Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness by Tye Michael;

Author:Tye, Michael; [Tye, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2021-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

3.11 An Argument for Property Representationalism

Agreed:

(19) In carefully attending to the color the sky appears to have in one’s experience (while wondering for instance if it is slightly reddish or slightly greenish or pure blue), one attends to a specific aspect of the phenomenal character of our own color experience.

(20) There is only a single act of attention here.

One doesn’t (and can’t) turn their attention away from the experienced color to the relevant aspect of the phenomenal character. Now,

(21) If indeed there is only a single act of attention, then, if there are qualia, that act has two different properties as its objects: the color outside, as it were, and the color quale of the experience.

But one cannot attend to one quality by attending to a quality with a different (non-overlapping) bearer (even though sometimes one can attend to one thing by attending to a part of that thing). So, if a single act of attention takes in two qualities of things without common parts, that act must be such that it can be narrowed to just one of those qualities, whether or not the resultant act is to be counted as the same act or not. So,

(22) If a single act of attention can be distributed among two or more properties with different non-overlapping bearers, then, for each property, the subject can narrow her attentional focus to that property and ignore the other.

But in the introspective case, one can’t narrow one’s attention in the above way—one can’t attend to the phenomenal character of one’s color experience without attending to the color experienced.

So,

(23) There is no color quale.

So,

(24) In reality there is just one thing attended to here, the color experienced.

So,

(25) The color experienced is the phenomenal character of one’s experience.

But

(26) The color experienced just is the color represented in one’s experience.

So,

(27) The color represented in one’s experience is the phenomenal character of one’s color experience.

For the property representationalist, then, if color is out there in the world or at least is presented as such, then so is color phenomenal character. The phenomenal character of a color experience is not an intrinsic quality of the experience. Indeed, it is not a quality of the experience at all. Instead, it is a quality represented by the experience, rather as the meaning of a predicate is not a quality of the predicate but a quality represented by the predicate. Once again, qualia realism is seen to be false.25

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