[Forthcoming in Philosophical Issues 13 2003]
What is the relation between an experience, the subject of the experience, and the
content of the experience?
Galen Strawson Draft
_____________________________________________________________________
‘Eventually meditators…come to see that the perceiver is only the subject side of a momentary
experience, an aspect of the perception or thought itself’. 1
_____________________________________________________________________
1 Introduction
Materialism is the view that every real, concrete2 phenomenon3 in the universe is
physical. It is a view about the actual universe, and in this paper I will assume that it is
true.4
Consider Louis, a representative human being. Louis is part of physical reality.
Everything about him is a wholly physical phenomenon, including, of course, his
conscious experience, and the experiential qualitative5 character that it has for him as he
has it.6
Let us call the part of reality that consists of Louis the Louis-reality—the L-reality
for short. The notion of the L-reality is rough, for as a concrete physical being Louis is
enmeshed in wide-reaching physical interactions, but it is serviceable and useful none
the less.7
Consider one of Louis’s experiences, and suppose for simplicity that it is a sharply
delimited, uninterrupted, two-second-long episode preceded and followed by a period of
complete unconsciousness on Louis’s part. Call this event of experience ‘e’, call the
subject of this experience ‘s’, and call the overall experiential content of this experience
‘c’—where by ‘experiential content’ I mean occurrent content, ‘narrow’ experiential
content, purely ‘internal’ content, ‘phenomenological’ content, whatever you prefer to
call it.8 My question is
_______________________________________________________
1
Rosch 1997: 193. When I cite a work I give the date of its completion or first publication, while
the page reference is to the edition listed in the bibliography.
2 By ‘concrete’ I simply mean ‘not abstract’. It is natural to think that any really existing thing is
ipso facto concrete, non-abstract, in which case ‘concrete’ is redundant. But some philosophers
like to say that numbers (for example) are real things—objects that really exist, but are ‘abstract’.
3 I use ‘phenomenon’ as a general word for any sort of existent that carries no implication as to
ontological category, and suppress its meaning of appearance.
4 Someone who agrees that physical phenomena are all there are but finds no logical incoherence
in the idea that physical things could be put together in such a way as to give rise to non-physical
things can define materialism as the view that every real, concrete phenomenon that there is or
could be in the universe is physical. See McLaughlin 2002: 146.
5 I qualify ‘qualitative’ by ‘experiential’ because every (non-relational) property of a thing
contributes to its qualitative character, and the standard materialist assumption is that experiences
have non-experiential non-relational properties as well as experiential properties.
6 I set this out in Strawson 2002a.
7 Louis is constitutively entangled with the quantum vacuum, and is not neatly separable out as a
single portion of reality. There are at any given time many millions of transient neutrinos in the
spatial volume bounded by the surface of Louis’s skin that are not, I take it, part of Louis. The
same goes for much of the contents of his digestive system. And so on.
8 It is whatever experiential content is left as incontrovertibly real when one assumes the truth of
the extreme sceptical hypothesis about the existence of anything other than one’s own conscious
states of mind. Note that such experiential content is not limited to sensory or feeling content. It
includes anything whose subtraction could impoverish a human being’s experience: experience
of thought, of understanding mathematics or a metaphor, and so on. There is cognitive
phenomenology as well as sensory phenomenology. See e.g. James 1890: 1.245-246, Strawson
1994: 5-13.
What is the relation between e, s and c?
I have called the subject of e ‘s’ rather than ‘Louis’ in order not to beg any questions. It
may seem obvious that s = Louis, but there are different views of what subjects of
experience are, and of what Louis is, and some combinations of these views have the
consequence that s is no more identical with Louis than Louis is identical with his left
hand.
I think it helps to start with some general truths about the relations between
experience, subject, and content, e.g. that there cannot be an experience without
experiential content, nor an experience without a subject. I take these to be necessary
truths, true without possible exception. Taking ‘Ex’, ‘Sx’, and ‘Cx’ stand for ‘x is an
experience’, ‘x is a subject of experience’, and ‘x is an experiential content’
respectively, one can then express them as
(1) [xEx  yCy]
(2) [xEx  ySy]
where ‘’ has modal force, strong as you like.
Introducing ‘Oxy’ to stand for ‘x is the content Of y’, in contexts in which contents
are in question, one can tighten (1) to
{1} x[Ex  y[Cy  yx]].
Letting ‘O*xy’ stand for ‘x is the subject (i.e. haver) Of y’, in contexts in which subjects
are in question, one can tighten (2) to
{2} x[Ex  y[Sy O*yx]].
now some appear to think that there can be an experience without a subject of
experience; they have appeared to doubt (2), which I will call the Subject thesis. But
this view is crazy, on its most natural reading, for ‘an experience is impossible without
an experiencer’.9 It is ‘an obvious conceptual truth that an experiencing is necessarily an
experiencing by a subject of experience, and involves that subject as intimately as a
branch-bending involves a branch’.10 This is not a ‘grammatical illusion’, as some have
proposed, but an evident—inconcussible— metaphysical truth. There cannot be
experience without a subject of experience because experience is necessarily experience
for—for someone-or-something. Experience necessarily involves experiential ‘what-itis-likeness’, and experiential what-it-is-likeness is necessarily what-it-is-likeness for
someone-or-something. Whatever the full story about the substantial nature of this
experiencing something, its existence cannot be denied.
Descartes gets this exactly right in his Second Meditation. He observes that he can
know that he exists as thinker or subject however wrong he is about his substantial
nature. As he explicitly says, he might for all he knows at this point in his argument be
nothing more than his body.11
_______________________________________________________
9
Frege 1918: 27.
Shoemaker 1986: 10.
1641: 18. This is why Lichtenberg’s famous objection to Descartes is no good.
10
11
2
The Cartesian point is secure even if individual-substance-suggesting noun phrases
like ‘an experiencer’ or ‘a subject of experience’ or ‘someone-or-something’ have the
potential to mislead. There is nothing in Buddhism that challenges the point when it is
understood as it is here. One could express it paradoxically by saying that if per
impossibile there could be intense pain-experience without any subject of that
experience, mere experience without any experiencer, there would be no point in
stopping it, because no one would be suffering.
(1) and (2) are true, then, obviously true. 12 And so also, no doubt, are
(3) [xCx  yEy]
(4) [xCx  ySy]
and
{3} x[Cx  y[Ey  xy]]
{4} x[Cx  y[Sy O*yx]].
Evidently there cannot be experiential content—actual, occurrent experiential content—
without there being an experience of some sort. Equally evidently there cannot be
experiential content without there being a subject of experience. (4) is in effect a version
of (2) and is in any case entailed by (2) and (3).
(3) and (4) can be questioned, on at least one reading. For it is arguable that there
are occurrent but unexperienced experiential contents.13 I will put this interesting issue
to one side, however, and take ‘experiential content’ to mean ‘experienced content’, so
that (3) and (4) are trivially true. The question that interests me is not whether there isa
some sense in which experiential content can possibly exist without experience existing,
but: given an experience, which must have content, and must have an experiencer (= (1)
and (2)), what is the relation between that experience, its content, and its subject?
With (1)-(4) in place, two possible entailments remain
(5) [xSx  yEy]
(6) [xSx  yCy]14
and if either is true the other is,15 but both are plainly false given the common
understanding of the notion of a subject of experience, according to which a subject of
experience can exist at time t without any experience existing at t.16 There is, however, a
way of conceiving of subjects of experience which has the consequence that (5) and (6)
are true. I will set this out in the next section, because I think it is important—perhaps
_______________________________________________________
12
At the end of §5 I will consider a challenge to (2)— the suggestion that the individualsubstance-suggesting word ‘subject’ can be replaced by ‘subjectivity’.
13 See e.g. Lockwood 1989: xxx, Strawson 1994: xxx.
14 Duly accompanied by {5} x[Sx  y[Ey O*xy]] and {6}  Sx  y[Cy Oxy]].
15 If [5] is true then [6] is, by [5] and [1]; if [6] is true then [5] is, by [6] and [3].
16
Or at any other time: on this view a creature may be a subject of experience in the sense that it
is capable of experience (it needs only to be awakened, or stimulated) even if it has never had,
and never has, any experience.
3
essential—to have this conception of the subject to hand if one wants to make progress
with the metaphysics of conscious experience or subjectivity.
First, though, I am going to simplify my terminology. I will take ‘E’, ‘S’ and ‘C’ to
stand, respectively, for any individual, arbitrarily selected experience, its actual subject
(haver) and its actual experiential content (considered as an occurrent phenomenon).
The general version of the question about the relation between e, s, and c is then this:
What is the relation between E, S and C?
and (1)-(6) can be replaced by
[1] [E  C]
[2] [E  S]
[3] [C  E]
[4] [C  S]
[5] [S  E]
[6] [S  C].
[1]-[4] are as trivial as ever, [5] and [6] will now be defended.
2 Subjects of experience—thick, traditional, thin (live)
Many find it natural to say that human beings and other animals considered as a whole
are subjects of experience. I will call this the thick conception of the subject of
experience. It is taken for granted by most experimental psychologists and analytic
philosophers, who may not easily see (or remember) that it is neither mandatory nor
even particularly natural.
In spite of this orthodoxy many (including analytic philosophers) still have a
tendency to think that the subject of experience properly or strictly speaking is some
sort of inner mental thing or presence: ‘the self’, or some such—a persisting something
that is essentially distinct from, not identical with, the persisting human being
considered as a whole. This conception of the subject was for a long time dominant in
philosophy, and I will call it the traditional inner use. It comes extremely naturally to
ordinary human beings, given the character of their experience of themselves; its
naturalness is not a covert product of philosophical or religious speculation.
Some who favour the thick, whole-creature conception of the subject accept that the
traditional inner conception is more widespread, but think it mistaken, pernicious, and
in some way anti-materialist. I agree that it is mistaken in so far as it posits a persisting
inner subject distinct from the persisting human being, but it is certainly not in any way
anti-materialist, and can be glossed in ways that make it an acceptable thing to say. 17
So far, then, we have two conceptions of the subject of experience:
[A] the thick whole-creature conception dominant in present-day analytic philosophy
and experimental psychology
and
_______________________________________________________
17
See Strawson xxx.
4
[B] the traditional inner conception according to which a subject of experience is an
inner mental thing of some sort.
As ordinarily understood, [A] and [B] both allow—assume—that a subject of
experience may and standardly does continue to exist even when it is not having any
experience. Whether you think that human subjects of experience are whole human
beings or whether you think they are inner mental somethings you are likely to allow
that they can continue to exist during periods of complete unconsciousness or
experiencelessness—in periods of dreamless sleep, say. I (hereby) take this assumption
to be built into [A] and [B].
It is this creates the need for a third conception of the subject of experience,
[C] the thin conception according to which a subject of experience does not and cannot
exist at any given time unless it is having experience at that time.
The thin conception stands opposed to both [A] and [B] precisely because they both
build in the assumption that a subject of experience can be said to exist in the absence of
any experience.
—Why shouldn’t they? It seems overwhelmingly natural.
Perhaps it does. But to limit oneself to [A] and [B] is to run the risk of begging a central
question. I face a serious problem of exposition, because many philosophers are so
accustomed to [A] and/or [B], and to the idea that they exhaust the options, that they
cannot take [C] seriously. And yet [C] simply makes a place for a natural use of the term
‘subject of experience’ according to which it is a necessary truth, no less, that
there cannot be a subject of experience, at a given time t, unless some experience exists
at t for it to be a subject of, at t.
The thin conception of the subject requires that the subject be as it were ‘live’ in order
to exist at all, and I will use ‘thin’ and ‘live’ interchangeably.
This is Descartes’s view: he holds that the soul or self or subject cannot exist in the
absence of experience or consciousness. In fact he holds that the subject is in some
sense wholly constituted of experience or consciousness. I think he may in fact be right
about this, but for the wrong reasons. (His reasons are entangled with his substance
dualism, but I think he may be right even while assuming the trurth of materialism.)
It is also Hume’s view: ‘when my perceptions are remov'd for any time, as by sound
sleep’, he writes, ‘so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist’.
He holds that there is no self or subject at all when there is no experience, although
there is certainly a self or subject when there is experience.18
How does all this apply to Louis—to the L-reality? Those who favour [A], the thick
use, find one subject in the L-reality, and the same goes, no doubt, for those who favour
[B], the traditional use.19 But those who favour [C], the thin use, and who concur with
the commonly accepted view that the life of a human being regularly involves periods of
_______________________________________________________
18
1739: 252. For an extended discussion of Hume’s wildly misunderstood position, see Strawson
2001 and forthcoming.
19 Louis has not had a cerebral commisurotomy, is not suffering from dissociative identity
disorder, and so on.
5
complete experiencelessness (periods of dreamless sleep, for example), must find many
subjects in the L-reality considered over time.
Some will feel confident that this consequence counts strongly against [C]. I think
this is terminological habit or prejudice. And whether or not there turn out to be many
subjects in the L-reality, on [C]’s way of counting (it is, for one thing, an unsettled
empirical question whether there are any periods of complete experiencelessness in the
life of an ordinary human being), I think, as already remarked, that it may be crucial to
have [C] in play when attempting a sound metaphysics of consciousness.
However that may be, I will be concerned only with thin subjects from now on, and
only with human subjects unless I specify otherwise. But nothing I say will challenge
any of the many true things that have been said about subjects of experience by those
who favour the thick use of ‘subject of experience’.
Are thin subjects persons? If you wish. In philosophy, the sense of the word ‘person’
is not clearly fixed independently of theory. Certainly longevity is not decisive: if a
creature qualitatively identical to me during three seconds of my life exists for just three
seconds, that creature is certainly a person and deserves all the consideration due to any
of us. And there may also be creatures who live lives as complex as ours in three
seconds. I take thin subjects to be inner mental things of some sort, but this certainly
does not decide the issue against their being persons. Some think it evident that human
persons cannot be anything other than human beings considered as a whole, but Henry
James’s phrasing is very natural when he writes, of one of his early books,
I think of...the masterpiece in question...as the work of quite another person than
myself...a rich relation, say, who...suffers me still to claim a shy fourth cousinship. 20
James knows perfectly well that he is the same human being as the author of that book,
but he does not feel he is the same person as the author of that book.21
Are thin subjects things that can be said to speak English and know French and
algebra? Certainly, in every sense in which you can be said to these things at any given
time.
Are we thin subjects? In one respect, of course, we are thick subjects, human beings
considered as a whole. In this respect we are, in being subjects of experience, things that
can yawn and scratch. In another respect, though, we are, in being subjects of
experience, no more whole human beings than hands or hearts: we are—literally—inner
things, thin subjects. In this respect we are, in being subjects of experience, no more
things that can yawn or scratch than eyebrows or thoughts. There is nothing antimaterialist about this view.
But ‘What then am I?’22 Am I two different sort of things, a thin subject and a thick
subject? This is ridiculous. Who—or what—speaks when Louis says ‘I’?
My answer is that ‘I’ is not univocal. We move naturally between conceiving of
ourselves primarily as a human being considered as a whole and primarily as some sort
of inner mental subject (we do not of course naturally conceive of ourselves as a thin
_______________________________________________________
20
21
Ref xxx.
He is precisely using ‘person’ in the familiar way that allows one to distinguish the person
from the human being.
22 As Descartes asked (1641: 18).
6
subject). Sometimes we mean to refer to the one, sometimes to the other; sometimes our
semantic intention hovers between both, sometimes it embraces both. 23
3 Terms and assumptions
To introduce the notion of a thin subject is not—not yet—to make any assertion about
the nature of reality that can be sensibly disputed. So far, it is simply to introduce a
certain way of talking about something whose existence is not in question. It is to draw a
theoretical line around a certain part of concrete reality, a certain real phenomenon, and
to choose to give it a certain name. The way of talking may be disliked or thought
unhelpful. Attachments to linguistic and theoretical habits can be as intense as
attachment to dietary prohibitions, and can incorporate a conviction that other ways of
talking are intrinsically wrong. But the phenomenon I refer to in speaking of thin/live
subjects is indisputably real and utterly commonplace. It is the subject of experience
understood in precisely the sense in which it is true to say that there is a subject of
experience in the L-reality only when (and whenever) there is experience in the Lreality. To claim that this is an unnatural or perverse way to section reality even when
doing metaphysics is simply to reveal one’s prior commitment to a notion of the subject
of experience that allows that it can persist through times of experiencelessness.
It is true that the inclination to think of the inner subject of experience (or self) as a
persisting thing is basic in ordinary thought. It is certainly not just a product of
philosophical fashion or habituation. It is, no doubt, one manifestation of the fact that
human beings have a deep, innate, highly general (and often thoroughly sensible)
tendency to posit and think in terms of persisting things, continuants, when faced with
sequences of experiences that resemble each other in certain respects although they are
in themselves numerically distinct.24 But it has no special weight when it comes to
metaphysics.
The existence of thin/live subjects is not an assumption, then. It is, so far, a
terminological ruling. ‘Thin/live subject’ picks out whatever portion of reality
constitutes the existence of a subject when a subject is defined as a thing that cannot
exist when there is no experience for it to be the subject of. The question is whether this
use of ‘subject’ can survive and thrive given the other energies contained in the notion
of a subject.
I am making certain assumptions: I have assumed that materialism is true, and I am
now going to assume that human live subjects are short-lived entities. I am going to
back the view that (contrary to Descartes) it is a fact about the human process of
consciousness that it is non-continuous in a certain way. I believe, in fact, that it is noncontinuous in such a way that there are many thin subjects of experience in the L-reality
in any normal waking day (others, perhaps, believe that it is continuous in the case of
any waking day but interrupted at night).
An outright temporal gap in consciousness in the L-reality is obviously sufficient for
non-continuity, but it is not necessary, on the present view: an experientially unitary
period of experience or ‘pulse’ of thought (in William James’s terminology) may
_______________________________________________________
23
See Strawson 1999c: xxx and 2002b: xxx for defence of this view. With regard to the inner
reference I claim (briefly) that we take ourselves to be referring to a persisting subject, but since
there is no such thing we refer in fact to the current thin/live subject or a series of such subjects.
24
See Hume 1739; for the case of objects in general see pp. 201-204; for the case of self or
subject in particular, see pp. 259ff. For important recent versions of the idea see e.g. Spelke 1994,
1996.
7
succeed another in a temporally seamless way and yet count as a discontinuity for the
purposes of counting subjects.25
Let me also register my view that subjects of experience are happily thought of as
objects or if you like substances; even when thinly understood, as here. If one is going
to talk of objects at all in one’s metaphysics, then it is I think not hard to show that live
subjects have at least as good a claim to be called objects as anything else. For whatever
objects or individual substances are, they are, given materialism, physical unities of a
certain sort, and there are I think no more indisputable physical unities than live subjects
of experience.26
That said, I think matter is best thought of as what one might call ‘process-stuff’, and
that all physical objects are best thought of as processes, even if the converse is not true.
And I take it this to be true on a three-dimensionalist (3D) view of objects as much as
on a four-dimensionalist (4D) view.27 We have continually to combat a deep staticism
in our thought about matter and objects.28 Matter is essentially dynamic: essentially in
time and essentially changeful.29 All reality is process, as Whitehead was moved to
observe by his study of twentieth-century physics, and as Heracleitus proposed long
ago. Perhaps we would do better to call matter ‘time-matter’, or ‘matter-in-time’, so that
we never for a moment forget its essential temporality. We think of matter as essentially
extended, but we tend to think only of extension in space !something that can, we
intuitively feel, be given to us as a whole at an instant). But space and time are
interdependent. They are aspects of spacetime, and all concrete spatial extension is
extension in spacetime.30
It follows from this interdependence alone, I think, that there is no metaphysically
weighty distinction between objects and processes given which objects are not truly said
to be processes, although there is for many purposes a perfectly respectable distinction
to be made between them. But there is in fact no need to invoke the spacetime of
relativity theory, for even if relativity theory is false in its account of the essential
interdependence of space and time there is no metaphysically defensible conception of a
physical object—a ‘spatio-temporal continuant’, as philosophers say—that allows one
to distinguish validly between objects and processes by saying that the latter are
essentially dynamic or changeful phenomena in some way in which the former are not. 31
The source of the idea that there might be some metaphysically deep distinction
between objects and processes lies in everyday habits of thought that are ordinarily
harmless and useful but seriously disabling—almost perfectly unhelpful—in certain
theoretical contexts. It seems to me that we philosophers continue to be very severely
hampered by this habit of thought even when we have, in the frame of theoretical
_______________________________________________________
25
26
I will say more about this later. For some related ideas see Strawson 1999.
For a brief defence see Strawson 1999. I think it is in the general spirit of van Inwagen’s
(1990) notion of an object to count live subjects as objects, although he does not do so himself.
27 It is arguable that it is more obviously true on a 3D view than on some versions of the 4D view
which see time as ‘spacelike’. But ‘process’ is a time word that has application on any view that
is realist about time, and the 4D view is realist about time. (It seems to me that the adversarial
character of the 3D/4D debate is a waste of time; for some outstanding mediation, see Jackson
1994: 96-103.)
28 I defend this idea in Strawson 1999: §XV-XVI; also Strawson 1987: §IV.
29 I am taking ‘dynamic’ to be essentially equivalent to ‘in time and changing’, although some
realists about time might precisely wish to question the aptness of the words ‘dynamic’ and
‘changing’.
30 This is not a distinctively 4D claim—should anyone’s terminological habits make it seem so.
31 Again, there is nothing in the 3D conception of objects that supports such a view.
8
discussion, fully agreed and, as we think, deeply appreciated, that objects are entirely
creatures of time, process-entities.32
Here is an analogy that I should not really use, because it has illustrative force only
relative to the staticist picture I reject. Imagine a connectionist’s customized set of party
lights. Switched on for a few seconds, each light flashes in a pattern that depends on the
other lights’ state of activation. The object that corresponds to experience e or subject s,
in this analogy, is not the set of lights conceived as something you can put away in a box
for next year (which we naturally think of as an object). Nor is it the set of lights
considered as a few-seconds-long temporal slice of the thing that you can put away in a
box for next year (a rather peculiar object, by our ordinary lights). The object that
corresponds to s (or e) in this analogy is: the-set-of-lights-in-the-process-of-flashing.
One might try to point up the idea by repeating that thin subjects are dynamic
entities, but this already concedes too much to the staticism of our ordinary thought
about objects, because all physical objects are dynamic entities (there is an awful lot
going on in a stone). The lights analogy draws what force it has from the contrast
between the natural staticist picture of the set of lights and the ‘dynamic’ entity that
consists of the set-of-lights-in-the-process-of-flashing-for-three-seconds, but really all
objects are best conceived on the model of the set-of-lights-in-the-process-of-flashingfor-three-seconds—as essentially processual entities made of process-stuff.
I labour the point because I want to establish its banality. I think there are areas of
metaphysics in which it is very important to cultivate the intuition of process in thinking
about concrete reality.
—In that case, why bother with the solid staticist word ‘object’ at all, or the strongly
substantial word ‘subject’? Why not fall back into a world—or vocabulary—of
Russellian ‘events’ or Whiteheadian ‘occasions’?
First because there is no reason why one should not take the words ‘object’ and
‘subject’ with one into the processual outlook, realigning them to mean more clearly on
their faces what they have meant (referentially speaking) all along. Second because
there are positive reasons why one should take these words with one—rather than
leaving them behind as specious rallying points for bad intuitions.
Certainly the brevity of human thin subjects should not count against their claim to
be objects, and, hence, physical objects, and the everyday human temporal scale has no
special validity. W-particles and Z-particles presumably count as objects in almost any
serious materialist metaphysics that countenances objects at all, and they are
considerably more ephemeral entities than thin subjects.
*
Thin subjects certainly exist as defined, then, and are to be counted among the objects,
on the present scheme of things; although objects are processes, wholly constituted out
of time-matter, process-stuff, and although ‘subjectivity’ may turn out to be a helpful
alternative to ‘subject’, in certain contexts, by the time I have finished. I take it, as a
materialist, that all thin subjects are entirely constituted out of process-stuff in the brain.
Cerebral process-stuff is constantly being recruited—electrochemically corralled—into
one transient subject-constituting (and equally experience-constituting) synergy of
process-stuff after another (I will say more about ‘synergy’ in due course). These
_______________________________________________________
32
I am ignoring the view, ingeniously argued for by Barbour, that time does not exist. See
Barbour xxxx.
9
experience-constituting synergies, these experiences, are intrinsically unified
phenomena, theory-independent, objective, physical unities; and there is one subject to
each one. This, I propose, is what the conscious life of a human being consists in. My
(empirical) bet is that these intrinsically unified episodes of experience, and hence these
thin subjects, last for a maximum of about three seconds, in the human case; with many
being much shorter.33 I believe that there is always some sort of break of consciousness
in any longer period of time, although this is not phenomenologically accessible to most
people in normal life.
What sort of break? There may either be a straightforward temporal gap, as already
remarked, or there may be a new experience-upsurging, with a new subject, following
seamlessly on from the previous one, taking up the baton.34 Nor need we rule out the
possibility that a new experience can overlap its predecessor temporally, as one
recruitment or neurons gathers pace and peaks in subject-involving conscious
experience before the previous one has died away to nothing.35
These experiences—these experiences-with-subjects—are I propose primitive
unities. They are ‘indecomposable unities’, 36 in the sense that no subpart of one such
experience-with-subject can be said to be itself having that experience, or a part of that
experience.37 One experience-surging means one subject of that experience. These
unities are of course physical unities, on the materialist view, and they are, most
strikingly, physical unities that we can know to exist and to be true unities.38 For we
know that thoughts—events of proposition-comprehension—occur.39 And we know that
they have (must have) distinguishable parts or elements. And we know that these
distinguishable parts must be held together, bound together in the sense of the ‘binding
problem’, in the unity that is the comprehension of the proposition by a subject.40 So we
know that there are actually existing concrete entities that realize a certain sort of
unsurpassable unity, a ‘logical’ unity, in Kant’s terms, the ‘absolute…logical unity of
the subject’, the ‘logical unity of any thought’.41
If overlap of the sort just imagined occurs in the L-reality then there are for a brief
time two experiences-with-subjects in the L-reality; this is what the consciousness of
Louis-considered-as-a-whole consists in, at this time. But neither of the two (thin)
subjects that are numerically distinguishable at time t, on this view of experiences as
successive neuronal recruitments, is aware of there being two subjects at t; nor is Louis
the whole human being considered as a (thick) subject of experience aware of this at t.
However we count subjects here, the experience of each one of them will standardly
_______________________________________________________
33
I am influenced by research by Pöppel and others—which is doubtless open to various
interpretations [Pöppel xxx, Ruhnau xxx).
34 Xxx Imagine a spatially sequential series of roughly semicircular figures sharing a common
baseline, each overlapping only with its predecessor and successor, if at all. Imagine a continuous
line through all the points of intersection. One may think of the above-the-line part of any given
figure as the actual experience, and the below-the-line part as the non-experiential goings that
prepare for it.
35 James agrees (1890: xxx). On the terms of the last note, one might draw the continuous line
just below the points of intersection (the figures’ common part would not in this case represent
something shared, but merely a temporal overlapping).
36 James 1890: 1.371. This is wholly compatible with the view that they involve many neurons
and many parts of neurons.
37 This is not to rule out the panpsychist view that ultimates might in some difficult sense be
subjects of experience themselves.
38 We cannot by contrast know with certainty that there are any absolutely distinct physical
ultimates of the sort physics postulates.
39
I consider the popular case of thought-experiences, but the point applies equally to a subject’s
having of any experience with distinguishable elements.
40
‘That…the I of…thought…designates a logically simple subject—this lies already in the very
concept of thought’ (Kant 1781/7: B407).
41 1781/7: A356, A398.
10
have, for it, the character of being part of a continuous process of experience on the part
of a single subject.42
I will elaborate this as I go along. Here let me stress that ‘thin’ carries no implication
of brevity, any more than ‘live’ does. The definition of thin/live subjects allows that
they might last for hours or days, even if they do not do so in our case. In some
creatures they might cease to exist only when very rare periods of complete
experiencelessness occur—only in dreamless sleep, say. One could even suppose, with
Descartes, that thin subjects are sempiternal, immortal.
—But what is the relation of a thin subject to a human being? What is the relation of this
putative thin subject s in the L-reality to Louis the human being?
I take it to be a straightforward part-whole relation, like the relation between Louis the
whole human being and one of his toes or transient blemishes. s is a spatiotemporally
bounded piece of process-stuff which one may call ps, Louis considered as a whole is
also a spatiotemporally bounded piece of process-stuff which one may call pL, and ps is
ontically distinct from pL in the way in which any (proper) part of an object that is itself
correctly thought of as an object (a cell, say, or a heart or finger) is ontically distinct
from the larger object of which it is a part. s is also not ontically distinct from Louis in
any sense in which such a part of Louis is not ontically distinct from Louis.
I take [s = ps] to be a simple identity claim, not a constitutive identity claim—if, that
is, a constitutive identity claim is one that allows that the constituter can possibly exist
in the absence of the constitutee, or conversely. On this view, neither ps nor s can exist
without the other—unlike (to take a familiar example) a statue and the lump of bronze
out of which it is made, on most accounts of the relation between these two things. s
could not possibly have consisted of anything other than the particular synergy of
process-stuff ps and ps could not possibly have existed without s existing. The same goes
for [e = pe] and that [c = pc]: any concrete existent consists of some portion of processstuff, e, s, and c are all concrete existents, and they could not, on the present terms, have
consisted of any ultimates other than the ones of which they do in fact consist.43
In the same spirit I take it that the identity conditions of subject-constituting
synergies of process-stuff are a strict function of their parts, in whatever sense they have
parts. If, given s = ps, one adds or subtracts a single constituent ‘particle’ or ‘string’ or
‘field’ or ‘physical simple’ or ultimate, as I will call the ultimate constituents of reality,
whatever they are, one no longer has the same synergy or the same subject.
This decision runs contrary to some common intuitions about the conditions under
which something (e.g a subject of experience) can be correctly said to remain the same
thing, and I will consider some counterfactual-based objections later.
I hope the word ‘synergy’ does some work against the staticist tendencies of our
natural picture of objects. It is not wrong, nor even particularly unclear, to say simply
that s (or e) consists of a piece or bit or segment of process-stuff, for the essentially
temporal, dynamic nature of what is in question has already been strongly marked by the
term ‘process-stuff’. But a piece of time-matter, process-stuff, could be dynamic in
every part (every piece of physical process-stuff is dynamic in every part, every atom is
_______________________________________________________
42
Standardly: some, like myself, often experience consciousness as gappy in everyday life—as if
it were somehow continually restarting. See Strawson 1997.
43
Some may think that c is best understood as a property and not as a thing. This raises the issue
of the inadequacy of the standard conception of the relation between an object and its properties,
which I consider in §7 below.
11
in internal uproar) without necessarily being synergetic in any very interesting way, let
alone synergetic in the way required for it to be a subject or an experience. 44 It is the
synergy of process-stuff ps that constitutes—is—s. It is not that the piece of processstuff, involving 1012 ultimates, say, already wholly constitutes s = ps, and that it is then a
further fact about s = ps that it is synergetic in a certain way. It is a portion of synergetic
process-stuff that constitutes/is s—the physical object that is the subject of experience.
Let me shift from s to e (the same points will apply in either case). I take it that the
‘process-stuff’ idiom allows one, in talking of e (= pe), to refer to a portion of reality—
e—in a very specific way that excludes any and all process-stuff that is not directly
constitutive of e, i.e. part of the being of e; and I take it that to do this is to exclude
things like cell-wall-constituting ultimates, myelin-constituting ultimates, blood-sugarconstituting ultimates, and so on (always assuming that nature in her astonishing
ingenuity45 has not somehow found a way to put even these things to work as
consciousness-constituting elements in those synergies of process-stuff that are
experiences) that may be supposed to be part of e on a more inclusive view of what an
experience is. The process-stuff idiom allows intensely fine-grained demarcations of
portions of reality (I hope the account of the distinction between an object and its
properties in §7 will make this easier to grasp). It allows one to separate off just the
process-stuff that directly constitutes e from everything else in the neuronal synergy that
is a candidate for being constitutive of e on a blunter view of things which lets in cellwall-constituting ultimates, and so on.46
4 ‘[E = S:C]’
So much for preliminaries. Thin subjects certainly exist. Human thin subjects certainly
exist (I think they last for a maximum of about three seconds). They have as good a
claim to the title ‘physical object’ as anything else. Like all other physical objects they
are essentially spatiotemporal, essentially dynamic entities. Like all other physical
objects other than individual ultimates they are constituted of collections of ultimates.
They are synergies of process-stuff of a certain very special sort, involving special
macroelectrical (electrochemical) goings on.47
We may now repeat the question:
What is the relation between E, S and C?
The first thing to do is to add
[5] [S  E]
and
_______________________________________________________
44
Mutual gravitational influence is already synergy, on one view. The physical synergy that is of
particular interest in the present case is the sort of (macroscopic) thing studied by
neurophysiologists.
45 So it seems to us, although it is surely banal given the actual and largely unknown nature of the
physical.
46 Perhaps serotonin-constituting ultimates are also excluded. But it doesn’t matter if these
examples are wrong. It is enough that there may be ultimates in the brain that are necessary for
the existence of e , and more particularly for the existence of the direct constituters of e although
they are not directly constitutive of e. I will say a little more about this in §xxx.
47
Tables and chairs are physical objects (unless van Inwagen is right), and do not involve such
special electrical goings on. Nor do electric motors, nor do plants or brain-dead living human
beings.
12
[6] [S  C]
to [1]-[4], to give the full house of [1]-[6]. Together [1]-[6] entail
[7] [E 
 C],
which, particularized to the case of e, a single experience in the L-reality, gives
[7L] [e sc].48
I take it, as before, that [7] and [7L] have modal force, but there is a sense in which ‘’
is really not very informative. If [7] is true it would be good to know more about what
makes it true. It would be nice to know more about the metaphysics of the situation.
My first proposal is that we may and should move on from [1] and [2]—the obvious
thesis that every experience has some experiential content, and the equally obvious
Subject thesis that experience has to be experience-for someone-or-something—to the
thesis that an experience consists of a (thin) subject entertaining—having, living—a
content. I propose to write this as
[8] [E = S:C]
where ‘:’ has some kind of strong intimacy-intimating function whose force (over and
above ‘’) remains to be determined. [8] then, is formed on the model of the general
connection schema
[7] [E 
 C].
It replaces the first ‘’ in [7] by identity and the second by some as yet unspecified
metaphysical intimacy.
5 The Subject thesis: polarity
One thing that seems helpful about [8] is that it gives expression to the idea that any
experience E comports an irreducible polarity—of subject and content. I will now
expound this idea, and say something further about the Subject thesis. And in so doing I
will abstract away from the non-experiential being of E (it certainly has non-experiential
being according to standard materialism) and consider it only in its experiential being. I
will call the object of enquiry that is delivered by this move Ee.49
_______________________________________________________
48
All the numbered proposals have Louis-relativized versions. I omit the brackets required by the
convention that two-place operators bring brackets with them.
49 In fact I think one can pick out e not just as an object of thought but as an object, a portion of
e
reality that has as good a title to the description ‘physical object’ as anything else. In other words:
when one is picking out physical objects, in this particular area of reality, one can not only pick
out the object that consists of those synergetic ultimates that are directly constitutive of e, and
that have (as standard materialism supposes) both experiential and non-experiential being; one
can also pick out, as a portion of reality that has an equally good a title to the description
‘physical object’, just the experiential being of e—ee. I hope the discussion of the relation
between an object and its properties in §7 will show how this can be so. For if one uses the
standard object/property idiom it looks pretty dubious. For suppose one says that ee is identical
with a synergy of ultimates and conceives these as objects that have properties in the usual way.
One may then feel obliged (as a standard materialist) to say that these ultimates have non-
13
Given that Ee exists, what else must exist? Different metaphysical positions deliver
different answers, but the Subject thesis completely bypasses all these disputes. It points
out that one has to grant that the subject must exist, given that E exists, even when one
considers only Ee, and before one has made any other assumptions about the nature of
reality. Even when all one has assumed to exist is Ee one can already know—so it
seems—that what exists given that Ee exists is complex in a certain respect. Ee may be
complex in virtue of its content: it may be experience as of seeing a complicated array
of different colours. But even if Ee is just uniform experience of green or a pure note50 it
seems that one is already in a position to assert (to know) that what exists, given that Ee
exists, is and must be complex or plural in a certain respect. For Ee cannot possibly exist
without the polarity of experiencer and experiential content. Where there is experiential
content there is necessarily experiencing, and where there is experiencing there is
necessarily an experiencer—a subject of experience.
This is the apparently irreducible polarity that, so far, seems well expressed by
[8] [E = S:C].51
Some may want to replace the individual-substance-suggesting word ‘subject’ by the
word ‘subjectivity’, in spite of assurances that the Subject thesis (in good SecondMeditation style) makes no claims whatever about the ultimate substantial nature of the
subject, and certainly doesn’t claim that the subject can be known to be something
ontologically distinct from E or indeed Ee. That’s fine. I won’t allow the replacement of
‘subject’ by ‘subjectivity’ in the Subject thesis unless it is allowed in return that
‘subject’ can also be correctly used, but this is surely only a matter of terminology, 52
and the basic point surely remains untouched: Ee must still involve some sort of
irreducible complexity or polarity in involving the phenomenon of subjectivity, on the
one hand, and the phenomenon of content, on the other.
Well, perhaps the point is not entirely untouched; perhaps it does not seem quite so
luminously evident after the substitution of ‘subjectivity’ for ‘subject’. That’s fine, too,
for in the end, I do not want it to be untouched at all. And to say that it is provable that
any experience comports some sort of irreducible polarity, and that this can be known to
be so even when one restricts oneself to Ee, is not yet to say that one can prove
irreducible, full-on ontological plurality a priori from the mere existence of Ee.
—I don’t know what you mean by ‘full-on ontological plurality’, and this is all wrong in
any case. Experiential content is all that can be truly discerned when one restricts
attention not just to E but to Ee. The subject of experience cannot be discerned. This is
what Hume took such pains to show.
experiential properties, non-experiential being. In which case one inevitably picks out something
with non-experiential being in attempting to pick out ee as a distinct physical object. In which
case one cannot really pick it out at all in this way, because it has, by hypothesis, no nonexperiential being.
50 Putting aside brightness/saturation/hue and pitch/timbre/loudness complexity.
51 [8] is I think the best expression of Hume’s view of an experience or ‘perception’. See
Strawson 2001 and, at more length, Strawson forthcoming.
52 Some Buddhists find it hard to accept, given time-honoured terminological habits, but I have
confidence in the judgement of the great Buddhist scholar Edmund Conze ‘that no passage in the
Buddhist scriptures teaches that there is no self’ (1963: 242). Xxx tells me that this is no longer
accepted, but it seems highly significant none the less.
14
Hume did no such thing,53 but let’s leave him out of this. Even it were true that
experiential content is all that can be discerned when one is restricted to Ee it would still
be true that the subject can be known to exist if Ee is known to exist, for the same old
reason54 if there is an experience of pain, then there must be something, however
unknown it is in any further respect, that feels the pain. There cannot be just experiential
content—if to say this is in any way to suggest or imply that there is not also a subject of
experience (occurrent subjectivity). Experience, once again, is necessarily experiencefor. We must discern at least this much structure in the world if it contains an
experience; even if we think that reality is purely mental. This is the Subject thesis. It
does not depend on the traditional idea that an experience, being a process or event,
necessarily requires some sort of substance that is in some way distinct from it, in which
it can go on or occur. It holds good even if one proposes that there is nothing but
process, ‘pure process’, indeed pure mental process, in the universe.
The necessary for-ness of any (arbitrary particular) experience E is not itself any part
of the experiential content of E. It is not, I take it, something that is necessarily
apprehended in some manner by the entity whose experience E is, when E occurs.
Equally, representation of the subject of E needn’t be part of the experiential content of
E, although I think it can be.55 The fact remains that the necessary for-ness of
experience requires us to acknowledge the existence of the subject when saying what
must exist given that E exists—even when considering E just as Ee—i.e. just in its
experiential being. Some, given their terminological preferences, think that Buddhist
meditation, or indeed any remotely successful practice of meditation, however secular,
shows the noun-phrase ‘subject of experience’ to be irredeemably excessive, but there is
no reason to accept this; it is only a terminological attachment, a verbal clinging. My
reply to those who want to replace ‘subject’ by ‘subjectivity’ is that the force of the
word ‘subject’ in its present use is such that the existence of subjectivity entails the
existence of a subject (while carrying no implication that a subject is a persisting thing).
6 ‘[E = S = C]’?
Before I was interrupted (before Hume was misrepresented) I was proposing that we can
know that reality is complex or plural in a certain way even if all we know is that a
given experience E exists—even when considering E just as Ee. Experience seems to
involve an irreducible polarity, which seems, so far, well enough represented by
[8] [E = S:C].
It is not, however, clear that we can know that this polarity involves some sort of
genuine ontological plurality—a real distinction, as opposed to a merely conceptual
distinction, as Descartes might have said. For there is a real distinction between two
phenomena—so that genuine ontological plurality is in question—if and only if they can
possibly ‘exist apart’, and a merely conceptual distinction between them if and only if
they are distinct, distinguishable, but cannot possibly exist apart, like trilaterality and
_______________________________________________________
53
54
See Strawson forthcoming.
Kant (1781) puts this well in the Paralogisms.
55 Contrary to Ryle (1949: 186-9), and the ancient ‘the eye cannot see itself’ analogy . I challenge
Ryle’s view directly in Strawson 1999, §X. Minds are considerably more flexible than eyes.
15
triangularity.56 And when we confine our attention to thin subjects, as here, it seems
quite unclear that the actual subject S of any given actual experience E can exist apart
from E, even in thought. So I am not claiming that the allegedly irreducible subjectcontent polarity of an experience proves the existence of irreducible ontological
plurality. (Some may think that counterfactual speculation can easily pull them apart,
but I am going to deny this.)
Well, is there or is there not irreducible ontological plurality?
This issue now has to be addressed. It is very difficult—it includes, for one thing, the
perennial problems raised by the distinction between an object and its properties—but I
will now attempt it, returning to e, Louis’s particular experience.
What more can be said about the relation between e, s and c in the light of the
biconditional template
[7L] [e sc]?
I have already proposed that
[8L] [e = s:c]
is informative and true as a exposition of [7L]. The colon-designated relation is
admittedly murky, but at least it seems clear that we cannot develop it into identity and
say that
[9L] [e = s = c].
The subject cannot, surely, be the content. It cannot be a general truth that
[9] [E = S = C].
Even if there is some sense in which it is best to say that the subject of the experience is
just the (necessary) subjectivity of the experience, still the subjectivity cannot, surely, be
the content.
That remains to be seen. In the meantime, it may be suggested that the colon in [8 L]
is too appositional, and too separatist. And perhaps it is also too egalitarian, suggesting
full equality of ontological status across the double dots—so that there is no difference
between s:c and c:s. Perhaps it would be more graphic to write [8 L] as
[10L] [e = s{c}],
the curly brackets representing not only the fact that c is essentially something for s, and
essentially belongs to s,57 but also, perhaps, the idea that c is somehow involved in s in
such a way that its being is at least partly constitutive of the being of s. On this view c is,
as it were, the body or flesh of s, without which s (the thin subject) could not exist, and
_______________________________________________________
56
I will use these terms in this sense, which is close to Descartes’s sense, throughout (see
Descartes 1644: 213-14xxx?).
57 Experiences, as one used to say, are ‘logically private’.
16
would be nothing. s, we feel, cannot simply be the same as c, but s is nothing without
c—not just utterly empty, but non-existent. s could not possibly exist apart from c.
—What if the s:c entity begins to exist but then c is cut short—after a millisecond—to be
seamlessly replaced by c* ≠ c? Doesn’t s then continue without c?
No; but it is not yet time to play with counterfactuals
Returning to the terms of §3, we may say that the existence of s is the existence of
s
p , a synergy of process-stuff: that [s = ps]. And whatever else it is or is not, the
existence of c is (given materialism) nothing over and above the existence of some
process-stuff which we may call pc: [c = pc].58 The question is then this: what is the
relation between ps (= s) and pc (= c)? What is the relation between the process-stuff
that is (wholly constitutive of) the being of s and the process-stuff that is (wholly
constitutive of) the being of c.
—This is lovely, but I don’t really follow. I really don’t follow. It looks as if the main
achievement of the colon and the curly brackets is to dramatize our uncertainty about
the metaphysics of the relation between s and c. The meaning of ‘=’, by contrast, is very
clear.
I agree. ‘=’ has an agreeable clarity. It would be nice to have more of it. And perhaps
[9L] [e = s = c]
is not as crazy as it sounds. It may at least be worth asking what sort of a case can be
made for [9L], at least—to examine where and how, exactly, it hits incoherence, if it
does.
The central strangeness is the identification of s and c. How can the subject be the
content? But is the intuition that s cannot be the same as c as sound as it is strong?
Perhaps it feeds off some elision or blurring of the difference between qualitativeidentity considerations and numerical-identity considerations; or between type identity
and token identity; or between contents considered as abstract particulars and contents
considered as concrete, occurrent particulars. One needs to bring the question ‘What is
it, actually, for concrete, occurrent, live, experiential content to exist?’ before one’s
mind, again and again, if necessary, in order to put this idea to the test. 59
One thing that is as plain as ever is that an experiential content C cannot exist
without a subject S that it is content for, a subject for which it is occurrent or live—
[4] [C  S]
—any more than a subject S can exist without an experiential content C for it to be the
subject of:
[6] [S  C].
_______________________________________________________
58
This may seem an odder claim than the claim that [S = ps]. I hope the discussion of the
object/property distinction in §8 will make it seem less unpalatable.
59
Clearly two numerically distinct subjects S1 and S2 can entertain qualitatively identical
contents. And if they do there will of necessity be two numerically distinct (occurrent, live)
contents C1 and C2.
17
I suggested above that [6] is not true merely by definition of ‘thin subject’ but because
C is in some way constitutive of the very existence of S. (What would S be without it?
Nothing, non-existent.) And if one reflects it can begin to seem that there is after all no
obvious asymmetry between S and C in this respect. Particularizing again to s and c: c is
living content, an actual occurrence of content that is (necessarily) an actual
entertaining of content, an episode that necessarily involves there being ‘what-it’slikeness’ in the world, and its very life and reality—its being something concrete and
particular, rather than being an uninstantiated what-it’s-likeness type—just is its being
lived, had, animated, by a subject (suffused by subjectivity). It is, as
[4L] [[c  s]
records, impossible for c—this very occurrence of experiential content—to exist
without s—this very (thin) subject existing and being its animating subject. And given
the proposal that part of what
[6L] [s  c]
reflects is that c is in some way constitutive of the very existence of s, the egalitarian
implication of the colon in ‘s:c’—the suggestion of (ontological) parity, commutativity,
relational symmetry—may seem justified after all.
Suppose this is so. What then remains to favour ‘:’ over ‘=’? Well, the colon, unlike
the identity sign, continues to stand up for the apparently adamantine fact that s and c
must be somehow distinct however intimate their relation of mutual dependence. The
idea that they are at least conceptually distinct, even if they are not really distinct, is
surely non-negotiable.
—But what does this mean, as applied to particulars? Surely the notion of a merely
conceptual distinction applies only to properties? And while two properties like
trilaterality and triangularity can be only conceptually distinct because unable to exist
apart while remaining clearly different properties, 60 it is quite unclear how two
(concrete) particulars could possibly be absolutely unable to exist apart without being the
same single thing…
Hang on a moment—
…but it hardly matters, because you’ve now just defined these entities into this intense
degree of metaphysical intimacy, and although you may not have meddled much with
‘experience’ and ‘content’ in doing so, you have had to bend the term ‘subject of
experience’ right out of shape to get anywhere near where you think you are now.
Out of shape? I think that’s terminological prejudice, for reasons given earlier. Why
should ‘subject of experience’ have a dispositional reading, a reading that allows there
to be a subject of experience when there is no experience? What is the evidence that a
subject of experience continues to exist when there is no experience? There is none.
_______________________________________________________
60
They are then not ‘really’ distinct, in Descartes’s sense.
18
The last question is silly, because the matter under discussion is not a matter of fact,
but that is the point of the question. It makes it vivid that it is a matter of terminological
decision to say that subjects of experience are things that can continue to exist when
there is no experience. Human beings do so continue, of course, and brains, and parts of
brains that are capable of being recruited into experience-constituting and subjectconstituting synergies; but I don’t think subjects of experience do. You don’t disagree
with me, on my terms. You simply choose to put things differently.
—But [9], the proposal that [E = S = C], still seems absurd. The experience is the subject?
The subject is the content? Contents have experience? Experiences have experience?
Experiences experience themselves?! [8], the claim that [E = S:C], may come to seem
relatively tolerable, once one has acclimatized to the thin use of ‘subject’. It simply states
that an experience-occurrence is a subject-entertaining-a-content-occurrence, and that is
certainly true, on the present terms. But why go on to [9], the triple identity?
Well, I suspect that [E = S = C] is a deep truth, although I don’t suppose that I will be
able to show this.61 On the one hand it seems to me that the claim made earlier—that S
and C stand in an intensely intimate relation given which they cannot possibly exist
apart, so that there is (in Cartesian terms) at most a conceptual distinction and no real
distinction between them—has considerable force. On the other hand the objection
made earlier—that if two concrete particulars can’t exist apart, and are therefore at most
conceptually distinct rather than really distinct, then they must be numerically
identical—seems pretty irresistible. And if this is right then unless one can show a real
distinction—a more than merely conceptual distinction—between S and C one will I
think be driven to
[12] [S = C].
But [12]—together with [9]—seems as crazy as ever.
Can anything be done? The next task, I think, is to consider an ancient problem
about the relation between objects and their properties. It sits at the centre of the present
difficulty, blinking like a slow loris.
7 Objects and their properties
Objects have properties, we say. There are, indisputably, objects; and, indisputably,
they have properties. Our habit of thinking in terms of the object/property distinction is
ineluctable. And it is perfectly correct, in its everyday way. But ordinary thought is not a
good guide to metaphysical truth, any more than it is a good guide to scientific truth.
And there is an equally ineluctable sense in which any sharp or categorial distinction
between an object and its properties is profoundly misleading.
This is a point that will obviously be important if one takes S to be an object (as I
do) and is naturally (and understandably) inclined to think of C as essentially on the
_______________________________________________________
61
It is on the face of it a much stronger proposal than the proposal made by Rosch (p. 000
above); but in the end this may be just a matter of different terminology.
19
property side of things; for this makes the proposal that [S = C] look like a Class A
category mistake.62
I think we can in fact sufficiently grasp the truth about the relation between objects
and their properties, although it eludes sharp formulation, has done so for millennia and
will doubtless continue to do so. It is a truth that violates a deep precept of our ordinary
thought in such a way that thought-expressing language does not provide adequately for
its precise expression, but I think it is not entirely beyond our reach.
As before I will consider only concrete phenomena:63 so my concern with properties
will be only with concrete ‘property-instances’, rather than with properties considered
as universals considered as abstract objects. (One can substitute ‘property-instance’ for
‘property’ wherever it fits.) What is at issue is the relation between a particular concrete
object—any particular concrete object—and its properties, and the central idea is
simply that one has already gone wrong, when discussing what exists in the world, if
one thinks that there is any sort of ontologically weighty distinction to be drawn
between objects and their properties according to which there are objects on the one
(ontological) hand and properties of those objects on the other—where by ‘properties of
objects’ I will always mean intrinsic, natural, categorical properties, unless I specify
otherwise.64
Clearly objects without properties are impossible. There can no more be objects
without properties than there can be closed plane rectilinear figures that have three
angles without having three sides. ‘Bare particulars’—objects thought of as things that
do of course have properties but are in themselves entirely independent of properties—
are incoherent. For to be is necessarily to be somehow or other, i.e. to have some nature
or other, i.e. to have (actual, concrete) properties.
Rebounding from the obvious incoherence of bare particulars, one may think that the
only other option is to conceive of objects as nothing but collections or collocations or
‘bundles’ of properties—concrete property-instances. And this option may seem no
better. Mere bundles of properties, concretely instantiated or not, may seem as bad as
bare particulars. Why should we accept properties without objects after having rejected
objects without properties?
But this is not what we are asked to do. The claim is not that there can be concretely
instantiated properties without concrete objects. It is that objects (just) are collections of
concretely instantiated properties. And although the debate is as troublesome as it is
ancient, conducted as it is against the stubborn background of everyday thought and
talk, I think adequate sense can (just about) be given to the admittedly odd-sounding—
even disagreeable—claim that objects are nothing but collections of instantiated
properties.
It will always sound highly peculiar—to say of a child or a refrigerator that it is
(‘strictly speaking’—but this qualification brings little relief) nothing but an assemblage
of instantiated properties. To some it may continue to sound little better than the claim
that there are bare propertyless objects. But this, again, is because our natural notions of
property and object are not adequate to representing reality correctly.
_______________________________________________________
62
Some may think that S, a thin/live subject, is best thought of as a property of something else, a
human being considered as a whole, but I have taken S to be as good an example of an object as
can be found (see p. 000 above and note xxx).
63 The basic idea may in fact have perfectly general application.
64 I am taking the propriety of such notions for granted (for some recent discussion, see Lewis &
Langton 1998 and the debate in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research xx). It is worth
noting that categorical properties can no more exist without dispositional properties existing than
conversely.
20
Philosophers have nevertheless managed to find ways of rendering the
object/property topos correctly. When Kant says that
in their relation to substance, accidents [or properties] are not really subordinated to it,
but are the mode of existing of the substance itself
I think he gets the matter exactly right.65 Nothing more needs to be said. Consider an
actual object in front of you. There is no ontological subordination of properties to
object, no existential inequality or priority of any sort, no dependence of either on the
other, no independence of either from the other. (The counterfactuals are coming.)
One might put the point by saying that the distinction between the actual being of a
thing or object or substance or particular, considered at any given time, and its actual
properties, at that time, is a merely conceptual distinction (like the distinction between
triangularity and trilaterality) rather than a real (ontological) distinction. We can as
Armstrong says ‘distinguish the particularity of a particular from its properties’, but
the two ‘factors’ are too intimately together to speak of a relation between them. The
thisness and the nature are incapable of existing apart from each other. Bare particulars
are vicious abstractions…from what may be called states of affairs: this-of-a-certainnature.66
Nagarjuna talks in the same vein of the complete codependence of things and their
attributes,67 and P. F. Strawson’s use of the suggestive phrase ‘non-relational tie’ can
profitably be extended from a logico-linguistic application (to grammatical subjectterms and predicate-terms) to a straightforwardly metaphysical application (to objects
and their properties).68
I believe it should be. One should—must—accept the ‘non-relational’ conception of
the relation [!] between an object and its intrinsic or non-relational properties, if one is
going to retain words like ‘object’ and ‘property’ in one’s metaphysics. This is entirely
compatible with claiming that an object’s properties—including its intrinsic or nonrelational properties—may and do change through time, while it remains the same
object.
—True, but we also want to be able to say that an object would have been the very
object it is, at t, even if its properties had been different, at t. We think that the (actual)
object could have existed apart from some at least of its (actual) properties.
Nothing here forbids this way of talking about the non-actual. To see this, all one needs
to do is to lose any tendency to slip (even in one’s underthought) from the evident fact
(i) that there are contexts in which it is entirely natural to take it that (some at least of)
an object’s properties might have been different from what they are while it remained
the same object
_______________________________________________________
65
Kant 1781/7: A414/B441. Note that ‘mode of existing’ cannot just mean ‘the particular way in
which a substance is’, where the substance is taken to be somehow independently existent
relative to its mode of existing; for that would be to take accidents or properties to be somehow
‘subordinate’ after all. (I take it that here ‘accident’ means essentially the same as ‘propertyinstance’.)
66 1980: 109-110. Armstrong says this for well known dialectical reasons to do with stopping
Bradley’s regress (see Loux 2002: 39-40), but I take it that there are completely independent
metaphysical reasons for saying it.
67
Kalupahana 1986: passim.
68 Strawson 1959: 167-178. ‘Tie’, though, is not a good word for this non-relational mutual
metaphysical involvement.
21
to the entirely mistaken idea
(ii) that an object has—must have—some form or mode of being independently of its
having the properties it does have.
—But we also want to be able to say that an object would still be the object it is even if
(some at least of) its properties were other than they are in fact.
True. This is how our ordinary notions of object and property work. And some may
think present-tense counterfactual talk more problematic than past-tense. But this is a
superficial reaction. In both cases, the nature of ordinary counterfactual talk is simply a
manifestation or expression of what the current proposal explicitly rejects: the way we
ordinarily think about the relation between objects and their properties. Counterfactual
talk has a whole metaphysic built into it—one that is simply incorrect, on the present
view. So it cannot by itself ground any argument that the current proposal is incorrect.
The adequacy of ordinary thought and talk to represent the true nature of reality is
already in the dock, and already stands condemned in other areas. Those who wish to
reject the proposal will have to produce independent (non-linguistic) metaphysical
arguments in support of their view. They cannot simply appeal to the common
understanding of counterfactuals.
We face the fact that some of our most fundamental thought categories simply do
not get the world right. When we think hard—obstinately69—I think we can see a priori
that this is so; but we cannot really liberate ourselves from the framework these thought
categories dictate.70 Ramsey does not exaggerate, I think, when he says that ‘the whole
theory of universals is due to mistaking…a characteristic of language…for a
fundamental characteristic of reality’,71 but he doesn’t go far enough. It is not just
ordinary language but ordinary thought that misleads us and will perhaps always do so.
The best thing to do, I think, is simply to keep Kant’s phrase in mind: ‘in their
relation to the object, the properties are not in fact subordinated to it, but are the mode
of existing of the object itself’.72 This, I think, is another of those points at which
philosophy requires a form of contemplation, something more than theoretical assent:
cultivation of a shift in intuitions, acquisition of the ability to sustain a different
continuo in place in the background of thought, at least for a time. The
object/process/property/state/event cluster of distinctions is unexceptionable in
everyday life, but it is pretty superficial from the point of view of science and
metaphysics.
Some think that conflict with our ordinary or common sense ways of thinking is
always an objection to a philosophical theory, but this is certainly untrue if it is anything
more than a recommendation always to keep in touch with ordinary ways of thinking
and speaking. Philosophy, like science, aims to say how things are, in reality, and it is
no more sensible to say that conflict with ordinary ways of thinking is an objection to a
philosophical theory about some feature of reality than it is to say that it is an objection
to a scientific theory about some feature of reality. Philosophy has its own distinctive
_______________________________________________________
69
‘Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly’ (James 1890:
1.144.)
70
The free will debate has some of the same characteristics, but it is I think far less difficult.
71 Ramsey 1925: 60.
72 I have substituted ‘object’ and ‘property’ for ‘substance’ and ‘accident’ respectively.
22
and proprietary principles of common sense, in any case, and they can conflict with
ordinary (‘common-sense’) common sense. There are many areas in which we can see
clearly that our ordinary concepts and ways of thinking are not and cannot be fully
adequate to the reality they purport to represent (consider our ordinary concepts of
space, time, and matter), and it so happens that one of the very deepest and most
startling demonstrations of this inadequacy is provided by our commitment to thinking
of objects and properties in the way we ordinarily do. In large parts of philosophy this
commitment causes no problems; for very many purposes the standard language of
object and property works smoothly enough (the same is true of Newtonian mechanics).
But there are, inevitably, areas in metaphysics where its inadequacy to reality is part of
the problem at issue (it may not be obviously or explicitly what is at issue), and then its
uncritical use—its use in any robust form—wreaks havoc, havoc aggravated by the ease
and success of its employment in other areas, which understandably misleads many into
thinking that it must be generally viable. In discussing the ‘mind-body problem’, for
example, it seems to me best to avoid the word ‘property’ as far as possible.
‘Huizinga, noting the vogue that the problem of universals enjoyed throughout the
Middle Age and the fact that the conflict was still unresolved in his day, was disposed to
find, in its persistence, confirmation of his view of philosophy as a form of agonistic
play’.73 But Huizinga was wrong; what he saw was an intellectual drama that was bound
to play itself out over and over again in different minds as they came to maturity and
faced a deep difficulty.74
8 [E = S = C]
Back now to E: a particular, concrete experience occurring in a human being H (in the
H-reality) at a particular time t (between t1 and t2) and consisting of a thin/live subject S
entertaining—living—a particular, concrete, occurrent content C.
Suppose, by way of example, that this E-S-C phenomenon is a two-second
experience of uniform red; or suppose it is you now, hearing or reading the following:
‘barath abalori trafalon’. The question is: What is the relation between E, S and C?
The answer I have proposed and shunned is ‘identity’—
[9] [E = S = C].
On this view, [E = S:C] does not go far enough. It is for some reason not enough to say
simply that an experience, an experience-event is a subject-having-a-content-event. But
why not? [E = S = C] still seems absurd. [S = C] seems absurd.
Let us accept the principle that if there is at most a conceptual distinction between
two apparently distinct (concrete) particulars, if they cannot possibly exist apart, then
they are not really two but only one: they are identical (that is, it is—of course—
identical with itself).75 The question is then this: can S and C possibly exist apart?
_______________________________________________________
73
74
75
P. F. Strawson 1979: 52.
Compare, again, the free will debate.
I am concerned only with concrete particulars, so counterexamples that cite abstract objects—
e.g. the case of Louis and the singleton set whose only member is Louis (see Lewis xxx: xxx)—
are not to the point. I am also concerned only with concrete particulars considered independently
of human intentions and conventions (this clause is designed to put aside the kinds of cases
adduced in Johnston 2003). ‘What about a ball and the surface of a ball?’ Well, either the surface
is not a concrete object or it can exist independently of the ball…. It seems to me that all
attempted counter-examples involve special devices of one sort or another that may be important
in other areas of discussion but not here.
23
The answer No is contained in what has gone before. Certainly C cannot possibly
exist without S; no actual, concrete, particular occurrent content occurring at some
particular place at some particular time can possibly have any subject other than the
subject it does have, whatever the subject’s girth (thick, traditional inner, thin). This is
[4] [C  S]
a point covered (as noted in §6) by an old slogan: ‘ideas (contents) are “logically
private”’. If (per impossibile) C did have some subject other than S, C could not be the
content occurrence it is: it could not be itself. [4] follows by reductio from [C ≠ C].
—But the converse
[6] [S  C]
fails, and this is the crux. Suppose S and C had begun to exist together at time t1, in the
H-reality, as they did, only for C to be cut short after a millisecond, at t1.1 and seamlessly
replaced by C* ≠ C, which lasted until t2? Surely in this case S would have continued
without C? President Nixon would have continued to exist throughout July 4, 1973 if he
had eaten a different breakfast, on that day, from the one he did eat. So too S would
have continued to exist—apart from C—in the case just described.
Not on my view. For C is the very body of S without which S (a live subject) cannot
exist. In this story, S ceases to exist at t1.1 and a completely new subject comes into
existence. Here as before the fact that certain sorts of counterfactual speculation run
smoothly in everyday thought and talk has no force against [6]. It simply presupposes
that S is substantially distinct from C in some way. That is, it begs the question. One
needs some independent reason to think that S is substantially distinct from C. But what
gives one an independent fix on the identity of S that allows one to say such a thing?
—Fine; just give me a reason for saying that S can’t possibly exist without C that doesn’t
equally beg the question. It isn’t enough for you to appeal to the definition of ‘subject’
according to which a subject exists in the H-reality only if experience exists in the Hreality. My proposal blocks that move with the phrase ‘seamlessly replaced’: there is no
time between t1 and t2 at which there is no experience in the H-reality.
I’ll take back ‘begs the question’, but this reply fails in any case. It does not follow,
from the fact that there is temporally seamless experience in the H-reality between t1
and t2, that there is a single live subject in the H-reality between t1 and t2. This issue
came up in §3, where it was proposed that new experiences, and so new (thin/live)
subjects, arise constantly as old ones die away, in the human case, each such
experience-and-subject being a primitive unity, a matter of a certain sort of upsurging of
activity in and across neurons, each such upsurging essentially numerically distinct from
the next. I believe that this is what the phenomenon of there being a subject of
experience actually consists in, in the human case. This is the reality that underlies all
the subjective phenomena of continuity and flow in experience, and the whole natural
picture of the persisting inner self or subject.
24
What more can be said? I argued in §3 that it is helpful to have a realistically
processual understanding of the nature of physical objects or substances. This should
couple smoothly with the account of the relation between an object and its properties
given in the last section to make it easier to see that there is nothing wrong with an
objectual or substantival conception of subjects of experience, even when one is
concerned only with live subjects. But this, perhaps, may be one of those points at
which it is helpful to put ‘subjectivity’ in place of ‘subject’, taking it as a count-noun (‘a
subjectivity’), or better, I think, as a constituent of a count-noun (‘an event or episode of
subjectivity’). [6] is then the claim that the existence of S (this particular episode of
subjectivity) is really nothing over and above the existence of C (this particular
occurrent living content): this subjectivity entails or is this occurrent content, this
occurrent content entails or is this subjectivity, neither is in any way ontologically over
and above the other.
It is perhaps the inertial force of the ordinary and ordinarily unexceptionable but on
occasion theoretically disastrous notion of what an object is, and so of what a subjectconsidered-as-an-object is, that makes meditators of many kinds want to deny the
existence of any such thing even though they cannot coherently deny the existence of
consciousness or subjectivity. In certain theoretical frames, the idea that the correct
thing to say is that the supposed subject of experience is really just occurrent
subjectivity seems an early, easy lesson of meditation. An experience that many find it
natural to characterize as experience of the non-existence of the self or subject can seem
inescapable in the present moment of meditation if meditation is practised with any
success.76 The occurrence of this experience is entirely banal and reliable. 77 But it does
not, in the present theoretico-terminological frame, give any reason to think that the
expression ‘the subject of experience’ is in any way inappropriate in the description of
reality, either in general or in the description of certain sorts of meditative state. In the
present frame it is a trivial (definitional) point that it is appropriate to speak of a subject
of experience whenever it is appropriate to speak of subjectivity: whenever there is
experience, with its necessary for-ness. It is, more bluntly, a necessary truth that there is
a subject of experience whenever there is subjectivity.78
It is equally trivial, on the present terms, that there is a substance or object that is a
subject of experience whenever there is subjectivity. To think that talk of objects or
substances that are subjects of experience can be put in question by what meditation
reveals is simply to have an excessively leaden, lumpen picture of what physical objects
or individual substances are.
*
Notice that we can deduce
[9] [E = S = C]
directly from §7’s account given of the relation between an object and its intrinsic
properties on one assumption: that the concrete object consisting of S’s experience E
with content C has no intrinsic properties other than those involved in its having or
_______________________________________________________
76
In traditions, like the Hindu tradition, that stress the existence of the self, the experience may
be characterized as the absorption of the apparently individual soul (atman) into the world soul
(brahman), like a glass of water poured into the sea.
77 It is an entirely ‘robust’ result (it can occur without delivering any particular spiritual benefits).
78 This would be my—I take it conciliatory—reply to the doubts Jim Stone raises in xxxx.
25
being79 S-lived C. In fact, of course, this assumption is unacceptable to standard
materialism, which insists that E, S and C have intrinsic non-experiential properties
(non-experiential being) in addition to having whatever experiential being they have. So
we need to add the further claim that the non-experiential being of E is the same as the
non-experiential being of S and the non-experiential being of C.
Now I suppose I’m offering [9] as a some sort of necessary truth (I'm not sure of
anything any more), but we can suppose for a moment that it is a merely empirical claim
about the material world. E is (by materialist hypothesis) identical with a two-second
synergy of process-stuff PE ([E = PE]), S is identical with a two-second synergy of
process-stuff PS ([S = PS]), and C is identical with a two-second synergy of process-stuff
PC ([C = PC]). Each of these things, correctly considered, is seen to be a primitive
physical unity that has, as such, as good a right to be considered an object as anything
else, and the proposal is then that as a matter of fact
[13] [PE = PS = PC]
—that in any and all cases of experience the process-stuff that is the experience just is
the process-stuff that is the subject, which in turn just is the process-stuff that is the
content. We cannot section PE into regions, a PS region and a PC region. In which case
[9] [E = S = C].
Suppose the art of mapping the neural constituters of consciousness has been
perfected, and that we have picked out the synergy of process-stuff PE that is directly
constitutive80 of a single experience E. And suppose we find that we can somehow
independently identify the subject synergy PS that must exist given that E exists and the
content synergy PC that must exist given that E exists. The present claim is that in this
case we will find that PS and PC are the same, and that both are the same as PE.
If we suppose instead that we can corral out a subject subsynergy P S of PE or a
content subsynergy PC of PE, neither PC nor PS being identical with PE, then the claim is
that PS and PC will still always be the same.
This last supposition is directly contrary to [13], and so to [9], but I think it is worth
pursuing a little way, and in order to do so I will depart slightly from my present
expository scheme. In §3 (p. 00) I proposed that the ‘process-stuff’ idiom allows one to
refer to E (= PE), understood to be a physical object, in a very fine-grained way that
excludes any and all matter (process-stuff) that is not directly constitutive of E, and
thereby exclude (we may suppose) things like cell-wall-constituting ultimates. Here,
however, I want to think of E, i.e. PE, as something that can have parts like cell-wallconstituting ultimates that are not themselves parts that are directly experienceconstituting parts.81
With this in place, consider the following ‘empirical’ challenge to the claim that if
we could identify a subject subsynergy PS of PE or a content subsynergy PC of PE, then
PS and PC would have to be identical. Suppose there seem to be good intuitive
_______________________________________________________
79
80
81
An importantly natural disjunction on the present account of the object/property relation.
See p. xxx.
The neural (direct) constituters of E are (I take it) a very small subset of the neural correlates
of E, given that ‘X is a neural correlate of E’ is understood to entail only that if E occurs/exists
then X must occur/exist. (Note that talk of correlates invites a type reading, but can be given a
token reading, as here. Also that this use of ‘neural’, deriving as it does from the standard use of
‘neural correlates of consciousness’, ignores the point about ‘neural’ made in note [42]xxx.)
26
reasons—simple spatial reasons, say—for distinguishing a subject subsynergy PS from a
content subsynergy PC within a given experience-synergy PE that exists from t1 to t2. At
t0, say, one is considering the collection of ultimates, K, that will participate in the
constituting of PE from t1 to t2. K, modelled in colour in two dimensions, has the shape
of a blue crescent moon curled tightly to the side of an orange ball. Little pathways
connect crescent to ball, and pathways for sensory inputs lead to the ball and only to the
ball. At t0 sensory inputs flow into the ball. A flush of red suffuses rapidly across the
ball and up the pathways to the crescent. Pulses of blue shoot out from the crescent
along the connecting paths, and at t1 the whole crescent-ball complex pulses purple for
two seconds—this is the existence of PE—until t2, when K loses its purple colour as
neurons (or ultimates) constitutive of PE become inactive with respect to experience, or
are rapidly recruited into other transient experience-synergies.
The idea is that one might think it right to say that the purple-pulsing crescent is PS
while the purple-pulsing ball is PC. But nothing in this story gives one good reason to
suppose that an actually existing (and hence actually experiencing) thin/livesubject S (=
PS) is ontologically distinct from an actually existing occurrent ‘living’ content C (= P C).
For E, in this story, is purple-pulsing PE. There is no (thin) subject at all existing in the
K-reality before t1, although there is a crescent formation; nor is there any occurrent
(conscious) content before t1, although there is an orange ball formation that has been
suffused with red. Neither S nor C exists at all before the onset of purple at t1. They
begin together. The occurrent content C is the ‘body’ of S without which S cannot exist
at all and the subject S is the ‘animating principle’ of C without which C—occurrent,
living content—cannot exist at all. The crescent-ball story supplies no reason to think
that the crescent formation between t1 and t2 is S while the ball formation between t1 and
t2 is C.
How might we try to express the suggestion (rejected on p. 000) that S could
continue to exist even if C were replaced by C* ≠ C? It won’t do to imagine that the red
flush in the ball structure (material for experience E1, say) is annihilated and seamlessly
replaced at by a differently caused darker red flush (material for experience E2, say)
before any empurplement occurs, for S does not yet exist at all in this story; experience
has not yet begun. We have to suppose instead that empurplement has taken place at t1
(experience has begun, S exists) and that the ball part of the purple process-stuff is
annihilated and seamlessly replaced by different (darker) process-stuff at t1.1 while the
crescent part of the process-stuff remains the same.82
Suppose we admit this possibility. Is it a case in which S continues while C does
not? No. According to the present story the subjectivity of E is no more located in the
crescent than in the ball—the subjectivity of the experience is undisentanglably
distributed across PE. So S does not continue to exist with this replacement.
It seems that something very like this is the present consensus among the
neurophysiologically informed about how experiences are actually realized in the brain;
both among those who are genuine (real) realists about consciousness, and those, like
Dennett (in so far as I understand him), who are not.83 On this view, there is simply no
_______________________________________________________
82
Exactly the same ultimates may be involved: they need only be in a different state of activation
in order to constitute a numerically distinct portion of process-stuff, a numerically distinct
synergy.
83 If some form of panpsychism is the most plausible, parsimonious, and ‘hard-nosed’ option for
materialism (Strawson 2002a), the way lies open for a spectacular makeover (takeover) of
Dennett’s apparently reductionist, consciousness-denying account of consciousness as ‘just’
‘cerebral celebrity’ or ‘fame in the brain’ (see e.g. Dennett 2001) into a fully realist, genuinely
consciousness-affirming account of consciousness. This, however, is a story for another paper.
27
locus in the brain, however scattered, that is [a] the locus of the subject of experience
and [b] distinct from the place where the neuronal activity in virtue of which the
experience has the content it does is located.
9 Conclusion
What next? I think this is enough for now. When we try to approach this part of reality
our categories of thought—even our philosophically elasticated categories of thought—
are close to breaking point. The standard conception of the relation between a thing and
its properties is locked into the terms ‘experience’, ‘subject of experience’ and ‘content’
in a way that makes it almost impossibly hard for us see or conceive, let alone endorse,
the proposed identity—even if the best current neurophysiology seems to support
something like this view. We can, it seems, pull C into line with E to get [E = C], as in
the traditional misunderstanding of Hume. And, jumping off from the [E = S:C] picture,
or the [E = S{C}] picture, we can it seems pull S into line with E to get [E = S]. But as
soon as we have done this with either S or with C—as soon as we have achieved some
sort of grip on the proposal that one of S or C is identical with E, as a step on the way to
asserting
[9] [E = S = C]
with some sense of real understanding—the other pops out of line, deliquescing and
recrystallizing as propertyish or aspectish. Suppose we’ve managed to set things out in
such a way as to give some plausibility to the claim that the experience just is—is just—
the subject. In this case the content of the experience seems left out, and it seems we can
get it back in only by thinking of it as an aspect or property or ‘modification’ of the
subject (back to [E = S:C] or [E = S{C}]). Suppose, alternatively, that we have
manoeuvred our intuitions closer to the thought that the experience just is—is just—the
occurrent content. In this case the subject seems left out, and it seems we can get it back
in only by thinking of it as the (essential) subjectivity of occurrent content: [E = CS], as
it were.
But the subjectivity (so I have proposed) just is the subject…. And, in spite of all
these troubles, I suspect that [E = S = C] is true; and that similar wonders of identity
(masked by the bad picture of the relation between an object and its properties to which
our minds keep defaulting) apply in the case of all other physical objects. 84
I think, in fact, that the case of the relation between an experience, the subject of the
experience, and the content of the experience—the sheer difficulty of the triple
identity—may be exemplary. It may be that we can get closer to apprehending the
identity of a thing and its properties (the identity of its being and its being, I am inclined
to say) in this case than in any other. It may be that [E = S = C] gives us a glimmering of
an extremely general metaphysical truth, opening a small frosted window onto the
_______________________________________________________
84
I feel obscurely that Leibniz should be on my side, although I know little about his work. At
one point Descartes claims that ‘each substance has one principal property which constitutes its
nature or essence…and Thinking [or thought] constitutes the nature of Thinking substance’
(1644: 210; my emphasis). Elsewhere he talks of "our soul or our Thought" in such a way that it
seems that he is treating the two terms as strictly interchangeable (1644: 184); and at one point he
writes, seemingly unequivocally, that "Thinking...must be considered as nothing else than
thinking substance itself..., that is, as mind" (1644: 215). It is arguable that he was hustled out of
this difficult insight by his critics’ insistence on the conventional metaphysical categories; see
Strawson 1994: xxx
28
nature of things in a way that nothing else can. (The frosting is in the mind, not the
glass: intellectual insight can bring us, however transiently, to transparency.)
10 Coda
—All this time you’ve been avoiding an obvious, fatal objection. It’s true on your terms
that S can’t exist without C and that C can’t exist without S, but this fact is no more
difficult than the fact that no object that has an essential property can exist without
having that property. C is really just a property of S, and is on your terms (your thin
conception of the subject) an essential property of S. That’s why S and C are
unbreakably locked. And this doesn’t force us into any strange identity claim. You
should stick to [8] [E = S:C].
Well, I used to think that [8] was the most that could be said, but something led me on.
And you can guess my reply: as it stands, this objection draws any force it has from the
deep, reality-fogging inadequacy of the standard account of the relation between an
object and its propertie .
—I’ll grant this for the purpose of argument. And I’ll also grant that ‘S’ and ‘C’ name
things that have as good a claim to be physical objects as anything else, so that the
question of their identity can be posed. But an identity claim entails that the ‘two’ things
that are said to be identical have all their properties in common (because they are after
all only one thing). And S and C do not have all their properties in common. If one thing
is certain, subjects experience things, and contents don’t.
The identity claim is in flagrant conflict with ordinary thought and talk. If you’re
content to rely on them they will secure your case. My hope is that we’re beyond this
sort of objection by now. S is not a subject as conceived in your objection, C is not a
content as you conceive it. What we have is living content: a content-bodied subject
S/C, a subject-animated content C/S: a true unity, a physical unity that is a physical
realization of ‘logical’ unity, no less, an unsurpassably single object also known as E. 85

References
Armstrong, D. M. (1980/1997), ‘Against “Ostrich Nominalism”’, in Properties, edited by D. H.
Mellor & Alex Oliver (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Armstrong, D. M. (1997), A World of States of Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Conze, E. (1963/1967) ‘Buddhist Philosophy and its European Parallels’ in E. Conze Thirty
Years of Buddhist Studies (Oxford: Cassirer).
Dennett, D. (2001), ‘Are We Explaining Consciousness Yet?’ Cognition 79 221-237.
Descartes, R. (1641/1985), Meditations, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume 2,
translated by J. Cottingham et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Ferris, T. (1997), The Whole Shebang (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson).
Frege, G. (1918/1967), ‘The Thought: A Logical Inquiry’, in Philosophical Logic, edited by P.
F. Strawson (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Hume, D. (1739-40/1978) A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge & P. H.
Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
James, W. (1890/1950), The Principles of Psychology, volume 1 (New York: Dover).
Kalupahana, D. (1986), Nagarjuna: The Philosophy of the Middle Way Albany, NY: SUNY
Press).
_______________________________________________________
85
My thanks to Jesus Aguilar, Torin Alter, Barry Dainton, Brie Gertler, Mark Greenberg, Mark
Johnston, Adrian Moore, Martine Nida-Rümelin, Ben Olsen, Jim Stone, P. F. Strawson, and
Dean Zimmerman. Thanks also to the members of the 2002 Pew Charitable Trusts Workshop on
‘The Metaphysics of the Human Person’ and the 2002 NEH Summer Institute on ‘Intentionality
and Consciousness’.
29
Johnston, M. (2003), ‘Parts and Principles of Unity’, in Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Kant, I. (1781-7/1889), Critique of Pure Reason, edited by E. Adickes (Berlin: Mayer and
Müller).
Lange, F. A. (1865/1925), A History of Materialism, translated by E. C. Thomas with an
introduction by Bertrand Russell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).
Lewis, D. & Langton, R. (1998/1999), ‘Defining “intrinsic”’, in D. Lewis, Papers in metaphysics
and epistemology, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Lewis, D. (2003), ‘Things qua Truthmakers’, in Real Metaphysics: Essays in Honour of D. H.
Mellor, edited by H. Lillehammer & G. Rodriguez-Pereyra, (London: Routledge).
Lockwood, M. (1989), Mind, Brain, and the Quantum. Oxford: Blackwell.
Loux, M. (2002) Metaphysics: a contemporary introduction, second edition (London:
Routledge).
McLaughlin, B. (2002), ‘Colour, Consciousness, and Colour Consciousness’, in Quentin Smith
ed. Consciousness: New Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Pöppel, E. (1978) ‘Time Perception'. In R. Held, H. W. Leibovitz, & H. L. Teuber eds.
Handbook of Sensory Physiology, Volume VIII (New York: Springer).
Ramsey, F. (1925/1997) ‘Universals’, in Properties, edited by D. H. Mellor & Alex Oliver (
Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Rosch, E. (1997) ‘Mindfulness meditation and the private (?) self’, in The Conceptual Self in
Context: Culture, experience, self-understanding, edited by U. Neisser & R. Fivush (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
Ruhnau, E. (1995) ‘Time Gestalt and the Observer'. In T. Metzinger ed. Conscious Experience.
(Thorverton: Imprint Academic).
Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes and Noble).
Shoemaker, S. (1986/1996) ‘Introspection and the Self’, in The First-Person Perspective And
Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Spelke, E. (1994) ‘Initial knowledge: Six suggestions’ Cognition 50 431-445.
Strawson, G. (1987) ‘Realism and Causation’, Philosophical Quarterly 37 253-77.
Strawson, G. (1994) Mental Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Strawson, G. (1999) ‘The Self and the SESMET’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 99-135.
Strawson, G. (2001) ‘Hume on himself’ in Essays in Practical Philosophy: From Action to
values, edited by D. Egonsson, J. Josefsson, B. Petersson & T. Rønnow-Rasmussen (Aldershot:
Ashgate Press), 69-94.
Strawson, G. (2002a) ‘Real materialism’, in Chomsky and his Critics, ed. L. Antony and N.
Hornstein (Oxford: Blackwell).
Strawson, G. (2002b) ‘Postscript to “The Self”’, in Personal Identity, edited by Raymond Martin
and John Barresi, editors. New York: Blackwell, 2002.
Strawson, G. (forthcoming) ‘David Hume: self and mind’,
Strawson, P. F. (1959) Individuals (London: Methuen).
Strawson, P. F. (1979) ‘Universals’, Midwest Studies xx, xxx.???
van Inwagen, P. (1990) Material Beings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
30