilosophy 48 (1-2):47-57.
Olson, D. (2019) Epistemic progress despite systematic disagreement. Epistemology & Philosophy of Science 56 (2):77–94.
Stoljar, D. (2017) Philosophical Progress: In Defence of a Reasonable Optimism. Oxford University Press.
Since the time of Galileo and Descartes, colors (or “colors-as-they-seem”) and other so-called secondary qualities have been eliminated from the external world as they did not fit into a purely non-qualitative understanding of physical reality. This elimination, however, resulted in a different problem regarding color as an offshoot of the mind-body problem, as the scientific image of the world seemed unfit to accommodate also the subjective counterpart of color construed as qualities of experiences (such as “color sensations”, “colors of sense-data”, “color qualia”, “what-it-is-like-to-see-colors”, and the like). In the last decades, this problem has led to attempts at returning to a realist stance about color, finding its clearest expression in Alex Byrne’s suggestion (2006) that the mind-body problem in the context of qualia and the like should have really been construed as a “body-body problem”, where the problem is to reconcile the manifest image of color with the scientific image of the world, and not to reconcile “color qualia” with the scientific image of the brain. These realist aspirations have led to physical-reductionist accounts of color (e.g. Byrne & Hilbert 2003) that received a great deal of criticism because they either fail to capture all the intricacies of color phenomenology or they start to sound too unintuitive and ad-hoc due to the increasingly complex nature of the properties that these theories identify colors with, in an attempt at accommodating the messy data regarding color perception which, on the first glance, seems to support a simpler, subjectivist or eliminativist account of color.
This stalemate in philosophical debates on color results from the fact that color realists tried to argue not only for the reality of color, but they also wanted to arrive at a type of realist theory which establishes that the majority of our particular color experiences are veridical, an epistemic question that should be separate from the question of the reality of color. An unexplored position is imperfect realism, where one can be realist about color while accepting that the majority of our color experiences do not correctly represent the exact colors of objects that we see, which allows for a search for simpler properties as properties that colors are identical to or supervene on, that don’t necessarily accommodate all or even most of our color experiences, as we are not anymore required to find a common a posteriori physical property that the majority of our color experiences map onto.
Giving a defense of imperfect realism is twofold: Against eliminativist and subjectivist views, I will motivate color realism by pointing out that it is the only option that makes sense in the face of the problem of figuring out what determines the qualitative content of color experiences. I will argue that it makes much more sense to think that why we experience the color qualities we experience and why we have color experiences at all have something to do with facts about colors in the world rather than with facts about the electrical-chemical states of our nervous system which doesn’t seem to have the resources to determine the vast qualitative phenomenology of color and other experienced qualities. The metaphysical problem regarding the qualitative content of experiences becomes much easier if the represented qualities are real features of the world and the content of our experiences is somehow supervenient on this reality (albeit in complex ways that allow for widespread illusion). Against realists of the standard type, I will motivate imperfect realism by pointing at how well-known complications regarding color perception sit better with an imperfect realist view. My aim is not to prove that color experiences are indeed systematically distorted, but to make the realist accept the possibility of this widespread distortion, which greatly reduces the burden on the realist view and makes it more intuitive for those who are not moved by worries related to the epistemology of particular perceptual cases.
References
Byrne, A. & Hilbert, D.R. (2003) Color realism and color science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (1):3-21.
Byrne (2006) Color and the mind‐body problem. Dialectica 60 (2):223-44.
In order to demonstrate the plausibility of this hypothesis, I will present a thought experiment where a professional philosophical community conduct their research in a way that is very different than how it is conducted in the actual world. The research model of the imagined philosophical community differs from the actual philosophical community in the following ways: (1) Having a clear prior agreement on the exact methodological steps to be followed when settling a philosophical dispute; (2) Research being conducted in large teams with division of labor, instead of solitary work; (3) The generated philosophical data being gathered together and analyzed in a systematized fashion and in a relatively short period, as opposed to the slow and ceremonial ways of the actual academic world; and (4) the researchers being relieved of other burdens such as teaching or accumulating prestige via publications. I will also discuss various objections to this hypothesis, and consider the possibility and desirability of establishing such a research environment in the actual world.
In this talk, I will present a defense of strong representationalism (or intentionalism) about phenomenal experience: All the qualitative properties one can find via introspection while undergoing an experience are qualities of the intentional objects of the experience, qualities of the world as the experience represents it. There have been many arguments put forward in defense of representationalism, most famously the argument from the transparency of experience. Even though the truth of these arguments are obvious to many, they have failed to convince and convert many defenders of the qualia theory, the theory which says that we can also be introspectively aware of qualities that outstrip the qualities found in the representational content. This talk does make an attempt to contribute to the argumentative and conceptual inventory of representationalism, but the primary contribution I intend to make is different. Given that the arguments in defense of representationalism have so far failed to persuade many qualia theorists, I will try a different dialectical approach, telling an autobiographical account of how I started out as a qualia theorist and what made me gradually change my mind, with the hope that putting forward the argument for representationalism packaged in such an account can make the defenders of qualia consider whether they would have the same reasons as I did to change their minds about the issue. The focus will be on how one might end up tacitly endorsing “the phenomenological fallacy”, the fallacy of postulating mind-dependent objects and properties when they are not found in the mind-independent world, couched in terms of “qualia” rather than “sense-data”, and how this fallacy can linger due to a popular but problematic understanding of mental representation that detaches mental representation from the subject’s introspectively accessible point of view.
Long Abstract
In this talk, I will present a defense of strong representationalism (or intentionalism) about phenomenal experience: All the qualitative properties one can find via introspection while undergoing an experience are qualities of the intentional objects of the experience, qualities of the world as the experience represents it. (Tye 2000, Byrne 2001)
There have been many arguments put forward in defense of representationalism, most famously the argument from the transparency of experience (Harman 1990). Even though the truth of these arguments are very obvious to many, they have failed to convince and convert many defenders of the qualia theory, the theory which says that we can also introspectively be aware of qualities that outstrip the qualities found in the representational content. These qualities go by the names of “qualia”, “what-it-is-likeness”, “mental paint”, “phenomenal feels” and “phenomenal properties”.
In this talk, I will make an attempt to contribute to the argumentative and conceptual inventory of representationalism, but my intended primary contribution will be different. Given that the arguments in defense of representationalism have so far failed to persuade the qualia theorists, I will try a different dialectical approach, telling an autobiographical account of how I started out as a qualia theorist and what made me gradually change my mind, with the hope that putting forward the argument for representationalism packaged in such an account can make the defenders of qualia consider whether they would have the same reasons as I did to change their minds about the issue.
My autobiographical account of the journey from qualia theory to representationalism goes roughly like this:
(1) Acquiring a subjectivist account of sensible qualities upon initial encounters with various findings of modern psychophysics, where color experiences are understood as a type of visual illusion;
(2) Reifying such qualities as literally existing in the mind, though without an explicit exposure to the traditional argument from perceptual error, therefore tacitly endorsing what Place (1956) has called the phenomenological fallacy, the fallacy of postulating mind-dependent objects and properties when they are nowhere to be found in the mind-independent world;
(3) Classifying these qualities as qualia rather than sense-data, partly due to the taboo surrounding the sense-data theory, and partly due to a failure to understand the qualia theory’s internal tensions that could make it collapse into a type of sense-data theory;
(4) Developing an understanding of qualia as narrowly-supervening mental vehicles that do the representing – as opposed to what is represented (e.g. color);
(5) Developing a resistance to the argument from transparency (Harman 1990), partly due to a misunderstanding of the theory, and partly because the qualities found in the representational content of an experience such as color are already conceptualized not as represented qualities, but qualitative vehicles that do the representing;
(6) Developing a resistance to theories of color that reduce colors to scientifically discovered complex properties of objects (as in Byrne and Hilbert 2001), because color terms refer to the qualities which are found and revealed in experience, and not to unknown physical properties of external objects that cause these experiences;
(7) The internal tension within the qualia theory begins to surface: Color qualia are now both the vehicles of representation that do the representing and also what is represented, that is, what appears to exist in the external world. This tension is temporarily solved by a projectivist account of perception: What we are aware of in experience are intrinsic qualities of experiences themselves, but we mistakenly take them to be the qualities found in the external environment;
(8) The projectivist account solves the tension by making one argument for qualia impossible, the argument from the inverted color spectrum. When one’s color experience is inverted, both the qualia and representational content is inverted, as phenomenally representing something is supposed to be nothing other than experiencing a phenomenal quality and erroneously taking it as a feature of the external world. Inverted spectrum argument is rejected, as it detaches phenomenal representation from actual phenomenology, which is representational in itself.
(9) Acquaintance with the Brentanian moral that objects of mental states need not exist: In cases of illusion or hallucination, if there doesn’t exist a veridically perceived quality, no mental qualities like qualia need to exist in order to explain the content of the experience. The phenomenal fallacy becomes apparent.
(10) Both the phenomenological fallacy and the problematic understanding of phenomenal representation that subsumes the inverted spectrum argument are gone. Given no other argument or motivation to favor qualia theory over representationalism, the latter prevails. The qualitative features of color experiences are exhausted by what the experience represents: Color qualities. In cases of hallucination and illusion (including systematic illusion), it is just the case that the qualities that appear to exist simply don’t exist. There is no need to postulate mentally instantiated qualities to explain what is going on.
References:
Byrne, A. (2001) Intentionalism defended. Philosophical Review 110 (2):199-240.
Byrne, A & D.R. Hilbert. (2003) Color realism and color science. 26, 3-64.
Harman, G. (1990) The intrinsic quality of experience. Philosophical Perspectives 4:31-52.
Place, U. T. (1956) Is consciousness a brain process? British Journal of Psychology 47 (1):44-50.
Tye, M. (2000) Consciousness, Color, and Content. MIT Press.
The version uploaded here is a preprint. For the published version, contact isiksarihan@gmail.com
Theorizing about abstract entities to solve various issues related to perceptual experience is not entirely new (see e.g. Bealer 1982; Butchvarov 1998; Pautz 2007) but the idea has not been developed to its full potential. I will argue that the view can help us to reconcile the main intuitions behind the intentionalist theory with the intuitions that motivate the other prominent theories in philosophy of perception. More particularly, I will claim that:
(Claim 1) The view allows us to satisfy the sense-data intuition that in hallucination we are in direct epistemic contact with various entities, but without postulating concretely existing objects (sense-data) or properties (mental paint, qualia) to explain this contact; and:
(Claim 2) The view also allows us to satisfy the naïve realist intuition that veridical experience puts us in direct epistemic contact with concrete objects in our environment (construed here as actualized possibilities) while not giving up the idea that veridical and non-veridical states have a shared content and phenomenology.
I will begin with clarifying some of the key terms and theoretical positions, and then present the reasons to believe that we are in a direct epistemic contact with abstract entities in perception, illusion, hallucination, imagination and dream. After countering some common misunderstandings regarding abstract entities and our epistemic relation to them, I will present a defense of the above two claims. I will conclude with a brief discussion of what to make of the Knowledge Argument (Jackson 1982) in light of the current view.
References:
Bealer, G. (1982) Quality and Concept. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Butchvarov, P. (1998) Skepticism about the External World. Oxford University Press.
Pautz, A. (2007) Intentionalism and perceptual presence. Philosophical Perspectives 21(1): 495-541.
Jackson, F. (1982) Epiphenomenal qualia. Philosophical Quarterly 32: 127–136.
In a recent, thought-provoking article, Alexandra Plakias (2019) argues for the permissibility of publishing without belief (hereafter ‘PWB’), that is, penning and publishing the defense of a philosophical claim without believing the claim, which also includes cases where the author’s lack of belief is not mentioned anywhere in the published work. She argues that an author’s attitude towards the claims she defends in a publication is irrelevant to the merit of those claims, and therefore not permitting PWB would deprive us of a significant amount of philosophical work that has merit. She also argues that PWB doesn’t have any undesirable consequences, while not permitting PWB would have an unfair outcome: Some philosophers, such as junior researchers with unsettled views, or philosophers who do not believe any philosophical claims due to certain metaphilosophical convictions (such as those, motivated by the conciliationist stance on disagreement, who think that persistent peer disagreement among philosophers should make us suspend belief in all philosophical claims), would be able to publish less than others if PWB is not permitted. She limits the scope of the argument to academic philosophical publications, leaving out philosophical assertion outside publications, public philosophy, empirical sciences and journalism.
In a reply to Plakias, Will Fleisher (2020a) offers a distinction between two types of claims, which he calls ‘advocacy role claims’ and ‘evidential role claims’. The former are claims which ‘aim to promote productive debate and disagreement’ (p.8), while the latter are those that ‘aim to add to the common stock of evidence’ (p.9). Fleisher argues that publishing evidential role claims without belief is impermissible, and some philosophical publications do involve such claims.
In this talk, I will introduce the following argument into this discussion:
(1) When an author does not believe a philosophical claim she defends, she often has a reason for not believing it.
(2) Some of the reasons for not believing a philosophical claim are trivial, but some are substantive: they have something to do with the shortcomings of the philosophical evidence that supports the claim (or they have something to do with the availability of equally compelling evidence that supports an alternative one.)
(3) PWB involves withholding philosophical evidence if one’s substantive reasons for disbelief are not presented within the publication.
(4) Withholding one’s reasons for disbelief (and therefore withholding relevant evidence), is impermissible.
Therefore,
(5) PWB is impermissible when it involves withholding substantive reasons for disbelief.
(Here, ‘disbelief’ should be understood as referring not only to the doxastic attitude of believing that something is false, but also to cases where judgement is suspended and cases that involve a significant amount of doubt.)
I will begin with introducing and discussing Plakias’ argument in more detail, followed by a discussion of Fleisher’s reply to Plakias. While Fleisher includes only philosophical claims that have an empirical component in the category of evidential roles claims (which he takes to be impermissible cases of PWB), I will argue that purely philosophical claims without an empirical component are also evidential role claims: they involve philosophical evidence: arguments, analyses, intuitions and phenomenological descriptions that help us to judge whether a philosophical claim is true or not, or at the very least, whether some degree of increased credence in a philosophical claim is justified. After further clarifying the notion of philosophical evidence, I will expand on the distinction between trivial and substantive reasons for disbelief. Trivial reasons for disbelief include what I call ‘metaphilosophical convictions’ and ‘mere incredulity’, where the reason for disbelief is too general and does not concern the specific claim the author defends, or where there is no further evidence-gathering the authors can do to support the claim. Substantive reasons for disbelief are what I call ‘insufficient literature review’, ‘insufficient reflection’, ‘significant incredulity’ and ‘opportunistic omission’, which involve omitting philosophical evidence that the authors readily possess or that could be acquired from further literature review, discussion with peers, or philosophical reflection. I will claim that withholding such evidence from a publication, especially when such withdrawal is concealed and the defense is not enveloped in a second-order conditional claim that points at the shortcomings of the defense, constitutes a vice according to Cassam’s characterization of epistemic vices, as it ‘systematically obstruct[s] the gaining, keeping, or sharing of knowledge in the actual world’ (2019:12). I will also argue that the reasons for premature or omissive publications are extra-philosophical, often involving a mixture of time constraints and careeristic motivations, as there does not seem to be a reason why one would publish defenses of claims one does not believe and conceal one’s reasons for doubt towards such claims for the sake of philosophical inquiry.
I will conclude the discussion with a practical suggestion: We can do more good for researchers and to the field of philosophy if we tolerate PWB only when it is strongly justified and if we try to find ways to eliminate academic factors that pressure philosophers to publish their unsettled views or to withhold their reasons for disbelief. These ways include doing away with publication pressure, especially on junior philosophers, by coming up with novel ways to assign academic prestige and merit to philosophers beyond the outputs of their research that are expected to be presented in the form of articles that defend a claim, and by promoting a form of academic honesty that would prevent authors from concealing the problems with the claims they defend.
References
Cassam, Q. (2019). Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fleisher, W. (2020a). ‘Publishing without (Some) Belief.’ Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 9 (4), 237–246.
Plakias, A. (2019). ‘Publishing without Belief.’ Analysis 79 (4), 638–646.
In response to this deflationist view, I will argue that sciences have indeed progressed more than philosophy. I will point out that there is more substantive agreement among scientists compared to philosophers, and the claim that there is no agreement on many central scientific questions results from a misleading comparison between the two fields in the context of the “centrality” of the questions asked. I will claim that a scientific question can have two types of significance, philosophical and non-philosophical. The mistake of Frances and others is to pick up examples from unresolved questions in sciences that have philosophical import (e.g. questions regarding fundamental physics or origins of life), which gives the impression that sciences have also not solved their “big” questions, and distracts us from seeing the immense amount of progress sciences have made on questions that are significant but that do not have philosophical import. Moreover, most “small” questions in sciences have intrinsic significance, while the value of such questions in philosophy are parasitic on bigger ones.
I will also try to demonstrate that while genuine scientific disagreements often result from the lack of clear evidence, persistent philosophical disagreements result from factors at the intersection of sociology of academic philosophy and philosophical methodology, which I call “professional factors”. I will briefly present fours factors, which are (1) a lack of explicit agreement about what counts as clear philosophical evidence and what are the steps to resolve a disagreement; (2) philosophical research being conducted in a solitary manner rather than in large research teams; (3) slow pace of philosophical exchange that leads to loss of philosophical data; and (4) factors such as publication pressure that promote disagreement for its own sake. Coupled with the fact that the falsity of a philosophical theory cannot be straightforwardly demonstrated and the related fact that a philosophical view’s being wrong has no immediate practical consequences, these four factors enable philosophers to easily disagree with their peers. My overall aim is not to arrive at a pessimistic picture of philosophical progress, but to help identify the factors that prevent philosophy from progressing in a more robust manner.
References
Balcerak Jackson, M. (2013) Conceptual analysis and epistemic progress. Synthese 190:3053–3074.
Frances, B. (2017) Extensive philosophical agreement and progress. Metaphilosophy 48 (1-2):47-57.
Olson, D. (2019) Epistemic progress despite systematic disagreement. Epistemology & Philosophy of Science 56 (2):77–94.
In response to this view, I will argue that there has indeed been much more progress in natural sciences compared to philosophy. First of all, I will point out that there is more substantial agreement among the practitioners of natural sciences compared to the practitioners of philosophy, and the claim that there is no agreement on many central questions in sciences results from a misleading comparison between the two fields in the context of the “centrality” of the questions asked. I will also try to demonstrate that while scientific disagreements result from the lack of clear evidence (and that agreement is reached relatively quickly when evidence is obtained), philosophical disagreements result from a deeper problem regarding a lack of explicit agreement about what counts as clear philosophical evidence and what are the steps to resolve a disagreement based on philosophical data. This methodological defect, coupled with the fact that the falsity of a philosophical view cannot be straightforwardly demonstrated, enables philosophers to easily resist various theories no matter how detailed and appealing are the arguments in defense of a rival theory. The fertile ground for philosophical disagreement, created by the above factors that relate to the method and the subject matter of philosophy, is further reinforced by psychological and professional factors such as a philosopher’s not giving up on a pet theory, or the constant search for avenues of disagreement in response to the pressure to come up with novel material for publication – which is an easy task given that in many areas of philosophy there is little or no immediate practical consequence of a theory’s being wrong, unlike the theories in empirical sciences.
The overall aim of the above argument is not to arrive at a pessimistic picture of philosophy where there has not been any progress at all or there won’t likely be much more progress. On the contrary, I will claim that a proper understanding of the predicament of philosophical progress in contrast to natural sciences can help us fix the shortcomings of philosophical methodology that prevents philosophy from progressing in a more robust manner. I will conclude by speculating on how academic philosophical practices can be reformed to bolster philosophical progress, and what, if any, can be learned from the example of progress in empirical sciences.
References
Balcerak Jackson, M. (2013) Conceptual analysis and epistemic progress. Synthese 190:3053–3074.
Chalmers, D.J. (2015) Why isn't there more progress in philosophy? Philosophy 90 (1):3-31.
Dietrich, E. (2011) There is no progress in philosophy. Essays in Philosophy 12 (2):9.
Frances, B. (2017) Extensive philosophical agreement and progress. Metaphilosophy 48 (1-2):47-57.
Olson, D. (2019) Epistemic progress despite systematic disagreement. Epistemology & Philosophy of Science 56 (2):77–94.
Stoljar, D. (2017) Philosophical Progress: In Defence of a Reasonable Optimism. Oxford University Press.
Since the time of Galileo and Descartes, colors (or “colors-as-they-seem”) and other so-called secondary qualities have been eliminated from the external world as they did not fit into a purely non-qualitative understanding of physical reality. This elimination, however, resulted in a different problem regarding color as an offshoot of the mind-body problem, as the scientific image of the world seemed unfit to accommodate also the subjective counterpart of color construed as qualities of experiences (such as “color sensations”, “colors of sense-data”, “color qualia”, “what-it-is-like-to-see-colors”, and the like). In the last decades, this problem has led to attempts at returning to a realist stance about color, finding its clearest expression in Alex Byrne’s suggestion (2006) that the mind-body problem in the context of qualia and the like should have really been construed as a “body-body problem”, where the problem is to reconcile the manifest image of color with the scientific image of the world, and not to reconcile “color qualia” with the scientific image of the brain. These realist aspirations have led to physical-reductionist accounts of color (e.g. Byrne & Hilbert 2003) that received a great deal of criticism because they either fail to capture all the intricacies of color phenomenology or they start to sound too unintuitive and ad-hoc due to the increasingly complex nature of the properties that these theories identify colors with, in an attempt at accommodating the messy data regarding color perception which, on the first glance, seems to support a simpler, subjectivist or eliminativist account of color.
This stalemate in philosophical debates on color results from the fact that color realists tried to argue not only for the reality of color, but they also wanted to arrive at a type of realist theory which establishes that the majority of our particular color experiences are veridical, an epistemic question that should be separate from the question of the reality of color. An unexplored position is imperfect realism, where one can be realist about color while accepting that the majority of our color experiences do not correctly represent the exact colors of objects that we see, which allows for a search for simpler properties as properties that colors are identical to or supervene on, that don’t necessarily accommodate all or even most of our color experiences, as we are not anymore required to find a common a posteriori physical property that the majority of our color experiences map onto.
Giving a defense of imperfect realism is twofold: Against eliminativist and subjectivist views, I will motivate color realism by pointing out that it is the only option that makes sense in the face of the problem of figuring out what determines the qualitative content of color experiences. I will argue that it makes much more sense to think that why we experience the color qualities we experience and why we have color experiences at all have something to do with facts about colors in the world rather than with facts about the electrical-chemical states of our nervous system which doesn’t seem to have the resources to determine the vast qualitative phenomenology of color and other experienced qualities. The metaphysical problem regarding the qualitative content of experiences becomes much easier if the represented qualities are real features of the world and the content of our experiences is somehow supervenient on this reality (albeit in complex ways that allow for widespread illusion). Against realists of the standard type, I will motivate imperfect realism by pointing at how well-known complications regarding color perception sit better with an imperfect realist view. My aim is not to prove that color experiences are indeed systematically distorted, but to make the realist accept the possibility of this widespread distortion, which greatly reduces the burden on the realist view and makes it more intuitive for those who are not moved by worries related to the epistemology of particular perceptual cases.
References
Byrne, A. & Hilbert, D.R. (2003) Color realism and color science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (1):3-21.
Byrne (2006) Color and the mind‐body problem. Dialectica 60 (2):223-44.
In order to demonstrate the plausibility of this hypothesis, I will present a thought experiment where a professional philosophical community conduct their research in a way that is very different than how it is conducted in the actual world. The research model of the imagined philosophical community differs from the actual philosophical community in the following ways: (1) Having a clear prior agreement on the exact methodological steps to be followed when settling a philosophical dispute; (2) Research being conducted in large teams with division of labor, instead of solitary work; (3) The generated philosophical data being gathered together and analyzed in a systematized fashion and in a relatively short period, as opposed to the slow and ceremonial ways of the actual academic world; and (4) the researchers being relieved of other burdens such as teaching or accumulating prestige via publications. I will also discuss various objections to this hypothesis, and consider the possibility and desirability of establishing such a research environment in the actual world.
In this talk, I will present a defense of strong representationalism (or intentionalism) about phenomenal experience: All the qualitative properties one can find via introspection while undergoing an experience are qualities of the intentional objects of the experience, qualities of the world as the experience represents it. There have been many arguments put forward in defense of representationalism, most famously the argument from the transparency of experience. Even though the truth of these arguments are obvious to many, they have failed to convince and convert many defenders of the qualia theory, the theory which says that we can also be introspectively aware of qualities that outstrip the qualities found in the representational content. This talk does make an attempt to contribute to the argumentative and conceptual inventory of representationalism, but the primary contribution I intend to make is different. Given that the arguments in defense of representationalism have so far failed to persuade many qualia theorists, I will try a different dialectical approach, telling an autobiographical account of how I started out as a qualia theorist and what made me gradually change my mind, with the hope that putting forward the argument for representationalism packaged in such an account can make the defenders of qualia consider whether they would have the same reasons as I did to change their minds about the issue. The focus will be on how one might end up tacitly endorsing “the phenomenological fallacy”, the fallacy of postulating mind-dependent objects and properties when they are not found in the mind-independent world, couched in terms of “qualia” rather than “sense-data”, and how this fallacy can linger due to a popular but problematic understanding of mental representation that detaches mental representation from the subject’s introspectively accessible point of view.
Long Abstract
In this talk, I will present a defense of strong representationalism (or intentionalism) about phenomenal experience: All the qualitative properties one can find via introspection while undergoing an experience are qualities of the intentional objects of the experience, qualities of the world as the experience represents it. (Tye 2000, Byrne 2001)
There have been many arguments put forward in defense of representationalism, most famously the argument from the transparency of experience (Harman 1990). Even though the truth of these arguments are very obvious to many, they have failed to convince and convert many defenders of the qualia theory, the theory which says that we can also introspectively be aware of qualities that outstrip the qualities found in the representational content. These qualities go by the names of “qualia”, “what-it-is-likeness”, “mental paint”, “phenomenal feels” and “phenomenal properties”.
In this talk, I will make an attempt to contribute to the argumentative and conceptual inventory of representationalism, but my intended primary contribution will be different. Given that the arguments in defense of representationalism have so far failed to persuade the qualia theorists, I will try a different dialectical approach, telling an autobiographical account of how I started out as a qualia theorist and what made me gradually change my mind, with the hope that putting forward the argument for representationalism packaged in such an account can make the defenders of qualia consider whether they would have the same reasons as I did to change their minds about the issue.
My autobiographical account of the journey from qualia theory to representationalism goes roughly like this:
(1) Acquiring a subjectivist account of sensible qualities upon initial encounters with various findings of modern psychophysics, where color experiences are understood as a type of visual illusion;
(2) Reifying such qualities as literally existing in the mind, though without an explicit exposure to the traditional argument from perceptual error, therefore tacitly endorsing what Place (1956) has called the phenomenological fallacy, the fallacy of postulating mind-dependent objects and properties when they are nowhere to be found in the mind-independent world;
(3) Classifying these qualities as qualia rather than sense-data, partly due to the taboo surrounding the sense-data theory, and partly due to a failure to understand the qualia theory’s internal tensions that could make it collapse into a type of sense-data theory;
(4) Developing an understanding of qualia as narrowly-supervening mental vehicles that do the representing – as opposed to what is represented (e.g. color);
(5) Developing a resistance to the argument from transparency (Harman 1990), partly due to a misunderstanding of the theory, and partly because the qualities found in the representational content of an experience such as color are already conceptualized not as represented qualities, but qualitative vehicles that do the representing;
(6) Developing a resistance to theories of color that reduce colors to scientifically discovered complex properties of objects (as in Byrne and Hilbert 2001), because color terms refer to the qualities which are found and revealed in experience, and not to unknown physical properties of external objects that cause these experiences;
(7) The internal tension within the qualia theory begins to surface: Color qualia are now both the vehicles of representation that do the representing and also what is represented, that is, what appears to exist in the external world. This tension is temporarily solved by a projectivist account of perception: What we are aware of in experience are intrinsic qualities of experiences themselves, but we mistakenly take them to be the qualities found in the external environment;
(8) The projectivist account solves the tension by making one argument for qualia impossible, the argument from the inverted color spectrum. When one’s color experience is inverted, both the qualia and representational content is inverted, as phenomenally representing something is supposed to be nothing other than experiencing a phenomenal quality and erroneously taking it as a feature of the external world. Inverted spectrum argument is rejected, as it detaches phenomenal representation from actual phenomenology, which is representational in itself.
(9) Acquaintance with the Brentanian moral that objects of mental states need not exist: In cases of illusion or hallucination, if there doesn’t exist a veridically perceived quality, no mental qualities like qualia need to exist in order to explain the content of the experience. The phenomenal fallacy becomes apparent.
(10) Both the phenomenological fallacy and the problematic understanding of phenomenal representation that subsumes the inverted spectrum argument are gone. Given no other argument or motivation to favor qualia theory over representationalism, the latter prevails. The qualitative features of color experiences are exhausted by what the experience represents: Color qualities. In cases of hallucination and illusion (including systematic illusion), it is just the case that the qualities that appear to exist simply don’t exist. There is no need to postulate mentally instantiated qualities to explain what is going on.
References:
Byrne, A. (2001) Intentionalism defended. Philosophical Review 110 (2):199-240.
Byrne, A & D.R. Hilbert. (2003) Color realism and color science. 26, 3-64.
Harman, G. (1990) The intrinsic quality of experience. Philosophical Perspectives 4:31-52.
Place, U. T. (1956) Is consciousness a brain process? British Journal of Psychology 47 (1):44-50.
Tye, M. (2000) Consciousness, Color, and Content. MIT Press.
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worldwide for these reports to be collected and cross-examined globally in a transparent and non-hierarchical way, with the products of the global research being compiled on a growing and open online platform. If it is true that the philosophical methods we have now can ultimately lead us to objective knowledge, then this kind of philosophical conduct can provide us with a much more robust way of making progress, compared to the slow and ceremonial working process of the ordinary philosopher who works under many other burdens of academia and personal career. I will provide this thought experiment not to prove that the lack of organizational rigor is the primary cause behind the lack of progress in philosophy, but to put forward a positive proposal to point towards structures of professional conduct we can try to implement in the future at our academic institutions, which also have a surprising side-advantage of creating more jobs for philosophers.
continues today mainly as the problem of understanding the relation between mental properties and physical
properties, and it is considered as one of the biggest problems of philosophy and continues to puzzle many people. In
this talk, I want to investigate whether the solution of the problem has any practical significance or not. By "practical
significance", I mean what we can do with the answer given to the problem, how it would affect our daily or scientific
practices, etc. A preliminary analysis shows us that, like many other philosophical problems, the solution to the mind-body
problem would not have any practical implications, besides helping us clear our minds of some puzzles,
confusions, and curiosity. The only important practical issue seems to arise at the intersection of philosophy of mind
and ethics, particularly in ethics of artificial intelligence, as the solution to the problem would tell us which creatures
should be treated as moral subjects. But due to some general features philosophical progress and how it relates to
everyday practice, practical significance might be little or none even in that area.
The first chapter argues for internalism against the dominant externalist view. Firstly, it is discussed what the best way is to elucidate the debate between internalism and externalism rooted in the Twin Earth thought experiment. (Putnam 1975) It is argued that the issue between internalists and externalists is whether concrete items that stand in a referential relation to mental states are among the constitutive bases of mental states. The Dry Earth thought experiment (Boghossian 1998) is introduced to make a case for internalism, relying on concepts that do not refer. Externalist counter-arguments are introduced and rejected.
The second chapter argues for representationalism/intentionalism against qualia theory. It is argued that there are no mental qualities (qualia) that account for the qualitative aspects of phenomenology. What do account for the qualitative aspects of phenomenology are apparent qualities of the intentional objects of conscious experiences, the qualities the world is represented as having by the experiences. Three sets of arguments for qualia are introduced and rejected. The first set of arguments are the type of arguments that are variants of the argument from error, which are rejected by an intentionalist analysis of mentality, and an epistemology of experience is developed where experience provides an acquaintance relation between a subject and something abstract such as a possibility. This makes it unnecessary to postulate epistemic relations both to concretely instantiated items in the environment and to mental items such as qualia or sense-data. Arguments based on allegedly non-representational states such as double vision and afterimages are shown to fail by demonstrating that such states are non-endorsed representations. Arguments that rely on spectrum inversion cases where representational content allegedly differs while qualitative phenomenology stays the same are rejected by arguing against the account of representation that underlies such arguments. (The order of the two chapters is largely arbitrary, though a rejection of externalism is useful in arguing against the argument from spectrum inversion.)
The account is completed by briefly discussing and rejecting the disjunctivist theory of perception, and some other motivations for externalism such as externalism’s advantage in providing a naturalistic account of mentality is discussed. The thesis concludes by pointing at the naturalistic prospects for an account of mentality that analyses mental states as representational states while the representational content is based neither on mental qualities like qualia, nor on causal-informational relations to environmental items. I further speculate about the role of powers and dispositions of organisms that might underpin a future naturalistic analysis of mentality, and also consider the plausibility of a mysterian account of mind where the special mystery regarding the explanatory gap about consciousness is downgraded by suggesting that explanatory gaps might be widespread in nature, such as in our failure to logically link qualities like color and sound as we experience them to the lower-level physical phenomena they supervene on.