Phenomenal Presence and Perceptual Awareness. A Subjectivist Account of
Perceptual Openness to the World1
Martine Nida-Rümelin, University of Fribourg
To appear in a special volume of Philosophical Issues (Noûs supplement) edited by Berit Brogaard, forthcoming
1. A puzzle about perception
After a longer stay in Australia where I learned to deeply enjoy the close presence of
magpies and cockatoos, I took the habit, back in Switzerland, to put pieces of cheese in
front of the window to attract the black crows living in the neighborhood. One of them
discovered the new source of food very quickly and he returns to the window almost every
day. When I watch the crow outside the window I am perceptually aware of it and I have,
in some sense, direct access through the senses to that beautiful animal.
Suppose that after having worked through several nights in order to finish this paper I
take a drug with the intention to enhance my concentration on the topic of perception and
that the drug has, unbeknownst to me, psychedelic side effects. It might then happen that
during my work I look out of the window and seem to see a crow approaching the
window, hesitating in the air before landing and finally picking up the pieces of cheese, although in reality no crow has yet discovered the cheese on that particular morning.
The two experiences, seeing a crow and hallucinating a crow are, or so we may
suppose, phenomenally alike. There is no difference in phenomenal character, or so I
assume, between the experience I have when I actually see the approaching crow and the
corresponding pseudo-perception which I have in hallucinating an approaching crow.
There is no difference, as I think one should put the point, with respect to my experiential
properties. My experiential properties are those that characterize the way it is like for me
1
The research in preparation of this paper is part of the project PDM-118610 funded by the Swiss National
Science Foundation. Many elements of the view here presented developed in exchange with my collaborator in
the project, Fabrice Theler about transparency and representationalism. The main ideas here presented became
clearer during the fruitful exchange in the worskop on phenomenal presence (Fribourg, June 2010, organized by
Fabrice Theler, Fabian Dorsch, Fiona McPherson and me) which was part of that project. I would like to thank
all the participants in that workshop for the intense, focussed and stimulting discussion. In developing my views
about phenomenal presence regular meetings with Laura Schröter during her stay in Fribourg in 2007 (within a
research project funded by the SNF) and with Daniel Stoljar during my subbatical in Canberra in 2009 were of
great help. In the last few months I profited enourmously from the feedback received by the participants in my
two seminars on perception in Fribourg in spring 2011; I would like to thank all the students who contributed to
the discussion. I specifically remember critical remarks that helped me a lot to articulate the view by Emmanuel
Baierlé, Oswald Benjamin, Julien Bugnon, Patrik Engisch, Josua Maurer and Benoît Pittet. Philosophical
conversations with Coralie Dorsaz and Jacob Naito had a lot of influence in finding a way to express the view
here presented. I would like to thank my colleague Gianfranco Soldati whose contributions in several workshops
and seminars in Fribourg helped me to clearly ‘see’ the problem of perception. I have to mention that the
subjectivist approach to the problem of perception here proposed has developed over many years in continous
exchange with my partner, the philosopher Max Drömmer. I here give voice to ideas present in the chapter
« Sinnesdaten » of his book « Philosophische Skizzen » (unpublished manuscript).
1
to see (or to hallucinate) a crow. I have the same relevant experiential properties in both
cases.
These two kinds of crow experiences can be used to illustrate a puzzle about
perception. In my perception of a crow I am, in some sense, directly aware of something, I
am, for instance, directly aware of a crow approaching the window. The phenomenal
character of my experience is fully determined by what I am directly aware of in that
perception. In general, when we perceive or pseudo-perceive (I will use the term ‘pseudoperception’ for cases where the subject is the victim of an illusion or a hallucination and
takes the experience to be a genuine perception), then the phenomenal character of the
experience is fully determined by what the subject is directly aware of, or so one might
wish to say. But this assumption leads into trouble if we wish to acknowledge that seeing
the crow and hallucinating a crow can be phenomenally alike. Only in the case of
perceiving the crow but not in hallucinating a crow I am directly aware of a real animal
approaching the window. So there is a difference between these experiences in what I am
directly aware of. It follows, according to the principle just formulated, that a perception
of a crow and a hallucination of a crow cannot be phenomenally alike after all.
Different views about perception can be characterized by the way they react to this
puzzle. I will propose a simple solution: we have to distinguish perceptual awareness and
phenomenal presence. Phenomenal character is determined by what is directly present to
the subject in the sense of phenomenal presence. The two experiences are not distinct with
respect to phenomenal presence; they are only distinct with respect to perceptual
awareness.
Perceptual awareness is constituted by causal relations between the object perceived
and what is phenomenally present to the perceiving subject. Phenomenal presence, by
contrast, is not a relation between the subject and some external object, phenomenal
presence, as I propose to understand it, is not a relation at all. When we talk about what is
phenomenally present to a subject we thereby describe the subject’s intrinsic, nonrelational properties; we do not thereby establish a relation between the subject and
something else.
I propose to accept the notion of phenomenal presence as a fundamental notion and to
understand it in a purely phenomenological way. The notion of phenomenal presence
cannot be avoided, or so I suggest, if we wish to think clearly about phenomenal
consciousness. The notion has general application and is not restricted to the domain of
perceptual experience. The ongoing debate about whether thinking is a case of
2
phenomenal consciousness is about what it phenomenally present in thinking. I side with
those who argue that when a thought pops up in one’s mind that ‘popping-up’ itself is
phenomenally present to the subject and the propositional content is, or can be,
phenomenally present to the thinker as well.2 Other non-perceptual cases of phenomenal
presence are to be found in the phenomenology of agency. I agree, for example, with
those who defend the view that, in acting, we experience ourselves as the causal origin of
what happens:3 Being him- or herself the causal origin of what happens is phenomenally
present to the agent in acting.
Phenomenal presence characterizes all episodes of phenomenal consciousness.
Whenever a subject undergoes a conscious experience something is phenomenally present
to the subject in having the experience.4 To be a subject of experience is to have the
potential to be phenomenally presented with something. If this is correct then the notion of
phenomenal presence and what it refers to deserves the closest attention of philosophers
interested in issues about consciousness.
The distinction between phenomenal presence and perceptual awareness just
sketched will raise the suspicion that the view here advocated implies that we are only
indirectly aware of the objects surrounding us. The view may seem to imply that – in
watching the crow - I am directly aware only of what is phenomenally present to me and
only indirectly aware of the crow. I will argue that this is not so. Phenomenal presence
correctly understood does not involve the introduction of an extra level of representations
‘between’ the subject and its perceptually accessible environment. The distinction
between phenomenal presence and perceptual awareness is not in conflict with the
intuitive idea of ‘openness’ to the world through the senses.5
The view developed in this paper is an attempt to reconcile two basic ideas: the
conviction of what one might call the ontological primacy of consciousness and the
conviction that we have direct access to the world via the senses. The first element of the
view might be briefly described as follows: the phenomenal character of experience is
neither conceptually nor ontologically reducible to anything more fundamental.
Experiential properties are basic properties of experiencing beings (subjects of
experience); phenomenal presence cannot be reduced to representation in any relational
2
Compare Charles Siewert, 1999, chapter 8 for an illuminating discussion of these issues and forceful arguments
in favor of so-called cognitive phenomenology.
3
Compare Terrence Horgan, 2011, and for a view including doings which are not actions M. Nida-Rümelin,
2007a.
4
I do not wish to thereby imply that self-awareness is an instance of phenomenal consciousnes (which I take to
be false). Arguably, however, self-awareness is present only in episodes of phenomenal concsiousness.
5
Compare Tim Crane (2005/2011).
3
sense nor can it be conceptually or ontologically reduced in any way suitable for the
philosopher pursuing the so-called naturalistic program concerning consciousness.
Phenomenal presence involves a subject to whom what is present is present; subjects
belong to a specific ontological category different from the category of material objects. I
developed this view in some detail in other places.6
The second element the view is supposed to fully endorse is the insight that we are not
‘looking’ at the world through a ‘veil of mental images’; we are directly aware of what we
perceive, we have direct access to what we perceive and there is no illusion involved in
our impression that we do have such direct access. I will propose what one may call a
subjectivist account of this idea of ‘perceptual openness to the world’. The account may
be called subjectivist since it incorporates the first basic idea sketched above..
Phenomenological arguments play an important role in the philosophy of perception;
nonetheless phenomenological reflection is often done only in passing and often
superficially with a specific argumentative goal in mind. It would be fruitful, I believe, for
the discussion about perception if more attention would be given to the question of how
and in what language the phenomenology of perceptual experience can be adequately
described. By proposing and motivating a number of distinctions that appear to me
necessary for an adequate description of perceptual phenomenology, I hope to contribute
to attracting attention to this particularly intriguing area for phenomenological reflection.
2. Philosophical presuppositions and terminology
I start with a few remarks about the terminology used in this paper. The choice of
terminology is partially motivated by the view here adopted about consciousness. I hope
that those who reject that terminology will still be able to identify, in their own perceptual
phenomenology, those aspects I will be trying to draw attention to.
Every experiencing subject when awake or dreaming is in a state with some over-all
phenomenology. A subject’s overall present phenomenology consists in being
phenomenally presented with a complex, rich and constantly changing totality through
perceiving or pseudo-perceiving, imagining, thinking, being active, remembering etc.. We
can focus on elements in that totality. A subject can focus, for instance, on the element
phenomenally present to it in a visual experience of a tree with moving leaves at a certain
apparent distance, or on the element present when the subject vividly remembers a
childhood episode. The common metaphor of a stream of consciousness involving
6
Compare in particular M. Nida-Rümelin, 2006, 2007a, 2008a, 2001.
4
elements ‘flowing by’ is not a bad metaphor. One should, however, keep in mind that the
‘stream’ stands for what is phenomenally present to the subject and that the subject is not
just a passive observer but that it is rather actively involved. The subject is not part of the
stream nor is the subject the whole stream, the subject is the one to whom the stream
‘occurs’.
Conscious experience, quite generally, has the structure of ‘something’ being given to
a subject. But this structure is not to be understood in the sense of a relation between the
subject and something else, or so I propose. The subject’s being presented with a ‘stream
of consciousness’ should be understood as a succession of instantiations of non-relational
properties, experiential properties, instantiated by the subject. I hereby presuppose the
following understanding of experiential properties: a property is an experiential property
of a subject if and only if its instantiation in a given moment partially constitutes the
overall-phenomenology of the subject’s state in that moment. Talking of experiential
properties of subjects replaces, in the terminology here proposed, talking of phenomenal
properties of experiences. I thereby wish to avoid the mistaken perceptual metaphor for
phenomenal awareness.7
The ‘inner structure’ of consciousness which consists in their being a subject and
‘something’ phenomenally present to the subject is not to be interpreted metaphysically: it
is not a relation between the subject and some thing beyond itself. According to this view,
we need to combine the following insights: (a) In being phenomenally conscious we
exhibit a basic form of intentionality: ‘something’ is phenomenally present. (b) To be in
that way phenomenally conscious is not to stand in a relation to some entity; it is to
instantiate an intrinsic, non-relational property.
It will sometimes be convenient to have a name for the totality of what is
phenomenally given to a subject. I will use the term “the experiential quasi-object”:
“experiential” is intended to remind that what is given is given in experience (that is it is
phenomenally given), “object” is intended to remind the general subject-object-structure
of phenomenal consciousness just alluded to and “quasi” is used to recall that there is no
entity, no genuine object involved. To say that there is no genuine object or entity
involved is to claim that we should not accept the experiential quasi-object as a further
7
The perceptual metaphor involves thinking of phenomenal awareness in the following way: in having an
experience with a certain phenomenal character we are presented with an event, an experience, and that event is
presented as having some qualitative property. This metaphor is so obviously misleading that it cannot be
assumed to be seriously adopted by philosophers. However, the common ‘picture’ that experiences (understood
as events in the brain) have qualia tends to favor errors that are close to implicitly presupposing this mistaken
perceptual view about phenomenal awareness. I discuss this issue at some length in M. Nida-Rümelin, 2007c and
2008a. For related considerations compare Shoemaker (1994).
5
piece of reality over and above material objects and experiencing beings. We should not
commit ourselves to the existence of experiential quasi-objects. The subject is
phenomenally presented with a rich, complex and constantly changing experiential quasiobject, but the subject is not thereby related to some thing. The totality of what is
phenomenally present to a subject is not an object in the sense of being an entity which
needs to be recognized as a further piece of reality. Nor should any element of that totality
be so recognized.
Furthermore, talking of ‘elements’ of that totality must be understood as a metaphor. I
do not mean to imply that these elements are parts of the experiential quasi-object in any
literal sense. The only way to grasp the locution of ‘elements’ in the relevant sense is to
understand it, on the basis of examples, as a purely phenomenological notion. Using the
notion to describe phenomenology does not involve any ontological commitment to these
elements.
Elements of the experiential quasi-object are not ‘sense data’ in the sense in which
they are postulated by sense data theory as usually understood: they are not entities and, in
the case of perception, they do not have the properties things appear to have in the
perceptual experience at issue. One may pick out an element of a subject’s experiential
quasi-object saying that the subject is phenomenally presented with ‘a black, cheese eating
crow’. In being presented with that element the subject is under the impression of there
being, in a certain location, an animal which is black and eating cheese. Obviously, the
relevant element of the experiential quasi-object is neither black nor is it eating cheese. It
is not an entity and therefore incapable of instantiating properties. Nor is the subject under
the impression that an element of what is phenomenally present to it is black or is eating
cheese. We are not under the impression that elements of our stream of consciousness are
black or eating cheese.
Some seem to be attracted by the following idea: in visual experience we are presented
with certain items (e.g. with a ‘black crow’) and these items can turn out to be real things
(as when the subject discovers that it is genuinely perceiving). 8 This is not the view I will
advocate. Even in genuine perception we are phenomenally presented with elements of the
experiential quasi-object and even in that case these elements are no pieces of reality.
We can distinguish different kinds of such elements. Some of them come with the
impression of there being something independent of one’s own experience and to which
one appears to have direct access through the senses (e.g. in hallucinating a crow); some
8
Moore appears to take this position in Moore (1914) and is interpreted by Katalin Farkas in that way (see
Katalin Farkas, 2010).
6
such elements do not come with the ‘appearance of reality’ but nonetheless with the
impression of being presented with countable ‘individuals’ (like in afterimage experience
or when presented with ‘red’ points with the eyes closed). As underlined above, it is a
mistake, to ‘reify’ these elements. Still, we can quasi-refer to them (see section 3) and we
can talk ‘about’ them in the description of how it is to be phenomenally presented with
them.
3. Quasi-reference
Example 1 (seeing red ball)
Looking at a red ball, we are under the impression that the ball has a certain surface
property, it appears to be red. The redness of the ball appears to be outside there on the
surface of the object and the one who looks at the ball is under the impression of being
directly presented with that property of the surface. The following descriptions are
adequate according to the way I understand phenomenal presence: a red ball is
phenomenally present to the subject. The color of the ball, redness, is phenomenally
present to the subject. The color of the ball being a property of the object perceived is
phenomenally present to the subject. Furthermore, the subject appears to have direct
access, visual direct access, to the color of the ball, so we can say: it is phenomenally
present to the subject that he or she has direct access to the ball’s color simply by looking.
The property attributed saying “the person is phenomenally presented with a red ball” is a
property the perceiver shares with the person who undergoes a corresponding
hallucination. According to a common version of so-called disjunctivism, the person
hallucinating a red ball and the person seeing a red ball have the following common
feature: they both have an experience which is indistinguishable for the subject from a
genuine perception of a red ball. This claim is undoubtedly correct. One should, however,
disagree if the disjunctivist makes the further claim that this is the only relevant property
they share. If hallucinating a red ball is indistinguishable for the person concerned from
perceiving a red ball in a given case, then this is due to the fact that the hallucinating
person shares a complex set of experiential properties with the one who genuinely
perceives a ball: both are under the impression that there is a ball in a specific distance
with the surface property of being red, both are under the impression that the ball is a
piece of reality which exists independently of their experience, both are under the
impression of having direct access, direct visual access, to that object. According to the
7
view here adopted, having these properties is to instantiate substantial non-relational
intrinsic properties. 9
The description
(S1) A red ball is phenomenally present to the subject s.
is meant to describe a common feature of people who perceive a red ball and people who
only hallucinate a red ball. (S1) therefore, as it is here intended, does not state a relation of
being conscious or aware of a real ball; this relational interpretation, since it is true only of
the case of a genuine perception, could not capture the common feature at issue. (S1)
attributes an experiential property to the subject s which is shared by people who seem to
see a red ball. It follows that (S1) does not have the logical structure it appears to have. “A
red ball” is not used to refer to an object of which the sentence then would say that it is
related in a particular way to the subject s.
But this raises a question. If “a red ball” in (S1) has no referential function, how
should we then understand its semantic role? The intentionalist has an answer that may
appear to be in agreement with the view I am trying to articulate. The intentionalist might
propose to paraphrase (S1) by (S1’)10:
(S1’) It is phenomenally present to the subject s that there is an object which is a ball and
which is red.
I agree that (S1) implies (S1’). But something is lost in the transition from (S1) to (S1’),
or so I would like to insist. The hallucinating and the perceiving person are both presented
with a concretum, as one my try to put the point. (S1’) does not appear to capture this
common feature. Maybe this is a way to put what I have in mind: (S1’), if true of a person,
is made true by something that (S1), but not (S1’) explicitly mentions: it is made true by a
9
Disjunctivism is often characterized by its denial of the common kind assumption: the assumption that a
perception and a corresponding pseudo-perception belong to the same psychological kind of experiences. I find
this characterization of little help since it tends to focus attention on a side issue about what it is to belong to ‘the
same psychological kind’. (In a sense, it is easy to admit that perceptions and hallucinations are so radically
different that they should be ‘put into’ different psychological categories). The real issue is about the status of
experiential properties. The disjunctivist seems to be saying that people who share a certain set of experiential
properties do not thereby have anything substantial in common. This claim is close to an eliminativist theory
about experiential properties. It has been argued that only disjunctivism can avoid the conclusion that our
apparent ‘openness to the world’ is illusionary (compare Mike Martin [2002] and [2004]).
10
For a few more remarks about intentionalism see section 14.
8
certain specific element of the experiential quasi-object, an element which is ‘present to
the mind’ in the visual phenomenology of the person concerned. The person can attend to
that concrete element by visually attending to a particular part of its visual field. One may
describe the semantic function of “a red ball” in (S1) as follows: it has the function to
‘pick out’ the particular element in the experiential quasi-object which is ‘responsible’ for
the truth of the whole sentence and it is used to specify the experiential property attributed
by the whole sentence. “A red ball”, according to this proposal, has a double function: it
contributes to the meaning of the whole sentence by specifying the experiential property
which is attributed and it quasi-refers (‘picks out’) the element in what is given to the
subject which makes it the case that the whole sentence is correct (if it is correct).
Quasi-reference is no genuine reference since reference requires a referent. But quasireference has features in common with genuine reference. A first common feature might
be described along the following lines. When an existentially quantified sentence “There
is an x such that Fx” is true then there is an individual which renders the sentence true by
having property F; in many cases we can refer to such an individual. In a somewhat
analogous manner, we quasi-refer in (S1) to the element in the experiential object which
makes it the case (S1’) is true. This similarity between reference and quasi-reference
sheds some light on the earlier issue about the difference between (S1) and (S1’). The
difference cannot be brought out by finding a case where (S1’) but not (S1) applies since
(S1’) can only be rendered true by the presence of some concrete element in the
experiential quasi-object which is quasi-referred to by “a red ball” in sentence (S1).
A second similarity between reference and quasi-reference has to do with
demonstrative thought. When a person who hallucinates a red ball and knows that she
does, thinks or talks about her experience then she can use a sentence like (S1) (“A red
ball is phenomenally present to me”) in order to describe the phenomenology of her
hallucination. She then quasi-refers to a specific element of the totality of what is
phenomenally present to her using “A red ball”; she refers to an element she can visually
attend to. This is similar to the case where a person refers demonstratively to a
perceptually given red ball. She thereby refers to a real ball to which she can visually
attend. (I will come back to issues about attending and demonstrative reference in section
9).
An account of the semantics of sentences like (S1) would have to avoid a number of
dangers and solve tricky problems. Although “a red ball” is used to quasi-refer to a
specific phenomenological element, as one might say, it does not say of that element that
9
it is red or that it is a ball. Nor does it say of that element that it appears to the subject to
be red or to be a ball for the same reasons mentioned earlier with respect to the example of
perceiving or pseudo-perceiving a cheese eating black crow. The account must do duty to
the idea that the role of “the red ball” is the same when (S1) is used to describe a pseudoperception as when it is used to describe a perception. In both cases the expression quasirefers. This is to say, to repeat a point made earlier, that the expression “a red ball” in (S1)
does not refer to something which might turn out to be a real red ball. It quasi-refers to an
element in what is phenomenally given to the subject and does not refer to a real thing, irrespectively of whether we use the sentence to talk about a perception or a pseudoperception or a dream.11
4. A note on natural language
Sometimes it is necessary in philosophy to depart from natural language. When one
tries to think clearly and to talk precisely about phenomenal presence one quickly arrives
at such a point. It is hard or impossible to unambiguously paraphrase (S1) when one limits
oneself to the tools of natural language.
One might try, for instance the following
paraphrase:
(P1) It appears to s that there is a red ball in front of it.
11
The present view has similarities with adverbialism (as it has been advocated, for
instance by Roderick Chisholm, 1957). Like adverbialism the view includes that (a)
elements of what is phenomenally given should not be given the status of entities (for
instance, no sense data should be accepted), that (b) experiences should not be taken to
have qualitative properties (experiences are neither blue nor ‘mentally painted’) and that
(c) differences in phenomenal character between experiences should be understood as
differences in the way the subject experiences. The last point puts the present view
particularly near to adverbialism. Adverbialism, as commonly understood, appears,
however, to deny what I called here basic intentionality or the ‘subject-object-structure’ of
experience (see section 2). As a consequence, there does not appear to be room, within
adverbialism as commonly understood, for admitting the phenomenon of quasi-reference.
If there was such room, then the problem famously raised by Frank Jackson against
adverbialism would not arise: Jackson argues (see Jackson, 1977) that adverbialism
cannot make the difference between experiencing, for instance, a blue circle and a red
square from experiencing a red circle and a blue square. A view which, like the view here
proposed, endorses the necessity of quasi-reference to elements of what is phenomenally
given for adequate phenomenological descriptions, has the capacity to escape this sort of
objection.
10
Contrary to (S1), however, there is no quasi-reference to a concrete element in the
experiential quasi-object involved. (P1) is better as a paraphrase of (S1’) than as a
paraphrase of (S1). In order to capture the concreteness of what is given in the experience
one might think of a different paraphrase:
(P2) There is an object which appears to s to be a red ball.
Obviously, (P2) is incompatible with the present account of phenomenal presence since it
presupposes an existing object the subject is related to. To avoid this flaw one might put
the concreteness of the object within what appears to be the case:
(P3) It appears to s that there is a real object which appears to be a ball and which appears
to be red.
But (P3) is in no way better than (P1) as a paraphrase of (S1). The concreteness of
phenomenal presence, in particular the concreteness of object-like ‘individuals’ in
phenomenal presence, must not be confused with the appearance of reality (see section 4).
To see this one might think of a case of clear dreaming where the person is aware of
dreaming and where this awareness enters the phenomenal character (the whole scene is
experienced as unreal). The person is not under the impression, in that case, that there is a
real object but still (S1) may be true of her. - One might think that it helps to talk of
apparent objects and their apparent properties. One might then propose something like
this:
(P4) S is confronted with an apparent ball with the apparent property of being red.
The main problem with this reformulation (which is of course quite remote from natural
language anyway) is that the ‘apparent property’ of being red is treated as if it was a
property of the apparent ball. But, as stressed earlier, there are no apparent balls capable
of instantiating properties and the subject satisfying (S1) is not under the impression either
that some such object (an apparent ball) is red. It might be objected that (S1) raises the
same kind of problems. The answer is that (S1) introduces a technical terminology which
then can be protected against possible misunderstandings by explicitly addressing them (in
the way started in the preceding section).
11
4. Appearance of reality
In a natural understanding of (S1) the subject is phenomenally presented with a real
object. To say this involves attributing to the subject the impression that there is a real
ball; it is not to say that the subject is related – via phenomenal presence – to a real ball.
Assertions of phenomenal presence are made true, not by a relation between subjects and
objects but by non-relational properties of the subject; this is so independently of whether
the experience at issue is a case of perception or pseudo-perception. The locution
(S2) A real ball is phenomenally present to the subject (the subject is phenomenally
presented with a real ball)
is not declared unacceptable or false, according to the proposal here presented. Rather
(S2) is interpreted as a purely phenomenological description. In perceiving or pseudoperceiving we are under the impression of being presented with real objects in the space
around us, with objects that exist independently of our perceptual experience. On a natural
reading of (S2), and according to the reading here proposed, the adjective “real” in (S2)
has the function of attributing to the subject the impression of there being a real object
which exists independently of its experience.12 The appearance of reality need not
disappear when a hallucinating person realizes that she is hallucinating.
6. The Appearance of unreality
Example 2: afterimages
When you look for a while into a red light and then look at a white wall you will see a
green shiny patch which changes position depending on the movements of your head and
eyes. These afterimages are at an apparent distance in a funny way: they are located in
some sense (they are ‘located’ in a specific area in the visual field with a specified
distance from the perceiver); yet, they do not appear to be in a specific spatial location:
they do not appear to be actually there, outside in one’s environment; nor do they appear
to be in any internal space; no such ‘internal space’ is phenomenally present to the
perceiver. Afterimages have an ‘apparent location’ without appearing to be in space.
Afterimages do not appear to actually be anywhere. They are experienced as something
which is ‘only apparent’, they are experienced as unreal.13
12
Katalin Farkas has developed an account according to which this appearance of reality (« perceptual
intentionality » as she calls it) is ‘constructed’ of non-intentional features of sensory experience. Her account
incorporates plausible speculations about how the appearance of reality comes about in human perceivers
(compare Katalin Farkas, 2011 and Katalin Farkas, forthcoming).
13
I am grateful to Katalin Farkas for having attracted my attention to the philosophical interest of afterimage
experiences and, in particular, to that aspect of not being real in a talk she delivered in Oslo in a conference on
Sensation and Perception in October, 2006. She discusses the case in Farkas (2011).
12
In an afterimage experience the subject is visually aware of the fact that she is not seeing
something flexibly attached to the wall and moving on its surface. The afterimage, as one
may say, is presented as unreal in the visual experience of the person concerned. One
might propose the following formulation in an attempt to capture that specific feature of
the afterimage experience.
(S3) The afterimage’s being unreal is phenomenally present to the subject.
(S3) ‘picks out’ a specific element of the subject’s experiential quasi-object (the element
the person herself could quasi-refer to in a demonstrative thought about the afterimage)
and makes a statement about that element’s contribution to the overall phenomenology of
the person. (S3) affirms that the person is under the impression that there is nothing real
outside there that she is perceptually related to in having the afterimage experience.
According to (S3) the afterimage’s ‘unreality’ is positively present in the experience.14
7. Veridicality conditions for the appearance of unreality: a problem for intentionalism
The appearance of unreality is not limited to extravagant cases like afterimages. It occurs
in everyday life experiences such as ‘seeing’ red points with one’s eyes closed. Some
14
An alternative would be to say that the experience simply lacks the appearance of
reality and to replace (S3) by (S4):
(S4) The afterimage is not phenomenally present to the subject as real.
(S4) is correct when affirmed of afterimage experiences but (S3) is more accurate, or so I
claim. This intuition can be supported considering a fake afterimage case:
Example (fake afterimages):
A person has an experience which is just like the experience of a red afterimage floating
in front of a white wall. However the person has been fooled. Due to some complicated
mechanism there is a red transparent flat piece of plastic actually moving on the wall
depending on the person’s eye movements; it is ‘floating around’ just like an afterimage
typically does.
According to a description including (S4) and excluding (S3) the subject is not suffering
any illusion, - rather her experience is incomplete: something which actually is the case
(‘there is an experience-independent object out there’) does not show up in what appears
to be the case in the subject’s experience If, on the other hand, we accept (S4) as
phenomenologically adequate, then we can say that the subject suffers an illusion.
13
intentionalist philosophers hold that phenomenal character is exhausted by veridicality
conditions (plus, possibly, the phenomenal character associated with the mode of
representation). I would like to consider a rather weak consequence of this view and argue
that even this weak consequence has trouble to account for experiences which include the
appearance of reality. The weak intentionalist claim I wish to consider is this: all
differences in phenomenal character within a given modality (e.g. vision) are differences
with respect to representational content specifiable in terms of veridicality conditions.
This weak claim is false if there are visual experiences with a specific phenomenal
character that cannot be specified by their veridicality conditions. Plausibly the afterimage case is an example in place.
The reason is quite obvious: there simply are no conditions under which an afterimage
experience would be veridical. The person is phenomenally presented with a red patch
moving in front of the wall in a specific manner and, in the very same experience, that
patch is presented as unreal. There is no possible situation in which that visual experience
is veridical since the experience itself contains the impression that what is experienced is,
so to speak, not realized in the surrounding world. I note this difficulty for a weak
intentionalist claim only in passing. To make this argument convincing I would have to
elaborate its details and reject a number of possible replies. (There is no room to do this in
the present paper.)15
8. Object-likeness and appearance of reality
In some sense, elements present in the totality of what is given to a subject can be ‘objectlike’ even when there is no appearance of reality involved. This can be illustrated, again,
by afterimages and red points visually experienced with the eyes closed.
In these
experiences afterimages (or red points) can be counted; they have, in a sense, a ‘location’
although they do not appear to be genuinely localized; they can change their position
relative to one another. Furthermore, in the way they are phenomenally presented, they
15
The intentionalist may, for instance reply that veridicality conditions specifying phenomenal character need
not be consistent. Experiences of impossible figures (e.g. Escher drawings) may be used as illustrating examples.
I do not find that reply convincing. What is phenomenally present in an afterimage experience or in the ‘sensing’
of non-existent red points with the eyes closed does not, or so I would claim, contain elements which are in
‘contradiction’ with one another in a way analogous to the experience of impossible figures. Furthermore, it
might be said that the content of an afterimage experience is some fact about one’s own visual experience. I do
not find that possible reply convincing either. The subject is not phenomenally presented with experiences and
their properties in the way the opponent would have to suggest.
14
have an astonishing concreteness and an apparent ‘individuality’. We may say, for
instance, quasi-referring to red points visually experienced with the eyes closed that the
first one just disappeared while the second is now moving in circles around the third. This
makes it clear that, in a sense, identity over time is ‘attributed in experience’ to these
items. Let us say that an element of the experiential quasi-object is object-like when it is
associated with these aspects: ‘apparent location’ (sometimes without ‘apparent real
location’), apparent identity across time (sometimes without ‘apparent real existence
across time’) and being ‘countable’ (sometimes without the impression that there really is
something to be counted). As the two examples used show, object-likeness does not
include the appearance of reality.
The opposite direction should not be assumed as obvious either. Arguably, melodies
and smells are experienced as existing independently of one’s own experience but they do
not fulfill the criteria for object-likeness, or so I tend to think. The direction of the origin
of a smell (the basil plant, for instance) and the direction of the violin used to play the
melody may well be phenomenally present, but this is not to say that the smell or the
melody itself appears localized. Both are experienced as located around the subject; but
this is not the kind of experienced location relevant for object-likeness. Smells and
melodies are not countable in a way analogous to the one in which afterimages are. Smells
may be experienced as remaining here over time; but this is not to be confused with
experiencing them as persisting through time in the sense in which an individual is
experienced as numerically identical to itself across time. Similar remarks apply to
melodies. (Melodies might be said to be experienced as extended in time, but this is
different from experiencing them as existing, identically to themselves, over time.)16
9. Objections from demonstrative thought and attention
It may seem that the view proposed has unacceptable consequences related to
demonstrative thought. Suppose that in hallucinating a crow I entertain the thought “this
crow is looking for cheese” and suppose that, on a different occasion, while actually
seeing the crow, I entertain, once again, the demonstrative thought “this crow is looking
for cheese”. The view proposed may appear to imply that I quasi-refer on both occasions
to the common element in both experiences: to the relevant item in the experiential object.
16
I mentioned above that intentionalism and adverbialism do not seem to have a place for quasi-reference. This
observation might be elaborated using the notion of object-likeness. Both theories, arguably, ignore that
phenomenon (compare section 3 and the footnote at the end of that section).
15
But this would be a reductio ad absurdum. Obviously, when I perceive the crow, my
demonstrative thought is about the real crow.
My answer to this objection takes into account that the referent of demonstrative
thought depends on the thinker’s intention. Both subjects intend to refer to the real crow
which they appear to see. In the case of the perception, there is a real crow and the act of
demonstrative reference succeeds. In the case of the hallucination there is no such real
animal and the thinker fails to refer to anything in his or her demonstrative thought. Both
can of course also intend to only describe how things appear; in this case they both quasirefer to the relevant item in their respective experiential object. The view here proposed is
perfectly compatible with this assessment of demonstrative reference in perception and
pseudo-perception. So the challenge can be met quite easily.
It might however be suspected that the view proposed has a similar but more serious
problem with the object of attention. It is impossible to successfully turn your attention
upon a non-existent object, or so someone may argue. Therefore, so the objection
continues, either you must accept that we cannot turn our attention towards an element in
the experiential object or you must accept that the elements in the experiential object have
to be accepted as genuine entities.
In response to this objection I deny its central premise. We can correctly say of a
person that she is directing her attention upon red points ‘seen’ with closed eyes without
thereby being committed to introducing these points into our ontology.
But the opponent may now take a different line of thought still related to the topic of
attention. A commonly recognized flaw of sense data theory is its commitment to
something ‘between’ the subject and the perceived object. The present view, so the
opponent might argue, has a similar consequence. When Hans, a person who hallucinates
a raven, and Peter, a person who perceives a raven, both attend to the raven which appears
to be there, then, according to the view presented, they both attend to an element in their
experiential object. Peter thereby also attends to the real raven. But his act of attention is
indirect: he attends to the real raven only by attending to the element in his experiential
object.
The answer, I think, must be this: Peter attends to two ‘objects’, he attends to a
pseudo-object (the element in his experiential object) and he attends to the raven; but this
does not make his attention to the raven indirect. Peter attends to the raven by attending to
a specific aspect of his overall phenomenology (by attending to the relevant element in his
experiential object) and he attends to that element by attending to the raven. In normal
16
cases, these two acts of attention are even one and the same. If X is an element in the
experiential object and Y is a real object, then “S attends to X” and “S attends to Y” can
describe one and the same act of attention (they can be made true by the same act of the
subject).17
10. The appearance of having direct access through the senses
Example 4 : Feeling the position of one’s own legs
I once had to undergo an operation of my left leg with local anesthesia. I was awake
during the whole operation. Due to the effect of the anesthesia I felt no pain and could not
move my legs. I could hear but not see what was going on. At some point I realized that I
felt the position of my legs. I felt my left leg turned to the right side and lying heavily on
the other leg. I wondered about how this was possible despite the effect of the anesthesia.
I asked a friendly young lady assisting in the operation and sitting next to me for an
explanation. She answered very kindly in the following way: « You do not actually feel
the position of your legs. It only appears to you that way. We learned in medical school
that the brain retains the last information it gets before the onset of the anesthesia. Your
legs have been moved since then.” I had no reason to doubt what she said but I was deeply
puzzled. I seemed to directly feel the position of my whole body but, as I just learned, that
impression was illusionary.
In imagining the relevant traits of this situation you must just focus on your proprioceptive
experience of the position of your limbs and try to imagine you learn by a reliable source
that their actual position is radically different. This exercise might make you realize how
hard it is to believe that one is wrong about the position of one’s own body in
proprioception. It is almost as if one experiences oneself as infallible with respect to
proprioception. When focusing with one’s eyes closed on the position of one’s own body
the position of one’s limbs appears to be so directly available that an illusion appears to be
an absurd idea. However, as the example shows and as one should have expected anyway,
misrepresentation is, of course, not excluded.
Based on the example and further reflection on how it is to feels one’s body via this
‘inner sense’, one can realize that a phenomenological adequate description of
proprioception must mention this impression of direct access. In feeling the position of
one’s arm as lying above the head in a particular way when one wakes up in the morning
one is phenomenally presented with a specific position of that arm; in addition, one is
presented with something else: one appears to have, in that experience, direct access to the
position of one’s arm and that additional impression is part, or so I claim, of the
experience itself. That additional aspect of proprioceptive experiences can easily go
17
Compare for a more detailed discussion M. Nida-Rümelin (2007c) and (2008a).
17
unnoticed. Proprioception in adult humans never comes without that impression of having
direct access; therefore, we cannot discover the aspect by contrasting experiences having
it with experiences lacking it. One way to become acutely aware of being under the
impression of having direct access is to undergo a proprioceptive experience, as in
example 4, of which one knows while having it, that it misrepresents. What was puzzling
for me in the situation reported was not so much the fact in itself that my legs were in a
position other than I thought on the basis of my feeling. What was so puzzling or even
bewildering was to learn that - despite the clear appearance of having direct access to the
position of my body - I actually did not have direct access to the position of a great part of
my body.
I have been using the example in order ‘to pick out’ a specific aspect of proprioceptive
experience. If I succeeded in doing so then the reader will be able to focus on that aspect
in his or her own proprioceptive experience. Describing the experience as an impression
of ‘direct access’ is to introduce a name which captures quite well its phenomenal
character by characterizing in a preliminary manner what appears to be the case in being
under the impression at issue. But the characterization is only preliminary. Once this
particular aspect of the phenomenology of proprioception has been identified one may
further reflect upon how what appears to be the case in that impression of direct access
can be more fully and more precisely captured. Theoretical considerations can enter in
that process of finding an adequate description of the corresponding veridicality
conditions.18 It is part of the impression of direct access that we seem to be able to ‘track’
the position of our own body, - where to be able to ‘track’ one’s bodily position includes
that the way we appear to be positioned is due to the way we are positioned. Understood
in that way, a specific counterfactual dependence (of how our position appears to be in
proprioception on how the body actually is positioned) is essential to having direct access
to one’s bodily position in proprioception. To say that we are under the impression of
having direct access to the position of our limbs in proprioception then amounts to
something like this: we are under the impression that any relevant change in our actual
bodily position would result in our noticing that change; should such a change occur then
the change would be phenomenally present to us.
18
For a discussion of the role of theoretical consideration in the description of veridicality condition for
experiences with a given phenomenal character compare Terrence Horgan (2011) .
18
The appearance of direct access, or so I suggest, is present in other modalities of
perception as well and, arguably, it is an essential feature of what it is to perceive. 19 In
visual perception we appear to have direct access to the things around us. This includes
the impression that we are sensible in an appropriate way to relevant changes. When a
subject puts its hand into water and perceives its temperature as warm, then it is part of
that experience, or so I would like to suggest, that the experience would change if the
water were to change with respect to the property thus felt. Arguably this is so at least in
the human case. In mature human visual experience visual perceptions appear to provide
access to the colors, forms and position of things and many other properties. When I see a
crow in front of the window, I am, for instance, under the impression that I would notice
the change if the crow where to turn white (that the color phenomenally present to me
would change accordingly); and I am under the impression that I would be phenomenally
aware of a crow flying away if the crow were to fly away.
As example 4 illustrates, the impression of direct access can be illusionary. It was
impossible for me to free myself from the impression of having direct access to the
position of my legs in proprioception during the operation; yet, the impression of direct
access was an illusion and I even knew that it was; I was not in a position to track the
position of that part of my body via proprioception. - Under normal circumstances the
impression of having direct access to the things around us through vision, for instance, is
largely veridical: we can track an immense amount of properties of things through vision;
we are visually sensible to the relevant changes and being so sensible is precisely what
appears to be the case in the impression of having direct access. The properties we can
visually track go far beyond colors, forms and spatial relations. We can, for instance,
visually track finest emotions in the faces of other humans. We are often under the
impression of having direct access to what another person feels looking into her face.
Arguably, this impression is, in most cases, veridical.20
– I will come back to the
impression of having direct access in section 17 below.
19
One may doubt whether all non-human conscious animals or human newborns are under this impression in
getting phenomenally conscious information through the senses. Perhaps it is safer to say that the impression of
direct access is not essential to perception but omnipresent in mature human perception. I here assume ‘though
that in having an experience a subject can be phenomenally present with some proposition p which the subject
itself cannot explicitly conceptualize in thought.
20
The impression of having direct access to features of objects surrounding us can be systematically illusionary
in a subject with respect to a certain piece of reality. A good example is intercultural misunderstanding. A group
of people may systematically misread the expression of faces in a group of other people. Despite this systematic
error a member of one of the two groups can be under the impression of having direct perceptual access to the
expression of emotion in members of the other group. In that case the subject is phenomenally aware of the
alleged emotional expression and thereby under the impression of directly seeing it in the sense explained. This
19
13. Phenomenal presence of qualia
The following is a clear example of phenomenal presence of a quale in the way in which I
will use the term:
Example 4:
There is a picture painted by Karl-Theodor Piloty in 1855 entitled “Seni vor dem
Leichnam des Wallenstein” (Moderne Pinakothek, Munich) in which you can see a huge
golden tissue when you look at it from a certain distance. The picture has a horrible theme
and if your art taste is similar to mine then you will not like it. The picture is, however,
interesting: when you approach it you will detect that the painter hasn’t used a single
golden pigment in order to produce the impression of gold. All there is on its surface are
patches of brown, orange, yellow and white. Yet, when you go back a few steps, shining
gold will be phenomenally present to you (and no orange, yellow, brown or white).21
This example renders the notion of being presented with a quality quite clear, even
clearer, I believe, than ordinary color perception. But any color experience is an example
of being presented with a quale; further examples are being phenomenally presented with
a melody, a sound, a smell or a taste. (I use “gold” and “golden” in what follows as color
terms, no reference to the chemical substance is intended).
The term ‘qualia’ is usually introduced as referring to properties of experiences which
are constitutive of the phenomenal character of the experience. On the other hand, qualia
are usually understood as something that is directly present to the mind, - in the way in
which colors, smells and sounds are present in experience. These two characterizations of
qualia – as specific properties of experiences on the one hand and as something directly
given in experience on the other – are, however, incompatible. When looking at Piloty’s
picture, the color gold is phenomenally present to the subject. But that color is not thereby
a property of the experience (it is not a property of the event consisting in the subjects
experiencing that color). Nor is gold a property experiences appear to have. When a
person sees the picture she is not thereby confronted with a mental item, an experience,
which appears to be golden; no golden items appear to float inside. The closest one can
get to attributing ‘gold’ or ‘mental gold’ or any other ‘qualitative property’ to the
is, I believe, an important element for a psychological explanation of the fact that intercultural misinterpretations
tend to persist and are so hard to correct on the basis of counterevidence.
21
It is not just that you see a golden tissue ‘into’ the picture; rather you see the part of the surface as golden. One
should describe the case, I guess, as an example of color illusion. There is really no golden patch anywhere on
the surface you are looking at. But you are clearly and in an astonishingly intense way phenomenally presented
with gold.
20
experience itself is to say that the experience has the property that having that experience
is to be presented with gold. But any understanding of this complex property of an
experience E (to be such that having E is to be presented with gold) is based on an
understanding of what it is to be phenomenally presented with gold. Therefore, the notion
of a quale as something that can be phenomenally present is conceptually more
fundamental than the notion of qualia as properties of experiences. Furthermore, the term
“qualia” is not suited for the complex properties (illustrated above) that might be
considered constitutive of phenomenal character. I therefore reserve the term ‘quale’ for
qualities that can be phenomenally present in experience. Qualia in this sense are not
properties of experiences.22
When qualia are understood as those properties of experiences which constitute
phenomenal character then, by definition, there can be no difference with respect to
phenomenal character unless there is a difference with respect to qualia. But let as ask the
corresponding question using the term qualia in the sense here adopted. Are all differences
with respect to overall phenomenology differences with respect to phenomenal presence
of qualia? If so, then any difference in phenomenal character between subjects X and Y is
either constituted by a quale being phenomenally present to X which is not phenomenally
present to Y or by a different ‘distribution’ of qualia over items in the experiential object
(e.g. a red square and a blue circle is phenomenally present to X while a blue square and a
red circle is phenomenally present to Y). The answer, or so I claim, is clearly ‘no’. A huge
amount of phenomenal differences is not a difference with respect to phenomenal
presence of qualia. The following example 6 is a typical case.
Example 5 : Hearing directions
When you sit on a beach with your eyes closed you might here a wave breaking to your
left and then hear a wave breaking to your right. You can distinguish just by listening
where the sound comes from. In both cases the sound might otherwise be exactly alike.
But there is a phenomenal difference between the two cases. It is phenomenally different
to hear an otherwise qualitatively identical sound as coming from the right side as
opposed to hearing it as coming from the left side.
22
The question about whether qualia are non-intentional properties (or can even be characterized as such)
reoccurs in the here adopted perspective in a different way: is being phenomenally presented with a quale
necessarily an intentional property? As far as I can see it is not: being phenomenally presented with red with
one’s eyes closed (without object-likeness and without the appearance of reality) is intentional only in the sense
of basic intentionality and not in the sense at issue in the relevant debate. However, when a person is presented
with red in a perceptual experience then the redness is phenomenally given as a property of a real thing and the
person is thereby in an intentional state (in a stronger sense of intentionality).
21
Example 5 illustrates that two experiences can be phenomenally different (which means
that it is different for the subject involved to have the first as opposed to the second)
without any difference with respect to the presence of qualia. There is no quale (in the
sense exemplified by colors and smells) associated to hearing a sound as coming from a
certain direction. Qualia ‘occur’ in experiences which present the world in a certain way
to the subject but they are separable - at least in thought - from the way the world appears
to be in that experience. There is no quale which is ‘separable’ from being under the
impression that the sound comes from the left hand side. In the case of a perceptual
experience of gold, for instance, we can isolate the purely qualitative aspect of what is
phenomenally present (the gold). (There are experiences where gold is phenomenally
present and yet nothing appears to be golden). In the case of a perceptual experience of a
given sound coming from the left, there is no purely qualitative aspect of ‘hearing it as
coming from the left’ which could be isolated and then imagined as occurring in an
experience where the subject is not under the impression that the sound comes from the
left. No quality can be ‘separated’ in thought from being under the impression that a
sound comes from a specific direction. The separation in thought of a pure quality is
impossible, or so I claim, for a simple reason: there is no such pure quality phenomenally
present to the subject when a subject hears directions in addition to the other qualities of
the sound such as pitch and loudness.
14. The appearance of three-dimensionality
There is an-going discussion about whether, in visual perception, the hidden part of an
object is phenomenally present. When I see the red ball on the grass, am I then
phenomenally presented only with the part which is visually accessible to me or is the rest
of the ball also phenomenally present? It is certainly misleading to say that the hidden part
of the ball’s surface is phenomenally present. Another description is more adequate: in
visual perception we are phenomenally presented with three-dimensional objects. When,
for instance, I see the crow outside the window, I am phenomenally presented with a
three-dimensional crow-body. The phenomenal presence of the whole crow-body in a
given moment is certainly ‘created’ by the visual system due to the fact that the
experience in that moment belongs to the experience of a scene in which the crow is
moving and I have visual access from various perspectives to its body.23
23
Reference
22
Differences in phenomenal presence of three-dimensional form are differences in
phenomenal character. But again, these differences are not due to differences in
phenomenal presence of qualia. Compare a case where a person seems to see a whole
apple (an object with the three-dimensional form of a normal apple is phenomenally
present) with a case where a person seems to see one half apple cut into two from a
perspective which renders only the intact surface visible (the three-dimensional form of a
half of an apple is phenomenally present). The two experiences are phenomenally
different but the difference cannot be explained by a difference with respect to the
phenomenal presence of qualia. There is no ‘whole-apple-quale’ separable in thought
from the impression of there being an object with that particular form.
Three-dimensional form is sometimes phenomenally present in a highly specified and
distinct manner, and sometimes only vaguely present and quite unspecified. Phenomenal
presence of three-dimensionality in perceptual experience is hard to deny, or so it seems
quite obvious to me. Lack of agreement about this point is likely to be due to
misunderstandings. Some may suppose, for instance, that accepting phenomenal presence
of three-dimensional form commits one to accepting ‘qualia of three-dimensionality’. But
this supposition is based on the mistaken assumption that there are no phenomenal
differences without a difference in phenomenal presence of qualia.
15. Interpretations entering phenomenal presence
Under the heading “cognitive penetration” philosophers of perception argue about what
can enter the content, as they say, of perceptual experience; the question is about to what
extent cognitive elements, or interpretation, can alter what is present in the perceptual
experience itself.24 I would like to ask the question (or at least a related question) as
follows: to what extent can interpretation (in a wide sense where ‘interpretation’ can be
the result of unconscious neural processing but also the more or less voluntary application
of concepts) enter the phenomenal character of perceptual experience via phenomenal
presence? In other words: what properties are such that their instantiation in an object can
be phenomenally present to a subject in a perceptual experience? 25 Several examples have
already been discussed above: phenomenal presence of three-dimensionality must be due
to some ‘interpretative work’ of the perceptual system; the same must be assumed for the
24
For an illuminating discussion of the issue see Susanna Siegel (2005).
The reader should keep in mind when reading this formulation that phenomenal presence is understood nonrelationally in the present approach (compare section 2).
25
23
appearance of reality or unreality and for the impression of having direct access. These
interpretations enter the phenomenal character of perception according to what has been
said earlier. Furthermore, interpretation at a high conceptual level enters the phenomenal
character when I see the crow in front of the window as an experiencing subject with
certain intentions (when the crow’s being an experiencing subject and its having cetrain
intentions is phenomenally present to me) or when I see the crow as the one I have met so
many times before (its identity with a crow met earlier is phenomenally present to me).
There is no room in the present paper to defend the view that these complex
interpretations enter what is phenomenally present. Here I will just briefly comment
example 7 with the aim to thereby further explain the notion of phenomenal presence.
Example 7: Artificial trees
In some restaurants a comfortable atmosphere is produced by the presence of small trees.
You might be disappointed when you touch them and when you thereby discover: these
are not trees, they are fake trees made of plastic. You can see an object as a real tree and
then, after having learned that it is not real, see it as a fake tree. Even when you have
learned that the apparent tree is artificial you might still be able to switch back and forth
between seeing it as a real tree and seeing it as a fake tree. The switch makes a difference
in visual phenomenology, or so I would like to claim. The object looks different to you
according to whether you see it as a real tree or as a plastic object. The difference is due to
a ‘Gestalt switch’ and need not go along with any change in the way the object is
presented to you with respect to color and form.
There are of course different views one might take about the example. Some will deny
that there is any phenomenal difference involved here and say that the difference lies in
some cognitive element (a thought, for instance) which does not have any influence on
overall phenomenology. Others may acknowledge that there is a phenomenal difference
between the experience before and after the ‘switch’ but they will locate the phenomenal
difference in the cognitive element itself (e.g. in having the thought that the plant is
artificial). Still others might – accepting that there is a phenomenal difference – locate the
phenomenal difference in the way the plant appears to be with respect to color and shape.
They might argue that other details about color or shape become salient after the switch
and insist that this is what the phenomenal difference consists in.
The view I would like to look at here is different from all these positions. It does not
deny that a phenomenal difference with respect to salience of details about color and
shape may occur with the ‘Gestalt shift’. It does deny, however, that the difference
consists in these changes. And it involves the claim that the difference lies in the
24
phenomenology of vision, not in the phenomenology of some co-occurrent thought. The
view may be put like this: the plant’s being real is phenomenally present in the visual
experience in the first case and the plant’s being artificial is phenomenally present in the
visual experience in the second case. According to the view here presented, an experience
with the same phenomenological aspect of being under the impression of seeing an
artificial plant may occur in pseudo-perception, although, in that case, it is not a result of
interpreting visual ‘information’, - it then is the result of a ‘free construction’ achieved by
the brain.
Using the notion of phenomenal presence as it has been introduced in the preceding
sections, I will now (in the sections 16 and 17) sketch a way in which the intuition of
‘openness to the world’ can be accounted for within the present subjectivist framework.
16. Weak direct awareness of features of the world and weak transparency
Suppose that, with my eyes close (but without being aware that they are closed) I
hallucinate >a crow< >in front of the window< which >looks< a particular way and
>behaves in a particular way<.26 Suppose that by sheer luck my hallucination is, with
respect to the properties of the crow, perfectly veridical: the crow actually in front of the
window is exactly like and behaves exactly like >the crow< phenomenally present to me
in the hallucination. Obviously, in that case, I only seem to have visual access to a real
animal; with respect to ‘direct access’ my experience is non-veridical.
But there is a sense in which, despite my lack of access to the relevant piece of reality,
I am directly aware of features of reality. There is a rich variety of propositions p such
that, in this situation, I am phenomenally presented with p and p is actually the case. I am
visually under the impression of there being a crow which is black and which behaves in a
particular way; the crow appears to be outside in the world, existing independently of my
experience and having those properties independently of my experience; and there is,
‘outside there in reality’ a crow which is black and which behaves exactly in that manner.
In phenomenal presence what is phenomenally present is ‘directly before the mind’, so
to speak, it is directly given to the subject. In the case of my hallucination >a crow eating
cheese outside of the window< is directly present to me and what is thereby directly
present to me is the way things really are. This is, it seems to me, a first weak sense of
direct awareness of features of the real world that we must recognize. When, in
perception, something appears to be the case which actually is the case, then the subject
I put these expressions in brackets (« >…< ») to remind the reader that these expressions are not used
referentially in the context of descriptions of phenomenal presence (compare section 2).
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concerned is, in a respectable sense, directly aware of features of the world. With respect
to these features, the world is then presented to the subject exactly as the world actually is;
there is a clear intuitive sense in which the person is directly aware, in this case, of real
features of the world since a true proposition is ‘directly present to the mind’ without any
mediation.
One might think that the notion of weak direct awareness of features of the world I am
trying to capture here is constituted by phenomenal presence plus veridicality. But this is
not right. Not any kind of phenomenal presence plus veridicality is enough to constitute,
in the relevant intuitive sense, weak direct awareness. When I sit in my room and simply
consider that the crow might be back and that it might be eating cheese in front of the
window in a moment where this thought is true, then I do not have weak direct awareness
of features of the world. The true proposition that a crow is eating cheese in front of the
window is then, in thought, phenomenally present to me (or so I claim), but there is no
temptation to think of this case as one of direct awareness of real features of the world
even in the weak sense I am aiming at. Only in perception, but not in thought, the subject
is under the impression of reality, under the impression of there being a real thing outside
there with certain properties. Phenomenal presence must have this feature, the appearance
of reality, for being – in the case of veridicality – an instance of weak direct awareness of
real features of the world. I assume that perceptual experiences (perceptions and pseudoperceptions) and only perceptual experiences include this aspect. Weak direct awareness
can then be defined as follows:
Definition 1:
A subject has weak direct awareness of the fact that p iff
The subject is – in having a perceptual experience (a perception or a pseudo-perception) –
phenomenally aware that p and p is the case.
Alternatively one might choose the following definition:
Definition 1’:
A subject has weak direct awareness of the fact that p iff
The subject is – in having an experience which includes the appearance of reality –
phenomenally aware that p and p is the case.
In analogy to these notions of weak direct awareness of facts one might introduce an
equally plausible notion of weak direct awareness of concrete objects. When I have weak
direct awareness of a sufficiently rich class of facts involving the crow, then I may be said
to have weak direct awareness of the individual involved in these facts, the particular
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crow. Of course, this is not a case of genuine access via the senses to that particular
individual. Genuine access requires more, as will be discussed in the next section.
I hope the reader will agree, upon reflection on concrete cases, that the notion so
defined deserves its name. The adjective “weak” is unproblematic: weak direct awareness
need not involve genuine perceptual access; it is not direct awareness of something in the
strong sense of having direct perceptual access. Nonetheless it is, in a sense, direct. The
intuition of directness is based here on three sources: (a) the proposition is phenomenally
present and so present without any mediation, (b) the proposition is present in the
perceptual way which includes the appearance of reality and (c) what is thus presented
without mediation and involving the appearance of reality typical for perception is
actually true.
Any case of phenomenal presence is one where what is so present is ‘directly there’
for the subject. This kind of directness is shared by all cases of phenomenal presence,
independently of whether they involve or do not involve the appearance of reality,
independently of whether they involve or do not involve object-like items and
independently of whether they involve or do not involve phenomenal presence of qualia.
When what is phenomenally present is, for instance, >a real red ball< in perceptual
experience, then the directness of phenomenal presence is combined with the appearance
of reality. In that case, what is ‘directly present to the mind’, without any mediation, is
that there is an experience-independent object outside there which is a ball and which is
red (and which has these properties in an experience-independent way).
When the directness of phenomenal presence is combined with the appearance of
reality, then – at least sufficiently sophisticated subjects – will be under the impression of
being directly presented with the world through the experience. A certain aspect of what
has been called transparency of perception in recent literature may be taken to be just this:
it is the impression of being directly presented with how things stand in having the
experience one is presently having.
I propose to distinguish the appearance of reality from this latter impression, the
impression of direct awareness. In the appearance of reality things appear to be real and
appear to really have certain properties. One may express this appearance of reality adding
that things appear to exist and to have the properties at issue independently of one’s own
experience. But this should not be understood as the claim that the appearance of reality
contains a reference to one’s own experience. The appearance of reality – or rather the
27
aspect I am trying to focus the reader’s attention on in using this term – is less
sophisticated and might well be present in animals cognitively much less complex than
humans. Being real is attributed – in the experience - to things that appear to be ‘out there’
and to their instantiation of properties, - without reference to the way one’s own
experience is related to them. Contrary to the appearance of reality, weak transparence –
as I understand the term – does involve reference to one’s present experience. It is the
impression that, in having the experience, one is directly aware of how things stand. (It is
an impression that becomes salient only upon reflection.)
Once weak transparence is described in this way (as the impression of being directly
aware of pieces of reality) the question arises of how ‘being directly aware’ should be
understood in that context. My proposal is to use definition 1 for that purpose and to
understand direct awareness in the sense of weak awareness there defined. Weak
transparency so interpreted is the impression of being phenomenally presented with some
proposition p in a way which involves the appearance of reality where that p is a fact
about reality. Weak transparency so understood is an aspect of the phenomenology of
perception and pseudo-perception. Weak transparency is veridical when what is
phenomenally present in an experience exhibiting the appearance of reality is actually the
case (the subject is under the impression of being directly aware of a fact and it is then
directly aware of that fact, in the sense of definition 1).
Weak direct awareness of features of the world is veridical phenomenal presence in
perceiving or pseudo-perceiving, or – equivalently – it is veridical phenomenal presence
in an experience which includes the appearance of reality. To sum up, one might say,
simply: one has direct weak awareness of features of the world when things perceptually
appear the way they are (where ‘perceptually appear’ does not exclude pseudoperception). Weak transparency then is the impression, included in any perception or
pseudo-perception (and veridical in any case of perception), that things appear the way
they are.
17. Direct perceptual access and the appearance of direct perceptual access
Any philosophical view concerning perception must do duty to the intuition of ‘openness
to the world through the senses’. Weak direct awareness as defined above only captures a
small part of what must be said about that ‘openness’. An important aspect is still missing
in what has been said so far.
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As illustrated by various examples above, we are phenomenally presented with having
direct access to the world around us (or – in proprioception - to the position of our own
body). We now need to find an adequate understanding of ‘direct access’ such that (a) it is
plausible that we are under the impression of having direct access in this sense in
perception and (b) we actually have direct access in that sense in perception.
In my perception of the crow I actually have direct access to the crow in the following
sense: changes concerning the crow result in changes in phenomenal presence. When I am
under the impression of having direct access to the crow in the case of perception, then my
impression is veridical: I do have that kind of access. The case illustrates a sense of ‘direct
access’ which satisfies both constraints (a) and (b) above. I propose to call this special
relation, this special kind of direct access, which we have to objects in perception
perceptual awareness. One might define the notion along the following lines:
Definition 2:
A subject s is perceptually aware of an object o in a given situation iff relevant changes
concerning that object would lead in that situation – by the normal causal process
characteristic of genuine cases of perception – to corresponding changes in what would
then be phenomenally present to the subject s. (In other words, the following holds for a
sufficiently rich set of properties: would the object cease to have property p then the
subject would – due to that change and as a causal consequence of that change – cease to
be under the impression that there is an object there having property p).27
This is only a first sketch of a definition of perceptual awareness which needs further
elaboration. But the basic idea, I hope, is clear enough for the present purposes. Perceptual
awareness provides direct access to objects; it captures a further aspect of our openness to
the world.
Perceptual access would not be an intuitively satisfying account of an important aspect
of ‘openness to the world through the senses’ if it wasn’t defined in terms of phenomenal
presence. Phenomenal presence combined with the appearance of reality and veridicality
constitutes a weak but important sense of direct awareness of features of the world.
Perceptual access guarantees that we are in genuine contact with the world in normal
cases where we have and appear to have weak direct awareness of pieces of reality. It is
only on the basis of the kind of directness provided by weak direct awareness (which
includes the directness characteristic of phenomenal presence) that perceptual access
deserves being regarded as direct access to the world through the senses.
27
Perceptual awareness of facts could be defined in an analogous manner.
29
Weak direct awareness and weak transparency can be present and weak transparency
can be veridical in the absence of perceptual awareness; this may happen even in a case of
perception. If my description of the fake tree example is accepted, then it can be used to
illustrate the claim: after the ‘switch’, the object’s being a fake tree is phenomenally
present to the subject and the experience involves the appearance of reality. Let us assume
that the object is a fake tree. Then the subject has direct weak awareness of the tree’s
being fake. Furthermore, the aspect of weak transparency may well be present: the subject
may be under the impression of being directly aware of the tree’s being fake, and this
impression is veridical according to definition 1. However, it may well be that the subject
is incapable of making the difference, just by looking, between real and artificial trees. If
the tree, by magic, were exchanged by a genuine tree, the subject would not notice the
difference, or so we may assume. In that case, the subject is not perceptually aware of the
tree’s being a fake tree.
It is psychologically plausible to assume that weak transparency normally goes along
with what one may call strong transparency: the impression of being perceptually aware of
the relevant item. In the fake tree case it is quite possible that the subject is, in addition to
weak transparency, under the impression of having perceptual access to the tree being
fake. If so, her experience exhibits strong transparency but that impression is nonveridical.
18. Full direct awareness or openness to the world
All elements required for the account of ‘openness to the world through the senses’ which
I would like to propose are now in place. In a normal perception, e.g. when I observe the
black crow eating cheese in front of the window, I am phenomenally presented with there
being a black crow eating cheese and the experience comes with the appearance of reality:
the crow appears to be outside in the external, objective world and to have the relevant
properties independently of my experience. Furthermore, my impression that there is a
black crow eating cheese is veridical. So, I have weak direct awareness of the crow and a
number of facts about it. I also appear to have that weak direct access: my experience
exhibits weak transparency. Furthermore, I am perceptually aware of the crow; I am in a
position to track relevant changes of the crow by looking at the crow; and I am under the
impression of having that access: my experience exhibits strong transparency. When all
this is satisfied (veridical phenomenal presence plus the appearance of reality plus
veridicality plus weak transparency plus perceptual access plus strong transparency) then
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the subject has full direct awareness of the relevant object or fact. This is my account of
‘openness to the world through the senses’: it consists in having direct access to a rich
variety of objects and facts about the world by being fully directly aware of them.
19. A puzzle about perception revisited
To conclude I would like to come back to the puzzle with which I started: Three initially
plausible statements taken together lead into contradiction:
(1) Phenomenal character of perception is determined by what one is directly aware of in
perception.
(2) The phenomenal character of a perception and its corresponding pseudo-perception is
the same.
(3) In perception but not in pseudo-perception we are directly aware of the perceived real
objects (or of a fact).
The view here proposed solves the problem by distinguishing different senses of being
directly aware of something in perception: phenomenal presence, weak direct awareness
and perceptual awareness. Phenomenal character of perceptual experiences is determined
by what is phenomenally present to the subject. So direct awareness in (1) must be read,
according to the view here proposed, in the sense of phenomenal presence. (1) is false if
direct awareness is understood either as weak direct awareness (definition 1) or as
perceptual awareness (definition 2). By contrast, (3) cannot be accepted when direct
awareness is read as phenomenal presence. No piece of reality is phenomenally present,
neither in perception nor in pseudo-perception. But (3) is true when direct awareness is
read as perceptual awareness. The problem is thereby solved since no contradiction arises
when “direct awareness” is interpreted differently in (1) and (3).
The view here presented about perception is characterized by taking phenomenal
presence as basic. It shares with sense data theory its emphasis on what is present in
phenomenology while avoiding its well-known errors, in particular the error of
introducing entities which have the properties objects appear to have in perception. It
avoids, furthermore, the unwelcome result that perception is indirect awareness of objects
and facts. The view here proposed shares with disjunctivism the idea that direct causal
contact is essential for direct awareness of perceptual objects. But it avoids the main flaw
of disjunctivism which consists in missing the substantial commonality between genuine
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perception and pseudo-perception. The view shares with intentionalism the basic idea that,
at least in many cases, having a perceptual or pseudo-perceptual experience with a given
phenomenal character consists in being under the impression – in a particular way - that
such-and-such is the case. It insists, however, that not all aspects of the phenomenal
character of perception can be captured in this manner. It rejects every version of
intentionalism which involves the claim that phenomenal presence can be ontologically
reduced to some relation satisfying the constraints a genuine physicalist will impose. The
view, furthermore, endorses the idea that what has been called quasi-reference is
necessary for an adequate description of phenomenal presence.
The view presented in this paper contains a description of some basic ideas for a
solution to the so-called problem of perception. It would, however, be ridiculous to
pretend having presented a new and genuine solution given the difficulty and the depth of
the problem of perception and the enormous effort past and present philosophers have
invested in solving the problem. I hope, however, that I succeeded in a much more modest
enterprise. I hope I will convince some readers that there is a further option which has not
been sufficiently thought through in the discussion about perception and which
incorporates elements in a coherent manner that may appear to be in irresolvable tension
at first sight: the subjectivist approach which takes what is phenomenally given to the
subject (understood in a non-relational manner) as basic and the full acceptance of the
intuition that we have direct access through the senses to a mind-independent world.
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