Seeing Things As They Are by Searle John R.;

Author:Searle, John R.; [Searle, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2014-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

VIII. The Role of Presentational Intentional Causation

We can now state the same points from the point of view of the causal character of the perceptual experience. It is a Background presupposition of all conscious perceptual experience that you take it for granted that what you are perceiving is what causes your subjective perceptual experience. Think of the examples I mentioned earlier. For example, when you hear a strange and unexpected sound, you take it for granted that the auditory event in the subjective perceptual field was caused by a sound in the objective perceptual field. Similarly, when you smell a strange smell, or run your hand along the top of the desk and feel the smoothness of the surface, in every case you simply take it for granted that the subjective experience is caused not by just any objective state of affairs but by the very one that you are perceiving. Now let us apply this lesson to the perception of the red object. You look at an object in the objective visual field, and you have a certain subjective experience in the subjective visual field. We have been calling this visual experience Glog. But your Background presupposition is that what you are seeing is what caused Glog. Now, what makes the subjective perceptual experience into a presentation of red is simply that red consists precisely, at least in part, in the ability to cause subjective perceptual experiences like Glog.

I now think we have satisfied our requirements at least for the case of color and other so-called secondary qualities. We have shown how the characterization of the perceptual experience in non-intentional terms gives us sufficient (and in this case necessary) conditions for it being, when veridical, a perception of red. The internal connection between the experience and its object is guaranteed by the fact that the object essentially, so to speak, by definition consists in, at least in part, the ability to cause that type of experience. That is what I meant when I said we would go backwards from reality to representation, rather than follow the tradition of analytic philosophy that goes from representation to reality. In the sentence “There is a red object in front of me” the conditions of satisfaction are determined by the meaning of the sentence, and that meaning is imposed on sounds and marks that are not intrinsically intentional. But in the visual experience reported by, “I see that there is a red object in front of me,” the visual experience is intrinsically intentional. It could not be that visual experience if it did not have that visual intentionality. It gets the visual intentionality that it has by a backward road from the object to the presentation because for something to be a red object is precisely for to be able to cause visual experiences of this type. (More about this in Section X.)

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