A Representationalist Account of Ineffability of Consciousness

Iranian Center of Cognitive Science holds its third international Conference of Cognitive Science from March 3rd t0 March 5th. (Here's the link to the conference website: http://www.iccs.ir/e/pages.php?pid=20) I will present a lecture on ineffability of consciousness. I should thank Farid Masrour (NYU) for helping me develop the paper. Here's a summary of my representationalist idea about the topic.

There are two kinds of ineffability: descriptive and demonstrative. X is descriptively ineffable both for those who have experienced it before and those who have not. Our criterion for descriptive effability is that the description gives a subject S the ability to recognize X among other things; otherwise it is descriptively ineffable. Demonstrative effability is by intersubjectively pointing to X through definitions of the sort of “P1 is the P of X”. X might be intersubjective at one level, like pre-epistemological level, hence demonstratively effable relative to that level, but pure subjective at another, like epistemological level, hence demonstratively ineffable at that level. Phenomenal properties P are descriptively ineffable because of their primitiveness. P is identified with primitive representations R, and R is not describable since it is not preceded by more primitive representations to be described in their terms. This is how representationalism can deal with the descriptive ineffability of the phenomenal.

Qualia are demonstratively effable at a pre-epistemological level, because people ordinarily think of qualia as intersubjectively the same and this is what gives them the ability to demonstratively teach or learn qualia. However at an epistemological level, they are demonstratively ineffable, since the possibility of different qualia with different subjects can in no way be repudiated, thus they cannot be demonstrated at this level. This fact is explained in representational terms: qualia are different manners of representations and since these manners are internally determined, subjects have no access to each other’s internal manners of representations of things in the world, which in turn gives rise to epistemological skepticisms about their intersubjectivity, hence demonstrative ineffability at an epistemological level.

Therefore, as we can see, representationalism can handle the ineffability of the phenomenal in both descriptive and demonstrative senses.

Thick Perceptual Content in Aristotle’s Philosophy

It appears that the perceptual content is, for Aristotle, thick, viz. it is not only rudimentary individual objects (unlike Plato in Theatetus), but also propositions and universals. By “perceptual content” I mean what is directly perceived. The fact of the matter is that we take propositions, dispositions, relations and universals to be the direct objects of various kinds of perceptions in our ordinary language; consider for instance (all examples are of the visual perception for convenience): (a) “I see the sharpness of the knife” (sharpness is a disposition), (b) “I see that John is going” (that John is going is a proposition), (c) “I see that the flood is destroying that little hut” (flood’s destroying the little hut is a causal relation), (d) “I see a man in you” (man is a universal). But some philosophers may not take these ordinary statements seriously and try to translate them into more deflationist statements such as: (a*) “I see the edge of the knife which has the disposition to cut”, (b*) “I see John in different places in continuous points of time”, (c*) “I see the flood and right after it, I see the destruction of the hut”, (d*) “I see an individual person (you) and I know by other non-perceptual means that you are a man-token”. Such deflationist strategy suggests a thin view of the perceptual contents, but inflationists hold a thick view of the perceptual contents, taking the ordinary expressions of perceiving the above phenomena literary.
I think Plato and Aristotle have opposing views on this issue, with the former maintaining a deflationist and the latter holding an inflationist view of perceptual experiences. They both have epistemological concerns for their respective views.

A draft of this idea is available here. Comments welcome.

A Collection On the Mind-Body Problem

A collection of articles has been translated to Farsi and will appear soon in Iran, together with introductions to each part. The collection has five parts: dualism, behaviorism, identity theory, functionalism and eliminative materialism; it concludes with Kim's "Mind-Body Problem after 50 years" and McGinn's "Solving the Mind-Body Problem". I thank Ned Block for his detailed introduction to my translation of his "What Is Functionalism?" and "Troubles With Functionalism", Lynne Baker for hers to my translation of chapter 7 of her Saving Belief : "Instrumentalism: Back from the Brink?" and Dennett for his to my translation of his "True Believers". Here's Dennett's nice introduction:

Scientists are making dramatic progress on figuring out how the brain works. In a few special sorts of cases they are even quite good at saying how, and why, brains cause bodies to act as they do. The brain is an extraordinarily complex collection of biological mechanisms, but its operation is not too complex to resist science forever. Meanwhile, non-scientists—everyday folk, and even children—continue to do what they have always done: figure out what people are going to do by recognizing what they want, what they know, and how they intend to achieve their goals. Our anticipations are not always right; sometimes even our closest friends baffle us with their unexpected behavior, but in general we are confident in our expectations, and those expectations are confirmed in due course. For instance, we all casually risk our lives by riding in cars on highways, quite certain that the drivers in the oncoming cars (1) see us, (2) believe correctly that a collision would probably be fatal, (3) strongly desire not to die or to kill, and (4) know how to avoid that unwanted outcome by guiding their intentional behavior, safely steering their vehicles on non-collision courses. This is all obvious to us, and it is couched in the terms of what I have called “folk psychology”: seeing and hearing, believing and wanting, hopes, fears, intentions, decisions, and so forth. Minds are easier to read than brains! How do we do it? We do it by using a strategy—adopting a stance—that treats all people (and most animals, and even some robots) as rational agents. We do this instinctively, without having to understand the reasons why it works. This permits us to ignore the unbelievably messy and unknown details of their brains’ hardware and concentrate on the informational level, where much more simplified, if slightly risky, calculations can be effortlessly made. This is what I call the intentional stance. We can compare it to other strategies to understand both its power and the risks associated with it. It works because evolution has designed us to be quite good approximations of (ideally) rational agents. If we understand our competence at mind-reading in this way, many of the traditional conceptual problems about the relationship between mind and body dissolve. The huge gap between knowing and wanting on the one hand, and neurons and brain waves on the other hand, is accounted for in a scientifically conservative way: no miracles, no mysterious emergent properties, no ‘wonder tissue’. Minds are what brains do, seen from the perspective of the intentional stance.
Much of this account of the nature of folk psychology is now accepted by both the philosophical and scientific community, but there remain significant pockets of skepticism. There is a widespread belief that on this analysis beliefs and desires and thoughts do not emerge as “real enough” entities in their own right. I have tried to assuage that suspicion in subsequent essays, especially in “Real Patterns,” Journal of Philosophy, 1991. But “True Believers” remains the best introduction to the concept of intentional systems and the intentional stance we use to understand them.

Qualia

I have finished the revision of my paper "Putting the Quality Back into Qualia". In this paper, I presented arguments against phenomenalism, and for representationalism. To allow for a qualia-analysis, I distinguished the concept of "qualia" from that of "phenomenality" and I also made a distinction between perceptual and sensational qualia. I presented different arguments for each. It's waiting to be published in the procedings of the first Annual Coloquium of Iranian Institute of Philosophy on Analytic Philosophy.