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.