Stol Jar 2016

The Semantics of ‘What it’s like’ and the
Nature of Consciousness
Daniel Stoljar
Downloaded from http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/ at Cornell University Library on September 8, 2016

Australian National University
Daniel.stoljar@anu.edu.au
This paper defends a novel view of ‘what it is like’-sentences, according to which they
attribute certain sorts of relations—I call them ‘affective relations’—that hold between
events and individuals. The paper argues in detail for the superiority of this proposal
over other views that are prevalent in the literature. The paper further argues that the
proposal makes better sense than the alternatives of the widespread use of Nagel’s
definition of conscious states (‘an organism has conscious states if and only if there
is something it is like to be that organism’) and that it also shows the mistakes in two
prominent (but inconsistent) suggestions about the definition when properly under-
stood: first, that it is empty and uninformative, and second, that it leads directly to a
substantial claim in the theory of consciousness, namely that an individual is in a
conscious state only if the individual is aware (in some way) of their being in that state.
1. Introduction
It may have been Wittgenstein who first noted explicitly the link be-
tween experience or consciousness, on the one hand, and the expres-
sion ‘what it is like’ on the other. In Remarks on the Philosophy of
Psychology Vol.1, he says ‘I know what toothaches are like, I am ac-
quainted with them, *I know what it is like to see red, green, blue,
yellow, I know what it’s like to feel sorrow, hope, fear, joy, affection’
(1980, §91).1 The expression was then used in a similar way by Farrell
(1950) and Sprigge (1971), and finally by Nagel in his 1974 paper ‘What
is it like to be a bat?’ Nagel offered, as no-one had offered before him,
a definition2 of consciousness in terms of what it is like: ‘an organism
has conscious states’, he wrote, ‘if and only if there is something it is
1
This text was published in 1980 but written in 1946-7. As Malcolm emphasizes (see
Armstrong and Malcolm 1984), the words after the asterisk were in English rather than
German, which suggests ‘what it is like’ is particularly forceful in English. For some discussion
see the introduction to Ludlow, Nagasawa, and Stoljar (2004).
2
I assume that Nagel (1974) offers a definition of consciousness, but, since (as we will see)
the definition is not reductive, others may prefer a more neutral term, e.g. ‘proposal’ or
‘account’. Nothing will turn on this.
Mind, Vol. 0 . 0 . 2016 ß Stoljar 2016

doi:10.1093/mind/fzv179
2 Daniel Stoljar
like to be that organism—something it is like for that organism’ (1974,

p. 519) It is hard to overestimate the importance of this idea for phil-
osophy of mind and for consciousness studies more generally.
Whenever someone wants to introduce a notion of consciousness
they think requires explanation, they talk about what it is like.3
From the point of view of philosophy of language, however, the
popularity of Nagel’s definition is puzzling. Put aside your precon-
ceptions and look afresh at this phrase: ‘what it is like’. Is there any-

thing here that would tip you off to a connection to consciousness?
Certainly not on the surface; there is nothing (or nothing obvious) in
its constituent words—‘it’, ‘is’, ‘like’ etc.—and nothing (or nothing
obvious) in the way they are put together. And yet the phrase is con-
nected to consciousness. Not only that, it seems to provide a linguistic
window onto the very features of consciousness that are philosophic-
ally and scientifically perplexing. Why?
This paper is about the connection between the semantics of ‘what
it is like’ and the nature of consciousness. In the first part, (§§3-6), I
present a novel account of ‘what it is like’-sentences, which I call the
affective account. According to this account, ‘what it is like’-sentences
express relations of a certain kind—I call them affective relations—that
hold between individuals and events; to a first approximation, an
affective relation holds between an individual and an event just in
case the individual is affected in a particular kind of way by the
event. In many contexts, but not in all, the affective relations expressed
by ‘what it is like’-sentences will be of a certain special kind I call
experiential relations; to a first approximation, an experiential relation
holds between an individual and an event just in case the individual
feels a certain way in virtue of the event.
In the second part, (§§7-9) I turn to the connection between the
affective account and the nature of consciousness. As will emerge, an
attractive feature of this account is that it represents a middle way
between two extremes that dominate the literature concerning Nagel’s
definition. At one extreme are authors who say that the analysis of
‘what it is like’ reveals the definition to be trivial and uninformative;
all it tells us is that some events have some property and so has no
consequences for philosophy of mind at all. At the other extreme are
authors who say that the analysis of ‘what it is like’ reveals the
3
There are too many examples to list; a typical case is Block (1995, p. 380) who writes: ‘the
totality of the experiential properties of a state are “what it is like” to have it’. For further
discussion and quotations, see Snowdon (2010).

The Semantics of ‘What it’s like’ and the Nature of Consciousness 3
definition as embodying a philosophically controversial theory of con-

sciousness, namely, a reflexive or self-representational theory, accord-
ing to which an individual is in a conscious state only if the individual
is aware (in some sense) of their being in that state. I will argue that
both extremes are mistaken, and are mistaken precisely because they
start from the wrong account of ‘what it is like’.

2. The nature of the project
We may begin with a number of remarks about the project.
First, the sort of sentence we are seeking to understand may be
illustrated as follows:
(1a) There is something it is like to have a toothache.
(1b) John knows what it is like to have a toothache.
(1c) You don’t know what it is like to love someone.
(1d) Mary does not know what it is like to see a red thing.
(1e) What is it like to be a bat?
(1f ) What is it like being a bat?
These sentences and others like them are different from each other in
various ways. Some contain obvious quantifiers (1a); some contain
‘wh’-clauses, in both embedded (1b-d) and non-embedded forms
(1e-f ). Some are indicatives (1a-d), some interrogatives (1e-f ). Some
contain infinitive verbs (1a-e), some gerunds (1f ). Some are drawn
from ordinary life (1b), some from philosophy of mind (1d-e), and
some from pop music (1c).4 What all of them have in common, how-
ever, is that they contain the phrase ‘it is like’ followed by either an
infinitive verb or a gerundive phrase.5 It is sentences of this type—
‘what it is like’-sentences, as we will call them (though not all contain
‘what’)—that are our target.
Second, the word ‘like’ is extremely common. Sometimes it is an
emphatic or interjection, as in ‘Snow is, like, white’. Sometimes it
means ‘approximately ’ or ‘roughly ’ as in ‘We left at like 9 o’clock’
(cf. Ross and Cooper 1979). Sometimes it means ‘similar to’ or ‘re-
sembles’ as in ‘He is exactly like his father’. And sometimes it
4
For more pop songs in this context, see Hellie (2004).
5
I assume in what follows that what goes for the infinitive goes also for the gerundive.

4 Daniel Stoljar
functions to specify or request a certain kind of property, e.g. ‘You

know what he’s like when he drinks’. There are important connections
(and disconnections) between our target sentences and these uses; we
will go into some of them as we proceed. But in what follows we will
restrict the phrase ‘“what it is like”-sentences’ to sentences structurally
like the examples in (1), rather than to any other sentence containing
‘like’. This does not beg any questions, since doing so is a termino-
logical convenience rather than a substantive claim.

Third, I will adopt the standard practice in philosophy of language
of distinguishing (a) the linguistic meaning of a sentence, (b) the
proposition expressed in a context by a sentence (i.e. its truth condi-
tions, for our purposes), and (c) the proposition communicated or
conveyed by a sentence in that context. To take a simple example,
consider ‘I am thirsty ’. This sentence is usually taken to have as its
linguistic meaning a function from contexts of utterance to propos-
itions (cf. Kaplan 1989). If a particular context is fixed, say the context
in which Alice utters it, it expresses the proposition that Alice is
thirsty; that is, ‘I am thirsty ’ is true in a context in which Alice
utters it just in case Alice is thirsty. And it may convey (rather than
express) in that same context the proposition that Alice will soon
drink, in the sense that someone who hears Alice say this will naturally
infer that soon she will drink. In what follows our focus will be on the
linguistic meanings of sentences like those in (1) and on what prop-
ositions they express in particular contexts. The affective account has
little to say explicitly about what propositions they might convey.
Fourth, I will be guided in what follows by two sets of facts about
our target sentences, one concerning usage and the other concerning
inference. These are:
Usage Fact #1: sentences like those in (1) are routinely used by
speakers to convey propositions about (or to ask questions about)
experiences; for example, (1a) may be used to convey the
proposition that there is some (presumably unpleasant) experience
you have when you have a toothache.
Usage Fact #2: sentences like those in (1) are routinely used by
speakers to convey propositions about psychological subjects of
experiences, i.e. individuals (in the typical case, people or animals)
who have experiences; for example, (1a) may be used to convey the
proposition that there is something it is like to someone to have a
toothache.

Inference Fact #1: sentences like those in (1) often seem to be entailed
by sentences that are overtly about experience. For example, ‘Going
to the dentist frightens John’ is overtly about John’s being
frightened, which is an experience in one good sense of that term.
But it seems to entail the sentence ‘There is something it is like for
John to go to the dentist’.
Inference Fact #2: sentences like those in (1) often seem to entail
sentences which are overtly about experiences; for example, ‘There

is something it is like for John to go to the dentist’ seems to entail
‘John feels a certain way when he goes to the dentist’.
Notice that the usage facts are about what speakers routinely use ‘what
it is like’-sentences to do; they are not about the linguistic meanings of
these sentences or about what propositions they express. Similarly, the
inference facts are about what such sentences often seem to entail and
to be entailed by, rather than what they in fact do entail and are
entailed by. Stating both pairs of facts in this cautious way has the
advantage that they are more likely to be accepted as data that any
theory should explain. But again no questions are being begged. These
facts might be explained by what our target sentences literally mean
and entail, but they might also be explained in some other way.
Finally, it is often helpful, when considering proposals about the
linguistic meaning of a sentence (and what proposition it expresses in
context) to consider first its syntactic or logical structure—its logical
form, as I will say here.6 In the next section (§3), therefore, I will make
explicit the claim about the logical form of our target sentences that
the affective account presupposes. The subsequent three sections (§§4-
6) state and elaborate that account.
3. The logical form of ‘what it is like’-sentences

As regards logical form, the proposal I want to defend is as follows. A
sentence like (1a)—‘There is something it is like to have a tooth-
ache’—has schematically the form ‘There is a way x’s c-ing is to y ’.
A sentence like (1b)—‘John knows what it is like to have a tooth-
ache’—has schematically the form ‘John knows what way x’s c-ing
is to y ’. Other target sentences are treated analogously.
6
Since the notion of logical form is controversial, I should note that all that is intended
here is the syntactic form of the sentence, rendered simply.

6 Daniel Stoljar
3.1 First potentially implicit argument place

Sentences containing infinitive verbs require a covert (i.e. unvoiced)
subject. For example, in ‘There is something it takes to win a gold
medal’, the verb phrase ‘to win a gold medal’ requires a subject that is
covert—linguists usually call this ‘PRO’, interpreting it roughly as a
kind of pronoun.7 Hence the sentence is better rendered from a syn-
tactic point of view as ‘There is something it takes [PRO to win a gold
medal]’. Moreover, when one fills in the covert subject one must use a

prepositional phrase of the form ‘for S’, where ‘S’ is a name or a
pronoun or a description, which co-refers with, or controls, ‘PRO’.
So, for example, ‘There is something it takes for Bill to win a gold
medal’ is better rendered as ‘There is something it takes for Billi [PROi
to win a gold medal]’, where the subscripts indicate that the occur-
rence of ‘PRO’ and the occurrence of ‘Bill’ co-refer.
Since ‘what it is like’-sentences contain infinitive verbs, the facts just
noted should obtain here too, and so they do. First, (1a) is better
rendered as ‘There is something it is like [PRO to have a toothache]’.
Second, when one fills in the covert subject one must do so by sup-
plying an expression of the form ‘for S’ that then co-refers with ‘PRO’.
For example, ‘There is something it is like for Alice to have a tooth-
ache’ is better rendered as ‘There is something it is like for Alicei
[PROi to have a toothache]’.
Hence we arrive at the first important point about the logical struc-
ture of our target sentences, viz. they contain a potentially covert
argument place generated by the infinitive verb. As just noted, lin-
guists would represent this by postulating a covert pronoun. But in the
presentation to follow, linguistic details will be kept to a minimum; it
will be sufficient for our purposes to capture the relevant facts by
saying that (1a) has at least the form ‘There is something it is like
for x to have toothache’.
3.2 Second potentially implicit argument place

(1a) contains an implicit argument place owing to its infinitive verb,
but there are good reasons to suppose that there is a second argument
place here, which is generated by the finite clause ‘it is like to have a
toothache’. In what follows, I will adopt the convention of making this
explicit by using a ‘to’-phrase, to distinguish it from the argument
7
For a philosophically accessible account of PRO, see Stanley (2011, Ch. 3). Note that while
many linguists assume that infinitival phrases require a covert subject, not all do. Here we go
with the majority.

place generated by the infinite verb for which as noted we are obliged
by English to use a ‘for’-phrase. So from this point of view, the logical
form of this part of the sentence is ‘it is like to y for x to have a
toothache’.
There are at least five reasons to postulate this second argument
place.
First, there are ‘what it is like’-sentences that distinguish the in-
tended subject of the infinitive verb from the psychological subject of

the relevant experience apparently reported by the sentence. Suppose
Bill is a very strange person who reacts in an odd way when he is in the
presence of someone else (Alice, say) eating a peach. What happens is
that he is overcome with an intense feeling of anger and also suffers an
outbreak of prickly hives. In that case we might say ‘There is some-
thing it is like to Bill for Alice to eat a peach’.8 Here it is intuitively Bill
who is the subject of the experience, but it is not Bill but Alice who is
the intended subject of the infinitive verb.
Second, there are ‘what it is like’-sentences that report experiences
and yet in which the intended subject of the infinitive verb is inani-
mate and so not a psychological subject at all. For example, a familiar
complaint in modern universities is that they are always being
‘restructured’. Sympathizing with a colleague employed at one of
these universities, one might say ‘I know what it is like for a university
to be restructured’. Here the university is the thing being restructured
but the subject of the experience is rather its faculty and staff. What is
intended, in short, is ‘I know what it is like to its members for a
university to be restructured’.
Third, there are ways of making explicit the subject of the reported
experience that depart from the syntactically mandatory ways of filling
in the grammatical subject of the infinitive; indeed, we have taken
advantage of this fact so far by using a ‘to’-phrase if we want to
make the subject of the experience explicit.9 For example, returning
to the case in which Bill gets angry and suffers hives, one can say (as
we did) that ‘There is something it is like to Bill for Alice to eat a
peach’ but one can also say ‘There is something it is like for Bill for
8
See Hellie’s dicussion of Byrne (2004) (Hellie 2007, p. 460) for examples like this. I
should emphasize that in my discussion of this and similar examples the ‘to’-phrase is used
solely for convenience to mark the second argument place described in the text. It is also
possible to use a second ‘for’-phrase for the same effect. This may be more natural but it runs
the risk of conflating what is better kept apart.
9
For the ideas behind the third and fourth reasons to postulate a second argument place, I
am indebted to Zoltán Gendler Szabó.

8 Daniel Stoljar
Alice to eat a peach’. On the other hand, one cannot say ‘There is
something it is like for Bill to Alice to eat a peach’. This suggests that
the argument place made explicit with the ‘to’-phrase is distinct from
that made explicit with the ‘for’-phrase.
Fourth, consider the sentences in (2):
(2a) There is something it is like for me to be bitten by a snake.
(2b) There is something it is like for a snake to bite me.

Assuming that the semantic value of the ‘for’-phrases is the same—
that is, assuming that passivization makes no difference to semantic
value—these sentences should be equivalent. But they do not seem to
be equivalent. (2b) is naturally read as saying that it is the snake who is
the subject of experience; (2a) is naturally read as saying that it is me.
So we face a puzzle: the sentences are (apparently) both equivalent and
not equivalent.
This puzzle is solved if we adopt our proposal that there is a covert
‘to’-phrase here as well as a covert ‘for’-phrase. If that is so, there are
four possible sentences here, not two:
(2a*) There is something it is like to me for me to be bitten by
a snake.
(2a**) There is something it is like to a snake for me to be
bitten by it.
(2b*) There is something it is like to a snake for it to bite me.
(2b**) There is something it is like to me for a snake to bite me.
On the one hand, the natural reading of (2a) is (2a*), and that sen-
tence is indeed equivalent to (2b**). On the other hand, the natural
reading of (2b) is (2b*), and that sentence is indeed equivalent to
(2a**). However since (2b*) and (2b**) are not equivalent, the prob-
lem goes away.
Fifth, there is an argument in favour of a second argument place
that concerns what linguists call ‘binding’.10 Consider angry Bill again,
and contrast him with Jill, who, rather than getting angry, feels serene
when Alice eats a peach. And suppose further that both Bill and Jill
know perfectly well what happens to them when Alice does this. On
the assumption that Bill and Jill are the only people contextually sa-
lient, (3) seems to capture the situation:
10
For discussion and applications of this idea, see Stanley (2000)

(3) Everyone knows what it is like for Alice to eat a peach.

There is a reading—we may call it the ‘bound’ reading—of this
sentence on which it is true if Bill knows what it is like to him for
Alice to eat a peach—i.e. he gets angry—and Jill knows what it is like
to her for Alice to eat a peach—i.e. she feels serene. Once again this
reading is well explained by the proposal about logical form that we
have advanced. On that proposal, (3) has the form ‘Every person x

knows what it is like to x for Alice to eat a peach’, which clearly admits
of a bound reading.
Putting these five reasons together, (1a) has two potentially covert
argument places and so has at least the form ‘There is something it is
like to x for y to have toothache’. But to identify these two places is not
to deny that they might on occasion co-refer. On the contrary, there is
a pattern of co-reference here, depending on which are voiced. If
neither is voiced, as in ‘There is something it is like to have a tooth-
ache’, co-reference is required: the subject of the toothache and the
subject of the experience must be identical. The same applies to the
case in which only the subject of the experience is voiced, as in ‘There
is something it is like to Bill to have a toothache’. By contrast, if both
are voiced, as in ‘There is something it is like to Bill for him to have a
toothache’, co-reference is permitted but not required; ‘him’ may refer
to Bill but need not. The same applies to the case in which only the
subject of the infinitive is voiced as in ‘There is something it is like for
him to have a toothache’.11
3.3 ‘What it is like’ and other ‘wh’-phrases

We mentioned earlier that some of our target sentences include ‘wh’-
clauses. But what exactly is the connection between ‘what it is like’ and
other interrogative words such as ‘who’, ‘where’, and ‘how’?
A good way to make progress here is to look at the translation of
‘what it is like’-sentences into other languages, an easy thing to do
since Nagel (1974) is very famous. Here is the title of that paper in a
number of different languages:12
11
As Zoltán Gendler Szabó pointed out to me, the patterns mentioned in the text are
plausibly themselves to be explained by principles of syntax, together with the assumption that
‘it is like to x’ is an expression that has (so-called) control syntax. I will not attempt to pursue
this issue however.
12
Some of these cases come from translations of Nagel’s Mortal Questions, the 1979 col-
lection that contains the 1974 paper. Other cases come from informants. For help with the
translations I am indebted to Christian Barry, Paolo Santorio, and Zoltán Gendler Szabó.

10 Daniel Stoljar
French: Quel effet cela fait-il d’être une chauve-souris?

What effect has it to be a bat?
German: Wie ist es, eine Fledermaus zu sein?
How is it a bat to be?
Italian: Che cosa si prova a essere un pipistrello?
What feels to be a bat?
Hungarian: Milyen lehet denvérnek lenni?
How could bat to be?

Portuguese: Como é ser morçego?
How is to be a bat
Russian: J‘imbm |qm azq{ jeqrve— kzw{}?
How this to be bat?
In at least four of these cases (German, Hungarian, Portuguese, and
Russian) the interrogative word is something that is best rendered as
‘how’ in English, which strongly suggests that ‘what it is like’ questions
are closely related to ‘how’ questions. Indeed, this connection is borne
out in English too. ‘How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?’
is a close variant on ‘What is it like to be one of the beautiful people?’
Likewise, any of the ‘what it is like’-sentences in (1) that contain ‘wh’-
clauses can fairly naturally be recast has ‘how’- questions.
Suppose then we agree that ‘what it is like’-questions are a species of
‘how’-questions or at least are very closely related.13 It is then clear also
that ‘knowing what it is like’ is very closely related to ‘knowing how’.
And the importance of this point is that recent philosophy of language
presents us with a very good understanding of ‘know how’, and we
may straightforwardly adapt the insights of this literature to the case of
‘what it is like’. In particular, it is plausible to suppose that, just as
‘know-where’ quantifies over places, and ‘know-when’ quantifies over
times, ‘know-how’ quantifies over ways, where a ‘way ’ is either a way a
thing is or a way to do something.14 (See Lycan 1996, Stanley and
Williamson 2001, and Stanley 2011.) So for example ‘Carla knows
how to ride a bike’ is plausibly analysed—to a first approxima-
tion—as ‘There is some way such that Carla knows that that way is
13
The qualification acknowledges that ‘what it is like’ seems to convey modal information
slightly differently from ‘how’: ‘How is it to be a bat?’ seems to presuppose that the addressee
is a bat, but ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ does not, at least not obviously; the question may be
posed in the spirit of inquiry. I will set this issue aside.
14
I assume that a way is a certain sort of property something has, i.e. a property which
answers the question ‘How is it?’ rather than ‘Where is it?’ or ‘Why is it?’, but I will not go
into this further here; see Yablo (1996) and Stanley (2011).

a way for her to ride a bike’. Likewise, ‘Dennis knows how Stalin was
to his generals’ is plausibly analysed (to a first approximation) as
‘There is some way such that Dennis knows that that way is the way
Stalin was to his generals’.
This suggests an analogous treatment of ‘knowing what it is like’.
On this treatment, (1b)—‘John knows what it is like to have a tooth-
ache’—is plausibly analysed (again, to a first approximation) as ‘There
is some way such that John knows that it is that way to have a tooth-

ache’. Moreover, this analysis may easily be extended to other target
sentences, such as (1a). For just as one can say ‘There is a way for Carla
to ride a bike’ or ‘There is a way that Stalin was to his generals’ (1a) is
plausibly interpreted as saying ‘There is a way it is to have a tooth-
ache’. Conjoining this with our earlier points, we arrive at the idea
that ‘There is something it is like to have toothache’ has at least the
form ‘There is some way such that it is that way to x for y to have a
toothache’ or to put it more briefly ‘There is some way it is to x for y
to have a toothache’.
3.4 The role of ‘like’

The connection between ways and ‘what it is like’ may also be brought
out in a manner that does not involve a comparison with ‘how’. As we
noted at the outset, ‘like’ has many different uses in English. On one
very common use, however, it functions as a stand-in precisely for a
way that a thing can be. Consider:
(4a) What is Chicago like?
(4b) What’s he like when he drinks?
(4c) What was Byron like?
Here we are asking for the way things are or were. (4a), for example, is
asking for the way that Chicago is; it would be acceptable to say in
response that it is cold or sports-crazy or surprisingly tolerant of
smokers for an English-speaking city.
It is an important point about the sentences in (1) that the use of
‘like’ in them is akin to its use in (4). What it shows in part is that
there is a non-comparative use of ‘like’ in English and that ‘what it is
like’-sentences very plausibly employ it.15 As we will see later, this is a
major problem for any comparative analysis of such sentences. But for
15
The non-comparative ‘like’ may be captured within a formal semantic theory in various
ways. One way is to say that it is a predicate-functor, another that it is a pro-predicate. It will

12 Daniel Stoljar
the moment I want to emphasize something else, viz. that the point
provides further support for the claim that ‘what it is like’-sentences,
like ‘how’-questions, quantify over ways.
3.5 The role of ‘it’

We have argued so far that ‘what it is like’-sentences contain two
potentially covert argument places, and quantify over ways. We may
bring the discussion of logical form to a close by turning to ‘it’. What

(if anything) does ‘it’ refer to?
The answer is that ‘it’ here is pleonastic or expletive, and so behaves
just as it does in ‘There is something it takes to win a gold medal’. In
general, we may view this last sentence as an ‘equivalent transform-
ation’, in Hellie’s phrase (2004, p. 339), of ‘There is something to win
a gold medal takes’ or to put it more naturally in the gerundive form,
‘There is something winning a gold medal takes’. Likewise we may
view (1a) as an equivalent transformation of ‘There is something to
have a toothache is like’ or more naturally ‘There is something having
a toothache is like’. It follows that ‘There is some way it is to x for y to
have a toothache’—which is the logical form of (1a) according to our
earlier suggestion—has as an equivalent transformation ‘There is some
way such that for y to have a toothache is that way to x’ or more
naturally, ‘There is a way y ’s having a toothache is to x’. Hence we
arrive at the overall proposal that we wanted to defend in this section:
(1a) has the logical form ‘There is a way that x’s c-ing is to y ’.
4. Semantics for ‘what it is like’-sentences

So much for form; what about interpretation? In this section, I will
answer this question by advancing two hypotheses about the semantics
of ‘what it is like’-sentences, the first concerns their linguistic mean-
ing, the second concerns what propositions they stereotypically
express.
4.1 Hypothesis #1: The linguistic meaning of ‘what it is like’-sentences

The proposal about the linguistic meaning of ‘what it is like’-sen-
tences is as follows. A sentence like (1a)—‘There is something it is
like to have a toothache’—means in effect there is a way that having a
toothache affects you. A sentence like (1b)—‘John knows what it is like
not matter in what follows how to express this point. For a defence of the predicate-functor
view, see Lormand (2004); for a defence of the pro-predicate view, see Hellie (2004, 2007).

to have a toothache’—means in effect Johns know what way having a

toothache affects you. Other target sentences are treated analogously.
To put it more formally, and concentrating for definiteness on the
structure of (1a), our proposal is this:
(H1) ‘There is something it is like to x for y to c’ is true in a context
c if and only if there is in c some way that y ’s c-ing affects x.
It should be clear that the right-hand side of this proposal has the

structure proposed in the previous section: ‘There is some way that y ’s
c-ing affects x’ has the same structure as ‘There is some way that y ’s
c-ing is to x’. What (H1) adds is only a claim about the linguistic
meaning of the preposition ‘to’, viz. that it means what ‘affects’ means.
Of course ‘affect’ is a powerful word in philosophy and psychology but
here we have in mind something quite modest, viz. its use as a verb
according to which it means something like ‘influence’ or ‘bring about a
change or condition in’. As (5) illustrates, this is widespread in English:
(5a) Having the disease affects you by making you very tired.
(5b) The wedding affected us all—we were bored half to death.
(5c) Leaving your car out in the sun can affect it.
(5d) Seeing the film affected Bill—he started crying.
These examples report some sort of causal or explanatory relation be-
tween an event—having a disease, a wedding, leaving your car in the
sun, seeing a film—and an individual (or group of individuals): you, us,
your car, Bill. Obviously the suggestion that ‘affects’ expresses a relation
in the same general class as explanation or ‘in virtue of’ raises the issue
of what precisely the relation is. However, apart from one remark later
on, I am going to leave this aspect of our discussion impressionistic.
It might seem surprising that (H1) focuses on ‘to’. But of course
prepositions often bear significant weight in generating the meanings
of English sentences; contrast ‘Alice ran in the house’, for example, and
‘Alice ran from the house’. Nor is it implausible that prepositions are the
focus of philosophical analysis. Consider the classic point that ‘in’ in ‘I
have a pain in my fingertip’ cannot indicate spatial inclusion of a
straightforward sort, because otherwise the inference from ‘I have a
pain in my fingertip’ and ‘my fingertip is in my mouth’ to ‘I have a
pain in my mouth’ would be valid, when it clearly is not (cf. Block 1983).
It might also seem surprising that (H1) says, of the preposition ‘to’,
that it means ‘affects’—presumably it doesn’t always mean this after

14 Daniel Stoljar
all. However, while that is true, there is a class of cases in which it does
mean this, or at least something very close, and these cases provide a
model for ‘what it is like’-sentences. Consider the examples in (6):
(6a) It is awful to behave in this manner.
(6a*) It is awful to Bill in particular to behave in this manner.
(6a**) There is some way that behaving in this manner affects

Bill in particular.
(6b) It is destabilizing for a country to be in debt.

(6b*) It is destabilizing to its politicians for a country to be in
debt.
(6b**) There is some way that a country ’s being in debt affects
its politicians.
In these examples, the second member of the triple contains a ‘to’-
phrase that makes explicit the individual that is affected by the events
in question: Bill by the behaviour, the politicians by their country ’s
being in debt. The phrases ‘awful’ and ‘destabilizing’ in turn bring out
the way in which the individual is affected. The third member of the
triple is an existential quantification over those ways of affecting things.
In effect, the suggestion of the affective view is that the ‘to’-phrases in
sentences like those in (1) should be interpreted analogously.
4.2 ‘What it is like’-sentences are context sensitive

If you are affected by some event then at least in principle there may
be various different ways in which you are affected. You might be
affected financially or physically or aesthetically or psychologically—
among other ways. Moreover, if you are affected in one of these gen-
eral ways (e.g. financially) there may be various specific ways in which
you are affected. You might make a lot of money or you might be
rendered bankrupt—among other ways.
Now, according to (H1), ‘what it is like’-sentences say that an in-
dividual is affected by some event, but they leave open in what way the
individual is affected. In a particular context, an utterance of such a
sentence may express the proposition that a certain event may affect
an individual in one way, while in a different context an utterance of
the very same sentence may express the proposition that the same
event may affect the same individual in a different way. In short,

according to (H1), ‘what it is like’-sentences are context sensitive, i.e.

they express different propositions in different contexts.16
For example, imagine Grandpa and Grandma have just heard from
their daughter that her slightly wayward son Bobby has taken up the
euphonium. They talk:
Grandma: Sally called. Bobby has been playing the euphonium.
Grandpa: What’s it like for him?

Grandma: It is great. Sally says he loves it.
Grandpa: But doesn’t he get frustrated and worn out? That
euphonium is bigger than he is.
Grandma: Yes maybe. Sally didn’t say. I don’t know what it’s like
for him.
In this exchange, it need not be that Grandma is contradicting herself
or speaking falsely or making any mistake about the meaning of words
or changing her mind. And yet she is in a position both to answer the
question ‘What is it like for Bobby to play the euphonium?’ (and so
convey she knows the answer) and also to assert that she does not
know the answer. Intuitively one wants to say that she knows that
playing the euphonium affects Bobby in one way, viz. he loves it, but
she does not know whether it affects him in a different way, viz. he
gets frustrated by it—it is possible after all that both are true.
In the light of the points set out above, it is not difficult to locate the
reason for the context sensitivity here. In general, sentences involving
quantifiers are almost always context sensitive because what is
included in the domain of the quantifier varies from context to con-
text. On the affective view, as we have seen, ‘what it is like’-sentences
involve quantifiers. In some cases, like (1a), the quantifier is overt; in
other cases, cases in which there is a ‘wh’-phrase, the quantifier comes
out in the linguistic analysis. Either way it is no surprise that such
sentences are context sensitive.
4.3 Hypothesis #2: What propositions ‘what it is like’-sentences

stereotypically express
To say that a sentence is context sensitive is not to deny that there
might be (what I will call) stereotypical contexts of use, i.e. ways of
16
Different philosophers have different accounts of context sensitivity. We will operate
with this simple model in the text, but nothing turns on this. See Stanley and Szabó (2000)
for general discussion.

16 Daniel Stoljar
using the sentence that speakers regard as particularly normal or rou-

tine, though not required by the linguistic meaning of the sentence.
Consider ‘He has all the qualities of his father’. This is context sensi-
tive owing to the quantifier phrase ‘all the qualities’. If we consider
only its linguistic meaning, the sentence could express propositions
about any qualities whatsoever. The sentence is stereotypically used,
however, in contexts in which what is at issue are good qualities. To
say of little Freddie that he has all the qualities of his father is stereo-

typically a way of saying something positive about him, viz. that he has
all the good qualities of his father. Stereotypically, but not always: if
little Freddie has just been sent to the very same prison that papa
Freddie spent years in, one might say ‘He has all the qualities of his
father’ and mean by this that he has all the bad qualities.
Now, as we have seen, (H1) permits that the same ‘what it is like’-
sentence might express different propositions about different ways of
being affected on different occasions. But this is not to deny that speak-
ers who employ such sentences often have a particular way of being
affected in mind or that the quantifier over ways present in such sen-
tences is not stereotypically restricted to a particular sort of way. Indeed,
the opposite seems true. Very often when we use a ‘what it is like’-
sentence we have in mind that the individual is affected in an experi-
ential way, or more colloquially, that the individual feels a certain way
in virtue of the event or that there is a way that the event makes the
individual feel. In what follows, I will—somewhat stipulatively—use the
word ‘experiencing’ to denote an affective relation of this special sort.
So, on this usage, x experiences y just in case y is an event which affects
x experientially, i.e. there is some way x feels as a result of y. In the light
of this, we can now formulate a second hypothesis about ‘what it is
like’-sentences, viz. that they are stereotypically used when what is at
issue are experiential, and not merely affective, relations. To say this is
not to take back (H1) construed as a proposal about linguistic meaning;
rather it is to add to it a distinct hypothesis about the stereotypical
context in which ‘what it is like’-sentences are used.
We may formulate this further hypothesis as (H2):
(H2) There are stereotypical contexts c such that ‘There is
something it is like to x for y to c’ is true in c if and only
if there is in c some experiential way that y ’s c-ing affects x;
in other words, there is in c some way that x experiences y ’s
c-ing; in still other words, there is some way that x feels as a
result of y ’s c-ing.

(H1) told us about the linguistic meaning of ‘what it is like’-sentences;

(H2) tells us what propositions ‘what it is like’-sentences stereotypic-
ally express. The affective account I wish to advance is the conjunction
of (H1) and (H2).
4.4 Reasons for (H2)

Why believe that (H2), and not merely (H1), is true? There are at least
three reasons for this. First, the conjunction of (H1) and (H2) fits the

data, and moreover does so better than any other available theory.
This point will be illustrated throughout the following discussion.
Second, (H2) is plausible because ‘affects’ itself works in the way
indicated, i.e. it itself is stereotypically used to express relations of
experiencing. To be affected by an event is as we have seen a very
general notion—one may speak of Bill’s being affected by a film, as
well as a car’s being affected by the sun. But it is also true that speakers
stereotypically use ‘affects’ in contexts in which what is at issue is how
someone feels as a result of something; that is, it is often or routinely
employed to talk about being affected by an event experientially.
Indeed, even in cases in which experiential relations are not at issue,
the use of words like ‘affect’ often provokes an impulse to talk as if
they were. While no one thinks that a car literally feels anything when
it is left out in the sun, it is natural for us to go on to talk as if it did—
‘Poor car, left out in the sun!’ etc. So another reason for (H2) is this:
‘what it is like’-sentences are semantically connected to ‘affects’, and
‘affects’ itself is stereotypically used to express experiential and not
simply affective relations.
Finally, (H2) is plausible in the light of a point about covert argu-
ment places made earlier, viz. that for ‘what it is like’-sentences in
which neither the subject of the infinitive nor the thing affected by the
event is made explicit, the two covert subjects must co-refer. Now in
some cases the infinitive verb will require a covert subject that is
psychological, which entails that in such sentences the thing affected
by the event is likewise psychological. On the other hand, when we ask
in what ways psychological subjects are affected by events it is very
common to be interested in how the event makes them feel. For ex-
ample, when you ask ‘How did getting her paper rejected affect
Frances?’ you are stereotypically (but not always) interested in how
Frances is feeling as a result of getting her paper rejected. So we have a
third reason in favour of (H2): the structure of ‘what it is like’-sen-
tences will sometimes require that the thing affected is a psychological
subject, and when we are interested in how psychological subjects are

18 Daniel Stoljar
affected by events we are often interested in how they experience those

events, i.e. how they feel as a result of those events.
4.5 Explaining the intuitive data

In §2 we mentioned two pairs of facts as a starting point of our inquiry
into ‘what it is like’-sentences. Once the affective account has been set
out the explanation of these facts is straightforward.

The first pair of facts concerned usage. These were that sentences
like those in (1), first, are routinely used by speakers to convey prop-
ositions about experiences and, second, are routinely used by speakers
to convey propositions about psychological subjects of experiences. To
explain these facts, the affective account draws on (H2). (H2) says that
speakers stereotypically use ‘what it is like’-sentences to express prop-
ositions about an individual feeling a certain way as a result of an
event. But if that is so, it is quite clear that these sentences are rou-
tinely used to convey information about experiences. Moreover, it is
quite clear that these sentences are routinely used to convey informa-
tion about subjects of experience—for information about the way
things feel to a subject is information (in part) about that subject.
The second pair of facts concerned inference. These were that sen-
tences like those in (1), first, often seem to be entailed by sentences
that are overtly about experiences, and, second, often seem to entail
sentences that are overtly about experiences. To explain the first of
these facts, the affective account draws on (H1). (H1) entails that a
sentence overtly about experience does indeed entail a ‘what it is like’-
sentence; for example, ‘Going to the dentist frightens Bill’ entails that
there is some way that going to the dentist affects Bill. To explain the
second of these facts, the affective account draws on (H2). A sentence
like ‘There is something it is like for Bill to go to the dentist’ literally
means ‘There is some way that going to the dentist affects Bill’ but it is
stereotypically used in a context in which what is at issue is how Bill
feels when he goes to the dentist. That is why the sentence seems to
entail a sentence overtly about experience.
5. Elaboration and defence

The main elements of the affective account have now been presented.
Those who are impatient for applications to philosophy of mind
might at this point jump ahead to §7. Meanwhile, in this section I

will make four points of elaboration and defence, and then in §6 I will
compare the affective account with rival proposals.
5.1 A simpler account?

The affective account is the conjunction of (H1) and (H2), but one
might wonder why the following proposal is not preferable:
(H3) ‘There is something it is like to x for y to c’ is true in a

context c if and only if there is in c some experiential way
that y ’s c-ing affects x; in other words, there is in c some
way that x experiences y ’s c-ing; in still other words, there is
in c some way that x feels in virtue of y ’s c-ing.
(H3) takes the basic idea of (H2) and treats as a proposal about what
happens, not in stereotypical contexts, but in all contexts, i.e. as a
proposal about the linguistic meaning of the sentence. This in turn
affords a simpler explanation of the usage and inference facts. The
usage facts, for example, are explained if (H3) is true as a direct func-
tion of the linguistic meanings of ‘what it is like’-sentences: people
often use these sentences to convey propositions about experiences
because this is what they mean. Similar things apply to the inference
facts.
However, while (H3) may seem plausible on the surface, there are
examples that tell against it. Here are some adapted slightly from
Snowdon (2010):
(7a) What will it be like for the British economy to finally enter
the Euro-zone?
(7b) What is it like for the British economy to enter the Euro-
zone?
(7c) What will it be like to the British economy for Denmark to
enter the Euro-zone?
(7d) What is it like to Bill’s knee for him to play at prop?
Intuitively, we are here asking how a thing is affected by a certain
event, where the way in question is not psychological but rather eco-
nomical or physical. So (7a) asks how entering the Euro-zone will
(economically) affect the British economy, while (7d) asks how play-
ing at prop will (physically) affect Bill’s knee. Since the affective ac-
count permits possibilities of this sort, the examples pose no problem
for it. But they pose a major problem for (H3). For it entails that these

20 Daniel Stoljar
sentences are literally about how the British economy or Bill’s knee
will feel, and that is plainly mistaken. In sum, while (H3) is simpler
than the conjunction of (H1) and (H2), it is overly simple, because it
does not have the resources to deal with the examples in (7).17
5.2 Event types and tokens

The affective account says that (1a) is true only if an individual bears a

certain sort of relation to an event, something that can only happen if
both the individual and the event exist. But consider ‘There is some-
thing it is like for a human to be chased by a dinosaur’. This might be
true, and yet no human was ever chased by a dinosaur; there never
was, and never will be, any such event. So the affective account seems
mistaken: there is something it is like for a human to be chased by a
dinosaur, and yet there is no such event.
This objection overlooks the distinction between event types and
event tokens. It is true that there is no particular event, no token
event, which consists of a human being chased by a dinosaur. But it
is consistent with this to suppose that there is such a type of event. If
so, the problem for the affective account is removed: the sentence in
question is true, and does report a relation between an individual and
an event, it is simply that the event in question is a type of event rather
than a token.
It might be thought that, if there is a type/token ambiguity in ‘what
it is like’-sentences, our account should specify exactly when a token
event is at issue and when a type is. But this is unrealistic. Sometimes
we are interested in particular token events; for example we might ask
‘What was it like for Alice to eat that peach in the precise way she did
last Tuesday at 10.30 sharp?’ At other times we are interested in types
of events; for example we might ask ‘What is it like in general for a
person to see red?’ The affective view is silent on when the event in
question is a type or token—and wisely so.18
17
One might try to defend (H3) by interpreting ‘experience’ broadly. We do sometimes say
after all that the British economy would experience some difficulty if it were to enter the Euro-
zone. However, while this may be a way of squaring (H3) with these examples, it also removes
whatever advantage (H3) has over our account. For now the notion of experiencing is being
used to mean something akin to ‘affecting’.
18
Since a small number of people have told me they feel that ‘There is something it is like
for a human to be chased by a dinosaur’ involves a token event, it is worth noting a different
(though compatible) answer to the objection in the text, viz. that it overlooks the distinctive
way in which ‘what it is like’-sentences convey modal information, as noted in fn.13 above.
However, I will not attempt to develop that here.

5.3 The concept of feeling

The affective account says that (1a) reports an experience only if the
relevant individual feels a certain way in virtue of the relevant event.
But consider ‘There is something it is like for Mary to see red’. At least
if the Mary in question is the famous heroine of Jackson’s knowledge
argument, this sentence does indeed report an experience, viz. the one
she will have when she comes out of her black-and-white room and
sees something red for the first time. (See Ludlow et. al 2004.) But one

might argue against the affective account that, while this is true, there
is no feeling that Mary has in virtue of seeing red; she obviously
needn’t have touched anything, for example, and nor need she have
any bodily sensation or emotion.
However, there are at least two ways to deal with this objection. The
first is to insist on a concept of feeling broader than that at issue in the
objection. It is true that philosophers of mind tend to restrict the
notion of feeling to bodily sensations, the sense of touch and emotions
(e.g. Harman 1996, Janzen 2011), but English speakers are more for-
giving. For example, it is reasonable to say that in Anna Karenina,
Tolstoy brilliantly described how it feels to be a young girl in upper-
class society. But Tolstoy ’s description of Kitty (the young girl) is not
limited to her bodily sensations or emotional responses. Here is a
different example: in ‘I feel like I have lived in this house for ages’
the notion of feeling is not limited to bodily sensations or emotions.
So it is possible to say that while philosophers sometimes use the
notion of feeling narrowly, there is also a legitimate broader notion,
and the affective account can perfectly well appeal to it to capture
what it is like for Mary to see red.19
The second way to deal with the objection is to modify the affective
account. In our discussion of (H2) above, we stipulated that an ex-
periential relation is one that obtains between an individual and an
event just in case the individual feels a certain way in virtue of the
event. It is that stipulation, together with the narrow interpretation of
the notion of feeling, which is causing the problem just noted.
However, it is possible to alter the stipulation by saying that an ex-
periential relation obtains between an individual and an event just in
case either the individual feels a certain way in virtue of the event or
things seem to the individual a certain way in virtue of the event. On
the modified view, (H2) says that it is stereotypical to use a ‘what it is
19
See Brogaard (2012) for discussion of this broader notion of feeling. The second example
mentioned in the text is hers.

22 Daniel Stoljar
like’-sentence in contexts in which what is at issue is either how a

person feels or how things seem to the person. If the affective account
were modified in this way, it would avoid the idea that there is some
bodily sensation or emotion that Mary feels, in favour of the more
plausible suggestion that things seem a certain way to Mary when she
sees a red thing.20

5.4 Knowing what it is like
Earlier we noted that (1b)—‘John knows what it is like to have a
toothache’—is plausibly analysed (to a first approximation) as
‘There is a way such that John knows that it is that way to have a
toothache’. But one might be concerned that this represents knowing
what it is like as a sort of knowledge-that, i.e. as propositional know-
ledge. One version of this concern denies outright that knowing what
it is like is propositional; a more cautious version says that it is an
open question whether it is, and the semantic analysis should not
decide the question.
However, this objection forgets that (1b) is ambiguous in a way that
many ‘know what’-sentences are. On the one hand, it might be used to
say that John knows some fact (i.e. some true proposition) that (in the
context) answers the embedded question ‘What is it like to have a
toothache?’ If we assume that this question asks ‘What way does
having a toothache make you feel?’ the sentence on this reading
means that John knows some fact that answers this question. We
may call this the ‘interrogative’ reading of the sentence. On the
other hand the sentence can also be used to say that John knows
the thing denoted by the referring expression ‘what it is like to have
a toothache’. Since the referring expression intuitively denotes a way
you feel, i.e. the way you feel in virtue of having a toothache, on this
reading the sentence says that John knows the way you feel, or more
colloquially, that he knows the feeling. We may call this the ‘free
relative’ reading of the sentence. It is the interrogative reading we
use when we say ‘He wonders what it is like to have a toothache’—
what he wonders is not a way one feels, but what fact answers a certain
question. It is the free relative reading we use when we say ‘He hates
20
It does not matter for our purposes which of these two ways one might take to deal with
the objection. So, having noticed this potential modification of the affective view, we will
continue to restrict attention to feeling in what follows. Nothing will turn on this restriction.

what it is like to have a toothache’—what he hates is a way one feels,

not an answer to a certain question.21
Suppose then that (1b) has these two readings; how does that affect
the objection? Well, it is true that if we take the sentence on its inter-
rogative reading—as we have in effect done so far—it is naturally read
as reporting propositional knowledge. On the other hand, if we take
the sentence on its free relative reading—as we may also do—it is
naturally read as reporting non-propositional knowledge. Of course

I don’t mean that a proponent of the affective account must take it as
reporting non-propositional knowledge; here as elsewhere there is a
question of whether the psychological states reported by various sen-
tences mirror the structure of the sentences themselves. The point is
that this is left open by the affective account, just as the most plausible
version of the objection we are considering insists that it should be.
6. Compare and contrast

Apart from the affective account, there are four main theories of ‘what
it is like’-sentences: the technical account, the comparative account,
the property account, and the operator account. In this section I will
argue that all of these are less plausible than our own.
6.1 The technical account22

The technical account has two parts: first, that (1a) is true if and only if
there is some experience you have when you have a toothache; and,
second, that this is a technical stipulation, a matter of decision on the
part of technocrats (i.e. philosophers of mind), and so is unrelated to
its ordinary meaning whatever that might be.
The problem for this account is that ‘what it is like’-sentences are
completely ordinary English sentences which are routinely used to talk
about experiences or feelings. Contrast (1a) with (1c)—‘You don’t
know what it is like to love somebody ’. When the Bee Gees sing
that, the language they are using is completely ordinary and non-
technical. Ordinary hearers know perfectly well that what they mean
21
For the distinction (plus the labels), though not the application to ‘know what it is like’,
I am indebted to Schaffer (2010); as he notes, the distinction is well known in the linguistics
literature.
22
Hellie (2004) argues that the technical account is the standard view in the literature and
attributes it to Lewis (1995) in particular. I doubt both the sociological claim and the attribu-
tion to Lewis but will set that aside here.

24 Daniel Stoljar
is that you don’t know how it feels to love somebody (or what ex-
perience one has when one loves somebody).
It might be replied that the technical account concerns not (1a) as
such but only (1a) as it is used in specific circumstances, e.g. in phil-
osophy of mind. But this is implausible. Of course many academic
disciplines use technical vocabulary, but in such cases the technical
nature of the language is apparent to its users; people need (and know
that they need) explicit instruction in how to use the language

(whether the instruction is successful is of course another matter).
But this is not the case for ‘what it is like’-sentences, which are very
often used in philosophy of mind in apparently just the way that they
are used outside it.
Indeed, it is plausible that the force of ‘what it is like’-sentences in
philosophy of mind derives precisely from the fact they are not tech-
nical. Take the knowledge argument against materialism, which as we
just mentioned is usually stated in terms of ‘what it is like’-sentences.
If such sentences are themselves technical, one could reasonably worry
that the notion of consciousness at issue in this argument is technical
too. But it is presumably of no interest that there is some technical
notion of consciousness that is inconsistent with materialism. Hence,
if this and other arguments have the significance that they are com-
monly assumed to have, ‘what it is like’-sentences are not technical.
6.2 The comparative account

According to the comparative account, (1a) is true in a context c if and
only if there is in c a thing x such that the event of your having a
toothache resembles (i.e. is similar to) x. More generally, on this view,
‘like’ in ‘what it is like’-sentences is a comparative term meaning
something like ‘resembles’ or ‘similar to’, as in ‘Seattle resembles
San Francisco more than it resembles Los Angeles’.
This account has been heavily criticised in previous discussions, and
so here we will be brief.23 First, while ‘like’ sometimes means the same
as ‘resembles’, it does not always mean that (as we have seen), so there
is no particular reason to adopt the comparative account. Second, if
‘What is it like to see red?’ meant ‘What does seeing red resemble?’ we
would answer it by mentioning some things that seeing red resem-
bles—imagining seeing red, for example. But the question does not
23
The comparative account is considered and rejected by Nagel himself; see Nagel (1974,
fn.6). For further criticism see, among others, Lormand (2004), Hellie (2004), and Snowdon
(2010).

call for that; it calls for various properties that seeing red might have
or might be associated with (cf. Hellie 2004). Third, one can know
what an event resembles without knowing what it is like (cf. Lewis
1988). For example, someone who has never eaten a peach and does
not know what it is like may still know (for instance because they have
heard it on good authority) that eating a peach resembles something
else, e.g. eating a nectarine.

6.3 The property account24
According to the property account, (1a) is true in a context c if and
only if there is in c some property F such that the event of your having
a toothache has F.
This account faces the obvious objection that its right-to-left dir-
ection is too weak; an event of c-ing can have some contextually
salient property without its being the case that there is something it
is like to c. Imagine a situation in which a contextually salient prop-
erty of going to the dentist is that it will happen next Tuesday. In that
case the property view predicts that there is something it is like to go
to the dentist, and moreover that I will know what it is like simply by
knowing that it will happen next Tuesday. But this is false: even if it
happens next Tuesday, there need be nothing it is like to go to the
dentist, and I do not count as knowing what it is like simply by
knowing it will happen next Tuesday.
One might respond by revising the account so that what is at issue is
not any old property of going to the dentist, but a way of going to the
dentist, where a way is, as we noted earlier (cf. fn 14), a certain kind of
property of a thing, one which answers the question ‘How is it?’ rather
than ‘Why is it?’ or ‘When is it?’ However, while this is an improve-
ment, it is possible to adjust the counterexample accordingly. Imagine
a situation in which a contextually salient way of going to the den-
tist—i.e. a way that going to the dentist is— is that it is expensive. In
that case the property view predicts that there is something it is like to
go to the dentist, and moreover that I know what it is like to go to the
dentist simply by knowing it is expensive. But that is false: I may know
that going to the dentist is expensive and still not know what it is like
in the usual sense.
A different, and perhaps more obvious, response for the property
account appeals to the fact that (1a) is context sensitive. (See Hellie
24
Authors who express sympathy for the property view or something like it include Byrne
(2004), Hacker (2002), Hellie (2004), Snowdon (2010).

26 Daniel Stoljar
2004, Snowdon 2010.) On this development of the property account,

(1a) strictly and literally means only that there is some property that
having a toothache has, but an utterance in context of that sentence
may express the proposition that there is some experience that one has
when one has a toothache.
However, while there is of course nothing wrong with appealing to
context, appealing to it in this way is unattractive. For recall the usage
and the inference facts. These are about how ‘what it is like’-sentences

are routinely used, and what they often seem to entail and be entailed
by. We noted above that the affective account explains these facts. But
it is hard to see how the property account on the development we are
considering can do likewise. It is true on such a view that (1a) may be
used to report a fact about experience, but why it should be routinely
used that way remains a mystery.
6.4 The operator account25

According to the operator account, (1a) is true in a context c if and
only if there is some way such that it seems to you that your having a
toothache is that way; alternatively, there is some way such that your
having a toothache seems that way.26
What is the difference between the operator account and the affect-
ive account? Both accounts might agree that (1a) has the form ‘There
is some way x’s c-ing is to y ’, but they differ on the nature of the ‘to’-
phrase. According to the affective account the ‘to’-phrase makes ex-
plicit the individual affected in a particular way by the event.
According to the operator account, by contrast, the ‘to’-phrase is an
operator—that is, a function from sentences to sentences—that
expresses how the event seems to some individual. The motivation
25
Authors who express sympathy for the operator view include Lormand (2004), Hellie
(2007), Janzen (2008, 2011), Rosenthal (2011), and Weisberg (2011). As Rosenthal has recently
put it: ‘As many, myself included, use that phrase, there being something it’s like for one to be
in a state is simply its seeming subjectively that one is in that state’ (2011, p. 434). Lormand
(2004) is a defence of a particular form of the operator view according to which ‘It seems to S
that’ reports a state of inner seeming; hence Lormand endorses a perceptual model of intro-
spection and consciousness. See Hellie (2007) for persuasive criticism of this version of the
operator view. The criticisms we are advancing in the text are more general, and would apply
to any version of the operator view, including the one explored briefly by Hellie in the last
pages of his paper.
26
I assume in the text that the operator account is formulated in terms of a particular
operator, viz. ‘It seems to S that’. In principle however, that account could appeal to other
sentential operators, e.g. ‘S represents it as being the case that’, and operators of a non-
sentential sort, e.g. ‘S is aware of ’. I will not consider these other forms of the proposal here.

for this is that sometimes we do use expressions such as ‘to x’ in this

way, or at least in an analogous way. For example, ‘To me, Alice was
the best player’ does mean something like ‘It seems to me that Alice
was the best player’.
Now an obvious question for the operator account is what ‘seems’ is
to mean here. To put it mildly, this is a fraught matter in philosophy
of mind; is it an epistemic notion, a doxastic notion, a phenomenal
notion, or a perceptual notion? However, I don’t want to suggest here

that the interpretation of ‘seems’ constitutes a decisive reason to reject
the operator account. A friend of that account might regard this as a
project rather than a problem.
Nevertheless there are other reasons to reject it. First, consider again
Snowdon’s examples, such as (7a)—‘What will it be like for the British
economy to finally enter the Euro-zone’. On the operator account,
(7a) will come out as (something like) ‘How will finally entering the
Euro-zone seem to the British economy?’ But this is clearly not what
the sentence means. What it means, rather, is something like ‘How will
entering the Euro-zone affect the British Economy?’ And of course this
is something directly predicted by the affective account.
Second, the operator view faces a major challenge having to do with
the difference between ‘feels’ and ‘seems’.27 Consider the following
pairs:
(8a) There is something it seems like for Bill to be home.
(8b) To me, there is something it seems like for Bill to be home.
(9a) There is something it feels like for Bill to be home.
(9b) To me, there is something it feels like for Bill to be home.
Here, (8b) makes me the subject of the reported seeming. For example,
suppose Bill seems happy to be home; that is the way he seems to be
home. In that situation, (8b) is true only if I am the person to whom Bill
seems that way. By contrast, (9b) does not make me the subject of the
reported feeling. For example, suppose Bill feels happy to be home; that
is the way he feels to be home. In that situation, it is not me but Bill who
is the subject of the feeling; nevertheless (9b) may be true.28
27
For the idea behind this second argument against the operator view, I am indebted to
Zoltán Gendler Szabó.
28
Linguists might capture this difference by saying that ‘seems’ is a raising verb, while
‘feels’ is not; rather it is a control verb. For a recent, philosophically accessible discussion of
the control/raising distinction, see Schroeder (2011).

28 Daniel Stoljar
But now consider the following pair:

(10a) There is something it is like for Bill to be home.
(10b) To me, there is something it is like for Bill to be home.
Here, (10b) patterns with (9b) and not with (8b). That is, like (9b),
(10b) does not make me the subject of the reported experience; it may
be me to whom Bill’s being home is like something, but it may also be

Bill.
How does this observation cause a problem for the operator view?
Well according to that view, (10a) is equivalent to (8a). But this
implies in turn that (10b) is equivalent to (8b). But as we have just
seen this is not so. To put it differently (10a) embeds under ‘to me’ in
a way that (8a) does not; hence they are not equivalent, and the op-
erator account is false.
7. ‘What it is like’ and Nagel’s definition

Our attention to this point has been occupied with stating and de-
veloping the affective account, and contrasting it with others. In the
remainder of the paper, I turn to the second of the two topics men-
tioned in the introduction: the relation between ‘what it is like’-sen-
tences and the nature of consciousness, focusing on Nagel’s definition.
In this section, I consider how to understand the definition in the light
of the affective account. In the next two sections, I will address two
controversial claims that have been made about it in the recent
literature.
7.1 What it is
What exactly is Nagel’s definition? Well, the one he actually offers, as
we have seen, is (N1):
(N1) An organism has conscious states if and only if there is
something it is like to be that organism.
But there is reason to suppose that (N1) is not the one contemporary
philosophers of mind typically operate with. First, it is a definition of
what it is for an organism to have conscious states, not what it is for a
state to be a conscious state. Second, it is apparently focused on con-
sciousness in general, rather than on some kind of consciousness in
particular, viz. phenomenal consciousness as opposed to access

consciousness or monitoring consciousness, among others (cf. Block

1995, 2007, 2008).29
If we are looking for a version of the definition closer to that em-
ployed in contemporary literature, a good suggestion is (N2):
(N2) For any subject S and any psychological state30 X of S, X is a
phenomenally conscious state if and only if X is such that
there is something it is like for S to be in X.

But the problem for (N2) is that it is implausible when combined with
the affective account. On that view, ‘There is something it is like for S
to be in X’ literally means that there is some way that S’s being in X
affects S, and this entails that (N2) is equivalent to (N3):
(N3) For any subject S and any psychological state X of S, X is a
there is some way that being in X affects S.
But the right-to-left direction of (N3) is false. Being in some state
might affect you in a certain way—it might make your blood pressure
go up—without that state being a conscious state. In effect, this is
another application of Snowdon’s examples mentioned above.
One might take this as a reason to reject either Nagel’s definition or
the affective account or both, but a better response is to recall that
‘what it is like’-sentences are context sensitive, and that Nagel’s def-
inition is charitably interpreted as being asserted in what we earlier
called a ‘stereotypical context’—that is, a context in which what is at
issue is not simply the way an event affects an individual but the
experiential way it does, i.e. how the individual feels as a result of
the event. This suggests the definition is better rendered as:
there is some way that S feels in virtue of S’s being in X.
However, while (N4) is an improvement, it still has at least one im-
plausible feature. For consider some desire that is assumed to be un-
conscious. Perhaps as a matter of empirical fact, when a person has
this desire they get a feeling of nausea. If so, there is some way the
person will feel in virtue of having this desire. But now, given (N4), we
get the result that the desire is conscious, i.e. because there will be
29
Snowdon (2010) has an insightful discussion of some of these issues.
30
I will use ‘state’ broadly to include states, events, and processes.

30 Daniel Stoljar
some way that the person feels as a result of having the desire, and that
contradicts our assumption.
This problem arises because of an issue concerning ‘what it is like’-
sentences we mentioned earlier but (deliberately) left impressionistic,
namely, exactly how to understand the explanatory relation that ‘af-
fects’ expresses. Now if one is interested simply in the analysis of ‘what
it is like’-sentences, that attitude is appropriate, but Nagel’s definition
requires something quite particular of the affective relation, viz. that if

X is a conscious state then it is not simply that its subject must be
affected in a certain way by being in X but moreover that this is in
some way essential or constitutive of X. So, in our example, you might
have a feeling of nausea in virtue of having the repressed desire, but
this is not an essential or constitutive feature of the desire, and that is
why it remains unconscious. We may accommodate this by replacing
(N4) with (N5):
phenomenally conscious state if and only if X is constitu-
tively such that there is some way that S feels in virtue of S’s
being in X.
No doubt further refinements can be made, but (N5) is not subject to
any of the objections we have mentioned, and it is this that we will
work with here.31
7.2 Why it is attractive

If we assume that (N5) or something like it is the best version of
Nagel’s definition we are now in a position to answer an important
question about it, viz. ‘Why is it so popular?’
First, it is non-technical; in fact this point was foreshadowed in our
discussion of the technical account above. One problem with that view
was in effect that, if ‘what it is like’ were technical, then, given Nagel’s
definition, consciousness would turn out to be technical too. Turning
this around, if ‘what it is like’ is not technical, then Nagel’s definition
will entail likewise that the notion of consciousness—or anyway one
notion of consciousness—is not technical. This is an important point,
for while it is not surprising that people can invent notions of
31
It is worth noting that there are two different ways that the right-hand-side of this
definition can be satisfied, at least as I intend it. On the one hand, the state of consciousness
might be identical to the relevant state of feeling; on the other hand, the conscious state might
be distinct from the relevant state of feeling. I assume that both cases might be covered by
(N5), but will not attempt to defend that here.

consciousness that are resistant to scientific and philosophical analysis,

it is surprising if some non-technical notion is so resistant.
Second, it is non-reductive. Nagel’s definition does not seek to
define consciousness in terms that do not themselves involve con-
sciousness. Indeed, on the affective account, the definition explains
phenomenal consciousness in terms of the notion of feeling (or some-
thing like it), which is unlikely to be understood by someone who does
not understand the notion of consciousness. Indeed, if it were an

attempted reductive definition it would have been much more con-
troversial, and much less popular, than it is, for the history of reduc-
tive definitions in philosophy is the history of controversy.
Third, it is illuminating. While it is non-reductive, Nagel’s defin-
ition tells us something interesting and informative about conscious-
ness rather than simply repeating that a conscious state is a conscious
state. What does it tell us? First, that being a conscious state is asso-
ciated with having a certain feeling, rather than, for example, being the
object of a certain sort of attention or knowledge. Second, that being a
conscious state is a complex property consisting in the relation be-
tween the state and the subject, which entails that the subject feels a
certain way in virtue of being in the state. Third, and related, that the
notion of a conscious state is subject-involving; that is, a state is con-
scious only if the subject of that state feels a certain way.
8. Is Nagel’s definition empty?

So far we have appealed to the affective account to help clarify Nagel’s
definition. Turning now to the two claims mentioned earlier, the first
is that, despite appearances, the definition is (if true) not substantive,
and so can play no role at all in illuminating or guiding philosophical
discussion. Paul Snowdon (see also Hacker 2002) is a forceful advocate
of this position:
The attitude toward the slogan that I am recommending is this. If we
consider [it] from left to right, then it is trivial, or more or less trivial.
Experiences, like anything else, must be some way, and being events must
be some way for the subject of them. Further, the slogan in no way pins
down which ways are the distinctive ways experiences are. Considered
from right to left, though, the slogan is not trivial; in fact, if I am right to
claim that there can be non-experiences which can be like something for a
thing to undergo, then it is not even true. So part of my conclusion is that
the slogan is not correct going right to left. (2010, p. 26)

32 Daniel Stoljar
Put in our terms, what Snowdon is saying is that Nagel’s definition

(‘the slogan’) taken from left-to-right is trivial because all it says is that
if X is a conscious state then X has some property. Likewise, if it is
taken from right-to-left then it is false because from the mere fact that
a state has some property it does not follow that it is a conscious state.
His overall recommendation is that the slogan should be rejected.
If (N5) is the best version of Nagel’s definition, however, there is no
justification for Snowdon’s recommendation. Taken from left-to-right

(N5) says that if X is a phenomenally conscious state, then X is con-
stitutively such that its subject feels a particular way in virtue of being
in it; and this is not trivial. Taken from right-to-left (N5) says that if X
is constitutively such that its subject feels a particular way, then X is a
conscious state; and this is not false.
One might reply that Snowdon is not operating with (N5) but in-
stead with something closer to (N3). But as we have seen, (N3) is not a
plausible version of Nagel’s definition; in particular, it ignores the fact
that ‘what it is like’ is context sensitive. Alternatively, one might reply
that Snowdon is not operating with the affective account in the first
place. His own proposal (as I understand it) is something like this:
‘There is something it is like for x to c’ is true in a context c if and only
if there is in c some property F such that x has F when x cs. While this
is structurally unlike the affective account, it is in some ways similar to
it since the property attributed in context is to a subject of the event
and not the event itself. But in spirit it is much closer to the property
account, since Snowdon thinks, as I understand him, that one can say
‘There is something it is like to have a toothache’ meaning that you
have some property (any property) when you have a toothache.
However, while Snowdon’s proposal may if true make his position
on Nagel’s definition plausible, there is considerable reason to doubt it
is true. First, like the simpler property view, it provides no good ex-
planation for the usage and inference facts we began with; it does not
explain, for example, why ‘what it is like’-sentences are routinely used
to talk about experiences, even though it permits that they might be
used that way. Second, there is no persuasive argument for this view.
The main consideration Snowdon offers here is that his view accom-
modates examples like (7a), that is, ‘What will it be like for the British
economy to enter the Euro-zone?’ These examples are certainly im-
portant, as we have seen, but they present no problem for the affective
account; hence they provide no reason to adopt Snowdon’s proposal
as opposed to that account.

9. Does Nagel’s definition entail a reflexive theory?

A second (and inconsistent) claim about Nagel’s definition is that it
entails a substantial proposal about consciousness, viz. a reflexive or
self-representational theory, according to which an individual is in a
conscious state only if the individual represents or is aware of (in some
sense) their being in that state.
There are many examples of this suggestion in the literature.32 For
Joseph Levine, for example, ‘the idea of phenomenal consciousness

totally divorced from any access by the subject does not really seem
like any kind of consciousness at all’. He goes on:
… the very phrase that serves to canonically express the notion of the
phenomenal – ‘what it’s like for x to . . .’ – explicitly refers to the
phenomenal state in question being ‘for’ the subject. The way I would put
it … is: Phenomenal states/properties are not merely instantiated in the
subject, but are experienced by the subject. Experience is more than mere
instantiation, and part of what that ‘more’ involves is some kind of access.
(2007, p. 514)
Uriah Kriegel similarly argues that if there is something it is like for
you to see a blue sky, it is crucial to distinguish two features, namely,
what Kriegel calls ‘the qualitative character’, i.e. the blueish-ness, and
what he calls ‘the subjective character’, i.e. the ‘for me’ aspect, which
brings with it a kind of self-representation or awareness: ‘… to say that
my experience has subjective character is to point to a certain aware-
ness I have of my experience’ (2009, p. 8). And Josh Weisberg argues
that the phrase ‘for the organism’ in Nagel’s ‘something it is like for
the organism’ suggests ‘a connection to the rest of the mind, a mode of
access by a sentient subject’ (2011, p. 411).
Of course Levine, Kriegel, and Weisberg have different concerns and
are motivated in different ways. Yet it seems possible to formulate a
general argument lying behind what they say, which we may call the
emphatic argument because it proceeds by placing stress on the ‘for S’
of Nagel’s definition. The argument goes as follows:
(P1) X is a phenomenally conscious state of S only if there is
something it is like for S to be in X.
(P2) There is something it is like for S to be in X only if S stands
in some representational or awareness relation to X.
32
Further examples of this line of thought may be found in Church (1997), Hellie (2007),
Janzen (2008, 2011), Lormand (2004), and Rosenthal (2011).

34 Daniel Stoljar
(C) X is in a phenomenally conscious state of S only if S stands

in some representational or awareness relation to X.
On the face of it, this argument is valid and both premises are plaus-
ible. The first seems a straightforward application of Nagel’s defin-
ition, and the second brings out what seems an obvious fact about the
prepositional phrase ‘for S’.
However, it becomes evident that the emphatic argument is unper-

suasive if we look again at (N5), the version of Nagel’s definition with
which we have been operating, this time with emphasis added:
phenomenally conscious state if and only if X is constitu-
tively such that there is some way that S feels in virtue of S’s
being in X.
There is no support here at all for the reflexive theory. For one thing
‘for S’ (or ‘for me’) has completely disappeared, and so nothing at all
may be wrung from this phrase in particular. Moreover, emphasizing
‘S’ in (N5) merely serves to bring out who the subject of the relevant
state is and who it is that is affected by the state (in this case the same
individual). But, unless a reflexive theory is being assumed from the
start, a person can be affected by a state and be its subject without
being aware of it or represent it in any way. Applying these points to
the emphatic argument, it emerges that properly understood its prem-
ises are as follows:
(P1*) X is a phenomenally conscious state of S only if X is
constitutively such that there is some way that S feels in
virtue of S’s being in X.
(P2*) X is constitutively such that there is some way that S feels
in virtue of S’s being in X only if S stands in some rep-
resentational or awareness relation to X.
However, while (P1*) is indeed a plausible application of Nagel’s def-
inition, (P2*) is surely unpersuasive to someone who does not already
agree with the reflexive theory.33
One might reply that, while this objection to the emphatic argument is
plausible if the affective account is true, the same cannot be said if some
rival account is true. For example, suppose the operator view is true; isn’t
the argument then persuasive? Perhaps it is, but that is not a good reply
33
See Siewert (2012) for allied ideas placed in a different framework.

to our objection. First, if the emphatic argument presupposed the oper-

ator account this would make it unpersuasive to anyone who did not,
e.g. any proponent of the affective view. Second, as we have argued, there
are considerable reasons to doubt the operator view anyway.
Alternatively, one might reply that even if the emphatic argument is
unpersuasive, the reflexive theory might nevertheless be true.
However, what is at issue here is not whether the reflexive theory is
true, but whether it may be established on the basis of Nagel’s defin-

ition; the interesting suggestion that the emphatic argument makes is
that it can be. Now, to assess that suggestion we need to know what
that definition is. The affective account provides, we have argued, the
best analysis of the definition. But on that analysis, the argument is
unpersuasive; more generally, there is nothing in Nagel’s definition of
consciousness to suggest that a reflexive theory is correct.
10. Conclusion
In the first half of the paper we set out and defended the affective
account of ‘what it is like’-sentences. We saw that the affective ac-
count is grounded in a plausible proposal about the logical form of
such sentences, that it can be developed in various ways, and that it is
more plausible than rival proposals. In the second half we showed that
the affective account provides an attractive analysis of the nature and
plausibility of Nagel’s definition, as well as a basis from which to
criticize two contemporary ideas about that definition: first, that it
is empty and should be abandoned, and second, that it leads directly
to a reflexive theory of consciousness.34
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I would like to thank the following for their help: Christian Barry, David Chalmers, Ryan
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Santorio, and the editor of this journal. I gave this paper or material from it to audiences at
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The Semantics of ‘What it’s like’ and the

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like to be that organism—something it is like for that organism’ (1974,

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definition as embodying a philosophically controversial theory of con-

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functions to specify or request a certain kind of property, e.g. ‘You

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3. The logical form of ‘what it is like’-sentences

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3.1 First potentially implicit argument place

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3.2 Second potentially implicit argument place

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(3) Everyone knows what it is like for Alice to eat a peach.

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3.3 ‘What it is like’ and other ‘wh’-phrases

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French: Quel effet cela fait-il d’être une chauve-souris?

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3.4 The role of ‘like’

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3.5 The role of ‘it’

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4. Semantics for ‘what it is like’-sentences

4.1 Hypothesis #1: The linguistic meaning of ‘what it is like’-sentences

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to have a toothache’—means in effect Johns know what way having a

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(6b) It is destabilizing for a country to be in debt.

4.2 ‘What it is like’-sentences are context sensitive

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according to (H1), ‘what it is like’-sentences are context sensitive, i.e.

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4.3 Hypothesis #2: What propositions ‘what it is like’-sentences

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using the sentence that speakers regard as particularly normal or rou-

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(H1) told us about the linguistic meaning of ‘what it is like’-sentences;

4.4 Reasons for (H2)

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affected by events we are often interested in how they experience those

4.5 Explaining the intuitive data