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(Oxford Cognitive Science Series) John Campbell-Reference and Consciousness-Oxford University Press, USA (2002) PDF
(Oxford Cognitive Science Series) John Campbell-Reference and Consciousness-Oxford University Press, USA (2002) PDF
REFERENCE
AND
CONSCIOUSNESS
JOHN CAMPBELL
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PREFACE
In May 1995, Naomi Eilan and Michael Martin organized a one-day meeting in London on 'Attention and Consciousness' in which I was to be cosymposiast with Jon Driver. Driver's talk, presenting results about the
connections between acts of perceptual attention in different sensory
modalities, seemed to me fascinating but difficult to interpret in terms of its
implications for the character of experience. I found, however, an immediate and intuitive connection between Driver's findings and a problem that
had long interested me, namely the connections between references to
objects made on the basis of perceptions of them in different sensory
modalities, such as sight or touch or hearing. To refer to an object on the
basis of seeing it seems to require attention to that object; to refer to an
object on the basis of hearing it or touching it seems to require attention to
that object. So in principle, I thought, it ought to be possible to use results
on relations between acts of attention in different sensory modalities to
illuminate the relations between, for example, demonstratives referring to
seen objects and demonstratives referring to touched or heard objects.
In pursuing this line of thought after the conference, though, it quickly
became apparent to me that the fundamental problem is to articulate the
relation between attention to an object and knowledge of the reference of
a demonstrative referring to it. The issue of the relations among the sensory modalities is touched on only glancingly in this book, though I think
there are ready extensions of the present approach to that topic. Rather, I
have gone back to the original topic of the London conference, to find the
relations now between three phenomena: attention, knowledge of reference, and our experience of the world.
In finding my way around the basic conceptual links between these three
notionsattention, knowledge of reference, and experienceI have been
greatly helped by a long series of sceptical challenges from Philippa Foot.
Christopher Peacocke provided a detailed set of comments on four chapters from an early draft. Quassim Cassam and Timothy Williamson helped
me see the exact shape of many particular arguments in an area whose
scope, though narrowly defined, is quite far-reaching. And most of all,
I have tried in one way or another to address Michael Dummett's
deeply thought-through set of challenges for any account of knowledge of
reference.
vi
Preface
Preface
vii
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Experiential Highlighting
1
7
22
46
4. Sortals
61
5. Sense
84
114
132
8. Joint Attention
157
9. Memory Demonstratives
177
194
216
235
Bibliography
255
Index
265
Introduction
It is experience of the world that puts us in a position to think about it.
Without experience, we would not know what the world is like. Those who
have experiences of which we know nothing may be able to think in ways of
which we know nothing. Those who do not have our experience of the
world will not be able to think of it as we do. These points show up even at
the simplest levels. Someone who has never had experience of the colours
will not be able to understand the concepts of the different colours. As
Locke said, a scholarly and indeed brilliant individual born blind, on pursuing an investigation into the nature of the various colours, may eventually say of scarlet, "Tis like the sound of a trumpet!', but this will not reflect
any knowledge of what scarlet is. Or again, if I have picked something up
and I conceal it from you, I may make a series of remarks to you about 'this
extraordinary object', but the most direct way for you to interpret my
remarks is by experiencing the object itself; seeing the object would mean
that you knew what I was referring to.
This connection between reference and consciousness is one that has
been lost sight of. The complexity of the issues surrounding the two topics
individually has led to a fragmentation of effort in theorizing about them.
Reference is one problem, consciousness is another. This means that it is
easy to lose sight of ways in which the two problems illuminate each other.
We understand reference better when we keep in view that it is at bottom a
phenomenon of consciousness. We know better how to think about consciousness when we know that, whatever else is true of it, consciousness of
objects is what provides knowledge of reference. This gives some discipline
to theorizing about consciousness: of what we say about consciousness, we
can ask whether it contributes to explaining how consciousness can be
what provides knowledge of reference.
There is a way of focusing discussion of this connection which appeals
to the notion of attention. Reference and attention are generally taken to
be different topics. Reference is one of the fundamental problems in philosophy, though the nature of reference is not often directly discussed by
scientists: the general problem is how our thoughts and words connect to
the things about which we think and talk. Attention, in contrast, is little
introduction
discusse d by philosophers, but one of the most intensively studied phenomena in cognitive science. To see why attention seems important in cognitive science, suppose for a moment that you think about a human being
as an engineer might view the thing. There is a lot of machinery here, in the
human being, which can be deployed now on this task, now on that. What
makes the difference between the machinery being deployed on this object
as opposed to that object, is a difference in what you are attending to.
Attention is an element in the control of the whole system. So reference
and attention seem individually to be important topics, in philosophy and
psychology respectively, yet to have little to do with one another.
Suppose, though, that you and I are sitting side by side looking at a
cityscape, a panorama of buildings. If I am to think about any one of those
buildings, if I am to formulate conjectures or questions about any of those
buildings, if I am to be able to refer to any one of those buildings in my own
thoughts, it is not enough that the building should simply be there, somewhere or other in my field of view. If it is simply there in my field of view,
though unnoticed by me, I am not yet in a position to refer to it; I cannot
yet think about it. If I am to think about it, 1 have to single out the building
visually: I have to attend to it. And if I want to refer to that building, to
make a remark about that building for your benefit, I have to draw your
attention to it. That is what pointing is. Pointing is at once the most basic
kind of reference to objects, and the single most useful way of drawing
someone else's attention to an object. So reference and attention are not
just different topics. When we think about demonstrative reference in particularthat is, reference made to a currently perceived object on the basis
of current perception of itit seems that reference to the object depends
on attention to the object. So we should expect that philosophical problems about reference and psychological theorizing about attention should
be capable of illuminating one another.
It is attention as a phenomenon of consciousness that matters for
knowledge of reference. If I am to understand a demonstrative referring to
an object, it is not enough merely that the object be there somewhere in my
visual field; I have to attend to it. But the attention that is needed here is, as
it were, a matter of experiential highlighting of the object; it is not enough
merely that there be some shifts in the architecture of my information-processing machinery, remote from consciousness. To understand how knowledge of reference depends on attention we will have to understand the
relation between the experiential highlighting of an object and underlying
shifts in the configuration of information-processing machinery.
We can make a rough division between a description of what knowledge
of reference is, and a description of what knowledge of reference does.
When I say that knowledge of reference is provided by conscious attention
Introduction
introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Experiential Highlighting
1. Intuition and Explanation
Suppose you say to me, 'What is that mountain over there?' To understand
your question I have to know which mountain you are talking about. I can
construct various descriptions that I might use to interpret your demonstrative, 'that mountain'. For example, there are 'the mountain she is looking at', 'the mountain she is asking me about', and so on. But ordinarily, I
do not need to construct any such description. I have a more direct way of
interpreting the demonstrative, 'that mountain'. I can interpret it simply by
looking to see which thing you mean. Ordinarily, my knowledge of which
thing you are talking about is provided by experience of the object. And it
is not just having the mountain in my visual field that matters. I have to
single the thing out visually, I have to see it as a figure against a background. Of course, grasp of a demonstrative like 'that mountain' does not
mean that I have to sustain visual attention on the object continuously
throughout the period during which I am thinking or talking about it. We
can discuss 'that mountain' during a period in which my attention shifts
around the scene. It remains that my understanding of the demonstrative
depends on the act of visual attention.
You might acknowledge that ordinarily we would use visual information to interpret the demonstrative, but question whether it has to be conscious. The idea of visual information that is not conscious is made vivid
by cases of blindsight. A blindsight patient is one who has suffered damage
to his primary visual cortex, as a result of which he has no awareness of
objects in one half of his visual field. Nonetheless, when forced to guess
about what is in the blind field, he may be reliably correct about, for
example, the orientation, direction, and sort of the object in the blind field,
perhaps to his own as well as our surprise (Weiskrantz 1986). So here we
seem to have visual information in the absence of consciousness. Couldn't
this subject use such visual information to achieve an understanding of a
visual demonstrative? If the answer is that there is a problem because a
blindsighted subject will not in fact have enough visual information, or the
wrong sort of visual information, we could try supposing, as a thought
Experiential Highlighting
experiment, that we have a subject who has all the relevant visual information but is not yet conscious of the object in the blind field. (Cf. Block 1997
for a related notion of 'super-blindsight'.) Suppose that our blindseer can
guess reliably at the properties of an objectsay, a treein his blind field,
and can act appropriately with respect to it: pointing in the right direction,
avoiding walking into it, and so on. Why should we not say that he is able
to understand the demonstrative 'that tree'? Of course, anyone has to agree
that the blindsight patient may be able to construct descriptions which will
allow him to give some interpretation or other of the demonstrative, 'that
tree', descriptions such as 'the tree in my blind field'. The issue is whether
the blindseer has the very same way of interpreting the demonstrative as
the ordinary subject has. That is, the question is whether for the ordinary
subject, consciousness of the object is not completely idle in an understanding of the demonstrative. In that case, the blindseer could have
exactly the same understanding of the demonstrative as the ordinary subject has.
One problem here is to explain what role experience could be playing in
providing you with knowledge of the reference of the demonstrative. That
is, even if it is compelling to common sense that experience is needed for an
understanding of the demonstrative, we still need an explanation, a
theoretical analysis, of why that should be so. What work could experience
of the object be doing? Another, much simpler question is whether it can be
made compelling to common sense that the blindseer does not have the
same understanding of the demonstrative as is provided by experience of
the object. Let me start with the simpler question.
I think that the simplest way to grasp the common-sense difference
between the blindseer and the ordinary subject is to consider an ordinary
case in which you and I are sitting at a dinner table with a large number of
people around and you make a remark to me about 'that woman'. There
are a lot of people around; I can't yet visually single out which one you
mean. So on anyone's account, I do not yet know which woman you are
talking about. Suppose now that we add to the example. My visual experience remains as before: a sea of faces. I cannot consciously single out the
person you mean. All I get consciously is the sea of faces. But now we add
some of what the blindseer has. You refuse to give me any further clues as
to which person you mean, but you say, Try to point to the woman I mean'.
As first I protest that I can't do that, since I don't know who you're talking
about, but I do try to point, and to my surprise you say I'm pointing right
at the person you mean. Suppose now that my conscious experience
remains a sea of faces, but we extend the reach of my reliable guessing so
that it encompasses everything the blindseer can do. So I can make reliable
guesses about what the person is eating, wearing, and so on, as well as
Experiential Highlighting
reaching and pointing appropriately. But so long as my conscious experience remains a sea of faces, there is an ordinary sense in which I do not
know who you mean. The problem here does not have to do with whether
I am reliable: we can suppose that I am quite reliable in my guesses and we
establish this over a series of such cases. The point is rather that I do not
know who you mean until I finally look at where my finger is pointing, or
look to see who is wearing the clothes I described in my guesses. It is only
when I have finally managed to single out the woman in my experience of
the room, when it ceases to be a sea of faces and in my experience I focus on
that person, that I would ordinarily be said to know who was being referred
to. So it does seem to be compelling to common sense that conscious attention to the object is needed for an understanding of the demonstrative. If
common sense is right about this, then the problem is to achieve a theoretical understanding of why that should be so.
In some contextsthough not, I think, the present onethe importance of visual attention has to do with the sheer quantity of information
you are receiving about the thing. You receive much more information
about an object whose physical image is focused on the relatively small part
of the retina called the fovea than you do about an object whose image falls
on some more peripheral part of the retina, just because of the mass and
type of nerve-endings packed in to the fovea. So sometimes attention matters because it can involve foveating the object, hence receiving more information about it. But this is not the explanation of the importance of visual
attention for knowledge of reference. We have to resist the analysis that
says: 'I know which mountain you are talking about only when I have
foveated the mountain, because only then do I have enough visual information about it to know which thing you are talking about'. Sheer quantity of information is not to the point here. Since Helmholtz 1866/1925,
psychologists have distinguished between overt and covert shifts of visual
attention. An overt shift of attention involves movement of the head, eyes,
or body, generally to bring the thing into focus on the fovea. But it is possible to shift visual attention covertly, without movement of the head, eyes,
or body. You can shift visual attention around even though your eyes hold
steady on a particular fixation point (cf. e.g. Posner 1988). If you say to me,
'Don't look now, but that man over there seems to recognize you', I may
exactly maintain fixation on my wine-glass, but look at him, as we say, 'out
of the corner of my eye'. Even though I will not get a mass of visual information in this way, I may still manage to single him out visually to a sufficient extent that I know to which man you are referring. '
In any case, an appeal to the mere quantity of information being
received about an object could hardly be what explains why experience of
the object plays a role in knowledge of the reference of a demonstrative,
10
Experiential Highlighting
since you could in principle receive quite a lot of information about the
thing without experiencing it. So how are we to characterize the role of
experience? This is the question that will occupy us through the whole
book. But for preliminary orientation, it may be helpful to indicate the
direction of reply. I think that what explains the role of conscious attention
here is the combination of two points. First, there is what I will call the relational character of experience of the object. So long as we do not analyse
experience of the object as a matter of the object causing some experiential
effect in you, we can regard experience as making the object itself, the
categorical thing, available to the subject. Experience of the object makes
the object itself, rather merely some sensory effect of the object, available
to the subject.
Secondly, there is the functional role of conscious attention. Suppose
that you have a complex scene before yousay, a number of people you
have never met before. As you look over the throng, you attend now to one,
now to another face in the crowd. What does this experiential highlighting
of one rather than another person come to? It affects the functional role of
your experience of that person. It means that you are in a position to keep
track of that person deliberately over time, you are in a position to answer
questions about that person on the basis of vision, and you are now able to
act with respect to that person. In an ordinary situation, until you highlighted that person in experience, you could have done none of those
things.
Both of these points need some explanation and defence. We also need
an account of the relation between these two points: I will argue that this is
provided by the notion of a 'way' of attending to the object, which is both
strongly relational, being individuated in terms of the object in question,
and needed in an account of functional role. I will discuss this point in
Chapter 5.
In Chapter 6, I will set out the first point, the relational character of
experience. I will pursue the ramifications of the relational character of
experience through Chapters 7-12. In Chapters 1-4 I will be principally
concerned with the functional role of conscious attention, to which I now
turn.
2. Conscious Attention
I have said that conscious attention to an object, the highlighting of your
experience of that thing, affects the functional role of your experience of
the object. Having once consciously focused on the object, you are now in
a position to keep track of it deliberately, to answer questions about it, and
Experiential Highlighting
11
to act on it. But how exactly can it happen that your experience of the
object has this functional role? Take, for example, your ability to answer
questions about the object. Do you, as it were, somehow read off the
answers from the intrinsic nature of your experience of the object? Or is
some further process at work? Let me contrast two different types of
explanation you might give of your verbal report:
A. 'I say it's blue, because it looks blue.'
B. 'I say it's blue, because the cell-firing in V4 is registering blue at
that location.'
In discussing these contrasting explanations, I do not mean to be appealing
to anything idiosyncratic about colours and colour experience, as opposed
for example to shapes and shape experience. I could equally well work with
the contrast:
Al. 'I say it's square, because it looks square.'
B1. 'I say it's square, because the cell-firing in V3 is registering squareness at that location.'
I use colour only because it is a good example of a visible characteristic of
a demonstrated object. V4 and V3 are areas of the visual cortex thought to
be involved in, respectively, the processing of colour and the processing of
form information. Filling out an explanation of type B or Bl might be held
to involve emphasizing neural areas upstream or downstream of V4 or V3;
for present purposes this point is not critical.
I think the first thing we have to say is that both types of explanation are,
on the face of it, legitimate. Of course, in a particular case they could be
mistaken. Perhaps the object doesn't actually look blue, but you made a
mistake anyway. Or perhaps it was cell-firing in some other area that
caused your verbal report. But the styles of explanation seem right.
Explanations of type A (or Al) are most familiar to common sense; it
seems, to common sense, absolutely compelling that such explanations are
often correct. They are the kinds of explanation you might give when asked
your reasons for making a particular report. In contrast, explanations in
the style of B are not in general readily known to the person making a verbal report. But scientific accounts of vision depend very heavily on the
legitimacy of explanations of this type. The picture of verbal report as
caused by visual information-processing in various specialized pathways is
fundamental to much of the experimental work on the visual pathways. I
will give some examples in a moment.
Information-processing explanations challenge the unity of the
philosophers' notion of a representational state. Philosophers sometimes
think of beliefs and desires as representational and suppose that it will be
12
Experiential Highlighting
possible to explain all other representational notions in terms of their relations to beliefs and desires. However, the representational states postulated
in information-processing explanations are not themselves beliefs and
desires, nor does it seem possible to explain their contents in terms of their
relations to beliefs and desires. According to Chomsky 1976, we do have a
unitary notion of 'representational state' which covers both ordinary
beliefs and the states involved in, for example, analysing the grammatical
structure of a heard sentence. The difference is only that some of these
statesin particular, ordinary beliefs and desiresare accessible to consciousness, while others, such as those postulated by linguists, are not
accessible to consciousness. But, according to Chomsky, the distinction
between representational states accessible to consciousness and those not
accessible to consciousness is of no particular theoretical interest. An
alternative reaction is provided by Searle 1995. According to Searle, there
is only one notion of representation and it is constitutively linked to consciousness; there are only the ordinary beliefs and desires, of which we can
in principle become aware, and it does not really make sense to talk in
terms of other kinds of representational state. On this view, informationprocessing explanations are problematic, for we can have intentionality
only on the part of states which are in principle accessible to consciousness.
The cautious view, though, is that we have (at least) two different types of
representation (Davies 1995). On the one hand, there are the conceptual
contents of ordinary beliefs and desires, to which consciousness may constitutively attach. On the other hand, there are the non-conceptual
contents of information-processing states. The present point is about the
relation between non-conceptual, information-processing content, and a
third element: the content of conscious attention. I began with the remark
that conscious attention is what explains our grasp of a particular type of
conceptual content, namely, demonstrative content. We are now looking
at the relation between conscious attention and information-processing
content.
If you are asked the question,'What colour is that block?', you must, to
understand the question, consciously attend to the block. As we saw, it
seems compelling that it is in virtue of your conscious attention to the
block that you know which thing is in question. If you are to verify the
proposition, That block is blue', it is not enough merely that there be
appropriate cell-firing in visual area V4. After all, at any one moment, as
you look at a complex scene, there will be many objects of various colours
in your visual field. So there will be a lot of cells in V4 firing in response to
the different colours in the scene. Your verbal response, 'That block is
blue', has to be caused by just the right cell-firings; it has to be caused by
exactly the cells which are firing as a consequence of that particular block
Experiential Highlighting
13
having the colour it does. So these particular cells have to be selected and
used to affect the verbal response. What causes there to be that connection?
I want to propose that what causes there to be that connection, between
your verbal response and the cell-firing, is your conscious attention to the
object.
3. The Causal Hypothesis
Let me state this Causal Hypothesis formally:
The Causal Hypothesis: When, on the basis of vision, you answer the
question, 'Is that thing F?', what causes the selection of the relevant
information to control your verbal response is your conscious attention to the thing referred to.
What is the argument for this causal hypothesis? If you were not consciously attending to just that object, then just those cells would not be
affecting your verbal response. Had you been consciously attending to a
different object, a different set of cells would have been affecting your verbal response. And so long as you were to be looking at just that object, in
just that context, it still would have been just those cells that affected your
verbal response. These counterfactuals do not, in themselves, constitute
the truth of the causal claim. But the counterfactuals are plainly true;
otherwise, your verbal responses would not bear any relation to the objects
of your conscious attention, and the visual verification of propositions
about demonstrated objects would be simply impossible. Moreover, the
causal thesis explains why those counterfactuals are true.
There are two complementary lines of objection that you might have to
this causal thesis. First, you might accept that there is a serious question:
'How does it come about that the firing of cells in V4 is connected to your
verbal response?' But, you might say, the cause of there being this connection is not conscious attention to the relevant object. It is, rather, a further
information-processing mechanism. To this objection we must immediately concede that there are illuminating information-processing models of
the executive control of mental processes, and that the errors made in controlling which mental operations to perform can show that the causation of
a verbal response by cell-firing in the visual cortex, under the guidance of
conscious attention, is not a simple matter and may well be mediated by a
number of small-scale mechanisms concerned with, for example, sequencing the various tasks the agent may be performing in roughly the same
period (cf. Norman and Shallice 1986; Shallice 1988; Monsell 1996). But at
the highest level of determining the objectives of the subject, there simply
14
Experiential Highlighting
Experiential Highlighting
15
16
Experiential Highlighting
Experiential Highlighting
17
cessing? That is, what is it about your identification of the object at the level
of your subjective life that causes the selection of just the right underlying
information to control your verbal reports?
The very fact that this question demands an answer defines a sense in
which there has to be a commensurability between content at the information-processing level and the content of consciousness. There is commensurability in the sense that there are causal-explanatory relations between
the two types of content. One familiar way in which it is generally supposed
that there is commensurability between the two types of content is that it is
often supposed that a scientific account of vision could eventually explain
why we have the kinds of visual experience that we do: for example, that the
experience of redness may be causally explained in part by the fact that various cell-firings are registering the presence of redness (cf. Marr 1982). This
does not presuppose that it is the very same type of content at both levels,
but it does demand a commensurability between them. A parallel commensurability is presupposed between information-processing content
and the conceptual content of verbal report, when we assume that what is
happening at the information-processing level can explain our making the
verbal reports that we do.
I am not here concerned with this bottom-up commensurability, in
which the content of conscious experience is explained in terms of
information-processing content. The issue that concerns me is, as it were, a
top-down commensurability: to explain in detail just how conscious attention to an object can identify the thing, so that, at the informationprocessing level, just the right information is selected to control your verbal
reports. How in detail does conscious attention to an object serve to single
out the right information to control verbal report and action? Suppose we
consider a minimalist response to this question. The minimalist would say
that, at the conscious level, the object is identified demonstratively, as 'that
block', for example, and that at the information-processing level, the object
is again identified demonstratively, as 'that block'. You might protest that
these have to be quite different types of demonstrative, since the subjective
'that block' has to be grasped by the use of conscious attention, whereas
there is no similar role for consciousness at the information-processing
level. But we are already acknowledging that there must be commensurability between different types of content, and so we should allow that
there could in principle be causal-explanatory relations between different
types of demonstrative content. You might also protest, as against the
minimalist, that we have as yet no account of how demonstratives are individuated, so we do not yet have any analysis of when we have commensurability between demonstratives at the two levels; but a minimalist may
simply reject the demand for an account of individuation and take this
18
Experiential Highlighting
commensurability to be a primitive phenomenon. The most radical problem for minimalism is, rather, that we cannot assume that the relevant
information-processing contents are to be specified using singular terms
at all.
The point here is that visual processing is carried out in specialized processing streams, and there is no such thing as the single stream in which all
the information about any single object is carried (Zeki 1993). The way in
which the object is identified at the level of visual attention has to be capable of singling out information from any of a range of specialized processing streams, to control verbal report.
The evidence from physiology and from cognitive studies is that location is what is used in cross-referencing visual processing streams (Zeki
1993). In each specialized processing stream, determining colour, shape, or
movement, for example, the processing generally carries information also
about the locations of the colour, shape, or movement; so that if it matters
whether a colour and shape discovered in different processing streams
relate to the same object, a first approximation to the answer will be provided by asking whether the colour and shape are at the same place.
If this is right, then when you consciously attend to the object, you will
be able to single out which information streams are relevant to verification
and action on the object so long as your experience identifies the object as
the thing at a particular location. Of course, there is more to the singling
out of the relevant information than merely location. If you are verifying
or acting on the basis of propositions about a glass which is currently being
clasped in a hand, the parts of the glass may be no closer to each other than
they are to the parts of the hand. So location alone would not be enough to
select the information relating just to the glass. There must also be some use
of something like traditional Gestalt principles of grouping (cf. e.g. Palmer
and Rock 1994; Prinzmetal 1995).
As we shall see, it has been a traditional insight, shared by Moore 1962
and Evans 1982, and carefully expounded by David Kaplan 1989b from
Michael Bennett, that the senses of demonstratives involve the locations of
the objects seen. But the problem for the traditional insight has always
been that articulating it seems to involve ascribing something like a
descriptive sense to the demonstrative. It seems to involve supposing that
the demonstrative 'that box' must mean something like 'the box at that
place'. And this proposal always runs into the problem that you may in
vision be having an illusion about where the thing is, and yet be demonstrating it successfully. The proposal I am making is that the sense of the
demonstrative is indeed given by the seen location of the object, but the
role of the experienced location of the object is not to provide a descriptive
identification of it. It is, rather, to organize the information-processing
Experiential Highlighting
19
procedures that you use to verify, and to act on the basis of, judgements
involving the demonstrative. It is entirely possible that the experienced
location of the object should succeed in playing that role, so that you
manage to have just the right information-processing procedures swinging
into play to allow you to verify and to act with respect to the object, even
though you are under an illusion about where it is. So we can individuate
demonstrative senses by the seen locations of the objects, without supposing that location has to be providing a descriptive identification of the
thing. And we have to keep in mind that there will be a role also for something like Gestalt organizing principles in individuating the senses of
demonstratives.
5. The Empirical Evidence for the Role of Location
The question I have been asking is, how does the selection of an object, at
the level of conscious experience, affect the selection of information to
control verbal report? There has to be something general-purpose about
the selection of an object at the level of conscious attention. By singling
out an object in experience, you enable yourself to answer any of a range of
questions about its visible characteristicsnot just its colour and shape,
but its location, movement, orientation, and so on. So how is it that your
singling out of an object in experience can have this general-purpose
character?
We could, in principle, use any of a wide range of strategies. For
example, we could in principle use colour as a selection cue. Suppose that
you are looking in the window of a shop selling jerseys and sweaters. The
big display window is a mass of jerseys, all different shapes, colours, and
sizes, from floor to ceiling; both the back of the display and the two side
wings seeming to engulf you in jerseys. As you look, you focus now on one,
now on another. Perhaps you spend some time comparing two. It is easy to
imagine that you might select now one jersey, now another, to dwell on
visually. What is not so easy to imagine is that you might simultaneously
select all and only the red jerseys, from different parts of the display; that
you might simultaneously highlight in experience all these different jerseys
at their different places. It is not that there is a contradiction in supposing
that someone might be able to do this. There is no a priori reason why we
could not operate in that way. If we did, then at the level of conscious
experience, we would simply highlight redness, and at the informationprocessing level, information from all the objects designated as red would
be simultaneously selected. Certainly from a computational point of view
we could construct a machine which, when given information about the
20
Experiential Highlighting
shape, size, colour, and so on of targets at various places, could simultaneously select the information from all the targets labelled as red, for further
processing, in parallel, simultaneously, on all of it. So why can't we do that?
The obvious answer is that though we could indeed construct a machine
which worked in that way, that is not, as matter of engineering fact, the way
in which we work. We visually select targets on the basis of location, and in
general we can give focused attention to only one location at a time. The
evidence that this is in fact how human vision works, selecting information
from objects on the basis of location, comes from a variety of experiments.
Suppose, for example, that you are shown a display of nine letters, three
of them red, three of them green, and three of them brown. You are asked
to name one of the red letters, and as many of the others as you can. If it
were possible for you to focus simultaneously on all the red letters in the
display, then the simplest strategy would be for you to do that: read out all
the red letters, then name as many of the green and brown as you could. In
fact, though, Tsal and Lavie 1988 found that this was not what subjects did.
Rather, having first named one red letter, subjects then typically went on to
name other letters spatially adjacent to the red letter. This implies that
there are two steps in focusing onto the initial target red letter: (a) find a
location at which there is redness; (b) report the letter found at that location. To complete the task, you then (c) go on to report the letters at
adjacent locations.
. Tsal and Lavie were building on a finding by Snyder 1972, who asked his
subjects to name the single red letter in a display of otherwise variously
coloured letters. Looking at the mistakes people made in trying to do this
when under time pressure, he found that observers tended to report one of
the two immediate neighbours of the red letter on about 35 per cent of the
trials on which mistakes were made. If errors had been equally likely to
involve all positions, this should have happened on only 18 per cent of the
trials. Again, it looks as though the strategy being used is to find the location of the redness, then report which letter is at that location.
On this analysis, it should happen that you can accurately report which
letter is the red one only when you can also accurately report the location
of the letter. Nissen 1985 confirmed that this is indeed so.
In his review of the literature on this point, Pashler writes:
In summary, location is special in this sense: when an observer detects a target
defined on other dimensions ranging from simple to relatively complex, this provides information about the location of the stimulus being detected. A simple
metaphor conveys the essence of this idea: when someone reads out information
from a channel selective for a particular target, this channel is labelled with at least
rough location information. (Pashler 1998: 98-9)
Experiential Highlighting
21
The force of the idea that location is a primary selection cue, as Pashler
puts it (1998: 98), is illustrated by forced-choice tasks in which just one out
of n possible targets is present, and your task is to say which one of the n
targets is present on this occasion. In this task, you may also be asked about
the location of the target. And if you get the location wrong, the probability that you are right about which target is present is close to 1/n; that is, you
are at chance, you are just guessing (Shiffrin and Gardner 1972; Johnston
and Pashler 1991).
Suppose we accept that location is a primary selection cue. What are the
implications of this for the Causal Hypothesis? What does it tell us about
the way in which the experiential highlighting of an object can cause the
selection of input information for further processing? What it all tends to
show is that in experientially singling out an object, identification of the
location of the object will enable the information relating to that location
to be selected, for the control of verbal report. So if, at the level of experiential highlighting, you can identify the object by its location, this will
enable the relevant information to be singled out to control your verbal
reports about that object. And this is why location plays a special role in the
way in which you identify the object at the level of conscious experience.
2
What is Knowledge of Reference?
In this chapter, I want to set in broader philosophical context the observation that knowledge of the reference of a demonstrative is provided by conscious attention to the object.
There is a connection between the notion of reference and the notion
of truth. When you refer to an object and say something about it, whether
or not what you say is true depends on whether what you have said is true
of the object to which you have referred. So a term that stands for an object
makes a contribution to determining whether a statement containing that
term is true or false, by standing for that object.
What exactly is the relation between knowledge of the reference of a
singular term, such as a demonstrative, and your ability to verify, or find
the implications of, propositions involving the demonstrative? Understanding this is fundamental to understanding the role of conscious
attention.
1. Reference vs. Use
23
24
This tells you how to verify a proposition of the form, 'Elmo is F': establish
both that there is such a thing as Elmo, and that anything meeting the condition for being Elmo is F. The elimination rules will include:
Elmo is F
exactly one tree in this garden is oldest
Elmo is F
any tree in this garden which is oldest is F
Given that Elmo is F, you can move to the conclusion that there is such a
thing as Elmo: the first elimination rule above spells out the implication of
there being such a thing as Elmo. The second elimination rule spells it out
that if Elmo is F, you can conclude that anything meeting the condition for
being Elmo is F. These are the procedural rules. On the Classical View,
what causes and justifies your use of these ways of verifying and finding the
implications of propositions involving the term 'Elmo' will be your knowledge of the reference of the term:
25
26
object, I will argue, is what causes and justifies the use of particular procedures for verifying and finding the implications of propositions containing the demonstrative. Hence, knowledge of the reference of the
demonstrative is provided by conscious attention to the object.
27
28
29
objects. The reason is that you can hardly have conscious experience of the
object without already having, in some sense, verified its possession of various properties. It does not make sense to suppose that you could consciously attend to an object without being aware of it as having certain
properties of shape, colour, and so on. You might therefore argue that the
kind of high-level processing involved in finding whether one object is
enclosed by another, which we discussed in the last section, is quite a
special case. To verify that the 'X' is enclosed, after all, you will have to first
identify the 'X'. And, you might argue, that will already involve you in having verified its possession of simple sensory properties, such as shape, size,
and colour. (By a 'sensory property' I do not mean a 'secondary quality' in
the traditional philosophical sense, but one of the properties used as primitive by the visual system.) So, you might argue, the Classical View cannot
be sustained for the relation between knowledge of the reference of a
demonstrative and verification that the object has particular sensory
properties. Knowledge of reference in this case does not cause and justify
the use of particular methods of verification. Rather, those verifications had to be performed already in order for there to be knowledge of
reference.
To deal with this objection there is a distinction we need. This is the distinction between
(1) Using an object's possession of a property to single it out visually,
and
(2) Verifying a proposition to the effect that the object has that
property.
Verifying a proposition involves the use of your conceptual skills, whereas
visually singling out an object is a more primitive phenomenon. You could
use the fact that an object is moving in a particular way to separate it visually from its background, without having formulated any proposition about
its movement and indeed without having any concepts of motion at all.
Similarly, it is possible to use colour as one of the properties by which you
visually define the objectit is one of the properties in virtue of which you
can be said to be seeing an object at alleven though you have not verified
the proposition that the object has that property, and even though you do
not have colour concepts. The obvious example here is an animal which
may entirely lack concepts, but be able to use colour vision in separating
objects from their backgrounds.
Although we have to distinguish these two phenomena, visual singlingout and the verification of propositions, there is a connection between
them. But before coming to the connection, let me give one more
30
illustration of the distinction. For you might wonder whether this distinction can be drawn in the case of people who do have concepts of objects. If
you are capable of grasping demonstratives referring to physical objects,
can you be using colour vision to discriminate the objects around you, even
though you do not have colour concepts and so cannot be said to be verifying propositions about the colours of those objects? Plainly you can. An
example of this phenomenon is provided by children, who have the ability
to refer to perceived objects, on the basis of colour vision, in place long
before they have any grasp of colour concepts. Children have unusual difficulty in learning colour words, even the four basic terms, 'blue', 'green',
'yellow', and 'red'. This is not because of any delay in the maturation of
colour vision. Even four-month-olds can discriminate, match, and recognize the four basic colours, so there is no reason to suppose that they lack
experience of colour. And the difficulty is not because of a delay in learning which words are colour words. At an early stage, children will reply to
the question, 'What colour is it?', by producing a colour word, but they
may use the colour words randomly, or perseverate in using the same word
for all colours. The situation seems to be that, as Bornstein puts it in his
review of the developmental literature, 'early in life, sensory and linguistic
colour knowledge seem to coexist, but a proper map connecting names and
perceptions is late in developing' (Bornstein 1985: 78). At an early stage,
then, children do not yet have colour concepts. But since they have colour
vision, they can use the colour of an object as one of the characteristics
that differentiates it from its background; they can use colour as an objectdefining characteristic without yet being able to verify propositions about
the colour of the object.
So there is certainly a distinction between visually singling out an object
by use of its sensory properties, and verifying propositions to the effect that
it has those sensory properties. But as I said, there is also a connection
between the two phenomena: (1) visual singling-out and (2) the verification
of demonstrative propositions ascribing sensory properties to perceived
objects. To see this, let us put our distinction in the context of a fundamental topic in vision science: the way in which the visual system solves the socalled Binding Problem. As I said earlier, there is much converging
evidence that different properties of an object, such as colour, shape,
motion, size, or orientation are processed in different processing streams
(Zeld 1993). This means that the visual system has the problem of reassembling individual objects, as it were, from the results of these specialized processing streams. A specific colour and shape, for example, have to be put
together as the colour and shape of a single object, just when they are the
colour and shape of a single object. We do not have perception of an individual object until this Binding Problem has been solved, and various
31
32
Fig. 1. Framework proposed to account for the role of selective attention in feature integration. (From Treisman 1988. Copyright 1988 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.)
33
tives referring to the objects in the vicinity. The second use of the feature
maps is in verifying propositions about the observational properties of
perceived objects; and this, as we have seen, is a separate use. It is one thing
to verify a proposition to the effect that an object has a particular property,
and another thing to use the object's possession of that property to single
it out visually. Experience of an object is the upshot of low-level attention
to a particular location. But once you have experience of the object, you
can now attend to it consciously, keep track of it over time, find out more
about it, and act intentionally on it.
What happens in this second use of feature maps? Here we see the connection between the two phenomena. At this stage, the subject can be
assumed to be capable of demonstrative reference to the object. What the
subject has to do, to verify the proposition that the object has a certain
colour, is to make that second use of a feature map in the right way. The
right location has to be identified so that the verification of the judgement
can be sensitive to which feature is represented as being at that location.
This means that in demonstrative reference, the perceived location of
the object is not simply a ladder that we throw away; it is not simply a feature of low-level processing which, although used in binding, is not itself
registered in the way in which you experience the object. For the way in
which you experience the object has to retain the capacity to single out the
correct location, at the level of the feature map, when you attempt to verify the proposition. If your grasp of the demonstrative is to be capable of
causing and justifying your use of feature maps to verify propositions
about the observational properties of the object, then your grasp of the
demonstrative must include information about the location of the thing.
Hence, your experience of the object must include information about the
location of the thing.
This distinction between two uses of feature maps applies to the analysis of the kinds of experimental findings I discussed in Chapter 1, section
5. Consider, for example, Nissen's finding (Nissen 1985). Subjects were
instructed to report the shape of, say, the red target. Nissen's finding was
that subjects could give an accurate report of the shape of a target identified by its colour only if they could incidentally give correct reports of the
location of the target. Her interpretation of the result is that subjects, in
order to answer the question, consult the kind of feature map described by
Treisman, and use the location of the target to identify the information
relating to it in different processing streams. But then this is exactly an
example of the kind of second use of feature maps that I am describing. We
are not here dealing with the kind of low-level exercise of attention
involved in the initial binding of features in ordinary perception, but a conscious attempt by the subject to find the red thing and then verify a
34
proposition about its shape. (For more material relevant to the distinction
between types of attention here, see Briand and Klein 1987 and Briand
1998).
To sum up, it seems that we can sustain the Classical View, even when it
is applied to the relation between knowledge of the reference of a demonstrative and verification of the most basic observable properties of the
object. Even in this case, it can be your knowledge of the reference of the
term, supplied by your conscious attention to the object, that causes and
justifies the use of particular information-processing proceduresthe second use of feature mapsto verify propositions about these observable
properties of the thing. So we can continue to think of demonstrative reference on the Classical View. Your knowledge of the reference of the demonstrative is constituted by your conscious attention to the object itself. And
this conscious attention to the object is what causes, and justifies, the use of
particular information-processing procedures, reaching down to the feature maps, to verify demonstrative propositions about that object. (In this
section, we have in effect recapitulated the argument of Chapter 1 from a
slightly different perspective.)
35
to locations. This is not inconsistent with the evidence that location is fundamental as a selection criterion, because objects are individuated partly
by their locations. But the point is that location is not all that binds
together an object. The kind of evidence that shows that visual attention
can be allocated to objects rather than to locations is this. Suppose you
have two figures, spatially overlapping and each continuously changing
shape. People can track one of the figures, apparently to the exclusion of
the other overlapping figure (Neisser and Becklen 1975). Or again, people
are betterfaster and more accurateat judging two attributes of a single
object than at judging two attributes of different objects (Duncan 1984).
Again, suppose subjects are set the task of responding to a central object,
while ignoring an object beside it. Interference from the irrelevant object
can be increased when it and the target are grouped by Gestalt principles
for example, by moving in the same direction, or by having the same colour
(Driver and Baylis 1989; Baylis and Driver 1992). So we ought to think in
terms not of simple locations, but of 'visual objects', which will be
individuated by some combination of (a) specific Gestalt principles, such
as boundedness, sameness of colour, or common motion, and (b) location.
So the kind of introduction rule we want is this:
FEATURE MAP: Roundnesss at visual object X
That figure is round
Isn't 'visual object X'just a notational variant of 'that figure'? No, because
at the input stage here we are still at a level of content more primitive than
demonstrative content: individuation by Gestalt principles plus location is
not yet conceptual demonstration of an object. We are talking only about
a way of cross-referencing information in separate processing streams
which does in fact relate to the same object, not about a level of representation at which we already have reference to objects (Prinzmetal 1995).
What would an elimination rule for a perceptual demonstrative look
like? As a first shot we could conjecture that the outputs of a perceptualdemonstrative judgement can be characterized in some such way as this:
That cup contains water
MOTOR SYSTEM: To reach water, move towards whatever is at
position p, hand prehended thus and so
On the classical approach I am recommending, the question of knowledge
of reference comes up at the level at which we consider the justification that
the subject has for the use of those procedures. This is where we have to
appeal to the idea of conscious attention to the object.
Which object you are consciously attending to is what causes you to use
36
37
38
level. All that is required is that conscious attention to the object should
identify which thing is the target, in such a way that the informationprocessing sub-systems can, in one way or another, lock onto that thing in
order to keep track of it over time, act effectively on the object, or verify
propositions about it.
39
the level of visual information-processing. Suppose there are several different people called Reagan, and your informant Sally collects and provides you with information about each of them. So you stand to Sally
somewhat as the level of conscious attention stands to the level of visual
information-processing. Or rathersince the point of the analogy is not to
encourage a homuncular picture of either conscious attention or visual
information-processing, but to make it easier to think about the relations
between different levels of contentthe level of conscious attention
stands to the level of information-processing somewhat as the content of
your speech stands to the level of Sally's speech, in the analogy.
Since there are several different people called Reagan, and Sally is collecting and providing you with information about each of them, Sally will
be using tags like, 'the actor who was President of the U.S.A. in the early
eighties' as bundling principles. Suppose that Sally gives you this information about all these various people, using the name 'Reagan'. You know
that they all have the same name, so you are not in a position to use the
name itself alone as a bundling principle. Now suppose that you want to
have the following general capacities:
(a) You want to be able to interrogate Sally for further information
about any of the people about whom she is giving you information, and
(b) You want to be able to instruct Sally to act on any one of the
people about whom she is giving you information.
To have these general capacities, you have to be able to identify the person
in whom you are interested, for Sally's benefit. That is, your identification
of the person about whom you wish to interrogate Sally has to be one that
she can use to find the further information you have requested. Not just any
way of uniquely identifying the thing you have in mind will do. Likewise,
when you instruct Sally to act on a particular individual about whom she
has given you information, you have to identify the individual in such a way
that Sally can go about acting on that person; not just any way of uniquely
identifying the thing will do.
When you are interrogating Sally for further information about one of
the Reagans, what you have to provide her with is a way of finding which
bundle of information is relevant to your question. The simplest way
would be to use the same tags that she uses. So you might say something
like: 'How old is the Reagan who is an actor who was President in the early
eighties?' But although that is the simplest procedure, it is not the only one
that would work. You could identify the Reagan you mean as 'the one who
was Governor of California', and that will work, even if it is not itself a tag
40
that Sally uses as a tag, so long as she can work out that the Reagan who
was Governor of California is the Reagan who was an actor that was
President in the early eighties. So long as your identifier can be translated
into a tag that Sally usesand so long as Sally can make the translation
you will be in a position to interrogate her for further information about
this person. A similar point applies, of course, to giving Sally instructions
to act on one of the Reagans about whom she has given you information.
She needs to have a way of identifying the target that she can use. So your
way of saying which Reagan is in question has to be commensurable with
the ways of identifying people that she uses in setting the parameters for
her actionsin finding the address to which to write, for example.
I am spelling out this analogy quite fully, partly because it may be
helpful in reviewing the points that I have made so far. But I am also setting
out the analogy because, as we shall see in a moment, it can be pursued
to give a way of thinking about the bearing of the approach I am
recommending on the Crick-Koch hypothesis (Crick and Koch 1990,
1992; see also Crick 1994). The Crick-Koch hypothesis is that the neural
correlate of consciousness is to be found in the physiological mechanisms
of binding.
The Binding Problem was originally a physiological problem. Once it
was observed that after the primary visual cortex, the visual system split
into separate processing streams, it was apparent that neurons responding
to different features of the same object may be anatomically separated.
How, then, is it registered that these neurons are responding to features of
the same object? The basic finding on which Crick and Koch build is that
two neurons fire in synchrony when a single object, causes them to fire
(Eckhorn et al. 1988; Gray et. al. 1989). This suggests that what registers
the fact that a number of neurons are currently responding to features of
one and the same object is that those neurons are currently firing in synchrony. There are many ways in which this line of thought can be developed. Crick and Koch argue that neurons in different regions are bound
together by a mechanism that synchronizes the spikes of their firings in
40Hz oscillations; it is this synchronized firing that signals that they concern one and the same object. The Crick-Koch hypothesis is that this synchronized firing is the neural correlate of consciousness.
This proposal is consistent with Treisman's cognitive model. The suggestion would be that the synchronized firing of cells in different processing streams is signalling the fact that those cells are registering the presence
of various features all at the same location. Crick and Koch in fact suggest
that the reason why binding is, as on Treisman's model, a phenomenon of
attention, rather than being carried out automatically and in parallel for all
detected features simultaneously, may be an engineering one: that the syn-
41
42
identifying the object that Sally can use? One way would be just to operate
in a hit-and-miss manner: use whatever identifiers occur to you. Some of
them will be usable by Sally, and some will not. It's hard to believe that
would be the right model for conscious attention. But how are you to have
any guarantee that you are using the right identifiers, if you have not made
a direct study of your informantif you have not directly asked Sally
which identifiers to use, or made an experimental study of your own visual
system? One answer is that some hidden hand, such as evolution, has
brought it about that you will be using suitable identifiers.
Another, cruder way would be to use the very same physical tokens to
issue requests and instructions to Sally as she uses in giving you information. So if she uses cards to give you information about a particular
Reagan, just re-use those very same cards in giving her further questions or
instructions. Using the same physical base twice over could give a guarantee of commensurability in the identifiers used. It would be quite a strong
guarantee of commensurability.
It should, I think, be testable which procedure is being used. If you are
re-using the same identifiers, there is a kind of breakdown which should be
impossible, one in which you simply use all the wrong codes in asking questions or issuing instructions and as a result get nowhere. If, however, there
is merely a hidden hand guaranteeing that you are using suitable identifiers,
it ought to be possible for the hidden hand to fail on some occasions, so
that you use all the wrong identifiers and consequently get nowhere with
your questions and instructions. The analogue for vision would be someone who consciously attends to the objects around him, and plans to act on
those objects or to interrogate the scene for further information about
them, but uses all the wrong identifiers at the level of conscious attention,
so the information-processing systems cannot identify the target. It is hard
to believe that this is possible, though there is always room for surprise
about which pathological cases are possible; intuitively, the content of conscious attention to an object seems to be more tightly linked than that to
the ways of identifying objects used in the underlying informationprocessing, so that they could not come apart. But the obvious way to
secure that is to use the same physical vehicles to identify objects at the
level of conscious attention as are used at the level of the underlying
information-processing.
Suppose you have a complex experienced visual scene before you. You
consciously attend to one object, now to another. What does it come to,
that you are engaging in this experiential highlighting of one rather than
any other object in the scene? In effect, what I have been arguing is that it
comes to this: when a particular seen object is given this experiential highlighting, when you are consciously attending to it, that affects the func-
43
tional role of your experience of that object. Your experience of that object
is now capable of controlling your information-processing, so that (a) you
can use your information-processing capacities to verify propositions
about that object, and (b) you can use your information-processing capacities to act on that object. For this to work, there must be some intrinsic
aspects of your visual experience of the object, which can identify, for the
benefit of subsequent information-processing, either to verify or to initiate
action, which object is in question. But how exactly does your awareness of
the object identify the target? What are these intrinsic aspects of the conscious experience, which identify for the information-processing system
which object is in question? I am suggesting that a central aspect here is the
experienced location of the object; or, more generally, the complex parameter used in binding. And in effect, what I have proposed is that we can
find some support for the Crick-Koch hypothesis by asking how it is
guaranteed that conscious attention is identifying the target in that way,
using the complex parameter using in binding. The natural proposal is that
conscious attention has as part of its neural correlate the very correlated
firing that implements that solution to the Binding Problem.
Of course, none of this implies that the only neural correlate of consciousness of an object would be this correlated firing. There is more to
consciousness than that. You could have binding, and correlated firing
implementing the binding, in the absence of consciousness. The thesis at its
strongest is only that when you do have consciousness of an objectwhich
will doubtless require the coordination of a mass of neural activity across
many regionsthe neural correlate of the fact that it is just that object
which has been highlighted in conscious attention, is the correlated firing
implementing the solution to the Binding Problem.
This discussion of the neural correlate of conscious attention began from
the need for there to be commensurability between the informationprocessing input that we use in verifying propositions about seen objects,
and the demonstrative propositions themselves. I have been suggesting
that one elegant way in which the effect could be achieved here is by the
same neural circuitry serving as the vehicle of binding and as the vehicle of
consciousness. But suppose for the moment we go back to the simplified
introduction rule I formulated for demonstratives:
FEATURE MAP: Roundness at position p
That cup is round
One simplification here is that location is being used as the sole binding
parameter. Another point to remark is that a legitimate application of this
44
rule does not require that the cup should actually be at position p, or even
that the subject should believe that the cup is at position p. All that is
required is that the cup should visually seem to be at position p. This is easy
to see in practice. Suppose you are looking at the cup through a prism, or
in a mirror. Then there is an ordinary sense in which the cup is not where it
visually seems to be. But your visual system can still be using location as the
binding parameter, and putting together all the information relating to
that particular location in successful binding, even though the cup is not
where it seems to be. And your judgements about the shape or colour of the
cup, for example, can be perfectly sound even though location is being used
as the binding parameter and even though the cup is riot where it seems to
be. Your judgements about the shape or colour of the cup can be sound
even though you do not believe that the cup is where it visually seems to be,
perhaps because you suspect the presence of the prism or the mirror. There
is a parallel with proper names: if the bundling principle for one collection
of information circulating about an individual is 'Reagan, the actor who
became President', you can use the fact that information is so tagged in
forming beliefs about Reagan, even though you do not believe that he was
in fact an actor; even though, say, you believe that the story of a Hollywood
past is merely a romantic myth about the President.
Does a similar point apply to action? I said that as a first shot, we could
state the elimination rule for a perceptual demonstrative as follows:
That cup contains water
MOTOR SYSTEM: To reach water, move towards whatever is at
position p, hand prehended thus and so
But if the remarks I have just made about the introduction rule were correct, we should expect that, a parallel point would apply to the elimination
rule. That is, we have to separate the role of location (a) as a binding parameter for action, allowing the putting together of all the information relevant to the action, and (b) as itself one of the parameters to be set in
planning an action on an object. The point 1 have just been making is that
success as a binding parametersuccessful discharge of role (a)does not
require that the visual location of the object be correct, or even that the
subject believe it to be correct. Presumably a similar point applies to
action. But successful discharge of role (b)setting the parameter for
actionwould require that the experienced location of the object be correct. At any rate, that would be so if we thought that the experienced location of the object is what we use in setting the parameters for action on the
object. But as we shall see in the next chapter, that is not so. We do not, in
general, use the experienced location of an object to determine how far
45
away it is, in what direction, and so on. It remains true that location is a
binding parameter for action, and that the experienced location of the
object is what we use in identifying which thing is in question so that the
motor system can swing into play appropriately when we act on the object.
But let us, in the next chapter, look at these issues in more detail. We will
reach a canonical statement of the introduction and elimination rules for
demonstrativesa characterization of their usein Chapter 5.
What I have been proposing is that the notion of conscious attention to an
object has an explanatory role to play: it has to explain how it is that we
have knowledge of the reference of a demonstrative. This means that conscious attention to an object must be thought of as more primitive than
thought about the object. It is a state more primitive than thought about an
object, to which we can appeal in explaining how it is that we can think
about the thing. As I said in the Introduction, this seems to be how Russell
thought of acquaintance: acquaintance with an object is a state more
primitive than prepositional thought about the object, which nonetheless
explains how prepositional thought about the object is possible (Russell
1917). And by providing you with knowledge of the reference of the
demonstrative, this conscious attention to the object will cause and justify
the use of those introduction and elimination rules.
3
Space and Action
So far I have talked about the experienced location of an object about
which you are thinking demonstratively. I have said that the experienced
location of the object matters because it is part of the way in which the
object is identified, at the level of the subjective life. Location provides a
way the object can be identified for the benefit of the neural informationprocessing systems involved in acting on the basis of propositions about
that object, or verifying propositions about that thing. I have not, though,
said anything about how locations themselves are identified.
1. Experience of Places
How does experience of a place enable one to identify it? You might propose that place-identifiers such as 'there' identify places by their spatial
relations to perceived objects. But a simple way of seeing that terms like
'there' do not work like this is to consider the possibility of illusions about
the locations of perceived objects. If I am watching an object but subject to
some illusion about its locationsay, the desert heat is refracting the light
so I am observing a scene which is actually taking place several miles
awaythen I may form the judgement, That palm tree is there', designating the place at which the tree seems to be. If 'there' referred merely to the
place at which the palm tree is, there would be no possibility of error in that
judgement of location: the term would automatically refer to the spot, several miles away, where the palm tree is. But we do have to keep open the
possibility of error in the judgement: the judgement may be precisely an
expression of my having been taken in by an illusion of location.
There are other counterexamples to the idea that vision identifies places
by their spatial relations to seen objects. In Wittgenstein's Philosophical
Remarks (1975), he says that in visual space there is absolute position and
absolute motion. If you watch two stars orbit one another in a pitch-dark
night, you can see their movement even though their relative positions
remain the same. In fact, a visual space in which there was only relative
motion is not even imaginable. Suppose you were looking at a clock face
47
with twelve simple bars on it, no numerals. If your visual space had only
relative motion, then if you were watching a single clock hand move
between two bars on a clock face, you would be able to see the movement
as it left the first bar, but the moment it reached the second bar everything
would be exactly as it had been initially. We can't, says Wittgenstein, visualize that.
In explaining how vision can identify places, if not by their relations to
seen objects, it is natural to appeal to the idea of a frame of reference used
in vision. The immediate problem here is that demonstratives such as
'there', which refer to places on the basis of your current experience of
them, seem to be logically simple. These demonstratives do not involve us
in giving some complex identification of a place by specifying coordinates
along three axes. When he asserts that visual space is not merely relative,
Wittgenstein tries putting the point by saying that it is as if we could always
see, as well as the usual things, a set of axes which could be used to identify
the locations of the things seen. But, as he says, even that is not correct,
because if you could see a set of axes, those axes would already have an
orientation in the visual fieldas though they were located in relation to
an unseen coordinate system used to give locations in visual space
(Wittgenstein 1975: 254-5).
The problem is to catch the sense in which this unseen coordinate frame
can be used in identifying places. The place you are referring to, when you
say 'there' and point, is the place to which you are consciously attending.
So the question now is how attention is directed to one place rather than
another. When, in experience, you highlight one place rather than another,
how is it determined which place is in question? What happens is that the
attentional spotlight ranges over the places identified by the frame of reference, and the reference of 'there' depends on where the attentional spotlight is focused.
If we leave it there, though, we leave it seeming that the unseen frame of
reference may be altogether remote from consciousness, perhaps a subpersonal control mechanism for conscious attention which does not itself
affect the nature of the conscious life. How does the fact that we are using
a frame of reference in our ordinary identifications of places show up in
the subjective life, if not by the axes flaring up in the visual field? One way
is through the fact that we can give expression to illusions of location, as in
the example of the palm tree. Another is through the fact that the space of
the visual field is absolute, in Wittgenstein's sense, in that we can perceive
motion even of objects whose relative positions are unchanged.
We can also consider propositions about the spatial relations between
perceptually demonstrated places. Suppose you attend now to one place,
now to another, forming the judgement, 'This place is to the left of that
48
49
could still be that your experience of the location of the glass was what was
causing you to move in just that way.
As we shall see in the next section, it does not seem likely that this characterization of the role of experience of location in the control of action
can be sustained. But it is a very natural picture. It could be set out as a way
of explaining two points, which any view does have to acknowledge:
(1) Demonstrative identification of objects has a special role to play
in action-explanation,
and
50
used. On any one occasion on which I use it, its meaning has to be filled out
by the way in which I am perceiving the object. My current experience of
the object gives me a kind of picture of the objectits shape and size, how
far away it is, and so on. This picture of the object is the meaning that the
term has on that occasion. And the way in which I am aware of the object
the picture of it that I consciously havedetermines the coordinates of my
action, it sets the details of the way in which I reach for the thing. The idea
is that the perceptual information in which the meaning of a perceptual
demonstrative is grounded gives a kind of descriptive meaning of the
demonstrative, and this perceptual information controls the parameters of
my actionhow far I move, in what direction, how my hand is shaped, and
so on. What explains the fact that perceptual demonstratives have this special link to action is that the meaning of the demonstrative is given by the
pictorial content of the experience, which is what controls my movements.
You might be encouraged in your adherence to Grounding by an uncritical reading of Alan Airport's conception of visual attention as 'selectionfor-action'. He describes it as follows:
Any goal-directed action requires the specification of a unique set of (timevarying) parameters for its execution- -parameters that determine the outcome
as this particular action rather than any other: as this particular vocative or
manual gesture, this particular directional saccade, and so forth. Consider now
what is required if these parameters are to be controlled by sensory (say, visual)
information.
Suppose that visual information has to guide manual reaching, for example, to
grasp a stationary object or to catch a moving one. Clearly, many different objects
may be present in the visual field, yet information specific to just one of these
objects must uniquely determine the spatiotemporal coordinates of the end-point
of the reach, the opening and closing of the hand, and so on. Information about
the position, size and the like of the other objects in view, and also available, must
not be allowed to interfere with (that is, produce crosstalk affecting) these parametersthough they may need to influence the trajectory of the reach in other
ways. Consequently, some selective process is necessary to map just these aspects of
the visual array, specific to the target object, selectively onto the control parameters of the action. (Allport 1989: 648)
51
52
53
There are many cases which show the opposite dissociation, intact spatial experience and an impaired action system. In cases of optic ataxia,
patients can accurately display the size of an object by holding up their fingers to show how big it is. Or they can show the orientation of a slot they
can see by holding up a card in the same orientation. So they seem to have
accurate experience of the spatial layout of their surroundings. But these
patients cannot accurately grasp the object, and they cannot post a card
through the slot in the right orientation. Their visuomotor capacities have
been impaired (Goodale 1996).
Our discussion so far points to the distinction between two visual pathways, sometimes referred to as the 'action' and 'perception' pathways. This
distinction is partly motivated by the anatomical distinction between dorsal and ventral visual pathways, which were originally described as 'where'
and 'what' pathways. One way of setting out the distinction is provided by
Jeannerod 1997, from whom I take Figure 2 (p. 54).
The suggestion is that the various processing streams can be divided into
(a) the computation of the direction and distance of the object, given in
body-centred coordinates, for activation of reach, together with (b) size,
shape and so on being computed in allocentric terms, for activation of
grasp. Both of these processing streams belong to the 'action' pathway.
They are contrasted with the 'perception' pathway, in which (c) properties
of the object such as size, shape, colour, and so on are bound together and
the object categorized by the visual system.
The 'action' pathway is a relatively low-level system, remote from consciousness, used in the fine control of motor movement. Once we have this
distinction in place, the natural proposal is that intentional action on a
demonstrated object must involve the 'perception' pathway. For there to be
a demonstrative referring to the object, there must be an involvement of
high-level semantic identification of the object involved, provided by processing in the 'perceptual' pathway.
4. The Binding Thesis
Does this mean that the epiphenomenalist is right, and that there is no role
for the experienced location of the object in the causation of movements
towards or away from the object? What I have argued so far is that the
epiphenomenalist is right that there is no especial reason to suppose that
spatial experience is what causally controls the spatial aspects of intentional action on an object. But that is not to say that there is no role whatever for the experienced location of the object to play in the causation of
your action on the object. Suppose you identify an object on the basis of
54
your conscious experience of it, and choose to act on it: you think, 'I'll pick
up that penny'. Suppose we agree with the epiphenomenalist that a lowlevel visuomotor system has to be swinging into play to set the parameters
for your action in picking up the penny. There is still the problem that your
visuomotor system has to be swinging into play so that you can reach the
very object that you identified on the basis of experience. But how does the
visuomotor system manage to connect with the right object?
In terms of Jeannerod's picture, a parallel problem arises if you identify
an object on the basis of semantic processingif you think, for example,
'I'll have that penny'and choose to act on it, there is the problem that the
'action' system has to swing into play to pick that very penny, the one that
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56
you see a penny in a mirror without realizing that you are seeing it in a
mirror, you may use its apparent location in verifying that it is brown, and
prehending your hand correctly to pick it up, even though your experience
of its location is not actually correct. There is an obvious analogy with the
behaviour of a heat-seeking missile. Once the thing is launched, it sets the
parameters for action on its target in its own way; but to have it reach
the target you want, you have to have it roughly pointed in the right direction before it begins, so that it has actually locked on to the intended object.
The role I am envisaging for conscious attention to the object, then, is to
find the target of the information-processing, which need not itself be conscious, involved in acting on demonstrative propositions about the object.
The reason why location matters in your experience of the object is that
your conscious attention to the object has to be identifying the target for
the benefit of these information-processing systems. And location is one of
the ways in which the information-processing systems identity their target.
Christopher Peacocke (1981) maintained that intentional action on an
object requires that you have an intention to act on the object, as identified
using a perceptual demonstrative. Nevertheless, the thesis, that demonstrative identification is essential for intentional action on an object, seems
too strong as it stands. Telephoning someone is an intentional action that
is intentional with respect to the person rung up, even though they might
not be in when you ring. But ringing up Sam does not require that I currently be able to demonstrate Sam perceptually. The same point could be
made about letter-writing, voting for a candidate in an election, or suing
someone who has written something disagreeable about you. So you can
act intentionally with respect to an object even though you cannot currently perceptually demonstrate the thing. You might point out that these
counterexamples involve quite special actions on objects, rather than the
reaching and grasping that Peacocke evidently had in mind. So you might
say that perceptual-demonstrative intentions are essential if you are to perform a reaching or grasping action on an object. The kinds of actions in
question will have to be delineated quite finely, though, for this strategy to
help. You have only to think of someone with prosthetic limbs activated by
spoken commands to see the possibility of someone whose reaching and
grasping movements do not depend on demonstrative identification. But
no doubt we can distinguish between ordinary reaching and grasping, and
the reaching and grasping performed by a person with voice-activated
prosthetic limbs.
Even in the case of ordinary reaching for an object, though, it does not
seem that the use of demonstratives is essential to action on an object.
Suppose we have a blindsighted subject who has a hat present in his blind
field. The subject is not in a position to identify the hat demonstratively;
57
lacking any visual experience of the hat, he cannot refer to it as 'that hat'.
The most the subject can do is formulate the description, 'the hat (if there
is one) in my blind field'. But suppose the experimenter says, 'There is a hat
somewhere in your blind field; can you reach for it?'. Since the subject now
has enough descriptive identification of the object to provide a rough identification of it for his visuomotor system, he is certainly in a position to
reach for the hat; given the rough descriptive guide, his visuomotor system
can do the rest. The most we can say, on behalf of the thesis that demonstratives are essential for intentional action, is that usually you will not, in
the absence of experience of the object, have any knowledge of where the
object is, in a form that you can use to identify the thing for the benefit of
your visual system.
If we ask why Peacocke maintained that demonstratives are necessary
for intentional action on an object, one answer is proposed by him in Sense
and Content:
Consider an example in which we explain your walking up to a particular man by
citing your intention to shake hands with that (perceptually presented) man. The
direction in which you walk varies systematically with the position your experience
represents him as occupying relative to yourself. If in intention you think of a man
descriptively, as when you intend to shake hands with the richest man in London,
then there is no saying on the basis of your then current psychological states in
which direction you would or should walk. (Peacocke 1983: 159)
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59
60
serious inquiry to identify who you were talking about, the idea of his
having committed a murder may simply not be to the point: the fixing of
reference may be much more fundamental than anything about the
murder, it may relate entirely to his having been someone you have known
for years, and so on.
Nonetheless, Moore continues to insist that '"This is here" is certainly
partly tautological, in some uses' (1962: 154). But if the discussion in this
book has been right up to this point, that is not quite the right way to put
it, because the experienced location of the object may be an illusion, so
there is nothing tautological about the proposition which articulates that
the object is at its experienced location. What we can say is that there is still
a role for experienced location in fixing the meaning of the demonstrative,
because it is the experienced location of the object that functions to control
the verification of propositions about it and action on the basis of propositions about it.
4
Sortals
1. Styles of Conscious Attention
Our theme is the role of conscious attention in providing knowledge of the
reference of a demonstrative. Knowledge of reference, we have seen, can be
viewed as causing and justifying the use of particular ways of verifying and
finding the implications of propositions. So far, we have looked at the sense
in which conscious attention to an object can be said to cause and justify
the use of particular information-processing procedures to verify, or to act
on the basis of, demonstrative propositions concerning that object.
However, the things to which we can refer by means of demonstratives
are of many different sorts. You can, for example, refer demonstratively to
people, to valleys, and to clouds. These are different sorts of things, in the
sense that there are striking differences in the ways in which their identities
over time, and their boundaries at a time, are determined. In determining
whether the person in the dock is identical to the person who committed
the crime, for example, spatiotemporal continuity is perhaps one criterion
being used; but the style of spatiotemporal continuity in question here is
quite different to that relevant in finding whether this is the valley in which
an infamous massacre was performedwe don't, for example, allow for
the possibility of movement by valleys. And the identities of clouds have
little of the complexity associated with the identities of persons.
We register these differences between types of objects when we use what
Locke (Essay, II. iii. 15) called a sortal concept. The idea of a sortal concept was introduced to the recent literature by P. F. Strawson in Individuals,
as follows:
A sortal universal supplies a principle for distinguishing and counting individual
particulars which it collects. It presupposes no antecedent principle, or method, of
individuating the particulars it collects. (Strawson 1959:168)
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Sortals
'square' does not involve any grasp of a criterion of identity; they can be
applied indifferently to things of quite different sorts.
As I said, I have been stressing the role of conscious attention in providing knowledge of the reference of a demonstrative. And different styles of
conscious attention will be used in attending to different sorts of object.
For example, if you are consciously attending to a person over a period of
time, the way in which you keep track of that person will be quite different
from the way in which you keep track of a valley to which you are attending over a period of time. In consciously attending to the person you will,
for example, keep track of the movements of that person; but in the case of
the valley you will make no such allowance for movement (certainly none
for movement with respect to the flanking mountains). These differences in
style of attention amount to differences in what I called the complex binding parameter used by the visual system in putting together the information true of the object. The binding parameter for a person will have to
allow for the possibility of movement by the person; the binding parameter
for a valley will not have to allow for any possibility of movement by the
valley. As I said, the complex binding parameter in effect provides an
address for the object, by which it can be identified, at the level of conscious
attention, in a way that can be used in recruiting information from various
processing streams to allow verification of propositions about the object,
and action on the object. So the style of conscious attention to the object
that is appropriate will depend on what sort of object is in question.
The use of one style of conscious attention rather than anotherthat is,
the use of one type of complex binding parameter rather than another
seems on the face of it to be a more primitive phenomenon than the ability
to use sortal concepts to classify the objects to which you can attend.
Animals other than humans plainly have a repertoire of binding strategies
available to them: a cat keeping track of a mouse is plainly using different
binding strategies than a cat keeping track of its home. It seems evident,
also, that you could be using various styles of conscious attention in keeping track of various of the things around you in a new environment, for
example, without yet having learned what sorts of things any of them are.
Philosophers interested in the fact that we can make demonstrative
reference to various quite different sorts of physical object have frequently
proposed that our understanding of sortal concepts has a foundational
role to play in making it possible for us to refer to objects of these various
sorts. What I want to propose in this chapter, though, is that grasp of sortal
concepts is a more sophisticated matter than is the mere capacity for
demonstrative reference. What is important, in our capacity for demonstrative reference to different sorts of object, is our capacity to engage in
different styles of conscious attention. And indeed, that capacity to engage
Sortals
63
in different styles of conscious attention is what plays the roles that have so
often been assigned to our grasp of sortal concepts.
In sections 3-5 of this chapter, I will try to define the roles that sortal
concepts have been taken to play in our understanding of demonstratives.
And I will argue that those roles are indeed best viewed as being taken by
the more primitive phenomenon: capacities to engage in various styles of
conscious attention. As a preliminary, though, I want to look first, in
section 2, at the idea that our grasp of sortal concepts may underlie our
capacity for various styles of conscious attention. We shall see that while
this idea is engaging, it does not seem to be correct. The capacity for
various styles of conscious attention is a more primitive phenomenon than
grasp of sortal concepts.
2. What Justifies Binding?
So far, I have talked about the binding strategies that the visual system
uses to put together the various properties of a single object. The question
I want to address now is: what causes and justifies our use of those strategies? Is there a role for sortal concepts in explaining how we come to use
those strategies, or in explaining why those strategies are correct? To see
just what question I have in mind here, and how a sortalist might answer it,
it is illuminating to look first at the kinds of binding strategy used in hearing. Suppose that as you sit in a building you can hear the roar of a helicopter directly above the building; you cannot yet see the thing, though.
Plainly you are in a position to use the auditory demonstrative, 'that helicopter'. There may be other sounds in the vicinity than the sound of the
helicopterpeople talking and so on. But your auditory system has put
together the sounds produced by the helicopter. It has effectively solved the
auditory analogue of the Binding Problem, for that object. How in detail
the auditory system organizes sounds so that sounds produced by the same
object are put together is not a topic I will address here (for discussion, see
Bregman 1990). What I want to consider is a question that arises at the
most general level: namely, what is the justification for the way in which the
auditory system organizes the information it receives? And why does the
auditory system organize sounds in the way it does?
I think that in answering those questions you might suppose that there
is a dependence of auditory organization on visual organization. First,
when someone uses an auditory demonstrative such as 'that helicopter' to
refer to a visible object, they must be able to understand an identity proposition of the form, 'That (heard) helicopter is identical to that (seen) helicopter'. You must be willing to allow that, in principle, you could be
64
Sortals
confronted visually with the helicopter you are hearing. Otherwise, your
auditory demonstrative would not be referring to a helicopter at all, but to
something quite different, namely, a sound. The organization of the auditory world is, for us, dependent on the organization of the visual world. It
is because we know through vision of such things as helicopters that we can
organize the auditory world as we do. You understand the auditory
demonstrative 'that helicopter' only because you understand how an identity of the form, That (heard) helicopter is identical to that (seen) helicopter', could be true; there is no converse dependence of your grasp of the
visual demonstrative, 'that (seen) helicopter', on the auditory demonstrative. So when your auditory system is organizing the auditory information
from that helicopter into a single whole, it is using a principle of integration
that depends on vision; it depends on the knowledge you have, on the basis
of vision, of what such an object is. The integration that is done in hearing
depends on the binding that is done in vision.
Putting matters like this naturally raises a question about those who
have been blind since birth. Surely such a person could still understand
auditory demonstratives like 'that helicopter'. But: such a person does not
have a potential to understand visual demonstratives referring to the same
object. If hearing still has a dependent status for such a subject, it must be
dependent on some other sense-modality, presumably touch. I do not want
to attempt a serious discussion of this issue here, since it would take us very
far afield. For the moment, I want to remark only that the concept formation of those born blind is obviously quite radically different to the concept
formation of the sighted; and that those born blind are evidently aiming to
live in a social world largely defined by the sighted, so there is evident pressure on them to conform their concepts as closely as possible to those of
the sighted. The critical point for us is that the auditory demonstratives of
the sighted may nonetheless depend on grasp of the connection between
auditory and visual demonstratives.
How is the connection made between auditory organization and visual
binding? A simple, sortalist suggestion is this. You learn on the basis of
vision what a helicopter is. You now grasp the sortal, 'helicopter'. In hearing, you aim to find whether there are such things as, for example, helicopters in your surroundings. So the organization of the auditory scene is
driven by the objective of discerning things of the sorts with which you
have been made familiar by vision. If this picture is right, then the organization of the auditory scene depends on our grasp of sortal concepts. So
there is indeed a sense in which the conscious attention to the heard
helicopter, which explains your grasp of the auditory demonstrative, 'that
(heard) helicopter', has been focused by your grasp of such sortals as
'helicopter'.
Sortals
65
Even on its own terms, there are a number of ways in which this line of
thought might be questioned. In particular, even if you accept that auditory integration is dependent on visual binding, you might question
whether the link has to be mediated by sortal concepts. There is, after all,
cross-modal binding, which seems to be a relatively low-level matter, in
that it does not require the active involvement of sortal concepts. When
you are looking right at something that is plainly making a noise, for example, the visual and auditory information is integrated in a way that does not
depend on your conceptual thought about what is happening (cf. Ward et
al. 1998 for a review discussion of cross-modal interaction). The purely
auditory demonstrative may be, as it were, a limiting case of a cross-modal
demonstrative, rather than being a separately motivated demonstrative
dependent on visual demonstration. Whatever we say about that point in
the argument, the point I want to stress for the present is that this argument
at best establishes a role for sortal concepts in auditory binding to mediate
the dependence of auditory binding on visual demonstratives. This line of
argument does not establish a role for sortal concepts in causing or justifying the use of binding strategies in vision.
Consider, for example, the use of location as a binding parameter. As I
said earlier, it seems likely that the visual system uses location as a fundamental parameter in binding together different features as features of the
same object: features at the same location are, as a first approximation,
assigned to the same object. Someone who thinks there is a foundational
place for sortal concepts in explaining how there can be conscious attention to objects may press the question: why is binding together features at
the same location the right procedure for the visual system to use? What
causes and justifies the use of this binding procedure?
The null hypothesis is that there is nothing which justifies the use of one
binding procedure rather than another. On this hypothesis, which binding
procedures the visual system uses is more fundamental than either the
question which objects there are in the environment, or the question which
sortal concepts the subject employs. It is more fundamental than the question which objects there are in the environment, because, the argument
runs, the very notion of the 'environment' is always relative to a particular
type of creature; it depends on the ecological niche the creature inhabits.
And, on this view, the way in which the perceptual system solves the
Binding Problem is one of the things that determines what kind of world
the creature inhabits. Moreover, on this view, which procedure the visual
system uses to solve the Binding Problem is also more fundamental than
the question which sortal concepts we use. For which sortal concepts we
use depends partly on what our perceptual skills are; the most fundamental sortal concepts are observational concepts, which we can apply to
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Sortals
objects on the basis of perception alone. But then the way in which our perceptual system solves the Binding Problem is one of the things which determines what kinds of sortal concepts we can have and use. So our way of
solving the Binding Problem cannot be justified by reference to our use of
one rather than another collection of sortal concepts. Rather, our grasp of
sortal concepts simply has to work with whatever solution to the Binding
Problem the visual system finds. In any area, there is always, I think, a presumption in favour of the null hypothesis; but it is a startling thought that
the choice of a particular procedure to solve the Binding Problem may be
quite unconstrained by anything other than the internal requirements of
the visual system.
We can see what the null hypothesis is saying by considering for a
moment what would have to happen for the visual system to solve the
Binding Problem in a radically non-standard way. Quine (1960) and
Goodman (1951) used to talk about spatiotemporally scattered objects,
which they claimed were just as real as anything else. So a typical spatiotemporally scattered object might comprise the top of one chair plus the
base of a lightbulb. Non-standard binding would involve putting together
the perceived properties of the top of the chair and the perceived properties of the base of the lightbulb as properties of a single, albeit spatiotemporally scattered, object. These features would be combined to give an
'object token', which could then be compared to stored representations to
determine its characteristics. We could have a still more radically nonstandard form of binding. The properties of the top of the chair would all
be bound, and the properties of the base of the lightbulb would all be
bound, on the picture I just gave; the odd part is just putting the two
together. But we could in principle have binding in which no two features
from the same location were put together. The redness at this location, the
squareness at that location, and the uprightness from a still further location could all be put together to give a single 'object token', to be compared
to stored representations. The upshot would be a kind of collection of
spatiotemporally scattered tropes.
According to the null hypothesis, there is no justification to be given for
the visual system operating in the ordinary way rather than in the ways I
just described; there is no objective advantage in the standard approach.
The visual system proceeds in whatever way it does; that is a primitive
datum. The way in which the visual system proceeds will determine which
object tokens are constructed, and that in turn will determine what stored
object representations the subject has. This in turn will determine what
sorts of objects are in the subject's environment; it is up to the subject to use
one system of object representations rather than another to delineate
which things in the surroundings he is thinking and talking about. It is
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natural to protest, as against the null hypothesis, that the way in which we
actually bind objects has objective advantages over these bizarre alternatives. But the natural suspicion is that this protest is just a parochial, conservative reaction which elevates habit into a kind of transcendent
superiority. What reason could be given for thinking that one way of binding features into objects is better than another?
I think we can immediately say that it is not believable that there are no
normative constraints on binding. There do appear occasionally individuals whose visual systems have problems with binding; see, for example,
Friedman-Hill, Robertson, and Treisman 1995, or Robertson et al. 1997.
These patients are quite seriously impaired. Though they may, for example,
be above chance at saying which features are present in a scene displayed to
them, they will be at chance when saying which combinations of features
are present. Or, as in the case of the patient described by Humphreys and
Riddoch (1987), they may be able to copy a drawing of a complex scene
accurately, but be doing it without any identification of the objects
involved. It is difficult to accept that since there are no norms of binding,
these patients cannot be described as impaired. Rather, it seems that there
must be normativity here, since these patients are so palpably impaired.
However, you might have a view on which getting it right in your use of
particular binding procedures is simply a matter of doing it the same way
as everyone else. That is, you might have a view of binding which is like
Chomsky's view of the innate systems he holds to be involved in language
use. On this picture, there is such a thing as getting it right or wrong in your
use of a particular grammar; but ultimately, rightness and wrongness here
are just a question of whether you are in step with other people of the same
species. Similarly, you might have, as it were, a 'community view' of binding procedures, on which rightness or wrongness is simply a matter of
agreement or disagreement with others in your community. This view
implies that the only problem with a non-standard binding strategy, such
as putting together features at different locations, and the only problem
with the impaired patients I just mentioned is social. Their only problem is
that they bind differently to other people. But that seems entirely inadequate as an analysis of the problem. The problem with these subjects is that
they cannot see the objects around them.
The sortalist proposal, at this point, contains two elements. One is a
causal hypothesis: that our visual systems use the binding strategies they
do because we have the sortal concepts that we do. The other element in the
sortalist proposal is normative: that what defines the objective of the binding strategies being used is the need to keep faith with the system of sortal
concepts used by the subject. It has to be said, though, that neither of these
ideas is compelling. Given the similarities between human vision and
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vision in other species, it seems somewhat unlikely that the use of particular binding strategies in humans evolved in response to our possession of
particular sortal concepts. And it is difficult anyway to see how our possession of particular sortal concepts could have come first; our grasp of the
concepts of particular sorts of observable objects depends on our abilities
to perceive them, which in turn depends on having the relevant binding
strategies in use already. Grasp of a system of sortal concepts thus seems to
depend causally on possession of a relevant set of binding strategies, which
makes it hard to see how there could also be a causal dependence in the
other direction.
The second element in the sortalist proposal is also difficult to accept.
According to the second element, it is our system of sortal concepts that
defines the objectives of the binding strategies that we use. Since the system
of sortal concepts that we have presumably developed later than the binding strategies that we use, the sortal concepts are in effect providing a kind
of after-the-fact justification for the use of those binding strategies, on this
view. But if we have in fact developed a system of binding strategies in
virtue of which we can see various sorts of objects, then we do not need the
development of sortal concepts to provide a justification for the use of
those strategies. The objective is simply to see the relevant objects, and
binding strategies achieve that. To develop a system of sortal concepts consequently upon this achievement, and then maintain that the objectives of
the binding strategies were after all being set by this system of sorta! concepts, adds nothing. We already have it in place that the objective of the
binding strategies is to let us see the various sorts of objects around us, and
there is no place for a further level of justification.
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river itself. There is also a stage of that collection of water molecules, at the
same place: a momentary stage in the life of that collection of water
molecules. Quine gave the basic argument here when he said:
Pointing is of itself ambiguous as to the temporal spread of the indicated object.
Even given that the indicated object is to be a process with considerable temporal
spread, and hence a summation of momentary objects, still pointing does not tell
us which summation of momentary objects is intended, beyond the fact that the
momentary object at hand is to be in the desired summation. Pointing... could be
interpreted either as referring to the river ... or as referring to the [collection of
water molecules] . . ., or as referring to any one of an unlimited number of less
natural summations... [SJuch ambiguity is commonly resolved by accompanying
the pointing with such words as 'this river', thus appealing to a prior concept of a
river as one distinctive type of time-consuming process. (Quine 1953a: 67)
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culty in understanding what a teacup is. To grasp the concept they would
need to have a lot of background filled in of which they know nothing as
yet. But the discovered teacup prompts a lot of discussion. There are
learned conferences speculating as to its nature. A strong body of opinion
leans to the view that it 'probably had some religious significance'. It is kept
in a glass case in a museum. Given the intense discussion it receives, it
would be absurd to say that our descendants have not managed to 'single it
out'. They can certainly make demonstrative reference to it; their experience of the object is sufficient to specify uniquely which thing is in question. In both these cases, the plant and the teacup, what is happening is that
your visual system is managing to bind together the information from a
single thing, and you are consequently able to attend consciously to it, even
though you have not managed to apply the right sortal concept to it.
Application of the correct sortal concept seems therefore to be a more
sophisticated phenomenon than conscious attention to the object; the
Delineation Thesis is simply false.
The work that the Delineation Thesis allots to grasp of sortal concepts
ought rather to be assigned to the principles used by the visual system in
binding together the various characteristics of a single object. In particular, it is a capacity for binding, rather grasp of sortal concepts, that allows
the subject to delineate the object in experience. Another way to put the
point is in terms of the classical distinction between 'associative' and
'apperceptive' visual agnosias (Lissauer 1890; for discussion see Farah
2000). On the one hand, according to the classical distinction, there are
'associative' agnosias in which the patient sees the object, but does not
recognize which object he is seeingso the patient may be able to give quite
a full description of the volumetric properties of, for example, a glove, but
be at a loss to say what such a thing might be used for (cf. Humphreys and
Riddoch 1987 on 'semantic access agnosia'). A patient of this type seems
perfectly capable of using and understanding perceptual demonstratives.
Such patients seem to be plain counterexamples to the Delineation Thesis;
there is no question but that they have singled out the object in experience,
though they are unable to give a semantic classification of it. The patient is
even, in this kind of case, able to find what sort of thing it is that he is looking at. His understanding of the demonstrative means that he has the
resources to understand a demonstration that the object is of this or that
sort; it may be only the capacity for specifically visual recognition of the
sort of the object that is impaired. What makes it so compelling that the
patient is able to understand visual demonstratives is that his situation is,
after all, not so very different from that of an ordinary subject given an
unfamiliar view of an object of a familiar type, or a view of an object of a
sort he has never seen before. In those cases, vision alone does not allow
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So this returns us to the argument from Quine with which I began this
chapter. And exactly the same style of reply seems apt. First, it is a
peculiarity of both Quine and Wiggins that they seem to find conscious
attention to a particular place relatively unproblematic; there is no suggestion that attending to a place requires use of the sortal concept 'place'.
Why attention to an object should not similarly be possible in the absence
of a sortal concept is not explained. Moreover, it is perfectly possible to
draw the distinctions Wiggins wants without appealing to sortal concepts.
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Conscious attention to the thing is manifestly quite different from conscious attention to the parcel of stuff that makes up the thing. Keeping
track of the thing, even over quite a brief period of time, is manifestly different from keeping track of the parcel of stuff that makes up the thing; the
difference will show up immediately the parcel of stuff is subjected to any
fragmentation that does not affect the integrity of the thing, as when a
small bit falls off. Someone attending to the thing will ignore the bit; someone attending to the parcel of stuff will either have to abandon the exercise
or (depending on how we read 'parcel') may keep track of the totality of
scattered stuff As for mereological sums, it is not obvious that they are
visible at all, though their parts may be visible, so it is not obvious how you
could be visually attending to such a thing.
Notice also that Wiggins's argument above seems after all to demand
that we have correct sortal classification of the object by the thinker. If we
suppose that the mind does have to do the work of fixing the sort of the
thing that is being singled out, it makes no sense to suppose that it might do
the work by supplying an incorrect sortal classification. And in fact, if fixing the sort of the thing being singled out really is the task of the mind, it
makes no sense to suppose that it could get it wrong; what else is there to
determine what sort of thing is being singled out? If you suppose that
something elsecall it 'the world'fixes the sort of the thing that is being
singled out, then you can make sense of the idea that the mind could be
making a mistake when it classifies the object. In that case there is no need
for the mind to supply the sortal, in order to fix which sort of thing is being
singled out. That task had been performed by 'the world'. But if you
suppose that the world does not perform that task, then the talk of the
mind doing its part by merely 'approximating towards' something or
other, really makes no sense. Towards what is the mind supposed to be
approximating?
4. Sortals as Orienting Attention
There are two quite simple points which together can make it seem that
there must be something right about the Delineation Thesis. One is that we
usually do use sortal concepts in demonstrative constructions; very often,
in discussion, you would not know which thing was in question unless your
interlocutor used a sortal. The second point is that if someone uses an
incorrect sortal classification in a demonstrative construction, then what
they have said cannot be regarded as correct as it stands; once the facts are
known, the statement has to be withdrawn and replaced by a use of the correct sortal classification. These points together can make it seem that
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(a) concepts are indeed essential to demonstrative reference, and (b) cases
in which there seems to be singular reference but incorrect sortal classification are, after all, not cases in which the singular reference has been successful. But actually these points need to be independently explained, and
they do not in the end offer any support to the Delineation Thesis. 1 will
take them in turn.
On the first point, there is a role for sortal concepts in demonstrative
identification which is much less fundamental than the kind of role allotted to them by the Delineation Thesis, but which is commonplace and pervasive. When I commented on Quine's discussion of pointing, I remarked
on the distinction between conscious attention to an object, and the control, or causation, of conscious attention. We can distinguish between the
factors in virtue of which you can be said to be consciously attending to
one particular object rather than anything else, and the factors which
caused you to be attending to that object rather than anything else. For
example, in the case of vision, it is arguable that you attend to a specific
object in virtue, in part, of the fact that you are attending to the location the
object is at. In contrast, I might orient your attention to the object by
pointing, or by physically turning your head towards it while waggling the
object in front of you. You can see the distinction between the two cases.
Suppose that attending to the object is partly constituted by attending to
the place, while the turning of your head is merely a cause of your attending to the object. Then you could have attended to the object, in the very
same way, as a result of some other cause. For example, I could simply have
pointed to the thing, or you might have become interested in it spontaneously. The upshot could still have been that you consciously attended to
it in the very same way.
As I said, we do not in ordinary communication confine ourselves to
saying 'this' and 'that'; we very often do use phrases of the form, 'this F',
where F is indeed a sortal term. Does this show that the Delineation Thesis
is after all correct? I think it does not. We can distinguish between two ways
in which a descriptive component can figure in demonstrative reference.
Suppose you and I are strolling through the park and I point my umbrella
and say something about 'that clock to the left of the fountain'. How does
the descriptive component 'to the left of the fountain' relate to the demonstrative 'that clock' in this case? There are two possibilities. One is that it
states a descriptive condition which has to be met by any object, if it is to
be the reference of my term. So if there is no clock to the left of the fountain, I have not referred to anything. The other possibility is that the
phrase, 'to the left of the fountain', is just a way of orienting your attention,
exactly on a par with the flick of my umbrella, which aims to direct your
attention onto an object I have already identified, prior to my use of the
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phrase or the umbrella. The identification of the object came first, and now
I am trying, by hook or by crook, to direct your attention to that thing, and
it does not really matter how I achieve that effect. So if the clock is not really to the left of the fountain, but I have still managed to direct your attention to it by means of my use of the phrase, then my term still refers and you
understand what I have said.
In these terms, we can say that one commonplace role for sortals in
demonstrative identification is to orient attention to one object rather than
another. The sortal really does play a role in the singling out of the object:
it is what causes the orientation of attention to one thing rather than
another. If I say to you, 'That is very old', you will very often have no idea
which thing I am talking about until I supply the sortal, even if I point in
roughly the right direction. You use the sortal to orient your attention onto
the right object. But since the sortal here is functioning merely to orient
your attention onto the right object, it can play its role successfully even if
the object is not actually of that sort. That is why the notion of a 'plant' can
be playing a role in referring to an object which is not actually a plant; it is
'good enough' in the sense that anyone looking in roughly the right direction will have their attention directed onto the right object by the sortal,
even though the thing is not in fact a plant. This lets us see what was right
about Wiggins' talk of 'approximating to' correct sortal classification. All
we need here is that the approximation must be sufficiently close in this
minimal sense: the use of the term must be successful in actually bringing
it about that you attend to the right object.
To say that the role of the sortal is merely to orient attention towards the
right object, though, is also to say that the use of the sortal is dispensable.
You could in principle have your attention oriented towards that object by
some other cause. This is what happens in the case of the long-preserved
teacup. Our descendants manage to orient their attention onto the thing
without the use of any sortals at all.
This place for the role of sortals does not give them the kind of constitutive role that the Delineation Thesis envisages in making it the case
that you are consciously attending to one thing rather than another. It is
merely an external causal factor in the act of conscious attention. But it
does explain why typically you simply would not understand a demonstrative 'this' which was not, implicitly or explicitly, accompanied by a
sortal.
This point, about the role of sortals in demonstrative reference, should
not be interpreted as a point about the semantic treatment of complex
demonstratives in English. We can contrast simple demonstratives, such as
'this' and 'that', with complex demonstratives, such as 'this river' or 'that
mountain'. Suppose that the contribution of the nominal 'F' in a phrase of
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the form 'that F' were merely to orient attention to the demonstrated
object. Then the truth of a statement of the form, 'That F is G', would not
require that the object referred to be F. But it does have to be acknowledged
that when you use a demonstrative 'that F' to identify an object which is
not in fact F, your statement cannot be regarded as correct (this was the
second point we had to address). On the face of it, at any rate, if I point to
a sundial and say, That clock is one hour slow', then what I say is not literally true; it implies that there is a clock which is one hour slow, and there
may be no such clock. One analysis of the situation is that in addition to
orienting attention, the nominal 'F' restricts what the demonstrative can
refer to (cf. Kaplan 1989a, 1989b). On the view I am recommending, it
would be surprising if ordinary English did work in this way. For demonstrative reference, on the view I am recommending, does not intrinsically
require that you get it right about the sort of the object. But it would in
principle be possible for English to impose an extrinsic requirement on
reference: that when the simple demonstrative is coupled with a nominal,
the nominal must apply to the object for the simple demonstrative to refer
to it.
It may be, though, that the nominal in a complex demonstrative contributes to the truth-conditions of a sentence containing it otherwise than
by imposing a condition on the reference of the demonstrative. Strawson
1950 suggested that a sentence of the form, That F is G', says the same
thing as a sentence of the form, That is the F which is G'. On this interpretation, the simple demonstrative refers without any conditions on reference being imposed by the nominal, though the nominal may indeed
serve the pragmatic function of orienting attention. But the nominal does
contribute to the truth-conditions of the sentence. The sentence cannot be
true unless the nominal applies to the object to which the simple demonstrative refers.
In a recent discussion, Lepore and Ludwig provide an analysis of the
same general type, in which we have a self-standing use of a simple demonstrative and a quantificational analysis of the role of the nominal:
The key to understanding demonstratives in complex demonstratives is to see the
concatenation of a demonstrative with a nominal, as in That F', as itself a form of
restricted quantification, namely as equivalent to '[The x: x is that and x is F]'.
(Lepore and Ludwig 2000: 229)
On this analysis, the simple demonstrative refers without the nominal playing any role in fixing its reference. Such an analysis nonetheless acknowledges that a statement of the form, That F is G', cannot be true unless the
object referred to is F; this is the second point with which we had to deal.
And it provides no comfort to a proponent of the Delineation Thesis.
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use patterns of inference which exploit spatiotemporal continuity as a criterion of identity for the thing, to establish that this dog is the one which
your neighbour has just bought. But your auditory experience alone does
not display the dog as a spatiotemporal continuant. As I said, it does seem
to be very different in the case of a visual demonstrative, 'that dog', referring to a dog you currently have in view. Here we do seem to be directly confronted with the thing itself. And direct confrontation with the thing itself,
as a spatiotemporal continuant for which particular strategies of keeping
track are appropriate, does seem to be capable of providing a justification
for your use of the demonstrative. This, I think, explains the dependence
we remarked, in section 2 of this chapter, of the auditory demonstrative on
the visual demonstrative.
Of course, this distinction between ways of being presented with the
object is simply invisible on a sortalist picture, on which the role of experience of the thing is merely to provide you with a sortal classification of it;
for sortal classification of the object could be supplied just as well by hearing as by vision. But as I have said, we ought anyway to reject the sortalist
picture.
Knowledge of the reference of a demonstrative is provided by conscious
attention to the relevant object. Our grasp of the identity conditions of an
object over time, or the boundaries of the object at a time, is grounded not
in grasp of sortal concepts, but in the style of conscious attention that we
pay to the thing. And conscious attention to the object does not have to be
focused by a grasp of sortal concepts; the various styles of conscious attention of which we are capable do not rely on our use of sortal concepts.
Grasp of sortal concepts is a more sophisticated matter than the phenomena of reference and conscious attention.
Sense
/. Informative Identities
Frege (1952) introduces the notion of sense in terms of the informativeness
of identities. The identity statement, 'The Morning Star is the Morning
Star', is uninformative; the identity, 'The Morning Star is the Evening
Star', is informative. The difference between the two identity statements
has to be explained by a difference in the senses of the two singular terms.
In these terms, the problem of the sense of a perceptual demonstrative
arises because it is possible to have two demonstratives that refer to the
same thing in different ways, so that the identity statement which uses the
two demonstratives is informative. For example, suppose that you and I are
rewiring the electrical supply to a house. We have a number of wires spilling
out of a panel on the wall, and we also have a number of wires welling up
from beneath the floorboards. We have to match up the wires from the wall
with the wires from the floor. If I say, 'This wire [tugging at one from the
wall] is the same as this wire [tugging again at that very same wire from the
wall]', then 1 have simply expressed the law of identity and my statement is
uninformative. If, however, I say, 'This wire [tugging at one from the wall]
is the same as this wire [pointing at one from the floor]', then I have
expressed an important truth; life or death may depend on it. In this case,
the two demonstratives refer to the same thing. But there is evidently a difference between them. Frege calls this a difference in sense. And really that
is all Frege gives us by way of a characterization of sense. Sense is that,
sameness of which makes an identity uninformative, difference in which
makes an identity informative.
This emphasis on the notion of informativeness is unfortunate, because
it has sometimes led commentators to think it telling to ask the question,
'informative to whom?' After all, you might say, if I already know that the
Morning Star is the Evening Star, then it will not be informative to me to
be told that the Morning Star is the Evening Star; whereas if I did not know
that already, the remark will be informative. This can make it seem that
Frege's criterion makes sameness or difference of sense depend on the
idiosyncrasies of your prior state of knowledge. I think the right reaction
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85
to this comment is to put Frege's criterion directly in terms of what is, and
what is not, an instance of a logical law. To be 'uninformative', in this sense,
is to be an instance of a logical law. In these terms, then, the point is that
'The Morning Star is the Morning Star' is an instance of the law of identity, whereas The Morning Star is the Evening Star' is not an instance of
the law of identity. And no matter what my prior state of knowledge, even
if I do already know that the Morning Star is the Evening Star, the remark
that the Morning Star is the Evening Star will still be a substantial piece
of information, in the sense that it is not merely an instance of the law of
identity.
We could, indeed, put the point in terms not of which truths are logical
truths, but rather, which inferences are valid inferences. In these terms, the
point is that the transition, 'The Morning Star is 5 million years old; the
Morning Star is a planet; hence, some planet is 5 million years old', is valid
as it stands, whereas the transition, 'The Morning Star is 5 million years
old; the Evening Star is a planet; hence, some planet is 5 million years old',
is not valid. This second argument is enthymematic, and has to be completed by filling in the missing premise, 'The Morning Star is the Evening
Star'. Similarly, consider the inference, 'This wire [tugging at the one on the
wall] has been disconnected; any wire that has been disconnected is safe to
touch; hence, this wire [tugging at the one on the wall] is safe to touch'. This
inference is evidently valid; contrast the transition, 'This wire [tugging at
the one on the wall] has been disconnected; any wire that has been disconnected is safe to touch; hence this wire [pointing at one from the floor] is
safe to touch'. This second inference is not valid; anyone who thinks otherwise is in for a shock. The second inference needs to have filled in the missing premise, 'This wire [tugging at the one on the wall] is this wire [pointing
to the one from the floor]'.
2. Sense and Use
The points I have made so far do not exhaust the notion of sense. They do
not fully bring out the connection between sense and reference, on a
Classical View. It does follow from the characterization I have given so far
that sense must determine reference, in that sameness of sense guarantees
sameness of reference. For suppose we had sameness of sense of two terms,
but not sameness of reference. Then the identity statement connecting the
two terms would be uninformative, or a logical truth, because of the sameness of sense, yet false, because of the difference in reference. And that
hardly seems possible. Frege goes still further than this, though, in connecting sense and reference. He says that your knowledge of the reference
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of the term is provided by your grasp of the sense of the term. And on the
Classical View, knowledge of the reference of a term is what causes, and
justifies, your use of particular ways of verifying, and finding the implications of, propositions involving the term. The natural question is now
whether the way in which you have knowledge of the reference of the term
will affect the use that you make of the term. That is, does it matter what
sense you grasp the term as having, for which ways of using the term you
will be caused and justified in employing?
This approach applies to singular terms. Recall the descriptive name
'Elmo', for which the introduction and elimination rules were:
Exactly one tree in this
garden is oldest
and:
Elmo is F
exactly one tree in this garden is oldest
Elmo is F
any tree in this garden which is oldest is F
On the Classical Model, use of these rules is caused and justified by your
knowledge of the axiom:
'Elmo' refers to the oldest tree in this garden.
Suppose now that there is exactly one palm tree in the garden. And suppose
we have the descriptive name, 'Woody', for which the axiom is:
'Woody' refers to the palm tree in this garden.
Then the rules for 'Woody' are:
There is exactly one
palm tree in this garden
Woody is G
and:
Woody is G
There is exactly one
palm tree in this garden
And suppose, moreover, that:
Woody is G
Any palm tree
in this garden is G
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Elmo is Woody
that the palm tree is the oldest tree in the garden. Then the identity,
'Elmo is Woody', is an informative identity in Frege's sense. The identity is
not merely an instance of the law of identity. And though the two terms
have the same reference, they do not have the same introduction and elimination rules. The rules for 'Elmo' and for 'Woody' are, as you can see, quite
different.
Again, we reach the conclusion that grasp of sense is what causes, and
justifies, your use of a particular pattern of use of the terma particular
set of procedures for justifying and finding the implications of propositions involving the term.
At this point we can see something of the constraints on an account of
the sense of a demonstrative. The most immediate remark is that it should
now be apparent how incomplete it would be to regard an account of
demonstrative sense as having to do only with the classification of identity
statements as uninformative or informative. Rather, having characterized
the introduction and elimination rules for a demonstrativethe pattern of
use of the demonstrativewe can say that grasp of the sense of the term
has to be what causes, and justifies, your use of just these input and output
rules. It justifies your use of these rules, in the sense that it defines the objective at which you are aiming in using these procedures, and allows us to display these procedures as ways of achieving that objective. And grasp of
sense has to be the cause of your use of these procedures. It is not just a
coincidence that you have the objective you do, and that suitable procedures swing into play for you to achieve it.
To say that it would be incomplete to regard an account of sense as a way
only of classifying identity statements as uninformative or informative is
not to say that we can eliminate the notion of informativeness. It is still true
that we can have different ways of referring demonstratively to one and the
same object, as in the example of wires with which I began. It is just that
these different ways of referring to the thing will cause and justify different
procedures for verification and action. But when we have one procedure
and when we have two will itself have to be understood in terms of informativeness. The different procedures will themselves ultimately be individuated in terms of informativeness.
I have been arguing that what provides your knowledge of the reference
of a demonstrative is your conscious attention to the object demonstrated.
So what we need, in an account of sense here, is a characterization of ways
of consciously attending to an object that can cause and justify the use of
particular input-output patterns. So different ways of consciously attending to one and the same wire can validate different verification-action
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patterns. This is exactly analogous to the point about 'Elmo' and 'Woody',
that different ways of grasping one and the same reference can validate the
use of quite different introduction and elimination rules. Knowledge of the
reference of a demonstrative, provided by conscious attention to the
object, causes and justifies the use of information-processing procedures
to verify, and to find the implications for action of, propositions involving
the demonstrative. So the issue of sense, as it applies to demonstratives, has
to do with the relation between conscious experience and informationprocessing.
What we have just found is that different ways of consciously attending
to a single object can cause and justify the use of different informationprocessing procedures to verify, and to find the implications for action of,
different demonstrative propositions involving reference to the same
object.
To characterize the sense of a demonstrative, then, we need to know
how to characterize the content of conscious attention to the object, so
that we can explain how one way of consciously attending to the thing can
cause and justify:
(1) use of one particular set of information-processing procedures
to verify a proposition involving the demonstrative, and
(2) use of one particular set of information-processing procedures
to act on the basis of a proposition involving the demonstrative.
What we have to do here, then, is to find a way of characterizing the content of your conscious attention to the object, so that we can see how the
content of your conscious attention systematically causally affects which
information-processing procedures swing into play in verification and in
action.
In Chapter 2,1 set out the relation between conscious attention to an
object and the use of particular information-processing procedures to
verify demonstrative propositions about the object. I described two types
of verification. First, there was verification involving bringing to bear
some high-level information-processing, such as the visual routines
described by Ullman (1996). This is what you have to do to verify visually
propositions to the effect that a particular object is enclosed by a boundary, for example. Secondly, there was verification that the object has a particular simple property, such as redness or roundness, where these
properties are determined in establishing the initial feature maps used to
find that there is an object there at all. In both cases, I said, it is your conscious attention to the object that causes, and justifies, the use of particular
information-processing procedures to verify the proposition that the thing
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has that property. But we can ask about the details of the causation here.
Just what aspect of your conscious attention to the thing is operative in
determining how the information-processing swings into play?
Location is a key factor from the point of view of the informationprocessing mechanisms that have to swing into play. If a visual routine is to
be brought to bear on an object, the first thing that has to be found is where
the object is. If a feature map is to be consulted to find which property an
object has, the first thing that has to be determined is the location of the
object. In Chapter 3,1 argued for a parallel picture of the relation between
conscious attention to an object and the use of particular informationprocessing procedures to act on the object. I said that conscious attention
to the object again causes, and justifies, the use of these informationprocessing procedures. Which actions you perform must, in general, be
determined by the direction of your conscious attention, if action is to be
voluntary at all. And again, we can ask which aspects of your conscious
attention to the object are causally operative in determining which
information-processing procedures are to swing into play. Again, as we
saw, the experienced location of the object is likely to play a key role, as that
can identify the target of processing for the visuomotor system.
The Gestalt organization of the visual field, when you are consciously
attending to the object, must also play a role, since different objects can be
close together, and there must be a way in which the subject can decide to
verify visually a proposition about one rather than another of those
objects, and it must be possible for the subject to decide to act on one rather
than another of those objects. As I stressed in Chapter 3, it is not that the
experience of the object directly sets the parameters for your action on it,
but rather that this can identify the target for visuomotor processing.
Similarly, the experienced Gestalt organization of the target can identify
the target for processing to verify a proposition about it.
The experienced location of the object may not involve the very same
frame of reference for identifying locations as is used in cognitive processing. Nonetheless, it is the lead candidate for systematically affecting which
location is selected at the level of cognitive processing, since it will have the
same structure, a structure which can sustain systematic causal connections. Similarly, it is not quite immediate that the Gestalt organization of
your experience of the object is just the same as the Gestalt organization
used in cognitive processing; but the Gestalt organization of your experience is, again, the lead candidate when we seek a structure in the content of
experience, so there could be systematic causal connections between it and
the Gestalt organization used in cognitive processing.
All this suggests that we can formulate the introduction and elimination
rules for a visual demonstrative somewhat as follows. Suppose we have a
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else, which is not at that location. And that does not seem to be a coherent
possibility. So a mistake in thinking that the thing is at this particular place
could not leave intact your claim to know that there is something or other
at that place.
The problem now is to say more explicitly just what the explanation is of
this immunity to error through misidentification of judgements about the
locations of demonstrated objects. There is an easy way to generate judgements which are immune to error through misidentification. Suppose we
introduce a descriptive name, 'Frank', which has its reference fixed by 'the
inventor of the postmark'. And suppose you have good reason to think
that there was such a thing as the inventor of the postmark; it was not the
product of a committee or an accidental artefact of the mailing system.
Then, exploiting that background belief, and your understanding of the
name, you form the judgement, 'Frank was a sole inventor of the postmark'. You are fallible about this. For there may after all have been no
inventor of the postmark, despite your evidence to the contrary. But there
is a kind of mistake you cannot have made. It cannot be that you are right
about there having been a sole inventor of the postmark, but that you are
just wrong about which person it was. It cannot be that you do know that
there was a sole inventor of the postmark, but that you have made a mistake in thinking that it was Frank rather than somebody else. If you are
right in thinking that there was a sole inventor of the postmark, then you
cannot but be right in thinking that it was Frank who did it. To put it round
the other way, if you are wrong about whether Frank invented the postmark, your mistake cannot be localized as an error of identification about
who it was that invented the postmark. If you are wrong about whether
Frank invented the postmark, you must also be wrong about whether there
was a sole inventor of the postmark.
This suggests a connection between immunity to error through misidentification, and the way in which the reference of a singular term is fixed. It
suggests that the way in which it happens that there are judgements which
are immune to error through misidentification, is that there are descriptive
conditions on the reference of the singular term. So when the subject uses
his grasp of the singular term to articulate a judgement in which the
descriptive conditions are said to apply to the referent of the singular term,
the result will be a judgement that cannot involve an error of identification.
The point about the judgement, 'Sally spoke', is then that in an ordinary
case, you are not using the fact of her speaking as a descriptive condition
by which to fix the reference of 'Sally'; that is why your judgement 'Sally
spoke' is subject to errors of identification.
If we have a term whose reference is fixed by a descriptive condition, this
will have the consequence that judgements applying that description to the
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has to do with the way in which the meaning of the demonstrative depends
on the exercise of perceptual attention. On the analysis I have presented,
it is your conscious attention to the object that provides your knowledge
of the reference of the demonstrative. So your experience of the object
has to provide enough information about it to identify the target of the
information-processing involved in verifying and acting on propositions
involving the demonstrative. What I have argued is that you use the experienced location of the object in identifying the target of this informationprocessing. The reason that experienced location is crucial here, I argued,
is the role of location in solving the Binding Problem for the demonstrated
object.
Your use of a demonstrative, such as 'that person', depends on your
having solved the Binding Problem. It is the fact that you are using the
demonstrative 'that person' on the basis of your having bundled together
all the information from location p as true of a single thing, that grounds
your use of the demonstrative. It is because the solution to the Binding
Problem gave a special place to location that judgements ascribing a location to the demonstrated object are immune to error through misidentification
To see this, suppose we ask how it can happen that you might make an
error of identification in using a demonstrative term. Suppose we stay with
the case in which you make your judgement purely on the basis of vision,
and that vision is using spatial location as its principle of binding. Then
what has to happen for there to be an error of identification is that you do
visually detect the presence of a certain attribute, so that you have the right
to say, 'Something is F', even though there may be grounds for doubt as
whether you are right in judging, 'That thing is F'. For you to have made
such a mistake, you must have bound the attribute F-ness together, mistakenly, with a collection of attributes belonging to a different object than
the object which is F. Since you are using spatial location as your principle
of binding, what this means is that you have assigned F the wrong spatial
location, in that it has been put together with a collection of attributes that
do not belong to an object which is F. You are right in thinking that there is
F-ness around, but you have mislocated it, which is how you have made
your mistake of identification. But this can hardly happen with your
ascription of location itself. Visual location is the principle which you are
using to bind together a collection of features as features of a single object.
So it does not make sense to suppose that you might have assigned the location to the wrong bundle of features. It is visual locations that individuate
the bundles of features, so it does not make sense to suppose that the right
location has crept into the wrong bundle.
This shows a contrast between demonstratives and descriptions. An
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mistakenly think that it is Reagan who is being referred to. In that case,
someone might provide you with grounds for doubt as to whether it was
Reagan who is in question, without undermining your knowledge that
someone has been awarded the Prize in Economics. Or again, at the start of
the eighties, you might hear a broadcast announcing that Reagan has been
elected President, and someone could challenge you at that point, accepting your evidence that a President had been elected but questioning your
grounds for supposing it to be Reagan. Suppose, however, that we consider
the position of an ordinarily well-informed speaker now, in the twenty-first
century. Such a speaker uses some such gloss as, 'the actor who became
American President in the early eighties', as his way of checking that the
information he is getting concerns that Ronald Reagan; it provides his
bundling principle, analogously to the use that the visual system makes of
location. Suppose this speaker says, 'Reagan is the former actor who
became American President in the early eighties'. This judgement is fallible. It takes a bit of an effort, but you can imagine being given strong
evidence that Reagan was after all never elected President, or that he after
all never was an actor. But can you envisage being given proof that though
someone who was an actor was elected President in the early eighties, and
though you do have knowledge of that existential proposition, still that
person was not Reagan? You can imagine discovering that your whole picture of the early eighties is a complete hallucination, and that coincidentally there was a former actor who became President. But what is not
conceivable is that you have knowledge that there was a former actor who
became President in the early eighties, and that you are mistaken only in
thinking that person was Reagan. The key point is to see that acknowledging this point does not commit you to thinking that 'Reagan' is a descriptive name, just because it is entirely possible that Reagan exists yet was
neither an actor nor a President, though he was often referred to as such.
The general point here is this. In the case of visual demonstratives, I have
talked about binding principles, such as location. And in the case of proper names, I have talked about bundling principles, such as the gloss, 'the
former actor who became President'. Such a binding or bundling principle
does not deliver a definite description equivalent in meaning to the proper
name. This comes out in a number of ways. Most dramatically, the binding
or bundling principle is just a way of collecting together a cluster of information as all true of a single thing. For just that reason, it does not need to
yield a definite description which actually is true of the object the name
refers to. Nonetheless, when you articulate the judgement which ascribes
the property used as your binding or bundling principle to the object
referred to, the result will be a judgement which, though fallible, is immune
to error through misidentification.
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4. Trading on Identity
I have been arguing that we have to think of knowledge of the reference of
a demonstrative as provided by conscious attention to the object in question. For conscious singling-out of the object to be what explains your
knowledge of reference, it cannot itself be a matter of demonstrative reference to the thing. Otherwise, conscious attention would presuppose what it
explains. If visual experience of the object was simply one way among
many of having a demonstrative thought about the object, there would be
no saying how visual attention to the object could be what explained your
knowledge of reference. There would be no primacy for perception in the
understanding of a demonstrative; your understanding of the demonstrative could not be represented as depending on your perception of the
object. To understand why perception of the object may be essential to
your understanding of the demonstrative, we have to take visual attention
to the object to be more primitive than demonstrative identification of the
thing.
Nonetheless, conscious attention to the object has a certain content, as
we have just seen. We experience objects as having certain locations, and it
is the fact that you experience the object as having a certain location that
allows you to identify the object for the benefit of the underlying systems
that have to swing into play to verify or act on the basis of propositions
about the thing. Moreover, it is the fact that you are using the binding
parameter for the object as the way of identifying it that explains the fact
that judgements about the location of the object are immune to error
through misidentification, though they can be simply mistaken.
Suppose we return to the problem with which this chapter began,
namely, to explain why some identities are informative, or, as I suggested
we reformulate the question, to explain why some inferences involving
identity are valid and others are not. The example I gave earlier of a valid
inference involving trading on identity was this:
This wire [tugging at the one on the wall] has been disconnected;
Any wire that has been disconnected is safe to touch;
Hence, this wire [tugging at the one on the wall] is safe to touch.
This inference is evidently valid; contrast the transition:
This wire [tugging at the one on the wall] has been disconnected;
Any wire that has been disconnected is safe to touch;
Hence, this wire [pointing at one from the floor] is safe to touch.
This second inference is not valid; it needs to have filled in the missing
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premise, 'This wire [tugging at the one on the wall] is this wire [pointing to
the one from the floor]'.
Some inferences involving a trading on identity are valid; some are
not. In the case in which trading on identity is legitimate, your knowledge
of the reference of the demonstrative should cause, and justify, your
making the inferential step. So what, in general, can we say about knowledge of reference, in virtue of which it has that character? My argument
has been that it is experience of the object that provides us with knowledge
of reference. So can we say how it is that experience of the object causes,
and justifies, trading on identity in some cases but not in others? We have
seen that the way in which you experience the object can be seen as identifying the object by using the complex binding parameter by which the
visual system put together the information from that object as all true of a
single thing. So can we say that trading on identity is legitimate when the
occurrences of the demonstrative are each being interpreted by an act of
conscious attention for which the same complex binding parameter is
being used? In the present context, that seems the simplest hypothesis. I
think this hypothesis is basically correct, but it does need to be glossed a
little.
The problem emerges when we consider a case in which I am watching
you manipulate, say, a matchbox. In line with the kinds of input move
licensed by my grasp of the demonstrative, 'that matchbox', I might think,
for example, 'that matchbox now contains my watch', having seen the
watch in the thing. Unknown to me, though, you are actually manipulating
two matchboxes, not one, even though it looks to me as though there is just
one matchbox there. Then, as I see you filling with matches what looks like
one and the same matchbox, I may think, 'That matchbox was empty a
moment ago'. And I may be using the same complex binding parameter
over the period. So, by our present hypotheses, I will be licensed in trading
on identity to conclude that one and the same matchbox at one and the
same time contained my watch and was empty. But something has gone
wrong somewhere.
I think that the basic point here is that there can be mistakes at the level
of binding, and different degrees of error are possible. Suppose you are
seated at a red traffic light, and for a split second it seems to you that the
light has turned to green; but in fact this is an illusion: one of the traffic
lights facing another set of traffic has turned green, and the mistake was to
bind that greenness together with the rest of the perceptual information
about the light facing you. In that case, it seems evident that you saw the
light in front of you but just made a mistake about whether it had changed
colour. (This is an error of identification.) In this case, there has been amistake at the level of binding, but not one that affects your ability to be think-
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ing demonstratively about one particular object, one particular set of traffic lights.
What concerns me now, though, are more radical cases, in which the
mistakes in binding mean that there is no saying which object you are perceiving. Suppose, for example, that you are rapidly presented with, in succession, a pink X and a yellow T, but perceive a pink T (Treisman and
Schmidt 1982). Did you perceive the T and make a mistake about its
colour, or did you perceive the X and make a mistake about its shape? It
seems quite obvious that there is no answer to such a question. This is a
kind of limiting case of the matchbox example. If I say, 'That figure is pink'
and 'That figure is a T', and trade on identity, I will get the conclusion that
one and the same thing is both pink and a T, even though there is no pink
T in the display. But where did I go wrong?
It is not enough, to have a way of thinking demonstratively of an object,
that you be consciously attending using a particular complex binding
parameter. For there to be an object you are identifying, it must be that the
bulk, the overwhelming majority, of the perceptual information that you
are binding together does indeed all causally derive from just one object.
Otherwise, if there are, for example, two different objects in play, as in the
case of the matchboxes or the pink T, there is no saying which one you are
identifying demonstratively.
So perhaps we could put it like this: in order for there to be a way of
identifying an object in place here at all, there must be just one object from
which the relevant visual information causally derives. Given that this
external condition is met, we can say that trading on identity will be
legitimate if the uses of the demonstrative are interpreted by an act of conscious attention in which we have the very same complex binding parameter being used.
There is, though, just one further line of thought we have to add here. It
is not enough that there be a single object from which most of the visual
information causally derives. It must be, further, that the subject does not
believe there to be a number of objects from which the relevant information derives. Suppose we go back to the case of the matchboxes one more
time. But this time, suppose that what is happening is that I am watching
you at work with the matchbox, and there really is only one matchbox
there, so things are just as they seem. But suppose that I suspect you of
trickery, and believe there to be two matchboxes in play. Then it seems evident that, by my own lights, I cannot verify propositions about 'that matchbox', and trade on identity in inferences involving the demonstrative, in the
usual way. For, by my own lights, the upshot would be that I was putting
together information about different matchboxes as if it all related to a
single matchbox. So for the trading on identity to be legitimate, it must be
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not just that there is a single thing from which all the information causally
derives, and that the information is all bound together by a single complex
binding parameter. It must also be that I do not disbelieve that this is what
is happening; that I do not believe that I am getting information about two
different things and that my visual system is being fooled.
We do not want to go so far as to demand that 1 should know that there
is just one object here, as opposed to a pair of skilfully operated lookalikes;
in most ordinary cases, most of us would not be able to rule out the hypothesis that there are many objects in play. Even if we believe there is only
one thing in play, that is not because we can rule out a patiently constructed sceptical hypothesis on which there are two objects here being moved in
some complex way that results in the illusion of a single object. But it is not,
either, as though experience of the object is neutral on this point. We would
ordinarily take it that our experience of the object is enough to allow us to
interpret the demonstrativeto know which thing is being referred to
and, consequently, to recognize the correctness of inferences involving the
demonstrative which trade on identity. This means that your ordinary
experience of an object cannot be regarded as being neutral on the question whether there is one thing or two things in play. Just how we are, in
consequence, to analyse the experience of the object involved in understanding the demonstrative is a matter to which I will return in Chapter 7.
For the meantime, we can say that in an ordinary case, in which you experience the objectthe object existsand your visual information is causally
deriving from just one thing, then you can trade on identity whenever you
encounter a demonstrative which you interpret by an act of attention in
which the very same complex binding parameter is used.
These points, incidentally, all have their analogues in the case of proper
names. Suppose we go back one last time to the name, 'Ronald Reagan'.
You might think it inconceivable that an actor could ever have become
President; you suspect that there are two or more different people here, the
actor and the politician, for instance. In that case, you will mistakenly think
that the information that is bundled together in gossip and testimony by
the bundling principle, 'Reagan, the actor who became President in the
early eighties', is actually a bundling together of information from at least
two different individuals. So you will not be able to trade on identity in the
usual way; indeed, you will not think that the name 'Reagan', as ordinarily
used, serves to pick out just one rather than the other of those individuals
(cf. Kripke 1979). What makes trading on identity legitimate in the ordinary case is that there is just one individual from whom derives the majority
of the information bundled together by the tag, 'Reagan, the actor who
became President in the early eighties'. Moreover, the ordinary speaker
does not believe that there is more that one individual in play here. Whether
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A&B
The standard way of finding the implications of a proposition of the form,
A&B', is to derive A from it, and to derive B from it:
A&B
A&B
Suppose you ask: what causes us to use the procedures? And is there any
justification for our using them? The classical answer is that the cause, and
justification, for your use of these procedures is your knowledge of the
classical truth-table for '&', which shows how the truth or falsity of any
sentence of the form 'A&B' is determined by the truth or falsity of the constituent sentences A, B:
A B
A&B
T T
T F
FT
F F
T
F
F
F
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The Classical View is that your grasp of the truth-table is what causes, and
justifies, your use of the above ways of verifying, and finding the implications of, propositions of that form.
Just to spell out what the truth-table says: whenever you have a complex
proposition, such as 'Snow is white and grass is green', you can isolate the
simpler statements from which it is built upin this case, (a) 'Snow is
white' and (b) 'Grass is green'. You can then ask what the relation is
between the truth or falsity of the whole proposition, and the truth or falsity of the simple statements from which it is composed. The truth-table
simply lists all the possible combinations of truth and falsity for the two
simpler statements: that they are both true, that one or the other is false,
and that they are both false. So there are four lines in all. Evidently, the
whole statement, 'Snow is white and grass is green', is true if both constituent statements are themselves true. Otherwiseif either or both of the
constituent statements are false rather than truethe whole statement is
false. The truth-table simply sets this out. Whenever you have a statement
of the form 'A&B', the whole thing is true if both constituents are true, and
it is false otherwise.
Whether ordinary speakers can in some sense be said to know truthtables for the ordinary logical constants used in everyday speech is a vexed
question. (Cf, for example, Dummett 1991.) At the moment I am not aiming to force a decision on this difficult question. The point I am making is
rather that the picture on which the use of a concept is caused and justified
by your grasp of the concept is given an absolutely exact illustration by the
view on which your use of a logical constantthe introduction and elimination rules you use for itis caused and justified by your grasp of a truthtable for the logical constant.
There is, indeed, a notorious crux over the threat of circularity at this
point. How in detail is the causing and justifying of those patterns of use
by your knowledge of the truth-table supposed to proceed? One easy
answer is that the subject can by reflective reasoning establish that these
introduction and elimination rules are the right ways to verify and find the
implications of statements using a sign, '&', for which the above is the
truth-table. You can establish that the rules will be truth-preserving; if the
inputs are true, then, you can read off the truth-table, the outputs will be
true. Moreover, the introduction rule demands as little as possible, consistently with its being truth-preserving; and the elimination rule allows you
to extract as much as possible from the proposition, consistently with the
elimination rule's being truth-preserving. The trouble is that the subject
engaged in this kind of reflective derivation of the rules from the truthtable will have to be using deductive reasoning in the derivation. (Cf. Quine
1976.)
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The sense in which the speaker grasps the justification of the practice
need not, though, involve the use of reasoning at all. The point is rather
this: which particular introduction and elimination rules the speaker
employs must be systematically causally dependent on which truth-table
the subject associates with the sign. So the use of inference rules in connection with a logical constant is systematically dependent on which truthtable you associate with the constant. Change one line of the truth-table
the subject associates with the sign, and there is a corresponding change in
the inference rules the subject uses in connection with the sign. Moreover,
this grasp of the truth-table acquaints you with the validation of your
practice.
You might point out that even on a Classical View, there is a significant
contrast between prepositional constants and demonstratives, in that
there is a canonical way of identifying the semantic value of a prepositional constant, but no one canonical way of identifying the semantic
value of a demonstrative. The canonical way of identifying the semantic
value of a prepositional constant is by way of a truth-table, such as the
table for '&' given above. In contrast, the referent of a demonstrative can be
identified in many different ways, and there is no single way of identifying
it that has canonical status. Some such point is certainly correct. But I will
not here pause over just how the point is to be spelled outjust what
notion of 'canonical' we need here to explain the point, or where exactly its
significance lies. For our purposes, the important fact is that there are
other, non-canonical ways in which the semantic value of a classical prepositional constant can be given, and the way in which the semantic value of
a prepositional constant is given will determine the correct use of the
propositional constant; so that the situation here really is, to that extent,
parallel with the case of names such as 'Elmo' and 'Woody' which I discussed in section 2 above.
The point is that two propositional connectives could have the same
semantic value even though it is not a trivial matter that they do have the
same semantic value. For example, consider the connectives'+' and '#', for
which the tables are as follows:
A B
A+B
AB
A#B
T T
T T
T F
T if 53 is prime,
F otherwise
F
T if 71 is prime,
F otherwise
F
FT
FT
F F
F F
T F
Since 53 and 71 are both prime numbers,'+' and '#' have the same semantic
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value, and both have the same semantic value as '&'. They yield the same
truth-values for the complex sentences which contain them, given the same
truth-values for the constituent sentences. The two tables above provide
different modes of presentation of the same semantic value. The reason it
matters that these truth-functors have different modes of presentation of
semantic value is that, as a result of the difference in mode of presentation,
the introduction and elimination rules for the two truth-functors will be
different:
A
53 is prime
A+B
A#B
A+BA+B
A
71 is prime
A+B
53 is prime
A#BA#B
A
A#B
71 is prime
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The problem with this informal introduction of the notion is that it does
not distinguish between a demonstration as an instrument of communication, and a demonstration as my way of achieving a visual fix on the object.
There is an oscillation in Kaplan's account of demonstratives between
viewing 'demonstrations'the (in general, non-linguistic) complements
of a use of a demonstrative term such as 'this' or 'that'as instruments of
communication, and viewing a demonstration as the way in which the
individual thinker achieves a perceptual fix on the object. When we are
thinking of demonstration as an instrument of communication, it is simply the method by which, by hook or by crook, you get your audience to
attend to the right object. One method would be to grasp your hearer's
head and turn it firmly towards the object, meanwhile waggling the object
itself. On that kind of understanding of the role of the demonstration, it
really is a ladder you climb to secure understanding, but you throw it away
at the conclusion.
The trouble with this is that Kaplan is quite explicit about the fact that
the demonstration has a further role: it has to do with the cognitive significance of the way in which the proposition is grasped, and in particular,
with how the proposition affects your propensities to action; Kaplan
approvingly quotes Perry on this (Kaplan 1989b: 532). So we need some
account of just how the demonstration is to impact on action.
Moreover, as I said, in his formal analysis of inferences involving
demonstratives, Kaplan gives an account on which trading on identity in
an inference involving demonstratives is correct just in case the two
demonstratives on whose identity we are trading involve the same demonstration. And in giving the account of when trading on identity is legitimate, we are considering the propositions used in the argument as grasped
by a single thinker at a time, and the 'instrument of communication' notion
of a demonstration is not the relevant notion. Just to illustrate this point,
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suppose you and I are watching a play and 1 notice that one of the actors
seems about to faint. When I think, 'That man is about to collapse', I am
visually discriminating him from his colleagues and the background. In
this case, the visual discrimination, however exactly it is accomplished, is
the demonstration, in that it determines the referent of the term. However,
suppose I want to alert you to this situation, then my own visual discrimination is not quite what is needed to complete my use of the term, 'that
man', when I say to you, 'That man is about to keel over'. If you say, 'Which
one?', I have to say, 'The one second from the left on stage', The one playing King Lear', or perhaps even point. These communicative instruments
succeed just when their upshot is that you visually discriminate the same
man as I do. So there are two phenomena here that are covered by the
notion of a 'demonstration': there is the communicative instrument, the
means by which I focus your attention onto the right object, and there is
the visual discrimination, the way in which I achieve my visual fix on the
object. Suppose we consider a case in which you are sitting on my left, Bill
is sitting on my right, and there are some actors on the stage. You whisper
in my left ear, 'That actor (the one wearing a hat) is about to faint', while
Bill whispers in my right ear, ' I met that actor (the one playing King Lear)
once'. Can I immediately trade on identity, to conclude that, if what I have
just been told is right, Bill has met someone who is about to faint? Notice
first that the demonstrations associated with the two demonstratives, in the
communicative sense of 'demonstration', are certainly different: you
demonstrate him as 'the one wearing a hat', whereas Bill demonstrates him
as 'the one playing King Lear'. However, the fact that the demonstrations
are different does not of itself mean that the inference, as I understand it,
cannot legitimately trade on identity. Kaplan suffers over the conflation of
different notions of 'demonstration' at this point, since although he generally uses 'demonstration' in the communication-theoretic sense, he also
says that the validity of the inference depends on whether we have the same
demonstration here. But the demonstrations used in communication are
merely instrumental to my achieving a visual fix on the person. And
whether it would be legitimate for me to trade on identity depends on
whether I achieved my visual fix on the object in the same way both times.
This means that an account of how we understand demonstratives has to
give some elucidation of the idea that there is such as thing as the way in
which you achieve your visual fix on an object.
Bearing in mind these problems about the interpretation of the notion
of a 'demonstration', suppose we consider how the notion is to be used in
giving an analysis of demonstratives. We could give the gist of Kaplan's
analysis by saying that a use of a demonstrative like 'that yacht' is to be
analysed by:
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dthat + [demonstration]
This puts a lot of weight onto the technical term 'dthat' which Kaplan
introduces. He gives a canonical explanation of the notion in 'Afterthoughts'. Kaplan writes:
The word 'dthat' was intended to be a surrogate for a true demonstrative, and the
description which completes it was intended to be a surrogate for the completing
demonstration. On this interpretation 'dthat' is a syntactically complete singular
term that requires no syntactical completion by an operand. (A 'pointing', being
extralinguistic, could hardly be a part of syntax.) The description completes the
character of the associated occurrence of 'dthat', but makes no contribution to
content. Like a whispered aside or a gesture, the description is thought of as offthe-record (i.e., off the content record). It determines and directs attention to what
is being said, but the manner in which it does so is not strictly par? of what is asserted. The semantic role of the description is pre-propositional; it induces no complex, descriptive element into content. (Kaplan 1989a: 581)
Ordinarily, then, 'dthat' is to be coupled with a description, which stands in
for the demonstration used in conjunction with a demonstrative. In this
framework, how could we make sense of the idea that the experienced location of an object has a special connection with the meaning of the visual
demonstrative referring to it? In fact, Kaplan sets out a proposal of
Michael Bennett's which addresses exactly this point:
Michael Bennett has proposed that only places be demonstrata and that we require
an explicit or implicit common noun phrase to accompany the demonstrative, so
that:
that [pointing at a person]
becomes:
dthat [the person who is there [pointing at a place]]
(Kaplan 1989b: 527-8)
This proposal of Bennett's is indeed the obvious way to accommodate,
within Kaplan's framework, the insight that there is a special connection
between the experienced location of an object and the visual demonstrative which refers to it. The trouble is that the demonstration, in
Kaplan's account, is intended to fix the reference of the demonstrative.
Consequently, if the descriptive phrase, 'the person who is there [pointing
at a place]', is to fix the reference of the demonstrative, 'that person', then
there is no possibility of referring to a person while being under an illusion
as to the location of that person. But this rules out the possibility of
demonstrative identification of objects seen in mirrors, through prisms,
and so on; and these certainly are real possibilities. We could rule out the
possibility of error here only by supposing that the place in question is
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identified only as 'the place at which that person is located'; but then the
spatial demonstration cannot fix the reference of the demonstrative.
If we want, within Kaplan's framework, to accommodate the insight
that there is a special connection between the experienced location of an
object and the visual demonstrative which refers to it, then we have to keep
Bennett's proposal but rework the explanation of 'dthat'. In effect, all that
Kaplan tells us about the correct interpretation of 'dthat' in the passage
quoted above is that when coupled with a demonstration which singles out
an object uniquely, it yields a term whose contribution to any proposition
is to identify the object on whose modal properties the modal status of the
proposition depends.
There is, though, more to say about the meaning of 'dthat'. We can ask
how the prefixing of 'dthat' to a demonstration affects the cognitive role of
propositions involving the term, and we can ask how the prefixing of
'dthat' to a demonstration affects the behaviour of propositions involving
the term in inferences which trade on identity.
The conclusions we reached already imply that the way to proceed here
would be to:
(a) keep the analysis of a demonstrative as: dthat + demonstration,
but use the conception of a 'demonstration' as a way of achieving
a visual fix on the object, rather than the conception of a demonstration as an instrument of communication;
(b) interpret the prefixing of 'dthat' as implying that what follows is
an indication of the binding principles governing your current
attention to the object; this will determine the cognitive significance of the term (the way in which propositions involving it are
to be verified, and the way in which to act on propositions involving the term); and
(c) lay down that the validity of inferences trading on identity
depends on whether the same binding principles are being used in
connection with the demonstratives involved.
Points (a)-(c) would, of course, be consistent with the point Kaplan was
most anxious to urge in connection with 'dthat': namely, that only the
object referred to, and not any of the descriptive or quasi-descriptive
material involved in singling out that object, are relevant to the evaluation
of the modal status of propositions involving 'dthat'.
We might roughly sum up the gist of this approach by saying that, in
addition to Kaplan's comments specifically on the evaluation of modal status, 'dthat' has been reinterpreted as a device signalling that what follows it
is an articulation of the binding principles governing the act of attention
that has been used to achieve a visual fix on the object referred to. This
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110
Sense
Sense
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concept of the property constitute, respectively, knowledge of what it is for propositions of these forms to be true. Provided a subject knows what it is for identifications like '<5 = a' to be true, a link is set up between his Idea, a, and his entire
repertoire of conceptual knowledge, and he will be able to grasp as many propositions of the form 'a is F' as he has concepts of being F. His Ideas make contact
with his concepts, so to speak, at the fundamental level. (Evans 1982:111-12)
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Sense
would not rely upon a causal-perceptual link. Rather, they would use perceptual information to give a descriptive identification of the object. So
such a demonstrative, 'yonder object', would identify its referent as the
tomato at such-and-such a locationas 'the tomato there'where the
location is identified using the primitive frame of reference involved in
vision. Here the object has been identified by its type and location, without
relying on a causal-perceptual link between it and the subject. Using this
kind of demonstrative, it would be possible for our subject to make reference to tomato A, the tomato hidden by the unsuspected mirror. This kind
of perceptual demonstrative, using perceptual information to give in effect
a kind of descriptive identification of the object, seems perfectly well
defined, though, as I said, we do not actually have such demonstratives. In
using a demonstrative of this second type, it would be impossible to make
a mistake of identification in articulating a judgement of location.
Suppose we now introduce a further type of demonstrative. For a
demonstrative of our new type to refer to an object, the object must be at
the place where there seems to be an object of the relevant sort (so in this
respect it is just like a demonstrative of the second type). But there is a further condition on reference: for the demonstrative to refer to an object
there must also be a causal-perceptual link between that object and the use
of the demonstrative. So we have two separate conditions on successful reference, descriptive and causal, which must both be met for the demonstrative to refer. On Evans's account, this is how we actually use perceptual
demonstratives (Evans 1982: 132-5).
The problem with this is that it assimilates demonstratives to descriptive
names, in the following sense: it implies that if you make a mistake about
the location of the object, you are not in a position to refer to the object at
all. So you cannot refer demonstratively to an object which you see through
a prism that you do not know is there. This view has no plausibility at all. It
implies that you cannot even think demonstratively about an object you
can see perfectly well, because you are subject to some illusion about its
location.
A further difficulty is that this account rejects the possibility of auditory
demonstratives which may refer to ordinary physical objects without you
having any perception of their locations. If I hear an ear-shattering drill at
work somewhere outside my room, I may have no perception or knowledge
of where it is. Nonetheless, it is a datum that I can refer to the drill by means
of a demonstrative, and make complaints like, 'That drill is noisy'. On
Evans's account, the lack of perception of location means that I cannot
refer, on the strength of my hearing it, to 'that drill'. On his account, I do
not, in my understanding of the demonstrative, have the resources to let me
understand a proposition of the form, 'That drill is identical to 6' . So I can-
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not understand any proposition of the form, That drill is F'. For on this
account, any predicate F is first introduced and explained at that fundamental level of thought. An understanding of the demonstrative, on this
view, requires that I perceive the location of the drill. To abandon any component here would mean that Evans lost his analysis of the role of location
in the understanding of a visual demonstrative. But the whole picture is not
credible. Predicates such as 'noisy' are obviously first introduced and
explained at the level of demonstrative propositions themselves, used in
connection with perceived objects. As we saw in Chapter 4, it is arguable
that an auditory demonstrative such as 'that drill' is dependent on there
being other ways of referring to the thing; an understanding of that auditory demonstrative does mean that you can comprehend the possibility of
a more direct, perhaps visual confrontation with the thing itself. But this
has to do with the relations among different types of demonstrative; not a
relation between demonstratives and some hypothesized non-demonstrative type of singular identification.
The background problem is Evans's explanation of why location matters for visual demonstratives, and in particular his conception of the 'fundamental level of thought'. It seems evident that we cannot sustain this
conception of a level of thought, more fundamental than the level of perceptual demonstratives, at which predicates of physical things are first
introduced and explained. In the case of physical objects, we have to
acknowledge that predicates such as 'flashing' must be first introduced and
explained at the level of perceptual demonstratives, in the context of judgements such as, 'That light is flashing'. The idea that observational predicates have to be first introduced in the context of some other level of
thought than demonstrative thought, so that the importance of location
can be explained in terms of its link to that level, cannot be sustained. The
reason why location matters for the meaning of a visual demonstrative has
to be explained rather in terms of the special role of location in attention
and binding.
6
The Relational View of Experience
1. The Explanatory Role of Experience
I have been arguing that experience of objects has an explanatory role to
play: it explains our ability to think demonstratively about perceived
objects. Experience of a perceived object is what provides you with knowledge of the reference of a demonstrative referring to it. In this chapter I
want to look at the way in which we should characterize the phenomenal
content of experience; that is, how we should give the most direct and
explicit characterization of the qualitative nature of particular experiential states. I do not think we can expect there to be one uniform style of
characterization that applies equally to all conscious states: to seeing a
rainbow and to feeling anxious, to having a word on the tip of your tongue
and to remembering an autumn afternoon from years ago. In this chapter,
I want to focus on the characterization of our perceptual experience of
objects. What is important about this case is that we have a way of telling
when the characterization is correct. Whatever else is true of it, experience
of objects has to explain our ability to think about those very objects. So a
characterization of the phenomenal content of experience of objects has
to show how it is that experience, so described, can be what makes it possible for us to think about those objects demonstratively.
Suppose, for example, you hold that experience of objects is a matter
merely of having sensations, and that a characterization of the phenomenal content of experience is exhausted by a characterization of sensation.
Then you leave it opaque how it is that experience of objects could make it
possible to think about them. At best, the subject possessed of such sensations could formulate descriptions such as 'whatever is causing this sensation'. It is, on this view, opaque how experience of an object could
constitute the kind of simple acquaintance with the object that provides
knowledge of the reference of a simple demonstrative.
In this chapter, I will argue that if we are to acknowledge the explanatory role of experience of objects, we have to appeal to what I will call a
Relational View of experience. On a Relational View, the qualitative character of the experience is constituted by the qualitative character of the
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scene perceived. I will argue that only this view, on which experience of an
object is a simple relation holding between perceiver and object, can characterize the kind of acquaintance with objects that provides knowledge of
reference.
Of course, we have so far not begun to survey the various views you
might hold here. In particular, I have not mentioned views on which the
content of perception is one or another kind of representational state. But
I postpone considering such views for a moment, in order to look once
again at the basic point: that experience of objects has a role to play in
explaining our knowledge of reference.
Suppose that you live in one of a terraced row of houses, and you sometimes hear noises from the house next door. Being of an enquiring turn of
mind, you formulate hypotheses about what objects are to be found next
door. There's a couple, you conjecture, a man and a woman, though you
never see them directlythere are two cars outside, you occasionally hear
noises coming simultaneously from different parts of the house next door,
and sometimes there are raised voices. You conjecture that there's a model
railway next doorthat's the only hypothesis you can think of to explain
some of what you hear. And so on. Not all the objects you posit are postulated as noise-producers: for example, you might postulate a mirror at a
certain place, in explaining the occasional sound of an electric razor. If you
are of a formal turn of mind, you might write down your hypotheses. You
could say: There are objects xt, x 2 ,..., xn, which stand to one another in the
following relations. . ., and which stand in the following relations to the
audible phenomena . . . You could, in effect, give a functional characterization of all the particular objects you postulate as being next door. And
you might test and confirm your hypotheses over a long period, without
ever catching sight of those things.
Suppose now that the day finally arrives when you do get a look inside
the house. What does this add to your knowledge? Perhaps the hypotheses
you formed had been amply confirmed long before your look inside, so the
existence of objects with these particular functional roles does not get significant further confirmation from your observation. Nor is it that you can
now refer to those particular objects but could not refer to them before.
You could have referred to those particulars before. The functional roles
you postulated were, so to speak, token functional roles postulated ultimately in the explanation of particular auditory phenomena. So you already
had the conceptual materials to identify uniquely each of the relevant
objects.
The contrast between the knowledge you have now, on the basis of a
look at the objects, and the knowledge you had before of the existence of
objects with particular functional roles, is that when you see the thing, you
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windows is surely correct. But, the intuition runs, the existence of cognitive
processing is incompatible with the 'glass' model: the whole point about
looking through a window is that the window does not have to construct a
representation of the world outside. But what the study of the brain tells us
is that in vision, the brain is actively involved in constructing a representation of the world. Therefore, following this line of thought, we have to
abandon the 'pane of glass' model. The obvious alternative model is the
television set, which does indeed laboriously construct an image from the
information input to it. Now both these models are homuncularthey
implicitly appeal to the perceiver who is looking at the scene through the
glass, or on the screen. So neither of these models should be taken too
seriously. But if you are caught by the idea that the existence of brain processing in vision means that a Representationalist View must be correct, it
may be helpful to consider another analogy. Suppose we have a medium
which, like glass, can be transparent. But suppose that, unlike glass, it is
highly volatile, and needs constant adjustment and recalibration if it is to
remain transparent in different contexts. Suppose, in fact, that the adjustment required is always sensitive to the finest details of the scene being
viewed. The upshot of the adjustment, in each case, is still not the construction of a representation on the medium of the scene being viewed; the
upshot of the adjustment is simply that the medium becomes transparent.
You might think of visual processing as a bit like that. It is not that the
brain is constructing a conscious inner representation whose intrinsic
character is independent of the environment. It is, rather, that there is a
kind of complex adjustment that the brain has to undergo, in each context,
in order that you can be visually related to the things around you; so that
you can see them, in other words.
If we think of visual processing in this way, we can, of course, acknowledge that the adjustment and recalibration may not always yield full transparency. You may, for example, be looking at the world with a jaundiced
eye, so that everything you see seems to have a yellowish cast. In that case
your visual experience would not have exactly the same content as the
visual experience of an ordinary observer looking at the same scene. But
this point does not tell in favour of a Representational view; it is entirely
consistent with the Relational View. The scene through a pane of yellowish
glass will be different to the scene through a pane of purely transparent
glass. That does not show that in either case the transparency should be
understood as a matter of a representation being inscribed on the glass. It
is just a mistake to suppose that the Relational View is undermined by
the fact that the idiosyncracies of the perceiver may affect phenomenal
content.
You might wonder whether the idea of an egocentric frame of reference
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for conscious vision is consistent with the Relational View. But the
Relational View says only that the qualitative character of conscious
experience is constituted by the characteristics and layout of the objects
one is seeing. It is consistent with that to say that only certain of their characteristics constitute one's experience of them. For example, hidden
characteristics of the objects will play no role in constituting one's experience of them. Hence, the egocentric spatial layout of the scene may play a
role in constituting the qualitative character of one's experience of the
scene. So long as the ordinary notion of a 'view' is coherent, it is coherent
to suppose that the egocentric layout of the scene could constitute the content of someone's experience of it.
Consequently, we can maintain a Relational View of experience but still
hold that conscious attention singles out its targets in a way that is commensurable with the underlying information-processing used in verifying
and acting on the basis of propositions about a demonstrated object.
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Without arguing the point here, I do want to suggest that the argument that
knowledge would not be possible, on the common factor approach, is not
the fundamental issue; the common factor theorist could as readily as anyone else define a notion of 'knowledge' which more or less matched the
ordinary concept. For example, there is no evident difficulty in the idea that
a common factor image could be a reliable sign of an external phenomenon; if you already have the concept of that phenomenon, there is no particular difficulty about using a reliable sign of it to give you knowledge of
it. The fundamental objection to the common factor approach is that on
the common factor approach, experience cannot play its explanatory role;
we cannot understand how experience, so conceived, could be what provides us with our concepts of the objects around us. As Child puts it, 'to
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looking to see could provide you with knowledge of which cup is being
talked about. It is, therefore, entirely obscure how you could have achieved
knowledge of which cup is in question.
A different view of the content of perception is set out by Tyler Burge
(1991). Burge uses the idea that there are 'demonstrative elements' in the
content of perception. A 'demonstrative element' can be as it is, whether or
not it refers to an object, and independently of which object it refers to. The
reference of a particular demonstrative element is fixed by the context of
the perception in which it occurs. In different possible contexts, one and the
same demonstrative element would refer to different external objects, or to
no object at all (Burge 1991: 208). Unlike Davies, Burge's view does find a
place for the representation of particular objects in experience.
Can this view acknowledge the role of experience of objects in making
it possible for us to think about objects? On the face of it, this view is open
to exactly the same problem as we saw facing the disjunctivist. It ascribes
an intentional content to perception, but gives no explanation of how it is
that we are able to grasp that intentional content. Consequently, it does not
seem that the view can explain why experience of the world is fundamental
to our ability to think about the objects around us. Experience of objects has
simply itself become one among many ways of thinking about objects.
So it does not seem capable of explaining how thought about objects is
achieved.
You might reply that the demonstrative element is not to be regarded as
something that is itself immediately involved in thought about the object;
it belongs to a category of perceptual representation that is more primitive
than thought, and therefore it can play an explanatory role here. But the
move to thinking in terms of 'non-conceptual' content does not help. The
explanatory role of the perception is still limited. All that is within the perceiver's subjective life is the demonstrative element itself. The aspects of
context which fix the reference of a particular demonstrative element on a
particular occasion are not themselves to be assumed to be available to the
subject (Burge 1991: 203-6). The thing that is subjectively availablethe
demonstrative elementcannot of itself, therefore, distinguish between
presentation of one object and presentation of another. Nor can it, of
itself, provide an assurance that the demonstrative refers at all. It is, therefore, opaque how the demonstrative element could provide the subject with
an understanding of the demonstrative term. The demonstrative element
itself could not provide knowledge of what the term refers to. The only way
to supplement the picture, to provide the subject with knowledge of what
the demonstrative element is referring to in this context, would be to provide the subject with knowledge of the context in which the demonstrative
element is occurring. But this knowledge will evidently not be provided by
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the initial perception of the object itself, on Burge's account, nor does it
seem likely to provide a demonstrative identification of the thing, rather
than a description of it. So Burge's picture of the content of experience
cannot acknowledge the role of experience of objects in explaining our
understanding of demonstratives.
I think that one powerful reason for resistance to the Relational View of
experience is the thought that to characterize the content of an experience,
it cannot be enough simply to say which object is being experienced: you
must also say how the object is being experienced, you must characterize
the way in which the object is being perceived by the subject. After all, two
people could be seeing the very same object, and yet the intrinsic character
of their experiences be quite different. This in itself is undeniable. It is the
next step that leads to rejection of the Relational View. The next step is to
say that the way in which the object is given is independent of whether the
object exists, and independent of whether the subject is experiencing one
or many similar objects.
On the Classical View I outlined in Chapter 1, though, the way in which
you are given an object has to be what causes and justifies the pattern of use
that you make of the demonstrative. But for the way in which you are given
the object to justify the use that you make of the demonstrative, it really
matters whether there is an object there at all, and if so, whether it is one or
many. If, as on the Classical View, ways of being given objects are to be
individuated in terms of which patterns of use they cause and justify, then
which way of being given an object is in question is not something that is
indifferent as between the cases in which there are many, one, and no
objects there at all.
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on the common factor view, could be what explained your grasp of the
validity of the transition from 'It is not the case that that tree is on fire' to
'There is something which is not on fire'. In contrast, consider the
Relational View, on which the object itself is a constituent of your conscious experience as you attend to the object. Since the conscious experience has the object itself as a constituent, it has as a constituent the object
whose existence is what makes the existential generalization true. So when
you interpret the demonstrative in the premise by consciously attending to
the object, this interpretation is one that guarantees the truth of the existential generalization. On this picture, someone who uses a demonstrative
term which does not refer is in something like the position of a person who
uses a logical connective for which there is no truth-table. So, for example,
consider someone who uses a sign '*' subject to the following rules of
inference:
A
A*B
A*B
A
And those are all the rules of inference. In particular, you cannot, from
A*B', infer B. You can only infer A. So there is no truth-table to be drawn
for this sign. Any truth-table which explains why verification of A*B'
requires that you have both A and B, will have to say that the truth of 'A*B'
requires the truth of A and the truth of B. But then the truth-table will validate the elimination rule, that from 'A*B' you can infer B, as well as the
rule that from 'A*B' you can infer A. So if you ask, 'What does "*" mean?',
the only answer is that it has no meaning. Someone who uses such a sign
has just made a mistake: they think it has a meaning when it has none. Now
it is certainly arguable that someone who uses such a sign as '*' must have
made some kind of error of rationality: just thinking about the situation
ought to have been enough to allow them to see the mistake. So there is a
marked contrast here with the case of demonstratives. Even if you are
maximally rational, it can, in principle, happen that you are the victim of
hallucination or radical perceptual illusion, and so suppose that a demonstrative refers when in fact it does not. But while that is indeed an important contrast, the situation of someone who uses a demonstrative even
though it refers to nothing is still formally the same as that of someone who
uses a logical connective for which there is no truth-table. Any account of
our understanding of logical connectives must, on a classical account,
explain how it can be enough to guarantee knowledge of the existence of
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facts about the person, such as their age and sex, may be readily apparent
(Johansson 1973; Runeson and Frykholm 1983). Here you can use the
demonstrative, 'that woman', and your use of the term depends on temporally extended observation; a momentary observation would yield only the
random array of lights. Or again, suppose you consider someone who is
playing a guitar and thinking, 'This guitar is going out of tune', so pausing
to adjust the tuning. Here it is essential to the whole operation that the
demonstrative 'this guitar' refers to something of which you have visual,
tactual, and auditory information.
The problem now is that on the common factor approach, when you
consider what is involved in keeping track of the object across time, or
across sensory modality, it seems that it will have to involve different
sensory presentations that, moment by moment, or from modality to
modality, are being used to interpret the demonstrative. These sensory presentations cannot in themselves guarantee that you are succeeding in keeping track of the thing from modality to modality, or from moment to
moment. After all, on the common factor account, you could have exactly
the same sensory presentations whether or not there was an object there at
all; and certainly you could, on this view, have the same sensory presentations even though you were not in fact managing to keep track of a single
object, but were encountering different things from moment to moment, or
from modality to modality. The problem now is not existence but uniqueness: the problem is not that there may be reference failure, and nothing
being talked about, but too many objects which are candidates for being
the reference of the term. (The parallel would be with a logical constant
whose rules for use underspecify the meaning of the term, so that there are
different truth-tables which would all validate those rules for use.)
In consequence of this, there are certain basic patterns of inference
involving demonstratives whose correctness cannot be grasped by someone interpreting the demonstrative by means of conscious attention to the
object, if 'conscious attention' is conceived on the common factor model.
For example, there is the Temporal Case, in which the two premises state
knowledge which depends on you having kept track of a single thing:
That woman is running;
That woman is jumping;
Hence, that woman is running and jumping.
Recognizing the validity of the inference requires that your experience
should make the sameness of the object transparent to you; but, on the
common factor conception, that is precisely what your experience of the
object cannot do. On the common factor conception, your experience of
the object would have been exactly the same whether there was one woman
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7
The Explanatory Role of
Consciousness
1. Consciousness as Higher-Order Thought
I am pursuing the question: how must we think of experience of objects, if
experience of an object is to be what provides you with your knowledge of
the reference of a demonstrative? When we are given any analysis of what
consciousness is, one way in which we can test such an analysis is by asking:
if this is what it is to experience an object, could that be what explains your
knowledge of the reference of a demonstrative?
Suppose we look briefly at the account of consciousness as higher-order
thought provided by David Rosenthal (1997). According to Rosenthal, a
mental state is conscious just in case it is accompanied by a non-inferential,
non-dispositional, assertoric thought to the effect that one is in that very
state. So, in particular, suppose we ask what the difference is between a conscious perception and a perceptual state which is not conscious. In general,
says Rosenthal, a perceptual state's being conscious consists in its having
two sorts of properties: sensory qualitiessuch as sensory redness, in the
case of vision, or throbbing, in the case of a painand the property of
being conscious. A state can have sensory qualities but fail to be conscious,
because there is no accompanying thought to the effect that one is in that
very state. According to Rosenthal, that is exactly what happens in cases of
blindsight. The blindsighted subject has the perception with the sensory
qualities, but does not have the higher-order thought to the effect that he is
in that very perceptual state.
Of course, this higher-order thought need not itself be conscious; for
the higher-order thought to be conscious you would need to have a
further thought, about that higher-order thought, and in general we do not
usually attend to our own higher-order thoughts. So it is in virtue of your
unconscious higher-order thought, to the effect that you are having
a particular perception, that the perception itself can be said to be
conscious.
Is this the kind of description of consciousness that would allow us to
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see how consciousness of a perceived object could be what explains knowledge of the reference of a demonstrative? On this view, consciousness of
the perceived object would be a matter of (a) perceiving the object, and
(b) that perception being a conscious perception. What makes the perception conscious is that you have a higher-order thought to the effect that you
are having that perception. But the theory has to be developed somewhat.
Which aspects of the perception are conscious will depend on exactly
which higher-order thought you have about your perception. This is how
Rosenthal explains the way in which acquisition of new concepts can affect
your conscious experience. Gaining new concepts means that you can have
a wider range of higher-order thoughts about exactly which perceptions
you are having, so that a wider range of aspects of those perceptions can be
conscious. So how is the fact that the perception is a perception of that very
object to be reckoned into consciousness? The only way in which we can
get that effect, on Rosenthal's theory, is by saying that the higherorder thought you have, to the effect that you are having a perception, is a
thought that your perception is a perception of that very object. The
higher-order thought itself, then, must use a perceptual demonstrative
referring to the object.
The immediate problem now is that this notion of 'consciousness of the
object' seems to provide us with nothing in the way of an explanation of
how it is that we have knowledge of the reference of the demonstrative.
'Consciousness of the object' consists in perceiving the object together
with having a thought to the effect that one is perceiving that very object.
But 'having a thought to the effect that one is perceiving that very
object' presumes that you understand the demonstrative vised to refer to
the object; that is the only way you have of singling out the object you are
identifying. So this account simply presupposes the phenomenon we are
trying to explain. That is, it simply presupposes knowledge of the reference
of the demonstrative, and cannot explain how you have knowledge of the
reference of the demonstrative.
It would, incidentally, by no means be an adequate response to this
point to say that we must, instead of higher-order thoughts, appeal to the
'qualia' or sensational properties that the perception has, in explaining
what it is to be conscious of an object. For that move does not of itself let
us see why consciousness of the object should be what explains the capacity
to think demonstrative thoughts about it. To give an analogy: there are the
bases on which we find out about whether something is carrying an electric
charge (is it plugged in? and so on). And there are the consequences we
draw from a judgement that something is carrying an electric charge (it
should work fine if we switch it on now). You might grasp all these procedures, without knowing anything about what electricity actually is.
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this functionalist analysis, experiencing the object is the very same thing as
having a collection of dispositions to use a demonstrative term in various
ways. So we would lose the explanations. We would lose the right to say that
use of the term is explained by knowledge of reference, which in turn is
explained by experience of the object.
This does not mean that I am giving a functionalist analysis of what it is
to be conscious of an object. I am saying that consciousness of an object
does have a functional role to play; and any characterization of what it is to
be conscious of an object must acknowledge that consciousness of objects
has that explanatory role. But this view stands in opposition to the idea
that all there is to being conscious of an object is being able to use the
demonstrative term correctly. On the contrary, since consciousness of the
object has to be what explains your ability to use the demonstrative term
correctly, it cannot be identified with the ability to use the demonstrative. This is not to say that functionalist analysis is altogether impossible, but it is not going to be easy to find a functional characterization
of experience of the object which will acknowledge the point that experience of the object is what explains the pattern of use that you make of a
demonstrative term, rather than merely identifying experience of the
object with the tendency to engage in that pattern of use. Your experience
of the object has to be what ultimately explains your ability to verify
propositions about that thing, and to act on the basis of propositions
about that thing.
Suppose that, in this light, we consider Daniel Dennett's early
'Cognitive Theory of Consciousness' (1981), in which he famously presented a flow-chart for consciousness. Since we are specifically concerned
with experience of objects and its role in our understanding of demonstratives, what particularly concerns us are the relations between the areas
Dennett labelled 'Perceptual Analysis', 'M' (a short-term memory store),
'Control', and ' PR' (an area that confirms which speech-acts to execute).
The centre of the system is dialogue between Control and M. The idea is
that Control may in effect interrogate short-term memory for the answers
to questions in which it is interested (the reasons for the interest not
themselves being explained in this model); short-term memory has input
from both perceptual analysis and a problem-solving module. The answers
that Control receives from short-term memory may in turn lead to activation of PR, so that there is in the end production of speech. Dennett's
view now is that this characterizes all that there is to being conscious. In
particular, consciousness of objects would be a matter of having input
from perceived objects as part of the content of short-term memory
(Dennett 1981: 169).
The common-sense objection to this model is stated by David
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a particular shape, for instance, then in virtue of having that shape the
object is in a complex dispositional state. Shape combines with the other
characteristics of the object to yield the behaviour of the object. So, for
example, a round thing will roll, but only if it is made of a rigid material, of
a sufficient density, and suitably propelled. A full characterization of the
functional role of roundness would of course be quite complicated, but
you can see in principle how it would go. We could simultaneously give
functionalist characterizations of other characteristics of concrete objects,
such as rigidity and density. Yet we would not ordinarily think of shape
properties as exhaustively characterized by their functional descriptions.
We would ordinarily regard shape properties as the paradigmatic categorical properties of objects. Roundness is the reason why the thing tends to
roll if suitably propelled and so on; it is the intrinsic ground of the complex
functional state described.
Why does it seem so evident to us that we have this conception of shape
as a categorical property of the object? I think that the reason it seems so
evident is that we take experience of shape properties to be confronting us
with the categorical properties that underlie the object's tendencies to various behaviours. Experience of shape properties is what explains knowledge of what the shape property is. It is experience of the shape that
confronts us with the categorical property, and thereby explains our grasp
of the concept of shape as categorical. If this is right, then perceptual
experience has a theoretical role to play. Experience of the world is what
explains our grasp of the concepts of observable properties. So for any
description of the phenomenal character of experience of shapes, we can
ask whether phenomenal character, so described, could be what explains
our grasp of the concepts of the categorical properties of objects around
us. For example, an analysis on which experience of shapes is a matter of
having sensations of a particular sort would evidently fail us at this point.
All that having sensations would do is to provide you with knowledge of
yet another of the dispositional characteristics of roundness: that round
objects tend to produce this kind of visual sensation when seen in suitable
light. Merely having the sensation could not explain how it is that you have
the conception of the categorical property of roundness.
I want to propose that there is similarly a sense in which experience of
the object confronts you with the identity of the categorical thing itself. Let
me explain what I mean by this, by setting out why we need the notion of
the identity of a macroscopic object. What can we causally explain by
appealing to the identity of a macroscopic thing? I think that there are two
types of phenomenon we use the notion of 'this particular object' in
explaining. First, objects have tendencies to propagate causal influence
over time. We could say:
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Suppose the object would, in the absence of interactions with other objects, remain
uniform with regard to characteristic Q over a period of time. Then a marka
modification of Q into Q'is transmitted over the period if the object has Q' at
all points throughout the period without additional interventions. (Salmon
1984:148)
And we can say that an object at a later time is capable of bearing marks
transmitted by the way it was earlier. This is a doubly counterfactual formulation: whether we have a case of mark transmission depends on how
things would have gone had it not been for the original marking interaction. And the later object has the potential for mark transmission from the
earlier object. It doesn't matter if there actually are any marking interactions; what matters is what would have happened if there had been any. In
the case of an ordinary physical object, we would usually suppose that
these counterfactuals are not barely true; that sameness of the object over
time is what explains this internal causal connectedness. Suppose that
while at school you carve your initials on a desk. When you revisit years
later, there they still are. In this case, the identity of the object over time
seems to be the categorical ground of its potentiality to sustain this kind of
marking interaction. The reason why the marks are there is that it's the
same desk. If this is right, then sameness of an ordinary object over time is
what causally explains the potential of the object for mark transmission
over time. We need the notion of a categorical object, whose categorical
identity can be the ground of its complex of dispositions to interact with
other objects.
The second type of phenomenon in explaining which we use the identity
of macroscopic objects has to do with the tendency of macroscopic objects
to produce ranges of correlated effects. For example, one person addressing a group of people may produce a range of effects in them: there may be
a shared sense of lassitude, or on the other hand intense intellectual excitement, after such an encounter. What explains the correlation in the effects
produced is, in part, that it was one and the same person addressing all
these people.
These explanations, of mark transmission over time, or of correlated
effects at a time, by appeal to the identity of a macroscopic object, are in a
sense independent: that is, they are not merely promissory notes for some
more fundamental microphysical explanation. They are complete as they
stand. Hilary Putnam (1975) remarked long ago that when we explain the
inability of a square peg to get through a round hole by appealing to the
rigidity of the materials used and the fact that the cross-section of the peg
is greater than the diameter of the hole, this explanation is complete as it
stands; it is not merely a promissory note to be redeemed by an excursion
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is a dispositional characteristic of the thing, a tendency it has to yield a certain result if treated in a particular way.
On the analysis of blindsight suggested by Milner and Goodale (1995),
this would, I think, be exactly the right way to describe what the blindsight
patient has. As we saw in Chapter 3, Milner and Goodale distinguish
between an 'action' pathway and a 'perception' pathway in vision. The
'action' pathway is in general remote from consciousness, but holds the
information used in the visual control of action. Roughly, much of what
Gibson said about affordances seems to apply to the 'action' pathway; the
'action' pathway determines the affordances provided by the object. The
'perception' pathway, in contrast, is what sustains visual experience of
the object. In blindsight, according to Milner and Goodale, the primary
visual cortex is damaged, so neither the 'action' nor the 'perception' pathway receives input from it. But the 'action' pathway, unlike the 'perception'
pathway, does still receive input from several other visual structures. So the
blindsighted patient can grasp many of the Gibsonian affordances provided by the object, without yet having conscious visual experience of the
thing.
Gibson seems to have thought that the affordances provided by an
object are all that we ever see. This view is hard to sustain. Once, when I
visited Warwick University Psychology Department, someone told me the
following story. One year, pigeons started nesting in the concrete interstices
of the multi-storey car parks in the university. Presumably, according to
my informant, pigeons perceive these Gibsonian affordances directly.
These would immediately look like good nesting places. But it had never
occurred to humans that it was so. These affordances are not perceived by
humans. But it is not as if the matter is entirely opaque to us. For though
we cannot perceive the affordances directly, we can see the reasons why
these interstices would be good for nesting. We do not see the affordance
itself; we see the ground of the affordance. This should be quite puzzling,
on Gibson's view. Gibson seems to have thought that ordinary conscious
vision, in whatever species, provides knowledge only of the affordances the
environment provides for that species. So a cat chasing a bird up a tree, for
example, sees only what the tree affords it, the cat; the cat does not see what
affordances the tree provides for the bird. If this were right, we should only
be able to see that the car parks afford car-parking, and their potential for
nesting should be as inscrutable to us as it is to a cat. But that is not how
things are. Or again, suppose, for example, that an unfamiliar piece of
apparatus appears on a workbench. I have no idea what this thing is for. I
don't know if can touch itmaybe I will be electrocuted, or the thing will
blind me, if I do that. Or maybe it is simply the latest kind of television, or
a paper weight. So I don't see it as affording anything in particular. In that
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though, our analysis of what experience is has to acknowledge that experience of the world is what explains our grasp of what the world is intrinsically like.
Experience of the object has to explain how it is that we can gasp
demonstratives referring to the object as referring to a categorical object,
not merely a collection of potentialities. This means that, given any
description of the phenomenal character of experience of objects, we can
ask whether experience, so described, would be capable of explaining our
grasp of a demonstrative referring to the thing.
A simple illustration of how this requirement can be violated is again
provided by the idea that experience of an object is a matter of having sensations produced by the object. Merely having sensations could explain
how it is that you have the conception of the object as a hypothesized cause
of those sensations; having sensations could explain how it is that you can
identify the object as having a disposition to produce those sensations. But
it could not provide you with knowledge of the categorical thing itself, the
thing which is causing those sensations. But that is exactly what happens
when you rely on your experience of the object to interpret a demonstrative
referring to that object. So the picture of experience as the having of sensations once again does not seem to be tenable.
These points put significant weight on our conception of what it is to
experience an object. If experience of the object is to be what explains our
grasp of the object as categorical, then we cannot think of experience of
the object as consisting merely of grasp of a demonstrative thought about
the object; it has to be what explains our capacity for demonstrative
thought about the thing. So experience of the object should not be regarded as consisting in grasping a thought about the object, 'in the mode:
vision', as we might say. Rather, consciousness of the object has to be a
more primitive state than thought about the object, which makes thought
about the object possible by revealing the object to you. I will argue that we
have to think of experience of the object as a primitively relational state,
with the object itself figuring as a constituent of the experience. We have to
regard experience of the object as reaching all the way to the object itself,
and thereby providing us with the conception of that categorical object.
4. Representationalism
It seems to me, then, that the need to acknowledge what I earlier called the
Intrinsicness Condition, that experience is experience of the categorical,
argues in favour of what, in the last chapter, I called a Relational View of
experience, on which the qualitative character of a visual experience is
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ation. But the question for the Representationalist is whether it is the categorical or the dispositional that is being represented by the system. On the
face of it, there are two different views you could have of what this kind of
causal theory delivers as the representational content of an experience:
(1) The experience represents the properties as dispositional and the
objects as collections of functional connections.
(2) The experience represents the properties and objects as categorical, as the grounds of various complexes of dispositions.
These are quite different views. On view (1), experience represents the
world only, as it were, up to functional isomorphism. That is, suppose there
were an environment which was, from a functional or dispositional point
of view, structurally just like our actual environment, including the structure of its impacts on the brain. Suppose, for example, that you are currently watching a game of tennis, so your environment consists of the
tennis players and the ball. The simplest way to imagine a functional analogue of this environment is to suppose a brain inside a complicated vat,
which has internal structures that correspond to, for example, ordinary
tennis balls and tennis rackets, in that the causal impacts that the tennis
rackets can make on the ball have their structural analogues in the causal
impacts that two types of internal vat-configuration can have on a third
type of vat-configuration. And suppose that this parallel in causal structure is actually quite far-reaching, so that all the items that we ordinarily
encounter, and the causal relations among them, in so far as they ever
affect us, and their causal relations to us, all have their structural analogues
in the patterns of causation among internal states of the vat and their
causal relations to the brain occupying the vat. Then, according to view (1),
our experience does not differentiate between our environment and the
environment found in the vat. According to view (1), experience represents
the world only up to functional isomorphism, so our experiences do not
differentiate between our actual environment and the environment found
in the vat.
Of course, the causal theory of representation was introduced in connection with Twin Earth cases, in which the locally known functional characteristics of two stuffswater and XYZ, for examplemay be the same.
The representations of those in an environment featuring water may
nonetheless be different in content to the representations of those in an
environment featuring XYZ. But this point still leaves it open that in either
case, the stuff being represented is still represented as a complex of powers,
some of which may not be known by the subject, rather than being represented as the categorical basis of a collection of powers. The microphysical
characteristics of water, or of XYZ, will typically be characterized using
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is why we have the guarantee that your representations will generally come
out true, because in each of the alternative scenarios, the world does have
that functional structure. But what you would have commonsensically
hoped for is some intimation that the world is the way you think it is. And
you do not get that reassurance by being told that one way or another, your
representational system is expressing truths. That is the intuitive reservation about Putnam's Proof. When you think it through, it is actually a
reservation about the dispositional interpretation of a causal theory of
content, precisely because the dispositional interpretation gives no role to
consciousness in providing us with our conception of what the world is
intrinsically like. We can accept Putnam's Proof only if we accept that we
have no conception of what the world is like, only a set of representations
which one way or another will be interpreted so as to come out true,
whichever way the world is.
On a Relational View, in contrast, we have to appeal to the ideas of categorical properties and categorical objects in characterizing the content of
experience. And I think it is instructive here to contrast Putnam's Proof
with the Relationalist response to the sceptic. The sceptic's idea is that the
qualitative character of a subject's experience could be as it is whether the
subject was in a world of trees and oceans, or in a vat. If the qualitative
character of the experience was the same, whichever scenariothe trees
and oceans, or the vatwas realized, then it is hard to see how the qualitative character of experience could be providing knowledge of intrinsic
objects and their characteristics. The categorical properties of trees and
oceans are quite different to the categorical properties of a vateven if
there is some sense in which the two are functionally isomorphic. So it is
hard to see how subjectively indistinguishable conscious experiences could
be providing knowledge of both ranges of categorical properties, in the
two scenarios envisaged. There seem to be just three possibilities. One is
that neither the experiences of the ordinary subject nor the experiences of
the vat subject provide knowledge of categorical objects and properties;
rather, in the first instance, all that the experiences provide is knowledge of
the types of sensation that the objects and properties tend to produce. As
we have seen, this view cannot acknowledge the explanatory role of experience. The two remaining possibilities are both consistent with the Relational View. The second option is that you might argue that the experiences
of the ordinary subject and the experiences of the vat subject would after
all be qualitatively different, because of the differences in the qualitative
characters of their surroundings, and that both sets of experiences could
provide knowledge of categorical objects and their properties. Finally, it
may be that the experiences of the ordinary subject and the experiences of
the vat subject are again qualitatively different, but that the experiences of
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in us. Rather, we simply use the simple ideas of perception in making our
ways through the world. But in fact we are using those simple ideas as signs
of their regular causes. So he is ascribing a representational content to those
ideas, and giving a causal analysis of how it is that they have that content.
Consider a sceptical hypothesis, such as the hypothesis that my experiences of redness are not caused by redness but by something else, or the
proposition that my experiences of squareness are not caused by squareness but by something else. Locke's answer to this is that simple ideas 'conform to their archetypes', are 'real', 'adequate', or 'true' (1975: IV. iv. 4;
II. xxx. 2; II. xxxi. 2; II. xxxii. 14). His point is that since, on his view, the
simple idea is merely a sign only of its regular cause, whatever that is, and
the word given meaning by its association with that idea therefore stands
only for the regular cause of that idea, whatever it is, the sceptical hypothesis amounts to the hypothesis that the regular cause of a simple idea is not
what the idea signifies; but whatever the regular cause of an idea is, that just
is what the idea signifies. Here is Locke putting the case:
simple Ideas, which since the Mind, as has been shewed, can by no means make to
it self, must necessarily be the product of Things operating on the Mind in a natural
way, and producing therein those Perceptions which by the Wisdom and Will of
our Maker they are ordained and adapted to. From whence it follows, that simple
Ideas are not fictions of our Fancies, but the natural and regular production of
Things without us, really operating upon us; and so carry with them all the
conformity which is intended; or which our state requires; For they represent to us
Things under those appearances which they are fitted to produce in us; whereby we
are enabled to distinguish the sorts of particular Substances, to discern the states
they are in, and so to take them for our Necessities, and apply them to our Uses.
Thus the Idea of Whiteness, or Bitterness, as it is in the Mind, exactly answering
that Power which is in any Body to produce it there, has all the real conformity it
can, or ought to have, with Things without us. (1975: IV. iv. 4)
I should emphasize that Locke's point here is about simple ideas generally;
the last sentence of the quotation applies to all simple ideas of perception,
not just to ideas of secondary qualities. If we put the upshot of this discussion in contemporary terms, and ask, 'How do I know that I am not a brain
in a vat?', where the point of the question is that if I were a brain in a vat,
the regular causes of my perceptions would be other than I take them to be,
the answer is that my words just do stand for the regular causes of my perceptions, whatever they are. So it is a priori that I am not a brain in a vat.
Locke's view thus seems to share with Putnam the dispositional interpretation of a causal theory of content, and his argument at this point seems to
be a form of Putnam's Proof that we can't all be brains in a vat, which I discussed in the last section.
Locke, however, does not believe that we have no conception of what the
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world is intrinsically like; he thinks that we do have the conception of categorical objects and their properties. But his causal theory of perceptual
representation cannot explain how we have this conception, so he introduces a further dimension to his account of phenomenal content.
In introducing this further dimension, Locke exploits the fact that on his
view, the causation on which perceptual representation is held to depend
does not hold between the external phenomenon and a brain state, as it did
with the views we discussed in the last section. Rather, on Locke's view, the
relevant causal relation holds between the external phenomenon and the
perceptual experience itself. Consequently, the perceptual experience itself
must be held to have intrinsic, non-representational characteristics.
Experiences are signs of external phenomena in virtue of the fact that particular intrinsic experiential characteristics function as reliable signs of
particular external phenomena. The simple ideas of perception are reliable
signs of their causes in something like the way in which smoke is a sign of
fire. The problem Locke is facing is that although my ideas are signs of their
causes, I do not yet know what any of those causes are like. If all I ever get
is smoke, how do I know what fire is like? In the last section, I was in effect
arguing that some version of this problem will in the end face any version
of a causal correlation view of content, even one that takes the causal relation to hold between external phenomena and brain states. How can effects
provide you, the subject, with any conception of what their causes are like?
But since Locke thinks that experiences themselves have intrinsic, nonrepresentational characteristics, he makes a move that is not open to the
Representationalist.
The move Locke makes is to appeal to his notion of 'resemblance'.
Some ideas, the ideas of primary qualities, intrinsically resemble their
causes. Those ideas do show what their causes are like. Ideas of secondary
qualities, on the other hand, do not resemble their causes. They represent
the world perfectly accurately, but they do not show you what the world is
intrinsically like (1975: II. xxxii. 15; cf. II. viii. 15). Now Locke's notion of
resemblance is generally mocked. One possibility is that 'resembles' should
be interpreted in representational termsthe world is the way representedwith the notion of representation still being interpreted in terms of
the causal theory. And then we have made no progress towards understanding how experience can explain the subject's grasp of categorical
properties and objects. Alternatively, 'resemblance' requires that the
intrinsic properties of the experience should be like the categorical properties of the object. The idea is that experience can play its explanatory role
by being within the thinker's subjective life, yet possessed of intrinsic characteristics which are just like the categorical properties and objects of
which the thinker has to form an understanding.
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It is this second reading of Locke that is the crucial one, at this point in
the dialectic. But within Locke's own framework, the move seems untenable. The intrinsic characteristics of experience have to play a double role:
they have to be caused by the material objects and properties, and they have
to be intrinsically like them. But it is hard to see how there could be anything which played both roles. Whatever it is that the material objects and
properties are causing, it is hard to see how it could be something which is
intrinsically like those objects and properties. We seem to be faced with the
idea of an absurd duplication of the material world in some other area. It
is because of this that Locke's notion of resemblance is usually mocked,
and because of this that Berkeley's retort, that an idea can be like nothing
but another idea, seems perfectly just.
Suppose, however, that we drop the notion that the intrinsic characteristics of experience are caused by the categorical objects and properties
being seen. Suppose instead we think of the intrinsic characteristics of
experience as constituted by the categorical objects and properties being
seen. We can characterize the phenomenal content of experience only by
saying which 'view' the subject is enjoying. Then we are indeed in a position
to understand how the phenomenal content of experience can explain our
grasp of what the world is intrinsically like.
On this pictureon the Relational Viewyou simply cannot ask the
question that is so pressing for a Representationalist, namely: 'How is the
subject representing what she sees?' The reason the question is so pressing
for the Representationalist is that, as we saw in the last section, all that
there is for the Representationalist to appeal to in answering that question
is the use that the subject makes of the representation, and that cannot of
itself constitute a grasp of anything more than the dispositional. On the
Relational View, in contrast, it makes no sense to ask how the subject is representing what she sees. You can ask from which position the subject is
viewing the scene, and you can ask whether the subject is an ordinary
observer or if there are idiosyncratic factors affecting the nature of her
experience. But seeing the categorical object is not a matter of consciously
representing it, so there is no question to be asked about the nature of the
representation. Rather, we can think of conscious attention to the object as
being itself the categorical ground of the subject's dispositions to use particular procedures in verifying, or in acting on the basis of, demonstrative
propositions about the object. And this conscious attention to the object is
no more exhausted by the dispositions it grounds than the categorical ever
is, in general, exhausted by the dispositions it grounds.
8
Joint Attention
In this chapter and the next, I want to set out some extensions of the
approach developed so far. They really are extensions of the approach:
they are not implications of what I have so far said, or foundations for it.
But having provided an analysis of an individual's understanding of
presently used perceptual demonstratives, it seems reasonable to ask how
this approach might be developed to apply to the various distinctions we
might draw relating to an understanding of someone else's use of a perceptual demonstrative, and currently used demonstratives referring to
remembered objects. I begin, in this chapter, with the role of joint attention
in an understanding of someone else's use of a demonstrative.
1. Understanding Someone Else's Perceptual Demonstratives
My topic in this chapter is, then, once again, the way in which we understand perceptual demonstratives: terms like 'that mountain' or 'that book',
used to refer to currently perceived objects. We use these terms in expressing perceptual-demonstrative beliefs and intentions, as when I say, 'I'm
going to climb that mountain', or 'I've just found a mistake in that book'. I
want, in particular, to focus on the way in which I understand someone
else's uses of demonstrative terms. That is, I want to focus on the characterization of my knowledge of someone else's demonstrative beliefs and
intentions.
It has for some time been recognized that demonstrative propositions
have a pivotal place in our ordinary thinking. By observing objects, we get
knowledge first of demonstrative propositions concerning those objects;
observation is in the first place a way of verifying demonstrative propositions. And if you are to act intentionally on an object, by reaching for it or
grasping it, for example, then usually you need to have and use a demonstrative way of identifying that object. If I want to pick up the box that
contains the money, for example, I can do it only when I know the demonstrative identity, 'That box is the one with the money'.
Since demonstrative propositions have a pivotal place in our ordinary
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Joint Attention
Joint Attention
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Joint Attention
thought, as when they say, 'That dog is on the loose again', how do you
know which thing the person is referring to? The natural answer is that you
do it by perceiving the thing. But it is not enough that the thing is in
your field of view; it might be in your field of view but quite unnoticed by
you. You have to single it out visually. You have to attend to it. Understanding someone else's use of a perceptual demonstrative does not,
though, demand only that you and the other person should both be attending to the same object. After all, it might be that you happen to be attending to the object anyway; that would not of itself mean that you knew what
the other person was referring to. There are some distinctions we need at
this point. First, there seems to be an ordinary sense in which I can be said
to understand what you are saying and know what you are thinking, even
if you are not so much as aware of my presence. Suppose that I am hiding
in the bushes as you come out into the moonlight, and as you look around
you soliloquize. You use demonstratives in your soliloquy, referring to, for
example, 'that star'. There seems to be no reason why I can't understand
what you are saying and know what you are thinking; I can see the star
myself and I know that it is what you are talking and thinking about. Of
course, there is a sense in which your perspective on the star will be a bit different from mine, since you are seeing it from a different position; but I can
compensate for that, either by imagining how it would look from your perspective, or by explicit reasoning about what you can see. All this, without
you even knowing that I am there. But it is often said that this kind of situation contrasts with ordinary communication, in which there is common
knowledge of what is being said. The classical analysis of common knowledge, given by Lewis in Convention (Lewis 1969) is an infinite conjunction:
a fact is common knowledge between you and me if we both know it, we
both know that we both know it, we both know that we both know that we
both know it, and so on. For example, if there is a carafe between us on a
table, we may both be attending to the carafe, and we may both know
that we are, know that we know that we are, and so on. I want now to look
at what the relation might be between joint attention and common
knowledge.
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another person with whom you are jointly attending to the thing, the existence of that other person enters into the individuation of your experience.
The other person is there, as co-attender, in the periphery of your experience. On the Relational View of experience I discussed in earlier chapters,
the object of which you have experience is not a cause of your experience,
because it is actually a constituent of your experience. So, too, in a case of
joint attention, on a Relational View, the other person will not be one of
the factors bringing about your experience, because the other person will
be one of the constituents of your experience. Of course, the object attended to, and the other person with whom you are jointly attending to that
object, will enter into your experience in quite different ways.
An experientialist account can accept that there are monitoring and
control dimensions to joint attention. Joint attention as such surely
requires the causal coordination of attention. There are various notions of
joint attention we can characterize that have to do with the way in which
attention is controlled. The core of all these notions is that you and I are
causally coordinating our attention onto the same object. It might be that
we achieve attention to the same object through my slavishly attending to
whatever you attend to, though you pay no heed to what I am attending to.
Or it might happen that 1 attend to whatever I like and you track along
behind me. But it can also be that our attention is reciprocally controlled:
that you and I each keep track of what the other is attending to, so that we
both work to ensure we attend to the same thing. Putting the notion of
causally coordinated attention like this may make it sound as though we
will have joint attention to an object only in the cases in which the object
itself is of no intrinsic interest, so that it would not draw your attention to
it of itself; you are each attending to it only because someone else is attending to it. But, of course, there can be more than one causal factor behind
your attention to the object; it can be both partly stimulus-driven and
partly driven by appreciation of what the other person is attending to. The
important point, for the notion of causally coordinated attention, is that
what the other person is attending to should be one of the causal factors
making you attend to that thing. So far, causal coordination of attention
could be a fairly low-level matter, involving only sub-personal mechanisms
so that both parties keep focused on the same thing.
To fill out the experientialist account, then, we could say that for it to be
true that x and y are jointly attending to z, x and y must be coordinating
their attention onto z, in that one of the factors sustaining x's attention on
z is that y is attending to z, and one of the factors sustaining y's attention
on z is that x is attending to z. This coordination of attention may involve
the use of sub-personal mechanisms, rather than explicit, personal-level
thoughts about the direction of the other person's attention, or explicit
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when x and y are jointly attending to z, we can describe x's states without
presupposing that y exists, and we can describe y's states without presupposing that x exists. Of course, in giving a full analysis of what it is for it to
be true that 'x and y are jointly attending to z', the reductionist may have to
appeal to causal relations between the direction of x's attention and the
direction of y's attention. At that point, the analysis will indeed presuppose the existence of both x and y. It remains true that on the reductionist
account, the relevant psychological states ascribed to x in the analysis will
not themselves presuppose the existence of y, and similarly the psychological states ascribed to y will not of themselves presuppose the existence
of x. So those psychological states can be described individually without
presupposing that the subject is engaging in joint attention with another.
In contrast, as we saw, on a Relational account the other person is a constituent of your experience when you are jointly attending to something,
and present in the capacity of co-attender, so on this account a characterization of the individual subject's psychological state does after all presuppose that this individual is engaged in joint attention with another
person.
Which, if any, of these pictures of joint attention is correct? I think we
have to be quite explicit here about why we need the notion of joint attention at all. It is, after all, not needed for knowledge of the reference of
someone else's demonstrative. I can understand your soliloquy in the
moonlight perfectly well even though you have no idea I am there, so there
is no question of us jointly attending to anything, except in the minimal
sense that we must both be in fact attending to the same thing in interpreting your use of a demonstrative such as 'that star'. So to determine
which picture of joint attention we want, we still have to explain why any
such picture is required, since there is a basic understanding of other
people's demonstratives that can be achieved without the benefit of joint
attention.
3. Coordinated Attack
If I am to know which demonstrative thought you are having, there has to
be some way in which it is indicated to me which thing you are thinking
about. If you are expressing your thought to me, using a demonstrative
term, there has to be what Kaplan (1989b) called the demonstration
accompanying the demonstrativea pointing gesture, some descriptions
indicating where to look, maybe a sortal term, and so on. Suppose we consider a case in which the demonstration is a little bit unusual. Suppose that
you and I are both sitting in front of the same big screen, but in separate
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Joint Attention
But we have to acknowledge that agents are not usually logically omniscient. Since a rational attack by either or both of us seems to require that we
have the infinitary knowledge, it seems to follow that we could never be in
a position to attack. You might say that what all this shows is that it would
not, in an ordinary situation, without the booths, ever be rational for you
and me to launch a coordinated attack on the basis of one of us saying,
'Let's attack that one!'. Perhaps at best there is a thought, 'Well, we'll have
to do something sooner or later', that might drive you to take the risk. But
this really would be irrational, since we are considering a case in which
there are known to be no time-limits on effective action, and the pay-off
structure is that mismanaged attack means disaster while a successful
attack yields only a significant but limited reward. The trouble is that it
seems perfectly evident that even with that pay-off structure in place, in the
ordinary case, without the booths, a coordinated attack on the basis of the
demonstrative utterance, 'Let's attack that one!', could be quite rational.
Intuitively, in an ordinary case, with you and me looking at the screen and
no booths, everything is out in the open to such an extent that we can
rationally attack. How can that be? This is the puzzle raised by Coordinated Attack.
Suppose we go back to considering the ways in which we might analyse
the report, 'x and y are jointly attending to z'. Suppose we consider the
non-experiential view, on which what this requires of x is that x should be
(a) attending to z, and (b) monitoring the direction of y's attention and
having the direction of y's attention function as one of the factors causally
determining the direction of x's own attention. It seems evident that on this
view the puzzle is insoluble. The mere fact that x is attending to z does not
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of itself mean that anything is out in the open. And when we add the
monitoring and control conditions to that, it seems evident that x would
need, from monitoring y, to achieve infinitary knowledge of what they
both know about the direction of their attention to z, by the argument
above.
Similarly, if we consider the reductive version of an experientialist view,
it seems evident that again, on this view, the puzzle of Coordinated Attack
will be insoluble. The subject x will still have to achieve infinitary knowledge of their joint attention in order to make the attack rational.
It does seem to be different on what I called the Relational version of the
experiential view. On this view, what the subject in an ordinary context
begins with is experience of the object to which she is attending, with the
co-attender present as a constituent of the experience. This kind of relational experience is simply not available to the players in the booths. No
matter how many iterations they go through, the end state will never be
such a relational state, with the other person figuring as co-attender in
one's experience. But on this view, the availability of the relational experience in the ordinary case is what makes it possible for us, in the ordinary
case, to be rational in executing a Coordinated Attack.
There are two challenges that this view has to face. The first is to check
whether being in the relational-experiential state it describes could provide
anything more than n-level knowledge of the situation, for some particular
finite n. The further challenge is this: suppose we can establish that being in
the relational-experiential state transcends n-level knowledge, for any particular n. We need to determine whether that is because the relationalexperiential state merely provides the basis for n-level knowledge, for any
finite value of n. That is, if the situation is merely that the logically omniscient subject could derive infinitary knowledge from the relationalexperiential state, then we have not progressed beyond the idea of an
appeal to normality set out in the quotation from Bacharach above.
I begin with the first challenge, which we can address inductively.
Suppose someone claims that being in the relational-experiential state can
provide only knowledge of what the other person is attending to; that it can
provide only level-1 knowledge. We can see that the significance of the
relational-experiential state goes beyond that, by reflecting that if x is in
such a state, with y present, as co-attender, as a constituent of the state,
then it follows that y too must be in such a relational-experiential state. So
y has the experience of attending to z, jointly with x, and on that basis y can
know that x is attending to z. And x knows that y has such an experience.
So x is in a position to have the level-2 knowledge that y knows that x is
attending to z. Hence, x's relational-experiential state is not exhausted by
its implications for level-1 knowledge. Suppose now that, for some finite n,
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we agree that x has n-level knowledge of the situation. Then on the basis of
y's relational experience, y too has n-level knowledge of the situation.
And x can know this. So x can achieve n + 1 level knowledge of y's knowledge of the direction of x's attention. The derivational possibilities of the
relational-experiential state do not have a finite bound.
Now the second challenge comes. Does this show anything more than
that the relational-experiential state can serve as the basis on which a logically omniscient subjectperhaps given auxiliary knowledge of the context
(that y's experiences do yield y knowledge)could derive infinitary knowledge? If not, then we have made no progress beyond the appeal to
'normality'. I think that this challenge has not yet been met; to meet it we
have to consider just what it means to say that in x's experience, y is 'present
as co-attender', that y too is a constituent of the experience. I think that so
long as we think of the role y is playing in the experience as something that
we have to understand in broadly representational terms, then this challenge really is lethal. For when you think of the experience in representational terms, all that is happening is that y has been introduced as a
constituent of x's experience, but we have as yet been told nothing about
how the relationship between x and y is being represented within x's experience. And when we ask what relation is being represented, it seems entirely
obscure how that relation, whatever it is, could be anything more than the
provision of a basis on which n-level finitary knowledge could be derived,
for arbitrary n.
I think that the problem here is the Representational View of experience,
and it is, indeed, just to counter the Representational View that the Relational account takes the co-attender to be a constituent of the experience.
Suppose that we consider for a moment the case of ordinary, solitary attention to an object you can see. Suppose that your eye is resting on a scene
say, a gardenand your attention is now on one plant, now on another. What
change does it make to your experience when you shift from highlighting
one plant to highlighting another? On a Representationalist account, the
difference must be a difference in the representational content of your
experience. But it seems quite evident that there need be no such difference
in representational content. The tree seems no greener than it did before
you attended specifically to it, for example. And although in some cases the
shift in attention will result in your obtaining more information about just
that tree, as we saw that is not definitive of the attentional shift; a covert
shift in attention will not typically lead to any enrichment of your representation of the object. The change, when you shift attention from one
plant to another, has to do rather with the basis of the functional role of
your experience of the object. When you attend specifically to it, you are in
a position to harvest knowledge from it, and to act specifically on it.
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Suppose now we consider the case in which another person enters the
content of your experience, not now as the object of your attention, but as
your co-attender: not as the thing to which you are attending, but as the
person with whom you are attending to a specific object. There is again no
reason to think that this shift, from solitary attention to having the other
person enter your experience as co-attender, should be thought of as a shift
in the representational content of your experience. Rather, there is a
shift in functional role. If the other person enters your experience as coattender, then you and the other person are now in a position rationally to
engage in joint projects with regard to the object, whether Coordinated
Attack, joint investigation of the object, or some other project, such as
fighting over it or jointly moving it. This is not in itself a representational
change; there is no representation of your relation to the other person, and
the way in which the other person seems to you to be may be exactly
the same as it was before you became involved in the exercise of joint
attention.
To repeat remarks I made earlier, I am here only saying that attention
and joint attention have functional roles; I am not saying that they are
exhausted by those functional roles. Rather, attention and joint attention
should be regarded as the categorical bases for the kinds of project we can
carry out, whether those projects are solitary or joint verification and
action. In either case, being in the state confronts one with the rational
basis for one's actions. As we saw, this picture does not seem to be available
on either the non-experiential or the reductive views of joint attention;
only the relational-experiential account can sustain this non-representational analysis.
There is an analogy here between the puzzle of Coordinated Attack and
Lewis Carroll's famous puzzle of Achilles and the Tortoise (Carroll 1895).
Having crossed the line first, Achilles claims to have beaten the tortoise, a
claim the tortoise disputes. But, says Achilles, 'If I crossed the line first,
then I won; and I did cross the line first'. The tortoise agrees to that, but
resists the conclusion that Achilles won. All right', says Achilles, 'but you
must agree that if it's the case that if I crossed the line first, then I won, and
if it's the case that I crossed the line first, then I did win. Moreover, it is the
case that if I crossed the line first, then I won. And it is the case that I
crossed the line first.' The tortoise agrees to all that. 'So I won!', says
Achilles. But here the tortoise disagrees. Setting up the problem in this way
can make it seem that what the tortoise really needs to appreciate the validity of Achilles' inference is some infinitary knowledge; and the puzzle then
is how we can rationally engage in inference without having such infinitary
knowledge. But this generates the puzzle only by supposing that our
appreciation of logical validity must be a matter exhaustively of the
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Joint Attention
171
even be aware of each other's existence. But suppose, as we lean out of our
windows, that you and I catch sight of each other. Perhaps you and I have
quarrelled, so that the mere fact that you are looking at the dog has not the
slightest tendency to dispose me to continue looking at it. The fact that you
are looking at the dog may actually dispose me somewhat to look away, but
in fact I remain fascinated by the commotion. So it is not that you are causing me to attend to the dog, or that I am causing you to. There is no 'coordination' between us. I would be attending to the thing whether or not
you existed. If, as we look out of our windows, you say to me, 'That dog is
barking', I will on the face of it have no trouble in interpreting your
remark, which thing you are talking about, or what aspect of it you are
commenting on, even though there is no coordination of the control of
attention. But this case is only one step away from the case in which I hear
you soliloquizing while hiding in the bushes. It is not a case in which we
have full openness of communication; we are not yet in a position to launch
a coordinated attack on the dog.
The case of the dog in the moonlight is a much more unusual case than
it might at first appear, because it really has to be a case in which there is
zero causal coordination of attention. And that is not at all what would
usually happen, even in the case of the quarrelling neighbours. Once you
have any interest, however slight, in interpreting the other person's remark,
there would ordinarily be some moves towards causal coordination by you;
and similarly if the other person has any interest in being understood. The
case in which the auditor has no interest whatever in whether he is attending to the same thing as his neighbour, and meanwhile the neighbour is
speaking without any interest in whether her audience is able to interpret
her correctly, is far removed from ordinary communication, and cannot be
used to establish that causal coordination is not necessary in ordinary communication.
4. The Role of Consciousness
I said that joint attention to the object is needed if you are to communicate
openly with someone else, using a perceptual demonstrative. It is striking
that joint attention to an object generally involves both parties being conscious of the object. Recall James's definition of attention: 'it is the taking
possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out what seem
several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalisation,
concentration of consciousness are of its essence' (James 1890:403-4). On
this common-sense understanding of the notion, attention is a phenomenon of consciousness. It is a modification of the conscious life: your
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experience is different when you attend to one object from when you attend
to another object. Joint attention, I am proposing, we should think of as a
further special modification of consciousness.
Suppose you think about the subject in a blindsight experiment being
asked to report on, say, the orientation of an object in the blind field. The
experimenter can see the object perfectly well; the experimenter is consciously attending to it. There is also a sense in which the subject is attending to the object, even without being conscious of it. The subject is
selectively reporting on the orientation of just that object, and if he reaches for the object or points to it he is selecting information from just that
object to set the parameters for his actions. So even though he is not consciously attending to the object, there is a sense in which he is attending to
it. There is even some causal coordination between the experimenter and
the patient in their directing attention onto that object. Still, just because
he is not conscious of the object, there is a way of understanding the
experimenter's uses of perceptual demonstratives which is not available to
the patient, when the experimenter says, for example, 'Can you point to
that light?'. The patient can construct descriptions which he can use
to interpret the demonstratives the experimenter uses, descriptions like 'the
light at which the experimenter is looking', or 'the light the experimenter
wants me to talk about', so it is not as if their meaning is entirely opaque to
him. But the ordinary way of understanding someone else's use of a
perceptual demonstrative does not require you to construct such a description. Ordinarily, you interpret someone else's use of a perceptual demonstrative just by being conscious of the object yourself. The joint attention
we need to interpret each other's perceptual demonstratives in ordinary
communication involves conscious attention to the object.
I said that the reason we need conscious attention to the object in order
to have knowledge of each other's demonstrative thoughts is that conscious attention is what supplies us with grasp of the normative dimension
of the thought. It is because there is conscious attention to the object that
you can assess the causal role that the other person assigns to the thought.
Conscious attention is what supplies your knowledge of the reference of
the thought. And it is because you know the reference of the thought that
you can assess the evidence that led the other person to have that thought,
and the actions or further reasoning which the other person will be
engaged in as a consequence of having that thought. And you have knowledge of the causal role of the thought as a result of either your capacity to
simulate the other person, or your having tacit knowledge of a theory
about the causal roles that such thoughts have.
There is no particular reason to think that your knowledge of the causal
role of someone else's demonstrative thought is itself conscious. It is true
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competition, and a new repertoire of causal relations that can hold among
the psychological states of different people. It seems likely that the real
importance of joint attention in our grasp of other minds lies in its role
here, as an essential factor in one's practical grasp of the causal relations
between other people's psychological states and one's own.
9
Memory Demonstratives
Having looked at the case of joint attention, I turn now to the second
extension of the approach to perceptual demonstratives I have been recommending, to the case of memory demonstratives.
1. Experience of the Past Object
Memory demonstratives are made available by memory of events. There
are a number of distinctions we can draw among types of event memory.
For example, we can distinguish between memory of repeated events
'that walk we took so often last summer'; memory of extended events
'that trip to the coast'; and memory of episodic events'the time you cut
your finger'. It is striking that each of these types of event memory may
involve conscious imagery, appropriate to the type. I may have an experiential memory of the walk that does not relate to any one occasion, but
draws on many; or a series of images which relate to different aspects of the
trip, as well as memory of your cry of pain. Each of these types of experiential memory can sustain memory demonstratives referring to objects. I
may refer to 'that tree', which was part of the walk, 'that cottage', which
figured in the trip, or 'that knife', which divided the flesh. It seems likely
that memory is hierarchically organized among the types of event memory.
The nesting of an experiential memory in a hierarchy of event memories
can provide the temporal and spatial context for the remembered object. If
I try to locate 'that knife', with which you cut your finger, I can do it by saying I am remembering the knife as it was while we were out walking during
that trip to the coast (Barsalou 1988).
Psychologists working on memory distinguish between memory with
awareness and memory without awareness, conscious and unconscious
memory, or explicit and implicit memory. Straight off, it seems that memory demonstratives depend on conscious memory. In unconscious memory, the past affects the subject without there being any conscious
recollection. There is a famous anecdote from Claparede which illustrates
the distinction. He shook hands with an amnesic woman, having hidden a
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pin in his hand. The next day she refused to shake hands with him,
although she had no conscious recollection of the earlier encounter. She
said, 'Sometimes pins are hidden in people's hands' (Kelley and Jacoby
1993). This woman was evidently not in a position to understand a memory demonstrative referring to 'that pin'. The central problem we have to
address, in explaining how memory demonstratives work, is to characterize the role that consciousness of the past object plays in knowledge of the
reference of the demonstrative. You might suppose that the role of the
image is to provide descriptive conditions which must be met by an object
for the term to refer to it. The image will provide what we might call pictorial conditions on what the object must be like for the term to refer to it
the sort of object, its colour, size, shape, and so on. The image will not of
itself provide any information about the time and place at which the object
has to have met these pictorial conditions. The image needs a context, specifying the time and place. The time and place need not be specified using any
particular canonical system for specifying times and places. They may be
given in terms which relate to one or another memory narrative, locating
the time and place with respect to other remembered events and places.
Something like this approach, treating the demonstrative as having its
reference fixed by a descriptive condition, seems to be the only one possible
for demonstratives referring to future objects. Suppose you are in your
usual cafe. You have ordered a coffee. All that is sustaining you through the
next few minutes is the thought of the arrival of the coffee. You know
exactly what it will look like when it comes. You have a vivid image of it.
That cup', you say, 'will taste good.' There seems to be no particular
reason to deny that this image could sustain a demonstrative referring to
the future cup. But it does seem that this could only be by fixing a descriptive condition which an object must meet in order to be that cup. I am not
considering a case in which you know which particular cup will be brought
to you, and have a memory of it. Rather, since this is your usual cafe, you
know in general what the cups look like, so you know what your next one
will look like, and you use that knowledge in forming your image. And you
have knowledge enough to provide a context for the imageyou know
roughly when and where the cup will arrive. So you have enough to have a
descriptive condition uniquely identifying that cup. And the only way the
demonstrative 'that cup' can have a reference is by having as referent whatever cup best fits that descriptive condition.
There is an evident contrast here between memory images and images of
future objects. Suppose that someone, your sister, say, is trying to remind
you of the oddly shaped window in your childhood bedroom. 'It was circular, with spokes running out from the centre, like the wheel of a ship', she
says. As she talks, you form a vivid image of the window. The image may be
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correct, detailed, and reliable. Even at this stage, it seems that you could, on
the strength of the image, form a demonstrative, 'that window'. Still, you
cannot be said to remember the window. It may be, though, that as your sister continues talking, she finally succeeds in jogging your memory, so that
eventually you say, 'Aha! Now I remember!' (Ayer 1956: 146). After the
shift, your image of the window may be exactly the same as before. There
need be no pictorial change in the image. And it may be no more reliable
than it was before. But this non-pictorial shift, whatever it is, marks the
transition from your merely having an accurate, reliable, conscious image
of the past window, to your consciously recollecting it. What differentiates
images of past objects from images of future objects is that in the case of
future objects, such as my projected cup of coffee, only the first of these two
elements is ever available. I can form an accurate, reliable image of my
future cup of coffee. But I am irredeemably stuck at that stage, and there is
no such thing as my moving to the second stage and saying Aha! Now I
have it!' (except in the altogether irrelevant sense in which I might make
that remark when the coffee finally arrives).
On one analysis, what this shows is that there are two elements in conscious recollection of the past window. One element is having an accurate,
reliable, conscious image of the thing. The other element is whatever it is
that is gained by the non-pictorial shift. One analysis of the situation is that
the second element is an experienced shift in the causation of the image.
What difference, if any, does this make to the kind of demonstrative that
the image can sustain? On the face of it, you might think it does not make
a lot of difference. Of course, since there is now an experienced causal link
between the image and the past object, there can be a causal dimension to
the way in which reference is fixed. But a causal link was there anyhow in
the case in which I form the image in response to the description given by
my sister. In that case, there is still a causal link between my image and the
past object, although it is one that goes by way of my sister's memory
rather than my own. And that causal link is one which is again quite apparent to me. So when, in this case, I use the demonstrative 'that window' to
refer to the window of which I have formed an image, there may well be a
causal dimension to the way in which the reference of the term is fixed. So
there does not yet seem to be a radical difference between the demonstrative I use in this case, and a memory demonstrative. The causal links to
the object which serve to fix the references of the two types of demonstrative will be somewhat different in detail. In one case the causal link goes
by way of another person, in the memory case it does not. But that difference of detail is all there is to it.
You might wonder if there is not a more radical difference between, on
the one hand, the case in which the reference of the demonstrative is fixed
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by a purely descriptive condition and the case in which the reference of the
demonstrative is fixed by a causal chain which goes by way of another person, and, on the other hand, a memory demonstrative. The first two, it is
natural to feel, are only dubiously cases of demonstrative reference at all.
With the memory demonstrative we come to a quite different case: here we
have a kind of direct connection between the present subject and the past
object which means that we have demonstrative reference proper. I think
this is a natural reaction. The problem is to explain what the radical difference is, in the case of memory demonstratives. Do we not, in all these cases,
just have conscious imagery, which may or may not have one or another
kind of causal link to an object? You might respond to this, though, by saying that there is in the case of memory proper more to consciousness of the
past object than that. What the 'Aha!' of memory proper signals is not an
experience of causation, but a shift from merely having a conscious image
to being directly conscious of the past thing itself. To use Russell's term, it
signals a shift to being directly acquainted with the past object. It is this
kind of direct awareness of an object that alone is capable of supporting
demonstrative reference proper.
2. Decentring and the Introduction Rule for a
Memory Demonstrative
So much, for the moment, for consciousness and knowledge of the reference of a memory demonstrative. Let us consider what an introduction
rule for a memory demonstrative might look like (I explained the parallel
notion of an introduction rule for a perceptual demonstrative in Chapter 2,
section 4). In general, memory exploits broadly logical links between differently tensed statements made at different times. For example, the statement, 'Yesterday it rained', made on Tuesday, is true if and only if the
statement, 'Today it is raining', made on Monday, is true. The two statements are truth-value linked. Our ordinary use of memory exploits the
existence of these truth-value links. What happens, in our ordinary use of
memory, is that you shift from the judgement, 'Today it is raining', made
on Monday, to the memory judgement, made on Tuesday, 'Yesterday it
rained'. This procedure depends on the existence of logical connections
between differently tensed judgements made at different times. We find this
exploitation of truth-value links also in our use of memory demonstratives. Suppose you see someone standing in a shop doorway during a
downpour and you think, "That man is drenched'. The following day,
remembering the scene, you think, That man was drenched'. This is a
memory demonstrative judgement, and in making it you exploit its being
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Memory Demonstratives
Memory Demonstratives
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Memory Demonstratives
of things from someone else's point of view. Let me say something first
about the strategies that are available for spatial decentring, and then consider a parallel distinction between strategies for temporal decentring.
First, a distinction between two different ways of thinking about egocentric space. The notions 'above', 'below', 'right', 'left', 'in front', and
'behind' are usually called 'egocentric' notions, the idea being that they
define positions with respect to the subject: the perceiver and agent is taken
to be the origin of the frame of reference, and places are identified by their
spatial relations to that subject. But there is a basic distinction that we have
to draw here between what I shall call relational and what I shall call
monadic egocentric spatial notions. Relational egocentric notions are
those that we use when we say, for example, 'He is sitting on my left', 'The
chasm yawned before him', 'Look behind you', and so on. These notions
specify the person whose right or left, up or down is in question. They are
two-place notions: 'x is to y's left', 'x is below y', and so on. Now in stating
the spatial content of vision, we do not seem to need these relational
notions. We do not need the general conception of something's being to the
right or left of an arbitrary subject. Rather, we need the more primitive
monadic egocentric terms. These are notions such as 'x is to the right', 'x is
below', and so on. An animal could quite well have spatial vision even
though it did not have the relational egocentric notions; it could not represent anyone else's left or right, only its own. But it is not even as if its vision
makes explicit the spatial relations that things bear to it; it is not always
itself an object in its own visual field. Its vision represents things as 'to the
right' or 'above'; it does not seem correct to say it represents things as 'to
my right' using the relational notion, because of the lack of generality in
whose right or left can be represented. And the same seems to be true of
ordinary human vision. It represents things as 'to the right' or 'above' using
the monadic egocentric notions, rather than the relational terms.
I said that spatial decentring is the ability to grasp the egocentric positions of things from someone else's point of view. To decentre, one obvious
way to proceed is to use relational egocentric notions. That is what we are
doing when we say, 'It's behind you!', and so on. You have the problem of
representing what the indexical spatial facts are from a position other than
the position you currently occupy. From where you are, the path is ahead
and the farm is to the right. But, you might say, using the relational egocentric notions, 'The path is to Sally's left and the farm is ahead of her'.
This explicitly represents the place decentred to as Sally's position, and
relates the places of various things to her. But there is another possibility.
You might decentre using the monadic spatial notions. This is what you
would do if you formed an image of the scene from Sally's position. The
spatial content of the image is given in monadic spatial terms; that the
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image is from Sally's position is not itself part of the content of the image.
You are forming the image as part of the project of grasping the indexical
facts from Sally's viewpoint, but that this is the project is not itself part of
the content of the image you form. To say that, you have to step back from
the formation of the image, and use some other method of representation.
So the decentring here involves a two-level construction: at one level there
is the imagistic representation of the monadic egocentric facts, and at the
other level there is the statement of which position it is that is being decentred to.
Why should we bother with this kind of two-level construction? The
point of this kind of decentring has to do with our need to use ways of
presenting the world that involve a viewpoint only implicitly, where the
viewpoint from which the world is being described cannot be made part of
the description. These ways of presenting the world include perceptions or
imagistic presentations, where which person is having the image is not itself
part of the content of the image. So if you are to use these ways of presenting the world to indicate how things stand from viewpoints other than your
current one, you will need a two-stage construction. At the first stage you
describe which viewpoint is going to be presented, and at the second stage
you use the implicitly viewpointed system to describe how the world is
from that viewpoint. The two stages cannot be collapsed together, because
the implicitly viewpointed system will resist any attempt to make it incorporate an identification of which viewpoint is being described.
An understanding of the relational egocentric concepts seems to
depend on the ability to engage in decentring involving this kind of twolevel construction. To understand the notion of something's being 'above
Sally' or 'below Sally', you need some grasp of up and down as notions
relating to orientation in the gravitational field. There is an external physical magnitude which up and down relate to. To understand the notion of
something's being 'in front of Sally' or 'behind Sally', you need some grasp
of in front and behind as notions relating to bodily asymmetriesthat we
can see in one direction and that we are better placed to act with respect to
what is in front of us than with respect to what is behind. There is no
external physical magnitude here, only the bodily asymmetry. So far, then,
it seems possible to understand the relational egocentric notions without
any appeal to the two-stage construction. The problem comes when we
consider 'right' and 'left'. This does not reflect some external physical
magnitude, but nor does it relate to some bodily asymmetry. If you are told
what constitutes 'up' and 'down', 'in front' and 'behind' for Sally, how are
you to go about determination of Sally's right and left? The only thing you
can do is use the two-stage process: form the image of how things are from
Sally's perspective, using your knowledge of what is up, down, in front, and
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Memory Demonstratives
behind for Sally to orient the image, and use your prior grasp of monadic
right and left to determine what is to Sally's right and left. So an understanding of the relational egocentric notions seems to be constituted by an
ability to use the monadic notions together with the capacity for the twostage decentring process. I shall call the two-stage decentring process 'deep
decentring' and contrast it with the decentring process which uses only the
relational egocentric terms, which I shall call 'surface decentring'.
Let us now look at the temporal case. Suppose you consider a tensed
statement made at a time other than the present, such as 'That (perceived)
man is drenched'. And suppose that you know the time at which the statement was made, using a time specification from a suitable temporal framework. How are you to use the time specification to interpret the statement?
The analogue of using relational egocentric notions would be to use complex tenses; but suppose we just use the simplest approach here in decentring. This is simply to delete the use of the present tense, and replace it
with the time-specification. So you might have something like, 'That (perceived) man is drenched at noon on Monday'. Just to try to make it unmistakable what process I have in mind here, notice that this interpretation
process loses information. By the time the process is complete, the fact that
we were dealing with a tensed sentence at the outset has been lost. So you
might try to meet this point by keeping a log of the process, so that you
record that you began with a tensed sentence. Notice, though, that if
you approach temporal decentring in this way, there seems to be no obvious route by which the link between the present memory demonstrative
and the past perceptual judgement, as you understood it then, could be
made apparent to you simply by your having an understanding of the
memory demonstrative.
There is, though, another way in which you might go about the
interpretation process in temporal decentring. The process I just described
is surface decentring. The process I am about to describe is deep decentring. This is, again, a more complex, two-stage construction. In the
first level of the construction, you adopt the hypothesis, or the supposition,
or the pretence, that it is now noon on Monday. Then, in the second level,
you consider, within the scope of the hypothesis, the sentence, 'That (perceived) man is drenched', as a sentence which is currently being uttered.
There is no need for any further interpretation of the sentence.
This procedure exploits the fact that in my current use of tense, I do not
need knowledge of the time to interpret the tenses I use. I might have lost
all track of what the time is, and I still understand perfectly well what my
tensed utterances mean. That is why it makes sense to raise such questions
as 'What time is it now?', Is it still January?', and so on. That such questions make sense exploits the fact that I do have a current temporal
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location, that these sentences are being uttered at determinate times, but I
can understand them without knowing what those times are. In contrast,
to understand a use of tense at another time than the present, I do need to
know the time of utterance.
In this second way of understanding a use of tense at some time other
than the present, tense is used, not mentioned, in the final understanding
one reaches. One reaches imaginatively to the past time and, within the
context of the imaginative project, thinks the tensed thoughts. This way of
understanding a past use of tense is deep decentring. You might think of it
on analogy with consciously imagining the mental states of another person
than yourself; this is imagining the properties of another time than the
present.
The question I left hanging earlier was the relation between my current
understanding of a past perceptual demonstrative and my past understanding of it. This seems to turn on the relation between my current memory imagery and my past perception of the object. But it seems possible to
think of the relation like this: that grasp of the memory demonstrative just
consists in deep decentring to the past time, the time at which the past perceptual demonstrative was used. We can think of knowledge of the reference of a memory demonstrative as actually provided by deep decentring
to the past time. To understand the memory demonstrative is to simulate
the time at which a past perceptual demonstrative could have been used. If
you think of knowledge of the reference of the memory demonstrative in
this way, then I think you can see how it could validate the use of the kind
of introduction rule I mentioned for memory demonstratives.
The crucial point is that deep decentring is not simply a matter of knowing how to verify or to find the implications of the demonstrative proposition. It actually provides you with knowledge of which thing is being
referred to. It is what causes, and justifies, your use of the particular methods that you use to verify or find the implications of judgements involving
the demonstrative.
4. A Relational View of Memory
Suppose that your local garage is staffed by a number of people who come
and go over the years, and that to varying degrees you have minor
exchanges and conversations with many of them, although rarely if ever do
you reach the point of finding out anyone's name. Years later, with your
feet up on the verandah, you may suddenly recall one particular mechanic,
and think: 'I' wonder what became of him? That man once told me he
always went on holiday to Plymouth. And I once saw that man in a fight
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Memory Demonstratives
189
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Memory Demonstratives
What I am suggesting now is that judgements involving memory demonstratives need not typically depend on an actual application of this rule.
Judgements involving memory demonstratives may typically depend,
rather, on the subject being in a position to judge that there could in principle have been a correct use of this rule, in the past situation. When, in the
disciplined way I suggested, the subject forms a memory image of the past
scene, in effect what is happening is that the subject is deep decentring to a
possible past perception, which could have been used as the basis for the
formation of a past perceptual-demonstrative judgement which would
serve as the input to a correct application of the introduction rule.
This is, of course, a quite general point about introduction rules. To
establish a proposition of the form, 'A or B', the standard introduction
rules would suggest that you must have established A or established B. But
you do not always have to proceed in that way. It will do if you can establish that in principle, you could have established one or the other, even
though you did not in fact establish either. Similarly, the fact that the standard introduction rule for a memory demonstrative requires that you have
established a suitable past perceptual-demonstrative judgement does not
imply that the only way to establish the memory demonstrative judgement
is to have first established the relevant past perceptual-demonstrative
judgement. It is enough if you can establish that, in principle, you could
have established a suitable past perceptual-demonstrative judgement. But
that is what ordinary memory experiences, formed in the usual, epistemically sound ways, do establish: they allow deep decentring to a suitable past
perceptual-demonstrative judgement.
Does this approach favour the two-component view of conscious recollection over the direct acquaintance view? At first it may not seem that a
direct acquaintance view could acknowledge any need for deep decentring
in understanding a memory demonstrative, since acquaintance was
thought of as a primitive relation between the present rememberer and the
past object, which would not be mediated by any representation of past
perceptions. On a two-component view, on the other hand, the current
conscious image just serves as the basis for deep decentring. The current
conscious image is a potential perceptual image, and knowing the
temporal and spatial context for the image just provides for the second
phase of deep decentring. So the two-component view of conscious recollection and the view of grasp of a memory demonstrative as involving deep
decentring seem to support one another.
The argument for a Relational View of perceptual experience that I
emphasized in earlier chapters was that only the Relational View can
acknowledge the role of experience in making the categorical object itself
available to the subject. But that argument cannot apply directly to the case
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Memory Demonstratives
Memory Demonstratives
193
formation of the memory image here is not top-down, in the sense that I
have an objective in forming the memory image which can be specified
using a non-demonstrative designator; though you are certainly supplying
me with retrieval cues. My aim is simply to form an image of the scene in
the doorway, and consequent upon that, I can refer to that individual as
'that man'. There is in this case no designator D such that I express a priori
knowledge when I say 'That (remembered) man is D'. So this is a bottomup memory demonstrative.
The use of bottom-up memory demonstratives does not seem to depend
on the use of any other types of singular reference. So in that sense they
might be said to be basic. They do not yet, however, seem to have any claim
to being fundamental, in the sense in which perceptual demonstratives are
fundamental. That is, we do not yet have any reason to think that other
types of singular reference depend on the use of memory demonstratives.
The most intriguing and problematic line of thought here was once again
set out by Russell. Explaining the need for experiential memory of past
objects, Russell wrote:
But for the fact of memory in this sense, we should not know that there ever was a
past at all, nor should we be able to understand the word 'past' any more than a
man born blind can understand the word 'light'. Thus there must be intuitive
judgements of memory, and it is upon them, ultimately, that all our knowledge of
the past depends. (Russell 1967: 115)
10
The Anti-Realist Alternative
So far, I have been arguing that knowledge of the reference of a demonstrative referring to a currently perceived object is provided by your
conscious attention to the object. I argued that conscious attention to
the object provides a knowledge of reference which causes and justifies the
pattern of use that you make of the demonstrative. In the last two chapters,
I have been looking at how we can extend the approach to joint attention
and memory demonstratives.
The traditional objection to this Classical View is that there is no such
thing as knowledge of reference, over and above the use that we make of a
term. All it can come to, that you know the reference of a term, is that you
know how to use the term. This line of thought has been pressed hard by
Michael Dummett; I will consider his arguments on this point in section 2
of this chapter.
So long as we think in terms of the Classical View, of there being such a
thing as knowledge of reference, we could suppose that the use of language
has ends which it may attain more or less successfully, and that the justification or criticism of a way of using language would appeal to whether or
not it achieves those ends. Without the notion of knowledge of reference,
it is not easy to see how standards of correctness are to be set. If there is
only the use, and no knowledge of reference with which the use must keep
faith, how can there be any such thing as a right or wrong use?
The guiding idea in Dummett's The Logical Basis of Metaphysics
(Dummett 1991) is that our total linguistic practice involves a multiplicity
of principles for getting from one state to another, a multiplicity of transition rules. There are principles which we use in verifying statements, and
principles which we use in drawing consequences from statements. And for
the linguistic practice to be in order, all the various principles we use must
be in harmony with one another.
In that book, Dummett's concern is with the demand for harmony
between the introduction and elimination rules for a logical constant.
Given a particular set of introduction rules, we do not want the elimination
rules to allow us to derive unwarrantedly strong conclusions, but we do
want them to allow us to derive all the conclusions we are entitled to. And
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[A]
[B]
A*B
C
In other words, if from A together with other premises 0 you can derive C,
and if from B together with other premises you can derive C, then you can
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derive C from 0, , and A*B alone. This is the same elimination rule as for
'or'. And the introduction rule for '*' is:
B
A*B
In other words, to establish A*B you need to have both A and B. So this is
the same introduction rule as for 'and'.
It is not hard to feel that things are not well with this pattern of use. If
you are going to be so reserved about what you infer from A*B, why should
you be so demanding about what you require to establish it? And if so
much is required to establish A*B, why do you have to be so cautious in
what you infer from it? The problem here is not that you are going to find
some contradiction. It is really more basic than that. You do not know
what someone is saying when they make a statement of the form 'A*B'.
Suppose someone you trust implicitly says to you, 'Your talk was terrific *
it's raining again'. Should you be pleased? On the one hand, you know that
he wouldn't have said that unless he had established both 'Your talk was
terrific', and 'It's raining again'. That might lead you to conclude your talk
had not been so bad after all. On the other hand, though, you cannot infer
A from A*B; that is what it means, that the elimination rule is the same as
for 'or', rather than 'and'. So you know that you have no licence to infer
that your talk was terrific, even though you accept his statement. So what
has he said to you?
Dummett's diagnosis of the problem here is that the introduction and
elimination rules are not in harmony. Given the introduction rule, you
could validate stronger elimination rules: since you had to establish A and
to establish B to establish A*B, any canonical proof of A*B would provide
a canonical proof of A and a canonical proof of B, so you could validate
the elimination rules, from A*B to infer A, and from A*B to infer B.
Alternatively, if you took the above elimination rule for '*' as given, you
could validate a weaker introduction rule. Suppose that from A*B
(together with premises 0 and ), you can infer C, using the elimination
rule. That means you must be able to derive C from A (together with 0). So
any conclusion you draw from A*B, using the elimination rule, could
already have been derived from A itself. That is enough to validate the
introduction rule, from A itself to infer A*B. And this is less demanding
than the above introduction rule. Similarly, you could validate the introduction rule, from B itself to infer A*B.
Consider now the case of classical negation. The elimination rule is,
from not-not-A to infer A. That will validate the introduction rule, that
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from A we can infer not-not-A, and that is all; it does not show how
to validate any other introduction rule. The introduction rule we want,
for classical negation, is that if, from A as hypothesis, we can derive not-A,
then we may discharge the hypothesis that A and conclude not-A. Can
we take that introduction rule as given, and use it to justify the elimination rule? Evidently not: to obtain the premise of an application of the
elimination rule, not-not-A, we need to derive not-not-A from the hypothesis that not-A. But that does not of itself give us a way of deriving
A by use of the introduction rules alone. So it does seem that by this
criterion, the classical rules for negation are not in harmony with one
another.
It is at this point that we see most simply and vividly the difference
between an approach in terms of harmony and the Classical View. On the
Classical View, there really is no demand for harmony, and the introduction and elimination rules have to separately keep faith with the truth-table
for the constant, rather than standing in any particular relation to one
another. So on the Classical View, the problem with '*' is not that the input
and output rules are not in harmony with one another, but that you cannot
write a truth-table for '*' which will validate just these rules. Any truthtable which validates one of the rules will fail to validate the other rule. On
a Classical View, the case of negation is quite different. Here there is a
truth-table which plainly does validate the classical introduction and
elimination rules; and on the Classical View, that is all that matters.
Whether the rules are in harmony with one another is neither here nor
there. The whole thrust of the anti-realist critique of the Classical View,
though, is to sweep aside the idea of knowledge of reference as providing
something with which use must keep faith, and to hold that the only normativity we can find here is in the demand that the different aspects of use be
in harmony with one another. So, on the anti-realist view, '*' and classical
negation are each as bad as the other.
On Dummett's approach, for classical negation to be coherent, the
introduction and elimination rules must be in harmony with one another.
He does not, however, immediately draw the strong conclusion that classical negation is not coherent. All we have established so far, after all, is that
we cannot, merely by reference to the rules themselves, see them to be in
harmony with one another. Therefore, Dummett says, these rules cannot
of themselves explain the meaning of negation; they do not provide
enough for us to see that the use of the term is coherent. It remains possible,
though, that there are non-logical principles, relating to the specific meanings of the specific sub-sentences to which we apply negation, from which
it follows that the inputs and outputs to negated judgements can indeed be
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seen to be overall in harmony. This remains, though, only an abstract possibility, and there is no particular reason to suppose that classical negation
can indeed be validated in this way; it would be hard to know where to
begin.
It seems reasonable to ask whether there is on a Classical View any role for
harmony in justifying or criticizing the pattern of use that we make of a
term. I have said that if we are operating with a classical picture, there is no
reason to accept the demand for harmony; all we can ask of the transitions
we make is that they be truth-preserving, or separately justifiable by appeal
to the references of the terms involved. Where harmony plainly does matter is if we plan on giving only a syntactic explanation of a logical constant,
if we are only going to give introduction and elimination rules for it in
order to explain it, with no semantic foundation. A logical constant so
understood is really just a trick to facilitate inference, and what we want to
be sure of is that its use will do no harm; at the same time, we would like to
be sure that we are getting as much as we can out of the device. The prooftheoretic account explains how to secure precisely that, though how
exactly we apply the account may depend on some semantic presuppositions and ultimately upon a theory of meaning (Dummett 1991: 270). But
this applies only to the case in which we are trying to rest with a purely syntactic account of the functioning of a constant.
I do not think we can make anything of the idea of formulating criteria
of harmony that would, as Dummett hopes, be purely syntactic, yet provide unconditional and quite general demands on any pattern of use, even
for terms whose reference we know. The idea of justifying a pattern of use
by showing it to be a conservative extension of some pre-existing practice
only makes sense if we think of ourselves thereby showing we have
remained faithful to the notion of truth that we have for the pre-existing
practice. The natural interpretation of such a situation is that the extended
language is not to be taken at face value: it does not deal with a separate
domain of reality, but merely provides an instrumental way of organizing
our thought in the pre-existing practice, which is where we find the hard
facts.
If it is to be a general demand on the use we make of terms, harmony
cannot be understood as a relation holding simply between sets of transition rules; the question we must always ask is whether those transition
rules are serving the purpose to which we put them. And we cannot understand what the point is of a set of inference rules without appealing to the
truth-conditions of the statements involved. The upshot of applying the
inference rules is assertion of the conclusion. And as Dummett himself has
often said, truth just is that which is the aim of assertion.
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200
201
processing procedures to swing into play to allow you to verify propositions about the object, or to act on that object. And the fact that you
are consciously attending to just that object is what allows us to justify
or criticise the particular information-processing procedures that have
swung into play: it allows us to assess them in terms of whether or not
they are successful in providing verification concerning or action on that
particular object. Conscious attention defines the objective of the information-processing procedures. (For brief remarks on the parallel with the
case of truth-tables and the propositional constants, see Chapter 5,
section 5.)
Dummett's third line of objection to the Classical View is an appeal to
the need for our understanding of language to be shared, that we have the
right to be sure that communication will not break down. The problem for
the truth-conditional theorist is that he attempts to provide a foundation
for that right, in our all associating the same truth-conditions with sentences. But this raises the question how we know that we all do associate the
same truth-conditions with the same sentences, and at that point the truthconditional approach lets us down. As Dummett remarks, 'The right thing
to say, from a Wittgensteinian standpoint, is that communication is in no
danger of breaking down, and that this is one of the things of which we are
entitled to be sure, but that our assurance does not rest on anything'
(Dummett 1991: 311). Applied to the case of demonstratives, this third
objection is that if we did manage to distinguish between being able to
verify a demonstrative proposition and knowing the reference of the
demonstrative, we would be left with the conclusion that no one knows
what anyone else is talking about. All we can observe of each other are the
ways in which we verify or act on the basis of demonstrative thoughts.
Since conscious attention to the object, providing knowledge of the reference of the demonstrative, is supposed to be something over and above a
capacity to verify demonstrative propositions or to act on the basis of
demonstrative propositions, it follows, according to Dummett, that it is
something of which we can have no knowledge in one another. In present
terms, that amounts to the claim that you cannot know what other people
are consciously attending to. And there seems to be no reason at all to
believe that. Which objects the other person is attending to seems to be as
fundamental and as evident as any facts about what uses he is making of
the propositions he understands. Moreover, on the relational picture, it is
the very same objects that he is attending to as I am attending to. So there
is no mystery about the intrinsic nature of the other person's conscious
attention. Certainly acknowledging the possibility of joint attention, as I
described it in Chapter 8, does not depend on accepting a functionalist
view of conscious attention.
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203
The anti-realist may accept that the introduction rule for a demonstrative is:
Feature F at location p
That cup is F
and the elimination rule is:
That cup is F
If you'd like F-ness, move towards whatever is at position p
And the normative issue is whether the input and output rules are in harmony with one another. On the face of it, there is harmony here, since the
binding parameter used in the introduction rule'location p'is the same
as the binding parameter used in the elimination rule'position p'. The
same binding parameter will ideally be used in identifying the target of
visual perception in verifying propositions about the object and in identifying the target of the visuomotor system for action on the object.
As we saw in Chapter 5, this is a simplification of the rules of inference
we can expect there to be for a demonstrative; but for present purposes, I do
not think that the simplification affects the main points.
Now, of course, a demonstrative such as 'that cup' is not itself a logical
constant. So by Dummett's lights, it will be legitimate to suppose that harmony in the use of the demonstrative is secured as an empirical matter, by
the kind of empirical considerations Dummett thinks a defender of classical logic might appeal to in trying to show that classical negation is after
all harmonious. The non-logical character of demonstratives will emerge
vividly the moment we think about the possibility of reference failure, or
the empirical consideration involved in keeping track of a single object
over time. But suppose we just focus on the question whether the ordinary
subject has knowledge of harmony when using a demonstrative.
We do not in practice operate in such a way that the parameters for
action are set by the perceptual input that we use in verifying propositions
about perceived objects. As we saw in Chapter 3, conscious perceptual illusions regarding a perceived object can leave intact your ability to act on
that object. So even in the veridical case, there is no reason to suppose that
the parameters for your actions on the thing are being set directly by your
conscious experience of the object. We do not in practice regulate the
inputs to and outputs from demonstrative propositions by appeal to one
another. Rather, the inputs and outputs are each independently regulated
by appeal to the object itself, onto which our experience locks by means of
a complex binding parameter. So on Dummett's account, our practice in
using demonstratives as we do is subject to criticism in the same way as our
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practice in using classical negation. In this case, it is not that the upshot of
the process is necessarily the use of inharmonious rules. It is rather that
such harmony as we find is a consequence of something more fundamental: namely, the introduction and elimination rules individually keeping
faith with your conscious attention to the object.
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theory was to explain his ability to understand why the forms of inference
he uses are correct. So what notion of truth do we have for the sentences of
our language? In answering this question, we are not to appeal to the fact
that we actually use various particular forms of inference. We have to look
at the notion of truth we have for the atomic sentences of the language, and
the notion of truth we have, established in our understanding of the atomic
sentences alone, and then our grasp of that notion of truth can be presupposed by the semantic theory we construct for the logical constants we
introduce. The key point in Dummett's argument now is:
If we consider a fragment of a natural language lacking the sentential operators,
including negation, but containing sentences not effectively decidable by observation, it would be impossible for that fragment to display features embodying our
recognition of the undecidable sentences as determinately true or false... A very
clear case would be that of the past tense in a language in which there were no compound tenses, and in which the past tense, considered as an operator, could not be
subjected to any of the ordinary logical constants: in such a language nothing
could reveal the assumption that each statement about the past was determinately
either true or false. (Dummett 1978: 316-17)
The conclusion of this argument is that we simply do not have the notions
of truth and falsity which are presupposed by classical semantic theory.
Suppose for the momentbut only for the momentthat we grant that
the basic semantic notions have to be established in a logic-free fragment of
language. What does this tell us about the notion of singular reference? A
language without logic would of course be very primitive. It is hard to see
how there could even be singular reference. For there would be no quantification, and there would be no complex predication: it would be impossible to make inferences such as 'a is F; a is G; so, a is both F and G'. And
without logically complex predicates, it is hard to see with what right we
could claim to find singular terms in the language. All we would have
would be feature-placing sentences, such as 'Rain!' or 'It was cold'. Many
philosophersAyer, Dummett, Strawson, and Quinehave thought that
there is a level of language use that is more basic than the level at which we
have reference to objects. This is the feature-placing level of discourse, at
which we have a use of predicates to report the presence of features in the
environment, without any reference being made to objects of which these
are features. To use an example from Strawson 1971, we can have a level at
which a child can use the term 'Cat! to report the presence of cat, without
having the distinction between one cat and two, or any understanding of
the question whether the cat he is now encountering is one and the same as
the cat he encountered earlier. The child might indeed use 'Cat!' as a mass
term, and distinguish between the case in which there is only a limited
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amount of cat around and the case in which it has become unbearably
catty, as it were. But that would not involve the child in singular reference.
On this approach, our talk of objects depends on this more primitive level.
Understanding of an atomic proposition 'a is F' depends on an understanding of it as following from a pair of statements, the subjectless
identification-statement, 'This is a', and the subjectless feature-placing
statement, 'This is F'. You have understood the atomic statement when you
know how to verify it; and you verify it by the two-stage process of checking that what is before you is indeed a, and by checking that what is before
you is indeed F. To get to talk of objects, according to Dummett, we have
to explain 'when it is right to point in two different directions on the same
occasion, and say "This is the same X as that"; and when it is right to say
things like "That is the same X as the one which we saw on such-and-such
a previous occasion'" (Dummett 1973: 572-3).
There is a broad sense in which this is a constructivist view of singular
reference. All of our talk about objects is constructed from talk at the more
basic feature-placing level. So the notion of reference we get will not be the
one used by a classical truth-conditional semantics. As I said, it is hard to
see how you could have anything other than a verificationist or pragmatist
account of our understanding of feature-placing discourse. And therefore
it will be hard to see how you could have anything other than a verificationist or pragmatist conception of reference by this procedure.
However, having reached this point in Dummett's argument, a reply is
ready to hand. Dummett in effect offers a choice. On the one hand, we can
think of reference to objects as defined in terms of talk at a more basic featureplacing level, and face the significant difficulties of (a) characterizing what
conceptual resources are available at the feature-placing level (to take just
one crucial issue, will talk of causation be available at the feature-placing
level?), and (b) defining our ordinary talk of concrete objects in terms of
whatever conceptual resources are thought to be available at the featureplacing level. It is not at all clear that this exercise could be completed. On
the other hand, we can take the inferential patterns characteristic of singular terms as given, and postulate singular reference as what must explain
the legitimacy of those familiar patterns of inference. This is the route that
regards semantic characterizations of the language as involving the mere
postulation of semantic value so as to allow favoured patterns of inference
to be recognized as valid. But we do not have to take either route; we can
resist the choice that Dummett offers. For we can regard knowledge of the
references of a particularly basic class of singular terms, the perceptual
demonstratives, as being provided by conscious attention to the objects
referred to. On this approach, we do not have to construct singular reference from a more basic feature-placing level. But nor are we regarding the
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Problem 2
1. B is on the right of A
2. C is on the left of B
3. D is in front of C
4. E is in front of B.
For both problems, the question set is: 'What is the relation between D and
E?' In both cases, the answer is that D must be to the left of E. On a mental
logic approach, Byrne and Johnson-Laird argued, Problem 1 should be
harder than Problem 2, since it has a longer derivation than Problem 2. On
a mental models account, however, the situation is the opposite. In
Problem 1, only one model of the premises can be constructed, and in that
model D is to the left of E. In Problem 2, however, there are two different
models which could be constructed for the premises, depending on
whether A is taken to be to the left or to the right of C. So unlike the case in
problem 1, whichever initial model you constructed for the premises, at the
third, falsification stage you will find that there is an alternative model of
the premises, and you will have to check that in the second model, D is still
to the left of E. So Problem 2 should be more difficult than problem 1, on a
mental models approach. And indeed Byrne and Johnson-Laird found
that 70 per cent of the answers provided by their subjects were correct for
problem 1 and only 46 per cent for Problem 2. The whole point here is that
construction of a mental model of the premises is taken to involve assigning A a definite location with respect to B. If the relative locations of A and
B could be left indeterminate when constructing the model, that would be
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the best way to construct a model of the premises, and there would be no
need for the construction of a second model. The need for construction of
a second model arises only because of a presumption of determinacy.
Johnson-Laird has always been quite explicit about the presumption of
determinacy:
A characteristic difference in the contents of mental models, images and propositional representations, concerns their specificity. Models, like images, are highly
specifica characteristic which has often drawn comments from philosophers.
You cannot form an image of a triangle in general, but only of a specific triangle.
Hence, if you reason on the basis of a model or image, you must take pains to
ensure that your conclusion goes beyond the specific instance you considered.
(Johnson-Laird 1983: 157)
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This implies that there is something basic about the ordinary egocentric
frame of reference. The ordinary egocentric frame is what we use in ordinary perception, and spatial reasoning will typically involve beginning
from the facts about the egocentric spatial locations and relations of perceived objects, and deriving ultimately further facts about the observable
egocentric locations and relations of perceived object.
A classical interpretation of spatial reasoning, in contrast, does not
need to give any such fundamental place to the egocentric frame of reference, just because it does not give any fundamental place to the observational verification of propositions about spatial properties and relations.
So there is no reason for the classical theorist to accept Dummett's analysis
of Euler's proof. An alternative, classical diagnosis is that we are familiar
with the conditions under which observation of an event is possible; we
have some causal-explanatory understanding of how perception of events
occurs. Armed with this understanding, we can find no reason why, if the
traveller crossed a bridge twice, that should not be in principle observable.
The analysis Dummett is suggesting in the above passage is quite different. On his analysis, the fact of the bridge being crossed twice is actually
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objects are given; otherwise you could not set up the deictic or intrinsic
frames at all.
If we accept that the spatial prepositions are first explained and understood in connection with the basic egocentric frame of reference, the
'unseen' frame Wittgenstein talked about (cf. Chapter 3, section 1 above),
then we need to know how it is that those very same prepositions can be
used in the very same senses in connection with other frames of reference.
You might try to appeal to an imaginative capacity that we have, to project
yourself into the perspective of the other object whose axes are being used
to set up the frame of reference. And in fact it is not implausible to suppose
that we have some such capacity: if I am trying to imagine how the room
looks to you, for example, I may well try to put myself in your place, as it
were, and to determine the egocentric locations and spatial relations of
objects from that perspective. This is the capacity for spatial deep decentring that I described in Chapter 9, section 3. So it might be said that this
imaginative capacity is what allows one to understand the spatial prepositions as having just the same meanings, whatever the frame of reference.
In effect, the suggestion is, what we have is not just the basic frame of reference but the capacity to recentre that frame onto another perspective.
The difficulty is that this recentring is always recentring to another location, and that location has to be identified using the subject's basic frame of
reference. This is particularly striking when you consider the case in which
you are using an intrinsic frame of reference centred on another person,
who is in turn able to use the spatial prepositions to describe the surroundings. You have not managed to understand the spatial prepositions in the
same way that the other person is using them, even though the other person
is trying to use the same frame of reference.
On the proof-theoretic account, the hard facts about the spatial world
relate to the possibility of observation, and any kind of spatial reasoning
has to be justified by being shown to be a way of getting at the hard facts
about what could or could not be observed. Or we could have a pragmatist
version of the view, on which the hard facts about the world all relate to the
possibility of action, and any navigational system has to be justified by its
conservatively extending the capacities of the animal to act in response to
perception. This may be the right theoretical view of some animal navigation systems. For example, consider the case of the navigating rat. Any
navigational system the rat uses may be justified as being a conservative
extension of its basic spatial observations. What the system has to do, and
all it has to do, is predict just the observations the rat will have on pursuing
one or another trajectory through its environment. There is no reason to
suppose that the rat can be credited with anything other than the kind of
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11
Indeterminacy and Inscrutability
1. Inscrutability of Terms
In Word and Object, Quine articulated the thesis of indeterminacy of
translation: that consistently with all the evidence, different, indeed incompatible, translation manuals could be set up for translating from a foreign
language into the home tongue, and there be no fact of the matter to the
effect that one rather than any of the other translation manuals is correct.
To state the thesis, there has to be some view as to the database to which the
translation manuals are responsible, and Quine introduced the notion of
'stimulus meaning' to be as explicit as possible about what the database
contains:
We may begin by defining the affirmative stimulus meaning of a sentence such as
'Gavagai', for a given speaker, as the class of all the stimulations (hence evolving
ocular irradiation patterns between properly timed blindfoldings) that would
prompt his assent. More explicitly ... a stimulation a belongs to the affirmative
stimulus meaning of a sentence S for a given speaker if and only if there is a stimulation a' such that if the speaker were given a', then were asked S, then were given
o, and then were asked S again, he would dissent the first time and assent the second. We may define the negative stimulus meaning similarly with 'assent' and 'dissent' interchanged, and the define the stimulus meaning as the ordered pair of the
two. (Quine 1960: 32-3)
Quine continues:
Stimulus meaning ... may be properly looked upon ... as the objective reality that
the linguist has to probe when he undertakes radical translation. For the stimulus
meaning of an occasion sentence is by definition the native's total battery of present dispositions to be prompted to assent to or to dissent from the sentence; and
these dispositions are just what the linguist has to sample and estimate. (Quine
1960: 39)
'Gavagai' was Quine's example of an observation sentence; that is, roughly, a complete sentence, in that an utterance of it can be assigned a truthvalue, but that difference utterances of the sentence might have different
truth-values, and there is widespread agreement through the community
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You might suggest that this shows only that something has been missed out
in the definition of 'stimulus meaning'; we ought to be able to resolve the
issue about the translation of the term 'gavagai', by looking closely enough
at the situations in which it is used. Quine's response is as follows:
Does it seem that the imagined indecision between rabbits, stages of rabbits, integral parts of rabbits, the rabbit fusion, and rabbithood must be due merely to some
special fault in our formulation of stimulus meaning, and that it should be resoluble by a little supplementary pointing and questioning? Consider, then, how.
Point to a rabbit and you have pointed to a stage of a rabbit, to an integral part of
a rabbit, to the rabbit fusion, and to where rabbithood is manifested. Point to an
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integral part of a rabbit and you have pointed again to the remaining four sorts of
things, and so on around. Nothing not distinguished in stimulus meaning itself is
to be distinguished by pointing, unless the pointing is accompanied by questions of
identity and diversity: 'Is this the same gavagai as that?' 'Do we have here one gavagai or two?'. Such questioning requires of the linguist a command of the native language far beyond anything we have as yet seen how to account for. We cannot even
say what native locutions are to count as analogues of terms as we know them,
much less equate them with ours term for term, except as we have also decided what
native devices to view as doing in their devious ways the work of our own various
auxiliaries to objective reference: our articles and pronouns, our singular and
plural, our copula, our identity predicate. The whole apparatus is interdependent,
and the very notion of term is as provincial to our culture as are those associated
devices. The native may achieve the same net effects through linguistic structures so
different that any eventual construing of our devices in the native language and
vice versa can prove unnatural and largely arbitrary... Yet. the net effects, the occasion sentences and not the terms, can match up in point of stimulus meanings as
well as ever for all that. Occasion sentences and stimulus meaning are general coin;
terms and reference are local to our conceptual scheme. (Quine 1960: 53)
The point Quine is making here is that there are no hard facts about which
of the foreign constructions to translate by means of the English apparatus of individuation; so long as we translate so as to preserve stimulus
meanings, there is no further fact of the matter about what to translate as a
singular term and what as a plural, what: to translate as the sign of identity
and what to translate as a mere equivalence, and so on. As he puts it:
hypotheses need thinking up, and the typical case of thinking up is the case where
the linguist apprehends a parallelism in function between some component fragment of a translated whole native sentence and some component word of a translation of the sentence. Only in some such way can we account for anyone ever
thinking to translate a native locution radically into English as a plural ending, or
as the identity predicate'=', or as a categorical copula, or as any other part of our
domestic apparatus of objective reference. It is only by such outright projection of
prior linguistic habits that the linguist can find general terms in the native language
at all, or having found them, match them with his own; stimulus meanings never
suffice to determine even what words are terms, if any, much less what terms are
coextensive. (Quine 1960: 70)
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peripherally simply will not be one that prompts assent to 'Gavagai' or 'Rabbit'.
(Quine 1960: 32)
This is, of course, wholly inadequate as an attempt to cope with the impact
of variation in attention on stimulus meaning. It is a fact of common experience that something can be centred on the fovea and yet not noticed by
the subject; we have the expression 'staring me in the face' for just the situation in which you are looking right at the object but do not notice its
presence. And as I remarked in Chapter 1, the existence of covert shifts of
attention, in which attention shifts without any movement of the eyes,
head, or body, has been known at least since Helmholtz 1866/1925. For
that situation too we have an expression, looking at it out of the corner
of my eye'. Now each of these phenomena independently is capable of
torpedoing the intended effect of Quine's definition of stimulus meaning.
If I have a rabbit right in front of me, but simply do not notice it, despite
having the right pattern of ocular irradiation, then I will not assent to
'Gavagai'. On other occasions, with the same pattern of ocular irradiation,
I will assent to 'Gavagai', because I have noticed the thing. So the meaning
of 'Gavagai' cannot be characterized simply by listing the patterns of
ocular irradiation that will prompt assent to or dissent from the sentence.
What prompts assent or dissent is visual attention applied to the input processed as a result of ocular irradiation. Similarly, I will not always dissent
from 'Gavagai' if my pattern of ocular irradiation presents a rabbit in the
periphery; if I am currently attending to the periphery of my visual field
then I will assent to the query.
Quine has a principled objection to any such appeal to the operation of
visual attention:
A visual stimulation is perhaps best identified, for present purposes, with the pattern of chromatic irradiation of the eye. To look deep into the subject's head would
be inappropriate even if feasible, for we want to keep clear of his idiosyncratic
neural routings or private history of habit formation. We are after his socially
inculcated linguistic usage, hence his responses to conditions normally subject to
social assessment... Ocular irradiation is intersubjectively checked to some degree
by society and linguist alike, by making allowances for the speaker's orientation
and the relative disposition of objects. (Quine 1960: 31)
But this plainly gives no particular reason to resist the explicit appeal to
visual attention in defining 'stimulus meaning', as opposed to staying with
mere patterns of irradiation. Notice to begin with that there is no suggestion in Quine that; ordinarily, speakers directly inspect one another's patterns of irradiation; it is only that there is 'in effect' such checking, by
'making allowances for the speaker's orientation and the relative disposition of objects'. An appeal to visual attention does indeed look 'deep
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into the subject's head', well beyond the pattern of hits on the nerveendings in the retina. But nonetheless, we do 'in effect' intersubjectively
check the direction of each other's attention by taking into account each
other's interests and what is salient in the context. And there can be no
good reason to keep clear of 'idiosyncratic neural routings or private
history of habit formation'. These will certainly be involved as determinants of what the subject will or will not attend towhat I find arresting you
might pass over without noticingbut what matters from the point of
view of meaning is what the upshot is of the subject's visual attention,
given that the subject does attend to this or that aspect of the scene.
Is the subject's attention not allocated to objects? And if the subject is
attending to the objects in the scene, surely we can answer the question 'To
which objects is the subject attending?'. And the answer we give to this
question will be a contribution to characterizing the hard facts about
meaning.
We could interpret Quine as responding to some such idea when he says,
in a passage I have already quoted: 'Point to a rabbit and you have pointed
to a stage of a rabbit, to an integral part of a rabbit, to a rabbit fusion, and
to where rabbithood is manifested'(Quine 1960: 52). The suggestion would
be that visual attention is only ever allocated to places, rather than to
objects, so that we could accommodate spatial attention within a revised
definition of stimulus meaning yet still find an inscrutability in reference.
There is no particular reason, though, why we should suppose that the
allocation of visual attention to places is unproblematic when characterizing the hard facts about meaning, but that there is something problematic
about the allocation of visual attention to objects. Why let in places but not
objects? Of course there is such a thing as spatial attention, and as we saw
in Chapter 2, spatial attention may play a basic role in solving the Binding
Problem, and so making perception of objects possible. And, as I argued in
Chapters 1-3, location may by being one of the binding parameters for an
object provide the way in which the object is identified in conscious attention to it, when we want to answer questions about the object or act with
respect to it. But there is no reason to think that location is the only binding parameter involved; indeed, there surely are further principles of binding involved in object perception (cf. Prinzmetal 1995).
Anyway, if for some reason we were restricted to considering only spatial aspects of visual attention, the whole attempt to give a definition of
stimulus meaning would be blocked at the outset. For it would be possible
for a subject to have a particular pattern of ocular irradiation, to be attending to a particular place, but simply not to have noticed the object at that
place. This is indeed the case of which we would ordinarily say, 'The thing
was staring me in the face and I didn't see it'. In another case, the subject
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might have the same pattern of ocular irradiation, attend to the place, and
discern the object there. There is evidently no answer to the question
whether that pattern of ocular irradiation, together with visual attention
to a particular place, would be in the affirmative stimulus meaning of the
relevant observation sentence. The question has turned out to be ill-posed;
it could not be answered as it stands. So we would have lost Quine's way of
saying what the hard facts about meaning are.
It might be argued that for attention to be allocated to an object, the
subject must grasp and be exercising a relevant sortal concept. So we cannot take the facts about attention into account without presupposing that
we know which sortal concepts the subject has at his disposal. But, this
response runs, we were trying to find the foundations for ascription of a
particular set of concepts to the subject. This kind of response is not as
sympathetic to Quine as it might at first seem. For the point we have
reached is that there is no way to state the hard facts about meaning without appealing to facts about visual attention. So if the appeal to visual
attention has to be blocked, because it involves appeal to the subject's grasp
of concepts, then Quine's project has to abandoned; there is no way of stating the hard facts about meaning. Actually, though, it does not sound right
to say that visual attention to an object demands that you grasp the relevant sortal concept. As we saw in Chapter 4, sortal concepts are indeed
typically involved in the orientation of attention: if I want you to look
specifically at some aspect of the passing show, it will often be much the
best way to orient your visual attention to use a sortal concept together
with some kind of spatial indicator, whether verbal or by pointing, to
orient your attention onto the right thing. But I do not need to know the
sort of the object in question in order to be attending to it. You can have got
it quite wrong about what sort of thing is there, but still succeed in drawing
my attention to it by using a sortal concept that does not apply to the
object, as when you say, 'Look at that clock!' and I say, 'It's not a clock, it's
a sundial'. And my having my attention fixed on just that thing does not
depend on my having the relevant sortal concept myself. Never having seen
a sundial, and not even having the conception of such a thing, my attention
may nonetheless be arrested by the sight of one; and it may be unquestionable that it is to the sundial that I am attending.
I developed that point at much more length in Chapter 4. The present
implication is that the allocation of visual attention to objects is a more
primitive phenomenon than the application of sortal concepts to objects.
Could we, without appealing to the subject's grasp of the relevant sortal
concepts, distinguish between the case in which the subject is attending to
a temporal stage of a rabbit and the case in which the subject is attending
to a rabbit? It seems evident that we can do this. The subject attending to a
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temporal stage will simply stop attending at a certain point, when the stage
has reached its end. In contrast, the subject focusing on a rabbit will keep
on, even after the stage has terminated. Is there any distinction between
visually attending to an undetached rabbit part and visually attending to
the entire rabbit? Again, the question is no sooner asked than it is evident
what the answer is. The subject visually attending only to the undetached
rabbit part, and ignoring the rest of the rabbit, will notice blood only on the
rabbit part and will not notice blood elsewhere on the rabbit; the subject
attending to the whole rabbit will notice a sufficient quantity of blood anywhere on the thing. The subject attending to the rabbit part will be poised
to act only on the part; the subject attending to the whole rabbit will not yet
be able to act with respect specifically on any of the parts of the rabbit, but
only on the rabbit as a whole. If the two subjects both fire a gun at the rabbit, it will be chance if the first one hits anything other than the particular
undetached part, whereas it will be chance that the second one hits some
particular part rather than any other part of the rabbit. And so on. The distinctions which Quine finds inscrutable are in fact all available at the level
of conscious visual attention. This is a level more primitive than the level at
which we have applications of concepts to objects. And as we have seen,
Quine can hardly evade appeal to this level in his characterization of the
hard facts about meaning; without it, the appeal to stimulus meaning can
do no work.
Finally, though this is not a point directly addressed in Quine's discussion at all, the notion of visual attention that we need here is the notion of
conscious visual attention. Suppose, for example, that we have someone
blindsighted, with a rabbit momentarily frozen in the blind field. We query
the subject, 'Gavagai?'. It is in principle possiblethat is, it is possible, consistently with this being unconscious visual stimulationthat the subject
manages, at the level of visual information-processing, to attend sufficiently to be able to answer affirmatively. So the subject might find himself
assenting to 'Gavagai?' without any conscious awareness of a rabbit. But
this could not be the general case. Suppose that this happened more generally. Suppose that, without anyone having any glimmering as to how this
came about, our visual systems, at some level remote from consciousness,
became attuned to the presence of certain items in our surroundings
suppose we call them 'spooks'. Then we might find that we could achieve
intersubjective agreement on when to assent to 'Spooks!' on the basis of
visual information, without any of us ever having experienced these things.
But this would evidently be a case in which none of us had the slightest idea
what we were talking about. The hard facts about meaning are hard facts
about our knowledge of meaning, and our knowledge of meaning depends
on our capacities specifically for conscious attention to objects.
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3. Davidson on Inscrutability
The point I have been emphasizing is that knowledge of the reference of a
demonstrative is provided by conscious attention to the object referred to.
With Quine, Davidson objects to any such idea. Davidson writes:
The crucial point on which I am with Quine might be put: all the evidence for or
against a theory of truth (interpretation, translation) comes in the form of facts
about what events or situations in the world cause, or would cause, speakers to
assent to, or dissent from, each sentence in the speaker's repertoire. (Davidson
1984a:230)
On Davidson's picture, the notion of reference makes no contact with evidence except by way of yielding theorems of the truth-theory which fit with
our assent/dissent behaviour. As Davidson puts it,
We don't need the concept of reference; neither do we need reference itself, whatever that may be. For if there is one way of assigning entities to expressions... that
yields acceptable results with respect to the truth conditions of sentences, there will
be endless other ways that do so as well. There is no reason, then, to call any one of
these semantical relations 'reference'. (Davidson 1984b: 224)
On this picture, the axioms of the theory are simply a way of generating
appropriate T-sentencesthat is, T-sentences with the right assent/dissent
dispositions.
Like Quine, Davidson sees the striking implication of his view: that
there is no uniquely correct account to be given of the reference of a term.
This is not a paradox, but simply an illustration of their view at work.
Suppose, for example, we are giving a statement of the references of the
terms in a language containing the name 'Wilt' and the predicate 'is tall'.
Davidson says:
suppose that very object has one and only one shadow... On a first theory, we take
the name 'Wilt' to refer to Wilt and the predicate 'is tall' to refer to tall things; on
the second theory, we take 'Wilt' to refer to the shadow of Wilt and 'is tall' to refer
to the shadows of tall things. The first theory tells us that the sentence 'Wilt is tall'
is true if and only if Wilt is tall; the second theory tells us that 'Wilt is tall' is true if
and only if the shadow of Wilt is the shadow of a tall thing. The truth conditions
are clearly equivalent. If one does not mind speaking of facts, one might say that
the same fact makes the sentence true in both cases. (Davidson 1984a: 230)
(Davidson remarks that for the example to work properly, everything must
be, as well as have, a shadow; like him, I will not labour this complication.)
Of course, consciously attending to Wilt is a quite different thing from consciously attending to Wilt's shadow. So why should we take seriously the
interpretation of 'Wilt' as referring to Wilt's shadow? Suppose that the
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the thread and needle have shadows. This picture of threading a needle is
flatly in conflict with our ordinary picture of our objectives in action,
rather than simply being a notational variant of our ordinary picture. If I
am accused of clumsiness or failure in my attempts to thread the needle, it
would be a retort from very far outside our ordinary comprehension if
someone were to claim that his visuomotor skills had in fact performed
perfectly, because the shadow of the thread to which he had been attending
had actually got through the shadow of the needle to which he had been
attending. Of course, you can have a kind of Zen procedure, in which you
have one objective but try to achieve it by trying to achieve another, perhaps inconsistent with your real objectiveso you may know that to hit the
target, you have to aim somewhat above it. Similarly, someone who wants
the shadow of the thread to connect with the shadow of the needle might
try to achieve that objective by trying to get the thread through the needle.
But that is not the case we are considering here. In the case that presently
concerns us, there is no such involvement of conceptual thought. We are
simply dealing with someone trying to get the thread through the eye of the
needle, by consciously attending to the thread and the needle. Given that
this is all of the relevant story about the subject, the result of applying
Davidson's idea here would be that we should say that success or failure on
the part of this subject's visuomotor processing depends entirely on
whether the shadow of the thread connects with the shadow of the needle;
although, as I have said, the subject need not know that either shadow
exists. This idea is certainly very far from our ordinary conception of
visuomotor proficiency.
Davidson does not himself apply his idea to the non-conceptual cases,
such as the needle and the thread. Applied to the role of conscious attention to objects in conceptual thought, his idea is that conscious attention
can be setting the objectives for the use of information-processing procedures to verify propositions, or to act on the basis of propositions about
the object, as follows: the objective of the information-processing
procedures is to yield information true of the shadow of the object to
which you are consciously attending, and to allow you to act on the shadow of the object to which you are consciously attending. This does not
seem at all persuasive, since those information-processors will typically
carry no information whatever about that shadow, since it need not even be
visible.
The situation is masked in Davidson's example, because he is also considering an interpretation of the subject on which the predicates that the
subject uses are all of the form, 'x is the shadow of an object which is F'.
But once we get this into view, it appears that taking Davidson's view seriously would also mean reinterpreting the content of visual information-
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tion. There are other, more basic constraints on the ascription of conscious
attention, as we have seen: we can look at the subject's capacity to keep
track of an object to which he is consciously attending, or to act differentially with respect to that thing, for example, in determining to which
object he is consciously attending. These constraints are more basic
because they do not yet involve the subject's capacity for conceptual
thought at all. But nonetheless, for the case of a subject who is capable of
conceptual thought, we can acknowledge the compelling nature of Evans's
constraints by viewing them as constraints on the ascription of the conscious attention to objects that provides knowledge of the references of
demonstratives, rejecting the Quine/Davidson framework.
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However, you might wonder whether this line of thought does not apply
also to our talk of medium-sized physical objects. For on Quine's account,
our talk of medium-sized physical objects is itself part of a physical theory,
provisional like all physical theory:
we shall find, as we get on with organizing and adjusting various of the turns of
phrase that participate in what pass for affirmations of existence, that certain of
these take on key significance in the increasingly systematic structure; and then,
reacting in a manner typical of scientific behaviour, we shall come to favor these
idioms as the existence affirmations 'strictly so-called'. One could even end up,
though we ourselves shall not, by finding that the smoothest and most adequate
overall account of the world does not after all accord existence to ordinary physical things, in that refined sense of existence. Such eventual departures from
Johnsonian usage could partake of the spirit of science and even of the evolutionary spirit of ordinary language itself. (Quine 1960:4)
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subjective character of language, capable of being weeded out by devising an artificially subjective language for sense data. Rather they give us our main continuing
access to past sense data themselves; for past sense data are mostly gone for good
except as commemorated in physical posits. (Quine 1960: 2-3)
The puzzle is: how then can physical objects occupy the status of theoretical posits with respect to our experience? If the experiences themselves are
individuated'held together'by the physical objects which they are
experiences of, then how could we hold the experiences constant and yet
vary the macroscopic physical objects we 'posit' to be the objects that those
experiences are experiences of? And if that is not possible then there is no
question of there being any underdetermination of our ordinary 'theory'
of macroscopic physical objects with respect to our experiences of those
objects. Moreover, there seems to be no possibility of us finding out that
the 'theory' of macroscopic physical objects is itself mistaken, or finding
that the best explanation of our current experiences does not involve the
postulation of these macroscopic physical objects, does not 'accord existence' to the familiar physical objects.
It is evident what Quine must reply to this. He must reply that the underdetermination of theory is not an underdetermination of theory by the
experiences we wish to explain, but rather an underdetermination of
theory by, centrally, patterns of ocular irradiation. These patterns of
ocular irradiation are not 'held together' in any sense by macroscopic physical objects, so it is entirely possible that a given set of ocular irradiation
patterns could be explained equally well by many conflicting physical
theories, including theories which conflict over which macroscopic objects
there are, or even over whether there are any macroscopic objects.
This puts a great deal of weight on how the patterns of ocular irradiation are themselves to be characterized, and again it is evident how Quine
would proceed here: these patterns have to be characterized in terms of the
best physical theories available to us; there really is no alternative to that.
At this point, though, we may have secured an underdetermination of talk
of macroscopic physical objects by patterns of ocular irradiation, but it is
hard to see how there can be any significant underdetermination of physical theory by patterns of ocular irradiation. For the patterns of ocular
irradiation have to be described in terms of the physics of the day; how
then could they be consistent with some rival to the physics of the day?
There is a further problem with this position. Once we have accepted
that all physical theory is ultimately responsible to the evolving patterns of
ocular irradiation that we undergo, there automatically sets in a certain
ossification of physical theory. There now is no escape from the physics
presupposed in our description of those patterns of ocular irradiation. All
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12
Dispositional vs. Categorical
I have argued that conscious attention to the relevant object provides one
with knowledge of the reference of a perceptual demonstrative. We have
looked at extensions of this point to the cases of joint attention and
memory demonstratives, and we have looked at the implications of the
point for the programmes of Dummett and Quine. I want finally to look
further at a point I have emphasized: the role of experience in providing us
with our knowledge of the categorical. I begin by setting out, more fully
than I have so far, the view that tries to dispense with the idea of appealing
to categorical properties and objects: that we can conceive of properties
and objects only as complexes of dispositions. I will argue that in fact we
cannot eliminate the appeal to categorical properties and objects: our
understanding of causation depends on our grasp of categorical properties and objects.
However, I have to acknowledge that we do conceive of properties and
objects as having dispositional characteristics. So on the one hand, there is
our knowledge of categorical properties and objects, and on other hand,
there is our knowledge of the complexes of dispositions that are grounded
by categorical objects and properties. I will in conclusion look at the relation between these two types of knowledge: between knowledge of the
categorical and knowledge of the dispositional. I will argue that our experience of the categorical is what causes and justifies us in taking the
world to have the dispositional characteristics that it does, and that this
causing and justifying is mediated by the focus of our conscious attention.
The view that we have the conception of properties and objects only as
complexes of dispositions has been given quite a deep development and
defence by Sydney Shoemaker, so I begin by setting out his account.
1. Dispositionalism
As I said, although my principal concern is with the role of conscious
attention in providing knowledge of the reference of a perceptual demonstrative, I want also, in this chapter, to look at the role of experience in our
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our experience changes in ways undetectable by us; but this general problem of scepticism is not an issue on which the dispositionalist has any
advantage. Unless we capitulate to the sceptic, we would ordinarily take it
that so long as we are not actually in a sceptical scenario, we do have the
right to take it that experience is confronting us with categorical objects
and properties.
The dispositionalist will undoubtedly feel that this rejoinder is too
quick, and may give a kind of 'manifestation' argument in response to it.
The proponent of a relational view of experience takes it as evident that
experience confronts us with categorical objects and properties. But the
dispositionalist will ask: 'What could it be for experience to be confronting
us with the categorical? How could the perceiving subject manifest anything more than an encounter with dispositions of the object?' This seems
to me a fundamental challenge, and I want to spend the rest of this section
articulating it.
The point here is not only to consider what arguments are available to
the dispositionalist. Even if we think of experience as a relation to the
categorical, we have to acknowledge that we do know the dispositional
characteristics of things. So we still have to ask in what form we have this
knowledge, and how knowledge of the dispositional is related to knowledge of the categorical. So I will in effect be setting out the format in which
we may be said to have knowledge of the dispositional, and in section 4 we
will look at how it may be related to knowledge of the categorical.
To see the force of the dispositionalist's challenge, suppose we begin by
asking: 'How does the fact that one perceives an object as having a simple
power affect one's behavioural response to it?' Suppose you perceive a cat
as ready to pounce, for example. How you react will in part depend on what
you make of the pouncing. For example, you might want to take advantage
of the relative vulnerability of the cat to outside attack during the pounce.
So then you will position yourself ready to take advantage, should the
trigger to the pounce appear. In the case of a simple power, then, the
behavioural response is conditional on whether one takes the trigger conditions to be met. It may also involve acting to ensure that the trigger
conditions are met, or to ensure that they are not met.
Suppose now we consider how perception of an object as having a conditional power would affect one's behavioural response to it. What we need
is a conditionalization of the account just given of the behavioural
response to perception of a simple power. Suppose that you perceive an
object as having a power P, conditionally on its further possession of properties Q1, . . ., Qn. Then whether you have the behavioural response to the
object which is appropriate to its having the simple power P will be conditional on whether you also know the object to have the properties
240
Q!, . . ., Qn. And depending on whether you want the thing to have the
power P, you may act to ensure, or to prevent, the thing's having the properties Q 1 , . . . , Q n .
Suppose we ask how perception of an object as having a cluster of conditional powers will affect one's behavioural response to it. This will be a
matter of having a family of complex conditional behavioural responses of
the type just indicated, one for each conditional power in the cluster. That
one has grasped the causal unity of the cluster will show up in the causal
unity of one's behavioural responses. That is, there will be one or more of
the family of responses which are such that if they are activated by perception, all the rest of the responses in the family are activated. There may be
a single complex mechanism underlying all that family of behavioural
responses.
We could give an account of shape perception which has the same general type of structure but which focuses on imagery rather than on action
and manipulation. That is, we could have an account which sees the perception as being located in a space of imagistic reasoning. Perception of an
object as having a simple power would be a matter of the kinds of imagistic
transformation to which one was disposed to subject the image. So, for
example, perceiving the cat as ready to pounce would come to this: if you
asked yourself, 'What will happen if a mouse appears?', by imagining the
appearance of a mouse on the scene, you would follow that up by imagining the cat to leap. This transition would be internal to your imagistic reasoning, it would not be a matter of having your imagery controlled by some
explicit verbal reasoning.
How would perception of an object as having a conditional power affect
the role of the perception in your imagistic reasoning? Here we need a conditionalization of the account just given of perception of a simple power.
Suppose that you perceive an object as having a power P, conditionally on
its further possession of properties Q1 ..., Qn. What this comes to is that if
you perceive it also to have Q 1 ,..., Qn, then you will imagistically manipulate the perception in a way appropriate to its having power P. And even if
you do not initially perceive the object to have Q1, . . ., Qn, if you do then
make the imagistic transformation of imagining it to have Q 1 ,.. ., Qu, you
will then in further imagistic transformations proceed in the way appropriate to the object's having power P. That is, if you imagine the trigger to
appear, you will further imagine the response to have been produced.
Finally, suppose we ask how perception of a cluster of conditional powers would affect the role of the perception in one's imagistic reasoning. This
will be a matter of the perception being related in the way just indicated to
a whole family of imagistic transformations, depending on just which further properties one perceived the object to have, or went on to imagine it as
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having. And the causal unity of the cluster of conditional powers would
show up in the causal unity of this set of responses in one's imagistic
reasoning. That is, if you located the perception thus and so with respect to
one subset of the family of imagistic transformations, it would automatically be located appropriately with respect to all the rest of the family of
imagistic transformations.
Whether we do it by looking at the behavioural implications of the perception, or by looking at the role of the perception in imagistic reasoning,
then, it does seem that we can make sense of the idea of perceiving a shape
as a family of conditional powers. The problem now is not to find what can
be meant by saying that we perceive a shape as a family of conditional powers. There would only be a problem if we thought that perception of shape
comes to any more than this; if we thought, for example, that perception of
shape is perception of the categorical ground of a family of conditional
powers. The problem now is to see what reason there might be for thinking
that there must be such a thing as experience of the categorical, and, if such
a thing exists, what its relation is to the behavioural dispositions and
imaginative reasoning capacities that I have just indicated. In section 3,1
will address the question why we have to think of objects and properties as
categorical. In section 4,1 will look at the relation between experience of
the categorical and the kinds of behavioural response and imaginative
reasoning that I have just indicated.
3. Shoemaker's Puzzle
We certainly do not ordinarily operate with the kind of picture of the world
that the dispositionalist recommends. Suppose we consider what the dispositionalist must say about such a property as 'being wheel-shaped'. On
this view, being wheel-shaped will be a matter of having an enormous number of dispositions to behave in various ways, depending on which other
properties the object has. For instance, something wheel-shaped has the
disposition to roll along under the weight of a rider, if made of rigid
materials, the right size, and suitably installed on a bicycle. The dispositionalist identifies being wheel-shaped with possession of a massive
totality of dispositions of this sort. But our ordinary picture is that shapes
are the paradigms of categorical properties. We would say that the
property of being wheel-shaped is the reason why the object has that
totality of dispositions, rather than simply being identical to the totality.
You could argue for this view by considering what happens when there is a
change in the shape of an object. Suppose, for example, that the wheel of a
bicycle gets bent. The whole totality of dispositions that the wheel has is
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affected simultaneously. But how can this happen? How can a totality of
dispositions be changed? You could do it by acting on each disposition separately. But the various dispositions do not seem to be affected piecemeal,
one by one. And it is hard to see how you could single out some core set of
dispositions which are affected first so that changes in them cause changes
in the other dispositions. The picture we would ordinarily use is that the
shape of the wheel is the causal ground of its having that totality of dispositions. So acting on the shape of the wheel is acting on the causal
ground of the totality of dispositions. That is what explains the ability of
action on the object to affect all those dispositions simultaneously.
Another way to get at the contrast between the dispositionalist's
account and our ordinary picture is to recall the example of the square peg
and the round hole. Why can't the peg get through the hole? As Putnam
pointed out long ago (Putnam 1975), it is quite wrong to look for an
explanation of this phenomenon at the level of quantum mechanics: a finely detailed story about the particles constituting the peg and the board is
beside the point. We have to look for an explanation at the macroscopic
level. And at the macroscopic level, the explanation is this. Because the peg
and the board are both made of rigid material, and the length of the side of
the peg is the same as the diameter of the hole, the squareness of the peg
means that its diagonal is larger than the diameter of the hole, so the
peg cannot get through. But what, on the dispositionalist's account, does
the appeal to the squareness of the peg come to here? On this account, it is
an appeal to a cluster of conditional powers that the peg has. Now these
will mostly be irrelevant to the problem at hand. But there is, in particular,
the following: one of the cluster of conditional powers is that if the object
is rigid, then it will have the power to be unable to get through a hole with
the same diameter as the length of its side. So since the object is rigid, it has
the power to be unable to get through a hole with the same diameter as the
length of its side. That is the explanation of why the peg cannot get through
the hole. In effect, we have a virtus dormitiva explanation here. But there is
a difference between this virtus dormitiva explanation and the original.
Someone who explains the fact that opium puts people to sleep by saying
that it has a 'dormitive power' is at any rate saying that the opium has this
dispositional characteristic and holding open the possibility of explaining
its possession of this disposition by appealing to microstructural features
of the opium and human physiology. But in the case of the peg and the
hole, we have, on the dispositionalist's account, given a virtus dormitiva
explanation and we know already that no deeper explanation in terms of
microstructural properties will be forthcoming. That was Putnam's point.
Consider now the case of categorical objects. Suppose you pay a nostalgic visit to your old school, and in the corner there is a desk, just as you
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remember it, with, look at that, your initials carved on the lid. Why is that
mark there on that desk? The explanation is provided by an appeal to the
identity of the object: what explains the mark being there is that this is the
very same desk that you carved your initials on all those years ago. And this
appeal to identity has causal-explanatory force: it is not just that there is
here an unsupported disposition for there to be mark-transmission over
time. The sameness of the desk is, we would ordinarily think, the categorical basis of that tendency for mark-transmission over time.
You might acknowledge that points such as these do establish that we do
not ordinarily think of objects and properties in the way that the dispositionalist advocates, but say that an argument such as Shoemaker's
'epistemological' argument, which I rehearsed in section 2 above, shows
that common sense must be mistaken on this point. The trouble with that
kind of response is not just that the 'epistemological' argument does not
seem sufficiently compelling to force abandonment of common sense. The
trouble is rather that the appeal to categorical objects and properties seems
to be ineliminable from our picture of the world. We do need the conception of categorical objects and properties, and in fact I think that the simplest way of demonstrating this has been provided by Shoemaker himself.
The problem is that in the world as described by the dispositionalist, there
is simply not enough to sustain our ordinary talk of objects and causation.
So however exactly we do it, it must be possible to find a response to the
manifestation argument of the last section, to explain just how it is that our
ordinary talk of objects and causation is sustained.
I said that the problem is that there is not enough, in the world as
described by the dispositionalist, to sustain our ordinary talk of objects
and causation. The difficult thing in formulating this problem is to make
sure that the dispositionalist is not making some tacit appeal to a rich conception of categorical objects and properties that he officially disavows. To
see the shape of the difficulty, suppose we consider a much simplerand
much less attractiveview than dispositionalism, which also aims to subtract from the world the kinds of categorical objects and properties I have
indicated. The view I have in mind here is one which analyses objects simply in terms of their actual spatial extensions. A particular physical object,
on this account, is no more than an actual area of space, varying in its exact
contour over time, from the beginning to the end of the existence of the
object. This view is not one which makes appeal to the notion of the object
as an 'occupier' of space, using an as yet unexplained notion of 'occupancy'. This view is one which has no place for the notion of the 'matter',
something over and above geometrical extension itself, which might be
thought to be filling the space. Rather, it attempts to analyse the notion of
a physical object in purely geometrical terms. On this view, which we might
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connection between our knowledge of the categorical objects and properties around us, and our knowledge of the complexes of dispositions that
they ground. What are we to say about this? In section 2,1 said that we can
view knowledge of a complex of conditional dispositions possessed by an
object as being itself constituted by a complex of dispositions to behaviour
on the part of the subject who has that knowledge. Or the knowledge may
take the form of possession by the subject of a complex of dispositions to
engage in imagistic reasoning. We can remark also that when an object has
a particular complex of dispositions in virtue of its possession of a single
categorical property, there will be a certain causal unity in that complex of
dispositions. And when there is in the environment a particular complex of
dispositionstendencies to mark transmission and so onin virtue of the
existence of a single categorical object, there will again be a certain causal
unity to that complex of dispositions. So we can ask how that causal unity
is reflected in the subject's knowledge of the complex of dispositions. So far
in this section, after all, all that I have said is that the subject has a complex
of dispositions to behaviour or to imagistic reasoning, without remarking
on any causal unity there might be in that complex of dispositions possessed by the subject. In section 2, though, I suggested that the unity in the
subject's complex of dispositions consists in there being a single causal
ground for the subject's possession of all those dispositions in the complex.
And we are now in a position to see what that single causal ground might
be. The single causal ground is the subject's experience of the categorical
object or property in question.
5. A Sea of Faces
I began this book with the question why conscious attention should matter
for an understanding of perceptual demonstratives. We looked at the question whether a blindsighted subject could understand perceptual demonstratives referring to objects in the blind field, and moved to the example in
which, as you and I look out over a large dinner table at a sea of faces, you
make a remark to me about 'that woman'. I said that it is compelling to
common sense that so long as the scene remains a sea of faces to me, and I
do not manage to single out visually the person you mean, I do not, in the
ordinary way, understand the demonstrative you are using. I can, of
course, construct descriptions such as 'the woman you are talking about'
and so on, to allow me to interpret your remark, but that is not how we
ordinarily understand visual demonstratives. The situation is not, in this
regard, significantly altered if I find, to my surprise, that I have the kinds of
capacities possessed by the blindsighted patient: that I can correctly answer
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action. And I argued that conscious attention identifies the object by the
binding principle for that thing; the principle that the visual system uses to
put together all the information relating to that object as all concerning
one and the same object. This explains the role of location in demonstrative identification of the object on the basis of vision; in effect, it provides a kind of Fregean sense for the demonstrative. That is not to say,
however, that the binding principle provides a descriptive condition which
an object must meet in order to be the referent of the demonstrative. An
object could be the referent of a demonstrative even though it is not where
it seems to be; the role of location is apparent at the conceptual level rather
through the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification,
and in particular, the immunity to error through misidentification of
judgement about the location of a demonstrated object.
In this chapter, I have been arguing that it is experience of the categorical object that grounds possession of a complex of dispositions to act in
one or another way on the object. But, of course, at any one time there may
be a large number of different objects in your visual field, and in general
you will not be poised to act simultaneously on all of them. What makes
the connection between your experience of the object, and your capacity to
act with respect to it, your ability to engage in imagistic reasoning in connection with the object, or to verify simple propositions about the thing, is
the conscious attention that supplies your knowledge of the reference of
the demonstrative.
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