The Two- Concept versus the Interdependence Approach to Perception
I. The Two-Concept Claim
According to David Chalmers the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness is due to the
fact we have two independent concepts of mind.
The first is the phenomenal concept of mind. This is the concept of mind
as conscious experience, and of a mental state as a consciously
experienced state. This is the most perplexing aspect of mind. The second
is the psychological concept of mind. This is the concept of mind as the
causal or explanatory basis of behaviour. ...There should be no question of
competition between the two notions of mind. Neither of them is the
correct analysis. They cover different phenomena, both of which are quite
real.1
While there are technical complications in, and competing accounts of, the way in
which we should make sense of the location in the natural world of the psychological
mind, we have a general sense of how to go about this, mainly by appeal to functional
characterizations of aspects of the mind conceives of under the psychological concept.
But there is serious bafflement about the very idea of the phenomenally conceived of
mind being part of the natural world, precisely because of the independence of these
concepts. There is a conceptual gap between them of a kind that means we can’t help
ourselves to the functional characterizations we use in spelling out the functional
concepts in order to make sense of the location of the aspects of mind thought under
the phenomenal concept.
This independence of the two concepts shows up, says Chalmers, in our specific
everyday mental concepts "A specific mental concept can usually be analyzed as a
phenomenal concept, a psychological concept, or as a combination of the two." Pain
1
The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (1996), p.x
is given as an example of a concept, which "in its central sense" is phenomenal. The
concepts of memory and learning, on the other hand, "might best be taken as
psychological concepts". As a prime example of mental terms that "lead a double life"
Chalmers cites perception..
It can be taken wholly psychologically, denoting the process whereby
cognitive systems are sensitive to the environmental stimuli in such a way
that the resulting states play a certain role in directing cognitive processes.
But it can also be taken phenomenally, involving the conscious experience
of what is perceived.2
Everyone would agree that when we use our everyday concepts of perception,
e.g. that of vision ,we think of vision both as something that delivers a
distinctive phenomenology and as a way of picking up information from the
environment. What the two-concept claim says is that these aspects fall under
two mutually independent concepts. As I will be reading the claim it says the
following
We can give an exhaustive account of the nature of our everyday perceptual
concepts by separating out the phenomenological and psychological
ingredients in such a way that
(a) We get the extension of the phenomenological ingredient right without
any essential appeal to ingredients we use to determine the extension of the
psychological ingredient (call this the Phenomenal Independence clause)
(b) We get right the extension of the psychological component right without
any essential appeal to the materials we use to determine the extension of
the phenomenological component. (Call this the Psychological
Independence clause).
(c) In getting right the extension of each component we are deploying a
distinctive concept, a psychological one for the psychological ingredient,
and phenomenal once for the phenomenal ingredient.
Applying the two-concept approach, thus formulated, to the concept of vision, say,
the claim would be as follows. When, on the basis of introspection, one judges that
2
Ibid. p.
one is seeing a white rabbit, say, one is actually making two claims. One is about the
instantiation of properties identified by the use of a purely phenomenal concept of
vision; the second is a claim about the instantiation of a properties identified by a
purely psychological concept of vision. Each of these can be got without any
reference to the materials used, essentially, in getting right the other.
Chalmers’ two-concepts claims are rooted in the debate I sketched in the first
chapter. To say we have two concepts here is to give an account of conceptual
independence to be cashed by appeal to the absence of a priori entailments from, for
example, truths about the instantiation of the psychological visual properties to truths
about the instantiation of phenomenal visual properties. A central tenet of Chalmers'
general approach to the problem of consciousness, a tenet argued for extensively, is
that where there are no a priori entailments there are no reductions. If this is true, in
turn, then on the face of it, truths about the instantiation of psychological visual
properties do not entail, simplicter, truths about the instantiation of phenomenal visual
properties. This, in very crude form, is his challenge to materialists.
More specifically, his claims here are directed at against two positions we
referred in the first chapter. The first, the ‘Type A’ Materialist, will, in effect, deny
the first, Phenomenal Independence Clause, and uphold the second, Psychological
Independence clause. Such a theorist will say that the phenomenal aspects of our
concept of vision, say, can be exhaustively accounted for by appeals to the materials
we use in giving an account of the psychological components of our concepts of
vision. (If this is true, the a priori reduction goes through). The second position, that
of the Type B Materialist, will say that, contra the Type A Materialist, there is a sense
in which both clauses are true, so that there are indeed no a priori entailments, but this
does block reductions. The sense in which the Phenomenal Independence clause is
true requires distinguishing between two ways a concept might relate to essential
features of the property referred to. On one, the concept makes explicit those essential
(‘metaphysically necessary) features, on the other it doesn’t. Thus it might be
claimed, the concept of ‘H2O’ is an instance of the first, and the concept of ‘water’ is
an instance of the second. The claim might now be that the sense in which both
clauses of the conceptual independence claim are true is that they should be
interpreted in these terms. The psychological concepts make explicit the essential
properties of a visual state and the phenomenal properties do not. But that is still
consistent with a posteriori reductive identity claims being true about the properties
singled out by each concept, and that is enough to deliver materialism.
Now, the debate here is a version of a debate about the answers we should
give to what I labeled the Metaphysical Implications Question in Chapter 1: are a
priori entailments from the physical to the phenomenal possible? And, do intelligible
reductions depend on such entailments? Here, as in the previous chapter, I am going
to step back from such questions and look at the two-concept claim in its own right,
considered as a claim about our ordinary concept of perception. One question is: how
does one go about establishing such a claim? A second question is: what kinds of
opposition does it face?
II. Zombies
It has to be said that on the face of it we do not normally think of statements to the
effect that one sees such and such as consisting in two distinct, mutually independent
statements, each exploiting a different concept of seeing. But, the claim might be, that
is because we don’t normally think about our concepts at all. Furthermore, there is an
immediate test in which anyone can engage which shows that in fact this is the correct
account of our concepts as we use them.
The test is the claim that zombies are conceivable. To tailor it to our case, the
claim will be that anyone will find the claim that a perceptual duplicate is
conceivable, an entity who perceives as we do, when this is functionally defined, but
has no phenomenal consciousness. The mere conceivability of such a scenario
establishes the truth of the Psychological Independence Claim, it might be said. It
establishes, that is, that we can get right the extension of the psychological ingredient
in our everyday concept of vision without appeal to phenomenal ingredients.
To get the second, Phenomenal Independence Claim one might adopt a similar
strategy and say that we can easily conceive of creatures with experiences just like
our visual ones, say, but who fail to instantiate any of the psychological/visual
properties we do. An extreme case would be brains in a vat, who, it might be claimed,
we can easily conceive of as having exactly the same visual experiences as we have,
but no perceptual mechanisms at all. And this shows, it might be claimed, that we can
get the phenomenal components in our everyday concept of vision right with appeal
to the psychological ones.
Now, as we have seen, there are debates about the nature of the determinants
of phenomenal character, which would have a direct impact on the truth of the
Phenomenal Independence Claim. In particular, if you hold either an externalist
representational theory, or a relational theory you will deny that the brain-in-a-vat
thought experiments establish the truth of the Phenomenal Independence Claim. So
you will need to take a stand on the substantive debate about the nature of
phenomenal character if you appeal to such thought experiments, and adopt either an
internalist represent representational account or a sensational account. Although
Chalmers himself does not discuss this at length, his reference to visual sensations in
describing the phenomenal character of visual experiences suggests he would adopt a
sensational line.
These debates about phenomenal character also affect how you will react to
the zombie thought experiment For example, if you adopt an externalist
representational account of the determinants of phenomenal character then you will
deny that zombies are conceivable. What this brings out is a familiar point often
made, that such thought-experiments cannot be treated as a wholly conclusive datum,
when weighed up against independently motivated accounts of the nature of our
concepts. The question this raises is: what, if anything counts as a sufficiently
independently motivated account of our concepts, one that could withstand the prima
facie compellingness of the claim that zombies just are conceivable given that we
seem to have no difficulty in understanding zombie stories.
Rather than tackle this head-on, let me put on the table a different account of
the relation between the phenomenal and psychological components in our everyday
concept of vision, and use this to generate a different interpretation of the way we
understand the zombie stories, one which does not directly exploit any particular
account of the determinants of phenomenal character.
III. The ‘interdependence' response to zombie stories.
Something I will call the 'interdependence approach’ to our concept of perception
makes the following two claims. First, we cannot get right the extension of the
psychological component in perceptual concepts such as ‘vision’ without essential
appeal to the phenomenal ingredient. The Psychological Independence Claim is false.
Second, we cannot get right the extension of the phenomenal ingredient m such
without essential appeal to the causal explanatory ingredient. The Phenomenal
Independence Claim is false.
In subsequent sections I will turn to the substantive issues at stake here, and to
head-on debates between this approach and the two-concept approach, but to give
something of its flavour let me first lay out how it would deal with the zombie
thought experiments.
There is no doubt, the claim will be, that we (adults and children) have no
difficulty in understanding stories about zombies. We also have no difficulty in
understanding stories about men who morph overnight into giant beetles, invisible
people, trains who think they are late, or lions who fly through the sky. And one
possibility, indeed, is that in doing so we exploit a distinct concept of ‘man’, say,
which unlike our usual concept, is such that being a man doesn’t rule out being a
beetle; or a distinct concept of ‘train’, which unlike our usual concept, is such that one
can be both a train and a thinker; and so forth. This is the literal,‘two-concept’
solution. Another possibility, however, is that in understanding these stories we
employ a ‘metaphorical’ strategy of understanding. On one compelling, and
particularly pertinent account, this consists in bracketing off or ignoring those aspects
of our concepts that refer to features we think of as essential to the property our
concepts refer to, while hanging onto surfaces features only, the looks of a beetle say,
or the colour of roses when we talk of someone’s cheeks being roses. 3
If this is what is happening here, there is only one concept in play,
metaphorically deployed. We are subtracting consciousness from our concept of
perception when we go along with the story, in the same way one subtracts reference
to plants when one understands the claim: ‘her cheeks are roses’. The point is that
what we say about the concepts in play in any particular case of understanding a story
3
See Avishai Margalit’s ‘Open Texture’ in Meaning and Use
cannot be settled by the simple fact that we can understand the story. Just to drive this
home, consider the following story,, derived from the scenario described in Jackson’s
‘knowledge argument’. Suppose Mary is a blind neuroscientist who acquires all the
knowledge there is about the information processing mechanisms involved in vision.
Suppose suddenly she regains her sight. She will say: "Oh, this is what it is like to
see!” On the two-concept approach she will now be employing a new concept of
perception; on the interdependence approach she will only now be acquiring full
understanding of what her earlier concept meant. Our understanding of the story on its
own does not determine which is the correct account here.
More generally, we can certainly stipulate that whatever is left over from our
concept of lion, say, once we have subtracted everything that is inconsistent with lions
flying, constitutes a separate concept, and that is the concept we deploy when we
understand the story. Similarly, we can stipulate that when we understand a story
about a perceiving zombie, the concept of perception we deploy is a concept from
which everything that is inconsistent with absence of consciousness has been
subtracted. And once such stipulations are made, many interesting questions arise
about the relations between these various ingredients, and how and whether they
relate to logical and metaphysical possibility. But, on the face of it, such stipulations
tell us nothing about our everyday concepts and their referents unless they are backed
by independent reasons for thinking that these stipulations merely formalize
something implicit in our everyday concepts.
Of course, defence of the appeal to zombies might go through a claim to the
effect that our ordinary concept is incoherent or confused, and needs cleaning up
along two-concept lines. That is a possible claim, but not one yet made, and not, I
think, the line Chalmers himself would want to take. I come back to such
possibilities in the next section when we consider further arguments for the twoconcept claim, ones that do not relay on appeals to counterfactual stories. For now I
will take it that the understandability of zombie stories, on its own, does not tell in
favour of either the two-concept or the interdependence claims.
IV. Cognitive psychology and our concept of perception
Suppose you concede that the understandability of zombie stories does not serve as
conclusive evidence against an interdependence account. You might then say that we
in fact have strong independent reasons for adopting the two-concept account, and
that they are what our understanding of the zombie story is in fact tapping into.
Perhaps the most obvious move to make here will be to point to the huge advances
that have been made in information processing theories of perception, accounts that
are progressively being supplemented by the findings of brain imaging techniques,
and chemical and neurophysiological investigations of the working of the brain. The
claim will be that, say in the case of vision, scientists are working with a concept of
vision the extension of which is determined wholly independently of any appeal to
phenomenology, which shows, at least, that the Psychological Independence Claim is
true.
Well, whether or not vision scientists are working with a phenomenologyindependent concept of vision is a delicate matter to which I return. But to the extent
that it is true, I am not sure this is something the advocate of the two-concept
approach should appeal to. Just to give two examples: in the case of vision it is
increasingly being argued that, from a scientific point of view, there is no one kind of
input-output function that should count a visual. For example there is a growing
consensus that the visual system delivers distinct types of output to the action and
recognition systems. From a scientific point of view this does not matter, we can label
one the 'pragmatic' system and one 'semantic' system. 4Or consider the case of
attention. What is attention? William James famously responded to this question
saying that everyone knows what it is; it is the active selective bringing to the mind of
some objects in the scene while discarding others. A leading authority on information
processing accounts of attention Harold Pashler has claimed that contra James, the
answer is: there just is no such thing as attention. What he means is that as soon as we
begin delving into the complex information processing tasks that our perceptual
systems need to perform, which we informally describe as attentional tasks, we see
that there is nothing functional that holds them together5.
None of this matters when we are concerned with the scientific enterprise of
examining how we process information from the environment and respond to it. But it
matters when we ask which if any of these many functions is supposed to be identical
to an independently identified, ‘folk psychological’ functionally defined purely
psychological notion of vision or attention. On the face of it, at least, any answer we
give here has an arbitrary, stipulative feel. The right response, surely, is eliminativist.
Our folk psychological functionally-defined concepts are good starting points, to be
discarded as science progresses.
Now this is, of course, a line the two-concept theorist might want to take, but it
is not, as I have understood it, what the advocate of the two-concept approach has in
mind, at least intially In particular, it would yield a quite different claim from the one
we are considering. What it would yield is that the claim that on inspection our
ordinary concept of vision breaks down into one phenomenal concept plus a multitude
4
5
See e.g. Milner and Goodale, The Visual Brain in Action. pp
See introduction to Harold Pashler Attention, 1998. pp
of scientifically defined concepts, which is far more revisionary than the original twoconcept claim.
An advocate of the two-concept approach might concede this but then say that
this modification of the original claim is one we should endorse, given the intolerable
consequence of endorsing the alternative we are considering, namely the
interdependence approach. As I have introduced it, to adopt such an approach is to
say that the extension of the psychological component in our everyday concept of
vision, without appeal to the materials we use to get right the phenomenal component.
To see what the objector has in mind, let me now be more specific about what exactly
this means.
So far, phenomenal concepts in general have been defined as the concepts we
use when we introspect to describe what our experiences are like. Let us now extend
this to our concepts of perception, sticking to the example of vision, and say that
grasp of the phenomenal component in our concept of vision requires the capacity to
reports on how things look to one based on introspection of visual experiences.
Getting right how things look to one, in turn, requires sensitivity to the actual
character of the experience, where such sensitivity is constitutive of grasping that
aspect of our visual concept. To say that we cannot get right the psychological
component in our ordinary concept without appeal to the phenomenal component,
commits one, as I will be understanding it, to saying that the extension of the
psychological ingredient is constrained by the deliverances of phenomenology, those
we are sensitive to when using ‘look’ and it cognates in reporting on visual
experience.
The claim we are considering will say that the arguments deployed above
against the two-concept appeal to vision science show why this aspect of the
interdependence claim is simply false. What we have seen is that vision science, for
example, has it own allegiances and progresses unimpeded by anything
phenomenology delivers.
Now, there is something obviously right here, which an advocate of the
interdependence claim should straightforwardly endorse. Much work on attention and
vision is controlled, as I said above, by its own allegiances, and this is something an
advocate of the interdependence claim can and should acknowledge. What is being
denied by an advocate of the interdependence is that such work determines the
extension of the psychological component in our everyday concept of perception.
What is being asserted is that to the extent that work in vision science is relevant to
determining the extension of our everyday concept (I return to discussion of this issue
in the last section) it is essentially controlled by the deliverances of introspection (as
in fact much vision science is). That means that phenomenology controls what, if
anything, counts on any occasion as a scientific investigation of the process
underpinning vision, on our common sense understanding of the concept. And there is
nothing in the actual practice of vision science that tells against this conditional claim.
I suspect that the main resistance to the very idea that phenomenology could
have any constraining input into what science tells use about perception stems from
adherence to the Phenomenal Independence Claim. Suppose you hold that getting
phenomenology right is a matter of, for example, getting right the character of
sensations we are presented with this. Then you will say that this cannot serve to
constrain a correct account of the extension of the psychological component, on pain
of going over to some form of idealism about the latter.
That is right, but it brings us to the question of how we should understand the
denial of the Phenomenal Independence Claim, and the general question of what in
fact determines phenomenology. We also need to address the question of how, in fact,
we should conceive of the psychological component of our everyday concept. The
assumption implicit in the discussion in this section is that its extension will be
determined by the deliverances of perception-science, but what we have said about
the breakdown of functions under scientific investigation gives us good grounds for
denying this assumption. This is the issue to which we now turn. More specifically,
the issue I now want to consider is what the interdependence approach, as I will be
interpreting it, actually says about both the phenomenal and the psychological
components in our everyday concept. As to the discussion in this section of the
relation between science and phenomenology, the central point to take away from it is
that appeal to work done on the information processing underpinning perception in
the various modalities does not of itself lend any support to the claim that we have an
independent psychological concept of perception, as the two-concept theorist
conceives of such independence. In particular, we cannot appeal to such work to
supplement appeal to the zombie stories to make good the Psychological
Independence Claim.
V. The interdependence account of our concept of perception
When developmental psychologists investigate children’s acquisition of our concepts
of perception in the various sensory modalities, what they are looking for is the
progressive grasp children display of the enabling conditions associated with each
modality, what counts as a barrier, how you need to be located relative to an object in
order to perceive it in that modality, and so forth. What the developmentalists are
working with is what on many accounts constitutes our understanding of what it is to
see, hear, feel etc, On such accounts, grasping our general concept of perception is a
matter of understanding what in general is required for perceiving an object, namely,
that one be in the right place and the right time, there be nothing in the way and so
forth.. Grasping particular modality concepts, say vision, on this approach, is a matter
of grasping a specification of such enabling conditions. This is often called the
‘primitive theory’ approach to our ordinary concept of perception. Grasping the
concept is matter of grasping such a primitive theory of the enabling conditions of
perception.
The first claim of the interdependence approach, as I will be understanding it,
is that the primitive theory account captures, in rough terms, the basic psychological
component in our everyday concept of perception, where that is understood, broadly
as the ingredient in our concept that refers to perception being a way of picking up
information about the environment. In this sense, Chalmers’ characterization of this
component in our everyday concept as ‘denoting the process whereby cognitive
systems are sensitive to the environmental stimuli in such a way that the resulting
states play a certain role in directing cognitive processes’ is a bit too fancy, but, for
the moment, nothing much hangs on that if its taken merely as an abstraction from, or
addition to, what the primitive theory says.
How does the ‘primitive theory’ component of our concept of perception
relate to phenomenology? When we think of children acquiring the concept, no one
would deny that the distinctive phenomenology of our experiences in each modality is
an aid to acquiring the concept. But the interdependence approach makes a stronger
claim. It denies that such experiences merely fix the reference of our concept of
perception. It says that getting right the extension for each modality of the
psychological component is impossible without the use of the phenomenal component
in the concept, the ingredient that is exploited in reports on how things look, feel,
sound and so forth. This is how we should, initially, understand the claim that the
Psychological independence Claim is false
As to the Phenomenal Independence Claim: If you hold either an externalist
representational theory of the determinants of phenomenal character, or a relational
theory, you will say that getting right what ‘looks’ 'feels' etc mean, when used in
reports of experiences cannot be done independently of appealing, essentially, to the
psychological component in our everyday concepts, without appealing to the idea that
perception is a way of picking up information from the world, as what this
information is goes into determining the character of the experience. You will hold,
that is, that the Phenomenal Independence claim is false, for that reason. But here we
come to the distinctive feature of the interdependence approach. Most externalist
representational accounts adopt a version of the Psychological Independence Claim.
They will say that we can give an analysis of the phenomenal component in our
everyday concept by appeal only to the materials that go into spelling out what the
psychological component consists in. Thinking of perception as a way of taking in
information from the environment yields a notion of representation that we can then
appeal to explain what it is to have a perceptual experience in a way that makes no
essential use of the way we think of perceptual experiences on the basis of
introspection. And this is what the interdependence approach denies.
What does this denial amount to? We need a characterisation of what is
required for getting the phenomenal component right, which the only the
interdependence theory will hold is required for getting the psychological component
right. More specifically: until now our only characterisation of phenomenal concepts
has been that they are the concepts we use on the basis of introspection to describe
what our experiences are like. We now need to introduce a more specific
characterisation, one that would serve to to give substance to the interdependence
approach. To this end, the interdependence approach, as I will be understanding it,
makes the following two claims. (1) Phenomenal concepts are essentially
perspectival. (2) We need to use such concepts to get right the extension of the
psychological component of our concept of perception.
To say that phenomenal concepts are essentially perspectival is to say, loosely
at this stage, that getting right the extension of such concepts depends on having
experiences with the phenomenal properties to which the concepts refer, and the
capacity to use them on the basis of introspection What the interdependence approach
says is that such concepts are essential not only for getting right the extension of the
phenomenal component in concepts such as vision, but also for getting the extension
of the psychological component . Our earlier Mary, on this view, could not get right
the extension of concepts such as vision because,, lacking visual experiences she was
not in a position to grasp the perspectival ingredient in our everyday concept.
VI. Back to the Conceptual Question
So there we have it: a statement of the interdependence claim, a statement of the twoconcept claim, and a suggestion to the effect that arguments so far considered in
favour of the latter over the former are not convincing as they stand. To get further we
need to see, first, what the point of the interdependence claim is relative to issues we
have so far considered under the conceptual question heading. This, in turn, will lead
us to major challenge it faces, a challenge that can be formulated into an argument in
favour of the two-concept claim.
If the two-concept claim is true, the relational theory is false, and we cannot
appeal to it to show that we can make sense of the location of token experiences in the
natural world. If the interdependence claim is true, the relational theory is still in the
offing, as far as token experiences are concerned. So, that is one point, relative to
issues discussed in the previous chapter, of pitting the two approaches against each
other.
But the introduction of the interdependence claim does more than that.
McGinn’s complaint against externalist representational theories was that they leave
out what he calls ‘the interiority of consciousness’, its ‘subjectivity’. They leave out
what it is for an object to be ‘present to the subject’ (his italics). I suggest that a great
deal, though not all, of what he was after on that score is captured, precisely, by the
insistence that phenomenal concepts are essentially perspectival. This is one way of
explaining what doing justice to the subjectivity of consciousness consists in (I say
more about this in the next chapter).And it would certainly rule out many versions of
a representational theory. For example, Michael Tye appeals to David Marr's theory
of the stages in visual information processing to give a representational account of
phenomenal character. He acknowledges that the way we in fact think of the character
is via perspectival modes of presentation. But he denies these are essential for getting
right their extension: their essence is delivered by Marr’s theory, a theory which at the
same time does justice to our understanding of vision as a way of picking up
information from the environment, does justice, that is, to the psychological
component. Tye’s approach is one of many that, in effect, deny the Phenomenal
Independence Claim but uphold the Psychological Independence Claim. On the
interdependence approach, perspectival concepts are essential for getting right the
essence of what it is like, the essence of phenomenal character. And this goes, as I
noted, at least part of the way towards meeting McGinn’s concerns about
representational theories.
So, one thing the interdependence claim introduces into the scene, from the
relationalist’s point of view, is a way of doing justice to the subjectivity of perceptual
experience, thus, so far, cashed. But as I will be understanding it, it aims to do much
more than that. The suggestion that if the relational theory is true it shows that we can
make sense of the location of consciousness in the natural word was greeted, in the
previous chapter, by the claim that making sense of the location of token experiences
is not the same as showing that we understand of the location of consciousness itself
in the natural world. Consider now the proposal that the interdependence account of
our concept of perception shows that we do make sense of just that, in the case of
perceptual consciousness. Getting right the extension of our concept of perception, the
claim will be, both requires the use of essentially perspectival concepts, in a way that
brings in consciousness, and, at the same time, requires the use of spatial and physical
concepts in getting right the psychological component, cashed along primitive-theory
lines. The essential use of the later shows that we can and do makes sense of the
location of perceptual consciousness in the natural world; it is built into our very basic
perceptual concepts.
Here we come to the issue I flagged up towards the end of the previous
chapter, under the heading of the Analysis Claim. This is the claim that showing that
we can make sense of the idea that phenomenal properties are located in the natural
world requires showing that we can give an analysis of our phenomenal concepts in
physical terms. I suggested that Chalmers is, at least implicitly, committed to it. Such
commitment is implicit, in particular, in the fact that the debate I sketched in the first
chapter, in which his position is rooted, does not even consider the interdependence
account. The latter, instead of providing an analysis, of one kind of concept in terms
of the other, links phenomenal and spatial concepts in a relation of mutual
interdependence in specifying the extension of our concept of perception. The claim
that I now want to consider is that the interdependence account, precisely because of
the absence of analysis is at best useless, as far as the Conceptual Question is
concerned, and at worst incoherent.
One major reason for adopting the Analysis Claim, and not even considering
the interdependence approach, rests in the idea that the only answer to the Conceptual
Question that would be metaphysically interesting is one that would show that we can
make sense of consciousness in the natural world via an analysis of our phenomenal
concepts in the objective terms used in microphysics. This is what would show that
we can really make sense of the location of consciousness in the world as it is in
itself. And the thought might be that precisely the perspectivalness of our phenomenal
concepts is something we need to show can be dropped if we are to show that location
of consciousness in the objectively conceived of natural world is intelligible. If the
interdependence approach insists not only that phenomenal concepts are essentially
perspectival, but also that they are essential for getting right the extension of our
concept of perception, it is not even in the ballpark of delivering an interesting answer
to the intelligible location question.
More strongly, the claim a defender of the two-concept claim might make is
that it is not even coherent.. Either we say the extension of our concept of perception
is determined via the use of objective spatial and physical concepts; or we say it is
determined by the use of essentially perspectival concepts. We can’t have both
working in tandem. Given that we think that spatial and physical concepts are
essential for getting right the psychological component of our concept of perception,
if you also hold that perspectival concepts are essential for getting right the
phenomenal component, the obvious move to make is to say we have two separate
concepts, to adopt, that is, the two-concept approach.
Actually, once the objectivity issue is highlighted, it appears that relational
theory considered as an answer to the Perceptual Access Question, is also under the
threat. Recall, the idea was that the relational account does justice to the claim that
consciousness give us direct access to the world out there, the word as it is in itself.
Suppose that we say that access to the word as is in itself is a matter of representing it
objectively. If getting the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences requires the
use of essentially perspectival concepts it seems that precisely for that reason,
consciousness cannot reach all the way out to the world as it is itself.
In brief, it appears that the interdependence account of our concept of
perceptual, in virtue of attempting to do justice to the subjectivity of perceptual
experience, rules itself out from giving an account both of what intelligible location of
perceptual consciousness in the natural world amounts to, and of what it is for
consciousness to provide us with access to the natural world. That is the challenge it
must now meet, and the problem we turn to in the next chapter.
To sum up where we have got to so far: I have been suggesting that neither
appeal to our capacity to understand stories about zombies, not appeal to the practice
of the perception-sciences provides independent grounds for preferring the twoconcept claim to the interdependence approach. I will take it that the strongest
arguments for the two-concept claim are those just mooted, but that until we have
considered them, for all that has been said so far, both the interdependence approach
and the relational theory (which the two-concept claim would rule out) are still in the
running for delivering an account of perceptual experience that shows that we can and
do make sense of the location of consciousness in the natural world.