Consciousness by Christopher S. Hill

Author:Christopher S. Hill [Hill, Christopher S.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780511797927
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2009-10-22T04:00:00+00:00

Several of the premises of this argument require qualification and/or defense, but none of them seems beyond repair. They are on the whole quite plausible, and together they seem to make a strong case for the appearance view.

The first premise is one of the ones that require qualification. It claims, in effect, that conscious visual perception always has an experiential dimension. Reflection shows that this claim is called into question by cases of “amodal” visual awareness. Suppose, for example, that an observer is looking at a dog that is partially obscured by the slats of a picket fence. There is a sense in which it is true to say that the observer is visually aware of the occluded parts of the dog, but there is no experience of the parts in question. It could not be said that the occluded parts look-p a certain way to the observer. This is a reasonable objection, but there is also a reasonable response. In the case described, awareness of the occluded parts of the dog depends on visual awareness of the other parts. In general, it seems to hold that when one is amodally aware of an object (or an object part), one’s awareness depends on awareness of one or more other objects (or object parts). It also seems to hold that these other objects satisfy the first premise. That is to say, amodal awareness seems to be grounded in experiential awareness. By the same token, it seems possible to meet the present objection by restricting the first premise to forms of visual awareness that are not grounded in this way in other forms of awareness.

I turn now to the third premise, which claims, in brief, that when one has a perceptual experience with a certain associated phenomenology, P, one is ipso facto aware of certain properties as instantiated – properties that are constitutive of P. Claims of this sort are challenged by adverbial theories of phenomenology. According to adverbial theories, having an experience with an associated phenomenology consists in being in a mental state that has certain adjectival determinations (or in undergoing a mental process that has certain adverbial determinations), not in being aware of instantiated properties. My response to this objection is that adverbialism fails to acknowledge the intimate relationship between phenomenology and awareness. Indeed, as we saw in Chapter 3, it is in the end forced to deny that there is first order, experiential awareness of phenomenology. This is just wrong. It is non-negotiable that we are aware of phenomenology – this is how we know of its existence. Moreover, our awareness of the phenomenological dimension of an experience is experiential awareness. That is to say, awareness of phenomenology is located at the level of experience itself; it is not an adventitious, meta-cognitive awareness, and it does not involve conceptualization. Adverbialism fails to do justice to these fundamental facts. Indeed, it is forced to deny them.

There is also a second concern about the third premise. Someone with a representational theory

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