Phenomenal content

Byrne claims that, given its role in explaining illusion, we should ‘expect perceptual content to be relatively thin’ (Byrne 2009: 449; 450). By ‘thin’, Byrne means that p-representational content would not contain cognitively

sophisticated concepts like lemons, pigs or Vermeers, but instead relates to more

‘primitive’ sensory concepts, such as yellow or square. This contrasts with

theorists like Siegel (2010), who argue that experience has ‘rich’ content that involves precisely such natural-kind properties. On Byrne’s view, the propositional content arising from non-comparative looks would, like Jackson’s ‘phenomenal looks’ (Jackson 1977: 33), ‘concern properties like shape, motion,

colour, shading, orientation and the like, not properties like being tired,

belonging to Sarah or being a lemon’ (Byrne 2009: 449). The difficulty for this

view, however, arises when we try to spell out precisely which properties are

represented in perceptual experience.

Representationalists typically claim that the contents of perceptual experience concern, amongst other things, the appearance-independent

properties of objects, such as being yellow, being round, and so on. On this

view, that objects look yellow or look round, etc. to a subject is supposed to be

explained in terms of the subject’s representing them to be yellow, round, etc.

That is, an object o appearing to be F to subject S is explained in terms of S’s

representing that o is F, in accordance with Travis’s Objectivity condition

(2.2.1). Seeming or appearing is therefore a function of the propositional

attitude under which the relevant content is entertained — ‘exing’ in Byrne’s

terminology (3.2.1) — as opposed to something that features explicitly in the

content of experience itself.

5 _{Byrne himself seems happy to identify looksnc as a sense of ‘looks’ (ibid.).} 6 _{A more detailed analysis of the semantics of ‘looks’ is given in chapter 4.}

What Byrne and others appear to overlook, however, is that the argument

from looks applies equally to so-called perceptual primitives like being round

and being yellow as it does to cognitively sophisticated ones like being a lemon

or being a Vermeer. This leaves such views open to the following form of

objection: it is not S’s propositional attitude towards the representational

content of experience which makes it the case that o appears F — being yellow,

for example — to S, but rather the properties that are represented in that

content; i.e. they are appearance properties. In order for the representationalist

explanation of illusion to go through, every case in which o appears F to S must

involve the same content regardless of whether or not o actually is F. Only in

this way can the relevant content be said to misrepresent. However, according

to the present objection, if non-comparative looks index anything, it is how

things appear to a subject and not how things are in the world. That is to say,

the content that S’s perceptual experience makes recognisable is not that ois F,

but rather that oappears F. Thus, instead of appearances being a matter of the

subject’s representing that p under a particular propositional attitude, they

become embedded into the contents of the relevant p-representations, yielding

what I will call phenomenal content.

Why should we think that non-comparative looks index properties of the subject’s experience, rather than those of the external objects that give rise to them? After all, it is part of the representationalist’s view that things appear to

be, for example, yellow by representing them to be yellow, not by representing

them to look yellow. The problem stems from the nature of looks-indexing and

the need for the relevant content to be recognisable to the subject. If what is supposed to make the relevant content recognisable is the way that things

looknc, then this must be (as one might expect) common to both epistemically

‘good’ and ‘bad’ cases. A subject who undergoes a perceptual illusion is just as aware of experiencing a yellow non-comparative ‘look’ as one who sees a ripe

lemon under normal lighting — they are, according to Byrne, experiencing the

same phenomenal look. The point that the objection presses is: what is it about such looks, which are common to both good and bad cases, that makes the

content o is yellow recognisable, as opposed to o looks yellow? Since both cases

involve the same phenomenal look, then why should we think of the look as

favouring one case — e.g. (the object’s being) yellow — over the other, i.e. that it

(merely) looks yellow)?

The above point is precisely the one that Travis presses against visual, or comparative, looks. Given all that Byrne has said about non-comparative looks, it is as yet unclear how they could index propositions concerning the way the world objectively is since there is no determinate state of affairs that must obtain in order for things to look the way that they do. Something that looks yellow, for example, could just as well indicate a white object illuminated by yellow light as it does something being yellow. That is, there is no specific way that a given object must be in order for it to look the way that it does, and thus nothing objective to represent, except perhaps a disposition to cause a certain type of experience. Moreover, the presence of any given non-comparative look

co-varies not with o’s being F, but with o’s looking F. Thus, if looksnc index

some content, i.e. make it recognisable to the subject, then it should concern whatever property of experience corresponds to this look, and not the properties of the external objects that cause it. What is required here, and what Byrne’s account fails to provide, is an explanation of how the appearance-independent

properties of objects such as being yellow come to figure in the contents of

perceptual experience at all. The representation of such objective properties cannot simply be taken for granted by the representationalist since this is precisely what is at issue in Travis’s argument from looks.

At first blush, representing that objects look thus-and-so rather than being

thus-and-so, may seem unproblematic, at least for Byrne who denies that perceptual content need play any strong epistemic role (Byrne 2009: 450). However, if non-comparative looks, and therefore p-representations, relate only to the subjective appearances of objects (how they look) rather than their mind- independent properties (how they are), then it becomes impossible for the

resulting content to misrepresent. An object o that looks yellow to S, for

example, cannot fail to have the property of looking yellow to S under those

particular circumstances, quite independently of whether it is yellow or not.

This difficulty arises from the fact that being yellow and looking yellow can be

regarded as two distinct properties, one of which relates to the objects of experience and the other to experience itself. The fact that the English locutions that describe these properties both happen to include the word ‘yellow’ is a contingent feature of surface grammar that does not itself ground any deep philosophical connection between the two. Consequently, it is easy to overlook

the fact that, for all that Byrne has said, there is nothing to connect looking

yellow with being yellow — they are, to all intents and purposes, quite separate and distinct properties.

Byrne effectively concedes this when he states that ‘perceptual content, if

there is such a thing, goes with the way things look when they looknc F, which

need not include Fness’ (Byrne 2009: 443). Just as yellow objects do not always

look yellow, non-yellow objects can sometimes look yellow — when viewed

under yellow light, for example. Thus something can look yellow without being

yellow, and vice versa.7 _{Moreover, since being yellow is a monadic property of}

objects, whereas looking yellow to S is a relational property whose relata

include both subject and object, the two properties cannot be numerically identical. Rather, they must be connected in some other manner. The objection to Byrne’s account is that it fails to specify what this connection is, thus rendering it at the very least incomplete, and at worst incoherent since in any

experience in which things seem to S to be F, it is true that they seem this way to

S, and so perceptual experiences effectively become their own truthmakers.

7 _{Lest the metaphysics of colour be thought to present a particular problem in this regard,} compare the case of circular objects, which can sometimes exhibit a ‘non-comparative’ elliptical look when viewed at an angle. This is not to say that circular objects look to be elliptical when seen at an angle. Rather, they look like ellipses do when seen face-on such that they might, under certain circumstances, be mistaken for an ellipse on the basis of this shared visible look.

The form of objection sketched above does not deny that representational contents may be individuated by something other than looks. Rather, it shows

that p-representational contents that are indexed — that is to say, made

recognisable — by looksnc alone cannot privilege the representation of objective

properties, i.e. being F, over phenomenal properties, i.e. (merely) looking F.

Consequently, the resulting p-representations cannot misrepresent; they constitute phenomenal content. This counts against the view set out in Byrne

(2009) to the extent that it supports Looks-indexing, linguistic objections

notwithstanding. It is particularly pressing given that the ability to account for illusion is the reason Byrne gives for favouring representationalism over Travis’s

anti-representationism (3.2.1). If, on the other hand, Byrne rejects Looks-

indexing, the problem is circumvented, but this leaves him without an account of p-representation since the notion of non-comparative looks would then be explanatorily inert. The objection therefore counts against any theory that takes p-representational content to be grounded in non-comparative looks. This includes both Siegel (2010) and Schellenberg (2011b), who explicitly cite Byrne (2009) as a proponent of this form of content, and whose arguments I examine in further detail below.